99 Gods: Odysseia Read online

  “I’ve seen Nessa and Ken go to,” Lydia said. “Tell me Dubuque doesn’t have nightmares about them.”

  “I know, I know,” Nessa said. “But I’ve got twins now, Lydia, a new responsibility. Responsibility changed everything. I’m sorry, but no more war. As Dave forced me to realize, though, capers are hard to resist,” a quick glance at Dana made Dana shiver again “but aggressive war, an actual attack on an enemy? I’m no longer suited, if I ever was. All I can do is self-defense.”

  “But if us overly enlightened types don’t do something to use our momentary lead in firepower, we’re going to lose the benefit of everything that’s gone our way recently,” Lydia said. She shook her head and turned to study Dana and Richard. Dana snuggled up against Richard. “Get a room, guys,” Lydia said. Dana reddened and unsnuggled herself, to stand alone. “Look, we can’t just sit still until Dubuque gets his feet back underneath him. Can we?”

  “We’re ahead of him in finding and training Natural Supported,” Richard said. “But he’s still got the power of his worshippers. If I thought we had a chance I’d at least press the issue. But I don’t think we have a chance.”

  “Fakawat!” Lydia said. “Even with your new developments in computer-controlled willpower use?”

  “Even with them. The best I can hope for is enough power to fight Dubuque to a standstill if he invades our territory again.” Richard led Dana to a couch and motioned for her to sit; she sat and Richard sat next to her, barely touching. “I’m sorry.”

  Lydia glared at him. “At least you have a pragmatic reason for not attacking.” She then turned to glare at Bob. Bob shrugged.

  Meaning Bob had a non-pragmatic reason. “I’m interested in hearing your viewpoint, Bob,” Dana said.

  Bob flinched. His adolescent twitchy discomfort had come back, a result of his difficulties with Lydia, Dana guessed. “Uh, dunno. Attacking is wrong. When shit-for-brains attacks us here, the attack is wrong for him and right for us to defend ourselves.” He turned red. “Ah, uh, the attacks on Phoenix’s and Dubuque’s headquarters nearly did in us good guys. I’m afraid another such attack would finish us off.”

  Nessa nodded. “You’re talking morality, then.”

  Bob nodded. Dana smiled. Perhaps some of her lessons had taken.

  “I can’t argue with your gut feel,” Nessa said. She hadn’t been part of either of the attacks. “I think you’re right.”

  “We should have had the media crawling around here during Dubuque’s last attack,” Elorie said, a half smile on her face, angling her head to peer around Lydia to talk to Bob. Lydia didn’t appreciate the sight, but Bob sure did. “Especially with all the protests going on. The best thing that could happen to us, politically, is another Dubuque attack. Now. With the media as witnesses.”

  “Ah, sure, ma’am,” Bob said, stammering.

  Richard’s face turned serious. “The media doesn’t consider you Telepaths a positive thing.”

  “We’ll take the hit if this takes down Dubuque,” Elorie the-not-a-Telepath-in-the-slightest said.

  “Thanks for asking first, El,” Ken said. “But you’re right. Hear that, Betrayer?” Ken raised his voice. “Betray us to Dubuque again, pretty please?”

  Betrayer didn’t answer, thankfully.

  “Uh, guys,” Dana said. “We haven’t moved since the last attack. We don’t need Betrayer to do her thing. Dubuque knows exactly where we are.” She turned to Richard. “Why haven’t we moved, by the way? You’re inviting another attack, aren’t you?”

  Richard nodded. “Not for the reason stated, though. I’d like to see the damned City of God try anything in my territory now that they don’t have an army of Supported to toss at us.” He paused. “If your group doesn’t object, I can get the media here in numbers.”

  Nessa flipped her braid from shoulder to shoulder like a martial artist’s nunchucks. “How about you arrange it to get them here on ten minutes’ notice. Otherwise, someone’s going to notice the dolphin convention. I’d rather not freak out the media too much.”

  Dana, scanning the area, noticed the Natural Supported leave their former Grade One Orlando Supported students behind, dive into two of their group’s vans, and motor off. “What’s going on with the Natural Supported?”

