Issue 31, August 2017

© Wyrm Publishing, 2017
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Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the August 2017 issue of Forever Magazine!

This is the first month since February that I won’t be on the road. It’s been great getting out and going to various conferences, workshops, and conventions, but being social is particularly exhausting for me and I don’t feel like I’ve had enough downtime lately. That said, I have significant regrets about not going to Worldcon in Finland this year. I’m a Hugo nominee again, but that’s not the main reason. I particularly enjoyed Worldcon in London because I was spend time with so many authors and fans that I very rarely get to see. It will be very much the same in Finland. I’ll go buy a lottery ticket this week, but unless it’s a winner, I’ll be staying home this month and living vicariously through Facebook and Twitter posts.

While I’m home this month, I’ll be working on The Final Frontier, a sister anthology to Galactic Empires. I’ve been enjoying reading stories for this one and hope to have it wrapped up by the end of the month. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to share all that much with you for several months. This one is scheduled far off in July 2018. More Human than Human, Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3, and the Clarkesworld 10th anniversary best of anthology are all scheduled ahead of it, and only one of those is completed. Publishing can be odd like that sometimes.

That’s probably enough chatter for today. Wishing you a great month!

Until next time . . .

-Neil

Vishnu at the Cat Circus

Ian McDonald

They are saved by a desk.

Come Matsya, come Kurma. Come Narasimha and Varaha. By the smoky light of burning trash polyethylene and under the mad-eye moon lying drunk on its back, come run in the ring; ginger and black and tabby and grey, white and piebald and tortie and hare-legged tailless Manx. Run Varana, Pashurama, run Rama and Krishna.

I pray I do not offend with my circus of cats that carry the names of divine avatars. Yes, they are dirty street cats, stolen from rubbish dumps and high walls and balconies, but cats are naturally blasphemous creatures. Every lick and curl, every stretch and claw is a calculated affront to divine dignity. But do I not bear the name of a god myself, so may I not name my runners, my leapers, my stars, after myself? For I am Vishnu, the Preserver.

See! The trash-lamp are lit, the rope ring is set and the seats laid out, such as they are, being cushions and worn mattresses taken from the boat and set down to keep your fundament from the damp sand. And the cats are running, a flowing chain of ginger and grey, the black and the white and the part-coloured: the marvellous, the magical, the Magnificent Vishnu’s Celestial Cat Circus! You will be amazed, nay, astounded! So why do you not come?

Round they run and round, nose to tail. You would marvel at the perfect fluid synchronisation of my cats. Go Buddha, go Kalki! Yes, it takes a god to train a cat circus.

All evening I beat my drum and rang my bicycle bell through the heat-blasted hinterland of Chunar. The Marvellous, the Magical, the Magnificent Vishnu Cat Circus! Gather round gather round! There are few enough joys in your life: wonder and a week’s conversation for a handful of rupees. Sand in the streets, sand slumped against the crumbling walls of abandoned houses, sand slumped banked up on the bare wheel rims of the abandoned cars and minibuses, sand piled against the thorny hurdles that divided the river-edge sandbars into sterile fields. The long drought and the flashfire wars had emptied this town like so many others close to the Jyotirlinga. I climbed up to the old fort, with its preview twenty kilometres up and down river. From the overlook where the old British ambassador had built his governor’s residence I could see the Jyotirlinga spear into the sky above Varanasi, higher than I could see, higher than the sky for it ran all the way into another universe. The walls of the old house were daubed with graffiti. I rang my bell and beat my drum but there was never any hope of even ghosts here. Though I am disconnected from the deva-net, I could almost smell the devas swirling on the contradictory airs. Walking down into the town I caught the true smell of woodsmoke and the lingering perfume of cooking and I turned, haunted by a sense of eyes, of faces, of hands on doorframes that vanished into shadows when I looked. Vishnu’s Marvellous Magical Magnificent Cat Circus! I cried, ringing my bicycle bell furiously, as much to advertise my poverty and harmlessness as my entertainment. In the Age of Kali the meek and helpless will be preyed upon without mercy, and there will be a surplus of AK-47s.

The cats were furious and yowling in unison when I returned, hot in their cages despite the shade of the awning. I let them hunt by the light of the breaking stars as I set up the ring and the seats, my lamps and sign and alms bowl, not knowing if a single soul would turn up. The pickings were meagre. Small game will be scarce in the Age of Kali.

My fine white Kalki, flowing over the hurdles like a riffle in a stream, it is written that you will battle and defeat Kali, but that seems to me too big an ask for a mere cat. No, I shall take up that task myself, for if it’s your name, it’s also my name. Am I not Vishnu the ten-incarnated? Are not all of you part of me, cats? I have an appointment down this river, at the foot of that tower of light that spears up into the eastern sky.

Now come, sit down on this mattress—I have swept away the sand, and let the lamps draw away the insects. Make yourself comfortable. I would offer chai but I need the water for the cats. For tonight you will witness not only the finest cat circus in all of India—likely the only cat circus in all of India. What do you say? All they do is run in a circle? Brother, with cats, that is an achievement. But you’re right; running in a circle, nose to tail is pretty much the meat of my Cat Circus. But I have other ways to justify the handful of rupees I ask from you. Sit, sit and I will tell you a story, my story. I am Vishnu, and I was designed to be a god.

There were three of us and we were all gods. Shiv and Vish and Sarasvati. I am not the firstborn; that is my brother Shiv, with whom I have an appointment at the foot of the Jyotirlinga of Varanasi. Shiv the success, Shiv the businessman, the global success, the household name and the inadvertent harbinger of this Age of Kali; Shiv I cannot imagine what he has become. I was not the firstborn but I was the best born and therein lies the trouble of it.

Strife, I believe, was worked into every strand of my parents’ DNA. Your classical Darwinist scorns the notion that intellectual values can shape evolution, but I myself am living proof that middle class values can be programmed into the genes. Why not war?

A less likely cyberwarrior than my father you would be hard-pressed to imagine. Un-co-ordinated; ungainly; portly—no, let’s not mince words, he was downright fat; he had been a content and, in his own way, celebrated, designer for Dream-Flower. You remember DreamFlower? Street Sumo; RaMaYaNa; BollywoodSing-Star. Million-selling games? Maybe you don’t. I increasingly find it’s been longer than I think. In everything. What’s important is that he had money and career and success and as much fame as his niche permitted and life was rolling along, rolling along like a Lexus, when war took him by surprise. War took us all by surprise. One day we were the Great Asian Success Story—the Indian Tiger (I call it the Law of Aphoristic Rebound—the Tiger of Economic Success travels all around the globe before returning to us)—and unlike those Chinese we had English, cricket and democracy; the next we were bombing each others’ malls and occupying television stations. State against state, region against region, family against family. That is the only way I can understand the War of Schism; that India was like one of those big, noisy, rambunctious families into which the venerable grandmother drops for her six-month sojourn and within two days sons are at their father’s throats. And the mothers at their daughters, and the sisters feud and the brothers fight and the cousins uncles aunts all take sides and the family shatters like a diamond along the faults and flaws that gave it its beauty. I saw a diamond cutter in Delhi when I was young—apologies, when I was small. Not so young. I saw him set the gem in the padded vice and raise his cutter and pawl, which seemed too huge and brutal an object by far for so small and bright an object. I held my breath and set my teeth as he brought the big padded hammer down and the gem fell into three gems, brighter and more radiant than their parent.

“Hit it wrong,” he said, “and all you have is dazzling dust.”

Dazzling dust, I think, has been our history ever since.

The blow came—success, wealth, population strain—and we fell to dust but Delhi didn’t know it. The loyalists resolutely defended the dream of India. So my father was assigned as Help Desk to a Recon Mecha Squad. To you this will sound unspeakably hot and glamorous. But this was another century and another age and robots were far from the shimmering rakshasa-creatures we know today, constantly shifting shape and function along the edge of human expectation. This was a squad of reconnaissance bots; two legged joggers and jumpers, ungainly and temperamental as iron chickens. And Dadaji was the Help Desk, which meant fixing them and de-virusing them and unbugging them and hauling them out of the little running circles they’d trapped themselves in, or turning them away from the unscalable wall they were attempting to leap, all the while wary of their twin flechette-gatlings and their close-defence nano-edged blades.

“I’m a games coder,” he wailed. “I choreograph Bollywood dance routines and arrange car crashes. I design star-vampires.” Delhi ignored his cries. Delhi was already losing as the us-too voices of national self-determination grew loud in the Rashtrapati Bhavan, but she chose to ignore them as well.

Dadaji was a Cyber Warrior, Mamaji was a Combat Medic. It was slightly more true for her than for Dadaji. She was indeed a qualified doctor and had worked in the field for NGOs in India and Pakistan after the earthquake and with Medeçins Sans Frontieres in Sudan. She was not a soldier, never a soldier. But Mother India needed front line medics so she found herself at Advanced Field Treatment Centre 32 east of Ahmedabad at the same time my father’s recon unit was relocated there. My mother examined Tech-Sergeant Tushar Nariman for crabs and piles. The rest of his unit refused to let a woman doctor inspect their pubes. He made eye contact with her, for a brave, frail second.

Perhaps if the Ministry of Defence had been less wanton in their calling-up of cyberwarriors and had assigned a trained security analyst to the Eight Ahmedabad Recon Mecha Squad instead of a games designer, more would have survived when the Bharati Tiger-Strike-Force attacked. A new name was being spoken in old east Uttar Pradesh and Bihar; Bharat, the old holy name of India; its spinning wheel flag planted in Varanasi, most ancient and pure of cities. Like any national liberation movement, there were dozens of self-appointed guerrilla armies, each named more scarily than the predecessor with whom they were in shaky alliance. The Bharati Tiger-Strike-Force was an embryo of Bharat’s elite cyberwar force. And unlike Tushar, they were pros. At 21:23 they succeeded in penetrating the Eight Ahmedabad’s firewall and planted Trojans into the recon mechas. As my father pulled up his pants after experiencing the fluttering fingers and inspection torch of my mother-to-be at his little rosebud, the Tiger-Strike-Force took control of the robots and turned then on the field hospital.

Lord Shiva bless my father for a fat boy and a coward. A hero would have run out on to the sand to see what was happening when the firing started. A hero would have died in the crossfire, or, when the ammunition ran out, by their blades. At the first shot, my father went straight under the desk.

“Get down!” he hissed at my mother who froze with a look part bafflement, part wonderment on her face. He pulled her down and immediately apologised for the unseemly intimacy. She had lately cupped his testicles in her hand, but he apologised. They knelt in the kneehole, side by side while the shots and the cries and the terrible, arthritic click click click of mecha joints swirled around them, and little by little subsided into cries and clicks, then just clicks, then silence. Side by side they knelt, shivering in fear, my mother kneeling like a dog on all fours until she shook from the strain, but afraid to move, to make the slightest noise in case it brought the stalking shadows that fell through the window into the surgery. The shadows grew long and grew dark before she dared exhale, “What happened?”

“Hacked mecha,” my father said. Then he made himself forever the hero in my mother’s eyed. “I’m going to take a look.” Hand by knee by knee by hand, careful to make no noise, disturb not the least piece of broken glass or shattered wood, he crept out from under the desk across the strewn floor to underneath the window. Then, millimetre-by-millimetre, he edged up the side until he was in a half crouch. He glanced out the window and in the same instant dropped to the floor and began his painstaking crawl back across the floor.

“They’re out there,” he breathed to Mamaji. “All of them. They will kill anything that moves.” He said this one word at a time, to make it sound like the natural creakings and contractions of a portable hut on a Ganga sandbank.

“Perhaps they’ll run out of fuel,” my mother replied.

“They run off solar batteries.” This manner of conversation took a long time. “They can wait forever.”

Then the rain began. It was a huge thunder-plump, a forerunner of the monsoon still uncoiling across the Bay of Bengal, like a man with a flag or a trumpet who runs before a groom to let the world know that a great man is coming. Rain beat the canvas like hands on a drum. Rain hissed from the dry sand as it was swallowed. Rain ricocheted from the plastic carapaces of the waiting, listening robots. Rain-song swallowed every noise, so that my mother could only tell my father was laughing by the vibrations he transmitted through the desk.

“Why are you laughing?” she hissed in a voice a little lower than the rain.

“Because in this din they’ll never hear me if I go and get my palmer,” my father said, which was very brave for a corpulent man. “Then we’ll see who hacks whose robots.”

“Tushar,” my mother whispered in a voice like steam but my father was already steadily crawling out from under the desk towards the palmer on the camp chair by the zip door. “It’s only a . . .”

And the rain stopped. Dead. Like a mali turning off a garden hose. It was over. Drips dropped from the ridge-line and the never-weatherproof windows. Sun broke through the plastic panes. There was a rainbow. It was very pretty but my father was trapped in the middle of the tent with killer robots in the alert outside. He mouthed an excremental oath and carefully, deadly carefully reversed amongst all the shatter and tumbled debris, wide arse first like an elephant. How he felt the vibration of suppressed laughter through the wooden desk sides.

“Now. What. Are. You. Laughing. At?”

“You don’t know this river,” my mother whispered. “Ganga Devi will save us yet.”

Night came swift as ever on the banks of the holy river, the same idle moon as now lights my tale rose across the scratched plastic squares of the window. My mother and father knelt, arms aching, knees tormented, side-by-side beneath the desk. My father said, “Do you smell something?”

“Yes,” my mother hissed.

“What is it?”

“Water,” she said and he saw her smile in the dangerous moonlight. And then he heard it, a hissing, seeping suck sand would make if it were swallowing water but all its thirst were not enough, it was too much, too fast, too too much, it was drowning. My father smelled before he saw the tongue of water, edged with sand and straw and the flotsam of the sangam on which the camp stood, creep under the edge of the tent across the liner and around his knuckles. It smelled of soil set free. It was the old smell of the monsoon, when every dry thing has its true perfume scent and flavour and colour released by the rain; the smell of water that is the smell of everything water liberates. The tongue became a film, water flowed around their fingers and knees, around the legs of the desk as if they were the piers of a bridge. Dadaji felt my mother shaking with laughter, then the flood burst open the side of the tent and dashed dazed drowned him in wall of water so that he spluttered and choked and tried not to cough for fear of the traitor mecha. Then he understood my mother’s laughter and he laughed too, loud and hard and coughing up lungfuls of Ganges.

“Come on!” he shouted and leaped up, over-turning the desk, throwing himself on to it like a surfboard, seizing the legs with both hands. My mother dived and grabbed just as the side of the tent opened in a torrent and desk and refugees were swept away on the flood. “Kick!” he shouted as he steered the desk toward the sagging doorway. “If you love life and mother India, kick!” Then they were out in the night beneath the moon. The sentinel unfolded its killing-things, blade after blade after blade, launched after them and was knocked down bowled over, swept away by the flooding water. The last they saw of it its carapace was half-stogged in the sand, water breaking creamy around it. They kicked through the flotsam of the camp, furniture and ration packs and med kids and tech, the shorted, fused, sparked out corpses of the mecha and the floating, spinning swollen corpses of soliders and medics. They kicked through them all, riding their bucking desk, they kicked half-choked, shivering out into the deep green water of Mother Ganga, under the face of the full moon they kicked up the silver corridor of her river-light. At noon the next day, far far from the river beach of Chattigarh, an Indian patrol-RIB found them and hauled them, dehydrated, skin cracked and mad from the sun, into the bottom of the boat. At some point in the long night either under the desk or floating on it they had fallen in love. My mother always aid it was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to her. Ganga Devi raised her waters and carried them through the killing machines to safety on a miraculous raft. Or so our family story went.

Here a God is incarnated, and then me.

My parents fell in love in one country, India, and married in another, Awadh, the ghost of ancient Oudh, itself a ghost of the almost-forgotten British Raj. Delhi was no longer the capital of a great nation but of a geographical fudge. One India was now many, our mother goddess descended into a dozen avatars from re-united Bengal to Rajasthan, from Kashmir to Tamil Nadu. How had we let this happen, almost carelessly, as if we had momentarily stumbled on our march toward super-powerdom, then picked ourselves up and carried on. It was all most embarrassing, like a favourite uncle discovered with porn on his computer. You look away, you shun it, you never talk about it. Like we have never talked about the seisms of violence that tear through our dense, stratified society; the mass bloodletting of our independence that came with an excruciating partition, the constant threat of religious war, the innate, brooding violence in the heart of our caste system. It was all so very un-Indian. What are a few hundred thousand deaths next to those millions? If not forgotten, they will be ignored in a few years. And it certainly has made the cricket more interesting.

The new India suited my mother and father very well. They were model young Awadhis. My father, trapped by artificial intelligence once, viewed never to let that happen again and set up one of the first aeai farms breeding custom wares for low-level applications like Air Awadh, Delhi Bank and the Revenue Service. My mother went first for cosmetic surgery, then, after a shrewd investment in an executive enclave for the nascent Awadhi civil service, gave up the micro-manipulators for a property portfolio. Between them they made so much money that their faces were never out of Delhi Gloss! Magazine. They were the golden couple who had sailed to a glorious future over the floods of war and the interviewers who called at their penthouse asked, so then, where is the golden son?

Shiva Nariman made his appearance on September 27, 2025. Siva, oldest God in the world, Siva, first and favoured, Siva from whose matted hair the holy Ganga descended, generative force, auspicious one, lord of paradox. The photo rights went to Gupshup magazine for five hundred thousand Awadhi rupees. The golden boy’s nursery was featured on the nightly Nationwide show and became quite the style for a season. There was great interest in this first generation of a new nation; the Awadh Bhais, the gossip sites called them. They were the sons not just a small coterie of prominent Delhi middle class, but of all Awadh. The nation took them to its heart and suckled them from its breasts, these bright, bouncing brilliant boys who would grow up with the new land and lead it to greatness. It was never to be mentioned, not even to be thought, how many female foetuses were curetted or flushed out or swilled away, unimplanted, into the medical waste. We were a new country, we were engaged in the great task of nation-building. We could overlook a demographic crisis that had for years been deforming our middle classes. What if there were four times as many boys as girls? They were fine strong sons of Awadh. The others, they were only females.

So easily I say we, for I seem to have ended up as a impresario and story teller but the truth is that I did not exist, I didn’t even exist then, not until the day the baby spoke at the Awadhi Bhai Club. It was never anything as formal as a constituted club; the blessed mothers, darlings of the nation, had fallen together by natural mutual need to cope with a media gawping into every aspect of their lives. Perfection needs a support group. They naturally banded together in each other living rooms and penthouse, and their mothers and ayahs with them. It was a gilded Mothers and Infants group. The day the baby spoke my mother had gathered with Usha and Kiran and Devi. It was Devi’s baby who spoke. Everyone was talking about exhaustion and nipple softening oil and peanut allergies when Vin Johar lolling in his rocker opened his brown brown eyes, focused across the room and clearly said, “Hungry, want my bottle.”

“Hungry, are we my cho chweet?” Devi said.

“Now,” said Vin Johar. “Please.”

Devi clapped her hands in delight.

“Please! He hasn’t said ‘please’ before.”

The rest of the penthouse was still staring, dazed.

“How long has he been talking?” Usha asked.

“Oh, about a three days,” Devi said. “He picks up everything you say.”

“My bottle now,” demanded Vin Johar. “Quickly.”

“But he’s only . . .” Kiran said.

“Five months, yes. He’s been a bit slower than Dr. Rao predicted.”

The mothers’ mothers and the ayahs made furtive hand gestures, kissed charms to turn away evil. It was my Mamaji, dandling fat, content Shiv on her knee, who understood first.

“You’ve been, you’ve had, he’s a . . .”

“Brahmin, yes.”

“But you’re a Sudra,” Kiran wondered.

“Brahmin,” Devi said with such emphasis that no one could fail to hear the Capital. “We’ve had him done, yes.”

“Done?” asked Usha and then realised, “Oh.” And, “Oh!”

“He’ll be tall and he’ll be strong and he’ll be handsome—of course; that bit we didn’t have to engineer—and he’ll be fit and healthy. Oh so healthy—he’ll never get heart disease, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, Huntingdon’s; with his immune system he can laugh of almost any virus or infection. His immune system will even take out malaria! Imagine that! And intelligence; well, let’s just say, Dr. Rao told us there isn’t even a test smart enough to stretch him. He’ll just need to see a thing once and he’s learned it—like that! And his memory, well, Dr. Rao says there is double the number of connections in the brain, or something like that: what it means is that he’ll have a phenomenal memory. Like that Mr. Memory on India’s Got Talent, only even better. He won’t be able to forget anything. No forgetting birthdays and phone calls to his Mata when he’s off around the world with some big corporation. Look at him, look at him, isn’t he just the most gorgeous thing you’ve ever seen; those baby baby blue eyes. Look at you, look at you, just look at you my little lord? See them all, see them your friends? They are princes each and every one, but you, you are a god. Oh, I could bite your bum, oh, just bite it like that it’s so beautiful and plump and gorgeous.” Devi held Vin Johar up like a trophy in a cricket match. She kissed him on his bare belly where his little vest had ridden up. “Oh you little god.”

Then Shiv let out a long wail. All through Devi’s song of praise to her genetically improved darling son, my mother’s grip had gradually tightened in envy on golden Shiv, now hopelessly outmoded, until he cried out in pain. Her fingers had left bruises like purple carrots along his ribs.

Shiv gazed up at the mobile turning in the air-conditioning above his cot innocent and unaware of how his visual acuity was being stimulated by the cleverly designed blobs and clouds. My mother fretted and stormed by turns around the pastel-lit apartment until Dadaji returned from the office. After Shiv was born his duties at the office grew more arduous and his hours longer. He was never a terribly good father really. He was useless at cricket.

“What are you doing on Friday?” Mamaji demanded.

“Um, I’m not sure, there’s something at the office.”

“Cancel it.”

“What?” He was never very good at manners either, but then he was a Top Geek.

“We’re seeing Dr. Rao.”

“Dr. who?”

“Dr. Rao. At the Swaminathan Clinic.” He knew the name. He knew the clinic. All Delhi, even Top Geeks, knew of the strange and miraculous children that came out of there. He just need a moment for his balls to unfreeze and drop from that place close to the warmth of his perineum where they had retreated in terror.

“Friday, eleven thirty, with Dr. Rao himself. We are having a baby.”

It wasn’t Friday eleven thirty, nor the Friday after. It was not for six Fridays, after the initial consultation and the financial check and the medical assessment and the one-to-ones first Mamaji then Dadaji and only then did they get to choose from the menu. It was a menu, like in the most rarefied restaurant you can imagine. My parents blinked. Intelligence yes good looks yes enhanced concentration yes expanded memory and improved recall yes health wealth strength happiness, everything Vin Johar had. And more.

“Extended lifespan?”

“Ah yes, that is a new one. A new technique that has just been licensed.”

“Does that mean?”

“Exactly what it says.”

My parents blinked again.

“Your son”—for this was me they were building—“will enjoy a greatly increased span of life in full health and vigor.”

“How much increased?”

“Double the current human norm; what is that? Let me think, for people like us, affluent, educated, middle-class, with access to quality healthcare, that’s currently eighty years. Well double that.”

A third time they blinked.

“One hundred and sixty years old.”

“At the very least, you must remember that medical miracles are occurring every day. Every single day. There’s no reason your son . . .”

“Vishnu.”

My father stared open-mouthed ay mother. He didn’t know there was a name. He hadn’t yet realised that he had no say in this whatsoever. But his balls understood, cringing in his loose-and-cooling-good-for-sperm-production silk boxers.

“Vishnu, the Lord, governor and sustainer.” Dr. Rao dipped his head in respect. He was an old-fashioned man. “You know, I have often thought how the processes of conception, gestation and parturition are reflected in he ten incarnations of Lord Vishnu: the fish the restless sperm, the turtle of Kurma the egg, the saving of the earth from the bottom of the ocean by Varaha the fertilisation . . .”

“What about the dwarf?” my father asked. “The dwarf Brahmin?”

“The dwarf, yes,” Dr. Rao drawled. He was a man of slow speech, who seemed to lose the end of his sentences the closer he approached them. This led many people to make the mistake of thinking him stupid when what he was doing was shaping the perfect conclusion. As a consequence he didn’t do many television or net interviews. “The dwarf’s always the problem, isn’t he? But your son will assuredly be a true Brahmin. And Kalki, yes, Kalki. The ender of the Age of Kali. Who’s to say that he might not see this world end in fire and water and a new one be born? Yes, longevity. It’s very good, but there are a couple of minor inconveniences.”

“Never mind. We’ll have that. Devi Johar doesn’t have that.”

So my father was sent with a plastic cup to catch his sacred fish. My mother went with him; to make it an act of love but mostly because she didn’t trust him with Western porn. A few Fridays later Dr. Rao harvested a clutch of my mother’s turtle-eggs with a long needle. She didn’t need my father there for that. This was an act of biology. The slow-spoken doctor did his work and called up eight blastulas from the deep ocean of his artificial wombs. One was selected: Me! Me! Little me! Here I am! See me! See me! and I was implanted into my mother’s womb. It was then that she discovered the inconvenience: my doubled lifespan was bought at the price of aging at half the speed of baseline, non-Brahminic humanity. After sixteen months of pregnancy, sixteen months of morning sickness and bloating and bad circulation and broken veins and incontinence and backache but worst of all, not being able to smoke, my mother, with a great shriek of At last At last! Get the fucking thing out of me! gave birth on August 9, 2027 and I made my entry as a player in this story.

MY BROTHER HATES ME

What a world, into which I was born! What times: an age of light and brilliance. Shining India truly found herself in Shining Awadh, Shining Bharat, Shining Maratha, Shining Bengal—all the shining facets of our many peoples. The horrors of the Schisming were put behind us, apart from war-maimed begging on metro platforms, gangs of undersocialised ex-teen-cyberwarriors, occasional flare-ups from hibernating combat ’ware buried deep in the city net and Concerned Documentary Makers who felt that we had not sufficiently mourned our self-mutilation and achieved reconciliation. Reconciliation? Delhi had no time for such Western niceties. Let the dead burn the dead, there was money to be made and pleasure to be savoured. Our new boulevards and maidans, our malls and entertainment zones were brilliant with the bright and the young and the optimistic. It was a time of bold new fashions, father-scandalising hemlines and mother-troubling hairstyles; of new trends and obsessions that were old and cold as soon as they hit the gossip sites; of ten thousand shattering new ideas that disappeared as soon as they were iterated like a quantum foam of thought. It was youth, it was confidence, it was the realisation of all that old Mother India had claimed she might be but most of all it was money. As in Delhi, so in Varanasi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, Jaipur. But most of all, I think, in Delhi. In India she had been capital by whim, not by right. Mumbai, even Kolkata always outshone her. Now she truly was capital of her own nation, without rival, and she dazzled. My earliest memory, from the time when my senses all ran together and sounds had smells and colours had textures and a unified reality above those crude divisions, was of lines of light streaming over my upturned face, light in all colours and more, light that, to undifferentiated cortex, hummed and chimed like the sympathetic strings of a sitar. I suppose I must have been in our car and our chauffeur driving us somewhere through the downtown lights to some soirée or other, but all I remember is grinning up at the streaming, singing light. When I think of Delhi even now, I think of it as a river of light, a torrent of silver notes.

And what a city! Beyond Old Delhi and New Delhi, beyond the Newer Delhis of Gurgaon and the desirable new suburbs of Sarita Vihar and New Friends Colony, the Newest Delhis of all were rising. Invisible Delhis, Delhis of data and digits and software. Distributed Delhis, networked Delhis, Delhis woven from cable and wireless nodes, intangible Delhis woven through the streets and buildings of the material city. Strange new peoples lived here: the computer-constructed cast of Town and Country, the all-conquering soap opera that, in its complete artificiality, was more real than life itself. It was not just the characters who drew our fascinations, the genius of the production lay in the CG-actors who believed they played and had a separate existence from those characters, and whose gupshup and scandal, whose affairs and marriages meant more to us than our friends and neighbours. Other brilliant creatures streamed past and through us on our streets and squares: the aeais; the pantheon of artificial intelligences that served our immaterial needs from banking to legal services to household management to personal secretarial services. In no place and every place, these were entities of levels and hierarchies; high-end aeais cascading down through sub-routines into low-grade monitors and processors; thousands of those same daily-grind Level 0.8 (the intelligence of a street pig) scaling up through connection and associations into Level 1s—the intelligence of a monkey; those again aggregating together into the highest, the Level 2s, indistinguishable from a human seventy percent of the time. And beyond them were the rumoured, feared Level 3s: of human intelligence and beyond. Who could understand such an existence, beings of many parts that did not necessarily recognise each other? The djinns, those ancient haunters of their beloved Delhi, they understood; and older than they, the gods. They understood only too well. And in the material city, new castes appeared. A new sex appeared on our streets as if stirred out of heaven, neither male nor female, rejecting the compromises of the old hijras to be aggressively neither. The nutes, they called themselves. And then of course there were these like me; improved in egg and sperm, graced with outrageous gifts and subtle curses: the Brahmins. Yes I was an upper-middle class brat born into genetic privilege, but Delhi was laid out before me like a wedding banquet. She was my city.

