by Ian McDonald
As the shout ripples out across the field, Vishram Ray finds he is running. He knows they will not find Deba among them. Deba is down there, in his hole, in his black hole under the earth, on the precipice of nothing. A voice cries his name, a voice he does not recognise. He looks around to see Marianna Fusco running after him. She has kicked off her shoes, she runs ponderously in her business skirt. He has never heard her shout his name before.
‘Vish! Come back, there’s nothing you can do!’
The bubble expands again. It is now thirty metres across, rising out of the centre of the Research Unit like a Mughal dome. Like the dome of the Mughal Taj, it is empty inside, emptier even than the tomb of a grief-sick Emperor. It is nothing. It is annihilation so absolute the mind cannot contain it. And Vishram plunges towards it.
‘Deba!’
A silhouette emerges out of the light-dazzle, limbs flailing, awkward.
‘To me!’ Vishram yells. ‘To me!’
He seizes Deba in his arms. The kid’s face is badly burned, his skin smells of ultraviolet. He rubs incessantly at his eyes.
‘It hurts!’ he wails. ‘It hurts, it fucking hurts!’
Vishram spins him around and the bubble leaps again, a titanic quantum leap. Vishram is staring at a wall of light, brilliant, blinding, but within the light he thinks he can see shapes, patterns, flickering of bright and less bright, light and shadow. Black and white. He stares, entranced. Then he feels his skin start to burn.
Marianna Fusco takes Deba’s other shoulder and together they bring him to safety. The Ray Power shareholders have moved back to the furthest section of the formal charbagh. Vishram thinks it odd yet human that no one has left.
‘Assessment?’ he asks Sonia Yadav. The sirens are close now, he hopes they are parameds. And that aircraft is very, very near.
‘Our computers are downloading at an incredible rate,’ she says.
‘Where?’
‘Into that.’
‘Is there anything we can do?’
‘No,’ she says simply. ‘It’s not in our hands now.’
You’ve got what you wanted, Vishram prays at the sphere of light. You don’t have to do anything else. Just close the door and walk away. And as he thinks it there is a second flash of light and a huge thunderclap of air and light and energy and space-time rushing into absolute vacuum and when Vishram’s vision clears he sees two things.
The first is a large perfectly hemispherical perfectly smooth crater where Ray Power Research Centre had stood.
The other is a line of soldiers in full combat gear advancing across the neat, watered lawn, weapons at the present. At their head is a tall, thin man with a good suit and a bad five o’clock shadow and a gun in his hand.
‘Your attention please!’ the man shouts. ‘Nobody is permitted to leave. You are all under arrest.’
Lisa Durnau finds Thomas Lull kneeling on the grass, his hands still cuffed with black plastic cable grip. He is beyond tears, beyond wrack. All that remains is a terrible stillness. She settles awkwardly beside him on the grass, tears at her own plastic tie with her teeth.
‘They got away,’ Thomas Lull says, taking a long shuddering breath.
‘The counter-inflation force must have pushed into in-folded dimensions,’ Lisa Durnau says. ‘It was a hell of a risk . . .’
‘I looked into it,’ Thomas Lull whispers. ‘As we were coming in over it, I looked into it. It is the Tabernacle.’
But how? Lisa Durnau wants to ask, but Thomas Lull slumps back on to his back, bound hands on his small potbelly, staring up into the light of the sun.
‘She showed them there was nothing for them here,’ He says. ‘Just people, just bloody people. I like to think she made a choice, for people. For us. Even though . . . Even though . . .’ Lisa Durnau sees his body quiver and knows whatever it is lies beyond tears will come soon. She has never known that. She looks away. She has seen the look of this man destroyed before and that is enough for one lifetime.
