Ascendancies (23 page)

The prince shook Turner's hand. “You know my sister, I believe.”

“We met at the filming,” Turner said.

“Ah yes. Good footage, that.”

Brooke, with miraculous tact, lured the prince into the greenhouse. Seria immediately flung herself into Turner's arms. “You haven't written in two days,” she hissed.

“I know,” Turner said. He looked around quickly to make sure the Dayaks were occupied. “I keep thinking about Vancouver. How I'll feel when I'm back there.”

“How you left your Sleeping Beauty behind in the castle of thorns? You're such a romantic, Turner.”

“Don't talk like that. It hurts.”

She smiled. “I can't help being cheerful. We have two days together, and Omar gets seasick.”

The river flowed beneath their hulls like thin gray grease. Jungle leaned in from the banks; thick, clotted green mats of foliage over skinny light-starved trunks, rank with creepers. It was snake country, leech country, a primeval reek stewing in deadly humidity, with air so thick that the raucous shrieks of birds seemed to cut it like ripsaws. Bugs whirled in dense mating swarms over rafts of slime. Suspicious, sodden logs loomed in the gray mud. Some logs had scales and eyes.

The valley was as crooked as an artery, snaking between tall hills smothered in poisonous green. Sluggish wads of mist wreathed their tops. Where the trees failed, sheer cliffs were shrouded in thick ripples of ivy. The sky was gray, the sun a muddy glow behind tons of haze.

The wind died, and Brooke fired up the ship's tiny alcohol engine. Turner stood on the central bow as they sputtered upstream. He felt glazed and dreamy. Culture shock had seized him; none of it seemed real. It felt like television. Reflexively, he kept thinking of Vancouver, sailboat trips out to clean pine islands.

Seria and the prince joined him on the bow. “Lovely, isn't it?” said the prince. “We've made it a game preserve. Someday there will be tigers again.”

“Good thinking, Your Highness,” Turner said.

“The city feeds itself, you know. A lot of old paddies and terraces have gone back to jungle.” The prince smiled with deep satisfaction.

With evening, they tied up at a dock by the ruins of a riverine city. Decades earlier, a flood had devastated the town, leaving shattered walls where vines snaked up trellises of rusting reinforcement rods. A former tourist hotel was now a ranger station.

They all went ashore to review the troops: Royal Malay Rangers in jungle camo, and a visiting crew of Swedish ecologists from the World Wildlife Fund. The two aristocrats were gung-ho for a bracing hike through the jungle. They chatted amiably with the Swedes as they soaked themselves with gnat and leech repellent. Brooke pleaded his age, and Turner managed to excuse himself.

Behind the city rose a soaring radio aerial and the rain-blotched white domes of satellite dishes.

“Jamming equipment,” said Brooke with a wink. “The sultanate set it up years ago. Islamic, Malaysian, Japanese—you'd be surprised how violently people insist on being listened to.”

“Freedom of speech,” Turner said.

“How free is it when only rich nations can afford to talk? The Net's expensive, Turner. To you it's a way of life, but for us it's just a giant megaphone for Coca-Cola. We built this to block the shouting of the outside world. It seemed best to set the equipment here in the ruins, out of harm's way. This is a good place to hide secrets.” Brooke sighed. “You know how the corruption spreads. Anyone who touches it is tempted. We use these dishes as the nerve center of our own little Net. You can get a line out here—a real one, with video. Come along, Turner. I'll stand Maple Syrup a free call to civilization, if you like.”

They walked through leaf-littered streets, where pigs and lean, lizard-eyed chickens scattered from underfoot. Turner saw a tattooed face, framed in headphones, at a shattered second-story window. “The local Murut tribe,” Brooke said, glancing up. “They're a bit shy.”

The central control room was a small white concrete blockhouse surrounded by sturdy solar-panel racks. Brooke opened a tarnished padlock with a pocket key, and shot the bolt. Inside, the windowless blockhouse was faintly lit by the tiny green-and-yellow power lights of antique disk drives and personal computers. Brooke flicked on a desk lamp and sat on a chair cushioned with moldy foam rubber. “All automated, you see? The government hasn't had to pay an official visit in years. It keeps everyone out of trouble.”

