The Windup Girl

  Kanya jerks at the voice. It sounds like Jaidee. It has the telltales of Jaidee, of his humor and his relentlessness. The hint of laughter along with judgment. Jaidee never lost his sense of sanuk.

  I'm not your kind, Kanya thinks.

  Again the grin and the chuckle. I knew that.

  Why didn't you simply kill me if you knew?

  The voice is silent. The sound of the muay thai match continues to crackle behind them. Charoen and Sakda. A good match. But either Charoen has radically improved, or Sakda has been paid to fail. Kanya's bet will be a losing one. The match reeks of interference. Perhaps the Dung Lord has taken an interest in the fight. Kanya makes a face of irritation.

  "Bad match?" Narong asks.

  "I always bet on the wrong man."

  Narong laughs. "That's why it's so helpful to have information ahead of time." He hands her a scrap of paper.

  Kanya looks through the names on the list. "These are Pracha's friends. Generals, some of them. They're protected by him as the cobra sheltered the Buddha."

  Narong grins. "That's why they will be so surprised when he suddenly turns on them. Hit them. Make them hurt. Let them know that the Environment Ministry is not to be trifled with. That the Ministry views all infractions equally. No more favoritism. No more friendships and easy deals. Show them that this new Environment Ministry is unbending."

  "You're trying to drive a wedge between Pracha and his allies? Make them angry at him?"

  Narong shrugs. Doesn't say anything. Kanya finishes her noodles. When no other instructions seem to be forthcoming, she stands. "I must go. I can't have my men see me with you."

  Narong nods, dismissing her. Kanya stalks out of the coffee shop, followed by new groans of disappointment from the radio listeners as Sakda is cowed by Charoen's newfound ferocity.

  On the street corner, under the green glow of methane, Kanya straightens her uniform. There is a blotchy stain on her jacket, residue of the destruction she has wreaked tonight. She frowns with distaste. Brushes at it. Again opens the list that Narong gave her, memorizing the names.

  The men and women are General Pracha's closest friends. And they will now be enforced against as vigorously as the yellow cards in their towers. As vigorously as General Pracha once enforced against a small village in the northeast, leaving starving families and burning homes behind him.

  Difficult. But, for once, fair.

  Kanya crumples the list in her hand. This is the shape of our world, she thinks. Tit for tat until we're all dead and cheshires lap at our blood.

  She wonders if it was really better in the past, if there really was a golden age fueled by petroleum and technology. A time when every solution to a problem didn't engender another. She wants to curse those farang who came before. The calorie men with their active labs and their carefully cultured crop strains that would feed the world. Their modified animals that would work so much more efficiently on fewer calories. The AgriGens and PurCals who claimed that they were happy to feed the world, to export their patented grains, and then always found a way to delay.

  Ah, Jaidee, she thinks. I am sorry. So sorry. For everything I have done to you and yours. I did not set out to hurt you. If I had known how much it would cost to balance against Pracha's greed, I would have never come to Krung Thep.

  Instead of going after her men, she makes her way to a temple. It is small, a neighborhood shrine more than anything, with only a few monks in attendance. A young boy kneels before the glittering Buddha image with his grandmother, but otherwise, the place is empty. Kanya buys some incense from the vendor at the gate and goes inside. She lights the incense and kneels, holds the burning sticks to her forehead, raises them three times in the Triple Gem: buddha, damma, sanga. She prays.

  How many evils has she committed? How much bad kamma must she atone for? Was it more important to honor Akkarat and his promises of a balancing of the scales? Or was it more important to honor her adoptive father, Jaidee?

  A man comes to your village with a promise of food for your belly, a life in the city, and money for your aunt's cough and your uncle's whiskey. And he doesn't even want to buy your body. What else can one wish for? What else could buy loyalty? Everyone needs a patron.

  May you have much better friends in your next life, loyal fighter.

  Ah, Jaidee, I am sorry.

  May I wander as a ghost for a million years to make atonement.

  May you be reborn in a better place than this.

  She stands and makes a final wai to the Buddha and goes out of the temple. On the steps, she looks up at the stars. She wonders how it is that her kamma has so destroyed her. She closes her eyes, fighting back tears.

