River of Gods (49 page)

"And you make me a target now as well," Bernard hisses.
"You don't think. You run in and shout and expect everyone to
cheer because you're the hero."

"Bernard, I've always known that the only ass you're ultimately
interested in is your own, but that is a new low." But the barb
hits and hooks. She loves the action. She loves the dangerous
seduction that it all looks like drama, like action movies. Delusion.
Life is not drama. The climaxes and plot transitions are coincidence,
or conspiracy. The hero can take a fall. The good guys can all die in
the final reel. None of us can survive a life of screen drama. "I
don't know where else to go," she confesses weakly. He goes out
shortly afterwards. The closing door sends a gust of hot air, stale
with sweat and incense, through the rooms. The hanging nets and
gauzes billow around the figure curled into a tight foetus. Najia
chews at scaly skin on her thumb, wondering if she can do anything
right.

She feels again the crack of the thugee's ribs as she slammed into
him; the recoil through the frame of the bike and her hips as the
karsevak assassin slid away across the platform. She starts to shake
in the stifling, dim room. She cannot hold herself, she finds a chair
and sits, hugging her arms close against the cold from within. It is
all madness and you walked into it. A nute and a Swedish girl
reporter. You can be disappeared from Varanasi's ten million and no
one will blink.

She turns her chair to cover both the door and the bedroom window.
She angles the wooden louvres so she can see out but a bad man will
find it hard to see in. She sits and watches the slats of light move
across the floor.

Najia comes out of sleep with a start. Noise. Movement. She freezes,
then dives for the kitchen and its French cooking knives. She burst
the door open, a figure at the refrigerator whirls, snatches up a
knife. Him. Yt.

"Sorry sorry," yt says in yts strange, child's voice. "Is
there anything to eat? I am so hungry."

There are half-things, nibbles and a bottle of champagne in Bernard's
refrigerator. Of course. The nute sniffs at them, grazes from the
shelf.

"Excuse excuse," yt says. "I am so hungry. The
hormones.. .I pushed them too hard."

"Can I make you tea?" Najia says, the rescuing heroine
still needing a role to play. "Chai, yes, chai, wonderful."

They sit on the mattress with the little glasses. Yt likes it
European style, black without sugar. Najia starts at every shadow on
the shutters.

"There are not enough thanks."

"I don't deserve them. I got you into it in the first place."

"You said that at the station, yes. If not you, it would have
been someone else. They might not have felt so guilty. Was it guilt?"

This is the closest Najia Askarzadah has been in her life to a nute.
She knows of them and what they are and how they come to be and what
they can do with themselves and even some understanding of what they
enjoy of each other and has the proper Scandinavian acceptance-cool,
but this Tal smells different. She knows it is the things they can do
with their hormones and neurochemicals but she is afraid that Tal
will sense it and think it is neutrophobia.

"I remembered," she says. "I saw the pictures and I
remembered where I had seen you before."

Tal frowns. In the golden gloaming among the mesh fronds it is a
deeply alien expression. "At Indiapendent," she volunteers.

Tal holds yts head in yts hands, closes yts eyes. Yts lashes are long
and very beautiful to Najia.

"This is hurting me. I don't know what to think."

"I was doing an interview with Lal Darfan. Satnam took me
around. Satnam gave me the photographs."

"The trishul!" Tal exclaims. "Chuutya! He set us both
up! Ai!" Yt starts to shake, tears well, yts holds yts hands up
like leper's claws. "My Mama Bharat, they thought it was me; the
wrong flat." The shaking builds into heaving sobs, torn up from
exhaustion and shock. Najia creeps away and makes fresh chai until
she hears the keening cries subside. For an Afghan she has a northern
European fear of big emotion.

"More chai?"

Tal has the sheet wrapped around yt. Yt nods. The glass shakes in yts
hand. "How did you know I would be at the station?"

"Journalistic hunch," Najia Askarzadah says. She wants to
touch yts face, yts so bare, so tender scalp. "It's what I would
have done."

"Your journalistic hunches are powerful things. I have been a
fool! Smiling and laughing and dancing and thinking everyone loved
me! The new nute in town everyone wants to know, come to the big
party, come to the club."

