by Ian McDonald
Thomas Lull unfolds his palmer and places it on the brass table. Nanak winces at the display.
‘This was the most complex operation I have ever brokered. Weeks of work. They virtually unravelled her brain. Lobes and folds drawn out and suspended on wires. Extraordinary.’
Lisa Durnau sees Thomas Lull’s face tighten. Nanak touches him on the knee.
‘She is well?’
‘She is trying to find out who her true parents are. She’s realised that her life is lies.’
Nanak’s mouth forms a voiceless Oh.
‘I am but a broker of services . . .’
‘Was it these two hired you?’ Thomas Lull thumbs up the picture from the temple that had first sent him on this pilgrimage.
‘Yes,’ Nanak says, folding yts hands in yts shawl. ‘They represented a powerful Varanasi sundarban, the Badrinath sundarban. The legendary abode of Vishnu, I believe. I was paid two million US dollars in a banker’s draft drawn on the account of the Odeco Corporation. I can furnish you with the details if you require. Almost half the budget went on wetware applications, we had to find a way of programming memory; emotic designers are not cheap, though I like to think we have some of the best in the whole of Hindustan in this zone.’
‘Budget,’ Thomas Lull spits. ‘Like a fucking television programme . . .’
Now Lisa Durnau has to speak.
‘Her adoptive parents in Bangalore, do they actually exist?’
‘Oh, entirely false, madam. We spent much money on creating a credible back-story. It had to be convincing that she was human, with a childhood and parents and a past.’
‘Why, is she . . .’ Lisa Durnau asks, dreading the answer.
‘An aeai possessing a human body,’ Thomas Lull says and Lisa now hears the ice in his voice that is more dangerous than any heat of passion.
Nanak rocks on yts chair.
‘That is correct; forgive me, this is most distasteful. The Badrinath sundarban was the host for a Generation Three artificial intelligence. The scheme, as your colleagues told it to me, was to download a copy on to the higher cognitive levels of a human brain. The tilak was the interface. An extremely complicated piece of surgery. It took us three attempts to get it right.’
‘They’re scared, aren’t they?’ Thomas Lull says. ‘They can see the end coming. How many are left?’
‘Three only, I believe.’
‘They want to know if they can make peace or if they must be driven to extinction, but first they have to understand us. Our humanity baffles them, it’s a miracle she can make any sense out of it at all, but that’s what the false childhood is for. How old is Aj really?’
‘It is eight months since she left this place with your colleagues - whom she believed to be her real parents. It is just over a year since I was contacted by the Badrinath aeai. Oh, you should have seen her the day she left, she was so bright, so joyful, like everything was new. The European couple were to take her down to Bangalore - they had only a short time, levels of memory were decompressing and if they left it too long it would have disastrous, they would have become imprinted.’
‘You abandoned her?’ Lisa Durnau is incredulous. She tries to convince herself that this is India; life and individuality have different values from Kansas and Santa Barbara. But she still reels from what these people have done to a teenage girl.
‘It was the plan. We had a cover story that she was in a gap year travelling around the sub-continent.’
‘And did it ever, once occur to you, in your plans and cover stories and decompressing memories and your precision Chinese surgery, that for this aeai to live, a human personality had to die?’ Thomas Lull explodes. Lisa Durnau now touches a hand to his leg. Easy. Peace. Chill. Nanak smiles like a blessing saint.
‘Why sir, the child was an imbecile. No individuality, no sense of person at all. No life at all. It had to be that way, we could never have used a normal subject. Her parents were delighted when your colleagues bought her from them. At last their child might have a chance, with the experimental new technology. They thanked Lord Vishnu . . .’
With a wordless roar Thomas Lull is on his feet, fist balled. Nanak scuttles across the floor away from the raging male. Lisa Durnau smothers Lull’s fist in her two hands.
‘Leave it, let it go,’ she whispers. ‘Sit down, Lull, sit down.’
