River of Gods (46 page)

"Buteyko method?"

"Indeed so. Most alarming. I would not professionally recommend
it. He was most perturbed that this young woman knew who he was."

"Stop. I'm not the first?"

"I doubt she was the operative of any government."

Lisa Durnau shivers though it is clammy warm in the humid cabin. She
thumbs the first image from the Tabernacle upon the Tablet and turns
it on the low table to face Dr. Ghotse.

"Again, it is a poor photograph, but that is the young woman."

"Dr. Ghotse, this is also an image from the artefact inside
Darnley 285."

Dr. Ghotse sits back on his divan.

"Well, Miss Durnau, as Professor Lull says in his letter, there
is indeed deep mystery here." Outside the rain finally seems to
be lightening.

In the lawyer Nagpal's office the windows and shutters are all thrown
open. The din from the street is oppressive.

"Apologies apologies," the lawyer Nagpal says showing his
visitors to their cracked leather club chairs and settling himself
behind his ornately carved desk. "But otherwise the heat. Our
air-conditioning system; it is our landlord's duty to keep it in good
repair. A strongly worded letter, I think. Please, some chai.
Personally, I find hot chai the most refreshing beverage when the
heat oppresses."

Thomas Lull disagrees but the lawyer Nagpal has rung his little bell
for the office-wallah.

"I have heard it is already raining in Jharkhand." The boy
serves the hot, sickly chai from a brass tray. Nagpal picks up his
cup and gulps it down. Lawyer Nagpal of Nagpal, Pahelwan, and Dhavan
is a man who acts older than his years. Thomas Lull has long
subscribed to the theory that every human has an inner spiritual age
at which they remain all their lives. He's stuck at twenty-five. This
advocate is late fifties, though from his face and hands Thomas Lull
pegs him at no more than thirty. "Now, how may I help you?"

"A photograph was sent from this office to my colleague here,"
he says.

Nagpal frowns, purses his lips in a little
oh?
Aj pushes her
palmer across the desk. Thomas Lull puts the temperature in the early
forties but she is cool and poised. Her tilak seems to shine in the
shadowy office.

"It was sent to me on my eighteenth birthday," Aj prompts.

"Ah, I have you now!" Nagpal opens his palmer in a
hand-tooled leather case, taps up briefs. Thomas Lull reads the play
of lawyer's fingers, the movements of his pupils, the dilation of his
nostrils. What are you scared of, lawyer Nagpal with your degrees and
diplomas and certificates on the wall? "Yes, Ajmer Rao. You have
come all the way from Bangalore, most extraordinary, and in these
troubled times too. The photograph, I believe, is of your natural
parents."

"Bullshit," says Thomas Lull. "Sir, the photograph is
of."

"Jean-Yves and Anjali Trudeau. They're well known A-life
researchers, I've been working with them for years. And while Aj here
was theoretically being conceived, I was in daily contact with Anjali
and Jean-Yves in Strasbourg. If anyone had been pregnant I would have
known."

"With respect, Mr. Lull, there are modern techniques,
surrogacies."

"Mr. Nagpal, Anjali Trudeau never produced a viable egg in her
life."

The lawyer Nagpal chews his bottom lip in distaste.

"Our questions then are: who are Aj's natural parents, and who
instructed you to send that photograph? Someone is playing head-games
with her."

"Much as I feel for Miss Rao's confusion, I am not at liberty to
divulge that, Mr. Lull. It is a matter of client confidentiality."

"I can always talk to them directly. I'm only here as
formality."

"I do not think so, sir. Pardon my bluntness, but Mr. and Mrs.
Trudeau are deceased."

Thomas Lull feels the dark, sweating, cluttered room turn inside out.

"What?"

"Sir, I regret to inform you that Mr. and Mrs. Trudeau died in
an apartment fire yesterday morning. There is a question over the
circumstances, the police are investigating."

"Are you saying they were murdered?"

"I can say, sir, that the incident has attracted the attention
of the government department known informally as the Ministry."

"The Krishna Cops?"

"As you say. The apartment was alleged to be the location of the
Badrinath sundarban."

"They were working with the datarajas?" Lawyer Nagpal
spreads his hands. "I could not possibly speculate."

Thomas Lull speaks slowly and clearly so the lawyer can make no
mistake about what he means.

"Did the Badrinath sundarban instruct you to send the photograph
to Aj?"

"Mr. Lull, I have a mother, brothers, a married sister with
three children, gods be kind to her. I am a public notary and
recorder of oaths in a less than salubrious location. There are
forces at work here I do not have to understand to know are powerful.
I merely follow my instructions and bank my fee. I cannot help you
with any of your questions, please understand. But I can comply with
one final instruction from my clients."

