The Windup Girl

If she were not a New Person, she would simply strut into Hualamphong Railway Station, and purchase a ticket on a kink-spring train, ride it as far as the wastes of Chiang Mai, and then proceed into the wilderness. It would be easy. Instead she must be clever. The roads will be guarded. Anything that leads to the Northeast and the Mekong will be clogged with military personnel transferring between the eastern front and the capital. A New Person would excite attention, particularly given that New People military models sometimes fight on behalf of the Vietnamese.

But there is another way. From her time with Gendo-sama she remembers that much of the Kingdom's freight moves by river.

Emiko turns down Thanon Mongkut toward the docks and levees, and stops short. White shirts. She cringes against a wall as the pair stalks past. They don't even look at her-she blends if she does not move-but still, as soon as they are out of sight, she has the urge to scuttle back to her tower. Most of the white shirts there have been bribed. These ones… She shivers.

At last, the gaijin warehouses and trading stations rise before her, the newly built commercial blocks. She makes her way up the seawall. At its top, the ocean spreads before her, bustling with clipper ships unloading, dock workers and coolies hauling freight, mahout coaxing megodonts to greater labor as pallets come off the clippers and are loaded on huge Laotian-rubber-wheeled wagons for transit to the warehouses. Reminders of her former life litter the view.

A smudge on the horizon marks the quarantine zone of Koh Angrit, where gaijin traders and agricultural executives squat amid stockpiles of calories, all of them waiting patiently for a crop failure or plague to beat aside the Kingdom's trade barriers. Gendo-sama once led her to that floating island of bamboo rafts and warehouses. Stood on its gently rolling decks and had her translate as he confidently sold the foreigners on advances in sailing technologies that would speed a shipment of patented SoyPRO around the world.

Emiko sighs and ducks under the draped lines of saisin that top the levee. The sacred thread runs down the seawall in both directions, disappearing into the distance. Every morning the monks of a different temple bless the thread, adding spiritual support to the physical defenses that push back the hungry sea.

In her former life, when Gendo-sama provided her with permits and indulgences to move inside the city with impunity, Emiko had the opportunity to see the yearly blessing ceremonies of the dikes and pumps and the saisin that connects it all. As the first monsoon rains poured down on the assembled people, Emiko watched Her Revered Majesty the Child Queen pull the levers that set the divine pumps roaring to life, her delicate form dwarfed by the apparatus that her ancestors had created. Monks chanted and stretched fresh saisin from the city pillar, the spiritual heart of Krung Thep, to all of the twelve coal-driven pumps that ringed the city, and then they had all prayed for the continued life of their fragile city.

Now, in the dry season, the saisin looks ragged and the pumps are largely silent. The floating docks and their barges and skiffs bob softly in red sunlight.

Emiko makes her way down into the bustle, watching faces, hoping to spy someone who seems kind. She watches people pass, keeping her body still so that she does not betray her nature. Finally steels herself. She calls out to a passing day laborer, "Kathorh kha. Please, Khun. Can you tell me where I might purchase ferry tickets north?"

The man is covered with the powder and sweat of his work but he smiles, friendly. "How far north?"

She hazards a city name, unsure even if it will be close enough to the place that the gaijin has described. "Phitsanulok?"

He makes a face. "There's nothing going that far, not much past Ayutthaya. The rivers have gotten too low. Some people are using mulies to pull their way north, but that is all. Some kink-spring skiffs. And the war…" He shrugs. "If you need to go north, the roads will be dry for a while yet."

She masks her disappointment and wais carefully. No river then. By road or nothing. If she could go by river, then she would also have a way to cool herself. By road… she imagines the long distance through the tropic blaze of the dry season. Perhaps she should wait for the rainy season. With the monsoon, the temperatures will fall and the rivers rise…

Emiko starts back over the seawall and down through the slums that house dock families and de-quarantined sailors on shore leave. By road then. It was foolish even for her to go looking. If she could get aboard a kink-spring train-but that would require permits. Many, many permits, just to get aboard. But if she could bribe someone, stow away… She grimaces. All roads lead to Raleigh. She will have to speak with him. To beg the old crow for things he has no reason to give.