Islands in the Net

4

A stewardess thanked them as they stepped over the threshold. Down the scruffy carpeted runway into Point

Salines Airport. "Who's online?" Laura murmured.

["Emily,"] came the voice in her earplug. ["Right with you."] David stopped struggling with the baby's tote and reached up to adjust his volume. His eyes, like hers, hidden behind the gold-fretted videoshades. Laura felt nervously for her passport card, wondering what customs would be like. Airport hallway hung with dusty posters of white Grenadian beaches, ngratiating grinning locals in fashion colors ten years old, splashy holiday captions in Cyrillic and Japanese katakana.

A young, dark-skinned soldier leaned out from against the wall as they approached. "Webster party?"

"Yes?" Laura framed him with her videoglasses, then scanned him up and down. He wore a khaki shirt and trou- sers, a webbing belt with holstered gun, a starred beret, sunglasses after dark. Rolled-up sleeves revealed gleaming ebony biceps.

He fell into stride ahead of them, legs swinging in black lace-up combat boots. "This way." They paced rapidly across the clearing area, heads down, ignored by a sprinkling of fatigue-glazed travelers. At customs their escort flashed an ID

card and they breezed through without stopping.

"They be bringin' you luggage later," the escort muttered.

"Got a car waiting.", They ducked out a fire exit and down a flight of rusting stairs. For a brief blessed moment they touched actual soil, breathed actual, air. Damp and dark; it had rained. The car was a white Hyundai Luxury Saloon with one-way mirrored windows. Its doors popped, open as they approached.

Their escort slid into the front seat; Laura and David hustled in back with the baby. The doors thunked shut like armored tank hatches and the car slid into motion. Its suspen- sion whirled them with oily ease across the pitted and weedy tarmac. Laura glanced back at the airport as they left-pools of light over a dozen pedicabs and rust-riddled manual taxis.

The saloon's frigid AC wrapped them in antiseptic chill.

"Online, can you hear us in here?" Laura said.

["A little image static, but audio's fine,"] Emily whis- pered. ["Nice car, eh?"]

"Yeah," David said. Outside the airport grounds, they turned north onto a palm-bordered highway. David leaned forward toward their escort in the front seat. "Where we going, amigo?"

"Takin' you to a safehouse," said their escort. He turned in his seat, throwing one elbow over the back. "Maybe ten mile. Sit back, relax, seen? Twiddle you big Yankee thumbs, try and look harmless." He took off his dark glasses.

"Hey!" David said. "It's Sticky!"

Sticky smirked. " `Captain Thompson' to you, Bwana."

Sticky's skin was now much darker than it had been in

Galveston. Some kind of skin dye, Laura thought. Disguise, maybe. It seemed best to say nothing about it. "I'm glad to see you safe," she said. Sticky grunted.

"We never had a chance to tell you," Laura said. "How sorry we are about Mr. Stubbs."

"I was busy," Sticky said. "Trackin' those boys from

Singapore." He stared into the lenses of Laura's glasses, visibly gathering himself up, talking through her to the Rizome videotapes spooling in Atlanta. "This, while our Rizome security still dancin' like a chicken with its head lick off, mind. The Singapore gang ran off first thing after the killing.

So I track 'em in darkness. They run maybe half a mile south down the coast, then wade out to a smart yacht, waitin', so cozy, right offshore. A good-size ketch; two other men aboard.

I get the registry number." He snorted. "Rented by Mr. Lao

Binh Huynh, a so-call `prominent Viet-American business- man,' live in Houston. Rich man this Huynh-run half a dozen groceries, a hotel, a truckin' business."

["Tell him we'll get right on that,"] Emily's whisper urged.

"We'll get right on that," David said.

"You a little late, Bwana Dave. Mr. Huynh vanish some days back. Somebody snatch him out of his car."

"Jesus," David said.

Sticky stared moodily out the window. Rambling white- walled houses emerged from darkness in the Hyundai's head- lights, the walls gleaming ;like shellac. A lone drunk scurried off the road when the car honked once, sharply. A deserted marketplace; tin roofs, bare flagpole, a colonial statue, bits of trampled straw basket. Four tethered goats-their eyes shone red in the headlights like something out of a nightmare.

."None of that proves anything against the Singapore Bank,"

Laura said.

Sticky was annoyed; his accent faltered. "What proof?

You think we're planning to sue them? We're talking war."

He paused. "Too funny, Yankees asking for proof, these days! Somebody blow up your battleship Maine, seen-two months later wicked Uncle Sam invade Cuba. No proof at all."

"Well, that goes to show you how we've learned our lesson," David said mildly. "The invasion of Cuba, it failed really...adly. Bay of Pork-Bay of Pigs, I mean. A big humiliation for imperial Yankeedom."

Sticky looked at him with amazed contempt. "I'm talking eighteen ninety-eight, mon!"

David looked startled. "Eighteen ninety-eight? But that was the Stone Age."

"We don't forget." Sticky gazed out the window. "You in the capital now. Saint George."

Multistory tenements, again with that strange plastic-looking whitewash sheen. Dim greenish bursts of foliage clustered the rising hillside, shaggy jagged-edged palms like dreadlocked

Rasta heads. Satellite dishes and skeletal TV antennas ridged the tenement rooftops. Old dead dishes stood face-up on the trampled lawns-birdbaths? Laura wondered. "These are the government yards," Sticky said. "Public housing." He pointed away from the harbor, up the rising hillside. "That's Fort

George on the hill-the prime minister, live up there."

Behind the fort, a trio of tall radio antennas flashed their aircraft warning lights in sync. Red blips raced from ground to sky, seeming to fling themselves upward, into stellar black- ness. Laura leaned to peer through David's window. The dim bulk of Fort George's battlements, framed against the racing lights, gave her a buzz of unease.

Laura had been briefed about Grenada's prime minister.

His name was Eric Louison and his "New Millennium Move- ment" ruled Grenada as a one-party state. Louison was in his eighties now, rarely seen outside his secretive cabinet of data pirates. Years ago, after first seizing power, Louison had made a passionate speech in Vienna, demanding investigation of the "Optimal Persona phenomenon." It had earned him a lot of uneasy derision.

Louison was in the unhappy Afro-Caribbean tradition of ruler-patriarchs with heavy voodoo. Guys who were all Papa

Docs and Steppin' Razors and Whippin' Sticks. Looking up the hill, Laura had a sudden clear mental image of old

Louison. Skinny, yellow-nailed geezer, tottering sleepless through the fort's torchlit dungeons. In a gold-braided jacket, sipping hot goat blood, his naked feet stuck in a couple of

Kleenex boxes .. .

The Hyundai cruised through town under amber street- lights. They passed a few Brazilian three-wheelers, little wasplike buggies in yellow and black, chugging on alcohol.

Saint George had the sleepy look of a town where they roll up the pavements on week nights. By modern Third World standards it was a small city-maybe a hundred thousand people. Half a dozen high-rises loomed downtown, in the old and ugly International Style, their monotonous walls stippled with glowing windows. A fine old colonial church with a tall square clock tower. Idle construction cranes jutted over the geodesic skeleton of a new stadium. "Where's the Bank?"

David said.

Sticky shrugged. "Everywhere. Wherever the wires are."

"Good-lookin' town," David said. "No shantytowns, no- body camping under the overpasses. You could teach Mexico

City something." No response. "Kingston, too."

"Gonna teach Atlanta something," Sticky retorted. "Our

Bank-you think we're thieves. No so, mon. It's your banks what been sucking these people's blood for four hundred years. Shoe on the other foot, now."

The lights of the capital receded. Loretta stirred in her tote, waved her arms, and noisily filled her diaper. "Uh-oh,"

David said. He opened the window. The wet-dust smell of hot tropic rain filled the car. Another aroma crept under it, spicy, pungent, haunting. A kitchen smell. Nutmeg, Laura realized. Half the world's nutmeg came out of Grenada. Real natural nutmeg, off trees. They rounded a bay-lights glit- tered from an offshore station, lights on still water, industrial glare on gray clouds overhead.

Sticky wrinkled his nose and looked at Loretta as if she were a bag of garbage. "Why bring that baby? It's dangerous here."

Laura frowned, and reached for a fresh diaper. David said,

"We're not soldiers. We don't pretend to be fair targets."

"That's a funny way to think," Sticky said.

"Maybe you think she'd be safer at our home," Laura said. "You know, the place that got machine-gunned." Okay," Sticky shrugged. "Maybe we can cut it a bulletproof bib."

Emily spoke online. ["Oh, he's funny. They're wasting him here, he ought to be in network comedy. "]

Sticky noticed their silence. "Don't worry, Atlanta," he said loudly. "We be takin' better care of these guests than you did of ours."

I"Ouch,"] the whisper said.

They covered more miles in silence. ["Look,"] Emily said,

["y'all shouldn't waste this time so I'm going to play you selected highlights of the Committee campaign speeches ..."]

Laura listened intently; David played with the baby and looked out the window.

Then the Hyundai slid west off the highway, onto a grav- eled track. Emily cut off a speech about Rizome's Pacific

Rim holdings in lumber and microchips. The car cruised uphill, through thick stands of casuarina trees. It stopped in darkness.

"Car, honk," Sticky told the Hyundai, and it did. Arc lights flashed on from two iron poles at the gates of a plantation estate. The tops of the compound's fortress walls gleamed wickedly with embedded broken glass.

A guard hustled up belatedly, a rumpled-looking teenage militiaman with a blunderbuss tangle-gun slung on his back.

Sticky left the car. The guard looked jolted from sleep and guilty about it. As the gates swung open, Sticky pulled rank and hassled the kid. "Hey, check this cheap-shot fascist shit," David muttered, just for the record.

The car rolled into a graveled courtyard with a dead marble fountain and wet, weed-choked rosebushes. The distant gate lights showed low whitewashed stairs up to a long screened verandah. Above the verandah, windows glowed in a pair of goofy-looking turrets. Some Victorian colonial's idea of class.

.["Check it out!"] Emily commented.

"A Queen Anne mansion!" David said.

The car stopped at the stairs and its doors swung open.

They stepped out into rich-smelling tropic dampness, hauling the baby and their carry-ons. Sticky rejoined them, pulling a key card.

"Whose place is this?" David said.

"Yours, for now." Sticky motioned them up the stairs and across the dark, open porch. They passed a flat, dust-shrouded table. A ping-Pong ball glanced off David's foot, tick-ticking off into darkness and the skeletal gleam of aluminum lounge chairs. Sticky slid his key card into double doors of brass- studded rosewood.

The doors opened; hall lights flashed on. David was sur- prised. "This old place has a house system installed."

"Sure," sniffed Sticky. "It belong to Bank brass once- old Mr. Gelli. He fix it up." The voices of strangers echoed down the hall. They entered a living room: flocked velvet wallpaper, flower-printed couch and two matching recliners, kidney-shaped coffee table, wall-to-wall carpet in a purulent shade of maroon.

Two men and a woman, dressed in servants' whites, knelt beside a toppled drinks trolley. They stood up hastily, looking flustered.

"She not workin'," the taller man said sullenly. "Been chasin' us around all day."

"This is your staff," Sticky said. "Jimmy, Rajiv, and

Rita. The place a little musty now, but they'll make you cozy. "

Laura looked them over. Jimmy and Rajiv looked like pickpockets and Rita had eyes like hot black marbles-she looked at little Loretta as if wondering how she'd go in a broth with carrots and onions. "Are we doing entertaining?"

Laura said.

Sticky looked puzzled. "No."

"I'm sure Jimmy, Rajiv, and Rita are very capable,"

Laura said carefully. "But unless there's a pressing need for staff, I think we'd be cozier on our own."

"You had servants in Galveston," Sticky said.

Laura gritted her teeth. "The Lodge staff are Rizome associates.

Our coworkers."

"The Bank picked these people for you," Sticky said.

"They had good reason." He shepherded Laura and David toward another door. "Master bedroom in here."

They followed Sticky into a room with a massive canopied waterbed and closet-lined walls. The bed was freshly made.

Gardenia incense smoldered atop an old mahogany bureau.

Sticky closed the door behind them.

"Your servants protect you from spies," Sticky told them with an air of put-upon patience. "From people, and things too, things with wings and cameras, seen? We don't want them wondering what you are, why you here." He paused to let that sink in. "So this the plan: we pass you off for mad doctors."

David said, "For what?"

"Techies, Bwana. Hired consultants. High-technocrats, the

Grenada upper crust." Sticky paused. "Don't you see it?

How do you think we run this island? We got mad doctors all points round in Grenada. Yankees, Europeans, Russians, they come here for perks, like this place, seen? Big houses, with servants. " He winked deliberately. "Plus other tasty things. ".

"That's just great," David said. "Do we get field hands, too?"

Sticky grinned. "You a sweet pair, you really are."

"Why not pass us off for tourists, instead?" Laura said.

"You must get some, right?"

