River Of Gods

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Has somebody got a blanket or something?’ he asks as the soldier moves them through the line of cars. A foil space-blanket unfolds from somewhere, Thomas Lull pulls it around Aj’s shoulders. The soldier backs away; he has seen aeai strike helicopters and fought robots, but this scares him. You do well, Thomas Lull thinks as he guides Aj towards the laager of troop carriers. We would all do well.

  MR NANDHA

  Each of the five bodies has its fists raised. Mr Nandha has seen enough death by fire to understand that it is a thing of biology and temperature but an older, pre-Enlightenment sensibility sees them fighting swirling djinns of flame. It would have been demonic at the end. The apartment is still sooty with floating polycarbon ash, drifts of vaporised computer casing. When they settle on Mr Nandha’s skin they smear to the softest, darkest kohl. It takes a temperature of over a thousand degrees to reduce plastic to pure carbon soot.

  Varanasi, city of cremations.

  The morgue crew zip black bags shut. Sirens from the street; the firefighters pulling out. The scene is now in the hands of the law agencies, last of which is the Ministry. SOCO boys brush past Mr Nandha, recording videos on their palmers. He is trespassing on another’s bailiwick. Mr Nandha has his own comfortable methodology and for him simple observation and the application of imagination yield insights and intuitions police procedural might never apprehend.

  The first sense the crime assails is smell. He could smell the burned meat, the oily, sweet choke of melted plastic from the lobby. The stench so overpowers all other senses that Mr Nandha must focus to extract information from it. He opens his nostrils for hints, contradictions, subtle untogethernesses that might suggest what has happened here. An electrical fault among all the computers, the fire investigation officer had immediately suggested. Can he pick that unmistakable prickle of power out of the mix?

  Sight is the second sense. What did he see when he entered the crime locus? Double doors forced open by fire department hydraulics, the outer the standard apartment block fascia door; the inner, heavy green metal, dogged and barred, the latches warped by fire service jacks. They could not open the door ? They trapped themselves in their own security? The paint is seared from the inside of the inner door, blackened raw metal. Proceed. The short lobby, the main lounge, the bedrooms they had been using as their memory farm. Kitchen; skeletons of cupboards and racks on the wall, melamine peeled away but the woodchip intact. Chipboard survives. Ash and blackness, one thing fused into another. The windows have blown inwards. A pressure drop? The fire must almost have exhausted itself. It would have burned smoky and black. They would have asphyxiated before the windows blew and fresh oxygen kindled the fire djinn. Melted stubs of computer drives flow into each other. Vikram will rescue what is rescueable.

  Hearing. Three thousand people in this apartment pile yet the quiet on the fire floor is absolute. Not even the chirp of a radio left burbling. The firemen have withdrawn their cordon but residents are reluctant to return to their homes. There are rumours that the blaze was a revenge attack by the Awadhis for the shatabdi massacre. The neighbours on either side only knew what was happening when the wall grew hot and the paint started to blister.

  Touch. The greasy, coagulating smut of soot in the air. A black floating cobweb settles on to Mr Nandha’s sleeve. He goes to wipe it, then remembers that it is ten per cent human fat.

  Taste, the fifth test. Mr Nandha has learned the technique from cats, a flaring of the nostrils, a slight opening of the mouth, a rasping of the air across the palate. It is no elegance but it works for little hunters and Krishna Cops.

  ‘Nandha, whatever are you doing?’ Chauhan the State Pathologist bags up the penultimate corpse and slaps the despatch notice on the plastic sack.

  ‘A few preliminaries. Have you anything for me yet?’

  Chauhan shrugs. He is a big bear of a man with the callous joviality of those who work among the inner doings of the violently killed.

  ‘Call by me this afternoon, I may have something for you by then.’

  Vaish, the police inspector in charge, looks up, disapprovingly, at the trespass.

  ‘So, Nandha,’ Chauhan says as he steps back and his white-suit team lift the bag on to the stretcher. ‘I hear your good woman is rebuilding the hanging gardens of Babylon. She really must be missing the old village.’

  ‘Who is saying this?’

