by Ian McDonald
‘I don’t understand what’s going on here,’ Lisa Durnau says, up in space.
‘The Tierra probe project is a presentational solution,’ Suarez-Martin says. Her hair is pinned back with an array of glitter clips. Lisa’s short bob of curls hovers around her like a nebula. ‘The real mission was to develop a space propulsion system sufficiently powerful to move a large object to the Lagrange-five point of orbital stability.’
‘What kind of large object?’ Lisa Durnau cannot connect anything that has happened in the past fifty hours to any part of accumulated thirty-seven years of experience. They tell her this is space, but it’s hot, stinks of feet and you can’t see anything. Your government pulls off the biggest sleight-of- hand in history but no one notices because they were watching the pretty pictures.
‘An asteroid. This asteroid.’ Daley Suarez-Martin palms up a graphic on the screen. It’s the usual deep-space potato. The resolution is not very good. ‘This is Darnley 285.’
‘This must be some very special asteroid,’ Lisa says. ‘So is it going to do a Chicxulub on us?’
The G-woman looks pleased. She palms up a new graphic, coloured ellipses crossing each other.
‘Darnley 285 is an Earth-crossing asteroid discovered by NEAT skywatch in 2027. Please watch this animation.’ She taps a yellow ellipse, close in to Earth, far out to the back side of Mars. ‘Its nearest approach to Earth is just inside lunar orbit.’
‘That’s close for a NEO,’ Lisa Durnau says. See, I can do the speak too.
‘Darnley 285 is on a thousand eighty five day orbit; the next one would have brought her close enough to pose a statistical risk.’ The animation passes within a hair of blue Earth.
‘So you built the light sail to move it out of harm’s way,’ Lisa says.
‘To move it, but not on account of safety. Please look carefully. This was the projected orbit in 2030. This is the actual orbit.’ A solid yellow ellipse appears. It’s exactly the same as the 2027 orbit. The woman continues. ‘Close interaction with Near Earth Object Sheringham Twelve on the next orbit would bring Darnley 285 to its closest approach, one twelve thousand miles. Instead, in 2033 . . .’ The new dotted parabola switches place with the observed course: exactly the same trajectory logged in 2027. ‘It is an anomalous situation.’
‘You’re saying . . .’
‘An unidentified force is modifying Darnley 285’s orbit to keep it the same distance from Earth,’ Daley Suarez-Martin says.
‘Jesus,’ whispers Lisa Durnau, preacherman’s daughter.
‘We sent a mission out for the 2039 approach. It was in the highest confidentiality. We found something. We then embarked on an extended project to bring it back. That’s what the light sail test mission was about, all the Epsilon Indi cover story. We had to get that asteroid to somewhere we take a long, close look at it.’
‘And what did you find?’ Lisa Durnau asks.
Daley Suarez-Martin smiles. ‘Tomorrow we’ll send you out to see for yourself.’
LULL
Eleven thirty and the club is jumping. Boom-mounted floods define an oval of sand. The bodies cluster to the light like moths. They move, they grind, eyes shut in ecstasy. The air smells of used-up day, heavy sweat and duty-free Chanel. The girls wear this summer’s shift-dresses, last summer’s two pieces, the occasional classic V-string. The boys are all bare-chested and carry layers of neck jewellery. Chin wisps are back, the Mohican is so ’46, tribal body-painting hovers on the edge of the terminally unhip, but scarification seems to be the coming thing, boys and girls alike. Thomas Lull is glad the Australian penis-display thongs have cycled out. He’s worked the parties for the Ghosht Brothers for the past three seasons, cash in hand, and he’s seen the fast tide of planet youth culture ebb and flow, but those things, strapping it up like a periscope . . .
Thomas Lull sits on the soft, tired grey sand, forearms resting on drawn-up knees. The surf is unusually quiet tonight. Hardly a ripple at the tide line. A bird cries out over the black water. The air is still, dense, tired. No taste of monsoon on it. The fishermen have been saying that since the Banglas brought their ice up past Tamil Nadu the currents have been out of kilter. Behind him, bodies move in total silence.
