Ian McDonald - River of Gods

The tilt-jet banks in between the big projects. Mr. Nandha shelters in the stair head as the aircraft slides in over the rooftop and swivels its engines into a hover. Vik is in the copilot’s seat as the tilt-jet turns, face dramatically underlit by the console leds. The roof cannot possibly support a Bharati Air Force tilt-jet; the pilot brings her ship down centimetre by centimetre in a delicate Newtonian ballet, positioning the craft so Mr. Nandha can slip between the vortices from the wingtip engines and safely up the access ramp in the tail. The downblast works the destruction he had fantasised. The trellises are smashed flat in an instant. The geraniums are swept from their perches. Seedlings and small plants are uprooted from the soft soil; the earth itself peels away in muddy gobs. The saturated wood of the beds steams, then smokes. The pilot descends until her wheels kiss roofing felt. The rear ramp unfolds.

Lights go on piecemeal in the overlooking windows.

Mr. Nandha pulls his collar close and beats through the buffets to the open, blue-lit interior. All his team are there among the aircav sowars. Mukul Dev and Ram Lalli. Madhvi Prasad, even Morva of the Money Trail. As Mr. Nandha belts in beside him, the ramp closes and the pilot opens up the engines.

“My dear friends,” Mr. Nandha says. “I am glad you are beside me on this historic occasion. A Generation Three Artificial Intelligence. An entity as far beyond our fleshly intellect as ours is a pig’s. Bharat will thank us. Now, let us be diligent in our excommunication.”

The tilt-jet turns on its vertical axis as it climbs above Mr. Nandha’s shattered roof garden, higher than all the windows and balconies and rooftop solar farms and watertanks of his neighbours. Then the pilot puts the nose up and the tail down and the little ship climbs steeply between the towers.

The last of the gods flicker out over Varanasi and the sky is just the sky. The streets are silent, the buildings are mute, the cars have no voices and the people are just faces, closed like fists. There are no answers, no oracles in the trees and street shrines, no prophecies from the incoming aircraft, but this world without gods is rich in its emptiness. Senses fill up the spaces; engines roar, the wall of voices leap forward; the colours of the saris, the men’s shirts, the neons flashing through the grey rain, all glow with their own, vivid light. Each touch of street-incense, stale urine, hot fat, alcofuel exhaust, damp burning plastic is an emotion and a memory of her life before the lies.

She was a different person then, if the women in the hovel are to be believed. But the gods—the machines, she now realizes—say she is now another self altogether. Say: said. The gods are gone. Two sets of memories. Two lives that cannot live with each other, and now a third that must somehow incarnate both. Lull. Lull will know, Lull will tell her how to make sense of these lives. She thinks she can remember the way back to the hotel.

Dazed by the empire of the senses, released from the tyranny of information into the realm of simple things , Aj lets the city draw her to the river.

In the dawn rain on the Western Allahabad orbital motorway, two hundred Awadhi main battle tanks fire up their engines, spin on their tracks out of their laagered positions and form into an orderly column. Faster, fleeter traffic buzzes past the four-kilometre queue but there is no mistaking its general direction, south by southwest towards the Jabalpur Road. By the time the shops roll up their shutters and the salary-wallahs zip in to work in their phatphats and company cars the newsboys are screaming it from their pitches on the concrete central reserves: TANKS PULL OUT! ALLAHABAD SAVED! AWADH WITHDRAWS TO KUNDA KHADAR!

Another of Bharat’s inexhaustible fleet of Prime Ministerial Mercedes is waiting for the Bharatiya Vayu Sena Airbus Industries A510 as it turns into its stand well away from the busier parts of Varanasi airport. Umbrellas shelter Prime Minister Ashok Rana from the steps to the car; it draws away in a wush of fat tires on wet apron. There is a call waiting on the comlink. N. K. Jivanjee. Again. He is not looking at all like what would be expected of the Interior Minister of a Government of National Unity. He has unexpected news to break.

If she lets his hand slip in this crowd she is lost.

The armed police try to clear the riverside. The messages blaring from their bullhorns and truck-top speakers are for the crowds to disperse, the people to return to their homes and businesses; order has been restored, they are in no danger, no danger at all. Some, swept along in the general panic, who did not really want to abandon their livelihoods, turn back. Some do not trust the police or their neighbours or the contradictory pronouncements from the government. Some do not know what to do; they turn and mill, going nowhere. Between the three and the army hummers squeezing through the narrow galis around the Vishwanath Gali, the streets and ghats are locked solid.

Lisa Durnau keeps her fingers tightly locked around Thomas Lull’s left hand. In his right he holds the Tablet, like a lantern on a dark night. Some final fragment of her that feels responsible to governments and their strategies worries about the little built-in meltdown sequence should the Tablet get cold and lonely. But she does not think Lull will be needing it very long. Whatever is to be played out here will be ended soon.

Nandha. Krishna Cop. Licensed terminator of unauthorised aeais. The grainy Tabernacle image is fused into her forebrain. No point questioning how a Krishna Cop came to be inside a machine older than the solar system, no more than any of them, but she is certain of one thing; this is the place, the time where all images are born.

Thomas Lull stops abruptly, mouth open in frustration as he scans the crowd with the Tablet, looking for a match with the image on the liquid screen.

“The water tower!” he shouts and jerks Lisa Durnau along after him. The great pink concrete cylinders rise from the ghats every few hundred metres along the waterfront, each joined to the uppermost steps by pink-painted gantries. Lisa Durnau can’t make any face out of the mass of refugees and devotees pressing around the water tower base. Then the tilt-jet cuts in across the ghats so low everyone instinctively ducks. Everyone, Lisa observes, but a solitary figure in grey up on the catwalk around the top of the water tower.

He has it now. The Gyana Chakshu device is linked through to his ’hoek and by its extrapolations and modellings and vectorings and predictings he can see the aeai like a moving light that shines through people, through traffic, through buildings. He watches from kilometres of altitude and distance, moving through the warren of lanes and galis behind the riverfront. With his privileged insight, Mr. Nandha directs the pilot. She brings the tilt-jet round in a sweeping arc and Mr. Nandha looks down into the tide of people swelling the streets and she is a shining star. He and the aeai are the only two solid beings in a city of ghosts. Or is it, thinks Mr. Nandha, the converse that is true?

He orders the pilot to take them in over the river. Mr. Nandha summons his avatars. They boil up in his vision like thunderheads, ringing the fleeing aeai on every side, a siege of deities, their weapons and attributes readied, scraping the clouds, Ganga water boiling around their vahanas. An invisible world, seen only by the devotee, the true. The fleeing fleck of light stops. Mr. Nandha commands Ganesha the opener to flick through local security cameras until the pattern matcher locates the excommunicee on the Dasashvamedha Ghat water tower. It stands, hands gripping the rail, staring out over the mob of wheeling people fighting for the Patna boat. Does it stand so because it sees what I see? Mr. Nandha wonders. Does it stop in fear and awe as gods rear from the water? Are we the only two true seers in the city of delusions?