“Why are we here?” Colonel Shakia hissed. “Karma specifically told us to drop this.”
“She’s got a blind spot,” Hamilcar said. “I’m the failsafe.”
They were deep in the stacks, a hermetically sealed room that seemed somehow still choked with dust, under the watchful gaze of two ancient drones that trudged up and down on maglev rails, nightmarish many-armed things. As Colonel Shakia had already verified, they responded sluggishly to vocal commands, and their chief functions seemed to be fetch and carry, and fight fires.
The National Library proper, four stories above on ground level, was a high-ceilinged, swanky hall much like a cathedral, one of the wonders of the city, where tourists came to see ancient Buddhist and Hindu texts. The first three basements were archives, searchable through a manual interface. The last, fourth basement was a cavernous dumping ground filled with racks of material no one had even bothered to catalogue, let alone read, and it was clear from the logs that they were the first humans to enter here in the last seven years.
“We need an army to go through this,” Colonel Shakia said, after they had wandered the aisles for half an hour.
Hamilcar stared at her. A look of amusement crept across his face.
“What?” She frowned, irritated.
“You are a colonel. You actually have an army.”
An hour later, eighty-six of Kathmandu’s fiercest weekend warriors were cheerfully gathered in the bowels of the National Library, clad in fatigues and combat helmets, tackling with bewildered gusto an enemy comprised of deeds, documents, registers, and irritable drones. This floor was not wired up to the Virtuality; to a certain degree, they had privacy, and Hamilcar’s carte blanche was enough to ward off suspicious librarians.
Twelve exhausting hours later, they found it: original land registers, original title deeds from that time period, all packed in giant paper sacks marked “To Be Destroyed.” Some conscientious bureaucrat had saved them, or more likely, no one had gotten around to them yet with a flamethrower. The fourth basement was full of “To Be Destroyed” sacks, most of them harmless paperwork long since transcribed into immortal databases, the detritus of a bygone era slowly settling to dust.
“The last time anyone actually owned property.” Colonel Shakia held up the register ending on KD1. “Feels weird, thinking everyone owned little pieces of the city, like a quilt.”
Hamilcar was scanning the papers, his eye twitching as the Echo took over some of its functionality. The augments allowed rapid absorption of data, even analog, although most humans no longer required data at all, other than for the sake of amusement. It made his eye twitch in an unpleasant way.
“There’s something here,” he said finally. “I’ve found eight of the deeds Doje purchased.”
“I’m guessing all of the sellers are dead?” Colonel Shakia asked.
“Not even dead. They don’t exist. There is no mention of them at all in the census on KD1.”
“Erased? How is that even possible? Karma cannot be hacked. Not even Doje could have this much power,” Colonel Shakia said.
“The only answer, then,” Hamilcar said, “is that Karma already knows.”
Colonel Shakia slumped back against a rack. Some of the vitality drained out of her face. “What now, then? Are we to fight Karma herself? We are alone in this.”
Hamilcar smiled. “No, not alone.”
“What are we going to do?”
“You head back to the tower and get ready. Me? I’m going to go make a wish.”
* * *
He didn’t hear Gurung coming. He certainly didn’t see him. The first inkling he had was the smooth pull of the Gurkha’s knife, the little whoosh it made as it left the scabbard, and a sharp cold edge pressed against his neck, a motion so fast that his brain had barely registered anything before he was on his knees on the gravel.
“I came to make a wish,” Hamilcar said softly, trying to keep the blade from nicking his Adam’s apple.
The knife eased up a bit.
“You’re a company man,” Gurung said, from somewhere behind him. “Karma’s pet.”
“I can still dream of wishes,” Hamilcar said. “Is this not the Garden of Dreams, where the djinn grant wishes?”
“You can’t see the djinn,” Gurung said. “You tell me your wish, I decide if they hear it.”
“This wish is for you to grant, Bhan Gurung.”
The knife pressed back against his throat with alarming quickness.
“What game is this, Sheriff?”
“I want a wish from you.”
“I am not a djinn.”
“You are Bhan Gurung, the knife saint, champion of your regiment, who murdered twenty-three people in cold blood, sentenced to death in a secret military tribunal. You were guilty, beyond doubt, of the most violent crime in Kathmandu in a hundred years. I heard that the four judges at your trial wept to a man. Why did they weep, Gurung?”
