Islands in the Net Read online

  Her mother touched Loretta’s thin curls, and the baby gurgled. “Does it ever bother you, this place, Laura? All this ruin …”

  “David loves it here,” Laura said.

  Her mother spoke with an effort. “Does he treat you all right, dear? You seem happy with him. I hope that’s true.”

  “David’s fine, mother.” Laura had dreaded this talk. “You’ve seen how we live, now. We have nothing to hide.”

  “Last time we met, Laura, you were working in Atlanta. Rizome’s headquarters. Now you’re an innkeeper.” She hesitated. “Not that it’s not a nice place, but …”

  “You think it’s a setback to my career.” Laura shook her head. “Mother, Rizome’s a democracy. If you want power, you have to be voted in. That means you have to know people. Personal contact means everything with us. And innkeeping, as you put it, is great exposure. The best people in our company stay in the Lodges as guests. And that’s where they see us.”

  “That’s not how I remember it,” her mother said. “Power is where the action is.”

  “Mother, the action’s everywhere now. That’s why we have the Net.” Laura struggled for politeness. “This isn’t something David and I just stumbled into. It’s a showcase for us. We knew we’d need a place while the baby was small, so we drew up the plans, we carried it through the company, we showed initiative, flexibility.… It was our first big project as a team. People know us now.”

  “So,” her mother said slowly. “You worked it all out very neatly. You have ambition and the baby. Career and the family. A husband and a job. It’s all too pat, Laura. I can’t believe it’s that simple.”

  Laura was icy. “Of course you’d say that, wouldn’t you?”

  Silence fell heavily. Her mother picked at the hem of her skirt. “Laura, I know my visit hasn’t been easy for you. It’s been a long time since we went our separate ways, you and I. I hope we can change that now.”

  Laura said nothing. Her mother went on stubbornly. “Things have changed since your grandmother died. It’s been two years, and she’s not there for either of us now. Laura, I want to help you, if I can. If there’s anything you need. Anything. If you have to travel—it would be fine if you left Loretta with me. Or if you just need someone to talk to.”

  She hesitated, reaching out to touch the baby, a gesture of open need. For the first time, Laura truly saw her mother’s hands. The wrinkled hands of an old woman. “I know you miss your grandmother. You named the baby after her. Loretta.” She stroked the baby’s cheek. “I can’t take her place. But I want to do something, Laura. For my grandchild’s sake.”

  It seemed like a decent, old-fashioned family gesture, Laura thought. But it was an unwelcome favor. She knew she’d have to pay for her mother’s help—with obligations and intimacy. Laura hadn’t asked for that and didn’t want it. And didn’t even need it—she and David had the company behind them, after all, good solid Rizome gemeineschaft. “That’s very nice, mother,” she said. “Thank you for the offer. David and I appreciate it.” She turned her face away, to the window.

  The road improved as the van reached a section zoned for redevelopment. They passed a long marina clustered with autopilot sailboats for hire. Then a fortresslike mall, built, like the Lodge, from concretized beach sand. Vans crowded its parking lot. The mall flashed past in bright commercial garishness: T-SHIRTS BEER WINE VIDEO Come On In, It’s Cool Inside!

  “Business is good, for a weekday,” Laura said. The crowd was mostly middle-aged Houstonians, freed for the day from their high-rise warrens. Scores of them wandered the beach, aimlessly, staring out to sea, glad of an unobstructed horizon.

  Her mother continued to press. “Laura, I worry about you. I don’t want to run your life for you, if that’s what you’re thinking. You’ve done very well for yourself, and I’m glad for it, truly. But things can happen, through no fault of your own.” She hesitated. “I want you to learn from our experience—mine, my mother’s. Neither of us had good luck—with our men, with our children. And it wasn’t that we didn’t try.”

  Laura’s patience was eroding. Her mother’s experience—it was something that had haunted Laura every day of her life. For her mother to mention it now—as if it were something that might have slipped her daughter’s mind—struck Laura as grossly thoughtless and crass. “It’s not enough to try, Mother. You have to plan ahead. That was something your generation was never any good at.” She gestured at the window. “Don’t you see that out there?”

