99 Gods: Betrayer

by Randall Farmer

  “Uh, okay,” Soft Hand Lady said. “I think. What’s wrong with my emotions, then?”

  Nessa rubbed her temples. “I screwed up and, um, hooked you. Made you love me. It’s a trick, kinda sorta. Telepaths sometimes do this by accident, well, more than sometimes, but my mother taught me how to serve as a go-between between the two groups, to fix the problems and prevent some of the nastiness.”

  “And?”

  “And, well, my mother’s training gave me an aura that influences others to like me and trust me, instead of turning them into groupies, as I did to you by accident. That’s what’s caused the problem. Your subconscious knows I’m consciously influencing you so your subconscious hates me for messing you up.”

  “If you were anything like you are now as a kid, I’m amazed that your mother didn’t strangle you,” Soft Hand Lady said, softly.

  “There were times,” Nessa said. Soft Hand Lady stood. “Wait. I just thought of something.”

  “I just quit,” Soft Hand Lady said. “I must.”

  “I understand, but there’s something else.”

  “What?” Soft Hand Lady sat. “Dammit. If I don’t go now I’m going to follow you around like a puppy dog for the rest of my life.”

  “How smart are you?” Nessa said.

  “Couldn’t you tell?”

  “You seemed kinda smart to me, just wanted to make sure if I was right.”

  “Okay, I’m smart, so what?”

  “I’m trying to put together how good you are as an other, what you’ve self-trained,” Nessa said. “Tell me why I said there was something else. It’ll take a combination of brainpower and the type of hunches or whatever that you have. I can’t sense your mental tricks, what makes you an other, but I’ve learned to sense the shadows of the abilities in the minds of others. No Telepath can sense what others can do, actually.” Nessa pondered telling Soft Hand Lady about Satan, and then decided not to. Nessa still hadn’t decided whether Satan was an other or a Telepath.

  “Um,” Soft Hand Lady said, after a half minute of thought. “If you’re a go-between, then you must be in contact with someone from my side of the fence who’s part of this organized group of people who are like me.”

  Nessa nodded.

  “But I didn’t hear of anything of the sort in the story Ken told me about what you’ve been doing since the 99 Gods showed up.” Then Soft Hand Lady’s eyes popped open wide. “Eufemia Zumbrennen! The person you’re trying to rescue. She’s your contact. This is part of the reason why this is so important.”

  “Very good,” Nessa said, smiling now. “You’ll want to talk to her, both about your secret tricks and how to better utilize them, the organization she belongs to, the other allied organizations, and whether or not you should leave my service as we head toward this precipice, this Armageddon that Ken and I know is coming. I’m sure she’s going to have words with me about you. Strong words. Perhaps, though, if she doesn’t disown me or worse, she’ll be able to find our way off the precipice.”

  Soft Hand Lady sat stunned for a moment. Then she shrugged. “Well, since I’m drowning in you, I guess I shouldn’t ignore the chance this Eufemia might be able to teach me how to swim.”

  “You spoke with Portland?” Nessa said. She had fled the lounge when the dinner hour had rolled around, driven out by the smell of cooked meat coming from the nearest of the five hotel restaurants.

  “Yes,” Ken said. “I contacted a Wise Shepherd early riser and had her phone me when Portland awoke. Turns out Portland’s also an early riser.”

  “Hmph. Not anything we’d ever learn.” Being that Nessa tended to be a night owl and asleep when anyone was ‘early rising’, preferably all day long.

  “Anyway, she’s got some ideas about a non-cash payoff. God tricks.”

  “Let me guess, she and Inventor are at it again,” Nessa said.

  “No need to guess,” Ken said. He sat down on the bed and gathered Nessa into his arms. “Portland wasn’t willing to tell me the details, but she did say she would have something for us by the end of the week. She’s going to send the package by courier.”

  “Neat,” Nessa said. “That means we get to stay here and dance, instead of getting on another goddamned jet.”

  “Dance?”

  “Dance. Help me recover more of my mental equilibrium so I can do things like remember that cellphones exist.”

  “I wasn’t going to mention that,” Ken said. “What were you doing with… …this afternoon?” His roaming hands found bare midriff. Nessa leaned back into him. A little boink in the bed would be fun, too.

  “You mean my talk with Soft Hand Lady?” Nessa asked. Ken nodded. “Private stuff. Woman stuff.”

  “You were in her mind,” he said. “I thought you were through training her.” Nessa grunted. “You’re not telling me something.”

  “That’s right,” Nessa said. “Don’t worry. This isn’t anything you really want to know about anyway.”

  Wisdom found not a place on earth where she could inhabit; her dwelling therefore is in heaven.

