99 Gods: War

“In the face of such an exposition as this of the weakness and credulity of poor human nature in this enlightened country of common schools and colleges, in the boasted wide awake nineteenth century, who shall deny that we can study with interest and profit the history of impositions which have been practiced upon mankind in every possible phase throughout every age of the world, including the age in which we live ?” – P.T. Barnum, Humbugs of the World

  “I’m not some sort of crazy.”

  29. (Nessa)

  Quiet as a mouse, Ken had said. His comment necessarily led Nessa to thinking about mice, then sensing through the local mice, a more pathetic adventure than could be imagined. Rats were better. No rats in this area, but she found a few in the storeroom of the Albertsons across the road.

  “Alton Freudenberger?” Ken said. “We’d like to talk to you.”

  Alton looked up from his grocery cart full of frozen dinners and junk food. He paled, amazing for someone as pale as he was, and ran. He wore a torn but well starched EMT uniform with the name ‘Alt’ emblazoned over his left shirt pocket. Ken gave chase and Nessa followed. As she expected from someone who hadn’t made the transition to mature adult Telepath, his aura was all mixed up and difficult to parse. They caught up with him as he fumbled with his keys to his beat-up Ford SUV. Alton was tall, thin and had big feet. Nessa studied his feet. They stayed big.

  “Go away,” Alton said. He turned away from them, bowed his head, and squished his eyes shut almost violently.

  “We just want to talk,” Ken said.

  “No you don’t!”

  Nessa sent.

  “You stay away, too!”

  Ken stopped and looked at Nessa, giving her a thumbs up. Alton had picked up Nessa’s telepathic message, a good sign for someone as mentally messed-up as he was.

  “You know who we are, then,” Nessa said. Stains and dirty grime marked Alton’s starched uniform, keeping company with several small tears and a split seam along his left side. The uniform matched his mind. He was young, but not callow. He wore an AFA patch on his left shoulder, which confused her, since she couldn’t get ‘AFA’ from Iowa, Davenport, or Quad Cities. She wasn’t sure why Alton wore his uniform when off duty, but perhaps they worked different here, or Alton liked to break rules. “You’ve probably known who we were your entire life.” It wouldn’t be the first time she had run into a fellow Telepath who had picked up on her and Ken and their exploits long distance. The stark terror was a consistent give-away. Nessa approached, slowly, and reached out to put a hand on Alton’s shoulder.

  He took two steps away, about to run, but found Ken in front of him. He stopped and turned on Nessa. “Back off, dammit! I’ll hurt you.”

  “How?” Nessa said, and blinked as coyly and innocently as she could. Of course, the last person she confronted with the innocent routine, a fading Telepath tourist last year back home in Eklutna, had climbed out of her rental and run screaming into the forest. She couldn’t let Alton run. They needed him.

  Alton’s eyes opened, angry, pinpoint pupils. He swung his right fist at her and connected, sending Nessa skittering back in surprise. He had muscles for one so thin. Alton yelled in pain.

  Nessa gathered herself and walked up to Alton. She got into his face, possible only because the six two or three Alton hunched over in pain. “God dammit, Freudenberger, hitting me wasn’t called for,” Nessa said. “Do that shit again and I’ll blast your fucking brain out your fucking ears and leave you with a month long headache. What the fuck gives you the right to take a swing at someone who’s trying to talk to you?”

  “Stay away from me, bitch,” Alton said. “I don’t want to deal with anything like you or your friend. I don’t know what the fuck you are or who the fuck you represent, but I don’t want anything to do with you. I have enough problems in my life without you mucking things up and making things worse.”

  Nessa didn’t back off. She reached forward to grab Alton’s arm and steady his mind. He wore ample mind shields, which she expected from someone on the slippery slope back toward Mindbound. She couldn’t do anything to help him unless she touched him.

  Alton yanked his arm back. “Don’t touch me! Stay the fuck away!” He rubbed his bruised and bleeding fist.

  “Not going to happen, dickhead,” Nessa said. She flickered her eyes to Ken, and at Alton’s left hand, which held his keys. Ken caught the idea from her mind and telekinetically yanked Alton’s keys out of his hand. “Your place. We’re going to talk, whether you like it or not. Back seat, motherfucker.”

  “Fuck you,” Alton said. Bark chips and rocks exploded nearby, phat pow bing, the common poltergeist-teek display when Ken’s anger management techniques took a header.

  The door to the back seat opened on its own, Ken’s work. Alton’s eyes opened wide and his resistance crumbled. She motioned him into the back seat and Alton complied. Nessa slid in beside him. Ken shut the door behind her, climbed into the front seat and started Alton’s pollution machine. The transmission gave the heavy thunk of incipient death when Ken put the vehicle into gear.

  “You can’t do this,” Alton said. “I’ll go to the police.”

  “Sure you will,” Nessa said. “Go ahead, tell them all about car doors opening and shutting on their own, peanut brain. They’re going to appreciate that.” Nessa took a deep breath to steady herself. The initial rush of contact with Alton faded. He looked so forlorn, huddled up as far away from her as he could get in the back seat of his own SUV. Nessa’s anger at Alton’s intransigence vanished into little lost puppy dog feelings. “I’m sorry,” she said. Well, perhaps a rather oversized little lost puppy dog. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you. We just want to talk. We don’t mean you any harm at all.”

  Alton’s eyes flickered at Ken, then at the scenery. “You know where I live?”

  Nessa nodded. Alton cursed under his breath.

  “How’s your hand?” she asked Alton.

  “It’s like I hit a brick wall,” Alton said. Well, that’s how Nessa’s teek shell was supposed to work, save for the skittering back when someone hit her. Embarrassing. Alton looked Nessa over. “Which is impossible. There’s nothing to you at all.”

  “Lots of things are possible,” Nessa said.

  Alton backed away farther into the angle between the door and the second row seat. His eyes flickered back and forth, nervous. “You didn’t speak, but I heard you. This is insanity.” More mental shields sprang up around Alton. He wouldn’t be hearing her telepathy any more.

  Ken sent.

  Ken was jealous of her interest and attention. How sweet!

  “Normally, Alton…or do you prefer Alt?”

  “Alt.”

  “I’m Nessa. He’s Ken. Alt, normally, I’d never approach someone like you. It’s not fair to you.”

  The SUV rumbled over a set of train tracks and made a right turn. “I hear a ‘but’,” Alt said.

  Nessa nodded but didn’t say anything. Time for explanations later.

  Ken pulled them into an apartment complex parking lot and parked Alt’s SUV in front of his apartment.

  Nessa reached over and touched Alt’s arm. His eyes lit up in shock.

  “It’s like you’re not here,” he said. “I can’t... This is…”

  “Something that never happened to you before, something impossible,” Nessa said. “Fancy that. Come. We need to talk.”

  Clippings of hundreds of articles from the newspaper and printouts from the internet filled an entire wall of Alton’s apartment, all about the 99 Gods. Push-pins with nine colors of yarn connected the articles. White and black ribbons gaily accented several of the push-pins. Uh huh, full-fledged Telepath degeneration, soon to be full-fledged paranoid schizophrenia. Nessa had seen it dozens of times.

  “Which ones are you?” Alt said, as Nessa and Ken stood side by side admiring the wall and Alt’s work. She couldn’t understand the connections
he had drawn between the articles, or the deal with the ribbons. She did trace some of Atlanta’s murderous spree through the South, though.

  “We’re not Gods,” Ken said. Alt skittered back, wary, nervous, eyes fixated on Ken.

  Ken sent.

  Nessa sent.

  “If you’re not Gods, then what the hell are you?” Alt said.

  “We’re Telepaths,” Nessa said. “As are you.”

  Ken sent.

  Oh. Right. Nessa sent.

  Ken worked for a moment.

  Alt sat with a thud on a long storage bench on the wall opposite the push-pin wall. “No I’m not!” Alt said. He buried his head in his hands, running his hands through his short-cropped curly black hair. “I’m not some sort of crazy. You’re crazy. I’m no New Ager fluff-brain who thinks they can predict the future or see around corners or read other people’s minds. Only crazies believe in that sort of shit.”

