Islands in the Net

7

SINGAPORE. Hot tropic light slanted through brown wooden shutters. A ceiling fan creaked and wobbled, creaked and wobbled, and dust motes did a slow atomic dance above her head.

She was on a cot, in an upstairs room, in an elderly waterfront barn. Rizome's HQ in Singapore-the Rizome godown.

Laura sat up, reluctantly, blinking. Thin wood-grain lino- leum, cool and tacky under her sweating feet. The siesta had made her head hurt.

Massive steel I-beams pierced through floor and ceiling, their whitewash peeling over lichen patches of rust. The walls around her were piled high with bright, unstable heaps of crates and cardboard boxes. Canned hairspray that was bad for the atmosphere. Ladies' beauty soap full of broad-spectrum antibiotics. Quack tonics of zinc and ginseng that claimed to cure impotence and clarify the spleen. All this evil crap had come with the place when the previous owners went bank- rupt. Suvendra's Rizome crew refused to market it.

Sooner or later they would toss it out and take the loss, but in the meantime a clan of geckos had set up housekeeping in the nooks and crannies. Geckos-wall-walking lizards with pale, translucent skins, and slitted eyes, and swollen-fingered paws. Here came one now, picking its way stealthily across the water-stained ceiling. It was the big matronly-looking one that liked to crouch overhead by the light fixture. "Hello,

Gwyneth," Laura called to it, and yawned.

She checked her wrist. Four P.M. She was still far behind on her sleep, hurry and worry and jet lag, but it was time to get up and get back after it.

She stepped into her jeans, straightened her T-shirt. Her deck sat on a small folding table, behind a big woven basket of paper flowers. Some Singapore politico had sent Laura the bouquet as a welcome gift. Customary. She'd kept it, though, because she'd never seen paper flowers like they made here in

Singapore. They were extremely elegant, almost scary look- ing in their museum-replica perfection. Red hibiscus, white chrysanthemum, Singapore's national colors. Beautiful and per- fect and unreal. They smelled like French cologne.

She sat, and turned the deck on, and loaded data. Pop- topped a jug of mineral water and poured it in a dragon- girdled teacup. She sipped, and studied her screen, and was absorbed.

The world around her faded. Into black glass, green letter- ing. The inner world of the Net.

PARLIAMENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF SINGAPORE

Select Committee on Information PolicyPublic hearings, October 9, 2023

COMMITTEE CHAIR

S. P. Jeyaratnam, M.P. (Jurong), P.I.P.

VICE-CHAIR

_Y. H. Leong, M.P. (Moulmein), P.I.P.

A. bin Awang, M.P. (Bras Basah), P.I.P.

T. B. Pang, M.P. (Queenstown), P.I.P.

C. H. Quah, M.P. (Telok Blangah), P.I.P.

Dr. R. Razak, M.P. (Anson), Anti-Labour Party

Transcript of Testimony

MR. JEYARATNAM: ... accusations. scarcely less than libelous!

MRS. WEBSTER: I'm well aware of the flexibility of the local laws of libel.

MR. JEYARATNAM: Are you slurring the integrity of our legal system?

MRS. WEBSTER: Amnesty International has a list of eighteen local political activists, bankrupted or jailed through your Government's libel actions.

MR. JEYARATNAM: This committee will not be used as a globalist soapbox! Could you apply such high standards to your good friends in Grenada?

MRS. WEBSTER: Grenada is an autocratic dictatorship practicing political torture and murder, Mr. Chairman.

MR. JEYARATNAM: Indeed. But this has not prevented you Americans from cosying up to them. Or from attacking us: a fellow industrial democracy.

MRS. WEBSTER: I'm not a United States diplomat, I'm a Rizome associate. My direct concern is with your corporate policies. Singapore's information laws promote industrial piracy and invasion of privacy. Your

Yung Soo Chim Islamic Bank may have a better screen of legality, but it's damaged my company's interests as badly as the United Bank of Grenada. If not more so.

We don't want to offend your pride or your sovereignty or whatever, but we want those policies changed. That's why I came here.

MR. JEYARATNAM: You equate our democratic government with a terrorist regime.

MRS. WEBSTER: I don't equate you, because I can't believe that Singapore is responsible for the vicious attack that I saw. But Grenadians do believe it, because they know full well that you and they are rivals in piracy, and so you have a motive. And for revenge, I think ... I know, that they are capable of almost anything.

MR. JEYARATNAM: Anything? How many battalions does this witch doctor have?

MRS. WEBSTER: I can only tell you what they told me.

Just before I left, a Grenadian cadre named Andrei

Tarkovsky gave me a message for you. (Mrs. Webster's testimony deleted)

MR. JEYARATNAM: Order, please! This is rank terrorist propaganda.... Chair recognizes Mr. Pang for a motion.

MR. PANG: I move that the subversive terrorist message be stricken from the record.

MRS. QUAH: Second the motion.

MR. JEYARATNAM: It is so ordered.

DR. RAZAK: Mr. Chairman, I wish to be recorded as objecting to this foolish act of censorship.

MRS. WEBSTER: Singapore could be next! I saw it happen! Legalisms-that won't help you if they sow mines through your city and firebomb it!

MR. JEYARATNAM: Order! Order, please, ladies and gentlemen.

DR. RAZAK:... a kind of innkeeper?

MRS. WEBSTER: We in Rizome don't have "jobs, Dr.

Razak. Just things to do and people to do them.

DR. RAZAK: My esteemed colleagues of the People's

Innovation Party might call that "inefficient."

MRS. WEBSTER: Well, our idea of efficiency has more to do with personal fulfillment than, uh, material possessions.

DR. RAZAK: I understand that large numbers of Rizome employees do no work at all.

MRS. WEBSTER: Well, we take care of our own. Of course a lot of that activity is outside the money economy.

An invisible economy that isn't quantifiable in dollars.

DR. RAZAK: In ecu, you mean.

MRS. WEBSTER: Yes, sorry. Like housework: you don't get any money for doing it, but that's how your family survives, isn't it? Just because it's not in a bank doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Incidentally, we're not "employ- ees," but "associates."

DR. RAZAK: In other words, your bottom line is ludic joy rather than profit. You have replaced "labour," the humiliating specter of "forced production," with a series of varied, playlike pastimes. And replaced the greed motive with a web of social ties, reinforced by an elective power structure.

MRS. WEBSTER: Yes, I think so ... if I understand your definitions.

DR. RAZAK: How long before you can dispose of "work"

entirely?

Singha Pura meant "Lion City." But there had never been lions on Singapore island.

The name had to make some kind. of sense, though. So local legend said the "lion" had been a sea monster.

On the opposite side of Singapore's National Stadium, a human sea lifted their flash cards and showed Laura their monster. The Singapore "merlion," in a bright mosaic of cardboard squares.

Loud, patriotic applause from a packed crowd of sixty thousand.

The merlion had a fish's long, scaled body and the lion head of the old British Empire. They had a statue of it in

Merlion Park at the mouth of the Singapore River. The thing was thirty feet high, a genuinely monstrous hybrid.

East and West like cats and fishes-never the twain shall meet. Until some bright soul had simply chopped the fish's head off and stuck the lion's on: And there you had it:

Singapore.

Now there were four million of them and they had the biggest goddamn skyscrapers in the world.

Suvendra, sitting next to Laura in the bleachers, offered her a paper bag of banana chips. Laura took a handful and knocked back more lemon squash.. The stadium hawkers were selling the best fast food she'd ever eaten.

Back across the field there was another practiced flurry. A

big grinning face this time, flash-card pixels too big and crude, like bad computer graphics.

"It is the specimen they are showing," Suvendra said helpfully. Tiny little Malay woman in her fifties, with oily hair in a chignon and frail; protuberant ears. Wearing a yellow sundress, tennis hat, and a Rizome neck scarf. Next to her a beefy Eurasian man chewed sunflower seeds and care- fully spat the hulls into a small plastic trash bag.

