"The Machinist, Monk, & Mesmerizer Chronicles"
In the near future, a machinist, a monk, and a mesmerizer are looking for the Source of the universe, but among the ancient scriptures, they only find the devil …
Few humans in the future find the secrets of what words and sounds can do, for the Apocalypse and war led them to evolve in mind and physique. Two of them end World War III with just a speech. Some say they did a mass-hypnosis. Others say it was their voice and will. Fifty years later in South Asia, KUSHA, a twenty-three-year-old machine geek with social awkwardness and amnesia, tries to get the Devil’s Book with secrets of voice in a society that now worships the evolved High-Grades like its ancient people used to worship the Brahmins. But her idol war heroes, YUAN and RUEM, are also after it for power.
TITLE: The High Auction (Wisdom Revolution #1)
AUTHOR: Misba
No of Pages (Paperback): 185
Inside Illustrations & Cover Art: Misba
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5. Magic Mama
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“B |
EWARE OF VOICES lulling
your mind. Beware of images that still your spirit. Beware of words, which sway
your verdict. They might be coming from the mesmerizers …”
“Mesmerizers?”
“They make you love them, even
if you never wanted to, sweetie.”
“They make others love them?”
“They have a powerful fifth Chakra.
It makes them persuasive.”
“Fifth Chakra?”
“Throat, sweetie. I’ll give
you books about it.”
Meera’s three-bewares
soon drift off from Kusha’s thoughts, pushed by the laughter of children,
excited voices, and a terrible smell. As if she’s waking up right on a boat
floating on a years’ old unclean gutter. Kusha opens her eyes to a white pillow made of
cotton seeds and not of cotton. She rubs her face. The seeds were pressing hard,
embossing her skin and nose. When she leaves the pillow, the smell in the air
hits her prominently. It’s so horrible … she wants to cover her nose with the
sack of seed that can pass the definition of a punching bag instead of a pillow.
She hears noises, mostly shouts.
“You’ll do it again! That’s
crazy!” Kusha hears Taha’s voice.
“He never stops,” Haley says.
Haley is here! The bed creaks as Kusha sits
straight up. Her head hits the bunk above, and she crumples her face, grabbing
her head. Haley is her new non-citizen friend, and Taha never met Haley before.
Who knows what she’s thinking? What if she tells Meera about her?
Kusha looks through the window
right beside her and checks Taha and Haley’s faces outside the … room; well,
it’s not a room. Not exactly. It’s a bus. Magic Mama’s bus with old engines,
gears, and of course, fixed kitchen and furniture that may just fit
human ergonomics. Kusha crosses the bunk area past a tiny bookshelf, walks towards
the exit, and steps out of the bus.
The open space, a bit farther from
the Old City and an intercity highway, holds a gathering. However, everyone in
that gathering who knows her keeps their nose pointed at something, not caring she
has gained consciousness.
A boy and a girl—aged seven
and three—keep screaming and thumping the ground as they watch their father: “Don’t
stop, Papa … Don’t stop, Papa …”
“Do it, Papa … Do it, Papa …”
And their father, Magic Mama,
is doing what he always does.
“Is it a pump?” Kusha asks.
“A water-pump. Papa made it,” Kenn,
Magic Mama’s thirteen-year-old son, says, chewing a chunk off of a thick sugar-cane.
No one looks at Kusha when they hear her voice.
“Of course, he made it!” Magic
Mama’s wife complains as always. Apparently, no woman wants her husband to do
too useful things for people who don’t care about him.
Kusha watches. It’s not just a
water-pump; it’s a giant water-pump. How did he build it with only spare parts?
The thick rubber pipe, a foot in diameter, starts from the pump. The flexible
pipe, like the shed skin of a python, travels from the pump to a massive drain.
Kusha instantly crumples her face, looking at that drain: the world’s worst
smelling sewer as large as an endless lake stands not far from the Old City. “Where
does he plan to dump it?” Kusha asks, covering her nose like everyone who dared
to be here despite the smell of hell.
“To the river,” Kenn answers.
“But that’s fifteen miles
away,” Kusha frowns.
“Papa dug out a canal.”
“A canal?”
“Within three days,” Kenn
says, “Long story.”
“It should be,” Kusha mutters.
From somewhere deep in her guts she feels a familiar flutter, something similar
to her prophetic alarms, but not completely. Rather,
a farsightedness—the kind of glimpse into the future you get when you critically
evaluate the present. Dumping gutter spoil into the river that will flow
through some cities before draining into the southern ocean—the well-planned cities
around won’t like it. Though, they dump industrial waste into the oceans and
space. Who would want their rivers soiled by the shit of unevolved untouchables
who aren’t even citizens?
