Read Online Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald - Free Book Online Page A

reflected in the black water of the moat my father had built around his palace. A moat, in the middle of a drought.
         The noise swirled up from the street: traffic, a hundred musics, a thousand voices. I swayed on my high perch but I was not afraid. Softness brushed against my leg, my steel monkey pressed close, clinging to the warm pink stone with plastic fingers. I searched the web of light for the sharp edges of the Jantar Mantar, the observatory my ancestors had built three hundred years before. I made out the great wedge of the Samrat Yantra, seven stories tall, the sundial accurate to two seconds; the floodlit bowls of the Jai Prakash Yantra, mapping our the heavens on strips of white marble. The hot night wind tugged at my pajamas; I smelled biodiesel, dust, hot fat, spices carried up from the thronged bazaar. The steel monkey fretted against my leg, making a strange keening sound, and I saw out on the edge of the city: a slash of light down the night, curved like a sail filled with darkness. A tower, higher than any of the others of the new industrial city on the western edges of Jaipur. The glass tower of the Azads, our enemies, as different as could be from our old-fashioned Rajput-style palace: glowing from within with blue light. And I thought, I am to bring that tower to the ground.
         Then, voices. Shouts. Hey, you. Up there. Where? There. See that? What is it? Is it a man? I don't know. Hey, you, show yourself. I leaned forwards, peered carefully down. Light blinded me. At the end of the flashlight beams were two palace guards in combat armor, weapons trained on me. It's all right, it's all right, don't shoot, for gods' sake, it's the girl.
         "Memsahb," a soldier called up. "Memsahb, stay exactly where you are, don't move a muscle, we're coming to get you."
         I was still staring at the glowing scimitar of the Azad tower when the roof door opened and the squad of guards came to bring me down.
         Next morning I was taken to my father in his audience Diwan. Climate-mod fields held back the heat and the pollution; the open, stone-pillared hall was cool and still. My father sat on his throne of cushions between the two huge silver jars, taller than two of me, that were always filled with water from the holy River Ganga. My father drank a glass at every dawn every morning. He was a very traditional Rajput. I saw the plastic coil of his lighthoek behind his ear. To him his Diwan was full of attendants: his virtual aeai staff, beamed through his skull into his visual centers, busy busy busy on the affairs of Jodhra Water.
         My brothers had been summoned and sat uncomfortably on the floor, pulling at their unfamiliar, chafing old-fashioned costumes. This was to be a formal occasion. Heer knelt behind him, hands folded in yts sleeves. I could not read yts eyes behind yts polarized black lenses. I could never read anything about Heer. Not man, not woman—yt—yts muscles lay in unfamiliar patterns under yts peach-smooth skin. I always felt that yt did not like me.
         The robot lay on its back, deactivated, limbs curled like the dry dead spiders I found in the corners of my room where ayah Harpal was too lazy to dust.
         "That was a stupid, dangerous thing to do," my father said. "What would have happened if our jawans had not found you?"
         I set my jaw and flared my nostrils and rocked on my cushions.
         "I just wanted to see. That's my right, isn't it? It's what you're educating me for, that world out there, so it's my right to see it."
         "When you are older. When you are a . . . woman. The world is not safe, for you, for any of us."
         "I saw no danger."
         "You don't need to. All danger has to do is see you. The Azad assassins—" "But I'm a weapon. That's what you always tell me, I'm a weapon, so how can the Azads harm me? How can I be a weapon if I'm not allowed to see what I'm to be used