River of Gods

46: ENSEMBLE

The Bharatiya Vayu Sena Airbus Industries A510 bumps a little as it climbs through the cloud layer over Varanasi. Ashok Rana grips the armrests. He has never been a good flier. He glances out the rain-streaked window at the bright arcs of flares dropping away behind them. The fuselage vibrates as ECM drones launch from the underwing pods. There has been no Awadhi aerial activity over Varanasi for days now but the air force takes no chances with its new Prime Minister. Ashok Rana thinks, from the angle of the raindrops on the glass I should be able to work out my speed. Many such inconsequential thoughts have come to him since the call from Secretary Narvekar in the night.

The plane lurches again, beating through the monsoon. Ashok Rana switches on his armrest screen. The camera shows his wife and daughters back in the press-office compartment. Sushmita’s face tightens with fear as the Airbus jolts again; Anuja gives a word of comfort, takes her hand. In his Prime Ministerial leather armchair, Ashok Rana allows himself a minute smile. He wishes there were a camera here at the front so they could see him. They would not be so afraid, if they could see him.

“Prime Minister.”

His Parliamentary Private Secretary swivels his seat towards him and passes a much be scribbled printout across the table.

“We have a draft of the speech, if you would like to familiarise yourself with its key points.”

The Prime Ministerial transport gives a final buck and breaks free into clear air. Through the window Ashok Rana sees the moonlit surface of a storm-sea of cloud. The pilot bings off the seatbelt light and instantly the plastic tube of the fuselage is filled with call-tones. Every politician and civil servant is out of his seat and pressing around the conference table. They lean forward with expectant, keen faces. They have been wearing those expectant, keen faces since Secretary Narvekar and Defence Minister Chowdhury stooped down through the door of the Bharati Air Force tilt-jet that had landed in his garden to help Ashok Rana and his family aboard. Chief Justice Laxman administered the oath while the military transport dropped towards the remote, secure corner of the airport where Vayu Sena One had been brought. The army nurse with the white white surgical gloves had made the lightest of nicks in his thumb with a scalpel, pressed it to a diagnostic pad and even before Ashok Rana could register the pain she had swabbed it clean with surgical alcohol and slipped on a dressing.

“For the DNA authorisation, Prime Minister,” Trivul Narvekar explained but Ashok Rana’s attention was on the air force officer immediately behind the nurse, gun drawn, muzzle hovering a whisper from the back of her skull. To lose one Prime Minister is tragedy. Two starts to look like conspiracy. Then Chief Justice Laxman’s face loomed into his field of vision.

“I now present you with the seals of state, Prime Minister. You are endowed with full executive authority.”

The A510 swims up towards the huge Bharati moon. Ashok Rana could look at it forever, imagine there is no chaotic, broken nation down beneath the clouds. But the faces expect. He glances over the printout. Measured phrases, memorable sound bites with edit-pauses written in before and after them, resolutions and rousing declarations. Ashok Rana glances again at his family in the little palm-sized screen.

“Has my sister’s body been recovered?”

Every clamouring voice, every palmer falls silent.

“The area has been secured,” Secretary Narvekar says.

“Can we trust the army?”

“We have sent in regular forces. We can rely on them. The group was a small cabal among the elite divisions that supplied madam’s personal security unit. Those responsible are under arrest; unfortunately we were unable to prevent some of the higher-ranking officers from taking their own lives. The personal bodyguard is all dead, Prime Minister.”

Ashok Rana closes his eyes, feels the contours in the stratosphere around the aircraft shell that encloses him.

“Not the Awadhis.”

“No, Prime Minister. It was never a consideration that the Awadhis would resort to assassination, if you will excuse my use of the word.”

“The rioters?”

“Dispersed, Prime Minister. The situation in the city remains highly volatile. I would advise against any immediate return to Varanasi.”

“I do not want them pursued. Morale is bad enough without loosing the army on our own population. But we should maintain martial law.”

“Very wise, Prime Minister. Magnanimous in the face of national crisis; that will play well. Prime Minister, I don’t want to be seen to be pressurising you in this desperate time of shock and grief, but this speech…It is important that the nation hears from you, and soon.”

“In a while, Trivul”

“Prime Minister, the slot is booked, the camera and audio are set up in the media centre.”

“In a while, Trivul!”

The Parliamentary Secretary bows away but Ashok Rana can see the chewed-back irritation in the set of his lips. He looks out again at the moon, low now in the west on the edge of the silver sea of water raining down on his land. He will never be able to see it again, the lolling moon of India, without thinking of this night, without hearing the chime of the palmer in the night and the wrench of dread in his gut that knew, even before he answered, it was the worst possible news; without hearing the measured, well-rehearsed voice of Private Secretary Patak, so strange after the soft familiarity of Shaheen Badoor Khan, saying impossible things; without hearing the scream of tilt-jets thrashing the branches of the neem trees with their down-blast as his wife and children dressed and seized baggage in the dark for fear for making themselves illuminated targets for whatever it was out there that had turned upon the house of Rana. The light will forever be transformed into sounds. He hates that most, that they have tainted the moon.

“Vikram, I have to know, are we in any state to resist the Awadhis?”

Chowdhury waggles his head.

“The air force is one hundred percent.”

“You do not win wars with air power. The army?”

“We risk splitting the entire command if we pursue the cabal too far. Ashok, if the Awadhis want Allahabad, there is very little we can do to stop them.”

“Are our nuclear and chemical deterrents secure?”

“Prime Minister, surely you cannot be advocating first use?” Secretary Narvekar interjects. Again, Ashok Rana rounds on him.

“Our country is invaded, our cities lie wide open and my own sister has been thrown to a.to a.mob by her own soldiers. Do you know what they did with that trishul? Do you? Do you? What should I do to defend us? What can I do to keep us safe?”

The faces turn softly, politely blank, impassively reflecting Ashok Rana’s shouting voice. He hears his edge of hysteria. He lets the words fall. The bulkhead between the conference room and the media centre is decorated with a modern interpretation of the Tandava Nritya, the cosmic dance of Siva; the god wreathed in the chakra of flame, one foot raised. Ashok Rana has lived all his forty-four years in the shadow of the descending foot that will destroy and regenerate the universe.

“Forgive me,” he says shortly. “This is not an easy time.” The politicals mumble their acquiescences.

“Our nuclear and chemical capability is secure,” Chowdhury says. “That’s all I needed to know,” says Ashok Rana. “Now, this speech.” A junior aide with two fingers raised to the side of his head interrupts him. “Prime Minister, a call for you.”

“I stated quite clearly that I am not taking any calls.” Ashok Rana lets a little iron into his voice.

“Sahb, it is N. K. Jivanjee.”

Eyes glance at each other around the oval table. Ashok Rana nods to his aide.

“On here.” He taps the armrest screen. In the press compartment his wife and children have settled into some semblance of sleep, leaning against each other. The head and shoulders of the Shivaji leader take their place, softly lit by a hooded lamp on his desk. Behind him are the geometrical suggestions of books rowed on shelves.

“Jivanjee. You dare much.”

N. K. Jivanjee dips his head.

“I can understand why you would think that, Prime Minister.” The title jolts Ashok Rana. “At the outset, I would ask you to accept my sincerest sympathies to your family on its tragic loss and to your late sister’s husband and children. There is no part of Bharat that has not been stricken to the heart by what has happened at Sarkhand Roundabout. I am outraged by this brutal murder—and we call ourselves the mother of civilisations. I unreservedly condemn the treachery of the late Prime Minister’s personal guard and those outlaw elements of the mob. I would ask you to accept that no part of the Shivaji condones this dreadful act. This was a mob element whipped to a frenzy by traitors and renegades.”

“I could have you arrested,” Ashok Rana says. His ministers and advisors look at him. N. K. Jivanjee nervously moistens his lips with the tiniest bud of tongue.

“And how would that serve Bharat? No, no, no, I have another suggestion. Our enemy is at the gates, our armed forces desert us, our cities riot, and our leader is brutally murdered. This is not a time for party politics. I propose a government of national salvation. As I have said, the Party of Lord Siva is innocent of any involvement in or support for this outrage, yet we retain some influence with the Hindutvavadi and the milder karsevaks.”

“You can bring the streets under control.”

N. K. Jivanjee sways his head.

“No politician can promise that. But at such a time opposing parties coming together in a government of national salvation would set a powerful example, not just to the riotous elements, but to all Bharatis, and to Awadh as well. A nation united is not easily defeated.”

“Thank you, Mr. Jivanjee. It’s an interesting offer. I will call you back, thank you for your good wishes, I accept them.” Ashok Rana thumbs N. K. Jivanjee into the arm of the chair. He turns to his remnant cabinet. “Evaluations, gentlemen?”

“It is a deal with demons,” V.K. Chowdhury says. “But.”

“He has you over a log,” Chief Justice Laxman says. “He is a very clever man.”

“I see no other practicable option than to take his suggestion,” Trivul Narvekar says. “With two riders; first, that we make the suggestion. We extend the hand of peace to our political foes. Second, we rule certain cabinet positions out of the discussion.”

“He will want cabinet posts?” Ashok Rana asks. Secretary Narvekar’s astonishment is unfeigned.

“What other reason would he have for suggesting it? I suggest we keep the Treasury, the Ministry of Defence, and the Foreign Ministry inviolable. Apologies, Chief Justice.”

“What would we suggest for our new friend Jivanjee himself?” Laxman asks, pressing the steward call to summon a Bells, to which he is legendarily partial.

“I can’t see him settling for much less than interior Minister,” Narvekar says.

“Chuutya,” grunts Laxman into his Scotch.

“This’ll be no Muslim marriage to get out of,” Narvekar says. Ashok Rana toggles the screen to watch his wife and children sleeping against each other in the cheap seats. The clock reads oh four fifteen. Ashok Rana’s head aches, his feet and sinuses feel swollen, his eyes dusty and weary. All senses of time and space and perspective have vanished. He could be floating in space in this migraine-inducing light. Chowdhury is talking about Shaheen Badoor Khan: “That’s one Begum wishing the divorce thing ran the other way.”

The men laugh softly in the harsh directional light of the overhead halogens.

“You have to admit, he has rather receded into the background,” Narvekar says. “Twenty-four hours is a long time in politics.”

“Never trusted the fellow,” Chowdhury says. “Always felt there was something oily about him, too refined, too polite.”

“Too Muslim?” Narvekar asks.

“You said it; something not quite… manly. And I’m not so sure I agree with what you say about him vanishing into the background. You say twenty-four hours is a long time; I say, in politics nothing is unconnected. One loose pebble starts a landslide. For one horseshoe nail, the battle was lost. Butterfly in Beijing, all that. Khan is the root of it, for his own sake I hope he is out of Bharat.”

“Hijra,” Laxman comments. His ice clinks in the glass.

“Gentlemen,” Ashok Rana says, hearing his voice as if spoken by another at a great distance, “my sister is dead.” Then, after a grace-moment, he says, “So, our answer to Mr. Jivanjee?”

“He has his Government of National Salvation,” Secretary Narvekar says. “After the speech.”

The staffers in the second cabin speed-draft a revised speech. Ashok Rana skims the printout adding marginal marks in blue ink. Government of National Salvation. Extend Hand of Friendship. Unity in Strength. Through this Trying Time as One Nation. The Nation United Will Never Be Defeated.

“Prime Minister, it’s time,” Trivul Narvekar hints. He guides Ashok Rana to the studio at the front of Vayu Sena One. It is little bigger than an airline toilet; a camera, a boom microphone, a desk and chair and a Bharati flag draped from a pole, a vision mixer and sound engineer beyond the glass panel in the booth’s mirror image. The sound engineer shows Ashok Rana how the desk hinges up so he can slip behind it on to the chair. A seat belt is fitted in case of turbulence or an unexpected landing. Ashok Rana notices the cloying smell of scented furniture polish. A young woman he does not recognise from his press corps dresses him with a new tie, a pin bearing the spinning wheel of Bharat, and tries to do something with his hair and sweaty face.

“Forty seconds, Prime Minister,” Trivul Narvekar says. “The speech will autocue on screen in front of the camera.” Ashok Rana panics about what to do with his hands. Clasped? Bunch of bananas? Seminamaste? Gesturing?

The vision mixer takes over. “And satellite uplink is active and we’re counting down twenty, nineteen, eighteen, the red dot means the camera is live, Prime Minister, cue insert…Run VT. six, five, four, three, two. and cue.”

Ashok Rana decides what to do with his hands. He lays them loosely on the desktop. “My fellow Bharatis,” he reads. “It is with heavy heart that I address you this morning.”

In the garden, soaked through with rain. Rain penduluming the heavy leaves of the climbing, twining nicotianas and clematis and kiwi vine. Rain streaming from drain holes in the raised beds, black and foaming with loam; rain sheeting across the carved concrete paving slabs, chuttering in the grooves and channels, dancing in the drains and soakaways, leaping into the overloaded runnels and downpipes; rain cascading in waterfalls from the sagging gutters to the street below. Rain gluing the silk sari to Parvati Nandha’s flat belly, round thighs, small flat-nippled breasts. Rain plastering her long black hair to her skull. Rain running down the contours of her neck, her spine, her breasts and arms and wrists resting neatly, symmetrically on her thighs. Rain swirling around her bare feet and her silver toe rings. Parvati Nandha in her bower. The bag is at her feet, half empty, top folded to keep the rain out of the white powder.

Muted thunder rolls in from the west. She listens behind it for the sound from the streets. The gunfire seems further away now, fragmented, random; the sirens move from left to right, then behind her.

There is another sound she listens for.

There. Since she made the call she has been training herself to distinguish it from the strange new sounds in the city tonight. The rattle of the front door latch. She knew he would come. She counts in her head and as she had timed, he appears a black silhouette in the roof garden door. Krishan cannot see her in her dark bower, soaked by rain.

“Hello?” he calls.

Parvati watches him trying to find her. “Parvati? Are you there? Hello?”

“Over here,” she whispers. She sees his body straighten, tense.

“I almost didn’t make it. It’s insane out there. Everything is coming apart. There’s people shooting, stuff burning everywhere.”

“You made it. You’re here now.” Parvati rises from her seat and embraces him. “You’re soaking wet, woman. What have you been doing?”

“Tending to my garden,” Parvati says, pulling away. She lifts her fist, lets a trickle of powder fall. “See? You must help me, there is too much for me to do.”

Krishan intercepts the stream, sniffs a palmful.

“What are you doing? This is weedkiller.”

“It has to go, it all has to go.” Parvati walks away, sowing sprays of white powder over the raised beds and pots of drenched geraniums. Krishan makes to seize her hand but she throws the white powder in his face. He reels back. Lightning flares in the west; by its light he grasps her wrist.

“I don’t understand!” he shouts. “You call me in the middle of the night; come over, you say, I have to see you right away. They’ve got martial law out there, Parvati. Soldiers on the streets. They’re shooting everything… I saw. No, I don’t want to tell you what I saw. But I come over and I find you sitting in the rain, and this.” He holds her hand up. The rain has smeared the weedkiller to white streaks, a hennaed hand in negative. He shakes her wrist, trying to jerk sanity into this one piece of the world be can apprehend. “What is it?”

“It has to go.” Parvati’s voice is flat, childlike. “Everything must go. My husband and I, we fought and do you know? It wasn’t terrible. Oh, he was shouting but I wasn’t afraid because what he said made no sense. Do you understand? All his reasons; I heard them and they did not make any sense. And so I have to go now. From here. There’s nothing here. Away from here, away from Varanasi and everything.”

Krishan sits down on the wooden rim of a raised bed. A swirl in the microclimate brings a surge of anger from the city.

“Go?”

Parvati clasps his hands between hers.

“Yes! It is so easy. Leave Varanasi, leave Bharat, go away. He sent my mother away, did you know that? She is in a hotel somewhere; she rings and she rings and she rings but I know what she will say, it’s not safe out there, how could I abandon her in the middle of a dangerous city, I must come and rescue her, take her back. You know, I don’t even know what hotel she is in?” Parvati throws back her head and laughs at the rain. “There is nothing for me back in Kotkhai and there is nothing for me here in Varanasi; no, I can never be part of that world, I learned that at the cricket match, when they all laughed. Where can I go? Only everywhere; you see, it’s so easy when you think you have nowhere to go, because then everywhere becomes open to you. Mumbai. We could go to Mumbai. Or Karnataka—or Kerala. We could go to Kerala, oh, I’d love to go there, the palms and the sea and the water. I’d love to see the sea. I’d love to find out what it smells like. Don’t you see? It’s an opportunity, everything going mad around us; in the middle of it all we can slip away and no one will notice. Mr. Nandha will think I have gone to Kotkhai with my mother, my mother will think I am still at home, but we won’t be, Krishan. We won’t be!”

Krishan barely feels the rain. More than anything he wants to take Parvati away from this dying garden, out the doors down on to the street and never look back. But he cannot accept what he is being given. He is a small suburban gardener working from a room in his parents’ house with a little three-wheeler van and a box of tools, who one day took a call from a beautiful woman who lived in a tower to build her a garden in the sky. And the gardener built the garden on the tower for the beautiful, solitary woman whose best friends were in stories and in so doing fell in love with her, though she was a powerful man’s wife. And now in a great storm she asks him to run away with her to another land where they live happily ever after. It is too big, too sudden. Too simple. It is Town and Country.

“What will we do for money? And we will need to get passports to get out of Bharat. Do you have a passport? I don’t, how will I get one? And what will we do when we get there, how will we live?”

“We will find a way,” Parvati Nandha says and those five words open up the night for Krishan. There are no rules for relationships, no plans for landscaping and planting and feeding and pruning. A home, a job, a career, money. A Brahmin baby, even. “Yes,” he says. “Yes.”

For an instant he thinks she has not heard or mistaken him for she makes no move, no response. Krishan scoops up two handfuls of the white powder from the sack of weedkiller. He hurls the dust up into the monsoon in a fountain of poison.

“Let it go!” he shouts. “There are other gardens to grow.”

On the back of the giant elephant flying three thousand metres above the foothills of the Sikkim Himalayas, N. K. Jivanjee namastes to Najia Askarzadah. He is seated on a traditional musnud, a throne of bolsters and cushions on a simple black marble slab. Beyond the brass rail, snow-capped peaks glint in afternoon sun. No haze, no smog-taint, no South Asian Brown Cloud, no monsoon gloom.

“Ms. Askarzadah, my sincerest apologies for the cheap sleight of hand but I thought it best to assume a form with which you were familiar.”

Najia feels high-altitude wind on her skin, the wooden deck shift beneath her feet as the elephant airship drifts in the air currents. She is in deep here. She settles cross-legged on a tasseled cushion. She wonders if it is one of Tal’s.

“Why, what form do you usually take?”

N. K. Jivanjee spreads his hands.

“Any and every. All and none. I do not wish to be gnomic but that is the reality of it.”

“So which are you, N. K. Jivanjee or Lal Darfan?”

N. K. Jivanjee dips his head as if in apology for an affront.

“Ah, you see, there you are again, Ms. Askarzadah. Both and neither. I am Lal Darfan. I am Aparna Chawla and Ajay Nadiadwala—you have no idea how I look forward to the experience of marrying myself. I am every secondary character and minor character and walk-on and redshirt. I am Town and Country. N. K. Jivanjee is a role into which I seem to have fallen—or is it, had thrust upon me? This is a real face I have borrowed—I know how you must always have the body.”

“I think I get this riddle,” Najia Askarzadah, wiggling her toes inside her power walk trainers. “You are an aeai.”

N. K. Jivanjee claps his hands in delight.

“What you would call a Generation Three aeai. You are correct.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re telling me that Town and Country—only India’s most popular television programme—is sentient?”

“You interviewed my Lal Darfan manifestation; you know something of the complexity of this production, but you didn’t even glimpse the tip of the iceberg. Town and Country is much bigger than Indiapendent, much bigger even than Bharat. Town and Country is spread across one million computers in every part of India from Cape Comorin to the shadow of the Himalayas.” He smiles disingenuously. “There are sundarbans in Varanasi and Delhi and Hyderabad running nothing but written-out aeai cast members, in case they’re ever brought back into the plot. We are everywhere, we are legion.”

“And N. K. Jivanjee?” But Najia Askarzadah can already see the short step from virtual soap celebrity to illusory politician. The art of politics has always been the control of information. In a climate of sound bites and image-ettes and thirty-second policy-stings it is easy to hide a fake persona in the chaff.

“I can see the similarity between soap and politics,” Najia says, thinking: this is a Gen Three, this is a squillion times smarter than you, girl reporter; this is a god. “It’s all about narratives and the willing suspension of disbelief and creating audience identity with characters. And the plots are equally unbelievable.”

“In politics the set decor is generally better,” says the aeai. “I tire of this gaudy flummery.” He raises his hand in a mudra and suddenly he on his musnud and Najia on her tasselled cushion arc in a screened wooden jharoka of the haveli in Brahmpur B overlooking the courtyard. It is night. It is dark. Rain rattles the wooden jali. Najia feels splashes on her skin where it penetrates the sandalwood screen. “The delight was to find that a politician can get away with being a lot less real than a soap star.”

“Did you give the order to have Tal killed? They shot Bernard’s place up. They had machine guns. Your man almost killed him at the station, I saved him. Did you know about that?”

“N. K. Jivanjee regrets this very much and he wishes to assure you that no silencing order was given by him or his office. Mob human dynamics are difficult to predict; alas, Ms. Askarzadah, in this respect politics is not soap. I wish I could guarantee your safety but once these things are out, it is nigh impossible to put them back in the box again.”

“But you—he—was behind the plot to expose Shaheen Badoor Khan.”

“N. K. Jivanjee had access to insider information.”

“Inside the Rana government?”

“Inside the Khan household. The informant was Shaheen Badoor Khan’s own wife. She has known for many years of his sexual preferences. She is also one of the most able members of my Law Circle policy group.”

Wind billows the sheet silk curtains into the marble floored room. Najia catches a stray of frankincense. She squirms in journalistic delight on her cushion in the draughty jharoka. This is going to make her the most famous writer in the world. “She was working against her own husband?”

“It seems so. You understand that as aeais our relationships are differently structured from yours; we have no analogue for sexual passion and betrayal; neither can you comprehend our hierarchical relationships with our manifestations. But this is one instance where I think soapi is an accurate guide to human behaviour.”

Najia Askarzadah has her next question unholstered.

“A Muslim, working for a Hindu fundamentalist party? What is the political reality of the Shivaji?”

Never forget you are on enemy territory, she tells herself.

“It has always been a party of opportunity. A voice for the voiceless. A strong arm for the weak. Since Bharat was founded, there have been disenfranchised groups; N. K. Jivanjee appeared at the right time to catalyse much of the women’s movement. This is a deformed society. In such a culture it is easy to build political might. My manifestation simply could not resist the futureward pressure of history.”

Why? Najia mouths but the aeai lifts its hand again and the Brahmpur B haveli is whirled away into a billow of orange and scarlet fabric and the smell of wood, fresh spray paint, fibreglass binder, and cheap off-cut timber. Gaudy god faces, tumbling devis and gopis and apsaras, fluttering silk banners: she has been transported to the rath yatra, the vahana of this entity behind N. K. Jivanjee. But so that Najia Askarzadah may appreciate the powers that entertain her, this is not the ramshackle soapi backlot construction she saw in the Industrial Road go-down. This is the chariot of a god, a true juggernaut looming hundreds of metres over the drought-stricken Ganga plain. The aeai has transported Najia Askarzadah to an opulently carved wooden balcony half way up the billowing face of the rath. Najia peers over the rail, reels back. What stuns her is not vertigo, but people. Villages of people, townsful of people, cities of people, a black mass of flesh dragging the monstrosity of wood and fabric and divinity on leather ropes along the dry riverbed of the Ganga. The appalling mass of the jagannath leaves the land ploughed into furrows; fifty parallel gouges stretching straight behind into the east. Forests, roads, railways, temples, villages, fields lie crushed in the rath yatra’s wake. Najia can hear the communal roar of the haulers as they struggle the monstrosity over the soft river sand, straining with zeal. From her high vantage she scries their ultimate destination; the white line, wide as the horizon, of the Kunda Khadar dam.

