The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (144 page)

“Not that we ever exactly lived in each other’s pockets,” I said prissily. We had lived with twenty million people between us for most of our lives but still anger boiled within me. What had I to be resentful of? I had all the advantage, the love, the blessing and the gifts yet here he was in his cheap hire suit smug and assured and I was the ludicrous little lordling, the boy-husband swinging his legs on his golden throne.

“Not really no,” Shiv said. Even in his words, his smile, there was an aura, an intensity; Shiv-plus. What was he doing to himself, that could only be consummated in Varanasi?

The line was restless now, mothers shifting from foot to foot in their uncomfortable wedding shoes. Shiv dipped his head, his eyes meeting mine for an instant of the purest, most intense hatred. Then he moved on into the press of guests, picking up a glass of champagne here, a plate of small eats there, a strangely singular darkness like plague at the wedding.

The caterers cleared away, torches were lit across the heel-trodden grass of Lodi Gardens and the pandit tied us together in marriage. As fireworks burst over and the tomb of Muhammad Shah and dome of Bara Gumbad we drove away to the plane. We left the diamond stain of bright Delhi behind us and flew, far later than tots of our size should be up, through the night into morning as the private he li cop ter lifted us up and away to the tea house in the cool and watered green hills. Staff discreetly stowed out baggage, showed us the lie of the rooms, the shaded verandah with its outlook over the heart-stunning gold and purple of the morning Himalayas, the bedroom with the one huge four-poster bed. Then they swept away in a rustle of silk and we were alone, together, Vishnu and Lakshmi, two gods.

“It’s good isn’t it?”

“Lovely. Wonderful. Very spiritual. Yes.”

“I like the rooms. I like the smell of the wood, old wood.”

“Yes, it is good. Very old wood.”

“This is the honeymoon then.”

“Yes.”

“We’re supposed to . . .”

“Yes. I know. Do you . . . are you?”

“Wired? No I was never into that.”

“Oh. Well, I’ve some other stuff in my bag, it should work on you as well.”

“You’ve tried it?”

“Sometimes. I’m finding it gets hard all on its own now, just like that, nothing in particular, so I try it then.”

“Is it productive?”

“It’s a bit like the ’hoek sex. Feeling you really really need to pee something that isn’t pee and isn’t there. To be honest, not as good. Have you tried?”

“With the fingers? Oh yes, with the whole hand. It’s like you.”

“Need to pee?”

“Something like that. More of a clench. It works on a swing too. I don’t really think I want to use something you have on you, you know.”

“I suppose not. We could . . . I could . . .”

“I don’t really think so.”

“Do you think they’ll check? Save the sheets and show them round to all the relatives?”

“And our physical ages? Don’t be stupid.”

“It’s part of the contract.”

“I don’t think anyone’s going to invoke contractual obligation until I’ve at least had a period.”

“So do you want to do anything?”

“Not particularly.”

“So what will we do then?”

“The view’s nice.”

“There’s a pack of cards in the drawer in the table.”

“Maybe later. I might sleep now.”

“So might I. Are you all right about the bed?”

“Of course. We’re supposed too, aren’t we? We are husband and wife.”

We slept under the light silk cover with the ceiling fan turning slowly, each curled up like the eight-year-olds we physically were with our backs to each other, as far apart as Vish and Shiv and afterwards we invented card games of staggering complexity with the old circular Ganjifa cards on the verandah with its titanic view over the Himalayas. As Lakshmi turned over the kings and ministers our eyes met and we both knew it was more than over, it had never begun. There was nothing but contractual obligation between us. We were the hostages of our DNA. I thought of that line of offspring issuing like a rope of pearls from the end of my still-flaccid penis; those slow children toddling into a future so distant I could not even see its dust on time’s horizon, and onward and onward always onward. I was filled with horror at the blind imperative of biology. I owned superhuman intelligence, I only forgot what I chose to forget, I had never known a day’s illness in my life, I carried the name of a god, but to my seed all this was nothing, I was no different from some baseline Dalit in Molar Bund basti. Yes, I was a privileged brat, yes, I was a sneerer of the worst kind, how could I be anything other? I was a designer snob.