"Lady, this is the Caribbean," Sticky said. "America's backyard, seen? We're used to seeing Yankees runnin' round without their pants. It nah shock us, any." He paused, con- sidering, or pretending to. "Except that retrovirus-fancy

Yank V.D.-it do take a toll on the workin' girls.

Laura throttled her temper. "Those perks don't tempt us,

Captain. "

"Oh, sorry," Sticky said. "I forgot you were online back to Atlanta. You under heavy manners, must nah talk rude

... while they can hear."

["Oh,"J Emily whispered suddenly, ["if y'all are hypo- crites, that means he has a right to be an asshole. "I

"You want to prove that we're hypocrites," David said.

"Because that makes it right to insult us." Caught off guard,

Sticky hesitated. "Look," David soothed. "We're your guests.

If you want to surround us with these so-called `servants,'

that's your decision."

Laura caught on. "Maybe you don't trust us?" She pre- tended to think it over. "Good idea to have some houseboys watching us, just in case we decide to swim back to Galveston."

"We'll think about it," Sticky said grudgingly. The door- bell sounded, the bell plonking out the first verse of an old pop song. "I'm dream-ing of a White Christ-mas," David chanted, recognizing it. They hurried to the door, but the servants had beaten them there. Their luggage had arrived.

Rajiv and Jimmy were already hauling bags from the van.

"I can take the baby, madam," Rita volunteered at Laura's elbow. Laura pretended not to hear her, staring through the verandah screen. Two new guards lurked under the arc lights at the gate.

Sticky handed them matched key cards. "I'm going-got business elsewhere tonight. You make yourselves real cozy.

Take what you want, use what you want, the place is yours.

Old Mr. Gelli, he won't be complaining."

"When do we meet with the Bank?" Laura said.

"Soon come," Sticky said meaninglessly. He rambled down the steps; the Hyundai opened and he slipped in without breaking stride. The car took off.

They rejoined the servants in the living room and stood about uncomfortably in a knot of unresolved tension. "A

little supper, sir, madam?" Rajiv suggested.

"No, thank you, Rajiv." She didn't know the proper term for Rajiv's ethnic background. Indo-Caribbean? Hindu-Grenadian?

"Draw madam a bath?"

Laura shook her head. "You could. start by calling us

David and Laura," she suggested. The three Grenadians looked back stonily.

Loretta adroitly chose this moment to burst into sobs.

"We're all a bit tired from the trip," David said loudly. "I think we'll, uh, retire to the bedroom. So we won't need you tonight, thanks." There was a brief struggle over the bags, which Rajiv and Jimmy won. They triumphantly carried the luggage into the master bedroom. "We unpack for you,"

Rajiv announced.

"Thank you, no!" David spread his arms and herded them through the bedroom door. He locked it behind them.

"We be upstairs if you need us, madam," Jimmy shouted through the door. "The intercom nah work, so yell real good!"

David plucked Loretta from her tote and set about fixing her formula. Laura fell backward onto the bed, feeling a sapping rush of stress fatigue. "Alone at last," she said.

"If you don't count thousands of Rizome associates,"

David said from the bathroom. He emerged and set the baby on the bed. Laura roused herself to one elbow and held

Loretta's bottle.

David checked all the closets. "Seems safe enough in this bedroom. No other ways in or out-this is great old wood- work, too." He pulled his earpiece loose with a wince, then set his videoglasses on a bedside table. He aimed them care- fully at the door.

["Don't mind me,"] Emily said in Laura's ear. ["If David wants to sleep in the raw, I'll edit it."]

Laura laughed, sitting up. "You two and your in-jokes,"

David said.

Laura changed the baby and got her into her paper paja- mas. She was doped with food, sleepy and content, her eyes rolling under half-shut flickering lids. Sweet little hand-clenching motions, like she was trying to hold on to wakefulness but couldn't quite remember where she put it. It was funny how much she looked like David when she slept.

They undressed, and he hung his clothes in the closet.

"They still got the old guy's wardrobe here," he said. He showed her a tangle of leather. "Nice tailor, huh?"

"What the hell is that? Bondage gear?"

"Shoulder holster," David said. "Macho bang-bang stuff."

"Terrific," Laura said. More goddamned guns. Tired as she was, she dreaded sleep; she could smell another night- mare waiting. She plugged her gear into a clockphone from the biggest bag. "How's that?"

["It ought to do."] Emily's voice came loudly from the clockphone's speakers. ["I'm logging off, but the night shift will watch over you." ]

"Good night." Laura slid under the sheets. They nestled the baby between them. Tomorrow they'd look for a crib.

"Lights, turn off."

Laura came sluggishly out of sleep. David was already wearing jeans, an unbuttoned tropical shirt, and his videoglasses.

"The doorbell," he explained. It rang again, plonking through its antique melody.

"Oh." She looked gummy-eyed at the bedside clock. Eight

A.M. "Who's online?"

["It's me, Laura,"] the clock said. ["Alma Rodriguez."]

"Oh, Mrs. Rodriguez," Laura said to the clock. "Um, how are you?"

["Oh, the old man, his bursitis pretty bad today."]

"Sorry to hear that," Laura muttered. She struggled to sit up, the waterbed rippling queasily.

["This Lodge, it's pretty empty without you or the guests,"]

Mrs. Rodriguez said brightly. ["Mrs. Delrosario, she says her two girls are running around downtown like wild animals. "]

"Well, why don't you tell her that, uh .. Laura stopped, suddenly stunned by culture shock. "I don't know where the hell I am."

["Are you all right, Laurita?"]

"Sure, I guess " She looked wildly around the strange bedroom, located the bathroom door. That would help.

When she returned she dressed quickly, then slipped on the shades. ["Ay, it's strange when the picture moves like that,"]

Mrs. Rodriguez said from Laura's earplug. ["Makes me seasick!"]

"You and me both," Laura said. "Who's David talking to out there? The so-called servants?"

["You won't like it,"] Mrs. Rodriguez said drily..["It's the witch girl. Carlotta."]

"Jesus, now what?" Laura said. She picked up the squirm- ing, bright-eyed baby and carried her into the living room.

Carlotta sat on the couch; she had brought a wicker basket full of groceries. "Chow," she announced, nodding at the food.

"Good," Laura said. "How are you, Carlotta?"

"I'm jus' fine," Carlotta said sunnily. "Welcome to Grenada!

Real nice place you have here, I was just telling your mister."

"Carlotta gets to be our liaison today," David said.

"I don't mind, since Sticky's pretty busy," Carlotta said.

"Besides, I know the island, so I can tour y'all around. You want some papaya juice, Laura?"

"Okay," Laura said. She took the other armchair, feeling restless, wanting to run on the beach. No chance for that though, not here. She balanced Loretta on her knee. "So the

Bank trusts you to show us around?"

"I'm wired for sound," Carlotta said, pouring. A light pair of earphones circled her neck, trailing wire to a telephone on her studded belt. She wore a short-sleeved cotton top, with eight inches of bare freckled stomach between it and her red leather miniskirt. "Y'all gotta be a little careful of the food around here," Carlotta said. "They got houngans on this island that can really fuck you up."

" 'Houngans?' " David said. "You mean those designer drug people?"

"Yeah, them. They got voodoo poisons here that can do stuff to your CNS that I wouldn't do to a Pentagon Chief of

Staff! They ship those mad doctors in, high bio-techies, and kind of crossbreed 'em with those old blowfish-poison zom- bie masters, and they come out mean as a junkyard dog!"

She passed Laura a glass of juice. "If I was in Singapore right now, I'd be burnin' joss!"

Laura stared unhappily into her glass. "Oh, you're fine and safe with me," Carlotta said. "I bought all this in the market myself."

"Thanks, that's very thoughtful," David said.

"Well, us Texans gotta stick together!" Carlotta reached for the basket. "Y'all can try some of these little tamale things, 'pastels' they call 'em. They're like little curries in pastry. Indian food. East Indians I mean, they snuffed all the local Indians a long time ago."

["Don't eat it!"] Mrs. Rodriquez protested. Laura ignored her. "They're good," she said, munching.

"Yeah, they chased 'em off Sauteur's Point, Leaper's Point that means," Carlotta said to David. "The Carib Indians.

They knew the Grenada settlers had their number, so they all jumped off a cliff into the sea together, and died. That's where we're going today-Sauteur's point. I got a car outside."

After breakfast they took Carlotta's car. It was a longer, truck version of the Brazilian three-wheelers, with a kind of motorcycle grip for manual driving. "I like manual driving,"

Carlotta confessed as they got in. "High speed, that's a big premillennium kick." She beeped merrily with a thumb but- ton as they rolled past the guards at the gate. The guards waved; they seemed to know her. Carlotta gunned her engine, spraying gravel down the weaving hillside road, until they hit the highway.

"You think it's safe to leave the household slaveys with our gear?" Laura asked David.

David shrugged. "I woke 'em up and put 'em to work.

Rita's weeding the roses, Jimmy's cleaning the pool, and

Rajiv gets to strip the fountain pump."

Laura laughed.

David cracked his knuckles, his eyes clouded with anticipa- tion. "When we get back, we can hit it a lick ourselves."

"You want to work on the house?"

David looked surprised. "A great old place like that? Hell, yes! Can't just let it rot!"

The highway was busier in daylight, lots of rusting old

Toyotas and Datsuns. Cars inched past a construction bottle- neck, where a pick-and-shovel crew were killing time, sitting in the shade of their steamroller. The crew stared at Carlotta, grinning, as she inched the three-wheeler past. "Hey darleeng!"

one of them crowed, waving.

Suddenly a canvas-topped military truck appeared from the north. The crew grabbed their picks and shovels and set to with a will. The truck rumbled past them on the road's shoulder-it was full of bored-looking NMM militia.

A mile later, they passed a town called Grand Roy. "I stay at the Church here," Carlotta said, waving her arm as the engine sputtered wildly. "It's a nice little temple, local girls, they have funny ideas about the Goddess but we're bringin'

'em around."

Cane fields, nutmeg orchards, blue mountains off to the west whose volcanic peaks cut a surf of cloud. They passed two more towns, bigger ones: Gouyave, Victoria. Crowded sidewalks with black women in garish tropical prints, a few women in Indian saris; the ethnic groups didn't seem to mix much. Not many children, but lots of khaki-clad militia. In

Victoria they drove past a bazaar, where weird choking music gushed from chest-high sidewalk speakers, their owners sit- ting behind fiberboard tables stacked high with tapes and videos. Shoppers jostled coconut vendors and old men shov- ing popsicle carts. High on the walls, out of reach of scrib- blers, old AIDS posters warned against deviant sex-acts in stiffly accurate health-agency prose.

After Victoria they turned west, circling the shoreline at the northern tip of the island. The land began to rise.

Red loading cranes sketched the horizon over Point Sauteur, like skeletal; sky-etching filigree. Laura thought again of the red radio towers with their eerie leaping lights.... She reached for David's hand. He squeezed it and smiled at her, below the glasses; but she couldn't meet his eyes.

Then they were over a hill and suddenly they could see all of it. A vast maritime complex sprawled offshore, like a steel magnate's version of Venice, all sharp metallic angles and rising fretworks and greenish water webbed with floating cables.... Long protective jetties of white jumbled boulders, stretching north for miles, spray leaping here and there against their length, the inner waters calmed by fields of orange wave-breaker buoys... .

"Mrs. Rodriguez," David said calmly. "We need an oceaneering tech online. Tell Atlanta."

["Okay David, right away. "]

Laura counted thirty major installations standing offshore.

They were full of people. Most of them were old jackup oil-drilling rigs, their fretted legs standing twenty stories tall, their five-story bases towering high above the water. Martian giants, their knees surrounded by loading docks and small moored barges. Grenada's tropic sunlight gleamed fitfully from aluminum sleeping cabins the size and shape of mobile homes, seeming as small as toys aboard their rigs.

A pair of round, massive OTECS chugged placidly, suck- ing hot seawater to power their ammonia boilers. Octopus nests of floating cables led from the power stations to rigs piled high with green-and-yellow tangles of hydraulics.

They pulled off the highway. Carlotta pointed: "That's where, they jumped!" The cliffs of Point Sauteur were only forty feet high, but the rocks below them looked nasty enough.

They would have looked better with raging romantic break- ers, but the jetties and wave baffles had turned this stretch of sea into a mud-colored simmering soup. "On a clear day you can see Carriacou from the cliffs," Carlotta said. "Lot of amazing stuff out on that little island-it's part of Grenada,

She parked the three-wheeler on a strip of white gravel beside a drydock. Inside the drydock, blue-white arc welders spat brilliance. They left the car.

A sea breeze crept onshore, stinking of ammonia and urea.

Carlotta threw her arms back and inhaled hugely. "Fertilizer plants," Carlotta said. "Like the old days on the Gulf Coast, huh?"

"My granddad used to work in those," David said. "The old refinery complexes... you remember those, Carlotta?"

"Remember 'em?" She laughed. "These are them, I reckon.

They got all this dead tech dirt cheap-bought it, abandoned in place." She slipped on her earphones and listened. "Andrei's waiting... he can explain for y'all. C'mon."

