River of Gods (71 page)

An aeai incarnate in human flesh. Evil times indeed. Mr. Nandha
cannot imagine what alien, inhuman scheme is behind this outrage
against a soul. He does not want to imagine. To know can be the path
to understanding, understanding to tolerance. Some things must remain
intolerable. He will erase the abomination and all will be right. All
will be in order again.

A lone star shines in Mr. Nandha's vision from the top of the water
tower as the pilot turns between Hanuman and Ganesha. He jabs his
finger down towards the rain-puddled strand. The pilot pulls up the
nose and swivels the engines. Sadhus and swamis flee their
scab-fires, shaking their skinny fists at the object descending out
of heaven. If you saw as I see, thinks Mr. Nandha, loosing his seat
belt.

"Boss," Vik calls as he works his way through the cabin,
"we're picking up enormous traffic into the Ray Power internal
network. I think it's our Gen Three."

"In due time," Mr. Nandha says, gently chiding. "Everything
in proper order. That is the way to do business. We will finish our
task here and then attend to Ray Power."

His gun is ready in his fist as he hits the sand at the foot of the
ramp and the sky is crazy with gods.

All the people. Aj grips the rusted railing, dizzied by the masses on
the ghats and the riverbanks. The pressure of their bodies forced her
up on to this gallery when she found her breath catching in her
throat as she tried to get back to the haveli. Aj empties her lungs,
holds, inhales slowly through her nostrils. The mouth for talking,
the nose for breathing. But the carpet of souls appalls her. There is
no end to the people, they unfold out of each other faster than they
go to the burning ghats and the river. She remembers those other
places where she was among people, in the big station, on the train
when it burned and in the village afterwards when the soldiers took
them all to safety, after she stopped the machines.

She understands how she did that, now. She understands how she knew
the names of the bus driver on the Thekkady road, and of the boy who
stole the motorbike in Ahmedabad. It is a past as close and alien as
a childhood, indelibly part of her, but separate, innocent, old. She
is not that Aj. She is not the other Aj either, the engineered child,
the avatar of the gods. She attained understanding, and in that
moment of enlightenment was abandoned. The gods could not bear too
much humanity. And now she is a third Aj. No more voices and wisdoms
in street lights and cab ranks—these, she now realises, were
the aeais, whispering into her soul through the window of her tilak.
She is a prisoner now in that bone prison, like every other life out
there by that river. She is fallen. She is human.

Then she hears the plane. She looks up as it comes in low, fast over
the temple spires and the towers of the havelis. She sees ten
thousand people cringe as one but she remains standing for she knows
what it is. A final remembrance of being something other than human,
some last divine whisper, the god-light fading into the background
microwave hum of the universe, tells her. She watches the plane pull
up and descend on to the trampled sand, scattering the sadhu's
ash-fires in sprays of cinders and knows that it has come for her.
She begins to run.

With brisk flicks of his hand, Mr. Nandha dispatches his squad to
clear the ghats and seal off exits. In his peripheral vision he
notices Vik hang back, Vik still in his street garb from the night's
battles, Vik sweaty and grubby on this humid monsoon morning. Vik
uncertain, Vik fearful. He makes a note to himself to admonish Vik
for insufficient zeal. When the case is closed, that is the time for
robust management. Mr. Nandha strides out across the damp white sand.

"Attention attention!" he cries, warrant card held up.
"This is a Ministry security operation. Please render our
officers all assistance. You are in no danger." But it is the
gun in his right hand, not the authority in his left, that makes men
step back, parents pull curious children away, wives push husbands
out of his path. To Mr. Nandha, Dasashvamedha Ghat is an arena paved
with ghosts, ringed by watching gods. He imagines smiles on their
high, huge faces. He gives his attention to the small, glowing dot in
his enhanced vision, star-shaped now, the pentagram of the human
figure. The aeai is moving from its vantage on the water tower. It is
on the walkway now. Mr. Nandha breaks into a run.

The crowd ducked as the tilt-jet went over and Lisa Durnau ducked
with it and as she glimpses Aj on the tower, she feels Thomas Lull's
fingers slip through her own and separate. The bodies close around
him. He is gone.

