by Ian McDonald
Aj runs her hand over her hair.
‘I am sorry for your trouble,’ Lawyer Nagpal says. ‘This is the second part of what they wished you to have.’ He presents the little jewel box for Aj to open. Thomas Lull smells sandalwood as she unfastens the brass catch.
‘My horse!’
Between her thumb and forefinger is the universal circle of the fiery chakra. Dancing in its centre, a white horse rears.
Beyond the cracking towers and tank farms of the East Bank the sky is obsidian, the curtain wall of a fortress ten kilometres high. From where he sits on the upper tiers of Dasashvamedha ghat, Thomas Lull can feel its pressure in his sinuses. Hazy yellow sun covers city and river. The wide sand shoals of the eastern shore where the nagas perform their asceticisms are white against the black sky. A flaw of wind chases marigold petals across Dasashvamedha ghat, sets the boats rocking on the river. Even in Kerala Thomas Lull never knew humidity like it. He imagines the heat, the humidity, the chemicals coiling around his airways, tightening.
The nose for breathing, the mouth for talking.
The mood in the city is tight, coiling. Heat and war. The anger of Sarkhand has boiled over into the streets. Burnings. Deaths. The nutes first; then the Muslims, as ever. Now Mahindra pickups ram-raid American fast food chains in the New Town and karsevaks pour alcofuel over blasphemous cow burgers. For the first time Thomas Lull feels self-conscious of his accent and skin.
The army officer had taken his passport and left him alone in the windowless storeroom in the small village medical centre that the Bharati Defence Forces were using to process refugees from the train attack. Thomas Lull sat on the metal chair under the single shadeless light bulb suddenly scared, suddenly naked while in the next room men made loud, rattling phone calls in Hindi about his passport. He had never consciously believed in the American grace, that that little booklet made him a global aristocrat, cloaked him with invulnerability, but he had held it up like a crucifix, caught between incomprehensible clashing forces. He had not thought that it might make him a player, at best a running-dog of hostile power, at worst a spy. Thomas Lull was three hours in the room while keypads rattled as army babus took down testimonies from a torrent of voices and women keened on the street outside. Then a chubby subaltern with a neat blue tilak down the centre of his tongue from licking the point of his pen ripped out dockets, stamped pages and handed Thomas Lull a rustle of papers, pink blue and yellow, and his solid black passport.
‘This is a travel permit, this is your temporary ID, this is your ticket,’ he pointed out with his pen. ‘The buses leave from the front of the Durga temple, your bus number is 19. May I express the regrets of the Bharati government for your hardships and wish you a safe onward journey.’ Then he beckoned with his pen to the women behind him in the line.
‘My travelling companion, a young woman, with a Vishnu tilak?’
‘All buses, all people in front of the temple. God-speed you sir.’
The subaltern flicked Thomas Lull off the end of his pen. The village street was lit by vehicle headlights. Thomas Lull walked between rows of bodies, laid out close as lovers to each other. By the time he was half way to the white buses the army had run out of body bags and the dead lay uncovered. He tried not to breathe in the stench of charred flesh. Army medics were already at work stripping out the corneas.
‘Aj!’ he shouted. Camera-flashes flickered, camera lights bobbed as news crews sought shots. Behind the forest of sound booms, satellite uplink trucks unfolded dishes like poppies blooming. ‘Aj !’
‘Lull! Lull!’ A pale hand waved from a bus window. The tilak caught the light. Lull pushed through the crowd, turning his back to cameras with American logos on them. ‘You were so long,’ she said as he piled down beside her.
‘They wanted to make sure I wasn’t an agent of a foreign power. What about you? I’d’ve thought, with that display . . .’
‘Oh, they let me go at once. I think they were afraid.’
The bus drove through the remains of the night and all the next day. Hours blurred into heat and flatness and villages with painted advertisements for water and underwear and the constant blaring of vehicle horns. What Thomas Lull saw were red-eyed corpses laid out on the village street and Aj on one knee, her hand outstretched and the enemy robots obeying.
‘I have to ask you . . .’
‘I saw their gods and asked them. That is what I told the soldiers. I do not think they believed me, but then they seemed afraid of me.’
‘Robots have gods?’
‘Everything has a god, Mr Lull. You just have to find it.’
At the next toilet stop Thomas Lull bought a newspaper to convince himself that all his shards of impression and experience were real memory. Bharati Hindutva extremists had attacked an Awadhi Rail shatabdi in a regrettable excess of patriotic zeal (the editorial said) but the brave jawans of the Allahabad division had driven back the savage and unjustified Awadhi retaliatory strike.
However liberal the westerner, there is always some part of India that shocks. For Thomas Lull it is this buried stratum of rage and hatred that can one day take a neighbour of a lifetime into his neighbour’s house to cut him open with an axe and burn his wife and children in their beds, and then, when it is all done and over, to go back to the neighbourly life. Even on the ghats amongst the worshippers and the dhobi-wallahs and the hawkers chasing the rag-end of the tourist trade, the mob is only a shout away. There is no explanation for it in his philosophy.
