by Ian McDonald
‘Everyone is allowed. Come on, let’s get a boat.’
A boat. People didn’t do things like that but here they were settling on the seat as the boatman pushed out, a kid not that much older than Kyle himself with teeth that would never be allowed inside Cantonment yet Kyle felt jealous of him, with his boat and his river and the people all around and a life without laws or needs or duties. He sculled them through floating butter-candles - diyas, Salim explained to Kyle - past the ghat of the sadhus, all bare-ass naked and skinny as famine, and the ghat where people beat their clothes against rock washing-platforms and the ghat where the pilgrims landed, pushing each other into the water in their eagerness to touch the holy ground of Varanasi, and the ghat of the buffalos - where where? Kyle asked and Salim pointed out their nostrils and black, black-curved horns just sticking up out of the water. Kyle trailed his hand in the water and when he pulled it in it was covered in golden flower peals. He lay back on the seat and watched the marble steps flow past, and beyond them the crumbling, mould-stained waterfront buildings and beyond them the tops of the highest towers of New Varanasi and beyond them the yellow clouds, and he knew that even when he was a very old man, maybe forty or even more, he would always remember this day and the colour of this light and the sound of the water against the hull.
‘You got to see this!’ Salim shouted. The boat was heading in to shore now through the tourists and the souvenir-boats and a slick of floating flower garlands. Fires burned on the steps, the marble was blackened with trodden ashes, half-burned wood lapped at the water’s edge. There were other things among the coals: burned bones. Men stood thigh deep in the water, panning it with wide wicker baskets.
‘They’re Doms, they run the burning ghats. They’re actually untouchable but they’re very rich and powerful because they’re the only ones who can handle the funerals,’ said Salim. ‘They’re sifting the ashes for gold.’
The burning ghats. The dead place. These fires, these piles of wood and ash, were dead people, Kyle thought. This water beneath the boat was full of dead people. A funeral procession descended the steps to the river. The bearers pushed the stretcher out into the water, a man with a red cord around his shoulder poured water over the white shroud. He was very thorough and methodical about it, he gave the dead body a good washing. The river-boy touched his oars, holding his boat in position. The bearers took the body up to a big bed of wood and set the whole thing on top. A very thin man in a white robe and with a head so freshly shaved it looked pale and sick piled wood on top of it.
‘That’s the oldest son,’ Salim said. ‘It’s his job. These are rich people. It’s real expensive to get a proper pyre. Most people use the electric ovens. Of course, we get properly buried like you do.’
It was all very quick and casual. The man in white poured oil over the wood and the body, picked up a piece of lit wood and almost carelessly touched it to the side. The flame guttered in the river wind, almost went out, then smoke rose up and out of the smoke, flame. Kyle watched the fire take hold. The people stood back, no one seemed very concerned, even when the pile of burning wood collapsed and a man’s head and shoulders lolled out of the fire.
That is a burning man, Kyle thought. He had to tell himself that. It was hard to believe, all of it was hard to believe; there was nothing that connected to any part of his world, his life. It was fascinating, it was like a wildlife show on the sat; he was close enough to smell the burning flesh but it was too strange, too alien. It did not touch him. He could not believe. Kyle thought, This is the first time Salim has seen this too. But it was very very cool.
A sudden crack, a pop a little louder than the gunfire Kyle heard in the streets every day, but not much.
‘That is the man’s skull bursting,’ Salim said. ‘It’s supposed to mean his spirit is free.’