They walked under the shadows of towering cranes, up the limestone steps of a seawall, down to the waterfront. A

deeply tanned blond man sat on the stone dock, drinking coffee with a pair of Grenadian longshoremen. All three men wore loose cotton blouses, multipocketed jeans, hard hats, and steel-toed deck shoes.

"At last, here they are," said the blond man, rising.

"Hello, Carlotta. Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Webster. And this must be your little baby. What a cute little chicken." He touched the baby's nose with a grease-stained forefinger. The baby gurgled at him and gave him her best toothless smile.

"My name is Andrei Tarkovsky," the technician said. "I was from Poland." He looked at his dirty hands apologeti- cally. "Forgive me for not shaking."

"S'okay," David said.

"They have asked me to show you some of what we do here." He waved at the end of the pier. "I have a boat."

The boat was a twelve-foot swamp runner with a blunt prow and a water jet outboard. Andrei handed them life jackets, including a small one for the baby. They belted up.

Loretta, amazingly, took it cheerfully. They climbed down a short ladder onto the boat.

David sat in the stern. Laura and the baby took the bow, facing backward, sitting on a padded thwart. Carlotta sprawled in the bottom. Andrei shoved off and thumbed the engine on.

They scudded north over the slimy water.

David turned to Andrei and said something about catalytic cracking units. At that moment a new voice came online.

["Hello Rizome-Grenada, this is Eric King in San Diego... .

Could you give me another look at that distillation unit.... No, you, Laura, look at the big yellow thing-"]

"I'll take it," Laura shouted to David, putting her hand over her ear. "Eric, where is it you want me to look?"

["To your left-yeah-jeez, I haven't seen one like that in twenty years.... Could you give me just a straight, slow scan from right to left... . Yeah, that's great." ] He fell silent as Laura panned across the horizon.

Andrei and David were already arguing. "Yes, but you pay for feedstocks," Andrei told David passionately. "Here we have power from ocean thermals"-he waved at a chugging

OTEC-"which is free. Ammonia is NH3. Nitrogen from the air, which is free. Hydrogen from the seawater, which is free.

All it costs is capital investment."

["Yeah, and maintenance,"] Eric King said sourly. "Yeah, and maintenance," Laura said loudly.

"Is not a problem, with the modern polymers," Andrei said smoothly. "Inert resins ... we paint them on ... reduce corrosion almost to nothing. You must be familiar with these."

"Expensive," David said.

"Not for us," Andrei said. "We manufacture them."

He piloted them below a jackleg rig. When they crossed the sharp demarcation of its shadow, Andrei cut the engine.

They drifted on; the rig's flat, two-acre flooring, riddled with baroque plumbing, rose twenty feet above the shadowed wa- ter. At a sea-level floating dock, a dreadlocked longshoreman looked them over coolly, his face, framed in headphones.

Andrei guided them to one of the rig's four legs. Laura could see the thick painted sheen of polymer on the great load-bearing pipes and struts. There were no barnacles at the waterline. No seaweed, no slime. Nothing grew on this struc- ture. It was slick as ice.

David turned to Andrei, waving his hands animately. Car- lotta slouched in the bottom of the boat and dangled her feet over the side, smiling up at the bottom of the rig.

["I wanted to mention that my brother, Michael King, stayed in your Lodge last year,"] King said online. ["He spoke; really highly of it. "]

"Thanks, that's nice to know," Laura said into the air.

David was talking to Andrei, something about copper poison- ing and embedded biocides. He ignored King, turning down the volume on his earpiece.

["I've been following this Grenadian affair. Under the awful circumstances, you've been doing well."]

"We appreciate that support and solidarity, Eric."

["My wife agrees with me on this-though she thinks the .

Committee could have managed better.... You're support- ing the Indonesian, right? Suvendra?"]

Laura paused. She hadn't thought of the Committee elec- tions in a while. Emily supported Suvendra. "Yeah, that's right."

["What about Pereira?"]

"I like Pereira, but I'm not sure he has the stuff," Laura said. Carlotta grinned to see her, like an idiot, muttering into midair at an unseen presence. Schizoid. Laura frowned. Too much input at once. With her eyes and ears wired on separate realities, her brain felt divided on invisible seams, everything going slightly waxy and unreal. She was getting Net-burned.

["Okay, I know Pereira blew it in Brasilia, but he's honest.

What about Mr. Suvendra and this Islamic Bank business? That doesn't bother you?"]

David, still rapt in conversation with the émigré Pole, stopped suddenly and put his hand to his ear. "Islamic Bank business," Laura thought, with a little cold qualm. Of course.

Someone from Rizome was negotiating with the Singapore data pirates. And of course, it would be Suvendra. It fell neatly into place: Ms. Emerson, and Suvendra, and Emily

Donato. The Rizome old girls' network in action.

"Um ... Eric," David said aloud. "This is not a private line."

["Oh,"] King said in a small, now-I've-done-it voice.

"We'd be glad to have your input, if you could write it up and send e-mail. Atlanta can encrypt it for you."

["Yeah, sure,"] King said. ["Stupid of me... my apologies."] Laura felt sorry for him. She was glad David had gotten him off her back, but she didn't like the way it sounded. The guy was being frank and up-front, in very

Rizome-correct fashion, and here they were telling him to mind his manners because they were on spook business. How would it look?

David glanced at her and jerkily spread his hands, frown- ing. He looked frustrated.

Television. A kind of shellac of television surrounded and shielded both of them. It was like reaching out to touch someone's face, but feeling your fingers hit cold glass instead.

Andrei fired up the engine again. They picked up speed, scudding out to sea. Laura settled her videoglasses back carefully, blinking as her hair whipped around her head.

Caribbean water, smiling tropical sun, the cool, gleaming rush of speed below the bows. Intricate chunks of heavy industry loomed above the polluted shallows, huge, peculiar, ambitious ... full of insistent thereness. Laura closed her eyes. Grenada! What in hell was she doing here? She felt dazed, culture-shocked. A garbled crackling of talk from Eric

King. Suddenly the distant Net seemed to be digging into

Laura's head like an earwig. She felt a quick impulse to strip off the glasses and fling them into the sea.

Loretta squirmed in her arms and tugged her blouse in a. tight little fist. Laura forced her eyes open. Loretta was reality, she thought, hugging her. Her unfailing little guide.

Real life was where the baby was.

Carlotta edged closer across the damp bottom of the boat.

She waved her arm around her head. "Laura, you know why, all this?"

Laura shook her head.

"It's practice, that's what. Any one of these rigs-it could hold the whole Grenada Bank!" Carlotta pointed at a bizarre structure off to starboard-a flattened geodesic egg surrounded by buttressed pontoons. It looked like a fat soccer ball on bright orange spider's legs. "Maybe the Bank's computers are in there," Carlotta insinuated. "Even if the Man comes down on Grenada, the Bank can just duck aside, like electric judo! All this ocean tech-they can jackleg way out into international waters, where the Man just can't reach."

"The `Man'?" Laura said.

"The Man, the Combine, the Conspiracy. You know. The

Patriarchy. The Law, the Heat, the Straights. The Net. Them."

"Oh," Laura said. "You mean 'us.' "

Carlotta laughed.

Eric King broke in incredulously. ["Who is this strange woman? Can you give me another scan of that geodesic station? Thanks, uh, David... wild! You know what it looks like? It looks like your Lodge!"]

"I was just thinking that!" David said loudly, cupping his earphone. His eyes were riveted on the station and he was half leaning over the gunwale. "Can we cruise by it, Andrei?"

Andrei shook his head.

The stations fell behind them, their angular derricks framed against the curdled tropical green of the shoreline. The water grew choppier. The boat began to rock, its flat prow spanking each surge and flicking Laura's back with spray.

Andrei shouted and pointed off the port bow. Laura turned to look. He was pointing at a long, gray-black dike, a seawall.

A four-story office building stood near one end of it.

The installation was huge-the black dike was at least sixty feet high. Maybe a quarter mile long.

Andrei headed for it, and as they drew nearer, Laura saw little white spires scratching the skyline above the dike-tall street lights. Bicyclists rolled along the roadbed like gnats on wheels. And the office building looked more and more peculiar as they drew near-each story smaller than the last, stacked on a slant, with long metal stairs on the outside. And on its roof, a lot of tech busywork-satellite dishes, a radar mast.

The top story was round and painted nautical white. Like a smokestack.

It was a smokestack.

["That's a U.L.C.C.!"] Eric King said.

"A what, Eric?" Laura said.

["Ultra-Large Crude Carrier. A supertanker. Biggest ships ever built. Used to make the Persian Gulf run all the time, back in the old days."] King laughed. ["Grenada has super- tankers! I wondered where they'd ended up."]

"You mean it floats?" Laura said. "That seawall is a ship?

The whole thing moves?"

"It can load half a million tons," Carlotta said, luxuriating in Laura's surprise. "Like a skyscraper full of crude. It's bigger than the Empire State Building. Lots bigger." She laughed. "Course they don't have no crude in it, now. It's a righteous city now. One big factory."

They cruised toward it at full speed. Laura saw surface surges cresting against its bulk, whacking against it like a cliffside. The supertanker didn't show the slightest movement in response. It was far, far too big for that. It wasn't like any kind of ship she'd ever imagined. It was like someone had cut off part of downtown Houston and welded it to the horizon.

And on the closer edge of the mighty deck she could see-what? Mango trees, lines of flapping laundry, people clustered at the long, long railing•.... Hundreds of them. Far more than anybody could need for a crew. She spoke to

Carlotta. "They live there, don't they."

Carlotta nodded. "A lot goes on in these ships."

"You mean there's more than one?"

Carlotta shrugged. "Maybe." She tapped her own eyelid, indicating Laura's videoglasses. "Let's just say Grenada makes a pretty good flag of convenience."

Laura stared at the supertanker, scanning its length care- fully for the sake of Atlanta's tapes. "Even if the Bank bought it for junk-that's a lot of steel. Must have cost millions. "

Carlotta snickered. "You're not too hip about black mar- kets, huh? The problem's always cash. What to do with it, I mean. Grenada's rich, Laura. And gettin' richer all the time."

"But why buy ships?"

"Now you're getting into ideology," Carlotta told her.

"Have to ask of Andrei about that."

Now Laura could see how old the monster was. Its sides were blotted with great caking masses of rust, sealed shut under layers of modem high-tech shellac. The shellac clung, but badly; in places it had the wrinkled look of failing plastic wrap. The ship's endless sheet-iron hull had flexed from heat and cold and loading stress, and even the enormous strength of modem bonded plastics couldn't hold. Laura saw stretch marks, and broken-edged blisters of "boat pox," and patches of cracked alligatoring where the plastic had popped loose in plates, like dried mud. All this covered with patches of new glue and big slathery drips of badly cured gunk. A hundred shades of black and gray and rust. Here and there, work gangs had spray-bombed the hull of the supertanker with intricate colored graffiti. "TANKERSKANKERS," "MON-

GOOSE CREW-WE OPTIMAL," "CHARLIE NOGUES

BATALLION."

They tied up at a floating sea-level dock. The dock was like a flattened squid of bright yellow rubber, with radiating walkways and a floating bladder-head in the center. A bird- cage elevator slid down the dock's moored cable from a deck-level gantry seventy feet up. They followed Andrei into the cage and it rose, jerkily. David, who enjoyed heights, watched avidly through the bars as the sea shrank below them. Below his dark glasses, he grinned like a ten-year-old.

He was really enjoying this, Laura realized as she clutched the baby's tote, white-knuckled. It was all right up his alley.

The gantry swung them over the deck. Laura saw the gantry's operator as they passed-she was an old black woman in dreadlocks, shuffling her knobbed gearshifts and rhythmi- cally chewing gum. Below them, the monstrous deck stretched like an airport runway, broken with odd-looking functional clusters: dogged hatches, ridged metal vents, fireplugs, foam tanks, foil-wrapped hydraulic lines bent in reverse U's over the bicycle paths. Long tents, too, and patches of garden: trees in tubs, stretched greenhouse sheets of plastic over rows of citrus. And neatly stacked mountains of stuffed burlap bags.

They descended over a taped X on the deck and settled with a bump. "Everybody off," Andrei said. They stepped out and the elevator rose at once. Laura sniffed the air. A

familiar scent under the rust and brine and plastic. A wet, fermenting smell, like tofu.

"Scop!" David said, delighted. "Single-cell protein!"

"Yes," Andrei said. "The Charles Nogues is a food ship."

"Who's this 'Nogues'?" David asked him.

"He was a native hero," Andrei said,, his face solemn.

Carlotta nodded at David. "Charles Nogues threw himself off a cliff."

"What?" David said.. "He was one of those Carib Indians?"

"No, he was a Free Coloured. They came later, they were anti-slavery. But the Redcoat army showed up, and they died fighting." Carlotta paused. "It's an awful fuckin' mess, Gre- nada history. I learned all this from Sticky."

