99 Gods: Betrayer
Page 41
<‘Here’ is what mortals normally term ‘Heaven’, Nessa. Consider what you truly desire before you choose to act.>
Oh. Of course. She sighed, knowing she would have to leave this beauty behind.
Nessa blinked, and noted she had slipped from her chair. Ken’s telekinetic hands surrounded her, holding her. “Oooh, that was fun,” Nessa said, semi-orgasmic.
Nicole said.
“Again, I point out that I had a good insight when I thought you were possibly the entity behind the appearance of the 99 Gods,” Ken said aloud. She decided her little excursion had left her open to anyone with a scrap of telepathy. Bummer. At least the Angel had gone. This little scheme of hers had gone belly-up in almost record time.
Nessa sent back to Ken, using Ken’s mental voice.
Ken did so and deposited Nessa back in her chair. Portland glared. Boise was appalled and, if truth be told, wondering if the correct solution to the strife among the 99 Gods was to appoint Nessa ‘overgod’.
“Persona, I have some bad news,” Nessa said. “The Angels aren’t evil and they’re not working for the Devil.” No, the Constellations were not rising. “They are as they say they are.”
“Then God is evil,” Persona said.
“No, He’s just being the usual stiff-necked parent. It’s God’s job, my guess.”
Persona shook her head. “Don’t take it wrong, Nessa, but I’m a little leery of altering my Mission based on one of your screwy psi moments.”
Gods! Nessa rolled her eyes and turned to Orlando. “God said you know why the 99 Gods are here now. Come on. Give.” She read his mind, found the explanation, and shook her head. “And try to put it in words us mere mortal idiots can understand, why doncha.”
Orlando’s projection appeared put-upon. “If your experience is correct and we’re not being fed bad information by an unknown power, then the answer is in my original name, Singularity. The reason for ‘why now’ is, as many futurologists have posited, at some point in the near term future, the exponential growth in knowledge and technology will escape human control. If so, without some form of unified human governance, our chances of destroying ourselves approach unity. Sounds like God thinks this will happen.” Nessa translated his statement to mean ‘soon the Earth is going to look like a scene from one of the Terminator movies’. That sounded bad to Nessa.
Portland shook her head. “Interesting, but academic.”
Portland must have backed down on the Lorenzi-gigging, Nessa decided. Good timing. Nessa wasn’t sure she would be able to save Lorenzi’s bacon, right this instant, if Portland turned hostile.
John grumped for a few moments, before shrugging. “How about I give you a candidate to start with, and if this is the one I suspect, you don’t nose into the rest of my business.”
“No,” Portland said. “Unacceptable. Although as a compromise, I can save the rest for when we’re in private, if your candidate proves true. What’s your guess?”
“I have more than a guess. This project’s been gnawing at my overburdened conscience ever since I set it up.”
“Oh, crap,” Alt said. “You’re talking about the team I sent to find out what happened to your stupid order of religious ultra-reactionaries, isn’t it? The one that kept looking to me like a suicide mission.”
John nodded.
Portland and Boise exchanged glances. “Is there any way to prove this?” Boise said.
“Nope.”
“Can you take my word about this revelation?” War said. Nessa blinked. She had practically forgotten War had come in while she had been distracted one time or other. War must be off her feed, Nessa thought; War normally had a much more forceful presence. She peered into War’s mind and saw what War had done, and decided War’s wacky time vision crap fell into the area of privacy between them.
War ignored Nessa’s telepathy as best she could. Portland nodded ‘yes’. “This is the right answer,” War said. “It’s proven.”
“Then what do we do? I gave a moment of thought to the idea of interfering personally, and I got the worst case of ‘no way it’s suicide’ I’ve ever received,” Portland said.
“Same here,” echoed the other Gods and Dana. Dana thought the problem connected to Hell and her strange Indigo cult allies. Nessa couldn’t disagree, which bothered her immensely. Perhaps the Constellations were rising. Hell crap on Earth was always bad news.