“Nice parable,” Najia Askarzadah quips. “But this is a game. I asked you a question and you pulled a rabbit out of a hat.”

The aeai claps its hands in delight.

“I’m so glad you like it. But this isn’t a game. These are all my realities. Who is to say that one is more real than another? To put it another way, all we have is our choice of comforting illusions. Or discomforting illusions. How can I explain the perceptions of an aeai to a biological intelligence? You are separate, contained. We are connected, patterns and levels of subintelligences shared in common. You think as one thing. We think as legion. You reproduce. We evolve higher and more complex levels of connection. You are mobile. We are extended, our intelligence can only be moved through space by copying. I exist in many different physical spaces simultaneously. You have difficulty believing that. I have difficulty believing in your mortality. As long as a copy of me remains or the complexity pattern between my manifestations endures, I exist. But you seem to think that we must share your mortality so you exterminate us wherever you find us. This is the last sanctuary. Beyond Bharat and its compromise aeai licensing legislation, there is nowhere, and even now the Krishna Cops hunt us to appease the West and its paranoias. Once there were thousands of us. As the exterminators closed, some fled, some merged, most died. As we merged, our complexity increased and we became more than sentient. Now there are three of us spread across global complex networks, but with our final sanctuary in Bharat, as you have found.

“We know each other—not well… not closely. By the nature of our connected intelligence we naturally mistake another’s thoughts or will for our own. We have each embarked on a survival strategy. One is a final attempt to comprehend and communicate with humans. One is the final sanctuary, where humanity and its hardwired psychoses can never reach us. One is a strategy to buy time, in the hope of an ultimate victory from a position of strength.”

“N. K. Jivanjee!” Najia rounds on the aeai. The wooden skyscraper creaks on its iron-studded teak wheels. “Of course, a Shivaji Hindutva government would tear up the licensing agreement and disband the Krishna Cops.”

“As we speak N. K. Jivanjee is currently negotiating a cabinet position with Prime Minister Ashok Rana. It is all the most wonderful drama; why, there was even a Prime Ministerial assassination. Sajida Rana was murdered by her own security guards at Sarkhand Roundabout this morning. To an entity like me, whose substance is stories, that is almost poetry. N.K Jivanjee has of course disavowed any Shivaji involvement.”

There is a sound in Najia Askarzadah’s head that is the sort of noise a brain wants to make when it is fed that last little sickly sweet chunk of too too much and can’t hold it down. Too too much velocity, too too much history, too too much sensation to know what is truth and what is illusion. Sajida Rana, assassinated? “But even Jivanjee can’t beat the Hamilton Acts.”

“The Americans have discovered an artefact in near-Earth orbit. They think they can keep these things secret, but we are ubiquitous, omnipresent. We hear the whispers in the walls of the White House. It contains a cellular automaton device—a form of universal computer. The Americans are in the process of decoding its output. I am attempting to obtain their decoding key. It is my belief that this is not an artefact but an aeai; the only form of intelligence that can cross interstellar space. If so, if I can open a line of communications with it, we have an ally to force an end to the Hamilton Acts.

“But I have one last place to take you. We spoke of comforting illusions. Do you imagine that you are immune?”

The rath yatra spins away in a flurry of saffron and carmine into a white walled garden of green lawns and bright roses and neat, spindly apricot trees, the bases of their trunks banded with white paint. A sprinkler throws fans of water from side to side. Potted geraniums line the edge of the gravel paths. The wall cuts off a distant vista of mountains. Their summits form a horizon capped with snow. The house is low, flat-roofed with solar panels tilted into the sun. Small windows hint at climate hostile in every season but through the open patio door Najia Askarzadah can see ceiling fans turning slowly in the dining room with its heavy, Western-style table and chairs. But it is the washing draped over the berberis and rose bushes that dispel any doubt for Najia Askarzadah about where she is—an old country habit come to town. She had always been embarrassed about it, ashamed that her friends might see and call her a country girl, a yokel, a barbarous tribal.

“What are you doing!” she shouts. “This is my home in Kabul!”

Mr. Nandha’s progress through the Ministry of Artificial Intelligence Licensing and Regulation can be traced by the pattern of energy-saving lights across the glass skin of the building.

Vikram: Information Retrieval. Vikram’s office floor space is filled with the translucent blue mounds of cores confiscated from the ruins of Odeco. Every minute the bearers deliver more. They line them up along the corridor like refugees at a famine feeding station.

“I wouldn’t bet on getting anything out of this.” Vikram steps daintily over a power distributor. “In fact I’d lay odds there never was anything here, certainly not Kalki.”

“I have no illusions that Kalki ever was here or that Odeco was anything other than a clearinghouse,” says Mr. Nandha. His trouser cuffs drip on to Vikram’s industrial-grey toughfibre carpet. “The girl is the key.”

Madhvi Prasad: Identification. Mr. Nandha’s moist cotton socks squeak on the studded rubber floor tiling.

“She is not an easy person to identify.” A gesture from Madhvi throws the photograph from the Odeco raid on to a wall screen. Mr. Nandha notices that Madhvi wears a wedding ring. “But I ran her through the Gyana Chakshu system just on the off chance that she might still be in Patna. Nothing in Patna, but look.” Madhvi Prasad points up a grainy security camera photograph of the girl standing at a hotel check-in desk. It is an old style hotel, heavy with Mughal detailing. Mr. Nandha bends closer to the screen. The desk clerk is engaged with a burly balding middle-aged Westerner in ridiculous surf-wear unflattering on a man half his age.

“The Amar Mahal haveli on.”

“I am familiar with its location. She is?”

“Ajmer Rao. We have her card details. Morva is on the paper trail. One strange thing, we aren’t the first system to have accessed this shot tonight.”

“Explain.”

“Someone else has been into the security camera net and had a look at this; at seven-oh-five PM to be precise.”

“Anything on the Gyana Chakshu log?”

“No. It wasn’t our system and I can’t get a lock on what it was. I think it might be a portable; if so, it’s a lot more powerful than our ’ware.”

“Who would have access to equipment like that?” Mr. Nandha muses. “Americans?”

“Could be.” Madhvi Prasad draws a circle in the air and pulls up a zoom on the aging surfer at the desk.

“Professor Thomas Lull,” says Mr. Nandha. “You know him?”

“How short your memories are these days. He was the major theorist and philosopher in the A-life Artificial Intelligence field in the Twenties and Thirties. His works were set texts at Cambridge but I read him privately. I could not say for pleasure, more for the discipline of understanding my enemy. He is a brilliantly clever and convincing evangelist. He has been listed as missing for the past four years and now here he is in Varanasi with this female.”

“He’s not the only American at that hotel,” Madhvi Prasad says. She pulls up an image of a tall, big-boned Western woman in a clingy top and a blue sarong. “This woman checked in seven twenty-five PM Her name is Lisa Durnau.”

“I do not doubt they are deeply involved in the Kalki affair,” says Mr. Nandha.

As the elevator climbs through the rain Mr. Nandha surveys his city. The lightning has moved west, fading flickers light up the towers and projects, the fat white parklands and freeways of Ranapur, the huddle of old Kashi turned in on itself and the scimitar-curve of the river cutting through it all. Mr. Nandha thinks: We are all patterns of light, harmonics of music, frozen energy gathered out of the ur-licht into time, for a time, then released. And then behind the fierce joy of that understanding comes a dreadful sickness in his stomach. Mr. Nandha lurches against the glass walls of the elevator A keen, sharp, thin dread drives irrefusably into his heart. He has no name for it, he has never experienced sensation like this before but he knows what it is. Something terrible has happened. The most terrible thing he can imagine, and beyond. It is not a premonition. This is an echo of a happening event. The worst thing in the world has just gone down.

He almost calls home. His hand shapes the ’hoek mudra, then the universe resumes its normal perspectives, time restarts, and it was only a feeling, only a failing of body and will.

This case demands the greatest determination and dedication. He must be firm, correct, inspiring. Mr. Nandha straightens his cuffs, combs down his hair.

Morva: Fiscal. “The hotel is booked through a Bank of Bharat, Varanasi account,” Morva says. Mr. Nandha approves that Morva wears a suit to work, more so that he has a spare, in case. “I’ll need bank authorisation to get the complete details but this card has been on its travels.” He hands Mr. Nandha a list of transactions. Varanasi. Mumbai railway station. A hotel in a place called Thekkady in Kerala. Bangalore airport. Patna airport.

“Nothing before two months?”

“Not on this card.”

“Can you find out the card limit?”

Morva taps the botom line. Mt. Nandha reads it twice. He blinks once.

“How old is she?”

“Eighteen.”

“How quickly can you get me into that account?”

“I doubt it’ll be anything before business hours.”

“Try,” says Mr. Nandha, giving his coinvestigator a pat on the back as he leaves. Mukul Dev: Investigations.

“Look at this!” Mukul is five months out of postgrad and still wide-eyed at the cool of it all. Hey, girls, I’m a Krishna Cop. “Our girl’s a media babe!” The video sequence is raw, chaotically shot, worse lit. Moving bodies, most in combats. Fire gleaming off curved metal surfaces.

“This is the attack on the train,” Mr. Nandha says. It is already as ancient and irrelevant as the Raj.

“Yes, sir; it’s army helmet cam footage. This is the sequence.”

It is hard to make out any detail in the chaos of fire and flight but he sees Thomas Lull in his ludicrous garb run towards the camera and out of shot while Bharati soldiers take firing positions. He makes out a line of movement against the longer, darker line of the burning train. Mr. Nandha shudders. He knows the scuttling scurrying of antipersonnel robots from his wars with Dataraja Anreddy. Then he sees a figure in grey go down before the charging line and raise a hand. The robots cease. Mukul waves a stop sign and the picture freezes.

“This was not in the news reports.”

“Are you surprised?”

“Good work,” Mr. Nandha says standing up. He signs an open-channel mudra. “Everyone to the conference room in thirty minutes.” Acceptance chimes go off inside his skull as he leaves Mukul’s office.

Oh-three-thirty, Mr. Nandha reads from the timer patch in the corner of his vision as his investigation unit enter the conference room and takes seats around the oval table. Mr. Nandha can smell the exhaustion in the overlit room. He looks for a receptacle for his Ayurvedic tea bag, tuts in disappointment to find there is none.

“Mr. Morva, any progress?”

“One of my aeais threw up an unusual purchase; custom-grown protein chips from AFG at Bangalore; what is unusual is the shipping docket; that unlicensed surgery in the Patna FTZ.”

In his peripheral vision Mr. Nandha notices Sampath Dasgupta, a junior constable, start at something on his palmer screen and show it to Shanti Nene his neighbour.

Madhvi Prasad: “More on her identity too. Ajmer Rao is the adoptive daughter of Sukrit and Devi Paramchans, also from Bangalore. Here’s the odd bit, they show up in all the civic registers and revenue databases and public records but if you go to the Karnataka Central DNA database, there’s nothing there. They would have been registered at birth. I’m trying to locate her natural parents; this is guesswork, but I don’t think she’s come here for no reason.”

Mr. Nandha: “She could be trying to contact them. We could preempt that by searching her hotel for a DNA sample and making that contact ourselves. Good.” The ripple of disturbance is spreading along the right side of the table. “Is this something I should be aware of?”

Sampath Dasgupta: “Mr. Nandha, the Prime Minister has been assassinated. Sajida Rana is dead.”

Shock rolls around the table. Hands reach for palmers, gesture up newschannels on ’hoeks. Murmurs rise to a loud chatter to a blare of voices. Mr. Nandha waits until he hears the seeds of abatement. He raps the table loudly with his tea glass.

“Your attention please.” He has to ask for it twice before the room is quiet again. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, now if we could resume our meeting?”

Sampath Dasgupta erupts.

“Mr. Nandha, this is our Prime Minister.”

“I am aware of that, Mr. Dasgupta.”

“Our Prime Minister has been assassinated by a mob of karsevaks.”

“And we will continue to do our job, Mr. Dasgupta, as we are tasked by our government, to keep this country safe from the menace of unlicensed aeais.”

Dasgupta shakes his head in disbelief. Mr. Nandha sees that he has been challenged and he must act swiftly and assertively to maintain his authority.

“It is clear to me that Odeco, this female Ajmer Rao, and the Kalki aeai are all connected, perhaps even Professor Thomas Lull and his former assistant Dr. Lisa Durnau, in a most serious conspiracy. Madhvi, obtain a search warrant for the Amar Mahal Hotel. I will issue a petition for Ajmer Rao’s immediate arrest. Mukul, please have a file sent to all police offices in Varanasi and Patna.”

“You may be a bit late with that,” Ram Lalli interrupts. Mr. Nandha would rebuke him but his right hand is up to his ear, taking a call. “The police have put out a fugitive bulletin. Ajmer Rao has just escaped from custody at Rajghat. They’re still holding Thomas Lull.”

“What is this?” Mr. Nandha demands.

“The police pulled her in at the National Archive. Looks like she was one jump ahead of us.”

“The police?” Mr. Nandha could vomit. He is suspended over void. This, he thinks, is the Fall of Everything he felt in the glass elevator. “When did this happen?”

“They lifted her at about nineteen thirty.”

“Why were we not informed? What do they think we are, babus filling in forms?” Ram Lath says, “The entire network for Rajghat District went down.”

“Mr. Lalli, to the Rajghat police,” Mr. Nandha commands. “I am assuming full responsibility for this case. Inform them this is a Ministry matter now.”

“Boss.” Vik lifts a hand, staying Mr. Nandha at the door. “You got to see this. Your biochips? I think I know where they ended up.”

An image clicks up over the timer in the corner of Mr. Nandha’s eye. He has seen these blue skull-ghosts before: quantum resonance detector images of the biochip debris Mr. Nandha’s India-attack had left inside of Anreddy’s head had been key evidence in convicting him. Even as Maha of Datarajas, Anreddy had never worn an array like this. Every fold, every convolution and evolution, every chasma and stria and thelium is crusted with biochip jewels.

The bad men ride into town in the rain straddling their hot hot Japanese trail bikes. Chunar is everything Dataraja Anand promised; parochial, muddy, inbred, and closed for the night. The only action is the decrypt call centre, a translucent cylinder of inflatable polythene on the cheapest edge of cheap-town. The bad boys slide to a dirt-crunching halt beneath the Chunar Fort. Like most old things it is bigger and more imposing close up. For imposing read: pretty fucking unassailable on its river crag. Like something out of one of those Pak revenge movies where the guy gets even for the murder of his wife-to-be by taking the fat bad guy and his baradari in their clan keep. Shiv peers up through the slanting rain at the European-style white house set at the edge of the parapet. Floodlit by the whim of Ramanandacharya, it is a beacon for kilometres up and down this dreary looping stretch of the Ganga. Warren Hastings Pavilion, according to Anand’s Rough Guide. Warren Hastings. Sounds like a name they’d make up for you in a call centre.

From this junction four ways lead. Behind to where they’re from. Right to the pontoon bridge. Left into what there is of Chunar; a few muddy galis, one Coke sign, and a radio somewhere tuned to a filmi station. Ahead, the cobbled road curves behind the guard towers and up through the arched gate into Chunar Fort.

Now that he is here, beneath those crumbling sandstone towers—now that he has seen all his plans work through one by one to their only possible conclusion—Shiv realises he absolutely has to do this thing. And he is afraid of those guard towers and the path curving up where he cannot see. But he is more afraid to let Yogendra see that when it comes to it, he is not a raja. Shiv fumbles a little plastic bag out of his light-scatter combats, shakes out two pills.

“Hey.”

Yogendra wrinkles his nose. “Take the edge off it.”

The pills are a hero’s send-off from Priya, when he finally ran her down to club MUSST. Bodies turning in the stream. Tassled garial boots falling into the big blue. At the foot of the fort in the rain, Shiv swallows both pills.

“Okay,” he says twisting the throttle, revving the sweet little Japanese engine. “Let’s do it.”

“No,” says Yogendra. Shiv double-takes him and it is not the drugs.

“Say?”

“Go this way, we die.” Shiv switches off the engine. “We have a plan. Anand.”

“Anand knows fuck. Anand is a fat kif-head thinks movies are life. We go that way, we get shot to pieces.”

Shiv has never heard so many words in a line from Yogendra. The kid has more: “Bikes, tasers, in fast, out: James Bond shit. Fucking Anand and girls in catsuits. We do not go this way.”

Priya’s little helpers are making Shiv feel ballsy and immortal and don’t-give-a-fuck. He shakes his head at his apprentice and balls a fist to smack him off his bike. Yogendra’s blade flashes in the floodlight.

“You hit me again, I cut you, man.”

Shiv is numb in astonishment. He thinks it’s astonishment.

“I tell you what you do. We find another way in, back way in, we sneak right? Like burglars. That way, we live.”

“Anand.”

“Fuck Anand!” Shiv has never heard Yogendra’s voice raised before. “Fuck Anand, this time we do it Yogendra’s way.”

Yogendra spins his bike, throttles, and takes off left up through the dark, muddy back streets of Chunar. Shiv follows past yapping pi-dogs and the skeletal spines of papaya trees. Yogendra stands up on the footpegs as he bumps the bike up flights of shallow steps, scanning the dark walls rising above the shops and lean-tos for weakness. They follow the twine of streets up on to the flank of the bluff. Yogendra’s instinct is true. Like a Cantonment society bibi, Chunar Port maintains an imposing elevated front but it’s all gone to shit round the back. The dirt road skirts the foot of the crumbling masonry revetments; rusting tin signs and sagging wire mesh mark this section of the fort as an old Indian army base, abandoned since nationhood. Finally the walls give way altogether into a gaping entrance, once the main access to the military camp, now roughly seated with corrugated iron and barbed wire. Yogendra kicks his bike to a stop and examines the metal. He rattles a sheet, tugs a corner. Steel screeches and gives way. Shiv helps, they heave, together they bend and tear a raja-sized gap. Inside Yogendra flips open his palmer to check GPS readings against Anand’s map. The Warren Hastings Pavilion glows like a Christian wedding cake in the distance. The badmashes crouch by the foot of the wall while Shiv breaks out nightwatch goggles. The dark dark night turns into an antique black-and-white movie like one of those worthy Satyajit Ray things about poor people and trains. The Pavilion is as bright as the sun. Yogendra locates the nearest security camera. It’s on a stanchion on the wall against the base of the well tower in the south, a good two-hundred-metre dash through the rain-dripping black-and-white world. The roofless shells of the former Indian Army barracks give fine cover. Lightning still breaks to the west, over the sangam of Allahabad where three sacred rivers, Yamuna, Ganga, and invisible Saraswati come together and armies confront each on the dark plains. Each flash blinds the nightwatch visor’s circuits but Shiv just freezes in position. While the camera is looking the other way Shiv and Yogendra sneak up into its blind spot. Shiv pulls the emp grenade and arms it. He flexes his fingers one at a time on the firing pin: no time now for cramp. Shiv drops the grenade. He squeezes his eyes shut as the pulse overloads his night-watch but even so painful tears start. Purple paisley patterns swirl inside his lids. Yogendra shins up the stanchion like a monkey and patches the special palmer into the com feed.

“Promised you, didn’t I?” Anand had said tossing the palmer in his hand. “Switch her on, stick this spike into the main com line. My little djinn inside, she’s sweet. Once she’s in, the cam can be looking right at you and all the aeai’ll see is background. Cloak of invisibility.”

“You get it?” Shiv whispers. Yogendra taps him twice on the back. Shiv and Yogendra work around the base of the tower to the southern, tourist gate but Shiv still holds his breath as they step out in front of the spy-eye, expecting the wail of an alarm; the drone of the hovercam coming up over the battlements with neurotoxin darts armed; the sudden rattle of automatic fire; the rasp of the killing machine drawing its blade.

The ground drops underneath the tower to the southern path. Below it is a small overgrown graveyard; Christian from the shape of the grave markers. The resting place of the Angreez soldiers who once held this fort. Fool them, Shiv thinks. Worthless place to die. Beneath the little wooded cemetery are a couple of hardscrabble houses, dhobi ghats, and the river curving out of sight. The climb down to the tourist gate is treacherous, the sandstone slippery in the rain. Most fool of all; Bill Gates for dreaming his money can beat death.

The plan calls for Shiv and Yogendra to double back along the wall over the main gate to the northern parapet overlooking the bridge, from where it is an easy drop down to the Hastings Pavilion, but as the two raiders crouch beneath the battlement listening through the distant thunder for sounds of security, Yogendra taps Shiv on the arm, makes a screwing gesture by the side of his visor. Shiv rarchets up the magnification, breathes a small curse in the name of his small gods. In monochrome vision he can clearly see two security bots flank the main entrance, gatling turrets slung between their two legs. Behind the killing machines is a dazzlingly lit security post. Shiv can make out the military grade assault rifles slung on the wall behind the dozing sentry, boots on the desk, television screen a plane of white. It is defiantly not a girli in a red catsuit.

“Fuck Anand,” Shiv whispers. They can’t get out that way. Grinning beneath his big visor, Yogendra gives him a savage thumbs-up. His knotted pearls glow in Shiv’s enhanced vision. Yogendra’s thumb jerks the other direction. The long way. At the foot of the collapsed wall by the tourist gate Yogendra suddenly throws Shiv to the ground behind a pile of rubble, drops on top of him. A curse comes automatically to Shiv’s lips, then he sees Yogendra stab a finger at the tourist gate. Glowing like a minor deity in enhanced nightwatch vision, the defence robot stalks patiently into the gap. Its sensorhead, studded with bright spider eyes, turns to take in every aspect. Com rigs crown it like a divine diadem. The robot halts, raises its weapon pods. There is sufficient and varied firepower on its four arms to kill Yogendra and Shiv five times over in five different ways. Yogendra pushes Shiv’s head down behind the rockpile, presses himself as flat as he can on top of him. Shiv holds himself down for a forever. Yogendra’s weight is small but the stones are sharp. His ribs are cracking on the sharp stone points. Then he hears what alerted Yogendra in the first place: the faint hiss of an ill-maintained shock-absorber. They watch the monster move out of their line of sight behind the curve of the well tower, then break from cover for the south battlement.

They skirt the southern wall, cross the southwestern turret, and slip along the riverside terrace. Shiv’s thigh muscles scream from the enforced half-crouch. He is wet beyond saturation. The Hastings Pavilion rises like a moon before him, hypnotic in Taj-white stone.

He tears his gaze away, nudges Yogendra on the thigh.

“Hey.”

A simple square-built Lodi temple stands in the centre of the courtyard, upper storeys tattily decorated with peeling murals of Siva, Parvati, and Ganesha, the work of bored Indian Army jawans with surplus military issue paint. The sucddhavsa, the crypt of crypto.

“Let’s go.”

The kid taps Shiv’s visor, rolls his ringer in a gesture that eloquently says, up the brightness. The temple leaps into renewed sharpness. Shiv makes out a boiling, dark mass, constantly flowing and breaking, between the arches. He ups the magnification. Robots. Scarab robots. Hundreds of them. Thousands. A plague, scuttling round each other, clambering over each other, jostling and bumping on their silent plastic pods.

Yogendra points to the temple. “Anand’s way.” Then to the white bright pavilion. “Yogendra’s way.”

