Forbidden Planets

by Peter Crowther (Ed)

  Kyle plugged the buddy-lead into Salim’s lighthoek and slipped the curl of plastic behind his ear. It had taken a while to work out the sweet spot, but now he got it first time every time. He was not supposed to use lighthoek tech. Mom’s line was that it hadn’t been proved safe yet but Kyle suspected it was his father—it was opening yourself up to evil influences to let things inside your head like that. That was before you even got to what he thought of the artificial evolution game itself. Maybe if he could experience the lift out of the Cantonment, up through the solar arrays, past the cranes and helicopters, and see Salim’s world there in front of him—Alterre, as it was properly called, and feel himself falling toward it through the clouds faster than anything could possibly go to stop light as a feather with his feet brushing the wave—tops; maybe he would change his mind. He could smell the salt. He could feel the wind. He could see the lifted jelly sails of a kronkaeur fleet above the white-edged swell.

  “Aw not these jellyfish guys again,” said Kyle.

  “No no no, this is different.” Salim stood beside him above the waves. “Look, this is really cool.” He folded his hands and leaned forward and flew across the ocean, Kyle a heartbeat behind him. He always thought of those Hindu gods you saw on the prayer cards that blew into the compound from the street shrines. His dad didn’t like those either. They arrived over the kronkaeur armada, beating through a rising ocean on a steady breeze, topsails inflated. When the huge, sail-powered jellyfish had appeared, Kyle had been so excited at his first experience of a newly evolved species that the vast, inflatable monsters had sailed like translucent galleons through his dreams. But all they did was raise their triangular sails and weave their tentacles together into a huge raft-fleet and bud off little jellies that looked like see-through paper boats. Once the initial thrill of being part of the global game-experiment to start life on Earth all over again and see how it evolved differently had worn off, Kyle found himself wishing that Salim had been given somewhere a bit more exciting than a huge square of ocean. An island would have been good. A bit of continent would have been better. Somewhere things could attack each other.

  “Every bit of water on Alterre was land, and every bit of land was water,” Salim had said. “And they will be again. And anyway, everything eats everything out on the open ocean.”

  But not in a cool way, Kyle thought.

  Apart from his high tech and his skill at soccer, nothing about Salim was cool. At home he would never have been Kyle’s friend. Kyle would probably have beat him about a bit, he was geeky, had a big nose, couldn’t get clothes right—all the wrong labels—and had no idea how to wear a beanie. He went to a weird religious school for an hour every afternoon and Fridays to the mosque down by the river steps where they burned the dead people. Really, they should not be friends at all. Ozzie Ryan, who’d been the team big one before Kyle, said it was unnatural and disloyal, and you couldn’t trust them; one moment they’d be giving you presents, and the next they’d be setting you up to people out there to shoot you. Kyle knew Ozzie Ryan was just jealous.

  “Now, isn’t this so cool?” Salim said, his toes brushing the wave-tops. The sculpted upper surfaces of the great ocean-going jellies between the inflatable booms that held out the sails were bloated with bubbles, visibly swelling and bulging as Kyle floated around to a closer angle. Bigger, bigger, now the size of soccer balls, now the size of beach balls, stretching the skin until it split with a gush of acid-smelling liquid, and a host of balloons dashed into the air. They rose in a mass, tethered to their parents by woven strands of tentacles, rubbing and bouncing and rebounding from each other in the wind. They were higher than the sail tops now and Kyle could make out detail; each balloon carried a cluster of stingers and translucent claspers beneath its domed canopy. Blue eyes were grouped in threes and fours. One by one their tethers parted and the balloon-jellies sprang up into the air and were whisked away on the sea breeze. All around him the flotilla was bubbling and bursting into spasms of balloons; they soared up around him, some still tangled together by the tentacles. Kyle found himself laughing as he watched them stream up into the sky until they vanished against the fast-moving clouds. It was definitely undeniably way way way cool.