  ‘Oh, it’s all the word,’ Chauhan says, noting down comments on the fourth victim. ‘Doing the rounds after the Dawar’s party. This one’s a woman. Interesting. So, green fingers then, Nandha?’

  ‘I am having a roof-top retreat constructed, yes. We’re thinking of using it for entertainments, dinners, social get-togethers. It’s quite the thing in Bengal, roof gardens.’

  ‘Bengal? They’ve all the fashions, there.’ Chauhan regards himself as Mr Nandha’s equal in intellect, education, career and standing; everything but wedlock. Mr Nandha married within jati. Chauhan married below sub-caste.

  Mr Nandha frowns at the ceiling.

  ‘I presume this place would have a halon fire extinguisher system as a matter of course?’

  Chauhan shrugs. Inspector Vaish stands up. He understands.

  ‘Have you found anything that looks like a control box?’ Mr Nandha asks.

  ‘In the kitchen,’ the inspector answers. The box is under the sink beside the U-bend, the most inconvenient place. Mr Nandha rips off the seared cupboard door, squats down and shines his pencil torch all around. These people used a lot of multi-surface cleaner. All those hard cases, Mr Nandha presumes. The heat has penetrated even this safe cubby, loosening the plumbing solder and sagging the plastic cover. A few turns of the multitool unscrews it. The service ports are intact. Mr Nandha plugs in the avatar box and summons Krishna. The aeai balloons beyond the tight constraints of the under-sink cupboard. The god of little domesticities. Inspector Vaish crouches beside him. Where before he had radiated spiky resentment, he now seems in mild awe.

  ‘I’m accessing the security system files,’ Mr Nandha explains. ‘It will take no more than a few moments. Ironic; they’ll protect their memory farm with quantum keys but the extinguisher system is a simple four digit pin. And that,’ he says as the command lines scroll up on his field of vision, ‘seems to have been their downfall. Do we have an estimated time of the fire?’

  ‘The oven timer is stopped at seven twenty two.’

  ‘There’s a command from the insurance company - it’s certainly false - logged at seven oh five shutting down the halon gas system. It also activated the door locks.’

  ‘They were sealed in.’

  ‘Yes.’ Mr Nandha stands up, brushes himself down, noting with distaste the soft black smears of ten per cent human fat where floating soot has gravitated on to him. ‘And that makes it murder.’ He folds his avatars back into their box. ‘I shall return to my office to prepare an initial scene of crime report. I’ll need the most intact of the processors in my department before noon. And Mr Chauhan.’ The pathologist looks up from the last corpse, burned down to bones and a grin of bloody white teeth in black char. He knows those teeth; Radhakrishna’s impudent monkey-grin. ‘I will call on you at three and I expect you to have something for me by then.’

  He imagines the SOCO’s smile as he quits the incinerated shell of the Badrinath sundarban. Like him, they have neither the money nor the patience to marry in jati.

  At breakfast the talk had all been of the Dawar’s reception.

  ‘We must have one,’ Parvati said, bright and fresh with a flower in her long, black hair and the Fifth Test burbling in male baritones behind her. ‘When the roof garden is finished, we’ll have a durbar and invite everyone and it’ll be the talk for weeks.’ She pulled her diary from her bag. ‘October? It should be looking best then, after the late monsoon.’

  ‘Why are we watching the cricket?’ Mr Nandha asked.

  ‘Oh that? I don’t how that came to be on.’ She waved her hand at the screen in the gesture for Breakfast with
Bharti. An in-studio dance-routine bounced upon the screen. ‘There, happy? October is a good time, it is always such a flat month. But it might seem a bit of an anticlimax after the Dawars, I mean, it’s a garden and I love it very much and you are so good to let me have it, but it is only plants and seeds. How much do you think it cost them to get a Brahmin baby?’

  ‘More than an Artificial Intelligence Licensing Investigations Officer can afford.’

  ‘Oh, my love, I never thought for a moment . . .’

  Listen to yourself, my bulbul, he thought. Babbling away, letting it fall from your lips and presuming it will be golden because you are surrounded by colour and movement and flowers every second of every day. I heard the society women you so envy and said nothing because they were right. You are quaint and open and say what is in your heart. You are honest in your ambitions and that is why I would keep you away from them and their society.

