by Ian McDonald
That strange sigh, when he pulled her up on to the train, away from the firing on the platform. She had seen the bullets ricochet from the steel stanchions.
His face is the colour of ash, of the monsoon sky. His breath flutters, his arm quivers; he cannot support himself much longer and every heartbeat pumps more of his life on to the carriage floor. The blood pools around his feet. His lips move but he cannot shape words. Parvati pulls her to him, cradles his head in her lap.
‘It’s all right my love, it’s all right,’ she whispers. She should call out, shout for aid, help, a doctor but she knows with terrible certainty that no one will ever hear in those jammed carriages. ‘Oh Krishan,’ she murmurs as she feels the wet, sexual blood spread under her thighs. ‘Oh, my dear man.’ His body is so cold. She gently touches his long black hair and twines it in her fingers as the train drives ever south.
This is Mr Nandha coming up the stairs of Diljit Rana Apartments, jogging up one flight two flight three flight four in the cool cool light of the morning. He could take the elevator - unlike the old projects like Siva Nataraja Homes and White Fort, the services are operational in these government housing blocks - but he wants to maintain the energy, the zeal, the momentum. He shall not let it slip, not when it is so close. His avatars are threads of spider silk spun between the towers of Varanasi. He can feel the vibration of her energy shaking the world.
Five flights, six.
Mr Nandha intends to apologise to his wife for upsetting her in front of her mother. The apology is not strictly necessary but Mr Nandha’s belief is that it is a healthful thing in a marriage to give in occasionally even when you are right. But she must appreciate that he has made a window for her in the most important case in the Ministry’s history, a case that, when he has completed the excommunication, will elevate him to Investigative Officer First Rank. Then they will spend happy evenings together looking through the brochures for Cantonment new-builds.
The final three flights Mr Nandha whistles themes from Handel Concerti Grossi.
It is not in the moment he puts his key in the lock. Neither is it when he sets hand to handle and turns that handle. But in the time it takes for him to push that handle down and open the door, he knows what he will find. And he knows the meaning of that epiphany in the pre-dawn Ministry corridor. It was the precise instant his wife left him.
Scraps of Handel float in his auditory centres but as he crosses the lintel his life is as changed as the raindrop falling one millimetre to one side of a mountain peak ends up in a different ocean.
He does not need to call her name. She is utterly, irretrievably gone. It is not an absence of things; her chati magazines lie on the table, the dhobi basket sits in the kitchen by the ironing board, her ornaments and gods and small votives occupy their auspicious places. The flowers are fresh in the vase, the geraniums are watered. Her absence is from every part; the furniture, the shape of the room, the carpets, the comforting, happy television, the wallpaper and the cornices and the colour of the doors. The lights, the kitchen utensils, the white goods. Half a home, half a life and an entire marriage has been subtracted. Nature does not abhor this vacuum. It throbs, it has shape and geometry.
There are noises Mr Nandha knows he should make, actions he should perform, feelings he should experience proper to the discovery that a wife has left you. But he walks in and out of the room in a tight-faced daze, an almost-smile drawn on his lips, as if preparing defences against the full of it, like a sailor in a tropical storm might lash himself to a mast, to dare it to break over him, to turn into its full rage. That is why he goes to the bedroom. The embroidered cushions that were wedding gifts from his work colleagues are in their places on respective sides of the bed. The expensive copy of the Kama Sutra, for the proper work of a married couple, is on its bedside cabinet. The flat-worked sheet is neatly turned back.
Mr Nandha finds himself bending to sniff the sheet. No. He does not want to know if there is any blame there. He opens the sliding wood wardrobes, inventories what is taken, what remains. The gold, the blue, the green saris, the pure white silk for formal occasions. The beautiful, translucent crimson choli he used to love to see her wear, that excited him so much across a room or a garden party. She has taken all the padded, scented hangers, left the cheap wire ones that have stretched into shallow rhombuses. Mr Nandha kneels down to look at the shoe rack. Most of the spaces are empty. He picks up a slipper, soft-soled, worked with gold-thread and satin, runs his hands over its pointed toe, its soft, breast-curved heel. He sets it back in its position. He cannot bear her lovely shoes.
