Richard reached into a pocket and slid a be-ribboned box over to her. “Here. For you.” Today was the first day there was a chance of an attack, and Richard had extra patrols out just in case. She and Richard ate breakfast in the commissary, one of many giant tents making camp on the mansion grounds. The cooks dished out food with snappy efficiency to a long line of hungry followers. Whatever else a person might say about working for a God, they at least supplied good food.
Dana and Richard ate at a small empty table along a tent wall, and the crowd left them a polite distance.
“Thank you,” Dana said, and opened the package. Inside was an iPhone enchantment. “Okay, what’s this one do?”
“This is a Progress special,” Richard said. “With a few improvements. This device is set up as a data monitor.”
He explained the details to Dana; she thanked him several times, especially after experiencing the iPhone’s pseudo-AI, which did a wonderful job of prioritizing information. Dana always found data prioritization the worst problem in one of their messy melees.
“So, should we keep up our opposition, now Bob’s essentially matured to where he can protect himself?” Richard said. He had eaten four rashers of bacon, three pancakes, two fried eggs, and some toast with jelly. Dana wasn’t sure where he put it all, but the eating was a good sign for his humanity.
Dana shook her head. “I’d like this conflict to end, but not by running away. Do you want to run?”
“No way. After the debates, things have become clearer to me.”
Here we go again. “Not to me.”
“Most of the world is filled with people who aren’t reasonably bright,” Richard said. “Dubuque and Father Haus did us a favor, Dana: they drew the battle lines in big bold colors in these debates. Also, because of the way the City of God is set up, the debates pre-empted everything except the internet. Nearly everyone had to watch them.”
“You think people here in America care? Even after hearing the debates?” Dana said.
“Not everybody. I’m positive more people care than before, though, and I’m positive Dubuque’s sneering at popular sovereignty as immoral didn’t endear himself to many. In his debates he trashed, let’s see, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the idea of limited sovereign States within a Federal union, the Bill of Rights, public education, government-sponsored public works and secularism itself. In essence, he pulled down the American Flag in public and smiled. Dana, he made himself a target for the peoples’ wrath, starting in the various refugee camps and moving out from there. Nothing’s going to be easy for the City of God anymore.” He paused. “But that’s not my point.”
“What is your point?” She pushed her half-eaten pancakes away, not hungry anymore.
“Before the debates, the City of God didn’t have a Mission-level theology; Verona and Dubuque had left the theology purposely vague. Now? Dubuque’s radical religious philosophy is now the Mission-level theology of the City of God.”
“Eh?” Dana ran her hands through her hair, nervous. “I assume this is big at the God level?”
“Yes. The stronger the Mission, the more stature a God – or Gods – have. The City of God is now more seductive to other Gods because it has a strong theological Mission, even if they disagree with it, which makes our opposition much harder. Only the few Gods who are anti-religious by nature, like Progress, are going to be pushed away by his theology.”
Oh. “You wanted to see how it had affected me?” Dana said. Richard nodded. “It didn’t.”
“Let me explain where I’m coming from,” Richard said. “Most people, even in this new post-99 God world, won’t be shaking the hands of any of the 99 Gods, or meeting Angels or people like Nessa (thank the Lord). There aren’t enough of us. Seeing us on television isn’t the same, even if you’re seeing Mr. Charisma himself.” Dubuque. “Organized religions provide structure, community, continuity and service; they organize at the personal level. That’s their point – they organize popular belief, and not just belief about God. What I see is the possibility of, over time, having all human religions come together regarding the basic nature of God, the Divine and what society and culture mean, based on their shared experiences with the 99 Gods. Unity giving basic morality for all, without the contradictions, without the fighting. Unity at least until unforeseen new doctrinal differences divides them.”
“And where’s this utopia going to come from?” Dana said. “Sounds like the City of God to me, God’s dark side again showing itself.”
“The City of God is too top-down word-from-on-high, what you call ‘dark’. We’ve never had a popular religion spring up in the era of popular sovereignty. I think it’s time we do.”
