Chapter 11: Sapne

The dreams came on the third night after the dungeon.

I was in Pune. Not the Pune that existed — if it still existed, if Earth still existed in the way I remembered it, which was a question I had stopped asking because the answer, whatever it was, changed nothing about the moon and the swamp and the turrets and the thirty Gumalagians moving south. The Pune that existed in my memory, which was a different city entirely: the Pune of twenty-one years old, of engineering textbooks and chai at Vaishali, of the particular Pune that a young man carried inside him like a photograph that had been looked at so many times the edges were soft.

In the dream, I was sitting at the lassi stall near Fergusson College. The stall was run by a man named Shetty uncle — not his real name, probably, but the name everyone used, because in Pune the distance between a stranger and an uncle was approximately one lassi — and Shetty uncle made lassi the way Pramod made chai: with violence and love, the blender screaming, the sugar unmeasured, the result imprecise and perfect.

I was drinking mango lassi. The taste was — in the dream, the taste was so real that my sleeping body's mouth watered, the particular cruelty of dreams that give you what you've lost and then take it away when you wake. Mango. Not the alien fruit that the Game provided, which was close to mango the way a photograph of the sea was close to the sea — it captured the appearance but not the weight, not the smell, not the particular sweetness that real Alphonso mangoes produced in May when the temperature hit forty and the mango sellers appeared on every corner like seasonal gods.

"You're thinking too much, Karthik," Shetty uncle said, which was what Shetty uncle always said, because Shetty uncle believed that the primary function of a lassi stall was to provide a space where thinking stopped and drinking started. "Drink your lassi. The thinking can wait."

"The thinking can't wait. I have an exam tomorrow."

"You always have an exam tomorrow. You've had an exam tomorrow for three years. When does the exam end and the living begin?"

The dream shifted. Not abruptly — dreams didn't cut like films. They dissolved, one scene bleeding into another with the particular logic of a mind that was not bound by sequence and that processed memory through association rather than chronology. I was in my hostel room. Third floor, the room with the window that faced the campus banyan tree, the tree that was older than the college and that had, according to campus legend, been planted by a British officer's wife who had missed England and who had, in a gesture of horticultural defiance, planted a tree that was as Indian as anything could be.

My roommate Ashwin was playing guitar. Badly. Ashwin played guitar the way some people played cricket — with more enthusiasm than skill, the particular joy of a person who did not care about quality because the doing was the point. He was playing "Summer of '69" by Bryan Adams, which was not a great choice for a December evening in Pune but which was, apparently, the only song Ashwin knew all the chords to, and he played it repeatedly, nightly, the way a monk chanted a mantra: through repetition, the meaning was supposed to emerge.

"Do you ever think about what happens after college?" I asked.

"After college, I become a software engineer. I work in Hinjewadi. I marry someone my parents find on Shaadi.com. I buy a flat in Baner. I die." He strummed a chord that was not quite the chord he intended. "That's the plan."

"That's everyone's plan."

"That's the beauty of it. If everyone has the same plan, nobody can fail individually. We fail collectively, as a culture. It's very efficient."

The dream dissolved again. I was — somewhere else. Not Pune. Not Haven. Somewhere that didn't exist, the particular non-place that dreams produced when the associative logic ran out of real memories and began improvising. A white room. Empty. The particular emptiness of a space that was waiting to be filled.

My mother was there.

She was — my mother, in the dream, was exactly as I remembered her: the particular posture, the particular sari (blue, cotton, the everyday sari that she wore around the house and that smelled of coconut oil and sandalwood and the particular alchemy of a mother's proximity). She was sitting in a chair that didn't exist in any room I'd ever seen, in a white space that was too clean to be real, and she was looking at me with the expression that mothers wore when they knew something their children didn't and were deciding whether to share it.

"Amma," I said.

"You're on a moon," she said. Not a question. She said it the way she said everything: with the certainty of a woman who had raised three children and who had, through the experience, developed an immunity to surprise that extended even to her son's interstellar relocation.

"I'm on a moon."

"Is there food?"

"There's a dhaba. A man named Pramod runs it."

"Is his food clean?"

"Amma, I'm fighting aliens on a moon in another galaxy. The cleanliness of the dhaba is — "

"The cleanliness of the dhaba is the most important thing. If the food is not clean, the fighting doesn't matter. You'll get sick before the aliens get you." She paused. The particular pause that preceded the real question, the question that all the other questions had been circling. "Are you safe?"

"No."

"Are you trying to be safe?"

"I'm trying to keep other people safe. That's — that's what I do now."

"That's what you've always done. Since you were seven and you walked your sister to school even though your school was in the other direction and you were late every day for a month and your father wanted to scold you but I stopped him because — " she stopped. The mother-look. The look that contained thirty years of observation compressed into a single expression. "Because keeping people safe is who you are. Not what you do. Who you are."

