River Of Gods

by Ian McDonald

  The train rocks across points. The passengers sway like grain in the wind. Tal releases yts straphold and reels across the carriage. Yt pulls ytself up in front of the screaming front page. Newspaper girl folds to the top of her morning read down to stare at Tal, then gets back to the gossip about Test hero V.J. Mazumdar and his forthcoming celebrity wedding. The sub-head at the bottom of the page reads DEATHS IN PERVERT CLUB FIRE ATTACK.

  Varanasi City Station, the aeai announces over the din of radios and conversation. Tal spills out on to the platform, running ahead of the slow spreading stain of commuters. Time to mark and meditate on that headline later, when the shatabdi is up to speed and Varanasi a hundred kilometres behind yt.

  The escalator casts Tal up on to the main concourse. Yt’s already checked on yts palmer what’s going soonest out of here. The Kolkata Hi-Speed. Straight down the steel line to the States of Bengal. Patna and Nanak can wait. What Tal needs more than a new face is a new nation. The Banglas are civilised, cultured, tolerant people. Kolkata shall be yts new home. But the online booking is slow slow slow and the pile of bodies around the ticket office deadly. Unwanted newspapers lie scattered among the discarded mango-leaf bowls of aloo and dal on the concrete concourse. Ragpickers poke and sift. Any one of them would turn yt in for a fistful of rupees.

  Thirty minutes to train time.

  Again, the online booking is locked out. And the card ticketing machine have felt-markered Out of Service posters taped over their slots.

  Bloody Bharat.

  ‘Hey, hey there friend, you want to buy ticket right quick ?’ The tout is a barely-moustached youth in sports fashion, pressing close, do-a-deal intimate. He spreads a fan of tickets ‘Safe, sound. Reservation guaranteed. You look, you find your name on the bogie, no questions. We have a hack into the Bharat Rail system.’ A wave of a beat- up palmer.

  Come on come on. Yt’s not going to make it. Yt’s not going to make it.

  ‘How much?’

  Sports boy names a price that any other time, any other situation, would have made Tal laugh out loud.

  ‘Here, here.’ Yt presses a fan of rupees at the ticket tout.

  ‘Hey hey first things first,’ the boy says, leading Tal towards the platforms. ‘What train what train?’

  Tal tells him.

  ‘You come with me.’ He hustles Tal through the crowd around the chai stall where morning commuters sip their sweet, milky tea from tiny plastic cups. He slips a ticket blank into the palmer print slot, enters yts ID, thumbs a few icons. ‘Done. Bon voyage.’ He hands the ticket to Tal, grinning. The grin freezes. The mouth opens. A tiny ascot of red appears on the neck of his Adidas Tee. The red spreads into a soft gush. The expression goes from smug satisfaction to surprise to dead. The boy slumps on to Tal, a cry goes up from a woman in a purple sari, a cry taken up the whole crowd as Tal sees over the shot tout’s shoulder the man in the neat Nehru suit with the silenced black gun in his hand, caught between getting out after a botched job or taking a clear shot and finishing it here, now, in front of every one.

  Then out of the crowd comes a moped, twisting this way, that, horn blaring; a moped, with a girl on it, aiming straight at the gunman who hears and sees and reacts just that millisecond too late. He brings the gun around as the moped smashes into him. Screams. The gun spins out of his hand. The man in black reels across the platform, slams into the side of the train, slips down between the edge of the platform and the bogie, under the Kolkata Unlimited, on to the tracks.

  The girl spins her moped round to face Tal as the crowd rushes to the train to see what has become of the gunman. ‘Get on!’ she cries in English. A hand appears from underneath the bogie. Arms reach down to help it up. ‘If you want to live, get on the bike!’

  Any other option would be a greater insanity. The girl swings Tal around, yt slips on close and clinging behind her. She twists the throttle, tears away through the platform crowd, horn buzzing furiously. She runs off the end of the platform, steers the bouncing moped over the tracks and sleepers, cuts in front of a slow moving local, speeds along the litter-strewn verge, hooting at the pedestrians who use it as a commuter run.

