River of Gods (45 page)

She got her hair cut in the Ganga Devi Booti Salon by a blind
hairdresser and only afterwards as she patted the short bob did she
realise it was the style in the Tabernacle image. Seal of prophecy.
She bought bottled water in the middle of the monsoon and her light,
efficacious wet wear and had dozens of photographs of Thomas Lull
copied from the datablock—which she was beginning to think of
as the Tablet—at a print shop wedged behind a pipal tree hung
with red and orange Brahmin threads. Then she began her
investigation.

The rickshaw driver looked about twelve. Lisa doubted such a scrawn
could ever carry a passenger but he hung on her heel for three
blocks, calling "hello, hello lady," as she wove between
the umbrellas. She stopped him where the road narrowed at the fort
gate.

"You speak English?"

"Indian, American, or Australian, lady?"

"I need boys speak English."

"There are many such boys, lady."

"Here's a hundred rupees. Come back with as many as you can in
half an hour to that chai shop there and there are two hundred more
for you. I need boys can speak English and know everything and
everyone."

He tucked the banknote into a pocket inside his Adidas pants, gave
the wiggle of his head that Lisa had learned meant affirmation.

"Hey! What's your name?" she shouted as he pulled into the
traffic, bells chiming melodiously. He shot a grin back as he
pedalled off through the swirling water.

"Kumarmangalam."

Lisa Durnau installed herself in the chai shop and surfed into
Alterre for the half hour. A week was literally an age at twenty
thousand years per hour. Algal blooms in Biome 778 in the Eastern
Pacific had generating a self-sustaining oceanic microclimate that
created a wind reversal similar to RealEarth's El Nino. The montane
cloudforests were dying; the complex symbiotic ecosystems of
flowering trees, pollinating colonial birds, and complex
arborealsaurian canopy societies was coming apart. Within a couple of
days a dozen species and a system of rare, poised beauty would have
slipped into extinction. Lisa knew she should hold the Buddha-nature
about Alterre; they were only virtual species competing for memory
and power resources and a set of mathematical parameters in eleven
million host computers, but she grieved for every extinction. She had
proved the physical possibility of CyberEarth's reality somewhere in
the postexpansion polyverse. It was real death, real annihilation,
real forever.

Until now. In a Kerala chai shop, it felt like games, toys. A pocket
freak show. The flatscreen was running a soap. Every eye was turned
to it. She had read that not only were the characters aeai generated,
so were the actors that played them. A vast false edifice threatened
to overwhelm the drama, like the huge encrusted towers that dominated
the temple architecture of the Dravidians. There is not one
CyberEarth, she realised. There are thousands.

Kumarmangalam was back on the half hour. This was a thing she was
discovering about this alien world. It only looked like chaos. Things
got done and done well. You could trust people to lift your bags,
launder your clothes, find your former lover. The street boys jammed
into the chai shop. The owner gave the bold Western woman hard looks.
The other clients moved their seats and complained loudly that they
could not hear the television. Kumarmangalam stood beside Lisa and
shouted at this one, then that one, and they seemed to obey him.
Already he was making himself her lieutenant. As Lisa had suspected,
most of them had only meet-greet-and-fleece English but she fanned
the photographs of Thomas Lull across the table.

"One to each," she ordered Kumarmangalam. Hands tore at the
prints as the rickshaw boy dealt them out. Some he dismissed without
a photograph, some he harangued lengthily in Malayalam. "Okay, I
need to find this man. His name is Thomas Lull. He is American. He
comes from Kansas, can you get that?"

Kansas
, the street boys intoned back. She held up the shot. It
was his publisher's PR shot, the sensitive one leaning on one arm
with the wise smile. How he'd hated it.

"This is how he looked about four years ago. He may still be
here, he may have moved on. You know where the tourists go, where the
people who decide to stay go. I want to know where he is or where he
has gone. Do you understand?"

An oceanic murmur.

"Okay. I'm going to give Kumarmangalam here some money. There
are one hundred rupees now. There are another four hundred if you
come back with information. I will check this information before you
are paid."

Kumarmangalam translated. Heads nodded. She took her new lieutenant
aside and gave him the wad of notes.

"And there's your two hundred, and another thousand if you keep
your eye on these people."

