Here’s a story by Ian McDonald, whose “The Tear” appears later in this anthology. In this one, he takes us to visit a vivid and evocative future India, where ancient customs and dazzlingly sophisticated high-tech exist side by side, and where the age-old game of courtship has become far more complex and strange than anybody ever thought that it could.
A ROBOT is giving Jasbir the whitest teeth in Delhi. It is a precise, terrifying procedure involving chromed steel and spinning, shrieking abrasion heads. Jasbir’s eyes go wide as the spidery machine-arms flourish their weapons in his face, a demon of radical dentistry. He read about the Glinting Life! Cosmetic Dentistry Clinic, (Hygienic, Quick and Modern) in the February edition of Shaadi! for Eligible Boys. In double-page spread it looked nothing like these insect-mandibles twitching inside his mouth. He’d like to ask the precise and demure dental nurse (married, of course) if it’s meant to be like this but his mouth is full of clamps and anyway an Eligible Boy never shows fear. But he closes his eyes as the robot reaches in and spinning steel hits enamel.
Now the whitest teeth in Delhi dart through the milling traffic in a rattling phatphat. He feels as if he is beaming out over an entire city. The whitest teeth, the blackest hair, the most flawless skin and perfectly plucked eyebrows. Jasbir’s nails are beautiful. There’s a visiting manicurist at the Ministry of Waters, so many are the civil servants on the shaadi circuit. Jasbir notices the driver glancing at his blinding smile. He knows; the people on Mathura Road know, all Delhi knows that every night is great game night.
On the platform of Cashmere Café metro station, chip-implanted police-monkeys canter, shrieking, between the legs of passengers, driving away the begging, tugging, thieving macaques that infest the subway system. They pour over the edge of the platform to their holes and hides in a wave of brown fur as the robot train slides in to the stop. Jasbir always stands next to the Women Only section. There is always a chance one of them might be scared of the monkeys – they bite – and he could then perform an act of Spontaneous Gallantry. The women studiously avoid any glance, any word, any sign of interest but a true Eligible Boy never passes up a chance for contact. But that woman in the business suit, the one with the fashionable wasp-waist jacket and the low-cut hip-riding pants, was she momentarily dazzled by the glint of his white white teeth?
“A robot, madam,” Jasbir calls as the packer wedges him into the 18:08 to Barwala. “Dentistry of the future.” The doors close. But Jasbir Dayal knows he is a white-toothed Love God and this, this will be the shaadi night he finally finds the wife of his dreams.
Economists teach India’s demographic crisis as an elegant example of market failure. Its seed germinated in the last century, before India became Tiger of Tiger economies, before political jealousies and rivalries split her into twelve competing states. A lovely boy, was how it began. A fine, strong, handsome, educated, successful son, to marry and raise children and to look after us when we are old. Every mother’s dream, every father’s pride. Multiply by the three hundred million of India’s emergent middle class. Divide by the ability to determine sex in the womb. Add selective abortion. Run twenty-five years down the x-axis, factoring in refined, twenty-first century techniques such as cheap, powerful pharma patches that ensure lovely boys will be conceived and you arrive at great Awadh, its ancient capital Delhi of twenty million and a middle class with four times as many males as females. Market failure. Individual pursuit of self-interest damages larger society. Elegant to economists; to fine, strong, handsome, educated, successful young men like Jasbir caught in a wife-drought, catastrophic.
There’s a ritual to shaadi nights. The first part involves Jasbir in the bathroom for hours playing pop music too loud and using too much expensive water while Sujay knocks and leaves copious cups of tea at the door and runs an iron over Jasbir’s collars and cuffs and carefully removes the hairs of previous shaadis from Jasbir’s suit jacket. Sujay is Jasbir’s housemate in the government house at Acacia Bungalow Colony. He’s a character designer on the Awadh version of Town and Country, neighbour-and-rival Bharat’s all-conquering artificial intelligence generated soap opera. He works with the extras, designing new character skins and dropping them over raw code from Varanasi. Jahzay Productions is a new model company, meaning that Sujay seems to do most of his work from the verandah on his new-fangled lighthoek device, his hands drawing pretty, invisible patterns on air. To office-bound Jasbir, with a ninety-minute commute on three modes of transport each way each day, it looks pretty close to nothing. Sujay is uncommunicative and hairy and neither shaves nor washes his too-long hair enough but his is a sensitive soul and compensates for the luxury of being able to sit in the cool cool shade all day waving his hands by doing housework. He cleans, he tidies, he launders. He is a fabulous cook. He is so good that Jasbir does not need a maid, a saving much to be desired in pricey Acacia Bungalow Colony. This is a source of gossip to the other residents of Acacia Bungalow Colony. Most of the goings-on in Number 27 are the subject of gossip over the lawn sprinklers. Acacia Bungalow Colony is a professional, family gated community.
The second part of the ritual is the dressing. Like a syce preparing a Mughal lord for battle, Sujay dresses Jasbir. He fits the cufflinks and adjusts them to the proper angle. He adjusts the set of Jasbir’s collar just so. He examines Jasbir from every angle as if he is looking at one of his own freshly-fleshed characters. Brush off a little dandruff here, correct a desk-slumped posture there. Smell his breath and check the teeth for lunch-time spinach and other dental crimes.
“So what do you think of them then?” Jasbir says.
“They’re white,” grunts Sujay.
The third part of the ritual is the briefing. While they wait for the phat-phat, Sujay fills Jasbir in on upcoming plotlines on Town and Country. It’s Jasbir’s major conversational ploy and advantage over his deadly rivals; soap-opera gossip. In his experience what the women really want is gupshup from the meta-soap, the no-less-fictitious lives and loves and marriages and rows of the aeai actors that believe they are playing the roles in Town and Country. “Auh,” Sujay will say. “Different department.”
There’s the tootle of phatphat horns. Curtains will twitch, there will be complaints about waking up children on a school night. But Jasbir is glimmed and glammed and shaadi-fit. And armed with soapi gupshup. How can he fail?
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Sujay says as he opens the door for the God of Love. “Your father left a message. He wants to see you.”
“You’ve hired a what?” Jasbir’s retort is smothered by the cheers of his brothers from the living room as a cricket ball rolls and skips over the boundary rope at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. His father bends closer; confidentially across the tiny tin-topped kitchen table. Anant whisks the kettle off the boil so she can overhear. She is the slowest, most awkward maid in Delhi but to fire her would be to condemn an old woman to the streets. She lumbers around the Dayal kitchen like a buffalo, feigning disinterest.
“A matchmaker. Not my idea, not my idea at all; it was hers.” Jasbir’s father inclines his head toward the open living room door. Beyond it, enthroned on her sofa amidst her non-eligible boys, Jasbir’s mother watches the test match of the smart-silk wallscreen Jasbir had bought her with his first civil service paycheck. When Jasbir left the tiny, ghee-stinky apartment on Nabi Karim Road for the distant graces of Acacia Bungalow Colony, Mrs Dayal delegated all negotiations with her wayward son to her husband. “She’s found this special matchmaker.”
“Wait wait wait. Explain to me special.”
Jasbir’s father squirms. Anant is taking a long time to dry a tea-cup.
“Well, you know in the old days people would maybe have gone to a hijra . . . Well, she’s updated it a bit, this being the twenty first century and everything, so she’s, ah, found a nute.”
A clatter of a cup hitting a stainless steel draining board.
“A nute?” Jasbir hisses
“He knows contracts. He knows deportment and proper etiquette. He knows what women want. I think he may have been one, once.”
Anant lets out an aie!, soft and involuntary as a fart.
“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘yt’,” Jasbir says. “And they’re not hijras the way you knew them. They’re not men become women or women become men. They’re neither.”
“Nutes, neithers, hijras, yts, hes, shes; whatever; it’s not as if I even get to take tea with the parents let alone see an announcement in the shaadi section in the Times of Awadh.” Mrs Dayal shouts over the burbling commentary to the second Awadh-China Test. Jasbir winces. Like papercuts, the criticisms of parents are the finest and the most painful.
Inside the Haryana Polo and Country Club the weather was raining men snowing men hailing men. Well-dressed men, moneyed men, charming men, groomed and glinted men, men with prospects all laid out in their marriage resumés. Jasbir knew most of them by face. Some he knew by name, a few had passed beyond being rivals into becoming friends.
“Teeth!” A cry, a nod, a two-six-gun showbiz point from the bar. There leant Kishore, a casual lank of a man draped like a skein of silk against the Raj-era mahogany. “Where did you get those, badmash?” He was an old university colleague of Jasbir’s, much given to high-profile activities like horse racing at the Delhi Jockey Club or skiing, where there was snow left on the Himalayas. Now he was in finance and claimed to have been to five hundred shaadis and made a hundred proposals. But when they were on the hook, wriggling, he let them go. Oh, the tears, the threats, the phone calls from fuming fathers and boiling brothers. It’s the game, isn’t it? Kishore rolls on, “Here, have you heard? Tonight is Deependra’s night. Oh yes. An astrology aeai has predicted it. It’s all in the stars, and on your palmer.”
Deependra was a clenched wee man. Like Jasbir he was a civil servant, heading up a different glass-partitioned workcluster in the Ministry of Waters: Streams and Watercourses to Jasbir’s Ponds and Dams. For three shaadis now he had been nurturing a fantasy about a woman who exchanged palmer addresses with him. First it was call, then a date. Now it’s a proposal.
“Rahu is in the fourth house, Saturn in the seventh,” Deependra said lugubriously. “Our eyes will meet, she will nod – just a nod. The next morning she will call me and that will be it, done, dusted. I’d ask you to be one of my groomsmen, but I’ve already promised them all to my brothers and cousins. It’s written. Trust me.”
It is a perpetual bafflement to Jasbir how a man wedded by day to robust fluid accounting by night stakes love and life on an off-the-shelf janam-patri artificial intelligence.
A Nepali chidmutgar banged a staff on the hardwood dancefloor of the exclusive Haryana Polo and Country Club. The Eligible Boys straightened their collars, adjusted the hang of their jackets, aligned their cufflinks. This side of the mahogany double doors to the garden they were friends and colleagues. Beyond it they were rivals.
“Gentlemen, valued clients of the Lovely Girl Shaadi Agency, please welcome, honour and cherish the Begum Rezzak and her Lovely Girls!”
Two attendants slid open the folding windows on to the polo ground. There waited the lovely girls in their saris and jewels and gold and henna (for the Lovely Girl Agency is a most traditional and respectable agency). Jasbir checked his schedule – five minutes per client, maybe less, never more. He took a deep breath and unleashed his thousand-rupee smile. It was time to find a wife.
“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re muttering about in there,” Mrs Dayal called over the mantra commentary of Harsha Bhogle. “I’ve had the talk. The nute will arrange the thing for much less than you are wasting on all those shaadi agencies and databases and nonsense. No, nute will make the match that is it stick stop stay.” There is a spatter of applause from the Test Match.
“I tell you your problem: a girl sees two men sharing a house together, she gets ideas about them,” Dadaji whispers. Anant finally sets down two cups of tea and rolls her eyes. “She’s had the talk. It’ll start making the match. There’s nothing to be done about it. There are worse things.”
The women may think what they want, but Sujay has it right, Jasbir thinks. Best never to buy into the game at all.
Another cheer, another boundary. Haresh and Sohan jeer at the Chinese devils. Think you can buy it in and beat the world, well, the Awadhi boys are here to tell you it takes years, decades, centuries upon centuries to master the way of cricket. And there’s too much milk in the tea.
A dream wind like the hot gusts that fore-run the monsoon sends a spray of pixels through the cool white spacious rooms of 27 Acacia Avenue Bungalows. Jasbir ducks and laughs as they blow around him. He expects them to be cold and sharp as wind-whipped powder snow but they are only digits, patterns of electrical charge swept through his visual cortex by the clever little device hooked behind his right ear. They chime as they swirl past, like glissandos of silver sitar notes. Shaking his head in wonder, Jasbir slips the lighthoek from behind his ear. The vision evaporates.
“Very clever, very pretty but I think I’ll wait until the price comes down.”
“It’s, um, not the ‘hoek’,” Sujay mutters. “You know, well, the matchmaker your mother hired. Well, I thought, maybe you don’t need someone arranging you a marriage.” Some days Sujay’s inability to talk to the point exasperates Jasbir. Those days tend to come after another fruitless and expensive shaadi night and the threat of matchmaker but particularly after Deependra of the non-white teeth announces he has a date. With the girl. The one written in the fourth house of Rahu by his pocket astrology aeai. “Well, you see I thought, with the right help you could arrange it yourself.” Some days debate with Sujay is pointless. He follows his own calendar. “You, ah, need to put the hoek back on again.”
Silver notes spray through Jasbir’s inner ears as the little curl of smart plastic seeks out the sweet spot in his skull. Pixel birds swoop and swarm like starlings on a winter evening. It is inordinately pretty. Then Jasbir gasps aloud as the motes of light and sound sparklingly coalesce into a dapper man in an old-fashioned high-collar sherwani and wrinkle-bottom pajamas. His shoes are polished to mirror-brightness. The dapper man bows.
“Good morning sir. I am Ram Tarun Das, Master of Grooming, Grace and Gentlemanliness.”
“What is this doing in my house?” Jasbir unhooks the device beaming data into his brain.
“Er, please don’t do that,” Sujay says. “It’s not aeai etiquette.”
Jasbir slips the device back on and there he is, that charming man.
“I have been designed with the express purpose of helping you marry a suitable girl,” says Ram Tarun Das.
“Designed?”
“I, ah, made him for you,” says Sujay. “I thought that if anyone knows about relationships and marriages, it’s soap stars.”
“A soap star. You’ve made me a, a marriage life-coach out of a soap star?”
“Not a soap star exactly, more a conflation of a number of sub-systems from the central character register,” Sujay says. “Sorry Ram.”
“Do you usually do that?”
“Do what?”
“Apologise to aeais.”
“They have feelings too.”
Jasbir rolls his eyes. “I’m being taught husbandcraft by a mash-up.”
“Ah, that is out of order. Now you apologise.”
“Now then, sir, if I am to rescue you from a marriage forged in hell, we had better start with manners,” says Ram Tarun Das. “Manners maketh the man. It is the bedrock of all relationships because true manners come from what he is, not what he does. Do not argue with me, women see this at once. Respect for all things, sir, is the key to etiquette. Maybe I only imagine I feel as you feel, but that does not make my feelings any less real to me. So this once I accept your apology as read. Now, we’ll begin. We have so much to do before tonight’s shaadi.”
Why, Jasbir thinks, why can I never get my shoes like that?
The lazy crescent moon lolls low above the out-flarings of Tughluk’s thousand stacks; a cradle to rock an infant nation. Around its rippling reflection in the infinity pool bob mango-leaf diyas. No polo grounds and country clubs for Begum Jaitly. This is 2045, not 1945. Modern style for a modern nation, that is philosophy of the Jaitly Shaadi Agency. But gossip and want are eternal and in the mood lighting of the penthouse the men are blacker-than black shadows against greater Delhi’s galaxy of lights and traffic.
“Eyebrows!” Kishore greets Jasbir with TV-host pistol-fingers two-shot bam bam. “No seriously, what did you do to them?” Then his own eyes widen as he scans down from the eyebrows to the total product. His mouth opens, just a crack, but wide enough for Jasbir to savour an inner fist-clench of triumph.
He’d felt self-conscious taking Ram Tarun Das to the mall. He had no difficulty accepting that the figure in its stubbornly atavistic costume was invisible to everyone but him (though he did marvel at how the aeai avoided colliding with any other shopper in thronged Centrestage Mall). He did feel stupid talking to thin air.
“What is this delicacy?” Ram Tarun Das said in Jasbir’s inner ear. “People talk to thin air on the cellphone all the time. Now this suit, sir.”
It was bright, it was brocade, it was a fashionable retro cut that Jasbir would have gone naked rather than worn.
“It’s very . . . bold.”
“It’s very you. Try it. Buy it. You will seem confident and stylish without being flashy. Women cannot bear flashy.”
The robot cutters and stitchers were at work even as Jasbir completed the card transaction. It was expensive. Not as expensive as all the shaadi memberships, he consoled himself. And something to top it off. But Ram Tarun Das manifested himself right in the jeweller’s window over the display.
“Never jewellery on a man. One small brooch at the shirt collar to hold it together, that is permissible. Do you want the lovely girls to think you are a Mumbai pimp? No, sir, you do not. No to jewels. Yes to shoes. Come.”
He had paraded his finery before a slightly embarrassed Sujay.
“You look, er, good. Very dashing. Yes.”
Ram Tarun Das, leaning on his cane and peering intensely, said, “You move like a buffalo. Ugh, sir. Here is what I prescribe for you. Tango lessons. Passion and discipline. Latin fire, yet the strictest of tempos. Do not argue, it is the tango for you. There is nothing like it for deportment.”
The tango, the manicures, the pedicures, the briefings in popular culture and Delhi gossip (“soap opera insults both the intelligence and imagination, I should know, sir”), the conversational ploys, the body language games of when to turn so, when to make or break eye contact, when to dare the lightest, engaging touch. Sujay mooched around the house, even more lumbering and lost than usual, as Jasbir chatted with air and practised Latin turns and drops with invisible partner. Last of all, on the morning of the Jaitly shaadi,
“Eyebrows sir. You will never get a bride with brows like a hairy saddhu. There is a girl not five kilometres from here, she has a moped service. I’ve ordered her, she will be here within ten minutes.”
As ever, Kishore won’t let Jasbir wedge an answer in, but rattles on, “So, Deependra then?”
Jasbir has noticed that Deependra is not occupying his customary place in Kishore’s shadows; in fact he does not seem to be anywhere in this penthouse.
“Third date,” Kishore says, then mouths it again silently for emphasis. “That janampatri aeai must be doing something right. You know, wouldn’t it be funny if someone took her off him? Just as a joke, you know?”
Kishore chews his bottom lip. Jasbir knows the gesture of old. Then bells chime, lights dim and a wind from nowhere sends the butter-flames flickering and the little diyas flocking across the infinity pool. The walls have opened, the women enter the room.
