River of Gods (72 page)

She thinks now she knows why the aeai had shown her the childhood she
had suppressed. It had not been cruel, it had not been even a ploy
for time. It had been genuine, touching curiosity, an attempt by a
djinn made of stories to understand something outside its mandalas of
artifice and craft. Something it could believe it had not made up
itself. It wanted the drama of the real, the fountainhead from which
all story flows.

Najia Askarzadah pulls her legs up on to her seat, lays her body down
across Tal's. She drapes her arm over yts, loosely takes yts fingers
in hers. Tal starts with a half-syllable but she does not break yts
sleep. Yts hand is delicate and hot; beneath her cheek she can feel
yts ribs. Yt's so light, so loosely put together, like a cat but she
feels a cat's toughness in the muscles breathing in, breathing out.
She lies there, listening to yts heart. She thinks that maybe she has
never met a braver person. Yt has always had to fight to be ytself
and now yt goes into exile with no destination in sight.

From eight thousand metres she can understand that Shaheen Badoor
Khan had been an honourable man. In Bharat, even as he escorted their
taxi through the checkpoint at the vip gate and on to the perimeter
road to the vip lounge, she had seen only his falsities and
frailties; another man, another fabric of untruths and complications.
As she waited at the desk while he spoke low and hard and fast with
the airline official, she had confidently expected that at any moment
the airport police would come out of the walls and doors with
levelled weapons and plastic cable-ties for their wrists. They were
all betrayers. They were all her fathers.

She remembers how the gate staff had looked and whispered among
themselves as Shaheen Badoor Khan completed the final formalities. He
had quickly, formally shaken hands with her, then Tal, then briskly
walked away.

The shuttle flight had just punched through the monsoon cloud base
when the story broke all over the seatback screen news channel. N. K.
Jivanjee had resigned. N. K. Jivanjee had fled Bharat. The Government
of National Unity was in disarray. Disgraced advisor to the late
Prime Minister, Shaheen Badoor Khan, had come forward with
extraordinary revelations—backed by documentary evidence—that
the former leader of the Shivaji had masterminded a plot to destroy
the Rana government and fatally weaken Bharat against the Awadhis.
Bharat reels! Shock revelation! Stunning scandal! Ashok Rana to make
statement from the Rana Bhavan! Khan national saviour! Where is
Jivanjee, Bharat demands? Where is Jivanjee? Jivanjee the traitor?

Bharat quaked to its third political shock in twenty-four hours. Not
a fraction of the earthquake it would have been had Shaheen Badoor
Khan revealed that the Shivaji was a political front for a Generation
Three aeai formed our of the cumulative intelligence of
Town and
Country
. An attempted coup by its most popular soap opera. As the
plane levelled off and the hostess came round with the drinks—Tal
had had two double cognacs; yt had just fled an assassination,
battled a Generation Three aeai, and survived a murderous mob, so it
deserved
a little luxury, cho chweet—Najia watched the
story update by the second and comprehended the subtlety and skill
with which Shaheen Badoor Khan was managing it. Even as the plane was
pushing back from the stand he must have been cutting a deal with the
Generation Three, one that would leave Bharat as politically whole as
possible. This was his seat, his mini-bottle of Hennessy; he stayed
for his country, for he had nothing else.

She cannot go back to Sweden again. Najia Askarzadah is as much an
exile now as Tal. She shivers, hugs Tal closer. Yt entwines yts
fingers tightly around hers. Najia can feel yts subdermal activators
against her forearm. Not man not woman not both not neither. Nute.
Another way of being human, speaking a physical language she does not
understand. More alien to her than any man, any father, yet this body
next to hers is loyal, tough, funny, courageous, clever, kind,
sensual, vulnerable. Sweet. Sexy. All you could wish in a friend of
the soul. Or a lover. She starts at that thought, then presses her
cheek against Tal's hunched shoulder. Then she feels their conjoined
centres of gravity shift as the plane banks in to approach to
Kathmandu and she turns her head to look out the window, hoping maybe
for that revelatory glimpse of distant Sagarmatha but all she can see
is an oddly shaped cloud that you might almost think was the shape of
a huge elephant, were such a thing possible.

