Ambiguity Machines

by Vandana Singh

  Mechanically Avinash held out the box to Lalita. She took the feather out breathlessly.

  “Give me the flashlight for a moment. I want to see . . .”

  But something was happening. Lalita looked up in alarm; a mist was coming up around her. Felipe felt the change in the air, moved instinctively toward her, but he could not part the mist. Within it she was getting less and less visible—her arms, her clothes, made great sweeping motions. The alarm in her eyes changed swiftly to surprise. Then he couldn’t see her anymore. He couldn’t move into the mist to reach her. His body appeared to have become heavy and sluggish, his arm going up and toward her with so much effort that it took his breath away. The next thing he knew: a large, heavy bird, awkwardly flapping its wings, was making its way out of the mist . . . out of the doorway, into the courtyard. The three of them ran after it. Silently it flew, with increasing strength and grace, making its way to the queen’s balcony. Felipe was hardly aware of their mad rush up the stairs. He arrived, panting, in the little museum with Avinash and Raju. There was the bird perched on the balcony’s stone railing.

  It seemed to Felipe that in the jewel-like eye of the kharchal was the same humor, the same sadness he had known in Lalita’s eyes. Before he could speak there was a terrible cry from Avinash.

  “Don’t leave me!”

  Avinash looked all around him, like a blind man.

  “Where are you? You can’t leave me after all this! Come back!”

  The bird prepared to launch itself as Avinash’s tortured gaze finally settled on it. With a terrible shout he lunged toward the bird. But before his hands could close on the bird, Raju had moved, swift and efficient, and pinned Avinash’s arms to his side.

  “Boss, boss, let her go!”

  Felipe felt it, then, a presence barely tangible, like spider thread brushing across one’s face in the dark. A presence in the room, diminishing swiftly, a wave departing. No, not a departure, a dissipation. There was a feeling of sadness, of completion. The bird flew free. She flew low over the hotel ramparts, a blurry silhouette against the dusty old moon, and then she was gone.

  “You stupid boy! What have you done?” Avinash thrashed in the boy’s grip. Felipe grabbed a flailing arm.

  “Calm down!” Felipe said, holding his grief and wonder at bay with an enormous effort. “What is the matter with you?”

  “She’s gone! The queen!” His sobs ceased. He looked around him, searching, unbelieving. “I thought she would go with the bird, but she . . . she’s dead. The bitch! To die after all this! To leave me empty! All empty!”

  He sobbed out his story. “I am Avinash, and I am nothing, with a mustard seed for a soul. She said she would unleash the power inside me, so I could fill up. She left me . . . they left me. Five years old on the railways station because they wanted to save my brothers and there wasn’t enough food.”

  Through the sobs and the garbled words, Felipe saw in his mind’s eye the railway station, heard the noise, the terror of strangers, the vastness, the scale of the world. Saw that this had been the boy’s nightmare through all his life. Not the orphanage, not his education, nothing had taken away the pain . . . until she had come, the queen of Chattanpur, and filled the echoing emptiness inside him. Now she, too, was gone, gone to the death she had been awaiting for six hundred years.

  With one long cry of agony Avinash flung aside the restraining arms of the others and leapt toward the balcony. Their rush toward him, their shouts, were all too late. In a moment he was over the edge, limbs working wildly, and then he dropped. They heard the impact on the stone floor of the courtyard far below.

  There was nothing to be done for him. When they got to the body there was blood pooling under his head, and the stillness of death was on him. Raju muttered something under his breath, and straightening abruptly, began to run. Felipe followed him through the dusty passageways, through a door, half falling down an unexpected spiral staircase into a room where a laptop screen glowed upon a table. The screen saver showed falling leaves, and birds flying. Raju looked about him wildly. He loosened one of the mosquito net’s support rods and brought it down on the computer. Sparks flew; there was a burning smell in the air. The boy wouldn’t stop until Felipe took the rod gently from him. Then Raju began to weep.

  “I loved him, the fool!”

