Read Online River of Gods by Ian McDonald - Free Book Online Page A

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, isolate 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
subcontinent'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."
    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