River Of Gods

by Ian McDonald

  ‘It is.’

  ‘One other thing. Marianna told me there was something I should ask you, that only you could answer.’

  ‘What is that question, Mr Ray?’

  ‘What is Odeco, Mr Chakraborty?’

  The boat-boy idles on his oars, letting the current carry the skiff past the burnings to the capsized temple of Scindia ghat, leaning into the cracked mud.

  ‘Odeco is one of a series of shell companies for the Generation Three Artificial Intelligence known informally as Brahma.’

  ‘I’m going to ask you that question again,’ Vishram says.

  ‘And you will receive the same answer.’

  ‘Come on, man.’ The Bengali might as well have said Jesus or James Bond or Lal Darfan. Chakraborty turns to Vishram.

  ‘What is it about my answer that you do not believe?’

  ‘Generation Three aeais, that’s science fiction.’

  ‘I assure you my employer is quite actual. Odeco is indeed a venture capital holding company, it just happens that the venture capitalist is an artificial intelligence.’

  ‘The Hamilton Acts, the Krishna Cops . . .’

  ‘There are spaces where an aeai may live. Especially in something like the international financial markets which demand loose regulation to exploit their so-called market freedoms. These aeais are not like our kind of intelligence at all; they are distributed, in many places at once.’

  ‘You’re telling me that this . . . Brahma . . . is the stock market, come to life?’

  ‘The international financial markets have used low-level aeais to buy and sell since the last century. As the complexity of the financial transactions spiralled, so did that of the aeais.’

  ‘But who would design something like that?’

  ‘Brahma is not designed, no more than you, Mr Ray. It evolved. ’

  Vishram shakes his head. The heat at the edge of the monsoon is terrible, crazy, draining of all sense and energy.

  ‘Brahma?’ he says weakly.

  ‘A name. A title. It means nothing. Identity is a much larger and looser construct in CyberEarth. Brahma is a geographically dispersed entity across many nodes and many sub-components, lower-level aeais, that may not realise they are part of a larger sentience.’

  ‘And this . . . Generation Three . . . is more than happy to give me one hundred million US dollars.’

  ‘Or more. You must understand Mr Ray, to an entity such as Brahma, making money is the easiest thing there is. It is no harder than breathing is for you.’

  ‘Why, Mr Chakraborty?’

  Now the lawyer sits. The boat-boy reaches for the oars to keep the little shell from spilling its passengers into the Ganga water that washes those it receives free from karma.

  ‘My employer wishes to see the zero-point project safeguarded and brought to fruition.’

  ‘Again, why?’

  Mr Chakraborty shrugs slowly and expressively inside his well-cut black suit.

  ‘This is an entity with the financial power to destroy entire economies. I am not privy to that kind of intelligence, Mr Ray. Its understanding of the human world is partial. In the financial markets that are its ecological niche, Brahma as far exceeds human intellect as we do snakes but if you were to speak with it directly, it would seem to you naïve, neurotic; even a little autistic.’

  ‘I have to ask this, does . . . did . . . my father know?’

  Chakraborty sways his head. Affirmation.

  ‘The money can be transferred into your account within the hour.’

  ‘And I have to decide who I trust; a gang of American corporate raiders who want to shred my company or an aeai that just happens to be named after a god and can erase every bank account on the planet.’

  ‘Succinctly put, sir.’

  Not really a choice, is it?’

  Vishram gestures to the boat-boy. He leans into his left oar and turns the little skiff on the black water back towards the great Dasashvamedha Ghat. Vishram thinks he feels a spot of rain on his lip.

  NAJIA, TAL

  A whisper: ‘He can’t stay here.’

  The air is fetid and oppressive but the figure on the mattress sleeps the sleep of Brahma.

  ‘Yt’s not a he, yt’s an yt,’ Najia Askarzadah whispers back to Bernard. They stand in the door of the darkened room like parents watching over a colicky child. The light fades by the minute, the humidity climbs. The veils of gauze hang straight, heavy, gravity-bound.

