“What?”
“To ask me to marry you.”
He gave a little start, then waggled his head in disbelief and smiled. He had very good teeth.
“So, will you marry me?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”
The day was set three weeks hence. Sul had judged it the most propitious for a wedding of dynasties. Suleyra had been commissioned to stage the ceremony: Muslim first, then Hindu. Janda had been ask to draw on yts celebrity inside knowledge to invite all India to the union of the houses of Azad and Jodhra. This is the wedding of the decade, yt cried in yts gupshup columns, come or I will bad-mouth you. Schedules of the great and glorious were rearranged, aeai soapi stars prepared avatars to attend, as did those human celebs who were unavoidably out of the subcontinent. From the shuttered jharokas of the zenana I watched Salim order his staff and machines around the great court, sending architects here, fabric designers there, pyrotechnicians yonder. Marquees and pavilions went up, seating was laid out, row upon row, carpet laid, patterns drawn in sand to be obliterated by the feet of the processional elephants. Security robots circled among the carrion-eating black kites over the palace, camera drones flitted like bats around the great court, seeking angles. Feeling my eyes on him, Salim would glance up at me, smile, lift his hand in the smallest greeting. I glanced away, suddenly shy, a girl-bride. This was to be a traditional, Rajputana wedding. I would emerge from purdah only to meet my husband. For those three weeks, the zenana was not a marble cage but an egg from which I would hatch. Into what? Power, unimaginable wealth, marriage to man who had been my enemy. I still did not know if I loved him or not. I still saw the ghost shadows on the marble where his family had destroyed mine. He still came every night to read me Urdu poetry I could not understand. I smiled and laughed but I still did not know if what I felt was love, or just my desperation to be free. I still doubted it on the morning of my wedding.
Women came at dawn to bathe and dress me in wedding yellow and make up my hair and face and anoint me with turmeric paste. They decked me with jewels and necklaces, rings and bangles. They dabbed me with expensive perfume from France and gave me good luck charms and advice. Then they threw open the brass-studded doors of the zenana and with the Palace guard of robots, escorted me along the corridors and down the stairs to the great court. Leel danced and somersaulted before me; no wedding could be lucky without a hijra, a nute.
All of India had been invited and all of India had come, in flesh and in avatar. People rose, applauding. Cameras swooped on ducted fans. My nutes, my family from the Hijra Mahal, had been given seats at row ends.
“How could I improve on perfection?” said Dahin the face doctor as my bare feet trod rose petals towards the dais.
“The window, the wedding!” said Sul. “And, pray the gods, many many decades from now, a very old and wise widow.”
“The setting is nothing without the jewel,” exclaimed Suleyra Party Arranger, throwing pink petals into the air.
I waited with my attendants under the awning as Salim’s retainers crossed the courtyard from the men’s quarters. Behind them came the groom on his pure white horse, kicking up the rose petals from its hooves. A low, broad ooh went up from the guests then more applause. The maulvi welcomed Salim onto the platform. Cameras flocked for angles. I noticed that every parapet and carving was crowded with monkeys—flesh and machine—watching. The maulvi asked me most solemnly if I wished to be Salim Azad’s bride.
“Yes,” I said, as I had said the night when I first accepted his offer. “I do, yes.”
He asked Salim the same question, then read from the Holy Quran. We exchanged contracts, our assistants witnessed. The maulvi brough the silver plate of sweetmeats. Salim took one, lifted my gauze veil and placed it on my tongue. Then the maulvi placed the rings upon our fingers and proclaimed us husband and wife. And so were our two warring houses united, as the guests rose from their seats cheering and festival crackers and fireworks burst over Jaipur and the city returned a roaring wall of vehicle horns. Peace in the streets at least. As we moved towards the long, cool pavilions for the wedding feast, I tried to catch Heer’s eye as yt paced behind Salim. Yts hands were folded in the sleeves of yts robes, yts head thrust forward, lips pursed. I thought of a perching vulture.
