The Windup Girl (43 page)

We rest in the hands of a fickle god. He plays on our behalf only for entertainment, and he will close his eyes and sleep if we fail to engage his intellect.

A horrifying thought. The man exists only for competition, the chess match of evolution, fought on a global scale. An exercise in ego, a single giant fending off the attacks of dozens of others, a giant swatting them from the sky and laughing. But all giants must fall, and then what must the Kingdom look forward to? It makes Kanya sweat, thinking about it.

Gibbons is watching her. "You have more questions for me?"

Kanya shakes off her terror. "You're sure about this? You know what we need to do, already? You can tell just by looking?"

The doctor shrugs. "If you don't believe me, then go back and follow your standard methods. Textbook your way to your deaths. Or you can simply burn your factory district to the ground and root out the problem." He grins. "Now there's a blunt-instrument solution for you white shirts. The Environment Ministry was always fond of those." He waves a hand. "This garbage isn't particularly viable, yet. It mutates quickly, certainly, but it is fragile, and the human host is not ideal. It needs to be rubbed on the mucus membranes: in the nostrils, in the eyes, in the anus, somewhere close to blood and life. Somewhere it can breed."

"Then we're safe. It's no worse than a hepatitis or
fa' gan
."

"But
much
more inclined to mutate." He looks at Kanya again. "One other thing you should know. The manufacturer you want will have chemical baths. Someplace where they can culture biological products. A HiGro factory. An AgriGen facility. A windup manufactory. Something like that."

Kanya glances at the mastiffs. "Would windups carry it?"

He reaches down and pats one of the guard dogs, goading her. "If it's avian or mammalian, it could. A bath facility is where I would look first. If this were Japan, a windup crèche would be my first guess, but anyone involved in biological products could be the index source."

"What kind of windups?"

Gibbons blows out an exasperated breath. "It's not a
kind
. It's a matter of
exposure
. If they were cultured in tainted baths, they may be carriers. Then again, if you leave that garbage to mutate, it will be in people soon enough. And the question of its index will be moot."

"How long do we have?"

Gibbons shrugs. "This isn't the decay of uranium or the velocity of a clipper ship. This is not predictable. Feed the beasts well, and they will learn to gorge. Culture them in a humid city of dense-packed people and they will thrive. Decide for yourself how worried you should be."

Kanya turns, disgusted, and heads out the door.

Gibbons calls after her, "Good luck! I'll be interested to see which of your many enemies kills you first."

Kanya ignores the taunt and bolts into clean open air.

Kip approaches her, towelling her hair. "Was the doctor helpful?"

"He gave me enough."

Kip laughs, a soft twittering. "I used to think so. But I've learned that he never tells everything the first time. He leaves things out. Vital things. He likes company." She touches Kanya's arm and Kanya has to force herself not to recoil. Kip sees the movement but only smiles gently. "He likes you. He'll want you to return."

Kanya shivers. "He'll be disappointed then."

Kip watches her with wide liquid eyes. "I hope you don't die too soon. I also like you."

As Kanya leaves the compound, she catches sight of Jaidee, standing at the edge of the ocean, watching the surf. As if sensing her gaze, he turns and smiles, before shimmering into nothingness. Another spirit with no place to go. She wonders if Jaidee will ever manage to reincarnate, or if he will continue to haunt her. If the doctor is right, perhaps he is waiting to come back as something that will not fear the plagues, some creature that has not yet been conceived. Maybe Jaidee's only hope for reincarnation is to find new life in the husk of a windup body.

Kanya squashes the thought. It's an evil idea. She hopes instead that Jaidee will reincarnate into some heaven where windups and blister rust can never be, that even if he never achieves
nibbana
, never finishes his time as a monk, never makes his way into buddha-hood, that at least he will be saved from the anguish of watching the world he so dutifully defended stripped of its flesh by the slavering mass of nature's new successes, these windup creatures that seethe all around.

