“First find your universe.”
“Oh, we found one a long time ago. It’s a simple manifold of the M-Star theoretical structure of our own universe. Gravity is more powerful there; so is the expansion constant, so there’s a lot more vacuum energy tied up in the stressed space-time. It’s quite a small universe, and not too far away.”
“I thought you said the universes were all inside and outside each other.”
“They are, topologically. I’m talking about energy distance, how much we need to warp our ’branes to the geometry of that one. In physics, ultimately, everything is energy.”
Warped brains, all right.
Sonia Yadav sets her empty glass firmly on the gingham tablecloth, leans forwards, and Vishram cannot refuse the physical energy in her eyes, her face, her body.
“Come with me,” she says. “Come and see it.”
After Glasgow, the University of Bharat Varanasi at night is unusually well mannered. No discarded polystyrene trays of rain-soaked chips or dropped beer glasses or vomit pizzas to dodge in the brownout. No sounds of coitus from the halls or urination from the shrubberies. No sinister drunk reeling out of the peripheral vision with a racial curse. No gangs of half-naked girls arm in arm streeling across the dusty, withered lawns. What there is is a lot of heavy security, a few dons on big clunky bicycles with no lights, the rattle of a solitary night-radio and a sense from the shut-up faculty buildings and student residences of curfew.
The driver heads towards the only light. The experimental physics building is an orchidlike confection of luminous plastic sheeting and pylons, daring and delicate. The name on the marble plinth is the Ranjit Ray Centre for High Energy Physics. Buried beneath the delicate, flowery architecture is a grunt engineering pulse laser particle collider.
“He seems to have been a man of many parts, my father,” Vishram says as the night security nods them through the lobby. His face is known now.
“He’s not dead,” Sonia Yadav says and Vishram starts.
An elevator bank at the end of the lobby takes them down a tube to the root of the beast. It is a mythological creature indeed, a world-devouring worm curled in a loop beneath Sarnarh and Ganga. Vishram looks through the glass observation window at electrical devices each the size of a ship engine and tries to imagine particles forced into strange and unnatural liaisons.
“When we run it to full power to open an aperture, those containment magnets put out a field strong enough to suck the haemoglobin out of your blood,” Sonia Yadav says.
“How do you know this?” Vishram asks.
“We tried it with a goat, if you really want to know. Come on.”
Sonia Yadav leads the way down a long flight of concrete steps to an air-lock door. The security panel eyeballs her, opens into an airlock.
“Are we going into space or something?” Vishram asks as the lock cycles. “It’s just a containment device.”
Vishram decides he doesn’t want to know what’s being contained, so he fluffs, “I know my father’s rich—was rich—and there’s rich buys private jets, rich buys private islands, but rich that buys private particle colliders.”
“There are other backers involved,” Sonia Yadav says. The inner hatch spins and they enter an unspectacular concrete office, headachingly lit with neon and flatscreen flicker. A young, bearded man rocks back on a chair, feet on the desk, reading the evening paper. He has an industrial thermos of chai and a Styrofoam cup; the computers bang out old-school bhangra from a Bengali station. He jumps up when he sees his late-night visitors.
“Sonia, I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
“Deba, this is.”
“I know, pleased to meet you, Mr. Ray.” He has an overemphatic handshake. “So, you’ve come to take a look at our own little private universe?” Beyond a second door is a small concrete room into which the visitors fit like segments of an orange. A heavy glass panel is level with Vishram’s head. He squints but can make nothing out of it. “We only need numbers really, but some people have this atavistic urge to eyeball things,” Deba says. He’s brought his chai with him, he takes a sip. “Okay, we’re in an observation area beside the confinement chamber, which we in our humorous physicists’ way call the Holding Cell. It’s basically a modified tokamak torus—does this mean anything to you? No? Think of it as an inverse donut; it’s got an outside, but inside is the hardest vacuum you can imagine. It’s actually harder than any vacuum you can imagine, all there is in there is space-time and quantum fluctuation. And this.”
He hits the lights. Vishram’s blind for an instant, then he becomes aware of a gaining glow from the window. He remembers a physics student he once took home telling him that the retina can detect a single photon and therefore the human eye can see on the quantum scale. He leans forwards; the glow comes from a line of blue, sharp as a laser; Vishram can see it curve off around the walls of the tokamak. He presses his face to the glass.
“Uh oh, panda eyes,” Deba says. “It throws off a lot of UV.”
“This is. another universe?”
“It’s another space-time vacuum,” Sonia Yadav says. She stands close enough for Vishram to fully appreciate her Arpege 27. “It’s been stable for a couple of months. Think of it as another nothing, but with a vacuum energy higher than ours.”
“And it’s leaking into our universe.”
“It’s not much higher, we’re only getting a two percent above input return from it, but we hope to use this space to open an aperture into a yet higher energy space, and so on, up the ladder until we get a significant return.”
“And the light.”
“Quantum radiation; the virtual particles of this universe—we call it Universe two-eight-eight—running into the laws of our universe and annihilating themselves into photons.”
Not it’s not, Vishram thinks, looking into the light of another time and space. And you know it’s not, Sonia Yadav. It is the light of Brahma.
PART THREE: KALKI
16: SHIV
A boyz always got his mother.
It had been almost a homecoming, walking through the narrow galis between the shanties, ducking under the power cables, keeping the good shoes on the cardboard paths because even in the driest of droughts the alleys of Chandi Basti were piss-mud. The runways constantly realigned themselves as shanties collapsed or additions were build on, but Shiv steered by landmarks: Lord Ram Indestructible Car Parts where the brothers Shasi and Ashish were taking a VW apart into tiny parts; Mr. Pilai’s Sewing Machine under its umbrella; Ambedkar the child-buyer’s agent sitting on his raised porch of forklift pallets, smoking sweet ganja. Everywhere, people looking, people stepping aside, people making gestures to ward off the eye, people following him with their gaze because they had seen something from outside their existence, something with taste and class and great shoes, something that was something. Something that was a man.
His mother had looked up at his shadow across her doorway. He pushed money on her, a wad of grubby rupees. He had a little cash in hand from the man who hauled away the remains of the Merc. It left him short, but a son should repay some of the debt he owes his mother. She pretended to tsk it away, but Shiv saw her tuck it behind the brick by the fire.
He’s back. It’s only a charpoy in the corner but there’s a roof and a fire and dal twice a day and the secure knowledge that no one, no thing, no killing machine with scimitars for hands will find Shiv here. But there is a danger here, too. It would be easy to sink back into the routine of a little eating, a little sleep in the noon-day sun, a little thieving, a little hanging around with your friends, talking this and that and looking at the girls and that is a day, a year, a life gone. He must be thinking, talking, pulling in his debts and his favours. Yogendra goes out running through basti and city, listening to what the streets are saying about Shiv, who has turned his collar against him, who still has a thread of honour.