The blaft anthology of t.., p.38
The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction, Volume 3, page 38
Michael had said that they’d be able to make a plan as soon as Gabriel came back. And now he had returned, and Michael was with him. They decided to be patient, and delay any decisions until they could speak to them.
Just then, about five hundred meters away, a spaceship appeared out of nowhere.
Zhin looked at it with intense concentration. “It’s… it must be the LW chamber from Earth. The new people are here,” she said. They all got up excitedly.
²⁴
The spaceship was so gigantic it was as if a whole city had arrived. Akilan, stunned, took a few steps towards it. The others followed about two feet behind him.
“We don’t need to get too close. First let’s see who’s in it,” said Zhin, bringing up the rear.
A hiss of air came from the underside of the spaceship, a sound full of the weariness of having travelled crores of miles. A hydraulic staircase emerged from within the ship and slowly descended to the ground.
Akilan stood in the open, staring at it as though he’d been waiting for it.
“Akilan... let’s get just a little bit out of sight,” said Zhin, suddenly unsure whether there would be humans on the ship or Durphies. Catherine, Henrich, and Aggie went and hid behind a tree, their hearts pounding fast.
GL 581g’s sun was eclipsed, at the moment, by the planet’s larger moon, so it was quite dark, but still Vinodhini felt she too should hide. She couldn’t decide whether to go behind the tree, or to hide herself behind Akilan. Finally she decided to be brave, and stood next to him, holding onto him tight.
At that moment, from many points on the spaceship, stacks of lights started glowing; they washed the whole area with search beams. The beams passed quickly over the place where Akilan and Vinodhini stood, then returned and focused on them. Vinodhini held Akilan even tighter. The two of them stood frozen like a pair of rabbits, caught in the light of the hunter’s torch.
Zhin shouted, “Run and hide!”
“If we run now, they’ll catch you too. They’ve seen us.” Akilan pronounced the words without moving his lips.
A touch-screen door on the belly of the spacecraft slid open smoothly at the point where the stairs had descended.
Appada! At least the creatures that emerged were humans, not Durphies. But were they friends or foes? Because they were backlit, all they could make out were silhouettes. They walked towards the couple, who stood watching in fear. Then Vinodhini’s expression changed on one of joy.
“Angelina Jolie!” she said happily. The Hollywood star! And behind her was Brad Pitt. Husband and wife, along with their lovely kids.
“Hi,” said Angelina.
Vinodhini hesitated a moment, then answered, “Hi.”
“Seeing you guys here… It makes it seem real. Like we’ll actually be able to make a life on the new planet. How long have you been living here?”
To understand Angelina’s American accent, they had to use their language devices. By the time they had fit them back in and could answer her question, more astonishments had arrived: Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Star TV’S Rupert Murdoch—a queue of internationally famous people, the very presence of their bodies evidence that each of them had forked over the 600 crore fee.
“It was an easy journey… like flying to a neighboring state. Technology!” said Bill Gates, giving a thumbs up.
Zhin, Catherine, Aggie and Heinrich came out from their hiding place behind the trees. The new arrivals looked at them worriedly, as if they might be enemies who had hidden in the foliage to ambush them. Slowly, with mutual suspicion, both groups shared guarded smiles.
“There’s no problem here, is there?” asked Murdoch.
The newly-arrived one hundred people had one hundred questions they wanted to know the answers to immediately, while Akilan’s group had one thousand things to ask them about the Earth.
“What happened to the new Rajinikanth movie?” demanded Vinodhini. “Did Kochadiyan 2 get released? Will Kamal Haasan have to emigrate after Vishwaroopam 2 comes out?”
Soon, everyone was mingling—the world’s richest hundred people casually talking to the ordinary residents of GL 581g, sharing big surprises, asking and answering small questions.
Suddenly a five-foot-high hologram screen flickered to life. They all looked over at the same time, like people watching the for white smoke signal that means a new Pope has been chosen. On the screen appeared The Mother, smiling her insoluble smile.
