IRON GODS: PALIMPSEST Excerpt #3

Ashok Banker

5 September 2008, 05:05


© ASHOK K. BANKER 2006-08. PLEASE DO NOT COPY, FORWARD, PRINT, OR OTHERWISE PASS ON THIS COPYRIGHTED EXCERPT AS THIS IS A DRAFT IN PROGRESS FROM AN UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT AND MAY BE MISUSED WITHOUT YOUR KNOWLEDGE. THIS EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT IS MEANT ONLY FOR YOUR PERSONAL READING PLEASURE. THANKS AND BEST WISHES, ASHOK K. BANKER, SEPTEMBER 2008. © ASHOK K. BANKER 2006-08. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

3. BURNING BRIDGES

OORT

Oort had no name. Even the name “Oort” was only a generic title, a witticism really, that it had appropriated for itself from the literature of one of the infinite worlds it had visited and imbibed in its encyclopaedic voyages. It was impossible to describe what Oort truly was in any symbolic language, for Oort existed at a level so far beyond language itself, that the very attempt to explain it in linguistic terms was absurd and virtually impossible.

But Oort was self-aware; preternaturally so. And in all its experience, Oort had never before encountered subjects that could resist absorbtion. Not in a billion billion worlds over a billion billion units of time had Oort come across a single being that ejected Oort and remained independently sentient. And now it had encountered five!

Oort strained its resources to the utmost to connect these exceptions to itself, to re-acquire and absorb the stray units into its holistic unity. Oort failed. This too was a first. Oort had no precedent for such an event. Five separate individual units resisting absorbtion. How? Why? This defied the very rules of the eleven-dimensional universe. It was an affront to nature itself.

There was more.

Had the five units been of one world, one timestream, perhaps Oort could have computed some explanation. But they were of five separate continuums! Each of the five exceptions existed in slightly different parallel worlds, only a fraction apart, yet distinctly separate. Curiously enough, none of the other worlds in that part of the space-time continuum exhibited similar anomalies. Of the infinite number of variations in harvest worlds, only these five rejected Oort’s repeated attempts at holistic absorbtion.

What did it mean? There was nothing in Oort’s literally infinite compendium of knowledge—of knowability, really—that could account for this disturbing anomaly. It simply did not compute. And yet, there was no denying that the anomaly existed. Five times over, on five separate worlds.

Oort noted that the five worlds were only a fraction of an instant apart in the ring-around-the-sun model of parallax continuity.

What this meant was that even though they were distinctly separate worlds existing in distinctly separate parallel universes, the differences between their realities were so minute as to be barely measurable. In fact, Oort noted with the Oort equivalent of a drawn breath, the differences between these five specific multiverses were of the smallest possible measurable scale. And they consisted of five prime numbered alternate realities in continual sequence. What did that mean? Oort had no idea. But it was something.

For Oort, armed with the power to harvest literally infinite universes, a mere five worlds were so insignificant as to not matter at all. So Oort split these five off from the rest of that harvest rotation, placing them in a stable eleventh-dimensional way station, and sealing the way station hermetically. Now the anomaly of the Five was in a timeplace outside of sequential causality, outside the boundaries of the known computable variations of the multiverse. Oort continued its harvesting as it had done for a billion billion units of time before and after—for, to Oort, time itself was an interlocking ouroboros continuum, without any single beginning or end; rather, it could choose to enter any reality at any one or more of an infinite number of beginnings or endings. The only thing that could not be done, by the laws of eleven-dimensional spacetime, was to enter from the same nodal point more than once, or exit it more than once. That would produce the classic kill-the-grandfather time-travel paradox, and the universe did not take kindly to obvious paradoxes. You could never kill your grandfather because while you could go back in time, given suitable equipment, you would be travelling back into an alternate universe almost identical to your own—so nearly the same that the difference was indistinguishable to any mortal—yet not your own universe. So even though you might accidentally or deliberately kill the man who was your grandfather, it would not actually be your grandfather, only a nearly-identical replica in a parallel universe. Similarly, when you returned to your own time, you would in fact return to yet another nearly-identical parallel universe, not the universe you left at the outset of your time travelling sojourn.

So Oort could never replicate the specific anomaly of these five worlds on its own, no matter how much it may desire to do so. It was one of those naturally occuring phenomena that were perfect in and of themselves, filled with all the mystery and beauty of such things. A curiousity to be studied and examined any number of times, yet never replicated artificially.

