by Ian McDonald
My life changed that day. My father knew that something between us had been taken apart like the artificial life of the steel monkey. But I had seen beyond the walls of my life so I was allowed out from the palace a little way into the world. With Heer, and guards, in armoured German cars to bazaars and malls; by tilt-jet to family relatives in Jaisalmer and Delhi; to festivals and melas and pujas in the Govind temple. I was still schooled in the palace by tutors and aeai artificial intelligences, but I was presented with my new friends, all the daughters of high-ranking, high-caste company executives, carefully vetted and groomed. They wore all the latest fashions and make-up and jewellery and shoes and tech. They dressed me and styled me and wove brass and amber beads into my hair; they took me to shops and pool parties - in the heart of a drought - and cool summer houses up the mountains but they were never comfortable like friends, never free, never friends at all. They were afraid of me. But there were clothes and trips and Star Asia tunes and celebrity gupshup and so I forgot about the steel monkey that I once pretended was my friend and was taken to pieces by its brothers.
Others had not forgotten
They remembered the night after my fourteenth birthday. There had been a puja by the Govind priest in the diwan. It was a special age, fourteen, the age I became a woman. I was blessed with fire and ash and light and water and given a sari, the dress of a woman. My friends wound it around me and decorated my hands with mehndi, intricate patterns in dark henna. They set the red bindi of the kshatriya caste over my third eye and led me out through the rows of applauding company executives and then to a great party. There were gifts and kisses, the food was laid out the length of the courtyard and there were press reporters and proper French champagne that I was allowed to drink because I was now a woman. My father had arranged a music set by MTV-star Anila - real, not artificial intelligence - and in my new woman’s finery I jumped and down and screamed like any other of my teenage girlfriends. At the very end of the night, when the staff took the empty silver plates away and Anila’s roadies folded up the sound system, my father’s jawans brought out the great kite of the Jodhras, the winged man-bird the colour of fire, and sent him up, shining, into the night above Jaipur, up towards the hazy stars. Then I went to my new room, in the zenana, the women’s quarter, and old disgusting ayah Harpal locked the carved wooden door to my nursery.
It was that that saved me, when the Azads struck.
I woke an instant before Heer burst through the door but in that split-second was all the confusion of waking in an unfamiliar bed, in a strange room, in an alien house, in a body you do not fully know as your own.
Heer. Here. Not Heer. Dressed in street clothes. Men’s clothes. Heer, with a gun in yts hand. The big gun with the two barrels, the one that killed people and the one that killed machines.
‘Memsahib, get up and come with me. You must come with me.’
‘Heer . . .’
Now, memsahib.’
Mouth working for words, I reached for clothes, bag, shoes, things. Heer threw me across the room to crash painfully against the Rajput chest.
‘How dare . . .’ I started and, as if in slow motion, I saw the gun fly up. A flash, like lightning in the room. A metallic squeal, a stench of burning and the smoking steel shell of a defence robot went spinning across the marble floor like a burning spider. Its tail was raised, its stinger erect. Not knowing if this was some mad reality or I was still in a dream, I reached my hand toward the dead machine. Heer snatched me away.
‘Do you want to die? It may still be operational.’
Yt pushed me roughly into the corridor, then turned to fire a final e-m charge into the room. I heard a long keening wail like a cork being turned in a bottle that faded into silence. In that silence I heard for the first time the sounds. Gunfire, men shouting, men roaring, engines revving, aircraft overhead, women crying. Women wailing. And everywhere, above and below, the clicking scamper of small plastic feet.
‘What’s going on?’ Suddenly I was chilled and trembling with dread. ‘What’s happened?’
‘The House of Jodhra is under attack,’ Heer said.
I pulled away from yts soft grip.
‘Then I have to go, I have to fight, I have to defend us. I am a weapon.’
Heer shook yts head in exasperation and with yts gun hand struck me a ringing blow on the side of my head.
‘Stupid stupid! Understand! The Azads, they are killing everything! Your father, your brothers, they are killing everyone. They would have killed you, but they forgot you moved to a new room.’
‘Dadaji? Arvind, Kiran?’
Heer tugged me along, still reeling, still dizzy from the blow but more dazed, more stunned by what the nute had told me. My father, my brothers . . .
‘Mamaji?’ My voice was three years old.
‘Only the gene-line.’
We rounded a corner. Two things happened at the same time. Heer shouted ‘Down!’ and as I dived for the smooth marble I glimpsed a swarm of monkey-machines bounding towards me, clinging to walls and ceiling. I covered my head and cried out with every shot as Heer fired and fired and fired until the gas-cell canister clanged to the floor.
‘They hacked into them and reprogrammed them. Faithless, betraying things. Come on.’ The smooth, manicured hand reached for me and I remember only shards of noise and light and dark and bodies until I found myself in the back seat of a fast German car, Heer beside me, gun cradled like a baby. I could smell hot electricity from the warm weapon. Doors slammed. Locks sealed. Engine roared.
‘Where to?’
‘The Hijra Mahal.’
As we accelerated through the gate more monkey-robots dropped from the naqqar khana. I heard their steel lives crack and burst beneath our wheels. One clung to the door, clawing at the window frame until the driver veered and scraped it off on a streetlight.
