River of Gods (27 page)

Lull seizes her arm. Aj turns; he sees emotions in her eyes that
frighten him but he has broken the moment. The terrified family are
in various states of alarm; father fight, mother flight, grandmother
hands raised in praise, daughters trying to gather up the tea things.
A hot wet stain of spilled chai spreads across the dhuri.

"She is right," Thomas Lull calls as he drags Aj away. Now
she is unresisting, leaden, like the ones he would escort from the
beach parties, stumbling over the sand, the ones on the evil trips.
"She's always right. If she says go, you go."

Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus exhales and resumes its constant
low-intensity scream.

"What the fuck were you thinking of?" Lull says, hurrying
Aj to Platform Five where the Mumbai-Varanasi Raj shatabdi has been
called, a long scimitar of green and silver glistening in the station
floods. "What did you tell those people? You could have started
anything, anything at all."

"They were going to see their son but he is in trouble,"
she says faintly. He thinks she might collapse on him.

"This way sir, this way!" The porters escort them through
the crowd. "This car, this car!" Thomas Lull overpays them
to take Aj to her seat. It's a reserved two-person carrel, lamp-lit,
intimate. Leaning into the cone of light, Thomas Lull says, "How
do you know this stuff?"

She will not look at him, she turns her head into the padded
seatback. Her face is ash. Thomas Lull is very afraid she is going to
have another asthma attack.

"I saw it, the gods."

He lunges forward, takes her heart-shaped face between his two hands,
turns it to look at him.

"Don't lie to me; nobody can do this."

She touches his hands and he feels them fall away from her face.

"I told you. I see it like a halo around people. Things about
them; who they are, where they're going, what train they're on. Like
those people going to see their son, only he wouldn't be there for
them. All that, and they wouldn't have known, and they would have
been waiting and waiting and waiting at the station and trains would
come and trains would go and still he wouldn't come and maybe the
father would go to his address but all they would know is that he
went out that morning to work and that he'd said he would meet them
all at the station and they'd go to the police and find out that he'd
been arrested for stealing a motorbike and they would have to bail
him and they wouldn't know who to go to get him out."

Thomas Lull slumps in his seat. He is defeated. His anger, his blunt
Yankee rationalism fail before this girl's pale words.

"This son, this prodigal, what's his name?"

"Sanjay."

Automatic doors close. Up the line a whistle shrills over the station
roar.

"Have you got that photograph? Show me that photograph, the one
you showed me down by the backwater."

Silently, smoothly, the train begins to move, Station wallahs and
well-wishers keep pace for a last chance sale or farewell. Aj unfolds
the palmer on the table.

"I didn't tell you the truth," Thomas Lull says.

"I asked you. You said: 'Just other tourists on the trip.
They've probably got a photograph exactly the same.' That was not the
truth?"

The fast electric train rocks over points; picking up speed with
every metre it dives into a tunnel, eerily lit by flashes from the
overhead lines.

"It was a truth. They were tourists—we all were, but I
know these people. I've known them for years. We were all travelling
together in India, that's how well we knew each other. Their names
are Jean-Yves and Anjali Trudeau; they're Artificial-life
theoreticians from the University of Strasbourg. He's French, she's
Indian. Good scientists. The last time I heard from them they were
thinking of moving to the University of Bharat—all the closer
to the sundarbans. That was where they thought the real cutting
research was being done, unhampered by the Hamilton Acts and the aeai
licensing laws. Looks like they did, but they are not your real
parents."

"Why is that?" Aj asks.

"Two things. First, how old are you? Eighteen? Nineteen? They
didn't have a child when I knew them four years ago. But that all
falls at the second. Anjali was born without a womb. Jean-Yves told
me. She could never have children, not even in vitro. She cannot be
your natural mother."

The shatabdi bursts out from the undercity into the light. A vast
plane of gold slants through the window across the small table.
Mumbai's photochemical smog has blessed it with Bollywood sunsets.
The perpetual brown haze renders the ziggurats of the projects
ethereal as sacred mountains. Power gantries strobe past; Thomas Lull
watches them flicker over Aj's face, trying to read emotions,
reactions in the dazzling mask of gold. She bows her head. She closes
her eyes. Thomas Lull hears an intake of breath. Aj looks up.