Oort continued its endless work, unconcerned by the anomaly of the Five. Absorbing, reabsorbing, assimilating, reproducing, processing, reprocessing. Entropy was a harsh mistress. In due course, the anomaly of the Five was relegated to a barely recollected anecdote, a joke without a punchline told by someone somewhere somewhen, but nobody knew who, or where, or when.

It was as close to forgetting as Oort could ever get.

BOMBAY, INDIA

On the last Bombay bandh, Santosh and his chawlfriends had come out into the street and played cricket all day. Exulting in the sheer freedom accorded by empty traffic-free streets, they had played a full four innings before calling it quits at long past lunchtime. He remembered that sensation of feeling like a minor badshah, king of the road, if only for a day. Later, they had walked to Linking Road, stumps and bat hefted over shoulders in anticipation of any trouble. The city had been tense after two factions of a local political party split heads over obscure “insults” caused by one pramukh to the senior leader of the other party during a Buddha Jayanti speech. Even that day, the streets hadn’t been this deserted. Santosh had never seen the main traffic junction near National College so empty, the streets so empty of traffic, humanity, vendors—even police. There wasn’t so much as a stray dog to be seen wandering the streets. Devoid of its usual hordes, Linking Road seemed thrice as wide as usual. There was something immensely liberating about being alone and at large in a city this empty. This must be what someone like Shah Rukh felt, he though, or the Prime Minister, or that world’s richest man Bhill Gates. Like you owned everything.

He turned around, skipped a step, then turned around again, stretching out his arms. The arterial road stretched blindingly in both directions: North and South, an abandoned river. He felt freer than he had in his life. He wanted to jump and click his heels together like Raj Kapoor did in one of those old phillums where he was copying Charlie Chaplin copying Hitler. He felt that if he splayed out his arms and began singing, orchestral music would swell to fill the city. Perhaps an ensemble of Bollywood group dancers would appear on a rooftop, clad in identical glitter-encrusted costumes, and gyrate in choreographed coordination. As he opened his mouth to laugh at the absurdity of his imagination, the buzzing of the little cloudswarm sharpened to a keener pitch. He shut his mouth and let his hands drop to his sides. He still hadn’t grown used to those things following him around. It had been bad enough when he had seen them rise from the reeking viscous puddle of his vomit like a band of sentient horseflies, and he had run shamelessly from them for several agonized minutes, before realizing that they meant only to follow him, nothing more. Except that…when he opened his mouth wide, or inhaled deeply, they…dipped lower, the faint sound of their buzzing, audible only because the world was so quiet, growing more urgent somehow. He thought that maybe, if he kept his mouth open long enough, they might—they might…

He kept his mouth shut and watched them. Gradually, their buzzing keyed down from the higher pitch to the familiar plaintive droning. He took a few steps back, moving slowly until their buzzing sharpened minutely, and stayed still. They seemed to be on an invisible tether of about ten metres; if he went beyond that, they followed. The faster he went, the faster they followed. And vice versa. He wondered what would happen if he fell asleep. Would they continue to move in on him, until they—he swallowed, feeling his gorge rise—until they entered his body again?

Thinking about that, unpleasant as it was, reminded him he was hungry. And thirsty. After the bugs had risen from his vomit, he had fled the chawl in a panic, racing down Ambedkar Road blindly until he finally got a stitch in his side and had to stop, and realized that they weren’t any immediate danger to him. Since then, he had simply walked the streets, trying to understand what was going on here. He had glimpsed groups of people inside building compounds, even rich people in their shiny clothes and jewellery and watches sitting on the ground, lost in that mindless hypnotic state just like his own family and the rest of Ambedkar Chawl. After an hour of wandering the bylanes of Bandra-Khar, he had come to the conclusion that everybody except he had fallen under the spell of the bugs. He had remembered a bit more about the day of the visarjan by then, about seeing the cloudswarm emerge from the Jewel and head for Earth, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out that that cloudswarm had been made up of arbo-crores of these same tiny bugs, and that they had gotten inside all the people and drugged them somehow. He thought that probably people everywhere in the city, maybe even the whole vishwa, were sitting in groups like his chawl-neighbours, staring blankly at nothing and humming Aum.

