'Really?' A.J. now stands with his back against the sun-warm stone, looking up at the sky, and at her out the corner of his eye. The eyes smile, slyly. Of course, she thinks. Her city is as full of aeais as it is with birds. From computer systems and robots with the feral smarts of rats and pigeons to entities like this one standing before her on the gate of the Red Fort making charming compliments. Not standing. Not anywhere, just a pattern of information in her head. She stammers, 'I mean, a. . .a. . .'
'Level 2.9?'
'I don't know what that means.'
The aeai smiles and as she tries to work it out there is another chime in Esha's head and this time it is Pranh, swearing horribly as usual, where is she doesn't she know yts got a show to put on, half the bloody continent watching.
'Excuse me. . .'
'Of course. I shall be watching.'
How? she wants to ask. An aeai, a djinn, wants to watch me dance. What is this? But when she looks back all there is to ask is a wisp of dust blowing along the lantern-lit battlement.
There are elephants and circus performers, there are illusionists and table magicians, there are ghazal and qawali and Boli singers; there is the catering and the sommelier's wine and then the lights go up on the stage and Esha spins out past the scowling Pranh as the tabla and melodeon and shehnai begin. The heat is intense in the marble square, but she is transported. The stampings, the pirouettes and swirl of her skirts, the beat of the ankle bells, the facial expressions, the subtle hand mudras: once again she is spun out of herself by the disciplines of Kathak into something greater. She would call it her art, her talent, but she's superstitious: that would be to claim it and so crush the gift. Never name it, never speak it. Just let it possess you. Her own, burning djinn. But as she spins across the brilliant stage before the seated delegates, a corner of her perception scans the architecture for cameras, robots, eyes through which A.J. Rao might watch her. Is she a splinter of his consciousness, as he is a splinter of hers?
She barely hears the applause as she curtseys to the bright lights and runs off stage. In the dressing room as her assistants remove and carefully fold the many-jeweled layers of her costume, wipe away the crusted stage make-up to reveal the twenty-two-year-old beneath, her attention keeps flicking to her earhoek, curled like a plastic question on her dressing table. In jeans and silk sleeveless vest, indistinguishable from any other of Delhi's four million twentysomethings, she coils the device behind her ear, smoothes her hair over it and her fingers linger a moment as she slides the palmer over her hand. No calls. No messages. No avatars. She's surprised it matters so much.
The official Mercs are lined up in the Delhi Gate. A man and woman intercept her on her way to the car. She waves them away.
'I don't do autographs. . ..' Never after a performance. Get out, get away quick and quiet, disappear into the city. The man opens his palm to show her a warrant badge.
'We'll take this car.'
It pulls out from the line and cuts in, a cream-colored high-marque Maruti. The man politely opens the door to let her enter first but there is no respect in it. The woman takes the front seat beside the driver; he accelerates out, horn blaring, into the great circus of night traffic around the Red Fort. The airco purrs.
'I am Inspector Thacker from the Department of Artificial Intelligence Registration and Licencing,' the man says. He is young and good-skinned and confident and not at all fazed by sitting next to a celebrity. His aftershave is perhaps over-emphatic.
'A Krishna Cop.'
That makes him wince.
'Our surveillance systems have flagged up a communication between you and the Bharati Level 2.9 aeai A.J. Rao.'
'He called me, yes.'
'At 21:08. You were in contact for six minutes twenty-two seconds. Can you tell me what you talked about?'
The car is driving very fast for Delhi. The traffic seems to flow around from it. Every light seems to be green. Nothing is allowed to impede its progress. Can they do that? Esha wonders. Krishna Cops, aeai police: can they tame the creatures they hunt?
'We talked about Kathak. He's a fan. Is there a problem? Have I done something wrong?'
'No, nothing at all, Ms. But you do understand, with a conference of this importance. . . On behalf of the Department, I apologize for the unseemliness. Ah. Here we are.'
They've brought her right to her bungalow. Feeling dirty, dusty, confused, she watches the Krishna Cop car drive off, holding Delhi's frenetic traffic at bay with its tame djinns. She pauses at the gate. She needs, she deserves, a moment to come out from the performance, that little step way so you can turn round and look back at yourself and say, yeah, Esha Rathore. The bungalow is unlit, quiet. Neeta and Priya will be out with their wonderful fiancés, talking wedding gifts and guest lists and how hefty a dowry they can squeeze from their husbands-to-be's families. They're not her sisters, though they share the classy bungalow. No one has sisters anymore in Awadh, or even Bharat. No one of Esha's age, though she's heard the balance is being restored. Daughters are fashionable. One upon a time, women paid the dowry.
