by Ian McDonald
‘Come on.’ Vishram takes Marianna’s elbow and hurries her down the steps.
The pilot has the engines warmed up as Vishram and Marianna dive into their seats behind him. Shastri steps back out of the blast pattern of the jets, hands raised in blessing. The tilt-jet lifts through the downpour as the people come pouring down the steps like rats rushing to water, waving lathis and picking up sticks and stones to throw at the alien, the invader. The pilot is already too high. He turns his ship and Vishram sees the fire as a pool of heat, spreading from building to building like liquid, undaunted by the rain.
‘The Age of Kali,’ he whispers. The lowest throw of the dice when human discord and corruption abounds and heaven is closed, when the ears of the gods are deaf and entropy is maximum and there is no hope to speak of. When the earth is destroyed by fire and water, Vishram thinks as the tilt-jet slips into horizontal flight, when time stops and the universe is born anew.
LISA
Outside the arch the rain falls like a curtain and Lisa Durnau is on her third gin. She sits on the wicker chair on the marble cloister. The only others on the terrace are two men in cheap suits and sandals, taking tea. From this vantage she can cover main gate and reception desk. The noise of the rain on the tired stone is incredible. It is some storm, even by Midwestern standards. Lightning and everything.
Empty again. She signs to the waiter. They are all young, shy Nepalis dressed as Rajputs, in Bharati Varanasi. She cannot work that. She cannot work most anything up here in the black north. She had just been getting the beautiful civilised south and its soft anarchy then she was set down in the middle of a nation and a city that looked the same and dressed the same but was in every way different.
The taxi driver had taken the words American consulate as an invitation to scam her, driving her round a roundabout with a big statue of Ganesha under a funny little domed pavilion and a hoarding for Ribbed and Exciting! Corduroy trousers.
‘Sarkhand Roundabout,’ the driver shouted. ‘Danger money danger money.’
There were swastikas sprayed on every flat surface. Lisa could not remember which was the right way round and which was the fascist but either way they made her uneasy.
Rhodes the consular officer thumbed through her accreditations.
‘What exactly does this authorise you to do here, Ms Durnau?’
‘Find a man.’
‘This is not a good time. Embassy advice is for all US nationals to leave. We can’t guarantee your safety. American interests are being targeted. They burned a Burger King.’
‘Extra flame-grilled.’
He had leaked the tiniest, tightest smile. He raised an eyebrow at the Tablet. Lisa Durnau wished she could do that. He handed her documents smartly back to her. ‘Well, success with your mission, whatever it is. Whatever assistance we can render, we will. And whatever else they say, this is a great city.’
But to Lisa Durnau Varanasi seemed a city of ash, for all its neons and towers and floodlit shikaras. Ash on the streets and the shrines and temples, ash on the foreheads of the holy, ash on the streamlined wings and roofs of the Marutis and phatphats. A sky of ash, dark and breaking in a soft wave of soot. Even through the air-conditioning of her hotel room she could feel greasy hydrocarbon ash on her skin. Lull’s hotel was a lovely old Islamic city house of marble floors and unexpected levels and balconies but her room was unclean. The minibar was empty. There was a strip from a sanitary towel wedged across the toilet bowl. The levels and balconies were full of news crews. She checked the shower, for old times.
There was a second reservation in the Lull party. Ajmer Rao. The Tablet pulled a lo-res shot off the lobby-cam; her. Space-bunny. Shorter than Lisa had imagined. Wide in the ass but that might have been the angle of the lens. What was that on her forehead?
Ajmer Rao. But Lisa Durnau’s first thought was that she was glad Lull was not sleeping with her. And Lull himself. Leaner. Face softer. Terrible, terrible clothes. Encroaching baldness, hair long at the back in compensation. In every way as she had seen him swirl out of the seething pixels of the Tabernacle.
Watching the rain, Lisa Durnau finds she is angry, moltenly angry. All her life she has striven against her father’s Calvinist doctrine of predestination, yet the fact that she is watching the monsoon fall on Varanasi is the result of karmic forces seven billion years old. She, Lull, this wide-assed girl, all play to a script as foreordained and fatalistic as any episode of Town and Country. She is angry because she never had escaped. The complex behaviours of Alterre, of her Calabi-Yau mind-spaces, the cellular automata brawling across her monitor emerged from simple, relentless rules. Rules so simple you might never realise you were governed by them.
She thumbs into Alterre. For fun she enters her current GPS location adjusted for continental drift, taps in full proprioception and steps into hell. She stands on a furrowed plain of black lava veined red with glowing cracks. The sky is curdled with smoke lit by lightning flashes, a snow of ash falls about her. She almost chokes on sulphur and combustion gases, then thumbs off olfactory. The plain rises gently towards a line of low cones pouring thick, fast torrents of magma. Cascades of sparks close off the horizon. She can see around her for twenty kilometres in every direction and in none of them is there any living thing.
Panic-stricken, Lisa Durnau blinks back into Varanasi in the rain. Her heart races, her head reels; it is like turning a street intersection and stumbling on Ground Zero without warning. She is physically shocked. She fears to make the gesture that will wish her back into Alterre. She opens up window mode. The commentary box tells her the Deccan Traps are erupting.
