by Ian McDonald
‘Okay, I’m going to shut you down now,’ the voice of Captain Pilot Beth says. There is a moment of dislocation and she is back and blinking in the cramped cockpit of the transfer boat. Counters scroll down to zero, Lisa feels the lightest of touches and they are down. Nothing happens for quite a long time. Then there are clanks and clunks and hissings, Pilot Captain Beth unzips her and Lisa Durnau tumbles out in a wash of cramps and truly astonishing body odour. Darnley 285 possesses insufficient gravity to pull, but enough to give Lisa a sense of direction. This is down. This is left and right and forward and backwards and up. Another mental reorientation. She is hanging head-down like a bat. Down, in front of her face, the hatch dogs spin and opens out into a short tube narrow as a birth canal. A further hatch rotates and opens. A chunky, crew-cut man sticks his head and shoulders through. His nose and eyes hints at Polynesian genes not too many branches down his family tree and the suit-liner shoulder flashes say US Army. But he has a great smile as he reaches a hand out to Lisa Durnau.
‘Dr Durnau, I’m Sam Rainey, project director. Welcome to Darnley 285, or as our archaeological friends like to call her, the Tabernacle.’
MR NANDHA, PARVATI
The traffic is worse than ever now the karsevaks have a permanent encampment around the imperilled Ganesha statue and Mr Nandha the Krishna Cop’s yeast infections are punishing him. Worst, he has a briefing with Vik in Information Retrieval. Everything about Vik irritates Mr Nandha, from his self-crowned nickname (what is wrong with Vikram, a fine, historical name?) to his MTV fashion sense. He is the inverse of the fundamentalists camped out on the roundabout. If Sarkhand is atavistic India, Vik is a victim of the contemporary and fleeting. But what has set Mr Nandha’s day foul was the almost-argument with Parvati.
She had been watching breakfast television, laughing in her apologetic, hand-lifting way at the hosts gushing over their chati, soapi, celebriti guests.
‘This invoice. It seems . . . it is, quite a lot.’
‘Invoice?’
‘Ah, the drip irrigation.’
‘But it is necessary. You cannot hope to grow brinjal without irrigation.’
‘Parvati, there are people who do not have water to cook their rice.’
‘Exactly, that is why I went for the drip irrigation. It’s the most efficient way. Water conservation is our patriotic duty.’
Mr Nandha held the sigh until he was out of the room. He authorised payment through his palmer and his aeai informed him that Vik had requested a meeting and gave him a new, unfamiliar route to work avoiding Sarkhand Roundabout. He returned to bid Parvati goodbye and found her watching the top-of-the-hour news.
‘Have you heard?’ she said. ‘N.K. Jivanjee says he will get up a rath yatra and ride across the country like Rama until a million peasants march on Sarkhand Roundabout.’
‘That N.K. Jivanjee is a rabble-rouser, and his party too. What we need is national unity against Awadh, not a million karsevak louts marching on Ranapur.’
He kissed Parvati on her forehead. The day’s ills sweetened.
‘Goodbye, my bulbul. You will be working on the garden?’
‘Oh yes, Krishan will be here at ten. Have a good day. And don’t forget to pick up your suit from the laundry, we’ve that durbar at the Dawars tonight.’
Now Mr Nandha rides up the outside of the Vajpayee tower in a glass elevator. Stomach acid gnaws at him. He imagines it dissolving him from within, cell by cell.
‘Vikram.’
Vikram is not particularly tall nor particularly well shaped but he has not let these deter his fashion sense. The style being: baggy sleeveless T with random text messages flashing up on the smart fabric - they achieve the condition of accidental Zen, so the doctrine goes - square-cut below-the-knee ketchies with athletic tights worn underneath. Finish with Nike Predators at the equivalent of the monthly salary of the upright Sikh on the front door. To Mr Nandha this looks merely undignified. What he cannot tolerate is the strip of beard from lower lip to Adam’s apple.
‘Coffee?’
Vik always has one, in a never-cool cup. Mr Nandha cannot drink coffee. His acid reflux hates it. He gives his Ayurvedic tea bag to Vikram’s quiet assistant, whose name Mr Nandha can never remember. The processor unit stands on Vik’s desk. It’s an industry-standard translucent blue cube, charred inside from Mr Nandha’s EMP assault. Vik has it hooked into an array of probes and monitors.
‘Okay,’ he says and cracks his fingers. Theater of Bludd whispers from the speakers, muted from its usual thunder out of respect for Monteverdi-loving Mr Nandha. ‘It would be a lot easier if you occasionally left us something to work on.’
‘I perceived a clear and present danger,’ Mr Nandha says and is struck by revelation. Vik, cool Vik, technological Vik, trance-metal Vik, is jealous of him. He wants the missions, he wants the reserved first class bogies and the well-cut Ministry suits and the gun that can kill two ways and the pocketful of avatars.
‘You left even less than usual,’ says Vik, ‘but there was enough to get a few nanoprobes in and unravel what’s been going on. I presume the programmer . . .’
‘He was the first victim.’
‘Aren’t they always ? Would have been nice if he could have told us exactly why his home-brew satta aeai was running a background programme buying and selling on the international ventures market.’