"The crew of this ship are the vanguard of the New Millen- nium Movement," Andrei declared. The four of them fol- lowed his lead, strolling toward the distant, looming high-rise of the ship's super-structure. It was hard not to see it as some peculiar office complex, because the ship itself felt so city- solid underfoot. Traffic passed them on the bicycle paths, men pedaling loaded cargo-rickshaws. "Trusted party cad- res," said blond, Polish Andrei. "Our nomenklatura."

Laura fell a step behind, hefting the baby in her tote, while

David and Andrei walked forward, shoulder to shoulder.

"It's starting to make a certain conceptual sense," David told him.-"This time, if you get chased off your own island like

Nogues and the Caribs, you'll have a nice place to jump to.

Right?" He waved at the ship around them.

Andrei nodded soberly. "Grenada remembers her many invasions. Her people are very brave, and visionaries too, but she's a small country. But the ideas here today are big,

David. Bigger than boundaries."

David looked Andrei up and down, taking his measure.

"What the hell is a guy from Gdansk doing here, anyway?"

"Life is dull in the Socialist Bloc," Andrei told him airily.

"All consumer socialism, no spiritual values. I wanted to be with the action. And the action is South, these days. The

North, our developed world-it is boring. Predictable. This is the edge that cuts."

"So you're not one of those 'mad-doctor' types, huh?"

Andrei was contemptuous. "Such people are useful, only.

We buy them, but they have no true role in the New Millen- nium Movement. They don't understand people's Tech."

Laura could hear the capital letters in his emphasis. She didn't like the way this was going at all.

She spoke up. "Sounds very nice. How do you square that with dope factories and data piracy?"

"All information should be free," Andrei told her, slowing his walk. "As for drugs-" He reached into a side pocket in his jeans. He produced a flat roll of shiny paper and handed it to her.

Laura looked it over. Little peel-off rectangles of sticky- backed paper. It looked like a blank roll of address labels.

"So?"

"You paste them on," Andrei said patiently. "The glue has an agent, which carries the drug through the skin. The drug came from a wetware lab, it is synthetic THC, the active part of marijuana. Your little roll of paper is the same, you see, as many kilograms of hashish. It is worth about twenty ecu. Very little." He paused. "Not so thrilling, so romantic, eh? Not so much to get excited about."

"Christ," Laura said. She tried to hand it back.

"Please keep it, it means very little."

Carlotta spoke up. "She can't hold this, Andrei. Come on, they're online and the bosses are lookin'." She stuffed the roll of paper into her purse, grinning at Laura. "You know,

Laura, if you'd point those glasses over there to starboard, I can slap a little of this crystal on the back of your neck, and nobody in Atlanta will ever know. You can rush like Niagara on this stuff. Crystal THC, girl! The Goddess was cruisin'

when She invented that one."

"Those are mind-altering drugs," Laura protested. She sounded stuffy and virtuous, even to herself. Andrei smiled indulgently, and Carlotta laughed aloud. "They're danger- ous," Laura said.

"Maybe you think it will jump off the paper and bite you," Andrei said. He waved politely at a passing Rastaman.

"You know what I mean," Laura said.

"Oh, yes"-Andrei yawned-"you never use drugs your- self, but what about the effect on people who are stupider and weaker than you, eh? You are patronizing other people.

Invading their freedoms."

They walked past a huge electric anchor winch, and a giant pump assembly, with two-story painted tanks in a jungle of pipes. Rastas with hard hats and clipboards paced the cat- walks over the pipes.

"You're not being fair," David said. "Drugs can trap people. "

"Maybe," Andrei said. "If they have nothing better in their lives. But look at the crew on this ship. Do they seem like drugged wreckage to you? If America suffers from drugs, perhaps you should ask what America is lacking."

["What an asshole,"] Eric King commented suddenly.

They ignored him.

Andrei led them up three flights of perforated iron stairs, bracketed to the portholed superstructure of the Charles Nogues.

There was an intermittent flow of locals up and down the stairs, with chatting crowds on the landings. Everyone wore the same pocketed jeans and the standard-issue cotton blouses.

But a chosen few had plastic shirtpocket protectors, with pens. Two pens, or three pens, or even four. One guy, a beer-bellied Rasta with a frown and bald spot, had half a dozen gold-plated fibertips. He was followed by a crowd of flunkies. "Whoopee, real Socialism," Laura muttered at

Carlotta.

"I can take the baby if you want." Carlotta said, not hearing her. "You must be getting tired."

Laura hesitated. "Okay." Carlotta smiled as Laura handed her the tote. She slung its strap over her shoulder. "Hello,

Loretta," she cooed, poking at the baby. Loretta looked up at her doubtfully and decided to let it pass.

They stepped through a hatch door, with rounded corners and a rubber seal, into the fluorescent lights of a hall. Lots of old scratched teak, scuffed linoleum. The walls were hung with stuff-"People's Art," Laura guessed, lots of child- bright tropical reds and golds and greens, dreadlocked men and women reaching toward a slogan-strewn blue sky... .

"This is the bridge," Andrei announced. It looked like a television studio, dozens of monitor screens, assorted cryptic banks of knobs and switches, a navigator's table with elbowed lamps and cradled telephones. Through a glassed-in wall above the monitors, the deck of the ship stretched out like a twenty-four-lane highway. There were little patches of ocean, way, way down there, looking too distant to matter much. Glancing through the windows, Laura saw that there were a pair of big cargo barges on the supertanker's port side.

They'd been completely hidden before, by the sheer rising bulk of the ship. The barges pumped their loads aboard through massive ribbed pipelines. There was a kind of uneasy nastiness to the sight, vaguely obscene, like the parasitic sexuality of certain deep-sea fish.

"Don't you wanna look?" Carlotta asked her, swinging the baby back and forth at her hip. Andrei and David were already deeply engrossed, examining gauges and talking a mile a minute. Really absorbing topics, too, like protein fractionation and slipstream turbulence. A ship's officer was helping explain, one of the bigwigs with multiple pens. He looked weird: velvety black skin and straight blond flaxen hair. "This is more David's sort of thing," Laura said.

"Well, could you go offline for a second, then?"

"Huh?" Laura paused. "Anything you want to tell me, you ought to be able to tell Atlanta."

"You gotta be kidding," Carlotta said, rolling her eyes.

"What's the deal, Laura? We talked private all the time at the

Lodge, and nobody bothered us then."

Laura considered. "What do you think, online?"

["Well, hell, I trust you,"] King said. ["Go for it! You're in no danger that I can see."]

"Well... okay, as long as David's here to watch over me." Laura stepped to the navigator's table, took off her videoglasses and earplug, and set them down. She backed away and rejoined Carlotta, careful to stay in view of the glasses. "There. Okay?"

"You've got really strange eyes, Laura," Carlotta murmured.

"Kind of yellow-green.... I'd forgotten how they looked. It's easier to talk to you when you don't have that rig on-kinda makes you look like a bug."

"Thanks a lot," Laura said. "Maybe you ought to take it a little easy on the hallucinogens."

"What's this high-and-mighty stuff?" Carlotta said. "This grandmother of yours, Loretta Day, that you think so much of-she got busted for drugs once. Didn't she?"

Laura was startled. "What's my grandmother got to do with it?"

"Only that she raised you, and looked after you, not like your real mother. And I know you thought a lot of old granny." Carlotta tossed her hair, pleased at Laura's look of shock. "We know all about you... and her... and

David... . The farther you go back, the easier it is to sneak the records out. 'Cause no one's keeping guard on all the data. There's just too much of it to watch, and no one really cares! But the Bank does-so they've got it all."

Carlotta narrowed her eyes. "Marriage certificates-divorces

-charge cards, names, addresses, phones... . Newspapers, scanned over twenty, thirty years, by computers, for every single mention of your name.... I've seen their dossier on you. On Laura Webster. All kinds of photos, tapes, hundreds of thousands of words." Carlotta paused. "It's really weird... . I know you so well, I feel like I'm inside your head, in a way. Sometimes I know what you'll say even before you say it, and it makes me laugh."

Laura felt herself flush. "I can't stop you from invading my privacy. Maybe that gives you an unfair advantage over me. But I don't make final decisions-I'm only representing my people." A group of officers broke up around one of the screens, leaving the bridge with looks of stern devotion to duty. "Why are you telling me this, Carlotta?"

"I'm not sure ..." Carlotta said, looking genuinely puz- zled, even a little hurt. "I guess it's cause I don't want to see you walk blind into what's coming down for you. You think you're safe cause you work for the Man, but the Man's had his day. The real future's here, in this place." Carlotta low- ered her voice and stepped closer; she was serious. "You're on the wrong side, Laura. The losin' side, in the long run.

These people have hold of things that the Man don't want trifled with. But there's not a thing the Man can do about it, really. Cause they got his number. And they can do things here that straights are scared to even think about."

Laura rubbed her left ear, a little sore from its plug-in phone. "You're really impressed by that black market tech,

Carlotta?"

"Sure, there's that," Carlotta said, shaking her tousled head. "But they got Louison, the Prime Minister. He can raise up his Optimals. He can call 'em out, Laura-his Perso- nas, understand? They walk around in broad daylight, while he never leaves that old fort. I've seen 'em... walkin' the streets of the capital .... little old men." Carlotta shivered.

Laura stared at Carlotta with mixed annoyance and pity.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Don't you know what an Optimal Persona is? It's got no substance, time and distance mean nothing to it. It can look and listen... spy on you... . Or maybe walk right through your body! And two days later you drop dead without a mark on you. "

Laura sighed; Carlotta had had her going for a moment there. She could understand outlaw tech; but mystic bullshit had never done much for her. David and the Polish émigré were going over a CADCAM readout, all smiles. "Does

Andrei believe all this?"

Carlotta shrugged, her face closing up, becoming distant again. "Andrei's a political. We get all kinds in Grenada... .

But it all adds up in the end."

"Maybe it does... if you're batshit."

Carlotta gave her a look of pious sorrow. "I better put my rig back on," Laura said.

They had lunch with the ship's captain. He was the potbel- lied character with the six gold pens. His name was Blaize.

Nineteen of the ship's other commissars joined him in the supertanker's cavernous dining room, with its hinged chande- liers and oak wainscoting. They dined off old gold-rimmed china with the insignia of the P&O Shipping Line and were served by teenage waiters in uniform, hauling big steel tu- reens. They ate scop. Various hideous forms of it. Soups.

Nutmeg-flavored mock chicken breast. Little fricasseed things with toothpicks in them.

Eric King didn't wait through lunch. He signed offline, leaving them with Mrs. Rodriguez.

"We are by no means up to capacity," Captain Blaize announced in a clipped Caribbean drawl. "But we come, by and by, a little closer to the production quotas each and every month. -By this action, we relieve the strain on Grenada's productive soil ... and its erosion ... and the overcrowding as well, you understand, Mr. Webster " Blaize's voice drifted through a singsong cadence, causing strange waves of glazed ennui to course through Laura's brain. "Imagine, Mr.

Webster, what a fleet of ships, like this, could do, for the plight of Mother Africa."

"Yeah. I mean, I grasp the implications," David said, digging into his scop with gusto.

Light background music was playing. Laura listened with half an ear. Some kind of slick premillennium crooner on vocals, lots of syrupy strings and jazzy razzing saxophones

..."(something something) for you, dear ... buh buh buh boooh ..." She could almost identify the singer ... from old movies. Cosby, that was it. Bing Cosby.

Now digitizing. effects started creeping in and something awful began to happen. Suddenly a bandersnatch had jumped into Cosby's throat. His jovial white-guy Anglo good vibes stretched like electric taffy-arrooooh, werewolf noises. Now

Bing was making ghastly hub hub hub backward croonings, like a sucking chest wound. The demented noise was filtering around the diners but no one was paying attention.

Laura turned to the young three-pen cadre on her left. The guy was waving his fingers over Loretta's tote and looked up guiltily when she asked. "The music? We call it didge-Ital

... dig-ital, seen, D.J.-Ital.... Mash it up right on the ship."

Yeah. They were doing something awful to poor old Bing while he wasn't looking. He sounded like his head was made of sheet metal.

Now Blaize and Andrei were lecturing David about money.

The Grenadian rouble. Grenada had a closed; cash-free economy; everybody on the island had personal credit cards, drawn on the bank. This policy kept that "evil global currency," the ecu, out of local circulation. And that "razored off the creeping tentacles"

of the Net's "financial and cultural imperialism."

Laura listened to their crude P.R. with sour amusement.

They wouldn't crank out this level of rhetoric unless they were trying to hide a real weakness, she thought. It was clear that the Bank kept the whole population's credit transactions on file, just so they could look over everybody's shoulders.

But that was Orwell stuff. Even bad old Mao and Stalin couldn't make that kind of crap work out.

- David raised his brows innocently and asked about "left- hand payments," an old tag line from East Bloc premillennium days. Andrei got a stiff and virtuous look on his face. Laura hid her smile with a forkful of mock carrots. She'd bet anything that a wad of paper ecu, under the table, would buy the average Grenadian body and soul. Yeah, it was just like those old-time Russki hustlers, who used to pester tourists in

Moscow for dollars, back when there were dollars. Big fleas had little fleas, big black markets had little black markets.

