Ian McDonald - River of Gods

The train is felt before heard; the clank of the points, the deep vibration transmitted up through the sleepers to the steel stanchions that support the platform canopy, the rumble in the worn blacktop. The crowd arises family by family as the train expands out of the perspective of the tracks, weaving over the points as it draws in to platform fifteen. The indicator boards light up: Raipur Express. Krishan snatches up the cases as the crowd surges forward to meet the train. Bogie after bogie after bogie slides past without sign of stopping. Parvati presses close to Krishan. Trip here, stumble, fall and you would die beneath the guillotine-edge wheels. Slowly the great green train comes to halt.

Suddenly bodies push hard against Parvati. She reels forward against Krishan, he is driven hard against the side of the train. Simulataneously a roar goes up from the back of the crowd.

“To me, to me!” Krishan cries. The doors hiss open. Bodies immediately clog them. Arms thrust, torsos twist, luggage is squeezed and rammed. The surge carries Parvati away from the steps. Krishan fights the flow, clinging to the door stanchion, desperate that she will not be separated from him. Terrified, Parvati reaches out for him. Women shove around her screaming mindless oaths, children kick past. The platform is heads, heads and hands, heads and hands and bundles and more people are running across the tracks from the other platforms to reach the train, the train out of Varanasi. Young men trample Parvati as they scramble on to the roof; still she reaches for Krishan’s hand.

Then the shots bang out; short, stabbing bursts of automatic fire. The mob on the platform drops as one, covers heads with hands. Cries, shrieks, and the dreadful, unappeasable wail of the injured: the soldiers are not shooting to scare this time. Parvati feels Krishan’s hand close on her. Bullets crack out again. She sees flashes, hears the clang of shells ricocheting off the stanchions. Krishan gives a strange little sigh, then his grip tightens around hers and he draws her up, on to the train.

On the return trip Lisa and Thomas Lull are the only passengers in the lounge. It feels big and plasticy and exposed under its unkind fluorescents so Lisa Durnau suggests they go outside to regard the holy river. Sacred water is a new concept to Lisa Durnau. They stand side by side at the rail, buffeted by flaws of rain watching the sandy banks and rusty tin water abstraction plants. An object breaks the surface. Lisa wonders if it is one of the blind river dolphins she read about on the flight up from Thiruvananthapuram. Dolphin or dead. Certain classes of Hindus cannot be cremated and are surrendered to the mercy of Ganga Mata.

Once in a conference she flopped plane/train/taxi-lagged into a leather armchair in the lobby opposite an African delegate reclining generously in a seat. She nodded to him, wide-eyed, dazed, whoooo . He nodded back, patted his hands on the arms of the chair. “Just letting my soul catch up with me.” She needs to do that. Catch up with herself. Find a time out from the succession of one event to the next, that’s not filled with some person or thing or problem coming at her, frozen in the headlights of history. Stop reacting, take time, take a step, let your soul catch up. She would love to go for a run. Barring that, some time with a sacred river.

She looks at Thomas Lull. In his stance at the rail she sees four years, she sees uncertainty, she sees fading of confidence, cooling of ardour and energy. When did you last burn with passion about anything? she thinks. She sees a man in his middle years who looks at death every day. She sees almost nothing of the man she had dirty, grown-up sex with in an Oxford College shower. It is absolutely over, she thinks and feels sorry for him. He looks so very tired.

“So tell me, L. Durnau, do you ever, you know, see Jen around?”

“Occasionally, at the mall, sometimes the Jayhawks games. She’s got someone else.”

“I thought that even before. You know. Same way as you know when it’s on. Chemicals or something. Does she look happy?”

“Happy enough.” Lisa Durnau anticipates his inevitable next question. “No baby buggies.”

He looks at the passing shore, the white temple shikaras hazy against the rain clouds beyond the dark line of trees. Buffalo loll in the water, lifting their heads against the spreading hydrofoil wake.

“I know why Jean-Yves and Anjali did it, why they left her that photograph. I’d wondered why they should punch a hole right through the heart of it. Anjali never could have children, you know.”

“Aj was their surrogate daughter.”

“They felt they owed her the truth. Better to find out what she really was than be a life of illusions. To be human is to be disillusioned.”

“You don’t agree with that!”

“I haven’t your stern Calvinist mien. I’m comfortable with illusion. I don’t think I would have had the courage or the callousness to do that to her.”

But you also walked away, Lisa Durnau thinks. You also abandoned friends, career, reputation, lovers; it was easy for you, turn around and walk away and never look back.

“But she came looking for you,” Lisa Durnau says.

“I don’t have any answers for her,” Thomas Lull says. “Why do you have to have answers? You’re born not fucking knowing anything, you go through your life not fucking knowing anything, you die and you never know any fucking thing ever again. That’s the mystery of it. I am nobody’s guru, not yours, not NASA’s, not some aeai’s. You know something? All those articles and TV appearances and conferences? I was making it up as I went along. That’s all. Alterre? Just something I made up some day.”

Lisa Durnau grips the rail with both hands.

“Lull, Alterre’s gone.”

She cannot read his face, his stance, his muscles. She tries to provoke a reaction.

“Gone, Lull, everything. All eleven million servers, crashed. Extinct.”

Thomas Lull shakes his head. Thomas Lull frowns. His brow creases. Then Lisa sees an expression on his face she knows so well herself: the bafflement, wonderment, enlightenment of idea .

“What was always behind Alterre?” he says. “That a simulated environment.”

“Might eventually produce real intelligence.” The words come in a rush. “What if we succeeded better than we ever hoped? What if Alterre didn’t breed sentience, but the whole thing became alive. aware. Kalki is the tenth avatar of Vishnu. It sits there at the top of Alterre’s evolutionary pyramid, preserver and sustainer of all life; all things proceed from it and are of its substance. Then it reaches out and there’s another world of life out there, not part of it, separate, disconnected, utterly alien. Is it a threat, is it a blessing, is it something altogether other? It has to know. It has to experience.”

“But if Alterre has crashed.”

He chews in his bottom lip and goes quiet and dark, looking out at the rain in the great river. Lisa Durnau tries to count the impossibilities he has had to absorb. After a time he reaches out a hand. “Give me that thing. I need to find Aj. If Vishnu is gone, she’s unplugged from the net. All her life is illusion and now even the gods have abandoned her. What is she going to be thinking, feeling?”

Lisa slips the Tablet out of its flesh-soft leather holster and passes it to Thomas Lull. It emits a deep, chiming scale. Thomas Lull almost drops it in surprise. Lisa intercepts the thing on its way to moksha in the Ganga. A voice and image appear in her perceptions: Daley-Suarez Martin.

“Something’s happened at the Tabernacle. They’ve got another signal out of it.” The Tablet displays a fourth face, a man, a Bharati, so much is obvious even in the low-resolution cellular automaton image; a thin-boned, drawn man. Lisa Durnau can make out the collar of a Nehru suit. She thinks he has an unutterably sad face. There is an ident line attached.