River Of Gods

by Ian McDonald

  Madhvi Prasad: ‘More on her identity too. Ajmer Rao is the adoptive daughter of Sukrit and Devi Paramchans, also from Bangalore. Here’s the odd bit, they show up in all the civic registers and revenue databases and public records but if you go the Karnataka Central DNA database, there’s nothing there. They would have been registered at birth. I’m trying to locate her natural parents; this is guesswork, but I don’t think she’s come here for no reason.’

  Mr Nandha: ‘She could be trying to contact them. We could pre-empt that by searching her hotel for a DNA sample and making that contact ourselves. Good.’ The ripple of disturbance is spreading along the right side of the table. ‘Is this something I should be aware of?’

  Sampath Dasgupta: ‘Mr Nandha, the Prime Minister has been assassinated. Sajida Rana is dead.’

  Shock rolls around the table. Hands reach for palmers, gesture up newschannels on ‘hoeks. Murmurs rises to a loud chatter to a blare of voices. Mr Nandha waits until he hears the seeds of abatement. He raps the table loudly with his tea-glass.

  ‘Your attention please.’ He has to ask for it twice before the room is quiet again. ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, now if we could resume our meeting?’

  Sampath Dasgupta erupts.

  ‘Mr Nandha, this is our Prime Minister.’

  ‘I am aware of that, Mr Dasgupta.’

  ‘Our Prime Minister has been assassinated by a mob of karsevaks.’

  ‘And we will continue to do our job, Mr Dasgupta, as we are tasked by our government, to keep this country safe from the menace of unlicensed aeais.’

  Dasgupta shakes his head in disbelief. Mr Nandha sees that he has been challenged and he must act swiftly and assertively to maintain his authority.

  ‘It is clear to me that Odeco, this female Ajmer Rao and the Kalki aeai are all connected, perhaps even Professor Thomas Lull and his former assistant Dr Lisa Durnau, in a most serious conspiracy. Madhvi, obtain a search warrant for the Amar Mahal Hotel. I will issue a petition for Ajmer Rao’s immediate arrest. Mukul, please have a file sent to all police offices in Varanasi and Patna.’

  ‘You may be a bit late with that,’ Ram Lalli interrupts. Mr Nandha would rebuke him but his right hand is up to his ear, taking a call. ‘The police have put out a fugitive bulletin. Ajmer Rao has just escaped from custody at Rajghat. They’re still holding Thomas Lull.’

  ‘What is this?’ Mr Nandha demands.

  ‘The police pulled her in at the National Archive. Looks like she was one jump ahead of us.’

  ‘The police?’ Mr Nandha could vomit. He is suspended over void. This, he thinks, is the Fall of Everything he felt in the glass elevator. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘They lifted her at about nineteen thirty.’

  ‘Why were we not informed? What do they think we are, babus filling in forms?’

  Ram Lalli says, ‘The entire network for Rajghat District went down.’

  ‘Mr Lalli, to the Rajghat police,’ Mr Nandha commands. ‘I am assuming full responsibility for this case. Inform them this is a Ministry matter now.’

  ‘Boss.’ Vik lifts a hand, staying Mr Nandha at the door. ‘You got to see this. Your biochips? I think I know where they ended up.’

  An image clicks up over the timer in the corner of Mr Nandha’s eye. He has seen these blue skull-ghosts before: quantum resonance detector images of the biochip debris Mr Nandha’s Indra-attack had left inside of Anreddy’s head had been key evidence in convicting him. Even as Maha of Datarajas, Anreddy had never worn an array like this. Every fold, every convolution and evolution, every chasma and stria and thelium is crusted with biochip jewels.

  The bad men ride into town in the rain straddling their hot hot Japanese trail bikes. Chunar is everything Dataraja Anand promised; parochial, muddy, inbred and closed for the night. The only action is the decrypt call centre, a translucent cylinder of inflatable polythene on the cheapest edge of cheap-town. The bad boys slide to dirt-crunching halt beneath the Chunar Fort. Like most old things it is bigger and more imposing close up. For imposing read: pretty fucking unassailable on its river crag. Like something out of one of those Pak revenge movies where the guy gets even for the murder of his wife-to-be by taking the fat bad guy and his baradari in their clan keep. Shiv peers up through the slanting rain at the European-style white house set at the edge of the parapet. Floodlit by the whim of Ramanandacharya, it is a beacon for kilometres up and down this dreary looping stretch of the Ganga. Warren Hastings’ Pavilion, according to Anand’s Rough Guide. Warren Hastings. Sounds like a name they’d make up for you in a call centre.

