The city was well ordered. Everything seemed restful, the leaves stirring with soothing breezes, the skies pristine, so the great mountains could be viewed from all angles. Gurung assured him that the air was full of microscopic nanotech, fighting the good fight, on spectrums far beyond human senses, and that Kathmandu was among the top ten cities in the world for safety. People walked the tree-lined boulevards with distracted eyes, reacting to invisible things, their lips moving, but everything was oddly silent, words carried away by some invisible wind.
“They speak with the Echo.” Gurung tapped his head. “They see and hear and feel with it too. They do not see us.”
Melek Ahmar felt the urge to roll a fist of air down the street, scattering these abstracted half men, upending them. He sent out tendrils of his disruption field, searching for any potency. Surely a place this grand would have hidden djinn in the center? Or had his people withered so far during his slumber? It did not bother Melek Ahmar overmuch. He held djinn and humans and all variations in between in equal contempt. He was singular. That’s what it meant, to be king.
“There is nothing here to rival me,” he said finally. “I sense no other elder djinn. The Marid will not come here, so far from the sea. Nothing can prevent me from taking this city.”
They walked through the spotless, rolling streets, chased by a sweet-smelling breeze, the weather cool and pleasant enough to shed the bitter mountain chill from their bones, walking through the silent, busy people who seemed to dance to inaudible music. There was a peculiar tranquility to them, but perhaps it was just that their conflicts were hidden beneath the surface. Gurung led him to the foot of a grand spire, walled in, its true height lost in the clouds.
“My house was here,” he said, tapping on the exterior gate. “Old family house. Little rickety place. This street was a dump before Karma came, full of hippies. Most of Thamel was like that.”
“You are enormously wealthy then?” Melek asked. Hume wealth did not impress him much, but they seemed to set store by it.
“Not really,” Gurung said. “Money’s finished here. It’s all Karma points, see? And when Karma requisitioned everything, it was like a slate being cleaned. Rich, poor, didn’t matter. Usefulness. That was the key. Contribution to the system. You sell something you made, you get a fair price, Karma logs the value. Takes points from the buyer, gives ’em to you. You do some kind of public service, Karma gives you points. No more rich people sitting on their asses earning interest while we died in the mountains. We all thought it was a grand idea.”
“Didn’t work out, eh?” Melek Ahmar smiled. Backfiring wishes were a specialty of djinn, after all.
“Well, it did for everyone else,” Gurung said. He flashed his insane grin. “Turns out I’m a zero.”
“Zero. Yes, you probably are.”
“Knife fighter, part-time chef, gambler,” Gurung ticked off each thick finger. “Womanizer, if I do say so myself. Karma didn’t rate me much.”
“And where are all these other angry zeroes?” An army of malcontents, waiting for me.
“There weren’t as many as you’d think,” Gurung admitted.
“The God-Machine killed them? You alone escaped . . .” Of course the tyrant would destroy his enemies immediately.
“No, no, nothing like that,” Gurung said. “She gave us all basic. That’s the right to requisition basic shelter, food, drink, entertainment without any karma points at all. You could live and die, eat, sleep, fuck without a single karma point.”
“So you get all that for free? And you’re complaining? Sounds like a cut-price paradise. The gods promised far less, in my time.” And they delivered nothing, in the end.
“Come,” Gurung said. “Meet them and see for yourself.”
They walked around some quiet streets that progressively got narrower, some of the marble cladding now turning to stone, then to brick, and while it was still pristine, there was a utilitarian cast to these structures. Even this sparkling city had an underbelly, it seemed, although to Melek Ahmar it reeked nothing of the desperation and fear that typically marked the Hume poor. They turned into a colorful street, festooned with ancient shop signs, proclaiming to be the infamous Freak Street, the heart of the old Thamel district. Of course, the shops were mostly shuttered now, and the drug-fueled hippies were long gone, but the ghost of their revelries remained, a peculiar haunting of good times past.
They stopped at a tavern, well lit, furnished in basic molded chairs, and an unmanned bar that seemed to be dispensing drinks using a system of hidden rails. Cubes of liquor shot across the bar and stopped in front of each patron. Other cubes flew in parabolic arcs across the room, landing on table tops with uncanny accuracy. At a human touch, the cubes unfurled into steaming containers, either chilled or hot. As the patrons drank, more and more of the container dissolved into the drinks themselves, until it was down to a shot carried in a paper-thin translucent glass, which disappeared into air within seconds of the last liquid drop being quaffed. Melek Ahmar, quickly used to the magic of the age, was unimpressed. Besides, he liked to slam his metal tankard on a table after a good drink. You could also brain someone in a bar fight, if you had a metal tankard. Couldn’t brain a fly with these disappearing paper things.
He grabbed a flying cube from the air and drained it, waiting for some impudent fool to object. He loved bar fights. Nothing like stealing some fool’s drink to get the juices going.
No one noticed. The thirty or so patrons carried on their conversations or eye blinking or whatever. The bar didn’t even object; it just shot another identical container toward the waiting table. Melek Ahmar slumped. He had a feeling that it would continue doing so with infinite patience no matter how many drinks he kidnapped.
