Ascendancies (24 page)

He crept over the side, spotted Brooke's white suit in a patch of moonlight, and followed him. Brooke skirted the edge of the ruins and took a trail into the jungle, full of ominous vines and the promise of snakes. Beneath a spongy litter of leaves and moss, the trail was asphalt. It had been a highway, once.

Turner shadowed Brooke closely, realizing gratefully that the deaf old man couldn't hear the crunching of his boots. The trail led uphill, into the interior. Brooke cursed good-naturedly as a group of grunting hogs burst across the trail. Half a mile later he rested for ten long minutes in the rusting hulk of a Land-Rover, while vicious gnats feasted on Turner's exposed neck and hands.

They rounded a hill and came across an encampment. Faint moonlight glittered off twelve-foot barbed wire and four dark watchtowers. The undergrowth had been burned back for yards around. There were barracks inside.

Brooke walked nonchalantly to the gate. The place looked dead. Turner crept nearer, sheltered by darkness.

The gate opened. Turner crawled forward between two bushes, craning his neck.

A watchtower spotlight clacked on and framed him in dazzling light from forty yards away. Someone shouted at him through a bullhorn, in Malay. Turner lurched to his feet, blinded, and put his hands high. “Don't shoot!” he yelled, his voice cracking. “Hold your fire!”

The light flickered out. Turner stood blinking in darkness, then watched four little red fireflies crawling across his chest. He realized what they were and reached higher, his spine icy. Those little red fireflies were laser sights for automatic rifles.

The guards were on him before his eyesight cleared. Dim forms in jungle camo. He saw the wicked angular magazines of their rifles, leveled at his chest. Their heads were bulky: they wore night-sight

They handcuffed him and hustled him forward toward the camp. “You guys speak English?” Turner said. No answer. “I'm a Canadian, okay?”

Brooke waited, startled, beyond the gate. “Oh,” he said. “It's you. What sort of dumbshit idea was this, Turner?”

“A really bad one,” Turner said sincerely.

Brooke spoke to the guards in Malay. They lowered their guns; one freed his hands. They stalked off unerringly back into the darkness.

“What
is
this place?” Turner said.

Brooke turned his flashlight on Turner's face. “What does it look like, jerk? It's a political prison.” His voice was so cold from behind glare that Turner saw, in his mind's eye, the sudden flash of a telegram: DEAR MADAM CHOI, REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON STEPPED ON A VIPER IN THE JUNGLES OF BORNEO AND YOUR BOOTS DIDN'T SAVE HIM…

Brooke spoke quietly. “Did you think Brunei was all sweetness and light? It's a nation, damn it, not your toy train set. All right, stick by me and keep your mouth shut.”

Brooke waved his flashlight. A guard emerged from the darkness and led them around the corner of the wooden barracks, which was set above the damp ground on concrete blocks. They walked up a short flight of steps. The guard flicked an exterior switch, and the cell inside flashed into harsh light. The guard peered through close-set bars in the heavy ironbound door, then unlocked it with a creak of hinges.

Brooke murmured thanks and carefully shook the guard's hand. The guard smiled below the ugly night sight goggles and slipped his hand inside his camo jacket.

“Come on,” Brooke said. They stepped into the cell. The door clanked shut behind them.

A dark-skinned old man was blinking wearily in the sudden light. He sat up in his iron cot and brushed aside yellowed mosquito netting, reaching for a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles on the floor. He wore gray-striped prison canvas: drawstring trousers and a rough, buttoned blouse. He slipped the spectacles carefully over his ears and looked up. “Ah,” he said. “Jimmy.”

It was a bare cell: wooden floor, a chamber pot, a battered aluminum pitcher and basin. Two wire shelves above the bed held books in English and a curlicued alphabet Turner didn't recognize.

“This is Dr. Vikram Moratuwa,” Brooke said. “The founder of the Partai Ekolojasi. This is Turner Choi, a prying young idiot.”

“Ah,” said Moratuwa. “Are we to be cell mates, young man?”

“He's not under arrest,” Brooke said. “Yet.” He opened his valise. “I brought you the books.”

