“I’ve spoiled the worm, yes,” said Kalinin with a thin smile. “It’s like a decadent intellectual. A lazy gourmand that never spent a day on duty.”
“Don’t hate intellectuals, Kalinin. I’m one too. An artist, don’t you remember?”
Kalinin’s face reddened with a sudden access of rage. “Why do you ally yourself with decadent parasites? They only want to lord it over those who fight!”
“Are they so wrong?” said Ida gently. “Is war so wonderful?”
“We should liquidate any wretch who collaborates with the saucers,” cried Kalanin, maddened at the thought of Ida’s impending defection. Below his furry hat-brim, his narrow eyes filled with tears. Wildly he ranted. “Spineless bastards! Double-domes! Where’s their sense of destiny? Life to them is nothing but hashish and vulvas!”
“Let’s suppose the saucers are here to raise everyone’s level, dear Kalanin. Come with me now. Let’s see how our pet saucer worm has grown on its diet of poison rubbish.”
Kalinin and Ida made their way down from their overlook, following the debris-strewn tracks of the diesel trucks. The ragged lip of the former coal-mine was a variegated crust of crushed and flattened junkyard debris, smoldering like an overbaked pie. Moving with care, Ida and Kalinin tottered close to the unstable edge.
“What if a great hero chose this hole as his grave?” mused Ida. “A great man whom the worm loved. Such a hero might single-handedly transform the worm. Just as the mortar-blasted corpse debris transforms the flying saucers.” She gave Kalinin a calculating look. “How much do you love me?”
“What are you after?” said Kalanin, stepping back from the hole. The sun was beating on his head. The world seemed to spin around him. The rubble, the fruitless battles, Ida’s betrayal.
“It’s your best way out of here,” said Ida, nudging him forward once more. “Death in battle is a path to immortality. To resurrection, even. I’ll bring you back to life, and I’ll finally share your bed.”
They were at the very brink of the mineshaft, with the rubble shifting and rattling beneath their feet. Below them the gigantic worm stirred, liquid, exultant, entirely happy in its garbage.
Drunk with love, helplessly wanting to impress Ida, Kalinin leapt out into the air and slashed his own throat with his razor-sharp bayonet. He dropped down the shaft amid a spinning gush of blood.
Kalanin hit the bottom so fast that his substance merged into that of the startled saucer worm. And then—so great was the creature’s revulsion for human death—it explosively shattered into grubs. The sky-darkening plume of eruption was visible for hundreds of miles.
Ida was unharmed. Quickly and decisively, she took command of the paramilitary rabble—declaring a cease-fire and dismissing them all.
That night she set off for Mumbai, India. Following Kalinin’s plume.
“Mumbai is the greatest city mankind has ever seen,” Puneet remarked to his business associate, Leela. “We nearly wrecked the planet with filth, but that was just our subcontinental exuberance. And now, thanks to the saucers, all is well. Our business is an integral part of Mumbai’s greatness.”
Leela had brought in a bright stainless-steel tiffin-box full of free-range saucer grubs, fresh from the Ukraine. The edible grubs had blown in on the monsoon winds. They were unusually tasty. Leela offered one to Puneet, who gobbled it with his usual avidity.
Leela and Puneet were from the district of Maharashtra—elite school friends and now in business together. Their initial funding had come from Puneet’s prosperous family. Leela and Puneet had rocketed to commercial success by marketing saucer worms as a general house-cleaning product called Kleen Kobras.
The source of the worms? Lucky Puneet had managed to stable a saucer-creature inside a Mumbai warehouse, an anomalous silver being the size and shape of a crocodile. There was no knowing why the creature had approached him, but there it was. He fed it a steady diet of human garbage, and the obliging lizard budded off as many Kleen Kobras as Puneet and Leela could use.
It was Leela who’d thought of selling the worms. An image of the saucer salamander was an integral part of her marketing campaign—it appeared in all the ads. These days in India, there was a fad for all things relating to the beneficent saucers.
“Our trade is indeed bringing us fine success,” said Leela. “And now we should seek entree to high society. Philanthropy, Puneet. Highly upscale. We do something momentous for dear old Mumbai, and then we are in the social register.”
“A stupendous civic gift,” mused Puneet. “With the proviso that we spend no cash. Commercial moguls such as us are too slick for that.”
“Agreed,” said Leela. “What if you petition our saucer lizard on behalf of Mumbai? Perhaps a public feast upon our worms? Surely the lizard will honor the astral grandiosity of your soul.”
“You are a most agreeable woman,” said Puneet. He raised his finger. “I have indeed been envisioning a saucer gambit. A grand stroke for urban development. Presenting it as a philanthropy would be genial indeed.”
Leela crossed her stockinged legs and opened a paper notebook. “Tell me your raga to riches, Puneet.”
Puneet toyed with a cufflink, suddenly shy. But then, warmed by the sun of Leela’s smile, he found his voice. “I am proposing that we colonize Mumbai’s outlying districts with eleven duplicate copies of the city center.”
“What?”
“A Dodeca-Mumbai. Twelve supercities united in one magical, intricate graffito of urbanism. We’re far too crowded within our one small Mumbai. Once I issue my commands, we’ll enjoy a megasprawl of twelve. This is a good thing. The saucer lizard can accomplish it.”
“Truly so?” said Leela. “All I’ve seen the lizard do is hatch Kleen Kobra worms. Exceedingly many of them, yes, but—”
“Our saucer lizard is deeply sensitive to my kundalini,” replied Puneet. “The only limits are those within my mind!” Warming to the sound of his own voice, Puneet waved his spotless cotton sleeve at the view from their penthouse office’s window. “We’ll make the Dodeca-Mumbai of your dreams, Leela.”
“But I’ve dreamed no such thing.”
“The lizard and I will cut-and-paste our entire downtown, warping and squeezing where need be.”
“And you said—twelve in all?”
“I have conceptualized a keen workflow,” said Puneet, glowing with pride. “We copy Mumbai once, and that makes two Mumbais. Then we copy the two Mumbais, so there are four. And then—” Puneet rose from behind his teakwood desk and rapped his Kleen Kobra distribution map with a swagger-stick. “Then we make two fresh copies of the four, arriving at twelve altogether!”
“I understand,” said Leela, her expression studiously blank. She would never want the wealthy Puneet to know she thought he was an idiot.
“Imagine our tourism,” crowed Puneet. “Our exotic Indian fastness—twelve times as magical as before. Dodecaduplicated by saucer aliens! What a place for a honeymoon.”
Leela tapped her front teeth with her mechanical pencil. “But—twelve Mumbais means twelve times the slums. Dodgy to promote.”
“We won’t be copying the people of Mumbai,” said Puneet. “Human reproduction is for the likes of you and I. The saucer lizard will only be replicating the infrastructure. Dodeca-Mumbai will have twelve classic Royal Taj Hotels. Twelve Bombay Stock Exchanges. Twelve Marine Drives. Each and every Mumbai dweller will have twelve times as much room!”
Leela made jotting gestures in her notebook. She gazed up at Puneet, widening her eyes. “Brilliance! The lowest slumdog sleeping on the pavement will prosper as a landlord. Imagine the looks on their faces in Dubai! The Arabs have a mile-high skyscraper, yes, but our metropolis will be twelve times so flat as ever before!”