River of Gods (3 page)

He beckons Sen and Sunder in. The rural policeman looks nervous, but
the jemadar raises her assault rifle resolutely.

"Can it hear us?" Jemadar Sen asks, circling.

"Unlikely. Level One aeais seldom possess language skills. We're
dealing with something with about the intelligence of a monkey."

"And the attitude of a tiger," Sergeant Sunder comments.

Mr Nandha summons Siva out of the spatial dimensions of the food
factory, moves his hands into a mudra, and the go-down springs to
life with a glowing nervous system of information conduits. It's the
work of a moment for Siva to access the factory intranet, trace the
server; a small featureless cube in a corner of a desk, and insinuate
himself through the firewall into the factory system. File registers
blur across Mr. Nandha's back-brain. There. Password protected. He
summons Ganesha. At once the Remover of Obstacles runs into a quantum
key. Mr. Nandha is vexed. He dismisses Ganesha and sends in Krishna.
There could be a djinn hiding behind that quantum wall. Equally,
there could be three thousand pictures of Chinese girls having sex
with pigs. Mr.Nandha's fear is that the rogue aeai has reproduced.

One mail-out and it will take weeks to grub it all up. Krishna
reports the outgoing traffic log as clean. It is still in the
building, somewhere. Mr. Nandha disconnects the wireless web, unplugs
the server, and tucks it under his arm. His people back at the
Ministry will pry out its secrets.

He pauses, sniffs. Is the reek of pasta-tikka stronger, more acrid?
Mr. Nandha coughs, something has caught at the back of his throat,
burning chilli. He sees Sen sniff, frown. He hears a hum of heavy
electrical drain.

"Everyone out!" he shouts and at that moment the chain
drive on the roller shutter jerks into action just as the number two
cooking vat bursts into choking black chilli smoke. "Quick
quick!" he commands, blinking away searing tears, handkerchief
pressed to mouth. "Out, out." He follows the others out
under the descending shutter with millimetres to spare. In the alley
he irritably dusts street grime from his ironed suit.

"This is most annoying," says Mr. Nandha. To the
pasta-tikka workers he calls, "You, there. Is there another way
in?"

"Round the side, sahb," replies a teen with a
skin-condition Mr. Nandha would not want near anything
human-consumable.

"No time to lose," he says raising his weapon. "It may
have already used the diversion to escape. With me, please."

"I'm not going back in that place," Sunder says, hands on
thighs. He's a middle-aged man, putting on middle-body fat and none
of this is in the Nawada district police procedure manual. "I'm
not a superstitious man, but if you haven't got djinn in there, I
don't know what you have."

"There are no djinns," says Mr. Nandha. Sen falls in behind
him. Her suit camouflage is the exact shade of pasta-tikka. They
cover their faces, squeeze down the fetid side alley paved with
cigarette butts and in through the fire exit. The air is acrid with
chilli smoke. Mr. Nandha can feel it claw the back of his throat as
he delves into his avatars for his most potent programme, Kali the
Disrupter. He taps into the factory net and releases her into the
system. She'll go through the web, wire and wireless, copy herself
into every mobile and stationary processing unit. Anything without a
licence she will tag, trace, and erase. There will be only rags left
of Pasta-Tikka Inc. by the time Kali has done. She is a reason Mr.
Nandha isolated the factory. Let loose on the global web, Kali could
wreak crores of rupees of havoc across the continental net within
seconds. No better hunter of an aeai than another aeai. Mr. Nandha
cradles his gun. The mere scent of Kali, a mongoose after a snake,
has often been enough to flush a laired aeai from cover.

On full lighthoek resolution Kali is a startling sight, girdled with
severed hands, scimitars raised, tongue out and eyes wide, towering
up through a slowly settling pall of chilli smoke as data
constellations go out around her, one by one. This is what death must
be like, thinks Mr. Nandha. One by one the delicate blue glows of
information flow flicker and go out. One by one the nerve impulses
fail, the sensations fade, consciousness disintegrates.

Spooked by machine sounds falling silent all around her, Sen draws
close to Mr. Nandha. There are forces and entities here she cannot
comprehend. When nothing has made a noise or gone dark for a full
minute, Sen says, "Do you think they're all gone now?"

Mr. Nandha checks a report from Kali.