He closes the sliding door on the clothes and shoes but it is not Parvati he thinks of, it is his mother when he burned her on the ghat, his head shaved and all dressed in white. He thinks of her house afterwards, of the terrible poignancy of her clothes and shoes on their hangers and racks, all unnecessary now, all her choices and fancyings and likings naked and exposed by death.
The note is stuck to the shelf in the kitchen where his Ayurvedic teas and dietary items are kept. He finds he has read it three times without taking in anything more than the obvious meaning that she is gone. He cannot join the words up into sentences. Leaving. So sorry. Can’t love you. Don’t look for me. Too close. Too many words too near to each other. He folds the note, puts it in his pocket and climbs the stairs to the roof garden.
In the open space, in the grey light, under the eyes of his neighbours and his cybernetic avatars, Mr Nandha feels the compressed rage vomit up out of him. He would love to open his mouth and let it all pour out of him in an ecstatic stream. His stomach pulls, he fights it, masters it. Mr Nandha presses down the spasms of nausea.
What is that sickly, chemical smell? For a moment, despite his discipline, he feels that his gut might betray him.
Mr Nandha kneels on the edge of the raised bed, fingers hooked into the clinging loam. His palmer calls. Mr Nandha cannot think what the noise could possibly be. Then the insistent calling of his name draws his fingers out of the soil, draws him back to the wet rooftop in the Varanasi gloaming.
‘Nandha.’
‘Boss, we’ve found her.’ Vik’s voice. ‘Gyana Chakshu picked her up two minutes ago. She’s right here in Varanasi. Boss; she is Kalki. We’ve got it all put together; she is the aeai. She is the incarnation of Kalki. I’m diverting the tilt-jet to pick you up.’
Mr Nandha stands upright. He looks at his hands, brushes the dirt from them on the edge of the wooden sleepers. His suit is stained, crumpled, soaked. He cannot imagine he will ever feel dry again. But he adjusts his cuffs, straightens his collar. He takes the gun from inside his pocket and lets it hang loosely at his side. The early neons of Kashi gibber and flick at his feet. There is work to be done. He has his mission. He will do it so well that none can ever hold a whisper against Nandha of the Ministry.
The tilt-jet banks in between the big projects. Mr Nandha shelters in the stair head as the aircraft slides in over the rooftop and swivels its engines into a hover. Vik is in the copilot’s seat as the tilt-jet turns, face dramatically underlit by the console leds. The roof cannot possibly support a Bharati Air-force tilt-jet; the pilot brings her ship down centimetre by centimetre in a delicate Newtonian ballet, positioning the craft so Mr Nandha can slip between the vortices from the wingtip engines and safely up the access ramp in the tail. The downblast works the destruction he had fantasised. The trellises are smashed flat in an instant. The geraniums are swept from their perches. Seedlings and small plants are uprooted from the soft soil; the earth itself peels away in muddy gobs. The saturated wood of the beds steams, then smokes. The pilot descends until her wheels kiss roofing felt. The rear ramp unfolds.
Lights go on piecemeal in the overlooking windows.
Mr Nandha pulls his collar close and beats through the buffets to the open, blue-lit interior. All his team are there among the aircav sowars. Mukul Dev and Ram Lalli. Madhvi Prasad, even Morva of the Money Trail. As Mr Nandha belts in beside him, the ramp closes and th
e pilot opens up the engines.
‘My dear friends,’ Mr Nandha says. ‘I am glad you are beside me on this historic occasion. A Generation Three Artificial Intelligence. An entity as far beyond our fleshly intellect as ours is a pig’s. Bharat will thank us. Now, let us be diligent in our excommunication.’