She stands by the glass wall looking down into the cube of light that is the car park. She clutches her cocktail between her hands as if in prayer or concern. It is a new cocktail designed for the international cricket test, served in an egg-shaped goblet made from a new spin-glass that will always self-right, no matter how it is set down or dropped. A Test of Dragons is the name of the cocktail. Good Awadhi whisky over a gilded syrup with a six-hit of Chinese Kao Liang liqueur. A tiny red gel dragon dissolves like a sunset.
“Now, sir,” whispers Ram Tarun Das standing at Jasbir’s shoulder. “Faint heart, as they say.”
Jasbir’s mouth is dry. A secondary application Sujay pasted onto the Ram Tarun Das aeai tells him his precise heart rate, respiration, temperature and the degree of sweat in his palm. He’s surprised he’s still alive.
You’ve got the entry lines, you’ve got the exit lines and the stuff in the middle Ram Tarun Das will provide.
He follows her glance down into the car park. A moment’s pause, a slight inclination of his body towards hers. That is the line.
So, are you a Tata, a Mercedes, a Li Fan or a Lexus? Ram Tarun Das whispers in Jasbir’s skull. He casually repeats the line. He has been rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed in how to make it sound natural. He’s as good as any newsreader, better than those few human actors left on television.
She turned to him, lips parted a fraction in surprise.
“I beg your pardon?”
She will say this, Ram Tarun Das hints. Again, offer the line.
“Are you a Tata, a Mercedes, a Li Fan or a Lexus?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just pick one. Whatever you feel, that’s the right answer.”
A pause, a purse of the lips. Jasbir subtly links his hands behind his back, the better to hide the sweat.
“Lexus,” she says. Shulka, her name is Shulka. She is a twenty-two year-old marketing graduate from Delhi U working in men’s fashion, a Mathur – only a couple of caste steps away from Jasbir’s folk. The Demographic Crisis has done more to shake up the tiers of varna and jati than a century of the slow drip of democracy. And she has answered his question.
“Now, that’s very interesting,” says Jasbir.
She turns, plucked crescent-moon eyebrows arched. Behind Jasbir, Ram Tarun Das whispers, now, the fetch.
“Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai?”
A small frown now. Lord Vishnu, she is beautiful.
“I was born in Delhi . . .”
“That’s not what I mean.”
The frown becomes a nano-smile of recognition.
“Mumbai then. Yes, Mumbai definitely. Kolkata’s hot and dirty and nasty. And Chennai – no, I’m definitely Mumbai.”
Jasbir does the sucked-in-lip-nod of concentration Ram Tarun Das made him practise in front of the mirror.
“Red Green Yellow Blue?”
“Red.” No hesitation.
“Cat Dog Bird Monkey?”
She cocks her head to one side. Jasbir notices that she, too, is wearing a ’hoek. Tech girl. The cocktail bot is on its rounds, doing industrial magic with the self-righting glasses and its little spider-fingers.
“Bird . . . no.” A sly smile. “No no no. Monkey.”
He is going to die he is going to die.
“But what does it mean?”
Jasbir holds up a finger.
“One more. Ved Prakash, Begum Vora, Dr Chatterji, Ritu Parvaaz.”
She laughs. She laughs like bells from the hem of a wedding skirt. She laughs like the stars of a Himalaya night.
What do you think you’re doing? Ram Tarun Das hisses. He flips through Jasbir’s perceptions to appear behind Shulka, hands thrown up in despair. With a gesture he encompasses the horizon wreathed in gas flares. Look, tonight the sky burns for you, sir, and you would talk about soap opera! The script, stick to the script! Improvization is death. Almost Jasbir tells his matchmaker, Away djinn, away. He repeats the question.
“I’m not really a Town and Country fan,” Shulka says. “My sister now, she knows every last detail about every last one of the characters and that’s before she gets started on the actors. It’s one of those things I suppose you can be ludicrously well informed about without ever watching. So if you had to press me, I would have to say Ritu. So what does it all mean, Mr Dayal?”
His heart turns over in his chest. Ram Tarun Das eyes him coldly. The finesse: make it. Do it just as I instructed you. Otherwise your money and my bandwidth are thrown to the wild wind.
The cocktail bot dances in to perform its cybernetic circus. A flip of Shulka’s glass and it comes down spinning, glinting, on the precise needlepoint of its forefinger. Like magic, if you know nothing about gyros and spin-glasses. But that moment of prestidigitation is cover enough for Jasbir to make the ordained move. By the time she looks up, cocktail refilled, he is half a room away.
He wants to apologise as he sees her eyes widen. He needs to apologise as her gaze searches the room for him. Then her eyes catch his. It is across a crowded room just like the song that Sujay mumbles around the house when he thinks Jasbir can’t hear. Sujay loves that song. It is the most romantic, heart-felt, innocent song he has ever heard. Big awkward Sujay has always been a sucker for veteran Holywood musicals. South Pacific. Carousel, Moulin Rouge, he watches them on the big screen in the living room, singing shamelessly along and getting moist-eyed at the impossible loves. Across a crowded room, Shulka frowns. Of course. It’s in the script.
But what does it mean? she mouths. And, as Ram Tarun Das has directed, he shouts back, “Call me and I’ll tell you.” Then he turns on his heel and walks away. And that, he knows without any prompt from Ram Tarun Das, is the finesse.
The apartment is grossly over-heated and smells of singeing cooking ghee but the nute is swaddled in a crocheted shawl, hunched as if against a persistent hard wind. Plastic teacups stand on the low brass table, Jasbir’s mother’s conspicuously untouched. Jasbir sits on the sofa with his father on his right and his mother on his left, as if between arresting policemen. Nahin the nute mutters and shivers and rubs yts fingers.
Jasbir has never been in the physical presence of a third-gendered. He knows all about them – as he knows all about most things – from the Single-Professional-Male general interest magazines to which he subscribes. Those pages, between the ads for designer watches and robot tooth whitening – portray them as fantastical, Arabian Nights creatures equally blessed and cursed with glamour. Nahin the matchmaker seems old and tired as a god, knotting and unknotting yts fingers over the papers on the coffee table – “The bloody drugs, darlings” – occasionally breaking into great spasmodic shudders. It’s one way of avoiding the Wife Game, Jasbir thinks.
Nahin slides sheets of paper around on the tabletop. The documents are patterned as rich as damask with convoluted chartings of circles and spirals annotated in inscrutable alphabets. There is a photograph of a woman in each top right corner. The women are young and handsome but have the wide-eyed expressions of being photographed for the first time.
“Now, I’ve performed all the calculations and these five are both compatible and auspicious,” Nahin says. Yt clears a large gobbet of phlegm from yts throat.
“I notice they’re all from the country,” says Jasbir’s father.
“Country ways are good ways,” says Jasbir’s mother.
Wedged between them on the short sofa, Jasbir looks over Nahin’s shawled shoulder to where Ram Tarun Das stands in the doorway. He raises his eyebrows, shakes his head.
“Country girls are better breeders,” Nahin says. “You said dynasty was a concern. You’ll also find a closer match in jati and in general they settle for a much more reasonable dowry than a city girl. City girls want it all. Me me me. No good ever comes of selfishness.”
The nute’s long fingers stir the country girls around the coffee table, then slide three toward Jasbir and his family. Dadaji and Mamaji sit forward. Jasbir slumps back. Ram Tarun Das folds his arms, rolls his eyes.
“These three are the best starred,” Nahin says. “I can arrange a meeting with their parents almost immediately. There would be some small expenditure in their coming up to Delhi to meet with you; this would be in addition to my fee.”
In a flicker, Ram Tarun Das is behind Jasbir, his whisper a startle in his ear.
“There is a line in the Western wedding vows: speak now or forever hold your peace.”
“How much is my mother paying you?” Jasbir says into the moment of silence.
“I couldn’t possibly betray client confidentiality.” Nahin has eyes small and dark as currants.
“I’ll disengage you for an additional fifty per cent.”
Nahin’s hands hesitate over the pretty hand drawn spirals and wheels. You were a man before, Jasbir thinks. That’s a man’s gesture. See, I’ve learned how to read people.
“I double,” shrills Mrs Dayal.
“Wait wait wait,” Jasbir’s father protests but Jasbir is already shouting over him. He has to kill this idiocy here, before his family in their wedding fever fall into strategies they cannot afford.
“You’re wasting your time and my parents’ money,” Jasbir says. “You see, I’ve already met a suitable girl.”
Goggle eyes, open mouths around the coffee table, but none so astounded and gaping as Ram Tarun Das’s.
The Prasads at Number 25 Acacia Colony Bungalows have already sent over a pre-emptive complaint about the tango music but Jasbir flicks up the volume fit to rattle the brilliants on the chandelier. At first he scorned the dance, the stiffness, the formality, the strictness of the tempo. So very un-Indian. No one’s uncle would ever dance this at a wedding. But he has persisted – never say that Jasbir Dayal is not a trier – and the personality of the tango has subtly permeated him, like rain into a dry riverbed. He has found the discipline and begun to understand the passion. He walks tall in the Dams and Watercourses. He no longer slouches at the watercooler.
“When I advised you to speak or forever hold your peace, sir, I did not actually mean, lie through your teeth to your parents,” Ram Tarun Das says. In tango he takes the woman’s part. The lighthoek can generate an illusion of weight and heft so the aeai feels solid as Jasbir’s partner. If it can do all that, surely it could make him look like a woman? Jasbir thinks. In his dedication to detail Sujay often overlooks the obvious. “Especially in matters where they can rather easily find you out.”
“I had to stop them wasting their money on that nute.”
“They would have kept outbidding you.”
“Then, even more, I had to stop them wasting my money as well.”
Jasbir knocks Ram Tarun Das’s foot across the floor in a sweetly executed barrida. He glides past the open verandah door where Sujay glances up from soap-opera building. He has become accustomed to seeing his landlord tango cheek to cheek with an elderly Rajput gentleman. Yours is a weird world of ghosts and djinns and half-realities, Jasbir thinks.
“So how many times has your father called asking about Shulka?” Ram Tarun Das’s free leg traces a curve on the floor in a well-executed volcada. Tango is all about seeing the music. It is making the unseen visible.
You know, Jasbir thinks. You’re woven through every part of this house like a pattern in silk.
“Eight,” he says weakly. “Maybe if I called her . . .”
“Absolutely not,” Ram Tarun Das insists, pulling in breath-to-breath close in the embreza. “Any minuscule advantage you might have enjoyed, any atom of hope you might have entertained, would be forfeit. I forbid it.”
“Well, can you at least give me a probability? Surely knowing everything you know about the art of shaadi, you could at least let me know if I’ve any chance?”
“Sir,” says Ram Tarun Das, “I am a Master of Grooming, Grace and Gentlemanliness. I can direct you any number of simple and unsophisticated bookie-aeais; they will give you a price on anything though you may not fancy their odds. One thing I will say: Miss Shulka’s responses were very – suitable.”
Ram Tarun Das hooks his leg around Jasbir’s waist in a final gancho. The music comes to its strictly appointed conclusion. From behind it come two sounds. One is Mrs Prasad weeping. She must be leaning against the party wall to make her upset so clearly audible. The other is a call tone, a very specific call tone, a deplorable but insanely hummable filmi hit My Back, My Crack, My Sack that Jasbir set on the house system to identify one caller, and one caller only.
Sujay looks up, startled.
“Hello?” Jasbir sends frantic, pleading hand signals to Ram Tarun Das, now seated across the room, his hands resting on the top of his cane.
“Lexus Mumbai red monkey Ritu Parvaaz,” says Shulka Mathur. “So what do they mean?”
“No, my mind is made up, I’m hiring a private detective,” Deependra says, rinsing his hands. On the twelfth floor of the Ministry of Waters all the dating gossip happens at the wash-hand basins in the Number 16 Gentlemen’s WC. Urinals: too obviously competitive. Cubicles: a violation of privacy. Truths are best washed with the hands at the basins and secrets and revelations can always be concealed by judicious use of the hot-air hand-drier.
“Deependra, this is paranoia. What’s she done?” Jasbir whispers. A level 0.3 aeai chip in the tap admonishes him not to waste precious water.
“It’s not what she’s done, it’s what she’s not done,” Deependra hisses. “There’s a big difference between someone not being available and someone deliberately not taking your calls. Oh yes. You’ll learn this, mark my words. You’re at the first stage, when it’s all new and fresh and exciting and you are blinded by the amazing fact that someone, someone at last, at long last! thinks you are a catch. It is all rose petals and sweets and cho chweet and you think nothing can possibly go wrong. But you pass through that stage, oh yes. All too soon the scales fall from your eyes. You see . . . and you hear.”
“Deependra.” Jasbir moved to the battery of driers. “You’ve been on five dates.” But every word Deependra has spoken has chimed true. He is a cauldron of clashing emotions. He feels light and elastic, as if he bestrode the world like a god, yet at the same time the world is pale and insubstantial as muslin around him. He feels light-headed with hunger though he cannot eat a thing. He pushes away Sujay’s lovingly prepared dais and roti. Garlic might taint his breath, saag might stick to his teeth, onions might give him wind, bread might inelegantly bloat him. He chews a few cleansing cardamoms, in the hope of spiced kisses to come. Jasbir Dayal is blissfully, gloriously love-sick.
Date one. The Qutb Minar. Jasbir had immediately protested.
“Tourists go there. And families on Saturdays.”
“It’s history.”
“Shulka isn’t interested in history.”
“Oh, you know her so well after three phone conversations and two evenings chatting on shaadinet – which I scripted for you? It is roots, it is who you are and where you come from. It’s family and dynasty. Your Shulka is interested in that, I assure you, sir. Now, here’s what you will wear.”
There were tour buses great and small. There were hawkers and souvenir peddlers. There were parties of frowning Chinese. There were schoolchildren with backpacks so huge they looked like upright tortoises. But wandering beneath the domes and along the colonnades of the Quwwat Mosque in his Casual Urban Explorer clothes, they seemed as remote and ephemeral as clouds. There was only Shulka and him. And Ram Tarun Das strolling at his side, hands clasped behind his back.
To cue, Jasbir paused to trace out the time-muted contours of a disembodied tirthankar’s head, a ghost in the stone.
“Qutb-ud-din Aibak, the first Sultan of Delhi, destroyed twenty Jain temples and reused the stone to build his mosque. You can still find the old carvings if you know where to look.”
“I like that,” Shulka said. “The old gods are still here.” Every word that fell from her lips was pearl-perfect. Jasbir tried to read her eyes but her BlueBoo! cat-eye shades betrayed nothing. “Not enough people care about their history any more. It’s all modern this modern that, if it’s not up- to-the-minute it’s irrelevant. I think that to know where you’re going you need to know where you’ve come from.”
Very good, Ram Tarun Das whispered. Now, the iron pillar.
They waited for a tour group of Germans moved away from the railed-off enclosure. Jasbir and Shulka stood in the moment of silence gazing at the black pillar.
“Sixteen hundred years old, but never a speck of rust on it,” Jasbir said.
Ninety-eight per cent pure iron, Ram Tarun Das prompted. There are things Mittal Steel can learn from the Gupta kings.
“‘He who, having the name of Chandra, carried a beauty of countenance like the full moon, having in faith fixed his mind upon Vishnu, had this lofty standard of the divine Vishnu set up on the hill Vishnupada.’” Shulka’s frown of concentration as she focused on the inscription around the pillar’s waist was as beautiful to Jasbir as that of any god or Gupta king.
“You speak Sanskrit?”
“It’s a sort of personal spiritual development path I’m following.”
You have about thirty seconds before the next tour group arrives, Ram Tarun Das cuts in. Now sir; that line I gave you.
“They say that if you stand with your back to the pillar and close your arms around it, your wish will be granted.”
The Chinese were coming, the Chinese were coming.
“And if you could do that, what would you wish for?”
Perfect. She was perfect.
“Dinner?”
She smiled that small and secret smile that set a garden of thorns in Jasbir’s heart and walked away. At the centre of the gatehouse arch she turned and called back, “Dinner would be good.”
Then the Chinese with their shopping bags and sun visors and plastic leisure shoes came bustling around the stainless iron pillar of Chandra Gupta.
Jasbir smiles at the sunny memory of Date One. Deependra waggles his fingers under the stream of hot air.
“I’ve heard about this. It was on a documentary, oh yes. White widows, they call them. They dress up and go to the shaadis and have their résumés all twinkling and perfect but they have no intention of marrying, Oh no no no, not a chance. Why should they, when there is a never-ending stream of men to wine them and dine them and take out to lovely places and buy them lovely presents and shoes and jewels, and even cars, so it said on the documentary. They are just in it for what they can get; they are playing games with our hearts. And when they get tired or bored or if the man is making too many demands or his presents aren’t as expensive as they were or they can do better somewhere else, then whoosh! Dumped flat and on to the next one. It’s a game to them.”
“Deependra,” says Jasbir. “Let it go. Documentaries on the Shaadi Channel are not the kind of model you want for married life. Really.” Ram Tarun Das would be proud of that one. “Now, I have to get back to work.” Faucets that warn about water crime can also report excessive toilet breaks to line managers. But the doubt-seeds are sown, and Jasbir now remembers the restaurant.
Date Two. Jasbir had practised with the chopsticks for every meal for a week. He swore at rice, he cursed dal. Sujay effortlessly scooped rice, dal, everything from bowl to lips in a flurry of stickwork.
“It’s easy for you, you’ve got that code-wallah Asian culture thing.”
“Um, we are Asian.”
“You know what I mean. And I don’t even like Chinese food, it’s so bland.”
The restaurant was expensive, half a week’s wage. He’d make it up on overtime; there were fresh worries in Dams and Watercourses about a drought.
“Oh,” Shulka said, the nightglow of Delhi a vast, diffuse halo behind her. She is a goddess, Jasbir thought, a devi of the night city with ten million lights descending from her hair. “Chopsticks.” She picked up the antique porcelain chopsticks, one in each hand like drum sticks. “I never know what to do with chopsticks. I’m always afraid of snapping them.”
