The Starry Rift Part 19

I felt a huge, shuddering sigh inside me, a sigh I could never, must never utter.

"I called you a traitor when you said you had always been a loyal servant of the House of Jodhra."

"I was, am, and will remain so, please G.o.d." Heer dipped yts hairless head in a shallow bow. Then yt said, "When you become one of us, when you Step Away, you Step Away from so much, from your own family, from the hope of ever having children . . . You are my family, my children. All of you, but most of all you, Padmini. I did what I had to for my family, and now you survive, now you have all that is yours by right. We don't live long, Padmini. Ours lives are too intense, too bright, too brilliant. There's been too much done to us. We burn out early. I had to see my family safe, my daughter triumph."

"Heer . . ."

Yt held up a hand, glanced away; I thought I saw silver in the corners of those black eyes.

"Take your palace, your company; it is all yours."

That evening I slipped away from my staff and guards. I went up the marble stairs to the long corridor where my room had been before I became a woman, and a wife, and a widow, and the owner of a great company. The door opened to my thumbprint; I swung it open into dust-hazy golden sunlight. The bed was still made, mosquito nets neatly knotted up. I crossed to the balcony. I expected the vines and creepers to have grown to a jungle; with a start I realized it was just over a year since I had slept here. I could still pick out the handholds and footholds where I had followed the steel monkey up onto the roof. I had an easier way to that now. A door at the end of the corridor, previously locked to me, now opened onto a staircase. Sentry robots immediately bounced up as I stepped out onto the roof, crests raised, dart-throwers armed. A mudra from my hand sent them back into watching mode.

Once again I walked between the domes and turrets to the balcony at the very top of the palace f.a.gade. Again, Great Jaipur at my bare feet took my breath away. The pink city kindled and burned in the low evening light. The streets still roared with traffic. I could smell the hot oil and spices of the bazaar. I now knew how to find the domes of the Hijra Mahal among the confusion of streets and apartment buildings. The dials and half domes and b.u.t.tresses of the Jantar Mantar threw huge shadows over each other, a confusion of clocks. Then I turned toward the gla.s.s scimitar of the Azad Headquarters-my headquarters now, my palace as much as this dead old Rajput pile. I had brought that house cras.h.i.+ng down, but not in any way I had imagined. I wanted to apologize to Salim as he had apologized to me, every night when he came to me in the zenana, for what his family had done. They made me into a weapon and I did not even know.

How easy to step out over the traffic, step away from it all. Let it all end, Azad and Jodhra. Cheat Heer of yts victory. Then I saw my toes with their rings curl over the edge and I knew I could not, must not. I looked up and there, at the edge of vision, along the bottom of the red horizon, was a line of dark. The monsoon, coming at last. My family had made me one kind of weapon, but my other family, the kind, mad, sad, talented family of the nutes, had taught me, in their various ways, to be another weapon. The streets were dry, but the rains were coming. I had reservoirs and ca.n.a.ls and pumps and pipes in my power. I was Maharani of the Monsoon. Soon the people would need me. I took a deep breath and imagined I could smell the rain. Then I turned and walked back through the waiting robots to my kingdom.

IAN McDONALD was born in 1960 in Manchester and moved to Northern Ireland in 1965. He is the author of ten novels, most notably Desolation Road, Out on Blue Six, Philip K. d.i.c.k Award winner King of Morning, Queen of Day, Chaga, and Ares Express. His most acclaimed, novel is British SF Award winner and Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke award nominee River of G.o.ds. His short fiction has won the Sturgeon and British Science Fiction awards and been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Tiptree awards, and is collected in Empire Dreams and Speaking in Tongues. His most recent book is the novel Brasyl.

His Web journal is at http://ianmcdonald.livejournal.com.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

The future hits all of us. In the West we're used to feeling we're the cutting edge and the future is going to be just like us. But this is a wired, small planet, and the new technology that catches on in Boston or Birmingham appears simultaneously on the streets of Bangalore and Beijing.

The future is not necessarily American or European. The future may be shaped as much by the CRIB group: China, Russia, India, Brazil-huge countries with huge populations developing at an incredible rate. It's a big, thrilling planet out there, full of life, movement, pa.s.sion, color. We've taught ourselves over the past few years to be afraid of it. The way to beat fear is understanding, and to understand we need to look outside ourselves.

