Read Online Windup Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi - Free Book Online Page B

moving. “You were the richest of us all. And now here we are, old men scrambling for young men’s jobs. Every one of us ten thousand times overqualified.”
    The man behind them interjects, “I was executive legal council for Standard & Commerce.”
    Lao Xia makes a face. “Who cares, dog fucker? You’re nothing now.”
    The banking lawyer turns away, affronted. Lao Xia grins, sucks hard on the hand-rolled cigarette and passes it again to Tranh. Hu nudges Tranh’s elbow as he starts to take a puff. “Look! There goes old Ma.”
    Tranh looks over, exhales smoke sharply. For a moment he thinks Ma has followed him, but no. It is just coincidence. They are in the farang factory district. Ma works for the foreign devils, balancing their books. A kink-spring company. Springlife. Yes, Springlife. It is natural that Ma should be here, comfortably riding to work behind a sweating cycle-rickshaw man.
    “Ma Ping,” Li Shen says. “I heard he’s living on the top floor now. Up there with the Dung Lord himself.”
    Tranh scowls. “I fired him, once. Ten thousand years ago. Lazy and an embezzler.”
    “He’s so fat.”
    “I’ve seen his wife,” Hu says. “And his sons. They both have fat on them. They eat meat every night. The boys are fatter than fat. Full of U-Tex proteins.”
    “You’re exaggerating.”
    “Fatter than us.”
    Lao Xia scratches a rib. “Bamboo is fatter than you.”
    Tranh watches Ma Ping open a factory door and slip inside. The past is past. Dwelling on the past is madness. There is nothing for him there. There are no wrist watches, no concubines, no opium pipes or jade sculptures of Quan Yin’s merciful form. There are no pretty clipper ships slicing into port with fortunes in their holds. He shakes his head and offers the nearly spent cigarette to Hu so that he can recover the last tobacco for later use. There is nothing for him in the past. Ma is in the past. Three Prosperities Trading Company is the past. The sooner he remembers this, the sooner he will climb out of this awful hole.
    From behind him, a man calls out, “Wei! Baldy! When did you cut the line? Go to the back! You line up, like the rest of us!”
      “Line up?” Lao Xia shouts back. “Don’t be stupid!” He waves at the line ahead. “How many hundreds are ahead of us? It won’t make any difference where he stands.”
    Others begin to attend the man’s complaint. Complain as well. “Line up! Pai dui! Pai dui!” The disturbance increases and police start down the line, casually swinging their batons.   They aren’t white shirts, but they have no love for hungry yellow cards.
    Tranh makes placating motions to the crowd and Lao Xia.   “Of course. Of course. I’ll line up. It’s of no consequence.”   He makes his farewells and plods his way down the winding yellow card snake, seeking its distant tail.
    Everyone is dismissed long before he reaches it.
     
      A scavenging night. A starving night.   Tranh hunts through dark alleys avoiding the vertical prison heat of the towers. Devil cats seethe and scatter ahead of him in rippling waves. The lights of the methane lamps flicker, burn low and snuff themselves, blackening the city. Hot velvet darkness fetid with rotting fruit swaddles him. The heavy humid air sags. Still swelter darkness. Empty market stalls.   On a street corner, theater men turn in stylized cadences to stories of Ravana. On a thoroughfare, swingshift megodonts shuffle homeward like gray mountains, their massed shadows led by the gold trim glitter of union handlers.  
    In the alleys, children with bright silver knives hunt unwary yellow cards and drunken Thais, but Tranh is wise to their feral ways. A year ago, he would not have seen them, but he has the paranoid’s gift of survival, now. Creatures like them are no worse than sharks: easy to predict, easy to avoid. It is not these obviously feral hunters who churn Tranh’s guts with fear, it is the chameleons, the everyday people who work and