Ascendancies (25 page)

It was Friday night again. They were showing another free movie down in the park. Turner ignored it and called Vancouver.

“No video again?” Georgie said.

“No.”

“I'm glad you called, anyway. It's bad, Turner. The Taipei cousins are here. They're hovering around the old man like a pack of buzzards.”

“They're in good company, then.”

“Jesus, Turner! Don't say that kind of crap! Look, Honorable Grandfather's been asking about you every day. How soon can you get here?”

Turner looked in his notebook. “I've booked passage on a freighter to Labuan Island. That's Malaysian territory. I can get a plane there, a puddle-jumper to Manila. Then a Japan Air jet to Midway and another to Vanc. That puts me in at, uh, eight P.M. your time Monday.”

“Three days?”

“There are no planes here, Georgie.”

“All right, if that's the best you can do. It's too bad about this video. Look, I want you to call him at the hospital, okay? Tell him you're coming.”

“Now?” said Turner, horrified.

Georgie exploded. “I'm sick of doing your explaining, man! Face up to your goddamn obligations, for once! The least you can do is call him and play good boy grandson! I'm gonna call-forward you from here.”

“Okay, you're right,” Turner said. “Sorry, Georgie, I know it's been a strain.”

Georgie looked down and hit a key. White static blurred, a phone rang, and Turner was catapulted to his grandfather's bedside.

The old man was necrotic. His cheekbones stuck out like wedges, and his lips were swollen and blue. Stacks of monitors blinked beside his bed. Turner spoke in halting Mandarin. “Hello, Grandfather. It's your grandson, Turner. How are you?”

The old man fixed his horrible eyes on the screen. “Where is your picture, boy?”

“This is Borneo, Grandfather. They don't have modern telephones.”

“What kind of place is that? Have they no respect?”

“It's politics, Grandfather.”

Grandfather Choi scowled. A chill of terror went through Turner. Good God, he thought, I'm going to look like that when I'm old. His grandfather said, “I don't recall giving my permission for this.”

“It was just eight months, Grandfather.”

“You prefer these barbarians to your own family, is that it?”

Turner said nothing. The silence stretched painfully. “They're not barbarians,” he blurted at last.

“What's that, boy?”

Turner switched to English. “They're British Commonwealth, like Hong Kong was. Half of them are Chinese.”

Grandfather sneered and followed him to English. “Why they need you, then?”

“They need me,” Turner said tightly, “because I'm a trained engineer.”

His grandfather peered at the blank screen. He looked feeble suddenly, confused. He spoke Chinese. “Is this some sort of trick? My son's boy doesn't talk like that. What is that howling I hear?”

The movie was reaching a climax downstairs. Visceral crunches and screaming. It all came boiling up inside Turner then. “What's it sound like, old man? A Triad gang war?”

His grandfather turned pale. “That's it, boy. Is all over for you.”

“Great,” Turner said, his heart racing. “Maybe we can be honest, just this once.”

“My money bought you diapers, boy.”

“Fang-pa,”
Turner said. “Dog's-fart. You made our lives hell with that money. You turned my dad into a drunk and my brother into an ass-kisser. That's blood money from junkies, and I wouldn't take it if you begged me!”

“You talk big, boy, but you don't show the face,” the old man said. He raised one shrunken fist, his bandaged forearm trailing tubes. “If you were here I give you a good beating.”

Turner laughed giddily. He felt like a hero. “You old fraud! Go on, give the money to Uncle's kids. They're gonna piss on your altar every day, you stupid old bastard.”

“They're good children, not like you.”

“They hate your guts, old man. Wise up.”

“Yes, they hate me,” the old man admitted gloomily. The truth seemed to fill him with grim satisfaction. He nestled his head back into his pillow like a turtle into its shell. “They all want more money, more, more, more. You want it, too, boy, don't lie to me.”

“Don't need it,” Turner said airily. “They don't use money here.”

“Barbarians,” his grandfather said. “But you need it when you come home.”

