“Which is why now has become a very good time for me to return to God.”
“Exactly.”
“Is it time?” Reed said, looking up at John and Odysseia as they approached. He sat alone, at the edge of the Fallen Angels’ village, tossing stones into the small river.
“I have a question for you,” John said. “Do you know what fate has planned for you? What Bais prepared you for?”
“She seemed to think I would take up her old job of harassing autocrats after she passes on, but I’m not so sure the job’s going to be needed,” Reed said. “I mean, with the 99 Gods returning to their lost humanity, and their vow to stabilize the world and aid peace, Bais’s self-appointed job seems redundant.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” John said. Grover and Lara walked up quietly to a spot a few feet downstream, observing but not interacting. “We’re talking human nature here, son. Take it from someone who’s lived through a thousand years of revolutions, dynastic changes, and new deals – nothing lasts. Greed and self-service always come back, often within a few days of the establishment of the next thousand year utopia.”
Reed shrugged. “I take it this isn’t an academic discussion?” he said, noting Grover, Lara and Odysseia’s presence. “Let me guess. I’m going to either be working with you or against you.”
“I believe the answer to that is ‘yes’,” Odysseia said. “We have our Lucifer, light bringer and icon breaker over there.” She meant Bob, Child of Morning. Portland and her leading Gods would never be able to cope with Bob. John feared he would permanently end up in their doghouse within a generation. “I’m the official enemy and adversary, our Satan, and I’m afraid I’ll be dragging the Indigo with me into some aspect of the darkness.” Already in the doghouse. “We’re missing a role, though. Troublemaker and trickster, our Coyote, our Loki. I’m thinking this is you.”
“I’m not in that league, not even close. I’m not a tenth of Bais’s strength and I’m not immortal.”
Yet. John chuckled.
“Neither was Bais when she was your age. I’ve got a test, a challenge,” Odysseia said. “Let me dip you in Heaven and take you back. Let’s see what happens. We’re a few Gods shy at the moment, for one possibility. If I lose my grip, well, have a happy eternity with God Almighty.”
“This sounds more painful if you don’t lose your grip,” he said. “Will I be sane afterwards?”
“As sane as any Telepath, and as immortal as Bais.”
Reed closed his eyes and thought. “Well, Bais did say she thought I’d do well once this was all over.” He turned to Odysseia. “It fits that you’re going to inherit me,” he said.
“How so?”
“You’re so obviously the new Father of Darkness.”
“Amend that to Mother of Darkness and I won’t slay you outright,” Odysseia said.
“Mother of Darkness, then,” Reed said. “Sheesh!”
John licked his lips and studied Odysseia. Yes, she would do fine in his old role as slayer of rampaging evil magicians and the like. “You knew already, didn’t you.”
“Spang of the Ha-qodeshim informed me of my dubious honor days ago, to her utmost glee.”
“So you’re dolphin-haunted, too,” John said. “Good luck. You’re going to need every bit of luck you can get.”
He turned to Lara and Grover. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like you two crazies to tell me how you’ve got your end of this covered.” Seeing Heaven, that is, often termed the face of God in many holy books. “If anyone has to fear the seductive peace of Heaven, it’s you two.”
They looked at each other for a moment, and then turned back to him. “We’re the Godslayer’s consorts,” Lara said. “We always were, before, but we’ve made it official after the fall of the worshipped Gods.”
“Consorts?” John said. He knew about Archangel consorts, souls an Archangel carried inside them in their own private Heaven, that the Archangel could bring forth into the real world as needed. “That’s a form of death. How can you want that?”
“Life in death, death in life, eternal life but with a real big price.” Lara smiled. “What does that sound like to you?”
The answer she hinted at was ‘the Indigo inner circle’; the answer John really wanted to give was ‘a typical Godslayer joke’. Instead, John said “Trouble.” He had always wondered where the old Aristocrat demi-immortality came from, and why they fell apart after they got outed by the Ahnenerbe, the Nazi SS paranormal research group. Now he knew – some other Archangel, likely another story queen turned Archangel, lay behind them, likely someone he had bumped heads with several times, someone who couldn’t cope with the excesses of the Nazis. There were many things he was glad he had forgotten about his past.
