“What is it?” ReGi finally asked with a smirk.

  “Just did in a grandmother. Gust of wind. Blew her right out of her window. Third one this week, can you believe it?”

  “Humes,” ReGi said. “The shit they wish for . . .”

  “I can’t understand it,” Melek said. “Everyone keeps wishing for death and destruction. Other day, one woman wanted an earthquake. Just a small one, so her in-laws’ house would fall into the abyss. Great plan, except she was living next door. So of course half her place fell in as well. No one ever wishes for anything good . . .”

  “I guess Karma gives them all the good stuff,” ReGi said. “You’re kind of the antithesis. Melek Ahmar, the darkness in their souls, made incarnate.”

  “It’s Gurung,” Melek Ahmar snuffled. “He’s the one screening the petitioners. He keeps picking the worst ones, I know it. He hates everyone here. He’s enjoying it, every time they want something terrible. It’s the same old story. He picks fights all day and it’s poor old Melek Ahmar who has to do the smiting. No one ever thinks of me. Did he ask me if I wanted to off old ladies and turn wine sour? Did he ever ask me if I wanted to sit on that horrible throne and listen to every disgusting gripe from miserable Humes all day? No. He did not. Motherfucking Gurung. He’s not going to be happy until everyone wishes everyone dead. I just know it. And then he’s going to make me kill them turn by turn.”

  “Poor old Pops,” ReGi said. “I thought this was your oeuvre, you elder djinn granting wishes in a fucked-up way . . .”

  “Yeah, that’s like when someone asks for a bucket of gold and you put the bucket down a well full of poisoned snakes, and laugh at him while he gets bit,” Melek Ahmar said. “That’s time-honored fun. That’s in the Lore. This shit? This is just dark. These Humes are crazy. What happened to asking for money and houses and young lovers? What happened to asking for a bigger dick or bigger tits, eh?”

  ReGi laughed. “They got that shit already, Pops, don’t you see? They just need you for the bad stuff. Funny thing is, after this is all over, I bet they’ll all say you made them do it.”

  “Fucking Humes,” Melek Ahmar sighed. “All I wanted was a good party.”

  * * *

  Hamilcar went back to the brigadier, this time in person, alone. The urge to walk the streets, hands huddled in his coat pockets, was strange to him; even stranger, putting his Echo to sleep so that his eyes actually reverted to their natural state, a view curiously empty of input. It was a subconscious act, a rebellion unthinkable even three days ago; a physical meeting, Echos off, out of surveillance, a conversation with a low chance of being picked up by Karma, unless she had drones on him, which was possible, of course, but unavoidable. Had he vocalized his intentions, it would have shaken him to his core; he was looking to subvert the state. He wanted secrets the God-Machine was unwilling to give.

  Brigadier Uncle was just as shocked to see him in person, but old habits kicked in and soon they were sitting in a square balcony full of potted plants, having a nice cup of tea. Aunty Brigadier provided a platter of biscuits and cake, asked him a few pointed questions, and then left them to their “man talk” with a last forbidding glare. Exactly what perversions she expected him to lead her husband into in full sight of the street was a mystery.

  “So, young man, you’re the one stepping out with our Kanelia, eh?” the brigadier said after an uncomfortable silence. “Ahem. I hope I’m not being old-fashioned, but are you from the Ganesh Pande line, or the railroad Pandes?”

  Of course. They think I’m here to propose.

  Hamilcar, unsure how to stop this elderly barrage of polite inquiry, soon found himself delving exhaustively into the bones of his family tree, elucidating in depth every connection and childhood memory he could dredge up. They moved on to his elementary school grades, his sporting achievements, his choice in haircuts as a young man, and some comically ham-handed detective work into his alcohol and drug habits. Since the colonel could easily drink him under the table, he bore all of this with good humor and won the brigadier over. It was quite some time before he even remembered that he was not, in fact, here to get married.

  “And, of course, you’ll get out of those dreadful government quarters, eh?” Brigadier Uncle said with a chuckle. “Need a bigger place, hmm? I’m sure you’ll want to have some kiddies . . .”

