The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday Read online

  They no longer used roads. All the roads of the world had somehow overnight become lifeless, filled with lonely machines plodding around, through billboards and abandoned rest stops slowly rusting. It was peculiar. And no one lived in the countryside. An invisible holocaust, forcing people to huddle in compact cities, resulting in nature slowly erasing the signs of humanity out here altogether. One would think nature had won this round, but Gurung assured him that the air was poisoned, that without nanotech living things could not thrive here and almost all large mammals were gone. Once they saw a misshapen goat with two heads to reinforce this point. Melek Ahmar did not care for nanotech or human disease. He ate both heads and then the rest of the goat too. Gurung found this amusing; the little Hume sat on the rock and watched, twirling his big knife, eating nuts. He seemed to have an inexhaustible supply.

  There were no travelers on the road. Walking the trails was death. Gurung wore a mask and a little canister that produced puffs of emergency nanotech. Every inch of his body was covered with special fabric. He followed an internal chart of winds and currents, like Vasco de Gama hopping from island to island, stopping at oases of good air, skirting bad patches, so that their trip stretched into a week, then two, then three. It should have been an epic journey of adventure and self-discovery, but in reality it was just dull. Melek Ahmar would have barreled through, but he was slightly wrong-footed by this bizarre new world, and so he followed the little man, nursing his power, but his irritation grew, and by the time they reached the outskirts of the valley he was ready to blast someone into atoms.

  When they finally reached the city at dawn, the djinn realized that Gurung had planned this approach with some care. The first view was stunning. The sun rose behind, and the city sparkled in tones of copper and gold, from domes and pagodas and metallic towers, from incredibly slender spires and crystal spheres that seemed to float above the land, and there was water flowing from the sky, and trees upside down, suspended from god knows what . . . Kathmandu was beautiful, stunning, it was magic.

  Melek Ahmar grunted after a moment and spat. He was the King of Mars. This much beauty simply irritated him.

  “It is a wonder of the world, yes?” Gurung asked.

  “Yes, wonderful,” Melek Ahmar said. “I can imagine the little Humes strutting around like peacocks. I want to stamp on it and break open those floating spheres. I want to rip out those upside down trees and pick my teeth with them. We lived in cities once. I hated them.” Yes, and sadly on the day and night that cesspit Gangaridai finally disappeared, I was blind drunk and passed out in the ruins of Mohenjo Daro and so missed all the fun.

  Gurung smiled. He always smiled. Was he a halfwit?

  They entered through the West Gate.

  Chapter Three: The Punic Failsafe

  Hamilcar Pande worked for Central Administration. He came from a bastardized offshoot of a Kshatriyan noble family, somehow crossed with Carthaginian blood, his mother some relict of ancient Punic glory, so that within him were the crossroads of most of history, the blood of warriors and explorers, and a distemper in some fold of his brain that made him restless and yearning.

  No one was quite sure what he did, including himself. Central Admin itself was a strange place, because there wasn’t really much to administer. The city was run by Karma, and Karma was not self-aware. Karma didn’t care, she simply did her job, and did that damn well. Kathmandu ran without fear or failure. Central Admin was the failsafe, but what failsafe made up of meat could possibly deal with a situation where Karma herself failed? Could Hamilcar Pande make the trains run in the sky? No. Could he make water fall upward? No. Could he scrub from the air the evil nanotech the world shoveled at Kathmandu every day? No. Karma did this and everything else. Or rather, her subsystems did. Karma’s main job was not running city systems. There were plenty of AI around the world doing just that, maintaining microclimes, running water, food, shelter. Karma did math. Her job was to keep score. Of everything.

  Every so often, an aberration occurred, which disturbed Karma’s vast mind. She had no sense of self, allegedly, so there was no emotional subtext to her disquiet. Still, Hamilcar could feel it, that light flutter along systems, which denoted something irregular. It was his job to investigate. No one had appointed him to this job, at least in his memory, but being of Puritanical nature, he hated sitting around doing nothing.

