River of Gods (74 page)

Mr. Nandha thinks there is blood on his shoes.

Air-conditioning aeais. Djinns even in the air ducts. From his seat
he can look down upon his city as he has all those times when he
called upon it to be his oracle. Now there is nothing here. My
Varanasi is given over to djinns, he thinks.

Clouds move, light shifts in rays and shafts. Mr. Nandha winces at a
sudden glint of brilliance from the green western suburbs. A
heliograph, for his eye only, from the hundred-metre hemisphere
carved out by an alien space-time where Ray Power's Research and
Development section had once stood. Precise down to the quantum
level, a perfect mirror. He knows, because he stood there, firing and
firing and firing at his own distorted reflection until Vik wrestled
him to the ground, hauled the god-gun out of his fist. Vik, in his
hissing, ill-fitting rock-boi shoes.

He can still see her shoes, racked up so neatly in pairs like praying
hands.

They will be agreeing on a script, behind Arora's door. Exceeded his
authority. Excessive force. Public endangerment. The Energy Minister
in handcuffs. Disciplinary measures. Suspension from duties. Of
course. They must. But they do not know there is nothing they can do
to him now. Mr. Nandha can feel the acid start to burn his esophagus.
So many betrayals. His superiors, his stomach, his city. He erases
the faithless shikaras and mandapas of Varanasi, imagines the
campaniles and piazzas and duomos of Cremona. Cremona of the mind,
the only eternal city. The only true city.

The door opens. Arora peeps out nervously, like a bird from a nest.

"You can come in now, Nandha."

Mr. Nandha stands up, straightens his jacket and cuffs. As he walks
towards the open door, the opening bars of the first Bach cello
sonata soar through his mind.

In a dark room at the heart of a temple to a dark goddess, smeared
with blood and hazy with the ash of dead humans, a cross-legged old
man rolls on his skinny buttock bones and laughs and laughs and
laughs and laughs.

In the evening a wind blows up from the river as a cool exhalation.
It sweeps the ghats, stirs up the dust, and sends eddies of marigold
petals scurrying along the day-warmed stone. It rattles the
newspapers of the old widower men who know they will never marry
again, who come down to the ghats to talk the day's headlines with
their friends, it tugs at the trails and folds of the women's saris.
It sets the ghee-flames of the diyas swaying, ruffles the surface of
the water into little cat-waves as the bathers scoop it up in their
copper dishes and pour it over their heads. The scarlet silk flags
curl on their bamboo poles. The wide wicker umbrellas shift as the
breeze reaches under their decorated caps and lifts them. It smells
of deep water, this small wind. It smells of cool and time and a new
season. Down beneath the funeral ghats the men who pan the river for
the golden ashes of the dead look up, touched by a sense of something
more, something deeper than their dismal trade. The sound of the boat
oars as they dip and slop into the water is rich and bottomless.

It was in the early afternoon that the rain lifted and the roof of
grey cloud broke and there, beyond it, was a sky of high, miraculous
blue, Krishna blue. You could see all the way out of the universe in
that clear, washed blue. The sun shone, the stone ghats steamed.
Within minutes the foot-trodden mud had dried to dust. People came
out from under their umbrellas, uncovered their heads, unfolded their
newspapers, and lit cigarettes. Rain has been, rain will come again:
great curds of cumulus cruise the eastern horizon beyond the plumes
and vapours of the industrial shore, preposterous purple and yellow
in the fast-falling light. Already the people take up their positions
for the aarti, the nightly fire ceremony. These ghats may witness
panic, flight, populations on the move, bloody death, but thanks as
endless as the river are due to Ganga Mata. Drummers, percussionists
make their way to the sides of the wooden platforms where the
brahmins perform. Barefoot women carefully descend the steps, dip
their hands in the rising river before finding their accustomed
place. They skirt around the two Westerners sitting by the water's
edge, nod, smile. All are welcome at the river.