‘There was a time I thought I might work with the sundarbans,’ Thomas Lull says. ‘That was after I testified to the Hamilton Inquiry. They were right to be suspicious; half the idea behind Alterre was to set up an alternative ecosystem where intelligence could evolve on its own terms. I don’t think I could have stayed in the States. I like to think I’d have been tough and noble under persecution, like Chomsky in the Bush Wars but I’m a complete pussy cat when it comes to authority with guns. What I was scared of was being ignored. Writing and speaking and talking and not one blind soul paying attention to me. Locked in the white room. Shouting into your pillow. That’s worse than death. That’s what did Chomsky in the end. Smothered by inanity.
‘I knew what they had over here, everyone who did anything with aeai knew what they were hiding in their cyberabads. In the month before the Hamilton Act came into force they were pushing bevabytes of information out of the US. Washington had all the Indian states under incredible pressure to ratify the International Agreement on Artificial Intelligence Registration and Licencing. And I thought, they might at least have someone to speak for them, an American voice, making the other side of the argument.
‘Jean-Yves and Anjali wanted me to come - they knew that even if Awadh went with Washington the best they could ever get from the Ranas was a halfway house licensing deal to keep the soapis sweet. And then my wife walked out on me with half of my worldly goods and I thought I was together and sophisticated and cool and I was none of those things. I was the opposite of everything I thought I was. I was crazy for some time, I think. I’m not out of it yet. Jesus, I cannot believe they are dead.’
‘What do you think they were working on in the sundarban?’
Aj sits cross-legged on a wooden level where the priests celebrate the nightly puja to Ganga Devi. Devotees look long at her tilak, a Vaishnavite in the heart of Siva’s lordship.
‘I think they had a Generation Three in there.’
Aj toys with a twist of marigold petals.
‘Have we reached the singularity?’
Thomas Lull starts at the abstruse word falling like a pearl from Aj’s lips.
‘Okay mystery girl, what do you understand by singularity?’
‘Doesn’t it mean the theoretical point where aeais become first as intelligent as humans, then rapidly leave them behind?’
‘My answer is yes and no. Yes, there are undoubtedly Generation Three aeais out there that are every bit as alive and aware and filled with sense of self as I a
m. But they aren’t going to reduce us all to slavery or pethood or just nuke us because they perceive we’re in competition with them for the same ecological niche; that’s Hamilton’s thinking, and it’s not thinking at all. That’s the “no” part of the answer: they are intelligent but not as humans are intelligent. Aeai is alien intelligence. It’s a response to specific environmental conditions and stimuli, and that environment is CyberEarth, where the rules are very very different from RealEarth. First rule of CyberEarth: information cannot be moved, it must be copied. In RealEarth, physically moving information is a piece of piss; we do it every time we stand up, carrying this sense-of-self-ware around in our heads. Aeais can’t do that, but they can do one thing we can’t. They can copy themselves. Now, what that does to your sense of self, I don’t know, and technically speaking, I can’t know. It’s a philosophical impossibility for us to be in two places at the same time; not for aeais. For them, the philosophical implications of what you do with your spare copy when you move yourself to a new matrix is of fundamental importance. Does a complete self die, or is it just part of a greater gestalt? Already we’re getting into a completely alien mindset. So, even if aeais have hit the singularity and are racing away into IQs in the millions, what does that actually mean in human terms? How do we measure it? What do we measure it against? Intelligence is not an absolute thing, it’s always environment specific. Aeais don’t need to manufacture stock market crashes or set the nukes flying or trash our planetary web to put humanity in its place, there is no competition, these things have no meaning or relevance in their universe. We’re neighbours in parallel universes and as long as we live as neighbours we will live peacefully to our mutual advantage. But the Hamilton Acts mean we’ve risen up against our neighbours and are driving them into annihilation. At some point they will fight, like anything will when its back’s against the wall, and that will be a terrible, bitter battle. There’s no battle more terrible than when the gods fight and we are each other’s gods. We’re gods to the aeai. Our words can rewrite the appearance of any part of their world. That’s the reality of their universe; non-material entities that can unsay any part of reality are as much the fabric of it as quantum uncertainty and M-Star theory is of ours. We used to live in a universe that thought like that once; spirits and ancestors and everything was held together by the divine word. We need each other to maintain our worlds.’
‘Maybe there is another way,’ Aj says softly. ‘Maybe there doesn’t have to be a war.’
Thomas Lull feels a stir of wind on his face, a distant tiger-purr of thunder. It is coming.
‘Wouldn’t that be something?’ he says. ‘Wouldn’t that be a first? No no, this is the Age of Kali.’ He stands up, dusts wind-blown sand and human ashes from his clothes. ‘Come on then.’ He extends a hand to Aj. ‘I’m going to the Computer Science department at the University of Varanasi.’
Aj tilts her head to one side.
‘Professor Naresh Chandra is in today but you will have to hurry. You will forgive me if I do not accompany you, Lull.’
