The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (146 page)

The Girl with the Red Bindi

The war’s names were longer than its duration. The Kunda Khadar war, the Forty-Eight Hour War, the Soft War, the First Water War. You don’t remember it, though Awadhi main battle tanks manoeuvred over these very sands. You probably don’t even remember it from history lessons. There have been greater and more enduring wars; war running into war, the long and, I think, the final war. The war I shall end. That grand display of arms on these river strands I now understand as its opening shot, had any shots actually been fired. That was another of its names, the Soft War. Ah! Who is it names wars? Hacks and pundits, without doubt, media editors and chati journalists; people with an interesting a good, mouth-filling phrase. It is certainly not civil servants, or cat-circus proprietors. How much better a name would “Soft War” have been for the century of unrest that followed, this Age of Kali that now seems to have run down to its lowest ebb with the arrival of the Jyotirlingas on earth?

The Water War, the War of ’47, whatever we call it, for me marked the end of human history and the return of the age of miracles to earth. It was only after the smoke had cleared and the dust settled and our diplomatic teams arrived among the tall and shining towers of Ranapur to negotiate the peace that we realized the immensity of events in Bharat. Our quiet little water war was the least of it. I had received one terse communication down the Grand Trunk Road:
I am ruined, I have failed, I have resigned.
But there was Shaheen Badoor Khan, five paces behind his new Prime Minster Ashok Rana, as I trotted like a child behind our Srivastava.

“Rumours of my demise were exaggerated,” he whispered as we fell in beside each other as the politicians formed up on the grass outside the Benares Polo and Country Club for the press call, each jostling for status-space.

“War does seem to shorten the political memory.” A twenty-three-year-old in the body of a boy half his age may say pretty much whatever he likes. It’s the liberty granted to fools and angels. When I first met Shaheen Badoor Khan, as well as his decency and intelligence, I had sensed a bone-deep sadness. Even I could not have guessed it was a long-repressed and sterile love for the other, the transgressive, the romantic and doomed, as all wrapped up in the body of young Varanasi nute. He had fallen into the honey-trap laid for him by his political enemies.

Shaheen Badoor Khan dipped his head. “I’m far from being the first silly, middle-aged man to have been a fool for lust. I may be the only one to have got his Prime Minister killed as a consequence. But, as you say, war does very much clarify the vision and I seem to be a convenient figure for public expiation. And from what I gather from the media, the public will trust me sooner than Ashok Rana. People like nothing better than the fallen mughal who repents. In the meantime, we do what we must, don’t we, Mr Nariman? Our countries need us more than they know. These have been stranger times in Bharat than people can ever be let know.”

Bless your politician’s self-deprecation. The simultaneous collapse of major aeai systems across Bharat, including the all-conquering
Town and Country
, the revelation of the country’s rampant Hindutva opposition to have been a cabal of artificial intelligences, chaos at Ray Power and the mysterious appearance of a hundred-metre hemispherical crater in the university grounds, of mirror-bright perfection and, behind all, rumours that the long-awaited, long-dreaded Generation Three aeais had arrived. There was only one who could make sense of it to me. I went to see Shiv.

He had a house, a shaded place with many trees to push back the crowding, noisy world. Gardeners moved with the slow precision up and down the rolled gravel paths, dead-heading a Persian rose there, spraying aphids there, spot-feeding brown drought-patches in the lawn everywhere. He had grown fat. He lolled in his chair at the tiffin table on the lawn. He looked dreadful, pasty and puffy. He had a wife. He had a child, a little pipit of a girl playing on the snap-together plastic fun-park on the lawn under the eye of her ayah. She would glance over at me, unsure whether to treat me as a strange and powerful uncle or invite me to whiz down the plastic slide. Yes, wee one, I was a strange creature. That scent, that pheromone of information I had smelled on Shiv the day he came to my wedding still clung to him, stronger now. He smelled like a man who has spent too much time among aeais.

He welcomed me expansively. Servants brought cool home-made sherbet. As we settled into brother talk, man-to-eleven-year-old-talk, his wife excused herself in a voice small as a insect and went to hover nervously over her daughter playing exuberantly on her brightly coloured jungle-gym.

“You seem to have had a good war,” I said.

“There was war?” Shiv held my gaze for a moment, then exploded into volcanic laughter. Sweat broke out on his brow. I did not believe it for an instant. “I’ve got comfortable and greasy, yes.”

“And successful.”

“Not as successful as you.”

“I am only a civil servant.”

“I’ve heard you run Srivastava like a pimp.”

“We all have our sources.”

“Yes.” Again that affected pause. “I spotted yours pretty early on. Not bad for government ware.”

“Disinformation can be as informative as information.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t try anything as obvious as that with you. No, I left them there; I let them look. I’ve nothing to hide.”

“Your investors are interesting.”

“I doubt some of them will be collecting on their investment.” He laughed again.

“I don’t think I understand.”

“It transpires that one of my key investors, Odeco, was nothing more than a front for a Generation Three aeai that had developed inside the international financial markets.”

“So it wasn’t just a rumour.”

“I’m glad you’re still listening to rumours.”

“You say this all very casually.”

“What other way is there to treat the end of history? You’ve seen what happens in India when we take things seriously.” The laugh was annoying me now. It was thick and greasy.

“The end of history has been promised many times, usually by people rich enough to avoid it.”

“Not this time. The rich will be the ones who’ll bring it about. The same blind economic self-interest that caused the demographic shift, and you, Vish. Only this will be on a much greater scale.”

“You think your biochip has that potential?”

“On it’s own, no. I can see I’m going to have to explain this to you.”

