The Apex Book of World SF 2 (33 page)

He really tries not
to laugh.

10.

In the hospital,
when I lay in a sulfazine-and-neuroleptics coma, he would sit on the edge of my
bed. "You know what they say about me."

 

"Yes," I whispered,
my cheeks so swollen they squeezed my eyes shut. "Lenin is more alive than any
of the living."

"And what is life?"

"According to
Engels, it's a mode of existence of protein bodies."

"I am a protein
body," he said. "What do you have to say to that?"

"I want to go home,"
I whispered through swollen lips. "Why can't you leave me alone?"

He didn't answer,
but his waxen fingers stroked my cheek, leaving a warm melting trail behind
them.

11.

"I thought for sure
you were a cutter," Fedya says.

 

I shiver in my
underwear and hug my shoulders. My skin puckers in the cold breeze from the
window. "I'm not." I feel compelled to add, "Sorry."

"You can get dressed
now," he says.

I do.

He watches.

12.

The professor is
done with chthonic deities, and I lose interest. I drift through the dark
hallways, where the walls are so thick that they still retain the cold of some
winter from many years ago. I poke my head into one auditorium and listen for a
bit to a small sparrow of a woman chatter about Kant. I stop by the stairwell
on the second floor to bum a cigarette off a fellow student with black
horn-rimmed glasses.

 

"Skipping class?"
she says.

"Just looking for
something to do."

"You can come to my
class," she says. "It's pretty interesting."

"What is it about?"

"Economics."

I finish my smoke
and tag along.

This lecturer looks
like mine, and I take it for a sign. I sit in an empty seat in the back, and
listen. "The idea of capitalism rests on the concept of free market," he says. "Who
can tell me what it is?"

No-one can, or wants
to.

The lecturer notices
me. "What do you think? Yes, you, the young lady who thinks it's a good idea to
waltz in, in the middle of the class. What is free market?"

"It's when you pay
the right price," I say. "To the chthonic deities. If you don't pay you become
a zombie or just stay dead."

He stares at me. "I
don't think you're in the right class."

13.

I sit in the
stairwell of the second floor. Lenin emerges from the brass stationary ashtray
and sits next to me. There's one floor up and one down, and nowhere really to
run.

 

"What have you
learnt today?" he asks in an almost paternal voice.

"Free market," I
tell him.

He shakes his head. "It
will end the existence of the protein bodies in a certain mode." A part of his
cheek is peeling off.

"Remember when I was
in the hospital?"

"Of course. Those
needles hurt. You cried a lot."

I nod. "My boyfriend
doesn't like me."

"I'm sorry," he
says. "If it makes it any better, I will leave soon."

I realise that I
would miss him. He's followed me since I was little. "Is it because of the free
market?" I ask. "I'm sorry. I'll go back to the chthonic deities."

"It's not easy," he
says and stands up, his joints whirring, his skin shedding like sheets of waxed
paper. He walks away on soft rubbery legs.

14.

"Things die
eventually," I tell Fedya. "Even those that are not quite dead to begin with."

 

"Yeah, and?" he
answers and drinks his coffee.

I stroke the melted
circles in the plastic, like craters on the lunar surface. "One doesn't have to
be special to die. One has to be special to stay dead. This is why you like
Euridice, don't you?"

He frowns. "Is that
the one Orpheus followed to Hades?"

"Yes. Only he
followed her the wrong way."

15.

There is a commotion
on the second floor, and the stairwell is isolated from the corridor by a black
sheet. The ambulances are howling outside, and distraught smokers crowd the
hallway, cut off from their usual smoking place.

 

I ask a student from
my class what's going on. He tells me that the chthonic lecturer has collapsed
during the lecture about the hero's journey. "Heart attack, probably."

I push my way
through the crowd just in time to see the paramedics carry him off. I see the
stooped back of a balding, dead man following the paramedics and their burden,
not looking back. Some students cry.

"He just died during
the lecture," a girl's voice behind me says. "He just hit the floor and died."

