“There’s nothing here that I didn’t know already,” Orlando said.
Oh? Orlando’s comment pissed Dave off, and he turned to the Territorial God. “Have you actually seen this? Have you actually been here, in this wreckage of a church, before?”
Orlando didn’t answer.
“I wish I understood your point, Dave. All I see are just people being people,” Ken said. “People have problems. If you don’t block them out, they overwhelm you.”
“That’s a Telepath’s perspective, Ken,” Orlando said. “But Dave isn’t a Telepath, just a screwy Psychic. His empathy overwhelms him and it’s unfamiliar.”
“Uh huh,” Dave said. “This isn’t just me. Elorie, too. And Dana.” That’s what Orlando had to see and understand. Dana needed him to see and understand.
“Ahh,” Orlando said. “As a God, I know all of this, factually. As you guessed, though, I’ve never experienced this. I’ve certainly never lived this. I know we Gods have caused this to happen, but you’re right, Dave. Sensing this and experiencing their misery has far more of an effect on me than just knowing this as yet another nasty statistic.” He took a deep breath. “I can’t say I didn’t invite this on myself, either.” The backwards marriage to Dana, attracting their attention. “I don’t understand how to fix this, though. I was a physicist as a mortal. Anything I did here would be amateur, unprofessional and likely harmful.”
“There’s more,” Dave said. Bull forward. The only way around the God yips. Turn his perceived character flaw into something positive. “Horrors like this are what Dana thinks of as her cause in life to fix, one way or another. The mess caused by the Gods hurts her. And the problem isn’t just Newark” nicely out of both the Kid God and Orlando’s territory “but everywhere. If you want, I can show you camps in…” Cuba. Your territory.
“Don’t. I fully understand,” Orlando said. His lips thinned. “There’s only one solution, though. To fix this we must stop Dubuque and the other worshipped Gods. Which isn’t practical in the short term.”
“I’m not saying you need to fix all of this to smooth things over with Dana,” Dave said, leaping in feet first, rushing into a non-sequitur with a headfirst slide into home plate. “I’m saying you need to share your righteous anger at these problems, and your powerlessness to do anything about them, with her.”
“Despite what you fear about what this might do to your Mission, or what you fear this might do to Dana’s attitude toward you,” Ken said, finishing Dave’s idea. “If you can’t, you might as well decide to go court Nessa, as she’s the only one of the women in this mess who comes close to sharing your and my cavalier attitude toward the people.”
Orlando looked first at Ken, then over to Dave, not even bothering with a quizzical ‘oh, is that what this conversation’s been about from the start, eh?’ look. Dave quailed and shrunk back, Orlando’s gaze now solar hot. He didn’t freak and curl up in a ball, though, no matter how much he wanted to. “You two are the mirrors of my nightmares,” Orlando said. “You also think I need to be more human?”
Dave nodded, unable to say a word.
“Let your poetry out,” Ken said.
Orlando turned to glare at Ken, again. Ken, despite the fact Orlando’s glare was far hotter at him than Orlando’s glare at Dave, didn’t quail. “You’re a fool if you think that Dana would enjoy poetry of any kind,” Orlando said.
Dave’s eyebrows popped up. “Dana showed me the place of projection simply because she knew I could share in the beauty she discovered there,” Dave said.
Orlando turned back to Dave, this time without the glare. “That, I fear, is the best point you’ve made in this entire argument.” The Gods did think quickly, Dave realized, even with their emotions. Orlando paused. “I must, logically, agree with you, Dave. I’ll internalize this, and as Ken said, let my poetry out. I’ll experience what we’ve done to people in all walks of life. I’ll even teach this to Bob. He won’t appreciate the lesson yet, but he is my apprentice, of sorts, right now. I’ll teach him to appreciate mortal life.” Pause. Orlando’s eyes went vacant, his voice ethereal. “Changing partners would make things worse.”
Dave gulped.
Without any signal or word of warning, Orlando undid the projections, instantly yanking Dave’s mind back into his flesh-and-blood body. Dave went down like a bag of beans onto the carpet of the former foosball parlor, his body twitching and his mind hearing aural flashbacks from yesterday.
