“Damn if I know,” Nessa said, her mutter coarsely honest. “I’ve never tried this with a Psychic of your age and power. Why don’t we find out?”
So, would he follow through with his pledge? He thought through some options and decided to chance this. “Okay,” Dave said. He let his fear of Nessa vanish, replaced by curiosity. She had him hooked; he wanted to find out what would happen to him if she got into his mind. Would he be able to read her thoughts? He unbuttoned his shirt the rest of the way. He knew this was stupid. Stupid, though, wouldn’t stop him today.
Today, he would be the hero.
He did notice Nessa didn’t undo her bra.
She took him into her arms and kissed him like a lover.
For a moment, the world came alive around him in his mind. Wondrous lights, thousands of minds. For an instant, he read Nessa’s thoughts. Dolphins – the Minds in the Sea were dolphins! Wolves. Polar bears. Portland’s mind, holding a galaxy of thoughts. Memories of fights, memories of insanity. A conversation with God. Praying minds by the tens of thousands. An ocean of thoughts and experiences rolled over him before receding, all faster than he could think.
The contact vanished.
Nessa continued to kiss him, trembling in his arms. She sniffed, and with a free hand wiped improbable tears from her slate-hard eyes. She broke the clinch and stopped, nose to nose with him.
“You’re in love with Elorie,” Nessa said.
He nodded.
“That’s just so beautiful. She needs love. You ‘betrayed’ Dubuque, to save El.”
El? “Yes.” He wiped tears from his own eyes. “I’m not sure I succeeded.”
“Religion to me is ‘love your neighbors as yourself’,” Nessa said. “Coercing the City of God into being is evil. What he’s doing is the exact opposite of love.”
For a moment, they had shared thoughts and their shared thoughts had been of religion. Her sudden change of subject felt like they were continuing an ongoing conversation. Disconcerting. “Heaven on Earth is worth a lot. Something to fight for. Something to strive for.”
“Isn’t a God or religion evil if they don’t quail at spilling the blood of those they label ‘sinners’?” Nessa said. “Anyone can be labeled a ‘sinner’. Labels are cheap. Lives aren’t. Dave, think. Who set up Elorie and the rest to die?”
Realization rushed through him. The reason why Nessa and her team had been on the jet was so they could get to Elorie’s team and stop them from walking into this trap. He had seen, in Nessa’s mind, the motivations of all the rest: John Lorenzi’s ancient unbreakable honor, Alt’s squeamish goodness, and Portland’s fears of doing the wrong thing by acting impetuously. He remembered Dubuque’s attacks on Nessa’s people, Nessa’s memories; the truck stop fight, unprovoked, lay heavily in his mind. Nessa was one of the most pacifistic people he had ever encountered. In many cases, she would let herself be killed rather than kill in self-defense.
He couldn’t say the same about Ken.
He did notice Nessa didn’t give much weight to the concept of pain, though. From his perspective, she was quite insane.
From hers, so was he. The shock of the realization cleared up quite a few issues in his mind.
“Dubuque was behind this,” Dave said. “Without a doubt. He wanted all of us to die.” He closed his eyes. Whatever the Goth princess had done to him to ease his pain couldn’t ease this pain. Now he hurt, wounded in soul as well as body. “I’ve been used. I’ve been a fool.”
“You’re pissed.”
“I’m pissed.”
“Good.”
Dave opened his eyes. “What you’ve proposed, that I be a stability servant of yours, is just as bad.” He didn’t want to be used again. He wanted to find a corner and curl up and make this all go away.
Then go find Elorie.
“I can’t enslave you, Dave,” Nessa said. “You’re a peer, a top one percenter, just as powerful as I am. Even if I fall off the wagon into the temptation of enslaving others or coercing people to purchase nature artwork, I can’t get you. I can only beg and persuade.”
“What about Elorie?”
“What about her?” Nessa said. Her eyes opened wide in surprise. “Hey, yah, you’re male, I almost forgot. What we just did wasn’t a sexual thing, understand.” Nessa shrugged. Dave let her comment go, as totally beyond his understanding. “Besides, Ken gets jealous and he’d drop a car on you or something if we got it on.” Uh, right, Dave thought. “Now, Elorie’s not a Telepath of any variety, but I need her as well.”
