“You have made me the happiest man in the world,” Salim said.
I lifted my veil, bent to him, and kissed his lips. Every eye down the long table turned to me. Everyone smiled. Some clapped.
Salim’s eyes went wide. Tears suddenly streamed from them. He rubbed them away, and when he put his hands down, his eyelids were two puffy, blistered boils of flesh, swollen shut. He tried to speak but his lips were bloated, cracked, seeping blood and pus. Salim tried to stand, push himself away from me. He could not see, could not speak, could not breathe. His hands fluttered at the collar of his gold-embroidered sherwani.
“Salim!” I cried. Leel was already on yts feet, ahead of all the guest doctors and surgeons as they rose around the table. Salim let out a thin, high-pitched wail, the only scream that would form in his swollen throat. Then he went down onto the feast table.
The pavilion was full of screaming guests and doctors shouting into palmers and security staff locking the area down. I stood useless as a butterfly in my makeup and wedding jewels and finery as doctors crowded around Salim. His face was like a cracked melon, a tight bulb of red flesh. I swatted away an intrusive hovercam. It was the best I could do. Then I remember Leel and the other nutes taking me out into the courtyard, where a tilt-jet was settling, engines sending the rose petals up in a perfumed blizzard. Paramedics carried Salim out from the pavilion on a gurney. He wore an oxygen rebreather. There were tubes in his arms. Security guards in light-scatter armor pushed the great and the celebrated aside. I struggled with Leel as the medics slid Salim into the tilt-jet, but yt held me with strange, withered strength.
“Let me go, let me go, that’s my husband. . . .”
“Padmini, Padmini, there is nothing you can do.”
“What do you mean?”
“Padmini, he is dead. Salim, your husband, is dead.”
Yt might have said that the moon was a great mouse in the sky.
“Anaphylactic shock. Do you know what that is?”
“Dead?” I said simply, quietly. Then I was flying across the court toward the tilt-jet as it powered up. I wanted to dive under its engines. I wanted to be scattered like the rose petals. Security guards ran to cut me off, but Leel caught me first and brought me down. I felt the nip of an efuser on my arm, and everything went soft as the tranquilizer took me.
After three weeks I called Heer to me. For the first week the security robots had kept me locked back in the zenana while the lawyers argued. I spent much of that time out of my head, part grief-stricken, part insane at what had happened. Just one kiss. A widow no sooner than I was wed. Leel tended to me; the lawyers and judges reached their legal conclusions. I was the sole and lawful heir of Azad-Jodhra Water. The second week I came to terms with my inheritance: the biggest water company in Rajputana, the third largest in the whole of India. There were contracts to be signed, managers and executives to meet, deals to be set up. I waved them away, for the third week was my week, the week in which I understood what I had lost. And I understood what I had done, and how, and what I was. Then I was ready to talk to Heer.
We met in the Diwan, between the great silver jars that Salim, dedicated to his new tradition, had kept topped up with holy Ganga water. Guard-monkeys kept watch from the rooftops. My monkeys. My Diwan. My palace. My company, now. Heer’s hands were folded in yts sleeves. Yts eyes were black marble. I wore widow’s white—a widow, at age fifteen.
“How long had you planned it?”
“From before you born. From before you were even conceived.”
“I was always to marry Salim Azad.”
“Yes.”
“And kill him.”
“You could not do anything but. You were designed that way.”
Always remember, my father had said, here among these cool, shady pillars, you are a weapon. A weapon deeper, subtler than I had ever imagined, deeper even than Dahin’s medical machines could look. A weapon down in the DNA: designed from conception to cause a fatal allergic reaction in any member of the Azad family. An assassin in my every cell, in every pore and hair, in every fleck of dust shed from my deadly skin.
I killed my beloved with a kiss.
I felt a huge, shuddering sigh inside me, a sigh I could never, must never utter.
“I called you a traitor when you said you had always been a loyal servant of the House of Jodhra.”
