The Windup Girl

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  "Go off to bed. You'll wake up Niwat and Surat. And mother."

  Jaidee pulls her close, puts his lips to her ear. "She wouldn't mind another grandchild."

  Chaya pushes him away, laughing. "She will if you wake her up."

  His hands slip along her hips. "I'll be very quiet."

  She slaps his hands away, but doesn't try very hard. He catches her hand. Feels the stumps of her missing fingers, caresses their ridges. Suddenly they're both solemn again. She takes a ragged breath. "We've all lost too many things. I can't bear to lose you, too."

  "You won't. I'm a tiger. And I'm no fool."

  She holds him close. "I hope so. I truly do." Her warm body presses against him. He can feel her breathing, steady, full of concern for him. She draws back and looks at him solemnly, her eyes dark and full of care.

  "I'll be fine," he says again.

  She nods but doesn't seem to be listening. Instead she seems to be studying him, following the lines of his brow, of his smiles, of his scars and pocks. The moment seems to stretch forever, her dark eyes on him, memorizing, solemn. At last she nods, as though listening to something she tells herself, and her worried expression lifts. She smiles and pulls him close, pressing her lips to his ear. "You are a tiger," she whispers, as if she is a fortune teller pronouncing, and her body relaxes into him, pressing to him fully. He feels a rush of relief as they come together, finally.

  He clasps her to him more tightly. "I've missed you," he whispers.

  "Come with me." She slips free and takes him by the hand. Leads him toward their bed. She pulls aside the mosquito netting and slips under its tenting gossamer. Clothing rustles, falling away. A shadow woman teases him from within.

  "You still smell like smoke," she says.

  Jaidee pulls aside the nets. "And whiskey. Don't forget the whiskey."

  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.r />
  "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.

  6

  The problem with keeping money in a bank is that in the blink of a tiger's eye it will turn on you: what's yours becomes theirs, what was your sweat and labor and sold off portions of a lifetime become a stranger's. This problem—this banking problem—gnaws at the forefront of Hock Seng's mind, a genehack weevil that he cannot dig out and cannot pinch into pus and exoskeleton fragments.

  Imagined in terms of the time—time spent earning wages that a bank then holds—a bank can own more than half of a man. Well, at least a third, even if you are a lazy Thai. And a man without one third of his life, in truth, has no life at all.

  Which third can a man lose? The third from his chest to the top of his balding skull? From his waist to his yellowing toenails? Two legs and an arm? Two arms and a head? A quarter of a man, cut away, might still hope to survive, but a third is too much to tolerate.

  This is the problem with a bank. As soon as you place your money in its mouth, it turns out that the tiger has gotten its teeth locked around your head. One third, or one half, or just a liver-spotted skull, it might as well be all.

  But if a bank cannot be trusted, what can? A flimsy lock on a door? The ticking of a mattress, carefully unstuffed? The ravaged tiles of a rooftop lifted up and wrapped in banana leaves? A cutaway in the bamboo beams of a slum shack, cleverly sliced open and hollowed to hold the fat rolls of bills that he shoves into them?

  Hock Seng digs into bamboo.

  The man who rented him the room called it a flat, and in a way, it is. It has four walls, not just a tenting of coconut polymer tarps. It has a tiny courtyard behind, where the outhouse lies and which he shares—along with the walls—with six other huts. For a yellow card refugee, this is not a flat but a mansion. And yet all around he hears the groaning complaining
mass of humanity.

  The WeatherAll wooden walls are frankly an extravagance even if they don't quite touch the ground, even if the jute sandals of his neighbors peek underneath, and even if they reek with the embedded oils that keep them from rotting in the humidity of the tropics. But they are necessary, if only to provide places to store his money other than in the bottom of his rain barrel wrapped in three layers of dog hide that he prays may still be waterproof after six months of immersion.

  Hock Seng pauses in his labors, listening.

  Rustling comes from the next room but nothing indicates that anyone eavesdrops on his mouselike burrowing. He returns to the process of loosening a disguised bamboo panel at its joint, carefully saving the sawdust for later.

  Nothing is certain—that is the first lesson. The yang guizi foreign devils learned this in the Contraction when their loss of oil sent them scuttling back to their home shores. He himself finally learned it in Malacca. Nothing is certain, nothing is secure. A rich man becomes a poor man. A noisy Chinese clan, fat and happy during Spring Festival, fed well on pork strips, nasi goreng and Hainan-style chicken becomes a single emaciated yellow card. Nothing is eternal. The Buddhists understand this much, at least.

  Hock Seng grins mirthlessly and continues his quiet burrowing, following a line across the top of the panel, digging out more packed sawdust. He now lives in the height of luxury, with his patched mosquito net and his little burner that can ignite green methane twice a day, if he's willing to pay the local pi lien elder brother for an illegal tap into the city lamppost delivery pipes. He has his own set of clay rain urns sitting in the tiny courtyard, an astounding luxury in itself, protected by the honor and uprightness of his neighbors, the desperately poor, who know that there must be limits to anything, that every squalor and debauch has limits, and so he has rain barrels full of green slime mosquito eggs that he can assure himself will never be stolen from, even if he may be murdered outside his door, or the neighbor wife may be raped by any nak leng who takes a fancy to her.