“Okay,” Orlando said. “Perhaps I’ve been underestimating Lydia. I’ll talk to her.” He stopped and motioned for Dana to sit beside him on a limestone shelf just back from the beach. She did, and he presented her the driftwood, now intricately carved by his willpower into a bouquet of roses.
“It’s beautiful,” Dana said, not a hundred percent enthusiastic. “Thanks.” She would put it on her desk for the next few days, and then toss the trinket in a trunk with the rest. “Um.”
“Yes?”
His gift had been a gentle prompt about their relationship. Her ‘Um’ had been her instinctive response. Okay, they had dated an intense twice, long dates where they snuck into movie theatres, went dancing, sat in bars and talked about their pasts, wandered the beach, and through everything Orlando had been a perfect gentleman. Sparks had flown, but not caught into an all-consuming blaze.
Orlando deserved a better response than an ‘Um’. “I’m only a Natural Supported myself at the moment,” Dana said. “I’ve been thinking this clears up some of the problems I’ve had about us.”
Dana paused. The expression on Orlando’s face said ‘continue please’.
“I’m not tied to any of the 99 Gods, just to all of them, and…” Dana paused, lost in contemplation. “Everything is different. I’ve become a tight white dot of power, not the big diffuse mess I was.”
“Interesting,” Orlando said. “I think of myself similarly, without Supported to support.”
Dana frowned. She hadn’t thought about that aspect of things. After the first five minutes passed, Orlando hadn’t reacted at all to the loss of his Supported on a personal level. She hadn’t asked him how he was doing, what this had done to him before, but after the chaos of the battle other issues had come up, such as healing up the Natural Supported, coping with Dave and Elorie’s uncanny interference and dodging Nessa’s mental lightning bolts.
She enjoyed being around Orlando. She liked him: brilliant, less emotion-driven than even her, and willing to engage in idea-based conversations. Only: she didn’t have the instinctive pull toward him that she had with Dave.
“Talk to me,” she said. “The loss of your Supported has to be painful.”
Orlando turned away and looked out over the ocean. The expression on his face tugged on Dana’s heart. “I predicted the loss using the Place of Time, but I didn’t understand the details. The future kept changing and the timing of the end of the Supported changed every time I did something or one of the Telepaths did something. This was enough to confuse me about exactly what would happen.” He paused. Dana squeezed his hand. “Their passing stuck a knife through me. Through my Mission. Through the combined Mission of all the 99 Gods. This was the biggest ‘instant change’ since the Miami-Atlanta battle. I’m still not sure I understand everything this did to me. I’m sure most of the other 99 Gods are even more clueless.”
“I’m here,” Dana said. Orlando shivered.
“We’re weak in our own ways, us Gods,” Orlando said. “Instant changes are hard on us, worse than battle wounds. This weakness places an interesting limit on us, conditioning us. We can’t be too unresponsive to the outside world, too self-centered conservative, or we’ll go the way of Miami and Atlanta, and be sent back to God. Killed. On the other end of the spectrum, instant changes hurt, leading us away from radicalism.”
“Good,” Dana said. Orlando glanced at her, his eyes profoundly unhappy. “Moderation will help you stay human, which I’m convinced is necessary.” Which spoke to her last bit of resistance to their relationship. Inhumanity.
He nodded. “You and the Telepaths. I guess I just need faith.”
“Faith isn’t a swear word,” Dana said.
“Aren’t you the one who thinks God Almighty is evil?”
He had prized that admission out of her on their second date. “Evil and good.” Reluctant. Her gut said ‘evil’, her intellect said ‘good’. She compromised on ‘both’ and admitted she didn’t fully understand.
“Like the Watchers, then.”
“And mortal humans, made in His image.”
“Faith in its place is fine, but when we’re talking about me and my future, I want data.” Orlando sighed. He sounded very much the Indigo cultist now. “You’re holding something back. About us.”