History measures its course in centuries but its progress in the
events of an hour. As the tanks pull back to the Kunda Khadar, in the
wake of the shock resignation of N. K. Jivanjee over Badoor Khan's
allegations and the withdrawal of the Shivaji from the Government of
National Salvation only hours old, Ashok Rana accepts Delhi's offer
of talks in Kolkata to resolve the dam dispute. But the day has one
more surprise for the reeling Bharati nation. Whole families sit
shocked, speechless, numb with surprise in front of their screens. In
the middle of the one o'clock broadcast,
Town and Country
has
gone off air.

They go in lots of seven, down the elevators down the concrete steps
through the airlock to Deba's stinky little cubby and the observation
dock beyond where investment bankers, grameen, women, cub
journalists, clan Ray advisors, and a shell-shocked looking Energy
Minister Patel shuffle round in cramped circle dance to peer through
the heavy glass panel into the hard light of another universe.

"Okay, okay, come on, no more than five seconds, Ray Power will
not be held responsible for any eye irritation, sunburn, or other
ultraviolet-related complaints," Deba says, waving them through
and round and out. "No more than five seconds, Ray Power will
not be held responsible."

The lecture hall has been rigged with display nodes and screens and
copiously equipped with small eats and bottled water Sonia Yadav
bravely holds the lectern, trying to explain to the gathered what
they are seeing on the screens: two simple graphic bars that show the
energy drawn from the grid maintaining the zero-point field and the
energy output from the potential difference between the universal
ground-states, but she is fighting two losing fronts, scientifically
and acoustically.

"We're getting two percent over input," she shouts over the
swelling burble of countrywomen exchanging stories about their
grandchildren, businessmen pressing palms and palmers and journos
hanging on to their 'hoeks for the newest shock wonder revelation to
come out of the Bharat Sabha: the stunning resignation of N. K.
Jivanjee from the Government of National Unity. "We're storing
that in high-energy capacitors for the laser-collider until it
reaches a level where we can add it to the grid and open up an
aperture to a higher-level universe, and so on and so on. That way we
can climb a ladder of energy states until we're getting something
like one hundred and fifty percent return on input energy."

She clenches her fists, shakes her head, sighs in frustration as the
volume in the lecture hall reaches a mild roar. Vishram takes the
microphone.

"Ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your attention please? I
know it's been a long day for many of you and it's been nothing if
not eventful, but if you'd come with me through into the lab where
the breakthrough was first made."

The staff herds the guests into the zero-point lab.

"No plan ever survives contact with the enemy," he whispers
to Sonia Yadav. A hovercam darts past his head, close and irritating
as an insect, relaying the events to the remote shareholders. He
imagines the virtual ghosts of the agent aeais hovering over the
slow-moving line of guests. Centre Director Surjeet had objected
robustly to Vishram opening the zero-point theory lab with its
labyrinth of wall-writings and hieroglyphics. Surjeet feared it would
make the project look amateurish—see, this is how they do
things at Ray Power! With crayons and spray cans, on walls, like
badmashes making graffiti. Vishram wants it for just that reason: it
is human, messy, creative. It has the desired effect, the people
relax, look up in wonder at the hieroglyphics. Will it be a new
Lascaux, a Sistine chapel? Vishram wonders. The symbols that birthed
an age. He should start making inquiries about having the room
preserved.

Vishram Ray, with intimations of immortality. He notes with small,
sharp pleasure that his dinner date with Sonia Yadav still shines in
red felt-marker on the corner of the desk. In the less formal
environment, her passion easily keeps an audience. Vishram watches
her arm movements delimit swathes of ceiling to a rapt group of
greysuits. He overhears her telling them ". at a fundamental
level where quantum theory, M-Star theory, and computing all
interact. We're discovering that the quantum computers we're using to
maintain the containment fields—and its the containment fields
that affect the winding geometries of the 'branes—can actually
manipulate the Wolfram/Friedkin grain structure of the new universe.
At a fundamental level, the universe is computational."