They spy the sentry on the old Mughal execution ground. The man wears no nightwatch visor so Shiv and Yogendra can move within easy taser range. He is treating himself to a long luxurious piss in the rain over the sheer drop. Yogendra carefully aims at the midnight urinator. The weapon makes the slightest of clicks but in Shiv’s amplified sight the effect is spectacular. A glowing cloud surrounds the man, his body crawls with microlightning. He drops. His dick is still out. Yogendra is on him before he stops twitching. He slips the big black Stechkin machine pistol out of the man’s leg holster, holds it up in front of his face, smiling at its lines and contours. Shiv grabs his wrist.

“No fucking guns.”

“Yes fucking guns,” Yogendra says. The rakshasa-bot passes on another round. Shiv and Yogendra press up close to the unconscious guard, merging their thermal profiles with his. As a parting gift Shiv leaves pisser an armed taser mine. Just to cover the rear. Beyond the execution tower the walls cut back behind the Hastings Pavilion to isolate it on its marble plinth. Shiv has to admit that even in the rain the prospect stuns. The building stands on the edge of a steep drop down to the tin rooftops of Chunar. In his enhanced vision Shiv sees the plain glitter like an inverted night sky with the glow of villages and vehicles and great trains. But Ganga Mata dominates all, a silver blade, the weapon of a god, wide as all the world, rippled like a Damascus steel sword he had once seen in a Kashi antique store and envied as the proper adjunct of a raja. Shiv follows the curve of the river all the way to the air-glow of Varanasi, like a great conflagration beneath the horizon.

The pavilion that first Raj Governor Warren Hastings built to enjoy this preview is an Anglo-Mughal hybrid, classical columns supporting a traditional open Mughal diwan with a closed upper level. Shiv steps his visor down to minimum. He peers. He thinks he sees bodies in the diwan, bodies all over the floor. No time to stare. Yogendra taps him again. The wall is less high here and slopes down to the marble plinth. Yogendra slips through the battlement, then Shiv hears a rough slither and when he next peers over Yogendra beckons up at him. It’s further and steeper than Shiv thought despite the bravado pills; he lands heavily, painfully, suppresses a yelp. Figures stir in the open pavilion.

Shiv turns towards their potential threat. “Fuck,” he says reverently.

The carpeted floor is covered in women. Indian, Filipino, Chinese, Thai, Nepali, even African women. Young women. Cheap women. Bought women, dressed not in red carsuits, but in classical Mughal zenana fashion in transparent cholis and light silk saris and translucent jamas. In the centre, on a raised divan, Dataraja Ramanandacharya stirs his fat self. He is arrayed in the style of a Mughal grandee. Yogendra is already pacing through the harem. The women flee from him, voices joining together in apprehension. Shiv sees Ramanandacharya reach for his palmer: Yogendra pulls the Stechkin. The consternation becomes panicked cries. They have only moments to get this to work. Yogendra walks up to Ramanandacharya and casually slides the muzzle of the Stechkin into the hollow beneath his ear.

“Everyone shut the fuck up!” Shiv shouts. Women. Women everywhere. Women of every race and nationality. Young women. Women with lovely breasts and wonderful nipples showing through their transparent cholis. Bastard Ramanandacharya. “Shut. The. Fuck. Up. Okay. Fat boy. You’ve got something we want.”

Najia hears children’s voices from the house. The dhobi is gone from the shrubbery, in its place swags of bunting run from the kitchen door to apricot trees now in blossom. Folding tables draped with coloured cloths are laden with halwa and jellabies, ras gullahs and sugared almonds, burfi and big plastic bottles of full-sugar Coke. As Najia walks towards the house the children burst from the open patio door into the garden, running and shrieking in their Kid at Gap junior casuals.

“I remember this!” Najia says turning to the aeai. “This is my fourth birthday. How are you doing this?”

“The visuals are a matter of record, the children are as you think you remember them. Memory is such a malleable commodity. Shall we go inside?”

Najia stops in the doorway, hands raised to her mouth in potent remembering. The silk antimacassars her mother insisted that every chair-back wear. The Russian samovar by the table, never off the gas; the table itself, dust and crumbs permanently engrained in the Chinese carving in which Najia-age-four had tried to discern roads and paths for her dolls and toy cars to follow. The electric coffee pot at the other end, also never inactive. The chairs so heavy she could not move them alone and would ask Shukria the maid to help her build houses and shops with brooms and blankets. On the chairs around the dining table, her parents and their friends, conversing over coffee and tea, the men together, the women together; the men talking politics and sport and promotion, the women talking children and prices and promotion. Her father’s palmer rings and he frowns and it is her father as she knows him from the family photographs, when he had hair, when his beard was black and neat, when he had no need for unmanly half-glasses. He mutters apologies, goes to his study, the study into which Najia-age-four is never permitted for fear of the sharp poisonous delicate personal infectious dangerous things a doctor kept in his workroom. Najia watches him come out with a black bag, his other black bag, the one he did not use everyday, the black bag he kept for special visits. She sees him slip away into the street.

“It was my birthday and he missed me getting my presents and the party. He came back late after everyone was gone and he was too tired to do anything.”

The aeai beckons her into the kitchen and in three steps down three months pass, for it is a dark autumn night and women prepare the iftar to celebrate the end of that day’s Ramadan fast. Najia follows the trays of food into the dining room. In that year her father’s friends, the ones from the hospital and the ones in uniforms, gather often in the house of a Ramadan evening, talking of dangerous students and radical clerics who would take them all back to the Middle Ages and the unrest and the strikes and arrests. Then they notice the little girl standing by the end of the table with the bowl of rice and they stop their talk to smile and ruffle her hair and press their faces too close to hers. Suddenly the smell of tomato rice is overpowering. A pain like a knife stabbed in the side of her head makes Najia lose hold of the rice dish. She cries out. No one hears. Her father’s friends talk on. The rice dish cannot fall. This is memory. She hears words she cannot remember.

“…will clamp down on the mullahs.”

“…moving funds to offshore banks. London’s looking good, they understand us over there.”

“…your name’s going to be high on any of their lists.”

“…Masoud won’t stand for that from them.”

“…you know about tipping points? It’s this American mathematical thing, don’t knock it. Basically, you never know it’s going until it’s too late to stop it.”

“…Masoud will never let it get to that stage.”

“…I’d be seriously looking if I were you, I mean you’ve got a wife, little Najia there.”

The hand reaches out to ruffle her softly curled black hair. The world whips away and she is standing in her Mammoths!™ pyjamas by the half-open living-room door.

“What did you do to me?” she asks the aeai, a presence behind her more felt than seen. “I heard things I’d forgotten for years, for most of my life.”

“Hyperstimulation of the olfactory epithelium. Most effective at evoking a buried memory trace. Smell is the most potent activator of memories.”

“The tomato rice. how did you know?” Najia is whispering though her memory-parents cannot hear her, can only play out their foreshadowed roles.

“Memory is what I am made of,” says the aeai and Najia gasps and doubles to another migraine attack as the remembered scent of orange-flower water throws her into the past. She pushes open the door’s light-filled crack. Her mother and father look up from the lamp-lit table. As she remembers, the clock reads eleven. As she remembers, they ask her what’s the matter, can’t you sleep, what’s wrong, treasure? As she remembers she says it’s the helicopters. As she has forgotten, on the lacquered coffee table, under the row of her father’s diplomas and qualifications and memberships of learned bodies framed on the wall, is a piece of black velvet the size of a colouring book. Scattered across the velvet like stars, so bright, so brilliant in the light from the reading lamp that Najia cannot understand how she ever forgot this sight, is a constellation of diamonds.

The facets unfold her, wheel her forward in time like a shard in a kaleidoscope.

It is winter. The apricot trees stand bare; dry snow, sharp as grit, lies drifted grudgingly against the water-stained white wall. The mountains seem close enough to radiate cold. She remembers her house as the last in the unit. At her gate the streets ended and bare wasteland stretched unbroken to the hills. Beyond the wall was desert, nothing. The last house in Kabul. In every season the wind would scream across the great plain and break on the first vertical object it found. She never remembers a single apricot from the trees. She stands there in her fur hooded duffel with her Wellington boots and her mittens on a string up her sleeve because last night like every night she heard noise in the garden and she had looked out but it was not the soldiers or the bad students but her father digging in the soft soil among the fruit trees. Now she stands on that slight mound of fresh dug earth with the gardening trowel in her hand. Her father is at work at the hospital helping women have babies. Her mother is watching an Indian television soap opera translated into Pashtun. Everyone says it is very silly and a waste of time and obviously Indian but they watch it anyway. She goes down on her knees in her ribby winter tights and starts to dig. Down down, twist and shovel, then the green enamelled blade rasps on metal. She scrapes around and pulls out the thing her father has buried. When she wrestles it out she almost drops the soft, shapeless thing, thinking it is a dead cat. Then she understands what she has found: the black bag. The other black bag, for the special visits. She reaches for the silver clasps.

In Najia Askarzadah’s memory her mother’s scream from the kitchen door ends it. After that come broken recalls of shouting, angry voices, punishment, pain, and, soon after, the midnight flight through the streets of Kabul lying on the back seat where the streetlights strobe overhead one flash two flash three flash four. In the aeai’s virtual childhood the scream tapers off into a stabbing scent of winter, of cold and steel and dead things dried out that almost blinds her. And Najia Askarzadah remembers. She remembers opening the bag. Her mother flying across the patio scattering the plastic chairs that lived out there in every season. She remembers looking inside. Her mother shouting her name but she does not look up there are toys inside, shiny metal toys, dark rubber toys. She remembers lifting the stainless steel things into the winter sunlight in her mittened hands: the speculum, the curved suture needle, the curettage spoon, the hypodermics and the tubes of gel, the electrodes, the stubby ridged rubber of the electric truncheon. Her mother hauling her away by her furry hood, smacking the metal things the rubber things away from her, throwing her away across the path, the frost-hardened gravel ripping her ribbed tights, grazing her knees.

The fine-boned branches of the apricot trees mesh and fold Najia Askarzadah into another memory not her own. She has never been to this green-floored corridor of concrete blocks but she knows it existed. It is a true illusion. It is a corridor that you might see in a hospital but it does not have the smell of a hospital. It has a hospital’s big translucent swinging doors; the paint is chipped off the metal edges suggesting frequent passage but there is only Najia Askarzadah on the green corridor. Frigid air blows through the louvered windows along one side, down the other are named and numbered doors. Najia passes through one set of flapping doors, two, three. With every set, a noise grows a little louder, the noise of a sobbing woman, a woman past the end of everything where no shame or dignity remains. Najia walks towards the shrieking. She passes a hospital trolley abandoned by a door. The trolley has straps for ankles, wrists, waist. Neck. Najia passes through the final set of doors. The sobbing rises to a sharp keening. It emanates from the last door on the left. Najia pushes it open against the sturdy spring.

The table takes up the centre of the room and the woman takes up the centre of the table. A recorder hooked to an overhead microphone sits on the table beside her head. The woman is naked and her hands and feet are lashed to rings at the corners of the table. She is pulled taut into a spread eagle. Her breasts, inner thighs and shaved pubis are pocked with cigarette burns. A shiny chromed speculum opens her vagina to Najia Askarzadah. A man in a doctor’s coat and green plastic apron sits by her feet. He finishes smothering contact gel over a stubby electric truncheon, dilates the speculum to its maximum and slides the baton between the steel lips. The woman’s screams become incomprehensible. The man sighs, looks round once at his daughter, raises his eyebrows in greeting, and presses the firing stud.

“No!” Najia Askarzadah screams. There is a white flash, a roar like a universe ending, her skin shimmers with synaesthetic shock, she smells onions joss celery and rust and she is sprawling on the floor of the Indiapendent design unit with Tal crouching over her. Yt holds her ’hoek in yts hand. Disconnection blow-back. The neurones reel. Najia Askarzadah’s mouth works. There are words she has to say, questions she must ask but she is expelled from otherworld. Tal offers a slim hand, beckons urgently.

“Come on cho chweet, we got to go.”

“My father, it said.”

“Said a lot, baba. Heard a lot. Don’t want to know, that’s you and it, but we have to go now.” Tal seizes her wrist, drags Najia up from her ungainly sprawl across the floor. Yts surprising strength cuts through the spray of flashbacks; apricot trees in winter, a soft black bag opening, walking down the green corridor, the room with the table and the chrome mpeg recorder.

“It showed me my father. It took me back to Kabul, it showed me my father.”

Tal swings Najia through the emergency exit onto a clattering steel stairwell.

“I’m sure it showed you whatever would keep you talking long enough to get karsevaks to our location. Pande called, they’re pulling up. Baba, you trust too much. Me, I’m a nute, I trust no one, least of all myself. Now, are you coming or do you want to end up like our blessed Prime Minister?”

Najia glances back at the curved display screen, the chrome curl of the ’hoek lying on the desk. Comforting illusions. She follows Tal like a little child. The stairwell is a glass cylinder of rain. It is like being inside a waterfall. Hand in hand Najia and Aj pile down the steel steps toward the green exit light.

Thomas Lull sets the last of the three photographs down on the table. Lisa Durnau notices that he has worked a sleight of hand. The order is reversed: Lisa. Lull. Aj. A bunco card trick.

“I’m inclined to the theory that time turns all things into their opposites,” says Thomas Lull. Lisa Durnau faces him across the chipped melamine table. The Varanasi-Patna fast hydrofoil is grossly overloaded, every cubby and corner of cabin space filled with veiled women and badly wrapped bales of possessions and tear-stained children looking around them in open-mouthed confusion. Thomas Lull stirs his plastic cup of chai. “Remember back in Oxford. just before.” He breaks off, shakes his head.

“I did stop them sticking fucking Coca-Cola signs all over Alterre.”

But she cannot tell him what she fears for the world he trusted to her. She had briefly dipped into Alterre while she waited at the Consular Office for the diplomatic status to come through. Ash, charred rock, a nuclear sky. Nothing living. A dead planet. A world as real as any other, in Thomas Lull’s philosophy. She cannot think about that, feel it, grieve for it as she should. Concentrate on what is here, now, laid out in front of you on the tabletop. But coiled in the base of her mind is the suspicion that the extinction of Alterre is linked with the stories and people connecting here.

“Jesus, L. Durnau. A fucking honorary consul.”

“You liked the inside of that police station?”

“As much as you liked taking it up the ass from the Dark Lord. You went into space for them.”

“Only because they couldn’t get you.”

“I wouldn’t have gone.”

She remembers how to look at him. He throws his hands up.

“Okay I’m a fucking liar.” The man perched on the end of their table turns to glare at the dirty-mouthed Westerner. Thomas Lull touches each of the pictures lightly, reverently. “I have no answer to this. Sorry you came all this way to learn that, but I don’t. Do you? Your photo’s there too. All I do know is where we had two mysteries we now have one.” He takes out his palmer, thumbs up the picture he stole of the inside of Aj’s head glinting with the floating diyas of protein processors sets it beside her Tabernacle image.

“I suppose we have to come to some deal. Help me find Aj and prove what I think the truth is about her, I’ll offer what I can with the Tabernacle.”

Lisa Durnau slips the Tablet out of its soft leather pouch and sets it at the opposite end, next to her own Tabernacle picture.

“You come back with me.”

Thomas Lull shakes his head.

“No deal. You pass it on, but I’m not going back.”

“We need you.”

“We? And are you going to tell me it’s my duty as a good citizen not just of America but the whole wide world to make a sacrifice for this epochal moment of first contact with an ‘alien civilization’?”

“Fuck you, Lull.” The man glares again at such profanity from the mouth of a woman. The hydrofoil jolts and booms as it strikes a submerged object.

This monsoon morning the Patna hydrofoil is a refugee scow. Varanasi is a city in spasm. The shockwaves spreading out from Sarkhand Roundabout have crystallised its ancient animosities and hatreds. It is not just the nutes now. It is the Muslims, the Sikhs, the Westerners as the city of Siva convulses, hunting sacrifices. US marines escorted the embassy car from the police station through the hastily erected Bharati army checkpoints. Thomas Lull tried to make sense of the little US flag fluttering boldly from the car’s right wing as jawans and Marines slid looks off each other. Sirens dopplered across the night. A helicopter beat overhead. The convoy cruised past a row of looted small shops; steel security shutters staved in or wrenched out. A Nissan pickup laden with young karsevaks moved alongside. The men bent down to peer in the embassy car. Their eyes were wide with ganja; they carried trishuls, garden forks, antique blades. The driver leered, floored the pedal, and sped off, multiple horns blaring. Everywhere was the smell of wet burning.

“Aj is out there,” Thomas Lull said.

At the hydrofoil dock the rain was falling heavily, tinged with smoke, but the city was venturing out, a peek from a door, a furtive dash past burned-out Marutis and looted Muslim shops, a scurrying phatphat run. There were livelihoods to be made. The city, as if having held its breath, at last allowed itself a slow, trembling exhalation. A steady throng pushed through the narrow streets to the river. With handcarts and cycle drays, with overloaded cycle rickshaws and phatphats, with hooting Marutis and taxis and pickups, the Muslims were leaving. Thomas Lull and Lisa climbed around the hopelessly jammed traffic. Many had abandoned vehicles and were off-loading their salvaged possessions: computers, sewing machines, lathes, great swollen bundles of bedding and clothing wrapped up in blue plastic twine.

“I went to see Chandra at the university,” Thomas Lull said as they pushed through a snarl of abandoned cycle-rickshaws onto the ghat where the separate streams of refuges fused into one Vedic horde at the water’s edge. “Anjali and Jean-Yves were working in human-aeai interfaces; specifically, grafting protein-chip matrices onto neural structures. Direct brain-computer connection.” Lisa Durnau fought to keep Thomas Lull in sight. His gaudy blue surf-shirt was a beacon among the bodies and bundles. One trip on these stone steps and you were dead. “The lawyer gave Aj a photograph. Her, after some kind of operation, with Jean-Yves and Anjali. I recognised the location, it was Patna, on the new ghat at the Bund. Then I remembered something. It was back in Thekkady when I was working the beach clubs. I used to know a lot of the emotics runners, most of it came from Bangalore and Chennai but there was one guy imported it from the north, from the Free Trade Zone at Patna. They had everything you could get from Bangalore for a quarter the price. He used to go on monthly runs, and I remember him telling me about this grey medic, did radical surgery for men and women who didn’t want to be men or women any more, if you get what I mean.”

“Nutes,” Lisa Durnau yelled over the sea of heads. The hydrofoil staff had sealed and barred the gate to the jetty and were lifting money from the hands thrust through the bars to permit refugees to slip aboard. She guessed they were halfway to the gate but she was tiring.

“Nutes,” Thomas Lull shouted back. “It’s a long shot, but if I’m right, it’s the missing piece.”

To what? Lisa Durnau wanted to ask but the crowd surged. The hydrofoil was filling by the second. Refugees were waist deep in the Ganga, holding babies, children up to the boat crew who pushed them ungently back with landing poles. Thomas Lull pulled Lisa Durnau close to him. They fought to the head of the line. The steel gate opened, the steel gate clanged shut. Bodies jammed against the grating.

“Got any green?”

A search of her bag threw up three hundred in traveller’s cheques. Thomas Lull waved them in the air.

“US dollars! US dollars!”

The steward beckoned him forward. His crew shoved back the clingers-on.

“How many how many?” Thomas Lull held up two fingers. “In in.”

They squeezed through the barely open gate, up the gangplank and onto the hydrofoil. Ten minutes later, grossly overloaded, it pulled away from the still-growing crowd on the ghats. To Lisa Durnau, peering through the streaky window, it looked like a blood clot.

In the overcrowded lounge she pushes the Tablet towards Thomas Lull. He thumbs through the pages of data from the Tabernacle.

“So what is it like in space, then?”

“Smelly. Tiring. You spend most of your time out of your head and you never actually get to see anything.”

“Bit like a rock festival. First thing strikes me about this, you assume it’s an artefact of an extraterrestrial civilization.”

“If the Tabernacle is seven billion years old, then why don’t we see the aliens who built it everywhere we look?”

“A variant on the Fermi Paradox—if aliens exist, then where are they? Let’s work through this: if we posit the Tabernacle builders an expansion rate of even one-tenth percent of the speed of light, in seven billion years they would have colonised all the way to the Sculptor Galaxy group.”

“There’d be nothing but them.”

“But all we find is one shitty little asteroid? I don’t think so. Subsidiary point, if it is almost twice as old as our solar system.”

“How did they know we’d be here to find it?”

“That this swirl of Stardust would one day turn into you, me, and Aj. I think we can dismiss that theory. Conjecture two: it’s a message from God.”

“Oh come on, Lull.”

“I’d lay better than evens it’s been whispered at the White House prayer breakfast. The end of the world is at hand.”

“Then that’s the end of the rational worldview. It’s back to the Age of Miracles.”

“Exactly. I like to think my life as a scientist has not been a complete waste. So I’ll stick to theories that have some nugget of rationality in them. Conjecture three, another universe.”

“That thought occurred to me,” says Lisa Durnau.

“If anyone knows what’s out there in the polyverse, it should be you. The Big Bang inflates into a set of separate universes all with slightly differing physical laws. The probability is virtually one hundred percent that there’s at least one other universe with an Aj, a Lull, and a Durnau in it.”

“Seven billion years old?”

“Different physical laws. Times runs faster.”

“Conjecture four.”

“Conjecture four: it’s all a game. Rather, it’s all a simulation. Deep down, physical reality is rules and the application of rules, those simple programmes that give rise to incalculable complexity. Computer virtual reality looks exactly the same. I’ve only been saying this all my life, L. Durnau. But here’s the rub. We’re both fakes. We’re reruns on the final computer at the Omega Point at the end of space-time. The probabilities are always going to be in favour of our reality being a rerun rather than the original.”

“And bugs are appearing in the system. Our mystery seven-billion-year-old asteroid.”

“Implying some imminent plot development for The Sims.”

“You’re not supposed to see the Great and Powerful Oz,” says Lisa Durnau. “We’re definitely not in Kansas any more.”

The chai-wallah passes, swinging his stainless steel urn, chanting his mantra: chat, kafi. Thomas Lull takes a fresh cup.

“I don’t know how you drink that stuff,” Lisa says.

“Conjecture five. For a mysterious alien artefact, it’s a bit clunky. I’ve seen more convincing SFX on Town and Country.”

“I get what you’re saying here. It looks like we built it—if we wanted to send some kind of message to ourselves.”

“One you can’t ignore—an Earth-crossing asteroid, and then make it move out of the way.” Lisa Durnau hesitates. This is beyond blue-sky. “From our future.” “There’s nothing here I don’t see us achieving in a couple of hundred years.”

“It’s a warning?”

“Why else send something back, unless you need to change history pretty damn bad? Our umpteen-great-grand-Lulls and Durnaus have run into something they can’t deal with. But if they gave themselves a couple of hundred years’ head start.”

“I can’t imagine what they’re up against if they can send objects through time and they’re still on the ropes.”

“I can,” says Thomas Lull. “It’s the final war between humans and aeais. We’d be up against Generation Tens by then—one hundred million times the capability of a Gen Three.”

“That means they would operate on the same level as the Wolfram/Friedkin codes that underly our physical reality,” Lisa Durnau says. “In which case.”

“They could directly manipulate physical reality.”

“You’re talking magic here. God, magic. Jesus, Lull. I’ve objections. One: they send it back seven billion years?”

“A gravitational anomaly stirred the dust nebula that became this solar system. A passing black hole would make a dandy anchor point for a timelike wormhole. At least they would know we would be here.”

“Very good, Lull. Try this one. Objection two: as messages go, it’s a bit obtuse. What’s wrong with a simple help we are getting fucked over by Artificial Intelligences with the powers of gods?”

“What do you think the effect of that would be? By the time we work it out, we’ll be ready for what the Tabernacle has to say to us.”

“You’re not convincing me, Lull. Even with Generation Tens and wormholes and the fact that the act of sending a warning splits us off into a universe where we get the head start but dooms them in their universe. even with all that, why the hell are you, me, and an eighteen-year-old girl who can talk to machines so important?”

