The blaft anthology of t.., p.29
The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction, Volume 3, page 29
“On Earth, man was the pinnacle of evolution. Here, new men will be made; and we will bring other life forms, too, for man to depend on. The Mother seeks to recreate the biosphere of Earth,” declared Beetle. “Now. Our Mother has been generous in granting you these five minutes. The four of you need to head back to the Agro Department immediately.”
But Alice didn’t move right away; first, she took a long, careful look at everything around her. Akilan understood, and neither he nor Catherine voiced any opposition. Beetle took notice of everything, including who went for a piss and at what time.
The Mother’s room was on the top floor of the Central Research Unit. No one knew how to get there. There was no lift, no stairway, no escalator. The building itself needed to grant access and make the entrance visible, or else it was impossible to enter. The stairs leading to the basement, on the other hand, were open; and as the other three turned to head out of the building back toward the Agro Department, Alice made a quick decision and headed down the stairs. Shaking off Vasiliev’s cautioning hand, she descended.
There was deathly silence. It seemed as if no one had ever entered this place before; in fact, the further she went, she felt sure of it—this was a place that had never known the scent of a human. She crept like a cat down a long, dimly-lit corridor. She wasn’t worried about being seen, but still, she felt afraid. She came to a glass cell with the signboard Core Unit. Here was the mega-system that controlled the entire planet.
She heard Beetle’s voice. “You do not have permission.”
What will happen if I continue? They’ll only throw me into another cabin. Let them! she thought boldy. She saw many glass partitions. Is it only The Mother who is free to come and go here? she wondered. She tried to open the glass screen doors by pressing on them with her hands.
“I repeat: You do not have permission,” said Beetle. There was no visible mechanism by which the door might open: no keyhole, no fingerprint scanner, no retina scanner.
“Open sesame!” she said, irritated.
The words WRONG SECURITY CODE appeared on the glass screen door.
She tried “Amma”, “GL 581”, and “Operation Nova”, but it didn't budge.
There’s no hurry, she thought. I'll figure out how to get in eventually. She turned to head back to the Agro Department. The three others were relieved to see her come out alive.
Alice wrote on Akilan’s hand: I need a security code.
The three others looked at her in silence, as if to say: We’ll figure it out.
Vasiliev had made some breakthroughs in hydroponic vertical agriculture. He had grown a couple of thick and round squashes. Meanwhile Akilan was seriously involved in developing technology to activate the dormant seeds, and he showed a lot of determination. The pressure to bring about a new green revolution in the next six months hung over their heads.
Catherine’s graduation project at her university had been an attempt to get a hundred sprouts of paddy from a single seed of rice. For her too, this was a challenge.
She asked Akilan, “You said you could create seeds in natural systems?”
“No, you need Pseudomonas fluorescens to properly bio-prime seeds. On the day of introduction I just said it as a joke!’ said Akilan.
“Can I ask you another question?”
“Ask away, my dear wife. What is it—are you in the mood for some more Velcro connection?”
“Chee! No, I just wanted to ask what your Twitter password is. That first day, Beetle threatened to tell us. ‘Girls, shut your ears,’ it said.”
In reply, Akilan simply echoed: “Chee! No, I won’t tell you.”
Alice, watching, had started to notice how close Akilan and Catherine were getting. They seemed to be unconcerned about the rules forbidding husband/wife relationships, or loving the same person for more than a week. Alice started to worry. Who knew what fate had befallen Rosie, and her father Michael who had came to look for her? Love had blinded their eyes. “Don’t you remember what Beetle said?” she reminded them.
The first step towards escape was to blunt the Beetle’s spying skills. They needed to be able to share secrets without it knowing. The second step was to capture Cabin 24. The next target was the Central Research Unit, and finally The Mother. The fate of everyone was in The Mother’s hands: the ones who were already there, and the ones who were yet to arrive.
Just one day before, The Mother had appeared before them—her face now unpixelated—and announced that Akilan and Catherine’s child was expected within three months, and that an order for the next breeding session would be given after the delivery. They could hardly believe the cruelty of it, the artificiality.
Alice stared outside the glass screen at needle-like mountain spires, covered with sparse vegetation. The peaks looked like they had been finely sharpened. Below them, on the ground, were trees unlike anything she had ever seen on Earth: trunks with no bark; leaves that were long fronds; red, huge flowers. From one corner of the window she could glimpse an immense water body; she couldn’t gauge whether it was a lake or a sea. Foamy waves rolled onto the shore. Beetle had told them that water covered 50% of the surface of this world; the rest was was soil.
Just as Alice was beginning to develop a liking for this new landscape, she saw a monstrous black kite-like thing fly past the glass.
What’s this, now?
Astonished, she called the others over to look. The creature was five feet long. When Akilan first caught sight of it, he thought he saw a long wooden pestle in one of its claws. The next time it approached the window closely, he saw that it had some sort of equipment fixed to its back. It was definitely wasn’t a kite, and the thing it held in its claws wasn’t a pestle; it looked like a weapon.
“What is it?” the four of them asked.
