River of Gods (65 page)

"Why, is she." Lisa Durnau asks, dreading the answer.

"An aeai possessing a human body," Thomas Lull says and
Lisa now hears the ice in his voice that is more dangerous than any
heat of passion.

Nanak rocks on yts chair.

"That is correct; forgive me, this is most distasteful. The
Badrinath sundarban was the host for a Generation Three artificial
intelligence. The scheme, as your colleagues told it to me, was to
download a copy on to the higher cognitive levels of a human brain.
The tilak was the interface. An extremely complicated piece of
surgery. It took us three attempts to get it right."

"They're scared, aren't they?" Thomas Lull says. "They
can see the end coming. How many are left?"

"Three only, I believe."

"They want to know if they can make peace or if they must be
driven to extinction, but first they have to understand us. Our
humanity baffles them, it's a miracle she can make any sense out of
it it all, but that's what the false childhood is for. How old is Aj
really?"

"It is eight months since she left this place with your
colleagues—whom she believed to be her real parents. It is just
over a year since I was contacted by the Badrinath aeai. Oh, you
should have seen her the day she left, she was so bright, so joyful,
like everything was new. The European couple were to take her down to
Bangalore—they had only a short time, levels of memory were
decompressing and if they left it too long it would have been
disastrous, they would have become imprinted."

"You abandoned her?" Lisa Durnau is incredulous. She tries
to convince herself that this is India; life and individuality have
different values from Kansas and Santa Barbara. But she still reels
from what these people have done to a teenage girl.

"It was the plan. We had a cover story that she was in a gap
year travelling around the subcontinent."

"And did it ever, once occur to you, in your plans and cover
stories and decompressing memories and your precision Chinese
surgery, that for this aeai to live, a human personality had to die?"
Thomas Lull explodes. Lisa Durnau now touches a hand to his leg.
Easy. Peace. Chill. Nanak smiles like a blessing saint.

"Why sir, the child was an imbecile. No individuality, no sense
of person at all. No life at all. It had to be that way, we could
never have used a normal subject. Her parents were delighted when
your colleagues bought her from them. At last their child might have
a chance, with the experimental new technology. They thanked Lord
Vishnu."

With a wordless roar Thomas Lull is on his feet, fist balled. Nanak
scuttles across the floor away from the raging male. Lisa Durnau
smothers Lull's fist in her two hands.

"Leave it, let it go," she whispers. "Sit down, Lull,
sit down."

"Fuck you!" Thomas Lull yells at the nute-maker. "Fuck
you and fuck Kalki and fuck Jean-Yves and Anjali!"

Lisa Durnau presses him into his seat. Nanak gathers ytself up, dusts
ytself down, but yt does not dare come near.

"I apologise for my friend here," Lisa Durnau says. "He's
overwrought." She grips Thomas Lull's shoulder. "I think we
should go."

"Yes, maybe that would be best," says Nanak, shrugging yts
shawls around ytself. "This is a discreet business, I cannot
have raised voices."

Thomas Lull shakes his head, disgusted at himself as much as any
words in this room. He extends a hand but the nute does not take it.

The suitcases have little plastic wheels that rumble over the
downtown streets. But the surface is patched and uneven and the
handles are silly webbing loops and Krishan and Parvati are moving as
fast as they can so every few metres the cases twist off their wheels
and spill over. And the taxis just splash by Krishan's upraised hand
and the troop carriers prowl past and the songs of the karsevaks come
from this side then that side, from behind, then right in front so
they must hide in a doorway as they run past and Parvati is weary and
soaked through, sari clinging to her, hair hanging in ropes and it is
still five kilometres to the station.

"Too many clothes," Krishan jokes. Parvati smiles. He hefts
both cases, one in each hand, and sets off again. Together they
huddle through the streets clinging to doorways, cringing from the
military traffic, dashing across intersections, always alert for
unexpected sounds, sudden movements.

"Not far," Krishan lies. His forearms are knotted, burning.
"Soon be there."

