River of Gods

1: SHIV

The body turns in the stream. Where the new bridge crosses the Ganga in five concrete strides, garlands of sticks and plastic snag around the footings; rafts of river flotsam. For a moment the body might join them, a dark hunch in the black stream. The smooth flow of water hauls it, spins it around, shies it feet first through the arch of steel and traffic. Overhead trucks roar across the high spans. Day and night, convoys bright with chrome work, gaudy with gods, storm the bridge into the city, blaring filmi music from their roof speakers. The shallow water shivers.

Knee-deep in the river, Shiv takes a long draw on his cigarette. Holy Ganga. You have attained moksha. You are free from the chakra. Garlands of marigolds coil around his wet pant legs. He watches the body out of sight, then flicks his cigarette into the night in an arc of red sparks and wades back towards where the Merc stands axle-deep in the river. As he sits on the leather rear seat, the boy hands him his shoes. Good shoes. Good socks, Italian socks. None of your Bharati shit. Too good to sacrifice to Mother Ganga’s silts and slimes. The kid turns the engine; at the touch of the headlights wire-thin figures scatter across the white sand. Fucking kids. They’ll have seen.

The big Merc climbs up out of the river, over the cracked mud to the white sand. Shiv’s never seen the river so low. He’s never gone with that Ganga Devi Goddess stuff—it’s all right for women but a raja has sense or he is no raja at all—but seeing the water so low, so weak, he is uncomfortable, like watching blood gush from a wound in the arm of an old friend that you cannot heal. Bones crack beneath the SUV’s fat tires. The Merc scatters the embers of the shore kids’ fire; then the boy Yogendra throws in the four-wheel drive and takes them straight up the bank, cutting two furrows through the fields of marigolds. Five seasons ago he had been a river kid, squatting by the smudge-fire, poking along the sand, sifting the silt for rags and pickings. He’ll end up there, too, some time. Shiv will end up there. It’s a thing he’s always known. Everyone ends up there. The river bears all away. Mud and skulls.

Eddies roll the body, catch streamers of sari silk and slowly unfurl. As it nears the low pontoon bridge beneath the crumbling fort at Ramnagar, the corpse gives a small final roll and shrugs free. A snake of silk coils out before it, catches on the rounded nose of a pontoon and streams away on either side. British sappers built this bridge, in the nation before the nation before this one; fifty pontoons spanned by a narrow strip of steel. The lighter traffic crosses here; phatphats, mopeds, motorbikes, bicycle rickshaws, the occasional Maruti feeling its way between the bicycles, horn constantly blaring: pedestrians. The pontoon bridge is a ribbon of sound, an endless magnetic tape reverberating to wheels and feet. The naked woman’s face drifts centimetres beneath the autorickshaws.

Beyond Ramnagar the east bank opens into a broad sandy strand. Here the naked sadhus build their wicker and bamboo encampments and practise fierce asceticisms before the dawn swim to the sacred city. Behind their campfires tall gas plumes blossom skyward from the big transnational processing plants, throwing long, quivering reflections across the black river, highlighting the glistening backs of the buffaloes huddling in the water beneath crumbling Asi Ghat, first of the holy ghats of Varanasi. Flames bob on the water, a few pilgrims and tourists have set diyas adrift in their little mango leaf saucers. They will gather kilometre-by-kilometre, ghat-by-ghat, until the river is a constellation of currents and ribbons of light, patterns in which sages scry omens and portents and the fortunes of nations. They light the woman on her way. They reveal a face of middle-life. A face of the crowd, a face that would not be missed, if any face could be indispensable among the city’s eleven million. Five types of people may not be cremated on the burning ghats but are cast to the river: lepers, childrean, pregnant women, Brahmins, and those poisoned by the king cobra. Her bindi declares that she is none of those castes. She slips past, unseen, beyond the jostle of tourist boats. Her pale hands are soft, unaccustomed to work.

Pyres burn on Manikarnika ghat. Mourners carry a bamboo litter down the ash-strewn steps and across the cracked mud to the river’s edge. They dip the saffron-wrapped body in the redeeming water, wash it to make sure no part is untouched. Then it is taken to the pyre. As the untouchable Doms who run the burning ghat pile wood over the linen parcel, figures hip-deep in the Ganga sift the water with shallow wicker bowls, panning gold from the ashes of the dead. Each night on the ghat where Brahma the Creator made the ten-horse sacrifice, five Brahmins offer aarti to Mother Ganga. A local hotel pays them each twenty thousand rupees a month for this ritual but that does not make their prayers any less zealous. With fire, they puja for rain. It is three years since the monsoon. Now the blasphemous Awadh dam at Kunda Khadar turns the last blood in the veins of Ganga Mata to dust. Even the irreligious and agnostic now throw their rose petals on the river.

On that other river, the river of tires that knows no drought, Yogendra steers the big Merc through the wall of sound and motion that is Varanasi’s eternal chakra of traffic. His hand is never off the horn as he pulls out behind phatphats, steers around cycle rickshaws, pulls down the wrong side of the road to avoid a cow chewing an aged vest. Shiv is immune to all traffic regulations except killing a cow. Street and sidewalk blur: stalls, hot-food booths, temples, street shrines hung with garlands of marigolds. Let Our River Run Free! declares a hand-lettered banner of an anti-dam protestor. A gang of call-centre boys in best clean shirts and pants out on the hunt spill into the path of the SUV. Greasy hands on the paint job. Yogendra screams at their temerity. The flow of streets grows straiter and more congested until women and pilgrims must press into walls and doorways to let Shiv through. The air is heady with alcofuel fumes. It is a royal progress, an assertion. Clutching the cold-dewed metal flask in his lap, Shiv enters the city of his name and inheritance.

First there was Kashi: firstborn of cities; sister of Babylon and Thebes and survivor of both; city of light where the Jyotirlinga of Siva, the divine generative energy, burst from the earth in a pillar of radiance. Then it became Varanasi; holiest of cities, consort of the Goddess Ganga, city of death and pilgrims, enduring through empires and kingdoms and Rajs and great nations, flowing through time as its river flows through the great plain of northern India. Behind it grew New Varanasi; the ramparts and fortresses of the new housing projects and the glassy, swooping corporate headquarters piling up behind the palaces and narrow, tangled streets as global dollars poured into India’s bottomless labour well. Then there was a new nation and Old Varanasi again became legendary Kashi; navel of the world reborn as South Asia’s newest meat Ginza. It is a city of schizophrenias. Pilgrims jostle Japanese sex tourists in the crammed streets. Mourners shoulder their dead past the cages of teen hookers. Skinny Westerners gone native with beads and beards offer head massages while country girls sign up at the matrimony agencies and scan the annual income lines on the databases of the desperate.

Hello hello, what country? Ganja ganja Nepali Temple Balls? You want to see young girl, jig-a-jig; see woman suck tiny little American football into her little woman? Ten dollar. This make your dick so big it scares people. Cards, janampatri, hora chakra, buttery red tilaks thumbed onto tourists’ foreheads. Tween gurus. Gear! Gear! Knock off sports-stylie, hooky software, repro Big Name labels, this month’s movie releases dubbed over by one man in one voice in your cousin’s bedroom, sweatshop palmers and lighthoeks, badmash gin and whiskey brewed up in old tanneries (John E. Walker, most respectable label). Since the monsoon failed, water; by the bottle, by the cup, by the sip, from tankers and tanks and shrink-wrapped pallets and plastic litrejohns and backpacks and goatskin sacks. Those Banglas with their iceberg, you think they’ll give us one drop here in Bharat? Buy and drink.

Past the burning ghat and the Siva temple capsizing slowly, tectonically, into the Varanasi silts, the river shifts east of north. A third set of bridge piers stirs the water into cats’ tongues. Lights ripple, the lights of a high-speed shatabdi crossing the river into Kashi Station. The streamlined express chunks heavily over the points as the dead woman shoots the rail bridge into clear war.

There is a third Varanasi beyond Kashi and New Varanasi. New Sarnath, it appears on the plans and press releases of the architects and their PR companies, trading on the catchet of the ancient Buddhist city. Ranapur to everyone else; a half-built capital of a fledgling political dynasty. By any name, it is Asia’s biggest building site. The lights never go out. The labour never ceases. The noise appalls. One hundred thousand people are at work, from chowkidars to structural engineers. Towers of great beauty and daring rise from cocoons of bamboo scaffolding, bulldozers sculpt wide boulevards and avenues shaded by gene-mod ashok trees. New nations demand new capitals and Ranapur will be a showcase to the culture, industry, and forward-vision of Bharat. The Sajida Rana Cultural Centre. The Rajiv Rana conference centre. The Ashok Rana telecom tower. The museum of modern art. The rapid transit system. The ministries and civil service departments, the embassies and consuls, and the other paraphernalia of government. What the British did for Delhi, the Ranas will do for Varanasi. That’s the word from the building at the heart of it all, the Bharat Sabha, a lotus in white marble, the Parliament House of the Bharati government, and Sajida Rana’s prime-ministership.

Construction floods glint on the shape in the river. The new ghats may be marble but the river kids are pure Varanasi. Heads snap up. Something here. Something light, bright, glinting. Cigarettes are stubbed. The shore kids dash splashing into the water. They wade thigh-deep through the shallow, blood-warm water, summoning each other by whistles. A thing. A body. A woman’s body. A naked woman’s body. Nothing new or special in Varanasi but still the water boys drag the dead woman in to shore. There may be some last value to be had from her. Jewellery. Gold teeth. Artificial hip joints. The boys splash through the spray of light from the construction floods, hauling their prize by the arms up on to the gritty sand. Silver glints at her throat. Greedy hands reach for a trishul pendant, the trident of the devotees of Lord Siva. The boys pull back with soft cries.

From breastbone to pubis, the woman lies open. A coiled mass of gut and bowel gleams in the light from the construction site. Two short, hacking cuts have cleanly excised the woman’s ovaries.

In his fast German car, Shiv cradles a silver flask, dewed with condensation, as Yogendra moves him, through the traffic.

2: MR. NANDHA

Mr. Nandha the Krishna Cop travels this morning by train, in a first-class car. Mr. Nandha is the only passenger in the first-class car. The train is a Bharat Rail electric shatabdi express: it piles down the specially constructed high-speed line at three hundred and fifty kilometres per hour, leaning into the gentle curves. Villages roads fields towns temples blur past in the dawn haze that clings knee-deep to the plain. Mr. Nandha sees none of these. Behind his tinted window his attention is given over to the virtual pages of the Bharat Times. Articles and video reports float above the table as the lighthoek beats data into his visual lobes. In his auditory centre: Monteverdi, the Vespers of the Blessed Virgin performed by the Camerata of Venezia and the Choir of St. Mark’s.

Mr. Nandha loves very much the music of the Italian renaissance. Mr. Nandha is deeply fascinated with all music of the European humanist tradition. Mr. Nandha considers himself a Renaissance man. So he may read news of the water and the maybe war and the demonstrations over the Hanuman statue and the proposed metro station at Sarkhand Roundabout and the scandal and the gossip and the sports reviews, but part of his visual cortex the lighthoek can never touch envisions the piazzas and campaniles of seventeenth-century Cremona.

Mr. Nandha has never been to Cremona. He has never visited Italy. His imaginings are Planet History Channel establishing shots cut with his own memories of Varanasi, the city of his birth, and Cambridge, the city of his intellectual rebirth.

The train slams past a rural brickworks; kiln smoke lying on top of the mist. The ranks of stacked bricks are like the ruins of an unborn civilization. Kids stand and stare, hands raised in greeting, dazed by the speed. After the train has passed, they scramble up on to the track and look for paisa coins they have wedged into the rail joints. The fast trains smear them flat into the rail. There’s stuff you could buy with those coins but none would be as good as seeing them become stains on the high-speed express line.

The chai-wallah sways down the carriage.

“Sahb?”

Mr. Nandha hands him a tea bag, dangling from a string. The steward bows, takes the bag, drapes it over a plastic cup, and releases boiling water from the biggin. Mr. Nandha sniffs the chai, nods, then hands the wallah the wet, hot bag. Mr. Nandha suffers badly from yeast infections. The chai is Ayurvedic, made to his personal prescription. Mr. Nandha also avoids cereals, fruit, fermented foods including alcohol, many soy goods, and all dairy produce.

The call had come at four AM. Mr. Nandha had just fallen asleep after enjoyable sex with his beautiful wife. He tried not to disturb her but she had never been able to sleep when he was awake and she got up and fetched her husband’s Away Bag which she had the dhobi-wallah keep fresh, changed, and folded. She saw him off into the Ministry car. The car bypassed the station approach crowded with phatphats and rickshaws waiting on the Agra sleeper and brought Mr. Nandha through the marshalling yards on to the platform where the long, sleek electric train waited. A Bharat Rail official showed him to his reserved seat in his reserved carriage. Thirty seconds later the train ghosted out of Kashi Station. All three hundred metres of it had been held for the Krishna Cop.

Mr. Nandha thinks back to that sex with his wife and calls her up on the palmer. She appears in his visual cortex. He’s not surprised to find her on the roof. Since the work on the garden began, Parvati has spent increasing amounts of time on top of the apartment block. Behind the concrete mixer and the piles of blocks and sacks of compost and pipes for the drip irrigator, Mr. Nandha can see the early lights in the windows of the tenements leaning close across the narrow streets. Water tanks, solar panels, satellite dishes, rows of potted geraniums are silhouettes against a dull, hazy sky. Parvati tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, squints into the bindi cam.

“Is everything all right?”

“Everything is fine. I will arrive in ten minutes. I just wanted to call you.” She smiles. Mr. Nandha’s heart frays.

“Thank you, it’s a lovely thought. Are you worried about it?”

“No, it’s a routine excommunication. We want to nip it before panic spreads.” Parvati nods, sucking in her lower lip in that way she does when she thinks about issues. “So what are you doing today?”

“Well,” she says, with a turn of her body indicating the nascent garden. “I’ve had an idea. Please don’t be cross with me, but I don’t think we need so many shrubs. I’d like some vegetables. A few rows of beans, some tomatoes and peppers—they’d give lots of cover—maybe even some bhindi and brinjal. Herbs—I’d love to grow herbs, tulsi and coriander and hing.”

In his reserved first-class seat, Mr. Nandha smiles. “A proper little urban farmer.”

“Oh, nothing you would be ashamed of. Just a few rows of things until we move out to the Cantonment and get a bungalow. I could grow those salad vegetables you need. It would save money, they fly them in from Europe and Australia—I’ve seen the labels. Would that be all right?”

“If you wish, my flower.”

Parvati claps her hands together in soft delight.

“Oh good. This is a bit cheeky, but I’d already arranged to go with Krishan to the seedsman.”

Mr. Nandha often questions what he has done, bringing his lovely wife into Varanasi’s rip-throat society, a country girl among cobras. The games among the Cantonment set—his colleagues, his social peers—appall him. Whispers and looks and rumours, always so sweet and well mannered, but watching, weighing, measuring. Virtues and vices in the most delicate of balances. For men it’s easy. Marry as well as you can—if you can. Mr. Nandha has married within jati—more than Arora, his superior at the Ministry, more than most of his contemporaries. A good solid Kayastha/Kayastha marriage but the old rigours no longer seem to matter in new Ranapur. That wife of Nandha’s. Would you listen to the accent? Would you look at those hands? Those colours she wears, and the styles. She can’t speak, you know. Not a word. Nothing to say. Opens her mouth and flies buzz out. Town and country, I say. Town and country. Still stands on the toilet bowl and squats.