  Dubuque’s curse wasn’t the only thing making Alt miserable today.

  “This isn’t a matter of belief,” Nessa said. Alt was sort of cute, with all his balled up pain of denial and with the deep dark crevices in his mind he didn’t want anyone to see, where he feared he had sinned or done evil. Young and good looking, but no sign of a current lover in his life, if she trusted what she picked up in his apartment. “You probably have flashes of insight you don’t understand, you probably pick up on some of what other people are thinking, and likely things happen around you that you can’t understand, things that don’t happen to other people. Real events you don’t believe.”

  “No. Not me,” Alt said. “I’m perfectly normal. You’ve got me mistaken for someone else. I don’t know what sort of fake magic you used to do all those tricks, but it didn’t work. I’m on to you.”

  Ken sent.

  Ken’s spin didn’t sway her one bit. Trauma lay just under the surface of Alt’s mind which Nessa could occasionally spot through Alt’s mental shields. Nessa expected trauma, mental scars, horrors beyond imagining, and various neuroses, psychoses and blithering nuts-oid behaviors as well.

  Ken sent.

  “It’s not morally right to do this to me,” Alt said.

  Nessa smiled.

  “So, where did this thought come from?” Nessa asked Alt. She opened her hands and raised them to the sky, a question shrug. Alt looked at her as if she had grown a third arm.

  Ken sent.

  “This is wrong what you’re doing to me,” Alt said. “Stop pestering me.”

  Ken hadn’t mind controlled Alt; Ken didn’t have the mind control trick. Alt echoed Ken on his own, picking up Ken’s thoughts because of their high emotional content and the fact Ken telepathically blasted them at Nessa from only a few yards away from Alt.

  Ken she would deal with later. He should know better than this.

  “No, dammit, Alt! Pay attention. This is for your own good,” Nessa said. “Look at your wall. You understand the danger of the 99 Gods. How long before some bright God gets the inspiration to recruit weakling Telepaths like yourself? Wise up.”

  “Get out of my apartment!” Alt said. He looked up and leaned over toward Nessa. “You’re evil, twisted, and insane. Get out!”

  “Fuck you,” Nessa said. “Don’t be such a baby.”

  Alt twisted around and flung out his arms, sending a table lamp crashing to the floor and strewing a stack of newspapers around him. Blood showed on a rag he had wrapped around his hand. “Get out!” He put his head in his hands. “Leave me alone, dammit.” The last he spoke as a plaintive plea.

  Nessa didn’t move. “No,” she said, quietly and firmly. She intermixed her words with a mental order strong enough to get Alt’s attention.

  Ken said. He walked over to the apartment door.

  Nessa turned her back on Alt and walked over to Ken.

  Ken sent.

  Nessa sent.

  Nessa frowned and opened herself to Ken’s thoughts. She didn’t understand the strength of his feelings.

  Ken feared she would climb into bed with Alt. He feared Alt would replace him. Ken’s subconscious didn’t believe Nessa loved him; he still fought his own insecurity, fearing Nessa would bolt for the first available man who came along. Especially a white Telepath.

  Nessa sent hard, instantly flaming angry. She turned away from Ken and hugged herself. Every time they ran into the slightest problem, Ken fought with her. Unfair! His distrust hurt her. He didn’t understand her or how she worked.

  Ken didn’t say anything or send anything, though the papers tacked to the wall fluttered from Ken’s anger, and the apartment frame moaned behind the walls. He raised his mental shields and stalked out of the apartment, across the courtyard, and out to the street. Nessa walked over and closed the door behind him. She rubbed her forehead and wished it still rained outside.

  “You just had some sort of fight, didn’t you?” Alt said. “Freaky. Neither of you said a word.”

  “The fight was telepathic,” Nessa said, taking deep breaths. She heard a crash from outside and the screech of torn metal. She flipped open the shades to watch Ken, out in the street, flaying a ten year old Honda with his teek, car shreds flying everywhere. she sent. He didn’t answer, and his shields were so tight he couldn’t hear her, either. With one clenched fist wave of his hands, the Honda silently exploded into the darkness, leaving behind an eviscerated drive train. Car shreds pelted the exterior of the apartment, pat pat pat, and stopped. Ken strode off into the darkness, and was gone. She stood and waited, tense, as a fully robotic garbage truck rolled down the street, carefully hooking, lifting and dumping the trash into the truck’s trash bin, before setting down each identical garbage bin and moving to the next.

  Nessa took a last deep breath, and calmed as Ken vanished from her senses and she, finally, no longer rode his emotions. She walked across the apartment and sat in a chair next to the bench where Alt sat. At her left, on an ancient fold-down round dinette table, a laptop computer’s power light blinked at her. Its screen had gone dark, timed out or whatever the word for a computer being off but not fully off Nessa always confused with other words. She reached over and wiggled the mouse, and as she hoped she remembered, the laptop started up and its screen lit. The screen showed IE, open to the CNN website. Headline of the hour: Lima, the territorial God of Peru, had supported the Constitutional Court and overthrown the Peruvian government, calling for new elections. In the meantime Lima had assumed the presidency as an ‘emergency measure’. Right…

  Ever since Ken, the bastard, had forced her to pay attention, crap like this filled the news every single day, Gods appearing to ‘do good’ in a way she knew wasn’t good at all.

  “What did you fight over?” Alt said.

  “You. Ken agrees with you. I think you’re both fooling yourselves.”

  Alt sighed and stood. “Sorry, Nessa, but you need to leave.” He grabbed Nessa and yanked her to her feet. “I’m tired of asking politely.”

  “You don’t want to piss me off,” Nessa said, anger returning to her voice.

  “You’ve already pissed me off, why should pissing you off matter?” Alt said. He dragged her toward his apartment door. “Now, get out of…”

  Nessa slapped Alt’s mind and he fell like a sack of potatoes.

  “Now do you believe?” Nessa said. She dragged Alt over to his God-article wall and propped him up into a sitting position, then sat on the bench opposite to watch him. He awakened after about ten minutes. Nessa couldn’t find Ken. Dubuque had gone out of her range, somewhere hundreds of miles to the southwest. Atlanta was somewhere in Georgia. Miami did something in the southern Caribbean. She didn’t bother to try to locate John Lorenzi. She had never been able to sense him at range without a secondary connection, like a phone call. Tired of the big stuff, she visited the local dogs to look for something interesting going on.

  “Bitch,” Alt said, his mind
coming back.

  “Yah huh,” Nessa said. “I apologize. I’ve got a nasty temper, and I am crazy. I think all us Telepaths are. I’ve never met one who wasn’t.” She paused. “Want some chocolate?”

  “Sure,” Alt said, and winced. “My head. What did you do to me?”

  “Low grade mental attack,” Nessa said. “I call it blowing someone’s brain out their ears, or a mind blast, or the hard push. If I get scared and angry both, the attack is powerful enough to kill someone.”

  “That’s happened before, hasn’t it?”

  Nessa shrugged. This wasn’t something she would talk about to someone she just met. “You put together your God wall, Alt, because you’re afraid. You’re afraid of the Gods. You’re afraid of what the Gods are doing behind the scenes. You’re pissed because nobody’s doing anything to stop them and everybody believes in the coming Godly Utopia they’re going to bring.”

  Alt glared at her and didn’t answer.

  “Ken and I are doing something,” Nessa said. “We’re the other side. A small other side, but other sides have to start somewhere. We’re not failing, either.”

  “Prove it.”

  “Okay, then.” She pointed to a grouping of pinned articles. “Ken and I got jumped by Miami, the thug God, as you’ve so accurately named him. We flattened him and ran.” Nessa paused and looked Alt over. “Good. You’ve got enough active telepathy to be able to tell truth from lies. That’s basic.”

  “I’m not like you.”

  Nessa looked at the chocolate bar in Alt’s hand. “You’re a hell of lot more like me than you realize.”

  “You’re crazy, lady. You didn’t even mention the real reason I’m pissed at the Gods.”

  “Which is?”

  “Religious.”

