Anjom series 

Chapter One

Telangana must happen! 

Amaravati, Year of the Reconciliation

From the seventeenth floor of the old Secretariat – a building older than the war, older than the treaty, older than Roy’s species had any right to be familiar with – Amaravati looked the way the founders had once promised it would look. White stone in the morning. Pink stone at noon. Gold stone for the half-hour before dusk, when river Krishna threw the city back at itself in a long, lazy mirror. It looked like a capital. It had finally, after everything, become one.

Earth’s capital, now. Not Andhra’s. Not India’s. Earth’s. The signs at the maglev station had been rewritten in eleven human languages and four of the seven approved Anjom scripts, and even the rewriting had been an argument. Tirumala had been in the room for that argument, though he was only nineteen at the time and had no business being there. He liked to mention it whenever the cohort needed reminding that he had business everywhere.

The University of Amaravati sat across the river, its towers built deliberately lower than the city’s, as a courtesy and as a confession. A premier university now, the brochures said. Co-learning. Bridge-building. Closing the chasm. The brochures did not mention that most of the bridge-building happened underground, in a converted bunker forty meters below the music conservatory, where five students and one Professor were trying – for the third time in a decade – to do something the rest of the planet had agreed could not be done.

Professor Ralley said the rest of the planet was wrong. He said it the way other men said good morning.

* * *

The Cohort

There were five of them, and Ralley had chosen them the way a composer chooses notes for a raagam – not because each note was beautiful on its own, but because the intervals between them did something the ear had not heard before.

Ketan was six feet of gym-built certainty, white-skinned and dark-eyed, with the kind of curly brunette hair girls wrote bad poetry about and then wrote worse poetry about leaving. He hit the weights every night before sleep. He was always between girlfriends, and the gap was always closing. He was, by some distance, the best pilot in the cohort, possibly the best pilot in the building, possibly – though he would never say it out loud – the best the university had on its rolls. He did not need to say it. The simulator scoreboard said it for him.

Giri Tanayi was a Traveller. She did not use the word herself. Other people used it for her, and they used it the way they used the word orphan when they thought she could not hear them, which was always, because Girit could always hear them. She had been with her grandparents in a village near Khammam on night-zero, the night Hyderabad became a smear of glass and silence, the night her parents and her aunts and her two younger brothers and the cousin who had taught her to braid jasmine into her hair all stopped existing in the same instant. She had been eleven. She was twenty-three now. She was chubby, which she did not care about, and a bookworm, which she did, and she ran ten kilometers along the Krishna every morning before the sun was honest about being up. She had no friends. She had no visitors. In the summer she took extra courses and lived in the dorm and ate alone, and the cohort called her Girit because Tanayi was a name from a city that no longer existed and nobody quite knew what to do with that. Ralley had put her in the cohort, he said, to practice consoling together. Nobody in the cohort was sure who was supposed to be consoling whom.

Roy was the only Anjom in the bunker, and the only Anjom most of them had ever spoken to for longer than a polite minute at a checkpoint. He arrived to lab on Mondays in a Telugu pancha and angavastram, on Tuesdays in a Japanese yukata, on Wednesdays in jeans and a Senegalese boubou, on Thursdays in something the cohort had eventually given up trying to identify. He spoke fourteen human languages, three of them better than the humans in the cohort. His skin was a fine net of tiny scales – the kind of texture that, on Earth, belonged to the slow freshwater fishes of northern lakes – and Earthees, when they thought he was not paying attention, called it fish-skin. Roy himself, with the cheerful exactness of a foreigner who had read every dictionary, called it Anjom-body-hair. Of the five Anjom genders, his was the one closest to Male, and he answered to he, though he sometimes paused before doing so, the way a person pauses before signing for a parcel that is almost theirs. He never spoke of his family. He did not need to. The patrols at the conservatory gate saluted him before they saluted Ralley, and once a year a courier arrived from somewhere outside the solar system with a sealed pouch, and Roy would take it without looking at it, and the next morning the bunker would have a piece of equipment that nobody had requisitioned and nobody dared to question. There was a rumor – Tirumala’s rumor, which meant it was at least eighty percent true – that Roy had read every physical book in the Library of Amaravati. There were over four million.

