Ian McDonald - River of Gods

He leans against the window. By the dash glow he sees his face in half profile, ghosted over the people in the street. But it is as if every one of those people over whom his image falls takes ownership of part of him.

Fucking jabber.

“Where are you taking me, boy?”

“Fighting.”

He’s right. There’s nowhere else to go where it comes down. But Shiv doesn’t like the boy being that close, watching, observing, second-guessing.

Fight! Fight! is thumping. Shiv walks down the shallow steps and straightens his cuffs and the smell of blood and money and raw wood and the adrenaline kicks in under his breastbone. He loves this place above all places on earth. He checks the clientele. Some new faces. That girl, up by the rail in the balcony, the one with the Persian nose, trying to look so cool. Shiv catches her eye. She holds him, long enough. Some other night. Now the barker is calling the next bout and he goes down to the bookies’ table. Down on Sonarpur Road fire engines are putting out a restaurant blaze started in a filing cabinet while something with the anatomy of a ten-year-old boy and appetites twice that is sliding chubby fingers towards the shakti yoni of his girl and a woman dead without profit drifts in the Ganga flow towards moksha, but here are people and movement and light and death and chance and fear and a girl parading a superb silver tabby battle cat around a sand ring. Shiv flips his crocodile wallet out of his jacket, fans notes, and lays them out on the table. Blue. He’s still seeing that blue.

“One lakh rupees,” Bachchan says. Beyond which there are no more, nor hope of more. Bachchan’s scribe counts the cash and writes the docket. Shiv takes his place by the pit and the barker calls fight! fight! The crowd roars and rises and Shiv with them, pressing against the wooden rail to hide his hard on. Then he is out of the deep blue with the silver tabby microsabre meat on the sand and his one hundred thousand notes scraped into the sattaman’s leather satchel. He wants to laugh. He realises the truth of the sadhus: there is blessing in having nothing.

In the car the laughter breaks out of him. Shiv beats his head against the window again and again. Tears run down his face. Finally he can breathe. Finally he can talk.

“Take me to Murfi’s,” Shiv orders. He is ravenously hungry now.

“What with?”

“There’s change in the glovebox.”

Tea Lane embraces its smokes and miasmas under domed umbrellas. They serve no meteorological purpose: Murfi claims his protects him from moonlight, which he feels to be baleful. Murfi has many claims, not the least of which is his name. Irish, he says. Irish as Sadhu Patrick.

Tea Lane has grown up to serve the men who build Ranapur. Behind the ranks of hot food and spice and fruit sellers, the original chai-houses open their wooden shutters on to the street and spill their tin tables and folding chairs on to the road. Over the gentle roar of gas burners and wind-up radios pushing Hindi Hits, a never-ending surf of soapi dialogue plays from hundreds of wall-screen televisions. Ten thousand calendars of soapi goddesses hang from drawing pins.

Shiv leans our the window counting loose change into Murfi’s monkey hand.

“And some of those pizza pakoras for him.” Shiv regards these as he would monkey turd pakora, but Yogendra has this idea they are the epitome of Western snack cool. “Murfiji, you say you pakora anything. Try these.”

Murfi unscrews the top of the flask, waves away the clouds of dry ice, tries to scry inside. “Eh, what you got in there?”

Shiv tells him. Murfi screws up his face, thrusts the flask back at Shiv.

“No, you keep ’em. You never know someone may get the taste.”

It is no comment on Murfi’s cooking but between one bite and the next, Shiv’s appetite vanishes. The people are all looking in the same direction. Behind Shiv. Shiv drops his newspaper of fried things. Street dogs descend on it. He snatches Yogendra’s dung from him.

“Leave that shit and get me away.”

Yogendra boots the pedal, wheel-spins into the suddenly empty street as something comes down on the roof so hard it bows the Merc to the axles. A shock absorber detonates like a grenade, there’s a flash of blue and a smell of burning electrics. The car rocks on its remaining three suspension points. Something moves up there. Yogendra flogs and flogs and flogs the engine but it will not catch.

“Out,” Shiv commands as the blade comes down through the roof. It is long, scimitar curved, serrated, bright as a surgeon’s steel and stabs the Merc from roof plate to transmission tunnel. As Shiv and Yogendra tumble out into Tea Lane, it rips forward and guts pressed steel like a sacrificial kid.

Now Shiv can see what’s hit the roof of his sixty million rupees of German trash metal and though it is the absolute death of him, he’s as paralysed by the sheer spectacle as any of the frozen people on Tea Lane. The windscreen shatters as the fighting robot’s blade completes the first pass. The lower grasping arms seize the raw edges and peel the roof open. The blunt phallus of the E-M gun seeks Shiv out on the street, fixes him with its monocular stare. That can’t hurt him. Shiv is transfixed by the big blade as it withdraws from the wreck formerly known as a Series 7 Mercedes and swivels into horizontal slash. The fighting machine rises up on its legs and steps towards him. It still has the serial number and little stars and stripes on its side but Shiv knows that the pilot will not be some late-teen with game-boy reactions and a methamphetamine habit wired twenty levels under Plains States America. This will be someone in the back of that panel van down by the twenty-four-hour cinema, smoking a bidi and weaving his hands through cyberspace in the dance of Kali. Someone who knows him.

Shiv does not try to run. These things can hit one hundred kph in a gallop and once they have the scent of your DNA, that blade will cut through any obstacle until it meets the soft flesh of your belly. The Urban Combat Robot rears over him. The vile little mantis head lowers, sensor rigs swivelling. Now Shiv relaxes. This is a show for the street.

“Mr. Faraji.” Shiv almost laughs. “For your information; as of this moment, all debts and fiscal encumbrances owed to Mr. Bachchan have been assigned to Ahimsa Collections Agency.”

“Bachchan is calling in my account?” Shiv shouts, looking at the remains of his last vestige of value, gutted on the street, bleeding alcofuel.

“That is correct, Mr. Faraji,” the hunter-killer robot says. “Your account with Bachchan Betting currently stands at eighteen million rupees. You have one week from today to settle this account or action for recovery will ensue.”

The machine spins on its hind heels, gathers itself, and leaps over the tea-vendors, cows, and hookers towards the intersection.

“Hey!” Shiv calls after it. “What’s wrong with an invoice?” He picks up shards and orts of German precision engineering and shies them after the debt collector.

“So, Ms. Durnau, your best idea,” Thomas Lull said across the wide desk with her CV and presentation file on it and beyond the picture window, wider Kansas in the hottest June this century.

“Where were you when it came to you?”

(She flashbacks to this, twenty-two hours out from ISS, twenty-six to Darnley 285, stuffed full of flight drugs and zipped up in a bag velcroed to the wall of the transfer pod so she doesn’t get in the way of Captain Pilot Beth who has a slightly blocked right nostril and whose breath whistles rhythmically until it is the biggest thing in Lisa Durnau’s universe.)

No one had known a June like it; the airport staff, the car rental girl, the university security man she asked for directions. This was more than hot water off the coast of Peru or the dying thrash of the Gulf Stream. Climatology had run into the white zone where nothing could be predicted any more. Thomas Lull had flipped through her CV, glanced at the first page of her presentation and when she flashed up the first slide, stopped her with that curve-ball question.