Mr. Nandha finds his fists tight with rage at the thought of Parvati caught up in those terrible games of my husband this, my children that, my house the other. She does not need the Cantonment bungalow, the two cars and five servants, the designer baby. Like every modern bride, Parvati made her financial checks and genetic scans, but theirs was always a match of respect and love, not a desperate lunge for the first available wedding-fodder in Varanasi’s Darwinian marriage-market. Once the woman came with the dowry. The man was the blessed, the treasure. That was always the problem. Now after a quarter of a century of foetal selection, discreet suburban clinics and old-fashioned Kashi back stair car aerial joints, Bharat’s middle-class urban male population outnumbers the female fourfold.

Mr. Nandha feels a slight shift in acceleration. The train is slowing.

“My love, I’m going to have to go, we’re coming into Nawada now.”

“You won’t be in any danger, will you?” Parvati says, all wide-eyed concern.

“No, no danger at all. I’ve performed dozens of these.”

“I love you, husband.”

“I love you, my treasure.”

Mr. Nandha’s wife vanishes from inside his head. I’ll do it for you, he thinks as the rain draws him into his showdown. I’ll think of you as I kill it.

A handsome woman jemadar of the local Civil Defence meets Mr. Nandha with a sharp salute on the down line platform. Two rows of jawans hold onlookers back with lathis. Outriders fall in fore and aft as the convoy swings into the streets.

Nawada is a strip city, a name cast over the union of four cow-shit towns. Then out of the sky came a fistful of development grants, a slapped-down road grid, speed-built metal shed factories and warehouses, stuffed with call centres and data-farms. String together with cable and satellite uplinks, hook into the power grid and let it grind out crores of rupees. It’s among the corrugated aluminium and construction carbon go-downs of Nawada, not the soaring towers of Ranapur, that the future of Bharat is being forged. In the big heavy army hummer Mr. Nandha slips past the single unit stores and motor part workshops. He feels like a hired gun, riding into town. Scooters with country girls perched side-saddle on the pillion sway out of his path.

The outriders steer into an alley between spray-concrete go-downs, clearing a path for the hummer with their sirens. An electricity pylon slumps beneath illegal power-taps and siphons. Squatting women share chai and breakfast roti outside a huge windowless concrete box; the men gather as far from them as the geometry of the compound will allow, smoking. Mr. Nandha looks up at the outspread blessing hands of the Ray Power solar farm. Salutation to the sun.

“Turn off the sirens,” he orders the handsome jemadar, whose name is Sen. “The thing has at least animal-level intelligence. If it receives any advance warning, it will attempt to copy itself out.” Sen winds down the window and shouts orders to the escort. The sirens fall silent.

The hummer is a steel sweat-box. Mr. Nandha’s pants stick to the vinyl seat-covers but he’s too proud to squirm free. He slips his ’hoek over his ear, settles the bone transducer over the sweet spot on his skull and opens his box of avatars.

Ganesha, Lord of Auspicious Beginnings, Remover of Obstructions, throned upon his rat-vehicle, rears over the flat roofs and antenna farms of Nawada, vast as a thunderhead. In his hands are his qualities: the goad, the noose, a broken tusk, a rice flour dumpling, and a pot of water. His pot belly contains universes of cyberspace. He is the portal. Mr. Nandha knows the moves that summon each avatar by heart. His hand calls up flying Hanuman with his mace and mountain; Siva Nataraja, Lord of the Dance, one foot away from universal destruction and regeneration; Durga the Dark One, goddess of righteous wrath, each of her ten arms bearing a weapon; Lord Krishna with his flute and necklace; Kali the disrupter, the belt of severed hands around her waist. In Mr. Nandha’s mindsight the aeai agents of the Ministry bend low over tiny Nawada. They are ready. They are eager. They are hungry.

The convoy turns into a service alley. A scatter of police tries to part a press of bodies to let the hummer through. The alley is clogged with vehicles down the entry; an ambulance, a cop cruiser, an electric delivery jeepney. There’s something under the truck’s front wheel.

“What is going on here?” Mr. Nandha demands as he walks through the scrum of police, Ministry warrant card held high.

“Sir, one of the factory workers panicked and ran out into the alley, straight under,” says a police sergeant. “He was shouting about a djinn; how the djinn was in the factory and was going to get all of them.”

You call it djinn, Mr. Nandha thinks, scanning the site. I call it meme. Non-material replicators; jokes, rumours, customs, nursery rhymes. Mind-viruses. Gods, demons, djinns, superstitions. The thing inside the factory is no supernatural creature, no spirit of flame, but it is certainly a non-material replicator.

“How many inside?”

“Two dead, sir. It was the night shift. The rest escaped.”

“I want this area cleared,” Mr. Nandha orders. Jemadar Sen flicks orders to her jawans. Mr. Nandha walks past the body with the leather jacket draped over its face and the shaking truck driver in the back of the police Maruti. He surveys the locus. This bent metal shed makes pasta-tikka. An emigrant family run it from Bradford. Bringing the jobs back home. That’s what places like Nawada are all about. Mr. Nandha finds the concept of pasta-tikka an abomination but British-Diaspora Asian cuisine is the thing this season. Mr. Nandha squints up at the telephone cable box.

“Have somebody cut that cable.”

While the rural police scramble for a ladder, Mr. Nandha locates the night shift line manager, a fat Bengali pulling nervously at the tag-skin beside his nails. He smells of what Mr. Nandha presumes must be pasta-tikka.

“Do you have a cellular base-port or a satellite uplink?” he asks.

“Yes, yes, a distributed internal cell network,” the Bengali says. “For the robots. And one of those things that bounces signals off meteor trails; to talk to Bradford.”

“Officer Sen, please have one of your men take care of the satellite dish. We may yet be in time to stop it out-copying.”

The police finally drive the basti folk back to the ends of the alley. A jawan waves from the roof, job done.

“All communications devices off please,” Mr. Nandha instructs. Jemadar Sen and Rural Sergeant Sunder accompany him into the possessed factory. Mr. Nandha straightens his Nehru-cut jacket, shoots his cuffs and ducks under the roller shutter into the combat zone. “Stay close and do exactly as I instruct.” Breathing in the slow, stilling pranayama technique the Ministry teaches its Krishna Cops, Mr.Nandha makes his initial visual survey.

It is a typical development-grant job. Plastic barrels of feedstuff on one side, main processing in the middle, packaging and shipping on the other. No safety guards, no protective wear, no noise abatement equipment, no air-conditioning; one bathroom male, one restroom female.

Everything stripped down to accountancy-minimum. Minimal robotics: human hands have always been cheaper in the strip cities. On the right, a row of glastic cubes house the offices and aeai support. Water coolers and fans, all dead. The sun is well up. The building is steel oven.

A forklift is run into a wall to his extreme left. A body is just visible between the truck and the corrugated metal bulkhead, half-erect. Blood, glossy and furious with flies, is coagulated beneath the wheels The man has been bayoneted at belly height by the forklift’s tines.

Mr.Nandha purses his lips in distaste.

Camera eyes everywhere. Nothing to be done about it now. It is watching.

In his three years as a rogue-aeai hunter, Mr. Nandha has seen a sizeable number of the bodies that result when humans and artificial intelligences cross. He draws his gun. Jemadar Sen’s eyes widen. Mr. Nandha’s gun is big, black, heavy and looks as if it were cast in hell. It has all the knobs and details and bits a Krishna Cop needs on his weapon, it is self-targeting and dual action. The lower barrel kills the flesh: low-velocity explosive bullets. One hit in any part of the body is an impact trauma sure kill. Dum-Dum, after all, is a district of Kolkata. The upper barrel destroys the spirit. It is an EM pulse gun; a googlewatt of power poured into a three-millisecond directed beam. Protein chips crisp. Quantum processors heisenberg out. Carbon nanotubes vaporise. This is the gun that annihilates rogue aeais. Steered by GPS-oriented gyroscopes and controlled by a visual avatar of Indra, lord of the thunderbolt, Mr. Nandha’s gun always kills and never misses.

The reek of Bradford pasta-tikka tugs urgently at the base of Mr. Nandha’s stomach. How can this muck, this pollution, be all the thing? One of the big stainless steel industrial cooking pots is tipped over, its contents spilled on the floor. Here the second body lies. Its upper half is smothered in pasta-tikka. Mr. Nandha smells cooked meat, flicks out his handkerchief to cover his mouth. He notes the corpse’s good trousers, fine shoes, pressed shirt. That will be the IT wallah, then. In Mr. Nandha’s experience, aeais, like dogs, turn on their masters first.

He beckons Sen and Sunder in. The rural policeman looks nervous, but the jemadar raises her assault rifle resolutely.

“Can it hear us?” Jemadar Sen asks, circling.

“Unlikely. Level One aeais seldom possess language skills. We’re dealing with something with about the intelligence of a monkey.”

“And the attitude of a tiger,” Sergeant Sunder comments.

Mr Nandha summons Siva out of the spatial dimensions of the food factory, moves his hands into a mudra, and the go-down springs to life with a glowing nervous system of information conduits. It’s the work of a moment for Siva to access the factory intranet, trace the server; a small featureless cube in a corner of a desk, and insinuate himself through the firewall into the factory system. File registers blur across Mr. Nandha’s back-brain. There. Password protected. He summons Ganesha. At once the Remover of Obstacles runs into a quantum key. Mr. Nandha is vexed. He dismisses Ganesha and sends in Krishna. There could be a djinn hiding behind that quantum wall. Equally, there could be three thousand pictures of Chinese girls having sex with pigs. Mr.Nandha’s fear is that the rogue aeai has reproduced.

One mail-out and it will take weeks to grub it all up. Krishna reports the outgoing traffic log as clean. It is still in the building, somewhere. Mr. Nandha disconnects the wireless web, unplugs the server, and tucks it under his arm. His people back at the Ministry will pry out its secrets.

He pauses, sniffs. Is the reek of pasta-tikka stronger, more acrid? Mr. Nandha coughs, something has caught at the back of his throat, burning chilli. He sees Sen sniff, frown. He hears a hum of heavy electrical drain.

“Everyone out!” he shouts and at that moment the chain drive on the roller shutter jerks into action just as the number two cooking vat bursts into choking black chilli smoke. “Quick quick!” he commands, blinking away searing tears, handkerchief pressed to mouth. “Out, out.” He follows the others out under the descending shutter with millimetres to spare. In the alley he irritably dusts street grime from his ironed suit.

“This is most annoying,” says Mr. Nandha. To the pasta-tikka workers he calls, “You, there. Is there another way in?”

“Round the side, sahb,” replies a teen with a skin-condition Mr. Nandha would not want near anything human-consumable.

“No time to lose,” he says raising his weapon. “It may have already used the diversion to escape. With me, please.”

“I’m not going back in that place,” Sunder says, hands on thighs. He’s a middle-aged man, putting on middle-body fat and none of this is in the Nawada district police procedure manual. “I’m not a superstitious man, but if you haven’t got djinn in there, I don’t know what you have.”

“There are no djinns,” says Mr. Nandha. Sen falls in behind him. Her suit camouflage is the exact shade of pasta-tikka. They cover their faces, squeeze down the fetid side alley paved with cigarette butts and in through the fire exit. The air is acrid with chilli smoke. Mr. Nandha can feel it claw the back of his throat as he delves into his avatars for his most potent programme, Kali the Disrupter. He taps into the factory net and releases her into the system. She’ll go through the web, wire and wireless, copy herself into every mobile and stationary processing unit. Anything without a licence she will tag, trace, and erase. There will be only rags left of Pasta-Tikka Inc. by the time Kali has done. She is a reason Mr. Nandha isolated the factory. Let loose on the global web, Kali could wreak crores of rupees of havoc across the continental net within seconds. No better hunter of an aeai than another aeai. Mr. Nandha cradles his gun. The mere scent of Kali, a mongoose after a snake, has often been enough to flush a laired aeai from cover.

On full lighthoek resolution Kali is a startling sight, girdled with severed hands, scimitars raised, tongue out and eyes wide, towering up through a slowly settling pall of chilli smoke as data constellations go out around her, one by one. This is what death must be like, thinks Mr. Nandha. One by one the delicate blue glows of information flow flicker and go out. One by one the nerve impulses fail, the sensations fade, consciousness disintegrates.

Spooked by machine sounds falling silent all around her, Sen draws close to Mr. Nandha. There are forces and entities here she cannot comprehend. When nothing has made a noise or gone dark for a full minute, Sen says, “Do you think they’re all gone now?”

Mr. Nandha checks a report from Kali.

“I have deleted two hundred suspect files and programs. If even one percent of those are aeai copies.” But something more than chilli throat is tugging at his sensibilities.

“What makes them do this? Why do they turn rabid all of a sudden?” Sen asks.

“I’ve always found that the root of a computer problem is human frailty” Mr. Nandha says, turning slowly, trying to identify what it is that has provoked his suspicions. “I suspect our friend has been buying in illegal aeai hybrids from the sundarbans. In my experience, no good ever ionics out of the data-havens.”

Sen has another question but Mr. Nandha hushes her. Very faint, very distant, he hears a movement. Kali has left just sufficient of the office ware for Siva to be able to link into the security system. Nothing on the cameras, as he suspected, but in the diffuse world of infrared, something stirs. His head snaps to the crane gantry at the rear of the go-down.

“I can see you,” he says, gesturing to Sen. She goes up one end of the gantry. Mr. Nandha takes the other. The thing seems to be somewhere up in the ceiling. They walk towards each other.

“At some point, it will break for it,” warns Nandha.

“What will break?” Sen whispers, cradling her powerful weapon.

“I suspect it has copied itself into a robot and intends to escape by that means. Expect something small and fast-moving.”

Mr. Nandha can hear it now between the clanks of the human footsteps; something scrabbling at the roof, trying to tear a way out. Mr. Nandha raises a hand for Jemadar Sen to proceed with caution. He feels as if he is right under it. Mr. Nandha squints up into the nest of wires and ducting. A camera-eye on a boom stabs down at him. Mr. Nandha starts back. Sen raises her weapon; before thought, she lets off a burst into the ceiling. An object drops out so close to Mr. Nandha it almost strikes him, a thing all limbs and thrashing and skittering movement. It’s an inspection robot, a little clambering spider-monkey thing. Individual companies usually can’t afford them but development corporations keep one to service all the clients in a block. The thing will have access to every unit in this industrial zone. The machine rears, darts at Mr. Nandha, then turns and zigzags pell-mell down the gantry towards Sen. All it knows is that these creatures want to kill it and it wants to exist. Panicked by her wild firing, all military sense flies from Sen as the thing bounces towards her. She fumbles at her assault rifle. Mr. Nandha can see with perfect, still clarity that her panic will kill him.

“No!” he shouts, and draws his gun. Indra targets, aims, fires. The pulse momentarily overloads even his ’hoek. The world goes flash-blind. The robot freezes, spasms, goes down in fat yellow sparks. Its legs twitch, its eye booms slide out. It goes still and quiet. Smoke wisps from its vents. Mr. Nandha is not yet satisfied. He stands over the dead aeai, then kneels down and hooks the Avatar Box into its hotwire socket. Ganesha interfaces with the operating system: Kali stands by, swords raised.

It’s dead. Excommunicated. Mr. Nandha stands up, dusts himself down. He tucks his gun away. Messy one. Unsatisfactory. Questions left hanging. Many will be answered when the Fifteenth Floor Gang open up the server, but a man does not become a Krishna Cop without sensitivities and Mr. Nandha’s are telling him this tangle of metal and plastic is the opening letter of a new and long story. He will say that story, he will unravel its intricacies and characters and events and bring it to its right conclusion, but at this moment, his most pressing problem is how to get the stink of burned pasta-tikka out of his suit.