Thomas Lull shrugs, that maddening, grinning, don’t-know-don’t-care gesture that had always the power to infuriate Lisa when she argued his speculations down in sessions just like this. Now Lull pulls up his stolen images of the inside of Aj’s skull.

“Your side of the deal.”

“All right. For me, this isn’t the mystery. This is the corroboration. The mystery is how she stopped those Awadhi robots. So when we rule out magic and we rule out God all we have left is technology. And that, in there, is technology; technology that could let a human brain communicate directly with a machine. She hacked them.”

“No God, no gods,” says Thomas Lull. Lisa feels a vibration run through the hull of the hydrofoil. The boat throttles back its waterjets, settling down on its foils on its approach to the crowded waters around Patna. Through the glass she makes out the cheap mass-built light industrial units and ex-urban infotech sprawl behind the Ganga’s wide, sandy reefs.

“What does she see? A halo of information around people and things. She sees a bird and tells you its name and species. That sounds like the Birds of Southwest India. In the railway station she tells a family their son has been arrested, what train to get, what lawyers to hire. That’s police reports, the Ahmedabad Yellow pages, and the Mumbai Railroads timetable. In every way, she gets on like someone whose brain is hooked into the net.”

Lisa brushes her fingers lightly over the ghost-drawings on the Tablet.

“All this. is how she does it. I don’t know who she is, I don’t know how Jean-Yves and Anjali came to be caught up in it, but what I know is someone took a girl and turned her into an experiment, some monstrous test bed for new brain/machine interface technology.”

Passengers stir, gather up their dependants and possessions. Their brief respite on water is nearly over, now they must face a strange, new, unknown city.

“I’m with you all the way up to that point, L. Durnau,” says Thomas Lull. “I think it’s the other way round. It’s not a system for a human to interact with a machine. It’s a system for a machine to interact with a human brain. She is an aeai downloaded into a human body. She is the Generation Threes’ first and last ambassador to humanity. I think that’s why we’re all together in the Tabernacle. It’s a prophecy of a meeting.”

She is an orphan in the city of gods and therefore never alone. Gods beat behind her like wings, gods flock around her head, gods roll and tumble at her feet, gods peel apart before her like a million opening doors. She lifts her hand and ten thousand gods flow apart and fuse together again. Every building, every vehicle, every lamp and neon, every street shrine and traffic light, trembles with gods. She can look and read a hundred phatphat licence details, their owners’ dates of birth and addresses, their insurance histories, their credit ratings, their educational qualifications and criminal records, their bank account numbers, their children’s exam results, their wives’ shoe-sizes. Gods fold out of each other like paper streamers. Gods weave through each other like gold threads on a silk loom. Beyond the air-glow the night horizon is a jewelled crown of deities. Beneath the traffic boom, the sirens, the raised voices and car horns and blaring music, nine million gods whisper to her.

Violence here, warns the god of the gali that leads off the brightly lit street of chai bars and snack stalls. She halts as she hears a rising roar of male voices funnelling down the narrow, jharoka-lined alley. Student karsevaks come roaring forth. She picks one out of god-space: Mangat Singhal: mechanical engineering student at the University of Bharat. He has been a paid-up Youth Member of the Shivaji for three years; he has had two arrests for riotous behaviour at the Sarkhand Roundabout protest. His mother has smoking-related cancer of the throat and will likely go to the ghats before the year is out. This way, says the god of the taxi rank, showing her the Maruti cruising beyond the panicked chai-wallahs hastily putting up their steel grilles. Damage estimated at twenty thousand rupees, the god of small insurance claims tells her as she hears the crash of a chai-stall overturned behind her by karsevaks. Unclaimable under public disturbance exemptions. You will intersect with your taxi in thirty-five seconds. Left here. And she is there as the Maruti comes round the corner and stops for her hand.

“Don’t go there,” the driver says when she gives him the address out in the basti.

“I will pay you much money.” ATM next on right, the god of the shopping arcade says. “Stop here.” The card goes in without hesitation, without question, without need for number or face scan. How much do you require? asks the god of electronic banking. She gives it a five-digit number. It is so long coming out of the slot she worries the driver might move on to a safer fare. Cab licence number VRJ117824C45 is still stationary at the curb, advises the god that animates the traffic cameras. She blinks up to its elevated viewpoint, sees herself, close in at the ATM trying to fold fat wads of cash, sees the cab behind her, sees the small convoy of army hummers blast past.

“Will this suffice?” She thrusts the bouquet of notes in the driver’s face. “Baba, for this I will drive you to Delhi itself.”

He is a driver who likes to talk; riot riot riot; any excuse at all, why aren’t they concentrating on their studies instead of burning things up, when they try to get jobs, that’s when it’ll all come home, oh I see you were in trouble with the police for riotous behaviour, no, no jobs here for gundas and badmashes, but what about Sajida Rana, the Prime Minister, can you believe it, her own bodyguard, our Prime Minister, Mama Bharat, and what are we going to do, has anything thought of that? and god help us when we fall over, the Awadhis will roll right over us. Aj watches the gods flow in squadrons and chapters and orders and pile up behind her into an incandescent hemisphere over the city. She taps the driver on the shoulder. He almost steers into a brick and plastic roadside hovel.

“Your wife is well and safe and will spend the night at her mother’s until it is safe to come home.”

She leaves him shortly after. Gods are few as stars in a night sky here. They hover around the big yellow sodium lights on the main avenues, over the cars that swoosh past in the rain, they flicker up and down the communications cables like fire but the bastis beyond are black, unholy. Whispers guide her into the darkness. The world turns the city burns but the slum must sleep. A startled face in an all-night chai-stall stares at her as if she is a djinn, whirled out of the storm. Keep on along here until you come to a big power pylon, whispers the god of the MTV-Asia cable-channel on the pale blue screen. Divinities are draped from the girders of the big power tower like leaves on a tree. Left side, they say. The one with two steps down and the plastic fertiliser bag for the door. It is easily found, even in streaming, stinking darkness, when gods guide you. She feels out the contours of the rag house. The plastic door-sheet rustles at her touch. Lives awake within. Here is where the DNA in the database leads her. Beyond her the true light of dawn glows grey and wan through the god-glow. Aj lifts the plastic and ducks under the lintel.

They shout and they hammer for twenty minutes but the good doctor Nanak is not receiving visitors this day. The doors are sealed, the hatches dogged, the windows shuttered and locked with big bright brass padlocks. Thomas Lull bangs his fist on the grey door. “Come on, open the fuck up!”

In the end he lobs metal scrap up at the meshed-over bridge windows while the rain gathers into ever larger puddles on the grey decking. The barrage attracts the attention of the Australians on the next barge. Two bare-chested twentysomethings in calf-length jams come over the ramp. Water drips from their blond dreads but they move through the rain as if it is their natural environment. Lisa Durnau, sheltering under an awning, checks their abs. They have those little muscle groin grooves that point down under their waistbands.

“Mate, if the guru ain’t in, he ain’t in.”

“I saw something moving up there.” Thomas Lull shouts again. “Hey! I see you, come out, there’s things I want to ask you.”

“Look, bit of respect for a fella’s peace,” says second fit boy. He wears a carved jade spiral on a leather thong around his neck. “The guru is not giving interviews, no one, nowhere, no-how. Okay?”

“I am not a fucking journalist, and I am not a fucking karsevak,” Thomas Lull declares and starts to climb the superstructure.

“Lull,” Lisa Durnau groans.

“Oh no you don’t,” the first Australian shouts and together they seize Thomas Lull by the legs and pull him off the bridge. He hits the deck with a meaty thump.

“Now, you have definitely outstayed your welcome,” green spiral boy says and they wrestle Thomas Lull to his feet, pin his arms, and navigate him towards the main arterial companionway between the barges. Lisa Durnau decides it’s time to do something.

“Nanak!” she calls up at the bridge. A figure moves behind the mesh and the dirty glass. “We’re not journalists. It’s Lisa Durnau and Thomas Lull. We want to talk to you about Kalki.”

The door to the flying bridge opens. A face muffled in shawls peep out, a face like Hanuman the monkey god.

“Let him go.”

Nanak the dream surgeon bustles around the bridge making tea the proper way. The interior is oddly louche in its cod-colonial wicker and bamboo after the clanging industrial superstructure.

“Apologies apologies for my reticence.” Nanak fusses with pots and a folding brass Benares table. Lisa Durnau sips her chai and subtly studies her host. Nutes are not a common sex in Kansas. The details of yts skin, the subtle ridges down yts bare left arm that are the subdermal controls for the sexual system, fascinate her. She wonders how it is to programme your emotions, to design your fallings-in-love and heartbreaks, to reengineer your hopes and fears. She wonders how many kinds of orgasms you could create. But the question foremost in her mind is: was it male or female? The body shape, the fat distribution, the clothes—a deliberate eclectic mix favouring the floating and the floppy, give no indication. Male, she decides. Men are fragile and fluid in their sexual identities. Nanak continues pouring chai. “We have been victimised of late. The Australians look after me well, lovely boys. And the work here does demand discretion. But: Professor Thomas Lull, a great honour for a humble factor of surgical services.”

Thomas Lull unfolds his palmer and places it on the brass table. Nanak winces at the display.

“This was the most complex operation I have ever brokered. Weeks of work. They virtually unravelled her brain. Lobes and folds drawn out and suspended on wires. Extraordinary.”

Lisa Durnau sees Thomas Lull’s face tighten. Nanak touches him on the knee.

“She is well?”

“She is trying to find out who her true parents are. She’s realised that her life is lies.” Nanak’s mouth forms a voiceless Oh. “I am but a broker of services.”

“Was it these two hired you?” Thomas Lull thumbs up the picture from the temple that had first sent him on this pilgrimage.

“Yes,” Nanak says, folding yts hands in yts shawl. “They represented a powerful Varanasi sundarban, the Badrinath sundarban. The legendary abode of Vishnu, I believe. I was paid two million US dollars in a banker’s draft drawn on the account of the Odeco Corporation. I can furnish you with the details if you require. Almost half the budget went on wetware applications, we had to find a way of programming memory; emotic designers are not cheap, though I like to think we have some of the best in the whole of Hindustan in this zone.”

“Budget,” Thomas Lull spits. “Like a fucking television programme.”

Now Lisa Durnau has to speak.

“Her adoptive parents in Bangalore, do they actually exist?”

“Oh, entirely false, madam. We spent much money on creating a credible back-story. It had to be convincing that she was human, with a childhood and parents and a past.”

“Why, is she.” Lisa Durnau asks, dreading the answer.

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

Nanak rocks on yts chair.

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

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

“Three only, I believe.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This way.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Krishan. We have to go back. I can’t go. We were wrong.”

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

“Krishan, the ticket-wallah!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then the shots bang out; short, stabbing bursts of automatic fire. The mob on the platform drops as one, covers heads with hands. Cries, shrieks, and the dreadful, unappeasable wail of the injured: the soldiers are not shooting to scare this time. Parvati feels Krishan’s hand close on her. Bullets crack out again. She sees flashes, hears the clang of shells ricocheting off the stanchions. Krishan gives a strange little sigh, then his grip tightens around hers and he draws her up, on to the train.

On the return trip Lisa and Thomas Lull are the only passengers in the lounge. It feels big and plasticy and exposed under its unkind fluorescents so Lisa Durnau suggests they go outside to regard the holy river. Sacred water is a new concept to Lisa Durnau. They stand side by side at the rail, buffeted by flaws of rain watching the sandy banks and rusty tin water abstraction plants. An object breaks the surface. Lisa wonders if it is one of the blind river dolphins she read about on the flight up from Thiruvananthapuram. Dolphin or dead. Certain classes of Hindus cannot be cremated and are surrendered to the mercy of Ganga Mata.

Once in a conference she flopped plane/train/taxi-lagged into a leather armchair in the lobby opposite an African delegate reclining generously in a seat. She nodded to him, wide-eyed, dazed, whoooo. He nodded back, patted his hands on the arms of the chair. “Just letting my soul catch up with me.” She needs to do that. Catch up with herself. Find a time out from the succession of one event to the next, that’s not filled with some person or thing or problem coming at her, frozen in the headlights of history. Stop reacting, take time, take a step, let your soul catch up. She would love to go for a run. Barring that, some time with a sacred river.

She looks at Thomas Lull. In his stance at the rail she sees four years, she sees uncertainty, she sees fading of confidence, cooling of ardour and energy. When did you last burn with passion about anything? she thinks. She sees a man in his middle years who looks at death every day. She sees almost nothing of the man she had dirty, grown-up sex with in an Oxford College shower. It is absolutely over, she thinks and feels sorry for him. He looks so very tired.

“So tell me, L. Durnau, do you ever, you know, see Jen around?”

“Occasionally, at the mall, sometimes the Jayhawks games. She’s got someone else.”

“I thought that even before. You know. Same way as you know when it’s on. Chemicals or something. Does she look happy?”

“Happy enough.” Lisa Durnau anticipates his inevitable next question. “No baby buggies.”

He looks at the passing shore, the white temple shikaras hazy against the rain clouds beyond the dark line of trees. Buffalo loll in the water, lifting their heads against the spreading hydrofoil wake.

“I know why Jean-Yves and Anjali did it, why they left her that photograph. I’d wondered why they should punch a hole right through the heart of it. Anjali never could have children, you know.”

“Aj was their surrogate daughter.”

“They felt they owed her the truth. Better to find out what she really was than be a life of illusions. To be human is to be disillusioned.”

“You don’t agree with that!”

“I haven’t your stern Calvinist mien. I’m comfortable with illusion. I don’t think I would have had the courage or the callousness to do that to her.”

But you also walked away, Lisa Durnau thinks. You also abandoned friends, career, reputation, lovers; it was easy for you, turn around and walk away and never look back.

“But she came looking for you,” Lisa Durnau says.

“I don’t have any answers for her,” Thomas Lull says. “Why do you have to have answers? You’re born not fucking knowing anything, you go through your life not fucking knowing anything, you die and you never know any fucking thing ever again. That’s the mystery of it. I am nobody’s guru, not yours, not NASA’s, not some aeai’s. You know something? All those articles and TV appearances and conferences? I was making it up as I went along. That’s all. Alterre? Just something I made up some day.”

Lisa Durnau grips the rail with both hands.

“Lull, Alterre’s gone.”

She cannot read his face, his stance, his muscles. She tries to provoke a reaction.

“Gone, Lull, everything. All eleven million servers, crashed. Extinct.”

Thomas Lull shakes his head. Thomas Lull frowns. His brow creases. Then Lisa sees an expression on his face she knows so well herself: the bafflement, wonderment, enlightenment of idea.

“What was always behind Alterre?” he says. “That a simulated environment.”

“Might eventually produce real intelligence.” The words come in a rush. “What if we succeeded better than we ever hoped? What if Alterre didn’t breed sentience, but the whole thing became alive. aware. Kalki is the tenth avatar of Vishnu. It sits there at the top of Alterre’s evolutionary pyramid, preserver and sustainer of all life; all things proceed from it and are of its substance. Then it reaches out and there’s another world of life out there, not part of it, separate, disconnected, utterly alien. Is it a threat, is it a blessing, is it something altogether other? It has to know. It has to experience.”

“But if Alterre has crashed.”

He chews in his bottom lip and goes quiet and dark, looking out at the rain in the great river. Lisa Durnau tries to count the impossibilities he has had to absorb. After a time he reaches out a hand. “Give me that thing. I need to find Aj. If Vishnu is gone, she’s unplugged from the net. All her life is illusion and now even the gods have abandoned her. What is she going to be thinking, feeling?”

Lisa slips the Tablet out of its flesh-soft leather holster and passes it to Thomas Lull. It emits a deep, chiming scale. Thomas Lull almost drops it in surprise. Lisa intercepts the thing on its way to moksha in the Ganga. A voice and image appear in her perceptions: Daley-Suarez Martin.

“Something’s happened at the Tabernacle. They’ve got another signal out of it.” The Tablet displays a fourth face, a man, a Bharati, so much is obvious even in the low-resolution cellular automaton image; a thin-boned, drawn man. Lisa Durnau can make out the collar of a Nehru suit. She thinks he has an unutterably sad face. There is an ident line attached.

“I think you’d better find your friend quick,” she says. “This is Nandha. He’s a Krishna Cop.”

She flees from the house into the grey light. The rain falls on Scindia Basti. The bare feet of the women fetching water from the pumps have churned the alleys to fetid mud. The sewers overflow. The men also are about in the dawn, to buy and sell, maybe hire themselves to dig a ditch for a cable, maybe have a cup of chai, maybe see if there is anything left of the city.

They stare at the girl with the Vishnu tilak, shoving past them, running as if Kali rising is on her heels.

Eyes in the dark in the house by the pylon left’s foot. “We are poor people, we have nothing you can possibly want, please leave us in peace.” Then the scratch and flare of the match and the arc of light through the darkness as it moved to touch the wick of the little clay diya, the bud of light swelling and filling the clay-floored room. Then, the cries of fear.

Vehicles roar at her; metal looms huge, then recedes into the rain. Thundering voices, bodies pressing around her that seem the size of clouds. A river of motion and alcofueled peril. She is on the street and she does not know how. The certainties and divine guidances of the night have evaporated in the light. For the first time there is no clear distinction between god and human. She is not sure she can find her way back to the hotel.

Aid me.

The skyline crawls with the chaotic moire patterns of gods meshing, blurring, flowing, breeding into strange new configurations.

“What are you doing in this house?” She cries out, claps her hands to her ears as the remembered voice speaks again in her skull. The women’s faces in the glow of the grease lamp, one old, one younger, one youngest. A wail had gone up from the old woman; like something long and fragile tearing inside.

“What are you doing here? You have no place here!” A hand, held in a mudra against the evil eye. The youngest’s eyes wide with fear, wet with tears. “Get out of this house, there is no place for you here. Don’t be deceived. See her, see her? See what they have done? Ah, this is an evil thing, a djinn, a demon!” The old woman rocking now, eyes closed, moaning. “Away from us! This is not your home, you are not our sister!”

Entreaties never offered. Answers never spoken. Questions never worded. And the old woman, the old woman; her mother, her hand in front of her eyes as if Aj blinded her, as if she burned with a fire that could not be looked upon. On the street, underneath the monsoon rain, she cries out, a long, thin wail torn out of the heart of her. She understands now.

Fear: that is white, without surface or texture or anything you can lay a hand on to move or manipulate and it feels like rot in the base of you and you want to roll up and ask it to pass you over, like a rain-cloud, but it will never do that.

Loss bites and pulls. It is a thing of hooks sunk into every part of you, parts that you would not think could feel loss like thumbs and lips, hooks moored to wind and memory so that the slightest disturbance, the slightest act of recall, tugs at those fine lines. Red is the colour of loss and its smell is like burned roses.

Abandonment, that tastes like sick in the back of your throat, always on the edge of coming up; it feels like dizzy, like walking along the edge of a high stone harbour over a sea that glimmers and moves so far below you cannot be certain where it is, but brown, brown; abandonment is empty dull brown.

Desperation: a universal background hum, grey noise, part drone part hiss, a stifling, blurring, smudging of everything into soft grey. Universal rain. Universal yielding, into which you can push beyond the reach of any of your limbs and still touch nothing. Universal insulation. That is desperation.

Yellow is the colour of uncertainty, sick yellow, yellow like bile, yellow like madness, yellow like flowers that open their petals around you and whirl and spin so you cannot decide which is best, which is most perfect, which has the most gorgeous, cloying scent; yellow like acid that eats away at everything you think you know until you stand on a rotted filigree of rust and you are at once smaller than the tiniest grain of yellow pollen and vast beyond vastness, containing cities.

Shock is a numb pressure trying to smear your brain over the back of your skull. Betrayal is translucent blue, so cold cold cold. Incomprehension feels like a hair on the tongue.

And anger is heavy like a hammer but so light it can fly with its own wings, and the darkest, darkest rust.

This is what it is to be human.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she shouts at the gods as the street breaks around her and rain falls on her upturned face.

And the gods answer: we never knew. We never thought. And again: now we understand. Then one by one they extinguish like diyas in the rain.

Shiv can’t place the smell. It’s sweet, it’s musky, it reminds him of things he can’t fully remember and it’s coming from the dataraja Ramanandacharya. He’s a fat bastard but they all are. Fat and quivering. Doesn’t look so cool in those robes and gowns now. Shiv particularly hares the old-school Mughal-style moustaches. He’d love to cut them off but Yogendra needs to keep the hooked tip of the big knife at Ramanandacharya’s groin. One small wrist movement there will sever the femoral artery. Shiv knows the surgery. The raja will bleed out in under four minutes.

They walk up the sloping wet cobbles from the Hastings Pavilion to the Temple, close as lovers or drunks.

“How many have you got there?” Shiv whispers, nudging Ramanandacharya with his shoulder. “Back there, how many women, huh?”

“Forty,” says Ramanandacharya. Shiv cuffs him with the back of his hand. He knows it’s the pills, making him impatient, bolder than a clever man should be, but he likes the feel of it.

“Forty women? Where you get them from, huh?” Nudge.

“All over, Philippines, Thailand, Russians, anywhere cheap, you know?” Again, the rap with the back of the hand. Ramanandacharya cringes. They pass the sentry robot, crouched down on its steel hams.

“Any good Bharati women in there?”

“Couple from the village. ah!” Shiv cuffs harder now, Ramanandacharya rubs his ear. Shiv takes a fold of rich gold-threaded silk between his fingers, feels the subtle weave, the skin-smoothness, the lightness.

“Do they like this, huh? All this Mughal shit?” He shoves Ramanandacharya with both hands. The dataraja stumbles on a step. Yogendra flicks the knife away. “Why couldn’t you have been a Hindu, huh?”

Ramanandacharya shrugs.

“Mughal Fort,” he offers weakly. Shiv hits him again.

“Mughal Fort fuck!” He slides in close to the ear. “So how often do you, you know? Every night?”

“Lunchtimes too.” The sentence vanishes into a sharp cry as Shiv hits Ramanandacharya hard on the side of the head.

“Fucking dirty chuutya!” He knows what the smell is now. That sweet, sour, musky, dark smell from Ramanandacharya’s robes and jewels: sex.

“Eh,” says Yogendra. The swarm of robots has left its orbit of the Lodi temple and streams across the courtyard towards the trio, a black, oily arrow. Plastic peds rattle on the cobbles. Their wet carapaces glint blackly. Ramanandacharya tuts and sighs and twists the ring on his left pinky. The swarms part like that sea in that Christian story, the kind American missionaries put into the heads of good young women to turn them into unmarriageable things that can never get proper husbands.

“They’d have had your feet down to the bones in twenty seconds,” Ramanandacharya says.

“Fuck up, fat boy.” Shiv smacks him again because he was scared by the scarab robots. Ramanandacharya takes a step, takes another. The ring of robots flows with him. Yogendra brushes the knife tip against Ramanandacharya’s groin.

The temple colonnade is the same dismal, dripping shell of graffittied plaster and folk-art religious daubings Shiv scanned from the battlement but Ramanandacharya’s Kirlian signature activates banks of blue flood lamps and Shiv finds he is holding his breath. The suddhavasa within is a cube of translucent plastic, glowing at the edges under the sharp blue light. The scarab robots fall back into their orbit. Ramanandacharya lifts his hands to the translucent plastic yoni of the airlock door. A digit pad resolves out of the fluid surface.

Ramanandacharya moves to tap in a code; the knife flashes, Ramanandacharya cries out, seizes his hand. Blood wells from a hairline cut down his right forefinger.

“You do it.” Yogendra waves the knife blade at Shiv.

“What?”

“He could have tricks, traps, things we don’t know. He thinks soon as we have it, he’s going to die anyway. You use the code.”

Ramanandacharya’s eyes widen as Shiv takes out the palmer and starts to enter the door password.

