Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“Fuck Anand,” Shiv whispers. They can’t get out that way. Grinning beneath his big visor, Yogendra gives him a savage thumbs-up. His knotted pearls glow in Shiv’s enhanced vision. Yogendra’s thumb jerks the other direction. The long way. At the foot of the collapsed wall by the tourist gate Yogendra suddenly throws Shiv to the ground behind a pile of rubble, drops on top of him. A curse comes automatically to Shiv’s lips, then he sees Yogendra stab a finger at the tourist gate. Glowing like a minor deity in enhanced nightwatch vision, the defence robot stalks patiently into the gap. Its sensorhead, studded with bright spider eyes, turns to take in every aspect. Com rigs crown it like a divine diadem. The robot halts, raises its weapon pods. There is sufficient and varied firepower on its four arms to kill Yogendra and Shiv five times over in five different ways. Yogendra pushes Shiv’s head down behind the rockpile, presses himself as flat as he can on top of him. Shiv holds himself down for a forever. Yogendra’s weight is small but the stones are sharp. His ribs are cracking on the sharp stone points. Then he hears what alerted Yogendra in the first place: the faint hiss of an ill-maintained shock-absorber. They watch the monster move out of their line of sight behind the curve of the well tower, then break from cover for the south battlement.

They skirt the southern wall, cross the southwestern turret, and slip along the riverside terrace. Shiv’s thigh muscles scream from the enforced half-crouch. He is wet beyond saturation. The Hastings Pavilion rises like a moon before him, hypnotic in Taj-white stone.

He tears his gaze away, nudges Yogendra on the thigh.

“Hey.”

A simple square-built Lodi temple stands in the centre of the courtyard, upper storeys tattily decorated with peeling murals of Siva, Parvati, and Ganesha, the work of bored Indian Army jawans with surplus military issue paint. The sucddhavsa, the crypt of crypto.

“Let’s go.”

The kid taps Shiv’s visor, rolls his ringer in a gesture that eloquently says, up the brightness . The temple leaps into renewed sharpness. Shiv makes out a boiling, dark mass, constantly flowing and breaking, between the arches. He ups the magnification. Robots. Scarab robots. Hundreds of them. Thousands. A plague, scuttling round each other, clambering over each other, jostling and bumping on their silent plastic pods.

Yogendra points to the temple. “Anand’s way.” Then to the white bright pavilion. “Yogendra’s way.”

They spy the sentry on the old Mughal execution ground. The man wears no nightwatch visor so Shiv and Yogendra can move within easy taser range. He is treating himself to a long luxurious piss in the rain over the sheer drop. Yogendra carefully aims at the midnight urinator. The weapon makes the slightest of clicks but in Shiv’s amplified sight the effect is spectacular. A glowing cloud surrounds the man, his body crawls with microlightning. He drops. His dick is still out. Yogendra is on him before he stops twitching. He slips the big black Stechkin machine pistol out of the man’s leg holster, holds it up in front of his face, smiling at its lines and contours. Shiv grabs his wrist.

“No fucking guns.”

“Yes fucking guns,” Yogendra says. The rakshasa-bot passes on another round. Shiv and Yogendra press up close to the unconscious guard, merging their thermal profiles with his. As a parting gift Shiv leaves pisser an armed taser mine. Just to cover the rear. Beyond the execution tower the walls cut back behind the Hastings Pavilion to isolate it on its marble plinth. Shiv has to admit that even in the rain the prospect stuns. The building stands on the edge of a steep drop down to the tin rooftops of Chunar. In his enhanced vision Shiv sees the plain glitter like an inverted night sky with the glow of villages and vehicles and great trains. But Ganga Mata dominates all, a silver blade, the weapon of a god, wide as all the world, rippled like a Damascus steel sword he had once seen in a Kashi antique store and envied as the proper adjunct of a raja. Shiv follows the curve of the river all the way to the air-glow of Varanasi, like a great conflagration beneath the horizon.

The pavilion that first Raj Governor Warren Hastings built to enjoy this preview is an Anglo-Mughal hybrid, classical columns supporting a traditional open Mughal diwan with a closed upper level. Shiv steps his visor down to minimum. He peers. He thinks he sees bodies in the diwan, bodies all over the floor. No time to stare. Yogendra taps him again. The wall is less high here and slopes down to the marble plinth. Yogendra slips through the battlement, then Shiv hears a rough slither and when he next peers over Yogendra beckons up at him. It’s further and steeper than Shiv thought despite the bravado pills; he lands heavily, painfully, suppresses a yelp. Figures stir in the open pavilion.

Shiv turns towards their potential threat. “Fuck,” he says reverently.

The carpeted floor is covered in women. Indian, Filipino, Chinese, Thai, Nepali, even African women. Young women. Cheap women. Bought women, dressed not in red carsuits, but in classical Mughal zenana fashion in transparent cholis and light silk saris and translucent jamas. In the centre, on a raised divan, Dataraja Ramanandacharya stirs his fat self. He is arrayed in the style of a Mughal grandee. Yogendra is already pacing through the harem. The women flee from him, voices joining together in apprehension. Shiv sees Ramanandacharya reach for his palmer: Yogendra pulls the Stechkin. The consternation becomes panicked cries. They have only moments to get this to work. Yogendra walks up to Ramanandacharya and casually slides the muzzle of the Stechkin into the hollow beneath his ear.

“Everyone shut the fuck up!” Shiv shouts. Women. Women everywhere. Women of every race and nationality. Young women. Women with lovely breasts and wonderful nipples showing through their transparent cholis. Bastard Ramanandacharya. “Shut. The. Fuck. Up. Okay. Fat boy. You’ve got something we want.”

Najia hears children’s voices from the house. The dhobi is gone from the shrubbery, in its place swags of bunting run from the kitchen door to apricot trees now in blossom. Folding tables draped with coloured cloths are laden with halwa and jellabies, ras gullahs and sugared almonds, burfi and big plastic bottles of full-sugar Coke. As Najia walks towards the house the children burst from the open patio door into the garden, running and shrieking in their Kid at Gap junior casuals.

“I remember this!” Najia says turning to the aeai. “This is my fourth birthday. How are you doing this?”

“The visuals are a matter of record, the children are as you think you remember them. Memory is such a malleable commodity. Shall we go inside?”

Najia stops in the doorway, hands raised to her mouth in potent remembering. The silk antimacassars her mother insisted that every chair-back wear. The Russian samovar by the table, never off the gas; the table itself, dust and crumbs permanently engrained in the Chinese carving in which Najia-age-four had tried to discern roads and paths for her dolls and toy cars to follow. The electric coffee pot at the other end, also never inactive. The chairs so heavy she could not move them alone and would ask Shukria the maid to help her build houses and shops with brooms and blankets. On the chairs around the dining table, her parents and their friends, conversing over coffee and tea, the men together, the women together; the men talking politics and sport and promotion, the women talking children and prices and promotion. Her father’s palmer rings and he frowns and it is her father as she knows him from the family photographs, when he had hair, when his beard was black and neat, when he had no need for unmanly half-glasses. He mutters apologies, goes to his study, the study into which Najia-age-four is never permitted for fear of the sharp poisonous delicate personal infectious dangerous things a doctor kept in his workroom. Najia watches him come out with a black bag, his other black bag, the one he did not use everyday, the black bag he kept for special visits. She sees him slip away into the street.