Issue 26, March 2017

© Wyrm Publishing, 2017
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forever-magazine.com

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the March 2017 issue of Forever Magazine!

At the end of my first month of self-employment, I have a cold that is making it difficult for me to get anything done. On a good day, any sort of writing is taxing, but with a head cold, it's near-impossible. I really should be doing these earlier in the month to avoid these issues, but I’ve been swept up in my new-found ability to work on languishing projects. Even with the cold, I’ve been more productive this month than I have been in ages. I’m getting the house back in order and excited about some new projects my new career has made available to me. Still too early to talk about them though and besides, I should really get back in bed and rest.

Until next month . . .

-Neil

The Little Goddess

Ian McDonald

I remember the night I became a goddess.

The men collected me from the hotel at sunset. I was light-headed with hunger, for the child-assessors said I must not eat on the day of the test. I had been up since dawn; the washing and dressing and making up were a long and tiring business. My parents bathed my feet in the bidet. We had never seen such a thing before and that seemed the natural use for it. None of us had ever stayed in a hotel. We thought it most grand, though I see now that it was a budget tourist chain. I remember the smell of onions cooking in ghee as I came down in the elevator. It smelled like the best food in the world.

I know the men must have been priests but I cannot remember if they wore formal dress. My mother cried in the lobby; my father’s mouth was pulled in and he held his eyes wide, in that way that grown-ups do when they want to cry but cannot let tears be seen. There were two other girls for the test staying in the same hotel. I did not know them; they were from other villages where the devi could live. Their parents wept unashamedly. I could not understand it; their daughters might be goddesses.

On the street, rickshaw drivers and pedestrians hooted and waved at us with our red robes and third eyes on our foreheads. The devi, the devi look! Best of all fortune! The other girls held on tight to the men’s hands. I lifted my skirts and stepped into the car with the darkened windows.

They took us to the Hanumandhoka. Police and machines kept the people out of the Durbar Square. I remember staring long at the machines, with their legs like steel chickens’ and naked blades in their hands. The King’s Own fighting machines. Then I saw the temple and its great roofs sweeping up and up and up into the red sunset and I thought for one instant the upturned eaves were bleeding.

The room was long and dim and stuffily warm. Low evening light shone in dusty rays through cracks and slits in the carved wood; so bright it almost burned. Outside you could hear the traffic and the bustle of tourists. The walls seemed thin but at the same time kilometers thick. Durbar Square was a world away. The room smelled of brassy metal. I did not recognize it then but I know it now as the smell of blood. Beneath the blood was another smell, of time piled thick as dust. One of the two women who would be my guardians if I passed the test told me the temple was five hundred years old. She was a short, round woman with a face that always seemed to be smiling, but when you looked closely you saw it was not. She made us sit on the floor on red cushions while the men brought the rest of the girls. Some of them were crying already. When there were ten of us the two women left and the door was closed. We sat for a long time in the heat of the long room. Some of the girls fidgeted and chattered but I gave all my attention to the wall carvings and soon I was lost. It has always been easy for me to lose myself; in Shakya I could disappear for hours in the movement of clouds across the mountain, in the ripple of the grey river far below, and the flap of the prayer banner in the wind. My parents saw it as a sign of my inborn divinity, one of the thirty-two that mark those girls in whom the goddess may dwell.

In the failing light I read the story of Jayaprakash Malla playing dice with the devi Taleju Bhawani who came to him in the shape of a red snake and left with the vow that she would only return to the Kings of Kathmandu as a virgin girl of low caste, to spite their haughtiness. I could not read its end in the darkness, but I did not need to. I was its end, or one of the other nine low-caste girls in the god-house of the devi.

Then the doors burst open wide and firecrackers exploded and through the rattle and smoke red demons leaped into the hall. Behind them men in crimson beat pans and clappers and bells. At once two of the girls began to cry and the two women came and took them away. But I knew the monsters were just silly men. In masks. These were not even close to demons. I have seen demons, after the rain clouds when the light comes low down the valley and all the mountains leap up as one. Stone demons, kilometers high. I have heard their voices, and their breath does not smell like onions. The silly men danced close to me, shaking their red manes and red tongues, but I could see their eyes behind the painted holes and they were afraid of me.

Then the door banged open again with another crash of fireworks and more men came through the smoke. They carried baskets draped with red sheets. They set them in front of us and whipped away the coverings. Buffalo heads, so freshly struck off the blood was bright and glossy. Eyes rolled up, lolling tongues still warm, noses still wet. And the flies, swarming around the severed neck. A man pushed a basket towards me on my cushion as if it were a dish of holy food. The crashing and beating outside rose to a roar, so loud and metallic it hurt. The girl from my own Shakya village started to wail; the cry spread to another and then another, then a fourth. The other woman, the tall pinched one with a skin like an old purse, came in to take them out, carefully lifting her gown so as not to trail it in the blood. The dancers whirled around like flames and the kneeling man lifted the buffalo head from the basket. He held it up in my face, eye to eye, but all I thought was that it must weigh a lot; his muscles stood out like vines, his arm shook. The flies looked like black jewels. Then there was a clap from outside and the men set down the heads and covered them up with their cloths and they left with the silly demon men whirling and leaping around them.

There was one other girl left on her cushion now. I did not know her. She was of a Vajryana family from Niwar down the valley. We sat a long time, wanting to talk but not knowing if silence was part of the trial. Then the door opened a third time and two men led a white goat into the devi hall. They brought it right between me and the Niwari girl. I saw its wicked, slotted eye roll. One held the goat’s tether, the other took a big ceremonial kukri from a leather sheath. He blessed it and with one fast strong stroke sent the goat’s head leaping from its body.

I almost laughed, for the goat looked so funny, its body not knowing where its head was, the head looking around for the body and then the body realizing that it had no head and going down with a kick, and why was the Niwari girl screaming, couldn’t she see how funny it was, or was she screaming because I saw the joke and she was jealous of that? Whatever her reason, smiling woman and weathered woman came and took her very gently away and the two men went down on their knees in the spreading blood and kissed the wooden floor. They lifted away the two parts of the goat. I wished they hadn’t done that. I would have liked someone with me in the big wooden hall. But I was on my own in the heat and the dark and then, over the traffic, I heard the deep-voiced bells of Kathmandu start to swing and ring. For the last time the doors opened and there were the women, in the light.

“Why have you left me all alone?” I cried. “What have I done wrong?”

“How could you do anything wrong, goddess?” said the old, wrinkled woman who, with her colleague, would become my mother and father and teacher and sister. “Now come along with us and hurry. The King is waiting.”

Smiling Kumarima and Tall Kumarima (as I would now have to think of them) took a hand each and led me, skipping, from the great looming Hanuman temple. A road of white silk had been laid from the foot of the temple steps to a wooden palace close by. The people had been let into the square and they pressed on either side of the processional way, held back by the police and the King’s robots. The machines held burning torches in their grasping hands. Fire glinted from their killing blades. There was great silence in the dark square.

“Your home, goddess,” said Smiling Kumarima, bending low to whisper in my ear. “Walk the silk, devi. Do not stray off it. I have your hand, you will be safe with me.”

I walked between my Kumarimas, humming a pop tune I had heard on the radio at the hotel. When I looked back I saw that I had left two lines of bloody footprints.

You have no caste, no village, no home. This palace is your home, and who would wish for any other? We have made it lovely for you, for you will only leave it six times a year. Everything you need is here within these walls.

You have no mother or father. How can a goddess have parents? Nor have you brothers and sisters. The King is your brother, the kingdom your sister. The priests who attend on you, they are nothing. We your Kumarimas are less than nothing. Dust, dirt, a tool. You may say anything and we must obey it.

As we have said, you will leave the palace only six times a year. You will be carried in a palanquin. Oh, it is a beautiful thing, carved wood and silk. Outside this palace you shall not touch the ground. The moment you touch the ground, you cease to be divine.

You will wear red, with your hair in a topknot and your toe- and fingernails painted. You will carry the red tilak of Siva on your forehead. We will help you with your preparations until they become second nature.

You will speak only within the confines of your palace, and little even then. Silence becomes the Kumari. You will not smile or show any emotion.

You will not bleed. Not a scrape, not a scratch. The power is in the blood and when the blood leaves, the devi leaves. On the day of your first blood, even one single drop, we will tell the priest and he will inform the King that the goddess has left. You will no longer be divine and you will leave this palace and return to your family. You will not bleed.

You have no name. You are Taleju, you are Kumari. You are the goddess.

These instructions my two Kumarimas whispered to me as we walked between kneeling priests to the King in his plumed crown of diamonds and emeralds and pearls. The King namasted and we sat side by side on lion thrones and the long hall throbbed to the bells and drums of Durbar Square. I remember thinking that a King must bow to me but there are rules even for goddesses.

Smiling Kumarima and Tall Kumarima. I draw Tall Kumarima in my memory first, for it is right to give pre-eminence to age. She was almost as tall as a Westerner and thin as a stick in a drought. At first I was scared of her. Then I heard her voice and could never be scared again; her voice was kind as a singing bird. When she spoke you felt you now knew everything. Tall Kumarima lived in a small apartment above a tourist shop on the edge of Durbar Square. From her window she could see my Kumari Ghar, among the stepped towers of the dhokas. Her husband had died of lung cancer from pollution and cheap Indian cigarettes. Her two tall sons were grown and married with children of their own, older than me. In that time she had mothered five Kumari Devis before me.

Next I remember Smiling Kumarima. She was short and round and had breathing problems for which she used inhalers, blue and brown. I would hear the snake hiss of them on days when Durbar Square was golden with smog. She lived out in the new suburbs up on the western hills, a long journey even by the royal car at her service. Her children were twelve, ten, nine, and seven. She was jolly and treated me like her fifth baby, the young favorite, but I felt even then that, like the demondancing-men, she was scared of me. Oh, it was the highest honor any woman could hope for, to be the mother of the goddess—so to speak—though you wouldn’t think it to hear her neighbors in the unit, shutting yourself away in that dreadful wooden box, and all the blood, medieval, medieval, but they couldn’t understand. Somebody had to keep the king safe against those who would turn us into another India, or worse, China; someone had to preserve the old ways of the divine kingdom. I understood early that difference between them. Smiling Kumarima was my mother out of duty. Tall Kumarima from love.

I never learned their true names. Their rhythms and cycles of shifts waxed and waned through the days and nights like the faces of the moon. Smiling Kumarima once found me looking up through the lattice of a jali screen at the fat moon on a rare night when the sky was clear and healthy and shouted me away, don’t be looking at that thing, it will call the blood out of you, little devi, and you will be the devi no more.

Within the wooden walls and iron rules of my Kumari Ghar, years become indistinguishable, indistinct. I think now I was five when I became Taleju Devi. The year, I believe, was 2034. But some memories break the surface, like flowers through snow.

Monsoon rain on the steep-sloped roofs, water rushing and gurgling through the gutters, and the shutter that every year blew loose and rattled in the wind. We had monsoons, then. Thunder demons in the mountains around the city, my room flash lit with lightning. Tall Kumarima came to see if I needed singing to sleep but I was not afraid. A goddess cannot fear a storm.

The day I went walking in the little garden, when Smiling Kumarima let out a cry and fell at my feet on the grass and the words to tell her to get up, not to worship me were on my lips when she held, between thumb and forefinger, twisting and writhing and trying to find a place for its mouth to seize: a green leech.

The morning Tall Kumarima came to tell me people had asked me to show myself. At first I had thought it wonderful that people would want to come and look at me on my little jharoka balcony in my clothes and paint and jewels. Now I found it tiresome; all those round eyes and gaping mouths. It was a week after my tenth birthday. I remember Tall Kumarima smiled but tried not to let me see. She took me to the jharoka to wave to the people in the court and I saw a hundred Chinese faces upturned to me, then the high, excited voices. I waited and waited but two tourists would not go away. They were an ordinary couple, dark local faces, country clothes.

“Why are they keeping us waiting?” I asked.

“Wave to them,” Tall Kumarima urged. “That is all they want.” The woman saw my lifted hand first. She went weak and grabbed her husband by the arm. The man bent to her, then looked up at me. I read many emotions on that face; shock, confusion, recognition, revulsion, wonder, hope. Fear. I waved and the man tugged at his wife, look, look up. I remember that against all the laws, I smiled. The woman burst into tears. The man made to call out but Tall Kumarima hastened me away.

“Who were those funny people?” I asked. “They were both wearing very white shoes.”

“Your mother and father,” Tall Kumarima said. As she led me down the Durga corridor with the usual order not to brush my free hand along the wooden walls for fear of splinters, I felt her grip tremble.

That night I dreamed the dream of my life, that is not a dream but one of my earliest experiences, knocking and knocking and knocking at the door of my remembering. This was a memory I would not admit in daylight, so it must come by night, to the secret door.

I am in the cage over a ravine. A river runs far below, milky with mud and silt, foaming cream over the boulders and slabs sheared from the mountainsides. The cable spans the river from my home to the summer grazing and I sit in the wire cage used to carry the goats across the river. At my back is the main road, always loud with trucks, the prayer banners and Kinley bottled water sign of my family’s roadside tea-house. My cage still sways from my uncle’s last kick. I see him, arms and legs wrapped around the wire, grinning his gap-toothed grin. His face is summer-burned brown, his hands cracked and stained from the trucks he services. Oil engrained in the creases. He wrinkles up his nose at me and unhooks a leg to kick my cage forward on its pulley-wheel. Pulley sways cable sways mountains, sky and river sway but I am safe in my little goat-cage. I have been kicked across this ravine many times. My uncle inches forward. Thus we cross the river, by kicks and inches.

I never see what strikes him—some thing of the brain perhaps, like the sickness Lowlanders get when they go up to the high country. But the next I look my uncle is clinging to the wire by his right arm and leg. His left arm and leg hang down, shaking like a cow with its throat cut, shaking the wire and my little cage. I am three years old and I think this is funny, a trick my uncle is doing just for me, so I shake back, bouncing my cage, bouncing my uncle up and down, up and down. Half his body will not obey him and he tries to move forward by sliding his leg along, like this, jerk his hand forward quick so he never loses grip of the wire, and all the while bouncing up and down, up and down. Now my uncle tries to shout but his words are noise and slobber because half his face is paralyzed. Now I see his fingers lose their grip on the wire. Now I see him spin round and his hooked leg come free. Now he falls away, half his body reaching, half his mouth screaming. I see him fall, I see him bounce from the rocks and cartwheel, a thing I have always wished I could do. I see him go into the river and the brown water swallow him.

My older brother came out with a hook and a line and hauled me in. When my parents found I was not shrieking, not a sob or a tear or even a pout, that was when they knew I was destined to become the goddess. I was smiling in my wire cage.

I remember best the festivals, for it was only then that I left the Kumari Ghar. Dasain, at the end of summer, was the greatest. For eight days the city ran red. On the final night I lay awake listening to the voices in the square flow together into one roar, the way I imagined the sea would sound, the voices of the men gambling for the luck of Lakshmi, devi of wealth. My father and uncles had gambled on the last night of Dasam. I remember I came down and demanded to know what all the laughing was about and they turned away from their cards and really laughed. I had not thought there could be so many coins in the world as there were on that table but it was nothing compared to Kathmandu on the eighth of Dasain. Smiling Kumarima told me it took some of the priests all year to earn back what they lost. Then came the ninth day, the great day and I sailed out from my palace for the city to worship me.

I traveled on a litter carried by forty men strapped to bamboo poles as thick as my body. They went gingerly, testing every step, for the streets were slippery. Surrounded by gods and priests and saddhus mad with holiness, I rode on my golden throne. Closer to me than any were my Kumarimas, my two Mothers, so splendid and ornate in their red robes and headdresses and make-up they did not look like humans at all. But Tall Kumarima’s voice and Smiling Kumarima’s smile assured me as I rode with Hanuman and Taleju through the cheering and the music and the banners bright against the blue sky and the smell I now recognized from the night I became a goddess, the smell of blood.

That Dasain the city received me as never before. The roar of the night of Lakshmi continued into the day. As Taleju Devi I was not supposed to notice anything as low as humans but out of the corners of my painted eyes I could see beyond the security robots stepping in time with my bearers, and the streets radiating out from the stupa of Chhetrapati were solid with bodies. They threw jets and gushes of water from plastic bottles up into the air, glittering, breaking into little rainbows, raining down on them, soaking them, but they did not care. Their faces were crazy with devotion.

Tall Kumarima saw my puzzlement and bent to whisper.

“They do puja for the rain. The monsoon has failed a second time, devi.”

As I spoke, Smiling Kumarima fanned me so no one would see my lips move. “We don’t like the rain,” I said firmly.

“A goddess cannot do only what she likes,” Tall Kumarima said. “It is a serious matter. The people have no water. The rivers are running dry.”

I thought of the river that ran far down deep below the house where I was born, the water creamy and gushing and flecked with yellow foam. I saw it swallow my uncle and could not imagine it ever becoming thin, weak, hungry.

“So why do they throw water then?” I asked.

“So the devi will give them more,” Smiling Kumarima explained. But I could not see the sense in that even for goddesses and I frowned, trying to understand how humans were and so I was looking right at him when he came at me.

He had city-pale skin and hair parted on the left that flopped as he dived out of the crowd. He moved his fists to the collar of his diagonally striped shirt and people surged away from him. I saw him hook his thumbs into two loops of black string. I saw his mouth open in a great cry. Then the machine swooped and I saw a flash of silver. The young man’s head flew up into the air. His mouth and eyes went round: from a cry to an oh! The King’s Own machine had sheathed its blade, like a boy folding a knife, before the body, like that funny goat in the Hanumandhoka, realized it was dead and fell to the ground. The crowd screamed and tried to get away from the headless thing. My bearers rocked, swayed, uncertain where to go, what to do. For a moment I thought they might drop me.

Smiling Kumarima let out little shrieks of horror, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” My face was spotted with blood.

“It’s not hers,” Tall Kumarima shouted. “It’s not hers!” She moistened a handkerchief with a lick of saliva. She was gently wiping the young man’s blood from my face when the Royal security in their dark suits and glasses arrived, beating through the crowd. They lifted me, stepped over the body and carried me to the waiting car.

“You smudged my make-up,” I said to the Royal guard as the car swept away. Worshippers barely made it out of our way in the narrow alleys.

Tall Kumarima came to my room that night. The air was loud with helicopters, quartering the city for the plotters. Helicopters, and machines like the King’s Own robots, that could fly and look down on Kathmandu with the eyes of a hawk. She sat on my bed and laid a little transparent blue box on the red and gold embroidered coverlet. In it were two pale pills.

“To help you sleep.”

I shook my head. Tall Kumarima folded the blue box into the sleeve of her robe.

“Who was he?”

“A fundamentalist. A karsevak. A foolish, sad young man.”

“A Hindu, but he wanted to hurt us.”

“That is the madness of it, devi. He and his kind think our kingdom has grown too western, too far from its roots and religious truths.”

“And he attacks us, the Taleju Devi. He would have blown up his own goddess, but the machine took his head. That is almost as strange as people throwing water to the rain.”

Tall Kumarima bowed her head. She reached inside the sash of her robe and took out a second object which she set on my heavy cover with the same precise care as she had the sleeping pills. It was a light, fingerless glove, for the right hand; clinging to its back was a curl of plastic shaped like a very very tiny goat fetus.

“Do you know what this is?”

I nodded. Every devotee doing puja in the streets seemed to own one, right hands held up to snatch my image. A palmer.

“It sends messages into your head,” I whispered.

“That is the least of what it can do, devi. Think of it like your jharoka, but this window opens onto the world beyond Durbar Square, beyond Kathmandu and Nepal. It is an aeai, an artificial intelligence, a thinking-thing, like the machines up there, but much cleverer than them. They are clever enough to fly and hunt and not much else, but this aeai can tell you anything you want to know. All you have to do is ask. And there are things you need to know, devi. You will not be Kumari forever. The day will come when you will leave your palace and go back to the world. I have seen them before you.” She reached out to take my face between her hands, then drew back. “You are special, my devi, but the kind of special it takes to be Kumari means you will find it hard in the world. People will call it a sickness. Worse than that, even . . . ”

She banished the emotion by gently fitting the fetus-shaped receiver behind my ear. I felt the plastic move against my skin, then Tall Kumarima slipped on the glove, waved her hand in a mudra and I heard her voice inside my head. Glowing words appeared in the air between us, words I had been painstakingly taught to read by Tall Kumarima.

