River of Gods (66 page)

Then the shots bang out; short, stabbing bursts of automatic fire.
The mob on the platform drops as one, covers heads with hands. Cries,
shrieks, and the dreadful, unappeasable wail of the injured: the
soldiers are not shooting to scare this time. Parvati feels Krishan's
hand close on her. Bullets crack out again. She sees flashes, hears
the clang of shells ricocheting off the stanchions. Krishan gives a
strange little sigh, then his grip tightens around hers and he draws
her up, on to the train.

On the return trip Lisa and Thomas Lull are the only passengers in
the lounge. It feels big and plasticy and exposed under its unkind
fluorescents so Lisa Durnau suggests they go outside to regard the
holy river. Sacred water is a new concept to Lisa Durnau. They stand
side by side at the rail, buffeted by flaws of rain watching the
sandy banks and rusty tin water abstraction plants. An object breaks
the surface. Lisa wonders if it is one of the blind river dolphins
she read about on the flight up from Thiruvananthapuram. Dolphin or
dead. Certain classes of Hindus cannot be cremated and are
surrendered to the mercy of Ganga Mata.

Once in a conference she flopped plane/train/taxi-lagged into a
leather armchair in the lobby opposite an African delegate reclining
generously in a seat. She nodded to him, wide-eyed, dazed,
whoooo
.
He nodded back, patted his hands on the arms of the chair. "Just
letting my soul catch up with me." She needs to do that. Catch
up with herself. Find a time out from the succession of one event to
the next, that's not filled with some person or thing or problem
coming at her, frozen in the headlights of history. Stop reacting,
take time, take a step, let your soul catch up. She would love to go
for a run. Barring that, some time with a sacred river.

She looks at Thomas Lull. In his stance at the rail she sees four
years, she sees uncertainty, she sees fading of confidence, cooling
of ardour and energy. When did you last burn with passion about
anything? she thinks. She sees a man in his middle years who looks at
death every day. She sees almost nothing of the man she had dirty,
grown-up sex with in an Oxford College shower. It is absolutely over,
she thinks and feels sorry for him. He looks so very tired.

"So tell me, L. Durnau, do you ever, you know, see Jen around?"

"Occasionally, at the mall, sometimes the Jayhawks games. She's
got someone else."

"I thought that even before. You know. Same way as you know when
it's on. Chemicals or something. Does she look happy?"

"Happy enough." Lisa Durnau anticipates his inevitable next
question. "No baby buggies."

He looks at the passing shore, the white temple shikaras hazy against
the rain clouds beyond the dark line of trees. Buffalo loll in the
water, lifting their heads against the spreading hydrofoil wake.

"I know why Jean-Yves and Anjali did it, why they left her that
photograph. I'd wondered why they should punch a hole right through
the heart of it. Anjali never could have children, you know."

"Aj was their surrogate daughter."

"They felt they owed her the truth. Better to find out what she
really was than be a life of illusions. To be human is to be
disillusioned."

"You don't agree with that!"

"I haven't your stern Calvinist mien. I'm comfortable with
illusion. I don't think I would have had the courage or the
callousness to do that to her."

But you also walked away, Lisa Durnau thinks. You also abandoned
friends, career, reputation, lovers; it was easy for you, turn around
and walk away and never look back.

"But she came looking for you," Lisa Durnau says.

"I don't have any answers for her," Thomas Lull says. "Why
do you have to have answers? You're born not fucking knowing
anything, you go through your life not fucking knowing anything, you
die and you never know any fucking thing ever again. That's the
mystery of it. I am nobody's guru, not yours, not NASA's, not some
aeai's. You know something? All those articles and TV appearances and
conferences? I was making it up as I went along. That's all. Alterre?
Just something I made up some day."

Lisa Durnau grips the rail with both hands.

"Lull, Alterre's gone."

She cannot read his face, his stance, his muscles. She tries to
provoke a reaction.

"Gone, Lull, everything. All eleven million servers, crashed.
Extinct."

Thomas Lull shakes his head. Thomas Lull frowns. His brow creases.
Then Lisa sees an expression on his face she knows so well herself:
the bafflement, wonderment, enlightenment of
idea
.

"What was always behind Alterre?" he says. "That a
simulated environment."

