Ambiguity Machines

by Vandana Singh

  Vishnumitra has done this before, used manipulation of prana to kill. When someone is dying in great pain, it is a mercy to let the individual prana flow cease, to draw life out gently, as one draws the last of thread from a spindle. He has never used this skill to murder. But his way is clear.

  Upamanyu is shaking his head as though Vishnumitra has just proposed something quite absurd, but he comes up to Vishnumitra, and their hands meet. Fingertip to fingertip, then clasping lightly, as though they might be about to draw each other into an embrace. Vishnumitra can sense the prana flow in the other’s body—thick and strong. He senses the other finding his own prana flow as a bird on the wing might sense the landscape below. The duel begins.

  Vishnumitra attempts to still the flow, to draw life and breath and consciousness from Upamanyu, and in the beginning Upamanyu simply resists. He is smiling a little, but Vishnumitra hardly notices. He is intent upon the task, looking for weaknesses in the chakras, turbulence in the nadis. The thing is to take Upamanyu by surprise, to strike without warning, as he scans his friend’s subtle body with that gentle inner gaze. Then he’s hit.

  It feels as though the world has suddenly grown dark. Controlling his breath, Vishnumitra finds his balance; the light returns. He fights back. They are going back and forth, sending great waves of weakness, invisible sword-cuts that might stop the heart or constrict a blood vessel. Every few minutes Vishnumitra is aware of that gaze, so light, contemplative even. He is aware that deep within him there is a great resistance to kill the man he loves. Surely there is another way! In his pain and love he cries out:

  “In the name of the art, which you betrayed, in the names of those whom you had imprisoned and killed, for Shankara, who was innocent in her fierceness and courage, I beg you, Upamanyu, to repent by choosing death! Do not make me kill you!”

  Upamanyu’s face is intent, sweat has broken out over his brow.

  “Nobody can kill me . . .”

  And Vishnumitra sees with his inner eye what Upamanyu has done, how he can kill an adept in the art, how he must have killed Shankara. The columns of mahaprana that rain down from the sky are joining and coalescing, coming down at him, filling every part of his being with the life force, a fullness that his body cannot take. For a moment Upamanyu is Indra himself, wielding the thunderbolt. Vishnumitra knows for a split second the beauty of the cosmic prana, the vastness of the mystery that they have barely begun to comprehend, and he knows that he has done wrong, just as Upamanyu has, to use the prana vidya for murder. As he accepts his death, welcomes it as a man guided by dharma must, he senses the capillaries on his skin bursting. A pain in his chest, his lungs, and he is losing consciousness, falling to the floor. Then blessed darkness and he knows nothing at all.

  When Vishnumitra came to, the first thing he noticed was the smell. It was a rotten odor, sickly sweet, like spoiled fruit. He hurt all over. Gradually, through the pain, he realized he was alive. He was lying on a great pile of refuse, above which he could see the silhouette of the fort wall, a dark wave against the starlit sky. He tried to sit up and groaned as the pain hit him anew. Lying back in the filth, he tasted his defeat, and the struggles that still lay ahead, and the bitterness of knowing that he—greatest of the practitioners of the art (or so he’d thought), defender of the prana vidya, had ultimately betrayed it and failed all the ones he loved. He shuddered in the cold air.

  Why had Upamanyu left him alive?

  He should be dead!

  He must have lain there for many hours before he noticed the horse. There was a faint radiance in the eastern sky, although the darkness was still profound. Against that sky stood the king’s stallion, black, strong, unmistakable. There was no rider.

  Vishnumitra dragged his broken body off the pile of trash and crawled to where the stallion stood. The horse bent its great head, snorting softly, blowing twin puffs of breath from the enormous nostrils. Vishnumitra saw the pale shape of a rolled scroll hanging from the saddle and reached for it. He lay gasping on the hard ground, waiting for the light. The horse waited too.

