River of Gods (55 page)

The taxi driver had taken the words
American consulate
as an
invitation to scam her, driving her round a roundabout with a big
statue of Ganesha under a funny little domed pavilion and a hoarding
for
Ribbed and Exciting! Corduroy trousers.

"Sarkhand Roundabout," the driver shouted. "Danger
money danger money."

There were swastikas sprayed on every flat surface. Lisa could not
remember which was the right way round and which was the fascist but
either way they made her uneasy.

Rhodes the consular officer thumbed through her accreditations.

"What exactly does this authorise you to do here, Ms. Durnau?"

"Find a man."

"This is not a good time. Embassy advice is for all US nationals
to leave. We can't guarantee your safety. American interests are
being targeted. They burned a Burger King."

"Extra flame-grilled."

He had leaked the tiniest, tightest smile. He raised an eyebrow at
the Tablet. Lisa Durnau wished she could do that. He handed her
documents smartly back to her. "Well, success with your mission,
whatever it is. Whatever assistance we can render, we will. And
whatever else they say, this is a great city."

But to Lisa Durnau Varanasi seemed a city of ash, for all its neons
and towers and floodlit shikaras. Ash on the streets and the shrines
and temples, ash on the foreheads of the holy, ash on the streamlined
wings and roofs of the Marutis and phatphats. A sky of ash, dark and
breaking in a soft wave of soot. Even through the air-conditioning of
her hotel room she could feel greasy hydrocarbon ash on her skin.
Lull's hotel was a lovely old Islamic city house of marble floors and
unexpected levels and balconies but her room was unclean. The minibar
was empty. There was a strip from a sanitary towel wedged across the
toilet bowl. The levels and balconies were full of news crews. She
checked the shower, for old times.

There was a second reservation in the Lull party. Ajmer Rao. The
Tablet pulled a lo-res shot off the lobby-cam; her. Space-bunny.
Shorter than Lisa had imagined. Wide in the ass but that might have
been the angle of the lens. What was that on her forehead?

Ajmer Rao. But Lisa Durnau's first thought was that she was glad Lull
was not sleeping with her. And Lull himself. Leaner. Face softer.
Terrible, terrible clothes. Encroaching baldness, hair long at the
back in compensation. In every way as she had seen him swirl out of
the seething pixels of the Tabernacle.

Watching the rain, Lisa Durnau finds she is angry, moltenly angry.
All her life she has striven against her father's Calvinist doctrine
of predestination, yet the fact that she is watching the monsoon fall
on Varanasi is the result of karmic forces seven billion years old.
She, Lull, this wide-assed girl, all play to a script as foreordained
and fatalistic as any episode of
Town and Country
. She is
angry because she never had escaped. The complex behaviours of
Alterre, of her Calabi-Yau mind-spaces, the cellular automata
brawling across her monitor emerged from simple, relentless rules.
Rules so simple you might never realise you were governed by them.

She thumbs into Alterre. For fun she enters her current GPS location
adjusted for continental drift, taps in full proprioception, and
steps into hell. She stands on a furrowed plain of black lava veined
red with glowing cracks. The sky is curdled with smoke lit by
lightning flashes, a snow of ash falls about her. She almost chokes
on sulphur and combustion gases, then thumbs off olfactory. The plain
rises gently towards a line of low cones pouring thick, fast torrents
of magma. Cascades of sparks close off the horizon. She can see
around her for twenty kilometres in every direction and in none of
them is there any living thing.

Panic-stricken, Lisa Durnau blinks back into Varanasi in the rain.
Her heart races, her head reels; it is like turning a street
intersection and stumbling on Ground Zero without warning. She is
physically shocked. She fears to make the gesture that will wish her
back into Alterre. She opens up window mode. The commentary box tells
her the Deccan Traps are erupting.

