River of Gods (73 page)

"Yes, but the Atiyah's Ladder effect."

The guy who let off the second Big Bang, Vishram thinks. Creation
Two. That's the biggest laugh any comedian will ever get. He says,
"Here's what we do. We continue with the demonstration as
planned. If it goes over one hundred and seventy, we close the whole
thing down, show's over, please exit via the gift shop. Whatever
happens, nothing said in this room goes any further. Keep me
appraised."

As he heads for the door to the zero-point lab, thinking, I can see a
beautiful clear career path opening in front of Ms. Sonia Yadav Hindu
physicist, a fresh tremor hits the Research Centre, hits it hard,
hits it to its roots, sends Vishram Ray and Sonia Yadav and Director
Surjeet reeling for handholds, for something safe and solid that is
not moving, knocks dust and plaster and loose ceiling tiles from the
roof and rattles the display screens, those same screens that show
power output at one hundred and eighty-four percent.

Universe 2597. The aperture is running away, laddering up through
successive universes.

And Vishram Ray's palmer is calling, everyone in that room's palmer
is calling, they put their hands up to their heads and it is the same
voice in each of their ears telling them that the aeais controlling
the aperture are not responding to commands.

They've lost control of the zero-point.

Like a Christian angel, like the sword of avenging Michael plunging
from the sky, Mr. Nandha comes sliding down a path of air towards the
Ray Research Centre. He knows that in the belly of the tilt-jet his
Excommunication Squad is muted, uncertain, scared, mutinous. The
prisoners will be talking to them, sowing unbelief and dissent. That
is their matter, they do not share his dedication and he cannot
expect them to. Their respect is a sacrifice he is prepared to make.
This warrior woman beside him in the cockpit will bring him to his
ordained place.

He clicks up the astringencies of a Bach violin sonata as the pilot
tips the tilt-jet into the long slow dive towards the green rhombuses
of the University of Bharat.

A presence, a throat clear, a tap on his shoulder interrupt the
infinite geometries of the solo violin. Mr. Nandha slowly removes his
'hoek.

"What is it, Vikram?"

"Boss, the American woman's going on about diplomatic incidents
again."

"This will have to be resolved later, as I have said."

"And the sahb wants to talk to you, again."

"I am otherwise engaged."

"He's mightily pissed off that he can't get through to you."

"I sustained damage to my communicator when I was battling the
Kalki aeai. I have no other explanation." He has turned it off.
He does not want squawking questions, demands, orders breaking the
perfection of his execution.

"You should still talk to him."

Mr. Nandha sighs. The tilt-jet leans into a stack, climbing down the
sky towards the airy, toy-bright buildings of the Rana's university,
gleaming in the sun that is tearing the monsoon apart. He takes the
'hoek.

"Nandha."

The voice says something about excessive zeal, use of weapons,
endangering the public, questions and inquiries, too far Nandha too
far, we know about your wife she turned up at Gaya Station but the
word that rings, the word that chimes like the sword of that
Christian, Renaissance angel against the dome of heaven, that cuts
through the aircraft noise is Vik's, repeating to the crew strapped
into their seats in full combat armour:
battling the Kalki aeazi
.

He despises me, Mr. Nandha thinks. He thinks I am a monster. This is
nothing to me. A sword requires no comprehension. He removes the
'hoek and with a swift, sharp jerk of his hands, snaps it in two.

The pilot turns her mirrored HUD visor to him. Her mouth is a perfect
red rosebud.

The fourth quake shakes the Research Centre as Vishram hits the fire
alarm. Bookcases topple, whiteboards drop from walls, light-fittings
sway, cornices crack, wiring ducts splinter. The water-cooler
teeter-totters this way, that way, then falls gracefully to the floor
and bursts its distended plastic belly.

"Okay, ladies and gentlemen, there is no need for alarm, we've
had a small report of an overheat in the electrical relay gear,"
Vishram lies as wide-eyed people with their hands over their heads
look for the exits. "Everything is under control. Our assembly
point is outside on the quad, if we could make our way there in an
orderly fashion. Walk slowly, walk carefully, don't run, our staff
are fully trained and will get you to safety."

