The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  I went across to him, trying to control my excitement. His being Indian provided an easy excuse to introduce myself.

  He was a post-doctoral researcher at one of the universities scattered about this great city. He lived in a hole in Cambridge. While traveling on a bus he had gotten so engrossed in a collection of conference reports that he had gotten off at the wrong stop. Finding himself near a café, he had dropped in for a coffee and a good, long read.

  “You mean you don’t know where you are?”

  He turned his brown eyes to me and smiled. For a moment he really seemed to be there in the café. “Does any body?” he said, separating the “body” from the “any” with the precision of a surgeon. I thought this a deeply philosophical statement until he explained that he meant that since the Earth and the solar system and the entire galaxy were constantly changing their places in space, one had to be very specific about reference frames. I was utterly charmed.

  After I helped Sankaran find his way home, we became friends. He never sought me out, but I began to haunt a coffee shop in Cambridge where he turned up nearly every evening like a homing pigeon, armed with books and papers. When aware of the mundane world, he treated it with a bemused, indiscriminate kindness—being the kind of person who, upon bumping into people, doors, or potted plants, apologizes to them with equal courtesy. Much of the time I watched him over my coffee cup, filled with silent wonder. I could explore his mind, embrace it with my own, but I could not draw it to me, play with it, or manipulate it. He was untouched by my mental explorations. He had no need of me; he posed no threat. He filled the emptiness that had been growing in me.

  I discovered in Sankaran some of the things that had drawn me to Dulari—but without the pain. His mind had the delicacy of petals about to unfurl and the innocence and wonder of a child beholding a rainbow for the first time. Instead of the white noise of contradictory emotions, the cacophony of thwarted desire and loneliness that makes up a typical human mind, his mind possessed the deep peacefulness found in high places, in the thin air of Himalayan country above the snow line. He did not torture himself with questions about his purpose in life or what other people thought about him—indeed, the obsession with self was quite absent in him. He was beautiful, a being absorbed at play in a universe far vaster than ordinary humans could imagine.

  Looking at him, at his thin, mahogany brown body draped without grace on the sofa while his mind saw wonders I could only guess at, I was filled with the sweetness of desire. I wanted to touch his body as well as his mind. I wanted his touch, even if it were only as brief and innocent as a hand on my arm. In India, where platonic friends of the same sex often hold hands or fling arms around each other in public without censure or misunderstanding, it would have been easy. But social mores were different here, and—more to the point—he remained unaware of my need of him.

  I spent as much time as I could with Sankaran. Sometimes I would meet him in the physics department and amuse myself looking at star charts on the computer as he finished a colloquium or worked out his equations. He would join me at the computer when he was done and fill me with astronomical lore as we roamed the galaxy. Here was a red giant, there a supernova, a binary star system, a neutron star, a black hole, an extra-solar planet fifteen times the mass of Jupiter. I learned the lexicon of astronomy as a lover learns the body of his love.

  Gradually I got to know a little about Sankaran’s background. He was from a learned Tamilian family. He was very fond of his mother and his elder brother, who remained in the ancestral home in Chennai after his father’s death. I had a mental picture of the faded whitewash on the walls, the banana trees in the courtyard at the back. When he talked about his family, he seemed suddenly to come to earth.

  “My mother’s cooking, nothing like it.” Or, “Unna taught me calculus in eighth class.”

  “They want for me to get married,” he told me once, shyly. He shook his head. “I do not have time for a wife. But it is also tradition to continue your line. Life is not simple.” He sighed. But for an accident of gender and the cruelty of convention, I would have married him in a minute.

  He was also a devotee of Lord Shiva. He kept a small stone Shiva lingam in his room, a shrine in a bookshelf surrounded by books and papers on astrophysics. There was only one picture on the wall—a photograph of the beautiful and graceful Tamilian actress Shobhana. Sankaran confessed shyly to me that he was a fan.

