Ascendancies

by Bruce Sterling

  The minister, whooping in triumph, hauled hard on his line. A fat, spotted fish broke the surface, flopping on the hook. Turner decided to break the rules and to hell with it.

  The local neighborhood organization, the kampong, was showing a free movie in the little park fourteen stories below Turner’s window. Bright images crawled against the bleak white Bauhaus wall of a neighboring high-rise.

  Turner peered down through the blinds. He had been watching the flick all night as he finished his illegal tinkering.

  The Bruneians, like Malays everywhere, adored ghost stories. The film’s protagonist, or chief horror (Turner wasn’t sure which), was an acrobatic monkey-demon with razor-sharp forearms. It had burst into a depraved speakeasy and was slaughtering drunkards with a tremendous windmilling flurry of punches, kicks, and screeches. Vast meaty sounds of combat, like colliding freight trains packed with beef, drifted faintly upward.

  Turner sat before his bootleg keyboard, and sighed. He’d known it would come to this ever since the Bruneians had confiscated his phone at customs. For five months he’d politely tried to work his way around it. Now he had only three months left. He was out of time and out of patience.

  The robots were okay, under caked layers of yellowing grease. They’d been roped down under tarps for years. But the software manuals were a tattered ruin.

  Just thinking about it gave Turner a cold sinking feeling. It was a special, private terror that had dogged him since childhood. It was the fear he felt when he had to confront his grandfather.

  He thought of his grandfather’s icy and pitiless eyes, fixed on him with that “Hong Kong Bad Cop” look. In the 1970s, Turner’s grandfather had been one of the infamous “millionaire sergeants” of the Hong Kong police, skimming the cream of the Burmese heroin trade. He’d emigrated in the Triad bribery scandals of 1973.

  After forty-seven years of silk suits and first-class flights between his mansions in Taipei and Vancouver, Grandfather Choi still had that cold eye and that grim shakedown look. It was an evil memory for Turner, of being weighed and found wanting.

  The documentation was hopeless, crumbling and mildewed, alive with silverfish. The innocent Bruneians hadn’t realized that the information it held was the linchpin of the whole enterprise. The sultanate had bought the factory long ago, with the last gush of Brunei’s oil money, as a stylish, doomed gesture in Western industrial chic. Somehow, robots had never really caught on in Borneo.

  But Turner had to seize this chance. He had to prove that he could make it on his own, without Grandfather Choi and the stifling weight of his money.

  For days, Turner had snooped around down on the waterfront, with its cubbyholed rows of Chinese junkshops. It was Turner’s favorite part of Brunei Town, a white-elephant’s graveyard of dead tech. The wooden and bamboo shops were lined with dead, blackened televisions like decaying teeth.

  There, he’d set about assembling a bootleg modern phone. He’d rescued a water-stained keyboard and screen from one of the shops. His modem and recorder came from work. On the waterfront he’d found a Panamanian freighter whose captain would illegally time-share on his satellite navigation dish.

  Brunei Town was full of phone booths that no one ever seemed to use, grimy old glass-and-plastic units labeled in Malay, English, and Mandarin. A typical payphone stood on the street outside Turner’s high-rise. It was an old twentieth-century job with a coin-feed and a rotary dial, and no videoscreen.

  In the dead of night he’d crept down there to install a radio link to his apartment on the fourteenth floor. Someone might trace his illegal call back to the phone booth, but no farther. With the radio link, his own apartment would stay safe.

  But when he’d punch-jacked the payphone’s console off, he’d found that it already had a bootleg link hooked up. It was in fine working order, too. He’d seen then that he wasn’t alone, and that Brunei, despite all its rhetoric about the Neo-Colonial World Information Order, was not entirely free of the global communications net. Brunei was wired too, just like the West, but the net had gone underground.

  All those abandoned payphones had taken on a new and mildly sinister significance for him since that discovery, but he wasn’t going to kick. All his plans were riding on his chance to get through.

  Now he was ready. He rechecked the satellite guide in the back of his ASME handbook. Arabsat 7 was up, in its leisurely low-orbit ramble over the tropics. Turner dialed from his apartment down through the payphone outside, then patched in through the Panamanian dish. Through Arabsat he hooked up to an American geosynchronous sat and down into the American ground net. From there he direct-dialed his brother’s house.