"I might not be able to keep all of them safe."

"You couldn't keep all of them safe when it was just your sister and the road to school. A bicycle hit you. You broke your arm. Your sister was fine."

"I remember."

"You broke your arm and the first thing you said, in the hospital, with a fracture that the doctor said must have been extremely painful — the first thing you said was: 'Is Priya okay?' Not 'my arm hurts.' Not 'what happened.' 'Is Priya okay.'"

"Amma — "

"You'll keep them safe, Karthik. Not all of them. Not every time. But you'll keep trying, and the trying is what matters. The trying is the only thing that has ever mattered."

I woke up. The Controller showed 4:12 AM. The colony was dark. The turrets hummed — the sound that had become, over the weeks, the particular background of sleep, the white noise of defense, the lullaby of machines that didn't rest so that people could.

The dream lingered. Dreams on this moon were different from Earth dreams — more vivid, more persistent, the particular residue of a sleeping mind in an alien environment that the Game's system influenced in ways that were documented but not fully understood. The Delphinian database noted that human dreaming increased in intensity after prolonged Game exposure, the neural pathways that the Game used for skill acquisition and level progression remaining active during sleep and producing dream states that were, in Neelam's clinical description, "neurologically significant."

"You look terrible," Bhavana said, when I emerged from my quarters at 5 AM. She was — as always — already awake, already alert, already positioned where she needed to be, which this morning was the wall's northeast section, scanning the terrain with the focused attention of a person who regarded sleep as a necessary evil and waking as the natural state.

"Bad dreams."

"Earth dreams?"

"How did you know?"

"Everyone has them. The Game makes them worse. More real. More — " she paused, selecting the word with the precision that Bhavana applied to everything — "expensive. They cost more. Emotionally."

"Do you have them?"

She looked at me. The Bhavana look — direct, unguarded, the particular honesty of a woman who had decided that evasion was a waste of time and that the people she cared about deserved the truth even when the truth was private.

"My father," she said. "Every night. He's surveying land. I'm helping him. We're walking the boundaries of a field in Rajasthan — the field that was our family's, the field that my grandfather farmed and that my father mapped and that I — " she stopped. Restarted. "I'm walking the boundaries and I know, in the dream, that the boundaries don't exist anymore. The field doesn't exist. Not because someone took it. Because the draft took me, and without me, the surveying stopped, and without the surveying, the land — " another stop. "The land forgot itself."

"Bhavana."

"I'm fine. The dreams are expensive but they're also — they're the only way I see him now. The cost is worth it." She returned to scanning. The conversation was over — not because Bhavana was closing it but because Bhavana had given what she had to give and the giving was complete. "You should eat. Pramod's up."

Pramod was, indeed, up. Pramod was always up before anyone who wasn't Bhavana, because Pramod's morning started with the tandoor and the tandoor started before dawn, the fire needing time to reach the temperature that Pramod considered acceptable, which was a temperature that other people considered dangerous but that Pramod regarded as the minimum requirement for a parantha that was worth eating.

"Dream?" he asked, handing me chai without my asking. The particular intuition of a man who fed people for a living and who had learned to read the particular hunger that was not for food but for comfort, the hunger that showed in the eyes rather than the stomach.

"Dream."

"Your mother?"

"How does everyone know?"

"Because everyone's mother visits in the dreams. It's the Game's cruelest feature — not the monsters, not the deaths, not the dungeons. The dreams. The Game gives you your mother back and then takes her away at sunrise."

"That's — you've thought about this."

"I've been thinking about this since the first night. My wife visits me. Not every night. But often enough that I wake up reaching for her side of the bed and finding — " he gestured at the dhaba. At the tandoor. At the colony. At everything that was not his wife. "Finding this."

"Pramod."

"I'm fine, bhai. I'm fine because I light the tandoor and I make the chai and I feed the people and the feeding is — the feeding is the reaching. The reaching for the side of the bed that's empty. I reach by feeding. It's not the same. But it's not nothing."

We stood in the dhaba — Pramod and me, 5:15 AM, the tandoor warming, the first parantha dough being kneaded with the violence that was love, the chai steaming in steel glasses, the colony waking around us to the sound of turrets and the smell of bread and the particular gravity of a morning that followed a night of expensive dreams.

"The attack comes in less than a week," I said.

"I know."

"If we don't — if it goes badly — "

"Then the last thing anyone eats will be my food. And it will be good. And the goodness will matter. Because the goodness always matters. Even at the end. Especially at the end."

The morning light arrived. The unnamed colour. The gas giant on the horizon. The swamp and the walls and the turrets and the colony that was, despite everything — despite the dreams, despite the coming attack, despite the absence of reinforcements and the presence of thirty hostiles and the particular mathematics that said we should not survive — the colony was alive. Alive and eating and drinking chai and waking up and reaching for the things that were not there and finding, in the reaching, the reason to keep going.