Delhi loved me. Loved me, loved all of my Brahmin brothers and occasional sisters. We were wonders, freaks, miracles and avatars. We might do anything, we were the potential of Awadh. Those first-born were accidents of birth, we, the Brahmins, were the true Awadhi Bhais. We even had our own comic, of that name. With our strange genetic powers, we battled criminals, demons and Bharatis. We were superheroes. It sold pretty well.

You might think I was blithe enough, a genetically high-caste blob bouncing in my baby-rocker blinking up into the sunlight beaming through the glass walls of our tower-top penthouse. You would be wrong. As I lay giggling and blinking neural pathways were twining up through my medulla and cerebellum and Area of Broca with preternatural speed. That blur of light, that spray of silver notes rapidly differentiated into objects, sounds, smells, sensations. I saw, I heard, I sensed but I could not yet understand. So I made connections, I drew patterns, I saw the world pouring in through my senses and up the fiery tree of my neurons as relation, as webs and nets and constellations. I formed an inner astrology and from it, before I could call dog “dog” and cat “cat” and Mamaji “Mamaji,” I understood the connectedness of things. I saw the bigger picture; I saw the biggest picture. This was my true superpower, one that has remained with me to this day. I never could fly to Lanka in a thought or lift a mountain by the force of my will, I was not master of fire or thunder or even my own soul, but I could always take one look and know the whole, absolute and entire.

The naming of names. That was where Mamaji first realised that Dr. Rao’s blessings were not unmixed. The soirée that day was at Devi Johar’s house, she of the amazing Vin. There he was, running around the place with his ayah trying to keep up with him in kiddie-wear by SonSun of Los Angeles. Shiv played with the other non-Brahmins in the roof garden, happy and content at their own limited, non-enhanced activities. How fast the gilt had rubbed off him, after I was born! As for me, I sat in my bouncer, burbling and watching big-eyed the mothers of the golden. I knew Shiv’s jealousy, though I didn’t have the words or the emotional language for it. I saw in a thousand looks and glances, the way he sat at the table, the way he rode in the car, the way he toddled along behind Ayah Meenakshi as she pushed me through the mall, the way he stood by my cot and gazed soft-eyed at me. I understood hate.

Vin asked Devi if he could go out and play with the others on the roof garden. Please.

“All right, but don’t show off,” Devi Johar said. When he had toddled away, Devi crossed her ankles demurely and placed her hands on her knees, so.

“Mira, I hope you don’t mind me saying, but your Vish; well, he isn’t talking yet. At his age, Vin had a vocabulary of two hundred words and a good grasp of syntax and grammar.”

“And shouldn’t he be, well, at least crawling?” Usha asked.

“How old is he; fifteen months? He does seem a little on the . . . small side,” Kiran chimed in.

My Mamaji broke down in tears. It was the crying nights and the sshing to sleep, the rocking and the cleaning and the mewling and puling, the tiredness, oh, the tiredness, but worst of all, the breast feeding.

“Breast? After a year?” Usha was aghast. “I mean, I’ve heard that some mothers keep them on the teat for years, but they’re from the villages, or mamas who love their sons too much.”

“My nipples feel like mulberries,” my Mamaji wept. “You see, he’s fifteen months old, but biologically, he not even eight months yet.”

I would live twice as long, but age half as fast. Infancy was a huge, protracted dawn; childhood an endless morning. When Shiv started school I would only have begun toddling. When I was of university age I would still have the physiology of a nine year-old. Adulthood, maturity, old age, were points so distant on the great plain of my lifespan that I could not tell if they were insects or cities. In those great days I would come into my own, a life long enough to become part of history; as a baby, I was a mother’s nightmare.

“I know breast is best, but maybe you should consider switching to formula,” Devi said soothingly.

See how I recall every word? Another of Dr. Rao’s equivocal gifts. I forget only what I choose to unremember. I understood every word—at eighteen months my vocabulary was far in advance of your precious Vin, bitch Devi. But it was trapped inside me. My brain formed the words but my larynx, my tongue, my lips and lungs couldn’t form them. I was a prisoner in a baby-bouncer, smiling and waving my fat little fists.

Four there were who understood me, and four only, and they lived in the soft-contoured plastic butterfly that hung over my cot. Their names were TikkaTikka, Badshanti, Pooli and Nin. They were aeais, set to watch over me and entertain me with song and stories and pretty patterns of coloured lights because Mamaji considered Ayah Meenakshi’s sleepy-time stories far too terrifying for a suggestible Brahmin. They were even more stupid than my parents but it was because they were deeply dense that they had no preconceptions beyond their Level 0.2 programming and so I could communicate with them.

TikkaTikka sang songs.

In a little green boat,
On the blue sea so deep
Little Lord Vishnu
Is sailing to sleep . . .

He sang that every night. I liked it, I still sing it to myself as I pole my circus of cats along the ravaged shores of Mata Ganga.

Pooli impersonated animals, badly. He was a cretin. His stupidity insulted me so I left him mute inside the plastic butterfly.

Badshanti, lovely Badshanti, she was the weaver of stories. “Would you like to hear a story, Vishnu?” were the words that led into hours of wonder. Because I don’t forget. I know that she never repeated a story, unless I asked her to. How did I ask? For that I must introduce the last of my four aeais.

Nin spoke only in patterns of light and colour that played across my face, an ever-wheeling kaleidoscope that was supposed to stimulate my visual intelligence. Nin-no-words was the intelligent one; because he could interpret facial expression, he was the one I first taught my language. It was a very simple language of blinking. One deliberate blink for yes, two for no. It was slow, it was tortuous but it was a way out the prison of my body. Nin reading my answers to Badshanti’s questions, I could communicate anything.

How did my brother hate me? Let me take you to that time in Kashmir. After the third drought in a row my mother vowed never again to spend a summer in Delhi’s heat, noise, smog and disease. The city seemed like a dog lying at the side of the street, panting and feral and filthy and eager for any excuse to sink its teeth into you, waiting for the monsoon. Mamaji looked to the example of the British of a hundred years before and took us up to the cool and the high places. Kashmir! Green Kashmir, blue lake, the bright houseboats and the high beyond all, the rampart of mountains. They still wore snow, then. I remember blinking in the wonder of the Dal Lake as the shikara sped us up the still water to the hotel rising sheer like a palace in one of Badshanti’s tales from the water. My four friends bobbed in the wind of our passage as the boat curved in across the lake to the landing stage where porters in red turbans waited to transport us to our cool summer apartment. Shiv stood in the bow. He wanted to throw them the landing rope.

The calm, the clear, the high cool of Kashmir after the mob heat of Delhi! I bobbed and bounced and grinned in my cot and waved my little hands in joy at the sweet air. Every sense was stimulated, every nerve vibrant. In the evening TikkaTikka would sing, Badshanti tell a story and Nin send stars sweeping over my face.

There was to be an adventure by boat across the lake. There was food and there was drink. We were all to go together. It was a thing of a moment, I can see it still, so small it looked like an accident. It was not. It was deliberate, it was meticulously planned.

“Where’s Gundi-bear? I’ve lost Gundi-bear,” Shiv cried as my father was about to get into the boat. “I need Gundi-bear.” He launched towards the shore along the gangplank. Dadaji swept him up.

“Oh no you don’t; we’ll never get anywhere at this rate. You stay here and don’t move. Now, where did you last see him?”

Shiv shrugged, innocently forgetful.

“Here, I’ll come with you, you’ll never find anything the way you ram and stam around.” My mother sighed her great sigh of exasperation. “Shiv, you stay here, you hear? Don’t touch anything. We’ll be back in two ticks.”

I felt a deeper shadow in the mild shade of the awning. Shiv stood over me. Even if I chose to I could not forget the look on his face. He ran up the gangplank, untied the mooring rope and let it fall into the water. He waggled his fingers, bye bye as the wind caught the curve of coloured cotton and carried me out into the lake. The frail little shikara was taken far from the shelter of the Lake Hotel’s island into the rising chop. The wind caught it and turned it. The boat rolled. I began to cry.

Nin saw my face change. TikkaTikka awoke in the little plastic butterfly my parents had hung from the bamboo ridge pole.

The lake is big and the lake deep

And Little Lord Vishnu is falling asleep

The wind is high and the sun is beaming

To carry you off to the kingdom of dreaming, he sang.

“Hello Vishnu,” Badshanti said. “Would you like a story today?”

Two blinks.

“Oh, no story? Well then, I’ll just let you sleep. Sweet dreams, Vishnu.”

Two blinks.

“You don’t want a story but you don’t want to sleep?”

One blink.

“All right then, let’s play a game.”

Two blinks. Badshanti hesitated so long I thought her software had hung. She was a pretty rudimentary aeai.

“Not a game, not a story, not sleep?” I blinked. She knew better than to ask “well, what do you want?” Now TikkaTikka sang a strange song I had never heard before,

“Wind and lake water

And gathering storm,

Carry Lord Vishnu

Far into harm.”

Yes. The shikara was far from shore, broadside to the wind and rolling on the chop. On gust could roll it over and send me to the bottom of the Dal Lake. I might be a hero in my own comic but Dr. Rao had neglected to give me the genes for breathing underwater.

“Are we on a boat, sailing far far away?” Badshanti asked.

Yes.

“Are you out on water?”

Yes.

“Are we on our own?”

Yes.

“Is Vishnu happy?”

No.

“Is Vishnu scared?”

Yes.

“Is Vishnu safe?”

Two blinks. Again Badshanti paused. Then she started to shout. “Help aid assist! Little Lord Vishnu is in peril! Help aid assist!” The voice was thin and tinny and would not have reached any distance across the wind-ruffled lake but one of the silent aeais, perhaps stupid Pooli, must also have sent out a radio, bluetooth and GPS alarm, for a fishing boat suddenly changed course, opened up its long-tail engine and sped towards me on a curve of spray.

“Thank you thank you sirs and saviours,” Badshanti babbled as the two fishermen hauled my shikara close with their hard hands and to their astonishment saw a child lying on the mattresses, smiling up at them.

A MAP DRAWN INSIDE THE SKULL

All my long life I have been ordained to be tied to water. My parents were delivered by the flood, my aeais saved me from the drifting boat. Even now I pick my way down the shrivelled memory of the Ganga, descended from the hair of Siva. Water it was that made me into a superhero of Awadh, albeit of a very different, non-tall-building-leaping type from the Awadhi Bhai who refused to grow up through the pages of Virgin comics.

There was of course no end of ruction after five-and-half-year old Shiv tried to expose me in an open boat. He made no attempt to deny it. He bore it stoically. The worst of it was my father’s therapy-speak. I almost felt for him. At least my mother was angry, blazingly, searingly angry. She didn’t try to wrap it up in swathes of how did you find it and I imagine you’re feeling and let’s try and talk through this like men. It didn’t end when the monsoon finally came late and scanty and we returned to Delhi slick and greasy with rain, the wonderful, rich smell of wet dust perfuming the air more purely than any incense. Four days later it ended and Delhi became afraid. That was how my parents kept the story out of the papers. FIFTEEN MILLION THIRSTY THROATS is a more immediate headline than FIVE-YEAR-OLD TRIES TO DROWN BRAHMIN BROTHER. Just.

There was counselling, of course, long and expensive and in the end producing no better result than the child psychologist saying, “This is possibly the most intractable case of sibling rivalry I have ever seen. Your son has a colossal sense of entitlement and deeply resents what he perceives as a loss of status and parental affection. He’s quite unrepentant and I fear he might make a second attempt to cause Vishnu harm.” My parents took these words and reached their own solution. Shiv and I could not live together so we must live apart. My father took an apartment across the city. Shiv went with him. I stayed with Mamaji, and one other. Before they parted plump Tushar loved my mother a goodbye-time, without planning or sex selection or genetic regulation. And so Sarasvati was born, the last of the three gods; my sister.

We grew up together. We lay in our cots side by side, looking not at our stimulating and educational toys but at each other. For a blissful time she paralleled me. We learned to walk and talk and regulate our bowels together. When we were alone I would murmur the words I knew to her, the words that had roosted and chattered so long in my skull and now were free, like someone throwing open a dark and fetid pigeon loft on a Delhi rooftop. We were close as twins. Then week by week, month by month, Sarasvati outgrew me. Bigger, better co-ordinated, more physically developed, her tongue never stumbled over her few and simple words while poems and vedas rattled inarticulate inside me. She grew out of being twin to bigger sister. She was the surprise, the delight, the child free from expectations and thus she could never disappoint. I loved her. She loved me. In those murmurous evenings filled with sunset and the cool of the air-conditioning, we found a common language and knowing born of shared playing that our various and despised ayahs, even our Mother, could never penetrate.

Across the city, on his own glass tower top filled with the staggering, pollution-born sunsets of great Delhi, Shiv grew up apart. He was six and a half, he was top of his class, he was destined for greatness. How do I know this? Once a week my father came to see his other son and daughter and for a snatched evening with his darling. I had long superseded TikkaTikka, Pooli, Nin and Badshanti with more powerful (and discreet) aeai attendants, ones that, as soon as I had the words on my tongue, I found I could reprogramme to my needs. I sent them out like djinns through the apartment. Not a word was spoken, not a glance exchanged that I could not know it. Sometimes the glances would become looks, and the murmurs cease and my parents would make love to each other. I saw that too. I did not think it particularly wrong or embarrassing; I knew fine and well what they were doing but, though it made them very happy, it did not look like a thing I would ever want.

I look back now from age and loss and see those babbling days with Sarasvati as the age of gold, our Satya Yuga of innocence and truth. We stumbled together towards the sunlight and found joy in every fall and bump and grin. Our world was bright and full of surprises’ delights in discovery for Sarasvati, pleasure in her evident delight for me. Then school forced us apart. What a terrible, unnecessary thing school is. I feel in it the enduring envy of parents for idle childhood. Of course it could be no ordinary school for little Lord Vishnu. Dr. Renganathan Brahminical College was an academy for the elite of the elite. Education was intimate and bespoke. There were eight in my year and that was large enough for divisions. Not all Brahmins were equal in the Dr. Renganathan College. Though we were all the same age we divided ourselves, quite naturally, like meiosis, into Old Brahmins and Young Brahmins, Or, as you like, Big Brahmins and Little Brahmins. Those who aged half as fast but would live twice as long and those who would enjoy all the gifts of health and smarts and looks and privilege but would still fall dead at whatever age the meditech of that era could sustain. Intimations of mortality in Miss Mukudan’s reception class.

Ah, Miss Mukudan! Your golden bangles and your Cleopatra smiling eyes, your skin the soft dark of the deepest south; your ever-discreet moustache and smell of camphor as you bent over me to help my fumble-fingers with my buttons or the Velcro fastenings on my shoes. You were my first vague love. You were the undifferentiated object of affection of all of us. We loved you for your lofty remoteness, your firmness and hinted-at tetchiness and the delicious knowledge that to you we were just more children to be turned from blind and selfish little barbarians into civilized young human beings. We loved you because you were not the mother-smother of our cottonwool parents. You took no shit.

The Class of ’31 was too much even for the redoubtable Miss Mukudan. At age four our engineered brains were pushing us down the strange and separate roads into strange ways of looking at the world, quasi-autistic obsessions, terrifying savant insights or just plain incomprehensibility. We were each given a personalised tutor to accompany us day and night. Mine was called Mr. Khan and he lived inside my ear. A new technology had arrived to save us. It was the latest thing in comms—which has always seemed the most faddish and trivial of technologies to me. No more did you need to be trapped by screens or pictures in the palm of your hand or devices that wrote on your eyeball as delicately as a bazaar fakir writing tourists’ names on a grain of rice. A simple plastic hook behind the ear would beam cyberspace into your head. Direct electromagnetic stimulation of the visual, auditory and olfactory centres now peopled the world with ghost messages and data spreads, clips from Town and Country, video messages, entire second-life worlds and avatars and, inevitably, spam and junk mailing. And for me, my customised aeai tutor, Mr. Khan.

How I hated him! He was everything Miss Mukudan was not; irascible, superior, gruff and persistent. He was a little waspy Muslim, thin as a wire with a white moustache and a white Nehru cap. I would rip off the “hoek” in frustration and whenever I put it on again, after Miss Mukudan’s ministrations—we would do anything for her—he would take up his harangue from the very syllable at which I had silenced him.

“Look and listen, you bulging pampered privileged no-right-to-call-yourself-a-proper-Brahmin brat,” he would say. “These eyes these ears, use them and learn. This is the world and you are in it and of it and there is no other. If I can teach you this I will have taught you all you need to ever learn.”

He was a stern moralist, very proper and Islamic. I looked at Miss Mukudan differently then, wondering what assessments she had made that assigned Mr. Khan especially to me. He had been programmed just for Vishnu? How had he been built? Did he spring into being perfectly formed or did he have a history, and how did he think of this past? Did he know it for a lie, but a treasured one; was he like the self-deceiving aeai actors of Town and Country who believed they existed separately from the roles they played? If he masqueraded as intelligent, did that mean he was intelligent? Was intelligence the only thing that could not be simulated? Such thoughts were immensely interesting to a strange little eight-year-old suddenly becoming aware of those other strange citizens of his tight world. What was the nature of the aeais, those ubiquitous and for the most part unseen denizens of great Delhi? I became quite the junior philosopher.

“What is right to you?” I asked him one day as we rode back in the Lexus through a Delhi melted by the heat into an impermeable black sludge. It was Ashura. Mr. Khan had told me of the terrible battle of Karbala and the war between the sons of the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him). I watched the chanting, waling men carrying the elaborate catafalques, flogging their backs bloody, beating their foreheads and chests. The world, I was beginning to realise, was far stranger than I.

“Never mind me what is right to me, impudent thing. You have the privileges of a god, you’re the one needs to think about right action,” Mr. Khan declared. In my vision he sat beside me on the back seat of the Lex, his hands primly folded in his lap.

“It’s a serious question.” Our driver hooted up alongside the dour procession. “How can right action mean anything to you, when anything you do can be undone and anything you undo can be done again. You’re chains of digits, what do you need morality for?” Only now was I beginning to understand the existence of the aeais, which had begun with the mystery of TikkaTikka, Pooli, Badshanti and Nin living together and sharing common code inside my plastic star. Common digits but separate personalities. “It’s not as if you can hurt anyone.”

“So right action is refraining from causing pain, is it?”

“I think that it’s the start of right action.”

“These men cause pain to themselves to express sorrow for wrong action; albeit the actions of their spiritual forebears. In so doing they believe they will make themselves more moral men. Consider those Hindu saddhus who bear the most appalling privations to achieve spiritual purity.”

“Spiritual purity isn’t necessarily morality,” I said, catching the line Mr. Khan had left dangling for me. “And they choose to do it to themselves. It’s something else altogether if they choose to do it to others.”

“Even if it means those others may be made better men?”

“They should be left to make their own minds up about that.”

We cruised past the green-draped faux-coffin of the martyr.

“So what then is the nature of my relationship with you? And your mother and father?”

My Mamaji, my Dadaji! Two years after that conversation, almost to the day, my flawless memory recalls, when I was a nine-year-old-in-a-four-year-old’s body and Sarasvati was a cat-lean, ebullient seven, my mother and father very gently, very peacefully, divorced. The news was broken by the two of them sitting at opposite ends of the big sofa in the lounge with the smog of Delhi glowing in the afternoon sun like a saffron robe. A full range of aeai counselling support hovered around the room, in case of tears or tantrums or anything else they couldn’t really handle. I remember feeling a suspicion of Mr. Khan on the edge of my perceptions. Divorce was easy for Muslims. Three words and it was over.

“We have something to tell you, my loves,” said my mother. “It’s me and your father. Things haven’t been going so well with us for quite some time and well, we’ve decided that it’s best for everyone if we were to get a divorce.”

“But it won’t mean I’ll ever stop being your Dad,” plump Tushar said quickly. “Nothing’ll change, you’ll hardly even notice. You’ll still keep living here, Shiv will still be with me.”

Shiv. I hadn’t forgotten him—I couldn’t forget him—but he had slipped from my regard. He was more distant than a cousin, less thought of than those remote children of your parents’ cousin, to whom I’ve never considered myself related at all. I did not know how he was doing at school or who his friends were or what sports teams he was on. I did not care how he lived his life or pursued his dreams across that great wheel of lives and stories. He was gone from me.

We nodded bravely and trembled our lips with the right degree of withheld emotion and the counsel-aeais dissolved back into their component code clusters. Much later in the room we had shared as bubbling babies and which was now our mutual den, Sarasvati asked me, “What’s going to happen to us?”

“I don’t think we’ll even notice,” I said. “I’m just glad they can stop having that ugly, embarrassing sex.”

Ah! Three little letters. Sex sex sex, the juggernaut looming over our childhoods. The kiddy thrill of being naked—doubly exciting in our body-modest society—took an edge and became something I did not quite understand. Oh, I knew all the words and the locations, as Sarasvati and I played our games of doctors and patients in our den, her pulling up her little vest and pulling down her pants as I listened and examined and prodded vaguely. We knew these were grown-up things not for the eyes of grown-ups. Mamaji would have been horrified and called in squadrons of counselling ware if she had discovered our games but I had long since suborned the aeais. If she had looked at the security monitors she would have seen us watching the Cartoon Network; my own little CG Town and Country playing just for her. Sex games for children; everyone plays them. Bouncing up and down in the pool, pressing ourselves against the jets in the rooftop spa, suspecting something in the lap of artificial waves across our private places as ochre dust-smog from the failed monsoon suffocated Delhi. And when we played horsey-horsey, she riding me around like Lakshmibai the warrior Rani, there was more in the press of her thighs than just trying to hold on as I cantered across the carpets. I knew what it should be, I was mostly baffled by my body’s failure to respond the way a twelve-year old’s ought. My lust may have been twelve but my body was six. Even Miss Mukudan’s purity and innocence lost its lustre as I began to notice the way her breasts moved as she leaned over me, or the shape of her ass—demurely swathed in a sari but no concealment was enough for the lusty curiosity of boy-Brahmins—as she turned to the smart-silk board.

“Now,” said Mr. Khan one day on the back seat of the Lexus. “Concerning onanism . . .” It was a dreadful realisation. By the time puberty hit me like a hammer I would be twenty-four. Mine was the rage and impotence of angels.

Now five burning years have passed and we are driving in a fast German car. I am behind the wheel. The controls have been specially modified so that I can reach the pedals, the gear-shift is a standard. If I cut you up on the Siri Ring, after the flicker of road rage, you’d wonder: that’s a child driving that Mercedes. I don’t think so. I’m of legal age. I passed my test without any bribery or coercion; well, none that I know of. I am old enough to drive, get married and smoke. And I smoke. We all smoke, my Little Brahmin classmates and me. We smoke like stacks, it can’t do us any harm, though we are all wearing smogmasks. The monsoon has failed for the fourth time in seven years; whole tracts of north India are turning into dust and blowing through the hydrocarbon-clogged streets and into our lungs. A dam is being built on the Ganges, Kunda Khadar, on the border with our eastern neighbour Bharat. It is promised to slake our thirst for a generation but the Himalaya glaciers have melted into gravel and Mother Ganga is starved and frail. The devotees at the Siva temple in the middle of the Parliament Street roundabout protest at the insult to the holy river with felt-marker banners and three-pronged trisuls. We bowl past them, hooting and waving and up Sansad Marg around Vijay Chowk. The comics portraying us as Awadh’s new superheroes were quietly dropped years ago. Now what we see about ourselves in print tends to headlines like TINY TEARAWAYS TERRORISE TILAK NAGAR, or BADMAASH BABY BRAHMINS.

There are four of us, Purrzja, Shayman, Ashurbanipal and me. We are all from the college—still the Brahminical College!—but when we are out we all have our own names, names we’ve made up for ourselves that sounds strange and alien, like our DNA. Strange and alien we make ourselves look too; our own style cobbled from any source that seems remote and outré: J-punk hair, Chinese bows and ribbons, French street sports fashion and tribal make-up entirely of our own design. We are the scariest-looking eight-year-olds on the planet. By now Sarasvati is a coltish, classy fifteen-year-old. Our closeness has unravelled; she has her own social circles and friends and crushing things of the heart that seem so important to her. Shiv, so I hear, is at his first year at the University of Awadh Delhi. He won a scholarship. Best marks in his school. He’s followed his father into informatics. Me, I howl up and down the boulevards of Delhi trapped in the body of a kid.

We race past the open arms of the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The red stone looks insubstantial as sand in the amber murk.

“That’s your home, that is, Vish,” Purrzja shouts through her mask. It’s well known that Mamaji Has Plans for me. Why should she not? Every other part of me is designed. A good legal job, a prominent practice, a safe parliamentary seat and a steady, planned ascent toward the top of whatever political party afforded the best chance of ambition. It’s assumed that one day I will lead the nation. I’m designed to rule. I floor the pedal and the big Merc leaps forward. Traffic parts like my divine counterpart churning the soma. Their autodrive aeais make them as nervous as pigeons.

Out on the Siri Ring; eight lanes of taillights in each direction, a never ceasing roar of traffic. The car eases into the flow. Despite the barriers and warning signs police pull twenty bodies a day from the soft shoulder. The ring does not obey old Indian rules of traffic. Men race here, hedge-fund managers and data-rajas and self-facilitating media mughals; racing around the twin chambers of Delhi’s heart. I flick on the auto-drive. I am not here to race. I am here for sex. I recline the driving seat, roll over and Ashurbanipal is beneath me. Her hair is drawn back behind her ear to show off the plastic curl of the ’hoek. It’s part of the look.

I snap the fingers of my right hand into my palm to activate the software in the palmer glove. I hold that hand a hovering few centimetres above her fluorescent body-paint-stained belly. I don’t touch. We never touch. That’s the rule. Sex has rules. I move my hand in a series of gestures as gentle and precise as any classical dancer’s mudras over Ashurbanipal. Not touching, never touching, never even flexing a finger. It’s not about physical touch. It’s our own thing. But inside her head, I am touching her, more intimately than any rubbing or pushing or chafing of parts. The ’hoek beams signals through the bone, stimulating those parts of the brain that correspond to my slow calligraphy. I am writing my signature across her body. As she in return maps the me drawn on the inside of my skull. How does it feel? Like a cat must feel when it’s stroked. Like an otter must feel diving and turning and performing its underwater acrobatics. Like a fire must feel when the wind catches it and sweeps it up a forested mountainside. And without the poetry; like I want to cringe and melt and the same time. Like I must move in a direction I can’t explain and body can’t express. Like there is something in my mouth that grows bigger with every second but never changes size, like a reverse turd, only sweet and joyful, is working its way back up into my colon. Like I need need need to pee something that isn’t pee that my body hasn’t learned yet. Like I want this to end and never end. It goes on for a long long time and terrible little crying noises come out of our eight-year-aged lips as the aeai steers us through the howling torus of traffic on Siri Ring. We are teens and we are making out in the car.

There is a coming. Oh yes, there is a coming. Like soft fireworks, or the giggling drop at the top of a Ferris wheel or the feeling you get on those nights when the air is clear and you can see out from the roof pool all the billion lights of Delhi and you are connected to every single one. Like a djinn, made of fire. Ecstatic and guilty and dirty, like you’ve shouted a dirty word at a sophisticated party. My nipples are very very sensitive.

Then I start with Purrzja. And then Shayman. As I said, it’s entirely our own thing. It’s well into dark by the time we out up our seats and straighten our clothing and re-gel our hair and I flick off the autodrive and take us up out and over the Ring on a curving off ramp to a club. It’s a bit of a freak place—nutes like it and where nutes are welcome we are usually welcome—but the door knows us—knows our money—and there are always chaati mag paps there. Tonight is no exception: we pose and pimp and preen for the cameras. I can write the society column headlines already. GENE-TWEAK FREAKS ON COCKTAIL CLUB ORGY. Except we don’t drink. We’re underage for that.

It’s always late when we get back. Only the house steward and aeais wait for us, gently chining that it is a school day tomorrow. Don’t they understand that those are the best nights? This night the lights are on in the big drawing room. I can see them from the approach to the car park. My mother waits for me. She’s not alone. There’s a man and a woman with her, money people, I can tell that right away from their shoes, their fingernails, their teeth, the cut of their clothes and the prickle of aeai servitors hovering around them; all those things I can assess in a glance.

“Vishnu, this is Nafisa and Dinesh Misra.”

I namaste, a vision in clashing cross-cultural trash.

“They are going to be your new Mother and Father-in-law.”