Satisfied for the moment that the bugs wouldn’t suddenly swoop down and try to ghussofy into his facial orifices, he turned and strolled across the four-lane crossroad. The Barista on the corner had always fascinated him, its tinted glass walls affording him and his friends tantalizing glimpses of jean-clad coeds sipping exotic coloured drinks in tall frosted glasses. He maneuvered carefully over the broken slabs of sidewalk paving and rubble left by the last work crew to dig up this particular stretch and reached the glass door. The sign hanging from the door said ‘Open’: he could read that much English easily but he was still surprised when the door yielded to the pressure of his fingertips. Inside the hallowed sanctum, out of reach to an Ambedkar Chawl municipal-school boy like he whose mother scrubbed floors and dishes in a half dozen houses daily to eke out a paltry sustenance, the air felt cool and smelled wonderful. He smelled coffee, of course, but also a chocolately aroma, and the tantalizing odour of other foods. He let the door swing shut, and headed straight for the large showcase displaying an assortment of western snackfoods. He greedily eyed rows upon rows of vegetable and chicken puffs, paneer-and-corn sandwiches, mushroom panini sandwiches, sausage rolls, and more pastries than he could count on both hands. He knelt down and pressed his face against the cold glass of the showcase as he tried to decide what he would eat first. A puff maybe? Or a burger? No, a Black Forest pastry!

He knew the names for almost all of them, thanks to his friend Tony D’Souza who was now in Bahrain. Tony-bro, as D’Souza had insisted on being called, had befriended him after his father died, and had taken him out several times for phillums, even to eat at decent if not fancy snack parlours, usually when he received payment for one of his computer jobs. Santosh had never wholly understood exactly what Tony-bro did for a living except that computers were involved. He called himself a ‘sysop’, whatever that meant. Tony-bro had been nice to him, for no reason other than that Tony-bro had once liked Santosh’s middle sister Sushila enough to want to marry her, and even after Sushila had rebuffed him, Tony had kept his friendship with Santosh going. Santosh missed Tony-bro. Tony had nicknamed him Santiago—Santosh had no idea what that meant in English but it always sounded exotic in Tony-bro’s accented drawl. Tony-bro had lived in the Christian block of Ambedkar Chawl, with an aging father and bad-tempered mother, and he had had his own tiny room, all of 6’ x 9’ to himself, with his own stereo system and 20” colour TV, and an income decent enough to afford him branded jeans and tee shirts and even a Titan wristwatch, which made him a veritable playboy by chawl standards. Santosh had enjoyed spending time with Tony-bro in that little cubicle of comfort, watching English movies on Star Movies and HBO to his heart’s content with no Pratibha-didi to scream at him about how ‘adult’ Angrezi movies would corrupt his mind and stunt his growth and no grandfather drooling on his shoulder after dinner.

Now, he went around the counter—he had to walk all the way to the far end of the coffee shop to reach the hinged half-door that led behind the serving counter—and picked out three or four things that seemed most attractive to his hungry eyes. He didn’t bother with searching for spoons, or forks—English people always ate with forks, Tony-bro had taught him—and just began wolfing down Black Forest pastry straight from the plastic container.

He was done with the pastry and had just taken his first bite of a roast chicken sandwich when he saw the movement outside the glass front of the coffee shop.

The bugs! He had been so eager to get into the Barista that he had forgotten about them completely. Naturally, once he was behind the closed door, they had been unable to follow, and when he moved further inside the store, they had tried to bridge the gap and had been obstructed by the glass front. Only now did he recall hearing the whirr-thump-buzz-thump of their tiny collisions with the sheer glass; he had been so totally engrossed in the contemplation of the smorgasbord of food at the time he hadn’t even looked up then.

But the bugs had stopped trying to get inside. Instead, he saw, the sandwich clutched in his right hand, a second pastry—a chocolate tart—held in his left hand, the bugs were going away! He could see the little cloud droning steadily farther out into the street, farther away than they had gone for the past hour or so since he had puked them out. They hovered briefly in the middle of the deserted traffic junction, silhouetted against the dirty grey building of National College, and buzzed louder than ever, growing more frantic, whirling in ever faster circles around each other, like a computer-simulated model of an atom he had seen on Discovery Channel once. This frenetic acceleration continued, their movements and sound increasing sharply in intensity and volume, until, with an abruptness that was startling in a world devoid of other sounds and movement, they reached an explosive crescendo, producing a sound like the crunch a crisp kernel of caramel popcorn made in your mouth, and shot upwards, like a barrage of pellets shot out of a cannon. And vanished from sight.

