Neither said anything more. Clay was acutely conscious that his briefing in Washington had been detailed technical assessments, without the slightest mention of how the Indians themselves saw their problems. Singh and Patil seemed either resigned or unconcerned; he could not tell which. Their sentences refracted from some unseen nugget, like seismic waves warping around the earth’s core.
“I would not worry greatly about these pouches,” Singh said after they had ridden in silence for a while. “They should not ripen before we are done with our task. In any case, the Kolar fields are quite barren, and afford few sites where the pouches can grow.”
Clay pointed out the front window. “Those round things on the walls, more pouches?”
To his surprise, both men burst into merry laughter. Gasping, Patil said, “Examine them closely, Doctor Clay. Notice the marks of the species which made them.” Patil slowed the car and Clay studied the round, circular pads on the whitewashed vertical walls along the road. They were brown and matted and marked in a pattern of radial lines. Clay frowned and then felt enormously stupid: the thick lines were handprints.
“Drying cakes, they are,” Patil said, still chuckling.
“Of what?”
“Dung, my colleague. We use the cow here, not merely slaughter it.”
“What for?”
“Fuel. After the cakes dry, we stack them—see?” They passed a plastic-wrapped tower. A woman was adding a circular, annular tier of thick dung disks to the top, then carefully folding the plastic over it. “In winter they burn nicely.”
“For heating?”
“And cooking, yes.”
Seeing the look on Clay’s face, Singh’s eyes narrowed and his lips drew back so that his teeth were bright stubs. His eyebrows were long brush strokes that met the deep furrows of his frown. “Old ways are still often preferable to the new.”
Sure, Clay thought, the past of cholera, plague, infanticide. But he asked with neutral politeness, “Such as?”
“Some large fish from the Amazon were introduced into our principal river three years ago to improve fishing yields.”
“The Ganges? I thought it was holy.”
“What is more holy than to feed the hungry?”
“True enough. Did it work?”
“The big fish, yes. They are delicious. A great delicacy.”
“I’ll have to try some,” Clay said, remembering the thin vegetarian curry he had eaten at breakfast.
Singh said, “But the Amazon sample contained some minute eggs which none of the proper procedures eliminated. They were of a small species—the candiru, is that not the name?” he inquired politely of Patil.
“Yes,” Patil said, “a little being who thrives mostly on the urine of larger fish. Specialists now believe that perhaps the eggs were inside the larger species, and so escaped detection.”
Patil’s voice remained calm and factual, although while he spoke he abruptly swerved to avoid a goat that spontaneously ambled onto the rough road. Clay rocked hard against the van’s door, and Patil then corrected further to stay out of a gratuitous mudhole that seemed to leap at them from the rushing foreground. They bumped noisily over ruts at the road’s edge and bounced back onto the tarmac without losing speed. Patil sat ramrod straight, hands turning the steering wheel lightly, oblivious to the wrenching effects of his driving.
“Suppose, Professor Clay, that you are a devotee,” Singh said. “You have saved to come to the Ganges for a decade, for two. Perhaps you even plan to die there.”
“Yeah, okay.” Clay could not see where this was leading.
“You are enthused as you enter the river to bathe. You are perhaps profoundly affected. An intense spiritual moment. It is not uncommon to merge with the river, to inadvertently urinate into it.”
Singh spread his hands as if to say that such things went without saying. “Then the candiru will be attracted by the smell. It mistakes this great bountiful largess, the food it needs, as coming from a very great fish indeed. It excitedly swims up the stream of uric acid. Coming to your urethra, it swims like a snake into its burrow, as far up as it can go. You will see that the uric flow velocity will increase as the candiru makes its way upstream, inside you. When this tiny fish can make no further progress, some trick of evolution tells it to protrude a set of sidewise spines. So intricate!”
Singh paused a moment in smiling tribute to this intriguing facet of nature. Clay nodded, his mouth dry.
“These embed deeply in the walls and keep the candiru close to the source of what it so desires.” Singh made short, delicate movements, his fingers jutting in the air. Clay opened his mouth, but said nothing.