"The what?" Laura said.

"Spaceman. Their cosmonaut."

"Oh, right." So that was Singapore's astronaut, grinning from his space helmet. It looked like a severed head stuck in a television.

A roar from the western twilight. Laura cringed. Six matte- black pterodactyls buzzed the stadium. Nasty-looking things.

Combat jets from the Singapore . Air Force, the precision flyers, Chrome Angels or whatever they called themselves.

The jets spat corkscrewed plumes of orange smoke from their canted wing tips. The crowd jumped gleefully to their feet, whooping and brandishing their programs.

The Boys and Girls Brigades poured onto the soccer field, in red-and-white T-shirts and little billed caps. They assumed formation, twirling long, ribbony streamers from broomsticks.

Antiseptic marching school kids, of every race and creed, though you wouldn't guess it to look at them.

"They are very well trained, isn't it?" Suvendra said.

"Yeah,

A video scoreboard towered at the eastern end of the field.

It showed a live feed of the televised coverage from the

Singapore Broadcasting Service. The screen flashed a closeup from within the stadium's celebrity box. The local bigwigs, watching the kids with that beaming, sentimental look that politicos reserved for voters' children.

Laura studied them. The guy in the linen suit was S. P.

Jeyaratnam, Singapore's communications czar. A spiky- eyebrowed Tamil with the vaguely unctuous look of a sacred

Thuggee strangler. Jeyaratnam was formerly a journalist, now chief hatchet man for the People's Innovation Party. He had a talent for invective. Laura hadn't liked tangling with him.

Singapore's prime minister noticed the camera. He tipped his goldbridged sunglasses down his nose and peered at the lens. He winked.

The crowd elbowed each other and squirmed with delight.

Chuckling amiably, the P.M. murmured to the woman beside him, a young Chinese actress with high-piled hair and a gold chiton. The girl laughed with practiced charisma. The

P.M. flicked back the smooth, dark wing of hair across his forehead. Gleam of strong, young teeth.

The video board left the celebs and switched to the plung- ing, bootclad legs of a majorette.

The kids left the stadium to fond applause, and two long lines of military police marched in. White chin-strapped hel- mets, white Sam Browne belts, pressed khakis, spit-polished boots. The soldiers faced the stands and began a complex rifle drill. Snappy over-the-shoulder_ high toss, in a precisely timed cascade.

"Kim looks good today," Suvendra said. Everybody in

Singapore called the prime minister by his first name. His name was Kim Swee Lok-or Lok Kim Swee, to his fellow ethnic Chinese.

"Mmm," Laura said.

"You are quiet this evening." Suvendra put a butterfly touch on Laura's forearm. "Still tired from testimony, isn't it?

"He reminds me of my husband," Laura blurted.

Suvendra smiled. "He's a good-looking bloke, your husband."

Laura felt a tingle of unease. She'd flown around the world with such bruising speed-the culture shock had odd side effects. Some pattern-seeking side of her brain had gone into overdrive. She'd seen Singapore store clerks with the faces of pop stars, and street cops who looked like presidents. Even

Suvendra herself reminded Laura somehow of Grace Web- ster, her mother-in-law. No physical resemblance, but the vibe was there. Laura had always gotten on very well with Grace.

Kim's practiced appeal made Laura feel truly peculiar. His influence over this little city-state had a personal intimacy that was almost erotic. It was as if Singapore had married him.

His People's Innovation Party had annihilated the opposition parties at the ballot box. Democratically, legally-but the

Republic of Singapore was now essentially a one-party state.

The whole little republic, with its swarming traffic and cheerful, disciplined populace, was now in the hands of a thirty-two-year-old visionary genius. Since his election to

Parliament at twenty-three, Kim Lok had reformed the civil service, masterminded a vast urban development scheme, and revitalized the army. And while carrying on a series of highly public love affairs, he had somehow managed to pick up advanced degrees in engineering and political science. His rise to power had been unstoppable, buoyed by a strange mix of menace and playboy appeal.

The soldiers finished with a flourish, then snapped to atten- tion, saluting. The crowd rose to sing the national anthem: a ringing ditty called "Count On Me, Singapore." Thousands of smiling, neatly dressed Chinese and Malays and Tamils- all singing in English.

The crowd resumed their bleacher seats with that loud, peculiar rustle emitted by tons of moving human flesh. They smelled of sassafras and suntan oil and snow cones. Suvendra lifted her binoculars, scanning the bulletproof glass of the celebrity box. "Now comes the big speech," she told Laura.

"He may start with the space launch, but shall end with the

Grenada crisis, as usual. You could be taking the measure of this fellow."

"Right." Laura clicked on her little tape deck.

They turned and stared expectantly at the video screen.

The prime minister rose, carelessly tucking his shades into his suit pocket. He gripped the edge of the podium with both hands, leaning forward, chin tilted, shoulders tense.

A tight, attentive silence seized the crowd. The woman next to Laura, a Chinese matron in stretch pants and straw hat, clamped her knees together nervously and jammed her hands in her lap. The guy eating sunflower seeds set his bag between his feet.

Closeup. The prime minister's head and shoulders loomed thirty feet high on the video board. A silkily amplified voice, smooth and intimate, rang from the elaborate P.A. system.

"My dear fellow citizens," Kim said.

Suvendra whispered hastily. "This shall be major, eh, definitely!" Sunflower Seeds hissed for silence.

"In the days of our grandparents," Kim intoned, "Ameri- cans visited the moon. At this moment, an antique space station from the Socialist Bloc still circles our Earth.

"Yet until today, the greatest -adventure of humanity has languished. The power brokers outside our borders are no longer interested in new frontiers. The globalists have stifled these ideals. Their clumsy, ancient space rockets still mimic the nuclear missiles with which they once threatened the planet.

"--`But ladies and gentlemen-fellow citizens-today I can stand before you and tell you that the world did not reckon with the vision of Singapore!"

(Frantic applause. The prime minister waited, smiling. He lifted a hand. Silence.)

"The orbital flight of Captain Yong-Joo is the greatest space achievement of our era. His feat proves to all that our republic now owns the most advanced launch technology on

Earth. Technology that is clean, swift, and efficient-based on modem breakthroughs in superconductivity and tunable lasers. Innovations that other nations seem unable to achieve-or even to imagine."

(Wry smile from Kim. Fierce cries of glee from the sixty thousand.)

"Today, men and women around the world turn their eyes to Singapore. They are bewildered by the magnitude of our achievement-a cold fact that puts the lie to years of globalist slander. They wonder how our city of four million souls has triumphed where continental nations have failed.

"But our success is not a secret. It -was inherent in our very destiny as a nation. Our island is lovely-but cannot feed us.

For two centuries, we of the Lion City have earned every mouthful of rice by our own wits."

(A stern frown on the enormous video-board face. Excited ripples through the crowd.)

"This struggle gave us strength. Harsh necessity forced

Singapore to shoulder the burden of excellence. Since Merdeka, we have matched the achievements of the developed world- and surpassed them. There has never been room here for sloth or corruption. Yet while. we forged ahead, those vices have eaten into the very core of global culture."

(A gleam of teeth-almost a sneer.)

"Today the American giant slumbers-its Government re- duced to a televised parody. Today, the Socialist Bloc pur- sues its hollow dreams of consumer avarice. Even the once-mighty Japanese have grown cautious and soft.

"Today, under the malignant spell of the Vienna Conven- tion, the world slides steadily toward gray mediocrity.

"But the flight of Captain Yong-Joo marks a turning point.

Today our historic struggle enters a new phase-for stakes higher than any we have faced before.

"Empires have always sought to dominate this island. We fought Japanese oppressors through three merciless years of occupation. We sent the British imperialists packing, back to their European decay. Chinese communism, and Malaysian treachery, sought to subvert us, without success.

"And today, at, this very moment, the globalist media net seethes with propaganda, targeted against our island."

