“This isn’t a matter of being squeamish,” Dubuque said. “It’s a matter of politics. I have allies, some whom I hold close to me, others whom I only loosely control. If I remove this Telepath from the equation, I’m going to be straining a relationship I’d worked hard to arrange and betraying an implied agreement with another God.”
“Ah,” Verona said. “So that’s what’s bothering your conscience. Betraying one’s word to another God is an immoral thing to do, but how implied was this agreement? If this was only an informal assumed agreement, this will not carry the stain of immorality.”
Dubuque didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he waved his hand and turned to lead Verona off the stage and down into the sanctuary. “I hear you and understand, but I’m troubled. The God in question, however, didn’t balk when I sent the current companions of this newly revealed enemy into harm’s way. The cause was good, and through it I gave two known divine enemies a chance to show their true colors and damn themselves before all of us. If my allies succeed, against all odds, they will neuter two divine enemies who greatly risk God’s plan. If they fail and die, their deaths will give me ample justification among the other wavering Gods to bring one or both of these independent actors forcibly under my sway. My ally, who also understands the danger, considered the risk to them acceptable.”
Verona closed his eyes and thought for a moment. “I suggest then working indirectly,” Verona said. “You can arrange things that are effective, but will not reflect…”
The functionary whose eyes provided the vision stopped and began a conversation with another functionary, while Verona and Dubuque pushed on ahead and out of hearing range.
The images vanished and the motel room lit again.
“I wish I had more to show you, but that’s the gist of it,” Celebrity said. “Unfortunately, John’s spy isn’t with Dubuque a hundred percent of the time. We’re lucky we got this much.”
Nessa looked at Alt.
“Thank you,” Ken said, to Celebrity. Nessa echoed his words.
“Why me?” Alt said, facing Celebrity. His earlier hatred of the God had vanished.
“You sure it’s you?” Celebrity said. Alt nodded. “Interesting. John guessed you were the target, Nessa. I don’t know anything about you, Alt. None of us do. To John’s magic and to my Godly senses, you’re just another Telepath, incomprehensible and, well, limited. But going after you is only part of Dubuque’s falsity.”
Do I have to spell this out for them? Nessa heard in Celebrity’s mind. Surely they’re not stupid.
Nessa had the sudden urge to flatten Celebrity with a mind blast. She repressed her urges and waited for one of their smarter group members to see what Celebrity thought obvious.
Phil cleared his throat. “If I may, Nessa?”
Polite and everything. Amazed, Nessa said “Go on, Dr. Blackburn.”
“Dubuque, the bastard, admitted that he’d essentially sent you and Ken out to die when he sent you after Miami and Atlanta,” Phil said.
“He did?” Nessa said, still confused, and wondering why her socks hadn’t caught this, either.
Ken slammed his left fist into his open right hand, a teek amplified firecracker pop. “Fuck! Dammit, he’s right. We’re the ‘companions of this newly discovered enemy’ that Dubuque ‘sent into harm’s way’, expecting us to fail and die. I didn’t catch this at first, because Dubuque talks in circles and I couldn’t make out half of what Verona was saying because of his thick accent.” Nessa nodded. This answered her question about why Dubuque had sent them after Miami and Atlanta if he thought the Gods were so much more powerful than the Telepaths. He had sent them on their quest to die.
“There’s more,” Phil said. “Note that both Dubuque and Verona are going on about ‘Gods’. In public, remember, they’re ‘Living Saints’. That’s the thing Dubuque’s most famous for. As you heard, they’re not ‘Living Saints’ when they’re in private with their hair down. Even the words of the supposedly ultra-liberal religious man-of-God Living Saints aren’t worth their weight in horseshit. Or any of the damned Gods!”
“Present company excluded,” Nessa said.
Celebrity winked at her. Nessa smiled.
“We fear both Dubuque and Verona are turning into megalomaniacs, addled by the fact they allow themselves to be worshipped,” Celebrity said. “You have to break off your alliance with Dubuque.”