A swarm of hovercams beats everyone but Energy Minister Patel out the
door. Sonia Yadav and Marianna Fusco want to wait for him but he
orders them out. No sign of course of Surjeet. The Captain is always
last to leave. As he turns the fifth and biggest tremor yet brings
the roof screens crashing down in the lecture hall beyond. Vishram is
afforded one burning, eternal glimpse on the message frozen on the
falling screens.

Output seven hundred and eighty-eight percent. Universe 11276.

The light, spacious, elegant architectures of Ray Power warp and
billow around Vishram Ray like his one and only mushroom trip as he
runs—no decorum, no carefully, no good example, just hammering
terror—for the door. The sixth tremor sends a crack racing up
the centre of the Ramayana floor. Stressed parquet tiles spring
apart, the glass door panels shatter into flying silicon snow as he
comes running through. The shareholders, already far back from the
building, retreat further. "This is no electrical overheat,"
Vishram overhears from a plump Grameen woman in widow's white as he
hunts down Sonia Yadav. Her face is ash.

"What the fuck is happening?"

"They've taken over the system," she says faintly. Many of
the shareholders are lying flat on the still-wet grass, waiting for
the next, even bigger shock.

"Who, what?" Vishram demands.

"We're shut out of our network, something else is running it.
There's stuff coming in, we can't stop it, all channels at once,
something huge."

"An aeai," Vishram says and Sonia Yadav hears that it is
not a question. The bolt-hole, the escape clause, the way out when
the Generation Threes were faced with final annihilation. "Tell
me, could Artificial Intelligences use the zero-point to build their
own universe?"

"It couldn't be a universe like this, it would have to be a
universe where the computations and digits that make up their reality
can become part of the fabric of the physical reality."

"A universe that thinks?"

"A mindlike space, we call it, but yes." She looks into his
face, daring his disdain. "A universe of real gods."

Sirens in the distance, racing in. Universe breaches, call the fire
brigade. There is another sound over the fire engines; aircraft
engines.

"Played for a fucking fool," Vishram grimaces and then
everything goes white in a pure, perfect, blinding flash of urlight
and when his vision clears, there is a star, pure and perfect and
dazzling, shining in the middle of the Research Centre Building.

White so bright, so searing it burns through the one-way mirror of
the pilot's visor and before he goes into white-out Mr. Nandha
receives a retina-burned image of big brown eyes, high cheekbones, a
small nose. Beautiful. A goddess. So many men must want to wed you,
my warrior, Mr. Nandha thinks. The face recedes into afterimage, then
the world returns in spots and blots of purple and Mr. Nandha feels
tears of justification start in his eyes, for there is the sign and
seal that he was right. A star burns in the heart of the city, from
deep inside the earth. He signs to the pilot. Take us, down.

"Away from the people," he adds. "We do not recklessly
endanger life."

Vishram thinks he might have seen this scene in a movie once. Or if
he hasn't, he should write it: a crowd of people standing in a wide
green field, all facing the same direction, hands raised to shield
their eyes from a dazzling, actinic spark in the distance. That's a
shot to build a story from. His eyes are squeezed half-shut, even so
everything is reduced to strangely stretched silhouettes.

"If that's what I think it is, there's a lot more than bright
light coming off it," says Ramesh's voice beside him.

"And what do you think it is?" Vishram asks, remembering
his sunburn from peering into the observation window. That was a low
level universe. A glance at Sonia Yadav's palmer, still receiving
data from the monitoring systems around the aperture, tells him this
is universe 212255. Two and something lakh universes.

"A universe being born," Ramesh says, dreamily. "The
only reason we're still here, there's anything left, is the
containment fields still have it. In terms of the subjective physics
of that universe, it must seem like a super-gravity squeezing its
space-time so it can't expand. But that kind of expansion energy has
to go somewhere."

"How long can the cores hold it?" Vishram asks Sonia Yadav.
He imagines he should be shouting. In the movies, they are always
shouting. Her shrug tells all he needs to know and fear. A fresh
tremor. People fall to the earth, though it is a traitor. Vishram
hardly sees them. The star, the blinding star. It is now a tiny
sphere. Then he does hear a shout, Sonia Yadav's voice.