MY LOVELY CONSORT

My cats can do other tricks too; I feel you grow bored of them running in their ring. Cats! Cats! See, a clap of my hands and they go and sit on their little stools: Matsya and Kurma, Varaha and Narasimha, Vamana, Parashurama, Rama and Krishna and Buddha and Kalki. Good cats. Clever cats. Rama, stop licking yourself. Hah! One word from me and they do as they will. Now, please feel this hoop, just ordinary paper. Yes? Yes. And these, the same, yes? Yes.

I set them out around the ring. Tabby Parashurama is squeezing his eyes closed in that way that makes him look very very smug.

By the way, I must thank you for coming to watch the Marvellous, the Magical, the Magnificent Vishnu Cat Circus. Yes, that’s the official name. It’s on the letters of registration. Yes, and I pay whatever taxes are due. It’s a small entertainment, but at least it’s working. You have solar? Not hooked up to the zero point? Very long-sighted of you. Now: watch! Varaha, Vamana, Buddha and Kalki!

They flow from their painted stools like liquid and run around the inside of the ring, an effortless, cat-lazy lope. The trick with cat circuses, I have found, is to convince them they are doing it for themselves.

And lo! I clap my hands and in perfect unison my cats leap from their ordained orbits clean through the paper hoops. Your applause please, but not for me: for Varaha, Vamana, Buddha and Kalki. Now they run in a circle, hurdling through the hoops. What was that? Is there a lesson in every trick? What do you mean? The spiritual significance of the cats I call to perform? I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t think cats especially spiritual; quite the reverse; they are the most worldly and sensual of creatures, though the Prophet Mohammed, so it’s said, was a great lover of cats and famously cut the sleeve from his robe rather than disturb a cat that had fallen asleep there.

Now, on with the story. Where am I going? Don’t you know it’s a terrible rudeness to interrupt the storyteller? You came here to see the cat circus, not watch some old goondah spin a yarn? You’ve seen cats leap through paper hoops, what more do you want? Where am I going? Very well then, to Varanasi. No, I am not. It’s not just the bodhisofts who go to Varanasi. Here’s the deal. I have plenty more tricks in my little ring here on the sand, but to see them you will have to listen to my story and remember, the power may be working but the broadcasters are out. Nothing on your screens tonight. But you’ll like this. It’s a wedding scene. What is a story without a wedding?

Elephants bore me. When I say that I don’t mean that I find the pachyderm genus tedious, as if I have some special personal conversational relationship with them and knew all their conversational tics and ploys. Is Ganesh not the best-loved god in our entire profligate pantheon? I mean, simply, that elephants carried me; in a howdah like a small gilt temple through the streets of Delhi. Five elephants, with mahouts; one for my school friend Suresh Hira, one for Vin Johar, one for Syaman and one, my sole spit of defiance in the face of tradition, for Sarasvati, and one for me, Vishnu Nariman Raj, the gnarly groom. Delhi’s eternal, monstrous traffic broke around the horde of musicians, drummers, dancers, merry-meeters like water. The traffic news had been reporting me as a major congestion for hours. People stopped and stared, women threw rice, ayahs pointed me out to their finger-sucking grandchildren: there, there he is, Lord Vishnu goes to his wedding. The chati mags had been full of little else than the first dynastic Brahmin marriage. My other break with tradition: much of the gaudy I had funded myself through the judicious auctioning of the photo rights to Gupshup magazine. Look here am I, in white sherwani and wrinkle-ankle pants in the very best style, the traditional veil of flowers over my face, gripping my sword with one hand (a ludicrous affectation by Sreem, Delhi’s most-sought nute wedding choreographer; who could ever sword-fight from the broad back of an elephant?), with the other gripping white-knuckled to the gold-leaf coping of my swaying howdah. Have I said that riding an elephant is like being on a boat on unstill waters? Does what you glimpse through the cascading marigolds look afraid? Were you expecting someone larger?

Negotiations had been protracted and delicate over the winter. Hosts of aeai attorneys circled and clashed around my mother and father, temporarily unified, as they entertained the Misras to a grand vagdana. Lakshmi and I sat blandly, quietly, hands folded neatly in our laps on the cream leather sofa as relatives and relatives passed and greeted and blessed us. We smiled. We nodded. We did not speak, not to our guests, not to each other. In our years together at the Dr. Renganathan Brahminical College we had said all that we could say to each other. We sat like an old married couple at a metro stop. At last the hosts of clashing attorney aeais withdrew: a pre-nuptial contract was drafted, a dowry was set. It was a brilliant match; property and ware with water, the very essence of life. Of course the price was high; we were Brahmins. It was no less than the flesh of our flesh and the seed of our loins, for all generations. Way down the list of ticky boxes on Dr. Rao’s shopping list was one I suspect Lakshmi’s parents had tickied blindly. I know my parents had. But it was perhaps the most profound change of all that Dr. Rao’s nanoworkers worked on us. Our genelines were modified. The traits engineered into us were inheritable. Our children and their children, all our conceivable Nariman-Misras marching into futurity, would be Brahmins, not from the microsurgery of Dr. Rao, but from our sperm and eggs.

Children, offspring, a line, a dynasty. That was our mutually contracted dowry. A match was made! Let great Delhi rejoice!

The janampatri aeais had read the stars for the most auspicious fates, the pandit had made the puja to Ganesh and the joint houses of Nariman and Misra had hired Gupshup Girls, Delhi’s biggest and brassiest girl band to sing and flash their thighs for two thousand society guests at our sangeet sandhya. Lakshmi duetted onstage with them. Pop-girli hotpants and belly-top looked disturbing on her as she danced and skipped among the high-heels. Too small, too too young to wed. I was never much of a singer. Mamji and Dadaji had neglected to ticky that box. I boogied down in the golden circle with my classmates. Though I had still two years more at Dr. Renganathan College under the tutelage of the invisible Mr. Khan, our circle was broken. I was all their imminent futures.

At India Gate Sarasvati called her mahout to a halt and slipped from her elephant’s back to run and dance among my parade of Baraatis. I had defied tradition by inviting her, she defied it back by coming dressed as a man in sherwani and kohl and huge, ludicrous false Rajput moustache. I watched her leap and whirl, brilliant and vivacious with the dancers and drummers and dance, laughing, with monkey-like Sreem and felt tears in my eyes behind my veil of flowers. She was so brilliant, so lovely, so lithe and free from expectation.

At Lodi Gardens the celebrity spotters were five deep. Policemen held them back with a chain of linked lathis. They had seen Rishi Jaitly and Anand Arora and ooh, isn’t that Esha Rashore the famous dancer and who is that little man with the very much younger wife; don’t you know, it’s Narayan Mittal from Mittal Industries. Last and least to them was the seeming child perched high on the back of a painted wedding elephant. A blare of trumpets and a barrage of drums greeted us. Then the smartsilk screens draped around us woke up and filled with the characters and, in a never-before-seen-feat of CG prestidigitation, the cast of Town and Country singing and dancing our wedding song specially written by legendary screen composer A H Husayin. They were aeais; singing and dancing were easy for them. There, almost lost among the sari silk and garlands as the bridal party stepped forward to greet us, was Lakshmi.

We were swept on a wave of drum beating and brass-tootling to the pavilions arrayed across the well-watered grass like a Mughal invasion. We feasted, we danced, we were sat on our thrones, our feet not touching the ground, and received our guests.

I didn’t see him. The line was long and the atmosphere in marquee stifling and I was bloated and drowsy from wedding food. I took the hand blindly, bored. I only became attentive when it held mine that moment too long, that quantum too firmly.

Shiv.

“Brother.”

I nodded in acknowledgement.

“Are you well?”

He indicated his suit, the fabric cheap, the cut niggardly, the cufflinks and the jewel at the shirt-throat phoney. A budget wedding outfit. Tomorrow it would go by phatphat back to the hire shop.

“I’ll be more suitably dressed when you come to my wedding.”

“Are you getting married?”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

I sniffed then. It was not Shiv’s perfume—that too smelled cheap and phenolic. My uniquely-connected senses show me subtleties to which others are quite oblivious. In his student hire-suit and cheap Bata shoes, Shiv seemed to carry an aura around him, a presence, crackle of information like distant summer thunder. He smelled of aeais. I tilted my head to one side: did I see a momentary shifting glow? It did not take a synaesthete or a Brahmin to spot the ’hoek tucked behind his ear.

“Thank you for coming,” I said and knew that he heard the lie.

“I wouldn’t have missed it.”

“We must meet up some time,” I went on, compounding the lie. “When Lakshmi and I get back into Delhi. Have you over to the place.”

“It’s not going to be terribly likely,” Shiv said. “I’m going to Bharat as soon as I graduate. I’ve a post-grad lined up at the University of Varanasi. Nano-informatics. Delhi’s not a good place for anyone working in artificial intelligence. The Americans are breathing down Srivastava’s neck to ratify the Hamilton Treaty.”

I consumed news, all news, any news, as universally and unthinkingly as breathing. I could watch twelve screens of television and tell you what was happening on any of them, simultaneously scan a table full of newspapers and reproduce any article verbatim; I frequently kept my newsfeeds on brain drip waking and sleeping, beaming the happening world into my tiny head. I knew too well of the international moves, begun by the United States to restrict artificial intelligence by licence. Fear motivates them; that vague Christian millennial dread of the work of our own hands rising up and making itself our god. Artificial intelligences with a thousand, ten thousand, infinite times our human intelligence, whatever that means. Intelligence, when you look down on it from above, is a very vague terrain. Nevertheless police forces had been set established, Krishna cops, charged with hunting down and eliminating rogue aeais. Fine title, vain hope. Aeais were utterly different from us; intelligences that could be in many places at one time, that could be exist in many different avatars, that could only move by copying themselves, not as I moved, lugging about my enhanced intelligence in the calcium bowl of my skull. They had very good guns, but I think my gnawing fear was aeais today, Brahmins tomorrow. Humans are very jealous gods.

I knew that it was inevitable that Awadh would sign up to the accord in return for favoured nation grants from the U.S. Neighbouring Bharat would never accede to that; its media industry, dependent on artificial intelligence for the success of Town and Country from Djakarta to Dubai, was too influential a lobby. The world’s first overt soapocracy. And, I foresaw, the world’s first data-haven nation state. Stitching together stories buried way down the business news; I was already seeing a pattern of software house relocations and research foundations moving to Varanasi. So Shiv, ambitious Shiv, Shiv-building-your-own-glory while I merely obeyed the imperative in my DNA, Shiv withy our whiff of aeais around you, what is it in Bharat? Would you be researcher into technologies as sky-blue as Lord Krishna himself, would you be a dataraja with a stable of aeais pretending they can’t pass the Turing Test?

“Not that we ever exactly lived in each other’s pockets,” I said prissily. We had lived with twenty million people between us for most of our lives but still anger boiled within me. What had I to be resentful of? I had all the advantage, the love, the blessing and the gifts yet here he was in his cheap hire suit smug and assured and I was the ludicrous little lordling, the boy-husband swinging his legs on his golden throne.

“Not really no,” Shiv said. Even in his words, his smile, there was an aura, an intensity; Shiv-plus. What was he doing to himself, that could only be consummated in Varanasi?

The line was restless now, mothers shifting from foot to foot in their uncomfortable weddings shoes. Shiv dipped his head, his eyes meeting mine for an instant of the purest, most intense hatred. Then he moved on into the press of guests, picking up a glass of champagne here, a plate of small eats there, a strangely singular darkness like plague at the wedding.

The caterers cleared away, torches were lit across the heel-trodden grass of Lodi Gardens and the pandit tied us together in marriage. As fireworks burst over and the tomb of Muhammad Shah and dome of Bara Gumbad we drove away to the plane. We left the diamond stain of bright Delhi behind us and flew, far later than tots of our size should be up, through the night into morning as the private helicopter lifted us up and away to the teahouse in the cool and watered green hills. Staff discreetly stowed out baggage, showed us the lie of the rooms, the shaded verandah with its outlook over the heart-stunning gold and purple of the morning Himalayas, the bedroom with the one huge four-poster bed. Then they swept away in a rustle of silk and we were alone, together, Vishnu and Lakshmi, two gods.

“It’s good isn’t it?”

“Lovely. Wonderful. Very spiritual. Yes.”

“I like the rooms. I like the smell of the wood, old wood.”

“Yes, it is good. Very old wood.”

“This is the honeymoon then.”

“Yes.”

“We’re supposed to . . .”

“Yes. I know. Do you . . . are you?”

“Wired? No I was never into that.”

“Oh. Well, I’ve some other stuff in my bag, it should work on you as well.”

“You’ve tried it?”

“Sometimes. I’m finding it gets hard all on its own now, just like that, nothing in particular, so I try it then.”

“Is it productive?”

“It’s a bit like the ’hoek sex. Feeling you really really need to pee something that isn’t pee and isn’t there. To be honest, not as good. Have you tried?”

“With the fingers? Oh yes, with the whole hand. It’s like you.”

“Need to pee?”

“Something like that. More of a clench. It works on a swing too. I don’t really think I want to use something you have on you, you know.”

“I suppose not. We could . . . I could. . . .”

“I don’t really think so.”

“Do you think they’ll check? Save the sheets and show them round to all the relatives?”

“And our physical ages? Don’t be stupid.”

“It’s part of the contract.”

“I don’t think anyone’s going to invoke contractual obligation until I’ve at least had a period.”

“So do you want to do anything?”

“Not particularly.”

“So what will we do then?”

“The view’s nice.”

“There’s a pack of cards in the drawer in the table.”

“Maybe later. I might sleep now.”

“So might I. Are you all right about the bed?”

“Of course. We’re supposed too, aren’t we? We are husband and wife.”

We slept under the light silk cover with the ceiling fan turning slowly, each curled up like the eight-year-olds we physically were with our backs to each other, as far apart as Vish and Shiv and afterwards we invented card games of staggering complexity with the old circular Ganjifa cards on the verandah with its titanic view over the Himalayas. As Lakshmi turned over the kings and ministers our eyes met and we both knew it was more than over, it had never begun. There was nothing but contractual obligation between us. We were the hostages of our DNA. I thought of that line of offspring issuing like a rope of pearls from the end of my still-flaccid penis; those slow children toddling into a future so distant I could not even see its dust on time’s horizon, and onward and onward always onward. I was filled with horror at the blind imperative of biology. I owned superhuman intelligence, I only forgot what I chose to forget, I had never known a day’s illness in my life, I carried the name of a god, but to my seed all this was nothing, I was no different from some baseline Dalit in Molar Bund basti. Yes, I was a privileged brat, yes, I was a sneerer of the worst kind, how could I be anything other? I was a designer snob.

We stayed our week in the teahouse in the green foothills of Himachal Pradesh, Lakshmi and Vishnu. Lakshmi patented some of her elaborate social card games—we tested the multi-player games by each of us playing several hands at once, an easy feat for the Brahmins—and made a lot of money from licensing them. It was radiantly beautiful, the mountains were distant and serene like stone Buddhas, occasional rain pattered on the leaves outside our window at night and we were utterly utterly miserable, but even more so at the thought of what we had to face on our return to Awadh, the darlings of the Delhi. My decision had been made on the third day of our honeymoon but it was not until we were in the limo to the Ramachandra Tower where we had been given an apartment fit for gods on the floor below my Mamaji that I made the call to the very special, very discreet doctor.

TWO EXTRANEOUS ASPECTS OF MYSELF

“Both of them?” the nute said. Yt would have raised an eyebrow had yt possessed any hair on yts shaven head to raise.

“History is quiet on the subject of half-eunuchs,” I said.

No one, alas, ever delivers such dialogue. Ticking lines, arch exchanges, loaded looks, these are things of story not real life. But I am telling you a story, my story, which is much more than just history or even memory. For if I choose to forget, I can also choose to remember and make what I chose memory. So if I wish the nute surgeon’s office to be at the top of a winding, creaking flight of stairs, each level haunted by the eyes of suspicious and hostile Old Delhiwallahs, if I decide to remember it so, it will be so. Likewise, if I choose to recall that office to be a charnel house of grotesque surgical implements and pictures of successfully mutilated body-parts as a like a demon-infested hell from a Himalayan Buddhist painting: it will be so forever. Perhaps it’s less strange a concept for you than for me. I more than anyone know the deceptiveness of physical appearance, but you seem young enough to have grown up in a world comfortable with universal memory, every breath and blink swarming with devas continuously writing and rewriting physical reality. And if the devas choose to rewrite that memory, who is there to say that it’s not so?

But there is east light in the sky beyond the blazing pillar of the Jyotirlinga, I have far to go, you have yet to see the most astonishing my cats can achieve and the reality is that the surgery of Dr. Anil was in a tastefully restored haveli in the warren of streets in the shadow of the Red Fort, the surgery elegant and discreet and fronted by the delightful Miss Modi, and Dr. Anil welcoming, professional subtle and frankly surprised by my request.

“I usually deal in more, substantial surgery,” yt said. The Ardhanarisvara clinic was Delhi’s leading centre for nute transformation. Leading through whispers and rumours; in bright new Awadh we might claim to be urbane, global, cosmopolitan and unshockable but nute culture, those who decided to escape our desperate sex wars by choosing a third way, a neither-way it was still almost as hidden and secretive as the ancient transgendered hijras who had long ago hidden themselves away in Old Delhi. The ancient city; older than any memory, its streets convoluted like the folds of a brain, has always looked after those with needs beyond the merely average.

“I think what I’m asking is substantial enough,” I said.

“True true,” Dr. Anil said, putting yts fingers together in a spire in that way that all doctors, male, female, transgendered or nute, seem to learn on day one of medical school. “So, both testicles.”

“Yes, both.”

“And not the penis.”

“That would be perverse.”

“You’re sure you won’t consider the chemical option? It’s reversible, should you ever reconsider.”

“No, not chemical. I don’t want it to be reversible. I want to remove myself from the future. I want this to end with me. I’m more than a stud animal. Complete physical castration, yes.”

“It’s quite simple. Much more so than the usual kind of thing we do here.” I knew well the medical procedures that flowed out from here to the anonymous godowns and grey surgery clinics beyond the Siri Ring orbital expressway. There is a video for everything somewhere in the online world and I had watched with fascination what those humans who desired another gender had done to themselves. The things strung out through the gel tanks, skin flayed, muscles laid open, organs drawn out and suspended in molecular sieve cradles, were so far from anything human as to be curious, like strange forest flowers, rather than obscene. I was much more of a coward, leaving only my two little organs on the doorstep of gender. “My only reservation would be that, as you are biologically prepubescent, it would be an internal orchidectomy. Miss Modi will draw up a consent form.” Yt blinked me, a delicate, faun-like creature behind a heavy Raj desk, too too lovely to speak of such things as testicular surgery. “Forgive me for asking, I haven’t met any High Brahmins before, but you are of an age to sign a consent form?”

“I’m of an age to be legally married.”

“Yes, but you must understand, mine is a business that attracts scrutiny in Awadh.”

“I’m of an age to pay you a profane sum of money to give me what I want.”

“Profane it is then.”

Surprisingly mundane it was. I did not even need to be driven out to the nasty industrial zones. In the cubicle I changed into the surgical gown, the sleeves too too long, the hem trailing on the ground, slid up onto the disinfectant-stinky operating table in the basement surgery and felt the needling suffusion of the local anaesthetic. Robot arms, finger-tips fine as insect antennae, danced in under the control of Dr. Anil. I felt nothing as I blinked up into the lights and strained to hear their synaesthetic music. The dancing arms withdrew; I felt nothing. And I still felt nothing as the car spun me back through streets full of pulsing, potent, hormone-raddled people. A mild twinge from the sutures pulling against the weave of my clothes. No pain, little loss, nothing of the sense of lightnes and freedom I had read of in the literature of castration fetishists. A unique pleasure, sexual castration; an orgasm to end all orgasms. I had not even had that. The cell-weave treatments would heal the wound in three days and hide all evidence, until the passing years revealed that my voice was not significantly deepening, my hair not receding, that I was growing unusually tall and willowy and that I had singularly failed to contractually conceive any children.

“Do you want to take then with you?” Dr. Anil asked as yt sat me down in yts consulting room after the short operation.

“Why should I wish to do that?”

“It was a tradition in China; Imperial eunuchs would be given their excised genitals preserved in a jar of alcohol to bury beside them on their deaths, so that they might enter heaven whole men.”

“It was a tradition in Ottoman Turkey that eunuchs, after their cutting clean, would sit in a dung-heap for three days to heal their wounds, or die. I don’t care for that tradition either. They’re not mine, they’re not me; they belong to someone else. Burn them or throw them to the pi-dogs, I don’t care.”

Thunder growled over me, a promise of a monsoon, the day was darkening. Lightning glowed cloud to cloud as I rode the elevator up the outside of Ramachandra Tower. Lakshmi sat curled on the sofa, the breaking storm magnificent behind her. Dry lightning, a false prophet of rain. All prophecies of rain were false these days,

“Did you do it, are you all right?”

I nodded. It was beginning to hurt now. I clenched my teeth, kicking in the analgesic nanoinfuser Dr. Anil had planted there. Lakshmi clapped her hands in joy. “I’ll go tomorrow. Oh dear Lord, I’m so happy, so happy.” And then, there, in the dark apartment glowing with muter lighting, she kissed me.

We did not tell anyone. That was part of the pact. Not our parents, not our relatives, not our circle of Brahmin friends, not even our aeais. Not even dear Sarasvati; I wouldn’t burden her with this. There was work we had to do before we announced to our respective families how we had so drastically denied their plans for us. Then we could sweetly and painlessly divorce.

I NUZZLE THE EARLOBE OF POWER

What is the proper work of eunuchs?

Does it make you uncomfortable, that word? Does it make you cross your legs, boys; does it give you a hollow clench in your uterus, ladies? When you hear it, do you see something other than a human being, something less? How then is it any different from other words of distinction: Kshatriya, Dalit? Brahmin? Eunuch. It is a very old and noble word, a fine and ancient tradition practised in al the great cultures of Earth. The principle is to give up the lesser to gain the greater. Of all those pitiful puffs of cock-juice, how many will ever turn into human beings? Come on, be honest. It’s almost all wasted. And never imagine that the ball-less are sexless, or without desire. No, the great castrati singers, the eunuch poets and holy visionaries, the grand viziers and royal advisors all understood that greatness came at a price and that was generation. Empires could be entrusted to eunuchs, free from dynastic urges. The care and feeding of great nations is our proper work and with all the gifts my parents had endowed me I steered myself toward the political cradle of the nation.

How almost right my mother was, and how utterly wrong-headed. She had imagined me carried in through the doors of the Lok Sabha on the shoulders of cheering election workers. I preferred the servant’s entrance. Politicians live and die by the ballot box. They are not there to serve, they are there to gain and hold office. Populism can force them to abandon wise and correct policies for whims and fads. The storm of ballots will in the end sweep them and all their good works from power. Their grand viziers endure. We understand that democracy is the best system by which a nation seems to be governed.

Months of social networking—the old-fashioned, handshake and gift type—and the setting up and calling in favours and lines of political credit, has gained me an internship to Parekh, the Minister for Water and the Environment. He was a tolerable dolt, a Vora from Uttaranchal with a shopkeeper’s shrewdness and head for details, but little vision. He was good enough to seem in control and a politician often needs little more for a long and comfortable career. This was the highest he would ever rise, as soon as the next monsoon failure hit and the mobs were hijacking water tankers in the street, he would be out. He knew I knew this. I scared him, even though I was careful to turn down the full dazzle of my intelligence to a glow of general astuteness. He knew I was far from the nine-year-old I seemed to be but he really had no idea of my and my kind’s capabilities and curses. I chose my department carefully. Naked ambition would have exposed me too early to a government that was only now realising it had never properly legislated around human gene-line manipulation. Even so I knew the colour of all the eyes that were watching me, skipping through the glassy corridors of the Water Ministry. Water is life. Water, its abundance and its rarity, would sculpt the future of Awadh, of all the nations of North India, from the Panjab to the United States of Bengal. Water was good place to be bright, but I had no intention of remaining there.

The dam at Kunda Khadar neared completion, that titanic fifteen-kilometre bank of earth and concrete like a garter around the thigh of Mother Ganga. Protests from downstream Bharat and the U.S.B. grew strident but the towers cranes lifted and swung, lifted and swung day and night. Minister Parekh and Prime Minister Srivastava communicated daily. The Defence Ministry was brought into the circle. Even the PR staffers could smell diplomatic tension.

It was a Thursday. Even before, I called I Bold Thursday, to commit myself, to get myself up. The genes don’t make you brave. But I had prepared as rigorously as I could; which was more than anyone in the Lok Sabha, Minister Parekh included. Srivastava was due with his entourage for a press conference from the Ministry to reassure the Awadhi public that Kunda Khadar would do its job and slake Delhi’s bottomless thirst. Everyone was turned out smart as paint: moustaches plucked, slacks creased, shirts white as mourning. Not me. I had picked my spot long before: a brief bustle down the corridor as Srivastava and his secretarial team was coming up. I had no ideas what they would be talking about but I knew they would be talking; Srivastava loved his “walking briefings”; they made him seem a man of action and energy. I trusted that my research and quicker wit would win.

I heard the burble of voices. They were about to turn the corner, I went into motion, pushed myself into the wall as the press of suits came toward me. My senses scanned five conversations, lit on Srivastava murmur to Bhansal his parliamentary secretary, “If I knew we had McAuley’s support.”

Andrew J McAuley, President of the United States of America. And the answer was there.

“If we could negotiate an output deal in return for Sajida Rana accepting partial ratification of the Hamilton Acts,” I said, my voice shrill and pure and piercing as a bird.

The Prime Ministerial party bustled past but Satya Shetty, the Press Secretary, turned with a face of thunder to strike down this upstart, mouthy intern. He saw a nine-year-old. He was dumb-struck. His eyes bulged. He hesitated. That hesitation froze the entire party. Prime Minister Srivastava turned toward me. His eyes widened. His pupils dilated.

“That’s a very interesting idea,” he said and in those five words I knew he had identified, analysed and accepted the gift I had offered him. A Brahmin advisor. The strange, savant child. The child genius, the infant guru, the little god. India adored them. It was PR gold. His staffers parted as he stepped toward me. “What are you doing here?”

I explained that I was on an internship with Minister Parekh.

“And now you want more.”

Yes, I did.

“What’s you name?”

I told him. He nodded his head.

“Yes, the wedding. I remember. So, it’s a career in politics, is it?”

It was.

“You’re certainly not backward about being forward.”

My genes wouldn’t allow it. My first political lie.

“Well, ideas do seem to be in short stock at the moment.” With that he turned, his entourage closed around him and he was swept on. Satya Shetty dealt me a glare of pure despite, I held his eyes until he snapped his gaze away. I would see him and all his works dust while I was still fresh and filled with energy. By the time I returned to my desk there was an invitation from the Office of the Prime Minister to call them to arrange an interview.

I told my great achievement to the three women in my life. Lakshmi beamed with delight. Our plans were working. My mother was baffled; she no longer understood my motivations, why I would accept a lowly and inconspicuous civil service position rather than a high-flyer in our superstar political culture. Sarasvati jumped up from her sofa and danced around the room, then clapped her hands around my face and kissed my forehead long and hard until her lips left a red tilak there.

“As long as there’s joy in it,” she said. “Only joy.”

My sister, my glorious sister, had voiced a truth that I was only now developing the maturity to recognise. Joy was all. Mamaji and Dadaji had aimed me at greatness, at blinding success and wealth, power and celebrity. I had always possessed the emotional intelligence if not the emotional vocabulary, to know that the blindingly powerful and famous were seldom happy, that their success and wealth often played against their own mental and physical well-being. All my decisions I made for me, for my peace, well-being, satisfaction and to keep me interested throughout my long life. Lakshmi had chosen the delicate world of complicated games. I had chosen the whirl of politics. Not economics; that was too dismal a science for me. But the state and those statelets beyond Awadh’s borders with which I could see we were as inextricably entwined as when we were one India, and the countries beyond those, and the continents beyond; that fascinated me. The etiquette of nations was my pleasure. There was joy in it, Sarasvati. And I was brilliant at it. I became the hero of my childhood comics, a subtle hero, Diplomacy Man. I saved your world more times than you can ever know. My superpower was to see a situation entire, connected, and all those subtler forces acting upon it that other, less gifted analysts would have discounted. Then I would give it nudge. The smallest, slightest tap, one tiny incentive or restriction, even a hint at how a policy might be shaped, and watch how the social physics of a complex capitalist society scaled them up through power laws and networks and social amplifiers to slowly turn the head of the entire nation.

In those first few years I was constantly fighting for my own survival. Satya Shetty was my deadliest enemy from the moment our eyes had met in the corridor in the Water Ministry. He was influential, he was connected, he was clever but not clever enough to realise he could never beat me. I just let my drips of honey fall into Krishna Srivastava’s ear. I was always right. Little by little his cabinet and Satya Shetty’s allies realised that, more than being always right, I was essentially different from them. I didn’t seek high office. I sought the greatest well-being. I was the prefect advisor. And I looked great on television: Prime Minister Srivastava’s dwarf vizier, trotting behind him like some throwback to the days of the Mughals. Who isn’t, at some level, unnerved by the child prodigy? Even if I was twenty two years old now, with puberty—whatever that might mean for me personally—looming on the horizon of my Brahmin generation like the rumbles of a long-delayed monsoon.

