River of Gods (63 page)

The table takes up the centre of the room and the woman takes up the
centre of the table. A recorder hooked to an overhead microphone sits
on the table beside her head. The woman is naked and her hands and
feet are lashed to rings at the corners of the table. She is pulled
taut into a spread eagle. Her breasts, inner thighs and shaved pubis
are pocked with cigarette burns. A shiny chromed speculum opens her
vagina to Najia Askarzadah. A man in a doctor's coat and green
plastic apron sits by her feet. He finishes smothering contact gel
over a stubby electric truncheon, dilates the speculum to its maximum
and slides the baton between the steel lips. The woman's screams
become incomprehensible. The man sighs, looks round once at his
daughter, raises his eyebrows in greeting, and presses the firing
stud.

"No!" Najia Askarzadah screams. There is a white flash, a
roar like a universe ending, her skin shimmers with synaesthetic
shock, she smells onions joss celery and rust and she is sprawling on
the floor of the Indiapendent design unit with Tal crouching over
her. Yt holds her 'hoek in yts hand. Disconnection blow-back. The
neurones reel. Najia Askarzadah's mouth works. There are words she
has to say, questions she must ask but she is expelled from
otherworld. Tal offers a slim hand, beckons urgently.

"Come on cho chweet, we got to go."

"My father, it said."

"Said a lot, baba. Heard a lot. Don't want to know, that's you
and it, but we have to go now." Tal seizes her wrist, drags
Najia up from her ungainly sprawl across the floor. Yts surprising
strength cuts through the spray of flashbacks; apricot trees in
winter, a soft black bag opening, walking down the green corridor,
the room with the table and the chrome mpeg recorder.

"It showed me my father. It took me back to Kabul, it showed me
my father."

Tal swings Najia through the emergency exit onto a clattering steel
stairwell.

"I'm sure it showed you whatever would keep you talking long
enough to get karsevaks to our location. Pande called, they're
pulling up. Baba, you trust too much. Me, I'm a nute, I trust no one,
least of all myself. Now, are you coming or do you want to end up
like our blessed Prime Minister?"

Najia glances back at the curved display screen, the chrome curl of
the 'hoek lying on the desk. Comforting illusions. She follows Tal
like a little child. The stairwell is a glass cylinder of rain. It is
like being inside a waterfall. Hand in hand Najia and Aj pile down
the steel steps toward the green exit light.

Thomas Lull sets the last of the three photographs down on the table.
Lisa Durnau notices that he has worked a sleight of hand. The order
is reversed: Lisa. Lull. Aj. A bunco card trick.

"I'm inclined to the theory that time turns all things into
their opposites," says Thomas Lull. Lisa Durnau faces him across
the chipped melamine table. The Varanasi-Patna fast hydrofoil is
grossly overloaded, every cubby and corner of cabin space filled with
veiled women and badly wrapped bales of possessions and tear-stained
children looking around them in open-mouthed confusion. Thomas Lull
stirs his plastic cup of chai. "Remember back in Oxford. just
before." He breaks off, shakes his head.

"I did stop them sticking fucking Coca-Cola signs all over
Alterre."

But she cannot tell him what she fears for the world he trusted to
her. She had briefly dipped into Alterre while she waited at the
Consular Office for the diplomatic status to come through. Ash,
charred rock, a nuclear sky. Nothing living. A dead planet. A world
as real as any other, in Thomas Lull's philosophy. She cannot think
about that, feel it, grieve for it as she should. Concentrate on what
is here, now, laid out in front of you on the tabletop. But coiled in
the base of her mind is the suspicion that the extinction of Alterre
is linked with the stories and people connecting here.

"Jesus, L. Durnau. A fucking honorary consul."

"You liked the inside of that police station?"

"As much as you liked taking it up the ass from the Dark Lord.
You went into space for them."

"Only because they couldn't get you."

"I wouldn't have gone."

She remembers how to look at him. He throws his hands up.

"Okay I'm a fucking liar." The man perched on the end of
their table turns to glare at the dirty-mouthed Westerner. Thomas
Lull touches each of the pictures lightly, reverently. "I have
no answer to this. Sorry you came all this way to learn that, but I
don't. Do you? Your photo's there too. All I do know is where we had
two mysteries we now have one." He takes out his palmer, thumbs
up the picture he stole of the inside of Aj's head glinting with the
floating diyas of protein processors sets it beside her Tabernacle
image.