Figures resolve out of the dark, two white girls in sarongs and halter-tops. They’re dirty beach-blonde with that exaggerated Scandinavian tan emphasised by pale Nordic eyes, hand in hand, barefoot. How old are you, nineteen, twenty? Thomas Lull thinks. With your sunbed top-up tans and bikini bottoms under those travel-ironed sarongs. This is your first stop, isn’t it, somewhere you saw on a backpacker site, just wild enough to see if you’re going to like it out in the raw world. You couldn’t wait to get away from Uppsala or Copenhagen and do all the fierce things in your hearts.
‘Ho there,’ Thomas Lull hails softly. ‘If you’re planning on attending tonight’s entertainment there are a couple of preliminaries. Purely for your own safety.’ He unfolds his scanning kit with a gambler’s flick.
‘Sure,’ says smaller, goldier girl. Thomas Lull runs her fistful of pills and patches through his scanner.
‘Nothing here going to leave you like a plate of Vichysoisse. Soup of the day is Transic Too, it’s a new emotic, you can get it from anyone up on the stage area. Now, madam . . .’ This to bug-eyed beach-Viking who has started the party early. ‘I need to see if it’ll ab-react with anything you’re already running. Could you . . .’ She knows the drill, licks her finger, rolls it across the sensor plate. Everything goes green. ‘No problem. Enjoy the party, ladies, and this is a no-alcohol event.’
He checks their asses through their sheer sarongs as they insinuate themselves into the quiet writhe. They’re still holding hands. That’s so nice, Thomas Lull thinks. But the emotics scare him. Computer emotions brewed on an unlicensed Level 2.95 Bharat sundarban aeai, chain-bred up in some Coke-bottle bedroom factory and stuck onto adhesive patches, fifty dollars a slap. It’s easy to tell the users. The twitchings and grinnings and bared teeth and uncanny noises of bodies trying to express feelings with no analogue in human need or experience. He’s never met anyone who could tell him what this feeling makes you feel. Then again, he’s never met anyone who can report what a natural emotion makes you feel. We are all programme ghosts running on the distributed network of Brahma.
That bird’s still out there, calling.
He glances over his shoulder at the silent beach party, every dancer in his or her private zone, dancing to his or her custom beat beamed through ’hoek link. He lies to himself that he only works the club nights because he can use the cash, but he’s always been drawn to mass humanity. He wants and dreads the self-loss of the dancers, merged into an unconscious whole, isolated and unified. It’s the same love and loathing that drew him to the dismembered body of India, one of the planet’s hundred most recognisable faces, shuffled into the sub-continent’s appalling, liberating, faceless billion and a half. Turn around, walk away, disappear. That ability to dissolve his face into a crowd has its flip-side: Thomas Lull can detect the individual, the unusual, the countervailing out of the herd.
She moves across the currents of the crowd, through the bodies, against the grain of the night. She is dressed in grey. Her skin is pale, wheat, Indo-Aryan. Her hair is short, boyish, very glossy, with a tinge of red. Her eyes are large. Gazelle eyes, like the Urdu poets sang. She looks impossibly young. She wears a three-stripe Vishnu tilak on her forehead. It doesn’t look stupid on her. She nods, smiles and the bodies close around her. Thomas Lull tries to angle himself to look without being seen. It’s not love, lust, fortysomething hormones. It is simple fascination. He has to see more, know more of her.
‘Hey there.’ An Australian couple want their gear checked. Thomas Lull runs their stash through his scanner while watching the party. Grey is the perfect party camouflage. She has melted into an interplay of silently moving limbs.
‘Fine, you’re whistling Dixie. But we do have a zero-tolerance policy on penis-display suits.’
&nb
sp; The guy frowns. Get out of here, leave me to my recreation. There, close by the decks. The bhati-boys are flirting with her. He hates them for that. Come back to me. She hesitates, bends low for a word. For a moment he thinks she might buy something from the Bangalore Bombastic. He doesn’t want her to do that. She shakes her head and moves on. She vanishes into the bodies again. Thomas Lull finds he is following her. She does blend well; he keeps losing track of her amongst the bodies. She isn’t wearing a ’hoek. How is she getting it then? Thomas Lull moves to the edge of the dance space. She only looks like she is dancing, he realises. She is doing something else, taking the collective mood and moving to it. Who the hell is she?
