Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk

by James Lovegrove

  I reminded him of this sorry episode, and his response was a sheepish, foot-shuffling, Yes, but...

  “I’m just saying, there’s none so gullible as a beguiler.”

  Lovely little slogan, that. You should have it made into a cross-stitch sampler and hung on your wall.

  “You know what? I think I might.”

  FIRST ORDER OF business was hiring a car. Sweetwater’s one and only vehicle rental place – Mojave Motors, “We Getcha Rollin’” – was run by a bickering elderly couple in matching dungarees, Jed and Gertie. A ten-year-old Ford Taurus was the best they had to offer. Jed said not to mind the patches of rust on the wheel arches, the car was still as reliable as anything that ever rolled off a Detroit assembly line. Gertie, meanwhile, alerted me to the fact that the gas tank was near-as-dammit empty and I should fill up at the Amoco on the way out of town, otherwise I’d be going no further than ten or fifteen miles.

  Ten or fifteen miles sounded okay to me.

  The next stage was to round up my three intended victims. I cruised the hotel, quizzing other avatars as to the whereabouts of Till Eulenspiegel, Uncle Tompa and Puck. Soon enough, all three got wind that I was after a meeting with them, and we congregated in the lobby.

  They looked cagey, understandably enough, and I went to great lengths to put their minds at ease.

  “I’m proposing a little road trip,” I said. “Just the four of us.”

  “Where to?” demanded the German. His name was Gunther, and with his pig-bristle ginger hair and red blubbery lips he was almost a caricature of the bierkeller Bavarian, a living archetype.

  “There’s a pueblo Indian village not far from here.”

  “So?” said the Tibetan, a wizened individual by the name of Rinzen.

  “I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, but there’s a place there that serves amazing food. It’s quite famous in the area. Little family-run restaurant, half a dozen tables, Mexican cuisine, generous portions, very exclusive.”

  “And you’re inviting us there?” said the Englishman. He was a children’s party entertainer called Robin. The sprite inside him liked to keep things straightforward. “Why?”

  “Why not? No fun going on my own. You’re all appreciators of fine dining, and you seem convivial sorts. I thought you might like to come along and check it out with me.”

  “Forgive me,” said Robin, “but this smells very like a trap.”

  The other two nodded and grunted in agreement.

  “I’d be astonished if you didn’t think that,” I said. “But look at it this way. How can I possibly be hoping to trap you? There’s three of you and only one of me. Each of you is my equal in intellect and cunning.” In my head I heard Anansi snort. “To try and take on all three of you at once would be rash indeed. More than likely it would backfire on me and I’d wind up the loser. All this is is a comradely, peaceable gesture. We get to go out of town, have a look-around, see some of the sights, and enjoy a feast into the bargain. The chimichangas, I’m reliably informed, are delicious, and the burritos are stuffed so full you can barely get your mouth round them.”

  Their eyes, to varying degrees, lit up.

  “Plus,” I added, “there’s beer.”

  Gunther moistened his lips with a glistening pink eel of a tongue.

  “So what do we say, gentlemen? Are we interested?”

  They remained wary, but I knew I had them.

  “We do outnumber you,” said Rinzen.

  “And the hotel food’s nothing to write home about,” said Robin.

  “But if there is any funny business...” Gunther growled.

  I smiled serenely. “Transport awaits. This way, my friends.”

  WE GLIDED OUT of Sweetwater in the Taurus, straight past the Amoco without stopping. For a time the road followed the erstwhile shoreline of the lake. Disused, decrepit jetties reached out aimlessly over a deepening depression in the ground. The lakebed – dry, cracked – shelved into the distance, dotted here and there with the sun-parched hulks of motorboats and kayaks. Perhaps a mile away, a thin ribbon of water glimmered, writhing in the heat haze like a trickle of mercury.

  I followed the interstate for approximately twenty minutes until a turnoff appeared. I remembered it from the bus journey in. The road was pitted and potholed, its asphalt cracked at the edges. I slowed to around 20mph, dodging drifts of dust and the occasional, honest-to-goodness rolling tumbleweed.

