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IRON GODS

PALIMPSEST

ASHOK K. BANKER

BOOK ONE OF THE GANESA PALINDROME

//Om Ganeshaaya Namaha//

/Vakratunda mahakaya surya koti sama prabha/

//Nirvighnam kuru mein deva sarva karyeshu sarvada//

Salutations to you, O Ganesa

O Lord with a twisted trunk and immense body

Radiant with the effulgence of a million suns

O Lord may all our endeavors

Always be accomplished without obstacles

I. OBSCURED BY CLOUDS

1. ABSOLUTELY CURTAINS

EARTH ORBIT

The Saffron starship came out of the sun. Or so the scientists said in their first flurry of shocked amazement. Later, they would rationalize that the ship had come from the direction of the sun, using its gravity to slingshot into our solar system. But in fact, it emerged from the deep core of the sun itself, created from the matter of our friendly neighbourhood yellow giant, depleting the total volume of Sol by a staggering 3 percent. The enormous energy conversion resulted in an unprecedented display of solar flares and a solar wind flowing past Earth at an estimated 3.1 million km/h, emitting 4.6 x 10 (26) J of energy per second. Every single orbital satellite was blasted by the lethal invisible solar particles, disrupting GPS systems worldwide, and effectively shutting down every major satellite-fed cable television network and radio service, as well as several hundred ’star wars’ nuclear-armed defense satellites that didn’t officially exist. The expensive debris fell to Earth, burning up on re-entry to produce a spectacular daytime fireworks display, turning back the human race’s observation, guidance and communications capabilities to World War II levels. No more Google Earth, people.

At first seeming to come directly at Earth at a genial reducing velocity of 160,000 km/h, the objectcontinued to move obliquely away to take up a position at the Sun-Earth LeGrangian point known as L5, although it wasn’t immediately clear what effect this might have on the Earth’s companion object 3752 Cruithne or its energy-swapping relationship with our planet. At this point, it assumed a stable orbit.

There it stayed, a gigantic burnished sphere brighter than our moon and more than twice as large. It rose and set in a six-hour cycle, dominating the sky. Its overall hue was saffron, the shade of a bindi dot on a Hindu married woman’s forehead, and flecked through with sparkling golden motes, producing a rainbow-hued spectrum at certain angles, like the book cover of an Alastair Reynolds science fiction novel. The overall effect was mesmerizing, resplendant, like a gigantic earring suspended in space from the invisible ear of an unseen inscrutable alien God. Jewel-perfect, effulgent with its halo-like corona of reflected sunlight, it compelled every pair of eyes, human and animal, to gaze upwards. Not since Skylab and the first Moon Landing had humanity watched the skies so respectfully.

It took Earth’s squabbling Governments seven days to reach a hastily cobbled together consensus on how best to deal with the unexpected occurrence. The controversial UN decision–57% for and 39% against, with 4 percent abstaining–was to send a shuttle into a geo-stationary orbit to study the Jewel, as it had been dubbed by the media, and attempt communication. The USA’s fervent arguments in favour of an armed mission–suppressed with great difficulty by the world’s governments, led strongly by the UK, and the European Union–consumed more valuable time. Selecting the mixed-nationality 11-member team took almost as long. There was much consternation in the US Senate over allegations that the artefact was man-made and controlled by Islamic extremists seeking to perpetrate the ultimate jihadi attack on Western civilization: total global annihilation.

But before they could launch, a message arrived from the Jewel. One that conclusively answered every question and put all doubts to rest.

BABULNATH, SOUTH MUMBAI, INDIA

Santosh was looking up at the sky when the invasion began.

The monsoon rains had given way unexpectedly to a week of cloudless sun-seared heat. He had taken his hands off the handcart he was pushing to wipe away a thread of sweat that was creeping down from his hairline. In doing so, he had smeared the tilak on his forehead and a drop of saffron-tinged sweat had run quickly, mischeviously, into his left eye, stinging it sharply and causing both eyes to spill hot, reactive tears. His paternal grandfather, a wizened small husk of a man seated crosslegged on the handcart, said in his toothless mumbling way: “Var baghaa, var.” And look up he did, bringing the gleaming alien object directly into his field of vision.

It was the last day of the annual Ganesa festival. The culmination of 10 days of fasting, feasting, prayer and daily rituals to propitiate the elephant-headed God of auspicious beginnings and remover of obstacles. On this, the 10th and final day, the biggest, grandest Ganesa idols, erected and supported by neighbourhood communities, were taken in long, slow processions to be immersed in the ocean. The smaller household Ganesas and Gauri, his mother, had been immersed over the past several days already. The city shut down early today, offices, schools and government instituitions closing by lunchtime to give people a chance to reach home before the processions began to wind their tedious way through the city’s potholed, narrow streets, clogging up all the major arteries of the metropolis till the early hours of the next morning.

