River Of Gods Page 10

  Shiv has never had that luxury. At every stage of his journey from Chandi Basti to this Ayurvedic restaurant, there was only ever one choice to make. Morality was for those who lived somewhere else than the basti. There had been one choice that night he raided the pharmacy. Any badmash could get a gun in the years of the Separation, but even then Shiv Faraji had been a man of style. A stylist uses a stolen Nissan SUV, rammed through the pharmacy steel shutter. His sister had recovered from the tuberculosis. The stolen antibiotics had saved her life. He had done what his father would not, could not. He had shown them what a man of courage and determination could achieve. He had not touched a paisa of the pharmacist’s money. A raja takes only what he needs. He had been twelve. Two years younger than his lieutenant Yogendra. Every step, the only step. It’s the same now the ovaries have come apart in his fingers. An action will present itself to him. He will take it. It will be the only action he can take. The one thing he will not do is run. This is his city.

  Madam Ovary snaps shut her valise.

  ‘Make yourself useful. Give me your lighter.’

  It’s an old US army model from the time they went into Pakistan. The days when they sent soldiers who smoked rather than machines. Madam Ovary applies fire. The papers catch and burn.

  ‘I’m done here now,’ she says. ‘Thank you for your work. I wish you well, but do not try to contact me, ever. We will not meet again, so goodbye for this life.’

  In the car Shiv slaps on the radio. Jabber. All these DJs do: jabber, as if the only way to tell them from aeais is by the constant flow of garbage from their mouths. Like the Ganga; this constant flow of shit. You’re a DJ, you play music. Music people want to hear, that makes them feel good or think of someone special or cry.

  He leans against the window. By the dash glow he sees his face in half profile, ghosted over the people in the street. But it is as if every one of those people over whom his image falls takes ownership of part of him.

  Fucking jabber.

  ‘Where are you taking me, boy?’

  ‘Fighting.’

  He’s right. There’s nowhere else to go where it comes down. But Shiv doesn’t like the boy being that close, watching, observing, second-guessing.

  Fight! Fight! is thumping. Shiv walks down the shallow steps and straightens his cuffs and the smell of blood and money and raw wood and the adrenaline kicks in under his breastbone. He loves this place above all places on earth. He checks the clientele. Some new faces. That girl, up by the rail in the balcony, the one with the Persian nose, trying to look so cool. Shiv catches her eye. She holds him, long enough. Some other night. Now the barker is calling the next bout and he goes down to the bookies’ table. Down on Sonarpur Road fire engines are putting out a restaurant blaze started in a filing cabinet while something with the anatomy of a ten-year-old boy and appetites twice that is sliding chubby fingers towards the shakti yoni of his girl and a woman dead without profit drifts in the Ganga flow towards moksha but here are people and movement and light and death and chance and fear and a girl parading a superb silver tabby battle cat around a sand ring. Shiv flips his crocodile wallet out of his jacket, fans notes and lays them out on the table. Blue. He’s still seeing that blue.

  ‘One lakh rupees,’ Bachchan says. Beyond which there are no more, nor hope of more. Bachchan’s scribe counts the cash and writes the docket. Shiv takes his place by the pit and the barker calls fight! fight! The crowd roars and rises and Shiv with them, pressing against the wooden rail to hide his hard on. Then he is out of the deep blue with the silver tabby microsabre meat on the sand and his one hundred thousand notes scraped into the sattaman’s leather satchel. He wants to laugh. He realises the truth of the sadhus: there is blessing in having nothing.

  In the car the laughter breaks out of him. Shiv beats his head against the window again and again. Tears run down his face. Finally he can breathe. Finally he can talk.

  ‘Take me to Murfi’s,’ Shiv orders. He is ravenously hungry now.

  ‘What with?’

  ‘There’s change in the glovebox.’

  Tea Lane embraces its smokes and miasmas under domed umbrellas. They serve no meteorological purpose: Murfi claims his protects him from moonlight, which he feels to be baleful. Murfi has many claims, not the least of which is his name. Irish, he says. Irish as Sadhu Patrick.