  Bharti on the Breakfast Banquette chattered and smiled with her Special! Morning! Guests! Today: Funki Puri Breakfast Specials from our Guest Chef, Sanjeev Kapur !

  ‘Good day, my treasure,’ Mr Nandha said pushing away his half-empty cup of Ayurvedic tea. ‘Forget those snobbish people. They have nothing we need. We have each other. I may be late back. I have a scene of crime to investigate.’ Mr Nandha kissed his beautiful wife and went to look at the incinerated remains of Mr Radhakrishna in his sundarban wedged unassumingly into a fifteenth floor apartment in Diljit Rana Colony.

  Dangling his damp tea-bag from its string, Mr Nandha looks out over Varanasi and tries to make sense of what he has seen in that charred apartment. The fire was savage but contained. Controlled. An engineered burn. A shaped charge? An infrared laser fired through the window?

  Mr Nandha flicks Bach violin concertos on to his palmer, sits back in his leather chair, puts his fingers together like a stupa and turns to the city outside his window. It has been an unfailing and unstinting guru to him. He scrys it like an oracle. Varanasi is the City of Man and all human action is mirrored in its geography. Its patterns and traumas have yielded insights and wisdoms beyond reason and rationality. Today his city shows him fire patterns. On any given day there will be at least a dozen coils of smoke from domestic conflagrations. Among the jostling middle classes the habits of bride-burning have been extinguished, but he does not doubt that some of those further, paler smoke ribbons are ‘kitchen fires’.

  You are safe with me, Parvati, he thinks. You can forever trust that I will not hurt you or tire of you, for you are rare, a pearl without price. You are protected from the sati of boredom or dowry envy.

  The military troopships cut down across the skyline in the same regular rhythm. How many lakhs of soldiers now? In the police cruiser he had scanned the day’s headlines. Bharati jawans had driven back an Awadhi incursion along the railway line into western Allahabad. Awadhi/American robots were attacking a sit-down demonstration blocking a Maratha shatabdi on the main-line from Awadh. Mr Nandha knows the reek of Rana spin, stronger than any incense or cremation smoke. Ironic that the Americans, engineers of the Hamilton Acts, chose to wage war through the machines they so mistrusted. If high-generation aeais ever gained access to the fighting robots . . .

  Mr Nandha’s fingers part. Intuition. Enlightenment. A movement at his side: a chai-boy whisks his used bag away on a silver saucer.

  ‘Chai-wallah. Send Vikram down here. Quick now.’

  ‘At once, sahb.’

  Military aeai counter-countermeasure gunships. Trained to fly down and assassinate cyber-war craft like hunting falcons. Armed with pulse lasers. The murder weapon is out there, cutting patrol arcs through the sacred city’s sacred airspace. Someone cut into the military system.

  Mr Nandha smells Vik before any other sense announces his arrival.

  ‘Vikram.’

  ‘How can I please you?’

  Mr Nandha turns in his chair.

  ‘Please get me a movement log of every military aeai drone over Varanasi for the past twelve hours.’

  Vikram sucks in his upper lip. He’s dressed in vast running shoes and pseudo-shorts hitting mid-calf today, with a cling- top someone of his carbohydrate intake should never contemplate.

  ‘Doable. Why for?’

  ‘I have an idea that this was no conventional arson. I have an idea that it was a sustained, high-energy infra-red laser pulse from a military aeaicraft.’ Vik’s eyebrows lift. ‘Anything on the source of the lock-down on the security system?’

  ‘Well, it didn’t come from Ahura Mazda Mutual of Varanasi. Its ass is well-covered but we’ll follow it home. We’ve got some initial data back from what we could salvage from Badrinath. Whatever it was they wanted gone, they took a lot of high-rental property out with it. We lost bodhisofts of Jim Carrey, Madonna, Phil Collins.’

  ‘I don’t believe it was bodhisofts, or even information they were after,’ Mr Nandha says. ‘I think it was the people.’

  ‘How come we’re the Aeai Licensing Department but it always ends up humans every time?’ Vikram says, bobbing on his big padded jog boots. ‘And next time you need me so badly, a simple message will suffice. Those stairs kill me, man.’