“Greetings, guests from Earth! I am The Mother. I’ll be managing the latest flight arrival. The hydrocopters are ready; they’ll drop you at your assigned quarters. Beetle will explain more about your schedules tomorrow. It’s not like it was in the beginning, anymore; there aren’t so many tough rules now. Am I right, Akilan? If it happens, it’s good, if it doesn’t happen, even better.”
She touched her fingers to her lips and sent a kiss into the air.
The Mother’s unexpected appearance had left Bill Gates with goosebumps. “Who is she? How… they must be using biomagnetic sensors… with low voltage frequency modulation...” He still hadn’t been fitted with an ear device.
“They didn’t tell us anything about ‘The Mother’ before we left from Earth,” said Angelina Jolie, with her trademark defiance.
“Well, you’ve just gotten here, right?” said Akilan.
As The Mother had promised, the hydrocopters arrived and arranged themselves in a line.
For now, we’ll do as The Mother says, they all seemed to decide, and each climbed into the hydrocopter that bore his or her number. With doubtful eyes and fake smiles, they said “See you!”, and waving their right hands in the air, they disappeared with the wind.
Albert Einstein once said, I fear the day technology overlaps with our humanity. Michael remembered hearing him say it in person, when he had gone to meet him at his house in New Jersey. The meeting had taken place six months before Einstein died. Michael had been just a research student then; the meeting was set up with the help of his professors.
I fear the day technology overlaps with our humanity. Had Einstein considered it carefully before saying it? Wouldn’t it have been more in character for him to take the opposite side?
How do you face a daughter that has no body? Gabriel had broken her skull open, removed her brain, and kept it soaking in cerebrospinal fluid. For him, that was scientific growth. The shock was unrelenting for Michael; he was unable to think, or even to cry properly.
“What is a human being but his intellect? His color, height, and shape are all temporary. After fifty or sixty years of life, it all changes: we go grey or bald, or faces wrinkle, our limbs begin to tremble… this fate is written, for each of us, in the concluding paragraph of our stories. But the brain is filled with so much knowledge and experience. Just because the end has come for the body, why must we bury the brain in the sand along with it? Think about what it would have meant if we could have saved the brains of Dostoyevsky, Richard Feynman, Marx, Beethoven! Without a body, one need not be plagued by debts, car loans… there are no more problems. Dostoyevsky wouldn’t have had to succumb to bitterness after losing everything from gambling with cards. When you’re just a brain, you can read and write as much as you want. Why would you cry just because Rosie has no body?”
Humanity. Gabriel seemed to have lost all trace of it.
They walked down lengthy corridors. Michael followed Gabriel the way a puppy follows his owner in hope of getting a biscuit. Soon they came to the place where the baby Marcus Aurelius was being raised. The nursery was filled with the latest playthings for a child: there were remote controls with small antennas to operate toy aeroplanes, mechanical dolls that would move if you stared at them, and visiflex robots scattered everywhere. A female robot sat with the boy, teaching him quantum theory. For a normal ten-month old child, even the rhyme “Rain, rain, go away…” would be too much, thought Michael.
The child looked up at the two of them and laughed.
A child who has never known the warmth of its parents. It’s like an organic machine that’s having software installed in it.
Gabriel asked the female robot to bring the child close to them. A look of pride came over Gabriel’s face.
“Watch how I’m going to raise this boy!” he said, lifting him up with one hand.
Michael looked at the child pityingly.
“I’m going to make him immortal. Think about it a little, Michael. We need at least one person who will never die to support us. Who is going to take care of all this? We need someone responsible, right? What do you say, Marcus?”
Marcus Aurelius simply laughed.
²⁵
It was cold. From that fact he assumed he was somewhere in Europe. But he couldn’t guess anything beyond that.
