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After a while, she mustered courage and looked out the wire-netted window. .
Flaming heat, flashbulb glare of sun, and dust. Round adobe huts-not even real adobe, just dried red mud-with ramshackle verandahs of plastic and tin. Filthy stretched rags throwing patches of shade. Trickles of smoke. The little domed huts were crowded thick as acne, an almighty slum stretching up slopes, down slopes, through gullies and trash heaps, as far as she could see. In the remote distance, a row of smokestacks gushed raw filth into the cloudless sky. A
smelter? A refinery?
She could see people. None of them moved: they crouched stu
'human shit, with vast explosive hordes of African flies. The flies were fierce and filthy and as big as beetles.
No paving. No ditches, no plumbing, no power. She saw a few klaxon speakers mounted on poles in the midst of the thickest slums. One rose over a fetid coffeehouse, a cobbled superhovel of plastic and crating. There were men in front of it, dozens of them, squatting on their haunches in the shade and drinking from ancient glass pop bottles and playing peb- ble games in the pitted dirt. Over their heads, the klaxon emitted a steady squawking rant in a language she couldn't recognize.
The men looked up as the van went past, guardedly, mo- tionless. Their clothes were caked with filth. And they were
American clothes: ragged souvenir T-shirts and checkered polyester pants and thick-heeled vinyl dance shoes decades out of, fashion and laced with bits of wire. They wore long turbans of bright quilted rag.
The van drove on, crunching through potholes, kicking up a miasma of dust. Her bladder was bursting. She relieved herself in a corner of the truck, the one that smelled worst.
The slums failed to end. They became, if anything, thicker and more ominous. She entered an area where the men were scarred and openly carried long knives on their belts, and had shaved heads and tattoos. A group of women in greasy burlap were wailing, without much enthusiasm, over a dead boy stretched out in the doorway of his hovel.
She spotted familiar bits and pieces of the outside world, her world, which had lost a grip on reality and swirled here into hell. Burlap bags, with fading blue stencil: hands in a friendly clasp and the legend in French and English: 100% TRITICALE
FLOUR, A GIFT TO THE PEOPLE OF MALI FROM THE PEOPLE OF CANADA.
A teenage boy wearing a Euro-Disney World T-shirt, with the slogan "Visit the Future!" Oil barrels, blackened with trash soot over curlicued Arabic. Pieces of a Korean pickup, plastic truck doors and windows painstakingly cemented into a wall of red mud. Then a foul, smoke-stained lodge or church, its long, rambling walls carefully outlined in a terrifying iconography of gri
The van drove for hours. She was in the middle of a major city, a metropolis. There were hundreds of thousands living here. The entire country, Mali, a huge place, bigger than
Texas-this was all that was left of it, this endless rat warren.
All other choices had been stolen by the African disaster. The drought survivors crowded into gigantic urban camps, like this one. She was in Bamako, capital of Mali.
The capital of the F.A.C.T. They were the secret police here, the people who ran the place. They were ru
In a sudden repellent flash of insight Laura understood how
FACT had casually carried out massacres. There was a sump of misery in this camp city big enough to choke the world.
She had always known it was bad in Africa, but she'd never known that life here meant so utterly little. She realized with a rush of fatalistic terror that her own life was simply too small to matter anymore. She was in hell now and they did things differently here.
At last they rolled past a barbed-wire fence, into a cleared area, dust and tarmac and skeletal watchtowers. Ahead-Laura's heart leapt---the familiar, friendly look of brown, walls of concretized sand. They were approaching a fat domed build- ing, much like her own Rizome Lodge in Galveston. It was much bigger, though. Efficiently built. Progressive and mod- em, the same techniques David had chosen.
Thinking of David was something so amazingly painful that she shut it off at once.
Then they rolled into the building, through its double walls of solid sand four feet thick, under cruel portcullises of welded iron.
The van stopped. A wait.
The European flung open the doors. "Out."
She stepped out into dazzling heat. She was in a bare arena, round baked-earth exercise yard surrounded by a twostory ring of brown fortress walls. The European led her to an iron hatchway, an armored door leading into the prison. Two guards loomed behind her. They went inside, into a hall lit by cheap sunlight pipes bracketed to the ceiling. "Showers," the
European said.
The word had an evil ring. Laura stopped in place. "I don't want to go to the showers."
"There's a toilet, too," the European offered.
She shook her head. The European looked over her shoul- der and nodded fractionally.
A club hit her from behind, at the juncture of her neck and shoulder. It was as if she'd been struck by lightning. Her entire right side went numb and she fell to her knees.
Then the shock faded and pain began to seep in. True pain, not the pastel thing she'd called "pain" in the past, but a sensation truly profound, biological. She couldn't believe that that was all, that she'd simply been hit with a stick. She could already feel it, changing her life.
"Get up," he said, in the same tired voice. She got up.
They took her to the showers.
There was a prison matron there. They stripped her, and the woman did a body-cavity search, the men examining
Laura's nakedness with distant professional interest. She was pushed into the shower and handed a cake of raw lye that stank of insecticide. The water was hard and briny and wouldn't lather. It shut off before she had rinsed..
She got out. Her clothes and shoes had been stolen. The prison matron jabbed her in the buttock with five cc's of yellow fluid. She felt it sink in and sting.
The European and his two goons left, and two female goons showed up. Laura was given trousers and shirt of striped black-and-white canvas, creased and rough. She put them on, trembling. Either the injection was begi
She kept thinking that there was going to come a time when she could take a stand and demand that they kill her with her dignity intact. But they didn't seem anxious to kill her; and she didn't feel anxious to die, and she was begi
The matron said something in Creole French and indicated the toilet. Laura shook her head. The matron looked at her as if she were an idiot, and shrugged, and made a note on her clipboard.
Then two female goons cuffed her hands behind her back.
One of them pulled a billy club, wrapped it cleverly through the metal chain of the old-fashioned handcuffs, and levered
Laura's arms up in their sockets until she was forced to double over. They then marched her out, steering her like a grocery cart, down the hall, and up narrow stairs barred at top and bottom. Then, on the upper floor, past a long series of iron doors equipped with sliding peepholes.