Their little mouths are wide open.

Vishram shimmies in beside Marianna Fusco.

"When this is done," he says, getting as close as
professional propriety allows to a legal advisor, "How about. We
go. Off somewhere. Where there is sun and sea and sand and really
good bars and no people and we can run around in nothing but factor
thirty for a month?"

And she slides her head as close to his as she dares and through a
frozen public smile says, "I can't. I have to go."

"Oh," says Vishram. And, "Fuck."

"It's a family thing," Marianna Fusco says. "Big
anniversary in my constellation family. People coming from all over.
Relations I didn't have last time we did this. No, I'll be back,
funny man. Just tell me where to turn up,
sans
luggage."

Then the lights flicker and the room quivers. Glass rattles in the
windows and door. There is a murmur of consternation. Director
Surjeet's hands are raised in placation.

"Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, please, there is no
need for alarm. What we have just felt is a quite normal side effect
of us ramping up the collider. We have closed one aperture and used
the energy to warp the 'brane into another. Ladies and gentlemen, we
have broken through into a new universe!"

There is polite, baffled applause. Vishram takes the opportunity to
showboat.

"And what that means, my friends, is a twelve percent return on
our energy investment. We put a hundred percent into maintaining the
aperture, we get all that, plus an extra twelve back again! It's this
way to the zero-point future!"

Inder starts off a tattoo of enthusiastic corporate applause.

"You should have been a lawyer," Marianna Fusco says. "You
have the gift of talking endless shit on subjects you know nothing
about."

"Didn't I tell you that's what my Dad wanted for me?"
Vishram says, positioning himself so that he can see down Marianna
Fusco's top. He imagines slowly, luxuriously oiling those
hand-filling nipples.

"I remember you saying something about the law and comedy both
being professions that make their living in the arena," she
says.

"I did? It must have been after sex."

He does remember that conversation. It seems like another geological
era, another incarnation. The room shakes again, harder, more
sustained. Pens fall from desk; concentric ripples clash inside the
water-cooler.

"Another universe, another point on the share-price,"
Vishram quips but Sonia Yadav looks concerned. Vishram catches her
eye. She abandons her tour. They move through the groups of
shareholders back to the empty lecture hall.

"Problem?" he whispers. Sonia points at the display boards.
Output, one hundred and thirty-five percent.

"We shouldn't be anywhere close to that kind of figure."

"It's doing better than expected."

"Mr. Ray, this is physics. We know exactly the characteristics
of the universes we create, no surprises, no guesswork, no 'better
than expected, good boy, top of class.'"

Vishram messages Director Surjeet. When he enters, Vishram closes the
door to hovercams and eavesdroppers.

"Sonia tells me we have a problem with the zero-point."

Surjeet does this tooth sucking thing that grates Vishram's nipples,
especially when it reveals the saag he had for lunch.

"We're getting anomalous readings."

"That tells me exactly as much as 'Vishram, we have a problem.'
"

"Very well, Mr. Ray. It's a universe, but it's not the one we
ordered."

Vishram feels his balls contract. Surjeet has his palmer open,
mathematical renderings and wire-frame graphics spins across it.
Sonia, too, is reading the digits.

"Eight three zero."

"It should be."

"Two two four."

"Wait wait wail wait wait; enough of the lottery results."

Sonia Yadav says carefully, "All the universes have what we call
winding numbers, the higher the number, the more energy we need to
access it and the more we can get out of it."

"We're six hundred universes too high."

"Yes," says Sonia Yadav.

"Recommendations?"

"Mr. Ray, we must close the zero-point down immediately."

Vishram cuts him off. "That is absolutely the last resort. How
do you think that's going to look in front of our entire board and
the press? Another Bharati humiliation. If we can get the thing up to
full power safely." To Sonia Yadav, he says, "Does this
pose any danger?"

"Mr. Ray, the energies released if membranes cross."

Sonia cuts in.

"No."

"You're sure."

"Dr. Surjeet is correct about the energy levels if membranes
cross, it would be like a nano-Big Bang, but that involves energies
thousands of times more powerful than we can generate here."