‘Heer . . .’
Inside it was all starting to burst, to disintegrate into the colours and visions and sounds and glances of the night. My father my head my brothers my head my mother my family my head my head my head.
‘It’s all right,’ the nute said, taking my hand in yts. ‘You’re safe. You’re with us now.’
The house of Jodhra, which had endured for a thousand years, fell, and I came to the house of the nutes. It was pink, as all the great buildings of Jaipur were pink, and very discreet. In my life before, as I now thought of it, I must have driven past its alleyway a hundred times without ever knowing the secret it concealed; cool marble rooms and corridors behind a fac¸ade of orioles and turrets and intricately carved windows, courts and tanks and water-gardens open only to the sky and the birds. But then the Hijra Mahal had always been a building apart. In another age it had been the palace of the hijras, the eunuchs. The un-men, shunned yet essential to the ritual life of Rajput Jaipur, living in the very heart of the old city, yet apart.
There were six of them: Sul the janampatri seer, astrologer to celebs as far away as the movie boulevards of Mumbai; Dahin the plastic surgeon, who worked on faces on the far side of the planet through remote machines accurate to the width of an atom; Leel the ritual dancer, who performed the ancient Nautch traditions and festival dances; Janda the writer, whom half of India knew as Queen Bitch of gupshup columnists; Suleyra, whose parties and events were the talk of society from Srinagar to Madurai; and Heer, once khidmutgar to the House of Jodhra. My six guardians bundled me from the car wrapped in a heavy chador like a Muslim woman and took me to a domed room of a hundred thousand mirror fragments. Their warm, dry hands gently held me on the divan - I was thrashing, raving as the shock hit me - and Dahin the face surgeon deftly pressed an efuser to my arm.
‘Hush. Sleep now.’
I woke among the stars. For an instant I wondered if I was dead, stabbed in my sleep by the poison needle of an Azad assassin robot that had scaled the hundred windows of the Jodhra Mahal. Then I saw that they were the mirror shards of the roof, shattering the light of a single candle into a hundred thousand pie
ces. Heer sat cross-legged on a dhuri by my low bedside.
‘How long . . .’
‘Two days, child.’
‘Are they . . .’
‘Dead. Yes. I cannot lie. Every one.’
But even as the House of Jodhra fell, it struck back like a cobra, its back broken by a stick. Homing missiles, concealed for years, clinging like bats under shop eaves and bus shelters, unfolded their wings and lit their engines and sought out the pheromone profiles of Azad vehicles. Armoured Lexuses went up in fireballs in the middle of Jaipur’s insane traffic as they hooted their ways towards the safety of the airport. No safety even there, a Jodhra missile locked on to the company tilt-jet as it lifted off, hooked into the engine intake with its titanium claws until the aircraft reached an altitude at which no one could survive. The blast cast momentary shadows across the sundials of the Jantar Mantar, marking the moment of Jodhra revenge. Burning debris set fires all across the slums.
‘Are they . . .’
‘Jahangir and the Begum Azad died in the tilt-jet attack and our missiles took out much of their board, but their countermeasures held off our attack on their headquarters.’
‘Who survived?’
‘Their youngest son Salim. The line is intact.’
I sat up in my low bed that smelled of sandalwood. The stars were jewels around my head.
‘It’s up to me then.’
‘Memsahib . . .’
‘Don’t you remember what he said, Heer? My father? You are a weapon, never forget that. Now I know what I am a weapon for.’
‘Memsahib . . . Padmini.’ The first time yt had ever spoken my name. ‘You are still shocked, you don’t know what you’re saying. Rest. You need rest. We’ll talk in the morning.’ Yt touched yts forefinger to yts full lips, then left. When I could no longer hear soft footfalls on cool marble, I went to the door. Righteousness, rage and revenge were one song inside me. Locked. I heaved, I beat, I screamed. The Hijra Mahal did not listen. I went to the balcony that hung over the alley. Even if I could have shattered the intricate stone jali, it was a ten-metre drop to street level where the late night hum of phatphat autorickshaws and taxis was giving way to the delivery drays and cycle-vans of the spice merchants. Light slowly filled up the alley and crept across the floor of my bedroom: by its gathering strength I could read the headlines of the morning editions. WATER WARS: DOZENS DEAD IN CLASH OF THE RAJAS. JAIPUR REELS AS JODHRAS ANNIHILATED. POLICE POWERLESS AGAINST BLOODY VENDETTA.
In Rajputana, now as always, water is life, water is power. The police, the judges, the courts: we owned them. Us, and the Azads. In that we were alike. When gods fight, what mortal would presume to judge?
‘A ride in triumph, a fall through a window into love, a marriage and a mourning?’ I asked. ‘That’s it?’