He waited several seconds, then slowly began chewing the mouthful of chicken sandwich. He wasn’t sure whether to believe that the cloudswarm had truly vanished forever—but then again, he had no idea how those things normally behaved, so how could he know what to expect? He finished the sandwich and the chocolate tart, and was contemplating whether to have a chicken puff next or to get himself a drink, maybe one of those bright green iced drinks in a tall frosted glass, when a voice spoke from just beside his left shoulder.

“Santosh,” it said.

DESSEN, USA

“You are not alone,” said the voice, from somewhere behind her, and Ruth was shocked out of her reverie. She was on her feet in a trice, swinging around, fists clenched protectively rather than aggressively. She had settled in this little glade for the cool shade of the trees, and because it was still within eyeshot of the public field. The population of the town, her father included, still sat there, glassy eyed and senseless, undaunted by the sun which was near noon by now. She realized now that she had dozed off sitting here on the soft grass with her back propped against the trunk of the oak. The only thing that had kept her from falling fast asleep was the eeiry absence of any sound, even the slightest wisp of breeze or birdsong or insect-call. She had even forgotten to keep an eye on her little personal cloud of those tiny black buzzing fuckers; from the absence of that irritating hum-buzzing sound, it would seem they had finally left her alone. That meant she had fallen asleep for more than a minute or two, or she’d have noticed their absence.

The glade was small, a narrow strip lining the turnoff to the highway turnpike. Beyond it was the Dessen-Anderson cemetery, shared by the neighbouring towns. She could see through the gaps in the trees clear to where the headstones of the cemetery gleamed dully in the overhead sunlight, a glint of metal or colour marking where grievers had left mementoes. In the shadows of the glade, a figure moved slightly, silhouetted by the leafy shade of a young Dutch elm.

“Who are you? Show yourself!”

Her voice sounded unnaturally loud and jarring. It sounded like someone else speaking. Like most people, she wasn’t accustomed to hearing her voice aloud in an atmoshere of such quietude.

The shadow moved. There was something odd about the shape of the person—if it was a person. Odd. Yet vaguely familiar.

“Do not fear me, Ruth Marsten.”

She swallowed, wishing she had had the foresight to pick up some kind of weapon. She hesitated, unsure whether to turn and run away, back to the house, where she knew her father kept a gun in his bedside drawer, just as a precaution. But it was at least a kilometer away. And whoever it was might catch up with her before she made it. No. Better to stay her ground and identify the stranger—or strange thing. Eyeball it, as her father would have said, crusty old Corpsman. Sir, yes sir. There was something profoundly disturbing about the shape of that shadow by the elm sapling. What was with the guy’s head anyway? Some kind of deformity? A turban? Was he one of those Indian religious cultists, what were they called, Sics? No, Sikhs. With the throaty ‘kh’ sound, as in Ackhmed’s name.

The figure moved forward a pace, then one more. A nearly vertical ray of sunlight, dissected by the curving trunk of the elm, lit the torso and lower body of the visitor, but his head remained in shadowy shade. Ruth frowned. Her eyes couldn’t be taking this long to adjust to the dimness—no, this guy, thing, whatsisface, was doing something to keep his head concealed. What she could see of his body looked normal enough, if more than a tad overweight. He had a nice pot, chunky haunches and thighs, all clad in a very well tailored worsted suit that must be way too hot for this excellent weather they were having today. A crisp gunmetal grey, with a striking deep red-coloured tie, red-ochre really. Still, that impression of his head being impossibly large for his body persisted. And something about his face—something more than just the usual nose, eyes, mouth, but what? She squinted, feeling a surge of frustration and anger. What was she angry about?

“You are angry because you do not comprehend what is happening. You feel powerless, afraid.” The voice was calm, pleasant, the sort of higher tenor that was just discernible as a man’s voice, but only just. No gravel there, not even a stray pebble. It was a voice that cried out for a sub-woofer.

She swallowed. “So you can read my thoughts? What are you? Some kind of Martian?”

There was a pause. “Martian?” the man repeated. “Why would you think me to be a—? Ah, it is a cultural reference, no? A general term for those not from your world? Not literally a denizen of your neighbouring planet.”

“Google it later. Right now, just tell me this, what are you doing here and what do you want with our world?” And why am I the only one not affected by your alien voodoo whatchercallitshit? She didn’t say the last bit aloud, but it didn’t matter.

“With your world?” The voice sounded puzzled, sincere, as if the person was trying as hard to make sense of her as she was trying to understand him. “Nothing at all. Why would we want your world? It has nothing of any value.”

