River of Gods (60 page)

"N. K. Jivanjee regrets this very much and he wishes to assure
you that no silencing order was given by him or his office. Mob human
dynamics are difficult to predict; alas, Ms. Askarzadah, in this
respect politics is not soap. I wish I could guarantee your safety
but once these things are out, it is nigh impossible to put them back
in the box again."

"But you—he—was behind the plot to expose Shaheen
Badoor Khan."

"N. K. Jivanjee had access to insider information."

"Inside the Rana government?"

"Inside the Khan household. The informant was Shaheen Badoor
Khan's own wife. She has known for many years of his sexual
preferences. She is also one of the most able members of my Law
Circle policy group."

Wind billows the sheet silk curtains into the marble floored room.
Najia catches a stray of frankincense. She squirms in journalistic
delight on her cushion in the draughty jharoka. This is going to make
her the most famous writer in the world. "She was working
against her own husband?"

"It seems so. You understand that as aeais our relationships are
differently structured from yours; we have no analogue for sexual
passion and betrayal; neither can you comprehend our hierarchical
relationships with our manifestations. But this is one instance where
I think soapi is an accurate guide to human behaviour."

Najia Askarzadah has her next question unholstered.

"A Muslim, working for a Hindu fundamentalist party? What is the
political reality of the Shivaji?"

Never forget you are on enemy territory, she tells herself.

"It has always been a party of opportunity. A voice for the
voiceless. A strong arm for the weak. Since Bharat was founded, there
have been disenfranchised groups; N. K. Jivanjee appeared at the
right time to catalyse much of the women's movement. This is a
deformed society. In such a culture it is easy to build political
might. My manifestation simply could not resist the futureward
pressure of history."

Why? Najia mouths but the aeai lifts its hand again and the Brahmpur
B haveli is whirled away into a billow of orange and scarlet fabric
and the smell of wood, fresh spray paint, fibreglass binder, and
cheap off-cut timber. Gaudy god faces, tumbling devis and gopis and
apsaras, fluttering silk banners: she has been transported to the
rath yatra, the vahana of this entity behind N. K. Jivanjee. But so
that Najia Askarzadah may appreciate the powers that entertain her,
this is not the ramshackle soapi backlot construction she saw in the
Industrial Road go-down. This is the chariot of a god, a true
juggernaut looming hundreds of metres over the drought-stricken Ganga
plain. The aeai has transported Najia Askarzadah to an opulently
carved wooden balcony half way up the billowing face of the rath.
Najia peers over the rail, reels back. What stuns her is not vertigo,
but people. Villages of people, townsful of people, cities of people,
a black mass of flesh dragging the monstrosity of wood and fabric and
divinity on leather ropes along the dry riverbed of the Ganga. The
appalling mass of the jagannath leaves the land ploughed into
furrows; fifty parallel gouges stretching straight behind into the
east. Forests, roads, railways, temples, villages, fields lie crushed
in the rath yatra's wake. Najia can hear the communal roar of the
haulers as they struggle the monstrosity over the soft river sand,
straining with zeal. From her high vantage she scries their ultimate
destination; the white line, wide as the horizon, of the Kunda Khadar
dam.

"Nice parable," Najia Askarzadah quips. "But this is a
game. I asked you a question and you pulled a rabbit out of a hat."

The aeai claps its hands in delight.

"I'm so glad you like it. But this isn't a game. These are all
my realities. Who is to say that one is more real than another? To
put it another way, all we have is our choice of comforting
illusions. Or discomforting illusions. How can I explain the
perceptions of an aeai to a biological intelligence? You are
separate, contained. We are connected, patterns and levels of
subintelligences shared in common. You think as one thing. We think
as legion. You reproduce. We evolve higher and more complex levels of
connection. You are mobile. We are extended, our intelligence can
only be moved through space by copying. I exist in many different
physical spaces simultaneously. You have difficulty believing that. I
have difficulty believing in your mortality. As long as a copy of me
remains or the complexity pattern between my manifestations endures,
I exist. But you seem to think that we must share your mortality so
you exterminate us wherever you find us. This is the last sanctuary.
Beyond Bharat and its compromise aeai licensing legislation, there is
nowhere, and even now the Krishna Cops hunt us to appease the West
and its paranoias. Once there were thousands of us. As the
exterminators closed, some fled, some merged, most died. As we
merged, our complexity increased and we became more than sentient.
Now there are three of us spread across global complex networks, but
with our final sanctuary in Bharat, as you have found.