Funny!

Laura felt pleased, sure she was on to something. Tonight she'd have to write Debra Emerson in Atlanta, on an encrypted line, and tell her: yeah, Debra, here's a place to stick a crowbar. Debra'd know how, too: it was just like bad old

CIA work before the Abolition... . What did they used to call it? Destabilization.

"It's not like the Warsaw Pact, _before openness," contin- ued Andrei, shaking his handsome blond head. "Our island is more like little OPEC country-Kuwait, Abu Dhabi... . Too much easy money eats the social values, makes life like

Disneyland, all fat Cadillacs and the cartoon mouses ... empty, meaningless. "

Blaize smiled a little, his eyes half closed, like a dreadlocked

Buddha. "Without Movement discipline," he rumbled smoothly,

"our money would flow back, like water downhill... from the Third World periphery, down to the centers of the Net.

Your `free market' cheats us; it's a Babylon slave market in truth! Babylon would drain away our best people, too ... they would go to where the phones already work, where the streets are already paved. They want the infrastructure, where the

Net is woven thickest, and it's easiest to prosper. It is a vicious cycle, making Third World sufferation."

"But today the adventure is here!" Andrei broke in, leaning forward. "No more frontiers in your America, David, my friend! Today it's all lawyers and bureaucrats and `social impact statements'.... "

Andrei sneered and slapped his fork on the tabletop. "Huge prison walls of paperwork to crush the life and hope from modern pioneers! Just as ugly, just such a crime, as the old

Berlin Wall, David. Only more clever, with better public relations." He glanced at Laura, sidelong. "Scientists and engineers, and architects, too, yes-we brothers, David, who do the world's true work-where is our freedom? Where, eh?"

Andrei paused, tossing his head to flick back a loose wing of blond hair. Suddenly he had the dramatic look of an orator on a roll, a man drawing inspiration from deep wells of sincerity. "We have no freedom! We cannot follow our dreams, our visions. Governments and corporations break us to their harness! For them, we make only colored toothpaste, softer toilet paper, bigger TVs to stupefy the masses!" He chopped air with his hands. "It's an old man's world today, with old man's values! With soft, cozy padding on all the sharp corners, with ambulances always standing by. Life is more than this, David. Life has to be more than this!"

The ship's officers had stopped to listen. As Andrei paused, they nodded among themselves. "I-rey, mon, star righ- teous Laura watched them trade sturdy looks of macho comradeship. The air felt syrup-thick with their ship crew's gemeineschaft, reinforced by the Party line. It felt familiar to

Laura, like the good community feeling at a Rizome meeting, but stronger, less rational. Militant-and scary, because it felt so good. It tempted her.

She sat quietly, trying to relax, to see through their eyes and feel and understand. Andrei blazed on, hitting his stride now, preaching about the Genuine Needs of the People, the social role of the Committed Technician. It was a mishmash:

Food, and Liberty, and Meaningful Work. And the New Man and New Woman, with their hearts with the people, but their eyes on the stars.... Laura watched the crew. What must they be feeling? Young, most of them; the committed Move- ment elite, taken from those sleepy little island towns into a place like this. She imagined them running up and down the deck stairs of their strange steel world, hot and fervid, like hopped-up lab rats. Sealed in a bottle and drifting away from the Net's laws and rules and standards.

Yeah. So many changes, so many shocks and novelties; they broke people up inside. Dazzled by potential, they longed to throw out the rules and limits, all the checks and balances- all discredited now, all lies of the old order. Sure, Laura thought. This was why Grenada's cadres could chop genes like confetti, rip off data for their Big Brother dossiers, and never think twice. When the People march in one direction, it only hurts to ask awkward questions.

Revolutions. New Orders. For Laura the words had the cobwebby taste of twentieth-century thinking. Visionary mass movements were all over the 1900s, and whenever they broke through, blood followed in buckets. Grenada could be 1920s

Russia, 1940s Germany, 1980s Iran. All it would take was a war.

Of course it wouldn't be a big war, not nowadays. But even a little terror war could turn things septic in a little place like Grenada. Just enough killing to raise the level of hysteria and make every dissident a traitor. A little war, she thought, like the one beginning to seethe already... .

Andrei stopped. David smiled at him uneasily. "I can see you've given this speech before."

"You are skeptical about talk," Andrei said, throwing down his napkin. "That's only wise. But we can show you the facts and the practice." He paused. "Unless you want to wait for dessert."

David looked at Laura and Carlotta. "Let's go," Laura said. Sweetened scop was nothing to linger for.

They nodded at the crew, thanked the captain politely, left the table. They exited the dining room by another hallway and stopped by a pair of elevators. Andrei punched a button and they stepped in; the doors slid shut behind them.

Static roared in Laura's head. "Jesus Christ!" David said, clutching his earpiece. "We just went offline!"

Andrei glanced once, over his shoulder, skeptically. "Re- lax, yes? It's only a moment. We can't wire everything."

"Oh," David said. He glanced at Laura. Laura stood clutching the tote as the elevator descended. Yeah, they'd lost the armor of television, and here they stood helpless: Andrei and Carlotta could jump them . jab them with knockout needles.... They'd wake up somewhere strapped to tables with dope-crazed voodoo doctors sewing little poisoned time bombs into their brains.... ;

Andrei and Carlotta stood flat-footed, with the patient, bovine look of people in elevators. Nothing whatever happened.

The doors slid open. Laura and David rushed out into the corridor, clutching their headsets. Long, long seconds of crackling static. Then a quick staccato whine of datapulse.

Finally, high-pitched anxious shouting in Spanish.

"We're fine, fine, just a little break," Laura told Mrs.

Rodriguez. David reassured her at length, in Spanish. Laura missed the words, but not the distant tone of voice: frantic little-old-lady fear, sounding weak and tremulous. Of course, good old Mrs. Rodriguez, she was only worried for them; but despite herself, Laura felt annoyed. She adjusted her glasses and straightened self-consciously.

Andrei was waiting for them, suffering fools gladly, hold- ing a side door. Beyond it was a scrubbing room, with shower stalls and stainless-steel sinks under harsh blue light, and air that smelled of soap and ozone. Andrei yanked open a rubber-sealed locker. Its shelves were stacked with fresh- pressed scrub garments in surgical green: tunics, drawstring pants, hairnets and surgical masks, even little crinkly, tie-on galoshes.

"Mrs. Rodriguez," David said, excited. "Looks like we need a Rizome bio-tech online."

Andrei stretched over a sink, catching an automatic drip feed of pink disinfectant. He lathered up vigorously. Beside him, Carlotta caught water in a sterile paper cup. Laura saw her palm a red Romance pill from her purse. She knocked it back with the ease of long practice.

From within her tote, Loretta wrinkled up her little eyes.

She didn't like the scrub room's light, or maybe it was the smell. She whimpered rhythmically, then began screaming.

Her yells echoed harshly from the walls and scared her into new convulsions of effort. "Oh, Loretta," Laura chided her.

"And you've been so good lately, too." She kicked down the tote's wire rocker stand and rocked it on the floor; but Loretta only turned tomato-red and flung her chubby arms wildly.

Laura checked her diaper and sighed. "Can I change her in here, Andrei?"

Andrei was rinsing his neck; he pointed with his elbow at a disposal chute. Laura dug in the back of the tote and unrolled the changing pad from its tube. "That's cute," Carlotta said, crowding up and peering over her shoulder. "Like a window shade. "

"Yeah," Laura said. "See, you press this button on the side, and little bubble-cell padding pops up." She spread the pad over a laminated counter and set Loretta on it. The baby wailed in existential terror.

Her little kicking rump was caked with shit. By this time,

Laura had learned to look at it without really seeing it. She cleaned it deftly with an oiled napkin, not saying anything.

Carlotta was squeamish and looked away, at the tote.

"Wow! This thing is really intricate! Hey look, these flaps pop out and you can make it into a baby bath... "

"Hand me the powder, Carlotta." Laura puffed dry spray on the baby's rump and sealed her in a new diaper. Loretta howled like a lost soul.

David came up. "You get scrubbed, I'll take her." Loretta had one look at her father's surgical mask and screamed in anguish. "For heaven's sake," David said.

["You shouldn't take your baby into a bio-hazard zone,"]

said a new voice online.

"You don't think so?" David shouted. "She won't like wearing the mask, that's for sure."

Carlotta looked up. "I could take her," she said meekly.

["Don't trust her,"] online said at once.

"We can't let the baby out of our sight," David told

Carlotta. "You understand."

"Well," Carlotta said practically, "I could wear Laura's headset. And that way, Atlanta could watch everything I did.

And meanwhile Laura would be safe with you."

Laura hesitated. "My earplug's custom-made."

"It's flexible, I. could wear it for a while. C'mon, I can do it, I'd like to."

"What do you think, online?" David said.

["It's me, Millie Syers, from Raleigh,"] online told them.

["You remember. John and I and our boys were in your

Lodge, last May."]

"Oh, hello," Laura said. "How are you, Professor Syers?"

["Well, I got over my sunburn."] Millie Syers laughed.

["And please don't call me Professor; it's very non-R. Any- way, if you want my advice, I wouldn't leave any baby of mine with some data pirate dressed like a hooker."]

"She is a hooker," David said. Carlotta smiled.

["Well! I guess that explains it. Must not see many babies in her line of work.... Hmmm, if she wore Laura's rig, I suppose I could watch what she did, and if she tries anything

I could scream. But what's to keep her from dropping the glasses and running off with the baby?"]

"We're in the middle of a supertanker, Millie," David said. "We got about three thousand Grenadians all around us."

Andrei looked up from tying his galoshes. "Five thousand,

David," he said, over the baby's piercing sobs. "Are you not sure you are both carrying this a bit far? All these little quibbles of security?"

"I promise she'll be all right," Carlotta said. She raised her right hand, with the center finger bent down into the palm. "I swear it by the Goddess."

["Good heavens, she's one of"] said Millie Syers, but

Laura lost the rest as she stripped off her rig. It felt glorious to have it out of her head. She felt free and clean for the first time in ages; a weird feeling, with the sudden strange urge to jump in a shower stall and soap down.

She locked eyes with Carlotta. "All right, Carlotta. I'm trusting you, with what I love best in the world. You under- stand that, don't you? I don't have to say anything more."

Carlotta nodded soberly, then shook her head.

Laura scrubbed and got quickly into the gear. The baby's howling was driving them out of the room.

Andrei ushered them to another elevator, at the back of the scrub room. She looked back one last time at the door and saw Carlotta walking back and forth with the baby, singing.

Andrei stepped in after them, turned his back, and pushed the button. "We're losing the signal again," David warned.

The steel doors slid shut.

They descended slowly. Suddenly Laura was shocked to feel David tenderly pat her ass. She jumped and stared at him.

"Hey, babe," he murmured. "We're offline. Wow."

He was starved for privacy.

And here they had almost thirty seconds of it. As long as

Andrei didn't turn and look. She glanced at David in frustration, wanting to tell him what? To reassure him that it wasn't so bad.

And that she felt it, too. And that they could tough it out together, but he'd better behave himself. And yeah, that it was a funny thing to do, and she was sorry she was jumpy.

But absolutely none of it could get across to him. With the surgical mask and the gold-etched glasses, David's face had turned totally alien. No human contact.

The doors opened; there was a sudden rush of air and their ears popped. They turned left into another hall. "It's okay,

Millie," David said distractedly. "We're fine, leave Carlotta alone... .

He kept mumbling from behind his mask, shaking his head and talking into the air. Like a madman. It was odd how peculiar it looked when you weren't doing it yourself. This hall looked peculiar, too: strangely funky and makeshift, the ceiling tilted, the walls out of true. It was cardboard, that was it-brown cardboard and thin wire mesh, but all of it lacquered over with a thick, steel-hard ooze of translucent plastic. The lights overhead were wired with extension cord, cheap old household extension cord, all stapled to the ceiling and sealed under thick lacquered gunk. It was all stapled, there wasn't a nail in it anywhere. Laura touched the wall, wondering. It was quality plastic, slick and hard as porcelain, and she knew from the feel of it that a strong man couldn't dent it with an axe. But there was so much of it-and it cost so much to make! Yeah, but maybe not so much-if you didn't pay insurance, or worker's comp, and never shut down for safety inspec- tions, and didn't build failsafes and crashproof control sys- tems and log every modification in triplicate. Sure; even nuclear power was cheap if you played fast and loose.

But bio-safety rules were ten times as strict, or supposed to be. Maybe plutonium was bad, but at least it couldn't jump out of a tank and grow by itself.

"This hall is made of cardboard! David said.

"No, it's thermal epoxy over cardboard," Andrei told him.

"You see that plug? Live steam. We can boil this entire hall at any moment. Not that we would need to, of course."