3: SHAHEEN BADOOR KHAN

Shaheen Badoor Khan looks down on to the Antarctic ice. From two thousand metres it is less ice than geography, a white island, Sri Lanka gone rogue. The ocean-going tugs hired from the Gulf are the biggest and strongest and newest but they look like spiders tackling a circus big top, hauling away at silk thread guy ropes. Their role is supervisory now; the Southwest Monsoon Current has the berg and the whole performance is running north-by-northeast at five nautical miles per day. Out here on the ocean five hundred kilometres south of the delta the only visual referents are ice and sky and the dark blue of deep water, nothing that gives any sense of motion. How long and hard must those tugs pull to bring it to a stop? Shaheen Badoor Khan thinks. He imagines the berg rammed deep into the Gangasagar, the mouth of the holy river, ice cliffs rising sheer from mangroves.

With a manifest of Bengali politicians and their diplomatic guests from neighbour and erstwhile rival Bharat, the States of Bengal tilt-jet lurches in the chill microclimate spiralling up from the ice floe. Shaheen Badoor Khan notices that the surface is grooved and furrowed with crevasses and ravines. Torrent water glitters; ice-melt has gouged sheer canyons in the ice walls, spectacular waterfalls arc from the berg’s cliff edges.

“It’s constantly shifting,” says the energetic Bangla climatologist across the aisle. “As it loses mass, the centre of gravity moves. We have to maintain equilibrium, a sudden shift close in could prove catastrophic.”

“You do not need another tidal wave in your delta,” Shaheen Badoor Khan says.

“If it ever makes it,” says Bharat’s Water and Energy Minister, nodding at the ice. “The rate it’s melting.”

“Minister,” Shaheen Badoor Khan says quickly, but Bengal’s official climatologist snaps up the opportunity to shine.

“It has all been worked out to the last gram,” he says. “We are well within the parameters for microclimatic shift.” This with a flash of expensively dentistried teeth, and a precision purse of thumb and forefinger. Flawless. Shaheen Badoor Khan feels deep shame when one of his ministers opens his mouth and lets his ignorance walk out in public, especially before the smooth Banglas. He long ago understood that politics needs no extraordinary talent, skill, or intelligence. That’s what advisors are for. The skill of a politician is to take that advice and make it look as if he made it up himself. Shaheen Badoor Khan hates that someone might think he has not properly briefed his charges. Go with them, Shah, Prime Minister Sajida Rana had asked. Stop Srinavas making a tit of himself.

The Bengali Minister With Iceberg lumbers up the aisle smiling his big bear smile. Shaheen Badoor Khan knows from his sources of the territory wars between Bengal’s government departments over whose bailiwick ten-kilometre chunks of Amery ice shelf fall into. Tension between the joint capitals is always something that can be worked to Bharat’s advantage. Environmental Affairs gave way in the end to Science and Technology, with a little help from Development and Industry to secure the contracts and now its Minister stands in the aisle, arms braced on the seat backs. Shaheen Badoor Khan can smell his breath.

“So, eh? And all our own work, too, we didn’t run to the Americans to sort out our water supply, like those ones in Awadh, and their dam. But you’d know all about that.”

“The river used to make us one country,” Shaheen Badoor Khan observes. “Now we seem to be the squabbling children of Mother Ganga; Awadh, Bharat, Bengal. Head, hands, and feet.”

“There are a lot of birds,” Srinavas says, peering out the window. The berg trails a pale plume like smoke from a ship’s stack: flocks of seabirds, thousands strong, hurling themselves into the water to hunt silver sardine.

“That just proves the cold current gyratory is working,” says the climatologist, trying to make himself seen past his Minister. “We’re not so much importing an iceberg as a complete ecosystem. Some have followed us all the way from Prince Edward Island.”

“The Minister is curious about how soon you expect to see benefits,” Shaheen Badoor Khan inquires.

Naipaul starts to bluster and blow about the daring and reach of Bengali climatic engineering but his weather wizard cuts him off. Shaheen Badoor Khan blinks at the unforgivable interruption. Have these Banglas no protocol at all?

“The climate is not an old cow to be driven where you will,” the climatologist, whose name is Vinayachandran, says. “It is a subtle science, of tiny shifts and changes that over time build to vast, huge consequences. Think of a snowball rolling down a mountain. A half-degree temperature drop here, a shift in the ocean thermocline by a handful of metres, a pressure shift of a single millibar.”

“No doubt, but the Minister is wondering how long before these little effects from this. snowball.” Shaheen badoor Khan asks.

“Our simulations show a return to climate norms within six months,” Vinayachandran says.

Shaheen Badoor Khan nods. He has given his Minister all the clues. He can draw his own conclusion.

“So all this,” Bharati Water and Energy Minister Srinavas says with a wave of the hand at the alien ice out there in the Bay of Bengal, “All this will come too late. Another failed monsoon. Maybe if you were to melt it and send it to us by pipeline, it might do some good. Can you make the Ganga flow backwards? That might help us.”

“It will stabilise the monsoon for the next five years, for all of India,” Minister Naipaul insists.

“Minister, I don’t know about you, but my people are thirsty now,” V. R. Srinavas says right into the eye of the news camera peering like a vulgar street boy over the back of the seat row in front. Shaheen Badoor Khan folds his hands, content that that line will head every evening paper from Kerala to Kashmir. Srinavas is almost as great a buffoon as Naipaul, but he’s a stout man for a good one-liner in a pinch.

The new, beautiful, state-of-the-market tilt-jet banks again, swivels its engines into horizontal flight, and heads back for Bengal.

Also new, beautiful, and state-of-the matket is Daka’s new airport, and so is its recently installed air-traffic control system. This is the reason a high-priority diplomatic transport is stacked for half an hour and then put down on a stand way on the other side of the field from the BharatAir airbus. An interface problem; the ATC computer are Level 1 aeai, with the intellect, instinct, autonomy, and morals of a rabbit, which is considerably more, as one of the Bharat Times press corps comments, than the average Daka air-traffic controller. Shaheen Badoor Khan conceals a smile but no one can deny that the Joint States of East and West Bengal are technologically savvy, bold, forward-looking, sophisticated, and a world player—all those things Bharat aspires to in the avenues and atria of Ranapur, that the filth and collapse and beggary of Kashi deny.

The cars finally arrive. Shaheen Badoor Khan follows the politicians down on to the apron. Heat bounces from the concrete. The humidity sucks out every memory of ice and ocean and cool. Good luck to them with their island of ice, Shaheen Badoor Khan thinks, imagining those urgent Bangla engineers clambering around on the Amery berg in their cold-weather parkas and fur-fringed hoods.

In the front seat of Minister Srinavas’s car, Shaheen Badoor Khan slips his ’hoek behind his ear. Taxiways, planes, airbridges, baggage trains merge with the interface of his office system. The aeai has winnowed his mail but there are still over fifty messages requiring the attention of Sajida Rana’s Parliamentary Private Secretaty. A flick of the finger yeses that report on the Bharat’s combat readiness problem, nos that press release on further water restrictions, laters that video conference request from N. K. Jivanjee. His hands move like the mudras of a graceful Kathak dancer. A curl of a finger; Shaheen Badoor Khan summons the notepad out of thin air. Keep me advised of developments re: Sarkhand Roundabout, he writes on the side of an Air Bengal airbus in virtual Hindi. I have a feeling about this one.

Shaheen Badoor Khan was born, lives, and assumes he will die in Kashi but still cannot understand the passion and wrath Hinduism’s scruffy gods command. He admires its disciplines and asceticisms but they seem to him pledged to such poor security. Every day on his way to the Bharat Sabha the government car whisks him past a little plastic shelter on the junction of Lady Castlereagh Road where for fifteen years a sadhu has held his left arm aloft. Shaheen Badoor Khan reckons the man could not put this twig of bone and sinew and wasted muscle down now even if his god willed it. Shaheen Badoor Khan is not an overtly religious man, but these gaudy, cinematic statues, brawling with arms and symbols and vehicle and attributes and supporters as if the sculptor had to cram in every last theological detail, offend his sense of aesthetics. His school of Islam is refined, intensely civilised, ecstatic and mystical. It is not painted day-glo pink. It does not wave its penis around in public. Yet every morning thousands descend the ghats beneath the balconies of his haveli to wash away their sins in the withered stream of Ganga. Widows spend their last rupees that their husbands might burn by the holy waters and attain Paradise. Every year young males fall beneath the Puri Jagannath and are crushed—though nowhere near as many as by the juggernaut of Puri rush hour. Armies of youths storm mosques and take them to rubble with their bare hands because they profane the honour of Lord Rama and still that man sits on the kerb with his arm lifted like a staff. And on a traffic roundabout in new Sarnath, a stained concrete statue of Hanuman not ten years old is told it must relocate to make way for a new metro station and there are gangs of youths in white shirts and dhotis punching the air and banging drums and gongs. There will be deaths out of this, thinks Shaheen Badoor Khan. Little things snowballing. N. K. Jivanjee and his Hindu fundamentalist Shivaji party will ride this juggernaut to death.

There is further confusion at the VIP reception centre. It seems two very important parties are both booked into the business section of BH137. The first Shaheen Badoor Khan knows of it is a tussle of reporters and sound booms and free-fly mikes outside the executive lounge. Minister Srinavas preens himself but the lenses are looking elsewhere. Shaheen Badoor Khan forces himself politely through the crowd to the dispatcher, credentials held high.

“What is the problem here?”

“Ah, Mr. Khan, there seems to be some mix-up.”

“There is no mix-up. Minister Srinavas and party are returning to Varanasi on your flight. Why is there any reason for confusion?”

“Some celebrity.”

“Celebrity,” Shaheen Badoor Khan says with scorn that would wither an entire harvest.

“A Russian, a model,” says the dispatcher, flustered now. “A big name model. There’s some show in Varanasi. I apologise for the mix-up, Mr. Khan.” Shaheen Badoor Khan is already motioning his own staff down to the gate.

“Who?” Minister Srinavas says as he passes the scrum.

“Some Russian model,” Shaheen Badoor Khan says in his soft, precise voice.

“Ah!” says Minister Srinavas, eyes widening. “Yuli.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Yuli,” Srinavas says, craning for a look at the celeb. “The nute.”

The word is like the toll of a temple bell. The crowd parts. Shaheen Badoor Khan sees clear and true into the executive lounge. And he is transfixed. He sees a tall figure in a long, beautifully cut coat of white brocade. It is worked with patterns of dancing cranes, beaks intermeshing. The figure has its back to him, Shaheen Badoor Khan cannot make out a face but he sees curves of pale skin; long hands delicately moving; an elegantly curved nape, a smooth perfect curve of hairless scalp.

The body turns towards him. Shaheen Badoor Khan sees a line of jaw, an edge of cheekbone. A gasp goes out of him, unheard in the press corps tumult. The face. He must not look at the face, he would be lost, damned, stone. The crowd shifts again, the bodies close across the vision. Shaheen Badoor Khan stands, paralysed.

“Khan.” A voice. His Minister. “Khan, are you all right?”

“Ah, yes, Minister. Just a little dizzy; the humidity.”

“Yes, these bloody Banglas need to get their air-conditioning sorted.”

The spell is broken but as Shaheen Badoor Khan ushers his Minister down the airbridge, he knows he will never know peace again.

The gate controller has gifts for all from Minister Naipaul; vacuum flasks bearing the crest of the Joint States of East and West Bengal. When he is belted in and the curtains are closed on economy and the BharatAir airbus is bumping out over the uneven concrete, Shaheen Badoor Khan uncaps his flask. It contains ice: glacier cubes for Sajida Rana’s gin slings. Shaheen Badoor Khan caps the flask. The airbus makes its run and as its wheels leave Bengal, Shaheen Badoor Khan presses the flask to him as if the cold might heal the wound in his belly. It can’t. It never will. Shaheen Badoor Khan looks out the window at the steadily greying land as the airbus heads west to Bharat. He sees the white dome of a skull; the sweep of a neck; pale, lovely hands elegant as minarets, cheekbones turning towards him like architecture. Cranes dancing.

So long he had thought himself safe. Pure. Shaheen Badoor Khan hugs his glacier ice to him, eyes closed in silent prayer, heart luminous with ecstasy.

4: NAJIA

Lal Darfan, number one soap star, grants interviews in the howdah of an elephant-shaped airship navigating the southern slopes of the Nepali Himalayas. In a very good shirt and loose pants he reclines against a bolster on a low divan. Behind him banners of high cloud stripe the sky. The mountain peaks are a frontier of jagged white, a wall across the edge of sight. The tasselled fringe of the howdah ripples in the wind. Lal Darfan, Love God of Indiapendent Production’s biggest and brightest soap, Town and Country, is attended by a peacock that stands by the head of his divan. He feeds it ftagments of rice cracker. Lal Darfan is on a low-fat diet. It’s all the talk in the gossip chati magazines.

The diet, Najia Askarzadah thinks, is a fine conceit for a virtual soapi star. She takes a deep breath and opens the interview.

“In the West we find it hard to believe that Town and Country can be so incredibly popular. Yet here there’s maybe as much interest in you as an actor as in your character, Ved Prekash.”

Lal Darfan smiles. His teeth are as improbably and gloriously white as the tivi chat channels say.

“More,” he says. “But I think what you’re asking is why an aeai character needs an aeai actor. Illusions within illusions, is that it?”

Najia Askarzadah is twenty-two, freelance and fancy-free, four weeks in Bharat and has just landed the interview she hopes will seal her career.

“Suspension of disbelief,” she says. She can hear the hum of the airship engines, one in each elephant foot.

“It is simply this. The role is never enough. The public have to have the role behind the role, whether that is me”—Lal Darfan touches his hands self-deprecatingly to his going-to-bulge midriff—"or a flesh and blood Hollywood actor, or a pop idol. Let me ask you a question. What do you know about, say, some Western pop star like Blochant Matthews? What you see on the television, what you read in the soap magazines and the chati communities. Now, what do you know about Lal Darfan? Exactly the same. They are no more real to you than I am, and therefore no less real, either.”

“But people can always bump into a real celebrity or catch a glimpse at the beach or the airport, or in a shop.”

“Can they? How do you know anyone has had these glimpses?”

“Because I’ve heard… Ah.”

“You see what I mean? Everything comes through one medium or another. And, with respect, I am a real celebrity, in that my celebrity is indeed very real. In fact these days, I think it’s only celebrity that makes anything real, don’t you agree?”

Half a million person-hours have gone into Lal Darfan’s voice. It’s a voice calculated to seduce and it is laying orbits around Najia Askarzadah. It says, “Might I ask you a personal question? It’s very simple; what is your earliest memory?”

It’s never far, that night of fire and rush and fear, like a geological iridium layer in her life. Daddy scooping her out of her bed, the paper all over the floor and the house full of noise and the lights waving across the garden. That she remembers most; the cones of torchlight weaving over the rose bushes, coming for her. The flight across the compound. Her father cursing under his breath at the car engine as it turned and turned and turned. The flashlights darting closer, closer. Her father, cursing, cursing, polite even as the police came to arrest him.

