Cyberabad Days (5 page)

     There was a long green smear down the front of his fresh-laundered soccer shirt.

     "Salim's always welcome here," Mom called from the kitchen where she was blitzing smoothies. "Just make sure he calls home to let them know he's all right the moment the network comes back up. Now promise you'll do that."

     Of course they did and of course they didn't and the smoothies stood there forgotten and warming on the worktop while Mom edged about folding underwear and pillowcases but really keeping an eye on the rolling news. She was worried. Kyle knew that. Cantonment was locked down and would be until Coalition and Bharati forces had resecured the Green Zone: that was the way it was, Kyle had learned that. Locked-down was locked-out for Dad, and the SKYIndia hovercams were still showing towers of black plastic-smoke and ambulances being walked through the crowds of lost people and burned-out cars by Bharati policemen. The reporters were saying there were casualties, but they were also saying that the network wasn't fully restored and that was why he couldn't call; if there had been Western casualties, they would have said straight away because dead Bharatis didn't count and, anyway, it was inconceivable that anything could happen to Kyle's dad. No, in situations like this you kept your head down and got on with things while you waited for the call, so he didn't trouble Mom and fetched the smoothies himself from the kitchen and took them to join Salim in his world.

     On the house smartsilk screen you couldn't get that full-sensory drop from orbit or the feeling of walking like God over the water, but in the house, even with Mom in her distracted fold-laundry state, it wasn't smart to use the buddy-lead. Anyway, Kyle didn't want to give her more to worry about.

     Three days in Alterre was more like three million years: still water water water whichever way he turned the point of view, but the Mansooris had evolved. High above the blue Atlantic, fleets of airships battled. "Whoa," said Kyle Rubin and Salim Mansoori.

     In three days the jellyfish balloons had become vast sky-going gasbags, blimp-creatures, translucent airships the size of the Boeing troop transports that brought supplies and workers into the secure end of Varanasi Airport. Their bodies were ridged like the condom Kyle had been shown at the back of a bike rack behind the school; light rippled over them and broke into rainbows as the air-jellies maneuvered. For this was battle, no doubt about it. This was hot war. The sky-jellyfish trailed long clusters of tentacles beneath them, many dangling in the water, their last connection with their old world. But some ended in purple stingers, some in long stabbing spines, some in barbs, and these the airships wielded as weapons. The air-medusas raised or lowered sail-flaps to tack and maneuver into striking positions. Kyle saw one blimp, body blotched with black sting-weals, vent gas from nose and tail and drop out of combat. In a tangle of slashing and parrying tentacles, Kyle watched a fighting blimp tear a gash the length of an army Hummer down an opponent's flank with its scimitar-hook. The mortally wounded blimp vented glittering dust, crumpled, folded in half in the middle, and plunged into the sea, where it split like a thrown water-balloon. The sea instantly boiled with almkvists, spear-fast scavengers all jaw and speed.

     "Cool," both boys said together.

     "Hey now, didn't you promise you'd let your folks know you're okay as soon as the network was up?" said Mom, standing behind them. "And Kyle, you know your dad doesn't like you playing that game."

     But she wasn't mad. She couldn't be mad. Dad was safe, Dad had called in, Dad would be home soon. It was all in the little tremble in her voice, the way she leaned over between them to look at the screen, the smell of perfume just dabbed on. You know these things.

     It had been close. Kyle's dad called Kyle in to show him the rolling news and point out where his company car had been when the bombers hit the escort Hummers.

     "There's next to no protection in those things," he said over jerky, swooping flash-cut images of black smoke boiling out of yellow flames and people standing and shouting and not knowing what to do: pictures taken from a passerby's palmer. "They used a drone RAV; I saw something go past the window just before it hit. They were aiming for the soldiers, not for us."

     "It was a suicide attack here," Kyle said.

     "Some karsevak group claimed responsibility; some group no one's ever heard of before. Fired everything off in one shooting match."

     "Don't they go straight into a state of moksha if they blow themselves up in Varanasi?"

     "That's what they believe, son. Your soul is released from the wheel of reincarnation. But I still can't help feeling that this was the final throw. Things are getting better. The Ranas are taking control. People can see the difference we're making. I do feel we've turned the corner on this."

