Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

Laura learned about prison. The tricks of doing time. Mem- ory was the enemy. Any connection with the outside world would be, she knew, too painful to survive. She just did her time. She invented antimemory devices, passivity devices.

When it was time for a cry she would have a cry. She didn't think about what might happen to her, to David and the baby, to Galveston, to Rizome, to the world. She thought about professional activities, mostly. Writing public relations state- ments. Testifying to public bodies about Malian terrorism.

Writing campaign documents for imaginary Rizome Commit- tee candidates.

She spent several weeks writing a long imaginary sales brochure called Loretta's Hands and Feet. She memorized it and would spin it off sentence by sentence, silently, inside her head, slowly, one second per word, until she reached the end. Then she would add on a new sentence, and then start over..

The imaginary brochure was not about the baby herself, that would have been too painful. It was simply about the baby's hands and feet. She described the shape and texture of the hands and feet, their smell, their grasp, their potential usefulness if mass-produced. She designed boxes for the hands and feet, and old-fashioned marketing slogans, and ad jingles.

She organized a mental dress store. She had never been much of a fashion maven, at least not since junior high school . days, and her discovery of boys. But this was a top-of-the- line fashion outlet, a trend-setting emporium catering to the wealthy Atlanta crowd. There were galaxies of hats, march- ing armies of hosiery and shoes, whirlwinds of billowing skirts, vast technicolor brothels of sexy lingerie.

She had decided on ten years. She was going to be in this jail for ten years. It was long enough to destroy hope, and hope was identical with anguish.

A month, and a month, and a month, and a month.

And another month, and another and another and another.

And then three, and then one more.

A year.

She had been in prison for a year. A year was not a particularly long time. She was thirty-three years old. She had spent far more time outside captivity than in, thirty-two times as much. People had done far more time in prison than this.

Gandhi had spent years in prison.

They were treating her better now. Jofuette had made some kind of arrangement with one of the female goons. When the goon was on duty she let Laura run in the exercise yard, at night, when no other prisoners were present.

Once a week they brought an ancient video recorder into the cell. It had a black-and-white TV manufactured in Alge- ria. There were tapes, too. Most of them were old-fashioned

American football games. The old full-contact version of football had been banned for years now. The game was spectacularly brutal: huge lumbering gladiators in helmets and armor. Every fourth play seemed to leave one of them sprawl- ing and wounded. Sometimes Laura would simply close her eyes and listen to the wonderful flow of English. Jofuette liked the games.

Then there were movies. The Sands of Iwo Jima. The Green

Berets. Fantastic, hallucinatory violence. Enemies would be shot and fall down neatly, like paper cutouts. Sometimes the good guys were shot, in the shoulder or arm usually. They would just grimace a bit, maybe bind it up.

One week a film arrived called The Road to Morocco. It was set in the African desert and had Bing Cosby and Bob

Hope. Laura had vague memories of Bob Hope, she thought she must have seen him when she was very young and he was very old. He was young in the film, and quite funny, in a quaint premillennial way. It hurt terribly to watch him, like having a bandage ripped away, touching deep parts of her that she had managed to numb. She had to stop the tape several times to mop at tears. Finally she snatched the tape out and jammed it back in the box.

Jofuette shook her head, said something in Bambara, and plugged the tape back in. As she did so a folded slip of tissue, cigarette paper, fell from a crevice in the box's cardboard side. Laura picked it up.

She unfolded it as Jofuette watched the TV, riveted. It was covered with smudgy, minuscule writing. Not ink. Blood, maybe. A list.

Abel Lacoste-Euro. Cons. Service

Steven Lawrence-Oxfam America

Marianne Meredith-ITN Channel Four

Valeri Chkalov-Vienna

Georgi Valdukov-Vienna

Sergei Ilyushin-Vienna

Kazuo(?) Watanabe-Mitsubishi

(?)Riza-Rikabi-EFT Commerzbank

Laura Webster-Rizome IG

Katje Selous-A.C.A. Corps and four others

The second year went faster than the first. She was used to it. It had become her life. She no longer thirsted for the things she had lost-she could no longer name them to herself, without an effort. She was past thirst: she was mummified. Monastic, sealed.

But she could sense the pace picking up, spiderweb tremors of movement in the distant world outside.

There were shootings almost every night now. When they took her down for exercise in the yard, she could see bullet- pounded patches in the wall, cratered, just like the Lodge had been. Below the pockmarks the baked bare earth had turned foul, carpeted with swarming flies and the coppery reek of blood.

One day the desert sky outside the wall hole of her cell showed endless dark skeins of drifting smoke. Trucks squealed in and out of the prison for hours, and they shot people all night. Assembly style: shouts, orders, screams, pleading, fierce chatter of machine-gun fire. Quick finishing shots. Doors slamming, engines. Then more. Then more. Then more again.

Jofuette had been frightened for days. Finally the goons came for her, two women. They came smiling and talking her language, seeming to tell her that it was over, they were going to let her go. The bigger goon grinned suggestively and put her hands on her hips and did a bump-and-grind. A

boyfriend, she was saying-or Jofuette's husband maybe. Or maybe she was suggesting a night on the town in glamorous downtown Bamako.

Jofuette smiled tremulously. One of the goons gave her a cigarette and lit it with a flourish.

Laura never saw her again.

When they brought in the video recorder for the usual weekly session Laura waited till they were gone. Then she picked up the machine with both hands and smashed it into the wall repeatedly. It came apart, a tangle of wiring and circuit cards. She was crushing them underfoot when the door rattled and two of the male goons burst in.

They had drawn clubs. She threw herself at them with her fists clenched.

They knocked her to the ground immediately, with con- temptuous ease.

Then they picked her up and began beating her. With thoroughness, methodically. They hit her on the neck, on the kidneys. They threw her onto the bunk and hit her across the spine. Lightning flared inside her, great electrocuting swathes, white-hot, bloody-red. They were hitting her with axes, chop- ping her body apart. She was being butchered with sticks.

Roaring filled her head. The world faded.

A woman sat across the cell, sitting in Jofuette's bunk. A

blond woman in a blue dress. How old-forty, fifty? Sad, composed face, laugh lines, yellow-green eyes. Coyote eyes.

Mother ... ?

The woman looked at her: remembrance, pity, strength. It was restful to look at the woman. Restful as dreaming: she's wearing my favorite shade of blue.

But who is it ...?

Laura recognized her self. Of course. Rush of relief and joy. That's who it is. It's me.

Her Persona rose from the bunk. She crossed the cell, drifting, graceful, soundless. Radiant. She knelt silently by

Laura's side and looked into her face: her own face. Older, stronger, wiser.

Here I am.

"I'm dying."

No, you'll live. You'll be as I am.

The hand stopped an inch from her face, caressed the air.