River of Gods (53 page)

"Cease fire!"

The power lines fizz with overload as the last escapees are consigned
to scrap. Glancing behind him, Mr. Nandha reads the distaste on Vik's
face as he he struggles with his big multirole assault rifle. This is
what you wanted, Mr. Nandha thinks. A piece of the action. The gun
and the gear.

The rain falls luminous through the belly-spots from the hovering
aircraft. Jet-wash and the rising storm wind swirl the drops into
glowing veils.

"Something is not right here," Mr. Nandha says quietly and
then the monsoon breaks over Varanasi. In an instant Mr. Nandha is
soaked to the bone. His dove grey suit is plastered to his skin.
Blinded, he tries to wipe the rain from his eyes. Unbowed by the
monsoon, Indra towers through the lightning and rain over
five-thousand-year-old Kashi.

The sowars crash down through the roof onto the desks and filing
cabinets and collapsed ceiling fans, kicking over displays and chai
cups and water coolers. Weapons levelled, they quarter the open-plan
office with their nightwatchs. It's a dead black office in the middle
of a downpour. Rain cascades through the holes they have blown in the
roof. The subadar-major signs for her sowars to make safe the
evidence. As they shift processor cubes and stacks out of the rain
she calls Mr. Nandha on her throat-mike. Another mudra and her
troopers spread out, scanning on full sensory array for aeai
activity. Lightning spooks her face. She can hear the regular police
jawans work their ways up through the lower levels. She gestures for
her warriors to spread and secure. There's nothing here. Whatever
spirit dwelled in this place is fled.

Mr. Nandha signals his team to close up.

"What's not right?" Vik says. His hair is streaked flat,
his nose runs rain, and his baggy clothes cascade at the creases. He
raises his eyes to Indra, high above the chaotic roofscape of Kashi.

"This is a decoy." Mr. Nandha kicks a fist-curled corpse of
a maintenance robot. "This is not the Generation Three breaking
itself down into subaeais and escaping. This is deliberate. They want
us to destroy everything." He calls into his palmer-glove. "All
units, cease firing, do not
^en
g
^a
g
^e
."

But the two squads to the north and west are too busy chasing
monkey-robots over bales of sari silk and through racks of
schoolgirls' uniforms while the proprietors throw their hands up in
loud lamentation as the pulses wipe their till memories. The jawans'
combat suits turn sari-colour as they run, whooping, after the
leaping, bounding machines through storerooms, past chowkidars hiding
in doorways, hands over their heads, up and up concrete staircases
until the last of the robots are driven under the guns of the sowars.
It is like a Raj duck-shoot. For a few moments the light of induced
EM-charges outshines the lightning.

Mr. Nandha enters the destroyed office. He looks at the circular
waterfalls pooling on the cheap carpet. He looks at the smoking
robots and the shattered screens and smashed desks. Mr. Nandha purses
his lips, vexed.

"Who is in command here?"

The subadar-major's helmet opens and retracts into the cowl of her
combat suit. "Subadar-Major Kaur, sir."

"This is a crime-scene investigation, subadar-major."

Voices, feet scuffling at the door. The sowars restrain a small but
evidently vigorous Bangla, smart as a mynah in an inexplicably dry
black suit.

"I demand to see."

"Admit him," Mr. Nandha orders. Shafts of search-light
beaming through the streaming holes in the roof light the office. The
Bangla looks around him in shock as the soldiers stand back.

"What is the meaning of this?" the Bangla demands.

"You are, sir?" Mr. Nandha asks, acutely conscious of his
saturated suit.

"My name is Chakraborty, I am a lawyer with this company."

Mr. Nandha holds up his left hand. The picture in his palm displays
the open hand symbol of the Ministry. Palm within a palm.

"I am conducting an investigation into the illegal harbouring of
a Generation Three Artificial Intelligence contrary to Section
twenty-seven of the International Treaty of Lima," Mr. Nandha
says. The Bangla blinks at him.

"Buffoon."

"Sir, these are the premises of Odeco Incorporated?"

"They are."

"Please read this warrant."

The sowars have the generator up and string clip-lamps around the
office. Chakraborty swivels Mr. Nandha's hand into the light of the
nearest lamp. "This is what is known informally as an
excommunication order."

