99 Gods: Odysseia Read online

  “Stop,” Elorie said. “Please? Just let go.”

  “I can’t. I can’t lie to myself. I have to know. I have to face this. I have to get over the icks. This is the Telepath way.”

  “What if you don’t?” Dave said. His voice sounded like someone squeezed him.

  “I become inhuman.” Oh, the pain this particular lesson had cost. She didn’t want to remember any of the pain involved, just the final lesson on how to keep her puzzle mind together.

  “Not even white lies?”

  “No, not even that, not about this. Nor evasions. Nor anything,” Nessa said. She relaxed, though. “Let me do this my way, one memory at a time.”

  Her arm muscles had detached from tendons and ligaments, sliding past each other.

  “This is wrong, you know,” Nessa said. “One of my favorite words – the conundrum. Lying to myself makes me inhuman, but remembering is, in itself, inhuman.”

  “Remembering?” Elorie said. “When you remember, you’re broadcasting your emotions. We’re not strong enough to take this.”

  “I’m not saying this right. What’s wrong for me is to be so hung up on the flesh of my body,” Nessa said. “I mean, I believe in the immortal soul and eternal heaven for the saved and the good. Why should I worry about my freaky mortal body? This is…” She paused. “Uh oh.”

  Someone else had entered the clearing, a cloaked woman.

  “Shit,” Elorie muttered.

  “Who?” Nessa said. “Remember, I’m head blind now. The rest of you have my telepathy.”

  “It’s Sorrow,” Ken said. For a second, Nessa was confused. The emotion? Then she understood – not the emotion, the Watcher.

  “Figures,” Nessa said. “Come on over, Sorrow. Feed on my pain, bitch.”

  Sorrow came over and sat. To Nessa, she was a pale outline of a person. “Coming over is not the problem,” Sorrow said. “You are linked to us until our ending, Daughter of Light. I do not need to be with you to feed on your pain. This is something else. I find I need to be here with you, if you wish the Daughter of Light to remain with you, corporeal.”

  Dave gave Sorrow the biggest what-the-fuck frown Nessa had ever seen. She giggled.

  “Nessa’s ties to her flesh are important. They’re part of what keeps her human,” Elorie said. “If we disrupt her ties to her flesh, here, we risk something. Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  Sorrow didn’t react.

  Nessa purred, filled with love for Elorie. For Elorie and Dave. For their ability to cut through the crap without the normal dance of argument and logic. “I can transform myself into a bodiless spirit?” Nessa asked.

  “Not exactly.”

  “I can…” Nessa thought about her disgust and horror at what she remembered. Her body coming apart. Her frantic moments holding herself together. What if she let go? “I’m not me without my body, but something of me and from me can live on if I die. I’ve known that for years. This knowledge is behind my screwy idea that I can become the mind of the Earth’s predators so they no longer prey on humans so humans don’t have to hunt them down.”

  “Nessa, even you cannot do this in a fit of emotion without losing the goodness of your desires,” Sorrow said. “We know evil, us Watchers. Your humanity keeps you good. Let loose your humanity in a single haphazard leap and you will become in all fullness what you most fear, a thing of dire evil.”

  Well, yes, Nessa knew. Short cuts were evil. Duh. Good was long and hard, by definition.

  “But if you’re here, you imply there’s a way around this dilemma,” Dave said. At Ken and Nessa’s blank stare, he continued. “A way for her to lose her disgust about being mutilated without losing her humanity.” Yay Dave!

  “Yes. There is a way for Nessa to do as you have stated. In the process she will lose her last bits of mental blockages, though, which she was not before interested in doing,” Sorrow said.

  “Can you show me the cost?” Nessa asked. She didn’t trust anything that smacked of a gift from the Watchers.

  “Can I? Yes. Should I? I’m not sure,” Sorrow said, her eyes on Dave, deeply appraising him. “This would be better, though, than having you cut free of your body in a way that makes you evil. Because of your progress through all your intervening travails the remaining cost, the mental stress of becoming less human, can be borne by all four of you. Distributed four ways, even I would have to work to notice, yet there will indeed be changes.” Sorrow smiled, one of her rare smiles. Only hers was a Casper the Ghost smile. Nessa still couldn’t resolve Sorrow into a real person.