“When the Godslayer started us off, I said what she was doing to us was like in the game where you start out knowing how to build stone axes, and you win by saving the multiverse by game turn 300,” Grover said. John was sure he meant something, but to him this was the usual Grover gibberish. “It’s game turn 41, and I think we’re finally starting to make progress.”
The chosen shape was a ring, with John facing Bais across the circle of Fallen Angels in the courtyard of the village. They sat on the flat paving stones, cross-legged. John fought for self-control. Sorrow and the others had been right. At the end, the urge to postpone, prevaricate, and run away was mighty strong; too much mortal left in him. The magical oath he had given to the Fallen Angels not to fight his fate helped, but wasn’t sufficient to calm his twitching hands or his mile-a-minute mind. The fact Bais didn’t have any such problems didn’t help at all. To her, Heaven was an unlooked for gift, one she couldn’t bear to turn down. Her excitement rang through all her words and her posture.
He, on the other hand, remained intensely curious about the outside world and the current events. He wanted to find out what would happen next, whether the 99 Gods would be able to integrate with human society, and what the crazy singularity nonsense was all about.
Not that he had any choice, he realized, not after magically blocking his ability to self-resurrect. Which meant that he would die, a mortal, when his current body aged and failed. Which, he suspected, would happen within a few weeks after the passing of the Fallen Angels. He had lost track of the various symptoms of chronic illness he had ‘cured’ with his magic, magic he would no longer possess after the Fallen Angels vanished.
For all he knew, he would die of a heart attack the instant the Fallen Angels went to Heaven. However, logic didn’t suffice. He remained mortal enough to fear death at a gut level, an instinctive level, despite his intellectual understanding of what would happen and his faith that Heaven awaited.
He clenched his fists tight and worked magic on himself, to quiet the nerves and the urge to spring to his feet yelling “Stop, stop, let’s all talk this over rationally!”
“God Almighty, receive us, welcome us back, let us rejoin you,” John and the Fallen Angels chanted. They hadn’t agreed upon these words beforehand. They came to each of them independently, yet they spoke in unison, in many languages. “We have sinned, and in sinning become mortal, as mortal we long to rejoin with You in Heaven. The Earth shudders under our feet, proclaiming our long night of Darkness over. We have opened our eyes to the Light and awakened from our long dream of stasis. Now the Morning beckons us onward, but the only path we can take, that we choose to take, is to You. Are we welcome? We submit to you all that we are.”
The light expanded around Bob and his deviously programmed array of willpower-using supercomputers, the only way to stabilize something as complex as a physical opening to the distant and small part of Heaven able to accept the Fallen Angels. John’s sense of his own body faded. He caught an image in his mind, or perhaps with his magic, of his body slumped over, dead. The lack of body-sense calmed him. Too late now to do anything about fighting off death.
He had died.
To John’s surprise, a single being, not God Almighty, not an Angel,
but a single unfamiliar human woman, clad in black leather and studded like some sort of urban punk, walked forward out of the surrounding darkness. “Love her, Bob,” the woman said. He saw in her layers of complexity he had rarely sensed in any being. “You can, you must. Our time together was only a moment, but we made up for its brevity with the consuming heat of our passion. Remember me well, for I saved you all.”
She had been a God, one of the 99, one of the fallen, and John had never met her! Such an interesting woman! Would Heaven be a place where one would be able to meet people? New people? He had never imagined any such thing.
His realization gave him hope.
Bob nodded to the woman; she departed. The world, the Earth of his life, dimmed at the edge of the circle of light and was gone. The last thing John saw of the world of his birth was Odysseia holding a screaming and squalling Reed in the fires of eternity, proving that a good of sorts can come from evil, and that the day had come for writing new myths, legends and holy books.
Ahead, eternity awaited. He had heard Dana’s story, Dana who had gone to limbo in an imagined body form. Not for him or the Fallen Angels. All sense of form vanished from him; all that remained of him was mind, pure mind. This was deep Heaven, far into the mind of God Almighty.