We stayed our week in the tea house in the green foothills of Himachal Pradesh, Lakshmi and Vishnu. Lakshmi patented some of her elaborate social card games – we tested the multi-player games by each of us playing several hands at once, an easy feat for the Brahmins – and made a lot of money from licensing them. It was radiantly beautiful, the mountains were distant and serene like stone Buddhas, occasional rain pattered on the leaves outside our window at night and we were utterly utterly miserable, but even more so at the thought of what we had to face on our return to Awadh, the darlings of the Delhi. My decision had been made on the third day of our honeymoon but it was not until we were in the limo to the Ramachandra Tower where we had been given an apartment fit for gods on the floor below my Mamaji that I made the call to the very special, very discreet doctor.

Two Extraneous Aspects of Myself

“Both of them?” the nute said. Yt would have raised an eyebrow had yt possessed any hair on yts shaven head to raise.

“History is quiet on the subject of half-eunuchs,” I said.

No one, alas, ever delivers such dialogue. Ticking lines, arch exchanges, loaded looks, these are things of story not real life. But I am telling you a story, my story, which is much more than just history or even memory. For if I choose to forget, I can also choose to remember and make what I chose memory. So if I wish the nute surgeon’s office to be at the top of a winding, creaking flight of stairs, each level haunted by the eyes of suspicious and hostile Old Delhiwallahs, if I decide to remember it so, it will be so. Likewise, if I choose to recall that office to be a charnel house of grotesque surgical implements and pictures of successfully mutilated body-parts as a like a demon-infested hell from a Himalayan Buddhist painting: it will be so forever. Perhaps it’s less strange a concept for you than for me. I more than anyone know the deceptiveness of physical appearance, but you seem young enough to have grown up in a world comfortable with universal memory, every breath and blink swarming with devas continuously writing and rewriting physical reality. And if the devas choose to rewrite that memory, who is there to say that it’s not so?

But there is east light in the sky beyond the blazing pillar of the Jyotirlinga, I have far to go, you have yet to see the most astonishing my cats can achieve and the reality is that the surgery of Dr Anil was in a tastefully restored haveli in the warren of streets in the shadow of the Red Fort, the surgery elegant and discreet and fronted by the delightful Miss Modi, and Dr Anil welcoming, professional subtle and frankly surprised by my request.

“I usually deal in more, substantial surgery,” yt said. The Ardhanarisvara clinic was Delhi’s leading centre for nute transformation. Leading through whispers and rumours; in bright new Awadh we might claim to be urbane, global, cosmopolitan and unshockable but nute culture, those who decided to escape our desperate sex wars by choosing a third way, a neither-way it was still almost as hidden and secretive as the ancient transgendered hijras who had long ago hidden themselves away in Old Delhi. The ancient city; older than any memory, its streets convoluted like the folds of a brain, has always looked after those with needs beyond the merely average.

“I think what I’m asking is substantial enough,” I said.

“True true,” Dr Anil said, putting yts fingers together in a spire in that way that all doctors, male, female, transgendered or nute, seem to learn on day one of medical school. “So, both testicles.”

“Yes, both.”

“And not the penis.”

“That would be perverse.”

“You’re sure you won’t consider the chemical option? It’s reversible, should you ever reconsider.”

“No, not chemical. I don’t want it to be reversible. I want to remove myself from the future. I want this to end with me. I’m more than a stud animal. Complete physical castration, yes.”

“It’s quite simple. Much more so than the usual kind of thing we do here.” I knew well the medical procedures that flowed out from here to the anonymous godowns and grey surgery clinics beyond the Siri Ring orbital expressway. There is a video for everything somewhere in the online world and I had watched with fascination what those humans who desired another gender had done to themselves. The things strung out through the gel tanks, skin flayed, muscles laid open, organs drawn out and suspended in molecular sieve cradles, were so far from anything human as to be curious, like strange forest flowers, rather than obscene. I was much more of a coward, leaving only my two little organs on the doorstep of gender. “My only reservation would be that, as you are biologically prepubescent, it would be an internal orchidectomy. Miss Modi will draw up a consent form.” Yt blinked me, a delicate, faun-like creature behind a heavy Raj desk, too too lovely to speak of such things as testicular surgery. “Forgive me for asking, I haven’t met any High Brahmins before, but you are of an age to sign a consent form?”

