by Ian McDonald
‘Kalki,’ he whispers and the room goes black. Complete lightlessness. No lights, no emergency power, nothing. Thomas Lull fumbles his palmer out of his pocket. Hindi voices yell in the corridor, rising in intensity.
‘Professor Lull Professor Lull, do not attempt to move!’ Tom Hanks’ voice is querulous and panicky. ‘For your own safety, I order you to remain where you are while I ascertain what has happened.’
The voices in the corridor grow louder. A rasp, a flare; chair-rocker man lights a match. Three faces in a bubble of light, then darkness. Thomas Lull moves quickly. His fingers feel out the memory wafer slot on the side of the police palmer and slide it open. A rasp, he whips his hands back, then light. Tom Hanks is by the door. The babble of voices has become intermittent, calls, responses. As the match burns out Thomas Lull thinks he sees a fluctuating line of light under the door, a torch bobbing. He releases the memory chip. Another match flare. The door is open now, Tom Hanks conversing with an unseen officer in the corridor.
‘What’s going on, is Varanasi under attack?’ Thomas Lull calls out. Anything to sow uncertainty. The match burns out. Thomas Lull flips out the memory chip of his own palmer. A few deft movements and he has switched them over.
He glimpsed other phantoms in that look inside Aj, phantoms that might confirm his suspicions about what had been done to her, and why.
‘Your friend has escaped,’ Tom Hanks says, swinging the torch beam into Thomas Lull’s face. In the shadow his hands close the slots.
‘How did she manage to do that?’ Thomas Lull asks.
‘I was hoping you might be able to tell me.’
‘I’ve been right here in front of you all along.’
‘Every system is out,’ Tom Hanks says. The mouth is working double-shifts. ‘We do not know how far the blackout reaches, it is at least this district.’
‘And she walked right out.’
‘Yes,’ the policeman says. ‘You will understand if we detain you for further questioning.’ A burst of Hindi to chair-rocker who gets up and closes the door. Thomas Lull hears an old-school manual bolt shoot over.
‘Hey!’ he shouts in the dark. Thoughts of a middle-aged man locked in a dark police interview room. His suspicions, his calculations, his speculations swell to room-filling proportions, giants of fear and shock that press close against him, pressing the air from his lungs. The nose for breathing, the mouth for talking. The mind for dark imagining. Kalki. She is Kalki, the final avatar. All he needs is the proof he glimpsed etched into the scanner print.
After a timeless time that is only ten minutes by the wall clock the lights come back on. The door opens and Tom Hanks stands back to admit a black man in a wet raincoat that immediately identifies his nationality and employment.
‘Professor Thomas Lull?’
Lull nods.
‘I am Peter Paul Rhodes from the United States consular office. Please come with me.’
He extends a hand. Thomas Lull takes it hesitantly.
‘What is this?’
‘Sir, your release into my charge has been ordered by the Bharati Justice Department because of your diplomatic status in the Department of Foreign Affairs.’
‘Foreign Affairs?’ Thomas Lull knows how dumb he sounds, thick like a broken-down petty thief. ‘Senator Joe O’Malley knows I’m in a Bharati police station and wants me out?’
‘That is correct. All will be explained. Please come with me.’
Thomas Lull takes the hand but scoops his palmer into his pocket. Tom Hanks escorts them down the corridor. The front office is full of policemen and one woman. She gets up from the wooden bench where she has been sitting. There is a pool of rainwater at her feet. Her clothes are wet, her hair is wet, her face shines with wet and is thinner, older but he knows it instantly and it makes the madness complete.
‘L. Durnau?’
TAL, NAJIA
Eight and a half thousand rupees is enough to bribe the chowkidar. He counts notes with his skinny fingers while Najia Askarzadah drips in the glass and marble foyer of Indiapendent. Then he swipes his master pass and namastes them through the glass half doors.