“That’s your wish?”
“Yes.”
“To know why the generals cried?”
“Yes.”
Gurung sighed. The knife moved away. Hamilcar touched his neck, half expecting his head to fall off. He sat back on the ground in relief, trying to still his shaking legs.
“You want some pistas?” Gurung sat down beside him, on a rock.
“Sure.” He ate one and looked at the shell.
“I just throw the shells on the ground, it drives the girl djinn crazy.” Gurung grinned. “Mister Sheriff, what will you do with an old story like that? There are no more generals left in the city, and no more tears, either. No one wants to know those old things.”
“I came here, didn’t I?”
“You are on Karma’s side.”
“I am Karma’s failsafe. If she fails, it is my job to make it right. “
Gurung snorted. “Karma never fails. You are a straw man.”
“So take a chance, Bhan Gurung. Let me count for something. Tell me why they cried.”
“Fine,” Gurung said. “It is a short story. Not remarkable. When I was tried, I admitted my guilt readily. As you said, there was no doubt. I was appointed a military lawyer, but I told him to stay home. At the tribunal, I waived my defense and accepted all of the prosecutor’s evidence as truth. No cross-examination, no questions.
“Suspecting a ploy, they asked me if I would plead insanity, and I said no, I had been and was still perfectly sane. In fact I was willing to sign an affidavit to that effect. Puzzled, they asked finally if I would plead for leniency, given my exemplary record. I said no. I requested death by firing squad, at their earliest convenience. I then thanked them for their time, saluted, and stood down from the dock. It was done in ten minutes, the shortest trial in the history of the tribunal. Still they were not satisfied. As a parting shot, one of them held my collar and asked me why. Why, man, did you kill so many people?
“It was the first time anyone had asked why. I asked if they had time to hear a story. I assured them it would have no bearing on my plea or the verdict. They looked at each other, and, to a man, said yes.
“So I told them the story of the businessman Doje, who was rich beyond measure. He bought cheap and sold high, isn’t that business? He accrued great wealth doing this, and wasn’t that a virtue? He sold people, also. It was the time when microclimate equilibrium was up for grabs, and PMDs were just getting started, so pretty soon it was obvious that if you had enough people, your city or town or whatever would win the nanotech battle. Survival. All of a sudden, cities wanted refugees, all those little rich communities that had walled themselves in, they realized they didn’t have enough warm bodies to run their microclimes. The math was getting better, and the AIs could tell you to an exact number what population you needed to be viable. So, brokers like Doje started shifting migrants around, and when the spring ran dry, they started snatching them off the streets and selling them.
“It accelerated before KD1. He shifted five thousand in that last month alone, sold them to some failed town in America, and they all died a month later, because the numbers still weren’t right. I guess he figured once Karma came online all of this would stop. Because he didn’t give a shit, he did three thousand more, and this time there weren’t enough people in the villages, so he just started grabbing them right here, off the streets. There were food riots already, no one in charge, it was easy.”
“And the properties he bought?”
“Wartime profiteering,” Gurung said. “It was win-win for him. He’d auction off some small landholder’s entire family, take their house, fake the documentation, and then strike their name off the census altogether. Men, women, children, babies, grandmothers, uncles, aunts, he’d sell the whole lot, and take whatever they had. Double the profit. No one asked questions, people were moving around all the time, according to whim or rumor.”
“Your family?”
“All gone. Sold. Thirty-two of them. Dead somewhere. My kaka, my oldest uncle, he didn’t even make it out of the city, he died in the sky, they eventually dumped his body from the plane somewhere over the Kanchenjunga. I was gone in the army, they missed me somehow. Or maybe Doje didn’t care. What could one man do, anyway, a simple soldier? That tower he asked for, that your Karma gave him? That used to be a two-story house before. Three bedrooms upstairs, and a big kitchen on the ground floor. Big wooden table from a single tree. You could fit a lot of people around it.”
“Yours?”
Gurung looked at the ground.
“And now you’ve come back to tear it all down,” Hamilcar said. “Everything bad and everything good. Just burn it all.”
“Maybe I should have died. I wanted to. Karma even fucked that up,” Gurung said.
“Maybe you should have,” said Hamilcar Pande, failsafe.