The Apex Book of World SF Part 23

Somebody up there loves me! The bus is at the stop. At the last moment, I rush through the doors and as they hiss shut I allow myself to look at my helpless pursuers, left behind. I give them a finger, mentally. I'm still the best in business, chums!

It is only then that I look at the people in the bus. Several pensioners, couple of kids, two women. It might even be worthwhilst attaching the swarm to one of them. And a...my knees almost let go when I spot him on the back seat: dark grey suit, hat, shades, undefined traits. And I think it's game over, but no, the bloke just sits there and stares at me. Then it dawns upon me: we're not alone, and he doesn't dare waste me in front of some fifteen people. Piko, as dumb as a d.i.c.k, must have arranged a meeting in a lonely place.

I run out of the bus at the next stop. The goon does nothing. He doesn't give chase. But as the bus leaves, I see him opening his mobile phone and pressing the keys. I turn around. n.o.body suspicious nearby, but I haven't gone far and I should move on.

Suddenly, a hollow KA-BUUM! Gla.s.ses shudder and alarms go off everywhere. I try to determine where it came from, and then I see smoke billowing into the sky and realise they blew my place up. They want to erase me thoroughly, as if I never existed.

The rest of the day is a long, cold, and exhausting chase. Whatever they were, and now I'm certain they weren't human, they were real good. I tried every trick in the book, changing buses, taking cabs, getting lost in the crowd, everything I know. But they were always one step in front of me. Every time I thought I finally got them off my d.i.c.k, one of them would tap my shoulder. One by one, they cut all my attempts to leave the town unseen, to take a fast ride to Vienna or Belgrade, where I could disappear.

I even wanted to change my phiz. In the black parlour, naturally. It would last perhaps an hour or two, and it would pull me through the dragnet. And I'd have done that, not gladly, if I haven't found that bloke waiting at the address. Grey suit, hat, shades...I just turned tail and ran.

Then it occurred to me. Maybe they had pinned a tracer on me? I didn't have the slightest idea how: I'd had no physical contact with any of them, but it wasn't impossible. And so, a visit to the cleaner's. I wasted a lot of cash just to find out that I was wrong. Even telepathy came to my mind, but then why would they use mobile phones? I knew they couldn't buzz around the town that fast, so there was only one explanation left: there was a whole shipload of them, and they deployed at the start to block me. That means they are very keen that Lydia's business doesn't leak and there is no possibility I can make some deal with them.

I'm completely helpless, unable to move, and I should. I'm asking for trouble now; all they have to do is comb coffeehouses in the city. The waiter brings me another cup and I don't recall ordering it. I lift my eyes and I see him well for the first time. Human face, seemingly everything in place, but to describe it....

The waiter glides on, and I know I flew right into their hands. I want to get up and run, but the legs don't work. I touch my left leg. I don't feel my hand on it. I pinch myself; I don't feel it. I'm f.u.c.ked. I know it for certain now. There is some nano s.h.i.t in the coffee, and they've stuffed me like a goose with it since I came in here. It screwed my nerves: the connection to my legs is history, and there's no reason to believe it will stop at that.

That's why they let me go, once I gave up breaking out of town and turned back. And me, dumba.s.s, didn't find it strange how easily I got rid of them in Martic Street and again in Jurisic Street and how I slipped away in the crowd on the square. I mean, why chase a jerk who's impaling himself?

I recall a party a couple of years ago--there was a conspiracy freak there. He was more fun than most of the others, so some of us gathered and listened to him. I couldn't believe my ears.

Flying saucers and MIBs and they're everywhere and Chris Carter was their man. Seriously, they sent him to cloud the truth. Otherwise, he would have ended up under a truck before take one. But that was just for starters: masons and who wasted JFK and Marilyn and why they brought the Soviet Union down and started the war in Yugoslavia. That's when it became crazy. There was a whole treatise on trucks as a.s.sa.s.sination weapons; the guy was obsessed with trucks. And why Quebec separated from Canada and how nanotechnology became the ultimate step in a conspiracy to rule the world. Of course, it all started back in Roswell in nineteen-forty-something, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I have nothing to complain about. I can't say that I wasn't warned.

