Shiv shifts on his charpoy. Hell is one thing Christians do well. His dick lifts in his pants. The torment, the screaming, the bodies heaped up in pain, the nakedness, the helplessness, have always stirred him. Yogendra sifts the drained puris into a basket. His eyes are dead, dull, his face animal.
“And the thing is, it goes on forever. A thousand years is not even a second. An age of Brahma is not even one instant in hell. A thousand ages of Brahma and you are still no nearer the end. You haven’t even begun. That is where you are going. You will be taken down by the demons and chained up and set on top of the pile of people and your flesh will begin to burn and you will try not to breathe in the flame but in the end you will have to and after that nothing will ever change. The only way to avoid Hell is to put your trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and accept him as your personal Lord and Saviour. There is no other way. Imagine it: hell. Can you even begin to imagine what it will be like?”
“Like this?” Yogendra is fast as a knife in an alley. He grabs Leela’s wrist. She cries out but she cannot break his hold. His face is the same feral blank as he pushes her hand towards the boiling ghee.
Shiv’s boot to the side of his head knocks him across the room, scattering puris. Leela/Martha flees shrieking to the back room. Shiv’s mother flies back from the stove, the hot fat, the treacherous gas flame.
“Get him out of here, out of my house!”
“Oh, he’s going,” Shiv says as he crosses the room in two strides, lifts Yogendra by two fistfuls of T-shirt and drags him out into the gali. Blood wells from a small cut above his ear but Yogendra still wears that numb, animal smile. Shiv throws him across the alley and follows in with the boot. Yogendra doesn’t fight back, doesn’t try to defend himself, doesn’t try to run or curl into a ball, takes the kicking with a fuck-you smile on his face. It is like striking a cat. Cats never forgive. Fuck him. Cats you drown, in the river. Shiv kicks him until the blue is gone. Then he sits back against the shanty wall and lights a bidi. Lights another, passes it to Yogendra. He takes it. They smoke in the gali. Shiv grinds the butt out on the cardboard beneath the heel of his Italian shoe.
Raja of shit.
“Come on, we’ve got a car to pick up.”
17: LISA
Hand over hand, Lisa Durnau hauls herself up the tunnel into the heart of the asteroid. The shaft is little wider than her body, the vacuum suits are white and clinging, and Lisa Durnau cannot get the thought out of her head that she is a NASA sperm swimming up a cosmic yoni. She pulls herself up the white nylon rope after Sam Rainey’s receding gripsoles. The project director’s feet come to a halt. She pushes back against a knot on the rope and floats, halfway up a stone vagina, a quarter of a million miles from home. A robot manipulator arm squeezes past her on its way down from the core, outstretched and creeping on little manipulator fingers. Lisa flinches as it brushes past her compression suit. Japanese King Crabs are a childhood horror; things chitinous and spindly. She used to dream of pulling back the bed cover and finding one lying there, pincers weaving up towards her face.
“What’s the delay?”
“There’s a turning hollow. From here on, you’ll begin to feel the effects of gravity. You don’t want to be heading facedown.”
“This Tabernacle doofus has its own gravity field?”
Sam Rainey’s feet tuck up, he vanishes into the gloom between the lume tubes. Lisa sees vague whiteness tumbling and manoeuvring, then his face looks through its visor into hers.
“Just be careful not to get your arms trapped where you can’t use them.”
Lisa Durnau gingerly draws herself up into the turning space. It’s just wide enough to fit a hunched body in a vacuum suit and, as Sam warns, get yourself inextricably trapped. She grimaces at the rock grating on her shoulders.
It’s all been cramming and jamming and slamming since she was excreted through the pressure lock into Darnley 285 Excavation Headquarters. If ISS had smelled rancid, Darnley Base was that distilled and casked for a year. Darnley was an unstable trinity of space scientists, archaeologists, and oil rats from the Alaska north slope. Darnley’s greatest surprise was what the drill-crews discovered when their bits punched through raw rock and the spycams were lowered in. It was not a propulsion system, a mythical space-drive. It was altogether other.
The suit she had been given was a tight-fitting skin, a microweave smaller than a molecule of oxygen, flexible enough to move in the confined spaces of Darnley’s interior, yet with the strength to maintain a human body against vacuum. Lisa had clung, still vertiginous from the transfer from the shuttle, to a handhold in the pressure lock as she felt the white fabric press ever-tighter against her skin and one by one the crew upended themselves and dived down the rabbit hole that was the entrance to the rock. Then it was her turn to fight the claustrophobia and go down into the shaft. Clocks were ticking. She had forty-five minutes to get in, get done with whatever it was dwelt in the heart of Darnley 285, get out, and get on to Captain Pilot Beth’s shuttle before she made turnaround.
In the gullet of the asteroid, Lisa Durnau folds her arms across her chest, pulls up her legs, and neatly somersaults. Pushing herself down the rope she feels a little extra assistance pulling at her feet. Now there is a distinct sensation of down and up and her stomach starts to gurgle as it reverts to its natural orientation. She glances between her feet. Sam Rainey’s head fills the shaft; around it is a halo. There’s light down there.
A few hundred knots downshaft and she can kick off and glide in hundred-metre swoops. Lisa whoops. She finds microgee more exhilarating and liberating than bloated, nauseous free fall.
“Don’t forget, you have to come back up again,” Sam says.
Five more minutes down and the light is a bright silver shine. Lisa’s body says half a gravity and getting stronger by the metre. Her mind rebels at the outrage of weight in absolute vacuum. Suddenly Sam’s head vanishes. She clings fingers and toes to the wall and squints through her feet into a disk of silver light. She thinks she sees a spider web of ropes and cables.
“Sam?”
“Climb down until you see a rope ladder. Grab a good hold of that, you’ll see me.”
Feet first, in a too-tight sperm-suit, Lisa Durnau enters the central cavity of Darnley 285. Beneath her feet is the web of cables and ratlines strung around the roof of the cavern. Clinging to the guy ropes, Lisa catwalks across the net towards Sam Rainey, who lies prostrate on the netting.
“Don’t look down,” Sam warns. “Yet. Come over here and lie beside me.” Lisa Durnau eases herself prone on to a sling of webbing and looks down into the heart of the Tabernacle.