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.