Ascendancies

by Bruce Sterling

  She watched him narrowly. “Seria Bolkiah Muizzaddin Waddaulah.”

  “Sorry, I don’t speak Malay.”

  “That’s my name,” she said.

  Turner laughed. “Oh, Lord. Look, I’m just a no-neck Canuck with hay in my hair. Make allowances, okay?”

  “You’re a Western technician,” she said. “How exotic. How is your work progressing?”

  “It’s a strange assignment,” Turner said. He sat on the couch at a polite distance, marveling at her bizarre accent. “You’ve spent some time in Britain?”

  “I went to school there.” She studied his face. “You look rather like a Chinese Keith Richards.”

  “Sorry, don’t know him.”

  “The guitarist of the Rolling Stones.”

  “I don’t keep up with the new bands,” Turner said. “A little Russian pop, maybe.” He felt a peculiar tension in the situation. Turner glanced quickly at the woman’s hands. No wedding ring, so that wasn’t it.

  “Would you like a drink?” the woman said. “It’s grape juice.”

  “Sure,” Turner said. “Thanks.” She poured gracefully: innocent grape juice over ice. She was a Moslem, Turner thought, despite her dyed hair. Maybe that was why she was oddly standoffish.

  He would have to bend the rules again. She was not conventionally pretty, but she had the kind of neurotic intensity that Turner had always found fatally attractive. And his love life had suffered in Brunei; the kampongs with their prying eyes and village gossip had cramped his style.

  He wondered how he could arrange to see her. It wasn’t a question of just asking her out to dinner—it all depended on her kampong. Some were stricter than others. He might end up with half-a-dozen veiled Muslim chaperones—or maybe a gang of muscular cousins and brothers with a bad attitude about Western lechers.

  “When do you plan to start production, Mr. Choi?”

  Turner said, “We’ve built a few fishing skiffs already, just minor stuff. We have bigger plans once the robots are up.”

  “A real factory,” she said. “Like the old days.”

  Turner smiled, seeing his chance. “Maybe you’d like a tour of the plant?”

  “It sounds romantic,” she said. “Those robots are free labor. They were supposed to take the place of our free oil when it ran out. Brunei used to be rich, you know. Oil paid for everything. The Shellfare state, they used to call us.” She smiled wistfully.

  “How about Monday?” Turner said.

  She looked at him, surprised, and suddenly blushed. “I’m afraid not.”

  Turner caught her eye. It’s not me, he thought. It was something in the way—adat or something. “It’s all right,” he said gently. “I’d like to see you, is that so bad? Bring your whole kampong if you want.”

  “My kampong is the Palace,” she said.

  “Uh-oh.” Suddenly he had that cold feeling again.

  “You didn’t know,” she said triumphantly. “You thought I was just some rock groupie.”

  “Who are you, then?”

  “I’m the Duli Yang Maha Mulia Diranee…Well, I’m the princess. Princess Seria.” She smiled.

  “Good lord.” He had been sitting and flirting with the royal princess of Brunei. It was bizarre. He half expected a troupe of bronzed eunuchs to burst in, armed with scimitars. “You’re the sultan’s daughter?”

  “You mustn’t think too much of it,” she said. “Our country is only two thousand square miles. It’s so small that it’s a family business, that’s all. The mayor of your Vancouver rules more people than my family does.”

  Turner sipped his grape juice to cover his confusion. Brunei was a Commonwealth country, after all, with a British-educated aristocracy. The sultan had polo ponies and cricket pitches. But still, a princess…

  “I never said I was from Vancouver,” he told her. “You knew who I was all along.”

  “Brunei doesn’t have many tall Chinese in lumberjack shirts.” She smiled wickedly. “And those boots.”

  Turner glanced down. His legs were armored in knee-high engineering boots, a mass of shiny leather and buckles. His mother had bought them for him, convinced that they would save his life from snakebite in savage Borneo. “I promised I’d wear them,” he said. “Family obligation.”

  She looked sour. “You, too? That sounds all too familiar, Mr. Choi.” Now that the spell of anonymity was broken, she seemed flustered. Their quick rapport was grinding to a halt. She lifted the music paper with a rustle of pages. He saw that her nails were gnawed down to the quick.

  For some perverse reason this put Turner’s libido jarringly back into gear. She had that edgy flyaway look that spelled trouble with a capital T. Ironically, she was just his type.

  “I know the mayor’s daughter in Vancouver,” he said deliberately. “I like the local version a lot better.”