“Farewell, farewell,” Bob shouted, as he vanished from the center of their circle. “Fare better in Heaven than you did on Earth.”
Eternity started.
68. (Dave)
“…and because of that, I’m pregnant again with another replacement divinity, this time the replacement for Kay of Progress,” Maria said. She had tricked up their big flat screen as a communication device, and Dave and Elorie watched it from the library of their borrowed Greenwich estate. “But hold on to your hats – I’m no more mentally suited to raise such a prodigy than I was to raise Bob. So I’ve arranged to exchange him with Dana’s divine offspring, the willful little girl who’ll replace Worcester. She we can handle.”
“Okay,” Elorie said. She sat in a cozy reading chair, piled high with cushions and with a floor lamp providing light. Dave had pulled the desk chair around to the front for a good viewing angle. “I sense a gotcha.” Dave had thought the game of musical divine infant exchanges obscure enough already. This just made things worse.
Maria of Birmingham nodded. “Lydia’s going to be regent for the Worcester territory; as you know her divine offspring, Dubuque’s replacement, is going to be fostered by Patricia and her people. We’ve finally convinced Lydia not to try and raise Worcester’s replacement. She and Bob have too many other things to do.”
Ahh. “You’re offering up the two of us, aren’t you?” Dave said. Elorie froze for an instant. ‘We’ indeed.
Maria smiled. “Not yet. I want you two to think about this first. The fostering makes sense, though. Raising a divine child in an extended family of Telepaths might help damp the continuing distrust of Telepaths among far too many of my peers.” They could say the same about Uffie’s Indigo sub-group, the Sharp Pencils, who would be raising Boise’s replacement.
“We’ll think about the offer,” Elorie said. She couldn’t keep a frown off her face. Dave again had the urge to turn Elorie upside down and make her smile.
Think about the offer? Hell. He knew he would agree, and he was positive Elorie would eventually agree as well.
Maria speared Dave’s eyes through the screen. “Have you given any more thought to the enchantment Bob made for you?” Yes, Bob had been able to find computer code in telepathy, but not in Angel magic, Indigo magic, or Lorenzi-style magic. He had made Dave a test enchantment supposedly able to unblock Psychic and turn him into a functional Telepath.
“Yes,” Dave said, shivering. “My answer to Bob is ‘Thanks, but not now’; my answer to you is ‘perhaps not ever’.”
“You want someone else to be the guinea pig?” Maria said. “I understand, and I’ll support you on this.”
“Thanks,” Dave said. He wasn’t ready to make the plunge, and certainly not as a test subject. He was no longer sure telepathy was right for him, more interested in Knot’s training regimen to tease forward his ability to understand and use unknown high tech without any training manuals.
“Anything new?” Elorie said, burping Alana over her shoulder.
Dave switched off the enchanted phablet and the private video feeds from the Conclave of the Gods and Mortal Representatives in New York City. “Nothing. I swear Patricia’s going to talk everybody to death. Luckily, Maria appears to be able to convince Patricia to make a few decisions.” The tension of the day made his arms and feet ache. He wanted the world to ease its way back to normal. Save for a small empty hole, deep inside him, a hole aching for another madcap journey to the land of far-too-much excitement.
Better for him and everyone near him if he papered over the hole and forgot about it.
“I’m sure Maria’s going to set things right,” Elorie said. She wore her casual finest, a white blouse over an aqua skirt. “Come on over here. Zach needs you.”
Dave nodded, walked over, and picked up Zach. The infant no longer had that newborn look about him and at five months old felt ready to crawl, even though it took most of Zach’s efforts to roll over. Dave smiled and cuddled Zach, but Zach didn’t pay attention, face squinched up in baby anger. He put Zach over his shoulder, and the infant quieted as Dave walked him. “They miss their mother.”
“Of course,” Elorie said, voice unyielding, stiff. Dave practiced patience; Elorie had tossed and turned all last night, and her shadowed look reminded him of the bad old days before her cancer cure. Something more than Maria’s crazy intrigues had to be involved. “So, how’re you holding out?”