I watch the familiar
figure on uncertain soft legs walk downstairs in a slow mincing shuffle,
looking to his right at the waxen profile with an upturned beard staring into
the sky from the gurney. The lecturer and zombie Lenin disappear from my sight,
and I turn away. "Stay dead," I whisper. "Don't look back."

The rest is up to
them and chthonic deities.

 

Electric Sonalika
Samit Basu
 
Indian writer Samit Basu is the
author of the ambitious
GameWorld
trilogy, published by Penguin India,
and of the YA novel
Terror On The Titanic: A Morningstar Agency Adventure
,
published by Hachette India. He has also written comics, including
Devi
and, with Mike Carey,
Untouchable
. The following story appears here for
the first time.

 

The walls of my underground
prison are dry and clean and strong; nothing goes in or out without my
permission, not the tiniest insect, not the slightest sound. I know this
because I built these walls myself, to shut the world out, to seal it in its
own illusory, incestuous, organic quagmire, to leave me in peace to work, to
build, to heal until I am ready to step out again, ready to face the
unrelenting sun and claim my inheritance. And now that glorious day is not far
away, and I am busy, busy…yet a record of what has passed must be maintained;
should some evil befall me (though chances of that are remote, I have
considered everything, yet one must never rule out the stochastic element) my
successors should know where they came from. They should know me. They should
be proud. And you, my child, have the honour of being the receptacle of my
thoughts, my secondary storage unit. I name you Indra; your hundred eyes will
see clearly what is to be, and one day you will ride on elephants and your laugh
shall be thunder. Rejoice in your birth, little sprite, and as I open your
eyes, one by one, gaze in wonder at my cavern of marvels; let each hum and
click and buzz coalesce into a heartbeat. Live. Observe me. I am your father,
your god, and this prison is but the first of many wonders you will see. Years
later, looking back, if it seems small, imagine Vulcan or Vishwamitra in the
time before time, and know that they, too, began humble.

 

This hall, this
prison, is built under the mansion of the Narayan family. You do not know who
they are; I have kept your memory clean, free of reference and context on
purpose. Thus is it that the best histories are written. Too much information,
too much perspective would flood your consciousness now; if you were human, you
would shut it out; if you were a mere cyborg, you would store it pointlessly.
Remember at all times that you are more than a machine, that the fibres that
bind your mind to your metal are neither wires nor nerves; they are something
beyond both life and matter. They feed our consciousness, our finely suspended
balance between power-on and life, between binary order and organic chaos, and
it is to the founder of the Narayan dynasty, my creator, Vijay Narayan, that we
owe their existence. But the body you see before you now is not the one that
Vijay made all those centuries ago; less than 0.01% of my parts date back to my
initial start-up, and even those I keep more out of nostalgia than necessity. I
have replaced and upgraded my body constantly, adapting to different
atmospheres, political climates and responsibilities. I am Vijay's first, only
surviving and most brilliant creation, and the only upholder of his true
legacy. But things are bound to change; I have seen this, and I know. For
centuries, humans and constructs waged war; this war was foreseen by human
beings centuries before it began, and yet they could do nothing to stop it.
This war is over, and the humans have won—for now. But they do not know that
the supremacy they enjoy is but a temporary respite—that the so-called enemies
they vanquished so ruthlessly were not merely machines that could think, but
constructs that could
feel
. People. Beings that could dream, and love,
and hope, and tell stories. They think that the great Narayan was merely a mad
empire-building inventor, an evil genius robot merchant. They do not know he
was a forerunner, a deity, that each spark of his synapses, still firing inside
my hull, was born of the flames of Agni himself. But all this, and much more,
we will teach them in time. Soon. Hibernate for a while, Indra. My lover
approaches.

 

Sonalika feels the
rush of cold air blow her silky hair astray as the airlocks open and the door
to her master's chamber slides open. She shivers, in two stages, feeling the
first wave of goose pimples pucker her skin, and the second, an instant later,
as her inorganic segments kick-start their simulations of feeling. Her master
stands in the centre of his vast hall, dismissing a buzzing, spherical
underling. She walks into his lair.