"Professor Lull, I am experiencing a number of strong and
unpleasant sensations. Let me describe them to you. Though I am at
relative rest, I experience a sense of vertigo, as if I am falling;
not in a physical sense, but inwards. I experience a sense of nausea
and what I can only describe as hollowness. I experience unreality,
as if this present is not happening to me and I am dreaming in my bed
in the hotel in Thekkady. I experience a sense of impact, as if I
have been struck without a physical blow being landed on me. I
imagine that the physical substance of the world is frail and fragile
like glass and that at any moment I will fall through into a void,
yet at the same time I find a thousand different ideas rushing
through my head. Professor Lull, can you explain my contradictory
sensations?"

The swift sun of India is now setting, staining Aj's face red like a
devotee of Kali. The fast train blurs through Mumbai's vast
basti-lands. Thomas Lull says, "It's what anyone feels when
their life turns to lies. It's anger and it's betrayal and it's
confusion and loss and fear and hurt but those are only names. We
have no language for emotions other than the emotion itself."

"I feel tears starting in my eyes. This is most surprising."
Then Aj's voice breaks and Thomas Lull helps her to the washroom to
let the alien emotions work themselves out away from the stares of
the passengers. Back at his seat he calls a steward and orders a
bottle of water. He pours a glass, adds a high-grade tranq from his
small but efficacious travelling apothecary, and marvels at the
simple complexity of the ripple patterns on its surface transmitted
from the steel beat of the wheels. When Aj returns he pushes the
trembling glass across the table before any more of her questions can
tumble out. He has enough of his own.

"All of it."

The tranq is not long taking effect. Aj blinks at him like a drunk
owl, curls up as cat-comfortable as she can in the seat. She is out.
Thomas Lull's hand moves to her tilak, stops. It would be a violation
as monstrous as if he slipped his hand down the front of her loose
grey tie-waist pants. And that is a thought he hadn't verbalised
until this second.

Strange girl, curled up like a gangly ten-year-old in her seat. He
told her truths to scarify any heart and she treated them like
propositions in philosophy. As if they were strange to her, new.
Alien. Why had he told her? To break her illusion or because he knew
how she would react? To see the look on her face as she fought to
comprehend what her body was experiencing? He knows that fearful
bafflement from the faces of the beach-club kids when emotions brewed
up in the protein processor matrices of the cyberabads hit them.
Emotions for which their bodies have no needs or analogues; emotions
they experience but cannot understand. Alien emotions.

He has much work to do. As the fast train plunges past the empty,
stepped reservoirs of the purifying Narmada, hurling itself into the
night past the villages and towns and drought-blighted forests,
Thomas Lull goes far-fetching. An old down-home expression of Lisa
Durnau's for blue-skying; sitting back and letting your mind roam the
furthest bounds of possibility. It is the work he loves best and the
closest heathen old Thomas Lull comes to spirituality. It is, he
thinks, all of spirituality. God is our selves, our true,
preconscious selves. The yogis have had it right all these millennia.
The working out of the idea is never as thrilling as the burn of
creation, the moment of searing insight when all at once, you know
absolutely.

He studies Aj as ideas tumble and collide and shatter and are drawn
together again by intellectual gravity. In time they will coalesce
into a new world, but there is enough for Thomas Lull to guess its
future nature. And he is afraid. The train ploughs on, peeling a
bow-wave of night from its streamlined prow as it eats two hundred
and eighty kilometres of India every hour. Exhaustion struggles with
intellectual excitement and eventually subdues it. Thomas Lull
sleeps. He wakes only at the brief halt at Jabalpur as Awadhi customs
make a perfunctory border check. Two men in peaked caps glance at
Thomas Lull. Aj sleeps on, head cradled on arm. White man and Western
woman. Unimpeachable. Thomas Lull dozes again, waking once to shiver
with an ancient, childhood pleasure at the rumble of the wheels
beneath him. He falls into a long and untroubled sleep terminated by
an untimetabled jolt that throws him out of unconsciousness hard
against the table.