“I’m lying in the back of a car,” Najia says. “I’m lying flat, and it’s night, and we’re driving fast through Kabul. My Dad’s driving and my Mum’s beside him, but I can’t see them over the backs of the seats. But I can hear them talking, and it sounds like they’re very far away, and they’ve got the radio on; they’re listening for something but I can’t make the voices out.” The news of the raid on the women’s house and the issue of their arrest warrants, she knows now. When that bulletin came, they knew they would have only minutes before the police closed the airport. “I can see the streetlights passing over me. It’s all very regular and exact, I can see the light start, go over me, and then up the back of the rear seat and out the window.”

“That’s a powerful image,” Lal Darfan says. “How old would you have been, three, four?”

“Not quite four.”

“I, too, have an earliest memory. This is how I know I am not Ved Prekash. Ved Prekash has scripts, but I remember a paisley shawl blowing in the wind. The sky was blue and clear and the edge of the shawl was blowing in from the side—it was like a frame, with the action out of shot. I can see it quite clearly, it’s flapping. I’m told it was on the roof of our house in Patna. Mama had taken me up to get away from the fumes down at the ground level, and I was on a blanket with a parasol over me. The shawl had been washed and was hanging on the line; odd, it was silk. I can remember it as clear as anything. I must have been two at the most. There. Two memories Ah, but you will say, yours is manufactured but mine is experience. How do you know? It could be something you’ve been told that you’ve made into a memory, it could be a false memory, it could have been artificially manufactured and implanted. Hundreds of thousands of Americans believe they’ve been spirited away by grey aliens who stick machines up their rectums; utter fantasy, and undoubtedly false memories each and every one, but does that make them fake people? And what are our memories made of anyway? Patterns of charge in protein molecules. We are not so different there, I think. This airship, this silly elephant gimmick I’ve had built for me, the idea that we’re floating along over Nepal; to you it’s just patterns of electrical charge in protein molecules. But so is everything. You call this illusion, I’d call it the fundamental building blocks of my universe. I imagine I see it very differently from you, but then, how would I know? How do I know what I see as green looks the same to you? We’re all locked up inside our little boxes of self; bone or plastic, Najia; and none of us ever get out. Can any of us trust what we think we remember?”

I do, computer, Najia Askarzadah thinks. I have to trust, because everything I am comes from those memories. The reason I am here, talking in this ludicrous virtual-reality pleasure dome to a tivi soap star with delusions of significance, is because of those memories of light, moving.

“But in that case are you—as Lal Darfan—sailing pretty close to the wind? I mean, the Hamilton Acts on Artificial Intelligence.”

“The Krishna Cops? McAuley’s hijras,” Lal Darfan says with venom.

“What I’m saying is, for you to say you’re self-aware—sentient, as you seem to be claiming—is signing your own death warrant.”

“I never said I was sentient, or conscious, whatever that is. I am a level 2.8 aeai and it’s done very nicely for me. I’m only claiming to be real; as real as you.”

“So you couldn’t pass a Turing test?”

“Shouldn’t pass a Turing test. Wouldn’t pass a Turing test. Turing test, what’s that prove anyway? Here, I’ll give you a Turing test. Classic setup, two locked rooms and a badmash with an old style print-display screen. Let’s put you in one room and Satnam from PR in the other—I presume it’s him giving you the tour, they always give him the girls. He fancies himself a bit. The badmash with the display types in questions, you type back answers. Standard stuff. Satnam’s job is to convince the badmash he’s a woman and he can lie, cheat, say anything he wants to prove it. I think you can see it’s not going to be that hard for him to do. So, does that make Satnam a woman then? I don’t think it does; Satnam certainly doesn’t think it does. How then is it any different from a computer to pass itself as sentient? Is the simulation of a thing the thing itself, or is there something unique about intelligence that it is the only thing which cannot be simulated? What does any of this prove? Only something about the nature of the Turing test as a test, and the danger of relying on minimum information. Any aeai smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.”

Najia Askarzadah throws up her hands in mock defeat.

“I’ll tell you one thing I like about you,” Lal Darfan says. “At least you didn’t spend an hour asking me stupid questions about Ved Prekash as if he’s the real star. Speaking of which, I’m due in make-up.”

“Oh, sorry, thank you,” Najia Askarzadah says, trying to do the gushy girl journo thing while the truth is she’s glad to be out of the pedantic creature’s headspace. What she intended to be light and frothy and soapi has turned into existential phenomenology with a twist of retro po-mo. She wonders what her editor will say, let alone the passengers on the TransAm Chicago-Cincinnati red-eye when they pull their inflights out of the seatback pocket. Lal Darfan merely beams beatifically as his audience chamber comes apart around him until all that’s left is pure Lewis Carroll grin that fades into the Himalayan sky and the Himalayan sky rolls up into the back of Najia’s head and she’s back in the render farm, in the rocky swivel chair with the racked cylinders of the protein processors tramlining into the perspective: sci-fi bottled brains in jars.

“He’s quite convincing, isn’t he?” Satnam-Who-Fancies-Himself’s aftershave is a little assertive. Najia slips off the lighthoek, still a little mazy from the total immersion of the interview experience.

“I think he thinks he thinks.”

“Exactly the way we programmed him.” Satnam has media style, dress, and easy confidence but Najia notes a little Siva trident on that platinum chain around his neck. “Truth is, Lal Darfan’s as tightly scripted as Ved Prekash.”

“That’s my angle, appearance and reality. If folk can believe in virtual actors, what else’ll they swallow?”

“Now don’t be giving the game away,” Satnam smiles as he shows her into the next section. He’s almost cute when he smiles, Najia thinks. “This is the meta-soap department, where Lal Darfan gets the script he doesn’t think he follows. It’s got to the stage where the meta-soap’s as big as the soap itself.”

The department is a long farm of workstations. The glass walls are polarised dark, the soap-farmers work in the umbral light of low-level spots and screen-glow. Designers’ hands draw in neurospace. Najia suppresses a shudder at the thought of spending her working years in a place like this, shut off from the sun. Stray light on high cheekbones, a hairless head, a delicate hand catches her attention and it’s her turn to cut Satnam off.

“Who’s that?”

Satnam cranes.

“Oh, that’s Tal. He’s new here. He heads up visual wallpaper.”

“I think the pronoun is ‘yt,’” Najia says, trying to catch a better glance at the nute through the hand-ballet. She can’t say why she is surprised to find a third-sex in the production office—in Sweden nutes tended towards the creative industries and India’s premier soap undoubtedly exerts a similar gravity. She realises she has assumed that India’s long history of trans- and non-genders has always been hidden, veiled.

“Yt, him, whatever. Yt’s full of it today, some invite to a big celebi party.”

“Yuli. The Russian model. I tried to get invited to that, to interview him. Yt.”

“So you settled for Fat Lal instead.”

“No, I really am interested in the psychology of aeai actors.” Najia looks over at the nute. Yt glances up. Yts eyes meet hers for a moment. There is no recognition, no communication. Yt looks back into its work again. Yts hands sculpt digits.

“What Fat Lal doesn’t know is the characters and plot are basic packages,” Satnam continues, ushering Najia along between the glowing workstations. “We franchise them out and different national broadcasters drop their own aeai actors in on top of them. There are different actors playing Ved Prekash in Mumbai and Kerala and they’re as mega down there as Fat Lal is up here.”

“Everything’s a version,” Najia says, trying to decipher the beautiful dance of the nute’s long hands. Out in the corridor, Satnam tries the chat.

“So, are you really from Kabul?”

“I left when I was four.”

“It’s not a thing I know very much about. I’m sure it must have been.”

Najia stops dead in the corridor, turns to face Satnam. She’s half-a-head shorter, but he takes a step back. She grabs his hand, scrawls a UCC across his knuckles.

“There, my number. You call it, I may answer. I may suggest we go out somewhere, but if we do, I choose where. Okay? Now, thanks for the tour, and I think I can find my way back to the front door.”

He’s where and when he said he would be as she cruises in to the kerb in the phatphat. He’s dressed in nothing he’s too fond of, as Najia requested, but he still wears his trishul. Site’s been seeing a lot of those, on the streets, around men’s necks. He settles in the seat beside her; the little autorickshaw rocks on its home-brew suspension.

“My shout, remember?” she says. The driver pulls out into the swarm of traffic.

“Mystery tour, okay, that’s fine,” Satnam says. “So, did you get your article written?”

“Written, done, off,” Najia says. She banged it out this afternoon on the terrace at the Imperial International, the Cantonment backpackers hostel where she has a room. She’ll move out when the payment comes in from the magazine. The Australians are getting to her. They moan about everything.

The thing is, Najia Askarzadah has a boyfriend. He’s called Bernard. He’s a fellow Imperialist, a gap-yearer whose twelve months turned into twenty, forty, sixty. He’s French, indolent, overly convinced of his own genius and has atrocious manners. Najia suspects he only stays at the hostel to pull fresh girls like her. But he practises Tantric sex, and can keep his dick up any woman for an hour while chanting. So far Tantra with Bernard has involved her squatting on his lap for twenty, thirty, forty minutes tugging on a leather thong looped around his cock to keep it hard hard hard until his eyes roll up and he says Kundalini has risen, which means the drugs are finally kicking in. It’s not Najia’s idea of Tantra. He’s not Najia’s idea of a boyfriend. Neither is Satnam, and for many of the same reasons, but it’s an idea, a game, a why not? Najia Askarzadah has steered as many of her twenty-two years as she’s been allowed responsibility for by why nots ? They steered her to Bharat, against the advice of her tutors, friends, and parents.

New Varanasi runs into old Kashi in a series of discontinuities and juxtapositions. Streets begin in one millennium and end in another. Vertiginous corporate spires lean over shambles of alleys and wooden houses unchanged in four centuries. Metro viaducts and elevated expressways squeeze past the sandstone linga of decaying temples. The cloy of rotting petals permeates even the permanent jizz of alcohol-engine fumes, dissolving into an urban perfume that cities dab behind their cloacal bits. Bharat Rail employs sweepers with besoms to keep flower petals off the track. Kashi generates them by the billion and the steel wheels can’t cope. The phatphat turns down a dark laneway of clothing shops; pale plastic dummies, armless and legless but smiling nevertheless, swing from racks overhead.

“Am I allowed to ask where you’re taking me?” Satnam says.

“You’ll find out soon enough.” Truth is, Najia Askarzadah has never been, but ever since she heard the Australians crowing about how bold they were in going to it and they weren’t grossed out, not at all, she’s looked for an excuse to find this back-of-backstreet club. She has no idea where she is, but she reckons the driver is taking her in the right direction when dangling shop dummies give way to hookers in open storefronts. Most have adopted the Western standard uniform of lycra and overemphatic footwear, a few cling to tradition, in the steel cages.

“Here,” says the phatphat driver. The little wasp-coloured plastic bubble rocks on its suspension.

Fight! Fight! exclaim the alternating neons above the tiny door between the Hindu icon shop and the hookers drinking Limka at the chai stall. A cashier sits in a tin cubby by the door. He looks thirteen, fourteen, and already he’s seen everything from under his Nike beanie. Beyond him, stairs lead up into stark fluorescent light.

“One thousand rupee,” he says, hand out. “Or five dollar.”

Najia pays local.

“This isn’t exactly what I imagined for a first date,” Satnam says.

“Date?” Najia says as she leads him up the stairs that climb, turn, dip, turn again, and finally empty on the balcony over the pit.

The large room had once been a warehouse. Sick green paint, industrial lamps and conduiting, louvred skylights all tell its history. Now it’s an arena. Ranged around a five-metre hexagon of sand are ranks of wooden pews, tiered as steeply as a lecture hail. Everything’s new built from construction timber stolen from the cash-starved Varanasi Area Rapid Transit. The stalls are faced with packing case panels. When Najia lifts her hand from the railing it comes away sticky with resin.

The warehouse is heaving, from betting booths and fighters’ stalls down at the ringside to the back row of the balcony where men in check workshirts and dhotis stand on their benches for a better look. The audience is almost entirely male. The few women are dressed to please.

“I don’t know about this,” Satnam says but Najia has the scent of close packed bodies, sweat, primal fluids. She pushes to the front and peers down into the pit. Money changes owners over the betting table in a blur of soft, worn notes. Fists wave fans of rupees and dollars and euros; the sattamen keep track of every paisa. All eyes are on the money, except for one man, diagonally opposite her on the ground floor, who looks up as if he has felt the weight of her regard. Young, flashy. Obvious Hood, thinks Najia. Their eyes meet.

The barker, a five-year-old boy in a cowboy suit, stalks the pit hyping up the audience as two old men with rakes turn the bloody sand into a Zen garden. He has a bindi mike on his throat; his weird little voice, at once old and young, rattles from the sound system through a wash of tabla-and-mix anokha. From his tone of innocence and experience, Najia wonders if he might be a Brahmin. No: that’s the Brahmin in the front row booth, a seeming ten-year-old dressed twentysomething flanked by tivi-wannabe girlis. The barker is just another street boy. Najia finds she’s breathing fast and shallow. She no longer knows where Satnam is.

The din, already staggering, ratchets up a level as the teams go out on the sand to parade their fighters. They hold them high over their heads, stalking around the ring, making sure everyone can see where their money is going.

The microsabres are appalling creatures. A small California gentech company owned the original patent. Cut standard Felis domesticus with reconstructed fossil DNA from Smilodon fatalis. Result: bonsai sabretooth, something the size of a large Maine Coon with Upper Palaeolithic dentistry and manners to match. They enjoyed a brief star-pet celebrity until their owners found them taking out their and their neighbours’ cats, dogs, Guatemalan domestics, babies. The engineering company filed for bankruptcy before the writs took to the air, but the patent had already been massively infringed in the battle clubs of Manila and Shanghai and Bangkok.

Najia watches an athletic girl in cropped muscle top and parachute baggies parade her champion head-high around the ring. The cat is a big silver tabby, built like a strike aircraft.

Killing genes, gorgeous monster. Its fangs are sheathed in leather scabbards. Najia sees the girl’s pride and love, the crowd’s roaring admiration redirected on to her. The barker retires to his commentary podium. The bookies issue a rush of slips. The competitors slide back into their boxes.

Muscle-top girl jabs a needle of stimulant into her cat while her male colleague waves a bottle of poppers under its nose. They hold their hero. They hold their breaths. Their opponents drug up their contender, a low lean black microsabre, mean as midnight. There is absolute silence in the arena. The barker gives a blast on his air horn. The combatants let slip the leather guards and throw their battle cats into the pit.

The crowd rises in one voice and one blood. Najia Askarzadah howls and raves with them. All Najia Askarzadah knows is two fighting cats leaping and slashing at each other down in the pit as the blood surges in her eyes and ears.

It’s terrifyingly fast and bloody. Within seconds the beautiful silver tabby has one leg hanging from a rope of gristle and skin. Blood jets from the open wound, but it screams defiance at its enemy, tries to dodge and dart on the flapping triangle of meat; slashing with its terrible, killing teeth. Finally it’s down and spinning spastically on its back, ploughing up a wave of bloody sand. The victors have already hooked their champion with a neck loop and are wrestling the furious, shrieking thing towards the pen. The silver tabby wails and wails until someone from the judge’s pew walks over and drops a concrete breeze-block on its head.

Muscle-top girl stands staring sullenly as the mashed, twitching thing is shovelled away. She bites her bottom lip. Najia loves her then, loves the boy whose glance she caught, loves everyone, everything in this wooden arena. Her heart is quivering, her breath burning, her fists clenched and trembling, her pupils dilated, and her brain blazing. She is eight hundred percent alive and holy. Again she makes eye contact with Obvious Hood. He nods but she can see he has had a heavy loss.

