Ian McDonald - River of Gods

He catches his mother’s eye as he sits down. She smiles, privately, wisely, quietly as suddenly the entire boardroom is on its feet, shouting questions.

The taxi driver was smoking with the radio on, sprawled on the back seat with his feet sticking out the open door getting rained on as Tal came splashing across the glass bridge towing a stumbling, half-coherent Najia.

“Cho chweet, am I glad to see you,” Tal shouted as the driver switched on his yellow sign and flashed his headlights.

“You had the look of people who might be in need of transport.” Tal bundled Najia into the back. “Anyway, there are no fares tonight, not with all that is happening. And I am charging you waiting time. Where to or shall I just drive again?”

“Anywhere but here.” Tal pulled out yts palmer and opened up Najia’s video file from N. K. Jivanjee together with a neat little chunk of blackware on every street-credible nute’s Must Have list: a phone tracer. A nute never knows when yt’s going to need a little Ron. Day. Voo.

“Should we not be moving?” Tal asked, looking up from stripping the code from the video file.

“One thing I must be asking,” the driver said. “I require assurance that you were not involved with this morning’s. unpleasantness. I may speak my mind on our government’s many failings and incompetencies, but I am at heart a man who loves his nation.”

“Baba, the same people went after her, shot at me,” Tal said. “Trust me. Now, just drive.” That was when he floored the pedal.

“Is your friend all right?” the driver asks as he hoots a path through the soap worshippers, now on their feet, hands upheld as if in offering, eyes closed, lips moving. “She does not seem her usual self.”

“She’s had bad news about her family,” Tal says. “And what’s with them?”

“They offer puja to the gods of Town and Country for the safe deliverance of our nation,” the driver says. “Idle superstition if you ask me.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Tal mutters under yts breath. As the taxi turns on to the main road a big Toyota Hi-Lux turns in in a woosh of spray. Karsevaks cling to the roll bars and side rails. Blue light catches on their swords and trishuls. Tal watches it out of sight, shivers. Two minutes more, spellbound by the aeai.

“I presume you would like me to avoid them as well as policemen, soldiers, government officials, and everyone else?” the taxi-wallah offers.

“Especially them.” Tal absently fingers the contoured studs beneath yts skin, remembering adrenaline burn, remembering a city of blades and trishuls and more fear than yt ever felt possible. You don’t know it but I’ve beaten you, gendereds, Tal thinks. Rough boys, violent boys, think you own the streets, think you can do what you like and no one will stop you because you are strong, wild, young men, but this nute has you beat. I have the weapon in my hand and it has just given me the location of the man who will destroy you with it. “Do you know this place?” Tal asks, leaning over the seatback and thrusting the palmer in front of the driver’s face. Out there beyond the slashing windscreen wipers the night was turning hollow grey. The taxi-wallah waggled his head.

“It’s a drive.”

“Then I can get some sleep,” Tal says, settling back into the greasy upholstery, which is partly true and partly a disinvitation to the driver to chitter away about the state of the nation. But Najia clutches yts arm and whispers, “Tal, what am I going to do? It showed me things, about my dad, when we were in Afghanistan. Tal, awful things no one else could know about.”

“It lies. It’s a soap opera aeai, it’s designed to put minimal information together into stories with the greatest possible emotional impact. Come on, sister, who doesn’t get shit from their parents?”

In the hour and a half it takes the Maruti to detour around smouldering trash fires, dodge checkpoints, slip through barricades of burned-out cars, drive over street-sprayed swastikas and exhortations of Jai Bharat! Tal hears the radio play the national anthem twenty-four times, interrupted by short bulletins from the Rana Bhavan about the success of the Government of National Salvation in restoring safety and security. Yt squeezes Najia’s hand and presently she stops crying softly into the sleeve of her soft grey fleece top.

The taxi-wallah balks at taking his lovely Maruti across the dirty, gravelly causeway.

“Baba, for what I’m paying you, you buy a new taxi,” Tal exhorts. It is then that the Merc comes bowling towards them along the long straight causeway from the walled hunting lodge half-seen in the grey drizzle; hooting furiously. Tal checks yts lock on the position of the target palmer, taps the driver. “Stop that car,” yt orders.

“Stop that?” the driver asks. Tal flings the door open. The driver swears, skids to a halt. Before cry or protest, Tal has slipped out and walks through the drizzling rain towards the car. Headlights flash on, blinding yt. Yt can hear the engine rev deep in its throat. The horn is deep, polyphonic. Tal shields yts eyes with yts hand and keeps walking. The Merc leaps towards yt.

Najia presses her palms against the glass and cries our as she sees the car bear down on Tal in yts bedraggled finery. Tal raises a futile hand. Brakes screech and bind in the clingy marsh-mud. Najia closes her eyes. She does not know what the sound of half a million rupees of heavy Northern European engineering striking a heavily engineered human body sounds like but she is certain she will know it when she hears it. She doesn’t hear it. She hears a heavy car door thud shut. She dares open her eyes. The man and the nute stand in the dawn rain. That is Shaheen Badoor Khan, Najia thinks. She cannot but remember that other time she saw him, in the photographs at the club. Flashlight over dark upholstery, carved wood, polished surfaces but the dialogue is the same, politician and nute. This time it is the nute handing over the object of power. Shaheen Badoor Khan is smaller than she had imagined. She tries to fit opinions to him: traitor, coward, adulterer, fool; but her accusations are drawn down like stars to a black hole to the image of the room at the end of the corridor; the room she was never in, the room she never knew existed, the room at the end of her childhood, and her father welcoming her. History is happening here, she tries to tell herself to burn through the dreadful gravity of what the aeai had told her about her father. In front of you on a dirt road the feature is being shaped and you have a ringside seat. You are down there by the sand among the blood and sinews and you can smell the warm money. This is the story of yours or anyone else’s lifetime. This is your Pulitzer Prize before you are twenty-five.

And the rest of your life looking back, Najia Askarzadah.

A tap on the glass. Shaheen Badoor Khan bends low. Najia winds down the window. His face is grey-stubbled, his eyes are buried in exhaustion but they hold a tiny light, like a diya floating on a wide, dark river. Against all events and odds, against the tide of history, he has glimpsed victory. Najia thinks of the women parading their battle-cats head-high around the fighting ring, torn but valiant. He offers a hand.

“Ms. Askarzadah.” His voice is deeper than she imagined. She takes the hand. “You’ll excuse me if I seem a little slow this morning; I have rather been overwhelmed by the flow of events, but I must thank you, not just for myself—I am only a civil servant—but on behalf of my nation.”

Don’t thank me, Najia thinks. I was the one sold you in the first place. She says, “It’s all right.”

“No no, Ms. Askarzadah, you have uncovered a conspiracy of such scale, such audacity. I do not know quite how to deal with this, it is quite literally breathtaking. Machines, artificial intelligences.” He shakes his head and she senses how infinitely weary he is. “Even with this information, it is by no means over yet and you are by no means safe. I have an escape plan—everyone in the Bharat Sabha has an escape plan. I had intended to take myself and my wife, but my wife, as you have discovered.” Shaheen Badoor Khan shakes his head again and this time Najia senses his disbelief at the nested involutions, the wanton daring of the conspiracy. “Let’s say, I still have loyal agents in positions of influence, and those whose loyalty I can’t trust are at least well paid. I can get you to Kathmandu, after that you are on your own, I am afraid. I’d ask one thing, I know you’re a journalist and you have the story of the decade, but please do not release anything until I have played my card?”