The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Until then I had not thought about the duties of a wife with a ten-year-old boy.

  On a day of staggering heat I was wed to Ved Prakash Narayan in a climate-control bubble on the manicured green before Emperor Humayun’s tomb. As on the night I was introduced, I was dressed as Kumari. My husband, veiled in gold, arrived perched on top of a white horse followed by a band and a dozen elephants with colored patterns worked on their trunks. Security robots patrolled the grounds as astrologers proclaimed favorable auspices and an old-type brahmin in his red cord blessed our union. Rose petals fluttered around me, the proud father and mother distributed gems from Hyderabad to their guests, my shaadi sisters wept with joy and loss, Mamaji sniffed back a tear and vile old Shweta went round hoarding the free and over-flowing food from the buffet. As we were applauded and played down the receiving line, I noticed all the other somber-faced ten-year-old boys with their beautiful, tall foreign wives. I reminded myself who was the child bride here. But none of them were goddesses.

  I remember little of the grand durbar that followed except face after face after face, mouth after mouth after mouth opening, making noise, swallowing glass after glass after glass of French champagne. I did not drink for I do not have the taste for alcohol, though my young husband in his raja finery took it, and smoked big cigars too. As we got into the car—the honeymoon was another Western tradition we were adopting—I asked if anyone had remembered to inform my parents.

  We flew to Mumbai on the company tilt-jet. I had never before flown in an aircraft. I pressed my hands, still hennaed with the patterns of my mehndi, on either side of the window as if to hold in every fleeting glimpse of Delhi falling away beneath me. It was every divine vision I had ever had looking down from my bed in the Kumari Ghar on to India. This was indeed the true vehicle of a goddess. But the demons whispered as we turned in the air over the towers of New Delhi, you will be old and withered when he is still in his prime.

  When the limousine from the airport turned on to Marine Drive and I saw the Arabian Sea glinting in the city-light, I asked my husband to stop the car so I could look and wonder. I felt tears start in my eyes and thought, the same water in it is in you. But the demons would not let me be: you are married to something that is not human.

  My honeymoon was wonder upon wonder: our penthouse apartment with the glass walls that opened on sunset over Chowpatty Beach. The new splendid outfits we wore as we drove along the boulevards, where stars and movie-gods smiled down and blessed us in the virtual sight of our palmers. Color, motion, noise, chatter; people and people and people. Behind it all, the wash and hush and smell of the alien sea.

  Chambermaids prepared me for the wedding night. They worked with baths and balms, oils and massages, extending the now-fading henna tracery on my hands up my arms, over my small upright breasts, down the manipuraka chakra over my navel. They wove gold ornaments into my hair, slipped bracelets on my arms and rings on my fingers and toes, dusted and powdered my dark Nepali skin. They purified me with incense smoke and flower petals, they shrouded me in veils and silks as fine as rumors. They lengthened my lashes and kohled my eyes and shaped my nails to fine, painted points.

  “What do I do? I’ve never even touched a man,” I asked, but they namasted and slipped away without answer. But the older—the Tall Kumarima, as I thought of her—left a small soapstone box on my bridal divan. Inside were two white pills.

  They were good. I should have expected no less. One moment I was standing nervous and fearful on the Turkestan carpet with a soft night air that smelled of the sea stirring the translucent curtains, the next visions of the Kama Sutra, beamed into my brain through my golden earhook, swirled up around me like the pigeons over Chandni Chowk. I looked at the patterns my shaadi sisters had painted on the palms of my hands and they danced and coiled from my skin. The smells and perfumes of my body were alive, suffocating. It was as if my skin had been peeled back and every nerve exposed. Even the touch of the barely moving night air was intolerable. Every car horn on Marine Drive was like molten silver dropped into my ear.

  I was terribly afraid.

  Then the double doors to the robing room opened and my husband entered. He was dressed as a Mughal grandee in a jeweled turban and a long-sleeved pleated red robe bowed out at the front in the manly act.

  “My goddess,” he said. Then he parted his robe and I saw what stood so proud.

  The harness was of crimson leather intricately inlaid with fine mirror-work. It fastened around the waist and also over the shoulders, for extra security. The buckles were gold. I recall the details of the harness so clearly because I could not take more than one look at the thing it carried. Black. Massive as a horse’s, but delicately upcurved. Ridged and studded. This all I remember before the room unfolded around me like the scented petals of a lotus and my senses blended as one and I was running through the apartments of the Taj Marine Hotel.