The victors step into the ring to receive the adulation of the crowd. The barker screams into the sound system and on the bookies’ bench hands push money money money. This is what you came to Bharat for, Najia Askarzadah, she tells herself. To feel this way about life, about death, about illusion and reality. To have something burn through bloody reasonable, sane, tolerant Sweden. To taste the insane and raw. Her nipples are hard. She knows she’s damp. This war, this war for water, this war that she denies brought her here, this war that everyone fears will come. She doesn’t fear it. She wants that war. She wants it very much.

5: LISA

Four hundred and fifty kilometres above Western Ecuador, Lisa Durnau runs through a herd of bobbets. They scatter from her, hiking up on their powerful legs and hoofing it, semaphore crests raised. The canopy forest echoes their warbling alarms. The young look up from their grazing, forelegs pawing at air in dread, then shrill and dive for their parents’ pouches. The waist-high sauro-marsupials peel away from Lisa in her running tights and top and shoes in two wings of fright, hatchlings trying desperately to stuff themselves headfirst into belly flaps. They’re one of Biome 161’s most successful species. The forests of Simulated Year Eight Million Before Present throb black with their herds. Alterre is running a hundred thousand years a Real World day, so by tomorrow they could be extinct; this high, humid cloud forest of umbrella-shaped trees desiccated by a climatic shift.

But in this ecological moment, this timeslice of what, in another age, another earth, will be northern Tanzania, today belongs to them.

The rush and dash of bobbets disturbs a group of tranter, reared up on their hind legs, sucking leaves from a trudeau tree. The big slow tree feeders drop to their longer forelegs and canter disjointedly away. Their internal armour plates move like machinery under willow-striped hides. Camouflage by William Morris, Lisa Durnau thinks. Botany by Rene Magritte. The trudeau trees are perfect hemispheres of leaves, regularly spaced across the plain like an exercise in statistical distribution. Some of the branches bear seed buds, penduluming on the breeze. They can scatter seed across a hundred-metre radius, like a riot-control flechette gun. That’s how they achieve their mathematical regularity. No trudeau will grow in the shade of another, but the forest canopy is a cornucopia of species.

Flickers of moving shadow between the trees; a flock of parasitic beckhams darts from the dead tranter in which they have injected their eggs. An ystavat stoops from its high glide path, darts and weaves and scoops up a laggard sauro-bat in the net of skin between its hind legs. A flip, a duck of the tearing beak, and the hunter climbs away again. Invulnerable, inviolable, Lisa Durnau runs on. No god is mortal in his own world and for the past three years she has been director, sustainer, and mediator of Alterre, the parallel Earth evolving in accelerated time on eleven and a half million Real-World computers.

Beckhams. Tranters. Trudeaus. Lisa Durnau loves the mischief of Alterre taxonomy. It’s the principles of astronomy applied to alternative biology; you find it lurking in your hard-drive, you name it. Mcconkeys and mastroiannis and ogunwes and hayakawas and novaks. Hammadis and cuestras and bjorks.

So very Lull.

She’s settled into her rhythm now. She could move like this forever. Some listen to music when they run. Some chat or read their mail or the news. Some have their aeai PAs brief them on the day. Lisa Durnau checks out what’s new across ten thousand biomes running on eleven and a half million computers participating in the biggest experiment in evolution. Her usual route is a loop around the University of Kansas campus, her marvellous and mysterious bestiary laid over the Lawrence traffic. There’s always something to surprise and delight, some new phone-directory name hanging off a fantastical creature that’s fought its way out of the silicon jungle. When the first arthrotects had appeared out of the insects by pure evolutionary leap on a Biome 158 host in Guadalajara, she had experienced that thrilled satisfaction you feel when a plot twist hits you that you didn’t expect. No one could have predicted the lopezs, but they had lain there, latent, in the rules. Then, two days ago the parasitogenic beckhams evolved from an elementary school in Lancashire and it hit her all over again. You never see it coming.

Then they fired her into space. She hadn’t seen that coming, either.

Two days ago she had been running her loop of the campus, past the honey stone faculty buildings, Alterre laid over Kansas summer. She turned by the student halls to run back to shower, shampoo, and office. In which a woman in a suit had been waiting as Lisa came in screwing water out of her ears with twists of tissue. She’d shown identifications and authorisations for responsibilities Lisa hadn’t known her nation ever needed and three hours later Lisa Durnau, Director of the Alterre Simulated Evolution project, was on a government hypersonic transport seventy-five thousand feet over central Arkansas.

The G-woman had told her luggage was strictly mass-limited but Lisa packed her running gear anyway. It felt like a friend. Down in Kennedy she took it out on to the space centre roads to unwind, to explore, to try to get some perspective on where she was and what her government was doing to her. With the sun setting across the lagoons, she ran past sentry rows of rockets, old boosters and missiles and heavy lift launchers. Glorious, perilous machines, now jammed like pikes into the earth, their purpose defeated, their shadows long as continents.

Forty-eight hours on, Lisa Durnau runs orbits of the centrifuge wheel of the ISS, wheeling over Southern Colombia. In her Alterre-sight she sees a krijcek castle rising in the distance above the trudeau tree cover. The krijcek are evolutionary arrivistes from Biome 163 in south-east coastal Africa. They’re a species of finger-sized dinos that have developed a hive culture, complete with sterile workers, breeders, egg laying queens, a complex social order based on skin colour, and herculean architecture. A new colony will work outwards from a small underground bunker, converting anything and everything organic to pulp, moulding it with dextrous tiny hands into soaring piers and towers and buttresses and vaulted egg chambers. Sometimes Lisa Durnau wishes she could override Lull’s naming policy. ‘Krijcek’ has a nice tone of lethality, but she would have loved to call them ‘gormenghasts’.

A chime in her auditory centre tells her her pulse rate has hit the required digits for the requisite amount of time. She has caught up with herself. Alterre’s un-reality has anchored her. She jogs to a stop, goes into her cool-down regime, and flicks out of Alterre. ISS’s centrifuge is a hundred-metre diameter ring, spun to give a quarter gravity. It rises sheer in front and behind her, she’s forever at the bottom of a spin-gravity well. Plant racks lend a gloss of green but nothing can conceal that this is aluminium, construction carbon, plastic, and nothing beyond. NASA doesn’t build its ships with windows. Outer space for Lisa Durnau has thus far been crawling from one sealed room to another.

Lisa stretches and flexes. Low grav puts different loads on new muscle groups. She slips off her runsoles, flexes her toes against the metal honeycomb. As well as an intensive NASA exercise regimen she takes calcium supplements. Lisa Durnau’s at the age a woman starts to think about her bones. ISS virgins have puffy faces and upper limbs as body fluids redistribute; sophomores a stretched, light, cat-look, but the long-termers eat their own bones. They spend most of their time up in the old core from which ISS has grown chaotically over its half-century in the sky. Few ever come down to dirty gravity, centrifugal or otherwise. Legend is they never can. Lisa Durnau wipes herself down with a moist towelette, seizes a wall rung, and hand-over-hands up the spoke towards the old core. She feels her weight dropping exponentially; she can grab a rung and swoop herself upwards two, five, ten metres. Lisa has a meeting with her G-woman up in the hub. A long-termer dives towards her, executing a neat midcourse somersault to point his feet downwards. He nods and he tumbles past Lisa. His flexibility makes her look like a walrus, but the nod encourages her. It is as warm a welcome as ISS has offered. Fifty people is small enough for first names, big enough for politics. Just like the faculty, then. Lisa Durnau loves the physicality of space but she does wish the budget had stretched to windows.

Shock number one came on the first Kennedy morning as she sat on her verandah with the ocean view and the maid poured coffee. That was when she realised that Dr. Lisa Durnau, Evolutionary Biologist, had been vanished by her own state. She had been unsurprised to learn from the woman in the suit that she was to be sent into space. The State Department did not fly people down to Kennedy in a hypersonic shuttle to study the bird life. When they confiscated her palmer and gave her a lookie-no-talkie model it had been a displeasure but not a shock. Startlement but no shock to find the hotel had been cleared for her. The gym, the pool, the laundry. All for her, alone. Lisa felt good Presbyterian guilt about calling room service until the Nicaraguan maid told her it gave her something to do. That is, the maid said she came from Nicaragua. She poured the coffee and in that same moment of vertiginous paranoia came the second shock: Lull had vanished, too. Lisa had never thought it anything other than a reaction to his marriage disintegrating.

At their next meeting Lisa Durnau confronted Suit Woman, whose name was Suarez-Martin, pronounced the Hispanic way.

“I have to know,” said Lisa Durnau, shifting her weight from foot to foot, unconsciously recapitulating her warm-up routine. “Was this what happened to Thomas Lull?”

The government woman Suarez-Martin kept the executive suite as her office. She sat with her back to the panoramic of rockets and pelicans.

“I don’t know. His disappearance was nothing to do with the United States government. You do have my word on that.”

Lisa Durnau chewed the answer over a couple of times. “Okay then, why me? What’s this about?”

“I can answer that first part.”

“Shoot then.”

“We got you because we could not get him.”

“And the second part?”

“That will be answered, but not here.” She slid a plastic bag across the desk to Lisa. “You’ll need this.”

The bag was marked with NASA logos and contained one standard issue one-size-fits-all flight-suit liner in hi-visibility yellow.

When next she saw Suarez-Martin the G-woman was not wearing her suit. She lay strapped into the acceleration couch on Lisa Durnau’s right with hints of NASA yellow peeking through her flight gear at wrists and throat. Her eyes were closed and her lips formed silent prayers, but Lisa had the idea that these were the rituals of familiar terror rather than stark novelty. Airport rosaries.

The pilot occupied the couch on the left. He was busy with pre-flight checks and communications and treated Lisa as he would any other cargo. She shifted on her couch and felt the gel flow and conform to her body contours, a disturbingly intimate sensation. Beneath her, down in the launch pit, a thirty-terawatt laser was charging, focusing its beam on a parabolic mirror underneath her ass. I am about to be blasted into space on the end of a beam of light hotter than the sun, she thought, marvelling at the cool with which she could contemplate this insane notion. Perhaps it was sell-defensive disbelief. Perhaps the Nicaraguan maid had slipped something in the coffee. While Lisa Durnau was trying to decide the count hit zero. A computer in Kennedy flight control fired the big laser. The air ignited under Lisa and kicked the NASA lightbody orbitwards at three gravities. Two minutes into flight a thought so ridiculous, so absurd hit her that she could not help giggling, sending laughter ripples through her gel bed. Hey ma! Top of the world. The most exclusive travel lounge on the planet, the Five-Hundred-Mile-High Club! And all this in something that looks like a designer orange squeezer.

It was there that the third shock crept up and mugged her. It was the realisation of how few people would ever miss her.

The ident patch on the yellow suit liner reads Daley Suarez-Martin. The G-woman is one of those people who will set up office anywhere, even in a cubby full of film-wrap astronaut food. Palmer, water bottle, television patch, and family photos are velcroed in an arc on the wall: three generations of Suarez-Martins arrayed on a big house porch with palms in large terracotta pots. The TV patch is set to timer and tells Lisa Durnau she’s at 01.15 GMT. She does a subtraction. She’d be at Tacorofico Superica with the Wednesday night gang on her third Margarita.

“How are you settling in?” Daley Suarez-Martin asks.

“It’s, uh, it’s okay. Really.” Lisa still has a small back-of-skull headache, like you get the first few times you use a lighthoek. She suspects it’s the ash of the launch trauma drugs she hasn’t run out of her system in the rat wheel. And zero-gee leaves her feeling horridly exposed. She doesn’t know what to do with her hands. Her breasts feel like cannons.

“We won’t keep you long, honest,” Daley Suarez-Martin says. In orbit she smiles more than in Kennedy or Lisa Durnau’s Lawrence office. You can only do so much authority wearing something that looks like an Olympic luge suit, “First, an apology. We have not exactly told you the actualite.”

“You’ve told me exactly nothing,” Lisa Durnau says. “I presume this is to do with the Tierra project, and it’s a great honour to be involved on the mission, but I really work in a completely different universe.”

“That’s our first tactical misdirection,” Daley Suarez-Martin says. She sucks in her bottom lip. “There is no Tierra mission.”

Lisa Durnau feels her mouth is open.

“But all that Epsilon Indi stuff.”

“That’s real enough. There’s a Tierra all right. We’re just not going to it.”

“Wait wait wait, I’ve seen the light sail. On television. Hell, I even eyeballed the thing when you sent it out to the L-five point and back on that test run. Friends of mine had a telescope. We had a barbecue. We watched it on a monitor.”

“You certainly saw that. The light sail is perfectly real and we did run it out to the Lagrange-five point. Only, that wasn’t the test. That was the mission.”

In the same year that Lisa Durnau made the Fremont High soccer team and found out that rock boyz, pool parties, and sex are not a good combo, NASA found Tierra. Extra-solar planetary systems had been popping out of the big black faster than the taxonomists could thumb through their dictionaries of mythology and fable for names, but when the Darwin Observatory’s rosette of seven telescopes turned back for a closer look at Epsilon Indi, ten light-years away, they found a pale blue dot hugged up close to the warmth of the sun. A waterworld. An earthworld. Spectroscopes peeled the atmosphere and found oxygen, nitrogen, CO₂, water vapour, and complex hydrocarbons that could only be the result of biological activity. There was something living out there, close to the sun in Epsilon Indi’s shrunken habitable zone. It might be bugs. It might just be people with scopes watching our own little blue spot on the sun. The discovery team christened the planet Tierra. A Texan immediately filed a claim to the planet and everything that dwelt upon it. It was this story that broke Tierra through the celebrity gossip and crime-of-the-month scandal into checkout chitchat. Another Earth? What’s the weather like? How can he own a planet? He just has to file a claim, that’s all. Like half your DNA’s owned by some biotech corporation. Every time you have sex, you break copyright.

Then came the pictures. Darwin’s resolution was high enough to resolve surface features. Every school in the developed world carried a map of Terra’s three continents and vast oceans on its wall. It alternated with Emin Perry, reigning Olympic five thousand metres champion, as the screen saver on Lisa Durnau’s A-life project in her first year at UCSB. NASA put an interstellar space probe proposal together with First Solar, the orbital power division of EnGen, using its experimental orbital maser array and a light sail. Transit time was two hundred and fifty years. As development schedules grew ever longer Tierra receded into the wallpaper of public perception and Lisa Durnau found it easier and more satisfying to explore strange worlds and discover new life-forms in the universe inside her computer. Alterre was as real as Tierra and much cheaper and easier to visit.

“I don’t understand what’s going on here,” Lisa Durnau says, up in space.

“The Tierra probe project is a presentational solution,” Suarez-Martin says. Her hair is pinned back with an array of glitter clips. Lisa’s short bob of curls hovers around her like a nebula. “The real mission was to develop a space propulsion system sufficiently powerful to move a large object to the Lagrange-five point of orbital stability.”

“What kind of large object?” Lisa Durnau cannot connect anything that has happened in the past fifty hours to any part of accumulated thirty-seven years of experience. They tell her this is space, but it’s hot, stinks of feet, and you can’t see anything. Your government pulls off the biggest sleight-of-hand in history but no one notices because they were watching the pretty pictures.

“An asteroid. This asteroid.” Daley Suarez-Martin palms up a graphic on the screen. It’s the usual deep-space potato. The resolution is not very good. “This is Darnley 285.”

“This must be some very special asteroid,” Lisa says. “So is it going to do a Chicxulub on us?”

The G-woman looks pleased. She palms up a new graphic, coloured ellipses crossing each other.

