River of Gods (29 page)

"Who is saying this?"

"Oh, it's all the word," Chauhan says, noting down comments
on the fourth victim. "Doing the rounds after the Dawar's party.
This one's a woman. Interesting. So, green fingers then, Nandha?"

"I am having a roof-top retreat constructed, yes. We're thinking
of using it for entertainments, dinners, social get-togethers. It's
quite the thing in Bengal, roof gardens."

"Bengal? They've all the fashions, there." Chauhan regards
himself as Mr. Nandha's equal in intellect, education, career, and
standing; everything but wedlock. Mr. Nandha married within jati.
Chauhan married below subcaste.

Mr. Nandha frowns at the ceiling.

"I presume this place would have a halon fire extinguisher
system as a matter of course?"

Chauhan shrugs. Inspector Vaish stands up. He understands.

"Have you found anything that looks like a control box?"
Mr. Nandha asks.

"In the kitchen," the inspector answers. The box is under
the sink beside the U-bend, the most inconvenient place. Mr. Nandha
rips off the seared cupboard door, squats down, and shines his pencil
torch all around. These people used a lot of multisurface cleaner.
All those hard cases, Mr. Nandha presumes. The heat has penetrated
even this safe cubby, loosening the plumbing solder and sagging the
plastic cover. A few turns of the multitool unscrews it. The service
ports are intact. Mr. Nandha plugs in the avatar box and summons
Krishna. The aeai balloons beyond the tight constraints of the
under-sink cupboard. The god of little domesticities. Inspector Vaish
crouches beside him. Where before he had radiated spiky resentment,
he now seems in mild awe.

"I'm accessing the security system files," Mr. Nandha
explains. "It will take no more than a few moments. Ironic;
they'll protect their memory farm with quantum keys but the
extinguisher system is a simple four-digit pin. And that," he
says as the command lines scroll up on his field of vision, "seems
to have been their downfall. Do we have an estimated time of the
fire?"

"The oven timer is stopped at seven twenty-two."

"There's a command from the insurance company—it's
certainly false—logged at seven oh five shutting down the halon
gas system. It also activated the door locks."

"They were sealed in."

"Yes." Mr. Nandha stands up, brushes himself down, noting
with distaste the soft black smears of ten percent human fat where
floating soot has gravitated on to him. "And that makes it
murder." He folds his avatars back into their box. "I shall
return to my office to prepare an initial scene of crime report. I'll
need the most intact of the processors in my department before noon.
And Mr. Chauhan." The pathologist looks up from the last corpse,
burned down to bones and a grin of bloody white teeth in black char.
He knows those teeth; Radhakrishna's impudent monkey-grin. "I
will call on you at three and I expect you to have something for me
by then."

He imagines the SOCO's smile as he quits the incinerated shell of the
Badrinath sundarban. Like him, they have neither the money nor the
patience to marry in jati.

At breakfast the talk had all been of the Dawar's reception.

"We must have one," Parvati said, bright and fresh with a
flower in her long, black hair and the Fifth Test burbling in male
baritones behind her. "When the roof garden is finished, we'll
have a durbar and invite everyone and it'll be the talk for weeks."
She pulled her diary from her bag. "October? It should be
looking best then, after the late monsoon."

"Why are we watching the cricket?" Mr. Nandha asked.

"Oh that? I don't know how that came to be on." She waved
her hand at the screen in the gesture for
Breakfast with Bharti
.
An in-studio dance-routine bounced upon the screen. "There,
happy? October is a good time, it is always such a flat month. But it
might seem a bit of an anticlimax after the Dawars, I mean, it's a
garden and I love it very much and you are so good to let me have it,
but it is only plants and seeds. How much do you think it cost them
to get a Brahmin baby?"

"More than an Artificial Intelligence Licensing Investigations
Officer can afford."

"Oh, my love, I never thought for a moment."

Listen to yourself, my bulbul, he thought. Babbling away, letting it
fall from your lips and presuming it will be golden because you are
surrounded by colour and movement and flowers every second of every
day. I heard the society women you so envy and said nothing because
they were right. You are quaint and open and say what is in your
heart.

You are honest in your ambitions and that is why I would keep you
away from them and their society.

Bharti on the Breakfast Banquette chattered and smiled with her
Special! Morning! Guests! Today:
Funki Puri
Breakfast Specials
from our Guest Chef, Sanjeev Kapur!

