River of Gods (70 page)

This is Mr. Nandha coming up the stairs of Diljit Rana Apartments,
jogging up one flight two flight three flight four in the cool cool
light of the morning. He could take the elevator—unlike the old
projects like Siva Nataraja Homes and White Fort, the services are
operational in these government housing blocks—but he wants to
maintain the energy, the zeal, the momentum. He shall not let it
slip, not when it is so close. His avatars are threads of spider silk
spun between the towers of Varanasi. He can feel the vibration of her
energy shaking the world.

Five flights, six.

Mr. Nandha intends to apologise to his wife for upsetting her in
front of her mother. The apology is not strictly necessary but Mr.
Nandha's belief is that it is a healthful thing in a marriage to give
in occasionally even when you are right. But she must appreciate that
he has made a window for her in the most important case in the
Ministry's history, a case that, when he has completed the
excommunication, will elevate him to Investigative Officer First
Rank. Then they will spend happy evenings together looking through
the brochures for Cantonment new-builds.

The final three flights Mr. Nandha whistles themes from Handel
Concerti Grossi.

It is not in the moment he puts his key in the lock. Neither is it
when he sets hand to handle and turns that handle. But in the time it
takes for him to push that handle down and open the door, he knows
what he will find. And he knows the meaning of that epiphany in the
predawn Ministry corridor. It was the precise instant his wife left
him.

Scraps of Handel float in his auditory centres but as he crosses the
lintel his life is as changed as the raindrop falling one millimetre
to one side of a mountain peak ends up in a different ocean.

He does not need to call her name. She is utterly, irretrievably
gone. It is not an absence of things; her chati magazines lie on the
table, the dhobi basket sits in the kitchen by the ironing board, her
ornaments and gods and small votives occupy their auspicious places.
The flowers are fresh in the vase, the geraniums are watered. Her
absence is from every part; the furniture, the shape of the room, the
carpets, the comforting, happy television, the wallpaper and the
cornices and the colour of the doors. The lights, the kitchen
utensils, the white goods. Half a home, half a life and entire
marriage has been subtracted. Nature does not abhor this vacuum. It
throbs, it has shape and geometry.

There are noises Mr. Nandha knows he should make, actions he should
perform, feelings he should experience proper to the discovery that a
wife has left you. But he walks in and out of the room in a
tight-faced daze, an almost-smile drawn on his lips, as if preparing
defences against the full of it, like a sailor in a tropical storm
might lash himself to a mast, to dare it to break over him, to turn
into its full rage. That is why he goes to the bedroom. The
embroidered cushions that were wedding gifts from his work colleagues
are in their places on respective sides of the bed. The expensive
copy of the Kama Sutra, for the proper work of a married couple, is
on its bedside cabinet. The flat-worked sheet is neatly turned back.

Mr. Nandha finds himself bending to sniff the sheet. No. He does not
want to know if there is any blame there. He opens the sliding wood
wardrobes, inventories what is taken, what remains. The gold, the
blue, the green saris, the pure white silk for formal occasions. The
beautiful, translucent crimson choli he used to love to see her wear,
that excited him so much across a room or a garden party. She has
taken all the padded, scented hangers, left the cheap wire ones that
have stretched into shallow rhombuses. Mr. Nandha kneels down to look
at the shoe rack. Most of the spaces are empty. He picks up a
slipper, soft-soled, worked with gold-thread and satin, runs his
hands over its pointed toe, its soft, breast-curved heel. He sets it
back in its position. He cannot bear her lovely shoes.

He closes the sliding door on the clothes and shoes but it is not
Parvati he thinks of, it is his mother when he burned her on the
ghat, his head shaved and all dressed in white. He thinks of her
house afterwards, of the terrible poignancy of her clothes and shoes
on their hangers and racks, all unnecessary now, all her choices and
fancyings and likings naked and exposed by death.

The note is stuck to the shelf in the kitchen where his Ayurvedic
teas and dietary items are kept. He finds he has read it three times
without taking in anything more than the obvious meaning that she is
gone. He cannot join the words up into sentences.
Leaving. So
sorry. Can't love you. Don't look for me.
Too close. Too many
words too near to each other. He folds the note, puts it in his
pocket, and climbs the stairs to the roof garden.