  Abruptly a great roaring filled their ears: the storm. They were suddenly back in the flow of time. Above them, in the rooms and courtyards, people screamed. The poet and the errand boy looked at each other, ran up the staircase into the open. There was complete confusion: people running, tables turning over. The emergency klaxon was blaring and a booming voice attempting to direct traffic. Some lights went on as the backup generator began to run.

  Felipe had never known such a night. The storm broke upon them in a fury. He and Raju worked to bring people to safety, to help close and tape windows, to fill up cracks in doorways. Their hands bled, their eyes stung. At last they huddled in Felipe’s room, wrapped in shawls and blankets, handkerchiefs around their faces, to wait it out. Felipe couldn’t stop coughing. Tears ran down his cheeks as he sipped water. Between coughs, he thought he heard the cries of the kharchal, the cry of the desert itself. His soul called back, again and again, soundlessly.

  In the mid-day the storm subsided. They had lost two more people, and there were several injuries. Raju threw himself into the work, running for medical supplies, helping with the dead. But he would not touch Avinash.

  Felipe’s throat was so sore by mid-day that he could not speak. He was coughing blood. He packed up and went to the van that was taking the injured to hospital. He whispered good-bye to Raju as the boy stood under the great archway of the entrance. “Be careful, sar,” Raju said. “Queen’s gone to her death, but Boss . . . that old bastard, he didn’t die right. Came to me in a dream, begging for asylum. Maybe it was just a dream, but maybe when the death’s not right you can’t go away. Like the queen. In the dream I told him I was having none of it. Told him to get lost.” The boy’s eyes filled with tears. He said, inconsequentially, “He taught me how to read and write. On the computer.” Felipe put his arms around the boy, surprising him, and whispered good-bye. From the van he waved. Raju was dirty, disheveled, scraped and bleeding in half a dozen places, but he stood tall. I will remember you, Felipe thought: Raju, errand boy, goatherd, possible descendant of kings.

  It was after a few days of tests that the bad news came. The doctors did not think Felipe would get his voice back. There was too much damage to the larynx. When they told him this, he had been doodling on a prescription pad in the waiting room. He stared at their sympathetic faces. All he could do was whisper. He got up, shouldered his bag, and staggered out. He went into the bright sun, the mad traffic of Jaipur, and began to walk swiftly toward nowhere. For a week or more, he lost himself in the city, in its markets and pink palaces, its gardens and residential areas. The days paraded before him like the faces of strangers.

  Then one afternoon he found himself outside the railway station. Horns blaring, bells ringing, shouting voices, auto-rickshaws and taxis and cars everywhere, and a surge of humanity going this way and that. A small boy cannoned into him, looked up at the stranger with the long hair and burning eyes, and burst into tears. “Mamma!” he wailed. A terrible, irrational fear that was not his own gripped Felipe. But here was the mother, barreling through the crowds like a battleship, grabbing the child. She gave Felipe a backward look full of suspicion as the two vanished into the crowd.

  The spell broke. Felipe rubbed his eyes.

  “You’re here, aren’t you?” Felipe said into the air. “Avinash?” There was a sigh in his mind, a plea. Felipe didn’t respond. He walked around the corner of the road, raising dust with every step, weaving his way through the traffic, until he found himself in a small park with a fountain, where he bought an ice-cream cone from a man with a cart. He stood contemplating the water cascading into the pool of the fountain. Small children were throwing pebbles, watching the
ripples.

  So it is with our lives, Felipe thought. Each life like a ripple, spreading out, changing as it met other ripples, other lives. Some circles die away quickly, others expand into larger circles. A minor character in one story becomes the lead in another. We are all actors on shifting stages. We contain one another.

  I should throw you out, like Raju did—you could have killed Lalita.

  So what shall I do with you?

  The presence in his mind was barely tangible, as though Avinash had cried himself to sleep. Who knew where he would go, what mischief he would cause, if Felipe rejected him? There must be a way to release you, to bring you the peace you need, he said after a while. There was no answer.

  I suppose we are all haunted, he thought, with sudden insight. All humans carry with them unacknowledged ghosts. He thought of his mother. His uncle. The poet, Jaime Saenz, whom he had never met. Little Carmelita. Pedro. The crowded two-room tenement where he had grown up. He heard his uncle say: Hell, what’s one more?

