There was no mist for Bhatar to become. He danced it away. It lurks around us now, and from it Hemal starts crying. The others shift, uneasy, and draw closer to the pavilion’s sunlit centre. Do they hear her?
A child I do not know says, “The rest of us ran.”
“What should we do?” Yash asks us.
Nira looks at me. I shake my head, tears hot in my eyes. What do I know? Only that Bhatar is dead.
Nira says, “Let’s hide now, meet another day. They will come for us. But they won’t come far into the mist.”
Lying to Ataa and Abjit makes me feel as flat and distorted as a shadow on the door screen. Who is the girl Ataa hugs and calls eldest child? Not me. He would not hug a lawbreaker. He would call the King’s men.
For I have taken Bhatar’s role. Even Ratit, who joins us when Nira and I are both fourteen, looks to me. He brings us to fifty-three people from all twenty-four castes. Ratit is twelve. He dances well, and he is the King’s youngest son.
We meet in different streets each day, call the sun down to different castes. People look up into the blue beyond the mist, tears streaming down smiling faces. They call us God-sent; they call us Sunbringers. And when we run, scattering before the King’s men, hiding in Hemal’s mist, they lie. The city protects us.
We share songs when we hide. Hemal knows weaver’s songs and potter’s songs and the marching chants of the King’s men, though she does not remember that she was my jal-amaa. We can see through her, now, and she has no bruises and no caste marks.
Sometimes Nira teaches us a song nobody knew.
Other people remember the red bricks and blue door of Nira’s house, but inside it is gone to shifting grey. Except for what she remembers: the black and white rug with its jagged toothy stripes, stairs as blue as the door, her room at the top. We go there to love each other. The stairs sink and wobble, but her room is steady and her blanket is warm soft yellow. And her smile is bright with the sunshine that fills me.
“Can the law lie?” I ask one day. The law says we cannot love each other.
“Maybe that’s how it brings the mist,” says Nira.
“We lie.”
“We pretend,” she says. “We know what’s real.”
We pretend all the time at home. We let Ataa and Abjit love shadow-girls. But we do not become the shadow-girls because we each remember the other.
Amaa’s skin grows grey. Mist-burnt. We remember her, but she forgets. She calls us both Hemal, and the little ones, too. She remembers us only at midday, when sunlight filters bright through the mist.
I cry about this sometimes. Ataa does not, though he looks like he wants to. He still says the law protects us. He says the Sunbringers just push mist around, making everything worse for hardworking people. He is not alone. One day the hardworking people catch Yash with bottles and bricks.
His sons cry when they dance.
“I want to show her sunshine,” I tell Nira. “Before we lose her.” As we lost Bhatar and Yash.
She says, “They would stone us.” They. We are no longer rememberers.
“We can do it when the workers are not home,” I say. “Who else will tell? We’ll give them something to remember.”
We are Sunbringers.
Sixty-one of us dance in the street of the rememberers the next day. Only children watch us, and the old, and the mist-sick. They are silent through our song, angry, huddled together—until sunlight pours into the street and paints it in colours they had forgotten. Until they see blue sky, as dry and hot as coconut rice.
Then we are dancing all together. Amaa dances, too. Grey fades from her skin, and she knows me. I beam at her, full of light, and dance away to kiss Nira. And Amaa stops.
The dance stumbles, fades around her. Mist trickles in. Nira and I back away from the glitter in her eyes. Our sunlit friends gather to us, behind us. Four neighbourhood children run over to our side.
“What are you doing?” says Amaa. “Caste-mixing is bad enough, but girls with girls…what are?”
Uwati says, “We should run, before they call the King’s men.”
I say, “No.” Holding hands, standing tall, Nira and I face the sun. Our shadows fall away behind us. Ratit takes my other hand and holds his hand out to Uwati. My baby sister Rimi comes toddling to Nira. I say, “We should dance.”
Mist gathers into Hemal, and she starts to sing.
Nothing Happened in 1999
Fábio Fernandes
Humankind discovered time travel in the early twenty-second century.
It wasn’t on purpose, as it were. As happens with many scientific discoveries, sometimes you are looking for one thing, then another gets in the way with results you are most definitely not expecting. Take Viagra, for instance. Or antigravity associated with superconductors.
The time travel process was discovered during experiments in locative media and augmented reality applied to elevators.
Anyway, it happened at a very interesting time in History. The human race had suffered a long period of wars, diseases and, even though it was far from global peace and understanding, now it seemed to be entering, if not a golden age, at least a time to start dreaming and making plans. A post-virtual environment embedded in anti-gravitational elevators as part of an ambience designed to soothe and distract people during the long rises and falls through the more-than two hundred floors of the arcologies seemed as good a place as any to give this age a jumpstart with such an invention.
As it were, the environment turned out to be not only a virtuality, but also a time displacement device that took its occupants to a very different set of co-ordinates from those originally expected. Suffice it to say that, when the doors of the elevator opened, the dumbfounded passengers were no longer in Kansas—at least not in 2113 Kansas anyway (for the building really was located in that American state) but in a shabby building in 1999 with a mere fifty floors.
After a few minutes of absolute confusion and, in some cases, total denial, the discombobulated denizens of the future returned to the elevator and told it to get them back to where they had come from. Fortunately, it was able to do so.
The First Prototype, as this elevator is called today, is on permanent exhibition at the Smithsonian—but not before the post-virtual environment was carefully dissected and examined in search of what caused it to behave so unexpectedly. Something to do with quantum teleportation, apparently, but the details were never disclosed to the public. (Perhaps, as some media pundits said, because even the scientists didn’t know how the hell such a thing happened.)
Be it as it may, time travel rapidly became a fad, and—who would have expected that?—a sort of escape valve for the stressed citizen. People cherished the idea of travelling to a fine, quiet time, not to any turning point in History where they could be attacked by terrorists or die in an earthquake, for instance. Nobody tried to alter the past in order to change the future.
One of these Safe Years—as they were called—was the very first year reached by the elevator: 1999.
(Now, there were some dissenters who argued that even 2001 could be considered a Safe Year, in every city other than New York, but the majority preferred to stay on the safe side.) It was a year when anything could have happened—except that it didn’t.