The tilt-jet turns on its vertical axis as it climbs above Mr Nandha’s shattered roof garden, higher than all the windows and balconies and rooftop solar farms and water-tanks of his neighbours. Then the pilot puts the nose up and the tail down and the little ship climbs steeply between the towers.
The last of the gods flicker out over Varanasi and the sky is just the sky. The streets are silent, the buildings are mute, the cars have no voices and the people are just faces, closed like fists. There are no answers, no oracles in the trees and street shrines, no prophecies from the incoming aircraft, but this world without gods is rich in its emptiness. Senses fill up the spaces; engines roar, the wall of voices leap forward; the colours of the saris, the men’s shirts, the neons flashing through the grey rain, all glow with their own, vivid light. Each touch of street-incense, stale urine, hot fat, alcofuel exhaust, damp burning plastic is an emotion and a memory of her life before the lies.
She was a different person then, if the women in the hovel are to be believed. But the gods - the machines, she now realises - say she is now another self altogether. Say: said. The gods are gone. Two sets of memories. Two lives that cannot live with each other, and now a third that must somehow incarnate both. Lull. Lull will know, Lull will tell her how to make sense of these lives. She thinks she can remember the way back to the hotel.
Dazed by the empire of the senses, released from the tyranny of information into the realm of simple things, Aj lets the city draw her to the river.
In the dawn rain on the Western Allahabad orbital motorway, two hundred Awadhi main battle tanks fire up their engines, spin on their tracks out of their laagered positions and form into an orderly column. Faster, fleeter traffic buzzes past the four-kilometre queue but there is no mistaking its general direction, south by south west towards the Jabalpur Road. By the time the shops roll up their shutters and the salary-wallahs zip in to work in their phatphats and company cars the newsboys are screaming it from their pitches on the concrete central reserves: TANKS PULL OUT! ALLAHABAD SAVED! AWADH WITHDRAWS TO KUNDA KHADAR!
Another of Bharat’s inexhaustible fleet of Prime Ministerial Mercedes is waiting for the Bharatiya Vayu Sena Airbus Industries A510 as it turns into its stand well away from the busier parts of Varanasi airport. Umbrellas shelter Prime Minister Ashok Rana from the steps to the car; it draws away in a wush of fat tyres on wet apron. There is a call waiting on the comlink. N.K. Jivanjee. Again. He is not looking at all what would be expected of the Interior Minister of a Government of National Unity. He has unexpected news to break.
If she lets his hand slip in this crowd she is lost.
The armed police try to clear the riverside. The messages blaring from their bullhorns and truck-top speakers are for the crowds to disperse, the people to return to their homes and businesses; order has been restored, they are in no danger, no danger at all. Some, swept along in the general panic, who did not really want to abandon their livelihoods, turn back. Some do not trust the police or their neighbours or the contradictory pronouncements from the government. Some do not know what to do; they turn and mill, going nowhere. Between the three and the army hummers squeezing through the narrow galis around the Vishwanath Gali, the streets and ghats are locked solid.
Lisa Durnau keeps her fingers tightly locked around Thomas Lull’s left hand. In his right he holds the Tablet, like a lantern on a dark night. Some final fragment of her that feels responsible to governments and their strategies worries about the little built-in meltdown sequence should the Tablet get cold and lonely. But she does not think Lull will be needing it very long. Whatever is to be played out here will be ended soon.
Nandha. Krishna Cop. Licensed terminator of unauthorised aeais. The grainy Tabernacle image is fused into her forebrain. No point questioning how a Krishna Cop came to be inside a machine older than the solar system, no more than any of them, but she is certain of one thing; this is the place, the time where all images are born.
Thomas Lull stops abruptly, mouth open in frustration as he scans the crowd with the Tablet, looking for a match with the image on the liquid screen.