  From this junction four ways lead. Behind to where they’re from. Right to the pontoon bridge. Left into what there is of Chunar; a few muddy galis, one Coke sign and a radio somewhere tuned to a filmi station. Ahead, the cobbled road that curves behind the guard towers and up through the arched gate into Chunar Fort.

  Now that he is here, beneath those crumbling sandstone towers - now that he has seen all his plans work through one by one to their only possible conclusion - Shiv realises he absolutely has to do this thing. And he is afraid of those guard towers and the path curving up where he cannot see. But he is more afraid to let Yogendra see that when it comes to it, he is not a raja. Shiv fumbles a little plastic bag out of his light-scatter combats, shakes out two pills.

  ‘Hey.’

  Yogendra wrinkles his nose.

  ‘Take the edge off it.’

  The pills are a hero’s send-off from Priya, when he finally ran her down to club MUSST.

  Bodies turning in the stream. Tassled garial boots falling into the big blue.

  At the foot of the fort in the rain, Shiv swallows both pills.

  ‘Okay,’ he says twisting the throttle, revving the sweet little Japanese engine. ‘Let’s do it.’

  ‘No,’ says Yogendra. Shiv double-takes him and it is not the drugs.

  ‘Say?’

  ‘Go this way, we die.’

  Shiv switches off the engine.

  ‘We have a plan. Anand . . .’

  ‘Anand knows fuck. Anand is a fat kif-head thinks movies are life. We go that way, we get shot to pieces.’

  Shiv has never heard so many words in a line from Yogendra. The kid has more: ‘Bikes, tasers, in fast, out: James Bond shit. Fucking Anand and girls in catsuits. We do not go this way.’

  Priya’s little helpers are making Shiv feel ballsy and immortal and don’t-give-a-fuck. He shakes his head at his apprentice and balls a fist to smack him off his bike. Yogendra’s blade flashes in the floodlight.

  ‘You hit me again, I cut you, man.’

  Shiv is numb in astonishment. He thinks it’s astonishment.

  ‘I tell you what you do. We find another way in, back way in, we sneak right? Like burglars. That way, we live.’

  ‘Anand . . .’

  ‘Fuck Anand!’ Shiv has never heard Yogendra’s voice raised before. ‘Fuck Anand, this time we do it Yogendra’s way.

  Yogendra spins his bike, throttles and takes off left up through the dark, muddy back streets of Chunar. Shiv follows past yapping pi-dogs and the skeletal spines of papaya trees. Yogendra stands up on the foot-pegs as he bumps the bike up flights of shallow steps, scanning the dark walls rising above the shops and lean-tos for weakness. They follow the twine of streets up on to the flank of the bluff. Yogendra’s instinct is true. Like a Cantonment society bibi, Chunar Fort maintains an imposing elevated front but it’s all gone to shit round the back. The dirt road skirts the foot of the crumbling masonry revetments; rusting tin signs and sagging wire mesh mark this section of the fort as an old Indian army base, abandoned since nationhood. Finally the walls give way altogether into a gaping entrance, once the main access to the military camp, now roughly sealed with corrugated iron and barbed wire. Yogendra kicks his bike to a stop and examines the metal. He rattles a sheet, tugs a corner. Steel screeches and gives way. Shiv helps, they heave, together they bend and tear a rajasized gap. Inside Yogendra flips open his palmer
to check GPS readings against Anand’s map. The Warren Hastings Pavilion glows like a Christian wedding cake in the distance. The badmashes crouch by the foot of the wall while Shiv breaks out nightwatch goggles. The dark dark night turns into an antique black and white movie like one of those worthy Satyajit Ray things about poor people and trains. The Pavilion is as bright as the sun. Yogendra locates the nearest security camera. It’s on a stanchion on the wall against the base of the well tower in the south, a good two hundred-metre dash through the rain-dripping black and white world. The roofless shells of the former Indian Army barracks give fine cover. Lightning still breaks to the west, over the sangam of Allahabad where three sacred rivers, Yamuna, Ganga and invisible Saraswati come together and armies confront each on the dark plains. Each flash blinds the nightwatch visor’s circuits but Shiv just freezes in position. While the camera is looking the other way Shiv and Yogendra sneak up into its blind spot. Shiv pulls the emp grenade and arms it. He flexes his fingers one at a time on the firing pin: no time now for cramp. Shiv drops the grenade. He squeezes his eyes shut as the pulse overloads his nightwatch but even so painful tears start. Purple paisley patterns swirl inside his lids. Yogendra shins up the stanchion like a monkey and patches the special palmer into the com feed.