     Kyle loved it when his dad talked military, though he was really a structural engineer.

     "So Salim got home safe."

     Kyle nodded.

     "That's good." Kyle heard his father sigh in the way that men do when they're supposed to talk about things they don't want to. "Salim's a good kid, a good friend." Another intake of breath. Kyle waited for it to shape into a
but.

     
"Kyle, you know, that game. Well . . ."

     Not a
but,
a
well.

     
"Well, I know it's real educational and a lot of people play it and enjoy it and get a lot out of it, but it's not really right. I mean, it's not accurate. It claims it's an evolution simulation, and it is as far as it goes. But if you think about it, really, it's just following rules laid down by someone else. All that code was programmed by someone else; so really, it's evolution inside a bigger framework that's been deliberately designed. But they don't tell you, Kyle, and that's dishonest; it's pretending to be something it's not. And that's why I don't like it—because it isn't honest about the truth, and I know that whatever I say, what you do with Salim is your thing, but I do think you're not to play it here, in the house. And it's good you've got a good friend here—I remember when Kelis was your age, when we were in the Gulf, she had a really good friend, a Canadian girl—but it would be good if you had a few more friends from your own background. Okay? Now, how about
Wrestle Smackdown
on cable?"

     The referee had gone down with a head-butt to the nuts in the first thirty seconds, so it was only when the decibel count exceeded the mundane Varanasi traffic roar that security heads-upped, guns-downed, and came running. A guard-woman in full color-smear combats and smart-visor locked her arms around Kyle and hauled him out of the steel-cage match into which the under-eleven practice had collapsed.

     "I'll sue you I'll sue the ass off you your children will end up living in a cardboard box, let go of me," Kyle yelled. The security woman hauled.

     It was full fight, boys, girls, supporters, cheerleaders. At the bottom of the dog-pile, Striker Salim and Ozzie Ryan. Security hauled them off each other and returned the snoopy RAV drones that flocked to any unusual action to their standby roosts. Parameds rushed to the scene. There was blood, there were bruisings and grazings, there were torn clothes and black eyes. There were lots and lots of tears but no contusions, no concussions, no breaks.

     Then the Gitmoisation.

     Coach Joe: Okay, so, want to tell me what that was about? Ozzie Ryan: He started it. Striker Salim: Liar! You started it.

     Coach Joe: I don't care who started it; I want to know what all that was about. Ozzie Ryan: He's the liar. His people just lie all the time; they don't have a word for the truth.

     Striker Salim: Ah! Ah! That's such a lie too.

     Ozzie Ryan: See? You can't trust them: he's a spy for them, it's true; before he came here they never got in, since he came there's been things happening almost every day. He's a spy and he's telling them all ways to get in and kill us because he thinks we're all animals and going to hell anyway.

     Coach Joe: Jesus. Kyle—what happened?

     Kyle Rubin: I don't know, I didn't see anything, I just heard this noise, like, and when I looked over they were on the ground tearing lumps out of each other.

     Striker Salim: That is so not true ... I cannot believe you said that. You were there, you heard what he said.

     Kyle Rubin: I didn't hear everything, I just heard, like, shouting . . . Gitmoisation Part Two.

     Kyle's Dad: Coach Joe called me, but I'm not going to bawl you out, I think there's been enough of that already. I'm disappointed, but I'm not going to bawl you out. Just one thing: did Ryan call Salim something?

     Kyle Rubin: (Mumble.)

     Kyle's Dad: Son, did Ryan use a racist term to Salim? Kyle Rubin: (Twisting foot.)

     Kyle's Dad: I thought Salim was your friend. Your best friend. I think if someone had done something to my best friend, doesn't matter who he is, what he is, I'd stand up for him.

     Kyle Rubin: He said Salim was a diaper-head curry-nigger and they were all spies and Salim was just standing there so I went in there and popped him, Ryan, I mean, and he just went for Salim, not me, and then everyone was piling on with Ryan and Salim at the bottom and they were all shouting curry-nigger-lover curry-nigger-lover at me and trying to get me too and then the security came in.

     At the end of it two things were certain: soccer was suspended for one month, and when it did come back, Salim would not be playing, never would be again. Cantonment was not safe for Bharatis.