  ‘I should introduce myself,’ the girl throws back over her shoulder. ‘You don’t know me, but I sort of feel I owe you.’

  ‘What?’ shouts Tal, cheek pressed against her back.

  ‘My name’s Najia Askarzadah. I got you into all this.’

  BANANA CLUB

  By eleven o’clock repeated police lathi charges have cleared the streets. Policemen chase individual karsevaks through the galis but they are just the rude boys, trouble boys who are always there for anything on their terrain. The alleys are too narrow for the fire engines so the brigade reels hoses along the streets, bolting them together into longer runs. Water sprays from the seams. Kashi residents peer enviously from their verandas and open storefronts. It is all too late. It is over. The old wooden haveli has fallen in on itself in a pile of glowing, clinking coals. All the firefighters can do is tamp it down and prevent it spreading to neighbouring buildings. They slip and fall on a slick of banana skins.

  The attack was thorough and effective. Amazing, the speed with which it caught and held. Dry as tinder. This drought, this long drought. Stretcher parties draw away the dead. Varanasi, city of burnings. The ones who fled out the front ran into the full wrath of the Shivaji. The bodies are strewn up the alley. One wears a car tyre around its neck, burned down to the steel wires. The body is intact, the head a charred skull. One has been run through with a Siva trident. One has been disembowelled and the gape filled with burning plastic trash. The police stamp out the flames and drag the thing away, trying to handle it as little as possible. They fear the polluting touch of the hijra, the un-sex.

  Hovercams and hand-helds come in for close ups, back in the live-feed studio the news editors read the footage and decide what stance to take: outraged liberal opinion or popular wrath at the hypocrisy of the Rana government. N.K. Jivanjee will issue a statement at eleven thirty. Newsroom editors love a story on the up-ramp. The cricket pulled out before the climax, the war has provided nothing but hours of armoured personnel carriers driving up and down the long curve of the Kunda Khadar dam; but this Rana sex scandal is spiralling out of control into charred bodies and street fighting. One shot in particular makes it on to all the morning bulletins; the poor blind lady, caught up by the rage with the side of her head smashed in by a club. No one can work out why she has a banana in her hand.

  LISA

  Beyond the dripping fringe of coconut thatch, the rain reduces the world to flux. Palms, church, the stalls along the road, the road itself and the vehicles that pass up and down it are shades of grey, washed out, liquid, running into each other like a Japanese ink painting. The truck headlights are wan and watery. Earth, river and sky are a continuity.

  In her shapeless plastic cape, Lisa Durnau can’t even see the end of the gangplank. In the next cabin Dr Ghotse crouches over the gas burner with a promise of chai and cheer. Lisa Durnau can leave the chai. She’s tried to get them to make it just with water and nix the sugar but it comes sweet and milky anyway. Iced would be ecstasy. Beneath her stifling rainsheet sweat clings to her. The rain cascades from the eaves.

  It was raining when she touched down at Thiruvananthapuram. A boy with an umbrella escorted her across the streaming apron to arrivals. Coach-class westerners dashed and cursed, jackets and newspapers held over their heads. The Indians just got wet and looked happy. Lisa Durnau has seen many types of rain; the steely grey rain of north eastern springs; the penetrating drizzle that blows for days on end up in the north west; the terrifying cloudbursts of the plains states that are like a waterfall opening in the sky, mothers of flash-floods and sheet erosion. Happy rain was new to her. The cab to the hotel had driven axle-deep through streets awash with floodwater and floating trash. The cows stood mired to the hock. Cycle rickshaws ploughed through the dancing brown liquid, throwing up beery wakes. She watched a rat swim across the t
axi’s path, brave head held high. Today as she dodged between the puddles to the gangplank she had seen a little girl swimming up the backwater, pushing a slim raft no more than three bamboo poles lashed together, a battered metal pot balanced on it. The girl’s hair was plastered to her skull like some sleek aquatic mammal but her face was radiant.

  The CIA briefing had neglected to tell her it was the monsoon in Kerala.

