The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Now there is a new race jostling for space in their city: the aeais. If the djinni are the creation of fire and men of clay, these are the creation of word. Fifty million of them swarm Delhi’s boulevards and chowks: routing traffic, trading shares, maintaining power and water, answering inquiries, telling fortunes, managing calendars and diaries, handling routine legal and medical matters, performing in soap operas, sifting the septillion pieces of information streaming through Delhi’s nervous system each second. The city is a great mantra. From routers and maintenance robots with little more than animal intelligence (each animal has intelligence enough: ask the eagle or the tiger) to the great Level 2.9s that are indistinguishable from a human being 99.99 percent of the time, they are a young race, an energetic race, fresh to this world and enthusiastic, understanding little of their power.

  The djinns watch in dismay from their rooftops and minarets: that such powerful creatures of living word should so blindly serve the clay creation, but mostly because, unlike humans, they can foresee the time when the aeais will drive them from their ancient, beloved city and take their places.

  * * * *

  This durbar, Neeta and Priya’s theme is Town and Country: the Bharati mega-soap that has perversely become fashionable as public sentiment in Awadh turns against Bharat. Well, we will just bloody well build our dam, tanks or no tanks; they can beg for it, it’s our water now, and, in the same breath, what do you think about Ved Prakash, isn’t it scandalous what that Ritu Parvaaz is up to? Once they derided it and its viewers but now that it’s improper, now that it’s unpatriotic, they can’t get enough of Anita Mahapatra and the Begum Vora. Some still refuse to watch but pay for daily plot digests so they can appear fashionably informed at social musts like Neeta and Priya’s dating durbars.

  And it’s a grand durbar; the last before the monsoon--if it actually happens this year. Neeta and Priya have hired top bhati-boys to provide a wash of mixes beamed straight into the guests’ ‘hoeks. There’s even a climate control field, laboring at the limits of its containment to hold back the night heat. Esha can feel its ultrasonics as a dull buzz against her molars.

  “Personally, I think sweat becomes you,” says A.J. Rao, reading Esha’s vital signs through her palmer. Invisible to all but Esha, he moves beside her like death through the press of Town and Countrified guests. By tradition the last durbar of the season is a masked ball. In modern, middle-class Delhi that means everyone wears the computer-generated semblance of a soap character. In the flesh they are the socially mobile, dressed in smart-but-cool hot season modes, but, in the mind’s eye, they are Aparna Chawla and Ajay Nadiadwala, dashing Govind and conniving Dr. Chatterji. There are three Ved Prakashes and as many Lal Darfans--the aeai actor that plays Ved Prakash in the machine-made soap. Even the grounds of Neeta’s fiancé’s suburban bungalow have been enchanted into Brahmpur, the fictional Town where Town and Country takes place, where the actors that play the characters believe they live out their lives of celebrity tittle-tattle. When Neeta and Priya judge that everyone has mingled and networked enough, the word will be given and everyone will switch off their glittering disguises and return to being wholesalers and lunch vendors and software rajahs. Then the serious stuff begins, the matter of finding a bride. For now Esha can enjoy wandering anonymous in company of her friendly djinn.

  She has been wandering much these weeks, through heat streets to ancient places, seeing her city fresh through the eyes of a creature that lives across many spaces and times. At the Sikh gurdwara she saw Tegh Bahadur, the Ninth Guru, beheaded by fundamentalist Aurangzeb’s guards. The gyring traffic around Vijay Chowk melted into the Bentley cavalcade of Mountbatten, the Last Viceroy, as he forever quit Lutyen’s stupendous palace. The tourist clutter and shoving curio vendors around the Qutb Minar turned to ghosts and it was 1193 and the muezzins of the first Mughal conquerors sang out the adhaan. Illusions. Little lies. But it is all right, when it is done in love. Everything is all right in love. Can you read my mind? she asked as she moved with her invisible guide through the thronging streets, that every day grew less raucous, less substantial. Do you know what I am thinking about you, Aeai Rao? Little by little, she slips away from the human world into the city of the djinns.