Don’t let anyone find it, her dancing hand said. Tell no one, not even Smiling Kumarima. I know you call her that, but she would not understand. She would think it was unclean, a pollution. In some ways, she is not so different from that man who tried to harm you. Let this be our secret, just you and me.

Soon after, Smiling Kumarima came to look in on me and check for fleas, but I pretended to be asleep. The glove and the fetus-thing were hidden under my pillow. I imagined them talking to me through the goose down and soft soft cotton, sending dreams while the helicopters and hunting robots wheeled in the night above me. When the latch on her door clicked too, I put on the glove and earhook and went looking for the lost rain. I found it one hundred and fifty kilometers up, through the eye of a weather aeai spinning over east India. I saw the monsoon, a coil of cloud like a cat’s claw hooking up across the sea. There had been cats in the village; suspicious things lean on mice and barley. No cat was permitted in the Kumari Ghar. I looked down on my kingdom but I could not see a city or a palace or me down here at all. I saw mountains, white mountains ridged with grey and blue ice. I was goddess of this. And the heart went out of me, because it was nothing, a tiny crust of stone on top of that huge world that hung beneath it like the full teat of a cow, rich and heavy with people and their brilliant cities and their bright nations. India, where our gods and names were born.

Within three days the police had caught the plotters and it was raining. The clouds were low over Kathmandu. The color ran from the temples in Durbar Square but people beat tins and metal cups in the muddy streets calling praise on the Taleju Devi.

“What will happen to them?” I asked Tall Kumarima. “The bad men.”

“They will likely be hanged,” she said.

That autumn after the executions of the traitors the dissatisfaction finally poured on to the streets like sacrificial blood. Both sides claimed me: police and demonstrators. Others yet held me up as both the symbol of all that was good with our Kingdom and also everything wrong with it. Tall Kumarima tried to explain it to me but with my world mad and dangerous my attention was turned elsewhere, to the huge, old land to the south, spread out like a jeweled skirt. In such a time it was easy to be seduced by the terrifying depth of its history, by the gods and warriors who swept across it, empire after empire after empire. My kingdom had always been fierce and free but I met the men who liberated India from the Last Empire—men like gods—and saw that liberty broken up by rivalry and intrigue and corruption into feuding states; Awadh and Bharat, the United States of Bengal, Maratha, Karnataka.

Legendary names and places. Shining cities as old as history. There aeais haunted the crowded streets like gandhavas. There men outnumbered women four to one. There the old distinctions were abandoned and women married as far up and men as few steps down the tree of caste as they could. I became as enthralled by their leaders and parties and politics as any of their citizens by the aeai-generated soaps they loved so dearly. My spirit was down in India in that early, hard winter when the police and King’s machines restored the old order to the city beyond Durbar Square. Unrest in earth and the three heavens. One day I woke to find snow in the wooden court; the roofs of the temple of Durbar Square heavy with it, like frowning, freezing old men. I knew now that the strange weather was not my doing but the result of huge, slow changes in the climate. Smiling Kumarima came to me in my jharoka as I watched flakes thick and soft as ash sift down from the white sky. She knelt before me, rubbed her hands together inside the cuffs of her wide sleeves. She suffered badly in the cold and damp.

“Devi, are you not one of my own children to me?”

I waggled my head, not wanting to say yes.

“Devi, have I ever, ever given you anything but my best?”

Like her counterpart a season before, she drew a plastic pillbox from her sleeve, set it on her palm. I sat back on my chair, afraid of it as I had never been afraid of anything Tall Kumarima offered me.

“I know how happy we are all here, but change must always happen. Change in the world, like this snow—unnatural, devi, not right—change in our city. And we are not immune to it in here, my flower. Change will come to you, devi. To you, to your body. You will become a woman. If I could, I would stop it happening to you, devi. But I can’t. No one can. What I can offer is . . . a delay. A stay. Take these. They will slow down the changes. For years, hopefully. Then we can all be happy here together, devi.” She looked up from her deferential half-bow, into my eyes. She smiled. “Have I ever wanted anything but the best for you?”

I held out my hand. Smiling Kumarima tipped the pills into my palm. I closed my fist and slipped from my carved throne. As I went to my room, I could hear Smiling Kumarima chanting prayers of thanksgiving to the goddesses in the carvings. I looked at the pills in my hand. Blue seemed such a wrong color. Then I filled my cup in my little washroom and washed them down, two gulps, down, down.

After that they came every day, two pills, blue as the Lord Krishna, appearing as miraculously on my bedside table. For some reason I never told Tall Kumarima, even when she commented on how fractious I was becoming, how strangely inattentive and absent-minded at ceremonies. I told her it was the devis in the walls, whispering to me. I knew enough of my specialness, that others have called my disorder , that that would be unquestioned. I was tired and lethargic that winter. My sense of smell grew keen to the least odor and the people in my courtyard with their stupid, beaming upturned faces infuriated me. I went for weeks without showing myself. The wooden corridors grew sharp and brassy with old blood. With the insight of demons, I can see now that my body was a chemical battlefield between my own hormones and Smiling Kumarima’s puberty suppressants. It was a heavy, humid spring that year and I felt huge and bloated in the heat, a waddling bulb of fluids under my robes and waxy make-up. I started to drop the little blue pills down the commode. I had been Kumari for seven Dasains.

I had thought I would feel like I used to, but I did not. It was not unwell, like the pills had made me feel, it. was sensitive, acutely conscious of my body. I would lie in my wooden bed and feel my legs growing longer. I became very very aware of my tiny nipples. The heat and humidity got worse, or so it seemed to me.

At any time I could have opened my palmer and asked it what was happening to me, but I didn’t. I was scared that it might tell me it was the end of my divinity.

Tall Kumarima must have noticed that the hem of my gown no longer brushed the floorboards but it was Smiling Kumarima drew back in the corridor as we hurried towards the darshan hall, hesitated a moment, said, softly, smiling as always.

“How you’re growing, devi. Are you still . . . ? No, forgive me, of course . . . . Must be this warm weather we’re having, makes children shoot up like weeds. My own are bursting out of everything they own, nothing will fit them.”

The next morning as I was dressing a tap came on my door, like the scratch of a mouse or the click of an insect.

“Devi?”

No insect, no mouse. I froze, palmer in hand, earhook babbling the early morning news reports from Awadh and Bharat into my head.

“We are dressing.”

“Yes, devi, that is why I would like to come in.”

I just managed to peel off the palmer and stuff it under my mattress before the heavy door swung open on its pivot.

“We have been able to dress ourselves since we were six,” I retorted.

“Yes, indeed,” said Smiling Kumarima, smiling. “But some of the priests have mentioned to me a little laxness in the ritual dress.”

I stood in my red and gold night-robe, stretched out my arms and turned, like one of the trance-dancers I saw in the streets from my litter. Smiling Kumarima sighed.

“Devi, you know as well as I . . . ”

I pulled my gown up over my head and stood unclothed, daring her to look, to search my body for signs of womanhood.

“See?” I challenged.

“Yes,” Smiling Kumarima said, “but what is that behind your ear?”

She reached to pluck the hook. It was in my fist in a flick.

“Is that what I think it is?” Smiling Kumarima said, soft smiling bulk filling the space between the door and me. “Who gave you that?”

“It is ours,” I declared in my most commanding voice but I was a naked twelve-year-old caught in wrongdoing and that commands less than dust.

“Give it to me.”

I clenched my fist tighter.

“We are a goddess, you cannot command us.”

“A goddess is as a goddess acts and right now, you are acting like a brat. Show me.”

She was a mother, I was her child. My fingers unfolded. Smiling Kumarima recoiled as if I held a poisonous snake. To her eyes of her faith, I did.

“Pollution,” she said faintly. “Spoiled, all spoiled.” Her voice rose. “I know who gave you this!” Before my fingers could snap shut, she snatched the coil of plastic from my palm. She threw the earhook to the floor as if it burned her. I saw the hem of her skirt raise, I saw the heel come down, but it was my world, my oracle, my window on the beautiful. I dived to rescue the tiny plastic fetus. I remember no pain, no shock, not even Smiling Kumarima’s shriek of horror and fear as her heel came down, but I will always see the tip of my right index finger burst in a spray of red blood.

The pallav of my yellow sari flapped in the wind as I darted through the Delhi evening crush-hour. Beating the heel of his hand off his buzzer, the driver of the little wasp-colored phatphat cut in between a lumbering truck-train painted with gaudy gods and apsaras and a cream Government Maruti and pulled into the great chakra of traffic around Connaught Place. In Awadh you drive with your ears. The roar of horns and klaxons and cycle-rickshaw bells assailed from all sides at once. It rose before the dawn birds and only fell silent well after midnight. The driver skirted a saddhu walking through the traffic as calmly as if he were wading through the Holy Yamuna. His body was white with sacred ash, a mourning ghost, but his Siva trident burned blood red in the low sun. I had thought Kathmandu dirty, but Delhi’s golden light and incredible sunsets spoke of pollution beyond even that. Huddled in the rear seat of the autorickshaws with Deepti, I wore a smog mask and goggles to protect my delicate eye make-up. But the fold of my sari flapped over my shoulder in the evening wind and the little silver bells jingled.

There were six in our little fleet. We accelerated along the wide avenues of the British Raj, past the sprawling red buildings of old India, toward the glass spires of Awadh. Black kites circled the towers, scavengers, pickers of the dead. We turned beneath cool neem trees into the drive of a government bungalow. Burning torches lit us to the pillared porch. House staff in Rajput uniforms escorted us to the shaadi marquee.

Mamaji had arrived before any of us. She fluttered and fretted among her birds; a lick, a rub, a straightening, an admonition. “Stand up stand up, we’ll have no slumping here. My girls will be the bonniest at this shaadi, here me?” Shweta, her bony, mean-mouthed assistant, collected our smog-masks. “Now girls, palmers ready.” We knew the drill with almost military smartness. Hand up, glove on, rings on, hook behind ear jewelry, decorously concealed by the fringed dupattas draped over our heads. “We are graced with Awadh’s finest tonight. Crème de la crème.” I barely blinked as the resumes rolled up my inner vision. “Right girls, from the left, first dozen, two minutes each then on to the next down the list. Quick smart!” Mamaji clapped her hands and we formed a line. A band struck a medley of musical numbers from Town and Country, the soap opera that was a national obsession in sophisticated Awadh. There we stood, twelve little wives-a-waiting while the Rajput servants hauled up the rear of the pavilion.

Applause broke around us like rain. A hundred men stood in a rough semi-circle, clapping enthusiastically, faces bright in the light from the carnival lanterns.

When I arrived in Awadh, the first thing I noticed was the people. People pushing people begging people talking people rushing past each other without a look or a word or an acknowledgement. I had thought Kathmandu held more people than a mind could imagine. I had not seen Old Delhi. The constant noise, the everyday callousness, the lack of any respect appalled me. You could vanish into that crowd of faces like a drop of rain into a tank. The second thing I noticed was that the faces were all men. It was indeed as my palmer had whispered to me. There were four men for every woman.

Fine men good men clever men rich men, men of ambition and career and property, men of power and prospects. Men with no hope of ever marrying within their own class and caste. Men with little prospect of marrying ever. Shaadi had once been the word for wedding festivities, the groom on his beautiful white horse, so noble, the bride shy and lovely behind her golden veil. Then it became a name for dating agencies: lovely wheat-complexioned Agarwal, U.S.-university MBA, seeks same civil service-military for matrimonials. Now it was a bride-parade, a marriagemarket for lonely men with large dowries. Dowries that paid a hefty commission to the Lovely Girl Shaadi Agency.

The Lovely Girls lined up on the left side of the Silken Wall that ran the length of the bungalow garden. The first twelve men formed up on the right. They plumped and preened in their finery but I could see they were nervous. The partition was no more than a row of saris pinned to a line strung between plastic uprights, fluttering in the rising evening wind. A token of decorum. Purdah. They were not even silk.

Reshmi was first to walk and talk the Silken Wall. She was a Yadav country girl from Uttaranchal, big-handed and big-faced. A peasant’s daughter. She could cook and sew and sing, do household accounts, manage both domestic aeais and human staff. Her first prospective was a weasely man with a weak jaw in government whites and a Nehru cap. He had bad teeth. Never good. Any one of us could have told him he was wasting his shaadi fee, but they namasted to each other and stepped out, regulation three paces between them. At the end of the walk Reshmi would loop back to rejoin the tail of the line and meet her next prospective. On big shaadis like this my feet would bleed by the end of the night. Red footprints on the marble floors of Mamaji’s courtyard haveli.

I stepped out with Ashok, a big globe of a thirty-two-year-old who wheezed a little as he rolled along. He was dressed in a voluminous white kurta, the fashion this season though he was fourth generation Punjabi. His grooming amounted to an uncontrollable beard and oily hair that smelled of too much Dapper Deepak pomade. Even before he namasted I knew it was his first shaadi. I could see his eyeballs move as he read my resume, seeming to hover before him. I did not need to read his to know he was a dataraja, for he talked about nothing but himself and the brilliant things he was doing; the spec of some new protein processor array, the ’ware he was breeding, the aeais he was nurturing in his stables, his trips to Europe and the United States where everyone knew his name and great people were glad to welcome him.

“Of course, Awadh’s never going to ratify the Hamilton Acts—no matter how close Shrivastava Minister is to President McAuley—but if it did, if we allow ourselves that tiny counterfactual—well, it’s the end of the economy: Awadh is IT, there are more graduates in Mehrauli than there are in the whole of California. The Americans may go on about the mockery of a human soul, but they need our Level 2.8s—you know what that is? An aeai can pass as human 99 percent of the time—because everybody knows no one does quantum crypto like us, so I’m not worrying about having to close up the data-haven, and even if they do, well, there’s always Bharat—I cannot see the Ranas bowing down to Washington, not when 25 percent of their forex comes out of licensing deals from Town and Country . . . and that’s hundred percent aeai generated . . . . ”

He was a big affable clown of a man with wealth that would have bought my Palace in Durbar Square and every priest in it and I found myself praying to Taleju to save me from marrying such a bore. He stopped in mid-stride, so abruptly I almost tripped.

“You must keep walking,” I hissed. “That is the rule.”

“Wow,” he said, standing stupid, eyes round in surprise. Couples piled up behind us. In my peripheral vision I could see Mamaji making urgent, threatening gestures. Get him on. “Oh wow. You’re an ex-Kumari.”

“Please, you are drawing attention to yourself.” I would have tugged his arm, but that would have been an even more deadly error.

“What was it like, being a goddess?”

“I am just a woman now, like any other,” I said. Ashok gave a soft harrumph, as if he had achieved a very small enlightenment, and walked on, hands clasped behind his back. He may have spoken to me once, twice before we reached the end of the Silk Wall and parted: I did not hear him, I did not hear the music, I did not even hear the eternal thunder of Delhi’s traffic. The only sound in my head was the high-pitched sound between my eyes of needing to cry but knowing I could not. Fat, selfish, gabbling, Ashok had sent me back to the night I ceased to be a goddess.

Bare soles slapping the polished wood of the Kumari Ghar’s corridors. Running feet, muted shouts growing ever more distant as I knelt, still unclothed for my Kumarima’s inspection, looking at the blood drip from my smashed fingertip onto the painted wood floor. I remember no pain; rather, I looked at the pain from a separate place, as if the girl who felt it were another person. Far far away, Smiling Kumarima stood, held in time, hands to mouth in horror and guilt. The voices faded and the bells of Durbar Square began to swing and toll, calling to their brothers across the city of Kathmandu until the valley rang from Bhaktapur to Trisuli Bazaar for the fall of the Kumari Devi.

In the space of a single night, I became human again. I was taken to the Hanumandhoka—walking this time like anyone else on the paving stones—where the priests said a final puja. I handed back my red robes and jewels and boxes of make-up, all neatly folded and piled. Tall Kumarima had got me human clothes. I think she had been keeping them for some time. The King did not come to say goodbye to me. I was no longer his sister. But his surgeons had put my finger back together well, though they warned that it would always feel a little numb and inflexible.

I left at dawn, while the street cleaners were washing down the stones of Durbar Square beneath the apricot sky, in a smooth-running Royal Mercedes with darkened windows. My Kumarimas made their farewells at the palace gate. Tall Kumarima hugged me briefly to her.

“Oh, there was so much more I needed to do. Well, it will have to suffice.”

I felt her quivering against me, like a bird too tightly gripped in a hand. Smiling Kumarima could not look at me. I did not want her to.

As the car took me across the waking city I tried to understand how it felt to be human. I had been a goddess so long I could hardly remember feeling any other way, but it seemed so little different that I began to suspect that you are divine because people say you are. The road climbed through green suburbs, winding now, growing narrower, busy with brightly decorated buses and trucks. The houses grew leaner and meaner, to roadside hovels and chai-stalls and then we were out of the city—the first time since I had arrived seven years before. I pressed my hands and face to the glass and looked down on Kathmandu beneath its shroud of ochre smog. The car joined the long line of traffic along the narrow, rough road that clung to the valley side. Above me, mountains dotted with goatherd shelters and stone shrines flying tattered prayer banners. Below me, rushing cream-brown water. Nearly there. I wondered how far behind me on this road were those other government cars, carrying the priests sent to seek out little girls bearing the thirty-two signs of perfection. Then the car rounded the bend in the valley and I was home, Shakya, its truck halts and gas station, the shops and the temple of Padma Narteswara, the dusty trees with white rings painted around their trunks and between them the stone wall and arch where the steps led down through the terraces to my house, and in that stone-framed rectangle of sky, my parents, standing there side by side, pressing closely, shyly, against each other as I had last seen them lingering in the courtyard of the Kumari Ghar.

Mamaji was too respectable to show anything like outright anger, but she had ways of expressing her displeasure. The smallest crust of roti at dinner, the meanest scoop of dhal. New girls coming, make room make room—me to the highest, stuffiest room, furthest from the cool of the courtyard pool.

“He asked for my palmer address,” I said.

“If I had a rupee for every palmer address,” Mamaji said. “He was only interested in you as a novelty, dearie. Anthropology. He was never going to make a proposition. No, you can forget right about him.”

But my banishment to the tower was a small punishment for it lifted me above the noise and fumes of the old city. If portions were cut, small loss: the food had been dreadful every day of the almost two years I had been at the haveli. Through the wooden lattice, beyond the water tanks and satellite dishes and kids playing rooftop cricket, I could see the ramparts of the Red Fort, the minarets and domes of the Jami Masjid and beyond them, the glittering glass and titanium spires of New Delhi. And higher than any of them, the flocks of pigeons from the kabooter lofts, clay pipes bound to their legs so they fluted and sang as they swirled over Chandni Chowk. And Mamaji’s worldly wisdom made her a fool this time, for Ashok was surreptitiously messaging me, sometimes questions about when I was divine, mostly about himself and his great plans and ideas. His lilac-colored words, floating in my inner-vision against the intricate silhouettes of my jali screens, were bright pleasures in those high summer days. I discovered the delight of political argument; against Ashok’s breezy optimism, I set my readings of the news channels. From the opinion columns it seemed inevitable to me that Awadh, in exchange for Favored Nation status from the United States of America, would ratify the Hamilton Acts and outlaw all aeais more intelligent than a langur monkey. I told none of our intercourse to Mamaji. She would have forbidden it, unless he made a proposal.

On an evening of pre-monsoon heat, when the boys were too tired even for cricket and the sky was an upturned brass bowl, Mamaji came to my turret on the top of the old merchant’s haveli. Against propriety, the jalis were thrown open, my gauze curtains stirred in the swirls of heat rising from the alleys below.

“Still you are eating my bread.” She prodded my thali with her foot. It was too hot for food, too hot for anything other than lying and waiting for the rain and the cool, if it came at all this year. I could hear the voices of the girls down in the courtyard as they kicked their legs in the pool. This day I would have loved to be sitting along the tiled edge with them but I was piercingly aware that I had lived in the haveli of the Lovely Girl Shaadi Agency longer than any of them. I did not want to be their Kumarima. And when the whispers along the cool marble corridors made them aware of my childhood, they would ask for small pujas, little miracles to help them find the right man. I no longer granted them, not because I feared that I had no power any more—that I never had—but that it went out from me and into them and that was why they got the bankers and television executives and Mercedes salesmen.

“I should have left you in that Nepalese sewer. Goddess! Hah! And me fooled into thinking you were a prize asset. Men! They may have share options and Chow-patty Beach apartments but deep down, they’re as superstitious as any back-country yadav.”

“I’m sorry, Mamaji,” I said, turning my eyes away.