Then a noise that had been in the back of Kyle’s head moved to the front of his perception: engines, aircraft engines. Tilt-jet engines. Loud, louder than he had ever heard them before, even when he watched them lifting off from the field in Cantonment. The mourners were staring, the Doms turned from their ash-panning to stare too. The boat-boy stopped rowing; his eyes were round. Kyle turned in his seat and saw something wonderful and terrible and strange: a tilt-jet in Coalition markings, moving across the river towards him, yes him, so low, so slow, it was as if it were tiptoeing over the water. For a moment he saw himself, toes scraping the stormy waters of Alterre. River-traffic fled from it, its down-turned engines sent flaws of white across the green water. The boat-boy scrabbled for his oars to get away but there was now a second roar from the ghats. Kyle turned back to see Coalition troopers in full combat armour and visors pouring down the marble steps, pushing mourners out of their way, scattering wood and bones and ash. Mourners and Doms shouted their outrage; fists were raised; the soldiers lifted their weapons in answer. The boat-boy looked around him in terror as the thunder of the jet engines grew louder and louder until Kyle felt it become part of him and when he looked round he saw the big machine, morphing between city and river camouflage, turn, unfold landing gear and settle into the water. The boat rocked violently, Kyle would have been over the side had not Salim hauled him back. Jet-wash blew human ash along the ghats. A single oar floated lost down the stream. The tilt-jet stood knee-deep in the shallow water. It unfolded its rear ramp. Helmets. Guns. Between them, a face Kyle recognised, his dad, shouting wordlessly through the engine roar. The soldiers on the shore were shouting, the people were shouting, everything was shout shout roar. Kyle’s dad beckoned, to me to me. Shivering with fear, the boat-boy stood up, thrust his sole remaining oar into the water like a punt pole and pushed toward the ramp. Gloved hands seized him, dragged him out of the rocking boat up the ramp. Everyone was shouting, shouting. Now the soldiers on the shore were beckoning to the boat-boy and Salim, this way this way, the thing is going to take off, get out of there.
His dad buckled Kyle into the seat as the engine roar peaked again. He felt the world turn, then the river was dropping away beneath him. The tilt-jet banked. Kyle looked out the window. There was the boat, being pulled in to shore by the soldiers, and Salim standing in the stern staring up at the aircraft, a hand raised: goodbye.
Gitmoisation part three.
Dad did the don’t-you-know-the-danger-you-were-in/ trouble-you-caused/expense-you-cost bit.
‘It was a full-scale security alert. Full-scale alert. We thought you’d been kidnapped. We honestly thought you’d been kidnapped. Everyone thought that, everyone was praying for you. You’ll write them, of course. Proper apologies, handwritten. Why did you turn your palmer off? One call, one simple call, and it would have been all right, we wouldn’t have minded. Lucky we can track them even when they’re switched off. Salim’s in big trouble too. You know, this is a major incident, it’s in all the papers, and not just here in Cantonment. It’s even made SKYIndia News. You’ve embarrassed us all, made us look very very stupid. Sledgehammer to crack a nut. Salim’s father has had to resign. Yes, he’s that ashamed.’
But Kyle knew his dad was burning with joy and relief to have him back.
Mom was different. Mom was the torturer.
‘It’s obvious we can’t trust you; well, of course you’re grounded, but really, I thought you knew what it was like here, I thought you understood that this is not like anywhere else, that if we can’t trust each other, we can really put one another in danger. Well, I can’t trust you here and your dad, well, he’ll have to give it up. We’ll have to quit and go back home and the Lord knows, he won’t get a job anything closer to what we have here. We’ll have to move to a smaller house in a less good area, I’ll have to go out to work again. And you can forget about that Salim boy, yes, forget all about him. You won’t be seeing him again.’
Kyle cried himself out that night in bed, cried himself into great shivering, shuddering sobs empty of everything except the end of the world. Way way late he heard the door open.
‘Kyle?’ Mom’s voice. He froze in h
is bed. ‘I’m sorry. I was upset. I said things I shouldn’t have said. You did bad, but all the same, your dad and I think you should have this.’
A something was laid beside his cheek. When the door had closed, Kyle put on the light. The world could turn again. It would get better. He tore open the plastic bubble-case. Coiled inside, like a beckoning finger, like an Arabic letter, was a lighthoek. And in the morning, before school, before breakfast, before anything but the pilgrims going to the river, he went up on to the roof at Guy’s Place, slipped the ’hoek behind his ear, pulled his palmer-glove over his fingers and went soaring up through the solar farm and the water tanks, the cranes and the construction helicopters and the clouds, up towards Salim’s world.
