River of Gods (2 page)

The train slams past a rural brickworks; kiln smoke lying on top of
the mist. The ranks of stacked bricks are like the ruins of an unborn
civilization. Kids stand and stare, hands raised in greeting, dazed
by the speed. After the train has passed, they scramble up on to the
track and look for paisa coins they have wedged into the rail joints.
The fast trains smear them flat into the rail. There's stuff you
could buy with those coins but none would be as good as seeing them
become stains on the high-speed express line.

The chai-wallah sways down the carriage.

"Sahb?"

Mr. Nandha hands him a tea bag, dangling from a string. The steward
bows, takes the bag, drapes it over a plastic cup, and releases
boiling water from the biggin. Mr. Nandha sniffs the chai, nods, then
hands the wallah the wet, hot bag. Mr. Nandha suffers badly from
yeast infections. The chai is Ayurvedic, made to his personal
prescription. Mr. Nandha also avoids cereals, fruit, fermented foods
including alcohol, many soy goods, and all dairy produce.

The call had come at four AM. Mr. Nandha had just fallen asleep after
enjoyable sex with his beautiful wife. He tried not to disturb her
but she had never been able to sleep when he was awake and she got up
and fetched her husband's Away Bag which she had the dhobi-wallah
keep fresh, changed, and folded. She saw him off into the Ministry
car. The car bypassed the station approach crowded with phatphats and
rickshaws waiting on the Agra sleeper and brought Mr. Nandha through
the marshalling yards on to the platform where the long, sleek
electric train waited. A Bharat Rail official showed him to his
reserved seat in his reserved carriage. Thirty seconds later the
train ghosted out of Kashi Station. All three hundred metres of it
had been held for the Krishna Cop.

Mr. Nandha thinks back to that sex with his wife and calls her up on
the palmer. She appears in his visual cortex. He's not surprised to
find her on the roof. Since the work on the garden began, Parvati has
spent increasing amounts of time on top of the apartment block.
Behind the concrete mixer and the piles of blocks and sacks of
compost and pipes for the drip irrigator, Mr. Nandha can see the
early lights in the windows of the tenements leaning close across the
narrow streets. Water tanks, solar panels, satellite dishes, rows of
potted geraniums are silhouettes against a dull, hazy sky. Parvati
tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, squints into the bindi cam.

"Is everything all right?"

"Everything is fine. I will arrive in ten minutes. I just wanted
to call you." She smiles. Mr. Nandha's heart frays.

"Thank you, it's a lovely thought. Are you worried about it?"

"No, it's a routine excommunication. We want to nip it before
panic spreads." Parvati nods, sucking in her lower lip in that
way she does when she thinks about issues. "So what are you
doing today?"

"Well," she says, with a turn of her body indicating the
nascent garden. "I've had an idea. Please don't be cross with
me, but I don't think we need so many shrubs. I'd like some
vegetables. A few rows of beans, some tomatoes and peppers—they'd
give lots of cover—maybe even some bhindi and brinjal.
Herbs—I'd love to grow herbs, tulsi and coriander and hing."

In his reserved first-class seat, Mr. Nandha smiles. "A proper
little urban farmer."

"Oh, nothing you would be ashamed of. Just a few rows of things
until we move out to the Cantonment and get a bungalow. I could grow
those salad vegetables you need. It would save money, they fly them
in from Europe and Australia—I've seen the labels. Would that
be all right?"

"If you wish, my flower."

Parvati claps her hands together in soft delight.

"Oh good. This is a bit cheeky, but I'd already arranged to go
with Krishan to the seedsman."

Mr. Nandha often questions what he has done, bringing his lovely wife
into Varanasi's rip-throat society, a country girl among cobras. The
games among the Cantonment set—his colleagues, his social
peers—appall him. Whispers and looks and rumours, always so
sweet and well mannered, but watching, weighing, measuring. Virtues
and vices in the most delicate of balances. For men it's easy. Marry
as well as you can—if you can. Mr. Nandha has married within
jati—more than Arora, his superior at the Ministry, more than
most of his contemporaries. A good solid Kayastha/Kayastha marriage
but the old rigours no longer seem to matter in new Ranapur. That
wife of Nandha's. Would you listen to the accent? Would you look at
those hands? Those colours she wears, and the styles. She can't
speak, you know. Not a word. Nothing to say. Opens her mouth and
flies buzz out. Town and country, I say. Town and country. Still
stands on the toilet bowl and squats.

