Islands in the Net

1

The sea lay in simmering quiet, a slate-green gumbo seasoned with warm mud. Shrimp boats trawled the horizon.

Pilings rose in clusters, like blackened fingers, yards out in the gentle surf. Once, Galveston beach homes had crouched on those tar-stained stilts. Now barnacles clustered there, gulls wheeled and screeched. It was a great breeder of hurricanes, this quiet Gulf of Mexico .

Laura read her time and distance with a quick downward glance. Green indicators blinked on the toes. of her shoes, flickering with each stride, counting mileage. Laura picked up the pace. Morning shadows strobed across her as she ran.

She passed the last of the pilings and spotted her home, far down the beach. She grinned as fatigue evaporated in a flare. of energy.

Everything seemed worth it. When the second wind took her, she felt that she could run forever, a promise of inde- structible confidence bubbling up from the marrow. She ran in pure animal ease, like an antelope.

The beach leapt up and slammed against her.

Laura lay stunned for a moment. She lifted her head, then caught her breath and groaned. Her cheek was caked with sand, both elbows numbed with the impact of the fall. Her arms trembled as she pushed herself up onto her knees. She looked behind her.

Something had snagged her foot. It was a black, peeling length of electrical cable. Junked flotsam from the hurricane, buried in the sand. The wire had whiplashed around her left ankle and brought her down as neatly as a lariat.

She rolled over and sat, breathing hard, and kicked the loosened wire off her shoe. The broken skin above her sock had just begun to bleed, and the first cold shock gave way to hot smarting pain.

She stood up and threw off the shakiness, brushing sand from her cheek and arms. Sand had scratched the plastic screen of her watchphone. Its wrist strap was caked with grit.

"Great," Laura said. A belated rush of anger brought her strength back. She bent and pulled at the cable, hard. Four feet of wet sand furrowed up.

She looked around for a stick or a chunk of driftwood to dig with. The beach, as usual, was conspicuously clean. But

Laura refused to leave this filthy snag- to trip some tourist.

That wouldn't do at all-not on her beach. Stubbornly, she knelt down and dug with her hands.

She followed the frayed cord half a foot down, to the peeling, chromed edge of a home appliance. Its simulated plastic wood grain crumbled under Laura's fingers like old linoleum tile. She kicked the dead machine several times to loosen it. Then, grunting and heaving, she wrenched it up from its wet cavity in the sand. It came up sullenly, like a rotten tooth.

It was a video cassette recorder. Twenty years of grit and brine had made it a solid mass of corrosion. A thin gruel of sand and broken shell dripped from its empty cassette slot.

It was an old-fashioned unit. Heavy and clumsy. Limping,

Laura dragged it behind her by its cord. She looked up the beach for the local trash can.

She spotted it loitering near a pair of fishermen, who stood in hip boots in the gentle surf. She called out. "Trash can!

The can pivoted on broad rubber treads and rolled- toward her voice. It snuffled across the beach, mapping its way with bursts of infrasound. It spotted Laura and creaked to a stop beside her.

Laura hefted the dead recorder and dropped it into the open barrel with a loud, bonging thump. "Thank you for keeping our beaches clean," the can intoned. "Galveston appreciates good citizenship. Would you like to register for a valuable cash prize?"

"Save it for the tourists," Laura said. She jogged on toward home, favoring her ankle.

Home loomed above the high-tide line on twenty sand- colored buttresses.

The Lodge was a smooth half cylinder of dense concretized sand, more or less the color and shape of a burnt bread loaf.

A round two-story tower rose from the center. Massive con- crete arches held it a dozen feet above the beach.

A broad canopy in candy-stripe red and white shaded the

Lodge's walls. Under the canopy, a sun-bleached wooden walkway girdled the building. Behind the walkway's railings, morning sunlight gleamed from the glass doors of half a dozen guest rooms, which faced east to the sea.

A trio of guest kids were already out on the beach. Their parents were from a Rizome Canadian firm, and they were all vacationing at company expense. The kids wore navy blue sailor suits and nineteenth-century Fauntleroy hats with trail- ing ribbons. The clothes were souvenirs from Galveston's historical district.

The biggest kid, a ten-year-old, ran headlong toward Laura, holding a long wooden baton over his head. Behind him, a modern window-sculpture kite leapt from the others' arms, wing after tethered wing peeling loose in blue and green pastels.

Yanked free, each fabric aerofoil flapped into shape, caught the wind, and flung itself into flight. The ten-year-old slowed and turned, fighting its pull. The long kite bucked like a serpent, its movements eerily sinuous. The children screamed with glee.

Laura looked up at the Lodge's tower roof. The flags of

Texas and Rizome Industries Group slid up the tower's flag- pole. Old Mr. Rodriguez waved at her briefly, then disappeared behind the satellite dish.. The old man was doing the honors as usual, starting another day.

Laura limped up the wooden stairs to the walkway. She pushed through the heavy doors of the front lobby. Inside, the

Lodge's massive walls still held the coolness of night. And the cheerful reek of Tex-Mex cooking-peppers, cornmeal, and cheese.

Mrs. Rodriguez was not at the front desk yet she was a late riser, not as spry as her husband. Laura walked through the empty dining room and up the tower stairs.

The tower's trapdoor slid open at her approach. She emerged through the tower's lower floor, into a round conference room lined with modem office equipment and padded swivel chairs.

Behind her, the trapdoor accordioned shut.

David, her husband, was stretched out on a wicker couch, with the baby on his chest. They were both fast asleep. One of David's hands spread cozily across little Loretta's pajama'd back.