  Lisa Durnau does not like being a government spook. No sooner had the lightbody touched down on a pyre of plasma than the lessons began. She had her first briefing in the bus to the medical centre, still weak and achey from welcoming back gravity. She had not even time to change before they lifted her and threw her on the flight up to New York. At Kennedy she was briefed on embassy liaisons and security passwords in the limo to the vip suite. There a man and a woman in suits lectured her on the correct use of the location device inside one of the business centre mute fields. At the gate they presented her with a small valise of suitable clothing in her size. Then they shook hands gravely and wished her a pleasant trip and a successful mission. Lisa opened the case as the taxi drew up at the hotel. As she had feared. The sleeves on the T-shirts were all wrong and the underwear was simply unspeakable. Folded at the bottom were two elegant black suits. She half expected Daley Suarez-Martin to climb out of the minibar. The next day Lisa took her bottomless black credit card out to the bazaar and refilled the case for less than the price of a pair of Abercrombie and Fitch panties. Including wet-weather wear.

  ‘Yes, it is a marvellous thing to see,’ Dr Ghotse says. Lisa Durnau starts. She has let herself become hypnotised by the fingers of rain on the thatch. He stands with a cup of chai in either hand. It is as she feared but it indeed cheers her. The boat smells damp and neglected. She does not like to think of Thomas Lull ending up here. She cannot imagine it under any other climate than this endless white rain. She had read the Tantric symbols on the roof mats, noted the name in white on the prow: Salve Vagina. No doubt that Thomas Lull had been here. But she had been scared at what she would find: Lull’s things; Lull’s life beyond her, beyond Alterre; Lull’s new world. Now that she has seen how little there is, how poor and spare the three thatched cabins are, apprehension turns to melancholy. It is like he has died.

  Dr Ghotse bids her sit on one of the upholstered divans that run the length of the cabin. Lisa Durnau struggles out of her plastic sheet, leaves it dripping on the soft fibre matting. The chai is good, sensual.

  ‘Why, up in the black north they have gone to war over it. They are uncivilised people. Most caste ridden. Now, Miss Durnau; what is it you require from my good friend Thomas Lull?’

  Lisa Durnau realises there are two ways she can play this and every other similar scene. She can assume Lull has told his good friend Dr Ghotse about what he left behind, and who. She can take the line of her intelligence briefings and assume no one knows or can know anything.

  You’re in India now, LD.

  A chip of Schubert piano sonatas has worked its way down the side of the cushion.

  ‘I’ve been commissioned by my government to find Lull and pass information to him. If possible, I’m to persuade him to return to the US with me.’

  ‘What is this information you are asking?’

  ‘I’m technically not at liberty to disclose that, Dr Ghotse. Sufficient to say that it’s of a scientific nature and requires Lull’s unique insight to interpret.’

  ‘Lull. Is that what you called him?’

  ‘Did he tell you about me?’

  ‘Enough for me to be surprised that you are about your government’s business.’

  Look after it right. Stop them sticking fucking Coke banners on the clouds, he had charged her. The memory of Lull that night in the Oxford student bar is more fresh, more vital than this house he vacated so recently. She cannot feel him here, beneath this canopy of rain-sound. She imagines running through that rain, pushing like an otter through the blood-warm backwater like the little raft girl with her pewter pot. What have they asked you to become?

  Lisa Durnau takes out the datablock and thumbs it open. Dr Ghotse sits with his legs crossed at the ankles, his chai cup set on the low carved coffee table.

  ‘You’re right. This is the truth. You may not believe it, but as far as I know, it is true.’ She calls up the Tabernacle image of Lull.

  ‘That is Professor Lull,’ Dr Ghotse says. ‘It is not a very good photograph. Excessively grainy.’

  ‘That’s because that photograph was generated by an extraterrestrial artefact discovered by NASA inside an asteroid called Darnley 285. This artefact is known as the Tabernacle.’

  ‘Ah, tabernacle, the sanctuary of the Ark of the Covenant of the Hebrews.’

  ‘I’m not quite sure you heard what I said. The Tabernacle is a non-human artefact. It’s the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence.’