  Nessa snickered and Dana’s sense of impending doom grew. “Nothing someone on a familiar basis with Telepaths should be surprised about,” Diana said. Dana turned to Lydia.

  “They wouldn’t say, only that it’s not one of our emergencies, boss,” Lydia said.

  Dana tapped her nails on the chair arm. “Lydia.”

  “Really, truthfully, I don’t know, oh great mistress of the magics.”

  “Uh, so, uh, Elorie, ah, anyone want to see what I’ve done with the iPads?” Bob said. Elorie’s face turned impassive. “I’ve got your new UI working, Dana.”

  Dana licked her lips. “I’ll take your word. Can I ask, though, what your plans for these are?”

  “This is actually, uh, Miz Uffie’s idea, Dana.”

  Dana turned to Uffie. “Yes?”

  Uffie sighed. “I happened to mention that the Watchers called their enchantments ‘gamme’, which in my mind is clearly related to a term from the Sumerian mythos and their gods, that their gods kept their powers in objects they termed ‘me’.” She pronounced it ‘may’, so it rhymed with ‘gahm-may’. “I thought you Gods might be able to do something similar – and better, use modern technology and mass produce them. Use the benefits of modern civilization.”

  “You’re talking weapons, then,” Dana said. Mass produced enchanted computerized weapons to replace the mass-produced Supported. This didn’t seem like progress to her.

  “Weapons aren’t, uh, the primary use for this, Dana. Think distributed miracle distribution,” Bob said, sheepish. “The same way we do music and video downloads, perhaps even peer-to-peer miracle networks.”

  “Just what the world needs,” Lydia said. “Bit Torrent’s a miracle enough without the damned thing being miraculous for-realsies….”

  Dana grunted and thought. How easily could they make these, anyway? How quickly could they get them to their former Supported? What were the ramifications of this? “Okay, I’ll take you up on your offer, Bob. Give me the iPad show.”

  Bob reddened, but after his first couple of sentences of technical descriptions, he lost his embarrassment. Richard joined in, boyish, describing how they could use this to mimic the proposed semi-utopian uses of nanotech technology. Eventually.

  Dana paid attention as best as possible.

  “This smells socially destabilizing,” Dana said, a half hour later, numbed by technical bafflegab gathering in waist high drifts. The Kid God had been working on this trick since before the Betrayal, and with Richard’s help his trick appeared to be finally taking off. “What if every adult in America had one of these miracle tablets?”

  “We can’t, unless we can make some more Gods,” Richard said.

  “Not if they were in ‘off’ mode most the time, sir,” Bob said. Richard nodded. “Is this too socially stressful?”

  “I don’t know,” Dana said. “Uffie? Diana?”

  “Sounds like an improvement to me,” Diana said. “Not that I’m getting any special information about it, understand.” She muttered something about too much static, giving the rest of Nessa’s family the stink-eye.

  “I don’t know, either,” Uffie said. “I doubt this would be too much worse than another ‘information revolution’, and perhaps not even so disruptive. The exposure of the dolphins is going to be much worse.”

  “Eh?” Dana said. She thought the dolphins were a waste of time.

  “Oh, I’ve been making progress with the dolphins,” Uffie said. “Also squeezing stories about them out of Nessa and Ken, who are much more closed mouthed than I realized.”

  Nessa giggled. Diana rolled her eyes. Dana already knew Diana shared Dana’s disdain about the dolphins.

  Dana watched with her magical scan as the
Natural Supported returned in their two vans. Relieved, she ignored them.

  “What sort of progress, Uffie?” Richard said.

  “After much tedious translation work, I squeezed out of Korua how he’s been helping us,” Uffie said, pleased with herself. “Not that I understand how this is going to help, but Ken says he thinks this might be a good thing.”

  “What is it?” Richard said.

  “Somehow our dolphin friends have arranged for a series of televised theological debates between a conservative Catholic theologian, a Father Haus, and Dubuque himself,” Uffie said, eyes twinkling. “Three debates, starting tomorrow.”

  “This is help?” Dana said. Insane, screwy, and likely utterly pointless.

  “The dolphins don’t do war either,” Nessa said. “They do tricks.”

  “So they’re another group of psychotic pacifists,” Dana muttered, mostly to herself.

