River Of Gods

by Ian McDonald

  ‘I remember this!’ Najia says turning to the aeai. ‘This is my fourth birthday. How are you doing this?’

  ‘The visuals are a matter of record, the children are as you think you remember them. Memory is such a malleable commodity. Shall we go inside?’

  Najia stops in the doorway, hands raised to her mouth in potent remembering. The silk antimacassars her mother insisted that every chair-back wear. The Russian samovar by the table, never off the gas; the table itself, dust and crumbs permanently engrained in Chinese carving in which Najia-age-four had tried to discern roads and paths for her dolls and toy cars to follow. The electric coffee pot at the other end, also never inactive. The chairs so heavy she could not move them alone and would ask Shukria the maid to help her build houses and shops with brooms and blankets. On the chairs around the dining table, her parents and their friends, conversing over coffee and tea, the men together, the women together; the men talking politics and sport and promotion, the women talking children and prices and promotion. Her father’s palmer rings and he frowns and it is her father as she knows him from the family photographs, when he had hair, when his beard was black and neat, when he had no need for unmanly half-glasses. He mutters apologies, goes to his study, the study into which Najia-age-four is never permitted for fear of the sharp poisonous delicate personal infectious dangerous things a doctor kept in his work-room. Najia watches him come out with a black bag, his other black bag, the one he did not use everyday, the black bag he kept for special visits. She sees him slip away into the street.

  ‘It was my birthday and he missed me getting my presents and the party. He came back late after everyone was gone and he was too tired to do anything.’

  The aeai beckons her into the kitchen and in three steps three months pass, for it is a dark autumn night and women prepare the iftar to celebrate the end of that day’s Ramadan fast. Najia follows the trays of food into the dining room. In that year her father’s friends, the ones from the hospital and the ones in uniforms, gather often in the house of a Ramadan evening, talking of dangerous students and radical clerics who would take them all back to the Middle Ages and the unrest and the strikes and arrests. Then they notice the little girl standing by the end of the table with the bowl of rice and they stop their talk to smile and ruffle her hair and press their faces too close to hers. Suddenly the smell of tomato rice is overpowering. A pain like a knife stabbed in the side of her head makes Najia lose hold of the rice dish. She cries out. No one hears. Her father’s friends talk on. The rice dish cannot fall. This is memory. She hears speak words she cannot remember.

  ‘. . . will clamp down on the mullahs . . .’

  ‘. . . moving funds to offshore banks. London’s looking good, they understand us over there . . .’

  ‘. . . your name’s going to be high on any of their lists . . .’

  ‘. . . Masoud won’t stand for that from them . . .’

  ‘. . . you know about tipping points? It’s this American mathematical thing, don’t knock it. Basically, you never know it’s going until it’s too late to stop it . . .’

  ‘. . . Masoud will never let it get to that stage . . .’

  ‘. . . I’d be seriously looking if I were you, I mean you’ve got a wife, little Najia there . . .’

  The hand reaches out to ruffle her softly curled black hair. The world whips away and she is standing in her Mammoths!™ pyjamas by the half open living room door.

  ‘What did you do to me?’ she asks the aeai, a presence behind her more felt than seen. ‘I heard things I’d forgotten for years, for most of my life . . .’

  ‘Hyperstimulation of the olfactory epithelium. Most effective at evoking a buried memory trace. Smell is the most potent activator of memories.’

  ‘The tomato rice . . . how did you know?’ Najia is whispering though her memory-parents cannot hear her, can only play out their foreshadowed roles.

  ‘Memory is what I am made of,’ says the aeai and Najia gasps and doubles to another migraine attack as the remembered scent of orange-flower water throws her into the past. She pushes open the door’s light-filled crack. Her mother and father look up from the lamp-lit table. As she remembers, the clock reads eleven. As she remembers, they ask her what’s the matter, can’t you sleep, what’s wrong, treasure? As she remembers she says it’s the helicopters. As she has forgotten, on the lacquered coffee table, under the row of her father’s diplomas and qualifications and memberships of learned bodies framed on the wall, is a piece of black velvet the size of a colouring book. Scattered across the velvet like stars, so bright, so brilliant in the light from the reading lamp that Najia cannot understand how she ever forgot this sight, is a constellation of diamonds.

