River Of Gods

by Ian McDonald

  Lack upon slack upon slop breeds lapse. It was scruffy maintenance and shoddy security that let the prisoner escape those other two times. That, and stealthy robots the size and agility of cockroaches.

  The security bot completes its check, stalks away into the shrubbery like some late Cretaceous hunter. Mr Nandha jerks the car forward to scare off the monkeys. He has a horror of one getting trapped in his wheel-arch. Lord High Masturbator takes a tumble from the bonnet. Mr Nandha peers to see if it has left a vile squiggle of monkey-jizz on the paintwork.

  When he was thirteen and hammered flat by hormones and doubt, Mr Nandha had entertained a fantasy about catching a sacred monkey, keeping it in a cage and slowly and excruciatingly breaking every one of its tiny, bird-like bones. He can still feel a glow of the joyous anger of that delight.

  A persistent few monkeys ride the Ministry Lexus all the way up the curving drive to the lodge. Mr Nandha kicks them away as he steps out on to the crunching red gravel and slips on his dark glasses. The white Mughal marble is dazzling in the afternoon light. Mr Nandha steps away from the car to enjoy the uninterrupted view of the palace. It is a hidden pearl, built in 1613 by the Shah Ashraf as a game retreat. Where hunting cheetahs rode atop howdahs and Mughal lords hawked over the marshes of Kirakat, now factory units and pressed-aluminium go-downs nudge up to the low, cool lodge on every side. But the genius of the architect endures: the colonnaded house remains enfolded, separate in its jungled gardens, unseen by any of them, unseeing in return. Mr Nandha admires the balance of the pillared cloister, the understatement of the dome. Even among the English Perpendicular and Baroque triumphs of Cambridge, he had still considered the Islamic architects the masters of Wren and Reginald of Ely. They built as Bach composed, strong and muscular, with light and space and geometry. They built timelessly and for all time. Mr Nandha thinks that he might not mind confinement in such a prison as this. He would have solitude, here.

  Sweepers bow around him, twig besoms busy as Mr Nandha goes up the shallow steps to the cool cool cool of the cloister. The Ministry staff greet him at the door; discreetly scanning him down with their palmers. Mr Nandha commends their thoroughness but they look bored. They are E01 civil servants but they did not join the Ministry to guard a mouldering pile of Mughal masonry. Mr Nandha waits for the warder to cycle the transparent plastic lock that sits like an ugly sex-toy yoni in the wall of exquisitely carved alabaster. The last security check lights green. Mr Nandha steps into the banqueting hall. As ever, he catches his breath at the white stone jalis, the banded masonry, the low generous spaciousness of the onion arches, the geometries of the azure roof tilings, the tall pointed windows shaded by fabric blinds. But the true focus of the room is not the radiant harmony of the design. It is not even the Faraday cage painstakingly woven into the fabric of the architecture. It is the transparent plastic cube that stands in the centre. It is five metres long and five metres high, a house within a house divided by transparent plastic partitions into see-through rooms, with transparent plumbing and wiring and chairs and tables and a transparent bed and a transparent toilet. In the midst of this transparency sits a dark, heavily bearded man, running to fat. He is dressed in a white kurta and is barefoot and reads a paperback book. His back is turned to Mr Nandha but hearing his footfalls on the cool marble he rises. He peers short-sightedly, then recognises his visitor and drags his chair to the transparent wall. He pokes the broken-backed paperback with a toe. He wears a transparent toe-ring.

  ‘The words still don’t move.’

  ‘The words don’t need to move. It is you who is moved by them.’

  ‘It is a very effective way of compressing a virtual reality experience, I’ll give it that. All this for one-point-four megs? It’s just so non-interactive . . .’

  ‘But it is different for everyone who reads it,’ says Mr Nandha.

  The man in the plastic cube nods his head, pondering.

  ‘Where’s the shared experience in that? So, what can I do for you, Mr Nandha?’

  Mr Nandha glances up as he hears the mosquito drone of a hovercam. It rolls its lens-eye at the plastic cage, climbs away towards the fantasia of the domed roof. Light falls in dusty shafts through the mullions. Mr Nandha takes the plastic evidence bags out of his jacket pocket, holds them up. The man in the plastic chair squints.

  ‘You’re going to have to bring them closer, I can’t see anything without my glasses. You could at least have left me them.’

  ‘Not after last time, Mr Anreddy. The circuitry was most ingenious.’

  Mr Nandha presses the bags against the plastic wall. The prisoner kneels down. Mr Nandha sees his breath mist the transparency. He gives a small, hushed gasp.

  ‘Where did you get these?’

  ‘From their owners.’

  ‘They’re dead, then.’

  ‘Yes.’

