Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk

by James Lovegrove

  He passed the file on to Barnaby via email late one evening, with a note saying, ‘Thought you might like to see this. It’s going in tomorrow’s edition, but unfortunately the presses are already rolling, so we’re too late to do anything about it if we wanted to. Doesn’t appear defamatory to me, but you may be able to read a subtext I can’t.’

  The article was entitled ‘Hasn’t It Been A Strange Summer?’ and appeared in the pages of the paper’s Femail section.

  You’ve probably noticed we haven’t seen much of the sun here in Britain lately.

  It rained throughout May, June and July. August was mostly overcast and not particularly warm. As we edge into autumn, the mercury’s dropping but there are still no clear skies.

  Has anyone on these islands managed a tan this year, without travelling abroad? Or an outdoor picnic?

  And what about those poor people whose summer was blighted by flooding? Dozens of rivers burst their banks, flood protection measures could not cope, homes were inundated.

  Wimbledon was a washout. The Test was played on a quagmire, not a cricket pitch.

  The weather has gone haywire. That’s a fact on which we climate-obsessed Brits can all agree. There hasn’t been a summer as wet as the one just past, not in living memory, nor indeed since records began. Why?

  The quick and easy answer is global warming. Carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise unchecked, reflecting thermal radiation back into our planet’s atmosphere. Across the board, the mean global temperature is inexorably on the rise.

  In the specific case of Britain, we can look to the influence that global warming is having on the Atlantic Ocean in order to account for the increasingly erratic behaviour of our weather.

  In the normal course of events, the Atlantic’s “heat transport” effect cycles warmer water up from the tropics to keep northern and western Europe more temperate than other landmasses on the same latitude.

  Meltwater from the dwindling polar icecaps is interfering with that process. The waters of the Atlantic are becoming colder and denser and its “heat pump” is weakening, meaning that while the rest of the world hots up, our corner of the continent is getting cooler and the levels of precipitation here are amplified.

  The science is complex, but in simple terms, the UK is starting to get the weather it ought to have, and has been protected from for centuries by the prevailing ocean currents.

  But there’s more going on than just a waterlogged tennis tournament and hundreds of householders stacking sandbags outside their front doors and baling out their living rooms. More danger signs we should be aware of.

  There’s the steady drop in songbird numbers. The loss of millions of honeybees to disease and pesticide. The decline in wildflowers and butterflies.

  We may not notice these things, but they’re happening all around us. Small deviations from baseline don’t impinge on our everyday perception. Tiny gradual losses go unremarked.

  Yet they’re part of a pattern, a wave of changes that is gathering pace and momentum.

  Avalanches start off small. All it takes is a thin layer of snow to become dislodged. Suddenly, it’s an unstoppable, deadly cascade.

  So many factors feed into the global-warming doomsday equation.

  There’s loss of albedo from the shrinking of glaciers and sea ice, meaning less solar radiation is reflected away from the Earth.

  There’s the melting of tundra permafrost, releasing methane, another greenhouse gas like CO2.

  There’s yet more methane being given off by cattle as the demand for meat and dairy products intensifies in order to sate the appetites of a fast-growing world population.

  These anthropogenic (human-generated) causes of global warming can be – and hopefully will be – mitigated by international laws and by changes in social behaviour.

  But there is reason to believe that the worst of the damage has already been done. That it’s too late. A runaway process has begun which cannot be halted or reversed and which is liable to make life incredibly hard, if not intolerable, for future generations. Flooding, famine, disease, death on an unprecedented scale.

  Mother Earth has been ravaged and despoiled and is in distress. We feel it instinctively. We know it.

  For just over a century, since the advent of the combustion engine and the great industrial boom, the human race has been engaged in a hedonistic fossil-fuel orgy. We have sported around in our cars. We have turned up the thermostats in our houses without a second thought. We have plundered and squandered the planet’s resources with all the self-restraint of a gang of children let loose in a sweetshop.

  Our world is an organism, an enclosed, self-regulating system. The environmentalist and futurologist James Lovelock came up with that idea. He also gave it a name: the Gaia Hypothesis.

  Gaia is our Earth. And Gaia is not happy.

  Gaia, of course, was the personification of the Earth in ancient Greek mythology. She was a primordial goddess, mother to Titans, Giants, and all the other gods in the Greek pantheon.

  Hesiod, in his poem the Theogony, tells how Gaia’s husband, the sky god Uranus, began hiding their many monstrous children one after another as they were born. He buried them inside Gaia, causing her pain.

  Her revenge was to forge an adamantine sickle, which she gave to their son Cronus, who despised his priapic father for his passions and his relentless lust.

  The next time Uranus tried to have his way with Gaia, Cronus stepped in. He castrated Uranus with the sickle. From the blood which gushed out from the wound sprang the Furies and various kinds of nymph, and from Uranus’s severed testicles arose Aphrodite, goddess of love.

  The lesson we can draw from this is obvious.

  You do not mess with Gaia.

  It’s true of all women. Down through the centuries, men have learned to their cost that no woman is to be trifled with or abused. Love us, and you will be rewarded with all that you could desire. Cross us, and you’re in for a sound thrashing.

