Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk by James Lovegrove Read Free Book Online

way upstream to create a reservoir and a hydroelectric plant, providing hungry, ever-expanding LA with power and leaving Sweetwater with nothing but a swampy pond fed by a trickle of a stream, and sad memories of its boom days. The town was mostly forgotten now, in spite of the billboards lining the freeway at five-mile intervals announcing to drivers that they were getting closer to The Best Little Burg You’ll Ever Pass By. Most people seemed content to do just that, pass by, and Sweetwater had sunk slowly into sand and obsolescence.
    That was certainly the impression I got as the bus turned off Interstate 15 and followed the narrow road into town. Everything about Sweetwater appeared to belong to a bygone era. A gas station with clockface-dial pumps. Diners that looked like railroad cars. Everywhere, that low-slung American architecture that spoke of space-age optimism and the capacity to spread outwards into infinite acres of wilderness. Sprawling aingle-storey structures. Polygonal blocks of concrete and plate glass and steel.
    The bus halted opposite the town’s one remaining hostelry, the Friendly Inn And Conference Center. Only I alighted. For a moment, as I felt the weight of the midday sun on my head, I wavered. It wasn’t too late to climb back aboard and go elsewhere.
    No , warned Anansi.
    And then it was too late. The Greyhound pulled away with a diesel growl, executing a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and sending a fine cloud of dust over me that stung my eyes as it trundled back to the interstate.
    I crossed the street, tugging my roll-along suitcase behind me.
     
     
    T HE F RIENDLY I NN And Conference Center had one of those cheap display signs outside it, the kind you see almost everywhere in the USA, with simple cutout letters that clip onto thin rods. It read:
     
    THE FRIENDLY WELCOMES
    18TH ANNUAL JOKE SHOP
    PROPRIETORS JAMBOREE!!!
     
    I couldn’t help but smile to myself. I’d read a feature about this little trade fair a couple of years ago in the Sunday Times Magazine . The article described how retailers and wholesalers in the American novelty retail industry got together once a year to compare notes, buy and sell the latest items, and discuss the ins and outs of their rarefied business. I recalled photographs of rather odd-looking men, and a few women, poring over trestle tables laden with stink bombs, hand buzzers, sachets of itching powder and suchlike. The tone adopted by the journalist had been a mix of wistful and snide. Joke shops were dying out, he averred, kids in our computer age no longer as attracted to pocket-money prank wares as kids used to be. How brave and foolhardy these people were who strove to uphold the tradition.
    In that respect, Sweetwater was the ideal spot for such a convention to be held. For all concerned, their heyday had passed.
    A joke shop trade fair was, of course, perfect cover for a gathering of trickster gods to come and conduct their tournament of one-upmanship. Amid all the plastic hilarity of squirting buttonhole flowers and fake dog turds, who would notice us divine avatars fooling and foiling one another? Who would care? We would blend right in, camouflaged like tigers in the jungle. No one would look twice at us.
     
     
    I CHECKED IN at the reception desk, which was staffed by an elderly lady with a beehive hairdo and those pointy-tipped schoolmistress spectacles that I didn’t think anyone made any more, let alone wore. Gladys, as identified by her name tag, wished me a pleasant stay in a voice like gargled gravel.
    “Friendly by name, friendly by nature, that’s us,” she drawled, a motto that had been leached of all warmth and meaning through decades of repetition.
    The hotel was a ramble of long corridors and branching annexes, arranged in a complex geometrical pattern around a sun deck and a drained swimming pool. My room, which overlooked Sweetwater’s main drag, proved to be small but serviceable. There was a TV set from the era when no