Upside Down

by Jaym Gates

  “No wonder you punched me,” he said quietly.

  Gabi summoned up a pained smile. “It wasn’t you, Ital.”

  #

  She’d been asleep maybe ten minutes when the wind bellowed and the tent did its best impression of Auntie Em’s house.

  Gabi pulled on her boots and a sweater to ward off the wind and overnight chill. “Ital?”

  No answer.

  Apparently, he’d ignored her suggestion to spend the night in her grandmother’s tent with her in case there were more mazzikim.

  Brilliant.

  A flashlight in one hand and her kit slung over her shoulder, Gabi emerged into Tent Hell and promptly ate a mouthful of hair. Tent Gehenna, meu bem, her grandmother’s voice sounded in her head.

  “Ital?”

  The wind swallowed her voice.

  Ignoring the creeping dread and deja vu, Gabi moved methodically from one partial windbreak to the next. Each time she stopped, she swept the light in an arc ahead of her to look for debris or worse.

  Seeing nothing and no one, Gabi kept to her search, one meter at a time. Eventually the cause would reveal itself. The imprint of a cock’s feet in the dirt, untouched by the wind. A spirit force grabbing her —

  An ox-headed storm-demon plowed through a half-downed tent bawling furiously and followed by Ital, who was carrying a two-handed axe.

  Combat archaeology.

  Gabi suppressed the urge to smile, raced to his side, and snarled, “You couldn’t have mentioned the shedim you summoned?” instead.

  “It wasn’t me, remember?” he yelled as he swung the weapon at the demon’s … flank?

  Now she did smile, choked on a laugh when the end of her ponytail filled her mouth again. “How did you even hear that?”

  “What?” He grinned at her, his teeth white and gleaming even in the beiged-out night.

  Rolling her eyes, she gestured that she needed to get out in front of the shedim. Like bodybuilders in a roid-rage, shedim tended to forget they could fly, or really do anything other than run and make wind.

  Ital didn’t bother trying to make himself heard, just slammed the flat side of the axe into the demon. It spun to face him. The demon raked its clawed wing across Ital’s chest.

  Storm-wind threw her howl of denial back in her face.

  It whipped a cyclone of sand around the demon and Ital and they disappeared from sight.

  Don’t get attached. Most of you won’t survive six months in the field.

  “Fuck that noise,” Gabi growled into the dark-beige night.

  She crouched low beneath the major gusts where the sand only eddied in swirls around her feet and didn’t cut her face. Quickly, she wrapped her head and shoulders in a sky-blue cashmere pashmina from her kit, then prostrated herself in the dirt.

  “Tell me your name, great shedim,” she whispered reverently into the wind and put every ounce of her will into it. It was a risk, one that opened her to spiritual attack, but once upon a time, the shedim had been gods. “Tell me who you are. Please, lord.” Lowercase, but it wouldn’t hear that, if it heard her at all.

  Nothing happened.

  “Please,” she begged. “Please, great lord.”

  The wind slowed and seemed almost to pause and consider. Her light, on the ground but aimed out ahead of her, revealed Ital curled over his knees, clutching his torso.

  “Please, storm lord. My people worshipped you once,” Gabi murmured.

  The ox-headed demon turned toward her, leaving Ital to his fate as its rage seemed to die away. Its wings folded down. “Very well, young one. If you will know, I am Pazuzu, god of the South-West wind and son of Hanbi.”

  Demon of the South-West wind. Even in its own mythology, Pazuzu had never been a god, and arrogance had always been its besetting sin.

  “Pazuzu.” As though a sculpture made of sand, the demon’s form shuddered and shivered. It tried to bellow up a proper wind but it could only bawl. “Zuzu.” The edges of its wings and horns and hooves eroded and its substance began to trickle away. “Zu.”

  Before the demon lost its battle with being, Gabi was up on her feet and racing across the now quiet Tent Gehenna. She dropped at Ital’s side and caught his face in her hands.

  “Nice work with Paz-” he coughed.

