River Of Gods

by Ian McDonald

  He’s changed his glasses, trimmed the beard to a rim of stubble; he’s grown out his hair and lost a pile of weight but the little grey cells have captured the sardonic, self-conscious, get-that-camera-away-from-me look. Thomas Lull.

  ‘Oh my good God,’ she breathes.

  ‘Before you say anything, please look at this last image.’

  Daley Suarez-Martin sets the final photograph floating, framed in space.

  Her. It is her face, drawn in silver but clear enough to make out the love spot on her cheek, the laugh-lines around the eyes, a shorter, sportier haircut, the open mouthed, eyes-wide, muscle-straining expression she cannot quite read: fear? Anger? Horror? Ecstasy? It is impossible and unbelievable and mad; it is mad beyond madness, and it is her. Lisa Leonie Durnau.

  ‘No,’ Lisa says slowly. ‘You’re making this up, it’s the drugs, isn’t it? I’m still on the shuttle. This is out of my head, isn’t it? Come on, tell me.’

  ‘Lisa, can I assure you that you are not suffering from any post-flight delusions. I’m not showing you fakes or mockups. Why should I? Why bring you all the way up here to show you fake photographs?’

  That soothing tone. That G-woman MBA-speak. Peace. Be calm. We are in control here. Be reasonable, in the face of the most unreasonable thing in the universe. Clinging with one hand to a webbing strap on the quilted wall of ISS’s hub, Lisa Durnau understands that it has all been unreasonable, a chain of ever larger and heavier links, from the moment the people in suits turned up in her office. From before; from the moment her face swirled out of the seethe of cells, without her knowledge, without her permission, the Tabernacle chose her. It has all been foreordained by this thing in the sky.

  ‘I don’t know!’ Lisa Durnau shouts. ‘I don’t know why . . . it throws up nothing and then comes up with my face. I don’t know, right? I didn’t ask it to, I didn’t want it to, it has nothing to do with me, do you understand me?’

  ‘Lisa.’ Again, the gentling tone.

  It is her, but a her she has never seen. She’s never worn her hair like that. Lull has never looked like that. Older freer guiltier. No wiser. And this girl; she has never met her, but she will, she knows. This is a snapshot of her future taken seven billion years ago.

  ‘Lisa,’ Daley Suarez-Martin says a third time. The third time is Peter’s time. The betraying time. ‘I’m going to tell you what we need you to do.’

  Lisa Durnau takes a deep breath.

  ‘I know what it is,’ she says. ‘I’ll find him. I can’t do anything else, can I?’

  The earth has the little lightbody firmly in its grip. It’s three minutes - Lisa’s been counting seconds - since the roll jets last fired. The aeai has made its mind up, it is all now in the hands of velocity and gravity. Back-first, Lisa Durnau screams along the edge of the atmosphere in a thing that still looks like an overgymmed orange squeezer, only now, with the hull temperature climbing towards three thousand cee, it’s not as funny as it was down in Canaveral. One digit out either way and thin air becomes a solid wall that ricochets you off into space and no one to catch you before your airco runs flat, or you fireball out and end as a sprinkle of titanium ions with a seasoning of charred carbon.

  When she was a teen in her college hall room, Lisa Durnau had given herself one of the great scares of her life, alone in the dark among the noisy plumbing, by imagining what it will be like when she dies. The breath failing. The rising sense of panic as the heart fights for blood. The black drawing in from all sides. The knowledge of what is happening, and that you are unable to stop any of this and that after this meagre, unworthy last instance of consciousness, there will be nothing. And that this will happen to Lisa Durnau. No escape. No let- off. The death sentence is incommutable. She had woken herself up, frozen cold in her stomach, heart sick with certainty. She had stabbed on her light and tried to think good thoughts, bright thoughts, thoughts about guys and running and what she would do for that term paper and where the girls could go for Friday lunch club but her imagination kept returning to the awful, delicious fear, like a cat to vomit.