She breathes deep of her city. The cool garden microclimate presses down the roar of Delhi to a muffled throb, like blood in the heart. She can smell dust and roses. Rose of Persia. Flower of the Urdu poets. And dust. She imagines it rising up on a whisper of wind, spinning into a charming, dangerous djinn. No. An illusion, a madness of a mad old city. She opens the security gate and finds every square centimetre of the compound filled with red roses.
* * *
Neeta and Priya are waiting for her at the breakfast table next morning, sitting side-by-side close like an interview panel. Or Krishna Cops. For once they aren't talking houses and husbands.
'Who who who where did they come from who sent them so many must have cost a fortune. . .'
Puri the housemaid brings Chinese green chai that's good against cancer. The sweeper has gathered the bouquets into a pile at one end of the compound. The sweetness of their perfume is already tinged with rot.
'He's a diplomat.' Neeta and Priya only watch Town and Country and the chati channels but even they must know the name of A.J Rao. So she half lies: 'A Bharati diplomat.'
Their mouths go Oooh, then ah as they look at each other. Neeta says, 'You have have have to bring him.'
'To our durbar,' says Priya.
'Yes, our durbar,' says Neeta. They've talked gossiped planned little else for the past two months: their grand joint engagement party where they show off to their as-yet-unmarried girl friends and make all the single men jealous. Esha excuses her grimace with the bitterness of the health-tea.
'He's very busy.' She doesn't say busy man. She cannot even think why she is playing these silly girli secrecy games. An aeai called her at the Red Fort to tell her it admired her. Didn't even meet her. There was nothing to meet. It was all in her head. 'I don't even know how to get in touch with him. They don't give their numbers out.'
'He's coming,' Neeta and Priya insist.
* * *
She can hardly hear the music for the rattle of the old airco but sweat runs down her sides along the waistband of her Adidas tights to gather in the hollow of her back and slide between the taut curves of her ass. She tries it again across the gharana's practice floor. Even the ankle bells sound like lead. Last night she touched the three heavens. This morning she feels dead. She can't concentrate, and that little lavda Pranh knows it, swishing at her with yts cane and gobbing out wads of chewed paan and mealy eunuch curses.
'Ey! Less staring at your palmer, more mudras! Decent mudras. You jerk my dick, if I still had one.'
Embarrassed that Pranh has noted something she was not conscious of herself—ring, call me, ring call me, ring, take me out of this—she fires back, 'If you ever had one.'
Pranh slashes yts cane at her legs, catches the back of her calf with a sting.
'Fuck you, hijra!' Esha snatches up towel bag palmer, hooks the earpiece behind her long straight hair. No point changing, the heat out there will
soak through anything in a moment. 'I'm out of here.'
Pranh doesn't call after her. Yts too proud. Little freak monkey thing, she thinks. How is it a nute is an yt, but an incorporeal aeai is a he? In the legends of Old Delhi, djinns are always he.
'Memsahb Rathore?'
The chauffeur is in full dress and boots. His only concession to the heat is his shades. In bra top and tights and bare skin, she's melting. 'The vehicle is fully air-conditioned, memsahb.'
The white leather upholstery is so cool her flesh recoils from its skin.
'This isn't the Krishna Cops.'
'No memsahb.' The chauffeur pulls out into the traffic. It's only as the security locks clunk she thinks, Oh Lord Krishna, they could be kidnapping me.
'Who sent you?' There's glass too thick for her fists between her and the driver. Even if the doors weren't locked, a tumble from the car at this speed, in this traffic, would be too much for even a dancer's lithe reflexes. And she's lived in Delhi all her life, basti to bungalow, but she doesn't recognize these streets, this suburb, that industrial park. 'Where are you taking me?'
'Memsahb, where I am not permitted to say for that would spoil the surprise. But I am permitted to tell you that you are the guest of A.J. Rao.'
The palmer calls her name as she finishes freshening up with bottled Kinley from the car-bar.
'Hello!' (kicking back deep into the cool cool white leather, like a filmi star. She is star. A star with a bar in a car.)
Audio-only. 'I trust the car is acceptable?' Same smooth-suave voice. She can't imagine any opponent being able to resist that voice in negotiation.
