The blond creature’s surprised dead eyes stare out at him as he prostrates himself. Spring gun disks chatter across the walls, people are screaming. Suddenly there is silence.
The white shirt general yanks him to his feet and shoves her spring gun into his face.
“Please,” Hock Seng whispers in Thai. “I am not their kind.”
The general’s hard eyes study him. She nods sharply, and shoves him aside. He huddles against a wall as she begins barking orders to her men. They quickly drag the AgriGen bodies aside, then coalesce around her. Hock Seng is surprised at how quickly the unsmiling woman musters her troops. She goes to the monks of the seedbank. Makes her own khrab of respect and begins speaking quickly. Even though she performs a khrab to their spiritual authority, there can be no doubt that she is the one who is the master of the place.
Hock Seng’s eyes widen as he hears what she is planning. It’s terrifying. An act of destruction that cannot be allowed … and yet, the monks are nodding and now people are streaming out of the seedbank, all of them working quickly. The general and her men begin throwing open doors, revealing rack after rack of weaponry. She begins assigning teams: the Grand Palace, Korakot Pump, Khlong Toey Seawall Lock …
The general spares a glance at Hock Seng as she finishes dispatching her people. The monks are already taking seeds down from the shelves. Hock Seng cringes at her attention. After what he has heard, she cannot intend to let him live. The bustle of activity increases. More and more monks stream in. They stack the seeds cases carefully. Rank after rank of seeds coming down from the shelves. Seeds from more than a hundred years ago, seeds that every so often are cultured in the strictest of isolation chambers and then carried back to this underground safe, to be stored again. The heritage of millennia in the boxes, the heritage of the world.
And then the monks are streaming out of the seedbank, carrying the boxes on their shoulders, a river of shaven-headed men in saffron robes, bearing forth their nation’s treasure. Hock Seng watches, breathless at the sight of so much genetic material disappearing into the wilds. Somewhere outside, he thinks he hears monks chanting, blessing this project of renewal and destruction, and then the white shirt general is looking at him again. He forces himself not to duck his head. Not to grovel. She will kill him. She must. He will not grovel and piss himself. At least he will die with dignity.
The general purses her lips, then simply jerks her head toward the open doors. “Run, yellow card. This city is no longer a refuge for you.”
He stares at her, surprised. She jerks her head again and the shadow of a smile touches her lips. Hock Seng wais quickly and climbs off his knees. He hurries through the tunnels and out into hot open air, the river of saffron-robed men all around him. Once they reach the temple grounds, the monks disperse through various gates, separating into smaller and smaller groups, a diaspora bound eventually for some pre-arranged place of distant safety. A secret place, far from calorie company reach, watched over by Phra Seub and all the spirits of the nation.
Hock Seng watches for a moment longer as the monks continue to pour from the seedbank, and then he runs for the street.
A rickshaw man sees him and slows to a stop. Hock Seng leaps in.
“Where to?” the man asks.
Hock Seng hesitates, thinking furiously. The anchor pads. It is the only certain way to escape the coming chaos. The yang guizi Richard Carlyle is probably still there. The man and his dirigible, preparing to fly for Kolkata to retrieve the Kingdom’s coal pumps. There will be safety in the air. But only if Hock Seng is fast enough to the catch the foreign devil before he untethers the last anchor.
“Where to?”
Mai.
Hock Seng shakes his head. Why does she torment him now? He owes her nothing. She is nothing, in truth. Just some fishing girl. And yet against his better judgment he allowed her to stay with him, told her he would hire her as a servant of some sort. Would keep her safe. It was the least he could do … But that was before. He was going to be flush with money from the calorie companies. It was a different sort of promise, then. She will forgive him.
“The anchor pads,” Hock Seng says. “Quickly. I don’t have much time.”
The rickshaw man nods and the bike accelerates.
Mai.
Hock Seng curses himself. He is a fool. Why does he never focus on the most important goal? Always he is distracted. Always he fails to do what would keep him alive and safe.
