99 Gods: Odysseia Read online

  Damn that exploitationist monster, Betrayer thought. Jennifer Miller had filled the ‘lost blonde white girl’ slot on the internet and cable news outlets for five long months, until the authorities found her remains a month and a half ago, buried with her bicycle in a landfill. Because of the media’s infatuation with this archetype, there likely wasn’t a North American viewer of this debate who didn’t know the entire sorry story. The fact that while hordes of people searched for the poor lost Jennifer thousands of not-blonde non-white girls were kidnapped, and dozens killed, irked Betrayer and reduced what small sympathy she had for Dubuque’s position.

  “What madness is this?” Father Haus said, all composure fled, his thick southern German accent now very noticeable. “This is a debate, not a circus!”

  “I will show you the power of God in this world, a power strong enough to penetrate the hearts of all men, including yours, a power beyond mere faith,” Dubuque said. “Jennifer’s life was cut short, tragically and senselessly, not due to accident or the will of God, but due to the free will of a broken and evil man. What you shall see is far beyond my everyday abilities as a Living Saint. What you shall see is the hand of God Almighty acting upon the world.”

  Dubuque concentrated. “Whatever’s going on here must be Dubuque’s hidden leverage,” Phil said.

  Betrayer moaned as agony filled her. To her horror, she realized Dubuque focused the power of all the 99 Gods into him, through their shared mission.

  Which meant God Almighty wanted this and needed this.

  Betrayer’s faith quailed.

  Reality curdled, flooding the television with light. When the light faded, instead of a pile of bones, a naked young blonde girl lay on the stage, alive. Dubuque fell, hands outstretched in exhaustion; his minions covered the girl in a blanket as she started to cry.

  Father Haus made the sign of the cross over his chest and stepped back hurriedly, audibly muttering about God’s words and the devil’s voice.

  Dubuque had raised the dead. No – all the 99 Gods had raised the dead, channeling the true power of God Almighty into the working of this miracle.

  What was this going to do? Like the loss of virginity, once resurrection was possible, the deed couldn’t be undone. Dubuque, with God Almighty’s help and acquiescence, had pulled the rug out from under the lot of them.

  The camera focused on the resurrected girl as she slowly sat and wiped tears from her face. Dubuque, that bastard, had done more than just plan this ahead of time. He had arranged for Jennifer’s parents to be in the audience, for they rushed the stage at that instant to take their beloved daughter into their arms. Father Haus stood distant and numb, but his facial expression was both priceless and open to easy interpretation: he thought he had stumbled into the presence of the Antichrist.

  “Shit,” Phil said, quiet. “Oh holy shit.”

  “Kind of makes you wonder if we’re on the right side or not, eh,” Betrayer said.

  “Or makes you wonder if you Gods are spawns of the Devil. Who else could do holy-seeming miracles and yet use such self-evident evil methods to achieve his goals?”

  Betrayer’s faith remained as shaken as her Leo body; for a moment she had the urge to defend Dubuque and the City of God. Dubuque’s Mission rumbled through her: victory, victory, victory! Triumph. Success. There were two more debates left to go, but Dubuque had put together an impressive lead.

  She shook her head. “Yah, I’ve got the same doubts, too,” she said. “I’m going to have to think long and…”

  She fell from her real body into darkness.

  When Betrayer regained consciousness, she found herself carried by four men and two women, stuck inside her projection that had once been inside Worcester’s house. She found her body secured by a dozen metal cylinders, of the same design as the ones she had used when she had restrained Persona.

  The men and women, saying nothing, loaded her into a classic unmarked white van parked outside of Worcester’s house, closed the doors, and drove off.

  “If I were to put my money on the single most important exogenous cause of the Rights Revolutions, it would be the technologies that made ideas and the people increasingly mobile. … Less well known is that they were also the decades of an explosion in book publishing. From 1960 to 2000, the annual number of books published in the United States increased almost fivefold.” – Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature

  “Can we go back to see what sort of hash my family and friends have made of my physical body this time?”

