Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

"It seems to be the duty of my generation to pay for history's mistakes."

"You're really convinced they'll kill us, aren't you?"

She looked remote. "I'm sorry you should be involved."

"They killed a man in my house," Laura said. "That's where it all started for me. I know it doesn't seem like much, one death compared to what's happened in Africa. But I couldn't let it pass. I couldn't shrug off my responsibility for - what happened on my own home ground. Believe me, I've had a long time to think about it. And I still think I was right, even if it costs me everything."

Selous smiled.

They had picked up a convoy. Two armored half-tracks had swung into action behind them, jouncing over the rutted road, the long, ridged wands of machine guns swaying in the turrets.

"They think they have an answer," Selous said, looking at the half-tracks. "It was worse in Mali before they came."

"I can't imagine anything worse."

"It's not something you can imagine-you have to see it."

"Do you have an answer?"

"We hold on and wait for a miracle-save whoever we can.... We were getting somewhere in the camp, I think, before the F.A.C.T. seized it. They captured me, but the rest of our Corps escaped. We're used to raids-the desert is full of scorpions."

"Were you stationed in Mali?"

"Niger actually, but that's a formality only. No central authority. It's tribal warlords mostly, in the outback. Fulani

Tribal Front, the Sonrai Fraternal Forces, all kinds of bandit armies, thieves, militias. The desert crawls with them. And

FACT's machineries, too."

"What do you mean?"

"That's how they prefer to work. By remote control. When they locate the bandits, they attack them with robot planes.

They pounce on them in the desert. Like steel hyenas killing rats."

"Jesus."

"They're specialists, technicians. They learned things, in

Lebanon, Afghanistan, Namibia. How to fight Third Worlders without letting them touch you. They don't even look at them, except through computer screens."

Laura felt a thrill of recognition. "That's them all right.... I saw all that happen in Grenada."

Selous nodded. "The president of Mali thought they. did fine work. He made them his palace guard. He's a puppet now. I think they keep him drugged."

"I've seen the guy who runs Grenada-I bet this Mali president doesn't even exist. He's probably nothing but an image on a screen and some prerecorded speeches."

"Can they do that?" Selous said.

"Grenada can-I saw their prime minister disappear into thin air."

Selous thought it over. Laura could see it working in her face-wondering if Laura was insane, or she herself was insane, or whether the bright television world was brewing something dark and awful in its deepest voodoo corners. "It's as if they're magicians," she said at last. "And we're just people. "

"Yeah," Laura said. She lifted two fingers. "But we have solidarity, and they're busy killing each other."

Selous laughed.

"We're going to win, too."

They began talking about the others. Laura had long since memorized the list. Marianne Meredith, the television corre- spondent, had been the ringleader. It was she who had invented-or already knew, maybe-the best methods of smug- gling messages. Lacoste, the French diplomat, was their interpreter-his parents had been African émigrés, and he knew two of Mali's tribal languages.

They had tortured the three agents of Vienna. One of them had turned, the other two had been released or, probably, shot.

Steven Lawrence had been taken from an Oxfam camp.

The camps were often raided-they were dumping grounds for scop, the primary source of food for millions of Saharans.

The black market for single-cell protein was the major econ- omy of the region-the "government" of Mauritania, for instance, was little more than a scop cartel. Foreign handouts, a few potash mines, and an army-that was Mauritania.

Chad was a malignant welfare bureaucracy, a tiny fraction of aristocrats whose thugs periodically emptied automatic weapons into starving crowds. The Sudan was run by a radical Muslim lunatic who consulted dervishes while facto- ries washed away and airports cracked and burst. Algeria and

Libya were one-party states, more or less organized in the coastal provinces but roiling tribalist anarchy in their Saharan outback. Ethiopia's government was preserved by Vienna's fiat; it was as frail as a pressed bouquet, and under siege by a dozen rural "action fronts."

All of them drawing venom from the lethal inheritance of the last century, a staggering tonnage of outdated armaments, passed from government to government at knock-down prices.

From America to Pakistan to mujahideen to a Somalian splin- ter group with nothing to recommend it but a holy desperation for martyrdom. From Russia to a cadre of bug-eyed Marxist strongmen shooting anything that even looked like a bourgeois intellectual.... Billions in aid had been poured into the sub-Sahara, permanently warping governments into bizarre funnels of debt and greed, and as the situation worsened more and more arms were necessary for "order" and. "stability"

and "national security," the outside world heaved a cynical sigh of relief as its lethal junk was disposed of to people still desperate to kill each other....

At noon the convoy stopped. A soldier gave them water and gruel. They were in the Sahara now-they'd been driving all day. The driver unchained their legs. There was no place to run, not now.

Laura jumped out under the hammer blow of sun. A haze of heat distorted the horizons, marooning the convoy in a shimmering plaza of cracked red rock. The convoy had three trucks: the first carried soldiers, the second radio equipment, the third was theirs. And the two armored half-tracks in the rear. No one came out of the half-tracks or offered any food to their crews. Laura began to suspect that they had no crews.

They were robots, big carnivorous versions of a common taxi-bus.

The desert shimmer was seductive. She felt a hypnotic urge to run out into it, into the silver horizon. As if she would dissolve painlessly into the infinite landscape, vanish like dry ice and leave only pure thought and a voice from the whirlwind.

Too long inside a cell. The horizon was strange, it was pulling at her, as if it were trying too tug her soul out through the pupils of her eyes. Her head filled with strange pounding pulses of incipient heatstroke. She relieved herself quickly and climbed back into the canvas shade of the truck.

They drove all afternoon, all evening. There was no sand, it was various kinds of bedrock, blasted and Martian-looking.

Miles of heat-baked flints for hours and hours, then sandstone ridges in a million shades of dun and beige, each more tedious than the last. They passed another military convoy in the afternoon, and once a distant airplane flew across the south- ern horizon.

At night they left the road, drew the trucks in a circle. The soldiers set metal stakes, pitons, into the rock all around the camp. Monitors, Laura thought. They ate again and the sun fell, an eerie desert sunset that lit the horizon with roseate fire. The soldiers gave them each a cotton army blanket and they slept in the truck, on the benches, one foot cuffed to prevent them from sneaking up on a soldier in the dark and tearing him apart with their fingernails.

The heat fled out of the rocks as soon as the sun was gone.

It was bitterly cold all night, dry and arctic. In the first light of morning she could hear rocks cracking like gunshots as the sunlight hit.

The soldiers gassed up the trucks from jerry cans of fuel, which was too bad, because it occurred to her for the first time that a jerry can of fuel might be poured over the trucks and set alight, if she could get loose, and if she was strong enough to carry one, and if she had a match.