Half a million cubic kilometres of lava issue from a magma plume coiling up from the mantle over what will in sixty-five million years’ time be the island of Reunion. Mt St Helens blew a puny single cubic kilometre when it shook the Pacific North West. Half a million Mt St Helens. Spread them out and they would smother the states of Washington and Oregon two kilometres deep in liquid basalt. The actual Deccan Traps formed a layer two kilometres deep over Central Western India, when that subcontinent was racing (geologically speaking) towards the Asian landmass in the head-on collision that would throw up Earth’s mightiest mountain range. The CO2 released overwhelmed all extant carbon burying mechanisms and brought the curtain down on Earth’s Cretaceous period. Life on Earth has been to the edge many times. Alterre would not have been an alternative evolution without mechanisms for mass extinction like vulcanism, polar wandering, celestial impact. The toys of major league God-gamers. What scares Lisa Durnau is not that the Traps are erupting. It is that the Deccan flood basalts never reached the Indo-Gangetic plain. In Alterre, Varanasi is buried beneath a plain of glowing basalt.
Lisa pulls up into God-vision. A finger of guilt from her church childhood accuses her as she spins up high above the Australo-Indian Ocean. The view was never this good from real space. Europe is an arc of islands and peninsulas around the westward curve of the planet, Asia a northward-steering sweep of terrain. North Asia burns. Ash clouds cover half a continent. The fires light the dark half of the planet. Lisa Durnau calls up a data window. She gives a soft, wordless cry. The Siberian Traps are also erupting.
Alterre is dying, trapped between the fires at its head and its waist. Crustal carbon dioxide released by the frothy, gassy basalt will join with carbon from the burning forests into a rabid greenhouse that will lift atmospheric and ocean temperatures sufficiently to trigger a clathrate burst: methane, locked in ice cages deep under the ocean, released in one titanic outgassing. The oceans will seethe like a dropped can of soda. Oxygen levels plunge as temperatures rise. Photosynthesis in the oceans shuts down. The seas become cauldrons of rotting plankton.
Life might survive one meltdown. Earth had survived the Chixulub impact and the resulting Deccan melt on the other side of the planet at the cost of twenty-five per cent of its species. The Siberian Traps eruption two hundred and fifty million years ago had ended the Permian life-burst with the extinction of n
inety-five per cent of living organisms. Life had reeled over the abyss and come back. Two eruptions at the same time is the end of biology on Earth.
Lisa Durnau watches her world fall apart.
This is not nature. This is an assault. Thomas Lull had designed Alterre with a robust immune system to defend against the inevitable hacks. For an attack to come through the aeais that ran the geophysical, oceanological and climatological systems must access to the central registries. This is an inside job.
Lisa Durnau rolls out of Alterre back on to the terrace of the haveli in the summer rain. She is shaking. Once in London Lisa Durnau was mugged outside a Tube Station. It had been short and sharp and not particularly brutal, just quick and businesslike: her cash, her cards, her palmer, her shoes. It was over before she realised. She had gone through the crime with a sense of numb acquiescence, almost of scientific inquiry. Afterwards the fear hit, the shaking, the anger, the outrage at what had been done to her and her utter impassivity in the face of it.
A whole world has been mugged here.
The call is lined up to the department before she realises. Lisa Durnau waves away the address, folds the Tablet, slides it back inside her pocket. She cannot break cover. She does not know what to do. And she sees him; Thomas Lull, leaning over the reception desk, asking for his key, dripping from his saturated surfer shirt and baggie shorts and slicked-down hair into little spreading pools on the white marble. He has not seen her. To him she is half a planet away on a hilltop in Kansas. Lisa Durnau starts to call his name and the two men in cheap suits and sandals get and walk over to the desk. One shows Thomas Lull an object in his hand. The other places a firm hand on his shoulder. He looks dazed, confused, then the first man opens a large black umbrella and the three of them hurry across the rain-soaked garden to the gates where a police car has drawn up in a slush of spray.
LULL
The game is bad cop and bad cop. You’re in an interrogation room. It could be a jail cell, a confession box or a torture chamber, what matters is that you can’t hear or see what’s happening outside. All you know is what the cops tell you. You have a partner in crime in an identical room. For you are accused.
So they have you in this green interview room that smells of thick paint and antiseptic. See that partner/fellow hoodlum/ lover of yours? Soon as the tape went on, they spilled everything, including you. This is what you have to decide. They could be telling the truth. They could be playing headgames to get you to grass up your partner. You don’t know and bad cops won’t tell you. They’re bad. Then they let you stew without even a cop coffee.
They way you see the deal is this. You deny everything and your partner/fellow hoodlum/lover denies everything and you might both walk. Insufficient evidence. You both confess and the cops turn out to be not so bad after all because there’s nothing a cop likes less than paperwork and you’ve just saved them deskloads of that so they’ll push for a non-custodial. Or you deny everything and in the other cell, you get fessed up. Fellow hoodlum walks and the full weight falls on you. What’s best for you? You’ve got the answer before their footsteps even reach the far end of the corridor. You bang on the door. Hey hey hey, come back here, I want to tell you every little thing.