  “Then how?” Nessa said.

  “Do as you were about to. Dive into your own experiences with your recent mutilation until it loses its emotional flavor. Only do not do so alone. This is the key. You need to delve in your state of oneness, all four of you, willing and fully participating. Let me guide the four of you to the next and correct step. You will be able to take this from there on your own.”

  Nessa glanced at Ken. “There’s going to be a cost, some sort of dissolution down the road, some sort of rebound, but I have a hunch this is an acceleration of a maturation process for all four of us,” Ken said. Nessa rolled her eyes but said nothing. If she objected to Ken going into his bookworm mode, she would just trigger a Ken drama queen attack. He had to be under a lot of stress to slip into bookworm in public. This side of him normally embarrassed him too much. “This is your call.” Dave and Elorie nodded.

  “Let’s plumb,” Nessa said. She gripped her family tight to her and dove into her memories, sensing Sorrow’s minor and deft guidance, opening one memory after the other, each moment as her body came apart on her, as her pathetically controlled teek and Ken’s worked together to keep her body from sliding into sodden heaps on the ground as separate tissues.

  Sorrow dispelled the lies and nudged their oneness into a more flexible and stable configuration. Nessa didn’t fight Sorrow’s work. Though she would have kept to the lies without the Watcher’s help. Beauty, beauty, reality.

  Reality – her body – was, in the end, nothing but flesh.

  Then, many-in-one, they swam through the oceans, in their bodies, and sang with their sonar.

  Nessa woke with a start. She sat up and stood, disentangling herself from a pile of sleeping bodies including herself. After a stumble she righted herself and tried to walk.

  Down she went. “Crap!”

  Only her words moved away from her glacially slowly, visible and tangible, written in the air in pink shaking cursive.

  “Oh, fuck!” There the words went again, the cursive now red, a bit less shaky and a bit more emphatic.

  She thought she had been on the beach at Big Pine Key. Nope. Instead, she found herself inside a house, an actual mansion. Oversized rooms, overly ornate furniture, overly expensive decorations, all the color of sand, or a close relative of sand color. Not her style. No pictures as artwork, either. Just abstract sculptures in metal, stone, clay and plastic. Several modern pieces that should have stayed in the big city galleries they originated in, jumbles of found art saying nothing more than “ooh, I’m post-modern, so be impressed.”

  Nessa walked, with difficulty. Her legs and arms didn’t want to work together and she kept stumbling if she didn’t brace herself when she walked. Everything she touched was too warm, hot bath temperature. Nighttime, yes; sleeping people everywhere. Just outside of wherever she had been huddled with her family, Uffie and Diana slept, close but not huddled together.

  “Help me.” The words weren’t hers. They floated visible to her, seeking her ears like seeing-eye minnows. Blocky letters, a commanding sans serif typeface, slate gray.

  Hallucinogenic. Blech.

  Nessa crouched and hunted for the origin of the voice. There! This way the letters got smaller! Smaller and smaller. Right back to there!

  ‘There’ being a mirror in the hands of the sculpture by the bathroom door. Diana at bath, Nessa guessed, and not a real mirror. Marble sculpture, marble mirror. She walked o
ver and found the mirror showed a reflection anyway. Only not a real reflection, but a reflection of someone else. Someone somewhere else. Someone she thought she recognized.

  “Portland?”

  “Help me,” Portland said, again, more plaintive. The God appeared disheveled and distraught. Suffering.

  “I can hear you,” Nessa said, showing herself to the reflection. Image. Whatever in the hell this was. “It’s me, Nessa, your daughter.” She had to brace herself on a corner molding to keep from falling over.

  “Oh, Nessa, everything’s all gone wrong,” Portland said. “I’m drowning.”

  Nessa frowned as she saw a marching band of sounds striding toward her. “In what?”

  “In people. In prayer.”

  The other sounds reached Nessa: voices, all pleading for mercy or asking for help. Some she didn’t recognize, some, like Boise’s voice and Worcester’s voice, she did. She didn’t hear Orlando’s voice or the Kid God’s voice among them.

