8

A monsoon breeze whipped at her hair. Laura looked over the city from the roof of the Rizome godown.

The Net was a broken spiderweb. No phones at all. Televi- sion shut down, except for a single, emergency government channel. Laura felt the dead electric silence in her bones.

The dozen Rizome associates were all on the roof, mo- rosely spooning up breakfasts of seaweed and kashi. Laura rubbed her bare, phoneless wrist, nervously. Below her, three stories down by the loading docks, a gang of Anti-Labourites practiced their morning Tai Chi Chuan. Soft, languorous, hypnotic movements. No one led them, but they moved in unison.

They had barricaded the streets, their bamboo rickshaws laden with stolen sacks of cement and rubber and coffee beans. They were defying the curfew, the government's sud- den and draconic declaration of martial law, which lay over

Singapore like a blanket of lead. The streets were the army's now. And the skies, too.... Tall monsoon clouds over the morning South China Sea, a glamorous tropic gleam like puffed gray silk. Against the clouds, the dragonfly cutouts of police helicopters.

At first, the Anti-Labourites had claimed, as before, that they were "observing for civil rights." But as more and more of them had gathered during the night of the fourteenth, the pretense had faded. They had broken into warehouses and offices, smashing windows, barricading doors. Now the reb- els were swarming through the Rizome godown, appropriat- ing anything they felt was useful... .

There were hundreds of them, up and down the waterfront, viper-eyed young radicals in blood-red headbands and wrinkled paper clothes, wearing disposable surgical masks to hide their identities from police video. Grouping on street corners, exchanging elaborate ritual handshakes. Some of them mut- tering into toy walkie-talkies.

They had gathered here deliberately. Some kind of contin- gency plan. The docklands of East Lagoon were their strong- hold, their natural turf.

The docks had been depressed for years, half abandoned from the global embargoes inflicted on Singapore. The pow- erful Longshoreman's Union had protested to the P.I.P. ruler- ship with increasing bitterness. Until the troublesome union had been simply and efficiently disemployed, as a deliberate act, by a government investment in industrial robots.

But with the embargoes, even the robots were idle much of the time. Which was why Rizome had been able to buy into the shipping business cheaply. It was hard for Singapore to turn down such a sucker bet: even knowing that Rizome's intentions were political, an industrial beachhead.

The P.I.P. 's attack on the union, like most of their actions, was smart and farsighted and ruthless. But none of it had worked out quite the way the Government had planned. The union hadn't broken, but bent, twisted, mutated, and spread.

Suddenly they had stopped demanding work at all, and started demanding permanent leisure.

Laura could see them down there now, in the streets. A

few were women, a few older men, but mostly classic young troublemakers. She'd read somewhere once that 90 percent of the world's havoc was committed by men between fifteen and twenty-five. They were branding the walls and streets with neat stenciled slogans. "PLAY FOR KEEPS! WORKERS OF THE

WORLD, RELAX!"

Razak's Rejects, their bellies full of cheap bacterial chow. For years they'd lived for next to nothing, dossing down in abandoned warehouses, drinking from public fountains. Politics filled their days, an elaborate ideology, as convoluted as a religion.

Like most Singaporeans, they were sports nuts. Day after day they gathered in their polite, penniless hordes, keeping fit with healthful exercise. Except in their case it was unarmed combat-a very cheap sport, requiring no equipment but the human body... .

You could tell them in the streets by the way they walked.

Heads held high, eyes glazed with that calm karate look that came from the knowledge that they could break human bones with their hands. They were worthless and proud, languidly accepting any handout the system offered, but showing noth- ing even close to gratitude. Legally and constitutionally speak- ing, it was hard to say why they shouldn't be allowed to do nothing.... Except, of course, that it struck at the very heart of the industrial ethic.

Laura left the parapet. Mr. Suvendra had jury-rigged a coat-hanger antenna for his battery-powered TV, and they were struggling to catch a broadcast from Johore. The broad- cast flickered on suddenly, and everyone crowded around the television. Laura shouldered her way in between Ali and

Suvendra's young niece, Derveet.

Emergency news. The anchorman was a Malay-speaking

Maphilindonesian. The image was scratchy. It was hard to tell whether it was a simple. TV screwup or deliberate jam- ming by Singapore.

"Invasion talk," Suvendra translated gloomily. "Vienna are not liking this state of emergency: they call it coup d'etat, la!"

A young newswoman in a chiffon Muslim chador gestured at a map of the Malay peninsula. Nasty-looking storm fronts showed the potential striking range of Singaporean planes and ships. A weather girl for warfare, Laura thought.

"Definitely, Vienna could not invasion against all that, la...."

"Singapore Air Force are flying up Nauru, to protect the launch sites!"

"I hope their giant lasers are not hitting their own fellow in orbit!"

"Those poor little Pacific Island fellows, they must bitterly regretting the day they started on Singapore client-state!"

Despite its awful news, the television was cheering every- one up. The sense of contact with the Net sent a quick, racing sense of community over them. Half circled, shoulder to shoulder before the TV, they were almost like a Rizome council session. Suvendra felt it, too-she looked up with her rust smile in hours.

Laura was discreetly silent. The crew were still chagrined at her for disappearing earlier. She had run off to get in touch with David and had come back unconscious in a cab. She had told them about meeting Sticky. Their first thought was to inform the Government-but the Government had all that news already. The spring guns, the pellets, the mines-the acting prime minister, Jeyaratnam, had announced all that on television. Warned the populace-and shut them up in their own homes.

Suvendra clapped her hands. "Council session?"

A young associate manned the television, off on the corner of the roof. The rest linked hands and briefly sang a Rizome song, in Malay. Amid the city's menacing silence, their raised voices felt good. It almost made Laura forget that

Rizome Singapore were now refugees skulking on the roof of their own property... .

"For me," Suvendra told them seriously, "I think we have done all we can. The Government is martial law now, isn't it?

Violence is coming, isn't it? Do any of us want to fight

Government? Hands?"

No one voted for violence. They'd already voted with their feet-by running upstairs to avoid the rebels.

Ali spoke up. "Could we escape the city?"

"Out to sea?" suggested Derveet hopefully.

They looked over the waterfront: the unmanned cargo ships, the giant idle cranes, the loading robots shut down by Anti-

Labourite longshoremen who had seized the control systems.

Out to sea were the skidding white plumes of navy hydrofoils on patrol.

"This isn't Grenada. They're not letting anyone go," Mr.

Suvendra said with finality. "They'd shoot at us."

"I agree," said Suvendra. "But we could demand arrest,

Ia. By the Government. "

The others looked gloomy.

"Here we are radicals," Suvendra told them. "We are economic democrats in authoritarian regime. It is Singapore reform we are demanding, but chance is spoilt, now. So the proper place for us in Singapore is jail."