River of Gods (7 page)

It was there that the third shock crept up and mugged her. It was the
realisation of how few people would ever miss her.

The ident patch on the yellow suit liner reads
Daley
Suarez-Martin. The G-woman is one of those people who will set up
office anywhere, even in a cubby full of film-wrap astronaut food.
Palmer, water bottle, television patch, and family photos are
velcroed in an arc on the wall: three generations of Suarez-Martins
arrayed on a big house porch with palms in large terracotta pots. The
TV patch is set to timer and tells Lisa Durnau she's at 01.15 GMT.
She does a subtraction. She'd be at Tacorofico Superica with the
Wednesday night gang on her third Margarita.

"How are you settling in?" Daley Suarez-Martin asks.

"It's, uh, it's okay. Really." Lisa still has a small
back-of-skull headache, like you get the first few times you use a
lighthoek. She suspects it's the ash of the launch trauma drugs she
hasn't run out of her system in the rat wheel. And zero-gee leaves
her feeling horridly exposed. She doesn't know what to do with her
hands. Her breasts feel like cannons.

"We won't keep you long, honest," Daley Suarez-Martin says.
In orbit she smiles more than in Kennedy or Lisa Durnau's Lawrence
office. You can only do so much authority wearing something that
looks like an Olympic luge suit, "First, an apology. We have not
exactly told you the
actualite."

"You've told me exactly nothing," Lisa Durnau says. "I
presume this is to do with the Tierra project, and it's a great
honour to be involved on the mission, but I really work in a
completely different universe."

"That's our first tactical misdirection," Daley
Suarez-Martin says. She sucks in her bottom lip. "There is no
Tierra mission."

Lisa Durnau feels her mouth is open.

"But all that Epsilon Indi stuff."

"That's real enough. There's a Tierra all right. We're just not
going to it."

"Wait wait wait, I've seen the light sail. On television. Hell,
I even eyeballed the thing when you sent it out to the L-five point
and back on that test run. Friends of mine had a telescope. We had a
barbecue. We watched it on a monitor."

"You certainly saw that. The light sail is perfectly real and we
did run it out to the Lagrange-five point. Only, that wasn't the
test. That was the mission."

In the same year that Lisa Durnau made the Fremont High soccer team
and found out that rock boyz, pool parties, and sex are not a good
combo, NASA found Tierra. Extra-solar planetary systems had been
popping out of the big black faster than the taxonomists could thumb
through their dictionaries of mythology and fable for names, but when
the Darwin Observatory's rosette of seven telescopes turned back for
a closer look at Epsilon Indi, ten light-years away, they found a
pale blue dot hugged up close to the warmth of the sun. A waterworld.
An earthworld. Spectroscopes peeled the atmosphere and found oxygen,
nitrogen, CO
₂
, water vapour, and complex hydrocarbons that
could only be the result of biological activity. There was something
living out there, close to the sun in Epsilon Indi's shrunken
habitable zone. It might be bugs. It might just be people with scopes
watching our own little blue spot on the sun. The discovery team
christened the planet Tierra. A Texan immediately filed a claim to
the planet and everything that dwelt upon it. It was this story that
broke Tierra through the celebrity gossip and crime-of-the-month
scandal into checkout chitchat. Another Earth? What's the weather
like? How can he own a planet? He just has to file a claim, that's
all. Like half your DNA's owned by some biotech corporation. Every
time you have sex, you break copyright.

Then came the pictures. Darwin's resolution was high enough to
resolve surface features. Every school in the developed world carried
a map of Terra's three continents and vast oceans on its wall. It
alternated with Emin Perry, reigning Olympic five thousand metres
champion, as the screen saver on Lisa Durnau's A-life project in her
first year at UCSB. NASA put an interstellar space probe proposal
together with First Solar, the orbital power division of EnGen, using
its experimental orbital maser array and a light sail. Transit time
was two hundred and fifty years. As development schedules grew ever
longer Tierra receded into the wallpaper of public perception and
Lisa Durnau found it easier and more satisfying to explore strange
worlds and discover new life-forms in the universe inside her
computer. Alterre was as real as Tierra and much cheaper and easier
to visit.

"I don't understand what's going on here," Lisa Durnau
says, up in space.