'It's wonderful. Very luxurious. Very high status.' She's out in the bastis now, slums deeper and meaner than the one she grew up in. Newer. The newest ones always look the oldest. Boys chug past on a home-brew chhakda they've scavenged from tractor parts. The cream Lex carefully detours around emaciated cattle with angular hips jutting through stretched skin like engineering. Everywhere, drought dust lies thick on the crazed hardtop. This is a city of stares. 'Aren't you supposed to be at the conference?'
A laugh, inside her auditory centre.
'Oh, I am hard at work winning water for Bharat, believe me. I am nothing if not an assiduous civil servant.'
'You're telling me you're there, and here?'
'Oh, it's nothing for us to be in more than one place at the same time. There are multiple copies of me, and subroutines.'
'So which is the real you?'
'They are all the real me. In fact, not one of my avatars is in Delhi at all, I am distributed over a series of dharma-cores across Varanasi and Patna.' He sighs. It sounds close and weary and warm as a whisper in her ear. 'You find it difficult to comprehend a distributed consciousness; it is every bit as hard for me to comprehend a discrete, mobile consciousness. I can only copy myself through what you call cyberspace, which is the physical reality of my universe, but you move through dimensional space and time.'
'So which one of you loves me then?' The words are out, wild, loose, and unconsidered. 'I mean, as a dancer, that is.' She's filling, gabbling. 'Is there one of you that particularly appreciates Kathak?' Polite polite words, like you'd say to an industrialist or a hopeful lawyer at one of Neeta and Priya's hideous match-making soirees. Don't be forward, no one likes a forward woman. This is a man's world, now. But she hears glee bubble in A.J. Rao's voice.
'Why, all of me and every part of me, Esha.'
Her name. He used her name.
It's a shitty street of pie-dogs and men lounging on charpoys scratching themselves, but the chauffeur insists, here, this way memsahb. She picks her way down a gali lined with unsteady minarets of old car tires. Burning ghee and stale urine reek the air. Kids mob the Lexus but the car has A.J. Rao levels of security. The chauffeur pushes open an old wood and brass Mughal style gate in a crumbling red wall. 'Memsahb.'
She steps through into a garden. Into the ruins of a garden. The gasp of wonder dies. The geometrical water channels of the charbagh are dry, cracked, choked with litter from picnics. The shrubs are blousy and overgrown, the plant borders ragged with weeds. The grass is scabbed brown with drought-burn; the lower branches of the trees have been hacked away for firewood. As she walks towards the crack-roofed pavilion at the centre where paths and water channels meets, the gravel beneath her thin shoes is crazed into rivulets from past monsoons. Dead leaves and fallen twigs cover the lawns. The fountains are dry and silted. Yet families stroll pushing baby buggies; children chase balls. Old Islamic gentlemen read the papers and play chess.
'The Shalimar Gardens,' says A.J. Rao in the base of her skull. 'Paradise as a walled garden.'
And as he speaks, a wave of transformation breaks across the garden, sweeping away the decay of the twenty-first century. Trees break into full leaf, flower beds blossom, rows of terracotta geranium pots march down the banks of the charbagh channels which shiver with water. The tiered roofs of the pavilion gleams with gold leaf, peacocks fluster and fuss their vanities, and everything glitters and splashes with fountain play. The laughing families are swept back into Mughal grandees, the old men in the park transformed into malis sweeping the gravel paths with their besoms.
Esha claps her hands in joy, hearing a distant, silver spray of sitar notes. 'Oh,' she says, numb with wonder. 'Oh!'
'A thank you, for what you gave me last night. This is one of my favorite places in all India, even though it's almost forgotten. Perhaps, because it is almost forgotten. Aurangzeb was crowned Mughal Emperor here in 1658, now it's an evening stroll for the basti people. The past is a passion of mine; it's easy for me, for all of us. We can live in as many times as we can places. I often come here, in my mind. Or should I say, it comes to me.'
Then the jets from the fountain ripple as if in the wind, but it is not the wind, not on this stifling afternoon, and the falling water flows into the shape of a man, walking out of the spray. A man of water, that shimmers and flows and becomes a man of flesh. A.J. Rao. No, she thinks, never flesh. A djinn. A thing caught between heaven and hell. A caprice, a trickster. Then trick me.