In the open space, in the grey light, under the eyes of his
neighbours and his cybernetic avatars, Mr. Nandha feels the
compressed rage vomit up out of him. He would love to open his mouth
and let it all pour out of him in an ecstatic stream. His stomach
pulls, he fights it, masters it. Mr. Nandha presses down the spasms
of nausea.

What is that sickly, chemical smell? For a moment, despite his
discipline, he feels that his gut might betray him.

Mr. Nandha kneels on the edge of the raised bed, fingers hooked into
the clinging loam. His palmer calls. Mr. Nandha cannot think what the
noise could possibly be. Then the insistent calling of his name draws
his fingers out of the soil, draws him back to the wet rooftop in the
Varanasi gloaming.

"Nandha."

"Boss, we've found her." Vik's voice. "Gyana Chakshu
picked her up two minutes ago. She's right here in Varanasi. Boss;
she
is Kalki. We've got it all put together; she is the aeai. She
is the incarnation of Kalki. I'm diverting the tilt-jet to pick you
up."

Mr. Nandha stands upright. He looks at his hands, brushes the dirt
from them on the edge of the wooden sleepers. His suit is stained,
crumpled, soaked. He cannot imagine he will ever feel dry again. But
he adjusts his cuffs, straightens his collar. He takes the gun from
inside his pocket and lets it hang loosely at his side. The early
neons of Kashi gibber and flick at his feet. There is work to be
done. He has his mission. He will do it so well that none can ever
hold a whisper against Nandha of the Ministry.

The tilt-jet banks in between the big projects. Mr. Nandha shelters
in the stair head as the aircraft slides in over the rooftop and
swivels its engines into a hover. Vik is in the copilot's seat as the
tilt-jet turns, face dramatically underlit by the console leds. The
roof cannot possibly support a Bharati Air Force tilt-jet; the pilot
brings her ship down centimetre by centimetre in a delicate Newtonian
ballet, positioning the craft so Mr. Nandha can slip between the
vortices from the wingtip engines and safely up the access ramp in
the tail. The downblast works the destruction he had fantasised. The
trellises are smashed flat in an instant. The geraniums are swept
from their perches. Seedlings and small plants are uprooted from the
soft soil; the earth itself peels away in muddy gobs. The saturated
wood of the beds steams, then smokes. The pilot descends until her
wheels kiss roofing felt. The rear ramp unfolds.

Lights go on piecemeal in the overlooking windows.

Mr. Nandha pulls his collar close and beats through the buffets to
the open, blue-lit interior. All his team are there among the aircav
sowars. Mukul Dev and Ram Lalli. Madhvi Prasad, even Morva of the
Money Trail. As Mr. Nandha belts in beside him, the ramp closes and
the pilot opens up the engines.

"My dear friends," Mr. Nandha says. "I am glad you are
beside me on this historic occasion. A Generation Three Artificial
Intelligence. An entity as far beyond our fleshly intellect as ours
is a pig's. Bharat will thank us. Now, let us be diligent in our
excommunication."

The tilt-jet turns on its vertical axis as it climbs above Mr.
Nandha's shattered roof garden, higher than all the windows and
balconies and rooftop solar farms and watertanks of his neighbours.
Then the pilot puts the nose up and the tail down and the little ship
climbs steeply between the towers.

The last of the gods flicker out over Varanasi and the sky is just
the sky. The streets are silent, the buildings are mute, the cars
have no voices and the people are just faces, closed like fists.
There are no answers, no oracles in the trees and street shrines, no
prophecies from the incoming aircraft, but this world without gods is
rich in its emptiness. Senses fill up the spaces; engines roar, the
wall of voices leap forward; the colours of the saris, the men's
shirts, the neons flashing through the grey rain, all glow with their
own, vivid light. Each touch of street-incense, stale urine, hot fat,
alcofuel exhaust, damp burning plastic is an emotion and a memory of
her life before the lies.

She was a different person then, if the women in the hovel are to be
believed. But the gods—the machines, she now realizes—say
she is now another self altogether. Say: said. The gods are gone. Two
sets of memories. Two lives that cannot live with each other, and now
a third that must somehow incarnate both. Lull. Lull will know, Lull
will tell her how to make sense of these lives. She thinks she can
remember the way back to the hotel.

Dazed by the empire of the senses, released from the tyranny of
information into the realm of simple
things
, Aj lets the city
draw her to the river.

