Djinn City, page 8
Givaras returned the carapace to him with a flourish. This time the meat was charred along the outside and smelled faintly of overripe bananas. He was so hungry that he didn’t hesitate anymore. Givaras let him eat in peace, holding off on any discourse with obvious impatience. Indelbed reflected that conversation was possibly what the djinn hungered for most after his long solitary confinement.
He napped after eating, and then woke up and ate again, feeling slightly better. Givaras had spent this time making a kind of bed for him, using loose dirt and a ring of rounded stones from the water. It was a small thing, but it brought tears to Indelbed’s eyes.
Fully recovered now, he took the guided tour. Their sleeping chamber was the largest niche, a collapsed tunnel shaped carefully by the djinn. It tapered off into an alcove, where Givaras stored all of his extra carapace segments, dried strips of cartilage, and chipped mouth parts.
Back across the cavern, a deep-pitted niche served as a latrine and compost. Givaras had ringed this space with plates from wyrm carapace, the edges fused together with heat to prevent leakage and contamination of the water source. He used the compost to grow wild mushrooms along the banks of the pond, a crop of various edible fungi that augmented the meals of wyrm meat. Mushrooms fried in wyrm oil was a firm favorite on the menu.
Beside the farm there was a largish nook for a workshop, a makeshift larder with a shallow reservoir of water, and a number of other fancifully titled niches, including a library of Givaras’s own works etched on shell and a map room. Everything was made of wyrm parts or bones: knives cunningly fused from teeth; rope from dried tendons plied together; chisels, shovels, hammers, and picks from a variety of bones; and even a set of slightly creepy duvets made of inner membranes pressed together. Indelbed was most impressed. The djinn had clearly not been idle.
“You have djinn blood, you are djinn,” Givaras said, when they returned to the nest. “You can see the distortion field when I use it, correct?”
“Yes,” Indelbed admitted.
“That is an indication,” Givaras said. “This vision is not granted to humans. You have sensory apparatus in your brain that is not normal.”
“I heard djinn are made of fire and humans from mud,” Indelbed said, remembering some garbled religious lessons from Butloo.
“That, my dear boy, is literature. What I am interested in is science! Evolution, dear boy, is at the root of our existential crisis,” Givaras said. He seemed to have no notion of Indelbed’s age and treated him exactly as he would a slightly dim-witted contemporary.
Indelbed found this refreshing. When the elder djinn’s musings became incomprehensible, he just let them wash over him like a soothing lullaby. Givaras was a kindly conversationalist, however. He never failed to repeat himself.
“Evolution. It is the bane of our existence.”
“Existential crisis?”
They would spend long hours doing random things, and when the silence became oppressive, old conversations would be restoked like promising coals.
“Us djinns,” Givaras said. “By and large, we believe in divinity. The Great Creator. One God. One of our greatest schisms is the old divide: Are we unique or are we, like man, the product of evolution? That is the root of our existential crisis: the very key to our racial pride, our entire attitude to the physical world.”
“Evolution says men came from monkeys, right?” Indelbed had seen something of this on television. Also, Rais had taught him the rudiments of Darwinism in one of his rants. “And those giant turtles on some island, right?” He knew turtles were involved somehow. The whole thing intrigued him.
“All physical life on this world share the same genetic markers, the same genetic chemistry,” Givaras said. “That alone is irrefutable proof that all life is related. The Creationists among the djinn maintain that we are superior creatures not of this earth. The Evolutionists, such as myself, believe that we too are an unlikely manifestation of the usual collisions and mutations of the messy thing that is life.”
“And the turtles?”
“Wonderful pets, turtles,” Givaras said. “I myself had one for a time. A giant brute. I used to ride him around in the water. He tried to eat me several times. Come. Let us look once again at Risal and reflect on the valuable lessons of survival.”
Looking at Risal was a ritual they indulged in with some regularity. Their day was boring enough, and the tunnel end, while providing some degree of safety, grew cramped and fetid after some time. The open cavern with the black pond was a pleasant, if risky, spot to promenade.