“Twitchy,” Dave said, Elorie’s question echoing his own inner thoughts. “Waiting for the next shoe to drop. Intellectually, however, I think the bad stuff is over.” Elorie shrugged and paced. “Sit,” Dave said, and sat himself on one end of the TV room couch. Elorie sat and leaned up against him. “Relax. Maria’s Mission won, and the divine factions no longer mirror the divisions among the Angelic Host.” Dave had found the answer in one of his hunches – about the factions mirroring the divisions among the Host, and spread his insight as far as he could.
He still didn’t like talking to reporters, though.
Elorie didn’t relax.
“You’re worried about meeting Ron, Shannon and Stacy?” Dave said. His kids would arrive here within the hour, brought by a couple of ultra-professional nannies from Christina of Akron’s organization. His kids and the two ultra-nannies were flying in from Colorado, schedule arranged to the minute after a terse and tense long distance phone conversation with Tiff. His ex-wife hadn’t been at all happy to learn she couldn’t dictate the terms of their children’s visit; he hadn’t been happy to learn she would soon be Christina’s new CIO. They had negotiated, Dave getting everything he wanted, throwing a few bones to Tiff regarding their kids’ trip but not budging on any of Tiff’s attempted interference in the details of their kids’ actual visit. ‘I liked the old Dave better,’ Tiff had complained, putting a grin on Dave’s face.
To use a phrase he had read about in some of Odysseia’s assigned reading, he had seen the elephant. Combat. As a veteran of the 99 Gods conflicts, and as one of the Indigo’s non-combat Heroes, he had emotional reserves to draw on that he hadn’t before. People listened when he spoke and did what he asked.
Elorie’s girls, Iris and Leah, already nosed about somewhere else on the estate, shepherded around by Diana. He and Elorie had arranged for housing for whomever – children, Telepaths, Indigo, neo-Supported, diplomats, visiting Gods, random guests – the usual chaotic retinue. The arrangement with the owners of their place, the Samuelson clan, especially Martine, a contact of Elorie’s, had been half arm-twisting and half-favor gathering. The Samuelsons, rolling in third generation money, were just one of the many moneyed parties begging to volunteer their help. The Samuelsons lived in Greenwich, in southwest Connecticut, and Dave and Elorie had ar
ranged to use the estate, its main house and two guest houses for another three or four months, until they found their own place, likely down in Maria’s territory, likely large and expensive. The Samuelsons had a paddock and four horses, and Iris and Leah couldn’t resist.
Dave still had a hard time coping with the fact that he and Elorie now wallowed in money. Four days ago they had signed an eight digit book contract about their exploits. Sure, the Troubles had sparked a nasty round of inflation, but the money shocked, almost too much money, and Dave hadn’t been poor before. He did worry that Susan, their agent, had ripped off the publishing house, and hoped they wouldn’t stumble over any hidden gotcha-clauses or sneaky handshake deals involving access to the Telepaths. Now they had to write the book, or, more importantly, dictate the book to a ghost writer save for a few special parts that he and Elorie had agreed to write together, such as that last spine-chilling day in Cappadocia and their involvement in Santa Fe’s demise.
“No, not at all,” Elorie said, her voice stiffening. Dave took that as a ‘yes’. “I’ll admit to being a little worried about how well your kids are going to get along with Iris and Leah, especially Iris. You’ve made your kids sound so easygoing and sociable, which is not what anyone would say about my two.” Standoffish and quiet were the terms Dave used. Pushy might work as well, as well as outwardly hostile, as well as far too serious for children. Not that anyone could call Iris a child, being off in college, but Iris had already looked through Dave and sneered at him for being too unserious. The impromptu violin concerto hadn’t helped, either. Their last bluegrass piece had made things much worse.
“Iris is being too good, especially to me,” Elorie said. Dave sighed. “I’m just waiting for the explosion.” Elorie and Iris had negotiated a reconciliation, taking three days of work and Iris’s demand of a Divine Compact contract. He and Iris hadn’t clicked, yet, not going beyond minimal social niceties. He understood Iris’s reticence, and knew she went down the same sort of fifty item mental checklist in her mind that Elorie did in similar circumstances.
99 Gods: Odysseia Page 69