(Laura shivered in the balmy tropic air.)

"Tariffs are raised-export quotas imposed on our products- conspiracies launched against our pioneering industries by foreign multinationals. Why? What have we done to deserve such treatment?

"The answer is simple. We have beaten them on their own ground. We have succeeded where the globalists have failed!"

(His hand cut the air with a sudden flash of cuff link.)

"Travel through any other developed nation in the world today! You will find laziness, decay, and cynicism. Every- where, an abdication of the pioneering spirit. Streets littered with trash, factories eaten by rust. Men and women aban- doned to useless lives on the dole queue. Artists and intellec- tuals, without goals or purpose, playing empty games of listless alienation. And everywhere the numbing web of one- world propaganda.

"The regime of Gray Culture stops at nothing to defend, and extend, its status quo. Gray Culture cannot fairly match the unleashed vigor of Singapore's free competition. So they pretend to despise our genius, our daring. We live in a world of Luddites, who give billions to preserve ugly jungle wilderness-but nothing for the highest aspirations of humanity.

"Lulled by the empty promise of security, the world out- side our borders is falling asleep.

"It is an ugly prospect. Yet there is hope. For Singapore today is alive and awake as no society has ever been before.

"My fellow citizens-Singapore will no longer accept an imposed and minor role in the world's periphery. Our Lion

City is no one's backyard, no one's puppet state! This is an

Information Era, and our lack of territory-mere topsoil-no longer restrains us. In a world slipping into medieval slum- ber, our Singapore is the potential center of a renaissance!"

(The woman in stretch pants clutched her husband's hand.)

"I have risen before you today to tell you that a battle is coming-a struggle for the soul of civilization. Our Singapore will lead that battle! And we will win it!"

(Frenzied applause. Throughout the stadium, men and women-Party cadres perhaps?-leapt to their feet. Catching the cue, the entire crowd rose in surges. Laura and Suvendra stood, not wanting to be conspicuous. Shouts died down, and the stadium rang with cadenced applause.)

("He's nasty," Laura muttered. Suvendra nodded, pretending to clap.)

"Dear ladies and gentlemen," the prime minister murmured. (The crowd settled back like angry surf.)

"We have never been a people of complacency. We

Singaporeans. have never abandoned our wise tradition of universal military service. Today we profit by that long sacri- fice of time and effort. Our small but highly advanced armed forces now rank with the finest in the modern world. Our adversaries have threatened and blustered for years, but they dare not trifle with Fortress Singapore. They know very well that our Rapid Deployment Forces can carry swift, surgical retribution to any corner of the globe!

"So the battle we face will be subtle, without clear bound- aries. It will challenge our will, our independence, our traditions-our very survival as a people.

"The first skirmish is already upon us. I refer to the recent terrorist atrocity against the Caribbean island of Grenada.

"The Grenadian government-I use the term loosely ..."

(A tension-relieving burst of laughter.)

"Grenada has publicly alleged that certain elements in

Singapore bear responsibility for this attack. I have called on

Parliament to conduct a thorough and public investigation of the affair. At present, dear ladies and gentlemen, I cannot comment on this matter fully. I will not prejudice the investi- gation, nor will I endanger our vital intelligence sources.

However-I can tell you that Grenada's enemies may have used Singapore's commercial conduits as a blind.

"If this is true, I pledge to you today that the- parties responsible will pay a heavy price."

(Look of grim sincerity. Laura checked the faces of the crowd. They sat on the edges of their seats, looking serious and glowing and ennobled.),

"Dear ladies and gentlemen, we of this island bear no ill will toward, the suffering people of Grenada.. Through diplo- matic channels, we have already reached out to them, offering them medical and technical assistance in their time of crisis.

"These acts of goodwill have been rejected. Stunned by the cruel attack, their government is in shambles, and their rhetoric is scarcely rational. Until the crisis settles, we must stand firm against acts of provocation. We must have pa- tience. Let us remember that the Grenadians have never been a disciplined people. We must hope that when their panic fades they will come to their senses."

(Kim released his white-knuckled grip on the podium and brushed the smooth lock of hair. from his eyes. He paused a moment, working his fingers as if they itched.)

"In the meantime, however, they continue to utter belliger- ent threats. Grenadia has failed to recognize our basic com- monality of interest."

(Laura blinked. "Grenadia?" )

"An attack on Grenadia's sovereignty is a potential threat to sour own. We must recognize the possibility-the probability

-of a covert divide-and-conquer strategy at work. Happening

... today ... "

(Kim glanced away from the camera. There were sudden beads of sweat on his powdered forehead-on the giant screen, they looked as big as soccer balls. Long seconds passed.

Little knots of anxious murmuring rose among the crowd.)

"Today-tomorrow-I will be declaring a state of emergency

-granting the executive... power. Necessary to protect our citizenry from possible subversion... from attack. By either the Gray globalists, or the blacks. The Gremadies. The ... Ne- gro niggers!"

(Kim lurched from the podium, half reeling. He glanced to his left again, dizzily, searching for support. Someone off-camera murmured drowned words, anxiously. Kim muttered aloud.)

"What did I say?"

He tugged at his pocket kerchief, and his shades clattered to the floor. He mopped his forehead, his neck. Then a sudden convulsion seized him. He stumbled forward, slap- ping his podium. His face congested and he screamed into the microphones.

"Dogs fucked Vienna! Ladies and gentlemen, I... I'm afraid I'm sorry that the pariah dump-dogs fucked the Ayatollah!

Lick my ass! You should-shit on the Space Captain fucking laser launch-"

Horrified screams. A roar and rustle as the crowd of thou- sands rose in bewilderment.

Kim slumped and fell behind the podium.

Suddenly he vaulted up again, like a puppet. He opened his mouth.

Suddenly, hellishly, he vomited blood and fire. A torrent of livid flame gushed from his mouth and eyes. In seconds his giant video face was blackening with impossible heat. A

deafening agonized scream shook the stadium. A sound like damned souls and sheet metal torn apart.

His hair flared like a candle, his skin crisped. He clawed at his burning eyes. The air became a hurricane of obscene metallic noise.

Suddenly, people from the lower stands were scrambling onto the soccer field. Vaulting, stumbling, clambering over the rails, over each other. Sweeping the white helmets of police away, like buoys in a tidal wave.

The noise went on and on.

There was a hard tug at Laura's knee. It was Suvendra. She was crouching low beneath the bleacher, hunkered on knees and elbows. She shouted something impossible to hear. Then gestured-get down!

Laura hesitated, looked up, and suddenly the crowd was all over her.

It poured down the slope like a juggernaut. Elbows, knees, shoulders, murderous stampeding feet. A sudden slamming body block, and Laura tumbled backward, downhill, over the bleacher. She slammed down into something that buckled spongily-a human body.

Concrete rose and smacked her' face. She was down and trampled-a crushing blow across her back that drove the air from her lungs. Winded, blinded. Dying!

Raw seconds of black panic. Then-she found herself scram- bling. Squirming, like Suvendra, under a denting, rocking bleacher. People pouring over her now. An endless, mad threshing engine of pistoning legs. A sandaled foot mashed her fingers and she snatched her hand back.

A little boy spun past her headlong. His shoulder smashed against the hard edge of a bleacher, and he was down.

Shadows and rising heat and the stink of fear and noise, bodies falling, scrambling-

Laura clenched her teeth and lunged out into a beating. She grabbed the boy's waist and hauled him back with her. She wrapped her arms around him, huddled him under her.

He buried his face against her shoulder, clutching her so hard it hurt. Concrete trembled under her, the stadium quaking to the avalanche of human meat.

Suddenly the hellish racket from the speakers vanished.

Laura's ears rang. With shocking suddenness, she could hear the boy sobbing. Wails of shock and pain bloomed in the sudden silence.

The soccer field was awash with the mob. The bleachers around her were littered with abandoned trash: shoes, hats, splattered dripping drinks. Down at the railing, the dazed and wounded staggered like drunks. Some knelt, sobbing. Others lay sprawled and broken.