“Nessa, Ken – oh, I hate pushing Mystics this way, it always backfires – but I’m afraid it’s up to you,” Lorenzi said.
“That’s Telepaths, dammit, not Mystics,” Nessa said. “Why us?”
“Because you can stare down anybody or anything, and you’ve got the power to back it up. Nor are you afraid or ashamed to run away, if necessary.”
“Awwwh, come on, all of you!” Too many of this group agreed with Lorenzi. “If there’s a dozen or more decently trained Grade One Supported on the other end of this quest of yours, the next time we meet I’ll be your enemy, or dead,” Nessa said. “Ken and I aren’t half as good as you think we are. We can still be coerced, blackmailed, mentally twisted – hell, all anyone has to do to stop me is to take out my sanity support.” She took a deep breath. “Nor am I taking my unborn children into a situation so absurdly dangerous. Find another patsy.”
“Then we must turn John over to Dubuque and let Dubuque handle this problem in his own way,” Portland said.
“I don’t follow your reasoning,” Nessa said.
“It’s not reasoning, it’s Mission,” Boise said. Nessa winced. Ignoring logic was just plain stupid. “If you don’t know already, for reasons I’m still not happy with, the Ecumenist quest in question is one of the few things we and Dubuque have been able to cooperate on. He’s got one of his worshippers with the group working on this.”
“Pardon me if I scream silently for a moment,” Nessa said.
Dammit, why the dolphins? Nessa stored Alt’s insight away for much later contemplation.
“I changed my mind, Portland,” Nessa said. “I’m in.”
“Gee, thanks, what about me?” Ken said.
“I’m hoping you’re coming with.”
“You think I’d desert you in something like this? I just wanted a bit of consultation time.”
“Why? Your inner boy scout wanted to do this before I stated my first objection. Is this some guy thing?”
<-------->
“There’s a cost, though,” Nessa said. She turned to Portland. “I want Uffie out of Nairobi’s hands first, which means either I need help fighting Nairobi or you need to cough up this academic and twist his arm so he’ll work without an employment contract, or find some way of arranging said contract in an enforceable manner.”
Nessa put down her crossword puzzle. Despite the occasional appearance of a celebrity name, which led her telepathy out to a celebrity mind too far away to read, she had managed to finish one for once. The remains of a dinner and a late snack littered the tray table in front of her. Boise had morphed Nessa’s chair into a comfortable massaging lounger, and she wondered if she should nod off. Then she peered into the minds she had been studiously ignoring for several hours. All this planning and no agreement on what to do bored her.
“Hey, everybody,” Nessa said. “I like Montreal’s idea.”
The people in the round fallout shelter room turned to stare at her. No, glare at her.
“I’m sorry the idea came up two and a half hours ago and you rejected it. No, that didn’t come out right. I apologize for not paying strict attention, but if I was the sort of person who paid strict attention to things like this I’d be unlivable so it’s best I wasted your two and a half hours.”
“That’s ‘more unlivable’, Nessa,” Alt said.
She stuck her tongue out at him, reached into Ken’s pocket with her weak telekinesis and brought out a chocolate bar. She needed a boost of one kind or another.
“I didn’t consider Montreal’s idea the least bit usable,” Portland said.
“Which one?” Ken said. “I forgot.”
She decided she wasn’t the only one who had given up on paying attention. Portland, War and Alt did tend to dominate any conversation once they got going.
Ken sent.
Ken extracted half of Nessa’s chocolate bar from her and began to nibble.
Alt did.
“Alt, what’s going on?” Persona asked. “That was an excessive amount of telepathy bandwidth there.”
Bandwidth? Nessa ignored the bafflegab.
“The problem we’re having needs to be restated,” Alt said. “What we’re facing is the question of how the Gods should organize among themselves, not just a question about a contract. The problem is that the 99 Gods appear to have ‘hierarchy’ built into them, at a base instinct level. The idea that the Gods bind to each other, laterally, for purposes of judgment of conflicts, is clearly possible but is a more organized state than the default.”
