The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-I

by Jonathan Strahan

  Esha watched them both as she slowly, distractedly dried herself. She had felt glowing, sensual, divine. Now she was fleshy, self-conscious, stupid. The water on her skin, the air in the big room was cold cold cold.

  'AyJay, is that really you?'

  He frowned.

  'That's a very strange question first thing in the morning. Especially after. . .'

  She cut cold his smile.

  'There's a tivi in the bathroom. You're on, doing an interview for the news. A live interview. So, are you really here?'

  'Cho chweet, you know what I am, a distributed entity. I'm copying and deleting myself all over the place. I am wholly there, and I am wholly here.'

  Esha held the vast, powder-soft towel around her.

  'Last night, when you were here, in the body, and afterwards, when we were in the bed; were you here with me? Wholly here? Or was there a copy of you working on your press statement and another having a high-level meeting and another drawing an emergency water supply plan and another talking to the Banglas in Dhaka?'

  'My love, does it matter?'

  'Yes it matters!' She found tears, and something beyond; anger choking in her throat. 'It matters to me. It matters to any woman. To any. . . human.'

  'Mrs. Rao, are you all right?'

  'Rathore, my name is Rathore!' She hears herself snap at the silly little chati-mag junior. Esha gets up, draws up her full dancer's poise. 'This interview is over.'

  'Mrs. Rathore Mrs. Rathore,' the journo girli calls after her.

  Glancing at her fractured image in the thousand mirrors of the Sheesh Mahal, Esha notices glittering dust in the shallow lines of her face.

  * * *

  A thousand stories tell of the wilfulness and whim of djinns. But for every story of the djinni, there are a thousand tales of human passion and envy and the aeais, being a creation between, learned from both. Jealousy, and dissembling.

  When Esha went to Thacker the Krishna Cop, she told herself it was from fear of what the Hamilton Acts might do to her husband in the name of national hygiene. But she dissembled. She went to that office on Parliament Street looking over the star-geometries of the Jantar Mantar out of jealousy. When a wife wants her husband, she must have all of him. Ten thousand stories tell this. A copy in the bedroom while another copy plays water politics is an unfaithfulness. If a wife does not have everything, she has nothing. So Esha went to Thacker's office wanting to betray and as she opened her hand on the desk and the techi boys loaded their darkware into her palmer she thought, this is right, this is good, now we are equal. And when Thacker asked her to meet him again in a week to update the 'ware—unlike the djinns, hostages of eternity, software entities on both sides of the war evolved at an ever-increasing rate—he told himself it was duty to his warrant, loyalty to his country. In this too he dissembled. It was fascination.

  Earth-mover robots started clearing the Kunda Khadar dam site the day Inspector Thacker suggested that perhaps next week they might meet at the International Coffee House on Connaught Circus, his favourite. She said, my husband will see. To which Thacker replied, we have ways to blind him. But all the same she sat in the furthest, darkest corner, under the screen showing the international cricket, hidden from any prying eyes, her 'hoek shut down and cold in her handbag.

  So what are you finding out? she asked.

  It would be more than my job is worth to tell you, Mrs. Rathore, said the Krishna Cop. National security. Then the waiter brought coffee on a silver tray.

  After that they never went back to the office. On the days of their meetings Thacker would whirl her through the city in his government car to Chandni Chowk, to Humayun's Tomb and the Qutb Minar, even to the Shalimar Gardens. Esha knew what he was doing, taking her to those same places where her husband had enchanted her. How closely have you been watching me? she thought. Are you trying to seduce me? For Thacker did not magic her away to the eight Delhis of the dead past, but immersed her in the crowd, the smell, the bustle, the voices and commerce and traffic and music; her present, her city burning with life and movement. I was fading, she realised. Fading out of the world, becoming a ghost, locked in that invisible marriage, just the two of us, seen and unseen, always together, only together. She would feel for the plastic fetus of her 'hoek coiled in the bottom of her jewelled bag and hate it a little. When she slipped it back behind her ear in the privacy of the phatphat back to her bungalow, she would remember that Thacker was always assiduous in thanking her for her help in national security. Her reply was always the same: Never thank a woman for betraying her husband over her country.