We sat side by side on golden cushions at the head of the long, low table. Guests great and good took their places, slipping off their Italian shoes, folding their legs and tucking up their expensive Delhi frocks as waiters brought vast thalis of festival food. In their balcony overlooking the Diwan, musicians struck up, a Rajput piece older than Jaipur itself. I clapped my hands. I had grown up to this tune. Salim leaned back on his bolster.
“And look.”
Where he pointed, men were running up the great sun-bird-man kite of the Jodhras. As I watched it skipped and dipped on the erratic winds in the court, then a stronger draught took it soaring up into the blue sky. The guests went oooh again.
“You have made me the happiest men in the world,” Salim said.
I lifted my veil, bent to him and kissed his lips. Every eye down the long table turned to me. Everyone smiled. Some clapped.
Salim’s eyes went wide. Tears suddenly streamed from them. He rubbed them away and when he put his hands down, his eyelids were two puffy, blistered boils of flesh, swollen shut. He tried to speak but his lips were bloated, cracked, seeping blood and pus. Salim tried to stand, push himself away from me. He could not see, could not speak, could not breath. His hands fluttered at the collar of his gold-embroidered sherwani.
“Salim!” I cried. Leel was already on yts feet, ahead of all the guest doctors and surgeons as they rose around the table. Salim let out a thin, high-pitched wail, the only scream that would form in his swollen throat. Then he went down onto the feast table.
The pavilion was full of screaming guests and doctors shouting into palmers and security staff locking the area down. I stood useless as a butterfly in my make-up and wedding jewels and finery as doctors crowded around Salim. His face was like a cracked melon, a tight bulb of red flesh. I swatted away an intrusive hovercam. It was the best I could do. Then I remember Leel and the other nutes taking me out into the courtyard where a tilt-jet was settling, engines sending the rose petals up in a perfumed blizzard. Paramedics carried Salim out from the pavilion on a gurney. He wore an oxygen rebreather. There were tubes in his arms. Security guards in light-scatter armour pushed the great and the celebrated aside. I struggled with Leel as the medics slid Salim into the tilt-jet but yt held me with strange, withered strength.
“Let me go, let me go, that’s my husband . . . ”
“Padmini, Padmini, there is nothing you can do.”
“What do you mean?”
“Padmini, he is dead. Salim your husband is dead.”
Yt might have said that the moon was a great mouse in the sky.
“Anaphylactic shock. Do you know what that is?”
“Dead?” I said simply, quietly. Then I was flying across the court toward the tilt-jet as it powered up. I wanted to dive under its engines. I wanted to be scattered like the rose petals. Security guards ran to cut me off but Leel caught me first and brought me down. I felt the nip of an efuser on my arm and everything went soft as the tranquilizer took me.
After three weeks I called Heer to me. For the first week the security robots had kept me locked back in the zenana while the lawyers argued. I spent much of that time out of my head, part grief-stricken, part insane at what had happened. Just one kiss. A widow no sooner than I was wed. Leel tended to me, the lawyers and judges reached their legal conclusions. I was the sole and lawful heir of Azad-Jodhra Water. The second week I came to terms with my inheritance: the biggest water company in Rajputana, the third largest in the whole of India. There were contracts to be signed, managers and executives to meet, deals to be set up. I waved them away, for the third week was my week, the week in which I understood what I had lost. And I understood what I had done, and how, and what I wa
s. Then I was ready to talk to Heer.
We met in the Diwan, between the great silver jars that Salim, dedicated to his new tradition, had kept topped up with holy Ganga water. Guard-monkeys kept watch from the rooftops. My monkeys. My Diwan. My palace. My company, now. Heer’s hands were folded in yts sleeves. Yts eyes were black marble. I wore widow’s white—a widow, at age fifteen.
“How long had you planned it?”
“From before you born. From before you were even conceived.”
“I was always to marry Salim Azad.”
“Yes.”
“And kill him.”
“You could not do anything but. You were designed that way.”
Always remember, my father had said, here among these cool, shady pillars, you are a weapon. A weapon deeper, subtler than I had ever imagined, deeper even than Leel’s medical machines could look. A weapon down in the DNA: designed from conception to cause a fatal allergic reaction in any member of the Azad family. An assassin in my every cell, in every pore and hair, in every fleck of dust shed from my deadly skin.