Morning light poured through the tower's thick, round windows, slanting high across the room. It lent a strange

Renaissance glow to their faces. David's head was propped against a pillow, and his profile, always striking, looked like a Medici coin. The baby's relaxed and peaceful face, her skin like damask, was hauntingly fresh and new. As if she'd popped into the world out of cellophane.

David had kicked a woolen comforter into a wad at the foot of the couch. Laura spread it carefully over his legs and the

.baby's back.

She pulled up a chair and sat by them, stretching out her legs. A wash of pleasant fatigue came over her. She savored it a while, then gave David's bare shoulder a nudge.

"Morning."

He stirred. He sat up, cradling Loretta, who slept on in babylike omnipotence. "Now she sleeps," he said. "But not at three A.M. The midnight of the human soul."

"I'll get up next time," Laura said. "Really."

"Hell, we ought to put her in the room with your mother."

David brushed long black hair from his eyes, then yawned into his knuckles. "I dreamed I saw my Optimal Persona last night."

"Oh?" Laura said, surprised. "What was it like?"

"I dunno. About what I expected, from the stuff I read about it. Soaring and foggy and cosmic. I was standing on the beach. Naked, I think. The sun was coming up. It was hyp- notic. I felt this huge sense of total elation. Like I'd discov- ered some pure element of soul."

Laura frowned. "You don't really believe in that crap."

He shrugged. "No. Seeing your O.P. it's a fad. Like folks used to see UFO's, you know? Some weirdo in Oregon says he had an encounter with his personal archetype. Pretty soon, everybody and his brother's having visions. Mass hysteria, collective unconscious or some such. Stupid. But modern at least. It's very new-millennium." He seemed obscurely pleased.

"It's mystic bullshit," Laura told him. "If it was really your Optimal Self, you should have been building something, right? Not beachcombing for Nirvana."

David looked sheepish. "It was just a dream. Remember that documentary last Friday? The guy who saw his O.P. walking down the street, wearing his clothes, using his charge card? I got a long way to go just yet. ",He looked down at her ankle and started. "What'd you do to your leg?"

She looked at it. "I tripped over a piece of hurricane junk.

Buried in the sand. A VCR, actually." Loretta woke up, her tiny face stretching in a mighty toothless yawn.

"Really? Must have been there since the big one of '02.

Twenty years! Christ, you could get tetanus." He handed her the baby and fetched a first-aid kit from the bathroom. On the way back he touched a console button. One of the flat display screens on the wall flared into life.

David sat on the floor with limber grace and put Laura's foot in his lap. He unlaced her shoe and glanced at its readout. "That's pretty rotten time. You must have been limping, babe."

He peeled off her sock. Laura held the wriggling baby to her shoulder and stared at the screen, distracting herself as

David dabbed at her raw skin.

The screen was running David's Worldrun game-a global simulation. Worldrun had been invented as a forecasting tool for development agencies, but a glamorized version had found its way onto the street. David, who was prone to sudden enthusiasms, had been playing it for days.

Long strips of the Earth's surface peeled by in a simulated satellite view. Cities glowed green with health or red with social disruption. Cryptic readouts raced across the bottom of the screen. Africa was a mess. "It's always Africa, isn't it?"

she said.

"Yeah." He resealed a tube of antiseptic gel. "Looks like a rope burn. It didn't bleed much. It'll scab.

"I'll be okay." She stood up, lifting Loretta, and disguis- ing the pain for his sake. The rawness faded as the gel soaked in. She smiled. "I need a shower."

David's watchphone beeped. It was Laura's mother, calling from her guest room in the Lodge, downstairs.

"Ohayo, y'all! How about helping Granny surround some breakfast?"

David was amused. "I'll be down in a minute, Margaret.

Don't eat anything with the hide still on it." They went upstairs to their bedroom.

Laura gave him the baby and stepped into the bathroom, which shut behind her.

Laura could not understand why David actively liked her mother. He'd insisted on her right to see her grandchild, though Laura hadn't met her mother face to face in years.

David was taking naive pleasure in his mother-in-law's stay, as if a week-long visit could smooth over years of unspoken resentment.

To David, family ties seemed natural and solid, the way things should be. His own parents doted on the baby. But

Laura's parents had split when she was nine, and she'd been raised by her grandmother. Laura knew that family was a luxury, a hothouse plant.

Laura stepped into the tub and the curtain shunted shut.

The sun-warmed water washed the tension from her; she put family troubles out of mind. She stepped out and blew her hair dry. It fell into place-she wore a simple cut, short, with light feathery bangs. Then she confronted herself in the mirror.

After three months, most of her postnatal flab had suc- cumbed to her running campaign. The endless days of her pregnancy were a fading memory, though her swollen body image still lurched up sometimes in her dreams. She'd been happy, mostly-huge and achy, but cruising on motherhood's hormones. She'd given David some rough times. "Mood swings," he'd said, smiling with fatuous male tolerance.

In the last weeks they'd both been spooked and twitchy, like barnyard animals before an earthquake. Trying to cope, they talked in platitudes. Pregnancy was one of those arche- typal situations that seemed to breed cliche's.

But it was the right decision. It had been the right time.

Now they had the home they'd built and the child they'd wanted. Special things, rare things, treasures.

It had brought her mother back into her life, but that would pass. Basically, things were sound, they were happy. Nothing wildly ecstatic, Laura thought, but a solid happiness, the kind she believed they had earned.

Laura picked at the part in her hair, watching the mirror.

That light threading of gray-there hadn't been so much before the baby. She was thirty-two now, married eight years.

She touched the faint creases at the corners of her eyes, thinking of her mother's face. They had the same eyes-set wide, blue with a glimmer of yellow-green. "Coyote eyes,"

her grandmother had called them. Laura had her dead father's long, straight nose and wide mouth, with an upper lip that fell a little short. Her front teeth were too big and square.

