Idolatry by Aditya Sudarshan

Author:Aditya Sudarshan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: New Adult; future fiction; near-future; utopian fiction; dystopia:Asian;Desi;
Publisher: Flame Tree Publishing
Published: 2023-11-24T21:44:07+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

I have become, remembered the priest, all things to all men, so that by all possible means…

In armored boots, he was trudging up a scraggly hillside, on a broad, lengthy dust-path, hemmed in by grasses and thorny shrubs.

…I may save some.

But for that, he reminded himself, the avatar was inexcusably showy. But in view of this consideration, the salus animarum, it was indeed necessary to be this Knight. Everyone at the gathering would be in the garb of their shrine-created god. So he also, now that he was plunging into the drama, must appear in costume, as the Knight of the Cross.

His thoughts turned again to Saint Paul. He had begun, for obvious reasons, to feel especially close to the great evangelist. Paul of Tarsus, who had stood up in the Areopagus of Athens, and proclaimed, with all love and fear and trembling, the Unknown God before the city of idols. What was that Paul saying to him now?

The top of the hill was in his sights now, the white-hot sky unrolling before it. Joachim paused in the dust, leaning on his sword. He said, in deliberate succession, an Our Father, a Hail Mary and the Apostle’s Creed. The Creed. That was reality. And this – all of it, from sky to toe – was naught but a simulation. But the souls within it were real. It was to the souls that the Lord was leading him.

After a few more steps, he became aware of a sound. It was a kind of whirring, filling up the air with increasing vigor. He began to walk faster. The buzzing and whirring and churning were rising up in waves, rising and not falling. He kept his gaze on the sky ahead, though it hurt his eyes. The sky was painfully bright, like light itself. Then the ground fell away beneath his vision. In one fell glance, he saw the Mahasabha.

And it saw him! The old man grimaced and grinned uncontrollably. Upon the great plain that had no end, save in the shimmering horizon, there sat, stood, strolled and squirmed a Leviathan, many-colored, many-sized, in high spirits. In the first seconds he spied the Hindu pantheon, both its greatest hits as well as lesser-known numbers. When that familiar shock had passed, he noticed the clusters of wild beasts and reptiles; cricket players and celebrities; kings, queens and warriors; lugubrious sadhus and smiling politicians. But there were also big clots of unknown men and women, in exotic finery (and some in white lab coats), typically muscular and voluptuous, and some of them gigantic, as tall as small trees, peering calmly into space. There were even animated lifeless objects – he saw an unmanned motorcycle, a copper mace with a huge head, some kind of grenade launcher on wheels, and two brightly painted Lamborghinis – swerving and gliding through the living mass – as well as a rocket ship about a hundred feet tall that stood gleaming in the sun. Nor did all the trees belong to the scrubland’s vegetation.

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