More Human Than Human

by Neil Clarke

  “What’s that for?”

  “Killing aeais,” he says simply.

  A kiss and he is gone. Esha scrambles into his cricket pullover, a waif in baggy white that comes down to her knees, and dashes to the forbidden balcony. If she cranes over, she can see the street door. There he is, stepping out, waiting at the curb. His car is late, the road is thronged, the din of engines, car horns, and phatphat klaxons has been constant since dawn. She watches him wait, enjoying the empowerment of invisibility. I can see you. How do they ever play sport in these things? she asks herself, skin under cricket pullover hot and sticky. It’s already thirty degrees, according to the weather ticker across the foot of the video-silk shuttering over the open face of the new-built across the street. High of thirty-eight. Probability of precipitation: zero. The screen loops Town and Country for those devotees who must have their soapi, subtitles scrolling above the news feed.

  Hello, Esha, Ved Prakash says, turning to look at her.

  The thick cricket pullover is no longer enough to keep out the ice.

  Now Begum Vora namastes to her and says, I know where you are, I know what you did.

  Ritu Parzaaz sits down on her sofa, pours chai and says, What I need you to understand is, it worked both ways. That ’ware they put in your palmer, it wasn’t clever enough.

  Mouth working wordlessly; knees, thighs weak with basti girl superstitious fear, Esha shakes her palmer-gloved hand in the air but she can’t find the mudras, can’t dance the codes right. Call call call call.

  The scene cuts to son Govind at his racing stable, stroking the neck of his thoroughbred über-star Star of Agra. As they spied on me, I spied on them.

  Dr. Chatterji in his doctor’s office. So in the end we betrayed each other.

  The call has to go through Department security authorization and crypt.

  Dr. Chatterji’s patient, a man in black with his back to the camera turns. Smiles. It’s A.J. Rao. After all, what diplomat is not a spy?

  Then she sees the flash of white over the rooftops. Of course. Of course. He’s been keeping her distracted, like a true soapi should. Esha flies to the railing to cry a warning but the machine is tunneling down the street just under power-line height, wings morphed back, engines throttled up: an aeai traffic monitor drone.

  “Thacker! Thacker!”

  One voice in the thousands. And it is not hers that he hears and turns toward. Everyone can hear the call of his own death. Alone in the hurrying street, he sees the drone pile out of the sky. At three hundred kilometers per hour it takes Inspector Thacker of the Department of Artificial Intelligence Registration and Licensing to pieces.

  The drone, deflected, ricochets into a bus, a car, a truck, a phatphat, strewing plastic shards, gobs of burning fuel and its small intelligence across Sisganj Road. The upper half of Thacker’s body cartwheels through the air to slam into a hot samosa stand.

  The jealousy and wrath of djinns.

  Esha on her balcony is frozen. Town and Country is frozen. The street is frozen, as if on the tipping point of a precipice. Then it drops into hysteria. Pedestrians flee; cycle rickshaw drivers dismount and try to run their vehicles away; drivers and passengers abandon cars, taxis, phatphats; scooters try to navigate through the panic; buses and trucks are stalled, hemmed in by people.

  And still Esha Rathore is frozen to the balcony rail. Soap. This is all soap. Things like this cannot happen. Not in the Sisganj Road,

  not in Delhi, not on a Tuesday morning. It’s all computer-generated illusion. It has always been illusion.

  Then her palmer calls. She stares at her hand in numb incomprehension. The Department. There is something she should do. Yes. She lifts it in a mudra—a dancer’s gesture—to take the call. In the same instant, as if summoned, the sky fills with gods. They are vast as clouds, towering up behind the apartment blocks of Sisganj Road like thunderstorms; Ganesh on his rat vahana with his broken tusk and pen, no benignity in his face; Siva, rising high over all, dancing in his revolving wheel of flames, foot raised in the instant before destruction; Hanuman with his mace and mountain fluttering between the tower blocks; Kali, skull-jeweled, red tongue dripping venom, scimitars raised, bestriding Sisganj Road, feet planted on the rooftops.