‘Fuck you!’ Thomas Lull yells at the nute-maker. ‘Fuck you and fuck Kalki and fuck Jean-Yves and Anjali!’
Lisa Durnau presses him into his seat. Nanak gathers ytself up, dusts ytself down but yt does not dare come near.
‘I apologise for my friend here,’ Lisa Durnau says. ‘He’s overwrought . . .’ She grips Thomas Lull’s shoulder. ‘I think we should go.’
‘Yes, maybe that would be best,’ says Nanak, shrugging yts shawls around ytself. ‘This is a discreet business, I cannot have raised voices.’
Thomas Lull shakes his head, disgusted at himself as much as any words in this room. He extends a hand but the nute does not take it.
The suitcases have little plastic wheels that rumble over the downtown streets. But the surface is patched and uneven and the handles are silly webbing loops and Krishan and Parvati are moving as fast as they can so every few metres the cases twist off their wheels and spill over. And the taxis just splash by Krishan’s upraised hand and the troop carriers prowl past and the songs of the karsevaks come from this side then that side, from behind, then right in front so they must hide in a doorway as they run past and Parvati is weary and soaked through, sari clinging to her, hair hanging in ropes and it is still five kilometres to the station.
‘Too many clothes,’ Krishan jokes. Parvati smiles. He hefts both cases, one in each hand and sets off again. Together they huddle through the streets, clinging to doorways, cringing from the military traffic, dashing across intersections, always alert for unexpected sounds, sudden movements.
‘Not far,’ Krishan lies. His forearms are knotted, burning. ‘Soon be there.’
As they approach the station people emerge from the capillary galis and project streets, laden like them with bags, burdens, cycle rickshaws, carts, cars; rivulet joining to stream joining to flow joining together into a broad river of heads. Parvati clutches at Krishan’s sleeve. To slip apart here is to be lost for years. Krishan wades on, fists rigid around the plastic handles that feel as if they are made of burning coal, neck muscles tensed, teeth clenched, looking ahead, ahead, thinking of nothing but the station the train the station the train and how every footstep takes him closer, takes him nearer to the time when he can set these burdens down. He waddles now, trying to keep step with the surge of people. Parvati is closer than a shadow. A woman in a full burqa presses past. ‘What are you doing here?’ she hisses. ‘You have brought this to us.’ Krishan pushes the woman away with his suitcases before her words can spread and bring the wrath of the crowd down on them for now he sees what has been before his face all this long road: the Muslims are leaving Varanasi.
Parvati whispers, ‘Do you think we will be able to get a train?’ Then Krishan understands that the world will not stop for their romantic notions, the crowds will not part and let them have free passage, history will not grant them a lovers’ pardon. Theirs is not a bold, romantic flight. They are foolish and blind and selfish. His heart sinks deeper as the street opens into the approach to the station and the flow of refugees empties into the largest mass of people he has ever seen, more than any crowd that ever streamed out of Sampurnanand Stadium. He can see the spars and translucent spun-diamond canopy of the concourse, the gaping glass portals to the ticket halls. He can see the train at the platform, glistening under the yellow lights, already loaded to the roof and more climbing on all the time. He can see the soldiers silhouetted against the breaking dawn on their armoured vehicles. But he cannot see a way through the people; all those people. And the cases, those stupid suitcases, pull him down through the concrete into the soil, anchoring him like roots. Parvati tugs at his sleeve.
> ‘This way.’
She draws him towards the concourse gates. The press is less at the edge of the plaza; refugees instinctually keep away from soldiers. Parvati hunts in the beadwork bag over her shoulder. She fetches a tube of lipstick, ducks her head briefly and comes up again with a red bindi on her forehead.
‘Please, for the love of Siva for the love of Siva!’ she cries to the soldiers, hands pressed together into a namaskar of entreaty. The jawans’ eyes cannot be read behind their mirrored, rain-spotted visors. Louder now: ‘For the love of the Lord Siva!’ Now the people around her start to turn and look and growl. They start to jostle, their anger begins. Parvati pleads with the soldiers. ‘For the love of Lord Siva.’