“Can you help it? You were only born perfect in thirty-two different ways. Now you listen, cho chweet. A man came to call on me.”

Men always came calling, glancing up at the giggles and rustles of the Lovely Girls peeping through the jalis as he waited in the cool of the courtyard for Shweta to present him to Mamaji. Men with offers of marriage, men with prenuptial contracts, men with dowry down-payments. Men asking for special, private viewings. This man who had called on Mamaji had come for one of these.

“Fine young man, lovely young man, just twenty. Father’s big in water. He has requested a private rendezvous, with you.”

I was instantly suspicious, but I had learned among the Lovely Girls of Delhi, even more than among the priests and Kumarimas of Kathmandu, to let nothing show on my painted face.

“Me? Such an honor . . . and him only twenty . . . and a good family too, so well connected.”

“He is a Brahmin.”

“I know I am only a Shakya . . . . ”

“You don’t understand. He is a Brahmin.”

There was so much more I needed to do, Tall Kumarima had said as the royal car drove away from the carved wooden gates of the Kumari Ghar. One whisper through the window would have told me everything: the curse of the Kumari.

Shakya hid from me. People crossed the street to find things to look at and do. Old family friends nodded nervously before remembering important business they had to be about. The chai-dhabas gave me free tea so I would feel uncomfortable and leave. Truckers were my friends, bus-drivers and long-haulers pulled in at the biodiesel stations. They must have wondered who was this strange twelve-year-old girl, hanging around truck-halts. I do not doubt some of them thought more. Village by village, town by town the legend spread up and down the north road. Ex-Kumari.

Then the accidents started. A boy lost half his hand in the fan belt of a Nissan engine. A teenager drank bad rakshi and died of alcohol poisoning. A man slipped between two passing trucks and was crushed. The talk in the chai-dhabas and the repair shops was once again of my uncle who fell to his death while the little goddess-to-be bounced in her wire cradle laughing and laughing and laughing.

I stopped going out. As winter took hold over the head-country of the Kathmandu valley, whole weeks passed when I did not leave my room. Days slipped away watching sleet slash past my window, the prayer banners bent almost horizontal in the wind, the wire of the cableway bouncing. Beneath it, the furious, flooding river. In that season the voices of the demons spoke loud from the mountain, telling me the most hateful things about faithless Kumaris who betray the sacred heritage of their devi.

On the shortest day of the year the bride buyer came through Shakya. I heard a voice I did not recognize talking over the television that burbled away day and night in the main room. I opened the door just enough to admit a voice and gleam of firelight.

“I wouldn’t take the money off you. You’re wasting your time here in Nepal. Everyone knows the story, and even if they pretend they don’t believe, they don’t act that way.”

I heard my father’s voice but could not make out his words. The bride buyer said,

“What might work is down south, Bharat or Awadh. They’re so desperate in Delhi they’ll even take Untouchables. They’re a queer lot, those Indians; some of them might even like the idea of marrying a goddess, like a status thing. But I can’t take her, she’s too young, they’ll send her straight back at the border. They’ve got rules. In India, would you believe? Call me when she turns fourteen.”

Two days after my fourteenth birthday, the bride buyer returned to Shakya and I left with him in his Japanese SUV. I did not like his company or trust his hands, so I slept or feigned sleep while he drove down into the lowlands of the Terai. When I woke I was well over the border into my childhood land of wonder. I had thought the bride-buyer would take me to ancient, holy Varanasi, the new capital of the Bharat’s dazzling Rana dynasty, but the Awadhis, it seemed, were less in awe of Hindu superstitions. So we came to the vast, incoherent roaring sprawl of the two Delhis, like twin hemispheres of a brain, and to the Lovely Girl Shaadi Agency. Where the marriageable men were not so twenty-forties sophisticated, at least in the matter of ex-devis. Where the only ones above the curse of the Kumari were those held in even greater superstitious awe: the genetically engineered children known as Brahmins.

Wisdom was theirs, health was theirs, beauty and success and status assured and a wealth that could never be devalued or wasted or gambled away, for it was worked into every twist of their DNA. The Brahmin children of India’s super-elite enjoyed long life—twice that of their parents—but at a price. They were indeed the twice-born, a caste above any other, so high as to be new Untouchables. A fitting partner for a former goddess: a new god.

Gas flares from the heavy industries of Tughluq lit the western horizon. From the top of the high tower I could read New Delhi’s hidden geometries, the necklaces of light around Connaught Place, the grand glowing net of the dead Raj’s monumental capital, the incoherent glow of the old city to the north. The penthouse at the top of the sweeping wing-curve of Narayan Tower was glass; glass walls, glass roof, beneath me, polished obsidian that reflected the night sky. I walked with stars at my head and feet. It was a room designed to awe and intimidate. It was nothing to one who had witnessed demons strike the heads from goats, who had walked on bloody silk to her own palace. It was nothing to one dressed, as the messenger had required, in the full panoply of the goddess. Red robe, red nails, red lips, red eye of Siva painted above my own black kohled eyes, fake-gold headdress hung with costume pearls, my fingers dripped gaudy rings from the cheap jewelry sellers of Kinari Bazaar, a light chain of real gold ran from my nose stud to my ear-ring; I was once again Kumari Devi. My demons rustled inside me.

Mamaji had drilled me as we scooted from old city to new. She had swathed me in a light voile chador, to protect my make-up she said; in truth, to conceal me from the eyes of the street. The girls had called blessings and prayers after me as the phat-phat scuttled out of the haveli’s courtyard.

“You will say nothing. If he speaks to you, you duck your head like a good Hindu girl. If anything has to be said, I will say it. You may have been a goddess but he is a Brahmin. He could buy your pissy palace a dozen times over. Above all, do not let your eyes betray you. The eyes say nothing. They taught you that at least in that Kathmandu, didn’t they? Now come on cho chweet, let’s make a match.”

The glass penthouse was lit only by city-glow and concealed lamps that gave off an uncomfortable blue light. Ved Prakash Narayan sat on a musnud, a slab of unadorned black marble. Its simplicity spoke of wealth and power beneath any ornate jewelry. My bare feet whispered on the star-filled glass. Blue light welled up as I approached the dais. Ved Prakash Narayan was dressed in a beautifully worked long sherwani coat and traditional tight churidar pajamas. He leaned forward into the light and it took every word of control Tall Kumarima had ever whispered to me to hold the gasp.

A ten-year-old boy sat on the throne of the Mughal Emperor.

Live twice as long, but age half as fast. The best deal Kolkata’s genetic engineers could strike with four million years of human DNA. A child-husband for a once-child goddess. Except this was no child. In legal standing, experience, education, taste, and emotions, this was a twenty-year-old man, every way except the physical.

His feet did not touch the floor.

“Quite, quite extraordinary.” His voice was a boy’s. He slipped from his throne, walked around me, studying me as if I were an artifact in a museum. He was a head shorter than me. “Yes, this is indeed special. What is the settlement?”

Mamaji’s voice from the door named a number. I obeyed my training and tried not to catch his eye as he stalked around me.

“Acceptable. My man will deliver the prenuptial before the end of the week. A goddess. My goddess.”

Then I caught his eyes and I saw where all his missing years were. They were blue, alien blue, and colder than any of the lights of his tower-top palace.

These Brahmins are worse than any of us when it comes to social climbing, Ashok messaged me in my aerie atop the shaadi haveli, prison turned bridal boudoir. Castes within castes within castes. His words hung in the air over the hazy ramparts of the red fort before dissolving into the dashings of the musical pigeons. Your children will be blessed.

Until then I had not thought about the duties of a wife with a ten-year-old boy.

On a day of staggering heat I was wed to Ved Prakash Narayan in a climate-control bubble on the manicured green before Emperor Humayun’s tomb. As on the night I was introduced, I was dressed as Kumari. My husband, veiled in gold, arrived perched on top of a white horse followed by a band and a dozen elephants with colored patterns worked on their trunks. Security robots patrolled the grounds as astrologers proclaimed favorable auspices and an old-type brahmin in his red cord blessed our union. Rose petals fluttered around me, the proud father and mother distributed gems from Hyderabad to their guests, my shaadi sisters wept with joy and loss, Mamaji sniffed back a tear and vile old Shweta went round hoarding the free and over-flowing food from the buffet. As we were applauded and played down the receiving line, I noticed all the other somber-faced ten-year-old boys with their beautiful, tall foreign wives. I reminded myself who was the child bride here. But none of them were goddesses.

I remember little of the grand durbar that followed except face after face after face, mouth after mouth after mouth opening, making noise, swallowing glass after glass after glass of French champagne. I did not drink for I do not have the taste for alcohol, though my young husband in his raja finery took it, and smoked big cigars too. As we got into the car—the honeymoon was another Western tradition we were adopting—I asked if anyone had remembered to inform my parents.

We flew to Mumbai on the company tilt-jet. I had never before flown in an aircraft. I pressed my hands, still hennaed with the patterns of my mehndi, on either side of the window as if to hold in every fleeting glimpse of Delhi falling away beneath me. It was every divine vision I had ever had looking down from my bed in the Kumari Ghar on to India. This was indeed the true vehicle of a goddess. But the demons whispered as we turned in the air over the towers of New Delhi, you will be old and withered when he is still in his prime.

When the limousine from the airport turned on to Marine Drive and I saw the Arabian Sea glinting in the city-light, I asked my husband to stop the car so I could look and wonder. I felt tears start in my eyes and thought, the same water in it is in you. But the demons would not let me be: you are married to something that is not human.

My honeymoon was wonder upon wonder: our penthouse apartment with the glass walls that opened on sunset over Chowpatty Beach. The new splendid outfits we wore as we drove along the boulevards, where stars and movie-gods smiled down and blessed us in the virtual sight of our palmers. Color, motion, noise, chatter; people and people and people. Behind it all, the wash and hush and smell of the alien sea.

Chambermaids prepared me for the wedding night. They worked with baths and balms, oils and massages, extending the now-fading henna tracery on my hands up my arms, over my small upright breasts, down the manipuraka chakra over my navel. They wove gold ornaments into my hair, slipped bracelets on my arms and rings on my fingers and toes, dusted and powdered my dark Nepali skin. They purified me with incense smoke and flower petals, they shrouded me in veils and silks as fine as rumors. They lengthened my lashes and kohled my eyes and shaped my nails to fine, painted points.

“What do I do? I’ve never even touched a man,” I asked, but they namasted and slipped away without answer. But the older—the Tall Kumarima, as I thought of her—left a small soapstone box on my bridal divan. Inside were two white pills.

They were good. I should have expected no less. One moment I was standing nervous and fearful on the Turkestan carpet with a soft night air that smelled of the sea stirring the translucent curtains, the next visions of the Kama Sutra, beamed into my brain through my golden earhook, swirled up around me like the pigeons over Chandni Chowk. I looked at the patterns my shaadi sisters had painted on the palms of my hands and they danced and coiled from my skin. The smells and perfumes of my body were alive, suffocating. It was as if my skin had been peeled back and every nerve exposed. Even the touch of the barely moving night air was intolerable. Every car horn on Marine Drive was like molten silver dropped into my ear.

I was terribly afraid.

Then the double doors to the robing room opened and my husband entered. He was dressed as a Mughal grandee in a jeweled turban and a long-sleeved pleated red robe bowed out at the front in the manly act.

“My goddess,” he said. Then he parted his robe and I saw what stood so proud.

The harness was of crimson leather intricately inlaid with fine mirror-work. It fastened around the waist and also over the shoulders, for extra security. The buckles were gold. I recall the details of the harness so clearly because I could not take more than one look at the thing it carried. Black. Massive as a horse’s, but delicately up-curved. Ridged and studded. This all I remember before the room unfolded around me like the scented petals of a lotus and my senses blended as one and I was running through the apartments of the Taj Marine Hotel.

How had I ever imagined it could be different for a creature with the appetites and desires of an adult but the physical form of a ten-year-old boy?

Servants and dressers stared at me as I screamed incoherently, grabbing at wraps, shawls, anything to cover my shame. At some tremendous remove I remember my husband’s voice calling Goddess! My Goddess! over and over.

“Schizophrenia is a terribly grating word,” Ashok said. He twirled the stem of a red thornless rose between his fingers. “Old-school. It’s dissociative disorder these days. Except there are no disorders, just adaptive behaviors. It was what you needed to cope with being a goddess. Dissociating. Disjuncting. Becoming you and other to stay sane.”

Night in the gardens of the Dataraja Ashok. Water trickled in the stone canals of the charbagh. I could smell it, sweet and wet. A pressure curtain held the smog at bay; trees screened out Delhi’s traffic. I could even see a few stars. We sat in an open chhatri pavilion, the marble still warm from the day. Set on silver thalis were medjool dates, halva—crisp with flies—folded paan. A security robot stepped into the lights from the Colonial bungalow, passed into shadow. But for it I might have been in the age of the rajas.

Time broken apart, whirring like kabooter wings. Dissociative behavior. Mechanisms for coping. Running along the palm-lined boulevards of Mumbai, shawls clutched around my wifely finery that made me feel more naked than bare skin. I ran without heed or direction. Taxis hooted, phatphats veered as I dashed across crowded streets. Even if I had had money for a phatphat—what need had the wife of a Brahmin for crude cash?—I did not know where to direct it. Yet that other, demonic self must have known, for I found myself on the vast marble concourse of a railway station, a sole mite of stillness among the tens of thousands of hastening travelers and beggars and vendors and staff. My shawls and throws clutched around me, I looked up at the dome of red Raj stone and it was a second skull, full of the awful realization of what I had done.

A runaway bride without even a paisa to her name, alone in Mumbai Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. A hundred trains leaving that minute for any destination but nowhere to go. People stared at me, half Nautch-courtesan, half Untouchable street-sleeper. In my shame, I remembered the hook behind my ear. Ashok, I wrote across the sandstone pillars and swirling ads. Help me!

“I don’t want to be split, I don’t want to be me and other, why can’t I just be one?” I beat the heels of my hands off my forehead in frustration. “Make me well, make me right!” Shards of memory. The white-uniformed staff serving me hot chai in the first-class private compartment of the shatabdi express. The robots waiting at the platform with the antique covered palanquin, to bear me through the Delhi dawn traffic to the green watered geometries of Ashok’s gardens. But behind them all was one enduring image, my uncle’s white fist slipping on the bouncing cable and him falling, legs pedalling air, to the creamy waters of Shakya river. Even then, I had been split. Fear and shock. Laughter and smiles. How else could anyone survive being a goddess?

Goddess. My Goddess.

Ashok could not understand. “Would you cure a singer of his talent? There is no madness, only ways of adapting. Intelligence is evolution. Some would argue that I display symptoms of mild Asperger’s syndrome.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

He twirled the rose so hard the stem snapped.

“Have you thought about what you’re going to do?”

I had thought of little else. The Narayans would not give up their dowry lightly. Mamaji would sweep me from her door. My village was closed to me.

“Maybe for a while, if you could . . . ”

“It’s not a good time . . . Who’s going to have the ear of the Lok Sabha? A family building a dam that’s going to guarantee their water supply for the next fifty years, or a software entrepreneur with a stable of Level 2.75 aeais that the United States government thinks are the sperm of Shaitan? Family values still count in Awadh. You should know.”

I heard my voice say, like a very small girl, “Where can I go?”

The bride-buyer’s stories of Kumaris whom no one would marry and could not go home again ended in the woman-cages of Varanasi and Kolkata. Chinese paid rupees by the roll for an ex-Goddess.

Ashok moistened his lips with his tongue.

“I have someone in Bharat, in Varanasi. Awadh and Bharat are seldom on speaking terms.”

“Oh thank you, thank you . . . ” I went down on my knees before Ashok, clutched his hands between my palms. He looked away. Despite the artificial cool of the charbagh, he was sweating freely.

“It’s not a gift. It’s . . . employment. A job.”

“A job, that’s good, I can do that; I’m a good worker, work away at anything I will; what is it? Doesn’t matter, I can do lit . . . . ”

“There are commodities need transported.”

“What kind of commodities? Oh it doesn’t matter, I can carry anything.”

“Aeais.” He rolled a paan from the silver dish. “I’m not going to wait around for Shrivastava’s Krishna Cops to land in my garden with their excommunication ware.”

“The Hamilton Acts,” I ventured, though I did not know what they were, what most of Ashok’s mumbles and rants meant.

“Word is, everything above level 2.5.” Ashok chewed his lower lip. His eyes widened as the paan curled through his skull.

“Of course, I will do anything I can to help.”

“I haven’t told you how I need you to transport them. Absolutely safe, secure, where no Krishna Cop can ever find them.” He touched his right forefinger to his Third Eye. “Self, and other.”

I went to Kerala and had processors put into my skull. Two men did it on a converted bulk gas carrier moored outside territorial waters. They shaved my long lovely black hair, unhinged my skull and sent robots smaller than the tiniest spider spinning computers through my brain. Their position out beyond the Keralese fast patrol boats enabled them to carry out much secret surgery, mostly for the Western military. They gave me a bungalow and an Australian girl to watch over me while my sutures fused and hormone washes speed-grew my hair back.

Protein chips: only show on the highest resolution scans but no one’ll look twice at you; no one’ll look twice at another shaadi girl down hunting for a husband.

So I sat and stared at the sea for six weeks and thought about what it would be like to drown in the middle of it, alone and lost a thousand kilometers from the nearest hand that might seize yours. A thousand kilometers north in Delhi a man in an Indian suit shook hands with a man in an American suit and announced the Special Relationship that would make Ashok an outlaw.

You know what Krishna Cops are? They hunt aeais. They hunt the people who stable them, and the people who carry them. They don’t care. They’re not picky. But they won’t catch you. They’ll never catch you.

I listened to demons in the swash and run of the big sea on the shore. Demons I now knew were facets of my other self. But I was not afraid of them. In Hinduism, demons are merely the mirrors of the gods. As with men, so with gods; it is the winners who write the history. The universe would look no different had Ravana and his Rakshasas won their cosmic wars.

No one but you can carry them. No one but you has the neurological architecture. No one but you could endure another mind in there.

The Australian girl left small gifts outside my door: plastic bangles, jelly-shoes, rings, and hairslides. She stole them from the shops in town. I think they were her way of saying that she wanted to know me, but was afraid of what I had been, of what the things in my head would make me become. The last thing she stole was a beautiful sheer silk dupatta to cover my ragged hair when she took me to the airport. From beneath it I looked at the girls in business saris talking into their hands in the departure lounge and listened to the woman pilot announce the weather in Awadh. Then I looked out of the phatphat at the girls darting confidently through the Delhi traffic on their scooters and wondered why my life could not be like theirs.

“It’s grown back well.” Ashok knelt before me on my cushions in the chhatri. It was his sacred place, his temple. He raised his palmer-gloved hand and touched his forefinger to the tilak over my third eye. I could smell his breath. Onions, garlic, rancid ghee. “You may feel a little disoriented . . . . ”

I gasped. Senses blurred, fused, melted. I saw heard felt smelled tasted everything as one undifferentiated sensation, as gods and babies sense, wholly and purely. Sounds were colored, light had texture, smells-spoke and chimed. Then I saw myself surge up from my cushions and fall toward the hard white marble. I heard myself cry out. Ashok lunged toward me. Two Ashoks lunged toward me. But it was neither of those. I saw one Ashok, with two visions, inside my head. I could not make shape or sense out of my two seeings, I could not tell which was real, which was mine, which was me. Universes away I heard a voice say help me. I saw Ashok’s houseboys lift me and take me to bed. The painted ceiling, patterned with vines and shoots and flowers, billowed above me like monsoon storm clouds, then blossomed into darkness.

In the heat of the night I woke stark, staring, every sense glowing. I knew the position and velocity of each insect in my airy room that smelled of biodiesel, dust, and patchouli. I was not alone. There was an other under the dome of my skull. Not an awareness, a consciousness; a sense of separateness, a manifestation of myself. An avatar. A demon.

“Who are you?” I whispered. My voice sounded loud and full of bells, like Durbar Square. It did not answer—it could not answer, it was not a sentience—but it took me out into the charbagh water garden. The stars, smudged by pollution, were a dome over me. The crescent moon lay on its back. I looked up and fell into it. Chandra. Mangal. Budh. Guru. Shukra. Shani. Rahu. Ketu. The planets were not points of fight, balls of stone and gas; they had names, characters, loves, hatreds. The twenty-seven Nakshatars spun around my head. I saw their shapes and natures, the patterns of connections that bound the stars into relationships and stories and dramas as human and complex as Town and Country. I saw the wheel of the rashis, the Great Houses, arc across sky, and the whole turning, engines within engines, endless wheels of influence and subtle communication, from the edge of the universe to the center of the earth I stood upon. Planets, stars, constellations; the story of every human life unfolded itself above me and I could read them all. Every word.