  Dear brother, [Upamanyu wrote]

  I regret the pain I have caused you, but perhaps it is better this way. As I said I have awaited your coming these many years. Kingship has been very interesting but I grow weary of it. You recall that your father’s explanation of the mahaprana when I was just a boy launched me on a journey of discovery. My kingdom was but a stop on the way to greater adventures, one that enabled me to consolidate my knowledge and distracted me pleasantly with interesting dilemmas. I have as yet no answer to the question I once posed your father: From whence does the cosmic prana arise? What is the origin of the life force beyond this earth? Some invoke gods but I seek no such convenient answers. My dabbling with the knowledge of the mechanical forces convinces me that one will lead me to the other. The Chinese have been experimenting with propulsion power for eons, and in my own small laboratory I have found enough evidence that a carefully designed craft might bear the weight of a man to the endless skies. There I will fly as the Vidyadharas are said to do, and seek the adventures that have constantly beckoned my soul.

  Meanwhile, I leave you my horse (with great regret as he, strengthened by my knowledge of prana vidya, has been my dear companion these many years). And I leave you my kingdom. I have talked all night with my chief queen, the peerless Jahanara, who has known for some time that I have a brother in spirit. She is to be trusted, as is Noori, her slave and my best spy, who is an expert archer and fighter. My minister, Sukhwant Singh, will guide you as well. Your name, my friend, is Ambar Khan, and you are born of a Muslim father and a Hindu mother (this small reversal of the truth I deemed necessary in order to explain away any Hindu traits that you, the next Mughal king, might display). Do not fear that such a thing would betray you, for I have attempted to re-create as much as possible the vibrant hybrid culture that I so enjoyed in your father’s ashram. I have prepared the ground, you see, for the past few years, in the hope that you might come, although what it took to draw you out was the girl Shankara’s death. It might comfort you to know that she fought bravely to the end, and that I spared her pain at the passing. So I bid you, dear brother, to save and keep what I have built—the most prosperous kingdom in the hemisphere, if not the world. This morning at dawn one of my proxies will appear at the jharokha as usual, for the people of the city must see their king daily. I will be well on my way by then, on the north road out of Dilli, once more a traveler on a quest, unhampered by the burdens of the settled life. My heart will be as light as my pack, which contains little besides a device or two of my invention, a few books—and a bagful of rice from the one place that felt like home to me.

  Now you must take my horse to the inn an hour’s journey from the gate, and rest and recover a while. Just before sunset I bid you ride into the city from the Eastern gate on my horse. The smallest child in the city knows that the new king will, like Akbar Khan, take the kingdom without a single weapon, riding in on this very horse, the noble Vikram. I have signed documents stating that none of my offspring will inherit the throne, which is perhaps the main reason they have not killed each other. Apparently the latter is a tradition among the Mughals.

  If you do not wish to be king, simply let my horse return to the city. Sukhwant Singh will know what to do. But I am confident that you, who have always been led by your dharma, will not betray the people who await you.

  Through all my life I have resisted giving my heart to another. It would only be a distraction from my quest, which is to comprehend the mysteries that surround me, and thus to comprehend myself. I have never even told anyone the name I was born with—I have worn names as another man might wear clothes. Yet you, Vishnumitra, took my heart from me without my knowledge or permission. I knew this as I stood over your body. My anger—unused to defiance all these years, and honed by the sutras of the ancient, rageful sage Durvasa, who lived five thousand years—flared up as we dueled. In that moment I would have given up my careful plans to insta
ll you in my place (a wise ruler always has other options prepared)—I would have killed you, my friend, but when I held the hand that had brought me the rice from his mother’s kitchen, I could not do it. So have I learned that my knowledge of myself is far from complete, and this humbles me.

  I do not know if you will forgive me. I will not insult you or those dear to you I killed by asking it of you. But consider this: you have a vast network of practitioners of the prana vidya spread all over the country. This great instrument I have forged as much as you have, by pruning the incompetent or the rash. Use it as you will, for in the days ahead there will be much turmoil. Sher Shah in the North-West shows signs of impatience, there are rumors the Portuguese king is mad, and as the British lose their hold over the South, their envious gaze turns northwards.

  So, dear brother, farewell! I go north to China now, to the next adventure. Only the sky—Ambar!—is my limit! May you and yours find peace.