  The facets unfold her, wheel her forward in time like a shard in a kaleidoscope.

  It is winter. The apricot trees stand bare; dry snow, sharp as grit, lies drifted grudgingly against the water-stained white wall. The mountains seem close enough to radiate cold. She remembers her house as the last in the unit. At her gate the streets ended and bare wasteland stretched unbroken to the hills. Beyond the wall was desert, nothing. The last house in Kabul. In every season the wind would scream across the great plain and break on the first vertical object it found. She never remembers a single apricot from the trees. She stands there in her fur hooded duffel with her Wellington boots and her mittens on a string up her sleeve because last night like every night she heard noise in the garden and she had looked out but it was not the soldiers or the bad students but her father digging in the soft soil among the fruit trees. Now she stands on that slight mound of fresh dug earth with the gardening trowel in her hand. Her father is at work at the hospital helping women have babies. Her mother is watching an Indian television soap opera translated into Pashtun. Everyone says it is very silly and a waste of time and obviously Indian but they watch it anyway. She goes down on her knees in her ribby winter tights and starts to dig. Down down, twist and shovel, then the green enamelled blade rasps on metal. She scrapes around and pulls out the thing her father has buried. When she wrestles it out she almost drops the soft, shapeless thing, thinking it is a dead cat. Then she understands what she has found: the black bag. The other black bag, for the special visits. She reaches for the silver clasps.

  In Najia Askarzadah’s memory her mother’s scream from the kitchen door ends it. After that come broken recalls of shouting, angry voices, punishment, pain and soon after, the midnight flight through the streets of Kabul lying on the back seat where the streetlights strobe overhead one flash two flash three flash four. In the aeai’s virtual childhood the scream tapers off into a stabbing scent of winter, of cold and steel and dead things dried out that almost blinds her. And Najia Askarzadah remembers. She remembers opening the bag. Her mother flying across the patio scattering the plastic chairs that lived out there in every season. She remembers looking inside. Her mother shouting her name but she does not look up there are toys inside, shiny metal toys, dark rubber toys. She remembers lifting the stainless steel things into the winter sunlight in her mittened hands: the speculum, the curved suture needle, the curettage spoon, the hypodermics and the tubes of gel, the electrodes, the stubby ridged rubber of the electric truncheon. Her mother hauling her away by her furry hood, smacking the metal things the rubber things away from her, throwing her away across the path, the frost-hardened gravel ripping her ribbed tights, grazing her knees.

  The fine-boned branches of the apricot trees mesh and fold Najia Askarzadah into another memory not her own. She has never been to this green-floored corridor of concrete blocks but she knows it existed. It is a true illusion. It is a corridor that you might see in a hospital but it does not have the smell of a hospital. It has a hospital’s big translucent swinging doors; the paint is chipped off the metal edges suggesting frequent passage but there is only Najia Askarzadah on the green corridor. Frigid air blows through the louvered windows along one side, down the other are named and numbered doors. Najia passes through one set of fl
apping doors, two, three. With every set, a noise grows a little louder, the noise of a sobbing woman, a woman past the end of everything where no shame or dignity remains. Najia walks towards the shrieking. She passes a hospital trolley abandoned by a door. The trolley has straps for ankles, wrists, waist. Neck. Najia passes through the final set of doors. The sobbing rises to a sharp keening. It emanates from the last door on the left. Najia pushes it open against the sturdy spring.

  The table takes up the centre of the room and the woman takes up the centre of the table. A recorder hooked to an overhead microphone sits on the table beside her head. The woman is naked and her hands and feet are lashed to rings at the corners of the table. She is pulled taut into a spread eagle. Her breasts, inner thighs and shaved pubis are pocked with cigarette burns. A shiny chromed speculum opens her vagina to Najia Askarzadah. A man in a doctor’s coat and green plastic apron sits by her feet. He finishes smothering contact gel over a stubby electric truncheon, dilates the speculum to its maximum and slides the baton between the steel lips. The woman’s screams become incomprehensible. The man sighs, looks round once at his daughter, raises his eyebrows in greeting and presses the firing stud.