  In the distance, a building explodes in flame. She has over a hundred men working this district, letting everyone feel the pain of real enforcement. Laws are a fine thing on paper, but painful when no bribery can ease their bind. People have forgotten this. Suddenly she feels tired. She turns away from the carnage. She has enough blood and soot on her hands for one night. Her men know their work. Home is not far.

  * * *

  "Captain Kanya?"

  Kanya opens her eyes to dawn light filtering into her home. For a moment, she is too groggy to remember anything about the days, about her position. . .

  "Captain?" The voice is calling in through her screened window.

  Kanya pulls herself out of bed and goes to her door. "Yes?" she calls through. "What is it?"

  "You're wanted at the Ministry."

  Kanya opens the door and takes an envelope from the man, unbinds the seal. "This is from the Quarantine Department," she says, surprised.

  He nods. "It was a volunteer duty that Captain Jaidee had. . ." he trails off. "With everyone working, General Pracha asked. . ." he hesitates.

  Kanya nods. "Yes. Of course."

  Her skin crawls, remembering Jaidee's stories of the wars against early strains of cibiscosis. How he worked with his heart in his throat alongside his men, all of them wondering who would die before the week was done. All of them in a terror of sickness and a sweat of work as they burned whole villages: homes and wats and Buddha images all going up in smoke while monks chanted and called spirits to their aid and people all around them lay on the ground and died, gagging on fluids as their lungs ruptured. The Quarantine Department. She reads the message. Nods sharply to the boy. "Yes. I see."

  "Any return?"

  "No." She sets the envelope on a side table, a scorpion crouched. "This is all I need."

  The messenger salutes and runs down the steps to his bicycle. Kanya closes the door, thoughtful. The envelope hints at horrors. Perhaps this is her kamma. Retribution.

  In a short time she is on her way to the Ministry, cycling through leafy streets, crossing canals, coasting down city boulevards built for five lanes of petroleum-burning cars that now carry herds of megodonts.

  At the Quarantine Department, she endures a second security check before she is allowed to enter the complex.

  Computer and climate fans hum relentlessly. The whole building seems to vibrate with the energy burning within. More than three-quarters of the Ministry's carbon allocation goes to this single building, the brain of the Quarantine Department that evaluates and predicts the shifts in genetic architecture that necessitate a Ministry response.

  Behind glass walls, LEDs on servers wink red and green, burning energy, drowning Krung Thep even as they save it. She walks down the halls, past a series of rooms where scientists sit before giant computer screens and study genetic models on the brightly glowing displays. Kanya imagines that she can feel the air combusting with all the energy being burned, all the coal being consumed to keep this single building running.

  There are stories of the raids that were necessary to create the Quarantine Department. Of the strange marriages that gave them footholds in these technologies. Farang brought across at great expense, foreign experts used to transfer the viruses of their knowledge, the invasive concepts of their generip criminality to the
Kingdom, the knowledge needed to preserve the Thai and keep them safe in the face of the plagues.

  Some of these people are famous now, as important in folklore as Ajahn Chanh and Chart Korbjitti and Seub Nakhasathien. Some of them have become boddhis in their own right, merciful spirits, dedicated to the salvation of an entire kingdom.

  She passes through a courtyard. In the corner, a small spirit house sits, housing miniature statues of Teacher Lalji, looking like a small wizened saddhu, and the AgriGen Saint Sarah. The twinned boddhis. Male and Female, the calorie bandit and the generipper. The thief and the builder. There are only a few incense sticks burning, the usual plate of breakfast and garlands of marigolds that are always strung. When the plagues are bad, the place seethes with prayers as scientists struggle to find a solution.

  Even our prayers are to farang, Kanya thinks. A farang antidote for a farang plague.

  Take any tool you can find. Make it your own, Jaidee said in times past, explaining why they consorted with the worst. Why they bribed and stole and encouraged monsters like Gi Bu Sen.

  A machete doesn't care who wields it, or who made it. Take the knife and it will cut. Take the farang if they will be a tool in your hand. And if it turns on you, melt it down. You will have at least the raw materials.

