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.”