Laura sat up slowly onto the bleacher, holding the boy on her lap. He hid his face against her shoulder.

Streaks of television static hissed soundlessly on the giant display board. She breathed hard, trembling. As long as it had lasted, there had been no time, just a maddened, deafen- ing eternity. Madness had streaked through the crowd like a tornado. Now it was gone.

It had lasted maybe forty seconds.

An elderly turbanned Sikh limped past her, his white beard dripping blood.

Down in the soccer field the crowd was milling, slowly.

The police had rallied here and there, clumps of white hel- mets. They were trying to make people sit. Some were doing it, but most were shying away, dumb and reluctant, like cattle.

Laura sucked her mashed knuckles and gazed down in wonder.

It was all for nothing. Sensible, civilized people had boiled out of their seats and trampled each other to death. For no sane reason at all. Now that it was over, they weren't even trying to leave the stadium. Some of them were even return- ing to their seats in the bleachers. Faces drained, legs rubbery- the look of zombies.

At the far end of Laura's bleacher, a .fat woman in a flowered sari was shaking and screaming. She was hitting her husband with her floppy straw hat, over and over again.

There was a touch on Laura's shoulder. Suvendra sat be- side her, her binoculars in her hand. "You are all right?"

"Mama," the little boy begged. He was about six. He had a gold ID bracelet and a T-shirt with a bust of Socrates.

"I hid. Like you did," Laura told Suvendra. She cleared her throat shakily. "That was smart."

"I have seen such troubles before, in Djakarta," Suvendra said.

"What the hell happened?"

Suvendra tapped her binoculars and pointed at the celebrity box. "I have spotted Kim there. He is alive."

"Kim! But I saw him die...."

"You saw a dirty trick," Suvendra said soberly. "What you saw was not possible. Even Kim Swee Lok cannot spit fire and explode." Suvendra winced a little, sourly. "They knew he was scheduled to speak today. They had time to prepare. The terrorists."

Laura knotted her hands. "Oh, Jesus."

Suvendra nodded at the static-laden screen. "The authori- ties have shut it down, now. Because it was sabotaged, yes?

Someone pirated that screen and put on a nightmare. To frighten the city."

"But what about that weird, vile stuff Kim was babbling....

He looked doped!" Laura smoothed the boy's hair absently.

"But that had to be faked, too. It was all a faked tape. Right?

So Kim's all right, really. "

Suvendra touched her binoculars. "No, I saw him. They were carrying him.... I'm afraid the celebrity box was booby- trapped. Kim fell into a trap."

"You mean all that really happened? Kim actually said that? All about dogs and... oh, God, no."

"To drug a man so to play a fool, then make him seem to burn alive-that might seem pleasant-to a voodoo man."

Suvendra stood up, tying the ribbons of her sun hat under her chin.

"But Kim ... he said he wanted peace with Grenada."

"Hurting Kim is a stupid blunder. We could have worked things out sensibly," Suvendra said. "But then, we are not terrorists." She opened her purse and dug out a cigarette.

A woman in a torn satin blouse limped up the aisle, screaming for someone named Lee.

"You can't smoke in public," Laura said blankly. "It's illegal here."

Suvendra smiled. "Rizome must help these poor mad people. I hope you are remembering your first-aid training."

Laura lay in her Rizome camp bed, feeling like shredded confetti. She touched her wrist. Three A.M. Singapore time,

Friday, October 13. The window glowed palely with the bluish light of arc lamps from the wharfs of East Lagoon.

Longshore robots on big lugged tires rolled unerringly through patches of darkness. A skeletal crane dipped into the holds of a Rumanian cargo clipper, the vast iron arm moving with mindless persistence, shuffling giant cargo containers like alphabet blocks.

A television flickered at the foot of Laura's cot, its sound off. Some local newsman, a government-approved flunky like all the newsmen here in Singapore ... like newsmen every- where, when you came right down to it. Reporting from the hospitals .. .

When Laura closed her eyes, she could still see chests

.laboring beneath tom shirts and the gloved, probing fingers of the paramedics. Somehow the screams had been the worst, more unnerving than the sight of blood. That nerve-shredding din of pain, the animal sounds people made when their dig- nity was ripped away .. .

Eleven dead. Only eleven, a miracle. Before this day she'd never known how tough the human body was, that flesh and blood were like rubber, full of unexpected elasticity. Women, little old ladies, had been at the bottom of massive, scram- bling pileups and somehow come out alive. Like the little

Chinese granny with her ribs cracked and her wig knocked off, who had thanked Laura over and over with apologetic nods of her threadbare head, like the riot was all her own fault.

Laura couldn't sleep, still dully tingling with an alchemy of horror and elation. Once again the black water of her night- mares had broken into her life. But she was getting better at it. This time she had actually saved someone. She had jumped out into the. middle of it and rescued someone, a random statistic: little Geoffrey Yong. Little Geoffrey, who lived in

Bukit Timah district and was in first grade and took violin lessons. She'd given him back, alive and whole, to his mother.

"I have a little girl myself," Laura had told her. Mrs.

Yong had given her an unforgettable spirit-lifting look of vast and mystical gratitude. Battlefield gallantry, from sister-soldiers in the Army of Motherhood.

She checked her watchphone again. Just now noon, in

Georgia. She could phone David again, at his hideout at a

Rizome Retreat. It would be great to hear his voice again.

They missed each other terribly, but at least he was there on the phone, to give her the view from the outside world and tell her she was doing well. It made all the difference, took the weight off. She needed desperately to talk about what had happened. To hear the baby's sweet little voice. And to make arrangements to get the hell out of this no-neck town and back where she belonged.

She tapped numbers. Dial tone. Then nothing. Damned thing was broken or something. Cracked in the crush.

She sat up in bed and tried some functions. Still had all her appointment notes, and the list of tourist data they'd given her at customs... . Maybe the signal was bad, too much steel in the walls of this stupid barn. She'd slept in some dumps in her day, but this retro-fitted godown was pushing it, even for

Rizome.

A flicker on the television. Laura glanced down.

Four kids in white karate outfits-no, Greek tunics-had rushed the reporter. They had him down on the pavement outside the hospital, and they were methodically kicking and punching him. Young guys, students maybe. Striped bandan- nas hid their mouths and noses. One of them batted at the camera with a protest sign in hasty, splattered Chinese.

The scene blinked away to an anchor room where a middle- aged Eurasian woman was staring at her monitor aghast.

Laura quickly turned up the sound. The anchor woman jerkily grabbed a sheaf of printout. She began speaking Chinese.

"Damn!" Laura switched channels.

Press conference. Chinese guy in medical whites. He had that weird, repulsive look common to some older Singaporeans

-the richer ones. A tightened vampire face, sleek, ageless skin. Part hair dye, part face-lift, part monkey glands maybe, or weekly blood changes tapped how teenage Third Worlders ...

...ull function, yes," Dr. Vampire said. "Today, many people with Tourette's Syndrome can live quite normal lives."

Mumble mumble mumble from the floor. This thing looked taped. Laura wasn't sure why. Somehow it lacked that fresh feeling.

"After the attack, Miss Ting held the prime minister's hands," said Dr. Vamp. "Because of this, the transfer agent contaminated her fingers also. Of course, the drug dosage was much lower than that received by the prime minister. We still have Miss Ting under observation. But the convulsions and so forth were, ah, never in question in her case."

Laura felt a surge of shock and loathing. That poor little actress. They got Kim through something he touched, and she held his hands. Holding the hands of her country's leader while he was foaming and screaming like some rabid baboon.

Oh, Christ. What did Miss Ting think when she realized she was getting it, too? Laura missed the next question. Mumble mumble Grenada mumble.

Frown, dismissive wave. "The use of biomedicine for political terrorism is ... horrifying. It violates every conceiv- able ethical code."