"I have deleted two hundred suspect files and programs. If even
one percent of those are aeai copies." But something more than
chilli throat is tugging at his sensibilities.

"What makes them do this? Why do they turn rabid all of a
sudden?" Sen asks.

"I've always found that the root of a computer problem is human
frailty" Mr. Nandha says, turning slowly, trying to identify
what it is that has provoked his suspicions. "I suspect our
friend has been buying in illegal aeai hybrids from the sundarbans.
In my experience, no good ever ionics out of the data-havens."

Sen has another question but Mr. Nandha hushes her. Very faint, very
distant, he hears a movement. Kali has left just sufficient of the
office ware for Siva to be able to link into the security system.
Nothing on the cameras, as he suspected, but in the diffuse world of
infrared, something stirs. His head snaps to the crane gantry at the
rear of the go-down.

"I can see you," he says, gesturing to Sen. She goes up one
end of the gantry. Mr. Nandha takes the other. The thing seems to be
somewhere up in the ceiling. They walk towards each other.

"At some point, it will break for it," warns Nandha.

"What will break?" Sen whispers, cradling her powerful
weapon.

"I suspect it has copied itself into a robot and intends to
escape by that means. Expect something small and fast-moving."

Mr. Nandha can hear it now between the clanks of the human footsteps;
something scrabbling at the roof, trying to tear a way out. Mr.
Nandha raises a hand for Jemadar Sen to proceed with caution. He
feels as if he is right under it. Mr. Nandha squints up into the nest
of wires and ducting. A camera-eye on a boom stabs down at him. Mr.
Nandha starts back. Sen raises her weapon; before thought, she lets
off a burst into the ceiling. An object drops out so close to Mr.
Nandha it almost strikes him, a thing all limbs and thrashing and
skittering movement. It's an inspection robot, a little clambering
spider-monkey thing. Individual companies usually can't afford them
but development corporations keep one to service all the clients in a
block. The thing will have access to every unit in this industrial
zone. The machine rears, darts at Mr. Nandha, then turns and zigzags
pell-mell down the gantry towards Sen. All it knows is that these
creatures want to kill it and it wants to exist. Panicked by her wild
firing, all military sense flies from Sen as the thing bounces
towards her. She fumbles at her assault rifle. Mr. Nandha can see
with perfect, still clarity that her panic will kill him.

"No!" he shouts, and draws his gun. Indra targets, aims,
fires. The pulse momentarily overloads even his 'hoek. The world goes
flash-blind. The robot freezes, spasms, goes down in fat yellow
sparks. Its legs twitch, its eye booms slide out. It goes still and
quiet. Smoke wisps from its vents. Mr. Nandha is not yet satisfied.
He stands over the dead aeai, then kneels down and hooks the Avatar
Box into its hotwire socket. Ganesha interfaces with the operating
system: Kali stands by, swords raised.

It's dead. Excommunicated. Mr. Nandha stands up, dusts himself down.
He tucks his gun away. Messy one. Unsatisfactory. Questions left
hanging. Many will be answered when the Fifteenth Floor Gang open up
the server, but a man does not become a Krishna Cop without
sensitivities and Mr. Nandha's are telling him this tangle of metal
and plastic is the opening letter of a new and long story. He will
say that story, he will unravel its intricacies and characters and
events and bring it to its right conclusion, but at this moment, his
most pressing problem is how to get the stink of burned pasta-tikka
out of his suit.

Shaheen Badoor Khan looks down on to the Antarctic ice. From two
thousand metres it is less ice than geography, a white island, Sri
Lanka gone rogue. The ocean-going tugs hired from the Gulf are the
biggest and strongest and newest but they look like spiders tackling
a circus big top, hauling away at silk thread guy ropes. Their role
is supervisory now; the Southwest Monsoon Current has the berg and
the whole performance is running north-by-northeast at five nautical
miles per day. Out here on the ocean five hundred kilometres south of
the delta the only visual referents are ice and sky and the dark blue
of deep water, nothing that gives any sense of motion. How long and
hard must those tugs pull to bring it to a stop? Shaheen Badoor Khan
thinks. He imagines the berg rammed deep into the Gangasagar, the
mouth of the holy river, ice cliffs rising sheer from mangroves.

