Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) (15 page)

I
AM NOT
by nature an intrepid person. You’ve probably worked that out by now.

What I am, though, and have always been, is someone who resents being taken for a ride. I have a perilously low bullshit threshold. If a publisher was ever slow paying off an invoice or a contract contained a few too many ambiguously worded clauses, I had no problem making a fuss about it. I like to deal fairly with others, on the condition that they deal fairly with me. Muck me around, try to bamboozle me, and you’ll get my hackles right up.

So that, I think, is how I found the nerve to penetrate the inner recesses of Mount Meru. My motivation wasn’t curiosity or even courage. It was righteous indignation, a sense that someone was not being straight with me, that the Trinity were pulling a fast one.

Righteous indignation is not the same thing as bravery. I was scared as hell sneaking through to the fourth ring of the complex while everyone else was preoccupied with the Avatars’ return and the Shujau kitchen siege. I was shitting enough bricks to build a second Westminster Abbey.

I made it to one of the locked doors without being spotted. I’ll say this for Mount Meru: no CCTV cameras. Not a one. The Trinity didn’t spy on their workers. To that extent, our overlords trusted us underlings.

I inserted the swipe card into the slot. There was no numeric pad, no PIN code to enter, thankfully. Slide swipe card through, wait for little LED light to flicker from red to green.

Which it did.

I couldn’t quite believe it.

I heard the
clunk
of a bolt withdrawing electronically.

I depressed the handle.

I was through.

This ring of the complex, I quickly gathered, was all about the technology. It was decked out in the plain, functional style of an IT department: long sterile hallways, low-level lighting, with the hum and the ozone tang of electric current strong in the air. I imagined the headquarters of Apple or Facebook might look something like this, clean and uncluttered, an abundance of space as if to emphasise the increasing miniaturisation of computer hardware.
Hey, check out all that square footage we
don’t
need any more
.

I passed doors marked Systems and Data Core and suchlike. I tried to act confident, like I belonged, in case I ran into anyone. It wasn’t easy. I wanted to skulk, hug the walls, cast surreptitious looks all around.

One room seemed to be the ring’s hub of operations. It was huge, amphitheatre-shaped, with a raised viewing gallery at the rear where I halted and took stock.

Dozens of plasma screens formed a curved wall, towering over a raked floor dotted with workstations. A handful of technicians were manning their posts, all seated with their backs to me, facing the screen wall. I thought of Mission Control at Houston, and the War Room in
Dr Strangelove
, and, damn it, Ozymandias’s bank of televisions in which he divines the trends of the future like a wizard scrying into his crystal ball.

Each screen showed clips that were either live or recorded, I couldn’t tell. They were all different and yet it didn’t take me long to discern a common theme.

Worship.

Not just any kind of worship, though.

Hindu worship.

Shrines decked with offerings – fruit, flowers, jugs of water.

Idols of blue-skinned, multiple-armed deities wreathed in incense smoke.

Temples being visited by flocks of pilgrims dressed in a myriad of bright hues.

Families bowing before pictures tacked to the living room wall.

Businesspeople in the workplace tending ritually to statuettes set in alcoves.

Individuals with sacred cotton threads slung over their shoulders, sending up prayers.

Orange-garbed priests officiating at ceremonies.

A bride having her feet washed with milk and honey.

A corpse being cleaned and shaved in readiness for cremation.

A spring festival in a dusty village square, petals and coloured powder being hurled about by riotous laughing crowds.

Bathers dunking themselves in the hot-chocolate waters of the river Ganges.

A dreadlocked sadhu, skeleton-thin and covered in ash, adopting yoga postures that would cripple a cat.

Some of the clips were news feeds. Others were amateur camcorder jobs. Some were international broadcasts. Others were private uploads.

It was a vast, ever-changing collage of devotion. Everywhere it showed Indians of all ages and backgrounds attending to their religious duties. It spoke of a billion-strong nation whose faith interpenetrated their lives at every level. It ran the gamut from elaborate mass occasions to simple personal rites, from heaving throngs in public spaces to private daily acts of self-purification and mortification, from choral chants to solitary meditative mantras, from the joyous to the solemn.

It was dazzling and bewildering and in its way quite moving.

But, for me, it also raised a massive question.

Why?

What was with all these screens? What did the Trinity get from assembling hundreds, possibly thousands of scenes of Hindu worship in one place? What purpose did it serve?

I couldn’t fathom it. There had to be a connection between this and the Dashavatara, clearly, but what was it?

One of the techies called across to the other, “Dude, where are we at, download-total-wise?”

“Just shy of five terabytes.”

“That ought to be enough. Time for the three C’s.”

“Affirmative. Compress, classify, cache. And after that it’s beer o’clock.”

They were wrapping up for the day. That was my cue to move on. I could have stood and gawped at the screen wall for hours, but I didn’t want one of the techies turning round and looking up and spotting me.

From the fourth ring to the third.

This one housed the Avatars’ living quarters. They had sizeable individual suites, plus a gym, a swimming pool, a sauna, recreation rooms that made the well-equipped ones on the outer ring look paltry by comparison, and indoor and outdoor dining areas furnished like five star restaurants. I couldn’t help but feel a tad jealous. The Ten were getting rock-star treatment, the full-on lap-of-luxury lifestyle. I wouldn’t have minded a bit of that myself, even if it did mean I’d be obliged to keep jetting off at a moment’s notice to put the smackdown on some grotesque supernatural beastie or other. The pros, in my view, well outweighed the cons.

