Haluk led them into a small chapel, and immediately Elorie covered her mouth to stifle laughter. The frescoes lacked all ornateness, the crucified Jesus was practically a stick figure, his halo a cross of light – tacky, in Dave’s mind. “It can’t all be exquisite,” Haluk said, deadpan. These Elorie didn’t take any pictures of.
Dave could have done without the modern pavement outside, either. Tourist friendly perhaps, but pavement blew the natural all to hell, and didn’t fit in with the medieval theme of the place. “My mental picture, after you and Georgia described the area, was a hippie or backpacker tourist haven,” Elorie said. She looked around, counting noses and doing mental statistics. “Too many well-dressed people for that.”
“Christian pilgrims,” Dave said. Elorie must have been daydreaming when Haluk had gone into his story. Dave didn’t blame her. “Want to find a place that sells snacks? With this much tourist infrastructure, we should be able to get everything but beer.”
“Goreme’s not the place we want,” Elorie said. “It’s Disneyworld meets the Flintstones as narrated by the Epistles of Paul.”
Dave nodded and found a shaded area where Elorie could curl into his arms and rest. Dave swore Elorie had lost more weight and used more makeup, more zombie-like every day.
Jack, Georgia and Lisa met up with them in the late afternoon.
“Nothing,” Lisa said. “It’s as if the Ecumenists vanished from the face of the Earth when they came to Cappadocia.”
No shit, Dave thought.
“I just had a thought,” Elorie said. “Georgia, take a look at these.” She handed Georgia her smartphone. “Wasn’t there something similar to this in Lorenzi’s notes?”
Dave looked over Elorie’s shoulder, marveling at the picture quality from her top-of-the-line smartphone. Lorenzi, as always, had gone first class. Elorie’s picture showed one of the Goreme ceilings, marked with an incomprehensible drawing or symbol.
“Uh, yes,” Georgia said. “Yes!” She paged through her own smartphone until she found the digital image she was looking for. Georgia enlarged the image and looked. “It’s a note taken from a trash can at the Ecumenist’s HQ. The note mentions both a ‘grotto monastery’ and ‘ceiling as guide’. I think we’ve got ourselves a clue.”
Dave shook his head, disgusted. He had scanned the note and hadn’t remembered.
Elorie reached over Georgia’s shoulder, moved the image around, and then frowned. “Do you think you can make any sense out of this?”
“I’m willing to give it a shot,” Georgia said. “First, though, let’s go back and make sure we’ve got good pictures of all of these ceiling symbols.”
Elorie napped on the bed of their rock-enclosed hotel room while Dave read. A loud knock on the door startled him to his feet, but before he reached the door, Jack’s voice rang out. “You might want to turn on the cable news,” he said, before he walked to the next door and pounded on it.
“Oh, what time is it?” Elorie asked, from under the covers.
“Nearly midnight.”
“Uhhhg, can’t you get to sleep, Dave?”
“Jet lag, still,” Dave said. Nothing like a nearly twelve hour time difference from the US west coast to throw him off. He turned on the hotel room’s television, lowered the sound, and searched for a cable channel in English. He finally found an English-language CNN feed.
“Not good,” he said.
Elorie stuck her head up out of the covers and looked for herself, her eyes too bleary to focus. “What’s going on?” she said.
“Portland’s goons are attacking again,” Dave said. First Phoenix, now this. He had feared outright divine war ever since Atlanta and Miami’s fight. If only they had found the secret of the Ecumenists in time. If only the secret of the Ecumenists, whatever the mystery turned out to be, had brought the Living Saints and the so-called Gods together. If only Portland and her crew had any sense.
“They’re not goons.”
“Well, then, what are they? They’re the ones attacking. Wasn’t the core of the message of the 99 Gods to end war? God’s new divine commandment?” This time the divine fight happened in and around Dubuque’s headquarters in Oklahoma City. From what Dave could tell, the fight didn’t look good for Dubuque and his people.
Elorie pointed to the screen-bottom message scroll, which read: ‘Fight erupts after Dubuque refuses to meet with a delegation of Portland Supported.’ “I’m not sure who shot first,” Elorie said. “It sounds to me like what happened with Phoenix. Another captured delegation. More self-defense.”