Najia reaches out to touch, to reassure and warm. Then she finds Tal
pulled into her breast, her cheek brushing its smooth, oiled head. It
is like hugging a cat, all bone and tension. Her fingers brush the
dimples on yts arm, like rows of symmetrical insect bites. Najia
recoils.

"No, there, please," Tal says. She gently pushes the spot,
feels fluids move under the skin. "And, please, here?" Yts
fingers guide hers to a place near the wrist. "And here." A
hand's breadth down from the elbow. The nute shudders in her embrace.
Yts breathing steadies. Yts muscles tighten. Yt gets shakily to yts
feet, moves nervously around the room. Najia can smell the edgy
tension.

Najia says, "I can't imagine how you live, being able to choose
your emotions."

"We don't choose our emotions, just our reactions. It is..
.intense. We don't live much over sixty." Tal is pacing now,
fretting, a caged mongoose, glancing through the shutter slats,
snapping them closed again.

"How can you. ?"

"Make that choice? It's long enough for beauty."

Najia shakes her head. Unbelievable on unbelievable. Tal bangs yts
fist against the wall. "Fool! I should die I should die I am too
stupid to live."

"You are not the only one, I was stupid too, thinking I had a
special line to N. K. Jivanjee."

"You met Jivanjee?"

"I spoke to him, on the video, when he set up the meeting where
Satnam gave me the photographs."

A shadow falls across the shutters. Nute and woman freeze. Tal slowly
lowers ytself until it is beneath the line of the windowsill. Yt
beckons for Najia to join it against the wall. Listening with her
whole body, Najia crawls across the matting through the planes of
gauze. Then a woman's voice speaks German. Najia's stomach loosens.
For a moment she thought she might have vomited from fear.

"We must get out of Bharat. They've seen you with me," Tal
whispers. "We are the same now. We have to buy safe passage."

"Should we not go to the police?"

"Do you know nothing about how this country works? Sajida Rana
owns the police and she wants me for a traitor, and the police she
doesn't own belong to Jivanjee. We need something that will give us
enough value to be protected. You said you talked to Jivanjee on the
video. I presume you've enough intelligence to have kept it. Show me.
There may be something there."

They sit by side against the wall. Najia holds up the palmer. Her
hand shakes; Tal grasps her wrist, steadying her.

"This is not a very good model," yt says.

The volume is painfully loud as Najia plays back the video chip.

Out in the club tennis balls pop and tock. On the screen the
undulations of N. K. Jivanjee's kalamkari-hung pavilion seem a divine
inversion of this dim, overheated bedroom choked with fear.

"Freeze freeze freeze!"

Najia's thumb fumbles the control.

"What is this?"

"It is N. K. Jivanjee."

"I know this stupid. Where is it from?"

"It is his office, maybe his private apartment, it could even be
his rath yatra, I don't know."

"Lies lies lies," Tal hisses. "I do know. That is not
the private apartment or rath yatra or office of Mr. N. K. Jivanjee.
That is the marriage chamber of Aparna Chawla and Ajay Nadiadwala for
the wedding of the year on
Town and Country
. I designed those
kalamkaris myself."

"A stage set?"

"My stage set. For a scene that hasn't been shot yet."

Najia Askarzadah feels her eyes widen. She wishes she had a subdermal
menu she could call up to wash away her paralysing disbelief in a
rinse of neurotransmitters.

"No one's ever met N. K. Jivanjee face to face," she says.

"Our passport," Tal says. "I have to get into
Indiapendent. We have to go now, right now."

"You can't go like that, they'll see you a kilometre off, we
have to get you a disguise." Then the cluck of tennis balls and
the shouts of the players fall silent all at once. Tal and Najia dive
and roll across the room as the shadows touch the shutters. Voices.
Not German. Not female. Crouching, Najia wheels the moped from the
hall into the kitchen. She squats on one side, Tal on the other. They
know what they have to wait for though it is the scariest wait in the
world. Click click. Then the bedroom explodes in automatic fire. In
the same instant Najia guns the little alcohol engine, throws herself
on. Tal jumps up behind her. The bullets go on and on and on. Don't
look back. You can never look back. She negotiates Bernard's folding
table, opens the back door and bursts out into the scrubby ground
behind the bar. Waiters look up as she steers between the crates of
Kingfisher and Schweppes mixers.