  “It’s a completely new way of reproducing,” Salim said. “It’s a new species!” Kyle knew what that meant. By the rules of Alterre, played out on eleven million computers around the globe, whoever found a new species gave it his or her name. “They’re not kronkaeurs any more. I went and registered them; they’re Mansooris!”

  Gunfire on Monday Tuesday Wednesday. They were working up to something; that was the pattern of it. (Dad Dad who are they this time, is it the Hindus? but his father had eyes and ears and arms only for Mom, full of thanks and praise to have him safe home from that fearsome city.) Cantonment went to orange alert, but security was still unprepared for the ferocity of the attack. Bombers attacked twelve Western-owned targets simultaneously across Old and New Varanasi. The twelfth and final device was a car bomb driven at full speed across the green zone, impervious to automatic fire, its driver dead or ecstatic to die. Close-defense robots uncoiled from their silos and leaped, nanodiamond blades unsheathed, but the bombers had recced Cantonment’s weaknesses well. Slashed, gashed, leaking oil and fuel, engine dead but still rolling under a heaving cancer of robots trying to cocoon it in impact-foam, the car rammed the inner gate and blew up.

  On the soccer pitch the referee had heard the general alert siren, judged the distance to the changing room, and ordered everyone to lie flat in the goal. Kyle had just wrapped his arms around his head—Day One, Lesson One—when the boom lifted him off the ground by the belly and punched every breath of wind out of him. For a moment he thought he had gone deaf; then the sounds of sirens and RAV air-drones pushed through the numbness until he was sitting on the grass beside Salim seemingly at the center of a vast spiral of roar. It was much bigger than the exploding cat. A column of smoke leaned toward the south. Hummers were rushing past, security men on foot dodging between them. The soccer net was full of chunks of blast-foam and scraps of wire and fragments of shattered plastic robot shell and warning signs in three languages that this was a restricted area with security authorized to use deadly force. A shard of nanodiamond antipersonnel blade was embedded in the left upright. The referee stood up, took off his shirt, and wrapped it around the hand wedged under the crossbar.

  “Would you look at that?” Kyle said.

  There was a long green smear down the front of his freshly laundered soccer shirt.

  “Salim’s always welcome here,” Mom called from the kitchen where she was blitzing smoothies. “Just make sure he calls home to let them know he’s all right the moment the network comes back up. Now promise you’ll do that.”

  Of course they did and of course they didn’t, and the smoothies stood there forgotten and warming on the worktop while Mom edged about folding underwear and pillowcases but really keeping an eye on the rolling news. She was worried. Kyle knew that. Cantonment was locked down and would be until Coalition and Bharati forces had resecured the Green Zone; that was the way it was, Kyle had learned that. Locked down was locked out for Dad, and the SKYIndia hovercams were still showing towers of black plastic smoke and ambulances being walked through the crowds of lost people and burned-out cars by Bharati policemen. The reporters were saying there were casualties, but they were also saying that the network wasn’t fully restored, and that was why he couldn’t call; if there had been Western casualties, they would have said straight away because dead Bharatis didn’t count, and anyway, it was inconceivable that anything could happen to Kyle’s dad. No, in situations like this you kept your head down and got on with things while you waited for the call, so he didn’t trouble Mom and fetched the smoothies himself from the kitchen and took them to join Salim in his world.

  On the house smartsilk screen you couldn’t get that full-sensory drop from orbit or the sense of walking like God over the water, but in the house, even with Mom
in her distracted fold-laundry state, it wasn’t smart to use the buddy-lead. Anyway, Kyle didn’t want to give her more to worry about. Three days in Alterre was more like three million years: still water water water whichever way he turned the point-of-view, but the mansooris had evolved. High above the blue Atlantic, fleets of airships battled.

  “Whoa,” said Kyle Rubin and Salim Mansoori.

