Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [191]
“There is no one to exterminate them.”
“I should collect the skins and take them back to New Orleans.”
“Not on my boat.”
Many of the shimmers were fleeing, finally understanding the quality of their enemy. Creo pumped again and aimed at a twist of light further down the street.
Lalji watched complacently. “You will never hit it.”
“Watch.” Creo aimed carefully.
A shadow fell across them. “Don’t shoot.”
Creo whipped his spring gun around.
Lalji waved a hand at Creo. “Wait! It’s him!”
The new arrival was a skinny old man, bald except for a greasy fringe of gray and brown hair, his heavy jaw thick with gray stubble. Hemp sacking covered his body, dirty and torn, and his eyes had a sunken, knowing quality that unearthed in Lalji the memory of a long-ago sadhu, covered with ash and little else: the tangled hair, the disinterest in his clothing, the distance in the eyes that came from enlightenment. Lalji shook away the memory. This man was no holy man. Just a man, and a generipper, at that.
Creo resighted his spring gun on the distant cheshire. “Down south, I get a bluebill for everyone I kill.”
The old man said, “There are no bluebills for you to collect here.”
“Yeah, but they’re pests.”
“It’s not their fault we made them too perfectly.” The man smiled hesitantly, as though testing a facial expression. “Please.” He squatted down in front of Creo. “Don’t shoot.”
Lalji placed a hand on Creo’s spring gun. “Let the cheshires be.”
Creo scowled, but he let his gun’s mechanism unwind with a sigh of releasing energy.
The calorie man said, “I am Charles Bowman.” He looked at them expectantly, as though anticipating recognition. “I am ready. I can leave.”
Gita was dead, of that Lalji was now sure.
At times, he had pretended that it might not be so. Pretended that she might have found a life, even after he had gone.
But she was dead, and he was sure of it.
It was one of his secret shames. One of the accretions to his life that clung to him like dog shit on his shoes and reduced himself in his own eyes: as when he had thrown a rock and hit a boy’s head, unprovoked, to see if it was possible; or when he had dug seeds out of the dirt and eaten them one by one, too starved to share. And then there was Gita. Always Gita. That he had left her and gone instead to live close to the calories. That she had stood on the docks and waved as he set sail, when it was she who had paid his passage price.
He remembered chasing her when he was small, following the rustle of her salwar kameez as she dashed ahead of him, her black hair and black eyes and white, white teeth. He wondered if she had been as beautiful as he recalled. If her oiled black braid had truly gleamed the way he remembered when she sat with him in the dark and told him stories of Arjuna and Krishna and Ram and Hanuman. So much was lost. He wondered sometimes if he even remembered her face correctly, or if he had replaced it with an ancient poster of a Bollywood girl, one of the old ones that Shriram kept in the safe of his winding shop and guarded jealously from the influences of light and air.
For a long time he thought he would go back and find her. That he might feed her. That he would send money and food back to his blighted land that now existed only in his mind, in his dreams, and in half-awake hallucinations of deserts, red and black saris, of women in dust, and their black hands and silver bangles, and their hunger, so many of the last memories of hunger.
He had fantasized that he would smuggle Gita back across the shining sea, and bring her close to the accountants who calculated calorie burn quotas for the world. Close to the calories, as she had said, once so long ago. Close to the men who balanced price stability against margins of error and protectively managed energy markets against a flood of food. Close to those small gods with more power than Kali to destroy the world.
But she was dead