“I was, am, and will remain so, please God.” Heer dipped yts hairless head in a shallow bow. Then yt said, “When you become one of us, when you Step Away, you Step Away from so much, from your own family, from the hope of ever having children . . . You are my family, my children. All of you, but most of all you, Padmini. I did what I had to for my family, and now you survive, now you have all that is yours by right. We don’t live long, Padmini. Ours lives are too intense, too bright, too brilliant. There’s been too much done to us. We burn out early. I had to see my family safe, my daughter triumph.”
“Heer . . .”
Yt held up a hand, glanced away; I thought I saw silver in the corners of those black eyes.
“Take your palace, your company; it is all yours.”
That evening I slipped away from my staff and guards. I went up the marble stairs to the long corridor where my room had been before I became a woman, and a wife, and a widow, and the owner of a great company. The door opened to my thumbprint; I swung it open into dust-hazy golden sunlight. The bed was still made, mosquito nets neatly knotted up. I crossed to the balcony. I expected the vines and creepers to have grown to a jungle; with a start I realized it was just over a year since I had slept here. I could still pick out the handholds and footholds where I had followed the steel monkey up onto the roof. I had an easier way to that now. A door at the end of the corridor, previously locked to me, now opened onto a staircase. Sentry robots immediately bounced up as I stepped out onto the roof, crests raised, dart-throwers armed. A mudra from my hand sent them back into watching mode.
Once again I walked between the domes and turrets to the balcony at the very top of the palace fagade. Again, Great Jaipur at my bare feet took my breath away. The pink city kindled and burned in the low evening light. The streets still roared with traffic. I could smell the hot oil and spices of the bazaar. I now knew how to find the domes of the Hijra Mahal among the confusion of streets and apartment buildings. The dials and half domes and buttresses of the Jantar Mantar threw huge shadows over each other, a confusion of clocks. Then I turned toward the glass scimitar of the Azad Headquarters—my headquarters now, my palace as much as this dead old Rajput pile. I had brought that house crashing down, but not in any way I had imagined. I wanted to apologize to Salim as he had apologized to me, every night when he came to me in the zenana, for what his family had done. They made me into a weapon and I did not even know.
How easy to step out over the traffic, step away from it all. Let it all end, Azad and Jodhra. Cheat Heer of yts victory. Then I saw my toes with their rings curl over the edge and I knew I could not, must not. I looked up and there, at the edge of vision, along the bottom of the red horizon, was a line of dark. The monsoon, coming at last. My family had made me one kind of weapon, but my other family, the kind, mad, sad, talented family of the nutes, had taught me, in their various ways, to be another weapon. The streets were dry, but the rains were coming. I had reservoirs and canals and pumps and pipes in my power. I was Maharani of the Monsoon. Soon the people would need me. I took a deep breath and imagined I could smell the rain. Then I turned and walked back through the waiting robots to my kingdom.
IAN McDONALD was born in 1960 in Manchester and moved to Northern Ireland in 1965. He is the author of ten novels, most notably Desolation Road, Out on Blue Six, Philip K. Dick Award winner King of Morning, Queen of Day, Chaga, and Ares Express. His most acclaimed, novel is British SF Award winner and Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke award nominee River of Gods. His short fiction has won the Sturgeon and British Science Fiction awards and been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Tiptree awards, and
is collected in Empire Dreams and Speaking in Tongues. His most recent book is the novel Brasyl.
His Web journal is at http://ianmcdonald.livejournal.com.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The future hits all of us. In the West we’re used to feeling we’re the cutting edge and the future is going to be just like us. But this is a wired, small planet, and the new technology that catches on in Boston or Birmingham appears simultaneously on the streets of Bangalore and Beijing.
The future is not necessarily American or European. The future may be shaped as much by the CRIB group: China, Russia, India, Brazil—huge countries with huge populations developing at an incredible rate. It’s a big, thrilling planet out there, full of life, movement, passion, color. We’ve taught ourselves over the past few years to be afraid of it. The way to beat fear is understanding, and to understand we need to look outside ourselves.
