Carrying his sacked fruit, Anderson squeezes back down the soi to the avenue beyond. A seethe of traffic greets him, morning commuters clogging Thanon Rama IX like the Mekong in flood. Bicycles and cycle rickshaws, blue-black water buffaloes and great shambling megodonts.
At Anderson’s arrival, Lao Gu emerges from the shade of a crumbling office tower, carefully pinching off the burning tip of a cigarette. Nightshades again. They’re everywhere. Nowhere else in the world, but here they riot in abundance. Lao Gu tucks the remainder of the tobacco into a ragged shirt pocket as he trots ahead of Anderson to their cycle rickshaw.
The old Chinese man is nothing but a scarecrow, dressed in rags, but still, he is lucky. Alive, when most of his people are dead. Employed, while his fellow Malayan refugees are packed like slaughter chickens into sweltering Expansion towers. Lao Gu has stringy muscle on his bones and enough money to indulge in Singha cigarettes. To the rest of the yellow card refugees he is as lucky as a king.
Lao Gu straddles the cycle’s saddle and waits patiently as Anderson clambers into the passenger seat behind. “Office,” Anderson says. “Bai khap.” Then switches to Chinese. “Zou ba.”
The old man stands on his pedals and they merge into traffic. Around them, bicycle bells ring like cibiscosis chimes, irritated at their obstruction. Lao Gu ignores them and weaves deeper into the traffic flow.
Anderson reaches for another ngaw, then restrains himself. He should save them. They’re too valuable to gobble like a greedy child. The Thais have found some new way to disinter the past, and all he wants to do is feast on the evidence. He drums his fingers on the bagged fruit, fighting for self-control.
To distract himself, he fishes for his pack of cigarettes and lights one. He draws on the tobacco, savoring the burn, remembering his surprise when he first discovered how successful the Thai Kingdom had become, how widely spread the nightshades. And as he smokes, he thinks of Yates. Remembers the man’s disappointment as they sat across from one another with resurrected history smoldering between them.
“Nightshades.”
Yates’ match flared in the dimness of SpringLife’s offices, illuminating florid features as he touched flame to a cigarette and drew hard. Rice paper crackled. The tip glowed and Yates exhaled, sending a stream of smoke ceilingward to where crank fans panted against the sauna swelter.
“Eggplants. Tomatoes. Chiles. Potatoes. Jasmine. Nicotiana.” He held up his cigarette and quirked an eyebrow. “Tobacco.”
He drew again, squinting in the cigarette’s flare. All around, the shadowed desks and treadle computers of the company sat silent. In the evening, with the factory closed, it was just possible to mistake the empty desks for something other than the topography of failure. The workers might have only gone home, resting in anticipation of another hard day at their labors. Dust-mantled chairs and treadle computers put the lie to it-but in the dimness, with shadows draped across furniture and moonlight easing through mahogany shutters, it was possible to imagine what might have been.
Overhead, the crank fans continued their slow turns, Laotian rubber motorbands creaking rhythmically as they chained across the ceiling, drawing a steady trickle of kinetic power from the factory’s central kink-springs.
“The Thais have been lucky in their laboratories,” Yates said, “and now here you are. If I were superstitions, I’d think they conjured you along with their tomatoes. Every organism needs a predator, I understand.”
“You should have reported how much progress they were making,” Anderson said. “This factory wasn’t your only responsibility.”
Yates grimaced. His face was a study in tropic collapse. Broken blood vessels mapped rosy tributaries over his cheeks and punctuated the bulb of his nose. Watery blue eyes blinked back at Anderson, as hazy as the city’s dung-choked air. “I should have known you’d cut my niche.”
“It’s not personal.”
“Just my life’s work.” He laughed, a dry rattling reminiscent of early onset cibiscosis. The sound would have had Anderson backing out of the room if he didn’t know that Yates, like all of AgriGen’s personnel, had been inoculated against the new strains.
“I’ve spent years building this,” Yates said, “and you tell me it’s not personal.” He waved toward the office’s observation windows where they overlooked the manufacturing floor. “I’ve got kink-springs the size of my fist that hold a gigajoule of power. Quadruple the capacity-weight ratio of any other spring on the market. I’m sitting on a revolution in energy storage, and you’re throwing it away.” He leaned forward. “We haven’t had power this portable since gasoline.”
“Only if you can produce it.”
“We’re close,” Yates insisted. “Just the algae baths. They’re the only sticking point.”
Anderson said nothing. Yates seemed to take this as encouragement. “The fundamental concept is sound. Once the baths are producing in sufficient quantities—”
“You should have informed us when you first saw the nightshades in the markets. The Thais have been successfully growing potatoes for at least five seasons. They’re obviously sitting on top of a seedbank, and yet we heard nothing from you.”
“Not my department. I do energy storage. Not production.”
Anderson snorted. “Where are you going to get the calories to wind your fancy kink-springs if a crop fails? Blister rust is mutating every three seasons now. Recreational generippers are hacking into our designs for TotalNutrient Wheat and SoyPRO. Our last strain of HiGro Corn only beat weevil predation by sixty percent, and now we suddenly hear you’re sitting on top of a genetic gold mine. People are starving—”
Yates laughed. “Don’t talk to me about saving lives. I saw what happened with the seedbank in Finland.”
“We weren’t the ones who blew the vaults. No one knew the Finns were such fanatics.”
“Any fool on the street could have anticipated. Calorie companies do have a certain reputation. ”
“It wasn’t my operation.”
Yates laughed again. “That’s always our excuse, isn’t it? The company goes in somewhere and we all stand back and wash our hands. Pretend like we weren’t the ones responsible. The company pulls SoyPRO from the Burmese market, and we all stand aside, saying intellectual property disputes aren’t our department. But people starve just the same.” He sucked on his cigarette, blew smoke. “I honestly don’t know how someone like you sleeps at night.”
“It’s easy. I say a little prayer to Noah and Saint Francis, and thank God we’re still one step ahead of blister rust.”
“That’s it then? You’ll shut the factory down?”
“No. Of course not. The kink-spring manufacturing will continue.”
“Oh?” Yates leaned forward, hopeful.
Anderson shrugged. “It’s a useful cover.”
The cigarette’s burning tip reaches Anderson’s fingers. He lets it fall into traffic. Rubs his singed thumb and index finger as Lao Gu pedals on through the clogged streets. Bangkok, City of Divine Beings, slides past.
Saffron-robed monks stroll along the sidewalks under the shade of black umbrellas. Children run in clusters, shoving and swarming, laughing and calling out to one another on their way to monastery schools. Street vendors extend arms draped with garlands of marigolds for temple offerings and hold up glinting amulets of revered monks to protect against everything from infertility to scabis mold. Food carts smoke and hiss with the scents of frying oil and fermented fish while around the ankles of their customers, the flicker-shimmer shapes of cheshires twine, yowling and hoping for scraps.