"Good day, my treasure," Mr. Nandha said pushing away his
half-empty cup of Ayurvedic tea. "Forget those snobbish people.
They have nothing we need. We have each other. I may be late back. I
have a scene of crime to investigate." Mr. Nandha kissed his
beautiful wife and went to look at the incinerated remains of Mr.
Radhakrishna in his sundarban wedged unassumingly into a
fifteenth-floor apartment in Diljit Rana Colony.

Dangling his damp tea bag from its string, Mr. Nandha looks out over
Varanasi and tries to make sense of what he has seen in that charred
apartment. The fire was savage but contained. Controlled. An
engineered burn. A shaped charge? An infrared laser fired through the
window?

Mr. Nandha flicks Bach violin concertos on to his palmer, sits back
in his leather chair, puts his fingers together like a stupa, and
turns to the city outside his window. It has been an unfailing and
unstinting guru to him. He scrys it like an oracle. Varanasi is the
City of Man and all human action is mirrored in its geography. Its
patterns and traumas have yielded insights and wisdoms beyond reason
and rationality. Today his city shows him fire patterns. On any given
day there will be at least a dozen coils of smoke from domestic
conflagrations. Among the jostling middle classes the habits of
bride-burning have been extinguished, but he does not doubt that some
of those further, paler smoke ribbons are "kitchen fires."

You are safe with me, Parvati, he thinks. You can forever trust that
I will not hurt you or tire of you, for you are rare, a pearl without
price. You are protected from the sati of boredom or dowry envy.

The military troopships cut down across the skyline in the same
regular rhythm. How many lakhs of soldiers now? In the police cruiser
he had scanned the day's headlines. Bharati jawans had driven back an
Awadhi incursion along the railway line into western Allahabad.
Awadhi/American robots were attacking a sit-down demonstration
blocking a Maratha shatabdi on the mainline from Awadh. Mr. Nandha
knows the reek of Rana spin, stronger than any incense or cremation
smoke. Ironic that the Americans, engineers of the Hamilton Acts,
chose to wage war through the machines they so mistrusted. If
high-generation aeais ever gained access to the fighting robots.

Mr. Nandha's fingers part. Intuition. Enlightenment. A movement at
his side: a chai-boy whisks his used bag away on a silver saucer.

"Chai-wallah. Send Vikram down here. Quick now."

"At once, sahb."

Military aeai counter-countermeasure gunships. Trained to fly down
and assassinate cyber-war craft like hunting falcons. Armed with
pulse lasers. The murder weapon is out there, cutting patrol arcs
through the sacred city's sacred airspace. Someone cut into the
military system.

Mr. Nandha smells Vik before any other sense announces his arrival.
"Vikram."

"How can I please you?" Mr. Nandha turns in his chair.

"Please get me a movement log of every military aeai drone over
Varanasi for the past twelve hours."

Vikram sucks in his upper lip. He's dressed in vast running shoes and
pseudo-shorts hitting midcalf today, with a clingtop someone of his
carbohydrate intake should never contemplate.

"Doable. Why for?"

"I have an idea that this was no conventional arson. I have an
idea that it was a sustained, high-energy infrared laser pulse from a
military aeaicraft." Vik's eyebrows lift. "Anything on the
source of the lockdown on the security system?"

"Well, it didn't come from Ahura Mazda Mutual of Varanasi. Its
ass is well covered but we'll follow it home. We've got some initial
data back from what we could salvage from Badrinath. Whatever it was
they wanted gone, they took a lot of high-rental property out with
it. We lost bodhisofts of Jim Carrey, Madonna, Phil Collins."

"I don't believe it was bodhisofts, or even information they
were after," Mr. Nandha says. "I think it was the people."

"How come we're the Aeai Licensing Department but it always ends
up humans every time?" Vikram says, bobbing on his big padded
jog boots. "And next time you need me so badly, a simple message
will suffice. Those stairs kill me, man."