  ‘Promised you, didn’t I?’ Anand had said tossing the palmer in his hand. ‘Switch her on, stick this spike into the main com line. My little djinn inside, she’s sweet. Once she’s in, the cam can be looking right at you and all the aeai’ll see is background. Cloak of invisibility.’

  ‘You get it?’ Shiv whispers. Yogendra taps him twice on the back. Shiv and Yogendra work around the base of the tower to the southern, tourist gate but Shiv still holds his breath as they step out in front of the spy-eye, expecting the wail of an alarm; the drone of the hovercam coming up over the battlements with neurotoxin darts armed; the sudden rattle of automatic fire; the rasp of the killing machine drawing its blade.

  The ground drops underneath the tower to the southern path. Below it is a small overgrown graveyard; Christian from the shape of the grave markers. The resting place of the Angreez soldiers who once held this fort. Fool them, Shiv thinks. Worthless place to die. Beneath the little wooded cemetery are a couple of hardscrabble houses, dhobi ghats and the river curving out of sight. The climb down to the tourist gate is treacherous, the sandstone slippery in the rain. Most fool of all; Bill Gates for dreaming his money can beat death.

  The plan calls for Shiv and Yogendra to double back along the wall over the main gate to the northern parapet over-looking the bridge, from where it is an easy drop down to the Hastings Pavilion, but as the two raiders crouch beneath the battlement listening through the distant thunder for sounds of security, Yogendra taps Shiv on the arm, makes a screwing gesture by the side of his visor. Shiv ratchets up the magnification, breathes a small curse in the name of his small gods. In monochrome vision he can clearly see two security bots flank the main entrance, gatling turrets slung between their two legs. Behind the killing machines is a dazzlingly-lit security post. Shiv can make out the military grade assault rifles slung on the wall behind the dozing sentry, boots on the desk, television screen a plane of white. It is defiantly not a girli in a red catsuit.

  ‘Fuck Anand,’ Shiv whispers. They can’t get out that way. Grinning beneath his big visor, Yogendra gives him a savage thumbs-up. His knotted pearls glow in Shiv’s enhanced vision. Yogendra’s thumb jerks the other direction. The long way. At the foot of the collapsed wall by the tourist gate Yogendra suddenly throws Shiv to the ground behind a pile of rubble, drops on top of him. A curse comes automatically to Shiv’s lips, then he sees Yogendra stab a finger at the tourist gate. Glowing like a minor deity in enhanced night-watch vision, the defence robot stalks patiently into the gap. Its sensorhead, studded with bright spider eyes, turns to take in every aspect. Com rigs crown it like a divine diadem. The robot halts, raises its weapon pods. There is sufficient and varied firepower on its four arms to kill Yogendra and Shiv five times over in five different ways. Yogendra pushes Shiv’s head down behind the rockpile, presses himself as flat as he can on top of him. Shiv holds himself down for a forever. Yogendra’s weight is small but the stones are sharp. His ribs are cracking on the sharp stone points. Then he hears what alerted Yogendra in the first place: the faint hiss of an ill-maintained shock-absorber. They watch the monster move out of their line of sight behind the curve of the well tower, then break from cover for the south battlement.

  They skirt the southern wall, cross the south-western turret and slip along the riverside terrace. Shiv’s thigh muscles scream from the enforced half-crouch. He is wet beyond saturation. The Hastings Pavilion rises like a moon before him, hypnotic in Tajwhite stone. He tears his gaze away, nudges Yogendra on the thigh.

  ‘Hey.’

  A simple square-built Lodi temple stands in the centre of the courtyard, upper storeys tattily decorated with peeling murals of Siva, Parvati and Ganesha, the work of bored Indian Army jawans with surplus military issue paint. The suddhasa, the crypt of crypto.

  ‘Let’s go . . .’

