Read Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk for Free Online

sunburnt plains of the American south-west.
     
     
    A T M C C ARRAN I NTERNATIONAL , I witnessed what turned out to be the contest’s first elimination.
    In baggage reclaim, as I waited for my suitcase to appear on the carousel, I caught sight of a Middle Eastern man haring across the hall. He was being pursued by half a dozen plainclothes and uniformed security officials in full cry, all demanding that he stop. The man darted a glance over his shoulder, then collided headlong with a luggage trolley. He sprawled to the floor and the security men pounced. The man struggled, and someone produced a Taser. There was a high-voltage sizzle, and the man shrieked, writhed and lay still. The security men carted him off unceremoniously. A passenger asked them what was going on. The curt reply: “Terrorist suspect.”
    It was enough. It was all anyone needed. Almost everyone present started cheering and applauding, and a couple of suggestions were offered as to what should be done with the Middle Easterner: essentially, imprisonment, interrogation and execution.
    That’s no terrorist , Anansi scoffed. If he’s an Islamic extremist, I’m a tarantula. That’s Juha, that is .
    I didn’t have my Bluetooth on just then, so I gave a kind of mental shrug, as if to say Really?
    Oh yes. Undoubtedly. Juha’s avatar. And if I don’t miss my guess, one of our opponents “dropped a dime on him,” as they say .
    It made sense. In the paranoid post-9/11 United States, anyone looking remotely Arabic was automatically under suspicion. A phone call to the authorities, or a tap on the shoulder and a few words whispered in the right ear, and people would see bomb vests and phials of anthrax where there were none, and overreact accordingly.
    Juha, who, annoyed by his local muezzin’s calls to prayer, cut off the man’s head and threw it down a well, then threw a ram’s head down there too in order to allay suspicion...
    Juha, who sold his house but drove a nail into the wall before he left, then kept coming back on the pretext of inspecting the nail, meanwhile preying on the new owner’s hospitality until eventually the new owner fled the property in high dudgeon without asking for his money back...
    Juha, who borrowed a large sum of money off his rich-but-stingy neighbour and refused to return it, then asked the neighbour to lend him his horse, robe and shoes as they made their way to see the judge, who he hoodwinked into believing that Juha himself must be the rich one and the neighbour a liar...
    Now out of contention.
    One entrant down already, and the contest hadn’t even officially begun.
     
     
    T HOUGH IT PERHAPS ought to have been, Las Vegas was not the location of the contest. Our ultimate destination lay some one hundred and fifty miles outside the world capital of tourist fleecing: a tiny town that went by the name of Sweetwater, stuck out in the Mojave Desert.
    So, after a night in a decent enough hotel some distance from the lights and hurly-burly of the Strip, I caught a westbound Greyhound. The bus rolled away from the city into a landscape so arid and barren it almost hurt to look at it. Everything that was not rocks was scrubby, barely-there plant life.
    Anansi was enthralled. Reminds me of the savannahs of home , he said wistfully. The Serengeti. The Rift Valley. Olduvai Gorge.
    “I’m a city boy,” I told him. “All I see is wasteland, without a Starbucks or a Marks and Spencer in sight.”
    “Is like Mars,” said a voice from across the bus aisle.
    “Excuse me?”
    He was big and thickly bearded, with a lumberjack shirt and a snake tattoo on his forearm. His accent put him somewhere east of the Caucasus. “I said is like Mars. All this red desert. No wonder peoples is always seeing flying spaceships out here. If Martians are coming to this planet, here is where they are likely to be landing. Somewhere like their own home.”
    “Oh. Yes. Fair point.”
    “Do I know you?” The man squinted at me, his bushy