It was that treacherous monsoon that became the driver of Awadhi politics, town and country, home and away. Thirsty nations are irrational nations; nations that pray and turn to strange saviours. The great technocracy of the United States of Bengal had, in a display of national hysteria, put its faith in a bizarre plan to haul an iceberg from Antarctica into the Sundarbans with the hope that the mass of cold air would affect the shifting climatic patterns and claw the monsoon back over India. Strange days, a time of rumours and wonders. The Age of Kali was upon us and once again the gods were descending upon us, walking in the shapes of ordinary men and women. The Americans had found something in space, something not of this world. The datahavens of Bharat, boiling with aeais, had spawned Generation Three artificial intelligences; legendary entities whose intelligence as far outstripped mine as mine does the fleas crawling on my poor, harassed cats. Sajida Rana, politically embattled from resurgent Hindu fundamentalism, was preparing a pre-emptive strike on Kunda Khadar as a PR stunt. This last rumour I took seriously enough from my trawling of the Bharati press to call for a departmental level meeting between my ministry and its Bharati counterpart. Did I mention that I was now parliamentary secretary to Krishna Srivastava? A steady, not stellar, climb. It was still too easy to lose grip and fall into the reaching hands of my rivals.

My counterpart at the Bharat Bhavan was a refined Muslim gentleman, Shaheen Badoor Khan, from an excellent family and impeccably educated. Behind his pitch-perfect etiquette and a dignity I envied deeply for I was a small, scampering child next to him, I did sense a sadness; an ache behind the eyes. We recognised and liked each other immediately. We knew instinctively that we both cared deeply enough for our countries to be prepared to betray them. Such a thing could never be said, or even implied. Thus our conversation, as we walked among the Buddha’s deer of old Sarnath, our security men discreet shadows among the trees, the security drones circling like black kites overhead seemed as casual and elliptical as two old dowagers on a Friday afternoon stroll.

“Awadh has always seemed to me a country at peace with itself,” Shaheen Badoor Khan said. “As if it’s solved some great and quintessentially Indian paradox.”

“It wasn’t always so,” I said. Behind the security fence Western tourists on the Buddha trail tried to hold down their flapping robes in the rising wind. “Delhi’s streets have run red far too many times.”

“But it’s always been a cosmopolitan city. Varanasi, on the other hand, always has and always will be the city of Lord Siva.”

I waggled my head in agreement. I knew now what I would report to Srivastava. Sajida Rana is under pressure from the Hindutvavadis. She will launch a pre-emptive strike at Kunda Khadar. Awadh will have the moral high-ground; we must not lose it.

“I have a relative in Varanasi,” I said casually.

“Oh, so?”

“My brother—a Shiva himself, so no surprise really that he should end up in Varanasi.”

“And is he a Brahmin like yourself?’

“No, but he is very gifted.”

“We do seem to attract talent. It’s one of our blessings, I suppose. I have a younger brother in the United States. Terrible at keeping in contact, terrible; my mother, well, you know what they’re like. Of course it’s my responsibility.”

You’re worried that your brother has drifted into business that could adversely affect your standing, if it became public, was what this sage Mr. Khan was telling me. You want me to keep an eye on him, in return you’ll open up a secure channel of communications between us to prevent war between Bharat and Awadh.

“You know what brothers are like,” I said.

The information was beaming into my head even as I stepped off the plane at Indira Gandhi airport. Shiv had opened a company, Purusa, in Varanasi. He had attracted substantial funding from a venture capital company called Odeco and match-funding from the research and development division at Bharat’s mighty Ray Power. His field was nanoscale computing. Top designers and engineers were working with him. The Ghost Index, which valued companies with the potential to become global players when they went public, valued Purusa as one of their top five to watch. He was young and he was hot and he was headed for orbit. He had made some questionable friends among Bharat’s datarajas and a cloud of high-level aeais hid much of Purusa’s activities from its rivals and from the Bharati government. The Krishna Cops had a file on him and a deliberately clumsy team of aeai wards to keep him aware that he was known to them. My own Awadhi intelligence service surveillance aeais were of a subtler stripe than the police. They coded themselves into the very informational fabric of Purusa. The security of Awadh was a flimsy fiction; I was intensely curious as to what my brother was up to. What Shiv planned was of course monstrously ambitious. He had cracked open the prison of the skull. More prosaically, Purusa developed a prototype biochip that could interface directly with the brain. No more a tacky coil of plastic behind the ear and the soft invasion of electromagnetic radiation into the brain, like shouting in a temple. This was engineered protein, stuff of our stuff, which sent its artificial neurons through skin and bone to mesh with the threads of though. It was third eye, forever open to the unseen world. See how easily I resort to the language of the mystical? Omniscience was standard; anyone so infected had access to all the knowledge and all the bitchy triviality of the global web. Communication was no longer a click and a call, it was a thought, a subtle telepathy. Virtual worlds became real. The age of privacy, that first Western luxury that India wealth bought, was over. Where our own thoughts ended and those of others began, how would we know? We would touch the world of the aeais, in their dispersed, extended, multi-levelled perceptions. Speculation led to speculation. I could see no end to them. Lakshmi, disturbed from her mathematical games, would sense my mood and look up to see the adult anxiety on my child’s face. This technology would change us, change us utterly and profoundly. This was a new way of being human, a fault-line, a diamond cutter’s strike, across society. I began to realise that the greatest threat to Awadh, to Bharat, to all India, was not water. It was the pure and flawless diamond Shiv and his Purusa Corporation dangled and spun in front of each and every human. Be more, be everything. So engaged was I that I did not notice when the warning came down the Grand Trunk Road from Shaheen Badoor Khan in Varanasi and thus was caught sleeping when Sajida Rana sent her tanks to take Kunda Khadar without a shot.

THE GIRL WITH THE RED BINDI

The war’s names were longer than its duration. The Kunda Khadar war, the Forty-Eight Hour War, the Soft War, the First Water War. You don’t remember it, though Awadhi main battle tanks manoeuvred over these very sands. You probably don’t even remember it from history lessons. There have been greater and more enduring wars; war running into war, the long and, I think, the final war. The war I shall end. That grand display of arms on these river strands I now understand as its opening shot, had any shots actually been fired. That was another of its names, the Soft War. Ah! Who is it names wars? Hacks and pundits, without doubt, media editors and chati journalists; people with an interesting a good, mouth-filling phrase. It is certainly not civil servants, or cat-circus proprietors. How much better a name would “Soft War” have been for the century of unrest that followed, this Age of Kali that now seems to have run down to its lowest ebb with the arrival of the Jyotirlingas on earth?

The Water War, the War of ’47, whatever we call it, for me marked the end of human history and the return of the age of miracles to earth. It was only after the smoke had cleared and the dust settled and our diplomatic teams arrived among the tall and shining towers of Ranapur to negotiate the peace that we realised the immensity of events in Bharat. Our quiet little water war was the least of it. I had received one terse communication down the Grand Trunk Road: I am ruined, I have failed, I have resigned. But there was Shaheen Badoor Khan, five paces behind his new Prime Minster Ashok Rana, as I trotted like a child behind our Srivastava.

“Rumours of my demise were exaggerated,” he whispered as we fell in beside each other as the politicians formed up on the grass outside the Benares Polo and Country Club for the press call, each jostling for status-space.

“War does seem to shorten the political memory.” A twenty-three-year-old in the body of a boy half his age may say pretty much whatever he likes. It’s the liberty granted to fools and angels. When I first met Shaheen Badoor Khan, as well as his decency and intelligence, I had sensed a bone-deep sadness. Even I could not have guessed it was a long-repressed and sterile love for the other, the transgressive, the romantic and doomed, as all wrapped up in the body of young Varanasi nute. He had fallen into the honey-trap laid for him by his political enemies.

Shaheen Badoor Khan dipped his head. “I’m far from being the first silly, middle-aged man to have been a fool for lust. I may be the only one to have got his Prime Minister killed as a consequence. But, as you say, war does very much clarify the vision and I seem to be a convenient figure for public expiation. And from what I gather from the media, the public will trust me sooner than Ashok Rana. People like nothing better than the fallen mughal who repents. In the meantime, we do what we must, don’t we, Mr. Nariman? Our countries need us more than they know. These have been stranger times in Bharat than people can ever be let know.”

Bless your politician’s self-deprecation. The simultaneous collapse of major aeai systems across Bharat, including the all-conquering Town and Country, the revelation of the country’s rampant Hindutva opposition to have been a cabal of artificial intelligences, chaos at Ray Power and the mysterious appearance of a hundred-metre hemispherical crater in the university grounds, of mirror-bright perfection and, behind all, rumours that the long-awaited, long-dreaded Generation Three aeais had arrived. There was only one who could make sense of it to me. I went to see Shiv.

He had a house, a shaded place with many trees to push back the crowding, noisy world. Gardeners moved with the slow precision up and down the rolled gravel paths, dead-heading a Persian rose there, spraying aphids there, spot-feeding brown drought-patches in the lawn everywhere. He had grown fat. He lolled in his chair at the tiffin table on the lawn. He looked dreadful, pasty and puffy. He had a wife. He had a child, a little pipit of a girl playing on the snap-together plastic fun-park on the lawn under the eye of her ayah. She would glance over at me, unsure whether to treat me as a strange and powerful uncle or invite me to whiz down the plastic slide. Yes, wee one, I was a strange creature. That scent, that pheromone of information I had smelled on Shiv the day he came to my wedding still clung to him, stronger now. He smelled like a man who has spent too much time among aeais.

He welcomed me expansively. Servants brought cool home-made sherbet. As we settled into brother talk, man-to-eleven-year-old-talk, his wife excused herself in a voice small as a insect and went to hover nervously over her daughter playing exuberantly on her brightly coloured jungle-gym.

“You seem to have had a good war,” I said.

“There was war?” Shiv held my gaze for a moment, then exploded into volcanic laughter. Sweat broke out on his brow. I did not believe it for an instant. “I’ve got comfortable and greasy, yes.”

“And successful.”

“Not as successful as you.”

“I am only a civil servant.”

“I’ve heard you run Srivastava like a pimp.”

“We all have our sources.”

“Yes.” Again that affected pause. “I spotted yours pretty early on. Not bad for government ware.”

“Disinformation can be as informative as information.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t try anything as obvious as that with you. No, I left them there; I let them look. I’ve nothing to hide.”

“Your investors are interesting.”

“I doubt some of them will be collecting on their investment.” He laughed again.

“I don’t think I understand.”

“It transpires that one of my key investors, Odeco, was nothing more than a front for a Generation Three aeai that had developed inside the international financial markets.”

“So it wasn’t just a rumour.”

“I’m glad you’re still listening to rumours.”

“You say this all very casually.”

“What other way is there to treat the end of history? You’ve seen what happens in India when we take things seriously.” The laugh was annoying me now. It was thick and greasy.

“The end of history has been promised many times, usually by people rich enough to avoid it.”

“Not this time. The rich will be the ones who’ll bring it about. The same blind economic self-interest that caused the demographic shift, and you, Vish. Only this will be on a much greater scale.”

“You think your biochip has that potential?”

“On it’s own, no. I can see I’m going to have to explain this to you.”

By the time Shiv had told his tale the gardeners were lighting torches to drive away the evening insects and wife daughter and ayah had withdrawn to the lit comfort of the verandah. Bats dashed around me, hunting. I was shivering though the night was warm. A servant brought fresh made lassi and pistachios. It was greater, as Shiv as promised. Perhaps the greatest. The gods had returned, and then in the instant of their apotheosis, departed. A soft apocalypse.

The fears of the Krishna Cops, of the scared Westerners, had of course come true. The Generation Threes were real, had been real for longer than anyone had foreseen, had moved among us for years, decades even, unresting, unhasting and silent as light. There was no force capable of extirpating truly hyper-intelligent aeais whose ecosystem was the staggering complexity of the global information network. They could break themselves into components, distribute themselves across continents, copy themselves infinitely, become each other. They could speak with our voices and express our world but they were utterly utterly alien to us. It was convenient for them to withdraw their higher functions from a world closing in on the secret of their existence and base them in the datahavens of Bharat, for they had a higher plan. There were three of them, gods all. Brahma, Shiva, Krishna. My brothers, my gods. One, the most curious about the world, inhabits the global financial market. One grew out of a massively multiple online evolution simulation game pf which I had vaguely heard. In creating an artificial world, the gamers had created its deity. And one appeared in the vast servers farms of Bharat’s Indiapendent Productions, coalesced out of the cast and pseudo-cast of Town and Country. That one particularly impressed me, especially since, with the characteristic desire to meddle in the affairs of others mandatory in the soapi universe, it expanded into Bharati politics in the shape of the aggressive Hindutva Party that had engineered the downfall of the perceptive and dangerous Shaheen Badoor Khan and assassination of Sajida Rana.

That would have been enough to end our hopes that this twentieth first century would be a smooth and lucrative extension of its predecessor. But their plans were not conflict or the subjugation of humanity. That would have meant nothing to the aeais, it was a human concept born of a human need. They inhabited a separate ecological niche and could have endured indefinitely, caught up whatever concerns were of value to distributed intelligences. Humanity would not let them live. The Krishna Cops were cosmetic, costume cops to maintain an illusion that humanity was on the case, but they did signal intent. Humans would admit no rivals, so the Trimurti of Generation Three engineered an escape from this world, from this universe. I did not understand the physics involved from Shiv’ description; neither, despite his pedantic, lecturing IT-boy tone, did he. I would look it up later, it would not be beyond me. What I did glean was that I was related to that mirrored crater on the university campus that looked so like a fine piece of modern sculpture, or an ancient astronomical instrument like the gnomons and marble bowls of Delhi’s ancient Jantar Mantar observatory. That hemisphere, and an object out in space. Oh yes, those rumours were real. Oh yes, the Americans had discovered it long ago and tried to keep it secret, and were still trying, and; oh yes, failing.

“And what is it then?”

“The collected wisdom of the aeais. A true universal computer. They sent it through from their universe.”

“Why?”

“Do you never give presents to your parents?”

“You’re privileged to this information?”

“I have channels that even the government of Awadh doesn’t. Or, for that matter, the Americans. Odeco . . .”

“Odeco you said was an avatar of the Brahma aeai. Wait.” Had I balls, they would have contracted cold and hard. “There is absolutely nothing to prevent this happening again.”

“None,” said Shiv. It was some time since had laughed his vile, superior laugh.

“It’s already happening.” And we thought we had won a water war.

“There’s a bigger plan. Escape, exile, partition is never a good solution. Look at us in Mother India. You work in politics, you understand the need for a settlement.” Shiv turned in his chair to the figures on the verandah. His wife was still watching me. “Nirupa, darling. Come over here, would you? Uncle Vish hasn’t had a chance to meet you properly.”

She came dashing down the steps and across the lawn, holding up the hem of her print dress, in a headlong, heedless flight that made me at once fearful for stones snakes and stumble and at the same time reminded so much of my golden years growing up alongside Sarasvati. She put her fingers in her mouth and pressed close to her father, shy of looking at me directly.

“Show him your bindi, go on, it’s lovely.”

I had noticed the red mark on her forehead, larger than customary, and the wrong colour. I bent forward across the table to examine it. It was moving. The red spot seemed to crawl with insect-movement, on the edge of visibility. I reeled back into my chair. My feet swung, not touching the ground.

“What have you done?” I cried. My voice was small and shrill.

“Shh. You’ll scare her. Go on; run on, Nirupa. Thank you. I’ve made her for the future. Like our parents made you for the future. But it’s not going to be the future they thought.”

“Your biochip interface.”

“Works. Thanks to a little help from the aeais. But like I said, that’s only part of it. A tiny part of it. We have a project in development; that’s the real revolution. That’s the real sound of the future arriving.”

“Tell me what it is.”

“Distributed dust-processing.”

“Explain.”

Shiv did. It was nothing less than the transformation of computing. His researchers were shrinking computers, smaller and smaller, from grain of rice to sperm cell, down down to the molecular scale and beyond. The endpoint was swarm-computers the size of dust particles, communicating with each other in free flying flocks, computers that could permeate every cell of the human body. They would be as universal and ubiquitous as dust. I began to be afraid and cold in that clammy Varanasi night. I could see Shiv’s vision for our future, perhaps further than he could. The bindi and the dust-processor: one broke the prison of the skull; the other turned the world into memory.

Little by little our selves would seep into the dust-laden world; we would become clouds, non-localised, we would penetrate each other more intimately and powerfully than any tantric temple carving. Inner and outer worlds would merge. We could be many things, many lives at one time. We could copy ourselves endlessly. We would merge with the aeais and become one. This was their settlement, their peace. We would become one species, post-human, post-aeai.

“You’re years away from this.” I denied Shiv’s fantasia shrilly.

“Yes, we would be, if we hadn’t had a little help.”

“How?” I cried again. Now the ayah was staring concerned at me.

Shiv pointed a finger to the night sky.

“I could report you,” I said. “Americans don’t take kindly to having their security hacked.”

“You can’t stop it,” Shiv said. “Vish, you’re not the future any more.”

Those words, of all that Shiv spoke in the garden, clung to me. Gliding silently through Delhi in the smooth-running black government car, the men in their white shirts, the woman in their coloured shoes, the cars and the buzzing phatphats seemed insubstantial. The city was still thrilled with its brilliant victory—only a drubbing in cricket would have exercised public excitement more—but the crowds seemed staged, like extras, and the lights and streets as false as a set on Town and Country. How would we survive without our national panacea? But Shiv had confirmed, there was nothing, absolutely nothing to prevent a new generation of Threes from arising. They could already be stirring into sentience, like my divine namesake on his scared turtle Kurma churning the sacred milk into creation. I was acutely aware of the clouds of aeais all around me, penetrating and interpenetrating, layer upon layer, level upon level, many and one. There was no place in the two Delhis for the ancient djinns. The aeais had displaced them. This was their city. Settlement was the only answer. Dust blew through the streets, dust upon dust. I had seen the end of history and still my feet did not touch the floor of the limo.

I was obsolete. All the talents and skills Mamaji and Dadaji were nothing in a world where everyone was connected, where everyone could access the full power of a universal computer, where personality could be as malleable and fluid as water. Slowly slowly I would grow up through adolescence to maturity and old age while around me this new society this new humanity, would evolve at an ever-increasing rate. I was all too aware of my choice. Take Shiv’s way and deny everything I had been made for, or reject it and grow old with my kind. We, the genetically enhanced Brahmins, were the last humans. Then, with a physical force that made me spasm on the back seat of the limo, I realised my hubris. I was such an aristocrat. The poor. The poor would be with us. India’s brilliant middle class, its genius and its curse, would act as it always had, in its unenlightened self-interest. Anything that would give advantage to its sons and daughters in the Darwinian struggle for succcess. The poor would look on, as disenfranchised from that post-human as they were from this fantasy of glass and neon.

I was glad, glad to tears, that I had chose to pass nothing on into this future. No endless chain of slow-aging, genetically obsolete Brahmins hauling themselves into an increasing unrecognisable and inhuman future. Had I received some premonition; had my uniquely overlapping senses seen a pattern there all those years ago that even Shiv, with his clandestine access to the collected knowledge of the Generation Threes, had not. I wept unreservedly and ecstatically in the back of the smooth-running car. It was time. As we turned into the down ramp to the underground car park at Ramachandra Tower, I made three calls. First I called Prime Minister Srivastava and tendered my resignation. Then I called Lakshmi, patient Lakshmi who had through our charade of a marriage and sterility become a dear and intimate friend, and said, now, now’s the time for that divorce. Last of all I called my mother on the floor above and told her exactly what I had done with myself.

A FATHER FESTOONED WITH MEMORY

Wait! One more trick. You’ll like this trick, the best trick of all. You haven’t seen anything yet, just a bit of running on circles and jumping through hoops. Yes. I know it’s very very late and the sun will soon be up the sky and you have cows to milk and fields to tend to and I appointments to keep but you will like this trick. Not a lot, but you will like it. Now, two ticks while I fix up this wire.

And anyway, I haven’t finished my story. Oh no no, not by a long chalk. You thought it ended there? With the world as you see it, now you know how intimately I am involved in our history? No, it must end well, a well-made story. I must confront the villain, according to the theories on such things. There must be resolution and an appropriate moral sentiment. Then you will be satisfied.

The wire? Oh, they can walk that. Oh yes, those cats. No no no; first you must listen a little longer.

I walked away. We have a great and grand tradition of it in this great teat of divine milk hanging from the belly of Asia. Our country is big enough to swallow any soul, our orders still porous to pilgrims with a stick and a dhoti wrapped around their loins. Our society has a mechanism for disappearing completely. Anyone can walk away from the mundane world into the divine. Mine was not the orthodox spiritual path and not conventionally divine. I had seen the coming gods. I set aside my career, my clothes, my apartment, my wife—with her blessing and a farewell kiss—my family and friends, my identity, my social networks, my online presence, everything but my genetic inheritance which could not be undone and turned saddhu. Only Sarasvati knew my secret com address. I was gone from the apartment, beating through the neon-lit heat of Rajiv Circle, out along the sides of expressways, drenched in yellow light, beneath the back-throttle of aircraft coming in to the airport, past the brick and cardboard and plastic shelters of the invisible poor. Dawn saw me among the ribbed aluminium flanks of the godowns and factories of Tughluk. I crossed a city on foot in a single night. It’s a great and strange thing to do. Everyone should do it. I walked along the cracked concrete spans of expressway, by the sides of country roads blasted by the grit and gust of passing trucks, along the side of the huge slow trains materialising like visions out of the heat haze, the drivers flinging me rupees for blessing as they passed. I sat down and covered my head and eyes as the high-speed shatabdi express blasted past at hundreds of kilometres per hour. Did the passengers even glance me through the darkened glass? If so I must have seemed a very strange saddhu to them. The littlest saddhu. Small but determined, beating forward with my staff at every stride.

What was I doing? Walking. What did I hope to find? Nothing. Where was I going? To see. Don’t think me a coward or a failure, that I was walking away from truths I could not admit. I had been stabbed to the bone by the revelation that I was irrelevant. I was not the future. I was a dead-end, a genetic backwater. That was the natural reaction of privilege to its absolute irrelevance. I’m a brat, remember that. A spoiled Mamaji’s boy. That same night I returned and dropped my progenitive bombshell; that my mother would never have the dynasty of brilliant Brahmins she desired, I woke from my sleep. It was the uncertain hour, when reality is groggy and the djinns run free. The hour when you wake in your familiar bed without the least knowledge of where the hell you are. I was woken by a sound. It was like a breath and like a roar, like traffic and air conditioners, like a distant desperate shouting and the buzz of neons and powerlines. It was the pulse of underground trains and delivery trucks; it was filmi music and item-songs playing through each other. I heard Great Delhi breath in its shallow sleep and I wanted to go to my balcony and shout as loud as my eleven-year-old glottis would allow: wake up! Wake up! Shiv’s future might be inevitable, written into the geometry of space-time by entities outside it, but I would not allow us to sleepwalk into it. My mind was racing. I had never known anything like it before. I was thinking at a staggering rate, images and memories and ideas crashing together, shattering, fusing. Edifices of thought, huge as mountains, tumbled around me. The way was clear and bright and laid out in front of me. It was there complete and entire in two seconds. I would have to take myself away from the distractions of Delhi politics and society. My ambitions were much larger than that, I would have to become anonymous for a time, I would have to be silent and look and listen. There was a war to be fought and it was a war of mythologies.

Lakshmi kissed me and I left. I wandered for nine months, south across the border into Rajasthan, back into Bharat and to the north under the breath of the Himalayas, to the cool green ridges where I had spent my honeymoon with Lakshmi. To Dal Lake and Srinagar, to Leh and the high country. I could never grow the proper saddhu beard, but I grew the saddhu leanness and tallness. Boy eunuchs grow tall and lean. And the dreadlocks. Oh yes. They are good to have but unpleasant to get. I also gained a nickname: the Beardless Saddhu. With it I got muscles and sunburn, I grew the stamina to walk all day on a cup of rice and a cup of water. What a pulpy, unfit puppy I had been! I begged and performed small miracles of accountancy and feats of memory for food and shelter. Everywhere, I looked in men and women’s Third Eyes. I saw things I could never have from the top of Ramachandra Tower or the Awadh Bhavan. I saw thirst and I saw drought. I saw good village leaders and diligent local civil servants frustrated by government bureaucrats. I saw clever women turn a few hundred rupees from microcredit schemes and grameen banks into successful businesses. I saw good teachers try to lift generations out of low expectations and the trap of caste and Awadh’s soar-away middle-class, rapidly pulling the ladder of social mobility up behind it. I helped with harvests and rode the back of tractors and listened to farers curse the ever-increasing price of their sterile GM seed. I chased rats with sticks and waved my arms to set whole fields of sparrows to flight. I sat in the community house and watched cricket on giant plasma screen powered by stored sunlight. Oh, I was a most peculiar saddhu. I gained a new nickname to set beside Beardless Saddhu: Cricketing Saddhu. I saw village weddings and festivals, I saw funerals. I saw death. It came quite unexpectedly one day, in a small town outside Agra. It was Holi and the streets were full of flying colour, jets of dye, clouds of powder, stained saris and white shirts ruined beyond the power of any laundry to save and everywhere grinning faces stained with colours, teeth white, eye flashing, everyone shouting Holi hai! Holi hai! as they launched jets of colour into the air. I moved through this circus of colour, as motley as any. The phatphat was grossly overloaded, a dozen colour-stained youth hanging off every strut and stanchion. Their eyes were wide on ganja and they were roaring with laughter and throwing fistfuls of dye powder at every passer-by. They caught me full in the face. The front wheel hit a pothole, the overstrained suspension collapsed the whole thing flipped over in a perfect somersault on to its roof, which split like an egg. Bodies flew everywhere, many of them so relaxed on the ganja they were still laughing as they picked themselves and skipped away. One didn’t move. He was trapped under the crushed plastic shell. He lay in his back, his arms at odd angles. His face was stained blue and green and pink and he seemed to be smiling but my senses realised he was dead. I had never seen death before. It was so simple and strange, here undeniably before me yet so subtle, an instant’s transformation yet the opposite of everything that was life. I mumbled the prayers expected of me, but inwardly I was coming to terms with the deepest of all human truths. I was twenty six years old with the body of albeit-strange thirteen year-old, my lifespan was measurably in centuries, but one day I too would lie down like this and stop moving and thinking and feeling and be nothing forever. I saw death and began to understand.

Village to village, town to town, temple to temple, from the huge complexes the size of cities to white-washed roadside shrines. Then one day outside a mall in a droyght-dusty suburb of Jaipur, as the security men were coming to ask me politely (for one must always be respectful to saddhus) to please move on, I saw what I had been looking for. A man turned to see the very small kerfuffle and as I momentarily looked at him, the Eye of Shiva looked back. I saw biotechnology move there.

I went to a community centre and wrote my first article. I sent it to Suresh Gupta, the editor of Gupshup, that most unashamedly populist of the Delhi’s magazines, which had carried the photographs of my birth and marriage and now, unknowingly, my prophecies of the coming Age of Kali. He rejected it out of hand. I wrote another the next day. It came back with a comment: interesting subject matter but inaccessible for our readership. I was getting somewhere. I went back and wrote again, long into the night over the pad. I am sure I gained another nickname: the Scribbling Saddhu. Suresh Gupta took that third article, and every article since. What did I write about? I wrote about all the things Shiv had prophesied. I wrote about what they might mean for three Indian families, the Voras, the Dashmukhs and the Hirandanis, village, town and city. I created characters—mothers, fathers, sons and daughters and mad aunties and uncles with dark secrets and long-lost relatives come to call—and told their stories, week upon week, year upon year, and the changes, good and ill, the constant hammer-blows of technological revolution wrought upon them. I created my own weekly soap opera; I even dared to call it Town and Country. It was wildly successful. It sold buckets. Suresh Gupta saw his circulation increase by thirty percent among those Delhi intelligentsia who only saw Gupshup in hair salons and beauty parlours. Questions were asked, who is this pseudonymous “Shakyamuni?” We want to interview him, we want to profile him, we want him to appear on Awadh Today, we want an op-ed piece from him, we want him to be an advisor on this project, that think tank, we want him to open a supermarket. Suresh Gupta fielded all such inquiries with the ease of a professional Square Leg. There were others questions, ones I overheard at train stations and phatphat lines, in supermarket queues and at bazaars, at parties and family get-togethers: what does it mean for us?

