The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (44 page)

“Nor of hers.” The resemblance was picture perfect. Gangly limbs, skinned knees and elbows, festival clothes. It had been the anniversary of First Planetfall. Mother and father had baked a cake in the shape of a rocket he had been too young to remember.

He banged the stick on the ground like a sorcerer dispelling demons. “Out! Out of my shape!”

His own youthful face smirked back at him. “Shan’t.”

He poled himself forwards towards himself, breathing with difficulty. “You can’t kill me.”

“But I can get out of your way easier than air.” He skipped away from himself easily to just outside stick range. “Your heart is beating a mite too fast for your health, by the way. I can hear it, grandfather. If any vessel leaves this world, it leaves with all of us or none.”

Krishna drew himself up to his full height. His spine complained, unaccustomed to being made straight. “That is transparently not compatible with the offer I have made. I give you one hour to discuss it amongst yourselves – ”

“We have no need to discuss it; we are of one mind.”

“Nevertheless, I give you one hour, after which time my transport will leave. In the meantime, please indulge an old man by allowing him what may after all be his last walk with something that looks like his sister. I must make it clear that this world will be destroyed. This is not raving; this is a fact.”

She simulated genuine concern. “Grandfather, you shouldn’t do that. Your skin provides virtually no resistance against blast and gamma.”

He shrugged. “I can see no better solution. Shall we walk? Your other selves tire me.”

The cyclopean avenues of seamless concrete that constituted the Proprietors’ original city loomed overhead. Their crumbling summits had been crowned a livid birdshit grey by the local flora.

“In the right light this could be home,” he said. “The sky is blue enough, and there is not one blade of grass. I believe this is the most hospitable part of the planet, and yet it resembles a desert. The native vegetation is poikilohydric. It specializes in being soaked and dried alternately. We are now in the dry season.”

“I can’t accompany you, Grandfather. To try to make me go back is to attempt to put an explosion back in a hand grenade. To be cooped up in a box? My only company a being with one tenth my service life, and when that lifespan’s at an end, then what?”

The boundaries of the terminal were walls of hand-cut masonry, slave-built, recent. Beyond them a low bluff rose out of the die-flat dry seabed the settlement had been built of. Krishna was forced to speak haltingly as they climbed the bluff. His heart was throbbing in his chest like a wounded hand. “The box is planet-sized – and the majority of company you keep – you kill.”

“But not all! I only killed a thousand on Railhead. The larger the world, the greater the likelihood of immunity. A world with a billion inhabitants might yield a million companions.”

“And only – nine hundred and ninety nine million graves.” Krishna powered himself over the bluff with the stick; what he had been walking towards came into view, standing on the dry sea bed surrounded by armed crewmen. She had not been expecting to see it, and stopped dead.

“It’s a shuttle,” she said redundantly.

“Yes.” He began poling himself along with the stick; he had to move faster. “The shuttle that brought me here – to be precise . . . it circled around behind the bluff and landed here right after take-off. We will have to hurry – if we want to board – the crew will turn on the burners if they believe anyone but you and I is coming . . . Did you really believe – I’d give you the location of the ship we were leaving on?”

“I keep telling you; I am not going with you.”

Krishna nodded. He could not count the beats of his heart now; it was like that of a bird. “Then I have – no option.” He pulled out the small fragment of his god that he took with him on long journeys, held it to the light. “Behold my travel god. You have paid – little enough attention to it over the years. It was in fact given me by my masters. It contains a very small travel bomb which can nevertheless – split this planet in two; and that, sister daughter granddaughter,
will
kill all of you.”

Her face lost its look of certainty for the first time. “It’s a rock.”

“It’s a bomb,” said Old Krishna. “Though also still a god.”

She looked at the rock in real terror. “When will it detonate?”

“When I want it to.” He whipped back his hand and threw; the god bounced several times on the wall of the bluff before being lost in the heat haze. “Now it is a rock – among several million rocks. Find it – if you can. As your other selves are all of one mind with you, they now know my shuttle is here – they are therefore coming here – and they will be coming quickly . . . Believe me, I know this . . . But they’re coming from the wrong end of the terminal . . . And they’re trying – to worm their way aboard a Proprietor military transport that has orders – not to allow any unauthorized personnel inside it – ”

He had to stop. There were men with guns around him now, ushering him into the loading lock. The take-off sparklers were already lit. Turning to look up the bluff, he could see figures silhouetted against the sun. Figures that were humanoid, but certainly not human. They would have taken other shapes, faster shapes. She was still dawdling twenty metres behind him. Trying to delay him.

She still had time.

The loading lock door whined shut, slowly, interminably, narrowing to a metre-wide sliver. She had still not moved. Eventually, he could not bear it any longer, and turned his face away.