Suddenly, I sniff a stench coming from under the table. I don't even have to touch, I did a number one in my trousers. That went, too. The system is falling apart. Soon I'll know the answer to another big question. The one about life after death.

There's only one way out, better than none. The Lazarus.

I got it two years ago in return for some five hundred terabytes of clips. I open the Apple, turn it on, unfold the headset and put it on my head. I put the glove on. My hands still serve me, but I know I don't have much time. I plug it all into a connector on my table. VROS unfolds before my eyes, and I touch the Lazarus with my finger. Black stuff, real black. I heard of it before, but it was only then that I saw it for the first time. Two years ago.

The man came to my home carrying two cases of equipment. It took him fifteen minutes just to unpack it all and unwind the cables. Then he put a helmet on my head and recorded with the Lazarus for an additional half an hour. My brain, everything in it, the complete content, memories, everything. He never explained how the stuff worked. He just told me there were a lot of big shots using it, and often, in case somebody iced them. When the session was over, he had me completely downloaded to his computer. I took a look: the machine was custom-built, nothing you would see in shop windows.

The recording was step one, followed by the compression, to reduce it into an acceptable size. Finally, it all ended on my Apple, together with the user's part of the Lazarus. Theoretically, I should have dialled the man every few months to update. In practise, the thing had remained untouched since the evening he'd first recorded me.

Now, all I have to do is raise the Lazarus, to uncompress me and return me to life, me, two years ago, in the VR, scattered across the sites, but alive. Sort of.

And whilst the Lazarus rises, I choose a site. I know a good one. I discovered it six months ago: an abandoned virtual role-playing game site in Nairobi. I cut the remains of C-level security; the last access was two years ago. G.o.d only knows how the site survived that long. Perhaps it went unnoticed when the Kampala server blew up, pulling all of East Africa with it. But the site is big enough, VRPGs need memory, and it will be enough to put me in and unpack. And the black clinics are near, Kampala, Kinshasa, Luanda. Allegedly, they can raise you out of nothing, like Adam out of clay, if only they have the DNA. Expensive, though.

The Lazarus interrupts me, giving me thumbs-up. It's connected. All I have to do is touch "okay" and we go. But before that, I send all the programs and the DNA and all the materials from the portfolio disc, to keep them handy. And Lydia, my perfect baby, I will go nowhere without her. I place her comfortably next to me. I open a notepad and type several remarks, what happened to me and why. What is past to me is future to my doppelganger: I have to warn him. Finally, I give the Lazarus a go-ahead and it streams me to the site, me of two years ago.

It's over in a moment. TRANSMISSION SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED and the line is terminated. The Lazarus sweeps tracks, leaving me alone in the VROS. With the last touch of my finger, I activate the virus to burn everything in the Apple, whilst somewhere over there, in Kenya, I'm being reborn amidst the roar of lions.

Here, in the coffeehouse, in the murmur, the body loses the last atoms of strength. My hands drop feebly on the table. I lean back, my neck barely holding. I can't take off the headset. I remain that way, then the head drops, too.

I feel myself shutting down...eyes...as if I drain, dirty water in the gutter....

...darkness....

They say that your whole life pa.s.ses before your eyes...no time, not even for that.

Fear...somehow, I don't feel it...worse...could've been worse....

Everything around me disappears...

...just one...last....

Lydia...meet you...I'd like to meet you so much...

...perhaps one day...

Lydia....

"Into the Night"

Anil Menon.

Anil Menon grew up in Mumbai, India, and moved to the United States in the 1990s. In 2006, he was a nominee for the Carl Brandon Society's Parallax Prize. His short stories have appeared widely, and his first novel, The Beast with Nine Billion Feet (Zubaan/Penguin) has just been published.

The island of Meridian was still thirty minutes away, but Kallikulam Ramaswamy Iyer had already done enough neck stretches, shoulder shrugs, hand wiggles, and toe scrunches to limber his joints for this lifetime and the next.

He was tired. He was eighty-two years old and had relaxed his ancient Brahmin joints through many a stressful hour, but the last few days had been some of the worst: first, a thirteen-hour flight from Mumbai to Sydney with a three-day layover in Singapore, then a four-hour flight in a boomerang-shaped aeroplane from Sydney to Fiji's Nadi airport followed by a two-hour ride in a catamaran ferry to Meridian. Far away.