“It’s not in my database,” said Beetle. “It appears to be a hostile life form. The image has been sent to The Mother.”
⁷
“When the devil chants holy verses, how can we tell what is the truth and what is a lie? That’s what your ‘Mother’s’ concern feels like,” Michael said bitterly.
He was locked up alone in Cabin 52, where he had been ever since demanding to see his daughter.
Beetle tried hard to console him. “The path shown by The Mother’s edicts is now the only way forward for future generations of man to flourish.” But Michael had been involved with the work of the Human Development Council from the beginning, and Beetle’s propagandizing was as useless as a newborn child conducting classes for a professor.
He had become unjustifiably thin. No matter how much energy and food was fed to him, it could not dissolve his worries. “Yes, Rosie is alive,” was the only answer they gave whenever he asked about her. But where? On Earth? Or here? You’ve already brought 40,000 people here. Among so many lives, is there really no place left for hers? Why this betrayal?
The fact of it was, he cared for neither of the two planets. Rosie was his world, the only one that mattered. She had grown up as her father’s daughter, a child prodigy. He had watched her knowledge of science develop step by step. The moment she had gone missing, part of him had died; what remained now was just his body, an empty shell. The last words of his guru, Richard Feynman, came to mind: “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.”
An agitated Michael looked out of the glass windows at the landscape of GL 581g. So many tests had been conducted to ensure this place was suitable for human life. So many preparations had been made, so many plans, so much methodology. Rosie had been involved in every aspect of it; but now that everything had finally been realized, she was not there to witnesses it.
Wait! What was that? He chanced to notice a few black shapes moving outside the window. It had to be the same life form that had surprised Akilan and Catherine—but they had only seen one, and here there were four! At first he thought they were flying, but when he looked closer, it seemed more as if they were floating. They were incredibly strange. What are these creatures? he wondered. Are they hostile? Or harmless, like the Greenies? As he watched, the four of them took off into the sky, circled his cabin once and then disappeared into the distance. Each of them seemed to be holding something… a weapon? Something told him these creatures were not native to this planet.
In a worried voice, he asked Beetle, “Do you know what they are?”
“No, other than that they seem to be a hostile life form. I have relayed the information to The Mother.”
For the first time in what felt like ages, Michael chuckled. “Well, that should turn her hair gray.”
Though the first impression one of the creatures would invariably make on a human mind was that of a black kite, in fact they were civilized life forms—though it was difficult to compare them with human cultures and civilizations. For one thing, they were asexual and genderless: things like family, inheritance, divorce, or false love did not concern them at all. They required food, and not much else besides. They did not wear clothes. They believed in one straightforward purpose, to propagate their species. Their tree of scientific knowledge was wholly aimed at this purpose, with no growth at all along the other withered branches. They had mastered the skill of travelling from star to star. To describe them any further was not simple.
The creatures were citizens of a planet known on Earth as Kepler 78b, around 400 light years away. The abundant nitrogen available on GL 581g had drawn their attention. That element was their life, their sustenance.
The language they spoke contained no letters, but was formed wholly by numbers. Even if they wrote poetry, they wrote it in numbers—not in decimal notation, either, but in base 16. And even after this maths was translated into Tamil, it was still difficult to understand what they were saying.
The word for nitrogen in their language could be rendered as pousa. Their name for their home planet, the one humans had named Kepler 78b, was Siguju. They called themselves Durphies.
Now the four of them spoke quickly, planning. “We must take this planet; there is no other option.”
“There is much pousa here. And many enemies,” said one of them.
“We should kill them all,” said another.
The creatures’ mouths, the organs they used for speaking, were the same organs they used for hearing. As a result they were unable to talk while listening, or to listen while talking. They were easily able to stand, float, or fly, but sleeping, walking, and sitting were impossible for them. They floated by means of anti-gravity; there was no expenditure on petrol. Natural gas was emitted from their bodies like exhaust. All they required was nitrogen. There was no need to cultivate anything, or produce anything from the soil. The soil itself was food. Direct and simple.
Culture, refinement, taste, art, music, beauty—all such human concepts were meaningless to the Durphies. Theirs was a life form that could live without all of it. They were beast-scientists, single-minded and fierce.
“There are too many enemies. Our weapons will not be sufficient.”
“It will suffice to select the important ones and kill them. Then the rest will die on their own. This species lives by following the orders given by the head. All we need to do is discern who is the leader, and take care of that one.”
They flew on.
At the Royapettah Hospital Mortuary, the Inspector showed Vinodhini and Akilan’s family a dead body. “This is Akilan.” He opened a folder of evidence. “In a drunken state, he and his friend caught an auto to return home after the movie. As the auto made a U-turn it was hit by a water lorry.”
The face was unrecognizable, completely disfigured. She could hardly even make out what the color of his shirt had been. The only identifier was the black jeans. She wasn’t allowed time to ask questions; to chase away the nauseating stench of decay, the body was quickly rolled up in a funnel of white cloth, and instructions were given for it to be taken straight to the crematorium. Vinodhini did not know what else to do. She ran behind them like a cow being herded towards a country market.