  Your brother in spirit,

  Upamanyu

  Vishnumitra read this missive three times. The horse whinnied softly, and at last he put the scroll away in his shirt and staggered shakily to his feet. He leaned against the horse’s side and wept for all he had lost, and for all the losses still to come. He thought of the curve of the great river of his home, and the steps of the ghat leading down to the grey water, and the kind-eyed elephants sporting by the shore. He saw in memory the bright saris of his mother and sisters, and the golden walls of the ashram. Then, with great difficulty, he hoisted himself upon the horse, and lay for a moment against his neck, panting. He wiped his tears with his tattered sleeve and turned the horse away from the city toward the inn, to await the sunset of all he had known. Above him the last stars went out in the vast bowl of the sky.

  Peripeteia

  It occurred to Sujata that what she was experiencing was a kind of life-after-living. Veenu’s abrupt and unexplained departure three days ago was a clean dividing line between what she had thought of as her life and the inexplicable state of being that came after. A phase transition as fundamental as that of water boiling in the saucepan, turning to steam, she thought, stirring in the tea leaves. The brown ink spread through the water the way pain seeped through every part of her being. She’d become, in her post-life, a sponge for metaphors, a hammer to which everything was yet another nail in the coffin of that earlier existence. The other day she had found herself wandering disconsolately through the park between frolicking, screaming children, staring at Lost Cat notices on the utility poles, and she’d thought of posting a notice—Lost: The Ground Under My Feet.

  It was getting dark; she left the tea steeping in the pan and turned on the kitchen light. The brightness hurt her eyes. White walls, white counters, the potted coriander on the windowsill, the small dining table piled with sympathy cards. The fridge snored like a polar bear. On a shelf to its left was a little altar from the time Sujata’s mother had visited last year; it held a smiling Buddha and a Nataraja, a somewhat garish print of Lakshmi, and a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet showing an equally garish Christ. Sujata’s mother didn’t really have any basis for believing in God, a fact she would readily admit, but she liked to plan for contingencies. She’d put Jesus up there with the others, as she said, “just in case.” The wall across from the window bore witness to Sujata’s own probabilistic approach to the universe: it was covered almost entirely with sticky notes in yellow, green, and pink, fluttering in the breeze from the window like so many prayer flags. Here, in Sujata’s tiny, neat hand, were maps of possibility, random thoughts, and notes on a variety of subjects that had caught her interest. In the middle there was a large sheet of paper with a graph showing two world-lines, hers in purple, Veenu’s in green, two lines crawling across the white space, more or less parallel, until three days ago when Veenu packed up and left. Since that time the purple line had crawled forward, tentative and alone.

  The latest series of sticky notes was an exercise in possibility. Imagine a phenomenon, and write down all possible explanations and descriptions. Then some time-dependent weighted combination of these was (maybe) an approximation to the ever-changing truth.

  Who or What is Veenu?

  An idea. A beginning and end in one, a snake chasing its tail.

  A lover, a partner, a friend.

  An offspring of the mind’s deepest sigh.

  A neural implant, an AI that enables us to network with others at a thought.

  Defined by my existence, the way Veenu’s existence defines mine.

  A traveler through the whorls and eddies of space and time, whose world-line sometimes intercepts with mine.

  An imaginary friend who didn’t go away when I grew up.

  She picked up the last one, which had fallen off the wall, and stuck it back next to the others.

  “You’re so weird,” Veenu used to say, in an indulgent tone. She approved of eccentricity as a matter of principle, but was the more practical of the two of them. “Why don’t you go back to your paper on the Higgs field?”

  The paper on the Higgs field had been sitting in Sujata’s laptop for three months. The trouble, she had said to Veenu—goodness, was that just a few days ago?—the trouble was that the paper was straightforward and eminently publishable, and therefore not very interesting. She’d rather write a paper entitled “The Higgs Field Considered as a Metaphor for the Entanglement of Matter in Time,” or “Alien Manipulations and the Unfinished Universe.”

  She was sipping the too-bitter tea when the road appeared. As always the apparition came without warning; the only hint of its impending arrival was a dull headache and a slight visual aura. Then the wall, the one with the sticky notes and the graph, began to shimmer and crackle like an old television set between channels. After which there was no wall at all, just the white and dusty road.

