River Of Gods

by Ian McDonald

  Shiv shifts on his charpoy. Hell is one thing Christians do well. His dick lifts in his pants. The torment, the screaming, the bodies heaped up in pain, the nakedness, the helplessness, have always stirred him. Yogendra sifts the drained puris into a basket. His eyes are dead, dull, his face animal.

  ‘And the thing is, it goes on forever. A thousand years is not even a second. An age of Brahma is not even one instant in hell. A thousand ages of Brahma and you are still no nearer the end. You haven’t even begun. That is where you are going. You will be taken down by the demons and chained up and set on top of the pile of people and your flesh will begin to burn and you will try not to breathe in the flame but in the end you will have to and after that nothing will ever change. The only way to avoid Hell is to put your trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and accept him as your personal Lord and Saviour. There is no other way. Imagine it: hell. Can you even begin to imagine what it will be like?’

  ‘Like this?’ Yogendra is fast as a knife in an alley. He grabs Leela’s wrist. She cries out but she cannot break his hold. His face is the same feral blank as he pushes her hand towards the boiling ghee.

  Shiv’s boot to the side of his head knocks him across the room, scattering purls. Leela/Martha flees shrieking to the back room. Shiv’s mother flies back from the stove, the hot fat, the treacherous gas flame.

  ‘Get him out of here, out of my house!’

  ‘Oh, he’s going,’ Shiv says as he crosses the room in two strides, lifts Yogendra by two fistfuls of T-shirt and drags him out into the gali. Blood wells from a small cut above his ear but Yogendra still wears that numb, animal smile. Shiv throws him across the alley and follows in with the boot. Yogendra doesn’t fight back, doesn’t try to defend himself, doesn’t try to run or curl into a ball, takes the kicking with a fuck-you smile on his face. It is like striking a cat. Cats never forgive. Fuck him. Cats you drown, in the river. Shiv kicks him until the blue is gone. Then he sits back against the shanty wall and lights a bidi. Lights another, passes it to Yogendra. He takes it. They smoke in the gali. Shiv grinds the butt out on the cardboard beneath the heel of his Italian shoe.

  Raja of shit.

  ‘Come on, we’ve got a car to pick up.’

  LISA

  Hand over hand, Lisa Durnau hauls herself up the tunnel into the heart of the asteroid. The shaft is little wider than her body, the vacuum suits are white and clinging and Lisa Durnau cannot get the thought out of her head that she is a NASA sperm swimming up a cosmic yoni. She pulls herself up the white nylon rope after Sam Rainey’s receding gripsoles. The project director’s feet come to a halt. She pushes back against a knot on the rope and floats, halfway up a stone vagina, a quarter of a million miles from home. A robot manipulator arm squeezes past her on its way down from the core, outstretched and creeping on little manipulator fingers. Lisa flinches as it brushes past her compression suit. Japanese King Crabs are a childhood horror; things chitinous and spindly. She used to dream of pulling back the bed cover and finding one lying there, pincers weaving up towards her face.

  ‘What’s the delay?’

  ‘There’s a turning hollow. From here on, you’ll begin to feel the effects of gravity. You don’t want to be heading facedown.’

  ‘This Tabernacle doofus has its own gravity field?’

  Sam Rainey’s feet tuck up, he vanishes into the gloom between the lume tubes. Lisa sees vague whiteness tumbling and manoeuvring, then his face looks through its visor into hers.

  ‘Just be careful not to get your arms trapped where you can’t use them.’

  Lisa Durnau gingerly draws herself up into the turning space. It’s just wide enough to fit a hunched body in a vacuum suit and, as Sam warns, get yourself inextricably trapped. She grimaces at the rock grating on her shoulders.