Genetics, Laura thought. You pass them on to the next generation. Then they relax and start to crumble on you. They do it anyway. You just have to pay a little extra for using the copyright.

She lined her eyes, touched on lipstick and video rouge.

She put on hose, knee-length skirt, long-sleeve blouse in patterned Chinese silk, and a dark blue business vest. She stuck a Rizome logo pin through the vest's lapel.

She joined David and her mother in the Lodge's dining room. The Canadians, here for the last day, were playing with the baby. Laura's mother was eating the Nipponese breakfast, little cakes of pressed rice and tiny popeyed fish that smelled like kerosene. David, on the other hand, had fixed the usual: cunningly disguised food-oid stuff. Fluffy mock scrambled eggs, soybean bacon, pancakes from batter made of thick, yellow scop.

David was a health-food nut, a great devotee of unnatural foods. After eight years of marriage, Laura was used to it. At least the tech was improving. Even the. scop, single-cell protein, was better these days. It tasted all right, if you could forget the image of protein vats crammed with swarming bacteria.

David wore his overalls. He was going out house wrecking today. He had his heavy toolbox and his grandfather's old oil-company hard hat. The prospect of bashing up houses- filthy, crowbar-swinging muscle work-always filled David with childlike glee. He drawled more than usual and put hot sauce on his eggs, infallible signs of his good mood.

Laura's mother,. Margaret Alice Day Garfield Nakamura

Simpson, wore a Tokyo original in blue crepe de chine, with a trailing waist sash. Her woven-straw sun hat, the size of a bicycle wheel, was tied across her back. She called herself

Margaret Day, since she had recently divorced Simpson, a man Laura scarcely knew.

"It's not the Galveston I remember anymore," Laura's mother said.

David nodded. "You know what I miss? I miss the wreck- age. I mean, I was ten when the big disaster hit. I grew up in the wreckage down the island. All those beach homes, snapped off, washed up, tossed around like dice... It seemed infi- nite, full of surprises."

Laura's mother smiled. "That's why you stayed here?"

David sipped his breakfast juice, which came from a pow- dered mix and was of a color not found in nature. "Well, after '02, everyone with sense pulled out. It left all the more room for us diehards. We BOI's, Born on the Island folks, we're a weird breed." David smiled self-consciously. "To live here, you have to have a kind of dumb love for bad luck.

Isla Malhaldo, that was Galveston's first name, you know.

Isle of Bad Luck."

"Why?" Laura's mother said obligingly. She was humoring him.

"Cabeza de Vaca called it that. His galleon was ship- wrecked here in 1528. He was almost eaten by cannibals.

Karankawa Indians."

"Oh? Well, the Indians must have had some name for the place. "

"Nobody knows it," David said. "They were all wiped out by smallpox. True Galvestonians, I guess-bad luck."

He thought it over. "A very weird tribe, the Karankawas.

They used to smear themselves with rancid alligator grease- they were famous for the stench."

"I've never heard of them," Margaret Day said.

"They were very primitive," David said, forking up an- other scop pancake. "They used to eat dirt! They'd bury a fresh deer kill for three or four, days, until it softened up, and--

"David!" Laura said.

"Oh," David said. "Sorry." He changed the subject.

"You ought to come out with us today, Margaret. Rizome has a good little side, biz with the city government. They condemn it, we scrap it, and it's a lot of fun all around. I mean, it's not serious money, not by zaibatsu standards, but there's more to life than the bottom line-"

" `Fun City,' " her mother said.

"I see you've been listening to our new mayor," Laura said.

"Do you ever worry about the people drifting into Galves- ton these days?" her mother said suddenly.

"What do you mean?" Laura said.

"I've been reading about this mayor of yours. He's quite a strange character, isn't he? An ex-bartender with a big white beard who wears Hawaiian shirts to the office. He seems to be going out of his way to attract-what's the word?-fringe elements. "

"Well, it's not a real city anymore, is it?" David said.

"No more industry. Cotton's gone, shipping's gone, oil went a long time ago. About all that's left is to sell glass beads to tourists. Right? And a little, uh, social exotica is good for tourism. You expect a tourist burg to run a little fast and loose."

"So you like the mayor? I understand Rizome backed his campaign. Does that mean your company supports his policies?"

"Who's asking?" Laura said, nettled. "Mother, you're on vacation. Let Marubeni Company find their own answers."

The two of them locked eyes for a moment. "Aisumimasen."

her mother said at last. "I'm very sorry if I seemed to pry. I spent too much time in the State Department. I still have the reflexes. Now that I'm in what they laughingly call private enterprise." She set her chopsticks across her plate and reached for her hat. "I've decided to rent a sailboat today. They say there's an offshore station-an OPEC, or something like that."

"OTEC," David corrected absently. "The power station.

Yeah, it's nice out there."

"I'll see you at supper then. Be good, you two."

Four more Canadians came in for breakfast, yawning. Mar- garet Day filtered past them and left the dining room.

"You had to step on her toes," David said quietly. "What's wrong with Marubeni? Some creaky old Nipponese trading company. You think they sent Loretta's grandma here to swipe our microchips or something?"

"She's a guest of Rizome," Laura said. "I don't like her criticizing our people."

"She's leaving tomorrow," David said. "You could go a little easier on her." He stood up, hefting his tool chest.

"All right, I'm sorry," Laura told him. There wasn't time to get into it now. This was business.

She greeted the Canadians and took the baby back. They were part of a production wing from a Rizome subsidiary in

Toronto, on vacation as a reward for increased production.

They were sunburned but cheerful.

