Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

"You don't have to talk that way to me. Now that I can see what you're trying to do."

"Oh, Lord," Gresham said unhappily. He stalked across the dome in the mellow light of the monitor and gathered an armload of burlap bags. He lugged them next to his screen and terminal and spread them for pillows. "Come on, sit here with me."

She joined him. The pillows had a pleasant, resinous smell.

They were full of grass seed. She saw that some were already half empty. They'd been sowing the grass in the gullies as they ran from pursuit.

"Don't get to thinking I'm too much like you," he said.

"Honest and sweet and wishing everybody the best... . I grant you good intentions, but intentions don't count for much. Corruption-that's what counts."

He meant it. They were sitting together inches apart, but something was eating at him so badly that he wouldn't look at her. "What you just said-it doesn't make any sense to me."

"I was in Miami once," he said. "A long time ago. The sky was pink! I stopped this rudie on the boardwalk, I said: looks like you got some bad particulate problems here. He told me the sky was full of Africa. And it was true!. It was the harmattan, the sandstorms. Topsoil from the Sahara, blown right across the Atlantic. And I said to myself: there, that place, that's your home."

He looked at her, into her eyes. "You know when it really got bad here? When they tried to help. With medicine. And irrigation. They sank deep wells, with sweet, flowing water, and of course the nomads settled there. So instead of moving their herds on, leaving the pastures a chance to recover, they ate everything down to bare rock, for miles around every well. And the eight, nine children that African women have borne from time immemorial-they all lived. It wasn't that the world didn't care. They struggled heroically, for gen- erations, selflessly and nobly. To achieve an atrocity."

"That's too complicated for me, Gresham. It's perverse!"

"You're grateful to me, because you think I saved you.

The hell. We did our best to kill. everyone in that convoy. We raked that truck with machine-gun fire, three times. I don't know how the hell you lived."

" `Fortunes of war

"I love war, Laura. I enjoy it, like the F.A.C.T. Them, they enjoy murdering rag-heads with robots. Me, I'm more visceral. Somewhere inside me, I wanted Armageddon, and this is as close as it ever got. Where the Earth is blasted and all the sickness comes to a head."

He leaned closer. "But that's not all of it. I'm not innocent enough to let chaos alone. I stink of the Net, Laura. Of power and planning and data, and the Western method, and the pure inability to let anything alone. Ever. Even if it destroys my own freedom. The Net lost Africa once, blew it so badly that it went bad and wild, but the Net will get it back, someday.

Green and pleasant and controlled, and just like everywhere else. "

"So I win, and you lose-is. that what you're telling me?

That we're enemies? Maybe we are enemies, in some abstract way that's all in your head. But as people, we're friends, aren't we? And I'd never hurt you if I could help it."

"You can't help it. You were hurting me even before I knew you existed." He leaned back. "Maybe my abstractions aren't your abstractions, so I'll give you some of your own.

How do you think I financed all this? Grenada. They were my biggest backers. Winston Stubbs... now there was a man with vision. We didn't always see eye to eye, but we were allies. It hurt a lot to lose him."

She was shocked. "I remember.... They said he gave money to terrorist groups."

"I haven't been picky. I can't afford to be-this project of mine, it's all Net stuff, money, and money's corruption is in the very heart of it. The Tuaregs have nothing to sell, they're

Saharan nomads, destitute. They don't have anything the Net wants-so I beg and scrape. A few rich Arabs, nostalgic for the desert while they tool around in their limousines.... Arms dealers, not many of those left I even took money from FACT, back in the old days, before the Countess went batshit. "

"Katje told me that! That it's a woman who runs FACT.

The Countess! Is it true?"

He was surprised, sidetracked. "She doesn't `run it,' ex- actly, and she's not really a countess, that's just her nom de guerre... . But, yeah, I knew her, in the old days. I knew her very well, when we were younger. As well as I know you."

"You were lovers?"

He smiled. "Are we lovers, Laura?"

The silence stretched, a desert silence broken by the distant whooping of the Tuaregs. She looked into his eyes.

"I talk too much," he said sadly. "A theorist."

She stood and pulled the tunic over her head, threw it to her feet. She sat beside him, naked, in the light of the screen.

He was silent. Clumsily, she pulled at his shirt, ran her hand over his chest. He opened his robe and put his weight on her.

He fumbled at her gently. For the first time, something vital, deep within her, realized that she was alive again. As if her soul had gone to sleep like a handcuffed arm, and now blood was returning. A torrent of sensation.

A moment passed with the muted crinkling of contraceptive plastic. Then he was on her, inside her. She wrapped her legs around him, her skin aflame. Flesh and muscle moving in darkness, the smell of sex. She closed her eyes, overwhelmed.

He stopped for a moment. She opened her eyes. He was looking at her, his face alight. Then he reached out with one arm and tapped the keyboard.

The machine scanned channels. Light flashed over them as it blasted one-second gouts of satellite video into the tent.

Unable to stop herself, she turned her head to look.

Cityscape / cityscape / trees / a woman I brand names /

Arabic script / image / image / image/

They were moving in time. They were moving in rhythm to the set, eyes lifted up, fixed on the screen.

Pleasure shot through her like channeled lightning. She cried out.

He gripped her hard and closed his eyes. He was going to finish soon. She did what she could to help him.

And it was over. He slid aside, touched the screen. The image froze on a weather station, ranks of silent numbers, cool computer-graphic blues of. lows and highs.

"Thank you," he said. "You were good to me."

She was shaking in reaction. She found her robe and put it on, body-mind whirling in turmoil. As reality came seeping back, she felt a sudden giddy wash of joy, of pure release.

It was over, there was nothing to fear. They were people together, a man and woman. She felt a sudden rush of affection for him. She reached out. Surprised, he patted her hand. Then he rose and moved into the television dimness.

She heard him fumbling, opening a bag. He was back in a moment. Bright gleam of tin. "Abalone."

She sat up. Her stomach rumbled loudly. They laughed, comfortable in their embarrassment, the erotic squalor of intimacy. He pried open the can and they ate. "God, it's so good," she told him.

"I never eat anything grown in topsoil. Plants are full of deadly natural insecticides. People are nuts to eat that stuff."

"My husband used to say that all the time."

He looked up, slowly. "I'm gone tomorrow," he repeated.

"Don't worry about anything."

"It's fine, I'll be all right." Meaningless words, but the concern was there-it was as if they had kissed. Night had fallen, it had grown cold. She shivered.

"I'll take you back to camp."

"I'll stay, if you want."

He stood up, helped to her feet. "No. It's warmer there."

Katje lay in a camp bed, white sheets, the floral smell of an air spray over the reek of disinfectant. There was not much machinery by modern standards, but it was a clinic and they had pulled her through.

"Where did you find such clothes?" she whispered.