Charles tried to open his eyes, but couldn’t. He tried to pull open his lids with his fingers… and only then did he realize both his hands were tied behind his back. A dirty handkerchief was stuffed in his mouth. Tied over both his mouth and nose was a cloth laced with Ketamine—and the smell brought back the memory of his abduction.
Gabriel had left him abruptly outside the television studio. He had sat down in lobby. Someone had brought him a cool drink, and he had downed it. That smell...
He wouldn’t have minded so much, really, being kidnapped for the second time in a week, if his kidnappers weren’t driving what had to be the least comfortable car on Earth. The road was in bad shape, too. He had finally managed to open his eyes, but now they began snapping open and shut like a suitcase with a broken latch. It was a mountain road, some place that would not attract tourists. They were passing what looked like an old power station that had long since been shut down. He wished he could breathe through his mouth. If you take the cloth out of my mouth, I promise not to scream—he wished he could speak the words out loud. There were people on the either side of him who could have granted his request. To the right a man, to the left a woman. Both wore monkey caps. Who had kidnapped him, and why? Where were they taking him?
It’s the Radical Anti-Nova Movement. They’re taking me to some desolate place and they’re going to kill me. It wasn’t too difficult to deduce the answers. But they’re going to kill the wrong guy. He was in too much pain to feel much fear for his life. What pained him most was that it would all be unnecessary—his torture, his death, all for nothing.
Eventually the rough, uneven road ended, and the car stopped. The man who had been driving the car opened the left side door, and bitingly cold air rushed in. The woman sitting to Charles’s left got out, pointed a gun at him, and gestured for him to get down. His hands still tied, Charles struggled to get out of the car. The man sitting to his right pushed him out as if he were unloading a sack.
Aside from the four of them, there was no one else around. Charles could not move his feet, but the girl kept nudging him forward with the gun. Ahead, at the top of the rise, was a dilapidated church. He could see cobwebs, plants growing out of the cracks in the walls—it looked like no one had set foot there in at least six months.
In front of a statue of Christ on the cross were long pews covered in dust. Without waiting for anyone’s permission, Charles sat himself down on one of the pews. The girl yanked the handkerchief out his mouth like she was pulling out a valve cap to release air. Then she tied him to the bench.
One of the men came up to him and stared at him with burning eyes.
“Why don’t you tell us what is going on, at least.”
“Water,” he managed. It took all his strength to speak the word.
After a nod of approval from the fellow with the blazing eyes, the other man took a bottle from his back pocket and handed it to Charles. He drank it all, not leaving a drop. Then he looked at the three faces carefully.
“You need to ask Gabriel,” he said.
“Who’s Gabriel? Explain yourself!”
“Calm down,” said Charles, still in pain but patient. “Ask without anger and you will understand.”
“Keep acting smug and we’ll blow you away!” said the woman, aiming the gun at his forehead.
Charles did his best to explain how the Human Development Council had tried to save people from the dangers threatening the world, and how Gabriel had infiltrated those efforts and become a tyrant.
“In fact, you didn’t kidnap me; you saved me,” he said.
Should they believe this old geezer, or should they kill him? One of the men went out to speak to someone on a cell phone, and then returned.
“You said in your TV interview that you would send people to the new planet for one hundred million dollars. That was planned by you and Gabriel together, wasn’t it?”
“You have a gun. He had a bomb. I only said it out of fear for my life. He used me because he knew both the public and the scientific community would believe me. Ask someone to look in the place where you kidnapped me; you’ll find a bomb under my bed. If I tried to go against him, he could have killed me at any time. It’s a good thing you saved me. Not that I care about myself anymore; but we need to save both these planets. Or rather, the people living on them. That’s the only reason I’m holding onto life.”
This was a most unexpected twist for the youngsters. The satisfaction they’d felt at getting hold of the enemy was slipping away.
“I can help you. The scientists have formed an association. We need to explain things to them. We need to tell them about Gabriel’s greed, and grab the technology from Gabriel’s control.”
”Would we need the help of an army for that?”