  Georgie Choi was at breakfast in Vancouver, dressed in a French-cuffed pinstripe shirt and varsity sweater. Behind him, Turner’s sleek sister-in-law, Marjorie, presided over a table crowded with crisp linen napkins and silver cutlery. Turner’s two young nieces decorously spread jam on triangles of toast.

  “Is it you, Turner?” Georgie said. “I’m not getting any video.”

  “I couldn’t get a camera,” Turner said. “I’m in Brunei—phone quarantine, remember? I had to bootleg it just to get sound.”

  A monsoon breeze blew up outside Turner’s window. The wind-power generators bolted to the high-rise walls whirred into life, and threw broad bars of raw static across the screen. Georgie’s smooth brow wrinkled gracefully. “This reception is terrible! You’re not even in stereo.” He smiled uncertainly. “No matter, we’ll make do. We haven’t heard from you in ages. Things all right?”

  “They will be,” Turner said. “How’s Grandfather?”

  “He’s flown in from Taipei for dialysis and his blood change,” Georgie said. “He hates hospitals, but I had good news for him.” He hesitated. “We have a new great-grandchild on the way.”

  Marjorie glanced up and bestowed one of her glittering wifely smiles on the camera. “That’s fine,” Turner said reflexively. Children were a touchy subject with Turner. He had not yet married, despite his family’s endless prodding and nagging.

  He thought guiltily that he should have spent more time with Georgie’s children. Georgie was already in some upscale never-never land, all leather-bound law and municipal politics, but it wasn’t his kids’ fault. Kids were innocent. “Hi, kids,” he said in Mandarin. “I’ll bring you something you’ll like.”

  The younger girl looked up, her elegant child’s mouth crusted with strawberry jam. “I want a shrunken head,” she said in English.

  “You see?” Georgie said with false joviality. “This is what comes of running off to Borneo.”

  “I need some modem software,” Turner said, avoiding the issue. Grandfather hadn’t approved of Borneo. “Could you get it off the old Hayes in my room?”

  “If you don’t have a modem protocol, how can I send you a program?” Georgie said.

  “Print it out and hold it up to the screen,” Turner explained patiently. “I’ll record it and type it in later by hand.”

  “That’s clever,” Georgie said. “You engineers.”

  He left to set it up. Turner talked guardedly to Marjorie. He had never been able to figure the woman out. Turner would have liked to know how Marjorie really felt about cold-eyed Bad Cop Grandfather and his eight million dollars in Triad heroin money.

  But Marjorie was so coolly elegant, so brilliantly designed, that Turner had never been able to bring himself to probe her real feelings. It would have been like popping open some factory-sealed peripheral that was still under warranty, just so you could sneak a look at the circuit boards.

  Even he and Georgie never talked frankly anymore. Not since Grandfather’s health had turned shaky. The prospect of finally inheriting that money had left a white hush over his family like fifteen feet of Canadian snow.

  The horrible old man relished the competition for his favor. He insisted on it. Grandfather had a second household in Taipei; Turner’s uncle and cousins. If Grandfather chose them over his Canadian brood, Georgie’s perfe
ct life would go to pieces.

  A childhood memory brushed Turner: Georgie’s toys, brightly painted little Hong Kong windups held together with folded tin flaps. As a child, Turner had spent many happy, covert hours dexterously prying Georgie’s toys apart.

  Marjorie chatted about Turner’s mother, a neurotic widow who ran an antique store in Atlanta. Behind her, a Chinese maid began clearing the table, glancing up at the camera with the spooked eyes of an immigrant fresh off the boat.

  Turner was used to phone cameras, and though he didn’t have one he kept a fixed smile through habit. But he could feel himself souring, his face knotting up in that inherited Bad Cop glare. Turner had his grandfather’s face, with hollow cheeks, and sunken eyes under heavy impressive brows.

  But Canada, Turner’s birthplace, had left its mark on him. Years of steak and Wonder Bread had given him a six-foot frame and the build of a linebacker.

  Georgie came back with the printout. Turner said goodbye and cut the link.