Patil took them around a team of bullocks towing a wooden wagon and put in, “The pain is intense. Apparently there is no good treatment. Women—forgive this indelicacy—must be opened to get at the offending tiny fish before it swells and blocks the passage completely, having gorged itself insensate. Some men have an even worse choice. Their bladders are already engorged, having typically not been much emptied by the time the candiru enters. They must decide whether to attempt the slow procedure of poisoning the small thing and waiting for it to shrivel and withdraw its spines.
“However, their bladders might burst before that, flooding their abdomens with urine and of course killing them. If there is not sufficient time…”
“Yes?” Clay asked tensely.
“Then the penis must be chopped off,” Singh said, “with the candiru inside.”
Through a long silence Clay rode, swaying as the car wove through limitless flat spaces of parched fields and ruined brick walls and slumped whitewashed huts. Finally he said hoarsely, “I…don’t blame you for resenting the…well, the people who brought all this on you. The devotees—”
“They believe this apocalyptic evil comes from the philosophy which gave us modern science.”
“Well, look, whoever brought over those fish—”
Singh’s eyes widened with surprise. A startled grin lit his face like a sunrise. “Oh no, Professor Clay! We do not blame the errors, or else we would have to blame equally the successes!”
To Clay’s consternation, Patil nodded sagely.
He decided to say nothing more. Washington had warned him to stay out of political discussions, and though he was not sure if this was such, or if the lighthearted way Singh and Patil had related their story told their true attitude, it seemed best to just shut up. Again Clay had the odd sensation that here the cool certainties of Western biology had become diffused, blunted, crisp distinctions rendered into something beyond the constraints of the world outside, all blurred by the swarming, dissolving currents of India. The tin-gray sky loomed over a plain of ripe rot. The urgency of decay here was far more powerful than the abstractions that so often filled his head, the digitized iconography of sputtering, splitting protons.
The Kolar gold fields were a long, dusty drive from Bangalore. The sway of the van made Clay sleepy in the back, jet lag pulling him down into fitful, shallow dreams of muted voices, shadowy faces, and obscure purpose. He awoke frequently amid the dry smells, lurched up to see dry farmland stretching to the horizon, and collapsed again to bury his face in the pillow he had made by wadding up a shirt. They passed through innumerable villages that, after the first few, all seemed alike with their scrawny children, ramshackle sheds, tin roofs, and general air of sleepy dilapidation. Once, in a narrow town, they stopped as rickshaws and carts backed up. An emaciated cow with pink paper tassels on its horns stood square in the middle of the road, trembling. Shouts and honks failed to move it, but no one ahead made the slightest effort to prod it aside. Clay got out of the van to stretch his legs, ignoring Patil’s warning to stay hidden, and watched. A crowd collected, shouting and chanting at the cow but not touching it. The cow shook its head, peering at the road as if searching for grass, and urinated powerfully. A woman in a red sari rushed into the road, knelt, and thrust her hand into the full stream. She made a formal motion with her other hand
and splashed some urine on her forehead and cheeks. Three other women had already lined up behind her, and each did the same. Disturbed, the cow waggled its head and shakily walked away. Traffic started up, and Clay climbed back into the van. As they ground out of the dusty town, Singh explained that holy bovine urine was widely held to have positive health effects.
“Many believe it settles stomach troubles, banishes headaches, even improves fertility,” Singh said.
“Yeah, you could sure use more fertility.” Clay gestured at the throngs that filled the narrow clay sidewalks.
“I am not so Indian that I cannot find it within myself to agree with you, Professor Clay,” Singh said.
“Sorry for the sarcasm. I’m tired.”
“Patil and I are already under a cloud simply because we are scientists, and therefore polluted with Western ideas.”
“Can’t blame Indians for being down on us. Things’re getting rough.”
“But you are a black man. You yourself were persecuted by Western societies.”
“That was a while back.”
“And despite it you have risen to a professorship.”
“You do the work, you get the job.” Clay took off his hat and wiped his brow. The midday heat pressed sweat from him.
“Then you do not feel alienated from Western ideals?” Patil put in.
