by Ian McDonald
With a wordless shriek Rai slashed his hand through the air like a sword. The bot crouched, its carapace slid open in a dozen places, extruding weapons. Without breaking her purposeful stride the woman lifted her left hand. The weapons retracted, the hull ports closed, the war machine staggered as if confused and then sat down heavily in the dead field, head sagging, hands trailing in the dust. The woman removed her helmet. The cameras made the jemadar look five kilos heavier, but she had big hips. She tucked her helmet under her left arm, and with her right swept back her hair to show the control unit coiled behind her ear.
‘Come on now, Rai. It’s over. Come on, we’ll go back. Don’t make a fuss. There’s not really anything you can do. We all have to think what to do next, you know? We’ll take you back in the plane, you’ll like that.’ She looked Sanjeev up and down. ‘I suppose you could take the car back. Someone has to and it’ll be cheaper than sending someone down from Divisional, it’s cost enough already. I’ll retask the aeai. And then we have to get that thing ...’ She shook her head, then beckoned to Rai. He went like a calf, quiet and meek down to the tilt-jet. Black hopping crows settled on the robot, trying its crevices with their curious shiny-hungry beaks.
The hummer ran out of gas twenty kays from Ramnagar. Sanjeev hitched home to Varanasi. The army never collected it and as the new peace built, the local people took it away bit by bit.
With his war dividend Sanjeev bought a little alco-buggy and added a delivery service to his father’s pizza business, specialising in the gap-year hostels that blossomed after the peacekeepers left. He wore a polo-shirt with a logo and a baseball cap and got a sensible haircut. He could not bring himself to sell his robotwallah gear, but it was a long time before he could look at it in the box without feeling embarrassed. The business grew fast and fat.
He often saw Rai down at the ghats or around the old town. They worked the same crowd: Rai dealt Nepalese ganja to tourists. Robotwallah was his street name. He kept the old look and everyone knew him for it. It became first a novelty and then retro. It even became fashionable again, the spiked hair, the andro make-up, the slashed Ts and the latex and most of all the boots. It sold well and everyone wore it, for a season.
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~ * ~
Kyle Meets the River
Kyle was the first to see the exploding cat. He was coming back from the compound HFBR-Mart with the slush cone - his reward for scoring a goal in the under elevens — squinted up at the sound of a construction helicopter (they were still big and marvellous and exciting) and saw it leap the narrow gap between the med centre and Tinneman’s coffee bar. He pointed to it one fragment of a second before the security men picked it up on their visors and started yelling. In an instant the compound was full of fleeing people; men and women running, parents sweeping up kids, guards sweeping their weapons this way and that as the cat, sensing it had been spotted, leaped from the roof in two bounds onto the roof of an armoured Landcruiser, then dived to ground and hunted for targets. A security guard raised his gun. He must be new. Even Kyle knew not to do that. They were not really cats at all, but smart missiles that behaved like them, and if you tried to catch them or threatened them with a weapon, they would attack and blow themselves up. From the shade of the arcade he could see the look on the guard’s face as he tried to get a fix on the dashing, dodging robot. Machine-gun rattle. Kyle had never heard it so close. It was very exciting. Bullets cracked all over the place, flying wild. Kyle thought that perhaps he should hide himself behind something solid. But he wanted to see. He had heard it so many times before and now here it was, on the main streets in front of him. That cat-missile was getting really really close. Then the guard let loose a lucky burst; the steel cat went spinning up into the air and blew itself up. Kyle reeled back. He had never heard anything so loud. Shrapnel cracked the case of the Coke machine beside him into red and white stars. The security man was down but moving, scrabbling away on his back from the blast site and real soldiers were arriving, and a med Hummer, and RAV airdrones. Kyle stood and stared. It was wonderful wonderful wonderful and all for him, and there was Mom, running towards him in her flappy-hands, flappy-feet run, coming to take it all away, snatching him up in front of everyone and crying, ‘Oh, what were you doing what were you thinking are you all right all right all right?’
‘Mom,’ he said. ‘I saw the cat explode.’