“Excuse me,” Nessa said, frowning. “Worshipped? Where did that come from? How do you know they’re being worshipped?”
“When John confronted Dubuque, he sensed a wrongness in him, but didn’t know what it was,” Celebrity said. “He found the same wrongness in Miami and several other Gods, including Verona. He sought the answer in prayer and found out they were being worshipped. That, and only that, was what gave him the moral courage to become an active magician again.”
“That’s no proof,” Ken said.
“That’s as good a proof as anything else we have,” Celebrity said.
“For that accusation, you need more,” Ken said. “That’s up there with incest and cannibalism, hun. You can’t expect us to change our allegiance based on some piece of Lorenzi innuendo.”
Nessa stood and walked over to the motel room wall by the poker table, pounded it and cursed in thought. She grabbed a half-eaten bar of chocolate and sucked on it while she pounded. Milk chocolate, not her favorite. Polluted with almonds, too, which she normally liked but not today. Ken, Celebrity, Alt, Mary and Phil yammered at each other about proof, how nobody could ever trust Lorenzi or Atlanta, and how stupid it would be to break off their alliance with the leading North American Territorial God. She ignored them and pounded on the wall.
Celebrity endured the argument for only a few minutes before she followed Nessa. “So what has you upset?” she asked. Ken and Mary argued, across the room, about going to Africa, Mary expounded on how defenseless they would be on the way, and about the difficulties of getting her arsenal through baggage claim. Mary still didn’t have a good feel for the level of tricks the Telepaths could play. Phil and Alt talked about ways they might get proof of Dubuque worshippers.
“The agreement with Dubuque was in return for his help in extracting a friend of mine who’s apparently been nabbed by Nairobi,” Nessa said. “We bring Miami and Atlanta to justice, Dubuque gets my friend released.”
“That’s a moot point,” Celebrity said. “You can’t succeed.”
“Why not?” Nessa said. “Ken and I fought off Miami once. Ken fought him off by himself earlier than that.”
“Uh huh,” Celebrity said. “John told me about your confrontations with Miami. All you did was give him incentive to get better at fighting. Which he’s done, according to John’s spy in Miami’s camp.”
“We’re better too,” Nessa said. “There’s more of us, too.”
“You’re not that much better, and you’re already mature Telepaths.”
“I’ve heard that argument before,” Nessa said. “Okay, I get the point. You Gods are still new at the God thing and have lots of room for improvement, while us Telepaths aren’t and don’t. So you think Dubuque had no intention of following through with his end of the agreement?”
“He’s not going to do a thing unless you miraculously find a way to subdue Miami or Atlanta for him,” Celebrity said.
Nessa caught Celebrity’s worried train of thought. “Don’t worry about us subduing you, Celebrity. No wonder you’re so worried about us.”
“I’m not a fighter,” Celebrity said. “I’m at your mercy, just as I feared I would be.”
Nessa nodded. “Well, yes. Coming here was foolish of you.”
“I drew the short straw,” Celebrity said. “The consensus was that you wouldn’t listen to any of the rest of us.”
“Probably true.” Nessa turned back to the room and mentally pushed, to grab e
veryone’s attention. Beside her, Celebrity winced in pain. “So what are we going to do?” Nessa said, speaking to the crowd. Uffie! How were they going to rescue Uffie now? Dubuque had sent her and Ken out to die. He never intended to help them rescue Uffie, and probably wouldn’t even bother if they captured both Miami and Atlanta.
“If we can’t go after the Gods directly, we need to do so indirectly,” Phil said. “Lucky for us we have a specimen here to play with.”
“I beg your pardon?” Celebrity said, arch and theatrical.
“A tissue sample,” Phil said. “Nessa gave hers away and we need another. I have some friends in the biotech industry, and if we can figure out what makes you Gods tick, we should be able to find a weapon to use against you.”