"From the office of the Minister of Justice himself."

"I will be launching an official appeal and civil action for
damages."

"Of course, sir. You would not be acting professionally
otherwise, Now, please be careful; my agents have work to do and
there are live weapons present."

Sowar engineers rig waterproof covers over the holes in the ceiling,
Jawans spool power cables to the processors; Vik is already at the
terminals, his own version of the avatar box jacked into the arrays.

"Nothing here."

"Show me."

Mr. Nandha feels Chakraborty at his shoulder, smirking as he bends
over Vik squatting at the roll screen. Vik thumbs through stack after
stack of registers.

"If there was ever any Gen Three here, it's long gone," he
says. "But hey, look at this! Our friend Vishram Ray."

"Sir." Madhvi Prasad at another screen. She pulls up a pair
of broken-backed typist's chairs. Mr. Nandha settles beside her. His
socks squeak inside his shoes and he winces at the indignity. It is
bad to conduct the most important investigation of your career in
creaking cotton socks. It is worse to be called a buffoon by a sleek
Bangla lawyer. But what is worst is to be accused of being no man at
all, a ball-less hijra, in your kitchen, under your own roof, by your
wife's mother, by a withered country widow. Mr. Nandha pushes the
humiliation away. Those naked sadhus dancing in the rain endure
greater for less.

"What am I looking at?" Mr. Nandha asks. Prasad swings the
screen to him.

It is bright morning at the new ghat at Patna. Ferries and hydrofoils
crowd the edges of the shot, businessmen and workers throng the
background; behind them the towers of the new commercial Bund glitter
in the east-light. In the foreground stand three smiling people. One
is Jean-Yves Trudeau, the other his wife, Anjali. Their arms are
around a third person who stands between them, a girl in her late
teens, wheat-complexioned like the best matrimonial advertisements.
She is a head shorter than the Westerners but her smile is wide and
radiant despite her shaved scalp on which Mr. Nandha can read the
hairline scars of recent surgery.

Mr. Nandha bends closer. Chilled by the rain, his breath steams in
the close blue glow of the stack-and-stick neons.

"This is what they wanted us to destroy." He touches a
finger to the girl's face. "This one is still alive."

For ten days the slow missiles have crossed the flat, scorched lands
of western Bharat. Even as the Awadhi garrison at Kunda Khadar fled
before the bold Bharati jawans, artillery units across an
eighty-kilometre front released between two and three hundred
autonomous drones from their stubby cylindrical silos. Each carries a
payload of ten kilogrammes of high-yield explosive and is the size
and shape of a small, densely muscled cat. By day they sleep in
shallow scrapes or stacks of half-moon dried dung ladhus. When the
night comes they unfold antennae to the moon, stir their folded metal
legs and skulk across fields and down dry country drains, feline
subtle, feline wary, steering by the light of the moon and quiet
chirps of GPS. Truck headlights startle them, they freeze, trusting
in their rudimentary chameleon camouflage. No one sees, no one hears,
though they slink within centimetres of the tractor mechanic sleeping
on his charpoy. By the time the first Brahmin salutes the sun on the
banks of holy Ganga they have burrowed into the sand or cling to the
rafters in the smoke and shadows of the temple ceiling or have
submerged themselves at the bottom of the village tank. They are
level 1.4 aeais but their fuel cells run on a tungsten-moderated
methane reaction. They converge across Bharat navigating from cow
fart to cow fart.

In the late hours of a July evening the slow missiles arrive on
target. For the past two nights they have moved through city streets,
running along suburban garden walls standing hunting cats, leaping
from rooftop to rooftop across the narrow inner-city alleys, jumping
down tiers of balconies to dart silent and dark across city streets,
banding together in twos and threes, in tens and dozens, finally in
their hundreds, a swarm of plastic paws and flexing whisker antennae,
setting the pi-dogs to barking. But no one heeds the barking of
pi-dogs.

At ten thirty, two hundred and twenty slow missiles infiltrate all
key systems at Ray Power's Allahabad Main electrical distribution
station and simultaneously detonate themselves.

