Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“Professor Lull, I am experiencing a number of strong and unpleasant sensations. Let me describe them to you. Though I am at relative rest, I experience a sense of vertigo, as if I am falling; not in a physical sense, but inwards. I experience a sense of nausea and what I can only describe as hollowness. I experience unreality, as if this present is not happening to me and I am dreaming in my bed in the hotel in Thekkady. I experience a sense of impact, as if I have been struck without a physical blow being landed on me. I imagine that the physical substance of the world is frail and fragile like glass and that at any moment I will fall through into a void, yet at the same time I find a thousand different ideas rushing through my head. Professor Lull, can you explain my contradictory sensations?”

The swift sun of India is now setting, staining Aj’s face red like a devotee of Kali. The fast train blurs through Mumbai’s vast basti-lands. Thomas Lull says, “It’s what anyone feels when their life turns to lies. It’s anger and it’s betrayal and it’s confusion and loss and fear and hurt but those are only names. We have no language for emotions other than the emotion itself.”

“I feel tears starting in my eyes. This is most surprising.” Then Aj’s voice breaks and Thomas Lull helps her to the washroom to let the alien emotions work themselves out away from the stares of the passengers. Back at his seat he calls a steward and orders a bottle of water. He pours a glass, adds a high-grade tranq from his small but efficacious travelling apothecary, and marvels at the simple complexity of the ripple patterns on its surface transmitted from the steel beat of the wheels. When Aj returns he pushes the trembling glass across the table before any more of her questions can tumble out. He has enough of his own.

“All of it.”

The tranq is not long taking effect. Aj blinks at him like a drunk owl, curls up as cat-comfortable as she can in the seat. She is out. Thomas Lull’s hand moves to her tilak, stops. It would be a violation as monstrous as if he slipped his hand down the front of her loose grey tie-waist pants. And that is a thought he hadn’t verbalised until this second.

Strange girl, curled up like a gangly ten-year-old in her seat. He told her truths to scarify any heart and she treated them like propositions in philosophy. As if they were strange to her, new. Alien. Why had he told her? To break her illusion or because he knew how she would react? To see the look on her face as she fought to comprehend what her body was experiencing? He knows that fearful bafflement from the faces of the beach-club kids when emotions brewed up in the protein processor matrices of the cyberabads hit them. Emotions for which their bodies have no needs or analogues; emotions they experience but cannot understand. Alien emotions.

He has much work to do. As the fast train plunges past the empty, stepped reservoirs of the purifying Narmada, hurling itself into the night past the villages and towns and drought-blighted forests, Thomas Lull goes far-fetching. An old down-home expression of Lisa Durnau’s for blue-skying; sitting back and letting your mind roam the furthest bounds of possibility. It is the work he loves best and the closest heathen old Thomas Lull comes to spirituality. It is, he thinks, all of spirituality. God is our selves, our true, preconscious selves. The yogis have had it right all these millennia. The working out of the idea is never as thrilling as the burn of creation, the moment of searing insight when all at once, you know absolutely.

He studies Aj as ideas tumble and collide and shatter and are drawn together again by intellectual gravity. In time they will coalesce into a new world, but there is enough for Thomas Lull to guess its future nature. And he is afraid. The train ploughs on, peeling a bow-wave of night from its streamlined prow as it eats two hundred and eighty kilometres of India every hour. Exhaustion struggles with intellectual excitement and eventually subdues it. Thomas Lull sleeps. He wakes only at the brief halt at Jabalpur as Awadhi customs make a perfunctory border check. Two men in peaked caps glance at Thomas Lull. Aj sleeps on, head cradled on arm. White man and Western woman. Unimpeachable. Thomas Lull dozes again, waking once to shiver with an ancient, childhood pleasure at the rumble of the wheels beneath him. He falls into a long and untroubled sleep terminated by an untimetabled jolt that throws him out of unconsciousness hard against the table.

Luggage crashes from the overhead racks. Passengers in the aisles fall. Voices cry, merge into a jabber of panic. The shatabdi jars hard, jars again; comes to a screaming, shuddering halt. The voices peak and fall silent. The train sits motionless. The com crackles, goes dead. Thomas Lull cups his hands around his face, peers out of the window. The rural dark is impenetrable, enfolding, yonic. He thinks he sees distant car headlights, bobbing lights like torches. Now the questions start, everyone asking at once is everyone all right what happened?

Aj mumbles, stirring. The tranqs are more effective than Thomas Lull thought. Now he is aware of a wall of voices advancing down the train and with it a stench of burning polycarbon from the air-conditioning ducts. With one hand he snatches up Aj’s bag, with the other he drags her upright. Aj blinks thickly at him.

“Come on, sleeping beauty. We’re making an unscheduled disembarkation.” He pulls her, still quasi-conscious, into the aisle, seizes the bags, and pushes her towards the rear sliding doors. Behind him the black picture window explodes in a spray of glass-sugar as a concrete block trailing a sling-rope bursts through. It bounces off the table, strikes a woman in the seat across the aisle. She goes down, spraying blood from a smashed knee. The press of fleeing passengers trip over her and fall. She is dead, Thomas Lull realises with a terrible, intimate chill. The woman, or anyone else who goes down in this surge.

“Get the fuck moving!” Thomas Lull bounces the dazed Aj down the aisle with slaps of his hands to her back. He glimpsed flames through the empty window; flames and faces. “Go go go.” Behind them the jam is hideous. Low vanguards of smoke steal from the vents and under the uptrain carriage door. The voices rise to a chorus of dread.

“To me! To me!” roars a Sikh steward in railway livery standing on a table by the inner carriage door. “One at a time, come on, there is plenty of time. You. Now, you. You.” He uses his passkey to turn the sliding door into a people-lock. One family at a time.

“What the hell is going on?” Thomas Lull asks as he takes his place at the head of the line.

“Bharati karsevaks have fired the train,” the steward says quietly. “Say nothing. Now, you go.”

Thomas Lull shoves Aj into the door section, blinks into the dark outside.

“Fucking hell.” A ring of fire encircles the small encampment of dazed, fearful passengers and their goods. Decades of working with the digits of cellular automata have made Thomas Lull skilled at estimating number from a single glance. There must be five hundred of them out there, holding burning torches. Sparks blow back from the front of the train; orange smoke, luminous in half light, is a sure signifier of burning plastics. “Change of plan. We’re not getting off here.”

“What’s going on, what’s happening?” Aj asks as Thomas Lull forces open the doors to the next carriage. It is already half empty.

“The train’s been stopped, some Shivaji protest.”

“Shivaji?”

“I thought you knew everything. Hindu fundamentalists. Who are pretty pissed with Awadh right now.”

“You’re very glib,” Aj says and Thomas Lull cannot tell if it is the end of the tranqs or the start of her weird wisdom. But the glow from outside grows stronger and he can hear the slam and shatter of objects hurled against the carcass of the train.