When he turned back, she was holding him up against acceleration, his head in her hands, while men clung on to safety grips on the walls around him. Someone was yelling into a communicator, “GET US AIRBORNE! GET US SOME HEIGHT NOW!” Something heavy clanged off the outside hull.

She turned his head to face her. “Was it all bullshit? It sounded like it.”

“Complete bullshit,” he gasped weakly. “A good thing I’m having a – heart attack, or you’d have been able to tell I was lying just by listening to my – heartbeat.”

She held him close, supporting him, as the acceleration mounted and the shuttle rolled towards orbit.

“Try to relax. Don’t exert yourself. We’ll get you through this.”

“Just promise me this is one ship you’ll – never get off. If you never make planetfall, your aggression algorithms may – never kick in. Stay in space – travel hopefully – never arrive – ”

She held him close and made a very reasonable facsimile of tears until the acceleration lessened and they came to take him off her.

“Give us room! Give us room! Let us get him some oxygen!”

She shook her head. “His heart has stopped.”

The certainty of the statement gave them pause. They separated from her, treating her with the respect prudent men give to things they cannot explain. She sank down against the wall, trying to let gravity drag her miserably to the floor. Gravity refused to do so. She had to suffer in mid-air.

A
BDUL KARIM
is his name. He is a small, thin man, precise to the point of affectation in his appearance and manner. He walks very straight; there is gray in his hair and in his short, pointed beard. When he goes out of the house to buy vegetables, people on the street greet him respectfully. “Salaam, Master Sahib,” they say, or “Namaste, Master Sahib,” according to the religion of the speaker. They know him as the mathematics master at the municipal school. He has been there so long that he sees the faces of his former students everywhere: the autorickshaw driver Ramdas who refuses to charge him, the man who sells paan from a shack at the street corner, with whom he has an account, who never reminds him when his payment is late – his name is Imran and he goes to the mosque far more regularly than Abdul Karim.

They all know him, the kindly mathematics master, but he has his secrets. They know he lives in the old yellow house, where the plaster is flaking off in chunks to reveal the underlying brick. The windows of the house are hung with faded curtains that flutter tremulously in the breeze, giving passersby an occasional glimpse of his genteel poverty – the threadbare covers on the sofa, the wooden furniture as gaunt and lean and resigned as the rest of the house, waiting to fall into dust. The house is built in the old-fashioned way about a courtyard, which is paved with brick except for a circular omission where a great litchi tree grows. There is a high wall around the courtyard, and one door in it that leads to the patch of wilderness that was once a vegetable garden. But the hands that tended it – his mother’s hands – are no longer able to do more than hold a mouthful of rice between the tips of the fingers, tremblingly conveyed to the mouth. The mother sits nodding in the sun in the courtyard while the son goes about the house, dusting and cleaning as fastidiously as a woman. The master has two sons – one is in distant America, married to a gori bibi, a white woman – how unimaginable! He never comes home and writes only a few times a year. The wife writes cheery letters in English that the master reads carefully with finger under each word. She talks about his grandsons, about baseball (a form of cricket, apparently), about their plans to visit, which never materialize. Her letters are as incomprehensible to him as the thought that there might be aliens on Mars, but he senses a kindness, a reaching out, among the foreign words. His mother has refused to have anything to do with that woman.

The other son has gone into business in Mumbai. He comes home rarely, but when he does he brings with him expensive things – a television set, an air-conditioner. The TV is draped reverently with an embroidered white cloth and dusted every day but the master can’t bring himself to turn it on. There is too much trouble in the world. The air-conditioner gives him asthma so he never turns it on, even in the searing heat of summer. His son is a mystery to him – his mother dotes on the boy but the master can’t help fearing that this young man has become a stranger, that he is involved in some shady business. The son always has a cell phone with him and is always calling nameless friends in Mumbai, bursting into cheery laughter, dropping his voice to a whisper, walking up and down the pathetically clean drawing-room as he speaks. Although he would never admit it to anybody other than Allah, Abdul Karim has the distinct impression that his son is waiting for him to die. He is always relieved when his son leaves.

Still, these are domestic worries. What father does not worry about his children? Nobody would be particularly surprised to know that the quiet, kindly master of mathematics shares them also. What they don’t know is that he has a secret, an obsession, a passion that makes him different from them all. It is because of this, perhaps, that he seems always to be looking at something just beyond their field of vision, that he seems a little lost in the cruel, mundane world in which they live.

He wants to see infinity.

It is not strange for a mathematics master to be obsessed with numbers. But for Abdul Karim, numbers are the stepping stones, rungs in the ladder that will take him (Inshallah!) from the prosaic ugliness of the world to infinity.

When he was a child he used to see things from the corners of his eyes. Shapes moving at the very edge of his field of vision. Haven’t we all felt that there was someone to our left or right, darting away when we turned our heads? In his childhood he had thought they were farishte, angelic beings keeping a watch over him. And he had felt secure, loved, nurtured by a great, benign, invisible presence.