“I'm staying here,” Turner said. “I like it here. I'm free here, understand? Free of the money and free of the family and free of you!”

“Wicked boy,” his grandfather said. “I was like you once. I did bad things to be free.” He sat up in bed, glowering. “But at least I helped my family.”

“I could never be like you,” Turner said.

“You wait till they come after you with their hands out,” his grandfather said, stretching out one wrinkled palm. “The end of the world couldn't hide you from them.”

“What do you mean?”

His grandfather chuckled with an awful satisfaction. “I leave you all the money, Mr. Big Freedom. You see what you do then when you're in my shoes.”

“I don't want it!” Turner shouted. “I'll give it all to charity!”

“No, you won't,” his grandfather said. “You'll think of your duty to your family, like I had to. From now on
you
take care of them, Mr. Runaway, Mr. High and Mighty.”

“I won't!” Turner said. “You can't!”

“I'll die happy now,” his grandfather said, closing his eyes. He lay back on the pillow and grinned feebly. “It worth it just to see the look on their faces.”

“You can't make me!” Turner yelled. “I'll never go back, understand? I'm staying—”

The line went dead.

Turner shut down his phone and stowed it away.

He had to talk to Brooke. Brooke would know what to do. Somehow, Turner would play off one old man against the other.

Turner still felt shocked by the turn of events, but beneath his confusion he felt a soaring confidence. At last he had faced down his grandfather. After that, Brooke would be easy. Brooke would find some loophole in the Bruneian government that would protect him from the old man's legacy. Turner would stay safe in Brunei. It was the best place in the world to frustrate the banks of the Global Net.

But Brooke was still on the river, on his boat.

Turner decided to meet Brooke the moment he docked in town. He couldn't wait to tell Brooke about his decision to stay in Brunei for good. He was feverish with excitement. He had wrenched his life out of the program now; everything was different. He saw everything from a fresh new angle, with a
bricoleur's
eyes. His whole life was waiting for a retrofit.

He took the creaking elevator to the ground floor. In the park outside, the movie crowd was breaking up. Turner hitched a ride in the pedicab of some teenagers from a waterfront
kampong
. He took the first shift pedaling, and got off a block away from the dock Brooke used.

The cracked concrete quays were sheltered under a long rambling roof of tin and geodesic bamboo. Half-a-dozen fishing smacks floated at the docks, beside an elderly harbor dredge. Brooke's first boat, a decrepit pleasure cruiser, was in permanent dry dock with its diesel engine in pieces.

The headman of the dock
kampong
was a plump, motherly Malay grandmother. She and her friends were having a Friday night quilting bee, repairing canvas sails under the yellow light of an alcohol lamp.

Brooke was not expected back until morning. Turner was determined to wait him out. He had not asked permission to sleep out from his
kampong
, but after a long series of garbled translations he established that the locals would vouch for him later. He wandered away from the chatter of Malay gossip and found a dark corner.

He fell back on a floury pile of rice bags, watching from the darkness, unable to sleep. Whenever his eyes closed, his brain ran a loud interior monologue, rehearsals for his talk with Brooke.

The women worked on, wrapped in the lamp's mild glow. Innocently, they enjoyed themselves, secure in their usefulness. Yet Turner knew machines could have done the sewing faster and easier. Already, through fishing smacks, as he watched, some corner of his mind pulled the task to computerized pieces, thinking: simplify, analyze, reduce.

But to what end? What was it really for, all that tech he'd learned? He'd become an engineer for reasons of his own. Because it offered a way out for him, because the gift for it had always been there in his brain and hands and eyes… Because of the rewards it offered him. Freedom, independence, money, the rewards of the West.

But what control did he have? Rewards could be snatched away without warning. He'd seen others go to the wall when their specialties ran dry. Education and training were no defense. Not today, when a specialist's knowledge could be programmed into a computerized expert system.

Was he really any safer than these Bruneians? A thirty-minute phone call could render these women obsolete—but a society that could do their work with robots would have no use for their sails. Within their little greenhouse, their miniature world of gentle technologies, they had more control than he did.