  There was indeed a village at the end of this unimpressive highway. What my passengers didn’t know was that its residents had abandoned it thirty years ago. I’d looked it up on Google. A handful of adobe dwellings, some of them dating back to the late nineteenth century and once occupied by a Zuni tribe, now lay uninhabited, home only to scorpions and lizards. The village was protected by some sort of heritage status, but to be honest, it was unlikely that a property developer was going to happen along, deem the spot a prime site for commercial exploitation and try to raze the buildings to the ground. It was more a case of the American government wishing to be seen to be actively preserving indigenous culture, compensation for the many long years when it had tried to do the exact opposite.

  Anyway, we didn’t make it to the village. Some six or seven miles after we left the interstate, the Taurus’s engine began to plink and splutter. Moments later, I was coasting to a halt, the driver of a car that was most assuredly going nowhere.

  “What’s this?” snapped Gunther. “We cannot be stopping. I see no restaurant.”

  “Or any village,” said Rinzen.

  “Is there something wrong with the car?” Robin asked.

  “Not as such,” I replied. None of them had noticed the fuel warning light that had been glaring on the dashboard all along. Nor had any of them cottoned to the significance of the fact that I was wearing running shorts and trainers. “Nothing a tank of petrol couldn’t fix.”

  “What!” Gunther roared. “You mean to say the car has run out? You let it?”

  “Looks that way,” I said, opening my door and getting out.

  “Where are you going?” Rinzen asked.

  “Back to town.”

  “How?”

  “On foot.”

  “That’s insane,” said Robin. “It must be a hundred degrees out there.”

  “Hundred and eleven, according to the thermometer on the dash,” I said. “But I’ll be fine. At a steady jog I can make it to Sweetwater in under an hour, I reckon. I’m pretty fit. How about you lot? You fit too?”

  Judging by their looks of dismay, Gunther’s especially, the answer was: not very.

  “Phone,” said Robin, fishing a Nokia out of his pocket. “I can call for help.”

  “Really? And how many bars have you got there?”

  Robin frowned at the screen, then hissed in annoyance. “None. No signal.”

  “That’s funny, there weren’t any on my iPhone either, last time I checked.” Which I did, surreptitiously, while driving just a few minutes earlier. “This is the back of beyond. Network coverage’s pretty much nonexistent. Tell you what, when I get to the hotel I’ll arrange for someone to come out with a can of unleaded. Can’t say fairer than that. Until then, you three sit tight, don’t exert yourselves, stay in the shade, try to keep cool.”

  “And the restaurant?” Gunther said plaintively. Even now he couldn’t quite give up on the dream of those plump, grease-dripping burritos. “The meal?”

  “Oh, Till Eulenspiegel,” I said with a sorrowful shake of the head.

  I set off, leaving them to their own devices. A last look back showed me Robin clambering onto the roof of the car, vainly angling his phone to the heavens; Rinzen watching me go, hand shading his eyes, his posture phlegmatic; and Gunther stamping around in impotent fury, filling the air with guttural Teutonic oaths.

  IT WAS A hard run, the hardest I’d ever done. The heat was atrocious. Every mile seemed to sap a bit more of the life out of me. The sweat on my face dried to a salty crust. My throat burned with dust and d
ehydration.

  But Anansi lent me the stamina to keep at it. He drove me onwards, telling me I had the body of an African, designed to cope with lack of water and withstand the blaze of the sun. It was in my blood, in my very DNA, to endure these sorts of conditions. I was as much a creature of harsh, arid lands as Nanabaa Oboshie had been, as all my ancestors had been, as Anansi himself was. We’d both agreed beforehand that I could do this. We were both counting on it.

  Reaching Interstate 15, I got lucky. Some Good Samaritan in an RV saw me trudging along by the roadside and pulled over.

  “Need a lift, pal?”

  I got round the “What the hell are you doing out here on foot?” questions by simply saying my car had broken down.

  Minutes later I was back in Sweetwater, where I gulped water from the drinking fountain in the hotel lobby until my stomach could hold no more. I was planning on phoning Mojave Motors from my room to tell them where their Taurus was and ask them to send help, but first I needed to lie down and recover from my ordeal.

