Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“No!” Najia Askarzadah screams. There is a white flash, a roar like a universe ending, her skin shimmers with synaesthetic shock, she smells onions joss celery and rust and she is sprawling on the floor of the Indiapendent design unit with Tal crouching over her. Yt holds her ’hoek in yts hand. Disconnection blow-back. The neurones reel. Najia Askarzadah’s mouth works. There are words she has to say, questions she must ask but she is expelled from otherworld. Tal offers a slim hand, beckons urgently.

“Come on cho chweet, we got to go.”

“My father, it said.”

“Said a lot, baba. Heard a lot. Don’t want to know, that’s you and it, but we have to go now.” Tal seizes her wrist, drags Najia up from her ungainly sprawl across the floor. Yts surprising strength cuts through the spray of flashbacks; apricot trees in winter, a soft black bag opening, walking down the green corridor, the room with the table and the chrome mpeg recorder.

“It showed me my father. It took me back to Kabul, it showed me my father.”

Tal swings Najia through the emergency exit onto a clattering steel stairwell.

“I’m sure it showed you whatever would keep you talking long enough to get karsevaks to our location. Pande called, they’re pulling up. Baba, you trust too much. Me, I’m a nute, I trust no one, least of all myself. Now, are you coming or do you want to end up like our blessed Prime Minister?”

Najia glances back at the curved display screen, the chrome curl of the ’hoek lying on the desk. Comforting illusions. She follows Tal like a little child. The stairwell is a glass cylinder of rain. It is like being inside a waterfall. Hand in hand Najia and Aj pile down the steel steps toward the green exit light.

Thomas Lull sets the last of the three photographs down on the table. Lisa Durnau notices that he has worked a sleight of hand. The order is reversed: Lisa. Lull. Aj. A bunco card trick.

“I’m inclined to the theory that time turns all things into their opposites,” says Thomas Lull. Lisa Durnau faces him across the chipped melamine table. The Varanasi-Patna fast hydrofoil is grossly overloaded, every cubby and corner of cabin space filled with veiled women and badly wrapped bales of possessions and tear-stained children looking around them in open-mouthed confusion. Thomas Lull stirs his plastic cup of chai. “Remember back in Oxford. just before.” He breaks off, shakes his head.

“I did stop them sticking fucking Coca-Cola signs all over Alterre.”

But she cannot tell him what she fears for the world he trusted to her. She had briefly dipped into Alterre while she waited at the Consular Office for the diplomatic status to come through. Ash, charred rock, a nuclear sky. Nothing living. A dead planet. A world as real as any other, in Thomas Lull’s philosophy. She cannot think about that, feel it, grieve for it as she should. Concentrate on what is here, now, laid out in front of you on the tabletop. But coiled in the base of her mind is the suspicion that the extinction of Alterre is linked with the stories and people connecting here.

“Jesus, L. Durnau. A fucking honorary consul.”

“You liked the inside of that police station?”

“As much as you liked taking it up the ass from the Dark Lord. You went into space for them.”

“Only because they couldn’t get you.”

“I wouldn’t have gone.”

She remembers how to look at him. He throws his hands up.

“Okay I’m a fucking liar.” The man perched on the end of their table turns to glare at the dirty-mouthed Westerner. Thomas Lull touches each of the pictures lightly, reverently. “I have no answer to this. Sorry you came all this way to learn that, but I don’t. Do you? Your photo’s there too. All I do know is where we had two mysteries we now have one.” He takes out his palmer, thumbs up the picture he stole of the inside of Aj’s head glinting with the floating diyas of protein processors sets it beside her Tabernacle image.

“I suppose we have to come to some deal. Help me find Aj and prove what I think the truth is about her, I’ll offer what I can with the Tabernacle.”

Lisa Durnau slips the Tablet out of its soft leather pouch and sets it at the opposite end, next to her own Tabernacle picture.

“You come back with me.”

Thomas Lull shakes his head.

“No deal. You pass it on, but I’m not going back.”

“We need you.”

“ We? And are you going to tell me it’s my duty as a good citizen not just of America but the whole wide world to make a sacrifice for this epochal moment of first contact with an ‘alien civilization’?”

“Fuck you, Lull.” The man glares again at such profanity from the mouth of a woman. The hydrofoil jolts and booms as it strikes a submerged object.

This monsoon morning the Patna hydrofoil is a refugee scow. Varanasi is a city in spasm. The shockwaves spreading out from Sarkhand Roundabout have crystallised its ancient animosities and hatreds. It is not just the nutes now. It is the Muslims, the Sikhs, the Westerners as the city of Siva convulses, hunting sacrifices. US marines escorted the embassy car from the police station through the hastily erected Bharati army checkpoints. Thomas Lull tried to make sense of the little US flag fluttering boldly from the car’s right wing as jawans and Marines slid looks off each other. Sirens dopplered across the night. A helicopter beat overhead. The convoy cruised past a row of looted small shops; steel security shutters staved in or wrenched out. A Nissan pickup laden with young karsevaks moved alongside. The men bent down to peer in the embassy car. Their eyes were wide with ganja; they carried trishuls, garden forks, antique blades. The driver leered, floored the pedal, and sped off, multiple horns blaring. Everywhere was the smell of wet burning.

“Aj is out there,” Thomas Lull said.

At the hydrofoil dock the rain was falling heavily, tinged with smoke, but the city was venturing out, a peek from a door, a furtive dash past burned-out Marutis and looted Muslim shops, a scurrying phatphat run. There were livelihoods to be made. The city, as if having held its breath, at last allowed itself a slow, trembling exhalation. A steady throng pushed through the narrow streets to the river. With handcarts and cycle drays, with overloaded cycle rickshaws and phatphats, with hooting Marutis and taxis and pickups, the Muslims were leaving. Thomas Lull and Lisa climbed around the hopelessly jammed traffic. Many had abandoned vehicles and were off-loading their salvaged possessions: computers, sewing machines, lathes, great swollen bundles of bedding and clothing wrapped up in blue plastic twine.

“I went to see Chandra at the university,” Thomas Lull said as they pushed through a snarl of abandoned cycle-rickshaws onto the ghat where the separate streams of refuges fused into one Vedic horde at the water’s edge. “Anjali and Jean-Yves were working in human-aeai interfaces; specifically, grafting protein-chip matrices onto neural structures. Direct brain-computer connection.” Lisa Durnau fought to keep Thomas Lull in sight. His gaudy blue surf-shirt was a beacon among the bodies and bundles. One trip on these stone steps and you were dead. “The lawyer gave Aj a photograph. Her, after some kind of operation, with Jean-Yves and Anjali. I recognised the location, it was Patna, on the new ghat at the Bund. Then I remembered something. It was back in Thekkady when I was working the beach clubs. I used to know a lot of the emotics runners, most of it came from Bangalore and Chennai but there was one guy imported it from the north, from the Free Trade Zone at Patna. They had everything you could get from Bangalore for a quarter the price. He used to go on monthly runs, and I remember him telling me about this grey medic, did radical surgery for men and women who didn’t want to be men or women any more, if you get what I mean.”