  ‘I don’t care, yt’s not staying here.’

  ‘They tried to kill yt, Bernard,’ Najia hisses. It had seemed bold and brilliant when she took the moped across the polo lawn past the yelling malis and along the verandah, dodging tables and gap-yearers to Bernard’s room. Somewhere to hide. Somewhere they would never connect but was close. Bernard had not said a word as they stumbled through his door. The nute had been half-conscious, raving something about adrenaline in yts strange, heavily accented voice. Yt was out by the time they got it to the bed. Bernard had taken yts boots off, then stepped back, scared. Then they stood in the door and argued in whispers.

  ‘And you make me a target now as well,’ Bernard hisses. ‘You don’t think. You run in and shout and expect everyone to cheer because you’re the hero.’

  ‘Bernard, I’ve always known that the only ass you’re ultimately interested in is your own, but that is a new low.’ But the barb hits and hooks. She loves the action. She loves the dangerous seduction that it all looks like drama, like action movies. Delusion. Life is not drama. The climaxes and plot transitions are coincidence, or conspiracy. The hero can take a fall. The good guys can all die in the final reel. None of us can survive a life of screen drama. ‘I don’t know where else to go,’ she confesses weakly. He goes out shortly afterwards. The closing door sends a gust of hot air, stale with sweat and incense, through the rooms. The hanging nets and gauzes billow around the figure curled into a tight foetus. Najia chews at scaly skin on her thumb, wondering if she can do anything right.

  She feels again the crack of the thugee’s ribs as she slammed into him; the recoil through the frame of the bike and her hips as the karsevak assassin slid away across the platform. She starts to shake in the stifling, dim room. She cannot hold herself, she finds a chair and sits, hugging her arms close against the cold from within. It is all madness and you walked into it. A nute and a Swedish girl reporter. You can be disappeared from Varanasi’s ten million and no one will blink.

  She turns her chair to cover both the door and the bedroom window. She angles the wooden louvres so she can see out but a bad man will find it hard to see in. She sits and watches the slats of light move across the floor.

  Najia comes out of sleep with a start. Noise. Movement. She freezes, then dives for the kitchen and its French cooking knives. She burst the door open, a figure at the refrigerator whirls, snatches up a knife. Him. Yt.

  ‘Sorry sorry,’ yt says in yts strange, child’s voice. ‘Is there anything to eat? I am so hungry.’

  There are half-things, nibbles and a bottle of champagne in Bernard’s refrigerator. Of course. The nute sniffs at them, grazes from the shelf.

  ‘Excuse excuse,’ yt says. ‘I am so hungry. The hormones . . . I pushed them too hard.’

  ‘Can I make you tea?’ Najia says, the rescuing heroine still needing a role to play.

  ‘Chai, yes, chai, wonderful.’

  They sit on the mattress with the little glasses. Yt likes it European style, black without sugar. Najia starts at every shadow on the shutters.

  ‘There are not enough thanks . . .’

  ‘I don’t deserve them. I got you into it in the first place.’

  ‘You said that at the station, yes. If not you, it would have been someone else. They might not have felt so guilty. Was it guilt?’

  This is the closest Najia Askarzadah has been in her life to a nute. She knows of them and what they are and how they come to be and what they can do with themselves and even some understanding of what they enjoy of ea
ch other and has the proper Scandinavian acceptance-cool, but this Tal smells different. She knows it is the things they can do with their hormones and neurochemicals but she is afraid that Tal will sense it and think it is neutrophobia.

  ‘I remembered,’ she says. ‘I saw the pictures and I remembered where I had seen you before.’

  Tal frowns. In the golden gloaming among the mesh fronds it is a deeply alien expression.

  ‘At Indiapendent,’ she volunteers.

  Tal holds yts head in yts hands, closes yts eyes. Yts lashes are long and very beautiful to Najia.

  ‘This is hurting me. I don’t know what to think.’

  ‘I was doing an interview with Lal Darfan. Satnam took me around. Satnam gave me the photographs.’

