by Neil Clarke
We sat in the near-dark and I was reading to him from the light of my comm. “‘He saw that to be firm soldiers they must go forward. It would be death to stay in the present place . . . ‘” And at that exact moment Mark launched off the bed and out the door with the precision of a guided missile.
I was fumbling for my chair, images in my mind of fang-toothed, angry neighbors storming my front door with pitchforks, when my mother’s shriek penetrated every surface between the foyer and my bedroom.
“Mark!” Ass in the seat, hands on the wheels. “Mark!” I rolled out to see my mother face down on the floor, arms triangled behind her back, wrists caught in the vise of Mark’s one-handed grip. “Stand down, soldier.”
“Get him off me, Tawn! Get this crazy fu—”
“Shut up, Mom!” I stopped close enough to touch Mark’s arm. Beneath his sleeve felt like iron. I kept my voice quiet because I couldn’t see his eyes in the dark: “It’s okay. It’s my mother. It’s okay.” I repeated it until he let her go and stepped back near to the wall. Becoming motionless.
“Mom.”
“He’s crazy! What did I tell you!”
“Mom, tone it down.” I didn’t offer to help her up. She wouldn’t have accepted it.
She propelled herself to her feet in a pitch and yaw. “Look what he did to my wrists!” She stuck her hands toward me. In the cracks of lightning and illumination, I saw vague shadows. Maybe bruises.
“You’re all right, you’re fine. Come sit down. You should’ve rung the doorbell, he thought you were breaking in.”
“I have a key!”
“I told you to call ahead.”
“My own son!”
I went to Mark and held his sleeve. “Come over here, man.” My mother wasn’t listening; she could stand by the door and bleat until it passed.
Mark followed me to the living room where I hoped he would sit, but instead he went to the window, his post, and stared out. He didn’t have to breathe and he didn’t say a word, but I knew the entire ruckus unnerved him. There was no other word for it. It reverbed through my body.
“Is that what he does all day?” my mother demanded behind me.
“Can you at least lower your voice? You aren’t helping.”
“I’m not helping!”
“MOM.”
We both stopped. Mark had turned around, now with his back to the window. His body blotted out what light came in from the street, creating a vacuum in my vision. So he could face us dead on. It was like the stare of a sarcophagus.
My mother turned her back to him. “I’m worried for you, Tawn.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“This isn’t normal. Look at him!”
“He’s fine. We’re fine. We—”
But she wasn’t listening. She began to walk around, feeling her way through the dark toward the office. Or my bedroom. It was so sudden when the lights flickered on and held that I had to blink spots from my vision. And in those moments Mark disappeared. After her.
“Mark!”
I couldn’t roll fast enough. I recognized his mode. Full protection, decisive defense. What he’d been built for. I wanted to hold him back but this was his nature. He wasn’t the one unnerved, he wasn’t the one concerned for himself. It was my voice he heard, that his programming responded to. My voice and its irritation and tension and impatience.
In the seconds it took me to get from the living room to my bedroom where my mother had gone, I saw it ahead of me. In the span of his back and the straightness of his spine. In the precise way he seized my mother before she could set hands on my possessions. He spun her around.
She struck him. Reflex or intent, I didn’t know. Of course it didn’t affect him at all, didn’t even bruise him. He didn’t flinch.
Instead he dragged her to my window, opened it, and pitched her out.
Luckily my house was a bungalow.
She said she’d wanted to pack me a bag and take me away from any danger. That if she did that for me I couldn’t protest and would’ve been forced to go with her and ditch this mad idea of taking care of a military model. She had never understood that we wanted to take care of ourselves.
She didn’t understand—when the VA engineers came to take him away—that he was my company and I was his.
In the hospital they ran more tests on him. It was procedure because she’d filed a complaint. I gave my own statement: that he’d felt I was threatened, that he’d only been defending me, that my mother was crazy in her own right (I reworded that part a little). She’d disregarded my words and his existence. If I restricted her access to me or she learned to interact better, there would be no more problems.