  He would ask of course. Out and about, she would say. Sometimes I just need to get out of this place, get away. Yes, even from you. . . Holding the words, the look into the eye of the lens just long enough. . .

  Yes, of course, you must.

  Now the earth-movers had turned Kunda Khadar into Asia's largest construction site, the negotiations entered a new stage. Varanasi was talking directly to Washington to put pressure on Awadh to abandon the dam and avoid a potentially destabilising water war. US support was conditional on Bharat's agreement to the Hamilton protocols, which Bharat could never do, not with its major international revenue generator being the wholly aeai-generated soapi Town and Country.

  Washington telling me to effectively sign my own death warrant, A.J. Rao would laugh. Americans surely appreciate irony. All this he told her as they sat on the well-tended lawn sipping green chai through a straw, Esha sweating freely in the swelter but unwilling to go into the air-conditioned cool because she knew there were still paparazzi lenses out there, focusing. AyJay never needed to sweat. But she still knew that he split himself. In the night, in the rare cool, he would ask, dance for me. But she didn't dance anymore, not for aeai A.J. Rao, not for Pranh, not for a thrilled audience who would shower her with praise and flowers and money and fame. Not even for herself.

  Tired. Too tired. The heat. Too tired.

  * * *

  Thacker is on edge, toying with his chai cup, wary of eye contact when they meet in his beloved International Coffee House. He takes her hand and draws the updates into her open palm with boyish coyness. His talk is smaller than small, finicky, itchily polite. Finally, he dares looks at her.

  'Mrs. Rathore, I have something I must ask you. I have wanted to ask you for some time now.'

  Always, the name, the honorific. But the breath still freezes, her heart kicks in animal fear.

  'You know you can ask me anything.' Tastes like poison. Thacker can't hold her eye, ducks away, Killa Krishna Kop turned shy boy.

  'Mrs. Rathore, I am wondering if you would like to come and see me play cricket?'

  The Department of Artificial Intelligence Registration and Licensing versus Parks and Cemeteries Service of Delhi is hardly a Test against the United States of Bengal but it is still enough of a social occasion to out posh frocks and Number One saris. Pavilions, parasols, sunshades ring the scorched grass of the Civil Service of Awadh sports ground, a flock of white wings. Those who can afford portable airco field generators sit in the cool drinking English Pimms Number 1 Cup. The rest fan themselves. Incognito in hi-label shades and light silk dupatta, Esha Rathore looks at the salt white figures moving on the circle of brown grass and wonders what it is they find so important in their game of sticks and ball to make themselves suffer so.

  She had felt hideously self-conscious when she slipped out of the phatphat in her flimsy disguise. Then as she saw the crowds in their mela finery milling and chatting, heat rose inside her, the same energy that allowed her to hide behind her performances, seen but unseen. A face half the country sees on its morning chati mags, yet can vanish so easily under shades and a headscarf. Slum features. The anonymity of the basti bred into the cheekbones, a face from the great crowd.

  The Krishna Cops have been put in to bat by Parks and Cemeteries. Thacker is in the middle of the batting order, but Parks and Cemeteries pace bowler Chaudry and the lumpy wicket is making short work of
the Department's openers. One on his way to the painted wooden pavilion, and Thacker striding towards the crease, pulling on his gloves, taking his place, lining up his bat. He is very handsome in his whites, Esha thinks. He runs a couple of desultory ones with his partner at the other end, then it's a new over. Clop of ball on willow. A rich, sweet sound. A couple of safe returns. Then the bowler lines and brings his arm round in a windmill. The ball gets a sweet mad bounce. Thacker fixes it with his eye, steps back, takes it in the middle of the bat and drives it down, hard, fast, bounding towards the boundary rope that kicks it into the air for a cheer and a flurry of applause and a four. And Esha is on her feet, hands raised to applaud, cheering. The score clicks over the on the big board, and she is still on her feet, alone of all the audience. For directly across the ground, in front of the sight screens, is a tall, elegant figure in black, wearing a red turban.

