‘And how is Nirupa?’
His smile made me think that he was human. Aeais have their own emotions, or things like emotions.
‘She’s good. Very good. Twenty-eight now, would you believe?’ I confessed that I could not.
‘Doing well, found an eligible boy, from a good enough family, who’s not a complete gold-digger. Old-fashioned stuff like that. I’m glad she bided her time, but they can afford to take their time now.’
‘All the time in the world.’
‘She’s beautiful. Vish, there’s something I need to tell you. Not a warning exactly, more to prepare yourself.’
‘This sounds ominous.’
‘I hope not. You’ve predicted it all very well.’
‘Predicted what?’
‘Don’t be coy. I know who you were. No secrets in the transparent world, I’m afraid. No, you got it right and I’m glad you did it because I think you softened the blow, but there is something you didn’t predict, maybe something you couldn’t predict.’
A whisper of breeze stirred the candle flames in my simple wooden room. Heavy white feet went tread tread tread on the creaking boards outside my latticed window. If they had looked through the grille they would have seen me talking to a ghost. No strange thing in this age, or most other ages.
‘Whenever we last spoke, you said that you were making use of information from the legacy-device the original aeais had bequeathed us.’
‘Well-guessed.’
‘It seems logical.’
‘When the Trimurti left Earth, they opened a connection to a separate space-time continuum. There were several major differences from our space-time. One was that time runs much faster there than in our space-time, though it would not be noticeable to anyone in that continuum. Another was that the arrow of time was reversed. The Trimurti move backwards in time; this was how their artefact, which the Americans call the Tabernacle, seemed to have predated the solar system when it was found in space. But the more important one – and that was why they chose it – was that information was integrated into the geometrical structure of that space-time.’
I closed my eyes and focused my imagination.
‘You’re saying that information, data – minds – form part of the basic structure of that universe. Minds without the need for bodies. The whole universe is like a cosmological computer.’
‘You’ve got it.’
‘You’ve found a way back into that universe.’
‘Oh no no no no no. That universe is closed. It ended with the Trimurti. Their time is gone. It was an imperfect universe. There are others, mind-spaces like that, but better. We’re going to open up dozens – hundreds, eventually thousands – of portals. Our need for processing will always outstrip our available memory, and the devas are just a stopgap. A whole universe, right beside ours, only a footstep away, available for computing resources.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘The Jyotirlingas are coming.’
The Jyotirlingas were the sacred places where, in the Vedic Age, the creative, generative energy of the Lord Siva burst from the ground in pillars of divine light, the ultimate phallic linga symbols. These would come not from the earth, but another universe. And Shiv named them after his namesake’s cosmological cock. No one could accuse him of lack of hubris. His I-dust image sparkled and swirled and exploded into a billion motes of light. His smile, like that of the legendary Cheshire cat, seemed to remain. A week later, twelve pillars of light appeared in cities all across the states of India. By a slight misalignment, the Delhi Jyotirlinga touched down in the middle of the Dalhousie, the city’s largest slum, crowded beyond all imagining with refugees from the drought.
The simultaneous appearance, at eleven thirty-three, of twelve columns of light in cities across India paralysed the rail network. It was one of the least of the disturbances that day but for me, on an island in the middle of the Brahmaputra and needing to get to Delhi, that was the most important. That there were any flights at all was a miracle, that I could book onto one at any price at all was proof indeed that the age of the gods had truly returned. Even when alien universes open up in the hearts of our great and ancient cities, Indian grandmothers will still need to travel to see their wee darlings.
I had tried to call Sarasvati but all com channels into Delhi were down and the call-centre aeais announced indefinite delays before the network was restored. I wondered what it would be like for those accustomed to being strung out across the deva net to be back into just one head as the Air Awadh Airbus took me up over the shrivelled silver thread of the parched Ganga. In the tiny toilet I once again transformed myself back into a shaved, shorn, urbane Delhi-boy. As we descended into Indira Gandhi airport the captain told those of us on the right to look out and we would see the Jyotirlinga. His voice was uncertain, not a tone you want to hear from an airline captain, as if he could not believe what he was seeing. I had been studying it long before the captain’s calclass="underline" a line of sun-bright light rising from the hazy, grey stain of central Delhi up beyond all sight, further than I could see, craning to look up through the tiny window into the darkening sky.
Sarasvati would be there. That was Shiv’s warning. When the light struck, she would have looked around and, in the same instant, made her mind up. People in need. She could not refuse.
Immigration took an hour and a half. Five flights of journalists had disgorged at once. A wired world, it seemed, was no substitute for reporters on the ground. The hall buzzed with swarming fly-sized hovercams. Two hours to grind into Delhi in the limo. The highways were clogged with lines of traffic, all headed out, all moving with geological slowness. The noise of horns was appalling to one fresh from the profound, liquid silence of the dharamshala. Only military and media seemed headed into Delhi but soldiers stopped us at intersections to wave past thundering convoys of chartered refugee buses. We were held up for a motionless half an hour on the big cloverleaf on Siri Ring. In awe and leisure, I studied the wall of memory farms; towering black monoliths drinking in sunlight through their solar skins, pressed shoulder to shoulder as far as I could see. In every breath of air-conditioned air I took, I inhaled millions of devas.
Every roadside, every verge and roundabout, every intersection and car park, every forecourt and garden was filled with the shanties and lean-tos of the refugees. The best were three low walls of brick with plastic sacking for a roof, the worst cardboard scrapes, or sticks and rags worked together into a sun-shade. Feet had worn away all greenery and stripped the trees bare for firewood. The bare earth had blown into dust, mingling with the airborne devas. The bastis pressed right up to the feet of the memory towers. What did Sarasvati imagine she could achieve here in the face of so colossal a catastrophe? I called her again. The network was still out.
Bharat had invaded India and now India was casting it out. We drove, blaring the horn constantly, past a terrible, emaciated army of refugees. No fine cars here. Trucks, old buses, pick-ups for the better off, behind them, swarms of phatphats, more overloaded than that fatal one I had seen on the Holi I discovered death. Motorbikes and mopeds almost invisible under bundles of bedding and cooking pots. I saw a chugging, home-engineered half-tractor device, engine terrifyingly exposed, dragging a trailer piled as high as house with women and children. Donkey carts, the donkey bent and straining at the loads. In the end, human muscle pushed the exodus onward: bicycle rickshaws, handcarts, bent backs. Military robots guided them, herded them, punished those who strayed from the approved refugee route, or fell, with shock sticks.