“I’m of an age to be legally married.”

“Yes, but you must understand, mine is a business that attracts scrutiny in Awadh.”

“I’m of an age to pay you a profane sum of money to give me what I want.”

“Profane it is then.”

Surprisingly mundane it was. I did not even need to be driven out to the nasty industrial zones. In the cubicle I changed into the surgical gown, the sleeves too too long, the hem trailing on the ground, slid up onto the disinfectant-stinky operating table in the basement surgery and felt the needling suffusion of the local anaesthetic. Robot arms, finger-tips fine as insect antennae, danced in under the control of Dr Anil. I felt nothing as I blinked up into the lights and strained to hear their synaesthetic music. The dancing arms withdrew; I felt nothing. And I still felt nothing as the car spun me back through streets full of pulsing, potent, hormone-raddled people. A mild twinge from the sutures pulling against the weave of my clothes. No pain, little loss, nothing of the sense of lightnes and freedom I had read of in the literature of castration fetishists. A unique pleasure, sexual castration; an orgasm to end all orgasms. I had not even had that. The cell-weave treatments would heal the wound in three days and hide all evidence, until the passing years revealed that my voice was not significantly deepening, my hair not receding, that I was growing unusually tall and willowy and that I had singularly failed to contractually conceive any children.

“Do you want to take then with you?” Dr Anil asked as yt sat me down in yts consulting room after the short operation.

“Why should I wish to do that?”

“It was a tradition in China; Imperial eunuchs would be given their excised genitals preserved in a jar of alcohol to bury beside them on their deaths, so that they might enter heaven whole men.”

“It was a tradition in Ottoman Turkey that eunuchs, after their cutting clean, would sit in a dung-heap for three days to heal their wounds, or die. I don’t care for that tradition either. They’re not mine, they’re not me; they belong to someone else. Burn them or throw them to the pi-dogs, I don’t care.”

Thunder growled over me, a promise of a monsoon, the day was darkening. Lightning glowed cloud to cloud as I rode the elevator up the outside of Ramachandra Tower. Lakshmi sat curled on the sofa, the breaking storm magnificent behind her. Dry lightning, a false prophet of rain. All prophecies of rain were false these days,

“Did you do it, are you all right?”

I nodded. It was beginning to hurt now. I clenched my teeth, kicking in the analgesic nanoinfuser Dr. Anil had planted there. Lakshmi clapped her hands in joy. “I’ll go tomorrow. Oh dear Lord, I’m so happy, so happy.” And then, there, in the dark apartment glowing with muter lighting, she kissed me.

We did not tell anyone. That was part of the pact. Not our parents, not our relatives, not our circle of Brahmin friends, not even our aeais. Not even dear Sarasvati; I wouldn’t burden her with this. There was work we had to do before we announced to our respective families how we had so drastically denied their plans for us. Then we could sweetly and painlessly divorce.

I Nuzzle the Earlobe of Power

What is the proper work of eunuchs?

Does it make you uncomfortable, that word? Does it make you cross your legs, boys; does it give you a hollow clench in your uterus, ladies? When you hear it, do you see something other than a human being, something less? How then is it any different from other words of distinction: Kshatriya, Dalit? Brahmin? Eunuch. It is a very old and noble word, a fine and ancient tradition practised in al the great cultures of Earth. The principle is to give up the lesser to gain the greater. Of all those pitiful puffs of cock-juice, how many will ever turn into human beings? Come on, be honest. It’s almost all wasted. And never imagine that the ball-less are sexless, or without desire. No, the great castrati singers, the eunuch poets and holy visionaries, the grand viziers and royal advisors all understood that greatness came at a price and that was generation. Empires could be entrusted to eunuchs, free from dynastic urges. The care and feeding of great nations is our proper work and with all the gifts my parents had endowed me I steered myself toward the political cradle of the nation.