Even now, as he turned his head this way then that to try and prevent the runoff from seeping into his good eye, he could see people craning their necks out the windows and balconies of the ancient British Raj-era Edwardian buildings lining the winding street, straining for a glimpse of the hand-sculpted idols. A few glanced up occasionally at the strange alien object in the sky, but after these past two and a half weeks most Mumbaikars, or Bombayites if you preferred, seemed to have accepted the artifact with the philosophical simplicity of their fellow Indians across the country. The rumour in B.R. Ambedkar Chawl where Santosh lived, was that the object was an American military device deployed to spy on the Middle Eastern Islamic nations, and that all this talk about it being an alien spaceship was just a cover-up. It was testimony to the times that even this alarming possibility had been accepted without much curiosity, and that life went on as normal. It would take far more than the appearance of a mysterious alien artefact in the sky to put the denizens of this city off their Ganesa festival. This was, after all, the country that hadinvented mystery and mysticism.

Santosh’s family’s handcart was still a few hundred yards from the beach, at the point where Babulnath Road curved past Babulnath Mandir before becoming Marine Drive, stuck in a seemingly endless line of similar handcarts, all bearing Ganesa idols of varying designs. This was the ’small’ line. The ‘big’ line was on the far side of the road: smoke-belching noise-farting lorries and trucks bearing enormous idols, some as much as forty-fifty feet tall. Size didn’t matter, it seemed, since the ‘big’ line was moving at the same slug-like pace as its ’small’ counterpart. Everywhere one looked, there were elephant heads in the air, smoothly hand-sculpted mud idols painted in the vivid colours of Hindu deities. He was looking out for the famous ‘Lalbaugcha Raja’, the king of them all; this year, it was said to be over 40 feet tall, adorned from trunk to toe with real gold and precious gems. It wasn’t visible yet, so he surmised it would probably come last of all, in the late evening, just before sunset, when all the other Ganesas had been carried by hand over the slippery wet sands of Chowpatty and borne out far enough that the ebbing tide would carry it to sea. He couldn’t imagine what it must be like to immerse Lalbaugcha Raja. His uncle Ramesh More had said it took a hundred men underneath the idol and another hundred and fifty to steady them and help coordinate their movements–and even then, a few broken limbs and the occasional drowning were to be expected each year.

Right now, though, the only thing he could see was sky the colour of the blue on a cola logo, the sun a searing nuclear-blast yellow at the edge of his vision, and the Jewel, suspended directly overhead, like the enormous saffron-painted temple bell at Siddhivinayak Mandir, the largest Ganesa temple in the city. He felt an absurd urge to reach up and try to ring the bell, some stupid tweak of memory from the times when he was a toddler and his father would pick him up and hold him high so he could reach and swing the brass ringer, twice as thick as his own little hand back then. He blinked, the ash and saffron stinging his eyes and tears spilled hotly down the sides of his face, running into his ears now, as the dhol-drums and electronic synthesizers of a hundred different Ganesa immersion groups syncopated serendipitously into an epic Bollywood orchestral score. His head swam for a moment, disoriented from not having slept the night before. With his father gone, the burden of performing all the major ceremonies fell to his slender shoulders now. When he managed to force open his eyes again, a black spot had appeared, marring the smooth unblemished surface of the Jewel.

He watched the tiny speck for a long uncomprehending moment, assuming it at first to be some trick of the light, a mote in his own eye, or even just some other object in the sky–a jetplane maybe, or a very large bird…although it behaved like no bird or plane he’d ever seen. The tiny black spot grew steadily, at surprising speed, like an ink stain on blotting paper, to cover a quarter, then half, then almost all of the luminous artefact. He realized then that it was not a blot on the Jewel itself, but something oozing out of it. A kind of dense black…smoke? Powder? His adolescent mind, its experience of such things limited to his SSC-course studies in the L.T. Municipal School beside his chawl, a few Diamond Comics and the Marathi edition of Chandamama, the occasional Hollywood movie on cable TV that his older sister Pratibha, self-appointed moral policewoman of the family, considered acceptable viewing, had no lexicon to describe or explain what that thing was, coming out of the Jewel. All he could say for sure was that it was gushing, like thick gouts of black fluid ejaculating from a burst sewer pipe struck by a careless Bombay street repair crew, and that the stuff coming out was falling at tremendous velocity–headed straight for Earth.

He heard himself emit a stunned, “Tuchaa aiilaa!”, the ubiquitous Bombay utterance that embraced a world of expression in its incomplete but eloquently suggestive phrasing: Your Mother’s–.

His grandfather gurgled a phlegmy laugh and asked, “Kai zaala?”

Santosh was about to answer when a scream cut through the street.

It came not from the street but from the terrace of a building to the right, just after Babulnath Mandir, near the old ice factory which had supplied bullock-carts carrying slabs of sawdust-covered ice to most of South Bombay and where Santosh’s father and uncle had once worked. He had helped his father deliver ice to that very building, it being close enough for young boys like him to carry small kilo-sized chunks of steaming cold ice to, wrapped in sawdusty muslin. He had spent three summers working that lane. The building’s name was Bandstand View, even though its reputed view of the old military band stand cupola in the public garden further down the street was long since obstructed by a line of newer buildings. He had got some good tips from Bandstand View.