‘I never believed it was you, Talji,’ Pande the security man shouts after them, folding Najia’s wad of cash into the breast pocket of his high-collared jacket. ‘We can make pictures do anything these days.’
‘They shot at me, you know,’ Tal calls as they head for the elevator stack.
It’s never like this in the movies, Najia Askarzadah thinks as the glass lift descends like a pearl of light. They should have had to blast their way in with beva-firepower and hi-kicking, mid-air-spinning, slo-mo martial arts action. The cool heroine shouldn’t have to call her parents in Sweden to ask them to BACS her a bribe. The most action she had seen was Pande the nightwatchman thumbing his generous wad. But it’s a strange little conspiracy; more Bollywood than Hollywood.
The glass walls of the metasoap wing stream with rain. It had begun as the taxi they had been hiding in all day arrived outside Indiapendent Productions. The car-park was a basti of brick-and-cardboard lean-tos and knots of soapi faithful huddled under plastic sheets.
‘They always come out for a wedding,’ Tal said. ‘It’s like a religion. Lal Darfan always delivers. PR says he’s had twenty miracle births attributed to him.’
Tal hurries Najia past the dark work carrels to the furthest desk. Yt pulls up two chairs, logs in - ‘nothing we can do about that, baba’ - opens up the wrap-round screen and drops them into Brahmpur, the eponymous Town of Indiapendent’s all-conquering soapi.
Tal whirls her through the streets and galis, the ghats and malls of this virtual city. Najia is dazzled. The detail is complete down to the advertising signs and the bustling phatphats. In Brahmpur as in Varanasi it is night and it is raining. The monsoon has come to this imaginary city. Najia is too proud to have watched an entire episode of Town and Country but even as a neo she recognises there are whole districts of this city of illusions the plot never visits, that have been lovingly built and maintained by exabytes of processing power merely to hold the rest together. Tal raises yts hands and their djinn-flight slams to a halt in front of a crumbling waterfront haveli. She feels she could touch the flaking stucco. A mudra and they pass through the walls into the great hall of the Nadiadwala haveli.
‘Wow,’ says Najia Askarzadah. She can see the cracks on the low leather sofas.
‘Oh, this isn’t the real Brahmpur,’ Tal says. Another elegant gesture and time blurs forward. ‘Well, the cast think it is but we call it Brahmpur B. It’s the metacity in which the metasoap takes place. I’m just winding us forward to the Chawla/Nadiadwala wedding. Have you got that video handy?’
But Najia is dazed by the flickering ghosts of future plotlines across the still room. Day and night strobe across her vision. Tal opens yts hand like a claw, twists it and time slows down to a chug of light and dark. She can see the people now, zipping through the elegant, cool marble hall. Tal slows time again and the hall is suddenly bright with coloured hangings. Tal pushes yts open palm against air and time freezes.
‘Here, here.’ Tal clicks yts fingers impatiently. Najia hands yt her palmer. Without taking yts eyes off the screen yt data-transfers from the palmer. A hole opens in the middle of the hall and fills with N.K. Jivanjee. With delicate flicks of yts fingers Tal jogs the picture forward until it has a good lock on the background, then pulls in, draws a box around the fabric hung-wall, tears it out of N.K. Jivanjee’s world and drops it into fake Brahmpur. Even Najia Askarzadah can see the match.
‘This is about six months down our metasoap timeline,’ Tal says as yt lets the POV roam around the room, swooping around the frozen wedding guests in their couture and the simulacra of real-world chati-mag reporters in their texture-mapped society-best, waiting for the arrival of the fake groom on his white horse. ‘They exist in several time-frames at once.’
Najia remembers Lal Darfan’s fantastical flying elephant-pavilion hovering over the high Himalayas. C
an any of us trust what we think we remember? he had asked. She had thought to argue sophistries with an aeai actor but Tal plays a more sophisticated game, the meta-meta-game. Najia remembers an old childhood faery-tale told by a babysitter on a midwinter night, a dangerous one, disquieting as only the truly fey disquiets; that the faery realms were nested inside each other like baboushka dolls, but each was bigger than the one that enclosed it until at the centre you had to squeeze through a door smaller than a mustard seed but it contained whole universes.