"Out of my fucking way!" Najia Askarzadah screams. They
scatter like magpies. Her peripheral vision checks two dark figures
rounding the end of the accommodation wing, figures busy with their
hands. "Oh Jesus," she prays and takes the moped up three
concrete steps into the club kitchens. "Move move move move!"
she yells as she swerves around stainless-steel coolers the size of
battle tanks and sacks of rice and dal and potatoes and chefs with
trays and chefs with knives and chefs with hot fat. She skid-turns on
a spot of dropped ghee, smashes through the swinging door and through
the dining room, down the neat aisles of linen-covered tables, blares
her hooter at a couple in matching surf-Ts and shades and into the
corridor. In the main hall an evening yoga class is under way: Najia
and Tal bowl through, horn rasping rudely as sarvangasana shoulder
stands collapse like a felled forest all around them. Through the
French windows—always open to allow ventilation for the women
in cotton lycra, over the gasping flower beds and through the main
gates into safe anonymity of the early evening rush. Najia laughs.
Thunder echoes her.

Mr. Nandha's presentation of the case against Kalki takes the form of
an orb floating in the 'hoek-sight of managers, at once small enough
to fit beneath the dome of the human skull and so vast it envelops
the Ministry's glass tower like a fist around an orchid. It rotates
in the inner vision of Commissioner Arora and Director General
Sudarshan bringing new vistas of information into their view. A
continent-sized cityscape of pages and windows and images and frames
opens up into a two-dimensional map of information.
Saraswati
is the name of the voice-over aeai, goddess of speech and
communication. Over a glowing schematic of Pasta-Tikka Inc.
information system, Saraswati traces the unlicensed aeai back to the
neural fizz of Kashi, then ratchets up level by fractal level into
the dendritic blur of the Janpur localnet, Malaviri node, sublocation
Jashwant the Jain (all his little cyberpooches, ghostly skeletons
knobbly with actuators and chipset arrays: Jashwant himself is a
saggy blue bag of naked flesh). The next window of information is
SOCO footage of the incinerated shell of the Badrinath sundarban. The
hovercam bobs through blackened rooms, floating a moment over
half-fleshed skeletons, processor shells melted like candles, Mr.
Nandha peering into the utility box with his pen-flash. Two huddled
humps of charcoal unfold into living, smiling, passport photo
Westerners: Jean-Yves Trudeau; Annency, France, European Union,
d.o.b. 15/04/2022; Anjali Trudeau, nee Patil, Bangalore, Karnataka.
d.o.b. 25/11/2026.

"Jean-Yves and Anjali Trudeau were formerly researchers at the
University of the Strasbourg in the Artificial Life laboratory of the
Computer Science Department. For the past four years they have been
research fellows at the Varanasi campus of the University of Bharat
in the Faculty of Computer Science under Professor Chandra
specialising in the application of Darwinian paradigms to
protein-matrix circuitry," Saraswati says. Her voice is derived
from Kalpana Dhupia on
Town and Country
.

The Trudeaus tear off from their quadrant of the sphere and hover in
stationary orbit. A video window fills with the low-resolution grain
of an apartment interior. Foreground of shot, a naked
eighteen-year-old male, half-hard erection in right-handed grip.
Attitude, leaning back, aiming it into the centre of shot. Goofy grin
on face. Mid-ground Shanti Rana apartments; mid-level, window open.
Balcony, some washing. Across the canyon of street, apartment windows
and the rusty boxes of air-conditioners. A dart of white across the
square of outside. Then the window frame fills with a peal of flame.
Mr. Grippo spins round, shrieks something overloaded by the digital
compression on the camera mike. Freeze-frame, skinny ass against
exploding glass and flame, left hand reaching for a silk wrap.

"The Krishna system ran a traceback through all net traffic out
of the area network for an hour before and after the offence,"
Saraswati says sweetly, "This fortunate webcam footage was
obtained from an apartment immediately opposite the crime scene."
The image reels back to the darting sliver of white, freezes, frames
and enlarges, frames and enlarges. What it ends up with is a pile of
pixels but the image manipulation packages sharpen and smear and turn
the array of greyscale boxes into a flying machine, a white bird with
upturned winglets and a sponson tail and a bulbous ducted fan in its
belly. Graphics packs outline it, isolate it, render it in, and morph
it into catalogue-spec war-porn pin-ups of an Ayappa aerial defence
drone, Bharati licence version, infrared laser armed.