At the hall's end, they stopped by a tall sealed hatchway. It had the international symbol of bio-hazard: the black-and- yellow, triple-horned circle. Good graphic design, Laura thought as Andrei worked the hatch wheel; as frightening in its ele- gant way as a skull and crossbones.

They stepped through.

They emerged on a landing of lacquered bamboo. It stood forty feet in the air, overlooking a steel cavern the size of an aircraft hangar. They'd reached a section of the supertanker's hold; its floor-the steel hull-was gently curved. And lit- tered with surreal machinery, like the careless toys of some giant ten-year-old with a taste for chemistry sets.

The cardboard corridor, and their bamboo landing, and its sloping, spidery catwalks, were all bolted to a monster bulk- head at their backs. The hangar's far bulkhead rose in the distance, a great gray wall of girder-stiffened steel-this one spread with a giant polychrome mural. A mural of men and women in berets and fatigue shirts, marching under banners, their pie-cut painted eyes as big as basketballs, fixed in midair... their brown arms rounded and monolithic, gleam- ing like wax in a strange underwater glare.

The hangar's eerie lighting flowed from liquid chandeliers.

They were glass-bottomed steel tubs, big as children's wading pools, full of cool and oozy radiance. Thick, white, lumines- cent goo. It threw weird shadows on the dents and ripples of the cardboard ceiling.

It was loud here: industrial chugging and gurgling, with the busy whir of loaded motors and the thrum and squeal of plumbing. The warm, moist air smelled bland and pleasant, like boiled rice. With strange reeks cutting through-the chemi- cal tang of acid, a chalk-dust whiff of lime. A plumber's dope dream: great towers of ribbed stainless steel, jutting three stories tall, their knobby bases snaked with tubing. Indicator lights in Christmas-tree red and green, glossy readout panels shining like cheap jewelry... . Scores of crew people in white paper overalls-checking readouts, leaning over long, glass-topped troughs full of steamy, roiling oatmeal .. .

They followed Andrei down the stairs, David carefully scanning everything and mumbling into his set. "Why aren't they wearing scrub gear?" Laura asked.

"We wear the scrub gear," Andrei said. "It's clean down here. But we have wild bugs on our skin." He laughed.

"Don't sneeze or touch things."

Three flights down, still above the hull, they detoured onto a catwalk. It led to glass-fronted offices, which overlooked the plant from a bamboo pier.

Andrei led them inside. It was quiet and cool in the offices, with filtered air and electric lights. There were desks, phones, office calendars, a fridge beside stacked cartons of canned

Pepsi-Cola. Like an office back in the States, Laura thought, looking around. Maybe twenty years behind the times .. .

A door marked "PRIVATE" opened suddenly, and an Anglo man backed through it. He was working. a pump-piston aero- sol spray. He turned and noticed them. "Oh! Hi, uh, Andrei

"Hello," Laura said. "I'm Laura Webster, this is David, my husband...."

"Oh, it's you folks! Where's your baby?" Unlike everyone they'd seen so far, the stranger wore a suit and tie. It was an old suit, in the flashy "Taipan" style that had been all the rage, ten years ago. "Didn't want to bring the little guy down here, huh? Well it's perfectly safe, you needn't have wor- ried." He peered at them; light gleamed from his glasses.

"You can take off those masks, it's okay inside here.... You don't have, like, flu or anything?"

Laura pulled her mask below her chin. "No."

"I'll have to ask you not to use the, um, toilets." He paused. "It's all linked together down here, see-all sealed tight and recycled. Water, oxygen, the works! Just like a space station." He smiled.

"This is Dr. Prentis," Andrei told them.

"Oh!" Prentis said. "Yeah. I'm kind of the head honcho down here, as you must've guessed... . You're Americans, right? Call me Brian."

"A pleasure, Brian." David offered his hand.

Prentis winced. "Sorry, now, that's not kosher, either....

You guys want a Pepsi?" He set his sprayer on a desk and opened the fridge. "Got some Doo-Dads, Twinkies, beef jerky... "

"Uh, we just ate...." David was listening to something online. "Thanks anyway."

"All plastic-sealed, all perfectly safe! Right out of the carton! You're sure? Laura?" Prentis popped a Pepsi. "Oh, well, all the more for me."

"My contact online," David said. "She wants to know if you're the Brian Prentis who did the paper on ... I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that-polysaccharide something."

Prentis nodded, shortly. "Yeah. I did that."

"Reception's a little scratchy down here," David apologized.

"At Ohio State. Long time ago," Prentis said. "Who is this person? Somebody from your Rizome, right?"

"Professor Millie Syers, a Rizome Fellow at North Carolina State ... "

"Never heard of her," Prentis said. "So! What's new

Stateside, huh? How about that `L. A. Live' comedy show? I never miss an episode."

"They say it's very funny," Laura said. She never watched it.

"Those guys who do the 'Breadhead Brothers,' they slay me." Prentis paused. "We can get everything down here, y'know. Anything that hits the Net-not just American! Those

Stateside cable companies, they edit out a lot. Brazilian exot- ics ..." He winked clumsily. "And that Japanese blue stuff-whew!"

"Porn doesn't sell like it used to," Laura said.

"Yeah, they're stuffy, they're uptight," Prentis nodded.

"I don't hold with that. I believe in Total openness ... honesty, y'know? People shouldn't go through life with blinders on."

"Can you tell us what you do here?" Laura said.

"Oh. Surely. We use auxotrophic E. coli, they're homoserine auxotrophs mostly, though we use double auxotrophy if we're trying anything ticklish.... And the fermenters, the tower rigs, those are saccharomyces.... It's a standard strain, Pruteen copyright, nothing very advanced, just tried-and-true scop technology. At eighty percent capacity, we pump about fif- teen metric tons per rig per day, dry weight... . Of course we don't leave it raw, though. We do a lot of what they call cosmetics-palate work."

Prentis walked toward the windows. "Those smaller troughs are bell-and-whistle rigs. Texture, flavoring, secondary fer- mentation ..." He smiled at Laura, glassily. "It's very much the normal things that any housewife might do in the comfort of her own kitchen! Blenders, microwaves, eggbeaters; just a little scaled up, that's all."

Prentis glanced at David and away; the dark glasses both- ered him. He looked to Laura, gazing raptly at her bustline.

"It's not so new, really. If you've ever eaten bread or cheese or beer, you're eating molds and yeasts. All that stuff: tofu, soy sauce; you'd be amazed what they have to go through to make soy sauce. And believe it or not, it's far safer than so-called natural foods. Fresh vegetables!" Prentis barked with laughter. "They're chock-full of natural poisons! There are cases on record where people have died outright from eating potatoes!"

"Hey," David said, "you're preaching to the converted, amigo

Laura turned away toward the windows. "This isn't ex- actly new to us, Dr. Prentis. Rizome has a synthetic foods division... . I did some P.R. for them once."

"But that's good, that's good!" Prentis said, nodding in surprise. "People have, you know, absurd prejudices.... About

`eating germs.' "

"Maybe they did years ago," Laura said. "But nowadays it's mostly a class thing-that it's poor people's food. Cattle feed. "

Andrei folded his arms. "A bourgeois Yankee notion.

"Well, it's a marketing problem," Laura said. "But I agree with you. Rizome sees nothing wrong with feeding hungry people. We have our own expertise in this--and it's the kind of technology transfer that might be very helpful to a developing industry...." She paused. "I heard your speech upstairs, Andrei, and there's more common ground between us than you may think."

David chimed in, nodding. "There's a game in the States now called Worldrun. I play it a lot, it's very popular.... Protein tech, like this, is one of your major tools for world stability.

Without it, there are food riots, cities crumble, governments go down... . And not just in Africa, either."

"This is work," Andrei said. "Not a game."

"We don't make that distinction," David told him seri- ously. "We don't have `work' in Rizome just things to do, and people to do them." He smiled winningly. "For us, play is learning ... you play Worldrun, and you learn that you can't sit on your ass and let things go to hell. You can't just take a salary, make a profit, be a dead weight in the system.

In Rizome, we know this-hell, that's why we came to Grenada. "

He turned to Prentis. "I got a copy on my rig-call me up,

I can download it, for you. You too, Andrei."

Prentis snickered. "Uh, I can access the Bank from here,

David.... Computer games, they've got a couple hundred thousand on file, all kinds, all languages...."

"Pirated?" Laura said.

Prentis ignored her. "But Worldrun, I'll give it a shot, could be fun, I like to keep up with what's new...."

David touched his earpiece. "How long have you been in

Grenada, Dr. Prentis?"

"Ten years four months," Prentis said. "And very reward- ing work, too." He gestured out at the thudding rigs outside the glass. "You look at this and you may think: secondhand plant, jury-rig, corner cutting.... But we got something they'll never match Stateside. We got the True Entrepreneurial

Spirit...." Prentis stepped behind the desk and yanked open a bottom drawer.

He started piling things on the scarred tabletop: pipe cleaners,

X-acto knives, a magnifying glass, a stack of tape cas- settes held with a rubber band. "We'll tackle anything here, shake it, turn it upside down, look at any angle... you can blue-sky it, brainstorm... . The money boys here, they're not like those jaspers back Stateside; once they trust you, well, it's just like a block grant, only better. You get True Intellectual

Freedom.... " More crap hit the desk: rubber stamps, paperweights, molecular tinker toys. "And they know how to party, too! You might not think so to see those Movement cadres up-deck, but you never seen a carnival fete in Grenada... - They go ape!

They really know how to get loose... . Oh, here it is." He pulled out an unmarked tube; it looked like toothpaste. "Now this is something!"

"What is it?" David said.

"What? Just the greatest suntan lotion ever made, that's all!" He tossed it to David. "We invented this right here in

Grenada. It's not just sunscreens and emollients. Hell, that old crap just layers the epidermis. But this soaks right into the cells, changes the reaction structure...."

David unscrewed the cap. A sharp, minty reek filled the room. "Whew!" He recapped it.

"No, keep it."

David stuck the tube in his pocket. "I haven't seen this on the market... .

"Hell, no, you haven't. And you know why? 'Cause the

Yankee health feds flunked it, that's why. A 'mutagen risk.'

`Carcinogenic.' In a pig's eye, brother!" Prentis slammed the drawer shut. "Raw sunlight! Now that's a real cancer risk.

But no, they'll let that go, won't they? 'Cause it's `natural.' "

Prentis sneered. "Sure, you use that lotion every day for forty years, maybe you get a little problem. Or maybe you already got gastric ulcers from booze! That'll wreck you from top to bottom, but you don't see them banning alcohol, do you?

Goddamn hypocrites."

"I take your point," Laura said. "But look what's been done about cigarettes. Alcohol's a drug too, and people's attitudes-"

Prentis stiffened. "You're not gonna start in on that, are you? Drugs?" He glared at Andrei.

"The Charles Nogues is a food ship," Andrei said. "I have told them this already."

"I don't make dope!" Prentis said. "You believe that?"

"Sure," David said, surprised.

"People come down here, they try and hit off me," Prentis complained. "They say, `Hey Brian, pal, bet you got tons of syncoke, never miss a couple teaspoons for us, huh?"' He glared. "Well, I'm off that. Totally."

Laura blinked. "We weren't trying to imply-"

Prentis pointed angrily at David. "Look, he's listening.

What are they telling you on the Net, huh? All about me, I bet. Jesus Christ." Prentis stamped out from behind the desk.

"They never forget, do they? Sure, I'm famous! I did it-the Prentis Polysaccharide Process-man, I made millions for Biogen. And they had me on hot proteins, too...." He held up thumb and finger. "I was that far from the Nobel, maybe! But that was live bioactives, Type Three Security. So they made me piss in a cup." He glared at Laura. "You know what that means."

"Drug tests," Laura said. "Like for airline pilots...."

"I had this girl friend," Prentis said slowly. "Kind of a live wire. Not one of those Goddess types, but, you know, a party girl... . `Brian,' she says, `you'll make it really smooth, behind a couple lines.' And she was right!" He whipped off his glasses. "Goddamn it, she was the most fun I ever had."

"I'm sorry," Laura said in the sudden embarrassed si- lence. "Did they fire you?"

"Not at first. But they took me off everything important, wanted to give me to their goddamn shrinks... . A lab like that, it's like a fuckin' monastery. 'Cause what if you crack, y'know, what if you run out with some Jell-O in your pocket

... dangerous Jell-O... patented Jell-O."

"Yeah, it's tough," David told him. "I guess they pretty much run your social life."

"Well, more fools they," Prentis said, a little calmer now.

"Guys with imagination ...visionaries ... we need elbow room. Space to relax. An outfit like Biogen, it ends up with bureaucrats. Drones. That's why they're not getting any- where." He put his glasses back on. Then he sat on the desk, swinging his feet. "A conspiracy, that's what it is. All those

Net multinationals, they're in each other's pockets. It's a closed market, no real competition. That's why they're fat and lazy. But not here."

"But if it's dangerous... " Laura began.

"Dangerous? Hell, I'll show you dangerous." Prentis bright- ened. "Stay here, I'll be back, you gotta see this. Everybody oughta see this."

