River of Gods (48 page)

By the time either of them can speak again it is twenty past eleven
on the Noughties retro wall-clock and they lie side by side on the
mat drinking minibar malt from the bottle and thrilling to the
flickers and growls of approaching thunder.

"I will never, ever be able to look at that silk wrap the same
way," Vishram says. "Where did you learn that from?"

"Who said I had to be taught?" Marianna Fusco rolls on to
her side. "It's you Indians have this guru thing."

The room flashlights blue to a stronger pulse of lightning. Vishram
thinks of the photograph on the cover page of his morning news-site;
the faces white in the camera flash, the man, open mouthed, the
alien, sexlessly beautiful nute with the bank notes in yts hand. What
do they do? he thinks. What do they think they can do? And whatever
they can do, does it deserve the destruction of a man's career and
family? He had always thought of and practised sex as one thing, one
set of actions and reactions whatever the sexual orientation but on
the floor with Marianna Fusco among the shreds of her swimsuit and
the knotted snake of a scarf he had lovingly pulled out of her colon
he realises it is a nation of many erogenies and responses, as full
of languages and cultures as India. "Marianna," he says,
staring at the ceiling. "Don't go."

"Vish." The nick again. "This time there really is
something I need to tell you." She sits up. "Vish, I told
you I was hired by your father to oversee the transfer of power."

"Hired, ah, right, so what does that make what we've just done?"

"You know, any real comedian I've ever known doesn't try to be
funny in real life. Vish, I was hired by another company. I was hired
by Odeco."

Vishram feels he is falling into the floor. Muscles go limp, his
hands fall open, an unconscious Corpse Asana.

"Well, now it all makes sense, doesn't it? Soften the horny
fucker before you knife him."

"Hey!" Marianna Fusco sits up, leans over him. Her hair
falls around her face, a soft dark silhouette against the windows.
"That is not right and it is not fair. I am not a corporate.
whore. We did not do this because it was some plot or conspiracy.
Fuck you, Vishram Ray. I told you because I trusted you, because I
like you, because I like sex with you. You've had your hand up my
ass, how much more trust would you like?"

Vishram counts the spaces between the lightning flicker and the
thunder growl. One Odeco two Odeco three Odeco four. The rain is
almost upon them.

"I have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on," he
says to the bland, international-stylie ceiling. "Who's behind
what, who's funding what, who's got a stake in what and who is
working for what and why."

"You think I know any better?" Marianna Fusco says, rolling
on to her side and pressing her thick dense body against Vishram's.
He can feel the soft kiss of her pubic hair against his thigh. He
wonders at the yonic secrets she keeps from him. "I'm a junior
partner in a London corporate law firm. We do mergers, acquisitions,
and hostile takeovers. We're not very good at cloak and dagger,
skulduggery and conspiracy theory."

"So can you tell me, what is Odeco?"

"Odeco is an international group of venture capitalists based in
various tax havens. They specialise in blue-sky technology and in
what some might consider the grey economy; industries that aren't
strictly illegal but have a dodgy reputation, like Darwinware.
They've invested in Silicon Jungles in cyberabads all across the
developing world, including a sundarban right here in Varanasi."

"And they came up with the money for the accelerator at the
research centre. I met Chakraborty, or rather, Chakraborty met me."

"I know. Mr. Chakraborty is my liaison here in Varanasi. You can
believe me or not, but

Odeco wants the zero-point project to succeed."

"He told me he was delighted I was going to run a full demo. The
only people I told that to were our friends from EnGen."

"EnGen is not Odeco."

"Then how did Chakraborty know about the trial?" Marianna
Fusco chews her top lip.

"You'll have to ask Chakraborty. I'm not authorised to tell you.
But believe me, anything EnGen has offered you to shut down the
experiment, Odeco will match it to keep it open. Match it and more."

"Good," says Vishram Ray sitting up. "Because I'm
minded to take their money. Can you get me a meeting with your
liaison? Provided he doesn't know already, like telepathy or
something? And can we do this again, real real soon?"

Marianna Fusco tosses back her still-damp and chlorine-perfumed hair.

