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-story, 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 fingerprints 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.