Anderson watches, transfixed. Emiko is adapted for a different sort of world, not this brutal sweltering place. The city will swallow her eventually. It’s obvious.
She becomes aware of his gaze. Shares a small melancholy smile. “Nothing lasts forever, I think.”
“No.” Anderson’s throat is tight.
They stare at one another. Her blouse has fallen open again, showing the line of her throat, the inner curve of her breasts. She doesn’t move to hide herself, just looks back at him, solemn. Is it deliberate? Does she mean to encourage him? Or is it simply her nature to entice? Perhaps she cannot help herself at all. A set of instincts as ingrained in her DNA as the cheshire’s clever stalking of birds. Anderson leans close, unsure.
Emiko doesn’t pull away, moves instead to meet him. Her lips are soft. Anderson runs his hand up her hip, pushes her blouse open and quests inside. She sighs and presses closer, her lips opening to him. Does she wish this? Or only acquiesce? Is she even capable of refusing? Her breasts press against him. Her hands slip down his body. He’s shaking. Trembling like a sixteen-year-old boy. Did the geneticists embed her DNA with pheromones? Her body is intoxicating.
Mindless of the street, of Lao Gu, of everything, he pulls her to him, running his hand up to cup her breast, to hold her perfect flesh.
The windup girl’s heart speeds like a hummingbird’s under his palm.
11
Jaidee has a certain respect for the Chaozhou Chinese. Their factories are large and well-run. They have generations rooted in the Kingdom, and they are intensely loyal to Her Majesty the Child Queen. They are utterly unlike the pathetic Chinese refugees who have flooded in from Malaya, fleeing to his country in hopes of succor after they alienated the natives of their own. If the Malayan Chinese had been half as clever as the Chaozhou, they would have converted to Islam generations ago, and woven themselves fully into the tapestry of that society.
Instead, the Chinese of Malacca and Penang and the Western Coast arrogantly held themselves apart, thinking the rising tide of fundamentalism would not affect them. And now they come begging to the Kingdom, hoping that their Chaozhou cousins will aid them when they were not clever enough to help themselves.
The Chaozhou are smart, where the Malayan Chinese are stupid. They are practically Thai themselves. They speak Thai. They took Thai names. They may have Chinese roots somewhere in their distant past, but they are Thai. And they are loyal. Which, when Jaidee thinks about it, is more than can be said about some of his own race, certainly more than can be said of Akkarat and his brood at the Trade Ministry.
So Jaidee feels a certain sympathy when a Chaozhou businessman in a long white shirt, loose cotton trousers and sandals strides back and forth in front of him on the factory floor, complaining that his factory has been shut down because some coal ration has been exceeded, when he paid every white shirt who came through his door, and that Jaidee has no right—no right—to shut down the entire factory.
Jaidee even has sympathy when the man calls him a turtle’s egg—which is certainly an annoying thing to hear, knowing that it is a terrible insult in Chinese. Yet still, he remains tolerant of the emotional explosions on the part of this businessman. It’s in the Chinese nature to be a bit hot-hearted. They are given to explosions of emotion that a Thai would never indulge in.
All in all, Jaidee has sympathy for the man.
But he doesn’t have sympathy for a man who shoves a finger into his chest repeatedly while he curses, and so Jaidee is sitting atop that man’s chest now—with a black baton over his windpipe—explaining the finer points of respect due a white shirt.
“You seem to have mistaken me for another Ministry man,” Jaidee observes.
The man gurgles and tries to get free, but the baton crushing his throat prevents him. Jaidee watches him carefully. “You of course understand that we have coal rationing because we are a city underwater. Your carbon allocation was exceeded many months ago.”
“Ghghhaha.”
Jaidee considers the response. Shakes his head sadly. “No. I think that we cannot allow it to continue. King Rama XII decreed, and Her Royal Majesty the Child Queen now supports that we shall never abandon Krung Thep to the invasions of the rising sea. We will not flee from our City of Divine Beings the way the cowards of Ayutthaya fled from the Burmese.
