River of Gods (23 page)

Uninvited, Govind seated himself on the edge of the bed. Vishtam
noticed in the mirror that his brother's feet did not quite reach the
ground.

"You may find this hard to believe, but all I want to do is keep
the company together."

"You're right."

Still Vishram kept his back turned.

"EnGen have made no secret that they want Ray. Even when our
father was CEO, they had made approaches. They will have it, sooner
or later. We cannot hope to stand against the Americans. They will
have us in the end, and what we, between us, have to decide is if
they pick us off one by one, or take us in one big mouthful. I know
what I prefer. I know what is better for the company our father
built. There is strength in unity."

"Our father built an Indian business in an Indian way."

"My brother, the social conscience?" In those five words
Vishram knew that he and his brother were eternal enemies. Rama and
Ravanna. "Those old women and Grameen bankers will be the first
to turn on you when the offers come in," Govind continued. "They
speak fine and noble but offer then a purseful of dollars and see the
solidarity of the poor then. They know business better than you,
Vishram."

"I don't think so," Vishram said softly. His brother
frowned.

"I'm sorry, I didn't hear you."

"I said, I don't think so. In fact, you can say whatever you
like now, and I will go against you. That's the way it's going to be
from now on. Whatever you do, whatever you say, whatever offer you
make or deal you strike, I will oppose it. You may be wrong, you may
be right, it may make me a billion dollars, but I am going to oppose
it. Because now I can, and now you can't do anything or run to anyone
or issue any older-brother orders, because I will still own one-third
of Ray Power. Now, you're in my bedroom and you didn't knock and
you're certainly not here by invitation, but I'm going to overlook it
because this is the last night I stay in this room, in this house and
I have work to do now."

It was only as he settled into the airco-cooled leather of the car
that Vishram noticed the little crescents of blood in his palms; the
stigmata of clenched nails.

It's a dire Italian but it's the only Italian. Nostalgic already for
the cooking of the Glasgow Italians, a mighty race, Vishram had lit
upon the prospect of pasta and ruffino before he remembered that
Varanasi has no rooted Italian community, has no Italian in its genes
at all. The staff is all local. The music is compiled from the
charts. The wine is overheated and tired from the long drought. There
is something on the menu called pasta-tikka.

"I'm sorry it's so terrible," he apologises to Sonia Yadav.

She struggles with overcooked spaghetti.

"I've never eaten Italian before."

"You're not eating Italian now."

She has made an effort for this dire dinner. She has done something
with her hair, hung a little gold and amber around her.
Arpege 27
:
that'll have been some European duty-free somewhere. He likes it that
she has worn a business sari and not an ugly Western-style suit.
Vishram sits back in his chair, touches his fingertips together, then
realises he looks too much like a James Bond villain and unfolds.

"How much could you reasonably expect a liberal arts boy to
understand about zero-point power?"

Sonia Yadav pushes her plate away from her with evident relief.

"Okay, well for starters, it's not strictly zero-point as most
people think of it." Sonia Yadav has a slight pucker between the
eyes when she is saying or thinking or contemplating something
difficult. It's very cute. "Do you remember what I said back in
the lab about cold and hot? The classic zero-point theories are cold
theories. Now, our theories suggest they won't work. Can't work:
there's a ground-state wall you just can't get around. You don't beat
the second law of thermodynamics."

Vishram lifts a breadstick, breaks it theatrically in two. "I
got the cold and hot bit."

"Okay. I'll try. And by the way, I saw that thing with the
breadstick in the remake of the
Pyar Diwana Hota Hai
."

"Little more wine, then?"

She takes the refill but doesn't touch it. Wise woman. Vishram
settles back with the traumatised Chianti in the ancient ritual of
listening to a woman tell a story.

It's a strange and magical tale as full of contradictions and
impossibilities as any legend from the Mahabharata. There are
multiple worlds and entities that can be two contradictory things at
the same time. There are beings that can never be fully known or
predicted, that once entangled remain linked though they be removed
to opposite ends of the universe so that what happens to one is
instantly felt by the other. Vishram watches Sonia's demonstration of
the double-slit experiment with a fork, two capers, and ripples in
the tablecloth and thinks, what a strange and alien world you
inhabit, woman. The quantum universe is as capricious and uncertain
and unknowable as the triple world that rested on the back of the
great turtle, ruled by gods and demons.