And, yes, I wanted him home again. He belonged there—where I could read to him, where we could play games, and where he might one day be able to speak to me. He’d made a place beside me and at my window. He’d learned my routines and created ones of his own.
He wanted to know all the books on my shelves. He liked walking in the sun.
He protected me. I wouldn’t strip that from him.
They let me see him once while he was in the hospital. He lay on a stiff bed with transparent monitoring tape stuck to his temples. Little dots of glowing blue and red on the tape winked at me while his dark eyes stared blinkless, asking no questions.
I touched his arm. His skin felt cold. Human warmth didn’t course through his veins. He didn’t even have veins. None of it mattered. “Mark. Hey man, don’t worry.”
His head tilted, eyes met mine.
I gripped his hand. After a moment his fingers curled around mine, just as strong. Even stronger. I said, “The storm’s gone and you’re coming home.”
The children were walking on their way to school when we pulled up to the drive. It was a warm day, the kind where you wore light open jackets and began to roll up your sleeves in anticipation of summer. With the car windows down we heard their voices all the way to the school, to the yard. They sounded as colorful as their clothes and seemed to carouse right through the leaves to where we sat.
He hadn’t said a word on the ride, only looked out the window. The parents passing behind on the sidewalk noticed us there; I spied the glances on the rearcam of the car. A couple of them paused as if debating whether to approach, to ask why we were just sitting on my own driveway doing nothing.
But they didn’t approach and I looked at Mark’s profile. “You know . . . people are going to be like my mother. Like the neighbors. That’s just the way it is until they get used to us.” Not just him, but us.
I’d learned not to expect conversation but he did make contact in his own way. No Scrabble board lay between us but he turned his hands palm up and open. He looked at me.
What answer could I give him? That people were afraid, or lazy, or just plain ignorant? Who could we blame? The government, the military, the doctors and engineers?
We were both on probation. Mark, so he wouldn’t injure somebody. And me, so I wouldn’t let him.
“Where do you think this will lead?” my mother had asked. “You rehabilitate him or whatever they want to call it, and then what?”
Somehow it was impossible for her to understand. “Then he’ll choose,” was all I’d said.
Maybe one day he’d discover what had happened to his unit. Maybe I would help him. Or maybe we’d leave it alone because some memories were best left in the dark.
Before we went inside the house I caught his attention again, touched his shoulder. “The doctors say you’re capable of speaking but you just choose not to. Sometimes that happens with people—”
“I am people,” he said. His voice was lighter than I thought it would be, if hoarse from disuse. He was looking back out the window again. The sidewalk stretched clear now. “I am a person,” he said to the glass. To the outside world.
They had created him to task but with the capacity for emotion. He was perfectly vulnerable, just enough, even for war.
When he slid from the car to
head into the house, eventually I followed him, calling the chair from the back of the car to lever myself into it. I rolled up the ramp to the front door, where Mark stood, holding it open for me even though he didn’t have to.
It was just the human thing to do.
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.
THE DJINN’S WIFE
IAN McDONALD
Once there was a woman in Delhi who married a djinn. Before the water war, that was not so strange a thing: Delhi, split in two like a brain, has been the city of djinns from time before time. The Sufis tell that God made two creations, one of clay and one of fire. That of clay became man; that of fire, the djinni. As creatures of fire they have always been drawn to Delhi, seven times reduced to ashes by invading empires, seven times reincarnating itself. Each turn of the chakra, the djinns have drawn strength from the flames, multiplying and dividing. Great dervishes and brahmins are able to see them, but, on any street, at any time, anyone may catch the whisper and momentary wafting warmth of a djinn passing.
I was born in Ladakh, far from the heat of the djinns—they have wills and whims quite alien to humans—but my mother was Delhi born and raised, and from her I knew its circuses and boulevards, its maidans and chowks and bazaars, like those of my own Leh. Delhi to me was a city of stories, and so if I tell the story of the djinn’s wife in the manner of a Sufi legend or a tale from the Mahabharata, or even a tivi soap opera, that is how it seems to me: City of Djinns.