  ‘I heard you correctly, Miss Durnau.’

  ‘You’re not surprised?’

  ‘The universe is a very great place. The surprise would be if it were not so.’

  Lisa sets the block down on the table between the chai cups.

  ‘There’s something else I need you to understand. This asteroid Darnley 285 is extremely old. It’s older than the age of our solar system. Can you understand that?’

  ‘Miss Durnau, I am educated in both Western and Hindu cosmologies. It is indeed a wonder that an object has survived the destruction at the end of the Dwapara Yuga; perhaps even ages before that. This Tabernacle might be a remnant of the Age of Truth itself.’

  ‘The reason I want to find Thomas Lull, what I want to ask him is: why is his face inside a rock seven billion years old?’

  ‘That would be a question,’ Dr Ghotse agrees.

  The rain has found its way through the coconut thatch. A small but swelling drip gathers and bursts on the low table carved with entwined Tantric lovers. Monsoon above Lisa Durnau, below her, behind her, before her, dissolving the certainties of Kennedy, of New York, of the hypersonic transport. This rain, this India.

  The roar, the rain, the smell of sewage and spice and rot, the ceaseless chaos of the traffic, the burst dog half gone to black bones in the streaming gutter, the circling carrion-eyed kites, the peeling mould-stained buildings, the sweet stench of sugar-cane alcofuel and burning ghee from the puri vendors, the children pressing in around her, clean and fed but asking for rupee rupee, a pen a pen, the hawkers and vendors and fortune tellers and massage artists homing in on a white woman in the rain: the people. The people. Within a hundred metres of her hotel, Kerala felled her. The sounds, the smells, the sights and sensations combined into a massive attack on her sensibilities. L. Durnau the preacherman’s daughter. This was Thomas Lull’s world. She must meet it on Thomas Lull’s terms.

  She got her hair cut in the Ganga Devi Booti Salon by a blind hairdresser and only afterwards as she patted the short bob did she realise it was the style in the Tabernacle image. Seal of prophecy. She bought bottled water in the middle of the monsoon and her light, efficacious wet wear and had dozens of photographs of Thomas Lull copied from the datablock - which she was beginning to think of as the Tablet - at a print shop wedged behind a pipal tree hung with red and orange Brahmin threads. Then she began her investigation.

  The rickshaw driver looked about twelve. Lisa doubted such a scrawn could ever carry a passenger but he hung on her heel for three blocks, calling ‘hello, hello lady,’ as she wove between the umbrellas. She stopped him where the road narrowed at the fort gate.

  ‘You speak English?’

  ‘Indian, American or Australian, lady?’

  ‘I need boys who speak English.’

  ‘There are many such boys, lady.’

  ‘Here’s a hundred rupees. Come back with as many as you can in half an hour to that chai shop there and there are two hundred more for you. I need boys who can speak English and know everything and everyone.’

  He tucked the banknote into a pocket inside his Adidas pants, gave the wi
ggle of his head that Lisa had learned meant affirmation.

  ‘Hey! What’s your name?’ she shouted as he pulled into the traffic, bells chiming melodiously. He shot a grin back as he pedalled off through the swirling water.

  ‘Kumarmangalam.’

  Lisa Durnau installed herself in the chai shop and surfed into Alterre for the half hour. A week was literally an age at twenty thousand years per hour. Algal blooms in Biome 778 in the Eastern Pacific had generating a self-sustaining oceanic microclimate that created a wind reversal similar to RealEarth’s El Niño. The montane cloud-forests were dying; the complex symbiotic ecosystems of flowering trees, pollinating colonial birds and complex arborealsaurian canopy societies was coming apart. Within a couple of days a dozen species and a system of rare, poised beauty would have slipped into extinction. Lisa knew she should hold the Buddha-nature about Alterre; they were only virtual species competing for memory and power resources and a set of mathematical parameters in eleven million host computers, but she grieved for every extinction. She had proved the physical possibility of CyberEarth’s reality somewhere in the post-expansion polyverse. It was real death, real annihilation, real forever.