"Can I borrow a bathrobe? I don't think I should go down in the
lift like this."

Forty minutes later Vishram Ray is showered, shaved, suited, and
humming to himself as he rides down through the glass roof of the
hotel atrium. The car waits among the satellite vans. The silk wrap
soaks in the Jacuzzi, still in its knots, all the better to
scandalise the prying room staff.

Marigolds on black water. In the open boat Vishram feels the wall of
cloud like the hammer of God, raised over him. The wind from the feet
of the monsoon stirs the river into a chop. Buffalo press close to
shore, nostrils lifted our of the water, flared, sensing the change
of the season. Along the ghats women bathers struggle to hold their
saris with modesty. It is one of his nation's perennial
contradictions that the culture that wrote and illustrated the Kama
Sutra should be so glacially prudish. People in cold, wet Christian
Glasgow burned more ardently. He suspects what he has just done with
Marianna Fusco would get him twenty in chokey in back-country Bihar.

The boatman is a fifteen-year-old with a frozen wide smile,
struggling against the frets and flows. Vishram feels unclad and
exposed to the lightning. Already the factories across the river have
put on their lights.

"I hate to say it but EnGen got me a tilt-jet? To a tiger
sanctuary? With armed guards and a really good lunch. And their
flight crew was a lot better looking than him."

"Hm?" Chakraborty says. He stands in the middle of the boat
absently watching the passing panoply of shore life. Vishram wishes
he wouldn't do that. He remembers an old number from the College
Dram. Soc. production of
Guys and Dolls
. Sit down you're
rocking the boat.

And the devil will drag you under
. Heavy on the Christian sin
and judgement and damnation today Vishram, he thinks.

"I said, it's kind of choppy."

Rowing-boy grins. He has a clean blue shirt and very white teeth.

"Ah yes, a little turbulent, Mr. Ray." Chakraborty touches
a finger to his lips, then shakes it at the gleaming ghats. "Do
you not find it comforting, knowing where you will end, on these
steps, by this shore, before the eyes of all the people?"

"Can't say it's a thing I've thought too much about."
Vishram reaches for the gunwales as the boat rocks.

"Really? But you should, Mr. Ray. I think a little about death
every day. It is most focusing. It is a great reassurance that we
leave the particular and rejoin the universal. That I think is the
moksha of Ganga. We rejoin the river of history like a drop of rain,
our stories told and woven into the stream of time. Tell me—you
have lived in the West—is it true that they burn their dead in
secret, hidden away from everyone as if they are a thing to be
ashamed of?"

Vishram remembers the funeral in a grimy sandstone district of
Glasgow. He had not known the woman well—she had been a
flatmate of a girl he had been having sex with because she had a name
as an up-and-coming director in the Dram. Soc. — but he did
recall the sense of shock when he learned she had been killed in a
climbing accident in Glencoe. And he does recall the sense of horror
in the crematorium; the muffled grief, the eulogy by a stranger that
had got her friends' names wrong, the taped Bach as the sealed casket
lurched on the dais and then slowly sank out of sight to the furnace
below.

"It is true," he says to Chakraborty. "They can't look
at it because it scares them. For them, it is the end of everything."

On the ash-strewn river steps the process of death and moksha wheels
on. By the waterline a pyre has collapsed, the head and shoulders of
the dead loll out, strangely untouched by the flames. That is a
burning man, Vishram thinks. The wind swirls smoke and ash over the
burning ghat. Vishram Ray watches the burning man slump on his pyre,
cave in, and collapse in sparks and charcoal and he thinks that
Chakraborty is right; it is better by far to end here, death in the
midst of life, to leave the particular and rejoin the universal.

"Mr. Chakraborty, I would like a very large sum of money from
you," Vishram Ray says.

"How much do you need?"

"Enough to buy out Ramesh's part of the company."

"That will require a sum in the region of three hundred billion
rupees. I can give you that in US dollars, if you require."

"I just need to know that that money could be available to me."

Mr. Chakraborty does not hesitate. "It is."

"One other thing. Marianna told me there was something I should
ask you, that only you could answer."

"What is that question, Mr. Ray?"

"What is Odeco, Mr. Chakraborty?"

