Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

‘A goddess cannot do only what she likes,’ Tall Kumarima said. ‘It is a serious matter. The people have no water. The rivers are running dry.’

I thought of the river that ran far down deep below the house where I was born, the water creamy and gushing and flecked with yellow foam. I saw it swallow my uncle and could not imagine it ever becoming thin, weak, hungry.

‘So why do they throw water then?’ I asked.

‘So the devi will give them more,’ Smiling Kumarima explained. But I could not see the sense in that even for goddesses and I frowned, trying to understand how humans were, and so I was looking right at him when he came at me.

He had city pale skin and hair parted on the left that flopped as he dived out of the crowd. He moved his fists to the collar of his diagonally striped shirt and people surged away from him. I saw him hook his thumbs into two loops of black string. I saw his mouth open in a great cry. Then the machine swooped and I saw a flash of silver. The young man’s head flew up into the air. His mouth and eyes went round: from a cry to an oh! The President’s machine had sheathed its blade, like a boy folding a knife, before the body, like that funny goat in the Hanumandhoka, realised it was dead and fell to the ground. The crowd screamed and tried to get away from the headless thing. My bearers rocked, swayed, uncertain where to go, what to do. For a moment I thought they might drop me.

Smiling Kumarima let out little shrieks of horror, ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ My face was spotted with blood.

‘It’s not hers,’ Tall Kumarima shouted. ‘It’s not hers!’ She moistened a handkerchief with a lick of saliva. She was gently wiping the young man’s blood from my face when security in their dark suits and glasses arrived, beating through the crowd. They lifted me, stepped over the body and carried me to the waiting car.

‘You smudged my make-up,’ I said to the guard as the car swept away. Worshippers barely made it out of our way in the narrow alleys.

Tall Kumarima came to my room that night. The air was loud with helicopters, quartering the city for the plotters. Helicopters, and machines like the President’s Own robots, that could fly and look down on Kathmandu with the eyes of a hawk. She sat on my bed and laid a little transparent blue box on the red and gold embroidered coverlet. In it were two pale pills.

‘To help you sleep.’

I shook my head. Tall Kumarima folded the blue box into the sleeve of her robe.

‘Who was he?’

‘A fundamentalist. A karsevak. A foolish, sad young man.’

‘A Hindu, but he wanted to hurt us.’

‘That is the madness of it, devi. He and his kind think our nation has grown too Western, too far from its roots and religious truths.’

‘And he attacks us, the Taleju Devi. He would have blown up his own goddess, but the machine took his head. That is almost as strange as people throwing water to the rain.’

Tall Kumarima bowed her head. She reached inside the sash of her robe and took out a second object, which she set on my heavy cover with the same precise care as she had the sleeping pills. It was a light, fingerless glove, for the right hand; clinging to its back was a curl of plastic shaped like a very very tiny goat foetus.

‘Do you know what this is?’

I nodded. Every devotee doing puja in the streets seemed to own one, right hands held up to snatch my image. A palmer.

‘It sends messages into your head,’ I whispered.

‘That is the least of what it can do, devi. Think of it like your jharoka, but this window opens onto the world beyond Durbar Square, beyond Kathmandu and Nepal. It is an aeai, an artificial intelligence, a thinking-thing, like the machines up there, but much cleverer than them. They are clever enough to fly and hunt and not much else, but this aeai can tell you anything you want to know. All you have to do is ask. And there are things you need to know, devi. You will not be Kumari forever. The day will come when you will leave your palace and go back to the world. I have seen them before you.’ She reached out to take my face between her hands, then drew back. ‘You are special, my devi, but the kind of special it takes to be Kumari means you will find it hard in the world. People will call it a sickness. Worse than that, even…’

She banished the emotion by gently fitting the foetus-shaped receiver behind my ear. I felt the plastic move against my skin, then Tall Kumarima slipped on the glove, waved her hand in a mudra and I heard her voice inside my head. Glowing words appeared in the air between us, words I had been painstakingly taught to read by Tall Kumarima.

Don’t let anyone find it , her dancing hand said. Tell no one, not even Smiling Kumarima. I know you call her that, but she would not understand. She would think it was unclean, a pollution. In some ways, she is not so different from that man who tried to harm you. Let this be our secret, just you and me.

Soon after, Smiling Kumarima came to look in on me and check for fleas but I pretended to be asleep. The glove and the foetus-thing were hidden under my pillow. I imagined them talking to me through the goose down and soft soft cotton, sending dreams while the helicopters and hunting robots wheeled in the night above me. When the latch on her door clicked too, I put on the glove and earhook and went looking for the lost rain. I found it one hundred and fifty kilometres up, through the eye of a weather aeai spinning over east India. I saw the monsoon, a coil of cloud like a cat’s claw hooking up across the sea. There had been cats in the village; suspicious things, lean on mice and barley. No cat was permitted in the Kumari Ghar. I looked down on my Kingdom but I could not see a city or a palace or me down here at all. I saw mountains, white mountains ridged with grey and blue ice. I was goddess of this. And the heart went out of me, because it was nothing, a tiny crust of stone on top of that huge world that hung beneath it like the full teat of a cow, rich and heavy with people and their brilliant cities and their bright nations. India, where our gods and names were born.

Within three days the police had caught the plotters and it was raining. The clouds were low over Kathmandu. The colour ran from the temples in Durbar Square but people beat tins and metal cups in the muddy streets calling praise on the Taleju Devi.

‘What will happen to them?’ I asked Tall Kumarima. ‘The bad men.’

‘They will likely be hanged,’ she said.

That autumn after the executions of the traitors, the dissatisfaction finally poured onto the streets like sacrificial blood. Both sides claimed me: police and demonstrators. Others yet held me up as both the symbol of all that was good with our land and also everything wrong with it. Tall Kumarima tried to explain it to me but with my world mad and dangerous my attention was turned elsewhere, to the huge, old land to the south, spread out like a jewelled skirt. In such a time it was easy to be seduced by the terrifying depth of its history, by the gods and warriors who swept across it, empire after empire after empire. My land had always been fierce and free but I met the men who liberated India from the Last Empire – men like gods – and saw that liberty broken up by rivalry and intrigue and corruption into feuding states; Awadh and Bharat, the United States of Bengal, Maratha, Karnataka.

Legendary names and places. Shining cities as old as history. There aeais haunted the crowded streets like gandhavas. There men outnumbered women four to one. There the old distinctions were abandoned and women married as far up and men as few steps down the tree of caste as they could. I became as enthralled by their leaders and parties and politics as any of their citizens by the aeai-generated soaps they loved so dearly. My spirit was down in India in that early, hard winter when the police and government machines restored the old order to the city beyond Durbar Square. Unrest in earth and the three heavens. One day I woke to find snow in the wooden court; the roofs of the temple of Durbar Square heavy with it, like frowning, freezing old men. I knew now that the strange weather was not my doing but the result of huge, slow changes in the climate. Smiling Kumarima came to me in my jharoka as I watched flakes thick and soft as ash sift down from the white sky. She knelt before me, rubbed her hands together inside the cuffs of her wide sleeves. She suffered badly in the cold and damp.