Twelve Days

by Steven Barnes

She cried with him, shushed him, something cold and primal and hard as a diamond sparking to life in her heart.

  If you hurt my boy, she promised. I’ll see you all dead, so help me God.

  * * *

  Madame Gupta stood in the control room, watching with fascination as Olympia quieted her son. “Are they settling in?” she asked. A memory flickered to mind: her own mother, comforting her on a night of flame.

  She pushed the memory away.

  “Yes,” Sister Solitude said. “The woman has questions.”

  “What was Blossom’s assessment of the boy?” Madame Gupta asked. “What if we … removed the mother?”

  “It would depend on how it happened,” Maureen Skotak said, small mouth above her broad jaw working thoughtfully. “If he thought we were to blame, he might shut down completely.”

  “And given the fact that we brought them here, it is unavoidable that he might hold us responsible.”

  Oddly, she was relieved by that answer. She would have her goal, but if it was possible for the woman to survive, that would be a good thing. But … she would have her way. “And there is little chance that the boy would be able to function if … compelled.”

  “I don’t think so,” Master Bishop said, Cockney accent lending musicality to the words. “Survival stress would seem a barrier to conscious delta-state. And that is the doorway to the abilities.” He paused. “I think. And there is another matter. He seems to be able to detect the electronic monitoring equipment. When we turned the camera on a few minutes ago, it seemed to hurt his ears.”

  That was of interest. She herself prickled a bit when those hidden cameras were switched on, but she’d assumed her sensitivity was unique. “How is that possible?”

  “We don’t know. It may emit some sort of low-level tone. Something we couldn’t detect.”

  “He didn’t hear it in his home, did he?”

  “There is no sign he did, no. Several possible explanations come to mind. One is that the equipment is of a different make or model. Another is that it was installed improperly, and broadcasting an unshielded signal detectable to a child’s ears.”

  Or … it was something else. Hannibal was changing. And that was both good and something to watch very closely. “Is that all?”

  The technicians shared a worried expression. “Yes, there is another possibility. We want this boy because of his special sensitivities. And a few days ago, you triggered something in him, what you called a ‘kundalini trap,’ designed to help him focus and align his capacities at a greater level, yes?”

  Gupta nodded her head slowly.

  “Well…” Master Bishop swallowed. “It’s possible you were more successful than you knew. He might be consciously aware of things that most people register only on the unconscious level. It is certainly irritating him, and I think that will reduce his effectiveness.”

  She was pleased. Their thinking trailed but mirrored her own. “What do you suggest?”

  “I suggest that they are in a locked room, on the fourth floor of a secure building, in a guarded enclave, miles from any help. We can afford to turn the monitors off.”

  Madame Gupta regarded Bishop. Then slowly, she nodded. “I see. This increases our need for the daughter … the additional leverage could be valuable. We can … punish the girl without leaving marks upon the mother. That would increase her motivation to cooperate. Given that, I believe we will have a positive result.”

  The tech cleared his throat. “Have you ever considered…?”

  “Considered what, Master Bishop?”

  “Well, considering what we’re asking him to do. What we’re … teaching him to do … have you considered that there may be risks associated with pushing him too hard?”

  She leaned her head slightly to the side. “Risks? I would be concerned more about what will happen if we don’t succeed. In that instance, I can promise that an eight-year-old boy will be the very least of your concerns.”

  And with that, Madame Gupta turned lightly and left the room. But she was glad that they could not read her mind.

  This was a most unusual boy. Beloved son of a fascinating family. Olympia Dorsey and her own mother would have understood each other.

  And that thought disturbed Gupta more than any she had entertained for a very long time.

  CHAPTER 37

  The energy of the universal vibration within the unawakened person enslaves him. Whereas this same energy liberates the yogi.

  —The Spanda Karika

  The stars played peekaboo with gray-edged, cloaking clouds. The air swirled with flecks of ice. Ignoring the cold, Madame Gupta walked clockwise around the outside of the maze, returning to her castle. She tapped a four-digit code and the front door opened. Another code, and her private elevator lifted her to the top level and opened again, depositing her in the foyer of her personal residence.

  If a museum exhibit of Indian and African art had selected for images of family, workers, and celebrants of little-known spiritual and physical practices, it might have resembled her furnishings. Statues carved in polished driftwood or scraped stone or beaten metal. Beaded tapestries displaying images of dark-skinned African people with their hands raised to heaven, arrayed against the silhouette of an incongruously Indian palace. The walls were hung with flat sculptures made from iron and some kind of plastic treated to look like bronze or steel, each of them with wide mouths and open eyes, all seeming to represent a single family or members of a larger tribe.

  The furniture was a similar blend of earth tones and steel, balanced on an edge between luxury and austerity. It might have seemed incongruous without her human presence. Somehow, it all connected in her.

  She sighed and made herself a cup of herbal tea. Sipped it. Then went to a small room decorated with an ancient bronze of four-armed Kali and her necklace of heads. And sat. Closed her eyes. Slowed her breathing. And slowed it again, and then again, until respiration was barely detectable.