“Darnley 285 is an Earth-crossing asteroid discovered by NEAT skywatch in 2027. Please watch this animation.” She taps a yellow ellipse, close in to Earth, far out to the back side of Mars. “Its nearest approach to earth is just inside lunar orbit.”

“That’s close for a NEO,” Lisa Durnau says. See, I can do the speak, too.

“Darnley 285 is on a thousand-eighty-five-day orbit; the next one would have brought her close enough to pose a statistical risk.” The animation passes within a hair of blue earth.

“So you built the light sail to move it out of harm’s way,” Lisa says.

“To move it, but not on account of safety. Please look carefully. This was the projected orbit in 2030. This is the actual orbit.” A solid yellow ellipse appears. It’s exactly the same as the 2027 orbit. The woman continues. “Close interaction with Near Earth Object Sheringham Twelve on the next orbit would bring Darnley 285 to its closest approach, one twelve thousand miles. Instead, in 2033.” The new dotted parabola switches place with the observed course: exactly the same trajectory logged in 2027. “It is an anomalous situation.”

“You’re saying.”

“An unidentified force is modifying Darnley 285’s orbit to keep it the same distance from Earth,” Daley Suarez-Martin says.

“Jesus,” whispers Lisa Durnau, preacherman’s daughter.

“We sent a mission out for the 2039 approach. It was in the highest confidentiality. We found something. We then embarked on an extended project to bring it back. That’s what the light sail test mission was about, all the Epsilon Indi cover story. We had to get that asteroid to somewhere we can take a long, close look at it.”

“And what did you find?” Lisa Durnau asks.

Daley Suarez-Martin smiles. “Tomorrow we’ll send you out to see for yourself.”

6: LULL

Eleven thirty and the club is jumping. Boom-mounted floods define an oval of sand. The bodies cluster to the light like moths. They move, they grind, eyes shut in ecstasy. The air smells of used-up day, heavy sweat, and duty-free Chanel. The girls wear this summer’s shift-Dresses, last summer’s two pieces, the occasional classic V-string. The boys are all bare-chested and carry layers of neck jewellery. Chin wisps are back, the Mohican is so ’46, tribal body-painting hovers on the edge of the terminally unhip, but scarification seems to be the coming thing, boys and girls alike. Thomas Lull is glad the Australian penis-display thongs have cycled out. He’s worked the parties for the Ghosht Brothers for the past three seasons, cash in hand, and he’s seen the fast tide of planet youth culture ebb and flow, but those things, strapping it up like a periscope.

Thomas Lull sits on the soft, tired grey sand, forearms resting on drawn-up knees. The surf is unusually quiet tonight. Hardly a ripple at the tide line. A bird cries out over the black water. The air is still, dense, tired. No taste of monsoon on it. The fishermen have been saying that since the Banglas brought their ice up past Tamil Nadu the currents have been out of kilter. Behind him, bodies move in total silence.

Figures resolve out of the dark, two white girls in sarongs and halter-tops. They’re dirty beach-blonde with that exaggerated Scandinavian tan emphasised by pale Nordic eyes, hand in hand, barefoot. How old are you, nineteen, twenty? Thomas Lull thinks. With your sunbed top-up tans and bikini bottoms under those travel-ironed sarongs. This is your first stop, isn’t it, somewhere you saw on a backpacker site, just wild enough to see if you’re going to like it out in the raw world. You couldn’t wait to get away from Uppsala or Copenhagen and do all the fierce things in your hearts.

“Ho there,” Thomas Lull hails softly. “If you’re planning on attending tonight’s entertainment there are a couple of preliminaries. Purely for your own safety.” He unfolds his scanning kit with a gambler’s flick.

“Sure,” says smaller, goldier girl. Thomas Lull runs her fistful of pills and patches through his scanner.

“Nothing here going to leave you like a plate of Vichysoisse. Soup of the day is Transic Too, it’s a new emotic, you can get it from anyone up on the stage area. Now, madam.” This to bug-eyed beach-Viking who has started the party early. “I need to see if it’ll ab-react with anything you’re already running. Could you. ?” She knows the drill, licks her finger, rolls it across the sensor plate. Everything goes green. “No problem. Enjoy the party, ladies, and this is a no-alcohol event.”

He checks their asses through their sheer sarongs as they insinuate themselves into the quiet writhe. They’re still holding hands. That’s so nice, Thomas Lull thinks. But the emotics scare him. Computer emotions brewed on an unlicensed Level 2.95 Bharat sundarban aeai, chain-bred up in some Coke-bottle bedroom factory and stuck onto adhesive patches, fifty dollars a slap. It’s easy to tell the users. The twitchings and grinnings and bared teeth and uncanny noises of bodies trying to express feelings with no analogue in human need or experience. He’s never met anyone who could tell him what this feeling makes you feel. Then again, he’s never met anyone who can report what a natural emotion makes you feel. We are all programme ghosts running on the distributed network of Brahma.

That bird’s still out there, calling.

He glances over his shoulder at the silent beach party, every dancer in his or her private zone, dancing to his or her custom beat beamed through ’hoek link. He lies to himself that he only works the club nights because he can use the cash, but he’s always been drawn to mass humanity. He wants and dreads the self-loss of the dancers, merged into an unconscious whole, isolate and unified. It’s the same love and loathing that drew him to the dismembered body of India, one of the planet’s hundred most recognisable faces, shuffled into the subcontinent’s appalling, liberating, faceless billion and a half. Turn around, walk away, disappear. That ability to dissolve his face into a crowd has its flip-side: Thomas Lull can detect the individual, the unusual, the countervailing out of the herd.

She moves across the currents of the crowd, through the bodies, against the grain of the night. She is dressed in grey. Her skin is pale, wheat, Indo-Aryan. Her hair is short, boyish, very glossy, with a tinge of red. Her eyes are large. Gazelle eyes, like the Urdu poets sang. She looks impossibly young. She wears a three-stripe Vishnu tilak on her forehead. It doesn’t look stupid on her. She nods, smiles, and the bodies close around her. Thomas Lull tries to angle himself to look without being seen. It’s not love, lust, fortysomething hormones. It is simple fascination. He has to see more, know more of her.

“Hey there.” An Australian couple want their gear checked. Thomas Lull runs their stash through his scanner while watching the party. Grey is the perfect party camouflage. She has melted into an interplay of silently moving limbs.

“Fine, you’re whistling Dixie. But we do have a zero-tolerance policy on penis-display suits.”

The guy frowns. Get out of here, leave me to my recreation. There, close by the decks. The bhati-boys are flirting with her. He hates them for that. Come back to me. She hesitates, bends low for a word. For a moment he thinks she might buy something from the Bangalore Bombastic. He doesn’t want her to do that. She shakes her head and moves on. She vanishes into the bodies again. Thomas Lull finds he is following her. She does blend well; he keeps losing track of her amongst the bodies. She isn’t wearing a ’hoek. How is she getting it then? Thomas Lull moves to the edge of the dance space. She only looks like she is dancing, he realises. She is doing something else, taking the collective mood and moving to it. Who the hell is she?

Then she stops in her dance. She frowns, opens her mouth, swallows for breath. She presses a hand to her labouring chest. She can’t breathe. The gazelle eyes are scared. She bends over, trying to release the grip in her lungs. Thomas Lull knows these signs well. He is an old familiar of this attacker. She stands in the middle of the silent crowd, fighting for breath. No one sees. No one knows. Everyone is blind and deaf in their own private dancescapes. Thomas Lull forces a path through the bodies. Not to her, but to the Scandie girls.

He has their stash read-out on his scanner. There’s always someone doing a quick, dirty lift on the salbutamol/ATP-reductase reaction.

“I need your wheezers, quick.” Goldie girl peers at him as if he’s some incredible alien elf from Antares. To her, he could be. She fumbles open her pink Adidas purse. “Here, those.” Thomas Lull scrapes out the blue and white caplets. The grey girl is panting shallowly now, hands on thighs, very frightened, looking round for help. Thomas Lull bulls through the party people, cracking the little gelatin capsules and shaking them into his fist.

“Open your mouth,” he orders, cupping his hands. “Inhale on three and hold for twenty. One. Two. Three.”

Thomas Lull claps his cupped hands over her mouth and blows hard between his thumbs, spraying powder deep into her lungs. She closes her eyes, counting. Thomas Lull finds he’s looking at her tilak. He’s never seen one like it before. It looks like plastic fused to the skin, or raw bone. Suddenly he has to touch it. His fingers are millimetres away when she opens her eyes. Thomas Lull snatches his hand back.

“You all right?”

She nods. “Yes. Thank you.”

“You should’ve brought some medication with you. You could have been in a lot of trouble; these people, they’re like ghosts. You could have died and they’d’ve danced right over you. Come on.”

He leads her through the maze of blind dancers to the shadowed sand. She sits, bare feet splayed out. Thomas Lull kneels beside her. She smells of sandalwood and fabric conditioner. Twenty years of undergraduate expertise pins her at nineteen, maybe twenty. Come on, Lull. You’ve saved a strange little driftwood girl from an asthma attack and you’re running your prepull checks. Show some self-respect.

“I was so scared,” she says. “I am so stupid, I had inhalers but left them back at the hotel. I never thought.”

Her soft accent would sound English to less experienced ears but Thomas Lull’s recognises a Karnatakan twang.

“Luck for you Asthma Man picked up your wheezing on his super-hearing. Come on. Party’s over for you tonight, sister. Where are you staying?”

“The Palm Imperial Guest House.” It’s a good place, not cheap, more popular with older travellers. Thomas Lull knows the lobby and bar of every hotel for thirty kays up and down the coconut coast. Some of the bedrooms too. Backpackers and gap-yearers tend toward the beachshacks. He’s seen a few of those too. Killed a few snakes.

“I’ll get you back. Achuthanandan will look after you. You’ve had a bit of a shock, you need to take it easy.”

That tilak: he’s certain it’s moving. Mystery girl gets to her feet. She offers a hand shyly, formally.

“Thank you very much. I think I would have been in very bad trouble without you.” Thomas Lull takes the hand. It is long and aesthetic, soft and dry. She cannot quite look at him.

“All in a day’s work for Asthma Man.”

He walks with her toward the lights among the palms. The surf is lifting, the trees grow agitated. The lamps on the hotel veranda dance and glimmer behind the veil of fronds. The beach party behind him is suddenly weary and stale. All the things that seemed valuable and confirming before this girl now taste thin and old. Perhaps the monsoon is coming; the wind that will blow him on again.

“If you want, there’s a technique I can teach you. I used to suffer asthma bad when I was young; it’s a breathing trick; to do with gas exchange. It’s quite easy. I haven’t had an attack in twenty years, and you can throw away those inhalers. I could show you the basics; you could call round tomorrow.”

The girl pauses, gives it thought, then nods her head. Her tilak catches a light from somewhere.

“Thank you. I would value that very much.”

The way she talks; so reserved, so Victorian, such regard for the stress of words. “Okay well, you can find me.”

“Oh, I will just ask the gods, they will show me. They know the way to everywhere.”

Thomas Lull has no answer to that, so he sticks his hands in the pockets of his cut-off baggies and says, “Well, gods permitting, I’ll see you tomorrow, ah?”

“Aj.” She gives her name a French pronunciation: Ah-zjh. She looks to the hotel lights, coloured bulbs jigging in the rising wind. “I think I will be all right from here, thank you. Until tomorrow then, Professor Lull.”

7: TAL

Tal travels tonight in a plastic taxi. The little bubble phatphat rattles over the pocks and pots of a rural road as the driver steers nervously by his single headlamp. He’s already narrowly missed one wandering cow and a column of women with bundles of firewood on their heads. Shade trees loom out of the deep, thick rural night. The driver scans the verge for the turn-off. His instructions are taped to the dash where he can read them by instrument light. So many kays along this road, through this number of villages, second left after the wall ad for Rupa underwear. He’s never been out of the city before.

Tal’s special mix plays big anokha breaks with Slav Metal death chords, in honour of the host. Celebrity occasions demand extra-special mixes. Tal’s life can be chronicled by a series of soundtrack files. Tal’s DJ aeai wove up a set of top grooves between drafting the wedding pavilion for the Chawla/Nadiadwala match. There’s much happening in Town and Country’s actors’ lives right now.

A sudden lurch throws Tal from the bench seat. The phatphat bounces to a stop. Tal rearranges yts thermal scatter coat, tuts at the dust on yts silk pants, then notices the soldiers. Six of them phase out of rural night camouflage. A chubby Sikh officer has his hand raised. He steps up to the taxi.

“Didn’t you see us?”

“You are kind of hard to spot,” the driver says. “No chance of a licence, I suppose?” the jemadar asks. “None whatever,” the driver says. “My cousin.”

“Do you not know we are in a state of heightened vigilance?” the Sikh soldier admonishes. “Awadhi slow missiles could already be moving across our country. They are stealthy things, they can conceal themselves in many ways.”

“Not as slow as this old crock,” the driver jokes. The Sikh suppresses a smile and bends down to glance in at the passenger. Tal hastily shuts off the bpm. Yt sits very still, very upright, heart betrayingly loud.

“And you sir? Madam?”

His soldiers titter. The Sikh has been eating onions. Tal thinks yt might pass out from the reek and the tension. Yt opens yts evening bag, slips out the thick, gilt-scallop-edged invitation. The Sikh looks at it as if it could be grounds for a full body-cavity search, then snaps it back to Tal.

“You’re lucky we’re out here tonight. You missed your turn a couple of kilometres back. You must be about the seventh or eighth. Now, what you do is.”

Tal breathes again. As the driver turns the cab Tal can clearly hear the soldiers’ nasty laughter over the purr of the alcohol motor.

Hope there are slow missiles a-creeping up on you, Tal thinks.

The half-ruined Ardhanarisvara temple stands among trees on a country track that strikes right from the main road. The party organisers have lit the drop-off zone with biolume patches. The green light draws faces from the tree trunks, spook-lights the slumped statues and yakshis, bedded in the ancient soil. The reception is themed around polar opposites: sakti and purusa; female and male energies; sattva and tamas; spiritual intelligence and earthy materialism. The yoni-shaped tanks have been extravagantly flooded. Tal thinks of yts party preparations, a frugal lick-wash with a bottle of warmed mineral water. The mains water in the White Fort—the mammoth agglomeration of housing projects where Tal has yts two-room apartment—has not been working for two months now. Day and night a procession of women and children carry water cans up and down the stairs past yts front door.

Gas flames blaze from nozzles in the centres of the yoni tanks. Tal studies the twin temple guardian dvarapalas while the taxi driver runs yts card through his reader. The ruined arcade is dominated by the image of Ardhanarisvara; half male, half female. A single full breast, an erect penis sliced down the middle, a mono testicle, a curl of labius, a hint of a slit. The torso has a man’s broadness of shoulder, a woman’s fullness of hip, the hands sensitively held in ritual mudras but the features are genetic, androgynous. The third eye of Siva is closed on the forehead. Inside, the music is banging. Invitation clutched in hand, Tal passes between the guardian deities, into the party of the season.

Even when Tal showed them the invitation, the department told yt yt had faked it. It was an automatic supposition to make in a section designing visual wallpaper for the fake lives of the aeai actors of India’s favorite soapi. Tal hadn’t believed it ytself when yt found the thick, creamy wafer card resting in yts intray.

FASHIONSTAR PROMOTIONS on behalf of MODE ASIA invites TAL, 27 Corridor 30, 12th Floor, Indira Gandhi Apartments (as White Fort was known only to the post office, the tax department, and the bailiffs) to a RECEPTION to welcome YULI to Varanasi for BHARAT FASHION WEEK. LOCATION: Ardhanarisvara Temple, Mirza Murad District CELEBRATION: 22 bells. NATION: NuTribe. RSVP.

