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.