"Lull!" In a few footsteps he has vanished completely,
absorbed into the motion of bright salwars and jackets and T-shirts.
Hiding in plain sight. "Lull!" No chance she will ever be
heard over the roar of Dasashvamedha Ghat. Suddenly she is more
claustrophobic than she ever was confined in the stone birth-canal of
Darnley 285. Alone in the crowd. She stops, panting in the rain.
"Lull!" She looks up at the water tower at the head of the
staggered stone steps. Aj still stands at the rail. Wherever she is,
Lull will be. No place, no time for Western niceties. Lisa Durnau
elbows through the milling crowd.

In the Tablet she is innocent, in the Tablet she is unknowing,
unseeing, in the Tablet she is a teenage kid up on a high place
looking down on one of Earth's great human wonders.

"Let me through, let me through!" Thomas Lull shouts. He
sees the tilt-jet unfold its mantis landing-gear and settle on the
sand bar. He sees ripples of discontent spread through the crowd as
the soldiers push people back. From his higher vantage on the ghat he
sees the pale figure advance across the cleared marble. That is the
fourth avatar of the Tabernacle. That is Nandha the Krishna Cop.

There is a story by Kafka, Lull recalls in the mad sell-consciousness
of ultimate effort; of a herald bringing a message of grace and
favour from a king to a subject. Though the herald holds seals and
passes and words of power, he can never leave the palace because of
the press of people, never make it through the crowd to bring the
vital word. And thus it goes unsaid, or so he remembers it from his
paranoid days.

"Aj!" He is close enough to see the three grubby white
stripes on the side of her grey trainers. "Aj." But his
words fall into well of sound, flattened and obliterated by sharper,
louder Hindi tones. And his breath is failing, he can feel the little
elastic pull of tension at the bottom of each inhalation.

Fuck Kafka.

"Aj!"

He cannot see her any more.

Run
, whisper the ashes of the gods. Her feet clatter along the
metal gantry, she swings around the stanchion and down the
sharp-edged steel steps. An elderly man cries out and curses as Aj
slams into him.

"Sorry, sorry," she whispers, hands held up in supplication
but he is gone. She pauses a moment on the topmost step. The tilt-jet
stands on the sand to her right, down by the water's edge. A
disturbance in the crowd moves towards her like a cobra. Behind her
the whip aerials of an army hummer move between the low, dripping
stalls of Dasashvamedha Gali. No escape there. The hydrofoil stands
at the jetty at the head of a huge diamond of people trying to press
on board. Many are shoulder deep in the water, burdens and
livelihoods borne on their heads. Once she might have tried to rule
the machines that control the boat and escape by water. She does not
have that power any more. She is only human. To her left the walls
and buttresses of Man Singh's astronomical palace step down to Ganga.
Heads, hands, voices, things, colours, rain-wet skin, eyes. A pale
head raised above the others by a foreign height. Long hair, grey
stubble. Blue eyes. Blue shirt, silly shirt, loud garish shirt,
saving glorious shirt.

"Lull!" Aj shouts and leaps down the steep, slippery ghats,
skidding on the stone, hurdling bundles of luggage, sending children
reeling, leaping over low walls and platforms where the Brahmins
commemorate the ten-horse sacrifice of Brahma with fire and salt,
music and prasad. "Lull!"

With a thought Mr. Nandha banishes his gods and demons. He has it
now. It cannot escape into the city. The river is closed to it, Mr.
Nandha is behind it, there is no way but forward. The people sweep
away from him like a sea parting in some alien religious myth. He can
see the aeai. It is dressed in grey, drab machine grey, so easy to
spot, so simple an identification.

"Stop," says Mr. Nandha softly. "You are under arrest.
I am a law enforcement officer, stop at once and lie flat on the
ground."

There is clear open space between him and the aeai. And Mr. Nandha
can see that it will not stop, that it knows what the law demands of
it and that in defiance is its one, minuscule chance of survival. Mr.
Nandha clicks off his gun safeties. The Indra avatar system swings
his outstretched arm on to the target. Then his right thumb performs
an action it has never taken before. It switches the gun from the
lower barrel, that kills machines, to the upper. The mechanism slides
into position with a silken click.

Run. It is such a simple word, when your lungs are not clenched tight
like fists for every breath, when the crowd does not resist your
every lunge and shove and push and elbow, when one single,
treacherous slip will send you plunging to annihilation under the
feet of the crowd, when the man who might save you is not at the
geometrical furthest point of the universe.

Run. It is such a simple word for a machine.

Mr. Nandha slides to a stop on the treacherous, foot-polished stone,
gun levelled. He could no more remove his aim from the target than he
could shift the sun from its centre. Indra will not permit it. His
outstretched arm, his shoulders ache.

