Outside Musharaf’s perimeter there are tens of thousands of people, some throwing rocks and screaming, some just apathetically staring in toward the
ghat
, many wearing scalpnets and illegal amplifier boxes so that while they’re here, they’re also cracking skulls in London, burning a family out of its shop in Dayton, or robbing the dead in Manila.
There’s been very little sniper fire, though, because Bangladesh is so poor that practically no one can afford guns. That’s some consolation.
He checks the computer again; things haven’t changed. He can put about 1200 more children and mothers onto the hovercraft sitting at the
ghat,
before they have to lift and run, in only about another eight minutes. The big wave from the storm surge of Clem 114 is already on its way inland, and he can no longer raise any of the army posts in the Sundarbans, the great mangrove swamps that form the southern coast of Khulna Division.
A thought occurs to him; he nods to his company sergeant, who salutes. He wonders what this man thinks of him. Well, in fourteen minutes it will not matter.
“Find me a mullah,” Captain Musharaf says. “Now. From somewhere close.”
The sergeant asks nothing, turns, and is gone.
Musharaf is reasonably sure that the mob doesn’t know what is about to happen. The poverty-stricken wetland where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra run together and dribble out to the sea has more people per square meter than any other nation. It is no longer among the Earth’s poorest nations—as he always does, when he thinks of that, Musharaf gets a little surge of pride when he realizes that Bangladesh has climbed so fast in the last thirty years that it has passed places like Zambia and Paraguay that had a much longer head start. But its demographics and its accomplishments are
not noteworthy to the global audience, and so they might as well be invisible here. The two-kilometer-high wave now roaring up toward them, pushed to far greater heights because the continental shelf extends so far down into the Bay of Bengal, will not be described or discussed on any channel, and it will fall as a complete surprise to anyone not listening to local news.
When he was a boy, he was here every day—his mother sold
sringala,
little bits of meat folded into a triangle of some vegetable and deep-fried, at a stand in the Bazar, just south of here, and more often than not he tended the stand while she cooked. It was a shrewd choice, for
sringala
is nourishing enough so that she could feed whatever was left over to the family; they sometimes went to bed broke, but seldom hungry.
He would give up half his remaining minutes to be at his mother’s stand again, nostrils full of the familiar odor of onions and peppers, schoolbook propped up in front of him because she insisted that he study while he worked, eating the leftover
sringala
with her and his sisters when the day ended.
Two of his sisters are already in Assam, and one married a rich German, who, when Europe expelled non-whites, emigrated with her to Ontario. He has three nephews he will never see … but at least they’re in Toronto, and surely that’s a safe place.
The sergeant arrives with the mullah, and in a low voice Captain Musharaf explains the situation. The mullah agrees at once, and runs off to the mosque nearest at hand. It occurs to Musharaf that it’s a good thing this is a fairly young, agile mullah.
As the mullah rounds the corner and passes out of sight, the last hovercraft’s engines are dying off in the distance; now people wait patiently for the next one. Only Musharaf, the mullah, and now his sergeant know that there will be no more.
There are four minutes left when the muezzin—about an hour early, but few of these people will check—issues the call to prayer. Across that part of the city, the drifting mob, last dregs of Global Riot Two, kneels to pray; the patient refugees, and Musharaf himself, spread their prayer rugs if they have them, or merely bow and pray if they don’t, facing west toward Mecca.
When the great wave strikes, it comes from the southeast, behind them, and it is on them before people can do much more than stand up. Musharaf’s last thought is that surely, for getting into Paradise, dying in the midst of prayers must count for something.
Whether it does or not, it’s over very fast; the black wave, already frothing with corpses, pounds on northward. It will be many kilometers before it sinks down far enough to begin leaving any survivors behind it.
They are in Progreso, a little village not far south of Pijijiapan, when Passionet finally catches up with Mary Ann. She’s been thinking seriously of just resigning, Jesse knows, but she also figured that since they had made her rich, she owed it to them to at least talk things over a little. He goes over to play with Tomás’s grandkids for a while—there’re a couple of them who are pretty decent little soccer players, and Jesse played soccer all the way through high school, so they have a nice little three-way game on a bit of triangular ground, and after a while he has all but forgotten the intrusion of the real world into his adventure.
He’s almost startled when Mary Ann comes over to talk to him; the whistle has sounded the ten-minute warning till they are to move again, but now that the road has toughened him a bit, Jesse doesn’t feel any big need to do more than gulp some extra water before they get back on the road. This stretch, where the road follows the first big ridgeline in from the coast, is a terrific place for a long hike, and even those who are abandoning homes they may never see again seem to be enjoying themselves.
“Well,” she says, “I know what they want and it’s really different. I’m not sure how to explain it to you. Did you catch any of Surface O’Malley’s work in the last few months? She’s the new girl that’s been filling in for me, and though they’re too polite to say it, she’s probably also the one they had in mind to replace me.”
“No, I haven’t. What’s she got to do with all this?”
“Well, a few days ago in Bangkok, she managed to do everything we’re not supposed to do within one hour, and the audience loved it. So naturally, now it’s a stroke of genius and they want us all to do it.” She explains it all to Jesse during the next hour on the road, as they wind back toward Federal Highway 200; for a day or so they’ve been on the thin, badly paved Chiapas state highway that runs parallel to the great Federal highway, to leave the main road clear for more urgent convoys. At the speed they’re moving, it hasn’t made much difference, except that it’s much quieter and more pleasant, and for some reason farmers and locals seem to be more willing to come out, say hello, and sell them melons and corn.