People in the West talked about the “technical elite”—and Turner knew it was a damned lie. Technology roared on, running full-throttle on the world's last dregs of oil, but no one was at the wheel, not really. Massive institutions, both governments and corporations, fumbled for control, but couldn't understand. They had no hands-on feel for tech and what it meant, for the solid feeling in a good design.

The “technical elite” were errand boys. They didn't decide how to study, what to work on, where they could be most useful, or to what end. Money decided that. Technicians were owned by the abstract ones and zeros in bankers' microchips, paid out by silk-suit hustlers who'd never touched a wrench. Knowledge wasn't power, not really, not for engineers. There were too many abstractions in the way.

But the gift was real—Brooke had told him so, and now Turner realized it was true. That was the reason for engineering. Not for money, because there was more money in shuffling paper. Not for power; that was in management. For the gift itself.

He leaned back in darkness, smelling tar and rice dust. For the first time, he truly felt he understood what he was doing. Now that he had defied his family and his past, he saw his work in a new light. It was something bigger than just his private escape hatch. It was a worthy pursuit on its own merits: a thing of dignity.

It all began to fall into place for him then, bringing with it a warm sense of absolute Tightness. He yawned, nestling his head into the burlap.

He would live here and help them. Brunei was a new world, a world built on a human scale, where people mattered. No, it didn't have the flash of a hot CAD-CAM establishment with its tons of goods and reams of printout; it didn't have that technical sweetness and heroic scale.

But it was still good work. A man wasn't a Luddite because he worked for people instead of abstractions. The green technologies demanded
more
intelligence, more reason, more of the engineer's true gift. Because they went against the blind momentum of a dead century, with all its rusting monuments of arrogance and waste…

Turner squirmed drowsily into the scrunchy comfort of the rice bags, in the fading grip of his epiphany. Within him, some unspoken knot of division and tension eased, bringing a new and deep relief. As always, just before sleep, his thoughts turned to Seria. Somehow, he would deal with that too. He wasn't sure just how yet, but it could wait. It was different now that he was staying. Everything was working out. He was on a roll.

Just as he drifted off, he half-heard a thrashing scuffle as a
kampong
cat seized and tore a rat behind the bags.

A stevedore shook him awake next morning. They needed the rice. Turner sat up, his mouth gummy with hangover. His T-shirt and jeans were caked with dust.

Brooke had arrived. They were loading provisions aboard his ship: bags of rice, dried fruit, compost fertilizer. Turner, smiling, hoisted a bag over his shoulder and swaggered up the ramp on board.

Brooke oversaw the loading from a canvas deck chair. He was unshaven, nervously picking at a gaudy acoustic guitar. He started violently when Turner dropped the bag at his feet. “Thank God you're here!” he said. “Get out of sight!” He grabbed Turner's arm and hustled him across the deck into the greenhouse.

Turner stumbled along reluctantly. “What the hell? How'd you know I was coming here?”

Brooke shut the greenhouse door. He pointed through a dew-streaked pane at the dock. “See that little man with the black songkak hat?”

“Yeah?”

“He's from the Ministry of Islamic Banking. He just came from your
kampong
, looking for you. Big news from the gnomes of Zurich. You're hot property now, kid.”

Turner folded his arms defiantly. “I've made my decision, Tuan Councilor. I threw it over. Everything. My family, the West…I don't want that money. I'm turning it down! I'm staying.”

Brooke ignored him, wiping a patch of glass with his sleeve. “If they get their hooks into your cash flow, you'll never get out of here.” Brooke glanced at him, alarmed. “You didn't sign anything, did you?”

Turner scowled. “You haven't heard a word I've said, have you?”

Brooke tugged at his hearing aid. “What? These damn batteries…Look, I got spares in my cabin. We'll check it out, have a talk.” He waved Turner back, opened the greenhouse door slightly, and shouted a series of orders to the crew in their Dayak dialect. “Come on,” he told Turner.

They left by a second door, and sneaked across a patch of open deck, then down a flight of plywood steps into the center hull.