But that would not be seemly for a Senior Investigator, Mr. Nandha
wants to say. Order, propriety, smudge-free suits; varna. On his
tenth Holi his mother dressed them up as little Jedi with swirling
robes and the new super-soaker guns from Chatterjee's store, the ones
with five separate barrels, Gatling-style and a different festival
colour in each one. He had watched his younger brother and sister go
through their moves in their hooded cloaks made from old sheets with
their tubes of brightly coloured festival liquid, going zuzh, zuzh,
zuzh as they cut down the forces of the dark side. He feels again the
nausea of embarrassment, that they were expected to go in public in
these humiliating rags, with these cheap toys, with everyone looking.
That night he had crept from his room and taken the lot to Dipendra
the nightwatchman's brazier and fed them to the coals. His father's
fury had been terrible, his mother's incomprehension and
disappointment worse, but he bore the emotions and the privations
stoically for he knew he had prevented a more terrible thing
altogether: shame.

Mr. Nandha's fingers scrabble for his lighthoek. He will call Parvati
now, about that Brahmin baby talk, he will tell her what his opinion
really is about those
things
. He will set her straight, she
will know, and there will be no more of this. He slides the 'hoek
over his ear, unconsciously adjusts the inducer, and has the number
up as an unexpected call comes through from outside.

"Umph," says Mr. Nandha, discommoded. It is Chauhan.

"Here's a novelty, me calling you. Something to show you,
Nandha."

"It was an infrared laser, wasn't it?" Mr. Nandha says as
he walks into the morgue. The bodies are laid on ceramic tables,
black, shrivelled mummy-corpses and snapping teeth.

"Well guessed," says jolly, brutal Chauhan in his morgue
greens with his demure forensic nurses around him. "Short,
high-intensity burst from a high-power infrared laser, almost
certainly air-capable, though I wouldn't rule out a lined-up shot
from Shanti Rana Apartments opposite."

One body, more terribly charred than the rest, is a black stick
opening into bare ribs and yellow thigh bones, truncated at the knee.
The stench of burned hair, flesh, incinerated bone is worse in
Ranapur's pristine new city morgue than masked by the hydrocarbons
and polycarbonates of the apartment, but there is nothing in this
clean, cool room that is ultimately unfamiliar or disturbing to a
Varanasian.

"What happened to him?"

"I suspect he was by the window when the fireball blew out. He's
not the interesting one," Chauhan continues as Mr. Nandha bends
over the inhuman Y-shape of the Darwinware pirate. "These ones.
Nothing to identify them of course—I've only had an initial
poke around—but this one was male, this one female. The male is
European, anywhere from Palermo to Paris, the female is South
Indian-Dravidian. I get the feeling they were a couple. Interesting,
the woman was born with a severe deformity of the womb—certainly
nothing functional. Good old police procedure'll crack them
eventually, but you might be interested in these."

Chauhan slides open a padded drawer and holds up two plastic evidence
bags. In each is a small ivory pendant, charred and blackened. The
motif is a white horse rearing on its back legs in a chakra circle of
stylised flames.

"Do you know what it is?" Chauhan asks.

"Kalki," Mr. Nandha says. He lifts a disc and holds it to
the light. The work is very fine. "The tenth and final
incarnation of Vishnu."

Veritable shitfuls of holy monkeys pour off the trees and come loping
on their soft knuckles to greet the Ministry Lexus as it draws up
outside the old Mughal hunting palace. The bot steps out of the scrub
rhododendrons to scan the driver's credentials. The staff has let the
gardens go to weed and wild again. Few gardeners pass the security
vetting and those that do don't work long for Ministry money. The
machine squats down in front of the car, drawing a line on Mr. Nandha
with its arm-turret. Its left-leg piston vents intermittently, giving
it a lopsided bob as it interrogates the clearances. Maintenance
slipping also. Mr. Nandha purses his lips as the monkeys swarm the
car, prying for crannies with their mannikin fingers. They remind him
of the hands of the burned corpses in Chauhan's clean morgue, those
black, withered fists. A langur perched over the radiator like a hood
ornament masturbates furiously as the St. Matthew Passion swirls
around Mr. Nandha.

Lack upon slack upon slop breeds lapse. It was scruffy maintenance
and shoddy security that let the prisoner escape those other two
times. That, and stealthy robots the size and agility of cockroaches.

The security bot completes its check, stalks away into the shrubbery
like some late Cretaceous hunter. Mr. Nandha jerks the car forward to
scare off the monkeys. He has a horror of one getting trapped in his
wheel-arch. Lord High Masturbator takes a tumble from the bonnet. Mr.
Nandha peers to see if it has left a vile squiggle of monkey-jizz on
the paintwork.