Gurung was well known here. He ambled from table to table with his bowlegged swagger, slapping people on the back, swooping down to kiss a couple of ladies on the cheek, and conversations started up; people jolted awake, remembering that he had no Echo, they broke out their dusty, unused voices, and he left a small trail of noise and laughter, of life, behind him.
“All zeroes here,” Gurung said, settling down next to Melek after a few minutes. “There are bars like this throughout town. Zeroes tend to hang together.”
Melek Ahmar looked around. They did not appear particularly discontented, this lot. He turned to the man next to him, a kindly older gent with neat clothes and a roguish air.
“So you lost everything to Karma, eh?” he asked. “Left to rot here in this bar, hmm?”
“Not at all,” the old gent said. “I gladly gave it up. My name’s Gaje. Karma came, what, twenty years ago? I had a shop selling fake Gurkha knives. The tourists used to lap that shit up. They’d buy two, three each, especially the young men. And I’d trot out that old canard, about how you had to blood the knife every time you took it out, like a true Gurkha. About half of those idiots would actually try to cut themselves. Of course, the knives were so dull they were never in much danger. Unless you count tetanus. Anyway, backbreaking, boring work for a pittance. I used to get up every morning and sit in that damn shop until ten at night. And then on the weekends I had to chase down all the drunken knife makers, like Gurung here, to collect my stock.”
“Still, you were free as a bird before, right?”
“Not really. The air was so bad with nanotech and pollution that the birds all died. You couldn’t see the mountains from here, can you believe it? We had to carry around portable nannite kits, just in case the air level hit red. Three times, I remember they issued citywide alerts, and whole neighborhoods had to go to slow-sleep until the nannite levels improved.”
“Boring now, though, am I right? Nothing to do . . .” Melek Ahmar was getting irritated. These churls were all acting unreasonably cheerful for Humes. It was unnatural. What good were humans without their habitual dissatisfaction? It was their defining trait.
“Hah! I get up in the morning in my little place, and the kitchen unit makes a great roti breakfast. Better than my own mother’s, believe it or not. I eat some yak cheese midday and then after a quick nap I hit the parks. I’ve got three girlfriends in three districts, do you know that? Gaje the Player they call me. Me, who didn’t even have time to get married or have kids when I was young, thanks to the damn store. After I see to the ladies, I come here most evenings, for a drink and some backgammon, or ludo. We don’t have anything to gamble with, true, since money was thrown out, but we put up little knickknacks, things of sentimental value. Makes the game spicier. And the best thing? No hangovers. I can drink as much as I like, and the little PMD just cleans it up when I sleep.”
“You call this drinking?” Melek Ahmar looked around in contempt. No one was slumped over, no raised voices, no one was even laughing. And due to the stupid flying cubes there weren’t even tavern wenches to molest. He thumped Gurung. “This is your bar of desperados? You want me to overthrow this God-Machine with these limp pricks?”
“They are a bit anemic,” Gurung admitted.
“Overthrow Karma?” Gaje frowned. “I don’t like the sound of that. I’m not going to report you, Gurung, because of that thing back in the day, but really, you ought to stop hanging out with degenerates.”
“Degenerate?” Melek Ahmar grabbed the old man by the collar, shoved his teeth into his face. “I’m the djinn king Melek Ahmar, Lord of Tuesday, you old fuck! I can drink this entire city dry and still walk out. I’ll fuck every man, woman, and goat in this miserable place and still be hard.” He tossed Gaje into a table of aghast zeroes.
His distortion sphere flexed around him like a swarm of bees, a sound and atmospheric effect that made the Humes retch as he floated above them, his outline hazy with power, and landed with a crunch on the bar, cracking the hard laminate surface. His eyes were red, his skin red, like fire licking at the edges of it, and his archaic claims did not seem so funny anymore. The Humes cringed on the ground, expecting fury. But Melek Ahmar, at this moment, was not interested in destruction. He had been asleep for so long. What he really wanted was a good party. He grabbed the blinking bar unit and ripped it out of the wall. The drink cubes stopped their aerial ballet and fell helter-skelter, pelting the hapless customers. With two impossibly strong hands he wrenched off the bar counter itself, revealing a large stock of cubes underneath. If this was the only shit they had, this was what he would drink.
He started throwing them around. “Zeroes! Rejoice, for your king is here! Tonight we drink until the little machines in your spine cry for mercy! And enough of this blinking shit. Someone play some music!”
Zeroes stared at him, lost. Gurung got up from the floor, grabbed two cubes, and calmly drained them both. He grabbed two more, bit them in half, raw liquor sloshing over his face, tipped his head back, and gave out an ululating Gurkha warrior scream. Someone smashed a cube into Gaje’s face, and the old man suddenly echoed Gurung’s war cry, eating the cube like a watermelon, even as it dissolved into dark rum. The bar seemed to unfurl en masse, a bud suddenly flowering into something jagged and colorful. A couple jumped onto their table and began kissing, a group started singing loudly, off key and tuneless, but an old melody everyone knew. Zeroes around the room started leaping about, dancing, shouting; the party had begun.