Make Shift

by Gideon Lichfield

  She leaned back without hesitation, still clinging to the apple core. He took it from her fingers, to add to the biofuel compost cache. She was snoring softly in seconds. He shook his head, cursing his single-minded will, the fact that he hadn’t remembered to let her sleep in the side seat earlier in the day. As a mekha, he had a duty to do the work of repair, rescue, and cleanup after the cyclone. But logic evaded his self-judgment. How could he have not let her sleep or eat, after everything she had been through? He found himself once again struck by a fear—that she would dream of her parents, of her real father and mother, if she had ever known them, and wake and remember them. He shook his head to banish this uncharitable unease.

  She jerked awake with a gasp. Her little hand found his larger hand. He enclosed it. “Don’t leave!” she said.

  “No. This is my body, my mekha. This is my home. You are part of this body now, as am I. I cannot abandon my body. I will not go anywhere, I promise you,” he said. Her breathing slowed, eyelids drifting down as she fell back to sleep. He unfolded the blanket, and covered her entire body with it. He looked around at his mekha’s chest, the neuronal flicker of its internal lights, its cabled nervous system and hydraulic musculature surrounding them. He wondered whether it too felt this new heart inside their chest. Water glittered on the panes between the mekha’s ribs, catching the soft organic light from the alor gach. The city was calm now.

  He was a giant.

  The girl was small for her age, from the way she talked, her memory of the march. Probably nine or ten. He touched the wall of the mekha in silent thanks, for being the body it was, for saving this child. For making him into a giant, though he had never felt less like one than in that moment. He felt like an open wound, in a way that awakened his senses.

  “By god’s grace. A daughter,” he whispered, looking at the sleeping child. “My daughter.”

  TO BRISHTI, THE HEART OF THE GIANT BECAME DAITYA, OR BABA.

  II

  Brishti, in all her smallness, became one of the giants.

  She was a spark in their solitude during fresh plagues like this one, when the mekha were among the only ones on the roads of Kolkata, along with the rest of what the inside-people called robotlok, the essential workers who ventured outside in smaller exoskeletons and HEV suits that were second skins rather than second bodies. The chatter of the robotlok was constant. They would take job requests from the barirlok, the insiders, over their comms, and joke with each other in between, to stave off loneliness.

  As they roamed the city, Brishti sat in her father’s lap, following the movements of his limbs, the giant’s limbs, the dance of his hands across the instruments, learning how he was both heart and brain to the great body that surrounded them. He often repeated that the mekha was an emanation of god. At other times he would point to the stenciled tattoos all over its body in Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Japanese, and explain how it was designed by international technology collectives, made in factories here and owned by the government. But to Brishti, it was clear that the mekha was him. He was the life of the giant, and she learned how this was truth.

  She learned to use the tiny toilet embedded in the back of the cockpit, which was attached to a biofuel processor, cleaning it in turns so it didn’t stink.

  She learned that the mekha had no religion but their own.

  She learned how they bathed out in the open, in forest groves, turning on the mekha’s hose and standing under the giant’s open hands. Daitya would always turn around to give her privacy, asking her to hum loudly so he would know she was right behind him as they scrubbed themselves under the cold spray.

  She learned how they made the mekha breathe disinfectant, gushing vapor like breath in winter, trailing clouds of it as they walked the city’s valleys.

  She learned how they unfurled the mekha’s solar sails when they were low on biofuel or charge, the absorbent membranes iridescent, reminding her of dragonfly wings.

  DAITYA SHOWED BRISHTI THE CITY THE GIANTS HAD MADE ANEW.

  The streams the giants had dug with their titanic hands out of old roads no longer used, redirecting the anger of the rising Hooghly, filled with fish they could snatch from the waters and eat after roasting them in the palms of the giant, under the flames of their mounted torch.

  The hilly ranges that the giants had raised from the flat land of the city, layering fertile earth over the vast mounds of garbage being digested by microbes in Rajarhat and New Town, stepped villages of huts and terraced farms replacing refuse, peaks graced with the floodlights and huge mesh origami of insect farmers’ traps.