"Might eventually produce real intelligence." The words
come in a rush. "What if we succeeded better than we ever hoped?
What if Alterre didn't breed sentience, but the whole thing became
alive. aware. Kalki is the tenth avatar of Vishnu. It sits there at
the top of Alterre's evolutionary pyramid, preserver and sustainer of
all life; all things proceed from it and are of its substance. Then
it reaches out and there's another world of life out there, not part
of it, separate, disconnected, utterly alien. Is it a threat, is it a
blessing, is it something altogether other? It has to know. It has to
experience."

"But if Alterre has crashed."

He chews in his bottom lip and goes quiet and dark, looking out at
the rain in the great river. Lisa Durnau tries to count the
impossibilities he has had to absorb. After a time he reaches out a
hand. "Give me that thing. I need to find Aj. If Vishnu is gone,
she's unplugged from the net. All her life is illusion and now even
the gods have abandoned her. What is she going to be thinking,
feeling?"

Lisa slips the Tablet out of its flesh-soft leather holster and
passes it to Thomas Lull. It emits a deep, chiming scale. Thomas Lull
almost drops it in surprise. Lisa intercepts the thing on its way to
moksha in the Ganga. A voice and image appear in her perceptions:
Daley-Suarez Martin.

"Something's happened at the Tabernacle. They've got another
signal out of it." The Tablet displays a fourth face, a man, a
Bharati, so much is obvious even in the low-resolution cellular
automaton image; a thin-boned, drawn man. Lisa Durnau can make out
the collar of a Nehru suit. She thinks he has an unutterably sad
face. There is an ident line attached.

"I think you'd better find your friend quick," she says.
"This is Nandha. He's a Krishna Cop."

She flees from the house into the grey light. The rain falls on
Scindia Basti. The bare feet of the women fetching water from the
pumps have churned the alleys to fetid mud. The sewers overflow. The
men also are about in the dawn, to buy and sell, maybe hire
themselves to dig a ditch for a cable, maybe have a cup of chai,
maybe see if there is anything left of the city.

They stare at the girl with the Vishnu tilak, shoving past them,
running as if Kali rising is on her heels.

Eyes in the dark in the house by the pylon left's foot. "We are
poor people, we have nothing you can possibly want, please leave us
in peace." Then the scratch and flare of the match and the arc
of light through the darkness as it moved to touch the wick of the
little clay diya, the bud of light swelling and filling the
clay-floored room. Then, the cries of fear.

Vehicles roar at her; metal looms huge, then recedes into the rain.
Thundering voices, bodies pressing around her that seem the size of
clouds. A river of motion and alcofueled peril. She is on the street
and she does not know how. The certainties and divine guidances of
the night have evaporated in the light. For the first time there is
no clear distinction between god and human. She is not sure she can
find her way back to the hotel.

Aid me.

The skyline crawls with the chaotic moire patterns of gods meshing,
blurring, flowing, breeding into strange new configurations.

"
What are you doing in this house
?" She cries out,
claps her hands to her ears as the remembered voice speaks again in
her skull. The women's faces in the glow of the grease lamp, one old,
one younger, one youngest. A wail had gone up from the old woman;
like something long and fragile tearing inside.

"What are you doing here? You have no place here!" A hand,
held in a mudra against the evil eye. The youngest's eyes wide with
fear, wet with tears. "Get out of this house, there is no place
for you here. Don't be deceived. See her, see her? See what they have
done? Ah, this is an evil thing, a djinn, a demon!" The old
woman rocking now, eyes closed, moaning. "Away from us! This is
not your home, you are not our sister!"

Entreaties never offered. Answers never spoken. Questions never
worded. And the old woman, the old woman; her mother, her hand in
front of her eyes as if Aj blinded her, as if she burned with a fire
that could not be looked upon. On the street, underneath the monsoon
rain, she cries out, a long, thin wail torn out of the heart of her.
She understands now.

Fear: that is white, without surface or texture or anything you can
lay a hand on to move or manipulate and it feels like rot in the base
of you and you want to roll up and ask it to pass you over, like a
rain-cloud, but it will never do that.