Tirumala was short, and dark, and adopted, and rich in the way that several generations of being rich makes you rich – quietly, with bracelets. He wore a great many gold bracelets. He wore at least one gold chain at all times, sometimes two, and once, on a dare from Ketan, he had worn five and made it look almost reasonable. Nothing was known about his birth parents and Tirumala did not appear to consider this a wound. He was the cohort’s social ninja: he could befriend a sweeper, a dean, a black-market parts dealer, and the wife of a black-market parts dealer in the same evening, and could borrow money from all four by morning. He was Roy’s best friend in the cohort, which was not surprising; Tirumala befriended everyone. What was surprising was that Roy was Tirumala’s best friend, too.

And Devi. Skinny, pink-cheeked, with the kind of beauty the old films used to film badly because they did not know what to do with it. She moved like a deer surprised in a clearing – fast, decisive, then perfectly still. She hated running. She loved badminton, sometimes, and her consoles, always. Her voice was the voice you wanted reading the announcements in an airport. She hated arguments and she hated raised voices and when the cohort fought, which was often, Devi vanished for forty-eight hours and came back with the pinched, careful look of someone who had spent the morning with her therapist and the afternoon pretending she had not.

These were the five. Ralley called them his cohort. The rest of the university called them the third cohort, with a small, pitying weight on the word third.

* * *

The Machine

It had been an aircraft once. A wartime transport, broad in the belly and ugly in the nose, the sort of plane that had carried refugees out of the Krishna delta in the bad months and carried them back in the worse ones. After the treaty it had been condemned and parked in a hangar in Vijayawada and forgotten, which was the best thing that could have happened to it. The first cohort had bought it for the price of its scrap. The second cohort had cut a hole in its fuselage to fit the field generators. The third cohort, Ralley’s cohort, had filled the hole with something none of them entirely understood and welded a panel over it and hoped.

It sat in the bunker the way a whale would sit in a swimming pool. The walls had been knocked out twice to give it room. The freight elevator had been rebuilt three times to bring its parts down. There were scratches along its flanks from every failed attempt and dents from a few of them, and a long black scar near the tail where the second cohort’s reactor had vented and a girl named Pallavi had lost her hand. The cohort touched the scar sometimes, on the way past, the way pilgrims touched a temple stone.

They called it Garuda. Ketan had named it. Nobody had argued with him about it, which Ketan, who liked to argue, found mildly insulting.

* * *

Eureka, after a fashion

The Eureka moment, when it came, did not feel the way the textbooks said it would. There was no shout. There was no leaping from a bath. There was, instead, Girit at the whiteboard at two-forty in the morning, pen uncapped, eyes very large, saying nothing for a long time.

She had been quiet all evening, even by Girit’s standards. She had eaten half a vada and pushed the rest at Devi. She had stared at the flux equations the way she stared at Roy when she thought no one was looking – as if the equations had personally killed her family and she was only waiting for them to admit it.

Then she had stood up. She had walked to the board. She had drawn one line through Ralley’s third assumption – the assumption that nobody, not even Ralley, had ever questioned because it was the assumption that made the rest of the math behave.

“It isn’t a constant,” she said. “It’s a boundary condition.”

Roy was the first to move. He came around the table so fast his angavastram caught on the corner of a console and tore. He did not notice. He stood next to her, scales catching the fluorescent light in their thousand small ways, and read her line, and read it again, and then he laughed. It was not a human laugh. It was the Anjom equivalent, a soft three-tone trill that the cohort had learned, over months, meant something between joy and vindication.

