The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “You thought she had come back to you, but she was still working for the network.”

  She nodded. Eyes that had once been beautiful peered out from a nest of premature wrinkles. Lines of discontent surrounded the well-shaped lips. Her hair was tied in a bun, the free end of the sari draped over her head. Her sari was blue, not white, but I knew I was looking into the face of a mourner.

  “So she said nothing about this network,” I said at last. “You didn’t see her meet anyone … .”

  “I don’t know anything about those people,” she said. “Janani knew I would be upset if she talked about them. Always, letters came for her, and phone calls at the booth in the next lane. I don’t know anything.”

  She made space for me on a mat on the floor. Through the one shutter she had opened, pale light came in. She went to the front and yelled to a boy to bring tea.

  The tea came in chipped glasses, milky and strong with the scent of cardamom. I sipped and listened to Rinu talk about her life with Janani. She kept rubbing tears away from the corners of her eyes.

  “Why are you so certain she is dead?” I asked her. Without a word she got up, went behind a curtain at the back of the shop, and returned with an envelope that she handed to me. When I opened it I found a piece of newsprint torn from an English-language daily based out of Bangkok. With it was a note in a crude hand that said simply: “Sorry. She was one of our best.” It was signed “A.R.”

  “The man at the tea shop read it to me,” she said, pointing to the newspaper fragment. “I don’t read English—not enough.”

  The news brief said only that there had been an explosion in an abandoned warehouse in a locality on the outskirts of Bangkok. Three people had been killed, two of them women. One of them was believed to have been a tourist from India, one Janani Devi. The heat from the explosion had been so great that nothing recognizable had been left of the bodies. Witnesses had seen the three people entering the warehouse just before the explosion.

  I stared at the dirty little piece of paper, numb with grief and anger. This only confirmed what I had feared all along—that Janani was dead. I would never be able to confront her now, never have answers to my questions. Never receive letters from her, full of scolding and advice …

  Rinu leaned forward, patted me on the shoulder. She wiped her face with the end of her sari. I thought of Rahul Moghe in the hotel room, the phone call, and his face filled with hunger and anticipation as he said, “Bangkok.”

  Who had called him? Who had told him about the next landing? Had he known Janani would be there?

  For that matter, how had he known—twice—where to find me?

  “You betrayed her, didn’t you?” My words came out brokenly.

  Her shapely lower lip trembled. Perhaps she thought I could read her mind. But the pieces were slowly coming together.

  “You were the one who told Rahul Moghe I had gone to America. Someone must have been telling him. How else would he find me in San Francisco and Boston? You couldn’t read the English return addresses on my letters to Janani, but perhaps you could read enough to make out the city I was in. Tell me, did you phone him from somewhere, or did you write?”

  She flinched, then gathered herself together and stood up. I stood up also, trembling with rage. She spat at my feet.

  “Yes, yes, I betrayed her. I told Rahul Moghe that she was going to Bangkok, that they had found one of his kind. I knew he would find her and confront her, perhaps kill her. So what! She betrayed our love a hundred times. I always came second for her. Even to you—you!”

  Tears slid down her face, and a wave of jealous hatred rose in her mind.

  “You! A thing, a creature from another world—she loved you better than me! Serve her right! But I never knew what it would be like without her. I thought I could just go back to the time ten years ago before she returned. I had become free of wanting her, you see … .”

  My mind lashed out at hers like the talons of a predatory bird. I had never been able to do this before. Suddenly, I knew I could hurt her. I drew back. I looked at her, now sobbing at my feet. A face peered around the shutters.

  “Anything wrong, Rinu-behn?”

  It was the barber’s wife from next door; she glared suspiciously at me.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “It’s just some bad news I brought. Death in the family. Look after her—I must be on my way.”

  I left that miserable creature sobbing in the arms of her neighbor and went away, feeling a hundred curious eyes on me.