I've been writing about a big, powerful, future hi-tech India in my book River of G.o.ds and the Cyberabad sequence of stories, of which this is one. It's a vast, endlessly fascinating country. But in the end, despite all the seeming strangenesses of Padmini and her world in "The Dust a.s.sa.s.sin," we are all people with the same needs and desires. There is no Third World: there is just One World.

THE STAR SURGEON'S APPRENTICE.

Alastair Reynolds.

Through the bar's windows, Juntura s.p.a.ceport was an endless grid of holding berths, launch gantries, and radiator fins, coiling in its own pollution under a smeared pink sky. The air crackled with radiation from uns.h.i.+elded drives. It was no place to visit, let alone stay.

"I need to get out of here," I said.

The s.h.i.+pmaster sneered at my remaining credit. "That won't get you to the Napier Belt, kid, let alone Frolovo."

"It's all I've got."

"Then maybe you should spend a few months working in the port, until you can pay for a ride."

The s.h.i.+pmaster-he was a cyborg, like most of them-turned away with a whine of his servo-driven exoskeleton.

"Wait," I said. "Please . . . just a moment. Maybe this makes a difference."

I pulled a black bundle from inside my jacket, peeling back enough of the cloth to let him see the weapon. The s.h.i.+pmaster- his name was Master Khorog-reached out one iron gauntlet and hefted the prize. His eye-goggle clicked and whirred into focus.

"Very nasty," he said appreciatively. "I heard someone used one of these against Happy Jack." The eye swiveled sharply onto me. "Maybe you know something about that?"

"Nothing," I said easily. "It's just an heirloom."

The heirloom was a bone gun. Kalarash Empire tech: very old, very difficult to pick up in security scans. Not much of it around anymore, which is why the gun cost me so much. It employed a sonic effect to shatter human bone, turning it into something resembling sugar. Three seconds was all it needed to do its work. By then the victim no longer had anything much resembling a skeletal structure.

You couldn't live long like that, of course. But you didn't die instantly either.

"The trick-so they say-is not to dwell on the skull," Khorog mused. "Leave enough cranial structure for the victim to retain consciousness. And the ability to hear, if you want to taunt them. There are three small bones in the ear. People usually forget those."

"Will you take the gun or not?"

"I could get into trouble just looking at it." He put the gun back onto the cloth. "But it's a nice piece. Warm, too. It might make a difference. There used to be a good market for antique weapons on Jelgava. Maybe there still is."

I brightened. "Then you can give me a berth?"

"I only said it makes a difference, kid. Enough that you can pay off the rest aboard the Iron Lady."

I could already feel Happy Jack's b.u.t.ton men pus.h.i.+ng their way through the port, asking urgent questions. Only a matter of time before they hit this bar and found me.

"If you can get me to the Frolovo Hub, I'll take it."

"Maybe we're not going to Frolovo. Maybe we're going to the Bafq Gap, or the Belterra Sphere."

"Somewhere nearby, then. Another hub. It doesn't matter. I just have to get off Mokmer."

"Show us your mitts." Before I could say yes, Khorog's metal hands were examining my skin-and-bone ones, splaying the fingers with surprising gentleness. "Never done a hard day's work in your life, have you? But you have good fingers. Hand-to-eye coordination okay? No neuromotor complications? Palsy?"

"I'm fine," I said. "And whatever it is you want me to do, I can learn."

"Mister Zeal-our surgeon-needs an a.s.sistant. It's manual labor, mostly. Think you can handle it?"

Jack's men, closer now. "Yes," I said. By then I'd have said anything to get off Mokmer.

"There'll be no freezer berth: the Iron Lady doesn't run to them. You'll be warm the whole trip. Two and a half years subjective, maybe three, till we make the next orbitfall. And once Zeal's trained you up, he won't want you leaving his service at the first port of call. You'll be looking at four or five years aboard the Lady; maybe longer if he can't find another pair of hands. Doesn't sound so sweet now, does it?"

No, I thought, but then neither did the alternative.

"I'm still willing."

"Then be at shuttle dock nine in twenty minutes. That's when we lift for orbit."

We lifted on time.

