by Ian McDonald
Then she hears the plane. She looks up as it comes in low, fast over the temple spires and the towers of the havelis. She sees ten thousand people cringe as one but she remains standing for she knows what it is. A final remembrance of being something other than human, some last divine whisper, the god-light fading into the background microwave hum of the universe, tells her. She watches the plane pull up and descend on to the trampled sand, scattering the sadhu’s ash-fires in sprays of cinders and knows that it has come for her. She begins to run.
With brisk flicks of his hand, Mr Nandha dispatches his squad to clear the ghats and seal off exits. In his peripheral vision he notices Vik hang back; Vik still in his street garb from the night’s battles, Vik sweaty and grubby on this humid monsoon morning. Vik uncertain, Vik fearful. He makes a note to himself to admonish Vik for insufficient zeal. When the case is closed, that is the time for robust management. Mr Nandha strides out across the damp white sand.
‘Attention attention!’ he cries, warrant card held up. ‘This is a Ministry security operation. Please render our officers all assistance. You are in no danger.’ But it is the gun in his right hand, not the authority in his left that makes men step back, parents pull curious children away, wives push husbands out of his path. To Mr Nandha, Dasashvamedha Ghat is an arena paved with ghosts, ringed by watching gods. He imagines smiles on their high, huge faces. He gives his attention to the small, glowing dot in his enhanced vision, star-shaped now, the pentagram of the human figure. The aeai is moving from its vantage on the water tower. It is on the walkway now. Mr Nandha breaks into a run.
The crowd ducked as the tilt-jet went over and Lisa Durnau ducked with it and as she glimpses Aj on the tower, she feels Thomas Lull’s fingers slip through her own and separate. The bodies close around him. He is gone.
‘Lull!’ In a few footsteps he has vanished completely, absorbed into the motion of bright salwars and jackets and T-shirts. Hiding in plain sight. ‘Lull!’ No chance she will ever be heard over the roar of Dasashvamedha Ghat. Suddenly she is more claustrophobic than she ever was confined in the stone birth-canal of Darnley 285. Alone in the crowd. She stops, panting in the rain. ‘Lull!’ She looks up at the water-tower at the head of the staggered stone steps. Aj still stands at the rail. Wherever she is, Lull will be. No place, no time for Western niceties. Lisa Durnau elbows through the milling crowd.
In the Tablet she is innocent, in the Tablet she is unknowing, unseeing, in the Tablet she is a teenage kid up on a high place looking down on one of Earth’s great human wonders.
‘Let me through, let me through!’ Thomas Lull shouts. He sees the tilt-jet unfold its mantis landing-gear and settle on the sand bar. He sees ripples of discontent spread through the crowd as the soldiers push people back. From his higher vantage on the ghat he sees the pale figure advance across the cleared marble. That is the fourth avatar of the Tabernacle. That is Nandha the Krishna Cop.
There is a story by Kafka, Lull recalls in the mad self-consciousness of ultimate effort; of a herald bringing a message of grace and favour from a king to a subject. Though the herald holds seals and passes and words of power, he can never leave the palace because of the press of people, never make it through the crowd to bring the vital word. And thus it goes unsaid, or so he remembers it from his paranoid days.
‘Aj !’ He is close enough to see the three grubby white stripes on the side of her grey trainers. ‘Aj . . .’ But his words fall into well of sound, flattened and obliterated by sharper, louder Hindi tones. And his breath is failing, he can feel the little elastic pull of tension at the bottom of each inhalation.
Fuck Kafka.
‘Aj!’
He cannot see her any more.
