The Windup Girl

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 steers 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.