“Hell no. Look, I’m not some sharecropper who pulled himself up from poverty. I grew up in Falls Church, Virginia. Father’s a federal bureaucrat. Middle class all the way.”
“I see,” Patil said, eyes never leaving the rutted road. “Your race bespeaks an entirely different culture, but you subscribe to the program of modern rationalism.”
Clay looked at them quizzically. “Don’t you?”
“As scientists, of course. But that is not all of life.”
“Um,” Clay said.
A thousand times before he had endured the affably condescending attention of whites, their curious eyes searching his face. No matter what the topic, they somehow found a way to inquire indirectly after his true feelings, his natural emotions. And if he waved away these intrusions, there remained in their heavy-lidded eyes a subtle skepticism, doubts about his authenticity. Few gave him space to simply be a suburban man with darker skin, a man whose interior landscape was populated with the same icons of Middle America as their own. Hell, his family name came from slaves, given as a tribute to Henry Clay, a nineteenth-century legislator. He had never expected to run into stereotyping in India, for chrissakes.
Still, he was savvy enough to lard his talk with some homey touches, jimmy things up with collard greens and black-eyed peas and street jive. It might put them at ease.
“I believe a li’l rationality could help,” he said.
“Um.” Singh’s thin mouth twisted doubtfully. “Perhaps you should regard India as the great chessboard of our times, Professor. Here we have arisen from the great primordial agrarian times, fashioned our gods from our soil and age. Then we had orderly thinking, with all its assumptions, thrust upon us by the British. Now they are all gone, and we are suspended between the miasmic truths of the past, and the failed strictures of the present.”
Clay looked out the dirty window and suppressed a smile. Even the physicists here spouted mumbo jumbo. They even appeared solemnly respectful of the devotees, who were just crazies like the women by the cow. How could anything solid come out of such a swamp? The chances that their experiment was right dwindled with each lurching, damp mile.
They climbed into the long range of hills before the Kolar fields. Burned-tan grass shimmered in the prickly heat. Sugarcane fields and rice paddies stood bone dry. In the villages, thin figures shaded beneath awnings, canvas tents, lean-tos, watched them pass. Lean faces betrayed only dim, momentary interest, and Clay wondered if his uncomfortable disguise was necessary outside Bangalore. Without stopping they ate their lunch of dried fruit and thin, brown bread.
In a high hill town, Patil stopped to refill his water bottle at a well. Clay peered out and saw down an alley a gang of stick-figure boys chasing a dog. They hemmed it in, and the bedraggled hound fled yapping from one side of their circle to the other. The animal whined at each rebuff and twice lost its footing on the cobblestones, sprawling, only to scramble up again and rush on. It was a cruel game, and the boys were strangely silent, playing without laughter. The dog was tiring; they drew in their circle.
A harsh edge to the boys’ shouts made Clay slide open the van door. Several men were standing beneath a rust-scabbed sheet-metal awning nearby, and their eyes widened when they saw his face. They talked rapidly among themselves. Clay hesitated. The boys down the alley rushed the dog. They grabbed it as it yapped futilely and tried to bite them. They slipped twine around its jaws and silenced it. Shouting, they hoisted it into the air and marched off.
Clay gave up and slammed the door. The men came from under the awning. One rapped on the window. Clay just stared at them. One thumped on the door. Gestures, loud talk.
Patil and Singh came running, shouted something. Singh pushed the men away, chattering at them while Patil got the van started. Singh slammed the door in the face of a man with wild eyes. Patil gunned the engine and they ground away.
“They saw me and—”
“Distrust of outsiders is great here,” Singh said. “They may be connected with the devotees, too.”
“Guess I better keep my hat on.”
“It would be advisable.”
“I don’t know, those boys—I was going to stop them pestering that dog. Stupid, I guess, but—”
“You will have to avoid being sentimental about such matters,” Patil said severely.
“Uh—sentimental?”
“The boys were not playing.”
“I don’t—”
“They will devour it,” Singh said.
Clay blinked. “Hindus eating meat…?”