A woman on the terrace, dressed in a yellow salwar kameez, was pointing upwards, at the Jewel, and as Santosh peered up at her through his right eye–the left was still gummed shut and refusing to participate–her companions joined her, pointing upwards and exclaiming loudly. Their voices were lost in the cacophony of music and devotional sloganeering from the packed street but Santosh could guess at the gist. They had seen the black stuff spilling out of the Jewel.

Several more screams and shouts broke out then, across the street and from the various buildings overlooking it, as others noticed the phenomenon in the sky and alerted their neighbours to it. The noise level on the street was much too high to hear anything from more than a few dozen metres away, but Santosh sensed rather than heard a ripple of excitement race across the whole seafacing causeway as all of South Mumbai reacted to the curiosity in the sky. A few of the Ganesa processioneers even stopped their drumming and dancing to gaze up at this unexpected event, and in moments, tens of thousands of faces were turned upwards in wonderment and awe–and more than a smidgen of fear. Santosh felt his stomach, empty from a day and night of fasting, contract and convulse in sudden, lurching alarm. He gripped the rough wooden sides of the handcart tighter and wished his father were here, now, alive. He missed his father something awful right now.

His left eye chose that moment to resume its duties, sullenly, and he blinked rapidly up at the Jewel. From the handcart, his grandfather echoed his earlier profanity: “Tuchaa aaila” with a hollow shakiness that Santosh hadn’t heard since last February, when Santosh’s papa had suffered that final brain-blasting stroke.

The black ooze now filled half the sky between the Jewel and the Earth, spreading and expanding like the densest, blackest monsoon cloud he had ever seen. In moments, it was large enough to block out the sun over this part of the city, casting the entire street into sudden dusky shadow. Santosh felt the heat of the sun on his face fade away, as effectively as if he had stepped under a concrete overhang. Now, it filled most of the visible sky, turning the bright September morning into unnatural dusk, eclipsing the Jewel itself completely. As he watched, it spread outwards, covering the last visible glimpse of sky. The world turned monsoon-dark. The music and devotional slogans died out completely and a sudden hush blanketed the city.

FRIGATE, NEW YORK, USA

Ruth was plugged into her ‘pod when the air raid sirens went off.

She mistook them for a backup arrangement on the track she was listening to–a Gnarls Barkley song that was more amusing and whimsical and mixed-roots than anything she’d heard in years.

She was on the cradle hanging down the side of the vessel in the dry dock, welding a port-section underplate that one of the temps had done the week before and Ackhmed, the foreman, wanted done over. Ackhmed was a hard one to please, but a damn good ship-builder, and he didn’t accept anything less than goddamn perfect, as he reminded his crew over and over again, usually thumping the nearest available surface when he did, sending tabletop clutter a-jumping, and making the newbies and temps nervous. If you so much as fluttered your eyes when Ackhmed thumped, he took that as a sign of nerves, and nerves and a rivetteer were never good bedmates–his second-most popular aphorism.

She had lost track of the time but knew it was late; the day shift had got off hours earlier. She had been working overtime this past summer, and intended to keep working the same hours for as long as they would let her. She needed the extra bucks. She had finally made up her mind and as her mother had always said, ‘Ruthie makes up her mind, nobody get in her way.’ Right, ma. Except that Ruthie usually took her own sweet time making up that mind of her’s, and more often than not, it remained as unmade-up as an undergrad’s bed in a sorority house.

She had taken too goddamn long to make up her mind back in July, and it had cost her dearly. She had lost the one person on this planet that she really gave a damn about, and it had taken her even longer to realize how badly she’d fucked up.

She ground the gum in her mouth hard enough to snap it into three separate fragments, and forced her protesting triceps to keep the face visor up. She had the lean lithe panther-like physique of a woman who worked out, but still had enough curviness to make the guys look twice. She could make a dress look as pretty as she could fill out a pair of jeans. She could cook as well as she could rivet, though she’d die before she admitted it to any man. From the way the guys on the crew still glanced at her when she passed by–discreetly, because they all knew her sexual preference–she knew that even at 29, she still had it.

But none of that had mattered in July. Amy had wanted more than just the physical package. More than just the good sex–correction, the great sex–the loyalty, the quality time together. She wanted the big C. Not the one that had got ma; in some ways, a need for commitment was worse than cancer. You could possibly fight off cancer if you detected it early enough. Commitment reared its ugly head anytime, full-blown and fully metastized, ready to rock and roll.

She ground the gum in her mouth into plastic shreds as she worked the oxytorch around the last point, her train of thought helping her focus rather than distracting. It wasn’t for nothing that she was nicknamed The Surgeon by her crewmates for the precision of her work. Like most surgeons, she found she had to occupy the more active, ‘noisy’ part of her mind while working. Music helped; thinking about past mistakes and departed lovers didn’t help as much.