‘Please clarify,’ says Mr Nandha.
‘Morva up in Fiscal will explain it better, but it looks like Tikka-Pasta was unconsciously trading crores of rupees for a venture capital company called Odeco.’
‘I shall indeed speak with Morva,’ Mr Nandha decides.
‘One thing I can tell you right off.’ Vik stabs a line of code on his thin blue screen with his forefinger.
‘Ah’ says Mr Nandha with a thin smile.
‘Our old friend Jashwant the Jain.’
Parvati Nandha sits in a bower of amaranthus on the roof of her housing block. She shields her eyes with her hand to watch another military transport slide in from the east and disappear over New Varanasi’s corporate towers. They and the high-circling black kites are the only interruptions of the peace of her garden in the heart of the city. Parvati goes to the edge, peers over the parapet. Ten stories down the street is thick with people as an arm with blood. She crosses the tiled patio to the raised bed, gathers her sari around her as she stoops to inspect the marrow seedlings. The plastic evaporation tent is opaque with moisture. Already the air on the roof is thirty-seven degrees and the sky is heavy, impenetrable, close, caramel yellow from the smog. Peering between the sheeting and the soil, Parvati inhales the smell of soil and mulch and moisture and growing.
‘Let them get on with it themselves.’
Krishan is a big man who can move very quietly, as many big men can, but Parvati felt the cool of his shadow on the soft hairs on the nape of her neck, like the dew on the marrow leaves.
‘Oh, you gave me a shock!’ she says, demure and flustered, which is a game she likes to play with him.
‘Forgive me, Mrs Nandha.’
‘So?’ Parvati says.
Krishan takes his wallet and hands Parvati a hundred rupee note.
‘How did you guess?’
‘Oh, it’s obvious,’ Parvati says. ‘It has to be Govind, otherwise why would he track her down to that bad house in Brahmpur East just to mock and deride her? No no no, only a true husband would find his wife, no matter what she had done, and forgive her and bring her home. I knew it was him from the moment he turned up on the doorsteps of that Thai Massage house. That airline pilot disguise did not fool me. Her family may cast her out, but a true husband, never. Now, all he has to do is get his revenge on the director of that SupaSingingStar Show . . .’
‘Khursheed.’
‘No, he runs the restaurant. Arvind is the director. Govind will get his revenge, if the Chinese do not get him first about the casino project.’
Krishan throws his hands up in surrender. He is no devotee of Town and C
ountry but he will watch and bet on its improbably complex plot lines if it makes his client happy. It is a strange commission; this farm on top of a downtown apartment block. It hints at compromises. They can be hard, these town and country marriages.
‘I will have cook fetch you chai,’ Parvati says. Krishan watches her call down the stairs. She has the grace of the country. The city for gloss, the village for wisdom. Krishan wonders about her husband. He know that he is a civil servant and that he settles his accounts promptly and without argument. With only half a picture, all Krishan can do is speculate on the relationship, the attraction. Not such a speculation, the attraction. He sometimes wonders how he can ever find a wife for himself when even a low-caste girl can catch herself a solid middle-class husband with a glance and a turn of the hand. Garden well. Make money, plant it, grow it into more money. Buy a Maruti and move out to Lotus Gardens. You will marry as well as you can, out there.
‘Today,’ Krishan announces when he has finished his chai and set the glass down on the wooden wall of the raised bed, ‘I am thinking, perhaps beans and peas there, to give some kind of screen. You’re open on the left. And here, a quarter-bed for Western style salad vegetables. Western style salad is the thing at dinner parties; when you entertain, cook can cut fresh.’
‘We do not entertain,’ Parvati says. ‘But there is a big reception out at the Dawar house tonight. It will be quite an occasion. It is so lovely out there. So many trees. But Mr Nandha says it’s inconvenient, too far out. Too much driving. I can have everything here they have out there, and so much more convenient.’
It takes two runs down to the street for Krishan to bring up the old wooden railway sleepers he uses to build the retaining walls for the beds. He lays them out in rough order, then cuts and moulds the damp-proof sheet and lays it in position. Parvati Nandha sits on the rim of the tomato and pepper bed.
‘Mrs Nandha, are you not missing Town and Country?’ Krishan asks.
‘No no, it is delayed until eleven thirty today, it’s the final day of the test against England.’
‘I see,’ says Krishan, who adores cricket. When she goes, he might bring up the radio. ‘Well, don’t mind me.’ He sets to drilling the drain holes in the sleepers but all the time he is aware that Mrs Nandha is still perched there, watching.
‘Krishan,’ she says after a time.
‘Yes Mrs Nandha?’
‘It’s just, it’s such a lovely day, and when I’m down there, I hear all the dragging and bumping and hammering up here, but I never see it until it’s finished.’
‘I understand,’ Krishan the mali says. ‘You won’t disturb me.’
But she has, and she does.
‘Mrs Nandha,’ he says as he bolts the last railway sleeper into place. ‘I think you are missing your programme.’
‘Am I?’ Parvati Nandha says. ‘Oh, I never noticed the time. Not to worry, I can catch the early evening repeat.’