  She winced and pushed him back to see how bad the damage was — and found nothing but torn clothes and a few minor scratches across an inked hamsa on his left pectoral muscle. A hamsa inscribed with a Star of David and the Aleph-Lamet-Dalet on the chest of an interesting, compassionate, intelligent, sexy scholar saying, “Hamsa, hamsa, hamsa, tfu, tfu, tfu,” to ward off the demon he’d almost invoked again.

  “You’re Jewish?” Gabi demanded, unable to tear her gaze from his perfectly intact chest.

  “One second you look like an avenging angel and the next you want to know my faith?” Ital looked … adorably confused.

  Gabi took a note from her grandmother and declined to clarify. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “When did you want me to do that? When you were punching not-me? When you were grieving for your boyfriend? Or maybe in the middle of battle with a storm-demon?” He shook his head and climbed to his feet. “I knew you had issues, Gabriela, but I didn’t think you were a bigot.”

  “What?” Now Gabi wanted to clarify. “He wasn’t my boyfriend.”

  “That’s not really the point.”

  “Yes, it is. If I’d known you were Jewish, I would’ve at least kissed you goodnight.”

  “From bigotry to fetishization in under sixty seconds.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

  Gabi pulled out her cell phone and, heedless of the hour, texted Avó. Why didn’t you tell me he was Jewish?

  As though she’d been waiting for the question, her grandmother responded immediately. You would have suspected my motives.

  Gabi snorted back a laugh. Would I have been wrong?

  No answer. Shrugging, she tucked her phone back in her jeans pocket.

  “What was that about?” Ital looked as prickly as he sounded.

  For an answer, Gabi hauled herself up along his arms, hooked her hand behind his neck, and released a half-dozen emotions into a hard, edgy kiss. Eventually, he relented and wound his arm around her, which steadied her knees gone weak from the adrenaline draining out of her.

  “I’m Jewish, too, jerkface,” she whispered. For a long moment, eyes closed and tension fading with the warmth of physical contact, Gabi silently gave thanks she wouldn’t be burying her impromptu partner. “My dad’s a rabbi. He’d kill me if I brought home anyone but a nice, Jewish boy.”

  “Oh.” Smiling, Ital pulled a sandy lock of her hair from her lips and then erased the memory of the dybbuk’s kiss with one of his own. “You know, we did this backwards. I’ve already met your grandmother.”

  Real Women Are Dangerous

  Rati Mehrotra

  The trouble started when Jai found out where the women were hiding. I didn’t believe him at first — there were so few left on the planet. Especially our part of the planet, which already had millions more men than women even before the Femonza outbreak. But Jai was utterly convinced.

  “My sensor picked her up,” he told me at the New Years’ Eve office party in the Tej Hotel. “Walking into an electronics store as cool as you please, just as if she was a man. She was dressed like one, of course, but I got the genetic readout, clear as anything. I followed her out and saw her go into …”

  “Stop it, Jai,” I hissed. I glanced around the crowded room, but no one seemed to have heard. “You and your stupid sensors. You’ll land us both in jail.”

  “More snacks, sir?” the house robot trilled in my ear, nearly giving me a heart attack. Jai helped himself to a chicken seekh kebab, and the robot glided away to a group of our colleagues nearby.

  Jai jabbed a finger in its direction. “Once those were real. Imagine? Real women serving you. Real women giving you a massage. Real women . . .”

  “… be
ing doctors and engineers and scientists,” I said. “I know. What’s your point?” Not that I was interested. Jai was always going off on these tangents.

  Lights flashed and someone began to sing Auld Lang Syne. The countdown would begin soon. Another year, another missed promotion, another ‘informal’ chat with the company head about how I wasn’t living up to my potential. Top student at the Bioengineering Institute of Pune, and what did I have to show for it? A lousy fifty thousand a week job at a second-rate organ manufacturer. My mother would have died of shame if she hadn’t died of the Female-Only-Influenza pandemic twenty years ago. Of course, if she’d known of the clandestine little research project that was taking up all my time and energy, she’d have disowned me before dying of shame.

  I wrenched my mind back from the unproductive turn it had taken.

