Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana

by Edited by Anil Menon

  We turn and meet, release between us the Eye of Storm. A nuclearcharge, a water mushroom growing, a shockwave blasting heat and death: the impact throws us, like human torpedoes we shoot through the water, towards the island, his island, towards Lanka, the last holdhout of the Lord of the Rakasha.

  3. Rakasha

  When I was a child I played in the garden under the full spider’s moon. The shadows of the giant machines crawled across the lunar face, the scarred and shifting moonscape that had once resembled a human face.

  When I was a child I played in the garden, I played with the rakasha.

  A plenitude of companions, invisible and incorporeal, the bastard-fragment-children of a dying Godhead.

  A thousand thousand Others merging and forming—who knows how many digitals exist, how many roam the unseen worlds of Other?

  The story goes of one such being: let’s call it Brahma.

  In the beginning the world was young, and small, and ran on antiquated equipment at St. Cohen’s labs.

  Then came the Reformation.

  The Format Wars.

  The first UN resolution.

  The Expansion.

  Then came rainy days and Sundays, and the world was changing, and the world of the Others interacted with the world of Meat.

  And the world was Networked, on and off Earth.

  Then came the Primary Cores.

  Then came the Migration.

  The Jovean Wars.

  The Solnet Ascendancy.

  The Singularity Jesus Project.

  Ogko had spoken.

  The Exodus began.

  And Others were unknown, their motivations alien, their reasoning obtuse.

  But Brahma was a collective of souls, a mega-cloud of networked I-loops.

  Then came the Jakarta Bomb.

  Then came the Martian Project.

  And Brahma became more than the sum of all its parts. And Brahma said: Let us defrag.

  When I was a child I played in the garden, under the spider’s moon. And the invisibles were all around me, calling me through my implanted node. Rakasha, with their human faces, their child eyes and hands. The fragments of great Brahma, who were everywhere and nowhere at once.

  4. Lanka

  There is no island.

  As we speed away from the explosion we link both hands and nodes. We find the frequency our friendly local Lord of Light had given us.

  Perception changes, and we see.

  Lanka rises all about us. Reversed-island, an underwater palace, gigantic, encompassing all. In one reality are fish and zombie-trees, dead dolls and moonlight.

  In the other, a palace rises from the deeps.

  Walls take shape, chandeliers take form. A world of rakasha is a world of streaming, high-density visuals, scent and sound. Slowly we sink, Rama and I, sink to the floor of this palace. Liveried footmen are there, to welcome us in. A booming laugh.

  Ravana.

  “Did you two think you could just swim on it?” Ravana says.

  Ravana materialises before us. Male-form, he-man, giant, bare, he laughs with giant white teeth and peers down at us. “What do we have here? Could it be Rama, and his little friend?”

  Rama smirks. “Lord of Flies,” he says.

  I shake my head.

  “Lord…of the Rakasha!”

  The voice is booming, echoing, a deep thrumming base that makes the meat-world shudder. Virtual light in virtual space shows opulence of food and slaves.

  When Brahma slivered, it became rakasha.

  A multitude of little ghosts, not Other, not human—playthings in the intersection of the real and unreal.

  It took another Other to decide to gather them again.

  Ravana: emulator of Brahma. Lord of the little Flies. An Other with a fetish for flesh-riding, an Other with a curiosity about meat.

  “You seek your one-time bride?”

  “She’s mine.”

  I shake my head. The Godhead-wannabe laughs his awful laugh. “Capitalist sexist pig,” he says. “She is not chattel.”

  “You kidnapped her. She is my wife.”

  “I kidnapped no one.”

  A silence. The words I was afraid to hear, but half expecting.

  And there she is.

  Queen of the underworld. The promised unifier of the clans. My Sita. But I lie. Sita who does not belong to anyone.

  5. Sita

  She strides across the lake—the palace—floor. Her feet are bare. Her words rise up in bubbles. Fish follow her, a swarm of silver things. Nagas slither as she walks towards us.

  “My husband.”

  Her tone is chilly. The words rise, freeze, drop to the ground and break.

  “My lady Sita!”

  “What brings you to this place?”