     He was trapped, a traffic-island castaway. Marooned on an oval of concrete in Varanasi's never-ebbing torrent of traffic by the phatphat driver when he saw Kyle fiddling in his lap with pogs.

     "Ey, you, out here, get out, trying to cheat, damn gora."

     "What, here, but—?"

     Out onto this tiny traffic island twenty centimeters in front of him twenty centimeters behind him on one side a tall man in a white shirt and black pants on the other a fat woman in a purple sari who smelled of dead rose, and the phatphat, the little yellow and black plastic bubble, looked/ sounded like a hornet, throbbed away into the terrifying traffic.

     "You can't do this, my dad's building this country!"

     The man and the woman turned to stare. Stares everywhere, every instant, from the moment he slipped out of the back of the Hi-Lux at the phatphat stand. They had been eager for his money then,
Hey, sir, hey, sahb, good clean cab, fast fast, straight there no detours, very safe safest phatphat in Varanasi.
How was he to know that the cheap, light cardboard pogs were only money inside the Cantonment? And now here he was on this traffic island no way forwards no way back no way through the constant movement of trucks, buses, cream-colored Marutis, mopeds, phatphats, cycle rickshaws, cows, everything roaring ringing hooting yelling as it tried to find its true way while avoiding everything else. People were walking through that, just stepping out in the belief that the traffic would steer around them; the man in the white shirt, there he went, the woman in the purple sari,
Come on, boy, come with me,
he couldn't, he daren't, and there she went and now there were people piling up behind him, pushing him pushing pushing pushing him closer to the curb, out into that killing traffic . . .

     Then the phatphat came through the mayhem, klaxon buzzing, weaving a course of grace and chaos, sweeping into the traffic island. The plastic door swiveled up and there, there was Salim.

     "Come on come on."

     Kyle bounded in, the door scissored down, and the driver hooted off into Varanasi's storm of wheels.

     "Good thing I was looking for you," Salim said, tapping the lighthoek coiled behind his ear. "You can find anyone with these. What happened?" Kyle showed him the Cantonment pogs. Salim's eyes went wide. "You really haven't ever been outside, have you?"

     Escaping from Cantonment was easier than anything. Everyone knew they were only looking for people coming in, not going out, so all Kyle had to do was slip into the back of the pickup while the driver bought a mochaccino to go at Tinneman's. He even peeked out from under the tarpaulin as the inner gate closed because he wanted to see what the bomb damage was like. The robots had taken away all the broken masonry and metal spaghetti, but he could see the steel reinforcing rods through the shattered concrete block work and the black scorch marks over the inner wall. It was so interesting and Kyle was staring so hard that he only realized he was out of Cantonment entirely, in the street, the alien street, when he saw the trucks, buses, cream-colored Marutis, mopeds, phatphats, cycle rickshaws, cows close behind the pickup, and felt the city roar surge over him.

     "So, where do you want to go, then?" Salim asked. His face was bright and eager to show Kyle his wonderful wonderful city. This was a Salim Kyle had never seen before: Salim not-in-Cantonment, Salim in-his-own-place, Salim among-his-own-people. This Mansoori seemed alien to Kyle. He was not sure he liked him. "There's theNewBharatSabhaholydeerof-SarnathDoctorSampunananandcricketgroundBuddhiststupaRamnagar-FortVishwanathTempleJantarMantar ..."

     Too much too much Kyle's head was going round all the people, all the people, the one thing he never saw, never noticed from the rooftop lookout, under all the helicopters and cranes and military RAV drones, there were people.

     "River," he gasped. "The river, the big steps."

     "The ghats. The best thing. They're cool." Salim spoke to the driver in a language Kyle had never heard from his mouth before. It did not sound like Salim at all. The driver waggled his head in that way you thought was
no
until you learned better, and threw the phatphat around a big traffic circle with a huge pink concrete statue of Ganesh to head away from the glass towers of Ranapur into the old city. Flowers. There were garlands of yellow flowers at the elephant god's feet, little smoking smudges of incense; strange strings of chillies and limes; and a man with big dirty ash gray dreadlocks, a man with his lips locked shut with fishing hooks.