  Darkness seethed behind her closed eyes, like clouds of oil suspended in water. And then light in the darkness, as if weaving a golden cocoon around her heart.

  A cocoon that birthed a forest, within which she knew every tree, every bush. And from those familiar branches hung decorations beyond counting, as if she walked through an infinite Christmas tree display, each tree burdened with chakras, mandalas, and constructs of sound and light, delicate glassy structures resembling diatoms, like creatures swarming in the stygian depths of the sea, shining in her inner world.

  And as she walked, the years fell away, and again she was a child.

  Indra. Little Indra.

  What a good little girl she had been.

  * * *

  She heard things, felt them, saw memories preserved like insects in amber, echoes of emotional prehistory.

  Her family lived in the shadow of a great palace, a gold and crystalline citadel perched on the hill above the common folk, but at the very tip of that shadow, where there was no wealth, no luxury. There lived a darkness of another kind. Of the spirit, and of the flesh. Her father worked on the grounds of the palace, but when he returned at night, cloaked in fatigue, none of its splendor returned to their hovel with him. None of them ever traveled into the light with him.

  Father was darker than Mother. Indra and her siblings and cousins were different, darker than the brown-skinned people around them. There was a word for that difference, and the word was “Siddhi.”

  “Why do they call me names?” she asked her mother one night. “Why won’t the girls play with me?”

  “We are Siddhi,” she said. “Many years ago, traders brought your father’s Bantu ancestors from West Africa as slaves. And abandoned them here. I am of his people now. We have no other home, but many here think us unclean, unfit.”

  “Are we, Mother?” The softest questions cut the deepest.

  “No, darling,” her mother said. Mother was so beautiful, her light copper skin only a little paler than Indy’s own. She was Brahmin, had been diso
wned by her family for marrying Indra’s handsome father. Tears sparkled in her eyes. “No one knows where the name ‘Siddhi’ comes from. Some say it is related to ‘sahibi,’ an Arabic term of respect like ‘sahib.’ Others that it comes from ‘Sayyid,’ the name of Arab captains who brought your people here. They are ignorant.” She spat, angered. “They know nothing of the old ways. It comes from the term for powers derived from deep knowledge of mind and body. I knew your father was magic the moment I met him.” The shadow of a dreamy smile softened her face. “And they are afraid of you, because they know you have strength.”

  “I feel very weak,” little Indra said.

  “Never fear,” her mother said, and kissed her forehead tenderly. “In time, you will find what you need to walk this world with power. You will make them pay, my little Indra. Anyone who ever hurt us. Anyone who ever hurt you. You will make them pay.”

  And her mother taught her things, things to focus her mind and cleanse her heart. To find stars in the darkest night. A glimmer of hope in the midst of chaos and pain. To focus her breathing, and create tunnels of attention that blocked out the confusion. At times they lacked food, but every day there remained the discipline of the mind and heart, the only gift that her mother had to give.

  “Where did you learn these things, Mother?” Indra asked.

  Her mother would not answer at first, but over weeks Indra asked and asked, and finally her mother answered her. “I learned from my grandfather,” she said.

  “The one who disowned you when you married Papa?”

  “Yes,” she said, tears sparkling in her eyes.

  “What was his name?”

  “Savagi,” her mother said. “His name was Savagi.”

  * * *

  But the day came when her father was accused of stealing silver from the palace, and of fighting with the men who tried to arrest him. She only saw him once more after that terrible day. He wept in his cell, unable to hold her except through the bars, telling her mother not to bring Indra to see him again.

  There was no adequate repayment for that. Or for the things her mother was forced to do to support them. And even though she was willing to dishonor herself to feed her children, because they knew she had married a Siddhi, the men who came to her bed paid few rupees, and hunger was a sharp-fanged, gnawing beast in the night.

  * * *

  Was it disease? Or a crowd with torches? She could not remember. Despite all the power of her deep and questing vision, a gap existed in her memory. There were scattered images: flaming brands, angry faces, hands pulling her from her mother’s ravaged body.

  Blackness. A scream she recognized as her brother’s. Then no sound from him, no sight, ever again. Alive? Dead? She did not know.

  All she remembered then was thirst, crawling in the streets begging for water, her hands stained red with blood. Hers? She didn’t know.

  In her memory there stood a building with a blue flag. Or was it red? No, red and white stripes against blue. A British flag. And gates opening, and a man with a camera filming her, and arguments about what should be done, and what something called the Bee Bee See would want.

  She tried to whisper: water. Even though she knew that water would only postpone death for short while. She was … broken.

  But the people in the building with the flag, the people who had traveled the streets with cameras, took her in, and that was the last she remembered for another time.

  There was pain. But also comfort, and clean sheets on a hard bed. And faces that did not hate, and hands that did not hurt.

  A new life began there in the place where the people with cameras lived while they took pictures and made films. And in time little Indra was healthy enough to perform tasks around the building, which she did with a feverish energy, hoping and praying that she would not be sent back outside.

  By some miracle, she was not. She remained there for months. Over a year. A woman in the building was surprised, shocked perhaps, to learn that Indra could read, and more to realize just how well, and they began to look at her differently, and spoke to her of different matters.