“Except for your insiders,” Turner said.

“We
are
trouble,” said Brooke. “Besides, this was my idea in the first place.” He opened a musty wicker chest and pulled a video camera from a padded wrapping of cotton batik. He popped it open, sprayed its insides with silicone lubricant, and propped it on a tripod. “All the comforts of home.” He left the blockhouse.

Turner hesitated. He'd finally realized what had bothered him about Brooke. Brooke was
hip
. He had that classic hip attitude of being
in
on things denied to the uncool. It was amazing how sleazy and suspicious it looked on someone who was
really old
.

Turner dialed his brother's house. The screen remained dark. “Who is it?” Georgie said.

“Turner.”

“Oh.” A long moment passed; the screen flashed on to show Georgie in a maroon silk houserobe, his hair still flattened from the pillow. “That's a relief. We've been having some trouble with phone flashers.”

“How are things?”

“He's dying, Turner.”

Turner stared. “Good God.”

“I'm glad you called.” Georgie smoothed his hair shakily. “How soon can you get here?”

“I've got a job here, Georgie.”

Georgie frowned. “Look, I don't blame you for running. You wanted to live your own life; okay, that's fine. But this is
family business
, not some two-bit job in the middle of nowhere.”

“Goddammit,” Turner said, pleading, “I
like
it here, Georgie.”

“I know how much you hate the old bastard. But he's just a dying old man now. Look, we hold his hands for a couple of weeks, and it's all ours, understand? The Riviera, man.”

“It won't work, Georgie,” Turner said, clutching at straws. “He's going to screw us.”

“That's why I need you here. We've got to double-team him, understand?” Georgie glared from the screen. “Think of my kids, Turner. We're your family, you owe us.”

Turner felt growing despair. “Georgie, there's a woman here…”

“Christ, Turner.”

“She's not like the others. Really.”

“Great. So you're going to marry this girl, right? Raise kids.”

“Well…”

“Then what are you wasting my time for?”

“Okay,” Turner said, his shoulders slumping. “I gotta make arrangements. I'll call you back.”

The Dayaks had gone ashore. The prince blithely invited the Swedish ecologists on board. They spent the evening chastely sipping orange juice and discussing Krakatoa and the swamp rhinoceros.

After the party broke up, Turner waited a painful hour and crept into the deserted greenhouse.

Seria was waiting in the sweaty green heat, sitting cross-legged in watery moonlight crosshatched by geodesies, brushing her hair. Turner joined her on the mat. She wore an erotic red synthetic nightie (some groupie's heirloom from the legion of Brooke's women), crisp with age. She was drenched in perfume.

Turner touched her fingers to the small lump on his forearm, where a contraceptive implant showed beneath his skin. He kicked his jeans off.

They began in caution and silence, and ended, two hours later, in the primeval intimacy of each other's musk and sweat. Turner lay on his back, with her head pillowed on his bare arm, feeling a sizzling effervescence of deep cellular pleasure.

It had been mystical. He felt as if some primal feminine energy had poured off her body and washed through him, to the bone. Everything seemed different now. He had discovered a new world, the kind of world a man could spend a lifetime in. It was worth ten years of a man's life just to lie here and smell her skin.

The thought of having her out of arm's reach, even for a moment, filled him with a primal anxiety close to pain. There must be a million ways to make love, he thought languidly. As many as there are to talk or think. With passion. With devotion. Playfully, tenderly, frantically, soothingly. Because you want to, because you need to.

He felt an instinctive urge to retreat to some snug den—anywhere with a bed and a roof—and spend the next solid week exploring the first twenty or thirty ways in that million.

But then the insistent pressure of reality sent a trickle of reason into him. He drifted out of reverie with a stabbing conviction of the perversity of life. Here was all he wanted—all he asked was to pull her over him like a blanket and shut out life's pointless complications. And it wasn't going to happen.

He listened to her peaceful breathing and sank into black depression. This was the kind of situation that called for wild romantic gestures, the kind that neither of them were going to make. They weren't allowed to make them. They weren't in his program, they weren't in her
adat
, they weren't in the plans.