  In three days the jellyfish balloons had become vast sky-going gasbags, blimp creatures, translucent airships the size of the Boeing troop transports that brought supplies and workers in to the secure end of Varanasi airport. Their bodies were ridged like the condom Kyle had been shown by the bike rack behind the school; light rippled over them and broke into rainbows as the air-jellies maneuvered. For this was battle, no doubt about it. This was hot war. The sky-jellyfish trailed long clusters of tentacles beneath them, many trailing in the water, their last connection with their old world. But some ended in purple stingers, some in long stabbing spines, some in barbs, and these the airships wielded as weapons. The air-medusas raised or lowered sail flaps to tack and maneuver into striking positions. Kyle saw one blimp, body blotched with black sting-weals, vent gas from nose and tail and drop out of combat. In a tangle of slashing and parrying tentacles Kyle watched a fighting blimp tear a gash the length of an Army hummer down an opponent’s flank with its scimitar-hook. The mortally wounded blimp vented glittering dust, crumpled, folded in half in the middle, and plunged into the sea, where it split like a thrown water balloon. The sea instantly boiled with almkvists, spear-fast scavengers all jaw and speed.

  “Cool,” both boys said together.

  “Hey now, didn’t you promise you’d let your folks know as soon as the network was up?” said Mom, standing behind them. “And Kyle, you know your dad doesn’t like you playing that game.”

  But she wasn’t mad. She couldn’t be mad. Dad was safe, Dad had called in, Dad would be home soon. It was all in the little tremble in her voice, the way she leaned over between them to look at the screen, the smell of perfume just dabbed on. You know these things.

  It had been close. Kyle’s dad called him in to show him the rolling news and point out where his company car had been when the bombers hit the escort hummers.

  “There’s next to no protection in those things,” he said over jerky, swooping flash-cut images of black smoke boiling out of yellow flames and people standing and shouting and not knowing what to do, pictures taken from a passerby’s palmer. “They used a drone RAV; I saw something go past the window just before it hit. They were aiming for the soldiers, not for us.”

  “It was a suicide attack here,” Kyle said.

  “Some karsevak group claimed responsibility, some group no one’s ever heard of before. Fired everything off in one shooting match.”

  “Don’t they go straight into a state of moksha if they blow themselves up in Varanasi?”

  “That’s what they believe, son. Your soul is released from the wheel of reincarnation. But I still can’t help feeling that this was the final throw. Things are getting better. The Ranas are taking control. People can see the difference we’re making. I do feel we’ve turned the corner on this.”

  Kyle loved it when his dad talked military, though he was really a structural engineer.

  ‘So Salim got home safe.”

  Kyle nodded.

  “That’s good.” Kyle heard his father sigh in the way that men do when they’re supposed to talk about things they don’t want to. “Salim’s a good kid, a good friend.” Another intake of breath. Kyle waited for it shape into a but.

  “Kyle, you know, that game. Well . . .”

  Not a but, a well.

  “Well, I know it’s real educational, and a lot of people play it and enjoy it and get a lot out of it, but it’s not really right. I mean, it’s not accurate. It claims it’s an evolution simulation, and it is as far as it goes. But if you think about it, really it’s just following rules laid down by someone else, All that code was programmed by someone else; so really, it’s evolution inside a bigger framework that’s been deliberately designed. But they don’t tell you, Kyle, and that’s dishonest; it’s pretending to be something it’s not. And that’s why I don’t like it—because it isn’t honest about the truth. I know that whatever I say, what you do with Salim is your thing, but you’re not to play it here, in the house. And it’s good you’ve got a good friend here—I remember when Kelis was your age when we were in the Gulf, she had a really good friend, a Canadian girl—but it would be good if you had a few more friends from your own background. Okay? Now, how about Wrestle Smackdown on cable?”

  The referee had gone down with a head-butt to the nuts in the first thirty seconds, so it was only when the decibel count exceeded the mundane Varanasi traffic roar that security heads-upped, guns-downed, and came running. A guardwoman in full color-smear combats and smart visor locked her arms around Kyle and hauled him out of the steel-cage match into which the under-eleven practice had collapsed.

  “I’ll sue you I’ll sue the ass off you, your children will end up living in a cardboard box, let go of me,” Kyle yelled. The Security woman hauled.