“Oh, they’re quite easy once you get the hang of them.” Jasbir rose from his seat and came round behind Shulka. Leaning over her shoulder he laid one stick along the fold of her thumb, the other between ball of thumb and tip of index finger. Still wearing her lighthoek. It’s the city girl look. Jasbir shivered in anticipation as he slipped the tip of her middle finger between the two chopsticks. “Your finger acts like a pivot, see? Keep relaxed, that’s the key. And hold your bowl close to your lips.” Her fingers were warm, soft, electric with possibility as he moved them. Did he imagine her skin scented with musk?
Now, said Ram Tarun Das from over Shulka’s other shoulder. Now do you see? And by the way, you must tell her that they make the food taste better.
They did make the food taste better. Jasbir found subtleties and piquancies he had not known before. Words flowed easily across the table. Everything Jasbir said seemed to earn her starlight laughter. Though Ram Tarun Das was as ubiquitous and unobtrusive as the waiting staff, they were all his own words and witticisms. See, you can do this, Jasbir said to himself. What women want, it’s no mystery; stop talking about yourself, listen to them, make them laugh.
Over green tea Shulka began talking about that new novel everyone but everyone was reading, the one about the Delhi girl on the husband-hunt and her many suitors, the scandalous one, An Eligible Boy. Everyone but everyone but Jasbir.
Help! he subvocalized into his inner ear.
Scanning it now, Ram Tarun Das said. Do you want a thematic digest, popular opinions or character breakdowns?
Just be there, Jasbir silently whispered, covering the tiny movement of his jaw by setting the tea-pot lid ajar, a sign for a refill.
“Well, it’s not really a book a man should be seen reading . . .”
“But . . .”
“But isn’t everyone?” Ram Tarun Das dropped him the line. “I mean, I’m only two-thirds of the way in, but . . . how far are you? Spoiler alert spoiler alert.” It’s one of Sujay’s Town and Country expressions. Finally he understands what it means. Shulka just smiles and turns her tea bowl in its little saucer.
“Say what you were going to say.”
“I mean, can’t she see that Nishok is the one? The man is clearly, obviously, one thousand per cent doting on her. But then that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?”
“But Pran, it would always be fire with him. He’s the baddest of bad-mashes but you’d never be complacent with Pran. She’ll never be able to completely trust him and that’s what makes it exciting. Don’t you think you feel that sometimes it needs that little edge, that little fear that maybe, just maybe you could lose it all to keep it alive?”
Careful, sir, murmured Ram Tarun Das.
“Yes, but we’ve known ever since the party at the Chatterjis where she pushed Jyoti into the pool in front of the Russian ambassador that she’s been jealous of her sister because she was the one that got to marry Mr Panse. It’s the eternal glamour versus security. Passion versus stability. Town versus country.”
“Ajit?”
“Convenient plot device. Never a contender. Every woman he dates is just a mirror to his own sweet self.”
Not one sentence, not one word had he read of the hit trash novel of the season. It had flown around his head like clatter-winged pigeons. He’s been too busy being that Eligible Boy.
Shulka held up a piece of sweet, salt, melting fatty duck breast between her porcelain forceps. Juice dripped on to the table cloth.
“So, who will Bani marry, then? Guess correctly and you shall have a prize.”
Jasbir heard Ram Tarun Das’s answer begin to form inside his head. No, he gritted on his molars.
“I think I know.”
“Go on.”
“Pran.”
Shulka stabbed forward, like the darting bill of a winter crane. There was hot, fatty soya duck in his mouth.
“Isn’t there always a twist in the tale?” Shulka said.
In the Number 16 Gentlemen’s WC Deependra checks his hair in the mirror and smoothes it down.
“Dowry thievery; that’s what it is. They string you along, get their claws into your money, then they disappear and you never see a paisa again.”
Now Jasbir really really wants to get back to his little work cluster.
“Deep, this is fantasy. You’ve read this in the news feeds. Come on.”
“Where there’s smoke there’s fire. My stars say that I should be careful in things of the heart and beware false friends. Jupiter is in the third house. Dark omens surround me. No, I have hired a private investigation aeai. It will conduct a discreet surveillance. One way or the other, I shall know.”
Jasbir grips the stanchion, knuckles white, as the phatphat swings through the great mil of traffic around Indira Chowk. Deependra’s aftershave oppresses him.
“Exactly where are we going?”
Deependra had set up the assignation on a coded palmer account. All he would say was that it required two hours of an evening, good clothes, a trustworthy friend and absolute discretion. For two days his mood had been grey and thundery as an approaching monsoon. His PI Aeai had returned a result but Deependra revealed nothing, not even a whisper in the clubbish privacy of the Number 16 Gentlemen’s WC.
The phatphat, driven by a teenager with gelled hair that falls in sharp spikes over his eyes – an obvious impediment to navigation – takes them out past the airport. At Gurgaon the geography falls into place around Jasbir. He starts to feel nauseous from more than spike-hair’s driving and Deependra’s shopping mall aftershave. Five minutes later the phatphat crunches up the curve of raked gravel outside the pillared portico of the Haryana Polo and Country Club.
“What are we doing here? If Shulka finds out I’ve been to shaadi when I’m supposed to be dating her it’s all over.”
“I need a witness.”
Help me Ram Tarun Das, Jasbir hisses into his molars but there is no reassuring spritz of silvery music through his skull to herald the advent of the Master of Grooming, Grace and Gentlemanliness. The two immense Sikhs on the door nod them through.
Kishore is sloped against his customary angle of the bar, surveying the territory. Deependra strides through the throng of eligible boys like a god going to war. Every head turns. Every conversation, every gossip falls silent.
“You . . . you . . . you.” Deependra stammers with rage. His face shakes. “Shaadi stealer!” The whole club bar winces as the slap cracks across Kishore’s face. Then two fists descend on Deependra, one on each shoulder. The man-mountain Sikhs turn him around and arm-lock him, frothing and raging, from the bar of the Haryana Polo and Country Club. “You, you chuutya!” Deependra flings back at his enemy. “I will take it out of you, every last paisa, so help me God. I will have satisfaction!”
Jasbir scurries behind the struggling, swearing Deependra, cowed with embarrassment.
“I’m only here to witness,” he says to the Sikh’s you’re-next glares. They hold Deependra upright a moment to snap his face and bar him forever from Begum Rezzak’s Lovely Girl Shaadi Agency. Then they throw him cleanly over the hood of a new model Li Fan G8 into the carriage drive. He lies dreadfully still and snapped on the gravel for a few moments, then with fetching dignity draws himself up, bats away the dust and straightens his clothes.
“I will see him at the river about this,” Deependra shouts at the impassive Sikhs. “At the river.”
Jasbir is already out on the avenue, trying to see if the phatphat driver’s gone.
The sun is a bowl of brass rolling along the indigo edge of the world. Lights twinkle in the dawn haze. There is never a time when there are not people at the river. Wire-thin men push handcarts over the trash-strewn sand, picking like birds. Two boys have set a small fire in a ring of stones. A distant procession of women, soft bundles on their heads, file over the grassy sand. By the shrivelled thread of the Yamuna an old Brahmin consecrates himself, pouring water over his head. Despite the early heat, Jasbir shivers. He knows what goes into that water. He can smell the sewage on the air, mingled with wood smoke.
“Birds,” says Sujay looking around him with simple wonder. “I can actually hear birds singing. So this is what mornings are like. Tell me again what I’m doing here?”
“You’re here because I’m not being here on my own.”
“And, ah, what exactly are you doing here?”
Deependra squats on his heels by the gym bag, arms wrapped around him. He wears a sharp white shirt and pleated slacks. His shoes are very good. Apart from grunted greetings he has not said a word to Jasbir or Sujay. He stares a lot. Deependra picks up a fistful of sand and lets his trickle through his fingers. Jasbir wouldn’t advise that either.
“I could be at home coding,” says Sujay. “Hey ho. Show time.”
Kishore marches across the scabby river-grass. Even as well-dressed distant speck it is obvious to all that he is furiously angry. His shouts carry far on the still morning air.
“I am going to kick your head into the river,” he bellows at Deependra, still squatting on the riverbank.
“I’m only here as a witness,” Jasbir says hurriedly, needing to be believed. Kishore must forget and Deependra must never know that he was also the witness that night Kishore made the joke in the Tughluk tower.
Deependra looks up. His face is bland, his eyes are mild.
“You just had to, didn’t you? It would have killed you to let me have something you didn’t.”
“Yeah, well. I let you get away with that in the Polo Club. I could have taken you then, it would have been the easiest thing. I could have driven your nose right into your skull, but I didn’t. You cost me my dignity, in front of all my friends, people I work with, business colleagues, but most of all, in front of the women.”
“Well then let me help you find your honour again.”
Deependra thrusts his hand into the gym bag and pulls out a gun.
“Oh my god it’s a gun he’s got a gun,” Jasbir jabbers. He feels his knees turn liquid. He thought that only happened in soaps and popular trash novels. Deependra gets to his feet, the gun never wavering from its aim in the centre of Kishore’s forehead, the precise spot a bindi would sit. “There’s another one in the bag.” Deependra waggles the barrel, nods with his head. “Take it. Let’s sort this right, the man’s way. Let’s sort it honourably. Take the gun.” His voice has gained an octave. A vein beats in his neck and at his temple. Deependra kicks the gym bag towards Kishore. Jasbir can see the anger, the mad, suicidal anger rising in the banker to match the civil servant’s. He can hear himself mumbling Oh my god oh my god oh my god. “Take the gun. You will have a honourable chance. Otherwise I will shoot you like a pi-dog right here.” Deependra levels the gun and takes a sudden, stabbing step towards Kishore. He is panting like a dying cat. Sweat has soaked his good white shirt through and through. The gun muzzle is a finger’s-breadth from Kishore’s forehead.
Then there is a blur of movement, a body against the sun, a cry of pain and the next Jasbir knows Sujay has the gun swinging by its trigger guard from his finger. Deependra is on the sand, clenching and unclenching his right hand. The old Brahmin stares, dripping.
“It’s okay now, it’s all okay, it’s over,” Sujay says. “I’m going to put this in the bag with the other and I’m going to take them and get rid of them and no one will ever talk about this, okay? I’m taking the bag now. Now, shall we all get out of here before someone calls the police, hm?”
Sujay swings the gym back over his sloping shoulder and strides out for the streetlights, leaving Deependra hunched and crying among the shredded plastic scraps.
“How, what, that was, where did you learn to do that?” Jasbir asks, tagging behind, feet sinking into the soft sand.
“I’ve coded the move enough times; I thought it might work in meat life.”
“You don’t mean?”
“From the soaps. Doesn’t everyone?”
There’s solace in soap opera. Its predictable tiny screaming rows, its scripted swooping melodramas, draw the poison from the chaotic, unscripted world where a civil servant in the water service can challenge a rival to a shooting duel over a woman he met at a shaadi. Little effigies of true dramas, sculpted in soap.
When he blinks, Jasbir can see the gun. He sees Deependra’s hand draw it out of the gym bag in martial-arts-movie slow motion. He thinks he sees the other gun, nestled among balled sports socks. Or maybe he imagines it, a cut-away close-up. Already he is editing his memory.
Soothing to watch Nilesh Vora and Dr Chatterji’s wife, their love eternally foiled and frustrated, and Deepti; will she ever realize that to the Brahmpur social set she is eternally that Dalit girl from the village pump?
You work on the other side of a glass partition from someone for years. You go with him to shaadis, you share the hopes and fears of your life and love with him. And loves turns him into a homicidal madman. Sujay took the gun off him. Big, clumsy Sujay, took the loaded gun out of his hand. He would have shot Kishore. Brave, mad Sujay. He’s coding, that’s his renormalizing process. Make soap, watch soap. Jasbir will make him tea. For once. Yes, that would be a nice gesture. Sujay is always always getting tea. Jasbir gets up. It’s a boring bit, Mahesh and Rajani. He doesn’t like them. Those rich-boy-pretending-they-are-car-valets-so-they-can-marry-for-love-not-money characters stretch his disbelief too far. Rajani is hot, though. She’s asked Mahesh to bring her car round to the front of the hotel.
“When you work out here you have lots of time to make up theories. One of my theories is that people’s cars are their characters,” Mahesh is saying. Only in a soap would anyone ever imagine that a pick-up line like that would work, Jasbir thinks. “So, are you a Tata, a Mercedes, a Li Fan or a Lexus?”
Jasbir freezes in the door.
“Oh, a Lexus.”
He turns slowly. Everything is dropping, everything is falling leaving him suspended. Now Mahesh is saying,
“You know, I have another theory. It’s that everyone’s a city. Are you Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai?”
Jasbir sits on the arm of the sofa. The fetch, he whispers. And she will say . . .
“I was born in Delhi . . .”
“That’s not what I mean.”
Mumbai, murmurs Jasbir.
“Mumbai then. Yes, Mumbai definitely. Kolkata’s hot and dirty and nasty. And Chennai – no, I’m definitely Mumbai.”
“Red Green Yellow Blue,” Jasbir says.
“Red.” Without a moment’s hesitation.
“Cat Dog Bird Monkey?”
She even cocks her head to one side. That was how he noticed Shulka was wearing the lighthoek.
“Bird . . . no.”
“No no no,” says Jasbir. She’ll smile slyly here. “Monkey.” And there is the smile. The finesse.
“Sujay!” Jasbir yells. “Sujay! Get me Das!”
“How can an aeai be in love?” Jasbir demands.
Ram Tarun Das sits in his customary wicker chair, his legs casually crossed. Soon, very soon, Jasbir thinks, voices will be raised and Mrs Prasad next door will begin to thump and weep.
“Now sir, do not most religions maintain that love is the fundament of the universe? In which case, perhaps it’s not so strange that a distributed entity, such as myself, should find – and be surprised by, oh, so surprised, sir – by love? As a distributed entity, it’s different in nature from the surge of neurochemicals and waveform of electrical activity you experience as love. With us it’s a more – rarefied experience – judging solely by what I know from my subroutines on Town and Country. Yet, at the same time, it’s intensely communal. How can I describe it? You don’t have the concepts, let alone the words. I am a specific incarnation of aspects of a number of aeais and sub-programmes, as those aeais are also iterations of sub-programmes, many of them marginally sentient. I am many, I am legion. And so is she – though of course gender is purely arbitrary for us, and, sir, largely irrelevant. It’s very likely that at many levels we share components. So ours is not so much a marriage of minds as a league of nations. Here we are different from humans in that, for you, it seems to us that groups are divisive and antipathetical. Politics, religion, sport, but especially your history, seem to teach that. For us folk, groups are what bring us together. They are mutually attractive. Perhaps the closest analogy might be the merger of large corporations. One thing I do know, that for humans and aeais, we both need to tell people about it.”
“When did you find out she was using an aeai assistant?”
“Oh, at once sir. These things are obvious to us. And if you’ll forgive the parlance, we don’t waste time. Fascination at the first nanosecond. Thereafter, well, as you saw on the unfortunate scene from Town and Country, we scripted you.”
“So we thought you were guiding us . . .”
“When it was you who were our go-betweens, yes.”
“So what happens now?” Jasbir slaps his hands on his thighs.
“We are meshing at a very high level. I can only catch hints and shadows of it, but I feel a new aeai is being born, on a level far beyond either of us, or any of our co-characters. Is this a birth? I don’t know, but how can I convey to you the tremendous, rushing excitement I feel?”
“I meant me.”
“I’m sorry sir. Of course you did. I am quite, quite dizzy with it all. If I might make one observation; there’s truth in what your parents say. First the marriage, then the love. Love grows in the thing you see every day.”
Thieving macaques dart around Jasbir’s legs and pluck at the creases of his pants. Midnight metro, the last train home. The few late-night passengers observe a quarantine of mutual solitude. The djinns of unexplained wind that haunt subway systems send litter spiralling across the platform. The tunnel focuses distant shunts and clanks, uncanny at this zero hour. There should be someone around at the phatphat stand. If not he’ll walk. It doesn’t matter.
He met her at a fashionable bar all leather and darkened glass in an international downtown hotel. She looked wonderful. The simple act of her stirring sugar into coffee tore his heart in two.
“When did you find out?”
“Devashri Didi told me.”
“Devashri Didi.”
“And yours?”
“Ram Tarun Das, Master of Grooming, Grace and Gentlemanliness. A very proper, old fashioned Rajput gent. He always called me sir; right up to the end. My house-mate made him. He works in character design on Town and Country.”
“My older sister works in PR the meta-soap department at Jazhay. She got one of the actor designers to put Devashri Didi together.” Jasbir has always found the idea of artificial actors believing they played equally artificial roles head-frying. Then he found aeai love.
“Is she married? Your older sister, I mean.”
“Blissfully. And children.”
“Well, I hope our aeais are very happy together.” Jasbir raised a glass. Shulka lifted her coffee cup. She wasn’t a drinker. She didn’t like alcohol, Devashri Didi had told her it looked good for the Begum Jaitly’s modern shaadi.
“My little quiz?” Jasbir asked.
“Devashri Didi gave me the answers you were expecting. She’d told me it was a standard ploy, personality quizzes and psychic tests.”
“And the Sanskrit?”
“Can’t speak a word.”
Jasbir laughed honestly.
“The personal spiritual journey?”
“I’m a strictly material girl. Devashri Didi said . . .”
“. . . I’d be impressed if I thought you had a deep spiritual dimension. I’m not a history buff either. And An Eligible Boy?”
“That unreadable tripe?”
“Me neither.”
“Is there anything true about either of us?”
“One thing,” Jasbir said. “I can tango.”
Her surprise, breaking into a delighted smile, was also true. Then she folded it away.
“Was there ever any chance?” Jasbir asked.
“Why did you have at ask that? We could have just admitted that we were both playing games and shaken hands and laughed and left it at that. Jasbir, would it help if I told you that I wasn’t even looking? I was trying the system out. It’s different for suitable girls. I’ve got a plan.”
“Oh,” said Jasbir.
