River of Gods (31 page)

"I was wondering how you were going to explain the panda eyes.
Is this a universe of sunbeds?"

"Zero-point energy, actually. And you have very elegant ankles."

He thinks he sees a shadow of a smile.

"Okay, these people, how do I deal with them?"

"You don't," says Marianna Fusco. "You shake hands and
you smile politely and you listen to what they have to say and you do
absolutely nothing. Then you report back to me."

"You're not coming with me?"

"You're on your own on this one, funny man. But be prepared for
Govind to make Ramesh an offer this afternoon."

By the time he gets to the airport, Vishram's forehead is starting to
flake. The car drives past the drop-off zones and the white zones and
picking-up zones and tow-away zones to the bizjet zone through the
double barrier security gate on to the field up to a private
executive tilt-jet perched on its engines and tail pods like a
mantis. An Assamese hostess, immaculate in traditional costume, opens
the doors, namastes like a flower budding, and takes Vishram to his
seat. He raises a hand to Marianna Fusco as the Merc pulls away.
Flying solo.

The hostess's hand lingers as she checks Vishram's seat belt but he
doesn't notice for then Vishram feels his belly and balls sag as the
tilt-jet leaps into the air, puts its nose down, and takes him up
over the brassy towers of Varanasi. An ineluctable part of Vishram
Ray registers the close presence of an attractive woman next to him
but he keeps his face pressed to the window as the tilt-jet swoops in
over the river temples and ghats and the palaces and havelis onto a
course following Ganga Devi. The shikara of the Vishwanath temple
dazzles gold. The hand on his thigh finally draws his attention as
the engines swivel into horizontal flight and the pilot takes the
aircraft up to cruising altitude.

"I can get you some ointment for your forehead, sahb," says
the perfect, round face full in front of his like a moon.

"I'll survive, thank you," says Vishram Ray. The first of
the champagne arrives. Vishram assumes it's the first. He'll make
that first last, although he's supposed to abuse the hospitality. It
is cold and very very good and drinking airborne has always made
Vishram Ray feel like a god. The bastis spread under him,
multicoloured plastic roofs so tight together they look like a cloth
spread on the ground for a feast. The tilt-jet follows the line of
the river to the edge of Patna airspace, then swings south. Vishram
should read his briefing but Bharat bedazzles him. The titanic
conurbation of slums breaks up in a weave of fields and villages that
rapidly turns from tired yellow to drought white as the river's
influence diminishes. It would have looked little different two
thousand years ago and were Vishram Ray indeed a god passing across
holy Bharat to battle the rakshasas of the black south. Then his eyes
catch on a power line and a stand of wind-turbines turning sluggishly
in the heavy dry air. Ray Power turbines. His brother's turbines. He
looks out at the yellow haze of the horizon. Does he imagine a line
of shadow in the brown high-atmospheric smog, the skirmish line of an
advance of clouds? The monsoon, at last? The burned stone of the
plain deepens to beige, to yellow, to outcrops of green trees as the
land rises. The tilt-jet rises with the edge of a plateau and Vishram
is over high forest. To the west rises a line of smoke, drifting
northward on the wind. The green is a lie, this high forest is dry,
fire-hungry after three years of drought. Vishram finishes his
champagne—flat and hand-warm now—as the seat belt sign
lights.

"Shall I take that?" the hostess says, too close again.
Vishram imagines a tic of irritation on that perfect, made-up face. I
resisted your seductions. The tilt-jet leans into a landing spiral. A
change in turbine pitch tells him the engines are swivelling into
landing mode but looking down Vishram can see nothing that appears
like an airport. The tilt-jet drifts across the forest canopy, so low
its jet wash sends the leaves raving and storming. Then the engine
roar peaks, Vishram drops into the canopy, birds scatter on every
side in a silent explosion of wings, and he is down with a gentle
bounce. The engines ebb to a whine. Assam girl is doing the thing
with the door. Heat floods in. She beckons. "Mr. Ray." At
the foot of the steps is an old Rajput with a great white moustache
and a turban so tight Vishram feels himself developing a sympathetic
migraine. Ranked behind him are a dozen men in khaki with bush hats
bent severely up at one side and heavy assault rifles at the slope.

"Mr. Ray, you are most welcome to Palamau Tiger Sanctuary,"
says the Rajput with a bow.

Assam girl stays with the tilt-jet. The hats carrying rifles spread
out on all sides as the Rajput guides Vishram away from the 'plane.
The ship has come down in a circle of bare dirt in a dense stand of
bamboo and scrub. A sandy path leads into the trees. The path is
lined with what seems to Vishram an excessive number of solidly built
wood shelters. None is more than a panicked sprint away.

"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."

"You don't want to buy me out?"

"Mr. Siggurdson said no," says Clementi tetchily.
Siggurdson nods. He has a smile like a Minnesota winter.

"Ah. I think I have misunderstood you. Could you excuse me one
moment, gentlemen? I have to go to the snanghar."

Enthroned among the exotic wood panels, Vishram slips his 'hoek
behind his ear and flicks open the palmer. He's about to call up
Inder when the paranoia strikes. Plenty of time for these men in
suits to have bugged the gents. He calls up a mail aeai, raises his
hand like a pianist, ready to type air. They could have bindicams.
They could have movement sensors that read the flexing of his
fingers. They could have nanochips that read the gurglings of his
palmer; they could have sanyassins looking into the corners of his
soul. Vishram Ray settles on the polished mahogany ring and zips off
a query to Inder. Inder-in-the-head is back within seconds; head and
shoulders materialising over the toilet paper holder on the back of
the door.