Crap, Dave thought. Orlando vanished. Dave tried to stand up and instead vomited on the floor of Orlando’s office.
I need to be stronger than this. I need to, so I can keep up with the Telepaths, the Gods…and Elorie.
Bad to worse. His life was always bad to worse. He huddled in the corner, alone, mind spinning, fighting the urge to vomit again, unable to shake Orlando’s last words from his mind, reliving yesterday’s fight, and worried sick about Nessa.
25. (Nessa)
Nessa awoke when the butterfly landed on her finger. She looked around, carefully, not remembering when she had fallen asleep, or where. Not here. She lay in a gently sloping field of wildflowers. She sat up, put her hands on her knees and a smile on her face. She recognized the place, a field about a thousand feet higher in elevation than her trailer home in Eklutna, one of her favorites. She couldn’t see her home but she could see the Sustina River as it wound through the valley below, as well as a housing development labeling itself as part of Eklutna but not, in her mind. The sun shone through a clear sky, the air warm on her skin, and birds chirped among the pine trees ringing the field of wildflowers. She didn’t have any of her guns on her, something she never did when outdoors in Alaska. The anomaly startled her out of her peace.
“What the fuck is this?” she said. Weather back home was never this pleasant. Nessa reached out with her mind. Nothing. Her telepathy had vanished.
She stood in sudden fear, voices gibbering in the back of her mind – the voices of her mother and father, her brothers and sister, Ken, her socks, Uffie, Ron, even Mrs. Danson from Eklutna. She put her hands to her head and swayed, but the voices didn’t go away.
“Dammit!”
She ran downhill, past her edge-of-clearing lean to and toward her trailer house, startling a few rabbits and birds on the way. She crashed through the pines, catching whips from the pine boughs on her arms as she followed a rocky trail she didn’t remember. Ahead, she saw another clearing, and ran. After passing the last of the pine trees and taking ten steps into the clearing, she saw she had returned to the same clearing where she had awakened.
“Shit, shit, shit!” Nessa said, and knelt in the grass. She closed her eyes and tried all her telepathic tricks. Nothing. Even her panic didn’t give rise to any results. This couldn’t be happening to her.
At least her panic had driven away the gibbering voices. She bit her tongue and glanced around the clearing again, then stalked over to examine, yes, the imprint of her body in the wildflowers. As well as the faint trace of her earlier downhill run. “Okay, what was I doing when I got into this mess?” she said. “Dolphins. Opartuth had died or come apart or something equivalently dolphin. The new mind who would deal with me was named Korua.” Something else, too. Something important, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. “Korua!” she shouted and listened with her mind for an answer. Nothing but echoes.
A memory trickled through. Gods. Ninety-nine of them. That’s what she hadn’t remembered. She and some friends – hell, she had married Ken, of all the crazy things – fought the Gods, trying to avoid being killed by the Gods. She susp
ected she hadn’t succeeded at the latter.
Well. Okay. Shit happens.
“So I’m dead? Well, if this is my slice of heaven, I’ll take it.” She lay back down in her original resting spot. “This is so sweet! They buried me up here! What a final resting spot,” she said. “I’m probably just a telepathic echo bouncing from human mind to human mind. That’s what Ken and I decided ghost stories came from, although we’d never found a standardly manifesting ghost, just heard about them.” Her mind did seem clearer than she remembered after the mental gibbering relaxed. Clear enough for her to be smart. Nope, can’t be smart when your entire mental focus is centered on keeping other people’s thoughts out of your mind. Now she could relax and properly use her mind.