The marble is warm under Lisa Durnau's thigh, skin smooth. She can
smell the water, coiling silently at her foot. The first flotillas of
diyas are striking bravely out into the current, stubborn tiny lights
on the darkening water. The breeze plays cool on her bare shoulders,
a woman namastes as she passes back from the forgiving water. India
endures, she thinks. And India ignores. These are its strengths,
twined around each other like lovers in a temple carving. Armies
clash, dynasties rise and fall, lords die and nations and universes
are born and the river flows on and the people flow to it. Perhaps
this woman had not even noticed the flash of light that was the aeais
departing to their own universe. If she had, how would she have
thought of it? Some new weapons system, some piece of electronica
gone bad, some inexplicable piece of complicated world gone awry. Not
for her to know or wonder. The only part of it to touch her was when
Town and Country
suddenly disappeared. Or did she look up and see
another truth entirely, the jyotirlinga, the generative power of Siva
bursting from an earth that could not contain it in a pillar of
light.

She looks at Thomas Lull beside her on the warm stone, knees pulled
up, arms around them, looking across the river at the fantastical
fortresses of the clouds. He said little since Rhodes from the
embassy secured their release from the Ministry's holding centre, a
conference room converted by removing all the tables and chairs,
filled with bad tempered businessmen, feisty grameen women, and
furious Ray Power researchers. The air was hissing with calls to
lawyers.

Thomas Lull had not even blinked. The car had left them at the haveli
but he turned away from the ornate wooden gate and headed out into
the warren of lanes and street markets that led down to the ghats.
Lisa had not tried to stop him or ask him or talk to him. She watched
him walk up and down the flights, along and around looking for where
feet had trodden blood into the stone. She had looked at his face as
he stood there with the people bustling over the place where Aj had
died and thought, I know that look from a big wide Lawrence living
room with no furniture. And she knew what she needed to do, and that
her mission was always going to fail. And when he finally shook his
head in the weak gesture of disbelief that was more eloquent than any
drama of emotion and went down to the river and sat by the water, she
had gone with him and settled on the sun-warmed stone, for when he
was ready.

The musicians have begun a soft, slow heartbeat. The crowd grows by
the minute. The sense of expectation, of presence, is a felt thing.

"L. Durnau," says Thomas Lull. Against herself, she smiles.
"Give me that thing."

She passes him the Tablet. He flicks through its pages. She sees him
call up the images from the Tabernacle; Lisa, Lull. Aj. Nandha the
Krishna Cop. He folds the faces back into the machine. A mystery
never to be solved. She knows he will never come back with her.

"You think you learn something, you think finally you've got it
worked out. It's taken time and grief and effort and a shitload of
experience but at last, you think you've got some idea how it all
works, the whole fucking show. You think I'd know better, I honestly
want to believe that we're actually all right, that there's something
more to it than just planet-slime and that's why it gets me every
time. Every single time."

"The curse of the optimist, Lull. People get in the way."

"No, not people, L. Durnau. No, I gave up on people long ago.
No, I'd hoped, when I worked out what the aeais were doing, I
thought, Jesus, that's a fucking irony, the machines that want to
understand what it's like to be human are actually more human than we
are. I never hoped in us, L. Durnau, but I hoped that the Gen Threes
might have evolved some moral sense. No, they abandoned her. As soon
as they saw there never would be peace between the meat and the
metal, they let her go. Learn what it's like to be human. They
learned all they needed to know in one act of betrayal.

"They saved themselves. They saved their species."

"Did you listen to a word I said, L. Durnau?"

A child comes down the steps, a little girl in a floral dress,
barefoot, uncertain on the ghats. Her face is pure concentration. Her
father has hold of one hand, the other, waving to keep balance, holds
a garland of marigolds. The father points her to the river, points
her to throw, go on, put it in. The girl flings the gajra, waves her
arms in delight as she sees it land on the darkening water. She
cannot be more than two.

No, you're wrong, Lull, Lisa Durnau wants to say. It's those stubborn
tiny lights they can never put out. It's those quanta of joy and
wonder and surprise that never stop bubbling out of the universal and
constant truths of our humanity. When she speaks, her words are, "So
where do you think you'll go then?"

