The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Turner thought it through, sadly. He realized now that he had found the ghost behind those huge old Green Party wallposters, 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 tent-like 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 lamp post.

  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 windowbox. “There,” he said, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Now grow, dammit!”

  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 tra
ined 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 drydock 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 reflex, 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 rightness. He yawned, nestling his head into the burlap.

  He would live here and help th
em. 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 the 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?”