"Because of the uncertainty principle, there are always virtual
particle pairs being born and vanishing again at all possible energy
levels. So, in effect, in every cubic centimetre of empty space,
there is theoretically an infinite amount of energy, if we can just
stop the virtual particles disappearing."

"I have to tell you, this liberal arts boy doesn't understand a
word of this."

"No one does. Not deep down; understand as we understand
understanding. All we have is a description of how it works, and it
works better than any theory we've ever come up with, and that's
including M-Star theory. It's like the mind of Brahma; no one can
understand the thoughts of a creator deity, but that doesn't mean
that there is no creation."

"For a scientist, you use a lot of religious metaphors."

"This scientist believes we live in a Hindu universe."
Sonia Yadav presses her point. "Don't get me wrong, I'm not like
those Christian fundamentalist creation scientists—that's not
science; it denies empiricism and the very fact the universe is
knowable. Creationists adapt the empirical evidence to suit their
particular scriptural interpretation. I think what I think because of
the empirical evidence. I'm a rational Hindu. I'm not saying I
believe in actual gods, but quantum information theory and M-Star
theory teach you the connectedness of all things and how properties
emerge that can never be predicted by any of the constituent elements
and that the very large and the very small are two sides of the same
superstring. Do I need to tell a Ray about Hindu philosophy?"

"Maybe this Ray. So you'll not be pulling N. K. Jivanjee on his
rath yatra." He'd seen the photographs on the evening news. Hell
of a scoop.

"I'll not be pulling, but I might be in the crowd. And anyway,
it's got a biodiesel engine in it."

Vishram sits back in his chair, pulls at his lower lip as he does
when observations and turns of phrase come flocking and cawing into a
comedy routine.

"So tell me; you haven't got a bindi and you're out without a
chaperone; how does this all sit with N. K. Jivanjee and the mind of
Brahma?"

Sonia Yadav does the pucker again.

"I will say this straight and simple. Jati and varna have
benighted our nation for three thousand years. Caste was never a
Dravidian concept—it was those Aryans and their obsession with
division and power. That's why the British loved it here—they're
still fascinated with anything to do with this country. The class
divide is their national narrative."

"Not the bit of Britain I was in," Vishram asides.

"For me, N. K. Jivanjee is about national pride, about Bharat
for Bharat, not sold by the kilo to the Americans. About Hindu
zero-point energy. And in the twenty first century, no woman needs a
chaperone; and anyway, my husband trusts me."

"Ah," Vishram says, hoping his crestfallenness doesn't
carry. "So, M-Star theory?"

As far as he can get it, it's like this. First there was string
theory, which Vishram has heard of, something to do with everything
being notes from vibrating strings. Very pretty. Very musical. Very
Hindu. Then there was M-theory, which attempted to resolve the
contradictions of string theory but which reached in different
directions, like the legs of a starfish. The theoretical centre
arrived last, in the late twenties in the shape of M-Star theory.

"I can see the star, but what's the M for?"

"That's a mystery," Sonia Yadav smiles. They're on Stregas
now. The liqueur holds up well against the climate.

In M-Star theory the wrappings and foldings of the primal strings in
eleven dimensions into membranes create the polyverse of all possible
universes, all with fundamental properties differing from those
experienced by humans.

"Everything is there," says Sonia Yadav. "Universes
with an extra time dimension, two-dimensional universes—there's
no gravity in two-dimensional universes. Universes where
self-organisation and life is a basic property of space-time. An
infinite number of universes. And that's the difference between cold
and hot zero-point theory."

Vishram calls for another round of Stregas. He doesn't know if it's
the Sip that Charms or the physics, but his brain is at the Swaddled
in Cottonwool stage.

"What stops cold zero-point theory in its tracks is the second
law of thermodynamics." The waiter serves the second round.
Vishram studies Sonia Yadav through the gold in the little bubble
glass. "Stop that, and pay attention! To be useful, energy has
to go somewhere. It's got to flow from higher to lower, hot to cold,
if you like. But in our universe the zero point, the quantum
fluctuation, is the ground state. There's nowhere for the energy to
flow; it's all uphill. But in another universe."