  Wisdom went forth to dwell among the sons of men, but she obtained not a habitation. Wisdom returned to her place, and seated herself in the midst of the angels. But iniquity went forth after her return, who unwillingly found a habitation, and resided among them, as rain in the desert, and as a dew in a thirsty land.

  I beheld another splendor, and the stars of heaven. I observed that he called them all by their respective names, and that they heard. In a righteous balance I saw that he weighed out with their light the amplitude of their places, and the day of their appearance, and their conversion. Splendor produced splendor; and their conversion was into the number of the angels, and of the faithful.

  Then I inquired of the angel, who proceeded with me, and explained to me secret things, What their names were. He answered. A similitude of those has the Lord of spirits shown you. They are names of the righteous who dwell upon earth, and who believe in the name of the Lord of spirits forever and forever.

  -- The Book of Enoch 42, 1:2 and 43, 1:2

  “You sure you’re not a Telepath?”

  13. (Dave)

  “So, do you have a moment for a work-related question before you spring on me whatever you’re trying to hide?” Dave asked, checking his half dozen Parryscope identities for feed updates as he and Elorie walked along the newly rutted dirt path from the work-cabin to the cabin they shared. Elorie hadn’t done much to hide the bounce in her step after they started on the dinner dishes.

  “I suppose,” Elorie said. She swiped the card-key and unlocked their door. Dave still hadn’t figured out what set of bright idiots put card key locks on vacation cabins that ostensibly weren’t rentals. Talk about gilding the frog…

  “Why’d the rest of the team react the way they did to me after John Lorenzi left?” Dave asked. He hadn’t expected bouquets of roses after the first or second day of Lorenzi question sessions, but…

  “You ruined their game,” Elorie said, without hesitation.

  “Oh, for the love of Dilbert,” Dave said, shaking his head.

  “I thought you liked to solve mysteries. Who leaked what, and what it’s doing.”

  Dave nodded. “Yes, I do, or did. However, what I’m doing is always in terms of ‘find the problems so a credible solution can be found’. Face it, Elorie, PhD or not, I’m not an academic, I’m an engineer. My dissertation wasn’t published in an academic journal, it was published in an industry trade journal. Shake me and nuts and bolts fall out.”

  Elorie laughed. “Okay, I understand. The rest of the team aren’t what I’d call academics either. For instance, Jack was a Captain in the Navy, teaching at the Naval War College in Rhode Island before he resigned and went underground after the 99 Gods appeared. I don’t think Darrel’s seen a day of any school since he got kicked out of MIT for hacking.”

  “This is supposed to make me feel better?” Dave asked. Naval War College? As their bodyguard? “You’ve expanded my fe
elings of inadequacy to new summits.” Everyone else on the team but he and Elorie had gone and hidden themselves away after the 99 Gods showed.

  “I don’t want you to feel better,” Elorie said. “I want you to know you’re on my side.”

  “Eh?”

  “Do you think someone of my background’s a technical professional or an academic? Or anything close? I’m a manager and a facilitator with a night school MBA. My job on this team is to turn the team’s successes at mystery solving into real-world problem solving. The difference between us, Dave, is I don’t think of the team as the competition, but as my resources.”

  Oh, he loved being a resource…but only if it gave him an opportunity to double-bill. “So, what do you think of me?”

  She lowered her painted-on eyebrows. “It’s complicated.”

  Dave sat and waited; Elorie just smiled.

  “Ooh, you’re good,” Dave said, when he couldn’t take the suspense. “El, from what I’ve seen, you outclass me six ways from Sunday as a manager and I’ve managed for years.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short. You and your partners had to wear so many hats I’d go crazy if I landed in any of your shoes: CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, directors, managers, supervisors, sales reps and technical gurus all in one.”

  “Thanks, but I don’t deserve your praise,” Dave said. “Other people handled the money for me.” His thoughts turned back to the collapse of his end of the partnership and all his futile effort spent trying to rebuild his client base after his miraculous cure. Right now, he didn’t feel anything like a master of the universe.

  “Well, I think you deserve the praise anyway.” Elorie stood and held out her hand to Dave. “Enough of this. Come on over here.”

  Dave took Elorie’s hand, collected a quick kiss, and let her lead him into the bedroom and to the bedroom closet. Two large packages he didn’t recognize decorated the shelf above the rod, threatening to tip over. Elorie stood on her tiptoes and brought down first one, then the other. UPS boxes.

  “Open up the box,” she said.

  He did, and amid the packing materials he found, of all things, a violin case. His violin case. He looked over and saw Elorie unpack a violin case of her own and several folders of escaping sheet music. Lastly, two music stands.