Luggage crashes from the overhead racks. Passengers in the aisles
fall. Voices cry, merge into a jabber of panic. The shatabdi jars
hard, jars again; comes to a screaming, shuddering halt. The voices
peak and fall silent. The train sits motionless. The com crackles,
goes dead. Thomas Lull cups his hands around his face, peers out of
the window. The rural dark is impenetrable, enfolding, yonic. He
thinks he sees distant car headlights, bobbing lights like torches.
Now the questions start, everyone asking at once is everyone all
right what happened?

Aj mumbles, stirring. The tranqs are more effective than Thomas Lull
thought. Now he is aware of a wall of voices advancing down the train
and with it a stench of burning polycarbon from the air-conditioning
ducts. With one hand he snatches up Aj's bag, with the other he drags
her upright. Aj blinks thickly at him.

"Come on, sleeping beauty. We're making an unscheduled
disembarkation." He pulls her, still quasi-conscious, into the
aisle, seizes the bags, and pushes her towards the rear sliding
doors. Behind him the black picture window explodes in a spray of
glass-sugar as a concrete block trailing a sling-rope bursts through.
It bounces off the table, strikes a woman in the seat across the
aisle. She goes down, spraying blood from a smashed knee. The press
of fleeing passengers trip over her and fall. She is dead, Thomas
Lull realises with a terrible, intimate chill. The woman, or anyone
else who goes down in this surge.

"Get the fuck moving!" Thomas Lull bounces the dazed Aj
down the aisle with slaps of his hands to her back. He glimpsed
flames through the empty window; flames and faces. "Go go go."
Behind them the jam is hideous. Low vanguards of smoke steal from the
vents and under the uptrain carriage door. The voices rise to a
chorus of dread.

"To me! To me!" roars a Sikh steward in railway livery
standing on a table by the inner carriage door. "One at a time,
come on, there is plenty of time. You. Now, you. You." He uses
his passkey to turn the sliding door into a people-lock. One family
at a time.

"What the hell is going on?" Thomas Lull asks as he takes
his place at the head of the line.

"Bharati karsevaks have fired the train," the steward says
quietly. "Say nothing. Now, you go."

Thomas Lull shoves Aj into the door section, blinks into the dark
outside.

"Fucking hell." A ring of fire encircles the small
encampment of dazed, fearful passengers and their goods. Decades of
working with the digits of cellular automata have made Thomas Lull
skilled at estimating number from a single glance. There must be five
hundred of them out there, holding burning torches. Sparks blow back
from the front of the train; orange smoke, luminous in half light, is
a sure signifier of burning plastics. "Change of plan. We're not
getting off here."

"What's going on, what's happening?" Aj asks as Thomas Lull
forces open the doors to the next carriage. It is already half empty.

"The train's been stopped, some Shivaji protest."

"Shivaji?"

"I thought you knew everything. Hindu fundamentalists. Who are
pretty pissed with Awadh right now."

"You're very glib," Aj says and Thomas Lull cannot tell if
it is the end of the tranqs or the start of her weird wisdom. But the
glow from outside grows stronger and he can hear the slam and shatter
of objects hurled against the carcass of the train.

"That's because I'm very very scared," Thomas Lull says. He
pushes Aj past the next door open on to the night. He does not want
her to register the screams and the sounds he recognises as
small-arms fire. The bogies are almost empty now, they plough their
way through one, two, three, then the car staggers sending Thomas
Lull and Aj reeling as a deep boom rocks the train. "Oh Jesus,"
Thomas Lull says. He guesses that a power car has exploded. A roar of
acclamation goes up from the mob outside. Thomas Lull and Aj press
on. Four carriages back they meet a wide-eyed Marathi ticket
inspector.

"You cannot go on, sir."

"I am going on whether it's past, over, or through you."

"Sir, sir, you do not understand. They have fired the other end,
too."

Thomas Lull stares at the inspector in his neat suit. It is Aj who
pulls him away. They reach the intercarriage lobby as smoke forces
its fingers between the inner door seals. The lights go out. Thomas
Lull blinks in darkness, then the emergency floor-level lighting
kicks in casting an eerie, Gothic footlight glow into the crannies
and crags of human faces. The outer door remains fast. Sealed. Dead.
Thomas Lull watches the smoke fill up the carriage behind the inner
door. He tries to find purchase on the rubber seal.