Cyberabad Days

by Ian McDonald

  I was afraid then. When I returned to Delhi it was like my fear had flown before me. The city of djinns was the city of rumours. The government had signed the Hamilton Acts. Krishna Cops were sweeping house to house. Palmer files were to be monitored. Children’s aeai toys were illegal. US marines were being airlifted in. Prime Minister Srivastava was about to announce the replacement of the rupee with the dollar. A monsoon of fear and speculation and in the middle of it all was Ashok.

  ‘One final run, then I’m out. Can you do this for me? One final run?’

  The bungalow was already half-emptied. The furniture was all packed, only his processor cores remained. They were draped in dustsheets, ghosts of the creatures that had lived there. The Krishna Cops were welcome to them.

  ‘We both go to Bharat?’

  ‘No, that would be too dangerous. You go ahead, I’ll follow when it’s safe.’ He hesitated. Tonight, even the traffic beyond the high walls sounded different. ‘I need you to take more than the usual.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Five.’

  He saw me shy back as he raised his hand to my forehead.

  ‘Is it safe?’

  ‘Five, and that’s it done. For good.’

  ‘Is it safe?’

  ‘It’s a series of overlays, they’ll share core code in common.’

  It was a long time since I had turned my vision inwards to the jewels Ashok had strung through my skull. Circuitry. A brain within a brain.

  ‘Is it safe?’

  I saw Ashok swallow, then bob his head: a Westerner’s yes. I closed my eyes. Seconds later I felt the warm, dry touch of his finger to my inner eye.

  We came to with the brass light of early morning shining through the jali. We were aware we were deeply dehydrated. We were aware that we were in need of slow-release carbohydrate. Our serotonin inhibitor levels were low. The window arch was a Mughal true arch. The protein circuits in my head were DPMA one-eight-seven-nine slash omegas, under licence from BioScan of Bangalore.

  Everything we looked at gave off a rainbow of interpretations. I saw the world with the strange manias of my new guests: medic, nutritionist, architectural renderer, biochip designer, engineering aeai controlling a host of repair-shop robots. Nasatya. Vaishvanara. Maya. Brihaspati. Tvastri. My intimate demons. I was a many-headed devi.

  All that morning, all afternoon, I fought to make sense of a world that was five worlds, five impressions. I fought. Fought to make us me. Ashok fretted, tugging at his woolly beard, pacing, trying to watch television, check his mails. At any instant Krishna Cop combat robots could come dropping over his walls. Integration would come. It had to come. I could not survive the clamour in my skull, a monsoon of interpretations. Sirens raced in the streets, far, near, far again. Every one of them fired off a different reaction from my selves.

  I found Ashok sitting amongst his shrouded processors, knees pulled up to his chest, arms draped over them. He looked like a big, fat, soft boy, his mama’s favourite.

  Noradrenalin pallor, mild hypoglycaemia, fatigue toxins, said Nasatya.

  Yin Systems bevabyte quantum storage arrays, said Brihaspati.

  I touched him on the shoulder. He jerked awake. It was full dark outside, stifling: the monsoon was already sweeping up through the United States of Bengal.

  ‘We’re ready,’ I said. ‘I’m ready.’

  Dark-scented hibiscus spilled over the porch where the Mercedes waited.

  ‘I’ll see you in a week,’ he said. ‘In Varanasi.’

  ‘In Varanasi.’

  He took my shoulders in his hands and kissed me lightly, on the cheek. I drew my dupatta over my head. Veiled, I was taken to the United Provinces Night Sleeper Service. As I lay in the first-class compartment the aeais chattered away inside my head, surprised to discover each other, reflections of reflections.

  The chowkidar brought me bed-tea on a silver tray in the morning. Dawn came up over Varanasi’s sprawling slums and industrial parks. My personalised news-service aeai told me that Lok Sabha would vote on ratifying the Hamilton Acts at ten a.m. At twelve Prime Minister Srivastava and the United States Ambassador would announce a Most Favoured Nation trade package with Awadh.