She could still picture Amy as she’d stood in the narrow kitchen space of their doublewide Airline in which they’d toured the Midwest. She had looked so goddamn heartbreakingly desirable in that chinese collared Vietnamese thingie she’d picked up at some yard sale, with matching floppy pants, just like the ones the farmer women wore in the ‘Nam movies–probably exactly like the ones Amy’s grandmother and mother had worn back in the old land before coming over to the United Snakes of America as they had taken to calling it nowadays–she and Amy, not Amy’s people. The incongruity of her strawgold blonde hair only enhanced the exotic sexuality of her mixed-race features, and the slice of sunlight slipping in through the blinds on the RV’s tinted side panel caught the side of her face just so, casting her perfect L-shaped jaw into pale relief, pooling a dark shadow in the nape of her neck where Ruth loved to nuzzle, and which always pushed Amy’s buttons when they made love.

Damn.

Damn.

She switched off the oxytorch.

Damn fool.

You let her go.

She leaned back on her haunches on the cradle, setting the torch aside with professional instinct, hand twisting the gas release to the off position without even being aware of it. Shoving back the visor and passing the back of her hand roughly against the top of her face, wiping off droplets of sweat and maybe a drop or two of not-sweat. Fighting back the maudlin emotions.

She wanted to stay, you only had to ask her to stay, but you, you stubborn, proud, arrogant asshole. You just folded your arms across your breasts and chewed your fucking gum and stayed silent. Just like your fucking dad, you fucking proud bitch, you. Even when she picked up the grip and turned and walked down the corrugated aluminium steps, letting the door swing shut behind her. Didn’t make a move to go after her, to call out, to say, Amy, damnit, okay, let’s sit down and talk about this, because, well, you know I have these issues, this Catholic guilt about same-sex marriages, and even though I’ve known I was a woman’s woman ever since I was old enough to know, I still need some time to work things out in my head, to figure out if there isn’t a way that I can retain my faith and my sexual preference without pissing off either my God or my s.o.

And in the end, she had pissed off both, anyway.

She was still sitting there like that, the Gnarls Barkely song “Crazy” still playing, when the sirens began to blare. She genuinely confused them for part of the song at first, just for a couple of seconds or so, before recognizing their harsh whinging tone for what it really was. A rush of post-911 adrenalin hit her then, cutting through the sentimental crap clogging up her head. What the hell–

She yanked out her ‘phones, twisting to look over the rearside of the cradle. In the glare of the dock floodlights, she saw small toy soldier figures dressed in identical orange crew jumpsuits spilling across the dock. She was suspended perhaps sixty or seventy yards above them, just high enough to make their overlapping shouts almost incomprehensible but audible. She frowned and rose to her feet, gripping the cradle suspension ropes for support. Everyone seemed to be looking at the horizon and pointing, so that was where she turned her eyes.

She caught her breath.

“Fuck is that?” she muttered.

Even at this hour of the night, the dockyard was ablaze with light. The intense saturation only intensified the darkness beyond the reach of the shipyard’s floods. Ruth shielded her eyes against the light from the towers above, and saw the impenetrable blackness of the open sea merging into the deep midnight blue of the sky, with a soft glow to the south just over the curve of the earth that marked the island of light that was NYC. There was just enough contrast to see the thick black stuff that was seeping across the sky. Impossibly, it seemed to be coming down, spreading across the skyline like a cloudmass, except that she’d never seen a cloudmass that moved this fast and looked quite like this.

Yet there was something oddly familiar about the way the thing…swarmed. It came to her with the treacly thick sweetness of a spoonful of honey pushed into her mouth. That thing out there, black fucking shit, it moved like a swarm of bees she’d seen once on her paternal grandfather’s bee farm in Kentucky, back when she was a girl. That swarm had swooped down just like this, their little furry brown bodies packed so densely they were one concerted clump of life rather than thousands of individual insects.

The black oily cloud in the sky was seeping wider and farther across now, blotting out the glow that was NYC, some two hundred kilometres South, and spreading like a cloud cover determined to cover every square kilometre of open ground, as if it was programmed to draw a curtain between the earth and the open sky. In the instant it took Ruth to take another breath, it had almost reached Frigate. As she watched in awed incomprehension, it passed directly overhead with the speed of an arrow out of the recurve bow she used to blow off steam on weekends, blanketing the dockyard and passing beyond, to the town of Frigate, and farther. A part of her mind told her, in stunned disbelief, that at the pace it was going, it would probably cover the whole of the East Coast in minutes.

East Coast? The fucking thing would cover all of North America before the current track finished playing out on her ‘pod!

She could still hear the tinny sounds of Gnarls Barkley playing on the ‘phones dangling around her neck. She fumbled for the ‘pod but her fingers, always so sure, so unshakeable, couldn’t seem to find the clickwheel and she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the sky.