Mr. Nandha finds his fists tight with rage at the thought of Parvati
caught up in those terrible games of my husband this, my children
that, my house the other. She does not need the Cantonment bungalow,
the two cars and five servants, the designer baby. Like every modern
bride, Parvati made her financial checks and genetic scans, but
theirs was always a match of respect and love, not a desperate lunge
for the first available wedding-fodder in Varanasi's Darwinian
marriage-market. Once the woman came with the dowry. The man was the
blessed, the treasure. That was always the problem. Now after a
quarter of a century of foetal selection, discreet suburban clinics
and old-fashioned Kashi back stair car aerial joints, Bharat's
middle-class urban male population outnumbers the female fourfold.

Mr. Nandha feels a slight shift in acceleration. The train is
slowing.

"My love, I'm going to have to go, we're coming into Nawada
now."

"You won't be in any danger, will you?" Parvati says, all
wide-eyed concern.

"No, no danger at all. I've performed dozens of these."

"I love you, husband."

"I love you, my treasure."

Mr. Nandha's wife vanishes from inside his head. I'll do it for you,
he thinks as the rain draws him into his showdown. I'll think of you
as I kill it.

A handsome woman jemadar of the local Civil Defence meets Mr. Nandha
with a sharp salute on the down line platform. Two rows of jawans
hold onlookers back with lathis. Outriders fall in fore and aft as
the convoy swings into the streets.

Nawada is a strip city, a name cast over the union of four cow-shit
towns. Then out of the sky came a fistful of development grants, a
slapped-down road grid, speed-built metal shed factories and
warehouses, stuffed with call centres and data-farms. String together
with cable and satellite uplinks, hook into the power grid and let it
grind out crores of rupees. It's among the corrugated aluminium and
construction carbon go-downs of Nawada, not the soaring towers of
Ranapur, that the future of Bharat is being forged. In the big heavy
army hummer Mr. Nandha slips past the single unit stores and motor
part workshops. He feels like a hired gun, riding into town. Scooters
with country girls perched side-saddle on the pillion sway out of his
path.

The outriders steer into an alley between spray-concrete go-downs,
clearing a path for the hummer with their sirens. An electricity
pylon slumps beneath illegal power-taps and siphons. Squatting women
share chai and breakfast roti outside a huge windowless concrete box;
the men gather as far from them as the geometry of the compound will
allow, smoking. Mr. Nandha looks up at the outspread blessing hands
of the Ray Power solar farm. Salutation to the sun.

"Turn off the sirens," he orders the handsome jemadar,
whose name is Sen. "The thing has at least animal-level
intelligence. If it receives any advance warning, it will attempt to
copy itself out." Sen winds down the window and shouts orders to
the escort. The sirens fall silent.

The hummer is a steel sweat-box. Mr. Nandha's pants stick to the
vinyl seat-covers but he's too proud to squirm free. He slips his
'hoek over his ear, settles the bone transducer over the sweet spot
on his skull and opens his box of avatars.

Ganesha, Lord of Auspicious Beginnings, Remover of Obstructions,
throned upon his rat-vehicle, rears over the flat roofs and antenna
farms of Nawada, vast as a thunderhead. In his hands are his
qualities: the goad, the noose, a broken tusk, a rice flour dumpling,
and a pot of water. His pot belly contains universes of cyberspace.
He is the portal. Mr. Nandha knows the moves that summon each avatar
by heart. His hand calls up flying Hanuman with his mace and
mountain; Siva Nataraja, Lord of the Dance, one foot away from
universal destruction and regeneration; Durga the Dark One, goddess
of righteous wrath, each of her ten arms bearing a weapon; Lord
Krishna with his flute and necklace; Kali the disrupter, the belt of
severed hands around her waist. In Mr. Nandha's mindsight the aeai
agents of the Ministry bend low over tiny Nawada. They are ready.
They are eager. They are hungry.

The convoy turns into a service alley. A scatter of police tries to
part a press of bodies to let the hummer through. The alley is
clogged with vehicles down the entry; an ambulance, a cop cruiser, an
electric delivery jeepney. There's something under the truck's front
wheel.

"What is going on here?" Mr. Nandha demands as he walks
through the scrum of police, Ministry warrant card held high.

"Sir, one of the factory workers panicked and ran out into the
alley, straight under," says a police sergeant. "He was
shouting about a djinn; how the djinn was in the factory and was
going to get all of them."