Krishan hefts a sack of compost, slashes it open with his gardening knife and sprinkles rich brown earth food down through his fingers on to the rooftop.
The burning dog gives off a vile oily smoke. Jashwant the Jain, his broom-boy before him, stands eyes closed. Whether they are closed in prayer or outrage Mr Nandha cannot say. Within moments the dog is a small intense fireball. The other dogs still surge yipping around Mr Nandha’s feet, too stupid in their small programmed obsessions to recognise danger.
‘You are a vile, cruel man,’ says Jashwant the Jain. ‘Your soul is black as anthracite, you will never attain the light of moksha.’
Mr Nandha purses his lips and levels his gun at a fresh target, a cartoon scoobi with lugubrious eyes and yellow/brown Friesianpatterned fur. Sensing attention, the thing wags its tail and waddles towards Mr Nandha through the frenzied sea of robot dogs, tongue lolling. Mr Nandha considers Animal Welfare charities a ludicrous social affectation. Varanasi cannot feed its children, let alone its abandoned cats and dogs. Sanctuaries for cyberpets occupy an altogether higher level of scorn.
‘Sadhu,’ Mr Nandha says. ‘What do you know of a company called Odeco?’
It is not the first time the Ministry has called on the Mahavira Compassion Home for Artificial Life. It is an ongoing debate in Jainism whether cyberpets and artificial intelligences are soul or non-soul. But Jashwant is old school, a Digambara. All things that live, move, consume and reproduce are jiva, and so when the kids have tired of the cyberscoobi and the Faithful Friend cyberguard-dog calls the cops out eighteen times a night, there’s a place other than the rubbish piles of Ramnagar to go. More than the occasional harried aeai finds shelter there too. Mr Nandha and his avatars have been here twice in the past three years to carry out mass excommunications.
Jashwant had been waiting outside the scruffy Janpur business district pressed-aluminium warehouse to greet him. Someone or thing had tipped him off. There would be nothing here for Mr Nandha. As Jashwant walked forward to greet the man from the Ministry, his sweeper, a ten-year-old boy, doggedly brushed insects and crawling things from the holy man’s path with a long-handled besom. A Digambara, Jashwant did not wear clothes. He was a big man, heavy with fat around his middle body and constantly flatulent from his holy high-carb diet.
‘Sadhu, I am investigating a fatal incident involving an unlicensed aeai. Our research indicates it was downloaded from a transfer point on these premises.’
‘Indeed? I find that hard to believe; but, as you are entitled, feel at liberty to check our system. I think you will find all is in legal order. We are an animal welfare charity, Mr Nandha, not a sundarban.’
Broom boy led the way. He wore only a very brief dhoti and his skin seemed to shine, as if it had been rubbed over with oil flecked with gold. There had been similar boys on his previous visits. All with those dull eyes and too much skin.
Inside the warehouse, the din was as Mr Nandha remembered, and some. The concrete floor heaved with thousands of cyber-dogs, constantly circling from charge point to charge point. The metal shell rang to their creaking, yapping, humming, singing.
‘More than a thousand in the past month,’ Jashwant said. ‘I think it is fear of a war. In sinful times, people reconsider their values. Much is cast off as worthless encumbrance.’
Mr Nandha drew his gun and aimed it at a stumpy little lap-dog sitting up on its back legs, front paws and tail waving, pink plastic tongue waggling. He shot the dog. Now Indra the Thunderer has the slowly advancing scoobi-pet in his sights.
‘Sadhu, did you supply an unlicensed Level One Artificial Intelligence to Tikka-Pasta of Nawada?’
Jashwant twists his head in pain but that is not the correct answer. The em-bolt sends the cartoon dog a metre and a half into the air. It lands on its back, thrashes once and starts to smoke.
‘Bad, evil man!’
The sweeper has his little besom raised, as if he might whisk Mr Nandha and his sin away. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that there are infected needles among the bristles. Mr Nandha stares the catamite down.
‘Sadhu.’
‘Yes!’ Jashwant says. ‘Of course I did, you know that. But it was only resting in our network.’
‘Where did it come from, sadhu?’ Mr Nandha says, raising his weapon. He draws aim on a waddling steel dachshund, all smiles and clog-feet, then swings the barrel to bear on a beautiful, top-end cybercollie, indistinguishable from the flesh right down to the live-plastic coat and fully interactive eyes. Jashwant the Jain lets slip a small squeak of spiritual anguish.
‘Sadhu, I must insist.’
Jashwant works his mouth.
Indra targets, aims and fires in one flick of Mr Nandha’s intention. The cybercollie lets out a long, shrieking keen that silences every other yap and wuff in the warehouse, snaps head to tail in an arc that would crack any flesh dog’s spine and spins on its side on the concrete.
‘Well, sadhu?’
‘Stop it stop it stop it, you will go to hell!’ Jashwant shrills.
Mr Nandha levels th
e gun and one shot puts the thing out of its misery. He picks a gorgeous tiger-stripe vizla.
‘Badrinath!’ Jashwant screams. Mr Nandha clearly hears him fart in fear. ‘Badrinath sundarban!’