River of Gods (6 page)

Muscle-top girl jabs a needle of stimulant into her cat while her
male colleague waves a bottle of poppers under its nose. They hold
their hero. They hold their breaths. Their opponents drug up their
contender, a low lean black microsabre, mean as midnight. There is
absolute silence in the arena. The barker gives a blast on his air
horn. The combatants let slip the leather guards and throw their
battle cats into the pit.

The crowd rises in one voice and one blood. Najia Askarzadah howls
and raves with them. All Najia Askarzadah knows is two fighting cats
leaping and slashing at each other down in the pit as the blood
surges in her eyes and ears.

It's terrifyingly fast and bloody. Within seconds the beautiful
silver tabby has one leg hanging from a rope of gristle and skin.
Blood jets from the open wound, but it screams defiance at its enemy,
tries to dodge and dart on the flapping triangle of meat; slashing
with its terrible, killing teeth. Finally it's down and spinning
spastically on its back, ploughing up a wave of bloody sand. The
victors have already hooked their champion with a neck loop and are
wrestling the furious, shrieking thing towards the pen. The silver
tabby wails and wails until someone from the judge's pew walks over
and drops a concrete breeze-block on its head.

Muscle-top girl stands staring sullenly as the mashed, twitching
thing is shovelled away. She bites her bottom lip. Najia loves her
then, loves the boy whose glance she caught, loves everyone,
everything in this wooden arena. Her heart is quivering, her breath
burning, her fists clenched and trembling, her pupils dilated, and
her brain blazing. She is eight hundred percent alive and holy. Again
she makes eye contact with Obvious Hood. He nods but she can see he
has had a heavy loss.

The victors step into the ring to receive the adulation of the crowd.
The barker screams into the sound system and on the bookies' bench
hands push money money money. This is what you came to Bharat for,
Najia Askarzadah, she tells herself. To feel this way about life,
about death, about illusion and reality. To have something burn
through bloody reasonable, sane, tolerant Sweden. To taste the insane
and raw. Her nipples are hard. She knows she's damp. This war, this
war for water, this war that she denies brought her here, this war
that everyone fears will come. She doesn't fear it. She wants that
war. She wants it very much.

Four hundred and fifty kilometres above Western Ecuador, Lisa Durnau
runs through a herd of bobbets. They scatter from her, hiking up on
their powerful legs and hoofing it, semaphore crests raised. The
canopy forest echoes their warbling alarms. The young look up from
their grazing, forelegs pawing at air in dread, then shrill and dive
for their parents' pouches. The waist-high sauro-marsupials peel away
from Lisa in her running tights and top and shoes in two wings of
fright, hatchlings trying desperately to stuff themselves headfirst
into belly flaps. They're one of Biome 161's most successful species.
The forests of Simulated Year Eight Million Before Present throb
black with their herds. Alterre is running a hundred thousand years a
Real World day, so by tomorrow they could be extinct; this high,
humid cloud forest of umbrella-shaped trees desiccated by a climatic
shift.

But in this ecological moment, this timeslice of what, in another
age, another earth, will be northern Tanzania, today belongs to them.

The rush and dash of bobbets disturbs a group of tranter, reared up
on their hind legs, sucking leaves from a trudeau tree. The big slow
tree feeders drop to their longer forelegs and canter disjointedly
away. Their internal armour plates move like machinery under
willow-striped hides. Camouflage by William Morris, Lisa Durnau
thinks. Botany by Rene Magritte. The trudeau trees are perfect
hemispheres of leaves, regularly spaced across the plain like an
exercise in statistical distribution. Some of the branches bear seed
buds, penduluming on the breeze. They can scatter seed across a
hundred-metre radius, like a riot-control flechette gun. That's how
they achieve their mathematical regularity. No trudeau will grow in
the shade of another, but the forest canopy is a cornucopia of
species.

Flickers of moving shadow between the trees; a flock of parasitic
beckhams darts from the dead tranter in which they have injected
their eggs. An ystavat stoops from its high glide path, darts and
weaves and scoops up a laggard sauro-bat in the net of skin between
its hind legs. A flip, a duck of the tearing beak, and the hunter
climbs away again. Invulnerable, inviolable, Lisa Durnau runs on. No
god is mortal in his own world and for the past three years she has
been director, sustainer, and mediator of Alterre, the parallel Earth
evolving in accelerated time on eleven and a half million Real-World
computers.