  Nessa rolled her eyes. “You mean the fact you’re Jewish and you’re pissed they’re proving by their simple existence that monotheism is a crock of shit?”

  Alt’s lips thinned but he didn’t make a move toward her.

  “The local territorial God, Dubuque, calls himself a Living Saint,” Nessa said. “He’s a God anyway.”

  “You’re mocking me. You’re not making sense.”

  “The universe isn’t required to make sense,” Nessa said. She, at least, had learned that lesson before she was ten. “Alt, they don’t have flesh and blood bodies. Their bodies are something silvery and mottled, at least after you beat the piss out of them. But they’re not like big Gods. They’re like the little pagan tribal Gods of mythology books made tangible. Instead of being big Gods, they’re big trouble.”

  “God will smite them.”

  “God’s angels made them,” Nessa said. “Every one of them I’ve met believes this.”

  “Liar!”

  “You’re being a fool,” Nessa said. “You know I didn’t lie, and you’re lying to yourself. You’re enough of a Telepath to be well on the road to full institutionalized insanity, which is what happens to any of us who lies to themselves.”

  “You admitted you’re crazy.”

  “But I’m still functional, despite my craziness,” Nessa said, and wrinkled her nose. Somewhere near her, under the bench she sat on, Alt had some laundry that needed washing. It smelled like old tennis shoes. “I’m functional because I don’t lie to myself anymore.” At least too often. “The truth hurts, it always hurts like fucking hell, but the alternative is far worse.” She read Alt, concentrating on opening herself to his stray thoughts. “You’re unlucky at love. Bad things have happened to you in your personal relationships.”

  He nodded.

  “You’re, I’m not sure, scarred by death. That’s the worst, isn’t it?” Nessa said. Alt nodded again. “You encounter death too much in your job. Death isn’t pretty, and to you death is much worse than society allows it to be, in writing and the movies.”

  “Damn,” Alt said. He shivered and looked away from Nessa.

  “Talk,” Nessa said. “Talking helps, especially with other Telepaths.” She pushed at Alt, much easier after she had blown his brain out his ears and taken down his mental defenses. Some of his trauma was recent.

  Alt shrugged and leaned his head against the push-pin wall. “A couple of weeks ago I got a call from near the edge of my patch. ‘13 year old female, collapsed’. I got to her fast, I always do, even when I suspect it’s just a panic attack, or a faint, or a bad scrape or something. The location was in front of a tenement down by the Mississippi. I found the patient lying in a parking lot, her family circled around her, standing.

  “Her family was calm. They told me their daughter had told her parents she was sick, on the way back from the Laundromat, ready to vomit, so they stopped their car and she got out, shook a bit and then fell to the ground. Her parents had laid her on her back and although they were worried they weren’t screaming and crying.

  “I examined the girl and found a little vomit in her mouth. She grunted and stopped breathing. Even when you run into these things often, they make you fly. I got my partner to cut off her clothes and start CPR while I got my ambu-bag and connected the defibrillator. She was in VF, which means her heart wasn’t pumping blood. It’s a rhythm we can shock and bring back to normal. Some of the time.

  “I shocked her. The defibrillator monitor showed asystole, which means her heart stopped beating. This sounds worse, but it’s one of the normal possibilities after a shock. However, I caught something impossible from the girl. She’d jerked herself conscious for a moment. I knew she was panicked and in pain. Then nothing.

  “Her parents asked us what was happening, but all we could tell them was their daughter was ‘ill’. That’s part of our training. You don’t tell people your patient is dead while you’re standing in a parking lot, in case they freak out and prevent you from doing your job. Lying makes you feel like a shit, but what else can you do? The girl was dead, right then, with her heart stopped. What we were trying to do was bring her back. If you were hoping I had any special psychic healing tricks, well, think again.

  “I continued CPR while my partner got the trolley out of the ambulance. We needed to load and go because this girl needed to be in the hospital as soon as possible. While I did the CPR the girl vomited all over me and her heart went back to VF. So I shocked her again, standard procedure. No glory. She went back asystole. We got her on the trolley, continuing the CPR, and loaded her into the ambulance. I didn’t stop the CPR, just like the rules say, but, dammit, I know when things turn futile. She’d fled her body. I did pick this up with my special tricks. I couldn’t say anything, of course, especially because her father was with us in the ambulance. We got to the nearest hospital in only a few minutes.

  “The hospital nurse took charge of the father while we wheeled the girl into the resus room and into the care of the specialists. This hospital is one of the good ones who allow parents to watch the resus attempt. The family will know we tried everything to save their dead child. My partner and I de-stressed in the nurse’s station for a few minutes and then went back out to finish our shift, as if nothing had happened.

  “If you do enough nightshifts, you lose the ability to care about anyone or anything. Later, though, I learned they hadn’t been able to resus the girl. That’s when the goolies hit. The girl was dead, never coming back; her family was devastated and they’ll never recover. They’ll always think of me as the loser who killed their daughter. I know they will. I don’t know how I know, but it’s true.”

  Nessa wiped tears from her eyes and looked over at Alt. She had turned away while he talked. Tear streaks ran down his face. “You’re not a monster, despite what you think. Want some more chocolate?”

  Alt shook his head. “I don’t want to be able to read people’s minds. I can’t imagine a worse horror.” I don’t want anyone seeing my secret thoughts.

  Nessa recognized a clue when it hit her square in the nose. “Someone you loved almost died wh
en you were young, and you were with them,” Nessa said.

  Alt nodded.

  “You held on to their thoughts, engaged their ego, and kept them alive by keeping them from giving up on themselves.”

  Alt nodded again.

  “Then they went and died some time later when you weren’t around. You blamed yourself,” Nessa said. “You locked the neat trick back into your head because you lost confidence you’d done good.”

  “Damn you.”

  Nessa wrung her hands. She couldn’t bear to look at Alt or sense how he felt about her. “You’re human, Alt. Just human. Nothing’s wrong with being human.”

  “Why’d you have to exist!” Alt said. “Just go away. Leave me alone.”

  “This is necessary. The Gods don’t have our sense of conscience or morality. That’s what your wall means,” Nessa said, quiet. “It’s why you put up the wall, because you know, even though the reporters don’t have a clue. Telepaths like us are terrified of what we can do, so we don’t use our tricks unless we’re forced to. Or unless our greed and foibles overwhelm our empathy, but if we use our tricks too much their use always bites us in the ass until we remember we’re human, have consciences and shouldn’t be mucking with people and reality and things like that. Alt, the Gods don’t give a shit about such considerations. They use their tricks as needed, consequences be damned. They don’t care, and we’re in big trouble. The rest of the world hasn’t realized they’re in trouble yet, but they will. It’ll likely be far too late by then.” She paused and let Alt sniffle. “I’m asking you, we’re asking you, to help us cope with these Gods. Stop them if we can. Undo the damage they’ve done when we can. It’s our responsibility as Telepaths because, well, because nobody else can do a damned thing to them.” Nessa wiped her eyes. “Thanks, by the way, for sharing. I’d forgotten why what I’m doing is important. I’ve got a friend of mine who’s been captured by one of the Gods and I’ve let my personal problems color my motivations too much. I’ve been told I have a tendency to obsess.”

  If one believed a sock.

  “What do I do?” Alt said. “How does this work?”

  “The more you use a trick, the better you can control it, and the better the trick works,” Nessa said. “I can speed this up by going into your mind and ripping open all the little scars keeping your mental tricks locked inside your head.”

  “Huh?”

  “For instance, Ken and I lived far apart until recently, though we’d worked together in the past. Since the last time Ken and I worked together, he’d given up on his telepathy. Mind reading isn’t his strong suit, and costs him a lot of work and energy. When we first got back together, he couldn’t send a thought to me no matter how he tried. Then, after a while, he remembered how to send thoughts, but his mental voice was so weak I had to concentrate to hear. A little while later, he was back to normal, able to mentally chatter to me like he’d never given up on his telepathy. He got his telepathy back quickly because I was always in his head, rattling around with my own megaphone mental voice, ripping open scars.”

  “He’s pissed at you.”

  “We’re always a little pissed at each other. That’s what being in love is all about,” Nessa said.

