Dana turned, still angry. “You’re as psychotic as the rest of them.”
He nodded, and shrugged.
“I’m not fit company.”
“No problem,” Dave said.
Dana didn’t answer. He decided to bull forward, his favorite tactic. He moved closer and put his hand lightly on Dana’s shoulder, to hint she might deign to turn and face him. “Talk. I’ll listen. Talking helps.”
Dana did turn toward him and Dave removed his hand. She looked more stern than angry. “I’m the regent of Atlanta’s old territory, until Bob – the Kid God – matures,” Dana said. “In loco parentis. He’s not human, though. He’s maturing at a week a day right now, I think. A few days ago he and Lydia went and got intimate, and I can’t stop their stupidity. I tried, but all I did was trigger a big fight. Now they’re flaunting their affair around me and I can’t take the emotional stress anymore.”
Ouch. “My kids, who are younger, will yank my chain repeatedly if they find something that works. At least until they get bored.” Dana glowered. “How old is this Lydia, anyway?”
“She just turned nineteen.”
“Well, remember what you were like as a nineteen year old? All those hormones and disastrous relationships?”
Dana glared at him for a moment, opened her mouth to say something…before interrupting herself and turning away.
“Dana?”
“There’s something wrong,” she said. “I want to confide in you, but I don’t know you from Adam, and you’re not using any Indigo tricks on me. Is this some sort of mental control?”
“Yes and no. You’re wearing the problem on your left hand and the trick isn’t working,” Dave said.
“Darn,” Dana said. “Okay, okay. Telepathic idiocy.” Dave raised his own left hand, showing his ring. Dana sighed at the direction of the conversation. “Are you, perchance, hitting on me?”
Dave stopped cold, Nessa echoes bouncing through his memories. Dammit! “Is there anywhere we can sit around here? It’s too chilly out here to stand.” In many senses of the word.
Dana led them to a fallen tree, wide enough to sit on and long enough to give Dana some comfort distance. While they walked, Dave weighed conversational gambits. This situation wasn’t as bad as when his former friend Steve had gotten cold feet about his former friend Marty. He knew from his relationship conversations with Steve not to hold back. He hoped the approach would work here. For one thing, Dana wielded the power of a God, and his immunity sat in a tent a quarter mile away pissed off at him for making time with another woman. It wouldn’t take much to turn him into a crispy critter.
“I wasn’t hitting on you, Dana, but you wouldn’t have brought it up if you didn’t have some attraction toward me,” Dave said. “Do you want to know why?”
“Let me guess,” Dana said, picking at the bark with her fingers and not meeting his eyes. “This idiotic backwards marriage thing has taken over all of our minds and made us carnally attracted to each other.” Spoken as if such a thing might be the darkest evil.
“No, Dana. What’s happening is the psi echoes involved are drawing compatible personalities, making the attraction a second order effect. Add in the surprise factor, from running into all these compatibles, and of course you’re feeling a bit hassled.”
“Elitist.”
“Look in a mirror lately?”
“You’re not going to score many points with me if you continue to make comments like that,” Dana said.
“I’m not trying to score points, I’m trying to help. Win you over with logic.”
Instead of incinerating him or something equally appropriate, Dana surprised him by moving closer. “That’s my line, Dave. Ice cold heart, ice cold logic, the rational economics of personal behavior and the like.”
Dave nodded. “Uh huh. You’ll fit in nicely, with Nessa the Snow Queen and Elorie the Heartbreaker.” He smiled. “You’re, um, Mt. Dana the unconquerable and glacially formidable. My guess.”
She didn’t smile. “What does this say about you and Ken, then?” she asked, scoring points herself.
“Or Orlando?” Dave said, with no hesitation.
Dana chewed on her lip, undone. Old and crafty beat youth and talent today, much to youth’s shock. She turned toward him, her eyes almost pleading. “I don’t know what to do with Orlando. On any level.”
“I’ll let Elorie handle that one,” Dave said, smiling. Dana still didn’t smile back. He sighed. “Look, if I wasn’t already married, I would have a hard time turning down a date with you.” Dana was just, well, wow.
Dana reddened. “I know.”
Dave smiled. “Perfect. I’ve got something for you, a suggestion all of us in the family are all one mind about giving, you might say.” He took out a worn credit-card sized manila envelope and handed the envelope to Dana. She held the envelope for a moment, and then shook Nessa and Ken’s two original wedding bands onto the palm of her hand. “Note that your finger size matches Elorie’s and mine matches Orlando’s.”
“Um. We already have rings. We’re already married.”
“Your backwards marriage has gotten messed up somehow.” He felt like he walked through knee-high mud. Perhaps this violated the veiled rule about the ‘why’ and ‘how’ stuff being taboo. He gave a mind-shielded middle finger at the entire idea. “These rings are for you and Orlando, for you to spring on him at the right moment. Don’t ignore them, they’ve got good karma.”
“Isn’t the man supposed to propose?”
“Not always. Elorie proposed to me.”
Dana closed her eyes before closing her fist around the rings, crushing the manila envelope. “Backwards.”
“Exactly.” Ken proposed to Nessa, but she refused; later, she proposed back to him in front of St. Knick’s church. “It’s your job to arrange this, Dana.”