“Where did you get this? Dane? Where’s Dane?”

“Hospital,” Shiv says. “Cat got his tongue.” Yogendra giggles. The pad sinks back into the surface of the smart plastic (which Shiv thinks is cooler than he will ever allow to a chuutya like Ramanandacharya) and the door clicks anticlimactically open.

The decryption system is a luminous plastic garbhagriha small enough to make Shiv itchily claustrophobic.

“Where’s the computer?” Shiv asks.

“The whole thing is the computer,” Ramanandacharya says and with a wave of his hands turns the walls translucent. Protein circuitry woven dense as Varanasi silk, as nerve fibres, is packed into the walls. Fluids bubble around the net of artificial neurones. Shiv notices he’s shivering in his wet combats.

“Why is it so fucking cold in here?”

“My central quantum processing unit needs a constant low temperature.”

“Your what?”

Ramanandacharya runs his hands over a slotted titanium cylinder head in the otherwise blemishless plastic wall.

“He dreams in code,” he says. Shiv bends forward to read the inscription on the metal disc. Sir William Gates.

“What is this?”

“An immortal soul. Or so he believed. Uploaded memories, a bodhisoft. How the Americans imagine they can beat death. One of the greatest minds of his generation—all this is because of him. Now he works for me.”

“Just get me this file and put it on here.” Shiv smacks Ramanandacharya on the side of the head with the palmer.

“Oh, not the Tabernacle crypt, the CIA will kill me, I am a dead man,” Ramanandacharya pleads then shuts his foolish blabbering mouth up, summons another code pad out of the plastic, and enters a short sequence. Shiv thinks about the frozen soul. He’s read of these things, circling in bangles of superconducting ceramic. All of a life: its sex, its books, its music and magazines, its friends and dinners and cups of coffee, its lovers and enemies, its moments when you punch your fists in the air and go jai! and when you want to kill everything, all reduced down to something you give a woman in a bar to slip around her wrist.

“One thing,” Ramanandacharya says as he passes the loaded palmer to Shiv, “what do you want it for?”

“N. K. Jivanjee wants to talk to men from space,” Shiv says. He slips the palmer into one of his many pants pockets. “Let’s get out of here.” The trick with the ring parts the scarab robots again; Shiv sees on Ramanandacharya’s face that he thinks they will let him go, then sees that face change as Yogendra prods him with the gun to walk on. It is not a pretty or edifying thing, to see a fat man wet with fear. Shiv cuffs the dataraja again.

“Will you stop that, that is so annoying,” Ramanandacharya flares.

Yogendra makes him take them back down through the tourist gate into the old Indian army camp. They squeeze through the gap in the sheeting. Shiv mounts his bike, kicks up the engine. Good and true little Japanese motor. He looks round for Yogendra, finds him standing over the kneeling Ramanandacharya with the muzzle of the Stechkin in the dataraja’s mouth. He licks it. He runs his tongue round the muzzle, licking it lapping it loving it. Yogendra grins.

“Leave him!”

Yogendra frowns, genuinely, deeply vexed. “Why? He’s over and done.”

“Leave him. We got to go.”

“He can call people up after us.”

“Leave him!”

Yogendra makes no move.

“Fuck you!” Shiv dismounts, pulls out a brace of taser mines and drops them in a ring around Ramanandacharya. “Now leave him.” Yogendra shrugs, puts up his piece and slides it inside his pants pocket. Shiv thumbs the control switch that arms the mines.

“Thank you thank you thank you,” Ramanandacharya weeps.

“Don’t beg, I hate begging,” Shiv says. “Have some fucking dignity, man.” Nawab of fucking Chunar. Let’s see any of your forty women sleep with you after this. Shiv twists the throttle and rips off on the Japanese trail bike, Yogendra on his wheel. The deed is done, there is no need for stealth or caution. It’s lights on engines open roaring down through the town past the glowing egg of the data centre and then the last light of Chunar and the exultation hits. It is done. They got it and they are getting away. A fringe of rain-soaked dawn lights the eastern horizon; by the time it fully opens, Shiv realises, he will be back in his city and he will have his prize and all his owings will be paid and he will be free, he will be a raja and no one will dare deny him again. He lets out a whoop, sends his bike careering madly all over the road, swooping from one side to the other, yipping and cawing and yawping crazier than any of the crazy jackals out there in the night. He swings deliberately close to the soft edge of the road, taunting the cracked blacktop, the treacherous gravel. Nothing can touch Shiv Faraji.

On an inside sweep, Shiv hears it. Running feet in the rural predawn. Titanium-shod feet, as much felt through the bike’s suspension as heard, gaining on them, faster than any running thing should. Shiv glances back. There is enough light in the sky to make out the pursuer. It holds its body low to the ground, poised, balanced; it paces on two strong legs like some monstrous demon bird released upon them from the high castle. It is gaining steadily. A glance at the speedo tells Shiv it is doing at least eighty.

Yogendra opens up his throttles a second after Shiv but to take the bikes up to the max on this crumbling, greasy rural road is as sure a death as the thing loping behind them. Shiv bends low over the handlebars, trying to make himself as small a target as possible for whatever esoteric firepower the machine carries. The turnoff must be soon. He can hear the metal beat over the drone of the Yokohama motor. That tree, that poster for bottled water, it’s here, surely. So busy looking, he almost misses Yogendra swing the bike across the blacktop and off on to the farm path. Panicked, Shiv brakes, oversteers, sticks a foot, almost spills across the country road before he brings the bike on to the sand track.

He saw it. There, behind him, down that road, pounding away, grey in the indigo, like it would never stop, never tire, keep running and running after them round the whole round world.

The dal bushes give way to hard-packed sand pocked with rain. The tires kick up sprays of hardpan and there is the boat, where they left it, anchor run into the sand, pulled round on the current, low in the river from heavy bilges, and there is a Brahmin beside it, waist deep in the stream, his thread across his shoulder, pouring water from his cupped hands and chanting the dawn salutation of Mother Ganga. Shiv skids the bike to a halt, splashes into the water, starts to heave the hot machine into the boat.

“Leave leave leave!” Yogendra screams.

The Brahmin chants.

“They can track us through them,” Shiv yells.

“They can track us through the mines.” Yogendra runs his bike down into the stream, it falls with a splash, starts to fade into the river quicksand. He pulls up the anchor as Shiv rolls into the boat. It rocks sickeningly and there is a nasty amount of water under the seating but by now he cannot get any wetter but he can be a lot more dead. The robots looms over the dune crest and rears up to its full height. It is some evil stalking rakshasa, part bird part spider, unfolding palps and manipulators and a brace of machine guns from its mandibles.

The Brahmin stares at that.

Yogendra dives for the engine. Pull one pull two. The hunter takes a step down the sandy bank to better its aim. Pull three. The engine starts. The boat surges away. Ramanandacharya’s machine takes a leap to land knee-joint deep in the water. Its head swivels on to target. Yogendra heads for the centre of the stream. The robot wades after them. Then Shiv remembers Anand’s clever little grenade in one of his pockets. Bullets send the water exploding up behind Yogendra in the stern. He dives flat. The Brahmin in the shallows crouches, covers his head. The grenade lobs through the air in a graceful, glittering arc. It falls with a splash. There is nothing to see, nothing to hear but the tiniest of cracks that is the capacitors discharging. The robot freezes. The guns veer skywards, ripping the dawn with bullets. It sags on its knees, goes down like a gutshot gunda. Its mandibles and graspers flex open, it tips forward into the silt. The soft silvery quicksand takes it almost immediately.

Shiv stands in the boat. He points at the felled robot. He laughs, huge, helpless, joyful laughter. He cannot stop. Tears stream down his face, mingling with the rain. He can hardly draw breath. He has to sit down. It hurts, it hurts.

“Should have killed him,” Yogendra mutters at the tiller. Shiv waves him away. Nothing can press down or nay-say him. The laughter passes into joy, a simple, searing ecstasy that he is alive, that it is over now. He lies back on the bench, lets the rain fall on his face and looks up at the purple banding of clouds that is another day unfurling over his Varanasi, another day for Shiv. Shiv raja. Maha raja. Raja of rajas. Maybe he will work for the Naths again; maybe his name will open other doors for him; maybe he will go into his own business, not body parts, not meat, meat betrays. Maybe he will go to that lavda Anand and make him an offer.

He can make plans again. And he can smell marigolds.

A small noise, a small movement of the boat.

The knife goes in so smooth, so thin and clean, so sharp so pure it challenges Shiv to express its shock. It is exquisite. It is unutterable. The blade stabs cleanly through skin, muscle, blood vessels, serrated edge grating along rib until the hooked tip rests inside his lung. There is no pain, only a sense of perfect sharpness, and of the blood foaming into his punctured lung. The blade kicks inside him to the pulse of his body. Shiv tries to speak. The sounds click and bubble and will not form words. It stays like this for a long time, wide-eyed with shock. Then Yogendra pulls the blade and pain shrieks from Shiv as the knife hooks out his lung. He turns to Yogendra, hands raised to fend off the next blow. The knife comes twisting in again, Shiv catches it between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. The knife cuts deep, down to the joint, but he holds it. He holds it. Now he can hear the frenzied puffing of two men caught in a fight of death. They strike at each other in desperate silence as the boat wallows. With his free hand Yogendra grabs for the palmer. Shiv slaps out, grabs for Yogendra, for anything. He seizes the string of pearls around the boy’s neck, pulls it tight, grips it hard to hold himself up. Yogendra whips the knife free from Shiv’s grasp, ripping the barbed edge along the bone. Shiv lets out a high, keening whine that passes into a bloody, drowning burble. His breath flutters the edge of his wound. Then Shiv sees the loathing, the contempt, the animal arrogance and disdain the grey light reveals in Yogendra’s face and he knows that he has always felt this, always looked this way at him that this blade was always coming. He reels back. The string snaps. Pearls bounce and roll. Shiv slips on the pearls, loses balance, wheels, flails; goes over.

The water takes him cleanly, wholly. The roar of the traffic transmitted through the concrete piers deafens him. He is deaf, blind, dumb, weightless. Shiv wrestles, thrashes. He does not know which way is up, where is air, light. Blue. He is embedded in blue. Everywhere he looks, blue, forever in every direction. And black, like smoke, his blood twining upwards. The blood, follow the blood. But he has no strength and the air bubbles from the gash in his back, he kicks but does not move, punches but does not stir Shiv fights water, sinking deeper in to the blue, drawn down by his weaponry. His lungs burn. There is nothing left in them but poison, ashes of his body, but he cannot open his mouth, take that final, silent whoop of water even though he knows he is dead. His head pounds, his eyeballs are bursting, he sees his half-severed thumb wave futilely in the blue, the great blue as he kicks and thrashes for life.

Blue, drawing him down. He thinks he sees a pattern in it; in the dying fascination of brain cells burning out one by one he makes out a face. A woman’s face. Smiling. Come Shiv. Priya? Sai? Breathe. He must breathe. He kicks, struggles. He has a huge erection in his heavy, dragging combat pants laden with esoteric cyberweaponry and he knows what must happen. But Yogendra will not have the crypt. Breathe. He opens his mouth, his lungs and the blue rushes in and he sees in the decaying embers of his brain who it is down there. It is not Sai. It is not Priya. It is the gentle, homely face of the woman he gave to the river, the woman whose ovaries he stole for nothing, smiling, beckoning him to join her in the river and the blue and redemption.

“The first rule of comedy,” says Vishram Ray checking the set of his collar in the gentlemen’s washroom mirror, “is confidence: every day, every way; we’re radiating confidence.”

“I thought the first rule of comedy was.”

“Timing,” Vishram interrupts Marianna Fusco, perched on the lip of the next washbasin in the line. Inder and various staffers Vishram never knew he had have sealed the Research Centre toilets off to all comers, whatever the state of their bladder or bowels. “That’s the second rule. This is the Vishram Ray Book of Comedy.”

But he hasn’t been this scared since he first stepped out into that single spot shining down on the chrome shaft of the mike stand with an idea he had about budget airline travel. No place to hide behind that mike. No place to hide in that minimalist wooden room with the single construction-carbon table in the centre. Because the truth is, his timing is shit. Calling a major board meeting in the middle of an assassination crisis, with enemy tanks lined up a day’s drive sunset-wards. And it’s the monsoon, just to add a little meteorological misery to the whole shebang. No, Vishram Ray thinks as he checks his shave in the mirror. His timing is perfect. This is real comedy.

So why does it feel like eighteen different cancers eating him up?

Shave okay, aftershave within tolerable limits, cuffs check, cufflinks check.

The chemical rush does wonderfully clear the mind of Kalis and Brahmas and M-Star theory multiverses. Comedy is always in the moment. And the true first rule, in the Book of Comedy or the Book of Business, is persuasion. Laughter, like parting with wealth, is a voluntary weakness.

Jacket okay, shirt okay, shoes immaculate.

“Ready to rock?” Marianna Fusco says, crossing her legs in a way that makes Vishram imagine his face between them. “Hey, funny man.” The most casual of hand gestures indicates the neat little line of coke on the black marble. “Just in case.”

“Lenny Bruce wasn’t desi,” Vishram says. He lets out a huff of tense breath. “Let’s do it.” Marianna Fusco slips off her marble perch and scoops the line straight down the washhand basin.

If she’d offered him a cigarette.

Vishram strides down the corridor. His leather soles give the slightest of creaks on the polished wood inlay, Marianna and Inder are at his back, every step he walks a little taller, a little prouder. The warm-up has the audience now, working them, getting the juices flowing, you on the left clap your hands, you on the right whistle, you up there in the gods, just roar! For! Mister! Vishram! Raaaaaaaay!

The carved wooden doors swing open and every face around the transparent table locks on to Vishram. Without a word his entourage splits around the table and takes their assigned places, Inder on his right-hand side, Marianna Fusco on his left, their advisors flying wing. Inder had been rehearsing them since five that morning. As he sets his palmer and ornately inlaid wooden document wallet (no leather: the policy of an ethical, Hindu power company) in his place at the head of the table, Vishram nods to Govind on the right, Ramesh on the left. Ramesh, he notes, has at least invested in a decent suit. His beard looks a little less scraggy. Signs. It’s no different for a stand-up or a suit, it’s all reading the signs. Team Vishram waits for its leader to sit. The advisors eyeball each other. Vishram checks out the shareholders. Inder-online has a clever little briefing feature that automatically gives him a profile, percentage control, voting history, and a probability on how they will swing in this one. Many of the shareholders are virtual, either on video link or represented by aeai agents modelled on their personalities. No US boardroom would recognise this as shareholder democracy. Vishram switches off Inder’s clever little toy. He’ll do this the old way, the stand-up’s way. He’ll search for the subtle graces, the potential in the set of that mouth to turn into a smile, the invitation in the corners of those eyes that say, go on then, entertain me.

The battle lines are by no means obvious. Even within his own division, there are major holders like SKM ProSearch who will vote against him. Too close to call. A glance to hider, a glance to Marianna. Vishram Ray stands up. The bubble of conversation around the table bursts.

“Ladies, gentlemen, shareholders of Ray Power, material and virtual.” The boardroom door opens. Clear in his line of sight, his mother slips into the room and takes a seat by the wall. “Thank you all for coming here this morning, some of you at considerable personal risk. This meeting is inevitably overshadowed by recent events, most fatefully by the brutal assassination of our Prime Minister Sajida Rana. I’m sure you would all echo my thoughts and sympathies for the Rana family at this time.” A murmur of assent from around the table. “I for one fully support the efforts of our new Government of National Salvation to restore us to our customary order and strength. I’m sure some of you must have questioned the appropriateness of carrying on this meeting in the light of the political situation. I could tell you that I would not have done so unless I felt it was in the highest interests of this company. It is, but there is another principle I feel needs upheld at times like these. The eyes of the world are on Bharat, and I believe it needs to be shown that, for Ray Power at least, it is business as usual.”

A nodding of heads together, soft, slow applause. Vishram surveys the room.

“Without doubt, most of you are surprised to find yourself back so soon at another Ray Power board meeting. It is only a couple of weeks since my father dropped his, if you’ll pardon the expression, bombshell. They have been a full and lively two weeks, I assure you, and I should warn you now, I fully intend for this meeting to be no less shocking—or transforming.”

A moment for audience reaction. His throat is as dry as a Rajasthan shitpipe but he won’t let slip even the weakness of a sip of water. Govind and his PA incline heads. Good. The murmur fades into inaudibility. Time to let the passion into the voice.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I want to announce to you a major technological breakthrough by Ray Power Research and Development. I don’t want to talk down to you; I don’t understand the physics either, but let me simply state, my friends, that we have achieved not just sustainable, but high-yield zero-point energy. In this very building, our research teams have explored the properties of other universes and have discovered how to make energy flow into our own on a commercial scale. Free energy, my friends.”

Snake-oil, my friends. No. You’re up there in the spotlight and the mike’s in your hand, that ultimate phallic symbol. Don’t get clever. Don’t get self-conscious.

“Limitless free energy; energy that is clean, that doesn’t pollute, that requires no fuel, that is endlessly renewable—that is as boundless as an entire universe. I have to tell you, my friends, many many companies have been looking for this miracle, and it is Bharati scientists in a Bharati company that have made the breakthrough!”

He has cheerleaders primed but the applause around the table is spontaneous and heartfelt. Now is the time for the sip of water and the glance over at his mother. She wears the merest of smiles on her face. And it’s that old glow in the balls, that hormone burn when you know you have them and can steer them any way you want. Careful careful, don’t blow it. It is timing, after all.

“This is history, this will change the shapes of our futures not just here in Bharat, but for every man woman and child on the planet. This is a great breakthrough and this is a great nation and I want the world to know that. We already have the world’s media here; now I want to give them something that will really make them remember us. Immediately after this meeting, I have arranged a full-scale public demonstration of the zero-point field.”

Now. Reel them in.

“In one quantum leap, Ray Power becomes a planetary-class player. And this is where I come to the second—more practical reason—I’ve asked you to come here. Ray Power is a company in crisis. We can still only speculate on our father’s motives for splitting the company; for my part, I have tried to be true to his vision of a Ray Power where vision and people mean as much as the bottom line. It’s not an easy standard to live up to.”

How may this engineer lead the right life? But he can’t get over the image of Marianna Fusco on her back with his fist gripping one end of the knotted silk scarf.

“I’ve called you here because I need your help. The values of our company are under threat. There are other, larger corporates out there whose values are not ours. They have offered very large sums of money to buy sections of Ray Power; I myself have been approached. You may judge me rash, or at least gauche, but I turned them down, for those very reasons: I believe in what this company is about.”

Throttle back.

“If I believed they were working in the best interests of the zero-point project, I would entertain their offers. But they are interested only because their own high-profile plans are far advanced. They would buy us up only to delay or even close down the zero-point. Offers have been made—maybe even by the same groups—to my brothers around this table. I want to preempt them. I want to cut them off at the pass, as the Americans say. I’ve made a generous offer to Ramesh to buy Ray Gen, the generating division that would implement the zero-point technique. That will give me a controlling interest in Ray Power, enough to keep any outside influence at bay until the zero-point goes public and we are in a position to resist more effectively. The details of the offer are in your presentation packs. If you’d like to take a moment to study them, and to consider what I’ve said, and then we could move to a vote.”

He catches his mother’s eye as he sits down. She smiles, privately, wisely, quietly as suddenly the entire boardroom is on its feet, shouting questions.

The taxi driver was smoking with the radio on, sprawled on the back seat with his feet sticking out the open door getting rained on as Tal came splashing across the glass bridge towing a stumbling, half-coherent Najia.

“Cho chweet, am I glad to see you,” Tal shouted as the driver switched on his yellow sign and flashed his headlights.

“You had the look of people who might be in need of transport.” Tal bundled Najia into the back. “Anyway, there are no fares tonight, not with all that is happening. And I am charging you waiting time. Where to or shall I just drive again?”

“Anywhere but here.” Tal pulled out yts palmer and opened up Najia’s video file from N. K. Jivanjee together with a neat little chunk of blackware on every street-credible nute’s Must Have list: a phone tracer. A nute never knows when yt’s going to need a little Ron. Day. Voo.

“Should we not be moving?” Tal asked, looking up from stripping the code from the video file.

“One thing I must be asking,” the driver said. “I require assurance that you were not involved with this morning’s. unpleasantness. I may speak my mind on our government’s many failings and incompetencies, but I am at heart a man who loves his nation.”

“Baba, the same people went after her, shot at me,” Tal said. “Trust me. Now, just drive.” That was when he floored the pedal.

“Is your friend all right?” the driver asks as he hoots a path through the soap worshippers, now on their feet, hands upheld as if in offering, eyes closed, lips moving. “She does not seem her usual self.”

“She’s had bad news about her family,” Tal says. “And what’s with them?”

“They offer puja to the gods of Town and Country for the safe deliverance of our nation,” the driver says. “Idle superstition if you ask me.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Tal mutters under yts breath. As the taxi turns on to the main road a big Toyota Hi-Lux turns in in a woosh of spray. Karsevaks cling to the roll bars and side rails. Blue light catches on their swords and trishuls. Tal watches it out of sight, shivers. Two minutes more, spellbound by the aeai.

“I presume you would like me to avoid them as well as policemen, soldiers, government officials, and everyone else?” the taxi-wallah offers.

“Especially them.” Tal absently fingers the contoured studs beneath yts skin, remembering adrenaline burn, remembering a city of blades and trishuls and more fear than yt ever felt possible. You don’t know it but I’ve beaten you, gendereds, Tal thinks. Rough boys, violent boys, think you own the streets, think you can do what you like and no one will stop you because you are strong, wild, young men, but this nute has you beat. I have the weapon in my hand and it has just given me the location of the man who will destroy you with it. “Do you know this place?” Tal asks, leaning over the seatback and thrusting the palmer in front of the driver’s face. Out there beyond the slashing windscreen wipers the night was turning hollow grey. The taxi-wallah waggled his head.

“It’s a drive.”

“Then I can get some sleep,” Tal says, settling back into the greasy upholstery, which is partly true and partly a disinvitation to the driver to chitter away about the state of the nation. But Najia clutches yts arm and whispers, “Tal, what am I going to do? It showed me things, about my dad, when we were in Afghanistan. Tal, awful things no one else could know about.”

“It lies. It’s a soap opera aeai, it’s designed to put minimal information together into stories with the greatest possible emotional impact. Come on, sister, who doesn’t get shit from their parents?”

In the hour and a half it takes the Maruti to detour around smouldering trash fires, dodge checkpoints, slip through barricades of burned-out cars, drive over street-sprayed swastikas and exhortations of Jai Bharat! Tal hears the radio play the national anthem twenty-four times, interrupted by short bulletins from the Rana Bhavan about the success of the Government of National Salvation in restoring safety and security. Yt squeezes Najia’s hand and presently she stops crying softly into the sleeve of her soft grey fleece top.

The taxi-wallah balks at taking his lovely Maruti across the dirty, gravelly causeway.

“Baba, for what I’m paying you, you buy a new taxi,” Tal exhorts. It is then that the Merc comes bowling towards them along the long straight causeway from the walled hunting lodge half-seen in the grey drizzle; hooting furiously. Tal checks yts lock on the position of the target palmer, taps the driver. “Stop that car,” yt orders.

“Stop that?” the driver asks. Tal flings the door open. The driver swears, skids to a halt. Before cry or protest, Tal has slipped out and walks through the drizzling rain towards the car. Headlights flash on, blinding yt. Yt can hear the engine rev deep in its throat. The horn is deep, polyphonic. Tal shields yts eyes with yts hand and keeps walking. The Merc leaps towards yt.

