The bus has a driver and shakes with the deep vibrations you get from hydrocarbon engines, fuel cells apparently not being big in Thailand. The net warned him that without air-conditioning the heat would be unbearable but the Thais don’t seem to mind and neither does he. In flooded green fields that might be rice he sees not robots but men and women in wide hats, bent and toiling.
The soap operas on the television behind the driver’s seat keep getting interrupted by the king of Thailand, who, Kern thinks, looks frightened; according to the English captioning, he’s urging his people to defy the foreign aggressors like the warriors of old. Officially, the Thai army is defending the nation’s territorial integrity against a salad of narcotraffickers, rebellious indigenes, bandits and incursions from what had been Burma and is now, he gathers, fucked. In practice, according to the chatter on the net, it’s a free-for-all, the combatants indifferent to nationalism, tribalism and warmed-over post-Marxism, their chaotic melees driven solely by a roaring trade in opium. An often repeated quote on the boards is “If you want to bring peace to Southeast Asia, make better synthetic heroin.” (Back in the favelas Lares had held forth at tedious length on the chemical glory of the poppy, the complexity and harmony of its neuroactive compounds.)
He gets off at a village where the houses have walls of blue plastic sheeting and rooves of corrugated aluminum. The bus depot is an old man with a laptop, sitting on an aluminum stool under a parasol advertising a beer not made since the millennium. Kern’s old phone had told him he could get a bus here to Kuan Lon, but the old man shakes his head, tells him through a text-only translator that there is no such bus. Kuan Lon is forty-five kilometers away and the jungle isn’t the contiguous tangle of snakes and darkness he’s been expecting, just trees, sun, heat, a dirt road. He buys large transparent bottles of water and candy bars. It’s not going to get cold, he figures, and if it rains, I’ll get wet, so he sets out.