  Tea Lane has grown up to serve the men who build Ranapur. Behind the ranks of hot food and spice and fruit sellers, the original chai-houses open their wooden shutters on to the street and spill their tin tables and folding chairs on to the road. Over the gentle roar of gas burners and wind-up radios pushing Hindi Hits, a never-ending surf of soapi dialogue plays from hundreds of wall-screen televisions. Ten thousand calendars of soapi goddesses hang from drawing pins.

  Shiv leans out the window counting loose change into Murfi’s monkey hand.

  ‘And some of those pizza pakoras for him.’ Shiv regards these as he would monkey turd pakora, but Yogendra has this idea they are the epitome of Western snack cool. ‘Murfiji, you say you pakora anything. Try these.’

  Murfi unscrews the top of the flask, waves away the clouds of dry ice, tries to scry inside.

  ‘Eh, what you got in there?’

  Shiv tells him. Murfi screws up his face, thrusts the flask back at Shiv.

  ‘No, you keep ’em. You never know someone may get the taste.’

  It is no comment on Murfi’s cooking but between one bite and the next, Shiv’s appetite vanishes. The people are all looking in the same direction. Behind Shiv. Shiv drops his newspaper of fried things. Street dogs descend on it. He snatches Yogendra’s dung from him.

  ‘Leave that shit and get me away.’

  Yogendra boots the pedal, wheel-spins into the suddenly empty street as something comes down on the roof so hard it bows the Merc to the axles. A shock absorber detonates like a grenade, there’s a flash of blue and a smell of burning electrics. The car rocks on its remaining three suspension points. Something moves up there. Yogendra flogs and flogs and flogs the engine but it will not catch.

  ‘Out,’ Shiv commands as the blade comes down through the roof. It is long, scimitar curved, serrated, bright as a surgeon’s steel and stabs the Merc from roof plate to transmission tunnel. As Shiv and Yogendra tumble out into Tea Lane, it rips forward and guts pressed steel like a sacrificial kid.

  Now Shiv can see what’s hit the roof of his sixty million rupees of German trash metal and though it is the absolute death of him, he’s as paralysed by the sheer spectacle as any of the frozen people on Tea Lane. The windscreen shatters as the fighting robot’s blade completes the first pass. The lower grasping arms seize the raw edges and peel the roof open. The blunt phallus of the E-M gun seeks Shiv out on the street, fixes him with its monocular stare. That can’t hurt him. Shiv is transfixed by the big blade as it withdraws from the wreck formerly known as a Series 7 Mercedes and swivels into horizontal slash. The fighting machine rises up on its legs and steps towards him. It still has the serial number and little stars and stripes on its side but Shiv knows that the pilot will not be some late-teen with game-boy reactions and a methamphetamine habit wired twenty levels under Plains States America. This will be someone in the back of that panel van down by the twenty four hour cinema, smoking a bidi and weaving his hands through cyberspace in the dance of Kali. Someone who knows him.

  Shiv does not try to run. These things can hit one hundred kph in a gallop and once they have the scent of your DNA, that blade will cut through any obstacle until it meets the soft flesh of your belly. The Urban Combat Robot rears over him. The vile little mantis head lowers, sensor rigs swivelling. Now Shiv relaxes. This is a show for the street.

  ‘Mr Faraji.’ Shiv almost laughs. ‘For your information; as of this moment, all debts and fiscal encumbrances owed to Mr Bachchan have been assigned to Ahimsa Collections Agency.’

  ‘Bachchan is calling in my account?’ Shiv shouts, looking at the remains of his last vestige of value, gutted on the str
eet, bleeding alcofuel.

  ‘That is correct, Mr Faraji,’ the hunter-killer robot says. ‘Your account with Bachchan Betting currently stands at eighteen million rupees. You have one week from today to settle this account or action for recovery will ensue.’

  The machine spins on its hind heels, gathers itself and leaps over the tea-vendors, cows and hookers towards the intersection

  ‘Hey!’ Shiv calls after it. ‘What’s wrong with an invoice?’ He picks up shards and orts of German precision engineering and shies them after the debt collector.