"There's still a dive school with my name on it somewhere down
Lanka, Thailand way," Thomas Lull says. "There's one night
in the year, just after the first full moon in November, when the
coral releases its sperm and eggs, all at once. It's quite wonderful,
like swimming in a giant orgasm. I'd like to see that. Or there's
Nepal, the mountains; I'd like to see the mountains, really see the
mountains, spend time among them. Do some mountain Buddhism, all
those demons and horrors, that's the kind of religion speaks to me.
Get up to Kathmandu, out to Pokhara, some place high, with a view of
the Himalayas. Will this get you in trouble with the G-men?"

Father and daughter stand by the water, watching the gajra bob on the
ripples. The child smiles suspiciously at her. What have you been
doing all your life, Lisa Durnau, that is more vital than this?

"They'll get round to me eventually."

"Well, take this back to them. I suppose I owe you, L. Durnau."
Thomas Lull hands her the Tablet. Lisa Durnau frowns at the
schematic. "What is this?"

"The winding maps for the Calabi-Yau space the Gen Threes
created at Ray Power."

"It's a standard set of transforms for an information-space with
a mindlike space-time structure. Lull, I helped develop these
theories, remember? They got me into your office."

And bed, she thinks.

"Do you remember what I said on the boat, L. Durnau? About Aj?
'The other way around.'"

Lisa Durnau frowns, then she sees it, as she saw it written by the
hand of God on the toilet door in Paddington Station, and it is so
clear and so pure and so beautiful it is like a spear of light
stabbed straight through her, ramming through her pinning her to the
white stone and it feels like death and it feels like ecstasy and it
feels like something singing. Tears start in her eyes, she wipes them
away, she cannot stop looking at the single, miraculous, luminous
negative sign. Negative T. The time-arrow is reversed. A mindlike
space, where the intelligences of the aeais can merge into the
structure of the universe and manipulate it in any way they will.
Gods. The clocks run backwards. As it ages, as it grows more complex;
our universe grows younger and dumber and simpler. Planets dissolve
into dust, stars evaporate into clouds of gas that coalesce into
brief supernovas that are not the light of destruction but candles of
creation, space collapsing in on itself, hotter and hotter reeling
back towards the primordial ylem, forces and particles churned back
into the primordial ylem while the aeais grow in power and wisdom and
age. Time's arrow flies the other way.

Hands shaking, she calls up a simple math aeai, runs a few fast
transforms. As she suspected, the arrow of time not only flies in the
other direction, it flies faster. A fast, fierce universe of
lifetimes compressed into moments. The clock-speed, the Planck-time
flicker that governs the rates at which the aeais calculate their
reality, is one hundred times that of universe zero. Breathless, Lisa
Durnau thumbs more calculations into the Tablet though she knows, she
knows, she knows what it is going to tell her. Universe 212255 runs
its course from birth to recollapse into a final singularity in seven
point seven eight billion years.

"It's a Boltzmon!" she exclaims with simple joy. The girl
in the flower dress turns and stares at her. The cinder of a
universe; an ultimate black hole that contains every piece of quantum
information that fell into it, that punches its way out of one dying
reality into another. And waits, humanity's inheritance.

"Their gift to us," Thomas Lull says. "Everything they
knew, everything they experienced, everything they learned and
created, they sent it through to us as their final act of thanks. The
Tabernacle is a simple universal automaton that codes the information
in the Boltzmon into a form comprehensible to us."

"And us, our faces."

"We were their gods. We were their Brahma and Siva, Vishnu and
Kali. We are their creation myth."

The light is almost gone now, deep indigo has settled across the
river. The air is cool, the far clouds carry an edge of luminosity,
they seem huge and improbable as dreams. The musicians have picked up
the pace, the devotees take up the song to Mother Ganga. The Brahmins
descend through the crowd. Father and child are gone.

They never forgot us, thinks Lisa Durnau. In all the
billions—trillions—of subjective years of their
experience and history, they always remembered this act of betrayal
on the banks of the Ganga, and they compelled us to enact it. The
burning chakra of regeneration is endless. The Tabernacle is a
prophecy, and an oracle. The answer to everything we need to know is
in there, if we only know how to ask.