‘Where are you going?’ Spoken like a piqued boyfriend.
‘The Bharati National Records Office on Raja Bazaar Road is open until five o’clock. As other methods have failed, I feel a mitochondrial DNA profile will tell me who my real parents are.’
The rising wind ruffles her boy-short hair, flaps Thomas Lull’s pant legs like flags. Down on the suddenly choppy water rowboats swarm for shore.
‘Are you sure about this?’
Aj turns her ivory horse over and over in her fingers.
‘Yes. I have thought about it and I have to know.’
‘Good luck then.’ Without thought, against will, Thomas Lull hugs her. She is slight and bony and so so light that he fears he might snap her like glass rods.
Thomas Lull prides himself on possessing the male gift for visiting somewhere once and forever after being able to navigate infallibly around it. Which is how he is lost within two minutes of stepping out of the phatphat onto the dense green lawns of the University of Bharat Varanasi. It had been eighty per cent building site when Thomas Lull delivered his lecture to the nascent Computer Science department.
‘Excuse me,’ he asks a mali inexplicably wearing gumboots in the greatest drought in Bharat’s brief history. The clouds pile deep and dark behind the light, airy faculty buildings, flickering with edges of lightning. The hot wind is strong now, the electric wind. It could sweep this frail university up into the clouds. Let it rain let it rain let it rain, Thomas Lull prays as he runs up stairs past the chowkidar and through the double doors into the department office where eight young men and one middle- aged woman fan themselves with soapi magazines. He picks the woman.
‘I’d like to see Professor Chandra.’
‘Professor Chandra is unavailable at present.’
‘Oh, I have it on the highest authority that he is sitting there in his office. If you could just buzz him.’
‘This is most irregular,’ the secretary says. ‘Appointments must be made in advance through this office and written into the appointments diary before ten a.m. on a Monday.’
Thomas Lull parks his ass on the desk. He’s getting his thunderhead on him but knows that the only ways to deal with Indian bureaucracy are patience, bribery or rank. He leans over and palms on all the intercom buttons at once.
‘Would you be so good as to tell Professor Chandra that Professor Thomas Lull needs to talk to him?’
Up the corridor a door opens.
PARVATI
It had started at the railway station. The porters were thieves and gundas, the security checks a gross discourtesy to a respectable widow from a loyal village in a peaceable district, the taxi driver had banged her case manhandling it into the boot and when he did drive took the longest route and drove fast and dodged in and out of the buses to terrify an old woman up from the country and then after half frightening her to death demanded an extra ten rupees to carry her bag up all those stairs and she had to give it to him, she could never have managed with the lungs half-coughed out of her with the terrible fumes in this city. And now the chai the cook has given her has a sour tang, there is never good clean water in this city.
Parvati Nandha shoos the sullen cook away, greets her mother with proper daughterly fervour and has the sweeper carry her bags to the guest room and make all ready.
‘I will make you a proper cup of chai, and then we will go up on to the roof.’
Mrs Sadurbhai softens like a ghee sculpture at a mela.
The sweeper announces that the room is ready. As her mother goes to inspect and unpack, Parvati busies herself with the kettle and wipes and tidies and neatens any lingerings of her humiliation at the cricket match.
‘You should not have to do that,’ Mrs Sadurbhai says, pushing in beside Parvati at the kettle. ‘The very least you should expect from a cook is that she can make a cup of chai. And that sweeper is cheating you. An exceedingly lazy girl. The dust rabbits I found under the bed. You must be firm with staff. Here.’ She sets a garish packet of tea on the worktop. ‘Something with real flavour.’
They sit in the semi shade of the jasmine arbour. Mrs Sadurbhai studies the workmanship, then the neighbouring rooftops.
‘You are a little overlooked here,’ she comments, pulling her dupatta over her head. The evening rush has started, conversation competes with car horns. A radio blats chart hits from a balcony across the street. ‘It will be nice when it grows up a little. You will have more privacy then. Of course you cannot expect the kind of privacy you would get out in the Cantonment with full size trees, but this will be quite pleasant of an evening, if you’re still here.’
‘Mother,’ Parvati says, ‘why are you here?’
‘A mother cannot visit her own daughter? Or is this some new style in the capital?’
‘Even in the country it’s customary to give some warning.’
‘Warning? What am I, a flash flood, a plague of locusts, an air raid? No, I came bec
ause I am worried about you, in this city, in this current situation; oh you message me every day but I know what I see on the television, all those soldiers and tanks and aeroplanes, and that train burning, dreadful, dreadful. And I sit here, and I look up and I see these things.’
Aeaicraft patrol the edge of the monsoon, white wings catching the westering light as they bank and turn kilometres above Varanasi. They can stay up there for years, Krishan had told Parvati. Never touch the ground, like Christian angels.
‘Mother, they are there to keep us safe from the Awadhis.’
She shrugs.
‘Ach. That is what they want you to think, but I know what I see.’
‘Mother, what do you want?’
Mrs Sadurbhai hitches up the pallav of her sari.
‘I want you to come home with me.’