  Felipe sighed in resignation. Well, stay with me awhile then.

  But you’ll have to behave yourself, he added.

  There was a long, answering sigh in his mind like a child turning over in sleep.

  He pushed his hands into his pockets, ready to leave the park, when he found the prescription pad from the hospital. His doodles were all drawings of kharchal. He thought he heard again that reverberating cry.

  At once he knew what he had to do. He began running through the streets toward the bus station. He had to get on the next bus to Jaisalmer, get out there in the open desert, find Lalita. He would be whisperer, interpreter between the kharchal and the human race. She held the key, the secret, the question for which his life was the answer. As for the boy Avinash, his story was as yet incomplete. Perhaps it was only in the largeness, the emptiness of the desert that the abandoned child would find his courage, his peace. Felipe found his way from the ticket line to the bus. “I’m taking you home,” he said to Avinash in his mind, not realizing he had whispered aloud. He didn’t know why he’d said that, but it felt right. The old man next to him looked at him in surprise. Felipe whispered, “Do you hear it? Do you hear it too? The cry of the kharchal? Cry for the kharchal, my brother.” He remembered abruptly the night in Madrid, the sirocco howling outside, the stirring within him, an animal waking from sleep, stretching, telling him he was not merely human. He remembered his fright at that discovery, his pushing it away into oblivion. Might as well put a lid on a sandstorm. Now he felt as though some barrier within him was dissolving, something was freeing itself. Without warning, words began to swirl in his mind. Sitting in the bus he found himself afraid they would disappear if he didn’t set them down now. He pulled out the prescription pad, found a pen, and began to write.

  Wake-Rider

  This is a story from the time before she was famous. In the early days she was known as Leli, or Lelia, a tease-name that had stuck. On her first mission for the revolution, she sat cramped, fists clenched with tension, waiting in the tiny scabship Tinka, out of sight in a radar deadzone. The salvage ship Gathering Moss, which she was stalking, lay like a giant, rusting silver slug in the docking bay. Everywhere the signs and slogans of the Euphoria Corpocracy flashed, in color and in subliminal space—on the ship itself, on the docking arms, on the walls of the great spaceport behind her, and within the minds of the subject population. Euphoria is Freedom, Better Life Through Euphoria, Rent-A-Share with Fora-ware, Subliminal is Sublime. Leli had checked three times that her protection against the nanoplague was current and sufficient, but the utter ubiquity of Euphoria was getting to her. It seemed absurd to even consider overcoming such a power. She pulled herself together, thinking of how much so many had lost, and what was at stake. My first solo mission, she told herself fiercely. I can’t fall apart just now. She wiped a drop of sweat from her brow.

  “You need to breathe,” said Shul’s voice in her ear. Shul had rescued her, trained her, and now he was somewhere on the space-station, monitoring her via a clandestine comm channel, reassuring his youngest trainee. “You’ve stalked salvagers before, remember? You’re one of the best wake-riders I’ve seen. Only, this time you’re alone. Don’t think of what’s at stake. Just breathe and be still. You’ll know when the time is right.”

  So she listened to the familiar voice, and took deep, slow breaths, and her mind eased into the now-familiar state of relaxed alertness. Shul’s voice faded away, and there was only the salvage ship before her, enormous against the stars.

  The ship was getting readied to leave—the repair and maintenance arms were retracting, the hatches on the ship closing one by one, like eyes. She saw the scuttlebots roving over the battered surface, seeking out scabships that might be hiding. Finding none, they rose up into a swarm, forming, for a moment, the word “Euphoria,” before they soared away. Before the use of scuttlebots became customary, stalking a salvage ship had been easy—a scabship would simply have attached itself to the hull and ridden along. Now, the only option for the scabships, with their relatively weak engine power, was the far more dangerous maneuver of wake-riding.

  The ship thrust away in a glory of terrible ionizing radiation that would have destroyed anything in its wake. Leli moved just out of range of the radiation field, pushing her engines to keep up. Gathering Moss was about to move into Metaspace—the acceleration lights flashed from her hull, the radiation field dimmed and disappeared, and Leli’s ship, swinging to the rear of the salvager, shuddered as streamers of spacetime ripples formed in the wake.

