Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“We’ve got them scripted up to about eight months ahead in fair detail. We haven’t got the weather; there’s a subaeai predicts it twenty-four hours ahead and then drops it on. By the time that script comes to real-time, the memory’s fixed and they can’t remember it ever having been another way. There’s a news aeai does the thing for gup-shup and sports results and stuff like that. The major characters are much further ahead on their timelines than the minor ones so we work in several time dimensions at once—properly they’re time vectors that angle away from our own.”

“This is freaky.”

“I like freaky. The point is, no one outside of Indiapendent has access to this.”

“Satnam?”

Tal frowns.

“I don’t know if he could operate the system. Okay, hold on. We’re going to go to full prope. I’ll ’hoek you up, here.”

Tal fixes yts own ’hoek, smart plastic hugging up warm against the curve of yts skull, then fits Najia with the second device. Yts fingers are very deft and very light and very soft. Were she not breaking and entering a secure system with a Most Wanted nute who might just have brought down the government and whom she had rescued that very morning from a railway-station assassin, she might purr.

“I’m going to go into the registries. You may find this a little disorienting.”

Najia Askarzadah almost goes straight over backwards on her chair. She is dropped into the centre of a vast sphere filled with dashes of registry code, all superimposed over the dark room and the curve of liquid screen and the rain streaming down the thick blue glass. She is the centre of a galaxy of data; whichever way she looks, code upon code streams away from her. Tal turns yts hands and the sphere spins, address lines blurring with data-shift across Najia’s vision. Reeling with vertigo, she grips the sides of her chair.

“Oh man.”

“You get used to it. If someone has been into my lovely wedding, they’ll have left a trace behind in the registry, that’s what I’m looking for now. The most recent entries are at the centre, the older ones get pushed further out. Ah.” Tal points. Codes blur like warp-driven stars. Najia Askarzadah is sure she can feel data-wind in her hair. She drops out of cyberdrive into an inertialess stop at a green code-fragment. The sphere of glowing file addresses looks unchanged. Centre everywhere, perimeter nowhere. Like the universe. Tal picks up the code.

“Now this is freaky.”

“Do you like this freaky?” Najia asks.

“Indeed I do not. Someone has been into my design files but it’s not a code I recognise. It doesn’t look like it’s come from the outside.”

“Some other bit of the ’ware is accessing your files?”

“More like the actors are rewriting their own scripts. I’m going in. If you feel dizzy, close your eyes.”

She doesn’t and her stomach turns loops as the universe of slow-drifting codes jerks and spins and zooms and warps around her. Tal hyper-jumps from code-cluster to code-cluster. “This is very very strange. It’s an inside job all right, but it’s not one of our cast. Look, see?” Tal gathers a harvest of codes, lays them out on a grid in space. “These bits here are all common. To save memory space, a lot of our lower-level aeai actors are subapplications of higher-level aeais. Anita Mahapatra also contains Narinder Rao, Mrs. Devgan, the Begum Vora and they in turn contain maybe fifty redshirts.”

“Redshirts?”

“Disposable extras. I think it’s an American term. This is a list of all the recent accesses to the set design system. See? Someone’s been into my design files regularly over the past eighteen months. But what is freaky is, all those common code sections point to an even higher level actor; one that contains Lal Darfan and Aparna Chawla and Ajay Nadiadwala. It’s like there’s something else running in there we can’t see because it’s too big.”

In the cream coloured house by the water there was an atlas the size of a small child. On the winter nights when the inlet froze, Najia, age eight, would fight the thing down from its shelf, open it on the floor, and lose herself in other climates. She played a game with her mother and father where you picked a word on a map and raced to put a finger on it. She realised early that the way to play and win was to go big and obvious. The eye scrying through the towns and villages and stations of the Matto Grosso could miss the name BRAZIL spread across the map in faded grey letters the size of her thumb. Hiding in plain sight among the scribbles.

Najia blinks out of Tal’s spiral dance of codes and file addresses back into the dark carrel. She is trapped inside a cube of rain. A master script that wrote itself? A soap opera like India’s seven million gods; avatars and emanations descending through levels of divinity from Brahman, the Absolute, the One?

Then she sees Tal push ytself back from the computer, mouth open in fear, hand raised to ward off the evil eye. In the same perspective she also sees Pande in his high-collared jacket and yellow turban rush loose-boned into the department.

Tal: “This is impossible.”

Pande: “Sir Madam, sir madam, come quick come quick, the Prime Minister.”

Then Najias Askarzadah’s ’hoek flashes into full prope and she is swept away from Tal, from Pande, from Indiapendent in the monsoon, to a bright, high place, a silk-draped prospect among the clouds. She knows where this is. She has been summoned to this place before. It is the airborne elephant pavilion of Lal Darfan, sailing the line of the Himalayas. But the man on the cushioned throne in front of her is not Lal Darfan. It is N. K. Jivanjee.

Yogendra takes the boat out into a stream of burning diyas. Monsoon winds churn Ganga but the little, delicate mango-leaf saucers bob on through the broken water. Shiv sits cross-legged under the plastic awning, gripping the gunwales and trying to feel the balance. He prays that he will not have to hurl. He glances back at Yogendra squatting in the stern, hand steady on the tiller of the alcofuel motor, eyes reading the river. His skin is beaded with rain, it streams from his hair down his face, his clothes cling to him. Shiv thinks of rats he has seen swimming in open roadside sewers. But the knotted pearls around Yogendra’s neck shine.

“Pump, pump,” Yogendra orders. Shiv bends to the little bilge pump. The rain is filling the boat—a handy little American sports white-waterer with Pacific Northwest iconography on its bows though Shiv would have preferred an Eye of Siva—faster than the hand-pump can clear it. That is not an arithmetic Shiv can look at too closely. He can’t swim. A raja’s experience of water is lolling in the shallow end of a pool with girls and floating drinks trays. As long as it takes them to Chunar.

“You land somewhere around here.” Anand laid the A4 high-resolution printouts of the Chunar district map out on his coffee table. Kif coffee simmered on its brazier. Anand tapped his finger on the map. “The town of Chunar is about five kays south. I call it a town purely as a politeness to the fact that it’s on a bridge over the Ganga. Chunar is a rural shithole full of cowfuckers and incest. The only thing of any interest is the old fort. Here, I’ve got printouts.” Anand dealt out a hand of glossies. Shiv flicked through the photographs. The story of the Ganga was the story of forts like Chunar, drawn down by historical inevitability onto the promontories and hill-tops where the river turned, drawing to them power, dynasty, intrigue, imprisonment, siege, assault. One last assault. He paused at the interiors, crumbling Raj-Moghul architectures smothered by swooping construction-carbon canopies, white as salt in the sun. “Ramanandacharya is a flash chuutya, but he’s the only game in town. As well as the sundarban, he’s got a call centre. You want to get into your husband’s system, see what he’s been up to; you want to hack into that credit black-list, they’ll crack the code for you while you wait.