The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (145 page)

How almost right my mother was, and how utterly wrong-headed. She had imagined me carried in through the doors of the Lok Sabha on the shoulders of cheering election workers. I preferred the servant’s entrance. Politicians live and die by the ballot box. They are not there to serve, they are there to gain and hold office. Populism can force them to abandon wise and correct policies for whims and fads. The storm of ballots will in the end sweep them and all their good works from power. Their grand viziers endure. We understand that democracy is the best system by which a nation
seems
to be governed.

Months of social networking – the old-fashioned, handshake and gift type – and the setting up and calling in favours and lines of political credit, has gained me an internship to Parekh, the Minister for Water and the Environment. He was a tolerable dolt, a Vora from Uttaranchal with a shop keep er’s shrewdness and head for details, but little vision. He was good enough to seem in control and a politician often needs little more for a long and comfortable career. This was the highest he would ever rise, as soon as the next monsoon failure hit and the mobs were hijacking water tankers in the street, he would be out. He knew I knew this. I scared him, even though I was careful to turn down the full dazzle of my intelligence to a glow of general astuteness. He knew I was far from the nine-year-old I seemed to be but he really had no idea of my and my kind’s capabilities and curses. I chose my department carefully. Naked ambition would have exposed me too early to a government that was only now realising it had never properly legislated around human gene-line manipulation. Even so I knew the colour of all the eyes that were watching me, skipping through the glassy corridors of the Water Ministry. Water is life. Water, its abundance and its rarity, would sculpt the future of Awadh, of all the nations of North India, from the Panjab to the United States of Bengal. Water was good place to be bright, but I had no intention of remaining there.

The dam at Kunda Khadar neared completion, that titanic fifteen-kilometre bank of earth and concrete like a garter around the thigh of Mother Ganga. Protests from downstream Bharat and the USB grew strident but the towers cranes lifted and swung, lifted and swung day and night. Minister Parekh and Prime Minister Srivastava communicated daily. The Defence Ministry was brought into the circle. Even the PR staffers could smell diplomatic tension.

It was a Thursday. Even before, I called I Bold Thursday, to commit myself, to get myself up. The genes don’t make you brave. But I had prepared as rigorously as I could; which was more than anyone in the Lok Sabha, Minister Parekh included. Srivastava was due with his entourage for a press conference from the Ministry to reassure the Awadhi public that Kunda Khadar would do its job and slake Delhi’s bottomless thirst. Everyone was turned out smart as paint: moustaches plucked, slacks creased, shirts white as mourning. Not me. I had picked my spot long before: a brief bustle down the corridor as Srivastava and his secretarial team was coming up. I had no ideas what they would be talking about but I knew they would be talking; Srivastava loved his “walking briefings”; they made him seem a man of action and energy. I trusted that my research and quicker wit would win.

I heard the burble of voices. They were about to turn the corner, I went into motion, pushed myself into the wall as the press of suits came toward me. My senses scanned five conversations, lit on Srivastava murmur to Bhansal his parliamentary secretary, “If I knew we had McAuley’s support.”

Andrew J. McAuley, President of the United States of America. And the answer was there.

“If we could negotiate an output deal in return for Sajida Rana accepting partial ratification of the Hamilton Acts,” I said, my voice shrill and pure and piercing as a bird.

The Prime Ministerial party bustled past but Satya Shetty, the Press Secretary, turned with a face of thunder to strike down this upstart, mouthy intern. He saw a nine-year-old. He was dumb-struck. His eyes bulged. He hesitated. That hesitation froze the entire party. Prime Minister Srivastava turned towards me. His eyes widened. His pupils dilated.

“That’s a very interesting idea,” he said and in those five words I knew he had identified, analysed and accepted the gift I had offered him. A Brahmin advisor. The strange, savant child. The child genius, the infant guru, the little god. India adored them. It was PR gold. His staffers parted as he stepped toward me. “What are you doing here?”

I explained that I was on an internship with Minister Parekh.

“And now you want more.”

Yes, I did.

“What’s you name?”

I told him. He nodded his head.

“Yes, the wedding. I remember. So, it’s a career in politics, is it?”

It was.

“You’re certainly not backward about being forward.”

My genes wouldn’t allow it. My first political lie.