Another pair of guests came in: Senor and Senora Kurosawa, from Brazil. They were fourth-generation Brazilians, with

Rizome-Unitika, a textile branch of the firm. They had no

English, and their Japanese was amazingly bad, laden with

Portuguese loan words and much Latin arm waving. They complimented Laura on the food. It was their last day, too.

Then, trouble arrived. The Europeans were up. There were three of them and they were not Rizome people, but bankers from Luxembourg. There was a banker's conference in the works tomorrow, a major do by all accounts. The Europeans had come a day early. Laura was sorry for it.

The Luxembourgers sat morosely for breakfast. Their leader and chief negotiator was a Monsieur Karageorgiu, a tawny- skinned man in his fifties, with greenish eyes and carefully waved hair. The name marked him as a Europeanized Turk; his grandparents had probably been "guest workers" in Ger- many or Benelux. Karageorgiu wore an exquisitely tailored suit of cream-colored Italian linen.

His crisp, precise, and perfect shoes were like objets d'art,

Laura thought. Shoes engineered to high precision, like the power plant of a Mercedes. It almost hurt to see him walk in them. No one at Rizome would have dared to wear them; the righteous mockery would have been merciless. He reminded

Laura of the diplomats she'd seen as a kid, of a lost standard in studied elegance.

He had a pair of unsmiling companions in black suits: junior executives, or so he claimed. It was hard to tell their origins; Europeans looked more and more alike these days.

One had a vaguely Corte d'Azur look, maybe French or

Corsican; the other was blond. They looked alarmingly fit and hefty. Elaborate Swiss watchphones peeked from their sleeves.

They began complaining. They didn't like the heat. Their rooms smelled and the water tasted salty. They found the toilets peculiar. Laura promised to turn up the heat pump and order more Perrier.

It didn't do much good. They were down on hicks. Espe- cially doctrinaire Yankees who lived in peculiar sand castles and practiced economic democracy. She could tell already that tomorrow was going to be rocky.

In fact the whole setup was fishy. She didn't know enough about these people-she didn't have proper guest files on them. Rizome-Atlanta was being cagey about this bankers'

meeting, which was most unusual for headquarters.

Laura took their breakfast orders and left the three bankers trading sullen glares with the Rizome guests. She took the baby with her to the kitchen. The kitchen staff was up and banging pans. The kitchen staff was seventy-year-old Mrs.

Delrosario and her two granddaughters.

Mrs. Delrosario was a treasure, though she had a mean streak that bubbled up whenever her advice was taken with anything less than total attention and seriousness. Her grand- daughters mooched about the kitchen with a doomed, submis- sive look. Laura felt sorry for them and tried to give them a break when she could. Life wasn't easy as a teenager these days.

Laura fed the baby her formula. Loretta gulped it with enthusiasm. She was like her father in that-really doted on goop no sane person should eat.

Then Laura's watchphone beeped. It was the front desk.

Laura left the baby with Mrs. Delrosario and took the back way to the lobby, through the staff rooms and the first-floor office. She emerged behind the desk. Mrs. Rodriguez looked up in relief, peering over her bifocals.

She had been talking to a stranger-a fiftyish Anglo woman in a black silk dress and a beaded choker. The woman had a vast mane of crisp black hair and her eyes were lined dramati- cally. Laura wondered what to make of her. She looked like a pharaoh's widow. "This is her," Mrs. Rodriguez told the stranger. "Laura, our manager."

"Coordinator," Laura said. "I'm Laura Webster."

"I'm the Reverend Morgan. I called earlier."

"Yes. About the City Council race?" Laura touched her watch, checking her schedule. The woman was half an hour early. "Well," she said. "Won't you come around the desk?

We can talk in my office."

Laura took the woman into the cramped and windowless little suboffice. It was essentially a coffee room for the staff, with a data-link to the mainframe upstairs. This was where

Laura took people from whom she expected the squeeze. The place looked suitably modest and penurious. David had dec- orated it from his wrecking expeditions: antique vinyl car seats and a modular desk in aged beige plastic. The ceiling light shone through a perforated hubcap.

"Coffee?" Laura said.

"No, thank you. I never take caffeine."

"I see." Laura put the pot aside. "What can we do for you, Reverend?"

"You and I have much in common," Reverend Morgan said. "We share a confidence in Galveston's future. And we both have a stake in the tourist industry." She paused. "I understand your husband designed this building."

"Yes, he did."

"It's `Organic Baroque,' isn't it? A style that respects

Mother Earth. That shows a broad-minded approach on your part. Forward-looking and progressive."

"Thank you very much." Here it comes, Laura thought.

"Our Church would like to help you expand services to your corporate guests. Do you know the Church of Ishtar?"

"I'm not sure I follow you," Laura said carefully. "We at

Rizome consider religion a private matter."

"We Temple women believe in the divinity of the sexual act." Reverend Morgan leaned back in her bucket seat, strok- ing her hair with both hands. "The erotic power of the

Goddess can destroy evil."

The slogan found a niche in Laura's memory. "I see,"

Laura said politely. "The Church of Ishtar. I know your movement, but I hadn't recognized the name."

"It's a new name-old principles. You're too young to remember the Cold War." Like many of her generation, the reverend seemed to have a positive nostalgia for it the good old bilateral days. When things were simpler and every morn- ing might be your last. "Because we put an end to it. We invoked the Goddess to take the war out of men. We melted the cold war with divine body heat. " The reverend sniffed.

"Male power mongers claimed the credit, of course. But the triumph belonged to our Goddess. She saved Mother Earth from the nuclear madness. And She continues to heal society today."

Laura nodded helpfully.

"Galveston lives by tourism, Mrs. Webster. And tourists expect certain amenities. Our Church has come to an arrange- ment with the city and the police. We'd like an understanding with your group as well."