I killed my beloved with a kiss.
I felt a huge, shuddering sigh inside me, a sigh I could never, must never utter.
“I called you a traitor when you said you had always been a loyal servant of the House of Jodhra.”
“I was, am and will remain so, please God.” Heer dipped yts hairless head in a shallow bow. Then yt said, “When you become one of us, when you step away, you step away from so much; from your own family, from the hope of ever having children . . . You are my family, my children. All of you, but most of all you, Padmini. I did what I had to for my family, and now you survive, now you have all that is yours by right. We don’t live long, Padmini. Ours lives are too intense, too bright, too brilliant. There’s been too much done to us. We burn out early. I had to see my family safe, my daughter triumph.”
“Heer . . . ”
Yt held up a hand, glanced away, I though I saw silver in the corners of those black eyes.
“Take your palace, your company, it is all yours.”
That evening I slipped away from my staff and guards. I went up the marble stairs to the long corridor where my room had been before I became a woman, and a wife, and a widow, and the owner of a great company. The door opened to my thumbprint, I swung it open into dust-hazy golden sunlight. The bed was still made, mosquito nets neatly knotted up. I crossed to the balcony. I expected the vines and creepers to have grown to a jungle; with a start I realized it was just over a year since I had slept here. I could still pick out the hand-holds and foot-holds where I had followed the steel monkey up onto the roof. I had an easier way to that now. A door at the end of the corridor, previously locked to me, now opened onto a staircase. Sentry robots immediately bounced up as I stepped out onto the roof, crests raised, dart-throwers armed. A mudra from my hand sent them back into watching mode.
Once again I walked between the domes and turrets to the balcony at the very top of the palace façade. Again, Great Jaipur at my bare feet took my breath away. The pink city kindled and burned in the low evening light. The streets still roared with traffic, I could smell the hot oil and spices of the bazaar. I now knew how to find the domes of the Hijra Mahal among the confusion of streets and apartment buildings. The dials and half-domes and buttresses of the Jantar Mantar threw huge shadows over each other, a confusion of clocks. Then I turned towards the glass scimitar of the Azad Headquarters—my headquarters now, my palace as much as this dead old Rajput pile. I had brought that house crashing down, but not in any way I had imagined. I wanted to apologise to Salim as he had apologised to me, every night when he came to me in the zenana, for what his family had done. They made me into a weapon and I did not even know.
How easy to step out over the traffic, step away from it all. Let it all end, Azad and Jodhra. Cheat Heer of yts victory. Then I saw my toes with their rings curl over the edge and I knew I could not, must not. I looked up and there, at the edge of vision, along the bottom of the red horizon, was a line of dark. The monsoon, coming at last. My family had made me one kind of weapon, but my other family, the kind, mad, sad, talented family of the nutes had taught me, in their various ways, to be another weapon. The streets were dry but the rains were coming. I had reservoirs and canals and pumps and pipes in my power. I was Maharani of the Monsoon. Soon the people would need me. I took a deep breath and imagined I could smell the rain. Then I turned and walked back through the waiting robots to my kingdom.
First published in The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan.
About the Author
British author Ian McDonald won the Locus “Best First Novel” Award for his novel Desolation Road in 1989. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novels Out On Blue Six, Hearts, Hands and Voices, Terminal Cafe, Sacrifice of Fools, Evolution’s Shore, Kirinya, Ares Express, Cyberabad, and Brasyl, as well as three collections of his short fiction, Empire Dreams, Speaking In Tongues, and Cyberabad Days. His novel, River of Gods, was a finalist for both the Hugo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke award in 2005, and a novella drawn from it, “The Little Goddess,” was a finalist for the Hugo and the Nebula. He won a Hugo Award in 2007 for his novelette “The Djinn’s Wife,” won the Theodore Sturgeon Award for his story “Tendeleo’s Story,” and in 2011 won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel The Dervish House. His most recent books are The Dervish House, and the first two volumes in a YA series, Planesrunner and Be My Enemy.