  J.P. Anreddy is a short, dumpy asthmatic in his mid- twenties with too little hair on his head and far too much around his soft jowls and he is Mr Nandha’s greatest professional triumph. He was Dataraja of the Sinha sundarban, a major station on the aeai underground railway when Awadh ratified the Hamilton Acts and outlawed all artificial intelligences above Level 2.0. He had made a cosmological amount of money rebranding high level aeais as low and faking their licence idents. Man-machine fusion had been his peccadillo, an extension of his one hundred and fifty kilos of mostly middle-body fat into lither, nimbler robot bodies. When Mr Nandha came to arrest him for licence violations, he had cut his way through charge after charge of service robots. He remembers the clicking plastic peds, conflates them with the little black monkey hands besieging his Ministry car. Mr Nandha shivers in the bright, warm, dust-fragrant room. He had run the dataraja down through his suite of chambers until Indra locked on to the protein matrix chips seeded across the underside of Anreddy’s cranium that allowed to interface directly with his machine extensions and fused them all with a single EM pulse. J.P. Anreddy had lain in a coma for three months, lost fifty per cent of his body mass and regained consciousness to find that the court had confiscated the house and turned it into his prison. Now he lived at the centre of his beautiful Mughal architecture in a transparent plastic cube where every move and breath, every mouthful and motion, every scratch and flea and insect crawling upon it could be monitored by the hovercams. He had twice escaped with the help of bug-sized robots. Though he could not longer control them by will alone, J.P. Anreddy had never lost his love for little scuttling sentiences. Here he would remain under house arrest until he expressed remorse for what he had done. Mr Nandha confidently expected he would die and rot in his plastic wrap. J.P. Anreddy genuinely had no comprehension that he had done anything wrong.

  ‘How did they die?’ the dataraja asks.

  ‘In a fire, on the fifteenth floor of . . .’

  ‘Stop. Badrinath? Radha?’

  ‘No one survived.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We have theories.’

  Anreddy sits on the transparent plastic floor, head bowed. Mr Nandha shakes out the medallions, holds them up by the chain.

  ‘You knew them then.’

  ‘Knew of them.’

  ‘Names?’

  ‘Something French, though she was Indian. They used to work at the University but got into the free world. They had a big-name project, there was a lot of money behind them.’

  ‘Have you ever heard of an investment company called Odeco?’

  ‘Everyone’s heard of Odeco. Everyone out in the wild, that is.’

  ‘Did you ever receive funding from Odeco?’

  ‘I’m a dataraja man, big and wild and fierce. Public enemy number one. Anyway, I wasn’t their particular shade of blue sky. I was into nano-scale robotics. They were high-level aeai; protein circuitry, computer-brain interfaces.’

  Mr Nandha holds the amulets against the plastic. ‘You know the significance of this symbol?’

  ‘The riderless white horse, the tenth avatar.’

  ‘Kalki. The fin
al avatar that will bring the Age of Kali to an end. A name from legend.’

  ‘Varanasi is a city of legends.’

  ‘Here is legend for our times. Might Badrinath, with funding from this Odeco organisation, have been developing a Generation Three aeai?’

  J.P. Anreddy rocks back on his coccyx, throws his head back. Siddha of the scuttling robots. He closes his eyes. Mr Nandha lays out the amulets on the tiles in Anreddy’s full view. Then he goes to the window and slowly pulls up the blind. It folds up on itself in a wide concertina of sun-bleached fabric.

  ‘I will tell you now our theory about how they died at Badrinath. We believe it was a deliberate attack by a laser-armed drone aircraft,’ Mr Nandha says. He draws up the next blind, admitting the blinding sun, the treacherous sky.

  ‘You bastard!’ J.P Anreddy shouts, leaping to his feet. Mr Nandha moves to the third window.

  ‘We find this theory convincing. A single high energy shot.’ He crosses the room to the opposite set of mullions. ‘Through the living room window. A precision attack. The aeai must have targeted, identified and fired in a few milliseconds. There’s so much traffic in the air since the train incident no one is ever going to notice a drone slip out of its patrol pattern.’

  Anreddy’s hands are spread on the plastic, his eyes wide, scanning the white sky for flecks of betrayal.

  ‘What do you know about Kalki ?’

  Mr Nandha furls another blind. Only one remains. Buttresses of light slant across the floor. Anreddy looks in pain, a cyber-vampire burned by the sun.

  ‘They’ll kill you, man.’

  ‘We shall see about that. Is Kalki a Generation Three aeai ?’

  He takes the soft cotton cord of the last blind and hauls it in, hand over hand. A wedge of light expands across the tiles. J.P. Anreddy has retreated to the centre of his plastic cage but there is no hiding from the sky.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Kalki is a Generation Three aeai. It exists. It’s real. It’s been real and existent for longer than you think. It’s out there. You know what Generation Three means? It means an intelligence, measured on standard assessment scales, between twenty and thirty thousand times human baseline. And they’re only the start. These are emergent properties, man. Evolution is running a million times faster in there. And if they want you, you cannot run, you cannot hide, you cannot lie down and hope that they will forget about you. Whatever you do, they can see you. Whatever identity you take, they know it before you do. Wherever you go, they’ll be there ahead of you, waiting, because they’ll have guessed it before you even think it yourself. These are Gen Threes, man. These are the gods! You cannot license gods.’

