River of Gods (56 page)

"You are Professor Thomas Lull."

"Do you not think I might be better positioned to offer a
hypothesis about this than you? If I knew what you were taking
about?"

Chair-rocker confers in short, stabbing Hindi with Tom Hanks. Thomas
Lull can't decide which of them is the superior.

"Very well, sir. As you know, we are in a state of heightened
alert because of the situation with our neighbour, Awadh. It is only
logical that we protect ourselves against cyberwar, so we have
installed a number of scanners at sensitive locations to pick up slow
missiles, infiltrators, agents, that sort of thing. Identity theft is
a recognised tool of undercover operatives so the archive was
routinely equipped with surveillance devices. The scanners at the DNA
archive picked up structures inside this woman's skull similar to
protein circuitry."

By now Thomas Lull cannot tell what is game and what is real and what
is beyond either. He thinks of the shock he gave Aj on the train when
he exposed the lies that were her life. She has returned that shock
tenfold.

Tom Hanks slides a palmer across the desk to Thomas Lull. He does not
want to look, he does not want to see the alien inside Aj but he
turns the device to him. It is a false-colour pseudo-X-ray assembled
from infrasound scans. Her lovely skull is pale blue. The globes of
her eyes, the tangled vine-root of the optic nerve, the ghostly
canals of sinuses and blood vessels are grey on greyer. Aj is a ghost
of herself; her brain most spectral of all, a haunting of sentience
in a web of fibres. There is a ghost in the ghost; lines and ranks of
nanocircuits arching across the inside of her skull. The tilak is a
dark gateway in her forehead like a mosque darwaz. From it chains and
webs of protein wiring thread back through the frontal lobes, across
the central fissure into the parietal lobe, sending probes into the
corpus callosum, twining tight around the limbic system, delving deep
into the medulla while it wraps the occipital lobe in coils of
protein processors. Aj's brain is chained in circuitry.

"Kalki," he whispers and the room goes black. Complete
lightlessness. No lights, no emergency power, nothing. Thomas Lull
fumbles his palmer out of his pocket. Hindi voices yell in the
corridor, rising in intensity.

"Professor Lull Professor Lull, do not attempt to move!"
Tom Hanks' voice is querulous and panicky. "For your own safety,
I order you to remain where you are while I ascertain what has
happened."

The voices in the corridor grow louder. A rasp, a flare; chair-rocker
man lights a match. Three faces in a bubble of light, then darkness.
Thomas Lull moves quickly. His fingers feel out the memory wafer slot
on the side of the police palmer and slide it open. A rasp, he whips
his hands back, then light. Tom Hanks is by the door. The babble of
voices has become intermittent, calls, responses. As the match burns
out Thomas Lull thinks he sees a fluctuating line of light under the
door, a torch bobbing. He releases the memory chip. Another match
flare. The door is open now, Tom Hanks conversing with an unseen
officer in the corridor.

"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.

"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."