They are not the first to fall in love on the walls of the Red Fort.
The politicians have talked for three days and an agreement is close. In honor the Awadhi government has prepared a grand durbar
in the great courtyard before the Diwan-i-aam. All India is watching so this spectacle is on a Victorian scale: event-planners scurry across hot, bare marble, hanging banners and bunting; erecting staging; setting up sound and light systems; choreographing dancers, elephants, fireworks, and a fly-past of combat robots; dressing tables; and drilling serving staff, and drawing up so-careful seating plans so that no one will feel snubbed by anyone else. All day three-wheeler delivery drays have brought fresh flowers, festival goods, finest, soft furnishings. There’s a real French sommelier raving at what the simmering Delhi heat is doing to his wine-plan. It’s a serious conference. At stake are a quarter of a billion lives.
In this second year after the monsoon failed, the Indian nations of Awadh and Bharat face each other with main battle tanks, robot attack helicopters, strikeware, and tactical nuclear slow missiles on the banks of the sacred river Ganga. Along thirty kilometers of staked-out sand, where brahmins cleanse themselves and saddhus pray, the government of Awadh plans a monster dam. Kunda Khadar will secure the water supply for Awadh’s one hundred and thirty million for the next fifty years. The river downstream, that flows past the sacred cities of Allahabad and Varanasi in Bharat, will turn to dust. Water is life, water is death. Bharati diplomats, human and artificial intelligence aeai advisors, negotiate careful deals and access rights with their rival nation, knowing one carelessly spilled drop of water will see strike robots battling like kites over the glass towers of New Delhi and slow missiles with nanonuke warheads in their bellies creeping on cat-claws through the galis of Varanasi. The rolling news channels clear their schedules of everything else but cricket. A deal is close! A deal is agreed! A deal will be signed tomorrow! Tonight, they’ve earned their durbar.
And in the whirlwind of leaping hijras and parading elephants, a Kathak dancer slips away for a cigarette and a moment up on the battlements of the Red Fort. She leans against the sun-warmed stone, careful of the fine gold-threadwork of her costume. Beyond the Lahore Gate lies hiving Chandni Chowk; the sun a vast blister bleeding onto the smokestacks and light-farms of the western suburbs. The chhatris of the Sisganj Gurdwara, the minarets and domes of the Jama Masjid, the shikara of the Shiv temple are shadow-puppet scenery against the red, dust-laden sky. Above them pigeons storm and dash, wings wheezing. Black kites rise on the thermals above Old Delhi’s thousand thousand rooftops. Beyond them, a curtain wall taller and more imposing than any built by the Mughals, stand the corporate towers of New Delhi, Hindu temples of glass and construction diamond stretched to fantastical, spiring heights, twinkling with stars and aircraft warning lights.
A whisper inside her head, her name accompanied by a spray of sitar: the call-tone of her palmer, transduced through her skull into her auditory center by the subtle ’hoek curled like a piece of jewelry behind her ear.
“I’m just having a quick bidi break, give me a chance to finish it,” she complains, expecting Pranh, the choreographer, a famously tetchy third-sex nute. Then, “Oh!” For the gold-lit dust rises before her up into a swirl, like a dancer made from ash.
A djinn. The thought hovers on her caught breath. Her mother, though Hindu, devoutly believed in the djinni, in any religion’s supernatural creatures with a skill for trickery.
The dust coalesces into a man in a long, formal sherwani and loosely wound red turban, leaning on the parapet and looking out over the glowing anarchy of Chandni Chowk. He is very handsome, the dancer thinks, hastily stubbing out her cigarette and letting it fall in an arc of red embers over the battlements. It does not do to smoke in the presence of the great diplomat A.J. Rao.
“You needn’t have done that on my account, Esha,” A.J. Rao says, pressing his hands together in a namaste. “It’s not as though I can catch anything from it.”