Charles laughed. “No. We just have to get our hands on some coding notes, and we have to press certain buttons. Can you take me to the London Institute of Technology?”
One of young men spoke to someone on the phone. He returned and said, “Okay.”
They got back in the car.
“If you’re thinking of trying to con us... trust me, not even one of you scientists will survive,” said the woman.
Charles stared at the gun in her hand, and knew it was not an empty threat.
The place that had been allotted to Angelina Jolie’s family could not properly be termed a house. It was more like a tall glass flask. There were no partitions to separate the bedroom from the kitchen; it was just one massive room. Even the bathtub and sink stood in the open, to one side. But the strange floor plan wasn’t such a big deal; they could adjust to that. What was much more difficult was the lack of TV, movies, Facebook, Twitter, internet, or any sports activities. They were supremely bored. Already, the children had begun to ask, “Mum, when are we going home?”
The very first day, there was a bitter argument about whether they had been too hasty in making the decision to leave Earth—even if it was going to be destroyed. They couldn’t even go shopping at the mall or market. Who would there be to buy or sell anything here?
Gabriel had presented them a list of the available jobs; they were supposed to tick the ones they wanted. At first, the idea that they would be able to choose what work they would do seemed an attractive proposition. But when Brad Pitt actually looked at the list Gabriel handed him, and read through it—polyvinyl construction, agro, hydro, genomics, bio-mechanics—he had no idea which to tick, and felt frustrated.
It occurred to them that even when the promises they’d been made on Earth were true, the experience was very different in reality. They’d been told there were plenty of gold and diamonds here. But what could one do with them?
“Shall we go back?” asked Brad Pitt.
Angelina Jolie did not answer at first. She didn’t know if they had the option of an exit.
“Let some more people come. Maybe we’ll have to get used to these new rules. Let’s wait awhile and see if there’s another way.”
The two moons were both up, and shining beautifully, but Jolie felt unable to enjoy them. She stood on the glass deck and looked out at the planet’s landscape, blanketed in darkness. Some distance away was another glass palace, gigantic and preternaturally silent. She had no way of knowing if there was anyone inside it.
They didn’t know who to trust here.
This thing we call the world... it’s a belief. Night gives way to day, we drink coffee, we put on our makeup, a film gets released, the fans swarm around us. But none of that will happen here. All those things we were used to, that life we believed in, none of it will happen here. Can we live out the remainder of our time like this? We came here because we feared for our lives. But what’s more important: just continuing to live, or living the life we knew?
Thoughts of Buddha, Christ, and Allah came and went through Angelina’s mind—followed by a strange emptiness. Brad Pitt put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her tenderly towards him. They didn’t speak.
As she gazed at the massive glass palace in front of her, she noticed something. A shape, hanging by a rope.
“Kitty, look over there!” she shouted, using her pet name for Brad.
There was a human figure, descending from the glass palace. They couldn’t make out if it was a man or woman.
“Something’s happening,” said Angelina.
“About time,” said Brad Pitt.
²⁶
Akilan and Vinodhini were happy. It was as if they had arrived and settled down in heaven. After their work hours were over, they spent their time in the big room, cloyingly in love.
“So you’re the first revolutionary?” she asked, her hair entwined in the strands of his forelock.
“Who told you that, Vino?”
“Everyone on the whole planet is telling me. Including Dr. Michael. He said you have a very quick temper.”
“Oh, that… Yes, but later, he admitted himself that my anger was justified.”
“So what’s happened to the revolution now?”
“It’s still on. It’s just that this love of ours has interrupted things a bit.” Akilan squeezed her fingers.
“A revolutionary love?”
“That’s right. Like Marx and Jenny, Lenin and Krupskaya, Che Guevara and Aleida…”
“O-ho! Putting us in the same league as all those famous people, are you?”
Suddenly there was a voice at the door. “And why only choose revolutionaries from such far-off foreign countries? What about Prabhakaran and Mathivathani, they don’t come to mind?”