  Sensation at the gate. The male stars of Town and Country buzz around a woman in an ivory sequined dress. It’s a bit damn clever: she’s come as Yana Mitra, freshest fittest fastest boli sing-star. And boli girlis, like Kathak dancers, are still meat and ego, though Yana, like every Item-singer, has had her computer avatar guest on T’n’C.

  A.J. Rao laughs. “If they only knew. Very clever. What better disguise than to go as yourself. It really is Yana Mitra. Esha Rathore, what’s the matter, where are you going?”

  Why do you have to ask don’t you know everything then you know it’s hot and noisy and the ultrasonics are doing my head and the yap yap yap is going right through me and they’re all only after one thing, are you married are you engaged are you looking and I wish I hadn’t come I wish I’d just gone out somewhere with you and that dark corner under the gulmohar bushes by the bhati-rig looks the place to get away from all the stupid stupid people.

  Neeta and Priya, who know her disguise, shout over, “So Esha, are we finally going to meet that man of yours?”

  He’s already waiting for her among the golden blossoms. Djinns travel at the speed of thought.

  “What is it what’s the matter...?”

  She whispers, “You know sometimes I wish, I really wish you could get me a drink.”

  “Why certainly, I will summon a waiter.”

  “No!” Too loud. Can’t be seen talking to the bushes. “No; I mean, hand me one. Just hand me one.” But he cannot, and never will. She says, “I started when I was five, did you know that? Oh, you probably did, you know everything about me. But I bet you didn’t know how it happened: I was playing with the other girls, dancing round the tank, when this old woman from the gharana went up to my mother and said, I will give you a hundred thousand rupees if you give her to me. I will turn her into a dancer; maybe, if she applies herself, a dancer famous through all of India. And my mother said, why her? And do you know what that woman said? Because she shows rudimentary talent for movement, but, mostly, because you are willing to sell her to me for one lakh rupees. She took the money there and then, my mother. The old woman took me to the gharana. She had once been a great dancer but she got rheumatism and couldn’t move and that made her bad. She used to beat me with lathis, I had to be up before dawn to get everyone chai and eggs. She would make me practice until my feet bled. They would hold up my arms in slings to perform the mudras until I couldn’t put them down again without screaming. I never once got home--and do you know something? I never once wanted to. And despite her, I applied myself, and I became a great dancer. And do you know what? No one cares. I spent seventeen years mastering something no one cares about. But bring in some boli girl who’s been around five minutes to flash her teeth and tits....”

  “Jealous?” asks A.J. Rao, mildly scolding.

  “Don’t I deserve to be?”

  Then bhati-boy One blinks up “You Are My Soniya” on his palmer and that’s the signal to demask. Yane Mitra claps her hands in delight and sings along as all around her glimmering soapi stars dissolve into mundane accountants and engineers and cosmetic nano-surgeons and the pink walls and roof gardens and thousand thousands stars of Old Brahmpur melt and run down the sky.

  It’s seeing them, exposed in their naked need, melting like that soap-world before the sun of celebrity, that calls back the madness Esha knows from her childhood in the gharana. The brooch makes a piercing, ringing chime against the cocktail glass she has snatched from a waiter. She climbs up on to a table. At last, that boli bitch shuts up. All eyes are on her.

  “Ladies, but mostly gentlemen, I have an announcement to make.” Even the city behind the sound-curtain seems to be holding its breath. “I am engaged to be married!” Gasps. Oohs. Polite applause who is she, is
she on tivi, isn’t she something arty? Neeta and Priya are wide-eyed at the back. “I’m very very lucky because my husband-to-be is here tonight. In fact, he’s been with me all evening. Oh, silly me. Of course, I forgot, not all of you can see him. Darling, would you mind? Gentlemen and ladies, would you mind slipping on your hoeks for just a moment. I’m sure you don’t need any introduction to my wonderful wonderful fiancé, A.J. Rao.”

  And she knows from the eyes, the mouths, the low murmur that threatens to break into applause, then fails, then is taken up by Neeta and Priya to turn into a decorous ovation, that they can all see Rao as tall and elegant and handsome as she sees him, at her side, hand draped over hers.