  It’s all been cramming and jamming and slamming since she was excreted through the pressure lock into Darnley 285 Excavation Headquarters. If ISS had smelled rancid, Darnley Base was that distilled and casked for a year. Darnley was an unstable trinity of space scientists, archaeologists and oil rats from the Alaska north slope. Darnley’s greatest surprise was what the drill-crews discovered when their bits punched through raw rock and the spycams were lowered in. It was not a propulsion system, a mythical space-drive. It was altogether other.

  The suit she had been given was a tight-fitting skin, a micro-weave smaller than a molecule of oxygen, flexible enough to move in the confined spaces of Darnley’s interior, yet with the strength to maintain a human body against vacuum. Lisa had clung, still vertiginous from the transfer from the shuttle, to a handhold in the pressure lock as she felt the white fabric press ever-tighter against her skin and one by one the crew upended themselves and dived down the rabbit hole that was the entrance to the rock. Then it was her turn to fight the claustrophobia and go down into the shaft. Clocks were ticking. She had forty five minutes to get in, get done with whatever it was dwelt in the heart of Darnley 285, get out and get on to Captain Pilot Beth’s shuttle before she made turnaround.

  In the gullet of the asteroid, Lisa Durnau folds her arms across her chest, pulls up her legs and neatly somersaults. Pushing herself down the rope she feels a little extra assistance pulling at her feet. Now there is a distinct sensation of down and up and her stomach starts to gurgle as it reverts to its natural orientation. She glances between her feet. Sam Rainey’s head fills the shaft; around it is a halo. There’s light down there.

  A few hundred knots downshaft and she can kick off and glide in hundred-metre swoops. Lisa whoops. She finds microgee more exhilarating and liberating than bloated, nauseous free fall.

  ‘Don’t forget, you have to come back up again,’ Sam says.

  Five more minutes down and the light is a bright silver shine. Lisa’s body says half a gravity and getting stronger by the metre. Her mind rebels at the outrage of weight in absolute vacuum. Suddenly Sam’s head vanishes. She clings fingers and toes to the wall and squints through her feet into a disk of silver light. She thinks she sees a spider web of ropes and cables.

  ‘Sam?’

  ‘Climb down until you see a rope ladder. Grab a good hold of that, you’ll see me.’

  Feet first, in a too-tight sperm-suit, Lisa Durnau enters the central cavity of Darnley 285. Beneath her feet is the web of cables and ratlines strung around the roof of the cavern. Clinging to the guy ropes, Lisa catwalks across the net towards Sam Rainey, who lies prostrate on the netting.

  ‘Don’t look down,’ Sam warns. ‘Yet. Come over here and lie beside me.’ Lisa Durnau eases herself prone on to a sling of webbing and looks down into the heart of the Tabernacle.

  The object is a perfect sphere of silver grey. It is the size of a small house and hangs perfectly at the centre of gravity of the asteroid twenty metres beneath Lisa Durnau’s faceplate. It gives off a steady, dull, metallic light. As her eyes become accustomed to the chromium glow she becomes aware of variations, ripples of chiaroscuro on the surface. The effect is subtle but once she has the eye for it, she can see patterns of waves clashing and merging and throwing off new diffraction patterns, grey on grey.

  ‘What happens if I drop something into it?’ Lisa Durnau asks.

  ‘Everyone asks that one,’ says Sam Rainey in her ear.

  ‘Well, what does happen?’

  ‘Try it and find out.’

  The only safely removable object Lisa Durnau can find is one of her nametags. She unvelcroes it from the breast of her suit, drops it through the web. She had imagined it would flutter. It falls straight and true through the tight vacuum inside Darnley 285. The tag is a brief silhouette against the light, then it vanishes into the grey shimmer like a coin into water. Ripples race away across the surface to clash and meld and whirl off brief vortices and spirals. It fell faster than it should, she thinks. Another thing she noticed: it did not pass through. It was annihilated as it intersected the surface. Taken apart.

  ‘The gravity increases all the way down,’ she observes.

  ‘At the
surface it’s about fifty gees. It’s like a black hole. Except . . .’

  ‘It’s not black. So . . . stupid obvious question here . . . what is it?’