As they approach the station people emerge from the capillary galis
and project streets, laden like them with bags, burdens, cycle
rickshaws, carts, cars; rivulet joining to stream joining to flow
joining together into a broad river of heads. Parvati clutches at
Krishan's sleeve. To slip apart here is to be lost for years. Krishan
wades on, fists rigid around the plastic handles that feel as if they
are made of burning coal, neck muscles tensed, teeth clenched,
looking ahead, ahead, thinking of nothing but the station the train
the station the train and how every footstep takes him closer, takes
him nearer to the time when he can set these burdens down. He waddles
now, trying to keep step with the surge of people. Parvati is closer
than a shadow. A woman in a full burqa presses past. "What are
you doing here?" she hisses. "You have brought this to us."
Krishan pushes the woman away with his suitcases before her words can
spread and bring the wrath of the crowd down on them for now he sees
what has been before his face all this long road: the Muslims are
leaving Varanasi.

Parvati whispers, "Do you think we will be able to get a train?"
Then Krishan understands that the world will not stop for their
romantic notions, the crowds will not part and let them free passage,
history will not grant them a lovers' pardon. Theirs is not a bold,
romantic flight. They are foolish and blind and selfish. His heart
sinks deeper as the street opens into the approach to the station and
the flow of refugees empties into the largest mass of people he has
ever seen, more than any crowd that ever streamed out of Sampurnanand
Stadium. He can see the spars and translucent spun-diamond canopy of
the concourse, the gaping glass portals to the ticket halls. He can
see the train at the platform, glistening under the yellow lights,
already loaded to the roof and more climbing on all the time. He can
see the soldiers silhouetted against the breaking dawn on their
armoured vehicles. But he cannot see a way through the people; all
those people. And the cases, those stupid suitcases, pull him down
through the concrete into the soil, anchoring him like roots. Parvati
tugs at his sleeve.

"This way."

She draws him towards the concourse gates. The press is less at the
edge of the plaza; refugees instinctually keep away from soldiers.
Parvati hunts in the beadwork bag over her shoulder. She fetches a
tube of lipstick, ducks her head briefly and comes up again with a
red bindi on her forehead.

"Please, for the love of Siva for the love of Siva!" she
cries to the soldiers, hands pressed together into a namaskar of
entreaty. The jawans' eyes cannot be read behind their mirrored,
rain-spotted visors. Louder now: "For the love of the Lord
Siva!" Now the people around her start to turn and look and
growl. They start to jostle, their anger begins. Parvati pleads with
the soldiers. "For the love of Lord Siva."

Then the soldiers hear her voice. They see her soaked, dirt-smeared
sari. They read her bindi. Jawans slip down from their vehicles,
jabbing their weapon muzzles at the women and children, forcing them
back though they scream God's curse at the soldiers. A jemadar
gestures briskly to Parvati and Krishan. The soldiers part, they slip
through, the weapons go up again to the horizontal, a bar, a denial.
A woman officer hurries Parvati and Krishan between the parked
transports that even in the rain smell of hot biodiesel. Voices rise
to a thunder of outrage. Glancing back, Parvati sees hands seize a
jawan's assault gun. There is a short, fierce balance of forces, then
the soldier next to him casually swings up the butt of his weapon and
smashes it into the side of the protestor's skull. The Muslim man
goes down without even a cry, hands clutched to head. The man's cry
becomes the crowd's; it surges like a river squall. Then the shots
rip out and everyone in the plaza falls to their knees.

"Gome on," the jemadar says. "No one's hurt. Keep your
heads down. What were you doing there? What ever possessed you? This
day of all days." She tuts. Parvati does not think Bharati
soldiers should tut.

"My mother," Parvati says. "I have to go to her, she's
an old woman, she needs me, she has no one else."

The jemadar brings them up the side steps into the station concourse.
Parvan's spirit turns to lead. The people, the people. There is no
way through this. She cannot see where the ticket counters are. But
Krishan bangs down the cases and jerks out the handles and lifts them
up on their little frayed black plastic wheels and pushes
determinedly into the rear of the crowd.