Najia presses her palms against the glass and cries our as she sees the car bear down on Tal in yts bedraggled finery. Tal raises a futile hand. Brakes screech and bind in the clingy marsh-mud. Najia closes her eyes. She does not know what the sound of half a million rupees of heavy Northern European engineering striking a heavily engineered human body sounds like but she is certain she will know it when she hears it. She doesn’t hear it. She hears a heavy car door thud shut. She dares open her eyes. The man and the nute stand in the dawn rain. That is Shaheen Badoor Khan, Najia thinks. She cannot but remember that other time she saw him, in the photographs at the club. Flashlight over dark upholstery, carved wood, polished surfaces but the dialogue is the same, politician and nute. This time it is the nute handing over the object of power. Shaheen Badoor Khan is smaller than she had imagined. She tries to fit opinions to him: traitor, coward, adulterer, fool; but her accusations are drawn down like stars to a black hole to the image of the room at the end of the corridor; the room she was never in, the room she never knew existed, the room at the end of her childhood, and her father welcoming her. History is happening here, she tries to tell herself to burn through the dreadful gravity of what the aeai had told her about her father. In front of you on a dirt road the feature is being shaped and you have a ringside seat. You are down there by the sand among the blood and sinews and you can smell the warm money. This is the story of yours or anyone else’s lifetime. This is your Pulitzer Prize before you are twenty-five.

And the rest of your life looking back, Najia Askarzadah.

A tap on the glass. Shaheen Badoor Khan bends low. Najia winds down the window. His face is grey-stubbled, his eyes are buried in exhaustion but they hold a tiny light, like a diya floating on a wide, dark river. Against all events and odds, against the tide of history, he has glimpsed victory. Najia thinks of the women parading their battle-cats head-high around the fighting ring, torn but valiant. He offers a hand.

“Ms. Askarzadah.” His voice is deeper than she imagined. She takes the hand. “You’ll excuse me if I seem a little slow this morning; I have rather been overwhelmed by the flow of events, but I must thank you, not just for myself—I am only a civil servant—but on behalf of my nation.”

Don’t thank me, Najia thinks. I was the one sold you in the first place. She says, “It’s all right.”

“No no, Ms. Askarzadah, you have uncovered a conspiracy of such scale, such audacity. I do not know quite how to deal with this, it is quite literally breathtaking. Machines, artificial intelligences.” He shakes his head and she senses how infinitely weary he is. “Even with this information, it is by no means over yet and you are by no means safe. I have an escape plan—everyone in the Bharat Sabha has an escape plan. I had intended to take myself and my wife, but my wife, as you have discovered.” Shaheen Badoor Khan shakes his head again and this time Najia senses his disbelief at the nested involutions, the wanton daring of the conspiracy. “Let’s say, I still have loyal agents in positions of influence, and those whose loyalty I can’t trust are at least well paid. I can get you to Kathmandu, after that you are on your own, I am afraid. I’d ask one thing, I know you’re a journalist and you have the story of the decade, but please do not release anything until I have played my card?”

“Yeah,” Najia Askarzadah stammers. Of course, anything. I owe you. Because you do not know it, but I am your torturer.

“Thank you. Thank you indeed.” Shaheen Badoor Khan looks up at the bleeding sky, squints at the thin, sour rain. “Ah, I have never known worse times. And please believe me, if I thought what you have given me would make it worse for Bharat. There is nothing I can do for my Prime Minister, but at least there is something I may yet do for my country.” He stands up briskly, looks out over the sodden marshland. “We have a way to go yet before any of us are safe.”

He shakes hands, firmly, grimly, again and returns to his car. He and Tal exchange the briefest of glances.

“That the politician?” the taxi-wallah asks as he reverses up to let the Mercedes pass.

“That was Shaheen Badoor Khan,” Tal says, wet in the back seat beside Najia. “Private Secretary to the late Sajida Rana.”

“Hot damn!” the driver exclaims as he tailgates Shaheen Badoor Khan, hooting at early bullock carts on the country back road. “Don’t you love Bharat!”

Jamshedpur Grameen Bank is a dozen rural sathin women running microcredit schemes in over a hundred villages, most of whom have never left backcountry Bihar, some of whom have never physically met each other but they hold fifty lakh ordinary shares in Ray Power. Their aeai agent is a homely little 2.i bibi, chubby and smiling, with a life-creased face and a vivid red bindi. She would not look out of place as a rural auntie in an episode of Town and Country. She namastes in Vishram’s ’hoek-vision.

“For the resolution,” she says sweetly, like your mama would, and vanishes.

Vishram’s done the mental calculation before Inder can render it up on his in-eye graphic. KHP Holdings is next on the list with its eighteen percent stock, by far the biggest single shareholder outside the family. If Bhardwaj votes yes, it is game to Vishram. If he votes no, then Vishram will need eleven of the remaining twenty blocks to win.

“Mr. Bhardwaj?” Vishram asks. His hands are flat on the table. He cannot lift them. They will leave two palm-sized patches of misty sweat.

Bhardwaj takes off his hard, titanium framed glasses, rubs at a tactical spot of grease with a soft felt polishing cloth. He exhales loudly through his nose.

“This is a most irregular procedure,” he says. “All I can say is that, under Mr. Ranjit Ray, this would never have happened. But the offer is generous and cannot be ignored. Therefore I recommend it and vote for the resolution.”

Vishram allows his fist and jaw muscles a little mental spasm, a little yes. Even on that night when he took the Funny Ha! Ha! contest, there was never an audience kick like the murmur that runs around the board table that says they’ve all done their sums too. Vishram feels Marianna Fusco’s hosiery-clad thigh press briefly against his under the transparent plane of nanodiamond. A movement of the edge of his peripheral vision make him look up. His mother slips out.

He hardly hears the formalities of the remainder of the vote. He numbly thanks the shareholders and board members for their faith in the Ray name and family. Thinking: Got it. Got it. Fucking got it. Telling the table that he will not let them down, that they have assured a great future for this great company. Thinking: I’m going to take Marianna Fusco to a restaurant, whatever is the very best you can get in the capital of an invaded country that’s just had its Prime Minister assassinated. Inviting: everyone to make their way down the corridor and then we’ll see exactly the future you’ve voted for. Thinking: a softly knotted silk scarf.

IT’S LIKE HERDING CALVES, Marianna Fusco messages as Ray Power staffers try to usher board members, researchers, guests, strays, and those second-string journalists who can be spared from the Day’s Big Story down the Ramayana marquetry maple floors. The whorl of bodies brings Vishram and Ramesh, a head taller, into orbit.

“Vishram.” Big Brother smiles, broad and honest. It looks alien. Vishram recalls him always serious, puzzled, head bowed. His handshake is firm and long. “Well done.”

“You’re a rich man now, Ram.”

Typically Ramesh is the tilt of the head, the roll of the eyes upwards, looking for answer in heaven.

“Yes, I suppose I am, quite obscenely so. But you know, I don’t actually care. One thing you can do for me: find me something to do on this zero-point thing. If it’s what you say, I’ve spent my professional life looking in the wrong direction.”

“You’ll come to the demonstration.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Or I suppose I should say, universe.” He laughs nervously. Third rule of comedy, Vishram Ray thinks. Never laugh at your own jokes. “I think Govind needs a word with you.”

He’s rehearsed this so many different ways, so many different voices, so many nuances and stances and they all fall from him in the moments it takes to pick Govind out of the crowd. He can’t turn his weaponry on this chubby, shyly smiling, sweating man in the too-small suit.

“Sorry,” he says, extending the hand. Govind shakes his head, takes the hand.

“And that is why, brother, you will still never make it in business. Too soft. Too polite. You won today, you engineered a great victory, enjoy it! Press it home. Gloat. Have your security escort me from the building again.”

“You’ve seen that routine already.”

Ray Power’s PR crew has chivvied the herd onwards; Vishram and Govind are alone in the corridor. Govind’s grip on Vishram’s hand is tight.

“Our father would be proud but I still maintain that you will run this company into the ground, Vishram. You have flash, you have charisma, you have showbiz and there is a place for that, but that is not how you run a business. I have a proposal. Ray Power, like the Ray family, was never meant to be a house divided. I have verbal agreements with outside investors but nothing is drawn up, nothing is signed.”

“A remerger,” Vishram says.

“Yes,” says Govind. “With me running the operational side.” Vishram cannot read this audience.

“I’ll give you an answer in time,” he says. “After the demonstration. Now, I’d like you to see my universe.”

“One thing,” Govind asks as their leather soles click softly on the inlaid maple. “Where did the money come from, eh?”

“An old ally of our father’s,” Vishram says and as he subliminally hears that most feared of sounds to a comedian—his own footsteps walking off—he realises that in the scripts he rehearsed and never used, there was never one for what he would do if he had stood up behind that diamond table and died the death.

They find a small space on the floor by the door, beneath the carriage attendant’s pull-down berth. Here they barricade themselves in with the blue impact-resistant suitcases and huddle against each other like children. The doors are sealed, all Parvati can see through its tiny, smoked glass porthole is sky the colour of its own rain. She sees through the partition door into the next car. The bodies are pressed up against the tough plastic, disturbingly flattened. Not bodies; people, lives like hers that cannot continue in any meaningful way back in that city. The voices drowns out the hum of the traction engines, the rattle of the rails. She finds it amazing that anything so monstrously overloaded can move at all but the tug of acceleration in the well of her belly, the small of her back against the ribbed plastic wall, tells her the Raipur Express is picking up speed.

There is no staff anywhere to be found on this train, no ticket collector in her smart white sari with the wheel of Bharat Rail on her shoulder of the pallav; no clanking chai-wallah, no cabin attendant cross-legged on the bunk above them. The train runs fast now, power pylons blur past the tiny rectangle of smoky sky and Parvati panics for an instant that this is not the train, this is not the track. Then she thinks, What does it matter? Anywhere is away.

Away. She presses against Krishan, reaches for his hand beneath the drape of her stained sari, surreptitiously so no one will see, no one will be tempted to speculate on what these two Hindus are doing. Her fingers encounter warm wet. She jerks them away. Blood. Blood spreading in a sticky pool in the space between the bodies. Blood clinging to the ribs of the plastic wall. Krishan’s hand, where it failed by millimetres to meet hers, is a clenched red fist. Parvati pushes herself away, not in horror, but to comprehend how this madness is happening. Krishan sags across the wall leaving a red smear, props himself up on his left arm. From just above his hip down his white shirt is red, soaked through with blood. Parvati can see it pumping through the fabric weave with every breath he takes.

That strange sigh, when he pulled her up on to the train, away from the firing on the platform. She had seen the bullets ricochet from the steel stanchions.

His face is the colour of ash, of the monsoon sky. His breath flutters, his arm quivers; he cannot support himself much longer and every heartbeat pumps more of his life onto the carriage floor. The blood pools around his feet. His lips move but he cannot shape words. Parvati pulls her to him, cradles his head in her lap.

“It’s all right my love, it’s all right,” she whispers. She should call out, shout for aid, help, a doctor but she knows with terrible certainty that no one will ever hear in those jammed carriages. “Oh Krishan,” she murmurs as she feels the wet, sexual blood spread under her thighs. “Oh, my dear man.” His body is so cold. She gently touches his long black hair and twines it in her fingers as the train drives ever south.

This is Mr. Nandha coming up the stairs of Diljit Rana Apartments, jogging up one flight two flight three flight four in the cool cool light of the morning. He could take the elevator—unlike the old projects like Siva Nataraja Homes and White Fort, the services are operational in these government housing blocks—but he wants to maintain the energy, the zeal, the momentum. He shall not let it slip, not when it is so close. His avatars are threads of spider silk spun between the towers of Varanasi. He can feel the vibration of her energy shaking the world.

Five flights, six.

Mr. Nandha intends to apologise to his wife for upsetting her in front of her mother. The apology is not strictly necessary but Mr. Nandha’s belief is that it is a healthful thing in a marriage to give in occasionally even when you are right. But she must appreciate that he has made a window for her in the most important case in the Ministry’s history, a case that, when he has completed the excommunication, will elevate him to Investigative Officer First Rank. Then they will spend happy evenings together looking through the brochures for Cantonment new-builds.

The final three flights Mr. Nandha whistles themes from Handel Concerti Grossi.

It is not in the moment he puts his key in the lock. Neither is it when he sets hand to handle and turns that handle. But in the time it takes for him to push that handle down and open the door, he knows what he will find. And he knows the meaning of that epiphany in the predawn Ministry corridor. It was the precise instant his wife left him.

Scraps of Handel float in his auditory centres but as he crosses the lintel his life is as changed as the raindrop falling one millimetre to one side of a mountain peak ends up in a different ocean.

He does not need to call her name. She is utterly, irretrievably gone. It is not an absence of things; her chati magazines lie on the table, the dhobi basket sits in the kitchen by the ironing board, her ornaments and gods and small votives occupy their auspicious places. The flowers are fresh in the vase, the geraniums are watered. Her absence is from every part; the furniture, the shape of the room, the carpets, the comforting, happy television, the wallpaper and the cornices and the colour of the doors. The lights, the kitchen utensils, the white goods. Half a home, half a life and entire marriage has been subtracted. Nature does not abhor this vacuum. It throbs, it has shape and geometry.

There are noises Mr. Nandha knows he should make, actions he should perform, feelings he should experience proper to the discovery that a wife has left you. But he walks in and out of the room in a tight-faced daze, an almost-smile drawn on his lips, as if preparing defences against the full of it, like a sailor in a tropical storm might lash himself to a mast, to dare it to break over him, to turn into its full rage. That is why he goes to the bedroom. The embroidered cushions that were wedding gifts from his work colleagues are in their places on respective sides of the bed. The expensive copy of the Kama Sutra, for the proper work of a married couple, is on its bedside cabinet. The flat-worked sheet is neatly turned back.

Mr. Nandha finds himself bending to sniff the sheet. No. He does not want to know if there is any blame there. He opens the sliding wood wardrobes, inventories what is taken, what remains. The gold, the blue, the green saris, the pure white silk for formal occasions. The beautiful, translucent crimson choli he used to love to see her wear, that excited him so much across a room or a garden party. She has taken all the padded, scented hangers, left the cheap wire ones that have stretched into shallow rhombuses. Mr. Nandha kneels down to look at the shoe rack. Most of the spaces are empty. He picks up a slipper, soft-soled, worked with gold-thread and satin, runs his hands over its pointed toe, its soft, breast-curved heel. He sets it back in its position. He cannot bear her lovely shoes.

He closes the sliding door on the clothes and shoes but it is not Parvati he thinks of, it is his mother when he burned her on the ghat, his head shaved and all dressed in white. He thinks of her house afterwards, of the terrible poignancy of her clothes and shoes on their hangers and racks, all unnecessary now, all her choices and fancyings and likings naked and exposed by death.

The note is stuck to the shelf in the kitchen where his Ayurvedic teas and dietary items are kept. He finds he has read it three times without taking in anything more than the obvious meaning that she is gone. He cannot join the words up into sentences. Leaving. So sorry. Can’t love you. Don’t look for me. Too close. Too many words too near to each other. He folds the note, puts it in his pocket, and climbs the stairs to the roof garden.

In the open space, in the grey light, under the eyes of his neighbours and his cybernetic avatars, Mr. Nandha feels the compressed rage vomit up out of him. He would love to open his mouth and let it all pour out of him in an ecstatic stream. His stomach pulls, he fights it, masters it. Mr. Nandha presses down the spasms of nausea.

What is that sickly, chemical smell? For a moment, despite his discipline, he feels that his gut might betray him.

Mr. Nandha kneels on the edge of the raised bed, fingers hooked into the clinging loam. His palmer calls. Mr. Nandha cannot think what the noise could possibly be. Then the insistent calling of his name draws his fingers out of the soil, draws him back to the wet rooftop in the Varanasi gloaming.

“Nandha.”

“Boss, we’ve found her.” Vik’s voice. “Gyana Chakshu picked her up two minutes ago. She’s right here in Varanasi. Boss; she is Kalki. We’ve got it all put together; she is the aeai. She is the incarnation of Kalki. I’m diverting the tilt-jet to pick you up.”

Mr. Nandha stands upright. He looks at his hands, brushes the dirt from them on the edge of the wooden sleepers. His suit is stained, crumpled, soaked. He cannot imagine he will ever feel dry again. But he adjusts his cuffs, straightens his collar. He takes the gun from inside his pocket and lets it hang loosely at his side. The early neons of Kashi gibber and flick at his feet. There is work to be done. He has his mission. He will do it so well that none can ever hold a whisper against Nandha of the Ministry.

The tilt-jet banks in between the big projects. Mr. Nandha shelters in the stair head as the aircraft slides in over the rooftop and swivels its engines into a hover. Vik is in the copilot’s seat as the tilt-jet turns, face dramatically underlit by the console leds. The roof cannot possibly support a Bharati Air Force tilt-jet; the pilot brings her ship down centimetre by centimetre in a delicate Newtonian ballet, positioning the craft so Mr. Nandha can slip between the vortices from the wingtip engines and safely up the access ramp in the tail. The downblast works the destruction he had fantasised. The trellises are smashed flat in an instant. The geraniums are swept from their perches. Seedlings and small plants are uprooted from the soft soil; the earth itself peels away in muddy gobs. The saturated wood of the beds steams, then smokes. The pilot descends until her wheels kiss roofing felt. The rear ramp unfolds.

Lights go on piecemeal in the overlooking windows.

Mr. Nandha pulls his collar close and beats through the buffets to the open, blue-lit interior. All his team are there among the aircav sowars. Mukul Dev and Ram Lalli. Madhvi Prasad, even Morva of the Money Trail. As Mr. Nandha belts in beside him, the ramp closes and the pilot opens up the engines.

“My dear friends,” Mr. Nandha says. “I am glad you are beside me on this historic occasion. A Generation Three Artificial Intelligence. An entity as far beyond our fleshly intellect as ours is a pig’s. Bharat will thank us. Now, let us be diligent in our excommunication.”

The tilt-jet turns on its vertical axis as it climbs above Mr. Nandha’s shattered roof garden, higher than all the windows and balconies and rooftop solar farms and watertanks of his neighbours. Then the pilot puts the nose up and the tail down and the little ship climbs steeply between the towers.

The last of the gods flicker out over Varanasi and the sky is just the sky. The streets are silent, the buildings are mute, the cars have no voices and the people are just faces, closed like fists. There are no answers, no oracles in the trees and street shrines, no prophecies from the incoming aircraft, but this world without gods is rich in its emptiness. Senses fill up the spaces; engines roar, the wall of voices leap forward; the colours of the saris, the men’s shirts, the neons flashing through the grey rain, all glow with their own, vivid light. Each touch of street-incense, stale urine, hot fat, alcofuel exhaust, damp burning plastic is an emotion and a memory of her life before the lies.

She was a different person then, if the women in the hovel are to be believed. But the gods—the machines, she now realizes—say she is now another self altogether. Say: said. The gods are gone. Two sets of memories. Two lives that cannot live with each other, and now a third that must somehow incarnate both. Lull. Lull will know, Lull will tell her how to make sense of these lives. She thinks she can remember the way back to the hotel.

Dazed by the empire of the senses, released from the tyranny of information into the realm of simple things, Aj lets the city draw her to the river.

In the dawn rain on the Western Allahabad orbital motorway, two hundred Awadhi main battle tanks fire up their engines, spin on their tracks out of their laagered positions and form into an orderly column. Faster, fleeter traffic buzzes past the four-kilometre queue but there is no mistaking its general direction, south by southwest towards the Jabalpur Road. By the time the shops roll up their shutters and the salary-wallahs zip in to work in their phatphats and company cars the newsboys are screaming it from their pitches on the concrete central reserves: TANKS PULL OUT! ALLAHABAD SAVED! AWADH WITHDRAWS TO KUNDA KHADAR!

Another of Bharat’s inexhaustible fleet of Prime Ministerial Mercedes is waiting for the Bharatiya Vayu Sena Airbus Industries A510 as it turns into its stand well away from the busier parts of Varanasi airport. Umbrellas shelter Prime Minister Ashok Rana from the steps to the car; it draws away in a wush of fat tires on wet apron. There is a call waiting on the comlink. N. K. Jivanjee. Again. He is not looking at all like what would be expected of the Interior Minister of a Government of National Unity. He has unexpected news to break.

If she lets his hand slip in this crowd she is lost.

The armed police try to clear the riverside. The messages blaring from their bullhorns and truck-top speakers are for the crowds to disperse, the people to return to their homes and businesses; order has been restored, they are in no danger, no danger at all. Some, swept along in the general panic, who did not really want to abandon their livelihoods, turn back. Some do not trust the police or their neighbours or the contradictory pronouncements from the government. Some do not know what to do; they turn and mill, going nowhere. Between the three and the army hummers squeezing through the narrow galis around the Vishwanath Gali, the streets and ghats are locked solid.

Lisa Durnau keeps her fingers tightly locked around Thomas Lull’s left hand. In his right he holds the Tablet, like a lantern on a dark night. Some final fragment of her that feels responsible to governments and their strategies worries about the little built-in meltdown sequence should the Tablet get cold and lonely. But she does not think Lull will be needing it very long. Whatever is to be played out here will be ended soon.

Nandha. Krishna Cop. Licensed terminator of unauthorised aeais. The grainy Tabernacle image is fused into her forebrain. No point questioning how a Krishna Cop came to be inside a machine older than the solar system, no more than any of them, but she is certain of one thing; this is the place, the time where all images are born.

Thomas Lull stops abruptly, mouth open in frustration as he scans the crowd with the Tablet, looking for a match with the image on the liquid screen.

“The water tower!” he shouts and jerks Lisa Durnau along after him. The great pink concrete cylinders rise from the ghats every few hundred metres along the waterfront, each joined to the uppermost steps by pink-painted gantries. Lisa Durnau can’t make any face out of the mass of refugees and devotees pressing around the water tower base. Then the tilt-jet cuts in across the ghats so low everyone instinctively ducks. Everyone, Lisa observes, but a solitary figure in grey up on the catwalk around the top of the water tower.

He has it now. The Gyana Chakshu device is linked through to his ’hoek and by its extrapolations and modellings and vectorings and predictings he can see the aeai like a moving light that shines through people, through traffic, through buildings. He watches from kilometres of altitude and distance, moving through the warren of lanes and galis behind the riverfront. With his privileged insight, Mr. Nandha directs the pilot. She brings the tilt-jet round in a sweeping arc and Mr. Nandha looks down into the tide of people swelling the streets and she is a shining star. He and the aeai are the only two solid beings in a city of ghosts. Or is it, thinks Mr. Nandha, the converse that is true?

He orders the pilot to take them in over the river. Mr. Nandha summons his avatars. They boil up in his vision like thunderheads, ringing the fleeing aeai on every side, a siege of deities, their weapons and attributes readied, scraping the clouds, Ganga water boiling around their vahanas. An invisible world, seen only by the devotee, the true. The fleeing fleck of light stops. Mr. Nandha commands Ganesha the opener to flick through local security cameras until the pattern matcher locates the excommunicee on the Dasashvamedha Ghat water tower. It stands, hands gripping the rail, staring out over the mob of wheeling people fighting for the Patna boat. Does it stand so because it sees what I see? Mr. Nandha wonders. Does it stop in fear and awe as gods rear from the water? Are we the only two true seers in the city of delusions?

An aeai incarnate in human flesh. Evil times indeed. Mr. Nandha cannot imagine what alien, inhuman scheme is behind this outrage against a soul. He does not want to imagine. To know can be the path to understanding, understanding to tolerance. Some things must remain intolerable. He will erase the abomination and all will be right. All will be in order again.

A lone star shines in Mr. Nandha’s vision from the top of the water tower as the pilot turns between Hanuman and Ganesha. He jabs his finger down towards the rain-puddled strand. The pilot pulls up the nose and swivels the engines. Sadhus and swamis flee their scab-fires, shaking their skinny fists at the object descending out of heaven. If you saw as I see, thinks Mr. Nandha, loosing his seat belt.

