2312

The woman drove them out to Newark. Jammed in the little seat behind them, he began to realize it was really happening-something, anyway. His idiot cousins were not going to be able to find him and beat him. A new life: he began to quiver slightly, as if he were the hostage who had been kidnapped. In a way it was almost true. Captured by a look, stuffed into the backseat of a car.

They came to an airport that did not look like Newark. They drove out to a hangar and were escorted up a stand of stairs into a small jet. He had never been in anything like it, and was impressed by its speed as they took off. They gave him a window seat and he watched Manhattan below, like a great ship of light. Off they went into the night.

Eventually he leaned his head on the window and fell asleep. Later he woke with a stiff neck, watched the ocean get closer. The jet landed on a green island with reddish soil.

Out into a pungent evening, humid air like mid-August in Jersey, almost like his childhood home in Hyderabad. Rice fields. Childhood memories sparked out of what he saw and smelled, and again he walked as if a little beside himself. He was very distracted as they entered a building. Mercury House, a sign said.

Inside, they took him to a big room, where immense white plastic tubs like those used in industrial kitchens were being sealed and loaded onto a pallet. “All right, young man,” said Swan’s friend Zasha, clearly still a little disgusted to have to be doing this for Swan. “In you go. Put on this spacesuit first, then the helmet. After that we’re going to cover you in dirt and worms, and up you go.” To Swan: “My friend won’t inspect the boxes that have my sign on them. He’s got the next shift.”

“Why the worms?”

“It’s a way to show I’m not using it casually. I only send up a couple people a year like this. And naturally he gets favors back from me.”

“What about the AI inspections?”

“What about them? We do a lot of stuff outside that system.” Zasha grinned fiercely at her. “This is a hawala elevator, the whole thing is set up to skip certain scans.”

Then Kiran was in a crinkly one-piece and had a helmet on and was breathing cool coppery air. They helped him in and laid him out in the tub as if in his coffin, and a wriggling mass of worms and black dirt was dumped over his body and face. He was going to leave Earth buried in worms. “Thank you!” he called out to the woman and her friend.

I t was a long trip. Kiran lay there thinking. He could feel the worms writhing all over him. When he freaked out and hyperventilated, the helmet and suit seemed to be able to take it. Eventually he always had to calm back down. There were water and food tubes that would come out of the neck of the suit to where he could suck on them, and though the food was a paste, it was very sustaining. He was not too cold or too hot. The sensation of movement over him was disconcerting, sometimes horrible. This must be what it was like to be dead and buried. The worms would eat you. Or it was like the purification rites in certain festivals-in the Durga-puja, for instance, in which you were steeped in ash or manure until it was time for the cleansing. He liked that holiday. So here he was. As he had to eat and drink, then shit and pee, all in this suit, he was for the moment pretty much like the worms. We are poor forked worms on this Earth, his grandfather used to say. Birds pick us off.

A s time passed he went entirely weightless. He had heard it took five days to ascend. It seemed longer. He began to get bored. When he felt a jolt upward, and then light flooded the dirt and the lid disappeared, he struggled up as carefully as he could, thinking the worms in the box were fellow travelers who deserved no harm. “Careful!” he commanded the people helping him out of the box, and Swan laughed at him.

She led him to a little bathroom. Once out of his suit, he showered. In the hot water he thought, Ah yes, this is the cleansing. Next came the purification; what would it be? Was this woman who had seized him a manifestation of Durga, mother of Ganesh-also sometimes manifested as Kali?

“You look good,” Swan said when he emerged from the bathroom. “Not too traumatic?”

Kiran shook his head. “Time to think. Where to next?”

Again she laughed. “This ship is going to Venus,” she told him. “I’m on my way to Mercury, so I’ll drop you off.”

Kiran said, “Isn’t Venus a Chinese place?”

“Yes and no,” Swan said.

Kiran persisted: “So I become Chinese?”

“No. There are all kinds of people there. My friends will give you an ID. After that, anything can happen. But Venus is a good place for you to start.”

T hey were traveling in a terrarium called the Delta of Venus, an ag asteroid dedicated to growing food for Earth-mostly enhanced rices but also other crops that liked it warm and wet. The internal gravity felt like Earth; Kiran couldn’t detect the famous Coriolis push to the side.