Mr Nandha would love most dearly to loosen his collar with his finger. The heat in the corridor is oppressive; the air-conditioning aeai follows Ray Power ethical practice, reluctant to react to sudden shifts in micro-climate in the name of energy efficiency. But the sun has broken through the monsoon clouds and the glass face of Mr Nandha’s headquarters is a sweat machine. His suit is rumpled. His skin is waxy with perspiration. He fears he may have an unpleasing body odour that his superiors will sense the moment he enters Arora’s office.
Mr Nandha thinks there is blood on his shoes.
Air-conditioning aeais. Djinns even in the air-ducts. From his seat he can look down upon his city as he has all those times when he called upon it to be his oracle. Now there is nothing here. My Varanasi is given over to djinns, he thinks.
Clouds move, light shifts in rays and shafts. Mr Nandha winces at a sudden glint of brilliance from the green western suburbs. A heliograph, for his eye only, from the hundred metre hemisphere carved out by an alien space-time where Ray Power’s Research and Development section had once stood. Precise down to the quantum level, a perfect mirror. He knows, because he stood there, firing and firing and firing at his own distorted reflection until Vik wrestled him to the ground, hauled the god-gun out of his fist. Vik, in his hissing, ill-fitting rock-boi shoes.
He can still see her shoes, racked up so neatly in pairs like praying hands.
They will be agreeing a script, behind Arora’s door. Exceeded his authority. Excessive force. Public endangerment. The Energy Minister in handcuffs . . . Disciplinary measures. Suspension from duties. Of course. They must. But they do not know there is nothing they can do to him now. Mr Nandha can feel the acid start to burn his oesophagus. So many betrayals. His superiors, his stomach, his city. He erases the faithless shikaras and mandapas of Varanasi, imagines the campaniles and piazzas and duomos of Cremona. Cremona of the mind, the only eternal city. The only true city.
The door opens. Arora peeps out nervously, like a bird from a nest.
‘You can come in now, Nandha.’
Mr Nandha stands up, straightens his jacket and cuffs. As he walks towards the open door, the opening bars of the first Bach cello sonata soar through his mind.
In a dark room at the heart of a temple to a dark goddess, smeared with blood and hazy with the ash of dead humans, a cross-legged old man rolls on his skinny buttock bones and laugh and laughs and laughs and laughs.
LULL, LISA
In the evening a wind blows up from the river as a cool exhalation. It sweeps the ghats, stirs up the dust and sends eddies of marigold petals scurrying along the day-warmed stone. It rattles the newspapers of the old widower men who know they will never marry again, who come down to the ghats to talk the day’s headlines with their friends, it tugs at the trails and folds of the women’s saris. It sets the ghee-flames of the diyas swaying, ruffles the surface of the water into little cat-waves as the bathers scoop it up in their copper dishes and pour it over their heads. The scarlet silk flags curl on their bamboo poles. The wide wicker umbrellas shift as the breeze reaches under their decorated caps and lifts them. It smells of deep water, this small wind. It smells of cool and time and a new season. Down beneath the funeral ghats the men who pan the river for the golden ashes of the dead look up, touched by a sense of something more, something deeper than their dismal trade. The sound of the boat oars as they dip and slop into the water is rich and bottomless.
It was in the early afternoon that the rain lifted and the roof of grey cloud broke and there, beyond it, was a sky of high, miraculous blue, Krishna blue. You could see all the way out of the universe in that clear, washed blue. The sun shone, the stone ghats steamed. Within minutes the foot-trodden mud had dried to dust. People came out from under their umbrellas, uncovered their heads, unfolded their newspapers and lit cigarettes. Rain has been, rain will come again: great curds of cumulus cruise the eastern horizon beyond the plumes and vapours of the industrial shore, preposterous purple and yellow in the fast-falling light. Already t
he people take up their positions for the aarti, the nightly fire ceremony. These ghats may witness panic, flight, populations on the move, bloody death, but thanks as endless as the river are due to Ganga Mata. Drummers, percussionists make their way to the sides of the wooden platforms where the brahmins perform. Barefoot women carefully descend the steps, dip their hands in the rising river before finding their accustomed place. They skirt around the two Westerners sitting by the water’s edge, nod, smile. All are welcome at the river.