  LISA, LULL

  ‘So, Ms Durnau, your best idea.’ Thomas Lull said across the wide desk with her CV and presentation file on it and beyond the picture window, wider Kansas in the hottest June this century. ‘Where were you when it came to you?’

  (She flashbacks to this, twenty two hours out from ISS, twenty six to Darnley 285, stuffed full of flight drugs and zipped up in a bag velcroed to the wall of the transfer pod so she doesn’t get in the way of Captain Pilot Beth who has a slightly blocked right nostril and whose breath whistles rhythmically until it is the biggest thing in Lisa Durnau’s universe.)

  No one had known a June like it; the airport staff, the car rental girl, the university security man she asked for directions. This was more than hot water off the coast of Peru or the dying thrash of the Gulf Stream. Climatology had run into the white zone where nothing could be predicted any more. Thomas Lull had flipped through her CV, glanced at the first page of her presentation and when she flashed up the first slide, stopped her with that curve-ball question.

  Lisa Durnau can still recall the surge of anger. She pressed her hands palm-down on to the thighs of her good pant suit to push the rage down. When she lifted them she had left two palm-shaped sweat marks like warnings against the evil eye.

  ‘Professor Lull, I’m trying to be professional here and I think you owe me the professional courtesy of your attention.’

  She could have stayed in Oxford. She had been happy in Oxford. Carl Walker would have sold body parts to keep her at Keble. Better doctorates than hers had returned shattered from this cow town where the schools by law still taught Intelligent Design. If the world’s pre-eminent centre for cyberlife research sat on a hill in the Bible belt, Lisa Durnau would come to that hill. She had rejected her father’s Christian universe before he and her mother separated, but Presbyterian stubbornness and self-reliance were twined around her DNA. She would not let this man shake her. He said, ‘You can earn my attention by answering my question. I want to know about your inspiration. Those moments when it hit you like lightning. Those moments when you ran for seventy hours on coffee and Dexedrine because if you let go of it, even for an instant, you’d lose it. The moments when it came out of the void and was all there, perfect and entire. I want to know how and when and where it hit you. Science is creation. Nothing else interests me.’

  ‘Okay,’ Lisa Durnau said. ‘It was the women’s toilet in Paddington Station in London, England.’

  Professor Thomas Lull beamed and settled back in his chair.

  The Cognitive Cosmology group met twice monthly in Stephen Sanger’s office at Imperial College London. It was one of those things that Lisa Durnau knew she should get round to some time but probably never would, like balancing her cheque book or having children. Carl Walker would cc. her its notes and abstracts. It was intellectually thrilling and she had no doubt that membership of the group would advance her name and career, but theirs was a quantum informational approach and Lisa’s thoughts moved in topological curves. Then the bi-monthly reports began to stray from quantum informational judder into speculation that Artificial Intelligence could indeed be a parallel universe mapped out in computing code as Oxford’s cloisters and choristers were in elementary particles and DNA. This was her bailiwick. She resisted for a month, then Carl Walker took her out for a Friday lunch that ended up in a Jamaican restaurant at midnight drinking Triple-X Guinness and swaying to the towers of dub. Two days later she was in a fifth floor conference room breakfasting on chocolate croissants and smiling too much at the country’s leading thinkers on the place of mind in the structure of the universe.

  Everyone recharged coffee cups and the discourse began. The speed of debate left Lisa slipstreamed and breathless. The transcripts gave no indication of the breadth and diversity of discussion. She felt like a fat kid at a basketball match, clutching and darting too late, too slow. By the time Lisa got to speak she was responding to things said three ideas ago and the climate of the conversation had raced on. The sun moved across Hyde Park and Lisa Durnau felt herself settling into despair. They were fast and quick and dazzling and they were wrong wrong wrong but she couldn’t get a word in to tell them. They were already becoming bored with the subject. They had milked it for what they thought it could yield and were moving on. She was going to lose it. Unless she told them. Unless she spoke now. Her right forearm lay flat on the oak table. She slowly raised her hand to the vertical. Every eye followed it. There was a sudden, terrible hush.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Lisa Durnau said. ‘Can I say something here? I think you’re wrong.’ Then she told them about the idea that made life, mind and intelligence emerge from the underlying properties of the universe as mechanically as physical forces and matter. That CyberEarth was a model of another universe that could exist on the polyverse, a universe where mind was not an emergent phenomenon but a fundamental like the Fine Structure constant, like Omega, like dimensionality. A universe that thought. Like God, she said and as she said those words she saw the gaps and the flaws and the bits she hadn’t thought through and she knew that every face around the table saw them too. She could hear her own voice, hectoring, so so certain, so so sure she had all the answers at twenty-four. She tailed off into an apologetic mumble.