Those born in the gutters
should learn to live with gutters.
“Come on, that’s a
hundred-and-eight times! Give up already. It’s painful to watch!” Taha says, biting
her nails while standing in the gathering with everyone else.
After ten more minutes of
looking at the pump, Kusha realizes what Taha means. Minutes make the place
crowded. Magic Mama is doing it for them, after all—the people. Dozens of eyes
full of pity now watch him. This time it won’t happen, they say, this time Magic
Mama’s magic won’t work. Such a giant pump made from old scraps can’t run. And
it’s painful to watch him try and try. He climbs the machine with a ladder,
unscrews and undoes a few things to fix problems, and repeats what he’s been
doing the whole time.
Kusha clenches her fists, forgetting
the black envelope and the voice she heard before fainting, forgetting to ask
Taha how she brought her here, forgetting why she wanted to meet Magic Mama
today. And it’s painful to watch. She wants to close her eyes, but her eyelids
stay glued to the air above, just as those of every spectator here.
Then it happens. Like a sudden
rainfall in the middle of a drought—the roar of the engine sounds as if it’s a
mixture of thunder and the first bird-songs in the spring. Next, comes the
scream from the crowd and a bubbling burst of smell, nastier than before. Air
pressure has stirred the decades-old gutter. Of course, it’ll smell terrible.
Kusha watches the crowd.
“Magic … Magic … Magic …”
It’s pure mechanics based on
the laws of the physical universe. But a mind that doesn’t understand something,
a mind that has never seen that thing, always calls it magic. The crowd here
isn’t primitive. They see machines and techs every day. But who wouldn’t love
the word magic roaring into the air?
They keep screaming as they often
do. The crowd of unevolved monsters: Low Grades who always stand there to react
based on what you give them, to respond together, to scream together. Meera
never says these words aloud, but Kusha hears what Meera—the politician who
owns half the media channels of the city—filters out while edited words escape
her lips: “Watch how you react, sweetie. Watch how others react.”
So, Kusha does. She watches
how the crowd reacts; her eyes trace how they scream, how they dance forgetting
to cover their noses and mouths. Now, they don’t mind the smell. Now, they
don’t remember saying: Mama’s magic won’t work. Now, they’d rather stand
with the winner.
Magic Mama smiles at Kusha,
the way you’d smile if someone caught you in muddy clothes and uncombed, grey
hair.
“How are you feeling?” he asks,
approaching her.
“Guttered.” Kusha shows her
usual, self-doubting grin.
“It won’t smell as bad near
Ajwain’s bar. The woman’s been complaining forever,” Magic Mama says, flashing
his fair teeth.
Kusha covers her nose again. ‘Rare
men are born sometimes who act and don’t complain,’ she read in a book once.
“Is there any formula?” she asks.
“Of what?” Magic Mama says.
“How did you know it’d work?”
“No need to know,” Magic Mama
says. “Just keep trying.”
“How many times?”
“Until it happens.”
Until it happens?—Of course. Rare are these moments
when Rashad and Meera will agree with Magic Mama. “Keep trying, Kusha ... Just
one more time ... Until it happens.”
*
* *
LEAVING SOMEONE TO guard the
giant water-pump, Magic Mama soon drives off in his bus, taking Taha, Haley,
and Kusha along with his family. They reach an open cliff—deep into the forest
and far away from the gutter and the Old City. Finally, they get fresh mountain
air. However, it comforts Kusha little. Throughout the ride, Haley tried to
convince her to join the Resolution Race, the competition where all the tech companies
come looking to recruit young talents from the Junk Land. And it happens in the
Old City—the only city in the world where the non-citizens can enter to
work—cheap labor or not.
“Come on! We could win! I need
an intuitive driver, Kusha!” Haley repeats. Her dark-blonde hair waves
around her brown eyes. “I’m halfway through coding the vehicle. It’s my last
chance!”
Kusha doesn’t reply with a definite
yes or no. She avoids Haley’s pleading gaze. No matter how many times
Haley says, Kusha can’t say yes. You don’t want to take the responsibility
for another’s one-and-only dream. What if things go wrong and you ruin it? Haley
would lose her chance to get a job in a city, a real city and not just the Old
City; she could lose her chance of becoming a citizen because of her. Besides,
who knows what Meera would say if she entered the Resolution Race? It’s for the
Junk Land’s people.
Taha distracts Haley, saying she
wants to see her old-generation camera—the one Haley carries around everywhere.
Kusha breathes a relief. She
sits on a stone near the cliff.
Magic Mama approaches her from
the bus, bringing two coconuts with straws and offering Kusha one.