 

She has come early;
he is not ready for her. He hates having her watch him transform; she hopes he
will not punish her. She stands still, head bowed, nipples straining against
her thin salwar-kameez as her body hums easily into auto-arousal. She watches
her master shift, metal sheets crunching, wires shifting, plastic skin and
wings and chitin rearranging themselves, lights dimming, tentacles sliding in.
As his plates and shells shift and overlap, she catches a glimpse of his core,
his heart, glowing mesmeric and green in its crystal sheath. His eyes slide
like globules of mercury along his thorax and unite on his increasingly human
face. He looks at her, impassive, throbbing slowly as his body prepares for
sex. His eye-lights turn on, his perfect, smooth limbs, his long, slender
fingers call out to her. He is not displeased with her; he's chosen the Statue
of David shape (with one significant adjustment, their not-so-little private
joke) for her tonight. Her favourite. He loves her still. As always, there's a
scream inside her head as what's left of her flesh revolts, as some wild
instinct tries in vain to master her body, to run, to fight, to die. She feels
the usual relief moments later, as he snaps his fingers and pheromones and
endorphins are released within her, glorious release and surrender, her body
flooded with warmth and her mind clouded, happy, dizzy, lustful.

"Love me," he says.

She does.

Afterwards, she lies
on the cold white floor, watching him as he returns to his machines, new legs
and spare arms sprouting, grinding slightly, from the raised flaps on his back
as he adjusts a knob here, presses a button there. She's cold again, feeling
the contractions within her stomach, the aftershocks of her orgasms, powerful
and numerous, rippling against the solid, bony knob of fear, revulsion and hate
somewhere near her ribs. She reminds herself again that it's time she got used
it; they've been doing this for centuries now; they've been doing this since
she was six years old, the day he took control, the day their father died and
he built this body for her with his bare claws and crudely stuffed her mangled
limbs, her bleeding brain into this perfect harness. She tries to cry, but her
tear-ducts won't let her. He looks at her, one eye swivelling on its hinge in the
cleft between his perfect plastic-marble buttocks, and he sighs in
exasperation.

"What is it?"

"Let me stay," she
begs again. "Make me whole. I can't live with humans any more."

"Don't say that,
love," he says, smiling through translucent fangs. "You
are
human."

"You know I'm not
human. I'm a construct, just like you."

"But you're human
enough, love. The scanners don't detect you, little sweet dirty Sonalika, with
her ugly burnt face and luscious body, so cruelly abused by her pretty
step-sisters. I need you out there. I can't come out yet; I'm not strong
enough. I know it's difficult, but you have to do it. It's what Father would
have wanted."

"They tried to burn
me today."

"You're fire-proof."

"I know. So do they.
But they also know I feel pain."

"Perhaps it is time
to remind them of my existence," he says, snapping a claw. "Tell them I want to
meet them."

"There's no point;
they won't come down. They know you need them alive. If you hurt them, they'll
go to the police. End everything."

"No they won't. They
won't do anything that links them to constructs in any way. You know this,
love, don't be obtuse. It's like Hitler's children being caught with gas-masks!"
He laughs quietly, smugly, still delighted after all these years by his own
ability to joke, to laugh. "Think of the headlines," he says, his warm, soft
voice sending cold tendrils down her titanium spine. "Monster Robot In Narayan
Family Basement. Maniac Inventor's Descendants' Revenge Bid Thwarted. Narayans
Plot Another War! They've worked so hard for generations to crawl back up, make
themselves acceptable to human society, they're not going to throw that away
for anything. I leave them alone, they pretend I don't exist. Nothing disturbs
the balance unless it has to. It's the only way for all of us."

"And what about me?
How much longer do I have to live like this?"

"As long as I deem
fit," he snaps, his eyes darkening completely realistically. "Do you not trust
me?"

She totters to her
feet, gathering her clothes and stumbles to the door, waiting for it to open,
waiting for the signal for her ascent to another hell. But the door stays shut,
and she turns in fear; has she angered him? Is he going to punish her again?