Spock's Pops: How Operational Research became Wartime Magic!
Jason S. Ridler
During the Second World War, a new form of applied science emerged called Operational Research (OR). OR scientists came from nuclear physics, engineering, advanced mathematics, physiology and other disciplines and applied their knowledge to a myriad of military problems, from lethality of weapons studies to battle investigations.
In many ways, these talented and unmilitary people are the real-life forefathers of the great literary creation of 1960s science fiction, Mr. Spock from Star Trek. Most were highly logical and strange. Some were hired to become living computers for complex firing tables and bombing strategy. Others used biological and medical knowledge to diagnose the problems of complex systems like fighter production and loss rates. All used highly developed and innovative scientific methods to improve the work and life of soldiers. Here’s Sir Patrick Blackett, the modern father of OR, describing its reason to be:
The object of having scientists in close touch with operations is to enable operational staffs to obtain scientific advice on those matters which are not handled by the service technical establishments. Operational staffs provide the scientists with the operational outlook and data. The scientists apply scientific methods of analysis to these data, and are thus able to give useful advice. The main field of their activity is clearly the analysis of actual operations, using as data the material to be found in an operations room, e.g. all signals, track, charts, combat reports, meteorological information, etc. it will be noted that these data are not, and on secrecy grounds cannot, be made available to the technical establishments. Thus such scientific analysis, if done at all, must be done in or near operations rooms. The work of an Operational Research Section should be carried out at Command, Group, Station or Squadron as circumstances dictate.
Can’t you hear Leonard Nimoy reciting this? As if he’s trying to tell Bones what is the role of a science officer on an away mission? Many OR scientists were, in fact, given the new title of “scientific advisor” to describe their new role in command HQs. Some even served in conflict zones, gathering data and offering advice like a “science officer” on an Away team! And, like Spock, OR scientists were often disdained for their quirks and attitudes by the career soldiers who needed their skills but often bristled at their deportment. SAs were given nicknames like “Boffin” or “long hair” or “egghead,” and they were often as hard to herd as a yard full of cats. But w
hen OR sections worked toward a common purpose in the right environment, they made a distinct and valuable contribution to defeating the Axis. It’s a credit to the flexibility and open mindedness of the Allies that OR scientists could succeed as much as they did. The Axis had a much less encouraging environment for the exchange of ideas and collaboration, a much more rigid, hierarchical and brutal working space. They never produced the same caliber of OR scientists as the Allies.
Here we look at how scientists became entrenched in military affairs in Britain, the birthplace of OR, from radars to tank design to the movement of armadas, and became the Spocks of their age!
ORIGINS OF OR
Operational research had distinct historical antecedents. Archimedes, Leonardo De Vinci, and Galileo Galilee all applied scientific methods to military affairs. But scientists by their nature preferred to stay out of military affairs until the industrial scale and demands of the First World War put them to work for their governments. In Britain, early precedents of OR were started in the air war. This included the statistical analysis by physiologist Captain A. V. Hill and his team of scientists-soldiers at the Experimental Section of Munitions Invention Development department (“Hill’s Brigands”). Hill’s team produced some pre-“OR” statistical analysis of the war against the German zeppelin raids of 1916-1917. In his only collected work, Hill lamented that their work had made it into a few textbooks in the 1920s, but the ideas were largely forgotten.
During the 1930s, fear of long range bomber attacks on the UK grew. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s quip that “the bomber will always get through” did not sit well with those charged with air defense. Rumors arose about a German “death ray” that could destroy ships in the sky. The Tizard Committee (named after the Chair, eminent chemist Sir Henry Tizard) was set up in 1934 to assess whether or not an effective air defense solution was possible. Physicist Robert Watson Watt dismissed the feasibility of a “death ray” but radio waves might be used to detect aircraft. The embryonic technology we know as radar soon emerged out of these discussions, and in its wake the British began to support the use of scientists in ever closer relations with the military.
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 82 Page 10