The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (125 page)

Sarasvati would be there. That was Shiv’s warning. When the light struck, she would have looked around and, in the same instant made her mind up. People in need. She could not refuse.

Immigration took an hour and as half Five flights of journalists had disgorged at once. A wired world, it seemed, was no substitute for reporters on the ground. The hall buzzed with swarming fly-sized hovercams. Two hours to grind into Delhi in the limo. The highways were clogged with lines of traffic, all headed out, all moving with geological slowness. The noise of horns was appalling to one fresh from the profound, liquid silence of the dharamshala. Only military and media seemed headed into Delhi but soldiers stopped us at intersections to wave past thundering convoys of chartered refugee buses. We were held up for a motionless half an hour on the big cloverleaf on Siri Ring. In awe and leisure, I studied the wall of memory farms; towering black monoliths drinking in sunlight through their solar skins, pressed shoulder to shoulder as far as I could see. In every breath of air-conditioned air I took, I inhaled millions of devas.

Every roadside, every verge and roundabout, every intersection and car park, every forecourt and garden, was filled with the shanties and leans to the refugees. The best were three low walls of brick with plastic sacking for a roof, the worst cardboard scrapes, or sticks and rags worked together into a sun-shade. Feet had worn away all greenery and stripped the trees bare for firewood. The bare earth had blown into dust, mingling with the airborne devas. The bastis pressed right up to the feet of the memory towers. What did Sarasvati imagine she could achieve here in the face of so colossal a catastrophe? I called her again. The network was still out.

Bharat had invaded India and now India was casting it out. We drove, blaring the horn constantly, past a terrible, emaciated army of refugees. No fine cars here. Trucks, old buses, pick-ups for the better off, behind them, swarms of phatphats, more overloaded than that fatal one I had seen the Holi I discovered death. Motorbikes and mopeds almost invisible under bundles of bedding and cooking pots. I saw a chugging, home-engineered half-tractor device, engine terrifying exposed, dragging a trailer piled as high as house with women and children. Donkey carts, the donkey bent and straining at the loads. In the end, human muscle pushed the exodus onward: bicycle rickshaws, handcarts, bent backs. Military robots guided them, herded them, punished those who strayed from the approved refugee route, or fell, with shock sticks.

Before everything, over everything was the silver spear of the Jyotirlinga.

“Sarasvati!”

“Vishnu?” I could hardly hear her over the roar.

“I’ve come to get you.”

“You’ve what?” It was as noisy where she was. I had a fix. The autodrive would take me there as quickly as it could.

“You’ve got to get out.”

“Vish.”

“Vish nothing. What can you do?”

I did hear her sigh.

“All right, I’ll meet you.” She gave me a fresh set of co-ordinates. The driver nodded. He knew the place. His uniform was crisp and his cap miraculously correct but I knew he was as scared as I.

On Mehrauli Boulevard I heard gunfire. Airdrones barrelled in over the roof of the car, so low their engines shook the suspension. Smoke rose from behind a tatty mall façade. This street, I recognized it. This was Parliament Road, that was the old Park Hotel, that the Bank of Japan. But so faded, so dilapidated. Half the windows were out on the Park. The secluded gardens around Jantar Mantar on Samsad Marg were over-run with packing-case houses, their plastic roofs pushing right against the austere marble angularities of Jai Singh’s astronomical instruments. Everything was over-run with lean-tos and huts and miserable hard-scrabble shelters.

“This is as far as I am going to take you,” the driver said as we ran into an immovable horde of people and animals and vehicles and military at Talkatora Road.

“Don’t go anywhere,” I ordered the driver as I jumped out.

“That’s not likely,” he said.

The press was cruel and chaotic and the most terrifying place I have ever been but Sarasvati was here, I could see her in my mind-map. A cordon of police bots tried to drive me back with the crowds from the steps of the Awadh Bhavan but I ducked under, out and away. I knew this place. I had given my balls to work in this place. Then suddenly, wonderfully, I was in the clear. My heart lurched. My vision swam. Delhi, dear Delhi, my Delhi, they let this happen to you. The gracious greens and boulevards, the airy chowks and maidans of the Rajpath was one unbroken slum. Roof after roof after roof, slumping walls, cardboard and wood and brick and flapping plastic. Smoke went up from a dozen fires. This, this was Dalhousie. I knew the name of course. I had never thought it would ever become the name of the great sink where this newest of New Delhi’s condemned those driven to it by drought and want. Such disdain did new India show for old Awadh. Who needed a Parliament when universal computing made everything a consensus? From where I guessed the old Imperial India Gate had stood at the end of the gracious Rajpath, rose the Jyotirlinga. It was so bright I could not look at I for more than moments. It cast a terrible, unnatural silver shine over the degradation and dread. It abused my Brahminic sensibilities: did I smell voices, hear colour, was that prickle like cold lemon fur on my forehead the radiation of another universe?