Dana nodded and walked back toward the surf. Orlando followed. They walked for along the surf for several minutes before Dana spoke again. “What I’m holding back isn’t something I want to pester you about.” The rumbles of fate and echoes of thoughts in her mind, summoned forth by her words, almost overwhelmed her. Telepathic crap, beyond her instant understanding. She half-wished Dave walked beside her now, invisible, able to advise her. Elorie, for one, had joined the ‘get yourself laid for gosh sakes’ crowd. She hadn’t discounted Elorie’s advice, but her feelings on the matter hadn’t changed. “I’m afraid you’re going to take my observation badly.”
“I’d rather learn about this sooner rather than later.” He stopped in front of Dana and looked into her eyes.
Dana sighed, caught in a déjà vu sensation of Ken and Dave pushing too hard in exactly the same way at approximately the same point in their appointed relationships. They hadn’t faced this problem, though, but the parallels whipped around her enough to broadcast their similarity. “After I lost Supported, I realized something new,” Dana said. “I can’t marry someone named ‘Orlando’. Your entire essence is built around a piece of inhumanity that I can’t quite get my hands around or overcome. I’m so sorry.”
Orlando didn’t respond. After a minute, he resumed walking. “I don’t understand,” he said, long moments later. He did take his hand out of Dana’s. The air around her cooled noticeably, not what she expected in the Keys. “Why’s my name so important? I don’t understand this at all.”
“My comment’s an attack on you, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
“I was afraid you would take things this way. Just…and this isn’t an attack on you…well, people don’t have names like ‘Orlando’. The name is inhuman. People’s names connect them with their families, and their names give gender and personality cues. By becoming a place you’ve left your humanity behind.”
Orlando stopped, mid stride, and turned to face her, planting both feet so firmly on the sand they sunk in an inch. “You’re saying Bob’s right and his bit of adolescent rebellion, taking the formal name of Bob Personason, is a good thing.”
Exactly what she feared. Blither blather blither blather wham-on-the-real. Just what she hoped to avoid. “He’s absolutely right. This is absolutely necessary.”
“This would be an insult to the other 99 Gods, to the Angelic Host, and to God Almighty himself,” Orlando said. “Bob insulted them on purpose, to declare his independence and piss on their feet. He said so himself. I asked him.”
“Given Bob, do you think he understands fully everything he does?” Dana said. Orlando shrugged, paused, and then shook his head. “Yes, he wanted to be insulting, but do you think he would have done this if he didn’t have an unconscious cue inside him saying ‘this is the right thing to do’, the same as his refusal to make Supported?”
“You may be right,” Orlando said, words stiff. “But I don’t have any such unconscious cue. To me this is wrong.”
“That’s because you’ve been tied to the Orlando name for too long.”
Orlando shook his head and crossed his arms. His under-the-eyebrows glare looked hot enough to ignite paper. “You’re impossible. I can’t please you.”
Dana had to force herself to remain firm; hurting him this much hurt her. “I know this looks like I keep raising the bar on you, but don’t forget that I’m learning myself as well as we go through this. I’m sorry, but this is a true complaint, not me being hesitant.”
Orlando, stony, didn’t respond for far longer than Dana could stand. She turned and walked away, back toward the mansion, gritting her teeth and fighting tears. She had known she would after she raised the name issu
e. She hated to need to do this.
She didn’t understand where this would lead, either.
“If I have to deal with another damned counting-based conceptual impasse I’m going to sca-reeem!” Nessa said. As Dana stalked up the beach, fleeing the ashes of her disastrous conversation with Orlando, she spotted Nessa stalking the other way, toward her. “Let’s talk,” Nessa said, when they met each other. Nessa’s order practically suborned Dana’s mind and turned her around.
“Back off,” Dana said.
“Huh?” Nessa blinked once, then twice, then a third time. After the third blink the compulsion lifted. Dana took a slow deep breath and the compulsion didn’t return.
“Let’s not go this way. I’ve just deeply insulted Orlando and he’s over there.”
“Fine,” Nessa said, and turned inland. “Ridiculous bottle-nosed swimming pricks. It would help if Uffie even pretended not to think in her own crazy science-language. The crazy old lady’s as bad as Korua!”