In the dawn rain on the Western Allahabad orbital motorway, two
hundred Awadhi main battle tanks fire up their engines, spin on their
tracks out of their laagered positions and form into an orderly
column. Faster, fleeter traffic buzzes past the four-kilometre queue
but there is no mistaking its general direction, south by southwest
towards the Jabalpur Road. By the time the shops roll up their
shutters and the salary-wallahs zip in to work in their phatphats and
company cars the newsboys are screaming it from their pitches on the
concrete central reserves: TANKS PULL OUT! ALLAHABAD SAVED! AWADH
WITHDRAWS TO KUNDA KHADAR!

Another of Bharat's inexhaustible fleet of Prime Ministerial Mercedes
is waiting for the Bharatiya Vayu Sena Airbus Industries A510 as it
turns into its stand well away from the busier parts of Varanasi
airport. Umbrellas shelter Prime Minister Ashok Rana from the steps
to the car; it draws away in a wush of fat tires on wet apron. There
is a call waiting on the comlink. N. K. Jivanjee. Again. He is not
looking at all like what would be expected of the Interior Minister
of a Government of National Unity. He has unexpected news to break.

If she lets his hand slip in this crowd she is lost.

The armed police try to clear the riverside. The messages blaring
from their bullhorns and truck-top speakers are for the crowds to
disperse, the people to return to their homes and businesses; order
has been restored, they are in no danger, no danger at all. Some,
swept along in the general panic, who did not really want to abandon
their livelihoods, turn back. Some do not trust the police or their
neighbours or the contradictory pronouncements from the government.
Some do not know what to do; they turn and mill, going nowhere.
Between the three and the army hummers squeezing through the narrow
galis around the Vishwanath Gali, the streets and ghats are locked
solid.

Lisa Durnau keeps her fingers tightly locked around Thomas Lull's
left hand. In his right he holds the Tablet, like a lantern on a dark
night. Some final fragment of her that feels responsible to
governments and their strategies worries about the little built-in
meltdown sequence should the Tablet get cold and lonely. But she does
not think Lull will be needing it very long. Whatever is to be played
out here will be ended soon.

Nandha. Krishna Cop. Licensed terminator of unauthorised aeais. The
grainy Tabernacle image is fused into her forebrain. No point
questioning how a Krishna Cop came to be inside a machine older than
the solar system, no more than any of them, but she is certain of one
thing; this is the place, the time where all images are born.

Thomas Lull stops abruptly, mouth open in frustration as he scans the
crowd with the Tablet, looking for a match with the image on the
liquid screen.

"The water tower!" he shouts and jerks Lisa Durnau along
after him. The great pink concrete cylinders rise from the ghats
every few hundred metres along the waterfront, each joined to the
uppermost steps by pink-painted gantries. Lisa Durnau can't make any
face out of the mass of refugees and devotees pressing around the
water tower base. Then the tilt-jet cuts in across the ghats so low
everyone instinctively ducks. Everyone, Lisa observes, but a solitary
figure in grey up on the catwalk around the top of the water tower.

He has it now. The Gyana Chakshu device is linked through to his
'hoek and by its extrapolations and modellings and vectorings and
predictings he can see the aeai like a moving light that shines
through people, through traffic, through buildings. He watches from
kilometres of altitude and distance, moving through the warren of
lanes and galis behind the riverfront. With his privileged insight,
Mr. Nandha directs the pilot. She brings the tilt-jet round in a
sweeping arc and Mr. Nandha looks down into the tide of people
swelling the streets and she is a shining star. He and the aeai are
the only two solid beings in a city of ghosts. Or is it, thinks Mr.
Nandha, the converse that is true?

He orders the pilot to take them in over the river. Mr. Nandha
summons his avatars. They boil up in his vision like thunderheads,
ringing the fleeing aeai on every side, a siege of deities, their
weapons and attributes readied, scraping the clouds, Ganga water
boiling around their vahanas. An invisible world, seen only by the
devotee, the true. The fleeing fleck of light stops. Mr. Nandha
commands Ganesha the opener to flick through local security cameras
until the pattern matcher locates the excommunicee on the
Dasashvamedha Ghat water tower. It stands, hands gripping the rail,
staring out over the mob of wheeling people fighting for the Patna
boat. Does it stand so because it sees what I see? Mr. Nandha
wonders. Does it stop in fear and awe as gods rear from the water?
Are we the only two true seers in the city of delusions?