People milled around me, smoke blew in my eyes, the downdraft of airdrones and hover cams buffeted me. I had only moments before the army would catch me and move me away with the rest of the panicked crowd. Or worse. I saw bodies on the ground and flames were coming up from a line of plastic shacks by the

“Sarasvati!”

And there she was. Oh, there she was, plunging whip-thin in combat pants and a silk blouse, but filled her wonderful energy and determination out of the pile of collapsing housing. She dragged a child in each hand, smudge-faced and tearful. Tiny mites. In this place, she had slipped from my nuptial elephant to caper with the revellers in her ridiculous man’s costume and exuberant false moustache.

“Sarasvati!”

“You’ve got a car?”

“It’s how I got here, yes.”

The children were on the verge of bawling. Sarasvati thrust them at me.

“Take these two to it.”

“Come with me.”

“There are kids still in there.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“It’s a special needs group. They get left when the sky opens. Everyone else runs and leaves the kids. Take these two to your car.”

“What are you doing?”

“There are more in there.”

“You can’t go.”

“Just get them to the car, then come back here.”

“The army.”

She was gone, ducking under the billowing smoke fall. She disappeared into the warren of lanes and galis. The children pulled at my hands. Yes yes, they had to get out. The car, the car wasn’t far. I turned to try and find an easy way with two children through the wheeling mass of refugees. Then I felt a wave of heat across the back of my neck. I turned to see the blossom of flame blow across the top of the gali, whirling up rags of blazing plastic. I cried something without words or point and then the whole district collapsed in on itself with a roar and explosion of sparks.

The Age of Kali. I have little patience with that tendency in many Indians to assume that because we are a very old culture, we invented everything. Astronomy? Made in India. Zero? Made in India. The indeterminate, probabilistic nature of reality as revealed through quantum theory? Indian. You don’t believe me? The Vedas say that the Four Great Ages of the Universe correspond to the four possible outcomes of our game of dice. The Krita Yuga, the Age of Perfection, is the highest possible score. The Kali Yuga, the Age of strife, darkness, corruption and disintegration, is the lowest possible score. It is all a roll of the divine dice. Probability. Indian!

Kali, Paraskati, Dark Lady, Mistress of Death and Drinker of Blood, Terrible ten-armed one with the necklace of skulls, She Who is Seated upon the Throne of Five Corpses. The Ender. Yet Kali is also Mistress of Regeneration. Ruler of All Worlds, Root of the Tree of the Universe. Everything is a cycle and beyond the Age of Kali we roll again into the Age of Gold. And that which cannot be reasoned with must then be worshipped.

I believe I was mad for some time after Sarasvati’s death. I know I have never been sane as you would consider me sane. We are Brahmins. We are different. But even for a Brahmin, I was crazy. It is a precious and rare thing, to take time out from sanity. Usually we allow it to the very very young and the very very old. It scares us, we have no place for it. But Kali understands it. Kali welcomes it, Kali gives it. So I was mad for a time, but you could as easily say I was divine.

How I reached the temple in the little, drought-wracked town by the sewer of Mata Ganga, I have chosen to forget. How I came by the offering of blood to the priest, that too I’ve put where I put the dis-remembered. How long I stayed there, what I did, does any of this matter? It was time out from the world. It is a powerful thing, to subject yourself to another time and another rhythm of life. I was a thing of blood and ashes, hiding in the dark sanctum, saying nothing but offering my daily puja to the tiny, garland-bedecked goddess in her vulva-like garbigraha. I could have vanished forever. Sarasvati, the brightest and best of us, was dead. I lolled on foot-polished marble. I disappeared. I could have stayed Kali’s devotee for the rest of my long and unnatural life.