‘We’ve got them scripted up to about eight months ahead in fair detail. We haven’t got the weather; there’s a sub-aeai predicts it twenty-four hours ahead and then drops it on. By the time that script comes to real-time, the memory’s fixed and they can’t remember it ever having been another way. There’s a news aeai does the thing for gupshup and sports results and stuff like that. The major characters are much further ahead on their timelines than the minor ones so we work in several time dimensions at once - properly they’re time vectors that angle away from our own.’
‘This is freaky.’
‘I like freaky. The point is, no one outside of Indiapendent has access to this.’
‘Satnam?’
Tal frowns.
‘I don’t know if he could operate the system. Okay, hold on. We’re going to go to full prope. I’ll ’hoek you up, here.’
Tal fixes yts own ’hoek, smart plastic hugging up warm against the curve of yts skull, then fits Najia with the second device. Yts fingers are very deft and very light and very soft. Were she not breaking and entering a secure system with a Most Wanted nute who might just have brought down the government and whom she had rescued that very morning from a railway-station assassin, she might purr.
‘I’m going to go into the registries. You may find this a little disorienting.’
Najia Askarzadah almost goes straight over backwards on her chair. She is dropped into the centre of a vast sphere filled with dashes of registry code, all superimposed over the dark room and the curve of liquid screen and the rain streaming down the thick blue glass. She is the centre of a galaxy of data; whichever way she looks, code upon code streams away from her. Tal turns yts hands and the sphere spins, address lines blurring with data-shift across Najia’s vision. Reeling with vertigo, she grips the sides of her chair.
‘Oh man.’
‘You get used to it. If someone has been into my lovely wedding, they’ll have left a trace behind in the registry, that’s what I’m looking for now. The most recent entries are at the centre, the older ones get pushed further out. Ah.’ Tal points. Codes blur like warp-driven stars. Najia Askarzadah is sure she can feel data-wind in her hair. She drops out of cyberdrive into an inertialess stop at a green code-fragment. The sphere of glowing file addresses looks unchanged. Centre everywhere, perimeter nowhere. Like the universe. Tal picks up the code.
‘Now this is freaky.’
‘Do you like this freaky?’ Najia asks.
‘Indeed I do not. Someone has been into my design files but it’s not a code I recognise. It doesn’t look like it’s come from the outside.’
‘Some other bit of the ‘ware is accessing your files?’
‘More like the actors are rewriting their own scripts. I’m going in. If you feel dizzy, close your eyes.’
She doesn’t and her stomach turns loops as the universe of slow drifting codes jerks and spins and zooms and warps around her. Tal hyper-jumps from code-cluster to code-cluster. ‘This is very very strange. It’s an inside job all right, but it’s not one of our cast. Look, see?’ Tal gathers a harvest of codes, lays them out on a grid in space. ‘These bits here are all common. To save memory space, a lot of our lower level aeai actors are sub-applications of higher level aeais. Anita Mahapatra also contains Narinder Rao, Mrs Devgan, the Begum Vora and they in turn contain maybe fifty redshirts.’
‘Redshirts?’
‘Disposable extras. I think it’s an American term. This is a list of all the recent accesses to the set design system. See? Someone’s been into my design files regularly over the past eighteen months. But what is freaky is, all those common code sections point to an even higher level actor; one that contains Lal Darfan and Aparna Chawla and Ajay Nadiadwala. It’s like there’s something else running in there we can’t see because it’s too big.’
