Free Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana by Edited by Anil Menon and Vandana Singh Page A

scientists from all fields and pumped them with the herbs he had been given as a boon. But things got less funny as Lanka outdid itself with each passing week. Just like the universe, which was accelerating its expansion, Lanka’s progress followed a steep upward rise, from geometric to exponential and then rocketedahead beyond any known curve that had been defined. Relaxing one day inside his flower, listening to Saraswati play her veena, Brahma began to suspect that Ravana was trying to oust him. He was intent on reverse engineering all of Creation. The inert matter of physics, the forces of cosmology, the evolving systems of biology, nothing was excluded from the cool analyzing gaze of Ravana or his crackteam. Brahma sighed. He let it be. He went back to Saraswati.
    Now he was puzzled by Ravana’s meditation. No one had prayed to the old man with such intensity in a while. And yet Ravana’s devotion was complete, pure. Like it had always been. Three days and four hours later Ravana shook out his limbs and stretched. He had been granted yet another boon. One of his computational heads would beable to work out the necessary equations on the fly and scan the known universe for rips. Gravity’s dance, the slowing of time, the stretching and bending of it, the weak force, the brane that limited the form of the universe, in short—everything, would yield it’s secrets to Ravana. The cosmological constant, formulae accumulated from decades of precise astronomy, data honed from thousands of terrestrialspectographs, the deepest nature of every gluon, muon, quark, and boson, would sit along the information superhighway that transmitted signals in and out of Ravana’s many brains. If sciencehad yet to discover it, Brahma would pass along the necessary detail as a gift.
    “But you can do all of this through pure maya. What do you want all this information for? Why get your hands dirty?”
    “I’mtired of having my way through magic. I want to earn the results. I know I’m asking here for a short cut but my goal is to stop asking for short cuts all together one day,” Ravana had replied, bowing humbly.
    “So that you don’t have to pray anymore?”
    “On the contrary. I’ll want absolutely nothing in return from you. What better proof that the prayers are real?”
    Ready and prepared, Ravanabarked swift orders to his team of scientists and technicians. They showed him the four hundred reality holograms they had prepared while he was meditating, all simulacra of the original forest that a fleet of GPS scanners and high-resolution satellites had mapped to the last detail. Even if Sita kept track of the small buds opening on the flowerpots of her tiny window she would be easily fooledby a movement here or there, a small animal grazing, a husband in the distance.
    His scientists fussed so much presenting the holograms that Ravana got suspicious.
    “Does this mean you don’t have the results of the other calculations we started running on the supercomputers last week?”
    “I’m afraid, Your Majesty. We should have them soon.”
    “Just one more thing,” he lectured the elitegroup of astronomers and physicists on his payroll, “last time I traveled across the galaxies the process was not perfect. I want this to be smooth. Sita shouldn’t guess she is anywhere but home.”
    “Yes, Your Majesty,” they replied together.
    “We’ve tweaked the teleportation algorithms a little and solved that problem,” the Chief of Staff said.
    Ravana set off.
    On the one hand, Ravanawas irritated by the delay in getting the full list from his powerful network of supercomputers that were hammering at the problem. On the other hand, he was delighted. The delay could only mean one thing. The list was long, very long. Longer than anyone could have imagined had the Mathematics been tested before. In five years he would lift the publishing restrictions and his crack team would authorpapers, reiterating once more that the tiny realm of