  I feigned an interest in cooking so I could spend more time with him in the privacy of his room. As I stirred eggplant curry on the stove, I would look at him as he lay on the bed, flipping through the latest Astrophysical Journal, his eyes dreamy. He would mutter phrases that were meaningless to me, things like “virial theorem” or “off-main-sequence star.” Sometimes I would ask him to explain, and I would perch on the bed next to him, feeling the heat of his body, the passion of his intellect. I would glance up at the stone phallus of Shiva and remember how it felt to pretend to be a woman for my old lover, Manek. In the little studio apartment the air would fill with the smell of roasting spices, cumin and coriander, and the sharp, enticing aroma of ginger. I would lean close to Sankaran, looking with him at incomprehensible pages of equations and star charts, conscious only of his nearness, the soft black hairs on his arms stirring in unison with the rhythm of his breath. I would stretch my mind toward his, enclosing him, burying myself between the flanks of his beautiful, oblivious mind. Sleepy with desire, I would remember that one of the manifestations of Shiva is Ardhanarishwaram: half man, half woman. Shiva is the one who dances the world into being and out of it. One day I said:

  “Tell me something, Sankaran. If you could ask the Lord Shiva three questions, what would they be?”

  He was silent for a while. Then he said, “I would ask if the dark matter problem is truly a question of missing mass. Then I would ask about the Higgs boson and the accelerating expansion rate. Which may be related to the very failure of the standard model I mentioned at the seminar. You have to consider …”

  I would distract him gently back to my question. Each time I asked him the question, he would answer as though he had never been asked this before. One day, after he had read a letter from his mother, he sighed.

  “I would like to ask Lord Shiva if there is some way I can avoid getting married without hurting my family.”

  And once:

  “I would ask Lord Shiva if there is life on the extra-solar planets we have found. If there is life on other worlds at all.”

  I found myself falling into Sankaran’s gravitational well as inevitably as a star being swallowed by a black hole.

  Janani cautioned me not to focus on Sankaran to the exclusion of other things. “Explore your ability,” she wrote. “Travel a bit. See the world, Arun. Immerse yourself in it. We think all we have are our paltry possessions and the special people in our lives. But the world is greater than that … .”

  Her advice came too late. I remember wondering about the tone of Janani’s letter—she was not one to wax philosophical as a rule. It occurred to me that she never wrote about her life in Rishikesh, or the woman she worked with—I had never thought to ask about these things. But then I had a new distraction. Sankaran got a phone call from his elder brother in India. The family had found him a bride. He was to go home in a week to tie the knot.

  He told me the news with a resigned air. Clearly he saw marriage as a duty to endure with good grace. We sat in silence for a while, my own mind reeling with dismay and resentment. Then Sankaran turned back to his notes and scribbled away at his equations, quite happily lost in his universe of stellar wonders, and I was relieved. The wife would be a nuisance, and I would have to find a way to spend time with Sankaran without her interfering, but she could never truly touch him, never own him. How could one woman compete with a trillion burning suns?

  I saw him off at the airport. As I felt the quiet comfort of his mind recede, I staggered out into the warm light of a spring day, a man adrift in a sea of bl
athering minds, without an island in sight.

  The days of his absence are still clear to me: the heat of my apartment, the monotony of the days at work, the stupefying predictability of the minds around me that produced an answering dullness in my own soul.

  Then came a letter from Janani that worried and mystified me.

  “I am going on a journey to Thailand,” she wrote. “I, who have never been out of India! I am very excited to be traveling on a plane and seeing the world, just as you have done. At my age, too! Still, it is not a pleasure trip. I am on an adventure, Arun, the culmination of a life’s work. I don’t know if I will emerge from it unscathed. Meanwhile I have just sent you a parcel containing the last of your things. When you understand who you are, Arun, I hope you will forgive me … .”

  There was no way to contact Janani for details. The little shop where she lived and worked as a seamstress did not have a phone. I debated going to India to see her. The thought was tempting. I had not been home in three years. Perhaps later I could go down to Chennai and see Sankaran. I began making inquiries at a travel agent’s.

  But Providence had other plans.

  A few days before I was to pay for my ticket, I woke up in the throes of a nightmare. I sat up in bed in the half-light of dawn, looking around at the familiar chaos of my room, wiping my sweaty hands on the bedclothes. The monster that had been there in my dream was still present, however. I sensed it—a meta-mind of great power. It seemed to be some distance away, a fact that puzzled me. Even the selfgenerated meta-mind I had encountered at the rally in Delhi had had a fairly short range. I remembered how it had buzzed and hummed in my ears, driving me close to madness. This was something like that, but quieter. It was engaged in some kind of play, like a child absorbed in a toy. Only this play felt dangerous.