The game is called the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It’s not as much fun as blackjack or Dungeons and Dragons but it’s a tool A-life researchers use to investigate complex systems. Play it enough and all manner of human truths emerge. Long term good, short-term bad. Do as you would be done by and if not, then do unto them as they do unto you. Thomas Lull has played Prisoner’s Dilemma and a slate of other limited-information games millions of times. It’s very different playing for real.
The room is green and smells of disinfectant. It also smells of mould, old urine, hot ghee and damp from the shirts of the rain-soaked cops. They are not good cops, they are not bad cops, they are just cops who would rather get back to their wives and children. One keeps rocking back on his chair and looking at Thomas Lull with his eyebrows raised, as if expecting an epiphany. The other one is constantly checking his nails and has an uncomfortable thing he does with his mouth that reminds Thomas Lull of old Tom Hanks movies.
Do what you need to, Lull. Don’t be clever, don’t be fly. Get yourself out of here. He feels a growing closeness in his chest.
‘Look, I told the soldiers, I’m travelling with her, she has relatives in Varanasi.’
Chair-rocker swings forwards and scrawls Hindi on a spiral-bound notepad. The voice recorder isn’t working. They say. Tom Hanks does the thing with the mouth again. It’s really starting to needle Thomas Lull. That too could be part of it.
‘That might be enough for provincial jawans, but this is Varanasi, sir.’
‘I don’t understand what the hell is happening.’
‘It is quite simple, sir. Your colleague made an inquiry at the National DNA database. A routine security scan revealed certain . . . anomalous structures in her skull. She was apprehended by security and passed into our custody.’
‘You keep saying this, anomalous structures, what does that mean, what are these anomalous structures?’
Tom Hanks looks at his nails again. His mouth is unhappy.
‘This is now a matter of national security, sir.’
‘This is fucking Franz Kafka, is what it is.’
Tom Hanks looks at chair-rocker, who writes the name down.
‘He’s a Czech writer,’ Thomas Lull says. ‘He’s been dead a hundred years. I was attempting irony.’
‘Sir, please do not attempt irony. This is a most serious issue.’
Chair-rocker deliberately crosses the name out and takes a swing back to study Thomas Lull with added perspective. The heat in the windowless room is incredible. The smell of damp policeman is overpowering.
‘What do you know of this female?’
‘I met her at a beach party at Thekaddy down in Kerala. I helped her over an asthma attack. I liked her, she was travelling north, I went with her.’
Tom Hanks flips up a corner of the folder on the desk, pretends to consult a scrap of text.
‘Sir, she stopped a section of Awadhi counter-insurgency robots with a wave of her hand.’
‘That’s a crime?’
Chair-rocker snaps forward. His chair feet crack on the shoe-polished concrete floor.
‘Awadhi airborne divisions have just taken the Kunda Khadar dam. The entire garrison has surrendered. It may not be a crime, but you must admit, the coincidence is . . . extreme.’
‘This is a fucking joke. What, you think she is something to do with that?’
‘I do not make jokes where my country’s security is concerned, ’ Tom Hanks says. ‘All I know is this report and that your travelling companion set off the alarms trying to access the National DNA database.’
‘I need to know these anomalies.’
Tom Hanks swivels his eyes at chair-rocker.
‘Do you know who I am?’
‘You are Professor Thomas Lull.’
‘Do you not think I might be better positioned to offer a hypothesis about this than you? If I knew what you were taking about?’
Chair-rocker confers in short, stabbing Hindi with Tom Hanks. Thomas Lull can’t decide which of them is the superior.
‘Very well, sir. As you know, we are in a state of heightened alert because of the situation with our neighbour, Awadh. It is only logical that we protect ourselves against cyberwar, so we have installed a number of scanners at sensitive locations to pick up slow missiles, infiltrators, agents, that sort of thing. Identity theft is a recognised tool of undercover operatives so the archive was routinely equipped with surveillance devices. The scanners at the DNA archive picked up structures inside this woman’s skull similar to protein circuitry.’
By now Thomas Lull cannot tell what is game and what is real and what is beyond either. He thinks of the shock he gave Aj on the train when he exposed the lies that were her life. She has returned that shock tenfold.
Tom Hanks sl
ides a palmer across the desk to Thomas Lull. He does not want to look, he does not want to see the alien inside Aj but he turns the device to him. It is a false-colour pseudo-X-ray assembled from infrasound scans. Her lovely skull is pale blue. The globes of her eyes, the tangled vine-root of the optic nerve, the ghostly canals of sinuses and blood vessels are grey on greyer. Aj is a ghost of herself; her brain most spectral of all, a haunting of sentience in a web of fibres. There is a ghost in the ghost; lines and ranks of nanocircuits arching across the inside of her skull. The tilak is a dark gateway in her forehead like a mosque darwaz. From it chains and webs of protein wiring thread back through the frontal lobes, across the central fissure into the parietal lobe, sending probes into the corpus callosum, twining tight around the limbic system, delving deep into the medulla while it wraps the occipital lobe in coils of protein processors. Aj’s brain is chained in circuitry.