I kept travelling, kept walking, immersing myself in the village and small town. I kept writing my little future-soap, sending off my articles from a cellpoint here, a village netlink there. I watched for the Eye of Shiva. It was several months between the first and second, down in a business park Madhya Pradesh. I saw them steadily after that, but never many; then, at the turn of 2049 to 2050, like a desert blooming after rain, they were everywhere.

I was walking down through the flat dreary country south of the Nepalese border to Varanasi developing my thoughts on evolution, Darwinian and post-Darwinian and the essential unknowability of singularities when I picked up the message from Sarasvati, my first in two weeks of loitering from village to village. At once I thumbed to Varanasi and booked the first shatabdi to Delhi. My natty dreads, my long nails, the dirt and sacred ash of months on the road went down the pan in the First Class Lounge. By the time the Vishwanath Express drew into the stupendous nano-diamond cocoon of New Delhi Central I was dressed and groomed, a smart, confident young Delhiwallah, a highly eligible teenager. Saravasti picked me up in her truck. It was an old battered white Tata without autodrive or onboard or even a functioning airconditioning system. New Delhi Women’s Refuge was painted on the side in blue. I had followed her career—or rather her careers—while I was running the country. Worthiness attracted her; had she been a Westerner and not a Delhi girl I would have called it guilt at the privilege of her birth. Theatre manager here, urban farming collective there, donkey sanctuary somewhere else, dam protest way way down there. She had derided me: deep down at the grass roots was where the real work was done. People work. And who will provide the water for those grass roots? I would answer. It had only taken our brother’s vision of the end of the Age of Kali for me to come round to her philosophy.

She looked older than the years I had spent wandering, as if those my youthfulness belied had been added to hers by some karma. She drove like a terrorist. Or maybe it was that I hadn’t travelled in a car, in a collapsing Tata pick-up, in a city, in Delhi . . . No, she drove like a terrorist.

“You should have told me earlier.”

“He didn’t want to. He wants to be in control if it.”

“What is it exactly?”

“Huntingdon’s.”

“Can they do anything?”

“They never could. They still can’t.”

Saravasti blared her way through the scrimmage of traffic wheeling about the Parliament Street roundabout. The Shaivites still defended their temple, tridents upheld, foreheads painted with the true tilak of Shiva, the three white horizontal stripes. I had seen that other mark on the forehead of almost every man and woman on the street. Sarasvati was pure.

“He would have known whenever he had the genetic checks when I was conceived,” I said. “He never said.”

“Maybe it was enough for him to know that you could never develop it.”

Dadaji had two nurses and they were kind, Nimki and Papadi he called them. They were young Nepalis, very demure and well-mannered, quiet spoken and pretty. They monitored him and checked his oxygen and emptied his colostomy bag and moved him around in his bed to prevent sores and cleared away the seepage and crusting around the many tubes that ran into his body. I felt they loved him after a fashion.

Sarasvati waited outside in the garden. She hated seeing Dad this way, but I think there was a deeper distaste, not merely of what he had become, but of what he was becoming.

Always a chubby man, Tushar Nariman had grown fat since immobility had been forced on him. The room was on the ground floor and opened out on to sun-scorched lawns. Drought-browned trees screened off the vulgarity of the street. It was exercise for the soul if not the body. The neurological degeneration was much more advanced that I had guessed.

My father was big, bloated and pale but the machine overshadowed him. I saw it like a mantis, all arms and probes and manipulators, hooked into him through a dozen incisions and valves. Gandhi it was who considered all surgery violence to the body. It monitored him through sensory needles pinned all over his body like radical acupuncture and, I did not doubt, through the red Eye of Shiva on his forehead. It let him blink and it let him swallow, it let him breathe and when my father spoke, it did his speaking for him. His lips did not move. His voice came from wall-mounted speakers, which made him sound uncannily divine. Had I been hooked into through a Third Eye, he would have spoken directly into my head like telepathy.

“You’re looking good.”

“I’m doing a lot of walking.”

“I’ve missed you on the news. I liked you moving and shaking. It’s what we made you for.”

“You made me too intelligent. Super-success is no life. It would never have made me happy. Let Shiv conquer the world and transform society: the super intelligent will always choose the quiet life.”

“So what have you been up to, son, since leaving government?”

“Like I said, walking. Investing in people. Telling stories.”

“I’d argue with you, I’d call you an ungrateful brat, except Nimki and Papadi here tell me it would kill me. But you are an ungrateful brat. We gave you everything—everything—and you just left it at the side of the road.” He breathed twice. Every breath was a battle. “So, what do you think? Rubbish, isn’t it?”

“They seem to be looking after you.”

My father rolled his eyes. He seemed in something beyond pain. Only his will kept him alive. Will for what I could not guess.

“You’ve no idea how tired I am of this.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“It’s defeatist? It doesn’t take your superhuman intellect to work out that there are no good solutions from this.”

I turned a chair around and perched on it, hands folded on the back, my chin resting on them.

“What is it you still need to achieve?”

Two laughs, one from the speakers, the other a phlegmy gurgle from the labouring throat.

“Tell me, do you believe in reincarnation?”

“Don’t we all? We’re Indian, that’s what we’re about.”

“No, but really. The transmigration of the soul?”

“What exactly are you doing?” No sooner had I asked the question than I had raced to the terrible conclusion. “The Eye of Shiva?”

“Is that what you call it? Good name. Keeping me ticking over is the least part of what this machine does. It’s mostly processing and memory. A little bit of me goes into it, every second.”

Uploaded consciousness, the illusion of immortality, endless reincarnation as pure information. The wan, bodiless theology of post-humanity. I had written about it in my Nation articles, made my soapi families face it and discover its false promises. Here it was now in too too much flesh, in my own real-world soap, my own father.

“You still die,” I said.

“This will die.”

“This is you.”

“There is no physical part of me today that was here ten years ago. Every atom in me is different, but I still think I’m me. I endure. I remember being that other physical body. There’s continuity. If I had chosen to copy myself like some folder of files, yes, certainly I would go down into that dark valley from which there is no return. But maybe, maybe, if I extend myself, if I move myself memory by memory, little by little, maybe death will be no different from trimming a toenail.”

There could never be silence in a room so full of the sounds of medicine, but there were no words.

“Why did you call me here?”

“So you would know. So you might give me your blessing. To kiss me, because I’m scared son, I’m so scared. No one’s ever done this before. It’s one shot into the dark. What if I’ve made a mistake, what if I’ve fooled myself? Oh please kiss me and tell me it will be all right.”

I went to the bed. I worked my careful way between the tubes and the lines and wires. I hugged the pile of sun-starved flesh to me. I kissed my father’s lips and as I did my lips formed the silent words, I am now and always must be Shiv’s enemy but if there is anything of you left in there, if you can make anything out of the vibrations of my lips on yours, then give me a sign.

I stood up and said, “I love you Dad.”

“I love you son.”

The lips didn’t move, the fingers didn’t lift, the eyes just looked and looked and filled up with tears. He swam my mother to safety on an upturned desk. No. That was someone else.

My father died two months later. My father entered cybernetic nirvana two months later. Either way, I had turned my back once again on Great Delhi and walked out of the world of humans and aeais alike.

THE MORNING OF THE WHITE HORSE

What? You expected a hero? I walked away, yes. What should I have done, run around shooting like filmi star? And who should I have shot? The villain? Who is the villain here? Shiv? No doubt he could have provided you with a great death scene, like the very best black-moustached Bollywood Baddies do, but he is no villain. He is a businessman, pure and simple. A businessman with a product that has changed every part of our world completely and forever. But if I were to shoot him nothing would change. You cannot shoot cybernetics or nanotechnology; economics stubbornly refuses to give you an extended five-minute crawling death-scene, eyes wide with incomprehension at how its brilliant plans could all have ended like this. There are no villains in the real world—real worlds, I suppose we must say now—and very few heroes. Certainly not ball-less heroes. For after all, that’s the quintessence of a hero. He has balls.

No, I did what any sensible Desi-boy would do. I put my head down and survived. In India we leave the heroics to those with the resources to play that game: the gods and the semigods of the Ramayana and the Maharabharata. Let them cross the universes in three steps and battle demon armies. Leave us the important stuff like making money, protesting our families, surviving. It’s what we’ve done through history, through invasion and princely war, through Aryans and Mughals and British: put our heads down, carried on and little by little survived, seduced, assimilated and in the end conquered. It is what will bring us through this dark Age of Kali. India endures. India is her people and we are all only, ultimately the heroes of our own lives. There is only one hero’s journey and that leads from the birth-slap to the burning-ghat. We are a billion and half heroes. Who can defeat that? So, will I yet be the hero of my own long life? We shall see.

After my father’s death I wandered for decades. There was nothing for me in Delhi. I had a Buddhist’s non-attachment though my wandering was far from the spiritual search of my time as a saddhu. The world was all to rapidly catching up my put-upon characters of Town and Country. For the first few years I filed increasingly sporadic articles with Gupshup. But the truth was that everyone now was the Voras and the Deshmukhs and the Hirandanis. The series twittered into nothingness, plotlines left dangling, family drama suspended. No one really noticed. They were living that world for real now. And my senses reported the incredible revolution in a richness and detail you cannot begin to imagine. In Kerala, in Assam, in the beach-bar at Goa or the game park in Madhya Pradesh, in the out-of-the-way places I chose to live, it was at a remove and thus comprehensible. In Delhi it would have been overwhelming. Sarasvati kept me updated with calls and emails. She had so far resisted the Eye of Shiva, and the thrilling instantaneousness and intimacy, and subtler death of privacy, of direct thought-to-thought communication. Shiv’s Third Revolution had given firmness and vision to her gadfly career. Sarasvati had chosen and set herself among the underclass. I took some small pleasure from the television and online pundits that maybe that old fart Shakyamuni had been right in those terrible populist potboilers in Gupshup, and the blow of technology had cracked India, all India, that great diamond of land, into two nations, the fast and slow, the wired and the wire-less, the connected and the unconnected. The haves and the have-nots. Sarasvati told me of a moneyed class soaring so fast into the universal-computing future they were almost red-shifted, and of the eternal poor, sharing the same space but invisible in the always-on, always-communicating world of the connected. Shadows and dust. Two nations; India—that British name for this congeries of ethnicities and languages and histories, and Bharat, the ancient, atavistic, divine land.

Only with distance could I attain the perspective to see this time of changes as a whole. Only by removing myself from them could I begin to understand these two nations. India was a place where the visible and the invisible mingled like two rivers flowing into each, holy Yamuna and Ganga Mata, and a third, the invisible, divine Saraswati. Humans and aeais met and mingled freely. Aeais took shapes in human minds, humans became disembodied presences strung out across the global net. The age of magic had returned, those days when people confidently expected to meet djinns in the streets of Delhi and routinely consulted demons for advice. India was located as much inside the mind and the imagination as between the Himalayas and the sea or in the shining web of communications, more complex and connected and subtle than any human brain, cast across this subcontinent.

Bharat was poor. Bharat had cracked hands and heels, but she was beautiful. Bharat cleaned and swept and cooked and looked after children, Bharat drove and built and pushed carts through the streets and carried boxes up flights of stairs to apartments. Bharat was always thirsty. How human it is to be so engrossed by our latest crisis that we forget we have failed to solve the crisis before that. Storage was India’s problem. Information was increasing exponentially, available memory only arithmetically. Data-Malthusianism was the threat to the great technological revolution. Water was Bharat’s. The monsoon, ever fickle, had dispersed into a drizzle, a few thunderstorms that ran off the crusted earth as soon as it dropped it rain, a tantalising line of grey clouds along the horizon that never came closer. The Himalayan glaciers that fed the great rivers of the North India and the slow-running Brahmaputra were exhausted; grey moraines of pebbles and dry clay. The mother of droughts was coming. But what was this to a connected class? They could pay for desalinated water, wasn’t India born from the waters? And if the worst came to the worst and universe ended in fire, they could, through their dazzling new technology, translate itself out of its icky physical bodies into that dream India between the real and the virtual worlds. Bodhisofts, they called these ascended creatures. Shiv would have been proud of a name like that.

From my beach bar, from my dive school, from my game reserve and bookshop and dance club and coffeehouse and walking-tour company, from my restaurant and antique shop and meditation retreat, I watched my prophecies come true. Yes, I embarked on all those enterprises. Ten of them, one for each of the dashavatara of my divine namesake. All of them on the edge of the world, all of them with that overview down onto the Age of Kali. I lost count of the years. My body grew into me. I became a tall, lean, high-foreheaded man, with a high voice and long hands and feet. My eyes were very beautiful.

I measured the years by the losses. I re-established contact with my old political counterpart in Varanasi, Shaheen Badoor Khan. He had been as surprised as any when I had vanished so abruptly from the political stage but his own career was not without a hiatus and when he discovered that I was the Shakyamuni behind the Town and Country articles (widely syndicated) we began a lively and lengthy correspondence that continued up until his death at the age of seventy seven. He died completely, and like a good Muslim. Better the promise of paradise than the cloudy doubts of the bodhisoft. My own mother slipped from the world into the realms of the bodhisofts. Sarasvati would not say whether it was a fearful illness or just ennui at the world. Either way I never looked for her among the skyscraper-sized memory stacks that now besieged Delhi along the line of the old Siri Ring. Lakshmi too, that almost-wife and sweetest of co-conspirators, entered the domain of the bodhisofts where she could explore the subtle mathematical games that so delighted her without limits. It was not all loss. The Age of Kali brought a friend; another great Khan, my old tutor from the Dr. Renganathan Brahminical College. He would swirl out of the cloud of I-dust that had replaced the screens and ’hoeks for those who atavistically refused the Eye of Shiva and he would spend many a delightful evening lecturing me on my moral laxity.

Then the dust started to blow through the streets of Delhi. It was not the dust from the perpetual drought that burned the fields and reduced the crops to powder and sent millions from Bharat into the cities of India. It was the dust of Shiva, the sacred ash of the Purusa Corporation’s nanoscale computers, released into the world. Bharat might be choking, but here! here! was the solution to India’s memory problems. Shiv did have a name for these, a good name too. He called them devas.

He called me. It was decades since we had spoken last in the garden of his house in Varanasi, over lemonade. I was running the dharamshala at Pandua then. It was spacious and peaceful and cool and the only disturbance was the over-heavy feet of the Westerners who flocked to the place. They are not naturally barefooted people, I have found. The I-dust relay chimed, a call. I was expecting Mr. Khan. My brother whirled out of the helix of motes instead. He had lost weight, too much weight. He looked well, too much well. He could have been anything: flesh, aeai agent, bodhisoft. We greeted each other and said how well each other looked.

“And how is Nirupa?”

His smile made me think that he was human. Aeais have their own emotions, or things like emotions.

“She’s good. Very good. Twenty eight now, would you believe?”

I confessed that I could not.

“Doing well, found an eligible boy, from a good enough family, who’s not a complete gold-digger. Old-fashioned stuff like that. I’m glad she bided her time, but they can afford to take their time now.”

“All the time in the world.”

“She’s beautiful. Vish, there’s something I need to tell you. Not a warning exactly, more to prepare yourself.”

“This sounds ominous.”

“I hope not. You’ve predicted it all very well.”

“Predicted what?”

“Don’t be coy. I know who you were. No secrets in the transparent world, I’m afraid. No, you got it right and I’m glad you did it because I think you softened the blow, but there is something you didn’t predict, maybe something you couldn’t predict.”

A whisper of breeze stirred the candle flames in my simple wooden room. Heavy white feet went tread tread tread on the creaking boards outside my latticed window. If they had looked through the grille they would have seen me talking to a ghost. No strange thing in this age, or most other ages.

“Whenever we last spoke, you said that you were making use of information from the legacy-device the original aeais had bequeathed us.”

“Well-guessed.”

“It seems logical.”

“When the Trimurti left Earth, they opened a connection to a separate space-time continuum. There were several major differences from our space-time. One was that time runs much faster there than in our space-time, though it would not be noticeable to anyone in that continuum. Another was that the arrow of time was reversed. The Trimurti move backwards in time; this was how their artefact, which the Americans call the Tabernacle, seemed to have predated the solar system when it was found in space. But the more important one—and that was why they chose it—was that information was integrated into the geometrical structure of that space-time.”

I closed my eyes and focused my imagination.

“You’re saying that information, data—minds—form part of the basic structure of that universe. Minds without the need for bodies. The whole universe is like a cosmological computer.”

“You’ve got it.”

“You’ve found a way back into that universe.”

“Oh no no no no no. That universe is closed. It ended with the Trimurti. Their time is gone. It was an imperfect universe. There are others, mind-spaces like that, but better. We’re going to open up dozens—hundreds, eventually thousands—of portals. Our need for processing will always outstrip our available memory, and the devas are just a stopgap. A whole universe, right beside ours, only a footstep away, available for computing resources.”

“What are you going to do?”

“The Jyotirlingas are coming.”

The Jyotirlingas were the sacred places where, in the Vedic Age, the creative, generative energy of the Lord Siva burst from the ground in pillars of divine light, the ultimate phallic linga symbols. These would come not from the earth, but another universe. And Shiv named them after his namesake’s cosmological cock. No one could accuse him of lack of hubris. His I-dust image sparkled and swirled and exploded into a billion motes of light. His smile, like that of the legendary Cheshire cat, seemed to remain. A week later, twelve pillars of light appeared in cities all across the states of India. By a slight misalignment, the Delhi jyotirlinga touched down in the middle of the Dalhousie, the city’s largest slum, crowded beyond all imagining with refugees from the drought.

The simultaneous appearance, at eleven thirty three, of twelve columns of light in cities across India paralysed the rail network. It was one of the least of the disturbances that day but for me, on an island in the middle of the Brahmaputra and needing to get to Delhi, that was the most important. That there were any flights at all was a miracle, that I could book on to one at any price at all proof indeed that the age of the gods had truly returned. Even when alien universes open up in the hearts of our great and ancient cities, Indian grandmothers will still need to travel to see their wee darlings.

I had tried to call Sarasvati but all com channels into Delhi were down and the call-centre aeais announced indefinite delays before the network was restored. I wondered what it would be like for those accustomed to being strung out across the deva net to be back into just one head as the Air Awadh Airbus took me up over the shrivelled silver thread of the parched Ganga. In the tiny toilet I once again transformed myself back into a shaved, shorn urbane Delhi-boy. As we descended into Indira Gandhi airport the captain told those of on the right to look out and we would see the Jyotirlinga. His voice was uncertain, not a tone you want to hear from an airline captain, as if he could not believe what he was seeing. I had been studying it long before the captain’s call: a line of sun-bright light rising from the hazy, grey stain of central Delhi up beyond all sight, further than I could see, craning to look up through the tiny window into the darkening sky.

Sarasvati would be there. That was Shiv’s warning. When the light struck, she would have looked around and, in the same instant made her mind up. People in need. She could not refuse.

Immigration took an hour and as half. Five flights of journalists had disgorged at once. A wired world, it seemed, was no substitute for reporters on the ground. The hall buzzed with swarming fly-sized hovercams. Two hours to grind into Delhi in the limo. The highways were clogged with lines of traffic, all headed out, all moving with geological slowness. The noise of horns was appalling to one fresh from the profound, liquid silence of the dharamshala. Only military and media seemed headed into Delhi but soldiers stopped us at intersections to wave past thundering convoys of chartered refugee buses. We were held up for a motionless half an hour on the big cloverleaf on Siri Ring. In awe and leisure, I studied the wall of memory farms; towering black monoliths drinking in sunlight through their solar skins, pressed shoulder to shoulder as far as I could see. In every breath of air-conditioned air I took, I inhaled millions of devas.

Every roadside, every verge and roundabout, every intersection and car park, every forecourt and garden, was filled with the shanties and leans to the refugees. The best were three low walls of brick with plastic sacking for a roof, the worst cardboard scrapes, or sticks and rags worked together into a sun-shade. Feet had worn away all greenery and stripped the trees bare for firewood. The bare earth had blown into dust, mingling with the airborne devas. The bastis pressed right up to the feet of the memory towers. What did Sarasvati imagine she could achieve here in the face of so colossal a catastrophe? I called her again. The network was still out.

Bharat had invaded India and now India was casting it out. We drove, blaring the horn constantly, past a terrible, emaciated army of refugees. No fine cars here. Trucks, old buses, pick-ups for the better off, behind them, swarms of phatphats, more overloaded than that fatal one I had seen the Holi I discovered death. Motorbikes and mopeds almost invisible under bundles of bedding and cooking pots. I saw a chugging, home-engineered half-tractor device, engine terrifying exposed, dragging a trailer piled as high as house with women and children. Donkey carts, the donkey bent and straining at the loads. In the end, human muscle pushed the exodus onward: bicycle rickshaws, handcarts, bent backs. Military robots guided them, herded them, punished those who strayed from the approved refugee route, or fell, with shock sticks.

Before everything, over everything was the silver spear of the Jyotirlinga.

“Sarasvati!”

“Vishnu?” I could hardly hear her over the roar.

“I’ve come to get you.”

“You’ve what?” It was as noisy where she was. I had a fix. The autodrive would take me there as quickly as it could.

“You’ve got to get out.”

“Vish.”

“Vish nothing. What can you do?”

I did hear her sigh.

“All right, I’ll meet you.” She gave me a fresh set of co-ordinates. The driver nodded. He knew the place. His uniform was crisp and his cap miraculously correct but I knew he was as scared as I.

On Mehrauli Boulevard I heard gunfire. Airdrones barrelled in over the roof of the car, so low their engines shook the suspension. Smoke rose from behind a tatty mall façade. This street, I recognised it. This was Parliament Road, that was the old Park Hotel, that the Bank of Japan. But so faded, so dilapidated. Half the windows were out on the Park. The secluded gardens around Jantar Mantar on Samsad Marg were over-run with packing-case houses, their plastic roofs pushing right against the austere marble angularities of Jai Singh’s astronomical instruments. Everything was over-run with lean-tos and huts and miserable hard-scrabble shelters.

“This is as far as I am going to take you,” the driver said as we ran into an immovable horde of people and animals and vehicles and military at Talkatora Road.

“Don’t go anywhere,” I ordered the driver as I jumped out.

“That’s not likely,” he said.

The press was cruel and chaotic and the most terrifying place I have ever been but Sarasvati was here, I could see her in my mind-map. A cordon of police bots tried to drive me back with the crowds from the steps of the Awadh Bhavan but I ducked under, out and away. I knew this place. I had given my balls to work in this place. Then suddenly, wonderfully, I was in the clear. My heart lurched. My vision swam. Delhi, dear Delhi, my Delhi, they let this happen to you. The gracious greens and boulevards, the airy chowks and maidans of the Rajpath was one unbroken slum. Roof after roof after roof, slumping walls, cardboard and wood and brick and flapping plastic. Smoke went up from a dozen fires. This, this was Dalhousie. I knew the name of course. I had never thought it would ever become the name of the great sink where this newest of New Delhi’s condemned those driven to it by drought and want. Such disdain did new India show for old Awadh. Who needed a Parliament when universal computing made everything a consensus? From where I guessed the old Imperial India Gate had stood at the end of the gracious Rajpath, rose the Jyotirlinga. It was so bright I could not look at I for more than moments. It cast a terrible, unnatural silver shine over the degradation and dread. It abused my Brahminic sensibilities: did I smell voices, hear colour, was that prickle like cold lemon fur on my forehead the radiation of another universe?

People milled around me, smoke blew in my eyes, the downdraft of airdrones and hover cams buffeted me. I had only moments before the army would catch me and move me away with the rest of the panicked crowd. Or worse. I saw bodies on the ground and flames were coming up from a line of plastic shacks by the

“Sarasvati!”

And there she was. Oh, there she was, plunging whip-thin in combat pants and a silk blouse, but filled her wonderful energy and determination out of the pile of collapsing housing. She dragged a child in each hand, smudge-faced and tearful. Tiny mites. In this place, she had slipped from my nuptial elephant to caper with the revellers in her ridiculous man’s costume and exuberant false moustache.

“Sarasvati!”

“You’ve got a car?”

“It’s how I got here, yes.”

The children were on the verge of bawling. Sarasvati thrust them at me.

“Take these two to it.”

“Come with me.”

“There are kids still in there.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“It’s a special needs group. They get left when the sky opens. Everyone else runs and leaves the kids. Take these two to your car.”

“What are you doing?”

“There are more in there.”

“You can’t go.”

“Just get them to the car, then come back here.”

“The army.”

She was gone, ducking under the billowing smoke fall. She disappeared into the warren of lanes and galis. The children pulled at my hands. Yes yes, they had to get out. The car, the car wasn’t far. I turned to try and find an easy way with two children through the wheeling mass of refugees. Then I felt a wave of heat across the back of my neck. I turned to see the blossom of flame blow across the top of the gali, whirling up rags of blazing plastic. I cried something without words or point and then the whole district collapsed in on itself with a roar and explosion of sparks.

The Age of Kali. I have little patience with that tendency in many Indians to assume that because we are a very old culture, we invented everything. Astronomy? Made in India. Zero? Made in India. The indeterminate, probabilistic nature of reality as revealed through quantum theory? Indian. You don’t believe me? The Vedas say that the Four Great Ages of the Universe correspond to the four possible outcomes of our game of dice. The Krita Yuga, the Age of Perfection, is the highest possible score. The Kali Yuga, the Age of strife, darkness, corruption and disintegration, is the lowest possible score. It is all a roll of the divine dice. Probability. Indian!

Kali, Paraskati, Dark Lady, Mistress of Death and Drinker of Blood, Terrible ten-armed one with the necklace of skulls, She Who is Seated upon the Throne of Five Corpses. The Ender. Yet Kali is also Mistress of Regeneration. Ruler of All Worlds, Root of the Tree of the Universe. Everything is a cycle and beyond the Age of Kali we roll again into the Age of Gold. And that which cannot be reasoned with must then be worshipped.

I believe I was mad for some time after Sarasvati’s death. I know I have never been sane as you would consider me sane. We are Brahmins. We are different. But even for a Brahmin, I was crazy. It is a precious and rare thing, to take time out from sanity. Usually we allow it to the very very young and the very very old. It scares us, we have no place for it. But Kali understands it. Kali welcomes it, Kali gives it. So I was mad for a time, but you could as easily say I was divine.

How I reached the temple in the little, drought-wracked town by the sewer of Mata Ganga, I have chosen to forget. How I came by the offering of blood to the priest, that too I’ve put where I put the dis-remembered. How long I stayed there, what I did, does any of this matter? It was time out from the world. It is a powerful thing, to subject yourself to another time and another rhythm of life. I was a thing of blood and ashes, hiding in the dark sanctum, saying nothing but offering my daily puja to the tiny, garland-bedecked goddess in her vulva-like garbigraha. I could have vanished forever. Sarasvati, the brightest and best of us, was dead. I lolled on foot-polished marble. I disappeared. I could have stayed Kali’s devotee for the rest of my long and unnatural life.

I was lolling on the wet, foot-polished marble when the women devotee, shuffling forward through the long, snaking line of cattle-fences toward the goddess, suddenly looked up. Stopped. Looked around as if seeing everything for the first time. Looked again and saw me. Then she unhooked the galvanised railing and pushed trough the switch-back line of devotees to come to me. She knelt down in front of me and namasteed. Above her the single vertical line of her Shakta-tilak she wore the red Eye of Shiva.

“Vish.”

I recoiled so abruptly I banged the back of my head off a pillar, “Ooh,” the woman said. “Ooh, cho chweet, that’s going to smart. Vish, it’s me, Lakhsmi.”

Lakshmi? My former wife, player of games? She saw my confusion and touched my face.

“I’m temporarily downloaded into this dear woman’s brain. It’s rather hard to explain if you’re not connected. Oh, it’s all right, it’s entirely consensual. And I’ll give her herself back as soon as I’m done. I wouldn’t normally do it—it’s very bad manners—but these are slightly exceptional circumstances.”

“Lakshmi? Where are you? Are you here?”

“Oh, you have had a bit of a nasty bang. Where am I? That’s hard to explain. I am entirely bodhisoft now. I’m inside the Jyotirlinga, Vish. It’s a portal as you know, they’re all portals.” After the initial twelve, the pillars of light had arrived all over earth, hundreds, then thousands. “It is a wonderful place Vish. It can be whatever you want it to be, as real as you like. We spend quite a lot of time debating that; the meaning of real. And the games, the number games; well, you know me. That’s why I’ve taken this step for you Vish. It can’t go on. It’s destructive, the most destructive thing we’ve ever done. We’ll burn through this world because we have another one. We have heaven, so we can do what we like here. Life is just a rehearsal. But you’ve seen that Vish, you’ve seen what that’s done.”

“What is it Lakshmi?” Was it memory and fond hope, the mild marble concussion, the strange nanotech possession, but was this stranger starting to look like Lakshmi?

“We have to bring this age to an end. Restart the cycle. Close the Jyotirlingas.”

“That’s impossible.”