He hopped down and vanished into his back office.

Laura and David traded uneasy glances. They looked at

Andrei. Andrei nodded. "He's right, you know."

Prentis emerged. He was brandishing a yard-long scimitar.

"Jesus Christ!" David said.

"It's from Singapore," Prentis said. "They make 'em for the Third World market. You ever see one of these?" He waved it. David stepped backward. "It's a machete," Prentis said impatiently. "You're a Texan, right? You must have seen a machete before."

"Yeah," David said. "For clearing brush ..."

Prentis slammed the machete down, overhand. It hit the desk with a shriek. The desk's corner flew off and hit the floor, spinning.

The machete blade had sheared completely through the wooden desk. It had sliced off an eight-inch triangle of tabletop, including two sections of desk wall and the back of a drawer.

Prentis picked up the severed chunk and set it on the desk like a little wooden pyramid. "Not a splinter! You want to give it a try, Dave?"

"No thanks," David said.

Prentis grinned. "Go ahead! I can superglue it right back; I do this all the time. You're sure?" He held the machete loosely, at arm's length, and let it fall. It sank half an inch into the desktop.

"A wicked knife," Prentis said, dusting his hands. "Maybe you think that's dangerous, but you don't see it all, yet. You know what that,is? That's peasant technology, brother. It's slash-and-burn agriculture. You know what that might do to what's left of the planet's tropical forests? It'll make every straw-hat Brazilian into Paul Bunyan, that's what. The most dangerous bio-tech in the world is a guy with a goat and an axe.

"Ax, hell," David blurted, "that thing's a monster! It can't be legal!" He leaned toward the desk and scanned it with his glasses. "I can see I never thought this through...

I know we use .ceramic blades in machine-tools... but that's in factory settings, with safety standards! You can't just sell 'em to all and sundry-it's like handing out personal flame-throwers!"

Andrei spoke up. "Don't tell us, David-tell Singapore.

They are radical technical capitalists. They don't care about forests-they have no forests to lose."

Laura nodded. "That's not farming, it's mass destruction.

That'll have to be stopped," she said.

Prentis shook his head. "We got one chance to stop it, and that's to put every goddamn farmer in the world out of business." He paused. "Yeah, honest old Mr. Yeoman Farmer, and the wife, and his million goddamn kids. They're eating the planet alive."

Prentis reached absently through the hole in the desk and pulled out a tube of glue. "That's all that matters. Sure, maybe we've cooked a little dope in Grenada, liberated a few programs, but that's just for start-up money. We make food.

And we make jobs to make food. See all those people work- ing down there? You wouldn't see 'em in a Stateside plant.

The way -we do it here, it's labor-intensive-people who might have been farmers, making their own food, for their own country. Not just handouts, dumped from some charity plane by rich nations."

"We have no quarrel with that," Laura said.

"Sure you do," Prentis said. "You don't want it stripped down and cheap. You want it expensive, and controlled, and totally safe. You don't want peasants and slum kids with that kind of technical power. You're afraid of it." He pointed to the machete. "But you can't have it both ways. All tech is dangerous--even with no moving parts."

Long silence. Laura turned to Andrei. "Thanks for bring- ing us down here. You've brought us in touch with a genuine problem." She turned to Prentis. "Thank you, Brian."

"Sure," said Prentis. His gaze flickered upward from her breasts. She tried to smile at him.

Prentis set the glue down carefully. "You want to tour the plant?"

"I'd love to," David said.

They left the office, reassuming their masks. They went down among the workers. The crew didn't look much like

"slum kids"-they were mostly middle-aged cadres, most of them women. They wore hair nets and their paper overalls had the shiny look of old bakery bags. They worked in twenty-four-hour shifts-a third of the crew was asleep, in soundproof acoustic cubicles, clustered under the giant mural like Styrofoam barnacles.

Backed by Millie Syers, David asked alert questions about the equipment. Any containment spills? No. Souring trouble?

Just the usual throwbacks to the wild state-tailored bacteria did tend to revert, after millions of generations. And wild bugs wouldn't produce-they just ate goop and freeloaded.

Left to multiply at the expense of the worthy, these backslid- ers would soon take over, so they were scorched from the tanks without mercy.

What about the rest of the Charles Nogues, beyond the bulkheads? Why, she was full of factories like this from bow to stern, all safety-sealed so spoiling couldn't spread. Lots of careful slurry-pumping back and forth between units-they used the old tanker pumps, still in fine condition The ship's containment systems, built to prevent petroleum gas explosions, were ideal for bio-hazard work.

Laura quizzed some of the women. Did they like the work?

Of course-they had all kinds of special perks, credit-card boosts whenever they beat the quotas, TV links with their families, special rewards for successful new recipes.... Didn't they feel cooped up down here? Heavens no, not compared to the crowded government yards down-the-island. A whole month vacation time, too. Of course, it did itch a bit when you got that skin bacteria back...

They toured the plant for over an hour, climbing bamboo stiles over the hull's six-foot reinforcement girders. David spoke to Prentis. "You said something about bathrooms?"

"Yeah, sorry. E. coli, that's a native gut bacterium... . If it gets loose, we have a lot of trouble."

David shrugged,. embarrassed. "The food upstairs was good,

I ate a lot. Uh, my compliments to the chef."

"Thanks," Prentis said.

David touched his glasses. "I think I've scanned pretty much everything... . If Atlanta has questions, could we get in touch?"

"Uhmmm ..." Prentis said. Andrei broke in. "That's a bit difficult, David." He didn't elaborate.

David forgot and offered to shake hands again. When they left, they could see Prentis stalking behind the office glass, pumping his spray gun.

They retraced their steps up the catwalk. Andrei was pleased.

"I'm glad you met Dr. Prentis. He's very dedicated. But he does get a bit lonely for his native countrymen."

"He does seem to lack a few of the amenities," David said.

"Yeah," Laura said. "Like a girl friend."

Andrei was surprised. "Oh, Dr. Prentis is married. To a

Grenadian worker."

"Oh," Laura said, feeling the gaffe. "That must be won- derful.... How about you, Andrei? Are you married?"

"Only to the Movement," Andrei said. He wasn't kidding.

The sun was setting by the time they returned to their safehouse. It had been a long day. "You must be tired,

Carlotta," Laura said as they climbed stiffly from the three- wheeler. "Why don't you come in and have supper with us?"

"It's nice to ask," Carlotta said, smiling sweetly. Her eyes glistened and there was a soft rosy glow to her cheeks. "But I can't make it tonight. I have Communion."

"You're sure?" Laura said. "Tonight's good for us."

"I can come by later this week. And bring my date, maybe."

Laura frowned. "I might be testifying then."

Carlotta shook her head. "No, you won't. I haven't even testified yet." She reached from the driver's seat and patted the baby's tote. "Bye, little one. Bye, y'all. I'll call or something. She gunned the engine, kicking gravel, and drove through the gates.

"Typical," Laura said.

They walked up onto the porch. David pulled his key card.

"Well, Communion, that sounds pretty important-"

"Not Carlotta, she's just a klutz. I mean the Bank. It's a ploy, don't you see? They're gonna make us cool our heels here in this big old barn, instead of letting me make my case.

And they're calling Carlotta to testify first, just to rub it in."

David paused. "You think so, huh?"

"Sure. That's why Sticky was giving us the runaround earlier." She followed him into the mansion. "They're work- ing on us, David; this is all part of a plan. That tour, everything... . What smells so good?"

Rita had dinner waiting. It was stuffed pork with peppers and parsley, Creole ratatouille, hot baked bread and chilled rum soufflé for dessert. In a candlelit dining room with fresh linen and flowers. It was impossible to refuse. Not without offending Rita. Someone they had to share the house with, after all... . At the very least, they had to try a few bites, just for politeness sake... . And after all that nasty scop, too.... It was all so delicious it stung. Laura ate like a wolverine.

And no dishes to wash. The servants cleared everything, stacking it onto little rosewood trolleys. They brought brandy and offered Cuban cigars. And they wanted to take the baby too. Laura wouldn't let them.

There was a study upstairs. It wasn't much of a study-no books-just hundreds of videotapes and old-fashioned plastic records, but they retired to the study with their brandies anyway. It seemed the proper thing to do, somehow.

Lots of old framed photos on the study's walls. Laura looked them over while David shuffled curiously through the tapes. It was clear who Mr. Gelli, the former owner, was.

He was the puffy-faced hustler throwing a good-buddy arm over vaguely familiar, vaguely repulsive Vegas show-biz types.... Here he was toadying up to some snake-eyed goof- ball in a long white dress-with a start, Laura realized it was the Pope.

David loaded a tape. He sat on the couch-an overstuffed monster in purple velour-and fired up the TV with a clunky remote. Laura joined him. "Find something?"

"Home movies, I think. He's got lots-I picked out the most recent."

A party at the mansion. Big ugly cake in the dining room, smorgasbord groaning with food. "I shouldn't have eaten so much," Laura said.

"Look at that jerk in the party hat," David said. "That's a mad doctor, for sure. Can you see that, Atlanta?"

Faint squeaking came from Laura's earpiece; she was wear- ing it loose, and it dangled. She felt a little funny about having shared the earpiece with Carlotta; kind of like sharing a toothbrush, or like sharing a... well, best not to think about that one. "Why don't you take that off, David?" She removed her own glasses and pointed them at the door, guarding them from intruders. "We're safe here, right? No worse than the bedroom."

"Well... " David froze the tape and got up. He punched an intercom button by the door. "Hello. Urn, Jimmy? Yeah, I want you to bring us that plug-in clock by the bedside. Right away. Thanks." He returned to the couch.

"You shouldn't do that," Laura said.

"You mean order them around like they were servants?

Yeah, I know. Very non-R. I got some ideas though-I want to talk to Personnel about it, tomorrow...." Discreet knock at the door. David took the clock from Jimmy. "No, nothing else... okay, go ahead, bring the bottle." He plugged his headset into the clock. "How's that, Atlanta?"

["You might as well point one set at the TV,"] the clock told him loudly. ["Watching that door's pretty boring."]

Laura didn't recognize the guy's voice; some Rizomian on the night shift, she'd given up caring at this point.

The tape spooled on; David had muted the sound. "Lotta

Anglos at this gig," David commented. "I miss the Rastas."

Laura sipped her brandy. It wrapped her mouth in molten gold. "Yeah," she said, inhaling over the glass. "There's a lot of different factions on this island, and I don't think they get along too well. There's the Movement revolutionaries

... and the Voodoo mystics... and the high-techies... and the low-techies ... "

"And the street poor, just looking for food and a roof ..."

Knock knock knock; the brandy had arrived. David brought it to the couch. "You realize this could be poisoning us."

He refilled their snifters.

"Yeah, but I felt worse when I left Loretta behind with

Carlotta, she's been so good since then, I was afraid Carlotta'd slipped her some kind of happy-pill...." She kicked off her shoes and curled her legs beneath her.. "David, these people know what they're doing. If they want to poison us they could do it with some speck of something we would never even see."

"Yeah, I kept telling myself that, while I ate the ratatouille. "

Some rich drunk had collared the cameraman and was shout- ing gleefully into the lens. "Look at this clown! I forgot to mention the local faction of pure criminal sleazebags.... Takes all kinds to make a data haven, I guess."

"It doesn't add up," Laura said, sinking easily into brandy- fueled meditation. "It's like beachcombing after a storm, all kinds of Net flotsam thrown up on the golden Grenadian shore.... So if you push on these people, maybe they go neatly to pieces, if you hit the right flaw. But too much pressure, and it all welds together and you got a monster on your hands. I was thinking today-the old Nazis, they used to believe in the Hollow Earth and all kinds of mystical crap.... But their trains ran on time and their state cops were efficient as hell David took her hand, looking at her curiously. "You're really into this, aren't you?"

"It's important, David. The most important thing we've ever done. You bet I'm involved. All the way."

He nodded. "I noticed you seemed a little tense when I grabbed your ass in the elevator. "

She laughed, briefly. "I was nervous... it's good to relax here, just us." Some moron in a bow tie was singing on a makeshift stage, some slick-haired creep pausing to make wisecracks and snappy in-joke banter... . Camera kept mov- ing to men in the audience, Big Operators laughing at them- selves with the bogus joviality of Big Operators laughing at themselves... .

David put his arm around her. She leaned her head onto his shoulder. He wasn't taking this as seriously as she did, she thought. Maybe because he hadn't been standing there with

Winston Stubbs...

She cut off that ugly thought and had more brandy. "You should have picked an earlier tape," she told him. "Maybe we could get a look at the place before old Gelli brought his decorators in."

"Yeah, I haven't seen our pal Gelli in any of this. Must be his nephew's party, or something.... Whoa!"

The tape had switched scenes. It was later now, outside, by the pool. A late-night swim party, lots of torches, towels

... and opulent young women in bikini bottoms. "Holy cow,"

David said in his comedian's voice. "Naked broads! Man, this guy really knows how to live!"

