Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana

by Edited by Anil Menon

  I knew more about Hirasor than anyone else did, although it was little enough.

  He liked absinthe and roses.

  He had a perfect memory.

  He was fastidious about his appearance. Every hair in place, fingers elegant and manicured, the signature ear-studs small and precisely placed on each ear-lobe. His clothing was made from the silk of sapient-worms.

  He had no confidant but for the chief of his guards, a nakalchi female called Suvarna, a walking weapon who was also his lover. He wrote her poetry that was remarkable for its lyrical use of three languages, and equally remarkable for its sadistic imagery.

  Later I killed three of his functionaries to learn his unique identity-number. It did me no good, or so I thought, then.

  In the years of his decline he lost his Harvester units; his three main hideouts were found and his assets destroyed, his loyal bands of followers dwindled to one, Suvarna—and yet he seemed more slippery and elusive than ever. Although he left trails of blood and shattered lives in his wake, he managed to elude me with trickery and firepower.

  He left me messages in blood.

  Sometimes it was the name of a planet or a city. I would go there and find, too late, another clue, spelled out in corpses. It was as though we were playing an elaborate game across the inhabited worlds, with him always in the lead. Slowly the universe began to take less and less notice. We were two lone players on a vast stage, and the audience had other, larger scale horrors to occupy them.

  I began to think of myself as a modern-day Ram. In the Ramayan epic, Prince Ram’s wife Sita is abducted by the ten-headed demon Ravan. Prince Ram, beloved by all, has no difficulty raising an army of animals and people and following Ravan to his kingdom.

  I was no prince. But Hirasor had stolen my whole world, as surely as Ravan stole Sita. I could not bring back Ramasthal or my childhood, but I could bring Hirasor down. Unlike Ram, I would have to do it alone.

  Alone. Sifting through travel records, bribing petty little mercenaries who may have had dealings with his people, tracking down witnesses at the scene of each orgy of violence, trying to think like him, to stand in his shoes and wonder: what would he do next? I would sleep only when I could no longer stand.

  Sleep brought a recurring nightmare: Hirasor standing before me at last. I shoot an arrow into his navel, and as he falls I leap upon him and put my hands around his throat. I am certain he is dying, but then I see his face change, become familiar, become my own face. I feel his hands on my throat.

  I would wake up in a sweat and know that in the end it was going to be only one of us who would prevail: him or me. But first I had to find him. So I worked obsessively, following him around from place to place, always one step behind.

  Then, quite suddenly, the trail got cold. I searched, sent my agents from planet to planet. Nothing but silence. I paced up and down my room, brooding for days. What was he waiting for? What was he about to do?

  Into this empty, waiting time came something I had not expected. A reason to live that had nothing to do with Hirasor. Her name was Dhanu.

  She was an urbanologist for whom I had performed a small service. She was a small, fierce, determined woman with long, black hair turning to grey that she tied in a braid. The job I did for her was shoddily done, and she demanded a reason. “I’m preoccupied with something more important,” I snapped, wanting her out of my office and my life.

  “Tell me,” she said, sitting down and waiting with her whole body, her eyes mocking and intrigued. So I did.

  We became lovers, Dhanu and I. Somehow she found her way past the armor-plating of my mind and body; she found cracks and interstices, living flesh that remembered loving touch, regions of vulnerability that I hadn’t cauterized out of myself. Here is a memory fragment:

  We lie in bed in my dingy room, with moonlight coming in through the narrow window, and the sounds outside of voices raised in argument, and the sweaty, chemical scent of the dead river that lies like an outstretched arm across this nameless, foul city. She is a shadow, a ghost limned with silver, turned into a stranger by the near-darkness. I find this suddenly disturbing; I turn her over so that the light falls full on her face. I don’t know what I look like to her. I don’t know what I am. I’ve been calling myself Vikram for a few years, but that doesn’t tell me anything.

  “Tell me a secret,” she says. “Something about yourself that nobody knows.”

  I pull myself together, settle down next to her and stare at the ceiling. I don’t know what to tell her, but something escapes my lips unbidden.

