Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

She had never realized the scale of the African disaster. It was continental, planetary. They had traveled hundreds of miles without glimpsing another human being, without seeing anything but a few wheeling birds and the tracks of lizards.

She'd thought Gresham was being cavalier, deliberately bru- tal, but she understood now how truly little he must care for

FACT and its weaponry. They lived here, it was their home.

Atomic bombardment could scarcely have made it worse. It would only make more of it.

At midafternoon a FACT pursuit plane found one of the

Tuareg buggies and torched it. Laura never even saw the plane, no sign of the deadly encounter except a distant column of smoke. They stopped and sought cover for half an hour, until the drone had exhausted its fuel or ammo.

Flies found them immediately as they waited. Huge, bold

Saharan flies that settled on Katje's blood-stained clothes like magnets. They had to be knocked loose, slapped away, be- fore they would leave. Even then they moved only in short buzzing arcs and lit again. Laura fought them grimly, wincing as they landed on her goggles, tried to sip moisture from her nose and lips.

At last the scattered caravan passed signals by their semaphore.

The driver had survived unwounded; a companion had picked him up and packed out the usable wreckage.

"Well, that's torn it," Gresham told her as they drove on.

From somewhere he had dug up a battered pair of mirrored sunglasses. "They know where we're heading now, if they didn't before. If we had any sense we'd lie low, rest up, work on the vehicles. "

"But she'll die."

"The odds say she won't even make it through the night."

"If she can make it, then we can, too."

"Not a bad bet," he said.

They stopped after dusk in a dead farming village of roof- less, wind-carved adobe walls. There were thornbushes in the ruins of a corral and a long, creeping gully had split the village threshing ground. The soil in the rudimentary irrigation ditches was so heavily salinized that it gleamed with a salted crust. The deep stone well was dry. People had lived here once-generation after generation, a thousand tribal years.

They left the buggy hidden in one of the ruined houses and set up camp in the depths of a gully, under the stars. Laura had more strength this time-she was no longer giddy and beaten. The desert had sand-blasted her down to some reflexive layer of vitality. She had given up worrying. It was an animal's asceticism.

Gresham set up the tent and heated a bowl of soup with an electric coil. Then he vanished, off on foot to check on some outflung post of his caravan. Laura sipped the oily protein broth gratefully. The smell of it woke Katje where she lay.

"Hungry," she whispered.

"No, you shouldn't eat."

"Please, I must. I must, just a little. I don't want to die hungry. "

Laura thought it over. Soup. It wasn't much worse than water, surely.

"You've been eating," Katje accused her, her eyes glazed and ghostly. "You had so much. And I had nothing."

"All right,- but not too much."

"You can spare it."

"I'm trying to think of what's best for you. No answer, just pain-brimming eyes full of suspicion and fever- ish hope. Laura tilted the bowl and Katje gulped desperately.

"God, that's so much better." She smiled, an act of heart- breaking courage. "I feel better.... Thank you so much."

She curled away, breathing harshly.

Laura leaned back in her sweat-stiff djellaba and dozed off.

She woke when she sensed Gresham climbing into the lean-to.

It was bitterly cold again, that lunar Saharan cold, and she could feet heat radiating off the bulk of him, large and male and carnivorous. She sat up and helped him kick his way under the carpet.

"We made good time today," he murmured. The soft voice of the desert, a bare disturbance of the silence. "If she lives, we can make it to her camp by midmorning. I hope the place isn't full of Azanian commandos. The long arm of imperialist law and order."

" `Imperialist.' That word doesn't mean anything to me."

"You gotta hand it to 'em," Gresham said. He was-looking down at Katje, who lay heavily, unconscious. "Once it looked like their little anthill was sure to go, but they pulled through somehow.... The rest of Africa has fallen apart, and every year they move a little farther north, them and their fucking cops and rule books."

"They're better than FACT! At least they help."

"Hell, Laura, half of FACT are white fascists who split when South Africa went one-man, one-vote. There's not a dime's worth of difference.... Your doctor friend may have a carrot instead of a stick, but the carrot's just the stick by other means. "

"I don't understand." It seemed so unfair. "What do you want?"

"I want freedom." He fumbled in his duffel bag. "There's more to us than you'd think, Laura, seeing us on the run like this. The Inadin Cultural Revolution-it's not just another bullshit cover name, they are cultural, they're fighting for it, dying for it.... Not that what we have is pure and noble, but the lines crossed here. The line of population and the line of resources. They crossed in Africa at a place called disaster.

And after that everything's more or less a muddle. And more or less a crime."

Deja vu swept over her. She laughed quietly. "I've heard this before. In Grenada and Singapore, in the havens. You're an islander too. A nomad island in a desert sea." She paused.

"I'm your enemy, Gresham."

"I know that," he told her. "I'm just pretending otherwise."

"I belong out there, if I ever get back."

"Corporate girl. "

"They're my people. I have a husband and child I haven't seen in two years."

The news didn't seem to surprise him. "You've been in the

War," he said: "You can go back to the place you called home, but it's never the same."

It was true. "I know it. I can feel it inside me. The burden of what I've seen."

He took her hand. "I want to hear all of it. All about you,

Laura, everything you know. I am a journalist. I work under other names. Sacramento Internet, City of Berkeley Munici- pal Video Cooperative, about a dozen others, off and on. I've got my backers.... And I've got video makeup in one of the bags. "

He was very serious. She began laughing. It turned her bones to water. She fell against him in the dark. His arms surrounded her. Suddenly they were kissing, his beard raking her face. Her lips and chin were sunburned and she could feel the bristles piercing through a greasy lacquer of oil and sweat.

Her heart began hammering wildly, a manic exaltation as if she'd been flung off a cliff. He was pinning her down. It was coming quick and she was ready for it-nothing mattered.

Katje groaned aloud at their feet, a creaking, unconscious sound. Gresham stopped, then rolled off her. "Oh, man," he said. "Sorry."

"Okay," Laura gasped.

"Too weird," he said reluctantly. He sat up, pulling his robed arm from under her head. "She's down there dying in that fucking Dachau getup ... and I left my condoms in the scoot."

"I guess we need those."

"Hell, yes, we do, this is Africa. Either one of us could have the virus and not know for years." He was blunt about it, not embarrassed. Strong.

She sat up. The air crackled with their intimacy. She took his hand, caressed it. It didn't hurt to do it. It was better now between them, the tension gone. She felt open to him and glad to be open. The best of human feelings.

"It's okay," she said. "Put your arm around me. Hold me. It's good."

"Yeah." Long silence. "You wanna eat?"

Her stomach lurched. "Scop, God, I'm sick of it."

"I've got some California abalone and a couple of tins of smoked oysters I've been saving for a special occasion."