Ian McDonald - River of Gods

Mr. Nandha frowns at the ceiling.

“I presume this place would have a halon fire extinguisher system as a matter of course?”

Chauhan shrugs. Inspector Vaish stands up. He understands.

“Have you found anything that looks like a control box?” Mr. Nandha asks.

“In the kitchen,” the inspector answers. The box is under the sink beside the U-bend, the most inconvenient place. Mr. Nandha rips off the seared cupboard door, squats down, and shines his pencil torch all around. These people used a lot of multisurface cleaner. All those hard cases, Mr. Nandha presumes. The heat has penetrated even this safe cubby, loosening the plumbing solder and sagging the plastic cover. A few turns of the multitool unscrews it. The service ports are intact. Mr. Nandha plugs in the avatar box and summons Krishna. The aeai balloons beyond the tight constraints of the under-sink cupboard. The god of little domesticities. Inspector Vaish crouches beside him. Where before he had radiated spiky resentment, he now seems in mild awe.

“I’m accessing the security system files,” Mr. Nandha explains. “It will take no more than a few moments. Ironic; they’ll protect their memory farm with quantum keys but the extinguisher system is a simple four-digit pin. And that,” he says as the command lines scroll up on his field of vision, “seems to have been their downfall. Do we have an estimated time of the fire?”

“The oven timer is stopped at seven twenty-two.”

“There’s a command from the insurance company—it’s certainly false—logged at seven oh five shutting down the halon gas system. It also activated the door locks.”

“They were sealed in.”

“Yes.” Mr. Nandha stands up, brushes himself down, noting with distaste the soft black smears of ten percent human fat where floating soot has gravitated on to him. “And that makes it murder.” He folds his avatars back into their box. “I shall return to my office to prepare an initial scene of crime report. I’ll need the most intact of the processors in my department before noon. And Mr. Chauhan.” The pathologist looks up from the last corpse, burned down to bones and a grin of bloody white teeth in black char. He knows those teeth; Radhakrishna’s impudent monkey-grin. “I will call on you at three and I expect you to have something for me by then.”

He imagines the SOCO’s smile as he quits the incinerated shell of the Badrinath sundarban. Like him, they have neither the money nor the patience to marry in jati.

At breakfast the talk had all been of the Dawar’s reception.

“We must have one,” Parvati said, bright and fresh with a flower in her long, black hair and the Fifth Test burbling in male baritones behind her. “When the roof garden is finished, we’ll have a durbar and invite everyone and it’ll be the talk for weeks.” She pulled her diary from her bag. “October? It should be looking best then, after the late monsoon.”

“Why are we watching the cricket?” Mr. Nandha asked.

“Oh that? I don’t know how that came to be on.” She waved her hand at the screen in the gesture for Breakfast with Bharti . An in-studio dance-routine bounced upon the screen. “There, happy? October is a good time, it is always such a flat month. But it might seem a bit of an anticlimax after the Dawars, I mean, it’s a garden and I love it very much and you are so good to let me have it, but it is only plants and seeds. How much do you think it cost them to get a Brahmin baby?”

“More than an Artificial Intelligence Licensing Investigations Officer can afford.”

“Oh, my love, I never thought for a moment.”

Listen to yourself, my bulbul, he thought. Babbling away, letting it fall from your lips and presuming it will be golden because you are surrounded by colour and movement and flowers every second of every day. I heard the society women you so envy and said nothing because they were right. You are quaint and open and say what is in your heart.

You are honest in your ambitions and that is why I would keep you away from them and their society.

Bharti on the Breakfast Banquette chattered and smiled with her Special! Morning! Guests! Today: Funki Puri Breakfast Specials from our Guest Chef, Sanjeev Kapur!

“Good day, my treasure,” Mr. Nandha said pushing away his half-empty cup of Ayurvedic tea. “Forget those snobbish people. They have nothing we need. We have each other. I may be late back. I have a scene of crime to investigate.” Mr. Nandha kissed his beautiful wife and went to look at the incinerated remains of Mr. Radhakrishna in his sundarban wedged unassumingly into a fifteenth-floor apartment in Diljit Rana Colony.

Dangling his damp tea bag from its string, Mr. Nandha looks out over Varanasi and tries to make sense of what he has seen in that charred apartment. The fire was savage but contained. Controlled. An engineered burn. A shaped charge? An infrared laser fired through the window?

Mr. Nandha flicks Bach violin concertos on to his palmer, sits back in his leather chair, puts his fingers together like a stupa, and turns to the city outside his window. It has been an unfailing and unstinting guru to him. He scrys it like an oracle. Varanasi is the City of Man and all human action is mirrored in its geography. Its patterns and traumas have yielded insights and wisdoms beyond reason and rationality. Today his city shows him fire patterns. On any given day there will be at least a dozen coils of smoke from domestic conflagrations. Among the jostling middle classes the habits of bride-burning have been extinguished, but he does not doubt that some of those further, paler smoke ribbons are “kitchen fires.”

You are safe with me, Parvati, he thinks. You can forever trust that I will not hurt you or tire of you, for you are rare, a pearl without price. You are protected from the sati of boredom or dowry envy.

The military troopships cut down across the skyline in the same regular rhythm. How many lakhs of soldiers now? In the police cruiser he had scanned the day’s headlines. Bharati jawans had driven back an Awadhi incursion along the railway line into western Allahabad. Awadhi/American robots were attacking a sit-down demonstration blocking a Maratha shatabdi on the mainline from Awadh. Mr. Nandha knows the reek of Rana spin, stronger than any incense or cremation smoke. Ironic that the Americans, engineers of the Hamilton Acts, chose to wage war through the machines they so mistrusted. If high-generation aeais ever gained access to the fighting robots.

Mr. Nandha’s fingers part. Intuition. Enlightenment. A movement at his side: a chai-boy whisks his used bag away on a silver saucer.

“Chai-wallah. Send Vikram down here. Quick now.”

“At once, sahb.”

Military aeai counter-countermeasure gunships. Trained to fly down and assassinate cyber-war craft like hunting falcons. Armed with pulse lasers. The murder weapon is out there, cutting patrol arcs through the sacred city’s sacred airspace. Someone cut into the military system.

Mr. Nandha smells Vik before any other sense announces his arrival. “Vikram.”

“How can I please you?” Mr. Nandha turns in his chair.

“Please get me a movement log of every military aeai drone over Varanasi for the past twelve hours.”

Vikram sucks in his upper lip. He’s dressed in vast running shoes and pseudo-shorts hitting midcalf today, with a clingtop someone of his carbohydrate intake should never contemplate.

“Doable. Why for?”

“I have an idea that this was no conventional arson. I have an idea that it was a sustained, high-energy infrared laser pulse from a military aeaicraft.” Vik’s eyebrows lift. “Anything on the source of the lockdown on the security system?”

“Well, it didn’t come from Ahura Mazda Mutual of Varanasi. Its ass is well covered but we’ll follow it home. We’ve got some initial data back from what we could salvage from Badrinath. Whatever it was they wanted gone, they took a lot of high-rental property out with it. We lost bodhisofts of Jim Carrey, Madonna, Phil Collins.”