“Of course,” he said. “Of course. Professor – ” He turned, but Ralley was already at the board, already nodding, already the colour of a man who had been told a very old joke in a way he had never quite heard it before.

“Run it,” Ralley said quietly. “Ketan. Run it.”

Ketan ran it. He had run it sixty-two times in the last three months and on every previous occasion the simulation had failed in the third second. This time the simulation did not fail in the third second. It did not fail in the thirtieth. It did not fail.

Devi made a small noise and sat down on the floor. Tirumala, who had been quietly fixing his bracelets, stopped fixing them. The bunker was, for one long, ridiculous moment, perfectly silent – and then, somewhere on the floor above them, a student in the conservatory began to practice a Thodi alapana, slow and unhurried, the kind of opening phrase that belonged to four in the morning and to nothing else.

Roy closed his eyes. He always did this when somebody played Karnatic music near him. None of them had ever asked him why. They suspected they did not want to hear the answer, in case the answer changed something they were not ready to change.

* * *

Departure

There was a checklist, and Ketan ran the checklist, and the checklist meant nothing because no one had ever written a checklist for this. They strapped in. They strapped in twice. Devi checked her straps a third time, and then, embarrassed, a fourth. Tirumala took off two of his bracelets and put them in the locker, and then put them back on, because he said he wanted to be wearing them when they landed in case he had to bribe somebody.

“Bribe whom?” Ketan said. “It’s twenty-ten.”

“Then it’ll be easier,” Tirumala said.

Girit said nothing. She was reading the flux numbers off her tablet in a voice barely above a breath, and her free hand was moving in small, unconscious patterns at her side, and Roy, who had been watching her for some time, finally recognized the patterns. They were taalam. She was keeping rhythm. Adi taalam, he thought. The first cycle. Eight beats.

He kept the observation to himself.

Ralley stood at the bunker door. He did not go inside the aircraft. None of the previous cohorts’ Professors had ever gone inside the aircraft, and Ralley was not about to be the first. He looked at them through the open hatch with an expression they would all, later, describe slightly differently to themselves.

“If it works,” he said, “come back.”

He did not say what to do if it didn’t.

The bunker doors above them – six meters of layered shielding, designed to keep the worst of a war out – slid open onto the night sky over Amaravati. The stars were wrong, the way they had been wrong since night-zero, because half of them now were not stars at all but the running lights of the Anjom orbital fleet, parked in a polite, terrible ring over the planet.

Ketan said, “Garuda One, lifting.”

And then they were not there anymore.

* * *

Australia, January 1, 2010

The first thing they noticed was the colour of the air.

Nobody in the cohort, not even Roy, who had read everything, had been prepared for the colour of the air over an undamaged sky. It was a blue you could not, quite, put a name to. It was the blue of a thing that has never had a city burn under it.

“We’re high,” Ketan said. His voice was thin, the way it always went thin when he was concentrating too hard to remember to be Ketan. “We’re – Christ, we’re at thirty-one thousand. Where are we?”

Devi, hands moving over the navigation board with the practiced quickness of a girl who had spent ten thousand hours on consoles, said, “Australia. South of – south of somewhere. The GPS satellites are talking to us. They think it’s Wednesday.”

“What’s Wednesday?” Tirumala said.

“January first,” Devi said. “Two thousand ten.”

Nobody said anything. The number had been the target, the precise target, the number written on the whiteboard in three colours of marker for six months – and now that the number was real, now that the number was reading itself out of a navigation board, none of them quite knew what to do with it.

Roy said, very softly, “Record everything.”

Tirumala was already recording. He had started recording the moment they had stopped being in Amaravati, because Tirumala recorded everything, on principle. He widened the capture. He pulled in radio. He pulled in the open civilian bands, the air-traffic chatter, the music – and music came in, of all things, music in English, a woman singing about a road, and Devi, despite herself, smiled.

