Turner said, “Admit it. You’re surprised to see me, aren’t you? Still think you were wrong about me?”
Brooke looked puzzled. “Surprised? Didn’t you get Seria’s message on the Net?”
“What? No. I slept on the docks last night.”
“You missed the message?” Brooke said. He mulled it over. “Why are you here, then?”
“You said you could help me if I ever had money trouble,” Turner said. “Well, now’s the time. You gotta figure some way to get me out of this bank legacy. I know it doesn’t look like it, but I’ve broken with my family for good. I’m gonna stay here, try to work things out with Seria.”
Brooke frowned. “I don’t understand. You want to stay with Seria?”
“Yes, here in Brunei, with her!” Turner sat on the bunk and waved his arms passionately. “Look, I know I told you that Brunei was just a glass bubble, sealed off from the world, and all that. But I’ve changed now! I’ve thought it through, I understand things. Brunei’s important! It’s small, but it’s the ideas that matter, not the scale. I can get along, I’ll fit in—you said so yourself.”
“What about Seria?”
“Okay, that’s part of it,” Turner admitted. “I know she’ll never leave this place. I can defy my family and it’s no big deal, but she’s Royalty. She wouldn’t leave here, any more than you’d leave all your money behind. So you’re both trapped here. All right. I can accept that.” Turner looked up, his face glowing with determination. “I know things won’t be easy for Seria and me, but it’s up to me to make the sacrifice. Someone has to make the grand gesture. Well, it might as well be me.”
Brooke was silent for a moment, then thumped him on the shoulder. “This is a new Turner I’m seeing. So you faced down the old smack merchant, huh? You’re quite the hero!”
Turner felt sheepish. “Come on, Brooke.”
“And turning down all that nice money, too.”
Turner brushed his hands together, dismissing the idea. “I’m sick of being manipulated by old geezers.”
Brooke rubbed his unshaven jaw and grinned. “Kid, you’ve got a lot to learn.” He walked to the door. “But that’s okay, no harm done. Everything still works out. Let’s go up on deck and make sure the coast is clear.”
Turner followed Brooke to his deck chair by the bamboo railing. The ship sailed rapidly down a channel between mud flats. Already they’d left the waterfront, paralleling a shoreline densely fringed with mangroves. Brooke sat down and opened a binocular case. He scanned the city behind them.
Turner felt a light-headed sense of euphoria as the triple bows cut the water. He smiled as they passed the first offshore rig. It looked like a good place to get some fishing done.
“About this bank,” Turner said. “We have to face them sometime—what good is this doing us?”
Brooke smiled without looking up from his binoculars. “Kid, I’ve been planning this day a long time. I’m running it on a wing and a prayer. But hey, I’m not proud, I can adapt. You’ve been a lot of trouble to me, stomping in where angels fear to tread, in those damn boots of yours. But I’ve finally found a way to fit you in. Turner, I’m going to retrofit your life.”
“Think so?” Turner said. He stepped closer, looming over Brooke. “What are you looking for, anyway?”
Brooke sighed. “Choppers. Patrol boats.”
Turner had a sudden terrifying flash of insight. “You’re leaving Brunei. Defecting!” He stared at Brooke. “You bastard! You kept me on board!” He grabbed the rail, then began tearing at his heavy boots, ready to jump and swim for it.
“Don’t be stupid!” Brooke said. “You’ll get her in a lot of trouble!” He lowered the binoculars. “Oh, Christ, here comes Omar.”
Turner followed his gaze and spotted a helicopter, rising gnatlike over the distant high-rises. “Where is Seria?”
“Try the bow.”
“You mean she’s here? She’s leaving too?” He ran forward across the thudding deck.
Seria wore bell-bottomed sailor’s jeans and a stained nylon wind-breaker. With the help of two of the Dayak crew, she was installing a meshwork satellite dish in an anchored iron plate in the deck. She had cut away her long dyed hair; she looked up at him, and for a moment he saw a stranger. Then her face shifted, fell into a familiar focus. “I thought I’d never see you again, Turner. That’s why I had to do it.”
Turner smiled at her fondly, too overjoyed at first for her words to sink in. “Do what, angel?”
“Tap your phone, of course. I did it because I was jealous, at first. I had to be sure. You know. But then when I knew you were leaving, well, I had to hear your voice one last time. So I heard your talk with your grandfather. Are you mad at me?”
