99 Gods: Odysseia

by Randall Farmer

  Oh! This is the day. Dana’s minute hesitation startled Ken and led to an Elorie and Dave analysis of Ken’s reaction. ‘Orlando’ indeed. “You can call him Richard when you’re talking to the family, Dana,” Nessa said. “You two are right not to go public with that, but we don’t count as public.” Pause. “I’m not quite positive what we count as, actually…”

  “Ah, uh, sure. Can you excuse me, I need to go somewhere private and have a good long vocal cord busting scream.” Nessa easily picked up from the flustered Dana the younger woman’s broadcasted thoughts through her multiple layers of willpower screens: I’m having an overdose of Telepath and I need to hold it together until I can get somewhere private.

  You would think someone as used to the 99 Gods magic crap could cope with telepathic strangeness, but noooo, Dana was like most everyone else.

  “No problem,” Nessa said. “Save some for me, ‘cause I’m going to be doing some at high volume later myself.” The fact that this was the day didn’t mean it was going to be a completely good day.

  Dana fled post-haste on tall stiletto heels.

  “Dolphins,” Uffie said, after she got dressed in her swimming suit and gathered her beach gear together.

  Nessa stuck her special wrap-around sunglasses on her head, the ones Orlando made, able to block out enough sunlight to keep her from getting any sun-caused headaches. “So you’re really going to ask these last set of questions to Korua?” Nessa said. “You could just tell us what you’ve put together so we can go bargain with them for real.” She led everyone out to the beach today and sat down on the wet shore, outside of physical contact for the moment. She stayed within talking distance, though.

  She wanted the innocent sense of water running through her toes for the last time.

  “These are important questions,” Uffie said, back up the shore beyond the high tide line. Her mind stayed shuttered tight.

  “What sort?” Nessa said, not expecting an answer. This was, of course, the day.

  “Nessa, I have a question for you,” Uffie said. “How much do you want to know? Today’s session might get boring and technical, so this might be one of those days where you might best be off bothering Lydia or Dana.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning just what I said,” Uffie said.

  “That’s nasty.”

  “What’s nasty?”

  “Trying to shoo me off with your tricky other charisma,” Nessa said. She stood, bounded over, and put her arm around Uffie’s shoulder. “I already know what you’ve learned will hurt me.”

  “This might be much worse than you think. I think this is real bad, inner circle Indigo real bad.” Pause. “Exactly why I didn’t want to end up seeing the Indigo,” she said, sotto voice.

  Which was all Uffie would say on the subject.

  Ken and Elorie set up the canopy while Dave, forgetting her earlier comment, walked over to put sunscreen on Nessa’s back and had her do the same for him.

  If he seduces me today, when I’m vulnerable, I swear I’ll give in and let Persona play with Dave enough so he can get pregnant and then get him knocked up. Idiot. Fool. He knows I’m curious. I told him I couldn’t restrain myself today. Or at least I hinted as much.

  Nessa sat back down on the wet sand, cross-legged, and closed her eyes.

 

  The dolphins had congregated here in more pods than they would normally do, and they had stripped Big Pine Key of fish. Nessa had even heard some of the fisherman in the neighboring Bahia State Recreation area complaining, though ‘heard’ wasn’t the right term as her hearing had been telepathic. She reached out to schools of fish in the nearby Keys and started them on their way with firm orders to ignore the presence of the dolphins, which had driven them away to start with.

  Nessa sent.

  she sent, along with a mental image of the seemingly immortal Telepath.

 

 

 

 

 

  Uffie sent. Nessa hadn’t expected this line of questioning. She wasn’t sure where it led, or why Uffie even bothered.

  Korua answered.

 

 

  Uffie said.

  No answer. Nessa knew the answer to that, deep in her mind, but even thinking about looking terrified her. Both of her Socks cowered inside, quivering in fear.

  Uffie said.

 

  Uffie said.

  The back of Nessa’s mind howled.

  Korua didn’t answer.

 

  The howling in Nessa’s mind grew so loud that Uffie and Korua’s telepathic voices became distant.

  Korua sent.

  Uffie sent.

  Spang sent.

 

  Spang paused.

  Ken started to howl. He saw the discovery now, something Nessa still refused to admit. Dave and Elorie crept into each other’s arms, Dave shivering, Elorie’s eyes wet at the corners.

  Uffie sent. She, on the other hand, became exultant and fearless.

  Spang laughed, dolphin style. well as the pod of pods. Spang says…>

  Elorie sent.

  The dam finally broke in Nessa’s head. She howled and lost contact with her telepathy and the rest of the minds. Her vision contracted to tiny dots in front of her eyes, her arms becoming numb and huge in her mind, and as she sobbed out “No, noooo,” she pounded the sand and writhed.

  This wasn’t fair.

  She had become nothing, nada, just the result of some amoral divine meddling, no better than a second-rate Supported, the cheap telepathic analog of Natural Supported.