"I suppose we have to come to some deal. Help me find Aj and
prove what I think the truth is about her, I'll offer what I can with
the Tabernacle."

Lisa Durnau slips the Tablet out of its soft leather pouch and sets
it at the opposite end, next to her own Tabernacle picture.

"You come back with me."

Thomas Lull shakes his head.

"No deal. You pass it on, but I'm not going back."

"We need you."

"
We?
And are you going to tell me it's my duty as a good
citizen not just of America but the whole wide world to make a
sacrifice for this epochal moment of first contact with an 'alien
civilization'?"

"Fuck you, Lull." The man glares again at such profanity
from the mouth of a woman. The hydrofoil jolts and booms as it
strikes a submerged object.

This monsoon morning the Patna hydrofoil is a refugee scow. Varanasi
is a city in spasm. The shockwaves spreading out from Sarkhand
Roundabout have crystallised its ancient animosities and hatreds. It
is not just the nutes now. It is the Muslims, the Sikhs, the
Westerners as the city of Siva convulses, hunting sacrifices. US
marines escorted the embassy car from the police station through the
hastily erected Bharati army checkpoints. Thomas Lull tried to make
sense of the little US flag fluttering boldly from the car's right
wing as jawans and Marines slid looks off each other. Sirens
dopplered across the night. A helicopter beat overhead. The convoy
cruised past a row of looted small shops; steel security shutters
staved in or wrenched out. A Nissan pickup laden with young karsevaks
moved alongside. The men bent down to peer in the embassy car. Their
eyes were wide with ganja; they carried trishuls, garden forks,
antique blades. The driver leered, floored the pedal, and sped off,
multiple horns blaring. Everywhere was the smell of wet burning.

"Aj is out there," Thomas Lull said.

At the hydrofoil dock the rain was falling heavily, tinged with
smoke, but the city was venturing out, a peek from a door, a furtive
dash past burned-out Marutis and looted Muslim shops, a scurrying
phatphat run. There were livelihoods to be made. The city, as if
having held its breath, at last allowed itself a slow, trembling
exhalation. A steady throng pushed through the narrow streets to the
river. With handcarts and cycle drays, with overloaded cycle
rickshaws and phatphats, with hooting Marutis and taxis and pickups,
the Muslims were leaving. Thomas Lull and Lisa climbed around the
hopelessly jammed traffic. Many had abandoned vehicles and were
off-loading their salvaged possessions: computers, sewing machines,
lathes, great swollen bundles of bedding and clothing wrapped up in
blue plastic twine.

"I went to see Chandra at the university," Thomas Lull said
as they pushed through a snarl of abandoned cycle-rickshaws onto the
ghat where the separate streams of refuges fused into one Vedic horde
at the water's edge. "Anjali and Jean-Yves were working in
human-aeai interfaces; specifically, grafting protein-chip matrices
onto neural structures. Direct brain-computer connection." Lisa
Durnau fought to keep Thomas Lull in sight. His gaudy blue surf-shirt
was a beacon among the bodies and bundles. One trip on these stone
steps and you were dead. "The lawyer gave Aj a photograph. Her,
after some kind of operation, with Jean-Yves and Anjali. I recognised
the location, it was Patna, on the new ghat at the Bund. Then I
remembered something. It was back in Thekkady when I was working the
beach clubs. I used to know a lot of the emotics runners, most of it
came from Bangalore and Chennai but there was one guy imported it
from the north, from the Free Trade Zone at Patna. They had
everything you could get from Bangalore for a quarter the price. He
used to go on monthly runs, and I remember him telling me about this
grey medic, did radical surgery for men and women who didn't want to
be men or women any more, if you get what I mean."

"Nutes," Lisa Durnau yelled over the sea of heads. The
hydrofoil staff had sealed and barred the gate to the jetty and were
lifting money from the hands thrust through the bars to permit
refugees to slip aboard. She guessed they were halfway to the gate
but she was tiring.

"Nutes," Thomas Lull shouted back. "It's a long shot,
but if I'm right, it's the missing piece."

