Ian McDonald - River of Gods

An aeai incarnate in human flesh. Evil times indeed. Mr. Nandha cannot imagine what alien, inhuman scheme is behind this outrage against a soul. He does not want to imagine. To know can be the path to understanding, understanding to tolerance. Some things must remain intolerable. He will erase the abomination and all will be right. All will be in order again.

A lone star shines in Mr. Nandha’s vision from the top of the water tower as the pilot turns between Hanuman and Ganesha. He jabs his finger down towards the rain-puddled strand. The pilot pulls up the nose and swivels the engines. Sadhus and swamis flee their scab-fires, shaking their skinny fists at the object descending out of heaven. If you saw as I see, thinks Mr. Nandha, loosing his seat belt.

“Boss,” Vik calls as he works his way through the cabin, “we’re picking up enormous traffic into the Ray Power internal network. I think it’s our Gen Three.”

“In due time,” Mr. Nandha says, gently chiding. “Everything in proper order. That is the way to do business. We will finish our task here and then attend to Ray Power.”

His gun is ready in his fist as he hits the sand at the foot of the ramp and the sky is crazy with gods.

All the people. Aj grips the rusted railing, dizzied by the masses on the ghats and the riverbanks. The pressure of their bodies forced her up on to this gallery when she found her breath catching in her throat as she tried to get back to the haveli. Aj empties her lungs, holds, inhales slowly through her nostrils. The mouth for talking, the nose for breathing. But the carpet of souls appalls her. There is no end to the people, they unfold out of each other faster than they go to the burning ghats and the river. She remembers those other places where she was among people, in the big station, on the train when it burned and in the village afterwards when the soldiers took them all to safety, after she stopped the machines.

She understands how she did that, now. She understands how she knew the names of the bus driver on the Thekkady road, and of the boy who stole the motorbike in Ahmedabad. It is a past as close and alien as a childhood, indelibly part of her, but separate, innocent, old. She is not that Aj. She is not the other Aj either, the engineered child, the avatar of the gods. She attained understanding, and in that moment of enlightenment was abandoned. The gods could not bear too much humanity. And now she is a third Aj. No more voices and wisdoms in street lights and cab ranks—these, she now realises, were the aeais, whispering into her soul through the window of her tilak. She is a prisoner now in that bone prison, like every other life out there by that river. She is fallen. She is human.

Then she hears the plane. She looks up as it comes in low, fast over the temple spires and the towers of the havelis. She sees ten thousand people cringe as one but she remains standing for she knows what it is. A final remembrance of being something other than human, some last divine whisper, the god-light fading into the background microwave hum of the universe, tells her. She watches the plane pull up and descend on to the trampled sand, scattering the sadhu’s ash-fires in sprays of cinders and knows that it has come for her. She begins to run.

With brisk flicks of his hand, Mr. Nandha dispatches his squad to clear the ghats and seal off exits. In his peripheral vision he notices Vik hang back, Vik still in his street garb from the night’s battles, Vik sweaty and grubby on this humid monsoon morning. Vik uncertain, Vik fearful. He makes a note to himself to admonish Vik for insufficient zeal. When the case is closed, that is the time for robust management. Mr. Nandha strides out across the damp white sand.

“Attention attention!” he cries, warrant card held up. “This is a Ministry security operation. Please render our officers all assistance. You are in no danger.” But it is the gun in his right hand, not the authority in his left, that makes men step back, parents pull curious children away, wives push husbands out of his path. To Mr. Nandha, Dasashvamedha Ghat is an arena paved with ghosts, ringed by watching gods. He imagines smiles on their high, huge faces. He gives his attention to the small, glowing dot in his enhanced vision, star-shaped now, the pentagram of the human figure. The aeai is moving from its vantage on the water tower. It is on the walkway now. Mr. Nandha breaks into a run.

The crowd ducked as the tilt-jet went over and Lisa Durnau ducked with it and as she glimpses Aj on the tower, she feels Thomas Lull’s fingers slip through her own and separate. The bodies close around him. He is gone.

“Lull!” In a few footsteps he has vanished completely, absorbed into the motion of bright salwars and jackets and T-shirts. Hiding in plain sight. “Lull!” No chance she will ever be heard over the roar of Dasashvamedha Ghat. Suddenly she is more claustrophobic than she ever was confined in the stone birth-canal of Darnley 285. Alone in the crowd. She stops, panting in the rain. “Lull!” She looks up at the water tower at the head of the staggered stone steps. Aj still stands at the rail. Wherever she is, Lull will be. No place, no time for Western niceties. Lisa Durnau elbows through the milling crowd.

In the Tablet she is innocent, in the Tablet she is unknowing, unseeing, in the Tablet she is a teenage kid up on a high place looking down on one of Earth’s great human wonders.

“Let me through, let me through!” Thomas Lull shouts. He sees the tilt-jet unfold its mantis landing-gear and settle on the sand bar. He sees ripples of discontent spread through the crowd as the soldiers push people back. From his higher vantage on the ghat he sees the pale figure advance across the cleared marble. That is the fourth avatar of the Tabernacle. That is Nandha the Krishna Cop.

There is a story by Kafka, Lull recalls in the mad sell-consciousness of ultimate effort; of a herald bringing a message of grace and favour from a king to a subject. Though the herald holds seals and passes and words of power, he can never leave the palace because of the press of people, never make it through the crowd to bring the vital word. And thus it goes unsaid, or so he remembers it from his paranoid days.

“Aj!” He is close enough to see the three grubby white stripes on the side of her grey trainers. “Aj.” But his words fall into well of sound, flattened and obliterated by sharper, louder Hindi tones. And his breath is failing, he can feel the little elastic pull of tension at the bottom of each inhalation.

Fuck Kafka.

“Aj!”

He cannot see her any more.

Run , whisper the ashes of the gods. Her feet clatter along the metal gantry, she swings around the stanchion and down the sharp-edged steel steps. An elderly man cries out and curses as Aj slams into him.

“Sorry, sorry,” she whispers, hands held up in supplication but he is gone. She pauses a moment on the topmost step. The tilt-jet stands on the sand to her right, down by the water’s edge. A disturbance in the crowd moves towards her like a cobra. Behind her the whip aerials of an army hummer move between the low, dripping stalls of Dasashvamedha Gali. No escape there. The hydrofoil stands at the jetty at the head of a huge diamond of people trying to press on board. Many are shoulder deep in the water, burdens and livelihoods borne on their heads. Once she might have tried to rule the machines that control the boat and escape by water. She does not have that power any more. She is only human. To her left the walls and buttresses of Man Singh’s astronomical palace step down to Ganga. Heads, hands, voices, things, colours, rain-wet skin, eyes. A pale head raised above the others by a foreign height. Long hair, grey stubble. Blue eyes. Blue shirt, silly shirt, loud garish shirt, saving glorious shirt.