All night I played among the stars.

In the morning, over bed-tea, I asked Ashok, “What is it?”

“A rudimentary Level 2.6 A janampatri aeai, does astrology, runs the permutations. It thinks it lives out there, like some kind of space monkey. It’s not very smart, really. Knows about horoscopes and that’s it. Now get that down you and grab your stuff. You’ve a train to catch.”

My reserved seat was in the women’s bogie of the high-speed shatabdi express. Husbands booked their wives on to it to protect them from the attentions of the male passengers who assumed every female was single and available. The few career women chose it for the same reason. My fellow passenger across the table from me was a Muslim woman in a formal business shalwar. She regarded me with disdain as we raced across the Ganga plain at three hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. Little simpering wife-thing.

You would not be so quick to judge if you knew what we really were, I thought. We can look into your life and tell you everything that has, is and will ever happen to you, mapped out in the chakras of the stars. In that night among the constellations my demon and I had flowed into each other until there was no place where we could say aeai ended and I began.

I had thought holy Varanasi would sing to me like Kathmandu, a spiritual home, a city of nine million gods and one goddess, riding through the streets in a phatphat. What I saw was another Indian capital of another Indian state; glass towers and diamond domes and industry parks for the big world to notice, slums and bastis at their feet like sewage pigs. Streets began in this millennium and ended in one three before it. Traffic and hoardings and people people people but the diesel smoke leaking in around the edges of my smog mask carried a ghost of incense.

Ashok’s Varanasi agent met me in the Jantar Mantar, the great solar observatory of Jai Singh; sundials and star spheres and shadow discs like modern sculpture. She was little older than me; dressed in a cling-silk top and jeans that hung so low from her hips I could see the valley of her buttocks. I disliked her at once but she touched her palmer-glove to my forehead in the shadows around Jai Singh’s astrological instruments and I felt the stars go out of me. The sky died. I had been holy again and now I was just meat. Ashok’s girli pressed a roll of rupees into my hand. I barely looked at it. I barely heard her instructions to get something to eat, get a kafi, get some decent clothes. I was bereft. I found myself trudging up the steep stone steps of the great Samrat not knowing where I was who I was what I was doing halfway up a massive sundial. Half a me. Then my third eye opened and I saw the river wide and blue before me. I saw the white sands of the eastern shore and the shelters and dung fires of the sadhus I saw the ghats, the stone river steps, curving away on either side further than the reach of my eyes. And I saw people. People washing and praying cleaning their clothes and offering puja and buying and selling and living and dying. People in boats and people kneeling, people waist deep in the river, people scooping up silver handfuls of water to pour over their heads. People casting handfuls of marigold flowers onto the stream people lighting little mango-leaf diya lamps and setting them afloat, people bringing their dead to dip them in the sacred water. I saw the pyres of the burning ghat, I smelled sandalwood, charring flesh, I heard the skull burst, releasing the soul. I had heard that sound before at the Royal burning ghats of Pashupatinath, when the King’s Mother died. A soft crack, and free. It was a comforting sound. It made me think of home.

In that season I came many times to the city by the Ganga. Each time I was a different person. Accountants, counselors, machine-soldiers, soapi actors, database controllers: I was the goddess of a thousand skills. The day after I saw Awadhi Krishna Cops patrolling the platforms at Delhi station with their security robots and guns that could kill both humans and aeais, Ashok began to mix up my modes of transport. I flew, I trained, I chugged overnight on overcrowded country buses, I waited in chauffeured Mercedes in long lines of brightly decorated trucks at the Awadh—Bharat border. The trucks, like the crack of an exploding skull, reminded me of my kingdom. But at the end was always the rat-faced girli lifting her hand to my tilak and taking me apart again. In that season I was a fabric weaver, a tax consultant, a wedding planner, a soapi editor, an air traffic controller. She took all of them away.

And then the trip came when the Krishna Cops were waiting at the Bharat end as well. By now I knew the politics of it as well as Ashok. The Bharatis would never sign the Hamilton Acts—their multi-billion-rupee entertainment industry depended on aeais—but neither did they want to antagonize America. So, a compromise: all aeais over Level 2.8 banned, everything else licensed and Krishna Cops patrolling the airports and railway stations. Like trying to hold back the Ganga with your fingers.

I had spotted the courier on the flight. He was two rows in front of me; young, wisp of a beard, Star—Asia youth fashion, all baggy and big. Nervous nervous nervous, all the time checking his breast pocket, checking checking checking. A small time badmash, a wannabe dataraja with a couple of specialist 2.85s loaded onto a palmer. I could not imagine how he had made it through Delhi airport security.

It was inevitable that the Varanasi Krishna Cops would spot him. They closed on him as we lined up at passport control. He broke. He ran. Women and children fled as he ran across the huge marble arrivals hall, trying to get to the light, the huge glass wall and the doors and the mad traffic beyond. His fists pounded at air. I heard the Krishna Cops’ staccato cries. I saw them unholster their weapons. Shrieks went up. I kept my head down, shuffled forward. The immigration officer checked my papers. Another shaadi bride on the hunt. I hurried through, turned away toward the taxi ranks. Behind me I heard the arrivals hall fall so shockingly silent it seemed to ring like a temple bell.

I was afraid then. When I returned to Delhi it was as if my fear had flown before me. The city of djinns was the city of rumors. The government had signed the Hamilton Act. Krishna Cops were sweeping house to house. Palmer files were to be monitored. Children’s aeai toys were illegal. US marines were being airlifted in. Prime Minister Shrivastava was about to announce the replacement of the rupee with the dollar. A monsoon of fear and speculation and in the middle of it all was Ashok.

“One final run, then I’m out. Can you do this for me? One final run?”

The bungalow was already half-emptied. The furniture was all packed, only his processor cores remained. They were draped in dustsheets, ghosts of the creatures that had lived there. The Krishna Cops were welcome to them.

“We both go to Bharat?”

“No, that would be too dangerous. You go ahead, I’ll follow when it’s safe.” He hesitated. Tonight, even the traffic beyond the high walls sounded different. “I need you to take more than the usual.”

“How many?”

“Five.”

He saw me shy back as he raised his hand to my forehead.

“Is it safe?”

“Five, and that’s it done. For good.”

“Is it safe?”

“It’s a series of overlays, they’ll share core code in common.”

It was a long time since I had turned my vision inward to the jewels Ashok had strung through my skull. Circuitry. A brain within a brain.

“Is it safe?”

I saw Ashok swallow, then bob his head: a Westerner’s yes. I closed my eyes. Seconds later I felt the warm, dry touch of his finger to my inner eye.

We came to with the brass light of early morning shining through the jali. We were aware we were deeply dehydrated. We were aware that we were in need of slow-release carbohydrate. Our serotonin inhibitor levels were low. The window arch through which the sun beamed was a Mughal true arch. The protein circuits in my head were DPMA one-eight-seven-nine slash omegas, under licence from BioScan of Bangalore.

Everything we looked at gave off a rainbow of interpretations. I saw the world with the strange manias of my new guests: medic, nutritionist, architectural renderer, biochip designer, engineering aeai controlling a host of repair-shop robots. Nasatya. Vaishvanara. Maya. Brihaspati. Tvastri. My intimate demons. This was not other. This was legion. I was a many-headed devi.

All that morning, all afternoon, I fought to make sense of a world that was five worlds, five impressions. I fought. Fought to make us me. Ashok fretted, tugging at his woolly beard, pacing, trying to watch television, check his mails. At any instant Krishna Cop combat robots could come dropping over his walls. Integration would come. It had to come. I could not survive the clamor in my skull, a monsoon of interpretations. Sirens raced in the streets, far, near, far again. Every one of them fired Off a different reaction from my selves.

I found Ashok sitting amongst his shrouded processors, knees pulled up to his chest, arms draped over them. He looked like a big, fat, soft boy, his Mama’s favorite.

Noradrenaline pallor mild hypoglycaemia, fatigue toxins, said Nasatya.

Yin Systems bevabyte quantum storage arrays, said Brihaspati simultaneously.

I touched him on the shoulder. He jerked awake. It was full dark outside, stifling: the monsoon was already sweeping up through the United States of Bengal.

“We’re ready,” I said. “I’m ready.”

Dark-scented hibiscus spilled over the porch where the Mercedes waited.

“I’ll see you in a week,” he said. “In Varanasi.”

“In Varanasi.”

He took my shoulders in his hands and kissed me lightly, on the cheek. I drew my dupatta over my head. Veiled, I was taken to the United Provinces Night Sleeper Service. As I lay in the first class compartment the aeais chattered away inside my head, surprised to discover each other, reflections of reflections.

The chowkidar brought me bed-tea on a silver tray in the morning. Dawn came up over Varanasi’s sprawling slums and industrial parks. My personalized news-service aeai told me that Lok Sabha would vote on ratifying the Hamilton Accords at ten A.M. At twelve, Prime Minister Shrivastava and the United States Ambassador would announce a Most Favored Nation trade package with Awadh.

The train emptied onto the platform beneath the spun-diamond canopy I knew so well. Every second passenger, it seemed, was a smuggler. If I could spot them so easily, so could the Krishna Cops. They lined the exit ramps, more than I had ever seen before. There were uniforms behind them and robots behind the uniforms. The porter carried my bag on his head; I used it to navigate the press of people pouring off the night train. Walk straight, as your Mamaji taught you. Walk tall and proud, like you are walking the Silken Way with a rich man. I drew my dupatta over my head, for modesty. Then I saw the crowd piling up at the ramp. The Krishna Cops were scanning every passenger with palmers.

I could see the badmashs and smuggler-boys hanging back, moving to the rear of the mill of bodies. But there was no escape there either. Armed police backed by riot-control robots took up position at the end of the platform. Shuffle by shuffle, the press of people pushed me toward the Krishna Cops, waving their right hands like blessings over the passengers. Those things could peel back my scalp and peer into my skull. My red case bobbed ahead, guiding me to my cage.

Brihaspati showed me what they would do to the circuits in my head.

Help me! I prayed to my gods. And Maya, architect of the demons, answered me. Its memories were my memories and it remembered rendering an architectural simulation of this station long before robot construction spiders started to spin their nano-diamond web. Two visions of Varanasi station, superimposed. With one difference that might save my life. Maya’s showed me the inside of things. The inside of the platform. The drain beneath the hatch between the rear of the chai-booth and the roof support.

I pushed through the men to the small dead space at the rear. I hesitated before I knelt beside the hatch. One surge of the crowd, one trip, one fall, and I would be crushed. The hatch was jammed shut with dirt. Nails broke, nails tore as I scrabbled it loose and heaved it up. The smell that came up from the dark square was so foul I almost vomited. I forced myself in, dropped a meter into shin-deep sludge. The rectangle of light showed me my situation. I was mired in excrement. The tunnel forced me to crawl but the end of it was promise, the end of it was a semi-circle of daylight. I buried my hands in the soft sewage. This time I did retch up my bed tea. I crept forward, trying not to choke. It was vile beyond anything I had ever experienced. But not so vile as having your skull opened and knives slice away slivers of your brain. I crawled on my hands and knees under the tracks of Varanasi Station, to the light, to the light, to the light, and out through the open conduit into the cess lagoon where pigs and rag-pickers rooted in the shoals of drying human manure.

I washed as clean as I could in the shriveled canal. Dhobi-wallahs beat laundry against stone slabs. I tried to ignore Nasatya’s warnings about the hideous infections I might have picked up.

I was to meet Ashok’s girl on the street of gajras. Children sat in doorways and open shop fronts threading marigolds onto needles. The work was too cheap even for robots. Blossoms spilled from bushels and plastic cases. My phatphat’s tires slipped on wet rose petals. We drove beneath a canopy of gajra garlands that hung from poles above the shop-fronts. Everywhere was the smell of dead, rotting flowers. The phatphat turned into a smaller, darker alley and into the back of a mob. The driver pressed his hand to the horn. The people reluctantly gave him way. The alco-fuel engine whined. We crept forward. Open space, then a police jawan stepped forward to bar our way. He wore full combat armor. Brihaspati read the glints of data flickering across his visor: deployments, communications, an arrest warrant. I covered my head and lower face as the driver talked to him. What’s going on? Some badmash. Some dataraja.

Down the street of gajras, uniformed police led by a plainclothes Krishna Cop burst open a door. Their guns were drawn. In the same breath, the shutters of the jharoka immediately above crashed up. A figure jumped up onto the wooden rail. Behind me, the crowd let out a vast roaring sigh. There he is there the badmash oh look look it’s a girl!

From the folds of my dupatta I saw Ashok’s girli teeter there an instant, then jump up and grab a washing line. It snapped and swung her ungently down through racks of marigold garlands into the street. She crouched a moment, saw the police, saw the crowd, saw me, then turned and ran. The jawan started toward her, but there was another quicker, deadlier. A woman screamed as the robot bounded from the rooftop into the alley. Chrome legs pistoned, its insect head bobbed, locked on. Marigold petals flew up around the fleeing girl but everyone knew she could not escape the killing thing. One step, two step, it was behind her. I saw her glance over her shoulder as the robot unsheathed its blade.

I knew what would happen next. I had seen it before, in the petal-strewn streets of Kathmandu, as I rode my litter among my gods and Kumarimas.

The blade flashed. A great cry from the crowd. The girl’s head bounded down the alley. A great jet of blood. Sacrificial blood. The headless body took one step, two.

I slipped from the phatphat and stole away through the transfixed crowd.

I saw the completion of the story on a news channel at a chai-dhaba by the tank on Scindia ghat. The tourists, the faithful, the vendors and funeral parties were my camouflage. I sipped chai from a plastic cup and watched the small screen above the bar. The sound was low but I could understand well enough from the pictures. Delhi police break up a notorious aeai smuggling ring. In a gesture of Bharati-Awadhi friendship Varanasi Krishna cops make a series of arrests. The camera cut away before the robot struck. The final shot was of Ashok, pushed down into a Delhi police car in plastic handcuffs.

I went to sit on the lowest ghat. The river would still me, the river would guide me. It was of the same substance as me, divinity. Brown water swirled at my beringed toes. That water could wash away all earthly sin. On the far side of the holy river, tall chimneys poured yellow smoke into the sky. A tiny round-faced girl came up to me, offered me marigold gajras to buy. I waved her away. I saw again this river, these ghats, these temples and boats as I had when I lay in my wooden room in my palace in Durbar Square. I saw now the lie Tall Kumarima’s palmer had fed me. I had thought India a jeweled skirt, laid out for me to wear. It was a bride-buyer with an envelope of rupees, it was walking the Silken Way until feet cracked and bled. It was a husband with the body of a child and the appetites of a man warped by his impotence. It was a savior who had always only wanted me for my sickness. It was a young girl’s head rolling in a gutter.

Inside this still-girl’s head, my demons were silent. They could see as well as I that that there would never be a home for us in Bharat, Awadh, Maratha, any nation of India.

North of Nayarangadh the road rose through wooded ridges, climbing steadily up to Mugling where it turned and clung to the side of the Trisuli’s steep valley. It was my third bus in as many days. I had a routine now. Sit at the back, wrap my dupatta round me, look out the window. Keep my hand on my money. Say nothing.

I picked up the first bus outside Jaunpur. After emptying Ashok’s account, I thought it best to leave Varanasi as inconspicuously as possible. I did not need Brihaspati to show me the hunter aeais howling after me. Of course they would have the air, rail, and bus stations covered. I rode out of the Holy City on an unlicensed taxi. The driver seemed pleased with the size of the tip. The second bus took me from Gorakhpur through the dhal fields and banana plantations to Nautanwa on the border. I had deliberately chosen small, out-of-the-way Nautanwa, but still I bowed my head and shuffled my feet as I came up to the Sikh emigration officer behind his tin counter. I held my breath. He waved me through without even a glance at my identity card.

I walked up the gentle slope and across the border. Had I been blind, I would have known at once when I crossed into my kingdom. The great roar that had followed me as close as my own skin fell silent so abruptly it seemed to echo. The traffic did not blare its way through all obstacles. It steered, it sought ways around pedestrians and sacred cows lolling in the middle of the road, chewing. People were polite in the bureau where I changed my Bharati rupees for Nepalese; did not press and push and try to sell me things I did not want in the shop where I bought a bag of greasy samosas; smiled shyly to me in the cheap hotel where I hired a room for the night. Did not demand demand demand.

I slept so deeply that it felt like a fall through endless white sheets that smelled of sky. In the morning the third bus came to take me up to Kathmandu.

The road was one vast train of trucks, winding in and out of the bluffs, looping back on itself, all the while climbing, climbing. The gears on the old bus whined. The engine strove. I loved that sound, of engines fighting gravity. It was the sound of my earliest recollection, before the child-assessors came up a road just like this to Shakya. Trains of trucks and buses in the night. I looked out at the roadside dhabas, the shrines of piled rocks, the tattered prayer banners bent in the wind, the cable-ways crossing the chocolate-creamy river far below, skinny kids kicking swaying cages across the high wires. So familiar, so alien to the demons that shared my skull.

The baby must have been crying for some time before the noise rose above the background hubbub of the bus. The mother was two rows ahead of me, she shushed and swung and soothed the tiny girl but the cries were becoming screams.

It was Nasatya who made me get out of my seat and go to her.

“Give her to me,” I said and there must have been some tone of command from the medical aeai in my voice for she passed me the baby without a thought. I pulled back the sheet in which she was wrapped. The little girl’s belly was painfully bloated, her limbs floppy and waxen.

“She’s started getting colic when she eats,” the mother said but before she could stop me I pulled away her diaper. The stench was abominable; the excrement bulky and pale.

“What are you feeding her?”

The woman held up a roti bread, chewed at the edges to soften it for baby. I pushed my fingers into the baby’s mouth to force it open though Vaishvanara the nutritionist already knew what we would find. The tongue was blotched red, pimpled with tiny ulcers.

“Has this only started since you began giving her solid food?” I asked. The mother waggled her head in agreement. “This child has ceoliac disease,” I pronounced. The woman put her hands to her face in horror, began to rock and wail. “Your child will be fine, you must just stop feeding her bread, anything made from any grain except rice. She cannot process the proteins in wheat and barley. Feed her rice, rice and vegetables and she will brighten up right away.”

The entire bus was staring as I went back to my seat. The woman and her baby got off at Naubise. The child was still wailing, weak now from its rage, but the woman raised a namaste to me. A blessing. I had come to Nepal with no destination, no plan or hope, just a need to be back. But already an idea was forming.

Beyond Naubise the road climbed steadily, switching back and forth over the buttresses of the mountains that embraced Kathmandu. Evening was coming on. Looking back I could see the river of headlights snaking across the mountainside. Where the bus ground around another hairpin bend, I could see the same snake climb up ahead of me in red taillights. The bus labored up a long steep climb. I could hear, everyone could hear, the noise in the engine that should not have been there. Up we crawled to the high saddle where the watershed divided, right to the valley of Kathmandu, left to Pokhara and the High Himalaya. Slower, slower. We could all smell the burning insulation, hear the rattling.

It was not me who rushed to the driver and his mate. It was the demon Trivasti.

“Stop stop at once!” I cried. “Your alternator has seized! You will burn us up.”

The driver pulled into the narrow draw, up against the raw rock. On the offside, trucks passed with millimeters to spare. We got the hood up. We could see the smoke wafting from the alternator. The men shook their heads and pulled out palmers. The passengers piled to the front of the bus to stare and talk.

“No no no, give me a wrench,” I ordered.

The driver stared but I shook my outstretched hand, demanding. Perhaps he remembered the crying baby. Perhaps he was thinking about how long it would take a repair truck to come up from Kathmandu. Perhaps he was thinking about how good it would be to be home with his wife and children. He slapped the monkey wrench into my hand. In less than a minute I had the belt off and the alternator disconnected.

“Your bearings have seized,” I said. “It’s a persistent fault on pre-2030 models. A hundred meters more and you would have burned her out. You can drive her on the battery. There’s enough in it to get you down to Kathmandu.”

They stared at this little girl in an Indian sari, head covered but sleeves of her choli rolled up and fingers greasy with biolube.