“You did ask and we agreed, right at the start tonight, no more pretence.” She turned her coffee cup so that the handle faced right and laid her spoon neatly in the saucer. “I have to go now.” She snapped her bag shut and stood up. Don’t walk away, Jasbir said in his silent Master of Grooming, Grace and Gentlemanliness voice. She walked away.
“And Jasbir.”
“What?”
“You’re a lovely man, but this was not a date.”
A monkey takes a liberty too far, plucking at Jasbir’s shin. Jasbir’s kick connects and sends it shrieking and cursing across the platform. Sorry monkey. It wasn’t you. Booms rattle up the subway tube; gusting hot air and the smell of electricity herald the arrival of the last metro. As the lights swing around the curve in the tunnel, Jasbir imagines how it would be to step out and drop in front of it. The game would be over. Deependra has it easy. Indefinite sick leave, civil service counselling and pharma. But for Jasbir there is no end to it and he is so so tired of playing. Then the train slams past him in a shout of blue and silver and yellow light, slams him back into himself. He sees his face reflected in the glass, his teeth still divinely white. Jasbir shakes his head and smiles and instead steps through the opening door.
It is as he suspected. The last phatphat has gone home for the night from the rank at Barwala metro station. It’s four kays along the pitted, flaking roads to Acacia Bungalow Colony behind its gates and walls. Under an hour’s walk. Why not? The night is warm, he’s nothing better to do and he might yet pull a passing cab. Jasbir steps out. After half an hour a last, patrolling phatphat passes on the other side of the road. It flashes its light and pulls around to some in beside him. Jasbir waves it on. He is enjoying the night and the melancholy. There are stars up there, beyond the golden airglow of great Delhi.
Light spills through the french windows from the verandah into the dark living room. Sujay is at work still. In four kilometres Jasbir has generated a sweat. He ducks into the shower, closes his eyes in bliss as the jets of water hit him. Let it run let it run let it run he doesn’t care how much he wastes, how much it costs, how badly the villagers need it for their crops. Wash the old tired dirt from me.
A scratch at the door. Does Jasbir hear the mumble of a voice? He shuts off the shower.
“Sujay?”
“I’ve, ah, left you tea.”
“Oh, thank you.”
There’s silence but Jasbir knows Sujay hasn’t gone.
“Ahm, just to say that I have always . . . I will . . . always. Always . . .” Jasbir holds his breath, water running down his body and dripping on to the shower tray. “I’ll always be here for you.”
Jasbir wraps a towel around his waist, opens the bathroom door and lifts the tea.
Presently Latin music thunders out from the brightly lit windows of Number 27 Acacia Bungalows. Lights go on up and down the close. Mrs Prasad beats her shoe on the wall and begins to wail. The tango begins.
British writer Dominic Green’s output has to date been confined almost entirely to the pages of Interzone, but he’s appeared there a lot, selling them eighteen stories in the last few years. The exciting story that follows, though, about a retired warrior reluctantly taking to arms again in the face of extreme need, appeared not in Interzone but in The Solaris Book of Science Fiction 2.
Green lives in Northampton, England, where he works in information technology and teaches kung fu part time. He has a website at homepage.ntlworld.com/lumpylomax, where the text of several unpublished novels and short stories can be found.
IT WAS CLOSE to dawn. The sun was a sliver of brilliance just visible over the mass of canyons on the western horizon. There was no reason why the direction the sun rose in should not be arbitrarily defined as East; the only reason why the sun rose in the West on this planet was that, if looked at from the same galactic direction as Earth, it span retrograde. Even at this number of light years’ distance, men still had an apron-string connecting them to their homeworld.
The old man was still doing his exercises.
The boy didn’t realize why the exercises had to take so long. They didn’t look hard to do, although when he tried to copy them, the old man laughed as if he were doing them in the most ridiculous manner possible. The old man used a sword while he did the exercises, but not even a real one – it had no edge, and was made of aluminium which could not even be made to take one. He held the sword-stick ridiculously, not even using his whole hand most of the time; usually he held it with only his middle finger and forefinger, some of the time with only the little and ring fingers. Both of his hands, in fact, were held in that peculiar crab claw, with the fingers separated.
Finally, though, there were signs that the old man was coming to the end of the set, stabbing around him to right and left with his stick. The boy now had something to do. Gradually, he scurried out among the rusting steel shells, carrying the basket of fruit. It was, of course, spoiled fruit, fruit the old man would not have been able to sell at market. There would have been no point in wasting saleable produce.
The boy arranged a marrow to the west, a pineapple to the east, a durian to the north, and a big juicy watermelon to the south. Each piece of fruit sat on its own square of rice paper. He was careful to leave the empty basket in a spot where it would not interfere with the old man’s movements. Then, just as his elder and better was turning into his final movement, facing into the sun as it blazed up into the sky, the boy ran to the long half-buried shelf the old man called the dead hulk’s ‘glacis plate,’ and unwrapped the Real Sword.
The Real Sword was taller than he was. He had been instructed to unwrap it carefully. The old man had illustrated why by dropping a playing card onto the blade. The card had stuck fast, its weight driving the blade a good half centimetre into it.
The old man bowed to the sun – why? Did it ever bow back? – walked over to the sword, nodded stiffly to the boy, and picked up the weapon. He executed a few practice cuts and parries, jumping backwards and forwards across the sand. This was more exciting – he was moving quickly now, with a sword of spring steel.
Then, he became almost motionless, the sword whipped up into a position of readiness up above his head. As always, he was directly between all four pieces of fruit. Sometimes there were five pieces of fruit, sometimes six or seven.
The sword moved up and down, one, two, three, four times, the old man lashing out at all quarters, turning on his heel on the sand. There were four soft tearing sounds, but no sparks or sounds of metal hitting metal.
The old man stood finally upright, ready to slide the sword back into a nonexistent scabbard. He had lost the scabbard somehow years ago, nobody seemed to know how – nobody could convince him to shell out the money for a new one.
He walked over to inspect the fruit. All four pieces now lay in two pieces, making eight pieces. In all four cases, the cut had been deep enough to completely halve the fruit right down to the rind. In not one case had the rice paper underneath been touched. In some cases, the old man’s activities had cut the rot clean out of the fruit. The boy gathered up the good pieces, which would now be breakfast.
The rotten pieces he slung away into the desert.
When they walked back toward the village, the General Alarm was sounding. This, the boy knew, could be very bad, as no alarm practice was scheduled for today.
General Alarm could mean that another boy like him had fallen down a melt-hole like a damned fool and the whole village was out looking for his corpsicle. Or it could mean that a flash flood was on the way and every homeowner had to rush out and bolt the streamliner onto the north end of his habitat, then rush back in and dog all the hatches. It might mean a flare had been reported, and everyone except Mad Farmer Bob who carried on digging his ditches in all weathers despite skin cancer and radiation alopoecia had to go underground till the All Clear.
But it was clear, when they reached the outskirts of the village, that this was none of these things. There was a personal conveyor in the Civic Square, with its green lights flashing to indicate it had been set to automatic guidance. Someone had used towing cable to secure three long irregular wet red shapes to the back of it, shapes the grown-ups would not let him see. But he had a horrible idea what they were, or what they had once been. Dragging your enemy behind a conveyor was a badabing-badaboum thing to do, and normally the boys in the village would have run and jostled to see such a marvellous sight. But when the men who had been dragged, probably alive, were Mr d’Souza, big friendly Mr d’Souza who had three hairy Irish wolfhounds, and Mr Bamigboye, who told rude jokes about naked ladies, and even Mr Chundi, who told kids to get off his property – then things did not seem so exciting.
Mr d’Souza, Mr Bamigboye, and Mr Chundi were Town Councillors, and they had gone up to the Big City to argue with the authorities about the mining site. Although there was nothing there now but a few spray-painted rocks and prospectors’ transponders, the boy knew that some Big City men had found rocks they called Radioactives upriver. But the boy’s father said the Big City men were too lazy to dig the rocks out of the ground using shovels and the Honest Sweat Of Their Brow. Instead, they planned to build a sifting plant downstream of the village, and set off bombs also made of Radioactives in the regolith upstream. A handsome stream of Radioactives would thus flow downriver to the sifting plant, but the village’s water would be poisoned. The villagers had all been offered what were described as ‘generous offers’ to leave by the Big City men; but the Town Councillors had voted to stay. The Big City men had been rumoured to be hiring a top Persuasion Consultancy to deal with the situation. Now it seemed that the rumours had come true.
“We ought to take a few guns into town and sort out those City folk,” said old father Magnusson, who thought everyone didn’t know he ordered sex pheromones and illegal subliminal messaging software through the mail from Big City, but Aunt Raisa knew. Now no woman in town would either visit him or call him on the videophone.
“How many guns do we have? And small-bore ones, too, for seeing off interlopers, not armour-piercing stuff. The combine bosses will be protected by men in armour, ten feet tall, with magnetic accelerators that shoot off a million rounds through you POW-POW-POW before you pop your first round off! You are maximally insane.” This was old mother Tho. Despite her insulting mode of communication, many of the older and wiser heads in the square were nodding their agreement.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Mother Murdo. “Magnetic accelerators are illegal.”
“Anything illegal is legal if nobody is prepared to enforce the law. Have you not been up to the City recently? The mining combines have been making their own militaria for months. After they had to start making their own machine tools and coining their own money, weapons were the logical next step.”
“But we are still citizens of the Commonwealth of Man,” said father Magnusson, drawing himself up to his full one hundred and thirty-five centimetres, “and an attack on us would be an attack on the Commonwealth itself.”
“Pshaw! The Commonwealth doesn’t even bother to send out ships to collect taxes any longer,” said mother Tho. “And when the taxman doesn’t call, you know the government is in disrepair.”
There were slow nods of appreciation from the crowd, most of whom were secretly glad that the tribute ships had not visited for so many years, but all of whom were alarmed at the prospect that those ships might have funded services whose unavailability might now kill the village.
“Well, in any case,” said father Magnusson, “if they dare to come up here and attempt their person-dragging activities, the State will repel them instantly.”
Mother Tho was unimpressed. “We must be pragmatic,” she said. “The Guardian has not moved for sixty Good Old Original Standard Years. Not since the last Barbarian incursion.”
Father Magnusson smacked his lips stolidly. “But I remember,” he said, “when it last moved. And it operated most satisfactorily on that occasion. The Barbarians’ ships filled the skies like locusts, but our Guardian was equal to them.”
Mother Tho looked up into the sky, where the silhouette of the Guardian took a huge bite out of the sunrise. “Father, you are only one of perhaps two or three people still alive who remember the Guardian moving. And it is a machine, and machines rust, corrode, and biodegrade.”
“The Guardian was built to last forever.”
“But a Guardian also needs an operator. And where is ours?”
The old man put a hand upon the boy’s shoulder, and moved away among the buildings before the conversation grew more heated.
“There are foreigners in the village,” said the boy’s mother, folding clothes with infinite precision. “Men from the mining company. They are asking for Khan by name, and you know why, old man.”
The old man tucked the sword away in a crevice by the side of the atmosphere detoxifier. “Khan can look after himself.”
“They had guns, by all accounts, and you know he can’t.” The boy’s mother ran the iron over a fresh set of clothes. “Khan is fat and slow and has long since ceased to be any use in a fight. It isn’t fair for him to be put through this.” She looked up at the old man. “Something must be done.”
The old man looked away. “They have heard the name Khan, heard that this Khan is the man who is our Guardian’s operator. They perhaps mean harm. I will radio to Khan in the clear to stay out fixing watercourses and not return home until these men have gone. They will be listening, of course. This will inform them that their task is pointless, and then maybe they will leave.”
“Or they will go out and search the watercourses till they find him.”
“Khan knows the watercourses, and is more resourceful than you give him credit for. They will not find him.”
“Khan is not as young as he once was. It will be cold tonight. You think that just because people are not as old as you, they are striplings who can accomplish anything.”
“I think nothing of the sort, woman. Now boil me some water. I have a revitalizing tea to prepare for Mother Murdo’s fin-de-siècle ennui.”
Khan’s mother gathered up the heap of ironing and made her way out of the kitchen past the floor maintenance robot. “Boil your own water, and lower your underparts into it.”
In order to defuse a family quarrel, the boy walked across the kitchen and turned on the water heater himself. He could not, however, meet the old man’s eyes. Khan was, after all, his father.
The next morning, underneath the Guardian’s metal legs, there was a gaggle of young men jostling for position.
“I will save the village!”
“You are wrong! It will be I!”
“No, I!”
The boy, who was running a flask of tea to Mother Murdo, saw Mother Tho rap three of them on the occiput with her walnut-wood staff in quick succession.
“Fools! Loblollies! What would you do, if you were even able to gain access to the Guardian’s control cabin?” She pointed upward with her polyethylene ferrule at the ladder that led up the Guardian’s right leg, with a dizzying number of rungs, up to the tiny hatch in its Under Bridge Area where a normal person’s back body would be. Once, the boy had climbed all those rungs and touched the hatch with his hand for a bet, before being dragged down by his father, who told him not to tamper with Commonwealth property. His father had had hair then, and much of it had been dark.
“If I gained access,” swaggered the most audacious of the three, “I would march to the Big City and trample the mining syndicate buildings beneath boots of iron.” And he blew kisses to those girls of marriageable age who had gathered to watch.
“If you gained access!” repeated the old witch, and grabbed him by the nose using fingers of surprising strength. “YOU WOULD NEVER GAIN ACCESS! Only the Guardian’s operator has a key, and it is synchronized to his genetic code. You would do nothing but sit staring up at a big metal arse until the cold froze you off the ladder.”
“OW! Bedder dat dan allow our iddibidual vreedods do be sudgu-gaded!” protested the putative loblolly.
Mother Tho let the young man go, and wiped her fingers on her grubby shawl.
“Our Guardian will defend us when its operator is ready,” she intoned.
A voice chipped in across the crowd: “Our Guardian’s operator is too feeble.”
The boy shrunk back behind a battery of heat sinks and hid his face.
“It’s true!” yelled another voice. “The company assassins turned out the whole of Mr Wu’s drinking establishment and threatened to shoot all its clientele one by one until Khan was turned over to them. In his confusion and concern for his customers, Wu turned over the wrong Khan, Khan the undertaker, and they killed him instantly. His tongue lolled out of his face like a frosted pickle. When the company men find the real Khan and kill him, there will be no trained professional to bury him.”
“There are men in the village with guns?” said one of the bold youngsters, removing his thumbs from his belt, staring at his contemporaries with a face of horror.
“Ha!” gloated Mother Tho. “So our bravos are not quite so audacious when faced with the prospect of their skins actually being broken.”
The boy put dropped his cargo of tea and ran for home.
Home proved to be more difficult to get to than usual. The boy followed the path most usually followed by children through the village, disregarding the streets and ducking under the support struts of the houses. Had crows been able to fly in this atmosphere instead of expiring exhausted after a few tottering flutters, he would have been travelling as the crow flew.
However, there was a problem. A small group of boys were holed up under the belly of Mother Tho’s house, whispering deafeningly, fancifully imagining they were Seeing without Beeing Seen. But the boy was not afraid of other boys – at least, not as much as he was afraid of the men in the street who were tolerating Being Seen.
It was quite rare for children to be playing on the streets now. Their mothers were keeping them indoors. It was hoped that the Persuasion Consultancy assassins had not realized their mistake, and would be happy with having disabled the village’s (admittedly one hundred per cent lethal) corpse-burying capabilities.
However, it seemed the assassins were not content with simple murder. They were standing in the street outside the house of Khan the undertaker, above which a grainy holographic angel flickered in the breeze. Not content with having murdered the undertaker’s unburied corpse, the men had turned out the contents of his funeral emporium, headstones-in-progress and all, into the street. They were searching the whole pile of morbid paraphernalia with microscopic thoroughness, while his widow screamed and hurled such violent abuse as the poor woman knew. The boy could only conclude that onyx-look polymer angels were of great value to them.
“They are searching for our Guardian’s access key,” hissed one of the watchers in a strict confidence that carried all the way to the boy’s ears.
“Only the Operator has the access key,” said another boy. “Was Khan the Operator?”
“No,” said a third. “I think it was Khan the farmer.”
“Khan, a warrior! He is a fat little fruit seller.”
“Operators are not chosen for their physical strength,” said the third boy contemptuously. “The servomechanisms of the Guardian provide that. Operators are chosen for the extreme precision of their physical movements. It is said that the operator of the Guardian of the Gate of the City of Governance back on Earth was so precise in his motions that he was able to grip a normal human paintbrush between his Guardian’s claws and inscribe the Rights and Duties of Citizens on the pavement in letters only three metres high.”
The boy ducked under the hull of the nearest building and took a dog leg to a habitat to the south before any Persuasion Consultancy men could engage him in conversation.
It was sunset. The sun was setting in the East.
The old man was sitting dozing, pretending to be absorbed in serious meditation. The boy walked up and pointedly slammed down the basket on a nearby ruined Barbarian war machine, pretending not to notice the old man starting as if he had been jumped on by a tiger.
“I have brought everything,” said the boy. “Father is still at large. The assassins are reputed to be pursuing him along the north arroyo.”
The old man nodded, and sucked his teeth in a repulsive manner. “Did you bring the weapons from underneath the loose slab in the conveyor garage?”
The boy nodded. “There is no need to conceal these weapons,” he sniffed. “It is not illegal to possess them, and surely they can be of no intrinsic value.”
The old man ran his hand along the bow as he lifted it from the bundle, and grinned. “There was also a picture of your grandmother underneath that slab,” he said. “That is also of little intrinsic value.”
“I never knew my grandmother,” said the boy.
“Think yourself lucky,” said the old man grumpily, “that I did.” He set an arrow – the only arrow in the bundle – to the bow, and began trying to bend it, frowning as his hands shook with the effort.
“OLD MAN,” called a voice. “STOP PLAYING AT SOLDIERS. WE DEMAND TO KNOW WHERE KHAN IS.”
