The Windup Girl(29)

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.