Fury Fury Fury

by Salman Rushdie

  Professor Kronos was not only a great scientist but an entrepreneur of Machiavellian daring and skill. As the Rijk lands drowned, he quietly moved his center of operations to the two small mountain-islands that formed the primitive but independent nation of Baburia, at the Galilean antipodes. Here he negotiated and signed an advantageous treaty with the local ruler, the Mogol. The Baburians would retain ownership of their territory, but Kronos would be granted long leases over the high mountain pastures, for which he agreed to pay what seemed to the Mogol a very high rent indeed: an annual pair of wooden shoes for every Baburian man, woman, and child. In addition, Kronos undertook to guarantee the defense of Baburia against the assault that must certainly come as the Rijk’s lands sank below the rising waves. For this he was accorded the title of National Savior and granted droit de seigneur over all the islands’ new brides. Having come to terms, Kronos proceeded with the creation of the masterpieces that would prove his undoing, the so-called Monstrous Dynasty of Puppet Caesars, also known as Professor Kronos’s No-Strings Puppet Kings.

  His own lover, Zameen, the legendary beauty of the Rijk and the only scientist whom Kronos regarded as his peer, refused to accompany him to his new antipodean world. Her place was with her people, she said, and she would die with them if that was what destiny decreed. Akasz Kronos abandoned her without a second thought, perhaps preferring the sexual multiplicity available on the other side of the world.

  The broken strings in the Kronos portrait are purely metaphorical. The Professor’s artificial life-forms were string-free from the start. They walked and talked; they had “stomachs,” sophisticated fueling centers that could process ordinary food and drink, with solar-cell backup systems that enabled them to stay alert, and work, for longer hours than any flesh-and-blood human being. They were faster, stronger, smarter—“better,” Kronos told them—than their human, antipodean hosts. “You are kings and queens,” he taught his creatures. “Carry yourselves well. You are the masters now.” He even gave them the power to reproduce themselves. Each cyborg was given his or her own blueprint so that it could, in theory, endlessly re-create itself in its own image. But in the master program Kronos added a Prime Directive: whatever order he gave, the cyborgs and their replicas were obliged to obey, even to the point of acquiescing in their own destruction, should he deem that necessary. He dressed them in finery and gave them the illusion of freedom, but they were his slaves. He gave them no names. There were seven-digit numbers branded on their wrists, and they were known by these.

  No two Kronosian creations were the same. Each was given its own sharply delineated personality traits: the Aristocratic Philosopher; the Promiscuous Child-Woman; the First, Rich Ex-Wife (a Bitch); the Aging Groupie; the Pope’s Driver; the Underwater Plumber; the Traumatized Quarterback; the Blackballed Golfer; the Three Society Girls; the Playboys; the Golden Child and His Ideal Mother; the Deceitful Publisher; the Angry Professor; the Goddess of Victory (an exceptionally beautiful cyborg modeled after Kronos’s abandoned lover, Zameen of Rijk); the Runners; the Cell-Phone Woman; the Cell-Phone Man; the Human Spiders; the Woman Who Saw Visions; the Astro-Adman; even a Dollmaker. And as well as characters—strengths, weaknesses, habits, memories, allergies, lusts—he gave them a value system by which to live. The greatness of Akasz Kronos, which was also his downfall, may be judged by this: that the virtues and vices he inculcated in his creations were not wholly, or not only, his own. Self-serving, opportunistic, unscrupulous, he nevertheless permitted his cybernetic life-forms a degree of ethical independence. The possibility of idealism was allowed.

  Lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, consistency: these were the six high Kronosian values, but instead of embedding single definitions of these principles in the cyborgs’ default programs, he offered his creations a series of multiple-choice options. Thus “lightness” might be defined as “doing lightly what is in reality a heavy duty,” that is to say, grace; but it might also be “treating frivolously what is serious,” or even “making light of what is grave,” that is, amorality. And “quickness” could be “doing swiftly whatever is necessary,” in other words, efficiency; however, if the emphasis were to be placed on the second part of that phrase, a kind of ruthlessness could result. “Exactitude” could tend toward “precision” or “tyranny,” “visibility” might be “clarity of action” or “attention-seeking,” “multiplicity” was capable of being both “open-mindedness” and “duplicity,” and “consistency,” the most important of the six, could mean either “trustworthiness” or “obsessiveness”—the consistency of—we may use our own world’s models here, for the sake of easy comparison—Bartleby the Scrivener, who preferred not to, or of Michael Kohlhaas, with his inexorable and world-shattering search for redress. Sancho Panza is consistent in the “reliable” sense of the word, but so, contrariwise, is erratic, fixated, chivalry-maddened Quixote. And note, too, the tragic consistency of the Land Surveyor, eternally yearning toward what he can never attain, or of Ahab in his pursuit of the whale. This is the consistency that destroys the consistent; for the Ahabs perish, while the inconsistent, the Ishmaels, survive. “The fullness of a living self is inexpressible, obscure,” Kronos told his mechanical fictions. “In that mystery is freedom, which is what I have given you. In that obscurity is light.”

  Why did he permit the Puppet Kings such psychological and moral liberty? Perhaps because the scientist and scholar in him could not resist seeing how these new life-forms resolved the battle that rages within all sentient creatures, between light and dark, heart and mind, spirit and machine.

  At first the Puppet Kings served Kronos well. They made the shoes that paid for the land leases, tended the livestock, and tilled the soil. He had dressed them all in court finery, but their long brocaded skirts and dress uniforms quickly grew soiled and torn, and they made themselves new clothes more suited to their labors. As the ice-caps continued to melt and the water levels rose, they prepared to defend their shrinking new home against the foretold Rijk attack. By now they had learned how to modify their own systems without Kronos’s help, and they added new skills and aptitudes by the day. One such innovation enabled them to use the local firewater as flying fuel. Carrying bottles of the toddy with them in case they wanted topping up, the cyborg air force took flight without any need for airplanes, and caught and destroyed the incoming Rijk craft in spydernets, the giant booby-trapped metal webs that they hung across the sky. Underwater, too, they laid similar spidery traps (they had modified their “lungs” for submarine use and were therefore able to sabotage and scuttle the entire Rijk fleet from below). The so-called Battle of the Antipodes was won, and the skies and seas fell silent. On the far side of Galileo-1, flood-waters engulfed the Rijk. If Akasz Kronos felt any compassion as his countrymen drowned, he did not record it.

  After the victory, however, things changed. The Puppet Kings returned from the wars with a new sense of individual worth, even of “rights.” To bring them into line, Kronos announced an urgent maintenance-and-repair schedule. Many cyborgs failed to keep their appointments at his workshop, preferring—in the case of those damaged in battle—to live with their disabilities: their malfunctioning servo-mechanisms and partially burned-out circuitry. Groups of the Puppet Kings became secretive, conspiratorial, surly. Kronos suspected that they were meeting covertly to plot against him and heard rumors that at these meetings they addressed one another not by number but by new names, which they had chosen for themselves. He became tyrannical, and when one of the Three Society Girls was insolent to his face, he made an example of her, turning against her his much feared “master blaster,” which caused an instant, irreversible deletion of all programs: in other words, cybernetic death.

  The execution was counterproductive. Dissension grew more rapidly than before. Many cyborgs went underground, erecting, around their hideouts, sophisticated anti-surveillance electronic shields, which even Kronos could not easily penetrate, and moving frequently, so that by the time the Pro
fessor had broken down one set of defenses, the revolutionaries had already disappeared behind the next. We cannot say for sure exactly when the Dollmaker, whom Akasz Kronos had created in his own image and imbued with many of his own characteristics, learned how to override the Prime Directive. But soon after that breakthrough it was Professor Akasz Kronos who disappeared. No longer safe from his creations, he had to go underground while the Peekay revolution triumphantly emerged into the daylight to be greeted by the cheers of all the cyborgs in Baburia.