  “I want to die,” I say, surprising myself because lately I haven’t been thinking about death. But it’s true. And also not true, because I want this moment for ever, the light from the broken moon Jagos silvering her hair, and the way she looks at me when I say that: a long, slow, sad, unsurprised look. She begins to say something but I stop her. “Your turn,” I say.

  “I’ll tell you what I want to know, more than anything,” she says after a pause. “I want to know what it is like to be somebody else. I remember, as a very small child, standing with my mother on a balcony, watching the most amazing fireworks display I had ever seen. It made me happy. I looked at my mother to share that joy, and found that she was crying. It was then that I realized that I was a different person from her, that she was in some profound way a stranger. Since then I’ve sought strangeness. I’ve wanted to know what it is like to be a tree, a sapient-worm, and most of all, a made-being. Like a nakalchi or a Cognizant-City. Can you imagine what the universe would look like to an entity like that?”

  We talk all night. She teaches me what she has learned about nakalchis and Cognizant-Cities, Corporate Entities and mother-machines—in particular, their rituals of death, because that is what interests me. I realize during the conversation that I am no more than a vessel for the death of another, and that is perhaps why I seek my own. Some time during the night she teaches me the song with which nakalchis welcome Nothen, their conception of death. She learned it from a nakalchi priest who was dying, who wanted someone to say the words to him. I cannot pretend to understand the lore and mysticism that the priests have developed around Nothen, which to me is simply irreversible non-functionality, the death that comes to us all. Or the philosophical comparison between Nothen and Shunyath. Dhanu tries to explain:

  “If you go into Shunyath, you contemplate what nakalchis call The River, which is inadequately translated as the Cosmic Stream of Being. If you go into Nothen, with the Last Song echoing in your mind, then you are the River. You are no longer separate from it—you become the River, see?”

  No, I don’t see. Never mind, she says, laughing at me. She says the words of the Last Song, breathing it out into the moonlit air.

  It has a pleasing, sonorous lilt. It is supposed to induce a state of acceptance and peace in a dying nakalchi. I am not sure why, but there are tears in my eyes as I repeat it after her in the gray, hushed light of dawn.

  Shantih. Nothen ke aagaman, na dukh na dard…

  Lying with her, seeing her hair unbound on my pillow like seaweed, I find myself in a still place, as though between breaths. Hirasor does not walk the paths that Dhanu and I tread.

  Looking back, I see how the paths branch out of each temporal nexus. For every pivotal event in my life, there was always more than one possible path I could have taken.

  This is the path I chose:

  I had accompanied Dhanu during one of her urbanology expeditions. We were in the bowels of a dying Cognizant-City on the ruined planet Murra. This was the first time she had had a chance to explore what was probably one of the earliest Cognizant-Cities in the galaxy. She was a few levels below me, attempting to salvage what was left of the City’s mind. All its recorded history and culture, its ruminations over the years of its existence, lay spooled in cavernous darkness below. The inhabitants had been evacuated, and even now I could see the last of the ships, a glint or t
wo in a reddening sky over the bleak mountains of Murra’s northern continent. I was perched on the highest ramparts, standing by our flyer and looking out for rogue destroyer bots. Every now and then I saw one rise up, a distant speck, and crash into the city-scape in a small fireball. Thin spires of smoke rose all around me, but there was as yet nothing amiss where I was waiting.

  Then I lost Dhanu’s signal.

  I searched the skies, found them clear of bots, and descended quickly into the warren-like passageways that led into the city’s heart. Two levels later, my wrist-band beeped. She was in range.

  “I’m all right, Vikram,” she said to my anxious query. She sounded breathless with excitement. “I had to go down a couple of levels to find the rest of the data-banks. This City is one of the first Cognizant-cities ever made! They still have direct human-to- City interfaces! I am hooking up to talk to it as I record. Go on up! I’ll only be a few minutes, I promise.”

  When I relive that moment, I think of the things I could have done. I could have insisted on going down to where she was, or persuaded her to leave everything and come. Or I could have been more careful going up, so I wouldn’t lose my way.