  Join the dolphins and help them? What a joke. They were fucking Gods, she just a pointless toy. An ancient knock-off of the dolphin Gods’ own abilities. Dolphin Gods! Elorie and the Watchers had said there were other Gods. Only she hadn’t ever expected them to be the dolphins. Her dolphins!

  “She hasn’t lost it fully. Look, she’s keeping her teek at skin level, just like she should.”

  They must have been the ones who made her the Daughter of Light. Was she supposed to save her Gods? Saving the Watchers meant sending them back to God. If she sent the 99 dolphin Gods back to God Almighty, this would end the Telepaths. Wouldn’t it?

  Not fair. Totally completely wholly insanely un-un-unfair!

  “How much danger are we in from Ken’s teeking the ocean? Can he cause a tsunami?”

  Everything was wrong, wrong!

  She had snickered to herself when Lorenzi had learned his life was a lie. Karma? Unfair! Not her fault. She wasn’t evil! She hadn’t killed tens of thousands and lied to herself that it wasn’t her fault like Lorenzi had! He had the comeuppance coming to him. She didn’t. She took back the snicker anyway.

  Humanity? Just a dolphin toy. Ken had been right to insist they confront the dolphins about the 99 Gods. The dolphins had been responsible for everything. They had welded their finny God to humanity. They had forced their idea of civilization down humankind’s throat, and succeeded. They had given humanity Telepaths, which had failed. The dolphins’ religious machinations had led, in the end, to the dead Ecumenists becoming Angels, responding to the prayers of humanity and creating the 99 Gods. Her deal with Opartuth even made this possible! This was all her fault!

  Hopeless, pointless and in the end, squack squeak, another culling of humanity into a more dolphin-friendly species, one that wouldn’t make overly loud mechanical sonar and would include better diplomatic quarters than Sea World.

  And she was responsible for this debacle! She had been the one who had introduced the dolphins to modern humanity.

 

 

 

  She sniffled mentally.

 

  Now might be a good time to die and join the dolphins. Dying would solve everything.

  Going home. That’s why she had always wanted to join the dolphins.

 

  Even at Korua’s most helpful, she couldn’t understand him.

  “Get Ken, she swallowed her tongue!”

  Nessa’s mind separated from her body, and immediately she felt calmer. There was nothing fun about being in a body having a fit. At least she wouldn’t die alone – Korua would be with her. She settled into Korua’s strong mental embrace.

  Her consciousness flew up, carried by Korua’s stronger mind. Nessa sent. No wonder she could talk with God; God was just another damned dolphin; she had always been able to talk to the dolphins. Everything was so pointless, just so pointless.

 

  The Earth fled below her. Soon empty space surrounded what she could sense.

 

 

  Her senses contracted, the stars in front becoming blue, the ones in back, red. She knew what that meant.

  In a few moments, the stars returned to their normal colors, but they had left Earth far behind. Nessa let the mathematical part of her mind, one of the pieces of her scattered self that she greatly enjoyed, do the math. She wondered if she should tell Dave she could do relativity calculations in her head, and decided telling him would be bragging too much. Nearly all the way to Jupiter’s orbit!

  Korua said.

  Nessa did, and her soul began to cry. Instead of empty space and absence of minds, the space around her was filled with distant points of telepathic song, each different from the other.

 

  She had hidden that insight away many years ago, where only she could gnaw on the idea in terror.

  Korua said.

  Nessa did; her soul continued to weep. The beauty existed too far away in time and space (which were the same, mathematically) for real contact. The massed thoughts, the static of Telepaths beyond numbers, couldn’t be heard one at a time. Not by her. Not by Korua or the others. She felt Korua’s curiosity mirrored in her. A curiosity that was also an aching desire.

  She grasped at understanding. Nessa sent.

 

 

 

  So that’s what Spang and Uffie had been jabbering about. Everything was a lie.

 

  She didn’t understand, and wasn’t sure she wanted to.

 

 
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  Nessa sent, gazing out into the star littered darkness at the uncounted distant minds. Some, she realized, were far enough away to shiver her soul. In some, all she could make out were individual galaxies of many civilizations of minds, not even the individual civilization or the individual worlds. She wondered how close the closest worlds she could sense were. There was no way she could tell, save a gut feeling that they lay inside the Milky Way galaxy and not too far away as galactic distances went.

 

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  Nessa relaxed and absorbed the beauty of the telepathic firmament above.

 

  Nessa’s eyes blinked open; she lay on her back, in the sand, staring at the top of the beach canopy. Orange. With sand in the seams. Chatty telepathy between Uffie, Diana, Korua and Spang rang through her mind, something about whether story queens (whatever they were) were natural or a Dolphin creation. Of all the annoying things, from the explanation it sounded like there were even yet more old Gods out there, meddling. Tiresome.