Beckhams. Tranters. Trudeaus. Lisa Durnau loves the mischief of
Alterre taxonomy. It's the principles of astronomy applied to
alternative biology; you find it lurking in your hard-drive, you name
it. Mcconkeys and mastroiannis and ogunwes and hayakawas and novaks.
Hammadis and cuestras and bjorks.

So very Lull.

She's settled into her rhythm now. She could move like this forever.
Some listen to music when they run. Some chat or read their mail or
the news. Some have their aeai PAs brief them on the day. Lisa Durnau
checks out what's new across ten thousand biomes running on eleven
and a half million computers participating in the biggest experiment
in evolution. Her usual route is a loop around the University of
Kansas campus, her marvellous and mysterious bestiary laid over the
Lawrence traffic. There's always something to surprise and delight,
some new phone-directory name hanging off a fantastical creature
that's fought its way out of the silicon jungle. When the first
arthrotects had appeared out of the insects by pure evolutionary leap
on a Biome 158 host in Guadalajara, she had experienced that thrilled
satisfaction you feel when a plot twist hits you that you didn't
expect. No one could have predicted the lopezs, but they had lain
there, latent, in the rules. Then, two days ago the parasitogenic
beckhams evolved from an elementary school in Lancashire and it hit
her all over again. You never see it coming.

Then they fired her into space. She hadn't seen that coming, either.

Two days ago she had been running her loop of the campus, past the
honey stone faculty buildings, Alterre laid over Kansas summer. She
turned by the student halls to run back to shower, shampoo, and
office. In which a woman in a suit had been waiting as Lisa came in
screwing water out of her ears with twists of tissue. She'd shown
identifications and authorisations for responsibilities Lisa hadn't
known her nation ever needed and three hours later Lisa Durnau,
Director of the Alterre Simulated Evolution project, was on a
government hypersonic transport seventy-five thousand feet over
central Arkansas.

The G-woman had told her luggage was strictly mass-limited but Lisa
packed her running gear anyway. It felt like a friend. Down in
Kennedy she took it out on to the space centre roads to unwind, to
explore, to try to get some perspective on where she was and what her
government was doing to her. With the sun setting across the lagoons,
she ran past sentry rows of rockets, old boosters and missiles and
heavy lift launchers. Glorious, perilous machines, now jammed like
pikes into the earth, their purpose defeated, their shadows long as
continents.

Forty-eight hours on, Lisa Durnau runs orbits of the centrifuge wheel
of the ISS, wheeling over Southern Colombia. In her Alterre-sight she
sees a krijcek castle rising in the distance above the trudeau tree
cover. The krijcek are evolutionary
arrivistes
from Biome 163
in south-east coastal Africa. They're a species of finger-sized dinos
that have developed a hive culture, complete with sterile workers,
breeders, egg laying queens, a complex social order based on skin
colour, and herculean architecture. A new colony will work outwards
from a small underground bunker, converting anything and everything
organic to pulp, moulding it with dextrous tiny hands into soaring
piers and towers and buttresses and vaulted egg chambers. Sometimes
Lisa Durnau wishes she could override Lull's naming policy. 'Krijcek'
has a nice tone of lethality, but she would have loved to call them
'gormenghasts'.

A chime in her auditory centre tells her her pulse rate has hit the
required digits for the requisite amount of time. She has caught up
with herself. Alterre's un-reality has anchored her. She jogs to a
stop, goes into her cool-down regime, and flicks out of Alterre.
ISS's centrifuge is a hundred-metre diameter ring, spun to give a
quarter gravity. It rises sheer in front and behind her, she's
forever at the bottom of a spin-gravity well. Plant racks lend a
gloss of green but nothing can conceal that this is aluminium,
construction carbon, plastic, and nothing beyond. NASA doesn't build
its ships with windows. Outer space for Lisa Durnau has thus far been
crawling from one sealed room to another.