“So they say.” As far as Dave knew, there hadn’t been any substantiated reports by neutral eyewitnesses regarding Phoenix’s alleged delegation capture or the other so-called attacks on Portland’s people. Not counting, of course, the fight between Miami and Atlanta, which Dubuque disavowed. He wasn’t sure why the Angelic Host hadn’t already pulled the plug on Portland and her thug Gods.
“So they say? How many times has Portland paraded Dubuque’s and Phoenix’s Supported to the media and had them confess their attacks?” Elorie said.
Dave licked his lips. They had studiously avoided this subject in the past and he didn’t want to talk about it now. Not when he was bleary from jet lag and lack of sleep. Or with Elorie, awakened out of a nice sound sleep, looking like a zombie. This felt like an embossed invitation to a bad fight, which Dave wanted to avoid at all costs.
However, Portland’s attack on Dubuque hit him like a punch in the gut. Not as bad as a major terrorist attack on the United States, but worse than a humiliating loss by the Broncos. He didn’t like this war-by-any-other-name, not a bit. The Living Saint under attack had saved his life, dammit.
“With the Telepaths involved, who’s to say whether those are real confessions or not?” Dave said.
Phoenix’s fate still rankled him, Portland’s people saying that Phoenix ‘escaped’, Dubuque’s people saying that Phoenix had been slain. Nor could Dave understand the shadowy references both sides had made to Santa Fe, a new Territorial God who may or may not have been Phoenix reborn. Killing Gods felt wrong to Dave, badly wrong. The more this new form of war went on, the more he felt that Portland and her crew had gone too far down the path of evil.
Elorie just groaned.
“You don’t have any problem with the fact that Portland claims to be peaceful but supports these endless attacks? First Worcester, then Phoenix, and now Dubuque?”
The cable news, bless their money-grubbing hearts, had named this travesty ‘The Siege of Dubuque’. According to the anchors, Portland’s thugs had the place surrounded and had control of the air. Dave half expected to see Portland’s witches on broomsticks flying around the place. Or Lorenzi and his Harry Potter clones and clonettes to show.
Dave knew three quarters of the babble put out by cable news’s gang of wolves to be utter crap, if not more. For all he knew, Dubuque was already dead, or the fight had ended hours ago, or even more likely, the ‘Siege of Dubuque’ would turn out to be a raid, part of some screwy Telepath-dreamt-up mission like his.
Or a reality television show.
“Worcester wasn’t attacked by an army but confronted by a group of Telepaths and Gods,” Elorie said. “There wasn’t any army involved.”
“All the same to me,” Dave said. He retreated to the bed and sat down beside Elorie. “I’m not trying to pick on you, El. I know you didn’t have anything to do with this. I just think this is wrong, and Dubuque did save my life.”
“Okaaaay,” Elorie said, suddenly angry. “Well, that’s my life they’re fighting over.”
Dave frowned. Uh oh. “How so?”
“Persona healed me, remember. Standard City of God policy states only Territorial Gods should be answering prayers and doing healing miracles. Persona’s one of the Ideological Gods.”
Persona. Dave couldn’t ever forget Persona’s involvement, not with his first glimpse of Elorie’s ruined body etched into his memory. “Dubuque believes the ad hoc miracle gra
nting is behind the factionalism and strife between the 99. The other so-called Gods need to be reined in to reduce the chaos.”
“I don’t trust this ‘reining in’,” Elorie said. “This smacks of tyranny to me, as do the rest of his City of God heaven-on-earth proposals. He’s pushing this only because he wants to limit the political power of the other Gods, but the real effects of the policy will be on the common people: fewer Gods, fewer answered prayers, fewer people like you and me surviving.”
Dave didn’t believe in the ‘fewer answered prayers’ bit of Elorie’s logic, but he let her comment slide for the moment. “I’d think, with the Magician counting himself as part of Portland’s Helping Hands group, the City of God idea would be the least of the issues you would be worried about,” Dave said. “You’ve read the ideas that motivated the Ecumenists; you’ve heard Mr. Lorenzi’s support for them. They’re very similar.”