Dana opened her mouth to interrupt, but Richard waved his hand. “I don’t mean a popular religion that imposes morality, but something that moves people to be better people – to, for instance, help others less fortunate than themselves. Practical morality, not faith-based.”
Dana nodded, not quite a believer. He was one of the 99 Gods; he might have built-in faith in humanity. Or this could have been one of the reasons he had been chosen.
Heaven help us if that leads us down yet another road toward evil, Dana thought. We might never break free, for thousands and thousands of years.
The lesson of the Harappans and the Watchers wouldn’t leave Dana’s mind: nothing of the Harappans and their accomplishments survived to influence the later world.
36. (Dave)
Dave huddled with Elorie, his mind fuzzy from lack of sleep. He shivered with her in their cold one-person bed in the only-Betrayer-knew-where jail cell. The room had gone dark again, a profound darkness that discomfited Dave, far darker than the minorly light-polluted skies of Eklutna. Despite the darkness, despite their lack of rest, neither of them could afford to fully fall asleep and relax their immunities.
Too many Betrayer attacks. Too small a bed. Too much interpersonal stress.
At least the distant yowling that echoed through the improbable drainpipes along the left wall of their jail cell had ended. Now all he heard was the indistinct sound of water dripping and a distant irregular clanking sound. The faint smell of garbage filled the air in their jail cell; the robot bringing them food often spilled a good fraction of the trash when the robot (in its crazy black uniform!) picked up the remains of their meals. Occasionally he would get a whiff of motor oil and other lubricants through the overly active ventilation system covering them with incessantly cold air.
He also smelled salt again; Elorie had gone back to her silent weeping. She refused to say why, or anything else about her tears. After a minute he wiped her eyes. When she realized he had awakened, she buried her head into his chest and let loose with a good five minute body-shaking crying jag intense enough to awaken Dave’s tear ducts as well.
“Don’t ask, please,” she said, when she finished and her breathing returned to normal. “Perhaps you could tell me more about your trip to Baku?”
They hadn’t made up, despite the number of days stuck in this hellish place. They had both attempted personal conversations about their feelings and started pointless fights they couldn’t afford here. Instead, as an unspoken compromise, they spent their time telling each other stories from their lives. The stories kept each other awake, and the more Elorie said, the more he understood her and understood why she picked fights with him. Enough of this and he might even…
Light flashed, all around. Elorie screamed and Dave dove into his own mind, focusing his thoughts and concentrating on mentally protecting them both. Betrayer had caught him relaxing his mental shields just once, and the God had taken over the both of them, letting Elorie pummel him, defenseless, until he fell unconscious. He still wore the livid bruises from the fight. Elorie still owned the guilt.
Helixes of divine willpower attacks curled around them, coming, unbelievably, from under their jail cell bed. Dave picked up Elorie to get them both off the cot and to safety, but his sudden movement put his f
oot outside Elorie’s defensive sphere. Betrayer’s ongoing attacks had forced them to work on expanding their defenses from touch to area.
Pain lanced through him but he didn’t let down his mental defenses. Elorie found Betrayer’s projection under their cot and pushed her immunity into the projection. The projection-spoofing worked for just the second time. The first time Elorie tried the projection-spoofing, it had worked, but her trick failed the second and third time, ending up with Betrayer in their faces, crowing “You’re dead!” and arcing pain through their bodies.
Betrayer’s projection vanished, only to reappear across the room. As after their first successful banishment of Betrayer’s projection, Betrayer’s second projection didn’t attack. The projection-glow illuminated the darkness. “You’re getting better with your protection sphere, Elorie, but it looks like there’s been a tiny problem.” Betrayer sighed. “Dave, if I didn’t know better I’d say you liked pain.”