  The kid taps Shiv’s visor, rolls his finger in a gesture that eloquently says, up the brightness. The temple leaps into renewed sharpness. Shiv makes out a boiling, dark mass, constantly flowing and breaking, between the arches. He ups the magnification. Robots. Scarab robots. Hundreds of them. Thousands. A plague, scuttling round each other, clambering over each other, jostling and bumping on their silent plastic peds.

  Yogendra points to the temple. ‘Anand’s way.’ Then to the white bright pavilion. ‘Yogendra’s way.’

  They spy the sentry on the old Mughal execution ground. The man wears no nightwatch visor so Shiv and Yogendra can move within easy taser range. He is treating himself to a long luxurious piss in the rain over the sheer drop. Yogendra carefully aims at the midnight urinator. The weapon makes the slightest of clicks but in Shiv’s amplified sight the effect is spectacular. A glowing cloud surrounds the man, his body crawls with micro-lightning. He drops. His dick is still out. Yogendra is on him before he stops twitching. He slips the big black Stechkin machine pistol out of the man’s leg holster, holds it up in front of his face, smiling at its lines and contours. Shiv grabs his wrist.

  ‘No fucking guns.’

  ‘Yes fucking guns,’ Yogendra says. The rakshasa-bot passes on another round. Shiv and Yogendra press up close to the unconscious guard, merging their thermal profiles with his. As a parting gift Shiv leaves pisser an armed taser mine. Just to cover the rear. Beyond the execution tower the walls cut back behind the Hastings Pavilion to isolate it on its marble plinth. Shiv has to admit that even in the rain the prospect stuns. The building stands on the edge of a steep drop down to the tin rooftops of Chunar. In his enhanced vision Shiv sees the plain glitter like an inverted night sky with the glow of villages and vehicles and great trains. But Ganga Mata dominates all, a silver blade, the weapon of a god, wide as all the world, rippled like a Damascus steel sword he had once seen in a Kashi antique store and envied as the proper adjunct of a raja. Shiv follows the curve of the river all the way to the airglow of Varanasi, like a great conflagration beneath the horizon.

  The pavilion that first Raj Governor Warren Hastings built to enjoy this preview is an Anglo-Mughal hybrid, classical columns supporting a traditional open Mughal diwan with a closed upper level. Shiv steps his visor down to minimum. He peers. He thinks he sees bodies in the diwan, bodies all over the floor. No time to stare. Yogendra taps him again. The wall is less high here and slopes down to the marble plinth. Yogendra slips through the battlement, then Shiv hears a rough slither and when he next peers over Yogendra beckons up at him. It’s further and steeper than Shiv thought despite the bravado pills; he lands heavily, painfully, suppresses a yelp. Figures stir in the open pavilion.

  Shiv turns towards their potential threat. ‘Fuck,’ he says reverently.

  The carpeted floor is covered in women. Indian, Filipino, Chinese, Thai, Nepali, even African w
omen. Young women. Cheap women. Bought women, dressed not in red catsuits, but in classical Mughal zenana fashion in transparent cholis and light silk saris and translucent jamas. In the centre, on a raised divan, Dataraja Ramanandacharya stirs his fat self. He is arrayed in the style of a Mughal grandee. Yogendra is already pacing through the harem. The women flee from him, voices joining together in apprehension. Shiv sees Ramanandacharya reach for his palmer: Yogendra pulls the Stechkin. The consternation becomes panicked cries. They have only moments to get this to work. Yogendra walks up to Ramanandacharya and casually slides the muzzle of the Stechkin into the hollow beneath his ear.

  ‘Everyone shut the fuck up!’ Shiv shouts. Women. Women everywhere. Women of every race and nationality. Young women. Women with lovely breasts and wonderful nipples showing through their transparent cholis. Bastard Ramanandacharya. ‘Shut. The. Fuck. Up. Okay. Fat boy. You’ve got something we want.’

  Najia hears children’s voices from the house. The dhobi is gone from the shrubbery, in its place swags of bunting run from the kitchen door to apricot trees now in blossom. Folding tables draped with coloured cloths are laden with halwa and jellabies, ras gullahs and sugared almonds, burfi and big plastic bottles of full-sugar Coke. As Najia walks towards the house the children burst from the open patio door into the garden, running and shrieking in the Kid at Gap junior casuals.