The Windup Girl(38)
Kanya grimaces. Jaidee watches as his lieutenant mulls what she will say. He wonders if he was ever so tactful as this young woman. He doubts it. He has always been too brash, too easily angered. Not like Kanya, dour Kanya, all jai yen all the time. Not sanuk at all, but certainly jai yen.
He waits, thinking that at last he will hear her story, her full story in all its painful humanity, but when Kanya finally summons the words, she surprises him. She speaks in a near whisper. Almost too embarrassed to form the words at all.
"Some of the men complain that you don't take enough gifts of goodwill."
"What?" Jaidee sits back, goggles at her. "We won't participate in that sort of thing. We're different than the rest. And proud of it."
Kanya nods readily. "And the newspapers and whisper sheets love you for it. And the people love you for it."
"But?"
Her miserable look returns. "But you don't get promoted anymore, and the men who are loyal to you get no help from your patronage, and they lose heart."
"But look what we accomplish!" Jaidee taps the sack of money between his legs that they confiscated off the clipper ship. "They all know that if they have a need, they will be helped. We have more than enough for anyone in need."
Kanya looks down at the table and mumbles, "Some say you like to keep the money."
"What?" Jaidee stares at her, dumbstruck. "Do you think this?"
Kanya shrugs miserably. "Of course not."
Jaidee shakes his head, apologizing. "No, of course you wouldn't. You've been a good girl. You've done great things here." He smiles at his lieutenant, almost overwhelmed with compassion for the young woman who came to him starving, idolizing him and his years as a champion, wanting so much to emulate him.
"I do what I can to squash the rumors, but…" Kanya shrugs again, miserable. "Cadets say that being under Captain Jaidee is like starving of akah worms. You work and work and get skinnier and skinnier. These are good boys we have, but they can't help but feel ashamed when they have old uniforms and their comrades have new crisp ones. When they ride a bicycle two at a time, and their comrades ride kink-spring scooters."
Jaidee sighs. "I remember a time when the white shirts were loved."
"Everyone needs to eat."
Jaidee sighs again. He pulls the satchel out from between his legs and shoves it across to Kanya. "Take the money. Divide it equally amongst them. For their bravery and hard work yesterday."
She looks at him surprised. "You're sure?"
Jaidee shrugs and smiles, hiding his own disappointment, knowing that this is the best way, and yet saddened immeasurably by it. "Why not? They're good boys, as you say. And it's not as though the farang and the Ministry of Trade aren't reeling at this very moment. They did good work."
Kanya wais deep respect, ducking her head low and raising her pressed palms to her forehead.
"Oh, stop that nonsense." Jaidee pours more Sato into Kanya's glass, finishing the bottle. "Mai pen rai. Never mind. These are small things. Tomorrow we'll have new battles to fight. And we'll need good loyal boys to follow us. How will we ever overcome the AgriGens and PurCals of the world if we don't feed our friends?"
8
"I lost 30,000."
"Fifty," Otto mutters.
Lucy Nguyen stares at the ceiling. "One-Eighty Five? Six?"
"Four hundred." Quoile Napier sets his warm glass of Sato down on the low table. "I lost four hundred thousand blue bills on Carlyle's goddamn dirigible."
The entire table falls silent, stunned. "Christ." Lucy sits up, bleary with drink in the middle of the afternoon. "What were you smuggling in, cibi-resistant seedstock?"
The conversationalists sprawl on the veranda of Sir Francis Drake's, all five together, the "Farang Phalanx" as Lucy has styled them, all of them staring out at the dry season blast furnace and drinking themselves into a stupor.
Anderson reclines with them, half-listening to their slurred complaints as he turns the problem of the ngaw's origins over in his mind. He's got another bag of the fruit between his feet, and he can't help thinking that the answer to his puzzle lies close, if only he had sufficient ingenuity to suss it out. He drinks warm Khmer whiskey and ponders.
Ngaw:apparently impervious to blister rust and cibiscosis even when directly exposed; obviously resistant to Nippon genehack weevil and leafcurl, or it could never have grown. A perfect product. The fruit of access to different genetic material than AgriGen and the rest of the calorie companies use for their generipping.
Somewhere in this country a seedbank is hidden. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of carefully preserved seeds, a treasure trove of biological diversity. Infinite chains of DNA, each with their own potential uses. And from this gold mine, the Thais are extracting answers to their knottiest challenges of survival. With access to the Thai seedbank, Des Moines could mine genetic code for generations, beat back plague mutations. Stay alive a little longer.
Anderson shifts in his seat, stifling irritation, wiping away sweat. He's so close. Nightshades have been reborn, and now ngaw. And Gibbons is running loose in Southeast Asia. If it weren't for that illegal windup girl he wouldn't even know about Gibbons. The Kingdom has been singularly successful at maintaining its operational security. If he could just ascertain the seedbank's location, a raid might even be possible… They've learned since Finland.