The card felt warm and soft as skin. Tal had shown it to Mama Bharat, the old widow woman whose front door shared yts stair head. She was a soft soul incarcerated by her family in a silk prison. The modern way: an independent old age. Three months ago Tal had moved in an become Mama Bharat’s family. No one would talk to yt, either. Tal accepted the daily chai and snack visits and twice weekly cleaning calls and never asked what kind of family yt was to her, daughter or son.

The aged aged woman ran her fingers over the invitation, stroking and cooing softly, like a lover.

“So soft,” she said. “So soft. And will they all be like you?”

“Nutes? Most. We’re a theme.”

“Ah, a great great honour, the best in the city, and all the tivi people.” Yes, Tal had thought. But why this one?

Tal walks through the shadowy temple mandapa lit by flambeaux held by four armed Kali avatars and feels a little gnaw of awe in yts nadi chakra. There is a Big Name Film Director talking rather uncomfortably to a Well Respected New Young Woman Writer underneath startlingly pornographic statue. Here is an international circuit tennis star looking relieved to have found not just a Big Pro golfer, but an All-India League footballer and his radiant wife so they can all talk strokeplay and handicaps. And that’s Mr. Interstellar Pop Promoter Man and he’s his latest piece of pop engineering with a debut song bound to go to Number One on prerelease bookings already while the girl in the too-short skirt clutching the cocktail a little too hard and laughing a little too loud has to be FASHIONSTAR PROMOTIONS PR. That’s not counting the three under-twenty-five wetware rajas, the two edgy games designers, and the deeply shady Lord of the Sundarbans, the Cyberjungle entrepreneur of the Darwinware hot zone, all on his ownio, at ease and sleekly tigerish as only a man with his own pandava legion of aeai bodyguards can. Plus the overdressed overmouthed faces Tal doesn’t recognise but who advertise their fashion magazine origins, the fortysomething tivi commissioning editors looking sweaty and over-familiar with each other, the gossip journos with the very wide and active peripheral vision, and the Varanasi society have-to-haves, ruffled and sullen at being outshone by a gaggle of nutes. There are even a couple of generals, gorgeous as parakeets in their full dress. Army is tres tres hip in this time of edge-play with Awadh. Not forgetting that clutch of sullen seeming-ten-year-olds looking daggers over the tops of their gyro-stabilised cocktail glasses: the Golden, the Brahmin sons and daughters.

Tal’s been given a checklist by Neeta, boss Devgan’s PA. Most of the metasoap unit find Neeta’s perfect vacuity oppressive but Tal likes her. Her unfeigned banality throws up unexpected, Zen-like juxtapositions. She wanted to know what yt was wearing, what makeup yt was going to put on, where yt was going for pre-club drinks and the after-party bash. You have to make an effort for the biggest brashest celeby gotta-go bash of the season. Along the colonnade yt clicks thirty Big Names off Neeta’s list.

Two rakshasas guard the entrance to the sanctuary and the free bar. The groove is Adani, Biblical Brothers remix. Scimitars swing down. The actors are flesh but the lower set of arms is robotic. Tal admires the full-body makeup. It really is seamless. They scan the invitation. The swords go up. Tal steps into wonderland. Every nute in the city has turned out. Tal notes that yts ankle-length shag-fibre optical shatter coat is still the thing, but since when have ski goggles pushed high on the forehead become the accessory? Tal hates missing a move. Heads turn as yt progresses to the bar, then bend together. Yt can feel the wave of gossip spread behind yt like a wake: Who’s that nute, yt’s new, where’s yt been hiding ytself, Stepped Away or stepped in?

I disregard your regard, Tal declares to ytself. Tal is here for stardom. Yt stakes a pitch at the end of the curving luminous plastic bar and scans the talent. Four-armed barmen shake acrobatic cockrails. Tal admires the dexterity of their robotics. “What’s this?” yt asks of the fluorescent cone of golden ice balanced on its point on the bar.

“Non-Russian,” says the barman as his lower arms lift another glass and scoop up ice. Tal sips cautiously. Vodka-based something vanilla-syrupy, a fistful of crush and a slash of German cinnamon schnapps, flakes of gold foil drifting down through the interstices in the ice. The thrum of the microgyros tickle Tal’s fingers.

Then party dynamics opens a momentary corridor of clear eyeline and in pure white polar bear shag and gold-tinted ski goggles Tal glimpses the Star Ytself: YULI.

Tal can’t speak. Yt is paralysed by the presence of celebrity. All media pretensions and sophistications fly. Even before yt Stepped Away, Tal idolised YULI: Superstar as a construct, a manipulation like the cast of Town and Country. Now yt’s here, in flesh and clothes and Tal’s awestruck. Yt has to be near Yuli. Yt has to hear yt breathe and laugh and feel yts warmth. There are only two real objects in the temple tonight. Guests, nutes, staff, music, all are indeterminate, in the domain of Ardhanarisvara. Tal is behind Yuli now, close enough to reach and touch and reify. The angle of the cheekbone shifts. Yuli turns. Tal smiles, big dumb grin. Oh Gods, I look like a drooling celebrity idiot, what am I going to say? Ardhanarisvara god of the dilemma, help me. Gods; do I smell, I only had a half bottle of water to wash in. Yuli’s gaze washes over yt, looks right through yt, annihilates yt, swings to focus on a figure behind yt. Yuli smiles, opens yts arms.

“Darling!”

Yt sweeps past, a warm wash of fur and gold tan and cheekbones like razors. The entourage follows. A hip jostles Tal, knocks the glass from yts hand. It falls to the floor, teeters wildly before coming to centre, spinning on its point. Tal stands stunned, stone as any of the temple’s alien sex statues.

“Oh, you seem to have lost your drink.” The voice that breaks through the wall of chatter is neither man’s nor woman’s. “Can’t have that dear, can we? Come on, they’re a pack of bloody bitches, sib, and we’re just wallpaper.”

Yt’s a head shorter than Tal, dark skinned, a hint of epicanthine fold: Assam or Nepali genes down in the mix. Yt carries ytself with shy pride of those peoples. Yt’s dressed in simple, fashion-denying white, the shaved scalp dusted with gold-flecked mica the only concession to contemporary style. As with all yts kind, Tal can’t begin to guess yts age.

“Tranh.”

“Tal.”

They curtsey and kiss in greeting. Yts fingers are long and elegant, French manicured, unlike Tal’s stubby, nail-bitten keypad-stabbers.

“Bloody awful thing, isn’t it?” Tranh says. “Drink, dear. Here!” It raps the bar. “Enough of that Non-Russian piss. Give me gin. Chota peg, by two. Chin chin.” After the cloying, theatrical house cocktail, the pure clear glass with the twist of lemon is very good and very pure and very cold and Tal can feel it shooting up yts spinal column like cold fire straight to the brain.

“Bloody marvellous drink,” Tal says. “Built the Raj, it did. All that quinine. Here!” This to the bar avatar. “Actor wallah! Two more of these.”

“I really shouldn’t, I’ve got work in the morning and I’ve no idea how I’m even getting back,” Tal says but the nute slides the dew-slick glass into yts hand and the music hits that perfect beat and a flaw of wind runs through the half-ruined temple drawing flames and shadows in its wake and everyone looks up at its touch, wondering if it could be the first caress of the monsoon. It blows a touch of mad into the terrible party and in its wake Tal finds ytself dizzy and full of talk and life and wonder at finding ytself in a new town, in a new job, in the eye of the social vortex with a small and dark and beautiful nute.

It all runs like calligraphy in the rain then. Tal finds yt dancing with no memory of how yt got out on the floor and there are a lot more people standing around watching than dancing, in fact no one is dancing, only Tal, alone dancing wonderfully, flawlessly, like all the wind that blew through the temple gathered into one place and one restlessness; like unaccustomed chota pegs, like light, like night, like temptation, like a laser focused on Tranh, illuminating yt alone, saying I want I need I will, come on, beckoning, come on, drawing Tranh out, step by step, yt smiling and shaking yts head, I don’t do this sort of bloody thing dear, but yts being pulled into the circle by this play of shakti and purusha until Tal sees Tranh shiver, as if something has come out of the night and passed into yt, some possessing, abandoned thing, and Tranh smiles a little, mad smile, and they come together in the circle of music a hunter and the thing yt hunts and every eye is on them and from the corner of one eye Tal sees YULI, brightest star in heaven, stalking away with yts entourage. Upstaged.

The meeja all expect them to kiss and make the drama perfect, but, despite the cascade of erotic sculpture tumbling from every pillar and buttress, they are Indian nutes, and the time and place for the kiss is not here, not now.

Then they’re in a taxi and Tal doesn’t know how or where but the dark is very big and yts ears are humming from the music and yts head is thudding from the chota pegs but things are gradually becoming more broken up and discrete. Tal knows what yt wants now. Yt knows what’s going to happen. The certainty is a dull, crimson throb at the base of yts belly.

On the back seat of the jolting phatphat, Tal lets yts forearm fall, soft inner flesh upwards, on Tranh’s thigh. A moment’s hesitation, then Tranh’s fingers stroke yts sensitive, hairless flesh, seek out the buried studs of the hormone control system beneath the skin and delicately tap out the arousal codes. Almost immediately, Tal feels yts heart kick, yts breath catch, yts face flush. Sex strums yts body like a sitar, every cord and organ ringing in its harmonic. Tranh offers yts arm to Tal. Yt plays the subdermal inputs, tiny and sensitive as goose flesh. Yt feels Tranh stiffen as the hormone rush hits. They sit side by side in the back of the jolting taxi, not touching but shivering with lust, incapable of speech.

The hotel is by the airport, comfortable, anonymous, internationally discreet. The bored receptionist hardly looks up from her romantic magazine. The night porter stirs, then identifies these guests and hides behind the cricket highlights on the television. A glass elevator takes them up the side of the hotel to their fifteenth-floor room, the patterned airport lights spreading themselves ever wider around them, like jewelled skirts. The sky is mad with stars and the navigation lights of troopships, flying in to support the state of heightened vigilance. All in heaven and earth tonight is trembling.

They fall into the room. Tranh reaches for yt, but Tal slips away, teasing. There is one thing necessary; Tal finds the room system and plugs in a chip. FUCK MIX. Nina Chandra plays and Tal sways and closes yts eyes and melts. Tranh comes towards yt, moving into the rhythm, stepping out of the shoes, slipping off the pure white coat, the linen suit, the Big Name Label mesh underwear. Yt offers yts arm.

Tal runs yts fingers over the orgasm keys. Everything is soundtrack.

The ghost of departing chota pegs wakes Tal and sends yt to the bathroom for water. Yt stares, still drunk, vertiginous with what has happened, at the never-ending stream from the mixer tap. There is a grey predawn light in the room. Tranh looks so very small and breakable on the bed. The aircraft never stop. Something in this morning lights makes every surgical scar on Tranh’s body stand out. Tal shakes yts head, suddenly needing very much to cry, but slips in beside Tranh and shivers when yt feels the other nute move in yts sleep and fold an arm around yt. Tal dozes and only wakes to the chambermaid banging on the door wondering if she can service the room. It’s ten o’clock. Tal has a wretched hangover. Tranh is gone. Yts clothes, yts shoes, yts shredded underwear. Yts gloves. Gone. In yts place is a card, with a street name, an address and two words: non-scene.

8: VISHRAM

The compere has the audience really laughing now. Down in the green room, Vishram can feel it like waves on a shore. Deep laughter. Laughter you can’t help, you can’t stop even though it hurts you. Best sound in the world. Hold that laugh for me, people. You can tell audience by the sound of its laugh. There are the thin laughs down south and the flat laughs from the Midlands and the resonant laughing that’s like church singing from way up in the islands, but that’s a good Glasgow laugh out there. A home crowd laugh. Vishram Ray taps his feet and puffs out his cheeks and reads the yellow reviews tacked to the green room wall. He’s within this of a cigarette.

You know your stuff. You can do this material forwards and backwards, in English, in Hindi, on your head, dressed as a lettuce. You know the hook points and the builds, you’ve got your three topical referents, you know where you can improv and then on-ramp without shifting gear. You can take out a heckler with a single shot. They’d laugh at a cat up behind the mike tonight so why do you feel like there’s a fist up your ass slowly hauling your guts out? Home crowds are always hardest and tonight they have the power. Thumbs-up, thumbs down, vote with your throat in the Glasgow region heat of the Funny Ha-Ha contest. It’s the first hurdle to Edinburgh and a Perrier Award, but it’s the first one trips you up.

Compere is doing the slow build up now. People on the right put your hands together. People on the left do the really penetrating two-finger whistles. People in the balcony start a titanic roar. For. Mr. Vishram! Raaaaayyyl And he’s out of the blocks, running for the bright stage lights, the roar of the audience and his metal mistress, the slim, steel torso of the lone microphone.

With his party eye he glimpses her leave her coat at the club check and decides, I’ll have a crack at that. Meerkatting. Head up high, looking left right, all over. She heads for the bar clockwise around the room. He heads widdershins, tracking her through the jungle of bodies. She has the gang of friends, the scary professional one, the one who’s into her body but you try touching, the dumpy one who’ll go with anything. He can cut her out, round her up. Vishram times his run and gets to the bar that split second before she does. The bar girl does a double take, left, right.

“Oh, sorry, go ahead there,” Vishram yells.

“No, you were here.”

“No no, you go on.”

Glasgow accent. Always good to go native. She wears a strap-back V-top and hipsters so low cut he sees the twin curves of her fit nates as she bends over the bar to roar an order at the bar gi^rL

“Here I’ll get this.” To the bar girl: “Throw in a vodka black dog.”

“We should be buying you.” she shouts in his ear. He shakes his head, chancing a glance round to see if his mates are looking. They are.

“My shout. I’m feeling flush.”

The bottles come. She hands them round to her mates, arrayed behind her, and clinks with him.

“Congratulations. So, is that you through?”

“To the Edinburgh final, yes. After that, fame, fortune, my own sitcom.” Time for manoeuvre one. “Listen, I can’t hear myself think, let alone attempt witty and scintillating conversation. Can we move away from the speakers?”

The corner by the cigarette machine under the balcony is not signifiantly quieter than anywhere else at the party, but it’s away from her friends and dark.

She says, “You got my vote.”

“Thank you. I owe you that drink then. Sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

“I didn’t throw it,” she says. “Anye.”

“Anye, good.”

“Gallic.”

“Yeah, Gallic name. Good Gallic solidity.”

“Thank my parents for that. Good solid Galls, the pair of them. You know, I think Bharat and Scotland have a lot in common. New nations, all that.”

“I still think we’ve got you beat when it come to good old-fashioned religious violence.”

“You clearly haven’t seen an Old Firm game.”

While Anye talks Vishram has been moving his body around, closing off her access to the dance floor, her friends. Manoeuvre two— the isolation—complete, he moves on to manoeuvre three. He pretends to recognise the music.

“I like this one.” He detests it but it’s a good solid 115. “You fancy a wee boogie?”

“I fancy a wee boogie very much,” she says, coming out of the corner at him with a low light in her eyes. The regulation five dances later, he’s found out that she’s a Law Major at Glasgow U, an SNP party worker and likes mountains, new nations, going out with her mates, and coming home without them. This sounds flawless to Vishram Ray, so he buys her another— her friends have receded into a glum huddle at the end of the bar nearest the women’s toilets—necks it quick and dirty and hauls her out for another couple on the floor. She dances heavy but enthusiastic, all limbs. He likes them meaty. Halfway through the mid-tempo shift-of-pace number his hip pocket starts calling his name. He ignores it.