  She can hear Sam’s intake of breath through his teeth on her suitcom.

  ‘Well, it gives off EM in the visible spectrum, but that’s the only information we get from it. Any remote sensing scans we perform just die. Apart from this light, in every other respect, it is a black hole. A light black hole.’

  Except it isn’t, Lisa Durnau realises. It does to your radar and X-rays what it did to my name. It takes them apart and annihilates them. But into what? Then she becomes aware of a small, beautiful nausea in her belly. It isn’t the embrace of gravity or the worm of claustrophobia or the intellectual fear of the alien and unknown. It’s the feeling she remembers from the women’s washroom in Paddington Station: the conception of an idea. The morning sickness of original thought.

  ‘Can I get a closer look at it?’ Lisa Durnau asks.

  Sam Rainey rolls across the mesh of webbing to the technicians huddled together in a rickety nest of old flight chairs and impact strapping around battered instrument cases. A figure with a woman’s shoulders and the name Daen on an androgynous breast passes an image amplifier to Director Sam. He hooks it over Lisa Durnau’s helmet and shows her how to thumb up the tricky little controls. Lisa’s brain reels as she zooms in and out, in and out. There’s nothing to focus on here. Then it swims into vision. The skin of the Tabernacle fizzes with activity. Lisa remembers elementary school lessons where you popped a slide of pond water under the video camera and it was abuzz with micro-beasts. She ratchets up the scale until the jittering, Brownian motion resolves into pattern and action. The silver is the newsprint grey of atoms of black and white, constantly changing from one to the other. The surface of the Tabernacle is a boil of patterns on fractal scales, from slow wave-trains to fleeting formations that scuttle together and annihilate each other or merge into larger, briefer forms that decay like trails in a bubble chamber into exotic and unpredictable fragments.

  Lisa Durnau ratchets the vernier up until the graphic display says X1000. The grainy blur expands into a dazzle of black and white, flickering furiously, throwing off patterns like flames hundreds of times a second. The resolution is maddeningly short of clarity but Lisa knows what she would find at the base of it if she could go all the way in; a grid of simple black and white squares, changing from one to the other.

  ‘Cellular automata,’ whispers Lisa Durnau, suspended above the fractal swirls of patterns and waves and demons like Michelangelo in the Sistine, inverted. Life, as Thomas Lull would know it.

  Lisa Durnau has lived most of her life in the flickering black and white world of cellular automata. Her Grandpa Mac - geneful of Scots-Irish contrariness - had been the one to first awaken her to the complexities that lay in a simple pattern of counters across an Othello board. A few basic rules for colour conversion based on the numbers of adjacent black and white tokens and she had baroque filigree patterns awaken and grow across her board.

  On-line she discovered entire bestiaries of black-on-white forms that crawled, swam, swooped, swarmed, over her flatscreen in eerie mimicry of living creatures. Downstairs in his study lined with theological volumes, Pastor David G. Durnau constructed sermons proving the earth was eight thousand years old and that the Grand Canyon was carved by waters from the Flood.

  In her final High School year, while girlfriends deserted her for Abercrombie, Fitch and skaterboyz, she concealed her social gawkiness behind glitterball walls of three-dimensional cellular automata. Her end-of-year project relating the delicate forms in her computer to the baroque glass shells of microscopic diatoms had boggled even her math teacher. It got her the university course she wanted. So she was a nerd. But she could run fast.

  By her second year she was running ten kay a day and probing beneath the surface dazzle of her black-and-white virtual world to the bass-line funk of the rules. Simple programmes giving rise to complex behaviour was the core of the Wolfram/Friedkin conjecture. She had no doubt the universe communicated with itself but she needed to know what it was in the fabric of spacetime and energy that called the counterpoint. She wanted to eavesdrop on the Chinese whisper of God. The search spun her off the chequerboard of Artificial Life into airy, dragon-haunted realms: cosmology, topology, M-theory and its heir, M-Star theory. She held universes of thought in either hand, brought them together and watched them arc and burn.