  “Right, right, sir, actually, I’m sure you know your niece very well.”

  “Of course, of course.”

  “Then I’m sure you’ll understand that all decisions about everything will undoubtedly have to be made in consultation with her, including marriage.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that I’m not at all sure she’d say yes to marriage, let alone children.”

  “What? But haven’t you even asked her yet, you daft boy?”

  “Ah no, I have not.”

  The brigadier looked dismayed. “What the devil are you doing here, then?”

  “I wanted to chat about that case of ours.”

  “The old Gurung one?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And not about getting married?”

  “Not right now, no sir.”

  “But damnation, man, you can’t carry on this way . . . surely you mean to get married at some point? You’re the first man she’s ever introduced to us . . .” He looked ready to cry.

  Hamilcar leaned back in his chair and seriously considered this question. Of course, they had never spoken about the future, she barely acknowledged any plans beyond the immediate week. He didn’t even know her views on marriage or children; these things had never come up. On the other hand, he couldn’t quite imagine life without her glowering in close proximity.

  “Honestly, I wouldn’t mind,” Hamilcar said. “I mean, I love her, I guess.”

  “Have you told her this?”

  “Do you not know her at all? She’s not a feelings sort of person. We don’t have that kind of conversation.”

  “Well, woo her properly, for karma’s sake!” The brigadier lit up an illicit pipe and indicated that this was going to turn into a reminisce of days gone by. “Do you think your Aunty Brigadier just fell into my lap, a woman like that?”

  “She must have been a rare catch,” Hamilcar said.

  “Twenty suitors, each one richer than the next!” the brigadier said. “She was like Helen of Troy. Every morning the street under her balcony would be strewn with flowers. I wrote thirty-two poems to her, each one a masterpiece. When I got shot, dead on the cot in the middle of nowhere, she finally replied. One word: ‘Yes.’ A lady of brevity! Alas, if only that were true now. No, but that’s what it took to convince her.”

  “You got shot?” Hamilcar asked.

  “Training accident,” the brigadier said hurriedly. “Gun went off by mistake. Ahem, that’s not the point. Thing is, you’ve got to make it happen. Do something. Don’t just sit around.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “In that case, boy, let me be the first to welcome you into our family.”

  “Let’s not jump the gun, Uncle, I don’t think the colonel, er, Kanelia, has any idea about this. Why don’t you wait for my signal before telling everyone . . .”

  “Quite right.” The brigadier winked at him.

  “So about the other matter.”

  “Gurung?”

  “Doje. The businessman who was attacked.”

  “The victim?”

  “Yes, well, I’m wondering about that. Was he a famous man, do you remember?”

  “Nothing really, I knew he was rich, not sure what he did. As I recall, details of the case were not published.”

  “As far as I can tell, he came into a lot of cash right before KD1. Money he used to purchase properties which in turn were converted into karma. Five, ten million bitto maybe. How would one get that much money back then?”

  The brigadier snorted. “You youngsters don’t even know anything about money. Money used to make the world go around. People would sell their mothers for money. Things were bad back then, everything was collapsing. Whole communities were disappearing. Do you know how quick people can die in a bad swarm of nanotech? Minutes. Skin shredding in front of your eyes, bodies just melting. We couldn’t make the good stuff fast enough in our bodies then, not with the old PMDs . . . Cities, towns, everything was on a knife’s edge, even with AI running the systems. Too many people, you couldn’t give them food or water. Too few, and you couldn’t make a viable microclimate with the nanotech. It was all guesswork, even AI couldn’t calculate it all fast enough, and people just died. I’ve seen highways full of the dead, people dropped where they stood. You kids live in paradise now, you don’t even know it.”

  “Can you think of any city financial records anywhere from back then? Land records perhaps? Nondigital.”

  “Eh? I thought you were with the government. Surely Karma herself has it all.”

  “She doesn’t,” Hamilcar said. “Trust me, I need to go back to the old ways. Specifically, I want to question the previous owners of those properties that Dojo bought and sold.”

