River Of Gods

by Ian McDonald

  ‘I didn’t tell them because I still thought, this is a great man, a star climbing in a black sky, with high office and achievements before him, even if he lies in his separate bed and dreams of things I cannot even see as human. But a wife can push things down to the bottom of her mind if she thinks that her husband is a man who could rise to greatness, as great as any of your ancestors buried out there, Shaheen. A woman who could have had her choice of men, who would have loved her in heart and in body, who might also have risen to great stations. A woman who had her own education and potential that was forced into the golden purdah because for every one woman lawyer there are five men. Do you understand what I am saying, Shaheen? Such a woman expects things. And if that star rose, and then it stopped, and stayed fixed, and rose no higher and other stars rose above it and outshone it . . . What should that woman do then, Shaheen? What should that wife and Begum do?’

  Shaheen Badoor’s hands cover his face in shame but he cannot stop the words that cut through the rain, the thunder, his own fingers. He had thought himself a good and true advisor to his leader, government and country but he remembers how he had reacted when Sajida Rana had offered him a cabinet position on the flight back from Kunda Khadar: fear of discovery, fear that the it was spilling out of him like blood from a cut throat. Now he sees how many times and places in his career he could have taken that step into public power and had drawn back, paralysed by the inevitable fall.

  ‘Jivanjee?’ he says weakly. The heart of the madness in this ancient Mughal drum turret in the heart of a monsoon storm: his wife an agent of N.K. Jivanjee. She laughs. There is no more terrible sound.

  ‘Yes, Jivanjee. All those afternoons when I would entertain the Law Circle, when you were at the Sabha, what did you think we were doing? Talking about property prices and Brahmin children and cricket scores? Politics, Shaheen. The finest woman lawyers in Varanasi; how else do you think we would amuse ourselves? We were a shadow cabinet. We ran a simulation on our palmers. I tell you this, there was more talent in my jharoka than there was in Sajida Rana’s Cabinet room. Oh, Sajida Rana, the great mother who has made it impossible for any other woman to match her. Well, in our Bharat, Shaheen, there was no water war. In our Bharat there was no three-year drought, no hostility with the US because we were in the pockets of the datarajas. In our Bharat we assembled a Ganga Valley Water Management plan with Awadh and the States of Bengal. We ran your country better than you did, Shaheen, and do you know why? To see if we could. To see if we could do it better. And we did.

  ‘And it was the talk of the capital but you don’t hear that kind of talk, do you? Women’s talk. Talk of no consequence. But N.K. Jivanjee heard. The Shivaji heard, and that is another thing I cannot forgive. A Hindu politician recognised the talent, whatever its gender, whatever its religion, that her husband could not. We became the Shivaji policy unit, our little afternoon group taking chai in our gardens. It was a game worth the playing now. I used to hope that you would not come home and tell me what you were up to in the Sabha so I could try to read your mind, ask myself what you would do, try and outguess and outmanoeuvre you. All those times you would come home cursing that Jivanjee because he always seemed to be that one step ahead, that was me.’ She touches her breast, not seeing her husband now, not seeing the rain breaking over Ramghar, seeing only her memory of a great game that became the rule of her life.

  ‘Jivanjee,’ Shaheen Badoor Khan whispers. ‘You sold me to Jivanjee.’ And the dam that held him in so long, so high and wide, breaks and Shaheen Badoor Khan finds that inside him, all these years, all these lies and concealments, is only a roar, an inchoate howl like the nothing before creation, shrieking out of him. He cannot stop it, he cannot hold it in. Its vacuum tugs at his inner organs. He is on his knees. He crawls on his knees towards his wife; everything is destroyed. He had allowed himself to hope and for that pride, it was taken away, everything was taken away. He cannot hope. The animal howl breaks into yelping, retching sobs. Bilquis backs away. She is afraid. This was never in her strategies and game plans. Shaheen Badoor Khan is on his hands and knees now, like a dog, barking up shrieks of pain.

  ‘Stop, stop it,’ Bilquis begs. ‘Please, no. Please, have some dignity.’

  Sheen Badoor Khan looks up at her. Her hand goes to her mouth in horror. There is nothing there she can recognise. The game has destroyed both them both.