  Perhaps the men who have exploited and abused our planet, this other Gaia, for their own personal gain will take heed at the treatment dished out on Uranus and start treating her with more respect.

  Because it is men – not mankind, but males – who have dug up Earth’s bounty and used it to line their own pockets.

  Men who have been so reckless with our planet’s ecosphere.

  Men who have sucked every last drop of goodness out of Gaia’s heart.

  Men who mistakenly believe they can keep on taking from her with impunity.

  And maybe it’s up to us women to persuade them to change their minds and mend their ways. Maybe we, as fecund, fearsome and feminine as Gaia herself, are the human race’s last and only hope.

  It could be that the planet is past the tipping point. Any effort to pull us back from the brink is futile. Our civilisation is doomed to extinction.

  But that must not prevent us from trying.

  LITTLE POISON DARTS

  BARNABY COULDN’T HELP but regard the Daily Mail article as a thinly veiled personal attack. He suspected that the editor who had commissioned it viewed it in much the same light. Rumours of a split between Barnaby and Lydia had been doing the rounds for days. The pair had not been seen together in public for well over a fortnight, whereas before they had seemed inseparable. The article seemed to harp on the idea of tension between masculine and feminine, a rift between the sexes, echoing Lydia’s own situation, which the editor must have been cognisant of. And Barnaby himself could hardly miss the targeted tartness in lines like “men who have exploited and abused our planet, this other Gaia, for their own personal gain” or in the use of sexually-charged phrases such as “hedonistic fossil-fuel orgy” and “relentless lust.” The entire piece was laced with little poison darts aimed straight at him.

  He consulted his lawyers first thing the following morning, but their conclusion only confirmed his gut instinct. There was nothing in the article that was actionable, nothing that would warrant taking out an
injunction against its being reproduced on the Mail’s website or reprinted elsewhere, nor any grounds to sue whatsoever. It was just a bit of surreptitious score-settling that he would have to take on the chin.

  He fumed about Lydia all that day. The nerve of her. The ingratitude.

  Jakob bore the brunt of his anger. He took it up to a point and then snapped back.

  “Look, boss, I hate to say I told you so, but I did,” he said. “I warned you exactly what would happen when you showed her the basement, and you, like the big domkop you are, ignored me. Lo and behold, she’s gone, and you’re left with a whole heap of egg on your face. Better than seagull, maybe, but still.”

  “Jakob...” Barnaby growled.

  “No, with all due respect, boss, shut up and listen. You’ve been lucky. It could have been plenty worse. The red-tops could right now be screaming ‘Barnaby Pollard – Bondage Pervert!’ in eighty-point type headlines on the front page. She let you off mildly. Consider yourself rapped on the knuckles and move on. Plenty more fish in the sea.”

  But were there?

  Barnaby doubted he would ever meet someone else like Lydia. She was one of a kind.

  What he wouldn’t give for a second chance with her.

  What he wouldn’t pay for another glimpse of those extraordinary blue-green eyes.

  Even after the article, her act of barbed retaliation, he still wanted her.

  He loved her, damn it.

  Only now, when it was too late to make a difference, could he admit that to himself.

  He loved Lydia.

  THORNS AND NETTLES

  WHEN HE ARRIVED home that evening, he was astonished to find her waiting for him inside, in the living room.

  “Still have my door key,” she said. “Still know the alarm disable codes.”

  “Lydia,” he breathed.

  She was seated on the chaise longue, hands in her lap, back straight, poised, composed.

  “It’s strange,” she said. “On the way over, I had this brilliant speech mapped out. Now I’m here, I’m not sure what to say.”

  He moved towards her. She stayed him, pointing a finger.

  “No, sit down over there.”

  He did as bidden.

  “I’m not even going to ask if you read today’s Mail,” she said. “I’m kind of regretting what I wrote. Parts of it. In hindsight it seems like a cheap shot. You didn’t deserve that, me sniping at you in the public domain. I’ve come to apologise.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, I suppose I –”

  She interrupted. “Please, just hear me out. This is phenomenally difficult. I look at you and I think of the man I thought I knew and the man I now know you to be, and it seems incredible that the two can be the same person. I’m not a prude, Barnaby. I realise there’s a whole subculture of fetishes and kinks, people out there who like to walk on the wild side sex-wise. I’ve nothing against them or what they do. As long as it’s consensual, as long it isn’t coerced, as long as it’s adults only, then I can’t see the harm. Each to their own. I just...”

  She looked at her hands, then back at him.

  “I just never would have suspected you were one of them. It was a hell of a shock, I’m sure you can appreciate that. You sprang it on me out of the blue. And I... I didn’t react in a very mature fashion. It was too sudden, too big for me to make sense of. All the while, we’d been going down this path together, you and me, this sunlit road paved with gold and lined with roses, and suddenly here’s you suggesting we take a detour through the woods where it’s dark and there are thorns and nettles. I wasn’t expecting that at all. I wasn’t ready.”