By the time Shiv had told his tale the gardeners were lighting torches to drive away the evening insects and wife daughter and ayah had withdrawn to the lit comfort of the verandah. Bats dashed around me, hunting. I was shivering though the night was warm. A servant brought fresh made lassi and pistachios. It was greater, as Shiv as promised. Perhaps the greatest. The gods had returned, and then in the instant of their apotheosis, departed. A soft apocalypse.

The fears of the Krishna Cops, of the scared Westerners, had of course come true. The Generation Threes were real, had been real for longer than anyone had foreseen, had moved among us for years, decades even, unresting, unhasting and silent as light. There was no force capable of extirpating truly hyper-intelligent aeais whose ecosystem was the staggering complexity of the global information network. They could break themselves into components, distribute themselves across continents, copy themselves infinitely, become each other. They could speak with our voices and express our world but they were utterly utterly alien to us. It was convenient for them to withdraw their higher functions from a world closing in on the secret of their existence and base them in the datahavens of Bharat, for they had a higher plan. There were three of them, gods all. Brahma, Shiva, Krishna. My brothers, my gods. One, the most curious about the world, inhabits the global financial market. One grew out of a massively multiple online evolution simulation game pf which I had vaguely heard. In creating an artificial world, the gamers had created its deity. And one appeared in the vast servers farms of Bharat’s Indiapendent Productions, coalesced out of the cast and pseudo-cast of
Town and Country.
That one particularly impressed me, especially since, with the characteristic desire to meddle in the affairs of others mandatory in the soapi universe, it expanded into Bharati politics in the shape of the aggressive Hindutva Party that had engineered the downfall of the perceptive and dangerous Shaheen Badoor Khan and assassination of Sajida Rana.

That would have been enough to end our hopes that this twentieth first century would be a smooth and lucrative extension of its predecessor. But their plans were not conflict or the subjugation of humanity. That would have meant nothing to the aeais, it was a human concept born of a human need. They inhabited a separate ecological niche and could have endured indefinitely, caught up whatever concerns were of value to distributed intelligences. Humanity would not let them live. The Krishna Cops were cosmetic, costume cops to maintain an illusion that humanity was on the case, but they did signal intent. Humans would admit no rivals, so the Trimurti of Generation Three engineered an escape from this world, from this universe. I did not understand the physics involved from Shiv’ description; neither, despite his pedantic, lecturing IT-boy tone, did he. I would look it up later, it would not be beyond me. What I did glean was that I was related to that mirrored crater on the university campus that looked so like a fine piece of modern sculpture, or an ancient astronomical instrument like the gnomons and marble bowls of Delhi’s ancient Jantar Mantar observatory. That hemi sphere, and an object out in space. Oh yes, those rumours were real. Oh yes, the Americans had discovered it long ago and tried to keep it secret, and were still trying, and; oh yes, failing.

“And what is it then?”

“The collected wisdom of the aeais. A true universal computer. They sent it through from their universe.”

“Why?”

“Do you never give presents to your parents?”

“You’re privileged to this information?”

“I have channels that even the government of Awadh doesn’t. Or, for that matter, the Americans. Odeco . . .”

“Odeco you said was an avatar of the Brahma aeai. Wait.” Had I balls, they would have contracted cold and hard. “There is absolutely nothing to prevent this happening again.”

“None,” said Shiv. It was some time since had laughed his vile, superior laugh.

“It’s already happening.” And we thought we had won a water war.

“There’s a bigger plan. Escape, exile, partition is never a good solution. Look at us in Mother India. You work in politics, you understand the need for a
settlement.”
Shiv turned in his chair to the figures on the verandah. His wife was still watching me. “Nirupa, darling. Come over here, would you? Uncle Vish hasn’t had a chance to meet you properly.”

She came dashing down the steps and across the lawn, holding up the hem of her print dress, in a headlong, heedless flight that made me at once fearful for stones snakes and stumble and at the same time reminded so much of my golden years growing up alongside Sarasvati. She put her fingers in her mouth and pressed close to her father, shy of looking at me directly.

“Show him your bindi, go on, it’s lovely.”

I had noticed the red mark on her forehead, larger than customary, and the wrong colour. I bent forward across the table to examine it. It was moving. The red spot seemed to crawl with insect-movement, on the edge of visibility. I reeled back into my chair. My feet swung, not touching the ground.

“What have you done?” I cried. My voice was small and shrill.

“Shh. You’ll scare her. Go on; run on, Nirupa. Thank you. I’ve made her for the future. Like our parents made you for the future. But it’s not going to be the future they thought.”

“Your biochip interface.”

“Works. Thanks to a little help from the aeais. But like I said, that’s only part of it. A tiny part of it. We have a project in development; that’s the real revolution. That’s the real sound of the future arriving.”

“Tell me what it is.”

“Distributed dust-processing.”

“Explain.”

Shiv did. It was nothing less than the transformation of computing. His researchers were shrinking computers, smaller and smaller, from grain of rice to sperm cell, down down to the molecular scale and beyond. The endpoint was swarm-computers the size of dust particles, communicating with each other in free flying flocks, computers that could permeate every cell of the human body. They would be as universal and ubiquitous as dust. I began to be afraid and cold in that clammy Varanasi night. I could see Shiv’s vision for our future, perhaps further than he could. The bindi and the dust-processor: one broke the prison of the skull; the other turned the world into memory.

Little by little our selves would seep into the dust-laden world; we would become clouds, non-localised, we would penetrate each other more intimately and powerfully than any tantric temple carving. Inner and outer worlds would merge. We could be many things, many lives at one time. We could copy ourselves endlessly. We would merge with the aeais and become one. This was their settlement, their peace. We would become one species, post-human, post-aeai.

“You’re years away from this.” I denied Shiv’s fantasia shrilly.

“Yes, we would be, if we hadn’t had a little help.”