"In the name of the Ministry, I order you to stop!" he
cries.

Useless, as it ever was. He forms the intention. Indra fires. The
crowd screams.

The munition is a medium-velocity liquid tungsten round that, rifled
by the barrel of Mr. Nandha's gun, expands in flight into a spinning
disc of hot metal the size of a circled thumb and finger, an
okay
sign. It takes Aj in the middle of the lower back, tearing through
spine, kidneys, ovaries, and small intestine in a spray of liquidised
flesh. The front of her sleeveless grey cotton top explodes outwards
in a rain of blood. The impact lifts her off her feet and throws her,
arms and legs splayed out, forward on to the crowd. The ghat people
scramble out from under her. She falls hard to the marble. The
impact, the trauma should have killed her—the bottom half of
her body is severed from the top—but she writhes and claws at
the marble in a spreading pool of warm sweet blood, making small soft
shrieking noises.

Mr. Nandha sighs and walks up to her. He shakes his head. Is he never
to be allowed dignity? "Stand back please," Mr. Nandha
orders. He stands over Aj, feet apart. Indra levels the gun. "This
is a routine excommunication but I would advise you to look away
now," he tells the public. He glances up at his crowd. His eyes
meet blue eyes, Western eyes, a Western face, bearded, a face he
recognises. A face he seeks. Thomas Lull. Mr. Nandha bows
infinitesimally to him. The gun fires. The second round takes Aj in
the back of the head.

Thomas Lull roars incoherently. Lisa Durnau is by him, holding him,
pulling him back, clinging to him with all her athletic strength and
weight and history. There is a sound in her ears like a universe
ending. Tracks of terrible heat on her face are tears. And still the
rain beats clown.

Mr. Nandha senses his warriors at his back. He turns to them. For now
he does not need to register the expressions on their faces. He
indicates Thomas Lull and the Western woman holding him back in her
arms.

"Have these people arrested under offences against the
Artificial Intelligence Registry and Licensing Act," he
commands. "Deploy all units immediately to Ray Power Research
and Development Unit at the University of Varanasi. And have someone
take care of this."

He holsters the gun. Mr. Nandha very much hopes he will not have to
use it again this day.

Look out the left
, the captain says.
That's Annapurna, and
the next one down is Manaslu. After that Shishapangma. All of them
over eight thousand metres. If you're on the left side of the plane,
I'll give you a call as we come in, on good days you can see
Sagarmath; that's our name for Everest
.

Tal is curled up in the wide business class seat, head on the cushion
on the armrest, asleep and giving little soprano snores though it's
only a forty minute flight from Varanasi. Najia can hear the treble
beats from yts headphones. Soundtrack for everything. HIMALAYA MIX.
She leans over yt to peer out the window. The little cityhopper skips
in over Ganga plain and the flatlands of the Nepal Terai then takes a
big jump over the river-riven foothills that guard Kathmandu. Beyond
them like a surf-line breaking at the edge of the world, is the High
Himalaya, vast and white and higher than she could ever dream, the
loftiest peaks streaked with torn cloud running on the jet stream.
Higher, and further; summit beyond summit beyond summit, the white of
the glaciers and high places and the flecked grey of the valleys
blurring into blue at the furthest edge of her vision, like a stone
ocean. Najia can see no limit to it in any direction.

Her heart leaps. There is something in her throat she cannot swallow.
There are tears in her eyes.

She remembers this scene from Lal Darfan's elephant pagoda, but those
mountains had not the power to touch, to move, to inspire. They had
been folds of fractals and digits, two imaginary landmasses colliding
with each other. And Lal Darfan had also been N. K. Jivanjee had also
been the Gen Three aeai, as the eastern extremities of these
mountains had been those peaks she had seen over the wall around that
garden in Kabul. She knows the image the Gen Three had shown her of
her father as torturer had been false; she had never walked down that
corridor, to that room, to that woman who in all probability had
never existed. But she does not doubt that others did, that others
had been strapped to that table to scream out how they endangered the
establishment. And she does not doubt that that image will now
forever be her memory.
Memory is what I am made of,
the aeai
had said. Memories make our selves, we make memories for ourselves.
She remembers another father, another Najia Askarzadah. She does not
know how she is going to live with either. And the mountains are
harsh and tall and cold and reach beyond any end she can see and she
is high and alone in her leather business-class seat with the
fifty-inch pitch.