Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“What does she see? A halo of information around people and things. She sees a bird and tells you its name and species. That sounds like the Birds of Southwest India. In the railway station she tells a family their son has been arrested, what train to get, what lawyers to hire. That’s police reports, the Ahmedabad Yellow pages, and the Mumbai Railroads timetable. In every way, she gets on like someone whose brain is hooked into the net.”

Lisa brushes her fingers lightly over the ghost-drawings on the Tablet.

“All this. is how she does it. I don’t know who she is, I don’t know how Jean-Yves and Anjali came to be caught up in it, but what I know is someone took a girl and turned her into an experiment, some monstrous test bed for new brain/machine interface technology.”

Passengers stir, gather up their dependants and possessions. Their brief respite on water is nearly over, now they must face a strange, new, unknown city.

“I’m with you all the way up to that point, L. Durnau,” says Thomas Lull. “I think it’s the other way round. It’s not a system for a human to interact with a machine. It’s a system for a machine to interact with a human brain. She is an aeai downloaded into a human body. She is the Generation Threes’ first and last ambassador to humanity. I think that’s why we’re all together in the Tabernacle. It’s a prophecy of a meeting .”

She is an orphan in the city of gods and therefore never alone. Gods beat behind her like wings, gods flock around her head, gods roll and tumble at her feet, gods peel apart before her like a million opening doors. She lifts her hand and ten thousand gods flow apart and fuse together again. Every building, every vehicle, every lamp and neon, every street shrine and traffic light, trembles with gods. She can look and read a hundred phatphat licence details, their owners’ dates of birth and addresses, their insurance histories, their credit ratings, their educational qualifications and criminal records, their bank account numbers, their children’s exam results, their wives’ shoe-sizes. Gods fold out of each other like paper streamers. Gods weave through each other like gold threads on a silk loom. Beyond the air-glow the night horizon is a jewelled crown of deities. Beneath the traffic boom, the sirens, the raised voices and car horns and blaring music, nine million gods whisper to her.

Violence here, warns the god of the gali that leads off the brightly lit street of chai bars and snack stalls. She halts as she hears a rising roar of male voices funnelling down the narrow, jharoka-lined alley. Student karsevaks come roaring forth. She picks one out of god-space: Mangat Singhal: mechanical engineering student at the University of Bharat. He has been a paid-up Youth Member of the Shivaji for three years; he has had two arrests for riotous behaviour at the Sarkhand Roundabout protest. His mother has smoking-related cancer of the throat and will likely go to the ghats before the year is out. This way, says the god of the taxi rank, showing her the Maruti cruising beyond the panicked chai-wallahs hastily putting up their steel grilles. Damage estimated at twenty thousand rupees , the god of small insurance claims tells her as she hears the crash of a chai-stall overturned behind her by karsevaks. Unclaimable under public disturbance exemptions. You will intersect with your taxi in thirty-five seconds. Left here. And she is there as the Maruti comes round the corner and stops for her hand.

“Don’t go there,” the driver says when she gives him the address out in the basti.

“I will pay you much money.” ATM next on right , the god of the shopping arcade says. “Stop here.” The card goes in without hesitation, without question, without need for number or face scan. How much do you require? asks the god of electronic banking. She gives it a five-digit number. It is so long coming out of the slot she worries the driver might move on to a safer fare. Cab licence number VRJ117824C45 is still stationary at the curb , advises the god that animates the traffic cameras. She blinks up to its elevated viewpoint, sees herself, close in at the ATM trying to fold fat wads of cash, sees the cab behind her, sees the small convoy of army hummers blast past.

“Will this suffice?” She thrusts the bouquet of notes in the driver’s face. “Baba, for this I will drive you to Delhi itself.”

He is a driver who likes to talk; riot riot riot; any excuse at all, why aren’t they concentrating on their studies instead of burning things up, when they try to get jobs, that’s when it’ll all come home, oh I see you were in trouble with the police for riotous behaviour, no, no jobs here for gundas and badmashes, but what about Sajida Rana, the Prime Minister, can you believe it, her own bodyguard, our Prime Minister, Mama Bharat, and what are we going to do, has anything thought of that? and god help us when we fall over, the Awadhis will roll right over us. Aj watches the gods flow in squadrons and chapters and orders and pile up behind her into an incandescent hemisphere over the city. She taps the driver on the shoulder. He almost steers into a brick and plastic roadside hovel.

“Your wife is well and safe and will spend the night at her mother’s until it is safe to come home.”

She leaves him shortly after. Gods are few as stars in a night sky here. They hover around the big yellow sodium lights on the main avenues, over the cars that swoosh past in the rain, they flicker up and down the communications cables like fire but the bastis beyond are black, unholy. Whispers guide her into the darkness. The world turns the city burns but the slum must sleep. A startled face in an all-night chai-stall stares at her as if she is a djinn, whirled out of the storm. Keep on along here until you come to a big power pylon , whispers the god of the MTV-Asia cable-channel on the pale blue screen. Divinities are draped from the girders of the big power tower like leaves on a tree. Left side , they say. The one with two steps down and the plastic fertiliser bag for the door . It is easily found, even in streaming, stinking darkness, when gods guide you. She feels out the contours of the rag house. The plastic door-sheet rustles at her touch. Lives awake within. Here is where the DNA in the database leads her. Beyond her the true light of dawn glows grey and wan through the god-glow. Aj lifts the plastic and ducks under the lintel.

They shout and they hammer for twenty minutes but the good doctor Nanak is not receiving visitors this day. The doors are sealed, the hatches dogged, the windows shuttered and locked with big bright brass padlocks. Thomas Lull bangs his fist on the grey door. “Come on, open the fuck up!”

In the end he lobs metal scrap up at the meshed-over bridge windows while the rain gathers into ever larger puddles on the grey decking. The barrage attracts the attention of the Australians on the next barge. Two bare-chested twentysomethings in calf-length jams come over the ramp. Water drips from their blond dreads but they move through the rain as if it is their natural environment. Lisa Durnau, sheltering under an awning, checks their abs. They have those little muscle groin grooves that point down under their waistbands.

“Mate, if the guru ain’t in, he ain’t in.”

“I saw something moving up there.” Thomas Lull shouts again. “Hey! I see you, come out, there’s things I want to ask you.”

“Look, bit of respect for a fella’s peace,” says second fit boy. He wears a carved jade spiral on a leather thong around his neck. “The guru is not giving interviews, no one, nowhere, no-how. Okay?”

“I am not a fucking journalist, and I am not a fucking karsevak,” Thomas Lull declares and starts to climb the superstructure.