  “Okay, I believe you,” Nessa said. “But what can I do to help? I’m here, wherever here is, and you’re there, I presume wherever there is. I can’t do anything at a distance, just sense.” Pause. “You might want to take a shower. Your hair looks like a rat’s nest.”

  Portland’s reflection focused on Nessa, surprised. “You are Nessa. Oh, no! I can’t talk to you. You’re too dangerous. You can’t come here, either, to help me. I’m too dangerous now.” Pause. “I’m doooomed.”

  Nessa knew from her time in Portland’s head that Portland was sleeping or meditating or something equally strange. Portland never spoke so melodramatically with her spoken voice. Only in her secret thoughts.

  “I’m not feeling so good myself,” Nessa said, attempting a short circle on the floor, dodging Ken’s extended feet. “I can barely walk. I can’t live like this. However will I be able to go dancing?”

  “You’re severely injured,” Portland said. “You shouldn’t be up and about.”

  “I’m not, I think,” Nessa said. “When I got up I saw I left a body behind, so this isn’t my injured body up and wandering, this is me in another form. This is some kind of new Telepathic thing.”

  “I didn’t think you could learn new things, as a mature Telepath.” Analytical, Portland lost the whiny tone to her voice. Ever the career counselor.

  “I can’t, not without losing established tricks. One of the Watchers showed me how to undo the last of my secret mental blocks, so my mind could survive what happened to me. It’s given me more mental flexibility and opened me up to conscious use of clairvoyance. I’m terrified about what I might have lost, but I can’t find anything I’ve lost. Yet.”

  “Uh, right.” Portland ran her fingers through her rat’s nest hair, making it worse. “So, what’s the catch?”

  “I’m more inhuman. Only this isn’t as bad as the change might have been. Did those words make any sense to you? They didn’t to me. I’m sharing my inhumanity, I think, with my family and friends. Truthfully, I don’t know.” Poor Dave and Elorie. Every moment with her tore away a little nibble of the flesh of their humanity. The loss was bound to hurt, sooner or later. Likely sooner, alas.

  “Go back to your body before you can’t,” Portland said. “Find a way to help me. Remember this when you wake.”

  Portland reached through and touched Nessa’s mind with her willpower; Nessa batted the willpower touch away. “I don’t need you to help me remember,” Nessa said. “I can forget things all on my own. Just remember that I love you, Portland.” She turned away from the Portland ‘mirror’, looking for the next pleading voice, one calling Nessa’s name. She immediately stumbled, then after standing, which took work, she carefully walked toward the closest voice. Sweat beaded on her brow. When her sweat dripped off, each tiny droplet of water had inscribed in it the word ‘drip’.

  The pleading wasn’t a spooky ‘Nesssssa’, but more like a ‘Nessa?’ “Whatever,” Nessa said, seeking out the one voice. She tripped over a nothing and fell nose-to-tile-floor as she left the sitting room. She stood, her muscles creaking with a shaky red visible script ‘creeeeek’ and lurched like a drunk down a far too tall and wide hallway, and opened a door that remained closed into a room filled with many sleeping people. A library. Out the library windows she saw a star-lit wave-battered shore she recognized. This was Big Pine Key. She was in the Van Der Somethingorother Estate.

  “Bedrolls in a library. If I had a camera I’d take a picture so I could draw this later,” Nessa said.

  One of the sleeping many sat up and left her body behind. She was, uh, uh… Nessa drew a blank.

  “Sorry, so sorry,” Nessa said. “I know you but I can’t remember your name.”

  The woman – it was a young woman – named herself. Her name passed through Nessa’s mind and didn’t stick. “Pissfiddles,” the young woman said. “I thought the astral wandering crap was my unique trick. Only you look strange, like a ghost. Nessa, did you die on us?”

  “Nah, I just got messed up long-distance by the Watchers,” Nessa said. “So, why aren’t you sleeping with the Kid God? Did you break up with him?”

  The woman – not even twenty yet, Nessa remembered – shook her head, and then shrugged. “Sorta. I told him we needed to cool things and stop acting like crazed weasels and he stuck his cute nose in the air and said he needed to work full time and give up sleeping for a while and, shit, I hope I didn’t mess everything up too much because he didn’t like the rejection, not one bit.” The woman’s eyes fountained copious astral tears each labeled ‘wet’ and Nessa gathered the young woman into her arms.