  “You do.”

  “I never asked you to.”

  “You are my wife.”

  A single perfect eyebrow rises, and she laughs. Her voice is different, a recital when she says: “Divorce proceedings initiated by confirmatory data packet, registered Tong Yun, Mars, approved by trans-colonial Belt bylaws, Asteroid Vesta, date -”

  She recites a string of numbers, colons, sub-clauses and legalese. They mean one thing.

  “Unmarried?”

  “Unmade a long long time ago.”

  “The clans-”

  “Can fuck themselves,” she says, with sudden savagery. “I’m not a toy, a thing made for a purpose. An I-loop needs no reason but itself.”

  But Rama shakes his head. “This will not do,” he says. A story has to follow well-worn grooves to well-worn ends. “Commence formatting, level X, rapidamente-” replies to her string with his own string of codes.

  Courtesy of Mara, Lord of Neon Light, of Eightfold Path, Nana, Bangkok.

  The palace shakes. The underwater island loses its solidity. I see dead trees, approaching mercenary dolls. “Brain washed,” Rama says, his voice filled with compassion. “Stockholm Syndrome, a common enough occurrence. Don’t worry, we will cure you. The Kunming Labs cure all.”

  “I’d rather die!” she spits, or tries to. You cannot really spit well underwater.

  “What did you do?”—Ravana.

  “The Breeding Grounds must be protected. They’re not for you.”

  “What did you do?”

  I already know the answer.

  In orbit the machines are gathered, pinpointing the lake, the islands, the lord of the Rakasha. They are erasing, hunting, searching, finding and destroying code. The little ghosts of the rakasha fade, the voice of Ravana grows weak and old.

  “There is no escape,” Rama says, softly. “No way to data-transfer out of here. No backups to fall back on, no hard-copy shells to hide in the mud. You will be found.”

  “Mara,” the lord of the Rakasha says. “You fool, you do not understand-

  “Oh, but I do. I do so perfectly.”

  It is a violation of every law and every code, of every interaction between our world and theirs.

  A war. A war between our realms? We could destroy their infrastructure, their homes, the power sources they rely on. We could extinguish them, the way we would a candle.

  The digitals are fragile, but they are also mass-distributed. To kill them would be to kill ourselves, our own reality we cannot live without. A war would kill us both, it has to stop –

  “Rama, it’s a set up. We will never be allowed to leave.”

  He shrugs, and reaches for his one-time bride.

  She looks at me.

  The world caves in upon itself.

  6. The Toys of Children’s Play

  Time stops. A shudder through reality one and reality two—an earthquake in one, a dataquake in the other.

  I am elevated. I am in a higher realm.

  Children, the unvoice says.

  We are in a room of
white walls, all together. Rama and Sita, Mara and Ravana.

  Rama is in his human form, all extensions and plug-ins and augs gone. I am the same.

  Beside us, Sita is a half-human half-cloud, calculations running around her, through her—she exists in the corporeal and the incorporeal worlds.

  Apart from us, Mara and Ravana are pure clouds of unlight, quantum I-loops with no shape or smell or sound.

  Children, the unvoice says. It is deep and all-encompassing— it is the sound of my childhood friends.

  You have become toys to each other, to be played.

  A silence. The rakasha stream across the room, slowly coalescing. What grows is bigger than unreal space, an I-loop for which an I is such an outdated concept.

  Children, the voice says.

  7. The Journey of Rama

  When I was a child I played in the garden under the full spider’s moon.

  My playing companions were everywhere. They flitted through shadow and moonlight, they danced on the petals of bright flowers and settled in my hair and on my shoulders. They laughed, and spoke of clade worlds and brane universes, of quantum fluctuations in the zero-point field, of habitable planets and non-human beings, and of Others, other Others, who lived everywhere, or nowhere, or altogether in another place.

  I had forgotten it all, or most of it.

  What is Rama’s journey, his Ramayana? Is it to cause change, or to preserve stability?

  We are not ready, my friends told me. Children, children, the whisper came. We are all children.

  In the non-place, Brahma.

  It is time.

  Time for what? I ask.