Jaidee died. But perhaps that is the best that anyone can hope for. Perhaps if she put a spring gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger, she would be happier. Perhaps if she had no large house and no
kamma
of betrayal. . .

Kanya shakes her head. If anything is certain, she must do her duty here. Her own soul will certainly be sent back to this world again, at best as a human being, at worst as something else, some dog or cockroach. Whatever mess she leaves behind, she will undoubtedly face it again and again and again. Her betrayals guarantee it. She must fight this battle until her kamma is finally cleansed. To flee it now in suicide would be to face it in an uglier form in the future. There is no escape for such as she.

29

Despite the curfews and the white shirts, Anderson-sama seems almost reckless with his attentions. It's almost as if he is making up for something. But when Emiko repeats her concerns about Raleigh, Anderson-sama only smiles a secret smile and tells her she needn't worry. All things are in flux. "My people are coming," he says. "Very soon, everything will be different. No more white shirts."

"It sounds very beautiful."

"It will be," he says. "I'll be gone for a few days, making arrangements. When I get back, everything will be different."

And then he disappears, leaving her with the admonishment that she should not change her patterns, and should not tell Raleigh anything. He gives her a key to his flat.

And so it is that Emiko wakes on clean sheets in a cool room in the evening, with a crank fan beating slowly overhead. She can barely remember the last time she slept without pain or fear, and she is groggy with it. The rooms are dim, lit only by the glow of the street's gaslights flickering alive like fireflies.

She is hungry. Ravenous. She finds Anderson-sama's kitchen and roots through sealed bins for snacks, for crackers, for snaps, for cakes, anything. Anderson-sama has no fresh vegetables, but he has rice and there is soy and fish sauce and she heats water on a burner, marvelling at the methane jug that he keeps unsecured. It is difficult for her to remember that she ever took such things for granted. That Gendo-sama kept her in accommodations twice as luxurious, on the top floor of a Kyoto apartment with a view of Toji Temple and the slow movement of old men tending the shrine in their black robes.

That long-ago time is like a dream to her. The autumn sky with its clear breathless blue. She remembers the pleasure of watching New People children from their crèche feeding the ducks or learning a tea ceremony with attention both total and without redemption.

She remembers her own training. . .

With a chill, she sees that she was trained to excellence, to the eternal service of a master. She remembers how Gendo-sama took her and showered her with affection and then discarded her like a tamarind hull. It was always her destiny. It was no accident.

Her eyes narrow as she stares at the pan and its boiling water, at the rice she has so perfectly measured by sight alone, without a measure cup but simply scooped with a bowl, knowing precisely how much she needed, and then unconsciously settling that rice into a perfect layer as if it were a gravel garden, as if she were preparing to perform
zazen
meditation on its grains, as if she would rake and rake and rake for her life with a little bowl of rice.

She lashes out. The rice bowl shatters, shards spinning in different directions, the pot of water flying, scalding jewels gleaming.

Emiko stands amidst the whirlwind, watching droplets fly, rice grains suspended, all of it stopped in motion, as if grain and water are windups, stuttering in flight as she herself is forced to stumble herky-jerky through the world, strange and surreal in the eyes of the naturals. In the eyes of the people she so desperately desires to serve.

Look what service has brought you.

The pot hits the wall. Rice grains skitter across marble. Water soaks everything. Tonight she will learn the location of this New People village. The place where her own kind live and have no masters. Where New People serve only themselves. Anderson-sama may say that his people are coming, but in the end, he will always be natural, and she will always be New People, and she will always serve.

She stifles the urge to clean up the rice, to make things neat for Anderson-sama when he returns. Instead, she makes herself stare at the mess and recognize that she is no longer a slave. If he wishes rice cleaned off the floor there are others to do his dirty work. She is something else. Something different. Optimal in her own way. And if she was once a falcon tethered, Gendo-sama has done one thing she can be grateful for. He has cut her jesses. She can fly free.

* * *

It is almost too easy to slip through the darkness. Emiko bobs amid the crowds, new color bright on her lips, her eyes darkened, glinting silver hoops at her lobes.

