Ian McDonald - River of Gods

That soothing tone. That G-woman MBA-speak. Peace. Be calm. We are in control here. Be reasonable, in the face of the most unreasonable thing in the universe. Clinging with one hand to a webbing strap on the quilted wall of ISS’s hub, Lisa Durnau understands that it has all been unreasonable, a chain of ever larger and heavier links, from the moment the people in suits turned up in her office. From before; from the moment her face swirled out of the seethe of cells, without her knowledge, without her permission, the Tabernacle chose her. It has all been foreordained by this thing in the sky.

“I don’t know!” Lisa Durnau shouts. “I don’t know why. it throws up nothing and then comes up with my face. I don’t know, right? I didn’t ask it to, I didn’t want it to, it has nothing to do with me, do you understand me?”

“Lisa.” Again, the gentling tone.

It is her, but a her she has never seen. She’s never worn her hair like that. Lull has never looked like that. Older freer guiltier. No wiser. And this girl; she has never met her, but she will, she knows. This is a snapshot of her future taken seven billion years ago.

“Lisa,” Daley Suarez-Martin says a third time. The third time is Peter’s time. The betraying time. “I’m going to tell you what we need you to do.”

Lisa Durnau takes a deep breath.

“I know what it is,” she says. “I’ll find him. I can’t do anything else, can I?”

The earth has the little lightbody firmly in its grip. It’s three minutes—Lisa’s been counting seconds—since the roll jets last fired. The aeai has made its mind up, it is all now in the hands of velocity and gravity. Back-first, Lisa Durnau screams along the edge of the atmosphere in a thing that still looks like an over-gymmed orange squeezer, only now, with the hull temperature climbing towards three thousand cee, it’s not as funny as it was down in Canaveral. One digit out either way and thin air becomes a solid wall that ricochets you off into space and no one to catch you before your airco runs flat, or you fireball out and end as a sprinkle of titanium ions with a seasoning of charred carbon.

When she was a teen in her college hall room, Lisa Durnau had given herself one of the great scares of her life, alone in the dark among the noisy plumbing, by imagining what it will be like when she dies. The breath failing. The rising sense of panic as the heart fights for blood. The black drawing in from all sides. The knowledge of what is happening, and that you are unable to stop any of this and that after this meagre, unworthy last instance of consciousness, there will be nothing. And that this will happen to Lisa Durnau. No escape. No let-off. The death sentence is incommutable. She had woken herself up, frozen cold in her stomach, heart sick with certainty. She had stabbed on her light and tried to think good thoughts, bright thoughts, thoughts about guys and running and what she would do for that term paper and where the girls could go for Friday lunch club, but her imagination kept returning to the awful, delicious fear, like a cat to vomit.

Reentry is like that. She tries to think good thoughts, bright thoughts, but all she has is a pick of evils and the worst is out there, heating the hull beyond that padded mesh wall to cremation temperatures. It burns through the drugs. It burns through everything. You are the woman who fell to earth. The lightbody jolts. Lisa gives a small cry.

“It’s okay, it’s routine, just an asymmetry in the plasma shield.” Sam Rainey is strapped in the number two acceleration couch. He’s an old hand, been up and down a dozen times but Lisa Durnau smells bullshit. Her fingers have cramped around the armrest; she frees them, touches her heart for brief reassurance. She feels the flat square object in the pocket with her name written on it.

When she finds Thomas Lull she is to show him the contents of her right breast pocket. It is a memory block containing everything known or speculated about the Tabernacle. All she has to do then is persuade him to join the research project. Thomas Lull was the most prominent, eclectic, visionary, and influential scientific thinker of his day. Governments and chat-show hosts alike heeded his opinions. If anyone has an idea, a dream, or a vision of what this thing is, spinning in its stone cocoon, if anyone has a way of unravelling its message and meaning, it will be Thomas Lull.

The block is also guru. Its special power is that it can scan any public or security camera system for recognised faces. It’s such a piece of gear that if it’s away from Lisa Durnau’s personal body odour for more than an hour, it will decompose into a smear of protein circuitry. Be careful with the showers, swims, and keep it close by you when you’re in bed, is the instruction. Her one lead is a semiconfirmed sighting of Thomas Lull three and a half years ago in Kerala, South India. The revelation of the Tabernacle hangs from a single, uncorroborated old backpacker story. The embassies and consuls are on Render-All-Assistance alert. A card has been authorised for expenses; it is limitless, but Daley Suarez-Martin, who will always be Lisa Durnau’s handler, in orbit or earthbound, would like some record of outgoings.

The little lightpusher hits the air hard, a fist of gravity shoves Lisa Durnau deep into her gel couch and everything is jolting and rattling and shaking. She is more afraid than she has ever been and there is nothing, absolutely nothing she can hold on to. She reaches out a hand. Sam Rainey takes it. His gloved hand is big and cartoonish and one tiny node of stability in a falling, shuddering universe.

“Some time!” Sam shouts, voice shaking. “Some time! When we! Get down! How about! We go out! For a meal! Somewhere?”

“Yes! Anything!” Lisa Durnau wails as she hurtles Kennedy-wards, drawing a long, beautiful plasma trail across the tall-grass prairies of Kansas.

How Thomas Lull knows he is un-American: he hates cars but loves trains, Indian trains, big trains like a nation on the move. He is content with the contradiction that they are at once hierarchical and democratic, a temporary community brought together for a time; vital while it lasts, burning away like early mist when the terminus is reached. All journey is pilgrimage and India is a pilgrim nation. Rivers, grand trunk roads, trains; these are sacred things across all India’s many nations. For thousands of years people have been flowing over this vast diamond of land. All is riverrun, meeting, a brief journey together, then dissolution.

Western thought rebels against this. Western thought is car thought. Freedom of movement. Self-direction. Individual choice and expression and sex on the back seat. The great car society. Throughout literature and music, trains have been engines of fate, drawing the individual blindly, inexorably towards death. Trains ran through the double gates of Auschwitz, right up to the shower sheds. India has no such understanding of trains. It is not where the unseen engine is taking you; it is what you see from the window, what you say to your fellow travellers for you all go together. Death is a vast, crowded terminus of half-heard announcements and onward connections on new lines, new journeys. Changing trains.

The train from Thiruvananthapuram moves through a wide web of lines into the great station. Sleek shatabdis weave over the points on to the fast uplines. Long commuter trains whine past festooned with passengers hanging from the doors, riding the boarding steps, piled onto the roofs, arms thrust through the barred windows, prisoners of the mundane. Mumbai. She has always appalled Thomas Lull. Twenty million people live on this onetime archipelago of seven scented islands and the evening rush is upon her. Downtown Mumbai is the world’s largest single building; malls and housing projects and office and leisure units fused together into a many-armed, many-headed demon. Nestled at the heart of it is Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus, a bezoar of Victorian excess and arrogance, now completely domed over with shopping precincts and business units, like a toad entombed in a nodule of limestone. There is never a moment when Chattrapati Shivaji is still or silent. She is a city within a city. Certain castes boast they are unique to it; families claim to have raised generations among the platforms and tracks and red brick piers who have never seen daylight. Five hundred million pilgrim feet pass over the Raj marble each year, tended to by citiesful of porters, vendors, shysters, insurance sellers, and janampatri readers.