It occurred to her that the weird black cloud might have, must have, surely did have, something to do with that alien thingie in the sky. Whatchmacallit. The Gem? The Jewel? She had watched the news reports, the governmental cross-accusations, the talking head celebs holding forth on a hundred different angles–there was even a book supposed to be published next month on the thing, which must be some kind of a record even for cash-in-quick publishing! But she hadn’t really paid much attention to the details. Tech stuff wasn’t really her thing. She was more likely to read a GQ in her dentist’s waiting room than a Scientific American or the Science section of the NYT. GQ had better babes.

Besides, she had been so obsessive over losing Amy, over how to get her back, about working out her plan to earn enough money to take a month off, then drive the RV across to Wisconsin, to do whatever it took to get her back, anything, to think of anything else these past two months. She’d reached a decision finally: She would work like mad, earn as much as she could, pool in her savings, and drive the RV over to Kentucky, to the Ing farm, and beg Amy to come back to her. Whatever it took: that was the mantra that kept her going. Current events were low priority.

She wished now that she had flipped through an article or two–even if it was just The National Enquirer. Because whatever was happening, it was big. Massive. And she had a feeling it was about to change her life forever. Correction: Everybody’s life.

She suddenly wondered where Amy was right now, this minute, and if she was watching the sky too, seeing this ugly black ooze seep across the world, like an oil spill on the surface of the ocean must seem to whales and fish in the sea. She felt very lonely all of a sudden.

BIRMINGHAM, UK

Salim came out of the mosque just in time to see the swarm begin its descent.

Shariyar had refused to accompany him to the pre-dawn roja namaz, even though it was one of the most sacred days of the Ramzan month. Shariyar had been having trouble with the faith, again, since the recent spate of arrests in the community–’roustings’, the Star had labelled them laconically. Salim had tried to take his son aside and talk to him, but Shariyar’s face had been set in that aspect of insolent indifference peculiar to 17-year olds and he knew that nothing was getting through. Words going in one ear and out the other, as old ammi-jaan would have put it.

The past few months had been hard, very hard, not just for the Muslim community but for all immigrants. He had many Sikh friends and business associates here as well as in London and Shropshire and they had all talked quietly of private harrassments and public humiliations. There wasn’t a brown-skinned Britisher today who didn’t live in perpetual fear or anxiety, either from the white Anglo authorities or community at large, or worst of all, from the infidels within their own ranks. Because those bastards were the ones really responsible for all this, weren’t they now? Sodding arses. What bleeding jihad? Bollocks! It was a farce, a stupid half-arsed reactionary response to the resentment and injustice they all felt. It was true, what the west had done, was doing in the Middle East was unforgivable. But that was no excuse for this bleeding madness. Bombs in the subway, bombs on planes, planes used as bombs…and good British youth subverted into fanatics. What a crying waste. Islamic terrorism. As if we invented the whole bloody concept. What about the things they had done back in the Boer wars then–’guerilla tactics’ they had called it then, and ‘terrorizing’. Or in Ulster and Dublin and the rest of Ireland during the Troubles? Would Bosnia ever have happened if there had been only Muslims there? Or Lebanon? Why didn’t anyone ever mention Christian Terrorism? Islamic Terrorism was fashionable, and so Islamic Terrorism it was, and boys like Shariyar refused to go to mosque and went out the house nobody knew where carrying their little burdens of simmering resentment and sense of injustice and they were even right some of the time, because therewas a jihad going on in the world today, except it was directed at Muslims. War against terror. It really meant war against Muslims, didn’t it? Why not just call it The New Crusades and be done with it then, hey?

He shook his head, standing for a moment in the quiet island of calm before venturing out into the street. There was a flurry of conversation out there, no doubt one of the agitated arguments that seemed to break out so often among the flock these days, and he was in no hurry to get caught up in yet another ‘who’s right, then’ debate between fellow worshippers. He had almost taken a punch in the nose last week for trying to break up one such disagreement.

He sighed as he removed his fez from his head, rubbing the sparse hair on the top of his skull, thinning more rapidly each week it seemed, and growing whiter by the day too. He admonished himself for thinking such thoughts on a Ramzan day, that too while still in the shadow of the masjid. The loss of Nizam had hurt them all badly, like a bomb blast sending them spinning in different directions all at once. If Shariyar had retreated further within his adolescent grunge-rock shell, behind his splatter film posters and DVD collection, his ultra-violent video games and goth friends, like some perverse form of self-flagellation, then Salim himself had turned unexpectedly angry, the rage spilling up at the most unexpected moments. Perhaps he should see someone. No, not the mullah. There were limits to how much the faith could help him now, blasphemous as that might seem, perhaps mainly because his feelings about the faith were themselves part of his overall confusion. A psychologist then? Had it really come to that?