  ‘The trishul!’ Tal exclaims. ‘Chuutya! He set us both up! Ai!’ Yt starts to shake, tears well, yts holds yts hands up like leper’s claws. ‘My Mama Bharat, they thought it was me; the wrong flat . . .’ The shaking builds into heaving sobs, torn up from exhaustion and shock. Najia creeps away and makes fresh chai until she hears the keening cries subside. For an Afghan she has a northern European fear of big emotion.

  ‘More chai?’

  Tal has the sheet wrapped around yt. Yt nods. The glass shakes in yts hand.

  ‘How did you know I would be at the station?’

  ‘Journalistic hunch,’ Najia Askarzadah says. She wants to touch yts face, yts so bare, so tender scalp. ‘It’s what I would have done.’

  ‘Your journalistic hunches are powerful things. I have been a fool! Smiling and laughing and dancing and thinking everyone loved me! The new nute in town everyone wants to know, come to the big party, come to the club . . .’

  Najia reaches out to touch, to reassure and warm. Then she finds Tal pulled into her breast, her cheek brushing its smooth, oiled head. It is like hugging a cat, all bone and tension. Her fingers brush the dimples on yts arm, like rows of symmetrical insect bites. Najia recoils.

  ‘No, there, please,’ Tal says. She gently pushes the spot, feels fluids move under the skin. ‘And, please, here?’ Yts fingers guide hers to a place near the wrist. ‘And here.’ A hand’s breadth down from the elbow. The nute shudders in her embrace. Yts breathing steadies. Yts muscles tighten. Yt gets shakily to yts feet, moves nervously around the room. Najia can smell the edgy tension.

  Najia says, ‘I can’t imagine how you live, being able to choose your emotions.’

  ‘We don’t choose our emotions, just our reactions. It is . . . intense. We don’t live much over sixty.’ Tal is pacing now, fretting, a caged mongoose, glancing through the shutter slats, snapping them closed again.

  ‘How can you . . .’

  ‘Make that choice? It’s long enough for beauty.’

  Najia shakes her head. Unbelievable on unbelievable. Tal bangs yts fist against the wall.

  ‘Fool! I should die I should die I am too stupid to live.’

  ‘You are not the only one, I was stupid too, thinking I had a special line to N.K. Jivanjee.’

  ‘You met Jivanjee?’

  ‘I spoke to him, on the video, when he set up the meeting where Satnam gave me the photographs.’

  A shadow falls across the shutters. Nute and woman freeze. Tal slowly lowers ytself until it is beneath the line of the windowsill. Yt beckons for Najia to join it against the wall. Listening with her whole body, Najia crawls across the matting through the planes of gauze. Then a woman’s voice speaks German. Najia’s stomach loosens. For a moment she thought she might have vomited from fear.

  ‘We must get out of Bharat. They’ve seen you with me,’ Tal whispers. ‘We are the same now. We have to buy safe passage.’

  ‘Should we not go to the police?’

  ‘Do you know nothing about how this country works? Sajida Rana owns the police and she wants me for a traitor, and the police she doesn’t own belong to Jivanjee. We need something that will give us enough value to be protected. You said you talked to Jivanjee on the video. I presume you’ve enough intelligence to have kept it. Show me. There may be something there.’

  They sit by side against the wall. Najia holds up the palmer. Her hand shakes; Tal grasps her wrist, steadying her.

  ‘This is not a very good model,’ yt says.

  The volume is painfully loud as Najia plays back the video chip. Out in the club tennis balls pop and tock. On the screen the undulations of N.K. Jivanjee’s kalamkari-hung pavilion seem a divine inversion of this dim, overheated bedroom choked with fear.

  ‘Freeze freeze freeze!’

  Najia’s thumb fumbles the control.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘It is N.K. Jivanjee.’

  ‘I know this, stupid. Where is it from?’

  ‘It is his office, maybe his private apartment, it could even be his rath yatra, I don’t know.’

