by Ian McDonald
‘Professor Lull, I am experiencing a number of strong and unpleasant sensations. Let me describe them to you. Though I am at relative rest, I experience a sense of vertigo, as if I am falling; not in a physical sense, but inwards. I experience a sense of nausea and what I can only describe as hollowness. I experience unreality, as if this present is not happening to me and I am dreaming in my bed in the hotel in Thekaddy. I experience a sense of impact, as if I have been struck without a physical blow being landed on me. I imagine that the physical substance of the world is frail and fragile like glass and that at any moment I will fall through into a void, yet at the same time I find a thousand different ideas rushing through my head. Professor Lull, can you explain my contradictory sensations?’
The swift sun of India is now setting, staining Aj’s face red like a devotee of Kali. The fast train blurs through Mumbai’s vast basti-lands. Thomas Lull says, ‘It’s what anyone feels when their life turns to lies. It’s anger and it’s betrayal and it’s confusion and loss and fear and hurt but those are only names. We have no language for emotions other than the emotion itself.’
‘I feel tears starting in my eyes. This is most surprising.’ Then Aj’s voice breaks and Thomas Lull helps her to the washroom to let the alien emotions work themselves out away from the stares of the passengers. Back at his seat he calls a steward and orders a bottle of water. He pours a glass, adds a high-grade tranq from his small but efficacious travelling apothecary and marvels at the simple complexity of the ripple patterns on its surface transmitted from the steel beat of the wheels. When Aj returns he pushes the trembling glass across the table before any more of her questions can tumble out. He has enough of his own.
‘All of it.’
The tranq is not long taking effect. Aj blinks at him like a drunk owl, curls up as cat-comfortable as she can in the seat. She is out. Thomas Lull’s hand moves to her tilak, stops. It would be a violation as monstrous as if he slipped his hand down the front of her loose grey tie-waist pants. And that is a thought he hadn’t verbalised until this second.
Strange girl, curled up like a gangly ten-year-old in her seat. He told her truths to scarify any heart and she treated them like propositions in philosophy. As if they were strange to her, new. Alien. Why had he told her? To break her illusion or because he knew how she would react? To see the look on her face as she fought to comprehend what her body was experiencing? He knows that fearful bafflement from the faces of the beach-club kids when emotions brewed up in the protein processor matrices of the cyberabads hit them. Emotions for which their bodies have no needs or analogues; emotions they experience but cannot understand. Alien emotions.
He has much work to do. As the fast train plunges past the empty, stepped reservoirs of the purifying Narmada, hurling itself into the night past the villages and towns and drought-blighted forests, Thomas Lull goes far-fetching. An old down-home expression of Lisa Durnau’s for blue-skying; sitting back and letting your mind roam the furthest bounds of possibility. It is the work he loves best and the closest heathen old Thomas Lull comes to spirituality. It is, he thinks, all of spirituality. God is our selves, our true, preconscious selves. The yogis have had it right all these millennia. The working out of the idea is never as thrilling as the burn of creation, the moment of searing insight when all at once, you know absolutely. He studies Aj as ideas tumble and collide and shatter and are drawn together again by intellectual gravity. In time they will coalesce into a new world, but there is enough for Thomas Lull to guess its future nature. And he is afraid. The train ploughs on, peeling a bow-wave of night from its streamlined prow as it eats two hundred and eighty kilometres of India every hour. Exhaustion struggles with intellectual excitement and eventually subdues it. Thomas Lull sleeps. He wakes only at the brief halt at Jabalpur as Awadhi customs make a perfunctory border check. Two men in peaked caps glance at Thomas Lull. Aj sleeps on, head cradled on arm. White man and western woman. Unimpeachable. Thomas Lull dozes again, waking once to shiver with an ancient, childhood pleasure at the rumble of the wheels beneath him. He falls into a long and untroubled sleep terminated by an untimetabled jolt that throws him out of unconsciousness hard against the table.
Luggage crashes from the overhead racks. Passengers in the aisles fall. Voices cry, merge into a jabber of panic. The shatabdi jars hard, jars again; comes to a screaming, shuddering halt. The voices peak and fall silent. The train sits motionless. The com crackles, goes dead. Thomas Lull cups his hands around his face, peers out of the window. The rural dark is impenetrable, enfolding, yonic. He thinks he sees distant car headlights, bobbing lights like torches. Now the questions start, everyone asking at once is everyone all right what happened?