  The van had reached the southern end of the Galveston Seawall. They were passing a suburb, once a commuter’s haven with fresh green lawns and a golf course. Now it was a barrio, with sprawling houses subdivided, converted into bars and Latin groceries.

  “The people who built this suburb knew they were running out of oil,” Laura said. “But they wouldn’t plan for it. They built everything around their precious cars, even though they knew they were turning the downtowns into ghettos. Now the cars are gone, and everyone with money has rushed back downtown. So the poor are shoved out here instead. Only they can’t afford the water bills, so the lawns are full of scrub. And they can’t afford air conditioning, so they swelter in the heat. No one even had the sense to build porches. Even though every house built in Texas had porches, for two hundred years!”

  Her mother stared obediently out the window. It was noon, and windows were flung open from the heat. Inside them, the unemployed sweated before their subsidized televisions. The poor lived cheap these days. Low-grade scop, fresh from the vats and dried like cornmeal, cost only a few cents a pound. Everyone in the ghetto suburbs ate scop, single-cell protein. The national food of the Third World.

  “But that’s what I’m trying to tell you, dear,” her mother said. “Things change. You can’t control that. And bad luck happens.”

  Laura spoke tightly. “Mother, people built these crappy tract homes, they didn’t grow there. They were built for rip-off quick profit, with no sense of the long term. I know those places, I’ve helped David smash them up. Look at them!”

  Her mother looked pained. “I don’t understand. They’re cheap houses where poor people live. At least they have shelter, don’t they?”

  “Mother, they’re energy sieves! They’re lathwork and sheetrock and cheap tinsel crap!”

  Her mother shook her head. “I’m not an architect’s wife, dear. I can see you’re upset by these places, but you talk as if it were my fault.”

  The van turned west up 83rd Street, heading for the airfield. The baby was asleep against her chest; Laura hugged her tighter, feeling depressed and angry. She didn’t know how she could make it any clearer to her mother without being bluntly rude. If she could say: Mother, your marriage was like one of these cheap houses; you used it up and moved on.… You threw my father out of your life like last year’s car, and you gave me to Grandmother to raise, like a house plant that no longer fit your decor.… But she couldn’t say that. She couldn’t force the words out.

  A shadow passed low overhead, silently. A Boeing passenger plane, an intercontinental, its tail marked with the red and blue of Aero Cubana. It reminded Laura of an albatross, with vast, canted, razor-like wings on a long, narrow body. Its engines hummed.

  The sight of planes always gave Laura a nostalgic lift. She had spent a lot of time in airports as a child, in the happy times before her life as a diplomat’s kid fell apart. The plane dropped gently, with computer-guided precision, its wings extruding yellow braking films. Modern design, Laura thought proudly, watching it. The Boeing’s thin ceramic wings looked frail. But they could have cut through a lousy tract house like a razor through cheese.

  They entered the airport through gates in a chain-link fence of red plastic mesh. Outside the terminal, vans queued up in the taxi lane.

  Laura helped her mother unload her bags onto a waiting luggage trolley. The terminal was built in early Organic Baroque, with insulated, fortresslike walls and double sliding doors. It was blessedly cool inside, with a sha
rp reek of floor cleaner. Flat display screens hung from the ceiling, shuffling arrivals and departures. Their luggage trolley tagged along at their heels.

  The crowd was light. Scholes Field was not a major airport, no matter what the city claimed. The City Council had expanded it after the last hurricane, in a last-ditch attempt to boost Galveston’s civic morale. A lot of taxpayers had quickly used it to leave Galveston for good.

  They checked her mother’s luggage. Laura watched her mother chat with the ticket clerk. Once again she was the woman Laura remembered: trim and cool and immaculate, self-contained in a diplomat’s Teflon shell. Margaret Day: still an attractive woman at sixty-two. People lasted forever, these days. With any luck, her mother could live another forty years.

  They walked together toward the departure lounge. “Let me hold her just once more,” her mother said. Laura passed her the baby. Her mother carried Loretta like a sack of emeralds. “If I’ve said anything to upset you, you’ll forgive me, won’t you? I’m not as young as I was and there are things I don’t understand.”