“I can’t do any such thing! Orlando’s too difficult, and I don’t want to be another Nessa Binglehauser meat-puppet!” Dana said, and then covered her mouth in embarrassment over her blurt.
“A real fear,” Dave said. He decided to gamble, and took Dana’s hand. “Talk to Elorie. She can explain this better than I can. Besides…” He doubled the gamble and pushed his mind shields over her, the usual persuader. “…I can help you. Telepathic immunity will help you think more clearly.”
“Oh!” Dana stared off into the distance. “You and Elorie need to get Portland to train you. There’s so much more you can do with this, and Portland’s the only one I know with the brilliance to figure out how the training’s supposed to be done. I can sense your potential. You’re as much of a weapon as I am.”
Dave yanked his hand off Dana’s as if her hand had burned his. “Okay, okay, point made. You’re as big an anomaly as the rest of us.” As big an ice cube as well. “You don’t have to rub it in.”
Dana turned her big eyes toward his and sucked in his soul. “Dave, if you’re right, consider how the pairs involved are relatively equal…” He had only thought that, but she had picked up on his thought anyway. “…then consider the fact I’m somehow gotten myself paired with a God.”
“Errr. Right. You have a point?” You pair up with her, Dave, and you’ll be a second banana forever – something said in the back of his mind.
So what – he thought. He would trade leadership in an instant to be second banana to someone like Dana, someone who mattered as much as she did.
Tiff would eat your balls for lunch for even thinking such a ridiculous thought, the something concluded in the back of his mind.
“Yes,” Dana said. “My point? I’m not a God. I’m afraid I’m not the one for Orlando, or he for me.”
“I wouldn’t bet my life or my soul on this bit of logic, Dana.” Dana’s comment tripped through his mind. Ken and Nessa matched in power, both top end Telepaths. He and Elorie were also a good match, both powerful in their respective immunities. Dana, albeit a Regent and Supported, wasn’t a God. Was Dana on to something, here, or just reaching for straws,
doing pattern recognition based on random data? She did have the rep for being the most powerful Supported, though.
“In fact,” Dave said, “I expect you’re going to find a way to match Orlando, then…”
Dana glared. “Don’t go there, please. I’m a bit touchy about my so-called unique so-called gifts.”
He nodded. The truly talented didn’t need to advertise. “Care to talk a little business, then?”
She took a deep breath and exhaled, eying the sky. “I’d love to.” Not even said sarcastically.
“My read is that you’re calling the shots here among your people, the same way I am with the Telepaths. Right now, at least.”
“If you say so.”
“As we said, we’d like to go bother some dolphins down in the Keys,” Dave said. “Do you have any problem with our plan?”
“Tell me about this. I don’t know anything more than rumors. I need to know the details.”
Dave told Dana the full story, as much as he knew. He wished he knew more. Nessa had implied she had some sort of earlier dealings with the dolphins, years ago, but he hadn’t ever teased the story out of her.
“So they’re another player in the game, as powerful as they are hidden,” Dana said.
Dave nodded.
“You have my permission, for what my permission is worth,” Dana said. “No, my comment wasn’t strong enough. I want you and the others to go figure out what’s going on with these Minds of the Sea, and if possible, bring them in on our side. I’d demand this if I had the leverage.”
Dave nodded, ignoring Dana’s glacial ‘demand’. “Thank you.”
“Too easy? Sorry,” Dana said, seeing right through him. “I’m taking a chance, here, that with your experience dealing with us cold blooded types, you won’t over-react to the fact I didn’t negotiate.” Meaning she did him a favor, on purpose. However, not too large a favor, and not for personal reasons.
This reminded him of when Elorie appointed him second in command of the Ecumenist quest and then tossed him out of her bed a day or two later.
“I understand,” Dave said.
“Let me make it up to you, sort of,” Dana said. Now she smiled…and offered her hand. “I want to show you something I suspect you might appreciate. I’m going to have to use willpower, though.”
Yank! Takedown. “Sure,” Dave said, and took Dana’s hand.
He hadn’t expected the almost electric connection between the two of them when their hands touched. Dana didn’t notice his reaction, her eyes unfocused and staring off into infinity as she wove willpower. Somewhere in the back of his mind Nessa laughed and reminded him of her warnings about Dana.
The willpower gathered up Dave’s mind and the world disappeared around him.
A kaleidoscope of orange and red appeared around him, slowly forming into densely packed knots and whorls of party-colored clouds, streamers and dots. “What is this place?” Dave said. He smelled ocean and pine, heard the rumbling of semis on the highway and heavy elevator doors opening and closing. Gravity still pulled him, but light splayed out like a squashed spider below, while a darkness tasting of fall and spent leaves arced above.
“This is the place of projection, where wielders of willpower can move their projections from one place to another without having to move them through the real world,” Dana said. “That’s Atlanta’s name. I think of this as projection space. It’s not at all congruent with reality. This is…well, I think projection space is overwhelmingly beautiful. I’ve showed this place to a few other people, but…” She paused. “Mostly they just wanted to go back.”
A gamble. A test, too.