  Life. The game.

  ‘We’ve got a few theories,’ Sam Rainey says. Thirty six hours of drugged sleep later, Lisa Durnau is back on ISS. She, Sam and G-woman Daley form a neat, polite trefoil up in the free-gee, an unconscious recapitulation of the steel symbol pointing the way to the heart of Darnley 285. ‘Remember when you dropped your name badge.’

  ‘It’s a perfect recording medium,’ Lisa says. ‘Anything it interacts with physically is digitised to pure information.’ Her name is now part of it. She isn’t sure how she feels about that. ‘So, it takes stuff in; has it ever given anything out? Any kind of transmission or signal?’

  She catches a transmission or signal between Sam and Daley. Daley says, ‘I will address that momentarily, but first Sam will brief you on the historical perspective.’

  Sam says, ‘She says historical; it’s actually archaeological. In fact even that’s not close. It’s the cosmological perspective. We’ve done isotope tests.’

  ‘I know some palaeontology, you won’t blind me with science.’

  ‘Our table of U238 decay products give it an age of seven billion years.’

  Lisa Durnau’s a clergy child who doesn’t like to take the Lord’s name in vain but she says a simple, reverent, ‘Jesus.’ Alterre’s aeons that pass like an evening gone have given her a feel for Deep Time. But the decay of radioactive isotopes opens on the deepest time of all, an abyss of past and future. Darnley 285 is older than the solar system. Suddenly Lisa Durnau is very aware that she is a mere chew of gristle and nerve rattling round inside a coffee can in the middle of nothing.

  ‘What is it,’ Lisa Durnau says carefully, ‘that you wanted me to know this before?’

  Daley Suarez-Martin and Sam Rainey look at each other and Lisa Durnau realises that these are the people her country must rely on in its first meeting with the alien. Not super-heroes, not super-scientists, not super-managers. Not super-anything. Workaday scientists and civil servants. Working through, making it up as they go along. The ultimate human resource: the ability to improvise.

  ‘We’ve been videoing the surface of the Tabernacle more or less since day one,’ Sam Rainey says. ‘It took us some time to realise we had to run the camera at fifteen thousand frames per second to isolate the patterns. We’re having them analysed.’

  ‘Trying to pick out the rules behind the automaton.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m betraying any secrets, but we don’t have the capacity in this country.’

  This country, thinks Lisa Durnau, orbiting at the L-5 stable point. Screwed by your own Hamilton Act. She says, ‘You need high level pattern-recognition aeais; what, 2.8, higher?’

  ‘There are a couple of decrypting and pattern-recognition specialists out there,’ Daley Suarez-Martin says. ‘Regrettably, they aren’t in the most politically stable of locations.’

  ‘So you don’t need me to try and find your Rosetta Stone. What do you need me for?’

  ‘On occasions we have received an incontrovertible, recognisable pattern.’

  ‘How many occasions?’

  ‘Three, on three successive frames. The date was July third, this year. This is the first.’

  Daley floats a big thirty by twenty glossy through the air to Lisa Durnau. Etched in the grey on grey is a woman’s face. The cellular automaton’s resolution is high enough to show her slight, puzzled frown, her mouth slightly open, even the hint of her teeth. She is young, pretty, racially indeterminate and the scuttling blacks and whites, frozen in time, have caught a tired frown
.

  ‘Do you know who she is?’ she asks.

  ‘As you can imagine, determining that is a primary priority,’ Daley says. ‘We’ve already interrogated FBI, CIA, IRS, Social Security and passport databases. No matches.’

  ‘She doesn’t have to be American,’ Lisa Durnau says.

  Daley seems genuinely surprised by that. She skims the next glossy to Lisa face down. Lisa Durnau turns over the sheet of paper and reaches instinctively for something not falling to cling to. But everything falls here, all together, all the time.