  30. (John)

  John opened up the seventh crate with a crowbar, and flung the crate lid and crowbar down to the straw and dust of the floor of his workroom. The contents of the box crawled around in his mind, confabulating his eyesight. Gamme, of course, and as with the first six crates nearly all lesser gamme, the ones he would be able to destroy without help from the Fallen Angels.

  He picked up one from the top, a gourd made into a child’s rattle, and sat on the workbench seat to study it. Across his workroom Lara, Glory and Grover huddled, and to his disgust cuddled together, in one of the larger sleeping hammocks, this one set up for leisure.

  “Let’s try the ratio question again between greater and lesser plenums,” Lara said. The three of them worked on translation issues, and used John’s workshop because of Glory’s necessary magical illustrations, many of which reeked of Hell.

  To John, everything they spoke of was gobbledygook, gibberish jargon at its worst. John studied the gourd with care. He knew not to believe his straightforward gamme power rating spells answer of ‘lesser’; he had been bitten hard when a greater gamme almost ate his mind when he first tried a group assay on a crate. He poked a tendril of power into the gamme, and waited, concentrating on his sense of morality.

  “The ratio is five dimyriads upon the myriad upon the myriad, to one,” Glory said. She nuzzled Lara’s head while Grover punched numbers on his smartwatch with a stylus.

  “Huh,” Grover said. “And Hell is what in size, relative to the average lesser plenum?”

  “It is only two parts in ten larger than the average size, but beware,” Glory said. “You cannot judge size of a lesser plenum based on what is tangible or visible.”

  “How do you judge, then?” Lara asked.

  John tuned out Glory’s meaningless answer and tossed the gourd gamme into the lesser gamme bin, satisfied. He reached over to the crate and took the next from the top, a distaff. It wiggled in his hands, a snake attempting and failing to avoid his grasp. He twisted his hand to meet the figurative eyes of the snake and said “Behave.” The distaff became rigid, and he carefully spoke and inserted his immaterial magical probe into it, and waited. Despite its behavior, his probe revealed the distaff to have the morality of a lesser gamme, one tuned to women, not men.

  “What I find interesting,” Lara said, as Grover continued to calculate, amid much muttering and cursing, “is that you consider the size of the universe finite. Modern scientists have measured the flatness of the universe, and found it perfectly flat, and thus infinite in size.”

  Glory snorted. “Leaping to unwarranted conclusions is one of the hallmarks of all your impatient modern thinkers. I know nothing of the details of this, but I predict their measurement came with a small error bar. They all do.”

  “Uh huh,” Lara said. A group of Fallen Angels walked by the open entryway to the workroom, a single goat on a halter following each. If Wisdom hadn’t been pulling John’s ear, the Fallen Angels maintained what little remained of their humanity by living the mundane lives of peasants.

  “The difference between infinite and finite but extremely large lies within their error bar,” Glory said. She illustrated her point with a showy magical illusion. “Though both conclusions are logically correct, your scientific investigators leapt to the conclusion of ‘infinite’ instead of the vastly more realistic ‘extremely large’.”

  John tossed the distaff in the lesser gamme bin and reached for the next, a st
one awl with a wood handle. The gamme leapt toward his hand, point first, and he had to bark magic at it to keep it from piercing his palm.

  Grover whistled and held up his smartwatch display for Lara to see, leaning over Glory in the process, who smiled as he did so. “Holy crap!” Lara said. “Okay, the ‘grain of sand to entire world’ analogy for size of lesser to greater plenums was an overstatement, then. More like grain of sand to size of the solar system. Anyway, why the two sizes? Or, pardon me, Glory, why only the two sizes?”

  The awl took over John’s right arm and attempted to stab him in his left eye. The gamme’s attack failed when it hit John’s static antimagic defenses. “Gotcha,” John said. Glory’s gaze fell on him, and he heard muted snickers in his head. He tossed the stone awl into the greater gamme bin, and flickered his eyes over to Glory, who now illustrated a story with a magical illusion. Some variant on the Garden of Eden tale, he guessed, but one leading to the creation of Hell. That much was obvious from the magical reek of her illusion.