  Alt frowned. “You’re strange.”

  “You haven’t seen strange yet,” Nessa said. “This here’s about as functional as I get. Give me enough time and I’ll guarantee I’ll have an interesting breakdown for you.”

  “You talking tonight or this week?”

  “I’m talking minutes, Alt,” Nessa said. “Like if you try and make a pass at me like you’re thinking of doing.”

  Alt reddened.

  “Or try to convince me that since Ken’s pissed enough at me to leave, my marriage with him is over.”

  Alt reddened some more.

  “You don’t know us enough to predict like that,” Nessa said. “By the way, you only think you can predict the future. You can’t. You’re just picking up other people’s thoughts and plans and integrating them. Which, by the way, is a well-known talent Ken and I call ‘hunches’. Ken gets a lot more of them than I do, but he’s limited to his personal experiences and surroundings. You aren’t. We need you. We need you a whole lot.”

  Alt shook his head, eyes wide.

  “The ability to see around corners we call clairvoyance. Clairvoyance is best when you can use someone else’s eyes, although most clairvoyants don’t bother, instead reconstructing people’s vision from their emotional auras. Ken calls this imaginative projection.”

  Alt turned on Nessa, angry. “Get the fuck out of my head!”

  Finally. Nessa got on her hands and knees and backed away from Alt. She looked up at him like one of the myriad dogs she had been in her life. “Make me. Push me out of your mind. You can do it.”

  Alt closed his eyes and yelled. His mental push nibbled on Nessa’s mind.

  She licked her lips, focused on Alt’s face, and pushed her thoughts all the way inside him, until she could see herself out of his eyes and feel his rock hard erection. She limped his dick and yanked at his mental scabs. Alt panicked, yelled and pushed her out of his mind again.

  “Yah, Alt,” she said, cooing. “Do it, baby.”

  She rubbed against him, her nose filled with his musk. Then the next and the next. She shivered with an orgasm and continued. Then another. And another. Her mind on fire, she let the pleasure flow inside her. She made animal noises. She saw through animal eyes. Dirt her body, leaves and twigs her hair, she entered nature and left her previousness behind. She rubbed and stroked, fueling the fire inside. And again.

  This time, no pleasure. She had done enough, the long expanse of rubbing. Hours and hours. She called without words, for she had none.

  came a mental voice in reply. The name she recognized and understood. Then more words in her mind she didn’t understand. She rubbed up against the next and shivered in hot anticipation. Ready, fully ready. Time passed. The world stood still. More time passed, then motion.

  He arrived.

  Ready, too. She walked over to him, swaying, seductive. Clothes vanished. Impaled. Instant blinding light and pleasure. She held him in her until she fully drained him. She heard words as she collapsed in his arms, words she couldn’t understand. As she faded, she released her hold on the dogs, cats, raccoons, skunks, deer, horses and one lonely cow who hadn’t come home. Those she had called fled as they must.

  Nessa awoke in Ken’s arms, naked, in a shower. She didn’t recognize the place. Immaculately clean. Ken, naked as well, not as dirty as her, washed her as she buried her head in his curly chest hairs. She let the clean water run down her skin and wash off the dirt.

  “You’re back?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What happened?” Ken said. “What did you do to me?”

  “I’m not sure.” Beat. “Besides the obvious. What did I do?”

  “You called me and I couldn’t resist,” Ken said. “I came for you, but I didn’t find you in Alt’s apartment. I wandered, lost, crazy, and found you in a stand of forest about a mile away. I found you standing naked, surrounded by all the world’s animals.” He paused, his words filled with repressed horror. “I’ve never been so horny in my life. I took you without thinking and it was over in a few seconds.”

  Nessa smiled at the thoughts she caught from Ken. “I raped you, not the reverse.”

  Ken winced and turned off the shower. Dirt, twigs and leaves caked the bottom of the tub. “What happened to you?”

  “After I finished cleaning out Alt’s head, I had a fit. He was, um, attracted to me, and I had to remove his desire. Then I had a fit.”

  Ken stepped out of the shower and tried to put her down, but she wiggled and stayed in his arms. He shook his head; instead of using a towel, he dried them telekinetically. “You were a mess. Your hair was all tangled and filled with twigs and leaves, and you smel
led of wild animals and cathouse. Your clothes were ruined, so I left them where I found them.”

  “You’re pissed at me.”

  “I’m not sure,” Ken said. He carried her to the couch in the front room of Alt’s apartment. Alt slept in his bed instead of huddled on the floor where Nessa had left him. “I didn’t want to deal with you any more tonight. You were being intolerable again and I’d had too much of your ‘intolerable’ recently. Then you called me. I thought I had all your tricks stopped. I was wrong.” He paused. “I don’t like not knowing who I am.”

  “Ken, you know that I do impossible things in my fits, things I have barely any control over,” Nessa said. Ken lay down on the couch and Nessa snuggled up beside him. One of Alt’s extra blankets wafted out, unfolded itself, and covered them. The blanket smelled of recent laundering. “I’m sorry about tonight. I get so worked up about failing. I couldn’t let this recruitment fail, and so I pushed too hard.” She rolled back, wiggling to stay on the couch, and stared at the ceiling. “I feel so insignificant. All my adult life, it’s been one failure after another, and I don’t like failing. So I push myself into things that are too difficult, too wrong, or too idiotic, which invites the next failure. The cycle continues. That’s me.”

  “No failure here,” Ken said. “Save that I’m still not convinced that making Alt a mature adult Telepath in one night was a good thing to do. He’s out right now, but I can tell you succeeded. I wonder if there’s going to be anyone inside when he wakes up. If there is, he is going to hate you.”

  Nessa laughed. “He’ll get over it. You got over it.”

  “I was younger and infatuated with you,” Ken said.

  “True. So’s Alt.”

  “Which is the other thing pissing me off.”

  “Not to worry. That’s been taken care of, now.”

  Ken took a deep breath, called a comb, and started to work the tangles out of Nessa’s hair. She purred. “So this was on purpose?”

  “As much as anything is when I’m having a fit, which is to say not. But I don’t disagree with myself about this. Now? I did the right thing.”

  “I was afraid I’d done that,” he said, and patted her abdomen below her belly button. “Normally you have this cute little teek protection against pregnancy keeping the sperm out, but this time, the teek sucked them all into your uterus.”

  “Yes. Twins, a boy and a girl,” Nessa said. True for real, although the fertilized eggs hadn’t yet implanted or anything of the sort, so things might still mess up. “You needn’t fear any more that I’ll go wandering on you. I’m going to be carrying your children. When all the biological stuff gets settled out, of course.”

  “Nessa, this is normally a decision both members of a couple make,” Ken said.

  “Sorry.”

  “Like hell.”

  “Biological clock?”

  “You don’t really understand why you did what you did, do you?” Ken said. Nessa shook her head. “I guess I can’t complain too much, then. It is a Nessa thing to do. What was with the animals, though? You trying out for nature goddess or something?”

  Nessa closed her eyes and turned away. “You could pretend you didn’t notice.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  “It might be something you don’t want to understand.”

  “Bets?”

  Nessa sighed. “I’m not going to vanish on you until these kids are adults.”

  “I hear a ‘but’.”

  He understood her far too well. She wiggled up closer to him. “But I have a scheme I’ve been working on for years and years, to expand my ability to merge with animal minds. A long time ago, I got to where I can reach all the way across the planet to a single animal. That’s how I helped my friend Uffie. I wanted more. Back in Eklutna I pushed myself to where if I’m going for coverage I can get about four hundred miles of Alaskan tundra and nearby ocean.”

  “By coverage, you mean all the animals?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “How small?”

  “Rats and baitfish.”

  Ken grunted and made a ‘sssthk’ sound with his cheeks. “Then my instincts were right when I suspected you might have the power to have created the 99 Gods.”

  “Bastard,” Nessa said, bit a few of his chest hairs, and pulled. “I’m not good enough to extend my coverage across the entire planet, at least with animals. It wasn’t fair of you to remind me of my failure.”