Ketan was less inclined to smile. The plane was complaining. Garuda had not been built to fly in 2010; Garuda had been built to fly in the soup of fields and currents that the Anjom fleet draped over Earth like a heavy sari, and 2010’s sky had no soup in it. Garuda was, in the professional opinion of the only professional pilot on board, about to fall.

“I have to put her down,” Ketan said.

“Where?” Girit said. It was, for Girit, almost a shout.

“There.” Ketan jerked his chin at the screen. There was, below them, a road. A long, perfectly empty road, the kind of road that only exists in countries with too much land and not enough people. There was nothing on it. There was no car. There was no truck. There was a single white line down the middle and a great deal of red dirt on either side, and Ketan, who had landed simulators on roads narrower than this, said, “Strap in.”

They were already strapped in. They strapped in again.

* * *

The Car

He landed her. Of course he landed her – he was Ketan, and the road was straight, and the wind was kind, and Garuda, for all her age and all her scars, still had the bones of a transport that had carried refugees through worse. She bumped twice. She skidded. She came to a halt with two hundred meters of road still in front of her and the smell of hot metal rolling back into the cabin, and Ketan put his head on the yoke for exactly one second and then sat up and said, in a perfectly normal voice, “We’re down.”

Then they saw the car.

It was a small white sedan, the kind of car that meant nothing to anyone in the cohort because none of them had ever seen a 2010 sedan in person. It was perhaps two hundred meters in front of them. It had stopped. Through the cockpit’s main screen, they could see the driver – a shape, no more than a shape, head turning.

“Hello,” Tirumala said softly to the screen.

The shape did not say hello back. The shape did what any sensible human in 2010 would have done if a wartime Anjom-Earth hybrid transport aircraft had landed on a country road in front of them. It performed, with admirable competence, a three-point turn. The little car backed, swung, straightened, and drove away in the direction it had come from, and within a minute it was a dot, and within two it was nothing at all.

“Well,” Devi said.

“We could not have stopped them,” Roy said, in the tone of a man closing a small, heavy door.

“We didn’t try,” Girit said.

Roy looked at her. He almost said something. He did not.

* * *

The Rabbit

It was Devi who saw it first, on the rear camera, and Devi who said, in the surprised voice of a small girl, “Oh.”

They all turned. The rear camera showed the road behind them – the long, empty, beautifully empty road – and on the road, midway across, was an animal.

It had long ears. It had a small nose. It was brown, and its hindquarters were absurdly large for the rest of it, and it moved in a series of considered hops that suggested it had nowhere particularly to be and was prepared to take its time getting there. It crossed the road in about four hops. It paused at the verge. It looked, briefly, directly into the camera, the way small animals sometimes do, as if it had heard a sound it could not place.

Then it was gone, into the red dirt and the dry grass.

Nobody in the cabin spoke for several seconds.

“That,” Ketan said carefully, “is a rabbit.”

“I know what it is,” Devi whispered. She had her hand pressed flat against the screen, the way a child presses its hand against the glass of an aquarium. “I know what it is.”

Rabbits had been gone from Earth for seven years. The orbital weapons that had ended night-zero had been precise about cities and indifferent about everything else, and the small soft creatures of the world had not done well in the indifferent parts. There were photographs of rabbits in books. There were rabbits, supposedly, in the Anjom preservation arks, though the Anjoms did not, on the whole, share. There were no rabbits on the road. There were no rabbits anywhere.

Except, here, on this road, in 2010, there was.

“It’s so cute,” Devi said. Her eyes were wet. She was not trying to hide it. “It’s almost as cute as a puppy.”

Tirumala, who never cried, made a small sound that was not crying, and said, “Ketan. Take us back.”

“Now,” Roy said. “Take us back now.”

Ketan was already lifting. Garuda complained. Garuda lifted anyway.

* * *

Home, in a Manner of Speaking

They came back to Amaravati and Amaravati was not there.