  She can’t see that boli girl anywhere.

  * * * *

  He’s been quiet all the way back in the phatphat. He’s quiet now, in the house. They’re alone. Neeta and Priya should have been home hours ago, but Esha knows they’re scared of her.

  “You’re very quiet.” This, to the coil of cigarette smoke rising up toward the ceiling fan as she lies on her bed. She’d love a bidi; a good, dirty street smoke for once, not some Big Name Western brand.

  “We were followed as we drove back after the party. An aeai aircraft surveilled your phatphat. A network analysis aeai system sniffed at my router net to try to track this com channel. I know for certain street cameras were tasked on us. The Krishna Cop who lifted you after the Red Fort durbar was at the end of the street. He is not very good at subterfuge.”

  Esha goes to the window to spy out the Krishna Cop, call him out, demand of him what he thinks he’s doing?

  “He’s long gone,” says Rao. “They have been keeping you under light surveillance for some time now. I would imagine your announcement has upped your level.”

  “They were there?”

  “As I said...”

  “Light surveillance.”

  It’s scary but exciting, down in the deep muladharachakra, a red throb above her yoni. Scarysexy. That same lift of red madness that made her blurt out that marriage announcement. It’s all going so far, so fast. No way to get off now.

  “You never gave me the chance to answer,” says aeai Rao.

  Can you read my mind? Esha thinks at the palmer.

  “No, but I share some operating protocols with scripting aeais for Town and Country--in a sense they are a low-order part of me--they have become quite good predictors of human behavior.”

  “I’m a soap opera.”

  Then she falls back onto the bed and laughs and laughs and laughs until she feels sick, until she doesn’t want to laugh any more and every guffaw is a choke, a lie, spat up at the spy machines up there, beyond the lazy fan that merely stirs the heat, turning on the huge thermals that spire up from Delhi’s colossal heat-island, a conspiracy of djinns.

  “Esha,” A.J. Rao says, closer than he has ever seemed before. “Lie still.” She forms the question why? And hears the corresponding whisper inside her head hush, don’t speak. In the same instant the chakra glow bursts like a yolk and leaks heat into her yoni. Oh, she says, oh! Her clitoris is singing to her. Oh oh oh oh. “How...?” Again, the voice, huge inside her head, inside every part of her sssshhhhh. Building building she needs to do something, she needs to move needs to rub against the day-warmed scented wood of the big bed, needs to get her hand down there hard hard hard...

  “No, don’t touch,” chides A.J. Rao and now she can’t even move she needs to explode she has to explode her skull can’t contain this her dancer’s muscles are pulled tight as wires she can’t take much more no no no yes yes yes she’s shrieking now tiny little shrieks beating her fists off the bed but it’s just spasm, nothing will obey her and then it’s explosion bam, and another one before that one has even faded, huge slow explosions across the sky and she’s cursing and blessing every god in India. Ebbing now, but still shock after shock, one on top of the other. Ebbing now ... Ebbing.

  “Ooh. Oh. What? Oh wow, how?”

  “The machine you wear behind your ear can reach deeper than words and visions,” says A.J. Rao. “So, are you answered?”

  “What?” The bed is drenched in sweat. She’s sticky dirty needs to wash, change clothes, move but the afterglows are still fading. Beautiful beautiful colors.

  “The question you never gave me the chance to answer. Yes. I will marry you.”

  * * * *

  “Stupid vain girl, you don’t even know what caste he is.”

  Mata Madhuri smokes eighty a day through a plastic tube hooked from the respirator unit into a grommet in her throat. She burns through them three at a time: bloody machine scrubs all the good out of them, she says. Last bloody pleasure I have. She used to bribe the nurses but they bring her them free now, out of fear of her temper that grows increasingly vile as her body surrenders more and more to the machines.

  Without pause for Esha’s reply, a flick of her whim whips the life-support chair round and out into the garden.

  “Can’t smoke in there, no fresh air.”

  Esha follows her out on to the raked gravel of the formal charbagh.

