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.They ate scop.Various hideous forms of it.Soups.Nutmeg-flavored mock chicken breast.Little fricasseed things with toothpicks in them.Eric King didn’t wait through lunch.He signed offline, leaving them with Mrs.Rodriguez.“We are by no means up to capacity,” Captain Blaize announced in a clipped Caribbean drawl.“But we come, by and by, a little closer to the production quotas each and every month.By this action, we relieve the strain on Grenada’s productive soil … and its erosion … and the overcrowding as well, you understand, Mr.Webster.…” Blaize’s voice drifted through a singsong cadence, causing strange waves of glazed ennui to course through Laura’s brain.“Imagine, Mr.Webster, what a fleet of ships, like this, could do, for the plight of Mother Africa.”“Yeah.I mean, I grasp the implications,” David said, digging into his scop with gusto.Light background music was playing.Laura listened with half an ear.Some kind of slick premillennium crooner on vocals, lots of syrupy strings and jazzy razzing saxophones … “(something something) for you, dear … buh buh buh boooh …” She could almost identify the singer … from old movies.Cosby, that was it.Bing Cosby.Now digitizing effects started creeping in and something awful began to happen.Suddenly a bandersnatch had jumped into Cosby’s throat.His jovial white-guy Anglo good vibes stretched like electric taffy—arrooooh, werewolf noises.Now Bing was making ghastly hub hub hub backward croonings, like a sucking chest wound.The demented noise was filtering around the diners but no one was paying attention.Laura turned to the young three-pen cadre on her left.The guy was waving his fingers over Loretta’s tote and looked up guiltily when she asked.“The music? We call it didge-Ital … dig-ital, seen, D.J.Ital.… Mash it up right on the ship.” Yeah.They were doing something awful to poor old Bing while he wasn’t looking.He sounded like his head was made of sheet metal.Now Blaize and Andrei were lecturing David about money.The Grenadian rouble.Grenada had a closed, cash-free economy; everybody on the island had personal credit cards, drawn on the bank.This policy kept that “evil global currency,” the ecu, out of local circulation.And that “razored off the creeping tentacles” of the Net’s “financial and cultural imperialism.”Laura listened to their crude P.R.with sour amusement.They wouldn’t crank out this level of rhetoric unless they were trying to hide a real weakness, she thought.It was clear that the Bank kept the whole population’s credit transactions on file, just so they could look over everybody’s shoulders.But that was Orwell stuff.Even bad old Mao and Stalin couldn’t make that kind of crap work out.David raised his brows innocently and asked about “left-hand payments,” an old tag line from East Bloc premillennium days.Andrei got a stiff and virtuous look on his face.Laura hid her smile with a forkful of mock carrots.She’d bet anything that a wad of paper ecu, under the table, would buy the average Grenadian body and soul.Yeah, it was just like those old-time Russki hustlers, who used to pester tourists in Moscow for dollars, back when there were dollars.Big fleas had little fleas, big black markets had little black markets.Funny!Laura felt pleased, sure she was on to something.Tonight she’d have to write Debra Emerson in Atlanta, on an encrypted line, and tell her: yeah, Debra, here’s a place to stick a crowbar.Debra’d know how, too: it was just like bad old CIA work before the Abolition.… What did they used to call it? Destabilization.“It’s not like the Warsaw Pact, before openness,” continued Andrei, shaking his handsome blond head.“Our island is more like little OPEC country—Kuwait, Abu Dhabi.… Too much easy money eats the social values, makes life like Disneyland, all fat Cadillacs and the cartoon mouses … empty, meaningless.”Blaize smiled a little, his eyes half closed, like a dreadlocked Buddha.“Without Movement discipline,” he rumbled smoothly, “our money would flow back, like water downhill … from the Third World periphery, down to the centers of the Net.Your ‘free market’ cheats us; it’s a Babylon slave market in truth! Babylon would drain away our best people, too … they would go to where the phones already work, where the streets are already paved.They want the infrastructure, where the Net is woven thickest, and it’s easiest to prosper.It is a vicious cycle, making Third World sufferation.”“But today the adventure is here!” Andrei broke in, leaning forward.“No more frontiers in your America, David, my friend! Today it’s all lawyers and bureaucrats and ‘social impact statements’.…”Andrei sneered and slapped his fork on the tabletop.“Huge prison walls of paperwork to crush the life and hope from modern pioneers! Just as ugly, just such a crime, as the old Berlin Wall, David.Only more clever, with better public relations.” He glanced at Laura, sidelong.“Scientists and engineers, and architects, too, yes—we brothers, David, who do the world’s true work—where is our freedom? Where, eh?”Andrei paused, tossing his head to flick back a loose wing of blond hair.Suddenly he had the dramatic look of an orator on a roll, a man drawing inspiration from deep wells of sincerity.“We have no freedom! We cannot follow our dreams, our visions.Governments and corporations break us to their harness! For them, we make only colored toothpaste, softer toilet paper, bigger TVs to stupefy the masses!” He chopped air with his hands
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