  Ken ignored her whine, but thankfully didn’t mention a certain more showy episode from her past. “What sort of benefit are you trying to get out of this scheme?”

  “What if all the wild animals understand people’s words and are smart enough to stay out of the way of humans? What if wild animals never attacked humans or ate people’s gardens? Wouldn’t the world be a better place? We would be able to let all the wild animals run free without all the worries.”

  “You think you can do that? I thought you wanted to be one with Korua. Besides, this wouldn’t stick. Eventually, you’d die.”

  “Eventually nothing,” Nessa said. “When I push myself into the animals, I leave my body behind. If I don’t come back, my body’ll die within days, if not hours. The only question haunting me is how long would I be able to stay what I became. That’s what I meant when I said I wanted to become another collective like Korua or Opartuth. I think, with their help, I can hold myself together to become effectively immortal. I have to become a collective first, or at least apprentice collective, before I can do the immortality thing. Not that me, as Nessa, survives the initial push. Whatever I became would be totally new.”

  “How very Snow Queen. You’re crazy.”

  “People have said so, on occasion,” Nessa said, a grin etching itself across her worn face. “But now you don’t have to worry about me doing this any time soon. Not with a couple of children to love and nurture, so they grow up to become normal instead of the scarred-up messes we are.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that will work,” Ken said, half asleep. Nessa let him fall all the way asleep. She had more to talk about concerning their relationship, but this was enough for now.

  “I’m awake,” Alt said, through the closed bedroom door. “Now that you’ve ruined my life, what do you want out of me?”

  “We need to talk some more,” Nessa said. “You need to eat breakfast. You can’t hide in your room all day.”

  Alt muttered a curse and unlocked his bedroom door. He stalked around his small clean kitchen and made himself breakfast. Nessa and Ken, Nessa in clothes Ken had fetched from the car, waited at the table. Alt sat and looked at his push-pin wall.

  “My old analysis of the Gods is shit,” he said. “I can do better now.”

  “Good,” Ken said. “Do so.”

  Alt glowered and ate.

  “We need you to find recruits for us,” Nessa said. She wasn’t sure Korua had planned things this way, but Alt’s abilities were a perfect match for their needs. “People who are willing to give up their lives for our cause. People with useful talents. Telepaths if you can find them, Mindbound if you can’t.”

  “Mindbound? People you’re going to turn into Telepaths?”

  Nessa shook her head. “Nobody can turn a Mindbound into a Telepath.” And keep them functionally sane in the process, Nessa amended. She didn’t blush, but came close. “We need Mindbound because Mindbound are naturally good at resisting mental control, and the Gods are quite gifted in that area.”

  “Then you’ll need people who are already so pissed at the Gods they’re willing to throw everything away of their lives to join you,” Alt said. The frown didn’t leave his face, but Nessa’s idea leeched some of the anger from him. “Single people, people without attachments.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Ken took out a jewelry box and opened it. “Nessa and I are wearing the wrong rings. Some of the people you’re supposed to find fit them.” Inside
the jewelry box were two new, fancier, wedding bands. Nessa licked her lips, horny again.

  Alt looked at the wedding bands on Ken’s and Nessa’s fingers, and shook his head. “Those two people aren’t ready yet,” he said. He spooned more cereal and thought; Ken put away the new wedding bands. “How’d I figure this out?”

  “Your clairvoyance working with your hunches and your ability to read people’s thoughts and plans in their auras,” Nessa said. “What you showed me last night. You’ve got immense range and you use it instinctively. You’ve got real good hunches. Use your feel for things to find us the right people, then.”

  Alt shrugged. “Okay,” he said, without the slightest hesitation or concentration. “There’s a young woman in Ohio, an um Mindbound who’s already looking for allies. She knows how to fight.”

  “Good,” Nessa said. “We’ll get her next.”

  “There’s also someone close to us who’s been watching us,” Alt said. “He’s not a Telepath or a God, but he’s got tricks like we do.”

  “Name of John, right?” Ken asked.

  “What?” Nessa said.

  “Uh huh,” Alt said.

  “Watching us?” Nessa said. “How?” Then she got it. So that was what Ken had been saying to Lorenzi when she had left the two alone to ‘negotiate’?

  This wasn’t anything she wanted to understand.

  “Who is he? What is he?”

  “Let me tell you a story,” Ken said, and leaned back.

  Nessa stood and paced while Ken told the story. What she wanted to do was bang her head against the wall. Lorenzi using his magic. She couldn’t imagine a worse disaster, save that, yes, the 99 Gods were worse.

  She couldn’t find any chocolate, either. She had eaten the last.

  30. (John)

  John closed down the scry and sighed. He stood, bent over to pop his back into place with a grunt and stalked out of the hotel bathroom. Reed had taken over the faux office desk in their one bedroom extended stay suite, with his laptop computer (never on his lap, which confused John) attached to something he called broadband internet (John didn’t want to know, save that it didn’t use a cord or rope or whatever those strange things were called) and he sat in front of the computer, engrossed.

  After the first scry, the novelty had worn off and Reed tired of watching over John’s shoulder. John got a doughnut from the box, a cup of coffee from the coffeemaker Reed had ingeniously mastered, and sat down on the now-folded-up couch. Lumpy, uncomfortable, folded up couch. John muttered a curse in Old German, disgusted. Reed peered up. He had dark circles under his eyes, out all last night, sampling the Moline nightlife. John weighed the possibility of danger in Reed’s nightly wanderings against Reed’s need to continue his screwy social life, and decided a curfew wasn’t warranted. Yet.

  “What’s pissed you off?” Reed said.

  Well, if John hadn’t wanted his emotions read, he shouldn’t have selected a Telepath like Reed. He took a sip of coffee. “Other than too much smog on the noggin’, I’m angry because Vanessa and Kendrick have changed sides. They’re now after Atlanta and Miami.”

  “Damn,” Reed said. “Dubuque really got to them, didn’t he?”

  John nodded. His eavesdropping spell had worked fine, save that the new Telepath had somehow noticed his spying. “Well, yes and no. They don’t trust Dubuque, and if they capture Atlanta or Miami, they’re going to turn them over to Portland.”

  “You think they can pull it off, don’t you.”

  John waved his hands in the air. “If they can recruit a couple of more Telepaths to their group and do so quickly, yes,” he said. He stared at the print of a Mississippi Riverboat on the far wall of the suite. The American penchant for bad art and prints thereof disgusted him, the worst of many annoying American character flaws. The flaw stemmed from their long-ago sacrifice of their aristocrats to karmically empower their absurdly large middle class. Quantity over quality, never a good trade, in John’s opinion. “Now, I suspect they’ll only get one chance. Once the Gods realize the Telepaths endanger them, they’re going to get frosted and it’s going to be open season on Telepaths. At which point they’ll join Dubuque’s personal entourage in order to survive.”

  “If they’re on the other side, should we try and stop them?” Reed said.

  John cleared his throat. “How, pray tell? I’m not a killer, and from abundant previous experience I know Telepaths of their power level cannot be swayed by mundane force. I can remove their personal abilities the same way I can remove the ability to be a magician, but they’ve seen the trick and they’ll never let me near them if I’m thinking of using the trick on them. Nor do I want to. I owe them too damn much to ruin. Nor am I going to warn Miami of a damned thing.”

  “You’re really ticked.” Reed leaned back in the faux office chair and stuck his feet up on the table next to his tiny computer. The chair creaked ominously under his minor weight. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you so ticked off.”

  “I thought they were on my side,” John said. “I was positive they were on my side.” Despite their protestations, he still thought of those two as children. Right now, he thought they needed spanking.

  “Perhaps Dubuque got to their minds the same way he got to the minds of the other Gods?”

  “Perhaps. This assumes our analysis is correct and Dubuque got to Portland, Phoenix and Montreal. For all we know, he persuaded them logically. We didn’t have an eye in Dubuque’s place when the meeting went down and all we have for evidence is what Atlanta told Vanessa and Kendrick and what Dubuque and his crew said and did when they met those two.” John finished his cup of coffee, put down a half-eaten doughnut, and stood. The room wasn’t large enough and wasn’t the least bit homey. John wanted to leave, get out into the countryside and breathe some real air for a while.