  She steps away from the ruined thing huddled on the smooth sandstone of the drum turret, retching up the infected pus of its life. She finds the sandstone steps, flees into the curtains of rain.

  MR NANDHA

  The austere polyphony of the Bach Magnificat swirls around Mr Nandha as the tilt-jet banks over the river. The hot wind that heralds the monsoon buffets the ghats. Flaws spun off the storm front send the ordered flotillas of diyas scattering across Mother Ganga. The tilt-jet lurches on the gusts. Mr Nandha sees lightning reflected in the pilot’s visor, then her hands bring them safely about. Ahead of him the other three aircraft in the squadron are patterns of moving lights on the greater city glow. Kashi. City of light.

  In Mr Nandha’s augmented vision, gods tower over Varanasi, vaster even than the monsoon, their vahanas crawling in the concrete and shit, their crowns in the stratosphere. Gods like thunderclouds, attributes held aloft and crackling with lightning, multiple arms performing the sacred mudras with meteorological deliberateness. The containment went in as the excommunication force lifted off from the military airfield. Prasad has intercepted a few hundred Level One aeais running out along the cable network but otherwise it has been as quiet as death or innocence in the fifth floor office unit. The squadron splits, navigation lights darting aerobatically between Ganesha, Kartikkeya, Kali and Krishna. Mr Nandha’s lips silently pray Magnificat magnificat as the tilt-jet banks and plunges through Ganesha in a spray of hand-sized pixels. A spear in the side, thinks Mr Nandha. The pilot swivels the wing-tip engines into descent mode and takes them down through veils of divine light. Mr Nandha thumbs off the visuals. The gods are extinguished as if by unbelief but years of intimacy have given Mr Nandha a sense of their presence, an electricity in the back of the skull. His gun is a dark weight against his heart.

  Odeco corporate headquarters is a low-rent office block in a labyrinth of school-uniform clothiers and sari merchants. The pilot spins the tilt-jet to fit into the narrow street; wing-tip lights scrape balconies and power poles as she brings her ship down into the junction. The backwash from the engines tumbles racks of bicycles across the street. A cow idles out of the way. Shop owners haul down their billowing, flapping wares. Wheels unfold, kiss the concrete. Mr Nandha goes through to the troop hold and his excommunication team: Ram Lalli, Prasad, Mukul Dev, Vik queasy in riot armour over his Star-Asia rock-boyz gear.

  The tilt-jet settles on its shock absorbers. Nothing moves, nothing stirs but the wind from the edge of the monsoon, driving papers and scraps of torn filmi posters through the narrow streets. A street dog barks. The ramp lowers as the engines power down. Tilt-jets make point-perfect landings at the two other drop points. The fourth spins in the air against the neon towers of New Varanasi, swoops in over the roof of the office unit and swings its engines into hover. The roar in the narrow alleys is like Vedic armies clashing in the sky. Its belly opens and Bharati aircav sowars spool down on drop-lines. On the woman pilot’s helmet display they abseil into a yawning canyon of gods. Shaped demolition charges open up the roof like a can of ghee. Communicating by hand signals, the sowars reattach their karabiners to the solar array and dive in.

  Mr Nandha advances through a graveyard of bicycles. A touch to the right ear sets the ’hoek and Indra, Lord of Rain and Lightning, swirls into manifestation over the haberdasher’s quarter of old Kashi mounted on his elephant vahana, four-tusked Airavata. The Vajra of judgement is raised in his right hand. Mr Nandha shifts his hand to his gun. True lightning flickers through Indra’s translucent red body; Mr Nandha looks up. Rain. On his face. He stops, wipes the drip from his forehead,
stares at it in wonder. In the same instant, Indra swirls and he feels the gun aim him.