"Lady, I will keep them in line, as you say in American
English."

In her first year at Keble, Lisa Durnau had taken the crash course in
Anglophilia and read the complete Sherlock Holmes. She had always
felt that the Baker Street Irregulars never saw enough column inches.
Now she had her own. As Kumarmangalam pedalled her back through the
rain to the hotel, she imagined them, running out through the city,
into a shop here, a cafe there, a restaurant, a temple, a travel
bureau, a money changer, a lawyer, a real estate agent, a leasing
factor.
This man this man?
It pleased her greatly. Women make
the best private detectives. At the hotel she swam fifty lengths of
the outdoor pool with the rain slashing around her and the attendants
huddled together under an awning watching her gravely. Then she
changed into a sarong and top with gaudy blue gods printed on it and
took a phatphat out to the places Thomas Lull would have gone, the
tourist bars where the girls are.

The rain added a new glaze of dismal to the upstairs bars and dance
clubs. The Westerners who were stupid enough to have been caught in
town by the big rain were all corporate or political spooks. The club
owners and barristas and restaurateurs who shook their heads and
pursed their lips over her photographs were a hundred
Lulls-that-might-have-been; overweight and balding in XL beach-shirts
that hung off their bellies like square-rigging. The local bar boys
stirred from their stools and came round for the chat and an
attempted slip of the hand into her V-string. She worked twenty bars
and could take no more. Humming home in the phatphat she sat
half-hypnotised by the rhythm of the rain through the headlights and
wondered how it was that clouds never rained themselves dry. In the
hotel she attempted to watch CNN but it seemed as alien and
irrelevant as Alterre. One image lodged with her; warm monsoon rain
falling on an iceberg in the Bay of Bengal.

Kumarmangalam was circling on his rickshaw when she ventured out the
next morning. He swung her out through the traffic in a big U-turn to
an Internet shop on the other side of the street. Nobody walked in
this country. Just like home.

"This boy has information," he said. Lisa wasn't even sure
he was one of the mob from the day before. The boy waved his
photograph.

"Four hundred rupees four hundred rupees."

"We check it out first. Then you get your money."

Kumarmangalam glared down the boy's insolence. They rode on his
rickshaw. The boy would not ride in the back with a Western woman; he
clung on in front of Kumarmangalam, feet on the axle nuts, leaning
back against the handlebars, steering the rickshaw-wallah through the
traffic. It was a long heavy haul. Kumarmangalam dismounted and
pushed several times. The boy helped him. Lisa Durnau clutched her
bag beset by Presbyterian work-ethic guilt. Finally they rolled
downhill and through an arch scatter-gunned with filmi flyposters
into a courtyard framed by wooden balconies and cloisters in the
Keralese style. A cow chewed sodden straw. Men glanced up from a
battery of sewing machines. The boy led them upstairs past an actuary
and an Ayurvedic wholesaler to an open-fronted office unit beneath
the peeling sign
Gunaratna Floating Lotus Craft Hirings. A
greying Malayali and a younger Westerner in a surf-brand T-shirt
looked up.

"You've come about the gentleman in the photograph?" the
local man, Gunaratna, asked. Lisa Durnau nodded. Mr. Gunaratna waved
the street boys out of his office. They squatted on the balcony,
listening hard.

"This man." She slid the Tablet across the desk like a
poker dealer. Gunaratna showed it to his associate. Surf-shirt-man
nodded.

"It was a while ago." He was Oceanian—Oz, maybe
Enzee; Lisa had never been able to tell them apart but then some folk
couldn't distinguish Canucks from Americans.

"Several years," Gunaratna confirmed. Then Lisa realised
that they were waiting for the baksheesh. She fanned out three
thousand rupees.

"For information retrieval," she hinted. Gunaratna scooped
it sweetly away.

"We only remember him because he bought a boat from us,"
Oz-boy said.

"We run a bespoke vessel chartering service on the backwaters,"
Gunaratna chimed in. "It is most unusual for someone wanting to
buy, but such an offer."

"In cash." Oz-boy was now perched on the edge of the desk.

"In cash, was impossible for us to refuse. It was most excellent
craft. It had not one but two certificates of seaworthiness from the
State Inspectorate of Shipping."

