Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

She could feel its warmth-she could see herself, face-down on the bunk, beaten, paralyzed. Sad Laura. She could feel the warm torrent of healing and sympathy rush in from outside,

Olympian, soaring. Poor beaten body, our Laura, but she won't die. She lives. I lived.

Now, sleep.

She was sick for a month. Her urine was tinged with blood: kidney damage. And she had huge aching patches of bruises on her back, her arms, her legs. Deep bruises, into the muscle, bumps swollen on the bone: hematomas, they were called in first-aid. She was sick and creaky, barely able to eat. Sleep was a struggle for position, for the least amount of pain.

They had taken away the wreckage of the video machine.

She was pretty sure that someone had shot her up with something, too: there seemed to be an injection bruise just above her wrist, one of the few spots the goons had missed.

A woman, she thought: she had seen a woman medic, maybe even spoken to-her semiconscious, and that was it: an Opti- mal Persona experience.

She had been beaten up by fascist goons. And she had seen her Optimal Persona. She wasn't sure which was the most important but she knew that they were both turning points.

It was probably a medic that she'd seen. She'd just slotted it in, dreamed of seeing herself. That was probably all that an

Optimal Persona ever was, for anybody: stress and illusion and some deep psychic need. But none of that mattered.

She had had a vision. It didn't matter where it came from.

She clung to it and she was glad they were leaving her in solitary because she could chuckle over it aloud and hug it to herself. And cherish it.

Hatred. She'd never really hated them before, not like she did now. She'd always been too small and too scared and too hopeful of figuring some angle, as if they were people like herself and could be dealt with like people. That's what they'd pretended, but now she knew their pretense was an- other of their lies. She would never, ever join them, or belong to them, or see the world through their eyes. She was their enemy till death. That was a peaceful thought.

She knew she would survive. Someday she would dance on their graves. It made no sense, not rationally. It was faith.

They had blundered and given her faith.

She was woken by a roar. It sounded like a giant water faucet, rush of water and the high-pitched. scream of a vibrat- ing pipe. Coming nearer. Louder. Wa-woosh.

Then: monster drumbeats. Boom. Boom. Boom-wham-bam, firecracker sounds. Her cell wall flashed as hot light flickered through the window hole. Then another flash. Then a sudden thunderous explosion, very near. Earthquake. The walls shook.

Hot red light-the horizon was on fire.

The goons ran up and down the hall, shouting at each other. They were afraid, and Laura heard the fear in their voices with a wild leap of animal joy. Outside, the feeble crackle of small-arms fire. Then, distantly, belatedly, the banshee wail of sirens.

A burst of pounding from inside the prison. Someone on level two was beating on his door, not the bathroom pounding, but sheer ferocious battering. Muffled shouts. The upper- level prisoners were yelling from their cells. She couldn't make out the words. But she knew the tone. Rage and glee.

She swung out her legs and sat up in the bunk. In the distance, belatedly, she heard antiaircraft guns. Crump, whump, cramp, spider webs of flak searing the sky.

Someone was bombing Bamako.

"Yeah!" Laura screamed. She jumped from bed and rushed to the door and kicked it for all she was worth.

Next night they came in strafing. That sudden wa-whoosh again, treetop-level fighter jets in close formation. She could hear their aircraft cannon cutting loose, a weird convulsive belching, thup-thup-thup-thup, the sound of it dopplering off as the jets peeled away over the city. Then the sound of bombs, or missiles maybe: whump, crump, sky flashbulb- white as explosions hit.

Then the belated antiaircraft. There was more of it this time, better organized. Batteries of cannon, and even the hollow roar of what must be rockets, surface-to-air missiles.

But the jets were already gone. Mali's radar must be down, she concluded smugly. Otherwise they would surely fire at the jets as they were coming in, not too late, after they'd already blasted the living bejeezus out of something or somebody.

The attackers had probably knocked out the radar first thing.

She had never heard anything that sounded so sublime. The sky was full of hell, the rage of angels. She didn't even care if they hit the prison. All the better.

Outside the guards were firing machine guns: staccato bursts into the black sky. Bullets would rain down somewhere on a slum. Fools. They were fools. Amateurs.

They came for her in the morning. Two goons. They were sweating, which was nothing new, everyone sweated in the prison, but they were twitchy and wired, their eyes wide, and they stank-of fear.

"How's the war going?" Laura said.

"No war," said goon #1, a middle-aged male thug she'd seen many times. He wasn't one of the ones who had hit her.

"Practice.

"Air-raid practice? In the middle of the night? In down- town Bamako?"

"Yes. Our army. Practice. Do not worry."

"You think I believe that bullshit?"

"No talking!" They clamped her into handcuffs, hard.

They hurt. She laughed at them, inside.

They marched her downstairs, and into the courtyard. Then they prodded her into the back of a truck. Not a secret-police paddy wagon but a canvas-topped military truck daubed in dun-and-yellow desert camouflage. It had wooden benches inside for troops, and jerry cans of water and gasohol.

They shackled her legs to one of the support bars beneath the wooden bench. She sat there exulting. She didn't know where she was going, but it was going to be different now.

She sat sweating in the heat for ten minutes. Then they brought in another woman. White, blond. They shackled her to the opposite bench, and jumped out; and slammed the tailgate.

The engine started up with a roar. They jolted into movement.

Laura examined the stranger. She was blond and thin. and bony and wearing striped canvas prison garb. She looked about thirty. She looked very familiar. Laura realized that she and the stranger looked enough alike to be sisters. They looked at each other and grinned shyly.

The truck cleared the gates.

"Laura Webster!" Laura said.

"Katje Selous." The stranger leaned forward, extending both cuffed hands. They grabbed at each other's wrists and shook hard, clumsily, smiling.

"Katie Selous, A.C.A. Corps!" Laura said triumphantly.

"What?"

"I don't know what it means... . But I saw it on a list of prisoners."

"Ah!" Selous said. "Azanian Civil Action Corps. Yes,

I'm a doctor. Relief camp."

Laura blinked. "You're from South Africa?"

"We call it Azania now. And you, you're American?"

"Rizome Industries Group."

"Rizome." Selous wiped sweat from her forehead, a jail- bird's pallor. "I can't tell them apart, the multinationals.... "

She brightened. "Do you make suntan oil? That oil that makes you turn black?"

"Huh? No!" Laura paused, thinking about it. "I dunno.

Maybe we do, nowadays. I've been out of touch."

"I think you do make it." Selous looked solemn. "It's very important and wonderful."

"My husband used that stuff," Laura said. "He might have given Rizome the idea. He's very bright, my husband.

David's his name." Speaking of David made a whole buried section of her soul rise suddenly from the tomb. Here she was, chained in the back of a truck headed for God knew where, but with a few revivifying words she was part of the world again. The big sane world of husbands and children and work. Tears gushed suddenly down her face. She smiled at Selous and shrugged apologetically and looked at the floor.