“I understand. You are a compromise. If you will put this on …” Patil handed Clay a floppy khaki hat. “It will cover your curly hair. Luckily, your nose is rather more narrow than I had expected when the NSF cable announced they were sending a Negro.”
“Got a lot of white genes in it, this nose,” Clay said evenly.
“Please, do not think I am being racist. I simply wished to diminish the chances of you being recognized as a Westerner in the countryside.”
“Think I can pass?”
“At a distance, yes.”
“Be tougher at the site?”
“Yes. There are ‘celebrants,’ as they term themselves, at the mine.”
“How’ll we get in?”
“A ruse we have devised.”
“Like that getaway back there? That was pretty slick.”
Singh sent them jouncing along a rutted lane. Withered trees leaned against the pale stucco two-story buildings that lined the lane like children’s blocks lined up not quite correctly. “Men in customs, they would give word to people outside. If you had gone through with the others, a different reception party would have been waiting for you.”
“I see. But what about my bags?”
Patil had been peering forward at the gloomy jumble of buildings. His head jerked around to glare at Clay. “You were not to bring more than your carry-on bag!”
“Look, I can’t get by on that. Chrissake, that’d give me just one change of clothes—”
“You left bags there?”
“Well, yeah, I had just one—”
Clay stopped when he saw the look on the two men’s faces.
Patil said with strained clarity, “Your bags, they had identification tags?”
“Sure, airlines make you—”
“They will bring attention to you. There will be inquiries. The devotees will hear of it, inevitably, and know you have entered the country.”
Clay licked his lips. “Hell, I didn’t think it was so important.”
The two lean Indians glanced at each other, their faces taking on a narrowing, leaden cast. “Dr. Clay,” Patil said stiffly, “the ‘celebrants’ believe, as do many, that Westerners deliberately destroyed our crops with their biotechnology.”
“Japanese companies’ biologists did that, I thought,” Clay said diplomatically.
“Perhaps. Those who disturb us at the Kolar gold mine make no fine distinctions between biologists and physicists. They believe that we are disturbing the very bowels of the earth, helping to further the destruction, bringing on the very end of the world itself. Surely you can see that in India, the mother country of religious philosophy, such matters are important.”
“But your work, hell, it’s not a matter of life or death or anything.”
“On the contrary, the decay of the proton is precisely an issue of death.”
Clay settled back in his seat, puzzled, watching the silky night stream by, cloaking vague forms in its shadowed mysteries.
2
Clay insisted on the telephone call. A wan winter sun had already crawled partway up the sky before he awoke, and the two Indian physicists wanted to leave immediately. They had stopped while still in Bangalore, holing up in the cramped apartment of one of Patil’s graduate students. As Clay took his first sip of tea, two other students had turned up with his bag, retrieved at a cost he never knew.
Clay said, “I promised I’d call home. Look, my family’s worried. They read the papers, they know the trouble here.”
Shaking his head slowly, Patil finished a scrap of curled brown bread that appeared to be his only breakfast. His movements had a smooth liquid inertia, as if the sultry morning air oozed like jelly around him. They were sitting at a low table that had one leg too short; the already rickety table kept lurching, slopping tea into their saucers. Clay had looked for something to prop up the leg, but the apartment was bare, as though no one lived here. They had slept on pallets beneath a single bare bulb. Through the open windows, bare of frames or glass, Clay had gotten fleeting glimpses of the neighborhood—rooms of random clutter, plaster peeling off slumped walls, revealing the thin steel cross-ribs of the buildings, stained windows adorned with gaudy pictures of many-armed gods, already sun-bleached and frayed. Children yelped and cried below, their voices reflected among the odd angles and apertures of the tangled streets, while carts rattled by and bare feet slapped the stones. Students had apparently stood guard last night, though Clay had never seen more than a quick motion in the shadows below as they arrived.
“You ask much of us,” Patil said. By morning light his walnut-brown face seemed gullied and worn. Lines radiated from his mouth toward intense eyes.
Clay sipped his tea before answering. A soft, strangely sweet smell wafted through the open window. They sat well back in the room so nobody could see in from the nearby buildings. He heard Singh tinkering downstairs with the van’s engine.
“Okay, it’s maybe slightly risky. But I want my people to know I got here all right.”
“There are few telephones here.”
“I only need one.”
“The system, often it does not work at all.”
“Gotta try.”
“Perhaps you do not understand—”
“I understand damn well that if I can’t even reach my people, I’m not going to hang out here for long. And if I don’t see that your experiment works right, nobody’ll believe you.”
“And your opinion depends upon … ?”
Clay ticked off points on his fingers. “On seeing the apparatus. Checking your raw data. Running a trial case to see your system response. Then a null experiment—to verify your threshold level on each detector.” He held up five fingers. “The works.”
Patil said gravely, “Very good. We relish the opportunity to prove ourselves.”
“You’ll get it.” Clay hoped to himself that they were wrong, but he suppressed that. He represented the faltering forefront of particle physics, and it would be embarrassing if a backwater research team had beaten the world. Still, either way, he would end up being the expert on the Kolar program, and that was a smart career move in itself.