“Look at Risal, swarmed in the full glory of her power,” Givaras said, as they stood over the skeleton. “How many conclusions can we reach from her pitiful condition?”
“Don’t do magic in a nest of worms?” Indelbed did not like going into the technical details of the distortion field. It sounded like magic to him.
“Hehe, yes,” Givaras said. “That is, of course, the primary lesson. Risal died because she was too powerful. I survived because I am weak. When I realized this, I became weaker still. That is what we must achieve with you.”
“Me?”
“The light,” Givaras said. “You must learn to make the light.” He pointed at the stumps of his legs. “Remember, the light is the only thing keeping the worms away. If the light fails, we are finished.”
“You think I can do magic?” Indelbed had some doubts about this part of the plan.
“My dear boy, I am almost certain of it,” Givaras said. He seemed supremely excited by the prospect. “And what’s more, once I teach you, it will further prove my hypothesis.”
“Which is?”
“A theory of everything: physics, evolution, our own place in this universe,” Givaras said. “Topics the djinn do not wish to explore.”
“Was she your friend?” Indelbed pointed at Risal. It bothered him somewhat that they were using her bones as plates and glasses, among other things.
“Risal? She was, in some ways,” Givaras said. “We were part of the same club. We shared the same interests. As I said, she was a lot stronger than me. That gave her far greater dignatas. Come, let us look at the bodies of the others. They too died in various states of change. The wyrms get agitated by strength, as you know. I will relate my theories to you.”
Indelbed rolled his eyes. Givaras was big on theories. “When will you start teaching me magic?”
The magic did not come easily. It was weeks before Indelbed could even understand what Givaras was saying. At first he had to master the basic tasks of gathering food and water. The threat of the wyrms kept them on edge. Givaras’s method of hunting was extremely risky too, and food was necessarily scarce. He would select a tunnel and turn off the light. Then he would send out a beat of magic, a kind of siren signal in a mathematical pattern. Wyrms would come, larvae of different stages. Even the smallest ones were dangerous.
They made a kind of grinding, shuffling noise. It was one of the most terrifying things in the dark. At this stage, it was a matter of simple luck. Givaras would turn the light back on suddenly. The wyrms would all freeze. The idea was to seize the smallest one and kill it, the smaller ones having breaks in their carapace. Givaras had a tool made from Risal’s ulna, a bone sword. Most of these hunts were unsuccessful. Some of them had resulted in serious injuries for Givaras.
The light destroyed the wyrms’ delicate eyes. If they ever grew to sufficient size, they would enter a different level of development and the light would cease to be a deterrent. Eventually, they could become dragons. If any of these things happened, it would wreck the fragile eco system in this underground cavern. It would certainly result in both Givaras’s and Indelbed’s deaths. To the best of Givaras’s knowledge, no new dragon had been born on this planet for at least twenty thousand years. It was indeed highly speculative whether these wyrms were actually dragon larvae at all or just some other species altogether.
It was Indelbed’s job now to wield the bone sword. He was much weaker than the djinn, but with two intact legs, he was a sight more agile. It was riskier for Givaras. The wyrms did not use vision to hunt. They were drawn to the brilliance of the distortion field. Only the djinn lit up on their sensory apparatus. Givaras was the bait, and it was on Indelbed to make a kill as quickly as possible, before any of the wyrms actually reached the djinn. It was a gruesome, dangerous job. Indelbed took to it with a certain glee. It occurred to him that he might be eaten, but this seemed such a bizarre thing that he found his courage buoyed by an unexpected recklessness.
The hunting of rock wyrms was ideally a two-man job, and once Indelbed got the hang of it, their food supply improved drastically. The magic took a lot longer. For weeks they would practice hours at a stretch. Indelbed imagined the distortion field as a lattice of molecules around him. He could put up a few points like tent pegs, but his concentration inevitably failed and the whole thing collapsed in sparks. (It reminded him of his dad teaching him algebra at age six, the sheer impossibility of it, the unexpected patience Kaikobad had shown, and this made him feel weepy and miss the Doctor, and wonder, as he always did, whether he had ever woken up from his coma, whether he remembered he had a son and was out looking for him somewhere. It was always a comforting fiction, that someone outside still loved him.)
