River Of Gods

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Nutes,’ Thomas Lull shouted back. ‘It’s a long shot, but if I’m right, it’s the missing piece.’

  To what? Lisa Durnau wanted to ask but the crowd surged. The hydrofoil was filling by the second. Refugees were waist deep in the Ganga, holding babies, children up to the boat crew who pushed them ungently back with landing poles. Thomas Lull pulled Lisa Durnau close to him. They fought to the head of the line. The steel gate opened, the steel gate clanged shut. Bodies jammed against the grating.

  ‘Got any green?’

  A search of her bag threw up three hundred in traveller’s cheques. Thomas Lull waved them in the air.

  ‘US dollars! US dollars!’

  The steward beckoned him forward. His crew shoved back the clingers-on.

  ‘How many how many?’

  Thomas Lull held up two fingers.

  ‘In in.’

  They squeezed through the barely open gate, up the gangplank and onto the hydrofoil. Ten minutes later, grossly overloaded, it pulled away from the still-growing crowd on the ghats. To Lisa Durnau, peering through the streaky window, it looked like a blood clot.

  In the overcrowded lounge she pushes the Tablet towards Thomas Lull. He thumbs through the pages of data from the Tabernacle.

  ‘So what is it like in space, then?’

  ‘Smelly. Tiring. You spend most of your time out of your head and you never actually get to see anything.’

  ‘Bit like a rock festival. First thing strikes me about this, you assume it’s an artefact of an extraterrestrial civilization.’

  ‘If the Tabernacle is seven billion years old, then why don’t we see the aliens who built it everywhere we look?’

  ‘A variant on the Fermi Paradox - if aliens exist, then where are they? Let’s work through this: if we posit the Tabernacle builders an expansion rate of even one tenth per cent of the speed of light, in seven billion years they would have colonised all the way to the Sculptor Galaxy group.’

  ‘There’d be nothing but them . . .’

  ‘But all we find is one shitty little asteroid? I don’t think so. Subsidiary point, if it is almost twice as old as our solar system . . .’

  ‘How did they know we’d be here to find it?’

  ‘That this swirl of stardust would one day turn into you, me and Aj. I think we can dismiss that theory. Conjecture two: it’s a message from God.’

  ‘Oh come on, Lull.’

  ‘I’d lay better than evens it’s been whispered at the White House prayer breakfast. The end of the world is at hand.’

  ‘Then that’s the end of the rational world-view. It’s back to the Age of Miracles.’

  ‘Exactly. I like to think my life as a scientist has not been a complete waste. So I’ll stick to theories that have some nugget of rationality in them. Conjecture three, another universe.’

  ‘That thought occurred to me,’ says Lisa Durnau.

  ‘If anyone knows what’s out there in the polyverse, it should be you. The Big Bang inflates into a set of separate universes all with slightly differing physical laws. The probability is virtually one hundred per cent that there’s at least one other universe with an Aj, a Lull and a Durnau in it.’

  ‘Seven billion years old?’

  ‘Different physical laws. Times runs faster.’

  ‘Conjecture four.’

  ‘Conjecture four: it’s all a game. Rather, it’s all a simulation. Deep down, physical reality is rules and the application of rules, those simple programmes that give rise to incalculable complexity. Computer virtual reality looks exactly the same . . . I’ve only been saying this all my life, L. Durnau. But here’s the rub. We’re both fakes. We’re re-runs on the final computer at the Omega Point at the end of spacetime. The probabilities are always going to be in favour of our reality being a re-run rather than the original.’

  ‘And bugs are appearing in the system. Our mystery seven-billion-year-old asteroid.’

  ‘Implying some imminent plot development for The Sims.’

  ‘You’re not supposed to see the Great and Powerful Oz,’ says Lisa Durnau.

  ‘We’re definitely not in Kansas any more.’

  The chai wallah passes, swinging his stainless steel urn, chanting his mantra: chai, kafi. Thomas Lull takes a fresh cup.