The bow collapsed. The arrow quivered into the dirt. The old man turned round. From the direction of the village, three young men, muscles big from digging ditches and lifting baskets, had strolled in to the clearing between the destroyed military machines. The boy realized with a sinking heart that he had been followed.
“My father,” said their leader, “says that Khan is the operator of our Guardian.”
The old man nodded. “True enough,” he said.
“Then why is he hiding outside the village like a thief?” The youngster threw his hand out towards the horizon. “Not only are there murderers in our midst, but an army is gathering on our doorstep. Employees of a Persuasion Consultancy engaged by the mining combine have arrived. They have delivered an ultimatum to the effect that, if the combine’s generous terms are not accepted by sunrise tomorrow, they will evacuate the village using minimum force.” He licked his lips nervously. “Scouts have been out, and the consultancy’s definition of ‘minimum force’ appears to extend to fragmentation bombs and vehicle-seeking missiles.”
The old man’s face sunk into even more wrinkles than was normally its wont. “Khan,” he said, “hides nowhere. Who here says that Khan hides?” And despite the fact that he was armed only with a bamboo bow and arrows, none of the young men present would meet his eyes.
“Father, we have the greatest respect for your age, and none of us would dare to strike a weak and defenceless old man. We simply wish to know when, if at all, our Operator intends to discharge his duty.”
The old man nodded.
“Weak and defenceless, you say.”
He slung out the bow at the spokesman of the group, who the boy believed was called Lokman. It whirled in the air and struck Lokman in the jaw. Lokman rubbed the side of his face, complaining bitterly; but still his manners were too correct to allow him to attack his elders.
“Pick the bow up,” said the old man. He grubbed in the dirt for the arrow, and tossed it to Lokman. “Now notch the arrow, and pull the bow back as hard as you like.” He did not rise from his sitting position.
Lokman shrugged, and heaved hard on the bow. It was an effort even for him, the boy noticed. The bow was almost as stiff as a roof-tie.
“Point the bow at me,” said the old man, grinning. “You purulent stream of cat excrement.”
Lokman’s hands were shaking on the bow too now. It rotated round to point at the old man.
“Now fire!” said the old man. “I said FIRE, you worthless spawn of a mining company executive —”
“No, DON’T—” said the boy.
The string twanged free. The boy did not even see the arrow move. Nor did he see the old man’s hand move. But when both hand and arrow blurred back into position, the one was in the other; and the hand held the arrow, rather than the arrow being embedded in the hand.
Lokman stared at the old man’s hand for a second; then he snorted.
“A useful parlour trick,” he said. “Can you do it against missiles?”
He threw down the bow and walked away.
“Khan is a coward who will not fight,” he said, over his shoulder. “Besides, he could not get to the Guardian even if he wished. The assassins have the access ladder under guard. Pack up your things and leave, old man. The Councillors are leaving. We are all leaving. We are finished.”
The old man watched the visitors leave. Then, he reached into the bundle, where a battered oblong of black plastic lay alongside the picture of the boy’s grandmother. In the plastic were embossed the letters KHAN 63007248.
“It is good,” said the old man. “You have made sure Khan has everything he needs.”
The old man hung the oblong round his neck on a chain that pierced it, and felt his throat to make sure it was not visible as it hung.
“What time did they say the ultimatum expired tomorrow?” he asked, without looking at the boy.
“Sunup,” said the boy.
“It is good,” said the old man, nodding. “There is time. Run back to the village with these things, and return quickly. Then you shall accompany me while I deliver these troublemakers an ultimatum of our own.”
“Why am I going with you?” said the boy.
“Because no man will shoot an old man,” said the old man, “unless he is a wicked man indeed. But even a wicked man will not shoot an old man accompanied by a small boy – unless, of course, he is a very wicked man indeed.” He grinned, and his grin was more gaps than teeth. “This, I must admit, is the only flaw in my plan.”
Then he returned to his meditation, as if nothing had either happened or was about to. The boy seriously suspected he was sleeping.
The sun had set, and the reg had ceased to be its accustomed thousand shades of khaki. Now, it was the colour of a world plunged underwater to a depth where every shade of anything became a democratic twilight blue.
The boy followed the old man uncertainly across the regolith towards a group of Persuasion Consultants lounging around an alcohol burner in the shadow of an APC. Even the burner’s flame was blue, as if carefully coordinated to fit in with the night. The Consultants noticed the old man long before he began to jump up and down and wave his arms to get their attention, but the boy noticed that it was only at this point that they relaxed and began the laborious process of putting the safeties back on their weapons.
“Hey! Ugly Boy! Take me to your ugly leader!”
None of the Persuasion Consultants answered. Evidently none of them was willing to own up to the name of Ugly Boy.
“Suit yourselves, physically unprepossessing persons, but be informed that I bear a message from Khan.”
The men began to fidget indecisively in their dapper uniforms. Eventually, one spoke up and said:
“If you are in communication with Khan, you must give us information on his whereabouts, citizen, or it will go poorly with you.”
The old man scoffed. The boy was not entirely sure it was prudent to scoff in the presence of so much firepower. “You still do not know Khan’s whereabouts? With the man right under your nose, and so many complex tracking systems in that khaki jalopy you are leaning against? For shame! Khan has a message for you. You must vacate the environs of this village, or as the appointed operator of the Guardian of this colony he will be obliged to make you quit by main force.”
The spokesman crossed both hands over his rifle and said: “Your Guardian’s operator is taking sides unjustifiedly in a purely civil matter, citizen. This is not a military matter. For this reason, Beauchef and Grisnez Incorporated regrets that, on behalf of its clients, it is forced to take action to eliminate this unruly operator, and that this action will continue until he himself quits the village. We are also making initial seismic surveys preliminary to placing charges underneath the Guardian’s foundations, destroying the underground geegaws that charge it. Beauchef and Grisnez of course regret the damage to Commonwealth property concomitant to this strategy, but final blame for this unfortunate state of affairs must lie at the head of the operator concerned. That is our message, which you may convey to Khan.”
The old man stood facing the line of soldiers silently for several seconds.
“Very well,” he said. “Despite the fact that you behave like barbarians, you continue to describe yourselves as Commonwealth citizens and hence merit a warning in law; you have received that warning. Whatever consequences follow, Khan will not be answerable.”
He said nothing more, but turned and trudged back in the direction of the village. There were sniggers from the line of riflemen.
In the morning, the boy’s mother woke him well before dawn. She had already prepared sleeping gear for all of them, together with food she had irradiated that same morning. It would keep for a month, as well as making the boy’s stomach turn when he ate it. This was the sort of food City people had to eat.
“But aren’t we staying to defend the village?”
He got a slap for that one. Mother was in no mood to talk. She was crying softly as she walked round the rooms of the habitat, picking things up, putting things down, and the boy realized suddenly that she was deciding which of the pieces of her life she was going to take with her and which she was going to leave behind forever. He threw his arms around her, and this time she did not slap him.
“Go out and fetch the old one,” she said. “Where is he? I’ve prepared the conveyor. We have to leave.”
The boy told his mother that the old man had said he was going to do his exercises, and that, on this particular morning, the boy was not allowed to accompany him.
The boy’s mother’s eyes flew open in horror. She looked out of the window, which showed sand billowing down a dusty street.
She stood still a moment, as though paralysed. Then she grabbed his arm.
“Come with me.”
They walked out to the edge of the village. The village was small. It was not a long walk. Out there at the very edge of the sun farms, beyond a hectare or so of jet-black solar collectors, the wrecked battle machines of the Barbarians sat rusting in the sand.
What are Barbarians? the boy had asked his teacher once in class. And the answer had been quick and pat. Why, people from outside the Commonwealth, of course. Any people from outside the Commonwealth.
The machines sat at what the boy knew to have been the extreme limit of the Guardian’s target acquisition range, sixty years ago.
Of the old man, there was no sign.
“Stupid old fool,” said mother, and pulled the boy off down the village streets again. She seemed to know where she was going. Only two streets, two rows of gleaming aluminium-steel habitats, and the old man came into view. Standing in the square at the Guardian’s habitat-sized feet, he was arguing with a pair of Consultancy men, armoured troopers holding guns that could track the electrical emissions of a man’s heartbeat in the dark and shoot him dead through steel. He was carrying a sword.
“But I always do my exercises in the square at this time,” the old man was saying, which was a lie.
“You are carrying a weapon, grandfather,” said one of the Consultants gently, “which I am forced to regard as a potential threat, despite your advanced years.”
The old man looked from hand to hand, then finally held up the sword as if he had only just realized it was there. “This? Why, but this is only an old sword-shaped piece of aluminium. It cannot even be made to take an edge.”
“All the same,” said the Consultant persuasively, “out of deference to the tense situation in which we find ourselves, it would be safer if —”
“HOI!”
The shout broke the polite silence in the town square. Five heads turned towards it. As the sun heaved its head over the southern horizon, a figure staggered into town out of the desert. It waved its arms.
“HOI! It’s me, Khan! Khan, the man you’re looking for! Catch me if you can!”
Guns rose instantaneously to shoulders. Khan dived for cover. How useful that cover was was debatable, as a line of projectile explosions stitched its way across the wall of the nearest habitat like a finger tearing through tinfoil. When the guns had finished tracking across the building, the building was two buildings, one balanced precariously on top of the other, radiator coolant gushing from the walls and electrical connections sparking. Hopefully no one was sitting headless at breakfast within it. The Consultancy men were already spreading out round the habitat, hoping to outflank their target if he had somehow survived the first attack. The boy’s mother looked on, appalled.
Some caprice, however, drew the boy’s attention upward.
The old man was on the inside leg of the metal colossus, on the access ladder, moving with dinosaurian slowness towards the Guardian’s bumward access hatch.
The boy’s jaw dropped.
Meanwhile, the men who were guarding the Guardian seemed on the point of following Khan and finishing him, until one of them remembered his orders, waved his comrade back to the square, pulled a communicator from one of his ammunition pouches, opened it, spoke into it, and flipped it shut again. Someone Else, he told his comrade, Could Do The Running. Up above, the old man was still moving, but with the speed of evolution, at the speed glass flowed down windowpanes, at the speed boys grew up doorposts. He had not even reached the knee. Surely, before the old fool reached the top of his climb, somebody in the village underneath had to notice? And what did he think he’d accomplish, if he once got up the ladder?
The two Consultants reassumed their positions underneath the Guardian’s treads. They stood on the square of concrete, reaching all the way down through the regolith to the bedrock, that had been put there solely as a foundation for the vehicle to stand on. They faced outwards, willing to bleed good red blood to stop anyone who tried to get past them. One of them even remarked on the old man’s sword discarded in the sand, saying that they Must Have Frit The Old Coot Away. Meanwhile, by pretending to scratch his eye against the dust, the boy was able to see, far above, the old coot pulling an battered slab of black plastic from his tunic and sliding it into what the boy knew, from the climb he had been dared to do a year ago, to be a recess in the circular ass-end access hatch about the same size as the slab. The hatch was also spraypainted with the letters AUGMENTED INFANTRY UNIT MK 73 (1 OFF), and only members of the privileged club of boys who had taken the dare and made the climb knew it.
Something glittered like a rack of unsheathed blades in the Guardian’s normally dull and pitted skin; the old man skimmed his fingers over the glitter rapidly, and the boy saw blood ooze out of his fingers onto the hatch cover momentarily, before the surface drank it like a vampire.
The key was tuned to the operator’s genetic code. The vehicle had to have a part of him to know who he was.
The hatch slid into the structure, silently. The old man began to slip into the hole it had opened. But for all the wondrous silence of the mechanism, the old man was by now unable to prevent the boy’s mother from standing with her head in the air gawping like a new-hatched chick waiting to be fed worms. And as she gawped, the guards gawped with her.
Luckily for the old man, the guards also took a couple of moments to do helpless baby chick impersonations before remembering they had weapons and were supposed to use them. The hatch had slid shut before they could get their guns to their shoulders, take aim and fire. They were not used to firing their weapons in that position, and the recoil, coming from an unaccustomed direction, blew them about on the spot like unattended pneumatic drills. The boy saw stars twinkle on the Guardian’s hide. He was not sure whether they had inflicted any damage or not; the detonations left a mass of after-images on his retinas.
The two men could not have inflicted too much damage, however, as they thought better of continuing to shoot, and instead stood back and contemplated the crotch of the colossus.
For one long minute, nothing happened. The lead Consultant spoke quietly but urgently into his communicator, saying that he Wasn’t Quite Sure Whether Or Not The Shit Indicator Had Just Risen to Nostril Deep.
Then the dust under the left tread of the Guardian moaned like a man being put to the press. The boy looked up to see the great pipe legs of the Augmented Infantry Unit buckling and twisting, as if the wind were blowing it off its base. But Guardians weighed so much they smashed themselves if they fell over, the boy knew; and despite the fact that the dry season wind howled down from the mountains here like a katabatic banshee, it had never stirred the Guardian as much as a millimetre from its post.
The Guardian was moving under its own power.
Huge alloy arms the weight of bridge spans swung over the boy’s head. Knee joints that could have acted as railway turntables flexed arthritically in the legs. And at that point, the boy knew exactly who was at the controls of the Guardian.
The whole colossal thousand-tonne weapon was doing the old man’s morning exercises. Moving gently at first, swinging its arms and legs under their own weight, cautiously bending and unbending its ancient joints. Some of those joints screamed with the pressure of the merest movement. The boy suddenly, oddly, appreciated what the old man meant when he talked of rheumatism, arthritis and sciatica.
The old man’s exercises were good for a man with rheumatic joints who needed them oiling in the morning. But they were just as good for a village-sized automaton that had not moved for sixty standard years.
The men sent to guard the Guardian were backing away. From somewhere in the village on the other side of the buildings, meanwhile, someone else decided to fire at the machine. A pretty coloured show of lights sprayed out of the ground and cascaded off the metal mountain’s armour. Habitats that the cascade hit on the way back down became colanders full of flying swarf. The Guardian carried on its warm-up regardless.
Eight times for the leg-stretching exercise – eight times for the arm-swinging – eight times for the two-handed push up above the head –
The boy began to back away, and pulling at his mother’s robe. He knew what was coming next.
Men ran out of the buildings with light anti-armour weapons. Many of the weapons were recoilless, and some argument ensued about whether they should really be pointed up into the sky or not. Some of them were loosed off at point blank range at the Guardian’s treads, leaving big black stains of burnt hydrocarbon. But a Guardian’s feet were among its most heavily armoured parts. Every old person in town would tell you that. They were heavily armoured because they were used to crush infantry.
The Guardian lowered its massive head to stare at the situation on the ground. The operator, the boy knew, was actually in the main chassis, and the head was only used to affix target acquisition systems and armament. That small movement of the head was in itself enough to make the Consultants back away and run.
One of the Consultants, thinking smarter than his colleagues, grabbed hold of the boy’s mother, shouting at the sky and pointing a pistol shakily at her head. He might as well have threatened a mountain.
The Guardian turned its head to look directly at him.
The boy screamed to his mother to drop down.
The Guardian’s hand came down like the Red Sea on an Egyptian. Or, the boy pondered, like a sword upon a melon. Unlike a human hand, it had three fingers, which might be more properly described as claws. Exactly the same disposition of fingers a man might have, in fact, if a man held his middle finger and forefinger, and his little and ring finger, together, and spread the two groups of fingers apart. A roof of steel slammed down from heaven. The boy felt warm blood spray over his back.
Then the sunlight returned to the sand, though the sand was now red rather than brown, and the gunman’s headless body toppled to the ground in front of him. The man had not simply been decapitated. His head no longer existed. It had been squashed flat.
Beside him, his mother, still alive, was trembling. Looking at the front of her skirts, the boy realized suddenly that she had wet herself.
One of the Guardian’s massive treads rose from the ground and whined over his head. For some reason the sole of its left foot was stencilled LEFT LEG, and that on its right foot was labelled RIGHT LEG. Arms fire both small and large whined and caromed off its carapace; the Guardian ignored it. It was moving out of the village, eastward, in the direction of the mining company army camped beyond the outskirts. Soon it was out of shooting range, but the boy could still hear guns going off around him. Single shot firearms! The villagers had brought out their antique home defence weapons and were using them on their oppressors. The boy swelled with pride.
Despite the fact that she had clearly wet herself, the boy’s mother hauled herself to her feet, and remarked:
“The old fool! What does he think he’s doing? At his age!”
The boy hopped up onto a ladder fixed to the main water tower. The Guardian was striding eastward like a force of nature, silhouetted by things exploding against it. The boy saw it pick a thing up from the ground, and hurl it like a discus. The thing was a light armoured vehicle. He saw men tumble from it as it flew.
The mining company men were now flocking round a larger vehicle that was evidently their Big Gun. Most probably it had been brought in specially to deal with the possibility that the villagers might be able to revive their Guardian. It appeared to be a form of missile launcher, and the missile it fired looked frighteningly large. The turret on the top of the vehicle was being rotated round to bear on the approaching threat, and men were clearing from the danger space behind it.
The Guardian had stopped. Its hand was held before it, the elbow crooked, extended out towards the launcher. If had it been human, the boy would have described the posture it had now moved into as a defensive stance.
The boy blinked.
No. Surely not –
The missile blazed from its mounting, and then became invisible; and the Guardian’s arm blurred with it.
Then the missile was tumbling away into the sky, its gyros trying frantically to put it back on course, wobbling unsteadily overhead; and the Guardian was standing in exactly the same position as before. A streak of rocket exhaust had licked up its arm and blackened its fingers.
The Guardian had brushed aside the missile in mid-air, so softly as not to detonate its fuse.
Men in the mining company launcher were standing staring motionless, as if their own operators had left them via their back entrances. The boy, however, suspected that other substances were currently leaving them by that exit; and as soon as the Guardian cranked into a forward stride again, the men began to run. By the time the Guardian eventually arrived at the launcher and methodically and thoroughly destroyed it, the boy was quite certain there were no human beings inside it. To the east of the village, he heard the terrific impact of the anti-armour missile eventually reaching its maximum range and aborting.
Then there was nothing on the face of the desert but running men, and smoking metal, and the gigantic figure of the Guardian standing casting a long, long shadow in the dawn.