  How had I ever imagined it could be different for a creature with the appetites and desires of an adult but the physical form of a ten-year-old boy?

  Servants and dressers stared at me as I screamed incoherently, grabbing at wraps, shawls, anything to cover my shame. At some tremendous remove I remember my husband’s voice calling Goddess! My Goddess! over and over.

  “Schizophrenia is a terribly grating word,” Ashok said. He twirled the stem of a red thornless rose between his fingers. “Old-school. It’s dissociative disorder these days. Except there are no disorders, just adaptive behaviors. It was what you needed to cope with being a goddess. Dissociating. Disjuncting. Becoming you and other to stay sane.”

  Night in the gardens of the Dataraja Ashok. Water trickled in the stone canals of the charbagh. I could smell it, sweet and wet. A pressure curtain held the smog at bay; trees screened out Delhi’s traffic. I could even see a few stars. We sat in an open chhatri pavilion, the marble still warm from the day. Set on silver thalis were medjool dates, halva—crisp with flies—folded paan. A security robot stepped into the lights from the Colonial bungalow, passed into shadow. But for it I might have been in the age of the rajas.

  Time broken apart, whirring like kabooter wings. Dissociative behavior. Mechanisms for coping. Running along the palm-lined boulevards of Mumbai, shawls clutched around my wifely finery that made me feel more naked than bare skin. I ran without heed or direction. Taxis hooted, phatphats veered as I dashed across crowded streets. Even if I had had money for a phatphat—what need had the wife of a Brahmin for crude cash?—I did not know where to direct it. Yet that other, demonic self must have known, for I found myself on the vast marble concourse of a railway station, a sole mite of stillness among the tens of thousands of hastening travelers and beggars and vendors and staff. My shawls and throws clutched around me, I looked up at the dome of red Raj stone and it was a second skull, full of the awful realization of what I had done.

  A runaway bride without even a paisa to her name, alone in Mumbai Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. A hundred trains leaving that minute for any destination but nowhere to go. People stared at me, half Nautch-courtesan, half Untouchable street-sleeper. In my shame, I remembered the hook behind my ear. Ashok, I wrote across the sandstone pillars and swirling ads. Help me!

  “I don’t want to be split, I don’t want to be me and other, why can’t I just be one?” I beat the heels of my hands off my forehead in frustration. “Make me well, make me right!” Shards of memory. The white-uniformed staff serving me hot chai in the first-class private compartment of the shatabdi express. The robots waiting at the platform with the antique covered palanquin, to bear me through the Delhi dawn traffic to the green watered geometries of Ashok’s gardens. But behind them all was one enduring image, my uncle’s white fist slipping on the bouncing cable and him falling, legs pedalling air, to the creamy waters of Shakya river. Even then, I had been split. Fear and shock. Laughter and smiles. How else could anyone survive being a goddess?

  Goddess. My Goddess.

  Ashok could not understand. “Would you cure
a singer of his talent? There is no madness, only ways of adapting. Intelligence is evolution. Some would argue that I display symptoms of mild Asperger’s syndrome.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  He twirled the rose so hard the stem snapped.

  “Have you thought about what you’re going to do?”

  I had thought of little else. The Narayans would not give up their dowry lightly. Mamaji would sweep me from her door. My village was closed to me.

  “Maybe for a while, if you could . . .”

  “It’s not a good time. . . . Who’s going to have the ear of the Lok Sabha? A family building a dam that’s going to guarantee their water supply for the next fifty years, or a software entrepreneur with a stable of Level 2.75 aeais that the United States government thinks are the sperm of Shaitan? Family values still count in Awadh. You should know.”

  I heard my voice say, like a very small girl, “Where can I go?”

  The bride-buyer’s stories of Kumaris whom no one would marry and could not go home again ended in the woman-cages of Varanasi and Kolkata. Chinese paid rupees by the roll for an ex-Goddess.

  Ashok moistened his lips with his tongue.

  “I have someone in Bharat, in Varanasi. Awadh and Bharat are seldom on speaking terms.”

