River Of Gods

by Ian McDonald

  ‘So tell, L. Durnau, do you ever, you know, see Jen around?’

  ‘Occasionally, at the mall, sometimes the Jayhawks games. She’s got someone else.’

  ‘I thought that even before. You know. Same way as you know when it’s on. Chemicals or something. Does she look happy?’

  ‘Happy enough.’ Lisa Durnau anticipates his inevitable next question. ‘No baby buggies.’

  He looks at the passing shore, the white temple shikaras hazy against the rain clouds beyond the dark line of trees. Buffalo loll in the water, lifting their heads against the spreading hydrofoil wake.

  ‘I know why Jean-Yves and Anjali did it, why they left her that photograph. I’d wondered why they should punch a hole right through the heart of it. Anjali never could have children, you know.’

  ‘Aj was their surrogate daughter.’

  ‘They felt they owed her the truth. Better to find out what she really was than be a life of illusions. To be human is to be disillusioned.’

  ‘You don’t agree with that.’

  ‘I haven’t your stern Calvinist mien. I’m comfortable with illusion. I don’t think I would have had the courage or the callousness to do that to her.’

  But you also walked away, Lisa Durnau thinks. You also abandoned friends, career, reputation, lovers; it was easy for you, turn around and walk away and never look back.

  ‘But she came looking for you,’ Lisa Durnau says.

  ‘I don’t have any answers for her,’ Thomas Lull says. ‘Why do you have to have answers? You’re born not fucking knowing anything, you go through your life not fucking knowing anything, you die and you never know any fucking thing ever again. That’s the mystery of it. I am nobody’s guru, not yours, not NASA’s, not some aeai’s. You know something? All those articles and TV appearances and conferences? I was making it up as I went along. That’s all. Alterre? Just something I made up some day.’

  Lisa Durnau grips the rail with both hands.

  ‘Lull, Alterre’s gone.’

  She cannot read his face, his stance, his muscles. She tries to provoke a reaction.

  ‘Gone, Lull, everything. All eleven million servers, crashed. Extinct.’

  Thomas Lull shakes his head. Thomas Lull frowns. His brow creases. Then Lisa sees an expression on his face she knows so well herself: the bafflement, wonderment, enlightenment of idea.

  ‘What was always behind Alterre?’ he says.

  ‘That a simulated environment . . .’

  ‘Might eventually produce real intelligence.’ The words come in a rush. ‘What if we succeeded better than we ever hoped? What if Alterre didn’t breed sentience, but the whole thing became alive . . . aware . . . Kalki is the tenth avatar of Vishnu. It sits there at the top of Alterre’s evolutionary pyramid, preserver and sustainer of all life; all things proceed from it and are of its substance. Then it reaches out and there’s another world of life out there, not part of it, separate, disconnected, utterly alien. Is it a threat, is it a blessing, is it something altogether other? It has to know. It has to experience.’

  ‘But if Alterre has crashed.’

  He chews in his bottom lip and goes quiet and dark, looking out at the rain in the great river. Lisa Durnau tries to count the impossibilities he has had to absorb. After a time he reaches out a hand. ‘Give me that thing. I need to find Aj. If Vishnu is gone, she’s unplugged from the net. All her life is illusion and now even the gods have abandoned her. What is she going to be thinking, feeling?’

  Lisa slips the Tablet out of its flesh-soft leather holster and passes it to Thomas Lull. It emits a deep, chiming scale. Thomas Lull almost drops it in surprise. Lisa intercepts the thing on its way to moksha in the Ganga. A voice and image appear in her perceptions: Daley-Suarez Martin.

  ‘Something’s happened at the Tabernacle. They’ve got another signal out of it.’ The Tablet displays a fourth face, a man, a Bharati, so much is obvious even in the low resolution cellular automaton image; a thin-boned, drawn man. Lisa Durnau can make out the collar of a Nehru suit. She thinks he has an unutterably sad face. There is an ident line attached.

  ‘I think you’d better find your friend quick,’ she says. ‘This is Nandha. He’s a Krishna Cop.’