“Very well. I must make arrangements for the call, then. But I truly—”
“Just do it. Then we get down to business.”
The telephone was behind two counters and three doors at a Ministry for Controls office. Patil did the bribing and cajoling inside and then brought Clay in from the back of the van. He had been lying down on the back seat so he could not be seen easily from the street.
The telephone itself was a heavy black plastic thing with a rotary dial that clicked like a sluggish insect as it whirled. Patil had been on it twice already, clearing international lines through Bombay. Clay got two false rings and a dead line. On the fourth try he heard a faint, somehow familiar buzzing. Then a hollow, distant click.
“Angy?”
“Daddy, is that you?” Faint rock music in the background.
“Sure, I just wanted to let you know I got to India okay.”
“Oh, Mommy will be so glad! We heard on the TV last night that there’s trouble over there.”
Startled, Clay asked, “What? Where’s your mother?”
“Getting groceries. She’ll be so mad she missed your call!”
“You tell her I’m fine, okay? But what trouble?”
“Something about a state leaving India. Lots of fighting, John Trimble said on the news.”
Clay never remembered the names of news announcers; he regarded them as faceless nobodies reading prepared scripts, but for his daughter they were the voice of authority. “Where?”
“Uh, the lower part.”
“There’s nothing like that happening here, honey. I’m safe. Tell Mommy.”
“People have ice cream there?”
“Yeah, but I haven’t seen any. You tell your mother what I said, remember? About being safe?”
“Yes, she’s been worried.”
“Don’t worry, Ang
y. Look, I got to go.” The line popped and hissed ominously.
“I miss you, Daddy.”
“I miss you double that. No, squared.”
She laughed merrily. “I skinned my knee today at recess. It bled so much I had to go to the nurse.”
“Keep it clean, honey. And give your mother my love.”
“She’ll be so mad.”
“I’ll be home soon.”
She giggled and ended with the joke she had been using lately. “G’bye, Daddy. It’s been real.”
Her light laugh trickled into the static, a grace note from a bright land worlds away. Clay chuckled as he replaced the receiver. She cut the last word of “real nice” to make her good-byes hip and sardonic, a mannerism she had heard on television somewhere. An old joke; he had heard that even “groovy” was coming back in.
Clay smiled and pulled his hat down further and went quickly out into the street where Patil was waiting. India flickered at the edge of his vision, the crowds a hovering presence.
3
They left Bangalore in two vans. Graduate students drove the green Tochat from the previous night. He and Patil and Singh took the blue one, Clay again keeping out of sight by lying on the back seat. The day’s raw heat rose around them like a shimmering lake of light.
They passed through lands leached of color. Only gray stubble grew in the fields. Trees hung limply, their limbs bowing as though exhausted. Figures in rags huddled for shade. A few stirred, eyes white in the shadows, as the vans ground past. Clay saw that large boles sat on the branches like gnarled knots with brown sheaths wrapped around the underside.
“Those some of the plant diseases I heard about?” he asked.
Singh pursed his lips. “I fear those are the pouches like those of wasps, as reported in the press.” His watery eyes regarded the withered, graying trees as Patil slowed the car.
“Are they dangerous?” Clay could see yellow sap dripping from the underside of each.
“Not until they ripen,” Singh said. “Then the assassins emerge.”
“They look pretty big already.”
“They are said to be large creatures, but of course there is little experience.”
Patil downshifted and they accelerated away with an occasional sputtering misfire. Clay wondered whether they had any spare spark plugs along. The fields on each side of the road took on a dissolute and shredded look. “Did the genetech experiments cause this?” he asked.
Singh nodded. “I believe this emerged from the European programs. First we had their designed plants, but then pests found vulnerability. They sought strains which could protect crops from the new pests. So we got these wasps. I gather that now some error or mutation has made them equally excellent at preying on people and even cows.”
Clay frowned. “The wasps came from the Japanese aid, didn’t they?”
Patil smiled mysteriously. “You know a good deal about our troubles, sir.”
Neither said anything more. Clay was acutely conscious that his briefing in Washington had been detailed technical assessments, without the slightest mention of how the Indians themselves saw their problems. Singh and Patil seemed either resigned or unconcerned; he could not tell which. Their sentences refracted from some unseen nugget, like seismic waves warping around the earth’s core.
“I would not worry greatly about these pouches,” Singh said after they had ridden in silence for a while. “They should not ripen before we are done with our task. In any case, the Kolar fields are quite barren, and afford few sites where the pouches can grow.”
Clay pointed out the front window. “Those round things on the walls—more pouches?”
To his surprise, both men burst into merry laughter. Gasping, Patil said, “Examine them closely, Doctor Clay. Notice the marks of the species which made them.”
Patil slowed the car and Clay studied the round, circular pads on the whitewashed vertical walls along the road. They were brown and matted and marked in a pattern of radial lines. Clay frowned and then felt enormously stupid: the thick lines were handprints.
“Drying cakes, they are,” Patil said, still chuckling.
“Of what?”
“Dung, my colleague. We use the cow here, not merely slaughter it.”
“What for?”