  ‘No!’ Najia Askarzadah screams. There is a white flash, a roar like a universe ending, her skin shimmers with synaesthetic shock, she smells onions joss celery and rust and she is sprawling on the floor of the Indiapendent design unit with Tal crouching over her. Yt holds her ‘hoek in yts hand. Disconnection blow-back. The neurones reel. Najia Askarzadah’s mouth works. There are words she has to say, questions she must ask but she is expelled from otherworld. Tal offers a slim hand, beckons urgently.

  ‘Come on cho chweet, we got to go.’

  ‘My father, it said . . .’

  ‘Said a lot, baba. Heard a lot. Don’t want to know, that’s you and it, but we have to go now.’ Tal seizes her wrist, drags Najia up from her ungainly sprawl across the floor. Yts surprising strength cuts through the spray of flashbacks; apricot trees in winter, a soft black bag opening, walking down the green corridor, the room with the table and the chrome mpeg recorder.

  ‘It showed me my father. It took me back to Kabul, it showed me my father . . .’

  Tal swings Najia through the emergency exit onto a clattering steel stairwell.

  ‘I’m sure it showed you whatever would keep you talking long enough to get karsevaks to our location. Pande called, they’re pulling up. Baba, you trust too much. Me, I’m a nute, I trust no one, least of all myself. Now, are you coming or do you want to end up like our blessed Prime Minister?’

  Najia glances back at the curved display screen, the chrome curl of the ‘hoek lying on the desk. Comforting illusions. She follows Tal like a little child. The stairwell is a glass cylinder of rain. It is like being inside a waterfall. Hand in hand Najia and Aj pile down the steel steps toward the green exit light.

  Thomas Lull sets the last of the three photographs down on the table. Lisa Durnau notices that he has worked a sleight of hand. The order is reversed: Lisa. Lull. Aj. A bunco card-trick.

  ‘I’m inclined to the theory that time turns all things into their opposites,’ says Thomas Lull. Lisa Durnau faces him across the chipped melamine table. The Varanasi-Patna fast hydrofoil is grossly overloaded, every cubby and corner of cabin space filled with veiled women and badly wrapped bales of possessions and tear-stained children looking around them in open-mouthed confusion. Thomas Lull stirs his plastic cup of chai. ‘Remember back in Oxford . . . just before . . .’ He breaks off, shakes his head.

  ‘I did stop them sticking fucking Coca Cola signs all over Alterre.’

  But she cannot tell him what she fears for the world he trusted to her. She had briefly dipped into Alterre while she waited at the Consular Office for the diplomatic status to come through. Ash, charred rock, a nuclear sky. Nothing living. A dead planet. A world as real as any other, in Thomas Lull’s philosophy. She cannot think about that, feel it, grieve for it as she should. Concentrate on what is here, now, laid out in front of you on the tabletop. But coiled in the base of her mind is the suspicion that the extinction of Alterre is linked with the stories and people connecting here.

  ‘Jesus, L. Durnau. A fucking honorary consul.’

  ‘You liked the inside of that police station?’

  ‘As much as you liked taking it up the ass from the Dark Lord. You went into space for them.’

  ‘Only because they couldn’t get you.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have gone.’

  She remembers how to look at him. He throws his hands up.

  ‘Okay I’m a fucking liar.’ The man perched on the end of their table turns to glare at the dirty-mouthed Westerner. Thomas Lull touches each of the pictures lightly, reverently. ‘I have no answer to this. Sorry you came all this way to learn that, but I don’t. Do you? Your photo’s there too. All I do know is where we had two mysteries we now have one.’ He takes out his palmer, thumbs up the picture he stole of the inside of Aj’s head glinting with the floating diyas of protein processors, sets it beside her Tabernacle image.