  She met his eyes. “It’s really too bad about family obligations…”

  The privy councilor appeared suddenly in the archway. The wizened rock star wore a cream-colored seersucker suit with ruby cuff links. He was a cadaverous old buzzard with rheumy eyes and a wattled neck. A frizzed mass of snow-white hair puffed from his head like cotton from an aspirin bottle.

  “Highness,” he said loudly. “We need a fourth at bridge.”

  Princess Seria stood up with an air of martyrdom. “I’ll be right with you,” she shouted.

  “And who’s the young man?” said Brooke, revealing his dentures in an uneasy smile.

  Turner stepped nearer. “Turner Choi, Tuan Privy Councilor,” he said loudly. “A privilege to meet you, sir.”

  “What’s your kampong, Mr. Chong?”

  “Mr. Choi is working on the robot shipyard!” the princess said.

  “The what? The shipyard? Oh, splendid!” Brooke seemed relieved.

  “I’d like a word with you, sir,” Turner said. “About communications.”

  “About what?” Brooke cupped one hand to his ear.

  “The phone net, sir! A line out!”

  The princess looked startled. But Brooke, still not understanding, nodded blankly. “Ah yes. Very interesting…My entourage and I will stop by some day when you have the line up! I love the sound of good machines at work!”

  “Sure,” Turner said, recognizing defeat. “That would be, uh, groovy.”

  “Brunei is counting on you, Mr. Chong,” Brooke said, his wrinkled eyes gleaming with bogus sincerity. “Good to see you here. Enjoy yourself.” He shook Turner’s hand, pressing something into his palm. He winked at Turner and escorted the princess out into the hall.

  Turner looked at his hand. The old man had given him a marijuana cigarette. Turner shook himself, laughed, and threw it away.

  Another slow Monday in Brunei Town. Turner’s work crew meandered in around midmorning. They were Bruneian Chinese, toting wicker baskets stuffed with garden-fresh produce, and little lacquered lunchboxes with satay shish kebabs and hot shrimp paste. They started the morning’s food barter, chatting languidly in Malay-accented Mandarin.

  Turner had very little power over them. They were hired by the Industrial Ministry, and paid little or nothing. Their labor was part of the invisible household economy of the kampongs. They worked for kampong perks, like chickens or movie tickets.

  The shipyard was a cavernous barn with overhead pulley tracks and an oil-stained concrete floor. The front section, with its bare launching rails sloping down to deep water, had once been a Dayak kampong. The Dayaks had spraybombed the concrete-block walls with giant neon-bright murals of banshees dead in childbirth, and leaping cricket-spirits with evil Day-Glo eyes.

  The back part was two-storey, with the robots’ machine shop at ground level and a glass-fronted office upstairs that looked down over the yard.

  Inside, the office was decorated in crass ’80s High-Tech Moderne, with round-cornered computer desks between sleek modular partitions, all tubular chrome and grainy beige plastic. The plastic had aged hideously in forty years, absorbing a gray miasma of finge
rprints and soot.

  Turner worked alone in the neck-high maze of curved partitions, where a conspiracy of imported clerks and programmers had once efficiently sopped up the last of Brunei’s oil money. He was typing up the bootlegged modem software on the IBM, determined to call America and get the production line out of the Stone Age.

  The yard reeked of hot epoxy as the crew got to work. The robots were one-armed hydraulic jobs, essentially glorified tea-trolleys with single swivel-jointed manipulators. Turner had managed to get them up to a certain crude level of donkeywork: slicing wood, stirring glue, hauling heavy bundles of lumber.

  But, so far, the crew handled all the craftwork. They laminated the long strips of shaved lumber into sturdy panels of epoxied plywood. They bent the wet panels into hull and deck shapes, steam-sealing them over curved molds. They lapped and veneered the seams, and painted good-luck eye-symbols on the bows.

  So far, the plant had produced nothing larger than a twenty-foot skiff. But on the drawing boards was a series of freighter-sized floating kampongs, massive sail-powered trimarans for the deep ocean, with glassed-in greenhouse decks.

  The ships would be cheap and slow, like most things in Brunei, but pleasant enough, Turner supposed. Lots of slow golden afternoons on the tropical seas, with plenty of fresh fruit. The whole effort seemed rather pointless, but at least it would break Brunei’s isolation from the world, and give them a crude merchant fleet.