“Fuel. After the cakes dry, we stack them—see?” They passed a plastic-wrapped tower. A woman was adding a circular, annular tier of thick dung disks to the top, then carefully folding the plastic over it. “In winter they burn nicely.”
“For heating?”
“And cooking, yes.”
Seeing the look on Clay’s face, Singh’s eyes narrowed and his lips drew back so that his teeth were bright stubs. His eyebrows were long brush strokes that met the deep furrows of his frown. “Old ways are still often preferable to the new.”
Sure, Clay thought, the past of cholera, plague, infanticide. But he asked with neutral politeness, “Such as?”
“Some large fish from the Amazon were introduced into our principal river three years ago to improve fishing yields.”
“The Ganges?.I thought it was holy.”
“What is more holy than to feed the hungry?”
“True enough. Did it work?”
“The big fish, yes. They are delicious. A great delicacy.”
“I’ll have to try some,” Clay said, remembering the thin vegetarian curry he had eaten at breakfast.
Singh said, “But the Amazon sample contained some minute eggs which none of the proper procedures eliminated. They were of a small species—the candiru, is that not the name?” he inquired politely of Patil.
“Yes,” Patil said, “a little being who thrives mostly on the urine of larger fish. Specialists now believe that perhaps the eggs were inside the larger species, and so escaped detection.”
Patil’s voice remained calm and factual, although while he spoke he abruptly swerved to avoid a goat that spontaneously ambled onto the rough road. Clay rocked hard against the van’s door, and Patil then corrected further to stay out of a gratuitous mudhole that seemed to leap at them from the rushing foreground. They bumped noisily over ruts at the road’s edge and bounced back onto the tarmac without losing speed. Patil sat ramrod straight, hands turning the steering wheel lightly, oblivious to the wrenching effects of his driving.
“Suppose, Professor Clay, that you are a devotee,” Singh said. “You have saved to come to the Ganges for a decade, for two. Perhaps you even plan to die there.”
“Yeah, okay.” Clay could not see where this was leading.
“You are enthused as you enter the river to bathe. You are perhaps profoundly affected. An intense spiritual moment. It is not uncommon to merge with the river, to inadvertently urinate into it.”
Singh spread his hands as if to say that such things went without saying.
“Then the candiru will be attracted by the smell. It mistakes this great bountiful largess, the food it needs, as coming from a very great fish indeed. It excitedly swims up the stream of uric acid. Coming to your urethra, it swims like a snake into its burrow, as far up as it can go. You will see that the uric flow velocity will increase as the candiru makes its way upstream, inside you. When this tiny fish can make no further progress, some trick of evolution tells it to protrude a set of sidewise spines. So intricate!”
Singh paused a moment in smiling tribute to this intriguing facet of nature. Clay nodded, his mouth dry.
“These embed deeply in the walls and keep the candiru close to the source of what it so desires.” Singh made short, delicate movements, his fingers jutting in the air. Clay opened his mouth, but said nothing.
Patil took them around a team of bullocks towing a wooden wagon and put in, “The pain is intense. Apparently there is no good treatment. Women—forgive this indelicacy—must be opened to get at the offending tiny fish before it swells and blocks the passage completely, having gorged itself insensate. Some men have an even worse choice. Their bladders are already engorged, having typicall
y not been much emptied by the time the candiru enters. They must decide whether to attempt the slow procedure of poisoning the small thing and waiting for it to shrivel and withdraw its spines. However, their bladders might burst before that, flooding their abdomens with urine and of course killing them. If there is not sufficient time …”
“Yes?” Clay asked tensely.
“Then the penis must be chopped off,” Singh said, “with the candiru inside.”
Through a long silence Clay rode, swaying as the car wove through limitless flat spaces of parched fields and ruined brick walls and slumped whitewashed huts. Finally he said hoarsely, “I … don’t blame you for resenting the … well, the people who brought all this on you. The devotees—”
“They believe this apocalyptic evil comes from the philosophy which gave us modern science.”
“Well, look, whoever brought over those fish—”
Singh’s eyes widened with surprise. A startled grin lit his face like a sunrise. “Oh no, Professor Clay! We do not blame the errors, or else we would have to blame equally the successes!”
To Clay’s consternation, Patil nodded sagely.
He decided to say nothing more. Washington had warned him to stay out of political discussions, and though he was not sure if this was such, or if the lighthearted way Singh and Patil had related their story told their true attitude, it seemed best to just shut up. Again Clay had the odd sensation that here the cool certainties of Western biology had become diffused, blunted, crisp distinctions rendered into something beyond the constraints of the world outside, all blurred by the swarming, dissolving currents of India. The tin-gray sky loomed over a plain of ripe rot. The urgency of decay here was far more powerful than the abstractions that so often filled his head, the digitized iconography of sputtering, splitting protons.
4
The Kolar gold fields were a long, dusty drive from Bangalore. The sway of the van made Clay sleepy in the back, jet lag pulling him down into fitful, shallow dreams of muted voices, shadowy faces, and obscure purpose. He awoke frequently amid the dry smells, lurched up to see dry farmland stretching to the horizon, and collapsed again to bury his face in the pillow he had made by wadding up a shirt.
The Hard SF Renaissance Page 36