Laura rubbed her chin. "I think I can follow your reason- ing, Reverend."

"No civilization has ever existed without us," the reverend said coolly. "The Holy Prostitute is an ancient, universal figure. The Patriarchy degraded and oppressed her. But we restore her ancient role as comforter and healer."

"I was about to mention the medical angle," Laura said.

"Oh, yes," said the reverend. "We take the full range of precautions. Clients are tested for syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and herpes, as well as the retroviruses. All our temples have fully equipped clinics. Sexual disease rates drop dramatically wherever we practice our art-I can show you statistics. We also offer health insurance. And we guarantee confidentiality, of course."

"It's a very interesting proposal," Laura said, tapping her desk with a pencil. "But it's not a decision I can make on my own. I'll be happy to take your ideas to our Central Commit- tee." She took a breath. The air in the tiny room held the smoky reek of the reverend's patchouli. The smell of mad- ness, Laura thought suddenly. "You have to understand that

Rizome may have some difficulties with this. Rizome favors strong social ties in its associates. It's part of our corporate philosophy. Some of us might consider prostitution a sign of social breakdown."

The reverend spread her hands and smiled. "I've heard about Rizome's policies. You're economic democrats-I ad- mire that. As a church, a business, and a political movement, we're a new-millennium group ourselves. But Rizome can't change the nature of the male animal. We've already ser- viced several of your male associates. Does that surprise you?"

She shrugged. "Why risk their health with amateur or criminal groups? We Temple women are safe, dependable, and eco- nomically sensible. The Church stands ready to do business."

Laura dug into her desk. "Let me give you one of our brochures. "

The reverend opened her purse. "Have a few of ours. I have some campaign pamphlets-I'm running for City

Council."

Laura looked the pamphlets over. They were slickly printed.

The margins were dotted with ankh symbols, yin-yangs, and chalices. Laura scanned the dense text, spotted with italics and words in red. "I see you favor a liberal drug policy."

"Victimless crimes are tools of Patriarchal oppression."

The reverend dug in her purse and produced an enameled pillbox. "A few of these will argue the case better than I can." She dropped three red capsules on the desktop. "Try them, Mrs. Webster. As a gift from the Church. Astonish your husband."

"I beg your pardon?" Laura said.

"Remember the giddiness of first love? The sense that the whole world had new meaning, because of him? Wouldn't you like to recapture that? Most women would. It's an intoxi- cating feeling, isn't it? And these are the intoxicants."

Laura stared at the pills. "Are you telling me these are love potions?"

The reverend shifted uncomfortably, with a whisper of black silk against vinyl. "Mrs. Webster, please don't mistake me for a witch. The Church of Wicca are reactionaries. And no, these aren't love potions, not in the folklore sense. They only stir that rush of emotion-they can't direct it at anyone.

You do that for yourself."

"It sounds hazardous," Laura said.

"Then it's the sort of danger women were born for!" the reverend said. "Do you ever read romance novels? Millions do, for this same thrill. _ Or eat chocolate? Chocolate is a lover's gift, and there's reason behind the tradition. Ask a chemist about chocolate and serotonin precursors sometime."

The reverend touched her forehead. "It all comes to the same, up here. Neurochemistry." She pointed to the table.

"Chemistry in those pills. They're natural substances, cre- ations of the Goddess. Part of the feminine soul."

Somewhere along the line, Laura thought, the conversation had gently peeled loose from sanity. It was like falling asleep on an air raft and waking up far out to sea. The important thing was not to panic. "Are they legal?" Laura said.

Reverend Morgan picked up a pill with her lacquered nails and ate it. "No blood test would show a thing. You can't be prosecuted for the natural contents of your own brain. And no, they're not illegal. Yet. Praise the Goddess, the Patriar- chy's laws still lag behind advances in chemistry."

"I can't accept these," Laura said. "They must be valu- able. It's conflict of interest." Laura picked them up and stood, reaching over the desk.

"This is the modern age, Mrs. Webster. Gene-spliced bacte- ria can make drugs by the ton. Friends of ours can make them for thirty cents each." Reverend Morgan rose to her feet.

"You're sure?" She slipped the pills back in her purse.

"Come and see us if you change your mind. Life with one man can go stale very easily. Believe me, we know. And if that happens, we can help you." She paused meditatively.

"In any of several different ways."

Laura smiled tightly. "Good luck with your campaign,

Reverend."

"Thank you. I appreciate your good wishes. As our mayor always says, Galveston is Fun City. It's up to all of us to see it stays that way."

Laura ushered her outside. She watched from the walkway as the reverend slipped into a self-driven van. The van whirred off. A flock of brown pelicans crossed the island, headed for

Karankawa Bay. The autumn sun shone brightly. It was still the same sun and the same clouds. The sun didn't care about the landscape inside people's heads.

She went back in. Mrs. Rodriguez looked up from behind the front desk, blinking. "I'm glad my old man is no young- er, " she said. "La puta, eh? A whore. She's no friend to us married women, Laurita."

"I guess not," Laura said, leaning against the desk. She felt tired already, and it was only ten o'clock.

"I'm going to church this Sunday," Mrs. Rodriguez de- cided. "Que brujeria, eh? A witch! Did you see those eyes?

Like a snake." She crossed herself. "Don't laugh, Laura."

"Laugh? Hell, I'm ready to hang garlic." The baby wailed from the kitchen. A sudden Japanese phrase leapt into Laura's head. "Nakitsura ni hachi," she blurted. "It never rains but it pours. Only it's better in the original. `A bee for a crying face.' Why can't I ever remember that crap when I need it?"

Laura took the baby upstairs to the tower office to deal with the day's mail.