"You fucking hypocrite!" Laura shouted at the box.

Light rap at her door. Laura started, then tugged her cotton

T-shirt lower, over her underwear. "Come in?"

Suvendra's husband peeked around the door, a natty little man wearing a hair net and paper pajamas. "I am hearing you awake," he said politely. His accent was even less compre- hensible than Suvendra's. "There is a messenger at loading gate. He ask for you!"

"Oh. Okay. Be right down." He left and Laura jumped into her jeans. Grenadian cadre jeans-now that she'd broken them in, she liked them. She kicked on cheap foam sandals she'd bought locally for the price of a pack of gum.

Out the room, up the hall, down the catwalk stairs, under the arching girders and the dusty arc-lit glass. Walls lined with domino stacks of container shipping, socketed steel boxes the size of mobile homes. A dock robot sprawled wheelless on a hydraulic lift. Smell of rice and grease and coffee beans and rubber.

Outside the godown, at the truck dock, one of Suvendra's

Rizome crew was talking with the messenger. They spotted her, and there was a quick flare of red as the Rizome kid stomped out a cigarette.

The messenger's sandaled feet were propped on the handle- bars of his rickshaw, an elegant, springy tricycle framed in lacquered bamboo and piano wire.

The boy leapt from his seat with easy, balletic grace. He wore a white muscle shirt and cheap paper slacks. He looked about seventeen, a Malay kid with brown shoe-button eyes and arms like a gymnast. "Good evening, madam."

"Hi," Laura said. They shook hands, and he stuck his knuckle into her palm. A secret-society shake.

"He is `lazy' and 'stupid,' " the Rizome kid hinted. Like the rest of Suvendra's local crew, the Rizome kid was not

Singaporean, but a Maphilindonesian, from Djakarta. His name was Ali.

"Huh?" Laura said.

"I am `unfit for conventional employment,' " the messen- ger said, meaningfully.

"Oh. Right," Laura said, realizing. The kid was from the local opposition. The Anti-Labour Party.

Suvendra had scraped up a little solidarity with the leader of the Anti-Labourites. His name was Razak. Like Suvendra,

Razak was a Malay, a minority group in a city 80 percent

Chinese. He had managed to cobble together a fragile local mandate: part ethnic, part classbased, but mostly pure lunatic fringe.

Razak's political philosophy was bizarre, but he had held out stubbornly against the assaults of Kim's ruling party.

Therefore, he was now in a position to raise embarrassing questions on the floor of Parliament. His interests partly coincided with Rizome's, so they were allies.

And the Anti-Labourites made full use of the alliance, too.

Ragged bands of them hung out at the Rizome godown, cadg- ing handouts, using the phones and bathroom, running off peculiar handbills on the company Xerox. In the mornings they grouped together in the city parks, eating protein paste and practicing martial arts in their torn paper pants. People gathered to laugh at them.

Laura gave the kid her best conspiratorial glance. "Thanks for coming so late. I appreciate your, uh, dedication."

The boy shrugged "No problem, madam. I am the ob- server for your civil rights."

Laura glanced at Ali. "What?"

"He is staying this place all night," Ali said. "He is observing for our civil rights."

"Oh. Thank you," Laura said vaguely. It seemed as good an excuse to loiter as any. "We could send down some food or something."

"I eat only scop," the boy said. He plucked a crumpled envelope from a hidden slot under his rickshaw seat. Parliamentary stationery.: THE HONORABLE DR. ROBERT RAZAK, M.P. (Anson).

"It's from Bob," Laura told them, hoping to retrieve some lost prestige. She opened it.

A hasty scrawl of red ink above a printout.

Despite our well-founded ideological opposition we of the Anti-Labour Party do of course maintain files in the

Yung Soo Chim Islamic Bank, and this message arrived at 2150 hrs local time, tagged for you. If reply is necessary, do not use local phone system. Wishing you the best of luck in these difficult times. Message fol-

IOWS: YDOOL EQKOF UHFNH HEBSG HNDGH QNOQP LUDOO.

JKEIL KIFUL FKEIP POLKS DOLFU JENHF HFGSE! IHFUE KYFEN

KUBES KUVNE KNESE NHWQQ KVNEI? JEUNF HFENA OBGHE

BHSIF WHIBE. QHIRS QIFES BEHSE IPHES HBESA HFIEW HBEIA!

DAVID

"It's from David," Laura blurted. "My husband."

"Husband," the Party kid mused. He seemed sorry to hear that she had one.

"Why this? Why didn't he just phone me?" Laura said.

"The phones being out of order," the boy said. "Full of spooks. "

"Spooks?" Laura said. "You mean spies?"

The boy muttered something in Malay. "He means demons," Ali translated. "Evil spirits."

"You kidding?" Laura said.

"It tell me they are evil spirits, said the boy calmly.

" `Uttering terrorist threats intended to sow panic and dissen- sion.' A felony under Article 15, Section 3." He frowned.

"But only in English, madam! It did not use Malay language although use of Malay is officially mandated in Singapore

Constitution. "

"What did the demon say?" Laura demanded.

" `The enemies of the righteous to burn with brimstone fire,' " the boy quoted. " 'Jah Whirlwind to smite the oppressor.' Much else in similar bloody vein. It call me by name." He shrugged. "My mother cried."

"His mother thinks he should get a job," Ali confided.

"The future belong to the stupid and lazy," the boy de- clared. He doubled up his legs and perched expertly on the bamboo strut of his rickshaw.

Ali rubbed his chin. "Chinese and Tamil languages-were these also neglected?"

A gust of wind blew in from offshore. Laura rubbed her arms. She wondered if she should tip the kid. No, she remembered-the A-L.P. had some kind of strange phobia against touching money. "I'm going back inside."

The boy examined the sky. "Sumatra monsoon coming, madam." He popped hinges and pulled up the accordioned canopy of his rickshaw. The white nylon was painted in red, black, and yellow: a Laughing Buddha, crowned with thorns.

Inside the godown, Mr. Suvendra squatted on a quilted gray loading mat under the watery light of the geodesics. He had a television and a pot of coffee. Laura joined him, sitting cross-legged. "I am not like this graveyard shift," he said.

"Your message, it is saying?"

"What do you make of this? It's from my husband."

He examined the paper. "Not English.... A computer cipher. "

A dock robot rolled in with a shipping container on its back. It stacked the box with a powerful wheeze of hydrau- lics. Mr. Suvendra ignored it. "You and husband have a cipher, yes? A code. For hiding the meaning, and showing the message is truly from him."

"We never used anything like that! That's Triad stuff."

"Triad, tong." Suvendra smiled. "Like us, good gemeineschaft .

"Now I'm worried! I've got to call David right now!"

Suvendra shook his head. "The telly say the phones are bloody down. Subversives. "

Laura thought it over. "Look, I can take a taxi across the causeway and call from a phone in Johore. That's Malaysian territory. Maphilindonesian, I mean."

"In the morning," Suvendra said.

"No! David could be hurt. Shot! Dying! Or maybe our baby ..." She felt a racing jolt of guilt and fear. "I'm calling a taxi right now. " She accessed the tourist data on her watchphone.

"Taxis," the phone announced tinnily. "Singapore has over twelve thousand automated taxis, over eight thousand of them air-conditioned. Starting fare is two ecu for the first fifteen hundred meters or part thereof .. .

"Get on with it," Laura grated.

.. hailed in the street or called by telephone: 452-5555..."

"Right." Laura punched numbers. Nothing happened.

"Shit!"

"Have some coffee," Suvendra offered.

"They've killed the phones!" she said, realizing it again, but with a real pang this time. "The Net's down! I can't get on the goddamn Net!"

Suvendra stroked his pencil mustache. "So very important, is it? In your America."

She slapped her own wrist, hard enough to hurt. "David should be talking here right now! What kind of jerkwater place is this?" No access. Suddenly it seemed hard to breathe.

"Look, you must have another line out, right? Fax machine or telex or something."