“Keep it up, don’t worry.” Givaras was always cheerful. “You’re overthinking it. It should come naturally. I think I might have to hypnotize you.”
Indelbed, who had no intention of allowing any of this, hastily assured him that he was on the verge of a breakthrough.
“Not to rush you, dear boy,” Givaras said, “but it’s getting to be a bit of work keeping the light on for both of us.”
He finally got it during an almost trance state brought about by extreme tiredness. It was like a mental click, a moment of perfect balance, when some organ in his brain suddenly started working properly. The distortion field blinked on like a nest of fairy lights, cocooning him in every direction. A feeling of warm bliss came over him, an airiness akin to floating in water in the center of a still pond.
These wonderful feelings didn’t last long. Givaras cuffed him hard on the head, making him spill over. He was about to shout when the look of panic on the djinn’s face made him pause.
“Congratulations, congratulations,” Givaras babbled. “Really must turn that off, though. It’s like Eid for the wyrms…”
“Did you see that?” Indelbed asked. “It was beautiful!”
“You did it, very nice distortion field,” Givaras said. “I remember my first one, I spent the whole day knocking things over with it. You’ve got to be careful now, though. No time to be childish. You must learn to make the light, and never use the distortion field for anything else. Remember, if the wyrms come, the light is your only defense.”
The light took even longer to master. The urge to float around in the distortion field was almost overpowering. Givaras was onto him, however, and kept a vigilant eye. It took months to get the light right, to adjust the various strands of the distortion field just so, and then to understand how to tweak wavelengths and colors and densities. The things a djinn did instinctively had to be learned step by conscious step.
“First time in sixty years,” Givaras said, when Indelbed finally got the light floating above his left shoulder. “First time I’m turning this off. Keep yours on, mind you.”
He had a look of pride on his face that made Indelbed’s eyes water. The light promptly went off, of course, but Indelbed’s skill was hard-won: once he knew how to do a thing, he knew it forever.
“My aunts really hated me.” Indelbed liked to reminisce, not least because it gave him respite from Givaras’s incessant lessons. “Most of the uncles were pretty nice. I wondered why the aunts didn’t like me, but then Butloo once explained that maybe they were scared they’d be asked to take me in or something. I told you about Butloo, right?”
“Ah, yes, your butler. A very grand life you must have had up there,” Givaras said.
“Yeah, not really. I mean I guess the Ambassador and GU Sikkim and Uncle Pappo and all the others had a pretty grand life. I never saw much of it. Plus I never got to go to the real fancy parties, you know? Butloo told me you had to have a car to go to those, and of course, they wouldn’t want a rickshaw pulling up to the gate in front of their friends. I wouldn’t have minded going around the back or eating in the kitchen; it’s the food that I missed. Butloo said when my grandfather the judge was alive, they used to have big parties at home and everyone used to drink champagne and dance. I think Butloo made that up. He only heard it from his father, so it’s not like he saw it either.”
“Well, dear boy, there will be no dancing here, I’m afraid,” Givaras said, indicating his lack of legs.
“Haha, of course. Do djinns dance, though?”
“Oh yes, we invented all the best dances. We can dance weeks on end.”
“Like those swirling guys in skirts?”
“Whirling dervishes,” Givaras said. “Yes, they’re copying us when they do that.”
“I’ve never seen any dancing,” Indelbed said. “I think Aunty Juny knows how to dance. They lived all over the world, because the Ambassador was an ambassador, you see. Rais told me that. Aunty Sikkim is really fat, I don’t think she can even walk much. The other ones are kind of fat too. Aunty Juny used to hate me, I thought. She was mean all the time, but then I watched her, and she was mean to everyone, so it wasn’t just me.”
“She sounds like an interesting lady.”
“Rais gave me her phone number.” The Nokia was his prized possession here, the battery long dead, but otherwise in pristine condition. “She didn’t want me to go, I think. Rais told me that. She never said anything. No good-byes or anything. But she looked angry. I think maybe she looks angry when she means sad, like her face is mixed up.”