  ‘I don’t know how you drink that stuff,’ Lisa says.

  ‘Conjecture five. For a mysterious alien artefact, it’s a bit clunky. I’ve seen more convincing SFX on Town and Country.’

  ‘I get what you’re saying here. It looks like we built it - if we wanted to send some kind of message to ourselves.’

  ‘One you can’t ignore - an Earth-crossing asteroid, and then make it move out of the way.’

  Lisa Durnau hesitates. This is beyond blue-sky. ‘From our future.’

  ‘There’s nothing here I don’t see us achieving in a couple of hundred years.’

  ‘It’s a warning?’

  ‘Why else send something back, unless you need to change history pretty damn bad? Our umpteen-great grand-Lulls and Durnaus have run into something they can’t deal with. But if they gave themselves a couple of hundred years’ head start . . .’

  ‘I can’t imagine what they’re up against if they can send objects through time and they’re still on the ropes.’

  ‘I can,’ says Thomas Lull. ‘It’s the final war between humans and aeais. We’d be up against Generation Tens by then - one hundred million times the capability of a Gen Three.’

  ‘That means they would operate on the same level as the Wolfram/Friedkin codes that underly our physical reality,’ Lisa Durnau says. ‘In which case . . .’

  ‘They could directly manipulate physical reality.’

  ‘You’re talking magic here. God, magic. Jesus, Lull. I’ve objections. One: they send it back seven billion years?’

  ‘A gravitational anomaly stirred the dust nebula that became this solar system. A passing black hole would make a dandy anchor point for a time-like wormhole. At least they would know we would be here.’

  ‘Very good, Lull. Try this one. Objection two: as messages go, it’s a bit obtuse. What’s wrong with a simple “help we are getting fucked over by Artificial Intelligences with the powers of gods”?’

  ‘What do you think the effect of that would be? By the time we work it out, we’ll be ready for what the Tabernacle has to say to us.’

  ‘You’re not convincing me, Lull. Even with Generation Tens and wormholes and the fact that the act of sending a warning splits us off into a universe where we get the head start but dooms them in their universe . . . even with all that, why the hell are you, me and an eighteen-year-old girl who can talk to machines so important?’

  Thomas Lull shrugs, that maddening, grinning, don’t-know-don’t-care gesture that had always the power to infuriate Lisa when she argued his speculations down in sessions just like this. Now Lull pulls up his stolen images of the inside of Aj’s skull.

  ‘Your side of the deal.’

  ‘All right. For me, this isn’t the mystery. This is the corroboration. The mystery is how she stopped those Awadhi robots. So when we rule out magic and we rule out God all we have left is technology. And that, in there, is technology; technology that could let a human brain communicate directly with a machine. She hacked them.’

  ‘No God, no gods,’ says Thomas Lull. Lisa feels a vibration run through the hull of the hydrofoil. The boat throttles back its waterjets, settling down on its foils on its approach to the crowded waters around Patna. Through the glass she makes out the cheap mass-built light industrial units and ex-urban infotech sprawl behind the Ganga’s wide, sandy reefs.

  ‘What does she see? A halo of information around people and things. She sees a bird and tells you its name and species. That sounds like the Birds of South-West India. In the railway station she tells a family their son has been arrested, what train to get, what lawyers to hire. That’s police reports, the Ahmedabad Yellow pages and the Mumbai Railroads timetable. In every way, she gets on li
ke someone whose brain is hooked into the net.’

  Lisa brushes her fingers lightly over the ghost-drawings on the Tablet.

  ‘All this . . . is how she does it. I don’t know who she is, I don’t know how Jean-Yves and Anjali came to be caught up in it, but what I know is someone took a girl and turned her into an experiment, some monstrous test bed for new brain/machine interface technology.’

  Passengers stir, gather up their dependants and possessions. Their brief respite on water is nearly over, now they must face a strange, new, unknown city.

