Berlina has been listening to this very seriously, trying to decide whether Diem is flattering her for some future purpose. She decides that she can’t tell, but he’s probably too good at it for her to be able to spot it.
They chat for another moment or two, and then Diem clicks off and she’s left talking to Di Callare. “We’re getting out pretty fast,” he explains. “Lori will get it all packed up and storm-proofed in the next couple of weeks—it looks like the hurricanes coming up the East Coast will be bad, but not the Big One we’re figuring will happen either this season or next.”
“The Big One? I thought that Clem—”
“So far there’s been nothing the size of Clem in the Atlantic. To get to be Clem’s size you’ve got to build up over very hot water for a couple of weeks, the way Clem did, or start with a huge eye on a hot sea the way Clem Two, excuse me, Clem 200, did. And other hurricanes do use up some of the available energy and bind some of the available wind flow. Once Clem 200 got into the Caribbean, we thought we were goners, but luckily it did that pinwheeling stunt with its outflow jets and started up so many eyes that they limited each other’s growth. With luck we’ll merely have four or five very large hurricanes out of this event, counting Clem 200 itself, which has shrunk quite a bit, never recovered the energy it had before it crossed Mexico.”
Berlina shudders. “Still, hurricanes haven’t been that common—”
“No, but they haven’t been
un
common either. And most of these guys will follow the Gulf Stream and the steering currents and stay off the American East Coast. So we’ll see some big storms, loss of property and life, all of that—but not the catastrophe that’s going to happen once you get a hurricane into the eastern Caribbean all by itself. That’s the one that’s going to blow up to Clem size and resist the steering currents enough to tear up the coast.”
Berlina nods at the camera. “I start to see it, I guess. Are the hurricanes we have going to make it across to Europe?”
“They might. The temperature in the North Atlantic falls off fast as you go north, so if they swing up that way they’re dead. But on the right trajectory one of them could slug Europe for sure, and there will be enough of them so that at least one or two will get there—”
There’s a flashing light at the corner of the screen, and each of them says “Hold on” and reaches to take the call off hold; they don’t have time to
realize that it is odd for them both to get a call at the same time before they are unexpectedly back into a conference call with Harris Diem.
“Well,” he says, “have you seen or heard?”
Berlina says no as Di shakes his head.
“Congratulations, Ms. Jameson.” His smile is sardonic and doesn’t get up to his eyes. “You’ve made history twice in one day. It looks like the release of
Sniffings
has triggered Global Riot Two.”
The first Global Riot began in Islamabad and Seattle. No one can be that positive about Global Riot Two.
But
Sniffings
is almost certainly at the heart of it; at least half of the initial outbreaks of violence are, in one way or another, connected to Berlina Jameson’s exposé of the Klieg organizations, their influence, and their links both to organized crime and to the outlaw Abdulkashim regime.
Quaz, the guy with the attitude, Passionet’s bad boy, with an undeserved reputation for being brainy, is in Oran. He has been walking around in dusty streets all day, absorbing atmosphere, blocking out as best he can the knowledge that tomorrow he will be going directly to the place where he will be permitted to barge in and talk to some critical witnesses. He also ignores the fact that the reason the witnesses both seem very frightened and will tell him whatever he wants is that they were carefully left uninjured by the police in exchange for their cooperation with Passionet detectives. Passionet, lately, has been the net of choice for breaking organized crime in the Third World, as long as it’s reasonably sensational organized crime.
Quaz’s problem is that he’s bright enough to appreciate irony without being quite bright enough to get past it. A couple of times they’ve had to fake technical problems because he hasn’t blocked his knowledge of the next day’s script adequately. He gets too fascinated with how smoothly it all runs, and sometimes much too interested in Passionet’s detectives (who are anonymous gray types, eternally soft-spoken and reserved, the farthest thing that can be imagined from Quaz’s intellectual decadent aging-punk style).