  She dropped the cup. Bits of china crunched under her shoes as she walked through where the wall had been, and stood on the road. It smelled vaguely of burning insulation, with a hint of cinnamon.

  She had developed a ritual by now: look to the left, into the past first, a check for accuracy. Yes, there was the misty bulk of the university building where she worked, and the coffee shop where she and Veenu used to hang out most evenings until the impossible happened—and beyond that, a sloping green hill from her undergraduate days, and then the trees she climbed as a child, and the chai shop she frequented in high school. The order was a little muddled, and the images vague and shifting in the mist, but she could recognize each thing.

  She steeled herself to look to the right, toward the future. There was a deafening beat in her ears. Would there be any indication of Veenu’s return?

  On every previous sighting the future had appeared as a turbulent dust haze, a shifting cloud bank, through which vague images were sometimes discernible. On occasion these were visions of the road itself, flowing like a dark river through an unfamiliar green land, branching and bifurcating into the horizon. This she had interpreted as some kind of probability graph, a reassurance that the future was not determined, that she could choose her path. Sometimes other, more mysterious or terrifying silhouettes emerged from the cloud bank—a decrepit house by a river, a figure on a sloping roof, a sadness that was without shape or form, but recognizable as a sharp jab in the ribs, a sudden breathlessness. Once there had been an incongruous white tower like one of the minarets of the Taj, but she had never encountered it in real life, and it had not been there in subsequent sightings of the road. Her hypothesis was that some futures were more likely than others, and that the future with the white minaret had simply been eliminated through the games of chance.

  She closed her eyes before looking. When she opened them, she saw, to her complete astonishment, that the road ended to her right. No mist, no vague shapes, no branching paths into a semi-determined future, but just a clean line where the road abruptly stopped. There was nothing beyond it but a blank wall. She was so astounded by this that she staggered toward the demarcation before remembering that
it was never any use walking on the road, left or right. It was the sort of road where the destination maintained a constant distance from the traveler, no matter how fast or far she walked. She rubbed her eyes and looked again, but nothing had changed. She thought: this means I’m going to die.

  Abruptly she was back in the kitchen. The lower part of her left trouser-leg was cold and wet with tea, and there were bits of china on the floor everywhere. The air was still. The familiarity and emptiness filled her with foreboding. She looked at the wall she had walked through—it was solid again, and a few more of the sticky notes had fallen off.

  There was no sign of impending death. Perhaps it would come tomorrow, or the day after. Or maybe there was another interpretation for that clearly demarcated finish line. Something had ended. But what, exactly?

  She stayed up half the night, sipping tea and munching on dry crackers, thinking about Veenu and waiting for death. When death refused to oblige, she went to bed.

  Next evening, after a day at work in which she felt as though she were swimming upstream through a bewilderingly swift river, Sujata returned to the house, exhausted.

  There were more cards in the mailbox. She picked them up and threw them on the dining table in the kitchen. The house was silent as a tomb, except for the refrigerator’s constant purr. She stood in the dark by the window. The neighborhood was quiet, lights on behind curtained windows. There wasn’t a soul in sight. The neat lawns and fenced backyards of suburban America—every house a prison unto itself. Her reverie was disturbed by the cards falling off the table. A fury took hold of her then—she picked up a mass of cards in her hands and threw them up into the air. They were all around her like a pack of predatory birds. She was finally going insane, or so it seemed; the cards flapped away at her, calling out what was written in them in high-pitched voices. Thinking of you, wishing you strength for this difficult time. Theater tickets. People trying to be kind, without actually getting involved, people trying to mask their shock at the unthinkable: Veenu leaving, without warning, without a word! As though what had happened to Sujata was something shameful, something that might infect their own blessedly ordinary lives or threaten the security of their relationships. She batted at the cards, tearing them from the air, tearing them into little bits. At last the cards fell silent, lying torn and tattered on the floor, and she knelt down, sobbing like a child, pleading with the universe for some kind of explanation. The universe, not being obliged to reply, remained silent.