The Dust Assassin
When I was small a steel monkey would come into my room. My ayah put me to bed early, because a growing girl needed sleep, big sleep. I hated sleep. The world I heard beyond the carved stone jali screens of my verandah was too full of things for sleep. My ayah would set the wards, but the steel monkey was one of my own security robots and invisible to them. As I lay on my side in the warmth and perfume of dusk, I would see first its little head, then one hand, then two appear over the lip of my balcony, then all of it. It would crouch there for a whole minute, then slip down into the night shadows filling up my room. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark I would see it watching me, turning its head from one side to the other. It was a handsome thing; metal shell burnished as soft as skin (for in time it came close enough for me to slip a hand through my mosquito nets to stroke it) and adorned with the symbol of my family and make and serial number. It was not very intelligent, less smart than the real monkeys that squabbled and fought on the rooftops, but clever enough to climb and hunt the assassin robots of the Azads along the ledges and turrets and carvings of the Jodhra Palace. And in the morning I would see them lining the ledges and rooftops with their solar cowls raised and then they did not seem to me like monkeys at all, but cousins of the sculpted gods and demons among which they sheltered, giving salutation to the sun.
You never think your life is special. Your life is just your life, your world is just your world, even lived in a Rajput palace defended by machine monkeys against an implacable rival family. Even when you are a weapon.
Those four words are my memory of my father: his face filling my sight like the Marwar moon, his lips, full as pomegranates, saying down to me, You are a weapon, Padmini, our revenge against the Azads. I never see my mother’s face there: I never knew her. She lived in seclusion in the zenana, the women’s quarters. The only woman I ever saw was my ayah, mad Harpal, who every morning drank a steaming glass of her own piss. Otherwise, only men. And Heer, the khidmutgar, our steward. Not man, not woman: other. A nute. As I said, you always think your life is normal.
Every night, the monkey-robot watched me, turning its head this way, that way. Then one night it slipped away on its little plastic paws and I slid out of my nets in my silk pyjamas after it. It jumped up on the balcony, then in two leaps it was up the vine that climbed around my window. Its eyes glittered in the full moon. I seized two handfuls of tough, twisted vine, thick as my thigh, and was up after it. Why did I follow that steel monkey? Maybe because of that moon on its titanium shell. Maybe because that was the moon of the great kite festival, which we always observed by flying a huge kite in the shape of man with a bird’s tail and outstretched wings for arms. My father kept all the festivals and rituals, the feasts of the gods. It was what made us different from, better than, the Azads. That man with wings for arms, flying up out of the courtyard in front of my apartment with the sun in his face, could see higher and further than I, the only daughter of the Jodhras, ever could. By the moonlight in the palace courtyard I climbed the vine, like something from one of ayah’s fairytales of gods and demons. The steel monkey led on, over balconies, along ledges, over carvings of heroes from legends and full-breasted apsara women. I never thought how high I was: I was as light and luminous as the bird-man. Now the steel monkey beckoned me, squatting on the parapet with only the stars above it. I dragged myself up on to the roof. Instantly an army of machine monkeys reared up before me like Hanuman’s host. Metal gleamed, they bared their antipersonnel weapons: needle throwers tipped with lethal neurotoxins. My family has always favoured poison. I raised my hand and they melted away at the taste of my body chemistry, all but my guide. It skipped and bounded before me. I walked barefoot through a moonlit world of domes and turrets, with every step drawn closer to the amber sky-glow of the city outside. Our palace presented a false front of bays and windows and jharokas to the rude people in the street: I climbed the steps behind the fac¸ade until I stood on the very top, the highest balcony. A gasp went out of me. Great Jaipur lay before me, a hive of streetlights and pulsing neons, the reds and whites and blinking yellows of vehicles swarming along the Johan Bazaar, the trees hung with thousands of fairylights, like stars fallen from the night, the hard fluorescent shine of the open shop fronts, the glowing waver of the tivi screens, the floodlight pools all along the walls of the old city: all reflected in the black water of the moat my father had built around his palace. A moat, in the middle of a drought.