For the first thirty seconds nobody said this out loud, because there are some things one does not say first. Ketan checked the navigation board. Ketan checked the navigation board again. Ketan checked the navigation board a third time, and then leaned across and checked Devi’s navigation board, and Devi let him, because she was checking it too.

The coordinates were correct. The time was correct. The sky was wrong.

There was no Amaravati under them. There was no university. There was no Krishna in its familiar wide silver curve. There was, instead, a vast, low, smoking plain – black in patches, rust-red in others, with the geometry of cities still readable in the burns, the way the skeleton of a fish is still readable in its ash. The river had been pushed out of its bed. The Krishna was running the wrong way around what had been Vijayawada, and what had been Vijayawada was a glass scar.

The radio was full of voices. None of them were human.

Roy, very still, was listening. He listened for almost a minute. He listened with the patient, polite intensity of a diplomat at a funeral. Then he said – and his voice was not the voice they were used to, it was older, and there were notes in it that the human ear was not built to fully receive – he said, “Patrol. Anjom patrol. They’re vectoring on us.”

“What do they want?” Devi said.

“Identification,” Roy said. “Mine. They want mine.”

He keyed the radio. He spoke for forty seconds, in a register of his language none of the humans had ever heard him use. The cabin filled with words none of them understood, but the rhythm of them was unmistakable. He was invoking something. A name. Possibly several. Tirumala, who had once told Ketan that he had grown up listening to his adoptive mother bargain with Mumbai jewellers in local dialects, said quietly afterwards that he had recognized the rhythm of bargaining, but at a level of authority he had not previously believed Roy possessed.

There was a long, terrible pause. There was a single, short reply.

Roy let go of the key.

“They’ve cleared us,” he said. “I’ve told them we’re an Anjom science detail observing pre-war Earth machinery. They are confused, but they’ve cleared us. We have perhaps an hour before someone senior asks the right question.”

“And then?” Ketan said.

“And then we are not us anymore,” Roy said. “To them. To anyone.”

Girit had not moved through any of this. She was looking at the smoking plain where Amaravati had been, and her hands, which had been keeping taalam earlier, had stopped. They were flat on her thighs. Her knuckles were the colour of bone.

She said, very quietly, “We did this.”

Nobody contradicted her.

“Take us back,” she said. “One hour earlier. Before we landed. Before – before the car. Before the rabbit. We undo this.”

Ketan turned Garuda’s nose up into the wrong sky and Devi punched in the new coordinates and Tirumala, of all of them, was the one who quietly began to pray.

* * *

The Crash

An hour earlier than their first arrival, Garuda came down hard.

She had been complaining the whole jump. She complained louder on the descent. Something in the field generator – possibly the panel they had welded over the second cohort’s hole, possibly the hole itself – had gone sour, and Ketan, who knew planes the way other people knew their own hands, knew within ten seconds that he was no longer landing, he was falling with style.

He fell with style. They missed the road. They got close. They came down in a long shallow valley a few miles east of where they had landed the first time, in a smear of red dirt and a long screaming groan of metal, and Garuda, when she finally stopped, was lying on her belly in the dirt with one wing folded under her like a broken arm.

Devi was bleeding from the forehead. Girit’s wrist was wrong. Roy had hit something with his shoulder and his scales along the right side of his neck were a deep, alarming amber. None of them was about to die. All of them were about to be much less useful than they had been.

Fuel was leaking. They could smell it before they saw it – that thick, headache-bright smell of the modified aviation propellant they had been told, twice, by serious men with clipboards, absolutely under no circumstances to spill.

“Out,” Ketan said. “Everyone. Out, out, out.”

He got Devi out. Tirumala got Girit out. Roy got himself out, slowly, holding his shoulder, and between them they half-carried, half-marched into the dry grass at the valley’s edge, and turned to look back at the wreck.

It was twenty-three minutes to the moment when they themselves – their earlier selves, the cohort of an hour ago – would appear in the sky above the road. Twenty-three minutes.