  It was a full fight—boys, girls, supporters, cheerleaders. At the bottom of the dogpile, Striker Salim and Ozzie Ryan. Security hauled them off each other and returned the snoopy RAV drones that flocked to any unusual action to their standby roosts. Parameds rushed to the scene. There was blood, there were bruisings and grazings, there were torn clothes and black eyes. There were lots and lots of tears but no contusions, no concussions, no breaks.

  Then the gitmoization.

  Coach Joe: Okay, so want to tell me what that was about?

  Ozzie Ryan: He started it

  Striker Salim: Liar! You started it.

  Coach Joe: I don’t care who started it. I want to know what it was about.

  Ozzie Ryan: He’s the liar. His people just lie all the time; they don’t have a word for the truth.

  Striker Salim: Ah! Ah! That’s such a lie too.

  Ozzie Ryan: See? You can’t trust them. He’s a spy for them, it’s true; before he came here, they never got in; since he came, there’s been things happening almost every day. He’s a spy, and he’s telling them all ways to get in and kill us because he thinks we’re all animals and going to hell anyway.

  Coach Joe: Jesus. Kyle, what happened?

  Kyle Rubin: I don’t know, I didn’t see anything, I just heard this noise like, and when I looked over, they were on the ground tearing lumps out of each other.

  Striker Salim: That is so not true . . . I cannot believe you said that. You were there, you heard what he said.

  Kyle Rubin: I didn’t hear everything, I just heard like shouting. . . .

  Gitmoization Part 2

  Kyle’s dad: Coach Joe called me, but I’m not going to bawl you out. I think there’s been enough of that already. I’m disappointed, but I’m not going to bawl you out. Just one thing: Did Ryan call Salim something?

  Kyle Rubin: (mumble)

  Kyle’s dad: Son, did Ryan use a racist term to Salim?

  Kyle Rubin: (twisting foot)

  Kyle’s dad: I thought Salim was your friend. Your best friend. I think if someone had done something to my best friend, doesn’t matter who he is, what he is, I’d stand up for him.

  Kyle Rubin: He said Salim was a diaper-head curry-nigger and they were all spies, and Salim was just standing there, so I went in there and popped him, Ryan I mean, and he just went for Salim, not me, and then everyone was piling on with Ryan and Salim at the bottom, and they were all shouting curry-nigger-lover curry-nigger-lover at me and trying to get me too, and then the security came in.

  At the end of it two things were certain: Soccer was suspended for one month, and when it did come back, Salim would not be playing, never would be again. Cantonment was not safe for Bharatis.

  He was trapped, a traffic island castaway. Marooned on an oval of concrete in Varanasi’s never-ebbing torrent of traffic by the phatphat
driver when he saw Kyle fiddling in his lap with pogs.

  “Ey, you, out here, get out, trying to cheat, damn gora.”

  “What, here? But—?”

  Out onto this tiny traffic island, twenty centimeters in front of him and twenty centimeters behind him, on one side a tall man in a white shirt and black pants and on the other a fat woman in a purple sari who smelled of dead roses. And the phatphat, the little yellow-and-black plastic bubble that looked/sounded like a hornet, throbbed away into the terrifying traffic.

  “You can’t do this, my dad’s building this country!”

  The man and the woman turned to stare. Stares everywhere, every instant from the moment he slipped out of the back of the Hi-Lux at the phatphat stand. They had been eager for his money then, Hey sir, hey sahb, good clean cab, fast fast, straight there no detours, very safe safest phatphat in Varanasi. How was he to know that the cheap, light cardboard pogs were money only inside the Cantonment? And now here he was on this traffic island, no way forward, no way back, no way through the constant movement of trucks, buses, cream-colored Marutis, mopeds, phatphats, cycle-rickshaws, cows, everything roaring ringing hooting yelling as it tried to find its true way while avoiding everything else. People were walking through that, just stepping out in the belief that the traffic would steer around them; the man in the white shirt, there he went, the woman in the purple sari come on boy, come with me, he couldn’t, he daren’t, and there she went, and now there were people piling up behind him, pushing him pushing pushing pushing him closer to the curb, out in that killing traffic. . . .