Hmm. She appreciated the location, but this would be too boring for all eternity, nothing for her to use her mind on. Hell, she was already bored. Of course, this was just her. Always looking gift horses in the mouth. “I had kids!” she said, memory shocked. “Twins!” Her mind sifted through a few scattered memories of her twins, each one triggering the next, each one that included someone besides her holding one of the twins triggering memories of the holder of the twins. Ken, of course. Elorie and Dave, who she and Ken had invited into their bed for comfort. Uffie, Tracy, Diana and their never-ending secrets. Persona, a God who had turned out to be fun and helpful. Dana and Orlando, who couldn’t find their way to a bed and to a good time if a whole army led them there. She even smiled at a memory of a rather prune-faced John Lorenzi. “I must have been out of my mind to have trusted him to hold my kids.” Sudden anger at the last triggered more angry memories, a disastrous fight against some damn God’s minions. “What happened to my babies!” This time she put a little responsibility into her scream.
The world around her shivered and the sound of the light wind in the wildflowers vanished, along with the chirping birds. Nessa’s anger dissipated as she tried to figure out what she had done. The wind hadn’t stopped, but the sound of the wind had vanished. While she thought, the sound of the wind and the birds returned, along with the sound of someone walking through the wildflowers, behind her.
She turned. Ken. He appeared to be in bad shape…but he was naked.
“Yippie yippie goodie!” Nessa said. She started to strip. Now this was Heaven.
“Nessa,” Ken said. “You need to calm down. That last bit of whatever of yours nearly killed us all.”
“Huh?” she said. She stopped at panties and bra, looking around for other people because of Ken’s ‘us all’ comment. No stripping for an audience. Nuh uh, not her. Still nobody but Ken, though. “Get over here, you. You’re here to make love to me.”
Ken walked over. “We need to talk.”
“We’ve got all eternity for that. Now…”
He took her hands. “All eternity?”
“This is Heaven, right? You’re a figment of my imagination, my divine lover.” She furrowed her eyebrows. “No. You couldn’t be dead, too. For one thing, Eklutna’s the last place you’re going to end up. Besides, you couldn’t be dead because who else but you could have decided I needed to be buried here?”
“Sit,” Ken said.
She sat. Ken sat down beside her. Wildflowers swayed around them, back and forth like bobblehead dolls.
“You’ve been severely wounded,” Ken said. “You’re not dead. Persona kept you alive for over a day, but decided she couldn’t take the healing any farther, so Orlando took over. Persona and I put this place together in your mind to keep you quiet and sane while Orlando worked on healing you.”
“Oh.” She relaxed and let Ken hold her in his arms. “The twins?”
“Alana and Zachary are just fine.”
“Dave and Elorie?”
“Scared stiff and off their feed from the fight, but quite healthy.”
“So this place is all in my mind? I can’t make love to you here?”
“I have no idea,” Ken said.
She thought back and tried to remember the details of the battle. Nothing. Crap. “Well then, let’s try,” she said, nice and archly seductive.
“Okay, okay, this is a bit much,” Dave said. He picked a particularly large blue wildflower and sniffed. “Not perfect, though. The flower smells like one of Persona’s perfumes.”
“Oh quit being so damned analytical and enjoy yourself,” Elorie said. She giggled and picked up a rabbit. “How’s my little huggy bunny?”
Nessa shook her head and turned to Ken. They had ‘found clothes’ for him at the edge of the wildflower clearing afterwards, and he had dressed. “My rabbits act like real rabbits and run away from humans,” she said. “Why don’t Elorie’s rabbits run away?”
“She spent too much time in New York City; this is what she thinks rabbits should do,” Ken said. “Feel better?”
Nessa bent over and touched her toes, then spread her legs, arched her back, and tried to do a back bend. She thumped to the illusory ground, smashing illusory wildflowers. “I guess so,” Nessa said, looking at the sky. “Do I get to know what’s going on, or are you going to keep stalling?”
Ken whistled. Dave and Elorie crashed over, distracted from their examination of the mental illusion they now inhabited. “You two done yet?”
“Give us a little time to have our fun,” Elorie said.
“I’m not used to this at all, even after the tricks you two have been playing with my mind,” Dave said. He studied his hands again, shaking his head. “This is way freaky.”