At the Kannamapettai Electric Crematorium, Akilan’s body was laid out for the last time. Vinodhini wept, along with everyone else gathered there.
She recalled the time they had dreamt of a honeymoon in the mountains. “Give me one more week and I’ll have permission from home. Then the next thing you know we’ll be battling the cold in Kulu Manali!” Now the man who had made that promise had been delivered to her on a bed of ice. All the rituals and family traditions had been completed, the body bathed according to the instructions laid down in the shastras.
Then a thought struck her. Where was the tattoo on his left hand? Just two days before he disappeared, they had both gotten tattoos done. Each of them had got a dolphin, a symbol of their love. Suddenly her suspicions became strong. She approached the body and frantically searched the whole left arm.
There was nothing.
Aiyyo, this is not Akilan! Even saying it to herself, it sounded crazy.
She went up to Akilan’s mother. “This is not Akilan,” she whispered.
“What are you saying, ma! How can you say this now?”
“I just realized it. There should be a dolphin tattoo on his hand.”
“My son never had any tattoos. What are you blabbering?” said Akilan’s father.
“Aiyyo! Two days before he went missing, the two of us got matching tattoos... like this.”
He gazed at Vinodhini’s hand, perplexed.
“You’ll start claiming you’re his wife pretty soon! What are you after? Looking to get a portion of the property, are you?” said someone.
She realized there was nothing to be gained from talking to them. Instead she phoned the Teynampet police station. The transcriber picked up the call.
“I’ll put a case against that Inspector! He’s cheated us, showing some unclaimed body! What have you done with Akilan? I need to know now!” she shouted, furious.
The response was as she expected. The Inspector arrived at the crematorium so fast he might have been bounced there like a ball.
He walked up to Vinodhini, his face held tight. “His own parents have accepted that it’s his body. Who are you to claim otherwise?”
“I’m his lover.”
“There’s no reason I should be held to account by loose women like you. Be careful. If you cause too much disturbance you might find yourself locked up.”
“You must do your duty, sir!” Vinodhini demanded.
She wiped her eyes with her dupatta and left the crematorium. She caught an auto, and got down outside the office she went to every day. Her eyes were red—as red as the eyes of Kannagi had been, thousands of years ago, when she stood in front of Madurai Fort wearing a single anklet.[7]
⁸
Alice would not give up. She kept trying different combinations of numbers, letters and words. GL581G, Mother, Earth, 581123, 123581, 20LY. Nothing. The door of the Central Unit did not budge. Every day she was allowed three attempts, and then access was blocked. The next day she would try again. By the fourth day, the other three had given up hope. They began to talk—cracking the password didn’t seem so easy, and even if they got it, what could they do then?
Each night, Alice thought about which three passwords she would try the next day. Outside the window the night was pleasant. Nothing but trees, mountains, the breeze, a few animals. It was like a vision of how the Earth might have been five million years in the past. How hard it was to think without pen and paper!
“GL”, “Mother”… she tried saying the words in different permutations. She needed three new passwords for the next day. They said we’re in the constellation Libra… Okay, let’s see. What’s the zodiac sign for Libra? Weighing scales—okay, now just one more word…and I’ll have tomorrow’s quota done.
But no third word came to her.
Greenie? Beetle? No, we only made up those names after getting here… just one more word...
But tiredness weighed down her eyes, and she slept.
The Central Research Unit was about 4000 miles from cabin 24. But they could get there in less than a second, travelling at faster-than-light speed, cheating time. They travelled to the Central Research Unit as massless information, then regained solid form, exactly as they had been, without a wrinkle—without a loss of a single calorie—and got down to work at once.
There had been a lot of progress with the agro work. One or two plants were starting to flower. Soon they would bear fruit, and then new seeds would come. Vasiliev looked as happy as if he had seen Lenin in the flesh.
The Mother’s nose must have begun to sweat in anticipation, because she appeared in front of the four of them—again, with her face visible. She touched the plants and smiled. “Vaitrikku sorida vendum… ingu vaazhum manitharu kellaam,” she quoted. “We must provide food for the belly, for all the humans living here.” She looked at Akilan.
“You know Bharathiyar[8]?” he said, in amazement.
I do, she said, with a flirtatious motion of the eyes. Then she addressed all four of them. “Very soon, we can plant these outside in the soil and test them.”
She gave them an electric kiss of praise, and disappeared. The Mother seemed to be able to appear in a hundred different places simultaneously, and handle a hundred different problems.
“There’s nothing that The Mother doesn’t know about,” Akihilan mused.
“Are you planning to start a fan club?” asked Catherine.
“The Mother’s skillfulness is all cunning,” Alice said with conviction. “When she meets a Tamil person, she launches an attack by appealing to his sentiments by saying a poem from his homeland. Her robots help her to get prepared for the next person she meets. She doesn’t know everything. She just knows how to fool everyone.” With that, she left confidently for the entrance to the Central Unit.
Beetle kept singing the same refrain: “You do not have permission.” It was a long, dimly lit corridor; Alice was walking it for the fifth day, and it had become familiar. “Constellation Libra,” she said.
“Wrong security code,” said the synthesized voice.