~ * ~
His name is Kyle Rubin and he’s here to build a nation. Well, his father is. Kyle doesn’t have much of an idea of nations and nationhood, just that he’s not where he used to live but it’s OK because it’s not really all that different from the gated community, there are a lot of folk like him, though he’s not allowed to leave the compound. In here is Cantonment. Out there is the nation that’s being built. That’s where his dad goes in the armoured cars, where he directs the construction helicopters and commands the cranes that Kyle can just see from the balcony around the top floor of the International School. You’re not allowed to go there because there are still some snipers working but everyone does and Kyle can watch the booms of the tower cranes swing across the growing towers of the new capital.
It all fell apart, and it takes us to put it back together again, his father explained. Once there was a big country called India, with a billion and a half people in it, but they just couldn’t live together, so they fell to squabbling and fighting. Like you and Kelis’s mom, Kyle said, which made his father raise his eyebrows and look embarrassed and mom - his mom, not Kelis’s - laugh to herself. Whatever, it all fell apart and these poor people, they need us and our know-how to put it all back together for them. And that’s why were all here, because it’s families that make us strong and hopeful. And that’s how you, Kyle Rubin, are building a nation. But some people don’t think we should be doing that. They think it’s their nation so they should build it. Some people think we’re part of the problem and not part of the solution. And some people are just plain ungrateful.
Or, as Clinton in class said, the Rana’s control is still weak and there are a lot of under-represented parties out there with big grievances and arsenals of left-over weaponry from the Sundering. Western interests are always first in the firing line. But Clinton was a smart-mouth who just repeated what he heard from his dad who had been in Military Intelligence since before there was even a Cantonment, let alone an International Reconstruction Alliance.
The nation Kyle Rubin is building is Bharat, formerly the states of Bihar, Jharkand and half of Utter Pradesh on the Indo Gangetic plain, and the cranes swing and the helicopters fly over the rising towers of its new capital, Ranapur.
~ * ~
When there weren’t cats exploding, after practice Kyle would visit Salim’s planet.
Before Kyle, Striker Salim had been the best forward on Team Cantonment U-n. Really he shouldn’t have been playing at all because he didn’t actually live within the compound. His father was the Bharati government’s man in Cantonment, so he could pretty much do whatever he liked.
At first they had been enemies. On his second game Kyle had headed home a sweet cross from Ryan from Australia and after that every cross floated his way. In the dressing room Striker Salim had complained to Coach Joe that the new boy had got all the best balls because he was a Westerner and not Bharati. The wraths of dads were invoked. Coach Joe said nothing and put them on together for the game against the army kids, who imagined that being army kids was like an extra man for them. Salim on wing, Kyle in centre: three three four. Cantonment beat US Army two one, one goal by Salim, the decider from a run by Salim and a rebound from the goalkeeper by Kyle, in the forty-third minute. Now, six weeks in another country later, they were inseparable.
Salim’s planet was very close and easy to visit. It lived in the palmer-glove on his brown hand and could manifest itself in all manner of convenient locations: the school system, Tinneman’s coffeehouse, Kyle’s e-paper workscreen, but the best was the full proprioception so-new-it’s-scary lighthoek (tra
demark) that you could put behind you ear so, fiddle it so, and it would get inside your head and open up a whole new world of sights and sounds and smells and sensations. They were so new not even the Americans had them, but Varanasi civil servants engaged on the grand task of nation building needed to use and show off the latest Bharati technology. And their sons too. The safety instructions said you weren’t supposed to use it in full sensory outside because of the risk of accidents, crime or terror but it was safe enough in Guy’s Place up on the roof under the solar farm that was out of shot of any sniper, no matter how good or young she was.
Kyle plugged the buddy-lead into Salim’s lighthoek and slipped the curl of plastic behind his ear. It had taken a while to work out the sweet spot but now he got it first time every time. He was not supposed to use lighthoek tech; Mom’s line was that it hadn’t been proved safe yet but Kyle suspected it was his father: it was opening yourself up to evil influences to let things inside your head like that. That was before you even got to what he thought of the artificial evolution game itself. Maybe if he could experience the lift out of the Cantonment, up through the solar arrays, past the cranes and helicopters, and see Salim’s world there in front of him; Alterre, as it was properly called, and feel yourself falling towards it, through the clouds faster than anything could possibly go, to stop light as a feather with your feet brushing the wave-tops; maybe he would change his mind. He could smell the salt. He could feel the wind. He could see the lifted jelly sails of a kronkaeur fleet above the white-edged swell.