“Excellent,” said Moratuwa, yawning. He had lost most of his teeth. “Ah, Mumford, Florman, and Levi-Strauss. Thank you, Jimmy.”

“I think it's okay,” Brooke said, noticing Turner's stricken look. “The sultan winks at these little charity visits, if I'm discreet. I think I can talk you out of trouble, even though you put your foot in it.”

“Jimmy is my oldest friend in Brunei,” said Moratuwa. “There is no harm in two old men talking.”

“Don't you believe it,” Brooke said. “This man is a dangerous radical. He wanted to dissolve the monarchy. And him a privy councilor, too.”

“Jimmy, we did not come here to be aristocrats. That is not Right Action.”

Turner recognized the term. “You're a Buddhist?”

“Yes. I was with Sarvodaya Shramadana, the Buddhist technological movement. Jimmy and I met in Sri Lanka, where the Sarvodaya was born.”

“Sri Lanka's a nice place to do videos,” Brooke said. “I was still in the rock biz then, doing production work. Finance. But it was getting stale. Then I dropped in on a Sarvodaya rally, heard him speak. It was damned exciting!” Brooke grinned at the memory. “He was in trouble there, too. Even thirty years ago, his preaching was a little too pure for anyone's comfort.”

“We were not put on this earth to make things comfortable for ourselves,” Moratuwa chided. He glanced at Turner. “Brunei flourishes now, young man. We have the techniques, the expertise, the experience. It is time to fling open the doors and let Right Action spread to the whole earth! Brunei was our greenhouse, but the fields are the greater world outside.”

Brooke smiled. “Choi is building the boats.”

“Our Ocean Arks?” said Moratuwa. “Ah, splendid.”

“I sailed here today on the first model.”

“What joyful news. You have done us a great service, Mr. Choi.”

“I don't understand,” Turner said. “They're just sailboats.”

Brooke smiled. “To you, maybe. But imagine you're a Malaysian dock worker living on fish meal and single-cell protein. What're you gonna think of a ship that costs nothing to build, nothing to run, and gives away free food?”

“Oh,” said Turner slowly.

“Your sailboats will carry our Green message around the globe,” Moratuwa said. “We teachers have a saying: ‘I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand.' Mere preaching is only words. When people see our floating
kampongs
tied up at docks around the world, then they can touch and smell and live our life aboard those ships, then they will truly understand our Way.”

“You really think that'll work?” Turner said.

“That is how we started here,” Moratuwa said. “We had textbooks on the urban farm, textbooks developed in your own West, simple technologies anyone can use. Jimmy's building was our first Green
kampong
, our demonstration model. We found many to help us. Unemployment was severe, as it still is throughout the world. But idle hands can put in skylights, haul nightsoil, build simple windmills. It is not elegant, but it is food and community and pride.”

“It was a close thing between our Partai and the Moslem extremists,” Brooke said. “They wanted to burn every trace of the West—we wanted to retrofit. We won. People could see and touch the future we offered. Food tastes better than preaching.”

“Yes, those poor Moslem fellows,” said Moratuwa. “Still here after so many years. You must talk to the sultan about an amnesty, Jimmy.”

“They shot his brother in front of his family,” Brooke said. “Seria saw it happen. She was only a child.”

Turner felt a spasm of pain for her. She had never told him.

But Moratuwa shook his head. “The royals went too far in protecting their power. They tried to bottle up our Way, to control it with their royal
adat
. But they cannot lock out the world forever, and lock up those who want fresh air. They only imprison themselves. Ask your Seria.” He smiled. “Buddha was a prince also, but he left his palace when the world called out.”

Brooke laughed sourly. “Old troublemakers are stubborn.” He looked at Turner. “This man's still loyal to our old dream, all that wild-eyed stuff that's buried under twenty years. He could be out of here with a word, if he promised to be cool and follow the
adat
. It's a crime to keep him in here. But the royal family aren't saints, they're politicians. They can't afford the luxury of innocence.”

Turner thought it through, sadly. He realized now that he had found the ghost behind those huge old Green Party wall posters, those peeling Whole Earth sermons buried under sports ads and Malay movie stars. This was the man who had saved Seria's family—and this was where they had put him. “The sultan's not very grateful,” Turner said.