  The forests the giants had planted along the arteries and spaces of the city, the groves they had pulled forth from grassy field and torn concrete, where wild deer, horses, and goats were bred, hunted, or tamed by the urban villagers who lived in the bans, the woods of the Maidan, Victoria, and St. Paul’s. Self-repairing biocrete huts and garibari clusters huddled around the old Christian cathedral and the memorial palace to the queen whose empire had once ruled this land. Both buildings were now plague hospitals, and places of worship for people of any and all faiths.

  IN HUNTING SEASON, DAITYA SHOWED HIS DAUGHTER THAT ALL BODIES HAVE THEIR potential for violence. In the mekha, in low power mode with all their lights off and engine low, he stalked a cheetal, one of the local deer, through Victoriaban one dusk, when sunset crumbled in gleaming shards through the eaves. When the beautiful creature was in the sights of the giant’s ribs, Brishti’s father raised his hands, and so did the mekha. An invisible volley of hunting darts killed the cheetal instantly.

  Daitya regretted this instantly, not because he hadn’t hunted deer before and sold their carcasses to butchers in the Muslim communes of forest villages, but because his daughter burst into inconsolable tears when she realized what had happened to the cheetal.

  They carried the cheetal in the giant’s arms to a baner gram, one of the forest villages. There, it was exchanged for leaf-wrapped meals of kebabs and cricket flour roti left in the giant’s mouth. Daitya tried to share the meal with Brishti, but she refused, the meat a reminder of the death they had caused.

  In that moment, Daitya remembered clinging to his mother during one of the labor uprisings, so many years before Brishti was born, watching in terror as a giant not unlike the one they sat in sprayed scalding teargas over the crowds, and another swiped a huge hand through them, sending bodies flying like they didn’t matter. They had barely escaped.

  “You’re a horrible monster,” said Brishti to him, and to the mekha, no doubt. Daitya. Still the same word she normally used with such joy. Different meaning.

  “Brishti. A mekha will never hurt any animal unless the body is used to nourish others. And I would never hurt another person, ever, with my body or that of the mekha. You know that, don’t you?” he asked Brishti as she cried. “Just like the body of god we inhabit, and our bodies, that cheetal’s body is serving a purpose. His body didn’t expire in vain. It goes back to this city, this land. People need to eat. To make clothes and blankets for winter.”

  Brishti didn’t acknowledge her father’s words, only begrudgingly snatching the rotis and not the kebabs. He watched her eat through her tears and suppressed a smile. He had lied—he would hurt another person or animal, with his body or that of the mekha, if it meant protecting her. He ate the kebabs as her sniffles died down to a sulk.

  In a few years, Brishti would be helping her father target the cheetals during hunting season, and praying over their bodies before their delivery to the village butchers. She would soon deny she had ever refused the kebabs made over the firepits of the city’s bans.

  WHEN THEY HAD WANDERED LONG ENOUGH IN SERVICE, THE GIANTS OF KOLKATA returned to the mekha depots scattered throughout the city. There, the mekhas would periodically gather inside cavernous warehouse garages. Workers in gas masks and HEV suits would examine the giants and provide surgery on them if needed, sparks flying like glowing blood, lubricant oil seeping across the floor like bodily fluids,
filling the air with an acrid scent. Their disinfectant tanks would be refilled, their backup batteries charged, their bodies trailing cables like hair.

  They would usually spend the night at the depots, when all the mekhar hridaya, all the hearts of the giants, would talk to each other over their radios while lounging in the open chests of their mekhas, smoking weed beedis that twinkled in the shadows. Brishti thought it a beautiful sight, all the giants kneeling and quiet, praying in peace while their hearts chattered. Glowing earrings of worklights hung from their sides, illuminating their freshly polished and stencil-tattooed arms in the gloom of the warehouses. During these visits, Daitya would tense up, always holding Brishti’s hand, telling her not to wander off.