  ‘I suppose we have to come to some deal. Help me find Aj and prove what I think the truth is about her, I’ll offer what I can with the Tabernacle.’

  Lisa Durnau slips the Tablet out of its soft leather pouch and sets it at the opposite end, next to her own Tabernacle picture.

  ‘You come back with me.’

  Thomas Lull shakes his head.

  ‘No deal. You pass it on, but I’m not going back.’

  ‘We need you.’

  ‘We? And are you going to tell me it’s my duty as a good citizen not just of America but the whole wide world to make a sacrifice for this epochal moment of first contact with an “alien civilization”? ’

  ‘Fuck you, Lull.’ The man glares again at such profanity from the mouth of a woman. The hydrofoil jolts and booms as it strikes a submerged object.

  This monsoon morning the Patna hydrofoil is a refugee scow. Varanasi is a city in spasm. The shockwaves spreading out from Sarkhand Roundabout have crystallised its ancient animosities and hatreds. It is not just the nutes now. It is the Muslims, the Sikhs, the Westerners as the city of Siva convulses, hunting sacrifices. US marines escorted the embassy car from the police station through the hastily-erected Bharati army checkpoints. Thomas Lull tried to make sense of the little US flag fluttering boldly from the car’s right wing as jawans and Marines slid looks off each other. Sirens dopplered across the night. A helicopter beat overhead. The convoy cruised past a row of looted small shops; steel security shutters staved in or wrenched out. A Nissan pick-up laden with young karsevaks moved along side. The men bent down to peer in the embassy car. Their eyes were wide with ganja; they carried trishuls, garden forks, antique blades. The driver leered, floored the pedal and sped off, multiple horns blaring. Everywhere was the smell of wet burning.

  ‘Aj is out there,’ Thomas Lull said.

  At the hydrofoil dock the rain was falling heavily, tinged with smoke, but the city was venturing out, a peek from a door, a furtive dash past burned out Marutis and looted Muslim shops, a scurrying phatphat run. There were livelihoods to be made. The city, as if having held its breath, at last allowed itself a slow, trembling exhalation. A steady throng pushed through the narrow streets to the river. With handcarts and cycle drays, with overloaded cycle rickshaws and phatphats, with hooting Marutis and taxis and pickups, the Muslims were leaving. Thomas Lull and Lisa climbed around the hopelessly jammed traffic. Many had abandoned vehicles and were off-loading their salvaged possessions: computers, sewing machines, lathes, great swollen bundles of bedding and clothing wrapped up in blue plastic twine.

  ‘I went to see Chandra at the university,’ Thomas Lull said as they pushed through a snarl of abandoned cycle-rickshaws onto the ghat where the separate streams of refuges fused into one Vedic horde at the water’s edge. ‘Anjali and Jean-Yves were working in human-aeai interfaces; specifically, grafting protein-chip matrices onto neural structures. Direct brain-comp
uter connection.’ Lisa Durnau fought to keep Thomas Lull in sight. His gaudy blue surf-shirt was a beacon among the bodies and bundles. One trip on these stone steps and you were dead. ‘The lawyer gave Aj a photograph. Her, after some kind of operation, with Jean-Yves and Anjali. I recognised the location, it was Patna, on the new ghat at the Bund. Then I remembered something. It was back in Thekaddy when I was working the beach clubs. I used to know a lot of the emotics runners, most of it came from Bangalore and Chennai but there was one guy imported it from the north, from the Free Trade Zone at Patna. They had everything you could get from Bangalore for a quarter the price. He used to go on monthly runs, and I remember him telling me about this grey medic, did radical surgery for men and women who didn’t want to be men or women any more, if you get what I mean.’

  ‘Nutes,’ Lisa Durnau yelled over the sea of heads. The hydrofoil staff had sealed and barred the gate to the jetty and were lifting money from the hands thrust through the bars to permit refugees to slip. She guessed they were halfway to the gate but she was tiring.