Then the soldiers hear her voice. They see her soaked, dirt-smeared sari. They read her bindi. Jawans slip down from their vehicles, jabbing their weapon muzzles at the women and children, forcing them back though they scream God’s curse at the soldiers. A jemadar gestures briskly to Parvati and Krishan. The soldiers part, they slip through, the weapons go up again to the horizontal, a bar, a denial. A woman officer hurries Parvati and Krishan between the parked transports that even in the rain smell of hot biodiesel. Voices rise to a thunder of outrage. Glancing back, Parvati sees hands seize a jawan’s assault gun. There is a short, fierce balance of forces, then the soldier next to him casually swings up the butt of his weapon and smashes it into the side of the protestor’s skull. The Muslim man goes down without even a cry, hands clutched to head. The man’s cry becomes the crowd’s; it surges like a river squall. Then the shots rip out and everyone in the plaza falls to their knees.
‘Come on,’ the jemadar says. ‘No one’s hurt. Keep your heads down. What were you doing there? What ever possessed you? This day of all days.’ She tuts. Parvati does not think Bharati soldiers should tut.
‘My mother,’ Parvati says. ‘I have to go to her, she’s an old woman, she needs me, she has no one else . . .’
The jemadar brings them up the side steps into the station concourse. Parvati’s spirit turns to lead. The people, the people. There is no way through this. She cannot see where the ticket counters are. But Krishan bangs down the cases and jerks out the handles and lifts them up on their little frayed black plastic wheels and pushes determinedly into the rear of the crowd.
The sun climbs over the transparent roof. Trains arrive, more people than Parvati can ever imagine press onto the platforms. For every trainload of refugees that pulls out from under Varanasi Station’s spun-diamond canopy another presses into the foyer from the forecourt. Parvati and Krishan are pushed step by step toward the ticket desks. Parvati watches the flatscreens suspended from the roof. Something has happened to Breakfast with Bharti. In her place is a video loop of Ashok Rana, whom she has never liked, over and over. He is behind some studio desk. He looks tired and afraid. It is only on the sixth viewing that Parvati understands with a shock what he is saying. His sister is dead. Sajida Rana is dead. Now the streets, the shots, the crowds, the running, the Muslims and the soldiers firing over their heads, all become solid, one connected thing. Ignorant and innocent, they have been running, suitcases in hand, through the death throes of Mother Bharat. Suddenly her selfishness consumes her.
‘Krishan. We have to go back. I can’t go. We were wrong . . .’
Krishan’s face is perfect, drained, disbelief. Then the gap opens in front of him and it goes all the way to the ticket counter and the clerk looks at Parvati, just at Parvati and in a moment the gap will implode.
‘Krishan, the ticket-wallah!’
She pushes him up to the counter and the ticket-wallah asks him where he wants to go and he doesn’t know, and she can see the clerk will brush him aside, next please.
‘Bubaneshwar!’ she cries. ‘Two singles! Bubaneshwar.’ She has never been to Bubaneshwar, has never even crossed into ancient Orissa, but her mind is filled with the image of billowing orange and scarlet silk, the rath yatra of Jagannath. Then the ticket-wallah prints the tickets and gives them their train number and time and platform and seat reservations and spins the slips of paper through the hatch.
It is four hours until the train to Raipur, where they will change for Bubaneshwar. The slow conveyor of people takes them through the doors on to the platform where they sit on their luggage, too tired for words, each fearing that if the other speaks they will both leave the blue plastic cases and bolt back to their lives and lies, little adventure over and closed. Krishan buys newsprints from the stall - not many for what Parvati reads in them makes her afraid to be on the platform among the Muslims, despite the groups of soldiers that pass up and down. She feels the weight of their looks, hears their hisses and mutterings. Mrs Khan from the Cantonment Set, so certain on the politics of the war at the cricket match, could be on this platform. No, not the Begum Khan; she would be in a first-class air-conditioned a hundred kilometres away, she would be driving south in her chauffeured car, windows darkened; she would be in business class on an airbus.
