Her heart leaps. There is something in her throat she cannot swallow. There are tears in her eyes.
She remembers this scene from Lal Darfan’s elephant pagoda, but those mountains had not the power to touch, to move, to inspire. They had been folds of fractals and digits, two imaginary landmasses colliding with each other. And Lal Darfan had also been N. K. Jivanjee had also been the Gen Three aeai, as the eastern extremities of these mountains had been those peaks she had seen over the wall around that garden in Kabul. She knows the image the Gen Three had shown her of her father as torturer had been false; she had never walked down that corridor, to that room, to that woman who in all probability had never existed. But she does not doubt that others did, that others had been strapped to that table to scream out how they endangered the establishment. And she does not doubt that that image will now forever be her memory. Memory is what I am made of, the aeai had said. Memories make our selves, we make memories for ourselves. She remembers another father, another Najia Askarzadah. She does not know how she is going to live with either. And the mountains are harsh and tall and cold and reach beyond any end she can see and she is high and alone in her leather business-class seat with the fifty-inch pitch.
She thinks now she knows why the aeai had shown her the childhood she had suppressed. It had not been cruel, it had not been even a ploy for time. It had been genuine, touching curiosity, an attempt by a djinn made of stories to understand something outside its mandalas of artifice and craft. Something it could believe it had not made up itself. It wanted the drama of the real, the fountainhead from which all story flows.
Najia Askarzadah pulls her legs up on to her seat, lays her body down across Tal’s. She drapes her arm over yts, loosely takes yts fingers in hers. Tal starts with a half-syllable but she does not break yts sleep. Yts hand is delicate and hot; beneath her cheek she can feel yts ribs. Yt’s so light, so loosely put together, like a cat but she feels a cat’s toughness in the muscles breathing in, breathing out. She lies there, listening to yts heart. She thinks that maybe she has never met a braver person. Yt has always had to fight to be ytself and now yt goes into exile with no destination in sight.
From eight thousand metres she can understand that Shaheen Badoor Khan had been an honourable man. In Bharat, even as he escorted their taxi through the checkpoint at the vip gate and on to the perimeter road to the vip lounge, she had seen only his falsities and frailties; another man, another fabric of untruths and complications. As she waited at the desk while he spoke low and hard and fast with the airline official, she had confidently expected that at any moment the airport police would come out of the walls and doors with levelled weapons and plastic cable-ties for their wrists. They were all betrayers. They were all her fathers.
She remembers how the gate staff had looked and whispered among themselves as Shaheen Badoor Khan completed the final formalities. He had quickly, formally shaken hands with her, then Tal, then briskly walked away.
The shuttle flight had just punched through the monsoon cloud base when the story broke all over the seatback screen news channel. N. K. Jivanjee had resigned. N. K. Jivanjee had fled Bharat. The Government of National Unity was in disarray. Disgraced advisor to the late Prime Minister, Shaheen Badoor Khan, had come forward with extraordinary revelations—backed by documentary evidence—that the former leader of the Shivaji had masterminded a plot to destroy the Rana government and fatally weaken Bharat against the Awadhis. Bharat reels! Shock revelation! Stunning scandal! Ashok Rana to make statement from the Rana Bhavan! Khan national saviour! Where is Jivanjee, Bharat demands? Where is Jivanjee? Jivanjee the traitor?
Bharat quaked to its third political shock in twenty-four hours. Not a fraction of the earthquake it would have been had Shaheen Badoor Khan revealed that the Shivaji was a political front for a Generation Three aeai formed our of the cumulative intelligence of Town and Country. An attempted coup by its most popular soap opera. As the plane levelled off and the hostess came round with the drinks—Tal had had two double cognacs; yt had just fled an assassination, battled a Generation Three aeai, and survived a murderous mob, so it deserved a little luxury, cho chweet—Najia watched the story update by the second and comprehended the subtlety and skill with which Shaheen Badoor Khan was managing it. Even as the plane was pushing back from the stand he must have been cutting a deal with the Generation Three, one that would leave Bharat as politically whole as possible. This was his seat, his mini-bottle of Hennessy; he stayed for his country, for he had nothing else.
She cannot go back to Sweden again. Najia Askarzadah is as much an exile now as Tal. She shivers, hugs Tal closer. Yt entwines yts fingers tightly around hers. Najia can feel yts subdermal activators against her forearm. Not man not woman not both not neither. Nute. Another way of being human, speaking a physical language she does not understand. More alien to her than any man, any father, yet this body next to hers is loyal, tough, funny, courageous, clever, kind, sensual, vulnerable. Sweet. Sexy. All you could wish in a friend of the soul. Or a lover. She starts at that thought, then presses her cheek against Tal’s hunched shoulder. Then she feels their conjoined centres of gravity shift as the plane banks in to approach to Kathmandu and she turns her head to look out the window, hoping maybe for that revelatory glimpse of distant Sagarmatha but all she can see is an oddly shaped cloud that you might almost think was the shape of a huge elephant, were such a thing possible.
History measures its course in centuries but its progress in the events of an hour. As the tanks pull back to the Kunda Khadar, in the wake of the shock resignation of N. K. Jivanjee over Badoor Khan’s allegations and the withdrawal of the Shivaji from the Government of National Salvation only hours old, Ashok Rana accepts Delhi’s offer of talks in Kolkata to resolve the dam dispute. But the day has one more surprise for the reeling Bharati nation. Whole families sit shocked, speechless, numb with surprise in front of their screens. In the middle of the one o’clock broadcast, Town and Country has gone off air.
They go in lots of seven, down the elevators down the concrete steps through the airlock to Deba’s stinky little cubby and the observation dock beyond where investment bankers, grameen, women, cub journalists, clan Ray advisors, and a shell-shocked looking Energy Minister Patel shuffle round in cramped circle dance to peer through the heavy glass panel into the hard light of another universe.
“Okay, okay, come on, no more than five seconds, Ray Power will not be held responsible for any eye irritation, sunburn, or other ultraviolet-related complaints,” Deba says, waving them through and round and out. “No more than five seconds, Ray Power will not be held responsible.”
The lecture hall has been rigged with display nodes and screens and copiously equipped with small eats and bottled water Sonia Yadav bravely holds the lectern, trying to explain to the gathered what they are seeing on the screens: two simple graphic bars that show the energy drawn from the grid maintaining the zero-point field and the energy output from the potential difference between the universal ground-states, but she is fighting two losing fronts, scientifically and acoustically.
“We’re getting two percent over input,” she shouts over the swelling burble of countrywomen exchanging stories about their grandchildren, businessmen pressing palms and palmers and journos hanging on to their ’hoeks for the newest shock wonder revelation to come out of the Bharat Sabha: the stunning resignation of N. K. Jivanjee from the Government of National Unity. “We’re storing that in high-energy capacitors for the laser-collider until it reaches a level where we can add it to the grid and open up an aperture to a higher-level universe, and so on and so on. That way we can climb a ladder of energy states until we’re getting something like one hundred and fifty percent return on input energy.”