Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“All connections to Varanasi this way, ma’am.”

The Nagercoil bus driver sounds his horn. Last call for the south. Last call for peace and dive schools. Thomas Lull steers Aj through the skinny boys towards the Thiruvananthapuram express coach, firing up its biodiesels.

“You have changed your mind?”

“Gentleman’s prerogative. And I’ve always wanted to see a war close up.”

He jumps up on to the steps, pulls Aj up after him. They squeeze down the aisle, find the back seat. Thomas Lull puts Aj by the window grille. Shadows bar her face. The heat is incredible.

The driver sounds his horns a last time, then the bus for the north draws away.

“Professor Lull, I do not understand.” Aj’s short hair stirs as the bus picks up speed.

“Nor do I,” Thomas Lull says, looking at the cramped bus seat with distaste. A goat squirms against him. “But I do know if sharks ever stop moving they drown. And sometime gods are not enough to keep you right. Come on.”

“Where are you going?” Aj says.

“I’m not spending five hours cooped up in here on a day like this.” Thomas Lull raps on the driver’s glass partition. He rolls his paan into his left cheek, nods, stops the bus. “Come on, and bring your bag. They’ll have everything out of it.”

Thomas Lull climbs the roof ladder, extends a hand down to Aj.

“Throw that up here.”

Aj slings the bag up. Two roof-rider boys grab it and stash it safe among the bales of sari fabric. One hand holding her dark glasses in place, Aj scrambles up on to the roof and sits down beside Thomas Lull.

“Oh, this is wonderful!” she exclaims. “I can see everything!”

Thomas Lull bangs on the roof. “To the north!” With a fresh gust of bio-diesel smoke, the driver draws off. “Now, Buteyko method, advanced class.”

Lisa Durnau’s not sure how many times Captain Pilot Beth’s called her But the board is lit up, there’s chatter on the com channels and an air of imminence in the atmosphere.

“Are we coming in?”

“Final approach adjustments,” the little shave-headed woman says. Lisa feels a soft nudge; the attitude jets burping.

“Can you patch this up on my ’hoek?” She’s not going in blind to a rendezvous with a certified, genuine Mysterious Alien Artefact. Captain Pilot Beth hooks the device behind the immobilised Lisa’s ear, seeks the sweet spot in the skull, then touches a few lighted panels on the board. Lisa Durnau’s consciousness explodes into space. Under full prope, the sensation that her body is the ship, that she is flying skin to vacuum, is overwhelming. Lisa Durnau hovers like an angel in the midst of a slowly rotating ballet of space engineering: the laddered wings of a solar power array, a rosette of film-mirrors like a halo of miniature suns; a high-gain antenna loops over her head, an outbound shuttle flashes past. The whole array basks in baking light, webbed by cable to the spider at the dark heart, Darnley 285. Millions of years of accumulated dust have coloured the asteroid only a shade less black than space itself. Then the mirrors shift and Lisa Durnau gasps as a rayed trefoil blazes silver on the surface. Astonishment turns to laughter; someone has stuck a Mercedes logo on a space rock.

Someone not human. The triskelion is vast, two hundred metres along an arm. The huge waltz slows as Pilot Captain Beth matches rotation with the rock and Lisa Durnau forces a mental reorientation. She no longer drifts face-forward towards a crushing dark mass. The asteroid is under her feet and she settles like an angel on to it. Half a kilometre off touchdown, Lisa picks out the clusters of lights of the human base. The domes and converted drop-off tanks are coated in a thick layer of dust attracted by the static thrown up by the construction. The alien triskelion alone shines clear. The shuttle settles towards a cross-target of red navigation beacons. A procession of manipulator arms works diligently dusting the lamps and the launch laser lens. Looking up, she can see them marching hand-over-hand up and down the power and com cables. Preacherman’s daughter Durnau thinks of Bible stories of Jacob’s ladder.

“Okay, I’m going to shut you down now,” the voice of Captain Pilot Beth says. There is a moment of dislocation and she is back and blinking in the cramped cockpit of the transfer boat. Counters scroll down to zero, Lisa feels the lightest of touches, and they are down. Nothing happens for quite a long time. Then there are clanks and clunks and hissings, Pilot Captain Beth unzips her, and Lisa Durnau tumbles out in a wash of cramps and truly astonishing body odour. Darnley 285 possesses insufficient gravity to pull, but enough to give Lisa a sense of direction. This is down. This is left and right and forwards and backwards and up. Another mental reorientation. She is hanging head-down like a bat. Down, in front of her face, the hatch dogs spin and opens out into a short tube narrow as a birth canal. A further hatch rotates and opens. A chunky, crew-cut man sticks his head and shoulders through. His nose and eyes hints at Polynesian genes not too many branches down his family tree and the suit-liner shoulder flashes say US Army. But he has a great smile as he reaches a hand out to Lisa Durnau.

“Dr. Durnau, I’m Sam Rainey, project director. Welcome to Darnley 285, or as our archaeological friends like to call her, the Tabernacle.”

The traffic is worse than ever now the karsevaks have a permanent encampment around the imperilled Ganesha statue and Mr. Nandha the Krishna Cop’s yeast infections are punishing him. Worst, he has a briefing with Vik in Information Retrieval. Everything about Vik irritates Mr. Nandha, from his self-crowned nickname (what is wrong with Vikram, a fine, historical name?) to his MTV fashion sense. He is the inverse of the fundamentalists camped out on the roundabout. If Sarkhand is atavistic India, Vik is a victim of the contemporary and fleeting. But what has set Mr. Nandha’s day foul was the almost-argument with Parvati.

She had been watching breakfast television, laughing in her apologetic, hand-lifting way at the hosts gushing over their chati, soapi, celebriti guests.

“This invoice. It seems, it is, quite a lot.”

“Invoice?”

“Ah, the drip irrigation.”

“But it is necessary. You cannot hope to grow brinjal without irrigation.”

“Parvati, there are people do not have water to cook their rice.”

“Exactly, that is why I went for the drip irrigation. It’s the most efficient way. Water conservation is our patriotic duty.”

Mr. Nandha held the sigh until he was out of the room. He authorised payment through his palmer and his aeai informed him that Vik had requested a meeting and gave him a new, unfamiliar route to work avoiding Sarkhand Roundabout. He returned to bid Parvati good-bye and found her watching the top-of-the-hour news.

“Have you heard?” she said. “N. K. Jivanjee says he will get up a rath yatra and ride across the country like Rama until a million peasants march on Sarkhand Roundabout.”

“That N. K. Jivanjee is a rabble-rouser, and his party, too. What we need is national unity against Awadh, not a million karsevak louts marching on Ranapur.”

He kissed Parvati on her forehead. The day’s ills sweetened.

“Good-bye, my bulbul. You will be working on the garden?”

“Oh yes, Krishan will be here at ten. Have a good day. And don’t forget to pick up your suit from the laundry, we’ve that durbar at the Dawars tonight.”

Now Mr. Nandha rides up the outside of the Vajpayee tower in a glass elevator. Stomach acid gnaws at him. He imagines it dissolving him from within, cell by cell.

“Vikram.”

Vikram is not particularly tall nor particularly well shaped but he has not let these deter his fashion sense. The style being: baggy sleeveless T with random text messages flashing up on the smart fabric—they achieve the condition of accidental Zen, so the doctrine goes—squarecut below-the-knee ketchies with athletic tights worn underneath. Finish with Nike Predators at the equivalent of the monthly salary of the upright Sikh on the front door. To Mr. Nandha this looks merely undignified. What he cannot tolerate is the strip of beard from lower lip to Adam’s apple.