Paolo Bacigalupi - The Windup Girl

Kannika grabs her again. She has disrobed now and has a jadeite cock in her hands. She shoves Emiko down, pushing her onto her back. "Hold her hands," she says, and the men reach out eagerly, grip her wrists.

Kannika pries her legs wide and then Emiko cries out as Kannika takes her. Emiko turns her face aside, waiting out the assault, but Kannika sees her avoidance. She pinches Emiko's face in one hand and forces her to show her features so that the men can see the effect of Kannika's ministrations.

The men urge Kannika on. Begin to chant. Count in Thai. Neung! Song! Sam! Si!

Kannika indulges them with a building rhythm. The men sweat and watch and shout for more for the price of their admission. More men are holding her down, hands on her ankles and wrists, freeing Kannika for her abuse. Emiko writhes, her body shaking and jerking, twitching in the ways that windups do, in the ways that Kannika excels at bringing out. The men laugh and comment on the freakish movements, the stutter-stop motions, flash-bulb strange.

Kannika's fingers join the jade between Emiko's legs, play at Emiko's core. Emiko's shame builds. Again she tries to turn her face aside. Men are gathered around, close, staring. More crowd behind, straining for a glimpse. Emiko moans. Kannika laughs, low and knowing. She says something to the men and increases her tempo. Her fingers play in Emiko's folds. Emiko moans again as her body betrays her. She cries out. Arches. Her body performs just as it was designed-just as the scientists with their test tubes intended. She cannot control it no matter how much she despises it. The scientists will not allow her even this small disobedience. She comes.

The audience roars approval, laughing at the bizarre convulsions that orgasm wrings from her DNA. Kannika gestures at her movements as if to say, "You see? Look at this animal!" and then she is kneeling above Emiko's face and hissing to Emiko that she is nothing, and will always be nothing, and for once the dirty Japanese get what is coming to them.

Emiko wants to tell her that no self-respecting Japanese would do these things. Wants to tell her that all Kannika plays with is a disposable Japanese toy-a triviality of Japanese ingenuity, like Matsushita's disposable cellulose handlegrips for a cycle-rickshaw-but she has said it before and it only makes things worse. If she remains silent the abuse will end soon.

Even if she is New People, there is nothing new under the sun.

Yellow card coolies crank at wide-bore fans, driving air through the club. Sweat drips from their faces and runs in gleaming rivulets down their backs. They burn calories as quickly as they consume them and yet still the club bakes with the memory of the afternoon sun.

Emiko stands beside a fan, letting it cool her as much as she can, pausing in her labors of ferrying drinks for customers and hoping that Kannika will not catch sight of her again.

Whenever Kannika gets hold of her, she drags her out to where the men can all examine her. Makes her walk in the traditional Japanese windup way, emphasizing the stylized motions of her kind. Makes her turn this way and that, and the men joke about her aloud even as they silently consider buying her once their friends have gone away.

In the center of the main room, men invite young girls in their pha sin and cropped jackets out onto the dance floor and make slow turns around the parquet as the band plays Contraction mixes, songs that Raleigh has dredged from his memory and translated for use on traditional Thai instruments, strange melancholy amalgamations of the past, as exotic as his children with their turmeric hair and their wide round eyes.

"Emiko!"

She flinches. It's Raleigh, motioning her toward his office. Men's gazes follow her stutter-stop movements as she passes the bar. Kannika looks up from her date where they twine hands and nuzzle close. She smiles slightly as Emiko goes by. When Emiko first came to the country, she was told that the Thais have thirteen kinds of smile. She suspects that Kannika's denotes no good will.

"Come on." Raleigh says, impatient. He leads her through a curtain and down the hall past where the girls change into their work clothes, then through another door.

The memorabilia of three lifetimes lines his office's walls, everything from yellowed photographs of a Bangkok lit entirely by electricity to an image of Raleigh wearing the traditional dress of some savage hilltribe in the North. Raleigh invites Emiko to recline on a cushion on the raised platform where he does his private business. Another man is already sprawled there, a pale tall creature with blue eyes and blond hair and an angry scar on his neck.

The man startles when she comes into the room. "Jesus and Noah, you didn't tell me she was a windup," he says.

Raleigh grins and settles on his own cushion. "Didn't know you were a Grahamite."

The man almost smiles at the taunt. "Keeping something this risky… You're playing with blister rust, Raleigh. The white shirts could be all over you."

"The Ministry doesn't give a damn as long I pay the bribes. The guys who patrol around here aren't the Tiger of Bangkok. They just want to make a buck and sleep through the night." He laughs. "Buying her ice is more expensive than paying the Environment Ministry to look the other way."

"Ice?"

"Wrong pore structure. She overheats." He scowls. "If I'd known beforehand, I wouldn't have bought her."

The room reeks of opium and Raleigh busies himself filling the pipe again. He claims that opium has kept him young, vital through the years, but Emiko suspects that he sails for Tokyo and the same aging treatments Gendo-sama used. Raleigh holds the opium over its lamp. It heats and sizzles, and he turns the ball on its needles, working the tar until it turns viscous, then he quickly rolls it back into a ball and presses it into his pipe. He extends the pipe to the lamp and breathes deeply as the tar turns to smoke. He closes his eyes. Blindly offers it to the pale man.

"No, thank you."

Raleigh's eyes open. He laughs. "You should try it. It's the one thing the plagues didn't get. Lucky for me. Can't imagine going through withdrawal at my age."

The man doesn't answer. Instead, his pale blue eyes study Emiko. She has the uncomfortable feeling of being taken apart, cell by cell. Not so much that he undresses her with his gaze-this she experiences every day: the feel of men's eyes darting across her skin, clasping at her body, hungering and despising her-instead his study is clinically detached. If there is hunger there, he hides it well.

"She's the one?" he asks.

Raleigh nods. "Emiko, tell the gentleman about our friend from the other night."

Emiko glances at Raleigh, discomfited. She is fairly certain that she has never seen this pale blond gaijin at the club before, at least, that he has never attended any special performance. She has never served him a whiskey ice. She wracks her memories. No, she would remember. He has a sunburn, obvious despite the dim flicker of the candles and opium lamp. And his eyes are too strangely pale, unpleasantly so. She would remember him.

"Go on." Raleigh urges. "Tell him what you told me. About the white shirt. The kid you went with."

Raleigh is normally fanatic about the privacy of guests. He has even talked about building a separate stairwell for patrons, simply so they will not be seen entering and leaving Ploenchit tower at all, an access passage that would allow them to enter from a block away, under the street. And yet now he wants her to reveal so much.

"The boy?" she asks, stalling for time, unnerved by Raleigh's eagerness to expose a guest, and a white shirt, at that. She glances at the stranger again, wondering who he is, and what sort of hold he has on her papa-san.