A crowd of young .women, next to nude. Sipping drinks, combing wet hair with long, sensuous strokes and their el- bows out. Lying full length, drowsy or stoned, as if expecting a tan by torchlight. A full-color assortment of them, too.

"Good to see some black people have finally shown up,"

Laura said sourly.

"Those girls must have crashed the gig," David said. "No room in that gear for invites."

"Are they hookers?"

"Gotta be. "

Laura paused. "I hope this isn't going to turn into an orgy or anything."

"No," David said callously, "look at the way the camera follows their tits. He wouldn't be getting this excited if there was anything hot and heavy coming up." He set his empty glass down. "Hey, you can see part of the old back garden in that shot-" He froze the image.

["Hey,"] the clock protested.

"Sorry," David said. The tape kept rolling. Men enjoyed seeing women this way-rolling hips, jiggle, that soft acreage of tinted female skin. Laura thought about it, the brandy hitting her. It didn't do much for her. But despite David's pretended nonchalance she could feel him reacting a little.

And in some odd, vicarious way that itself was a little exciting.

For once there was no one looking at them, she thought wickedly. Maybe if they curled up on the couch and were very, very, quiet...

A slim brown girl with ankle bracelets mounted the diving board. She sauntered to the end, bent gracefully, and went into a hand-stand. She held it for five long seconds, then plunged head-fist Jesus Christ!" David said. He froze it in mid-splash.

Laura blinked. "What's so special about-"

"Not her, babe. Look." He ran it backward; the girl flew up feet-first, then grabbed the board. She bent at the waist, strolled backward... She froze again. "There," David said.

"There to the far right, by the water. It's Gelli. Lying in that lawn chair."

Laura stared. "It sure is... he looks thinner."

"Look at him move...." The girl walked the board

... and Gelli's head was wobbling. A spastic movement, compulsive, with his chin rolling in a ragged figure eight, and his eyes fixed on nothing at all. And then he stopped the wobbling, caught it somehow, leering with the pain of effort.

And his hand came up, a wizened hand like a bundle of sticks, bent down acutely at the wrist.

In the foreground, the girl balanced gracefully, slim legs held straight, toes pointed like a gymnast. And behind her

Gelli went touch-touch-touch, three little dabs of movement to his face-fast, jerky, totally ritualized. Then the girl plunged, and the camera slid away. And Gelli vanished.

"What's wrong with him?" Laura whispered.

David was pale, his mouth tight-set. "I don't know. Some nerve disorder, obviously. "

"Parkinson's disease?"

"Maybe. Or maybe something we don't even have a name for. "

David killed the television. He stood up and unplugged the clock. He put on his glasses, carefully. "I'm gonna go an- swer some mail, Laura."

I'll come with you." She didn't sleep for a long time. And there were nightmares, too.

Next morning, they inspected the foundations for settling and dry rot. They opened every window, making note of cracked glass and warped lintels. They checked the attic for drooping joists and moldy insulation, checked the stairs for springy boards, measured the slopes of the floor, cataloged the multitude of cracks and bulges in the walls.

The servants watched them with growing anxiety. At lunch they had a little discussion. Jimmy, it transpired, considered himself a "butler," while Rajiv was a "majordomo" and

Rita a "cook" and "nanny." They weren't a construction crew. To David this sounded ludicrously old-fashioned; things needed doing, so why not do them? What was the problem?

They responded with wounded pride. They were skilled house staff, not no-account rudies from the government yards.

They had certain places to fill and certain work that came with the places. Everybody knew this. It had always been so.

David laughed. They were acting like nineteenth-century colonials, he said; what about Grenada's high-tech, anti- imperialist revolution? Surprisingly, this argument failed to move them. Fine, David said at last. If they didn't want to help, it was no problem of his. They could prop up their feet and drink pina coladas.

Or maybe they could watch some television, Laura sug- gested. As it happened, she had some Rizome recruiting tapes that might help explain how Rizome felt about things... .

After lunch Laura and David continued their inspection remorselessly. They climbed up into the turrets, where the servants had their quarters. The floors were splintery, the roofs leaked, and the intercoms had shorted out. Before they left Laura and David deliberately made all the beds.

During the afternoon David caught some sun in the bottom of the dead pool. Laura played with the baby. Later David checked the electrical system while she answered the mail.

Supper was fantastic, again. They were tired and made an early night of it.

The Bank was ignoring them. They returned the favor.

Next day David got out his tool chest. He made a little unconscious ritual of it, like a duke inspecting his emeralds.

The toolbox weighed fifteen pounds, was the size of a large breadbox, and had been lovingly assembled by Rizome crafts- men in Kyoto. Looking inside; with the gleam of chromed ceramic and neat foam sockets for everything, you could get a kind of mental picture of the guys who had made it-white- robed Zen priests of the overhead lathe, guys who lived on brown rice and machine oil... .

Pry bar, tin snips, cute little propane torch; plumbing snake, pipe wrench, telescoping auger; ohm meter, wire stripper, needlenose pliers... Ribbed ebony handles that popped off and reattached-to push drills and screwdriver bits...avid's tool set was by far the most expensive possession they owned.

They worked on the plumbing all morning-starting on the servants' bathroom. Hard, filthy work, with lots of creeping about on one's back. After his afternoon sun worship David stayed outside. He'd found some gardening tools in a shed and tackled the front acreage, stripped to the waist and wear- ing his videoshades. Laura saw that he had fast-talked the two gate guards into helping him. They were trimming wild ivy and pruning dead branches and joking together.

She had nothing to report to Atlanta, so she spent her time catching flack. Unsurprisingly, there was plenty of gratuitous advice from every comer of the compass. Several idiots expressed grave disappointment that they had not yet toured a secret Grenadian drug lab. A Rizome graphics program was showing up as a pirate knock-off in Cuba-was the Bank involved? Rizome had contacted the Polish government-

Warsaw said Andrei Tarkovsky was a black-market operator, wanted for forging false passports.

The Rizome elections were heating up. It looked like the

Suvendra race was going to be close. Pereira-Mr. Nice

Guy-was making a surprisingly strong showing.

David came in to shower for supper. "You're gonna burn up out there," she told him.

"No, I won't, smell." He reeked of rank male sweat with an undertone of mint. His skin looked waxed.

"Oh no!" she said., "You haven't been using that tube stuff, have you?"

"Sure," David said, surprised. "Prentis claimed it was the best ever-you don't expect me to take that on faith, surely."

He examined his forearms. "I used it yesterday, too. I'd swear I'm darker already, and no burn either."

"David, you're hopeless...."

He only smiled. "I think I may have a cigar tonight!"

They had supper. The servants were upset by the recruiting tapes. They wanted to know how much of it was true. All of it, Laura said innocently.

As they lay in bed, she got Atlanta to slot her a Japanese- language tape-mystery stories of Edogawa Rampo. David fell asleep at once, lulled by the meaningless polysyllables.

Laura listened as she drifted off, letting the alien grammar soak in to those odd itchy places where the brain stored language. She like Rampo's straight journalistic Japanese, none of those involved circumlocutions and maddening veiled allusions....

Hours later she was shaken awake in darkness. Harsh babble of English. "Babe, wake up, it's news...."

Emily Donato spoke out of the darkness. ["Laura, it's me."]

Laura twisted in the lurching waterbed. The room was dim purples and grays. "Lights, turn on!" she croaked. Flash of overhead glare. She winced at the clock. Two A.M. "What is it, Emily?"

["We got the fact,"] the clock proclaimed, in Emily's familiar voice.

Laura felt a pang of headache. "What fact?"

["The F.A.C.T., Laura. We know who's behind them.

Who they really are. It's Molly."]

"Oh, the terrorists," Laura said. A little jolt of shock and fear coursed through her. Now she was awake. "Molly?

Molly who?"

["The government of Molly,"] Emily said.

"It's a country in North Africa," David said from his side of the bed. "The Republic of Mali. Capital Bamako, main export cotton, population rate two percent. " David, the

Worldrun player.

"Mali." The name sounded only vaguely familiar. "What do they have to do with anything?"

["We're working on that. Mali's one of those Sahara famine countries, with an army regime, it's nasty there.... The

F.A.C.T. is their front group. We've got it from three differ- ent sources."]

"Who?" Laura said.

["Kymera, I. G. Farben, and the Algerian State Department."]

"Sounds good," Laura said. She trusted Kymera Corporation

-the Japanese didn't throw accusations lightly. "What does the Vienna heat say?"

["Nothing. To butt out. They're covering something up, I think. Mali never signed the Vienna Convention.... "] Em- ily paused. ["The Central Committee meets tomorrow. Some people from Kymera and Farben are flying in. We all think it smells."I

"What do you want us to do?" Laura said.

["Tell the Bank when you testify. It wasn't Singapore that killed their man. Or the European Commerzbank either. It was the secret police in Mali."]

"Jesus," Laura said. "Okay ..."

["I'm sending you some backup data on a coded line....

Good night, Laura. I'm up late, too, if it helps."]

Emily signed off.

"Wow ..." Laura shook her head, clearing the last cob- webs. "Things are really moving...." She turned to her husband-''Yike!"

"Yeah," David said. He stretched out one arm, showing it to her. "I'm, uh, black."

"David ... you're black!" Laura yanked the sheet back, revealing his bare chest and stomach. She could feel her neck bristle in astonishment. "David, look at you. Your skin is black! All over!"

"Yeah ... I was sunbathing nude in the pool. " He shrugged sheepishly, his shoulders dark against the crisp white pillow.

"You remember that ship's officer-a blond, black guy-back on the Charles Nogues? I wondered, when I saw him... "

Laura blinked, trying to think back. "The blond black man

... Yeah, but I thought he'd dyed his hair...."

"His hair was natural, but he'd changed his skin. It's that suntan oil Prentis gave me. It affects the skin pigment, the melanin, I guess. It's a little patchy down here by my, uh, crotch ... like I got very dark freckles, but big, kinda splotchy.... I should've asked how it works."

"It's obvious how it works, David-it makes you black!"

Laura began laughing, her mind pinched between the shock- ing and the ridiculous. He looked so different.... "Do you feel all right, sweetheart?"

"I feel fine," he said coolly. "How do you feel about it?"

"Let me look at you She sneaked a look at his crotch and began giggling helplessly. "Oh... It's not that funny but. .. Oh, David, you look like a horny giraffe." She rubbed his shoulder, hard, with her thumb. "It's not coming off, is it.... Honey, you've really done it this time."

"This is revolutionary," he said soberly.

A fit of laughter seized her.

"I mean it, Laura. You can be black, from a tube. Don't you see what that means?"

She bit her knuckle until she got control of herself. "Da- vid, people don't want to risk skin cancer, just so they can be black. "

"Why not? I would. We live under a hard Texas sun. All

Texans ought to be black. In that kind of climate, it's best for you. Sensible."

She stared at him, biting her lip. "This is just too, too weird... . You're not really black, David. You've got an

Anglo nose, and Anglo mouth. Oh look, here's a patch on your ear that you missed!" She shrieked with laughter.

"Stop that, Laura, you're making me mad." He sat up straighter. "Okay, maybe I'm not black, up close.... But in a crowd, I'm a black man. Same in a car, or walking on the street. Or at a political meeting. That could change everything."

His passion surprised her. "Not everything, David, come on. Rizome's CEO is black. America's had a black president, even."

"Bullshit, Laura, don't pretend racism's a dead issue, why do you think Africa's in the mess it's in? Goddamn it, these

Grenadians have really got something! I'd heard rumors of stuff like this, but the way they painted it, it was some kind of risky freak experiment.... But it's easy! I wonder how much they've made? Pounds? Tons?"

David's eyes were full of visionary fire. "I'm gonna walk up to the first Third Worlder I see, and say,. 'Hi! I'm a white

American imperial exploiter, and I'm black as the ace of spades, compadre.' This is the greatest thing I've ever heard.

Laura frowned a little. "It's just color. It doesn't change how you feel about yourself, inside. Or the way you act, either. "

"The hell you say. Even a new haircut can do that much."

He leaned back against the pillow, cradling his head. His armpits were splotchy. "I gotta get more of this stuff."

Now he was involved. At last. It had taken something very weird to jolt him, but now he was with her all the way. He'd found something to galvanize him, and he was off and run- ning. He had that look in his eyes again. Just like when they were first married, back when they were planning the Lodge together. She felt glad.

She reached across his chest, admiring the svelte contrast of her arm against his dark ribs. "You look good, David, really.... It suits you somehow... . I guess I never told you this, but I always had a kind of minor thing for black guys."

She kissed his shoulder. "I knew this guy in high school, he and I--

David clambered suddenly out of bed. "Atlanta, who's online?"

["Uh, the name's Nash, Thomas Nash, you don't know me..."]

"Tom, I want you to get a look at this." David picked up his glasses and scanned himself head to foot. "What do you think of that?"

["Um, seem to be having some trouble with brightness levels, Rizome Grenada. Also, you're not wearing clothes.

Right?"]

Laura waited for David to come back to bed. Instead he started calling people. She fell asleep again while he was still ranting.