My dissembling skills were put to the test as I walked past a spa outside which a pair of very pretty Maldivian girls sat on deckchairs. Both were in tunic and trousers and could only have been masseuses, although their lavish makeup and long, manicured nails hinted strongly that they were of the “happy finish” variety. Underneath their uniforms lurked some considerably skimpier and less formal clothing.
¹

They broke off from their conversation in Divehi to look at me, smiling with a touch of curiosity.

I smiled back and waved the swipe card at them, my thumb covering the picture of Aanandi. “Lovely evening, ladies,” I said, and one of them nodded while the other turned back to the celebrity tittle-tattle rag she was reading. She pointed out a picture of an Indonesian soap actress to her companion and said something bitchy that made them both titter.

Phew. I had managed that far better than I’d expected to. Not in the Nick Fury super-spy league yet, but I had earned my basic covert operative credentials.

Onward to the second ring, and I was beginning to feel cocky. This was going well. In fact, it was a piece of cake. The swipe card was like an access all areas pass at a gig. It was allowing me to get as close to the stars of the show as I could wish. I doubted it would work for the innermost section of the complex, the Trinity’s private sanctum. If there was a Clearance Level Beta, then there must be a Clearance Level Alpha, exclusive to Lombard, Krieger, and Bhatnagar. But that didn’t matter. The second ring, surely, was where the truth lay. There, between the Avatars’ accommodation and the Trinity’s, I would learn what our bosses didn’t want the majority of us to know.

And I did.

Boy, did I ever.

¹
That may just have been my foetid imagination, but I don’t think so.

18. GODS IN SPANDEX

T
HE SECOND RING
was a warren of laboratories. Through small windows inset into doors I peered at workbenches laden with biochemistry apparatus: centrifuges, beaker shakers, incubators, dry baths, microscopes and other machinery whose identity I would only learn later.
¹
The equipment was all high-spec, to my layman’s eye, cool white and gleaming with newness. Screensavers cycled on idling computer monitors, the Trinity Syndicate logo gently dodgeming.

There was also a room whose door did not have a window but did bear the spiky biohazard symbol and a sophisticated-looking code lock. It was marked simply “Treatment Chamber,” with a small plaque insisting that entry was for authorised personnel only and that Level A hazmat suits were mandatory beyond this point. I shrank back from this door, as well anyone might, given the warnings festooning it.

You didn’t have to be the Dark Knight Detective to deduce that this Treatment Chamber was the place where theogenesis happened. Here, people were subjected to a sophisticated DNA manipulation process devised by R. J. Krieger’s geneticist boffins and remade into Avatars. They went in ordinary and came out siddhi-wielding superhumans.

It was the stuff of science fiction, and I might have had trouble believing theogenesis was possible if I hadn’t seen the evidence with my own eyes. What was surprising, in fact, was how easily everyone was taking the notion in their stride, not just me but the entire world. Superheroes were here. They had been created. It felt somehow...
inevitable
. For decades, comics had been defining and celebrating superheroes. You might even say that we had, as a race, been preparing ourselves for the day when paragons in form-fitting costumes would walk among us, combating evil, doing good. We had been psyching ourselves up for it through illustrated stories, fertilising the soil with the pop-culture mulch of cheap pulp fiction – and now they’d arrived. Science had made them, the same science that gave us vaccines and pacemakers and cochlear implants, improving lives on a daily basis. Science had advanced to the point where it could offer the ultimate improvement, super powers. The comicbook writers’ dreams of incredible speed, heightened reflexes, extraordinary strength, enhanced senses, and all the rest, had been brought to fruition, through gene tinkering, and it was almost as though it was past due, as though we’d been waiting plenty long enough. Superheroes? About bloody time.

And superheroes tricked out as members of an established pantheon of gods? Why ever not? Gods were the ancients’ superheroes, after all. Hercules performing his Labours, Thor battling Frost Giants, Quetzalcoatl the Feathered Serpent locked in constant rivalry with his were-jaguar brother Tezcatlipoca, Gilgamesh and Enkidu defeating lion-faced Humbaba and other monsters, demigod Cuchulainn defending Ulster from its foes by warping into a dreadful ogre-like warrior form at the height of his battle frenzy, Sun Wukong the Monkey King who could travel thousands of miles in a single somersault and transform magically into seventy-two different objects and animals, not forgetting that fellow from Nazareth who did some nifty magic tricks with wine, food and aquatic pedestrianism...

I could go on, but enough for now. We had been telling ourselves tales about super beings and their outlandish feats for centuries. Comicbook superheroes were just the latest iteration of an age-old trope. They were gods in spandex, and the Trinity had exploited this association to give their own superheroes a pre-established identity, a recognisable theme. Saved them from having to come up with a whole new one from scratch, didn’t it?

I was mulling over these thoughts and trying to link them back to the wall of Hindu worship I’d seen in the fourth ring, and I was doing this so intently that I wasn’t concentrating on anything much around me. I had become complacent. When I heard footfalls approaching round a corner, I didn’t react as sharply or as smartly as I might have. Earlier I had breezed past the two, ahem, masseuses. I could see no reason why I shouldn’t be able to pull off the same stunt again.