“We can’t stop the leak,” Ketan said. “We can’t lift her again. She’s done.”

“Then she has to be done usefully,” Tirumala said.

They all turned to him. Tirumala did not, as a rule, have ideas. Tirumala had relationships. Tirumala had angles. Tirumala had bracelets. He did not have ideas.

He was looking at the wreck the way he sometimes looked at a difficult uncle at a wedding.

“The truck,” he said. “The little truck in the cargo bay. The fuel cell. If I get the cell into the truck, and I drive the truck deeper into the valley – if I dump it down there, somewhere it’ll burn properly – ” He stopped. He worked the rest of it out where they could all watch him work it out. “There’ll be a surge. An EM surge. A big one. Big enough that anything flying overhead – “

“Would force-land,” Ketan said softly. “On a road. The nearest road.”

“Yes,” Tirumala said.

“You’d be – ” Devi started.

“I’d be fine,” Tirumala said, which was a lie, and which everyone, including Tirumala, recognized as a lie, and which nobody, including Devi, contradicted, because there was no time to contradict it.

He went back into the wreck. They could hear him swearing – quiet, fluent, multilingual swearing, in at least three of the dialects he had befriended his way into – as he wrestled the fuel cell into the cargo truck. The truck was small. The cell was not. He got it in. He came back out.

He drove the truck down the valley. They could see the dust of him for a long time. Then they could not.

They counted the minutes. Devi held Girit’s good hand and Girit, for the first time in her life that any of them had seen, did not pull away. Roy stood very still and listened – not to the radio, because the radio had been left behind in the wreck, but to the air. The Anjom ear could hear EM the way the human ear could hear thunder.

“Now,” Roy said.

And the valley flashed.

It was not a sound, exactly. It was a felt thing, a deep, wide, un-loud detonation that rattled the dust off the grass and made every hair on Ketan’s arms stand at attention and made Roy’s scales, in a single involuntary spasm, ripple from amber back to their normal slate. Above them, very high, very small, an aircraft they all recognized – Garuda One, the earlier Garuda, an hour younger than the wreck behind them – staggered, dropped a wing, and began the long, controlled glide that Ketan, both Ketans, knew so well.

It was going to land. On the road. In front of a small white sedan.

Tirumala came back out of the valley about ten minutes later. He was limping. He was missing an eyebrow. He was, against all reasonable expectations, alive.

Roy hugged him – the first time, in his life, that he had hugged an Earthee.

* * *

One Universe, One Timeline

They walked. They walked for a long time, in a country none of them knew, under stars that for the first time in their adult lives were all stars and no fleet. They walked toward a low ridge Roy said had cellular coverage in this era – Roy had read, of course Roy had read, the entire telecommunications history of pre-war Australia – and they walked in a silence that was not exactly grief and not exactly relief and not exactly either of the things they had names for.

It was Girit who broke the silence. Girit, who barely spoke. Girit, whose voice when she did speak was so quiet that the cohort, even after a year of her, had to lean in.

She stopped walking. She turned to face them, and she said – and her voice was not quiet now, her voice was the flat clean voice of a woman who had finally seen something she had only previously read – she said:

“There is only one Universe. And there is only one timeline.”

Nobody answered her. Nobody looked away, either. They stood in the dirt and they listened.

“There was a scientist,” she said. “Pre-war. Nicholai. I read him when I was sixteen. He was out of fashion even then. He said the multi-universe and the many-worlds – all of it, the branching, the parallel selves, all of it – was a fantasy. He said it was a wish. He said it was the wish of physicists who could not bear the idea that what they did mattered. He said there is one universe. One timeline. If time travel happens, it has already happened. If we change the past, we have always already changed it. There is no other version. There is no back-up. There is no – ” she gestured, vaguely, at the sky – “there is no second chance.”

She breathed.