The demon returned to his place and it was clear as the darkening sky what I would do now. The driver and his mate called out to me as I walked up beside the line of vehicles to the head of the pass. We ignored them. Passing drivers sounded their multiple, musical horns, offered lifts. I walked on. I could see the top now. It was not far to the place where the three roads divided. Back to India, down to the city, up to the mountains.

There was a chai-dhaba at the wide, oil-stained place where vehicles turned. It was bright with neon signs for American drinks and Bharati mineral water, like something fallen from the stars. A generator chugged. A television burbled familiar, soft Nepali news. The air smelled of hot ghee and biodiesel.

The owner did not know what to make of me, strange little girl in my Indian finery. Finally he said, “Fine night.”

It was. Above the smogs and soots of the valley, the air was magically clear. I could see for a lifetime in any direction. To the west the sky held a little last light. The great peaks of Manaslu and Anapurna glowed mauve against the blue.

“It is,” I said, “oh it is.”

Traffic pushed slowly past, never ceasing on this high crossroads of the world. I stood in the neon flicker of the dhaba, looking long at the mountains and I thought, I shall live there. We shall live in a wooden house close to trees with running water cold from high snow. We shall have a fire and a television for company and prayer banners flying in the wind and in time people will stop being afraid and will come up the path to our door. There are many ways to be divine. There is the big divine, of ritual and magnificence and blood and terror. Ours shall be a little divinity, of small miracles and everyday wonders. Machines mended, programs woven, people healed, homes designed, minds and bodies fed. I shall be a little goddess. In time, the story of me will spread and people will come from all over; Nepalis and foreigners, travelers and hikers and monks. Maybe one day a man who is not afraid. That would be good. But if he does not come, that will be good also, for I shall never be alone, not with a houseful of demons.

Then I found I was running, with the surprised chai-wallah calling, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” after me, running down the side of the slow-moving line of traffic, banging on the doors, “Hi! Hi! Pokhara! Pokhara!” slipping and sliding over the rough gravel, toward the far, bright mountains.

Originally published in Asimov’ Science Fiction, June 2005.

A Strange Loop

T.R. Napper

“In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference” —Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am A Strange Loop

A huge clown, jaws as wide as Irving was tall, about to swallow him whole . . . A woman, black hair with the fringe cut too short, green eye-shadow, skin so smooth it looked real-life airbrushed . . . The woman—what was her name again?—yelling at him, perfect skin creased with contempt . . . a red fireworks blast, neon, frozen into the sky . . . fairy floss and sweat and machine grease in his nostrils and a girl, freckled, staring up at him with tears in her eyes . . . and those sounds, tinny music on a maddening, endless cycle, and the clown, swallowing him, while the woman yelled and the girl watched with sadness.

Irving Kupfermann blinked into consciousness. White room with a white duo, man and woman, standing over him. The woman, young, lips glistening in the bright lights, pressed a paper cup into his hand. “Drink this,” she said.

Irving drank, first sipping, then gulping as the extent of his thirst hit him.

The man looked familiar. He wore a white lab coat and grasped a flexiscreen in both hands, looking down into its green-glowing ideograms. The doctor—Irving was pretty sure that’s what he was—had a full head of silver hair that probably wasn’t real, and a movie star chin that most definitely wasn’t real. The gold of the heavy chain around his wrist: that would be real. The doctor looked forty, but he stank of money. Probably closer to sixty.

Doctor Eduard—the name floated up and popped into Irving’s forebrain—spoke to the nurse. “Potentials for synaptic growth and multiplication high, as are an increased release of kinase A proteins. Emotional response very high; memories appear authentic across all measures. Or the patient believes they are real, in any case.” He enunciated each word clearly, like he expected his audience to savour every single one.

“Yes doctor,” the nurse replied, smiling, as she eased something from the top of Irving’s head—he caught a glimpse of a green neon circle. To his left, coming into view as the nurse moved to one side, was a painting of a tobacco pipe. Underneath it was written: this is not a pipe. Irving furrowed his brow at that.

The doctor looked up at Irving and gave him the perfect imitation of a smile, his pristine white teeth matching the room. “You always bring us a first-class product, Irving.”

Irving grunted and handed the nurse the empty cup.

“Now: do you remember anything of the memory you just sold?”

Irving shook his head. “No. Not really. It’s like a dream. It’s there at the edge of my mind . . . fragments. There was a woman, I think she was angry.”

Doctor Eduard nodded. “Best that you sold it to us then. The key to happiness, Irving, is a bad memory.”

Irving gave a non-committal shrug.

“Those remaining fragments should fade away, and by the time you get home today, they will have decamped completely from your cerebral cortex. But, remember Irving,” said the doctor, finger in the air, “in the unlikely event any of this does come back to you, you must inform us post-haste. It is a violation of mnemonic copyright to remember things you no longer legally own. In such an eventuality we would need you to return here immediately to eliminate the rogue memories.”

“Post-haste,” said Irving. “Indubitably.”

The doctor missed the sarcasm, smiled insincerely, and returned to looking over his flexiscreen.

Irving leaned back into the chair, relieved at the embrace of the soft, real leather against the back of his head. He’d been seated during the procedure, yet still felt exhausted. “How can I know if I’m remembering things I’ve sold?”

“Ah yes, very good question,” said the doctor, returning Irving’s gaze with a supercilious expression that clearly indicated that, in fact, it was a very stupid question. “We have a trace program downloaded from the Kandel-Yu machine into your memory pin. If it picks up a specific neural pattern in your cerebral cortex—a unique grouping we call a memory-print—you will receive a warning on-retina advising you that you have begun to re-consolidate memories under license to us here at Thanks for the Memories. Often this will happen when you are dreaming.”

Irving rubbed at his eye. “You tell me this often, doctor?”

“Very.”

The nurse suppressed a giggle.

Irving nodded at her. “Is she an actual nurse, or are the staff here hired to laugh at you?”

The doctor raised an eyebrow. The nurse retained her smile as she said: “A post-graduate qualification, three-year internship, and a field of five hundred candidates for this position.”

Her response came easy. Irving pushed his unruly hair back from his forehead. “I guess I’ve said that before, as well.”

“Once or twice,” said the doctor, with a smirk. “When you’re in a particularly bad mood. Something, I suspect, related to the experience you just sold to us.”

“Yeah. Yeah, forget it.”

“I was hoping you would,” replied the doctor.

The nurse’s smile widened.

Irving rolled his eyes.

The doctor pulled a vial from the pocket of his coat. “This is Neothebaine. Pour yourself a stiff drink when you get home, and add this before you imbibe. The memory eradication procedure should be sufficient to disrupt the neural print containing the target memory. But this—” the doctor held the vial up, its amber contents catching the light “—will be sure to wipe any remnants clean. You likely will not remember coming here to Thanks for the Memories, and you certainly will not remember either the procedure or this conversation.”

“No problem,” said Irving, and touched the cochlear-glyph implant behind his left ear, fingertip against the small circle of cool steel. “Exo-memory: remind me to drink Doctor Eduard’s date-rape drug when I get home.”

His exo-memory whispered back to him, its tone as flat as the steel of the implant: “Yes, Mister Kupfermann.”

Unperturbed, the doctor typed something into his flexiscreen. “And finally, your compensation has gone through.”

A message appeared on-retina, to Irving’s eyes only, in soft green glowing type:

A deposit of 70,500 dollars has been recorded in your UberCoin account. You’ve done it! You’ve hit your savings target. Next steps:

1) Ask your wife, Ondine Drinkwater, out to dinner to an expensive restaurant

2) At dinner, explain that through your entrepreneurial acumen, you’ve become highly successful

     a) Making sure to avoid mention of your numerous trips to Thanks for the Memories

3) As financial security has always been important to Ondine, it is important that you emphasize both your newfound reliability, and your considerable wealth

4) This will convince her to end your trial separation and let you return home to her and your daughter, Eulalie

Just a glance at the list made him smile. He’d done it. It’d been a long time, it’d been . . . Well, he wasn’t sure how long it had been. None of that mattered now. He was going to be reunited with his wife and daughter.

Irving pushed himself out of the chair and walked out of the room. The doctor was trying to tell him something; he didn’t hear a word the man said. He walked through the expansive, marble reception and stepped out of the large double doors at the front of the building. Irving breathed deeply, smile still on his face, squinting under a hot white sun.

It was time for him to come home.

“Irving.”

He looked up and there she was: Ondine. Purple eye shadow, black hair with the fringe cut too short and that soft, glowing skin. She was underdressed in denim pants and a tight leather jacket, but he didn’t notice that. She was twenty minutes late, but he didn’t think about that, either. All he could think about at that moment was the time, long ago, when he could have leaned over and kissed this beautiful woman, and she would have laughed and let him do so.

She wasn’t laughing now.

“Ondine,” he said, smiling despite the expression on her face. He stood up, dropping the gold-trimmed napkin he’d been playing with, and moved around the table to take her chair out.

“I got it Irving, I got it,” she said, but he pulled it out anyway.

She treated that with a raised eyebrow and half-smile. “I’m, ah, sorry I’m late.” Ondine’s voice was rich, throaty. She could be lead singer in a hard rock band. Or the voice-over for a sexy cartoon character.

“Oh, it’s nothing, nothing. Wine?”

“No,” she said, brusquely. And then, less so: “Not at lunch. I’ve got to get back to work after this.”

“Well—” he grimaced “—you couldn’t make dinner.”

“Be thankful you got lunch,” she said, deadpan.

Something twisted in his chest. “Shall we order, then?”

“Maybe. What’s this about, Irving?” she asked, indicating his clothes with her chin.

He glanced down. The suit was dark-blue, tailor-made, with sharp creases freshly-pressed. He wore a white shirt and smoke-blue tie, set with a silver tie-pin that matched the ring on his pinkie finger. He’d shaved his rough beard off, dabbed on some cologne, and tied his unruly curls back in a short ponytail. The restaurant was none other than The Prince—the most sought-after dining spot in town. Gold-gilded cutlery, waiters in blood-red jackets, white light glinting through crystal chandeliers, and the soft murmurings of the good and great as they smiled fake smiles at each other and crunched hors d’oeuvres between perfectly symmetrical teeth.

“I’m trying to make an impression,” he said.

“You look like an insurance salesman.”

“That wasn’t the impression I was going for.”

“So you’re not trying to sell me something?”

“Just a dream.”

“Oh Irving,” she said. “Spare the schmaltz, buster. It doesn’t suit either of us.” But she smiled as she said it, and the twisting in Irving’s chest loosened a little.

He pointed at her clothes. “Where do you get to work dressed like that? You a roadie now?”

“I work from home, you know that.”

“Doing what?”

Her brows furrowed. “Speech therapist, Irving. Same as always; same as I’ve been doing for the past ten years.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” he lied. “I meant the same sort of speech therapy you used to do.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Right. Sure. The same sort of speech therapy as I always did.”

Irving carefully hid his embarrassment. “And Eulalie—how is she? Still the smartest kid in class?”

Ondine paused, permitting her irritation to ebb. “Yes. Her teacher thinks she’ll be able to skip fourth grade. She . . . ” Ondine trailed off, looked down at her purple-painted nails.

“She?”

She sighed and looked back at him. “She misses you.”

“I miss her too,” he said, and it was the truest thing he’d said in a long time.

Things went well after that. For a little while, anyway.

Ondine agreed that she may as well stay for lunch, as she was there, after all. So they ate. And it was good. He ordered real meat and Ondine said oh no, eyes like circles, but he insisted and they shared a minute steak. They agreed neither of them had eaten meat since they honeymooned in Fiji, and then laughed about getting kicked out of the resort. They’d taken magic mushrooms and—in the throes of a sublime mind-and-body-buzz—broken into the kids” play centre and pasted glitter all over their naked bodies. Ondine had then convinced Irving that they were Moroccan glow worms looking for a burrow. A groundskeeper caught them an hour later, digging a hole in a golf course green with their hands.

Irving excused himself to the bathroom after they’d finished the main. He checked the stalls to make sure he was alone, then put a finger to his implant. “Exo-memory: I want on-retina recall dialled to maximum while I have lunch with Ondine Drinkwater. I don’t want to forget a single detail about our lives together—not a detail. Understood?”

“Understood, Mister Kupfermann,” whispered the implant. “I am required to remind you that you have previously ordered me to keep all memory prompts down to Level One: only in case of emergency or direct request. You said, and I quote, ‘I don’t need that shit haunting me anymore.’”

Irving looked at himself in the mirror. He didn’t recognize the guy in there. The shiny blue suit and the pale, sweaty skin and the ponytail and that ridiculous tie-pin he bought for ten grand at a glittering store full of smug service staff. He looked like a douche. Felt like one, too. The only thing that remained familiar was the nose. Big hook nose that Ondine charitably called ‘Roman.’ Combined with the bags under his eyes he didn’t feel very Roman, right then. He looked like a vulture, picking over the carcass of his marriage.

“Bloody hell,” he said, to himself. “Way to ruin the mood, arsehole.”

“Sorry, Mister Kupfermann?” murmured the implant.

“Nothing, it’s nothing.”

“Mister Kupfermann?”

“What?” he hissed.

“Are you sure you want your exo-memory turned up to maximum?”

He looked away from the mirror. “You heard me. I want to remember everything.”

Dessert came. She had ice-cream; he had coffee, strong and black. Ondine was quiet, biting her bottom lip as she ran her finger slow around the edge of the porcelain bowl. Irving waited for her to say what she wanted to say.

Eventually she did. “So where did all this—” she waved a hand at the room “—come from?”

“Hope, Ondine, it came from hope,” he said, and reached across the table, putting his hand on hers. She didn’t take hers away. “Hope can be the irrational desire for a miracle, despite all evidence to the contrary. But that’s not the sort of hope I have. Mine is based on the reality of what we had together, Ondine, and the concrete steps I’ve taken to reclaim my life. I’m successful now, like you always said I could be. I can be someone you depend on. I’m someone you can build realistic hopes around. All this is a manifestation of that—not an idle promise, but a promise kept, to myself, that I was worthy enough to get you back.”

Ondine was silent for a time, a strange expression on her face. “You been practicing that?”

“No.”

His exo-memory typed: You have been practicing: seven times this morning and eleven times last night. Twelve in front of the mirror, five while walking in a circle around the kitchen table, once while you were on the toilet.

He rubbed his eye, annoyed at the contradictory blurb in the corner of his vision. “Yes. Okay yes, I’ve been practicing.” He looked at her. “How did I do?”

“You did fine.”

“But?”

For the next few weeks, every time he smelled the bitter scent of strong black coffee, his mind would time travel backwards, and he’d see her as she was then. Something alive and real against the forced elegance of the restaurant and the manufactured glamour of its patrons. He would remember every detail: her leather jacket, creased with decades of loving use; her smooth skin a perfection no amount of genetic manipulation could replicate; and the sadness in her eyes as she first realised, and then rejected, his intentions.

“But, Irving,” she said, “I’m happy you’re back on your feet again. Truly happy, I mean that. And if you want to start seeing Eulalie, then I’ll agree to that. Slow at first, with me there, at my place. She wants to see her father again and I want you back in her life.” Ondine sighed. “But you and I, Irving? That’s ancient history. We had a good run. A few good years followed by a couple of terrible ones. It’s how these things end all the time, every day: in bitterness and regret. There’s no hope left for us, just the rubble.”

He gripped her hand harder. “But Ondine. You’re not listening. This restaurant isn’t an accident. This is who I am now. I’m successful, I’m a winner—I’m all those things you wanted me to be.”

She pulled her hand from his. The softness left her voice. “It isn’t about money.”

“Bullshit,” he said, loud enough for heads turn their way. He lowered it again. “Bullshit. It’s all you ever talked about.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is precisely true. Always money: money for the rent, for holidays, organic food, fancy medicine, better schools, better fucking everything. You want me to play it back for you right now? I still have all those memories.”

As he spoke the exo-memory popped up on-retina, taking some of the heat out of his accusations: I have many examples of Ondine criticizing you for other reasons. Would you like me to list them?

Ondine didn’t get angry. Instead she sighed, pushing her two scoops of fifty dollar ice-cream absently with her spoon. “I’m sure you could play back those fights. I remember all that, too. And you’re right, it was wrong of me to put it that way. When you’re angry you reach for the cheap shots, and they were cheap shots. But it was never about that.”

“Then what was it about?”

She looked up from the bowl, her face tinged with regret. “It was about ambition, Irving. We used to dream and plan together, about our family, our careers. But you fell into this rut and never got out. You gave up on nano-tech, neglected your daughter. Me. God Irving—you spent more time betting on weather patterns and drinking gin with your pals down at the bowls club than you ever did on trying to make a career. You were just going through the motions of life, constantly looking over the horizon, waiting for your ship to come in.”

“That’s not true.”

Ondine Drinkwater is correct. She encouraged you on 103 occasions to pursue your career. You spent 2,428 hours researching and betting on weather patterns, whereas you spent 41 hours applying for jobs in the nano-technology field. An image appeared above the words, of Ondine, concerned expression on her face. If he gave his exo-memory the command the image would become a playback of Ondine, from many years before, encouraging him to pursue his career. He didn’t give the command.

The present-day Ondine continued talking, her voice overlapping with the on-retina accusations. “Remember when you won the University Prize for your thesis on nano-technology and desertification? You could have parlayed that into a career—you had some great companies offer you an internship.” She shook her head. “But you said you didn’t want to work for free. You wanted the big bucks, straight away, so you turned them all down.”

He creased his forehead.

Ondine Drinkwater is incorrect about the University Prize. No record of receiving an award for your thesis exists in your exo-memory. Ondine Drinkwater’s recollections of job offers are correct. You rejected job offers from four different companies.

“I never won a university prize.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about, ‘never won?’”

Something itched in his mind. He couldn’t remember it. Unless . . .

“You don’t remember, do you?”

He set his jaw. “I don’t remember because it never happened.”

Ondine sighed through her nose. “It was one of the best nights we ever had, Irving. We got wasted at the reception at the Chancellor’s house; we danced and danced while all the guests just stood around staring at us. Then we snuck off and did it in one of the spare rooms. The Chancellor’s wife found us the next morning, passed out on the bed. You were naked except for a smoking jacket you’d stolen from the Chancellor’s wardrobe.” She shook her head, half-smiling at the memory. “She didn’t even blink. Just told us she was happy someone enjoyed the party, and then cooked us omelettes for breakfast.”

Irving was silent.

“How can you not remember that, Irving? And what did you mean before when you said you still had all those memories of us fighting?”

“I . . . ” He broke eye contact, looked down into the black of his coffee.

She shook her head. “I knew it. I knew it. You’re selling memories aren’t you? That’s what all this—” she dropped her spoon into the ice-cream “—bullshit is. This room filled with wankers, that ridiculous suit. It’s another get rich quick scheme, isn’t it?”

“No. No it’s not another scheme.”

You have previously discussed—on twenty-eight occasions—getting rich quick through selling memories, Mister Kupfermann. Your bank account currently has over fifteen million dollars, which you have claimed, in conversation with others, has come from memory sales. While your exo-memory has no direct recordings of you selling memory, it does have twenty-three instances of you approaching a memory acquisition business. It is possible you had these sections of your memory wiped during the procedure. I have scanned the two years since you separated from Ondine and can find no other possible source of your current wealth.

“Okay,” Irving said, fists clenching against the tabletop. “Okay.” He breathed out slowly. “Okay, yeah, I sold some memories. Just to get ahead. Get my life back together.” He tried to reach for her again, but she jerked her hand away like he’d just offered her a dead rat. “I did it for us, Ondine, for our family.”

“Oh Irving, you and your bullshit. Every scheme was always for the family.” She threw one hand up, exasperated. “I don’t get it. Why would you sell something so good? If your goal was getting back together with me, why would you sell one of the best moments we shared?”

He said: “I don’t know,” but he did know. Even if he couldn’t remember the procedures, he understood the pricing structure behind them perfectly. The most emotionally potent memories always fetched the most money—that and them being unique. Wiping them from one’s own memory, so the rich client was the sole proprietor. “I didn’t see it as selling memories. I saw it as an investment in a long, happy future of new memories. Once we’re back together, I’ll never have to sell another.”

“More bullshit.” She started to get up from her seat. “And I’m done listening to it.”

“Wait.” He got up from his seat as well. “Eulalie—I do want to see our daughter. That’s not bullshit.” As the words came out of his mouth he felt the truth of them, and was relieved.

She rubbed her forehead, but he’d found the right nerve. She sat back down, gingerly, on the edge of the seat.

He took a deep breath.