  Her voice was calm, but her face trembled for a moment, with a strange naked look of appeal. For the first time Laura realized how much it had cost her mother to go through this—how ruthlessly she had humbled herself. Laura felt a sudden empathetic shock—as if she’d met some injured stranger on her doorstep. “No, no,” she mumbled, walking. “Everything was fine.”

  “You’re modern people, you and David,” her mother said. “In a way you seem very innocent to us, oh, premillennium decadents.” She smiled wryly. “So free of doubts.”

  Laura thought it over as they walked into the departure lounge. For the first time, she felt a muddy intuition of her mother’s point of view. She stood by her mother’s chair, out of earshot from the sprinkling of other passengers for Dallas. “We seem dogmatic. Smug. Is that it?”

  “Oh, no,” her mother said hastily. “That’s not what I meant at all.”

  Laura took a deep breath. “We don’t live under terror, mother. That’s the real difference. No one’s pointing missiles at my generation. That’s why we think about the future, the long term. Because we know we’ll have one.” Laura spread her hands. “And we didn’t earn that luxury. The luxury to look smug. You gave it to us.” Laura relaxed a little, feeling virtuous.

  “Well …” Her mother struggled for words. “It’s something like that but.… The world you grew up in—every year it’s more smooth and controlled. Like you’ve thrown a net over the Fates. But Laura, you haven’t, not really. And I worry for you.”

  Laura was surprised. She’d never known her mother was such a morbid fatalist. It seemed a weirdly old-fashioned attitude. And she was in earnest, too—as if she were ready to nail up horseshoes or count rosary beads. And things had been going rather oddly lately.… Despite herself, Laura felt a light passing tingle of superstitious fear.

  She shook her head. “All right, Mother. David and I—we know we can count on you.”

  “That’s all I asked.” Her mother smiled. “David was wonderful—give him my love.” The other passengers rose, shuffling briefcases and garment bags. Her mother kissed the baby, then stood and handed her back. Loretta’s face clouded and she began snuffling up to a wail.

  “Uh-oh,” Laura said lightly. She accepted a quick, awkward hug from her mother. “Bye.”

  “Call me.”

  “All right.” Bouncing Loretta to shush her, Laura watched her mother leave, blending in with the crowd at the exit ramp. One stranger among others. Ironic, Laura thought. She’d been waiting for this moment for seven days, and now that it was here, it hurt. Sort of. In a way.

  Laura glanced at her watchphone. She had to kill an hour before the Grenadians arrived. She went to the coffee shop. People stared at her and the baby. In a world so crammed with old people, babies had novelty value. Even total strangers turned mushy, making faces and doing little four-finger waves.

  Laura sat, sipping the airport’s lousy coffee, letting the tension wash out of her. She was glad that her mother was gone. She could feel repressed bits of her personality rising slowly back into place. Like continental shelves lifting after an ice age.

  A young woman two booths away was interested in the baby. Her eyes were alight and she kept mugging at Loretta, big open-mouthed grins. Laura watched her, bemused. Something about the woman’s broad-cheeked, freckled face struck Laura as quintessentially Texan. A kind of rugged, cracker look, Laura thought—a genetic legacy from some hard-eyed woman in calico, the sort who rode shotgun through Comanche country and had six kids without anesthetic. It showed even through the woman’s garish makeup—blood-red waxy lipstick, dramatically lined eyes, hair teased into a mane.… Laura realized with a start that the woman was a hooker from the Church of Ishtar.

  The Grenadians’ flight was announced, a connection from Miami. The Church hooker leapt up at once, a flush of excitement on her face. Laura trailed her. She rushed at once to the embarkation lounge.

  Laura joined her as the plane emptied. She cataloged passengers at a glance, watching for her guests. A family of Vietnamese shrimpers. A dozen shabby but optimistic Cubans with shopping bags. A group of serious, neatly dressed black collegians in fraternity sweaters. Three offshore oil-rig roughnecks, wrinkled old men wearing cowboy hats and engineering boots.

  Suddenly the Ishtar woman drew near and spoke to her. “You’re with Rizzome, aren’t you?”

  “Rye-zoam,” Laura said.