He leans forward, angry with himself. Angry at Mai. “No. Wait. I have another address. First to Krungthon Bridge, then to the anchor pads.”
“That’s in the opposite direction.”
Hock Seng grimaces. “You think I don’t know it?”
The rickshaw man nods and slows. He turns his bike and aims it back the way he came. He stands on his pedals, getting up to speed. The city slides past, colorful and busy with cleanup activity. A city completely unaware of its impending doom. The cycle weaves through the sunshine, shifting smoothly through its gears, faster and faster toward the girl.
If he is very lucky there will be enough time. Hock Seng prays that he will be lucky. Prays that there will be enough time to collect Mai and still make the dirigible. If he were smart, he would simply run.
Instead, he prays for luck.
EPILOGUE
The destroyed locks and sabotaged pumps take six days to kill the City of Divine Beings. Emiko watches from the balcony of the finest apartment tower in Bangkok as water rushes in. Anderson-sama is nothing but a husk. Emiko squeezed water into his mouth from a cloth and he sucked at it like a baby before he finally expired, whispering apologies to ghosts that only he could see.
When she first heard the colossal explosions at the edge of the city, she did not guess at first what was happening, but as more explosions followed and twelve coils of smoke rose like naga along the levees it became clear that King Rama XII’s great floodwater pumps had been destroyed, and that the city was once again under siege.
Emiko watched the fight to save the city for three days, and then the monsoons came and the last attempts at holding back the ocean were abandoned. Rain gushed down, a vast deluge sweeping out dust and debris, sending every bit of the city swirling and rising. People swarmed from their homes with their belongings on their heads. The city slowly filled with water, becoming a vast lake lapping around second-story windows.
On the sixth day, her Royal Majesty the Child Queen announces the abandonment of the divine city. There is no Somdet Chaopraya now. Only the Queen, and the people rally to her.
The white shirts, so despised and disgraced just days before, are everywhere, guiding people north under the command of a new Tiger, a strange unsmiling woman who people say is possessed by spirits and who drives her white shirts to struggle and save as many of the people of Krung Thep as possible. Emiko herself is forced to hide as a young volunteer in a white uniform works the halls of her building offering assistance to anyone who needs food or safe water. Even as the city dies, the Environment Ministry is rehabilitated.
Slowly, the city empties. The lap of seawater and the yowl of cheshires replace the call of durian sellers and the ring of bicycle bells. At times, Emiko suspects that she is the only person living. When she cranks a radio she hears that the capital has decamped north to Ayutthaya, once again above sea level. She hears that Akkarat has shaven his head and become a monk to atone for his failure to protect the city. But it is all distant.
With the wet season, Emiko’s life becomes bearable. The flooded metropolis means that there is always water nearby, even if it is a stagnant bathtub stinking with the refuse of millions. Emiko locates a small skiff and uses it to navigate the city’s wilderness. Rain pours down daily and she lets it bathe her, washing away everything that has come before.
She lives by scavenge and the hunt. She eats cheshires and catches fish with her bare hands. She is very quick. Her fingers flash down to spear a carp whenever she desires it. She eats well and sleeps easily, and with
water all around, she does not so greatly fear the heat that burns within her. If it is not the place for New People that she once imagined, it is still a niche.
She decorates her apartment. She crosses the wide mouth of the Chao Phraya to investigate the Mishimoto factory where she had once been employed. It is shuttered, but she finds remnants of her past and collects some of them. Calligraphy torn and left behind, Raku chawan bowls.
A few times, she encounters people. Most of them are too occupied with their own problems of survival to bother with a tick-tock creature more glimpsed than seen, but there are a few who prey on a lone girl’s perceived weakness. Emiko deals with them quickly, and with as much mercy as she knows how.
The days pass. She becomes comfortable entirely in her world of water and scavenge. She is so comfortable, in fact, that when the gaijin and the girl find her, scrubbing her laundry from atop a second-floor apartment rail, they surprise her utterly.
“And who is this?” a voice asks.