The old man climbed down slowly, with painstaking exactness, just as he did in all things. He was breathing quite heavily by the time he swung off the last rung and into a crowd of cheering children.
“I knew Khan would not let us down,” said Mother Tho.
“Khan Senior is a terrible fruit farmer,” observed Father Magnusson, “but a Guardian operator without equal.”
“His oranges are scabby-skinned and dry inside,” agreed Mother Dingiswayo.
“All the same, I knew,” opined Mother Jayaraman, “that he would eventually come in useful for something.”
The old man shook his fist at the boy’s father in mock rage. “Khan Junior! What a fool to expose yourself so! Do you want your family to grow up without a father?”
Khan grinned. “I am sorry, father. I have no idea what came over me.”
“Maybe it is a hereditary condition,” muttered the boy’s mother.
“Well,” said the old man, “at least it has turned out for the best. Had you not jumped out when you did, I might not have made it to the access ladder. One might almost imagine that that was your deliberate intention.”
“I apologize if I did badly, father,” said Khan. “I am more of a farmer by trade.”
The old man walked across the square, to a handcart one of the younger boys had led out. In a fit of patriotic Commonwealther fervour, Father Magnusson had donated a hundred kilos of potatoes for a celebration, and they had been stacked in a neat pile ready for baking.
The old man picked one up, raw, and bit into it.
“Never apologize for being a farmer,” said the old man, chewing gamely for a man with few remaining teeth. “After all, a gun will protect your family’s life only once in a lifetime. But a potato,” he said, gesturing with the tuber to illustrate his point, “is useful every day.”
Canadian writer Karl Schroeder was born and raised in Brandon, Manitoba. He moved to Toronto in 1986, and has been working and writing there ever since. He is best known for his far-future Virga series, consisting of Sun of Suns, Queen of Candesce, and, most recently, Pirate Sun, but he has also written the novels Ventus, Permanence, and Lady of Mazes, as well as a novel in collaboration with David Nickle, The Claus Effect. He’s also the co-author, with Cory Doctorow, of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction. His short fiction has been collected in Engine of Recall.
In the evocative story that follows, set in his intricate Virga universe, he takes us along on a young man’s desperate quest to deliver a message that could save the worlds – if anybody would listen to it.
“IS EVERYBODY READY?” shouted Captain Emmen. At least, Jessie thought that’s what he’d said – it was impossible to hear anything over the spine-grating noise that filled the sky.
Jessie coughed, covering his mouth with his hand to stop the blood from showing. In this weightless air, the droplets would turn and gleam for every body to see, and if they saw it, he would be off the team.
Ten miles away the sound of the capital bug had been a droning buzz. With two miles to go, it had become a maddening – and deafening – howl. Much closer, and the bug’s defense mechanism would be fatal to an unshielded human.
Jessie perched astride his jet just off the side of the salvage ship Mistelle. Mistelle was a scow, really, but Captain Emmen had ambitions. Lined up next to Jessie were eight other brave or stupid volunteers, each clutching the handlebars of a wingless jet engine. Mounted opposite the saddle (“below” Jessie’s feet) was a ten-foot black-market missile. It was his team’s job to get close enough to the capital bug to aim their missiles at its noise-throats. They were big targets – organic trumpets hundreds of feet long – but there were a lot of them, and the bug was miles long.
Jessie had never heard of anybody breaking into a capital bug’s pocket ecology while the insect was still alive. Captain Emmen meant to try, because there was a story that a Batetranian treasure ship had crashed into this bug, decades ago. Supposedly you could see it when distant sunlight shafted through the right perforation in the bug’s side. The ship was still intact, so they said.
Jessie wasn’t here for the treasure ship. He’d been told a different story about this particular bug.
Emmen swung his arm in a chopping motion and the other jets shot away. Weak and dizzy as he was, Jessie was slower off the mark, but in seconds he was catching up. The other riders looked like flies optimistically lugging pea-pods; they were lit from two sides by two distant suns, one red with distance, the other yellow and closer, maybe two hundred miles away. In those quadrants of the sky not lit by the suns, abysses of air stretched away to seeming infinity – above, below, and to all sides.
Mistelle became a spindle-shape of wood and iron, its jets splayed behind it like an open hand. Ahead, the capital bug was too big to be seen as a single thing: it revealed itself to Jessie as landscapes, a vertical flank behind coiling clouds, a broad plain above that lit amber by the more distant sun. The air between him and it was crowded with clouds, clods of earth, and arrowing flocks of birds somehow immune to the bug’s sound. Balls of water shot past as he accelerated; some were the size of his head, some a hundred feet across. And here and there, mountain-sized boluses of bug-shit smeared brown across the sky.
The jet made an ear-splitting racket, but he couldn’t hear it over the sound of the bug. Jessie was swaddled in protective gear, his ears plugged, eyes protected behind thick goggles. He could hear the sound inside his body now, feel it vibrating his heart and loosening the bloody mess that was taking over his lungs. He’d start coughing any second, and once he did he might not be able to stop.
Fine, he thought grimly. Maybe I’ll cough the whole damn thing out.
The noise had become pure pain. His muscles were cramping, he was finding it hard to breathe. Past a blur of vibration, he saw one of the other riders double up suddenly and tumble off his jet. The vehicle spun away, nearly hitting somebody else. And here came the cough.
The noise was too strong, he couldn’t cough. The frozen reflex had stopped his breathing entirely; Jessie knew he had only seconds to live. Even as he thought this, curtains of cloud parted as the jet shot through them at a hundred miles an hour, and directly ahead of him stood the vast tower of the bug’s fourth horn.
The jet’s engine choked and failed; Jessie’s right goggle cracked; the handlebars began to rattle loose from their fittings as his vision grayed. A rocket contrail blossomed to his right and he realized he was looking straight down the throat of the horn. He thumbed the firing button and was splashed and kicked by fire and smoke. In one last moment of clarity Jessie let go of the handlebars so the jet wouldn’t break his bones in the violence of its tumble.
The ferocious scream stopped. Jessie took in a huge breath, and began to cough. Blood sprayed across the air. Breath rasping, he looked ahead to see that he was drifting toward some house-sized nodules that sprouted from the capital bug’s back. The broken, smoking horns jutted like fantastically eroded sculptures, each hundreds of feet long. He realized with a start that one of them was still blaring, but by itself it could no longer kill.
In the distance, the Mistelle wallowed in a cloud of jet exhaust, and began to grow larger.
I did it, Jessie thought. Then the grey overwhelmed all thought and sense and he closed his eyes.
Bubbles spun over the side of the washtub. In the rotational gravity of Aitlin Town, they twirled and shimmered and slid sideways from Coriolis force as they descended. Jessie watched them with fascination – not because he’d never seen bubbles before, but because he’d never seen one fall.
They’d both gotten into trouble, so he and his oldest brother Camron were washing the troupe’s costumes today. Jessie loved it; he never got a chance to talk to Camron, except to exchange terse barks during practice or a performance. His brother was ten years older than he, and might as well have lived in a different family.
“That’s what the world is, you know,” Camron said casually. Jessie looked at him quizzically.
“A bubble,” said Camron, nodding at the little iridescent spheres. “The whole world is a bubble, like that.”
“Is naaawwt.”
Camron sighed. “Maybe Father isn’t willing to pay to have you educated, Jessie, but he’s sent me to school. Three times. ‘The world of Virga is a hollow pressure-vessel, five thousand miles in diameter.’”
One big bubble was approaching the floor. Sunlight leaned across the window, a beam of gold from distant Candesce that was pinioning one spot of sky as the ring-shaped wooden town rotated through it. After a few seconds the beam flicked away, leaving the pearly shine of cloud-light.
“The whole world’s a bubble,” repeated Camron, “and all our suns are man-made.”
Jessie knew the smaller suns, which lit spherical volumes only a few hundred miles diameter, were artificial: they’d once flown past one at night, and he’d seen that it was a great glass-and-metal machine. Father had called it a “polywell fusion” generator. But surely the greatest sun of all, so ancient it had been there at the beginning of everything, so bright and hot no ship could ever approach it – “Not Candesce,” said Jessie. “Not the sun of suns.”
Camron nodded smugly. “Even Candesce. ’Cept that in the case of Candesce, whoever built it only made so many keys – and we lost them all.” Another shaft of brilliance burst into the laundry room. “People made Candesce – but now nobody can turn it off.”
The bubble flared in purples, greens, and gold, an inch above the floorboards.
“That’s just silly,” scoffed Jessie. “’Cause if the whole world were just a bubble, then that would make it —”
The bubble touched the floor, and vanished.
“— mortal,” finished Camron. He met Jessie’s eye, and his look was serious.
Jessie shivered and wiped at his mouth. Dried blood had caked there. His whole chest ached, his head was pounding, and he felt so weak and nauseous he doubted he’d have been able to stand if he’d been under gravity.
He hung weightless in a strange fever-dream of a forest, with pale pink tree trunks that reached past him to open into, not leaves, but a single stretched surface that had large round or oval holes in it here and there. Beyond them he could see sky. The tree trunks didn’t converge onto a clump of soil or rock as was usual with weightless groves, but rather tangled their roots into an undulant plain a hundred yards away from the canopy.
The light that angled through the holes shone off the strangest collection of life forms Jessie had ever seen. Fuzzy donut-shaped things inched up and down the “tree” trunks, and mirror-bright birds flickered and flashed as the light caught them. Something he’d taken to be a cloud in the middle distance turned out to be a raft of jellyfish, conventional enough in the airs of Virga, but these were gigantic.
The whole place reeked, the sharp tang reminding Jessie of the jars holding preserved animal parts that he’d seen in the one school he briefly attended as a boy.
He was just under the skin of the capital bug. The jet volunteers had taken turns squinting through the Mistelle’s telescope, each impressing on him- or herself as many details of the giant creature’s body as they could. Jessie recalled the strange skin that patched the monster’s back; it’d had holes in it.
It was through these holes that they’d caught glimpses of something that might be a wrecked ship. As the fog of pain and exhaustion lifted, Jessie realized that he might be close to it now. But where were the others?
He twisted in midair and found a threadlike vine or root within reach. Pulling himself along it (it felt uncomfortably like skin under his palms) he reached one of the “tree trunks” which might really be more analogous to hairs for an animal the size of the capital bug. He kicked off from the trunk, then off another, and so manoeuvered himself through the forest and in the direction of a brighter patch.
He was so focused on doing this that he didn’t hear the tearing sound of the jet until it was nearly on him. “Jessie! You’re alive!” Laughter dopplered down as a blurred figure shot past from behind.
It was Chirk, her canary-yellow jacket an unmistakable spatter against the muted colours of the bug. As she circled back, Jessie realized that he could still barely hear her jet; he must be half-deaf from the bug’s drone.
Chirk was a good ten years older than Jessie, and she was the only woman on the missile team. Maybe it was that she recognized him as even more of an outsider than herself, but for whatever reason she had adopted Jessie as her sidekick the day she met him. He indulged her – and, even three months ago, he would have been flattered and eager to make a new friend. But he hid the blood in his cough even from her – particularly from her – and remained formal in their exchanges.
“So?” She stopped on the air, ten feet away, and extended her hand. “Take a lift from a lady?”
Jessie hesitated. “Did they find the wreck?”
“Yes!” She almost screamed it. “Now come on! They’re going to beat us there – the damned Mistelle itself is tearing a hole in the bug’s back so they can come up alongside her.”
Jessie stared at her, gnawing his lip. Then: “It’s not why I came.” He leaned back, securing his grip on the stalk he was holding.
The bug was turning ponderously, so distant sunlight slid down and across Chirk’s astonished features. Her hand was still outstretched. “What the’f you talking about? This is it! Treasure! Riches for the rest of your life – but you gotta come with me now!”
“I didn’t come for the treasure,” he said. Having to explain himself was making Jessie resentful. “You go on, Chirk, you deserve it. You take my share too, if you want.”
Now she drew back her hand, blinking. “What is this? Jessie, are you all right?”
Tears started in his eyes. “No, I’m not all right, Chirk. I’m going to die.” He stabbed a finger in his mouth and brought it out, showed her the red on it. “It’s been coming on for months. Since before I signed on with Emmen. So, you see, I really got no use for treasure.”
She was staring at him in horror. Jessie forced a smile. “I could use my jet, though, if you happen to have seen where it went.”
Wordlessly, she held out her hand again. This time Jessie took it, and she gunned the engine, flipping them over and accelerating back the way Jessie had come.
As they shot through a volume of clear air she turned in her saddle and frowned at him. “You came here to die, is that it?”
Jessie shook his head. “Not yet. I hope not yet.” He massaged his chest, feeling the deep hurt there, the spreading weakness. “There’s somebody here I want to talk to.”
Chirk nearly flew them into one of the pink stalks. “Someone here? Jess, you were with us just now. You heard that . . . song. You know nobody could be alive in here. It’s why nobody’s ever gotten at the wreck.”
He nodded. “Not a —” He coughed. “Not a person, no —” The coughing took over for a while. He spat blood, dizzy, pain behind his eyes now too. When it all subsided he looked up to find they were coming alongside his jet, which was nuzzling a dent in a vast rough wall that cut across the forest of stalks.
He reached for the jet and managed to snag one of its handlebars. Before he climbed onto it he glanced back; Chirk was looking at him with huge eyes. She clearly didn’t know what to do.
He stifled a laugh lest it spark more coughing. “There’s a precipice moth here. I heard about it by chance when my family and me were doing a performance in Batetran. It made the newspapers there: Moth Seen Entering Capital Bug.”
“Precip – Precip moth?” She rolled the word around in her mouth. “Wait a minute, you mean a world-diver? One of those dragons that’re supposed to hide at the edges of the world to waylay travellers?”
He shook his head, easing himself carefully onto the jet. “A defender of the world. Not human. Maybe the one that blew up the royal palace in Slipstream last year. Surely you heard about that.”
“I heard about a monster. It was a moth?” She was being uncharacteristically thickheaded. Jessie was ready to forgive that, considering the circumstances.
She showed no signs of hying off to her well-deserved treasure, so Jessie told her the story as he’d heard it – of how Admiral Chaison Fanning of Slipstream had destroyed an invasion fleet, hundreds of cruisers strong, with only seven little ships of his own. Falcon captured him and tortured him to find out how he’d done it, but he’d escaped and returned to Slipstream, where he’d deposed the Pilot, Slipstream’s hereditary monarch.
“Nobody knows how he stopped that invasion fleet,” said Chirk. “It was impossible.”
Jessie nodded. “Yeah, that’s right. But I found out.”
Now she had to hear that story, but Jessie was reluctant to tell her. He’d told no one else because he trusted no one else, not with the location of one of the greatest secrets of the world. He trusted Chirk – she had her own treasure now – yet he was still reluctant, because that would mean admitting how he’d been wedged into a dark corner of Rainsouk Amphitheater, crying alone when the place unexpectedly began to fill with people.
For months Jessie had been hearing about Rainsouk; his brothers were so excited over the prospect of performing here. Jessie was the youngest, and not much of an acrobat – he could see that in his father’s eyes every time he missed a catch and sailed on through the weightless air to fetch up, humiliated, in a safety net. Jessie had given up trying to please the family, had in fact become increasingly alone and isolated outside their intense focus and relentless team spirit. When the cough started he tried to hide it, but their little travelling house was just too small to do that for long.
When Father found out, he was just disappointed, that was all. Disappointed that his youngest had gotten himself sick and might die. So Jessie was off the team – and though nobody said it out loud, off the team meant out of the family.
So there he’d been, crying in the amphitheatre he’d never get to perform in, when it began to fill with black-garbed men and women.
As he opened his mouth to refuse to tell her, Jessie found himself spilling the whole story, humiliating as it was. “These visitors, they were terrifying, Chirk. It looked like a convention of assassins, every man and woman the last person you’d want to meet on a dark night. And then the scariest of them flew out to the middle of the place and started to talk.”
The very world was threatened, he’d said. Only he and his brothers and sisters could save it, for this was a meeting of the Virga home guard. The guard were a myth – so Jessie had been taught. He’d heard stories about them his whole life, of how they guarded the walls of the world against the terrifying monsters and alien forces prowling just outside.
“Yet here they were,” he told Chirk. “And their leader was reminding them that something is trying to get in, right now, and the only thing that keeps it out is Candesce. The sun of suns emits a . . . he called it a ‘field,’ that keeps the monsters out. But the same field keeps us from developing any of the powerful technologies we’d need to stop the monsters if they did get in. Technologies like radar. . . . and get this:
“It was radar that made Admiral Chaison Fanning’s ships able to run rings around Falcon Formation’s fleet. Because Fanning had found a key to Candesce, and had gone inside to shut down the field for a day.”
Chirk crossed her arms, smiling skeptically. “Now this is a tall tale,” she said.
“Believe it or not,” said Jessie with a shrug, “it’s true. He gave the key to the precipice moth that helped him depose the Pilot, and it flew away . . . the home guard didn’t know where. But I knew.”
“Ahh,” she said. “That newspaper article. It came here.”
“Where it could be sure of never being disturbed,” he said eagerly.
“And now you’re, what? – going to duel it for the key?” She laughed. “Seems to me you’re in no state to slay dragons, Jess.” She held out her hand. “Look, you’re too weak to fly, even. Come with me. At least we’ll make you rich before . . .” She glanced away. “You can afford the best doctors, you know they —”
He shook his head, and spun the pedals of the jet’s starter spring. “That moth doesn’t know what I overheard in the amphitheatre. That the walls of the world are failing. Candesce’s shield isn’t strong enough anymore. We need the key so we can dial down the field and develop technologies that could stop whatever’s out there. The moth’s been hiding in here, it doesn’t know, Chirk.”
The jet roared into life. “I can’t slay a dragon, Chirk,” he shouted. “But at least I can give it the news.”
He opened the throttle and left her before she could reply.