  I could have walked away from it, but I felt a deep curiosity mingled with fear. Where was this meta-mind? What was taking up its attention so completely? How had such a powerful thing come into being?

  I dressed hurriedly, flung myself into the car, and began to drive toward it.

  When I was halfway to Boston (having driven about ten miles) I realized it was much farther than I had thought. What could make its presence felt from so far away?

  My apprehension mounted the closer I got to it. As I drove between the tall buildings of the city, with the sunlight flashing on tiers of windowpanes, reflecting in my eyes, I realized that the meta-mind was different from any I had encountered. The one at the Red Fort had been a hasty and temporary thing, powerful only because it was made up of seventeen thousand minds. This thing had fewer components and was more focused, like a laser beam.

  I came to a stop before an old brick office building. Sirens wailed; as I leaped out of my car, police vehicles and ambulances drove up, disgorging men in uniform. A crowd had collected in front of the building, looking skyward with a mixture of apprehension and ghoulish anticipation. I squinted against the glare of the sun and saw a man standing on a window ledge some seven stories above the street. He teetered, looked behind him, and jumped.

  He seemed to fall in slow motion, his arms flung up as though in surrender. About halfway down, his mind, which had been locked in a trancelike state, woke up to screaming terror. Too quickly, a red flower blossomed on the sidewalk, and a splinter of bone buried itself in a watching woman’s arm. People screamed, moving back, stumbling over each other. Blood spattered their clothes. TV cameras zoomed in as policemen began to shout orders.

  Then the next one fell. A woman, her skirts billowing up. She broke like a cracked egg on the sidewalk.

  In the screaming and confusion I darted into an entrance I’d noticed further along the sidewalk.

  I took an elevator to the seventh floor. The meta-mind was still quivering with satisfaction. It was composed of not more than twenty minds, twisted and knotted together, not randomly but with the intricacy, order, and beauty of an integrated circuit or a Persian carpet. It was beautiful and deadly, and I sensed its hunger as it felt around for its next victim.

  I entered a corridor with plush blue carpeting and chrome and glass décor. The place was cold and smelled of fear. People stood silently in little knots, with wide, frightened eyes. A troop of policemen were trying to force open one of the double doors in the hallway. A large woman in a red business suit was flailing her arms and crying hysterically, “Another one! There must be another one!”

  I stood very still, concentrating, stilling my own fears. My mind felt like it was being run over by a convoy of trucks. I thought of Sankaran, took a deep breath, and concentrated on undoing the meta-mind. I slipped into the meta-mind the way a snake enters a marsh, without a ripple, and started to unravel it, thread by thread, mind by mind. The exquisite patterns and symmetries were the work of a master. As I took it apart I regretted having to destroy something so beautifully constructed.

  It came loose as though it had been turned off with a switch. I took a breath of relief, and found that my knees were shaking. I trembled all over, and little rivers of sweat dribbled down my face. Untangling it had taken more out of me than I had realized.

  I leaned against the wall for support, fighting panic. Meanwhile the hysterical woman had stopped shouting and was looking around her in bewilderment. Tears started running down her face. The double doors that the police had been trying to force opened suddenly, and a man looked out. He seemed dazed. The policemen pushed him aside and ran into the room. Inside, people were getting up from a table, passing hands over their eyes, shaking their heads, as though they were coming out of a trance. Sunlight streamed through an open window; the glass lay smashed on the floor, like diamonds. One of the men at the table looked at the window, the policemen. “What happened?” he asked.

  I walked with difficulty to the elevator; every few steps I had to stop to lean against the wall. People around me were shouting, crying, and rushing about, and nobody took any notice of me. As I stumbled into the elevator I realized that only one person could have constructed a meta-mind so powerful.

  Now I recognized the familiar swift current of his mind drawing me toward him. I staggered out of the lobby and round the corner of the building to a blue station wagon. I saw the tinted windows, the flash of the gold ring as the door opened. I got into the passenger seat almost thankfully, collapsing in a heap.