Sul the astrologer nodded slowly. I sat on the floor of yts observatory. Incense rose on all sides of me from perforated brass censors. At first glance the room was so simple and bare that even a sadhu would have been uncomfortable, but as my eyes grew accustomed to the shadow in which it must be kept to work as a prediction machine, I saw that every centimetre of the bare pink marble was covered in curving lines and Hindi inscriptions, so small and precise they might be the work of tiny gods. The only light came from a star-shaped hole in the domed ceiling: Sul’s star chamber was in the topmost turret of the Hijra Mahal, closest to heaven. As yt worked with its palmer and made the gestures in the air of the janampatri calculations, I watched a star of dazzling sunlight crawl along an arc etched in the floor, measuring out the phases of the House of Meena. Sul caught me staring at it, but I had only been curious to see what another nute looked like, close up. I had only ever known Heer. I had not known there could be as many as six nutes in the whole of India, let alone Jaipur. Sul was fat and had unhealthy yellow skin and eyes and shivered a lot as it pulled yts shawl around yt, though the turret room directly under the sun was stifling hot. I looked for clues to what yt had been before: woman, man. Woman, I thought. I had always thought of Heer as a man - an ex-man, though yt never mentioned the subject. I had always known it was taboo. When you stepped away, you never looked back.
‘No revenge, no justice?’
‘If you don’t believe me, see for yourself.’
Fingers slipped the lighthoek behind my ear and the curving lines on the floor leaped up into mythical creatures studded with stars. Makara the crocodile, Vrishaba the Bull, the twin fishes of Meena: the twelve rashi. Kanya the dutiful daughter. Between them the twenty-seven nakshatars looped and arced, each of them subdivided into four padas; wheels within wheels within wheels, spinning around my head like blades as I sat on Sul’s marble floor.
‘You know I can’t make any sense out of this,’ I said, defeated by the whirling numbers. Sul leaned forward and gently touched my hand.
‘A ride in triumph, a fall through a window into love, a marriage and a mourning. Window to widow. Trust me.’
‘Young girls are truly beautiful on the inside.’ Dahin the dream doctor’s voice came from beyond the bank of glaring surgical lights as the bed on which I lay tilted back. ‘No pollution, no nasty dirty hormones. Everything clean and fresh and lovely. Most of the women who come here, I never see any deeper than their skin. It is a rare privilege to be allowed to look inside someone.’
It was midnight in the chrome and plastic surgery in the basement of the Hijra Mahal, a snatched half-hour between the last of the consultations (society ladies swathed in veils and chadors to hide their identities) and Dahin hooking into the global web, settling the lighthoek over the visual centre in yts brain and pulling on the manipulator gloves connected to surgical robots in theatres half a world away. So gentle, so deft; too agile for any man’s. Dahin of the dancing hands.
‘Have you found it yet?’ I asked. My eyes were watering from the lights. Something in them, something beyond them, was looking into my body and displaying it section by section, organ by organ, on Dahin’s inner vision. Traditionally, the hijras were the only ones allowed to examine the bodies of the zenana women and reported their findings to the doctors outside.
‘Found what? Finger lasers? Retractable steel claws? A tabletop nuke wired into your tummy?’
‘My father said over and over, I’m a weapon, I’m special . . . I will destroy the house of Azad.’
‘Cho chweet, if there’s anything there, this would have shown it to me.’
My eyes were watering. I pretended it was the brightness of the light.
‘Maybe there’s something . . . smaller, something you can’t see, like . . . bugs. Like a disease.’
I heard Dahin sigh and imagined the waggle of yts head.
‘It’ll take a day or two but I can run a diagnostic.’ Tippytapping by the side of my head. I turned my head and froze as I saw a spider robot no bigger than my thumb walking towards my throat. It was a month since the night, but still I was distrustful of robots. I imagined I always would be. I felt a little flicking needle pain in the side of my neck, then the robot moved over my belly. I cringed at the soft spiking of its sharp, precise feet. I said, ‘Dahin, do you mind me asking; did you do this?’
A short jab of pain in my belly.
‘Oh yes, baba. All this, and more. Much much more. I only work on the outside, the externals. To be like me - to become one of us - you have to go deep, right down into the cells.’
Now the robot was creeping over my face. I battled the urge to sweep it away and crush it on the floor. I was a weapon, I was special. This machine would show me how.
‘Woman, man, that’s not a thing easily undone. They take you apart, baba. Everything, hanging there in a tank of fluid. Then they put you back together again. Different. Neither. Better.’
Why, I wanted to ask, why do this thing to yourself? But then I felt a tiny scratch in the corner of my eye as the robot took a scrape from my optic nerve.
‘Three days for the test results, baba.’
Three days, and Dahin brought the results to me as I
sat in the Peacock Pavilion overlooking the bazaar. The wind was warm and smelled of ashes of roses as it blew through the jali and turned the delicately handwritten sheets. No implants. No special powers or abilities. No abnormal neural structures, no tailored combat viruses. I was a completely normal fourteen-year-old Kshatriya girl.
I leaped over the swinging stick. While still in the air, I brought my own staff up in a low arc, catching the Azad’s weapon between his hands. It flew from his grasp, clattered across the wooden floor of the hall. He threw a kick at me, rolled to pick up his pole, but my swinging tip caught him hard against the temple, sending him down to the floor like dropped laundry. I vaulted over him, swung my staff high to punch its brass-shod tip into the nerve cluster under the ear. Instant death.