  His previous attempts to help had rated approval from Karma. For that is what Karma did, of course, she rated the works, efforts, even the intentions of all her flock, and she awarded points for public service. She sifted through all the shit of humanity and she gave value, market value, and her judgment was beyond contest, for who in their right minds would argue with the vast computational power of Karma, whose creation was shrouded in mystery, whose systems could not be understood even by other AI?

  And Karma wanted nothing, her systems were infallible, she was relentlessly fair, she predicted well beyond the ken of human understanding, and found the truth in actions and inventions that benefited the city in ways far removed from what mammalian logic or instinct could anticipate. Was she divine? Half of the city seemed to think so, yet in a laughing way, as if keeping pocket gods was now a birthright for men.

  Kathmandu was rich, Karma made it richer beyond measure. Hamilcar yearned to be useful, to do, but he understood that his credo was hopelessly outdated. New philosophies had come to play these days, thoughts based on Hedonism and Epicureanism, ideas entirely necessary because there simply wasn’t any work for all those Puritans hungry for salvation, nothing useful to do, no crops to grow, no factories to work, no armies to man, no roads to build, nothing manual, nothing intellectual, only a series of human interactions pandering to each other in turn. And when bodies could be healed at whim, when the brain could be played with on a molecular level, why not search for pleasure, why not explore the absolute limits of excess? There were sybarites and daredevils, madmen and savants, celebrities famous for being famous. Yet people like Hamilcar persisted, and so unhappiness persisted, that annoyance at becoming irrelevant to the essential working of one’s own society, until Karma came, Karma who tweaked the system and gave value and validation, who made people useful, because she could see far and wide into everyone and everything.

  And so when Hamilcar felt her process list spike and flutter, he turned his Echo to the cameras, and took the feed from the western gate. Two men, waiting. They were wilderness people. Had they walked here? Karma had already scanned their bodies several times. Ah. They had no Echo, no PMD. No wonder they were invisible to most of her systems. They were trying to physically talk to the gate. These were primitives. Rare. Primitives had mostly died off during the first two decades of the Dissolution Era, before the necessity of microclimates had been fully accepted. Karma didn’t like people without Echos. She couldn’t read their minds.

  Savages. One of them was actually wearing an animal skin. Yes. This deserved the full attention of Central Admin. Hamilcar Pande subvocalized a command, and his Echo sent a request for microdrone surveillance to Karma. Karma’s assent was instantaneous. Of course, inside her machinery, algorithms computed his public standing, his request history, his intentions, and every other myriad variable against possible plotted outcomes, but that was the calculation of God, hidden in the tick of a second, and to Hamilcar, it seemed as if he were part of the whole glorious design, an extension of her will. It was difficult to remember that she had neither will nor desire.

  “Let them in,” Pande said to no one in particular. “Watch them. Tally reports and give me highlights every three hours. And rate them for Human Intervention. They’re prims. Might not understand how we work here.”

  “As you will, Sheriff,” Karma said. Sometimes she had a damn strange sense of humor.

  Chapter Four: King of Zeroes

  The city was well ordered. Everything seemed restful, the leaves stirring with soothing breezes, the skies pristine, so the great mountains could be viewed from all angles. Gurung as
sured him that the air was full of microscopic nanotech, fighting the good fight, on spectrums far beyond human senses, and that Kathmandu was among the top ten cities in the world for safety. People walked the tree-lined boulevards with distracted eyes, reacting to invisible things, their lips moving, but everything was oddly silent, words carried away by some invisible wind.

  “They speak with the Echo.” Gurung tapped his head. “They see and hear and feel with it too. They do not see us.”

  Melek Ahmar felt the urge to roll a fist of air down the street, scattering these abstracted half men, upending them. He sent out tendrils of his disruption field, searching for any potency. Surely a place this grand would have hidden djinn in the center? Or had his people withered so far during his slumber? It did not bother Melek Ahmar overmuch. He held djinn and humans and all variations in between in equal contempt. He was singular. That’s what it meant, to be king.