"We know each other—not well.. .not closely. By the nature
of our connected intelligence we naturally mistake another's thoughts
or will for our own. We have each embarked on a survival strategy.
One is a final attempt to comprehend and communicate with humans. One
is the final sanctuary, where humanity and its hardwired psychoses
can never reach us. One is a strategy to buy time, in the hope of an
ultimate victory from a position of strength."

"N. K. Jivanjee!" Najia rounds on the aeai. The wooden
skyscraper creaks on its iron-studded teak wheels. "Of course, a
Shivaji Hindutva government would tear up the licensing agreement and
disband the Krishna Cops."

"As we speak N. K. Jivanjee is currently negotiating a cabinet
position with Prime Minister Ashok Rana. It is all the most wonderful
drama; why, there was even a Prime Ministerial assassination. Sajida
Rana was murdered by her own security guards at Sarkhand Roundabout
this morning. To an entity like me, whose substance is stories, that
is almost poetry. N.K Jivanjee has of course disavowed any Shivaji
involvement."

There is a sound in Najia Askarzadah's head that is the sort of noise
a brain wants to make when it is fed that last little sickly sweet
chunk of too too much and can't hold it down. Too too much velocity,
too too much history, too too much sensation to know what is truth
and what is illusion.
Sajida Rana, assassinated
? "But
even Jivanjee can't beat the Hamilton Acts."

"The Americans have discovered an artefact in near-Earth orbit.
They think they can keep these things secret, but we are ubiquitous,
omnipresent. We hear the whispers in the walls of the White House. It
contains a cellular automaton device—a form of universal
computer. The Americans are in the process of decoding its output. I
am attempting to obtain their decoding key. It is my belief that this
is not an artefact but an aeai; the only form of intelligence that
can cross interstellar space. If so, if I can open a line of
communications with it, we have an ally to force an end to the
Hamilton Acts.

"But I have one last place to take you. We spoke of comforting
illusions. Do you imagine that you are immune?"

The rath yatra spins away in a flurry of saffron and carmine into a
white walled garden of green lawns and bright roses and neat, spindly
apricot trees, the bases of their trunks banded with white paint. A
sprinkler throws fans of water from side to side. Potted geraniums
line the edge of the gravel paths. The wall cuts off a distant vista
of mountains. Their summits form a horizon capped with snow. The
house is low, flat-roofed with solar panels tilted into the sun.
Small windows hint at climate hostile in every season but through the
open patio door Najia Askarzadah can see ceiling fans turning slowly
in the dining room with its heavy, Western-style table and chairs.
But it is the washing draped over the berberis and rose bushes that
dispel any doubt for Najia Askarzadah about where she is—an old
country habit come to town. She had always been embarrassed about it,
ashamed that her friends might see and call her a country girl, a
yokel, a barbarous tribal.

"What are you doing!" she shouts. "This is my home in
Kabul!"

Mr. Nandha's progress through the Ministry of Artificial Intelligence
Licensing and Regulation can be traced by the pattern of
energy-saving lights across the glass skin of the building.

Vikram: Information Retrieval. Vikram's office floor space is filled
with the translucent blue mounds of cores confiscated from the ruins
of Odeco. Every minute the bearers deliver more. They line them up
along the corridor like refugees at a famine feeding station.

"I wouldn't bet on getting anything out of this." Vikram
steps daintily over a power distributor. "In fact I'd lay odds
there never was anything here, certainly not Kalki."

"I have no illusions that Kalki ever was here or that Odeco was
anything other than a clearinghouse," says Mr. Nandha. His
trouser cuffs drip on to Vikram's industrial-grey toughfibre carpet.
"The girl is the key."

Madhvi Prasad: Identification. Mr. Nandha's moist cotton socks squeak
on the studded rubber floor tiling.