“You tapped my phone? You heard all that?” Turner said.
“Yes, darling. You were wonderful. I never thought you’d do it.”
“Well,” Turner said, “I never thought you’d pull a stunt like this, either.”
“Someone had to make a grand gesture,” she said. “It was up to me, wasn’t it? But I explained all that in my message.”
“So you’re defecting? Leaving your family?” Turner knelt beside her, dazed. As he struggled to fit it all together, his eyes focused on a cross-threaded nut at the base of the dish. He absently picked up a socket wrench. “Let me give you a hand with that,” he said through reflex.
Seria sucked on a barked knuckle. “You didn’t get my last message, did you? You came here on your own!”
“Well, yeah,” Turner said. “I decided to stay. You know. With you.”
“And now we’re abducting you!” She laughed. “How romantic!”
“You and Brooke are leaving together?”
“It’s not just me, Turner. Look.”
Brooke was walking toward them, and with him Dr. Moratuwa, newly outfitted in saffron-colored baggy shorts and T-shirt. They were the work clothes of a Buddhist technician. “Oh, no,” Turner said. He dropped his wrench with a thud.
Seria said, “Now you see why I had to leave, don’t you? My family locked him up. I had to break adat and help Brooke set him free. It was my obligation, my dharma!”
“I guess that makes sense,” Turner said. “But it’s gonna take me a while, that’s all. Couldn’t you have warned me?”
“I tried to! I wrote you on the Net!” She saw he was crestfallen, and squeezed his hand. “I guess the plans broke down. Well, we can improvise.”
“Good day, Mr. Choi,” said Moratuwa. “It was very brave of you to cast in your lot with us. It was a gallant gesture.”
“Thanks,” Turner said. He took a deep breath. So they were all leaving. It was a shock, but he could deal with it. He’d just have to start over and think it through from a different angle. At least Seria was coming along.
He felt a little better now. He was starting to get it under control.
Moratuwa sighed. “And I wish it could have worked.”
“Your brother’s coming,” Brooke told Seria gloomily. “Remember this was all my fault.”
They had a good head wind, but the crown prince’s helicopter came on faster, its drone growing to a roar. A Gurkha palace guard crouched on the broad orange float outside the canopy, cradling a light machine gun. His gold-braided dress uniform flapped in the chopper’s downwash.
The chopper circled the boat once. “We’ve had it,” Brooke said. “Well, at least it’s not a patrol boat with those damned Exocet missiles. It’s family business with the princess on board. They’ll hush it all up. You can always depend on adat.” He patted Moratuwa’s shoulder. “Looks like you get a cell mate after all, old man.”
Seria ignored them. She was looking up anxiously. “Poor Omar,” she said. She cupped her hands to her mouth. “Brother, be careful!” she shouted.
The prince’s copilot handed the guard a loudspeaker. The guard raised it and began to shout a challenge.
The tone of the chopper’s engines suddenly changed. Plumes of brown smoke billow
ed from the chromed exhausts. The prince veered away suddenly, fighting the controls. The guard, caught off balance, tumbled headlong into the ocean. The Dayak crew, who had been waiting for the order to reef sails, began laughing wildly.
“What in hell?” Brooke said.
The chopper pancaked down heavily into the bay, rocking in the ship’s wake. Spurting caramel-colored smoke, its engines died with a hideous grinding. The ship sailed on. They watched silently as the drenched guard swam slowly up and clung to the chopper’s float.
Brooke raised his eyes to heaven. “Lord Buddha, forgive my doubts…”
“Sugar,” Seria said sadly. “I put a bag of sugar in brother’s fuel tank. I ruined his beautiful helicopter. Poor Omar, he really loves that machine.”
Brooke stared at her, then burst into cackling laughter. Regally, Seria ignored him. She stared at the dwindling shore, her eyes bright. “Goodbye, Brunei. You cannot hold us now.”
“Where are we going?” Turner said.
“To the West,” said Moratuwa. “The Ocean Arks will spread for many years. I must set the example by carrying the word to the greatest global center of unsustainable industry.”
Brooke grinned. “He means America, man.”
“We shall start in Hawaii. It is also tropical, and our expertise will find ready application there.”
“Wait a minute,” Turner said. “I turned my back on all that! Look, I turned down a fortune so I could stay in the East.”