  The foreman, a spry old Chinese named Leng, shouted for Turner from the yard. Turner saved his program, got up, and looked down through the office glass. The minister of industrial policy had arrived, tying up an ancient fiberglass speedboat retrofitted with ribbed lateen sails.

  Turner hurried down, groaning to himself, expecting to be invited off for another avuncular lecture. But the minister’s zenlike languor had been broken. He came almost directly to the point, pausing only to genially accept some coconut milk from the foreman.

  “It’s His Highness the Sultan,” the minister said. “Someone’s put a bee in his bonnet about these robots. Now he wants to tour the plant.”

  “When?” Turner said.

  “Two weeks,” said the minister. “Or maybe three.”

  Turner thought it over, and smiled. He sensed the princess’s hand in this and felt deeply flattered.

  “I say,” the minister said. “You seem awfully pleased for a fellow who was predicting disaster just last Friday.”

  “I found another section of the manual,” Turner lied glibly. “I hope to have real improvements in short order.”

  “Splendid,” said the minister. “You remember the prototype we were discussing?”

  “The quarter-scale model?” Turner said. “Tuan Minister, even in miniature, that’s still a fifty-foot trimaran.”

  “Righto. How about it? Do you think you could scatter the blueprints about, have the robots whir by looking busy, plenty of sawdust and glue?”

  Politics, Turner thought. He gave the minister his Bad Cop look. “You mean some kind of Potemkin village. Don’t you want the ship built?”

  “I fail to see what pumpkins have to do with it,” said the minister, wounded. “This is a state occasion. We shall have the newsreel cameras in. Of course build the ship. I simply want it impressive, that’s all.”

  Impressive, Turner thought. Sure. If Seria was watching, why not?

  Luckily the Panamanian freighter was still in port, not leaving till Wednesday. Armed with his new software, Turner tried another bootleg raid at ten P.M. He caught a Brazilian comsat and tied into Detroit.

  Reception was bad, and Doris had already moved twice. But he found her finally in a seedy condominium in the Renaissance Center historical district.

  “Where’s your video, man?”

  “It’s out,” Turner lied, not wanting to burden his old girlfriend with two years of past history. He and Doris had lived together in Toronto for two semesters while he studied CAD-CAM. Doris was an automotive designer, a Rustbelt refugee from Detroit’s collapse.

  For Turner, school was a blissful chance to live in the same pair of jeans for days on end, but times were tough in the Rustbelt and Doris had lived close to the bone. He’d ended up footing the bills, which hadn’t bothered him (Bad Cop money), but it had preyed on Doris’s mind. Months passed, and she spent more each week. He picked up her bills without a word, and she quietly went over the edge. She ended up puking drunk on her new satin sheets, unable to go downstairs for the mail without a line of coke.

  But then word had come of his father’s death. His father’s antique Maserati had slammed head-on into an automated semitrailer rig.

  Turner and his brother had attended the cremation in a drizzling Vancouver rain. They put the ashes on the family altar and knelt before little gray ribbons of incense smoke. Nobody said much. They didn’t talk about Dad’s drinking. Grandfather wouldn’t have liked it.

  When he’d gone back to Toronto, he found that Doris had packed up and left.

  “I’m with Kyocera now,” he told her. “The consulting engineers.”

  “You got a job, Turner?” she said, brushing back a frizzed tangle of blonde hair. “It figures. Poor people are standing in line for a chance to do dishes.” She frowned. “What kind of hours you keeping, man? It’s seven A.M. You caught me without my vid makeup.”

  She turned the camera away and walked out of sight. Turner studied her apartment: concrete blocks and packing crates, vinyl beanbag chairs, peeling walls festooned with printout. She was still on the Net, all right. Real Net-heads resented every penny not spent on information.

  “I need some help, Doris. I need you to find me someone who can system-crack an old IBM robotics language called AML.”

  “Yeah?” she called out. “Ten percent agent’s fee?”

  “Sure. And this is on the hush, okay? Not Kyocera’s business, just mine.”

  He heard her shouting from the condo’s cramped bathroom. “I haven’t heard from you in two years! You’re not mad that I split, huh?”

  “No.”

  “It wasn’t that you were Chinese, okay? I mean, you’re about as Chinese as maple syrup, right? It’s just, the high life was making my sinuses bleed.”

  Turner scowled. “Look, it’s okay. It was a temporary thing.”