Loss bites and pulls. It is a thing of hooks sunk into every part of
you, parts that you would not think could feel loss like thumbs and
lips, hooks moored to wind and memory so that the slightest
disturbance, the slightest act of recall, tugs at those fine lines.
Red is the colour of loss and its smell is like burned roses.

Abandonment, that tastes like sick in the back of your throat, always
on the edge of coming up; it feels like dizzy, like walking along the
edge of a high stone harbour over a sea that glimmers and moves so
far below you cannot be certain where it is, but brown, brown;
abandonment is empty dull brown.

Desperation: a universal background hum, grey noise, part drone part
hiss, a stifling, blurring, smudging of everything into soft grey.
Universal rain. Universal yielding, into which you can push beyond
the reach of any of your limbs and still touch nothing. Universal
insulation. That is desperation.

Yellow is the colour of uncertainty, sick yellow, yellow like bile,
yellow like madness, yellow like flowers that open their petals
around you and whirl and spin so you cannot decide which is best,
which is most perfect, which has the most gorgeous, cloying scent;
yellow like acid that eats away at everything you think you know
until you stand on a rotted filigree of rust and you are at once
smaller than the tiniest grain of yellow pollen and vast beyond
vastness, containing cities.

Shock is a numb pressure trying to smear your brain over the back of
your skull. Betrayal is translucent blue, so cold cold cold.
Incomprehension feels like a hair on the tongue.

And anger is heavy like a hammer but so light it can fly with its own
wings, and the darkest, darkest rust.

This is what it is to be human.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she shouts at the gods as the
street breaks around her and rain falls on her upturned face.

And the gods answer:
we never knew. We never thought
. And
again:
now we understand
. Then one by one they extinguish like
diyas in the rain.

Shiv can't place the smell. It's sweet, it's musky, it reminds him of
things he can't fully remember and it's coming from the dataraja
Ramanandacharya. He's a fat bastard but they all are. Fat and
quivering. Doesn't look so cool in those robes and gowns now. Shiv
particularly hares the old-school Mughal-style moustaches. He'd love
to cut them off but Yogendra needs to keep the hooked tip of the big
knife at Ramanandacharya's groin. One small wrist movement there will
sever the femoral artery. Shiv knows the surgery. The raja will bleed
out in under four minutes.

They walk up the sloping wet cobbles from the Hastings Pavilion to
the Temple, close as lovers or drunks.

"How many have you got there?" Shiv whispers, nudging
Ramanandacharya with his shoulder. "Back there, how many women,
huh?"

"Forty," says Ramanandacharya. Shiv cuffs him with the back
of his hand. He knows it's the pills, making him impatient, bolder
than a clever man should be, but he likes the feel of it.

"Forty women? Where you get them from, huh?" Nudge.

"All over, Philippines, Thailand, Russians, anywhere cheap, you
know?" Again, the rap with the back of the hand. Ramanandacharya
cringes. They pass the sentry robot, crouched down on its steel hams.

"Any good Bharati women in there?"

"Couple from the village. ah!" Shiv cuffs harder now,
Ramanandacharya rubs his ear. Shiv takes a fold of rich gold-threaded
silk between his fingers, feels the subtle weave, the
skin-smoothness, the lightness.

"Do they like this, huh? All this Mughal shit?" He shoves
Ramanandacharya with both hands. The dataraja stumbles on a step.
Yogendra flicks the knife away. "Why couldn't you have been a
Hindu, huh?"

Ramanandacharya shrugs.

"Mughal Fort," he offers weakly. Shiv hits him again.

"Mughal Fort fuck!" He slides in close to the ear. "So
how often do you, you know? Every night?"

"Lunchtimes too." The sentence vanishes into a sharp cry as
Shiv hits Ramanandacharya hard on the side of the head.

"Fucking dirty chuutya!" He knows what the smell is now.
That sweet, sour, musky, dark smell from Ramanandacharya's robes and
jewels: sex.

"Eh," says Yogendra. The swarm of robots has left its orbit
of the Lodi temple and streams across the courtyard towards the trio,
a black, oily arrow. Plastic peds rattle on the cobbles. Their wet
carapaces glint blackly. Ramanandacharya tuts and sighs and twists
the ring on his left pinky. The swarms part like that sea in that
Christian story, the kind American missionaries put into the heads of
good young women to turn them into unmarriageable things that can
never get proper husbands.