River of Gods (64 page)

"I can't imagine what they're up against if they can send
objects through time and they're still on the ropes."

"I can," says Thomas Lull. "It's the final war between
humans and aeais. We'd be up against Generation Tens by then—one
hundred million times the capability of a Gen Three."

"That means they would operate on the same level as the
Wolfram/Friedkin codes that underly our physical reality," Lisa
Durnau says. "In which case."

"They could directly manipulate physical reality."

"You're talking magic here. God, magic. Jesus, Lull. I've
objections. One: they send it back seven billion years?"

"A gravitational anomaly stirred the dust nebula that became
this solar system. A passing black hole would make a dandy anchor
point for a timelike wormhole. At least they would know we would be
here."

"Very good, Lull. Try this one. Objection two: as messages go,
it's a bit obtuse. What's wrong with a simple help we are getting
fucked over by Artificial Intelligences with the powers of gods?"

"What do you think the effect of that would be? By the time we
work it out, we'll be ready for what the Tabernacle has to say to
us."

"You're not convincing me, Lull. Even with Generation Tens and
wormholes and the fact that the act of sending a warning splits us
off into a universe where we get the head start but dooms them in
their universe. even with all that, why the hell are you, me, and an
eighteen-year-old girl who can talk to machines so important?"

Thomas Lull shrugs, that maddening, grinning, don't-know-don't-care
gesture that had always the power to infuriate Lisa when she argued
his speculations down in sessions just like this. Now Lull pulls up
his stolen images of the inside of Aj's skull.

"Your side of the deal."

"All right. For me, this isn't the mystery. This is the
corroboration. The mystery is how she stopped those Awadhi robots. So
when we rule out magic and we rule out God all we have left is
technology. And that, in there, is technology; technology that could
let a human brain communicate directly with a machine. She hacked
them."

"No God, no gods," says Thomas Lull. Lisa feels a vibration
run through the hull of the hydrofoil. The boat throttles back its
waterjets, settling down on its foils on its approach to the crowded
waters around Patna. Through the glass she makes out the cheap
mass-built light industrial units and ex-urban infotech sprawl behind
the Ganga's wide, sandy reefs.

"What does she see? A halo of information around people and
things. She sees a bird and tells you its name and species. That
sounds like the Birds of Southwest India. In the railway station she
tells a family their son has been arrested, what train to get, what
lawyers to hire. That's police reports, the Ahmedabad Yellow pages,
and the Mumbai Railroads timetable. In every way, she gets on like
someone whose brain is hooked into the net."

Lisa brushes her fingers lightly over the ghost-drawings on the
Tablet.

"All this. is how she does it. I don't know who she is, I don't
know how Jean-Yves and Anjali came to be caught up in it, but what I
know is someone took a girl and turned her into an experiment, some
monstrous test bed for new brain/machine interface technology."

Passengers stir, gather up their dependants and possessions. Their
brief respite on water is nearly over, now they must face a strange,
new, unknown city.

"I'm with you all the way up to that point, L. Durnau,"
says Thomas Lull. "I think it's the other way round. It's not a
system for a human to interact with a machine. It's a system for a
machine to interact with a human brain. She is an aeai downloaded
into a human body. She is the Generation Threes' first and last
ambassador to humanity. I think that's why we're all together in the
Tabernacle. It's a prophecy of a
meeting
."

She is an orphan in the city of gods and therefore never alone. Gods
beat behind her like wings, gods flock around her head, gods roll and
tumble at her feet, gods peel apart before her like a million opening
doors. She lifts her hand and ten thousand gods flow apart and fuse
together again. Every building, every vehicle, every lamp and neon,
every street shrine and traffic light, trembles with gods. She can
look and read a hundred phatphat licence details, their owners' dates
of birth and addresses, their insurance histories, their credit
ratings, their educational qualifications and criminal records, their
bank account numbers, their children's exam results, their wives'
shoe-sizes. Gods fold out of each other like paper streamers. Gods
weave through each other like gold threads on a silk loom. Beyond the
air-glow the night horizon is a jewelled crown of deities. Beneath
the traffic boom, the sirens, the raised voices and car horns and
blaring music, nine million gods whisper to her.