Ramaswamy shook his head. Why had Ganga decided to settle so far away? She'd always been peculiar, his daughter, this bright-eyed girl they had raised from a mustard seed through plaits and school bags to first-cla.s.s first and first menses, this wild daughter of theirs who squeezed their hearts so, squeezed them till he'd sworn not to love her anymore, but of course it was all talk, as the missus would verify, for wasn't he here in the belly of a fish, going to a land of cannibals for the sake of their bright-eyed girl who only thirty-seven years ago had begun a mustard seed as modest as an ant's fart.

"Think in English," advised his wife. "Tamil will only make it harder for you to adjust."

Oh, listen to the Queen of England. Who was the matriculate, madam? And who was the Sixth Standard twice fail?

A wave of laughter surged through the boat. It was beginning to irritate him, these periodic laughs. What were they laughing at? And why was it funny? A pa.s.senger in the adjacent seat, a sleek cheetah of an Indian girl who'd been gesturing with her silver thimbles throughout the last half-hour, lifted her head, blinked rapidly and smiled. She looked tired too. What was she doing here, alone, so far away from home and husband?

He continued to brood. She could've stayed. There were plenty of jobs for Hindus in India. Even a job in Europe would've been acceptable. But the South Pacific! Meridian was so new it wasn't even listed in his Rand McNally 1995 World Almanac. Who could've foreseen when he left Kallikulam in 1962, barely nineteen years old and with ninety rupees in his pocket, when he'd left his parents, dressed in their starched best, left them behind and forever at the Thrichedur railway station, who could've foreseen this final migration, three score and three years later, to a land without elephants, to a land without ancestors; who could have foreseen?

"Stop beating that drum, sir," said Paru. "Fall on your knees and thank your Krishna-bhagavan that you have such a sterling daughter. You're in her care now. So chin up and get ready for the next innings."

You? What had happened to the we? His wife, Paru, had been younger by ten years. By all logic she should have been on this boat, not him. But of course, the "we" of sixty years plus had ended at the Sion Electric Crematorium in Mumbai.

He flexed his neck. No. That had just been the disposal of the end. The end had come with a shopping list. Paru had sent him to buy groceries and when he had returned, it was to a world without-- No, it was no use dwelling on that day. Today was the first day of the rest of his life.

He sat, resigned, as another rash of laughter broke out. The girl was also laughing. She must've sensed his inspection, because she turned her head in his direction. Her eyes were milked over, like the white, dead corals he'd seen near Fiji. Pity struggled with revulsion in his mind. Oh G.o.d, what was the matter with the girl's eyelids? Why was she rolling them up? Almost like a lizard. Poor girl. Ramaswamy quickly turned his head. So there were handicapped people in the West as well. But then, Earth itself was handicapped now, broke and broken.

People may say what they want, thought Ramaswamy, but fate was blind. Why else would this beautiful girl be blind, why else would he have had to leave India, and why else would the last conversation with his wife have been about potatoes, brinjals, and coconuts, and would he, for G.o.d's sake, please, please check the tomatoes before buying them, because the last batch had been overripe and practically rotten. It could've been about anything, and it had been.

He didn't mind that his wife had died. She'd become tired, worn out. Nothing had interested her anymore, not even their fights, and her insults had stopped being insults and begun to feel like the instructions of someone departing for an immensely long journey. She'd become weary, Paru had, his wife of sixty years and seven lives, weary of waiting for Ganga to ama.s.s the papers and travel credits "to bring you home, Amma. I love you, please, please hang in there, okay?" Why, had his house been any less of a home? Had he not taken care of his wife? Paru wanted to let go, and he'd gotten tired of holding on for the both of them. He didn't mind. But she hadn't left empty-handed. She'd taken his memories with her. That, he did mind.

It meant that he now had to recollect things, and could no longer rely on a shout ("Paru!") and an answer. For instance, what was the name of the school he'd attended in the 1940s? Had they first talked in the Esso canteen, or had it been that monsoon day when he'd offered her his umbrella? What was the name of his last American boss at Esso, the year before it became Hindustan Petroleum? He clearly remembered the fellow. Especially his laugh. The fellow would laugh, a great big honk of pure evil, revealing a panoply of white, red, yellow, lead glint and a couple of canines sharpened by decades of insatiable meat-eating. But what was his name?