  He pulled up the blinds for the climax of the movie downstairs. The monkey-demon massacred a small army of Moslem extremists in the corroded remnants of a Shell refinery. Moslem fanatics had been stock villains in Brunei since the failure of their coup of ’98.

  The last of the reel flickered loose. Turner unpinned a banana-leaf wrapping and dug his chopsticks into a midnight snack of rice fried with green pineapple. He leaned on the open window, propping one booted foot on the massive window box with its dense ranks of onions and pepper plants.

  The call to Vancouver had sent a shiver of culture shock through him. He saw his apartment with new eyes. It was decorated with housewarming gifts from other members of his kampong. A flat leather shadow-puppet, all perforations and curlicues. A gold-framed photo of the sultan shaking hands with the king of England. A hand-painted glass ant farm full of inch-long Borneo ants, torpid on molasses. And a young banyan bonsai tree from the kampong headman.

  The headman, an elderly Malay, was a political wardheeler for Brunei’s ruling party, the Greens, or “Partai Ekolojasi.” In the West, the Greens had long ago been co-opted into larger parties. But Brunei’s Partai Ekolojasi had twenty years of deep roots.

  The banyan tree came with five pages of meticulous instructions on care and feeding, but despite Turner’s best efforts the midget tree was yellowing and shedding leaves. The tree was not just a gift; it was a test, and Turner knew it. The kampong smiled, but they had their ways of testing, and they watched.

  Turner glanced reflexively at his deadbolt on the door. The locks were not exactly forbidden, but they were frowned on. The Greens had converted Brunei’s old office buildings into huge multilayered village longhouses. Western notions of privacy were unpopular.

  But Turner needed the lock for his work. He had to be discreet. Brunei might seem loose and informal, but it was still a one-party state under autocratic rule.

  Twenty years earlier, when the oil crash had hit, the monarchy had seemed doomed. The Muslim insurgents had tried to murder them outright. Even the Greens had had bigger dreams then. Turner had seen their peeling, forgotten wall posters, their global logo of the Whole Earth half-buried under layered years of want ads and soccer schedules.

  The Royal Family had won through, a symbol of tradition and stability. They’d weathered the storm of the Muslim insurgence, and stifled the Greens’ first wild ambitions. After five months in Brunei, Turner, like the Royals, had grasped Brunei’s hidden dynamics. It was adat, Malay custom, that ruled. And the first law of adat was that you didn’t embarrass your neighbors.

  Turner unpinned his favorite movie poster, a big promotional four-sheet for a Brunei historical epic. In garish four-color printing, a boatload of heroic Malay pirates gallantly advanced on a sinister Portuguese galleon. Turner had carved a hideout in the sheetrock wall behind the poster. He stowed his phone gear.

  Somebody tried the door, hit the deadbolt, and knocked softly. Turner hastily smoothed the poster and pinned it up.

  He opened the door. It was his Australian neighbor, McGinty, a retired newscaster from Melbourne. McGinty loved Brunei for its utter lack of televisions. It was one of the last places on the planet in which one could truly get away from it all.

  McGinty glanced up and down the hall, stepped inside, and reached into his loose cotton blouse. He produced a cold quart can of Foster’s Lager. “Have a beer, chum?”

  “Fantastic!” Turner said. “Where’d you get it?”

  McGinty smiled evasively. “The bloody fridge is on the blink, and I thought you’d fancy one while they’re still cold.”

  “Right,” Turner said, popping the top. “I’ll have a look at your fridge as soon as I destroy this evidence.” The kampong ran on a web of barter and mutual obligation. Turner’s skills were part of it. It was tiresome, but a Foster’s Lager was good pay. It was a big improvement over the liquid brain damage from the illegal stills down on Floor 4.

  They went to McGinty’s place. McGinty lived next door with his aged parents; four of them, for his father and mother had divorced and both remarried. The ancient Australians thrived in Brunei’s somnolent atmosphere, pottering about the kampong gardens in pith helmets, gurkha shorts, and khaki bush vests. McGinty, like many of his generation, had never had children. Now in retirement he seemed content to shepherd these older folk, plying them with megavitamins and morning Tai Chi exercises.