  The so-called last word from Kronos exists only in the form of an electronic message to his usurper, the cyborg Dollmaker. It is a rambling, incoherent text, self-exculpatory and full of accusations of ingratitude, threats, and curses. However, there is good reason to suppose that this text is a forgery, perhaps the work of the Dollmaker himself. The creation of a “mad Kronos,” whose sane mirror image he was, suited the cyborg’s purposes perfectly; and such is history’s appetite for the lurid that this version was widely accepted. (That single portrait of Kronos is notable, as we have remarked, for the scientist’s insane eyes.) Lately, the discovery of fragments of Professor Kronos’s journals has shed new light on his state of mind. A very different Kronos emerges from these fragments, whose authenticity seems beyond dispute; the handwriting is clearly the Professor’s. “The gods, too, murdered the Titans who made them,” Kronos writes. “Artificial life here merely mirrors the real thing. For man is born in chains but everywhere seeks to be free. I too once had strings. I loved my puppets, knowing that, like children, they might walk away from me one day. But they cannot leave me behind. I made them with love, and my love is in each one of them, in their circuits and plastics. In their wood.” Yet this Kronos, so free from bitterness, seems too good to be true. The Professor, a master of dissimulation, may have been plotting his vengeance behind a screen of fatalism.

  After Kronos’s disappearance, a PK delegation led by the Dollmaker and his lover, the Goddess of Victory, took the scientist’s place at the next annual Day of the Shoes, and informed the Mogol that the Professor’s contract was to be considered void. Henceforth the “Peekays” and Baburians must live on their twin islands as equals. Before walking out of the Mogol’s presence (instead of shuffling out backward as protocol dictated—a custom that even Kronos had not dared to ignore) the Goddess of Victory threw down the challenge that still reverberates between the two communities: “Let the fittest survive.”

  A few days later a small, battered amphibious craft landed unnoticed in a forested corner of the northern island of Baburia. Zameen of Rijk had escaped the destruction of her lost civilization and made her way, against overwhelming odds, to the island refuge of the man who had left her to die. Had she come to renew their love or to avenge her abandonment? Was she here as lover or assassin? Her uncanny resemblance to the cyborg Dollmaker’s lover, the Goddess of Victory, meant that the Puppet Kings deferred to her without question, believing her to be their new queen. What would happen when the two women confronted each other? How would the Dollmaker react to the “real” version of the woman he loved? How would she, the real woman, react to this mechanical avatar of her former lover? What would the Puppet Kings’ new enemies, the antipodeans to whose territory they had now staked so extensive a claim, make of her? How would she deal with them? And what had actually befallen Professor Kronos? If he was dead, how did he die? If alive, how great were his remaining powers? Had he genuinely been overthrown, or was his disappearance some sort of fiendish ploy? So many questions! And behind them, the greatest riddle of all. The Puppet Kings had been offered by Kronos a choice between their original, mechanical selves and some, at least, of the ambiguities of human nature. What would be their choice: wisdom—or fury? Peace—or fury? Love—or fury? The fury of genius, of creation, or of the murderer or tyrant, the wild shrieking fury that must never be named?

  The continuing story of the twin goddesses and doubled professors, of Zameen’s search for the vanished Akasz Kronos, and of the struggle for power between the two communities of Baburia will be reported on this site in regular bulletins. Click on the links for more PK info or on the icons below for answers to 101 FAQs, access to interactivities, and to see the wide range of PK merchandise available for INSTANT shipping NOW. All major credit cards accepted.

  13

  As a young man in the early 1960s, Malik Solanka had devoured the science fiction novels of what was later recognized as the form’s golden age. In flight from his own life’s ugly reality, he found in the fantastic—its parables and allegories, but also its flights of pure invention, its loopy, spiraling conceits—a ceaselessly metamorphosing alternative world in which he felt instinctively at home. He subscribed to the legendary magazines, Amazing and F&SF, bought as many of the yellow-jacketed Victor Gollancz SF series as he could afford, and all but memorized the books of Ray Bradbury, Zenna Henderson, A. E. van Vogt, Clifford D. Simak, Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Stanislaw Lem, James Blish, Philip K. Dick, and L. Sprague de Camp. Golden-age science fiction and science fantasy were, in Solanka’s view, the best popular vehicle ever devised for the novel of ideas and of metaphysics. At twenty, his favorite work of fiction was a story called “The Nine Billion Names of God,” in which a Tibetan monastery set up to count the names of the Almighty—believing this to be the only reason for the existence of the universe—buys a top-of-the-line computer to speed up the process. Hard-bitten industry mavens go to the monastery to help the monks get the great machine up and running. They find the whole idea of listing the names pretty laughable, and worry about how the monks might react when the job’s done and the universe goes on going on; so once they’ve done their work, they sneak quietly away. Later, on a plane home, they calculate that the computer must have finished its work. They look out of the window at the night sky, where—Solanka had never forgotten the last line—“one by one, very quietly, the stars were going out.”