Aj mumbles, stirring. The tranqs are more effective than Thomas Lull thought. Now he is aware of a wall of voices advancing down the train and with it a stench of burning polycarbon from the air-conditioning ducts. With one hand he snatches up Aj’s bag, with the other he drags her upright. Aj blinks thickly at him.
‘Come on, sleeping beauty. We’re making an unscheduled disembarkation.’ He pulls her, still quasi-conscious, into the aisle, seizes the bags and pushes her towards the rear sliding doors. Behind him the black picture window explodes in a spray of glass-sugar as a concrete block trailing a sling-rope bursts through. It bounces off the table, strikes a woman in the seat across the aisle. She goes down, spraying blood from a smashed knee. The press of fleeing passengers trip over her and fall. She is dead, Thomas Lull realises with a terrible, intimate chill. The woman, or anyone else who goes down in this surge.
‘Get the fuck moving!’ Thomas Lull bounces the dazed Aj down the aisle with slaps of his hands to her back. He glimpsed flames through the empty window; flames and faces. ‘Go go go.’ Behind them the jam is hideous. Low vanguards of smoke steal from the vents and under the uptrain carriage door. The voices rise to a chorus of dread.
‘To me! To me!’ roars a Sikh steward in railway livery standing on a table by the inner carriage door. ‘One at a time, come on, there is plenty of time. You. Now, you. You.’ He uses his passkey to turn the sliding door into a people-lock. One family at a time.
‘What the hell is going on?’ Thomas Lull asks as he takes his place at the head of the line.
‘Bharati karsevaks have fired the train,’ the steward says quietly. ‘Say nothing. Now, you go.’
Thomas Lull shoves Aj into the door section, blinks into the dark outside.
‘Fucking hell.’ A ring of fire encircles the small encampment of dazed, fearful passengers and their goods. Decades of working with the digits of cellular automata have made Thomas Lull skilled at estimating number from a single glance. There must be five hundred of them out there, holding burning torches. Sparks blow back from the front of the train; orange smoke, luminous in half light, is a sure signifier of burning plastics. ‘Change of plan. We’re not getting off here.’
‘What’s going on, what’s happening?’ Aj asks as Thomas Lull forces open the doors to the next carriage. It is already half empty.
‘The train’s been stopped, some Shivaji protest.’
‘Shivaji?’
‘I though you knew everything. Hindu fundamentalists. Who are pretty pissed with Awadh right now.’
‘You’re very glib,’ Aj says and Thomas Lull cannot tell if it is the end of the tranqs or the start of her weird wisdom. But the glow from outside grows stronger and he can hear the slam and shatter of objects hurled against the carcass of the train.
‘That’s because I’m very very scared,’ Thomas Lull says. He pushes Aj past the next door open on to the night. He does not want her to register the screams and the sounds he recognises as small-arms fire. The bogies are almost empty now, they plough their way through one, two, three, then the car staggers sending Thomas Lull and Aj reeling as a deep boom rocks the train. ‘Oh Jesus,’ Thomas Lull says. He guesses that a power car has exploded. A roar of acclamation goes up from the mob outside. Thomas Lull and Aj press on. Four carriages bac
k they meet a wide-eyed Marathi ticket inspector.
‘You cannot go on, sir.’
‘I am going on whether it’s past, over or through you.’
‘Sir, sir, you do not understand. They have fired the other end too.’
Thomas Lull stares at the inspector in his neat suit. It is Aj who pulls him away. They reach the inter-carriage lobby as smoke forces its fingers between the inner door seals. The lights go out. Thomas Lull blinks in darkness, then the emergency floor level lighting kicks in casting an eerie, Gothic footlight glow into the crannies and crags of human faces. The outer door remains fast. Sealed. Dead. Thomas Lull watches the smoke fill up the carriage behind the inner door. He tries to find purchase on the rubber seal.
‘Sir, sir, I have a key.’