Ruth laughed, the sound jangling harshly in the unnaturally soundless outdoors. “Yeah, sure. You just happened to be passing by and stopped to refuel, right? Soon as you fill up your interplanetary starship, you’ll be moving right along, won’t you?”

The man tilted his head. Or at least, Ruth saw the shadowy oblong where his head should have been move slightly, and his left shoulder rise in a small shrug-like action. His voice sounded even more puzzled. “I do not understand…” He paused again, as if listening to some inner voice, the way a TV anchor did when her producer spoke on her carefully concealed earpiece; Ruth almost expected him to raise a hand to his ear, pressing the earpiece with a finger the way Sherie Ann Lee did on KWFC12’s LiveWeather. “Ah, this is humour again. Designed to cover your nervous anxiety at my manifesting myself. Interesting. But quite unproductive. We do not have time to banter thus. There is much I must convey to you, and very little time in which to do it. It would be best if you abstain from hostility and pejorative remarks for the time being. Your cooperation is most highly desired.”

“Screw that.” She had begun to move slowly to her right, trying to catch the visitor at an angle that would expose his head. But no matter how many paces she moved, the area around his head remained fuzzy and inscrutable, like a blurred-out face on COPS. “I don’t know what your game is here, but you won’t get any cooperation from me.”

The visitor was silent for a moment, then said cautiously, “What can I do to assure you that I mean you no harm, Ruth Marsten?”

“You can start by showing me your face. I know you’re doing something to my eyes so I can’t see you clearly. But if you think I’m going to trust an alien visitor whose people have taken over the entire planet, you guys must be dumber than ET.”

Again, that gesture that she interpreted as a head-tilt. “Your eyes? Nothing has been done to your eyes, Ruth Marsten. But, yes, it is true that I commanded the dasyas to conceal sight of my head from you for the time being. I feared that my unusual appearance might…unsettle you.”

“Yeah, well, I’m already unsettled, so you may as well come clean. It’s weird talking to someone without a head, unless that’s what passes for polite behaviour in your culture.”

“I believe you wish me to reveal myself completely. Very well, I shall ask the dasyas to do so in a moment. But before I do so, I must warn you, my physiology is somewhat unusual, in relation to your own.”

“I figured as much. Show yourself already.”

She didn’t see him make any gestures or say anything. But almost at once, the blurriness surrounding the upper part of his body dissipated, like a thin mist blown away by a strong breeze. He stood completely visible before her then. She took a step back, raising a hand to her open mouth involuntarily.

“My name,” he said quietly, walking towards her, “is—”

BIRMINGHAM, UK

“Ganesha,” he finished.

Salim backed away from the man—the being—with the potbellied body and elephant head. He had seen images of the Hindu god Ganesha any number of times, was intimately familiar with the deity of aupicious beginnings and scribes, the omni-potent Remover of Obstacles. Even in Muslim-majority Pakistan, images, icons and effigies of the god were aplenty. The being that stood before him now, its head exposed at last after Salim’s repeated polite but firm insistences, was undoubtedly a Ganesha, down to the boyish plumpness of its human body, and the fleshy blueish-grey head with its waving trunk—the head of a baby elephant, according to mythic lore. The images and effigies usually portrayed the god clad in only a white dhoti, with the black thread of a brahmin wound diagonally over one shoulder and around his waist. This Ganesha was dressed in a kaftan and loose flowing kurta, the kind that Salim himself wore during family gatherings and religious occasions—to work, Salim preferred more ubiquitous western garb. Ganesha’s kaftan and kurta were the sandy shade of brown preferred in Salim’s native country, the Pindi outfit looking ludicruously incongruous on the short fat form. Yet Ganesha seemed wholly at home in the garb, as he moved with the waddling swiftness of a fat but vigorously active person.

He covered the distance that Salim had put between them, his kindly bright eyes peering into Salim’s anxiously.

“I know that my appearance must come as a shock to you.”

Salim attempted a shrug. “Yes.”

“Let me repeat, I mean you no harm. On the contrary, I am here to ask for your cooperation. It is imperative that you listen to me and aid me in my task. The fate of worlds depends on it.”

The fate of worlds. Salim shook his head, resisting the urge to clasp his hands behind his neck. He found himself unable to take his eyes off that wavering trunk. The appendage curled and uncurled constantly, animated with a life of its own. He found the wrinkles on the sides of the bridge of the trunk—as well as on the foot-long length of the trunk itself—curiously fascinating. “You are the Ganesha? God of the Hindus?”