  “… knew that modified sensor would come in handy. I’ve been looking for them for years. Stands to reason the government would hide the survivors. Can you imagine the chaos if it came out? Men would just fling themselves on that building and tear each other apart. It would be like the Emergency all over again.”

  I winced. The Emergency in Delhi had lasted almost four years before the government took control of the situation. I could still remember the news feeds, the undistilled horror of it.

  “Not everyone is as idiotic as you, Jai,” I said. “Real women are dangerous. I wouldn’t go near one, not if you paid me. The ones who’ve survived might be carriers. That woman had no business walking into an electronics store and exposing everyone to her germs. I suggest you go in for a Complete Clean.”

  I couldn’t help grinning as I said that. Jai had to endure a Complete Clean — physical and mental — a couple of months ago when he was bitten by a stray dog he’d adopted. The physical part of the Clean is easy. It’s the mental re-training that’s agony. But there’s no getting out of it. They don’t want you indulging in deviant behaviors, after all. Strays are supposed to be euthanized, not brought into your apartment and fed milk-soaked bread.

  Jai stiffened and glared at me. “You don’t get it, Shyam. There are actual women living in Delhi. Today, in the year 2048!”

  The lights dimmed and one of the walls turned into a firework display. A DJ began the countdown. “The year 2049,” I said. “And that’s Dr. Shyam, if you please.”

  Jai snorted. “Fat lot of good your doctorate has been. You’d have been better off trying to find a cure for Femonza rather than trying to replicate hearts and livers. Who cares about hearts and livers?”

  Infected men who would die without replacement surgery, I could have said, but didn’t. There wasn’t any cure for Femonza; Jai knew that.

  The countdown finished and the room erupted in cheers. The lights came on. My colleagues lined up at the elevators to the private pods up on the fortieth floor. Once a year, after the New Years’ Eve party, we could avail of the services of Ayesha models, all at company expense. The latest Ayeshas were the best, almost indistinguishable from the 2017 beauty queen they were modeled after. Without her germs, of course. Not that I knew. Thirty minutes with an Ayesha cost more than six weeks of my salary, and I had never been able to make myself push through the lines at the office party. It just seemed pointless when I could get what I needed easily enough at home with my vag-sim.

  Jai tugged my shirtsleeve. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  “And go where?”

  Jai didn’t bother to respond. He always knew where to go and have the most miserable time possible. Last year he’d dragged me to the Lotus temple for the ringing of the bells — 108 times, one for each human defilement. I hoped we weren’t going there again.

  Outside it was raining — cold winter rain, the kind that sneaks into your lungs and gives you pneumonia. I shivered and thought of my warm bed.

  “Jai, I need to go home.”

  “Shut up, Shyam. What you need is a drink and a fuck, in that order.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Not the red-light district. Please.”

  Jai hailed a cab. “You know your problem, Shyam? You lack human contact. You need a little love to get your creative juices flowing, get that promotion that’s been eluding you for the last three years.”

  “Jai, you’re a fool.” But I followed him into the cab anyway, glad of the darkness so he couldn’t see my face. Okay, so I hadn’t had a promotion in three years. This was also how long I had been working on my personal project. Even Jai didn’t know about it. But the day I succeeded — if I ever succeeded — the whole world would know.

  Jai gave the cabbie the name of the street and the cab jerked ahead. I could’ve sworn the driver smirked. Another pair of losers looking to get laid on the last night of the year.

  It took almost an hour to get to Chandini market. Yellow streetlights, dim red bars, and the goods preening themselves in windows and strutting down the street, waggling their butts in front of cars cruising by with open windows. Chandini market was the home of the genetically modified and the factory discards. Much, much cheaper than the Ayeshas. The authorities turned a blind eye. Heck, the authorities probably came here, too.

  We got out of the cab and went into a smoky bar, paying twenty thousand each at the door. There was a free drink — Scotch on the rocks — and a strip show, followed by a 3D simulated porn movie. When the movie started, some of the customers embraced each other. A little later, fights broke out and curses drowned out the moans, on-screen and off. Half-way through, right on cue, the depression hit. We pushed our way out of the bar.