“Boss,” Vik calls as he works his way through the cabin, “we’re picking up enormous traffic into the Ray Power internal network. I think it’s our Gen Three.”

“In due time,” Mr. Nandha says, gently chiding. “Everything in proper order. That is the way to do business. We will finish our task here and then attend to Ray Power.”

His gun is ready in his fist as he hits the sand at the foot of the ramp and the sky is crazy with gods.

All the people. Aj grips the rusted railing, dizzied by the masses on the ghats and the riverbanks. The pressure of their bodies forced her up on to this gallery when she found her breath catching in her throat as she tried to get back to the haveli. Aj empties her lungs, holds, inhales slowly through her nostrils. The mouth for talking, the nose for breathing. But the carpet of souls appalls her. There is no end to the people, they unfold out of each other faster than they go to the burning ghats and the river. She remembers those other places where she was among people, in the big station, on the train when it burned and in the village afterwards when the soldiers took them all to safety, after she stopped the machines.

She understands how she did that, now. She understands how she knew the names of the bus driver on the Thekkady road, and of the boy who stole the motorbike in Ahmedabad. It is a past as close and alien as a childhood, indelibly part of her, but separate, innocent, old. She is not that Aj. She is not the other Aj either, the engineered child, the avatar of the gods. She attained understanding, and in that moment of enlightenment was abandoned. The gods could not bear too much humanity. And now she is a third Aj. No more voices and wisdoms in street lights and cab ranks—these, she now realises, were the aeais, whispering into her soul through the window of her tilak. She is a prisoner now in that bone prison, like every other life out there by that river. She is fallen. She is human.

Then she hears the plane. She looks up as it comes in low, fast over the temple spires and the towers of the havelis. She sees ten thousand people cringe as one but she remains standing for she knows what it is. A final remembrance of being something other than human, some last divine whisper, the god-light fading into the background microwave hum of the universe, tells her. She watches the plane pull up and descend on to the trampled sand, scattering the sadhu’s ash-fires in sprays of cinders and knows that it has come for her. She begins to run.

With brisk flicks of his hand, Mr. Nandha dispatches his squad to clear the ghats and seal off exits. In his peripheral vision he notices Vik hang back, Vik still in his street garb from the night’s battles, Vik sweaty and grubby on this humid monsoon morning. Vik uncertain, Vik fearful. He makes a note to himself to admonish Vik for insufficient zeal. When the case is closed, that is the time for robust management. Mr. Nandha strides out across the damp white sand.

“Attention attention!” he cries, warrant card held up. “This is a Ministry security operation. Please render our officers all assistance. You are in no danger.” But it is the gun in his right hand, not the authority in his left, that makes men step back, parents pull curious children away, wives push husbands out of his path. To Mr. Nandha, Dasashvamedha Ghat is an arena paved with ghosts, ringed by watching gods. He imagines smiles on their high, huge faces. He gives his attention to the small, glowing dot in his enhanced vision, star-shaped now, the pentagram of the human figure. The aeai is moving from its vantage on the water tower. It is on the walkway now. Mr. Nandha breaks into a run.

The crowd ducked as the tilt-jet went over and Lisa Durnau ducked with it and as she glimpses Aj on the tower, she feels Thomas Lull’s fingers slip through her own and separate. The bodies close around him. He is gone.

“Lull!” In a few footsteps he has vanished completely, absorbed into the motion of bright salwars and jackets and T-shirts. Hiding in plain sight. “Lull!” No chance she will ever be heard over the roar of Dasashvamedha Ghat. Suddenly she is more claustrophobic than she ever was confined in the stone birth-canal of Darnley 285. Alone in the crowd. She stops, panting in the rain. “Lull!” She looks up at the water tower at the head of the staggered stone steps. Aj still stands at the rail. Wherever she is, Lull will be. No place, no time for Western niceties. Lisa Durnau elbows through the milling crowd.

In the Tablet she is innocent, in the Tablet she is unknowing, unseeing, in the Tablet she is a teenage kid up on a high place looking down on one of Earth’s great human wonders.

“Let me through, let me through!” Thomas Lull shouts. He sees the tilt-jet unfold its mantis landing-gear and settle on the sand bar. He sees ripples of discontent spread through the crowd as the soldiers push people back. From his higher vantage on the ghat he sees the pale figure advance across the cleared marble. That is the fourth avatar of the Tabernacle. That is Nandha the Krishna Cop.

There is a story by Kafka, Lull recalls in the mad sell-consciousness of ultimate effort; of a herald bringing a message of grace and favour from a king to a subject. Though the herald holds seals and passes and words of power, he can never leave the palace because of the press of people, never make it through the crowd to bring the vital word. And thus it goes unsaid, or so he remembers it from his paranoid days.

“Aj!” He is close enough to see the three grubby white stripes on the side of her grey trainers. “Aj.” But his words fall into well of sound, flattened and obliterated by sharper, louder Hindi tones. And his breath is failing, he can feel the little elastic pull of tension at the bottom of each inhalation.

Fuck Kafka.

“Aj!”

He cannot see her any more.

Run, whisper the ashes of the gods. Her feet clatter along the metal gantry, she swings around the stanchion and down the sharp-edged steel steps. An elderly man cries out and curses as Aj slams into him.

“Sorry, sorry,” she whispers, hands held up in supplication but he is gone. She pauses a moment on the topmost step. The tilt-jet stands on the sand to her right, down by the water’s edge. A disturbance in the crowd moves towards her like a cobra. Behind her the whip aerials of an army hummer move between the low, dripping stalls of Dasashvamedha Gali. No escape there. The hydrofoil stands at the jetty at the head of a huge diamond of people trying to press on board. Many are shoulder deep in the water, burdens and livelihoods borne on their heads. Once she might have tried to rule the machines that control the boat and escape by water. She does not have that power any more. She is only human. To her left the walls and buttresses of Man Singh’s astronomical palace step down to Ganga. Heads, hands, voices, things, colours, rain-wet skin, eyes. A pale head raised above the others by a foreign height. Long hair, grey stubble. Blue eyes. Blue shirt, silly shirt, loud garish shirt, saving glorious shirt.

“Lull!” Aj shouts and leaps down the steep, slippery ghats, skidding on the stone, hurdling bundles of luggage, sending children reeling, leaping over low walls and platforms where the Brahmins commemorate the ten-horse sacrifice of Brahma with fire and salt, music and prasad. “Lull!”

With a thought Mr. Nandha banishes his gods and demons. He has it now. It cannot escape into the city. The river is closed to it, Mr. Nandha is behind it, there is no way but forward. The people sweep away from him like a sea parting in some alien religious myth. He can see the aeai. It is dressed in grey, drab machine grey, so easy to spot, so simple an identification.

“Stop,” says Mr. Nandha softly. “You are under arrest. I am a law enforcement officer, stop at once and lie flat on the ground.”

There is clear open space between him and the aeai. And Mr. Nandha can see that it will not stop, that it knows what the law demands of it and that in defiance is its one, minuscule chance of survival. Mr. Nandha clicks off his gun safeties. The Indra avatar system swings his outstretched arm on to the target. Then his right thumb performs an action it has never taken before. It switches the gun from the lower barrel, that kills machines, to the upper. The mechanism slides into position with a silken click.

Run. It is such a simple word, when your lungs are not clenched tight like fists for every breath, when the crowd does not resist your every lunge and shove and push and elbow, when one single, treacherous slip will send you plunging to annihilation under the feet of the crowd, when the man who might save you is not at the geometrical furthest point of the universe.

Run. It is such a simple word for a machine.

Mr. Nandha slides to a stop on the treacherous, foot-polished stone, gun levelled. He could no more remove his aim from the target than he could shift the sun from its centre. Indra will not permit it. His outstretched arm, his shoulders ache.

“In the name of the Ministry, I order you to stop!” he cries.

Useless, as it ever was. He forms the intention. Indra fires. The crowd screams.

The munition is a medium-velocity liquid tungsten round that, rifled by the barrel of Mr. Nandha’s gun, expands in flight into a spinning disc of hot metal the size of a circled thumb and finger, an okay sign. It takes Aj in the middle of the lower back, tearing through spine, kidneys, ovaries, and small intestine in a spray of liquidised flesh. The front of her sleeveless grey cotton top explodes outwards in a rain of blood. The impact lifts her off her feet and throws her, arms and legs splayed out, forward on to the crowd. The ghat people scramble out from under her. She falls hard to the marble. The impact, the trauma should have killed her—the bottom half of her body is severed from the top—but she writhes and claws at the marble in a spreading pool of warm sweet blood, making small soft shrieking noises.

Mr. Nandha sighs and walks up to her. He shakes his head. Is he never to be allowed dignity? “Stand back please,” Mr. Nandha orders. He stands over Aj, feet apart. Indra levels the gun. “This is a routine excommunication but I would advise you to look away now,” he tells the public. He glances up at his crowd. His eyes meet blue eyes, Western eyes, a Western face, bearded, a face he recognises. A face he seeks. Thomas Lull. Mr. Nandha bows infinitesimally to him. The gun fires. The second round takes Aj in the back of the head.

Thomas Lull roars incoherently. Lisa Durnau is by him, holding him, pulling him back, clinging to him with all her athletic strength and weight and history. There is a sound in her ears like a universe ending. Tracks of terrible heat on her face are tears. And still the rain beats clown.

Mr. Nandha senses his warriors at his back. He turns to them. For now he does not need to register the expressions on their faces. He indicates Thomas Lull and the Western woman holding him back in her arms.

“Have these people arrested under offences against the Artificial Intelligence Registry and Licensing Act,” he commands. “Deploy all units immediately to Ray Power Research and Development Unit at the University of Varanasi. And have someone take care of this.”

He holsters the gun. Mr. Nandha very much hopes he will not have to use it again this day.

Look out the left, the captain says. That’s Annapurna, and the next one down is Manaslu. After that Shishapangma. All of them over eight thousand metres. If you’re on the left side of the plane, I’ll give you a call as we come in, on good days you can see Sagarmath; that’s our name for Everest.

Tal is curled up in the wide business class seat, head on the cushion on the armrest, asleep and giving little soprano snores though it’s only a forty minute flight from Varanasi. Najia can hear the treble beats from yts headphones. Soundtrack for everything. HIMALAYA MIX. She leans over yt to peer out the window. The little cityhopper skips in over Ganga plain and the flatlands of the Nepal Terai then takes a big jump over the river-riven foothills that guard Kathmandu. Beyond them like a surf-line breaking at the edge of the world, is the High Himalaya, vast and white and higher than she could ever dream, the loftiest peaks streaked with torn cloud running on the jet stream. Higher, and further; summit beyond summit beyond summit, the white of the glaciers and high places and the flecked grey of the valleys blurring into blue at the furthest edge of her vision, like a stone ocean. Najia can see no limit to it in any direction.

Her heart leaps. There is something in her throat she cannot swallow. There are tears in her eyes.

She remembers this scene from Lal Darfan’s elephant pagoda, but those mountains had not the power to touch, to move, to inspire. They had been folds of fractals and digits, two imaginary landmasses colliding with each other. And Lal Darfan had also been N. K. Jivanjee had also been the Gen Three aeai, as the eastern extremities of these mountains had been those peaks she had seen over the wall around that garden in Kabul. She knows the image the Gen Three had shown her of her father as torturer had been false; she had never walked down that corridor, to that room, to that woman who in all probability had never existed. But she does not doubt that others did, that others had been strapped to that table to scream out how they endangered the establishment. And she does not doubt that that image will now forever be her memory. Memory is what I am made of, the aeai had said. Memories make our selves, we make memories for ourselves. She remembers another father, another Najia Askarzadah. She does not know how she is going to live with either. And the mountains are harsh and tall and cold and reach beyond any end she can see and she is high and alone in her leather business-class seat with the fifty-inch pitch.

She thinks now she knows why the aeai had shown her the childhood she had suppressed. It had not been cruel, it had not been even a ploy for time. It had been genuine, touching curiosity, an attempt by a djinn made of stories to understand something outside its mandalas of artifice and craft. Something it could believe it had not made up itself. It wanted the drama of the real, the fountainhead from which all story flows.

Najia Askarzadah pulls her legs up on to her seat, lays her body down across Tal’s. She drapes her arm over yts, loosely takes yts fingers in hers. Tal starts with a half-syllable but she does not break yts sleep. Yts hand is delicate and hot; beneath her cheek she can feel yts ribs. Yt’s so light, so loosely put together, like a cat but she feels a cat’s toughness in the muscles breathing in, breathing out. She lies there, listening to yts heart. She thinks that maybe she has never met a braver person. Yt has always had to fight to be ytself and now yt goes into exile with no destination in sight.

From eight thousand metres she can understand that Shaheen Badoor Khan had been an honourable man. In Bharat, even as he escorted their taxi through the checkpoint at the vip gate and on to the perimeter road to the vip lounge, she had seen only his falsities and frailties; another man, another fabric of untruths and complications. As she waited at the desk while he spoke low and hard and fast with the airline official, she had confidently expected that at any moment the airport police would come out of the walls and doors with levelled weapons and plastic cable-ties for their wrists. They were all betrayers. They were all her fathers.

She remembers how the gate staff had looked and whispered among themselves as Shaheen Badoor Khan completed the final formalities. He had quickly, formally shaken hands with her, then Tal, then briskly walked away.

The shuttle flight had just punched through the monsoon cloud base when the story broke all over the seatback screen news channel. N. K. Jivanjee had resigned. N. K. Jivanjee had fled Bharat. The Government of National Unity was in disarray. Disgraced advisor to the late Prime Minister, Shaheen Badoor Khan, had come forward with extraordinary revelations—backed by documentary evidence—that the former leader of the Shivaji had masterminded a plot to destroy the Rana government and fatally weaken Bharat against the Awadhis. Bharat reels! Shock revelation! Stunning scandal! Ashok Rana to make statement from the Rana Bhavan! Khan national saviour! Where is Jivanjee, Bharat demands? Where is Jivanjee? Jivanjee the traitor?

Bharat quaked to its third political shock in twenty-four hours. Not a fraction of the earthquake it would have been had Shaheen Badoor Khan revealed that the Shivaji was a political front for a Generation Three aeai formed our of the cumulative intelligence of Town and Country. An attempted coup by its most popular soap opera. As the plane levelled off and the hostess came round with the drinks—Tal had had two double cognacs; yt had just fled an assassination, battled a Generation Three aeai, and survived a murderous mob, so it deserved a little luxury, cho chweet—Najia watched the story update by the second and comprehended the subtlety and skill with which Shaheen Badoor Khan was managing it. Even as the plane was pushing back from the stand he must have been cutting a deal with the Generation Three, one that would leave Bharat as politically whole as possible. This was his seat, his mini-bottle of Hennessy; he stayed for his country, for he had nothing else.

She cannot go back to Sweden again. Najia Askarzadah is as much an exile now as Tal. She shivers, hugs Tal closer. Yt entwines yts fingers tightly around hers. Najia can feel yts subdermal activators against her forearm. Not man not woman not both not neither. Nute. Another way of being human, speaking a physical language she does not understand. More alien to her than any man, any father, yet this body next to hers is loyal, tough, funny, courageous, clever, kind, sensual, vulnerable. Sweet. Sexy. All you could wish in a friend of the soul. Or a lover. She starts at that thought, then presses her cheek against Tal’s hunched shoulder. Then she feels their conjoined centres of gravity shift as the plane banks in to approach to Kathmandu and she turns her head to look out the window, hoping maybe for that revelatory glimpse of distant Sagarmatha but all she can see is an oddly shaped cloud that you might almost think was the shape of a huge elephant, were such a thing possible.

History measures its course in centuries but its progress in the events of an hour. As the tanks pull back to the Kunda Khadar, in the wake of the shock resignation of N. K. Jivanjee over Badoor Khan’s allegations and the withdrawal of the Shivaji from the Government of National Salvation only hours old, Ashok Rana accepts Delhi’s offer of talks in Kolkata to resolve the dam dispute. But the day has one more surprise for the reeling Bharati nation. Whole families sit shocked, speechless, numb with surprise in front of their screens. In the middle of the one o’clock broadcast, Town and Country has gone off air.

They go in lots of seven, down the elevators down the concrete steps through the airlock to Deba’s stinky little cubby and the observation dock beyond where investment bankers, grameen, women, cub journalists, clan Ray advisors, and a shell-shocked looking Energy Minister Patel shuffle round in cramped circle dance to peer through the heavy glass panel into the hard light of another universe.

“Okay, okay, come on, no more than five seconds, Ray Power will not be held responsible for any eye irritation, sunburn, or other ultraviolet-related complaints,” Deba says, waving them through and round and out. “No more than five seconds, Ray Power will not be held responsible.”

The lecture hall has been rigged with display nodes and screens and copiously equipped with small eats and bottled water Sonia Yadav bravely holds the lectern, trying to explain to the gathered what they are seeing on the screens: two simple graphic bars that show the energy drawn from the grid maintaining the zero-point field and the energy output from the potential difference between the universal ground-states, but she is fighting two losing fronts, scientifically and acoustically.

“We’re getting two percent over input,” she shouts over the swelling burble of countrywomen exchanging stories about their grandchildren, businessmen pressing palms and palmers and journos hanging on to their ’hoeks for the newest shock wonder revelation to come out of the Bharat Sabha: the stunning resignation of N. K. Jivanjee from the Government of National Unity. “We’re storing that in high-energy capacitors for the laser-collider until it reaches a level where we can add it to the grid and open up an aperture to a higher-level universe, and so on and so on. That way we can climb a ladder of energy states until we’re getting something like one hundred and fifty percent return on input energy.”

She clenches her fists, shakes her head, sighs in frustration as the volume in the lecture hall reaches a mild roar. Vishram takes the microphone.

“Ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your attention please? I know it’s been a long day for many of you and it’s been nothing if not eventful, but if you’d come with me through into the lab where the breakthrough was first made.”

The staff herds the guests into the zero-point lab.

“No plan ever survives contact with the enemy,” he whispers to Sonia Yadav. A hovercam darts past his head, close and irritating as an insect, relaying the events to the remote shareholders. He imagines the virtual ghosts of the agent aeais hovering over the slow-moving line of guests. Centre Director Surjeet had objected robustly to Vishram opening the zero-point theory lab with its labyrinth of wall-writings and hieroglyphics. Surjeet feared it would make the project look amateurish—see, this is how they do things at Ray Power! With crayons and spray cans, on walls, like badmashes making graffiti. Vishram wants it for just that reason: it is human, messy, creative. It has the desired effect, the people relax, look up in wonder at the hieroglyphics. Will it be a new Lascaux, a Sistine chapel? Vishram wonders. The symbols that birthed an age. He should start making inquiries about having the room preserved.

Vishram Ray, with intimations of immortality. He notes with small, sharp pleasure that his dinner date with Sonia Yadav still shines in red felt-marker on the corner of the desk. In the less formal environment, her passion easily keeps an audience. Vishram watches her arm movements delimit swathes of ceiling to a rapt group of greysuits. He overhears her telling them “. at a fundamental level where quantum theory, M-Star theory, and computing all interact. We’re discovering that the quantum computers we’re using to maintain the containment fields—and its the containment fields that affect the winding geometries of the ’branes—can actually manipulate the Wolfram/Friedkin grain structure of the new universe. At a fundamental level, the universe is computational.”

Their little mouths are wide open.

Vishram shimmies in beside Marianna Fusco.

“When this is done,” he says, getting as close as professional propriety allows to a legal advisor, “How about. We go. Off somewhere. Where there is sun and sea and sand and really good bars and no people and we can run around in nothing but factor thirty for a month?”

And she slides her head as close to his as she dares and through a frozen public smile says, “I can’t. I have to go.”

“Oh,” says Vishram. And, “Fuck.”

“It’s a family thing,” Marianna Fusco says. “Big anniversary in my constellation family. People coming from all over. Relations I didn’t have last time we did this. No, I’ll be back, funny man. Just tell me where to turn up, sans luggage.”

Then the lights flicker and the room quivers. Glass rattles in the windows and door. There is a murmur of consternation. Director Surjeet’s hands are raised in placation.

“Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, please, there is no need for alarm. What we have just felt is a quite normal side effect of us ramping up the collider. We have closed one aperture and used the energy to warp the ’brane into another. Ladies and gentlemen, we have broken through into a new universe!”

There is polite, baffled applause. Vishram takes the opportunity to showboat.

“And what that means, my friends, is a twelve percent return on our energy investment. We put a hundred percent into maintaining the aperture, we get all that, plus an extra twelve back again! It’s this way to the zero-point future!”

Inder starts off a tattoo of enthusiastic corporate applause.

“You should have been a lawyer,” Marianna Fusco says. “You have the gift of talking endless shit on subjects you know nothing about.”

“Didn’t I tell you that’s what my Dad wanted for me?” Vishram says, positioning himself so that he can see down Marianna Fusco’s top. He imagines slowly, luxuriously oiling those hand-filling nipples.

“I remember you saying something about the law and comedy both being professions that make their living in the arena,” she says.

“I did? It must have been after sex.”

He does remember that conversation. It seems like another geological era, another incarnation. The room shakes again, harder, more sustained. Pens fall from desk; concentric ripples clash inside the water-cooler.

“Another universe, another point on the share-price,” Vishram quips but Sonia Yadav looks concerned. Vishram catches her eye. She abandons her tour. They move through the groups of shareholders back to the empty lecture hall.

“Problem?” he whispers. Sonia points at the display boards. Output, one hundred and thirty-five percent.

“We shouldn’t be anywhere close to that kind of figure.”

“It’s doing better than expected.”

“Mr. Ray, this is physics. We know exactly the characteristics of the universes we create, no surprises, no guesswork, no ‘better than expected, good boy, top of class.’”

Vishram messages Director Surjeet. When he enters, Vishram closes the door to hovercams and eavesdroppers.

“Sonia tells me we have a problem with the zero-point.”

Surjeet does this tooth sucking thing that grates Vishram’s nipples, especially when it reveals the saag he had for lunch.

“We’re getting anomalous readings.”

“That tells me exactly as much as ‘Vishram, we have a problem.’”

“Very well, Mr. Ray. It’s a universe, but it’s not the one we ordered.”

Vishram feels his balls contract. Surjeet has his palmer open, mathematical renderings and wire-frame graphics spins across it. Sonia, too, is reading the digits.

“Eight three zero.”

“It should be.”

“Two two four.”

“Wait wait wail wait wait; enough of the lottery results.”

Sonia Yadav says carefully, “All the universes have what we call winding numbers, the higher the number, the more energy we need to access it and the more we can get out of it.”

“We’re six hundred universes too high.”

“Yes,” says Sonia Yadav.

“Recommendations?”

“Mr. Ray, we must close the zero-point down immediately.”

Vishram cuts him off. “That is absolutely the last resort. How do you think that’s going to look in front of our entire board and the press? Another Bharati humiliation. If we can get the thing up to full power safely.” To Sonia Yadav, he says, “Does this pose any danger?”

“Mr. Ray, the energies released if membranes cross.”

Sonia cuts in.

“No.”

“You’re sure.”

“Dr. Surjeet is correct about the energy levels if membranes cross, it would be like a nano-Big Bang, but that involves energies thousands of times more powerful than we can generate here.”

“Yes, but the Atiyah’s Ladder effect.”

The guy who let off the second Big Bang, Vishram thinks. Creation Two. That’s the biggest laugh any comedian will ever get. He says, “Here’s what we do. We continue with the demonstration as planned. If it goes over one hundred and seventy, we close the whole thing down, show’s over, please exit via the gift shop. Whatever happens, nothing said in this room goes any further. Keep me appraised.”