“Mr. Lorenzi’s support of the Ecumenists’ ideas surprised me,” Elorie said. “But this also backs up what I’ve heard of Portland’s alliance: there’s no necessity among Portland’s allies for ideological purity. Everything is open for discussion and nobody’s voice is stifled. I’ll agree the idea of some sort of utopian Judeo-Christian-Islamic paradise on Earth is beyond my desires or my comprehension – but, hey, so was the concept of Incarnate Gods a year ago. I’m willing to listen.”
“You’re describing a chaotic gaggle with no central leadership,” Dave said. He had attended professional society meetings arranged the same way. He suspected Portland had stumbled into this war. Wasn’t the Practical God War in Portland’s contingent, for instance?
“That’s how freedom’s supposed to work, Dave. Portland’s very good at leadership but she’s not doing ideological leadership,” Elorie said. “The City of God is a giant step backward, where a centralized authority sets the policy in all areas, practical and ideological, as revealed via prayer to God by the two City of God bosses, Verona and Dubuque. This is tyranny, scary tyranny.”
“You don’t think God supports Dubuque? That Dubuque’s actions aren’t God’s will?”
“You’ve heard my arguments,” Elorie said. “God’s too distant to govern. Trusting God to decide whether to build libraries or rebuild a sewer system is insane. Such questions are why we, us humans, are here.”
“Well, I’m willing to give this a shot.”
His comment elicited a wince from Elorie. “Dave, do you know what Dubuque’s real divine willpower trick is?”
“That’s easy,” Dave said. He had personal experience with it, several times. “The ability to directly answer the prayers of his worshippers and do his miracles wherever his worshippers are. Even outside his territory.”
“Listen to what you’ve just said,” Elorie said. “‘his worshippers’? ‘his miracles?’ Dubuque isn’t God, you know. If you read the fine print, he says that all he’s doing are God’s miracles, and those worshipping him are actually worshipping God.”
“The terms are just mental shorthand.”
“How soon before, in the mind of you and the rest of his worshippers, you forget this is mental shorthand and he becomes God? How long before the name ‘God’ begins to reside in Dubuque’s mind, if it isn’t already?”
Dave had heard that slander before. “That’s why he calls himself a Living Saint, to keep such a travesty from happening,” Dave said. “So what is Dubuque’s big trick, if not long-distance prayer answers?”
“Dubuque’s a mental takeover artist,” Elorie said. “Not only did he enslave Phoenix – Phoenix was originally pals with Atlanta and Portland, remember – but he actually got Nessa and Ken as well, until they found a way to wiggle free. Although this doesn’t get much mention in the media, one of the things Portland’s been teaching the other Gods is how to protect themselves from Dubuque’s mental takeover.”
“Talk about the pot calling the kettle black,” Dave said. “How can someone who employs an army of Telepaths, well known for taking over minds, complain about someone else’s alleged mental takeovers?”
“They’re not an army. There aren’t that many of them,” Elorie said, about the Telepaths. She took a big deep breath to calm herself and hugged the covers tight around her. “I think the big difference is Dubuque’s takeover trick’s permanent, or, well, permanent until undone. On the other hand, the telepathy-based takeover tricks of the Telepaths are purely tactical. They don’t last long at all,” Elorie said. She turned away for a moment, face a little red from embarrassment. “I know because they took me over.”
“They… What?”
“Nessa controlled me to keep me from running away after Persona’s appearance scared me shitless. The trick didn’t last. I couldn’t stop myself from testing the takeover all through that conversation. They said I was too stubborn to stay controlled for long.”
Dave covered his mouth to keep from laughing – he could see Elorie prodding and prodding and prodding – then let the chuckles out when Elorie laughed, too.
“Anyway,” she said, after wiping her eyes. “The idea that the Telepaths are anything other than victims is laughable. Without Portland’s support, they don’t even have the power to defend themselves against a small number of Supported. That’s why Portland’s Supported had to rescue the Telepath delegation from Phoenix’s people.”
“This fight tells me otherwise,” Dave said, pointed at the television. A box on the screen looped through something from the night before, a light show that was part of Portland’s thugs’ initial attack. He knew how overwhelming his woo-woo moments were, and he was only a Psychic. He had no doubt about the power of Telepaths.