  But I did lose my way. It was only one wrong turn, and I was about to retrace my steps (I had the flyer’s reassuring signal on my wristband as a guide) but what made me pause was curiosity. Or fate.

  I found myself in the doorway of an enormous chamber which smelled faintly of blood and hydrogen peroxide, and was lit by periodic blue flashes, like lightning. I saw the great, monstrous hulk of an old-fashioned mother-machine, her long-abandoned teats spewing an oily broth, her flailing arms beating the air over the shattered remains of her multiple wombs. She was old—it had been a long time since she had brought any nakalchis to life. As I stared at her I realized (from what pictures Dhanu had shown me of ancient made-beings) that she was probably a first-generation mother-machine. A priceless collector’s item, salvaged from who-knew-where, abandoned in the evacuation of the City. And now the City’s madness was destroying what little functionality she had, taking her to Nothen. Moved by a sudden impulse I went up to her and spoke the words of peace.

  Shantih. Nothen ke aagaman, na dukh na dard…

  Peace. As Nothen comes, there is no sorrow, no pain…

  I regretted my impulse almost immediately because after I stopped, the mother-machine began to recite the names of her children, the first part of her death-ritual. In her final moments she had mistaken me for a nakalchi priest. I don’t know what made me stay—there was something mesmerizing about that old, metallic voice in the darkness, and the proximity of death. Perhaps I was a little annoyed with Dhanu for delaying, for wanting to join with the City in an orgy of mutual understanding. Dhanu’s signal flickered with reassuring regularity on my wristband.

  Then I heard the mother-machine utter the name that to me meant more than life itself: Hirasor.

  I will remember that moment until I die: the grating voice of the mother-machine, the dull booms in the distance, the floor shaking below my feet, and that pungent, smoky darkness, pierced by occasional sparks of blue lightning.

  In the midst of it, clear as a bell, the name—or rather, Hirasor’s unique numerical identifier. Each of us had our identity numbers, given to us at birth, and I was one of the few people who knew Hirasor’s. But I had never suspected he was a nakalchi. Partly because of nakalchi lore and history—there never had been any confirmed master criminals who were nakalchi, conceived as they had once been to gently shepherd the human race toward the stars. Meanwhile the great uprising of the nakalchis in times long before Samarin, the consciousness debates that had preceded them, had all ensured that they were treated on par with human beings, so I had no way of knowing from the number alone. You can’t tell from appearance or behavior either, because nakalchis claim access to the full range of human emotion (or, if their priests are to be believed, to more than that). By now even we humans are so augmented and enhanced that the functional difference between nakalchi and human is very small—but important. To me the difference meant—at last—the possibility of vengeance.

  Hirasor: a first-generation nakalchi!

  That is why I had to wait. That is why I couldn’t go down to find Dhanu, why I ignored her frantic signals on my wrist-band. I had to wait for the mother-machine to tell me her name.

  At last she said it: Ekadri-samayada-janini, intermingled with a sequence of numbers that made up a prime.

  I left her then, to die. I left , repeating her name—what would always be, to me, the Word—so I would not forget. The floor was twisting and bucking beneath my feet, and a lone siren was blaring somewhere above me. I staggered against the rusting metal wall of the passage, and remembered Dhanu.

  I got up. I went back. I wish I could say that I went into the bowels of the City, braved everything to find her and rescue her. But I didn’t. I went down until I was stopped by the rubble of fallen masonry. Her signal still flickered on my wrist-band but she did not answer my query.

  There was a seismic shudder far below me, and a long sigh, a wind that blew through the wrecked passageways, running invisible fingers through my hair. I sensed—or imagined— Dhanu’s breath flowing with the breath of the dying City, her consciousness entangled inextricably with that of her host. But as I turned away I knew also that my real reason for abandoning her was that I was the only living being who had the means to bring Hirasor down. For that I couldn’t risk my life.

