Ian McDonald - River of Gods

Marianna Fusco takes Deba’s other shoulder and together they bring him to safety. The Ray Power shareholders have moved back to the furthest section of the formal charbagh. Vishram thinks it odd yet human that no one has left.

“Assessment?” he asks Sonia Yadav. The sirens are close now, he hopes they are parameds. And that aircraft is very, very near.

“Our computers are downloading at an incredible rate,” she says.

“Where?”

“Into that .”

“Is there anything we can do?”

“No,” she says simply. “It’s not in our hands now.”

You’ve got what you wanted, Vishram prays at the sphere of light. You don’t have to do anything else. Just close the door and walk away. And as he thinks it there is a second flash of light and a huge thunderclap of air and light and energy and space-time rushing into absolute vacuum and when Vishram’s vision clears he sees two things.

The first is a large perfectly hemispherical perfectly smooth crater where Ray Power Research Centre had stood.

The other is a line of soldiers in full combat gear advancing across the neat, watered lawn, weapons at the present. At their head is a tall, thin man with a good suit and a bad five o’clock shadow and a gun in his hand.

“Your attention please!” the man shouts. “Nobody is permitted to leave. You are all under arrest.”

Lisa Durnau finds Thomas Lull kneeling on the grass, his hands still cuffed with black plastic cable grip. He is beyond tears, beyond wrack. All that remains is a terrible stillness.

She settles awkwardly beside him on the grass, tears at her own plastic tie with her teeth.

“They got away,” Thomas Lull says, taking a long shuddering breath.

“The counterinflation force must have pushed into in-folded dimensions,” Lisa Durnau says. “It was a hell of a risk.”

“I looked into it,” Thomas Lull whispers. “As we were coming in over it, I looked into it. It is the Tabernacle.”

But how? Lisa Durnau wants to ask, but Thomas Lull slumps back on to his back, bound hands on his small pot belly, staring up into the light of the sun.

“She showed them there was nothing for them here,” he says. “Just people, just bloody people. I like to think she made a choice, for people. For us. Even though. Even though.” Lisa Durnau sees his body quiver and knows whatever it is lies beyond tears will come soon. She has never known that. She looks away. She has seen the look of this man destroyed before and that is enough for one lifetime.

Mr. Nandha would love most dearly to loosen his collar with his finger. The heat in the corridor is oppressive; the air-conditioning aeai follows Ray Power ethical practice, reluctant to react to sudden shifts in microclimate in the name of energy efficiency. But the sun has broken through the monsoon clouds and the glass face of Mr. Nandha’s headquarters is a sweat machine. His suit is rumpled. His skin is waxy with perspiration. He fears he may have an unpleasing body odour that his superiors will sense the moment he enters Arora’s office.

Mr. Nandha thinks there is blood on his shoes.

Air-conditioning aeais. Djinns even in the air ducts. From his seat he can look down upon his city as he has all those times when he called upon it to be his oracle. Now there is nothing here. My Varanasi is given over to djinns, he thinks.

Clouds move, light shifts in rays and shafts. Mr. Nandha winces at a sudden glint of brilliance from the green western suburbs. A heliograph, for his eye only, from the hundred-metre hemisphere carved out by an alien space-time where Ray Power’s Research and Development section had once stood. Precise down to the quantum level, a perfect mirror. He knows, because he stood there, firing and firing and firing at his own distorted reflection until Vik wrestled him to the ground, hauled the god-gun out of his fist. Vik, in his hissing, ill-fitting rock-boi shoes.

He can still see her shoes, racked up so neatly in pairs like praying hands.

They will be agreeing on a script, behind Arora’s door. Exceeded his authority. Excessive force. Public endangerment. The Energy Minister in handcuffs. Disciplinary measures. Suspension from duties. Of course. They must. But they do not know there is nothing they can do to him now. Mr. Nandha can feel the acid start to burn his esophagus. So many betrayals. His superiors, his stomach, his city. He erases the faithless shikaras and mandapas of Varanasi, imagines the campaniles and piazzas and duomos of Cremona. Cremona of the mind, the only eternal city. The only true city.

The door opens. Arora peeps out nervously, like a bird from a nest.

“You can come in now, Nandha.”

Mr. Nandha stands up, straightens his jacket and cuffs. As he walks towards the open door, the opening bars of the first Bach cello sonata soar through his mind.

In a dark room at the heart of a temple to a dark goddess, smeared with blood and hazy with the ash of dead humans, a cross-legged old man rolls on his skinny buttock bones and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs.

In the evening a wind blows up from the river as a cool exhalation. It sweeps the ghats, stirs up the dust, and sends eddies of marigold petals scurrying along the day-warmed stone. It rattles the newspapers of the old widower men who know they will never marry again, who come down to the ghats to talk the day’s headlines with their friends, it tugs at the trails and folds of the women’s saris. It sets the ghee-flames of the diyas swaying, ruffles the surface of the water into little cat-waves as the bathers scoop it up in their copper dishes and pour it over their heads. The scarlet silk flags curl on their bamboo poles. The wide wicker umbrellas shift as the breeze reaches under their decorated caps and lifts them. It smells of deep water, this small wind. It smells of cool and time and a new season. Down beneath the funeral ghats the men who pan the river for the golden ashes of the dead look up, touched by a sense of something more, something deeper than their dismal trade. The sound of the boat oars as they dip and slop into the water is rich and bottomless.

It was in the early afternoon that the rain lifted and the roof of grey cloud broke and there, beyond it, was a sky of high, miraculous blue, Krishna blue. You could see all the way out of the universe in that clear, washed blue. The sun shone, the stone ghats steamed. Within minutes the foot-trodden mud had dried to dust. People came out from under their umbrellas, uncovered their heads, unfolded their newspapers, and lit cigarettes. Rain has been, rain will come again: great curds of cumulus cruise the eastern horizon beyond the plumes and vapours of the industrial shore, preposterous purple and yellow in the fast-falling light. Already the people take up their positions for the aarti, the nightly fire ceremony. These ghats may witness panic, flight, populations on the move, bloody death, but thanks as endless as the river are due to Ganga Mata. Drummers, percussionists make their way to the sides of the wooden platforms where the brahmins perform. Barefoot women carefully descend the steps, dip their hands in the rising river before finding their accustomed place. They skirt around the two Westerners sitting by the water’s edge, nod, smile. All are welcome at the river.

The marble is warm under Lisa Durnau’s thigh, skin smooth. She can smell the water, coiling silently at her foot. The first flotillas of diyas are striking bravely out into the current, stubborn tiny lights on the darkening water. The breeze plays cool on her bare shoulders, a woman namastes as she passes back from the forgiving water. India endures, she thinks. And India ignores. These are its strengths, twined around each other like lovers in a temple carving. Armies clash, dynasties rise and fall, lords die and nations and universes are born and the river flows on and the people flow to it. Perhaps this woman had not even noticed the flash of light that was the aeais departing to their own universe. If she had, how would she have thought of it? Some new weapons system, some piece of electronica gone bad, some inexplicable piece of complicated world gone awry. Not for her to know or wonder. The only part of it to touch her was when Town and Country suddenly disappeared. Or did she look up and see another truth entirely, the jyotirlinga, the generative power of Siva bursting from an earth that could not contain it in a pillar of light.