Lisa stretches and flexes. Low grav puts different loads on new
muscle groups. She slips off her runsoles, flexes her toes against
the metal honeycomb. As well as an intensive NASA exercise regimen
she takes calcium supplements. Lisa Durnau's at the age a woman
starts to think about her bones. ISS virgins have puffy faces and
upper limbs as body fluids redistribute; sophomores a stretched,
light, cat-look, but the long-termers eat their own bones. They spend
most of their time up in the old core from which ISS has grown
chaotically over its half-century in the sky. Few ever come down to
dirty gravity, centrifugal or otherwise. Legend is they never can.
Lisa Durnau wipes herself down with a moist towelette, seizes a wall
rung, and hand-over-hands up the spoke towards the old core. She
feels her weight dropping exponentially; she can grab a rung and
swoop herself upwards two, five, ten metres. Lisa has a meeting with
her G-woman up in the hub. A long-termer dives towards her, executing
a neat midcourse somersault to point his feet downwards. He nods and
he tumbles past Lisa. His flexibility makes her look like a walrus,
but the nod encourages her. It is as warm a welcome as ISS has
offered. Fifty people is small enough for first names, big enough for
politics. Just like the faculty, then. Lisa Durnau loves the
physicality of space but she does wish the budget had stretched to
windows.

Shock number one came on the first Kennedy morning as she sat on her
verandah with the ocean view and the maid poured coffee. That was
when she realised that Dr. Lisa Durnau, Evolutionary Biologist, had
been vanished by her own state. She had been unsurprised to learn
from the woman in the suit that she was to be sent into space. The
State Department did not fly people down to Kennedy in a hypersonic
shuttle to study the bird life. When they confiscated her palmer and
gave her a lookie-no-talkie model it had been a displeasure but not a
shock. Startlement but no shock to find the hotel had been cleared
for her. The gym, the pool, the laundry. All for her, alone. Lisa
felt good Presbyterian guilt about calling room service until the
Nicaraguan maid told her it gave her something to do. That is, the
maid said she came from Nicaragua. She poured the coffee and in that
same moment of vertiginous paranoia came the second shock: Lull had
vanished, too. Lisa had never thought it anything other than a
reaction to his marriage disintegrating.

At their next meeting Lisa Durnau confronted Suit Woman, whose name
was Suarez-Martin, pronounced the Hispanic way.

"I have to know," said Lisa Durnau, shifting her weight
from foot to foot, unconsciously recapitulating her warm-up routine.
"Was this what happened to Thomas Lull?"

The government woman Suarez-Martin kept the executive suite as her
office. She sat with her back to the panoramic of rockets and
pelicans.

"I don't know. His disappearance was nothing to do with the
United States government. You do have my word on that."

Lisa Durnau chewed the answer over a couple of times. "Okay
then, why me? What's this about?"

"I can answer that first part."

"Shoot then."

"We got you because we could not get him."

"And the second part?"

"That will be answered, but not here." She slid a plastic
bag across the desk to Lisa. "You'll need this."

The bag was marked with NASA logos and contained one standard issue
one-size-fits-all flight-suit liner in hi-visibility yellow.

When next she saw Suarez-Martin the G-woman was not wearing her suit.
She lay strapped into the acceleration couch on Lisa Durnau's right
with hints of NASA yellow peeking through her flight gear at wrists
and throat. Her eyes were closed and her lips formed silent prayers,
but Lisa had the idea that these were the rituals of familiar terror
rather than stark novelty. Airport rosaries.

The pilot occupied the couch on the left. He was busy with pre-flight
checks and communications and treated Lisa as he would any other
cargo. She shifted on her couch and felt the gel flow and conform to
her body contours, a disturbingly intimate sensation. Beneath her,
down in the launch pit, a thirty-terawatt laser was charging,
focusing its beam on a parabolic mirror underneath her ass. I am
about to be blasted into space on the end of a beam of light hotter
than the sun, she thought, marvelling at the cool with which she
could contemplate this insane notion. Perhaps it was sell-defensive
disbelief. Perhaps the Nicaraguan maid had slipped something in the
coffee. While Lisa Durnau was trying to decide the count hit zero. A
computer in Kennedy flight control fired the big laser. The air
ignited under Lisa and kicked the NASA lightbody orbitwards at three
gravities. Two minutes into flight a thought so ridiculous, so absurd
hit her that she could not help giggling, sending laughter ripples
through her gel bed. Hey ma! Top of the world. The most exclusive
travel lounge on the planet, the Five-Hundred-Mile-High Club! And all
this in something that looks like a designer orange squeezer.