“Taha said you fainted,” he
says, “seeing a letter?”
He must have been watching her
the whole time, Kusha realizes. “It was, um,” she pauses. It was more than
fainting. She felt prana without
intending to, saw the skin in her hands tightening, un-aging her, even if it
was just a little. Only the highly trained, Grade-A humans can pause the
effects of time.
Kusha checks how far Taha and Haley
are. Taha is a Grade D, and Haley trains hard to evolve. Not being a citizen
and with no sponsor, Haley can’t start the grade test. Not yet. If she could,
she’d probably be a Grade C by now. None of them have heightened hearing as the
Grade-A people do; so they won’t hear her words. If Taha tells about the
envelope at home, Meera may ban her from going outside the walls again.
But what should she tell Magic
Mama? Kusha looks at him. He stares with the kind of gaze Meera once gave when
she returned home with Taha after visiting a friend’s house. Meera doesn’t like
that friend’s elder-brother because of a past incident concerning Kusha.
“I don’t know … a symbol,” Kusha
says. “Where is it now? The letter?” She asks about the black envelope, looking
guilty. Why should she feel guilty? Why should she avoid his gaze? It’s not
like she wants to see the letter? Or the symbol that makes her skin tighten? Who
cares about skin-tightening? Huh!—Kusha tells herself, giving a weak
internal scoff.
“Taha was busy bringing you,”
Magic Mama says. “Junk Land is not safe for the citizens, Kusha. On the 50th
Independence Day, no less. She’s a child, Grade D or not.” He watches Kusha piercingly
as if sensing whatever she’s hiding.
That gaze discomforts Kusha.
Within seconds, her brain calculates questions and options: What is he
thinking? … Definitely about the envelope … His gaze looks like he made a
decision … Did he make a decision? (a) Yes (b) No. Yes … What decision? Obviously,
related to the envelope … Will he look for the envelope in the forest? (a) Yes
(b) No. Yes … Did Taha tell him about the location already? (a) Yes (b) No.
Yes.
Tsk!—Kusha frowns, watching Taha
playing around with Haley’s camera far away. The girl has a loose tongue.
“How did you bring me here?” Kusha
asks, making sure Taha hears her and understands the question is for her.
“Lifted you on your tin-disc
and flew us,” Taha says, pronouncing tin as if it was picked up from a swamp.
Well, Kusha found it in the junk-yard, not a swamp.
“It worked?” Kusha drops her
jaw. She tried to make a do-it-yourself disc to carry machines, attaching a
do-it-yourself hover-tech under a flat tin sheet. But no transparent railings
appear at its edges as they do when the Low Grades ride those smooth, flat,
white, and hexagonal traffic discs without seats. Low Grades use the public traffic
discs to travel from place to place, and High Grades use the private ones to
move among the floors inside the buildings.
“Felt like a magic carpet that
needs seatbelts,” Taha says.
“O,” Kusha says, blushing,
just as she does whenever someone comments on something she made.
She checks the time; it’s
getting late. If they want to sneak back into the Gaumont Manor before Meera
arrives home (from hospital appointment and then from her office), they must go
now. They have dance lessons today. That means no time to pick up the envelope.
Kusha scolds herself for thinking about picking up the envelope.
When Taha and Haley walk away
out of their earshot, Magic Mama turns to Kusha. “Sounded like it could be a
mind-poisoning letter,” he remarks, out of context, the way anyone does while
questioning someone who probably won’t answer.
Kusha feels the discomfort
again. “I’ll get the ticket to the High Auction today.” She abruptly and
inexpertly avoids talking about the envelope. It’s rude, but Kusha still does
it. She checks Taha and Haley once more. Haley holds a thirty-year-old model of a camera—the
twenty-ninth digital SLR she found in the junk shop near the Old City. Now,
she’s taking photos of old chairs, caterpillars, texture in tree barks and
tiger poop. Kusha looks back at Magic Mama and hopes it’s safe to say now.
“I think someone will die at the
High Auction.” She whispers what she wanted to say since morning. “A murder,”
she adds in a lower volume than before.
“Was it an alarm?” Magic Mama asks, frowning.
“Yes.”
“Prophetic?”
“This morning,” Kusha nods, sensing
the worry in his tone. Murder in the High Auction could shake the entire Old
City; it is disturbing. “Rashad won’t, um, let me go if he knows,” Kusha
reveals her most important concern.
“You still didn’t tell your
guardians about the auction, did you?” Magic Mama says in an I-knew-it tone.
Kusha shakes her head, confirming
his guess. “I have to, um, ask them, today,” she says, mostly assuring
herself.