I’ve been writing about a big, powerful, future hi-tech India in my book River of Gods and the Cyberabad sequence of stories, of which this is one. It’s a vast, endlessly fascinating country. But in the end, despite all the seeming strangenesses of Padmini and her world in “The Dust Assassin,” we are all people with the same needs and desires. There is no Third World: there is just One World.
THE STAR SURGEON’S APPRENTICE
Alastair Reynolds
Through the bar’s windows, Juntura Spaceport was an endless grid of holding berths, launch gantries, and radiator fins, coiling in its own pollution under a smeared pink sky. The air crackled with radiation from unshielded drives. It was no place to visit, let alone stay.
“I need to get out of here,” I said.
The shipmaster sneered at my remaining credit. “That won’t get you to the Napier Belt, kid, let alone Frolovo.”
“It’s all I’ve got.”
“Then maybe you should spend a few months working in the port, until you can pay for a ride.”
The shipmaster—he was a cyborg, like most of them—turned away with a whine of his servo-driven exoskeleton.
“Wait,” I said. “Please . . . just a moment. Maybe this makes a difference.”
I pulled a black bundle from inside my jacket, peeling back enough of the cloth to let him see the weapon. The shipmaster— his name was Master Khorog—reached out one iron gauntlet and hefted the prize. His eye-goggle clicked and whirred into focus.
“Very nasty,” he said appreciatively. “I heard someone used one of these against Happy Jack.” The eye swiveled sharply onto me. “Maybe you know something about that?”
“Nothing,” I said easily. “It’s just an heirloom.”
The heirloom was a bone gun. Kalarash Empire tech: very old, very difficult to pick up in security scans. Not much of it around anymore, which is why the gun cost me so much. It employed a sonic effect to shatter human bone, turning it into something resembling sugar. Three seconds was all it needed to do its work. By then the victim no longer had anything much resembling a skeletal structure.
You couldn’t live long like that, of course. But you didn’t die instantly either.
“The trick—so they say—is not to dwell on the skull,” Khorog mused. “Leave enough cranial structure for the victim to retain consciousness. And the ability to hear, if you want to taunt them. There are three small bones in the ear. People usually forget those.”
“Will you take the gun or not?”
“I could get into trouble just looking at it.” He put the gun back onto the cloth. “But it’s a nice piece. Warm, too. It might make a difference. There used to be a good market for antique weapons on Jelgava. Maybe there still is.”
I brightened. “Then you can give me a berth?”
“I only said it makes a difference, kid. Enough that you can pay off the rest aboard the Iron Lady.”
I could already feel Happy Jack’s button men pushing their way through the port, asking urgent questions. Only a matter of time before they hit this bar and found me.
“If you can get me to the Frolovo Hub, I’ll take it.”
“Maybe we’re not going to Frolovo. Maybe we’re going to the Bafq Gap, or the Belterra Sphere.”
“Somewhere nearby, then. Another hub. It doesn’t matter. I just have to get off Mokmer.”
“Show us your mitts.” Before I could say yes, Khorog’s metal hands were examining my skin-and-bone ones, splaying the fingers with surprising gentleness. “Never done a hard day’s work in your life, have you? But you have good fingers. Hand-to-eye coordination okay? No neuromotor complications? Palsy?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “And whatever it is you want me to do, I can learn.”
“Mister Zeal—our surgeon—needs an assistant. It’s manual labor, mostly. Think you can handle it?”
Jack’s men, closer now. “Yes,” I said. By then I’d have said anything to get off Mokmer.
“There’ll be no freezer berth: the Iron Lady doesn’t run to them. You’ll be warm the whole trip. Two and a half years subjective, maybe three, till we make the next orbitfall. And once Zeal’s trained you up, he won’t want you leaving his service at the first port of call. You’ll be looking at four or five years aboard the Lady; maybe longer if he can’t find another pair of hands. Doesn’t sound so sweet now, does it?”
No, I thought, but then neither did the alternative.
“I’m still willing.”
“Then be at shuttle dock nine in twenty minutes. That’s when we lift for orbit.”
We lifted on time.