  ‘I’m with you all the way up to that point, L. Durnau,’ says Thomas Lull. ‘I think it’s the other way round. It’s not a system for a human to interact with a machine. It’s a system for a machine to interact with a human brain. She is an aeai downloaded into a human body. She is the Generation Threes’ first and last ambassador to humanity. I think that’s why we’re all together in the Tabernacle. It’s a prophecy of a meeting.’

  She is an orphan in the city of gods and therefore never alone. Gods beat behind her like wings, gods flock around her head, gods roll and tumble at her feet, gods peel apart before her like a million opening doors. She lifts her hand and ten thousand gods flow apart and fuse together again. Every building, every vehicle, every lamp and neon, every street shrine and traffic light, trembles with gods. She can look and read a hundred phatphat licence details, their owners’ dates of birth and addresses, their insurance histories, their credit ratings, their educational qualifications and criminal records, their bank account numbers, their children’s exam results, their wives’ shoe-sizes. Gods fold out of each other like paper streamers. Gods weave through each other like gold threads on a silk loom. Beyond the air-glow the night horizon is a jewelled crown of deities. Beneath the traffic boom, the sirens, the raised voices and car horns and blaring music, nine million gods whisper to her.

  Violence here, warns the god of the gali that leads off the brightly lit street of chai bars and snack stalls. She halts as she hears a rising roar of male voices funnelling down the narrow, jharoka-lined alley. Student karsevaks come roaring forth. She picks one out of god-space: Mangat Singhal: mechanical engineering student at the University of Bharat. He has been a paid-up Youth Member of the Shivaji for three years; he has had two arrests for riotous behaviour at the Sarkhand Roundabout protest. His mother has smoking-related cancer of the throat and will likely go to the ghats before the year is out. This way, says the god of the taxi rank, showing her the Maruti cruising beyond the panicked chaiwallahs hastily putting up their steel grilles. Damage estimated at twenty thousand rupees, the god of small insurance claims tells her as she hears the crash of a chai-stall overturned behind her by karsevaks. Unclaimable under public disturbance exemptions. You will intersect with your taxi in thirty five seconds. Left here. And she is there as the Maruti comes round the corner and stops for her hand.

  ‘Don’t go there,’ the driver says when she gives him the address out in the basti.

  ‘I will pay you much money.’ ATM next on right, the god of the shopping arcade says. ‘Stop here.’ The card goes in without hesitation, without question, without need for number or face scan. How much do you require? asks the god of electronic banking. She gives it a five-digit number. It is so long coming out of the slot she worries the driver might move on to a safer fare. Cab licence number VRJ117824C45 is still stationary at the kerb, advises the god that animates the traffic cameras. She blinks up to its elevated viewpoint, sees herself, close in at the ATM trying to fold fat wads of cash, sees the cab behind her, sees the small convoy of army hummers blast past.

  ‘Will this suffice?’ She thrusts the bouquet of notes in the driver’s face.

  ‘Baba, for this I will drive you to Delhi itself.’

  He is a driver who likes to talk; riot riot riot; any excuse at all; why aren’t they concentrating on their studies instead of burning things up, when they try to get jobs, that’s when it’ll all come home, oh I see you were in trouble with the police for riotous behaviour, no, no jobs here for gundas and badmashes, but what about Sajida Rana, the Prime Minister, can you believe it, her own bodyguard, our Prime Minister, Mama Bharat, and what are we going to do, has anything thought of that? and god help us when we fall over, the Awadhis will roll right over us . . . Aj watches the gods flow in squadrons and chapters and orders and pile up behind her into an incandescent hemisphere over the city. She taps the driver on the shoulder. He almost steers into a brick and plastic roadside hovel.

  ‘Your wife is well and safe and will spend the night at her mother’s until it is safe to come home.’