The ocean is not some marching army. Once we accede to the waters, we will never again throw it out.” He regards the sweating Chinese man. “And so we must all do our part. We must all fight together, like the villagers of Bang Rajan, to keep this invader from our streets, don’t you think?”
“Gghhghghhghhhh …”
“Good.” Jaidee smiles. “I’m glad we’re making progress.”
Someone clears his throat.
Jaidee looks up, stifling his annoyance. “Yes?”
A young private in new whites stands respectfully, waiting. “Khun
Jaidee.” He wais, lowering his head to his pressed palms. Holds the pose. “I am very sorry for my interruption.”
“Yes?”
“Chao Khun General Pracha requests your presence.”
“I’m busy,” Jaidee says. “Our friend here finally seems willing to communicate with a cool heart and a reasonable demeanor.” He smiles kindly down at the businessman.
The boy says, “I was to tell you … I was told to, to …”
“Go ahead.”
“To tell you that you should get your, your – so sorry – ‘glory-seeking ass’ – so sorry – back to the Ministry. Immediately if not before.” He winces at the words. “If you have no cycle you were supposed to take mine.”
Jaidee grimaces. “Ah. Yes. Well then.” He gets up off the businessman. Nods to Kanya. “Lieutenant? Perhaps you can reason with our friend here?”
Kanya makes a face of puzzlement. “Is something wrong?”
“It seems Pracha is finally ready to rant and rave at me.”
“Should I come with you?” Kanya glances at the businessman. “This lizard can wait for another day.”
Jaidee grins at her concern. “Don’t worry about me. Finish here. I’ll let you know whether we’re being exiled south to guard yellow card internments for the rest of our careers when you get back.”
As they head for the door, the businessman musters new bravery. “I’ll have your head for this, heeya!”
The sound of Kanya’s club connecting and a yelp are the last things Jaidee hears as he exits the factory.
Outside, the sun glares down. He’s already sweating from the exertion of working on the businessman, and the sun burns uncomfortably. He stands under the shade of a coconut palm until the messenger can bring the bike around.
The boy eyes Jaidee’s sweating face with concern. “You wish to rest?”
Jaidee laughs. “Don’t worry about me, I’m just getting old. That heeya was a troublesome one, and I’m not the fighter I used to be. In the cool season I wouldn’t be sweating so.”
“You won a lot of fights.”
“Some.” Jaidee grins. “And I trained in weather hotter than this.”
“Your lieutenant could do such work,” the boy says. “No need for you to work so hard.”
Jaidee wipes his brow and shakes his head. “And then what would my men think? That I’m lazy.”
The boy gasps. “No one would think such a thing of you. Never!”
“When you’re a captain, you’ll understand better.” Jaidee smiles indulgently. “Men are loyal when you lead from the front. I won’t have a man wasting his time winding a crank fan for me, or waving a palm frond just to keep me comfortable like those heeya in the Trade Ministry. I may lead, but we are all brothers. When you’re a captain, promise me you’ll do the same.”
The boy’s eyes shine. He wais again. “Yes, Khun. I won’t forget. Thank you!”
“Good boy.” Jaidee swings his leg over the boy’s bike. “When Lieutenant Kanya is finished here, she’ll give you a ride back on our tandem.”
He s
teers out into traffic. In the hot season, without rain, not many except the insane or the motivated are out in the direct heat, but covered arches and paths hide markets full of vegetables and cooking implements and clothing.
At Thanon Na Phralan, Jaidee takes his hands off the handlebars to wai to the City Pillar Shrine as he passes, whispering a prayer for the safety of the spiritual heart of Bangkok. It is the place where King Rama XII first announced that they would not abandon the city to the rising seas. Now, the sound of monks chanting for the city’s survival filters out onto the street, filling Jaidee with a sense of peace. He raises his hands to his forehead three times, one of a river of other riders who all do the same.
Fifteen minutes later, the Environment Ministry appears, a series of buildings, red-tiled, with steeply sloping roofs peering out of bamboo thickets and teak and rain trees. High white walls and Garuda and Singha images guard the Ministry’s perimeter, stained with old rain marks and fringed with growing ferns and mosses.