The sun climbs over the transparent roof. Trains arrive, more people
than Parvati can ever imagine press onto the platforms. For every
trainload of refugees that pulls out from under Varanasi Station's
spun-diamond canopy another presses into the foyer from the
forecourt. Parvati and Krishan are pushed step by step toward the
ticket desks. Parvati watches the flatscreens suspended from the
roof. Something has happened to
Breakfast with Bharti
. In her
place is a video loop of Ashok Rana, whom she has never liked, over
and over. He is behind some studio desk. He looks tired and afraid.
It is only on the sixth viewing that Parvati understands with a shock
what he is saying. His sister is dead. Sajida Rana is dead. Now the
streets, the shots, the crowds, the running, the Muslims, and the
soldiers firing over their heads, all become solid, one connected
thing. Ignorant and innocent, they have been running, suitcases in
hand, through the death throes of Mother Bharat. Suddenly her
selfishness consumes her.

"Krishan. We have to go back. I can't go. We were wrong."

Krishan's face is perfect, drained, disbelief. Then the gap opens in
front of him and it goes all the way to the ticket counter and the
clerk looks at Parvati, just at Parvati and in a moment the gap will
implode.

"Krishan, the ticket-wallah!"

She pushes him up to the counter and the ticket-wallah asks him where
he wants to go and he doesn't know, and she can see the clerk will
brush him aside, next please.

"Bubaneshwar!" she cries. "Two singles! Bubaneshwar."
She has never been to Bubaneshwar, has never even crossed into
ancient Orissa, but her mind is filled with the image of billowing
orange and scarlet silk, the rath yatra of Jagannath. Then the
ticket-wallah prints the tickets and gives them their train number
and time and platform and seat reservations and spins the slips of
paper through the hatch.

It is four hours until the train to Raipur, where they will change
for Bubaneshwar. The slow conveyor of people takes them through the
doors on to the platform where they sit on their luggage, too tired
for words, each fearing that if the other speaks they will both leave
the blue plastic cases and bolt back to their lives and lies, little
adventure over and closed. Krishan buys newsprints from the stall—not
many for what Parvati reads in them makes her afraid to be on the
platform among the Muslims, despite the groups of soldiers that pass
up and down. She feels the weight of their looks, hears their hisses
and mutterings. Mrs. Khan from the Cantonment Set, so certain on the
politics of the war at the cricket match, could be on this platform.
No, not the Begum Khan; she would be in a first-class air-conditioned
a hundred kilometres away, she would be driving south in her
chauffeured car, windows darkened; she would be in business class on
an airbus.

Rain drips from the fringe of the platform canopy. Krishan shows
Parvati the headline, still smeary from the printer, announcing a
great Government of National Salvation in coalition with N. K.
Jivanjee's Shivaji Party that will restore order and repulse the
invader. This is what Parvati has felt blow across the platforms like
a cold front. The enemy has gained the whip; there is no place in
Bharat for Islam.

The train is felt before heard; the clank of the points, the deep
vibration transmitted up through the sleepers to the steel stanchions
that support the platform canopy, the rumble in the worn blacktop.
The crowd arises family by family as the train expands out of the
perspective of the tracks, weaving over the points as it draws in to
platform fifteen. The indicator boards light up: Raipur Express.
Krishan snatches up the cases as the crowd surges forward to meet the
train. Bogie after bogie after bogie slides past without sign of
stopping. Parvati presses close to Krishan. Trip here, stumble, fall
and you would die beneath the guillotine-edge wheels. Slowly the
great green train comes to halt.

Suddenly bodies push hard against Parvati. She reels forward against
Krishan, he is driven hard against the side of the train.
Simulataneously a roar goes up from the back of the crowd.

"To me, to me!" Krishan cries. The doors hiss open. Bodies
immediately clog them. Arms thrust, torsos twist, luggage is squeezed
and rammed. The surge carries Parvati away from the steps. Krishan
fights the flow, clinging to the door stanchion, desperate that she
will not be separated from him. Terrified, Parvati reaches out for
him. Women shove around her screaming mindless oaths, children kick
past. The platform is heads, heads and hands, heads and hands and
bundles and more people are running across the tracks from the other
platforms to reach the train, the train out of Varanasi. Young men
trample Parvati as they scramble on to the roof; still she reaches
for Krishan's hand.