"You have a record of the transaction?"

"Madam, this is an upstanding business of immaculate repute and
all accounts are triple-filed in strict accordance with State Revenue
regulations."

Oz-boy hooked up a rollscreen and tapped through a database. "There's
your boy."

July 22, 2043. Ten-metre kettuvallam/houseboat conversion with
fixtures and fittings and ten horsepower alcofuel engines last
serviced 18/08/42, moored at Alumkadavu. Sold to J. Noble Boyd, US
citizen, passport number. A true Lull touch; using the name of the
Kansas pastor who had made it his religious duty to oppose the
evolutionist heresies of Alterre on his false ID. Lisa Durnau jotted
the boat's registration details into the Tablet.

"Thank you, you have been most helpful."

Oz-boy pushed a thousand rupees back across the desk.

"If you do find Dr. Lull could you get him to do another series
like
Living Universe?
Best science show I've seen in years.
Made you think. There's nothing but soap these days."

On the way out she gave the boy his four hundred rupees. In the back
of the rickshaw as Kumarmangalam pushed her up the long, slow hill
into the city centre Lisa Durnau called for the first time on the
full power of the Tablet. By the time Kumarmangalam had slipped back
onto his saddle, she had her answer. Ray Power Electric Pallakad
District Office had registered a hook-up to kettuvallam
Salve
Vagina
registry no: 18736BG at Thekaddy, St. Thomas's Road
Mooring. Supplied's name: J. Noble Boyd. Revd.

Salve Vagina.

The coastal hydrofoil did not run in the monsoon months so Lisa
Durnau spent four hours leaning against the window of an
air-conditioned express coach looking out at the buffalos in the
village ponds and the country women swaying beneath their burdens
along the raised pathways between the flooded fields and trying not
to hear the dsh dshdsh on her neighbour's fileplayer earphone that
was as irrefutable and annoying as Captain Pilot Beth's whistling
nostril. She could not believe she had been into space. She pulled
out the Tablet and thumbed through the data from the Tabernacle. Hey,
she wanted to say to her
Hindi-Hits!
aisle-mate, look at this!
Have you any idea what this means?

That was the question she must put to Thomas Lull. She found she was
dreading that meeting. When his disappearance had crossed the subtle
but distinct boundary between temporary and permanent, Lisa Durnau
had often imagined what she might say if, Elvis-like, she bumped into
Thomas Lull in some hypermarket aisle or airport duty-free. It was
easy to come up with smart lines when you knew you would never have
to use them. Now every kilometre through the rain and dripping palm
trees brought that impossible meeting closer and she did not know
what she was going to say. She put it away from her while she found a
phatphat in the sodden whirl of people and vehicles at the wide spot
in the road that was Thekkady's bus station. But as she bounced
around the lagoon-sized puddles on the long straight road past the
backwater the dread returned, became a fearful sickness in her
stomach. She sped past an elderly man labouring through the rain on
an enormous red tricycle. The phatphat driver let her off at the
mooring. Lisa Durnau stood in the rain, paralysed. Then the red
tricycle creaked past her, executed a right-angle turn, and bounced
down the gangplank on to the rear deck.

"Well, Ms. Durnau, even though I am not sure how Professor Lull
can help you, you have been frank with me and it is only proper that
I should reciprocate," Dr. Ghotse says. He shuffles out into the
rain to search in the boot of his red tricycle and returns with a
sheet of paper, folded and soggy. "If you please."

It's an e-mail printout.
Amar Mahal Hotel, Manasarovar Ghat,
Varanasi. My Dear Dr. Darius. Well, it's not that little dive school
I promised myself. Against all your advice, I'm in the black north
with Aj. Asthma girl, remember? Deep mystery here—never could
resist a mystery. Last place on earth I should be—already been
caught up in a small railroad incident you might have read about—but
could you ease my sojourn in hell by forwarding the rest of my stuff
to this address? I will reimburse you by BACS transfer
.

There followed a list of books and recordings including the Schubert
nestling down the side of the cushion.

"Aj?"

Dr. Ghotse corrects her pronunciation. "A young lady Professor
Lull met at a club. He taught her a technique to control her asthma."