  “Oh thank you, thank you . . .” I went down on my knees before Ashok, clutched his hands between my palms. He looked away. Despite the artificial cool of the charbagh, he was sweating freely.

  “It’s not a gift. It’s . . . employment. A job.”

  “A job, that’s good, I can do that; I’m a good worker, work away at anything I will; what is it? Doesn’t matter, I can do it. . . .”

  “There are commodities need transported.”

  “What kind of commodities? Oh it doesn’t mater, I can carry anything.”

  “Aeais.” He rolled a paan from the silver dish. “I’m not going to wait around for Shrivastava’s Krishna Cops to land in my garden with their excommunication ware.”

  “The Hamilton Acts,” I ventured, though I did not know what they were, what most of Ashok’s mumbles and rants meant.

  “Word is, everything above level 2.5.” Ashok chewed his lower lip. His eyes widened as the paan curled through his skull.

  “Of course, I will do anything I can to help.”

  “I haven’t told you how I need you to transport them. Absolutely safe, secure, where no Krishna Cop can ever find them.” He touched his right forefinger to his Third Eye. “Self, and other.”

  I went to Kerala and had processors put into my skull. Two men did it on a converted bulk gas carrier moored outside territorial waters. They shaved my long lovely black hair, unhinged my skull and sent robots smaller than the tiniest spider spinning computers through my brain. Their position out beyond the Keralese fast patrol boats enabled them to carry out much secret surgery, mostly for the Western military. They gave me a bungalow and an Australian girl to watch over me while my sutures fused and hormone washes speed-grew my hair back.

  Protein chips; only show on the highest resolution scans but no one’ll look twice at you; no one’ll look twice at another shaadi girl down hunting for a husband.

  So I sat and stared at the sea for six weeks and thought about what it would be like to drown in the middle of it, alone and lost a thousand kilometers from the nearest hand that might seize yours. A thousand kilometers north in Delhi a man in an Indian suit shook hands with a man in an American suit and announced the Special Relationship that would make Ashok an outlaw.

  You know what Krishna Cops are? They hunt aeais. They hunt the people who stable them, and the people who carry them. They don’t care. They’re not picky. But they won’t catch you. They’ll never catch you.

  I listened to demons in the swash and run of the big sea on the shore. Demons I now knew were facets of my other self. But I was not afraid of them. In Hinduism, demons are merely the mirrors of the gods. As with men, so with gods; it is the winners who write the history. The universe would look no different had Ravana and his Rakshasas won their cosmic wars.

  No one but you can carry them. No one but you has the neurological architecture. No one but you could endure another mind in there.

  The Australian girl left small gifts outside my door: plastic bangles, jelly-shoes, rings, and hairslides. She stole them from the shops in town. I think they were her way of saying that she wanted to know me, but was afraid of what I had been, of what the things in my head would make me become. The last thing she stole was a beautiful sheer silk dupatta to cover my ragged hair when she took me to the airport. From beneath it I looked at the girls in business saris talking into their hands in the departure lounge and listened to the woman pilot announce the weather in Awadh. Then I looked out of the phatphat at the girls darting confidently through the Delhi traffic on their scooters and wondered why my life could not be like theirs.

  “It’s grown back well.” Ashok knelt before me on my cushions in the chhatri. It was his sacred place, his temple. He raised his palmer-gloved hand and touched his forefinger to the tilak over my third eye. I could smell his breath. Onions, garlic, rancid ghee. “You may feel a little disoriented. . . .”

  I gasped. Senses blurred, fused, melted. I saw heard felt smelled tasted everything as one undifferentiated sensation, as gods and babies sense, wholly and purely. Sounds were colored, light had texture, smells spoke and chimed. Then I saw myself surge up from my cushions and fall toward the hard white marble. I heard myself cry out. Ashok lunged toward me. Two Ashoks lunged toward me. But it was neither of those. I saw one Ashok, with two visions, inside my head. I could not make shape or sense out of my two seeings, I could not tell which was real, which was mine, which was me. Universes away I heard a voice say help me. I saw Ashok’s houseboys lift me and take me to bed. The painted ceiling, patterned with vines and shoots and flowers, billowed above me like monsoon storm clouds, then blossomed into darkness.