‘The water tower!’ he shouts and jerks Lisa Durnau along after him. The great pink concrete cylinders rise from the ghats every few hundred metres along the waterfront, each joined to the uppermost steps by pink-painted gantries. Lisa Durnau can’t make any face out of the mass of refugees and devotees pressing around the water tower base. Then the tilt-jet cuts in across the ghats so low everyone instinctively ducks. Everyone, Lisa observes, but a solitary figure in grey up on the catwalk around the top of the water tower.
He has it now. The Gyana Chakshu device is linked through to his ‘hoek and by its extrapolations and modellings and vectorings and predictings he can see the aeai like a moving light that shines through people, through traffic, through buildings. He watches from kilometres of altitude and distance, moving through the warren of lanes and galis behind the riverfront. With his privileged insight, Mr Nandha directs the pilot. She brings the tiltjet round in a sweeping arc and Mr Nandha looks down into the tide of people swelling the streets and she is a shining star. He and the aeai are the only two solid beings in a city of ghosts. Or is it, thinks Mr Nandha, the converse that is true?
He orders the pilot to take them in over the river. Mr Nandha summons his avatars. They boil up in his vision like thunderheads, ringing the fleeing aeai on every side, a siege of deities, their weapons and attributes readied, scraping the clouds, Ganga water boiling around their vahanas. An invisible world, seen only by the devotee, the true . . . The fleeing fleck of light stops. Mr Nandha commands Ganesha the opener to flick through local security cameras until the pattern matcher locates the excommunicee on the Dasashvamedha Ghat water tower. It stands, hands gripping the rail, staring out over the mob of wheeling people fighting for the Patna boat. Does it stand so because it sees what I see? Mr Nandha wonders. Does it stop in fear and awe as gods rear from the water? Are we the only two true seers in the city of delusions?
An aeai incarnate in human flesh. Evil times indeed. Mr Nandha cannot imagine what alien, inhuman scheme is behind this outrage against a soul. He does not want to imagine. To know can be the path to understanding, understanding to tolerance. Some things must remain intolerable. He will erase the abomination and all will be right. All will be in order again.
A lone star shines in Mr Nandha’s vision from the top of the water tower as the pilot turns between Hanuman and Ganesha. He jabs his finger down towards the rain-puddled strand. The pilot pulls up the nose and swivels the engines. Sadhus and swamis flee their scab-fires, shaking their skinny fists at the object descending out of heaven. If you saw as I see, thinks Mr Nandha, loosing his seat belt.
‘Boss,’ Vik calls as he works his way through the cabin, ‘we’re picking up enormous traffic into the Ray Power internal network. I think it’s our Gen Three.’
‘In due time,’ Mr Nandha says, gently chiding. ‘Everything in proper order. That is the way to do business. We will finish our task here and then attend to Ray Power.’
His gun is ready in his fist as he hits the sand at the foot of the ramp and the sky is crazy with gods.
All the people. Aj grips the rusted railing, dizzied by the masses on the ghats and the riverbanks. The pressure of their bodies forced her up on to this gallery when she found her breath catching in her throat as she tried to get back to the haveli. Aj empties her lungs, holds, inhales slowly through her nostrils. The mouth for talking, the nose for breathing. But the carpet of souls appals her. There is no end to the people, they unfold out of each other faster than they go to the burning ghats and the river. She remembers those other places where she was among people, in the big
station, on the train when it burned and in the village afterwards when the soldiers took them all to safety, after she stopped the machines.
She understands how she did that, now. She understands how she knew the names of the bus driver on the Thekaddy road, and of the boy who stole the motorbike in Ahmedabad. It is a past as close and alien as a childhood, indelibly part of her, but separate, innocent, old. She is not that Aj. She is not the other Aj either, the engineered child, the avatar of the gods. She attained understanding, and in that moment of enlightenment was abandoned. The gods could not bear too much humanity. And now she is a third Aj. No more voices and wisdoms in street lights and cab ranks - these, she now realises, were the aeais, whispering into her soul through the window of her tilak. She is a prisoner now in that bone prison, like every other life out there by that river. She is fallen. She is human.