Seria took his arm, smiling radiantly. “You’re such a dreamer, darling. What a wonderful gesture. I love you, Turner.”
“Look,” said Brooke, “I left behind my building, my title of nobility, and all my old mates. I’m older than you, so my romantic gestures come first.”
“But,” Turner said, “it was all decided. I was going to help you in Brunei. I had ideas, plans. Now none of it makes any sense.”
Moratuwa smiled. “The world is not built from your blueprints, young man.”
“Whose, then?” Turner demanded. “Yours?”
“Nobody’s, really,” Brooke said. “We all just have to do our best with whatever comes up. Bricolage, remember?” Brooke spread his hands. “But it’s a geezer’s world, kid. We got your number, and we got you outnumbered. Fast cars and future shock and that hot Western trip…that’s another century. We like slow days in the sun. We like a place to belong and gentle things around us.” He smiled. “Okay, you’re a little wired now, but you’ll calm down by the time we reach Hawaii. There’s a lot of retrofit work there. You’ll be one of us!” He gestured at the satellite dish. “We’ll set this up and call your banks first thing.”
“It’s a good world for us, Turner,” Seria said urgently. “Not quite East, not quite West—like us two. It was made for us, it’s what we’re best at.” She embraced him.
“You escaped,” Turner said. No one ever said much about what happened after Sleeping Beauty woke.
“Yes, I broke free,” she said, hugging him tighter. “And I’m taking you with me.”
Turner stared over her shoulder at Brunei, sinking into hot green mangroves and warm mud. Slowly, he could feel the truth of it, sliding over him like some kind of ambiguous quicksand. He was going to fit right in. He could see his future laid out before him, clean and predestined, like fifty years of happy machine language.
“Maybe I wanted this,” he said at last. “But it sure as hell wasn’t what I planned.”
Brooke laughed. “Look, you’re bound for Hawaii with a princess and eight million dollars. Somehow, you’ll just have to make do.”
SPOOK
FOR RUDY RUCKER
THE SPOOK WAS PEELING off from orbit, headed for Washington, D.C., and it felt just great. The spook twisted convulsively in his seat, grinning out the Plexiglas at the cheery red-hot glow of the shuttle’s wind edges.
Far below, the unnatural green of genetically altered forests showed the faint scars of old-time roads and fence lines. The spook ran long, narrow, agile fingers through the roots of his short-cropped blue hair. He hadn’t made groundfall in ten months. Already the cooped-up feeling of the orbiting zaibatseries was peeling off cold and crisp like a snake’s skin.
The shuttle decelerated through Mach 4 with a faint, delicious shiver. The spook twisted in his seat and turned a long slanted green glance past the sleeping plutocrat in the seat beside him and at a woman across the aisle. She had that cool starved zaibatsery look and those hollow veinwebby eyes…Looked like the gravity was giving her trouble already, she’d spent too much time floating along those low-grav zaibatsery axes of rotation. She’d pay for it when they made groundfall, when she’d have to shuffle all cute from waterbed to waterbed, like helpless prey…The spook looked down; his hands were making unconscious twitchy clawing motions in his lap. He picked them up and shook the tension out of them. Silly little hands…
The forests of the Maryland Piedmont skinned by like green video. Washington and the DNA recombo labs of Rockville, Maryland, were 1,080 clean ticking seconds away. He couldn’t remember when he’d ever had so much fun. Inside his right ear the computer whispered, whispered…
The shuttle albatrossed down on the reinforced runway, and airport groundcraft foamed it cool. The spook decamped, clutching his valise.
A chopper was waiting for him from the private security apparat of the Replicon corporation. While it flew him to Replicon’s Rockville HQ, he had a drink, shuddering a little at the intuitive impact of the unspoken paradigms of the chopper’s interior. The techniques he had learned in the zaibatsery espionage camp oozed up his hind-brain like psychotic flashbacks. Under the impact of gravity, fresh air, and plush upholstery, whole sections of his personality were decaying at once.
He was as sweet and fluid as the heart of a rotting melon. This was fluidity, slick as grease, all right…Acting on intuition, he opened his valise, took a mechanical comb from a grooming case, and flicked it on with the iridescent nail of his right thumb. Black dye from the comb’s vibrating teeth soothed and darkened his blue zaibatsery coif.