Magic Mama gives her the silence she
needs.
“What if he doesn’t let me attend?”
Kusha asks; her blue eyes widening. “Should I go?”
Magic Mama doesn’t reply. Not
directly. Instead, he says, “The book is expensive. You won’t have a chance
to—”
“I don’t want to buy it.”
“Why, then?”
“Just … to, um, see …” Kusha feels
her voice drowning.
“You’re looking for shortcuts; do
you know that, Kusha?”
Kusha looks away. She knows he won’t
say, ‘there’s no shortcut to strength, to evolution, to voice’ like
Meera always says. She knows he won’t judge as Rashad does. Sitting quietly
before Magic Mama, the middle-aged non-citizen from the Junk Land who taught
her about machines, Kusha frowns. She’s not looking for shortcuts, not at all, she
tells herself. A book is never a shortcut; it’s just a start, a direction to
the path. And she will walk the path someday, on her own.
“Do you think the Devil’s Book is,
um, really written by the devil?” Kusha asks, avoiding his question again. Rude!
Rude! Rude! Avoiding questions is rude!—Kusha remembers.
Magic Mama stares. “What does your
intuition say?”
“I have to, um, check the definition
of the devil more. To find an answer,” Kusha says. She can find the answer to a
yes-or-no question, but it all depends on the question itself, doesn’t it?
Answer changes when question changes; question changes if its meaning changes.
And the meaning depends all on the mind, for the devil lies in the details.
“Why did you stop looking for it?”
“Secrets of mesmerism?” Magic Mama
scoffs. “Look around, Kusha. The place you’re in gives you some problems. You
either solve the problem or stay with it as it is. But whichever path you
choose, it shapes your purpose. Maybe my purpose is more earthly: dealing with
a gutter, getting water from falls miles away. I’m aging. I don’t have time to
earn more time, Kusha. I don’t have time for philosophies.”
“Is it just philosophy? I thought
mesmerism was practical.”
“What makes you think philosophy is
impractical?” Magic Mama looks as if he has heard an absurd question. “Because
you can’t make a machine with it?”
Kusha twitches her lips, trying to
speak the thoughts that don’t transform into words.
“Tread carefully, Kusha,” Magic Mama
breaks the silence. “A death prophecy about the High Auction isn’t good news.
If anyone finds out, the auction will be canceled, and the management will hunt
you down for causing them trouble. Don’t speak about it ever again.” He then points
at her CRAB.
Kusha knows the meaning of that
look. It’s true. You shouldn’t even think about some things when a bio-computer
attached to your wrist that can read your mind. Hopefully, no one is interested
to know what an unevolved, Ungraded girl talks or thinks about—a positive
thought—Kusha tells herself.
“Do you believe in fate, Kusha?”
“Fate?” Kusha frowns.
“The wheel of the grand plot,” Magic
Mama speaks in his usual jargon. “Promise me one thing, Kusha. If today, your
guardians don’t allow you to go, you won’t go; you won’t force fate to roll the
dice.”
“So, I’m … I’m forcing fate?” Kusha
says, more as a question with a slightly offended tone.
“You can’t answer why exactly you
want to attend the High Auction. Why you want to just see the book. For voice?
For power? I don’t think so. You don’t know your purpose. And it feels
forced, yes,” Magic Mama finishes bluntly.
Kusha gulps. For some reason, it
feels harsh. It’s harsh that most people think speaking is easy, that you can
have flawless answers readily delivered at the right time, just as most High Grades
do. As if it’s not real life, rather a well-planned script, a crafted book,
where punch lines and measured dialogues can happen whenever the author wants.
Kusha gulps, of course, not
delivering anything she thinks or feels, for she speaks only 1% of her
thoughts. People with a strong voice can speak all of their thoughts. She’s not
one with strong voice. In a world ruled with words, where even a
misworded greeting can cause you a bad profile, she needs her voice. “Do you
believe in my alarms?” she
asks.
“I do. Even though you don’t believe
it yourself. You still call it alarms,”
Magic Mama points out, “and not intuition.”
Kusha looks away from him. “Believe
me, I have to go, and I just know it,” she says the ‘just know it’ part as she
always does. It’s her other acceptable synonym for ‘alarms’.
The glowing sun, tilted in the sky, reminds
her of the bright room, the female voice, the weird eyes, and the shivering
sensation of being naked in an endless white room. Somehow, remembering it
makes her eyelids heavier, and her brain wants to sleep.
What was that black envelope?
What was that voice?
No answers come, for her brain has
no information to form possible options on it. As if dozens of questions about
the High Auction and the death alarm
and the Devil’s Book aren’t enough.
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