After that he was deaf and dumb. After that when the pushes came on the top of his beribboned head he thudded obediently to his knees, closed his eyes, and opened his mouth. But long months later things did change. One day Dr. Solanka was visited by Chandra’s father, Mr. Balasubramanyam Venkataraghavan the important banker, and they remained closeted together for more than an hour. Voices were raised, then swiftly lowered. Mallika was summoned, then swiftly dismissed. Malik hung back at the far end of a corridor, wide-eyed, speechless, clinging to a doll. Finally, Mr. Venkat left, looking like thunder, pausing only to pick up and hug Malik (who was dressed for Venkat’s visit in a white shirt and shorts), and to mutter, with high color burning in his face, “Don’t worry, my boy. Quoth the raven: nevermore.” That same afternoon, all the dresses and bows were taken away to be burned; but Malik insisted on being allowed to keep his dolls. Dr. Solanka never laid a forger on him again. Whatever threats Mr. Venkat had made had had their effect. (When Balasubramanyam Venkataraghavan left home to become a sanyasi, ten-year-old Malik Solanka had greatly feared that his stepfather might revert to the old routine. But it seemed Dr. Solanka had learned his lesson. Malik Solanka, however, never spoke to his stepfather again.)

From that day on Malik’s mother was different, too, interminably apologizing to her young son and weeping without restraint. He could barely speak to her without provoking an awful howl of guilty grief. This alienated Mali— He needed a mother, not a waterworks utility like the one on the Monopoly board. “Please, Ammi,” he scolded her when she had embarked on one of her frequent hug-and-sob fests. “If I can control myself, so can you.” Stung, she let him go, and after that did her weeping privately, muffled by pillows. So life resumed its air of surface normality, Dr. Solanka going about his business, Mallika running the household, and Malik locking his thoughts away, confiding only in whispers, only in the hours of darkness, to the dolls who crowded around him in bed, like guardian angels, like blood kin: the only family he could bring himself to trust.

“The rest doesn’t matter,” he said, the confession over. “The rest is ordinary—getting on with it, growing up, getting away from them, having my life.” A huge burden had fallen from him. “I don’t have to carry them around anymore,” he added, full of wonder. Neela put her arms around him and moved in even closer. “Now it’s I who have imprisoned you,” she said. “I’m the one asking you to go here, do that. But this time it’s what we both want. In this prison, you’re finally free.” He relaxed against her, even though he knew there was one last gate he had not unlocked: the gate of full disclosure, of absolute, brutal truth, behind which lay the strange thing that had happened between Mila Milo and himself. But that, he persuaded himself catastrophically, was for another day.

Everywhere on earth—in Britain, in India, in distant Lilliputpeople were obsessed by the subject of success in America. Neela was a celebrity back home simply because she had gotten herself a good job – “made it big”—in the American media. In India, great pride was taken in the achievements of U.S.-based Indians in music, publishing (though not writing), Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. British levels of hysteria were even higher. British journalist gets work in U.S.A.! Incredible! British actor to play second lead in American movie! Wow, what a superstar! Cross-dressing British comic wins two Emmys! Amazing. Wwe always knew British transvestism was best! American success had become the only real validation of one’s worth. Ah, genuflection, Malik Solanka thought. Nobody knew how to argue with money these days, and all the money was here in the Promised Land.

Such reflections had become germane because in his middle fifties he was experiencing the superlative force of a real American hit, a force that blew open all the doors of the city, unlocked its secrets, and invited you to feast until you burst. The Galileo launch, an unprecedented interdisciplinary business enterprise, had gone intergalactic from day one. It turned out to be that happy accident: a necessary myth. LET THE FITTEST SURVIVE T-shirts covered some of the finest chests in the city, becoming a triumphalist slogan for the gym generation that acquired mass public currency overnight. It was proudly worn, too, over some of the flabbiest bellies around, as proof of the wearers’ sense of irony and fun. Demand for the Playstation video game accelerated past all predictions, leaving even Lara Croft floundering in its wake. At the height of the Star Wars phenomenon, spin-off merchandising had accounted for a quarter of the toy industry’s worldwide turnover; since those days, only the Little Brain phenomenon had come close. Now the saga of Galileo-1 was setting new records, and this time the global mania was being driven not by films or television but by website. The new communications medium was finally paying off. After a summer of skepticism about the potential of many massively unprofitable Internet companies, here at last was the prophesied brave new world. Professor Solanka’s surprisingly smooth beast, its hour come around at last, was slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. (There were rough edges, though: in the early days the site often crashed under the sheer weight of hits, which seemed to grow faster than the webspyders’ ability to increase access by replication and mirroring, the spinning of new threads of the shining web.)

Once again, Solanka’s fictional characters began to burst out of their cages and take to the streets. From around the world came news of their images, grown gigantic, standing many stories high on city walls. They made celebrity public appearances, singing the national anthem at ball games, publishing cookbooks, guest-hosting the Letterman show. The leading young actresses of the day vied publicly for the coveted leading role of Zameen of Rijk and her double, the cyborg Goddess of Victory. And this time Solanka felt none of the old Little Brain frustration, because, as Mila Milo had promised, it really was his show. He marveled at his own excitement. Creative and corporate meetings filled his days. The e-mail standoff with the webspyders was over. Regular “face time” had become essential. The continuing, possibly even growing, anger of sexually spurned, father-fixated Mila was the single fly in this rich, even Croesus-worthy, ointment. Mila and Eddie arrived stone-faced at the crucial meetings and left without offering Solanka a friendly word. However, her hair and eyes spoke volumes. They changed color frequently, burned like a flame one day and glowered blackly the next. Often the contact lenses clashed violently with the hair, suggesting that Mila was in an exceptionally bad mood on that particular day.

Solanka had no time to deal with the Mila problem. The Galileo project’s ground-floor partners were bursting with ideas about diversification: a restaurant chain! A theme park! A giant Las Vegas hotel, entertainment center and casino in the shape of the two islands of Baburia, to be set in an artificially created “ocean” at the desert’s heart! The number of businesses hammering on the door, pleading to be let in, was almost as hard to set down as the full decimal expression of Tr. The webspyders created and received new proposals for the future of the property almost every day, and Malik Solanka lost himself in the ecstasy, the furia, of the work.

The intervention of the living dolls from the imaginary planet Galileo-1 in the public affairs of actually existing Earth had not, however, been foreseen. It was Neela who brought Solanka the news. She arrived at West Seventieth Street in a state of high excitement. Her eyes shone as she spoke. There had been a countercoup in Lilliput. It had begun as a burglary: masked men raided Mildendo’s biggest toy store and made off with its entire, just-imported supply of Kronosian Cyborg masks and costumes. Interestingly-given the name of Neela’s shiny-chested flag-bearing pal-no Baburian outfits were taken. The FRM radicals, the revolutionary Indo-Lilly “Fremen” who had orchestrated the raid, as was afterward revealed, identified strongly with the Puppet Kings, whose inalienable right to being treated as equals—as fully moral and sentient beings—was denied by Mogol the Baburian, their deadly foe, of whom Skyresh Bolgolam was accused of being an avatar.