Ian McDonald - River of Gods

The temple colonnade is the same dismal, dripping shell of graffittied plaster and folk-art religious daubings Shiv scanned from the battlement but Ramanandacharya’s Kirlian signature activates banks of blue flood lamps and Shiv finds he is holding his breath. The suddhavasa within is a cube of translucent plastic, glowing at the edges under the sharp blue light. The scarab robots fall back into their orbit. Ramanandacharya lifts his hands to the translucent plastic yoni of the airlock door. A digit pad resolves out of the fluid surface.

Ramanandacharya moves to tap in a code; the knife flashes, Ramanandacharya cries out, seizes his hand. Blood wells from a hairline cut down his right forefinger.

“You do it.” Yogendra waves the knife blade at Shiv.

“What?”

“He could have tricks, traps, things we don’t know. He thinks soon as we have it, he’s going to die anyway. You use the code.”

Ramanandacharya’s eyes widen as Shiv takes out the palmer and starts to enter the door password.

“Where did you get this? Dane? Where’s Dane?”

“Hospital,” Shiv says. “Cat got his tongue.” Yogendra giggles. The pad sinks back into the surface of the smart plastic (which Shiv thinks is cooler than he will ever allow to a chuutya like Ramanandacharya) and the door clicks anticlimactically open.

The decryption system is a luminous plastic garbhagriha small enough to make Shiv itchily claustrophobic.

“Where’s the computer?” Shiv asks.

“The whole thing is the computer,” Ramanandacharya says and with a wave of his hands turns the walls translucent. Protein circuitry woven dense as Varanasi silk, as nerve fibres, is packed into the walls. Fluids bubble around the net of artificial neurones. Shiv notices he’s shivering in his wet combats.

“Why is it so fucking cold in here?”

“My central quantum processing unit needs a constant low temperature.”

“Your what?”

Ramanandacharya runs his hands over a slotted titanium cylinder head in the otherwise blemishless plastic wall.

“He dreams in code,” he says. Shiv bends forward to read the inscription on the metal disc. Sir William Gates .

“What is this?”

“An immortal soul. Or so he believed. Uploaded memories, a bodhisoft. How the Americans imagine they can beat death. One of the greatest minds of his generation—all this is because of him. Now he works for me.”

“Just get me this file and put it on here.” Shiv smacks Ramanandacharya on the side of the head with the palmer.

“Oh, not the Tabernacle crypt, the CIA will kill me, I am a dead man,” Ramanandacharya pleads then shuts his foolish blabbering mouth up, summons another code pad out of the plastic, and enters a short sequence. Shiv thinks about the frozen soul. He’s read of these things, circling in bangles of superconducting ceramic. All of a life: its sex, its books, its music and magazines, its friends and dinners and cups of coffee, its lovers and enemies, its moments when you punch your fists in the air and go jai! and when you want to kill everything, all reduced down to something you give a woman in a bar to slip around her wrist.

“One thing,” Ramanandacharya says as he passes the loaded palmer to Shiv, “what do you want it for?”

“N. K. Jivanjee wants to talk to men from space,” Shiv says. He slips the palmer into one of his many pants pockets. “Let’s get out of here.” The trick with the ring parts the scarab robots again; Shiv sees on Ramanandacharya’s face that he thinks they will let him go, then sees that face change as Yogendra prods him with the gun to walk on. It is not a pretty or edifying thing, to see a fat man wet with fear. Shiv cuffs the dataraja again.

“Will you stop that, that is so annoying,” Ramanandacharya flares.

Yogendra makes him take them back down through the tourist gate into the old Indian army camp. They squeeze through the gap in the sheeting. Shiv mounts his bike, kicks up the engine. Good and true little Japanese motor. He looks round for Yogendra, finds him standing over the kneeling Ramanandacharya with the muzzle of the Stechkin in the dataraja’s mouth. He licks it. He runs his tongue round the muzzle, licking it lapping it loving it. Yogendra grins.

“Leave him!”

Yogendra frowns, genuinely, deeply vexed. “Why? He’s over and done.”

“Leave him. We got to go.”

“He can call people up after us.”

“Leave him!”

Yogendra makes no move.

“Fuck you!” Shiv dismounts, pulls out a brace of taser mines and drops them in a ring around Ramanandacharya. “Now leave him.” Yogendra shrugs, puts up his piece and slides it inside his pants pocket. Shiv thumbs the control switch that arms the mines.

“Thank you thank you thank you,” Ramanandacharya weeps.

“Don’t beg, I hate begging,” Shiv says. “Have some fucking dignity, man.” Nawab of fucking Chunar. Let’s see any of your forty women sleep with you after this. Shiv twists the throttle and rips off on the Japanese trail bike, Yogendra on his wheel. The deed is done, there is no need for stealth or caution. It’s lights on engines open roaring down through the town past the glowing egg of the data centre and then the last light of Chunar and the exultation hits. It is done. They got it and they are getting away. A fringe of rain-soaked dawn lights the eastern horizon; by the time it fully opens, Shiv realises, he will be back in his city and he will have his prize and all his owings will be paid and he will be free, he will be a raja and no one will dare deny him again. He lets out a whoop, sends his bike careering madly all over the road, swooping from one side to the other, yipping and cawing and yawping crazier than any of the crazy jackals out there in the night. He swings deliberately close to the soft edge of the road, taunting the cracked blacktop, the treacherous gravel. Nothing can touch Shiv Faraji.

On an inside sweep, Shiv hears it. Running feet in the rural predawn. Titanium-shod feet, as much felt through the bike’s suspension as heard, gaining on them, faster than any running thing should. Shiv glances back. There is enough light in the sky to make out the pursuer. It holds its body low to the ground, poised, balanced; it paces on two strong legs like some monstrous demon bird released upon them from the high castle. It is gaining steadily. A glance at the speedo tells Shiv it is doing at least eighty.

Yogendra opens up his throttles a second after Shiv but to take the bikes up to the max on this crumbling, greasy rural road is as sure a death as the thing loping behind them. Shiv bends low over the handlebars, trying to make himself as small a target as possible for whatever esoteric firepower the machine carries. The turnoff must be soon. He can hear the metal beat over the drone of the Yokohama motor. That tree, that poster for bottled water, it’s here, surely. So busy looking, he almost misses Yogendra swing the bike across the blacktop and off on to the farm path. Panicked, Shiv brakes, oversteers, sticks a foot, almost spills across the country road before he brings the bike on to the sand track.

He saw it. There, behind him, down that road, pounding away, grey in the indigo, like it would never stop, never tire, keep running and running after them round the whole round world.

The dal bushes give way to hard-packed sand pocked with rain. The tires kick up sprays of hardpan and there is the boat, where they left it, anchor run into the sand, pulled round on the current, low in the river from heavy bilges, and there is a Brahmin beside it, waist deep in the stream, his thread across his shoulder, pouring water from his cupped hands and chanting the dawn salutation of Mother Ganga. Shiv skids the bike to a halt, splashes into the water, starts to heave the hot machine into the boat.