I didn't see much of the s.h.i.+p from the shuttle: just enough to tell that the Iron Lady looked much the same as all the other ramscoops parked in orbit around Mokmer: a brutalist gray cylinder, swelling to the armored mouth of the magnetic field intake at the front, tapering to the drive a.s.sembly at the back. Comms gear, radiators, docking mechanisms, and modular cargo containers ringed the s.h.i.+p around its gently in-curving waist. It was bruised and battered from endless near-light transits, with great scorch marks and impact craters marring much of the hull.

The shuttle docked with just Khorog and me aboard. Even before I had been introduced to the rest of the crew-or even the surgeon-the Iron Lady was moving.

"Sooner than I expected," I said.

"Complaining?" Khorog asked. "I thought you wanted to get away from Mokmer as soon as possible."

"No," I said. "I'm glad we're under way." I brushed a wall panel as we walked. "It's very smooth. I expected it to feel different."

"That's because we're only on in-system motors at the moment."

"There's a problem with the ramscoop?"

"We don't switch on the scoop until we're well beyond Mokmer-or any planet, for that matter. We're safe in the s.h.i.+p- life quarters are well s.h.i.+elded-but outside, you're looking at the strongest magnetic field this side of the Crab pulsar. Doesn't hurt wetheads like you all that much . . . but us, that's different." He knuckled his fist against his plated cranium. "Cyborgs like me . . . cyborgs like everyone else you'll meet aboard this s.h.i.+p, or in any kind of s.p.a.ce environment-we feel it. Get within a thousand kilometers of a s.h.i.+p like this . . . it warms up the metal in our bodies. Inductive heating: we fry from the inside. That's why we don't light the scoop: it ain't neighborly."

"I'm sorry," I said, realizing that I'd touched the cyborg equivalent of a nerve.

"We'll light in good time." Khorog hammered one of the wall plates. "Then you'll feel the old girl s.h.i.+ver her timbers."

On the way to the surgeon, we pa.s.sed other members of the Iron Lady's redoubtable crew, none of whom Khorog saw fit to introduce. They were a carnival of grotesques, even by the standards of the cyborgs I'd seen around the s.p.a.ceport. One man consisted of a grinning, cackling, gap-toothed head plugged into a trundling life-support mechanism that had apparently originated as a cleaning robot: in place of wheels, or legs, he moved on multiple spinning brushes, polis.h.i.+ng the deck plates behind him. A woman glanced haughtily at me as she pa.s.sed: normal enough except that the upper hemisphere of her skull was a gla.s.s dome, in which resided a kind of ticking orrery: luminous planetary beads...o...b..ting the bright lamp of a star. As she walked she rubbed a hand over the swell of her belly and I understood-as I was surely meant to-that her brain had been relocated there for safekeeping. Another man moved in an exoskeleton similar to the one Khorog wore, but in this case there was very little man left inside the powered frame: just a desiccated wisp, like something that had dried out in the sun. His limbs were like strands of rope, his head a piece of shriveled, stepped-on fruit. "You'll be the new mate, then," he said in a voice that sounded as if he was trying to speak while being strangled.

"If Zeal agrees to it," Khorog said back. "Only then."

"What if Mister Zeal doesn't agree to it?" I asked, when we were safely out of earshot.

"Then we'll find you something else to do," Khorog replied. "Always plenty of jobs on the . . ." And then he halted, as if he'd been meaning to say something else but had caught himself in time.

By then we'd reached the surgeon.

Mister Zeal occupied a windowless chamber near the middle of the s.h.i.+p. He was working on one of his patients when Khorog showed me in. Hulking surgical machines loomed over the operating table, carrying lights, manipulators, and barbed, savage-looking cutting tools.

"This is the new a.s.sistant," Khorog said. "Has a good pair of hands on him, so try and make this one last."

Zeal looked up from his work. He was a huge, bald, thick-necked man with a powerful jaw. There was nothing obviously mechanical about him: even the close-up goggle he wore over his left eye was strapped into place, rather than implanted. He wore a stiff leather ap.r.o.n over his bare, muscular chest, and he glistened with sweat and oil.

His voice was a low rumble. "Just a pup, Master Khorog. I asked for a man."

"Beggars can't be choosers, Mister Zeal. This is what was on offer."