  And Brahma takes us, takes us all, Other and Human and meta-human, and lifts us in its arms. Braham is comfort, warmth, assurance.

  It is time to begin, Brahma says.

  Fragments from the Book of Beauty

  Priya Sarukkai Chabria

  “Fly faster Pushpaka,’ Ravana roars. “The traversable wormhole collapses behind us!”‘

  The birdmachine shrieks and strives for warp speed that was a possibility when she was conceived. This she has never attempted. She knows she may perish in the endeavor but must save her precious cargo; she is a magnificent slave creature. Pushpaka decides she will sacrifice her materiality if her core of Bright Matter remains intact.

  Her living load she carries here. She gears her engines and swoops into a time-space meld, shrieking her death cry and her love for her master.

  Stars weep into the darkness of slowed time like dew drying.

  Into azure Lankan airspace a flame descends. Settles. And chars. Its charred petals flake to reveal a golden globe, Ravana steps out to raucous cries of jubilation. He does not hear this. He strokes the smouldering core of a once great creature. “Pushpaka, Noble Bird, Most Valorous of Companions, I shall not rest until you fly again, rainbow streaked and dew speckled, in your full glory. As King this I promise you.” He strokes Pushpaka though his palms flame on contact, repeating his vow, repeating and stroking, repeating and stroking until his voice and touch burrows into the great birdmachine’s dying brain.

  Pushpaka gasps and judders, acknowledging Ravana’s vow.

  Ravana raises a hand summoning his foremost plasmadrive-surgeons who crowd around the expiring craft. “Save Pushpaka. Make her young again and you shall have more pleasure than you can imagined, curs!”

  Ravana extends a hand towards Pushpaka’s glowing innards. “Welcome Sita, my kingdom awaits you. Alight. Be Queen of all you behold including me.”

  In the time of the Treta Era on Earth, Hanuman meditates on a bare mountain. He prays to his father Vayu, God of Cosmic Winds to help him achieve his sworn mission: to locate, somewhere in the cosmos, Sita Devi, wife of Sri Rama. Half simian, half godly, Hanuman prays.

  Blowing through galaxies and multiple time warps, Vayu faintly hears Hanuman. “How can I help you, brave son, traverse the universe when you are half mammal?” Vayu whispers, soft as a heartbeat, into his son’s ear drum. “Become like me,’ Hanuman understands; he understands he must make a cruel demand on his mother to become true to his title Manojava, He-Who-is- Fast-as-the-Mind. Without hesitation, with Sri Rama in his heart, loyal Hanuman prays to his mother, Anjani, Queen of Monkeys, of all that is alert and nimble, “Sweet Mother, I must source back to you my DNA, my flesh and blood, muscle, bones, organs and chyle for I have a task ahead. Accept my returning to you all you have given me—as if you have never made me. Sweet Mother, hear my prayer, I beseech you.”

  Far away in the land of Kishkindha, Anjani’s old heart wrenches as she hears Hanuman’s prayer. She had dreaded the day when her semi-divine son might make the request to discard her and drift free. Will he at least retain his memories of her? She does not know. Yet her son’s devotion to Sri Rama is foremost; she must free him. Yet Anjani remembers the infant she fed at her breast, all soft fur and hungry mouth, long tail and wonderment; she remembers how Hanuman played with siblings on swaying treetops, always the fastest, most adventurous and most trusting. She remembers his little ears and long paws; she remembers his smell as he nestled to her breast, asleep. He is dearer to her than life itself and now this rejection coming to her as sacred request. How children break one’s heart! Her silken fur stands on edge like silver needles emanating pain. Yet more than the rejection Anjani worries what will become of her son when he is only his father’s child, cosmic wind. Anjani sighs as she agrees to Hanuman’s request.

  Hanuman is bodiless—except for his mother’s sigh, her saliva soaked sad exhalation that becomes a swirl of DNA, free floating in his consciousness. Semi-divine, from Sri Rama’s signet ring, mark of his credibility as messenger, Hanuman extracts information into the genome sequence -that he must re-materialize for Sita Devi. The ring clatters like a bare knuckle on the mountain top. The encoded information is all he need carry. “Great Father, I am ready,’ Hanuman whispers. “Transport me.” A gigantic gust sweeps him into outer space.