  She flees from the house into the grey light. The rain falls on Scindia Basti. The bare feet of the women fetching water from the pumps have churned the alleys to fetid mud. The sewers overflow. The men also are about in the dawn, to buy and sell, maybe hire themselves to dig a ditch for a cable, maybe have a cup of chai, maybe see if there is anything left of the city. They stare at the girl with the Vishnu tilak, shoving past them, running as if Kali rising is on her heels.

  Eyes in the dark in the house by the pylon left’s foot. ‘We are poor people, we have nothing you can possibly want, please leave us in peace.’ Then the scratch and flare of the match and the arc of light through the darkness as it moved to touch the wick of the little clay diya, the bud of light swelling and filling the clay-floored room. Then, the cries of fear.

  Vehicles roar at her; metal looms huge, then recedes into the rain. Thundering voices, bodies pressing around her that seem the size of clouds. A river of motion and alcofueled peril. She is on the street and she does not know how. The certainties and divine guidances of the night have evaporated in the light. For the first time there is no clear distinction between god and human. She is not sure she can find her way back to the hotel.

  Aid me.

  The skyline crawls with the chaotic moire patterns of gods meshing, blurring, flowing, breeding into strange new configurations.

  ‘What are you doing in this house?’ She cries out, claps her hands to her ears as the remembered voice speaks again in her skull. The women’s faces in the glow of the grease lamp, one old, one younger, one youngest. A wail had gone up from the old woman, like something long and fragile tearing inside.

  ‘What are you doing here? You have no place here!’ A hand, held in a mudra against the evil eye. The youngest’s eyes wide with fear, wet with tears. ‘Get out of this house, there is no place for you here. Don’t be deceived. See her, see her? See what they have done? Ah, this is an evil thing, a djinn, a demon!’ The old woman rocking now, eyes closed, moaning. ‘Away from us! This is not your home, you are not our sister!’

  Entreaties never offered. Answers never spoken. Questions never worded. And the old woman, the old woman; her mother, her hand in front of her eyes as if Aj blinded her, as if she burned with a fire that could not be looked upon. On the street, underneath the monsoon rain, she cries out, a long, thin wail torn out of the heart of her. She understands now.

  Fear: that is white, without surface or texture or anything you can lay a hand on to move or manipulate and it feels like rot in the base of you and you want to roll up and ask it to pass you over, like a raincloud, but it will never do that.

  Loss bites and pulls. It is a thing of hooks sunk into every part of you, parts that you would not think could feel loss like thumbs and lips, hooks moored to wind and memory so that slightest disturbance, the slightest act of recall, tugs at those fine lines. Red is the colour of loss and its smell is like burned roses.

  Abandonment, that tastes like sick in the back of your throat, always on the edge of coming up; it feels like dizzy, like walking along the edge of a high stone harbour over a sea that glimmers and moves so far below you cannot be certain where it is, but brown, brown; abandonment is empty dull brown.

  Desperation: a universal background hum, grey noise, part drone part hiss, a stifling, blurring, smudging of everything into soft grey. Universal rain. Universal yielding, into which you can push beyond the reach of any of your limbs and still touch nothing. Universal insulation. That is desperation.

  Yellow is the colour of uncertainty, sick yellow, yellow like bile, yellow like madness, yellow like flowers that open their petals around you and whirl and spin so you cannot decide which is best, which is most perfect, which has the most gorgeous, cloying scent; yellow like acid that eats awa
y at everything you think you know until you stand on a rotted filigree of rust and you are at once smaller than the tiniest grain of yellow pollen and vast beyond vastness, containing cities.

  Shock is a numb pressure trying to smear your brain over the back of your skull.

  Betrayal is translucent blue, so cold cold cold.

  Incomprehension feels like a hair on the tongue.

  And anger is heavy like a hammer but so light it can fly with its own wings, and the darkest, darkest rust.

  This is what it is to be human.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she shouts at the gods as the street breaks around her and rain falls on her upturned face.

  And the gods answer: we never knew. We never thought. And again: now we understand. Then one by one they extinguish like diyas in the rain.

  Shiv can’t place the smell. It’s sweet, it’s musky, it reminds him of things he can’t fully remember and it’s coming from the dataraja Ramanandacharya. He’s a fat bastard but they all are. Fat and quivering. Doesn’t look so cool in those robes and gowns now. Shiv particularly hates the old-skool Mughal-style moustaches. He’d love to cut them off but Yogendra needs to keep the hooked tip of the big knife at Ramanandacharya’s groin. One small wrist movement there will sever the femoral artery. Shiv knows the surgery. The raja will bleed out in under four minutes.