  Sometimes the other hearts greeted Brishti over the comms. She was an open secret. They knew about her from the radio chatter in the city, but it was only at the depot they saw her clearly. On these rest stops she would wear one of her father’s lungis like a long skirt, instead of her shorts, along with a t-shirt, and she’d tie her now long hair into a braid. She was welcomed by the tribe. They waved from their mekha’s chests and told her father how lucky he was to have found her, with a hint of envy in their voices. But they were loyal to each other, and no one informed the state that one of their own had broken the rules attached to their greater bodies—namely, that they couldn’t share the mekha with anyone else. Luckily for them, the age of plagues had diminished the surveillance networks of governments, broken by the very cataclysms they’d aided by using their billion eyes to look at the wrong things. In this fragile and healing world, trust had far more value than it had in the collapsing time before the age of plagues.

  Since Brishti’s father, like all of his lonesome tribe, was mekhar hridaya, the heart of the mekha, Brishti became affectionately known as mekhar atma, the soul of the mekha. Theirs was the giant with both heart and soul.

  SOMETIMES DAITYA WOULD BRING THE MEKHA TO THE CRACKED HIGHWAYS BEYOND New Town at night, where the dark green lakes of algae farms glistened under the moon. His hands guiding Brishti’s, they would increase the speed of the mekha together. The giant would run down the open road until the inside of its chest was shaking violently, making Brishti laugh, safely strapped into the seat. The packs of wild dogs who wandered the highways would join the race, howling and barking alongside the pumping mechanical legs of this strange beast, which they knew not to get too close to.

  III

  The forest flowed, the city ebbed.

  The plagues waned like the shadow of the moon, always sure to return.

  AS BRISHTI GREW OLDER, AND HER BODY GREW WITH THE YEARS, THE MEKHA stayed the same size, still a giant but less of one to her. She became, more and more, a part of this god’s body, a twin heart and soul to her father, mimicking his moves, absorbing his knowledge of the being that sheltered them. As she grew more confident inside the mekha, her father grew less confident about the future he had bestowed upon her, wondering if he had imprisoned her in the cramped chest of a giant for all her days. She was a teenager, and deserved a life of less solitude than being one of the mekha.

  Whenever he brought this up, she would go silent with rage. Later, she would blame him for trying to get rid of her, the only times she could bring him to tears deliberately. But Brishti couldn’t hide the way she looked at the young people in the villages they delivered supplies to. Daitya recognized the longing in her eyes as she watched them play in the distance, or walk up to the mekha’s open mouth to leave offerings. Sometimes they would look up and wave to Brishti. She would wave back but retreat into the chest of the giant with uncharacteristic shyness.

  One day, Daitya asked Brishti, “Do you feel like, living with me, that you’re missing out on being with other children?”

  She frowned as if this was an absurd question. “I am mekhar atma,” she put a fist to her chest. “My life is here, I don’t need anything else.”

  He smiled at her. “I know. But . . . it’s normal to want to be with others your age.”

  She shrugged and looked away, evening light through the panes of the giant’s chest catching the curve of her cheek. “You aren’t with others your age.” He felt these words, sharper than she realized. “I’m not normal. I’m like you. We live to serve the people of the city.”

  “You’re a child, Brishti. You shouldn’t have to live to serve—”

  Brishti’s head whipped around, eyes wide. “I’m not a child! We are the heart and soul. We are one with god together here, you said,” she said, her voice wobbling.

  “Of course you are. Of course we are, I didn’t—”

  “You don’t want me to live with you anymore,” she snapped, eyes shining.

  “No,” he pleaded. “I could never think of leaving you. But this is not a space for two people to live in. There are opportunities out there.”

  “You are mekhar hridaya. You can never leave this body. It’s your home!” Brishti said, shaking her head. “You told me that, you promised. Which means the only solution is for me to leave.”

  “I don’t want you to leave. I want you to think of . . . of a life outside. Outside this giant. I helped build this city, with its forests, these rivers and villages, with this giant. It is not like when I was small, and those without wealth would be doomed to die on the roads, or work for nothing. There are forests to live off, villages to settle and lend your labor to, where you could meet others your age, and grow with them.”

