The Windup Girl полностью

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.