Elorie inhaled a hiss; Dave followed her eyes. Betrayer’s attack had burned his right foot off his body, totally gone, about three inches above his ankle. Blood ran from his severed leg – partly cauterized, he decided, as the blood didn’t spurt. “No,” Dave said, speaking around the pain. “I rather like to avoid pain. So, does this little bit of damage meet your standard for life threatening, Betrayer?” She had said she would heal any life-threatening injuries she caused, and she wouldn’t go head-hunting, but wouldn’t guarantee anything if they did something stupid.
Betrayer chuckled. For reasons Dave couldn’t fathom, Betrayer had given up on her absurd cackles and bwah-haw-haws. “I see you finally understand. Yes, this I heal.” She did. Dave’s leg stopped bleeding and the flesh on the stump healed over. He knew Betrayer wouldn’t bother to regrow his foot.
“Let us go? Please?” Elorie said, after Betrayer finished with his foot.
“You don’t like this place’s ambience?” Betrayer said, raising a single eyebrow. “Consider what you haven’t been doing while you’ve been fucking and you’ll understand everything you need to understand.” The God’s words caused Dave to scratch his head with his fingers. “Now, I want both of you to get some sleep. I give you my word I won’t attack until the lights go back on. But be ready. Tomorrow morning we’re going to be doing this non-stop. Remember, your real enemies aren’t going to be as kind as I am!”
Her projection vanished. The darkness returned.
Betrayer didn’t clean up the blood. Predictable.
“Dave, you there?”
“Grunt.”
“You okay?”
He still stood, balanced on one foot, his left hand on the wall beside the cell’s small bed. “Other than feeling like I’m a foot shorter than normal, I’m fine.”
Elorie gasped, grabbed him off his feet, wrestled him over to their cot, pinned him on his back and tickled him. “Bastard! How can you joke about what the bitch is doing!” She spread out his arms, holding on to his wrists, put her face next to his and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Okay. Tell me what’s going on with her. You’ve figured something out, haven’t you?”
“Uh huh,” he said. “But I’m not saying anything unless you let go of me.”
She did, and went back to their earlier pre-attack cuddle. “Okay, give,” she said.
“Betrayer’s not getting her rocks off by these attacks, or torturing us to make the Telepaths miserable, or any of our earlier suppositions, El. Betrayer’s training us. That’s what her comment about ‘finally understanding’ meant.”
“Training…” Elorie paused. “I guess training fits the data, if you don’t mind the ‘learn or die’ aspect.”
“Don’t forget she used to be War,” Dave said. “She was rough back then. This is more of the same. The only thing different this time is we’re her captives and she’s training us whether we want to be trained or not.”
“Do you have an idea?”
“Uh huh. How about we cooperate with her and see if we can use our cooperation to get us out of this damned cell and into someplace nicer?”
Elorie paused. “I’ll bet your idea won’t work, but I’m willing to try anyway.” Elorie relaxed and her breathing started to slow, edging toward sleep.
The crazy place weighed on both of them. The improbable moaning pipes, the absurd clanking robots delivering their food, their jail cell doorway with its relatively normal looking non-locking handle on the outside (that they got to see every time the robot delivered food), the over-sized air vent nearly within Dave’s reach on the wall with the pipes, and Betrayer’s incessant appearances and attacks. He couldn’t relax. He couldn’t let himself relax.
“So,” Dave said. “What did you figure out, earlier?”
“You sure you want” snuffle “my idea? We could instead just pretend that I’m upset about losing the fake telepathy and teek, and not go any further.”
Their fake stuff had been gone when they had awakened in this cell. Dave wouldn’t say his words out loud, but he was happy the fake stuff was gone and hoped never to have to face the temptation of telepathy again.
Which is what Betrayer had to have been talking about with her crack about what they weren’t doing when they were making love – they had stopped shredding each other in passion as soon as they got dropped here. He didn’t want to mention this at all, as his realization wiggled far too close to their unending fights. “I want.”
“It’s subtle, and I’ve only recently worked out the details,” Elorie said. “My idea starts with the fact Betrayer’s not playing crazy with us, Dave.”
“I’ve noticed she seems less unhinged, but she still doesn’t seem sane to me.”
