Ian McDonald: Cyberabad Days

It all fell apart, and it takes us to put it back together again , his father explained. Once there was a big country called India, with a billion and a half people in it, but they just couldn’t live together, so they fell to squabbling and fighting. Like you and Kelis’s mom , Kyle said, which made his father raise his eyebrows and look embarrassed and mom – his mom, not Kelis’s – laugh to herself. Whatever, it all fell apart and these poor people, they need us and our know-how to put it all back together for them. And that’s why we’re all here, because it’s families that make us strong and hopeful. And that’s how you, Kyle Rubin, are building a nation. But some people don’t think we should be doing that. They think it’s their nation so they should build it. Some people think we’re part of the problem and not part of the solution. And some people are just plain ungrateful.

Or, as Clinton in class said, the Rana’s control is still weak and there are a lot of under-represented parties out there with big grievances and arsenals of left-over weaponry from the Sundering. Western interests are always first in the firing line. But Clinton was a smart-mouth who just repeated what he heard from his dad who had been in Military Intelligence since before there was even a Cantonment, let alone an International Reconstruction Alliance.

The nation Kyle Rubin is building is Bharat, formerly the states of Bihar, Jharkand and half of Utter Pradesh on the Indo Gangetic plain, and the cranes swing and the helicopters fly over the rising towers of its new capital, Ranapur.

When there weren’t cats exploding, after practice Kyle would visit Salim’s planet.

Before Kyle, Striker Salim had been the best forward on Team Cantonment U-11. Really he shouldn’t have been playing at all because he didn’t actually live within the compound. His father was the Bharati government’s man in Cantonment, so he could pretty much do whatever he liked.

At first they had been enemies. On his second game Kyle had headed home a sweet cross from Ryan from Australia and after that every cross floated his way. In the dressing room Striker Salim had complained to Coach Joe that the new boy had got all the best balls because he was a Westerner and not Bharati. The wraths of dads were invoked. Coach Joe said nothing and put them on together for the game against the army kids, who imagined that being army kids was like an extra man for them. Salim on wing, Kyle in centre: three three four. Cantonment beat US Army two one, one goal by Salim, the decider from a run by Salim and a rebound from the goalkeeper by Kyle, in the forty-third minute. Now, six weeks in another country later, they were inseparable.

Salim’s planet was very close and easy to visit. It lived in the palmer-glove on his brown hand and could manifest itself in all manner of convenient locations: the school system, Tinneman’s coffeehouse, Kyle’s e-paper workscreen, but the best was the full proprioception so-new-it’s-scary lighthoek (trademark) that you could put behind you ear so, fiddle it so, and it would get inside your head and open up a whole new world of sights and sounds and smells and sensations. They were so new not even the Americans had them, but Varanasi civil servants engaged on the grand task of nation building needed to use and show off the latest Bharati technology. And their sons too. The safety instructions said you weren’t supposed to use it in full sensory outside because of the risk of accidents, crime or terror but it was safe enough in Guy’s Place up on the roof under the solar farm that was out of shot of any sniper, no matter how good or young she was.

Kyle plugged the buddy-lead into Salim’s lighthoek and slipped the curl of plastic behind his ear. It had taken a while to work out the sweet spot but now he got it first time every time. He was not supposed to use lighthoek tech; Mom’s line was that it hadn’t been proved safe yet but Kyle suspected it was his father: it was opening yourself up to evil influences to let things inside your head like that. That was before you even got to what he thought of the artificial evolution game itself. Maybe if he could experience the lift out of the Cantonment, up through the solar arrays, past the cranes and helicopters, and see Salim’s world there in front of him; Alterre, as it was properly called, and feel yourself falling towards it, through the clouds faster than anything could possibly go, to stop light as a feather with your feet brushing the wave-tops; maybe he would change his mind. He could smell the salt. He could feel the wind. He could see the lifted jelly sails of a kronkaeur fleet above the white-edged swell.

‘Aw not these jellyfish guys again,’ said Kyle.

‘No no no, this is different.’ Salim stood beside him above the waves. ‘Look, this is really cool.’ He folded his hands and leaned forward and flew across the ocean, Kyle a heartbeat behind him. He always thought of those Hindu gods you saw on the prayer cards that blew into the compound from the street shrines. His dad didn’t like those either. They arrived over the kronkaeur armada, beating through a rising ocean on a steady breeze, topsails inflated. When the huge, sail-powered jellyfish had appeared, Kyle had been so excited at his first experience of a newly evolved species that the vast, inflatable monsters had sailed like translucent galleons through his dreams. But all they did was raise their triangular sails and weave their tentacles together into huge raft-fleets and bud off little jellies that looked like see-through paper boats. Once the initial thrill of being part of the global game-experiment to start life on earth all over again and see how it evolved differently had worn off, Kyle found himself wishing that Salim had been given somewhere a bit more exciting than a huge square of ocean. An island would have been good. A bit of continent would have been better. Somewhere things could attack each other.

‘Every bit of water on Alterre was land, and every bit of land was water,’ Salim had said. ‘And they will be again. And anyway, everything eats everything out on the open ocean.’

But not in a cool way , Kyle thought.

Apart from his teach and his skill at football, nothing about Salim was cool. At home he would never have been Kyle’s friend. Kyle would probably have beat him about a bit: he was geeky, had a big nose, couldn’t get clothes right – all the wrong labels – and had no idea how to wear a beanie. He went to a weird religious school for an hour every afternoon and Fridays to the mosque down by the river steps where they burned the dead people. Really, they should not be friends at all. Ozzie Ryan, who’d been the team big one before Kyle, said it was unnatural and disloyal and you couldn’t trust them; one moment they’d be giving you presents and the next they’d be setting you up for people out there to shoot you. Kyle knew Ozzie Ryan was just jealous.

‘Now, isn’t this so cool?’ Salim said, his toes brushing the wave-tops. The sculpted upper surfaces of the great ocean-going jellies between the inflatable booms that held out the sails were bloated with bubbles, visibly swelling and bulging as Kyle floated around to a closer angle. Bigger, bigger, now the size of footballs, now the size of beach balls, stretching the skin until it split with a gush and acid-smelling liquid and a host of balloon dashed into the air. They rose in a mass, tethered to their parents by woven strands of tentacles, rubbing and bouncing and rebounding from each other in the wind; higher than the sail-tops now, and Kyle could make out detail: each balloon carried a cluster of stingers and translucent claspers beneath its domed canopy. Blue eyes were grouped in threes and fours. One by one their tethers parted and the balloon-jellies sprang up into the air and were whisked away on the sea breeze. All around him the flotilla was bubbling and bursting into spasms of balloons; they soared up around him, some still tangled together by the tentacles. Kyle found himself laughing as he watched them stream up into the sky until they vanished against the fast-moving clouds. It was definitely undeniably way way way cool.