The Windup Girl(28)
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.