“Well, ideas do seem to be in short stock at the moment.” With that he turned, his entourage closed around him and he was swept on. Satya Shetty dealt me a glare of pure despite, I held his eyes until he snapped his gaze away. I would see him and all his works dust while I was still fresh and filled with energy. By the time I returned to my desk there was an invitation from the Office of the Prime Minister to call them to arrange an interview.

I told my great achievement to the three women in my life. Lakshmi beamed with delight. Our plans were working. My mother was baffled; she no longer understood my motivations, why I would accept a lowly and inconspicuous civil service position rather than a high-flyer in our superstar political culture. Sarasvati jumped up from her sofa and danced around the room, then clapped her hands around my face and kissed my forehead long and hard until her lips left a red tilak there.

“As long as there’s joy in it,” she said. “Only joy.”

My sister, my glorious sister, had voiced a truth that I was only now developing the maturity to recognise. Joy was all. Mamaji and Dadaji had aimed me at greatness, at blinding success and wealth, power and celebrity. I had always possessed the emotional intelligence if not the emotional vocabulary, to know that the blindingly powerful and famous were seldom happy, that their success and wealth often played against their own mental and physical well-being. All my decisions I made for me, for my peace, well-being, satisfaction and to keep me interested throughout my long life. Lakshmi had chosen the delicate world of complicated games. I had chosen the whirl of politics. Not economics; that was too dismal a science for me. But the state and those statelets beyond Awadh’s borders with which I could see we were as inextricably entwined as when we were one India, and the countries beyond those, and the continents beyond; that fascinated me. The etiquette of nations was my pleasure. There was joy in it, Sarasvati. And I was brilliant at it. I became the hero of my childhood comics, a subtle hero, Diplomacy Man. I saved your world more times than you can ever know. My superpower was to see a situation entire, connected, and all those subtler forces acting upon it that other, less gifted analysts would have discounted. Then I would give it nudge. The smallest, slightest tap, one tiny incentive or restriction, even a hint at how a policy might be shaped, and watch how the social physics of a complex capitalist society scaled them up through power laws and networks and social amplifiers to slowly turn the head of the entire nation.

In those first few years I was constantly fighting for my own survival. Satya Shetty was my deadliest enemy from the moment our eyes had met in the corridor in the Water Ministry. He was influential, he was connected, he was clever but not clever enough to realise he could never beat me. I just let my drips of honey fall into Krishna Srivastava’s ear. I was always right. Little by little his cabinet and Satya Shetty’s allies realised that, more than being always right, I was essentially different from them. I didn’t seek high office. I sought the greatest well-being. I was the prefect advisor. And I looked great on tele vision: Prime Minister Srivastava’s dwarf vizier, trotting behind him like some throwback to the days of the Mughals. Who isn’t, at some level, unnerved by the child prodigy? Even if I was twenty two years old now, with puberty – whatever that might mean for me personally – looming on the horizon of my Brahmin generation like the rumbles of a long-delayed monsoon.

It was that treacherous monsoon that became the driver of Awadhi politics, town and country, home and away. Thirsty nations are irrational nations; nations that pray and turn to strange saviours. The great technocracy of the United States of Bengal had, in a display of national hysteria, put its faith in a bizarre plan to haul an iceberg from Antarctica into the Sundarbans with the hope that the mass of cold air would affect the shifting climatic patterns and claw the monsoon back over India. Strange days, a time of rumours and wonders. The Age of Kali was upon us and once again the gods were descending upon us, walking in the shapes of ordinary men and women. The Americans had found something in space, something not of this world. The datahavens of Bharat, boiling with aeais, had spawned Generation Three artificial intelligences; legendary entities whose intelligence as far outstripped mine as mine does the fleas crawling on my poor, harassed cats. Sajida Rana, politically embattled from resurgent Hindu fundamentalism, was preparing a pre-emptive strike on Kunda Khadar as a PR stunt. This last rumour I took seriously enough from my trawling of the Bharati press to call for a departmental level meeting between my ministry and its Bharati counterpart. Did I mention that I was now parliamentary secretary to Krishna Srivastava? A steady, not stellar, climb. It was still too easy to lose grip and fall into the reaching hands of my rivals.