The noise swirled up from the street: traffic, a hundred musics, a thousand voices. I swayed on my high perch but I was not afraid. Softness brushed against my leg, my steel monkey pressed close, clinging to the warm pink stone with plastic fingers. I searched the web of light for the sharp edges of the Jantar Mantar, the observatory my ancestors had built three hundred years before. I made out the great wedge of the Samrat Yantra, seven storeys tall, the sundial accurate to two seconds; the floodlit bowls of the Jai Prakash Yantra, mapping out the heavens on strips of white marble. The hot night wind tugged at my pyjamas; I smelled biodiesel, dust, hot fat, spices carried up from the thronged bazaar. The steel monkey fretted against my leg, making a strange keening sound, and I saw out on the edge of the city a slash of light down the night, curved like a sail filled with darkness. A tower, higher than any of the others of the new industrial city on the western edges of Jaipur. The glass tower of the Azads, our enemies, as different as could be from our old-fashioned, Rajput-style palace: glowing from within with blue light. And I thought, I am to bring that tower to the ground.
Then, voices. Shouts. Hey, you. Up there. Where? There. See that? What is it? Is it a man? I don’t know. Hey, you, show yourself. I leaned forward, peered carefully down. Light blinded me. At the end of the flashlight beams were two palace guards in combat armour, weapons trained on me. It’s all right, it’s all right, don’t shoot, for gods’ sake, it’s the girl.
‘Memsahib,’ a soldier called up. ‘Memsahib, stay exactly where you are, don’t move a muscle, we’re coming to get you.’
I was still staring at the glowing scimitar of the Azad tower when the roof door opened and the squad of guards came to bring me down.
Next morning I was taken to my father in his audience diwan. Climate-mod fields held back the heat and the pollution; the open, stone-pillared hall was cool and still. My father sat on his throne of cushions between the two huge silver jars, taller than two of me, that were always filled with water from the holy River Ganga. My father drank a glass at dawn every morning. He was a very traditional Rajput. I saw the plastic coil of his lighthoek behind his ear. To him his diwan was full of attendants; his virtual aeai staff, beamed through his skull into his visual centres, busy busy busy on the affairs of Jodhra Water.
My brothers had been summoned and sat uncomfortably on the floor, pulling at their unfamiliar, chafing old-fashioned costumes. This was to be a formal occasion. Heer knelt behind him, hands folded in yts sleeves. I could not read yts eyes behind yts polarized black lenses. I could never read anything about Heer. Not man, not woman - yt - yts muscles lay in unfamiliar patterns under yts peach-smooth skin. I always felt that yt did not like me.
The robot lay on its back, deactivated, limbs curled like the dry dead spiders I found in the corners of my room where ayah
Harpal was too lazy to dust.
‘That was a stupid, dangerous thing to do,’ my father said. ‘What would have happened if our jawans had not found you?’
I set my jaw and flared my nostrils and rocked on my cushions.
‘I just wanted to see. That’s my right, isn’t it? It’s what you’re educating me for, that world out there, so it’s my right to see it.’
‘When you are older. When you are a . . . woman. The world is not safe, for you, for any of us.’
‘I saw no danger.’
‘You don’t need to. All danger has to do is see you. The Azad assassins . . .’
‘But I’m a weapon. That’s what you always tell me, I’m a weapon, so how can the Azads harm me? How can I be a weapon if I’m not allowed to see what I’m to be used against?’
But the truth was I didn’t know what that meant, what I was meant to do to bring that tower of blue glass collapsing down into the pink streets of Jaipur.
‘Enough. This unit is defective.’
My father made a gesture with his fingers and the steel monkey sprang up, released. It turned its head in its this-way, that-way gesture I knew so well, confused. In the same instant, the walls glittered with light reflecting from moving metal as the machines streamed down the carved stonework and across the pink marble courtyard. The steel monkey gave a strange, robot cry and made to flee but the reaching plastic paws seized it and pulled it down and turned it on its back and, circuit by circuit, chip by chip, wire by wire, took it to pieces. When they had finished there was no part of my steel monkey left big enough to see. I felt the tightness in my chest, my throat, my head of about-to-cry but I would not, I would never, not in front of these men. I glanced again at Heer. Yts black lenses gave nothing, as ever. But the way the sun glinted from those insect eyes told me yt was looking at me.