  Outside I breathed the cold, foggy air, trying to clear my head. Two in the morning and the crowd was beginning to thin. We leaned on the metal railings that separated the pavement from the street. I glanced at Jai. The rain had stopped, but his cheeks gleamed wet in the streetlight.

  “I’m thirty-eight,” he said. “What am I doing with my life and my education? What are you doing?”

  “We’re the lucky ones, remember?” I said, although my head was pounding and my mood was black. “The ones with the Y chromosome. The ones who don’t have a trace of infection. Many men weren’t so lucky.”

  Jai spat on the ground. “You call this luck?” he snarled. He shook his fist at the sky. “The gods have deserted us. Or maybe the goddesses have deserted the gods. This is our punishment for centuries of femicide. Shiva, where is your Shakti? Vishnu, where is your Lakshmi? Tell them we repent!”

  People turned around to stare. Such outbursts are not uncommon in Chandini market, but I hailed a cab anyway. No point prolonging this night, which already felt way too long.

  “I’m going to get ahold of a real woman,” said Jai when I dropped him off at his building. “It’s my resolution for the new year.”

  I didn’t say anything. I thought he’d be fine after a good night’s sleep, once the alcohol had worn off. And really, what could I have said that would have made any difference?

  #

  Jai didn’t come in to work all week. He didn’t pick up his phone either. I dropped in at Human Resources to ask after him, and the manager said he was on sick leave.

  I waited until the weekend to visit him. I thought perhaps he’d adopted another stray, or maybe he was just sulking.

  The building bot scanned my retina and relayed the information to Jai’s apartment. Several minutes passed before I was granted entry. I wondered about that. Maybe he was really sick. I found my anxiety mounting as the elevator soared up to the thirtieth floor. By the time I reached his apartment, I had convinced myself that he had picked up a serious bug in Chandini market.

  The door flew open and Jai stood in front of me, rumpled but healthy. There was an expression on his face, half-triumphant, half-defiant, that I hadn’t seen before. Not since the night he peed in front of the dean’s office, at any rate.

  “Shyam. Just the man I wanted to see.” He pulled me in and slammed the door shut.

  “What’s the matter? Why haven’t you been coming in to work?” I demanded, walking in. His small flat
looked the same as ever, scarlet cushions on a coffee-coloured divan, three walls lined with screens, the fourth leading to the hygiene cabinet.

  “I have a visitor,” he replied. “Sit down and you will see.”

  I sat on the divan, thinking that Jai would have real trouble with HR this time. You needed a medical certificate for sick leave longer than a day.

  One of the screens slid back and a woman stepped through. I knew right away it was a woman and not a bot by how utterly ordinary she looked. Nothing like an Ayesha. No make-up, no style, no hour-glass figure. Just blue jeans and a loose white T-shirt and limp, straight hair tucked behind her ears. In her hands she held a tray, balancing a cup.

  She walked right up to me. I was frozen, or I suppose I’d have done something. Run screaming to the hygiene cabinet, probably.

  “Tea?” she asked and bent forward, the front of her shirt falling open. I couldn’t help staring.

  “I told you,” crowed Jai. “Told you we’d have a real woman serving us one day.”

  That was when she spilled the scalding tea on my lap.

  “Shit!” I leaped up and hopped around. I must have looked ridiculous because she covered her mouth and laughed.

  Jai hustled me into his closet and gave me a pair of dry trousers, and advised me not to make a fool of myself in front of Devyani again.

  A little later I found myself sitting on the edge of the divan, across from the woman Jai had called Devyani. She perched on a stool opposite, smiling shyly at me. She was younger than I had expected — she must have been just a baby when Femonza hit. But even if she hadn’t caught the infection, she could be a carrier. I began to sweat.

  “Even being in the same room as her is dangerous,” I blurted out.

  Jai snorted. “Shyam, don’t be silly. Devyani is not a carrier.” He turned to her. “Don’t mind him, please. He’s not used to the company of women.”

  “That’s okay,” said Devyani. “He won’t tell anyone, will he?”