  At first the ripples pushed the little scabship farther back, but Leli knew how to play them. You had to get a sense of the frequency of vibration of the spacetime disturbance, wait for sufficient amplitude, position carefully, and let the disturbance hit you. She eased into the rhythm of it until it was as natural as breathing. Jumping from crest to crest on the shipside of each crest, she found herself following the salvage ship at a good pace. When they both reached the critical cruising speed, she shut off her engines, letting inertia do its job. Her ship’s grapplers engaged with the great bulk of the salvager for the few subjective seconds it took to engage the Firaaqui drive. Then she was being pulled through Metaspace.

  The two ships emerged together into the Sarria region with an abruptness that no longer surprised her. The Tinka’s grapplers retracted immediately and she pulled away. Her jinn piped data into Leli’s headset: there was only one inhabitable planet in the system, four light-years away, now abandoned. Euphoria had been here two decades ago, infecting eighty-seven percent of the population with the nanoplague that left them docile and welcoming, their minds locked in massively parallel calculations for the shareholders of the corpocracy, while they spent their lives buying and consuming the innumerable Euphoria products. A failed revolution wrought by those who had escaped the plague had earned the Sarrian world a total cleansing, and now there was nothing in this sector but empty space, and the remains of dreams.

  Now that they were out in normal space again, Leli had to keep in the radio shadow of the salvage ship. The ship had slowed—she set her controls to match velocity, every sense alert. Whatever they were salvaging must be here, not on the planet itself. A dead ship, then.

  There was a derelict, suddenly pricking out from the dense backdrop of stars, lit faintly by hull lights. A generation ship by the looks of it (old model, “class four,” her jinn told her), drifting dead in space. Euphoria had no use for such things, so why was the ship here, four light-years away from the planet? Given that it was a generation ship, perhaps there was still someone left alive . . .

  There was only one way to know. Gathering Moss was vectoring toward the docking port of the derelict. Leli moved swiftly away to the opposite side of the generation ship’s vast bulk, looking for an airlock hatch. Cruising over the surface of the great ship, she saw mysterious painted letters and symbols, a forest of vents and turrets, a few instrument hatches, and there, finally, was an entry point. She brought
the scabship gently to the surface, engaging magnetic anchors so that it sat atop the great dead ship like a fat tick. She got into her nanoplasteen suit. By the time she was outside, her jinn had cracked the ancient code that would open the airlock. The salvage ship on the other side of the derelict would have completed docking. Afloat, one hand on the great hull, she felt the shudder of contact. She looked around at the stars above and below her, the unending depth and distance in all directions, and took a deep breath. She would never get bored with the view.

  Now her suit had completed the nanoplague protection sequence, and her jinn was whispering “go!” in her ear; it was time to get to work. She pulled herself into the short passageway of the airlock closing the outer door behind her. In the illumination from her suit-lights she tackled the inner door. Her heart was thudding in her chest so loudly that it was deafening. She made herself pause, took a few more deep breaths, and slipped into the derelict.

  There was clearly multiple system failure here, because it was dark and claustrophobic, although she could sense a dim light ahead, possibly woken by her presence. The artificial-gravity drive was damaged or disengaged. Her jinn told her that the air exceeded normal pressure and was a noxious mixture—too much carbon dioxide and methane. There was very little chance that anyone was alive. No doubt the salvage crew at the other end of the ship was coming to the same conclusion. Leli breathed a sigh of relief, because this meant that there would be no new slaves for the taking. Her job now was to take whatever useful material she could find, perhaps in more than one trip, and get back to her ship. If her luck held, she would not be discovered, and she could wake-ride back with Gathering Moss.

  But why was the ship here in the first place? The most likely hypothesis, her jinn said, was that it had been appropriated by the Sarrian revolutionaries trying to escape when Euphoria threatened the planet with a cleansing. Class-four generation ships were already outdated when the corpocracy came to power. The revolutionaries, if this was indeed their ship, had clearly met with an unfortunate fate. Cascade ecosystem failure was the most common cause for the death of a class-four ship.