  “Can you get an eye into Dubuque’s place?” Reed said. “He has quite a few flunkies, and surely you can get to his personal attendants somehow.”

  “That’s very risky,” John said. He put his hands on his well-padded hips, threw back his shoulders, and stretched. Reed didn’t respond. “Unfortunately, this is a risk we probably need to take. I’ve already got some ideas about how to do it safely.” He didn’t like to expose his abilities so early in the game. He didn’t see any choice in the matter, though.

  “Speaking of risks, I think we’ve got a problem,” Reed said.

  “We’ve got lots of problems.” John glanced out the window, which showed a parking lot and a busy highway filled with morning commuters. While he had been scrying, he tried for the third time to contact his order, and as with his first two attempts, he hadn’t been successful. He had even called up a magical projection and traveled to their headquarters, which risked a chance they would decide to find a new magician-hunter and send the poor fool after John. He found the headquarters deserted. Not long deserted; the dust had been thin. He kicked himself that he hadn’t checked up on them more often in the last century, but he had found their attitude about the modern world difficult to stomach after the first World War. They had been hurt more by the loss of the old ways than he had, and the dissolution of the European monarchies and the Ottoman Empire coupled by the spread of their old bugaboo, democracy, had left his order both strapped for resources and alienated from the modern world. He only found one clue, a wadded up piece of paper in the personal trashcan of the order’s third in command. The scrap had mentioned speakers of Turkish and Armenian, supplied a phone number for ‘the grotto Monastery’ (which John didn’t recognize), and used the phrases ‘ceiling as guide’ and ‘under storage rooms or dwellings? Seismic?’ He would have to research the terms in use. He wondered what his crazy order was up to this time. Moving about had never been their gig.

  “Come over here, please, if you would,” Reed said, more firmly. “I want to show you what I’ve found.”

  John dragged a chair from the suite??
?s dining room table over to Reed and sat down. He studied the screen of Reed’s so called ‘laptop’ and couldn’t understand anything. “Okay, I’m here. Goose it.”

  Reed puzzled at him for a moment, and turned back to his computer. “First, we got an email response to the postings you had me put on various God-frequented message boards,” Reed said. He pointed to one of the overlapping screen documents. John read.

  “So a couple of Gods are willing to talk to me and say they’re on the way,” John said. The signature at the bottom of the letter wasn’t a signature, but typed at the bottom were the names ‘Singularity’ and ‘Inventor’. “How do you know this is legit?”

  “We don’t, though the email address used matches one ‘Singularity’ has used on four of the groups I’ve found.” Reed lost himself in thought for a minute. John had thought it screwy that some of the Gods communicated to each other using these internet group thingies. Reed had been bothered more by the fact these were open ‘user groups’ anyone could join, and the fact the groups hadn’t been overwhelmed by something called ‘spam’ and by groupies and worshippers. Reed’s mystery didn’t bother John. Some God had likely cursed them to work properly. Reed had just given him a funny look when he made the comment. “They said they’d pay us a personal visit. Doesn’t that mean your protections aren’t working and any of the Gods can find you?”

  “Magic,” John said. “I want people to be able to find me who want to help, so I have my defenses set up for this. If they want to harm me, I can’t be found.”

  Reed closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I can’t see how this crap works. None of your tricks make any logical sense to me.”

  “Magic isn’t logical, it’s psychological,” John said. He had used that tag line with his workers for about a century, as he found the comment easy for others to understand. “In some way, magic is alive and thinks for you. This is one of the reasons why magic’s so dangerous. If you ask for help, if you’re not careful, you create your helper. If you do evil, you create evil.”

  “Then why did you spend all those years turning off other magicians?” Reed said. “Why didn’t you just convince them to only do good?”

  John smiled at Reed’s centuries old argument. “What appears good to one person may not be good in an absolute sense. The infernal powers do exist, and we’ll likely run into them before this is over, Reed, so be prepared…and they are extremely talented at leading people astray.”

  “Uh, John, now that you’re…” Reed started, interrupted himself, and reddened.

  “Of course I’m worried about myself and what I’m doing,” John said. “But my backing is pure and religious. I know from my long experience that magicians with religious backing take the longest to fall to the infernal forces, often long enough to become saints, and many of them remove their own ability to do magic when it becomes too hazardous for them to continue.”

  “Then what’s the big worry?”

  “I’m far too powerful, and always have been, to be able to remove my own ability to do magic,” John said. “For this reason I’m sticking to informative and defensive magic.” For the moment.

  “Your defensive magic you used when you were attacked sounded offensive to me. Pardon my question.”

  “Don’t you worry. Self-defense is acceptable,” John said. “Wish safety, create safety. On the other hand, other risks do exist, dangerous risks. Those risks are why I took the new oath I told you about. In the long term, I’m no longer trustworthy enough to continue my old task.”

  “I just hope you’re not fooling yourself,” Reed said. He did something to his computer and the screen changed. “Take a look at this.”

  John read. “That’s me.” He even recognized the clothes, the ones he had worn when he went to visit Dubuque. He read some more. The news service article listed him as the likely suspect in numerous crimes he had no knowledge of, several of which he didn’t even understand. The article went on to say John was an ‘evil magician’ and an ‘alleged demon’, in the service of ‘Atlanta.’ He was, in the modern terminology, ‘wanted for questioning’. “What’s all this mean?” John said, and pointed to the accusations he did not understand.

  “You’re familiar with how websites work?”

  John shook his head.

  “Okay, hacking. Someone owns the name and puts on the website associated with the website name information they want published on the web. You are accused of changing this information without authorization, on hundreds of websites.” Reed moved the computer’s ‘mouse’ around and clicked. “Here’s an example.”

  John even recognized the website, since the site had the same name as one of the television networks. He read. The article started ‘Philip Johnson, an aide to the mayor of Cincinnati, has embezzled over three million dollars of federal government aid by funneling the stolen money through non-existent religious charities’ and went on to give some impressive details. “This is a hacked story,” Reed said. “Originally, the story had been about how the mayor shut down all of Cincinnati’s animal shelters because of inhumane euthanasia procedures.”

  “I didn’t do any such thing,” John said, confused. “Why am I being accused of this?”

  “Because the hacking behind this bit of alteration is otherwise impossible, at least according to the technical articles I’ve read on the subject. It takes magic to do something like this.” Reed shrugged. “Either that or someone just upped and bent the mind of several investigator types into believing you’re the one involved.”

  “Bah,” John said. He traced a few helpful symbols in the air and called up a picture of the perpetrator of this ‘hacking’ crime on to the ‘laptop’ screen. The screen blanked for a moment before returning to its normal incomprehensible self. “Double bah. Blocked. One of the 99 is behind this so-called ‘hacking.’”

  “Oh, great,” Reed said. “Then the internet isn’t safe from them, either. We’re hosed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if they can hack the internet, they’ll make it so you can’t stick your head up in public. They’ll be able to ruin your name and have every police agency in the world out after you.”

  “I think I understand.” All this internet stuff made John’s head spin. Sudden cold sweat covered his arms as a bad thought came to him. “Back away for a moment. I’ve got a bit of magic to do.”

  John called for the balance information of his dozens of worldwide bank accounts. The informative pictures came up on the screen, and each showed a summary of an empty bank account. He called for a picture of the thief who had pirated his money, and a picture of a well-dressed man in a suit appeared on the screen.

  “Someone as old as you should know that the nail that stands up gets hammered down,” the man in the suit said. Then he vanished. The screen now glowed a flat blue. Reed typed. The screen didn’t change.

  “The bastard gave me a blue screen of death!” Reed said. “How’d he do that? I made sure this piece of crap laptop was firewalled.”

  “Magic,” John said. “He’s the God Desire, one of the so-called Seven Suits.” John stood and paced. “I hope you haven’t gotten too comfortable with luxury, such as it is, because my easy money’s been wiped out. The Gods have stolen my money as well as ruined my reputation.” He had several tens of millions in gold and silver bullion stashed away in various places, most in thick vaults in Switzerland, just for disasters like this. The bullion wasn’t easy to get to, for obvious reasons. He would have to start work on getting access, on top of all the other things.

