"Well," he said. "Then it's no use arguing, is it? This is where I beat you into submission, or threaten divorce." He got off his barstool, jerkily,, and began pacing. Wired with tension, his feet stuffing the carpet. Somehow she forced herself to stay quiet and let him struggle with himself.
At last he spoke aloud. "I guess we're in the thick of it now, whether we like it or not. Hell, for all we know, half of
Rizome's on some terrorists' hit list, just because we took a stand. If we cower to criminals, we'll never live it down.
He stopped and looked at her.
She'd won. She felt her face, set stiff and stubbornly, break into a smile. Helpless and radiant, a smile for him. She was very proud of him. Proud just because of what he was; and proud, too, that Emily had seen it.
He sat on his barstool again and locked eyes with her.
"But you're not going," he told her. "I am."
She took his hand and looked at it, held it in her fingers.
Good, strong, warm hand. "That's not how it works with us," she told him gently. "You're the idea man, David. I'm the one who hustles people."
"Let me get shot," he said. "I couldn't stand it if anything happened to you. I mean that."
She hugged him hard. "Nothing will happen, sweetheart.
I'll just do the goddamned job. And I'll come back. Covered with glory."
He broke away from her, got to his feet. "You won't even give me that much, will you?" He headed for the door. "I'm going out."
Emily opened her mouth. Laura grabbed her arm. David left the apartment.
"Let him go," Laura said. "He's like that when we fight.
He needs it."
"I'm sorry," she said.
Laura felt close to tears. "It's been real bad for us. All that time online. He has to blow off some steam."
"You're just jet-lagged. And Net-burned. I'll get you some
Kleenex. "
"I'm better with him, usually." She forced a smile. "But right now I'm on-rag."
"Oh, gosh." Emily gave her a tissue. "No wonder."
"Sorry."
Emily touched her shoulder gently. "I always hassle you with my problems; Laura. But you never lean on me. Always so controlled. Everyone says so." She hesitated. "You and
David need some time together."
"We'll have all the time in the world when I get back."
"Maybe you ought to think it over."
"It's no use, Emily. We can't get away from it." She wiped her eyes. "It was something Stubbs told me, before they killed him. One world means there's no place to hide."
She shook her head, tossed her hair back, forced the sting in her eyes to fade. "Hell, Singapore's just a phone call away.
I'll call David from there every day. Make it up to him."
Singapore.
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.