Jaidee has seen the compound from the air, one of a handful taken up for a dirigible overflight of the city when Chaiyanuchit still ran the Ministry and white shirt influence was absolute, when the plagues that swept the earth were killing crops at such a fantastic rate that no one knew if anything at all would survive.
Chaiyanuchit remembered the beginning of the plagues. Not many could claim that. And when Jaidee was just a young draftee, he was lucky enough to work in the man’s office, bringing dispatches.
Chaiyanuchit understood what was at stake, and what had to be done. When the borders needed closing, when ministries needed isolating, when Phuket and Chiang Mai needed razing, he did not hesitate. When jungle blooms exploded in the north, he burned and burned and burned, and when he took to the sky in His Majesty the King’s dirigible, Jaidee was blessed to ride with him.
By then, they were only mopping up. AgriGen and PurCal and the rest were shipping their plague-resistant seeds and demanding exorbitant profits, and patriotic generippers were already working to crack the code of the calorie companies’ products, fighting to keep the Kingdom fed as Burma and the Vietnamese and the Khmers all fell. AgriGen and its ilk were threatening embargo over intellectual property infringement, but the Thai Kingdom was still alive. Against all odds, they were alive. As others were crushed under the calorie companies’ heels, the Kingdom stood strong.
Embargo! Chaiyanuchit had laughed. Embargo is precisely what we want! We do not wish to interact with their outside world at all.
And so the walls had gone up—those that the oil collapse had not already created, those that had not been raised against civil war and starving refugees—a final set of barriers to protect the Kingdom from the onslaughts of the outside world.
As a young inductee Jaidee had been astounded at the hive of activity that was the Environment Ministry. White shirts rushing from office to street as they tried to maintain tabs on thousands of hazards. In no other ministry was the sense of urgency so acute. Plagues waited for no one. A single genehack weevil found in an outlying district meant a response time counted in hours, white shirts on a kink-spring train rushing across the countryside to the epicenter.
And at every turn the Ministry’s purview was expanding. The plagues were but the latest insult to the Kingdom’s survival. First came the rising sea levels, the need to construct the dikes and levees. And then came the oversight of power contracts and trading in pollution credits and climate infractions. The white shirts took over the licensing of methane capture and production. Then there was the monitoring of fishery health and toxin accumulations in the Kingdom’s final bastion of calorie support (a blessing that the farang calorie companies thought as landlocked people and had only desultorily attacked fishing stocks). And there was the tracking of human health and viruses and bacteria: H7V9; cibiscoscosis111.b, c, d; fa’ gan fringe; bitter water mussels, and their viral mutations that jumped so easily from saltwater to dry land; blister rust … There was no end to the duties of the Ministry.
Jaidee passes a woman selling bananas. He can’t resist hopping off his bike to buy one. It’s a new varietal from the Ministry’s rapid prototyping unit. Fast growing, resistant to makmak mites with their tiny black eggs that sicken banana flowers before they can hope to grow. He peels the banana and eats it greedily as he pushes his bike along, wishing he could take the time to have a real snack. He discards the peel beside the bulk of a rain tree.
All life produces waste. The act of living produces costs, hazards and disposal questions, and so the Ministry has found itself in the center of all life, mitigating, guiding and policing the detritus of the average person along with investigating the infractions of the greedy and short-sighted, the ones who wish to make quick profits and trade on others’ lives for it.
The symbol for the Environment Ministry is the eye of a tortoise, for the long view—the understanding that nothing comes cheap or quickly without a hidden cost. And if others call them the Turtle Ministry, and if the Chaozhou Chinese now curse white shirts as turtle’s eggs because they are not allowed to manufacture as many kink-spring scooters as they would like, so be it. If the farang make fun of the tortoise for its slow pace, so be it. The Environment Ministry has ensured that the Kingdom endures, and Jaidee can only stand in awe of its past glories.
And yet, when Jaidee climbs off his bicycle outside the Ministry gate, a man glares at him and a woman turns away. Even just outside their own compound—or perhaps particularly there—the people he protects turn away from him.
Jaidee grimaces and wheels his cycle past the guards.
