"Go on," she said.
Our fathers had sweet milk and dates,
We have only nettles and thorns.
Why do we sufffer like this?
Is it the end of the world?
No, because we are not evil men,
No, because now we have tisma.
We are blacksmiths who have secret magic,
We are silversmiths who see the past and future.
In the past this was a rich and green land,
Now it is rock and. dust.
Gresham paused, watching the Tuaregs. Two rose and began dancing, their outstretched arms curling and waving, their sandaled feet stamping in time. It was slow, waltzlike dancing, elegant, elegiac. The singer rose to his feet again.
"Now comes the good part," Gresham said.
But where there is rock, there can be grass,
Where there is grass, the rain comes.
The roots of grass will hold the rain,
The leaves of grass will tame the sandstorm.
But we were the enemies of grass,
That is why we suffer.
What our cows did not eat, the sheep ate.
What the sheep refused, the goats consumed.
What the goats left behind, the camels devoured.
Now we must be the friends of grass,
We must apologize to it and treat it kindly.
Its enemies are our enemies.
We must kill the cow and the sheep,
We must butcher the goat and behead the camel.
For a thousand years we loved our herds,
For a thousand years we must praise the grass.
We will eat the tisma food to live,
We will buy Iron Camels from GoMotion
Unlimited in Santa Clara California.
Gresham folded his arms. The singer continued. "There's a lot more," Gresham said, "but that's the gist of it."
The question was obvious. "Did you write it for them?"
"No," he said proudly. "It's an old song." He paused.
"Retrofitted."
"Yeah.'
"A few of this crowd may join us. A few of the few may stay. It's a hard life in the desert." He looked at her. "I'm gone in the morning."
"Tomorrow? That soon?"
"It has to be that way."
The cruelty of it hurt her badly. Not his cruelty but the pure cruelty of necessity. She knew immediately that she would never see him again. She felt lacerated, relieved, panicky.
"Well, you did it, didn't you?" she said hoarsely. "You rescued me and you saved my friend's life." She tried to embrace him.
He backed off. "No, not out here-not in front of them."
He took her elbow. "Let's go inside."
He led her back into the dome. The guards were still there, patrolling. Against thieves, she thought. They were afraid of thieves and vandals from the camp. Beggars. It seemed so pathetic that she began weeping.
Gresham flicked on the screen of his computer. Amber light flooded the tent. He returned to the door of the dome, spoke to the guards. One of them said something to him in a sharp, high-pitched voice and began laughing. Gresham swung the door shut, sealed it with a clamp.
He saw her tears. "What's all this?"
"You, me. The world. Everything." She wiped her cheek on her sleeve. "Those camp people have nothing. Even though you're trying to help them, they'd steal all this stuff of yours, if they could."
"Ah," Gresham said, lightly. "That's what we high-falutin'
cultural meddlers refer to as `the vital level of corruption.' "
"You don't have to talk that way to me. Now that I can see what you're trying to do."
"Oh, Lord," Gresham said unhappily. He stalked across the dome in the mellow light of the monitor and gathered an armload of burlap bags. He lugged them next to his screen and terminal and spread them for pillows. "Come on, sit here with me."
She joined him. The pillows had a pleasant, resinous smell.
They were full of grass seed. She saw that some were already half empty. They'd been sowing the grass in the gullies as they ran from pursuit.
"Don't get to thinking I'm too much like you," he said.
"Honest and sweet and wishing everybody the best... . I grant you good intentions, but intentions don't count for much. Corruption-that's what counts."
He meant it. They were sitting together inches apart, but something was eating at him so badly that he wouldn't look at her. "What you just said-it doesn't make any sense to me."
"I was in Miami once," he said. "A long time ago. The sky was pink! I stopped this rudie on the boardwalk, I said: looks like you got some bad particulate problems here. He told me the sky was full of Africa. And it was true!. It was the harmattan, the sandstorms. Topsoil from the Sahara, blown right across the Atlantic. And I said to myself: there, that place, that's your home."
He looked at her, into her eyes. "You know when it really got bad here? When they tried to help. With medicine. And irrigation. They sank deep wells, with sweet, flowing water, and of course the nomads settled there. So instead of moving their herds on, leaving the pastures a chance to recover, they ate everything down to bare rock, for miles around every well. And the eight, nine children that African women have borne from time immemorial-they all lived. It wasn't that the world didn't care. They struggled heroically, for gen- erations, selflessly and nobly. To achieve an atrocity."
"That's too complicated for me, Gresham. It's perverse!"
"You're grateful to me, because you think I saved you.
The hell. We did our best to kill. everyone in that convoy. We raked that truck with machine-gun fire, three times. I don't know how the hell you lived."
" `Fortunes of war
"I love war, Laura. I enjoy it, like the F.A.C.T. Them, they enjoy murdering rag-heads with robots. Me, I'm more visceral. Somewhere inside me, I wanted Armageddon, and this is as close as it ever got. Where the Earth is blasted and all the sickness comes to a head."
He leaned closer. "But that's not all of it. I'm not innocent enough to let chaos alone. I stink of the Net, Laura. Of power and planning and data, and the Western method, and the pure inability to let anything alone. Ever. Even if it destroys my own freedom. The Net lost Africa once, blew it so badly that it went bad and wild, but the Net will get it back, someday.
Green and pleasant and controlled, and just like everywhere else. "
"So I win, and you lose-is. that what you're telling me?
That we're enemies? Maybe we are enemies, in some abstract way that's all in your head. But as people, we're friends, aren't we? And I'd never hurt you if I could help it."
"You can't help it. You were hurting me even before I knew you existed." He leaned back. "Maybe my abstractions aren't your abstractions, so I'll give you some of your own.
How do you think I financed all this? Grenada. They were my biggest backers. Winston Stubbs... now there was a man with vision. We didn't always see eye to eye, but we were allies. It hurt a lot to lose him."
She was shocked. "I remember.... They said he gave money to terrorist groups."
"I haven't been picky. I can't afford to be-this project of mine, it's all Net stuff, money, and money's corruption is in the very heart of it. The Tuaregs have nothing to sell, they're
Saharan nomads, destitute. They don't have anything the Net wants-so I beg and scrape. A few rich Arabs, nostalgic for the desert while they tool around in their limousines.... Arms dealers, not many of those left I even took money from FACT, back in the old days, before the Countess went batshit. "
"Katje told me that! That it's a woman who runs FACT.
The Countess! Is it true?"
He was surprised, sidetracked. "She doesn't `run it,' ex- actly, and she's not really a countess, that's just her nom de guerre... . But, yeah, I knew her, in the old days. I knew her very well, when we were younger. As well as I know you."
"You were lovers?"