  Let those three stew for a while, Anansi said. Rub their noses in their shame.

  In the event, I sank into a exhausted doze, and it wasn’t until mid-afternoon that I managed to make the call. A couple of hours later, Gunther, Rinzen and Robin were brought back to Sweetwater in the cab of a tow truck, with the Taurus hooked up and trundling along behind. Gunther was moaning about the awful headache he had from his hunger and thirst, while Rinzen and Robin simply professed themselves glad to be alive.

  All three, it goes without saying, were out of the contest.

  THAT SAME DAY, more fell by the wayside.

  Mullah Nasruddin, the Islamic scholar cleric renowned for his pithy aphorisms, was tripped up by his own vanity when he responded to an invitation to give a lecture in one of the conference rooms, only to find there was no audience when he arrived.

  Bulgaria’s Hitar Petar, who arranged this prank at the expense of his eternal foe Nasruddin, was literally tripped up – by Kaggen of the Kalahari bushmen – and broke his nose on a chair back.

  Kaggen in turn suffered a broken nose, and worse, when he was sent over to deliver a message and a beer to a biker in one of Sweetwater’s rougher drinking establishments and, owing to his poor command of English, failed to realise that he had been set up so that it looked like he was making a sexual proposition.

  By day’s end our complement of avatars had been whittled down to twenty-six. All anyone could talk about, though, was my three-in-one coup. It was as brassy and audacious a move as anyone could recall.

  “I was right about you,” Bill Gad said to me in the bar that evening. “You really are my main competition this time around. And I know what I’m talking about, being as I’ve won this contest a fair few times.”

  “So have I.”

  “But not lately. Past century or so, you’ve been off your game, spider. I’ve not been getting the contender vibe off of you that I’d come to expect. Not ’til now. What it is, is it’s a good match of rider and horse. You’re in synch, the two of you. Simpatico. When that happens, that’s when things start to cook.”

  ON MY WAY to my room, I had an encounter with Solveig. She appeared to be having trouble with the ice dispensing machine in the corridor, although I quickly realised she’d been lying in wait for me.

  “Can you help?” she pleaded, holding up one of the small tin buckets that could be found in every room. “I’ve put a quarter in, but this push chute thing doesn’t seem to be working.”

  “Help yourself,” I told her, swanning past.

  “It probably needs a man’s touch.”

  “You’ve got that already, haven’t you?”

  “Anansi...”

  Something about the way she said the name – the sudden croaky tenderness in her voice – halted me in my tracks.

  I turned. “Yes?”

  Her head was bent to one side. She was toying with a lock of her silver-blonde hair. A small smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. “Aren’t we too old to be like this with each other?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Anansi knew full well what she meant. Ignore her, Dion. Move on.

  “To pretend there’s no connection between us,” Solveig said. “To be aloof. That’s how children behave in the playground. The boy loves the girl but cannot show it, so he punches her and runs away.”

  “I haven’t punched anyone.”

  “We’ve been close before. So close.” She moved towards me, as if to illustrate her point. “You’ve not resisted me in the past.”

  I knew a little of Anansi’s history with Loki and the run-ins they’d had at previous contests. “The past is past,” I said. “Mistakes were made.”

  Too right they were, said Anansi.

  “Was it a mistake? That night in San Francisco? 1962, I believe it was. We were drawn to each other. You were so passionate, so intense.”

  You didn’t have a dick then, Anansi said, and I relayed the remark to her.

  “Details, details,” she replied airily.

  “And he was a married man,” I said. “Anansi’s avatar, I mean. That’s how you caught him out. His wife phoned the hotel room in the morning, you picked up, and all you did was say, ‘Hello,’ and it was game over. This time I don’t have a wife, so you’re not going to get me that way, and thanks to Reynard your little surprise package isn’t a surprise any more. That particular cat is out of the bag.”

  Solveig was right in front of me now. Her perfume was heady, her allure undeniable.

  “Are you so sure?”

  “I am.”

  So am I. But Anansi sounded far less adamant than I did.

  All at once her hand was cupping my crotch. My breath caught. I stiffened, in more ways than one.