In some ways, he sensed that Mumtaz was the worst hit of them all. At nights, his wife would start awake, hitching for breath, still knotted in the serpentine clasp of some familiar nightmare, whispering her dead nephew’s name. Once, two nights ago, when Salim had folded her into his arms, comforting as she spilled helpless, hot tears onto his collarbone, he had felt a despair wash over him, as dark and desperate as an eclipse over Mecca. He too had experienced a dream or two about Nizam, clean-cut, good-looking Nizam whom all the girls in the family had teased for bearing a passing resemblance in profile to a Pakistani TV soap star–’Hey, Shahbaaz,’ even he would say affectionately sometimes–dreams of Nizam being chased down unending tube tunnels, knelt on by anti-terrorist bobbies, and shot dead in the back of the head, like a gangland execution in a Channel 4 documentary on the Krays he had once seen. Not knowing the real details of the killing, dubbed as ‘unfortunate, though necessary and unavoidable due to the actions of the suspect,’ in the official verdict, his mind had made up its own little mpeg4 video to play back on its organic iPod screen.

Nizam had been as a son to them both, as a brother to Shariyar and Sara, as a part of their own branch of the family, ever since his own parents–Mumtaz’s sister and brother-in-law–had died back in Pakistan, and how could any of them have ever suspected that such a sensible, polite, charming young man could be secretly meeting in some basement madrassa with madcap jihadis, plotting to blow up a tube station? Yet that perfectly reasonable oversight–their not once noticing any sign of anything amiss with their perfect-as-peas nephew–was what caused the most pain now. The guilt bit back with teeth of steel. How could you not–? Surely you–? It’s not possible, is it, that you never once–? The half-voiced, half-thought accusations rang in their heads all day long, sidelong glances of neighbours, colleagues, associates, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, cutting like shards of glass from a windowpane smashed by a flung brick. He now lived in constant unease at the possibility that Shariyar might somehow be lured down the same doomed path, simply because of the example his late cousin had set. Who knew how these things worked? When was the first seed cast? Where did an act of terrorism truly begin–as a conscious mission planted in the minds of naïve acolytes by fanatical fundamentalists? Or simply as a barb of human discontent festering in the heart of an emotionally confused teenager? If the Ulster movement had been a ‘revolution’, did that make it less heinous than ‘terrorism’? Who would answer these questions for him? To which office should he apply for emotional clarification and spiritual restoration?

He suddenly realized that the noise and commotion outside had grown to unusually rabble-some proportions. Frowning, shaking his head at his own blurriness, he pushed his fez into his kurta pocket and went outside. It was still dark out, it still being a half-hour to sunrise, but the streetlights illuminated the street sufficiently well for him to be surprised by the size of the crowd gathered outside, as well as their state of agitation.

Almost immediately, he knew that this was something to do with the object in the sky. Everybody was staring and pointing upwards, their shouts and ejaculations directed there. He looked up and felt his heart thump as hard as when he had received the call on his mobile from the Paddington Green high security police station that fateful Friday.

At first it looked like a tornado of some kind, the kind one saw in American disaster films. Except that it was impossibly wide at the top, spread to cover a huge area, and the bottom was tapering, blunt, spinning down earthwards at a fantastic pace. It was like a gigantic funnel had been created and was being lowered to ground. A living, spinning, buzzing funnel. The top of the funnel was sucking its energy from a dense black cloudbank that covered every inch of sky visible in every direction. What was that? Where had it come from? From the alarmed comments of his companions on the street, he gathered that the black cloud was some kind of effusion that had come from the direction of the Jewel. But now a part of the cloud had begun to spiral downwards, forming this funnel-like shape, and seemed to be approaching the ground.

Someone called out in Arabic, and he turned with everyone else to look to the north-east, where he saw with a rising sense of panic, that another funnel had appeared and was also spiralling downwards at an amazing rate. Then another alert and this time all heads turned to the south. A third funnel.

In moments, they were everywhere, black spinning vortexes of unspeakable force spinning madly, growing out of the bottom of the cloudbank and descending in incredible speed to earth. ‘Darvash,’ someone said, and Salim nodded at once, the exact same thought having just popped into his own head. Dervishes. The ancient spinning demons of the desert. Except that this wasn’t the desert and these dervishes were coming down to ground rather than rising up from it. Even dervishes were demonaic, which gave them some kind of connection with humanity. There was something alien, completely foreign about these gigantic funnel-like objects. Something that even his lay senses recognized as not of this world.

He felt a sudden clutch of fear for Mumtaz and the children. Wanted to rush home to them, to lock the doors and cower under the bedsheets as they had all done during storms when Shariyar and Sara were little. But he had an intuition that it would be no use hiding from this storm. And that those among the crowd who had begun running helter-skelter in all directions, shouting pointlessly, were equally doomed.

He could hear the sound of the dervishes now, a kind of subvocal buzzing, a throbbing deep-bass reverberation that caused the bones of his ribs and chest to vibrate the way they did when standing in front of Shariyar’s Bose sub-woofer unit when the stereo was turned to full volume. There was power in that sound, a power so immense and so inhuman that he could not find any context to place it in, no measure to apply to it. It was not just loud, it was…world-filling. All-consuming. Absolute. As it grew, he sensed the voices of even those jostling his shoulders fade out of his hearing, subsumed by the sheer overwhelming mass of that sound. He was buffetted by the fullness of the sound, his entire being filled with its reverberation, bones, muscle, nerve, all vibrating till the teeth rattled in his skull and his jaw clenched to keep from biting his own tongue accidentally.

