Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) by James Lovegrove Page B

there, puzzled and nonplussed, watching her walk off.
    I had been given a warning. Unambiguously.
    But about what?
    Doubts were niggling at me. As though I’d sensed all along that something was off-kilter at Mount Meru, that the whole setup here was fundamentally unsound, but I had chosen to ignore my misgivings until now. The phrase “too good to be true” came to mind. And “gift horse.”
    With the Dashavatara, the Trinity were perpetrating a kind of lie, letting people believe they were one thing when they were actually another.
    In which case, what else might they be lying about? Aanandi seemed to have been hinting that there was more than met the eye here, that there were secrets to be worried about. Was that why the Pakistani planes had harassed the Garuda ? Did the Pakistani government have intelligence about Mount Meru that was giving them cause for concern?
    The sun swelled and bloated. A palm swayed nearby in the cooling onshore breeze. Waves lapped at my feet. My brain churned.
    Suddenly I was not happy at all.
    Nothing seemed right.
    Paranoid in paradise.

 

    15. THE OZYMANDIAS SOLUTION
     
     
    T HERE’S A SEQUENCE in Watchmen – the graphic novel, not the movie – where a bunch of writers, artists and scientists are on a remote Pacific island, working on what they have been led to believe is a Hollywood movie featuring some kind of spectacular special-effects alien creature. It turns out that what they’ve instead been doing is creating the giant tentacled psychic monster thing which Ozymandias, the book’s messianic nutjob baddie, uses at the end to shock the US and the USSR out of their brinkmanship and pull the world back from imminent nuclear Armageddon. Before that, though, the freighter on which the writers, artists and scientists are having a wrap party is blown up, killing them all. They are witnesses to Ozymandias’s plan, potential liabilities. They could blow the whistle on his audacious hoax, and so they must be got rid of.
    This scenario played on continuous repeat in my head. Could it happen here? Were the Trinity ruthless megalomaniacs like Ozymandias, and once we Mount Meru minions had fulfilled our purpose would we too be cold-bloodedly eliminated?
    Leaving the island was nigh-on impossible. Other than the cargo seaplane which brought supplies twice weekly from Malé, and of course the Garuda , there was no form of transportation on or off. What’s more, nobody I knew of had actually left. I presumed this was because nobody had asked to or been invited to yet. Would consent be granted if anyone did want to go? Were we all being kept here in a gilded cage, Prisoner -fashion? Were we sitting complacently like sheep, happy in our pens, blissfully unaware of the coming slaughter?
    I spent days in a state of dire anticipation, wishing I had never read Watchmen . 1
    I suppose I could have gone to the Trinity and let them know I was thinking about escaping, although of course I would call it “heading homeward.” But here’s the thing. They were pretty much inaccessible. They had apartments at the hub of Mount Meru, in its tallest central section. They ran the show from there and seldom ventured out into the complex’s surrounding rings, at least not any more, not since the Dashavatara had gone public. They’d been in the habit of popping over to visit us lowly subordinates, show their faces, rally the troops, once a day on average. But not now. Now they were remote and hard to reach. Even the odd email I sent them went unacknowledged.
    And the inner reaches of the complex were verboten to the majority of the workforce, including me. Past the middle ring of the seven you needed a special swipe card to gain access. I found this out the hard way while roaming one afternoon. At the far end of a skybridge I came to a door that wouldn’t open. I wrestled with it for a while, which drew me to the attention of a security officer, who politely but firmly steered me back the way I had come,