  She hesitated. Barnaby detected a note of trepidation in her voice, the sound of someone teetering on the verge of a momentous decision. He wanted to speak, to coax her across the threshold, but he kept silent. The wiser course was to allow her to take the final step all by herself.

  He was on tenterhooks. A cherished dream was close – this close – to coming true.

  Lydia took a deep breath, like a swimmer about to dive.

  “I may be ready now.” She held his gaze, anxious but resolute. “If it’s what you’d like. If it’ll bring the two of us closer. If it’s the only way we can be together again. I’m prepared to make the sacrifice. I’m prepared to try, at least.”

  Barnaby stood up, hearing his heartbeat loud in his ears, feeling the blood rushing through every vein.

  “My God,” he said, hoarse. “Really? You have no idea what this means to me, Lydia. This is the best news I’ve ever had. I love you. Truly, I do.”

  “And I love you too. Even after everything. I must be crazy, but yes, I still love you.”

  “So when can we start?”

  She shrugged gamely. “Now would seem as good a time as any.”

  SAFEWORD

  HE LAID OUT the basics, the rules. Informed consent had to be established beforehand. That was the grounding for any kind of sexual power exchange. They must be clear which of them was going to be the Top and which the Bottom, who was going to dominate and who was going to be dominated, although that should already be quite evident. He wouldn’t take her any further than she wanted to go, especially as it was their first session, and above all else they must agree on a safeword. It couldn’t simply be “no” or “don’t,” since sometimes in a bondage context those meant nothing. The safeword needed to be incongruous and easily remembered and recognised.

  “How about ‘Gaia’?” Lydia said. “That’s been on my mind a lot today.”

  “Mine as well. Gaia it is.” He couldn’t see a reason why not.

  “And the moment I say it, you stop whatever you’re doing?”

  “That’s the general idea.”

  “What if you don’t? What if you just carry on? What do I do then?”

  “You have to trust me. That’s the whole point. If you can’t trust me when you submit to me, then we have no business doing any of this stuff.”

  “I see. So I’m placing myself entirely in your hands. I’m at your mercy.”

  “You are,” Barnaby said. “But I’m no ogre, and I promise you I’ve never once lost control or gone too far. You’ve nothing to fear.”

  “I must be mad. I can’t believe I’m even considering going through with this.” Lydia nodded to the sideboard, where cut-crystal decanters sat on a salver. “Any of those whisky, by any chance?”

  “Will Laphroaig thirty-year-old single malt do?”

  “Don’t care how fancy it is. Just pour me a snifter. A large one.”

  She took the tumbler and drained the scotch at a gulp.

  “Right,” she said, exhaling hard. “Shall we?”

  KEEPER

  DOWN IN THE basement he made her strip off all her clothes. He himself undressed to his underpants.

  “Don’t you get to be naked too?” she asked.

  “I’m in charge. I choose. I want you without a stitch on, so that’s how it has to be. And if I want to keep something on, I will.”

  “Ooh, masterful.”

  “Now be quiet.” Barnaby surveyed the various pieces of apparatus. “Where should we begin? The Berkley Horse, I think.”

  He led her to the A-frame device. Her feet went into slots in the bottom. He lowered her forward on the angled, padded board, fitting her face into an oval hole. He buckled canvas straps across her legs, waist and arms, fastening her flat. She was immobilised, helpless.

  He deliberated over what to beat her with. In the end he settled on a fibreglass riding crop. The thin leather tongue at the tip, known as the ‘keeper,’ was designed to lessen the force of the blow and not leave a mark. It was a good selection for a novice.

  He positioned himself beside her, his target the enticing plump mounds of her buttocks.

  He extended his arm, crop raised.

  “Don’t tense up,” he told her. “Relax. You know you want this.”

  He flicked the crop.

  Keeper met skin with a glorious sharp snap.

  L
ydia shook from head to toe. A small gasp escaped her.

  Barnaby drew the crop back and flicked it again, a fraction harder this time.

  The keeper struck smartly. Lydia flinched and shuddered.

  Barnaby looked down to see the front of his underpants tented outwards. The pressure of restriction down there was painful, terrible – wonderful.

  He started to beat her with a regular, consistent rhythm, revelling in the impacts and the intervals between.

  He kept expecting the safeword to come, but it didn’t.

  Lydia took her punishment stoically. Now and then she let out a hiss or a little cry. But whenever he checked her face, Barnaby was pleased to see that she was smiling.

  FIVE ON THE MERCALLI

  INTENSITY SCALE

  BARNABY ARRIVED AT the GloCo Tower the next morning in a spry, sprightly mood. His PA, Veronica, couldn’t remember when she had seen him cheerier. He positively breezed through the antechamber, past her desk and into his office, like a man who hadn’t a care in the world, and she hesitated before going in after him. But she had to. She had bad tidings to deliver.

  “Mr Pollard, I’m sorry, but we’ve just received a flurry of emails from Japan. There’s, er, there’s been an earthquake. Nothing devastating,” she hastened to add. “A minor tremor, that’s all. Only, it was on the south coast and the epicentre was on the Atsumi Peninsula, not far from Ise Bay...”