Emiko draws back, startled, and nearly falls from where she perches. She jumps down and darts splashing into the safety of the abandoned apartment’s shadows.
The gaijin’s boat bumps up against the rail. “Sawatdi khrap?” he calls. “Hello?”
He’s old, mottled skin and bright intelligent eyes. The girl is lithe and brown with a soft smile. They both lean against the balcony railing, peering into the dimness from their boat. “Don’t run away little thing,” the old man says. “We are quite harmless. I can’t walk at all, and Kip here is a gentle soul.”
Emiko waits. They don’t give up, though. Just continue to peer in at her.
“Please?” the girl calls.
Against her better judgment, Emiko steps out, wading carefully in the ankle-deep water. It has been a long time since she has spoken with a person.
“Heechy-keechy,” the girl breathes.
The old gaijin smiles at the words. “New People, they call themselves.” His eyes contain no judgment. He holds up a limp pair of cheshires. “Would you like to dine with us, young lady?”
Emiko motions toward the balcony rail where she has tethered her own day’s catch just under water. “I do not need your help.”
The man looks down at the string of fish, then up at her with new respect. “I suppose you don’t. Not if your design is the one I know.” He invites her closer. “You live near here?”
She points upstairs.
“Lovely real estate. Perhaps we could dine with you this evening. If cheshire is not to your taste, we would certainly enjoy a bite of fish.”
Emiko shrugs, but she is lonely and the man and girl seem harmless. As night falls, they light a fire of kindled furniture on her apartment’s balcony and roast the fish. Stars show through gaps in the clouds. The city stretches before them, black and tangled. When they are finished eating, the old gaijin drags his wounded body closer to the fire while the girl attends him.
“Tell me, what is a windup girl doing here?”
Emiko shrugs. “I was left behind.”
“Ourselves, as well.” The old man exchanges smiles with his friend. “Though I think our vacation will be ending soon. It seems we are to return to the pleasures of calorie detente and genetic warfare, so I think that the white shirts will once again have uses for me.” He laughs at that.
“Are you a generipper?” Emiko asks.
“More than just that, I hope.”
“You said you know about my … platform?”
The man smiles. He beckons his girl over to him and runs his hand idly up her leg as he studies Emiko. Emiko realizes that the girl is not entirely what she seems; she is boy and girl, together. The girl smiles at Emiko, seeming to sense her thoughts.
“I have read about your kind,” the old man says. “About your genetics. Your training …
“Stand up!” he barks.
Emiko is standing before she knows it. Standing and shaking with fear and the urge to obey.
The man shakes his head. “It’s a hard thing they have done to you.”
Emiko blazes with anger. “They also made me strong. I can hurt you.”
“Yes. That’s true.” He nods. “They took shortcuts. Your training masks that, but the shortcuts are there. Your obedience … I don’t know where they got that. A Labrador of some sort, I suspect.” He shrugs. “Still, you are better than human in almost all other ways. Faster, smarter, better eyesight, better hearing. You are obedient, but you don’t catch diseases like mine.” He waves at his scarred and oozing legs. “You’re lucky enough.”
Emiko stares at him. “You are one of the scientists who made me.”
“Not the same, but close enough.” He smiles slightly. “I know your secrets, just as I know the secrets of megodonts and TotalNutrient wheat.” He nods at his dead cheshires. “I know everything about these felines here. If I cared enough, I might even be able to drop a genetic bomb in them that would strip away their camouflage and over the course of generations turn them back into their less successful version.”
“You would do this?”
He laughs and shakes his head. “I like them better this way.”
“I hate your kind.”
“Because someone like me made you?” He laughs again. “I’m surprised you aren’t more pleased to meet me. You’re as close as anyone ever comes to meeting God. Come now, don’t you have any questions for God?”
Emiko scowls at him, nods at the cheshires. “If you were my God, you would have made New People first.”
The old gaijin laughs. “That would have been exciting.”
“We would have beaten you. Just like the cheshires.”
“You may yet.” He shrugs. “You do not fear cibiscosis or blister rust.”