Then she stops in her dance. She frowns, opens her mouth, swallows for breath. She presses a hand to her labouring chest. She can’t breathe. The gazelle eyes are scared. She bends over, trying to release the grip in her lungs. Thomas Lull knows these signs well. He is an old familiar of this attacker. She stands in the middle of the silent crowd, fighting for breath. No one sees. No one knows. Everyone is blind and deaf in their own private dancescapes. Thomas Lull forces a path through the bodies. Not to her, but to the Scandie girls. He has their stash read-out on his scanner. There’s always someone doing a quick, dirty lift on the salbutamol/ATP-reductase reaction.
‘I need your wheezers, quick.’ Goldie girl peers at him as if he’s some incredible alien elf from Antares. To her, he could be. She fumbles open her pink Adidas purse. ‘Here, those.’ Thomas Lull scrapes out the blue and white caplets. The grey girl is panting shallowly now, hands on thighs, very frightened, looking round for help. Thomas Lull bulls through the party people, cracking the little gelatin capsules and shaking them into his fist.
‘Open your mouth,’ he orders, cupping his hands. ‘Inhale on three and hold for twenty. One. Two. Three.’
Thomas Lull claps his cupped hands over her mouth and blows hard between his thumbs, spraying powder deep into her lungs. She closes her eyes, counting. Thomas Lull finds he’s looking at her tilak. He’s never seen one like it before. It looks like plastic fused to the skin, or raw bone. Suddenly he has to touch it. His fingers are millimetres away when she opens her eyes. Thomas Lull snatches his hand back.
‘You all right?’
She nods. ‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘You should’ve brought some medication with you. You could have been in a lot of trouble; these people, they’re like ghosts. You could have died and they’d’ve danced right over you. Come on.’
He leads her through the maze of blind dancers to the shadowed sand. She sits, bare feet splayed out. Thomas Lull kneels beside her. She smells of sandalwood and fabric conditioner. Twenty years of undergraduate expertise pins her at nineteen, maybe twenty. Come on, Lull. You’ve saved a strange little driftwood girl from an asthma attack and you’re running your pre-pull checks. Show some self-respect.
‘I was so scared,’ she says. ‘I am so stupid, I had inhalers but I left them back at the hotel . . . I never thought . . .’
Her soft accent would sound English to less experienced ears but Thomas Lull’s recognises a Karnatakan twang.
‘Luck for you Asthma Man picked up your wheezing on his super-hearing. Come on. Party’s over for you tonight, sister. Where are you staying?’
‘The Palm Imperial Guest House.’ It’s a good place, not cheap, more popular with older travellers. Thomas Lull knows the lobby and bar of every hotel for thirty kays up and down the coconut coast. Some of the bedrooms too. Backpackers and gap-yearers tend toward the beach-shacks. He’s seen a few of those too. Killed a few snakes.
‘I’ll get you back. Achuthanandan will look after you. You’ve had a bit of a shock, you need to take it easy.’
That tilak: he’s certain it’s moving. Mystery girl gets to her feet. She offers a hand shyly, formally.
‘Thank you very much. I think I would have been in very bad trouble without you.’ Thomas Lull takes the hand. It is long and aesthetic, soft and dry. She cannot quite look at him.
‘All in a day’s work for Asthma Man.’
He walks with her toward the lights among the palms. The surf is lifting, the trees grow agitated. The lamps on the hotel veranda dance and glimmer behind the veil of fronds. The beach party behind him is suddenly weary and stale. All the things that seemed valuable and confirming before this girl now taste thin and old. Perhaps the monsoon is coming; the wind that will blow him on again.
‘If you want, there’s a technique I can teach you. I used to suffer asthma bad when I was young; it’s a breathing trick; to do with gas exchange. It’s quite easy. I haven’t had an attack in twenty years, and you can throw away those inhalers. I could show you the basics; you could call round tomorrow . . .’