“Why? Won’t her conscious thoughts mess you up?”
Nessa shook her head. “She’s been through the same hell that matures a Telepath and stabilizes them. She’s a rare person, a normal who thinks like a Telepath. As rare as adult Telepaths. I was attracted to her – no, not that way, don’t think with your dick, think with your higher emotions – from the first moment I telepped her mind.”
“Can I say I don’t understand?”
“Sure. Say it all you want. I’m going to have to win the both of you over, which won’t be easy, given how much of a lame-o I am most of the time,” Nessa said. To his surprise, for a moment Nessa looked vulnerable. “Oh hell. Here comes trouble.” The moment passed.
The rest of Nessa’s crew walked over, surrounded by a dust-free bubble. Ken carried the map in his hand. Nessa’s hands flew, buttoning buttons. Dave did the same.
“Got it. Let’s leave this rathole before the next horrible bad thing happens.” He looked at Dave, and Dave suspected Ken knew exactly what had been going on. “You sure he’s not one of those strange other types I’m not supposed to know about, like Uffie and Tracy?”
Uffie’s face turned stony. The face of the middle-aged oriental, who had to be Tracy, did the same.
“You’re not supposed to know enough to ask, Ken,” Nessa said. “Yes, I’m positive. He’s an honest-to-goodness top end Psychic. Real top end. I think you’re going to like him as much as I do.”
“Can we intercept Elorie and the rest before they get to wherever they’re going?” Dave asked.
Ken shook his head. “No way. I’m so exhausted I can barely keep the dust off of us.” He pointed to the edge of his anti-dust bubble, and Dave’s eyes widened as he took in the fact it didn’t have a sharp edge, but an undulating boundary where the dust seeped in and out. “Nessa’s nearly as exhausted. We’re going to grab those tents of yours, find a place to hole up here, and eat and sleep.”
“Then they’re going to get to where they’re going and run into the same thing the Ecumenists did,” Dave said. “They’ll die.” Somehow, he knew.
“They might die,” Ken said. “But so would we if I conked out at 30,000 feet above the Black Sea. We have to rest. I’m sorry.” He didn’t mean the words. “But we can’t help.”
The Goth princess snorted. “Oh, and if we don’t rest, half of us are gonna croak when my patch jobs run out. I’ve got hours of healing left to do before any of us are ready for anything more. Including you, Dave.”
“I’m fine now,” Dave said.
Nessa smiled and stuck a finger deep into his abdominal wound and threatened to stick another finger in the wound on his back. “Care to make a guess about whether I can get my fingers to touch?”
That did it. Dave’s knees buckled and he passed out again.
“You understand the danger, don’t you?”
Dave woke and sat up. He heard Ken’s voice, but Ken wasn’t in the tent.
“Relax. It’s a telekinetic trick I don’t advertise. I’ve set it up so no one else can hear us.”
“Okay,” Dave said. “What danger? Which danger?”
“Nessa trying to seduce you.”
Dave remembered Nessa’s comment about gravity assisted cars. “I’m married to Elorie; I’m in love with her.”
“No, not sex. Sex is just normal human weakness. I mean Nessa’s attempt to drag you into our group. That seduction.”
Oh.
“Well, I
guess I understand the danger. Your group’s doing dangerous things, and I’m defenseless.” Can’t fight, can’t shoot a gun, not a Supported any more. Useless.
“No, that’s not the problem,” Ken’s voice said, from wherever he was. Dave skittered back an inch in fear, startled by Ken’s tone. “It’s the temptation. Nessa can turn you into a fully functional Telepath. Someone as powerful as the two of us, or perhaps stronger.”
“You’re kidding. This is possible?”
“Yes, but the consequences aren’t pretty,” Ken said. “The transition would cause an ego death. You would be so different coming out of the procedure you would need a new name. You wouldn’t likely be able to remember any more than snippets of your former life. Evil, in my book. Real bad shit.” Ken paused. Dave shivered.
“How could…” Dave shook his head. “Why would you think I’d be tempted into something like that?”
“Love. It happens over time. We don’t try, but people always come to love us.”