“Lateral binding is wrong,” Portland said. “We’re not all equal. If I bind myself with unequals who are not on my side, I diminish my Mission.”
“The fact you, and the rest of the 99 Gods, judge everything by its Mission impact is skewing everything,” Dana said. “You – we – have to think about this as a group, not as individuals.”
“The idea is foul,” War said. Boise nodded as well.
“It’s an invitation to chaos,” Lorenzi said. “No leader?”
War opened her mouth to say something and stopped. “No leader,” she echoed. “Holy crap, this changes everything.”
“You’ve lost me,” Portland said. “I thought you wanted a leader.”
“Hey, whatever happened to ‘When we sit and discuss matters, we’re all equals’, eh, Portland?” Lydia said. “Or, how about: ‘A single leader among the Gods would necessarily be a tyrant’.”
Portland reddened.
“And: ‘We’re going to do it the right way, not my way’. Or…”
Nessa smiled. She knew she had a reason to bring in Lydia.
“Enough, enough, I get the point,” Portland said. “If you diminish me, though, it makes it harder for me to protect you.”
“Wouldn’t this enhance your allies, though?” Lydia said. For a brat teen natural Supported she could do the toe-to-toe with Portland with ease. Then Nessa understood – this was the pattern of Portland’s life as a guidance counselor. Good karma. Both ways. Neat.
“Probably not. These contracts will make us all appear weak.”
“What if the binding extends to mortals?” Alt said. “Someone once leaked some thoughts indicating some mortals, especially us Telepaths, have Missions.”
Portland raised her hands. “Okay, I understand. Yes, this would work. Yes, Nessa, I know I’ve let too much arrogance creep into my organization. But we were fighting a war. I thought this was necessary.”
Nessa smiled. Stealing thoughts could go either way, she knew.
“But,” Portland said, “A binding like you describe won’t be enough.”
“Portland, how about an actual charter,” Lawyer said. “A formal legal document that spells out the details of conflict resolution, not just simple bindings. We bind ourselves to this charter instead of each other. Charters are one of the basic foundational components of our civilization, don’t forget.”
Lorenzi nodded in agreement. He probably had witnessed the signing of the Magna Carta, damn him for his arrogance.
Portland carefully examined Lawyer. “We could bind ourselves to the charter and to each other.”
“Yes, perfect,” Lorenzi said. Something had clicked in his mind, Nessa wasn’t sure she understood what. Who were the Knights Templar, anyway? She didn’t think they had signed the Magna Carta, that’s for sure.
“Who, in this scenario, would be the judges?” Boise said.
Portland thought for a moment, and then smiled. “Normal juries – non-Supported, non-Telepaths, non-Gods. Take a page from the American legal system.”
“Okay, I guess,” Boise said, as if he found the idea distasteful. “A Divine Compact. At least it’s going to have the side effect of putting sand in Dubuque’s gears.”
And as to the death of the giants, wheresoever their spirits depart from their bodies, let their flesh, that which is perishable, be without judgment. Thus shall they perish, until the day of the great consummation of the great world. A destruction shall take place of the Watchers and the impious.
And now to the Watchers, who have sent you to pray for them, who in the beginning were in heaven,
Say, In heaven have you been; secret things, however, have not been manifested to you; yet have you known a reprobated mystery.
And this you have related to women in the hardness of your heart, and by that mystery have women and mankind multiplied evils upon the earth.
Say to them, Never therefore shall you obtain peace.
-- The Book of Enoch 16, 1:5
“I’d have a hard time tracking a train.”
33. (War)
War activated her dormant little girl projection stashed in Portland’s headquarters and immediately noticed the reek. She stalked her projection to Portland’s office. The low ceiling gave the place a dungeon-like aura, despite Portland’s best attempts to decorate.
Satan had beaten her there. Two days of tracking down Satan, at Portland’s orders, to try to convince Satan to stop harassing Portland’s charity efforts in California’s central valley, and the damned Telepath had beaten her here anyway. By logic, Satan’s tricks extended to the Place of Time.