“Hard times. I am really quite surprised that such an animal has survived this long,” Patil said judiciously. “Dogs are uncommon. I imagine it was wild, living in the countryside, and ventured into town in search of garbage scraps.”
The land rose as Clay watched the shimmering heat bend and flex the seemingly solid hills.
They pulled another dodge at the mine. The lead green van veered off toward the main entrance, a cluster of concrete buildings and conveyer assemblies. From a distance, the physicists in the blue van watched a ragtag group envelop the van before it had fully stopped.
“Devotees,” Singh said abstractedly. “They search each vehicle for evidence of our research.”
“Your graduate students, the mob’ll let them pass?”
Patil peered through binoculars. “The crowd is administering a bit of a pushing about,” he said in his oddly cadenced accent, combining lofty British diction with a singsong lilt.
“Damn, won’t the mine people get rid—”
“Some mine workers are among the crowd, I should imagine,” Patil said.
“They are beating the students.”
“Well, can’t we—”
“No time to waste.” Singh waved them back into the blue van. “Let us make use of this diversion.”
“But we could—”
“The students made their sacrifice for you. Do not devalue it, please.”
Clay did not take his eyes from the nasty knot of confusion until they lurched over the ridgeline. Patil explained that they had been making regular runs to the main entrance for months now, to establish a pattern that drew devotees away from the secondary entrance.
“All this was necessary, and insured that we could bring in a foreign inspector,” Patil concluded. Clay awkwardly thanked him for the attention to detail. He wanted to voice his embarrassment at having students roughed up simply to provide him cover, but something in the offhand manner of the two Indians made him hold his tongue.
The secondary entrance to the Kolar mine was a wide, tin-roofed shed like a low aircraft hangar. Girders crisscrossed it at angles t
hat seemed to Clay dictated less by the constraints of mechanics than by the whims of the construction team. Cables looped among the already rusting steel struts and sang low notes in the rot-tinged wind that brushed his hair.
Monkeys chattered and scampered high in the struts. The three men walked into the shed, carrying cases. The cables began humming softly. The weave above their heads tightened with pops and sharp cracks. Clay realized that the seemingly random array was a complicated hoist that had started to pull the elevator up from miles beneath their feet. The steel lattice groaned as if it already knew how much work it had to do.
When it arrived, he saw that the elevator was a huge rattling box that reeked of machine oil. Clay lugged his cases in. The walls were broad wooden slats covered with chicken wire. Heat radiated from them. Patil stabbed a button on the big control board and they dropped quickly. The numbers of the levels zipped by on an amber digital display. A single dim yellow bulb cast shadows onto the wire. At the fifty-third level the bulb went out. The elevator did not stop.
In the enveloping blackness Clay felt himself lighten, as if the elevator was speeding up.
“Do not be alarmed,” Patil called. “This frequently occurs.”
Clay wondered if he meant the faster box or the light bulb. In the complete dark, he began to see blue phantoms leaping out from nowhere.
Abruptly he became heavy—and thought of Einstein’s Gedanken experiment, which equated a man in an accelerating elevator to one standing on a planet. Unless Clay could see outside, check that the massive earth raced by beyond as it clasped him further into its depths, in principle he could be in either situation. He tried to recall how Einstein had reasoned from an imaginary elevator to deduce that matter curved space-time, and could not.
Einstein’s elegant proof was impossibly far from the pressing truth of this elevator. Here Clay plunged in thick murk, a weight of tortured air prickling his nose, making sweat pop from his face. Oily, moist heat climbed into Clay’s sinuses.
And he was not being carried aloft by this elevator, but allowed to plunge into heavy, primordial darkness—Einstein’s vision in reverse. No classical coolness separated him from the press of a raw, random world. That European mindscape—Galileo’s crisp cylinders rolling obediently down inclined planes, Einstein’s dispassionate observers surveying their smooth geometries like scrupulous bank clerks—evaporated here like yesterday’s stale champagne. Sudden anxiety filled his throat. His stomach tightened and he tasted acrid gorge. He opened his mouth to shout, and as if to stop him, his own knees sagged with suddenly returning weight, physics regained.
The Best of Gregory Benford Page 23
