Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“I don’t believe it was bodhisofts, or even information they were after,” Mr. Nandha says. “I think it was the people.”

“How come we’re the Aeai Licensing Department but it always ends up humans every time?” Vikram says, bobbing on his big padded jog boots. “And next time you need me so badly, a simple message will suffice. Those stairs kill me, man.”

But that would not be seemly for a Senior Investigator, Mr. Nandha wants to say. Order, propriety, smudge-free suits; varna. On his tenth Holi his mother dressed them up as little Jedi with swirling robes and the new super-soaker guns from Chatterjee’s store, the ones with five separate barrels, Gatling-style and a different festival colour in each one. He had watched his younger brother and sister go through their moves in their hooded cloaks made from old sheets with their tubes of brightly coloured festival liquid, going zuzh, zuzh, zuzh as they cut down the forces of the dark side. He feels again the nausea of embarrassment, that they were expected to go in public in these humiliating rags, with these cheap toys, with everyone looking. That night he had crept from his room and taken the lot to Dipendra the nightwatchman’s brazier and fed them to the coals. His father’s fury had been terrible, his mother’s incomprehension and disappointment worse, but he bore the emotions and the privations stoically for he knew he had prevented a more terrible thing altogether: shame.

Mr. Nandha’s fingers scrabble for his lighthoek. He will call Parvati now, about that Brahmin baby talk, he will tell her what his opinion really is about those things . He will set her straight, she will know, and there will be no more of this. He slides the ’hoek over his ear, unconsciously adjusts the inducer, and has the number up as an unexpected call comes through from outside.

“Umph,” says Mr. Nandha, discommoded. It is Chauhan.

“Here’s a novelty, me calling you. Something to show you, Nandha.”

“It was an infrared laser, wasn’t it?” Mr. Nandha says as he walks into the morgue. The bodies are laid on ceramic tables, black, shrivelled mummy-corpses and snapping teeth.

“Well guessed,” says jolly, brutal Chauhan in his morgue greens with his demure forensic nurses around him. “Short, high-intensity burst from a high-power infrared laser, almost certainly air-capable, though I wouldn’t rule out a lined-up shot from Shanti Rana Apartments opposite.”

One body, more terribly charred than the rest, is a black stick opening into bare ribs and yellow thigh bones, truncated at the knee. The stench of burned hair, flesh, incinerated bone is worse in Ranapur’s pristine new city morgue than masked by the hydrocarbons and polycarbonates of the apartment, but there is nothing in this clean, cool room that is ultimately unfamiliar or disturbing to a Varanasian.

“What happened to him?”

“I suspect he was by the window when the fireball blew out. He’s not the interesting one,” Chauhan continues as Mr. Nandha bends over the inhuman Y-shape of the Darwinware pirate. “These ones. Nothing to identify them of course—I’ve only had an initial poke around—but this one was male, this one female. The male is European, anywhere from Palermo to Paris, the female is South Indian-Dravidian. I get the feeling they were a couple. Interesting, the woman was born with a severe deformity of the womb—certainly nothing functional. Good old police procedure’ll crack them eventually, but you might be interested in these.”

Chauhan slides open a padded drawer and holds up two plastic evidence bags. In each is a small ivory pendant, charred and blackened. The motif is a white horse rearing on its back legs in a chakra circle of stylised flames.

“Do you know what it is?” Chauhan asks.

“Kalki,” Mr. Nandha says. He lifts a disc and holds it to the light. The work is very fine. “The tenth and final incarnation of Vishnu.”

