Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“What’s going on, is Varanasi under attack?” Thomas Lull calls out. Anything to sow uncertainty. The match burns out. Thomas Lull flips out the memory chip of his own palmer. A few deft movements and he has switched them over.

He glimpsed other phantoms in that look inside Aj, phantoms that might confirm his suspicions about what had been done to her, and why.

“Your friend has escaped,” Tom Hanks says, swinging the torch beam into Thomas Lull’s face. In the shadow his hands close the slots.

“How did she manage to do that?” Thomas Lull asks.

“I was hoping you might be able to tell me.”

“I’ve been right here in front of you all along.”

“Every system is out,” Tom Hanks says. The mouth is working double-shifts. “We do not know how far the blackout reaches, it is at least this district.”

“And she walked right out.”

“Yes,” the policeman says. “You will understand if we detain you for further questioning.” A burst of Hindi to chair-rocker who gets up and closes the door. Thomas Lull hears an old-school manual bolt shoot over.

“Hey!” he shouts in the dark. Thoughts of a middle-aged man locked in a dark police interview room. His suspicions, his calculations, his speculations swell to room-filling proportions, giants of fear and shock that press close against him, pressing the air from his lungs. The nose for breathing, the mouth for talking. The mind for dark imagining. Kalki. She is Kalki, the final avatar. All he needs is the proof he glimpsed etched into the scanner print.

After a timeless time that is only ten minutes by the wall clock the lights come back on. The door opens and Tom Hanks stands back to admit a black man in a wet raincoat that immediately identifies his nationality and employment.

“Professor Thomas Lull?”

Lull nods.

“I am Peter Paul Rhodes from the United States consular office. Please come with me.”

He extends a hand. Thomas Lull takes it hesitantly. “What is this?”

“Sir, your release into my charge has been ordered by the Bharati Justice Department because of your diplomatic status in the Department of Foreign Affairs.”

“Foreign Affairs?” Thomas Lull knows how dumb he sounds, thick like a broken down petty thief. “Senator Joe O’Malley knows I’m in a Bharati police station and wants me out?”

“That is correct. All will be explained. Please come with me.”

Thomas Lull takes the hand but scoops his palmer into his pocket. Tom Hanks escorts them down the corridor. The front office is full of policemen and one woman. She gets up from the wooden bench where she has been sitting. There is a pool of rainwater at her feet. Her clothes are wet, her hair is wet, her face shines with wet and is thinner, older but he knows it instantly and it makes the madness complete.

“L. Durnau?”

Eight and a half thousand rupees is enough to bribe the chowkidar. He counts notes with his skinny fingers while Najia Askarzadah drips in the glass and marble foyer of Indiapendent. Then he swipes his master pass and namastes them through the glass half doors.

“I never believed it was you, Talji,” Pande the security man shouts after them, folding Najia’s wad of cash into the breast pocket of his high-collared jacket. “We can make pictures do anything these days.”

“They shot at me, you know,” Tal calls as they head for the elevator stack.

It’s never like this in the movies, Najia Askarzadah thinks as the glass lift descends like a pearl of light. They should have had to blast their way in with beva-firepower and hi-kicking, mid-air-spinning, slo-mo martial arts action. The cool heroine shouldn’t have to call her parents in Sweden to ask them to BACS her a bribe. The most action she had seen was Pande the nightwatchman thumbing his generous wad. But it’s a strange little conspiracy; more Bollywood than Hollywood.

The glass walls of the metasoap wing stream with rain. It had begun as the taxi they had been hiding in all day arrived outside Indiapendent Productions. The parking lot was a basti of brick-and-card-board lean-tos and knots of soapi faithful huddled under plastic sheets.

“They always come out for a wedding,” Tal said. “It’s like a religion. Lal Darfan always delivers. PR says he’s had twenty miracle births attributed to him.”

Tal hurries Najia past the dark work carrels to the furthest desk. Yt pulls up two chairs, logs in—“nothing we can do about that, baba”—opens up the wrap-round screen and drops them into Brahmpur, the eponymous Town of Indiapendent’s all-conquering soapi.

Tal whirls her through the streets and galis, the ghats and malls of this virtual city. Najia is dazzled. The detail is complete down to the advertising signs and the bustling phatphats. In Brahmpur as in Varanasi it is night and it is raining. The monsoon has come to this imaginary city. Najia is too proud to have watched an entire episode of Town and Country but even as a neo she recognises there are whole districts of this city of illusions the plot never visits, that have been lovingly built and maintained by exabytes of processing power merely to hold the rest together. Tal raises yts hands and their djinn-flight slams to a halt in front of a crumbling waterfront haveli. She feels she could touch the flaking stucco. A mudra and they pass through the walls into the great hall of the Nadiadwala haveli.

“Wow,” says Najia Askarzadah. She can see the cracks on the low leather sofas.

“Oh, this isn’t the real Brahmpur,” Tal says. Another elegant gesture and time blurs forward. “Well, the cast think it is but we call it Brahmpur B. It’s the metacity in which the metasoap takes place. I’m just winding us forward to the Chawla/Nadiadwala wedding. Have you got that video handy?”

But Najia is dazed by the flickering ghosts of future plotlines across the still room. Day and night strobe across her vision. Tal opens yts hand like a claw, twists it, and time slows down to a chug of light and dark. She can see the people now, zipping through the elegant, cool marble hall. Tal slows time again and the hall is suddenly bright with coloured hangings. Tal pushes yts open palm against air and time freezes.

“Here, here.” Tal clicks yts fingers impatiently. Najia hands yt her palmer. Without taking yts eyes off the screen yt datatransfers from the palmer. A hole opens in the middle of the hall and fills with N. K. Jivanjee. With delicate flicks of yts fingers Tal jogs the picture forward until it has a good lock on the background, then pulls in, draws a box around the fabric hung-wall, tears it out of N. K. Jivanjee’s world, and drops it into fake Brahmpur. Even Najia Askarzadah can see the match.

“This is about six months down our metasoap timeline,” Tal says as yt lets the POV roam around the room, swooping around the frozen wedding guests in their couture and the simulacra of real-world chati-mag reporters in their texture-mapped society-best, waiting for the arrival of the fake groom on his white horse. “They exist in several time-frames at once.”

Najia remembers Lal Darfan’s fantastical flying elephant-pavilion hovering over the high Himalayas. Can any of us trust what we think we remember ? he had asked. She had thought to argue sophistries with an aeai actor but Tal plays a more sophisticated game, the meta-meta-game. Najia remembers an old childhood faery-tale told by a babysitter on a midwinter night, a dangerous one, disquieting as only the truly fey disquiets; that the faery realms were nested inside each other like baboushka dolls, but each was bigger than the one that enclosed it until at the centre you had to squeeze through a door smaller than a mustard seed but it contained whole universes.