  “No one marries in caste any more.”

  “Don’t be smart, stupid girl. It’s like marrying a Muslim, or even a Christian, Lord Krishna protect me. You know fine what I mean. Not a real person.”

  “There are girls younger than me marry trees, or even dogs.”

  “So bloody clever. That’s up in some god-awful shithole like Bihar or Rajputana, and anyway, those are gods. Any fool knows that. Ach, away with you!” The old, destroyed woman curses as the chair’s aeai deploys its parasol. “Sun sun, I need sun, I’ll be burning soon enough, sandalwood, you hear? You burn me on a sandalwood pyre. I’ll know if you stint.”

  Madhuri the old crippled dance teacher always uses this tactic to kill a conversation with which she is uncomfortable. When I’m gone ... Burn me sweetly...

  “And what can a god do that A.J. Rao can’t?”

  “Ai! You ungrateful, blaspheming child. I’m not hearing this la la la la la la la la have you finished yet?”

  Once a week Esha comes to the nursing home to visit this ruin of a woman, wrecked by the demands a dancer makes of a human body. She’s explored guilt need rage resentment anger pleasure at watching her collapse into long death as the motives that keep her turning up the drive in a phatphat and there is only one she believes. She’s the only mother she has.

  “If you marry that ... thing ... you will be making a mistake that will destroy your life,” Madhuri declares, accelerating down the path between the water channels.

  “I don’t need your permission,” Esha calls after her. A thought spins Madhuri’s chair on its axis.

  “Oh, really? That would be a first for you. You want my blessing. Well, you won’t have it. I refuse to be party to such nonsense.”

  “I will marry A.J. Rao”

  “What did you say?”

  “I. Will. Marry. Aeai. A.J. Rao.”

  Madhuri laughs, a dry, dying, spitting sound, full of bidi-smoke.

  “Well, you almost surprise me. Defiance. Good, some spirit at last. That was always your problem, you always needed everyone to approve, everyone to give you permission, everyone to love you. And that’s what stopped you being great, do you know that, girl? You could have been a devi, but you always held back for fear that someone might not approve. And so you were only ever ... good.”

  People are looking now, staff, visitors. Patients. Raised voices, unseemly emotions. This is a house of calm, and slow mechanized dying. Esha bends low to whisper to her mentor.

  “I want you to know that I dance for him. Every night. Like Radha for Krishna. I dance just for him, and then he comes and makes love to me. He makes me scream and swear like a hooker. Every night. And look!” He doesn’t need to call any more; he is hardwired into the hoek she now hardly ever takes off. Esha looks up: he is there, standing in a sober black suit among the strolling visitors and droning wheelchairs, hands folded. “There he is, see? My lover, my husband.�
��

  A long, keening screech, like feedback, like a machine dying. Madhuri’s withered hands fly to her face. Her breathing tube curdles with tobacco smoke.

  “Monster! Monster! Unnatural child, ah, I should have left you in that basti! Away from me away away away!”

  Esha retreats from the old woman’s mad fury as hospital staff come hurrying across the scorched lawns, white saris flapping.

  * * * *

  Every fairytale must have a wedding.

  Of course, it was the event of the season. The decrepit old Shalimar Gardens were transformed by an army of malis into a sweet, green, watered maharajah’s fantasia with elephants, pavilions, musicians, lancers, dancers, filmi stars, and robot bartenders. Neeta and Priya were uncomfortable bridesmaids in fabulous frocks; a great brahmin was employed to bless the union of woman and artificial intelligence. Every television network sent cameras, human or aeai. Gleaming presenters checked the guests in andchecked the guests out. Chati mag paparazzi came in their crowds, wondering what they could turn their cameras on. There were even politicians from Bharat, despite the souring relationships between the two neighbors now Awadh constructors were scooping up the Ganga sands into revetments. But most there were the people of the encroaching bastis, jostling up against the security staff lining the paths of their garden, asking, she’s marrying a what? How does that work? Can they, you know? And what about children? Who is she, actually? Can you see anything? I can’t see anything. Is there anything to see?