"No, sorry. Is a bit rough and ready here in Rizome

Singapore. Just lately we move into this wonderful palace."

Suvendra waved his arm. "Very difficult for us." He shrugged.

"You are relaxing, having some coffee, Laura. Could be message is nothing. A trick by the Bank."

Laura smacked her forehead. "I bet that Bank has a line out. Sure. Guarded fiber-optics! Even Vienna can't crack them. And they're right downtown on Bencoolen Street."

"Oh, dear me," said Suvendra. "Very bad idea."

"Look, I know people there. Old Mr. Shaw, a couple of his guards. They were my house guests. They owe me."

"No, no." He put a hand to his mouth.

"They owe me. Stupid bastards, what else are they good for? What are they going to do, shoot me? That'd look great in Parliament, wouldn't it? Hell, I'm not afraid of them-I'm going down there right now." Laura stood up.

"It's very late," Suvendra said timidly.

"They're a bank, aren't they? Banks are open twenty-four hours. "

He looked up at her. "Are they all like you, in Texas?"

Laura frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Can't call taxi," he said practically. "Can't walk in rain.

Catching cold." He stood up. "You are waiting-here, I get my wife." He left.

Laura went outside. Ali and the Party kid were sitting together in the back seat of the rickshaw, under the canopy, holding hands. Didn't mean anything. Different culture. Prob- ably not, anyway .. .

"Hi," she said. "Ummm... I didn't catch your name."

"Thirty-six," the boy said.

"Oh.... Is there a taxi stand near here? I need one."

"A taxi, is it," Thirty-six said blankly.

"For the Yung Soo Chim Bank. On Bencoolen Street?"

Agent Thirty-six hissed a little between his teeth. Ali dug out a cigarette.

"Can I have one of those?" Laura said.

Ali lit it and handed it to her; grinning. She took a puff. It tasted like clove-scented burning garbage. She felt her taste buds dying under a lacquer of cancerous spit. Ali was pleased.

"Okay, madam," said Thirty-six, with a fatalist's shrug.

"I am taking you." He elbowed Ali out of the rickshaw's back seat, then gestured to Laura. "Get on, madam. Start pedaling. "

She pedaled briskly out of the docks and a kilometer up

Trafalgar Street. Then the skies opened up like a water bal- loon, and rain came down in unbelievable pounding torrents.

She stopped and bought a nickel raincoat from a street-corner vending machine.

She turned up Anson Road, pedaling hard, steaming inside her cheap plastic. Rain sheeted from the wheels and steamed off the sidewalks and gushed down the spotless, trashless gutters.

There were a few old colonial-vintage piles by the docklands: white columns, verandahs, and railings. But as they neared downtown the city began to soar. Anson Road became a narrow defile into a mountain range of steel and concrete and ceramic.

It was like downtown Houston. But more like Houston than even Houston had ever had the nerve to become. It was an anthill, a brutal assault against any sane sense of scale.

Nightmarishly vast spires whose bulging foundations covered whole city blocks. Their upper reaches were pocked like waffle irons with triangular bracing. Buttresses, glass-covered superhighways, soared half a mile above sea level.

Story after story rose silent and dreamlike, buildings so unspeakably huge that they lost all sense of weight; they hung above the earth like Euclidean thunderheads, their summits lost in sheets of steel-gray rain.

Here and there the rounded tunnels of Singapore's mag-lev trains; she saw one flit silently above Tanjong Pagar, wheelless and bright, the carriages gleaming in Singapore's Coca-Cola white-and-red.

Agent Thirty-six guided her off the street through the auto- matic doors of a mall. Air conditioning gripped her wet shins.

Soon she was pedaling past rank after silent rank of clothing stores, video places, creepy-looking health centers offering cut-rate blood fractionation.

They drove on for over a mile, through ceramic halls thick with garish, brain-damaging ads. Meandering up and down empty ramps, pausing once to enter an elevator. Thirty-six casually popped the rickshaw onto its rear wheels, telescoped the front, and walked it along behind him like a luggage tote.

The malls were almost deserted; an occasional all-night eatery or coffee bar, its sober, well-groomed customers qu- ietly munching their salads under vivid, spiritless murals of daisies and seagulls. Once they saw some cops, Singapore's. finest, in neatly pressed blue Gurkha shorts, with tangle-guns and yard-long lathi sticks.

She no longer knew where the ground was. It didn't seem to mean much here.

They cruised a walkway. Below them lurked a teenage cycle gang: well-dressed Chinese boys with oiled quiffs, crisp white silk shirts, and gleaming chromed recliner bikes. Thirty- six, who had been lounging in the back with his feet up, sat up and yelled. He shot the boys a series of cryptic gestures, the last unmistakably obscene.

He leaned back again. "Pedal fast," he urged Laura. The boys downstairs hastily split up into hunting packs.

"Let me pedal," Thirty-six said. Laura jumped panting into the back. Thirty-six stood on his pedals and the trike took off like a scalded ape. They took corners on two wheels, his hard, plunging legs rasping in their paper trousers.

They crossed the Singapore River half a mile above the ground, inside a glassed-in archway offering snack stands and rented telescopes. Swollen with tropical rain, the little river surged hopelessly in its neatly managed concrete culvert.

Something about the sight depressed her enormously.

The rain had stopped by the time they reached Bencoolen

Street. Tropical dawn the color of hibiscus was touching the highest steel peaks downtown.

The Yung Soo Chim Islamic Bank was a modest little place, 1990s vintage, a mirror-glass office carton, sixty sto- ries high.

There was a line of people outside it a block long. Agent

Thirty-six cruised by silently, languidly dodging the automatic taxis. "Wait a minute," Laura muttered into empty air. "I know these people."

She'd seen them all before. In the Grenada airport, just after the attack. The vibe was uncanny. The same people- only instead of Yanks and Europeans and South Americans, these were Japanese, Koreans, Southeast Asians. The same mix though-seedy-looking techies, and hustlers with vacant money-eyes, and nasty-looking bullshit artists in wrinkled tropical suits. That same jittery, verminous look of people native to the woodwork and very unhappy outside of it .. .

Yeah. It was like the world had sloughed off a layer of crime in a bathtub, and this city block was its sink trap, full of suds and hair.

Flotsam, floating garbage, to be racked up and tidied away.

Suddenly she imagined the quiet and itchy-looking line of people all lined up and shot. The image gave her a rush of ugly joy. She felt bad. Losing control here. Bad vibrations .

"Stop," she said. She jumped out of the rickshaw and dodged across the street. She walked deliberately toward the front of the line: a pair of nervous Japanese techs. "Konnichi- wa!" The two men looked at her sullenly. She smiled.

"Denwa wa doko ni arimasu ka?"

"If we had a telephone we'd be using it right now," said the taller Japanese. "And you can knock it off with the high-school nihongo; I'm from Los Angeles."

"Really?" Laura said. "I'm from Texas."

"Texas-" His eyes widened. "Jesus, Harvey, look. It's her. What's-her-face."

"Webster," Harvey said. "Barbara Webster. What the fuck happened to you, girlie? You look like a drowned fuck- ing rat. " He looked over the rickshaw and laughed. "Did you ride here on that little fucking bike?"

"How do I cut through this crap and get to the Net?" she said.

"Why should we tell you?" Los Angeles smirked. "You crucified us in Parliament. You oughta break your goddamn legs. "

"I'm not the Bank's enemy," Laura said. "I'm an integrationist. I thought I made that clear in my testimony."

"Bullshit," Harvey said. "You telling me there's room in your little Rizome for guys who do musketeer chips? Fuck it! Are you as straight as you act? Or were you turned, in

Grenada? Me, I figure you're turned! 'Cause I don't see how any mama-papa bourgeois democrat is gonna fuck with the

P.I.P. out of principle."

Thirty-six had now successfully crossed the street, towing his folded rickshaw. "You could being more polite to madam,"

he suggested.