“No.” Emiko shakes her head. “We cannot breed. We depend on you for that.” She moves her hand. Telltale stutter-stop motion. “I am marked. Always, we are marked. As obvious as a ten-hands or a megodont.”
He waves a hand dismissively. “The windup movement is not a required trait. There is no reason it couldn’t be removed. Sterility …” He shrugs. “Limitations can be stripped away. The safeties are there because of lessons learned, but they are not required; some of them even make it more difficult to create you. Nothing about you is inevitable.” He smiles. “Someday, perhaps, all people will be New People and you will look back on us as we now look back at the poor Neanderthals.”
Emiko falls silent. The fire crackles. Finally she says, “You know how to do this? Can make me breed true, like the cheshires?”
The old man exchanges a glance with his ladyboy.
“Can you do it?” Emiko presses.
He sighs. “I cannot change the mechanics of what you already are. Your ovaries are non-existent. You cannot be made fertile any more than the pores of your skin supplemented.”
Emiko slumps.
The man laughs. “Don’t look so glum! I was never much enamored with a woman’s eggs as a source of genetic material anyway.” He smiles. “A strand of your hair would do. You cannot be changed, but your children—in genetic terms, if not physical ones—they can be made fertile, a part of the natural world.”
Emiko feels her heart pounding. “You can do this, truly?”
“Oh yes. I can do that for you.” The man’s eyes are far away, considering. A smile flickers across his lips. “I can do that for you, and much, much more.”
THE CALORIE MAN
“No mammy, no pappy, poor little bastard. Money? You give money?” The urchin turned a cartwheel and then a somersault in the street, stirring yellow dust around his nakedness.
Lalji paused to stare at the dirty blond child who had come to a halt at his feet. The attention seemed to encourage the urchin; the boy did another somersault. He smiled up at Lalji from his squat, calculating and eager, rivulets of sweat and mud streaking his face. “Money? You give money?”
Around them, the town was nearly silent in the afternoon heat. A few dungareed farmers led mulies toward the fields. Buildings
, pressed from WeatherAll chips, slumped against their fellows like drunkards, rain-stained and sun-cracked, but, as their trade name implied, still sturdy. At the far end of the narrow street, the lush sprawl of SoyPRO and HiGro began, a waving rustling growth that rolled into the blue-sky distance. It was much as all the villages Lalji had seen as he traveled upriver, just another farming enclave paying its intellectual property dues and shipping calories down to New Orleans.
The boy crawled closer, smiling ingratiatingly, nodding his head like a snake hoping to strike. “Money? Money?”
Lalji put his hands in his pockets in case the beggar child had friends and turned his full attention on the boy. “And why should I give money to you?”
The boy stared up at him, stalled. His mouth opened, then closed. Finally he looped back to an earlier, more familiar part of his script, “No mammy? No pappy?” but it was a query now, lacking conviction.
Lalji made a face of disgust and aimed a kick at the boy. The child scrambled aside, falling on his back in his desperation to dodge, and this pleased Lalji briefly. At least the boy was quick. He turned and started back up the street. Behind him, the urchin’s wailing despair echoed. “Noooo maaaammy! Nooo paaaapy!” Lalji shook his head, irritated. The child might cry for money, but he failed to follow. No true beggar at all. An opportunist only—most likely the accidental creation of strangers who had visited the village and were open-fisted when it came to blond beggar children. AgriGen and Midwest Grower scientists and land factotums would be pleased to show ostentatious kindness to the villagers at the core of their empire.
Through a gap in the slumped hovels, Lalji caught another glimpse of the lush waves of SoyPRO and HiGro. The sheer sprawl of calories stimulated tingling fantasies of loading a barge and slipping it down through the locks to St. Louis or New Orleans and into the mouths of waiting megodonts. It was impossible, but the sight of those emerald fields was more than enough assurance that no child could beg with conviction here. Not surrounded by SoyPRO. Lalji shook his head again, disgusted, and squeezed down a footpath between two of the houses.
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