  John reached over and grabbed the next gamme from the box, a woven shawl. He probed it and found no magic within it at all.

  “So, let me get this straight,” Grover said, wiggling around so he spoke at Glory’s ear. “Lesser universes, of which Hell is one, are created by post-singularity types. They are tiny because they aren’t created by God Almighty.”

  John stopped, shawl in hand, at the word ‘singularity’, a term that still bothered him, due to the fact that the Angelic Host had given that name to the God Orlando before he transitioned into a Territorial God. He turned to Grover, puzzled at why the term had come up in this gibbering nonsense conversation.

  “Yes, at least within the ambit of our translation difficulties and terminology,” Glory said. “Do you understand the rest, in your terms?”

  “Most lesser universes and their inhabitants go to God when they perfect or complete themselves, but some small fraction do not,” Grover said. He shook his head and muttered “Fallen universes, who’d have thunk it.” His comment drew a snicker from both Lara and Glory. “The ‘why’ must be of extreme importance, Glory. Yes?”

  The shawl found its way on to John’s shoulders and gave comfort. He sighed and tuned his magical analysis far from its norms and into the senserealm. There. Definitely a lesser gamme, one of the receptors of magic instead of a source or holder. It used John’s own magic to exude comfort.

  “Your mind thinks of ‘the singularity’ as a single moment or instant where the curve of technical advancement becomes infinite,” Glory said. She sighed. “This is the same foible I mentioned earlier, an assumption among your scholars that ‘very steep’ means ‘infinite’, and there are no limits on the steepness. Societal tech singularities, as you call them, do not occur in an instant, and are dangerous, and often fail, a topic we can delve into later. Yet failed singularities are relevant to the question you ask.”

  “I get it,” Grover said. “Hell is the product of a failed singularity, and it’s keeping itself from dissolving by parasitically leeching off of pieces of our universe, and others. Which also means your earlier assertion, that the Elder Gods are more like honeybee hives than humans means they are likely massive group AIs, in our terms.” His comment earned him a kiss on the cheek from Glory. “Are all of…”

  John tuned out Grover’s next bit of pointless theologically vacant hooey, about how magic was psychological because minds backed it, not rules and theories, and tossed the shawl into the lesser gamme bin. He peered into the seventh crate of gamme and sighed; to his eyes the crate was fuller than when he started.

  His sigh almost turned into a moan. After he finished the seventh crate, he had eleven more to go.

  31. (Nessa)

  Dana looked far too smug for Nessa’s tastes. Nessa bounded up to her and Orlando, predictably joined at the hip this fine morning – this is the day this is the day – and performed a fine bit of mental surgery to extract Dana from Orlando’s clutches. She had a little time before their appointment to communicate with the dolphins. Uffie, for instance, still clattered a keyboard, typing up her notes from yesterday, making up for the time lost during the interruption caused by some silly idea about a surprise wedding.

  Nessa still preened over her surprise wedding idea, despite the razzing she had taken from her family about Nessa-schemes and disasters. The surprise wedding hadn’t been a disaster.

  At least not yet.

  “I assume this is important,” Dana said, meaning the opposite. The mental image in Dana’s mind was a mathematical inequality: Nessa not-equals practicality. Nessa giggled. Today, because this was the day, she found herself amused by everything.

  “You seem to have forgotten something and you need to act quickly,” Nessa said. She dragged Dana to the back porch of the estate house, next to the silly infinity pool that didn’t seem to have one side, and sat the younger woman down in a white wicker chair. Nessa sat in the chair opposite. She couldn’t hold a conversation otherwise; Dana’s six inches on Nessa (four artificial, as Dana always wore footwear with high heels of one sort or another) made Nessa feel like she was talking to a skyscraper with small tits.

  “I assure you there is little I forget these days,” Dana said. Nessa never minded Dana’s prickliness. Prickliness fit her.