  They walk up the sloping wet cobbles from the Hastings Pavilion to the Temple, close as lovers or drunks.

  ‘How many have you got there?’ Shiv whispers, nudging Ramanandacharya with his shoulder. ‘Back there, how many women, huh?’

  ‘Forty,’ says Ramanandacharya. Shiv cuffs him with the back of his hand. He knows it’s the pills, making him impatient, bolder than a clever man should be, but he likes the feel of it.

  ‘Forty women? Where you get them from, huh?’ Nudge.

  ‘All over, Philippines, Thailand, Russians, anywhere cheap, you know?’ Again, the rap with the back of the hand. Ramanandacharya cringes. They pass the sentry robot, crouched down on its steel hams.

  ‘Any good Bharati women in there?’

  ‘Couple from the village . . . ah!’ Shiv cuffs harder now, Ramanandacharya rubs his ear. Shiv takes a fold of rich gold-threaded silk between his fingers, feels the subtle weave, the skin-smoothness, the lightness.

  ‘Do they like this, huh? All this Mughal shit?’ He shoves Ramanandacharya with both hands. The dataraja stumbles on a step. Yogendra flicks the knife away. ‘Why couldn’t you have been a Hindu, huh?’

  Ramanandacharya shrugs.

  ‘Mughal Fort,’ he offers weakly. Shiv hits him again.

  ‘Mughal Fort fuck!’ He slides in close to the ear. ‘So how often do you, you know? Every night?’

  ‘Lunchtimes too . . .’ The sentence vanishes into a sharp cry as Shiv hits Ramanandacharya hard on the side of the head.

  ‘Fucking dirty chuutya!’ He knows what the smell is now. That sweet, sour, musky, dark smell from Ramanandacharya’s robes and jewels: sex.

  ‘Eh,’ says Yogendra. The swarm of robots has left its orbit of the Lodi temple and streams across the courtyard towards the trio, a black, oily arrow. Plastic peds rattle on the cobbles. Their wet carapaces glint blackly. Ramanandacharya tuts and sighs and twists the ring on his left pinky. The swarms parts like that sea in that Christian story, the kind American missionaries put into the heads of good young women to turn them into unmarriageable things that can never get proper husbands.

  ‘They’d have had your feet down to the bones in twenty seconds,’ Ramanandacharya says.

  ‘Fuck up, fat boy.’ Shiv smacks him again because he was scared by the scarab robots. Ramanandacharya takes a step, takes another. The ring of robots flows with him. Yogendra brushes the knife tip against Ramanandacharya’s groin.

  The temple colonnade is the same dismal, dripping shell of graffittied plaster and folk-art religious daubings Shiv scanned from the battlement but Ramanandacharya’s Kirlian signature activates banks of blue flood lamps and Shiv finds he is holding his breath. The suddhavasa within is a cube of translucent plastic, glowing at the edges under the sharp blue light. The scarab robots fall back into their orbit. Ramanandacharya lifts his hands to the translucent plastic yoni of the airlock door. A digit pad resolves out of the fluid surface. Ramanandacharya moves to tap in a code; the knife flashes, Ramanandacharya cries out, seizes his hand. Blood wells from a hairline cut down his right forefinger.

  ‘You do it.’ Yogendra waves the knife blade at Shiv.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He could have tricks, traps, things we don’t know. He thinks soon as we have it, he’s going to die anyway. You use the code.’

  Ramanandacharya’s eyes widen as Shiv takes out the palmer and starts to enter the door password.

  ‘Where did you get this? Dane? Where’s Dane?’

  ‘Hospital,’ Shiv says. ‘Cat got his tongue.’ Yogendra giggles. The pad sinks back into the surface of the smart plastic (which Shiv thinks is cooler than he will ever allow to a chuutya like Ramanandacharya) and the door clicks anticlimactically open.

  The decryption system is a luminous plastic garbhagriha small enough to make Shiv itchily claustrophobic.