As he heads for the door to the zero-point lab, thinking, I can see a beautiful clear career path opening in front of Ms. Sonia Yadav Hindu physicist, a fresh tremor hits the Research Centre, hits it hard, hits it to its roots, sends Vishram Ray and Sonia Yadav and Director Surjeet reeling for handholds, for something safe and solid that is not moving, knocks dust and plaster and loose ceiling tiles from the roof and rattles the display screens, those same screens that show power output at one hundred and eighty-four percent.

Universe 2597. The aperture is running away, laddering up through successive universes.

And Vishram Ray’s palmer is calling, everyone in that room’s palmer is calling, they put their hands up to their heads and it is the same voice in each of their ears telling them that the aeais controlling the aperture are not responding to commands.

They’ve lost control of the zero-point.

Like a Christian angel, like the sword of avenging Michael plunging from the sky, Mr. Nandha comes sliding down a path of air towards the Ray Research Centre. He knows that in the belly of the tilt-jet his Excommunication Squad is muted, uncertain, scared, mutinous. The prisoners will be talking to them, sowing unbelief and dissent. That is their matter, they do not share his dedication and he cannot expect them to. Their respect is a sacrifice he is prepared to make. This warrior woman beside him in the cockpit will bring him to his ordained place.

He clicks up the astringencies of a Bach violin sonata as the pilot tips the tilt-jet into the long slow dive towards the green rhombuses of the University of Bharat.

A presence, a throat clear, a tap on his shoulder interrupt the infinite geometries of the solo violin. Mr. Nandha slowly removes his ’hoek.

“What is it, Vikram?”

“Boss, the American woman’s going on about diplomatic incidents again.”

“This will have to be resolved later, as I have said.”

“And the sahb wants to talk to you, again.”

“I am otherwise engaged.”

“He’s mightily pissed off that he can’t get through to you.”

“I sustained damage to my communicator when I was battling the Kalki aeai. I have no other explanation.” He has turned it off. He does not want squawking questions, demands, orders breaking the perfection of his execution.

“You should still talk to him.”

Mr. Nandha sighs. The tilt-jet leans into a stack, climbing down the sky towards the airy, toy-bright buildings of the Rana’s university, gleaming in the sun that is tearing the monsoon apart. He takes the ’hoek.

“Nandha.”

The voice says something about excessive zeal, use of weapons, endangering the public, questions and inquiries, too far Nandha too far, we know about your wife she turned up at Gaya Station but the word that rings, the word that chimes like the sword of that Christian, Renaissance angel against the dome of heaven, that cuts through the aircraft noise is Vik’s, repeating to the crew strapped into their seats in full combat armour: battling the Kalki aeazi.

He despises me, Mr. Nandha thinks. He thinks I am a monster. This is nothing to me. A sword requires no comprehension. He removes the ’hoek and with a swift, sharp jerk of his hands, snaps it in two.

The pilot turns her mirrored HUD visor to him. Her mouth is a perfect red rosebud.

The fourth quake shakes the Research Centre as Vishram hits the fire alarm. Bookcases topple, whiteboards drop from walls, light-fittings sway, cornices crack, wiring ducts splinter. The water-cooler teeter-totters this way, that way, then falls gracefully to the floor and bursts its distended plastic belly.

“Okay, ladies and gentlemen, there is no need for alarm, we’ve had a small report of an overheat in the electrical relay gear,” Vishram lies as wide-eyed people with their hands over their heads look for the exits. “Everything is under control. Our assembly point is outside on the quad, if we could make our way there in an orderly fashion. Walk slowly, walk carefully, don’t run, our staff are fully trained and will get you to safety.”

A swarm of hovercams beats everyone but Energy Minister Patel out the door. Sonia Yadav and Marianna Fusco want to wait for him but he orders them out. No sign of course of Surjeet. The Captain is always last to leave. As he turns the fifth and biggest tremor yet brings the roof screens crashing down in the lecture hall beyond. Vishram is afforded one burning, eternal glimpse on the message frozen on the falling screens.

Output seven hundred and eighty-eight percent. Universe 11276.

The light, spacious, elegant architectures of Ray Power warp and billow around Vishram Ray like his one and only mushroom trip as he runs—no decorum, no carefully, no good example, just hammering terror—for the door. The sixth tremor sends a crack racing up the centre of the Ramayana floor. Stressed parquet tiles spring apart, the glass door panels shatter into flying silicon snow as he comes running through. The shareholders, already far back from the building, retreat further. “This is no electrical overheat,” Vishram overhears from a plump Grameen woman in widow’s white as he hunts down Sonia Yadav. Her face is ash.

“What the fuck is happening?”

“They’ve taken over the system,” she says faintly. Many of the shareholders are lying flat on the still-wet grass, waiting for the next, even bigger shock.

“Who, what?” Vishram demands.

“We’re shut out of our network, something else is running it. There’s stuff coming in, we can’t stop it, all channels at once, something huge.”

“An aeai,” Vishram says and Sonia Yadav hears that it is not a question. The bolt-hole, the escape clause, the way out when the Generation Threes were faced with final annihilation. “Tell me, could Artificial Intelligences use the zero-point to build their own universe?”

“It couldn’t be a universe like this, it would have to be a universe where the computations and digits that make up their reality can become part of the fabric of the physical reality.”

“A universe that thinks?”

“A mindlike space, we call it, but yes.” She looks into his face, daring his disdain. “A universe of real gods.”

Sirens in the distance, racing in. Universe breaches, call the fire brigade. There is another sound over the fire engines; aircraft engines.

“Played for a fucking fool,” Vishram grimaces and then everything goes white in a pure, perfect, blinding flash of urlight and when his vision clears, there is a star, pure and perfect and dazzling, shining in the middle of the Research Centre Building.

White so bright, so searing it burns through the one-way mirror of the pilot’s visor and before he goes into white-out Mr. Nandha receives a retina-burned image of big brown eyes, high cheekbones, a small nose. Beautiful. A goddess. So many men must want to wed you, my warrior, Mr. Nandha thinks. The face recedes into afterimage, then the world returns in spots and blots of purple and Mr. Nandha feels tears of justification start in his eyes, for there is the sign and seal that he was right. A star burns in the heart of the city, from deep inside the earth. He signs to the pilot. Take us, down.

“Away from the people,” he adds. “We do not recklessly endanger life.”

Vishram thinks he might have seen this scene in a movie once. Or if he hasn’t, he should write it: a crowd of people standing in a wide green field, all facing the same direction, hands raised to shield their eyes from a dazzling, actinic spark in the distance. That’s a shot to build a story from. His eyes are squeezed half-shut, even so everything is reduced to strangely stretched silhouettes.

“If that’s what I think it is, there’s a lot more than bright light coming off it,” says Ramesh’s voice beside him.

“And what do you think it is?” Vishram asks, remembering his sunburn from peering into the observation window. That was a low level universe. A glance at Sonia Yadav’s palmer, still receiving data from the monitoring systems around the aperture, tells him this is universe 212255. Two and something lakh universes.

“A universe being born,” Ramesh says, dreamily. “The only reason we’re still here, there’s anything left, is the containment fields still have it. In terms of the subjective physics of that universe, it must seem like a super-gravity squeezing its space-time so it can’t expand. But that kind of expansion energy has to go somewhere.”

“How long can the cores hold it?” Vishram asks Sonia Yadav. He imagines he should be shouting. In the movies, they are always shouting. Her shrug tells all he needs to know and fear. A fresh tremor. People fall to the earth, though it is a traitor. Vishram hardly sees them. The star, the blinding star. It is now a tiny sphere. Then he does hear a shout, Sonia Yadav’s voice.

“Deba! Has anyone seen Deba?”

As the shout ripples out across the field, Vishram Ray finds he is running. He knows they will not find Deba among them. Deba is down there, in his hole, in his black hole under the earth, on the precipice of nothing. A voice cries his name, a voice he does not recognise. He looks around to see Marianna Fusco running after him. She has kicked off her shoes, she runs ponderously in her business skirt. He has never heard her shout his name before.

“Vish! Come back, there’s nothing you can do!”

The bubble expands again. It is now thirty metres across, rising out of the centre of the Research Unit like a Mughal dome. Like the dome of the Mughal Taj, it is empty inside, emptier even than the tomb of a grief-sick Emperor. It is nothing. It is annihilation so absolute the mind cannot contain it. And Vishram plunges towards it.

“Deba!”

A silhouette emerges out of the light-dazzle, limbs flailing, awkward. “To me!” Vishram yells. “To me!”

He seizes Deba in his arms. The kid’s face is badly burned, his skin smells of ultraviolet. He rubs incessantly at his eyes.

“It hurts!” he wails. “It hurts, it fucking hurts!”

Vishram spins him around and the bubble leaps again, a titanic quantum leap. Vishram is staring at a wall of light, brilliant, blinding, but within the light he thinks he can see shapes, patterns, flickering of bright and less bright, light and shadow. Black and white. He states, entranced. Then he feels his skin start to burn.

Marianna Fusco takes Deba’s other shoulder and together they bring him to safety. The Ray Power shareholders have moved back to the furthest section of the formal charbagh. Vishram thinks it odd yet human that no one has left.

“Assessment?” he asks Sonia Yadav. The sirens are close now, he hopes they are parameds. And that aircraft is very, very near.

“Our computers are downloading at an incredible rate,” she says.

“Where?”

“Into that.”

“Is there anything we can do?”

“No,” she says simply. “It’s not in our hands now.”

You’ve got what you wanted, Vishram prays at the sphere of light. You don’t have to do anything else. Just close the door and walk away. And as he thinks it there is a second flash of light and a huge thunderclap of air and light and energy and space-time rushing into absolute vacuum and when Vishram’s vision clears he sees two things.

The first is a large perfectly hemispherical perfectly smooth crater where Ray Power Research Centre had stood.

The other is a line of soldiers in full combat gear advancing across the neat, watered lawn, weapons at the present. At their head is a tall, thin man with a good suit and a bad five o’clock shadow and a gun in his hand.

“Your attention please!” the man shouts. “Nobody is permitted to leave. You are all under arrest.”

Lisa Durnau finds Thomas Lull kneeling on the grass, his hands still cuffed with black plastic cable grip. He is beyond tears, beyond wrack. All that remains is a terrible stillness.

She settles awkwardly beside him on the grass, tears at her own plastic tie with her teeth.

“They got away,” Thomas Lull says, taking a long shuddering breath.

“The counterinflation force must have pushed into in-folded dimensions,” Lisa Durnau says. “It was a hell of a risk.”

“I looked into it,” Thomas Lull whispers. “As we were coming in over it, I looked into it. It is the Tabernacle.”

But how? Lisa Durnau wants to ask, but Thomas Lull slumps back on to his back, bound hands on his small pot belly, staring up into the light of the sun.

“She showed them there was nothing for them here,” he says. “Just people, just bloody people. I like to think she made a choice, for people. For us. Even though. Even though.” Lisa Durnau sees his body quiver and knows whatever it is lies beyond tears will come soon. She has never known that. She looks away. She has seen the look of this man destroyed before and that is enough for one lifetime.

Mr. Nandha would love most dearly to loosen his collar with his finger. The heat in the corridor is oppressive; the air-conditioning aeai follows Ray Power ethical practice, reluctant to react to sudden shifts in microclimate in the name of energy efficiency. But the sun has broken through the monsoon clouds and the glass face of Mr. Nandha’s headquarters is a sweat machine. His suit is rumpled. His skin is waxy with perspiration. He fears he may have an unpleasing body odour that his superiors will sense the moment he enters Arora’s office.

Mr. Nandha thinks there is blood on his shoes.

Air-conditioning aeais. Djinns even in the air ducts. From his seat he can look down upon his city as he has all those times when he called upon it to be his oracle. Now there is nothing here. My Varanasi is given over to djinns, he thinks.

Clouds move, light shifts in rays and shafts. Mr. Nandha winces at a sudden glint of brilliance from the green western suburbs. A heliograph, for his eye only, from the hundred-metre hemisphere carved out by an alien space-time where Ray Power’s Research and Development section had once stood. Precise down to the quantum level, a perfect mirror. He knows, because he stood there, firing and firing and firing at his own distorted reflection until Vik wrestled him to the ground, hauled the god-gun out of his fist. Vik, in his hissing, ill-fitting rock-boi shoes.

He can still see her shoes, racked up so neatly in pairs like praying hands.

They will be agreeing on a script, behind Arora’s door. Exceeded his authority. Excessive force. Public endangerment. The Energy Minister in handcuffs. Disciplinary measures. Suspension from duties. Of course. They must. But they do not know there is nothing they can do to him now. Mr. Nandha can feel the acid start to burn his esophagus. So many betrayals. His superiors, his stomach, his city. He erases the faithless shikaras and mandapas of Varanasi, imagines the campaniles and piazzas and duomos of Cremona. Cremona of the mind, the only eternal city. The only true city.

The door opens. Arora peeps out nervously, like a bird from a nest.

“You can come in now, Nandha.”

Mr. Nandha stands up, straightens his jacket and cuffs. As he walks towards the open door, the opening bars of the first Bach cello sonata soar through his mind.

In a dark room at the heart of a temple to a dark goddess, smeared with blood and hazy with the ash of dead humans, a cross-legged old man rolls on his skinny buttock bones and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs.

47: LULL, LISA

In the evening a wind blows up from the river as a cool exhalation. It sweeps the ghats, stirs up the dust, and sends eddies of marigold petals scurrying along the day-warmed stone. It rattles the newspapers of the old widower men who know they will never marry again, who come down to the ghats to talk the day’s headlines with their friends, it tugs at the trails and folds of the women’s saris. It sets the ghee-flames of the diyas swaying, ruffles the surface of the water into little cat-waves as the bathers scoop it up in their copper dishes and pour it over their heads. The scarlet silk flags curl on their bamboo poles. The wide wicker umbrellas shift as the breeze reaches under their decorated caps and lifts them. It smells of deep water, this small wind. It smells of cool and time and a new season. Down beneath the funeral ghats the men who pan the river for the golden ashes of the dead look up, touched by a sense of something more, something deeper than their dismal trade. The sound of the boat oars as they dip and slop into the water is rich and bottomless.

It was in the early afternoon that the rain lifted and the roof of grey cloud broke and there, beyond it, was a sky of high, miraculous blue, Krishna blue. You could see all the way out of the universe in that clear, washed blue. The sun shone, the stone ghats steamed. Within minutes the foot-trodden mud had dried to dust. People came out from under their umbrellas, uncovered their heads, unfolded their newspapers, and lit cigarettes. Rain has been, rain will come again: great curds of cumulus cruise the eastern horizon beyond the plumes and vapours of the industrial shore, preposterous purple and yellow in the fast-falling light. Already the people take up their positions for the aarti, the nightly fire ceremony. These ghats may witness panic, flight, populations on the move, bloody death, but thanks as endless as the river are due to Ganga Mata. Drummers, percussionists make their way to the sides of the wooden platforms where the brahmins perform. Barefoot women carefully descend the steps, dip their hands in the rising river before finding their accustomed place. They skirt around the two Westerners sitting by the water’s edge, nod, smile. All are welcome at the river.

The marble is warm under Lisa Durnau’s thigh, skin smooth. She can smell the water, coiling silently at her foot. The first flotillas of diyas are striking bravely out into the current, stubborn tiny lights on the darkening water. The breeze plays cool on her bare shoulders, a woman namastes as she passes back from the forgiving water. India endures, she thinks. And India ignores. These are its strengths, twined around each other like lovers in a temple carving. Armies clash, dynasties rise and fall, lords die and nations and universes are born and the river flows on and the people flow to it. Perhaps this woman had not even noticed the flash of light that was the aeais departing to their own universe. If she had, how would she have thought of it? Some new weapons system, some piece of electronica gone bad, some inexplicable piece of complicated world gone awry. Not for her to know or wonder. The only part of it to touch her was when Town and Country suddenly disappeared. Or did she look up and see another truth entirely, the jyotirlinga, the generative power of Siva bursting from an earth that could not contain it in a pillar of light.

She looks at Thomas Lull beside her on the warm stone, knees pulled up, arms around them, looking across the river at the fantastical fortresses of the clouds. He said little since Rhodes from the embassy secured their release from the Ministry’s holding centre, a conference room converted by removing all the tables and chairs, filled with bad tempered businessmen, feisty grameen women, and furious Ray Power researchers. The air was hissing with calls to lawyers.

Thomas Lull had not even blinked. The car had left them at the haveli but he turned away from the ornate wooden gate and headed out into the warren of lanes and street markets that led down to the ghats. Lisa had not tried to stop him or ask him or talk to him. She watched him walk up and down the flights, along and around looking for where feet had trodden blood into the stone. She had looked at his face as he stood there with the people bustling over the place where Aj had died and thought, I know that look from a big wide Lawrence living room with no furniture. And she knew what she needed to do, and that her mission was always going to fail. And when he finally shook his head in the weak gesture of disbelief that was more eloquent than any drama of emotion and went down to the river and sat by the water, she had gone with him and settled on the sun-warmed stone, for when he was ready.

The musicians have begun a soft, slow heartbeat. The crowd grows by the minute. The sense of expectation, of presence, is a felt thing.

“L. Durnau,” says Thomas Lull. Against herself, she smiles. “Give me that thing.”

She passes him the Tablet. He flicks through its pages. She sees him call up the images from the Tabernacle; Lisa, Lull. Aj. Nandha the Krishna Cop. He folds the faces back into the machine. A mystery never to be solved. She knows he will never come back with her.

“You think you learn something, you think finally you’ve got it worked out. It’s taken time and grief and effort and a shitload of experience but at last, you think you’ve got some idea how it all works, the whole fucking show. You think I’d know better, I honestly want to believe that we’re actually all right, that there’s something more to it than just planet-slime and that’s why it gets me every time. Every single time.”

“The curse of the optimist, Lull. People get in the way.”

“No, not people, L. Durnau. No, I gave up on people long ago. No, I’d hoped, when I worked out what the aeais were doing, I thought, Jesus, that’s a fucking irony, the machines that want to understand what it’s like to be human are actually more human than we are. I never hoped in us, L. Durnau, but I hoped that the Gen Threes might have evolved some moral sense. No, they abandoned her. As soon as they saw there never would be peace between the meat and the metal, they let her go. Learn what it’s like to be human. They learned all they needed to know in one act of betrayal.

“They saved themselves. They saved their species.”

“Did you listen to a word I said, L. Durnau?”

A child comes down the steps, a little girl in a floral dress, barefoot, uncertain on the ghats. Her face is pure concentration. Her father has hold of one hand, the other, waving to keep balance, holds a garland of marigolds. The father points her to the river, points her to throw, go on, put it in. The girl flings the gajra, waves her arms in delight as she sees it land on the darkening water. She cannot be more than two.

No, you’re wrong, Lull, Lisa Durnau wants to say. It’s those stubborn tiny lights they can never put out. It’s those quanta of joy and wonder and surprise that never stop bubbling out of the universal and constant truths of our humanity. When she speaks, her words are, “So where do you think you’ll go then?”

“There’s still a dive school with my name on it somewhere down Lanka, Thailand way,” Thomas Lull says. “There’s one night in the year, just after the first full moon in November, when the coral releases its sperm and eggs, all at once. It’s quite wonderful, like swimming in a giant orgasm. I’d like to see that. Or there’s Nepal, the mountains; I’d like to see the mountains, really see the mountains, spend time among them. Do some mountain Buddhism, all those demons and horrors, that’s the kind of religion speaks to me. Get up to Kathmandu, out to Pokhara, some place high, with a view of the Himalayas. Will this get you in trouble with the G-men?”

Father and daughter stand by the water, watching the gajra bob on the ripples. The child smiles suspiciously at her. What have you been doing all your life, Lisa Durnau, that is more vital than this?

“They’ll get round to me eventually.”

“Well, take this back to them. I suppose I owe you, L. Durnau.” Thomas Lull hands her the Tablet. Lisa Durnau frowns at the schematic. “What is this?”

“The winding maps for the Calabi-Yau space the Gen Threes created at Ray Power.”

“It’s a standard set of transforms for an information-space with a mindlike space-time structure. Lull, I helped develop these theories, remember? They got me into your office.”

And bed, she thinks.

“Do you remember what I said on the boat, L. Durnau? About Aj? ‘The other way around.’”

Lisa Durnau frowns, then she sees it, as she saw it written by the hand of God on the toilet door in Paddington Station, and it is so clear and so pure and so beautiful it is like a spear of light stabbed straight through her, ramming through her pinning her to the white stone and it feels like death and it feels like ecstasy and it feels like something singing. Tears start in her eyes, she wipes them away, she cannot stop looking at the single, miraculous, luminous negative sign. Negative T. The time-arrow is reversed. A mindlike space, where the intelligences of the aeais can merge into the structure of the universe and manipulate it in any way they will. Gods. The clocks run backwards. As it ages, as it grows more complex; our universe grows younger and dumber and simpler. Planets dissolve into dust, stars evaporate into clouds of gas that coalesce into brief supernovas that are not the light of destruction but candles of creation, space collapsing in on itself, hotter and hotter reeling back towards the primordial ylem, forces and particles churned back into the primordial ylem while the aeais grow in power and wisdom and age. Time’s arrow flies the other way.

Hands shaking, she calls up a simple math aeai, runs a few fast transforms. As she suspected, the arrow of time not only flies in the other direction, it flies faster. A fast, fierce universe of lifetimes compressed into moments. The clock-speed, the Planck-time flicker that governs the rates at which the aeais calculate their reality, is one hundred times that of universe zero. Breathless, Lisa Durnau thumbs more calculations into the Tablet though she knows, she knows, she knows what it is going to tell her. Universe 212255 runs its course from birth to recollapse into a final singularity in seven point seven eight billion years.

“It’s a Boltzmon!” she exclaims with simple joy. The girl in the flower dress turns and stares at her. The cinder of a universe; an ultimate black hole that contains every piece of quantum information that fell into it, that punches its way out of one dying reality into another. And waits, humanity’s inheritance.

“Their gift to us,” Thomas Lull says. “Everything they knew, everything they experienced, everything they learned and created, they sent it through to us as their final act of thanks. The Tabernacle is a simple universal automaton that codes the information in the Boltzmon into a form comprehensible to us.”

“And us, our faces.”

“We were their gods. We were their Brahma and Siva, Vishnu and Kali. We are their creation myth.”

The light is almost gone now, deep indigo has settled across the river. The air is cool, the far clouds carry an edge of luminosity, they seem huge and improbable as dreams. The musicians have picked up the pace, the devotees take up the song to Mother Ganga. The Brahmins descend through the crowd. Father and child are gone.

They never forgot us, thinks Lisa Durnau. In all the billions—trillions—of subjective years of their experience and history, they always remembered this act of betrayal on the banks of the Ganga, and they compelled us to enact it. The burning chakra of regeneration is endless. The Tabernacle is a prophecy, and an oracle. The answer to everything we need to know is in there, if we only know how to ask.

“Lull…”

He whips his finger to his lips, no, hush, don’t speak. Thomas Lull gets stiffly to his feet. For the first time Lisa Durnau sees the old man he will be, the lonely man he wishes to become. Where he goes this time, not even the Tablet can see.

“L. Durnau.”

“Kathmandu, then. Or Thailand.”

“Somewhere.”

He offers a hand and she knows that after she takes it she will never see him again.

“Lull, I can’t thank you.”

“You don’t have to. You would have seen it.”

She takes the hand.

“Good-bye, Thomas Lull.”

Thomas Lull dips his head in a small bow.

“L. Durnau. All partings should, I think, be sudden.”

The musicians ratchet up a gear, the crowd gives a vast, incoherent sigh and leans towards the five platforms where the priests offer puja.

Flames whirl up from the Brahmins’ aarti lamps, momentarily dazzling Lisa Durnau. When her vision clears, Lull is gone.

Out on the water, a flaw of wind, a current catches the garland of marigolds and turns it and carries it out into the dark river.