The inspector hauls a heavy metal Allen key out of his pocket on a chain, fits it to a hex nut and begins to crank the door open. The inner carriage door is blackened with soot and beginning to buckle and blister. ‘A few more moments, sir . . .’
The door cranks wide enough for six hands to haul it open. Thomas Lull flings the luggage into the dark and himself after it. He hits awkwardly, falls, rolls on rocks and rails. Aj and the railwayman follow him. He pulls himself upright to see the interior of the carriage they have abandoned light startling yellow. Then every window detonates outwards in a hail of crumbed glass.
‘Aj!’ Thomas Lull shouts through the tumult. He has never heard noise like it. Screaming voices, wailing, a jagged tangle of cries and roars and language multilayered and shattered into incomprehensibility. Revving engines, a steady hammer of missiles. Children’s fear-stricken shrieks. And behind all, the sucking, liquid roar of the burning train, steadily consuming itself from both ends like vile incense. Hell must sound like this. ‘Aj !’
Bodies move everywhere in every direction. Thomas Lull has a sense of the geography of the atrocity now. The people flee from the head of the train, now a series of actinic detonations as electrical switchgear blows, where a deep line of men in white advances on them like a Raj army. Most are armed with lathis, some carry edged mattocks, hoes, machetes. An agricultural army. There is at least one sword, raised high above the horizon of heads. Some are naked, white with ash, naga sadhus. Warrior priests. All carry a scrap of red on them, the colour of Siva. Flames glint from missiles; bottles, rocks, pieces of smashed train superstructure hailing down on the passengers who crouch and scurry, not knowing where to look for the next attack, dragging bundles of luggage. Gunsmoke plumes up into the air. The ground is strewn with abandoned, burst baggage, shirts and saris and toothbrushes trampled and scuffed into the dust. A man clutches a gashed head. A child sits in the middle of the rush of feet, looking around in terror, mouth wide and silent with a terror beyond cries, cheeks glossy with tears. Feet trample a crumpled pile of fabric. The pile quivers, struck by hurrying shoes. Bones crack. Thomas Lull now senses a purpose and direction in the flight: away from the men in white, towards a low line of huts that has become visible as eyes adjust to the dark of Bharati countryside. A village. Sanctuary. Except a second wave of karsevaks runs from behind the burning rear of the train, cutting off the retreat. The stampede halts. Nowhere to run. People go down, piling up on each other. The noise redoubles.
‘Aj !’
And then she is there in front of him, like she’s come up off the ground. She combs glass crumbs out of her hair.
‘Professor Lull.’
He seizes her hand, hauls her back towards the train.
‘It’s all cut off on this side of the train. We’re going the other way.’
The two wings of attackers hook towards each other, closing a half-encirclement. Thomas Lull knows anything in that arena is dead. There is only a small gap to the dark, desiccated fields. The families flee into it, dropping everything and running for their lives. Ash swirls and storms in the updrafts from the train fire; Lull and Aj are now within missile range. Rocks and bottles start to clang off the carriages, shattering into glassy shrapnel.
‘Under here!’ Thomas Lull ducks under the train. ‘Watch out for this.’ The undercarriage is lethal with high voltage cables and drums of pressurised hydraulic fluid. Thomas Lull crawls out to find himself looking at a wall of car headlights. ‘Fuck.’ The vehicles are parked in a long line a hundred metres from the train. Trucks, buses, pick-ups, family cars, phatphats. ‘They’re right round us. We’re going to have to try it.’
Aj snaps her head up to the sky.
‘They’re here.’
Thomas Lull turns to see the helicopters roar over the top of the train, fast, hard, low enough to swirl the flames up into a fire tornado. They are blind insects, combat bots slung from their dragonfly thoraxes like eggs. They carry the green and orange yin-yang of Awadh on their noses. Counterinsurgency pulse lasers pivot in their housings seeking targets. Deep under Delhi, helicopter jockeys recline on gel beds watching through their pineal eyes, moving their hands a centimetre here, a flicker there to instruct the pilot systems. The three helicopters turn in the air above the parked cars, bow to each other in a robot gavotte and swoop down on their drop runs. Gunfire cracks out from beyond the line of headlights, bullets smack and white from the spun-diamond carapaces. From ten metres they release their riot control bots, then climb, spin and open up with the pulsers. The bots hit the ground and immediately charge. Cries. Shots. Men come running from between the cars into the open space. The helicopters lock on and fire. Soft bangs, dull flashes, bodies go sprawling, crawling. The pulse lasers flash the first thing they touch to plasma and pump it into an expanding shock wave, whether clothing or the ash-daubed skin of a naked naga. The karsevaks go reeling, stripped bare-chested by laser-fire. The counter-insurgency bots clear the vehicles in a leap like something from a Japanese comic and unfold their riot control shock-staves.