  “I will not leave the giant that saved me. The giant won’t abandon me, even if you will, Baba,” she said, not hearing him at all, because she was a teenager, and terrified of losing him.

  “Okay, I am sorry,” he said, over and over, and didn’t bring it up again. But he couldn’t forget the look on her face when she looked to other children beyond the shared body of their giant. He couldn’t forget what he had denied himself as a teenager, struggling to survive at the dawn of the age of plagues.

  DAITYA CONTACTED GOVERNMENT HQ OVER THE RADIO ONE DAY, WHEN BRISHTI was bathing under the open palms of their giant. They no longer bathed together, because she was too old. Though Brishti had little notion of privacy because of the way they lived, even she would come to appreciate some time alone, or even separated by just the barrier of the giant’s chest, since she had never left the shadow of the giant. She still hummed loudly, by habit, or to assure her father she was outside the giant, still there.

  It felt like a betrayal, but Daitya forced himself to tell HQ that he had a daughter now, and that she lived with him.

  Their next trip to a mekha depot was their last with their giant.

  Daitya lost his home, the body that housed him. He felt a self-loathing so powerful it nearly buckled his legs when Brishti looked at the reclaiming officers at the depot, the realization that the open secret was now no secret at all, that she had become the infection in the giant’s body, expelled along with her father from their place in god’s body.

  “Please, please, please, I take very little space, please don’t take away my baba’s home,” she begged the officers. They looked sympathetic but firm behind their masks. Daitya went to tell her the truth, to calm and comfort his daughter and absorb her anger. But he saw her holding on to the giant’s leg, the worn, soiled leg of the body that had been his for so long he couldn’t remember, the body that had saved her life. Brishti, born of a superstorm and a giant. Her face mask had slid off on her tears. Looking at this, Daitya collapsed at his daughter’s feet and broke down in shuddering sobs. Brishti’s own sorrow vanished in concern as she crouched and held him. She had never seen him cry with his body, his tough, exhausted body. Only ever his eyes, when she blamed him for trying to get rid of her. He shook in her arms and begged forgiveness, and she realized what had happened, that he had done the opposite of get rid of her, like she’d feared so many times.

  Though she was of the mekha, one of his tribe, he didn’t want her to be. He didn’t want her world restricted to the rib cage of a giant that did not grow with her.

>   IV

  Shorn of his outer body, Daitya the mekha became just a father raising his teenage daughter in a small village in the forest of the Maidan.

  Shorn of her outer body, Brishti the mekha became a young woman, taller than her father now and more formidable, a butcher and huntress with bow and machete. Clad in sari and gas mask, she rode out of the forests of central Kolkata on horseback with cryocaches full of meat, out to the less verdant valleys of high-rises, delivering the meat to open-air markets, sending the caches up hoisting cables to the balconies and windows of barirlok.

  Though Brishti’s hands remembered the motions controlling a different body, she loved riding horses through the forest paths with her friends, some of whom fell in love with her. She fell in love with some of them. She slept with some of them under the stars, drunk on this private intimacy new to her, thrilled by the mythic danger of tigers that sometimes wandered this deep into the city, annoyed by the real danger of insects.

  Sometimes, Brishti’s dreams made of her a giant running through the forest.

  With the passage of time, Brishti forgave her father. Her father, who found others to love besides her: the married couple who shared their communal hut. The quiet husband a butcher, and the garrulous wife a garden-farmer. They shared their bed with Daitya, who learned their trades, and shared his body in ways he had never done before. Their daughter, a child, became as a daughter to him, and as a sister to Brishti.

  By the grace of god, a family.

  BRISHTI GOT OFF HER HORSE AND LOOKED OUT OVER THE MEKHA SCRAPYARD. A graveyard of giants rusting in the rain, sinews overgrown with vines, chests heartless and filled with nests of birds and jackals that flitted across the grounds like spirits. Finally at rest, their limbs sprawled in disarray. Brishti’s contact, looking like a crow in her black cloak and gas mask, pointed the way through the winding labyrinth of bodies. Brishti led her horse carefully, not wanting her to get hurt on the rough ground.