The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  But this night Rai’s hand shot out to seize Sanjeev’s hand as it closed around the plastic bag.

  “Hey, we’ve been thinking.” The other robotwallahs, Suni and Ravana and Godspeed! and Big Baba, nodded. “We’re thinking we could use someone around the place, do odd jobs, clean a bit, keep stuff sweet, get us things. Would you like to do it? We’d pay—it’d be government scrip, not dollars or euros. Do you want to work for us?”

  He lied about it to his family: the glamour, the tech, the sexy spun-diamond headquarters and the chrome he brought up to dazzling dazzling shine by the old village trick of polishing it with toothpaste. Sanjeev lied from disappointment but also from his own naïve overexpectation: too many nights filled with androgynous teenagers in spandex suits being clamshelled up inside block-killing battle machines. The robotwallahs of the 15th Light Armoured and Recon Cavalry—sowars properly—worked out of a cheap pressed-aluminium go-down on a dusty commercial road at the back of the new railway station. They sent their wills over provinces and countries to fight for Bharat. Their talents were too rare to risk in Raytheon assault bots or Aiwa scout mecha. No robotwallah ever came back in a body bag.

  Sanjeev had scratched and kicked in the dust, squatting outside the shutter door squinting in the early light. Surely the phatphat had brought him to the wrong address? Then Rai and Godspeed! had brought him inside and shown him how they made war inside a cheap go-down. Motion-capture harnesses hung from steadi-rigs like puppets from a hand. Black mirror-visored insect helmets—real J-anime helmets—trailed plaited cables. One wall of the go-down was racked up with the translucent blue domes of processor cores, the adjoining wall a massive video-silk screen flickering with the ten thousand data flashes of the ongoing war: skirmishes, reconnaissances, air strikes, infantry positions, minefields and slow-missile movements, heavy armour, and the mecha divisions. Orders came in on this screen from a woman jemadar at Divisional Headquarters. Sanjeev never saw her flesh. None of the robotwallahs had ever seen her flesh, though they joked about it every time she came on the screen to order them to a reconnaissance or a skirmish or a raid. Along the facing wall, behind the battle harnesses, were cracked leather sofas, sling chairs, a watercooler (full), a Coke machine (three-quarters empty). Gaming and girli mags were scattered like dead birds across the sneaker-scuffed concrete floor. A door led to a rec room with more sofas, a couple of folding beds, and a game console with three VR sets. Off the rec room were a small kitchen area and a shower unit.

  “Man, this place stinks,” said Sanjeev.

  By noon he had it cleaned it front to back, top to bottom, magazines stacked by date of publication, shoes set together in pairs, lost clothes in a black plastic sack for the dhobiwallah to launder. He lit incense. He threw out the old bad milk and turning food in the refrigerator, returned the empty Coke bottles for their deposits, made chai, and sneaked out to get Samosas, which he passed off as his own. He nervously watched Big Baba and Ravana step into their battle harnesses for a three-hour combat mission. So much he learned in that first morning. It was not one boy, one bot; Level 1.2 aeais controlled most of the autonomous process like motion and perception; the pilots were more like officers, each commanding a bot platoon, their point of view switching from scout machine to assault bot to I-war drone. And they did not have their favourite old faithful combat machine, scarred with bullet holes and lovingly customised with hand-sprayed graffiti and Desi-metal demons. Machines went to war because they could take damage human flesh and families could not. The Kali Cavalry rotated between a dozen units a month as attrition and the jemadar dictated. It was not not not Japanese anime, but the Kali boys did look sexy dangerous cool in their gear even if they went home to their parents every night, and working for them, cleaning for them, getting towels for them when they went sweating and stinking to the shower after a tour in the combat rig was the maximum thing in Sanjeev’s small life. They were his children; they were his boys, no girls allowed.

  “Hanging round with those badmashes all day, never seeing a wink of sun, that’s not good for you,” his mother said, sweeping round the tiny top-floor living room before her next lesson. “Your dad needs the help more; he may have to hire a boy in; what kind of sense does that make, when he has a son of his own? They do not have a good reputation, those robot-boys.”