"The Tierra probe project is a presentational solution,"
Suarez-Martin says. Her hair is pinned back with an array of glitter
clips. Lisa's short bob of curls hovers around her like a nebula.
"The real mission was to develop a space propulsion system
sufficiently powerful to move a large object to the Lagrange-five
point of orbital stability."

"What kind of large object?" Lisa Durnau cannot connect
anything that has happened in the past fifty hours to any part of
accumulated thirty-seven years of experience. They tell her this is
space, but it's hot, stinks of feet, and you can't see anything. Your
government pulls off the biggest sleight-of-hand in history but no
one notices because they were watching the pretty pictures.

"An asteroid. This asteroid." Daley Suarez-Martin palms up
a graphic on the screen. It's the usual deep-space potato. The
resolution is not very good. "This is Darnley 285."

"This must be some very special asteroid," Lisa says. "So
is it going to do a Chicxulub on us?"

The G-woman looks pleased. She palms up a new graphic, coloured
ellipses crossing each other.

"Darnley 285 is an Earth-crossing asteroid discovered by NEAT
skywatch in 2027. Please watch this animation." She taps a
yellow ellipse, close in to Earth, far out to the back side of Mars.
"Its nearest approach to earth is just inside lunar orbit."

"That's close for a NEO," Lisa Durnau says. See, I can do
the speak, too.

"Darnley 285 is on a thousand-eighty-five-day orbit; the next
one would have brought her close enough to pose a statistical risk."
The animation passes within a hair of blue earth.

"So you built the light sail to move it out of harm's way,"
Lisa says.

"To move it, but not on account of safety. Please look
carefully. This was the projected orbit in 2030. This is the actual
orbit." A solid yellow ellipse appears. It's exactly the same as
the 2027 orbit. The woman continues. "Close interaction with
Near Earth Object Sheringham Twelve on the next orbit would bring
Darnley 285 to its closest approach, one twelve thousand miles.
Instead, in 2033." The new dotted parabola switches place with
the observed course: exactly the same trajectory logged in 2027. "It
is an anomalous situation."

"You're saying."

"An unidentified force is modifying Darnley 285's orbit to keep
it the same distance from Earth," Daley Suarez-Martin says.

"Jesus," whispers Lisa Durnau, preacherman's daughter.

"We sent a mission out for the 2039 approach. It was in the
highest confidentiality. We found something. We then embarked on an
extended project to bring it back. That's what the light sail test
mission was about, all the Epsilon Indi cover story. We had to get
that asteroid to somewhere we can take a long, close look at it."

"And what did you find?" Lisa Durnau asks.

Daley Suarez-Martin smiles. "Tomorrow we'll send you out to see
for yourself."

Eleven thirty and the club is jumping. Boom-mounted floods define an
oval of sand. The bodies cluster to the light like moths. They move,
they grind, eyes shut in ecstasy. The air smells of used-up day,
heavy sweat, and duty-free Chanel. The girls wear this summer's
shift-Dresses, last summer's two pieces, the occasional classic
V-string. The boys are all bare-chested and carry layers of neck
jewellery. Chin wisps are back, the Mohican is so '46, tribal
body-painting hovers on the edge of the terminally unhip, but
scarification seems to be the coming thing, boys and girls alike.
Thomas Lull is glad the Australian penis-display thongs have cycled
out. He's worked the parties for the Ghosht Brothers for the past
three seasons, cash in hand, and he's seen the fast tide of planet
youth culture ebb and flow, but those things, strapping it up like a
periscope.

Thomas Lull sits on the soft, tired grey sand, forearms resting on
drawn-up knees. The surf is unusually quiet tonight. Hardly a ripple
at the tide line. A bird cries out over the black water. The air is
still, dense, tired. No taste of monsoon on it. The fishermen have
been saying that since the Banglas brought their ice up past Tamil
Nadu the currents have been out of kilter. Behind him, bodies move in
total silence.

Figures resolve out of the dark, two white girls in sarongs and
halter-tops. They're dirty beach-blonde with that exaggerated
Scandinavian tan emphasised by pale Nordic eyes, hand in hand,
barefoot. How old are you, nineteen, twenty? Thomas Lull thinks. With
your sunbed top-up tans and bikini bottoms under those travel-ironed
sarongs. This is your first stop, isn't it, somewhere you saw on a
backpacker site, just wild enough to see if you're going to like it
out in the raw world. You couldn't wait to get away from Uppsala or
Copenhagen and do all the fierce things in your hearts.