The girl pauses, gives it thought, then nods her head. Her tilak catches a light from somewhere.
‘Thank you. I would value that very much.’
The way she talks; so reserved, so Victorian, such regard for the stress of words.
‘Okay well, you can find me . . .’
‘Oh, I will just ask the gods, they will show me. They know the way to everywhere.’
Thomas Lull has no answer to that, so he sticks his hands in the pockets of his cut off baggies and says, ‘Well, gods permitting, I’ll see you tomorrow, ah?’
‘Aj.’ She gives her name a French pronunciation: Ah-zjh. She looks to the hotel lights, coloured bulbs jigging in the rising wind. ‘I think I will be all right from here, thank you. Until tomorrow then, Professor Lull.’
TAL
Tal travels tonight in a plastic taxi. The little bubble phatphat rattles over the pocks and pots of a rural road as the driver steers nervously by his single headlamp. He’s already narrowly missed one wandering cow and a column of women with bundles of firewood on their heads. Shade trees loom out of the deep, thick rural night. The driver scans the verge for the turn-off. His instructions are taped to the dash where he can read them by instrument light. So many kays along this road, through this number of villages, second left after the wall ad for Rupa underwear. He’s never been out of the city before.
Tal’s special mix plays big anokha breaks with Slav Metal death chords, in honour of the host. Celebrity occasions demand extraspecial mixes. Tal’s life can be chronicled by a series of soundtrack files. Tal’s DJ aeai wove up a set of top grooves between drafting the wedding pavilion for the Chawla/Nadiadwala match. There’s much happening in Town and Country’s actors’ lives right now.
A sudden lurch throws Tal from the bench seat. The phatphat bounces to a stop. Tal rearranges yts thermal scatter coat, tuts at the dust on yts silk pants, then notices the soldiers. Six of them phase out of rural night camouflage. A chubby Sikh officer has his hand raised. He steps up to the taxi.
‘Didn’t you see us?’
‘You are kind of hard to spot,’ the driver says.
‘No chance of a licence, I suppose?’ the jemadar asks.
‘None whatever,’ the driver says. ‘My cousin . . .’
‘Do you not know we are in a state of heightened vigilance?’ the Sikh soldier admonishes. ‘Awadhi slow missiles could already be moving across our country. They are stealthy things, they can conceal themselves in many ways.’
‘Not as slow as this old crock,’ the driver jokes. The Sikh suppresses a smile and bends down to glance in at the passenger. Tal hastily shuts off the bpm. Yt sits very still, very upright, heart betrayingly loud.
‘And you sir? Madam?’
His soldiers titter. The Sikh has been eating onions. Tal thinks yt might pass out from the reek and the tension. Yt opens yts evening bag, slips out the thick, gilt-scallop-edged invitation. The Sikh looks at it as if could be grounds for a full body-cavity search, then snaps it back to Tal.
‘You’re lucky we’re out here tonight. You missed your turn a couple of kilometres back. You must be about the seventh or eighth. Now, what you do is . . .’
Tal breathes again. As the driver turns the cab Tal can clearly hear the sold
iers’ nasty laughter over the purr of the alcohol motor.
Hope there are slow missiles a-creeping up on you, Tal thinks.
The half-ruined Ardhanarisvara temple stands among trees on a country track that strikes right from the main road. The party organisers have lit the drop-off zone with biolume patches. The green light draws faces from the tree trunks, spook-lights the slumped statues and yakshis, bedded in the ancient soil. The reception is themed around polar opposites: sakti and purusa; female and male energies; sattva and tamas; spiritual intelligence and earthy materialism. The yoni-shaped tanks have been extravagantly flooded. Tal thinks of yts party preparations, a frugal lick-wash with a bottle of warmed mineral water. The mains water in the White Fort - the mammoth agglomeration of housing projects where Tal has yts two-room apartment - has not been working for two months now. Day and night a procession of women and children carry water cans up and down the stairs past yts front door.