You call it djinn, Mr. Nandha thinks, scanning the site. I call it
meme. Non-material replicators; jokes, rumours, customs, nursery
rhymes. Mind-viruses. Gods, demons, djinns, superstitions. The thing
inside the factory is no supernatural creature, no spirit of flame,
but it is certainly a non-material replicator.

"How many inside?"

"Two dead, sir. It was the night shift. The rest escaped."

"I want this area cleared," Mr. Nandha orders. Jemadar Sen
flicks orders to her jawans. Mr. Nandha walks past the body with the
leather jacket draped over its face and the shaking truck driver in
the back of the police Maruti. He surveys the locus. This bent metal
shed makes pasta-tikka. An emigrant family run it from Bradford.
Bringing the jobs back home. That's what places like Nawada are all
about. Mr. Nandha finds the concept of pasta-tikka an abomination but
British-Diaspora Asian cuisine is the thing this season. Mr. Nandha
squints up at the telephone cable box.

"Have somebody cut that cable."

While the rural police scramble for a ladder, Mr. Nandha locates the
night shift line manager, a fat Bengali pulling nervously at the
tag-skin beside his nails. He smells of what Mr. Nandha presumes must
be pasta-tikka.

"Do you have a cellular base-port or a satellite uplink?"
he asks.

"Yes, yes, a distributed internal cell network," the
Bengali says. "For the robots. And one of those things that
bounces signals off meteor trails; to talk to Bradford."

"Officer Sen, please have one of your men take care of the
satellite dish. We may yet be in time to stop it out-copying."

The police finally drive the basti folk back to the ends of the
alley. A jawan waves from the roof, job done.

"All communications devices off please," Mr. Nandha
instructs. Jemadar Sen and Rural Sergeant Sunder accompany him into
the possessed factory. Mr. Nandha straightens his Nehru-cut jacket,
shoots his cuffs and ducks under the roller shutter into the combat
zone. "Stay close and do exactly as I instruct." Breathing
in the slow, stilling pranayama technique the Ministry teaches its
Krishna Cops, Mr.Nandha makes his initial visual survey.

It is a typical development-grant job. Plastic barrels of feedstuff
on one side, main processing in the middle, packaging and shipping on
the other. No safety guards, no protective wear, no noise abatement
equipment, no air-conditioning; one bathroom male, one restroom
female.

Everything stripped down to accountancy-minimum. Minimal robotics:
human hands have always been cheaper in the strip cities. On the
right, a row of glastic cubes house the offices and aeai support.
Water coolers and fans, all dead. The sun is well up. The building is
steel oven.

A forklift is run into a wall to his extreme left. A body is just
visible between the truck and the corrugated metal bulkhead,
half-erect. Blood, glossy and furious with flies, is coagulated
beneath the wheels The man has been bayoneted at belly height by the
forklift's tines.

Mr.Nandha purses his lips in distaste.

Camera eyes everywhere. Nothing to be done about it now. It is
watching.

In his three years as a rogue-aeai hunter, Mr. Nandha has seen a
sizeable number of the bodies that result when humans and artificial
intelligences cross. He draws his gun. Jemadar Sen's eyes widen. Mr.
Nandha's gun is big, black, heavy and looks as if it were cast in
hell. It has all the knobs and details and bits a Krishna Cop needs
on his weapon, it is self-targeting and dual action. The lower barrel
kills the flesh: low-velocity explosive bullets. One hit in any part
of the body is an impact trauma sure kill. Dum-Dum, after all, is a
district of Kolkata. The upper barrel destroys the spirit. It is an
EM pulse gun; a googlewatt of power poured into a three-millisecond
directed beam. Protein chips crisp. Quantum processors heisenberg
out. Carbon nanotubes vaporise. This is the gun that annihilates
rogue aeais. Steered by GPS-oriented gyroscopes and controlled by a
visual avatar of Indra, lord of the thunderbolt, Mr. Nandha's gun
always kills and never misses.

The reek of Bradford pasta-tikka tugs urgently at the base of Mr.
Nandha's stomach. How can this muck, this pollution, be all the
thing? One of the big stainless steel industrial cooking pots is
tipped over, its contents spilled on the floor. Here the second body
lies. Its upper half is smothered in pasta-tikka. Mr. Nandha smells
cooked meat, flicks out his handkerchief to cover his mouth. He notes
the corpse's good trousers, fine shoes, pressed shirt. That will be
the IT wallah, then. In Mr. Nandha's experience, aeais, like dogs,
turn on their masters first.