  The robots come bounding down the unlit gali, a chitter of tiny running feet and tapping claws. Monkey robots cat robots robots like wingless birds and long-legged insects, a wave of clicking motion surging towards the main street. Mr Nandha levels his gun, fires, aims fires aims fires aims fires. Bach’s towering counterpoints roar in his ears. He never misses. Indra guides true and sure. The robots spin and smash into each other and wheel into walls and doorways as the fat, random drops steepen into rain. Mr Nandha advances up the gali, gun held before him, unerringly seeking its targets with its red laser eye and sending them spinning and smoking and burning in shaped pulses of electromagnetic radiation. Monkey robots scale the cables and chati-mag posters and metal advertising sheets for bottled water and language schools, scrambling for the rooftops and comlines. Indra brings them down his thunderbolt. Behind Mr Nandha the agents of the Ministry form a line, picking off those that make it into the excommunication zone. Mr Nandha silences Johann Sebastian and lifts his hand.

  ‘Cease fire!’

  The power lines fizz with overload as the last escapees are consigned to scrap. Glancing behind him, Mr Nandha reads the distaste on Vik’s face as he struggles with his big multi-role assault rifle. This is what you wanted, Mr Nandha thinks. A piece of the action. The gun and the gear.

  The rain falls luminous through the belly-spots from the hovering aircraft. Jet-wash and the rising storm wind swirl the drops into glowing veils.

  ‘Something is not right here,’ Mr Nandha says quietly and then the monsoon breaks over Varanasi. In an instant Mr Nandha is soaked to the bone. His dove grey suit is plastered to his skin. Blinded, he tries to wipe the rain from his eyes. Unbowed by the monsoon, Indra towers through the lightning and rain over five-thousand-year-old Kashi.

  The sowars crash down through the roof onto the desks and filing cabinets and collapsed ceiling fans, kicking over displays and chai cups and water coolers. Weapons levelled, they quarter the open plan office with their nightwatchs. It’s a dead black office in the middle of a downpour. Rain cascades through the holes they have blown in the roof. The subadar-major signs for her sowars to make safe the evidence. As they shift processor cubes and stacks out of the rain she calls Mr Nandha on her throat-mike. Another mudra and her troopers spread out, scanning on full sensory array for aeai activity. Lightning spooks her face. She can hear the regular police jawans work their ways up through the lower levels. She gestures for her warriors to spread and secure. There’s nothing here. Whatever spirit dwelled in this place is fled.

  Mr Nandha signals his team to close up.

  ‘What’s not right?’ Vik says. His hair is streaked flat, his nose runs rain and his baggy clothes cascade at the creases. He raises his eyes to Indra, high above the chaotic roofscape of Kashi.

  ‘This is a decoy.’ Mr Nandha kicks a fist-curled corpse of a maintenance robot. ‘This is not the Generation Three breaking itself down into sub aeais and escaping. This is deliberate. They want us to destroy everything.’ He calls into his palmer-glove. ‘All units, cease firing, do not engage.’

  But the two squads to the north and west are too busy chasing monkey-robots over bales of sari silk and through racks of school-girls’ uniforms while the proprietors throw their hands up in loud lamentation as the pulses wipe their till memories. The jawans’ combat suits turn sari-colour as they run, whooping, after the leaping, bounding machines through storerooms, past chowkidars hiding in doorways, hands over their heads, up and up concrete staircases until the last of the robots are driven under the guns of the sowars. It is like a Raj duck-shoot. For a few moments the light of induced EM-charges outshines the lightning.

  Mr Nandha enters the destroyed office. He looks at the circular waterfalls pooling on the cheap carpet. He looks at the smoking robots and the shattered screens and smashed desks. Mr Nandha purses his lips, vexed.

  ‘Who is in command here?’

  The subadar-major’s helmet opens and retracts into the cowl of her combat suit.

  ‘Subadar-Major Kaur, sir.’

  ‘This is a crime-scene investigation, subadar-major.’

  Voices, feet scuffling at the door. The sowars restrain a small but evidently vigorous Bangla, smart as a mynah in an inexplicably dry black suit.

  ‘I demand to see . . .’

  ‘Admit him,’ Mr Nandha orders. Shafts of search-light beaming through the streaming holes in the roof light the office. The Bangla looks around him in shock as the soldiers stand back.

  ‘What is the meaning of this?’ the Bangla demands.

  ‘You are, sir?’ Mr Nandha asks, acutely conscious of his saturated suit.

