Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“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.