  To such a reader—and admirer, in the cinema, of the highbrow sci-fi of Fahrenheit 451 and Solaris—George Lucas was a kind of Antichrist and the Spielberg of Close Encounters was a kid playing in the grown-ups’ sandbox, while the Terminator films, and above all the mighty Blade Runner, were carriers of the sacred flame. And now it was his own turn. In those unreliable summer days, Professor Malik Solanka would work on the world of the Puppet Kings—the dolls as well as their stories—like a man possessed. The story of the mad scientist Akasz Kronos and his beautiful lover, Zameen, filled his mind. New York faded into the background; or, rather, everything that happened to him in the city—every random encounter, every newspaper he opened, every thought, every feeling, every dream—fed his imagination, as though prefabricated to fit into the structure he had already devised. Real life had started obeying the dictates of fiction, providing precisely the raw material he needed to transmute through the alchemy of his reborn art.

  Akasz he got from aakaash, Hindi for “sky.” Sky as in Asmaan (Urdu), as in poor Sky Schuyler, as in the great sky gods: Ouranos-Varuna, Brahma, Yahweh, Manitou. And Kronos was the Greek, the child-devourer, Time. Zameen was earth, the heavens’ opposite, which embraces the sky at the horizon. Akasz he had seen clearly from the first, picturing his whole life’s arc. Zameen, though, had surprised him. In this tale of a drowning world he hadn’t expected an earth goddess—even one modeled on Neela Mahendra—to take a central role. Yet here she undeniably was, and by showing up she had valuably thickened the plot. Her presence seemed to have been prefigured, even though he hadn’t planned for it at all. Neela/Zameen of Rijk/Goddess of Victory: three versions of the same woman filled his thoughts, and he realized that he’d finally found the successor to the famous creation of his youth. “Hello to Neela,” he told himself, “and so, at last, farewell to Little Brain.”

  Which was also to say, farewell to his afternoons with Mila Milo. Mila had felt the change in him at once, intuiting it when she saw him leave for his tryst with Neela on the steps of the Met. She knew what I wanted before I had even dare
d admit it to myself, Solanka acknowledged. It was probably finished between us there and then. Even if there had been no miracle, even if Neela hadn’t so unpredictably chosen me, Mila had seen enough. She has real beauty of her own, and pride, and isn’t about to play second fiddle to anyone. He returned to West Seventieth Street after an endlessly surprising night spent with Neela in a hotel room across the park—a night whose biggest surprise was that it was happening at all—and found Mila wrapped ostentatiously around beautiful, stupid Eddie Ford on the stoop next door; Eddie, one of nature’s bodyguards, glowing with the joy of having regained guardianship over the only body he gave a damn about. The look Eddie gave Solanka over Mila’s shoulder was impressively articulate. It said, Buddy, you don’t have access privileges at this address no more; between you and this lady there’s now a red velvet rope and your accreditation is so canceled, you shouldn’t even think about stepping in this direction, unless of course you’d like me to clean your teeth, using your spinal column as a brush.

  The next afternoon, however, she was at his door. “Take me out somewhere great and expensive. I need to dress up and eat industrial quantities of food.” Eating was Mila’s normal reaction to misery, drinking her response to anger. Sad was probably better than mad, Solanka mused ungenerously. Easier for him, anyway. To make up for this selfish thought, he called one of the talked-about new places of the moment, a Cuban-themed bar-restaurant in Chelsea named Gio in honor of Doña Gioconda, an elderly diva whose star was shining brightly that Buena Vista summer and in whose languid smoke-trail of a voice all of old Havana came back to swaggering, swaying, seducing, smooching life. Solanka got a table so easily that he commented on the fact to the woman taking the booking. “City’s a ghost town righ’ now,” she agreed distantly. “It’s, like, Loserville. See jou at nine P.M.”