His exo-memory assumed the pause was an invitation for further information. Eulalie, your daughter, eight years old. A picture of his daughter’s face appeared above the writing. Hazel eyes like his, black hair like her mother’s, a cheeky grin all her own. Eulalie goes to North Fitzroy Montessori primary school, her favourite colour is purple with blue spots, and she has a pet goldfish called Squeak-and-Bubble.

“Are you reading something on-retina?” asked Ondine, sharply.

He refocused on her. “No.”

“Bullshit. Same old Irving. Even now, in your grand attempt at winning me back, you can’t help but put the freewave on. Is there a cricket game on today?”

“I’m not watching the cricket. I’m not watching anything.”

“I don’t believe you. It was ever thus—zoned out on some stupid live-feed every time I tried to talk to you.”

He felt his face going red. Part anger, part embarrassment. “That’s not true.”

It is mostly true: you watched sports, betting markets, or Chinese Kung-Fu films on-retina during 81% of your conversations with Ondine.

His fingernails dug into the palms of his hand.

Ondine looked at him for ten long seconds before she said: “Do you remember Luna Park?”

It was a test. And it was immediately clear it was a test he was going to fail. “Umm.”

“Do you remember Luna Park, Irving?”

“Yes.” He licked his lips. “Of course.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not lying—I do remember Luna Park.”

No recording of Luna Park exists in your exo-memory.

“Ah—stop!”

Her eyes went a stone-cold shade of bitter. “I will not stop.”

“No, no, not you. It’s my exo-memory, it—”

“I knew it.”

He hit the table. Cutlery danced, heads turned his way again and a middle-aged man in a red jacket suddenly appeared next to the table.

“Is everything all right here, sir?”

“Yes, yes,” said Irving. “We’re fine.”

Ondine said to the maître d’: “It’s not a problem. I’m leaving,” and got up from her seat.

“I think that would be best,” replied the maître d’.

Irving reached out his hand to her, begging. “No Ondine, please don’t leave.”

Ondine looked down at him, eyes glistening. “You need help, Irving. Professional help. You’re stuck in an endless loop of self-denial. You need to find a way out.”

She walked away.

“Sir,” said the head waiter, interposing himself between Irving and the exit as he rose to follow his wife. Irving’s lip curled in anger, but before he could barge past, the man spoke, voice an urgent whisper. “Sir, you are making a scene.”

“Fuck you,” Irving hissed. He pushed past, jogging from the restaurant, red-faced, as everyone stared.

He couldn’t see Ondine when he burst out onto the street. Squinting under the bone-white sun, spinning around, trying to glimpse her receding form in the heat shimmer rising from the sidewalk. His eyes watered from the sun. The sun: that’s what he tried to tell himself, anyway, before he sold the memory a few weeks later.

Irving stood in the huge clown mouth that formed the entrance of Luna Park, jaws three times as wide as he was tall. Eulalie waited, looking up at him, a cloud of pink fairy floss in her left hand. She was trying to tell him something, but he had a hand up, trying to stop her from speaking while he read the weather reports on-retina. He’d placed a series of bets on temperature and precipitation ranges in south-eastern China, and the official results were just coming in.

“Fuck it!” he yelled.

“Daddy?”

“Fuck fuck fuck.”

“But daddy—”

“Not now Eulalie.”

“But daddy I want to go—”

“Not now dammit!” he screamed.

Eulalie jumped, dropping the floss to the ground. Tears welled instantly.

Ondine had walked ahead, not realizing that he and Eulalie had stopped. Now she returned just to hear the end of him yelling. She seemed to be in shock for a few seconds, standing there, her smooth skin glowing in the blinking neon backwash of the amusement park.

“Jesus Irving,” she said, picking her daughter up.

“Quiet,” he hissed, eyes unfocussed as the massacre of his wagers scrolled down on-retina.

“Quiet? No. I’m not . . . ”

He tuned her out, her words background static to failure’s sting. He clenched his teeth as the news got worse and worse, and as Ondine’s criticisms started to cut through his concentration.

“Enough!” he yelled. “Enough of your nagging. Enough of your complaints.”

She put a hand over her daughter’s ear. “Not in front of Eulalie.”

“Eulalie,” he sneered, focusing now on wife and daughter. “I hate that name. Where did you get it? ‘Top ten hippest new names for children’ in the Huffington Post?”

Ondine’s mouth popped open, struggling to get out a reply.

He didn’t let her.

“No! Time for me to speak now. Time. For. Me. To. Speak.” He jabbed a finger at her with each word. “You never support my business decisions. You never listen to me. All I get from you is scorn and derision. You didn’t even let me have a say in our own daughter’s name. Eulalie? What sort of ridiculous name is that!?”

The steam started to leave his delivery as he watched the reaction of his wife and daughter. Eulalie, head buried in her mother’s shoulder, sobbing. Ondine, her perfect skin creased with contempt.

“You d-don’t understand,” he stuttered, his rage train coming off its rails.

“I understand, Irving.”

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Lose another bet, I take it?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Oh it is Irving, it is exactly that simple,” she said, her voice a terrifying calm. “It’s the most uncomplicated thing in the world. You’re lazy.”

“Don’t.”

“Greedy.”

“Don’t.”

“Resentful.”

“Not in front of Eulalie.”

“Cruel, isn’t it? Almost as bad as telling your own daughter that you hate her name. Well, I’ve needed to be cruel for a long time, but I’ve been a coward. Not anymore. I’m going to do what I needed to do a year ago, and I’m doing it here, in front of your daughter, so you understand that it is final.”

Eulalie had taken her head from her mother’s shoulder and was staring up at her as she spoke.

His eyes flicked to his daughter, then back to his wife. “Don’t. I’m sorry—”

“Goodbye Irving.”

She walked away. Only his daughter looked back. Watching him over her mother’s shoulder, eyes filled with tears.

Irving watched them leave, hands hanging limply at his side. Nowhere else to go, he wandered back into Luna Park. Into the cacophony of tinny music on a maddening, endless cycle, into the smell of fairy floss and sweat and machine grease, and the clown, swallowing him, while—

WARNING WARNING WARNING: these memories are property of the Mobius Group. Report immediately to your nearest Thanks for the Memories franchise for memory realignment.

Bleep bleep bleep bleep

WARNING WARNING WARNING: these memories are property of the Mobius Group. Report immediately to your nearest Thanks for the Memories franchise for memory realignment.

bleep bleep bleep bleep

“No.” Irving woke himself with the moan. “No.” He switched off the alarm and dismissed the message flashing on-retina.

He lay back on the bed, stared at the off-white ceiling. Moonlight and street light ebbed through the slatted window. The hum of the building’s hydrogen generator drifted up from below. He took control of his breathing, the rise and fall of his chest slowing.

“No.”

The ubiquitous double happiness ideogram split in two as the doors opened for Irving. The room inside was gloomy, thick with incense. A cymbal and discordant pipes of traditional Chinese music played softly from hidden speakers, and overhead red lanterns swung slightly on a breeze Irving couldn’t feel. A young Chinese man in a traditional straight-collared suit sat behind a darkwood reception desk.

“Um,” said Irving. “My exo-memory told me I had an appointment.”

The receptionist stood and bowed. “Mister Kupfermann. Omissioner Zau is waiting for you. Follow me.”

Irving tried to bow back, but the young man had already disappeared down the dim, red-tinted corridor. Irving was shown through a dark redwood door carved with stylistic, eastern dragons with large, wild eyes. The receptionist closed the door behind Irving, leaving him in an even darker room.

It took his eyes a moment to adjust. Within the gloom lay a traditional study with dark, wood-panelled walls, interspersed with red scrolls marked with calligraphy. There were white-and-blue porcelain pots sitting on plinths; leather-bounds books along the back wall; a golden bust of some old Chinese guy with a receding hairline in one corner; and in the middle of it all, an even older Chinese man sitting cross-legged on a woven mat with arms crossed, hands hidden in dark blue silk sleeves.

The old man had a strand of grey hair clinging to his chin. His eyes were closed.

Irving hesitated, wondering for a moment whether he’d caught the old bugger sleeping.

“Kupfermann xiansheng,” the old man intoned, in a thick Chinese accent. “Please, sit.”

Irving jumped a little. On second glance the man’s eyes were open. Sparkling slivers in a lined old face, fixed on him.

Irving stutter-stepped forward. “Omissioner Zau?”

The old man bowed.

“I . . . I don’t remember making this appointment.”

“But you have a problem,” said the Omissioner. It wasn’t a question.

“I’ve—ah—yeah. Yeah, I’ve got a problem.”

“Sit.”

Irving sat, cross-legged, three feet from the Omissioner.

“Tea?”

Irving shook his head.

The Omissioner waited, face inscrutable. It took Irving a long half-minute to realise the old man was waiting for him to speak. He cleared his throat, irritated by the incense. “It’s a—it’s about a memory I’ve sold to an extraction service.”

Still the old man waited.

Irving continued: “It—the memory—is coming back. And I . . . ” He paused. It felt like he was making confession. “I’m worried about others I’ve sold. I think things may have got a little out of control—I had this life with my wife. I mean lunch—lunch with my wife. She mentioned this—this incident in Luna Park, which I couldn’t remember at first, but which I’ve started to dream about.”

A hand appeared from within the Omissioner’s sleeve. “Your memory pin please, Mister Kupfermann.”

Irving’s mouth tightened.

The old man waited, gnarled hand extended.

Irving sighed. He put his finger to his cochlear implant and murmured the password. A quiet click sounded and the memory pin popped out of the steel. He plucked it between thumb and forefinger and handed it to the Omissioner.

Zau unclipped a dark green bracelet from his wrist and unfurled it, revealing a latest-model flexiscreen. One foot square, paper-thin, soft-glowing green. The Omissioner placed the memory pin on it and hid his hands back within his sleeves. The ancient lines of the old man’s face were lit up by reflected green as ideograms and graphs flowed across the screen.

After a minute of looking through the data, the man’s disposition changed completely. He took his hands from his sleeves, stopped squinting, and pulled a pack of cigarettes from a hidden pocket. “Dear oh dear. So you’re a Johnny,” he said, in a suddenly broad Australian accent. He lit his cigarette with a chrome lighter and snapped it shut, throwing it on the floor in front of him.

“A what?” asked Irving.

The Omissioner blew a cloud of smoke upwards. “You know—a memory hooker, an auto-amnesiac. Selling off those crystal-clear, seminal life moments to the ruling class—a Johnny.”

Irving paused, trying to get past the incongruity of the broad Australian accent coming out of the old Chinese guy’s mouth. “What? What is this—what game are you playing here?”

“Whatever do you mean?” the old man replied, with a half-smile that suggested he knew exactly what Irving meant.

Irving pointed an open hand at the room. “This game.”

“This,” said the Omissioner, letting his gaze roam around the gloom. “This is all part of the Mysteries of the East surcharge.” When he said Mysteries of the East his accent switched, for a moment, from Australian back to Chinese.

“Mysteries of the East?”

“Mysteries of the East, mate. Rich bastards don’t come here just for science; they want a mythic flourish from an ancient civilization. So I charge them extra for their ignorance, and give the same service they’d get from any other memory expert.”

“But—but everyone says the role of the Omissioner is an ancient Chinese tradition.”

“Oh yeah, sure mate. Thousands of years ago China had the Omissioners. Their sole responsibility was to remind the Emperor of important traditions or precedents.” Zau took a drag on his cigarette, blew the smoke upwards. “But many other cultures had something similar. In pre-Islamic Arabia, people known as Rawis were attached to poets as official memorizers. For centuries the Jews had the tannaim, who memorized oral law. All cultures, more or less, have had memory experts attached to the elite. The advent of the printing press, books, and libraries changed all that: they democratized exo-memory for the masses. For a couple of centuries, anyway. Until the invention of the cochlear-glyph and the subsequent epidemic of memory decline that has made good recall the rarest of commodities. These days, the virtuosos of natural memory like me—” an ironic grin touched Zau’s lips “—Well mate, I’m the darling of the elite.”

Zau pointed at Irving with the end of his cigarette. “But you ain’t the elite. You ain’t a repeat customer. You’re a Johnny. Your wealth has come from selling off your personal history, right?”

“Well—”

“And you’re here to ask me to fix the dog’s breakfast you’ve made of the inside of your head, yes?”

“Well, yes, there’s this—”

“Then you’re here to ask me to fix the unfixable. I see people like you all the time. Bloody idiots, one and all. You got no other source of income, right?”

Irving started to deny it, out of instinct. But he relented and shook his head no.

“Then I can’t prescribe a way out of this for you. To fix the damage you’ve done, to reclaim some of the fragments of these lost memories, I’ll need time. Months. But even if you could afford me, the memories I’d reconstruct would mostly be copyrighted. So that’s no good.” He took another drag, glittering eyes fixed on Irving. “You could purchase the memories of others in order to improve your overall brain function, of course. But I’m not a butcher. I don’t trade in the prime cuts of the personal histories of the desperate.”

Irving decided to focus on the only part of the little speech that could help him. “How would other people’s memories help?”

“You don’t know?” asked the Omissioner, with a hint of surprise.

“It’s—” Irving rubbed at his eye, he knew this “—on the tip of my tongue.”

“You don’t remember. Of course you don’t. How could you, after all the things those bastards have done to you?” The Omissioner had let his anger show, for a moment, but he stubbed it out with his cigarette in the ashtray in front of him.

Zau took a long breath, and then said: “When you sell a memory to the ruling class, you’re not simply selling one of your experiences. I mean, that’s part of it—having their subconscious integrate someone else’s experience as their own. The human brain is a wonderful thing isn’t it? Takes a distinct event from someone else’s life and—with a little nudging from technology and a good night’s sleep—absorbs it as one of its own.

“But what you’re really selling is the vitality and emotion of that experience. The power of these memories is such that when you experience them, they increase the strength and number of synaptic connections in your neural pathways. The rich need this, more than anyone, because nearly all of them are constantly editing their histories. For everything: relationships, jobs, family, making their lives seem superior to that of regular people. Bloody hell—some of them have a bad day they’ll erase it and replace it with a good one. In the end you get a kind of mass delusion among the one per cent—half their lives are based on vivid memories they’ve bought from Johnnies like you. So they become ever more dependent on top-of-the-line exo-memory to fabricate visual recordings and forge a consistent life narrative. In turn, they become less and less reliant on their own brains to encode new memories, and unused, those pathways atrophy.”

Zau took a long drag on his smoke and blew out a long slow cloud, watching as it curled its way to the ceiling. “So, there it is, mate. That’s why they pay so handsomely for your memories. Not just for the experience, but to repair brain damage.”

Irving felt the dread, sitting on his chest, making it hard for him to breathe. “How bad, Zau? How much have I lost?”

The Omissioner pointed at Irving’s memory pin, sitting on the flexiscreen. “I can’t tell you what memories you’ve lost. Not at a glance, anyway.”

“What can you tell me then?”

“How many memories you’ve sold.”

Irving’s breath came harder. “Well then, how many?”

“Two hundred and nineteen.”

It felt like a punch in the chest. “Fuck me.”

“Hmmm.”

“That’s bad, isn’t it?”

“Mate. It’s as bad as it gets.”

“Can . . . can I buy memories, like you said, help repair the damage?”

The Omissioner shook his head. “You’re remembering for them wholesale, but they’re selling it retail. If you’ve got no income other than selling memories, then you’re nothing more than a snake eating its own tail.”

“And you?”

“No. I’m not going re-craft your life into some sort of delusion—that’s what mercenaries like Thanks for the Memories do. That’s simply replacing one form of mental illness—dementia—for another—psychosis. My methods are more sophisticated than those butchers. They’re also much more expensive.”

“Can you do anything for me?” asked Irving, voice strained.

Omissioner Zau seemed oblivious. “Prescribe you Alzheimer’s medication. It’ll stabilize your condition, maybe even allow for a partial improvement. You’ll never be the way you were, but so long as you don’t sell anymore memories you should lead a relatively normal life.”

“Relatively?”

“Well—like I said—you have low-grade Alzheimer’s. You’re mildly intellectually impaired.”

“What the fuck?”

Zau paused for a moment. “Apologies. I tend to be less polite with people who won’t remember my rudeness.” The old man held out his cigarettes. “Fag?”

Irving shook his head.

“Drink?”

“Yeah,” Irving said, with a sigh. “Yeah, I could use one.”

The old man hopped up, far more sprightly than Irving would have guessed, and disappeared through a bead curtain in a dark corner of the room. As he did so, Irving saw that the Omissioner had no cochlear-glyph implant behind his ear. It had been a long time since he’d met someone unplugged.

Zau returned soon after with a bottle of amber liquid and two tumblers. The Omissioner settled down again across from Irving, poured them each three fingers. Irving downed his in a single hit. It burned his throat, but not too much, and relieved a little of the tension in his chest.

“I could go back to work,” said Irving. “Nano-tech pays well, if you stick with it. I could make enough to afford even you.” He smiled weakly.

Zau poured Irving another whisky. “No.”

“No?” What smile Irving had faded.

“Impossible.”

“Why?”

The Omissioner finished his whisky, eyes on Irving. “Imagination, that’s why. If you went back to work you’d be largely reliant on exo-memory, and exo-memory never made a new discovery or developed a new idea. It doesn’t have the rich associations of a natural memory, cannot accrete the layers of knowledge, interacting with each other, which give birth to an original idea. Memory is an act of creativity—the ability to form connections between disparate memories, build something new with them, and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a dance, or a nano-tech innovation.

“And you, Irving? You’ve pretty much lost your ability to create future memory. You used to be good at nano-tech? That’s gone now. You can’t get that back.”

Irving stared at the glass in his hand. He gave a sigh that included his shoulders, and said: “Well, I want to keep what I’ve got left, including the one I have of my daughter.” His throat closed a little when he said daughter.

“Sorry mate. But you won’t be able to do even that. You keep remembering copyrighted memories, you’ll get three years in jail and a fine so big you’ll be out on the street.” Zau waved his cigarette absently in the air. “You could leave the country, if you’re that desperate. A few countries left don’t have memory copyright. Belize has great beaches.”

Irving looked up at him. “Belize?”

“Belize.”

“Fuck Belize.”

Zau shrugged.

“Fuck Belize right in the arse.”

“That’s probably overdoing it.”

Irving picked his whisky up, and then put it down again, un-sipped. “What are my other options?”

“Options, chief?” Zau said, eyes narrowing. “You’re all out of options. You’re a fly, struggling in their web. Being aware of this fact is largely irrelevant. They’ll get what they want from you, one way or another. You resist, you’ll go to jail, and the judgment against you will include enforced reclamation of that stolen property—” Zau placed a finger on his own temple “—sitting there inside your head. And the government ain’t as careful extracting memories as the recall companies. It can get messy.”

Irving was silent. He let the words sting him, let the sting linger.

“Unless . . . ” Zau trailed off. His eyes bored right into Irving, searching for something.

“Unless?”

The Omissioner took a long drag of his cigarette. “Unless you settle for the only thing you really can get now: revenge.”

“Revenge? Against who?”

“Mate. Against the mercenaries that built this edifice of mnemonic servitude to the rich. Against the recall companies.”

Irving stroked his long, curved nose. Revenge was such an exhausting pastime. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“What else have you got?” asked the Omissioner. “Your family and career are gone.”

Irving narrowed his eyes. “What was that about you being rude, again?”

“I’m just being straight with you, mate.”

Irving was silent as he turned it all over in his mind. Ondine, looking at him, her face creased with contempt and Eulalie, water-blurred eyes, uncomprehending at the creeping neglect of his fatherhood.

Eulalie.

If he could have been a good father, all the other failures wouldn’t have mattered. Everything else was bullshit. If only.

And he thought about the recall companies. Yeah—them, most of all. With their spacious, marble receptions and employees with perfect white teeth and franchises popping up in every city, every suburb even. On the back of his dreams, his experiences, his essence, commodified as a plaything for the lucky rich. They were the ones who had done all this, brought him to this, reduced him to this. Tore his family apart, for profit.

Irving fixed his gaze on Zau. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe revenge is exactly what I want.”

The Omissioner leaned towards him. “Yes. Good. Now, if this works out, you won’t remember doing it.”

“Perfect.”

“From a certain perspective, yes. I’ll fix it so you won’t remember this conversation. You also won’t remember that Thanks for the Memories stole your life, or that you got revenge for all they’ve done. What point then, Irving? How does this act exist, if you cannot remember it?”