  “There is nothing here to rival me,” he said finally. “I sense no other elder djinn. The Marid will not come here, so far from the sea. Nothing can prevent me from taking this city.”

  They walked through the spotless, rolling streets, chased by a sweet-smelling breeze, the weather cool and pleasant enough to shed the bitter mountain chill from their bones, walking through the silent, busy people who seemed to dance to inaudible music. There was a peculiar tranquility to them, but perhaps it was just that their conflicts were hidden beneath the surface. Gurung led him to the foot of a grand spire, walled in, its true height lost in the clouds.

  “My house was here,” he said, tapping on the exterior gate. “Old family house. Little rickety place. This street was a dump before Karma came, full of hippies. Most of Thamel was like that.”

  “You are enormously wealthy then?” Melek asked. Hume wealth did not impress him much, but they seemed to set store by it.

  “Not really,” Gurung said. “Money’s finished here. It’s all Karma points, see? And when Karma requisitioned everything, it was like a slate being cleaned. Rich, poor, didn’t matter. Usefulness. That was the key. Contribution to the system. You sell something you made, you get a fair price, Karma logs the value. Takes points from the buyer, gives ’em to you. You do some kind of public service, Karma gives you points. No more rich people sitting on their asses earning interest while we died in the mountains. We all thought it was a grand idea.”

  “Didn’t work out, eh?” Melek Ahmar smiled. Backfiring wishes were a specialty of djinn, after all.

  “Well, it did for everyone else,” Gurung said. He flashed his insane grin. “Turns out I’m a zero.”

  “Zero. Yes, you probably are.”

  “Knife fighter, part-time chef, gambler,” Gurung ticked off each thick finger. “Womanizer, if I do say so myself. Karma didn’t rate me much.”

  “And where are all these other angry zeroes?” An army of malcontents, waiting for me.

  “There weren’t as many as you’d think,” Gurung admitted.

  “The God-Machine killed them? You alone escaped . . .” Of course the tyrant would destroy his enemies immediately.

  “No, no, nothing like that,” Gurung said. “She gave us all basic. That’s the right to requisition basic shelter, food, drink, entertainment without any karma points at all. You could live and die, eat, sleep, fuck without a single karma point.”

  “So you get all that for free? And you’re complaining? Sounds like a cut-price paradise. The gods promised far less, in my time.” And they delivered nothing, in the end.

  “Come,” Gurung said. “Meet them and see for yourself.”

  They walked around some quiet streets that progressively got narrower, some of the marble cladding now turning to stone, then to brick, and while it was still pristine, there was a utilitarian cast to these structures. Even this sparkling city had an underbelly, it seemed, although to Melek Ahmar it reeked nothing of the desperation and fear that typically marked the Hume poor. They turned into a colorful street, festooned with ancient shop signs, proclaiming to be the infamous Freak Street, the heart of the old Thamel district. Of course, the shops were mostly shuttered now, and the drug-fueled hippies were long gone, but the ghost of their revelries remained, a peculiar haunting of good times past.

  They stopped at a tavern, well lit, furnished in basic molded chairs, and an unmanned bar that seemed to be dispensing drinks using a system of hidden rails. Cubes of liquor shot across the bar and stopped in front of each patron. Other cubes flew in parabolic arcs across the room, landing on table tops with uncanny accuracy. At a human touch, the cubes unfurled into steaming containers, either chilled or hot. As the patrons drank, more and more of the container dissolved into the drinks themselves, until it was down to a shot carried in a paper-thin translucent glass, which disappeared into air within seconds of the last liquid drop being quaffed. Melek Ahmar, quickly used to the magic of the age, was unimpressed. Besides, he liked to slam his metal tankard on a table after a good drink. You could also brain someone in a bar fight, if you had a metal tankard. Couldn’t brain a fly with these disappearing paper things.