  Him. Impossibly, him. Looking right at her, through the white-clad players as if they were ghosts. And very slowly, he lifts a finger and taps it to his right ear.

  She knows what she'll find but she must raise her fingers in echo, feel with horror the coil of plastic overlooked in her excitement to get to the game, nestled accusing in her hair like a snake.

  * * *

  'So, who won the cricket then?'

  'Why do you need to ask me? If it were important to you, you'd know. Like you can know anything you really want to.'

  'You don't know? Didn't you stay to the end? I thought the point of sport was who won. What other reason would you have to follow intra-Civil Service cricket?'

  If Puri the maid were to walk into the living room, she would see a scene from a folk tale: a woman shouting and raging at silent dead air. But Puri does her duties and leaves as soon as she can. She's not at ease in a house of djinns.

  'Sarcasm is it now? Where did you learn that? Some sarcasm aeai you've made part of yourself? So now there's another part of you I don't know, that I'm supposed to love? Well, I don't like it and I won't love it because it makes you look petty and mean and spiteful.'

  'There are no aeais for that. We have no need for those emotions. If I learned these, I learned them from humans.'

  Esha lifts her hand to rip away the 'hoek, hurl it against the wall.

  'No!'

  So far Rao has been voice-only, now the slanting late-afternoon golden light stirs and curdles into the body of her husband.

  'Don't,' he says. 'Don't. . .banish me. I do love you.'

  'What does that mean?' Esha screams, 'You're not real! None of this is real! It's just a story we made up because we wanted to believe it. Other people, they have real marriages, real lives, real sex. Real . . .children.'

  'Children. Is that what it is? I thought the fame, the attention was the thing, that there never would be children to ruin your career and your body. But if that's no longer enough, we can have children, the best children I can buy.'

  Esha cries out, a keen of disappointment and frustration. The neighbours will hear. But the neighbours have been hearing everything, listening, gossiping. No secrets in the city of djinns.

  'Do you know what they're saying, all those magazines and chati shows? What they're really saying? About us, the djinn and his wife?'

  'I know!' For the first time, A.J. Rao's voice, so sweet, so reasonable inside her head, is raised. 'I know what every one of them says about us. Esha, have I ever asked anything of you?'

  'Only to dance.'

  'I'm asking one more thing of you now. It's not a big thing. It's a small thing, nothing really. You say I'm not real, what we have is not real. That hurts me, because at some level it's true. Our worlds are not compatible. But it can be real. There is a chip, new technology, a protein chip. You get it implanted, here.' Rao raises his hand to his third eye. 'It would be like the 'hoek, but it would always be on. I could always be with you. We would never be apart. And you could leave your world and enter mine. . ..'

  Esha's hands are at her mouth, holding in the horror, the bile, the sick vomit of fear. She heaves, retches. Nothing. No solid, no substance, just ghosts and djinns. Then she rips her 'hoek from the sweet-spot behind her ear and there is blessed silence and blindness. She holds the little device in her two hands and snaps it cleanly in two.

  Then she runs from her house.

  * * *

  Not Neeta not Priya, not snippy Pranh in yts gharana, not Madhuri a, smoke-blackened hulk in a life-support chair, and no not never her mother, even though Esha's feet remember every step to her door; never the basti. That's death.

  One place she can go.

  But he won't let her. He's there in the phatphat, his face in the palm of her hands, voice scrolling silently in a ticker across the smart fabric: come back, I'm sorry, come back, let's talk come back, I didn't mean to come back. Hunched in the back of the little yellow and black plastic bubble she clenches his face into a fist but she can still feel him, feel his face, his mouth next to her skin. She peels the palmer from her hand. His mouth moves silently. She hurls him into the traffic. He vanishes under truck tires.