  In that street, the people mill. They can’t see this, Esha comprehends. Only me, only me. It is the revenge of the Krishna Cops. Kali raises her scimitars high. Lightning arcs between their tips. She stabs them down into the screen-frozen Town and Country. Esha cries out, momentarily blinded as the Krishna Cops hunter-killers track down and excommunicate rogue aeai A.J. Rao. And then they are gone. No gods. The sky is just the sky. The video-silk hoarding is blank, dead.

  A vast, godlike roar above her. Esha ducks—now the people in the street are looking at her. All the eyes, all the attention she ever wanted. A tilt-jet in Awadhi air-force chameleo-flage slides over the roof and turns over the street, swiveling engine ducts and unfolding wing-tip wheels for landing. It turns its insect head to Esha. In the cockpit is a faceless pilot in a HUD visor. Beside her a woman in a business suit, gesturing for Esha to answer a call. Thacker’s partner. She remembers now.

  The jealousy and wrath and djinns.

  “Mrs. Rathore, it’s Inspector Kaur.” She can barely hear her over the scream of ducted fans. “Come downstairs to the front of the building. You’re safe now. The aeai has been excommunicated.”

  Excommunicated.

  “Thacker . . . ”

  “Just come downstairs, Mrs. Rathore. You are safe now, the threat is over.”

  The tilt-jet sinks beneath her. As she turns from the rail, Esha feels a sudden, warm touch on her face. Jet-swirl, or maybe just a djinn, passing unresting, unhasting, and silent as light.

  The Krishna Cops sent us as far from the wrath and caprice of the aeais as they could, to Leh under the breath of the Himalaya. I say us, for I existed; a knot of four cells inside my mother’s womb.

  My mother bought a catering business. She was in demand for weddings and shaadis. We might have escaped the aeais and the chaos following Awadh’s signing the Hamilton Acts—but the Indian male’s desperation to find a woman to marry endures forever. I remember that for favored clients—those who had tipped well, or treated her as something more than a paid contractor, or remembered her face from the chati mags—she would slip off her shoes and dance Radha and Krishna. I loved to see her do it and when I slipped away to the temple of Lord Ram, I would try to copy the steps among the pillars of the mandapa. I remember the brahmins would smile and give me money.

  The dam was built and the water war came and was over in a month. The aeais, persecuted on all sides, fled to Bharat where the massive popularity of Town and Country gave them protection, but even there they were not safe: humans and aeais, like humans and djinni, were too different creations and in the end they left Awadh for another place that I do not understand, a world of their own where they are safe and no one can harm them.

  And that is all there is to tell in the story of the woman who married a djinn. If it does not have the happy-ever-after ending of Western fairytales and Bollywood musicals, it has a happy-enough ending. This spring I turn twelve and shall head off on the bus to Delhi to join the gharana there. My mother fought this with all her will and strength—for her Delhi would always be the city of djinns, haunted and stained with blood—but when the temple brahmins brought her to see me dance, her opposition melted. By now she was a successful businesswoman, putting on weight, getting stiff in the knees from the dreadful winters, refusing marriage offers on a weekly basis, and in the end she could not deny the gift that had passed to me. And I am curious to see those streets and parks where her story and mine took place, the Red Fort and the sad decay of the Shalimar Gardens. I want to feel the heat of the djinns in the crowded galis behind the Jama Masjid, in the dervishes of litter along Chandni Chowk, in the starlings swirling above Connaught Circus. Leh is a Buddhist town, filled with third-generation Tibetan exiles—Little Tibet, they call it—and
they have their own gods and demons. From the old Moslem djinn-finder I have learned some of their lore and mysteries but I think my truest knowledge comes when I am alone in the Ram temple, after I have danced, before the priests close the garbagriha and put the god to bed. On still nights when the spring turns to summer or after the monsoon, I hear a voice. It calls my name. Always I suppose it comes from the japa-softs, the little low-level aeais that mutter our prayers eternally to the gods, but it seems to emanate from everywhere and nowhere, from another world, another universe entirely. It says, the creatures of word and fire are different from the creatures of clay and water but one thing is true: love endures. Then as I turn to leave, I feel a touch on my cheek, a passing breeze, the warm sweet breath of djinns.