  ‘My name is Chakraborty, I am a lawyer with this company.’

  Mr Nandha holds up his left hand. The picture in his palm displays the open hand symbol of the Ministry. Palm within a palm.

  ‘I am conducting an investigation into the illegal harbouring of a Generation Three Artificial Intelligence contrary to Section twenty-seven of the International Treaty of Lima,’ Mr Nandha says. The Bangla blinks at him.

  ‘Buffoon.’

  ‘Sir, these are the premises of Odeco Incorporated?’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘Please read this warrant.’

  The sowars have the generator up and string clip-lamps around the office.

  Chakraborty swivels Mr Nandha’s hand into the light of the nearest lamp.

  ‘This is what is known informally as an excommunication order.’

  ‘From the office of the Minister of Justice himself.’

  ‘I will be launching an official appeal and civil action for damages.’

  ‘Of course sir. You would not be acting professionally otherwise. Now, please be careful; my agents have work to do and there are live weapons present.’

  Sowar engineers rig waterproof covers over the holes in the ceiling. Jawans spool power cables to the processors; Vik is already at the terminals, his own version of the avatar box jacked into the arrays.

  ‘Nothing here.’

  ‘Show me.’

  Mr Nandha feels Chakraborty at his shoulder, smirking as he bends over Vik squatting at the roll screen. Vik thumbs through stack after stack of registers.

  ‘If there was ever any Gen Three here, it’s long gone,’ he says. ‘But hey, look at this! Our friend Vishram Ray.’

  ‘Sir.’ Madhvi Prasad at another screen. She pulls up a pair of broken-backed typist’s chairs. Mr Nandha settles beside her. His socks squeak inside his shoes and he winces at the indignity. It is bad to conduct the most important investigation of your career in creaking cotton socks. It is worse to be called a buffoon by a sleek Bangla lawyer. But what is worst is to be accused of being no man at all, a ball-less hijra, in your kitchen, under your own roof, by your wife’s mother, by a withered country widow. Mr Nandha pushes the humiliation away. Those naked sadhus dancing in the rain endure greater for less.

  ‘What am I looking at?’ Mr Nandha asks. Prasad swings the screen to him.

  It is bright morning at the new ghat at Patna. Ferries and hydrofoils crowd the edges of the shot, businessmen and workers throng the background; behind them the towers of the new commercial Bund glitter in the east-light. In the foreground stand three smiling people. One is Jean-Yves Trudeau, the other his wife Anjali. Their arms are around a third person who stands between them, a girl in her late teens, wheat-complexioned like the best matrimonial advertisements. She is a head shorter than the westerners but her smile is wide and radiant despite her shaved scalp on which Mr Nandha can read the hairline scars of recent surgery.

  Mr Nandha bends closer. Chilled by the rain, his breath steams in the close blue glow of the stack-and-stick neons.

  ‘This is what they wanted us to destroy.’ He touches a finger to the girl’s face. ‘This one is still alive.’

  KUNDA KHADAR

  For ten days the slow missiles have crossed the flat, scorched lands of west
ern Bharat. Even as the Awadhi garrison at Kunda Khadar fled before the bold Bharati jawans, artillery units across an eighty-kilometre front released between two and three hundred autonomous drones from their stubby cylindrical silos. Each carries a payload of ten kilogrammes of high-yield explosive and is the size and shape of a small, densely muscled cat. By day they sleep in shallow scrapes or stacks of half-moon dried dung ladhus. When the night comes they unfold antennae to the moon, stir their folded metal legs and skulk across fields and down dry country drains, feline subtle, feline wary, steering by the light of the moon and quiet chirps of GPS. Truck headlights startle them, they freeze, trusting in their rudimentary chameleon camouflage. No one sees, no one hears, though they slink within centimetres of the tractor mechanic sleeping on his charpoy. By the time the first Brahmin salutes the sun on the banks of holy Ganga they have burrowed into the sand or cling to the rafters in the smoke and shadows of the temple ceiling or have submerged themselves at the bottom of the village tank. They are level 1.4 aeais but their fuel cells run on a tungsten-moderated methane reaction. They converge across Bharat navigating from cow fart to cow fart.