The marble is warm under Lisa Durnau’s thigh, skin smooth. She can smell the water, coiling silently at her foot. The first flotillas of diyas are striking bravely out into the current, stubborn tiny lights on the darkening water. The breeze plays cool on her bare shoulders, a woman namastes as she passes back from the forgiving water. India endures, she thinks. And India ignores. These are its strengths, twined around each other like lovers in a temple carving. Armies clash, dynasties rise and fall, lords die and nations and universes are born and the river flows on and the people flow to it. Perhaps this woman had not even noticed the flash of light that was the aeais departing to their own universe. If she had, how would she have thought of it? Some new weapons system, some piece of electronica gone bad, some inexplicable piece of complicated world gone awry. Not for her to know or wonder. The only part of it to touch her was when Town and Country suddenly disappeared. Or did she look up and see another truth entirely, the jyotirlinga, the generative power of Siva bursting from an earth that could not contain it in a pillar of light.
She looks at Thomas Lull beside her on the warm stone, knees pulled up, arms around them, looking across the river at the fantastical fortresses of the clouds. He has said little since Rhodes from the embassy secured their release from the Ministry’s holding centre, a conference room converted by removing all the tables and chairs, filled with bad tempered businessmen, feisty grameen women and furious Ray Power researchers. The air was hissing with calls to lawyers.
Thomas Lull had not even blinked. The car had left them at the haveli but he turned away from the ornate wooden gate and headed out into the warren of lanes and street markets that led down to the ghats. Lisa had not tried to stop him or ask him or talk to him. She watched him walk up and down the flights, along and around looking for where feet had trodden blood into the stone. She had looked at his face as he stood there with the people bustling over the place where Aj had died and thought, I know that look from a big wide Lawrence living room with no furniture. And she knew what she needed to do, and that her mission was always going to fail. And when he finally shook his head in the weak gesture of disbelief that was more eloquent than any drama of emotion and went down to the river and sat by the water, she had gone with him and settled on the sun-warmed stone, for when he was ready.
The musicians have begun a soft, slow heartbeat. The crowd grows by the minute. The sense of expectation, of presence, is a felt thing.
‘L. Durnau,’ says Thomas Lull. Against herself, she smiles. ‘Give me that thing.’
She passes him the Tablet. He flicks through its pages. She sees him call up the images from the Tabernacle; Lisa, Lull. Aj. Nandha the Krishna Cop. He folds the faces back into the machine. A mystery never to be solved. She knows he will never come back with her.
‘You think you learn something, you think finally you’ve got it worked out. It’s taken time and grief and effort and a shitload of experience but at last, you think you’ve got some idea how it all works, the whole fucking show. You think I’d know better, I honestly want to believe that we’re actually all right, that’s there something more to it than just planet-slime and that’s why it gets me every time. Every single time.’
‘The curse of the optimist, Lull. People get in the way.’
‘No, not people, L. Durnau. No, I gave up on people long ago. No, I’d hoped, when I worked out what the aeais were doing, I thought, Jesus, that’s a fucking irony, the machines that want to understand what it’s like to be human are actually more human than we are. I never hoped in us, L. Durnau, but I hoped that the Gen Threes might have evolved some moral sense. No, they abandoned her. As soon as they saw there never would be peace between the meat and the metal, they let her go. Learn what it’s like to be human. They learned all they needed to know in one act of betrayal.’
‘They saved themselves. They saved their species.’
‘Did you listen to a word I said, L. Durnau?’
A child comes down the steps, a little girl in a floral dress, barefoot, uncertain on the ghats. Her face is pure concentration. Her father has hold of one hand, the other, waving to keep balance, holds a garland of marigolds. The father points her to the river, points her to throw, go on, put it in. The girl flings the gajra, waves her arms in delight as she sees it land on the darkening water. She cannot be more than two.
