Ian McDonald - River of Gods

“What are they for?” Vishram asks.

“In case of attack by tigers,” the Rajput answers.

“I’d imagine anything that could eat us is kilometres away by now, the noise we made coming in.”

“Oh, not at all sir. They have learned to associate the sound of aeroplane engines.”

With what? Vishram feels he should ask, but can’t quite bring himself to. He’s a city boy. City. Boy. Hear that you man-eaters? Full of nasty additives.

The air is clean and smells of growing and death and the memory of water. Dust and heat. The path curves so that in a few footsteps the landing pad is invisible. By the same camouflage the lodge conceals itself until the last stride. One moment it is green and leaves and rustling stems; then the trunks turn into stilts and ladders and staircases and there is a great wooden game lodge strung out across the treetops, like a galleon lifted by a monsoon and dropped in the forest.

White men in comfortable and therefore expensive suits hang over the balcony rail, greeting him with waves and smiles.

“Mr. Ray! Come aboard!”

They line up at the top of the wooden companionway as if receiving a boarding admiral. Clementi, Arthurs, Weitz, and Siggurdson. They have firm handshakes and make good eye contact and express Business School bluff cheer. Vishram does not doubt that they would bend you over and stick a mashie niblock up your hoop at golf or any other muy macho power game. His theory of golf is, never play any sport that requires you to dress as your grandfather. He can see quite a nice little routine falling together about golf; if his were the kind of life that any longer contemplated stand-up routines.

“Isn’t this just the greatest place for lunch?” the tall, academic-looking one, Arthurs, says as he escorts Vishram Ray along wooden walkways, spiralling higher and higher into the roof canopy. Vishram squints down. The men with rifles look up at him. “Such a pity that Bhagwandas here tells us we’ve almost no chance of seeing a tiger.” He has the nasal, slightly honking Boston accent. He’ll be the accountant then, Vishram decides. In Glasgow they had said, always have Catholic lawyers and Protestant accountants. They pass between rows of elegantly pyjamaed waiters in Rudyard Kipling turbans. Double mahogany doors carved with battle scenes from the Mahabharata are thrown open, a maitre d’ leads them to the meal, a sunken dining pit with cushions and a low table that would be the acme of kitsch but for the view out under the eaves through the panoramic windows to the waterhole. The verge is puddled to mud but Vishram thinks he sees chital sip nervously from the dirty brown water, ears swivelling on perpetual alert. He thinks of Varanasi, her vile waters and her radar defences.

“Sit, sit,” insists Clementi, a wide, dark-haired man, sallow as an Indian and already developing a blue chin. The Westerners adjust themselves with some huffing and laughing. Punkah fans wave overhead, redistributing the heat. Vishram seats himself comfortably, elegantly on the low divan. Maitre d’ brings bottled water. Saiganga . Ganges water. Vishram Ray raises his glass.

“Gentlemen, I am entirely at your mercy.” They laugh overappreciatively.

“We’ll claim your soul later,” says Weitz, who is the one who obviously never had to try too hard in Junior High, High, College Sports, and Business Law School. Vishram’s eye for an audience notes that Siggurdson, the big cadaverous one, finds this marginally less funny than the others. The Born-Again; the one with the money.

Lunch comes on thirty tiny thalis. It is of that exquisite simplicity that is always so much more expensive than any lavishness. The five men pass the dishes between them, murmuring soft alleluias of appreciation at each subtle combination of vegetables and spices. Vishram notices that they eat Indian style without self-consciousness. Their Marianna Fuscos have even drilled them on which hand to use. But for the quiet epiphanies of flavour and mutual encouragements to try a taste of this, a morsel of that, the lunch is conducted in silence. Finally the thirty silver thalis are empty. The maitre d’s boys flurry in like doves to clear and the men settle back on to their embroidered bolsters.

“So, Mr. Ray, without wasting too many words, we’re interested in your company.” Siggurdson speaks slowly, a measured tread of words like a buffalo drive, inviting dangerous underestimation.

“Ah, if only it were all mine to sell,” Vishram says. He wishes he hadn’t taken a side of the table all to himself now. Every head is turned to him now, every body-language focused on him.

“Oh, we know that,” says Weitz. Arthurs chips in.

“You’ve got a nice little middle-size power-generation and distribution company; good build-up, rudimentary semi-feudal ownership model and you really should have diversified years ago to maximise shareholder value. But you guys do things differently here, I recognise that. I don’t understand that, but then there’s a lot of things about this place that frankly makes no sense to me at all. Maybe you’re a little overcapitalised and you do have way too much invested in social capital—your R&D budget would raise eyebrows at home, but you’re in pretty good shape. Maybe not planet-beating, not sector-leading, but good Little League.”

“Nice of you to say so,” Vishram says which is all the venom he can permit himself in this teak arena—he knows that they want to niggle him, nettle him, needle him into a careless comment. He looks at his hands. They are steady on the glass as they were always steady on the mike. It’s no different from dealing with hecklers.

Siggurdson rests his big fists on the table, leans forward over them. He means to intimidate.

“I don’t think you quite appreciate the seriousness of what we are saying. We know your father’s company better than he knows it himself. His move was abrupt but not altogether unexpected: we have models. They are good models. They predict with an acceptable degree of accuracy. This conversation would be happening whatever he decided with regard to you. That this conversation is taking place here is a reflection of how much we know not just about Ray Power, but about you, Mr. Ray.”

Clementi draws a cigar case from inside his jacket. He flips it open. Little beautiful black Cuban cigarillos like bullets in a magazine. Vishram’s saliva glands stab with hungry pain. Lovely smokes.

“Who’s backing you?” he asks with fake nonchalance. He knows they can see through it like a gauze veil. “EnGen?”

Siggurdson deals him a long stupid-son look.

“Mr. Ray.”

Arthurs moistens his lip with his tongue, a tiny, delicate pink darting dab, like a tiny snake lodged in the crevices of his palate.

“We are a registered acquisitions arm of a large transnational concern.”

“And what is that large transnational^ concern in the research division of Ray Power? Might it be anything to do with the results we’ve been getting in the zero-point lab? Results that are turning in neat little positives where everyone else’s are handing back big red negatives?”

“We’ve heard rumours to that effect,” says Weitz, and Vishram decides that he is the cortex behind the whole operation. Arthurs the money man, Siggurdson the baron, Clementi the enforcer.

“More than rumours,” Vishram says. “But the zero point is not for sale.”

“I think perhaps you may have misunderstood me,” Siggurdson says slowly, ponderously. “We don’t want to buy your company outright. But if the results you’ve been getting are reproducible on a commercial scale, this is a very exciting area of potential high yield. This is an area we would be interested in investing in. What we want, Mr. Ray, is to buy a share in your company. It would be enough money to run a full-scale demonstration of the hot-zero-point technology.”