Laura's corporate specialty was public relations. When

David had designed the Lodge, Laura had prepared this room for business. It was equipped for major conferences; it was a full-scale node in the global Net.

The Lodge did most of its business as telex, straight print sent by wire, such as guest dossiers and arrival schedules.

Most of the world, even Africa, was wired for telex these. days. It was cheapest and simplest, and Rizome favored it.

"Fax" was more elaborate: entire facsimiles of documents, photographed and passed down the phone lines as streams of numbers. Fax was good for graphics and still photos; the fax machine was essentially a Xerox with a phone. It was great fun to play with.

The Lodge also took plenty of traditional phone traffic: voice without image, both live and recorded. Also voice with im- age: videophone. Rizome favored one-way prerecorded calls because they were more efficient. There was less chance of an expensive screwup in a one-way recorded call. And re- corded video could be subtitled for all of Rizome's language groups, a major advantage for a multinational.

The Lodge could also handle teleconferencing: multiple phone calls woven together. Teleconferencing was the expen- sive borderland where phones blurred into television. Run- ning a teleconference was an art worth knowing, especially in public relations. It was a cross between chairing a meeting and running a TV news show, and Laura had done it many times.

Every year of her life, Laura thought, the Net had been growing more expansive and seamless. Computers did it.

Computers melted other machines, fusing them together.

Television-telephone-telex. Tape recorder-VCR-laser disk.

Broadcast tower linked to microwave dish linked to satellite.

Phone line, cable TV, fiber-optic cords hissing out words and pictures in torrents of pure light. All netted together in a web over the world, a global nervous system, an octopus of data.

There'd been plenty of hype about it. It was easy to make it sound transcendently incredible.

She'd been more into it when she'd been setting it up.

Right now it seemed vastly more remarkable that Loretta was sitting up much straighter in her lap. "Looook at you, Lo- retta! Look how straight you can hold your head! Look at you, sweetie-face... . Wooga woog-woog-woog ... "

The Net was a lot, like television, another former wonder of the age. The Net was a vast glass mirror. It reflected what it was shown. Mostly human banality.

Laura zoomed one-handed through her electronic junk mail.

Shop-by-wire catalogs. City Council campaigns. Charities.

Health insurance.

Laura erased the garbage and got down to business. A

message was waiting from Emily Donato.

Emily was Laura's prime news source for the backstage action in Rizome's Central Committee. Emily Donato was a first-term committee member.

Laura's alliance with Emily was twelve years old. They'd met in college at an international business class. Their shared backgrounds made friendship easy. Laura, a "diplobrat," had lived in Japan as an embassy kid. For Emily, childhood meant the massive industrial projects of Kuwait and Abu

Dhabi. The two of them had shared a room in college.

After graduation, they'd examined their recruiting offers and decided together on Rizome Industries Group. Rizome looked modern, it looked open, it had ideas. It was big enough for muscle and loose enough for speed.

The two of them had been double-teaming the company ever since.

Laura punched up the message and Emily's image flashed onto the screen. Emily sat behind her antique desk at home in

Atlanta, Rizome's headquarters. Home for Emily was a high- rise apartment downtown, a cell in a massive modern beehive of ceramic and composite plastic._

Filtered air, filtered water, halls like streets, elevators like vertical subways. A city set on end, for a crowded world.

Naturally everything about Emily's apartment struggled to obscure the facts. The place abounded in homey quirks and little touches of Victorian solidity: cornices, baroque door frames, rich mellow lighting. The wall behind Emily was papered in paisley arabesques, gold on maroon. Her polished wooden desktop was set as carefully as a stage: low keyboard at her right hand, pen and pencil holders with a slanting peacock plume, a gleaming paperweight of gypsum crystal.

The Chinese synthetic of Emily's frilled gray blouse had the faint shimmer of mother-of-pearl. Emily's chestnut-brown hair had been done by machine, with elaborate braids and little Dickensian curls at the temple. She wore long malachite earrings and a round cameo hologram at her neck. Emily's video image was very twenties, a modem reaction against the stark, dress-for-success took of generations of businesswomen.

To Laura's eye, the fashion suggested an antebellum southern belle filled to gushing with feminine graciousness.

"I've got the Report's rough draft," Emily announced.

"It's pretty much what we expected."

Emily pulled her copy of the Quarterly Report from a drawer.

She flipped pages. "Let's get to the major stuff. The

Committee election. We've got twelve candidates, which is a joke, but three frontrunners. Pereira's an honest guy, you could play poker with him by telex, but he can't live down that Brasilia debacle. Tanaka pulled a real coup with that

Osaka lumber deal. He's pretty flexible for an oldline salary man, but I met him in Osaka last year. He drank a lot and wanted to pinch me. Besides, he's into countertrade, and that's my turf.

"So we'll have to back Suvendra. She came up through the

Djakarta office, so the East Asian contingent's behind her.

She's old, though." Emily frowned. "And she smokes. An ugly habit and it tends to rub people the wrong way. Those clove-scented Indonesian cancer sticks-one whiff and you're ready for a biopsy." She shuddered.

"Still, Suvendra's our best bet. At least, she'll appreciate our support. Unfortunately that moron Jensen is running again on a youth platform, and that'll cut into the votes we can swing. But to hell with it." She pulled at a coil of hair. "I'm tired of playing the young ingenue anyway. When I run again in '25 I think we should aim for the Anglo and feminist vote."

She flipped pages, frowning. "Okay, a quick review of the party line. Let me know if you need more data on the arguments. Philippines farm project: no way. Farming's a black hole and Manila's price supports are bound to collapse. Kymera joint project: yes. Russian software deal: yes. The Sovs still have hard-currency problems, but we can cut a good countertrade in natural gas. Kuwaiti housing project: no. Islamic Republic: the terms are good but it stinks politically. No."