  “Crap,” Reed said. He turned off his computer and tried to start the computer up again. It didn’t start. He closed the lid with a frustrated slam. “I guess the Gods aren’t all technophobes. That one broke my computer.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “What do you think I am, some sort of computer nerd?” Reed said. “I’m a damned social worker!”
/>
  John paced. This wasn’t good. The Gods were after him in a big way, bigger than any cause he knew of justified. Something else here danced the tango, something he knew he wouldn’t like.

  31. (Dave)

  “This is just so boring, Dad,” Ron said.

  “Sit still, please. I took Shannon and Stacy to your Pop Warner practice yesterday evening,” Dave said. He felt better today, but the wooden bleacher seats made his back ache. His eleven year old son squirmed and elbowed his younger sister Stacy, who stared in rapt attention at Shannon’s cheer practice. Dave wondered if he had said something wrong again. He knew at an intellectual level his kids weren’t little adults, but he had a hard time convincing himself to talk and think that way. Olinda had probably handled it differently, back before they had to let her go.

  He watched the cheer practice and the mouthy coach’s praise and rebukes. He hadn’t known kid pseudo-sports could be so organized and so serious. A part of him hoped he would be able to get some new clients for DPMJ and go back to work, freeing up the money for another nanny to take over chauffeur responsibilities, but another part found this crazy time-wasting activity heartwarming. These were his children; watching them progress filled a need inside him he didn’t know he had.

  However, he could only watch Shannon’s not-so-skillful jumping and tumbling for so long before his attention wandered. He took out his cellphone and surreptitiously leafed through the internet headlines. Nairobi had joined Khartoum and Accra in the African God war-stomp business, although Nairobi hadn’t laid waste to any armies. He had taken away their weapons, as the Gods had dealt with North Korea, and appeared to them as some sort of giant-sized projection, ordering them to stop their fighting. Dave wondered if this would work or whether the Gods would need to supply another stronger example.

  “Dad, this is mucho boring,” Ron said. “Olinda let us…”

  “I don’t want to hear about what Olinda did,” Dave said. “Think of this as building a new life skill, one of patience.” Ron rolled his eyes. Dave went back to his cell, viewing a transcript of today’s speech by Dubuque, an argument that even a belief in the literal truth of the Bible does not preclude either the vast expanses of geological time or evolution. ‘Poetic truth is still literal truth, especially for people who didn’t have words for concepts such as ‘billion’ and ‘solar system’. Evolution is a means of ordering life, and is a piece of God’s creation itself. Since God created everything, and since evolution exists, why would God need to intervene otherwise? He’s already created everything.’ Oooh, the fundies are going to hate this argument, Dave thought. Dubuque’s words appealed to Dave a lot, and to Dave’s environmental geologist training.

  He waited until Ron had calmed down and gone back to staring a different direction before he whispered a question to Stacy. “What did Olinda let you do during each other’s practices?” he said.

  Stacy gave Dave a blank look and didn’t answer. She, at least, remained interested in Shannon’s practice.

  “I want my Gamester, Dad,” Ron said, from his other side.

  Oh.

  What a splendid idea.

  All three kids wanted a snack after they returned home, and Dave made them microwave popcorn. Ron had his Gamester set on the Lias life-is-a-soundtrack social media site, listening to the boom-boom-boom feed of some football player as he went through a supposedly average day. He wasn’t sure what to make of Lias or the whole ‘my life as if I’m starring in a movie’ fad, but he had at least checked Ron’s Lias feed to make sure it was set to G-rated.

  Tiff rolled in just before nine, perfect timing to give Stacy a bedtime hug. Dave spent a few minutes watching Shannon suck in a streamed anime cartoon that made no sense to him at all and followed Ron through several levels of a flashy and equally pointless video game that made even less sense to him, until Tiff interrupted him with a tap on his shoulder.

  “Dave?” she said, motioning with her fingers. He followed her out of the game room. “If you’re going to be here and help, you need to check to make sure the kids did their homework before you take them to their practices,” Tiff said.

  “Homework? I didn’t think the public schools did homework.” Why else had he and Tiff sneered at the public school system for all these years?

  Tiff gave him a blank sideways glance. “Unlike the Mile High Academy, they don’t get homework every night, so it’s not a routine, but they do have homework on occasion,” Tiff said, tapping her fingers together as she led him into her office. “They bring the homework home in a special folder.”

  “Okay,” Dave said, vaguely annoyed. He hadn’t thought much of homework when he had been a kid, and he didn’t see any reason to change his mind now. Busywork.

  “In addition, I got a phone call from Ron’s coach. Ron’s been acting up in the Pop Warner practices again, refusing…”

  “Why do I need to know this?” Dave said. “I’m not their…”

  “Dave, come on,” Tiff said, turning to him. “You set an example for Ron; and if you talked to him on the way…”

  “I’m not the one acting up in practices…”

  “No, you set an example by not paying attention to details, which gives Ron an excuse not to cooperate with Coach Joe,” Tiff said.

  “I’m not what who?” Dave said. Tiff frowned and Dave frowned back. “How’s Ron even supposed to know I don’t pay attention to details, if I’m even doing such a thing? This isn’t anything we’ve talked about.”

  “He’s got eyes and a mind,” Tiff said.

  “He’s only eleven.”

  “You need to stop flipping back and forth between thinking they’re adults and thinking they’re infants,” Tiff said, hands on her hips. “Did you take your full complement of pills today, Dave?”

  Dave gritted his teeth, annoyed. “I think I’d rather not talk about this now,” he said. He turned and stalked out of Tiff’s office, angry enough to throw expensive office knick-knacks. He didn’t like to be criticized like some school-age truant by anybody, let alone by his wife. Chewed out in her office! He needed to dredge up another client trip and get himself out of this place, he told himself, even a client trip without any hope. He refused to let anyone think of him as an invalid who should be in a hospice.

  He stalked to the back of the house, exited the piano room to the deck overlooking the long backyard meadow and, at the bottom, the rocky intermittent stream marking the boundary between their property and the Mitchell’s. The stress and the medication made him lightheaded. The air outside made him shiver, cold enough to make him wonder if some early season snow might be on the way.

  Damn Tiff! Why did she make it so hard? He did everything she asked regarding the kid-care issues, but he just didn’t obsess about them the way Tiff obsessed about everything. He hadn’t done all these activities when he had been a kid. Hell, at Ron’s age, he had actually run with a gang! Okay, that’s my New York Puerto Rican background showing, he told himself. But still…

  A light flicked on over at the Mitchell’s, then another. They worked Tiff hours, too. Crazy. Didn’t anyone his age and current social class come home at a reasonable hour anymore? What had Steve said on the subject? Oh, right. The bigger and fancier the kitchen, the less often the place got used for cooking anything except in the microwave oven.

  What would a society of people without any non-work life look like? His marriage, perhaps?

  The French doors creaked open behind him. Tiff. Dave stiffened and leaned out over the waist-high deck railing, pretending he hadn’t heard a thing. Tiff walked over to near him and put her hands on the railing, five feet away.

  “I’ve got something to show you, Dave. Then I need to get back to work,” Tiff said.

  Ah. That’s why she had led him to her office, not to chew him out. He grunted an answer.

  “I’m sorry about earlier,” Tiff said. “I know I’m making things miserable for you, but, he
ll, I just don’t see it until after I say it. I’m not going out of my way to do this. I’m not trying to fight with you.”

  He grunted again, believing the opposite.

  “Say something, Dave.”

  “I don’t like having my life run for me,” he said. “I’m an adult, despite what you think.”

  “Dammit, I’m just trying to help,” she said. “You could make this easier for me, you know.”

  He glanced over at her; she had taken a step back from the railing and crossed her arms. He grunted again and turned back to watch the Mitchell’s lights.

  She didn’t speak for nearly two minutes. “I’m cold,” she said. She paused; he didn’t respond. “I do want to show you something.”

  He sighed. “Fine.”