“I don’t have any tissue,” Celebrity said, expertly curling her lip. “We’re something else entirely different.”
“I’ve told him that, but he doesn’t believe me,” Nessa said, to Celebrity.
“Lots of men are like that,” Celebrity said, her voice quiet, eyeing Nessa and making a secret decision that didn’t raise Nessa’s hackles. “Come over here, you.”
The last she aimed at Phil, and to Nessa’s surprise, Phil came over as Celebrity desired.
“Hold out your hand,” Celebrity said to Phil. Phil did so. Celebrity held out her hand above his, and lowered one finger. A silvery black-speckled drop fell from her finger and on to Phil’s hand.
“Does that look like tissue to you?”
The silvery drop spread out on Phil’s hand, then thinned to almost nothing, totally encasing his hand. His mind shrieked in terror, amplified by Celebrity’s anger and physical contact.
“Nice kitty,” Nessa said to Celebrity. “Sheathe your claws a bit, though.”
Celebrity glared at Nessa for a moment; when she realized her trick didn’t affect Nessa, sighed and reformed her silver flesh into a ball on Phil’s hand. “Let me magnify the light,” Celebrity said.
A magnified image of Phil’s hand and the silver drop appeared in midair, between him and his hand. The image interior grew until it became grainy and fuzzy. It remained focused on Phil’s hand, right at the edge of the silver drop. “We’re down past the size of human cells, as I’m sure you recognized,” Celebrity said. “Note that whatever I’m made of is still amorphous and undifferentiated. All the way down to the limits of visible light, all us Gods are this way. We’re not human any more. Not even close.”
“Damn,” Phil said.
“What did you think we were?” Celebrity said.
“Genetically manipulated things. It’s the only thing that made scientific sense to me.” Phil paused. “I thought you were a warning about where humanity was going if we continued to mess around with human genetics.”
“If there’s any science behind us, it’s far beyond what we can do or understand now,” Celebrity said. “According to John and his research crew, we’re not even normal matter. We’re miraculous.”
“There are no miracles,” Phil said.
“Well, then, what are we?”
“I thought I knew,” he said, staring at the mottled silver drop on his hand. “Not any more. But ignorance does not imply miracles.”
Celebrity reached down a finger and absorbed the silver drop. “Don’t let yourself be blinded by what you think you know,” Celebrity said. “The entities behind us made us to be as much a challenge to the scientific establishment as we are to the political and religious establishments. They didn’t say so outright, but they certainly implied the challenge.”
“When I got a piece of Miami, he howled in pain,” Nessa said. “This didn’t bother you?”
“The Practical Gods, the Ideological Gods and the Territorial Gods are different from each other,” Celebrity said. “Atlanta and I have compared notes, and we’re both of the opinion there’s almost as much of a difference between the two of us as between the Gods and mortals.”
“Atlanta,” Ken said. “What do you think of Atlanta, pray tell?”
Celebrity smiled, catching Ken’s never-hidden interest in Atlanta. Nessa poked his mind so he would behave, but he ignored her mental jab. “She’s Dubuque’s opposite, in my opinion,” Celebrity said.
“How so?”
“Dubuque’s paradise-on-Earth City of God is a worthy goal, but based on our espionage I’ve become convinced that he doesn’t have much in the way of scruples about what he’s willing to do to accomplish his goal,” Celebrity said. “The spy-snippet I showed you isn’t even close to being the worst. He literally makes my skin crawl when he goes on about how it’s every Christian’s duty to force the non-religious out of government. He’s become a fanatic of the first order. On the other hand, Atlanta’s got scruples up the wazoo, but her goal is utterly insane.”
“What’s her goal?” Ken asked.
“A world-wide military dictatorship of the Gods, or, when she’s feeling magnanimous, the Gods as a world-wide police force with a monopoly on police and military power.”
“I can’t say I find her goal a bad one. Hell, without human limitations and emotions mucking it up, I’d prefer a top-down logical and dispassionate dictatorship to our current mess,” Ken said, reaffirming his Atlanta partisanship. “What’s your goal, Celebrity?”