  Take any tool. He was always practical.

  But it hurts. They hunt and beg for scraps of knowledge from abroad, scavenge like cheshires for survival. So much knowledge sits inside the Midwest Compact. When a promising genetic thinker arises somewhere in the world, they are cowed and bullied and bribed to work with the other best and brightest in Des Moines or Changsha. It takes a strong researcher to resist a PurCal or AgriGen or RedStar. And even if they do stand up to the calorie companies, what does the Kingdom offer them? Even their best computers are generations behind those of the calorie companies.

  Kanya shakes off the thought. We are alive. We are alive when whole kingdoms and countries are gone. When Malaya is a morass of killing. When Kowloon is underwater. When China is split and the Vietnamese are broken and Burma is nothing but starvation. The Empire of America is no more. The Union of the Europeans splintered and factionalized. And yet we endure, even expand. The Kingdom survives. Thank the Buddha that he extends a compassionate hand and that our Queen has enough merit to attract these terrifying farang tools without which we would be completely defenseless.

  She reaches a final checkpoint. Endures another inspection of her papers. Doors slide aside and then she is invited into an electric elevator. She feels the air sucked in with her, negative pressure, and then the doors close.

  Kanya plunges into the earth, as though she is falling into hell. She thinks of the hungry ghosts that populate this awful facility. The spirits of the dead who sacrificed themselves to leash the demons of the world. Her skin prickles.

  Down.

  Down.

  The elevator's doors open. A white hall and an airlock. Out of her clothes. Into a shower heavy with chlorine. Out on the other side.

  A boy offers her lab clothes and reconfirms her identification from a list. He informs her she won't need secondary containment procedures and then leads Kanya down more halls.

  The scientists here carry the haunted looks of people who know they are under siege. They know that beyond a few doors, all manner of apocalyptic terrors wait to swallow them. If Kanya thinks about it, her bowels go watery. That was Jaidee's strength. He had faith in his past lives and future ones. Kanya, though? She will be reborn to die of cibiscosis a dozen times before she is allowed to progress once more. Kamma.

  "You should have considered that before you gave me up to them," Jaidee says.

  Kanya stumbles at his voice. Jaidee is trailing a few paces behind her. Kanya gasps and presses her back against a wall. Jaidee cocks his head, studying her. Kanya can't breathe. Will he simply strangle her here, to pay her back for her betrayals?

  Her guide stops. "Are you sick?" he asks.

  Jaidee is gone.

  Kanya's heart is pounding. She's sweating. If she were any further into containment, she would have to ask to be quarantined, beg not to be let out, to accept that some bacteria or virus had made the jump and that she was going to die.

  "I'm—" she gags, remembering the blood on the steps of General Pracha's administrative building. Jaidee's dismembered body, a careful brutal package. Ragged death.

  "Do you need a doctor?"

  Kanya tries to control her breathing. Jaidee is haunting her. His phii following her. She tries to control her fear. "I'm fine." She nods to the guide. "Let's go. Finish this now."

  A minute later the guide indicates a door and nods that Kanya should step through. As Kanya opens the door, Ratana looks up from her files. Smiles slightly in the glow of her monitor.

  The computers down here all have large screens. Some of them are models that haven't existed in fifty years and burn more energy than five new ones, but they do their work and in return are meticulously maintained. Still, the amount of power burning through them makes Kanya weak in the knees. She can almost see the ocean rising in response. It's a horrifying thing to stand beside.

  "Thank you for coming," Ratana says.

  "Of course I came."

  No mention of earlier trysts. No mention of shared history, gone awry. That Kanya could not play tom and dee with one she would inevitably betray. That was too much hypocrisy, even for Kanya. And yet Ratana is still beautiful. Kanya remembers laughing with her, taking a skiff out across the Chao Phraya and watching paper boats glowing all around them during Loi Kratong. Remembers the feel of Ratana curled against her as the waves lapped and as thousands of little candles burned, the city's wishes and prayers blanketing the waters.