  “Another? We’re not pacifists,” Nessa said. “Not always. Not as a group, either.” Pointedly not denying they were psychotic.

  “What’s this about stories?” Richard said, to Nessa.

  “Oh, those stories,” Ken said. “Nessa and I had a little adventure when she was twelve and I was a bit older.”

  “My big success,” Nessa said. Ken gently put his hand over Nessa’s mouth; she stuck out her tongue and began to lick it, complete with hopefully fake lustful moans.

  “Nessa here caught the dolphins mentally egging on the cold war and the UFO craze,” Ken said, ignoring Nessa’s overtly sexual tongue-work. “We went and contacted the chief dolphin honcho, one Opartuth, here in Florida, and convinced Opartuth to stop. The crazy dolphin didn’t understand the concept of nuclear war and how dangerous a nuclear war might be to them.”

  “Shit,” Richard said, echoed by Bob.

  “Crazy,” Lydia said, ultra wide eyed. “These dolphins can’t be that powerful. Can they?”

  Dana just shook her head. “You sure about all this?”

  “When the 99 Gods showed up, the first thing we thought of after we got together was that the dolphins were responsible for them,” Ken said. He removed his hand from Nessa’s attentions and wiped it on the back of his pants. “You didn’t. Nessa, that’s bad.”

  Ken’s last comment wasn’t about the dolphins or Nessa’s tongue game. Diana frowned and gave Dana an embarrassed glance. Nessa shot something back at Ken, private and telepathic, and the two of them went nose to nose, hands on hips and silent for a good long minute. Clearly a minor disagreement, not major. In a major disagreement Ken made the mansion moan around him and he disfigured glasses and tables.

  “Uh,” Nessa said, after she and Ken broke their nose to nose staredown, “One thing. The dolphins never gave up on the UFO stuff.”

  Dana winced. “So they still meddle.”

  “And they’ve been meddling forever, from what I’ve been able to gather,” Uffie said. “There’s no telling what they’ve done over the millennia. Either they’ve forgot, or they won’t tell.”

  “Won’t tell,” Nessa said. “Dana, Orlando – chop chop. Your presence is required in the estate’s formal dining room.”

  Dana flickered her senses to the formal dining room on the far side of the estate house, and found the room blocked from her magic.

  Nessa stood, almost stumbled, and walked robot-like over to her and Richard. She grabbed their arms. “Let’s go, you two.”

  Seeing no alternatives and no danger, Dana let Nessa lead her off; Elorie came around to her other side and, smiling, joined in on the leading. Diana lagged behind, whispering to Dave. As they walked, Persona stepped out of Nessa and began to play with her willpower, setting up something intricate, tricky, delayed and in the domestic bands. Something was clearly up, but Dana couldn’t tell what.

  Lydia chimed in with a sotto voiced “I’m so in favor of this you have no idea” that didn’t help one bit. Nope. Nuh uh. Not at all.

  Ken and Dave, fighting glee, opened the door to the formal dining room. The Natural Supported and the candidates had the place laden down with a feast for fifty, but an illusion of a small wedding chapel lay over that dinner hall reality. Persona slipped forward and morphed into a generic woman preacher, of the sucking on too many lemons sin-obsessed variety. Calm willpower, Persona style, glided over Dana and she found herself wearing a wedding dress. She glanced over at Richard and found him now wearing a tux.

  “Uh,” Richard said.

  “Surprise!” went a room filled with Natural Supported and Natural Supported candidates.

  A surprise wedding.

  My parents would die if they saw this, Dana thought, frozen in place by stunned shock.

  Richard laughed in glee…before his laugh tailed off into breathy air and he oh so carefully turned to Dana. As did everyone else. The place supernaturally quieted.

  In her Mission mode of thinking, this sucked. Looking at it in her World-As-Story mode of thinking, though, her analysis transformed the situation into a question: did she want this?

  To her surprise, she did, and that made the story benefits a positive thing. “Miss Manners just fainted,” Dana said, deadpan. This had to be Nessa’s crazy idea, and it worked…and doing this was likely the most Indigo thing Dana had ever done. This made love, and not just between her and Orlando. This hurt the 99, slapped the Angelic Host in the face, and invited God Almighty to smile upon all of them.