There was an announcement being made, but the accent was impossible to understand. It was clear, though, that they'd almost arrived. Through the giant windows, he could see bits and pieces of the skyline. Pa.s.sengers were busy getting their things together; a few were busy blinking at each other. Maybe that's how they said goodbye in this part of the world. The blinking reminded him of ants on a sugar trail. The catamaran docked with a b.u.mp and jerk.

"We've reached," said his co-pa.s.senger. "You can unbuckle now."

"I know," said Ramaswamy, smiling and blinking. "That's what I want, that's what you want, but that's not what the buckle wants."

"Here, let me help. It's been a long journey, huh?"

And before he could say anything, she leaned over and began to struggle with the belt. Her hair glistened as if it were coated with gla.s.s. He couldn't help touching a strand, and she glanced at him. "Careful. The alloy coat is not quite stable yet."

"Are you married?" he asked.

She frowned and didn't answer. "There!" She detached the belt. "Come, Appa. I'll call Aaliyah and let her know we've reached."

Appa? Yes, of course. This was Ganga, his daughter. How could he not have recognised her? The hair was a factor, yes. But still. What was happening to him? He was so astonished by the lapse in memory, he forgot to be terrified.

"I'm okay," he said, furious with Paru. It was all her fault. Fresh resentment began to ooze from the wound of his recent loss.

He'd been here before, a stranger in a strange land. In 1962, he'd stepped out on Platform No. 3 at the Victoria Terminus in Bombay with the smell of soot in his nostrils, a roll of bedding, and an aluminum trunk full of good advice. He'd survived the first strange day, and the second, and the third, till a season had pa.s.sed and he'd become part of the very strangeness he'd seen on the first day. On his way to work, he'd sometimes see himself stepping out of a train, on this platform, on that platform, from this village, from that village, going everywhere and going nowhere at all.

So why did this transition feel so different, as if he were doing it for the very first time? Perhaps strangeness simply could not be gotten used to. Especially if the strangeness lay, not in the miracles of the place, but in its small-small things.

The miracles were manageable, because they all had a familiar feel. Buildings that supposedly chatted to each other about energy, politics, and life. Or, for example, the "bubbles". They were cars with skins that quivered and became teardrop-shaped as they picked up speed. His daughter had tried to explain how it all worked: drive-by-wire, gyroscopic gaddabaddoo, Gandhi's loincloth, and pure unadulterated ghee...who knew how it worked? He could tell she had no idea either. But they were just inventions.

Ditto for the hea.r.s.ee. It was just binoculars and headset rolled into one. With the hea.r.s.ee, you could see what other people were seeing, hear what other people were hearing, a.s.suming they had hea.r.s.ees too. It used a "nictating membrane" and, of course, wireless. Wireless was a must. He'd had the idea himself one afternoon, so he wasn't too surprised.

No, the strangeness lay in other things, once-familiar things. It lay in Ganga. She had so many friends. He'd always hated that word: friend. It excused everything and expected nothing.

One friend--Aaliyah--seemed to be a permanent guest. Another "friend" was practically an animal; she lay curled on the sofa, her skinny, thimbled hands working ceaselessly--thinking about the mathematics of relatives in general, Ganga claimed--getting up only to feed, and eating things directly from the fridge, all the whilst standing on one leg like a flamingo and eyeing him cautiously, as if she half-expected an ambush. They were many others, all women, with made-up names: Tomi, Rex, Lace, Sharon, and once, just once, a slender man with a sharp Aryan nose, high forehead, and a girl's name. Ramaswamy had asked him why.

"Because I am a girl," he'd replied.

Dinner was a nightmare: meat and wine all around him, overcooked rice, undercooked vegetables (they crunched!), rubbery yogurt, and cold metal spoons. The first time he ate with his hand--thoroughly mixing the rice and b.u.t.termilk by hand, relishing every wet squelch, and licking his fingers at the end. It'd been impossible to ignore the long, watchful silences, rapid blinks, the Flamingo's high laugh, and most hurtful of all, Ganga's startled expression. As if she didn't know. As if she, too, hadn't eaten the Tamil Brahmin way, his way, the correct way, once. As if she'd forgotten.