“You sound like you need a break.”
“I need a break but I can’t take one,” Nessa said. She extended her stride but still did the robot-walk, courtesy of Orlando’s willpower prostheses. Dana never understood why other people had such problems with the prostheses. They were fully natural and integrated to her. “There’s a piece of my mind back with the rest of my family translating dolphin-think into English and vice versa.” Pause. “And I don’t care if they’re unhappy and think I’m showing off by being able to support translation at range!” Nessa raised her nose, pouting and flouncing. “Okay, they’re giving up for the day because they’re as frustrated as I am. Or something. I guess I’m going to get my break.”
They walked over a limestone shelf and across a soggy back-beach, partly flooded by the tides. Nessa didn’t mind the water, seemingly seeking out the deepest pools. Dana kept to the shallow less soggy areas, acting out some deep urge inside her. When they reached the estate lawn the world paused and inhaled as Lydia came storming out of the house. She took off flying, using Natural Supported in an uncontrolled and grass-flattening fashion as she did the Superman skyward. Nessa laughed, concentrated, and Lydia altered her course to fly down to them.
“Okay, spill,” Lydia said, when her feet splashed down in the wet ground. The young woman carried an iPad slung over her shoulder in a black leather pouch. “What do you mean we’re all having man problems? I thought I was just having some VPL issues.” She slung her head around to peer at her ample rear end. “Or I thought I did.”
Nessa’s telepathy doing the crazy, as normal. Speech? Who needed speech?
“Well, yes. Korua’s my man problem, even though he’s a dolphin group mind,” Nessa said.
“Meh,” Lydia said. Dana strode off as Nessa did, following some unconscious prompt. After a short pause Lydia fell into stride with the two of them. “What did the damned dolphin do this time?”
“The usual,” Nessa said. Dana frowned and kept quiet. She didn’t know about any other dolphin problems that Nessa and presumably Lydia kept quiet about. “The bastard – and today I’m convinced Korua is male, the same way I’m convinced that Opartuth was female – is sitting on something he could just tell us, but he’s playing some sort of game. Stalling. Forcing us to jump through hoops.” She hissed. “I don’t know why, either. Ken says they’re blocking his hunches on the subject too, and that’s a trick I didn’t know the dolphins could do.”
“Sic little Miss Cosmo-cover on the problem,” Lydia said. Dana decided she meant Elorie. “She can figure out anything.” Lydia held an image in her head of Elorie spending an hour preparing her makeup just to walk down to the beach and dive in the ocean.
“Neither she nor Dave can spit out their miraculous solutions on command,” Nessa said. “It’s like they’re coming up with their solutions mundanely.” Dana grinned, and took a sideways glance to see if Nessa joked or not. She couldn’t tell. “Whatever they’re doing is nothing they can use my telepathy or Ken’s ‘metry on.”
“They’re coming up with them mundanely,” Dana said. “Normal thinking has been known to happen.”
“Oooh,” Nessa said. “Prickly.”
“Orlando and I fought. Sort of.”
“Sort of?” Nessa said. “You didn’t fight, you just pissed him off. You need to fight, Dana. Build up the passion and let it out. Sca—reeem! There’s nothing like a good fight to spice up a relationship.”
Dana winced inside. She couldn’t picture herself fighting. Not really. Or at least not too often. “We’ve talked about trying relationship counseling,” Dana said.
“Uh huh, sure, Nessa,” Lydia said. “But what do you do about a man who’s too tied up in his work for makeouts and keeps giving you funny looks, like he doesn’t remember who you are?”
Okay, Dana said to herself. Here I am getting relationship advice from an amoral nineteen year old who’s been sexually active since she was fourteen and a certified insane Telepath whose logic made the word ‘inconsistent’ look weak and who had at least three unstable personalities that flip in and out moment by moment. This is progress?
“Have you tried an all-out assault on Bobby Boygod as a Natural Supported?” Nessa said, winking at Dana. Dana suspected Nessa had just read Dana’s mind.