  The train emptied onto the platform beneath the spun-diamond canopy I knew so well. Every second passenger, it seemed was a smuggler. If I could spot them so easily, so could the Krishna Cops. They lined the exit ramps, more than I had ever seen before. There were uniforms behind them and robots behind the uniforms. The porter carried my bag on his head; I used it to navigate the press of people pouring off the night train. Walk straight, as your mamaji taught you. Walk tall and proud, like you are walking the Silken Way with a rich man. I pulled my dupatta over my head, for modesty. Then I saw the crowd piling up at the ramp. The Krishna Cops were scanning every passenger with palmers.

  I could see the badmashes and smuggler-boys hanging back, moving to the rear of the mill of bodies. But there was no escape there either. Armed police backed by riot-control robots took up position at the end of the platform. Shuffle by shuffle, the press of people pushed me towards the Krishna Cops, waving their right hands like blessings over the passengers. Those things could peel back my scalp and peer into my skull. My red case bobbed ahead, guiding me to my cage.

  Brihaspati showed me what they would do to the circuits in my head.

  Help me! I prayed to my gods. And Maya, architect of the demons, answered me. Its memories were my memories and it remembered rendering an architectural simulation of this station long before robot construction spiders started to spin their nanodiamond web. Two visions of Varanasi Station, superimposed. With one difference that might save my life. Maya’s showed me the inside of things. The inside of the platform. The drain beneath the hatch between the rear of the chai-booth and the roof support.

  I pushed through the men to the small dead space at the rear. I hesitated before I knelt beside the hatch. One surge of the crowd, one trip, one fall, and I would be crushed. The hatch was jammed shut with dirt. Nails broke, nails tore as I scrabbled it loose and heaved it up. The smell that came up from the dark square was so foul I almost vomited. I forced myself in, dropped a metre into shin-deep sludge. The rectangle of light showed me my situation. I was mired in excrement. The tunnel forced me to crawl but the end of it was promise, the end of it was a semi-circle of daylight. I buried my hands in the soft sewage. This time I did retch up my bed-tea. I crept forward, trying not to choke. It was vile beyond anything I had ever experienced. But not so vile as having your skull opened and knives slice away slivers of your brain. I crawled on my hands and knees under the tracks of Varanasi Station, to the light, to the light, to the light, and out through the open conduit into the cess lagoon where pigs and rag-pickers rooted in the shoals of drying human manure.

  I washed as clean as I could in the shrivelled canal. Dhobiwallahs beat laundry against stone slabs. I tried to ignore Nasatya’s warnings about the hideous infections I might have picked up.

  I was to meet Ashok’s girl on the street of gajras. Children sat in doorways and open shop fronts threading marigolds onto needles. The work was too cheap even for robots. Blossoms spilled from bushels and plastic cases. My phatphat’s tyres slipped on wet rose petals. We drove beneath a canopy of gajra garlands that hung from poles above the shop-fronts. Everywhere was the smell of dead, rotting flowers. The phatphat turned into a smaller, darker alley and into the back of a mob. The driver pressed his hand to the horn. The people reluctantly gave him way. The alcofuel engine whined. We crept forward. Open space, then a police jawan stepped forward to bar our way. He wore full combat armour. Brihaspati read the glints of data flickering across his visor: deployments, communications, an arrest warrant. I pulled my dupatta over my head and lower face as the driver talked to him. What’s going on? Some badmash. Some dataraja.

  Down the street of gajras, uniformed police led by a plain-clothes Krishna Cop burst open a door. Their guns were drawn. In the same breath, the shutters of the jharoka
immediately above crashed up. A figure jumped up onto the wooden rail. Behind me, the crowd let out a vast roaring sigh. There he is there the badmash oh look look it’s a girl!