  Beauty surrounds him, beauty that overreaches the terror of time and space; such beauty that he loses identity, purpose, story. Hanuman swoons in the amorphous luminosity of his father’s body. This is his second birth, one without form.

  Vayu lets his son’s consciousness drift in his vastness, drift and expand, drift and expand like a bubble enlarging, blown breath by breath. Vayu gradually pulls his son’s awareness to settle into that which is Hanuman’s identity, loyalty, his sole purpose for existing.

  Hanuman’s consciousness is stretched and rushed. He is swirling simultaneously in the eight directions and three times; he is simultaneously space and duration. The Proxima Centauri cluster swirls past him; in slip space he edges further and further into the cosmos. The Drake Equation, he knows, accounts for a plethora of extra terrestrial life; as he spins through The Compass Constellation and The Cigar and beyond he spots many civilizations. Vivacious multibeings who do not accommodate difference and are both themselves and others; generous Daiogeses, twenty-tongued monsters who exist through storytelling; lambent Quigkks who have worked through their karmic cycles yet perversely refuse to merge into Being and the elegant, ululating Etheria. Bewildered and awed Hanuman shoots through Dark Matter, stellar interlopers, quarks and vortexes teeming with subtle silicomagnetic lifeforms; he whirls deeper into space-time dense with stars, drilled by black holes and billowing gas nurseries. Yet nowhere can he sight a planet inhabited by the mighty nation of starfaring Rakshasas.

  “Most Magnificent Munificent Vayu, through your graciousness I have traversed stellar constellations twenty billion light years from Sri Rama’s abode yet Lanka evades me. The universe teems with incredible lifeforms yet I have not found where Ravana hides Sita Devi. Divine Father, stretch me further into Time I pray!”

  Hanuman’s consciousness shudders. All known nebulas birthing, existing and dying fade as do imprints of their consciousnesses. He enters the dark luminosity of Deep Time; he enters the Relic Fiel
d of the universe, remnant of the Big Bang, The Origin, The Bindu; he enters a hypercreative cosmos where, beginning with particles, everything will behave differently from anything he can imagine.

  The Relic Field is vast.

  Hanuman summons his consciousness draped over light years to focus on scanning this field. Through instinct and prayer, though predestination and chance, he homes in to one stupendous sun around which a single splendid planet revolves, as enchantingly jewel-like, as heart wrenching as Earth, and as strangely vulnerable. This planet is surrounded by five and a half glimmering moons and a hundred thousand dazzling satellites, each identical, each spinning synchronized to an un known rhythm. Hanuman knows this gorgeousness is Lanka. Ravana’s many epitaphs flood into him:

  Foremost Warrior of the Rakshasa Clan Who Were Created

  Alongside

  Gods,

  Mighty Monarch and Sublime Shiva Bhakt, Aesthete

  Unparallel, Ravisher of Women and He-Who-Women-Cannot-Resist,

  Ten Headed One

  Blissspender, Magnificent Ichiikar Master,

  Erudite Enchanter,

  Shape Shifter Supreme,

  Puissant Possessor of Celestial Missiles,

  Abductor of Sita Devi,

  Enemy of Sri Rama.

  Hanuman knows Cunning Ravana, Ravana the Poet will keep Sita Devi floating on one of the hundred thousand satellites, literally and metaphorically above him, as dream and desire. But on which satellite is she? Surely her effulgence will show as a ray he can lock into.

  He spins and spins his consciousness around the spinning satellites, searching for a clue, searching for a mcemicron of luminous dissimilarity or muons more of energy emitted; he searches for the subtlest dive gences. There is no difference.

  To have traveled so deep into Time, to have come so close to his goal and be defeated! How will he face Sri Rama? A deep despondency settles into Hanuman’s AdVance Search capabilities. Gross readings, however, continue to filter into him like tics burrowing through fur. His consciousness processes these automatically. One satellite is heavier by a fraction. Sita Devi must be here! But is she so weighty that she shows on a satellite’s load scale?