  In my little hotel room I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling for what seemed like days. The sun rose and set in the two small windows that faced each other, and each time dark fell I saw the stars of Sapt-Rishi burning in a velvet sky.

  Sapt-Rishi … Sankaran showing me star charts on his computer.

  I roused myself, made a phone call to Sankaran’s home in Chennai. It would be good to see him, I thought. But he wasn’t there. I talked to his mother, who spoke with enthusiasm about the wedding. She told me that Sankaran and his bride had gone to Ootacamund for their honeymoon.

  I thought of Sankaran in the blue Nilgiri hills, the stars spreading in the sky above him like a great, sequined quilt. Would he lecture his wife on celestial objects? Would she listen to him as I had? A great wave of envy and loneliness swept over me.

  I spent the remaining week of my leave wandering around the hill towns near Rishikesh. I bathed in the holy waters of the Ganga with the other pilgrims. I went to a lonely shrine of Lord Shiva’s, high in the mountains. Moved by a strange impulse, I set before the stone lingam a small offering of marigolds. In the little hill towns I walked the crowded streets restlessly, enjoying, despite my grief and loneliness, the anonymity that I had nowhere else in the world.

  When I returned to Boston, I was in the lowest of spirits. I had lost everything, including my illusions about myself. Sankaran was my last resort. I needed the healing touch of his mind, the restful pleasure of his company. Meanwhile I wondered uneasily about Rahul Moghe. He seemed to have vanished from my life, but I could never rid myself entirely of his presence. It was as though he had left a splinter lodged in me, a ghost of a voice that called to me with a longing that could not be denied, an endless summons of desire that reminded me of the bull I had seen once on a street in New Delhi.

  Sankaran’s itinerary was posted on my fridge. As the day of his return approached, I became more and more nervous. What if his wife was a tyrant? What if she restricted his movements so that we could no longer meet? How could I make a claim on him that would be at least equal to that of his wife?

  How does a man who is not a man or a woman, not a human or an alien—how does such a being confess his love to another man?

  Then it came to me: I would tell him my story.

  Not all at once, but with hints and intimations at first.

  I shook all over at the thought. With Janani gone, there was nobody in the world excepting Rinu and the network who knew what I was. What better evidence of love and trust could I give Sankaran?

  On an impulse I went to the local bookstore and bought the most lavish card I could find. In it I wrote:

  Dear Sankaran,

  Lord Shiva has given me an answer to one of the questions you asked him.

  There is life on other worlds. Let’s talk about this.

  Your Friend,

  Arun.

  I put the card in an envelope and pushed it under the door of his apartment. Breathlessly I waited for his return, for the time when I could once more sink my mind into the cool streambed of his being. On the day that he was to arrive I decided to surprise him by meeting him and his wife at the airport.

  Because there was a traffic pileup on the highway, I was late getting to the airport. When I rushed into the baggage claim area, most of the passengers from his flight had left. I looked around for him for a while. Finally I realized that he must have already gone home.

  I drove like a madman to his apartment. When I arri
ved, I found Sankaran and his wife relaxing over coffee. Sankaran welcomed me and introduced me to his wife.

  She was all aglitter in a blue silk sari and gold jewelry. Her eyes were like black beetles. She smiled coldly and disapprovingly at me. With a shock I realized that I could not sense her mind at all. She was a blank.

  As for Sankaran, I sensed that the clarity and beauty of his mind was already being undermined by the confusion and contradictions that characterize the ordinary person. There were only hints of damage now, but the clean, clear transparency of his soul that had sustained me was breaking up into bubbles, little patches of opacity. He was dissipating before my eyes.

  What had she done to him?

  She was holding the card I had put under the door. She wrinkled her nose as though she had picked it up out of the trash and handed it to him.

  “What’s this?”

  He glanced at it without (apparently) noting my untidy scrawl. He shrugged his shoulders, put the card on the desk, and smiled fondly at his wife, following her movements with his eyes as she poured me a cup of coffee. He was already only peripherally aware of me.