“It’s all mathematics. The mathematics that govern this universe are different from the ones that govern yours; that’s why I’m able to exist as a pattern of information imprinted on space-time. Because the logic here allows that. It doesn’t where I come from. Two different logics. But if we could slide between the two a third logic, alien to either, that neither of them could recognise nor operate, then we would effectively lock the gates between the universes.”

“You have that key.”

“We have a lot of time for games here. Social games, language games, imagination games, mathematical and logical games. I can turn the lock from this side.”

“But you need someone to turn the key on my side. You need me.”

“Yes Vish.”

“I would be shut out forever. From you, from Mum, from Dad.”

“And Shiv. He’s here too. He was one of the first to upload his bodhisoft through the Varanasi Jyotirlinga. You’d be shut out from everyone. Everyone but Sarasvati.”

“Sarasvati’s dead!” I roared. Devotees looked up. The sadhus calmed them. “And would this be the final answer? Would this bring around the Age of Gold again?”

“That would be up to you, Vish.”

I thought of the villages that had so welcomed and amazed and blessed and watered me on my saddhu wandering, I thought of the simple pleasures I had taken from my business ventures: honest plans and work and satisfactions. India—the old India, the undying India—was its villages. Sarasvati had seen that truth though it had killed her.

“It sounds better than sprawling in this dusty old temple.” Kali, Mistress of Regeneration, had licked me with her red tongue. Maybe I could be the hero of my own life. Vishnu, the Preserver. His tenth and final incarnation was Kalki, the White Horse, who at the end of the Kali Yuga would fight the final battle. Kali, Kalki.

“I can give you the maths. A man of your intelligence should be able to hold it. But you will need one of these.”

The woman lifted her hand and seized a fistful of air. She threw it into my face and the air coalesced into a spray of red powder. In mid-air the cloud moiled and boiled and thickened and settled into a red circle, a tilak, on my forehead.

“Whatever you do, don’t connect it to the deva net,” Lakshmi said. “I’m going to have to go now. I don’t want to outstay my welcome in someone else’s body. Goodbye Vish, we won’t ever meet again, in any of the worlds. But we were well and truly wed, for a while.” For a moment I thought the woman might kiss me, then she gave a little twitch and straightened her neck just so as if shaking out a crick and I knew Lakshmi was gone. The woman namasteed again.

“Little Lord Vishnu,” she whispered. “Preserve us.”

I picked myself up from the marble. I dusted off the ash of the dark goddess. I walked to the edge of the temple, blinking up into the light of the real sun. I had an idea where to go to do what I had to do. Varanasi, the City of Siva, the seat of the great Jyotirlinga. How might I support myself, with nothing but the dhoti around my loins? Then I caught a sudden movement: on a window ledge on the first floor of one of the many shops that leaned in close to the temple, a cat was edging out along a waterpipe in pursuit of a bird. And I had an idea that filled me with laughter.

So here it is, here it is: at long last. The great trick, the grand Finale of the Magnificent Vishnu’s Celestial Cat Circus. The wire walk. You will never, ever have seen anything like this before, unless of course you’ve been to a certain Kali Temple . . . See, here are the two wires. And here is our star performer. Yes, white Kalki gets his chance to shine at last. Up he goes on to the podium and . . . drum roll. Well, you’ll have to provide the drum roll yourself.

Kalki! Kalki, beautiful white Kalki: do your trick!

And there he goes, carefully sliding one paw, then another out across the two wires, tail moving to keep him in balance, the whole trembling to his muscular control. Go on Kalki . . . Walking the wire. What a cat! And the final jump on to the further podium and I scoop him up to my chest and shout applause! Applause for my lovely cats! I let Kalki down and the rest of the cats run to join him, running their endless circle of fur and tails around the rope ring. Matsya, Kurma, Narasimha and Varaha; Varana, Pashurama and Rama; Krishna, Buddha and last but not least, Kalki.

I turn in the rising dawn light to savour the applause of my audience. And my cats, save your biggest cheer for Matsya, Kurma, Narasimha, Varaha, Varana, Pashurama, Rama, Krishna, Buddha and Kalki who have performed for your pleasure? And me? Just an impresario, a ringmaster: a storyteller. The light is up now and I will detain you no longer for you have your work and I have a place to go and I think now you know where that is and what I must do there. I may not succeed. I may die. I cannot see Shiv giving up without a fight. So please, will you do one thing for me? My cats. Would you look after them for me? You don’t have to feed them or anything like that, just take them. Let them go, they can look after themselves. It’s where I got them from in the first place. They’ll be happy on a farm, in the country. Lots to hunt and kill. You might even be able to make a bit of money from them. I mean, performing cats, who ever heard of a thing like that? It’s actually much easier than you think. Meat does it, every time. There, I’ve given away the trick. Be good to them. Well, I’ll be off then.

I push the boat out into the river, run into the dawn-bright water and hop in. It rocks gently. It is a glorious morning; the Jyotirlinga ahead can hold no comparison to the sun. I touch my fingers to my forehead, to the tilak Lakshmi put there in a small salutation to the sun. Then I put my back to the narrow oars and head out into the stream.

Originally published in Cyberabad Days, by Ian McDonald.

Oblivion: A Journey

Vandana Singh

Memory is a strange thing.

I haven’t changed my sex in eighty-three years. I was born female, in a world of peace and quietude; yet I have an incomplete recollection of my childhood. Perhaps it is partly a failure of the imagination that it is so hard to believe (in this age of ours) that there was once such a place as green and slow as my world-shell, Ramasthal. It was the last of the great world-shells to fall, so any memory of childhood is contaminated with what came after: the deaths of all I loved, the burning of the cities, the slow, cancerous spread of Hirasor’s culture-machines that changed my birth-place beyond recognition.

So instead of one seamless continuum of growing and learning to be in this world, my memory of my life is fragmentary. I remember my childhood name: Lilavati. I remember those great cybeasts, the hayathis, swaying down the streets in a procession, and their hot, vegetable-scented breath ruffling my hair. There are glimpses, as through a tattered veil, of steep, vertical gardens, cascading greenery, a familiar face looking out at me from a window hewn in a cliff—and in the background, the song of falling water. Then everything is obscured by smoke. I am in a room surrounded by pillars of fire, and through the haze I see the torn pages of the Ramayan floating in the air, burning, their edges crumpling like black lace. I am half-comatose with heat and smoke; my throat is parched and sore, my eyes sting—and then there are strange, metallic faces reaching out to me, the stuff of my nightmares. Behind them is a person all aflame, her arms outstretched, running toward me, but she falls and I am carried away through the smoke and the screaming. I still see the woman in my dreams and wonder if she was my mother.

In my later life as a refugee, first on the world of Barana and after that, everywhere and nowhere, there is nothing much worth recalling. Foster homes, poverty, my incarceration in some kind of soulless educational institution—the banality of the daily struggle to survive. But there are moments in my life that are seared into my mind forever: instants that were pivotal, life-changing, each a conspiracy of temporal nexuses, a concatenation of events that made me what I am. That is not an excuse—I could have chosen a different way to be. But I did not know, then, that I had a choice.

This is the first of those moments: the last time I was a woman, some ninety years ago in my personal time-frame. I was calling myself Ila, then, and doing some planet-hopping, working the cruisers and blowing the credits at each stop. I found myself on Planet Vilaasa, a rich and decadent world under the sway of the Samarin conglomerate. I was in one of those deep-city bars where it’s always night, where sunshine is like a childhood memory, where the air is thick with smoke, incipient violence and bumblebees. I don’t remember who I was with, but the place was crowded with humans, native and off-world, as well as mutants and nakalchis. There was a bee buzzing in my ear, promising me seven kinds of bliss designed especially for my personality and physical type if only I’d agree to let the Samarin Corporate Entity take over half my brain. I swatted it; it fell into my plate and buzzed pathetically, antennae waving, before it became non-functional. Somehow I found this funny; I still remember throwing back my head and laughing.

My fingers, slight and brown, curved around my glass. The drink half drunk, a glutinous purple drop sliding down the outer surface. Reflected on the glass a confusion of lights and moving shapes, and the gleam, sudden and terrifying, of steel.

There was a scream, and the sound of glass breaking that seemed to go on forever. This was no barroom brawl. The raiders were Harvesters. I remember getting up to run. I remember the terrified crowd pressing around me, and then I was falling, kicked and stepped upon in the stampede. Somehow I pushed myself to safety under a table next to a stranger, a pale woman with long, black hair and eyes like green fire. She looked at me with her mouth open, saying one word:

“Nothen . . . ”

A Harvester got her. It put its metal hands around her throat and put its scissor-like mouth to her chest. As she bled and writhed, it rasped one long word, interspersed with a sequence of numbers.

Her body turned rigid and still, her face twisted with horror. Her green eyes froze in a way that was simultaneously aware and locked in the moment of torment. It was then that I realized that she was a nakalchi, a bio-synthetic being spawned from a mother-machine.

The name of the mother-machine is what pushes a nakalchi into the catatonic state that is Shunyath. When they enter Shunyath they re-live the moment when that name was spoken. Since the nakalchis are practically immortal, capable of dying only through accident or violence, Shunyath is their way of going to the next stage. Usually a nakalchi who has wearied of existence will go to one of their priests, who will put the candidate in a meditative state of absolute calm and surrender. Then the priest will utter the name of the mother-machine (such names being known only to the priests and guarded with their lives) so that the nakalchi may then contemplate eternity in peace.

For first-generation nakalchis, Shunyath is not reversible.

That is when I realized that this woman was one of the ancients, one of the nakalchis who had helped humankind find its way to the stars.

So for her, frozen in the state of Shunyath, it would seem as though she was being strangled by the Harvester all the rest of her days. No wonder she had asked me for Nothen, for death. She had known the Harvesters had come for her; she had known what they would do. I remember thinking, in one of those apparently timeless moments that terror brings: somebody should kill the poor woman. She was obviously the target of the raid.

But to my horrified surprise the Harvester turned from her to me, even as I was sliding away from under the table to a safer place. While the Harvester had me pinned to the floor, its long, flexible electrodes crawled all over my skin as it violated my humanness, my woman-ness, with its multiple limbs. Through the tears and blood I saw myriad reflections of myself in those dark, compound eyes, from which looked—not only the primitive consciousness of the Harvester, but the eyes of whoever manipulated it—the person or entity who, not content with finding their target, fed like a starving animal on the terror of a bystander. In those eyes I was a stranger, a non-person, a piece of meat that jerked and gibbered in pain. Then, for a moment, I thought I saw the burning woman from my memories of childhood, standing behind the Harvester. This is death, I said to myself, relieved. But the Harvester left me a few hair-breadths short of death and moved on to its next victim.

I don’t know how many they killed or maimed that night. The nakalchi woman they took away. I remember thinking, through the long months of pain and nightmares that followed, that I wish I had died.

But I lived. I took no joy in it. All that gave my mind some respite from its constant seething was a game I invented: I would find the identity of the person responsible for the Harvester raid and I would kill them. Find, and kill. I went through endless permutations of people and ways of killing in my head. Eventually it was no longer a game.

I moved to another planet, changed my sex to one of the Betweens. Over the years I changed my body even further, ruthlessly replacing soft, yielding flesh with coralloid implants that grew me my own armor-plating. Other people shuddered when I walked by. I became an interplanetary investigator of small crime and fraud, solving trivial little cases for the rich and compromised, while biding my time.

It was already suspected that the man responsible for the Harvester attacks that terrorized whole planets during the Samarin era was no other than the governing mind of the Samarin Corporate Entity, Hirasor. The proof took many years and great effort on the part of several people, including myself, but it came at last. Nothing could be done, however, because Hirasor was more powerful than any man alive. His icons were everywhere: dark, shoulder-length hair framing a lean, aristocratic face with hungry eyes; the embroidered silk collar, the rose in his buttonhole. It came out then that he had a private museum of first-generation nakalchis locked in Shunyath in various states of suffering. A connoisseur of pain, was Hirasor.

But to me he was also Hirasor, destroyer of worlds. He had killed me once already by destroying my world-shell, Ramasthal. It was one of the epic world-shells, a chain of island satellites natural and artificial, that ringed the star Agni. Here we learned, lived and enacted our lives based on that ancient Indic epic, the Ramayan, one of those timeless stories that condense in their poetry the essence of what it means to be human. Then Samarin had infiltrated, attacking and destroying at first, then doing what they called “rebuilding”: substituting for the complexity and beauty of the Ramayan, an inanely simplified, sugary, cultural matrix that drew on all the darkness and pettiness in human nature. Ramasthal broke up, dissolved by the monocultural machine that was Samarin. I suffered less than my fellow-citizens—being a child, I could not contribute a brain-share to Samarin. I grew up a refugee, moving restlessly from one inhabited world to the next, trying and failing to find my center. Most of the ordinary citizens of these worlds had never heard of the Ramayan epic, or anything else that had been meaningful to me in that lost past life. In my unimaginable solitude my only defense was to act like them, to be what they considered normal. When the Harvesters invaded the bar, I had been living the fashionably disconnected life that Samarin-dominated cultures think is the only way to be.

Hirasor was so powerful that among my people his nickname was Ravan-Ten-Heads, after the demon in the epic Ramayan. Near the end of the story, the hero, Ram, tries to kill Ravan by cutting off his heads, one by one, but the heads simply grow back. In a similar manner, if a rival corporation or a society of free citizens managed to destroy one Samarin conglomerate, another would spring up almost immediately in its place. It—and Hirasor—seemed almost mythic in their indestructibility.

What I wanted to do was to find Hirasor’s secret vulnerability, as Ram does in the epic. “Shoot an arrow into Ravan’s navel,” he is told. The navel is the center of Ravan’s power. When Ram does so, the great demon dies at last.

But Samarin, and with it Hirasor, declined slowly without my help. An ingeniously designed brain-share virus locked Samarin’s client-slaves—several million people—into a synced epileptic state. After that Generosity Corp. (that had likely developed the virus) began its ascent to power while the Samarin Entity gradually disintegrated. Pieces of it were bought by other conglomerates, their data extracted through torture; then they were mind-wiped until the name Samarin only evoked a ghost of a memory, accompanied by a shudder.

But Hirasor lived on. He was still rich enough to evade justice. Rumors of his death appeared frequently in the news-feeds for a while, and a documentary was made about him, but over time people forgot. There were other things, such as the discovery of the worlds of the Hetorr, and the threats and rumors of war with that unimaginably alien species. “Give it up,” said the few people in whom I had confided. “Forget Hirasor and get on with your life.” But finding Hirasor was the only thing between me and death by my own hand. Each time I opened my case files on him, each time his image sprang up and I looked into his eyes, I remembered the Harvester. I remembered the burning woman. Despite all the reconstructive work my body had undergone, my old wounds ached. Find, and kill. Only then would I know peace.

I knew more about Hirasor than anyone else did, although it was little enough.

He liked absinthe and roses.

He had a perfect memory.

He was fastidious about his appearance. Every hair in place, fingers elegant and manicured, the signature ear-studs small and precisely placed on each ear-lobe. His clothing was made from the silk of sapient-worms.

He had no confidant but for the chief of his guards, a nakalchi female called Suvarna, a walking weapon who was also his lover. He wrote her poetry that was remarkable for its lyrical use of three languages, and equally remarkable for its sadistic imagery.

Later I killed three of his functionaries to learn his unique identity-number. It did me no good, or so I thought, then.

In the years of his decline he lost his Harvester units; his three main hideouts were found and his assets destroyed, his loyal bands of followers dwindled to one, Suvarna—and yet he seemed more slippery and elusive than ever. Although he left trails of blood and shattered lives in his wake, he managed to elude me with trickery and firepower.

He left me messages in blood.

Sometimes it was the name of a planet or a city. I would go there and find, too late, another clue, spelled out in corpses. It was as though we were playing an elaborate game across the inhabited worlds, with him always in the lead. Slowly the universe began to take less and less notice. We were two lone players on a vast stage, and the audience had other, larger scale horrors to occupy them.

I began to think of myself as a modern-day Ram. In the Ramayan epic, Prince Ram’s wife Sita is abducted by the ten-headed demon Ravan. Prince Ram, beloved by all, has no difficulty raising an army of animals and people and following Ravan to his kingdom.

I was no prince. But Hirasor had stolen my whole world, as surely as Ravan stole Sita. I could not bring back Ramasthal or my childhood, but I could bring Hirasor down. Unlike Ram, I would have to do it alone.

Alone. Sifting through travel records, bribing petty little mercenaries who may have had dealings with his people, tracking down witnesses at the scene of each orgy of violence, trying to think like him, to stand in his shoes and wonder: what would he do next? I would sleep only when I could no longer stand.

Sleep brought a recurring nightmare: Hirasor standing before me at last. I shoot an arrow into his navel, and as he falls I leap upon him and put my hands around his throat. I am certain he is dying, but then I see his face change, become familiar, become my own face. I feel his hands on my throat.

I would wake up in a sweat and know that in the end it was going to be only one of us who would prevail: him or me. But first I had to find him. So I worked obsessively, following him around from place to place, always one step behind.

Then, quite suddenly, the trail got cold. I searched, sent my agents from planet to planet. Nothing but silence. I paced up and down my room, brooding for days. What was he waiting for? What was he about to do?

Into this empty, waiting time came something I had not expected. A reason to live that had nothing to do with Hirasor. Her name was Dhanu.

She was an urbanologist for whom I had performed a small service. She was a small, fierce, determined woman with long, black hair turning to grey that she tied in a braid. The job I did for her was shoddily done, and she demanded a reason. “I’m preoccupied with something more important,” I snapped, wanting her out of my office and my life. “Tell me,” she said, sitting down and waiting with her whole body, her eyes mocking and intrigued. So I did.

We became lovers, Dhanu and I. Somehow she found her way past the armor-plating of my mind and body; she found cracks and interstices, living flesh that remembered loving touch, regions of vulnerability that I hadn’t cauterized out of myself. Here is a memory fragment:

We lie in bed in my dingy room, with moonlight coming in through the narrow window, and the sounds outside of voices raised in argument, and the sweaty, chemical scent of the dead river that lies like an outstretched arm across this nameless, foul city. She is a shadow, a ghost limned with silver, turned into a stranger by the near-darkness. I find this suddenly disturbing; I turn her over so that the light falls full on her face. I don’t know what I look like to her. I don’t know what I am. I’ve been calling myself Vikram for a few years, but that doesn’t tell me anything.

“Tell me a secret,” she says. “Something about yourself that nobody knows.”

I pull myself together, settle down next to her and stare at the ceiling. I don’t know what to tell her, but something escapes my lips unbidden.

“I want to die,” I say, surprising myself because lately I haven’t been thinking about death. But it’s true. And also not true, because I want this moment forever, the light from the broken moon Jagos silvering her hair, and the way she looks at me when I say that: a long, slow, sad, unsurprised look. She begins to say something but I stop her. “Your turn,” I say.

“I’ll tell you what I want to know, more than anything,” she says after a pause. “I want to know what it is like to be somebody else. I remember, as a very small child, standing with my mother on a balcony, watching the most amazing fireworks display I had ever seen. It made me happy. I looked at my mother to share that joy, and found that she was crying. It was then that I realized that I was a different person from her, that she was in some profound way a stranger. Since then I’ve sought strangeness. I’ve wanted to know what it is like to be a tree, a sapient-worm, and most of all, a made-being. Like a nakalchi or a Cognizant-City. Can you imagine what the universe would look like to an entity like that?”

We talk all night. She teaches me what she has learned about nakalchis and Cognizant-Cities, Corporate Entities and mother-machines—in particular, their rituals of death, because that is what interests me. I realize during the conversation that I am no more than a vessel for the death of another, and that is perhaps why I seek my own. Some time during the night she teaches me the song with which nakalchis welcome Nothen, their conception of death. She learned it from a nakalchi priest who was dying, who wanted someone to say the words to him. I cannot pretend to understand the lore and mysticism that the priests have developed around Nothen, which to me is simply irreversible non-functionality, the death that comes to us all. Or the philosophical comparison between Nothen and Shunyath. Dhanu tries to explain:

“If you go into Shunyath, you contemplate what nakalchis call The River, which is inadequately translated as the Cosmic Stream of Being. If you go into Nothen, with the Last Song echoing in your mind, then you are the River. You are no longer separate from it—you become the River, see?”

No, I don’t see. Never mind, she says, laughing at me. She says the words of the Last Song, breathing it out into the moonlit air.

It has a pleasing, sonorous lilt. It is supposed to induce a state of acceptance and peace in a dying nakalchi. I am not sure why, but there are tears in my eyes as I repeat it after her in the gray, hushed light of dawn.

Shantih. Nothen ke aagaman, na dukh na dard . . .

Lying with her, seeing her hair unbound on my pillow like seaweed, I find myself in a still place, as though between breaths. Hirasor does not walk the paths that Dhanu and I tread.

Looking back, I see how the paths branch out of each temporal nexus. For every pivotal event in my life, there was always more than one possible path I could have taken.

This is the path I chose:

I had accompanied Dhanu during one of her urbanology expeditions. We were in the bowels of a dying Cognizant-City on the ruined planet Murra. This was the first time she had had a chance to explore what was probably one of the earliest Cognizant-Cities in the galaxy. She was a few levels below me, attempting to salvage what was left of the City’s mind. All its recorded history and culture, its ruminations over the years of its existence, lay spooled in cavernous darkness below. The inhabitants had been evacuated, and even now I could see the last of the ships, a glint or two in a reddening sky over the bleak mountains of Murra’s northern continent. I was perched on the highest ramparts, standing by our flyer and looking out for rogue destroyer bots. Every now and then I saw one rise up, a distant speck, and crash into the city-scape in a small fireball. Thin spires of smoke rose all around me, but there was as yet nothing amiss where I was waiting.

Then I lost Dhanu’s signal.

I searched the skies, found them clear of bots, and descended quickly into the warren-like passageways that led into the city’s heart. Two levels later, my wrist-band beeped. She was in range.

“I’m all right, Vikram,” she said to my anxious query. She sounded breathless with excitement. “I had to go down a couple of levels to find the rest of the data-banks. This City is one of the first Cognizant-cities ever made! They still have direct human-to-City interfaces! I am hooking up to talk to it as I record. Go on up! I’ll only be a few minutes, I promise.”

When I relive that moment, I think of the things I could have done. I could have insisted on going down to where she was, or persuaded her to leave everything and come. Or I could have been more careful going up, so I wouldn’t lose my way.

But I did lose my way. It was only one wrong turn, and I was about to retrace my steps (I had the flyer’s reassuring signal on my wristband as a guide) but what made me pause was curiosity. Or fate.

I found myself in the doorway of an enormous chamber which smelled faintly of blood and hydrogen peroxide, and was lit by periodic blue flashes, like lightning. I saw the great, monstrous hulk of an old-fashioned mother-machine, her long-abandoned teats spewing an oily broth, her flailing arms beating the air over the shattered remains of her multiple wombs. She was old—it had been a long time since she had brought any nakalchis to life. As I stared at her I realized (from what pictures Dhanu had shown me of ancient made-beings) that she was probably a first-generation mother-machine. A priceless collector’s item, salvaged from who-knew-where, abandoned in the evacuation of the City. And now the City’s madness was destroying what little functionality she had, taking her to Nothen. Moved by a sudden impulse I went up to her and spoke the words of peace.

Shantih. Nothen ke aagaman, na dukh na dard . . .

Peace. As Nothen comes, there is no sorrow, no pain . . .

I regretted my impulse almost immediately because after I stopped, the mother-machine began to recite the names of her children, the first part of her death-ritual. In her final moments she had mistaken me for a nakalchi priest. I don’t know what made me stay—there was something mesmerizing about that old, metallic voice in the darkness, and the proximity of death. Perhaps I was a little annoyed with Dhanu for delaying, for wanting to join with the City in an orgy of mutual understanding. Dhanu’s signal flickered with reassuring regularity on my wristband.

Then I heard the mother-machine utter the name that to me meant more than life itself: Hirasor.

I will remember that moment until I die: the grating voice of the mother-machine, the dull booms in the distance, the floor shaking below my feet, and that pungent, smoky darkness, pierced by occasional sparks of blue lightning.

In the midst of it, clear as a bell, the name—or rather, Hirasor’s unique numerical identifier. Each of us had our identity numbers, given to us at birth, and I was one of the few people who knew Hirasor’s. But I had never suspected he was a nakalchi. Partly because of nakalchi lore and history—there never had been any confirmed master criminals who were nakalchi, conceived as they had once been to gently shepherd the human race toward the stars. Meanwhile the great uprising of the nakalchis in times long before Samarin, the consciousness debates that had preceded them, had all ensured that they were treated on par with human beings, so I had no way of knowing from the number alone. You can’t tell from appearance or behavior either, because nakalchis claim access to the full range of human emotion (or, if their priests are to be believed, to more than that). By now even we humans are so augmented and enhanced that the functional difference between nakalchi and human is very small—but important. To me the difference meant—at last—the possibility of vengeance.

Hirasor: a first-generation nakalchi!

That is why I had to wait. That is why I couldn’t go down to find Dhanu, why I ignored her frantic signals on my wrist-band. I had to wait for the mother-machine to tell me her name.

At last she said it: Ekadri-samayada-janini, intermingled with a sequence of numbers that made up a prime.

I left her then, to die. I left, repeating her name—what would always be, to me, the Word—so I would not forget. The floor was twisting and bucking beneath my feet, and a lone siren was blaring somewhere above me. I staggered against the rusting metal wall of the passage, and remembered Dhanu.

I got up. I went back. I wish I could say that I went into the bowels of the City, braved everything to find her and rescue her. But I didn’t. I went down until I was stopped by the rubble of fallen masonry. Her signal still flickered on my wrist-band but she did not answer my query.

There was a seismic shudder far below me, and a long sigh, a wind that blew through the wrecked passageways, running invisible fingers through my hair. I sensed—or imagined—Dhanu’s breath flowing with the breath of the dying City, her consciousness entangled inextricably with that of her host. But as I turned away I knew also that my real reason for abandoning her was that I was the only living being who had the means to bring Hirasor down. For that I couldn’t risk my life.

The roof of the passageway began to collapse. I was running, now, veering from one side to another to prevent being hit by debris. I burst into open air, my chest aching, and flung myself into the flyer. As I rose up, three destroyer bots honed into the very spot I had vacated. I had no time to activate the flyer’s defenses. A great fireball blossomed below me. I felt its heat as I piloted the rocking craft upward through the tumultuous air. Up, in the cool heights, I saw that there was blood flowing down my right arm. My shoulder hurt. I looked down and saw the myriad fires blooming, forming and dissolving shapes that my imagination brought to life. Monsters. And lastly, a woman, arms outstretched, burning.

In the Ramayan, Ram braves all to recover his consort Sita from the demon Ravan. But near the end of the story he loses her through his own foolishness. He turns her away, exiles her as he himself was once exiled, and buries himself in the task of ruling his kingdom.

All that: the war, the heroes killed—for nothing!

One of the most moving scenes in the epic is at the end of the story, when Ram goes down on his knees before Sita in the forest, begging her forgiveness and asking her to come back to him. She accepts his apology but she does not belong to him; she never has. She calls to her mother, the Earth; a great fissure opens in the ground and Sita goes home.

In the One Thousand Commentaries, there are different views on the significance of Sita. Some interpret her as signifying that which is lost to us. For a long time I had thought of Sita as my world, my childhood. I had seen myself as Ram, raising an army to win back—not those irredeemable things, but a chance for survival. Abandoned by my fellow investigators, hunting for Hirasor alone, I had, after a while, given up on analogies. Certainly I had never thought of Dhanu as Sita.

Dhanu was what I had to sacrifice to reach Hirasor, to rescue Sita. Dhanu had never belonged to me, anyway, I told myself. She could have come up out of the City at any time; it was her obsession with the made-beings that led to her death. Sometimes I was angry with her, at other times, I wept, thinking of the fall of her hair in the moonlight. At odd moments during my renewed pursuit of Hirasor, she would come unbidden into my mind, and I would wonder what her last moments had been like. Had she seen the Universe through the eyes of the dying City? Had she had her epiphany?

But I had little time for regret. My life narrowed down to one thing: find Hirasor. I set various agents sifting through mountains of possible leads; I re-established contact with criminal informers, coaxed or threatened information from scores of witnesses. At night I lay sleepless in my lonely bed, thinking of what I would do when I found Hirasor. My mind ran through scenario after scenario. I had to first put him in a hundred kinds of agony. Then I would say the name of the mother-machine and lock him in Shunyath forever.

His silence lasted over two years. Then, at last, one of my agents picked up his trail. This time, curiously, it was not marked with blood. No small, artistically arranged orgy of violence betrayed his presence. All I had was proof from a transit shuttle record that he had been headed for the planet Griddha-kuta two months ago.