Veritable shitfuls of holy monkeys pour off the trees and come loping on their soft knuckles to greet the Ministry Lexus as it draws up outside the old Mughal hunting palace. The bot steps out of the scrub rhododendrons to scan the driver’s credentials. The staff has let the gardens go to weed and wild again. Few gardeners pass the security vetting and those that do don’t work long for Ministry money. The machine squats down in front of the car, drawing a line on Mr. Nandha with its arm-turret. Its left-leg piston vents intermittently, giving it a lopsided bob as it interrogates the clearances. Maintenance slipping also. Mr. Nandha purses his lips as the monkeys swarm the car, prying for crannies with their mannikin fingers. They remind him of the hands of the burned corpses in Chauhan’s clean morgue, those black, withered fists. A langur perched over the radiator like a hood ornament masturbates furiously as the St. Matthew Passion swirls around Mr. Nandha.

Lack upon slack upon slop breeds lapse. It was scruffy maintenance and shoddy security that let the prisoner escape those other two times. That, and stealthy robots the size and agility of cockroaches.

The security bot completes its check, stalks away into the shrubbery like some late Cretaceous hunter. Mr. Nandha jerks the car forward to scare off the monkeys. He has a horror of one getting trapped in his wheel-arch. Lord High Masturbator takes a tumble from the bonnet. Mr. Nandha peers to see if it has left a vile squiggle of monkey-jizz on the paintwork.

When he was thirteen and hammered flat by hormones and doubt, Mr. Nandha had entertained a fantasy about catching a sacred monkey, keeping it in a cage, and slowly and excruciatingly breaking every one of its tiny, birdlike bones. He can still feel a glow of the joyous anger of that delight.

A persistent few monkeys ride the Ministry Lexus all the way up the curving drive to the lodge. Mr. Nandha kicks them away as he steps out on to the crunching red gravel and slips on his dark glasses. The white Mughal marble is dazzling in the afternoon light. Mr. Nandha steps away from the car to enjoy the uninterrupted view of the palace. It is a hidden pearl, built in 1613 by the Shah Ashraf as a game retreat. Where hunting cheetahs rode atop howdahs and Mughal lords hawked over the marshes of Kirakat, now factory units and pressed-aluminium go-downs nudge up to the low, cool lodge on every side. But the genius of the architect endures: the colonnaded house remains enfolded, separate in its jungled gardens, unseen by any of them, unseeing in return. Mr. Nandha admires the balance of the pillared cloister, the understatement of the dome. Even among the English Perpendicular and Baroque triumphs of Cambridge, he had still considered the Islamic architects the masters of Wren and Reginald of Ely. They built as Bach composed, strong and muscular, with light and space and geometry. They built timelessly and for all time. Mr. Nandha thinks that he might not mind confinement in such a prison as this. He would have solitude, here.

Sweepers bow around him, twig besoms busy as Mr. Nandha goes up the shallow steps to the cool cool cool of the cloister. The Ministry staff greet him at the door; discreetly scanning him down with their palmers. Mr. Nandha commends their thoroughness but they look bored. They are EO1 civil servants, but they did not join the Ministry to guard a mouldering pile of Mughal masonry. Mr. Nandha waits for the warder to cycle the transparent plastic lock that sits like an ugly sex-toy yoni in the wall of exquisitely carved alabaster. The last security check lights green. Mr. Nandha steps into the banqueting hall. As ever, he catches his breath at the white stone jalis, the bandied masonry, the low generous spaciousness of the onion arches, the geometries of the azure roof tilings, the tall pointed windows shaded by fabric blinds. But the true focus of the room is not the radiant harmony of the design. It is not even the Faraday cage painstakingly woven into the fabric of the architecture. It is the transparent plastic cube that stands in the centre. It is five metres long and five metres high, a house within a house divided by transparent plastic partitions into see-through rooms, with transparent plumbing and wiring and chairs and tables and a transparent bed and a transparent toilet. In the midst of this transparency sits a dark, heavily bearded man, running to fat. He is dressed in a white kurta and is barefoot and reads a paperback book. His back is turned to Mr. Nandha but hearing his footfalls on the cool marble he rises. He peers short-sightedly, then recognises his visitor and drags his chair to the transparent wall. He pokes the broken-backed paperback with a toe. He wears a transparent toe ring.