Ian McDonald - River of Gods

Vishram shuts off Marianna Fusco’s silent commentary with a twist of a finger.

His father’s engineers have designed a building more furniture than architecture. All is wood and fabric, curved into bows and arches, translucent and airy. The place smells of sap and resin and sandalwood. The floors are strip maple inlaid with marquetry panels of scenes from the Ramayana . Sonia Yadav looks pointedly at Marianna’s heels. She slips them off and closes them in her bag. It feels right to Vishram to be barefoot here. It’s a holy place.

At first sight the zero-point lab disappoints Vishram. There are no humming machines or looping power conduits, just desks and glass partitions, paper piled unsteadily on the floor, whiteboards on the walls. The white boards are full of scrawls. They continue onto the walls. Every square centimetre of surface is crammed with symbols and letters wedged at crazy angles to each other, lassoed in loops of black felt marker, harpooned by long lines and arrows in black and blue to some theorem on the other side of the board. The brawling equations spread over desks, benches, any flat surface that will take felt marker. The mathematics is as unintelligible to Vishram as Sanskrit, but the cocoon of thought and theory and vision comforts him, like being inside a prayer.

“It may not look like much but the research team at EnGen would pay a lot of money to get in here,” Sonia Yadav says. “We do most of the hot stuff over on the University collider, or at the LHC in Europe, but this is where the real work gets done. The headwork.”

“Hot stuff?”

“We’re following two approaches, hot and cold, we call them. I won’t bore you with the theory but it’s to do with energy levels and quantum foam. Two ways of looking at nothing.”

“And you’re hot?” Vishram asks, studying the hieratic glyphs on the wall.

“Absolutely,” Sonia Yadav says.

“And can you do what you say; generate power from nothing?” She stands firm with a light of belief in her eyes. “Yes, I can.”

“Mr. Ray, we really should be moving on,” Director Surjeet urges.

As his party leaves, Vishram picks up a felt marker and quickly writes on the desktop: DNNR, 2NITE?

Sonia Yadav reads the invite upside down.

“Strictly professional,” Vishram whispers. “Tell me what’s hot and what’s not.” OK she writes in red. 8. PICK-UP HERE. She underlines the OK twice.

Immediately outside in the corridor is a sight that instantly detumesces Vishram’s good humour: Govind, in his too-tight suit, with his phalanx of lawyers, bowling down the corridor as if he owned the place. Govind spies his younger brother, opens his mouth to greet, damn, bless, chide—Vishram doesn’t care, never hears because he calls out, loudly,

“Mr. Surjeet, could you please call security.” Then, as the Director talks into his palmer, Vishram holds up one single, commanding finger in front of his brother and his crew. “You, say nothing. This is not your place. This is my place.” Security arrives; two very large Rajputs in red turbans. “Please escort Mr. Ray from the building and scan his face for the security system. He is not to return without my express, written permission.”

The Rajputs seize Govind, one on each arm. It gives Vishram’s heart a pile of pleasure to watch them march him at a fast trot down the corridor.

“Hear me, hear me!” Govind shouts back over his shoulder. “He will wreck it like he has wrecked everything else he has ever been given. I know him of old. The leopard cannot change his spots, he will ruin you all, destroy this great company. Don’t listen to him, he knows nothing. Nothing!”

“I’m so sorry about that,” Vishram says when the doors have sealed behind his still-protesting brother. “Anyway, shall we continue, or have I seen everything?”

It had begun at breakfast.

“Just what have I inherited?” Vishram asked Marianna Fusco through mouthfuls of kitchiri at his breakfast briefing on the east balcony.

“Basically, you’ve got the research and development division.” She laid out the documents around his greasy plate like tarot cards.

“So, no money and a pile of responsibility.”

“I don’t think this is something your father thought up on a whim.”

“How much did you know about this?”

“What, who, where, and when.”

“You’re missing a ‘w’ there.”

“I don’t think anyone understands that ‘w.’”

I can, Vishram thought. I know how good it is to walk away from expectations and obligations. I know how frightening and freeing it is to go our there with nothing but a begging bowl, chancing people’s laughter.

“You could have told me.”

“And breach my professional confidentiality?”

“You are a cold, hard woman, Marianna Fusco.”

He forked down another load of kitchiri. Ramesh wandered into the geometrical planting of English roses, now crisped and withering in their third year of alien drought. His hands were folded behind him, a posture as ancient and familiar as any other element of the Shanker Mahal. Vishram-aged-six had mocked his older brother, stalking after him, hands clamped behind back, lips sucked in in abstract concentration, head up looking around for wonder in the world.

What about those East Asian trips? he wondered. Those Bangkok girls who could do and be anything you imagined. He felt a small stirring beneath his navel, a twitch of hormone. But it would be too easy No hunt there, no play, no testing of the will and wit, no unspoken contract of mutual recognition that both were engaged on a game with its ploys and stages and rules. A warm wind with the smell of the city on it tugged at the documents of incorporation. Vishram deployed cups and saucers and cutlery to hold them in their proper places. Ramesh, who had been trying to smell the desiccated roses, looked up at the warm touch on his face and was genuinely surprised to see his kid brother and his lady lawyer on the terrace.

“Ah, there you are, I was hall-hoping to find you.”

“Wretched coffee?”

“Oh, please, yes. And there wouldn’t be any more of that, would there?”

Vishram nodded to the servant. Wonderful, how quickly you settle back into the way of service. Ramesh poked at his plate of kitchiri with his fork. “Why did he give it to me?” he said abruptly. “I don’t want it, I don’t even understand it. I never did. Govind was always the one with the head for business; still is. I’m an astrophysicist; I know deep space organic molecular clouds. I do not know electricity generating.”

The split was clever, Shakespearean. Ramesh would have wanted the unworldliness of blue-sky thinking. He had been given the meat and muscle of the generating division.

Govind’s ambitions would have been for the core infrastructure. Instead he had been handed control of the distribution network. Wires and cables and pylons. And Number Three Son, the attention seeker, the grab-ass, had gear so arcane he didn’t even know if it did anything. Casting against type. Evil old sadhu.

The old man had left before the dawn. His clothes were neatly hangered in the wardrobe. His palmer and ’hoek sat square on the pillow with his wallet and his universal card beside them. His shoes, well polished, were arranged toe-to-footboard at a perfect right angle. His silver-backed hairbrush and comb were caught together in their final kiss on the dressing table. Kukunoor, khidmutgar now Old Shastri had left on the pilgrim path, showed all this to Vishram with the same dispassionate sense of disposable history he had seen in Scotland’s historic homes and castles. He did not know where his master had gone. Their mother did not know, either, though Vishram suspected some secret conduit of communication to monitor his legacy. The company would always be the company.