“We didn’t go to a parallel world,” she said. “We came home. To the only home there is. We came home to what we had done. The car turned around because we were on the road. One timeline. One universe. Ours. The blast in the valley happened because we needed it to happen. It always happened. We were always going to crash. We were always going to send Tirumala into the valley. We were always going to force our earlier selves down on that road. The rabbit ” – and her voice, when she said the rabbit, did something – “the rabbit was always going to cross the road. There is no other version where it doesn’t.”

Roy was looking at her with an expression none of them, not even Tirumala, could read. Eventually he said, “On Anjom, we have a phrase. It does not translate well. The closest is: what was, will have been.”

“Yes,” Girit said.

“This universe is precious,” she said, after a moment, more quietly. “It is the only one. We have to protect it with everything we have.”

Devi was crying again. She did not seem to have noticed. Ketan, who was not given to ceremony, put a hand briefly on Girit’s shoulder, and Girit did not flinch. Tirumala, missing an eyebrow, limping, alive, said, “Okay. Okay, Girit. Okay.”

* * *

The Two Timelines

Most of Garuda’s higher computers had survived the crash. Two of them were Anjom-built, and in the small, terrible window when they had hung over the second-timeline Earth, those two computers had done what Anjom computers always did when they came within range of the network – they had synced. Quietly. Without asking. Compulsively. The way certain children pocket shells at a beach.

It took the cohort two days, sheltering in the wreck, to pull the comparison apart.

Two days of Devi at the consoles, which she preferred to people. Two days of Roy translating Anjom news archives into Telugu with a great deal of English mixed in where the Telugu refused to oblige. They had rations enough – a long war had taught them the practice of always carrying them. Two days of Ketan stretching the field rations and Tirumala somehow, impossibly, befriending a passing road-truck driver well enough to obtain three bottles of stronger alcohol, and the road-truck driver’s silence, in exchange for one of his lesser bracelets. Two days of Girit, splinted wrist and all, building, on the back of a flight manifest, a diagram.

The diagram, when she was done, was simple enough that even Devi, who hated diagrams, could follow it.

In the new timeline – the timeline they had walked back into and seen burning – the car had turned around, on the road, because of a strange aircraft on the asphalt. On the way back the car had hit a kangaroo at speed, lost control, and gone off the verge, and the woman in the passenger seat had died before the ambulance arrived. She had been the girlfriend – secret, and not quite secret enough – of a famous South Indian film actor named Vayu Veg. He had loved her. Not, as famous actors are sometimes permitted to love, lightly; he had loved her with the patient seriousness of a man who had looked for love a long time and recognized, when he found it, that he had. Her death broke him. He stopped acting. He went, in the slow way these things happen, into politics; and there, to his own surprise, he found a different kind of love – love for the common man. He had a voice that touched ordinary people. He had a vision they could see themselves inside of. He ran for office. He won. He won bigger. He became Chief Minister of a state called United Andhra Pradesh – a state that, in the original timeline, had eventually been split, in 2014, into Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Vayu Veg had opposed that split. He had called it a distraction from the real work of uplifting ordinary people, a quarrel among elites for the scraps; and his followers, who were many, had agreed. The unintended consequence was a Hyderabad that kept on growing. By the time the Anjoms came for it and turned it into a sheet of glass, eighty percent of the Telugu population lived inside its limits. All of them died on night-zero – including the two who, in the original timeline, had found the first words to speak across the chasm at the end of that night. Here, those words were never spoken. The bombardment did not stop. Day-one never came.

In the original timeline – the timeline in which the Anjoms had found empathy for humans, the timeline Girit and the rest of the cohort had been born into – a small white sedan, on this road, on this date, January 1, 2010, had simply travelled on to wherever it was going. The woman had lived. She had married Vayu Veg. He had grown busy with the small ordinary disasters of a private life, and he had never quite found his moment to become Chief Minister of the Telugu people. Unfortunate for him. Fortunate, as it turned out, for the rest of humanity.