The nearly bald head—a few sparse hairs sprouted from the top of the flat greyish-blue scalp—dipped once. The trunk dipped with it. “I am Ganesha.”

Salim took a moment to reflect on this. Trying to distract himself from that overly fascinating trunk, he noted that one of Ganesha’s tusks was indeed broken off very close to the trunk, conforming to legend. He seemed to recall something about Ganesha having four arms—or was it six?—but could only see two.

“I kept my superior arms concealed,” Ganesha said, once again reading this unspoken thoughts, “so as not to startle you. If you have no objection, I would manifest them now.”

“Certainly…yes,” Salim said uncertainly. How exactly should one respond to a god asking permission to manifest its arms?

A second pair of arms appeared instantly, as if they had always been there but were hidden from sight. Salim surmised that the same effect that had kept Ganesha’s head concealed had done so for the third and fourth arms as well. Curiously enough, the extra arms extruded quite naturally from the kaftan, immediately above the first pair, each arm emerging from its own separate sleeve. Salim wondered what the tailor had thought when instructed to stitch two extra sleeves for the garment, then thought that it was highly unlikely that Ganesha got his clothes stitched anywhere in Birmingham, or even on Earth itself. He was recovering now from the shock of seeing the elephant head, and of the earlier larger shock of hearing and seeing the visitor moments earlier, but still felt only two steps from a panic attack. His right thigh trembled vigorously, so hard that he felt sure Ganesha must notice, and he controlled the nerves in that limb with an effort, straining to breathe normally.

“Much better,” Ganesha said, with an endearing toothless smile. Salim had another tiny start when that little mouth opened to reveal only pink gums and a complete absence of teeth. But of course. If the head was that of an elephant, he would hardly have a set of 32, would he?

“What is…happening here exactly?” Salim heard himself ask. He felt slightly faint. Not in any immediate danger of dropping unconscious, but just the slightest bit sick to the stomach, woozy. Fortunately, his stomach was quite empty of anything—he hadn’t been able to bring himself to sip so much as a drop of water since throwing up those vile black things. Besides, ramzan was still going on. “Would you be so kind as to explain the situation to me…My Lord?” he finished. The last appelation came naturally off his tongue, it seemed appropriate enough under the circumstances.

Ganesha looked up at him kindly. “Yes, of course. You have every right to ask, and to know. But as always, the truth is not easily palatable, bhaijaan. Perhaps it might be more expeditious for us to depart now and for me to explain it all to you when we are safely away. Within moments, if we are not many light years distant, we shall be caught up in the coming metamorphosis.”

TOKYO, JAPAN

“Metamorphosis?” Yoshi asked with the faintest trace of curiosity. “What is this metamorphosis you refer to, Ganesha—?”

He wrestled briefly with a choice of honorific—how was one to address a god in his presence?—alternatively considered ‘Ganesha-ue’ and ‘Ganesha-tono’. Finally he settled on the archaic: “Ganesha-dono?”

He inclined his head slightly, to show that he meant no offense by the query.

Ganesha’s trunk twirled skywards as if sniffing out the air. “Hmm,” said the god. “It would be preferable were I to explain this after we are safely away. Right now, we must begin the evacuation at once. As it is, there is barely sufficient time to transport so many and even valiant Akhu-rata cannot outstrip the bounds of this physical universe.”

Yoshi had no comprehension of what Ganesha might mean. Yet he could not simply fire questions at a God. To buy himself a moment to collect his thoughts, he glanced around. They were still on Omotesando Avenue, and as far as he could see, it was as deserted as it had been when Ganesha had first appeared before him moments earlier, stepping out from the doorway of an American sporting shoe store. In younger days, Yoshi and his friends had nickcalled this area Bittersweet, a pun on the literal meaning of Shibuya, in which district this lay, which meant Bitter Valley. He still remembered walking down this very street with Akechi, pointing out all the stores they would ransack once they were rich and famous, ordering truckloads of branded fashion merchandize and wearing different outfits every day of their lives—never the same outfit twice! They would always end such window-shopping sprees with high-fives and the battle cry of “Ichi-Maru-kyu”, with Akechi poking up his rude finger and Yoshi forming an 0 and a 9 with his hands. Those were the days, when becoming badshahs of kogal had seemed like the most desirable goal in the world. Now, he didn’t even know where Akechi was.

“So many?” he asked aloud, starting with the least innocuous question.

Ganesha spread his four hands. His pot belly quivered gelatinously. The trunk rolled and unfurled, pointing to the right and upwards. “All must go. We can leave not one behind.”

