Fury

by Salman Rushdie

  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 Rilkattack. 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—I, floodwaters 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 Professor 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 lost 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 scientists 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 ofthe Shoes, and informed the Mogol that the Professor’s con tract 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 andpodeans 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 interactivides, 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. Goldenage 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 r
eason 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 dared 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 Dona 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.”

  “You left me and I’m dying,” Gioconda sang on the restaurant’s sound system as Solanka and Mila came in, “but after three days I will rise again. Don’t go to my funeral, sucker, I’ll be out dancing with some better man. Resurrection, resurrection, and baby I’ll make sure you know when.” Mila translated the words for Solanka. “That’s perfect,” she added. Are you listening, Malik? Because if I could request a track, this would be it. As they say on the radio, the message is in the words. ‘Oh, you thought that you could break me, and it’s true that I’m in pieces now, but after three days they will wake me, from a distance you will see me take my bow. Resurrection, resurrection, gettin’ a new life any day now.’”

  At the bar she downed a mojito fast and ordered another one. Solanka saw that he was in for a rougher ride than anticipated. At the bottom of the second glass she moved to the table, ordered all the most highly spiced dishes on the menu, and let him have it. “You’re a lucky man,” she told him, plunging into the complimentary guacamole, “because evidently you’re an optimist. You have to be, because it’s so easy for you to throw things away. Your child, your wife, me, whatever. Only a wild optimist, a stupid brain-dead Pollyanna or Pangloss, throws away what’s most precious, what’s so rare and satisfies his deepest need, which you know and I know you can’t even name or look at without the shutters closed and the lights out, you have to put a cushion on your lap to hide it until somebody comes along who’s smart enough to know what to do, somebody whose own unspeakable need just happens to make a perfect fit with your own. And now, now when we’ve got there, when the defenses are down and the pretense is over and were really in that room that we never allowed ourselves to believe could exist for either of us, the invisible room of our greatest fear—right at the very moment when we discover there’s no need to be afraid in that room, we can have whatever we want for as long as we want it, and maybe when we’ve had our fill we’ll wake up and notice that we’re real living people, we’re not the puppets of our desires but just this woman, this man, and then we can stop the games, open up the shutters, turn out the lights, and step out into the city street hand in hand… this is when you choose to pick up some whore in the park and for Chrissake get a fucking room. An optimist is a man who gives up an impossible pleasure because he’s sure he’ll find it again just around the bend. An optimist thinks his dick talks better sense than, oh, never mind. I was going to say, than his girl, meaning, stupidly, me. Me, by the way, I’m a pessimist. My view is that not only does lightning not strike twice, it usually doesn’t strike once. So that was it for me, what happened between us, that was really it, and you, you just, damn, damn. I could have stayed with you, did you ever work that out? Oh, not for long, just thirty or forty years, more than you’ve got, probably. Instead, I’ll marry Eddie. You know what they say: charity begins at home.”

  Breathing heavily, she paused and applied herself to the carnival of food that stood before her. Solanka waited; more would soon enough be on the way. He was thinking, You can’t marry him, you mustn’t, but such advice was no longer his to give. “You’re telling yourself what we did was wrong,” she said. “I know you. You’re using guilt to set yourself free. So now you think you can walk away from me and tell yourself it’s the moral thing to do. But what we did wasn’t wrong,” and here her eyes filled with tears. “Not wrong at all. We were just comforting each other for our terrible feelings of loss. The doll thing was just a way of getting there. What, you really think I fucked my father, you imagine I wrig
gled my ass on his lap and pushed my nail into his nipple and licked his poor sweet throat? That’s what you’re telling yourself to give yourself an out, or was that also the in? Was that the turn-on, to be my father’s ghost? Professor, you’re the one who’s sick. I’m telling you again. What we did wasn’t wrong. It was play. Serious play, dangerous play, maybe, but play.

  I thought you understood that. I thought you might just be that impossible creature, a sexually wise man who could give me a safe place, a place to be free and to set you free, too, a place where we could release all the built-up poison and anger and hurt, just let it go and be free of it, but it turns out, Professor, you’re just another fool. You were on Howard Stern today, by the way.”

  That was a left turn he hadn’t expected, a fast swerve against the oncoming emotional traffic. Perry Pincus, he realized with a sudden heaviness. “She made it, then. What did she say?” “Oh,” said Mila, speaking through lamb smothered in salsa verde, “she said a mouthful.” Mila had an excellent memory and could often replay whole conversations almost verbatim. Her Perry Pincus, which she now gave with as much wounding gusto as a young Bernhardt, a Stockard Charming of the near-at-hand, was therefore, Solanka conceded with sinking heart, likely to be extremely reliable as far as accuracy was concerned. “Sometimes these so-called great male minds are textbook cases of pathetically arrested development,” Perry had told Howard and his huge audience. “Take the case of this guy Malik Solanka, not a major mind, gave up philosophy and went into television, and I should say right out that he was one of those I never, you know. Not on my resume. What was his problem, right? Well. Let me tell you that this Solanka’s whole room, and remember were talking here about a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, England, was crawling with dolls, and I do mean dolls. Once I noticed that, I couldn’t leave fast enough. God forbid he should mistake me for a dolly and poke me in the stomach till I said Ma-ma. I was like, excuse me, but I never even liked dolls when I was little, and I’m a girl? What? No, no. Gay I’m comfortable with. Absolutely. I’m from California, Howard. Sure. This wasn’t gay. This was… goo-goo. It was—what can I tell you?—icky. For a gag, I still send the guy stuffed animals at Christmas. The Coca-Cola polar bear. You got it. He never acknowledges receipt, but guess what? He never sent one back, either. Men. When you know their secrets, it’s hard not to laugh.”