They dressed as heroes. Dad wore gold and leather, the kids flame-red. Mom was the most fabulous creature Jessie had ever seen, and every night he fell in love with her all over again. She wore feathers of transparent blue plex, plumage four feet long that she could actually fly with when the gravity was right. She would be captured by the children – little devils – and rescued by Dad. They played all over the principalities, their backdrop a vast wall of spinning town wheels, green ball-shaped parks and the hithering-thithering traffic of a million airborne people. Hundreds of miles of it curved away to cup blazing Candesce. They had to be amazing to beat a sight like that. And they were.
For as long as Jessie could remember, though, there had been certain silences. Some evenings, the kids knew not to talk. They stuck to their picture books, or played outside or just plain left the house for a while. The silence radiated from Mom and Dad, and there was no understanding it. Jessie didn’t notice how it grew, but there came a time when the only music in their lives seemed to happen during performance. Even rehearsals were strained. And then, one day, Mom just wasn’t there anymore.
They had followed the circus from the principalities into the world’s outer realms, where the suns were spaced hundreds of miles apart and the chilly darkness between them was called “winter”.
Jessie remembered a night lit by distant lightning that curled around a spherical stormcloud. They were staying on a little town wheel whose name he no longer remembered – just a spinning hoop of wood forty feet wide and a mile or so across, spoked by frayed ropes and home to a few hundred farm families. Mom had been gone for four days. Jessie stepped out of the hostel where they were staying to see Dad leaning out over the rushing air, one strong arm holding a spoke-rope while he stared into the headwind.
“But where would she go?” Jessie heard him murmur. That was all that he ever said on the matter, and he didn’t even say it to his boys.
They weren’t heroes after that. From that day forward, they dressed as soldiers, and their act was a battle.
The capital bug was hollow. This in itself wasn’t such a surprise – something so big wouldn’t have been able to move under its own power if it wasn’t. It would have made its own gravity. What made Jessie swear in surprise was just how little there was to it, now that he was inside.
The bug’s perforated back let in sunlight, and in those shafts he beheld a vast oval space, bigger than any stadium he had ever juggled in. The sides and bottom of the place were carpeted in trees, and more hung weightless in the central space, the roots of five or six twined together at their bases so that they thrust branch and leaf every which way. Flitting between these were mirror-bright schools of long-finned fish; chasing those were flocks of legless crimson and yellow birds. As Jessie watched, a struggling group of fish managed to make it to a thirty-foot-diameter ball of water. The pursuing birds peeled away at the last second as the punctured water ball quivered and tossed off smaller spheres. This drama took place in complete silence; there was no sound at all although the air swarmed with insects as well as the larger beasts.
Of course, nothing could have made itself heard over the buzz of the capital bug itself. So, he supposed nothing tried.
The air was thick with the smell of flowers, growth, and decay. Jessie took the jet in a long curving tour of the vast space, and for a few moments he was able to forget everything except the wonder of being here. Then, as he returned to his starting point, he spotted the wreck, and the Mistelle. They were high up in something like a gallery that stretched around the “top” of the space, under the perforated roof. Both were dwarfed by their setting, but he could clearly see his teammates’ jets hovering over the wreck. The stab of sorrow that went through him almost set him coughing again. It would only take seconds and he’d be with them. At least he could watch their jubilation as they plundered the treasure he’d helped them find.
And then what? They could shower him with jewels but he couldn’t buy his life back. At best he could hold such baubles up to the light and admire them for a while, before dying alone and unremarked.
He turned the jet and set to exploring the forested gut of the capital bug.
Jessie had seen very few built-up places that weren’t inhabited. In Virga, real estate was something you made, like gravity or sunlight. Wilderness as a place didn’t exist, except in those rare forests that had grown by twining their roots and branches until their whole matted mass extended for miles. He’d seen one of those on the fringe of the principalities, where Candesce’s light was a mellow rose and the sky permanently peach-tinged. That tangled mass of green had seemed like a delirium dream, an intrusion into the sane order of the world. But it was nothing to the wilderness of the capital bug.
Bugs were rare; at any one time there might only be a few dozen in the whole world. They never got too close to the sun of suns, so they were never seen in the principalities. They dwelt in the turbulent middle space between civilization and winter, where suns wouldn’t stay on station and nations would break up and drift apart. Of course, they were also impossible to approach, so it was likely that no one had ever flown through these cathedrals walled by gigantic flowers, these ship-sized grass stalks dewed by beads of water big as houses. Despite his pain and exhaustion, the place had its way with him and he found himself falling into a meditative calm he associated with that moment before you make your jump – or, in midair, that moment before your father catches your hand.
In its own way, this calm rang louder than any feeling he’d ever had, maybe because it was about something, about death, and nothing he’d ever felt before had grown on such a foundation.
He came to an area where giant crystals of salt had grown out of the capital bug’s skin, long geodesic shapes whose inner planes sheened in purple and bottle-green. They combined with the dew drops to splinter and curl the light in a million ways.
Stretched between two sixty-foot grass stalks was the glittering outline of a man.
Jessie throttled back and grabbed a vine to stop himself. He’d come upon a spider’s web; the spider that had made it was probably bigger than he was. But someone or something had used the web to make a piece of art, by placing fist- to head-sized balls of water at the intersections of the threads, laying out a pattern shaped like a man standing proudly, arms out, as though about to catch something.
Jessie goggled at it, then remembered to look for the spider. After a cautious minute he egged the jet forward, skirting around the web. There were more webs ahead. Some were twenty or more feet across, and each one was a tapestry done in liquid jewels. Some of the figures were human; others were of birds, or flowers, but each was exquisitely executed. It came to Jessie that when the capital bug was in full song, the webs and drops would vibrate, blurring the figures’ outlines until they must seem made of light.
Spinning in the air, he laughed in surprise.
Something reared up sixty feet away and his heart skipped. It was a vaguely humanoid shape sculpted in rusted metal and moss-covered stone. As it stood it unfolded gigantic wings that stretched past the tops of the grass stalks.
Its head was a scarred metal ball.
“THIS IS NOT YOUR PLACE.” Even half-deaf as he was, the words battered Jessie like a headwind. They were like gravel speaking. If his team from the Mistelle were here, they’d be turning tail at this point; they would probably hear the words, even as far away as the wreck.
Jessie reached down and pointedly turned off the jet. “I’ve come to talk to you,” he said.
“YOU BRING NO ORDERS,” said the precipice moth. It began to hunker back into the hollow where it had been coiled.
“I bring news!” Jessie had rehearsed what he was going to say, picturing over and over in his mind the impresario of the circus and how he would gesture and stretch out his vowels to make his speech pretty and important-sounding. Now, though, Jessie couldn’t remember his lines. “It’s about the key to Candesce!”
The moth stopped. Now that it was motionless, he could see how its body was festooned with weapons: its fingers were daggers, gun barrels poked under its wrists. The moth was a war machine, half-flesh, half-ordnance.
“CLARIFY.”
Jessie blew out the breath he’d been holding and immediately started coughing. To his dismay little dots of blood spun through the air in the direction of the moth. It cocked its head, but said nothing.
When he had the spasms under control, Jessie told the monster what he’d overheard in the amphitheatre. “What the leader meant – I think he meant – was that the strategy of relying on Candesce to protect us isn’t working anymore. Those things from outside, they’ve gotten in at least twice in the last two years. They’re figuring it out.”
“We destroy them if they enter.” The moth’s voice was not so overwhelming now; or maybe he was just going deaf.
“Begging your pardon,” said Jessie, “but they slipped past you both times. Maybe you’re catching some of them, but not enough.”
There was a long pause. “Perhaps,” said the moth at last. Jessie grinned because that one word, a hint of doubt, had for him turned the moth from a mythical dragon into an old soldier, who might need his help after all.
“I’m here on behalf of humanity to ask you for the key to Candesce,” he recited; he’d remembered his speech. “We can’t remain at the mercy of the sun of suns and the things from outside. We have to steer our own course now, because the other way’s not working. The home guard didn’t know where you were, and they’d never have listened to me; so I came here myself.”
“The home guard cannot be trusted,” said the moth.
Jessie blinked in surprise. But then again, in the story of Admiral Fanning and the key, the moth had not in the end given it to the guard, though it had had the chance.
The moth shifted, leaning forward slightly. “Do you want the key?” it asked.
“I can’t use it.” He could explain why, but Jessie didn’t want to.
“You’re dying,” said the moth.
The words felt like a punch in the stomach. It was one thing for Jessie to say it. He could pretend he was brave. But the moth was putting it out there, a fact on the table. He glared at it.
“I’m dying too,” said the moth.
“W-what?”
“That is why I’m here,” it said. “Men cannot enter this creature. My body would be absorbed by it, rather than be cut up and used by you. Or so I had thought.”
“Then give me the key,” said Jessie quickly. “I’ll take it to the home guard. You know you can trust me,” he added, “because I can’t use the key to my own advantage. I’ll live long enough to deliver it to the home guard, but not long enough to use it.”
“I don’t have the key.”
Jessie blinked at the monster for a time. He’d simply assumed that the moth that had been seen entering this capital bug was the same one that had met Chaison Fanning in Slipstream. But of course there was no reason that should be the case. There were thousands, maybe millions of moths in Virga. They were almost never seen, but two had been spotted in the same year.
“That’s it, then,” he said at last. After that, there was a long silence between them, but the precipice moth made no effort to fit itself back into its hole. Jessie looked around, mused at the drifting jet for a while, then gave a deep sigh.
He turned to the moth. “Can I ask you a favour?”
“What is it?”
“I’d like to . . . stay here to die. If that wouldn’t be too much of an inconvenience for you.”
The precipice moth put out an iron-taloned forelimb, then another, very slowly, as if sneaking up on Jessie. It brought its round leaden head near to his, and seemed to sniff at him.
“I have a better idea,” it said. Then it snatched him up in its great claws, opened its wide lidless mouth, and bit.
Jessie screamed as his whole torso was engulfed in that dry maw. He felt his chest being ripped open, felt his lungs being torn out – curiously, not as pain but as a physical wrenching – and then everything blurred and went grey.
But not black. He blinked, coming to himself, to discover he was still alive. He was hovering in a nebula of blood, millions of tiny droplets of it spinning and drifting around him like little worlds. Gingerly, he reached up to touch his chest. It was whole, and when he took a tentative breath, the expected pain wasn’t there.
Then he spotted the moth. It was watching him from its cavity in the capital bug’s flesh. “W-what did – where is it?”
“I ate your disease,” said the moth. “Battlefield medicine, it is allowed.”
“But why?”
“Few moths know which one of us has the key, or where it is,” it said. “I cannot broadcast what I know, Candesce jams all lightspeed communications. I am now too weak to travel.
“You will take your message to the moth that has the key. It will decide.”
“But I’m – I’m not going to —?”
“I could not risk your dying during the journey. You are disease-free now.”
Jessie couldn’t take it in. He breathed deeply, then again. It would hit him sometime later, he knew; for now, all he could think to say was, “So where’s the one that does have the key?”
The moth told him and Jessie laughed, because it was obvious. “So I’ll wait until night and go in,” he said. “That should be easy.”
The precipice moth shifted, shook its head. “It will not speak to you. Not unless you prove you are committed to the course that you say you are.”
There was a warning in those words but Jessie didn’t care. All that mattered was that he was going to live. “I’ll do it.”
The moth shook its head. “I think you will not,” it said.
“You think I’ll forget the whole thing, take my treasure from the ship over there,” he nodded behind him, “and just set myself up somewhere? Or you think I’ll take the key for myself, auction it off to the highest bidder? But I won’t, you see. I owe you. I’ll do as you ask.”
It shook its head. “You do not understand.” By degrees it was inching its way back into its hole. Jessie watched it, chewing his lip. Then he looked around at the beautiful jewelled tapestries it had made in the spiders’ webs.
“Hey,” he said. “Before I go, can I do something for you?”
“There is nothing you can do for me,” murmured the moth.
“I don’t know about that. I can’t do very many things,” he said as he snapped off some smaller stalks of the strange grass. He hefted a couple in his hands. “But the one or two things I can do, I do pretty well.” He eyed the moth as he began spinning the stalks between his hands.
“Have you ever seen freefall juggling?”
Jessie stood alone on the tarred deck of a docking arm. His bags were huddled around his feet; there was nobody else standing where he was, the nearest crowd a hundred feet away.
The dock was an open-ended barrel, six hundred feet across and twice as deep. Its rim was gnarled with cable mounts for the spokes that radiated out to the distant rim of the iron city-wheel. This far from the turning rim, Jessie weighed only a pound, but his whole posture was a slump of misery.
There was only air where his ship was supposed to be.
He’d been late packing; the others had gone to get Dad at the circus pitch that had been strung, like a hammock, between the spokes of the city. Jessie was old enough to pack for himself, so he had to. He was old enough to find his way to the docks, too, but he’d been delayed, just by one thing and another.
And the ship wasn’t here.
He stared into the sky as it greyed with the approach of a water-laden cloud. The long spindle-shapes of a dozen ships nosed at other points on the circular dock, like hummingbirds sipping at a flower. Passengers and crew were hand-walking up the ropes of their long proboscises. Jessie could hear conversations, laughter from behind him where various beverage huts and newspaper stands clustered.
But where would they go?
Without him? The answer, of course, was anywhere.
In that moment Jessie focused his imagination in a single desperate image: the picture of his father dressed as the hero, the way he used to be, arrowing out of the sky – and Jessie reaching up, ready for the catch. He willed it with everything he had, but instead, the grey cloud that had been approaching began to funnel through the docks propelled by a tailwind. It manifested as a horizontal drizzle. Jessie hunched into it, blinking and licking his lips.
A hand fell on his shoulder.
Jessie looked up. One of the businessmen who’d been waiting for another ship was standing over him. The man was well-dressed, sporting the garish feathered hat his class wore. He had a kindly, well-lined face and hair the colour of the clouds.
“Son,” he said, “were you looking for the ship to Mespina?”
Jessie nodded.
“They moved the gate,” said the businessman. He raised his head and pointed way up the curve of the dock. Just for a second, his outline was prismed by the water beading on Jessie’s eyelashes. “It’s at 2:30, there, see it?”
Jessie nodded, and reached to pick up his bags.
“Good luck,” said the man as he sauntered, in ten-foot strides, back to his companions.
“Thanks,” Jessie murmured too late. But he was thunderstruck. In a daze he tiptoed around the dock to find Father and his brothers waiting impatiently, the ship about to leave. They hadn’t looked for him, of course. He answered their angry questions in monosyllables. All he could do was contemplate the wonder of having been saved by that man’s simple little gesture. The world must be crammed with people who could be saved just as easily, if somebody bothered to take a minute out of their day to do it.
From that moment forward, Jessie didn’t daydream about putting out a burning city or rescuing the crew of a corkscrewing passenger liner. His fantasies were about seeing that lone, uncertain figure, standing by itself on a dock or outside a charity diner – and of approaching and, with just ten words or a coin, saving a life.
He wasn’t able to visit the wrecked treasure ship, because the capital bug’s sound organs were recovering. The drone was already louder than Jessie’s jet as he left the bowl-shaped garden of the bug’s gut. From the zone just under the perforated skin of the bug’s back, he could see that the main hull of the wreck was missing, presumably towed by the Mistelle, because that was gone too.
When Jessie rose out of the bug’s back, there was no sign of the Mistelle in the surrounding air either. A massive cloud front – mushroom and dome-shaped wads of it as big as the bug – was moving in and would obscure one of the suns in minutes. Mistelle was probably in there somewhere but he would have the devil of a time finding it. Jessie shrugged, and turned the jet away.
He had plucked some perfect salt crystals, long as his thigh, from the precipice moth’s forest, just in case. He’d be able to sell these for food and fuel as he traveled.
He did exactly this, in two days reaching the outskirts of the principalities, and civilized airs. Here he was able to blend in with streams of traffic that coursed through the air like blood through the arteries of some world-sized, invisible beast. The sky was full of suns, all competing to tinge the air with their colours. The grandly turning iron wheel cities and green clouds of forest had a wealth of light they could choose to bask in. All those lesser suns were shamed when Candesce awoke from its night cycle, and all cities, farms, and factories turned to the sun of suns during this true day.
Billions of human lives marked their spans by Candesce’s radiance. All of the principalities were visible here: he could trace the curve of an immense bubble, many hundreds of miles across, that was sketched onto the sky by innumerable cities and houses, spherical lakes, and drifting farms. Nearby he could tell what they were; further away, they blended and blurred together into one continuous surface whose curve he could see aiming to converge on the far side of Candesce. The sun of suns was too bright to follow that curve to its antipode – but, at night! Then, it was all so clear, a hollow sphere made of glittering stars, city and window lights in uncountable millions encircling an absence where Candesce slumbered or – some said – prowled the air like a hungry falcon.
The bubble had an inner limit because nothing could survive the heat too close to Candesce. The cities and forests were kept at bay, and clouds dissolved and lakes boiled away if they crossed that line. The line was called the anthropause, and only at night did the cremation fleets sail across it carrying their silent cargoes, or the technology scavengers who dared to look for the cast-offs of Candesce’s inhuman industry. These fleets made tiny drifts of light that edged into the black immensity of Candesce’s inmost regions; but sensible people stayed out.
For the first time in his life, Jessie could go anywhere in that mist of humanity. As he flew he took note of all the people in a way he never had before; he marked each person’s role. There was a baker. Could he be that? There were some soldiers. Could he go to war? He would try on this or that future, taste it for a while as he flew. Some seemed tantalizing, though infinitely far out of reach for a poor uneducated juggler like himself. But none were out of reach anymore.
When he stopped to refuel at the last town before the anthropause, he found they wouldn’t take the coins he’d gotten at his last stop. Jessie traded the last of his salt, knowing even as he did it that several slouching youths were watching from a nearby net. He’d shifted his body to try to hide the salt crystal, but the gas jockey had held it up to the light anyway, whistling in appreciation.
“Where’d you get this?”
Jessie tried to come up with some plausible story, but he’d never been very good at stuff like that. He got through the transaction, got his gas, and took the jet into the shadow of a three-hundred-foot-wide grove, to wait for dark. It was blazingly hot even here. The shimmering air tricked his eyes, and so he didn’t notice the gang of youths sneaking up on him until it was too late.