To what? Lisa Durnau wanted to ask but the crowd surged. The
hydrofoil was filling by the second. Refugees were waist deep in the
Ganga, holding babies, children up to the boat crew who pushed them
ungently back with landing poles. Thomas Lull pulled Lisa Durnau
close to him. They fought to the head of the line. The steel gate
opened, the steel gate clanged shut. Bodies jammed against the
grating.

"Got any green?"

A search of her bag threw up three hundred in traveller's cheques.
Thomas Lull waved them in the air.

"US dollars! US dollars!"

The steward beckoned him forward. His crew shoved back the
clingers-on.

"How many how many?" Thomas Lull held up two fingers. "In
in."

They squeezed through the barely open gate, up the gangplank and onto
the hydrofoil. Ten minutes later, grossly overloaded, it pulled away
from the still-growing crowd on the ghats. To Lisa Durnau, peering
through the streaky window, it looked like a blood clot.

In the overcrowded lounge she pushes the Tablet towards Thomas Lull.
He thumbs through the pages of data from the Tabernacle.

"So what is it like in space, then?"

"Smelly. Tiring. You spend most of your time out of your head
and you never actually get to see anything."

"Bit like a rock festival. First thing strikes me about this,
you assume it's an artefact of an extraterrestrial civilization."

"If the Tabernacle is seven billion years old, then why don't we
see the aliens who built it everywhere we look?"

"A variant on the Fermi Paradox—if aliens exist, then
where are they? Let's work through this: if we posit the Tabernacle
builders an expansion rate of even one-tenth percent of the speed of
light, in seven billion years they would have colonised all the way
to the Sculptor Galaxy group."

"There'd be nothing but them."

"But all we find is one shitty little asteroid? I don't think
so. Subsidiary point, if it is almost twice as old as our solar
system."

"How did they know we'd be here to find it?"

"That this swirl of Stardust would one day turn into you, me,
and Aj. I think we can dismiss that theory. Conjecture two: it's a
message from God."

"Oh come on, Lull."

"I'd lay better than evens it's been whispered at the White
House prayer breakfast. The end of the world is at hand."

"Then that's the end of the rational worldview. It's back to the
Age of Miracles."

"Exactly. I like to think my life as a scientist has not been a
complete waste. So I'll stick to theories that have some nugget of
rationality in them. Conjecture three, another universe."

"That thought occurred to me," says Lisa Durnau.

"If anyone knows what's out there in the polyverse, it should be
you. The Big Bang inflates into a set of separate universes all with
slightly differing physical laws. The probability is virtually one
hundred percent that there's at least one other universe with an Aj,
a Lull, and a Durnau in it."

"Seven billion years old?"

"Different physical laws. Times runs faster."

"Conjecture four."

"Conjecture four: it's all a game. Rather, it's all a
simulation. Deep down, physical reality is rules and the application
of rules, those simple programmes that give rise to incalculable
complexity. Computer virtual reality looks exactly the same. I've
only been saying this all my life, L. Durnau. But here's the rub.
We're both fakes. We're reruns on the final computer at the Omega
Point at the end of space-time. The probabilities are always going to
be in favour of our reality being a rerun rather than the original."

"And bugs are appearing in the system. Our mystery
seven-billion-year-old asteroid."

"Implying some imminent plot development for The Sims."

"You're not supposed to see the Great and Powerful Oz,"
says Lisa Durnau. "We're definitely not in Kansas any more."

The chai-wallah passes, swinging his stainless steel urn, chanting
his mantra:
chat, kafi
. Thomas Lull takes a fresh cup.

"I don't know how you drink that stuff," Lisa says.

"Conjecture five. For a mysterious alien artefact, it's a bit
clunky. I've seen more convincing SFX on
Town and Country
."

"I get what you're saying here. It looks like we built it—if
we wanted to send some kind of message to ourselves."

"One you can't ignore—an Earth-crossing asteroid, and then
make it move out of the way." Lisa Durnau hesitates. This is
beyond blue-sky. "From our future." "There's nothing
here I don't see us achieving in a couple of hundred years."

"It's a warning?"

"Why else send something back, unless you need to change history
pretty damn bad? Our umpteen-great-grand-Lulls and Durnaus have run
into something they can't deal with. But if they gave themselves a
couple of hundred years' head start."