"The ground state, whatever you call it, might be higher."
Sonia Yadav claps her hands together in a silent namaste.

"Exactly! Exactly! It would naturally flow from higher to lower.
We could tap that infinite energy."

"First find your universe."

"Oh, we found one a long time ago. It's a simple manifold of the
M-Star theoretical structure of our own universe. Gravity is more
powerful there; so is the expansion constant, so there's a lot more
vacuum energy tied up in the stressed space-time. It's quite a small
universe, and not too far away."

"I thought you said the universes were all inside and outside
each other."

"They are, topologically. I'm talking about energy distance, how
much we need to warp our 'branes to the geometry of that one. In
physics, ultimately, everything is energy."

Warped brains, all right.

Sonia Yadav sets her empty glass firmly on the gingham tablecloth,
leans forwards, and Vishram cannot refuse the physical energy in her
eyes, her face, her body.

"Come with me," she says. "Come and see it."

After Glasgow, the University of Bharat Varanasi at night is
unusually well mannered. No discarded polystyrene trays of
rain-soaked chips or dropped beer glasses or vomit pizzas to dodge in
the brownout. No sounds of coitus from the halls or urination from
the shrubberies. No sinister drunk reeling out of the peripheral
vision with a racial curse. No gangs of half-naked girls arm in arm
streeling across the dusty, withered lawns. What there is is a lot of
heavy security, a few dons on big clunky bicycles with no lights, the
rattle of a solitary night-radio and a sense from the shut-up faculty
buildings and student residences of curfew.

The driver heads towards the only light. The experimental physics
building is an orchidlike confection of luminous plastic sheeting and
pylons, daring and delicate. The name on the marble plinth is the
Ranjit Ray Centre for High Energy Physics. Buried beneath the
delicate, flowery architecture is a grunt engineering pulse laser
particle collider.

"He seems to have been a man of many parts, my father,"
Vishram says as the night security nods them through the lobby. His
face is known now.

"He's not dead," Sonia Yadav says and Vishram starts.

An elevator bank at the end of the lobby takes them down a tube to
the root of the beast. It is a mythological creature indeed, a
world-devouring worm curled in a loop beneath Sarnarh and Ganga.
Vishram looks through the glass observation window at electrical
devices each the size of a ship engine and tries to imagine particles
forced into strange and unnatural liaisons.

"When we run it to full power to open an aperture, those
containment magnets put out a field strong enough to suck the
haemoglobin out of your blood," Sonia Yadav says.

"How do you know this?" Vishram asks.

"We tried it with a goat, if you really want to know. Come on."

Sonia Yadav leads the way down a long flight of concrete steps to an
air-lock door. The security panel eyeballs her, opens into an
airlock.

"Are we going into space or something?" Vishram asks as the
lock cycles. "It's just a containment device."

Vishram decides he doesn't want to know what's being contained, so he
fluffs, "I know my father's rich—was rich—and
there's rich buys private jets, rich buys private islands, but rich
that buys private particle colliders."

"There are other backers involved," Sonia Yadav says. The
inner hatch spins and they enter an unspectacular concrete office,
headachingly lit with neon and flatscreen flicker. A young, bearded
man rocks back on a chair, feet on the desk, reading the evening
paper. He has an industrial thermos of chai and a Styrofoam cup; the
computers bang out old-school bhangra from a Bengali station. He
jumps up when he sees his late-night visitors.

"Sonia, I'm sorry, I didn't know."

"Deba, this is."

"I know, pleased to meet you, Mr. Ray." He has an
overemphatic handshake. "So, you've come to take a look at our
own little private universe?" Beyond a second door is a small
concrete room into which the visitors fit like segments of an orange.
A heavy glass panel is level with Vishram's head. He squints but can
make nothing out of it. "We only need numbers really, but some
people have this atavistic urge to eyeball things," Deba says.
He's brought his chai with him, he takes a sip. "Okay, we're in
an observation area beside the confinement chamber, which we in our
humorous physicists' way call the Holding Cell. It's basically a
modified tokamak torus—does this mean anything to you? No?
Think of it as an inverse donut; it's got an outside, but inside is
the hardest vacuum you can imagine. It's actually harder than any
vacuum you can imagine, all there is in there is space-time and
quantum fluctuation. And this."