Rain drips from the fringe of the platform canopy. Krishan shows Parvati the headline, still smeary from the printer, announcing a great Government of National Salvation in coalition with N.K. Jivanjee’s Shivaji Party that will restore order and repulse the invader. This what Parvati has felt blow across the platforms like a cold front. The enemy has gained the whip; there is no place in Bharat for Islam.
The train is felt before heard; the clank of the points, the deep vibration transmitted up through the sleepers to the steel stanchions that support the platform canopy, the rumble in the worn blacktop. The crowd arises family by family as the train expands out of the perspective of the tracks, weaving over the points as it draws in to platform fifteen. The indicator boards light up: Raipur Express. Krishan snatches up the cases as the crowd surges forward to meet the train. Bogie after bogie after bogie slides past without sign of stopping. Parvati presses close to Krishan. Trip here, stumble, fall and you would die beneath the guillotine-edge wheels. Slowly the great green train comes to halt.
Suddenly bodies push hard against Parvati. She reels forward against Krishan, he is driven hard against the side of the train. Simultaneously a roar goes up from the back of the crowd.
‘To me, to me!’ Krishan cries. The doors hiss open. Bodies immediately clog them. Arms thrust, torsos twist, luggage is squeezed and rammed. The surge carries Parvati away from the steps. Krishan fights the flow, clinging to the door stanchion, desperate that she will not be separated from him. Terrified, Parvati reaches out for him. Women shove around her screaming mindless oaths, children kick past. The platform is heads, heads and hands, heads and hands and bundles and more people are running across the tracks from the other platforms to reach the train, the train out of Varanasi. Young men trample Parvati as they scramble on to the roof; still she reaches for Krishan’s hand.
Then the shots bang out; short, stabbing bursts of automatic fire. The mob on the platform drops as one, covers heads with hands. Cries, shrieks and the dreadful, unappeasable wail of the injured: the soldiers are not shooting to scare this time. Parvati feels Krishan’s hand close on her. Bullets crack out again. She sees flashes, hears the clang of shells ricocheting off the stanchions. Krishan gives a strange little sigh, then his grip tightens around hers and he draws her up, on to the train.
On the return trip Lisa and Thomas Lull are the only passengers in the lounge. It feels big and plasticy and exposed under its unkind fluorescents so Lisa Durnau suggests they go outside to regard the holy river. Sacred water is a new concept to Lisa Durnau. They stand side by side at the rail, buffeted by flaws of rain watching the sandy banks and rusty tin water abstraction plants. An object breaks the surface. Lisa wonders if it is one of the blind river dolphins she read about on the flight up from Thiruvananthapuram. Dolphin or dead. Certain classes of Hindus cannot be cremated and are surrendered to the mercy of Ganga Mata.
Once in a conference she flopped plane/train/taxi-lagged into a leather armchair in the lobby opposite an African delegate re
clining generously in a seat. She nodded to him, wide-eyed, dazed, whoooo. He nodded back, patted his hands on the arms of the chair. ‘Just letting my soul catch up with me.’ She needs to do that. Catch up with herself. Find a time out from the succession of one event to the next, that’s not filled with some person or thing or problem coming at her, frozen in the headlights of history. Stop reacting, take time, take a step, let your soul catch up. She would love to go for a run. Barring that, some time with a sacred river.
She looks at Thomas Lull. In his stance at the rail she sees four years, she sees uncertainty, she sees fading of confidence, cooling of ardour and energy. When did you last burn with passion about anything? she thinks. She sees a man in his middle years who looks at death every day. She sees almost nothing of the man she had dirty, grown-up sex with in an Oxford College shower. It is absolutely over, she thinks and feels sorry for him. He looks so very tired.