The boat-boy idles on his oars, letting the current carry the skiff
past the burnings to the capsized temple of Scindia ghat, leaning
into the cracked mud.

"Odeco is one of a series of shell companies for the Generation
Three Artificial Intelligence known informally as Brahma."

"I'm going to ask you that question again," Vishram says.
"And you will receive the same answer."

"Come on, man." The Bengali might as well have said Jesus
or James Bond or Lal Darfan. Chakraborty turns to Vishram.

"What is it about my answer that you do not believe?"

"Generation Three aeais, that's science fiction."

"I assure you my employer is quite actual. Odeco is indeed a
venture capital holding company, it just happens that the venture
capitalist is an artificial intelligence."

"The Hamilton Acts, the Krishna Cops."

"There are spaces where an aeai may live. Especially in
something like the international financial markets which demand loose
regulation to exploit their so-called market freedoms. These aeais
are not like our kind of intelligence at all; they are distributed,
in many places at once."

"You're telling me that this.. .Brahma.. .is the stock market,
come to life?"

"The international financial markets have used low-level aeais
to buy and sell since the last century. As the complexity of the
financial transactions spiralled, so did that of the aeais."

"But who would design something like that?"

"Brahma is not designed, no more than you, Mr. Ray. It evolved."

Vishram shakes his head. The heat at the edge of the monsoon is
terrible, crazy, draining of all sense and energy.

"Brahma?" he says weakly.

"A name. A title. It means nothing. Identity is a much larger
and looser construct in CyberEarth. Brahma is a geographically
dispersed entity across many nodes and many subcomponents,
lower-level aeais, that may not realise they are part of a larger
sentience."

"And this. Generation Three. is more than happy to give me one
hundred million US dollars."

"Or more. You must understand, Mr. Ray, to an entity such as
Brahma, making money is the easiest thing there is. It is no harder
than breathing is for you."

"Why, Mr. Chakraborty?"

Now the lawyer sits. The boat-boy reaches for the oars to keep the
little shell from spilling its passengers into the Ganga water that
washes those it receives free from karma.

"My employer wishes to see the zero-point project safeguarded
and brought to fruition."

"Again, why?"

Mr. Chakraborty shrugs slowly and expressively inside his well-cut
black suit.

"This is an entity with the financial power to destroy entire
economies. I am not privy to that kind of intelligence, Mr. Ray. Its
understanding of the human world is partial. In the financial markets
that are its ecological niche, Brahma as far exceeds human intellect
as we do snakes but if you were to speak with it directly, it would
seem to you naive, neurotic; even a little autistic."

"I have to ask this, does. did. my father know?"
Chakraborty sways his head. Affirmation.

"The money can be transferred into your account within the
hour."

"And I have to decide who I trust; a gang of American corporate
raiders who want to shred my company or an aeai that just happens to
be named after a god and can erase every bank account on the planet."

"Succinctly put sir."

"Not really a choice, is it?"

Vishram gestures to the boat-boy. He leans into his left oar and
turns the little skiff on the black water back towards the great
Dasashvamedha Ghat. Vishram thinks he feels a spot of rain on his
lip.

A whisper: "He can't stay here"

The air is fetid and oppressive but the figure on the mattress sleeps
the sleep of Brahma.

"Yt's not a he, yt's an yt," Najia Askarzadah whispers back
to Bernard. They stand in the door of the darkened room like parents
watching over a colicky child. The light fades by the minute, the
humidity climbs. The veils of gauze hang straight, heavy,
gravity-bound.

"I don't care, yt's not staying here."

"They tried to kill yt, Bernard," Najia hisses. It had
seemed bold and brilliant when she took the moped across the polo
lawn past the yelling malis and along the verandah, dodging tables
and gap-yearers to Bernard's room. Somewhere to hide. Somewhere they
would never connect but was close. Bernard had not said a word as
they stumbled through his door. The nute had been half-conscious,
raving something about adrenaline in yts strange, heavily accented
voice. Yt was out by the time they got it to the bed. Bernard had
taken yts boots off, then stepped back, scared. Then they stood in
the door and argued in whispers.