“I thought you Telepaths said you were the good guys,” Dave said, his voice reduced to a whisper.
“Well, there’s a reason why Uffie’s brand of others fears us Telepaths the way they do,” Ken said. “We suck people into our orbit and they die far too often. Things could be worse.” Ken’s voice grew distant. “Remind me to tell you someday about how Nessa and I barely avoided succumbing to the temptation to become honest-to-God world-threatening evil Telepaths. The story ties into this mess – years ago, Blind Tom, Dubuque’s leading battle Telepath, almost got to us and turned us into monsters.
“In any event, we have enough morality to warn those we recruit. Just like I’m warning you. I’m warning you far enough ahead, so you can steel yourself against the temptation.”
I’m dangerous, and so’s Nessa. Dave nodded, convincingly scared of Ken, at least. Then he understood. “I… Hell, Ken, I can even see a situation where I might be tempted to become a Telepath.”
“If you think you can save Elorie. Or if Elorie had been grotesquely murdered.”
Okay, Ken backed up his Telepath power with some serious mental wattage. “Yes,” Dave said. In the right situation, he would sacrifice his mind for the greater good.
“Don’t. Run, if you get even the least tempted. I don’t want your death on my conscience.”
“You’re not like them,” Dave said. “I don’t understand how I’m picking it up, but I can.” He hadn’t thought flight on an invisible platform to be something a person got used to, but there was only so long he was able to study the ocean below them before he got bored. Ken’s route to northern Georgia was not straight line.
“You can because you can,” Uffie said. She sighed. Dave had been talking with Uffie for ten minutes, on all sorts of mundane subjects. Getting on her nerves, too. Despite her wounds, she looked in excellent health and shape for someone her age. Not at all sedentary.
“You don’t want to talk about what’s going on?” Dave said. Ken maintained an invisible shell around the front of the platform to cut the wind, but the whistling still drowned out voices beyond a couple of feet.
Uffie shook her head.
“Look, you read Georgia’s report on my iPad in about five minutes.” Dave still couldn’t believe his iPad had survived the Cappadocia disaster. Lorenzi must have bought the industrial strength version. “I’ve taken enough speed-reading courses to know you weren’t doing any such thing. I think we need to talk about what you can do. We’re going in to a dangerous situation and we’re all going to need to contribute.”
“You don’t take hints at all well,” Uffie said. She spent a few moments looking him over, as if he was an anatomy cadaver. Disquieting. “Okay, you do make a good point. You need to agree to some ground rules before I’ll agree to talk to you, though.” Dave nodded. “First, what I say to you stays with you, and especially doesn’t go to the Telepaths.” Dave nodded again. “Second, I’m not going to explain everything or answer all your questions…and I don’t want you to give me a hard time.” Another nod.
“Dave,” Uffie said. “You’re one of us.”
Dave’s eyes widened. “What?”
“First, the good news: using the old terms, you’re a Riverwalker Sybil, the technical terms for your abilities. My new association terms you a Temporal Inseer.”
“Uh, I’m a Psychic.”
“Yes, I know you’re also a Psychic.” Uffie flicked her eyes at Nessa, who started to creep over to them. Nessa stopped, crossed her arms, and turned away, annoyed. “The bad news is the ‘riverwalker’ term. The story goes like this: a monk decides to learn to levitate across a narrow river. He spends years and years perfecting his mind and talent, and finally masters the trick when he’s about eighty years old. He then tells his people what he can do…and a young student monk says ‘Master, why didn’t you just walk across the river and get your feet wet?’.”
Dave chuckled. “You’re saying I’m a lousy Sibyl.”
“I wouldn’t say ‘lousy’. The polite phrase is ‘your potentials do not make you good enough to recruit’. We don’t want to waste people’s time. Since you noticed me, and our situation here is quite dire, I’m willing to bend a few rules.”
A rule-bender, eh? Yah, Uffie did look like the sort of person who did exactly what she wanted when she wanted to, and refused to let the world give her any grief. If she hadn’t chosen to talk to him about this crazy stuff, he wouldn’t have been able to wheedle it out of her no matter what he tried. “Okay, I think I understand. Where does Psychic end and Sibyl begin?”