  Then Sanjeev showed her the money he had got for one day.

  “Your mother worries about people taking advantage of you,” Sanjeev’s dad said, loading up the handcart with wood for the pizza oven. “You weren’t born to this city. All I’d say is, don’t love it too much; soldiers will let you down; they can’t help it. All wars eventually end.”

  With what remained from his money when he had divided it between his mother and father and put some away in the credit union for Priya, Sanjeev went down to Tea Lane and stuck down the deposit and first payment on a pair of big metally leathery black and red and flame-pattern boots. He wore them proudly to work the next day, stuck out beside the driver of the phatphat so everyone could see them, and paid the owner of the Bata Boot and Shoe store assiduously every Friday. At the end of twelve weeks they were Sanjeev’s entirely. In that time he had also bought the Ts, the fake-latex pants (real latex hot hot far too hot and sweaty for Varanasi, baba), the Kali bangles and necklaces, the hair gel and the eye kohl, but the boots first, the boots before all. Boots make the robotwallah.

  “Do you fancy a go?”

  It was one of those questions so simple and unexpected that Sanjeev’s brain rolled straight over it and it was only when he was gathering up the fast-food wrappers (messy, messy boys) that it crept up and hit him over the head.

  “What, you mean that?” A nod of the head towards the harnesses hanging like flayed hides from the feedback rig.

  “If you want; there’s not much on.”

  There hadn’t been much on for the better part of a month. The last excitement had been when some cracker in a similar go-down in Delhi had broken through the Kali Cav’s aeai firewall with a spike of burnware. Big Baba had suddenly leaped up in his rig like a million billion volts had just shot through (which, Sanjeev discovered later, it kind of had) and next thing the biocontrol interlocks had blown (indoor fireworks, woo) and he was kicking on the floor like epilepsy. Sanjeev had been first to the red button and a crash team had whisked him to the rich people’s private hospital. The aeais had evolved a patch against the new burnware by the time Sanjeev went to get the lunch tins from the dhabawallah and Big Baba was back on his corner of the sofa within three days suffering nothing more than a lingering migraine. Jemadar woman sent a get-well e-card.

  So it was with excitement and wariness that Sanjeev let Rai help him into the rig. He knew all the snaps and grips, he had tightened the straps and pulled snug the motion sensors a hundred times, but Rai doing it made it special, made Sanjeev a robotwallah.

  “You might find this a little freaky,” Rai said as he settled the helmet over Sanjeev’s head. For an instant it was blackout, deafness as the phonobuds sought out his eardrums. “They’re working on this new thing, some kind of bone induction thing so they can send the pictures and sounds straight into your brain,” he heard Rai’s voice say on the com. “But I don’t think we’ll get it in time. Now, just stand there and don’t shoot anything.”

  The warning was still echoing in Sanjeev’s inner ear as he blinked and found himself standing outside a school compound in a village so like Ahraura that he instinctively looked for Mrs. Mawji and Shree the holy red calf. Then he saw that the school was deserted, its roof gone, replaced with military camouflage sheeting. The walls were pocked with bullets down to the brickwork. Siva and Krishna with his flute had been hastily painted on the intact mud plaster, and the words 13th Mechanised Sowar: Section headquarters. There were men in smart, tightly belted uniforms with moustaches and bamboo lathis. Women with brass water pots and men on bicycles passed the open gate. By stretching, Sanjeev found he could elevate his sensory rig to crane over the wall. A village, an
Ahraura, but too poor to even avoid war. On his left a robot stood under a dusty neem tree. I must be one of those, Sanjeev thought, a General Dynamics A8330 Syce, a mean, skeletal desert rat of a thing on two vicious clawed feet, a heavy sensory crown and two Gatling arms—fully interchangeable with gas shells or slime guns for policing work, he remembered from War Mecha’s October 2038 edition.

  Sanjeev glanced down at his own feet. Icons opened across his field of vision like blossoming flowers: location, elevation, temperature, ammunition load-out, the level of methane in his fuel tanks, tactical and strategic sat maps—he seemed to be in south-west Bihar—but what fascinated Sanjeev was that if he formed a mental picture of lifting his Sanjeev foot, his Syce claw would lift from the dust.