I didn’t see much of the ship from the shuttle: just enough to tell that the Iron Lady looked much the same as all the other ramscoops parked in orbit around Mokmer: a brutalist gray cylinder, swelling to the armored mouth of the magnetic field intake at the front, tapering to the drive assembly at the back. Comms gear, radiators, docking mechanisms, and modular cargo containers ringed the ship around its gently in-curving waist. It was bruised and battered from endless near-light transits, with great scorch marks and impact craters marring much of the hull.
The shuttle docked with just Khorog and me aboard. Even before I had been introduced to the rest of the crew—or even the surgeon—the Iron Lady was moving.
“Sooner than I expected,” I said.
“Complaining?” Khorog asked. “I thought you wanted to get away from Mokmer as soon as possible.”
“No,” I said. “I’m glad we’re under way.” I brushed a wall panel as we walked. “It’s very smooth. I expected it to feel different.”
“That’s because we’re only on in-system motors at the moment.”
“There’s a problem with the ramscoop?”
“We don’t switch on the scoop until we’re well beyond Mokmer—or any planet, for that matter. We’re safe in the ship— life quarters are well shielded—but outside, you’re looking at the strongest magnetic field this side of the Crab pulsar. Doesn’t hurt wetheads like you all that much . . . but us, that’s different.” He knuckled his fist against his plated cranium. “Cyborgs like me . . . cyborgs like everyone else you’ll meet aboard this ship, or in any kind of space environment—we feel it. Get within a thousand kilometers of a ship like this . . . it warms up the metal in our bodies. Inductive heating: we fry from the inside. That’s why we don’t light the scoop: it ain’t neighborly.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, realizing that I’d touched the cyborg equivalent of a nerve.
“We’ll light in good time.” Khorog hammered one of the wall plates. “Then you’ll feel the old girl shiver her timbers.”
On the way to the surgeon, we passed other members of the Iron Lady’s redoubtable crew, none of whom Khorog saw fit to introduce. They were a carnival of grotesques, even by the standards of the cyborgs I’d seen around the spaceport. One man consisted of a grinning, cackling, gap-toothed head plugged into a trundling life-support mechanism that had apparently originated as a cleaning robot: in place of wheels, or legs, he moved on multiple spinning brushes, polishing the deck plates behind him. A woman glanced haughtily at me a
s she passed: normal enough except that the upper hemisphere of her skull was a glass dome, in which resided a kind of ticking orrery: luminous planetary beads orbiting the bright lamp of a star. As she walked she rubbed a hand over the swell of her belly and I understood—as I was surely meant to—that her brain had been relocated there for safekeeping. Another man moved in an exoskeleton similar to the one Khorog wore, but in this case there was very little man left inside the powered frame: just a desiccated wisp, like something that had dried out in the sun. His limbs were like strands of rope, his head a piece of shriveled, stepped-on fruit. “You’ll be the new mate, then,” he said in a voice that sounded as if he was trying to speak while being strangled.
“If Zeal agrees to it,” Khorog said back. “Only then.”
“What if Mister Zeal doesn’t agree to it?” I asked, when we were safely out of earshot.
“Then we’ll find you something else to do,” Khorog replied. “Always plenty of jobs on the . . .” And then he halted, as if he’d been meaning to say something else but had caught himself in time.
By then we’d reached the surgeon.
Mister Zeal occupied a windowless chamber near the middle of the ship. He was working on one of his patients when Khorog showed me in. Hulking surgical machines loomed over the operating table, carrying lights, manipulators, and barbed, savage-looking cutting tools.
“This is the new assistant,” Khorog said. “Has a good pair of hands on him, so try and make this one last.”
Zeal looked up from his work. He was a huge, bald, thick-necked man with a powerful jaw. There was nothing obviously mechanical about him: even the close-up goggle he wore over his left eye was strapped into place, rather than implanted. He wore a stiff leather apron over his bare, muscular chest, and he glistened with sweat and oil.
His voice was a low rumble. “Just a pup, Master Khorog. I asked for a man.”
The Starry Rift Page 24