‘Aw not these jellyfish guys again,’ said Kyle.
‘No no no, this is different.’ Salim stood beside him above the waves. ‘Look, this is really cool.’ He folded his hands and leaned forward and flew across the ocean, Kyle a heartbeat behind him. He always thought of those Hindu gods you saw on the prayer cards that blew into the compound from the street shrines. His dad didn’t like those either. They arrived over the kronkaeur armada, beating through a rising ocean on a steady breeze, topsails inflated. When the huge, sail-powered jellyfish had appeared, Kyle had been so excited at his first experience of a newly evolved species that the vast, inflatable monsters had sailed like translucent galleons through his dreams. But all they did was raise their triangular sails and weave their tentacles together into huge raft-fleets and bud off little jellies that looked like see-through paper boats. Once the initial thrill of being part of the global game-experiment to start life on earth all over again and see how it evolved differently had worn off, Kyle found himself wishing that Salim had been given somewhere a bit more exciting than a huge square of ocean. An island would have been good. A bit of continent would have been better. Somewhere things could attack each other.
‘Every bit of water on Alterre was land, and every bit of land was water,’ Salim had said. And they will be again. And anyway, everything eats everything out on the open ocean.’
But not in a cool way, Kyle thought.
Apart from his tech and his skill at football, nothing about Salim was cool. At home he would never have been Kyle’s friend. Kyle would probably have beat him about a bit: he was geeky, had a big nose, couldn’t get clothes right - all the wrong labels -and had no idea how to wear a beanie. He went to a weird religious school for an hour every afternoon and Fridays to the mosque down by the river steps where they burned the dead people. Really, they should not be friends at all. Ozzie Ryan, who’d been the team big one before Kyle, said it was unnatural and disloyal and you couldn’t trust them; one moment they’d be giving you presents and the next they’d be setting you up for people out there to shoot you. Kyle knew Ozzie Ryan was just jealous.
‘Now, isn’t this so cool?’ Salim said, his toes brushing the wave-tops. The sculpted upper surfaces of the great ocean-going jellies between the inflatable booms that held out the sails were bloated with bubbles, visibly swelling and bulging as Kyle floated around to a closer angle. Bigger, bigger, now the size of footballs, now the size of beach balls, stretching the skin until it split with a gush and acid-smelling liquid and a host of balloon dashed into the air. They rose in a mass, tethered to their parents by woven strands of tentacles, rubbing and bouncing and rebounding from each other in the wind; higher than the sail-tops now, and Kyle could make out detail: each balloon carried a cluster of stingers and translucent claspers beneath its domed canopy. Blue eyes were grouped in threes and fours. One by one their tethers parted and the balloon-jellies sprang up into the air and were whisked away on the sea breeze. All around him the flotilla was bubbling and bursting into spasms of balloons; they soared up around him, some still tangled together by the tentacles. Kyle found himself laughing as he watched them stream up into the sky until they vanished against the fast-moving clouds. It was definitely undeniably way way way cool.
‘It’s a completely new way of reproducing,’ Salim said. ‘It’s a new species!’ Kyle knew what that meant. By the rules of Alterre, played out on eleven million computers around the globe, whoever found a new species gave it his or her name. ‘They’re not kronkaeurs any more. I went and registered them; they’re mansooris!’
~ * ~
Gunfire on Monday Tuesday Wednesday. They were working up to something; that was the pattern of it. (Dad Dad who are they this time, is it the Hindus? but his father had eyes and ears and arms only for Mom, full of thanks and praise to have him safe home from that fearsome city.) The Cantonment went to orange alert but security was still unprepared for the ferocity of the attack. Bombers simultaneously attacked twelve Western-owned targets across Old and New Varanasi. The twelfth and final device was a car-bomb driven at full speed across the Green Zone, impervious to automatic fire, its driver dead or ecstatic to die. Close-defence robots uncoiled from their silos and leaped, nanodiamond blades unsheathed, but the bombers had recced Cantonment’s weaknesses well. Slashed, gashed, leaking oil and fuel, engine dead but still rolling under a heaving cancer of robots trying to cocoon it in impact-foam, the car rammed the inner gate and blew up.