  Go on try it it’s a quiet day you’re on sentry duty in some cow-shit Bihar village.

  Forward, he willed. The bot took one step two. Walk, Sanjeev commanded. There. The robot walked jauntily towards the gate. No one in the street of shattered houses looked twice as he stepped among them. This is great! Sanjeev thought as he strolled down the street, then, This is like a game. Doubt then: So how do I even know this war is happening? A step too far; the Syce froze a hundred metres from the Ganesh temple, turned, and headed back to its sentry post. What what what what what? he yelled in his head.

  “The onboard aeai took over,” Rai said, his voice startling as a firecracker inside his helmet. Then the village went black and silent and Sanjeev was blinking in the ugly low-energy neons of the Kali Cavalry battle room, Rai gently unfastening the clips and snaps and strappings.

  That evening, as he went home through the rush of people with his fist of rupees, Sanjeev realised two things: that most of war was boring and that this boring war was over.

  The war was over. The jemadar visited the video-silk wall three times, twice, once a week, where in the heat and glory she would have given orders that many times a day. The Kali Cav lolled around on their sofas playing games, lying to their online fans about the cool exciting sexy things they were doing, though the fans never believed they ever really were robotwallahs, but mostly doing battle-drug combos that left them fidgety and aggressive. Fights flared over a cigarette, a look, how a door was closed or left open. Sanjeev threw himself into the middle of a dozen robotwallah wars. But when the American peacekeepers arrived Sanjeev knew it truly was over because they only came in when there was absolutely no chance any of them would get killed. There was a flurry of car bombings and I-war attacks and even a few suicide blasts, but everyone knew that that was just everyone who had a grudge against America and Americans in sacred Bharat. No, the war was over.

  “What will you do?” Sanjeev’s father asked, meaning, What will I do when Umbrella Street becomes just another Asian ginza?

  “I’ve saved some money,” Sanjeev said.

  With the money he had saved Godspeed! had bought a robot. It was a Tata Industries D55, a small but nimble antipersonnel bot with detachable free-roaming submechas, Level 0.8s, about as smart as a chicken, which they resembled. Even secondhand it must have cost much more than a teenage robotwallah heavily consuming games, online time, porn, and Sanjeev’s dad’s kofta pizza could ever save. “I got backers,” Godspeed! said. “Funding. Hey, what do you think of this? I’m getting her pimped; this is the skin job.” When the paint dried, the robot would be roadfreighted up to Varanasi.

  “But what are you going to do with it?” Sanjeev asked.

  “Private security. They’re always going to need security drones.”

  Tidying the tiny living room that night for his mother’s nine o’clock lesson, opening the windows to let out the smell of hot ghee though the stink of the street was little better, Sanjeev heard a new chord in the ceaseless song of Umbrella Street. He threw open the window shutters in time to see an object, close, fast as a dashing bird, dart past his face, swing along the power line and down the festooned pylon. Glint of anodised alu-plastic: a boy raised on Battlebots Top Trumps could not fail to recognise a Tata surveillance mecha. Now the commotion at the end of Umbrella Street became clear: the hunched back of a battlebot was pushing between the cycle rickshaws and phatphats. Even before he could fully make out the customised goddemons of Mountain Buddhism on its carapace, Sanjeev knew the machine’s make and model and who was flying it.

  A badmash on an alco moto rode slowly in front of the ponderously stepping machine, relishing the way the street opened in front of him and the electric scent of heavy firepower at his back. Sanjeev saw the mech step up and squat down on its hydraulics before Jagmohan’s greasy little pakora stand. The badmash skidded his moped to a stand and pushed up his shades.

  They will always need security drones.

  Sanjeev rattled down the many many flights of stairs of the patriotically renamed Diljit Rana Apartments, yelling and pushing and beating at the women and young men in very white shirts. The robot had already taken up its position in front of his father’s big clay pizza oven. The carapace unfolded like insect wings into weapon mounts. Badmash was all teeth and grin in the anticipation of another commission. Sanjeev dashed between his father and the prying, insect sensory rig of the robot. Red demons and Sivas with fiery tridents looked down on him.