Violence here,
warns the god of the gali that leads off the
brightly lit street of chai bars and snack stalls. She halts as she
hears a rising roar of male voices funnelling down the narrow,
jharoka-lined alley. Student karsevaks come roaring forth. She picks
one out of god-space: Mangat Singhal: mechanical engineering student
at the University of Bharat. He has been a paid-up Youth Member of
the Shivaji for three years; he has had two arrests for riotous
behaviour at the Sarkhand Roundabout protest. His mother has
smoking-related cancer of the throat and will likely go to the ghats
before the year is out.
This way,
says the god of the taxi
rank, showing her the Maruti cruising beyond the panicked
chai-wallahs hastily putting up their steel grilles.
Damage
estimated at twenty thousand rupees
, the god of small insurance
claims tells her as she hears the crash of a chai-stall overturned
behind her by karsevaks.
Unclaimable under public disturbance
exemptions. You will intersect with your taxi in thirty-five seconds.
Left here.
And she is there as the Maruti comes round the corner
and stops for her hand.

"Don't go there," the driver says when she gives him the
address out in the basti.

"I will pay you much money."
ATM next on right
, the
god of the shopping arcade says. "Stop here." The card goes
in without hesitation, without question, without need for number or
face scan.
How much do you require?
asks the god of electronic
banking. She gives it a five-digit number. It is so long coming out
of the slot she worries the driver might move on to a safer fare.
Cab licence number VRJ117824C45 is still stationary at the curb
,
advises the god that animates the traffic cameras. She blinks up to
its elevated viewpoint, sees herself, close in at the ATM trying to
fold fat wads of cash, sees the cab behind her, sees the small convoy
of army hummers blast past.

"Will this suffice?" She thrusts the bouquet of notes in
the driver's face. "Baba, for this I will drive you to Delhi
itself."

He is a driver who likes to talk; riot riot riot; any excuse at all,
why aren't they concentrating on their studies instead of burning
things up, when they try to get jobs, that's when it'll all come
home, oh I see you were in trouble with the police for riotous
behaviour, no, no jobs here for gundas and badmashes, but what about
Sajida Rana, the Prime Minister, can you believe it, her own
bodyguard, our Prime Minister, Mama Bharat, and what are we going to
do, has anything thought of that? and god help us when we fall over,
the Awadhis will roll right over us. Aj watches the gods flow in
squadrons and chapters and orders and pile up behind her into an
incandescent hemisphere over the city. She taps the driver on the
shoulder. He almost steers into a brick and plastic roadside hovel.

"Your wife is well and safe and will spend the night at her
mother's until it is safe to come home."

She leaves him shortly after. Gods are few as stars in a night sky
here. They hover around the big yellow sodium lights on the main
avenues, over the cars that swoosh past in the rain, they flicker up
and down the communications cables like fire but the bastis beyond
are black, unholy. Whispers guide her into the darkness. The world
turns the city burns but the slum must sleep. A startled face in an
all-night chai-stall stares at her as if she is a djinn, whirled out
of the storm.
Keep on along here until you come to a big power
pylon
, whispers the god of the MTV-Asia cable-channel on the pale
blue screen. Divinities are draped from the girders of the big power
tower like leaves on a tree.
Left side
, they say.
The one
with two steps down and the plastic fertiliser bag for the door
.
It is easily found, even in streaming, stinking darkness, when gods
guide you. She feels out the contours of the rag house. The plastic
door-sheet rustles at her touch. Lives awake within. Here is where
the DNA in the database leads her. Beyond her the true light of dawn
glows grey and wan through the god-glow. Aj lifts the plastic and
ducks under the lintel.

They shout and they hammer for twenty minutes but the good doctor
Nanak is not receiving visitors this day. The doors are sealed, the
hatches dogged, the windows shuttered and locked with big bright
brass padlocks. Thomas Lull bangs his fist on the grey door. "Come
on, open the fuck up!"