The arm around his throat was a shocking surprise – so much so that Jessie’s reflexes took over and he found himself and his attacker spinning into the air before the astonished eyes of the others. Jessie wormed his way out of the other’s grasp. The lad had a knife but now that they were in free air that wasn’t a problem. Jessie was an acrobat.
In a matter of seconds he’d flipped the boy around with his feet and kicked him at his friends, who were jumping out of the leaves in a hand-linked mass. The kick took Jessie backwards and he spun around a handy branch. He dove past them as they floundered in midair, got to his jet, and kick-started it. Jessie was off before they could regroup; he left only a rude gesture behind.
Under the hostile glare of Candesce, he paused to look back. His heart was pounding, he was panting, but he felt great. Jessie laughed and decided right there to go on with his quest, even if it was too early. He turned the jet and aimed it straight at the sun of suns.
It quickly became obvious that he couldn’t just fly in there. The jet could have gotten him to it in two hours at top speed, but he’d have burned to death long before arriving. He idled, advancing just enough to discourage anyone from following.
He looked back after twenty minutes of this, and swore. There were no clouds or constructions of any kind between him and the anthropause, so the little dot that was following him was clearly visible. He’d made at least one enemy, it was clear; who knew how many of them were hanging off that lone jet?
He opened the throttle a little, hunkering down behind the jet’s inadequate windscreen to cut the blazing light and heat as much as he could. After a few minutes he noticed that it was lessening of itself: Candesce was going out.
The light reddened as the minutes stretched. The giant fusion engines of the sun of suns were winking out one by one; Candesce was not one sun, but a flock of them. Each one was mighty enough to light a whole nation, and together they shaped the climate and airflow patterns of the entire world. Their light was scattered and absorbed over the leagues, of course, until it was no longer visible. But Candesce’s influence extended to the very skin of the world where icebergs cracked off Virga’s frost-painted wall. Something, invisible and not to be tasted or felt, blazed out of here as well with the light and the heat: the field, which scrambled the energies and thoughts of any device more complicated than a clock. Jessie’s jet was almost as complex as a machine could get in Virga. Since the world’s enemies depended entirely on their technologies, they could not enter here.
This was protection; but there had been a cost. Jessie understood that part of his rightful legacy was knowledge, but he’d never been given it. The people in Virga knew little about how the world worked, and nothing about how Candesce lived. They were utterly dependent on a device their ancestors had built but that most of them now regarded as a force of nature.
Light left the sky, but not the heat. That would take hours to dissipate, and Jessie didn’t have time to wait. He sucked some water from the wine flask hanging off his saddle, and approached the inner circle of Candesce. Though the last of its lamps were fading red embers, he could still see well enough by the light of the principalities. Their millionfold glitter swam and wavered in the heat haze, casting a shimmering light over the crystalline perfection of the sun of suns. He felt their furnace-heat on his face, but he had dared a capital bug’s howl; he could dare this.
The question was, where in a cloud of dozens of suns would a precipice moth nest? The dying moth had told Jessie that it was here, and it made perfect sense: Where was the one place from which the key could not be stolen? Clearly in the one place that you’d need that key to enter.
This answer seemed simple until you saw Candesce. Jessie faced a sky full of vast crystal splinters, miles long, that floated freely in a formation around the suns themselves. Those were smaller, wizened metal-and-crystal balls, like chandeliers that had shrunk in on themselves. And surrounding them, unfolding from mirrored canopies like flowers at dawn, other vast engines stirred.
He flew a circuit through the miles-long airspace of the sun of suns; then he made another. He was looking for something familiar, a town wheel for giants or some sort of blockhouse that might survive the heat here. He saw nothing but machinery, and the night drew on towards a dawn he could not afford to be here to see.
The precipice moth he’d spoken to had been partly alive – at least, it had looked like that leathery skin covered muscles as well as body internal machinery. But what living thing could survive here? Even if those mirrored metal flowers shielded their cores from the worst of the radiation, they couldn’t keep out the heat. He could see plainly how their interiors smoked as they spilled into sight.
Even the tips of those great diamond splinters were just cooling below the melting point of lead. Nothing biological could exist here.
Then, if the moth was here, it might as well be in the heart of the inferno as on the edge. With no more logic to guide him than that, Jessie aimed his jet for the very centre of Candesce.
Six suns crowded together here. Each was like a glass diatom two hundred feet in diameter, with long spines that jutted every which way in imitation of the gigantic ones framing the entire realm. Thorns from all the suns had pinioned a seventh body between them – a black oval, whose skin looked like old cast iron. Its pebbled surface was patterned with raised squares of brighter metal, and inset squares of crystal. Jessie half-expected to faint from the heat as he approached it, and he would die here if that happened; but instead, it grew noticeably cooler as he closed the last few yards.
He hesitated, then reached out to touch the dark surface. He snatched his hand back: it was cold.
This must be the generator that made Candesce’s protective field. It was this thing that kept the world’s enemies at bay.
Gunning the jet, he made a circuit of the oval. It looked the same from all angles and there was no obvious door. But, when he was almost back to his starting point, Jessie saw distant city-light gleam off something behind one of the crystal panels. He flew closer to see.
The chrome skeleton of a precipice moth huddled on the other side of the window. It was too dark for Jessie to make out what sort of space it was sitting in, but from the way its knees were up by its steel ears, it must not be large.
There wasn’t a scrap of flesh on this moth, yet when Jessie reached impulsively to rap on the crystal, it moved.
Its head turned and it lowered a jagged hand from its face. He couldn’t see eyes, but it must be looking at him.
“Let me in!” Jessie shouted. “I have to talk to you!”
The moth leaned its head against the window and its mouth opened. Jessie felt a kind of pulse – a deep vibration. He put his ear to the cold crystal and the moth spoke again.
“WAIT.”
“You’re the one, aren’t you? The moth with the key?”
“WAIT.”
“But I have to . . .” He couldn’t hear properly over the whine of the jet, so Jessie shut it down. The sound died – then, a second later, died again. An echo? No, that other note had been pitched very differently.
He cursed and spun around, losing his grip on the inset edge of the window. As he flailed and tried to right himself, a second jet appeared around the curve of the giant machine. There was one rider in its saddle. The dark silhouette held a rifle.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
“I want what you want,” said a familiar voice. “Nothing less than the greatest treasure in the world.”
“Chirk, what are you doing here? How did – did you follow me?”
She hove closer and now her canary-yellow jacket was visible in the glow of distant cities. “I had to,” she said. “The wreck was empty, Jess! All that hard work and risking our lives, and there was nothing there. Emmen took it under tow – had to make the best of the situation, I guess – but for our team, there was nothing. All of us were so mad, murderous mad. Not safe for me.
“Then I remembered you. I went looking for you and what should I find? You, juggling for a monster!”
“I think he liked it,” said Jessie. He hoped he could trust Chirk, but then, why did she have that rifle in her hands?
“You said you were going to give it a message. When you left I trailed after you. I was trying to think what to do. Talk to you? Ask to join you? Maybe there was a prize for relaying the message. But then you set a course straight for the sun of suns, and I realized what had happened.
“Give me the key, Jessie.” She levelled the rifle at him.
He gaped at her, outraged and appalled. “I haven’t got it,” he said.
She hissed angrily. “Don’t lie to me! Why else would you be here?”
“Because he’s got it,” said Jessie. He jabbed a thumb at the window. He saw Chirk’s eyes widen as she saw what was behind it. She swore.
“If you thought I had it, why didn’t you try to take it from me earlier?”
She looked aside. “Well, I didn’t know exactly where you were going. If it gave you the key, then it told you where the door was, right? I had to find out.”
“But why didn’t you just ask to come along?”
She bit her lip. “’Cause you wouldn’t have had me. Why should you? You’d have known I was only in it for the key. Even if I was . . . nice to you.”
Though it was dark, in the half-visible flight of emotions across her face Jessie could see a person he hadn’t known was there. Chirk had hid her insecurities as thoroughly as he’d hoped to hide his bloody cough.
“You could have come to me,” he said. “You should have.”
“And you could have told me you were planning to die alone,” she said. “But you didn’t.”
He couldn’t answer that. Chirk waved the rifle at the door. “Get it to open up, then. Let’s get the key and get out of here.”
“If I can get the key from it, ordering it to kill you will be easy,” he told her. A little of the wild mood that had made him willing to dive into a capital bug had returned. He was feeling obstinate enough to dare her to kill him.
Chirk sighed, and to his surprise said, “You’re right.” She threw away the rifle. They both watched it tumble away into the dark.
“I’m not a good person, and I went about this all wrong,” she said. “But I really did like you, Jessie.” She looked around uneasily. “I just . . . I can’t let it go. I won’t take it from you, but I need to be a part of this, Jess. I need a share, just a little share. I’m not going anywhere. If you want to sic your monster on me, I guess you’ll just have to kill me.” She crossed her arms, lowered her head, and made to stare him down.
He just had to laugh. “You make a terrible villain, Chirk.” As she sputtered indignantly, he turned to the window again. The moth had been impassively watching his conversation with Chirk. “Open up!” he shouted at it again, and levering himself close with what little purchase he could make on the window’s edge, he put his ear to the crystal again.
“WAIT.”
Jessie let go and drifted back, frowning. Wait? For what?
“What did it say?”
“The other moth told me this one wouldn’t let me in unless I proved I was committed. I had to prove I wouldn’t try to take the key.”
“But how are you going to do that?”
“Oh.”
Wait.
Candesce’s night cycle was nearly over. The metal flowers were starting to close, the bright little flying things they’d released hurrying back to the safety of their tungsten petals. All around them, the rumbling furnaces in the suns would be readying themselves. They would brighten soon, and light would wash away everything material here that was not a part of the sun of suns. Everything, perhaps, except the moth, who might be as ancient as Candesce itself.
“The other moth told me I wouldn’t deliver the message,” said Jessie. “It said I would decide not to.”
She frowned. “Why would it say that?”
“Because . . .’cause it cured me, that’s why. And because the only way to deliver the message is to wait until dawn. That’s when this moth here will open the door for us.”
“But then – we’d never get out in time . . .”
He nodded.
“Tell it – yell through the door, like it’s doing to you! Jessie, we can’t stay here, that’s just insane! You said the other moth cured you? Then you can escape, you can live – like me. Maybe not with me, and you’re right not to trust me, but we can take the first steps together . . .” But he was shaking his head.
“I don’t think it can hear me,” he said. “I can barely hear it, and its voice is loud enough to topple buildings. I have to wait, or not deliver the message.”
“Go to the home guard, then. Tell them, and they’ll send someone here. They’ll —”
“— not believe a word I say. I’ve nothing to show them, after all. Nothing to prove my story.”
“But your life! You have your whole life . . .”
He’d tried to picture it on the flight here. He had imagined himself as a baker, a soldier, a diplomat, a painter. He longed for every one of them, for any of them. All he had to do was start his jet and follow Chirk, and one of them would come to pass.
He started to reach for his jet, but there was nowhere he could escape the responsibility he’d willingly taken on himself. He realized he didn’t want to.
“Only I can do this,” he told her. “Anyway, this is the only thing I ever had that was mine. If I give it up now, I’ll have some life . . . but not my life.”
She said nothing, just shook her head. He looked past her at the vast canopy of glittering lights – from the windows in city apartments and town wheel-houses, from the mansions of the rich and the gas-fires of industry: a sphere of people, every single one of them threatened by something that even now might be uncoiling in the cold vacuum outside the world; each and every one of them waiting, though they knew it not, for a helping hand.
Ten words, or a single coin.
“Get out of here, Chirk,” he said. “It’s starting. If you leave right now you might just get away before the full heat hits.”
“But —” She stared at him in bewilderment. “You come too!”
“No. Just go. See?” He pointed at a faint ember-glow that had started in the darkness below their feet. “They’re waking up. This place will be a furnace soon. There’s no treasure here for you, Chirk. It’s all out there.”
“Jessie, I can’t —” Flame-coloured light blossomed below them, and then from one side. “Jessie?” Her eyes were wide with panic.
“Get out! Chirk, it’s too late unless you go now! Go! Go!”
The panic took her and she kicked her jet into life. She made a clumsy pass, trying to grab Jessie on the way by, but he evaded her easily.
“Go!” She put her head down, opened the throttle, and shot away. Too late, Jessie feared. Let her not be just one second too late.
Her jet disappeared in the rising light. Jessie kicked his own jet away, returning to cling to the edge of the window. His own sharp-edged shadow appeared against the metal skull inches from his own.
“You have your proof!” He could feel the pulse of energy – heat, and something deeper and more fatal – reaching into him from the awakening suns. “Now open up.
“Open up!”
The moth reached out and did something below the window. The crystalline pane slid aside, and Jessie climbed into the narrow, boxlike space. The window slid shut, but did nothing to filter the growing light and heat from outside. There was nowhere further to go, either. He had expected no less.
The precipice moth lowered its head to his.
“I have come to you on behalf of humanity,” said Jessie, “to tell you that the ancient strategy of relying on Candesce for our safety will no longer work . . .”
He told the moth his story, and as he spoke the dawn came up.
Caught between two worlds can be a very uncomfortable place to be.
New writer Mary Robinette Kowal won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2008. Her work has appeared in Cosmos, Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Solaris Book of Science Fiction 2, Strange Horizons, Subterranean, Clarkesworld, Twenty Epics, Apex Digest, Apex Online, and Talebones, among other markets. She’s the secretary of the Science Fiction Writers of America, the art director of the magazine Shimmer, and in civilian life is a professional puppeteer and voice actor. She lives in New York City. Her website is at maryrobinettekowal.com.
SLIDING HIS HANDS over the clay, Sly relished the moisture oozing around his fingers. The clay matted down the hair on the back of his hands making them look almost human. He turned the potter’s wheel with his prehensile feet as he shaped the vase. Pinching the clay between his fingers he lifted the wall of the vase, spinning it higher.
Someone banged on the window of his pen. Sly jumped and then screamed as the vase collapsed under its own weight. He spun and hurled it at the picture window like faeces. The clay spattered against the Plexiglas, sliding down the window.
In the courtyard beyond the glass, a group of school kids leapt back, laughing. One of them swung his arms aping Sly crudely. Sly bared his teeth, knowing these people would take it as a grin, but he meant it as a threat. Swinging down from his stool, he crossed his room in three long strides and pressed his dirty hand against the window. Still grinning, he wrote SSA. Outside, the letters would be reversed.
The student’s teacher flushed as red as a female in heat and called the children away from the window. She looked back once as she led them out of the courtyard, so Sly grabbed himself and showed her what he would do if she came into his pen.
Her naked face turned brighter red and she hurried away. When they were gone, Sly rested his head against the glass. The metal in his skull thunked against the window. It wouldn’t be long now, before a handler came to talk to him.
Damn.
He just wanted to make pottery. He loped back to the wheel and sat down again with his back to the window. Kicking the wheel into movement, Sly dropped a new ball of clay in the centre and tried to lose himself.
In the corner of his vision, the door to his room snickled open. Sly let the wheel spin to a halt, crumpling the latest vase.
Vern poked his head through. He signed, “You okay?”
Sly shook his head emphatically and pointed at the window.
“Sorry.” Vern’s hands danced. “We should have warned you that they were coming.”
“You should have told them that I was not an animal.”
Vern looked down in submission. “I did. They’re kids.”
“And I’m a chimp. I know.” Sly buried his fingers in the clay to silence his thoughts.
“It was Delilah. She thought you wouldn’t mind because the other chimps didn’t.”
Sly scowled and yanked his hands free. “I’m not like the other chimps.” He pointed to the implant in his head. “Maybe Delilah should have one of these. Seems like she needs help thinking.”
“I’m sorry.” Vern knelt in front of Sly, closer than anyone else would come when he wasn’t sedated. It would be so easy to reach out and snap his neck. “It was a lousy thing to do.”
Sly pushed the clay around on the wheel. Vern was better than the others. He seemed to understand the hellish limbo where Sly lived – too smart to be with other chimps, but too much of an animal to be with humans. Vern was the one who had brought Sly the potter’s wheel, which, by the Earth and Trees, Sly loved. Sly looked up and raised his eyebrows. “So what did they think of my show?”
Vern covered his mouth, masking his smile. The man had manners. “The teacher was upset about the ‘evil robot monkey’.”
Sly threw his head back and hooted. Served her right.
“But Delilah thinks you should be disciplined.” Vern, still so close that Sly could reach out and break him, stayed very still. “She wants me to take the clay away since you used it for an anger display.”
Sly’s lips drew back in a grimace built of anger and fear. Rage threatened to blind him, but he held on, clutching the wheel. If he lost it with Vern – rational thought danced out of his reach. Panting, he spun the wheel trying to push his anger into the clay.
The wheel spun. Clay slid between his fingers. Soft. Firm and smooth. The smell of earth lived his nostrils. He held the world in his hands. Turning, turning, the walls rose around a kernel of anger, subsuming it.
His heart slowed with the wheel and Sly blinked, becoming aware again as if he were slipping out of sleep. The vase on the wheel still seemed to dance with life. Its walls held the shape of the world within them. He passed a finger across the rim.
Vern’s eyes were moist. “Do you want me to put that in the kiln for you?”
Sly nodded.
“I have to take the clay. You understand that, don’t you?”
Sly nodded again staring at his vase. It was beautiful.
Vern scowled. “The woman makes me want to hurl faeces.”
Sly snorted at the image, then sobered. “How long before I get it back?”
Vern picked up the bucket of clay next to the wheel. “I don’t know.” He stopped at the door and looked past Sly to the window. “I’m not cleaning your mess. Do you understand me?”
For a moment, rage crawled on his spine, but Vern did not meet his eyes and kept staring at the window. Sly turned.
The vase he had thrown lay on the floor in a pile of clay.
Clay.
“I understand.” He waited until the door closed, then loped over and scooped the clay up. It was not much, but it was enough for now.
Sly sat down at his wheel and began to turn.