With a manifest of Bengali politicians and their diplomatic guests
from neighbour and erstwhile rival Bharat, the States of Bengal
tilt-jet lurches in the chill microclimate spiralling up from the ice
floe. Shaheen Badoor Khan notices that the surface is grooved and
furrowed with crevasses and ravines. Torrent water glitters; ice-melt
has gouged sheer canyons in the ice walls, spectacular waterfalls arc
from the berg's cliff edges.

"It's constantly shifting," says the energetic Bangla
climatologist across the aisle. "As it loses mass, the centre of
gravity moves. We have to maintain equilibrium, a sudden shift close
in could prove catastrophic."

"You do not need another tidal wave in your delta," Shaheen
Badoor Khan says.

"If it ever makes it," says Bharat's Water and Energy
Minister, nodding at the ice. "The rate it's melting."

"Minister," Shaheen Badoor Khan says quickly, but Bengal's
official climatologist snaps up the opportunity to shine.

"It has all been worked out to the last gram," he says. "We
are well within the parameters for microclimatic shift." This
with a flash of expensively dentistried teeth, and a precision purse
of thumb and forefinger. Flawless. Shaheen Badoor Khan feels deep
shame when one of his ministers opens his mouth and lets his
ignorance walk out in public, especially before the smooth Banglas.
He long ago understood that politics needs no extraordinary talent,
skill, or intelligence. That's what advisors are for. The skill of a
politician is to take that advice and make it look as if he made it
up himself. Shaheen Badoor Khan hates that someone might think he has
not properly briefed his charges.
Go with them, Shah
, Prime
Minister Sajida Rana had asked.
Stop Srinavas making a tit of
himself.

The Bengali Minister With Iceberg lumbers up the aisle smiling his
big bear smile. Shaheen Badoor Khan knows from his sources of the
territory wars between Bengal's government departments over whose
bailiwick ten-kilometre chunks of Amery ice shelf fall into. Tension
between the joint capitals is always something that can be worked to
Bharat's advantage. Environmental Affairs gave way in the end to
Science and Technology, with a little help from Development and
Industry to secure the contracts and now its Minister stands in the
aisle, arms braced on the seat backs. Shaheen Badoor Khan can smell
his breath.

"So, eh? And all our own work, too, we didn't run to the
Americans to sort out our water supply, like those ones in Awadh, and
their dam. But you'd know all about that."

"The river used to make us one country," Shaheen Badoor
Khan observes. "Now we seem to be the squabbling children of
Mother Ganga; Awadh, Bharat, Bengal. Head, hands, and feet."

"There are a lot of birds," Srinavas says, peering out the
window. The berg trails a pale plume like smoke from a ship's stack:
flocks of seabirds, thousands strong, hurling themselves into the
water to hunt silver sardine.

"That just proves the cold current gyratory is working,"
says the climatologist, trying to make himself seen past his
Minister. "We're not so much importing an iceberg as a complete
ecosystem. Some have followed us all the way from Prince Edward
Island."

"The Minister is curious about how soon you expect to see
benefits," Shaheen Badoor Khan inquires.

Naipaul starts to bluster and blow about the daring and reach of
Bengali climatic engineering but his weather wizard cuts him off.
Shaheen Badoor Khan blinks at the unforgivable interruption. Have
these Banglas no protocol at all?

"The climate is not an old cow to be driven where you will,"
the climatologist, whose name is Vinayachandran, says. "It is a
subtle science, of tiny shifts and changes that over time build to
vast, huge consequences. Think of a snowball rolling down a mountain.
A half-degree temperature drop here, a shift in the ocean thermocline
by a handful of metres, a pressure shift of a single millibar."

"No doubt, but the Minister is wondering how long before these
little effects from this. snowball." Shaheen badoor Khan asks.

"Our simulations show a return to climate norms within six
months," Vinayachandran says.

Shaheen Badoor Khan nods. He has given his Minister all the clues. He
can draw his own conclusion.

"So all this," Bharati Water and Energy Minister Srinavas
says with a wave of the hand at the alien ice out there in the Bay of
Bengal, "All this will come too late. Another failed monsoon.
Maybe if you were to melt it and send it to us by pipeline, it might
do some good. Can you make the Ganga flow backwards? That might help
us."

"It will stabilise the monsoon for the next five years, for all
of India," Minister Naipaul insists.