I went to Griddha-kuta. Apparently he had headed straight for the Buddhist monastery of Leh, without any attempt at covering his tracks. I went to the monastery, suspecting a trap. There, to my angry surprise, I found him gone.

An elderly monk told me that yes, Hirasor had been here. What had he done during his stay? Apparently nothing but walk around in the hill gardens and read in the library. Where was he now?

“He said to tell you that he had gone to Oblivion,” the monk said, watching me. “But why don’t you stay here awhile, before you go? There is no hurry. Hirasor is not running any more. Why don’t you walk the gardens and ease your burdens a little?”

They let me search the grounds and the building, but there was no sign of Hirasor. I wondered if he had really gone to Oblivion, a planet about which I knew little, except that it was as close to hell as you could get among the inhabited worlds. It made no sense that he would go to such an uncomfortable place.

While I was wondering what to do, I walked briefly in the gardens with the monk, Chituri. I told him a little about myself and my quest; in return he confided to me that he had been a world-shell citizen, too, before the fall. His world-shell had been Gilgamesh.

There is no doubt that there was some magic about the place, because I stayed longer than I intended. The gardens in the terraced hills were tranquil, verdant, misty with waterfalls. Amid groves of moss-laden stone trees, pale clusters of flowers hung in the sweet air. Memories of Ramasthal, which had faded with time, returned to me vividly. Meanwhile Chituri tried to persuade me to stay, to give up my quest for justice. As we walked, he would tell me stories from the Indic tradition, even resorting to his knowledge of the Ramayan.

“Don’t you see,” he would tell me, “it is only when Ram forgets the god in him, forgets he is an avatar of Vishnu, that he acts foolishly? What is evil but ignorance of our true nature?”

“You are forgetting that Ravan is the villain of the story, not Ram,” I would say coldly. “If you want to talk about evil, talk about him.”

“But, Paren,” he said, using the name I had given him, “don’t your commentaries say that the entire epic is more than a literal telling of an old heroic tale—that the great battle is really the battle within . . . ”

He had a peculiar way of sidling up to me, of speaking as though imparting a great confidence, and yet his manner was ingratiating, tentative. He hardly spoke above a whisper. I guessed he had suffered much before his arrival here, but I took a dislike to him after a while.

For me this period was, like the time I had met Dhanu, only an interstice, a time to catch my breath before resuming my quest. I was not interested in academic discourses on morality. Chituri did not understand that. He had seen Hirasor walk these very gardens—Hirasor, who had brought down his world as well as mine—and he had done nothing.

I finished my researches on the planet Oblivion, and made arrangements to go there. It was a difficult place to get to, since there was only one settlement, if one could call it that, and only a small scientific research craft visited at rather long intervals. The day I left, Chituri again tried to persuade me to give up my pursuit of Hirasor. He did this in his usual oblique way of telling me a story.

This time it was an ancient Buddhist tale about a murderer called Ungli-maal. Ungli-maal had been a bandit in the time of the Buddha, a man so depraved that he wore the fingers of his victims as a garland around his neck. The Buddha was the only man he waylaid who was unafraid of death, who faced him empty-handed, with compassion. Eventually Ungli-maal—despite all he had been—became a Buddhist monk and a great teacher.

“If you are trying to persuade me that Hirasor has become a saint,” I said between clenched teeth, “you must think me naïve indeed. He is still the man who butchered millions, destroyed countless worlds. He will not escape justice.”

“That was not the point of my story,” Chituri said, rather sadly. I was glad not to see his face again.

Oblivion, they say, is another word for hell. A bleak world, barely habitable, it was once known as Dilaasha, and was considered a reasonable candidate for terraforming. Those hopes have long since vanished. The “habitable” zones are deserts, subject to violent dust-storms, and all indigenous life is primitive—bacterial, algal, and inimical to coexisting with humans.

But all this does not explain why the planet Oblivion is hell. Oblivion earns its name because those who stay there long enough slowly lose their minds.

It begins with forgetting and slips of tongue, peculiar speech disorders, waking terrors, and finally, silence. The rescue teams who first observed the early explorers (consisting of both human and nakalchi) could only speculate as to why the subjects walked around without apparent purpose, neglecting the basic needs of their bodies, muttering in unknown languages, reacting to things that nobody else could see. The second stage was one of great distress—the subjects howled or whimpered and ran about the compound as though to escape a terrible, invisible enemy. They could still, at times, respond to their names; they would look up when called, frowning, as though trying to remember who they had been. Sometimes they would weep in the arms of the staff; a terrible, heart-rending weeping it was. The final stage was silence and withdrawal. In this last stage the sufferers seemed to have completely lost any knowledge of who they were—they did not respond to their names or to instructions; they wandered around with dead eyes, tracing out complicated patterns with their feet.

Only three victims had been taken off-planet. When removed in the second stage they would resist with maniacal strength—both such subjects had met violent death at their own hand. The third had been in the final stage and had simply faded away after removal, although he had been in fine shape physically. However an autopsy had revealed a bizarre restructuring of his brain that no scientist had yet explained.

So now all that is left of the original settlement on Oblivion is a study center where the remaining subjects are incarcerated. Regulations decree that nobody can stay on Oblivion for more than a hundred and ten local days. It’s after that that most people seem to start losing their minds, although in some rare cases twenty days is enough.

There are theories—volatile compounds containing nanoorganisms that are slowly released by the soil, pervading everything, that act like psychotropic drugs, low frequency sound waves that boom through the barren hills, disturbing the inner functioning of the body, peculiar surges in radioactive emissions in the environs—but none of these are adequate explanations. Oblivion remains a mystery.

So I came, at last, to Oblivion, to the final confrontation. It was a fitting place for a last stand. The dome-town was mostly uninhabited, the empty buildings testament to the defeated hopes of the original settlers. The insane were housed in a primitive building built around a dusty compound. The skeleton crew that had managed the place for the last shift was irritable and moody, waiting to be taken off-planet in a week, and the few scientists looked depressed and preoccupied. Nobody seemed interested in talking with me, despite the fact that I was apparently a representative of a rich philanthropist considering a major donation. Everyone seemed curiously lacking in vitality or enthusiasm, as though under the influence of some drug. Within a few hours of my stay there, I, too, felt a distinct mental lethargy, punctuated by spikes of nervousness and paranoia. The medic who examined me, a thin, dark, spidery man, was pessimistic.

“You’re one of those who will succumb fast,” he said, not without some relish. “This is a terrible place, affects some people much more quickly than others. Get out while you can, or you’ll be joining them!”

He waved his long fingers toward the observation window behind him. There was something ghoulish about the way he stood watching the crazies, describing for me in painful detail every stage of the terrible sickness. The afflicted—men, women, most of them half naked, wandered aimlessly around the yard, muttering and drawing patterns in the dust with their feet. Some wailed incessantly, beating their chests, while others tore at their clothes. Still others sat very quietly on the ground, looking straight ahead of them with blank eyes. I felt as though their pain and confusion was somehow connected to me, that theirs was a sorrow that was drawing me in slowly. The dust patterns on the ground (the subject of much debate among the scientists) seemed almost to make sense, as though they were the script of a language I had known and forgotten. I shivered and looked away. The medic was right. I couldn’t stay here long.

But when I looked back into the compound, there was Hirasor.

He came into the yard through a door in the wall. A tall man, he now walked with a slight shuffle. He sat down on an unoccupied bench and watched the sufferers. I couldn’t see his face clearly, but the gait, and the arrogant set of the shoulders, was unmistakable. My heart started hammering.

“That’s the other visitor,” the medic said, noting the slight start I gave. “Claims to be interested in our subjects, but he seems to have problems of his own.”

He didn’t explain. Hirasor sat for a while, then moved his hands upward in a gesture that I didn’t recognize, and returned through the door, which shut behind him.

I went into my narrow cell of a room to make my plans.

It was hard to think clearly. Blood, revenge, murder—the sufferings of those who had lost to Hirasor—my own long years of trailing him, giving up love and life for this one obsession—these thoughts reverberated in my mind When I closed my eyes I saw Hirasor’s face, or the Harvester’s toothed mouth. When I opened them, I saw the stark, claustrophobic room, and the view from the skylight of a yellow dust-plume over the dome. The air smelled faintly of dust and burning. I knew then that Hirasor had chosen wisely. I didn’t know to what extent he, as a nakalchi (and a hardened one at that) would be affected by the place, but he had gambled on it being a disadvantage for me.

The next day there was a message from him, an audio. Giving me the location of his rooms, and telling me that he would let me know when I should come, when Suvarna was not around.

Bring your weapons, he said.

This is the last memory fragment, the one most fresh in my mind.

I had been waiting for days. Hirasor and I would make an appointment, then he would abruptly cancel it because Suvarna had returned unexpectedly to their quarters. He did not want her to be in the way. I could sense that, like me, he wanted our final confrontation to be between us alone. At times I suspected that he was playing with me, that I should be more circumspect, perhaps induce someone to spy on him—but this was not the time to play detective. It was fitting that at the end there should be no tricks and subterfuges, only him and me, face to face at last.

There was no doubt that he was wearing me down, however. I lay restlessly in my room, plagued by headaches and nightmares. I started at every sound, and the dust devils visible from my window became fiery-eyed monsters.

Thus Hirasor and I waited, like illicit lovers, for the final assignation.

Then his summons came.

I will remember that last journey to the end of my days:

My armor-plated body, all weapons systems readied; the dull, booming pain in my head keeping time with my footsteps. The walk through the complex, through which the other inhabitants seem to float like ghosts. Everything tinged faintly with red, as though the world itself is rusting. The stairs, dusted with Oblivion’s fine grit. The door, a white rectangle, that scans me with a round eye and opens in silence.

Inside is a sparsely furnished receiving room. On a low divan sits a woman. Her hair cascades over her shoulders in black waves; her legs are crossed, her long, tapering, steel-tipped fingers folded over one knee. Her eyes are a metallic dark gray, multi-faceted like the eyes of moths; a quick blink in the direction of the door behind me, and it shuts.

“Greetings, Suvarna,” I say, as calmly as I can, after the first heart-stopping moment. “Where’s Hirasor?”

“Out,” she says. “I intercepted some of his messages to you. It was I who sent you the last one.”

I am standing before her, outwardly calm, inwardly berating myself for my foolishness. Her nakalchi eyes track every move I might make, every muscle-twitch.

“My business is with Hirasor,” I say. I am determined that at the end of it all, she will not stand between Hirasor and I. But she will be hard to kill.

“I don’t think you understand,” she says, rising. She’s an impressive woman, tall, all teeth and muscle, but also beautiful.

“This may be a game for you and him,” she says, “but my job is to keep him alive. If it hadn’t been for you, he wouldn’t have taken to planet-hopping. He wouldn’t have found this accursed place. It’s time we stopped playing, Vikram, or whatever you are calling yourself now.”

I can sense her coming alive, the way a killer weapon comes alive when it finds its target. Through the fog in my brain it occurs to me that Suvarna might be Hirasor’s sibling, birthed by the same mother-machine.

I say the Word.

“What?” she says. She laughs. “Are you trying to distract me with nonsense?”

So it means nothing to her. She raises a finger-tip.

The next moment my alarm system begins to scream coordinates and trajectories; I leap aside just as a spot on the wall behind me blackens with heat.

I remember that she likes to play.

“If only you’d left us alone,” she says, watching me. “Hirasor is old and sated now, Vikram. All he wants—I want—is to be left in peace.”

“Don’t give me this old man nonsense,” I say breathlessly. “I know Hirasor is a nakalchi. He could live for hundreds of years.”

She stares at me, the perfect mouth hanging slack with surprise. I tongue a mouth-dart, but she recovers quickly, catching it in mid-air with a burst of flame. It falls smoking to the floor.

“How did you find out?”

Before I can answer, a door opens behind her. I see real terror on her face, then, as Hirasor walks into the room.

Except for the slight shuffle, he still walks tall, like Ravan-Ten-Heads.

“Get out!” she tells him, covering the ground between them in long strides, watching me all the time. “I’ll deal with him!”

He gives her a glance of pure hatred.

“Let me fight my battles, will you?” A look passes between them, and I see in that instant that what they had once shared has turned bitter; that they are locked in their relationship out of habit and necessity rather than passion, hating each other and yet unable to let go.

I study him as they glare at each other (one of her eyes is still tracking me). Now that I see him at close range, I am shocked by his appearance. How he has fallen! All that is left of his affectations is the silk tunic with the embroidered collar. His hair is ragged and unkempt, and his face, lean and aristocratic as a prize hound’s, is covered with scars. His burning dark eyes look out as though from a cage. I remember those eyes; I remember him peering down at me from the Harvester’s face. Silently I mouth the Word, waiting until he will be in my power.

He has turned toward me. He holds out his hands to show that they are empty.

“I want to die,” he says. “Even here, I can’t get rid of . . . I can’t go on. I have a perfect memory; I remember everything I have ever done, whether awake or in my dreams. All I want now is death . . . at your hands—”

“No, no,” Suvarna says to him. “Don’t talk like that. I won’t let anyone kill you.” She holds his arm, trying to pull him away. Her voice rises in a scream. “Don’t let him kill you! I’ll be all alone!”

“She thinks it will get better with time,” he says to me, ignoring her. “But I want to end it more than anything. I have had not a moment—not one moment of peace. Six times I tried to kill myself, and six times she prevented me.”

He turns to her: “Foolish Suvarna, we are all ‘all alone.’ I can’t allow you to interfere this time. Now go away and let me die.”

He pushes her suddenly and violently, throwing her across the room. She lies against the far wall in a huddle, staring at him with wide, shocked eyes.

“Death is not what I had in mind,” I say, coming closer. “Death would be too good for you, Hirasor.” I bring my armored hands up to his throat. He stands in front of me, not resisting, waiting. For a moment I think it is the old dream again, him and me at each other’s throats at the world’s end, but it is all going wrong. His wild eyes beg me for death. He shudders violently. I dig my claws into his neck, feel the pulse of the machine that he is, prepare myself to rip him half to death, to say the Word that will condemn him to perpetual hell, a hair’s-breadth short of death. “Please, please, hurry” he begs, half-choking, not understanding what it is I am giving him.

I cannot do it. This pathetic being—Hirasor, destroyer of worlds! He is no adversary. He sickens me.

Besides, he is in hell already, without my help.

I let my hands fall.

“Live, then,” I say angrily, backing toward the door.

His nostrils flare, his eyes widen. He begins a terrible high-pitched keening, clawing with his hands at his face and hair. Suvarna, who seems to have forgotten about me, has stumbled to her feet and is by his side in an instant. She puts her long arms around him.

“You are safe now,” she says, crooning, putting her red lips to his hair. “I’ll take care of him later. Nobody will take you away from me.”

“Let me go, Suvarna,” he weeps. “Leave me here on Oblivion. Leave me alone!”

As he thrashes in her arms, she says it, loudly and clearly.

The Word, which I had let slip in one panicked moment.

He becomes limp in her arms, his horrified gaze locked on hers. She lets him down gently on the divan.

She will not be alone now; she will have the perpetually suffering Hirasor to care for all her life.

I shoot him once, in the chest. She falls in a heap by his side, screaming and cursing. Over the wreck of his body, the slow and certain ebbing of his consciousness, I begin to speak the words of passing.

“Shantih. Nothen ke agaman na dukh na dard . . . ”

And I walk out of the room.

Hirasor got his freedom, but what of me, the man-woman with a hundred aliases, none of which were Ram after all? There I was, boarding the first shuttle out of Oblivion, cheated of true victory at the end, my life’s purpose lost. I had been tempted to stay on, to live with the crazies and let my mind descend into chaos, but the people there wouldn’t let me. They seemed to think Suvarna had killed Hirasor; nobody cared to connect me directly with the crime, but his violent death was enough for them to send the stranger packing. I don’t know what happened to Suvarna; I never saw her again.

At the first opportunity I switched from the shuttle to a passenger ship that made numerous stops on various inhabited worlds, thinking I might go back to my last residence on the planet Manaus. But when it came time to disembark I couldn’t manage to do it. I am still on the ship, waiting until the impulse comes (if it ever will) to step out under the skies of a new world and begin another life. What has passed for my life, my personal Ramayan, comes back to me in tattered little pieces, pages torn from a book, burning, blowing in the wind. Like patterns drawn in the dust, half-familiar, a language once understood, then forgotten.

Here are some things I have discovered about myself:

I have no pleasure in life. I like nothing, definitely not absinthe or roses.

I want to die. But a curious inertia keeps me from it. The things of the world seem heavy, and time slow.

I still have nightmares about the burning woman. Sometimes I dream that Dhanu has a mantram that will bring me peace, and I am looking for her in the tunnels of a dying city, its walls collapsing around me, but she is nowhere to be found. I never dream of Hirasor except as a presence behind my consciousness like a second pair of eyes, a faint ghost, a memory. There are moments when I wonder what led a first-generation nakalchi to become a monster. The Ramayan says that even Ravan was once a good man, before he fell prey to hubris and lost his way. If legend is to be believed, there is a cave on some abandoned planet where copies of the first-generation nakalchis are hidden. Were I to come across it, would I find Hirasor’s duplicate in an ice-cold crypt, dreaming, innocent as a child?

Lately I have begun to let myself remember that last climactic moment of my encounter with Hirasor. I shot my Ravan, I tell myself, trying to infuse into my mind a sense of victory despite the loss of the chance for true revenge—but I no longer know what any of those words mean: victory, revenge. Still, there is a solidity about that moment when I shot him, small though it is against the backdrop of all the years I’ve lived. That moment—it feels as tangible as a key held in the hand. What doors it might open I do not know, although I am certain that Sita does not wait behind any of them. Perhaps it is enough that it tells me there are doors.

Originally published in Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness, edited by Mike Allen.

My Last Bringback

John Barnes

“Oh my fucking god. You’re me. You’re me, aren’t you, Layla?”

The slumped ancient natch in the support chair pulls herself up straight. My shoulders drift back. Much of the lordosis in my lumbar vertebrae releases, bringing my back against the chair. I’ve lifted my mandibula half a centimeter out of the stretch cradle, and sucked in my gut.

I had thought all the slump was her.

I look through the display into those momentarily understanding eyes. Maybe an explanation will stick this time? “Well, you and me, we’re me, or we’re you. It’s complicated. But it’s really excellent that you figured that out.” For the fifth time, I add, but sometime soon, you will realize what’s going on, and begin to help me help you. That has always happened eventually, for all nine of my bringbacks before you.

Of course, you’ve never been me before, and I’ve never brought back myself. Who knows what difference that might make?

On the display in front of me, the old natch nods, but I see the wary, cunning concealment of her fear that I’ll see the waves of confusion smashing her sandcastles of meaning. So not on the fifth time, let’s push on to the sixth.

She’s staring at me, the muscles around her eyes slack, her attention wandering inside her head, desperate to know what she should say next, yet horribly aware that she should know already.

The first thing they know again is that they don’t know and should. Always, they get overwhelmed by that awareness that they ought to know where they are, recognize me, and understand conversation. That jolt has always come just before the breakthrough in all nine of my bringbacks. Somewhere beneath consciousness, the mirror shards of memory from her hippocampi, reclaimed by the plakophagic reconstructive neurons, are beginning to swarm and clamor to be activated, called up to working memory, put to work.

It shows in her ancient creased and folded face, too. At least I hope it does. Her dental implants and continuing eye and skin regeneration make her hundred-four years look like about seventy on the old, natch scale, or somewhere after six hundred on the new nubrid scale. (They think – no one is that old yet.) That is still much, much older than anyone except we few surviving natches looks now.

Her rapidly regenerating dorsolateral prefrontal cortex isn’t quite up to this yet, though oh my dear sweet lord it’s close, and as if she can feel how close it is, she goes on staring at me, hoping something will pop, rooting around in her regenerating hippocampi, in the places from which the PPRNs are sending up those sudden inexplicable chopped memories. She’s trying so hard. I want her to just –

“And what is your name again, dear?” Surrender, start over, time six. “I forget.”

“Layla Palemba. Doctor Layla Palemba. I’m your doctor.”

When I’m not alternating with her, when I’m fully deploying my prosnoetics for days and weeks at a time, am I as obviously a very old natch as she is?

“Oh my fucking god. You’re me.” The face in the display is confused. The slowly spinning realtime brain map in the upper right corner shows abundant, random, noisy firing going on in her dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. That’s the pattern I’ve been seeing more of each time, the one I want to see, the one that means, “I was thinking about that a moment ago.”

There’s really only one of us, with one camera and one display. The separations between my mostly-prosnoetic dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and her unboosted 100% biological DLPFC are only the 1.5-second lag imposed by the protocol. She doesn’t know that, but I do. Nonetheless, I abruptly feel confused as some of her irregularly misfiring DLPFC bleeds over onto my side of the lag.

When I recover my composure, her gaze on my face, through the display we share, is no longer blurry. Her face cracks in my huge I just thought of the best joke ever grin that always made Mama squat down, look me in the eye, and say, “Share that joke, Layla-honey-babe, the Lord hates a selfish laugher.”

And I would share that joke, and Mama’d hug me. It happened so often I still remember the fact of it, not just because I recorded it for my prosnoetics to prompt me with, but because a little shard of the memory has still been active.

But this time I remember those lilac sachets that Mama always made so many of every spring. So many she often had to put two or three in every drawer. She often wore one hanging from a thong between her big saggy old-fat-lady boobs, and sometimes she’d even tie one into the big pile of bound-up hair on top of her head. Daddy used to ask her if she could even smell lilacs anymore. She said that smelling them was everyone else’s job . . .

The memory fades but I know I’ll have it again. Layla’s right hippocampus, my right hippocampus, whichever, the plakophagic reconstructive neurons in it, they’ve done it, those shrewd, hardworking little PPRNs dug out and copied a little chunk of fossilized memory from the plaques they’re digesting. From now on they will do it faster and faster. That was how it was with all nine of my bringbacks before me,

Moreover, the DSPFC managed to send out a call for that long-term memory and move it into working memory – I want to hug all the parts of my brain and tell them what good little brain parts they are, hug them with big warm strong natural-living arms that smell like lilac, because I know that is what they will really like.

Wait. I’ve been paying no attention to Layla, whose I know a great joke smile startled me into –

I half-expect she’s fallen back into slack-faced drooling apathy while I was having my special moment. It would just serve me right if I were having the most vivid case ever of the meditator’s bane, Now I have it, didn’t I?

But her face isn’t slack at all. She’s still wearing that grin of impending shared joy; I remember I would grin like that and the other women at my table in the prison dining hall would all start to laugh, or sometimes start to groan, before I even told the joke.

And then Layla delivers her joke as clearly as anyone. “I’m pleased to meet me.” She giggles – laughing at my own jokes is another lifelong thing – and I’m still giggling with her giggles as I say, “It would be mutual, if there were more than one of us.”

She really laughs this time. I suppose no one is better or can be better at hitting your sense of humor than yourself.

Layla is smiling puckishly at me when she says, “I suppose no one is better or can be better at hitting your sense of humor than yourself.”

I say, “Oh my fucking god,” just the way she did, just the way I always do. “I just thought those, like, those exact words. So-ab so-lute so-ly.” My old, dry throat, tongue, and lips strain almost to cracking, trying to talk the way I did as a teenager.

She holds her hands out and chants, clapping and popping thumbs up on every third, “Abso-fucka,” clap clap thumbs clap, “abso-fucka,” clap clap thumbs clap, “abso,” clap, “fuckin’,” clap, “lucky-lute,” thumbs up, “lute-lee!” clap, clap, clap-clap-clap-thumbs-up!

My hands are stinging from the clapping, and I am holding thumbs up at the screen myself. Seeing my withered old crone self of a natch do the “Absofuckinglutely Popout” just the way all us cool girls did in middle school ninety years ago cracks me up again. She and I have a grand old laugh together.

Better still, when I look at her again, she’s still with me, and in the corner of the display, her DLPFC graphs moving toward normal and healthy faster than I’ve ever seen. It looks like my tenth and last bringback is going to be my best. I suppose, given that it’s me, I must have always hoped that. But now I know.

After that breakthrough session, I go in for scans and tests, including a full ONC that takes about an hour. From there I go to a review of my test results with Dr. Gbego, who is my partner, co-author, the person who persuaded me into this project. I had a big old load of neurology courses back when I was getting my MD, but compared to what Gbego knows, I might as well have spent my time on astrology or alchemy.

Gbego is a smooth young nubrid of about eighty. He looks about twenty-five on the old natch scale (my scale). He sits down beside me so we can both see the same displays. If he thinks I’m disgusting physically, he shows no sign of it, so he’s either aesthetically blind, well-controlled, or nice. Back when we started the project of the first and only auto-bringback, I’d’ve said all three. I grow more doubtful about the nice and the aesthetically blind every time we meet.

“Here’s the results from your oscillating neutrino chemopathy,” he says, pointing to the display on the wall in front of us.

Not only does he give no sign of disgust, he’s also rather good at putting me at my ease, good enough to make me wish hopelessly that I were not a hideous old crone of a freak, because I’m automatically suspicious of that easy, natural way of conversing he has. And because I don’t trust my automatic suspicions any more than I trust this brilliant man.

One of many thousands of advantages to being a nubrid is having time and plasticity to work around anything that didn’t come naturally, like, maybe, for example, getting along with people. It’s just another skill: some people are born good with people, some people are born abrasive, abrupt, or clueless. But when a nubrid is born socially wrong-footed, they just squirt fresh cloned cells into the correct brain center, add a dash of plasticity enhancers, and start that hapless jerk into a training regime overseen by specialists. Maybe, if it’s a severe case, that poor inept kid might spend thirty lonely, awkward years. So what? You’re going to have most of a millennium to flirt, make small talk, dance socially, and find true friendship and deep love and whatever else you need from other people, and do it as well as anyone.

So I always wonder if really nice, likeable, considerate nubrids are fake, and what real self they were born to.

I suspect smooth, young-looking, kind, and wise Dr. Gbego, brilliant neuro, had he been a natch, might have had an autism spectrum disorder, because all of his interactions with me feel perfectly performed, like he’s running apps: the be politely supportive app, the signal interest to get better information app, the listen empathetically app, the be nice to the hideous old natch even if she fucking disgusts you app.

From all those decades of constant self-polishing, nubrids become fake copies of themselves with perfect brains, so smooth there’s nothing for another personality to stick to. They’re totally likeable but not at all lovable, at least not with any passion, which is not lovable, really, in my pathetic old hideous limited natch opinion. Which is I’m sure what they’d think my opinion was – if they actually cared what a natch thought.

It’s so much better to be a nubrid. They probably don’t have these little flashes of envious rage the way a natch does, either.

I’m looking where Gbego’s finger is pointing, at the ONC image of my right hippocampus, and I go from blazing rage to abject humiliation at once, but there’s no other way, at least not one I understand, to get to what I must know. “I’m sorry, Dr. Gbego, I just blurred out for a second. Back me up and explain again please?”

“I probably bored you out of your mind,” he says, smiling apologetically. “I was just running through all the caveats, oscillating-neutrino chemopathy is still in its infancy, some of the things that show up on ONC don’t seem to correspond to any reality we understand, what we do understand doesn’t always say what we understand it to, yakka-da-yakka-dakka-day. All stuff I should have the respect to remember you already know and have heard. It’s a miracle we didn’t both zone out.” The apologetic smile gets broader.

“All right, you’re not sure what it means, you just have a guess. I promise I won’t take it as gospel.” I lean forward toward his finger on the display. “Now explain the color coding to me.”

“It’s sort of an emotional intensity indicator. Based on ONCs of similar brains – and we don’t have enough of a sample and ONC tech is progressing so fast that nearly all recordings are outdated immediately – we asked it to predict, if you recalled that complex of memories, how much you’d release of various neurotransmitters in your limbic system, how high your electrical activity might go above normal in the feeling part of the brain –”

“Dr. Gbego, I do have a Ph.D. and the parts of me that earned it and use it are over in the prosnoetic-enhanced side of me, not lost in the brain plaques. Show me what you mean, on the graphs and charts, and use appropriate technical language.”

He made a little head-bow, touching his forehead with two fingers. A few decades ago, that became the universal sorry I was a jerk signal. “Well, here.” He calls up an eigenvector-color legend.

Subtracting his too-smooth condescension, I must say Gbego did all right in explaining the overall color coding, though “I would guess that it is the intensity of the emotions that went into encoding the memory, not the emotions that are likely with its re-emergence, that is most strongly represented. Also, red for the mild ones and deep blues and purples for the strong ones? What kind of reporting software is that?”

“Physicists designed this.” He’s still smiling; I must fix that sometime soon. In two years of working with the man, I have found I can always make him stop smiling. “The short-wave, high frequency, high energy part of the spectrum is blues and violets.”

Disappointing myself, I smile back. “All right, I see what you mean: that ’mongous big purple blob there in my right hippocampus. Your oscillating neutrinos are telling you I’ve got some emotionally huge memory there. When I can access it directly, it is totally likely both to be a memory about something really emotionally huge, and also totally likely to upset the absolute living shit out of me. Right?”