  From the folds of my dupatta I saw Ashok’s girli teeter there an instant, then jump up and grab a washing line. It snapped and swung her ungently down through racks of marigold garlands into the street. She crouched a moment, saw the police, saw the crowd, saw me, then turned and ran. The jawan started toward her but there was another quicker, deadlier. A woman screamed as the robot bounded from the rooftop into the alley. Chrome legs pistoned, its insect head bobbed, locked on. Marigold petals flew up around the fleeing girl but everyone knew she could not escape the killing thing. One step, two step, it was behind her. I saw her glance over her shoulder as the robot unsheathed its blade.

  I knew what would happen next. I had seen it before, in the petal-strewn streets of Kathmandu, as I rode my litter among my gods and Kumarimas.

  The blade flashed. A great cry from the crowd. The girl’s head bounded down the alley. A great jet of blood. Sacrificial blood. The headless body took one step, two.

  I slipped from the phatphat and stole away through the transfixed crowd.

  I saw the completion of the story on a news channel at a chai-dhaba by the tank on Scindia ghat. The tourists, the faithful, the vendors and funeral parties were my camouflage. I sipped chai from a plastic cup and watched the small screen above the bar. The sound was low but I could understand well enough from the pictures. Delhi police break up a notorious aeai smuggling ring. In a gesture of Bharati-Awadhi friendship, Varanasi Krishna Cops make a series of arrests. The camera cut away before the robot struck. The final shot was of Ashok, pushed down into a Delhi police car in plastic handcuffs.

  I went to sit on the lowest ghat. The river would still me, the river would guide me. It was of the same substance as me, divinity. Brown water swirled at my be-ringed toes. That water could wash away all earthly sin. On the far side of the holy river, tall chimneys poured yellow smoke into the sky. A tiny round-faced girl came up to me, offered me marigold gajras to buy. I waved her away. I saw again this river, these ghats, these temples and boats as I had when I lay in my wooden room in my palace in Durbar Square. I saw now the lie Tall Kumarima’s palmer had fed me. I had thought India a jewelled skirt, laid out for me to wear. It was a bride-buyer with an envelope of rupees, it was walking the Silken Wall until feet cracked and bled. It was a husband with the body of a child and the appetites of a man warped by his impotence. It was a saviour who had always only wanted me for my sickness. It was a young girl’s head rolling in a gutter.

  Inside this still-girl’s head, my demons were silent. They could see as well as I that that there would never be a home for us in Bharat, Awadh, Maratha, any nation of India.

  North of Nayarangadh the road rose through wooded ridges, climbing steadily up to Mugling where it turned and clung to the side of the Trisuli’s steep valley. It was my third bus in as many days. I had a routine now. Sit at the back, wrap my dupatta round me, look out the window. Keep my hand on my money. Say nothing.

  I picked up the first bus outside Jaunpur. After emptying Ashok’s account, I thought it best to leave Varanasi as inconspicuously as possible. I did not need Brihaspati to show me the hunter aeais howling after me. Of course they would have the air, rail and bus stations covered. I rode out of the Holy City in an unlicensed taxi. The driver seemed pleased with the size of the tip. The second bus took me from Gorakhpur through the dhal fields and banana plantations to Nautanwa on the border. I had deliberately chosen small, out-of-the-way Nautanwa, but still I bowed my head and shuffled my feet as I came up to the Sikh emigration officer behind his tin counter. I held my breath. He waved me through without even a glance at my identity card.

  I walked up the gentle slope and across the border. Had I been blind, I would have known at once when I crossed into my country. The great roar that had followed me as close as my own skin fell silent so abruptly it seemed to echo. The traffic did not blare its way through all obstacles. It steered, it sought ways around pedestrians and sacred cows lolling in the middle of the road, chewing. People were polite in the bureau where I changed my Bharati rupees for Nepalese; did not press and push and try to sell me things I did not want in the shop where I bought a bag of greasy samosas; smiled shyly to me in the cheap hotel where I hired a room for the night. Did not demand demand demand.