Hell. Definitely another woman of sparring partner quality.
Dave didn’t respond, caught up in the evolution of an involuted swirl of rich red brown that flew by as an ensemble an unknown distance away, rotating and warping space as it went. He could almost see its mathematics. He watched how the color changes matched the changes in its density, perhaps even – yes, definitely – changes in temperature and pressure. A living, visible three-dimensional phase diagram! “The world ‘beauty’,” Dave said, whispering, “doesn’t even come close to doing this place justice.” He noticed a pulsing dot approaching, stately, its colors cycling through a spectrum of blue and green, colors he didn’t have the vocabulary to describe. As it passed, his hand tightened on Dana’s, as the pulsing dot not only rumbled in the near subsonics, but raised tingles on his skin, warmed his muscles, and smelled of late winter turning to spring. “This is addictive.”
“Yes,” Dana said, sounding pleased, caught up in his mood. Sharing in the rapture of the place, he and Dana pointed things out to each other. Different things. She had words for all these colors; he could see the mathematics in everything. In the end, though, they just experienced differences of notice, not reality. Dave hadn’t noticed how the wind in this place had such a strong vertical sheer, often blowing on his lower legs in a different direction than on his waist and always different than how it moved around his head. Dana hadn’t noticed how the more opaque the feature was, the more its colors varied within its internal structure. Aquamarine, chartreuse, cerise, mauve and jasmine were not colors in his vocabulary.
“If you listen carefully,” Dana said, her head close to his. “Sometimes you can hear snippets from radio and television. It’s like this place is connected to everything human.” She took her hand from his and put her arm around his shoulder. He echoed her. “Watch those pinwheels and carefully look in their centers. Not dead on, but look off to the side, so the view of their centers catches the fovea of your eyes.”
Dave did and caught the end of a popular YouTube clip showing the God Alexandria gathering clouds and summoning rain. “Shared thoughts and experiences.”
“Yes!” Dana said. Her arm slipped down to Dave’s waist and tightened. Bands of alternating early morning red ribbons intermixed with dusky purple threads rippled up and unbent their sinusoidal contraction right through the two of them. He tasted lemon meringue pie and fizzy cola.
Then all he saw was Dana’s eyes, and Dave’s heart exploded.
Poke. Prod.
In horror, Dave saw himself and his own thoughts from the outside, and realized he had fallen hard for Dana.
And she for him. They would have a baby on the way within a week if this went on.
14. (Dana)
“I’m not taking orders or giving orders to any of you, or anyone else,” Bob said, speaking to Uffie. The last two open chairs, side by side, were between Ken and Uffie, and Dana maneuvered Dave into taking the chair closest to Ken. After Dave sat, he got handed one of the two twins, Alana. Dana took a moment to quietly coo at Alana and fail again to quiet her aching heart.
“That’s not wise,” Diana said. “Leaders are important. Without a leader all you end up with is a mess.”
Betrayer’s comment to her as she had stared into Dave’s eyes had been about as graphic as possible. Dana’s worries about Orlando overshadowing her paled compared to the gulf between her and Dave. She could trivially lose her temper and fry him with her willpower or become overwhelmed by passion in some intimate moment and break his body with her own willpower-augmented Superm
an-style body. He wasn’t Jan. Worse, he was able to cut Dana’s mind off from the rest of the world in a stress situation if they battled arm in arm against their enemies, which according to Betrayer he did on a regular basis, something that might trivially lose a battle Dana directed.
Betrayer’s true words didn’t do a thing to salve the hurt in her heart. The moment she fell into his eyes, she knew she and Dave were far more compatible, emotionally, than she and Orlando. Or she and Jan. Or than anyone she had ever met, or even imagined could exist.
She just didn’t know what she would do about her realization.
If anything.
“Pretend I’m not here, then,” Bob said, with a nervous wipe of divine sweat from his brow. “Confining me to pre-set-up responsibilities and tasks would be wrong. I’m still feeling my way through this mess, and my moment to moment inspirations have turned out to be better than my plans. I also make too many willpower mistakes for you to be able to count on me. Integrating everything at once is hard.”
Ken examined S’up closely. “How does he fit in?” Ken asked. “Is he planned or is he something else?”
How had she gotten herself into this? This had to be due to the ring crap, making this Orlando’s fault. All her life she had managed to avoid the absurd drama and the emotional entanglements, but after Jan and Orlando pried her heart open a little she fell for the first pair of compelling brown eyes she met. Siiiiigggghhh.
“S’up?” Bob said. “Dunno how he fits in, but he’s sort of planned.”
Alana, in Dave’s lap, went back to sleep, not fully waking up after the handover. “Well, if you don’t need him, could the rest of us use him, for instance ordering him into battle or whatever?” Elorie said.
“Sure. I guess.” Dana repressed a smile. The instant Elorie had looked at Bob, Bob went distant. Since his body had awakened, he hadn’t seen top end glamour except in whatever porno crap he played with on the internet. In person, Elorie threw him.
Dana suspected now, after her near intimate experience with the straight-off-the-Harlequin-Romance-book-cover Dave, that Elorie threw everyone.
99 Gods: Odysseia Page 17