Once he'd returned to Vancouver, none of this would seem real. Jungle moonlight and erotic sweat didn't mix with cool piny fogs over the mountains and the family mansion in Churchill Street. Culture shock would rip his memories away, snapping the million invisible threads that bind lovers.

As he drifted toward sleep, he had a sudden lucid flash of precognition: himself, sitting in the backseat of his brother's Mercedes, letting the machine drive him randomly around the city. Looking past his reflection in the window at the clotted snow in Queen Elizabeth Park, and thinking:
I'll
never see her again
.

It seemed only an instant later that she was shaking him awake. “Shh!”

“What?” he mumbled.

“You were talking in your sleep.” She nuzzled his ear, whispering. “What does ‘Set-position Q-move' mean?”

“Jesus,” he whispered back. “I was dreaming in AML.” He felt the last fading trail of nightmare then, some unspeakable horror of cold iron and helpless repetition. “My family,” he said. “They were all robots.”

She giggled.

“I was trying to repair my grandfather.”

“Go back to sleep, darling.”

“No.” He was wide awake now. “We'd better get back.”

“I hate that cabin. I'll come to your tent on deck.”

“No, they'll find out. You'll get hurt, Seria.” He stepped back into his jeans.

“I don't care. This is the only time we'll have.” She struggled fretfully into the red tissue of her nightie.

“I want to be with you,” he said. “If you could be mine, I'd say to hell with my job and my family.”

She smiled bitterly. “You'll think better of it, later. You can't throw away your life for the sake of some affair. You'll find some other woman in Vancouver. I wish I could kill her.”

Every word rang true, but he still felt hurt. She shouldn't have doubted his willingness to totally destroy his life. “You'll marry too, someday. For reasons of state.”

“I'll never marry,” she said aloofly. “Someday I'll run away from all this. My grand romantic gesture.”

She would never do it, he thought with a kind of aching pity. She'll grow old under glass in this place. “One grand gesture was enough,” he said. “At least we had this much.”

She watched him gloomily. “Don't be sorry you're leaving, darling. It would be wrong of me to let you stay. You don't know all the truth about this place. Or about my family.”

“All families have secrets. Yours can't be any worse than mine.”

“My family is different.” She looked away. “Malay royalty are sacred, Turner. Sacred and unclean. We are aristocrats, shields for the innocent…Dirt and ugliness strikes the shield, not our people. We take corruption on ourselves. Any crimes the State commits are our crimes, understand? They belong to our family.”

Turner blinked. “Well, what? Tell me, then. Don't let it come between us.”

“You're better off not knowing. We came here for a reason, Turner. It's a plan of Brooke's.”

“That old fraud?” Turner said, smiling. “You're too romantic about Westerners, Seria. He looks like hot stuff to you, but he's just a burnt-out crackpot.”

She shook her head. “You don't understand. It's different in your West.” She hugged her slim legs and rested her chin on her knee. “Someday I will get out.”

“No,” Turner said, “its
here
that it's different. In the West families disintegrate, money pries into everything. People don't belong to each other there, they belong to money and their institutions…Here at least people really care and watch over each other…”

She gritted her teeth. “Watching. Yes, always. You're right, I have to go.”

He crept back through the mosquito netting of his tent on deck, and sat in the darkness for hours, savoring his misery. Tomorrow the prince's helicopter would arrive to take the prince and his sister back to the city. Soon Turner would return as well, and finish the last details, and leave. He played out a fantasy: cruising back from Vane with a fat cashier's check. Tea with the sultan.
Er, look, Your Highness, my granddad made it big in the heroin trade, so here's two mill, just pack the girl up in excelsior, she'll love it as an engineer's wife, believe me
…

He heard the faint shuffle of footsteps against the deck. He peered through the tent flap, saw the shine of a flashlight. It was Brooke. He was carrying a valise.

The old man looked around surreptitiously and crept down over the side, to the dock. Weakened by hours of brooding, Turner was instantly inflamed by Brooke's deviousness. Turner sat still for a moment, while curiosity and misplaced fury rapidly devoured his common sense. Common sense said Brunei's secrets were none of his business, but common sense was making his life hell. Anything was better than staying awake all night wondering. He struggled quickly into his shirt and boots.