The next morning, Gurung brought out a cardboard box. Inside was a tiny jar and a polished black object, the size and shape of a spinal bone. The jar was filled with a gel-like fluid, and embedded inside was a very faint, very small jellyfish creature made of luminescent thread, almost alive, radiating a disconcerting vitality. Melek Ahmar stared at these objects, nonplussed.
“PMD,” Gurung said, pointing at the black bone. “Personal medical device. This was attached to my spine before I took it out.” He lifted his shirt and showed a scar in the small of his back. He shook the jar, making the jellyfish undulate. “This is called an Echo. It’s implanted in your brain when you’re seventeen, eighteen. It grows there, afterward becomes a part of your mind. I took it out. Almost every person has these two augments. I told you, we are now a technological marvel. The PMD runs your body and keeps you healthy. It also makes the nanotech that humans contribute to maintain the environment. The tax, so to speak. The Echo lets you interface with the Virtuality directly from your brain, so all communication, and virtual interaction, is telepathic. It also lets you interact with physical services like transportation, homes, food vat machines. People who refuse these two augments are recidivists.”
“Like us,” Melek Ahmar said. He tapped the jar. The jellyfish was oddly mesmerizing.
“We will go to the city soon. I am warning you that without these, Karma will not recognize us as citizens, and we will be closely monitored. Please act accordingly.”
“I will act as I see fit,” Melek Ahmar said. “However, I will stay my hand until I can judge what force this city can bring to bear against me. Why have you removed these wonders from your body?”
“These things . . .” Gurung said. “Karma keeps score with these things. She can read your mind, almost. I was cast out of the city, so why should I keep their badges inside my body?”
“You are like Memmion, little man.” Melek Ahmar clapped Gurung on the back approvingly. “You refuse to bend the knee. No djinn would submit to this indignity either.”
“There are djinn in the city, Great One,” Gurung said.
“We will find them, and I will lead them to glory!” Melek Ahmar said. “But first, I will study this Virtuality. I have four thousand years of gossip to catch up on.”
* * *
The road to the city was paved and winding. In years past, before the air became poisoned and untenable, a stream of tourists, mountaineers, and pilgrims had come this way. Humans at that time had been largely rooted to the ground. This troubled Melek Ahmar. The air had once been the demesne of djinn and birds, and birds didn’t count, for they were largely mindless. The sentience of the upper reaches had been represented solely by djinnkind. Now humans floated with invisible nanotech, zipped around on little pods, flew great distances on rockets. It was said they had reversed gravity completely in distant space stations. He understood these terms now, realized how far they had come in the last few thousand years. Of course, they had completely cocked up the planet, too. And where are the djinn? Have we ceded the Earth completely? Has their technology out-jumped our magic? Unthinkable.
They no longer used roads. All the roads of the world had somehow overnight become lifeless, filled with lonely machines plodding around, through billboards and abandoned rest stops slowly rusting. It was peculiar. And no one lived in the countryside. An invisible holocaust, forcing people to huddle in compact cities, resulting in nature slowly erasing the signs of humanity out here altogether. One would think nature had won this round, but Gurung assured him that the air was poisoned, that without nanotech living things could not thrive here and almost all large mammals were gone. Once they saw a misshapen goat with two heads to reinforce this point. Melek Ahmar did not care for nanotech or human disease. He ate both heads and then the rest of the goat too. Gurung found this amusing; the little Hume sat on the rock and watched, twirling his big knife, eating nuts. He seemed to have an inexhaustible supply.
There were no travelers on the road. Walking the trails was death. Gurung wore a mask and a little canister that produced puffs of emergency nanotech. Every inch of his body was covered with special fabric. He followed an internal chart of winds and currents, like Vasco de Gama hopping from island to island, stopping at oases of good air, skirting bad patches, so that their trip stretched into a week, then two, then three. It should have been an epic journey of adventure and self-discovery, but in reality it was just dull. Melek Ahmar would have barreled through, but he was slightly wrong-footed by this bizarre new world, and so he followed the little man, nursing his power, but his irritation grew, and by the time they reached the outskirts of the valley he was ready to blast someone into atoms.
When they finally reached the city at dawn, the djinn realized that Gurung had planned this approach with some care. The first view was stunning. The sun rose behind, and the city sparkled in tones of copper and gold, from domes and pagodas and metallic towers, from incredibly slender spires and crystal spheres that seemed to float above the land, and there was water flowing from the sky, and trees upside down, suspended from god knows what . . . Kathmandu was beautiful, stunning, it was magic.
Melek Ahmar grunted after a moment and spat. He was the King of Mars. This much beauty simply irritated him.
“It is a wonder of the world, yes?” Gurung asked.
“Yes, wonderful,” Melek Ahmar said. “I can imagine the little Humes strutting around like peacocks. I want to stamp on it and break open those floating spheres. I want to rip out those upside down trees and pick my teeth with them. We lived in cities once. I hated them.” Yes, and sadly on the day and night that cesspit Gangaridai finally disappeared, I was blind drunk and passed out in the ruins of Mohenjo Daro and so missed all the fun.
Gurung smiled. He always smiled. Was he a halfwit?
They entered through the West Gate.