“Geez no. With Bob’s lack of control he might blast my chubbybutt self into graveyard goo,” Lydia said, giving Dana the eye and daring her to comment about her looks.
“No risk no reward,” Nessa said.
“I don’t need a reward,” Lydia said, implying hot sex and projecting memories of the same. “What I want is for Bob to think of me as something besides one of the soldiers. I mean, look at this!” Lydia plucked her iPad out of its pouch and un-snoozed the gadget. “He said, and I quote ‘Go learn how to integrate your Natural Supported mad skills with this willpower interface and get back to me when you do’ unquote. Like I’m his goddamned servant or something!” She lowered her voice to a mutter. “Perhaps it’s time for a little coitus hiatus here…”
“Let me see,” Dana said, reaching toward the iPad, far happier to be doing something work related than otherwise. She looked the device over, tapped and swiped fingers, and shook her head. “His user interface sucks. Significantly.” Dana made a mental note to lean on Bob about the problem, and with half her brain started to design a better user interface.
“Tell me about it, Cheery McHelpful,” Lydia said, raising an eyebrow. “Say, what did you tell Orlando to piss him off? I mean, with all the ground worshipping he does around you, you must have really nastied him.”
Dana sighed. “I told him I couldn’t marry someone named Orlando. His name’s too inhuman and…”
Nessa stopped walking and almost fell, catching herself on Lydia and twirling her willpower-prosthetic left leg around in the air like, well, a crazy lunatic. “You said what!” she said, her voice a high squeak. She continued her Lydia-turn until she faced Dana. “Yes yes tell me more much more!”
Gah. Lydia must have been contagious to get Nessa talking in girlese.
“I implied he had to take a real name,” Dana said. “He got pissed.” Nessa stared at Dana, but Nessa’s mind had fled elsewhere else in her mental ga-ga-land. “What?”
“Yaaaaaaah,” Nessa said.
“Nessa….”
“Steve the Studly God,” Nessa said. “Or, how about ‘Dork Droppants’.”
Lydia broke up in hysterical laughter, bending over and dragging Nessa to the ground. “Dork Droppants!” She laughed some more.
Dana sighed and sat down beside the other two crazies. The ground here at least wasn’t soggy and sodden. “I meant something serious.”
“Uh huh,” Nessa said. “The idea zinged me in a good way. I’m not sure why.” She snickered. “Half the time I can’t remember whether the Gods are male or female. Bristol, for one. Or Faith.”
�
�Faith’s male.”
“Faith’s a woman’s name,” Nessa said. “Perhaps the name should be ‘Sir Faith something-or-other’. Maybe we need a follow up name part like the Japanese have. Dirk Orlando-San or something.”
“Dirk Orlando-Sama; he is superior to us,” Lydia said. She spoke a smattering of Japanese, all learned from Anime.
“Super-sama,” Dana said, smiling, getting into this. “Or put in his previous Divine identity in as well – Dirk Singularity Orlando-Supersama.”
Nessa howled laughter. “I’d say ‘go for it’, but you’re edging toward losing the point of the renaming. Dirk Singularity Orlando-Supersama’s nowhere near human enough to count.”
“I think he’s got to come up with his own name,” Dana said. “This won’t mean anything if he just accepts a name we come up with. I want him to put some work into being human.”
“You’re going about this all wrong,” Lydia said. “First you fuck him silly, then you tell him that if he wants any more pooty he needs to pony up the name change. That’s when men are the most vulnerable, you know.”
“No, I don’t,” Dana said, rolling her eyes. “What do you mean, vulnerable?”
“Willing to bend to your will. We are their lordsss and masterssss, after all,” Lydia said, winking and wiggling her fingers scarequote style. Dana didn’t react. Lydia sighed. “This is also a good test of whether he’s a real prospect or just another useless one-nighter.”
Nessa stuck out her tongue. “You’re right about the vulnerability, but some of us are more choosy to start with.”
“I am choosy,” Lydia said. “I’m just not a fortress.”
99 Gods: Odysseia Page 29