  ‘Where’s the computer?’ Shiv asks.

  ‘The whole thing is the computer,’ Ramanandacharya says and with a wave of his hands turns the walls translucent. Protein circuitry woven dense as Varanasi silk, as nerve fibres, is packed into the walls. Fluids bubble around the net of artificial neurones. Shiv notices he’s shivering in his wet combats.

  ‘Why is it so fucking cold in here?’

  ‘My central quantum processing unit needs a constant low temperature.’

  ‘Your what?’

  Ramanandacharya runs his hands over a slotted titanium cylinder head in the otherwise blemishless plastic wall.

  ‘He dreams in code,’ he says. Shiv bends forward to read the inscription on the metal disc. Sir William Gates.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘An immortal soul. Or so he believed. Uploaded memories, a bodhisoft. How the Americans imagine they can beat death. One of the greatest minds of his generation - all this is because of him. Now he works for me.’

  ‘Just get me this file and put it on here.’ Shiv smacks Ramanandacharya on the side of the head with the palmer.

  ‘Oh, not the Tabernacle crypt, the CIA will kill me, I am a dead man,’ Ramanandacharya pleads then shuts his foolish blabbering mouth up, summons another code pad out of the plastic and enters a short sequence. Shiv thinks about the frozen soul. He’s read of these things, circling in bangles of superconducting ceramic. All of a life: its sex, its books, its music and magazines, its friends and dinners and cups of coffee, its lovers and enemies, its moments when you punch your fists in the air and go jai! and when you want to kill everything, all reduced down to something you give a woman in a bar to slip around her wrist.

  ‘One thing,’ Ramanandacharya says as he passes the loaded palmer to Shiv, ‘what do you want it for?’

  ‘N.K. Jivanjee wants to talk to men from space,’ Shiv says. He slips the palmer into one of his many pant pockets. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ The trick with the ring parts the scarab robots again; Shiv sees on Ramanandacharya’s face that he thinks they will let him go, then sees that face change as Yogendra prods him with the gun to walk on. It is not a pretty or edifying thing, to see a fat man wet with fear. Shiv cuffs the dataraja again.

  ‘Will you stop that, that is so annoying,’ Ramanandacharya flares.

  Yogendra makes him take them back down through the tourist gate into the old Indian army camp. They squeeze through the gap in the sheeting. Shiv mounts his bike, kicks up the engine. Good and true little Japanese motor. He looks round for Yogendra, finds him standing over the kneeling Ramanandacharya with the muzzle of the Stechkin in the dataraja’s mouth. He licks it. He runs his tongue round the muzzle, licking it lapping it loving it. Yogendra grins.

  ‘Leave him!’

  Yogendra frowns, genuin
ely, deeply vexed.

  ‘Why? He’s over and done.’

  ‘Leave him. We got to go.’

  ‘He can call people up after us.’

  ‘Leave him!’

  Yogendra makes no move.

  ‘Fuck you!’ Shiv dismounts, pulls out a brace of taser mines and drops them in a ring around Ramanandacharya. ‘Now leave him.’ Yogendra shrugs, puts up his piece and slides it inside his pants pocket. Shiv thumbs the control switch that arms the mines.

  ‘Thank you thank you thank you,’ Ramanandacharya weeps.

  ‘Don’t beg, I hate begging,’ Shiv says. ‘Have some fucking dignity, man.’ Nawab of fucking Chunar. Let’s see any of your forty women sleep with you after this. Shiv twists the throttle and rips off on the Japanese trail bike, Yogendra on his wheel. The deed is done, there is no need for stealth or caution. It’s lights on engines open roaring down through the town past the glowing egg of the data centre and then the last light of Chunar and the exultation hits. It is done. They got it and they are getting away. A fringe of rain-soaked dawn lights the eastern horizon; by the time it fully opens, Shiv realises, he will be back in his city and he will have his prize and all his owings will be paid and he will be free, he will be a raja and no one will dare deny him again. He lets out a whoop, sends his bike careering madly all over the road, swooping from one side to the other, yipping and cawing and yawping crazier than any of the crazy jackals out there in the night. He swings deliberately close to the soft edge of the road, taunting the cracked blacktop, the treacherous gravel. Nothing can touch Shiv Faraji.