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.