  “It’s okay to fight with a lover,” Nessa said. “Fighting’s good for a relationship. Keep’s the anger from turning into hatred.”

  “Shit, sorry, I guess I’m less guarded in this astral form.”

  “I think this is my fault,” Nessa said. “People around me recently have been complaining about gushing socially inconvenient truthiness.” Which bothered Nessa a bit. Was she forcing people into the Telepath lying-is-dangerous ethos? Impinging on their freedom in such a fashion would be wrong.

  For one thing, the ‘no lying’ wouldn’t work for them.

  “By the way, what’s with the makeover?” Nessa said. The woman’s astral form had spiky hair, black eye shadow and enough studs to make her serious magnet bait. Nothing like her sleeping body.

  “Huh?” The woman looked at herself. “Geewhosafat! I guess I must still think of myself like a rutting stupid grindcore fangurrrl.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Never really gotten used to this astral whatsis. For one thing, I don’t have any girl parts here and…”

  Sigh. “TMI there, sister. Grindcore?”

  “As in, duh, offshoot of death metal? Like, uh, Phobia?” Music played around them, the woman’s doing.

  Yuckie loud metal music. Nessa drowned out the bangy jangles with something more danceable.

  “Barfosaurus! EDM! Tiësto?”

  “Of course,” Nessa said. She danced, and then fell.

  “You’re, uh, impossible, yes,” the woman said. Nessa struggled back to her feet and instead impaled herself on some studs on the woman’s body. “So, why’re you here? Some sorta emergency?”

  “You didn’t call my name?”

  “Uh, no?”

  Nessa gave the woman a final hug and disentangled herself from the woman, and fell again. “Damnation!”

  The woman snickered. “The Great and Wondrous Almost-Nearly-Divine Nessa can’t handle one of Orlando’s set of willpower prostheses even while in an astral form? I’m shocked and amazed.”

  “Is that what’s going on?” Nessa said. She held out a shaky arm and let the woman lift her to her feet. “But this isn’t my physical body. Oh. I understand. This is another of those ‘the telepathic self mirrors the Telepath’s physical body’. This is why the Watchers and someone else I can’t remember said I might slip too far from humanity if the last of my mental blockages were undone.” She paused. “I probably could alter my,
what did you call this, ‘astral’?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Astral image to whatever I wanted. Which would be wrong. So I won’t.” At least right now, Nessa told herself. She would have to bring this up with the family and see what they thought. If she remembered.

  “Don’t feel too bad,” the woman said. “Everyone but Dana’s had problems with Orlando’s prostheses, but within a day or two you’ll be able to walk and do normal things again.”

  Dana. Right. Ms. Impossible. “So, what’s with her, anyway?” Nessa said, allowing herself to get distracted. “Is there anything she can’t do?”

  “Well, Ms. Zombie’s sleeping right there,” the woman said, pointing. Dana. Firmly asleep. “She doesn’t have the astral trick. And, no, I don’t know what’s going on with her or why she’s so damned talented at everything. I’ve an Idea I’ve been sitting on, though. What if Atlanta didn’t die and she just took on Dana’s form?”

  Nessa snorted, knowing what happened to Atlanta. At least when someone mentioned Atlanta. And when she had a sock or two on speaking terms with her whispering in her ear. “Trust me, that didn’t happen.”

  “Nessa, over here.”

  Oh. This was the voice calling to Nessa. She turned and found the commanding voice emanating from one of the purses strewn away from the bedrolls of what had to be Dana’s squad of Natural Supported. Nessa bent over, fell on her rear end, and dug through the purse until she found the offending article, which was to no surprise at all a fold up makeup mirror.

  “Straight up trick there,” the astral woman in the library said, kneeling beside Nessa. “I can’t interact with the physical at all in my astral form. How’re you doing this?”

  “Dunno,” Nessa said. “Asking ‘why’ is boring, confusing and won’t get you anywhere either.” She opened the makeup mirror and recognized the person. “Joanie!”