No, you’re wrong, Lull, Lisa Durnau wants to say. It’s those stubborn tiny lights they can never put out. It’s those quanta of joy and wonder and surprise that never stop bubbling out of the universal and constant truths of our humanity. When she speaks, her words are, ‘So where do you think you’ll go then?’
‘There’s still a dive school with my name on it somewhere down Lanka, Thailand way,’ Thomas Lull says. ‘There’s one night in the year, just after the first full moon in November, when the coral releases its sperm and eggs, all at once. It’s quite wonderful, like swimming in a giant orgasm. I’d like to see that. Or there’s Nepal, the mountains; I’d like to see the mountains, really see the mountains, spend time among them. Do some mountain Buddhism, all those demons and horrors, that’s the kind of religion speaks to me. Get up to Kathmandu, out to Pokhara, some place high, with a view of the Himalayas. Will this get you in trouble with the G-men?’
Father and daughter stand by the water, watching the gajra bob on the ripples.
‘Like our Mr Rhodes says, the G-men have enough troubles of their own, if they’ve had a Generation Three hiding inside the intelligence services,’ Lisa Durnau says. The child smiles suspiciously at her. What have you been doing all your life, Lisa Durnau, that is more vital than this? ‘They’ll get round to me eventually.’
‘Well, take this back to them. I suppose I owe you, L. Durnau.’
Thomas Lull hands her the Tablet. Lisa Durnau frowns at the schematic.
‘What is this?’
‘The winding maps for the Calabi-Yau space the Gen Threes created at Ray Power.’
‘It’s a standard set of transforms for an information-space with a mind-like space-time structure. Lull, I helped develop these theories, remember? They got me into your office.’
And bed, she thinks.
‘Do you remember what I said on the boat, L. Durnau? About Aj ? “The other way around.”
Lisa Durnau frowns, then she sees it, as she saw it written by the hand of God on the toilet door in Paddington Station, and it is so clear and so pure and so beautiful it is like a spear of light stabbed straight through her, ramming through her pinning her to the white stone and it feels like death and it feels like ecstasy and it feels like something singing. Tears start in her eyes, she wipes them away, she cannot stop looking at the single, miraculous, luminous negative sign. Negative T. The time-arrow is reversed. A mind-like space, where the intelligences of the aeais can merge into the structure of the universe and manipulate it in any way they will. Gods. The clocks run backwards. As it ages, as it grows more complex; our universe grows younger and dumber and simpler. Planets dissolve into dust, stars evaporate into clouds of gas that coalesce into brief super-novas that are not the light of destruction but candles of creation, space collapsing in on itself, hotter and hotter reeling back towards the primordial ylem, forces and particles churned back into the primordial ylem while the aeais grow in power and wisdom and age. Time’s arrow flies the other way.
Hands shaking, she calls up a simple math aeai, runs a few fast transforms. As she suspected, the arrow of time not only flies in the other direction, it flies faster. A fast,
fierce universe of lifetimes compressed into moments. The clock-speed, the Planck-time flicker that governs the rates at which the aeais calculate their reality, is one hundred times that of universe zero. Breathless, Lisa Durnau thumbs more calculations into the Tablet though she knows, she knows, she knows what it is going to tell her. Universe 212255 runs its course from birth to recollapse into a final singularity in seven point seven eight billion years.
‘It’s a Boltzmon!’ she exclaims with simple joy. The girl in the flower dress turns and stares at her. The cinder of a universe; an ultimate black hole that contains every piece of quantum information that fell into it, that punches its way out of one dying reality into another. And waits, humanity’s inheritance
‘Their gift to us,’ Thomas Lull says. ‘Everything they knew, everything they experienced, everything they learned and created, they sent it through to us as their final act of thanks. The Tabernacle is a simple universal automaton that codes the information in the Boltzmon into a form comprehensible to us.’