He had a room at the end of the hall on the first floor, tucked away from the rest of the house. The girls mostly lived upstairs, rarely coming down, and if they did talk to him, it was only to ask him idiotic questions about festivals, the caste system, and Hinduism. He had to watch his answers. Otherwise: "That's rubbish," Ganga would begin, knitting her brows. "If you look at the facts...."

The facts were these: Brahmanism was bad. The West was good. Everything he said was superst.i.tion. Everything she said was science. Those were the facts. S'all right. He had his beliefs, she had hers. She called her beliefs "facts," and that was all right too. If science was all-powerful, then why she did grovel before the Evolution G.o.d? Evolution this, Evolution that. The girl knew a lot, but she understood nothing. As people said, just being able to talk about a trunk didn't make you an elephant.

But most of all, it was the silence that was intolerable. So many circuits of the house, so many cautious in-the-doorway peeks into bedrooms, so many against-the-light inspections of their mail, so many cups of microwaved chai, so many naps and then to painfully go up, down, around and about the house, circ.u.mnavigating the hours, the day, the month. Occasionally the house would pa.s.s on messages in Ganga's or Aaliyah's voice, and he'd feel like a house pet, expected to mewl and bark at the sound of his master's voice. He never responded when they called, shuffling around silently, refusing to be happy for their sake, and fully aware that irrespective of whether he responded or not, every room in the house was visible to their lizard eyes.

The silence of his Mumbai apartment had always been bordered with far-away horns, shouts of neighbourhood children, Paru's telephone gossip, and the imminent possibility of tea. This silence had weight. Sometimes he cried.

Ramaswamy lay in bed, facing the wall, the coverlet pulled all the way to his neck, quietly burbling in a mix of English and Tamil.

"Appa?"

He froze.

"Who are you talking to? Are you alright? Are your legs hurting?"

When he turned, he saw Ganga in her nightdress, her face lit from below by the room's night light.

"I'm okay. Just thinking, that's all. About the good old days."

She sat down beside him and put a hand on his chest. "Not able to sleep?"

"How much sleep can I do?" He hesitated, and then spoke in a rush. "Ganga, I want to go back to Mumbai. I can't live here in this freezing cold and twenty-four hours of rain. Everything is backward and upside down. From the nose via the back of head to the ear, as people say. A simple man like myself only needs his two servings of rice curds and a gla.s.s of water. That I can get for myself. Why I should be a burden to you? I am going back."

"We can't have this conversation over and over again. Haven't you been watching the news from India? And there's no-one there to take care of you. In a few years, your health problems are only going to get worse. If anything happens--"

"Krishna-bhagavan will take care of me as he has all these years."

"Don't be childish! Amma took care of you all these years, not your b.l.o.o.d.y bhagavan. So at least give credit where it's due."

He was pleased to see her voice rise and her accent veer into its natural roly-poly South-Indian roundness. Ha! Not such a suit-and-boot madam after all. He remembered roly-poly; he'd walked this little girl back from kindergarten every day, pigtails and upturned face, hopeful smile and Appa, Appa, please can I have some kulfi, Appa?

Where had it all gone wrong with Ganga? Was it the day he'd found her smoking with the sweeper's boy, a Shudran, whose polluting dirty hand also happened to be inside her unzipped trousers? Or was it when she'd burnt her maths degree merely because her college had changed its name from the Indian Inst.i.tute of Science to the Hindu Inst.i.tute of Science? Or was it that black day when she'd left India, a month after renouncing her citizenship--he hadn't known it was possible--and in her fierce embrace, he'd sensed an irreversible letting go.

"I should've disciplined her more," thought Ramaswamy, "but as people say, a donkey never has a tiger for a father."

"Can we go to a doctor?" he asked.

"Now?"

She nictated, and geometric patterns flashed across her eyelids; the room seemed filled with a new awareness. He sensed there were others in the room, watching, listening, perhaps even commenting on him.

"Appa? Are you in pain? I can call an ambulance--"

"No, no. I just wanted to get an estimate of how much time I have left."

"No-one can tell you that!"

"Not even biology?"

She smiled and touched his face. "Not even biology."