Ian McDonald - River of Gods

She doesn’t rise to that one. Instead, she asks,

“How many brothers?”

“Big bear, middle bear.”

“No sisters?”

“Not many sisters in Varanasi, or at least, my bit of it.”

“I’ve heard this,” she says, turning her body comfortably on the leather couch towards him. “What’s it like, a society with four times as many men as women?”

“Not too many lady lawyers,” Vishram says, settling back on the creaking upholstery. “Not too many ladies anything professional.”

“I shall remember to press home my advantages,” the lawyer says. “Can I get you another vodka? It is going to be a long flight.”

Shortly after the third they are called to board. Vishram’s seat goes all the way back. After years of budget airlines, the legroom is incredible. There is such play value in the buttons and toys that he doesn’t notice the passenger strapping in beside him.

“Well, hello there, isn’t this a coincidence?” he says.

“It isn’t,” Marianna Fusco says, slipping off her jacket. She has good arm definition under her stretch-brocade top.

The first armagnac comes over Belgium as the hypersonic plane climbs steeply towards its thirty-three kilometre cruising altitude. It’s not a drink Vishram has ever considered. He’s a vodka boy. But now he thinks armagnac rather suits the personality he’s playing here. He and Marianna Fusco talk through the indigo sky about their childhoods, hers in a vast nation of family spread out across marriages and remarriages—her constellation family, she calls it, his in the bourgeois patriarchy of Varanasi. She finds the emergent social stratification fascinating and horrifying, as the English always have. It’s what they perennially love about Indian culture and literature. The guilt and thrill of a really good class system.

“I do come from rather a well-off family.” Play it up. “Not Brahmins, though. Capital ‘B’ Brahmins, I mean. My father’s a Kshatriya, quite devout in his wee way. Tinkering with the DNA would be blasphemous.”

Two more armagnacs and the conversation sags into a doze. In full luxurious recline, Vishram pulls his airline blanket up around his neck. He imagines the chill of near-space beyond that nanocarbon wall. Marianna moves against him under her blanket. She is warm and far too close and breathing in time with him.

Manoeuvre six. Somewhere over Iran he cups a breast. She moves against him. They kiss. Armagnac tongues. She wiggles closer. He slides her breasts out of her white stretch top. Marianna Fusco has big areolar patches with raised pores and nipples like bullets. She hitches up her comfortable-but-businesslike skirt as the shockwave rider hits Mach 3.6. He licks and tries the slip but Marianna Fusco intercepts him and guides his finger to that other, pert hole. She gives a little gasp, rides his finger up to the hilt and slickly unzips. Vishram Ray’s heavy dick tumbles out into the gap between the seats. Marianna Fusco rubs her thumb over the glans. Vishram Ray tries not to be overheard by the stewardess and thumbs her clitoris. “Fuck,” she whispers. “Rotate it. Fucking rotate.”

She hooks a leg over, settles deeper on to his digit. Sutra at thirty-three kay. A quarter of the way to orbit, Vishram Ray comes carefully into a BharatAir Raja Class napkin. Marianna Fusco has an airline pillow half stuffed into her mouth, making tiny muffled mewling screams. Vishram rolls back, feeling every centimetre of altitude beneath him. He just made it into the most exclusive club on the planet, the Twenty-Five-Mile-High Club.

They clean off in the bathroom, separately, giggling uncontrollably at each glance of the other. They straighten their clothes and return soberly to their seats and shortly after they feel the shift in pitch as the aerospacer enters descent, plunging like a burning meteor towards the IndoGangetic plain.

He waits for her on the far side of customs. He admires the cut of her cloth, how her height and the solid way she moves stand out among the Bharatis. He knows there will be no phone calls or e-mails or comeback. A professional relationship.

“Could I offer you a lift?” he asks. “My father will have sent a car — I know, it’s cheesy, but he’s old-fashioned about things like that. It’s no problem to drop you at your hotel.”

“Thank you,” Marianna Fusco says. “I don’t like the look of the taxi rank.”

It’s easy to spot the limo. The chauffeur is actually flying little Ray Power company flags from the wings. He doesn’t miss a beat as he takes Marianna Fusco’s bag, sticks it in the trunk, and chases a small posse of beggars and badmashes. The few seconds of heat between airport and air-conditioned car stun Vishram. He’s been too long in a cold climate. And he had forgotten the scent, like ashes of roses. The car pulls into the wall of colour and sound. Vishram feels the heat, the warmth of the bodies, the greasy hydrocarbon soot against the glass. The people. The never failing river of faces. The bodies. Vishram discovers a new emotion. It has the blue remembered familiarity of homesickness but is expressed through the terrible mundane squalor of the people that throng beneath these boulevards. Home nausea. Nostalgic horror.

“This is near the Sarkhand Roundabout, isn’t it?” Vishram says in Hindi. “I’d like to see it.”

The driver waggles his head and takes the next right.

“Where are we going?” Marianna Fusco asks.

“Somewhere to tell that constellation family of yours about,” Vishram says.

Police barricades block the main road so the driver takes a way he knows through intestinally narrow back streets and turns out of them straight into a riot. He hits the brakes. A young male tumbles over the bonnet. He picks himself up, more shaken than damaged, a chubby post-teen with a wisp of a holy moustache, but the impact has rocked the car and its passengers. Instantly, the crowd’s attention switches from the gaudy statue of Hanuman under his shady concrete chhatri to the car. Hands drum the hood, the roof, the doors. They bounce the limo on its springs. The crowd sees a big Merc, tinted windows, company flags, a thing allied to the forces that would demolish their sacred place and turn it into a metro station.

The driver slams the car into reverse, smokes rubber as he backs down the alley beneath the banners of laundry and rickety wooden balconies. Bricks lob through the air, crack off the metal work. Marianna Fusco gives a small cry as the windscreen suddenly stars into a white spider web. Steering by rear-view cam, the driver slots his car between two flanking bamboo scaffold towers. The young karsevaks chase the car, striking at it with lathis and calling curses on the faithless Ranas and their demonic Muslim spin-doctors. They wave the torn-off company flags. One petrol bomb in these alleys, and hundreds are dead, Vishram Ray thinks. But the driver navigates the maze to his point of entry, finds a momentary gap in the constant torrent of traffic, and throws his car backwards into it. Trucks buses mopeds slam to a halt. The driver handbrakes it. The holy boys follow them through the traffic, slipping between phatphats and Japanese pick-ups painted with Hindu iconography. Slipping, jogging, gaining. The driver raises his hands in desperation. Nothing to be done in this traffic. Glancing over his shoulder, Vishram can read their shirt-buttons. Then Marianna Fusco cries out Oh Jesus God! and the car slams to a halt hard enough for Vishram to jar the bridge of his nose off the back of the driver’s seat. Through tears and stun he sees a steel demon drop out of the sky before him; Ravana the devourer, demon-lord, squatting on hydraulic-loaded titanium hams, ten blades spread like a fan. The tiny mantis-head looks right at him, unfolds a dentist’s arsenal of sensor pods and probes. Then it leaps again. Vishram feels clawed toes rake the limo’s roof. He whirls, looks out the back to see it land beside a bus stop. Traffic freezes, karsevaks scatter like goats. The thing stalks away down the street, quartering the boulevard with gatling pods. It wears the stars and bars on its carapace. A US combat robot.