“So you think you’ll take them up on it?” Jesse finally asks. “Are you up to faking being sincere underneath faking being fake?” His description comes out more sarcastically than he had intended; he looks out over the deep greens of the valleys around him, now slashed with streaks of black mud where landslides and floods from Clem Two tore up the hillsides, under the deep blue of the equatorial sky, and he realizes it’s just resentment at being dumped back out of this little personal paradise, the special adventure that’s just him and Mary Ann.
She laughs at his description, but it’s clearly just a polite noise she’s making to avoid a fight. “I guess if you really pushed me I’d say I have to do it, Jesse.” She takes his hand, and that’s the same as ever, the terrific moment of looking over and seeing one of his adolescent fantasies smiling at him, and at the same time knowing that it’s good old reliable Mary Ann, his friend and partner in so much trouble and danger so far … .
He shrugs and grins. “It’s a
duty
? Who do you think you are, Berlina Jameson? I thought Passionet was just entertainment.”
“I thought so too, and I think Passionet did. One reason I was over there for so long was that since I got the call from Doug Llewellyn—the president of Passionet—I knew something pretty strange was up. Usually people with my job don’t talk to even a vice president twice in a year. We may be the most public aspect of Passionet but we sure don’t rate much in real importance within the company—I guess we’re just too easy to replace.” She lifts his hand in her own two small ones and kisses his fingers. “One of the reasons I get so much pleasure out of being treated like a human being is working with the people at Passionet teaches you how unusual that can be. Anyway, so when it was Llewellyn who made the call, I knew something big was up they weren’t telling me, and I insisted on knowing before I agreed to anything. They finally had to patch through David Ali—that’s Rock to you, he’s sort of my best friend in the biz—and let him explain some of it too.
“You know how everyone says nowadays you can’t censor because there are so many alternate pathways, and because packetized data can leak in through so many different ways and then reassemble?”
“Yep, I’m an engineer, remember?”
She makes a face at him. “If you want this explained, you have to let me do it my way. Okay?”
“’Kay.” He holds her hand tightly, and scuffs along the road a little.
She lifts his hand again, toys with it, smiles, and then says, “Well, it turns out you can still be a pretty effective censor if you’re just willing to play rough enough. Have you followed the news enough to know about Global Riot Two?”
“I know there is one and they aren’t sure when it’s going to end. I guess there have been a lot of deaths.”
“Unh-hunh. Nineteen million dead as of this morning, not counting a few million more who didn’t manage to evacuate before hurricanes hit, because they were pinned down by the riots. Twenty governments collapsed entirely. They just lost all of Bangladesh—the storm surge in front of Clem 114 finished off what the riots started. They claim ten million more people could have been evacuated there if troops and transport weren’t tied up in maintaining civil order.”
“Your public affairs voice is showing.”
“Well, I’m in public affairs whether I want to be or not.” She presses in close against him, and despite the heat he drops an arm around her shoulders and lets her small, warm body snug up into his armpit. “You know the basic thing about global riots, that you can get whatever that contagious ‘riot spirit’ is, right through the XV transmission? And of course because it’s dramatic and visceral and emotionally loaded, it’s really popular and people tend to watch it a lot.”
“So what does it have to do with the president of Passionet calling you up?”
“A lot. This morning he was awakened, very rudely, by a group of Marines who tore his house apart, cavity-searched his family, and ‘accidentally’ destroyed half his art collection. He got off lightly—they stopped a zipline right out in the middle of nowhere carrying three of his execs, took them off in handcuffs naked so that everyone could see them.
“When lawyers showed up to bail them out, they found out martial law had been declared around that courtroom, and they jailed the lawyers.
And
the Army was holding the Passionet library of XV recordings, announcing that they couldn’t be responsible for maintaining it and if lots of it got erased it would just be too bad.
And
they also sort of suggested that since a lot of it involves violence and sex in one form or another, they might just decide to review it for ‘pornography’, not let Passionet have access while they’re spending several months doing that, and then make a lot of arrests based on the evidence, using the Diem Act.”
“Jesus. I thought that was just to cover deathpom for hire.”
“What it says is you can’t distribute murder and torture experiences to people who are primarily buying them for pleasure. It’s been interpreted narrowly up till now, to just cover raping, killing, and torturing people and distributing wedges of that, but nothing says it always has to be. Theoretically, any time one of us gets killed or hurt and the ratings go up because weird people are getting off on it, Passionet could be prosecuted. And for aggravated cases they can actually give the death penalty to corporate officers and major stockholders as well as to the people that made the wedges directly. Sort of like the Nuremberg principles—‘I vas only follovink orders’ is not an excuse.”
“Jesus! Is all that constitutional?”
“Of course not. But Hardshaw got to the Supreme Court way ahead of Passionet, and the court refuses to hear anything about it; they’re calling it a ‘paramount national emergency,’ like back when Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, or some of the secrecy stuff during the Cold War. Which boils down to lawyer-talk for ‘Better do what we say.’ And all of that was really just
a demonstration of force, a little something to remind Llewellyn of how rough they could play if they wanted to, so that he’d understand that he’d better cooperate.”
“I suppose it got
that
idea across, anyway. What did they want him to do?”
“Not just him, but every XV net they can find. It’s an order: nothing to enhance Global Riot Two is going to go out over the nets. Nothing at all. Instead, what we’re going to do is put out all kinds of stuff about humanity banding together, about courage and hope and mutual help and all that. The kind of positive news that politicians have always wanted anyway.”
“Jesus God, Mary Ann. I see what you mean. I suppose you don’t really have any choice—it doesn’t sound like you want to fuck around with these guys. They could probably do just about anything it occurred to them to do to you.”