  ‘Lies lies lies,’ Tal hisses. ‘I do know. That is not the private apartment or rath yatra or office of Mr N.K. Jivanjee. That is the marriage chamber of Aparna Chawla and Ajay Nadiadwala for the wedding of the year on Town and Country. I designed those kalamkaris myself.’

  ‘A stage set?’

  ‘My stage set. For a scene that hasn’t been shot yet.’

  Najia Askarzadah feels her eyes widen. She wishes she had a sub-dermal menu she could call up to wash away her paralysing disbelief in a rinse of neurotransmitters.

  ‘No one’s ever met N.K. Jivanjee face to face,’ she says.

  ‘Our passport,’ Tal says. ‘I have to get into Indiapendent. We have to go now, right now.’

  ‘You can’t go like that, they’ll see you a kilometre off, we have to get you a disguise . . .’

  Then the cluck of tennis balls and the shouts of the players fall silent all at once. Tal and Najia dive and roll across the room as the shadows touch the shutters. Voices. Not German. Not female. Crouching, Najia wheels the moped from the hall into the kitchen. She squats on one side, Tal on the other. They know what they have to wait for though it is the scariest wait in the world. Click click. Then the bedroom explodes in automatic fire. In the same instant Najia guns the little alcohol engine, throws herself on. Tal jumps up behind her. The bullets go on and on and on. Don’t look back. You can never look back. She negotiates Bernard’s folding table, opens the back door and bursts out into the scrubby ground behind the bar. Waiters look up as she steers between the crates of Kingfisher and Schweppes mixers.

  ‘Out of my fucking way!’ Najia Askarzadah screams. They scatter like magpies. Her peripheral vision checks two dark figures rounding the end of the accommodation wing, figures busy with their hands. ‘Oh Jesus,’ she prays and takes the moped up three concrete steps into the club kitchens. ‘Move move move move!’ she yells as she swerves around stainless steel coolers the size of battle tanks and sacks of rice and dal and potatoes and chefs with trays and chefs with knives and chefs with hot fat. She skid-turns on a spot of dropped ghee, smashes through the swinging door and through the dining room, down the neat aisles of linen-covered tables, blares her hooter at a couple in matching surf-Ts and shades and into the corridor. In the main hall an evening yoga class is under way: Najia and Tal bowl through, horn rasping rudely as sarvangasana shoulder stands collapse like a felled forest all around them. Through the French windows - always open to allow ventilation for the women in cotton lycra, over the gasping flower beds and through the main gates into safe anonymity of the early evening rush. Najia laughs. Thunder echoes her.

  MR NANDHA

  Mr Nandha’s presentation of the case against Kalki takes the form of an orb floating in the hoek-sight of managers, at once small enough to fit beneath the dome of the human skull and so vast it envelops the Ministry’s glass tower like a fist around an orchid. It rotates in the inner vision of Commissioner Arora and Director General Sudarshan bringing new vistas of information into their view. A continent-sized cityscape of pages and windows and images and frames opens up into a two-dimensional map of information. Saraswati is the name of the voice-over aeai, goddess o
f speech and communication. Over a glowing schematic of Pasta-Tikka Inc. information system, Saraswati traces the unlicensed aeai back to the neural fizz of Kashi, then ratchets up level by fractal level into the dendritic blur of the Janpur localnet, Malaviri node, sub location Jashwant the Jain (all his little cyberpooches, ghostly skeletons knobbly with actuators and chipset arrays: Jashwant himself is a saggy blue bag of naked flesh). The next window of information is SOCO footage of the incinerated shell of the Badrinath sundarban. The hovercam bobs through blackened rooms, floating a moment over half-fleshed skeletons, processor shells melted like candles, Mr Nandha peering into the utility box with his pen-flash. Two huddled humps of charcoal unfold into living, smiling, passport photo westerners: Jean-Yves Trudeau; Annency, France, European Union, d.o.b. 15/04/2022, Anjali Trudeau, nee Patil, Bangalore, Karnataka. d.o.b. 25/11/2026.