He watched as the first of the funnels, impossibly huge, lowered itself in stages, until, with an gigantic burring sizzle like a dripping samosa-dough-strainer touching hot oil in a kadai, the phenomenon touched ground, only a few hundred yards to the west of where he stood, bang into the heart of the Council housing district. The street convulsed beneath his feet, and he instinctively raised his hands to steady himself but it was quite useless, of course.

TOKYO, JAPAN

‘What is it?’ Akimoto asked no one in particular, turning curiously to peer out.

The view was spectacular. Seventy nine stories up in the heart of Shinjuku, the offices of Banyan Media overlooked the gothic mirrored skyscrapers of Omekaido Avenue and half the city’s downtown district. The walls of the corner office of the Managing Editor and Publisher were floor-to-ceiling glass, polished to such perfection that you felt you could reach out and touch the Panasonic digital billboard across the street: 35 degrees C at 82 percent humidity, it read. In the streets below, Tokyo blurred past at the speed of life. Here, in the immaculate silence of Akimoto’s minimalistic office, decorated with prints and replicas of the Mary Griggs Burke collection, a personal obsession, time stood still. Or at least it had until moments ago, when the phone began buzzing with strident persistence, and Akimoto had turned, puzzled, to gaze outwards.

‘Something has occurred,’ he said in his customary understated way in their native tongue. ‘Some variety of effulgence from the alien craft.’

Neither of his visitors replied or commented. Both Yoshi and Akechi had sat silently since the start of the meeting twenty minutes ago. Arriving equally early and separately, they had waited in separate areas–at their own request–until Editor Akimoto was ready to see them. The brief delay was due to a clarification required by the American publisher who had made the final offer for North American English-language translation rights, and had quickly been sorted out after briefly consulting each of them individually. For the past twenty minutes, they had sat and listened to Akimoto spell out in precise, unexaggerated detail the plans for their property: the film adaptation currently in development by a major Hollywood studio, with an A-list star and director attached, the publication of the English translation of their original manga series in 100 volumes, to be published at the rate of one a week over the next two years, the spinoff novel series to be penned by American authors who met with their approval, the release of a new animated series for a major American network, based on their own anime series of eight years ago which Yoshi had written and produced and Akechi had directed and both had art directed together, plans and designs and proposals for the exploitation of numerous other sub-rights, and finally, the forthcoming release on DVD of the Uncut Special Edition of Sashi: The Creation, the anime film that had sparked off this whole boom and the current fever across the world, the acclaimed, billion-dollar earning film version of their own manga series that both had collaborated on just three years ago, the last thing they had worked on together, and whose success now promised to reap profits enough for them both to live comfortably on for the rest of their lives.

Normally, all this would have entailed a razzle dazzle presentation with the firm’s full team present, but at their mutual request, this had been toned down to a simple across-the-table meeting with Akimoto, who had known both since their days drawing and writing ten pages a day to keep body and soul together, and whose Banyan Books had been little more than a hole-in-the-wall one-man-show publishing a weekly manga magazine with the last of his savings, barely a month ahead of his alimony payments and dues to printers and paper suppliers. Two takeovers, one buyout, a subsequent merger of groups, and today, Banyan Media was part of Japan’s largest print and electronic publishing conglomerate, one of the world’s largest gaming companies, and Akimoto’s office no longer stank of Curry Flavour ramen noodles and asafoetida seasoning.

The current contracts, lying before them on the desk, were worth $15 million to each of them, payable in a carefully delineated schedule. Essentially, all they had to do was sign the paper and permit the machinery of Hollywood and New York publishing to grind up their property, their creation, their inspired ink-and-blood reinvention of the 16th century samurai warrior Musashi in a far-future post-mythological Earth setting and sit back and enjoy the money. And that was just for starters. If the film got made, once the series got released, after the English-language graphic novels began selling…once the whole monolith of western commercial exploitation went into overdrive, there would be royalties. Perhaps as much as ten times as this advance payout, every few years. Perhaps more. Right now, as Betsy, the President of the New York publishing house that had acquired English-language rights had said on a brief conference call preceded by Akimoto’s earnest apologies, ‘you’re the hottest property in town, gentlemen.’ That might actually last for a few years, maybe even a whole decade, an eon in publishing trends. Either way, they would be wealthy by any measure before they were 30, which was in four more years, and that was incredible, given their backgrounds.

But the contracts lay forgotten, the money talk cut off abruptly by the urgent blinking of the phone on Akimoto’s desk, and now all three of them were gazing out the wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling glass windows at a scene that might possibly have been a CGI effect from one of their own feverishly inspired scenes from the manga series that had sold a record 43 million copies in Japan alone, and counting.