She paused. "Now here's one you didn't know about.

Grenada United Bank. The Committee's slipping this one in." For the first time, Emily looked uneasy. "They're an offshore bank. Not too savory. But the Committee figures it's time for a gesture of friendship. It won't do our reputation much good if the whole thing is hashed out in public. But it's harmless enough-we can let it go."

Emily yanked open a wooden drawer with a squeak and put the Report away. "So much for this quarter. Things look good, generally." She smiled. "Hello, David, if you're watch- ing. If you don't mind, I'd like a private word with Laura now."

The screen went blank for a long moment. But the time elapsing didn't cost much. Prerecorded one-way calls were cheap. Emily's call had been compressed into a high-speed burst and sent from machine to machine overnight, at midnight rates.

Emily reappeared on the screen, this time in her bedroom.

She now wore a pink-and-white satin night-robe and her hair had been brushed out. She sat cross-legged in her wooden four-poster bed, a Victorian antique. Emily had refinished her ancient, creaking bed with modern hard-setting shellac. This transparent film was so mercilessly tough and rigid that it clamped the whole structure together like cast iron.

She had attached the phone camera to one. of the bedposts.

Business was over now. This was personal. The video eti- quette had changed along with Emily's expression. She had a hangdog look. A new camera angle, looking down into the bed from a somewhat superior angle, helped convey the mood. She looked pitiful.

Laura sighed, pausing the playback. She shifted Loretta in her lap and nuzzled her absently. She was used to hearing

Emily's problems, but it was hard to take before lunch.

Especially today. Weirdness beginning to mount. She lifted her finger again.

"Well, I'm back," Emily intoned. "I suppose you can guess what it is. It's Arthur again. We had another fight. A

brutal one. It started as one of those trivial things, about nothing really. Oh, about sex I guess, or at least that's what he said, but it came out of the blue for me. I thought he was being a bastard for no reason. He started sniping at me, using

That Tone of Voice, you know. And once he gets that way he's impossible.

"He started shouting, I started yelling, and things just went straight to hell. He almost hit me. He clenched his fist and everything." Emily paused dramatically. "I ran back in here and locked the door in his face. And he didn't say a damned thing. He just left me in here. When I came out he was gone.

And he took... " Her voice shook for a moment and she waited it out, pulling at a long strand of hair. "He took that photo he made of me, the black-and-white one in period dress, that I really liked. And that was two days ago and he doesn't answer his goddamn phone.

She looked close to tears. "I don't know, Laura. I've tried everything. I've tried men in the company, men outside, and it's just no luck at all. I mean, -either they want to own you and be the center of the universe, or they. want to treat you like some bed-and-breakfast service and expose you to Christ knows what kind of disease. And it's been worse since I've been on the Committee. Rizome men are a lost cause now.

They tiptoe around me like I was a goddamn land mine."

She looked off-camera. "C'mon, kitty." A Persian cat jumped onto the bed. "Maybe it's me, Laura. Other women come to decent terms with men. You certainly did. Maybe I need outside help." She hesitated. "Someone put an anony- mous post on the trade division board. About a psychiatric drug. Marriage counselors are using it. Romance, they call it.

You ever hear of it? I think it's illegal or something." She stroked her cat absently.

She sighed. "Well, this is nothing new. Emily's sob story, year thirty-two. I think it's through between me and Arthur now. He's an artistic type. A photographer. Not in business at all. I thought it might work out. But I was wrong as usual."

She shrugged. "I should look at the bright side, right? He didn't ask me- for money and he didn't give me a retrovirus.

And he wasn't married. A real prince."

She leaned back against the mahogany headboard, looking tired and defenseless. "I shouldn't tell you this, Laura, so be sure to erase it first thing. This Grenada Bank deal-that meeting you're about to hold is part of it. Rizome's sponsor- ing a meeting on data banking and data piracy. That doesn't sound like anything new, but listen: it's with actual live pirates. Sleazy offshore types from the data havens. Re- member the fight we put through to get your Lodge equipped for major meetings?"

Emily grimaced and spread her hands. "Well, the Europe- ans should be there already. They're the tamest of the bunch- the closest to legit. But you can expect some Grenadians in tomorrow, with one of our security people. The Committee's sent you the schedule already, but not the full details. As far as you know, they're all legitimate bankers. Be nice to them, all right? They may be the crooks to us, but what they do is completely legal in their little enclaves."

She frowned. The cat dropped to the floor with a thump off-camera. "They've been taking bites out of us for years, and we've got to talk some sense into them. It looks bad for

Rizome to cozy up to pirates, so keep it quiet, all right? I'm being stupid here, because I wanted to give you a break. If it comes out that I leaked this, the Committee will slap me down hard. So you'd better be a lot more discreet than I am.

Okay, end of message. Send me a tape of the baby, all right?

Say hi to David." The screen went blank.

Well, now she had it all. She erased the tape. Thanks, Em.

Pirate data bankers, no less. Creepy little hustlers from some offshore data haven-the kind of guys that chewed matchsticks and wore sharkskin suits. That explained the Europeans. Bank- ers my eye. They were all rip-off artists. Crooks.

They were nervous, that was it. Jumpy. And no wonder.

The general potential for embarrassment in this situation was vast. One phone call to the Galveston police and they could all be in machismo hot water.

She was a little mad at the Committee for being cagey about it. But she could see their reasons. And the more she thought about it, the more she recognized it as a gesture of trust. Her

Lodge was going to be right in the middle of some very delicate action. They could easily have taken it to another

Lodge-like the Warburtons in the Ozarks. This way they were going to have to level with her. And she was going to see it all.

