Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“Lull,” Lisa Durnau groans.

“Oh no you don’t,” the first Australian shouts and together they seize Thomas Lull by the legs and pull him off the bridge. He hits the deck with a meaty thump.

“Now, you have definitely outstayed your welcome,” green spiral boy says and they wrestle Thomas Lull to his feet, pin his arms, and navigate him towards the main arterial companionway between the barges. Lisa Durnau decides it’s time to do something.

“Nanak!” she calls up at the bridge. A figure moves behind the mesh and the dirty glass. “We’re not journalists. It’s Lisa Durnau and Thomas Lull. We want to talk to you about Kalki.”

The door to the flying bridge opens. A face muffled in shawls peep out, a face like Hanuman the monkey god.

“Let him go.”

Nanak the dream surgeon bustles around the bridge making tea the proper way. The interior is oddly louche in its cod-colonial wicker and bamboo after the clanging industrial superstructure.

“Apologies apologies for my reticence.” Nanak fusses with pots and a folding brass Benares table. Lisa Durnau sips her chai and subtly studies her host. Nutes are not a common sex in Kansas. The details of yts skin, the subtle ridges down yts bare left arm that are the subdermal controls for the sexual system, fascinate her. She wonders how it is to programme your emotions, to design your fallings-in-love and heartbreaks, to reengineer your hopes and fears. She wonders how many kinds of orgasms you could create. But the question foremost in her mind is: was it male or female? The body shape, the fat distribution, the clothes—a deliberate eclectic mix favouring the floating and the floppy, give no indication. Male, she decides. Men are fragile and fluid in their sexual identities. Nanak continues pouring chai. “We have been victimised of late. The Australians look after me well, lovely boys. And the work here does demand discretion. But: Professor Thomas Lull, a great honour for a humble factor of surgical services.”

Thomas Lull unfolds his palmer and places it on the brass table. Nanak winces at the display.

“This was the most complex operation I have ever brokered. Weeks of work. They virtually unravelled her brain. Lobes and folds drawn out and suspended on wires. Extraordinary.”

Lisa Durnau sees Thomas Lull’s face tighten. Nanak touches him on the knee.

“She is well?”

“She is trying to find out who her true parents are. She’s realised that her life is lies.” Nanak’s mouth forms a voiceless Oh . “I am but a broker of services.”

“Was it these two hired you?” Thomas Lull thumbs up the picture from the temple that had first sent him on this pilgrimage.

“Yes,” Nanak says, folding yts hands in yts shawl. “They represented a powerful Varanasi sundarban, the Badrinath sundarban. The legendary abode of Vishnu, I believe. I was paid two million US dollars in a banker’s draft drawn on the account of the Odeco Corporation. I can furnish you with the details if you require. Almost half the budget went on wetware applications, we had to find a way of programming memory; emotic designers are not cheap, though I like to think we have some of the best in the whole of Hindustan in this zone.”

“Budget,” Thomas Lull spits. “Like a fucking television programme.”

Now Lisa Durnau has to speak.

“Her adoptive parents in Bangalore, do they actually exist?”

“Oh, entirely false, madam. We spent much money on creating a credible back-story. It had to be convincing that she was human, with a childhood and parents and a past.”

“Why, is she.” Lisa Durnau asks, dreading the answer.

“An aeai possessing a human body,” Thomas Lull says and Lisa now hears the ice in his voice that is more dangerous than any heat of passion.

Nanak rocks on yts chair.

“That is correct; forgive me, this is most distasteful. The Badrinath sundarban was the host for a Generation Three artificial intelligence. The scheme, as your colleagues told it to me, was to download a copy on to the higher cognitive levels of a human brain. The tilak was the interface. An extremely complicated piece of surgery. It took us three attempts to get it right.”

“They’re scared, aren’t they?” Thomas Lull says. “They can see the end coming. How many are left?”

“Three only, I believe.”

“They want to know if they can make peace or if they must be driven to extinction, but first they have to understand us. Our humanity baffles them, it’s a miracle she can make any sense out of it it all, but that’s what the false childhood is for. How old is Aj really?”

“It is eight months since she left this place with your colleagues—whom she believed to be her real parents. It is just over a year since I was contacted by the Badrinath aeai. Oh, you should have seen her the day she left, she was so bright, so joyful, like everything was new. The European couple were to take her down to Bangalore—they had only a short time, levels of memory were decompressing and if they left it too long it would have been disastrous, they would have become imprinted.”

“You abandoned her?” Lisa Durnau is incredulous. She tries to convince herself that this is India; life and individuality have different values from Kansas and Santa Barbara. But she still reels from what these people have done to a teenage girl.

“It was the plan. We had a cover story that she was in a gap year travelling around the subcontinent.”

“And did it ever, once occur to you, in your plans and cover stories and decompressing memories and your precision Chinese surgery, that for this aeai to live, a human personality had to die?” Thomas Lull explodes. Lisa Durnau now touches a hand to his leg. Easy. Peace. Chill. Nanak smiles like a blessing saint.

“Why sir, the child was an imbecile. No individuality, no sense of person at all. No life at all. It had to be that way, we could never have used a normal subject. Her parents were delighted when your colleagues bought her from them. At last their child might have a chance, with the experimental new technology. They thanked Lord Vishnu.”

With a wordless roar Thomas Lull is on his feet, fist balled. Nanak scuttles across the floor away from the raging male. Lisa Durnau smothers Lull’s fist in her two hands.

“Leave it, let it go,” she whispers. “Sit down, Lull, sit down.”

“Fuck you!” Thomas Lull yells at the nute-maker. “Fuck you and fuck Kalki and fuck Jean-Yves and Anjali!”

Lisa Durnau presses him into his seat. Nanak gathers ytself up, dusts ytself down, but yt does not dare come near.

“I apologise for my friend here,” Lisa Durnau says. “He’s overwrought.” She grips Thomas Lull’s shoulder. “I think we should go.”

“Yes, maybe that would be best,” says Nanak, shrugging yts shawls around ytself. “This is a discreet business, I cannot have raised voices.”

Thomas Lull shakes his head, disgusted at himself as much as any words in this room. He extends a hand but the nute does not take it.

The suitcases have little plastic wheels that rumble over the downtown streets. But the surface is patched and uneven and the handles are silly webbing loops and Krishan and Parvati are moving as fast as they can so every few metres the cases twist off their wheels and spill over. And the taxis just splash by Krishan’s upraised hand and the troop carriers prowl past and the songs of the karsevaks come from this side then that side, from behind, then right in front so they must hide in a doorway as they run past and Parvati is weary and soaked through, sari clinging to her, hair hanging in ropes and it is still five kilometres to the station.

“Too many clothes,” Krishan jokes. Parvati smiles. He hefts both cases, one in each hand, and sets off again. Together they huddle through the streets clinging to doorways, cringing from the military traffic, dashing across intersections, always alert for unexpected sounds, sudden movements.