“Get down here and give me some skin,” Nessa said. Only the voice wasn’t her, but Left Sock, a voice brooking no compromise. Ken, Dave and Elorie sat around her, helped her back to a sitting position, and they all hugged her. Nessa practiced breathing. The skin helped, though in a mental illusion she did wonder, for only a moment, what this meant.
“Okay, people, why am I behaving like I’m all alone without any friendly mental support?”
“Well,” Ken said. “I was injured in the fight.”
“How bad off are you?”
“It took our people less than a minute to heal me up when it was over. Yesterday.”
“Something else, then,” Nessa said. “Persona’s got to be fine, since she’s holding this bit of idiotic Godly crap together in my head. In our heads.” She took a deep breath. “I’m not scared of dying. Or I didn’t think I was. Is that the problem?”
“No, I think this is something new, something we’ve never had to face before,” Ken said.
“So are you going to tell me or am I going to have to get angry?”
“You sure you want to poke at this, Nessa?” Elorie said. “You might find things easier if you just let them go.”
Growl.
“Okay. Consider Persona being blown into a thousand little Persona butterflies, screaming ‘That’s Nessa’s teek!’” Dave said. “Nobody knew your teek was that strong.”
“Oh,” Nessa said. “Well, uh, um, right. It’s not that my teek isn’t strong, but that I’ve never been able to control my teek at anywhere near full strength. Normally I just keep my teek tight around me, making me bulletproof. Away from my body my teek dissipates quickly.” She sniffed, unhappy she couldn’t remember or visualize the mathematics. She just hated losing the math. “I’ve gotten my teek trained up to where I can take two pens apart without breaking them.” Ken’s teek still dwarfed hers, even when she let her teek go uncontrolled. Irksome.
“Don’t worry,” Ken said. “You did just fine.”
“I do want to know what set me off, though,” Nessa said. “I’m prepared. A little.”
Ken took a deep breath, building his concentration. “It appears there might be a problem with a fear of mutilation.”
“Oooh, nice. Passive voice,” Nessa said. “You’re learning. So I’m reduced to being a brain in a fishbowl or something. Ewwww. Gross. Yuck!”
“Not that bad,” Dave said.
Nessa glared at Dave and caught some funky vibes from him.
“Okay, so I puked,�
�� Dave said. “So sue me.”
“There’s the problem,” Nessa said. “In some sense, all of you are me, the same way I’m in all of you.” She still wasn’t sure what she thought of Uffie’s late night talk with Dave about her hypothesis that Nessa had turned all of them into some sort of butt-sniffing pack of wolves. Or some other more appropriate animals, by analogy. No, she didn’t want to go there, not right now, not with something she didn’t want to know. “When you have the yuck reaction you amplify my yuck reaction.” Memories, unwanted, rolled through Nessa’s mind. “Wait a second. You have a cast iron stomach, Dave. So do you, Elorie. You’re both supposed to be ‘yuck’ proof.” Dave’s ability to cope with Elorie’s old pre-fix ruined body was what had driven him and Elorie together. Click click click went the thoughts in Nessa’s mind.
The three didn’t say a thing.
“So I was mucho disgusto, eh?”
“Yes,” Ken said.
“World class?” What a thing to be proud of.
“Uh huh.”
“Tell me.”
“Nessa, you stopped a disintegration attack created by a grade one Supported. The hard way. A direct hit when all of our defenses were down,” Ken said. “You held yourself together with your own teek, but the disintegration attack had some, um, bad effects. Persona kept you together, spent a day trying to fix you, and failed. We had to call in Orlando. He determined you had to be conscious to be correctly healed.”
Nessa shivered at Ken’s reiteration. A few memories of the event flashed through her mind, causing her to flinch. She had no idea she could survive one of those killer attacks. She had seen what a disintegration beam attack could do to an exhausted Supported, though, and the results hadn’t been pretty. She had assumed if one of them hit her she would die instantly. “I remember a bit,” she said. Her arms had been coming apart, each separate tissue in them almost magnetically repelled. “So, what’s left of me?” Her vision contracted to tiny dots, and she got dizzy.
99 Gods: Odysseia Page 26