  He grabbed a flying cube from the air and drained it, waiting for some impudent fool to object. He loved bar fights. Nothing like stealing some fool’s drink to get the juices going.

  No one noticed. The thirty or so patrons carried on their conversations or eye blinking or whatever. The bar didn’t even object; it just shot another identical container toward the waiting table. Melek Ahmar slumped. He had a feeling that it would continue doing so with infinite patience no matter how many drinks he kidnapped.

  Gurung was well known here. He ambled from table to table with his bowlegged swagger, slapping people on the back, swooping down to kiss a couple of ladies on the cheek, and conversations started up; people jolted awake, remembering that he had no Echo, they broke out their dusty, unused voices, and he left a small trail of noise and laughter, of life, behind him.

  “All zeroes here,” Gurung said, settling down next to Melek after a few minutes. “There are bars like this throughout town. Zeroes tend to hang together.”

  Melek Ahmar looked around. They did not appear particularly discontented, this lot. He turned to the man next to him, a kindly older gent with neat clothes and a roguish air.

  “So you lost everything to Karma, eh?” he asked. “Left to rot here in this bar, hmm?”

  “Not at all,” the old gent said. “I gladly gave it up. My name’s Gaje. Karma came, what, twenty years ago? I had a shop selling fake Gurkha knives. The tourists used to lap that shit up. They’d buy two, three each, especially the young men. And I’d trot out that old canard, about how you had to blood the knife every time you took it out, like a true Gurkha. About half of those idiots would actually try to cut themselves. Of course, the knives were so dull they were never in much danger. Unless you count tetanus. Anyway, backbreaking, boring work for a pittance. I used to get up every morning and sit in that damn shop until ten at night. And then on the weekends I had to chase down all the drunken knife makers, like Gurung here, to collect my stock.”

  “Still, you were free as a bird before, right?”

  “Not really. The air was so bad with nanotech and pollution that the birds all died. You couldn’t see the mountains from here, can you believe it? We had to carry around portable nannite kits, just in case the air level hit red. Three times, I remember they issued citywide alerts, and whole neighborhoods had to go to slow-sleep until the nannite levels improved.”

  “Boring now, though, am I right? Nothing to do . . .” Melek Ahmar was getting irritated. These churls were all acting unreasonably cheerful for Humes. It was unnatural. What good were humans without their habitual dissatisfaction? It was their defining trait.

  “Hah! I get up in the morning in my little place, and the kitchen unit makes a great roti breakfast. Better than my own mother’s, believe it or not. I eat some yak cheese midday and then after a quick nap I hit the parks. I’ve got three girlfriends in three districts, do you know that? Gaje the Player they
call me. Me, who didn’t even have time to get married or have kids when I was young, thanks to the damn store. After I see to the ladies, I come here most evenings, for a drink and some backgammon, or ludo. We don’t have anything to gamble with, true, since money was thrown out, but we put up little knickknacks, things of sentimental value. Makes the game spicier. And the best thing? No hangovers. I can drink as much as I like, and the little PMD just cleans it up when I sleep.”

  “You call this drinking?” Melek Ahmar looked around in contempt. No one was slumped over, no raised voices, no one was even laughing. And due to the stupid flying cubes there weren’t even tavern wenches to molest. He thumped Gurung. “This is your bar of desperados? You want me to overthrow this God-Machine with these limp pricks?”

  “They are a bit anemic,” Gurung admitted.

  “Overthrow Karma?” Gaje frowned. “I don’t like the sound of that. I’m not going to report you, Gurung, because of that thing back in the day, but really, you ought to stop hanging out with degenerates.”

  “Degenerate?” Melek Ahmar grabbed the old man by the collar, shoved his teeth into his face. “I’m the djinn king Melek Ahmar, Lord of Tuesday, you old fuck! I can drink this entire city dry and still walk out. I’ll fuck every man, woman, and goat in this miserable place and still be hard.” He tossed Gaje into a table of aghast zeroes.