  “Leave him alone; this is my dad; leave him be.”

  It seemed to Sanjeev that the whole of Umbrella Street, every vehicle upon it, every balcony and window that overlooked it, stopped to watch. With a whir the weapon pods retracted, the carapace clicked shut. The battle machine reared up on its legs as the surveillance drones came skittering between people’s legs and over countertops, scurried up the machine, and took their places on its shell mounts, like egrets on the back of a buffalo. Sanjeev stared the badmash down. He sneered, snapped down his cool sexy dangerous shades, and spun his moped away.

  Two hours later, when all was safe and secure, a Peacekeeper unit had passed up the street asking for information. Sanjeev shook his head and sucked on his asthma inhalers.

  “Some machine, like.”

  Suni left the go-down. No word no note no clue, his family had called and called and called, but no one knew. There had always been rumours of a man with money and prospects, who liked the robotwallah thing, but you do not tell those sorts of stories to mothers. Not at first asking. A week passed without the jemadar calling. It was over. So over. Rai had taken to squatting outside, squinting up through his cool sexy dangerous shades at the sun, watching for its burn on his pale arms, chain-smoking street-rolled bidis.

  “Sanj.” He smoked the cheap cigarette down to his gloved fingers and ground the stub out beneath the steel heel of his boot. “When it happens, when we can’t use you anymore, have you something sorted? I was thinking, maybe you and I could do something together, go somewhere. Just have it like it was, just us. An idea, that’s all.”

  The message came at 3:00 A.M. I’m outside. Sanjeev tiptoed around the sleeping bodies to open the window. Umbrella Street was still busy; Umbrella Street had not slept for a thousand years. The big black Kali Cav Hummer was like a funeral moving through the late-night people of the new Varanasi. The door locks made too much noise, so Sanjeev exited through the window, climbing down the pipes like a Raytheon double-eight thousand I-war infiltration bot. In Ahraura he would never have been able to do that.

  “You drive,” Rai said. From the moment the message came through, Sanjeev had known it would be him, and him alone.

  “I can’t drive.”

  “It drives itself. All you have to do is steer. It’s not that different from the game. Swap over there.”

  Steering wheel pedal drive windshield display all suddenly looked very big to Sanjeev in the driver’s seat. He touched his foot to the gas. Engines answered; the Hummer rolled; Umbrella Street parted before him. He steered around a wandering cow.

  “Where do want me to go?”

  “Somewhere, away. Out of Varanasi. Somewhere no one else would go.” Rai bounced and fidgeted on the passenger seat. His hands were busy busy; his eyes were huge. He h
ad done a lot of battle drugs. “They sent them back to school, man. To school, can you imagine that? Big Baba and Ravana. Said they needed real-world skills. I’m not going back, not never. Look!”

  Sanjeev dared a glance at the treasure in Rai’s palm: a curl of sculpted translucent pink plastic. Sanjeev thought of aborted goat fetuses, and the sex toys the girls had used in their favourite pornos. Rai tossed his head to sweep back his long, gelled hair and slid the device behind his ear. Sanjeev thought he saw something move against Rai’s skin, seeking.

  “I saved it all up and bought it. Remember, I said? It’s new; no one else has one. All that gear, that’s old; you can do everything with this, just in your head, in the pictures and words in your head.” He gave a stoned grin and moved his hands in a dancer’s mudra. “There.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The Hummer was easy to drive: the in-car aeai had a flocking reflex that enabled it to navigate Varanasi’s ever-swelling morning traffic, leaving little for Sanjeev to do other than blare the triple horns, which he enjoyed a lot. Somewhere he knew he should be afraid, should feel guilty at stealing away in the night without word or note, should say, Stop, whatever it is you are doing, it can come to nothing, it’s just silliness, the war is over, and we must think properly about what to do next. But the brass sun was rising above the glass towers and spilling into the streets and men in sharp white shirts and women in smart saris were going busy to their work, and he was free, driving a big smug car through them all, and it was so good, even if just for a day.