  Ratana motions her over. Shows her a set of photos on her screen. She catches sight of Kanya's captain's tags on her white collar. "I'm sorry about Jaidee. He was. . . good."

  Kanya grimaces, trying to shake off the memory of his phii in the halls outside. "He was better than that." She studies the bodies that glow in front of her. "What am I seeing?"

  "Two men. From two different hospitals."

  "Yes?"

  "They had something in them. Something worrisome. It seems to be a variant of blister rust."

  "Yes? And? They ate something tainted. They died. So?"

  Ratana shakes her head. "It was hosted in them. Propagating. I've never seen it host itself in a mammal."

  Kanya looks over the hospital records. "Who are they?"

  "We don't know."

  "No family visited them? No one saw them arrive? They didn't say?"

  "One was incoherent when he was admitted. The other was already deep into blister rust collapse."

  "You're sure they didn't just eat tainted fruit?"

  Ratana shrugs. Her skin is smooth and pale from a life underground. Not like Kanya whose skin has darkened like a peasant's in the harsh sun of active patrol. And yet Kanya would always choose to work above ground, not down here, in the darkness. Ratana is the brave one. Kanya is sure of it. She wonders what personal demons have driven Ratana to work in this hellish place. When they were together, Ratana never talked about her past. About her losses. But they are there. They have to be, like rocks under the waves and froth of a coastline. There are always rocks.

  "No, of course I'm not sure. Not one hundred percent."

  "Fifty percent?"

  She shrugs again, uncomfortable, goes back to her papers. "You know I can't make assertions like that. But the virus is different, the protein alterations in their samples are variants. The breakdown of the tissue doesn't match the standard fingerprint of blister rust. In testing, it conforms to blister rusts we've seen before. AgriGen and TotalNutrient variations, AG134.s and TN249.x.d Both of them offer strong similarities." She pauses.

  "Yes?"

  "But it was in the lungs."

  "Cibiscosis, then."

  "No. It was blister rust." Ratana looks at Kanya. "You see the problem?"

  "And we know nothing about th
eir history, their travel? Were they abroad maybe? On a clipper ship? Crossing into Burma. Over into South China? They're not from the same village, perhaps?"

  Ratana shrugs. "We have no history for either of them. Just the sickness to link them. We used to have a population database with DNA records, family history, work and housing data, but they were taken offline to provide more processing power for pre-emptive research." She shrugs. "In any case, so few people were bothering to register, it didn't make any sense."

  "So we have nothing. Any other cases?"

  "No."

  "You mean not so far."

  "This is beyond me here. We only noticed it because of the crackdowns. The hospitals are reporting everything, far more than they normally do, just to show that they're compliant. It was an accident that they reported and another that I noticed it in all the other reports that are coming in. We need Gi Bu Sen's help."

  Kanya's skin crawls. "Jaidee's dead. Gi Bu Sen won't help us now."

  "Sometimes he takes an interest. Not just in his own research. With this, it's possible." She looks up at Kanya, hopeful. "You went with Jaidee before. You saw him convince the man. Perhaps he will take an interest in you, too?"

  "It's doubtful."

  "Look at this." Ratana shuffles through the medical charts. "It has the markings of an engineered virus. DNA shifts don't look like ones that would reproduce in the wild. Blister rust has no reason to jump the animal kingdom barrier. Nothing is encouraging it, it is not easily transferred. The differences are marked. It's as though we're looking into its future. At what it will be like after being reborn 10,000 times. It's a true puzzle. And truly worrisome."

  "If you're right, we're all dead. General Pracha will have to be briefed. The palace told."

  "Quietly," Ratana begs. She reaches out, grasps Kanya's sleeve, her face anguished. "I could still be wrong."

  "You aren't."

  "I don't know that it can jump, or how readily. I want you to go to Gi Bu Sen. He will know."

  Kanya makes a face. "All right. I'll try. In the meantime, put out word to the hospitals and street clinics to look out for more symptoms. Draw up a list. With everyone already worried about crackdowns, it won't even look suspicious for us to demand more information from them. They'll think we're just trying to keep them on their toes. That will tell us something, at least."