Run, whisper the ashes of the gods. Her feet clatter along the metal gantry, she swings around the stanchion and down the sharp-edged steel steps. An elderly man cries out and curses as Aj slams into him.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ she whispers, hands held up in supplication but he is gone. She pauses a moment on the topmost step. The tiltjet stands on the sand to her right, down by the water’s edge. A disturbance in the crowd moves towards her like a cobra. Behind her the whip aerials of an army hummer move between the low, dripping stalls of Dasashvamedha Gali. No escape there. The hydrofoil stands at the jetty at the head of a huge diamond of people trying to press on board. Many are shoulder deep in the water, burdens and livelihoods borne on their heads. Once she might have tried to rule the machines that control the boat and escaped by water. She does not have that power any more. She is only human. To her left the walls and buttresses of Man Singh’s astronomical palace step down to Ganga. Heads, hands, voices, things, colours, rain-wet skin, eyes. A pale head raised above the others by a foreign height. Long hair, grey stubble. Blue eyes. Blue shirt, silly shirt, loud garish shirt, saving glorious shirt.
‘Lull!’ Aj shouts and leaps down the steep, slippery ghats, skidding on the stone, hurdling bundles of luggage, sending children reeling, leaping over low walls and platforms where the Brahmins commemorate the ten-horse sacrifice of Brahma with fire and salt, music and prasad. ‘Lull!’
With a thought Mr Nandha banishes his gods and demons. He has it now. It cannot escape into the city. The river is closed to it, Mr Nandha is behind it, there is no way but forward. The people sweep away from him like a sea parting in some alien religious myth. He can see the aeai. It is dressed in grey, drab machine grey, so easy to spot, so simple an identification.
‘Stop,’ says Mr Nandha softly. ‘You are under arrest. I am a law enforcement officer, stop at once and lie flat on the ground.’
There is clear open space between him and the aeai. And Mr Nandha can see that it will not stop, that it knows what the law demands of it and that in defiance is its one, minuscule chance of survival. Mr Nandha clicks off his gun safeties. The Indra avatar system swings his outstretched arm on to the target. Then his right thumb performs an action it has never taken before. It switches the gun from the lower barrel, that kills machines, to the upper. The mechanism slides into position with a silken click.
Run. It is such a simple word, when your lungs are not clenched tight like fists for every breath, when the crowd does not resist your every lunge and shove and push and elbow, when one single, treacherous slip will send you plunging to annihilation under the feet of the crowd, when the man who might save you is not at the geometrical furthest point of the universe.
Run. It is such a simple word for a machine.
Mr Nandha slides to a stop on the treacherous, foot-polished stone, gun levelled. He could no more remove his aim from the target than he could shift the sun from its centre. Indra will not permit it. His outstretched arm, his shoulders ache.
‘In the name of the Ministry, I order you to stop!’ he cries.
Useless, as it ever was. He forms the intention. Indra fires. The crowd screams.
The munition is a medium-velocity liquid tungsten round that, rifled by the barrel of Mr Nandha’s gun, expands in flight into a spinning disc of hot metal the size of a circled thumb and finger, an okay sign. It takes Aj in the middle of the lower back, tearing through spine, kidneys, ovaries and small intestine in a spray of liquidised flesh. The front of her sleeveless grey cotton top explodes outwards in a rain of blood. The impact lifts her off her feet and throws her, arms and legs splayed out, forward on to the crowd. The ghat people scramble out from under her. She falls hard to the marble. The impact, the trauma should have killed her - the bottom half of her body is severed from the top - but she writhes and claws at the marble in a spreading pool of warm sweet blood, making small soft shrieking noises.
Mr Nandha sighs and walks up to her. He shakes his head. Is he never to be allowed dignity? ‘Stand back please,’ Mr Nandha orders. He stands over Aj, feet apart. Indra levels the gun. ‘This is a routine excommunication but I would advise you to look away now,’ he tells the public. He glances up at his crowd. His eyes meet blue eyes, Western eyes, a Western face, bearded, a face he recognises. A fac
e he seeks. Thomas Lull. Mr Nandha bows infinitesimally to him. The gun fires. The second round takes Aj in the back of the head.
Thomas Lull roars incoherently. Lisa Durnau is by him, holding him, pulling him back, clinging to him with all her athletic strength and weight and history. There is a sound in her ears like a universe ending. Tracks of terrible heat on her face are tears. And still the rain beats down.