On the soccer pitch the referee had heard the general alert siren, judged the distance to the changing room and ordered everyone to lie flat in the goal. Kyle had just wrapped his arms around his head - Day One Lesson One - when the boom lifted him off the ground by the belly and punched every breath of wind out of him. For a moment he thought he had gone deaf, then the sounds of sirens and RAV airdrones pushed through the numb until he was sitting on the grass beside Salim seemingly at the centre of a vast spiral of roar. It was much bigger than the exploding cat. A column of smoke leaned over toward the south. Hummers were rushing past, security men on foot dodging between them. The football net was full of chunks of blast-foam and scraps of wire and fragments of shattered plastic robot shell and warning signs in three languages that this was a restricted area with security authorised in the use of deadly force. A shard of nanodiamond anti-personnel blade was embedded in the left upright. The referee stood up, took off his shirt and wrapped it around the shard wedged under the crossbar.
‘Would you look at that?’ Kyle said.
There was a long green smear down the front of his fresh-laundered soccer shirt.
~ * ~
‘Salim’s always welcome here,’ Mom called from the kitchen where she was blitzing smoothies. ‘Just make sure he calls home to let them know he’s all right the moment the network comes back up. Now promise you’ll do that.’
Of course they did and of course they didn’t and the smoothies stood there forgotten and warming on the worktop while Mom edged about folding underwear and pillowcases but really keeping an eye on the rolling news. She was worried. Kyle knew that. Cantonment was locked down and would be until Coalition and Bharati forces had re-secured the Green Zone: that was the way it was, Kyle had learned that. Locked-down was locked-out for Dad, and the SKYIndia hovercams were still showing towers of black plastic-smoke and ambulances being walked through the crowds of lost people and burned-out cars by Bharati policemen. The reporters were saying there were casualties but they
were also saying that the network wasn’t fully restored and that was why he couldn’t call; if there had been Western casualties they would have said straight away because dead Bharatis didn’t count and anyway, it was inconceivable that anything could happen to Kyle’s dad. No, in situations like this you kept your head down and got on with things while you waited for the call, so he didn’t trouble Mom and fetched the smoothies himself from the kitchen and took them to join Salim in his world.
On the house smartsilk screen you couldn’t get that full-sensory drop from orbit or the sense of walking like God over the water but in the house, even with Mom in her distracted fold-laundry state, it wasn’t smart to use the buddy-lead. Anyway, Kyle didn’t want to give her more to worry about. Three days in Alterre was more like three million years: still water water water whichever way he turned the point of view, but the Mansooris had evolved. High above the blue Atlantic, fleets of airships battled.
‘Whoa,’ said Kyle Rubin and Salim Mansoori.
In three days the jelly-fish balloons had become vast sky-going gasbags, blimp-creatures, translucent airships the size of the Boeing troop transports that brought supplies and workers in to the secure end of Varanasi airport. Their bodies were ridged like the condom Kyle had been shown at the back of the bike rack behind the school; light rippled over them and broke into rainbows as the air-jellies manoeuvred. For this was battle, no doubt about it. This was hot war. The sky-jellyfish trailed long clusters of tentacles beneath them, many hanging in the water, their last connection with their old world. But some ended in purple stingers, some in long stabbing spines, some in barbs, and these the airships wielded as weapons. The air-medusas raised or lowered sail-flaps to tack and manoeuvre into striking positions. Kyle saw one blimp, body blotched with black sting-weals, vent gas from nose and tail and drop out of combat. In a tangle of slashing and parrying tentacles Kyle watched a fighting blimp tear a gash the length of an army hummer down an opponent’s flank with its scimitar-hook. The mortally wounded blimp vented glittering dust, crumpled, folded in half in the middle and plunged into the sea where it split like a thrown water-balloon. The sea instantly boiled with almkvists, spear-fast scavengers all jaw and speed.