He lowered one hand, placing it on Yoshi’s shoulder. Yoshi saw the hand approaching and controlled himself; somehow it did not seem appropriate to flinch from the touch of a god. Yet he felt more than a little trepidation. He allowed Ganesha’s hand to rest on his shoulder. It felt just like anyone’s hand, if a bit heavier. Quite a bit heavier, actually. But then again, it had been a long while since he had allowed anyone to place a hand upon his shoulder, and he had lost a great deal of weight of late.

“Even Akechi-sama,” Ganesha said quietly.

Yoshi was taken aback at the honorific used by Ganesha for his brother. Akechi-sama? What did Ganesha mean by that? ‘Sama’ was used for those—

Ganesha raised his hand—the same hand he had placed on Yoshi’s shoulder. “And yet, my lord. And yet. I sense that you are not truly prepared to leave this plane of existence. Your mind seethes still with questions unanswered, wild curiosities, the tangled aranya of a lifetime of connections, physical and otherwise.” He sighed slowly, lowering the hand. “Time is a dwarf.” He grinned suddenly, unexpectedly. “By which, I mean only that it is always shorter than we expect. You see? Time, short, a dwarf?” He laughed, and after a scandalized hesitation, Yoshi laughed too—had the god actually cracked a joke? “Yet not so short that we cannot spare a moment to observe the coming metamorphosis and for me to explain, briefly albeit, what is about to befall your erstwhile habitat.”

The smile faded, the sucking lips withdrawing inwards tightly. “It is not meet to jest about such a thing. No. I apologize if I have shown any semblance of dishonour. I mean none, Yoshi-dono.” Ganesha dipped his balding pate briefly.

“Your apology is not necessary, my lord, Ganesha-dono,” Yoshi said, feeling suddenly as if he had downed too many daiquiries and then danced a whole night to pulsating techno-trance. His face felt flushed with emotion, the skin at the back of his neck tingling. What dishonour? What metamorphosis? He kept feeling he ought to bow his head deeply each time he addressed the elephant-headed deity. But Ganesha himself was speaking so casually, warmly to him, almost…almost as an equal! No, that was impossible. Surely he was mistaken. The god was merely being kind.

Ganesha smiled. The smile told Yoshi that he knew every thought passing through his head, every nuance of feeling. “Contemplate me.”

Yoshi started to ask what he meant, then stopped. Ganesha’s eyes were staring directly at him, commanding his attention. He looked into them. In that moment, he understood implicitly what was expected of him. He nodded once, and refrained from speaking further.

Ganesha walked out into the middle of the deserted avenue, to the center of the junction itself. He stood there a moment, an incongruous, impossible sight against the gleaming glass-fronted arcades of American and European and Japanese fashion brand showrooms.

Then, he raised his four arms, and closed his eyes. His trunk unfurled and pointed upwards. It straightened out like a trumpet until it was so taut, Yoshi could see it trembling slightly. There was a brief pause, and Yoshi saw the god’s torso move vigorously as Ganesha exhaled then inhaled deeply, drawing in a great breath. Yoshi had seen saxophone players do the same at jazz bars before starting a set. The sound that issued forth from that little trunk was so overpowering, he started violently, unable to understand how that little instrument could produce such a sound. Then reminded himself that this was a god in his presence. The size of that little trunk had no bearing upon the overwhelming, world-filling sound that issued from the tip of that fleshy proboscis. And it was world-filling. He felt the vibrations reverberate through his own body, through each cell and fibre of his being. Like a blast of nuclear energy exploding outwards from the epicentre that was Ganesha standing in the heart of the Shibuya shopping district. Yoshi could almost picture the trumpeting effulgence of that release rippling outwards through Tokyo, through the archipelago entire, through Asia, the world, audible even on the moon perhaps, even on distant planets and unnamed stars in the remotest galaxies. Such was the heart-stopping time-sundering power of that trunk’s trumpeting blast.

He felt himself lifted, ripped loose from the fabric of earth’s space and time. Everything shuddered violently, yet very briefly, only for the minutest fraction of a second. Like the afterquake of the great Hanshin-Awaji Daishinsai, which he had personally experienced in a suburb of Kobe where Akechi and he had been staying at the time. It had left such an imprint on his impressionable adolescent mind at the time that even four years later, his hand had trembled while drawing a picture of the collapsed Hanshin Expressway overpasses for a book cover commission. He shut his eyes tightly, and felt a teardrop spill hotly from his right eye, searing a track down his dust-grimed face. Suddenly, he wished Akechi was beside him.