Mr. Nagpal rings his bell, chips an order in Hindi at his babu who
returns with a book-sized case wrapped in Varanasi silk. Mr. Nagpal
unwraps the hand-woven silk square. Inside are two objects, a
photograph and a carved wooden jewellery box. He passes the
photograph to Aj. It is such a photograph as families lake, a mother,
a lather, a girl, smiling by the waterside with the towers of a
bright city behind them. But the man and the woman are dead now, and
the girl blinking in the bright morning has a shaved scalp scarred
with the evidence of recent surgery.

Aj runs her hand over her hair.

"I am sorry for your trouble," Lawyer Nagpal says. "This
is the second part of what they wished you to have." He presents
the little jewel box for Aj to open. Thomas Lull smells sandalwood as
she unfastens the brass catch.

"My horse!"

Between her thumb and forefinger is the universal circle of the fiery
chakra. Dancing in its centre, a white horse rears.

Beyond the cracking towers and tank farms of the East Bank the sky is
obsidian, the curtain wall of a fortress ten kilometres high. From
where he sits on the upper tiers of Dasashvamedha ghat, Thomas Lull
can feel its pressure in his sinuses. Hazy yellow sun covers city and
river. The wide sand shoals of the eastern shore where the nagas
perform their asceticisms are white against the black sky. A flaw of
wind chases marigold petals across Dasashvamedha ghat, sets the boats
rocking on the river. Even in Kerala Thomas Lull never knew humidity
like it. He imagines the heat, the humidity, the chemicals coiling
around his airways, tightening.

The nose for breathing, the mouth for talking.

The mood in the city is tight, coiling. Heat and war. The anger of
Sarkhand has boiled over into the streets. Burnings. Deaths. The
nutes first; then the Muslims, as ever. Now Mahindra pickups ram-raid
American fast-food chains in the New Town and karsevaks pour alcofuel
over blasphemous cow burgers. For the first time Thomas Lull feels
self-conscious of his accent and skin.

The army officer had taken his passport and left him alone in the
windowless storeroom in the small village medical centre that the
Bharati Defence Forces were using to process refugees from the train
attack. Thomas Lull sat on the metal chair under the single shadeless
lightbulb suddenly scared, suddenly naked while in the next room men
made loud, rattling phone calls in Hindi about his passport. He had
never consciously believed in the American grace, that that little
booklet made him a global aristocrat, cloaked him with
invulnerability, but he had held it up like a crucifix, caught
between incomprehensible clashing forces. He had not thought that it
might make him a player, at best a running-dog of hostile power, at
worst a spy. Thomas Lull was three hours in the room while keypads
rattled as army babus took down testimonies from a torrent of voices
and women keened on the street outside. Then a chubby subaltern with
a neat blue tilak down the centre of his tongue from licking the
point of his pen ripped out dockets, stamped pages, and handed Thomas
Lull a rustle of papers, pink blue and yellow, and his solid black
passport.

"This is a travel permit, this is your temporary ID, this is
your ticket," he pointed out with his pen. "The buses leave
from the front of the Durga temple; your bus number is 19. May I
express the regrets of the Bharati government for your hardships and
wish you a safe onward journey." Then he beckoned with his pen
to the women behind him in the line.

"My travelling companion, a young woman, with a Vishnu tilak?"

"All buses, all people in front of the temple. God-speed you
sir."

The subaltern flicked Thomas Lull off the end of his pen. The village
street was lit by vehicle headlights. Thomas Lull walked between rows
of bodies, laid out close as lovers to each other. By the time he was
half way to the white buses the army had run out of body bags and the
dead lay uncovered. He tried not to breathe in the stench of charred
flesh. Army medics were already at work stripping out the corneas.

"Aj!" he shouted. Camera-flashes flickered, camera lights
bobbed as news crews sought shots. Behind the forest of sound booms,
satellite uplink trucks unfolded dishes like poppies blooming. "Aj!"

"Lull! Lull!" A pale hand waved from a bus window. The
tilak caught the light. Lull pushed through the crowd, turning his
back to cameras with American logos on them. "You were so long,"
she said as he piled down beside her.

"They wanted to make sure I wasn't an agent of a foreign power.
What about you? I'd've thought, with that display."

"Oh, they let me go at once. I think they were afraid."

The bus drove through the remains of the night and all the next day.
Hours blurred into heat and flatness and villages with painted
advertisements for water and underwear and the constant blaring of
vehicle horns. What Thomas Lull saw were red-eyed corpses laid out on
the village street and Aj on one knee, her hand outstretched and the
enemy robots obeying.

"I have to ask you."

"I saw their gods and asked them. That is what I told the
soldiers. I do not think they believed me, but then they seemed
afraid of me."

"Robots have gods?"

"Everything has a god, Mr. Lull. You just have to find it."

At the next toilet stop Thomas Lull bought a newspaper to convince
himself that all his shards of impression and experience were real
memory. Bharati Hindutva extremists had attacked an Maratha Rail
shatabdi in a regrettable excess of patriotic zeal (the editorial
said) but the brave jawans of the Allahabad division had driven back
the savage and unjustified Awadhi retaliatory strike.

