Ian McDonald - River of Gods

She looks at Thomas Lull beside her on the warm stone, knees pulled up, arms around them, looking across the river at the fantastical fortresses of the clouds. He said little since Rhodes from the embassy secured their release from the Ministry’s holding centre, a conference room converted by removing all the tables and chairs, filled with bad tempered businessmen, feisty grameen women, and furious Ray Power researchers. The air was hissing with calls to lawyers.

Thomas Lull had not even blinked. The car had left them at the haveli but he turned away from the ornate wooden gate and headed out into the warren of lanes and street markets that led down to the ghats. Lisa had not tried to stop him or ask him or talk to him. She watched him walk up and down the flights, along and around looking for where feet had trodden blood into the stone. She had looked at his face as he stood there with the people bustling over the place where Aj had died and thought, I know that look from a big wide Lawrence living room with no furniture. And she knew what she needed to do, and that her mission was always going to fail. And when he finally shook his head in the weak gesture of disbelief that was more eloquent than any drama of emotion and went down to the river and sat by the water, she had gone with him and settled on the sun-warmed stone, for when he was ready.

The musicians have begun a soft, slow heartbeat. The crowd grows by the minute. The sense of expectation, of presence, is a felt thing.

“L. Durnau,” says Thomas Lull. Against herself, she smiles. “Give me that thing.”

She passes him the Tablet. He flicks through its pages. She sees him call up the images from the Tabernacle; Lisa, Lull. Aj. Nandha the Krishna Cop. He folds the faces back into the machine. A mystery never to be solved. She knows he will never come back with her.

“You think you learn something, you think finally you’ve got it worked out. It’s taken time and grief and effort and a shitload of experience but at last, you think you’ve got some idea how it all works, the whole fucking show. You think I’d know better, I honestly want to believe that we’re actually all right, that there’s something more to it than just planet-slime and that’s why it gets me every time. Every single time.”

“The curse of the optimist, Lull. People get in the way.”

“No, not people, L. Durnau. No, I gave up on people long ago. No, I’d hoped, when I worked out what the aeais were doing, I thought, Jesus, that’s a fucking irony, the machines that want to understand what it’s like to be human are actually more human than we are. I never hoped in us, L. Durnau, but I hoped that the Gen Threes might have evolved some moral sense. No, they abandoned her. As soon as they saw there never would be peace between the meat and the metal, they let her go. Learn what it’s like to be human. They learned all they needed to know in one act of betrayal.

“They saved themselves. They saved their species.”

“Did you listen to a word I said, L. Durnau?”

A child comes down the steps, a little girl in a floral dress, barefoot, uncertain on the ghats. Her face is pure concentration. Her father has hold of one hand, the other, waving to keep balance, holds a garland of marigolds. The father points her to the river, points her to throw, go on, put it in. The girl flings the gajra, waves her arms in delight as she sees it land on the darkening water. She cannot be more than two.

No, you’re wrong, Lull, Lisa Durnau wants to say. It’s those stubborn tiny lights they can never put out. It’s those quanta of joy and wonder and surprise that never stop bubbling out of the universal and constant truths of our humanity. When she speaks, her words are, “So where do you think you’ll go then?”

“There’s still a dive school with my name on it somewhere down Lanka, Thailand way,” Thomas Lull says. “There’s one night in the year, just after the first full moon in November, when the coral releases its sperm and eggs, all at once. It’s quite wonderful, like swimming in a giant orgasm. I’d like to see that. Or there’s Nepal, the mountains; I’d like to see the mountains, really see the mountains, spend time among them. Do some mountain Buddhism, all those demons and horrors, that’s the kind of religion speaks to me. Get up to Kathmandu, out to Pokhara, some place high, with a view of the Himalayas. Will this get you in trouble with the G-men?”

Father and daughter stand by the water, watching the gajra bob on the ripples. The child smiles suspiciously at her. What have you been doing all your life, Lisa Durnau, that is more vital than this?

“They’ll get round to me eventually.”

“Well, take this back to them. I suppose I owe you, L. Durnau.” Thomas Lull hands her the Tablet. Lisa Durnau frowns at the schematic. “What is this?”

“The winding maps for the Calabi-Yau space the Gen Threes created at Ray Power.”

“It’s a standard set of transforms for an information-space with a mindlike space-time structure. Lull, I helped develop these theories, remember? They got me into your office.”

And bed, she thinks.

“Do you remember what I said on the boat, L. Durnau? About Aj? ‘The other way around.’”

Lisa Durnau frowns, then she sees it, as she saw it written by the hand of God on the toilet door in Paddington Station, and it is so clear and so pure and so beautiful it is like a spear of light stabbed straight through her, ramming through her pinning her to the white stone and it feels like death and it feels like ecstasy and it feels like something singing. Tears start in her eyes, she wipes them away, she cannot stop looking at the single, miraculous, luminous negative sign. Negative T. The time-arrow is reversed. A mindlike space, where the intelligences of the aeais can merge into the structure of the universe and manipulate it in any way they will. Gods. The clocks run backwards. As it ages, as it grows more complex; our universe grows younger and dumber and simpler. Planets dissolve into dust, stars evaporate into clouds of gas that coalesce into brief supernovas that are not the light of destruction but candles of creation, space collapsing in on itself, hotter and hotter reeling back towards the primordial ylem, forces and particles churned back into the primordial ylem while the aeais grow in power and wisdom and age. Time’s arrow flies the other way.

Hands shaking, she calls up a simple math aeai, runs a few fast transforms. As she suspected, the arrow of time not only flies in the other direction, it flies faster. A fast, fierce universe of lifetimes compressed into moments. The clock-speed, the Planck-time flicker that governs the rates at which the aeais calculate their reality, is one hundred times that of universe zero. Breathless, Lisa Durnau thumbs more calculations into the Tablet though she knows, she knows, she knows what it is going to tell her. Universe 212255 runs its course from birth to recollapse into a final singularity in seven point seven eight billion years.

“It’s a Boltzmon!” she exclaims with simple joy. The girl in the flower dress turns and stares at her. The cinder of a universe; an ultimate black hole that contains every piece of quantum information that fell into it, that punches its way out of one dying reality into another. And waits, humanity’s inheritance.

“Their gift to us,” Thomas Lull says. “Everything they knew, everything they experienced, everything they learned and created, they sent it through to us as their final act of thanks. The Tabernacle is a simple universal automaton that codes the information in the Boltzmon into a form comprehensible to us.”

“And us, our faces.”

“We were their gods. We were their Brahma and Siva, Vishnu and Kali. We are their creation myth.”