Akechi clutched the nearest object at hand—a gingko tree trunk, by chance—convinced that he was being shaken to bits. The memory of the vibration seemed to outlast the actual reverberation. Even so, he released the tree with some reluctance, watching Ganesha-dono cautiously. The god was still standing in the center of the pathway, trunk pointed skywards, eyes shut, hands splayed out.

He opened his eyes slowly. Akechi saw that they had changed somehow, although he could not tell how exactly as he was standing too far away. Ganesha turned and gazed in Akechi’s direction.

“It is time.”

This time, his voice no longer sounded youthful and high-tenored, lacking the gravitas that Hollywood had conditioned one to expect from a ‘god’ voice. It was still the same voice, still more suited to a boy than an elephant headed god. But there was a sense of power inherent in its tone. An awareness of things beyond any human’s ken. A multitude of subtle nuances that encompassed the complete range of human emotion and exceeded them. In those three words, Akechi imagined he heard entire scriptures recited.

Ganesha held out his arms, and waited, standing still. Akechi realized with a start that he was expected to approach the god. He did so, swallowing nervously as he walked the several yards. As he went closer, he saw that Ganesha-dono’s eyes had indeed changed. They were no longer eyes at all: they were twin holes in the elephant head through which he could see swirling galaxies, the pinlights of a billion billion stars, the universe itself contained entire. The sight terrified him. He tore his gaze away, afraid he would be sucked into those eyes, be pulled through into the cold vastness of space itself. He happened to glance at Ganesha-dono’s mouth briefly and met with an even bigger shock. The god’s mouth was slightly open, thick undulating lips parted just enough to afford a small glimpse. Akechi held his breath. Yoshi had once drawn a black hole for an issue of ‘Sashi, using only black ink on white cartridge paper, working in double-size as he always did. It had covered an entire page, a rare luxury in a manga which was famous for its intricate text-heavy panels. Perhaps exhilerated by the feeling of freedom that the full-page splash gave him, Yoshi had exceeded his talents, capturing a sense of true ‘twilight zone’ otherworldliness within the limitations of simple black and white contrast. The full-page panel had portrayed a black hole inside a cigar box. The interior of Ganesha-dono’s mouth looked like a real-life rendition of that illustration.

Akechi stopped a few feet away from the god.

“Do not be afraid, my lord,” Ganesha said in that same all-knowing voice. “Remember that we cannot save all, or even some. But we can always save ourselves. And in doing so, we save all our fellows as well. For if one survives, all survive.”

Akechi barely trusted himself to speak. He felt a strange tingling in the air. Was it the aftermath of that epic trumpet blast? Or was the air literally charged with energy, ionized to an extent that he could literally feel atoms swirling and gnashing against one another on the surface of his skin, like comets and meteors crashing upon the surface of airless moons?

He was suddenly more afraid than he had ever been in his life. Where was Yoshi now? What had Ganesha-dono meant earlier when he said that Yoshi would be with them soon? Was all this mystical obscurantism simply euphemistic talk for dying? It certainly felt like the end of the world—or worlds, as Ganesha had put it in his first words. Yet if Akechi was somehow helping to prevent that ending, those endings, then—

Ganesha smiled. Galaxies churned within the orbs of his eyeholes. His belly was quivering, Akechi noted. “No harm shall befall you in my presence.” He raised his trunk again, and inhaled deeply. Akechi stared incredulously at that open mouth: infinity swirled within the darkness of Ganesha’s maw. The elephant god issued another burst from his trunk, this one a short series of three honks, like a message to a distant companion on a remote planet, coded in the dialect of gods. The earth trembled. The world blurred. Akechi felt his heart stop.

And then it began.

To read the rest, visit The Official Iron Gods blog. The free online serialization ends on Sunday 14th September 2008.


© ASHOK K. BANKER 2006-08. PLEASE DO NOT COPY, FORWARD, PRINT, OR OTHERWISE PASS ON THIS COPYRIGHTED EXCERPT AS THIS IS A DRAFT IN PROGRESS FROM AN UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT AND MAY BE MISUSED WITHOUT YOUR KNOWLEDGE. THIS EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT IS MEANT ONLY FOR YOUR PERSONAL READING PLEASURE. THANKS AND BEST WISHES, ASHOK K. BANKER, SEPTEMBER 2008. © ASHOK K. BANKER 2006-08. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Continued In Excerpt 4

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