Mr Nandha senses his warriors at his back. He turns to them. For now he does not need to register the expressions on their faces. He indicates Thomas Lull and the Western woman holding him backing her arms.
‘Have these people arrested under offences against the Artificial Intelligence Registry and Licensing Act,’ he commands. ‘Deploy all units immediately to Ray Power Research and Development Unit at the University of Varanasi. And have someone take care of this.’
He holsters the gun. Mr Nandha very much hopes he will not have to use it again this day.
Look out the left, the captain says. That’s Annapurna, and the next one down is Manaslu. After that Shishapangma. All of then over eight thousand metres. If you’re on the left side of the plane, I’ll give you a call as we come in, on good days you can see Sagarmath; that’s our name for Everest.
Tal is curled up in the wide business class seat, head on the cushion on the armrest, asleep and giving little soprano snores though it’s only a forty minute flight from Varanasi. Najia can hear the treble beats from yts headphones. Soundtrack for everything. HIMALAYA MIX. She leans over yt to peer out the window. The little cityhopper skips in over Ganga plain and the flatlands of the Nepal Terai then takes a big jump over the river-riven foothills that guard Kathmandu. Beyond them like a surf-line breaking at the edge of the world, is the High Himalaya, vast and white and higher than she could ever dream, the loftiest peaks streaked with torn cloud running on the jet stream. Higher, and further; summit beyond summit beyond summit, the white of the glaciers and high places and the flecked grey of the valleys blurring into blue at the furthest edge of her vision, like a stone ocean. Najia can see no limit to it in any direction.
Her heart leaps. There is something in her throat she cannot swallow. There are tears in her eyes.
She remembers this scene from Lal Darfan’s elephant pagoda, but those mountains had not the power to touch, to move, to inspire. They had been folds of fractals and digits, two imaginary landmasses colliding with each other. And Lal Darfan had also been N.K. Jivanjee had also been the Gen Three aeai, as the eastern extremities of these mountains had been those peaks she had seen over the wall around that garden in Kabul. She knows the image the Gen Three had shown her of her father as torturer had been false; she had never walked down that corridor, to that room, to that woman who in all probability had never existed. But she does not doubt that others did, that others had been strapped to that table to scream out how they endangered the establishment. And she does not doubt that that image will now forever be her memory. Memory is what I am made of, the aeai had said. Memories make our selves, we make memories for ourselves. She remembers another father, another Najia Askarzadah. She does not know how she is going to live with either. And the mountains are harsh and tall and cold and reach beyond any end she can see and she is high and alone in her leather business-class seat with the fifty-inch pitch.
She thinks now she knows why the aeai had shown her the childhood she had suppressed. It had not been cruel, it had not been even a ploy for time. It had been genuine, touching curiosity, an attempt by a djinn made of stories to understand something outside its mandalas of artifice and craft. Something it could believe it had not made up itself. It wanted the drama of the real, the fountainhead from which all story flows.
Najia Askarzadah pulls her legs up on to her seat, lays her body down across Tal’s. She drapes her arm over yts, loosely takes yts fingers in hers. Tal starts with a half-syllable but she does not break yts sleep. Yts hand is delicate and hot; beneath her cheek she can feel yts ribs. Yt’s so light, so loosely put together, like a cat but she feels a cat’s toughness in the muscles breathing in, breathing out. She lies there, listening to yts heart. She thinks that maybe she has never met a braver person. Yt has always had to fight to be ytself and now yt goes into exile with no destination in sight.
From eight thousand metres she can understand that Shaheen Badoor Khan had been an honourable man. In Bharat, even as he escorted their taxi through the checkpoint at the vip gate and on to the perimeter road to the vip lounge, she had seen only his falsities and frailties; another man, another fabric of untruths and complications. As she waited at the desk while he spoke low and hard and fast with the airline official, she had confidently expected that at any moment the airport police would come out of the walls and doors with levelled weapons and plastic cable-ties for their wrists. They were all betrayers. They were all her fathers.
She remembers how the gate staff had looked and whispered among themselves as Shaheen Badoor Khan completed the final formalities. He had quickly, formally shaken hands with her, then Tal, then briskly walked away.