“Dave, that’s a bunch of Supported going at each other,” Elorie said. “Telepaths can’t do such things.”
He snorted, not believing her. “In any event, the real problem comes from having all these 99 Gods running around unrestrained,” Dave said. Certainly Portland needed restraining. “The individual capabilities don’t scare me, but their capabilities as a group do. Chaos. Without coordination, without some limits on them, they can’t help but destroy our civilization. As I’ve said, that’s one of the big reasons I support Dubuque.”
“At what price do we buy this protection from the great danger of chaos?” Elorie said. “Dubuque plans on destroying our civilization; that’s the essence behind the City of God. He isn’t attempting to hide his goal at all.”
“Change, yes. Destroy, no,” Dave said. “I will admit I was a bit skeptical when I first heard the details behind the City of God, but the more I thought about his proposals the more I liked them. The United States had a good run as a nation, but when something significantly better came along, why not change? This isn’t a replacement for democracy, but an enhancement. Democracy at the local levels, the City of God leadership above.”
“The implied price is too high for me,” Elorie said. Her voice sounded raw, fighting her own anger. “Just keep your eyes open, that’s all I ask.”
“I only ask the same,” Dave said. He smiled as he listened to the anchors talk about how Dubuque’s defenders beat back Portland’s thugs in their initial attack. However, giving the television the finger every time the cable news slapped Portland’s ugly mug on the tube wouldn’t be polite or open minded, no matter how much Dave wanted. “So, back to my earlier comment, how do you reign in the chaos caused by the 99 Gods unless you support a centralized authority? Or do you just let the chaos continue?”
“No, I don’t want to let the chaos continue. There isn’t anything more dangerous,” she said. “Yet, it’s a difficult problem and difficult problems take complex solutions worked out over time. You want me to have faith? Well, I have faith in Portland. She and her crew know full well the dangers of the chaos the 99 Gods are causing and I believe they’ll have a well-thought out solution for the problem in good time.”
“I hope you’re right, because as far as I can see, these inter-99 conflicts are getting worse, not better,” Dave said.
Elorie si
ghed and grabbed the well-worn hotel-room remote from Dave. She switched off the television, tossed the remote off the bed, and bowled him over. She hopped up to her knees, straddled him, and with a wicked gleam in her eyes bent down to kiss him.
Of all the times… The discussion had left him tense and twitchy, not at all ready for this. Elorie kissed effortlessly and undemanding, and when he ran his hands up and down her back she grabbed his wrists and pinned him to the bed. She continued to kiss him. Dave gave up trying to understand and just kissed back.
“There,” Elorie said. “Much better.” She released his hands, unstraddled herself, flopped to the sheets and rolled on her side, presenting her back. Dave took a deep breath then followed her signal, spooning her, his front to her back. She grabbed his left hand and pressed it to her empty chest.
Whatever minor interest the long kiss had sparked in Dave vanished in an instant.
“It’s okay to touch,” Elorie said. “I don’t have a ‘no touching zone’ sign posted there.”
Dave froze for a moment, mind spinning. Elorie still wore her robe, so he ran his hands over the robe that covered the mutilated part of her body. Elorie snorted, grabbed his hand again, and thrust it under her robe. His hand froze in place, sympathetic icicles of agony racing across his abdomen.
“I’m sorry,” Dave said. “Most of my scars are very sensitive to the touch, even after my miraculous healing. I thought yours would be, too.” Dave hadn’t asked for cosmetic miracles and Dubuque hadn’t granted them.
“I figured out your scars are sensitive the first time you batted my hands away from them and left bruises. The only scar of mine that bothers me is the section above my left ear.” She grabbed his hand and carefully moved his index finger right on top of a scar. “For later information, assuming there is a later, this bump right there is all that remains of either of my nipples. Nubby here certainly isn’t off limits.” She took his finger off the spot. “But right now, I think we do need some sleep.”
“I’ve been sitting on something,” Elorie said. She pushed the hotel breakfast around on her plate, not eating more than a bit of yoghurt.
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