“What the fuck were you thinking of?” Lull says, hurrying Aj to Platform Five where the Mumbai-Varanasi Raj shatabdi has been called, a long scimitar of green and silver glistening in the station floods. “What did you tell those people? You could have started anything, anything at all.”
“They were going to see their son but he is in trouble,” she says faintly. He thinks she might collapse on him.
“This way sir, this way!” The porters escort them through the crowd. “This car, this car!” Thomas Lull overpays them to take Aj to her seat. It’s a reserved two-person carrel, lamp-lit, intimate. Leaning into the cone of light, Thomas Lull says, “How do you know this stuff?”
She will not look at him, she turns her head into the padded seatback. Her face is ash. Thomas Lull is very afraid she is going to have another asthma attack.
“I saw it, the gods.”
He lunges forward, takes her heart-shaped face between his two hands, turns it to look at him.
“Don’t lie to me; nobody can do this.”
She touches his hands and he feels them fall away from her face.
“I told you. I see it like a halo around people. Things about them; who they are, where they’re going, what train they’re on. Like those people going to see their son, only he wouldn’t be there for them. All that, and they wouldn’t have known, and they would have been waiting and waiting and waiting at the station and trains would come and trains would go and still he wouldn’t come and maybe the father would go to his address but all they would know is that he went out that morning to work and that he’d said he would meet them all at the station and they’d go to the police and find out that he’d been arrested for stealing a motorbike and they would have to bail him and they wouldn’t know who to go to get him out.”
Thomas Lull slumps in his seat. He is defeated. His anger, his blunt Yankee rationalism fail before this girl’s pale words.
“This son, this prodigal, what’s his name?”
“Sanjay.”
Automatic doors close. Up the line a whistle shrills over the station roar.
“Have you got that photograph? Show me that photograph, the one you showed me down by the backwater.”
Silently, smoothly, the train begins to move, Station wallahs and well-wishers keep pace for a last chance sale or farewell. Aj unfolds the palmer on the table.
“I didn’t tell you the truth,” Thomas Lull says.
“I asked you. You said: ‘Just other tourists on the trip. They’ve probably got a photograph exactly the same.’ That was not the truth?”
The fast electric train rocks over points; picking up speed with every metre it dives into a tunnel, eerily lit by flashes from the overhead lines.
“It was a truth. They were tourists—we all were, but I know these people. I’ve known them for years. We were all travelling together in India, that’s how well we knew each other. Their names are Jean-Yves and Anjali Trudeau; they’re Artificial-life theoreticians from the University of Strasbourg. He’s French, she’s Indian. Good scientists. The last time I heard from them they were thinking of moving to the University of Bharat—all the closer to the sundarbans. That was where they thought the real cutting research was being done, unhampered by the Hamilton Acts and the aeai licensing laws. Looks like they did, but they are not your real parents.”
“Why is that?” Aj asks.
“Two things. First, how old are you? Eighteen? Nineteen? They didn’t have a child when I knew them four years ago. But that all falls at the second. Anjali was born without a womb. Jean-Yves told me. She could never have children, not even in vitro. She cannot be your natural mother.”
The shatabdi bursts out from the undercity into the light. A vast plane of gold slants through the window across the small table. Mumbai’s photochemical smog has blessed it with Bollywood sunsets. The perpetual brown haze renders the ziggurats of the projects ethereal as sacred mountains. Power gantries strobe past; Thomas Lull watches them flicker over Aj’s face, trying to read emotions, reactions in the dazzling mask of gold. She bows her head. She closes her eyes. Thomas Lull hears an intake of breath. Aj looks up.
“Professor Lull, I am experiencing a number of strong and unpleasant sensations. Let me describe them to you. Though I am at relative rest, I experience a sense of vertigo, as if I am falling; not in a physical sense, but inwards. I experience a sense of nausea and what I can only describe as hollowness. I experience unreality, as if this present is not happening to me and I am dreaming in my bed in the hotel in Thekkady. I experience a sense of impact, as if I have been struck without a physical blow being landed on me. I imagine that the physical substance of the world is frail and fragile like glass and that at any moment I will fall through into a void, yet at the same time I find a thousand different ideas rushing through my head. Professor Lull, can you explain my contradictory sensations?”
The swift sun of India is now setting, staining Aj’s face red like a devotee of Kali. The fast train blurs through Mumbai’s vast basti-lands. Thomas Lull says, “It’s what anyone feels when their life turns to lies. It’s anger and it’s betrayal and it’s confusion and loss and fear and hurt but those are only names. We have no language for emotions other than the emotion itself.”
“I feel tears starting in my eyes. This is most surprising.” Then Aj’s voice breaks and Thomas Lull helps her to the washroom to let the alien emotions work themselves out away from the stares of the passengers. Back at his seat he calls a steward and orders a bottle of water. He pours a glass, adds a high-grade tranq from his small but efficacious travelling apothecary, and marvels at the simple complexity of the ripple patterns on its surface transmitted from the steel beat of the wheels. When Aj returns he pushes the trembling glass across the table before any more of her questions can tumble out. He has enough of his own.
“All of it.”
The tranq is not long taking effect. Aj blinks at him like a drunk owl, curls up as cat-comfortable as she can in the seat. She is out. Thomas Lull’s hand moves to her tilak, stops. It would be a violation as monstrous as if he slipped his hand down the front of her loose grey tie-waist pants. And that is a thought he hadn’t verbalised until this second.
Strange girl, curled up like a gangly ten-year-old in her seat. He told her truths to scarify any heart and she treated them like propositions in philosophy. As if they were strange to her, new. Alien. Why had he told her? To break her illusion or because he knew how she would react? To see the look on her face as she fought to comprehend what her body was experiencing? He knows that fearful bafflement from the faces of the beach-club kids when emotions brewed up in the protein processor matrices of the cyberabads hit them. Emotions for which their bodies have no needs or analogues; emotions they experience but cannot understand. Alien emotions.
He has much work to do. As the fast train plunges past the empty, stepped reservoirs of the purifying Narmada, hurling itself into the night past the villages and towns and drought-blighted forests, Thomas Lull goes far-fetching. An old down-home expression of Lisa Durnau’s for blue-skying; sitting back and letting your mind roam the furthest bounds of possibility. It is the work he loves best and the closest heathen old Thomas Lull comes to spirituality. It is, he thinks, all of spirituality. God is our selves, our true, preconscious selves. The yogis have had it right all these millennia. The working out of the idea is never as thrilling as the burn of creation, the moment of searing insight when all at once, you know absolutely.
He studies Aj as ideas tumble and collide and shatter and are drawn together again by intellectual gravity. In time they will coalesce into a new world, but there is enough for Thomas Lull to guess its future nature. And he is afraid. The train ploughs on, peeling a bow-wave of night from its streamlined prow as it eats two hundred and eighty kilometres of India every hour. Exhaustion struggles with intellectual excitement and eventually subdues it. Thomas Lull sleeps. He wakes only at the brief halt at Jabalpur as Awadhi customs make a perfunctory border check. Two men in peaked caps glance at Thomas Lull. Aj sleeps on, head cradled on arm. White man and Western woman. Unimpeachable. Thomas Lull dozes again, waking once to shiver with an ancient, childhood pleasure at the rumble of the wheels beneath him. He falls into a long and untroubled sleep terminated by an untimetabled jolt that throws him out of unconsciousness hard against the table.