The compound is still a hive of activity, and yet it is so different from when he first joined. There is mold on the walls and chunks of the edifice are cracking under the pressure of vines. An old bo tree leans against a wall, rotting, underlining their failures. It has lain so for ten years, rotting. Unremarked amongst the other things that have also died. There is an air of wreckage to the place, of jungle attempting to reclaim what was carved from it. If the vines were not cleared from the paths, the Ministry would disappear entirely. In a different time, when the the Ministry was a hero of the people, it was different. Then, people genuflected before Ministry officers, three times khrabbed to the ground as though they were monks themselves, their white uniforms inspiring respect and adoration. Now Jaidee watches civilians flinch as he walks past. Flinch and run.
He is a bully, he thinks sourly. Nothing but a bully walking amongst water buffalo, and though he tries to herd them with kindness, again and again, he finds himself using the whip of fear. The whole Ministry is the same—at least, those who still understand the dangers that they face, who still believe in the bright white line of protection that must be maintained.
I am a bully.
He sighs and parks the cycle in front of the administrative offices, which are desperately in need of a whitewashing that the shrinking budget cannot finance. Jaidee eyes the building, wondering if the Ministry has come to crisis thanks to overreaching, or because of its phenomenal success. People have lost their fear of the outside world. Environment’s budget shrinks yearly while that of Trade increases.
Jaidee finds a seat outside the general’s office. White shirt officers walk past, carefully ignoring him. That he is waiting in front of Pracha’s office should fill him with some satisfaction. It isn’t often that he is called before a man of rank. He’s done something right, for once. A young man approaches hesitantly. Wais.
“Khun Jaidee?”
At Jaidee’s nod, the young man breaks into a grin. His hair is cropped close and his eyebrows are only slight shadows; he has just come out of the monastery.
“Khun, I hoped it was you.” He hesitates, then holds out a small card. It is painted in the old Sukhothai-style and depicts a young man in combat, blood on his face, driving an opponent down into the ring. His features are stylized, but Jaidee can’t help smiling at the sight of it.
“Where did you get this?”
“I was at the fight, Khun. In th
e village. I was only this big—” he holds his hand up to his waist “—only like this, perhaps. Maybe smaller.” He laughs self-consciously. “You made me want to be a fighter. When Dithakar knocked you down and your blood was everywhere, I thought you were finished. I didn’t think you were big enough to take him. He had muscles …” he trails off.
“I remember. It was a good fight.”
The youth grins. “Yes, Khun. Fabulous. I thought I wanted to be a fighter, too.”
“And now look at you.”
The boy runs his hand over his close-cropped hair. “Ah. Well. Fighting is harder than I thought … but …” He pauses. “Would you sign it? The card? Please. I would like to give it to my father. He still speaks highly of your fights.”
Jaidee smiles and signs. “Dithakar was not the most clever fighter I ever faced, but he was strong. I wish all my fights were so clear-cut.”
“Captain Jaidee,” a voice interrupts. “If you are quite finished with your fans.”
The young man wais and flees. Jaidee watches him run and thinks that perhaps not all of the younger generation is a waste. Perhaps … Jaidee turns to face the general. “He is just a boy.”
Pracha glowers at Jaidee. Jaidee grins. “And it’s hardly my fault that I was a good fighter. The Ministry was my sponsor for those years. I think you won quite a lot of money and recruits because of me, Khun General, sir.”
“Don’t give me your ‘General’ nonsense. We’ve known each other too long for that. Get in here.”
“Yes, sir.”
Pracha grimaces and waves Jaidee into the office. “In!”
Pracha closes the door and goes to sit behind the expanse of his mahogany desk. Overhead, a crank fan beats desultorily at the air. The room is large, with shuttered windows open to allow light but little direct sun. The slits of the windows look out onto the Ministry’s ragged grounds. On one wall are various paintings and photographs, including one with Pracha’s graduating class of ministry cadets along with another of Chaiyanuchit, founder of their modern ministry. Another of Her Royal Majesty the Child Queen, looking tiny and terrifyingly vulnerable seated on her throne, and in a corner, a small shrine to Buddha, Phra Pikanet and Seub Nakhasathien. Incense and marigolds drape the shrine.
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