“Uh, I suppose – I mean, I intended – um, yes.”

I laugh at his sheer awkwardness. “Are you trying to find a gentle, discreet way to ask whether I remember that I chopped up both my parents with a wok cleaver? Yes, I know I did, and I’ve never stopped knowing. Back when they let me out of prison, they let me watch the sealed records of my testimony, so I know what I said was my reason. As for whatever else might be somewhere in the shriveled plaques that make up most of my hippocampus at the moment, no, I don’t recall anything emotionally or with any sense of having been there, about how I slaughtered my parents like a pair of deserving pigs.”

He stops smiling. Knew I could do it!

The rest of the meeting is very correct and businesslike. I keep thinking that should make me sad, but really I’m more interested in how smooth Dr. Gbego stays, even though his reserve doesn’t feel nearly as phony as his warmth.

Layla begins, “Hello Layla. Are you still me?”

“Hello, Layla, yes I am. Look around my office, you’re sitting here too, tell me what you see.”

She leans back to look slowly all around, taking it in, thinking. “That window is showing video from the moon. I guess it’s a display, not a window. But we’re not on the moon. The gravity’s all wrong. I must have been to the moon more than once, to know that the gravity is wrong right away.”

The little rotating 2-D brain map at upper right of the display has been changing across the last few sessions. At first it was an increasingly normal and regular dance of color through the DLPFC, and little trickles like forking lightning breaking out of the former plaques and reaching into the healthy bits of each hippocampus, at first more on the left than on the right, then the right caught up, then both got busy.

Lately it has looked like the old traffic flow maps that used to appear on the dash of Dad’s car when he’d drive into the city. He held one of the last human-operation-on-public-streets permits in New Jersey, thanks to his political pull. He said he just liked the fact that his license said ‘Human Operator’ because it meant they recognized he was still human, “which is rare even in humanists.”

Once I started to hate that, I steeled myself not to argue. Nor did I ask why other people’s lives should be endangered by his driving mistakes that no machine would ever make, just so he could have his little joke. Giving him no chance for the judicious and rigorous explication he loved, I’d just glare at him and say, “Dumbshit.” It worked a lot better.

Anyway, that tangled flow of brightly colored spots in the realtime brain image in front of me, like the New Jersey highway system on Dad’s old map, represent the same good situation: lots of things going lots of places smoothly. Layla’s brain, my brain, our brain, looks very nearly normal; it would take a neuro as proficient as my smug partner Gbego to spot the difference between those information flows on the display and what happens in a normal brain.

“We have been to the moon,” she says quietly. “I can feel it copying into my memory; it must have crossed over from the prosnoetics. Oh! And that’s the connection. The idea you had, because the last three bringbacks before me, before us, before they said you could do it for yourself . . . you had the idea because hypergerontological cases have mostly been moved to the moon anyway, and this body is acceleration-restricted because of those sclerotic arteries in the brain, so the last two cases – no, the last three, Bridget Soon moved to the moon after the first three treatments –”

I can feel it flooding in, including feelings I’d had at the time but hadn’t recalled afterward; it’s funny what a difference it makes to have your memories linked to their emotional context again.

Funny, and terrifying.

“What’s wrong?” she asks quietly. I look at the brain map; the welter of activity looks like termites coming out of a burning log.

I take a finger and write a word at a time on my palm, without any ink or pigment, and not looking down at it:

not now. not here. soon. not while connected. just think about it later today & you’ll know.

Then I babble something senseless about how a strong sense memory of swinging the cleaver backhanded into Mama’s face just came flooding back and overwhelmed me. And Layla immediately begins to babble comfort-noises back at me, so I know she understands too. After a minute or so of that, I launch into the story we would both know completely, the one she referred to just now. With just a spot of luck, maybe nobody monitoring will notice how unnecessary our explanations are now, or ask why we are making them.

Of course, for more than two decades before the murders, most sensible people, commenting on the news, had the good sense to hate my parents, along with the parents of all the other ‘natural children.’ Anyone with any empathy could understand how we felt about being condemned before we were born to age and die far before we had to.

Most nubrids and quite a few of the older generation of natural humans could also understand we had been deprived of the nubrids’ far greater brain plasticity. During the eighty or hundred years we would live beside them, we would be making up our minds for good and shutting off new experiences. In that same time, the nubrids would put mistakes and sad memories behind them, build on skills and knowledge, and keep growing mentally the way children could while enjoying the kind of mental maturity that only a handful of saints, philosophers, artists, and scientists ever had.

Our parents had elected to kill us early after first crippling us. No one in the global or regional or local government had done anything to stop them; there had been education campaigns and media campaigns and public pressure, but nobody had done what would have fixed it: investigated the personal data, kicked down the doors, and made our mothers get the virus sequence.

Privacy was too important, human rights were too important, the fucking right of fucking jackass parents to raise children no better than themselves was paramount. And because all those rights of all those now-dead people were so well protected, we natches would have to live as permanently immature stuck-in-our ways idiots, and then die, old, sick, ugly, and soon. But thank god society had respected our parents’ crazy fears, smug superiority, and deep attachment to that advertising sell-word ‘natural.’

My lawyers begged me not to give my speech to the jury, which I had written and rehearsed with such care. They went out of their way to tell the jury, over and over, that I was “young” (thirty-one? For a nubrid, that’s young. For us natches, that’s a real big chunk of life). They begged them to forgive me for being “impetuous and headstrong” (hoping the jury might ignore the steps I took to isolate the house so Mama and Daddy would not be able to call for help and I could take as long as I wanted about it, or that the police data recovery expert had found many dozens of drafts across many weeks of the script for exactly what I would say and do as I killed them).

I gave my speech anyway. I told them the truth: I had been cheated of what they all took for granted. Mama and Daddy had done it because they had enjoyed the revenue and attention from founding Natural Children Forever! and the Coalition to Preserve Natural Humans and god knew how many other fundraising and adulatory fronts, and because they liked to tell themselves how special and wonderful they were. The law could not make me whole; the ‘natural human’ organizations had lobbied hard to make sure that sentimental idiots had passed laws in every country to prevent us natch-spawn from suing the parents who had done this to us. The law would not arrest them or try them or get revenge for me; instead, it protected them.

So since the law wouldn’t do it, I did.

Apparently that made me a monster.

When the jury came back in, after only an hour, I didn’t detect a drop of sympathy in their faces. They had decided on life without the possibility of parole.

I suppose I cultivated my taste for science originally because it pissed off Daddy and Mama. Science in general was their number one scary, shiny anti-human monster. Or maybe I just wanted to understand the intellectual triumph of the decoding and application of the nubrid process, since I couldn’t partake of it. Ellauri and Jautta’s mapping of the deep level semisymmetric interconnections that enabled alloaddressing of genes between the immune, nervous, and regenerative systems would have been a feat as great as relativity, programmable computers, or calculus, even if it hadn’t led to any applications for a hundred years. But as it happened, the nubrid process explained why people got set in their ways and how they aged and why aging killed them, how one virus could be chicken pox and shingles and one brain center could handle bits and pieces of math, music, and language, why people got Alzheimer’s and arthritis, and countless other things.

I was thirty-two when they sent me to prison, supposedly forever. The Prison Authority spent a fortune on psychiatrists trying to persuade me I should feel bad about who I was and what I’d done, although they still weren’t going to let me out even if I rolled over and agreed with them. I had only two alternatives to madness: sparring with the psychiatrists and reading and studying The New Neuro, as it was being dubbed. And after a few years, the psychiatrists gave up.

That left me nothing to do but read and study, but fortunately it turned out that was an inexhaustible consolation. A few years into the process, I began writing papers and critiques. I couldn’t accept money, or patent anything, or publish them under my own name because of old laws about not allowing convicts to profit from their crimes; apparently the publicity I would have gotten from being Mama and Daddy’s killer was potentially a violation. But I found half a dozen editor-curators who were willing to run my work under aliases, a different alias each time so that there was supposedly less potential for the discovery that a leading New Neuro theoretician was me.

By that time they had the blood test; I knew Alzheimer’s for me was when, not if. So I concentrated my work on it, hoping to save myself and the thousands of natches then still alive who were starting to slide away.

That was another little bit of irony. In the process of recoiling from me and what I’d done, society backlashed itself into doing what it should have done more than a generation earlier, and made producing more natches a crime. A last few insistent natural-children types were forcibly sterilized, and that was that; there haven’t been any natural children now in fifty years, or any legal ones in almost sixty. And in some weird kind of atonement, they’d developed prosnoetics (if I’d been allowed, I’d have held some basic patents for those) and some not-very-effective anti-aging juices that could stretch a natch’s lifespan out to 125 or so.

My first unmistakable symptoms appeared in my late seventies. Bless their hearts, the editor-curators went public with who I was and the contributions I’d made, and the bighearted liberal Chief Administrator for the Atlantic Basin Region commuted my sentence. They hooked me up to prosnoetics, so that as my brain dropped away under me, I could keep going like an AI, and PrinceTech awarded me the Ph.D./MD I’d already earned a hundred times over.

I had just graduated and was looking for something to do when the bringback technology came along. Alzheimer’s was a natch-only disease, and we were running out of natches. There were good arrestors that would stop its progress, but nothing to undo it, and some few old natches had had the bad luck to develop advanced Alzheimer’s before there were arrestors.

With the bringback process, you could recover memories from the traces the dying cells left in the plaques, and recopy them into new, healthy brain structures, but it was exquisite long-term handwork; you needed someone with the right rapport for the patient and nearly infinite patience, having the same only slightly varied conversations over and over, constantly watching brain imagery to see what each new communication would make happen.

And of all things, I turned out to be good at it. Fifteen years of my life went into bringbacks, about three years per patient, and those were by far my most rewarding years.

My ninety-fifth birthday, and celebration of my sixth successful bringback, was kind of a gloomy occasion, despite the fact that I had real friends and colleagues and they were all there to help me feel loved and appreciated. The bringback business was running out of patients: only a few very old severely memory-damaged natches left, they were going to the moon or already there, and I couldn’t go with them. My trips to the moon had been decades ago, and I hadn’t felt like living the rest of my life in an underground office building, so I’d never thought seriously about relocating there.

But now my being off prosnoetics and on cardiopulmonary support for acceleration risked the prosnoetics being off too long and not rebooting, especially since their delicate contacts might well break inside my head . . . natches with scrambled and plaqued-up bio brains could go, natches running on prosnoetics who were even more cyborg than I could go, heart patients could go, but my combination of a heart and a brain that both needed support was the one thing that couldn’t go.

I’m afraid I got a little maudlin talking about the end of the only thing I’d done that felt really meaningful. People at my party were awfully nice, but it wasn’t much of a party, and they left early.

But the next day, as I was eating a melancholy, solitary breakfast and trying to make myself go to the hospital to do more of the exit interviews and other nonsense involved in losing my job, the communication system said Dr. Selataimh was calling from the moon about Bridget Soon.

I had thought, as we began work, that Bridget would be one of my favorites, and a wonderful seventh bringback, but then her health had started to fail in a way that indicated she needed to move to Serenity City as soon as possible. So after only a few appointments, she’d been bundled up and shipped to the moon, to restart her bringback process there.

Selataimh was a vigorous, raw-boned woman who moved around too much for the camera to stay on her face well. “It’s an honor to get to consult with you about a patient,” she said. “And perhaps there’s nothing we can do. But when Bridget Soon woke up, she demanded you. We tried to explain, but she’s absolutely insistent. And she’s so clear and coherent we think she must have gone into breakthrough just before you mothballed her process on Earth, or maybe waking up here was the last poke she needed. In any case, she’s acting like she’s having a breakthrough and she won’t talk to anyone else but you, and as you know, if she clams up and won’t communicate . . . ” She let that trail off. We both knew that patients could sometimes uncooperate themselves into needing to start the whole bringback process over, losing months or years of life.

“I wish I could get on the next ship going up,” I said.

“I’d feel that way myself,” Selataimh said. “And I confess I researched it first. It’s absolutely too dangerous for you to try traveling, and even if you got here and were lucky enough to still be alive and functional, you’d be stuck here. And I can certainly understand not wanting to spend the rest of your life in a basement on the moon. But . . . well, she was your patient, she’s mine, is there anything we can come up with that might help?”

“Maybe something obvious.” I felt hope flaring up.

“‘Try the obvious as soon as possible,’” Selataimh said, quoting me to me.

“I’ve had to apologize to a whole generation of medical students for that textbook chapter,” I said. “Apparently profs love to quote it. Nevertheless, here’s what I’m wondering: I’ve done plenty of bringbacks on remote, via communication displays. The reason we can’t do one from the moon is supposed to be that one point three second radio lag each way. But has anyone ever tried it? I’m patient, and Alzheimer’s patients have lots of time.

“Well, I need to see what’s happening in their brain while I talk and while they talk. And as long as the brain image remains synchronized with the conversation, there’s no real need for quick reactions. I can’t think of any time when I had to make an abrupt change of subject in mid-sentence, or react in real time to changing emotions. So why not just see if I can do it via telecommunication linkup? The worst that can happen is it will turn out that I can’t, which is exactly where we are right now.”

And that was how we discovered that the radio lag enhanced the bringback process. The delay gave me time to look at the picture of the brain a little longer, think about it a little deeper, have about one more slightly better founded thought before speaking. It forced the bringbacks themselves to try harder and more often to retain an idea in working memory, and to send out more calls to the areas where the PPRNs were working, and to make more connections before I could interrupt them.

The process we thought would be impossible was actually enhanced. Bridget Soon not only became my seventh bringback, she became my fastest and most complete up to that date. Knowing how to use the lag, I completed the two bringbacks after Bridget even more quickly.

And then there were just a handful left of the severe cases, the ones who had all but forgotten who they were, the Alzheimer’s-damaged natches of my generation who had not quite all died yet, thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, and had developed dementia before there was arresting technology and prosnoetics. Almost all of them, of us, had been brought back.

Daddy used to put on some old thing he called a “mixtape,” a bunch of unmodifiable songs in a fixed order, on the house speakers so we all had to listen to the same shit over and over, and there was a song with some line or thing about heartbreaker, dream waker, love faker on it that I guess was a big deal when Grandpa was young. He’d get all hurt if I added “mix-taper,” let alone “brain-raper,” to it. Like for some reason I was supposed to care what the song “really” sounded like, which meant whatever some old dead bitch had put down first, as if putting it down first (and being dead) meant she fucking owned it. The last generation before mine, when everyone was still a natch, trust me, totally fucking weird, all of them.

But especially Mama and Daddy. They must have known that their thirty-year fundraising-and-sympathy ride was peaking and winding down to an end by the time I was about twelve; the oldest nubrids were in their late twenties, still looked fresh-minted nineteen, and were still learning like bright twelve-year-olds and getting saner and more rational all the time. “Like a bunch of supermodel-athlete Spock-Buddhas,” Daddy would say, trying to sound sarcastic.

If he thought that by saying those things, he could get me to say “I don’t wanna be a yucky old yucky-face yucky-brain nubrid,” the way he’d been able to do when I was eight and he and Mama would love bomb the hell out of me and then put me on camera for promotions, he was even more of a useless self-deluded old fuck than I had imagined. Now that I was in my early teens, I had started to realize just what my parents’ world-famous leadership of the battle for the right to have ‘natural children’ had meant for me and a million or so ‘natural children’ worldwide.

Daddy, the old fool, was always telling me “be careful what you wish for, you may get it.” If only wishing could have gotten it for me! If only it could have undone what he and Mama did to me, and encouraged so many other people to do to the other natches. Him and his “preserving natural humanity”! He believed in that horseshit with such passion that he thought, if I got my way, despite the impossibility of injecting the nubrid modification virus sequence after the twelfth week of pregnancy, I would end up mourning, longing, yea fucking well fainting for the short painful life of increasing mental rigidity I had thrown away, and then I’d really be sorry.

Like fucking Christ.

Thanks to Daddy and all his pontificating about what was truly human (as if a professor of comparative literature would know shit about it), thanks to Mama and her blogging all the time about the Natural Way, thanks to them realizing that as the flow of new followers began to dry up, they would need to have a kid to demonstrate their point: here I was. Demonstrating away. Demonstrating just how wonderful and natural and human it was that I would barely live past a hundred if I were lucky, and that people thirty years older than I would still be young and vigorous in the year my withered old husk, long since having entered “second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,” would fall into its grave, at least four full centuries before the nubrids even began to wear out.

I feel my hand on the cleaver, and I look in Mama’s eyes, and I tell her, “I will hate you forever. I will hate you forever. I will hate you forever,” and just as she starts one of her whiny little pleads, I slash her across both of those watery soggy sentimental eyes with the cleaver, so that me saying that is the last thing she ever sees. It makes me laugh.

I release my painfully hard grip on my chair arms. The prosnoetics kick in. I am breathing like a racehorse on top of a mountain and the cardiopulmonary support gear is working itself into a lather trying to get me into the safe range. I sit gasping, trying to feel calmer, feeling all that rage in those memories, for the first time in at least twenty-five years.

To be overpowered by internal rages again; Oh, wise and gentle-spirited Dr. Gbego, you have no idea how good this feels. You probably can’t have any idea. I envy you that, but thank you for bringing my rage back.

The prosnoetics take hold, and finally I look into the screen and say, “Wow, Layla.”

“Wow indeed,” she says, I say, we giggle. “Do you think they’ll make us stop?”

I shake my head. “Not right away. By the time they figure out what we’re doing, we’ll be done.”

“You sound very sure.”

“Check my memories for a minute while I catch my breath from yours, my darling self. One thing that didn’t change as humans gave way to nubrids – career trumps caution. Remember how we got into this.”

My ninth bringback was a nice but rather timid 108-year-old named Annie Souriante who was rapidly reacquiring violin and Caribbean cooking and made me laugh a lot. Usually, before, I’d known by the end of the first year who was scheduled to be my next bringback, but Annie and I were closing in on full restoration, and not only did I not have another patient lined up, there weren’t any on the waiting list for the whole hospital.

“We’ve drained the pool of the severe cases,” Dr. Gbego said. “Now the problem is more ATB.”

“ATB?” I asked. We were sitting across the table from each other at a reception in the Mnemology Department. I didn’t know him well then, and I suppose because of his very controlled, deliberately pleasant personality, I may never know him very well. Nobody might.

“ATB is Ability to Benefit. We have a lot of people who are still mostly functional but lost big chunks of memory into plaques before we had the technology to arrest that. They’ve lost context or connections or some big chunk of themselves. I would bet the funding could be there to bring them back to full function.”

“Is there a reason you’re talking to me about it?”

He made a little press-lipped smile. “I try not to be so transparent.”

That made me like him a little, so I opened the door of possibility by a tiny crack. “Are you by any chance referring to the fact that I have substantial unrepaired Alzheimer’s damage, leading to my very flat and rude affect, and some severe difficulties with recall, and I’m an expert on bringbacks?”

“Well, yes, of course.” Gbego shrugged. “It was really foolish of me to think I could keep you from seeing where this was going long enough to sound you out.”

God, he’s a gorgeous man, smooth deep brown skin and beautiful symmetric features and eyes you could fall into forever. The nubrid process has improved the aesthetics of the visual world almost as much as it has altered the hope in people’s lives. And back then I hadn’t yet understood that his smoothness was neither a likeable act nor a cultivated strategy; he really was that smooth, with nothing for a person to stick to. But I didn’t know that then the way I do now.

His rueful little admission made me feel like he’d actually sought me out emotionally. So I asked, “Well, if we did a bringback on me . . . who would do it?”

Gbego said, “Conventional answers: Smithson, Abimbola, Cheng.” He shrugged, clearly indicating they’d all be fine with him, but that he wanted to be asked about another possibility.

“Unconventional answer?”

He leaned forward, the clear dark eyes zeroing into mine, the smile held closely in check. “You.”

“How could – what?”

He held up his hands. “Here’s the thought that occurred to me. The radio lag delay has shortened bringbacks from around three years to less than two. We’ve all been saying that if we knew how that was going to go, we’d have started out doing bringbacks on delays, even if people were in the same building. Because the delay doesn’t have to be radio lag; it was just that when we had to try to do Ms. Soon’s bringback on remote, we had to tolerate the delay, which otherwise we’d never have tried.

“But, here’s what intrigues me, Dr. Palemba, the delay could be artificial, we could just build it right there into the communication system, with the bringback and the coach right there in the same hospital. So we set you up with an interrupter; you talk as you, your prosnoetics switch out, your brain goes to its natural state, then your message is delivered. Your natural state brain replies, it comes back through a delay –”

“Do not,” I said, choking with more feeling than I had had in many years, “do not use the word ‘natural’ around me, all right?”

He did that little bow and forehead touch. “How thoughtless and rude of me. I am so sorry. But please think about it. It could enhance your life. Don’t let my rudeness and inconsideration cut you off from it.”

“Or cut us off from possibly being co-authors of the most brilliant research paper of the next decade?”

He grinned broadly; I didn’t know if I’d forgiven him but he thought I had. “Well, yeah. Well, hell yeah.”

“I’ll think about it. I don’t sleep much and I get ideas late at night. What’s the latest time I can call you?” I realized I probably had forgiven him, and right then, I knew I was going to do it.

We plunge in, Layla and I, and the memory swarms back with all its feelings, all its details, how it felt to say what I said and hear what I heard. All those things that the prosecutors deduced from blood spatters and coagulation time, from fluid ballistics, from running approximating simulations, are now all mine in memory again.

I raged at my parents, cursed them, made sure they knew what this was about. I had planned the blows and cuts, knowing neither of them would have it in them to fight, so that they heard everything I had to say. Knowing how devoted Daddy was to Mama, when he came rushing in at her scream, I shattered him with a dozen planned blows, so that he was bleeding and helpless while I worked on her and explained that all that shit she called love was nothing of the sort, that I knew it was all for her, not for me, that she would not have made me a natch (the word they prohibited in the house) if she had loved me, that it was malice and not mistake. And I cut, and cut, till she died sobbing.

Daddy took longer, and I reminded him that what had happened to Mama was his fault, the whole time.

They knew the cuts and blows of it all from the crime scene analysis, but I never told anyone what I had said.

Or what I had felt: sheer, glowing hot joy.

I hadn’t sought a bringback of my own, though there were skilled practitioners who would gladly have done it, not because I didn’t want to interrupt my scientific work, as I’d told that slick mannequin Gbego, but because I’d feared that I might find remorse or sorrow or weeping over their bodies.

I don’t find a bit of that. The memory is pure white rage, and that delights me. Especially it makes me happy in this way: Daddy and Mama were so convinced that natural humans needed to be preserved. They talked about remembering the human heritage, and you could hear, inside that, that they wanted to live forever in the memories of natural humans.

Well, here they are. Fewer than a hundred natural humans left, and the memory of their destruction is a burning hot glowing pleasure that will warm me the rest of my days. A nubrid, now, a nubrid has such total plasticity, I might have worn the memory down into smooth forgiveness and acceptance. But a human? We’re not that plastic. We can hold a grudge forever.

All you ever wanted was for me to be human, Daddy, that’s what you said. I laugh and laugh. It’s no longer we, the bio Layla and the prosnoetic Layla are merged, I can feel it.

“Dr. Palemba?”

I sit up, startled. It’s Gbego. He looks worried – more than that, ill. I try to play casual, but I think even a nubrid with Gbego’s carefully honed people skills would not be able to be smooth or slick about this. I ask, “Is something the matter?”

“What we saw on the monitors . . . ”

I shrug. “You saw me get those memories back.”

“We also saw . . . ” His face works through those little squish-the-lips motions, over and over. Finally he says, “You enjoyed that.”

“I did.”

“In fact we’ve never seen such intense pleasure and focus in any brain. That woman who testified and shocked the world, seventy years ago . . . you’re still her. Or you’re her again.”

I ignore what he’s saying, because it’s simply irrelevant. I’ve got myself back; whatever I ever wanted from oh-so-beautiful and far-too-smooth Dr. Gbego no longer matters. So I just say, “You’d better do some prep, get recordings soon, and think about what lab tests you want to run. I think that you’re going to find you can declare me officially brought back. You’ll really want data from the next couple of days.”

He’s flailing around, still trying to absorb the meaning of what his instruments told him about my huge surges of pleasure and rage. Finally all he manages to squeak out is, “How will we ever publish this?”

That’s such a stupid question. There are things he won’t say, things I won’t say, but plenty of things to publish. We’ll both advance our careers.

And of course there’s a real advance in knowledge all around. Dr. Gbego knows some technical things now that no one else had learned before, and me? I know what I really want to know.

At first Gbego will be bothered by the things he didn’t know he’d find out, the things he’d rather not have known. But soon he’ll see how to make this whole experience work for him. Perhaps later this week, at one of the unending parties where nubrids spend so much time, he will find his way to talking, or, really, bragging. People will find it so intriguing that he was working with that famous Dr. Layla Palemba that you saw in media. Layla, the natch who knows bringbacks better than anyone else, natch or nubrid, actually working her own bringback, isn’t that astonishing?

He will realize that the part of me that makes him sick and horrified need not intrude on what everyone wants to hear him say:

Yes, knowing Dr. Layla Palemba has been very inspiring.

Layla is a measure of the marvelous.

Yes, it’s been such an honor and a privilege to work with her. Not on her, oh, no, she’s tough and feisty and smart, I pity anyone so stupid he tries to work on her. With her, with her, with her.

What do I mean, a measure of the marvelous?

A measure of the marvel of plasticity that is the human brain, even the old natural human brain that, thank god, none of our parents would ever have stuck us with. A measure of the bigger marvel of neurology itself, that Ellauri and Jautta were able to understand the nubrid process a century ago. A measure of the even bigger marvel that in the last thirty years we’ve been able to do so much more to keep the surviving natches alive. A measure of the marvel of prosnoetics, to which she contributed, which saved them from being drooling, senseless lumps of flesh.

A measure of the biggest marvel of all, the continuing advance of science.

I imagine Gbego, my utterly smooth young-at-eighty nubrid neuro standing just a bit taller, shoulders stooped slightly, turning toward a perfectly beautiful young woman for her approval.

She beams at him, and then adds her little correction:

The science part is big, to be sure. But Dr. Layla Palemba is most of all a measure of the real biggest marvel of all: our modern global society that has so institutionalized generosity to the less fortunate and compassion for everyone that we are willing to spend so much expertise, time, research, and sheer treasure to rescue the very few surviving natches. She stands as a measure of the marvel that is us and our forgiveness and generosity.

Dr. Gbego will probably not even choke on a canapé when she says that. Probably he’ll take her aside and talk with her, tell her how deep her insights and compassion are. Perhaps they will have many meetings and deep conversations and some elegant sex in the days that follow.

And for the rest of the crowd, having satisfied themselves with the smooth little bit of interesting knowledge with which Dr. Gbego graced them, the rest of the evening will pass in a swirl of fine wine and perfect bodies in splendid clothing: smug smooth fake hateful nubrid bastards who have taken over the world, passing the time of which they have so much, letting time and life itself roll off them like neutrinos off matter, like bad memories off a plastic brain, like blood off a cleaver.

Originally published in Meeting Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

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 is a (mostly) science fiction writer living in Northern Ireland, just outside Belfast. In his longer-than-most-people realize career he’s been nominated for just about every SFF award, and even won a few. His most recent book is Luna: Wolf Moon, (Tor, Gollancz), the second part of the Luna series.

Vandana Singh

Vandana Singh was born and raised mostly in New Delhi, India and currently lives in the United States near Boston, where she professes physics and writes. Her short stories have appeared in numerous venues, including several Best of Year anthologies, and she is a recipient of the Carl Brandon Parallax award. She is the author of the ALA Notable book Younguncle Comes to Town and a short story collection, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories (Zubaan, Penguin India). A new short story collection, Ambiguity Machines, will be published by Small Beer Press in February 2018.

John Barnes

John Barnes recently turned sixty. He can remember having known people who were sixty, and they were old. He used to write a lot of books fairly fast, but lately he’s been bogged down in a mainstream novel, which may either be done by the time you read these words, or quite possibly continue to be his project until he’s a hundred, based on the time it has taken already. Some of the books that he did eventually finish include Tales of the Madman Underground, Directive 51, Losers in Space, Mother of Storms, A Million Open Doors, and One For the Morning Glory. He lives in Denver with his terrific spouse and near some grandchildren, and does not intend to move far from any of them anytime soon. When not dragging novels out forever, he is retraining in data science after years in market intelligence analysis. His day job is in sales in the financial industry, where he tells a great deal more truth than he does in his fiction, the laws being what they are.

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 The SFWA Bulletin; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a five-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, and the Best Science Fiction of the Year series, volume 2 of which was published earlier this year by Night Shade Books. His next anthology is More Human Than Human. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.