  Re-entry is like that. She tries to think good thoughts, bright thoughts, but all she has is a pick of evils and the worst is out there, heating the hull beyond that padded mesh wall to cremation temperatures. It burns through the drugs. It burns through everything. You are the woman who fell to earth. The lightbody jolts. Lisa gives a small cry.

  ‘It’s okay, it’s routine, just an asymmetry in the plasma shield.’ Sam Rainey is strapped in the number two acceleration couch. He’s an old hand, been up and down a dozen times but Lisa Durnau smells bullshit. Her fingers have cramped around the arm-rest; she flexes them, touches her heart for brief reassurance. She feels the flat square object in the pocket with her name written on it.

  When she finds Thomas Lull she is to show him the contents of her right breast pocket. It is a memory block containing everything known or speculated about the Tabernacle. All she has to do then is persuade him to join the research project. Thomas Lull was the most prominent, eclectic, visionary and influential scientific thinker of his day. Governments and chat-show hosts alike heeded his opinions. If anyone has an idea, a dream or a vision of what this thing is, spinning in its stone cocoon, if anyone has a way of unravelling its message and meaning, it will be Thomas Lull.

  The block is also a guru. Its special power is that it can scan any public or security camera system for recognised faces. It’s such a piece of gear that if it’s away from Lisa Durnau’s personal body odour for more than an hour, it will decompose into a smear of protein circuitry. Be careful with the showers, swims and keep it close by you when you’re in bed, is the instruction. Her one lead is a semi-confirmed sighting of Thomas Lull three and a half years ago in Kerala, South India. The revelation of the Tabernacle hangs from a single, uncorroborated old backpacker story. The embassies and consuls are on Render-All-Assistance alert. A card has been authorised for expenses; it is limitless, but Daley Suarez-Martin, who will always be Lisa Durnau’s handler, in orbit or earthbound, would like some record of outgoings.

  The little lightpusher hits the air hard, a fist of gravity shoves Lisa Durnau deep into her gel couch and everything is jolting and rattling and shaking. She is more afraid than she has ever been and there is nothing, absolutely nothing she can hold on to. She reaches out a hand. Sam Rainey takes it. His gloved hand is big and cartoonish and one tiny node of stability in a falling, shuddering universe.

  ‘Some time!’ Sam shouts, voice shaking. ‘Some time! When we! Get down! How about! We go out! For a meal! Somewhere?’

  ‘Yes! Anything!’ Lisa Durnau wails as she hurtles Kennedy-wards, drawing a long, beautiful plasma trail across the tall-grass prairies of Kansas.

  LULL

  How Thomas Lull knows he is un-American: he hates cars but loves trains, Indian trains, big trains like a nation on the move. He is content with the contradiction that they are at once hierarchical and democratic, a temporary community brought together for a time; vital while it lasts, burning away like early mist when the terminus is reached. All journey is pilgrimage and India is a pilgrim nation. Rivers, grand trunk roads, trains; these are sacred things across all India’s many nations. For thousands of years people have been flowing over this vast diamond of land. All is riverrun, meeting, a brief journey together, then dissolution.

  Western thought rebels against this. Western thought is car thought. Freedom of movement. Self-direction. Individual choice and expression and sex on the back seat. The great car society. Throughout literature and music, trains have been engines of fate, drawing the individual blindly, inexorably towards death. Trains ran through the double gates of Auschwitz, right up to the shower sheds. India has no such understanding of trains. It is not where the unseen engine is taking you; it is what you see from the window, what you say to your fellow travellers for you all go together. Death is vast, a crowded terminus of half-heard announcements and onward connections on new lines, new journeys. Changing trains.
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  The train from Thiruvananthapuram moves through a wide web of lines into the great station. Sleek shatabdis weave over the points on to the fast uplines. Long commuter trains whine past festooned with passengers hanging from the doors, riding the boarding steps, piled onto the roofs, arms thrust through the barred windows, prisoners of the mundane. Mumbai. She has always appalled Thomas Lull. Twenty million people live on this one-time archipelago of seven scented islands and the evening rush is upon her. Downtown Mumbai is the world’s largest single building; malls and housing projects and office and leisure units fused together into a many-armed, many-headed demon. Nestled at the heart of it is Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus, a bezoar of Victorian excess and arrogance, now completely domed over with shopping precincts and business units, like a toad entombed in a nodule of limestone. There is never a moment when Chattrapati Shivaji is still or silent. She is a city within a city. Certain castes boast they are unique to it; families claim to have raised generations among the platforms and tracks and red brick piers who have never seen daylight. Five hundred million pilgrim feet pass over the Raj marble each year, tended to by citiesful of porters, vendors, shysters, insurance sellers and janampatri readers.

