River of Gods (26 page)

"How many occasions?"

"Three, on three successive frames. The date was July third,
this year. This is the first."

Daley floats a big thirty by twenty glossy through the ait to Lisa
Durnau. Etched in the grey on grey is a woman's face. The cellular
automaton's resolution is high enough to show her slight, puzzled
frown, her mouth slightly open, even the hint of her teeth. She is
young, pretty, racially indeterminate and the scuttling blacks and
whites, frozen in time, have caught a tired frown.

"Do you know who she is?" she asks.

"As you can imagine, determining that is a primary priority,"
Daley says. "We've already interrogated FBI, CIA, IRS, Social
Security, and passport databases. No matches."

"She doesn't have to be American," Lisa Durnau says.

Daley seems genuinely surprised by that. She skims the next glossy to
Lisa face down. Lisa Durnau turns over the sheet of paper and reaches
instinctively for something not falling to cling to. But everything
falls here, all together, all the time.

He's changed his glasses, trimmed the beard to a rim of stubble; he's
grown out his hair and lost a pile of weight, but the little grey
cells have captured the sardonic, self-conscious,
get-that-camera-away-from-me look. Thomas Lull.

"Oh my good God," she breathes.

"Before you say anything, please look at this last image."

Daley Suarez-Martin sets the final photograph floating, framed in
space.

Her. It is her face, drawn in silver but clear enough to make out the
love spot on her cheek, the laugh-lines around the eyes, a shorter,
sportier haircut, the open-mouthed, eyes-wide, muscle-straining
expression she cannot quite read: Fear? Anger? Horror? Ecstasy? It is
impossible and unbelievable and mad; it is mad beyond madness, and it
is her. Lisa Leonie Durnau.

"No," Lisa says slowly. "You're making this up, it's
the drugs, isn't it? I'm still on the shuttle. This is out of my
head, isn't it? Come on, tell me."

"Lisa, can I assure you that you are not suffering from any
post-flight delusions. I'm not showing you fakes or mock-ups. Why
should I? Why bring you all the way up here to show you fake
photographs?"

That soothing tone. That G-woman MBA-speak. Peace. Be calm. We are in
control here. Be reasonable, in the face of the most unreasonable
thing in the universe. Clinging with one hand to a webbing strap on
the quilted wall of ISS's hub, Lisa Durnau understands that it has
all been unreasonable, a chain of ever larger and heavier links, from
the moment the people in suits turned up in her office. From before;
from the moment her face swirled out of the seethe of cells, without
her knowledge, without her permission, the Tabernacle chose her. It
has all been foreordained by this thing in the sky.

"I don't know!" Lisa Durnau shouts. "I don't know why.
it throws up nothing and then comes up with my face. I don't know,
right? I didn't ask it to, I didn't want it to, it has nothing to do
with me, do you understand me?"

"Lisa." Again, the gentling tone.

It is her, but a her she has never seen. She's never worn her hair
like that. Lull has never looked like that. Older freer guiltier. No
wiser. And this girl; she has never met her, but she will, she knows.
This is a snapshot of her future taken seven billion years ago.

"Lisa," Daley Suarez-Martin says a third time. The third
time is Peter's time. The betraying time. "I'm going to tell you
what we need you to do."

Lisa Durnau takes a deep breath.

"I know what it is," she says. "I'll find him. I can't
do anything else, can I?"

The earth has the little lightbody firmly in its grip. It's three
minutes—Lisa's been counting seconds—since the roll jets
last fired. The aeai has made its mind up, it is all now in the hands
of velocity and gravity. Back-first, Lisa Durnau screams along the
edge of the atmosphere in a thing that still looks like an
over-gymmed orange squeezer, only now, with the hull temperature
climbing towards three thousand cee, it's not as funny as it was down
in Canaveral. One digit out either way and thin air becomes a solid
wall that ricochets you off into space and no one to catch you before
your airco runs flat, or you fireball out and end as a sprinkle of
titanium ions with a seasoning of charred carbon.