  And one day they asked if a small lost Siddhi girl would like to go to a place called England.

  If she would have clean sheets and good food, yes, she would. There was a time of papers and officials and, she thought, money and gifts changing hands. And then the trips by car, and small plane, and then by a large plane, in the company of one of the men with a camera.

  And all of this was so new, and so strange to a small child, and she was grateful for all he did, so grateful when he brought her to a home almost like a palace, with her own room. And sent her to school with other children who spoke bad English, but learned to improve.

  It was all so mysterious, and so wonderful, that it was years before she understood that he should not have come into her bed at night, nor done the things he did once there.

  It took years. Not until he brought a young white woman home for his wife, and Indra was sent away to a boarding school, and she spoke to the other girls of how her life had been, did she understand.

  And then … she hated.

  * * *

  And she poured that hate into the books and lessons and lectures at the school. Knowledge, Francis Bacon had said, was power. And how she craved power. With power she could strike back at the people who had crushed her life, who had taken everything, who had given her dignity and snatched it away.

  Power, she understood. Power she would have.

  She remembered everything she had been taught, her mind keen as a diamond’s edge. But the lectures faded into each other, as if they were water pouring from myriad pitchers into a container the size and shape of Indra Gupta. A plump shape, a plump face of studious inclination, round wire-rim glasses perched on her plump little nose. She was alone most of the time, with no friends. She wanted none. She now understood what happened if you trusted.

  With precious few exceptions, all the lessons and teachers flowed together. One was a Mr. Bland, a balding man with comb-over hair. His class, his intense face, she remembered. Remembered both because of what he said, and the fact that she suspected that, behind his lectern, he stroked himself as he lectured and looked at her. “And Marxist theory suggests that power collects regardless of the specific system of government. Two thousand years ago, it was Egypt. And then Greece. Then Rome. And then England was the greatest power in the known world. Now it is America. And then? Who knows?” Bland peered out at them, owlish in his horn rims. “It may be China. Or, the era of nations may be passing. But what we do know, can be certain of, is that money is the most fluid form of power that has ever existed, and the rulers of the future will not be bounded by geographical lines…”

  Indra Gupta’s sixteen-year-old mind was transfixed.

  In time she graduated with honors, and found herself turned down for job after job for which she knew herself qualified. And finally an old Indian man named Sanjay gave her a chance. She had the sense that he would not have wanted her for a daughter, or as marriage material for his son, but that he had a certain amount of sympathy for a refugee from his own homeland. “We have a position as data analyst available,” old Sanjay said. “It is an entry position, but then, all things considered, that should be acceptable, shouldn’t it?”

  All things considered.

  Gupta seethed, but agreed.

  The valedictorian found herself working in the back of an office, scanning sheets and computer screens for errors made by her intellectual inferiors.

  Months passed. Years. She watched as others … white, male, Christian, British, sometimes all of these at once … were promoted over her, even if they often needed to come to her for help. Resentment simmered.

  Every night she would return to her efficiency apartment in London’s East End, and there she cried herself to sleep. She had found, in a magazine called National Geographic, a picture of the palace that gleamed like gold in the night, and kept it in a frame on her dresser. She watched it as sh
e went to sleep at night, pretending that just out of frame, down at the bottom of the picture, was the house where she and her family had once lived, the last place in this world she had ever smiled.

  * * *

  During the Brixton race riots of 1981, her skin caused her to be mistaken for one of the Afro-Caribbean immigrants who had triggered the outbreak of hatred and violence, and Indra was savaged again, losing consciousness as she had in childhood.

  She remembered staggering through the streets, not knowing who or what she was, yearning to die. And at that moment something awakened within her, something that was not Indra.

  I am Shakti, it said. And I will keep you alive. Follow me.

  Onward she had staggered, above herself, watching with a kind of placid horror at the marionette she had become. Poor little Indra, child of pain, had become this bleeding, mindless rag doll composed of meat. Controlled only by the voice of a goddess in her head now, no longer remotely human.

  Weeping blood, she had collapsed in front of a line of armored police officers. Awakening in a hospital, Indra learned that she was being treated for contusions, abrasions, and STDs. The nurses managed to imply that, while they were forced to admit that her wounds had been the result of the riot, in all probability she had acquired the STDs on her own.

  She heard them, but didn’t hear them.

  Shakti heard.

  Shakti replied in blistering words that sent the nurses fleeing from the room.

  Indra was far, far away. It was as if some part of her had become untethered from her soul, drifting up and far away. Perhaps dead. No, not dead, but no longer in this world.

  By the time she returned to her data analyst position, the Shakti voices had receded, but she had changed. She could no longer remember a single dream she had ever had in childhood, seemed only a machine designed for survival.

  Survive just another day. One more day. Kill yourself and end the pain … tomorrow. Shakti’s voice, returning to keep her alive. Then returning to the darkness like a beast shambling to its cave. But today, and today, and today and all the todays she could manage were for life, for the living. One more today, on the forlorn hope that some tomorrow would be better than yesterday.