  At least she never minded Dana’s prickliness today.

  “Then enjoy your pregnancy,” Nessa said. “Divine sperm won’t take ‘no’ for an answer unless you do something about them.”

  Dana reddened and didn’t answer.

  “You have researched this, haven’t you?”

  Dana shook her head.

  “If you’re going to be smug about having Orlando pop your cherry, you need to cope with all the consequences.”

  If anything, Dana turned even redder. “It’s that obvious?”

  “Who do you think you’re talking to anyway?” Nessa said, sing song. You would think the people around her would learn. “Besides – wedding night? Hint hint.”

  Dana sighed and gave up using her Natural Supported tricks to combat her embarrassment. Her subconscious wouldn’t let her. Smug indeed. “Yesterday, that was only the public celebration.”

  “The ceremony worked. For what I wanted.”

  “Yes.” Dana turned away. “I do hope there was something real behind your idea, because logically, there was no reason for you to push so hard.”

  Poor Dana could spout double entendres all day and never realize. Nessa didn’t care. This is the day. “How about just human emotions? Hope. A desire to see you and Orlando enjoy life for a few days or so. Love makes me happy.”

  Dana bit her quivering lip and Nessa sighed.

  “Uh, yes, Dana, that was an answer from all the different ‘me’s inside of this,” Nessa said, tapping her temple. “Trust me, there were hunches involved, and, no, you don’t want to know the details.” This is the day.

  “Okay, then,” Dana said, smiling and relaxing.

  She trusts a Telepath’s hunches but she doesn’t trust me, Nessa groused to herself.

 

 

  “So tell me about, ahem, those issues.”

  Dana was embarrassed about a little logical talk about birth control. How sweet!

  Ken sent back.

 

  The wedding band symbolism had drawn Nessa into Dana and Orlando’s orbit. Orlando’s gambit had worked well. Perhaps too well on her, as she had always wanted a go with a real male God. Persona just didn’t count. Luckily, Ken kept hovering around her mind doing damage control to save them all from her instincts or whatever coincidence pond events through which she often splashed.

  She didn’t want to even think about the word ‘scheme’.

 
“Divine sperm and eggs aren’t normal tissues, of course,” Nessa said, pulling on her braid to aid her concentration. “They’re nano-whatsis constructs. They can do things like slip through condoms” Dana’s redness returned “and trigger a woman’s ovulation, even if she’s on the pill. I hesitate to think what they’d do to a woman on an IUD. According to Persona – Dana, she’s not that much of a ditz, but she is an accomplished actress – according to Persona what you have to do is use your willpower, or however you Natural Supported look at your own abilities, to gather the divine sperm into one location and tell them, firmly, not now. After that, they’ll behave.”

  “Uh, okay.”

  “Furthermore, if you want to do any kid design work, such as picking the kid’s gender, hair or skin color, yadda yadda yadda, you can do that too, simply by giving the divine sperm firm magical instructions. Also, not that it’s going to matter for you given that you and Orlando are married now, but unless you or someone else physically removes them, those divine sperm will likely outlive you. They’re going to always be there if you need them.” Nessa ‘tchcked’. “All it takes is one shot. Gotta love these Gods of ours, they’ve certainly got the right stuff.”

  Dana twisted her hands in her lap and didn’t laugh. “What if I want to get pregnant? Now?”

  “Ah, such as the question about how stupid it is to get pregnant in a war, like a certain crazy Telepath you’re talking to?” Dana didn’t react at all to Nessa’s comment, showing firm self-control. “I don’t know how to answer that one, no hunches at all,” Nessa said. “Besides, you can work out the strategic and socio-political consequences of getting pregnant a hell of a lot better than I can. There’s a risk that the choice might get taken out of your hands, you understand.”

  “Yes,” Dana said, nodding. This one she had figured out by herself. “If one of the 99 Gods dies, I’m a prime candidate to give birth to the next one. Orlando and I have talked that one through and neither of us have a problem with such an eventuality.”