“Humes are complicated,” Givaras said wisely.
“I wish…” Indelbed said. “I wish she had tried harder.”
“My theory is this,” Givaras said. Not having to keep the light on had removed a visible quantity of stress from the old djinn. Indelbed powered the light now all the time, except when he slept. The strain and effort had faded with months of long practice. It was second nature now.
“Mind you, don’t go quoting my theories to the public. I’m something of a heretic. You might get your head cut off, haha.”
“Well, we’ll probably die here anyway.”
“Quite right, quite right,” Givaras said. “Well, my theory is that matter in this part of the universe exists in different forms, some of which interacts with each other and some of which doesn’t. Human physicists have theorized the same thing, clever boys; it is what they call dark matter and dark energy. Of course those names are catchalls for some very distinctive types of particles, but they will suffice for now. You with me so far?”
Indelbed, who had heard more scientific claptrap over the past year than he ever had a desire to think about, could only nod wearily. It was not until they got into the higher mathematics of Givaras’s “work” that the urge to sleep always became too strong to resist.
“Imagine that these different kinds of matter exist in the same space but do not affect each other. So when you move your hand through what you think is empty space, you are in effect going through some sort of ‘dark’ or ‘other’ matter, except neither you nor it can feel each other. I imagine they are particles or quanta of energy that do not interact at all with regular matter, unless under special circumstances.” Givaras backed this up with vigorous hand motions. “This, of course, is how the distortion field works. It is a manipulation of dark matter. A djinn, in my opinion, is simply a creature who can manipulate two radically different kinds of matter.”
“Right,” Indelbed said. “So it looks like magic, but really I’ve got a dark matter hand that is going around knocking things over.”
“Well, it’s not really a hand . . .”
“Of course it’s not a literal hand.” Indelbed tried to head off another fruitless tangent.
“But how, you might ask, did the djinn evolve such a useful and unlikely ability? Which dread organ allows this ‘magic’? Which terrible forge was this… er, forged in?”
“I might ask,” Indelbed said, suppressing a groan. There were times of extreme boredom when he was half tempted to let loose the distortion field and have the swarm eat him, if only to enjoy a bit of peace.
“It is obvious that the djinn physically exist in two different planes of existence,” Givaras said. “The djinn are, in fact, made up of two different kinds of matter: the physical matter of this world and the dark matter of some other. The dark universe, I surmise, is one of more energy and less physical matter. Thus my body, and even your own, has some organs that are made of dark energy! Now isn’t that exciting?”
“Er, is it?” Indelbed let his creativity roam. “Do you think I have a dark penis? I mean another one?”
“You utter philistine,” Givaras mourned. “Of all the punishments Matteras has inflicted upon me, you, undoubtedly, are the worst!” He said this, however, with an affectionate cast to his eyes, which never failed to make Indelbed slightly teary. “I was thinking of our eyes. We can see constructs made out of the field. At the same time, we can see the visible light spectrum of humans. How remarkable that the same sensory apparatus can interact with both types of particles. It leads me to believe that when we manipulate the dark matter energy particles, our distortion fields somehow alter their fundamental nature, allowing them to interact with the physical matter of this universe. We are a gateway between two fundamentally different planes of existence!
“Now how, you might ask, did we receive this beneficence? Why are we djinn so exalted as to exist on two different planes, whereas the rest of the world drudges along in the physical world? Is it a sure sign of the Almighty?”
“God?”
“Not at all!” Givaras said. “As I wrote in my thirty-fourth treatise on this subject, it is, in fact, evolution! We are not at all unique. We are merely rare. There are other animals, other forms of life that are similar to us, that carry components of both kinds of matter. Indeed, there might be more than two kinds of matter, who knows? What if there is a third, a fourth, a fifth type of matter, all of them occupying the same space, none of them interacting with one another? Could it be that when we are alone, we are in fact walking through an infinite crowd? Needless to say, the djinn do not like to explore this idea, since it might blow up their natural sense of superiority.”