  I slept so deeply that it felt like a fall through endless white sheets that smelled of sky. In the morning the third bus came to take me up to Kathmandu.

  The road was one vast train of trucks, winding in and out of the bluffs, looping back on itself, all the while climbing, climbing. The gears on the old bus whined. The engine strove. I loved that sound, of engines fighting gravity. It was the sound of my earliest recollection, before the child-assessors came up a road just like this to Shukya. Trains of trucks and buses in the night. I looked out at the roadside dhabas, the shrines of piled rocks, the tattered prayer banners bent in the wind, the cableways crossing the chocolate-creamy river far below, skinny kids kicking swaying wire cages across the high wires. So familiar, so alien to the demons that shared my skull.

  The baby must have been crying for some time before the noise rose above the background hubbub of the bus. The mother was two rows ahead of me, she shushed and swung and soothed the tiny girl but the cries were becoming screams.

  It was Nasatya who made me get out of my seat and go to her.

  ‘Give her to me,’ I said and there must have been some tone of command from the medical aeai in my voice for she passed me the baby without a thought. I pulled back the sheet in which she was wrapped. The little girl’s belly was painfully bloated, her limbs floppy and waxen.

  ‘She’s started getting colic when she eats,’ the mother said but before she could stop me I pulled away her napkin. The stench was abominable; the shit bulky and pale.

  ‘What are you feeding her?’

  The woman held up a roti bread, chewed at the edges to soften it for a baby. I pushed my fingers into the baby’s mouth to force it open though Vaishvanara the nutritionist already knew what we would find. The tongue was blotched red, pimpled with tiny ulcers.

  ‘This has only started since you began giving her solid food?’ I said. The mother waggled her head in agreement. ‘This child has ceoliac disease,’ I pronounced. The woman put her hands to her face in horror, began to rock and wail. ‘Your child will be fine, you must just stop feeding her bread, anything made from any grain except rice. She cannot process the proteins in wheat and barley. Feed her rice, rice and vegetables and she will brighten up right away.’

  The entire bus was staring as I went back to my seat. The woman and her baby got off at Naubise. The child was still wailing, weak now from its rage, but the woman raised a hand to me. I had come to Nepal with no destination, no plan or hope, just a need to be back. But an idea was already forming.

  Beyond Naubise the road climbed steadily, switching back and forth over the buttresses of the mountains that embraced Kathmandu. Evening was coming on. Looking back I could see the river of headlights snaking across the mountainside. When the bus ground around another hairpin bend, I could see the same snake climb up ahead of me in red taillights. The bus laboured up a long steep climb. I could hear, everyone could hear, the noise in the engine that should not have been there. Up we crawled, to the high saddle where the watershed divided, right to the valley of Kathmandu, left to Pokhara and the High Himalaya. Slower, slower. We could all smell the burning insulation, hear the rattling.

  It was not me who rushed to the driver and his mate. It was the demon Trivasti.

  ‘Stop stop at once!’ I cried. ‘Your alternator has seized! You will burn us up.’

  The driver pulled into the narrow draw, up against the raw rock. On the offside, trucks passed with millimetres to spare. We got the hood up. We could see the smoke wafting from the alternator. The men shook their heads and pulled out palmers. The passeng
ers piled to the front of the bus to stare and talk.

  ‘No no no, give me a wrench,’ I ordered.

  The driver stared but I shook my outstretched hand, demanding. Perhaps he remembered the crying baby. Perhaps he was thinking about how long it would take a repair truck to come up from Kathmandu. Perhaps he was thinking about how good it would be to be home with his wife and children. He slapped the monkey wrench into my hand. In less than a minute I had the belt off and the alternator disconnected.

  ‘Your bearings have seized,’ I said. ‘It’s a persistent fault on pre-2030 models. A hundred metres more and you would have burned her out. You can drive her on the battery. There’s enough in it to get you down to Kathmandu.’