'It is as the old Urdu poets declare,' says A.J. Rao. 'Paradise is indeed contained within a wall.'
* * *
It is far past four but she can't sleep. She lies naked—shameless—but for the 'hoek behind her ear, on top of her bed with the window slats open and the ancient airco chugging, fitful in the periodic brownouts. It is the worst night yet. The city gasps for air. Even the traffic sounds beaten tonight. Across the room her palmer opens its blue eye and whispers her name. Esha.
She's up, kneeling on the bed, hand to 'hoek, sweat beading her bare skin.
'I'm here.' A whisper. Neeta and Priya are a thin wall away on either side.
'It's late, I know, I'm sorry. . .'
She looks across the room into the palmer's camera.
'It's all right, I wasn't asleep.' A tone in that voice. 'What is it?'
'The mission is a failure.'
She kneels in the centre of the big antique bed. Sweat runs down the fold of her spine.
'The conference? What? What happened?' She whispers, he speaks in her head.
'It fell over one point. One tiny, trivial point, but it was like a wedge that split everything apart until it all collapsed. The Awadhis will build their dam at Kunda Khadar and they will keep their holy Ganga water for Awadh. My delegation is already packing. We will return to Varanasi in the morning.'
Her heart kicks. Then she curses herself, stupid, romantic girli. He is already in Varanasi as much as he is here as much as he is at Red Fort assisting his human superiors.
'I'm sorry.'
'Yes,' he says. 'That is the feeling. Was I overconfident in my abilities?'
'People will always disappoint you.'
A wry laugh in the dark of her skull.
'How very. . .disembodied of you Esha.' Her name seems to hang in the hot air, like a chord. 'Will you dance for me?'
'What, here? Now?'
'
Yes. I need something. . .embodied. Physical. I need to see a body move, a consciousness dance through space and time as I cannot. I need to see something beautiful.'
Need. A creature with the powers of a god, needs. But Esha's suddenly shy, covering her small, taut breasts with her hands.
'Music. . .' she stammers. 'I can't perform without music. . .' The shadows at the end of the bedroom thicken into an ensemble: three men bent over tabla, sarangi and bansuri. Esha gives a little shriek and ducks back to the modesty of her bedcover. They cannot see you, they don't even exist, except in your head. And even if they were flesh, they would be so intent on their contraptions of wire and skin they would not notice. Terrible driven things, musicians.
'I've incorporated a copy of a sub-aeai into myself for this night,' A.J. Rao says. 'A level 1.9 composition system. I supply the visuals.'
'You can swap bits of yourself in and out?' Esha asks. The tabla player has started a slow Natetere tap-beat on the dayan drum. The musicians nod at each other. Counting, They will be counting. It's hard to convince herself Neeta and Priya can't hear; no one can hear but her. And A.J. Rao. The sarangi player sets his bow to the strings, the bansuri lets loose a snake of fluting notes. A sangeet, but not one she has ever heard before.
'It's making it up!'
'It's a composition aeai. Do you recognize the sources?'
'Krishna and the gopis.' One of the classic Kathak themes: Krishna's seduction of the milkmaids with his flute, the bansuri, most sensual of instruments. She knows the steps, feels her body anticipating the moves.
'Will you dance, lady?'
And she steps with the potent grace of a tiger from the bed onto the grass matting of her bedroom floor, into the focus of the palmer. Before she had been shy, silly, girli. Not now. She has never had an audience like this before. A lordly djinn. In pure, hot silence she executes the turns and stampings and bows of the One Hundred and Eight Gopis, bare feet kissing the woven grass. Her hands shape mudras, her face the expressions of the ancient story: surprise, coyness, intrigue, arousal. Sweat courses luxuriously down her naked skin: she doesn't feel it. She is clothed in movement and night. Time slows, the stars halt in their arc over great Delhi. She can feel the planet breathe beneath her feet. This is what it was for, all those dawn risings, all those bleeding feet, those slashes of Pranh's cane, those lost birthdays, that stolen childhood. She dances until her feet bleed again into the rough weave of the matting, until every last drop of water is sucked from her and turned into salt, but she stays with the tabla, the beat of dayan and bayan. She is the milkmaid by the river, seduced by a god. A.J Rao did not chose this Kathak wantonly. And then the music comes to its ringing end and the musicians bow to each other and disperse into golden dust and she collapses, exhausted as never before from any other performance, onto the end of her bed.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-I Page 65