Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“Leave leave leave!” Yogendra screams.

The Brahmin chants.

“They can track us through them,” Shiv yells.

“They can track us through the mines.” Yogendra runs his bike down into the stream, it falls with a splash, starts to fade into the river quicksand. He pulls up the anchor as Shiv rolls into the boat. It rocks sickeningly and there is a nasty amount of water under the seating but by now he cannot get any wetter but he can be a lot more dead. The robots looms over the dune crest and rears up to its full height. It is some evil stalking rakshasa, part bird part spider, unfolding palps and manipulators and a brace of machine guns from its mandibles.

The Brahmin stares at that.

Yogendra dives for the engine. Pull one pull two. The hunter takes a step down the sandy bank to better its aim. Pull three. The engine starts. The boat surges away. Ramanandacharya’s machine takes a leap to land knee-joint deep in the water. Its head swivels on to target. Yogendra heads for the centre of the stream. The robot wades after them. Then Shiv remembers Anand’s clever little grenade in one of his pockets. Bullets send the water exploding up behind Yogendra in the stern. He dives flat. The Brahmin in the shallows crouches, covers his head. The grenade lobs through the air in a graceful, glittering arc. It falls with a splash. There is nothing to see, nothing to hear but the tiniest of cracks that is the capacitors discharging. The robot freezes. The guns veer skywards, ripping the dawn with bullets. It sags on its knees, goes down like a gutshot gunda. Its mandibles and graspers flex open, it tips forward into the silt. The soft silvery quicksand takes it almost immediately.

Shiv stands in the boat. He points at the felled robot. He laughs, huge, helpless, joyful laughter. He cannot stop. Tears stream down his face, mingling with the rain. He can hardly draw breath. He has to sit down. It hurts, it hurts.

“Should have killed him,” Yogendra mutters at the tiller. Shiv waves him away. Nothing can press down or nay-say him. The laughter passes into joy, a simple, searing ecstasy that he is alive, that it is over now. He lies back on the bench, lets the rain fall on his face and looks up at the purple banding of clouds that is another day unfurling over his Varanasi, another day for Shiv. Shiv raja. Maha raja. Raja of rajas. Maybe he will work for the Naths again; maybe his name will open other doors for him; maybe he will go into his own business, not body parts, not meat, meat betrays. Maybe he will go to that lavda Anand and make him an offer.

He can make plans again. And he can smell marigolds.

A small noise, a small movement of the boat.

The knife goes in so smooth, so thin and clean, so sharp so pure it challenges Shiv to express its shock. It is exquisite. It is unutterable. The blade stabs cleanly through skin, muscle, blood vessels, serrated edge grating along rib until the hooked tip rests inside his lung. There is no pain, only a sense of perfect sharpness, and of the blood foaming into his punctured lung. The blade kicks inside him to the pulse of his body. Shiv tries to speak. The sounds click and bubble and will not form words. It stays like this for a long time, wide-eyed with shock. Then Yogendra pulls the blade and pain shrieks from Shiv as the knife hooks out his lung. He turns to Yogendra, hands raised to fend off the next blow. The knife comes twisting in again, Shiv catches it between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. The knife cuts deep, down to the joint, but he holds it. He holds it. Now he can hear the frenzied puffing of two men caught in a fight of death. They strike at each other in desperate silence as the boat wallows. With his free hand Yogendra grabs for the palmer. Shiv slaps out, grabs for Yogendra, for anything. He seizes the string of pearls around the boy’s neck, pulls it tight, grips it hard to hold himself up. Yogendra whips the knife free from Shiv’s grasp, ripping the barbed edge along the bone. Shiv lets out a high, keening whine that passes into a bloody, drowning burble. His breath flutters the edge of his wound. Then Shiv sees the loathing, the contempt, the animal arrogance and disdain the grey light reveals in Yogendra’s face and he knows that he has always felt this, always looked this way at him that this blade was always coming. He reels back. The string snaps. Pearls bounce and roll. Shiv slips on the pearls, loses balance, wheels, flails; goes over.

The water takes him cleanly, wholly. The roar of the traffic transmitted through the concrete piers deafens him. He is deaf, blind, dumb, weightless. Shiv wrestles, thrashes. He does not know which way is up, where is air, light. Blue. He is embedded in blue. Everywhere he looks, blue, forever in every direction. And black, like smoke, his blood twining upwards. The blood, follow the blood. But he has no strength and the air bubbles from the gash in his back, he kicks but does not move, punches but does not stir Shiv fights water, sinking deeper in to the blue, drawn down by his weaponry. His lungs burn. There is nothing left in them but poison, ashes of his body, but he cannot open his mouth, take that final, silent whoop of water even though he knows he is dead. His head pounds, his eyeballs are bursting, he sees his half-severed thumb wave futilely in the blue, the great blue as he kicks and thrashes for life.

Blue, drawing him down. He thinks he sees a pattern in it; in the dying fascination of brain cells burning out one by one he makes out a face. A woman’s face. Smiling. Come Shiv. Priya? Sai? Breathe. He must breathe. He kicks, struggles. He has a huge erection in his heavy, dragging combat pants laden with esoteric cyberweaponry and he knows what must happen. But Yogendra will not have the crypt. Breathe. He opens his mouth, his lungs and the blue rushes in and he sees in the decaying embers of his brain who it is down there. It is not Sai. It is not Priya. It is the gentle, homely face of the woman he gave to the river, the woman whose ovaries he stole for nothing, smiling, beckoning him to join her in the river and the blue and redemption.

“The first rule of comedy,” says Vishram Ray checking the set of his collar in the gentlemen’s washroom mirror, “is confidence: every day, every way; we’re radiating confidence.”

“I thought the first rule of comedy was.”

“Timing,” Vishram interrupts Marianna Fusco, perched on the lip of the next washbasin in the line. Inder and various staffers Vishram never knew he had have sealed the Research Centre toilets off to all comers, whatever the state of their bladder or bowels. “That’s the second rule. This is the Vishram Ray Book of Comedy.”

But he hasn’t been this scared since he first stepped out into that single spot shining down on the chrome shaft of the mike stand with an idea he had about budget airline travel. No place to hide behind that mike. No place to hide in that minimalist wooden room with the single construction-carbon table in the centre. Because the truth is, his timing is shit. Calling a major board meeting in the middle of an assassination crisis, with enemy tanks lined up a day’s drive sunset-wards. And it’s the monsoon, just to add a little meteorological misery to the whole shebang. No, Vishram Ray thinks as he checks his shave in the mirror. His timing is perfect. This is real comedy.

So why does it feel like eighteen different cancers eating him up?

Shave okay, aftershave within tolerable limits, cuffs check, cufflinks check.

The chemical rush does wonderfully clear the mind of Kalis and Brahmas and M-Star theory multiverses. Comedy is always in the moment. And the true first rule, in the Book of Comedy or the Book of Business, is persuasion. Laughter, like parting with wealth, is a voluntary weakness.

Jacket okay, shirt okay, shoes immaculate.