Los Angeles examined the kid. "Don't tell me you're hanging with these little fuckers...." Suddenly he shrieked and grabbed at his thigh. "Goddamn it! There it is again!

Something fucking bit me, man!"

Thirty-six laughed at him. Los Angeles's face clouded instantly. He aimed a shove at the kid. Thirty-six twisted aside easily. With a muted clack, Thirty-six yanked one of the rickshaw's lacquered bracing bars from its sockets. He gripped it and smiled, and his shoebutton eyes gleamed like two dollops of axle grease.

Los Angeles stepped backward out of the line and ad- dressed the crowd. "Something stung me!" he screamed.

"Like a fucking wasp! And if it was this kid, like I think it was, somebody here ought to break his fucking back! And goddamn it, I've been standing out here all night! How come fucking big shots like this chick here get to go right in and, hey! This is that Webster bitch, everybody! Lauren Webster!

Pay attention, goddamn it!"

The crowd ignored him, with the inhuman patience of urbanites ignoring a drunk. Thirty-six quietly juggled his bamboo club.

A Tamil came limping up the pavement. He wore a dhoti, the ethnic skirt of a south Indian. He had a bandage on his bare, dark shin and an ornate walking cane. He gave Harvey a sharp poke with the cane's rubber tip. "Calming your friend down, la!" he advised. "Behaving like civilized fellows!"

"Fuck you, crip!" Harvey offered indifferently.

An automatic taxi pulled up to the curb and flung open its door.

A mad dog leapt out.

It was a big ugly mongrel that looked half Doberman, half hyena. Its hide was wet and slick, with something thick and oily, like vomit or blood. It erupted from the taxi with a frenzied snarl and tore into the crowd as if fired from a cannon.

It bowled into them, raging. Three men fell screaming. The crowd billowed away in terror.

Laura heard the dog's jaws snap like castanets. It tore a chunk from a fat man's forearm, then leapt up with an obscene, desperate wriggle and dashed toward the front of the bank. Great choking barks and shrieks, like some language of the damned. Flesh and shoes slapped damp pavement, the jostle and rush of panic-

The dog leapt six feet into the air, like a hooked marlin.

Its fur smoldered. A wedge of flame split it along the spine, bursting its body open.

Flame poured out of it.

It exploded wetly. A grotesque air-burst of steam and stink, spattering the crowd. It flopped to the pavement, dead in- stantly, a bag of burning flesh. Threads of impossible heat glimmered in it .. .

Laura was running.

The Tamil had her by the wrist. The crowd was running, everywhere, nowhere, into the streets where taxis screeched to sudden halts with robot honks of protest... "In here,"

the Tamil said helpfully, jumping into a cab.

It was silent inside the cab, air-conditioned. It took a right at the first curb and left the bank behind. The Tamil released her wrist, leaned back, smiled at her.

"Thanks," Laura said, rubbing her arm. "Thanks a lot, sir."

"No problem, la," the Tamil said. "The cab waiting for me." He paused, then tapped his cast with the cane. "My leg, you see."

Laura took a deep breath, shuddered. Half a block passed as she got a grip on herself. The Tamil looked her over, his eyes bright. He'd moved very fast for an injured man-he'd almost sprained her wrist, dragging her. "If you hadn't stopped me, I'd still be running," she told him gratefully. "You're very brave."

"So are you," he said.

"Not me, no way," she said. She was trembling.

The Tamil seemed to think it was funny. He nudged his chin with the head of his cane. A languid, dandyish gesture.

"Madam, you were fighting in the street with two big data pirates."

"Oh," she said, surprised. "That. That's nothing." She paused, embarrassed. "Thanks for taking my part, though."

" `An integrationist,' " the Tamil quoted. He was mimick- ing her. He looked down deliberately. "Oh, look-the nasty voodoo spoilt your nice coat."

There was a foul splattered blob on Laura's raincoat sleeve.

Red, glistening. She gasped in revulsion and tried to shrug her way out of it. Her arms were caught behind her... .

"Here," the Tamil said, smiling, as if to help. He held something under her nose. She heard a snap.

A wave of giddy heat touched her face. Then, without warning, she passed out.

A sudden sharp reek dug into Laura's head. Ammonia. Her eyes watered. "Lights..." she croaked.

The overheads dimmed to murky amber. She felt old, sick, like hours had marched through her on hangover feet. She was half-buried in something-she struggled, sudden claus- trophobic rush ...

She was lying in a beanbag chair. Like something her grandmother might have owned. The room around her was bluish with the grainy light of televisions.

"You back to the land of the living, Blondie."

Laura shook her head hard. Her nose and throat felt scorched.

"I'm..." She sneezed, painfully. "Goddamn it!" She got her elbows into the shifting pellets of the beanbag and levered herself up.

The Tamil was sitting in a chair of plastic and tubing, eating Chinese takeout food off a formica table. The smell of it, ginger and prawns, made her stomach tighten painfully.

"Is that you?" she said at last.

He looked down at her. "Who you thinkin', eh?"

"Sticky?"

"Yeah," he said, with the chin-swiveling nod of the Tamils.

"I and righteous I."

Laura knuckled her eyes. "Sticky, you're really different this time ... your goddamn cheeks are all wrong and your skin ... your hair.... You don't even sound the same."

He grunted.

She sat up. "What the hell have they done to you?"

"Trade secrets," Sticky said.

Laura looked around. The room was small and dark, and it stank. Bare plywood shelving weighted down with tape cas- settes, canvas bags, frazzled spools of wiring. Heaps of poly- urethane sheeting, and styrofoam noodles, and tangled cellulose.

A bolted wall rack held a dozen cheap Chinese televisions, alive with flickering Singapore street scenes. Against the other wall were heaped dozens of eviscerated cardboard boxes: bright commercial colors, American cornflakes, Kleenex, laun- dry soap. Gallon paint cans, tubing, rolls of duct tape. Some- one had tacked swimsuit shots of Miss Ting inside the grimy kitchenette.

It was hot. "Where the hell are we?"

"Don't ask," Sticky said.

"This is Singapore, though, right?" She glanced at her bare wrist. "What time is it?"

Sticky held up the smashed wreckage of her watchphone.

"Sorry. Nah sure I could trust it." He gestured across the table. "Take a seat, memsahib." He grinned tiredly. "You, I trust."

Laura got to her feet and made it to the second chair. She leaned on the table. "You know something? I'm goddamn glad to see you. I don't know why, but I am."

Sticky shoved her the remnants of his food. "Here, eat.

You been out a while." He scrubbed his plastic fork on a paper napkin and gave it to her.

"Thanks. There a ladies' room in this dump?"

"Over there," he nodded. "You feel a sting, back at the

Bank? You be sure to check you legs for pinholes in there."

The bathroom was the size of a phone booth. She had wet herself while unconscious-not badly, luckily, and the stains didn't show through her Grenadian jeans. She mopped herself with paper and came back. "No pinholes, Captain."

"Good," he said, "I'm happy I don't have to dig one of those Bulgarian pellets out of you ass. What the fock you doin' in that Bank crowd, anyway?"

"Trying to call David," she said, "after you screwed up the phones."

Sticky laughed. "Why you nah have the sense to stay with your Bwana? He nah as stupid as he look-have the sense not to be here, anyway."

"What are you doing here?"

"Having the time of my life," he said. "The last time, maybe." He rubbed his nose-they'd done something to his nostrils, too; they were narrower. "Ten years they train me for something like this. But now I'm here and doin' it, it's... "

It seemed to drift away from him then, and he shrugged and waved it past. "I see your testimony, right? Some of it.

Too late, but at least you tell them the same things you tell us. Same in Galveston, same in Grenada, same here, same everywhere for you, nah?"

"That's right, Captain."

"That's good," he said vaguely. "Y'know, wartime

... mostly, you do nothing. Time to think ... meditate

... Like down at the Bank, we know those fockin' bloodclots hurry down there when the phones shut down, and we know they be just like those bloodclots we got, but to see them

... see it happen like that, so predictable ..."