  And still he won't let her go. The phatphat spins into Connaught Circus's vast gyratory and his face is on every single one of the video-silk screens hung across the curving facades. Twenty A.J. Rao's greater, lesser, least, miming in sync.

  Esha Esha come back, say the rolling news tickers. We can try something else. Talk to me. Any ISO, any palmer, anyone. . ..

  Infectious paralysis spreads across Connaught Circus. First the people who notice things like fashion ads and chati-screens; then the people who notice other people, then the traffic, noticing all the people on the pavements staring up, mouths fly-catching. Even the phatphat driver is staring. Connaught Circus is congealing into a clot of traffic: if the heart of Delhi stops, the whole city will seize and die.

  'Drive on drive on,' Esha shouts at her driver. 'I order you to drive.' But she abandons the autorickshaw at the end of Sisganj Road and pushes through the clogged traffic the final half-kilometre to Manmohan Singh Buildings. She glimpses Thacker pressing through the crowd, trying to rendezvous with the police motorbike sirening a course through the traffic. In desperation she thrusts up an arm, shouts out his name and rank. At last, he turns. They beat towards each other through the chaos.

  'Mrs. Rathore, we are facing a major incursion incident. . ..'

  'My husband, Mr. Rao, he has gone mad. . ..'

  'Mrs. Rathore, please understand, by our standards, he never was sane. He is an aeai.'

  The motorbike wails its horns impatiently. Thacker waggles his head to the driver, a woman in police leathers and helmet: in a moment in a moment. He seizes Esha's hand, pushes her thumb into his palmer-gloved hand.

  'Apartment 1501. I've keyed it to your thumbprint. Open the door to no one, accept no calls, do not use any communications or entertainment equipment. Stay away from the balcony. I'll return as quickly as I can.'

  Then he swings up onto the pillion, the driver walks her machine round and they weave off into the gridlock.

  The apartment is modern and roomy and bright and clean for a man on his own, well furnished and decorated with no signs of a Krishna Cop's work brought home of an evening. It hits her in the middle of the big living-room floor with the sun pouring in. Suddenly she is on her knees on the Kashmiri rug, shivering, clutching herself, bobbing up and down to sobs so wracking they have no sound. This time the urge to vomit it all up cannot be resisted. When it is out of her—not all of it, it will never all come out—she looks out from under her hanging, sweat-soaked hair, breath still shivering in her aching chest. Where is this place? What has she done? How could she have been so stupid, so vain and senseless and blind? Games games, children's pretending, how could it ever have been? I say it is and it is so: look at me! At me!

  Thacker has a small, professional bar in his kitchen annexe. Esha does not know drink so the chota peg she makes herself is much much more gin than tonic but it gives her what she needs to clean the sour, biley vomit from the wool rug
and ease the quivering in her breath.

  Esha starts, freezes, imagining Rao's voice. She holds herself very still, listening hard. A neighbour's tivi, turned up. Thin walls in these new-built executive apartments.

  She'll have another chota peg. A third and she can start to look around. There's a spa-pool on the balcony. The need for moving, healing water defeats Thacker's warnings. The jets bubble up. With a dancer's grace she slips out of her clinging, emotionally soiled clothes into the water. There's even a little holder for your chota peg. A pernicious little doubt: How many others have been here before me? No, that is his kind of thinking. You are away from that. Safe. Invisible. Immersed. Down in Sisganj Road the traffic unravels. Overhead the dark silhouettes of the scavenging kites and, higher above, the security robots, expand and merge their black wings as Esha drifts into sleep.

  'I thought I told you to stay away from the windows.'

  Esha wakes with a start, instinctively covers her breasts. The jets have cut out and the water is long-still, perfectly transparent. Thacker is blue-chinned, baggy-eyed and sagging in his rumpled gritty suit.

  'I'm sorry. It was just, I'm so glad, to be away. . . you know?'

  A bone-weary nod. He fetches himself a chota peg, rests it on the arm of his sofa and then very slowly, very deliberately, as if every joint were rusted, undresses.