  And, Dana decided, this would make her very happy. A warm emotional tide ran through her, and she blushed.

  She looked around at the waiting throng, and realized Elorie had heisted back the ‘official Telepath’ wedding bands from Dana’s purse. Elorie now bounced them on her hand, a smirk on her face.

  “You’re supposed to cue the music, Nessa,” Dana said, a whisper.

  Here came the bride.

  29. (Betrayer)

  “So, is this what we’ve been waiting for?” Alt asked.

  Betrayer, in her true Leonides Pepper body, shook her head. “I have a confession to make, Alt. This series of debates between Father Haus and Dubuque isn’t something I foresaw. It’s another bit of unexplainable interference.”

  Alt’s time as a captive in Dubuque’s City of God headquarters in Oklahoma City had awakened his dormant religious feelings. They met in the small private place Betrayer had constructed out of the old meeting room, now a central sitting room for the telepaths, complete with chairs, sofas, and a big television mounted on the wall. The place was set up so that Alt knew everything, even the fact Betrayer was Atlanta, and Alt talked to her on his knees, as if in prayer to her. Worrisome, but she knew Alt directed his prayers to God Almighty, not her and not Dubuque.

  Alt had once been, and still was in his secret heart, Jewish. The piped-in ideology over the hallway loudspeakers, decrying the inhumanity of all Telepaths (as well as atheists, Wiccans, New Agers, secularists, the Indigo, and the like) didn’t help either.

  “I didn’t either, but your answer doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Well,” Betrayer said. “If any time isn’t the right time, this is.”

  “Okay, what’s with you today, Atlanta?” Alt said. “You’re not normally this cryptic.”

  She dropped her Leo body to a knee beside Alt, needing a little prayer time as well. She had felt off-balance ever since she was blindsided by the planned theological debates.

  “I’m bothered by these debates,” Betrayer said. “For starters, they’re too big to be something I could miss in the Place of Time. And, indeed, I missed them.”

  “Too big?” Alt shook his head. “They feel stupid and pointless to me. What sort of effects will they have?”

  “Large. Too large for me to have missed. These debates are the final piece of the struggle between Dubuque and Verona over the theology of the City of God. The winner of the debates wins the right to set the theology.”

  “Wow,” Alt said. “They shouldn’t be doing this. Not in public, and not this early. They should have waited at least until after they t
ook down Nessa’s Telepaths and Orlando’s rebels. Perhaps not until after the Armageddon War.”

  “My worry as well,” Betrayer said. “My plans and goals may not be as obtainable as I’d hoped, due to this interference.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Not that I know of. Yet. Keep a clairvoyant eyeball out, looking for problems, other huge bits of interference, and anyone able to operate at this level.”

  “I’ll do so,” Alt said. “Now…my turn to talk about my worries.” He paused. “The day is coming when the power of worshippers will fade. Not vanish, but fade. The time is close enough for me to get hunches about our attempt to take Dubuque down, and the biggest hunch I get is that none of us here will survive the attempt.”

  Betrayer’s mind filled with blistering invective. Damn Telepaths! “Nothing is certain. Hell, Alt, I’m working as hard as I can on this, and I still haven’t gotten our odds of success up above 20 percent. And this was before this interference.”

  “Which isn’t an answer,” Alt said.

  “You want a real answer? Alt, I flat out don’t know if you and the others will survive,” Betrayer said. There was always a chance. “I don’t know if I will survive. What else can I say?”

  Alt shook his head.

  “You’re going to have to decide for yourself whether the attack is worth the risk or not.”

  “Dammit, Atlanta, this…”

  “I know this is an impossible situation,” she said. Especially since she had prayed Alt wouldn’t get any of his hunches ahead of time about how miniscule their chances of survival actually were. “The alternative, letting the Armageddon War start between the City of God and Tradition, is far worse. That war may kill off all but a handful of people. Isn’t this attempt to destroy the City of God worth the risk?” She leaned on Alt with all her willpower.

  “I guess.”

  “A hymn of glory let us sing

  New songs throughout the world shall ring

  Alleluia, Alleluia.

  Dubuque, by a road once untrod

  Ascendeth to rule the City of God.