  Lull and Aj descend among the families and luggage onto the platform. The noise is like a mugging. Timetable announcements are inaudible blasts of public address roar. Porters converge on the white faces; twenty hands reach for their bags. A skinny man in a red MarathaRail high-collar jacket lifts Aj’s bag. Quick as a knife, her hand stabs out to arrest him. She tilts her head, looks into his eyes.

  ‘Your name is Dheeraj Tendulkar, and you are a convicted thief.’

  The ersatz porter recoils as if snake-bit.

  ‘We’ll carry our own.’ Thomas Lull takes Aj by the elbow, guides her like a bride through the press of faces and smells. Her gaze darts from face to face to face in the torrent of people.

  ‘The names. All the names; too many to read.’

  ‘I still can’t understand this gods thing,’ he says.

  The red-jackets have gathered around the rogue. Raised voices, a cry.

  There is an hour’s wait until the Bharat shatabdi. Thomas Lull finds haven in a global coffee franchise. He pays Western prices for a cardboard bucket with a wooden stirrer. There is a tightening in his chest, the asthmatic’s somatic reaction to this claustrophobic, relentless city beneath a city. Through the nose. Breathe through the nose. The mouth for talking.

  ‘This is very bad coffee, don’t you think?’ Aj says.

  Thomas Lull drinks it and says nothing and watches the trains come and go and the people mill through on their pilgrimages. Among them, a man bound for the last place a man of his age and sentiments should go, a dirty little water war. But it’s mystery, allure, it’s mad stuff and reckless deeds when all you expect to feel is the universal microwave background humming through your marrow.

  ‘Ai, show me that photograph again. There’s something I need to tell you.’

  But she is not there. Aj moves through the crowd like a ghost. People part around her, staring. Thomas Lull throws cash on the table, dives after her, waving down a couple of porters to heft the bags.

  ‘Aj ! Our train is over here!’

  She moves on, unhearing. She is the Madonna of Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus. A family sits on a dhuri underneath a display board drinking tea from thermos flasks: mother, father, grandmother, two girls in their early teens. Aj walks towards them, unhurried, unstoppable. One by one they look up, feeling the whole attention of the station turned upon them. Aj stops. Thomas Lull stops. The porters trotting behind him stop. Thomas Lull feels, at some quantum level, every train and luggage van and shunter stop, every passenger and engineer and guard freeze, every signal and sign and notice board halt between the flip and the flop. Aj squats down before the frightened family.

  ‘I have to tell you, you are going to Ahmedabad, but he will not be there to meet you. He is in trouble. It is bad trouble, he has been arrested. The charge is serious; theft of a motorbike. He is being held in Surendranagar District police station, number GBZ16652. He will require a lawyer. Azad and Sons is one of the most successful Ahmedabad criminal law practices. There is a quicker train you can catch in five minutes from platform 19. It requires a change at Surat. If you hurry you can still catch it. Hurry!’

  Lull seizes her arm. Aj turns; he sees emotions in her eyes that frighten him but he has broken the moment. The terrified family are in various states of alarm; father fight, mother flight, grandmother hands raised in praise, daughters trying to gather up the tea things. A hot wet stain of spilled chai spreads across the dhuri.