"Deba! Has anyone seen Deba?"

As the shout ripples out across the field, Vishram Ray finds he is
running. He knows they will not find Deba among them. Deba is down
there, in his hole, in his black hole under the earth, on the
precipice of nothing. A voice cries his name, a voice he does not
recognise. He looks around to see Marianna Fusco running after him.
She has kicked off her shoes, she runs ponderously in her business
skirt. He has never heard her shout his name before.

"Vish! Come back, there's nothing you can do!"

The bubble expands again. It is now thirty metres across, rising out
of the centre of the Research Unit like a Mughal dome. Like the dome
of the Mughal Taj, it is empty inside, emptier even than the tomb of
a grief-sick Emperor. It is nothing. It is annihilation so absolute
the mind cannot contain it. And Vishram plunges towards it.

"Deba!"

A silhouette emerges out of the light-dazzle, limbs flailing,
awkward. "To me!" Vishram yells. "To me!"

He seizes Deba in his arms. The kid's face is badly burned, his skin
smells of ultraviolet. He rubs incessantly at his eyes.

"It hurts!" he wails. "It hurts, it fucking hurts!"

Vishram spins him around and the bubble leaps again, a titanic
quantum leap. Vishram is staring at a wall of light, brilliant,
blinding, but within the light he thinks he can see shapes, patterns,
flickering of bright and less bright, light and shadow. Black and
white. He states, entranced. Then he feels his skin start to burn.

Marianna Fusco takes Deba's other shoulder and together they bring
him to safety. The Ray Power shareholders have moved back to the
furthest section of the formal charbagh. Vishram thinks it odd yet
human that no one has left.

"Assessment?" he asks Sonia Yadav. The sirens are close
now, he hopes they are parameds. And that aircraft is very, very
near.

"Our computers are downloading at an incredible rate," she
says.

"Where?"

"Into
that
."

"Is there anything we can do?"

"No," she says simply. "It's not in our hands now."

You've got what you wanted, Vishram prays at the sphere of light. You
don't have to do anything else. Just close the door and walk away.
And as he thinks it there is a second flash of light and a huge
thunderclap of air and light and energy and space-time rushing into
absolute vacuum and when Vishram's vision clears he sees two things.

The first is a large perfectly hemispherical perfectly smooth crater
where Ray Power Research Centre had stood.

The other is a line of soldiers in full combat gear advancing across
the neat, watered lawn, weapons at the present. At their head is a
tall, thin man with a good suit and a bad five o'clock shadow and a
gun in his hand.

"Your attention please!" the man shouts. "Nobody is
permitted to leave. You are all under arrest."

Lisa Durnau finds Thomas Lull kneeling on the grass, his hands still
cuffed with black plastic cable grip. He is beyond tears, beyond
wrack. All that remains is a terrible stillness.

She settles awkwardly beside him on the grass, tears at her own
plastic tie with her teeth.

"They got away," Thomas Lull says, taking a long shuddering
breath.

"The counterinflation force must have pushed into in-folded
dimensions," Lisa Durnau says. "It was a hell of a risk."

"I looked into it," Thomas Lull whispers. "As we were
coming in over it, I looked into it. It is the Tabernacle."

But how? Lisa Durnau wants to ask, but Thomas Lull slumps back on to
his back, bound hands on his small pot belly, staring up into the
light of the sun.

"She showed them there was nothing for them here," he says.
"Just people, just bloody people. I like to think she made a
choice, for people. For us. Even though. Even though." Lisa
Durnau sees his body quiver and knows whatever it is lies beyond
tears will come soon. She has never known that. She looks away. She
has seen the look of this man destroyed before and that is enough for
one lifetime.

Mr. Nandha would love most dearly to loosen his collar with his
finger. The heat in the corridor is oppressive; the air-conditioning
aeai follows Ray Power ethical practice, reluctant to react to sudden
shifts in microclimate in the name of energy efficiency. But the sun
has broken through the monsoon clouds and the glass face of Mr.
Nandha's headquarters is a sweat machine. His suit is rumpled. His
skin is waxy with perspiration. He fears he may have an unpleasing
body odour that his superiors will sense the moment he enters Arora's
office.