“She’s being evil. Well, if you’re right and what she’s doing is training us, then what’s going on here isn’t pointless and her massive evil’s being tempered by something. Perhaps she has a heart of gold in there somewhere. Or at least some kind of heart,” Elorie said. “In any event, she’s not the cackling crazy she’d portrayed to the others. Follow the clue…”
Dave shivered and shook his head. “You’re going to have to tell me. I don’t understand.” Or his subconscious wouldn’t let him know.
“Dave, she keeps the fact she’s sane a secret, which means we’re not going to survive to tell anyone else her big secret. I thought she was just treating us like a science experiment, to be disposed of later, but Dave, if you’re right about the training, then what’s going on isn’t much better. If she’s training us, then it’s for a mission or a war with no chance of survival.”
He didn’t respond, letting the room grow quiet enough for him to hear the distant dripping sound and what sounded like the distance-distorted bugle of one computer after another starting up Windows.
“Crap,” he said, after his few moments of quiet thought. “You’re right.” He stroked Elorie’s hair, or what was left of her hair after yesterday’s post-lunch Betrayer-attack. He didn’t stroke the right side of her head, now covered in red and painful blisters instead of hair. They both looked like hell. “Dammit!” What he would give for a normal life again…
Elorie wiped tears from his eyes. “Let’s get some sleep.”
“Yah. Tomorrow doesn’t sound like fun at all.”
“Leaders overestimate their prospects of winning. Their bravado may rally the troops and intimidate weaker adversaries, but also may put them on a collision course with an enemy who is not as weak as they think and who may be under the spell of an overconfidence of its own.” – Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature
“You’ve been served!”
37. (Dana)
“I’m not surprised at the vote,” Dana said. She and Richard had waited until the next day to brace everyone else – sleeping on Dana’s latest plan to keep the group’s momentum going, essentially. All four Gods opposed Dana’s idea; Lydia, S’up and the rest of Lydia’s Natural Supported squad supported her, but with reservations written all across their faces.
“Good try,” Persona said, relieved. �
�Now, let’s…”
Dana stood and grabbed eyes with hers, focusing her mind on the here and now, on leadership instead of trying to magic up a group Mission. “Now I’m going to tell you why we’re going to do this anyway,” she said, mundanely channeling her Jan Cox lessons. She walked around the beach pavilion, where they had gathered this morning to talk about Dana’s idea, playing to the audience, drawing out the mystery. “I’ve decided to play the mortal card.” As the self-appointed conscience of the Gods. “You’re going to follow my plan because you Gods can’t think about this rationally. Which makes this my choice.”
“Wait just a second,” Richard said. He continued to talk, but Progress, Persona and Bob’s objections drowned out Richard’s words.
“No, you four wait just a second,” Dana said, projecting her voice to grab attention. Lydia gave her a thumbs up, despite Lydia’s queasiness over Dana’s idea. “You and Bob have already made the plunge, so this isn’t for you, this is for Persona and Progress. The future of the 99 Gods lies in becoming more human. The Telepaths, who’re helping us with this, are now out on a mission to humanize the Gods their way. The humanizing the Gods idea comes from some work I did.” Though Dave, Nessa and Ken all claimed various pieces of this, too. “We’re agreed that humanizing the Gods is the only way out of the long term mess caused by the 99 Gods appearance. Now, part of the idea with humanization is a realization the 99 Gods have weaknesses, and that there’s some things mortals are better at than you Gods. This is one of them. This is a decision for us mortals to make. You Gods are going to just have to trust us.”
Richard’s peeved look returned to his face. Persona, who knew about ‘Richard’ and why, went blank. Progress looked like she was about to take things to the next level. Fight.
Bob, though, suddenly looked like a sheepish teen again.
“Okay,” Bob said. “I’m in.”
“Traitor,” Progress said. “Is there any logic behind this, or are you buying into that floozy’s emotionalism?”
99 Gods: Odysseia Page 41