“Psychic is what you’re born with, Dave, what Nessa and Ken term an innate. Sibyl is potential, a training path, the same way anyone who’s over seven feet tall has an easier training path into the NBA. You’ve been doing the training; that damned Telepath Jeanne D’Ark’s meditation techniques work just as well for Psychics and, um, us. In you, it’s made your unconscious telepathy and your other Psychic tricks far more frisky.”
Dave nodded. “Yes, I’ve been practicing said techniques ever since I learned I was a Psychic and, yes, my moments of strangeness are happening more often,” Dave said. He didn’t want to go into the details. Mistrust did work both ways. “You’re not a Sibyl.”
“You’re correct. I’m what’s called a Seer in the old terms, and an Inseer in the new terms.”
He didn’t doubt Uffie’s story. For one thing, he had heard the Seer and Sibyl names before, from Lorenzi. Second, he had a gut feeling they were correct and the names important, tied to the mundane meaning of the words involved. “I can sort of figure out Sibyl from the name, but what’s a Seer do?”
Uffie licked her lips. He had passed at least one of her tests, likely one based on intellect. “Think of me as a receiver without a transmitter, a long range receiver,” she said. “Only I pick up on far more than thoughts, and use all my senses.” She held up her hands, showing without saying. She used them as receivers as well as her eyes. “I can’t read minds. I can sense people’s emotions and general moods. At times it may look like I’m reading minds, but I’m not.” She leaned forward. “I’m open to patterns of unnatural power of many varieties, including the magic in places like that horrible underground city we found you in, as well as the miracles of the 99 Gods. What makes me special is the fact I can do this at a distance. As a receiver.”
“So you read the memory of my iPad?”
Uffie laughed. “No, I just didn’t tell you all that I can do. I also read fast, and I’m an information sponge with an excellent memory. Both are Seer benefits, and both took years to train. Comes in handy as an academic.” She shook her head. “Those Seer skills of mine aren’t likely to be at all useful if we get into any trouble, though.”
“What do Sibyls do, besides the obvious?”
“That’s a question us Seers have been asking for eons,” Uffie said, smiling. “You’re right about the obvious, though. Sibyls understand things about the future. It’s like a Telepath’s hunches, but hunches come from what peo
ple are doing, while Sibyls’ knowledge is more often about static things: facts, situations and places. Sibyls also possess other tricks involving presentation and other, rarer, tricks I’m not going to talk about today.”
Fair enough. “What can I do as a Sibyl, if anything?
“You’re a little bit better than normal people when dealing with machines and computer interfaces,” Uffie said. “It took me awhile to figure this out, because it’s a subtle talent. I’ll bet you don’t need to spend much time with manuals.”
He nodded. “I don’t, but I didn’t think it was anything abnormal. You sensed this as a Seer?” Dave said. Uffie nodded. He shrugged. “Uh, well, I guess I’m confused.” Dave felt off his feed, his brain bent too many different ways at once. “I can’t see my trick with the manuals causing our enemies to shake in their boots.”
“As I said, you’re a Riverwalker. Your native Sibyl skills are never going to be much, even if you do take the time to train them up.”
“Pardon me for asking this, but then why even bother answering my questions?” Dave said. “I might have lived the rest of my life in blissful ignorance of this nonsense and never missed a thing.”
“I answered your questions because you’re a Psychic; it’s your innate tricks, not your Sibyl potentials, that are important,” Uffie said. “I’ve read about Psychic Sibyls, Dave. Old stories. People like you aren’t at all common. In addition to the standard Sibyl tricks, you can likely learn to do things nobody else can do. The best way I can explain this is that your buried telepathic tricks are amplifying your Sibyl skills, likely in unforeseen ways. I’m not saying you’ll ever be able to tease out any of these additional potentials, or you can ever learn anything as flashy as Nessa and Ken’s tricks. Nor have I given you a full explanation of Sibyls or Seers. Keep your eyes open for new and unexpected things, though – you did notice that I was different, so something’s going on in your head. If I’m still around, I’ll help you if you come up with anything.”
Dave nodded. “I can do that, but truthfully I still would rather think of myself as just a Psychic.”
99 Gods: Betrayer Page 53