“That's not the problem. You see, my friend here doesn't really give a damn about Brunei. He wants to break the greenhouse doors off, and never mind the trouble to the locals. He's not satisfied to save one little postage-stamp country. He's got the world on his conscience.”

Moratuwa smiled indulgently. “And my friend Jimmy has the world in his computer terminal. He is a wicked Westerner. He has kept the simple natives pure, while he is drenched in whiskey and the Net.”

Brooke winced. “Yeah. Neither one of us really belongs here. We're both goddamn outside agitators, is all. We came here together. His words, my money—we thought we could change things everywhere. Brunei was going to be our laboratory. Brunei was just small enough, and desperate enough, to listen to a couple of crackpots.” He tugged at his hearing aid and glared at Turner's smile.

“You're no prize either, Choi. Y'know, I was wrong about you. I'm glad you're leaving.”

“Why?” Turner said, hurt.

“You're too straight, and you're too much trouble. I checked you out through the Net a long time ago—I know all about your granddad the smack merchant and all that Triad shit. I thought you'd be cool. Instead you had to be the knight in shining armor—bloody robot, that's what you are.”

Turner clenched his fists. “Sorry I didn't follow your program, you old bastard.”

“She's like a daughter to me,” Brooke said. “A quick bump-and-grind, okay, we all need it, but you had to come on like Prince Charming. Well, you're getting on that chopper tomorrow, and it's back to Babylon for you, kid.”

“Yeah?” Turner said defiantly. “Or else, huh? You'd put me in this place?”

Brooke shook his head. “I won't have to. Think it over, Mr. Choi. You know damn well where you belong.”

It was a grim trip back. Seria caught his mood at once. When she saw his Bad Cop scowl, her morning-after smile died like a moth in a killing bottle. She knew it was over. They didn't say much. The roar of the copter blades would have drowned it anyway.

The shipyard was crammed with the framework of a massive Ocean Ark. It had been simple to scale the process up with the programs he'd downloaded. The work crew was overjoyed, but Turner's long-expected triumph had turned to ashes for him. He printed out a letter of resignation and took it to the minister of industry.

The minister's
kampong
was still expanding. They had webbed off a whole city block under great tentlike sheets of translucent plastic, which hung from the walls of tall buildings like giant dew-soaked spiderwebs. Women and children were casually ripping up the streets with picks and hoes, revealing long-smothered topsoil. The sewers had been grubbed up and diverted into long troughs choked with watercress.

The minister lived in a long flimsy tent of cotton batik. He was catching an afternoon snooze in a woven hammock anchored to a high-rise wall and strung to an old lamppost.

Turner woke him up.

“I see,” the minister yawned, slipping on his sandals. “Illness in the family, is it? You have my sympathies. When may we expect you back?”

Turner shook his head. “The job's done. Those 'bots will be pasting up ships from now till doomsday.”

“But you still have two months to run. You should oversee the line until we're sure we have the beetles out.”

“Bugs,” Turner said. “There aren't any.” He knew it was true. Building ships that simple was monkey-work. Humans could have done it.

“There's plenty of other work here for a man of your talents.”

“Hire someone else.”

The minister frowned. “I shall have to complain to Kyocera.”

“I'm quitting them, too.”

“Quitting your multinational? At this early stage in your career? Is that wise?”

Turner closed his eyes and summoned his last dregs of patience. “Why should I care? Tuan Minister, I've never even
seen
them.”

Turner cut a last deal with the bootleg boys down on Floor 4 and sneaked into his room with an old gas can full of rice beer. The little screen on the end of the nozzle was handy for filtering out the thickest dregs. He poured himself a long one and looked around the room. He had to start packing.

He began stripping the walls and tossing souvenirs onto his bed, pausing to knock back long shuddery glugs of warm rice beer. Packing was painfully easy. He hadn't brought much. The room looked pathetic. He had another beer.

His bonsai tree was dying. There was no doubt of it now. The cramping of its tiny pot was murderous. “You poor little bastard,” Turner told it, his voice thick with self-pity. On impulse, he broke its pot with his boot. He carried the tree gently across the room, and buried its gnarled roots in the rich black dirt of the window box. “There,” he said, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Now grow, dammit!”