Celebrity shook her head. “My lonely voice in the wilderness? I think the Gods should serve humanity. There’s no limit to the amount of good we can do if we apply ourselves to it. Only I haven’t yet met anyone who thinks my idea’s worth shit.”
“It’s impractical and wrongheaded,” Phil said. “You have such immense power, so how could you restrain yourselves to serve humanity? No one has that amount of restraint. At best it would be a nasty fiction, at worst, an active dystopia.”
“See?”
Nessa shrugged. “Your idea’s incomplete, Celebrity, but incomplete doesn’t mean wrong. Try being a Telepath for a while, you’ll understand.”
Celebrity furrowed eyebrows; she did understand. Nessa realized she had made progress with this one. She had won her over, at least a little. Now she just had to avoid blowing the job…
Alt cleared his throat. “Back to reality, folks. If we break off our alliance with Dubuque, he’ll turn on us, and based on what I understand about what passes for God-logic, he’ll be justified. We’ll have the biggest fish on the block after us. We can’t break off the alliance.”
“So what do we do?” Nessa said.
“We vanish,” Javier said. “Find a place to hole up and shield ourselves from their minds.”
“Won’t work,” Nessa said. “We can’t even shield ourselves from Lorenzi. The Gods’ll just find us miraculously.”
“I think we need to take this evidence to Portland and strike at Dubuque politically. Well, God-politically,” Ken said.
Nessa smiled at her husband. “I like your idea. Portland’s really opposed to people worshipping the Gods. If we can’t nudge her Telepath-like, we can sure nudge her with data, such as with this vision of yours, Celebrity.” There went her hope of rescuing Uffie.
“You want me to go with you?” Celebrity said. “If you haven’t noticed, Portland’s on the other side of the political fence, bosom buddies with Dubuque…and I’m the ultimate rebel, at least from a Territorial God’s perspective. I’m not living up to the role given to me, expressed in my name. Not being Gods, you’re going to have to trust me on this one, but the other Gods think I’m bad news.”
“I understand your fear,” Nessa said. “But we’re all at risk. Portland’s powerful. Despite what your crew thinks she’s never been under Dubuque’s sway. But that also means she’ll be able to do whatever she wants with us if we can’t befriend her. She might even be able to subdue the lot of us with a wink and a nudge and pack
us off to Dubuque so he can enslave us. Going to her’s dangerous, but I think the attempt is worth the risk.”
Celebrity shook her head, as did Alt and Phil. “How can you contemplate such a thing so calmly?” she said. “You’re insane.”
Nessa nodded. “Too true. If you want, we can subdue you, so you can claim you were taken to Portland unwillingly.”
Nessa met Celebrity’s eyes. Celebrity looked like she might pop.
“No, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it honorably, for real.”
“Nessa?” Alt said. She looked over at him and blinked, her train of thought lost.
“Yes?”
“I have a hunch this won’t be enough,” he said. “I mean, all we have for evidence of Dubuque’s worshippers is a bunch of suppositions that aren’t even good enough to convince us. Portland likely has this evidence already, so she’s likely to just blow us off unless we can get proof that Dubuque’s lying to her about the one thing she cares about.”
Nessa rolled her eyes. “So… do you have a suggestion buried in there somewhere?”
Alt nodded. “Yes. I’d like to try an experiment,” he said. “Ken, Javier and I working together.”
“Oh, so you don’t need me anymore?” Nessa said. She crossed her arms and fumed. The nerve of them. Men! Any time you got two or more of them together in a group, they always took over. Hemph!
“We’re going to be using the internet,” Ken said.
“You can still do that? Haven’t the do-gooder Gods snuffed out the internet yet, protecting all those innocent fetuses from free porn and gazillions of smarmy cat pictures?” Ken shook his head. Nessa snorted. “Well, count me out, then.”
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