  My heart clenched in my chest. I drank my coffee in a few gulps, burning my tongue, made my excuses as quickly as I could, and left them to their domestic bliss.

  The next time I saw Sankaran, I didn’t see him. I was in the café, and he walked in with his wife, and I didn’t even feel the quiet, clean wave of his mind wash over and refresh my soul.

  I remembered then what physicists say about solitons—eventually they all dissipate.

  It is hard for me to recall with composure the days after these events. I lived in a surreal, depressive daze in which night and day blurred into one another. My mind dwelled constantly on death and loss.

  When my company folded and I lost my job, I left Boston and began to travel. My depression gave way to the restlessness that had always been a part of me. I moved from port to port, taking up jobs in short spells, staying only as long as the wanderlust let me. I felt as though I was being shadowed—whether it was by my ghost self or Rahul Moghe I could not tell. A footfall on a quiet street in the outskirts of Atlanta. My hotel door in Milan creaking open, then shut, while I lay half-asleep on the bed. A whisper in a darkened street in Ankara, saying my name. Through this troubled time I continued to experiment with mind-weaving, but without the enthusiasm of my earlier days. I was only too aware that whatever pleasure it gave me was temporary—and that it underlined the fact that I was not human.

  Eventually I washed up on Indian shores. It was a relief to be back; I took comfort in the small but immutable fact that I looked like everybody else. I knew the sense of belonging was illusory, but it eased my mind a little.

  I took up a job as a lecturer at a college in South Delhi. Something about the slow circumlocutions of the ceiling fans, the languor of heat-stupefied students, the cool rush of air-conditioned air in the computer rooms, took me back to my own days as a young student, when I had not a care in the world and Janani was still part of my life. I used my skills with mind-weaving, crude as they were, to settle disputes, to help students understand each other. This should have given me some satisfaction, but at the end of the day when I went up to my two-room flat only the familiar despair awaited me. At times I wanted to end my life, but the same inertia that kept me from living also kept me from dying by my own hand.

  Then I met Binodini.

  Her mind was muscular, strong, beautiful. Its fluxes and transformations were smooth, controlled, like a dancer executing a familiar turn. Although she could not sense my mind exploring hers, I had difficulty manipulating its topography to make a meta-mind with another. There was a discipline about her that, while quite different from the high-Himalayan feel of a soliton’s mind, had a similar, if muted, effect on me—a subtle quieting, a calming. In appearance she was a middle-aged woman with graying hair that she did up carelessly in a bun; her face was calm, her large, sympathetic eyes observant.

  She taught sociology. I had seen her at faculty meetings and liked the shape of her mind; one day, when I was nursing a cup of tea alone at a stained wooden table in the café, she asked if she could join me. It turned out she was a divorced single woman without children. She did research on groups that believed in supernatural phenomena including UFO sightings.

  “Do you believe in aliens?” I asked her, hoping I sounded jocular.

  She smiled. “There are things I’ve come across in my research that I can’t explain. So I keep an open mind.” She looked at me over her cup of chai. “Something tells me that your question wasn’t a casual one. Is there an experience you’ve had that you can’t explain either?”

  I wasn’t ready to tell her, but it occurred to me with an immense sense of relief that perhaps I had found a confidante.

  Life wasn’t easy for her. She was not interested in a relationship and had to keep fending off men who couldn’t understand that. There was a controlled fierceness about her, a courage and curiosity that kept her going. She kept a little vegetable garden behind her apartment, where she grew red radishes and brinjal, and simla mirch. I still recall the color and roundness of freshly uprooted radishes in the blue ceramic bowl on her kitchen table, the crunch of her strong white teeth as she bit into one. She did an hour of yoga every morning.

  “I’d be dead without yoga,” she told me. “Disciplines the mind.”

  She gave me a shrewd look.

  “It’s also good if you’re in mourning.”

  It was then that I told her. That morning—classes had been canceled due to some unrest in the city—we’d walked off campus together, and she had invited me into her home.