In the end he lobs metal scrap up at the meshed-over bridge windows
while the rain gathers into ever larger puddles on the grey decking.
The barrage attracts the attention of the Australians on the next
barge. Two bare-chested twentysomethings in calf-length jams come
over the ramp. Water drips from their blond dreads but they move
through the rain as if it is their natural environment. Lisa Durnau,
sheltering under an awning, checks their abs. They have those little
muscle groin grooves that point down under their waistbands.

"Mate, if the guru ain't in, he ain't in."

"I saw something moving up there." Thomas Lull shouts
again. "Hey! I see you, come out, there's things I want to ask
you."

"Look, bit of respect for a fella's peace," says second fit
boy. He wears a carved jade spiral on a leather thong around his
neck. "The guru is not giving interviews, no one, nowhere,
no-how. Okay?"

"I am not a fucking journalist, and I am not a fucking
karsevak," Thomas Lull declares and starts to climb the
superstructure.

"Lull," Lisa Durnau groans.

"Oh no you don't," the first Australian shouts and together
they seize Thomas Lull by the legs and pull him off the bridge. He
hits the deck with a meaty thump.

"Now, you have definitely outstayed your welcome," green
spiral boy says and they wrestle Thomas Lull to his feet, pin his
arms, and navigate him towards the main arterial companionway between
the barges. Lisa Durnau decides it's time to do something.

"Nanak!" she calls up at the bridge. A figure moves behind
the mesh and the dirty glass. "We're not journalists. It's Lisa
Durnau and Thomas Lull. We want to talk to you about Kalki."

The door to the flying bridge opens. A face muffled in shawls peep
out, a face like Hanuman the monkey god.

"Let him go."

Nanak the dream surgeon bustles around the bridge making tea the
proper way. The interior is oddly louche in its cod-colonial wicker
and bamboo after the clanging industrial superstructure.

"Apologies apologies for my reticence." Nanak fusses with
pots and a folding brass Benares table. Lisa Durnau sips her chai and
subtly studies her host. Nutes are not a common sex in Kansas. The
details of yts skin, the subtle ridges down yts bare left arm that
are the subdermal controls for the sexual system, fascinate her. She
wonders how it is to programme your emotions, to design your
fallings-in-love and heartbreaks, to reengineer your hopes and fears.
She wonders how many kinds of orgasms you could create. But the
question foremost in her mind is: was it male or female? The body
shape, the fat distribution, the clothes—a deliberate eclectic
mix favouring the floating and the floppy, give no indication.
Male,
she decides. Men are fragile and fluid in their sexual
identities. Nanak continues pouring chai. "We have been
victimised of late. The Australians look after me well, lovely boys.
And the work here does demand discretion. But: Professor Thomas Lull,
a great honour for a humble factor of surgical services."

Thomas Lull unfolds his palmer and places it on the brass table.
Nanak winces at the display.

"This was the most complex operation I have ever brokered. Weeks
of work. They virtually unravelled her brain. Lobes and folds drawn
out and suspended on wires. Extraordinary."

Lisa Durnau sees Thomas Lull's face tighten. Nanak touches him on the
knee.

"She is well?"

"She is trying to find out who her true parents are. She's
realised that her life is lies." Nanak's mouth forms a voiceless
Oh
. "I am but a broker of services."

"Was it these two hired you?" Thomas Lull thumbs up the
picture from the temple that had first sent him on this pilgrimage.

"Yes," Nanak says, folding yts hands in yts shawl. "They
represented a powerful Varanasi sundarban, the Badrinath sundarban.
The legendary abode of Vishnu, I believe. I was paid two million US
dollars in a banker's draft drawn on the account of the Odeco
Corporation. I can furnish you with the details if you require.
Almost half the budget went on wetware applications, we had to find a
way of programming memory; emotic designers are not cheap, though I
like to think we have some of the best in the whole of Hindustan in
this zone."

"Budget," Thomas Lull spits. "Like a fucking
television programme."

Now Lisa Durnau has to speak.

"Her adoptive parents in Bangalore, do they actually exist?"

"Oh, entirely false, madam. We spent much money on creating a
credible back-story. It had to be convincing that she was human, with
a childhood and parents and a past."