Esha Rathore returns the greeting, wondering if the stage crew down in the courtyard was watching her salute empty air. All Awadh knows those filmi-star features: A.J. Rao, one of Bharat’s most knowledgeable and tenacious negotiators. No, she corrects herself. All Awadh knows are pictures on a screen. Pictures on a screen, pictures in her head; a voice in her ear. An aeai.
“You know my name?”
“I am one of your greatest admirers.”
Her face flushes: a waft of stifling heat spun off from the vast palace’s microclimate, Esha tells herself. Not embarrassment. Never embarrassment.
“But I’m a dancer. And you are an . . . ”
“Artificial intelligence? That I am. Is this some new anti-aeai legislation, that we can’t appreciate dance?” He closes his eyes. “Ah: I’m just watching the Marriage of Radha and Krishna again.”
But he has her vanity now. “Which performance?”
“Star Arts Channel. I have them all. I must confess, I often have you running in the background while I’m in negotiation. But please don’t mistake me, I never tire of you.” A.J. Rao smiles. He has very good, very white teeth. “Strange as it may seem, I’m not sure what the etiquette is in this sort of thing. I came here because I wanted to tell you that I am one of your greatest fans and that I am very much looking forward to your performance tonight. It’s the highlight of this conference, for me.”
The light is almost gone now and the sky a pure, deep, eternal blue, like a minor chord. Houseboys make their many ways along the ramps and wall-walks lighting rows of tiny oil-lamps. The Red Fort glitters like a constellation fallen over Old Delhi. Esha has lived in Delhi all her twenty years and she has never seen her city from this vantage. She says, “I’m not sure what the etiquette is either. I’ve never spoken with an aeai before.”
“Really?” A.J. now stands with his back against the sun-warm stone, looking up at the sky, and at her out of the corner of his eye. The eyes smile, slyly. Of course, she thinks. Her city is as full of aeais as it is with birds. From computer systems and robots with the feral smarts of rats and pigeons to entities like this one standing before her on the gate of the Red Fort making charming compliments. Not standing. Not anywhere, just a pattern of information in her head. She stammers, “I mean, a . . . a . . . ”
<
br /> “Level 2.9?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
The aeai smiles and as she tries to work it out there is another chime in Esha’s head and this time it is Pranh, swearing horribly as usual, where is she doesn’t she know yts got a show to put on, half the bloody continent watching.
“Excuse me . . . ”
“Of course. I shall be watching.”
How? she wants to ask. An aeai, a djinn, wants to watch me dance. What is this? But when she looks back all there is to ask is a wisp of dust blowing along the lantern-lit battlement.
There are elephants and circus performers, there are illusionists and table magicians, there are ghazal and qawali and Boli singers; there is the catering and the sommelier’s wine and then the lights go up on the stage and Esha spins out past the scowling Pranh as the tabla and melodeon and shehnai begin. The heat is intense in the marble square, but she is transported. The stampings, the pirouettes and swirl of her skirts, the beat of the ankle bells, the facial expressions, the subtle hand mudras: once again she is spun out of herself by the disciplines of Kathak into something greater. She would call it her art, her talent, but she’s superstitious: that would be to claim it and so crush the gift. Never name it, never speak it. Just let it possess you. Her own, burning djinn. But as she spins across the brilliant stage before the seated delegates, a corner of her perception scans the architecture for cameras, robots, eyes through which A.J. Rao might watch her. Is she a splinter of his consciousness, as he is a splinter of hers?
She barely hears the applause as she curtseys to the bright lights and runs off stage. In the dressing room, as her assistants remove and carefully fold the many jeweled layers of her costume, wipe away the crusted stage makeup to reveal the twenty-two-year-old beneath, her attention keeps flicking to her earhoek, curled like a plastic question on her dressing table. In jeans and silk sleeveless vest, indistinguishable from any other of Delhi’s four million twen-tysomethings, she coils the device behind her ear, smoothes her hair over it, and her fingers linger a moment as she slides the palmer over her hand. No calls. No messages. No avatars. She’s surprised it matters so much.