  In the heat of the night I woke stark, staring, every sense glowing. I knew the position and velocity of each insect in my airy room that smelled of biodiesel, dust, and patchouli. I was not alone. There was an other under the dome of my skull. Not an awareness, a consciousness; a sense of separateness, a manifestation of myself. An avatar. A demon.

  “Who are you?” I whispered. My voice sounded loud and full of bells, like Durbar Square. It did not answer—it could not answer, it was not a sentience—but it took me out into the charbagh water garden. The stars, smudged by pollution, were a dome over me. The crescent moon lay on its back. I looked up and fell into it. Chandra. Mangal. Budh. Guru. Shukra. Shani. Rahu. Ketu. The planets were not points of light, balls of stone and gas; they had names, characters, loves, hatreds. The twenty-seven Nakshatars spun around my head. I saw their shapes and natures, the patterns of connections that bound the stars into relationships and stories and dramas as human and complex as Town and Country. I saw the wheel of the rashis, the Great Houses, arc across the sky, and the whole turning, engines within engines, endless wheels of influence and subtle communication, from the edge of the universe to the center of the earth I stood upon. Planets, stars, constellations; the story of every human life unfolded itself above me and I could read them all. Every word.

  All night I played among the stars.

  In the morning, over bed-tea, I asked Ashok, “What is it?”

  “A rudimentary Level 2.6. A janampatri aeai, does astrology, runs the permutations. It thinks it lives out there, like some kind of space monkey. It’s not very smart, really. Knows about horoscopes and that’s it. Now get that down you and grab your stuff. You’ve a train to catch.”

  My reserved seat was in the women’s bogie of the high-speed shatabdi express. Husbands booked their wives on to it to protect them from the attentions of the male passengers who assumed every female was single and available. The few career women chose it for the same reason. My fellow passenger across the table from me was a Muslim woman in a formal business shalwar. She regarded me
with disdain as we raced across the Ganga plain at three hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. Little simpering wife-thing.

  You would not be so quick to judge if you knew what we really were, I thought. We can look into your life and tell you everything that has, is and will ever happen to you, mapped out in the chakras of the stars. In that night among the constellations my demon and I had flowed into each other until there was no place where we could say aeai ended and I began.

  I had thought holy Varanasi would sing to me like Kathmandu, a spiritual home, a city of nine million gods and one goddess, riding through the streets in a phatphat. What I saw was another Indian capital of another Indian state; glass towers and diamond domes and industry parks for the big world to notice, slums and bastis at their feet like sewage pigs. Streets began in this millennium and ended in one three before it. Traffic and hoardings and people people people but the diesel smoke leaking in around the edges of my smog mask carried a ghost of incense.

  Ashok’s Varanasi agent met me in the Jantar Mantar, the great solar observatory of Jai Singh; sundials and star spheres and shadow discs like modern sculpture. She was little older than me; dressed in a cling-silk top and jeans that hung so low from her hips I could see the valley of her buttocks. I disliked her at once but she touched her palmer-glove to my forehead in the shadows around Jai Singh’s astrological instruments and I felt the stars go out of me. The sky died. I had been holy again and now I was just meat. Ashok’s girli pressed a roll of rupees into my hand. I barely looked at it. I barely heard her instructions to get something to eat, get a kafi, get some decent clothes. I was bereft. I found myself trudging up the steep stone steps of the great Samrat not knowing where I was who I was what I was doing halfway up a massive sundial. Half a me. Then my third eye opened and I saw the river wide and blue before me. I saw the white sands of the eastern shore and the shelters and dung fires of the sadhus. I saw the ghats, the stone river steps, curving away on either side further than the reach of my eyes. And I saw people. People washing and praying cleaning their clothes and offering puja and buying and selling and living and dying. People in boats and people kneeling, people waist deep in the river, people scooping up silver handfuls of water to pour over their heads. People casting handfuls of marigold flowers onto the stream, people lighting little mango-leaf diya lamps and setting them afloat, people bringing their dead to dip them in the sacred water. I saw the pyres of the burning ghat, I smelled sandalwood, charring flesh, I heard the skull burst, releasing the soul. I had heard that sound before at the Royal burning ghats of Pashupatinath, when the King’s Mother died. A soft crack, and free. It was a comforting sound. It made me think of home.