  The roof of the passageway began to collapse. I was running, now, veering from one side to another to prevent being hit by debris. I burst into open air, my chest aching, and flung myself into the flyer. As I rose up, three destroyer bots honed into the very spot I had vacated. I had no time to activate the flyer’s defenses. A great fireball blossomed be low me. I felt its heat as I piloted the rocking craft upward through the tumultuous air. Up, in the cool heights, I saw that there was blood flow ing down my right arm. My shoulder hurt. I looked down and saw the myriad fires blooming, forming and dissolving shapes that my imagination brought to life. Monsters. And lastly, a woman, arms outstretched, burning.

  In the Ramayan, Ram braves all to recover his consort Sita from the demon Ravan. But near the end of the story he loses her through his own foolishness. He turns her away, exiles her as he himself was once exiled, and buries himself in the task of ruling his kingdom.

  All that: the war, the heroes killed—for nothing!

  One of the most moving scenes in the epic is at the end of the story, when Ram goes down on his knees before Sita in the forest, begging her forgiveness and asking her to come back to him. She accepts his apology but she does not belong to him; she never has. She calls to her mother, the Earth; a great fissure opens in the ground and Sita goes home.

  In the One Thousand Commentaries, there are different views on the significance of Sita. Some interpret her as signifying that which is lost to us. For a long time I had thought of Sita as my world, my childhood. I had seen myself as Ram, raising an army to win back—not those irredeemable things, but a chance for survival. Abandoned by my fellow investigators, hunting for Hirasor alone, I had, after a while, given up on analogies. Certainly I had never thought of Dhanu as Sita.

  Dhanu was what I had to sacrifice to reach Hirasor, to rescue Sita. Dhanu had never belonged to me, anyway, I told myself. She could have come up out of the City at any time; it was her obsession with the made-beings that led to her death. Sometimes I was angry with her, at other times, I wept, thinking of the fall of her hair in the moonlight. At odd moments during my renewed pursuit of Hirasor, she would come unbidden into my mind, and I would wonder what her last moments had been like. Had she seen the Universe through the eyes of the dying City? Had she had her epiphany?

  But I had little time for regret. My life narrowed down to one thing: find Hirasor. I set various agents sifting through mountains of possible leads; I re-established contact with criminal informers, coaxed or thre
atened information from scores of witnesses. At night I lay sleepless in my lonely bed, thinking of what I would do when I found Hirasor. My mind ran through scenario after scenario. I had to first put him in a hundred kinds of agony. Then I would say the name of the mother-machine and lock him in Shunyath for ever.

  His silence lasted over two years. Then, at last, one of my agents picked up his trail. This time, curiously, it was not marked with blood. No small, artistically arranged orgy of violence betrayed his presence. All I had was proof from a transit shuttle record that he had been headed for the planet Griddha-kuta two months ago.

  I went to Griddha-kuta. Apparently he had headed straight for the Buddhist monastery of Leh, without any attempt at covering his tracks. I went to the monastery, suspecting a trap. There, to my angry surprise, I found him gone.

  An elderly monk told me that yes, Hirasor had been here. What had he done during his stay? Apparently nothing but walk around in the hill gardens and read in the library. Where was he now?

  “He said to tell you that he had gone to Oblivion,” the monk said, watching me. “But why don’t you stay here awhile, before you go? There is no hurry. Hirasor is not running any more. Why don’t you walk the gardens and ease your burdens a little?”

  They let me search the grounds and the building, but there was no sign of Hirasor. I wondered if he had really gone to Oblivion, a planet about which I knew little, except that it was as close to hell as you could get among the inhabited worlds. It made no sense that he would go to such an uncomfortable place.

  While I was wondering what to do, I walked briefly in the gardens with the monk, Chituri. I told him a little about myself and my quest; in return he confided to me that he had been a world-shell citizen, too, before the fall. His world-shell had been Gilgamesh.

  There is no doubt that there was some magic about the place, be cause I stayed longer than I intended. The gardens in the terraced hills were tranquil, verdant, misty with waterfalls. Amid groves of moss-laden stone trees, pale clusters of flowers hung in the sweet air. Memories of Ramasthal, which had faded with time, returned to me vividly. Mean while Chituri tried to persuade me to stay, to give up my quest for justice. As we walked, he would tell me stories from the Indic tradition, even resorting to his knowledge of the Ramayan.