  ‘She is right,’ Thomas Lull calls as he drags Aj away. Now she is unresisting, leaden, like the ones he would escort from the beach parties, stumbling over the sand, the ones on the evil trips. ‘She’s always right. If she says go, you go.’

  Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus exhales and resumes its constant low intensity scream.

  ‘What the fuck were you thinking of?’ Lull says, hurrying Aj to Platform Five where the Mumbai-Varanasi Raj shatabdi has been called, a long scimitar of green and silver glistening in the station floods. ‘What did you tell those people? You could have started anything, anything at all.’

  ‘They were going to see their son but he is in trouble,’ she says faintly. He thinks she might collapse on him.

  ‘This way sir, this way!’ The porters escort them through the crowd. ‘This car, this car!’ Thomas Lull overpays them to take Aj to her seat. It’s a reserved two-person carrel, lamp-lit, intimate. Leaning into the cone of light, Thomas Lull says, ‘How do you know this stuff?’

  She will not look at him, she turns her head into the padded seatback. Her face is ash. Thomas Lull is very afraid she is going to have another asthma attack.

  ‘I saw it; the gods . . .’

  He lunges forward, takes her heart-shaped face between his two hands, turns it to look at him.

  ‘Don’t lie to me; nobody can do this.’

  She touches his hands and he feels them fall away from her face.

  ‘I told you. I see it like a halo around people. Things about them; who they are, where they’re going, what train they’re on. Like those people going to see their son, only he wouldn’t be there for them. All that, and they wouldn’t have known, and they would have been waiting and waiting and waiting at the station and trains would come and trains would go and still he wouldn’t come and maybe the father would go to his address but all they would know is that he went out that morning to work and that he’d said he would meet them all at the station and they’d go to the police and find out that he’d been arrested for stealing a motorbike and they would have to bail him and they wouldn’t know who to go to get him out.’

  Thomas Lull slumps in his seat. He is defeated. His anger, his blunt Yankee rationalism fail before this girl’s pale words.

  ‘This son, this prodigal, what’s his name?’

  ‘Sanjay.’

  Automatic doors close. Up the line a whistle shrills over the station roar.

  ‘Have you got that photograph? Show me that photograph, the one you showed me down by the backwater.’

  Silently, smoothly, the train begins to move. Station wallahs and well-wishers keep pace for a last chance sale or farewell. Aj unfolds the palmer on the table.

  ‘I didn’t tell you the truth,’ Thomas Lull says.

  ‘I asked you. You said: “Just other tourists on the trip. They’ve probably got a photograph exactly the same.” That was not the truth?’

  The fast electric train rocks over points; picking up speed with every metre it dives into a tunnel, eerily lit by flashes from the overhead lines.

  ‘It was a truth. They were tourists - we all were, but I know these people. I’ve known them for years. We were all travelling together in India, that’s how well we knew each other. Their names are Jean-Yves and Anjali Trudeau; they’re Artificial-life theoreticians from the University of Strasbourg. He’s French, she’
s Indian. Good scientists. The last time I heard from them they were thinking of moving to the University of Bharat - all the closer to the sundarbans. That was where they thought the real cutting research was being done, unhampered by the Hamilton Acts and the aeai licensing laws. Looks like they did, but they are not your real parents.’

  ‘Why is that?’ Aj asks.

  ‘Two things. First, how old are you? Eighteen? Nineteen? They didn’t have a child when I knew them four years ago. But that all falls at the second. Anjali was born without a womb. Jean-Yves told me. She could never have children, not even in vitro. She cannot be your natural mother.’

  The shatabdi bursts out from the undercity into the light. A vast plane of gold slants through the window across the small table. Mumbai’s photochemical smog has blessed it with Bollywood sunsets. The perpetual brown haze renders the ziggurats of the projects ethereal as sacred mountains. Power gantries strobe past; Thomas Lull watches them flicker over Aj’s face, trying to read emotions, reactions in the dazzling mask of gold. She bows her head. She closes her eyes. Thomas Lull hears an intake of breath. Aj looks up.