  She leaves him shortly after. Gods are few as stars in a night sky here. They hover around the big yellow sodium lights on the main avenues, over the cars that swoosh past in the rain, they flicker up and down the communications cables like fire but the bastis beyond are black, unholy. Whispers guide her into the darkness. The world turns the city burns but the slum must sleep. A startled face in an all-night chaistall stares at her as if she is a djinn, whirled out of the storm. Keep on along here until you come to a big power pylon, whispers the god of the MTV-Asia cable-channel on the pale blue screen. Divinities are draped from the girders of the big power tower like leaves on a tree. Left side, they say. The one with two steps down and the plastic fertiliser bag for the door. It is easily found, even in streaming, stinking darkness, when gods guide you. She feels out the contours of the rag house. The plastic door-sheet rustles at her touch. Lives awake within. Here is where the DNA in the database leads her. Beyond her the true light of dawn glows grey and wan through the god-glow. Aj lifts the plastic and ducks under the lintel.

  They shout and they hammer for twenty minutes but the good doctor Nanak is not receiving visitors this day. The doors are sealed, the hatches dogged, the windows shuttered and locked with big bright brass padlocks. Thomas Lull bangs his fist on the grey door.

  ‘Come on, open the fuck up!’

  In the end he lobs metal scrap up at the meshed-over bridge windows while the rain gathers into ever larger puddles on the grey decking. The barrage attracts the attention of the Australians on the next barge. Two bare-chested twentysomethings in calf-length jams come over the ramp. Water drips from their blonde dreads but they move through the rain as if it is their natural environment. Lisa Durnau, sheltering under an awning, checks their abs. They have those little muscle groin grooves that point down under their waistbands.

  ‘Mate, if the guru ain’t in, he ain’t in.’

  ‘I saw something moving up there.’ Thomas Lull shouts again. ‘Hey! I see you, come out, there’s things I want to ask you.’

  ‘Look, bit of respect for a fella’s peace,’ says second fit boy. He wears a carved jade spiral on a leather thong around his neck. ‘The guru is not giving interviews, no one, nowhere, no-how. Okay?’

  ‘I am not a fucking journalist, and I am not a fucking karsevak,’ Thomas Lull declares and starts to climb the superstructure.

  ‘Lull,’ Lisa Durnau groans.

  ‘Oh no you don’t,’ the first Australian shouts and together they seize Thomas Lull by the legs and pull him off the bridge. He hits the deck with a meaty thump.

  ‘Now, you have definitely outstayed your welcome,’ green spiral boy says and they wrestle Thomas Lull to his feet, pin his arms and navigate him towards the main arterial companionway between the barges. Lisa Durnau decides it’s time to do something.

  ‘Nanak!’ she calls up at the bridge. A figure moves behind the mesh and the dirty glass. ‘We’re not journalists. It’s Lisa Durnau and Thomas Lull. We want to talk to you about Kalki.’

  The door to the flying bridge opens. A face muffled in shawls peep out, a face like Hanuman the monkey god.

  ‘Let him go.’

  Nanak the dream surgeon bustles around the bridge making tea the proper way. The interior is oddly louche in its cod-colonial wicker and bamboo after the clanging industrial superstructure.

  ‘Apologies apologies for my reticence
.’ Nanak fusses with pots and a folding brass Benares table. Lisa Durnau sips her chai and subtly studies her host. Nutes are not a common sex in Kansas. The details of yts skin, the subtle ridges down yts bare left arm that are the sub-dermal controls for the sexual system, fascinate her. She wonders how it is to programme your emotions, to design your fallings-in-love and heartbreaks, to re-engineer your hopes and fears. She wonders how many kinds of orgasms you could create. But the question foremost in her mind is: was it male or female? The body shape, the fat distribution, the clothes - a deliberate eclectic mix favouring the floating and the floppy, give no indication. Male, she decides. Men are fragile and fluid in their sexual identities. Nanak continues pouring chai. ‘We have been victimised of late. The Australians look after me well, lovely boys. And the work here does demand discretion. But: Professor Thomas Lull, a great honour for a humble factor of surgical services.’