The Windup Girl

5

The sun peers over the rim of the earth, casting its blaze across Bangkok. It rushes molten over the wrecked tower bones of the old Expansion and the gold-sheathed chedi of the city’s temples, engulfing them in light and heat. It ignites the sharp high roofs of the Grand Palace where the Child Queen lives cloistered with her attendants, and flames from the filigreed ornamentation of the City Pillar Shrine where monks chant 24-7 on behalf of the city’s seawalls and dikes. The blood warm ocean flickers with blue mirror waves as the sun moves on, burning.

The sun hits Anderson Lake’s sixth-floor balcony and pours into his flat. Jasmine vines at the edge of the veranda rustle in the hot breeze. Anderson looks up, blue eyes slitted against the glare. Sweat jewels pop and gleam on his pale skin. Beyond the rail, the city appears as a molten sea, glinting gold where spires and glass catch the full blaze of the sun.

He’s naked in the heat, seated on the floor, surrounded by open books: flora and fauna catalogs, travel notes, an entire history of the Southeast Asian peninsula scattered across teak. Moldy, crumbling tomes. Scraps of paper. Half-torn diaries. The excavated memories of a time when tens of thousands of plants lofted pollen and spores and seeds into the air. He has spent all night at work, and yet he barely remembers the many varietals he has examined. Instead, his mind returns to flesh exposed-a pha sin sliding up a girl’s legs, the memory of peacocks on a shimmering purple weave riding high, smooth thighs damply parted.

In the far distance, the towers of Ploenchit stand tall, backlit. Three shadow fingers spiking skyward in a yellow haze of humidity. In the daylight they just look like more Expansion-era slums, without a hint of the pulsing addictions contained within.

A windup girl.

His fingers on her skin. Her dark eyes solemn as she said, “You may touch.”

Anderson takes a shuddering breath, forcing away the memories. She is the opposite of the invasive plagues he fights every day. A hothouse flower, dropped into a world too harsh for her delicate heritage. It seems unlikely that she will survive for long. Not in this climate. Not with these people. Perhaps it was that vulnerability that moved him, her pretended strength when she had nothing at all. Seeing her fight for a semblance of pride even as she hiked up her skirt at Raleigh’s order.

Is that why you told her about the villages? Because you pitied her? Not because her skin felt as smooth as mango? Not because you could hardly breathe when you touched her?

He grimaces and turns his attention again to his open books, forcing himself to attend to his true problem, the question that has brought him across the world on clipper ship and dirigible: Gi Bu Sen. The windup girl said Gi Bu Sen.

Anderson shuffles through his books and papers, comes up with a photograph. A fat man, sitting with other Midwest scientists at an AgriGen-sponsored conference on blister rust mutation. He is looking away from the camera, bored, the wattles of his neck showing.

Are you still fat? Anderson wonders. Do the Thais feed you as well as we did?

There were only three possibilities: Bowman, Gibbons and Chaudhuri. Bowman, who disappeared just before the SoyPRO monopoly broke. Chaudhuri, who walked off a dirigible and disappeared into the Indian Estates, either kidnapped by PurCal or run off, or dead. And Gibbons. Gi Bu Sen. The smartest of them all, and the one deemed least likely. Dead, after all. His seared body recovered from the ashes of his home by his children… and then entirely cremated before the company could perform an autopsy. But dead. And when the children were questioned with lie detectors and drugs, all they could say was that their father had always insisted that he not be autopsied. That he couldn’t abide anyone cutting into his corpse and pumping it with preservatives. But the DNA matched. It was him. Everyone was sure it was him.

Except that it’s easy to doubt when all you have are a few genetic clippings from the supposed corpse of the finest generipper in the world.

Anderson shuffles through more papers, hunting up the transcripts of the calorie man’s final days, culled from bugging devices they kept in the labs. Nothing. Not a hint of his plans. And then he was dead. And they were forced to believe that it was true.

In that way, the ngaw almost makes sense. The nightshades as well. Gibbons always enjoyed flaunting his expertise. An egotist. Every colleague said so. Gibbons would delight in playing with the full range of a complete seedbank. An entire genus resurrected and then a bit of local lore to top it off. Ngaw. At least, Anderson assumes the fruit is local. But who knows? Perhaps it is an entirely new creation. Something sprung complete from Gibbons’ mind, like Adam’s rib spawning Eve.

Anderson idly thumbs through the books and notes before him. None of them mention the ngaw. All he has is the Thai word and its singular appearance. He doesn’t even know if “ngaw” is the traditional moniker for the red and green fruit, or something newly named. He had hoped that Raleigh would have his own recollections, but the man is old, and addled on opium-if he knew an Angrit word for the historical fruit, it is lost to him now. In any case, there’s no obvious translation. It will be at least a month before Des Moines can examine the samples. And there’s no telling if it will be in their catalogues even then. If it’s sufficiently altered, there may be no shortcut to a DNA match.

One thing is certain: the ngaw is new. A year ago, none of the inventory agents described anything of the sort in their ecosystem surveys. Between one year and the next, the ngaw appeared. As if the soil of the Kingdom had simply decided to birth up the past and deposit it in the markets of Bangkok.

Anderson thumbs through another book, hunting. Since his arrival, he has been creating a library, a historical window into the City of Divine Beings, tomes drawn from before the calorie wars and plagues, before the Contraction. He has pillaged through everything from antiquities shops to the rubble of Expansion towers. Most of the paper of that time has already burned or rotted in the humid tropics, but he has found pockets of learning even so, families that valued their books more than as a quick way to start a fire. The accumulated knowledge now lines his walls, volume after volume of mold-fringed information. It depresses him. Reminds him of Yates, that desperate urge to excavate the corpse of the past and reanimate it.