  Robert B Finegold, M.D., is a radiologist from Maine who’s practiced clinical and academic radiology for over thirty years. He has an undergraduate degree in English (creative writing and British literature), has been a university newspaper cartoonist, and served as a major in the U.S. Army during the first Gulf War. He is a new author and two-time Writers of the Future Contest finalist with stories published in venues such as Galaxy’s Edge magazine, Giganotosaurus, CRES, and Straeon 2, as well as a number of anthologies. He is the current assistant editor for “Myths, Legends, and Fairy Tales” at Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores. You can find him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/robertbfinegold/.

  AND THE ENDS OF THE EARTH FOR THY POSSESSION

  ROBERT B. FINEGOLD, M.D.

  My soul yearneth, yea, even pineth for the courts of the LORD . . . ”

  The rap of metal upon metal rang within the small cabin, startling me. Knocking before entering was a courtesy the Jews on the transport neither expected nor received.

  “Rabbi Makal? The Captain requests your presence.”

  At sight of the officer, I nearly dropped my chumash, and the words of the Psalm were immediately forgotten.

  “‘Requests,’ Danel?” I asked.

  The automaton’s face conveyed no emotion, but the humanlike hesitation was unmistakable. Its voice softened. “‘Commands’ would be more accurate.” It paused, and then added, “It is good to see you, sir.”

  When had I last seen him? Lyons in ’42? Paris in ’44? Yes, Paris; but then I’d been but one face among the many gathered at the grand exhibition of war machines. So many years ago . . . but—should I kvell? Look at him now: the pressed white suit with the ringed planet and dual stripes of an enseigne de la marine interstellaire de France on his epaulets, brass buttons as polished and gleaming as the unmarred silver skin of his face and hands. “It seems you’ve come far, Ensign,” I said, closing the chumash and placing the book in my jacket pocket.

  “Creator, I’m . . . ”

  I raised a finger. “There is but one Creator, Danel, and He is in Heaven.”

  The gold-leaved irises within the glass cylinders of his eyes cycled closed and then opened. “My apologies, Abba.”

  I shook my head and took off my prayer shawl. Was he utilizing his programming to choose words to make me receptive to his orders? Not that I would have dared to refuse the Captain. Folding my tallis, I placed it in its blue velvet bag, and then rested my hands on the metal shelf that served as my desk. It was cool to touch and vibrated with the thrum of the great ship’s engines. “I may have built you, Danel, but I am not your father. You are a machine, not a man . . . “ I waved a hand at his uniform. “ . . . regardless of how they dress you.”

  He chose not to reply. I buttoned my tweed jacket and gave my yarmulke a perfunctory check. It perpetually threatened to slip from atop my balding head, which wouldn’t do. The yellow badges of the Reich may have become history, but God forgive the Jew who failed to wear his or her identifying headpiece, for the New Europeans would certainly not. “Let us not keep the Captain waiting.”

  “That would be wise, sir.”

  Captain Emile Pétain stood as stiff as his handlebar mustache. His tall and square-jawed First Mate and Commanding Officer, Mr. Henri L’Hereux, belied his surname and gazed sullenly at the ship’s médicin conseil. The latter sat on the edge of a cot, the bell of his stethoscope pressed to the chest of its occupant.

  I’d seen the captain and first mate upon boarding, of course, scowling down at us from a catwalk above the great hold where we’d lined up holding our two permitted carry-ons. The bosun had identified them as our temporary gods for the duration of the voyage to HD 10307 before reading the edict of expulsion and the rules of conduct for which no transgression would be permitted upon the frigate Joan d’Arc.

  “Doctor Makal, thank you for coming,” said the seated man. His voice was high-pitched, and squeaked like an adolescent undergoing the change. He stood, a small gesture of respect, but he did not extend his hand. He was short, round-faced, with pince-nez spectacles perched on an upturned nose. His uniform was unbuttoned at the neck and splayed open to accommodate his extra chins.

  I inclined my head to the Captain and First Mate and then to the ship’s physician. “How may I be of service . . . “ I looked at his I.D. plate. “ . . . Doctor Eugène?”

  Mr. L’Heureux interrupted, his words clipped as one used to barking orders. “The doctor is stymied. He suggested you might be of use.” His tone indicated skepticism.

  “Of course,” I said. “Whatever I can do.”

  I stepped toward the cot but halted when Doctor Eugène moved aside and I saw the patient.