When she was a teen in her college hall room, Lisa Durnau had given
herself one of the great scares of her life, alone in the dark among
the noisy plumbing, by imagining what it will be like when she dies.
The breath failing. The rising sense of panic as the heart fights for
blood. The black drawing in from all sides. The knowledge of what is
happening, and that you are unable to stop any of this and that after
this meagre, unworthy last instance of consciousness, there will be
nothing. And that this will happen to Lisa Durnau. No escape. No
let-off. The death sentence is incommutable. She had woken herself
up, frozen cold in her stomach, heart sick with certainty. She had
stabbed on her light and tried to think good thoughts, bright
thoughts, thoughts about guys and running and what she would do for
that term paper and where the girls could go for Friday lunch club,
but her imagination kept returning to the awful, delicious fear, like
a cat to vomit.

Reentry is like that. She tries to think good thoughts, bright
thoughts, but all she has is a pick of evils and the worst is out
there, heating the hull beyond that padded mesh wall to cremation
temperatures. It burns through the drugs. It burns through
everything. You are the woman who fell to earth. The lightbody jolts.
Lisa gives a small cry.

"It's okay, it's routine, just an asymmetry in the plasma
shield." Sam Rainey is strapped in the number two acceleration
couch. He's an old hand, been up and down a dozen times but Lisa
Durnau smells bullshit. Her fingers have cramped around the armrest;
she frees them, touches her heart for brief reassurance. She feels
the flat square object in the pocket with her name written on it.

When she finds Thomas Lull she is to show him the contents of her
right breast pocket. It is a memory block containing everything known
or speculated about the Tabernacle. All she has to do then is
persuade him to join the research project. Thomas Lull was the most
prominent, eclectic, visionary, and influential scientific thinker of
his day. Governments and chat-show hosts alike heeded his opinions.
If anyone has an idea, a dream, or a vision of what this thing is,
spinning in its stone cocoon, if anyone has a way of unravelling its
message and meaning, it will be Thomas Lull.

The block is also guru. Its special power is that it can scan any
public or security camera system for recognised faces. It's such a
piece of gear that if it's away from Lisa Durnau's personal body
odour for more than an hour, it will decompose into a smear of
protein circuitry. Be careful with the showers, swims, and keep it
close by you when you're in bed, is the instruction. Her one lead is
a semiconfirmed sighting of Thomas Lull three and a half years ago in
Kerala, South India. The revelation of the Tabernacle hangs from a
single, uncorroborated old backpacker story. The embassies and
consuls are on Render-All-Assistance alert. A card has been
authorised for expenses; it is limitless, but Daley Suarez-Martin,
who will always be Lisa Durnau's handler, in orbit or earthbound,
would like some record of outgoings.

The little lightpusher hits the air hard, a fist of gravity shoves
Lisa Durnau deep into her gel couch and everything is jolting and
rattling and shaking. She is more afraid than she has ever been and
there is nothing, absolutely nothing she can hold on to. She reaches
out a hand. Sam Rainey takes it. His gloved hand is big and
cartoonish and one tiny node of stability in a falling, shuddering
universe.

"Some time!" Sam shouts, voice shaking. "Some time!
When we! Get down! How about! We go out! For a meal! Somewhere?"

"Yes! Anything!" Lisa Durnau wails as she hurtles
Kennedy-wards, drawing a long, beautiful plasma trail across the
tall-grass prairies of Kansas.

How Thomas Lull knows he is un-American: he hates cars but loves
trains, Indian trains, big trains like a nation on the move. He is
content with the contradiction that they are at once hierarchical and
democratic, a temporary community brought together for a time; vital
while it lasts, burning away like early mist when the terminus is
reached. All journey is pilgrimage and India is a pilgrim nation.
Rivers, grand trunk roads, trains; these are sacred things across all
India's many nations. For thousands of years people have been flowing
over this vast diamond of land. All is riverrun, meeting, a brief
journey together, then dissolution.

Western thought rebels against this. Western thought is car thought.
Freedom of movement. Self-direction. Individual choice and expression
and sex on the back seat. The great car society. Throughout
literature and music, trains have been engines of fate, drawing the
individual blindly, inexorably towards death. Trains ran through the
double gates of Auschwitz, right up to the shower sheds. India has no
such understanding of trains. It is not where the unseen engine is
taking you; it is what you see from the window, what you say to your
fellow travellers for you all go together. Death is a vast, crowded
terminus of half-heard announcements and onward connections on new
lines, new journeys. Changing trains.