“Think of it!” Yates had crowed. “A new Expansion! Dirigibles, next-gen kink-springs, fair trade winds…”

Yates had books of his own. Dusty tomes he’d stolen from libraries and business schools across North America, the neglected knowledge of the past-a careful pillaging of Alexandria that had gone entirely unnoticed because everyone knew global trade was dead.

When Anderson arrived, the books had filled the SpringLife offices and ranged around Yates’ desk in stacks: Global Management in Practice, Intercultural Business, The Asian Mind, The Little Tigers of Asia, Supply Chains and Logistics, Pop Thai, The New Global Economy, Exchange Rate Considerations in Supply Chains, Thais Mean Business, International Competition and Regulation. Anything and everything related to the history of the old Expansion.

Yates had pointed to them in his final moments of desperation and said, “But we can have it again! All of it!” And then he had wept, and Anderson finally felt pity for the man. Yates had invested his life in something that would never be.

Anderson flips through another book, examining ancient photographs in turn. Chiles. Piles of them, laid out before some long dead photographer. Chiles. Eggplants. Tomatoes. All those wonderful nightshades again. If it hadn’t been for the nightshades, Anderson wouldn’t have been dispatched to the Kingdom by the home office, and Yates might have had a chance.

Anderson reaches for his package of Singha hand-rolled cigarettes, lights one, and sprawls back, contemplative, examining the smoke of ancients. It amuses him that the Thais, even amid starvation, have found the time and energy to resurrect nicotine addiction. He wonders if human nature ever really changes.

The sun glares in at him, bathing him with light. Through the humidity and haze of burning dung, he can just make out the manufacturing district in the distance, with its regularly spaced structures so different from the jumble tile and rust wash of the old city. And beyond the factories, the rim of the seawall looms with its massive lock system that allows the shipment of goods out to sea. Change is coming. The return to truly global trade. Supply lines that circle the world. It’s all coming back, even if they’re slow at relearning. Yates had loved kink-springs, but he’d loved the idea of resurrected history even more.

“You aren’t AgriGen here, you know. You’re just another grubby farang entrepreneur trying to make a buck along with the jade prospectors and the clipper hands. This isn’t India, where you can walk around flashing AgriGen’s wheat crest and requisitioning whatever you want. The Thais don’t roll over like that. They’ll cut you to pieces and send you back as meat if they find out what you are.”

“You’re out on the next dirigible flight,” Anderson said. “Be glad the main office even approved that.”

But then Yates had pulled the spring gun.

Anderson draws again on his cigarette, irritated. He becomes aware of the heat. Overhead, his room’s crank fan has come to a halt. The winding man, who is supposed to arrive every day at four in the afternoon, apparently didn’t load enough joules. Anderson grimaces and rises to pull the shades, blocking out the blaze. The building is a new one, built on thermal principals that allow cool ground air to circulate easily through the building, but it is still difficult to withstand the direct blaze of equatorial sun.

Now in shadow, Anderson returns to his books. Turns pages. Flips through yellowed tomes and cracked spines. Crumbling paper ill-treated by humidity and age. He opens another book. He pinches his cigarette between his lips, squinting through the smoke, and stops.

Ngaw.

Piles of them. The little red fruits with their strange green hairs sit before him, mocking him from within a photo of a farang bargaining for food with some long ago Thai farmer. All around them, brightly colored, petroleum-burning taxis blur past, but just to their side, a huge pyramidal pile of ngaw stares out of the photo, taunting.

Anderson has spent enough time poring over ancient pictures that they seldom affect him. He can usually ignore the foolish confidence of the past-the waste, the arrogance, the absurd wealth-but this one irritates him: the fat flesh hanging off the farang, the astonishing abundance of calories that are so obviously secondary to the color and attractiveness of a market that has thirty varieties of fruit: mangosteens, pineapples, coconuts, certainly… but there are no oranges, now. None of these… these… dragon fruits, none of these pomelos, none of these yellow things… lemons. None of them. So many of these things are simply gone.

But the people in the photo don’t know it. These dead men and women have no idea that they stand in front of the treasure of the ages, that they inhabit the Eden of the Grahamite Bible where pure souls go to live at the right hand of God. Where all the flavors of the world reside under the careful attentions of Noah and Saint Francis, and where no one starves.

Anderson scans the caption. The fat, self-contented fools have no idea of the genetic gold mine they stand beside. The book doesn’t even bother to identify the ngaw. It’s just another example of nature’s fecundity, taken entirely for granted because they enjoyed so damn much of it.

Anderson briefly wishes that he could drag the fat farang and ancient Thai farmer out of the photograph and into his present, so that he could express his rage at them directly, before tossing them off his balcony the way they undoubtedly tossed aside fruit that was even the slightest bit bruised.

He flips through the book but finds no other images, nor mentions of the kinds of fruits available. He straightens, agitated, and goes to the balcony again. Steps out into the sun’s blaze and stares out across the city. From below, the calls of water sellers and the cry of megodonts echoes up. The chime of bicycle bells streaming across the city. By noon, the city will be largely stilled, waiting for the sun to begin its descent.

Somewhere in this city a generipper is busily toying with the building blocks of life. Reengineering long-extinct DNA to fit post-Contraction circumstances, to survive despite the assaults of blister rust, Nippon genehack weevil and cibiscosis.

Gi Bu Sen. The windup girl was certain of the name. It has to be Gibbons.

Anderson leans on the balcony’s rail squinting into the heat, surveying the tangled city. Gibbons is out there, hiding. Crafting his next triumph. And wherever he hides, a seedbank will be close.