And there was more. Girit kept drawing. The two brothers – the brothers from a village outside Amaravati, the brothers nobody outside Andhra had heard of before the war and nobody anywhere could forget after it, the brothers who had, in private, always believed in both aliens and gods – had found, one monsoon, an old temple near Amaravati. A Seeta-Rama-Lakshmana-Hanuma temple, garlanded for generations by villagers who did not know what they were garlanding. When the brothers opened the right stone in the right wall, the temple was not a temple. It was a Vimana. A craft, left behind in an era nobody had a date for, by an alien culture nobody on Earth had ever met. Inside it, still working, was a homing beacon – a kind of emergency call, sent out across distances the brothers could not begin to measure. They had used it. Who had received the signal, and what those receivers had done with it, was a mystery even now; the cohort, like everyone else, simply called them the Rama people. Whatever the Rama people did, it forced a channel open between Earth and Anjom. One thing led to another. And the thing that came out of the channel, impossibly, was the discovery that the two cultures shared the same music – the same intervals, the same modes, the same patient, ancient grammar of sound. That was what stopped the war. Not the diplomats. Not the weapons. The music. And what followed for the Anjoms was a long, painful turning-inwards, a self-questioning of everything they had been certain of.

The brothers had not, in the new timeline, been born near Amaravati. There had been no Amaravati to be born near. They had been born in the south of Hyderabad. On night-zero they had died with everyone else south of Hyderabad. There had been no first channel. There had been no day-one, no Reconciliation, no slow ugly miracle of an alien race discovering, that the people it had been bombing were equals in culture.

There had been no first moment when an Anjom listener had recognized a phrase she should not have known and wept, in the way Anjoms wept, which involved no tears at all. There had been no empathy. The war had not stopped even on day-seven. The war had not stopped at all.

In the new timeline, the Anjoms had finished what they had started. The fleet still hung over Earth in the new timeline, but it hung over an Earth on which there were no humans left to be bridged to.

When Girit finished her diagram, nobody spoke for a while.

Roy, eventually, said, “My people did this.”

“No,” Girit said. “We did this.”

“Both,” Tirumala said.

* * *

The Telangana Must Happen! 

It was Devi who said it. Of all of them, Devi, with the bandage on her forehead and her console balanced on her knees and her pink cheeks gone the colour of old paper. She said it without raising her voice. She said it the way she did everything, as though raised voices were a private moral failure.

She said, “We make sure the original timeline holds.”

“The split,” Girit said. “Two thousand fourteen. June. Telangana.”

“The Telangana has to be born,” Devi said. “Or there’s no Amaravati. Or there’s no two brothers. Or there’s no – ” she gestured at Roy, vaguely, with her free hand, in a way that would have embarrassed her on any other day – “there’s no him.”

Roy said, gently, “There is always me.”

“You know what I mean,” Devi said.

“Yes,” Roy said. “I know what you mean.”

Ketan looked at Garuda’s wreck. Garuda’s wreck looked back. Garuda was not, in any meaningful sense, going to fly again – but Garuda had not been the only thing the cohort had stolen out of the conservatory bunker, and Tirumala, who had spent the last two days befriending the road-truck drivers, had not been entirely idle in his other conversations either.

“India,” Tirumala said. “We have to get to India.”

“How?” Devi said.

“Slowly,” Tirumala said. He looked at his bracelets. He looked at Roy. He looked at the horizon. “And expensively. But we will.”

Girit stood up. Her wrist was still splinted. Her eyes, in the late light over the Australian desert, were the colour she had described once, in a rare unguarded moment, as the colour of the river at Khammam in the second hour after rain.

She said, very quietly, the way she said everything important:

“The Telangana must happen.”

Above them, and very far away, and in a year that for them had not yet come, a boy in a Krishna delta sugarcane field was already, although he did not know it, learning to play the harmonium from his older brother. A river was already running in its proper bed. A city was already, in the patient way of cities, waiting to be built.

Whatever happened, would always happen.

They began to walk.