In the cream coloured house by the water there was an atlas the size of a small child. On the winter nights when the inlet froze, Najia age eight would fight the thing down from its shelf, open it on the floor and lose herself in other climates. She played a game with her mother and father where you picked a word on a map and raced to put a finger on it. She realised early that the way to play and win was to go big and obvious. The eye scrying through the towns and villages and stations of the Matto Grosso could miss the name BRAZIL spread across the map in faded grey letters the size of her thumb. Hiding in plain sight among the scribbles.
Najia blinks out of Tal’s spiral dance of codes and file addresses back into the dark carrel. She is trapped inside a cube of rain. A master script that wrote itself? A soap opera like India’s seven million gods; avatars and emanations descending through levels of divinity from Brahman, the Absolute, the One?
Then she sees Tal push ytself back from the computer, mouth open in fear, hand raised to ward off the evil eye. In the same perspective she also sees Pande in his high-collared jacket and yellow turban rush loose-boned into the department.
Tal: ‘This is impossible . . .’
Pande: ‘Sir Madam, sir madam, come quick come quick, the Prime Minister . . .’
Then Najia’s Askarzadah’s ’hoek flashes into full prope and she is swept away from Tal, from Pande, from Indiapendent in the monsoon, to a bright, high place, a silk-draped prospect among the clouds. She knows where this is. She has been summoned to this place before. It is the airborne elephant pavilion of Lal Darfan, sailing the line of the Himalayas. But the man on the cushioned throne in front of her is not Lal Darfan. It is N.K. Jivanjee.
SHIV
Yogendra takes the boat out into a stream of burning diyas. Monsoon winds churn Ganga but the little, delicate mango-leaf saucers bob on through the broken water. Shiv sits cross-legged under the plastic awning, gripping the gunwales and trying to feel the balance. He prays that he will not have to hurl. He glances back at Yogendra squatting in the stern, hand steady on the tiller of the alcofuel motor, eyes reading the river. His skin is beaded with rain, it streams from his hair down his face, his clothes cling to him. Shiv thinks of rats he has seen swimming in open roadside sewers. But the knotted pearls around Yogendra’s neck shine.
‘Pump, pump,’ Yogendra orders. Shiv bends to the little bilge pump. The rain is filling the boat - a handy little American sports white-waterer with North-West Pacific iconography on its bows though Shiv would have preferred an Eye of Siva - faster than the hand-pump can clear it. That is not an arithmetic Shiv can look at too closely. He can’t swim. A raja’s experience of water is lolling in the shallow end of a pool with girls and floating drinks trays.
As long as it takes them to Chunar.
‘You land somewhere around here.’ Anand laid the A4 high-resolution print-outs of the Chunar district map out on his coffee table. Kif coffee simmered on its brazier. Anand tapped his finger on the map. ‘The town of Chunar is about five kays south. I call it a town purely as a politeness to the fact that it’s on a bridge over the Ganga. Chunar is a rural shithole full of cowfuckers and incest. The only thing of any interest is the old fort. Here, I’ve got print-outs.’ Anand dealt out a hand of glossies. Shiv flicked through the photographs. The story of the Ganga was the story of forts like Chunar, drawn down by historical inevitability onto the promontories and hill-tops where the river turned, drawing to them power, dynasty, intrigue, imprisonment, siege, assault. One last assault. He paused at the interiors, crumbling Raj-Moghul architectures smothered by swooping construction-carbon canopies, white as salt in the sun. ‘Ramanandacharya is a flash chuutya,
but he’s the only game in town. As well as the sundarban, he’s got a call centre. You want to get into husband’s system, see what he’s been up to; you want to hack into that credit black-list, they’ll crack the code for you while you wait.
‘Every adivasi is loyal to the chief. You get in, you do your business, you get out, you do not hang around for thank-yous or kisses. Now, the defences at Chunar Fort . . .’
Aircraft hammer overhead so low and loud Shiv covers his head. Yogendra stands in the stern, turning to follow their lights; four military tilt-jets in tight formation. Shiv sees his teeth glint in the light from the city.