The shuttle flight had just punched through the monsoon cloud base when the story broke all over the seat-back screen news channel. N.K. Jivanjee had resigned. N.K. Jivanjee had fled Bharat. The Government of National Unity was in disarray. Disgraced advisor to the late Prime Minister, Shaheen Badoor Khan, had come forward with extraordinary revelations - backed by documentary evidence - that the former leader of the Shivaji had masterminded a plot to destroy the Rana government and fatally weaken Bharat against the Awadhis. Bharat reels! Shock revelation! Stunning scandal! Ashok Rana to make statement from the Rana Bhavan! Khan national saviour! Where is Jivanjee, Bharat demands? Where is Jivanjee? Jivanjee the traitor?
Bharat quaked to its third political shock in twenty-four hours. Not a fraction of the earthquake it would have been had Shaheen Badoor Khan revealed that the Shivaji was a political front for a Generation Three aeai formed out of the cumulative intelligence of Town and Country. An attempted coup by its most popular soap opera. As the plane levelled off and the hostess came round with the drinks - Tal had had two double cognacs; yt had just fled an assassination, battled a Generation Three aeai and survived a murderous mob, so it deserved a little luxury, cho chweet - Najia watched the story update by the second and comprehended the subtlety and skill with which Shaheen Badoor Khan was managing it. Even as the plane was pushing back from the stand he must have been cutting a deal with the Generation Three, one that would leave Bharat as politically whole as possible. This was his seat, his mini-bottle of Hennessy; he stayed for his country, for he had nothing else.
She cannot go back to Sweden again. Najia Askarzadah is as much an exile now as Tal. She shivers, hugs Tal closer. Yt entwines yts fingers tightly around hers. Najia can feel yts sub-dermal activators against her forearm. Not man not woman not both not neither. Nute. Another way of being human, speaking a physical language she does not understand. More alien to her than any man, any father, yet this body next to hers is loyal, tough, funny, courageous, clever, kind, sensual, vulnerable. Sweet. Sexy. All you could wish in a friend of the soul. Or a lover. She starts at that thought, then presses her cheek against Tal’s hunched shoulder. Then she feels their conjoined centres of gravity shift as the plane banks in to approach to Kathmandu and she turns her head to look out the window, hoping maybe for that revelatory glimpse of distant Sagarmatha but all she can see is an oddly shaped cloud that you might almost think was the shape of a huge elephant, were such a thing possible.
History measures its course in centuries but its progress in the events of an hour. As the tanks pull back to the Kunda Khadar, in the wake of the shock resignation of N.K. Jivanjee over Badoor Khan’s allegations and the withdrawal of the Shivaji from the Government of National Salvation only hours old, Ashok Rana accepts Delhi’s offer of talks in Kolkata to resolve the dam dispute. But the day has one more surprise for the reeling Bharati nation. Whole families sit shocked, speechless, numb with surprise in front of their scr
eens. In the middle of the one o’clock broadcast, Town and Country has gone off air.
They go in lots of seven, down the elevators down the concrete steps through the airlock to Deba’s stinky little cubby and the observation dock beyond where investment bankers, grameen, women, cub journalists, clan Ray advisors and a shell-shocked looking Energy Minister Patel shuffle round in cramped circle dance to peer through the heavy glass panel into the hard light of another universe.
‘Okay, okay, come on, no more than five seconds, Ray Power will not be held responsible for any eye irritation, sunburn or other ultraviolet-related complaints,’ Deba says, waving them through and round and out. ‘No more than five seconds, Ray Power will not be held responsible . . .’
The lecture hall has been rigged with display nodes and screens and copiously equipped with small eats and bottled water. Sonia Yadav bravely holds the lectern, trying to explain to the gathered what they are seeing on the screens: two simple graphic bars that show the energy drawn from the grid maintaining the zero-point field and the energy output from the potential difference between the universal ground- states, but she is fighting two losing fronts, scientifically and acoustically.