  “Hmm.” The brigadier snuffed out his pipe. “You know, when the army digitized the last of our records, we sent all the books to the National Library. They’ve got acres of stuff underground. I wouldn’t be surprised if the old land registries are down there too.”

  “The library,” Hamilcar said. “Of course.”

  Chapter Twelve: Why the Generals Cried

  “Why are we here?” Colonel Shakia hissed. “Karma specifically told us to drop this.”

  “She’s got a blind spot,” Hamilcar said. “I’m the failsafe.”

  They were deep in the stacks, a hermetically sealed room that seemed somehow still choked with dust, under the watchful gaze of two ancient drones that trudged up and down on maglev rails, nightmarish many-armed things. As Colonel Shakia had already verified, they responded sluggishly to vocal commands, and their chief functions seemed to be fetch and carry, and fight fires.

  The National Library proper, four stories above on ground level, was a high-ceilinged, swanky hall much like a cathedral, one of the wonders of the city, where tourists came to see ancient Buddhist and Hindu texts. The first three basements were archives, searchable through a manual interface. The last, fourth basement was a cavernous dumping ground filled with racks of material no one had even bothered to catalogue, let alone read, and it was clear from the logs that they were the first humans to enter here in the last seven years.

  “We need an army to go through this,” Colonel Shakia said, after they had wandered the aisles for half an hour.

  Hamilcar stared at her. A look of amusement crept across his face.

  “What?” She frowned, irritated.

  “You are a colonel. You actually have an army.”

  An hour later, eighty-six of Kathmandu’s fiercest weekend warriors were cheerfully gathered in the bowels of the National Library, clad in fatigues and combat helmets, tackling with bewildered gusto an enemy comprised of deeds, documents, registers, and irritable drones. This floor was not wired up to the Virtuality; to a certain degree, they had privacy, and Hamilcar’s carte blanche was enough to ward off suspicious librarians.

  Twelve exhausting hours later, they found it: original land registers, original title deeds from that time period, all packed in giant paper sacks marked “To Be Destroyed.” Some conscientious bureaucrat had saved them, or more likely, no one had gotten around to them yet with a flamethrower. The fourth basement was full of “To Be Destroyed” sacks, most of them harmless paperwork long since transcribed into immortal databases, the detritus of a bygone era slowly settling to dust.

  “The last time anyone actually owned property.” Colonel Shakia held up the register ending on KD1. “Feels weird, thinking everyone owned little pieces of the city, like a quilt.”

  Hamilcar was scanning the papers, his eye twitching as the Echo took over some of its functionality. The augments allowed rapid absorption of data, even analog, although most humans no longer required data at all, other than for the sake of amusement. It made his eye twitch in an unpleasant way.

  “There’s something here,” he said finally. “I’ve found eight of the deeds Doje purchased.”

  “I’m guessing all of the sellers are dead?” Colonel Shakia asked.

  “Not even dead. They don’t exist. There is no mention of them at all in the census on KD1.”

  “Erased? How is that even possible? Karma cannot be hacked. Not even Doje could have this much power,” Colonel Shakia said.

  “The only answer, then,” Hamilcar said, “is that Karma already knows.”

  Colonel Shakia slumped back against a rack. Some of the vitality drained out of her face. “What now, then? Are we to fight Karma herself? We are alone in this.”

  Hamilcar smiled. “No, not alone.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “You head back to the tower and get ready. Me? I’m going to go make a wish.”

  * * *

  He didn’t hear Gurung coming. He certainly didn’t see him. The first inkling he had was the smooth pull of the Gurkha’s knife, the little whoosh it made as it left the scabbard, and a sharp cold edge pressed against his neck, a motion so fast that his brain had barely registered anything before he was on his knees on the gravel.

  “I came to make a wish,” Hamilcar said softly, trying to keep the blade from nicking his Adam’s apple.

  The knife eased up a bit.

  “You’re a company man,” Gurung said, from somewhere behind him. “Karma’s pet.”

  “I can still dream of wishes,” Hamilcar said. “Is this not the Garden of Dreams, where the djinn grant wishes?”