She is New People, and she moves through the crowds so smoothly that they do not know she is there. She laughs at them. Laughs and slips between them. There is something suicidal ticking in her windup nature. She hides in the open. She does not scuttle. Fate has cupped her in its protective hands.

She slips through the crowds, people jerking away startled from the windup in their midst, from the bit of transgressive manufactuary that has the effrontery to stain their sidewalks, as if their land were half as pristine as the islands that have ejected her. She wrinkles her nose. Even Nippon's effluent is too good for this raucous stinking place. They simply do not recognize how she graces them. She laughs to herself, and realizes when others look at her that she has laughed out loud.

White shirts ahead. Flashes of them between the trundle of megodonts and handcarts. Emiko stops at the rail of a
khlong
bridge, looking down into the waters, waiting for the threat to pass. She sees herself in the canal's reflection with the green glow of the lamps all around, backlighting her. She feels perhaps she could become one with the water, if she simply stares at the glow long enough. Become a water lady. Already is she not part of the floating world? Does she not deserve to float and slowly sink? She stifles the thought. That is the old Emiko. The one who could never teach her to fly.

A man approaches and leans against the rail. She doesn't look up, watches his reflection in the water.

"I like to watch when the children race their boats through the canals," he says.

She nods slightly, not trusting herself to speak.

"Is there something you see in the water? That you look so long?"

She shakes her head. His white uniform is tinged green. He is so close he can reach out and touch her. She wonders what his kind eyes would look like if his hands touched the furnace of her skin.

"You don't have to be afraid of me," he says. "It's just a uniform. You haven't done anything wrong."

"No." she whispers. "I am not afraid."

"That's good. A pretty girl like you shouldn't be." He pauses. "Your accent is odd. When I first saw you, I thought you might be Chaozhou. . ."

She shakes her head, slightly. A jerk. "So sorry. Japanese."

"With the factories?"

She shrugs. His eyes bore into her. She makes her head turn—slowly, slowly, smoothly, smoothly, not a single stutter, not a single jerk—and meet his eyes, return his steady gaze. Older than she first thought. Middle-aged, she thinks. Or not. Perhaps he is young and only worn down by the evils of his job. She stifles the urge to extend pity to him, fights her genetic need to serve him even if he would sooner see her dismembered. Slowly, slowly, she turns her eyes back to the water.

"What is your name?"

She hesitates. "Emiko."

"A nice name. Does it mean something?"

She shakes her head. "Nothing important."

"So modest, for a woman so beautiful."

She shakes her head, "No. Not so. I am ugly—" she breaks off, sees him staring, realizes that she has forgotten herself. Her movements have betrayed her. His eyes are wide, surprised. She backs away from him, all pretense of humanity forgotten.

His eyes harden.
"Heechy-keechy,"
he breathes.

She smiles tightly. "It was an honest mistake."

"Show me your import permits."

She smiles. "Of course. I'm sure they are here. Of course." She backs away, flashbulb movements broadcasting every kink in her DNA. He reaches for her, but she pulls her arm from his grasp, a quick twist, and then she is turning away, breaking into flight, blurring into traffic as he shouts after her.

"Stop her! Stop! Ministry business! Stop that windup!"

Her whole essence cries to stop and give herself up, to bend to his command. It is all she can do to keep running, to push herself against the lashings of Mizumi-sensei when she dared disobey, the disapproving sting of Mizumi's tongue when she dared to object to another's desires.

Emiko burns with shame as his commands echo behind her, but then the crowds have swallowed her and the surge of megodont traffic is all around, and he is far too slow to discover which alley hides her as she recovers.

* * *

It takes extra time to avoid the white shirts, but at the same time, it is a game. Emiko can play this game now. If she is quick and careful, and allows time between her sudden surges she evades them easily. At speed, she marvels at the movements of her body, how startlingly fluid she becomes, as if she is finally being true to her nature. As if all the training and lashes from Mizumi-sensei were designed to keep this knowledge buried.