“Aren’t you going to answer that?”

He hauls out the palmer hoping it’ll be someone wanting to talk to him about comedy. It’s not. Vishram, it’s Shastri. Not now, old servant. Absolutely not now.

But he’s getting bored with the party. Cut to manoeuvre four.

“Do you want to stay here, or shall we go on somewhere else?”

“I’m easy,” she says.

Right answer.

“Do you fancy coming back to mine, wee coffee?”

“Aye,” she says. “I would.”

Outside on Byres Road there’s still lingering magic hour blue over the rooftops. The car lights look unnatural, theatrical, a scene shot day for night. The taxi slo-mos through a midnight twilight. Anye sits close on the big leather seat. Vishrani slips the hand. She slides back on the seat to open up the front of her hipsters. He hooks panty elastic. Manoeuvre five.

“Funny man,” she says, guiding his fingers.

The golden stone of the tenements seem to glow in the half dark. Vishram can feel the stored warmth from the stonework on his face. There’s still a smell of cut grass from the park.

“This is nice,” Anye says. “Expensive.”

Vishram still has his hand down her pants, guiding her up the steps with his hot finger. His groin, his breathing, his belly muscles all tell him he’s going to have her big and heavy and naked on his floor. He’s going to find out the noises she makes. He’s going to see the dirt in her head, the things she wants another body to do to her. Vishram almost tumbles through the door in a rush of want. His foot sends the thing waiting for him skittering across the lobby. He thinks about leaving it. The automatic lights pick out the green and silver logo of The Company.

“Just a wee second.”

Already his proto-stiffie is subsiding.

The plastic priority mail wallet is addressed to Vishram Ray, Apartment 1a, 22 Kelvingrove Terrace, Glasgow, Scotland. Sick, sober and de-aroused, Vishram opens the envelope. Inside, two items: a letter from Shastri the wrinkled retainer and a ticket from Glasgow via LHR to Varanasi, first class, one way.

He began the thing with the woman in the very good suit in the BharatAir Raja Class lounge because he’s still glowing on the winning high and the booze but mostly frustrated libido.

He had the zip just pulled on his jam of travel essentials when the limo arrived. He’d offered Anye a ride back to hers. She’d given him a freezing, solid Gallic SNP-activist look.

“I’m sorry, it’s family.”

She looked very cold, in those pants, that much bare skin, hurrying through the early August Glasgow predawn. Vishram made it to check-in with ten minutes to spare. He was the sole occupant of the sharp end of the short shuttle flight to Londlon. He came down the airbridge slightly vertiginous from the velocity of it all and headed straight to the first-class lounge with a determination for vodka. The shower, the shave, the change of clothes, and a shot of Polish restored his Vishram Ray-ness. He felt good enough about himself to try to hook the woman in the comfortable-for-flying suit into casual chat. Just to pass the time. Lounge reptile.

Her name is Marianna Fusco. She is a corporate lawyer. She has been summoned to Varanasi to attend to a complex trusteeship issue.

“Me, I’m just the black sheep, the court jester. The youngest brother sent to England to study law at some ’bridge university; except he ends up in Scotland aspiring to stand-up. The highest human art form, incidentally. And not all that different from law, I suspect. We’re both creatures of the arena.”

She doesn’t rise to that one. Instead, she asks,

“How many brothers?”

“Big bear, middle bear.”

“No sisters?”

“Not many sisters in Varanasi, or at least, my bit of it.”

“I’ve heard this,” she says, turning her body comfortably on the leather couch towards him. “What’s it like, a society with four times as many men as women?”

“Not too many lady lawyers,” Vishram says, settling back on the creaking upholstery. “Not too many ladies anything professional.”

“I shall remember to press home my advantages,” the lawyer says. “Can I get you another vodka? It is going to be a long flight.”

Shortly after the third they are called to board. Vishram’s seat goes all the way back. After years of budget airlines, the legroom is incredible. There is such play value in the buttons and toys that he doesn’t notice the passenger strapping in beside him.

“Well, hello there, isn’t this a coincidence?” he says.

“It isn’t,” Marianna Fusco says, slipping off her jacket. She has good arm definition under her stretch-brocade top.

The first armagnac comes over Belgium as the hypersonic plane climbs steeply towards its thirty-three kilometre cruising altitude. It’s not a drink Vishram has ever considered. He’s a vodka boy. But now he thinks armagnac rather suits the personality he’s playing here. He and Marianna Fusco talk through the indigo sky about their childhoods, hers in a vast nation of family spread out across marriages and remarriages—her constellation family, she calls it, his in the bourgeois patriarchy of Varanasi. She finds the emergent social stratification fascinating and horrifying, as the English always have. It’s what they perennially love about Indian culture and literature. The guilt and thrill of a really good class system.

“I do come from rather a well-off family.” Play it up. “Not Brahmins, though. Capital ‘B’ Brahmins, I mean. My father’s a Kshatriya, quite devout in his wee way. Tinkering with the DNA would be blasphemous.”

Two more armagnacs and the conversation sags into a doze. In full luxurious recline, Vishram pulls his airline blanket up around his neck. He imagines the chill of near-space beyond that nanocarbon wall. Marianna moves against him under her blanket. She is warm and far too close and breathing in time with him.

Manoeuvre six. Somewhere over Iran he cups a breast. She moves against him. They kiss. Armagnac tongues. She wiggles closer. He slides her breasts out of her white stretch top. Marianna Fusco has big areolar patches with raised pores and nipples like bullets. She hitches up her comfortable-but-businesslike skirt as the shockwave rider hits Mach 3.6. He licks and tries the slip but Marianna Fusco intercepts him and guides his finger to that other, pert hole. She gives a little gasp, rides his finger up to the hilt and slickly unzips. Vishram Ray’s heavy dick tumbles out into the gap between the seats. Marianna Fusco rubs her thumb over the glans. Vishram Ray tries not to be overheard by the stewardess and thumbs her clitoris. “Fuck,” she whispers. “Rotate it. Fucking rotate.”

She hooks a leg over, settles deeper on to his digit. Sutra at thirty-three kay. A quarter of the way to orbit, Vishram Ray comes carefully into a BharatAir Raja Class napkin. Marianna Fusco has an airline pillow half stuffed into her mouth, making tiny muffled mewling screams. Vishram rolls back, feeling every centimetre of altitude beneath him. He just made it into the most exclusive club on the planet, the Twenty-Five-Mile-High Club.

They clean off in the bathroom, separately, giggling uncontrollably at each glance of the other. They straighten their clothes and return soberly to their seats and shortly after they feel the shift in pitch as the aerospacer enters descent, plunging like a burning meteor towards the IndoGangetic plain.

He waits for her on the far side of customs. He admires the cut of her cloth, how her height and the solid way she moves stand out among the Bharatis. He knows there will be no phone calls or e-mails or comeback. A professional relationship.

“Could I offer you a lift?” he asks. “My father will have sent a car — I know, it’s cheesy, but he’s old-fashioned about things like that. It’s no problem to drop you at your hotel.”

“Thank you,” Marianna Fusco says. “I don’t like the look of the taxi rank.”

It’s easy to spot the limo. The chauffeur is actually flying little Ray Power company flags from the wings. He doesn’t miss a beat as he takes Marianna Fusco’s bag, sticks it in the trunk, and chases a small posse of beggars and badmashes. The few seconds of heat between airport and air-conditioned car stun Vishram. He’s been too long in a cold climate. And he had forgotten the scent, like ashes of roses. The car pulls into the wall of colour and sound. Vishram feels the heat, the warmth of the bodies, the greasy hydrocarbon soot against the glass. The people. The never failing river of faces. The bodies. Vishram discovers a new emotion. It has the blue remembered familiarity of homesickness but is expressed through the terrible mundane squalor of the people that throng beneath these boulevards. Home nausea. Nostalgic horror.

“This is near the Sarkhand Roundabout, isn’t it?” Vishram says in Hindi. “I’d like to see it.”

The driver waggles his head and takes the next right.

“Where are we going?” Marianna Fusco asks.

“Somewhere to tell that constellation family of yours about,” Vishram says.

Police barricades block the main road so the driver takes a way he knows through intestinally narrow back streets and turns out of them straight into a riot. He hits the brakes. A young male tumbles over the bonnet. He picks himself up, more shaken than damaged, a chubby post-teen with a wisp of a holy moustache, but the impact has rocked the car and its passengers. Instantly, the crowd’s attention switches from the gaudy statue of Hanuman under his shady concrete chhatri to the car. Hands drum the hood, the roof, the doors. They bounce the limo on its springs. The crowd sees a big Merc, tinted windows, company flags, a thing allied to the forces that would demolish their sacred place and turn it into a metro station.

The driver slams the car into reverse, smokes rubber as he backs down the alley beneath the banners of laundry and rickety wooden balconies. Bricks lob through the air, crack off the metal work. Marianna Fusco gives a small cry as the windscreen suddenly stars into a white spider web. Steering by rear-view cam, the driver slots his car between two flanking bamboo scaffold towers. The young karsevaks chase the car, striking at it with lathis and calling curses on the faithless Ranas and their demonic Muslim spin-doctors. They wave the torn-off company flags. One petrol bomb in these alleys, and hundreds are dead, Vishram Ray thinks. But the driver navigates the maze to his point of entry, finds a momentary gap in the constant torrent of traffic, and throws his car backwards into it. Trucks buses mopeds slam to a halt. The driver handbrakes it. The holy boys follow them through the traffic, slipping between phatphats and Japanese pick-ups painted with Hindu iconography. Slipping, jogging, gaining. The driver raises his hands in desperation. Nothing to be done in this traffic. Glancing over his shoulder, Vishram can read their shirt-buttons. Then Marianna Fusco cries out Oh Jesus God! and the car slams to a halt hard enough for Vishram to jar the bridge of his nose off the back of the driver’s seat. Through tears and stun he sees a steel demon drop out of the sky before him; Ravana the devourer, demon-lord, squatting on hydraulic-loaded titanium hams, ten blades spread like a fan. The tiny mantis-head looks right at him, unfolds a dentist’s arsenal of sensor pods and probes. Then it leaps again. Vishram feels clawed toes rake the limo’s roof. He whirls, looks out the back to see it land beside a bus stop. Traffic freezes, karsevaks scatter like goats. The thing stalks away down the street, quartering the boulevard with gatling pods. It wears the stars and bars on its carapace. A US combat robot.

“What the. ?” They’ve started a war while he was in immigration. The driver points to the street across the intersection to a street of neon shop fronts and glowing umbrellas where a man in dark, expensive clothing yells imprecations at the departing machine. Behind him are two fillets of Mercedes SUV. The man picks up lumps of circuitry and metal and shies them after the battle-bot. “I still don’t.”

“Sahb,” the driver says as he engages drive. “Have you been so long gone you have forgotten Varanasi?”

The journey to Marianna Fusco’s hotel is in grim silence. She thanks him politely, the Rajput doorman salutes and lifts her bag, and she goes up the steps without a look back.

Not looking good for a follow-up fuck, then.

The battered limo turns into the gates between the motor parts shop and the IT school through the screen of ashok trees. At once he is in a different world. The first thing money buys in India is privacy. The street roar is hushed to a pulse. The insanity of his city is shut out.

The house staff has lit naphtha flares all along the drive to welcome the returned prodigal. Drummers greet Vishram Ray with a tattoo and escort the car, and there is the house, wide and proud and unbelievably white in the floods. Vishram finds uninvited tears in his eyes. When he was beneath its roof he had always been ashamed to acknowledge that he lived in a palace, cringing at its pillars and pediments and wide portico screened with honeysuckle and hibiscus, its bloody whiteness, its interior of swept marble and old quaint, pornographic wood carvings and ceilings painted in the Nepali style. A family of merchants had built it in the British days in a style to remind them of home. The Shanker Mahal, they named it. Now that adolescent contempt, that embarrassment at being privileged, is swept away as he steps out and the house assails him with the old remembered smells of dust and neem trees and the musk of the rhododendrons and the faint reek of the sewage system that never really worked.

They await him on the steps. Old Shastri, on the lowest rung, already namasteing. Flanking him, the house staff, in two wings, the women to his left, the men to the right. Ram Das the venerable gardener is still there, an incredible age now but still zealous as ever, Vishram doesn’t doubt, in his eternal war against the monkeys. On the middle rank, his brothers. Eldest Ramesh seems taller and thinner than ever, as if the gravity of the interstellar objects he studies is drawing him into the sky, spinning him into a rope of inquiry. Still no significant female. Even in Glasgow, Vishram heard Bharati diaspora rumours about weekend specials to Bangkok. Next, perfect brother, Govind. Perfect suit perfect wife perfect twin heirs Runu and Satish. Vishram sees the middle body fat piling around his chest. The stellar DiDi, former breakfast-tivi presenter and trophy bride, is at his side. At her side the aya cradles the latest line in the dynasty. A girl. How 2047. Vishram coos and chuckles little Priya but something about her gives him the idea that she’s a Brahmin. Something primal, pheromonal, a shift in the body chemistry.

His mother holds the top step; superior in her deference, as Vishram always remembers her. A shadow among the pillars. His father is not present.

“Where’s Dadaji?” Vishram asks.

“He will meet us tomorrow at the head office,” is all his mother will say.

“Do you know what this is about?” Vishram asks Ramesh when the greetings and cryings and look-at-you-haven’t-you-got-bigs? are done. Ramesh shakes his head as Shastri motions with a finger for a porter to carry Vishram’s case up to his room. Vishram doesn’t want to answer questions about the limo, so he begs jet lag and takes himself off to bed. He’d expected to be given his old room, but the porter guides him to a guest bedroom on the sunrise side of the house. Vishram is affronted at being treated as a stranger and sojourner. Then, as he settles his few things in the huge mahogany wardrobes and tallboys, he is glad not to have his childhood possessions watching him as he returns from his life beyond them. They would drag him back, revert him to teenage again. The old place never had air-conditioning worth a damn so he lies naked on the sheets, appalled by the heat, reading faces in the foliage of the painted ceiling, and listening to the rattle of monkey hands and feet in the vines outside his window. He lies on the edge of sleep, slipping towards unconsciousness and reawakening with a start as some half-forgotten sound breaks through from the city beyond. Conceding defeat, Vishram goes naked on to the iron balcony. The air and the perfume of the city of Siva powder his skin. Clusters of winking aircraft lights move over the hazy yellow skyline. The soldiers who fly in the night. He tries to imagine a war. Robot killing machines running through the alleys, titanium blades in all four hands, avatars of Kali. Aeai gunships piloted by warriors half a planet away coming in across the Ganga on strafing runs. Awadh’s American allies fight in the modern manner, without a single soldier leaving home, without a single body bag. They kill from continents away. He fears that strange tableau he had seen enacted on the streets was prophecy. Between the water and the fundamentalists, the Ranas have run out of choices.

A crunch of gravel, a movement on the silver lawns. Ram Das appears from the moon shadows under the harsingars. Vishram freezes on his balcony. Another Western way he has slipped into: casual nakedness. Ram Das steps on to the shaved lawn, parts his dhoti, and takes a piss by the lazy moon of India, lolling on its side like a temple gandava. He cleans himself, then turns around and waggles his head slowly at Vishram, a salutation, a blessing. He goes on his way. A peacock shrieks.

Home at last.