Chapter 1 of 6
The Coil
There is a particular kind of man who, at two in the morning, in a rented half-garage in Newton, will be found barefoot on a cold concrete floor, soldering iron in one hand, multimeter probe in the other, talking out loud to a bank of capacitors as though they could be reasoned with.
Angrez Singh was that kind of man.
“Come on,” he told the capacitor bank. “Come on, you beautiful, murderous things. Hold the charge. Just hold it.”
The capacitor bank did not answer, because it was a capacitor bank, but Angrez had long ago made peace with one-sided conversations.
Fourteen months had gone into the coilgun. It sat on a workbench he had welded himself, a metre of copper-wound steel launch tube fed by a stack of photoflash capacitors he had bought, two at a time, off a man in Edmonton who sold them out of a storage unit and who Angrez was fairly sure was either a genius or under some kind of investigation. On paper, the thing was capable of putting a small steel slug through a sheet of plywood at the far end of the garage. On paper.
In practice it had so far fired exactly twice, both times feebly, both times with a grounding behaviour on the third capacitor stage that the polite man on the coilgun forum had described, with the gentle dread of someone who has seen a friend do something stupid, as the kind of fault that does not hurt the gun.
“It hurts the operator,” the man had written. “Fix the ground on stage three before you fire it again. Please.”
For two years now, Angrez had been meaning to fix the ground on stage three.
‘Tomorrow,’ he thought, the way he had thought every night for two years. ‘Tomorrow I’ll pull stage three, redo the bus bar, ground it properly. Tonight I just want to see it throw the slug.’
This is the sort of sentence that, in the lives of certain men, functions as an epitaph.
None of this was where he had meant to end up.
At seventeen, the plan had been clean and shining and certain. Physics. Then aerospace, or fusion, or, on the nights he let himself dream the whole way out, propulsion, the actual moving of actual mass through actual space. At UBC he had taken engineering physics, one of the harder degrees the country handed out, and finished it first in his year. His references made professors apologize for not having anything better to offer.
And physics was only ever the spine of him. He could not leave a subject alone once it had been interesting at him even once, and an alarming number of subjects had been. He collected languages the way other men collect grudges: Punjabi at home, Hindi and Urdu off the same Surrey streets and the films his mother would not turn off, enough Persian script to embarrass a shopkeeper, and French, which he insisted on counting, having served out the full sentence of British Columbia secondary-school French and come away convinced. He read maps for the sheer pleasure of them and could draw one from memory, coast and contour and caravan road, which is a stranger thing to be good at than it sounds and would turn out to be the least strange thing about him. And he argued. God, he argued. He had been the quiet menace of three debate circuits and the documented despair of two vice-principals, suspended once for a rebuttal the school called disrespectful and he, on the merits, called correct.
Then he graduated into a year in which the entire province appeared to have collectively decided it did not require one more physicist, thank you, the position has been filled, we’ll keep your résumé on file.
For three years he kept applying. He worked the parts counter at a Lordco, and he tutored, and then his Bibi ji, his grandmother, who had spent his entire childhood filling his head with the Khalsa and the Sarkar and the great old wars until he could have drawn the map of Ranjit Singh’s empire freehand, mentioned over dal that the Khalsa school on the avenue was looking for teachers, and that the only posts going were for history and Punjabi, and that a boy as clever as her Angrez could surely learn to teach a little history.
So he had gone back to school, for a third time, and gotten the MA in history he did not want, because it was the only door anyone was holding open, and he had taken the job teaching Sikh history four days a week to teenagers who mostly did not want to learn it, and he had discovered, to his enormous private irritation, that he was good at it, and that he loved it, and that the thing his Bibi ji had poured into him as a child had become, somehow, the thing he was for.
He knew the empire the way other men knew sports statistics. He knew the misls and the chiefs and the European officers and the names of the Sarkar’s horses. He knew the order of the panj piyare. He knew which of Ranjit Singh’s sons would rule and which would not. He knew the day Hari Singh Nalwa died and the day the British marched into Lahore and the exact, stupid, avoidable sequence of murders that had hollowed the kingdom out from the inside before a single British boot crossed the Sutlej.
He knew all of it.
Grading essays at midnight, he had often thought that it was a great deal of extremely specific knowledge to be carrying around in a country where literally no one needed it.
About that, he was soon to learn, he was wrong.
The multimeter went down on the bench.
Out of the habit of a man who checked everything twice and stage three never, he checked the charge on the bank one more time. Then he stepped back to the firing position, a length of garden hose taped to the floor that he had decided marked the safe distance, and he put his thumb on the switch.
‘For Bibi ji,’ he thought, which made no sense, and which he thought anyway, because some part of him had always performed for the old woman who had taught him to love a dead kingdom.
He pressed the switch.
The capacitor bank discharged.
Up the tube went the slug. He saw it go, a grey blur, and heard it crack into the plywood at the far wall, actually into the plywood, through it, the first clean shot in fourteen months. For one suspended quarter of a second Angrez Singh felt the purest joy he had felt in years.
Then the grounding fault on the third stage did the thing the polite man from Edmonton had said it would do.
Two thousand volts went through the steel launch tube, into the concrete floor, up through the soles of his bare feet, across his chest, and out the palm of his right hand.
‘It’s do…’
It was over very quickly.
There was the ceiling of the garage. There was the bare bulb, very far away. There was the cold of the floor, which he could feel along the whole length of his back and then could not feel at all.
There was a long time that was not really time.
And then, with no transition he was ever able to reconstruct, there was a different ceiling, a ceiling of carved wood, and a great deal of heat that turned out to be a fever, and a voice he did not know, speaking a language he did know, saying, from somewhere above him, very softly, in Punjabi:
“The fever’s turning, putt. Stay with us. Stay.”
Notes
1. Kanwar Nau Nihal Singh (1821-1840), eldest grandson of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, son of Kanwar Kharak Singh and Bibi Chand Kaur. In the unaltered historical record he served as de facto ruler of the Sikh Empire from October 1839, having set aside his ailing father in concert with the Wazir, Raja Dhian Singh, until his death on 6 November 1840. He was killed, depending on which account one trusts, by a stone archway that fell on him as he returned from his father’s funeral, or by the Wazir himself, who arranged the accident and then kept every visitor, including the boy’s own wives, away from the body until it was no longer a body worth looking at. Angrez Singh had taught this to seventeen-year-olds. He had not expected to be issued the body in question.
2. The author has been advised that British Columbia public-school French does not, strictly, count as a second language. Angrez Singh disagreed, and would like that noted.