  Rahul Moghe took off his sunglasses, looked at me, and smiled. I had an impression of largeness, although physically he was not more than average in height and build. Seeing him in his entirety, body and mind, was like looking at a vast ship with the prow head-on. His eyes burned like forest fires in his dark face—his arms reached toward me, pulling me into the seat. I heard the click of the seat belt.

  Much later, when I came to, the first thing I saw was his face, leaning over me. We were in a dingy hotel room. I remember the hardness of the bed on which I lay, the sunlight making a pool of brightness on the green carpet. I closed my eyes, but he was still there in my mind.

  The feelers of his mind held me close, with an intimacy that terrified me. He spoke.

  “You are a coward, Arun. You run from the only person who is like you. Why?”

  The fingers of his mind opened every door, every barrier in my mind. He entered my memories, my secret places, the unknown depths of my consciousness. He gathered me to him, and hot pincers of pain gripped my head.

  “What you saw just now is only the beginning of what we can do together. You don’t know who you are, or how long I have needed you. Together we will build meta-minds that will make this last one look like a child. Come, I will train you, tell you how to use your power. But first let me tell you who you are. At last …”

  His mind relaxed its hold on mine as he began to caress me. I was so tired; I had struggled for so long. Now I could rest. I had never known what it was like to reach across the void between one person and another and find a hand held out to grasp your own … .

  I hit him with all the strength I had. I got him squarely on his throat; he
rolled off the bed and fell gasping and gurgling to the ground. My mind pushed his away as I leaped off the bed. He lay on the ground, clutching his throat, rolling from side to side.

  As my hands fumbled with the doorknob, a searing pain tore through my head. He was sitting on the floor, rubbing his neck, concentrating. Against my will, I turned around and walked back to him and sat helplessly on the bed. The pain receded. He sat beside me, his arms pushing me down until his face was leaning over mine.

  “You don’t know who you are, Arun. That bitch Janani took your memories away from you. Did you know that? She took away what you were. If I could resurrect you, I would. But all I can do now is share with you …”

  My vision blanked. I dropped into darkness, into a silence in which my own screams kept echoing. Terrifying images came crowding out of the dark—demonlike visages and shapes that kept morphing from one monstrosity to another. I fell with them toward a pale circle of light that opened up below me like the mouth of a well. Then I lost consciousness.

  When I came to, Rahul Moghe was holding me up against his shoulder, trying to spoon something into my mouth. I gagged as chicken soup went down my throat, then licked my cracked lips and tried to struggle out of his grasp. The room spun.

  “Take it easy,” he said. A dim lamp lit the room; I saw that night had already fallen. I felt weak and spent.

  “It was too much for you, too fast,” he told me, spooning more soup into my mouth. “I see that I have to work against a great deal of conditioning. So much damage has been done … .”

  He let me sleep after that, but throughout my incarceration I never truly regained consciousness. I experienced brief periods of wakeful clarity, but for the most part I was in a confused, dreamlike state during which I could not distinguish between reality and the nightmares that plagued me. Held in Rahul Moghe’s fierce grip, his face against mine, I thought I heard voices of people I had known. Once it seemed a woman lay by me, painfully thin; she nestled sensuously against my shoulder and spoke in Dulari’s voice. Another time I felt Sankaran prop me up to a sitting position. I thought I was being rescued at last, but he was holding a star chart in his hands, pointing at it, saying something insistently. Old friends—the boys I had played with in my teenage years, Manek—walked through my consciousness like ghosts. Always Rahul Moghe was there in my mind, muttering in my ear in Hindi, English, and languages I could not understand. “You belong to me,” he would say. “You and I are one of a kind … both alien, both lost, both pretending to belong … .” And again: “Alone, our powers are nothing. Together we can do things … .” Sometimes his words would echo in my head like muffled drumbeats: “power to change … to change … to change …” or “she burned you … burned you …” He would alternately entreat and reprimand me. “You think you belong, Arun,” I remember him muttering against my ear. “But you live in a dangerous place outside the boundaries humans create around themselves. Man-woman. Mind-body … If your so-called friends could see you as you are, they would hate and revile you. I am the only friend you have, my love. We owe our allegiance to a different star … .”