  “Well, then, you’d be waiting for Sticky and the old man?” Her eyes sparkled. It gave her bony face a strange vivacity. “Did the Rev’rend Morgan talk to you?”

  “I’ve met the reverend,” Laura said carefully. She knew nothing about anyone named Sticky.

  The woman smiled. “Y’all’s baby is cute.… Oh, look, there they are!” She raised her arm over her head and waved excitedly, the deep-cut neckline of her blouse showing fringes of red brassiere. “Yoo-hoo! Sticky!”

  An old-fashioned Rastaman in dreadlocks cut his way out of the crowd. The old man wore a long-sleeved dashiki of cheap synthetic, over baggy drawstring pants, and sandals.

  The Rastaman’s young companion wore a nylon windbreaker, sunglasses, and jeans. The woman rushed forward and embraced him. “Sticky!” The younger man, with sudden wiry strength, lifted the Church woman off her feet and spun her half around. His dark, even face was expressionless behind the glasses.

  “Laura?” A woman had appeared at Laura’s elbow, silently. It was one of Rizome’s security coordinators, Debra Emerson. Emerson was a sad-looking Anglo woman in her sixties with etched, delicate features and thinning hair. Laura had often spoken to her over the Net and had met her once in Atlanta.

  They exchanged brief formal hugs and cheek kisses in the usual Rizome style. “Where are the bankers?” Laura said.

  Emerson nodded at the Rastaman and his companion. Laura’s heart sank. “That’s them?”

  “These offshore bankers don’t follow our standards,” Emerson said, watching them.

  Laura said, “Do you realize who that woman is? The group she’s with?”

  “Church of Ishtar,” Emerson said. She didn’t look happy about it. She glanced up into Laura’s face. “We haven’t told you all we should yet, for reasons of discretion. But I know you’re not naive. You have good Net connections, Laura. You must know how things stand in Grenada.”

  “I know Grenada’s a data haven,” Laura said cautiously. She wasn’t sure how far to go.

  Debra Emerson had once been a high muckety-muck at the CIA, back when there had been a CIA and its muckety-mucks were still in vogue. Security work had no such glamor nowadays. Emerson had the look of someone who had suffered in silence, a sort of translucency around the eyes. She favored gray corduroy skirts and long-sleeve blouses in meek beiges and duns.

  The old Rastaman shambled over, smiling. “Winston Stubbs,” he said. He had the lilt of the Caribbean, softened vowels broken by crisp British consonants. He shook Laura’s hand. “And
Sticky Thompson, Michael Thompson that is.” He turned. “Sticky!”

  Sticky came up, his arm around the Church girl’s waist. “I’m Laura Webster,” Laura said.

  “We know,” Sticky said. “This is Carlotta.”

  “I’m their liaison,” Carlotta drawled brightly. She pushed her hair back with both hands and Laura glimpsed an ankh tattooed on her right wrist. “Y’all bring much luggage? I got a van waiting.”

  “I-and-I have business up-the-island,” Stubbs explained. “We be in to your Lodge later this night, call you on the Net, seen?”

  Emerson broke in. “If that’s the way you want it, Mr. Stubbs.”

  Stubbs nodded. “Later.” The three of them left, calling a luggage trolley.

  Laura watched them go, nonplussed. “Are they supposed to be running around loose?”

  Emerson sighed. “It’s a touchy situation. I’m sorry you were brought here for nothing, but it’s just one of their little gestures.” She tugged the strap of her heavy shoulder bag. “Let’s call a cab.”

  After their arrival, Emerson vanished upstairs into the Lodge’s conference room. Usually, Laura and David ate in the dining room, where they could socialize with the guests. That night, however, they joined Emerson and ate in the tower, feeling uneasily conspiratorial.

  David set the table. Laura opened a covered tray of chile rellenos and Spanish rice. David had health food.

  “I want to be as open and straightforward with you as I possibly can,” Emerson murmured. “By now, you must have realized the nature of your new guests.”

  “Yes,” David said. He was far from happy about it.

  “Then you can understand the need for security. Naturally we trust the discretion of you and your staff.”

  David smiled a little. “That’s nice to know.”