Zeal stood up from the table and studied me with a curl on his lips, wiping his right hand against his ap.r.o.n. He pushed his left hand against the rust-dappled side of one of the surgical machines, causing it to move back on a set of caterpillar tracks. He stepped over a body that happened to be lying on the floor, scuffing his boot heel against the chest.

The voice rumbled again. "What's your name, lad?"

"Peter," I said, fighting to keep my nervousness in check. "Peter Vandry."

He pushed the goggle off his eye, up onto his forehead.

"Your hands."

"I'm sorry?"

He roared, "Show me your d.a.m.ned hands, boy!"

I stepped closer to the surgeon and offered him my hands. Zeal examined them with a particular attentiveness, his scrutiny more thorough, more methodical, than Khorog's had been. He looked at my tongue. He peeled back my eyelids and looked deep into my eyes. He sniffed as he worked, the curl never leaving his lips. All the while I tried to ignore the semihuman thing laid out on the operating table, horrified that it was still breathing, still obviously alive. The crewman's torso was completely detached from his hips and legs.

"I need a new mate," Zeal told me. He kicked the body on the floor. "I've been trying to manage ever since with this lobot, but today . . ."

"Temper got the better of you, did it?" Khorog asked.

"Never mind my temper," Zeal said warningly.

"Lobots don't grow on trees, Mister Zeal. There isn't an inexhaustible supply."

The surgeon snapped his gaze back onto me. "I'm a pair of hands down. Do you think you can do better?"

My throat was dry, my hands shaking. "Master Khorog seemed to think I could do it." I held out my hand, hoping he didn't notice the tremble. "I'm steady."

"Steadiness is a given. But do you have the stomach for the rest?"

"I've seen worse than that," I said, glancing at the patient. But only today, I thought, only since I left Happy Jack flopping and oozing on the carpet.

Zeal nodded at the other man. "You may leave us now, Master Khorog. Please ask the captain to delay drive start-up until I'm finished with this one, if that isn't too much trouble?"

"I'll do what I can," Khorog said.

Zeal turned smartly back to me. "I'm in the middle of a procedure. As you can tell from the lobot, things took a turn for the worse. You'll a.s.sist in the completion of the operation. If things conclude satisfactorily . . . well, we'll see." The curl became a thin, uncharitable smile.

I stepped over the dead lobot. It was common knowledge that s.p.a.ce crews made extensive use of lobots for menial labor, but quite another to see the evidence. Many worlds saw nothing wrong in turning criminals into lobotomized slave labor. Instead of the death sentence, they got neurosurgery and a set of implants so that they could be puppeted and given simple tasks.

"What do you want me to do?" I asked.

Zeal lowered his goggle back into place, settling it over his left eye.

"Looking in the rough direction of the patient would be a start, lad."

I forced myself to take in the b.l.o.o.d.y mess on the table: the two detached body halves, the details of meat and bone and nervous system almost lost amid the eruptive tangle of plastic and metal lines spraying from either half, carrying pink-red arterial blood, chemical green pneumatic fluid. The tracked machines attending to the operation were of ancient, squalid provenance. Nothing in Zeal's operating room looked newer than a thousand years old.

Zeal picked up the end of one segmented chrome tube. "I'm trying to get this thoracic line in. There was a lot of resistance . . . the lobot kept fumbling the job. I'm a.s.suming you can do better."

I took the end of the line. It was slippery between my fingers. "Shouldn't I . . . wash, or something?"

"Just hold the line. Infection's the least of his worries."

"I was thinking of me."

Zeal made a small guttural sound, like someone trying to cough up an obstruction. "The least of yours as well."

I worked as best I could. We got the line in, then moved on to other areas. I just did what Zeal told me, while he watched me with his one human eye, taking in every slip and tremor of my hand. Once in a while he'd dig into the wide leather pocket sewn across the front of his ap.r.o.n and come out with some new blade or tool. Occasionally a lobot would arrive to take away some piece of equipment or dead flesh, or arrive with something new and gleaming on a plate. Now and then the tracked robot would creep forward to a.s.sist in a procedure. I noticed, with skin-crawling horror, that its dual manipulator arms ended in a pair of perfect female human hands, long fingered and elegant and white as snow.