“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.
GLOSSARY
AARTI: Hindu ceremony of offering light to a deity. ADIVASI: ancient Indian tribal cultures, beneath the caste system. ANGREEZ: Hindi-isation of “English”
APSARA: celestial nymph, often a bracket support in a temple, originally tree spirits.
ARAHB: Hindi number equal to 109. Indians have useful names for very large numbers.
ARDHA MANDAPA: entrance porch, leading into the mandapa, or colonnaded hall of a temple.
BABA: term of endearment. BABU: civil servant or bureaucrat.
BADMASH: a nasty and brutish little hood. With attitude. BAHADUR: proud, self-important, pompous. BAKHTI: the path of devotion.
BANSURI: North Indian six- or seven-hole bamboo flute.
BARADARI: Pakistani/Pashtun affiliation group somewhere between a clan, a gang, and a Massive.
BASTI: settlement or slum, also (confusingly) a Jain temple complex.
BEGUM: term of respect to a Muslim married lady.
BEHEN CHOWD: sister-fucker, most common Hindi term of abuse.
BHAI: suffix after a proper name, indicating respectful closeness.
BHAVAN: house—usually one of some distinction.
BHEESTY: domestic servant in charge of water supply.
BIBI: Hindi term for a married woman.
BIDI: a native Indian cigarette, tapered towards the tip. Deathsticks, if ever there were. BIG DADA: low hood; literally means “big arm.” Strong arm boy.
BINDI: forehead mark indicating caste, though it can be worn decoratively. The tilak is the religious equivalent.
BRAHMIN: the highest of the four main castes; the priestly caste, so holy not even the gods could harm them. (See also varna.) In context, also the genetically modified children of the rich.
BRINJAL: eggplant.
BULBUL: common, titlike bird with black head and white cheeks and a famously sweet song.
BURQA: traditional public attire of a Muslim woman, anything from a thin headscarf to a full marquee.
CHAKRA: energy node in the human body. There are seven: from the pubis to the crown of the head.
CHARBAGH: water garden, of Islamic design, divided into quarters.
CHARPOY: rope-strung, low bed frame, very popular in rural India for lolling on to observe the passing world.
CHHATRI: small decorative Mughal pavilion in the form of a cupola on open pillars.
CHITAL: most common species of Indian deer, with a spotted hide. Also known as the Buddha’s deer: his last incarnation before becoming human was a Chital.
CHO CHWEET: common term of endearment.
CHOLI: short-sleeved, tight undershirt worn by women under a sari.
CHOWKIDAR: a nightwatchman.
CHUUTYA: “cunthole” in Hindi slang.
CRORE: 107.
CUTCHA: opposite of pukka.
DACOIT: armed gangsters/robbers. Still widely used. DAL: lentils, the staple of rural India.
DALIT: the lowest caste. Literally “the Oppressed,” they were formerly known as Untouchables.
DARSHAN: the auspicious glance of a temple deity, or a rich and powerful person. DARWAZ: entrance gate to a mosque.
DESI: Indianness as perceived by the overseas community—a nostalgic, affectionate sense of India. In UK Asian youth parlance, means the same as pukka: real, genuine.