"Like wind-up toys," Laura said. "Like bugs ... like they just don't matter at all."

He looked at her, surprised. She felt surprised herself. It had been easy, to say, sitting there together with him in the darkness. "Yeah," he said. "Like toys. Like wind-up toys pretending to have souls... . It's a wind-up city, this place.

Full of lying and chatter and bluff, and cash registers ringin'

round the clock. It's Babylon. If there ever was a Babylon, it's here."

"I thought we were Babylon," Laura said. "The Net, I mean. "

Sticky shook his head. "These people are more like you than you ever were."

"Oh," Laura said slowly. "Thanks, I guess."

"You wouldn't do what they did to Grenada," he said.

"No. But I don't think it was. them, Sticky."

"Maybe it wasn't," he said. "But I don't care. f hate them. For what they are, for what they want to be. For what they want to make of the world."

Sticky's accent had wavered, from Tamil to Islands patois.

Now it vanished completely into flat Net English. "You can burn down a country with toys, if you know how. It shouldn't be true, but it is. You can knock the heart and soul out of people. We know it in Grenada, as well as they do here. We know it better."

He paused. "All that Movement talk your David thought was cute, cadres and feed the people... . Come the War, it's gone. Just like that. In that madhouse under Fedon's Camp, they're all chewing. on each other's guts. I know I'm getting my orders from that fucker Castleman. That fat hacker, who's got no real-life at all just a screen. It's all principles now.

Tactics and strategy. Like someone has to do this, doesn't matter where or who, just to prove it's possible...."

He bent in his chair and rubbed his bare leg, briefly. The cast was gone now, but there were buckle marks on his shin.

"They planned this thing in Fedon's Camp," he said. "This demon thing, DemonStration Project... . They been working under there for twenty years, Laura, they've got tech like

... not human. I didn't know about it-nobody knew about it. I can do things to this city-me, just a few brother soldiers smuggled in, not many-things you can't imagine."

"Voodoo," Laura said.

"That's right. With the tech they gave us, I can do things you can't tell from magic."

"What are your orders?"

He stood up suddenly. "You're not in them." He walked into the kitchenette and opened the rust-spotted refrigerator.

There was a book on the table, a thick looseleaf pamphlet.

No spine, no title. Laura picked it up and opened it. Page after page of smudgy Xerox: The Lawrence Doctrine and

Postindustrial Insurgency by Colonel Jonathan Gresham.

"Who's Jonathan Gresham?" she said.

"He's a genius," Sticky said. He came back to the table with a carton of yogurt. "That's not for you to read. Don't even look. If Vienna knew you'd touched that book, you'd never see daylight again."

She set it down carefully. "It's just a book."

Sticky barked with laughter. He started shoveling yogurt into his mouth with the pinched look of a little boy eating medicine. "You see Carlotta lately?"

"Not since the airport in Grenada."

"You gonna leave this place? Go back home?"

"I sure as hell want to. Officially, I'm not through testify- ing in Parliament. I want to know their decision on informa- tion policy...."

He shook his head. "We'll take care of Singapore."

"No, you won't," she said. "No matter what you can do, you'll only drive the data bankers underground. I want them out in the open-everything out in the open. Where everyone can deal with it honestly."

Sticky said-nothing. He was breathing hard suddenly, look- ing greenish. Then he belched and opened his eyes. "You and your people-you're staying on the waterfront, in Anson

District."

"That's right."

"Where that Anti-Labour fool, Rashak .. .

"Dr. Razak, yes, that's his electoral district."

"Okay," he said. "Razak's people, we can let them alone.

Let him run this town, if there's anything left of it. Stay there and you'll be safe. Understand?"

Laura thought it over. "What is it you want from me?"

"Nothing. Just go home. If they'll let you."

There was a moment of silence. "You gonna eat that, or what?" Sticky said at last. Laura realized that she had picked up the plastic fork. She'd been bending it in her fingers, over and over, as if it were glued to her hand.

She set it down. "What's a `Bulgarian pebble,' Sticky?"

" 'Pellet,' " Sticky said. "Old Bulgarian KGB use 'em long ago. Tiny lickle piece of steel, holes drilled in, and sealed with wax. Stick it in a man, wax melts from his body heat, poison inside, ricin mostly, good strong venom... . Not what we use. "

"What?" Laura said.

"Carboline. Wait." He left the table, opened a kitchen cabinet, and pulled out a sealed bubble pack. Inside it was a flat black plastic cartridge. "Here."

She looked it over. "What's this? A printer ribbon?"

"We wire 'em up to the taxis," Sticky said. "Has a spring gun inside, twenty, thirty pellets of carboline. When the taxi spots a man in the street, sometimes the gun fires. An un- manned taxi is easy to steal and rig. The taxis outside that bank were full of these toys. Carboline is a brain drug, it makes terror. Terror in his blood, slow, steady leak, to last for days and days! Why work to terrorize some fool when you can just terrorize him, simple and sweet?"

Sticky laughed. He was beginning to talk a little faster now. "That Yankee Jap in the line ahead of you, he's gonna toss, and turn, and sweat, and dream bad dreams. I could have killed him, just as easy, with venom. He could be dead right now, but why kill a flesh, when I can touch a soul? For everyone around him now, he'll talk dread and fear, dread and fear, just like burning meat stinks."

"You shouldn't tell me this," Laura said.

"Because you have to go tell the government, don't you?"

Sticky sneered. "You do that for me, go ahead! There are twelve thousand taxis in Singapore, and after you tell it, they have to search every damn one! Too much work to wreck their transport system, when we can get they own cops to do it for us! Don't forget to say this too: we rig their magnet trains. And we got plenty more such lickle guns left."

She set it down on the table. Carefully. As if it were made from spun glass.

The words began to tumble from him. "By now they know that sticky gum their boss man, Kim, touched." He pointed.

"You see those paint cans?" He laughed. "Evening gloves comin' back to fashion in Singapore! Raincoats and surgery masks, those are smart, too!"

"That's enough!"

"You don't want to hear about the paper-clip mines?"

Sticky demanded. "How cheap they are, to blow a fockin'

leg off at the knee!" He slammed his fist into the table.

"Don't you cry at me!"

"I'm not crying!"

"What's that on you face then?" He lurched to his feet, kicking back his chair. "Tell me you cry when they haul me out of here dead!"

"Don't!"

"I'm the devil in a cathedral! Stained glass everywhere, but me with lightning under every fingertip! I'm Steppin'

Razor, Voice of Destruction, they're gonna bust every black man in this town lookin' for us and they fockin' multiracial social justice, I mean chaos!" He was shrieking at her. "Not a stone on a stone! Not a board standing, not a mirror glass that don't cut to the bone!" He danced across the room, flailing his arms, kicking trash underfoot. "Jah fire! Thunder!

I can do it, girl! It's easy! So easy ..."

"No! Nobody has to die!"

"It's great! And grand! A great adventure! It's glorious! To - have the mighty power in you, and let it run, that's a war- rior's life! That's what I have, right now, right here, worth everything, anything!"

"No, it's not!" she screamed at him. "It's craziness!

Nothing's easy, you've got to think it through-"

He vanished before her eyes. It was quick, and simple. He gave a sort of sideways jump and wriggle first, as if he'd greased himself to slide through a hole in reality. Gone.

She rose from her chair, legs still a little weak, a pain behind her knees. She looked around herself carefully. Si- lence, the sound of dust settling, the damp warm smell of garbage. She was alone.

"Sticky?" she said. The words fell on emptiness. "Come back, talk to me."

A rush of human presence. Behind her, at her back. She turned, and there he stood. "You a silly girl," he said,

"somebody's mother." He snapped his fingers under her nose.

She tried to shove him away. He seized her neck with whiplash speed. "Go on," he crooned, "just breathe."