  “I’m Marcie,” the woman said. “You’re Dave?”

  He nodded, forcing himself to be open minded. Tiff sat beside him, running the fancy teleconferencing set-up in her office. “You work in Portland’s organization?”

  “Yes, Dave. I reviewed your case, passed the info on to the Boss, and she says I can make the offer.”

  Dave licked his lips. “Your boss?”

  “Portland,” Marcie said. “You didn’t know? I’m one of Portland’s Wise Shepherds. I get direct access.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dave said. “The name means nothing to me.” He hadn’t spent much time in his research on Portland and her organization, only long enough to realize Portland preferred women with Arts and Letters degrees and didn’t appreciate businesses or people who had ever made more than a dime of profit.

  “We’re new. Boss is experimenting with some new methods of Divine support, a new way to help her meet the demands of her responsibilities as a Territorial God.” Marcie smiled. She looked all of thirty, unattractive, overweight and serious. She reminded him of a caricature of a woman as an anthropomorphized tuna. “You’d be getting in on the ground floor of what’s likely to be a large operation.”

  “If I may ask,” Dave said, falling into his standard negotiation mode, honed for years by his client work at DPMJ, “what does this have to do with my request for medical help?”

  “This gets around the paperwork issues, the waiting time issues, and the fact you’re not a resident of the Boss’s territory,” Marcie said. “You sign on with us and the first thing we do is get you cured up.”

  Interesting. He wondered if the offer also came with a sex change operation and an unstoppable urge to gain weight. He banished his unkind and uncharitable thoughts. “What would my responsibilities be in this new job?” he said. “As you said, I live outside of Portland’s, um, territory.”

  “This isn’t a job, but a calling,” Marcie said, her voice taking on a strange tenor. “To start with, you would be helping us set up the Wise Shepherd organization. Once things are set up, you would be working in your professional specialty, finding, categorizing and leading other Wise Shepherds in environmental clean-up efforts.”

  He should have expected something this screwy. About to say something about how this sounded interesting, and thinking about how much good he could do in the world, environmentally, with a God backing him, he stopped cold. Cold, as in shivery goosepimpled arms watery eyes cold. One of his woo-woo moments, so familiar from before his illness, and so uncommon, now. He raised his hand for a moment to collect himself, and his scattered thoughts. Working for Portland was a bad idea, he realized. He wasn’t sure why, but it was. “You want me to do this from Denver?”

  “On your application, you did indicate you were open to travel,” Marcie said. Dave nodded. “During the initial startup period, and certainly while you’re being cured, you’ll come here. Later, when you’re doing the environmental work, you’d live at home and travel as normal up and down Portland’s territory and Boise’s territory, where you live, as Boise’s signaled an interest in this work.”

  Dave knew Portland’s territory stretched from Los Angeles in the south to British Columbia in the north, mainly the coastal areas but inland as well. Boise’s territory covered the intermountain West from the Grand Canyon on north, all the way to the arctic. Phoenix’s territory lay to the south, and Dubuque’s to the east.

  “Well, okay,” Dave said, his shoulders clenched up, and backing away from the screen. “What sort of salary is involved?”

  Marcie frowned. “As I said, this is a calling, not a job. No salary per se, but you would get travel and living expenses while you’re doing your Wise Shepherd duties. In addition, you would receive some amount of Boss’s loaned power. We need to do an in-depth interview with you to figure out what sort of loaned power you can handle, but at a minimum this would involve better health, better physical stamina, and the ability to talk directly to the Boss by what technically isn’t prayer but that’s how we refer to it because we don’t have a better term, yet.”

  “Okay, I’ll think about your offer,” Dave said. Beside him, Tiff stiffened. He gave Marcie his email address and extracted one from her, and had Tiff shut down the teleconference.

  “Slavery,” Dave said. He didn’t want to mention his moment of strangeness and his unnatural fears, so he went with a ‘no salary’ complaint. That wasn’t the way his world worked.

  Tiff took a deep breath, about to say something before she bit it back.

  “Yes?” Dave said.

  “I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss this offer,” Tiff said. “For instance, to do the clean-up work they’re going to need to hire people to do the dirty work, such as TPMJ. I read nothing in this agreement precluding you from working at TPMJ. Or owning TPMJ. They encourage this sort of thing.”

  “You’re talking cronyism and collusion, then. Corrupt business practices.”

  “The Gods don’t look at such things the way we non-Gods do; cronyism is fine as long as the people involved are qualified, which these Gods appear to be able to tell with a divine glance,” Tiff said. “This is all in this new load of information on the North American Gods I prepared for you today. I’m starting to get a good feel for their personalities, strengths and weaknesses. I included my analysis, as well.”

  Tiff had made up her mind. Dave sighed. “I’ll take a look.”

  Tiff sighed back. “Thanks.” She stood, walked over to her main desk set-up, and sat down. “Now, if you don’t mind…”

  She had work to do.

  Dave left, anger, fear and the willies cycling through him, confusing him. Doing things Tiff’s way hadn’t worked. No, he would choose on his own which God he liked best, one who didn’t trigger any icky gut feelings, and approach him.

  “Hi, Pete,” Dave said. “Got a minute?”

  Pete looked up from his paperwork. “Sure. Hadn’t expected you to be in today.”

  Today was a good day, but his aching back hadn’t gotten on well with the wooden bleachers at cheer practice and he sat gingerly. “I’m on my way back out for another client search trip, and I have some vouchers I need signing. I’d also like to touch base, and find out how things are going in the rest of the company.”

  Pete Diaz nodded, quickly signed the vouchers, and leaned back in his chair. “Terrible. Hanson Industries and Malco Gold both froze their accounts.” Both of those clients did a small amount of business with DPMJ. “They’re still in business, but they’re cutting way back. There’s a rumor going around that there’s a bunch of unexpected gold flooding the system and a crash in gold prices is inevitable. Jose’s convinced the Gods are making the damned stuff.”

  “More likely doing divine mining,” Dave said. “With the reality-warping willpower crap they do, they should be able to pull gold out of seawater without bothering with mines.” He had learned a lot about the Gods’ talents and tricks in his research, enough to know how much trouble they could cause if they wanted to.

  “That’s a cheery thought,” Pete said, after taking a sip of coffee. “Your client search turn up anything?”

  “Just a b
unch of companies running scared and doing the turtle routine,” Dave said. “I did run across a rumor indicating there might be some work in a few months, perhaps later, involving God-sponsored environmental clean-up work.”

  “How real is this rumor?”

  “Direct from a flunky of Portland’s,” Dave said.

  “Hmm. That’s worth keeping in mind,” Pete said. “Good luck on your trip to the Midwest.”

  Dave nodded. “Thanks. I think I’m going to need it.”

  Dave held out his hand, shook the functionary’s hand, and introduced himself.

  “Jeremy Lundy,” the Dubuque functionary said, and motioned for Dave to sit. He hadn’t expected a donut shop, but, well, whatever worked. “What can I do for you?”

  Dave explained his medical needs, ending by saying “modern medicine can’t cope.”

  “I hear that a lot,” Jeremy said. “You came to the wrong place, though. The Living Saint and his organization’s moved to Oklahoma City, where he’s decided to start a ministry. We’re going to formally announce it next week Friday.”

  Ten days from now. Just his luck.

  “I’d expected something preliminary,” Dave said. “I’m sure I need to fill out some paperwork and arrange for another appointment. I checked on the Internet and couldn’t find anything appropriate online. I guess your operation’s just getting underway and you’re falling behind on your website updates. Understandable.”

  “Actually, we’re trying to do things differently,” Jeremy said. “Dubuque looks at what he’s doing as a religious calling, not a miracle-for-hire business.”

  “I understand,” Dave said. This sounded a lot better to him than the Portland Wise Shepherd bureaucracy and their shenanigans. And he didn’t feel any of his woo-woo willies. “Well, I can tell you I like what I’ve seen of Dubuque and what I’ve read about him and his message.”

  “Why don’t you come down to Oklahoma City for the Sunday service,” Jeremy said. “I guarantee you’ll not just believe, you’ll feel the message in your soul.”