Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

The screaming was louder under her new cell. Several different voices and, she thought, different languages too.

The screaming would go on, raggedly, for about an hour.

Then there would be a coffee break for the torturers. Then they would set back to work. She believed that there were several different torturers. Their habits differed. One of them liked to play moody French cafe ballads during his break.

One night she was woken by a muffled volley of machine- gun fire. It was followed by five sharp coup-de-grace shots.

They had killed people, but not the people being tortured- two of them were back next night.

It took them two weeks to bring her statement. It was worse than she had imagined. They wanted her to tell Rizome and the world that she had been kidnapped in Singapore by the Grenadians and was being held in the underground tunnel complex at Fedon's Camp. It was a ridiculous draft; she didn't think that the person who had written it fully understood

English. Parts of it reminded her of the FACT

communiqué issued after the assassination of Winston Stubbs.

She no longer doubted that FACT had killed Stubbs and shot up her house. It was obvious. The remote-control killing smelled of them. It couldn't have been Singapore, poor brilliant, struggling Singapore. Singapore's military, soldiers Like

Hotchkiss, would have killed Stubbs face-to-face and never bragged about it afterward.

They must have launched the drone from a surface ship somewhere. It couldn't have come from their nuclear submarine- unless they had more than one, a horrible thought.

The sub couldn't have traveled fast enough to attack Galveston,

Grenada, and Singapore during the time of her adventure.

(She was already thinking of it as her adventure-some- thing over, something in her past, something pre-captivity.)

But America was an open country and a lot of the F.A.C.T. were Americans. They bragged openly that they could go anywhere, and she believed them.

She believed now they had someone-a plant, a spy, one of their Henderson/Hesseltines-in Rizome itself. It would be so easy for them, not like Singapore. All he would have to do was show up and work hard and smile.

She refused to read the prepared statement. The Inspector of Prisons looked at her with distaste. "You really think this defiance is accomplishing something, don't you?"

"This statement is disinformation. It's black propaganda, a provocation, meant to get people killed. I won't help you kill people."

"Too bad. I'd hoped you could send your loved ones a

New Year's greeting."

"I've written my own statement," Laura offered. "It doesn't say anything about you, or Mali, or the F.A.C.T., or your bombs. It just says I'm alive and it has a few words my husband will recognize so that he'll know it's really me."

The Inspector laughed. "What kind of fools do you take us for, Mrs. Webster? You think we'd let you spout secret messages, something you'd cooked up in your cell after weeks of your ... oh ... feminine ingenuity?"

He tossed the statement into a bottom drawer of his desk.

"Look, I didn't write the thing. I didn't make the decision.

Personally, I don't think it's all that great a statement.

Knowing Vienna, it's more likely to make them tiptoe their way into that termite castle under Fedon's Camp, instead of shelling it into oblivion, like they should have done way back in

'19." He shrugged. "But if you want to ruin your life, be declared legally dead, be forgotten, then go right ahead."

"I'm your prisoner! Don't pretend it's my decision."

"Don't be silly. If it meant anything serious, I could make you do it."

Laura was silent.

"You think you're strong, don't you?" The Inspector shook his head. "You think that, if we tortured you, it would be some kind of romantic moral validation. Torture's not roman- tic, Mrs. Webster. It's a thing, a process: torture is torture, that's all. It doesn't make you any nobler. It only breaks you.

Like the way an engine wears out if you drive it too fast, too hard, too long. You never really heal, you never really get over it. Any more than you get over growing old."

"I don't want to be hurt. Don't pretend I do."

"Are you going to read the stupid thing? It's not that important. You're not that important."

"You killed a man in my house," Laura said. "You killed people around me. You kill people in this prison every day. I know I'm no better than them. I don't believe you'll ever let me. go, if you can help it. So why don't you kill me too?"

He shook his head and sighed. "Of course we'll let you go.

We have no reason to keep you here, once your security threat is over. We won't stay covert forever. Someday, very soon, we'll simply rule. Someday Laura Webster will be an upstanding citizen in a grand new global society."

A long moment passed. His lie had slid past her comprehension, like something at the other end of a telescope. At last she spoke, very quietly. "If it matters at all, then listen to me. I'm going to go insane, alone in that cell. I'd rather be dead than insane."

"So now it's suicide?" He was avuncular, soothing, skeptical.

"Of course you've been thinking of suicide. Everyone does. Very few ever really do it. Even men and women doing hard labor in death camps find reason to go on living. They never bite their own tongues out, or open their veins with their fingernails, or run headlong into the wall, or any of those childish jailbirds' fantasies." His voice rose. "Mrs.

Webster, you're in the upper level here. You're in special custody. Believe me, this city's slums are full of men and women, and even children, who'd cheerfully kill to have it as easy as you do."

"Then why don't you let them kill me?"

His eyes clouded. "I really wish you wouldn't be like this."

He sighed and spoke into his watchphone. After a while the goons came and took her away.

She went on hunger strike. They let her do it for three days. Then they sent her a cellmate.

Her new cellmate was a black woman who spoke no English.

She was short and had a broad, cheerful face and two missing front teeth. Her name was something like Hofuette, or Jofuette. Jofuette would only smile and shrug at Laura's

English: she had no gift for languages and couldn't remember a foreign word two days running. She was illiterate.

Laura had poor luck with Jofuette's language. It was called something like Bambara. It was full of aspirations and clicks and odd tonalities. She learned the words for bed and eat and sleep and cards. She taught Jofuette how to play Hearts. It took days but they had a lot of time.

Jofuette came from downstairs, the lower level, where the screaming came from. She hadn't been tortured; or, at least, no marks showed. Jofuette had seen people shot, however.

They shot them out in the exercise yard, with machine guns.

They would often shoot a single man with five or six machine guns; their ammunition was old, with a lot of duds that tended to choke up the guns. They had a worldful of ammunition, though. All the ammunition of fifty years of the Cold War had ended up here in African war zones. Along with the rest of the junk.

She didn't see the Inspector of Prisons again. He wasn't the guy who ran the place. Jofuette knew the warden. She could imitate the way he walked; it was quite funny.

Laura was pretty sure that Jofuette was some kind of trusty, maybe even a stool pigeon. It. didn't bother her much. Jofuette didn't speak English and Laura had no secrets anyway. But

Jofuette, unlike Laura, was allowed to go out into the exer- cise yard and mingle with the prisoners. She could get hold of little things: harsh, nasty cigarettes, a box of sugared vitamin pills, a needle and thread. She was good to have around, wonderful, better than anyone.