Ian McDonald - Cyberabad Days

The woman lifted her hand and seized a fistful or 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 gong 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 namasted again.

‘Little Lord Vishnu,’ she whispered. ‘Preserve us.’

I picked myself up from the marble. I dusted off the ash of the dark goddess. I walked to the edge of the temple, blinking up into the light of the real sun. I had an idea where to go to do what I had to do. Varanasi, the City of Siva, the seat of the great Jyotirlinga. How might I support myself, with nothing but the dhoti around my loins? Then I caught a sudden movement: on a window ledge on the first floor of one of the many shops that leaned in close to the temple, a cat was edging out along a waterpipe in pursuit of a bird. And I had an idea that filled me with laughter.

So here it is, here it is: at long last. The great trick, the grand Finale of the Magnificent Vishnu’s Celestial Cat Circus. The wire walk. You will never, ever have seen anything like this before, unless of course you’ve been to a certain Kali Temple… See, here are the two wires. And here is our star performer. Yes, white Kalki gets his chance to shine at last. Up he goes on to the podium and… drum roll. Well, you’ll have to provide the drum roll yourself.

Kalki! Kalki, beautiful white Kalki: do your trick!

And there he goes, carefully sliding one paw, then another out across the two wires, tail moving to keep him in balance, the whole trembling to his muscular control. Go on Kalki… Walking the wire. What a cat! And the final jump onto the further podium and I scoop him up to my chest and shout applause! Applause for my lovely cats! I let Kalki down and the rest of the cats run to join him, running their endless circle of fur and tails around the rope ring. Matsya, Kurma, Narasimha and Varaha; Varana, Pashurama and Rama; Krishna, Buddha and last but not least, Kalki.

I turn in the rising dawn light to savour the applause of my audience. And my cats, save your biggest cheer for Matsya, Kurma, Narasimha, Varaha, Varana, Pashurama, Rama, Krishna, Buddha and Kalki who have performed for your pleasure. And me? Just an impresario, a ringmaster: a storyteller. The light is up now and I will detain you no longer for you have your work and I have a place to go and I think now you know where that is and what I must do there. I may not succeed. I may die. I cannot see Shiv giving up without a fight. So please, will you do one thing for me? My cats. Would you look after them for me? You don’t have to feed them or anything like that, just take them. Let them go, they can look after themselves. It’s where I got them from in the first place. They’ll be happy on a farm, in the country. Lots to hunt and kill. You might even be able to make a bit of money from them. I mean, performing cats, who ever heard of a thing like that? It’s actually much easier than you think. Meat does it, every time. There, I’ve given away the trick. Be good to them. Well, I’ll be off then.

I push the boat out into the stream, run into the dawn-bright water and hop in. It rocks gently. It is a glorious morning; the Jyotirlinga ahead can hold no comparison to the sun. I touch my fingers to my forehead, to the tilak Lakshmi put there, in a small salutation to the sun. Then I put my back to the narrow oars and head out into the stream.

River of Gods

Brasyl

Ian McDonald’s chops as a storyteller and visionary have become apparent over two decades of cutting-edge SF—in short stories, novels, and the trickier novellas and novelettes that have often formed the springboard for longer works. The stories in Cyberabad Days showcase those skills, distilling the author’s extrapolation of the present into a cyberpunk, dystopian future that is still fundamentally human despite the increasing dominance of technology in “a world that manages to be convincingly, sympathetically India, but is still created with such light strokes of McDonald’s pen that the reader never gets bogged down in the world-building” (Green Man Review). No matter what form his fiction takes, McDonald has become one of the surest bets in SF.

“In Cyberabad Days , author Ian McDonald returns to the technologically brilliant, parched and i-Dusty India of 2047, an India first visited in his award-winning novel River of Gods… McDonald is rightly praised as one of the industry’s preeminent SF authors and Cyberabad Days is a showcase of his talent. The world he has created on the bled-dry banks of the Ganges is richly textured and alien, detailing lives that are mundane to the characters but foreign and exotic to the readers. The work that went into researching and developing the culture of this future India utopian or dystopian depending on your caste and wealth is obvious. This is a world that manages to be convincingly, sympathetically Indian, but is still created with such light strokes of McDonald’s pen that the reader never gets bogged down in the world-building. You can taste the heat of the day on your tongue, feel the press of the crowds in the streets. Cyberabad Days is a brilliant, well-paced short story collection that snatches snapshots of life in this powerful, futuristic India. You don’t need to have read River of Gods to enjoy Cyberabad Days , McDonald’s world is so immersive it is easy to find your footing in it. The prose is elegant, drawing in lush scenes with a clean economy of language, and the stories riveting. It’s an admirable addition to the canon of McDonald’s work and one that I’d recommend reading.”

“He should be reckoned as one of the finest of all our novelists.”

“One of the most interesting and accomplished science fiction writers of this latter-day era, indeed maybe the most interesting and complished, and certainly the most culturally and musically sophisticated, the Frank Herbert, William Gibson, or arguably even Thomas Pynchonof the early 21st century.”

A Gollancz ebook

Copyright © Ian McDonald 2009

All rights reserved

The Little Goddess: Asimov’s Science Fiction. Copyright © Ian McDonald 2005

The Djinn’s Wife: Asimov’s Science Fiction. Copyright © Ian McDonald 2006

Kyle Meets the River: Forbidden Planets, ed. Peter Crowther, Daw Books Ltd.

Copyright © Ian McDonald 2006

Sanjeev and Robotwallah: Fast Forward 1, ed. Lou Anders, Pyr.

Copyright © Ian McDonald 2007

The Dust Assassin: The Starry Rift, ed. Jonathan Strahan, Viking.

Copyright © Ian McDonald 2008

The right of Ian McDonald to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Gollancz

An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group

Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane, London WC2H 9EA