Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

The goddess listened, and sifted through the metadata the trolls trailed in their paths—their histories, their patterns. The goddess wanted to give them what they wanted, but she could only do so much. She could not give them sex, nor was she trained to destroy herself as many of them wanted. She learned what the trolls considered beauty here in the state-run national veeyar nets, and responded with the opposite, to calm them. Her skin darkened several shades, becoming like the night sky before dawn, her eyes full moons in the sky that is part of her in this domain.

When Durga was a teenager, taller and without need of a mother’s shoulder to cling to, she joined the crowds around the fanciest pandals during Durga Puja. She already knew she wouldn’t be allowed in, because she didn’t have the mark of the ajna on her forehead—her third eye hadn’t been opened. She couldn’t look into veeyar samsara domains without the use of peripherals like glasses, lenses, helmets, and pods. She just wanted a glimpse inside the pandals. This time, peeping over shoulders, she saw through the fiber-optic entwined arches of the pandal a featureless hall bathed in dim blue light. It was filled with people, their foreheads all marked with a glowing ajna, their eyes unfocused. In that room was the goddess, lurking, once again invisible to her, visible to the people in there with expensive wetware in their heads. Durga was ajna-blind, and thus forbidden to enter wetware-enabled pandals with aug-veeyar.

By this time Durga was allowed, despite her dark skin and lack of an ajna, into lower-tier digital pandals with helmets or pods. When Durga was thirteen, she’d finally splurged on one even though she could barely afford it, using cryptocoin made from trading code and obsolete hardware in veeyar ports. She finally got to sit down on the uncomfortable faux-leather chairs by the whirring stand fans, and put on the wired helmets she’d so longed to see inside as a child. It stank of the stale sweat of hundreds of visitors. The pandal was an unimpressive one, its walls flimsy, the CPU cores within its domes slow and outdated, the crystal storage in its columns low-density, the coils of fiber-optics crawling down its walls hastily rigged.

She met the Ma Durga inside those helmets, finally, a low-resolution specter who nonetheless looked her in the eyes and unfurled her arms in greeting. Her skin wasn’t the mustard-yellow or pastel flesh shades of the clay idols, but the coveted pale human pink of white people or the more appealing Indian ancestries, the same shades you’d find in kilometer-high ads for skin whiteners or perfume, on tweaked gifshoots of Bollywood stars and fashion models. This impressive paleness was somewhat diluted by the aliased shimmer of the devi’s pixelated curves, the blurry backdrop of nebulae and stars they both floated in. Durga had hacked her way into veeyar spaces before on 2-D and 3-D screens, so this half-rate module didn’t exactly stun as much as it disoriented her with its boundlessness. But the cheapness of its rendering left the universe inside the helmet feeling claustrophobic instead of expansive. The goddess waited about five feet in front of her, floating in the ether, eight arms unfolded like a flower. Unlike many of the solid idols in realspace pandals, the goddess was alone except for her vahana curled by her side—no host of companion deities, no defeated demon by her feet. The goddess construct said nothing, two of ten arms held out, as if beckoning.

Durga spoke to Durga the devi: “Ma Durga. I’ve wanted to ask you something for a long time. Do you mind?” Durga waited to see if the devi responded in some way.

Ma Durga blinked, and smiled, then spoke: “Hear, one and all, the truth as I declare it. I, verily, myself announce and utter the word that gods and men alike shall welcome.” She spoke Hindi—there was no language selection option. Durga was more fluent in Bangla, but she did understand.

Durga nodded in the helmet, glancing at the nebulae beneath her, the lack of a body. It made her dizzy for a moment. “Okay. That’s nice. I guess I’ll ask. Why are only some welcome in some of your houses? Doesn’t everyone deserve your love?”

Ma Durga blinked, and smiled. “On the world’s summit I bring forth sky the Father: my home is in the waters, in the ocean as Mother. Thence I pervade all existing creatures, as their Inner Supreme Self, and manifest them with my body.” In the bounded world of that veeyar helmet, these words, recited in the devi’s gentle modulated Hindi, nearly brought tears to young Durga’s eyes. Not quite, though. The beauty of those words, which she didn’t fully understand, seemed so jarring, issued forth from this pixelated avatar and her tacky little universe.

Durga reached out to touch Ma Durga’s many hands, but the pandal’s chair rigs didn’t have gloves or motion sensors. She was disembodied in this starscape. She couldn’t hold the goddess’s hands. Couldn’t touch or smell her (what did a goddess smell like, anyway, she wondered) like those with ajnas could, in the samsara net. The tiger curled by the devi licked its paws and yawned. Durga thought of a long-gone green dress.

“I’m old enough to know you’re not really a goddess,” Durga said to Ma Durga. “You’re the same as the clay idols in the open pandals. Not even that. Artists make those. You’re just prefab bits and pieces put together for cheap by coders. You’re here to make money for pandal sponsors and the local parties.”

Ma Durga blinked, and smiled. “I am the Queen, the gatherer-up of treasures, most thoughtful, first of those who merit worship. Thus gods have established me in many places with many homes to enter and abide in.”

Durga smiled, like the goddess in front of her. “Someone wrote all this for you to say.” Someone had, of course, but much, much longer ago than Durga had any idea, so long ago that the original words hadn’t even been in Hindi.

With a nauseating lurch, the cramped universe inside the helmet was ripped away, and Durga was left blinking at the angry face of one of the pandal operators. “I heard what you were saying,” he said, grabbing her by the arm and pulling her from the chair. “Think you’re smart, little bitch? How dare you? Where is your respect for the goddess?” The other visitors waiting for the chair and helmet were looking at Durga like she was a stray dog who’d wandered inside.

“I didn’t even get to see her kill Mahishasura. I want my money back,” said Durga.

“You’re lucky I don’t haul you to the police for offending religious sentiments. And you didn’t give me enough money to watch Durga poke Mahishasura with a stick, let alone kill him. Get out of here before I drag you out!” bellowed the operator.

“Get your pandal some more memory next time, you fucking cheats, your Durga’s ugly as shit,” she said, and slipped out of reach as the man’s eyes widened.

Durga pushed past the line and left laughing, her insides scalded by adrenaline and anger, arm welted by the thick fingers of that lout of an operator. Durga had always wondered why Kali Puja didn’t feature veeyar pandals like Durga Puja, why clay and holo idols were still the norm for her. It was a smaller festival, but hardly a small one in the megacity. It felt like a strange contrast, especially since the two pujas were celebrated close to each other. Having seen the placid Ma Durga inside the pandal helmets, Durga understood. Kali was dark-skinned, bloody, chaos personified. They couldn’t have her running wild in the rarefied air of veeyar domains run by people with pale skin and bottom lines to look after. Kali was a devi for people like Durga, who were never allowed in so many places.

Best to leave Kali’s avatars silent, solid, confined to temples and old-school pandals where she’d bide her time before being ceremoniously dissolved in the waters of the Hooghly.