Ian McDonald - River of Gods

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.”