  “You can’t see the djinn,” Gurung said. “You tell me your wish, I decide if they hear it.”

  “This wish is for you to grant, Bhan Gurung.”

  The knife pressed back against his throat with alarming quickness.

  “What game is this, Sheriff?”

  “I want a wish from you.”

  “I am not a djinn.”

  “You are Bhan Gurung, the knife saint, champion of your regiment, who murdered twenty-three people in cold blood, sentenced to death in a secret military tribunal. You were guilty, beyond doubt, of the most violent crime in Kathmandu in a hundred years. I heard that the four judges at your trial wept to a man. Why did they weep, Gurung?”

  “That’s your wish?”

  “Yes.”

  “To know why the generals cried?”

  “Yes.”

  Gurung sighed. The knife moved away. Hamilcar touched his neck, half expecting his head to fall off. He sat back on the ground in relief, trying to still his shaking legs.

  “You want some pistas?” Gurung sat down beside him, on a rock.

  “Sure.” He ate one and looked at the shell.

  “I just throw the shells on the ground, it drives the girl djinn crazy.” Gurung grinned. “Mister Sheriff, what will you do with an old story like that? There are no more generals left in the city, and no more tears, either. No one wants to know those old things.”

  “I came here, didn’t I?”

  “You are on Karma’s side.”

  “I am Karma’s failsafe. If she fails, it is my job to make it right. “

  Gurung snorted. “Karma never fails. You are a straw man.”

  “So take a chance, Bhan Gurung. Let me count for something. Tell me why they cried.”

  “Fine,” Gurung said. “It is a short story. Not remarkable. When I was tried, I admitted my guilt readily. As you said, there was no doubt. I was appointed a military lawyer, but I told him to stay home. At the tribunal, I waived my defense and accepted all of the prosecutor’s evidence as truth. No cross-examination, no questions.

  “Suspecting a ploy, they asked me if I would plead insanity, and I said no, I had been and was still perfectly sane. In fact I was willing to sign an affidavit to that effect. Puzzled, they asked finally if I would plead for leniency, given my exemplary record. I said no. I requested death by firing squad, at their earliest convenience. I then thanked them for their time, saluted, and stood down from the dock. It was done in ten minutes, the shortest trial in the history of the tribunal. Still they were not satisfied. As a parting shot, one of them held my collar and asked me why. Why, man, did you kill so many people?

  “It was the first time anyone had asked why. I asked if they had time to hear a story. I assured them it would have no bearing on my plea or the verdict. They looked at each other, and, to a man, said yes.

  “So I told them the story of the businessman Doje, who was rich beyond measure. He bought cheap and sold high, isn’t that business? He accrued great wealth doing this, and wasn’t that a virtue? He sold people, also. It was the time when microclimate equilibrium was up for grabs, and PMDs were just getting started, so pretty soon it was obvious that if you had enough people, your city or town or whatever would win the nanotech battle. Survival. All of a sudden, cities wanted refugees, all those little rich communities that had walled themselves in, they realized they didn’t have enough warm bodies to run their microclimes. The math was getting better, and the AIs could tell you to an exact number what population you needed to be viable. So, brokers like Doje started shifting migrants around, and when the spring ran dry, they started snatching them off the streets and selling them.

  “It accelerated before KD1. He shifted five thousand in that last month alone, sold them to some failed town in America, and they all died a month later, because the numbers still weren’t right. I guess he figured once Karma came online all of this would stop. Because he didn’t give a shit, he did three thousand more, and this time there weren’t enough people in the villages, so he just started grabbing them right here, off the streets. There were food riots already, no one in charge, it was easy.”

  “And the properties he bought?”

  “Wartime profiteering,” Gurung said. “It was win-win for him. He’d auction off some small landholder’s entire family, take their house, fake the documentation, and then strike their name off the census altogether. Men, women, children, babies, grandmothers, uncles, aunts, he’d sell the whole lot, and take whatever they had. Double the profit. No one asked questions, people were moving around all the time, according to whim or rumor.”

 

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