‘Down!’ Thomas Lull yells, shoving Aj face to the dust. The men flee but the springing bots are faster, harder and more accurate. A body crashes beside Thomas Lull, face scorched in second-degree sunburn. Steel hooves flash, he covers his head with his arms, then rolls to see the machines hurdle the train. He waits. The helicopters are still up there. He plays dead until they pass over, frail craneflies never intended for human occupancy. ‘Up! Go, now! Run!’ A prickle of suspicion on the back of his neck makes Thomas Lull look up. A helicopter turns a sensor cluster on him. A gatling pulser swings to bear. Then smoke billows between man and machine, the aeai loses tracking and the helicopter dips over the train, turrets stuttering laser fire. ‘Get behind the cars, down behind a wheel, that’s the safest place,’ Thomas Lull shouts over the tumult. Then they both freeze in their flight as the air between the cars seems to shiver and the wash of light from the massed headlights breaks into moving shards. Men in combat gear fade into visibility. Thomas Lull pulls his passport from his pocket, holds it high like an Old Time preacher of the gospel.
‘American citizen!’ he shouts as the soldiers slip past, their suits now camouflaged in mirror and infra-red. ‘American citizen! ’ A subadar with an exquisitely groomed moustache pauses to survey Thomas Lull. His unit badge bears the eternal wheel of Bharat. He casually cradles a multitask assault gun.
‘We have mobile units to the rear,’ the subadar says. ‘Make your way there. You will be cared for.’ As he speaks the helicopters reappear over the train, now half ablaze. ‘Go now, sir.’ The subadar breaks into a run; the lead helicopter locks its belly turret on to him and fires. Thomas Lull sees the officer’s uniform glow as it absorbs the laser, then the Bharati soldier brings his weapon to bear and fires off a Sam. The helicopter pulls up and peels away in a spray of chaff, the little missile zig-zagging after it, a line of fire across the night. A rain of tinsel the colour of burning shatabdi falls around Thomas Lull and Aj. Recognising a more potent threat, a squad of riot control bots has taken position along the top of the train attempting to hold off the Bharati troops with stun lasers and riot control chaff. The fire-light catches on the chromed joints and sinews. The humans take th
em one at time with EMP fire. As each bot tumbles from the train it releases a clutch of fist-sized sub-drones. They bounce, unfold into scurrying scarabs armed with spinning strimmer-wires. They swarm the soldiers; Thomas Lull sees one man go down and turns Aj away before the wire flays him to the bone. He sees the subadar kick one off the toe of his boot, raise his weapon butt and smash it to pieces. But there are always too many of them. That is the tactic. The subadar calls his men back. They run. The scarabs skitter after. Thomas Lull still clutches his passport, like a tract waved in the face of a vampire.
‘I think it will take more than that,’ the subadar says, snatching Thomas Lull by the arm and dragging him in his wake. Beyond the line of vehicles men with flamethrowers fade out of stealth into visibility. And Thomas Lull realises that Aj has slipped his grip. He yells her name. He does not know how many times this night he has called that name in that lost, crippled by fear tone. Thomas Lull tears himself away from the Bharati officer.
Aj stands before the scurrying, bounding line of combat bots. She goes down on one knee. They are metres, moments away, flay-wires shrilling. She raises her left hand, palm outward. The onslaught of robots halts. By ones, then by two, tens, twenties, they spin down their weapons, curl up into their transit spheres. Then a Bharati jawan darts in and whirls her away and the flame-thrower men open up, fire on fire. Thomas Lull goes to her. She is shivering, tearful, smoke-smeared with the strap of her small luggage still twisted in her hand.