I was lolling on the wet, foot-polished marble when the women devotee, shuffling forward through the long, snaking line of cattle-fences toward the goddess, suddenly looked up. Stopped. Looked around as if seeing everything for the first time. Looked again and saw me. Then she unhooked the galvanised railing and pushed trough the switch-back line of devotees to come to me. She knelt down in front of me and namasteed. Above her the single vertical line of her Shakta-tilak she wore the red Eye of Shiva.

“Vish.”

I recoiled so abruptly I banged the back of my head off a pillar,

“Ooh,” the woman said. “Ooh, cho chweet, that’s going to smart. Vish, it’s me, Lakhsmi.”

Lakshmi? My former wife, player of games? She saw my confusion and touched my face.

“I’m temporarily downloaded into this dear woman’s brain. It’s rather hard to explain if you’re not connected. Oh, it’s all right, it’s entirely consensual. And I’ll give her herself back as soon as I’m done. I wouldn’t normally do it – it’s very bad manners – but these are slightly exceptional circumstances.”

“Lakshmi? Where are you? Are you here?”

“Oh, you have had a bit of a nasty bang. Where am I? That’s hard to explain. I am entirely bodhisoft now. I’m inside the Jyotirlinga, Vish. It’s a portal as you know, they’re all portals.” After the initial twelve, the pillars of light had arrived all over earth, hundreds, then thousands. “It is a wonderful place Vish. It can be whatever you want it to be, as real as you like. We spend quite a lot of time debating that; the meaning of real. And the games, the number games; well, you know me. That’s why I’ve taken this step for you Vish. It can’t go on. It’s destructive, the most destructive thing we’ve ever done. We’ll burn through this world because we have another one. We have heaven, so we can do what we like here. Life is just a rehearsal. But you’ve seen that Vish, you’ve seen what that’s done.”

“What is it Lakshmi?” Was it memory and fond hope, the mild marble concussion, the strange nanotech possession, but was this stranger starting to look like Lakshmi?

“We have to bring this age to an end. Restart the cycle. Close the Jyotirlingas.”

“That’s impossible.”

“It’s all mathematics. The mathematics that govern this universe are different from the ones that govern yours; that’s why I’m able to exist as a pattern of information imprinted on space-time. Because the logic here allows that. It doesn’t where I come from. Two different logics. But if we could slide between the two a third logic, alien to either, that neither of them could recognize nor operate, then we would effectively lock the gates between the universes.”

“You have that key.”

“We have a lot of time for games here. Social games, language games, imagination games, mathematical and logical games. I can turn the lock from this side.”

“But you need someone to turn the key on my side. You need me.”

“Yes Vish.”

“I would be shut out forever. From you, from Mum, from Dad.”

“And Shiv. He’s here too. He was one of the first to upload his bodhisoft through the Varanasi Jyotirlinga. You’d be shut out from everyone. Everyone but Sarasvati.”

“Sarasvati’s dead!” I roared. Devotees looked up. The sadhus calmed them. “And would this be the final answer? Would this bring around the Age of Gold again?”

“That would be up to you, Vish.”

I thought of the villages that had so welcomed and amazed and blessed and watered me on my saddhu wandering, I thought of the simple pleasures I had taken from my business ventures: honest plans and work and satisfactions. India – the old India, the undying India – was its villages. Sarasvati had seen that truth though it had killed her.

“It sounds better than sprawling in this dusty old temple.” Kali, Mistress of Regeneration, had licked me with her red tongue. Maybe I could be the hero of my own life. Vishnu, the Preserver. His tenth and final incarnation was Kalki, the White Horse, who at the end of the Kali Yuga would fight the final battle. Kali, Kalki.

“I can give you the maths. A man of your intelligence should be able to hold it. But you will need one of these.”

The woman lifted her hand and seized a fistful of air. She threw it into my face and the air coalesced into a spray of red powder. In mid-air the cloud moiled and boiled and thickened and settled into a red circle, a tilak, on my forehead.

“Whatever you do, don’t connect it to the deva net,” Lakshmi said. “I’m going to have to go now. I don’t want to outstay my welcome in someone else’s body. Goodbye Vish, we won’t ever meet again, in any of the worlds. But we were well and truly wed, for a while.” For a moment I thought the woman might kiss me, then she gave a little twitch and straightened her neck just so as if shaking out a crick and I knew Lakshmi was gone. The woman namasteed again.