  ‘Thank you for that,’ Stephen Sanger said. ‘There are a lot of interesting ideas in there . . .’

  They did not even let him finish his sentence. Chris Drapier from the Level Three Artificial Intelligence Unit at Cambridge sprang first. He had been the rudest and loudest and most pedantic and Lisa had caught him trying to size up her ass in the queue for the coffee flask. There was no reason to invoke some deus ex machina argument when quantum computation had the whole thing sewn up pretty nicely. This was vitalism - no, this was mysticism. Next up was Vicki McAndrews from Imperial. She picked a loose theoretical thread in her modelling, tugged it and the whole edifice unravelled. Lisa didn’t have a topological model of the space or even a mechanism for describing this universe that thought. All Lisa could hear was that high-pitched whine behind her eyes that is the sound when you want to cry but must not. She sat, annihilated among the coffee cups and chocolate croissant smears. She knew nothing. She had no talent. She was arrogant and stupid and shot her mouth off when any sensible postgrad would have sat and nodded and kept everyone’s coffee cups filled and the cookies coming round. Her star was at its absolute nadir. Stephen Sanger passed some encouragement as Lisa crept out, but she was destroyed. She cried her way back across Hyde Park, up through Bayswater to Paddington Station. She downed a half bottle of dessert wine in the station restaurant as that seemed the menu item that would get her whacked really quickly. She sat at her table shuddering with shame and tears and the certainty that her career was over, she could not do this thing, she didn’t know what they meant. Her bladder called ten minutes before her train. She sat in the cubicle, jeans around her knees, trying not to sob out loud because the acoustics of London station toilets would take it and amplify it so everyone could hear.

  And then she saw it. She could not say what it was she saw, staring at the cubicle door, there was no shape, no form, no words or theorems. But it was there, whole and unimaginably beautiful. It was simple. It was so simple. Lisa Durnau burst from the cubicle, rushed to the Paperchase store, bought a pad and a big marker. Then she ran for her train. She never made it. Somewhere between the fifth and sixth carriages, it hit her like lightning. She knew exactly what she had t
o do. She knelt sobbing on the platform while her shaking hands tried to jam down equations. Ideas poured through her. She was hardwired to the cosmos. The evening shift detoured around her, not staring. It’s all right, she wanted to say. It’s so all right.

  M-Star Theory. It was there all along, right in front of her. How had she not seen it? Eleven dimensions folded into a set of Calabi-Yau shapes, three extended, one time-like, seven curled up at Planck length. But the handles, the holes in the shapes, dictated the winding energies of the superstrings, and thus the harmonics that were the fundamental physical properties. All she had to do was model CyberEarth as a Calabai-Yau space and show its equivalence to a physical possibility in M-Star theory. It was all in the structure. Out there was a universe with its onboard computer built in. Minds were part of the fabric of reality there, not shelled in evolved carbon as they were in this bubble of the polyverse. Simple. So simple.

  She cried with joy all the way home in the train. A young French tourist couple sat across the table, nervously touching every time Lisa shuddered to a new attack of bliss. Joy bursts would send her wandering out of her room and through Oxford in the week she wrote up her insights. Every building, every street, every shop and person filled her with fierce delight at life and humanity. She was in love with every last thing. Stephen Sanger had flicked through the draft, grin growing wider with every page. Finally he said, ‘You’ve got them. Fuckers.’