  “Feels good, doesn’t it?” she whispered in my ear.

  It does. It does. Oh, it does.

  “I swear I won’t embarrass you, Anansi. Or Dion, if I may call you that. No one would ever have to know. It would be our secret. Your room. Now. I’ll do anything you desire. Anything.”

  Anything...?

  “For old times’ sake. We’ll keep the lights low. I’m very skilled. You won’t notice any difference.”

  Oh, Dion, we could, couldn’t we? Look at her. She’s so lovely. All we have to do is half-close our eyes and it would be like being with a normal woman, just about. Come on, what harm can it do?

  Fortunately, when it comes to one’s baser urges, I am made of sterner stuff than that.

  “I was wrong, Loki,” I said, yanking her hand away by the wrist. “I am married. Or at least, Anansi is.”

  “To silly old Aso, who’d be none the wiser.”

  “Aso would find out. She always finds out. Anansi’s infidelities always end up biting him on the backside.”

  “I could do that to you if you like,” Solveig purred.

  “No. You’ve tried your best, son of Odin, half-brother of Thor,” I said, “but your best isn’t good enough.”

  I strode off to my room, very pleased with myself, although Anansi was less than satisfied and kept grumbling discontentedly.

  I was even more pleased with myself after a swift search of the room turned up a tiny infrared camera and wireless transmitter which had been inserted into a corner crevice, up where the cork wall tiles met the Artexed ceiling. The camera’s lens was pointed straight at the bed, and I had no doubt who had installed it or why.

  “She broke in,” I said.

  Solveig? How?

  “Vintage hotel. No key cards. Old-fashioned door latches like these aren’t too hard to force with a credit card or a slim jim.” Hark at me, the man who’s rubbed shoulders with more than his fair share of cat burglars and carjackers.

  Devious bitch, said Anansi.

  “And if she’d had her way, we’d have been on YouTube before you know it. Every avatar with a laptop would have been watching us over breakfast. Dion Yeboah in flagrante with a shemale. Chances are she’d also send it as an email att
achment to my colleagues in chambers. I’d never live it down. My career would be in tatters.”

  Not to mention our hopes of victory.

  “She’ll get what’s coming to her,” I vowed. “Just you wait.”

  But still... It might have been memorable. Just as a one-off.

  “We don’t think that way, Anansi. Not if we’re here to win.”

  I was minded to crush the camera underfoot and present Solveig with the remnants, but decided instead to keep it. I lodged it in a drawer. It might come in handy.

  DAY TWO OF the contest was crueller than day one. This was the natural order of things, according to Anansi. As the ranks of competitors thinned and the tension mounted, the trickery took on a nastier, more vindictive edge.

  So Hershele Ostropoler, the Ukrainian Yiddish analogue of Mullah Nasruddin and Till Eulenspiegel, had his turkey bacon rashers at breakfast replaced by the real thing when he wasn’t looking. He wolfed down several mouthfuls of pig-flesh before the substitution was revealed. Given that his avatar was a Hasidic Jew, it was hardly surprising that he dashed straight out of the restaurant in search of the nearest toilet to throw up in.

  Someone, evidently inspired by my casual remark outside Reynard’s room, placed a live rattlesnake in the bed of the Korean woman who was acting as vector for Gumiho, the Nine-Tailed Fox. The woman was lucky, in as much as the snake only snuggled up against her leg for warmth and wasn’t prompted to bite her. She was too terrified to set foot inside the Friendly Inn again, however, and excused herself from the contest.

  A razor blade was embedded in the bar of soap used by San Martin Txiki from the Basque region. His hands were badly lacerated when he washed them.

  Păcală, whose name literally translates from the Romanian as ‘self-deluder,’ woke up from a drunken stupor to find himself cocooned from head to ankle in cling film. So much of the stuff had been wrapped around him – and the bed he was on – that he couldn’t move a muscle, although his captor had at least been generous enough to leave his nose uncovered to allow him to breathe. A chambermaid found him and cut him free, but not in time to prevent him voiding a full-to-bursting bladder all over himself and the mattress.