‘What is it?’ Akimoto repeated. He sounded curious rather than puzzled or alarmed. Akimoto rarely displayed anything resembling actual emotion. They had once rushed him to the hospital after a motorcycle accident involving the three of them and a laundry van in the early hours of a New Year’s morning, and even with his femur bone peeking out of a pink gash in his thigh hurriedly torniqued with Akechi’s shirt and Yoshi’s necktie, he had still asked the emergency ward doctor with a pale face, ‘Is anaesthetic absolutely essential?’ Akimoto had a morbid fear of anything that might cause one to lose control of one’s wits.

Neither Akechi nor Yoshi replied. They hadn’t so much as glanced in each other’s direction since entering Akimoto’s office. Had in fact managed to seat themselves at a discreet distance from one another–thanks to Akimoto’s strategic placement of their chairs beforehand–and get through this entire meeting without so much as a nod or glance in the other’s direction.

Now, Akechi felt the stirrings of a razor butterfly in his lower gut. Like the imaginative post-mythic steel insects he had created for Sashi’s first issue, drawn on the back of a paper napkin at the Saturn Circuit Coffee House on Kita Street where he and Yoshi had hung around from opening to closing time that desperate, feverish year. He uncrossed his legs, feeling the grains of the raw silk fibres rub together, and leaned forward. The sky had begun darkening a few moments earlier, but he had been so engrossed in Akimoto’s recitation of financial terms and sub-rights and clauses and sub-clauses, and the rest of his energy had been so focussed on studiously ignoring the palpable presence of his brother only yards away, that he had dismissed it as a cloud. Or something. Now, he realized with a start that no cloud could darken a September Tokyo morning that suddenly or dramatically. It was like a major stormfront had suddenly descended from overhead, pressing down upon the city.

Beside him, he felt Yoshi lean forward as well, heard the sliding sound of his jeans against the walnut wood of the antique chair, and his brother’s face, a mirror reflection of his own except for the little triangular frizzle of beard beneath the lower lip and the marine-short haircut–Akechi himself favoured hair two or three inches long, unstyled, and a clean-shaven face–emerged into his field of peripheral vision. He ignored it and continued to stare forward at the darkening sky outside.

‘What is that?’ he heard himself ask.

Akimoto stood at the window, his back to the room, staring out. After a brief moment, in which both twins hesitated, assessed one another without actually exchanging a glance or word, then moved forward to stand flanking their Editor and friend, the three of them gazed out the 79th floor with shared mystification.

From here they could see the sky. Or what had been the sky until a few moments ago. Now, it was one continuous layer of black roiling frenzy. Akechi caught his breath, his right hand rising to touch the jade Buddha he wore on a gold chain around his neck, bought from Dharamsala in Northern India on a trip two months ago, and blessed by the Dalai Lama himself. The jade felt cool and smooth to his touch. The sky outside seethed and boiled, reminding him of the scene in Sashi: The Creation in which the eponymous hero was submerged in a pit beneath a layer of tar-snakes. The seething, writhing mass of intertwined serpents blocking Sashi’s way back to the surface, back to precious, desperately needed breathable air, had looked so much like this. Except that there were no snake-like coils undulating in the sky, only clumps and gouts of black masses spilling and fragmenting from the underside of the cloud. His fingers itched for a pen and paper.

As he stared, the black cloud seemed to reach some kind of critical point, and an enormous funnel began to form, spinning round at a sickening pace, descending to earth. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of similar funnels descended, reaching down from the sky to the ground. They seemed to be composed entirely of the black writhing substance, which itself seemed to fragment into numerous tiny particles, behaving not like smoke or any cloud, but like…insects. Like infinite numbers of tiny insects, acting in concertation. But what species of insect could exist in such mind boggling numbers? And act this way?

‘Not insects, the Jewel,’ he heard Yoshi say softly, to himself. And knew that despite their differences, their sullen separation and irreconciliable distancing, his brother’s mind and his still moved along tracks as precisely parallel as those of a mag-lev supertrain.

‘Of course,’ Akechi himself repeated aloud, speaking the first words he had said to his brother in over a year and six months. ‘The Jewel.’

Akimoto, his hands folded behind his back, bifocalled spectacles pushed up by the crinkling of his nose as he peered out at the strange developments in the sky, said in response: ‘Yes, yes, but what is it doing? What is the nature and purpose of this occurrence?’

One funnel descended right before the skyscraper that housed the offices of Banyan Media itself, allowing Akechi a closer look at the peculiar black substance that made up its body. He was not surprised to see that it consisted of countless tiny black flying objects that moved in a manner that no natural insect could possibly mimic. Even though they were moving at such a high speed, vibrating loudly enough for him to feel the reverberation even through the toughened multi-layer reinforced float glass before him, setting his chest cavity thrumming, he could tell that they were not completely mindless and random. There was a definite pattern to their movement, and they were following a very distinct and clear plan.

‘An invasion,’ he heard himself say, echoed at the exact same time by Yoshi.

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