Half a million cubic kilometres of lava issue from a magma plume
coiling up from the mantle over what will in sixty-five million
years' time be the island of Reunion. Mt. St. Helens blew a puny
single cubic kilometre when it shook the Pacific Northwest. Half a
million Mt. St. Helens. Spread them out and they would smother the
states of Washington and Oregon two kilometres deep in liquid basalt.
The actual Deccan Traps formed a layer two kilometres deep over
Central Western India, when that subcontinent was racing
(geologically speaking) towards the Asian landmass in the head-on
collision that would throw up Earth's mightiest mountain range. The
CO
₂
, released overwhelmed all extant carbon-burying
mechanisms and brought the curtain down on Earth's Cretaceous period.
Life on Earth has been to the edge many times. Alterre would not have
been an alternative evolution without mechanisms for mass extinction
like vulcanism, polar wandering, celestial impact. The toys of major
league God-gamers. What scares Lisa Durnau is not that the Traps are
erupting. It is that the Deccan flood basalts never reached the
Indo-Gangetic plain. In Alterre, Varanasi is buried beneath a plain
of glowing basalt.

Lisa pulls up into God-vision. A finger of guilt from her church
childhood accuses her as she spins up high above the Australo-Indian
Ocean. The view was never this good from real space. Europe is an arc
of islands and peninsulas around the westward curve of the planet,

Asia a northward-steering sweep of terrain. North Asia burns. Ash
clouds cover half a continent. The fires light the dark half of the
planet. Lisa Durnau calls up a data window. She gives a soft,
wordless cry. The Siberian Traps are also erupting.

Alterre is dying, trapped between the fires at its head and its
waist. Crustal carbon dioxide released by the frothy, gassy basalt
will join with carbon from the burning forests into a rabid
greenhouse that will lift atmospheric and ocean temperatures
sufficiently to trigger a clathrate burst: methane, locked in ice
cages deep under the ocean, released in one titanic outgassing. The
oceans will seethe like a dropped can of soda. Oxygen levels plunge
as temperatures rise. Photosynthesis in the oceans shuts down. The
seas become cauldrons of rotting plankton.

Life might survive one meltdown. Earth had survived the Chixulub
impact and the resulting Deccan melt on the other side of the planet
at the cost of twenty-five percent of its species. The Siberian Traps
eruption two hundred and fifty million years ago had ended the
Permian life-burst with the extinction of ninety-five percent of
living organisms. Life had reeled over the abyss and come back. Two
eruptions at the same time is the end of biology on Earth.

Lisa Durnau watches her world fall apart.

This is not nature. This is an assault. Thomas Lull had designed
Alterre with a robust immune system to defend against the inevitable
hacks. For an attack to come through the aeais that ran the
geophysical, oceanological, and climatological systems must have
access to the central registries. This is an inside job.

Lisa Durnau rolls out of Alterre back on to the terrace of the haveli
in the summer rain. She is shaking. Once in London Lisa Durnau was
mugged outside a Tube Station. It had been short and sharp and not
particularly brutal, just quick and businesslike: her cash, her
cards, her palmer, her shoes. It was over before she realised. She
had gone through the crime with a sense of numb acquiescence, almost
of scientific inquiry. Afterwards the fear hit, the shaking, the
anger, the outrage at what had been done to her and her utter
impassivity in the face of it.

A whole world has been mugged here.

The call is lined up to the department before she realises. Lisa
Durnau waves away the address, folds the Tablet, slides it back
inside her pocket. She cannot break cover. She does not know what to
do. And she sees him; Thomas Lull, leaning over the reception desk,
asking for his key, dripping from his saturated surfer shirt and
baggie shorts and slicked-down hair into little spreading pools on
the white marble. He has not seen her. To him she is half a planet
away on a hilltop in Kansas. Lisa Durnau starts to call his name and
the two men in cheap suits and sandals get up and walk over to the
desk. One shows Thomas Lull an object in his hand. The other places a
firm hand on his shoulder. He looks dazed, confused, then the first
man opens a large black umbrella and the three of them hurry across
the rain-soaked garden to the gates where a police car has drawn up
in a slush of spray.

The game is bad cop and bad cop. You're in an interrogation room. It
could be a jail cell, a confession box, or a torture chamber, what
matters is that you can't hear or see what's happening outside. All
you know is what the cops tell you. You have a partner in crime in an
identical room. For you are accused.