He unplugged the tiny jack that was coupled to the auditory nerve of his right ear and unclipped his computer earring. Humming to himself to cover the gaps in its whispering, he opened a flat case clipped inside the valise and restored the minicomp earring to its own padded socket. Inside the case were seven others, little jeweled globes packed with microminiature circuitry, soaked tight with advanced software. He plugged in a new one and hung it from his pale pierced lobe. It whispered to him about his capabilities, in case he had forgotten. He listened with half an ear.
The chopper landed on the Replicon emblem on the rooftop pad of the four-story apparat headquarters. The spook walked to the elevator. He nibbled a bit of skin from the corner of his nail and flicked it into the recessed slot of a biopsy analyzer, then rocked back and forth on his clean new heels, grinning, as he was weighed and scanned and measured by cameras and sonar.
The elevator door slid open. He stepped inside, staring ahead easily, happy as a shadow. It opened again, and he walked down a richly paneled hall and into the office suite of the head of Replicon security.
He gave his credentials to the secretary and stood rocking on his heels while the young man fed them through his desktop computer. The spook blinked his narrow green eyes; the corporate Muzak was soaking into him like a hot bath.
Inside, the security chief was all iron gray hair and tanned wrinkles and big ceramic teeth. The spook took a seat and went limp as wax as the man’s vibrations poured over him. The man bubbled over with ambition and corruption like a rusting barrel full of chemical waste. “Welcome to Rockville, Eugene.”
“Thank you, sir,” the spook said. He sat up straighter, taking on the man’s predatory coloration. “It’s a pleasure.”
The security chief looked idly into a hooded data screen. “You come highly recommended, Eugene. I have data here on two of your operations for other members of the Synthesis. In the Amsterdam Gill Piracy case you stood up under p
ressure that would have broken a normal operative.”
“I was at the head of my class,” said the spook, smiling guilelessly. He didn’t remember anything about the Amsterdam case. It had all slicked aside, erased by the Veil. The spook looked placidly at a Japanese kakemono wall hanging.
“We here at Replicon don’t often enlist the help of your zaibatsery apparat,” the chief said. “But our cartel has been allotted a very special operation by the Synthesis coordinating board. Although you’re not a member of the Synthesis, your advanced zaibatsery training is crucial to the mission’s success.”
The spook smiled blandly, waving the toe of his decorated shoe. Talk of loyalties and ideologies bored him. He cared very little about the Synthesis and its ambitious efforts to unite the planet under one cybernetic-economic web.
Even his feelings about his native zaibatseries were not so much “patriotism” as the sort of warm regard that a worm feels for the core of an apple. He waited for the man to come to the point, knowing that his earring computer could replay the conversation if he missed anything.
The chief toyed with an electronic stylus, leaning back in his chair. “It hasn’t been easy for us,” he said, “facing the ferment of the postindustrial years, watching a relentless brain drain into the orbital factories, while overpopulation and pollution wrecked the planet. Now we find we can’t even put the pieces back together without help from your orbiters. You can appreciate our position, I hope.”
“Perfectly,” said the spook. Using his zaibatsery training and the advantages of the Veil, it wasn’t hard at all to put on the man’s skin and see through his eyes. He didn’t like it much, but it wasn’t difficult.
“Things are settling down now, since most of the craziest groups have killed themselves off or emigrated into space. The Earth cannot afford the cultural variety you have in your orbiting city-states. Earth must unite its remaining resources under the Synthesis aegis. The conventional wars are over for good and all. What we face now is a war of states of mind.”
The chief began doodling absently with the light pen on a convenient videoscreen. “It’s one thing to deal with criminal groups, like the Gill Pirates, and another entirely to confront those, ah, cults and sects who refuse outright to join the Synthesis. Since the population diebacks of the 2000s, large sections of the undeveloped world have gone to seed…This is especially true of Central America, south of the People’s Republic of Mexico…It’s there that we face a dissident cult calling itself the Maya Resurgence. We Synthetics are confronting a cultural mind-set, what your apparat, Eugene, would call a paradigm, that is directly opposed to everything that unites the Synthesis. If we can stop this group before it can solidify, all will be well. But if their influence continues to spread, it may provoke militancy among the Synthesis. And if we are forced to resort to arms, our own fragile concordance will come apart at the seams. We can’t afford to remilitarize, Eugene. We can’t afford those suspicions. We need everything we have left to continue to fight ecological disaster. The seas are still rising.”
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