The train from Thiruvananthapuram moves through a wide web of lines
into the great station. Sleek shatabdis weave over the points on to
the fast uplines. Long commuter trains whine past festooned with
passengers hanging from the doors, riding the boarding steps, piled
onto the roofs, arms thrust through the barred windows, prisoners of
the mundane. Mumbai. She has always appalled Thomas Lull. Twenty
million people live on this onetime archipelago of seven scented
islands and the evening rush is upon her. Downtown Mumbai is the
world's largest single building; malls and housing projects and
office and leisure units fused together into a many-armed,
many-headed demon. Nestled at the heart of it is Chattrapati Shivaji
Terminus, a bezoar of Victorian excess and arrogance, now completely
domed over with shopping precincts and business units, like a toad
entombed in a nodule of limestone. There is never a moment when
Chattrapati Shivaji is still or silent. She is a city within a city.
Certain castes boast they are unique to it; families claim to have
raised generations among the platforms and tracks and red brick piers
who have never seen daylight. Five hundred million pilgrim feet pass
over the Raj marble each year, tended to by citiesful of porters,
vendors, shysters, insurance sellers, and janampatri readers.

Lull and Aj descend among the families and luggage onto the platform.
The noise is like a mugging. Timetable announcements are inaudible
blasts of public address roar. Porters converge on the white faces;
twenty hands reach for their bags. A skinny man in a red MarathaRail
high-collar jacket lifts Aj's bag. Quick as a knife, her hand stabs
out to arrest him. She tilts her head, looks into his eyes.

"Your name is Dheeraj Tendulkar, and you are a convicted thief."
The ersatz porter recoils as if snake-bit.

"We'll carry our own." Thomas Lull takes Aj by the elbow,
guides her like a bride through the press of faces and smells. Her
gaze darts from face to face to face in the torrent of people.

"The names. All the names; too many to read."

"I still can't understand this gods thing," he says.

The red-jackets have gathered around the rogue. Raised voices, a cry.

There is an hour's wait until the Varanasi shatabdi. Thomas Lull
finds haven in a global coffee franchise. He pays Western prices for
a cardboard bucket with a wooden stirrer. There is a tightening in
his chest, the asthmatic's somatic reaction to this claustrophobic,
relentless city beneath a city. Through the nose. Breathe through the
nose. The mouth for talking.

"This is very bad coffee, don't you think?" Aj says.

Thomas Lull drinks it and says nothing and watches the trains come
and go and the people mill through on their pilgrimages. Among them,
a man bound for the last place a man of his age and sentiments should
go, a dirty little water war. But it's mystery, allure, it's mad
stuff and reckless deeds when all you expect to feel is the universal
microwave background humming through your marrow.

"Aj, show me that photograph again. There's something I need to
tell you."

But she is not there. Aj moves through the crowd like a ghost. People
part around her, staring. Thomas Lull throws cash on the table, dives
after her, waving down a couple of porters to heft the bags.

"Aj! Our train is over here!"

She moves on, unhearing. She is the Madonna of Chattrapati Shivaji
Terminus. A family sits on a dhuri underneath a display board
drinking tea from thermos flasks: mother, father, grandmother, two
girls in their early teens. Aj walks towards them, unhurried,
unstoppable. One by one they look up, feeling the whole attention of
the station turned upon them. Aj stops. Thomas Lull stops. The
porters trotting behind him stop. Thomas Lull feels, at some quantum
level, every train and luggage van and shunter stop, every passenger
and engineer and guard freeze, every signal and sign and notice board
halt between the flip and the flop. Aj squats down before the
frightened family.

"I have to tell you, you are going to Ahmedabad, but he will not
be there to meet you. He is in trouble. It is bad trouble, he has
been arrested. The charge is serious; theft of a motorbike. He is
being held in Surendranagar District police station, number GBZ16652.
He will require a lawyer. Azad and Sons is one of the most successful
Ahmedabad criminal law practices. There is a quicker train you can
catch in five minutes from Platform Nineteen. It requires a change at
Surat. If you hurry you can still catch it. Hurry!"