  But that would not be seemly for a Senior Investigator, Mr Nandha wants to say. Order, propriety, smudge-free suits; varna. On his tenth Holi his mother dressed them up as little Jedi with swirling robes and the new super-soaker guns from Chatterjee’s store, the ones with five separate barrels, Gatling-style and a different festival colour in each one. He had watched his younger brother and sister go through their moves in their hooded cloaks made from old sheets with their tubes of brightly coloured festival liquid, going zuzh, zuzh, zuzh as they cut down the forces of the dark side. He feels again the nausea of embarrassment, that they were expected to go in public in these humiliating rags, with these cheap toys, with everyone looking. That night he had crept from his room and taken the lot to Dipendra the nightwatchman’s brazier and fed them to the coals. His father’s fury had been terrible, his mother’s incomprehension and disappointment worse, but he bore the emotions and the privations stoically for he knew he had prevented a more terrible thing altogether: shame.

  Mr Nandha’s fingers scrabble for his lighthoek. He will call Parvati now, about that Brahmin baby talk, he will tell her what his opinion really is about those things. He will set her straight, she will know and there will be no more of this. He slides the ‘hoek over his ear, unconsciously adjusts the inducer and has the number up as an unexpected call comes through from outside.

  ‘Umph,’ says Mr Nandha, discommoded. It is Chauhan.

  ‘Here’s a novelty, me calling you. Something to show you, Nandha.’

  ‘It was an infra-red laser, wasn’t it?’ Mr Nandha says as he walks into the morgue. The bodies are laid on ceramic tables, black, shrivelled mummy-corpses and snapping teeth.

  ‘Well guessed,’ says jolly, brutal Chauhan in his morgue greens with his demure forensic nurses around him. ‘Short, high-intensity burst from a high-power infra-red laser, almost certainly air-capable, though I wouldn’t rule out a lined-up shot from Shanti Rana Apartments opposite.’

  One body, more terribly charred than the rest, is a black stick opening into bare ribs and yellow thigh bones, truncated at the knee. The stench of burned hair, flesh, incinerated bone is worse in Ranapur’s pristine new city morgue than masked by the hydrocarbons and poly-carbonates of the apartment, but there is nothing in this clean, cool room that is ultimately unfamiliar or disturbing to a Varanasian.

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘I suspect he was by the window when the fireball blew in. He’s not the interesting one,’ Chauhan continues as Mr Nandha bends over the inhuman Y-shape of the Darwinware pirate. ‘These ones. Nothing to identify them of course - I’ve only had an initial poke around - but this one was male, this one female. The male is European, anywhere from Palermo to Paris, the female is South Indian-Dravidian. I get the feeling they were a couple. Interesting, the woman was born with a severe deformity o
f the womb - certainly nothing functional. Good old police procedure’ll crack them eventually, but you might be interested in these.’

  Chauhan slides open a padded drawer and holds up two plastic evidence bags. In each is a small ivory pendant, charred and blackened. The motif is a white horse rearing on its back legs in a chakra circle of stylised flames.

  ‘Do you know what it is?’ Chauhan asks.

  ‘Kalki,’ Mr Nandha says. He lifts a disc and holds it to the light. The work is very fine. ‘The tenth and final incarnation of Vishnu.’

  Veritable shitfuls of holy monkeys pour off the trees and come loping on their soft knuckles to greet the Ministry Lexus as it draws up outside the old Mughal hunting palace. The bot steps out of the scrub rhododendrons to scan the driver’s credentials. The staff has let the gardens go to weed and wild again. Few gardeners pass the security vetting and those that do don’t work long for Ministry money. The machine squats down in front of the car, drawing a line on Mr Nandha with its arm-turret. Its left-leg piston vents intermittently, giving it a lopsided bob as it interrogates the clearances. Maintenance slipping also. Mr Nandha purses his lips as the monkeys swarm the car, prying for crannies with their mannikin fingers. They remind him of the hands of the burned corpses in Chauhan’s clean morgue, those black, withered fists. A langur perched over the radiator like a hood ornament masturbates furiously as the St Matthew Passion swirls around Mr Nandha.