  “Lieutenant Haran was found upon D deck,” the doctor said, “away from the, ah, passenger quarters.” His eyes flickered beneath his lenses like fish behind aquarium glass, first toward the Captain and his CO and then to me. The two officers’ scrutiny was a tangible pressure on the back of my head. I had the urge to check that my yarmulke was secure but stilled it. “He was in the state pretty much as you see him now,” said Dr. Eugène.

  And I saw him very well. Lieutenant Haran was a wiry middle-aged man with ringlets of thick ebon hair streaked gray at the temples. He was thin but not scrawny. His navy issue white tee molded to his chest; his bare arms bulged with muscle under the tawny skin but lay flaccid at his sides, one trailing an intravenous line. It was neither the golden brown color of his skin or his lax open mouth that arrested my movement, nor the dark walnut eyes staring sightlessly through the cabin roof, outer decks, and ship’s hull to the endless dark of space beyond, but the tattooed necklace of linked black scimitars encircling his neck—one for each Jew he’d murdered in the sack of Palestine.

  Or its reclamation. It depended on your point of view. How they could call it that when Haifa, the jewel of the Mediterranean, with its bright new schools and hospitals, its cultivated farms and young forests, blazed and turned to cinders, I couldn’t fathom. The thick pillar of smoke rising from the city could be seen from the deck of the Cyprian rescue ship for days, and the taste of ash had never left my tongue.

  My mouth went dry and my vision blurred. I fought against the flashback, but failed.

  Ruthie smiled through the open window, and the warm honey smell of fresh baked challah wafted into the yard where I sat on the grass with Hannah. Our child, our sheyna medele, stood petulantly in front of me, hands on her tiny hips and her lips pursed in disapproval. The perfect cat’s cradle she’d passed me dangled like twisted tzitzit from my fingers. “No, Abba!”

  Nails scoring my palms, and the image faded. I unclenched my hands. Doctor Eugène wore a worried expression, his herring eyes darting again between me and the two command officers. Small beads of sweat glistened like oil on his brow.

  I took a penlight from my pocket and sat on the edge of the cot. Lieutenant Haran had no pupillary response. He displayed no bruises or any sign of recent physical injury. I leaned forward and sniffed. No fruity breath to suggest ketoacidosis. No asymmetrical laxity in his facial muscles or body tone to suggest stroke. His limbs gave no resistance when I moved them. In fact, they’d maintain any position in which they were placed, like a manikin or an inactive automaton. From the corner of my eye I
noted Danel standing in the shadow of his superiors, respectful, vigilant, observant.

  I looked under the lieutenant’s eyelids, pressed upon his abdomen, and questioned Dr. Eugène about his medical history and lab results. His replies provided nothing of significance.

  “How long has he been like this?” I extended my hand, and Dr. Eugène suspended his stethoscope upon my palm.

  “Three days,” said Dr. Eugène.

  “Truly? No response to stimuli at all? Not the slightest resistance to movement?” The doctor shook his head.

  “As limp as a jellyfish,” the First Mate said and then demanded, “What’s wrong with him?”

  I listened to the Lieutenant’s chest and then sat back. “I’d say he’s in a catatonic stupor, or possibly suffered a severe stroke.” I shook my head, dissatisfied. “The signs are mixed.” I checked the Lieutenant’s pulse. It was thready, but he displayed no other signs of going into shock. I took the pillow from beneath his head and elevated his feet, and then I checked the i.v. bottle suspended above the head of the cot, opening it further. “His pulse is weak.”

  “ . . . and growing weaker,” Dr. Eugène said.

  “Have you administered vasopressors?”

  Dr. Eugène’s lips pressed together and he didn’t answer. “He needs norepinephrine,” I said.

  “No Jew drugs,” the First Mate said. “It must be as God wills.”

  Goyim. “His God or yours?” I said, the words slipping out before I could stop them. Mr. L’Hereux’s eyes widened. I thought he would strike me, but he mastered himself.

  “Captain Pétain?” I asked. The older man’s face was as unemotional and unreadable as Danel’s, but then he glanced upon the stricken Lieutenant and his imperiousness crumbled like halvah. He lowered his eyes and shook his head.