  She listened well. I don’t think she necessarily believed me the first time, but she didn’t disbelieve me either. To my own ears my story sounded ludicrous, but her sympathy was real, without condescension.

  Later I showed her my things, the broken ceramic bits that were presumably the remains of my ship; the photos; Janani’s letters. She looked at everything with a scholar’s interested gaze, mingled with childlike wonder. When she looked at me her eyes were bright; she hugged me.

  “Take me to your leader,” I said, to stop my own tears. And we laughed helplessly.

  After that we spent a lot of time together. We went to movie theaters and watched bad science fiction films. We sat in the café and talked. I sensed that she was holding off on becoming intimate with me, which at first upset me. But I knew that although our friendship had brought a lightness into my heart, the despair was still there. I was still haunted by what had happened to me, and she knew it.

  “You know you have to find him, don’t you?” she told me after we emerged from a showing of Antariksh ki Yatra.

  The crowd was spilling out of the exit doors; my feet crunched on popcorn. A teenager was shouting into her cell phone; somewhere I smelled henna. A man looked at me from the doorway and smiled, apparently mistaking me for someone else. His face changed when I stared at him.

  Outside under the neem trees it was dark, quiet. The earth smelled damp from yesterday’s rain. Tonight the stars were partly obscured by city haze and light pollution. As was my habit, I looked for the star that was my native sun, but the constellation Sapt-Rishi was lost in the haze.

  “Whom do I have to find?” I said, although I knew whom she meant.

  “Rahul Moghe.”

  His name, unspoken for so long, sent an electric shock through me. My ghost self arose in my mind as though it had been waiting for those very syllables. I felt a great wave of fear and longing.

  Over the next few days Binodini argued with me, and ultimately I gave in. She was simply repeating to me what my own mind had been trying to tell me: that if I were to have any peace in this life I would have to confront Rahul Moghe, to find the answers to the questions that had plagued me half my life. And then I would have to make a decision.

  “All right,” I said at last. From pursued I would become the pursuer. But how would I find him?


  “You’ll find him,” Binodini said confidently.

  One day I confessed to her my greatest fear. What if I joined forces with Rahul Moghe and turned against humanity as he had done? “He would kill you without a thought,” I told her. “Do you want me to become like that?”

  “Listen, Arun, whatever decision you make, you will still be you. Alien or human—those are just words, labels. You are what you are.”

  So I went looking. Because I didn’t know where to find Rahul Moghe, I followed the trails of disasters, riots, unexplained violent events. But all these turned out to be the work of human beings alone. Wherever he was, Rahul Moghe was not trying to attract my attention.

  One evening I was in a train returning from one of these trips. The Shatabdi Express was tearing through the night across the Gangetic plain. I was in a secondclass, air-conditioned compartment; my fellow travelers were asleep, but I was wide awake, leaning against the window, watching my reflection in the glass. The impenetrable night outside made the compartment seem like a cocoon, a world unto itself. Yet as the train swayed and sang in rhythm, it seemed to be singing his name.

  Rahul Moghe, wherever you are, let me find you, I said in my mind, with all the fervor of my despair.

  I didn’t know I had also spoken aloud. The man in front of me, huddled in a blanket, stirred; black eyes snapped open. His mind woke suddenly, but he closed his eyes and feigned sleep. There was a suitcase under his bunk, embossed in gold letters: Amit Rajagopal.

  It wasn’t him. I would have known Rahul Moghe anywhere from his mind’s signature. This man’s mind seemed vaguely familiar, but perhaps it was just that he reminded me of someone at the college. I didn’t pay much attention to him because something in my own mind woke up when I made my plea.

  How can I describe it?

  It’s like falling asleep with the radio on very low. The sound does not disturb your sleep or your dreams, except perhaps to give them a certain haunted quality, but when you wake up it is there. So I heard his voice in my mind as it woke, calling to me very faintly across a vast distance.