Western Bharat from Allahabad to the border is blacked out.
Communication lines go silent. Command and control centres are
paralysed, scrambling to get their backup system online. Satellite
ground stations go blind. Air defence switches to auxiliary.
Emergency power-up takes three minutes. Restoring comlinks and
control chains takes another two minutes. It is a further three
before Bharat is fully defence-capable.

In those eight minutes, one hundred and fifty Awadhi helicopter
drop-ships supported by aeai ground-attack craft morph out of stealth
and offload infantry and light mechanised units five kilometres
inside the Bharati border. As APCs drill through dirt-scrabble border
villages and mortar teams set up advanced positions, heavy armoured
units move under air support from their holding positions and sweep
in towards the northern end of the dam. Simultaneously two armoured
divisions punch through Bharat's lightly defended border at Rewa and
push up the Jabalpur road towards Allahabad,

By the time the backup power is online and command and intelligence
systems are restored, Bharat's western artillery positions are
staring down the muzzles of Franks main battle tanks while swarms of
rat-robots take out the defensive minefields and the first mortar
rounds whistle eerily onto the Kunda Khadar dam. Surrounded, cut off
from the command structure and naked to air power, support pinned
down holding Allahabad, General Jha surrenders. Five thousand
soldiers lay down their weapons. It is the most triumphant eight
minutes in Awadh's history of arms. It is the most ignominious in
Bharat's.

At ten forty the cell network is restored. Within ten minutes palmers
are ringing all over rain-punished Varanasi.

Under the instruction of old Ram Das the outdoor staff carry the
garden furniture to the shelter of the Shanker Mahal's generous
porches. Vishram walks past a line of white cast iron and wicker
crossing the lawn. His mother sits alone at the far end of the
garden, a little pale woman at a little white table highlit against
the towering dark of the monsoon. Like a British dowager, she will
wait until the storm is upon her before she relinquishes her redoubt.
Vishram perennially remembers her thus, on the lawns, at her white
tables, beneath her clustered parasols, with her ladies and her chai
on a silver tray. Vishram always loved the house best in the rain,
when it seemed to float free against the green and the black clouds.
Then its dehydrated ghosts returned to life and his room sounded to
their creakings and clickings. In this season the Shanker Mahal
smells of old wood and damp and growing, as if the plant patterns on
his bedroom ceiling might burst into bud and flower. The entwined
figures on the pillars and brackets relax in the rain.

"Vishram, my bird. That suit does look well on you."

He summons back the last garden chair with a crook of his finger.
Lightning glimmers beyond the Ashok trees. Beyond them, headlights
slash through the murk. "Mamaji." Vishram inclines his
head. "I won't keep you. I need to know where he is."

"Who, dear?"

"Who do you think?"

"Your father is a man who takes the spiritual life seriously. If
he has chosen the sadhu's path of seclusion, that should be
respected. What do you need from him?"

"Nothing," Vishram Ray says. He thinks he sees his mother
duck away a sly smile as she lifts her cup of Darjeeling to her lips.
Electric hot wind buffets the flowerbeds; peacocks shriek in panic.
"I want to tell him something I've decided."

"A business thing? You know I've never had a head for business,"
Mamata Ray says.

"Mother," Vishram says. All his life she had maintained
this soft lie; simple Mamata understands nothing of business, wants
nothing to do with it, that is men's affairs, business and money and
power. No decision had ever been taken, no investment made, no
purchase recommended, no research authorised, that Mamata Ray had not
been there saying she knew nothing but what would happen if, and how
would that be, and in the long run might this? Vishram did not doubt
that her hesitant questions had been at the root of the Shakespearean
division of Ray Power, hers the voice that gave Ranjit Ray his
blessing to walk away from the world.

Vishram pours himself a cup of the scented Darjeeling tea. He thinks
the taste overrefined but it gives himself something to do with his
hands. First Rule of Comedy. Always have something to do with your
hands.

"I'm buying out Ramesh. I've called an extraordinary board
meeting."

"You've spoken to Mr. Chakraborty."

His mother's eyes are lenses of lead, reflection of the churned grey
sky.

"I know what Odeco is."

"Is this what you want to tell your father?"

"No. What I want to tell him is that I have very few choices
here and I've made the best I think I can."