  “I was crazy then. But I’ve been hooked up to a good shrink program, it’s done wonders for me, really.” She came back to the screen; she’d put on rouge and powder. She smiled and touched her cheek. “Good stuff, huh? The kind the President uses.”

  “You look fine.”

  “My shrink makes me jog every day. So, how you doin’, man? Seeing anybody?”

  “Not really.” He smiled. “Except a princess of Borneo.”

  She laughed. “I thought you’d settle down by now, man. With some uptown family girl, right? Like your brother and whats-her-face.”

  “Didn’t work out that way.”

  “You like crazy women, Turner, that’s your problem. Remember the time your mom dropped by? She’s a fruitcake, that’s why.”

  “Aw, Jesus Christ, Doris,” Turner said. “If I need a shrink, I can download one.”

  “Okay,” she said, hurt. She touched a remote control. A television in the corner of the room flashed into life with a crackle of video music. Doris didn’t bother to watch it. She’d turned it on by reflex, settling into the piped flow of cable like a hot bath. “Look, I’ll see what I can scare you up on the Net. AML language, right? I think I know a—”

  BREAK

  The screen went blank. Alphanumerics flared up: ENTERING (C)HAT MODE

  The line zipped up the screen. Then words spelled out in 80-column glowing bright green. WHAT ARE YOU DOING ON THIS LINE??

  SORRY, Turner typed.

  ENTER YOUR PASSWORD:

  Turner thought fast. He had blundered into the Brunei underground net. He’d known it was possible, since he was using the pre-rigged payphone downstairs. MAPLE SYRUP, he typed at random.

  CHECKING…THAT
IS NOT A VALID PASSWORD.

  SIGNING OFF, Turner typed.

  WAIT, said the screen. WE DONT TAKE LURKERS LIGHTLY HERE. WE HAVE BEEN WATCHING YOU. THIS IS THE SECOND TIME YOU HAVE ACCESSED A SATELLITE. WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN OUR NET??

  Turner rested one finger on the off switch.

  More words spilled out. WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE, “MAPLE SYRUP.” YOU ARE TURNER CHONG.

  “Turner Choi,” Turner said aloud. Then he remembered the man who had made that mistake. He felt a sudden surge of glee. He typed. OKAY, YOU’VE GOT ME—TUAN COUNCILOR JIMMY BROOKE.

  There was a long blank space. Then: CLEVER, Brooke typed. SERIA TOLD YOU. SERIA, ARE YOU ON THIS LINE??

  I WANT HER NUMBER!! Turner typed at once.

  THEN LEAVE A (M)ESSAGE FOR “GAMELAN ROCKER,” Brooke typed. I AM “NET HEADHUNTED”

  THANKS, Turner typed.

  I’LL LOG YOU ON, MAPLE SYRUP. SINCE YOU’RE ALREADY IN, YOU’D BETTER BE IN ON OUR TERMS. BUT JUST REMEMBER: THIS IS OUR ELECTRIC KAMPONG, SO YOU LIVE BY OUR RULES. OUR “ADAT,” OKAY??

  I’LL REMEMBER, SIR.

  AND NO MORE BOOTLEG SATELLITE LINKS, YOU’RE SCREWING UP OUR GROUND LINES.

  OKAY, Turner typed.

  YOU CAN RENT TIME ON OUR OWN DISHES. NEXT TIME CALL 85-1515 DIRECTLY. OUR GAMES SECTION COULD USE SOME UPLOADS, BY THE WAY.

  The words flashed off, replaced by the neatly ranked commands of a computer bulletin board. Turner accessed the message section, but then sat sweating and indecisive. In his mind, his quick message to Seria was rapidly ramifying into a particularly touchy and tentative love letter.

  This was good, but it wasn’t how he’d planned it. He was getting in over his head. He’d have to think it through.

  He logged off the board. Doris’s face appeared at once. “Where the hell have you been, man?”

  “Sorry,” Turner said.

  “I’ve found you some old geezer out in Yorktown Heights,” she said. “He says he used to work with Big Blue back in prehistory.”

  “It’s always some old geezer,” Turner said in resignation.

  Doris shrugged. “Whaddya expect, man? Birth control got everybody else.”

  Down in the yard, the sultan of Brunei chatted with his minister as technicians in sarongs and rubber sandals struggled with their huge, ancient cameras. The sultan wore his full regalia, a high-collared red military jacket with gold-braided shoulder boards, heavy with medals and pins. He was an elderly Malay with a neatly clipped white mustache and sad, wise eyes.