Or, in short, he can never quite manage to remember that to be real enough for the experiencers, it’s got to be kept under control. Nobody wants to see what real detectives do, since nowadays that’s either cornering people and talking to them, or more likely writing lengthy search protocols for datarodents that spread out on the net, looking for the moment when a person, a dollar, an object linked with a crime, touches the great collective brain of capitalism.
It makes for dramatic phrases, and if you intercut five or ten seconds of it now and then along with an overload sense of weariness, you can make people feel like they stayed up all night catching crooks, but watching a person listen to a rambling witness is dull, and watching a person at a keyboard is duller than that. Especially if people see it taking as long as it really does.
Not to Quaz, though, and that’s the problem. Some strange part of the poor idiot’s mind refuses to understand that he is not out here to be a reporter, let alone a detective, himself. You’d think having both cheekbones broken and reshaped, or a surgically flattened stomach, would have given him a clue … .
All these thoughts are running through the mind of Dennis Ysabel-Garcia, Passionet’s special bodyguard detailed to Quaz, as he follows Quaz about a hundred feet back, monitoring his mind through a local tap. It’s late in the day, getting dark, and Dennis has been walking around for all this time getting more bored and annoyed, his feet getting sorer and his clothes more caked with dust and sweat. God knows, Quaz is not his first choice of bodies to guard—Rock, or Synthi Venture, are always courteous and stay on the track marked out for them; even the new kid, Surface O’Malley, for all her puppyish enthusiasm, can manage to follow orders.
So it’s an unpleasant shock but no surprise that when gunfire starts up some blocks away, Quaz turns and runs straight for it, despite urgent orders not to from the control office here in Oran. Dennis flings himself after Quaz, around corners into an unscouted alley that is secure only at the near end, down a long block—
The demonstration is in front of the mosque, and seems to have been thrown together by one of the fundamentalist groups that are always ready whenever scandal hits the ruling family, nowadays, anywhere in the Arab world. They were burning pictures of the ambassador to the UN, who had been exposed as on Klieg’s take; they ran head-on into a group of pro-Abdulkashim enthusiasts who had come here to demonstrate against the lies the Western media were spreading about their hero. Afterward no one will quite be sure of how the two groups got into a brawl with each other; the best guess will be that everyone involved assumed that two different demonstrations in the same place were enough cause for a fight.
“The first shots were fired by the first cop on the scene. I think he shot into the air, hoping to get people’s attention. Then somebody shot him. Now half of them are breaking and running to get away from the scene and the other half are realizing that the looting’s always best at the start of a riot,” the controller whispers in Dennis’s mind. “What does that pretty fool think he’s doing? We keep telling him to break off and turn back.”
This is as much as Dennis can get speed-talked into his head as he rushes
after Quaz, who with his typical sense of immunity from all harm wants to run up and ask the two sides what the fight is about. Nobody in his corner of the action seems to speak English, so he begins to speak loudly and slowly and gesture frantically.
Dennis has crossed most of the twilit square in front of the mosque when somebody shoots Quaz low in the gut, with a Self Defender, a twenty-dollar disposable hypervelocity derringer like you can buy at any 7-Eleven in the States. Though the slug is tiny—a bit of depleted uranium about the size of the tip of an ordinary sewing needle—it hits with ten times the foot-poundage of an old-style .357 Magnum round, and once it goes in it tumbles, so that aside from the exit hole, it makes a shock wave so big in his body cavity that Quaz’s guts erupt through his back around his spinal column.
During the six agonizing minutes it takes Quaz to die, lying on his back crushing his own bleeding intestines into the dirty street, more than sixty million experiencers worldwide tune in to Passionet; a hundred thousand channelspotters see to that. Through the haze of pain they catch the smell of smoke, glimpses of running feet, sounds of gunfire (most of it from Dennis trying to keep the riot off of Quaz—he himself dies, cut down by machine-gun fire, just an instant before Quaz, so that the last thing the experiencers see from Oran is Dennis Ysabel-Garcia pitching forward over Quaz).