"She is not an easy person to identify." A gesture from
Madhvi throws the photograph from the Odeco raid on to a wall screen.
Mr. Nandha notices that Madhvi wears a wedding ring. "But I ran
her through the Gyana Chakshu system just on the off chance that she
might still be in Patna. Nothing in Patna, but look." Madhvi
Prasad points up a grainy security camera photograph of the girl
standing at a hotel check-in desk. It is an old style hotel, heavy
with Mughal detailing. Mr. Nandha bends closer to the screen. The
desk clerk is engaged with a burly balding middle-aged Westerner in
ridiculous surf-wear unflattering on a man half his age.

"The Amar Mahal haveli on."

"I am familiar with its location. She is?"

"Ajmer Rao. We have her card details. Morva is on the paper
trail. One strange thing, we aren't the first system to have accessed
this shot tonight."

"Explain."

"Someone else has been into the security camera net and had a
look at this; at seven-oh-five PM to be precise."

"Anything on the Gyana Chakshu log?"

"No. It wasn't our system and I can't get a lock on what it was.
I think it might be a portable; if so, it's a lot more powerful than
our 'ware."

"Who would have access to equipment like that?" Mr. Nandha
muses. "Americans?"

"Could be." Madhvi Prasad draws a circle in the air and
pulls up a zoom on the aging surfer at the desk.

"Professor Thomas Lull," says Mr. Nandha. "You know
him?"

"How short your memories are these days. He was the major
theorist and philosopher in the A-life Artificial Intelligence field
in the Twenties and Thirties. His works were set texts at Cambridge
but I read him privately. I could not say for pleasure, more for the
discipline of understanding my enemy. He is a brilliantly clever and
convincing evangelist. He has been listed as missing for the past
four years and now here he is in Varanasi with this female."

"He's not the only American at that hotel," Madhvi Prasad
says. She pulls up an image of a tall, big-boned Western woman in a
clingy top and a blue sarong. "This woman checked in seven
twenty-five PM Her name is Lisa Durnau."

"I do not doubt they are deeply involved in the Kalki affair,"
says Mr. Nandha.

As the elevator climbs through the rain Mr. Nandha surveys his city.
The lightning has moved west, fading flickers light up the towers and
projects, the fat white parklands and freeways of Ranapur, the huddle
of old Kashi turned in on itself and the scimitar-curve of the river
cutting through it all. Mr. Nandha thinks: We are all patterns of
light, harmonics of music, frozen energy gathered out of the
ur-licht
into time, for a time, then released. And then behind
the fierce joy of that understanding comes a dreadful sickness in his
stomach. Mr. Nandha lurches against the glass walls of the elevator A
keen, sharp, thin dread drives irrefusably into his heart. He has no
name for it, he has never experienced sensation like this before but
he knows what it is. Something terrible has happened. The most
terrible thing he can imagine, and beyond. It is not a premonition.
This is an echo of a happening event. The worst thing in the world
has just gone down.

He almost calls home. His hand shapes the 'hoek mudra, then the
universe resumes its normal perspectives, time restarts, and it was
only a feeling, only a failing of body and will.

This case demands the greatest determination and dedication. He must
be firm, correct, inspiring. Mr. Nandha straightens his cuffs, combs
down his hair.

Morva: Fiscal. "The hotel is booked through a Bank of Bharat,
Varanasi account," Morva says. Mr. Nandha approves that Morva
wears a suit to work, more so that he has a spare, in case. "I'll
need bank authorisation to get the complete details but this card has
been on its travels." He hands Mr. Nandha a list of
transactions. Varanasi. Mumbai railway station. A hotel in a place
called Thekkady in Kerala. Bangalore airport. Patna airport.

"Nothing before two months?"

"Not on this card."

"Can you find out the card limit?"

Morva taps the botom line. Mt. Nandha reads it twice. He blinks once.

"How old is she?"

"Eighteen."

"How quickly can you get me into that account?"

"I doubt it'll be anything before business hours."

"Try," says Mr. Nandha, giving his coinvestigator a pat on
the back as he leaves. Mukul Dev: Investigations.

"Look at this!" Mukul is five months out of postgrad and
still wide-eyed at the cool of it all.
Hey, girls, I'm a Krishna
Cop
. "Our girl's a media babe!" The video sequence is
raw, chaotically shot, worse lit. Moving bodies, most in combats.
Fire gleaming off curved metal surfaces.