"Ho there," Thomas Lull hails softly. "If you're
planning on attending tonight's entertainment there are a couple of
preliminaries. Purely for your own safety." He unfolds his
scanning kit with a gambler's flick.

"Sure," says smaller, goldier girl. Thomas Lull runs her
fistful of pills and patches through his scanner.

"Nothing here going to leave you like a plate of Vichysoisse.
Soup of the day is Transic Too, it's a new emotic, you can get it
from anyone up on the stage area. Now, madam." This to bug-eyed
beach-Viking who has started the party early. "I need to see if
it'll ab-react with anything you're already running. Could you. ?"
She knows the drill, licks her finger, rolls it across the sensor
plate. Everything goes green. "No problem. Enjoy the party,
ladies, and this is a no-alcohol event."

He checks their asses through their sheer sarongs as they insinuate
themselves into the quiet writhe. They're still holding hands. That's
so nice, Thomas Lull thinks. But the emotics scare him. Computer
emotions brewed on an unlicensed Level 2.95 Bharat sundarban aeai,
chain-bred up in some Coke-bottle bedroom factory and stuck onto
adhesive patches, fifty dollars a slap. It's easy to tell the users.
The twitchings and grinnings and bared teeth and uncanny noises of
bodies trying to express feelings with no analogue in human need or
experience. He's never met anyone who could tell him what this
feeling makes you feel. Then again, he's never met anyone who can
report what a natural emotion makes you feel. We are all programme
ghosts running on the distributed network of Brahma.

That bird's still out there, calling.

He glances over his shoulder at the silent beach party, every dancer
in his or her private zone, dancing to his or her custom beat beamed
through 'hoek link. He lies to himself that he only works the club
nights because he can use the cash, but he's always been drawn to
mass humanity. He wants and dreads the self-loss of the dancers,
merged into an unconscious whole, isolate and unified. It's the same
love and loathing that drew him to the dismembered body of India, one
of the planet's hundred most recognisable faces, shuffled into the
subcontinent's appalling, liberating, faceless billion and a half.
Turn around, walk away, disappear. That ability to dissolve his face
into a crowd has its flip-side: Thomas Lull can detect the
individual, the unusual, the countervailing out of the herd.

She moves across the currents of the crowd, through the bodies,
against the grain of the night. She is dressed in grey. Her skin is
pale, wheat, Indo-Aryan. Her hair is short, boyish, very glossy, with
a tinge of red. Her eyes are large. Gazelle eyes, like the Urdu poets
sang. She looks impossibly young. She wears a three-stripe Vishnu
tilak on her forehead. It doesn't look stupid on her. She nods,
smiles, and the bodies close around her. Thomas Lull tries to angle
himself to look without being seen. It's not love, lust,
fortysomething hormones. It is simple fascination. He has to see
more, know more of her.

"Hey there." An Australian couple want their gear checked.
Thomas Lull runs their stash through his scanner while watching the
party. Grey is the perfect party camouflage. She has melted into an
interplay of silently moving limbs.

"Fine, you're whistling Dixie. But we do have a zero-tolerance
policy on penis-display suits."

The guy frowns. Get out of here, leave me to my recreation. There,
close by the decks. The bhati-boys are flirting with her. He hates
them for that. Come back to me. She hesitates, bends low for a word.
For a moment he thinks she might buy something from the Bangalore
Bombastic. He doesn't want her to do that. She shakes her head and
moves on. She vanishes into the bodies again. Thomas Lull finds he is
following her. She does blend well; he keeps losing track of her
amongst the bodies. She isn't wearing a 'hoek. How is she getting it
then? Thomas Lull moves to the edge of the dance space. She only
looks like she is dancing, he realises. She is doing something else,
taking the collective mood and moving to it. Who the hell is she?

Then she stops in her dance. She frowns, opens her mouth, swallows
for breath. She presses a hand to her labouring chest. She can't
breathe. The gazelle eyes are scared. She bends over, trying to
release the grip in her lungs. Thomas Lull knows these signs well. He
is an old familiar of this attacker. She stands in the middle of the
silent crowd, fighting for breath. No one sees. No one knows.
Everyone is blind and deaf in their own private dancescapes. Thomas
Lull forces a path through the bodies. Not to her, but to the Scandie
girls.