My counterpart at the Bharat Bhavan was a refined Muslim gentleman, Shaheen Badoor Khan, from an excellent family and impeccably educated. Behind his pitch-perfect etiquette and a dignity I envied deeply for I was a small, scampering child next to him, I did sense a sadness; an ache behind the eyes. We recognised and liked each other immediately. We knew instinctively that we both cared deeply enough for our countries to be prepared to betray them. Such a thing could never be said, or even implied. Thus our conversation, as we walked among the Buddha’s deer of old Sarnath, our security men discreet shadows among the trees, the security drones circling like black kites overhead seemed as casual and elliptical as two old dowagers on a Friday afternoon stroll.

“Awadh has always seemed to me a country at peace with itself,” Shaheen Badoor Khan said. “As if it’s solved some great and quintessentially Indian paradox.”

“It wasn’t always so,” I said. Behind the security fence Western tourists on the Buddha trail tried to hold down their flapping robes in the rising wind. “Delhi’s streets have run red far too many times.”

“But it’s always been a cosmopolitan city. Varanasi, on the other hand, always has and always will be the city of Lord Siva.”

I waggled my head in agreement. I knew now what I would report to Srivastava.
Sajida Rana is under pressure from the Hindutvavadis. She will launch a pre-emptive strike at Kunda Khadar. Awadh will have the moral high-ground; we must not lose it.

“I have a relative in Varanasi,” I said casually.

“Oh, so?”

“My brother – a Shiva himself, so no surprise really that he should end up in Varanasi.”

“And is he a Brahmin like yourself?’

“No, but he is very gifted.”

“We do seem to attract talent. It’s one of our blessings, I suppose. I have a younger brother in the United States. Terrible at keeping in contact, terrible; my mother, well, you know what they’re like. Of course it’s my responsibility.”

You’re worried that your brother has drifted into business that could adversely affect your standing, if it became public
, was what this sage Mr Khan was telling me.
You want me to keep an eye on him, in return you’ll open up a secure channel of communications between us to prevent war between Bharat and Awadh.

“You know what brothers are like,” I said.

The information was beaming into my head even as I stepped off the plane at Indira Gandhi airport. Shiv had opened a company, Purusa, in Varanasi. He had attracted substantial funding from a venture capital company called Odeco and match-funding from the research and development division at Bharat’s mighty Ray Power. His field was nanoscale computing. Top designers and engineers were working with him. The Ghost Index, which valued companies with the potential to become global players when they went public, valued Purusa as one of their top five to watch. He was young and he was hot and he was headed for orbit. He had made some questionable friends among Bharat’s datarajas and a cloud of high-level aeais hid much of Purusa’s activities from its rivals and from the Bharati government. The Krishna Cops had a file on him and a deliberately clumsy team of aeai wards to keep him aware that he was known to them. My own Awadhi intelligence service surveillance aeais were of a subtler stripe than the police. They coded themselves into the very informational fabric of Purusa. The security of Awadh was a flimsy fiction; I was intensely curious as to what my brother was up to. What Shiv planned was of course monstrously ambitious. He had cracked open the prison of the skull. More prosaically, Purusa developed a prototype biochip that could interface directly with the brain. No more a tacky coil of plastic behind the ear and the soft invasion of electromagnetic radiation into the brain, like shouting in a temple. This was engineered protein, stuff of our stuff, which sent its artificial neurons through skin and bone to mesh with the threads of though. It was third eye, forever open to the unseen world. See how easily I resort to the language of the mystical? Omniscience was standard; anyone so infected had access to all the knowledge and all the bitchy triviality of the global web. Communication was no longer a click and a call, it was a thought, a subtle telepathy. Virtual worlds became real. The age of privacy, that first Western luxury that India wealth bought, was over. Where our own thoughts ended and those of others began, how would we know? We would touch the world of the aeais, in their dispersed, extended, multi-levelled perceptions. Speculation led to speculation. I could see no end to them. Lakshmi, disturbed from her mathematical games, would sense my mood and look up to see the adult anxiety on my child’s face. This technology would change us, change us utterly and profoundly. This was a new way of being human, a fault-line, a diamond cutter’s strike, across society. I began to realize that the greatest threat to Awadh, to Bharat, to all India, was not water. It was the pure and flawless diamond Shiv and his Purusa Corporation dangled and spun in front of each and every human. Be more, be everything. So engaged was I that I did not notice when the warning came down the Grand Trunk Road from Shaheen Badoor Khan in Varanasi and thus was caught sleeping when Sajida Rana sent her tanks to take Kunda Khadar without a shot.