  Turner stripped the refrigerator. “It’s your compressor,” he said. “I’ll track you down one on the waterfront. I can jury-rig something. You know me. Always tinkering.”

  McGinty looked uncomfortable, since he was now in Turner’s debt. Suddenly he brightened. “There’s a party at the privy councilor’s tomorrow night. Jimmy Brooke. You know him?”

  “Heard of him,” Turner said. He’d heard rumors about Brooke: hints of corruption, some long-buried scandal. “He was a big man when the Parlai got started, right? Minister of something.”

  “Communications.”

  Turner laughed. “That’s not much of a job around here.”

  “Well, he still knows a lot of movie people.” McGinty lowered his voice.

  “And he has a private bar. He’s chummy with the Royal Family. They make allowances for him.”

  “Yeah?” Turner didn’t relish mingling with McGinty’s social circle of wealthy retirees, but it might be smart, politically. A word with the old com minister might solve a lot of his problems. “Okay,” he said. “Sounds like fun.”

  The privy councilor, Yang Amat Mulia Pengiran Indera Negara Pengiran Jimmy Brooke, was one of Brunei’s odder relics. He was a British tax exile, a naturalized Bruneian, who had shown up in the late ’90s after the oil crash. His wealth had helped cushion the blow and had won him a place in the government.

  Larger and better-organized governments might have thought twice about co-opting this deaf, white-haired eccentric, a washed-up pop idol with a parasitic retinue of balding bohemians. But the aging rock star, with his decaying glamour, fit in easily with the comic-opera glitter of Brunei’s tiny aristocracy. He owned the old Bank of Singapore office block, a kampong of remarkable looseness where peccadillos flourished under Brooke’s noblesse oblige.

  Monsoon rain pelted the city. Brooke’s henchmen, paunchy bodyguards in bulging denim, had shut the glass doors of the penthouse and turned on the air conditioning. The party had close to a hundred people, mostly retired Westerners from Europe and Australia. They had the stifling clubbiness of exiles who have all known each other too long. A handful of refugee Americans, still powdered and rouged with their habitual video makeup, munched imported beer nuts by the long mahogany bar.

  The Bruneian actress Dewi Serrudin was holding court on a rattan couch, surrounded by admirers. Cinema was a lost art in the West, finally murdered and buried by video; but Brunei’s odd policies had given it a last toehold. Turner, who had a mild long-distance crush on the actress, edged up between two hopeful émigrés: a portly Madrasi producer in dhoti and jubbah, and a Hong Kong chop-socky
director in a black frogged cotton jacket.

  Miss Serrudin, in a gold lamé blouse and a skirt of antique ultrasuede, was playing the role to the hilt, chattering brightly and chain-burning imported Rothmans in a jade holder. She had the ritual concentration of a Balinese dancer evoking postures handed down through the centuries. And she was older than he’d thought she was.

  Turner finished his whiskey sour and handed it to one of Brooke’s balding gofers. He felt depressed and lonely. He wandered away from the crowd, and turned down a hall at random. The walls were hung with gold albums and old yellowing pub-shots of Brooke and his band, all rhinestones and platform heels, their flying hair lavishly backlit with klieg lights.

  Turner passed a library, and a billiards room where two wrinkled, turbaned Sikhs were racking up a game of snooker. Farther down the hall, he glanced through an archway, into a sunken conversation pit lavishly carpeted with ancient, indestructible synthetic plush.

  A bony young Malay woman in black jeans and a satin jacket sat alone in the room, reading a month-old issue of New Musical Express. It was headlined “Leningrad Pop Cuts Loose!” Her sandaled feet were propped on a coffee table next to a beaten silver platter with a pitcher and an ice bucket. Her bright red, shoulder-length hair showed two long inches of black roots.

  She looked up at him in blank surprise. Turner hesitated at the archway, then stepped into the room. “Hi,” he said.

  “Hello. What’s your kampong?”

  “Citibank Building,” Turner said. He was used to the question by now. “I’m with the industrial ministry, consulting engineer. I’m a Canadian. Turner Choi.”

  She folded the newspaper and smiled. “Ah, you’re the bloke who’s working on the robots.”

  “Word gets around,” Turner said, pleased.