Before Quaz is dead, there are thirty more riots in the cities of the world. Passionet jumps to Surface O’Malley, tells her they want to tell her some bad news, and asks her to react by staggering out into the streets blindly.
Surface points out that she’s in Bangkok, at the Orient, and that the rioting is taking on a distinctly anti-foreign character, not surprisingly since the Thai ambassador too turns out to have been subverted by the Klieg organization, and a large Siberian spy ring was broken that week. “I’m not a chicken,” she says, “and I’d like to see my career take off and all, but I’ll be damned if I’m going out in that. I’m a redhead, for god’s sake. If the mob doesn’t get me the soldiers will.”
They offer her a lot more, but she won’t take it. The bosses at Passionet are swearing, beating desks with fists, yelling into each other’s face about who gave her a break, but she’s threatening to jack out entirely until they call her and tell her there’s an evacuation staticopter on the way. The truth is right now they need her more than she needs them—the riots in Bangkok are the best they have anyone on-site for, and they need feed from her, and it had better not contain any text thoughts about Passionet needlessly risking her life or screwing her over.
The trouble is that whoever says that is going to be the weasel that capitulated to the bitch, next week when they assess the results and someone asks why she wasn’t out there dodging rocks, getting chased up alleys, and just maybe please-oh-god-of-profits getting gang-raped.
Worse yet, her bodyguards are agreeing with her. They must have gotten shaken up by Ysabel-Garcia’s death, though surely they must have known all along that things like that come with the job and that’s why they are paid so much.
While they argue, Surface (whose real name is Leslie) and Fred and Saul, the two bodyguards whom she’s gradually become friends with, are seeing what they can from the window. That’s freaking the controller and editor out at the control station, across town where the expressway crosses Klong San Sab, because not only is she letting her bodyguards address her as “Les,” she’s looking right at them every now and then, and they aren’t supposed to exist. The editor there is having to fake in all kinds of noise, scramble, feedback, and snow to cover all the times she does that, and even then he’s painfully aware that he can’t really get Fred and Saul out of the picture—they tend to show up in her thoughts and the most he can do is blur them out.
The editor wishes Rock were here, and Rock
will
be in a little bit—he’s coming in with the international rescue mission, riding a whistler with Japanese marines. The editor is wishing for just one really professional reporter who understands the job and would get into it. Synthi Venture the way she used to be, before she cracked up in Point Barrow, would be wonderful right now. Global Riot Two is shaping up to be bigger and better than its predecessor, and here they are stuck with—
Hold it. They zoom in. Screw the i.d., what Surface/Leslie and her bodyguards are seeing is too interesting to blur it out just to hide what everyone knows anyway. They can always claim it’s “uncensored footage,” whatever footage means when you’re talking about a recorded XV wedge.
Leslie, Fred, and Saul had been watching the crowd down by the Chinatown waterfront, across the Chao Phraya River from the Orient. Now it looks like a battle developing on the adjoining Phra Pinklao Bridge to the south of them; they don’t quite have the right angle for it, but through her binoculars Leslie—Surface, dammit! We pay you for your name to be Surface!—
Leslie gets part of it in focus, just as gunfire begins to rip back and forth across the bridge and bodies fall everywhere. “Outstanding,” the editor whispers.
She figures it out, and he captures the “Eureka!” moment—the struggling mob on the Chinatown waterfront had been Thais, attacking Indian and Chinese shops; the Indians, Bangalas, Pakistanis, and Chinese seem to
have gotten together enough to mount a counterattack, and they are fighting their way across the bridge into the downtown. “Every little merchant over there probably has a couple of full auto weapons, after eighty years of war around here,” Fred comments. “They just had to get organized.”
“There are plenty of guns in Thai hands too,” Leslie says. “Chinatown’s fighting because it’s their lives, homes, and families, and by now because they’re pretty pissed off. Holy shit.”