So they have you in this green interview room that smells of thick
paint and antiseptic.
See that partner/fellow hoodlum/lover of
yours? Soon as the tape went on, they spilled everything, including
you
. This is what you have to decide. They could be telling the
truth. They could be playing headgames to get you to grass up your
partner. You don't know and bad cops won't tell you. They're
bad
.
Then they let you stew without even a cop coffee.

The way you see the deal is this. You deny everything and your
partner/fellow hoodlum/lover denies everything and you might both
walk. Insufficient evidence. You both confess and the cops turn out
to be not so bad after all because there's nothing a cop likes less
than paperwork and you've just saved them deskloads of that so
they'll push for a noncustodial. Or you deny everything and in the
other cell, you get fessed up. Fellow hoodlum walks and the full
weight falls on you. What's best for you? You've got the answer
before their footsteps even reach the far end of the corridor. You
bang on the door.
Hey hey hey, come back here, I want to tell you
every little thing
.

The game is called the Prisoner's Dilemma. It's not as much fun as
blackjack or Dungeons and Dragons but it's a tool A-life researchers
use to investigate complex systems. Play it enough and all manner of
human truths emerge. Long-term good, short-term bad. Do as you would
be done by and if not, then do unto them as they do unto you. Thomas
Lull has played Prisoner's Dilemma and a slate of other
limited-information games millions of times. It's very different
playing for real.

The room is green and smells of disinfectant. It also smells of
mould, old urine, hot ghee, and damp from the shirts of the
rain-soaked cops. They are not good cops, they are not bad cops, they
are just cops who would rather get back to their wives and children.
One keeps rocking back on his chair and looking at Thomas Lull, with
his eyebrows raised, as if expecting an epiphany. The other one is
constantly checking his nails and has an uncomfortable thing he does
with his mouth that reminds Thomas Lull of old Tom Hanks movies.

Do what you need to, Lull. Don't be clever, don't be fly. Get
yourself out of here. He feels a growing closeness in his chest.

"Look, I told the soldiers, I'm travelling with her, she has
relatives in Varanasi."

Chair-rocker swings forwards and scrawls Hindi on a spiral-bound
notepad. The voice recorder isn't working. They say. Tom Hanks does
the thing with the mouth again. It's really starting to needle Thomas
Lull. That, too, could be part of it.

"That might be enough for provincial jawans, but this is
Varanasi, sir."

"I don't understand what the hell is happening."

"It is quite simple, sit. Your colleague made an inquiry at the
National DNA database. A routine security scan revealed certain.
anomalous structures in her skull. She was apprehended by security
and passed into our custody."

"You keep saying this, anomalous structures, what does that
mean, what are these anomalous structures?"

Tom Hanks looks at his nails again. His mouth is unhappy.

"This is now a matter of national security, sir."

"This is fucking Franz Kafka, is what it is."

Tom Hanks looks at chair-rocker, who writes the name down.

"He's a Czech writer," Thomas Lull says. "He's been
dead a hundred years. I was attempting irony."

"Sir, please do not attempt irony. This is a most serious
issue."

Chair-rocker deliberately crosses the name out and takes a swing back
to study Thomas Lull with added perspective. The heat in the
windowless room is incredible. The smell of damp policeman is
overpowering.

"What do you know of this female?"

"I met her at a beach party at Thekkady down in Kerala. I helped
her over an asthma attack. I liked her, she was travelling north, I
went with her."

Tom Hanks flips up a corner of the folder on the desk, pretends to
consult a scrap of text. "Sir, she stopped a section of Awadhi
counterinsurgency robots with a wave of her hand."

"That's a crime?"

Chair-rocker snaps forward. His chair feet crack on the shoe-polished
concrete floor.

"Awadhi airborne divisions have just taken the Kunda Khadar dam.
The entire garrison has surrendered. It may not be a crime, but you
must admit, the coincidence is. extreme."

"This is a fucking joke. What, you think she is something to do
with that?"

"I do not make jokes where my country's security is concerned,"
Tom Hanks says. "All I know is this report and that your
travelling companion set off the alarms trying to access the National
DNA database."

"I need to know these anomalies." Tom Hanks swivels his
eyes at chair-rocker. "Do you know who I am?"