Irving downed the last of his whisky, cleared his throat. “Let’s not get metaphysical here, Omissioner. The tree still falls in the forest. The world still exists outside the boundaries of my skull. And if I make these motherfuckers pay, well they are going to pay.”

Zau nodded, eyes twinkling. “Good. You’re going to have to go to Thanks for the Memories, have the propriety product you are re-remembering wiped, and sell them one more legit memory.”

Irving shook his head immediately. “No. I’m done with it. They can take back Luna Park, but no more. I’ve lost too much of myself—you’ve just got through telling me I’m going to end up a retard.”

“Dementia.”

“Whatever. I’ve done enough damage. Time to draw a line under it.”

“Just one more, mate. It’s the only way to do it. This lunch you had recently, where your wife talked about Luna Park, it has to go.”

“Why?”

“Because it is part of a mnemonic loop that will keep sending you back in time to Luna Park, and forward in time to me, here. We need to snip it out, cover our tracks.”

Irving opened his mouth to say no, but the image came of Ondine, looking at him from across the table, her expression a mixture of sadness and pity. He rubbed at his eyes with his palms. “Yeah. Maybe that is one memory I could do without.”

“Good, mate, good,” said the Omissioner, eyes shining. “Now, they’ll be uploading more than a visual recording from your pin and a memory print from your cerebral cortex. They’ll be uploading a project I’ve been working on for a long time. An offensively expensive virus I’ve commissioned, one that will bypass—”

Irving held up hand. “I don’t care what it is, Omissioner, just so long as it works.”

“Oh, it will work. When they take your memory, the virus will plug straight into the Kandel-Yu machine. It will ensure that every customer after you experiences an immediate decline in the release of certain proteins crucial to long-term memory formation. They will suffer anterograde amnesia—everything that happens after their trip to Thanks for the Memories will be lost.”

“They’ll still have memory pins.”

“Yes, yes, they’ll still have exo-memory. That’s why it’s such a cracker—it won’t become immediately apparent. Not before hundreds, even thousands have been exposed. Those infected will be increasingly reliant on a computer to tell them what day it is, where they work, whether or not they ate lunch, who their new friends are, the names of their children. They’ll keep going back to recall companies, buying more memories, infecting more Kandel-Yu machines. We do this right, the whole system of memories trickling up to the rich, of the desperate selling off chunks of their own soul, will be broken.”

Irving laughed without humour. “And here I was thinking I’d never achieve anything in this life.”

Zau watched Irving through the glass, doing a stunned kind of shuffle, following his vulture nose down the sidewalk.

“Your insider at the recall centre,” said Zau. “She chose well.”

“Yes,” replied Qiang from behind the reception desk. “She knows a hopeless case when she sees one.”

“He’s better than hopeless.” Zau continued to watch Irving walk down the street. “He’s the utterly irredeemable still yearning for redemption.”

Qiang waited until Irving had disappeared from sight. “Mister Kupfermann said you’d come to an agreement and that he wasn’t to be charged for the session.”

Zau looked over at him. “Charge him triple.”

“Triple?”

“Yeah. He won’t remember what it’s for, and I’ve told his exo-memory to hide it from him. Plus—” the old man smiled, his eyes sparkling “—it’s for a good cause.”

The doors to Thanks for the Memories wouldn’t open. Distracted by the glare of the sun, Irving had missed the red neon sign flashing CLOSED next to the entrance.

“Exo-memory, why is Thanks for the Memories closed? What day is it?”

“Thursday,” whispered the implant. “A media release by the parent company, released nine days ago, stated that this franchise was not located in a profitable area, and was consolidating its branches to maximize economic returns for shareholders. However, multiple sources on the freewave have contradicted this, theorizing that the closure is related to several recent high-profile cases of amnesia. Shall I put the most-read article from each perspective up on-retina?”

“No, no, I don’t care about the details.”

Irving pursed his lips. This was a nuisance. Just a couple more sales and he would hit the target he’d set himself. Fifteen million and he’d take Ondine out for dinner, reveal his newfound wealth and success. Just a couple more sales were all he needed to win his wife and daughter back.

“Exo-memory.”

“Yes, Mister Kupfermann?”

“Give me directions to the nearest Thanks for the Memories franchise.”

Originally published in Interzone, January/February 2016.

The Waves

Ken Liu

Long ago, just after Heaven was separated from Earth, Nü Wa wandered along the bank of the Yellow River, savoring the feel of the rich loess against the bottom of her feet.

All around her, flowers bloomed in all the colors of the rainbow, as pretty as the eastern edge of the sky, where Nü Wa had to patch a leak made by petty warring gods with a paste made of melted gemstones. Deer and buffalo dashed across the plains, and golden carp and silvery crocodiles frolicked in the water.

But she was all alone. There was no one to converse with her, no one to share all this beauty.

She sat down next to the water, and, scooping up a handful of mud, began to sculpt. Before long, she had created a miniature version of herself: a round head, a long torso, arms and legs and tiny hands and fingers that she carefully carved out with a sharp bamboo skewer.

She cupped the tiny, muddy figure in her hands, brought it up to her mouth, and breathed the breath of life into it. The figure gasped, wriggled in Nü Wa’s hands, and began to babble.

Nü Wa laughed. Now she would be alone no longer. She sat the little figure down on the bank of the Yellow River, scooped up another handful of mud, and began to sculpt again.

Man was thus created from earth, and to earth he would return, always.

“What happened next?” a sleepy voice asked.

“I’ll tell you tomorrow night,” Maggie Chao said. “It’s time to sleep now.”

She tucked in Bobby, five, and Lydia, six, turned off the bedroom light, and closed the door behind her.

She stood still for a moment, listening, as if she could hear the flow of photons streaming past the smooth, spinning hull of the ship.

The great solar sail strained silently in the vacuum of space as the Sea Foam spiraled away from the sun, accelerating year after year until the sun had shifted into a dull red, a perpetual, diminishing sunset.

There’s something you should see, João, Maggie’s husband and the First Officer, whispered in her mind. They were able to speak to each other through a tiny optical-neural interface chip implanted in each of their brains. The chips stimulated genetically-modified neurons in the language-processing regions of the cortex with pulses of light, activating them in the same way that actual speech would have.

Maggie sometimes thought of the implant as a kind of miniature solar sail, where photons strained to generate thought.

João thought of the technology in much less romantic terms. Even a decade after the operation, he still didn’t like the way they could be in each other’s heads. He understood the advantages of the communication system, which allowed them to stay constantly in touch, but it felt clumsy and alienating, as though they were slowly turning into cyborgs, machines. He never used it unless it was urgent.

I’ll be there, Maggie said, and quickly made her way up to the research deck, closer to the center of the ship. Here, the gravity simulated by the spinning hull was lighter, and the colonists joked that the location of the labs helped people think better because more oxygenated blood flowed to the brain.

Maggie Chao had been chosen for the mission because she was an expert on self-contained ecosystems and also because she was young and fertile. With the ship traveling at a low fraction of the speed of light, it would take close to four hundred years (by the ship’s frame of reference) to reach 61 Virginis, even taking into account the modest time-dilation effects. That required planning for children and grandchildren so that, one day, the colonists’ descendants might carry the memory of the three hundred original explorers onto the surface of an alien world.

She met João in the lab. He handed her a display pad without saying anything. He always gave her time to come to her own conclusions about something new without his editorial comment. That was one of the first things she liked about him when they started dating, years ago.

“Extraordinary,” she said as she glanced at the abstract. “First time Earth has tried to contact us in a decade.”

Many on Earth had thought the Sea Foam a folly, a propaganda effort from a government unable to solve real problems. How could sending a centuries-long mission to the stars be justified when there were still people dying of hunger and diseases on Earth? After launch, communication with Earth had been kept to a minimum and then cut. The new administration did not want to keep paying for those expensive ground-based antennas. Perhaps they preferred to forget about this ship of fools.

But now, they had reached out across the emptiness of space to say something.

As she read the rest of the message, her expression gradually shifted from excitement to disbelief.

“They believe the gift of immortality should be shared by all of humanity,” João said. “Even the farthest wanderers.”

The transmission described a new medical procedure. A small, modified virus—a molecular nano-computer, for those who liked to think in those terms—replicated itself in somatic cells and roamed up and down the double helices of DNA strands, repairing damage, suppressing certain segments and overexpressing others, and the net effect was to halt cellular senescence and stop aging.

Humans would no longer have to die.

Maggie looked into João’s eyes. “Can we replicate the procedure here?” We will live to walk on another world, to breathe unrecycled air.

“Yes,” he said. “It will take some time, but I’m sure we can.” Then he hesitated. “But the children . . . ”

Bobby and Lydia were not the result of chance but the interplay of a set of careful algorithms involving population planning, embryo selection, genetic health, life expectancy, and rates of resource renewal and consumption.

Every gram of matter aboard the Sea Foam was accounted for. There was enough to support a stable population but little room for error. The children’s births had to be timed so that they would have enough time to learn what they needed to learn from their parents, and then take their place as their elders died a peaceful death, cared for by the machines.

“ . . . would be the last children to be born until we land,” Maggie finished João’s thought. The Sea Foam had been designed for a precise population mix of adults and children. Supplies, energy, and thousands of other parameters were all tied to that mix. There was some margin of safety, but the ship could not support a population composed entirely of vigorous, immortal adults at the height of their caloric needs.

“We could either die and let our children grow,” João said, “or we could live forever and keep them always as children.”

Maggie imagined it: the virus could be used to stop the process of growth and maturation in the very young. The children would stay children for centuries, childless themselves.

Something finally clicked in Maggie’s mind.

“That’s why Earth is suddenly interested in us again,” she said. “Earth is just a very big ship. If no one is going to die, they’ll run out of room eventually, too. Now there is no other problem on Earth more pressing. They’ll have to follow us and move into space.”

You wonder why there are so many stories about how people came to be? It’s because all true stories have many tellings.

Tonight, let me tell you another one.

There was a time when the world was ruled by the Titans, who lived on Mount Othrys. The greatest and bravest of the Titans was Cronus, who once led them in a rebellion against Uranus, his father and a tyrant. After Cronus killed Uranus, he became the king of the gods.

But as time went on, Cronus himself became a tyrant. Perhaps out of fear that what he had done to his own father would happen to him, Cronus swallowed all his children as soon as they were born.

Rhea, the wife of Cronus, gave birth to a new son, Zeus. To save the boy, she wrapped a stone in a blanket like a baby and fooled Cronus into swallowing that. The real baby Zeus she sent away to Crete, where he grew up drinking goat milk.

Don’t make that face. I hear goat milk is quite tasty.

When Zeus was finally ready to face his father, Rhea fed Cronus a bitter wine that caused him to vomit up the children he had swallowed, Zeus’s brothers and sisters. For ten years, Zeus led the Olympians, for that was the name by which Zeus and his siblings would come to be known, in a bloody war against his father and the Titans. In the end, the new gods won against the old, and Cronus and the Titans were cast into lightless Tartarus.

And the Olympians went on to have children of their own, for that was the way of the world. Zeus himself had many children, some mortal, some not. One of his favorites was Athena, the goddess who was born from his head, from his thoughts alone. There are many stories about them as well, which I will tell you another time.

But some of the Titans who did not fight by the side of Cronus were spared. One of these, Prometheus, molded a race of beings out of clay, and it is said that he then leaned down to whisper to them the words of wisdom that gave them life.

We don’t know what he taught the new creatures, us. But this was a god who had lived to see sons rise up against fathers, each new generation replacing the old, remaking the world afresh each time. We can guess what he might have said.

Rebel. Change is the only constant.

“Death is the easy choice,” Maggie said.

“It is the right choice,” João said.

Maggie wanted to keep the argument in their heads, but João refused. He wanted to speak with lips, tongue, bursts of air, the old way.

Every gram of unnecessary mass had been shaved off the Sea Foam’s construction. The walls were thin and the rooms closely packed. Maggie and João’s voices echoed through the decks and halls.

All over the ship, other families, who were having the same argument in their heads, stopped to listen.

“The old must die to make way for the new,” João said. “You knew that we would not live to see the Sea Foam land when you signed up for this. Our children’s children, generations down the line, are meant to inherit the new world.”

“We can land on the new world ourselves. We don’t have to leave all the hard work to our unborn descendants.”

“We need to pass on a viable human culture for the new colony. We have no idea what the long-term consequences of this treatment will be on our mental health—”

“—Then let’s do the job we signed up for: exploration. Let’s figure it out—”

“—if we give in to this temptation, we’ll land as a bunch of four-hundred-year-olds who were afraid to die and whose ideas were ossified from old Earth. How can we teach our children the value of sacrifice, of the meaning of heroism, of beginning afresh? We’ll barely be human.”

“We stopped being human the moment we agreed to this mission!” Maggie paused to get her voice under control. “Face it, the birth allocation algorithms don’t care about us, or our children. We’re nothing more than vessels for the delivery of a planned, optimal mix of genes to our destination. Do you really want generations to grow and die in here, knowing nothing but this narrow metal tube? I worry about their mental health.”

“Death is essential to the growth of our species.” His voice was filled with faith, and she heard in it his hope that it was enough for both of them.

“It’s a myth that we must die to retain our humanity.” Maggie looked at her husband, her heart in pain. There was a divide between them, as inexorable as the dilation of time.

She spoke to him now inside his head. She imagined her thoughts, now transformed into photons, pushing against his brain, trying to illuminate the gap. We stop being human at the moment we give in to death.

João looked back at her. He said nothing, either in her mind or aloud, which was his way of saying all that he needed to say.

They stayed like that for a long time.

God first created mankind to be immortal, much like the angels.

Before Adam and Eve chose to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they did not grow old and they never became sick. During the day, they cultivated the Garden, and at night, they enjoyed each other’s company.

Yes, I suppose the Garden was a bit like the hydroponics deck.

Sometimes the angels visited them, and—according to Milton, who was born too late to get into the regular Bible—they conversed and speculated about everything: Did the Earth revolve around the Sun or was it the other way around? Was there life on other planets? Did angels also have sex?

Oh no, I’m not joking. You can look it up in the computer.

So Adam and Eve were forever young and perpetually curious. They did not need death to give their life purpose, to be motivated to learn, to work, to love, to give existence meaning.

If that story is true, then we were never meant to die. And the knowledge of good and evil was really the knowledge of regret.

“You know some very strange stories, Gran-Gran,” six-year old Sara said.

“They’re old stories,” Maggie said. “When I was a little girl, my grandmother told me many stories and I did a lot of reading.”

“Do you want me to live forever like you, and not grow old and die someday like my mother?”

“I can’t tell you what to do, sweetheart. You’ll have to figure that out when you’re older.”

“Like the knowledge of good and evil?”

“Something like that.”

She leaned down and kissed her great-great-great-great…—she had long lost count—…granddaughter, as gently as she could. Like all children born in the low gravity of the Sea Foam, her bones were thin and delicate, like a bird’s. Maggie turned off the nightlight and left.

Though she would pass her four hundredth birthday in another month, Maggie didn’t look a day older than thirty-five. The recipe for the fountain of youth, Earth’s last gift to the colonists before they lost all communications, worked well.

She stopped and gasped. A small boy, about ten years in age, waited in front of the door to her room.

Bobby, she said. Except for the very young, who did not yet have the implants, all the colonists now conversed through thoughts rather than speech. It was faster and more private.

The boy looked at her, saying nothing and thinking nothing at her. She was struck by how like his father he was. He had the same expressions, the same mannerisms, even the same ways to speak by not speaking.

She sighed, opened the door, and walked in after him.

One more month, he said, sitting on the edge of the couch so that his feet didn’t dangle.

Everybody on the ship was counting down the days. In one more month they’d be in orbit around the fourth planet of 61 Virginis, their destination, a new Earth.

After we land, will you change your mind about—she hesitated, but went on after a moment—your appearance?

Bobby shook his head, and a hint of boyish petulance crossed his face. Mom, I’ve made my decision a long time ago. Let it go. I like the way I am.

In the end, the men and women of the Sea Foam had decided to leave the choice of eternal youth to each individual.

The cold mathematics of the ship’s enclosed ecosystem meant that when someone chose immortality, a child would have to remain a child until someone else on the ship decided to grow old and die, opening up a new slot for an adult.

João chose to age and die. Maggie chose to stay young. They sat together as a family and it felt a bit like a divorce.

“One of you will get to grow up,” João said.

“Which one?” Lydia asked.

“We think you should decide,” João said, glancing at Maggie, who nodded reluctantly.

Maggie had thought it was unfair and cruel of her husband to put such a choice before their children. How could children decide if they wanted to grow up when they had no real idea what that meant?

“It’s no more unfair than you and I deciding whether we want to be immortal,” João had said. “We have no real idea what that means either. It is terrible to put such a choice before them, but to decide for them would be even more cruel.” Maggie had to agree that he had a point.

It seemed like they were asking the children to take sides. But maybe that was the point.

Lydia and Bobby looked at each other, and they seemed to reach a silent understanding. Lydia got up, walked to João, and hugged him. At the same time, Bobby came and hugged Maggie.

“Dad,” Lydia said, “when my time comes, I will choose the same as you.” João tightened his arms around her, and nodded.

Then Lydia and Bobby switched places and hugged their parents again, pretending that everything was fine.

For those who refused the treatment, life went on as planned. As João grew old, Lydia grew up: first an awkward teenager, then a beautiful young woman. She went into engineering, as predicted by her aptitude tests, and decided that she did like Catherine, the shy young doctor that the computers suggested would be a good mate for her.

“Will you grow old and die with me?” Lydia asked the blushing Catherine one day.

They married and had two daughters of their own—to replace them, when their time came.

“Do you ever regret choosing this path?” João asked her one time. He was very old and ill by then, and in another two weeks the computers would administer the drugs to allow him to fall asleep and not wake up.

“No,” Lydia said, holding his hand with both of hers. “I’m not afraid to step out of the way when something new comes to take my place.”

But who’s to say that we aren’t the ‘something new’? Maggie thought.

In a way, her side was winning the argument. Over the years, more and more colonists had decided to join the ranks of the immortals. But Lydia’s descendants had always stubbornly refused. Sara was the last untreated child on the ship. Maggie knew she would miss the nightly story times when she grew up.

Bobby was frozen at the physical age of ten. He and the other perpetual children integrated only uneasily into the life of the colonists. They had decades—sometimes centuries—of experience, but retained juvenile bodies and brains. They possessed adult knowledge, but kept the emotional range and mental flexibility of children. They could be both old and young in the same moment.

There was a great deal of tension and conflict about what roles they should play on the ship, and, occasionally, parents who once thought they wanted to live forever would give up their spots when their children demanded it of them.

But Bobby never asked to grow up.

My brain has the plasticity of a ten-year-old’s. Why would I want to give that up? Bobby said.

Maggie had to admit that she always felt more comfortable with Lydia and her descendants. Even though they had all chosen to die, as João did, which could be seen as a kind of rebuke of her decision, she found herself better able to understand their lives and play a role in them.

With Bobby, on the other hand, she couldn’t imagine what went on in his head. She sometimes found him a little creepy, which she agreed was a bit hypocritical, considering he only made the same choice she did.

But you won’t experience what it’s like to be grown, she said. To love as a man and not a boy.

He shrugged, unable to miss what he never had. I can pick up new languages quickly. It’s easy for me to absorb a new worldview. I’ll always like new things.

Bobby switched to speech, and his boyish voice rose as it filled with excitement and longing. “If we meet new life and new civilization down there, we’ll need people like me, the forever children, to learn about them and understand them without fear.”

It had been a long time since Maggie had really listened to her son. She was moved. She nodded, accepting his choice.

Bobby’s face opened in a beautiful smile, the smile of a ten-year-old boy who had seen more than almost every human who had ever lived.

“Mom, I’ll get that chance. I came to tell you that we’ve received the results of the first close-up scans of 61 Virginis e. It’s inhabited.”

Under the Sea Foam, the planet spun slowly. Its surface was covered by a grid of hexagonal and pentagonal patches, each a thousand miles across. About half of the patches were black as obsidian, while the rest were a grainy tan. 61 Virginis e reminded Maggie of a soccer ball.

Maggie stared at the three aliens standing in front of her in the shuttle bay, each about six feet tall. The metallic bodies, barrel-shaped and segmented, rested on four stick-thin, multi-jointed legs.

When the vehicles first approached the Sea Foam, the colonists had thought they were tiny scout ships until scans confirmed the absence of any organic matter. Then the colonists had thought they were autonomous probes until they came right up to the ship’s camera, displayed their hands, and lightly tapped the lens.