  Mr Nandha lets the rant ebb before he collects the cheap, heat-tarnished Kalki amulets and returns them to their bags.

  ‘Thank you. I now know the name of my enemy. Good day.’

  He turns and walks away through the shafts of dusty white light. His heels resound on the fine Islamic marble. Behind him he hears the soft woof of fists on flexible transparent plastic, Anreddy’s voice, distant and muffled.

  ‘Hey, the blinds man! Don’t leave me, don’t leave the blinds! Man! The blinds! They can see me! Fuck you, they can see me! The blinds!’

  VISHRAM

  He has a desk big enough to land a fighter on. He has a top-level wood and glass office. He has an executive elevator and an executive washroom. He has fifteen suits made to the same design and fabric as the one he wore when he inherited his empire, with matching hand-tooled shoes. And he has for his personal assistant Inder who has the disconcerting ability to be physically in front of him and at the same time manifesting herself on his desk-top organiser and as a ghost in his visual cortex. He’s heard about these corporate PA systems who are part human, part aeai. It’s modern office management.

  Vishram Ray also has a raging Strega hangover and an oval of sunburn around his eyes where he looked too deep and too long into another universe.

  ‘Who are these people?’ asks Vishram Ray.

  ‘The Siggurdson-Arthurs-Clementi Group,’ says Inder-on-the-carpet while Inder-in-the-desk opens her lotus-hands to show him a schedule and Inder-in-the-head dissolves into mugshots of well-fed white men with good suits and better dentistry. Inder-on-the-carpet has a surprisingly deep voice for someone so very Audrey Hepburn. ‘Ms Fusco will brief you further in the car. And Energy Secretary Patel has requested a meeting, as has the Shivaji’s energy spokeswoman. They both want to know your plans for the company.’

  ‘I don’t even know them myself, but the Honourable Secretary will be the first to find out.’ Vishram pauses at the door. All three Inders wait inquiringly. ‘Inder, would it be possible to move this whole office right out of Ray Tower, to the Research Facility?’

  ‘Certainly, Mr Ray. Is it not to your satisfaction?’

  ‘No, it’s a lovely office. Very . . . business-like. I just feel a bit . . . close to the family. My brothers. And while we’re at it, I’d like to move out of the house. I find it a bit . . . oppressive. Can you find me a nice hotel, good room service?’

  ‘Certainly, Mr Ray.’

  As he leaves Inder’s alters are already pricing corporate removal firms and hotel penthouse suites. In the Ray Power Merc, Vishram savours Marianna Fusco’s Chanel 27. He can also sense that she is pissed at him.

  ‘She’s a physicist.’

  ‘Who’s a physicist?’

  ‘The woman I had dinner with last night. A physicist. I’m telling you this because you seem a little . . . snippy.’

  ‘Snippy?’

  ‘Short. Annoyed. You know. Snippy.’

  ‘Oh. I see. And this is because you had dinner with a physicist?’

  ‘Married physicist. Married Hindu physicist.’

  ‘I’m interested why you felt you had to tell me that she was married.’

  ‘Married Hindu physicist. Called Sonia. Whose paycheques I sign.’

  ‘As if that makes any difference.’

  ‘Of course. We’re professional. I took her to dinner and then she took me back to hers and showed me her universe. It’s small, but perfectly formed.’

  ‘I was wondering how you were going to explain the panda eyes. Is this a universe of sunbeds?’

  ‘Zero point energy, actually. And you have very elegant ankles.’

  He thinks he sees a shadow of a smile.

  ‘Okay, these people, how do I deal with them?’

  ‘You don’t,’ says Marianna Fusco. ‘You shake hands and you smile politely and you listen to what they have to say and you do absolutely nothing. Then you report back to me.’

  ‘You’re not coming with me?’

  ‘You’re on your own on this one, funny man. But be prepared for Govind to make Ramesh an offer this afternoon.’

  By the time he gets to the airport, Vishram’s forehead is starting to flake. The car drives past the drop off zones and the white zones and picking up zones and tow-away zones to the bizjet zone through the double barrier security gate on to the field up to a private executive tilt-jet perched on its engines and tail pods like a mantis. An Assamese hostess, immaculate in traditional costume, opens the doors, namastes like a flower budding and takes Vishram to his seat. He raises a hand to Marianna Fusco as the Merc pulls away. Flying solo.

  The hostess’s hand lingers as she checks Vishram’s seat belt but he doesn’t notice for then Vishram feels his belly and balls sag as the tilt-jet leaps into the air, puts its nose down and takes him up over the brassy towers of Varanasi. An ineluctable part of Vishram Ray registers the close presence of an attractive woman next to him but he keeps his face pressed to the window as the tilt-jet swoops in over the river temples and ghats and the palaces and havelis onto a course following Ganga Devi. The shikara of the Vishwanath temple dazzles gold. The hand on his thigh finally draws his attention as the engines swivel into horizontal flight and the pilot takes the aircraft up to cruising altitude.

  ‘I can get you some ointment for your forehead, sahb,’ says the per
fect, round face full in front of his like a moon.