However liberal the Westerner, there is always some part of India
that shocks. For Thomas Lull it is this buried stratum of rage and
hatred that can one day take a neighbour of a lifetime into his
neighbour's house to cut him open with an axe and burn his wife and
children in their beds, and then, when it is all done and over, to go
back to the neighbourly life. Even on the ghats amongst the
worshippers and the dhobi-wallahs and the hawkers chasing the rag-end
of the tourist trade, the mob is only a shout away. There is no
explanation for it in his philosophy.

"There was a time I thought I might work with the sundarbans,"
Thomas Lull says. "That was after I testified to the Hamilton
Inquiry. They were right to be suspicious; hall the idea behind
Alterre was to set up an alternative ecosystem where intelligence
could evolve on its own terms. I don't think I could have stayed in
the States. I like to think I'd have been tough and noble under
persecution, like Chomsky in the Bush Wars, but I'm a complete pussy
cat when it comes to authority with guns. What I was scared of was
being ignored. Writing and speaking and talking and not one blind
soul paying attention to me. Locked in the white room. Shouting into
your pillow. That's worse than death. That's what did Chomsky in the
end. Smothered by inanity.

"I knew what they had over here, everyone who did anything with
aeai knew what they were hiding in their cyberabads. In the month
before the Hamilton Act came into force they were pushing bevabytes
of information out of the United States. Washington had all the
Indian states under incredible pressure to ratify the International
Agreement on Artificial Intelligence Registration and Licencing. And
I thought, they might at least have someone to speak for them, an
American voice, making the other side of the argument.

"Jean-Yves and Anjali wanted me to come—they knew that
even if Awadh went with Washington the best they could ever get from
the Ranas was a halfway house licensing deal to keep the soapis
sweet. And then my wife walked out on me with half of my worldly
goods and I thought I was together and sophisticated and cool and I
was none of those things. I was the opposite of everything I thought
I was. I was crazy for some time, I think. I'm not out of it yet.
Jesus, I cannot believe they are dead."

"What do you think they were working on in the sundarban?"

Aj sits cross-legged on a wooden level where the priests celebrate
the nightly puja to Ganga Devi. Devotees look long at her tilak, a
Vaishnavite in the heart of Siva's lordship.

"I think they had a Generation Three in there."

Aj toys with a twist of marigold petals.

"Have we reached the singularity?"

Thomas Lull starts at the abstruse word falling like a pearl from
Aj's lips. "Okay mystery girl, what do you understand by
singularity?"

Doesn't it mean the theoretical point where aeais become first as
intelligent as humans, then rapidly leave them behind?"

"My answer is yes and no. Yes, there are undoubtedly Generation
Three aeais out there that are every bit as alive and aware and
filled with sense of self as I am. But they aren't going to reduce us
all to slavery or pethood or just nuke us because they perceive we're
in competition with them for the same ecological niche; that's
Hamilton's thinking, and it's not thinking at all. That's the 'no'
part of the answer: they are intelligent but not as humans are
intelligent. Aeai is alien intelligence. It's a response to specific
environmental conditions and stimuli, and that environment is
CyberEarth, where the rules are very very different from RealEarth.
First rule of CyberEarth: information cannot be moved, it must be
copied. In RealEarth, physically moving information is a piece of
piss; we do it every time we stand up, carrying this
sense-of-self-ware around in our heads. Aeais can't do that, but they
can do one thing we can't. They can copy themselves. Now, what that
does to your sense of self, I don't know, and technically speaking, I
can't know. It's a philosophical impossibility for us to be in two
places at the same time; not for aeais. For them, the philosophical
implications of what you do with your spare copy when you move
yourself to a new matrix is of fundamental importance. Does a
complete self die, or is it just part of a greater gestalt? Already
we're getting into a completely alien mind-set. So, even if aeais
have hit the singularity and are racing away into IQs in the
millions, what does that actually mean in human terms? How do we
measure it? What do we measure it against? Intelligence is not an
absolute thing, it's always environment specific. Aeais don't need to
manufacture stock market crashes or set the nukes flying or trash our
planetary web to put humanity in its place; there is no competition,
these things have no meaning or relevance in their universe. We're
neighbours in parallel universes and as long as we live as neighbours
we will live peacefully to our mutual advantage. But the Hamilton
Acts mean we've risen up against our neighbours and are driving them
into annihilation. At some point they will fight, like anything will
when its back's against the wall, and that will be a terrible, bitter
battle. There's no battle more terrible than when the gods fight and
we are each other's gods. We're gods to the aeai. Our words can
rewrite the appearance of any part of their world. That's the reality
of their universe; nonmaterial entities that can unsay any part of
reality are as much the fabric of it as quantum uncertainty and
M-Star theory is of ours. We used to live in a universe that thought
like that once; spirits and ancestors and everything was held
together by the divine word. We need each other to maintain our
worlds."