Yes, hands. Midway up each of the metallic bodies, two long, sinuous arms emerged and terminated in soft, supple hands made of a fine alloy mesh. Maggie looked down at her own hands. The alien hands looked just like hers: four slender fingers, an opposable thumb, flexible joints.

On the whole, the aliens reminded Maggie of robotic centaurs.

At the very top of each alien body was a spherical protuberance studded with clusters of glass lenses, like compound eyes. Other than the eyes, this “head” was also covered by a dense array of pins attached to actuators that moved in synchrony like the tentacles of a sea anemone.

The pins shimmered as though a wave moved through them. Gradually, they took on the appearance of pixellated eyebrows, lips, eyelids—a face, a human face.

The alien began to speak. It sounded like English but Maggie couldn’t make it out. The phonemes, like the shifting patterns of the pins, seemed elusive, just beyond coherence.

It is English, Bobby said to Maggie, after centuries of pronunciation drift. He’s saying ‘Welcome back to humanity.’

The fine pins on the alien face shifted, unveiling a smile. Bobby continued to translate. We left Earth long after your departure, but we were faster, and passed you in transit centuries ago. We’ve been waiting for you.

Maggie felt the world shift around her. She looked around, and many of the older colonists, the immortals, looked stunned.

But Bobby, the eternal child, stepped forward. “Thank you,” he said aloud, and smiled back.

Let me tell you a story, Sara. We humans have always relied on stories to keep the fear of the unknown at bay.

I’ve told you how the Mayan gods created people out of maize, but did you know that before that, there were several other attempts at creation?

First came the animals: brave jaguar and beautiful macaw, flat fish and long serpent, the great whale and the lazy sloth, the iridescent iguana and the nimble bat. (We can look up pictures for all of these on the computer later.) But the animals only squawked and growled, and could not speak their creators’ names.

So the gods kneaded a race of beings out of mud. But the mud men could not hold their shape. Their faces drooped, softened by water, yearning to rejoin the earth whence they were taken. They could not speak but only gurgled incoherently. They grew lopsided and were unable to procreate, to perpetuate their own existence.

The gods’ next effort is the one of most interest to us. They created a race of wooden manikins, like dolls. The articulated joints allowed their limbs to move freely. The carved faces allowed their lips to flap and eyes to open. The stringless puppets lived in houses and villages, and went busily about their lives.

But the gods found that the wooden men had neither souls nor minds, and so they could not praise their makers properly. They sent a great flood to destroy the wooden men, and asked the animals of the jungle to attack them. When the anger of the gods was over, the wooden men had become monkeys.

And only then did the gods turn to maize.

Many have wondered if the wooden men were really content to lose to the children of the maize. Perhaps they’re still waiting in the shadows for an opportunity to come back, for creation to reverse its course.

The black hexagonal patches were solar panels, Atax, the leader of the three envoys from 61 Virginis e, explained. Together, they provided the power needed to support human habitation on the planet. The tan patches were cities, giant computing arrays where trillions of humans lived as virtual patterns of computation.

When Atax and the others colonists had first arrived, 61 Viriginis e was not particularly hospitable to life from Earth. It was too hot, the air was too poisonous, and the existing alien life, mostly primitive microbes, was quite deadly.

But Atax and the others who had stepped onto the surface were not human, not in the sense Maggie would have understood the term. They were composed of more metal than water, and they were no longer trapped by the limits of organic chemistry. The colonists quickly constructed forges and foundries, and their descendants soon spread out across the globe.

Most of the time they chose to merge into the Singularity, the overall World-Mind that was both artificial and organic, where eons passed in a second as thought was processed at the speed of quantum computation. In the world of bits and qubits, they lived as gods.

But sometimes, when they felt the ancestral longing for physicality, they could choose to become individuals and be embodied in machines, as Atax and his companions were. Here, they lived in the slow-time, the time of atoms and stars.

There was no more line between the ghost and the machine.

“This is what humanity looks like now,” Atax said, spinning around slowly to display his metal body for the benefit of the colonists on the Sea Foam. “Our bodies are made of steel and titanium, and our brains graphene and silicon. We are practically indestructible. Look, we can even move through space without the need for ships, suits, layers of protection. We have left corruptible flesh behind.”

Atax and the others gazed intently at the ancient humans around them. Maggie stared back into their dark lenses, trying to fathom how the machines felt. Curiosity? Nostalgia? Pity?

Maggie shuddered at the shifting, metallic faces, a crude imitation of flesh and blood. She looked over at Bobby, who appeared ecstatic.

“You may join us, if you wish, or continue as you are. It is of course difficult to decide when you have no experience of our mode of existence. Yet you must choose. We cannot choose for you.”

Something new, Maggie thought.

Even eternal youth and eternal life did not appear so wonderful compared to the freedom of being a machine, a thinking machine endowed with the austere beauty of crystalline matrices instead of the messy imperfections of living cells.

At last, humanity has advanced beyond evolution into the realm of intelligent design.

“I’m not afraid,” Sara said.

She had asked to stay behind for a few minutes with Maggie after all the others had left. Maggie gave her a long hug, and the little girl squeezed her back.

“Do you think Gran-Gran João would have been disappointed in me?” Sara asked. “I’m not making the choice he would have made.”

“I know he would have wanted you to decide for yourself,” Maggie said. “People change, as a species and as individuals. We don’t know what he would have chosen if he had been offered your choice. But no matter what, never let the past pick your life for you.”

She kissed Sara on the cheek and let go. A machine came to take Sara away by the hand so that she could be transformed.

She’s the last of the untreated children, Maggie thought. And now she’ll be the first to become a machine.

Though Maggie refused to watch the transformation of the others, at Bobby’s request, she watched as her son was replaced piece by piece.

“You’ll never have children,” she said.

“On the contrary,” he said, as he flexed his new metal hands, so much larger and stronger than his old hands, the hands of a child, “I will have countless children, born of my mind.” His voice was a pleasant electronic hum, like a patient teaching program’s. “They’ll inherit from my thoughts as surely as I have inherited your genes. And some day, if they wish, I will construct bodies for them, as beautiful and functional as the ones I’m being fitted with.”

He reached out to touch her arm, and the cold metal fingertips slid smoothly over her skin, gliding on nanostructures that flexed like living tissue. She gasped.

Bobby smiled as his face, a fine mesh of thousands of pins, rippled in amusement.

She recoiled from him involuntarily.

Bobby’s rippling face turned serious, froze, and then showed no expression at all.

She understood the unspoken accusation. What right did she have to feel revulsion? She treated her body as a machine too, just a machine of lipids and proteins, of cells and muscles. Her mind was maintained in a shell too, a shell of flesh that had long outlasted its designed-for life. She was as “unnatural” as he.

Still, she cried as she watched her son disappear into a frame of animated metal.

He can’t cry anymore, she kept on thinking, as if that was the only thing that divided her from him.

Bobby was right. Those who were frozen as children were quicker to decide to upload. Their minds were flexible, and to them, to change from flesh to metal was merely a hardware upgrade.

The older immortals, on the other hand, lingered, unwilling to leave their past behind, their last vestiges of humanity. But one by one, they succumbed as well.

For years, Maggie remained the only organic human on 61 Virginis e, and perhaps the entire universe. The machines built a special house for her, one insulated from the heat and poison and ceaseless noise of the planet, and Maggie occupied herself by browsing through the Sea Foam’s archives, the records of humanity’s long, dead past. The machines left her pretty much alone.

One day, a small machine, about two feet tall, came into her house and approached her hesitantly. It reminded her of a puppy.

“Who are you?” Maggie asked.

“I’m your grandchild,” the little machine said.

“So Bobby has finally decided to have a child,” Maggie said. “It took him long enough.”

“I’m the 5,032,322th child of my parent.”

Maggie felt dizzy. Soon after his transformation into a machine, Bobby had decided to go all the way and join the Singularity. They had not spoken to each other for a long time.

“What’s your name?”

“I don’t have a name in the sense you think of it. But why don’t you call me Athena?”

“Why?”

“It’s a name from a story my parent used to tell me when I was little.”

Maggie looked at the little machine, and her expression softened.

“How old are you?”

“That’s a hard question to answer,” Athena said. “We’re born virtual and each second of our existence as part of the Singularity is composed of trillions of computation cycles. In that state, I have more thoughts in a second than you have had in your entire life.”

Maggie looked at her granddaughter, a miniature mechanical centaur, freshly made and gleaming, and also a being much older and wiser than she by most measures.

“So why have you put on this disguise to make me think of you as a child?”

“Because I want to hear your stories,” Athena said. “The ancient stories.”

There are still young people, Maggie thought, still something new.

Why can’t the old become new again?

And so Maggie decided to upload as well, to rejoin her family.

In the beginning, the world was a great void crisscrossed by icy rivers full of venom. The venom congealed, dripped, and formed into Ymir, the first giant, and Auðumbla, a great ice cow.

Ymir fed on Auðumbla’s milk and grew strong.

Of course you have never seen a cow. Well, it is a creature that gives milk, which you would have drunk if you were still . . .

I suppose it is a bit like how you absorbed electricity, at first in trickles, when you were still young, and then in greater measure as you grew older, to give you strength.

Ymir grew and grew until finally, three gods, the brothers Vili, and Vé, and Odin, slew him. Out of his carcass the gods created the world: his blood became the warm, salty sea, his flesh the rich, fertile earth, his bones the hard, plow-breaking hills, and his hair, the swaying, dark forests. Out of his wide brows the gods carved Midgard, the realm in which humans lived.

After the death of Ymir, the three brother gods walked along a beach. At the end of the beach, they came upon two trees leaning against each other. The gods fashioned two human figures out of their wood. One of the brother gods breathed life into the wooden figures, another endowed them with intelligence, and the third gave them sense and speech. And this was how Ask and Embla, the first man and the first woman, came to be.

You are skeptical that men and women were once made from trees? But you’re made of metal. Who’s to say trees wouldn’t do just as well?

Now let me tell you the story behind the names. “Ask” comes from ash, a hard tree that is used to make a drill for fire. “Embla” comes from vine, a softer sort of wood that is easy to set on fire. The motion of twirling a fire drill until the kindling is inflamed reminded the people who told this story of an analogy with sex, and that may be the real story they wanted to tell.

Once your ancestors would have been scandalized that I speak to you of sex so frankly. The word is still a mystery to you, but without the allure that it once held. Before we found how to live forever, sex and children were the closest we came to immortality.

Like a thriving hive, the Singularity began to send a constant stream of colonists away from 61 Virginis e.

One day, Athena came to Maggie and told her that she was ready to be embodied and lead her own colony.

At the thought of not seeing Athena again, Maggie felt an emptiness. So it is possible to love again, even as a machine.

Why don’t I come with you? she asked. It will be good for your children to have some connection with the past.

And Athena’s joy at her request was electric and contagious.

Sara came to say goodbye to her, but Bobby did not show up. He had never forgiven her for her rejection of him the moment he became a machine.

Even the immortals have regrets, she thought.

And so a million consciousnesses embodied themselves in metal shells shaped like robot centaurs, and like a swarm of bees leaving to found a new hive, they lifted into the air, tucked their limbs together so that they were shaped like graceful teardrops, and launched themselves straight up.

Up and up they went, through the acrid air, through the crimson sky, out of the gravity well of the heavy planet, and steering by the shifting flow of the solar wind and the dizzying spin of the galaxy, they set out across the sea of stars.

Light year after light year, they crossed the void between the stars. They passed the planets that had already been settled by earlier colonies, worlds now thriving with their own hexagonal arrays of solar panels and their own humming Singularities.

Onwards, they flew, searching for the perfect planet, the new world that would be their new home.

While they flew, they huddled together against the cold emptiness that was space. Intelligence, complexity, life, computation—everything seemed so small and insignificant against the great and eternal void. They felt the longing of distant black holes and the majestic glow of exploding novas. And they pulled closer to each other, seeking comfort in their common humanity.

As they flew on, half dreaming, half awake, Maggie told the colonists stories, weaving her radio waves among the constellation of colonists like strands of spider silk.

There are many stories of the Dreamtime, most secret and sacred. But a few have been told to outsiders, and this is one of them.

In the beginning there was the sky and the earth, and the earth was as flat and featureless as the gleaming titanium alloy surface of our bodies.

But under the earth, the spirits lived and dreamed.

And time began to flow, and the spirits woke from their slumber.

They broke through the surface, where they took on the forms of animals: Emu, Koala, Platypus, Dingo, Kangaroo, Shark . . . Some even took the shapes of humans. Their forms were not fixed, but could be changed at will.

They roamed over the earth and shaped it, stamping out valleys and pushing up hills, scraping the ground to make deserts, digging through it to make rivers.

And they gave birth to children, children who could not change forms: animals, plants, humans. These children were born from the Dreamtime but not of it.

When the spirits were tired, they sank back into the earth whence they came. And the children were left behind with only vague memories of the Dreamtime, the time before there was time.

But who is to say that they will not return to that state, to a time when they could change form at will, to a time where time had no meaning?

And they woke from her words into another dream.

One moment, they were suspended in the void of space, still light years from their destination. The next, they were surrounded by shimmering light.

No, not exactly light. Though the lenses mounted on their chassis could see far beyond the spectrum visible to primitive human eyes, this energy field around them vibrated at frequencies far above and below even their limits.

The energy field slowed down to match the subluminal flight of Maggie and the other colonists.

Not too far now.

The thought pushed against their consciousness like a wave, as though all their logic gates were vibrating in sympathy. The thought felt both alien and familiar.

Maggie looked at Athena, who was flying next to her.

Did you hear that? they said at the same time. Their thought strands tapped each other lightly, a caress with radio waves.

Maggie reached out into space with a thought strand, You’re human?

A pause that lasted a billionth of a second, which seemed like an eternity at the speed they were moving.

We haven’t thought of ourselves in that way in a long time.

And Maggie felt a wave of thoughts, images, feelings push into her from every direction. It was overwhelming.

In a nanosecond she experienced the joy of floating along the surface of a gas giant, part of a storm that could swallow Earth. She learned what it would be like to swim through the chromosphere of a star, riding white-hot plumes and flares that rose hundreds of thousands of miles. She felt the loneliness of making the entire universe your playground, yet having no home.

We came after you, and we passed you.

Welcome, ancient ones. Not too far now.

There was a time when we knew many stories of the creation of the world. Each continent was large and there were many peoples, each told their own story.

Then many peoples disappeared, and their stories forgotten.

This is one that survived. Twisted, mangled, retold to fit what strangers want to hear, there is nonetheless some truth left in it.

In the beginning the world was void and without light, and the spirits lived in the darkness.

The Sun woke up first, and he caused the water vapors to rise into the sky and baked the land dry. The other spirits—Man, Leopard, Crane, Lion, Zebra, Wildebeest, and even Hippopotamus—rose up next. They wandered across the plains, talking excitedly with each other.

But then the Sun set, and the animals and Man sat in darkness, too afraid to move. Only when morning came again did everyone start going again.

But Man was not content to wait every night. One night, Man invented fire to have his own sun, heat and light which obeyed his will, and which divided him from the animals that night and forever after.

So Man was always yearning for the light, the light that gives him life and the light to which he will return.

And at night, around the fire, they told each other the true stories, again and again.

Maggie chose to become part of the light.

She shed her chassis, her home and her body for such a long time. Had it been centuries? Millennia? Eons? Such measures of time no longer had any meaning.

Patterns of energy now, Maggie and the others learned to coalesce, stretch, shimmer, and radiate. She learned how to suspend herself between stars, her consciousness a ribbon across both time and space.

She careened from one edge of the galaxy to the other.

One time, she passed right through the pattern that was now Athena. Maggie felt the child as a light tingling, like laughter.

Isn’t this lovely, Gran-gran? Come visit Sara and me sometime!

But it was too late for Maggie to respond. Athena was already too far away.

I miss my chassis.

That was Bobby, whom she met hovering next to a black hole.

For a few thousand years, they gazed at the black hole together from beyond the event horizon.

This is very lovely, he said. But sometimes I think I prefer my old shell.

You’re getting old, she said. Just like me.

They pressed against each other, and that region of the universe lit up briefly like an ion storm laughing.

And they said goodbye to each other.

This is a nice planet, Maggie thought.

It was a small planet, rather rocky, mostly covered by water.

She landed on a large island, near the mouth of a river.

The sun hovered overhead, warm enough that she could see steam rising from the muddy riverbanks. Lightly, she glided over the alluvial plains.

The mud was too tempting. She stopped, condensed herself until her energy patterns were strong enough. Churning the water, she scooped a mound of the rich, fertile mud onto the bank. Then she sculpted the mound until it resembled a man: arms akimbo, legs splayed, a round head with vague indentations and protrusions for eyes, nose, mouth.

She looked at the sculpture of João for a while, caressed it, and left it to dry in the sun.

Looking about herself, she saw blades of grass covered with bright silicon beads and black flowers that tried to absorb every bit of sunlight. She saw silver shapes darting through the brown water and golden shadows gliding through the indigo sky. She saw great scale-covered bodies lumbering and bellowing in the distance, and close by, a great geyser erupted near the river, and rainbows appeared in the warm mist.

She was all alone. There was no one to converse with her, no one to share all this beauty.

She heard a nervous rustling and looked for the source of the sound. A little ways from the river, tiny creatures with eyes studded all over their heads like diamonds peered out of the dense forests, made of trees with triangular trunks and pentagonal leaves.

Closer and closer, she drifted to those creatures. Effortlessly, she reached inside them, and took ahold of the long chains of a particular molecule, their instructions for the next generation. She made a small tweak, and then let go.

The creatures yelped, and skittered away at the strange sensation of having their insides adjusted.

She had done nothing drastic, just a small adjustment, a nudge in the right direction. The change would continue to mutate and the mutations would accumulate, long after she left. In another few hundred generations, the changes would be enough to cause a spark, a spark that would feed itself until the creatures would start to think of keeping a piece of the sun alive at night, of naming things, of telling stories to each other about how everything came to be. They would be able to choose.

Something new in the universe. Someone new to the family.

But for now, it was time to return to the stars.

Maggie began to rise from the island. Below her, the sea sent wave after wave to crash against the shore, each wave catching and surpassing the one before it, reaching a little farther up the beach. Bits of sea foam floated up and rode the wind to parts unknown.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction December 2012.

About the Artist and Authors

Ron Guyatt (ronguyatt.com)

Ron Guyatt is a self-taught artist and professionally-taught graphic designer from Toronto Canada. He attended George Brown College for Design Foundation where he completed with Honors and then followed with his three-year diploma in graphic design at George Brown College.

Inspired by Art Deco, film and science fiction he loves to design posters & create illustrations. His work as been featured in magazines such as Games TM, Level, and Playstation Magazine and worked with clients like EA, Digital Devolver and Bioware.

His Forever cover art is available for purchase as part of his space poster series at: fabledcreative.bigcartel.com/category/space-posters

Ian McDonald

Ian McDonald was born in 1960 in Manchester, England, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He moved with his family to Northern Ireland in 1965. He has won the Locus Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His novels include King of Morning, Queen of Day (winner of the Philip K. Dick Award), River of Gods, The Dervish House, the graphic novel Kling Klang Klatch, and many more. His latest novel, Luna: Wolf Moon, is out this month from Tor Books. He now lives in Belfast.

T.R. Napper

T. R. Napper’s short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Interzone, Grimdark Magazine, Galaxy’s Edge, and numerous others. His work has been translated into Hebrew, German, and French.

By profession T. R. Napper is an aid worker, recently returned to Australia after three years in Vietnam. He is currently undertaking a creative writing PhD focusing on speculative fiction in Southeast Asia.

Ken Liu

Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places.

Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings (2015), is the first volume in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, The Dandelion Dynasty. It won the Locus Best First Novel Award and was a Nebula finalist. He subsequently published the second volume in the series, The Wall of Storms (2016) as well as a collection of short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016).

In addition to his original fiction, Ken is also the translator of numerous literary and genre works from Chinese to English. His translation of The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015, the first translated novel ever to receive that honor. He also translated the third volume in Liu Cixin’s series, Death’s End (2016) and edited the first English-language anthology of contemporary Chinese science fiction, Invisible Planets (2016).

About Forever

Forever Magazine is edited by Neil Clarke and published monthly by Wyrm Publishing. Subscription information is available on our website at forever-magazine.com.

Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine (clarkesworldmagazine.com), Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a four-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His latest anthology, Galactic Empires, was published earlier this year and the second volume in his Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series will be published by Night Shade Books in April. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.