After a late lunch, she took the Canadians into the confer- ence room in the tower. They logged in to Atlanta and picked up their last messages. They killed a couple of hours before departure, grinning into videophones and gossiping. One of the women had run out of video rouge and had to borrow Laura's.

At four, the fall Quarterly Report came on line, a little early. The printers chattered hard copy. The Kurosawas picked up their Portuguese translation and left.

David showed up at five o'clock, and he'd brought his wrecking crew. They stomped into the bar, raided the beer, and rushed upstairs to see the baby. Laura's mother arrived, sunburned from her boat trip to the OTEC. Galveston's Ocean

Thermal Energy Converter was a civic pride and joy, and one of David's crew had been on the project. Everyone seemed delighted to trade notes.

David was peppered head to foot with grime and sawdust.

So were his four wrecking buddies. In their work shirts, denim overalls, and heavy boots, they looked like Depression hoboes. Actually David's friends were a dentist, two marine engineers, and a biology professor, but appearances counted.

She tugged his shoulder strap. "Did the European bankers see you; coming in?"

David beamed paternally as his friends admired Loretta's amazing new skill at clenching her sweaty little fists. "Yeah, so?"

"David, you reek."

"A little honest sweat!" David said. "What are we, Marx- ists? Hell, they envy us! Those Luxembourg paper shufflers are dying for a day's honest work."

Supper with David's friends was a 'great success. David broke his principles and ate the shrimp, but refused to touch the -vegetables. "Vegetables are full of poisons!" he insisted loudly. "They're crammed with natural insecticides! Plants use chemical warfare. Ask any botanist!"

Luckily no one pursued the subject. The wrecking crew called vans and left for home. Laura locked up for the night while the staff loaded the dishes. David took a shower.

Laura limped up to the top floor to join him. It was sunset.

Mr. Rodriguez lowered the flags on the roof and tottered back down three flights of stairs to staff quarters. He was a stoic old man, but Laura thought he looked tired. He'd had life- guard duty. The Canadians' manic brood had run him ragged.

Laura kicked off her sandals and hung her vest and skirt in the bedroom closet. She shrugged out of her blouse, then sat on the bed and peeled off her hose. Her injured ankle had swollen and was now an impressive blue. She kicked her legs out straight and leaned back against the headboard. A ceiling vent came on and cool air poured over the bed. Laura sat in her underwear, feeling tired and vaguely squalid.

David stalked naked out of the bathroom and disappeared into the baby's room. She heard him making soothing goo-`

goo noises. Laura checked tomorrow's schedule on her watchphone. Her mother was leaving tomorrow. Her depar- ture flight to Dallas was scheduled just before the Grenadians arrived. Laura grimaced. Always more trouble.

David emerged from the baby's room. His long hair was parted in the middle and wet-combed down, flatly, over his ears and neck. He looked like a demented Russian priest.

He flopped down onto the bed and gave her a big, knowing grin. Make that a demented Russian priest with a yen for women, Laura thought with a sinking feeling.

"Great day, huh?" He stretched. "Man, I worked my ass off. I'll be sore tomorrow. Feel great now, though. Lively."

He watched her with narrowed eyes.

Laura was not in the mood. A sense of ritual settled over both of them, a kind of unspoken bargaining. The object was to make your mood set the tone of the evening. Souring it was a foul.

There were multiple levels of play. Both sides won big if you both reached the same mood quickly, through sheer infectious charisma. You won second-class if you got your own way without feeling guilty about it. Pyrrhic victory was when you got your own way but felt rotten. Then there were the various levels of giving in: Gracious, Resigned, and

Martyr to the Cause. .

Fouls were easiest, and then you both lost. The longer the ritual lasted, the more chances there were to screw up. It was a hard game to play, even with eight years' practice.

Laura wondered if she should tell him about the Church of

Ishtar. Thinking about the interview revived her sense of sexual repulsion, like the soiled feeling she got from seeing pornography. She decided not to mention it tonight. He was sure to take it all wrong if he thought his overtures made her feel like a hooker.

She buried the idea and cast about for another one. The first twinge of guilt nibbled her resolve. Maybe she should give in. She looked down at her feet. "My leg hurts," she said.

"Poor babe." He leaned over and had a closer look. His eyes widened. "Jesus." Suddenly she had become an invalid.

The mood shifted all at once, and the game was over. He kissed his fingertip and tapped it lightly on the bruise.

"Feels better, she said, smiling. He leaned back in bed and got. under the sheet, looking resigned and peaceable. That was easy. Victory class one for the Poor Little Lame Girl.

Now it was overkill, but she decided to mention her mother anyway. "I'll be fine when things get back to normal. Mother leaves tomorrow."

"Back to Dallas, huh? Too bad, I was just getting used to the old gal. "

Laura kicked her way under the sheet. "Well, at least she didn't bring some obnoxious boyfriend."

David sighed. "You're so hard on her, Laura. She's a career woman of the old school, that's all. There were mil- lions like her-men, too. Her generation likes to get around.

They live alone, they cut their ties, they stay fast and loose.

Wherever they walk families crumble." He shrugged. "So she had three husbands. With her looks she could have had twenty."

"You always take her side. Just because she likes you."

Because you're like Dad, she thought, and blocked the thought away.

"Because she has your eyes," he said, and gave her a quick, snaky pinch.

She jumped, shocked. "You rat!"

"You big rat," he corrected, yawning.

"Big rat," she agreed. He'd broken her out of her mood.

She felt better.

"Big rat that I can't live without."

"You said it," she said.

"Turn out the light." He turned onto his side, away from her.

She reached out to give his hair a final ruffle. She killed the lights, touching her wrist. She put her arm over his sleeping body and slid up against him in darkness. It was good.