  “How’d you get my violin so quickly?” Dave asked.

  “Arranging things is my best skill,” Elorie said, a twinkle in her eye. “I know how to make things happen.”

  “I’m impressed.” He wasn’t sure he wanted to know how Elorie had gotten his violin out of Tiff’s hands. This smelled shady. “I hadn’t realized you were an operator, Elorie.”

  “Operator?”

  “Mob boss. Kingpin. Shark.”

  Elorie laughed and shook her head, sending her wig askew. Dave admired the view. She was beautiful inside and out. “Silly man. Let’s play.”

  “I’m a bit rusty with this thing,” Dave said. “You should have gotten the cello.”

  “If I’d wanted the cello, I’d have gotten the cello,” Elorie said, with a quirky smile. “I’m much more interested in the violin.”

  Dave pulled two of the uncomfortable dinette chairs into the bedroom, helped Elorie set up the music stands and looked at the sheet music, some classical, some bluegrass. He picked one.

  They played and made the violins sing.

  “…so I look back and the bulldozer’s still coming after me. I hear Vin, one of our standard engineer consultants, yell out ‘Quit running in a straight line, you fool!’ or some such,” Dave said. “He was right. I had panicked and I had been running in a straight line. I’d been thinking so much about saving the box of seismo relay stations I’d forgotten to think tactically and dodge. So I turned to run out of the way. What happens? The relay stations shift around in the box, I lose my balance and I fall, spilling the damned relay stations all over the place. Now that got my adrenaline moving, I’ll have to tell you, and the next thing I realized I was out of the way of the runaway bulldozer and a half dozen relay stations were history.”

  Elorie laughed. She had changed into her robe, and the conversation had moved to the bed, where they had set up a nest of pillows and blankets; they sat next to each other at the head of the bed, propped up by the pillows.

  “So, how about you tell me about those calluses on your hands,” Dave said.

  “Eh?”

  “Oh, and these, and these, and these.” He tapped on her tight biceps, quadriceps and triceps. They weren’t as obvious as Tiff’s hard-body musculature, since Elorie’s BMI ran far closer to his than Tiffs, but he knew they weren’t the muscles you found on Ms. Sedentary. Not by a long shot.

  “I do like to have my fun,” Elorie said. Her giggle turned into a sigh. “You do notice the most obscure things, Dave.”

  “I am who I am,” he said, and paused. “And I do smell a story.” Elorie, back in high school, had thought sports were for the retarded, especially football. If not sports, though, then what?

  Another sigh. “Yes, there’s a story behind this; actually several stories,” she said. She took a moment to wiggle around and climb into his lap, resting her head on his right shoulder. “I’ve been avoiding them because I know they might upset you.” She paused to enjoy where she sat. “Somewhere in college, I decided I liked taking risks, physical risks. Edgy X-games types of things. Adventure sports. They’re loads of fun, and I’ve been doing them ever since.”

  “Ah,” Dave said. She hadn’t wanted to rub his face in their old ‘staid versus wild’ differences. Kind of her. “This sounds interesting, actually. Tell me.”

  “Hmmm. Well, there’s hang gliding, parachuting, wind surfing, scuba diving, white water kayaking, bungee jumping, snowboarding, climbing…” Dave tensed. She turned her head and met his eyes. “You sure you want me to go on?”

  “Absolutely. I hadn’t expected climbing. Of your list, climbing is the only one I’ve done.” He hadn’t expected they would share anything, given how her list started.

  Her eyes lit up with wild fire. “You climb? Neat! We need to go climbing together someday.”

  “Uh, sure,” Dave said. “I’m not into adrenaline rushes. I put lots of work into avoiding adrenaline rushes.” Tiff had dragged him out climbing before they had gotten married, and he had learned to enjoy the challenge. To him, climbing was a chess match with nature, with aching muscles thrown in.

  “You wouldn’t be you otherwise,” Elorie said, crinkles at the edges of her eyes. He gave her a sidelong glance of the falsely nasty variety. She giggled a single sinister giggle. “Sense of accomplishment?” He nodded. Yes, she understood why he climbed. “I’ll bet you’d like white water kayaking, too, for much the same reason.”

  “I’ve never been a fan of cold water.”

  “That’s what wet suits are for,” Elorie said. She shifted around and put her head back on his shoulder. “I haven’t done much in the way of the adventure sports since I got sick and I’m probably too old for some of my old standbys, like urban inline skating. Putting myself on the edge gets the crankies out of my system like nothing else can and for obvious reasons it wasn’t something I could keep up with when working for NGOs out of the country. If I can finish this project and get myself fully healed up, though, I did promise myself I’d do some wingsuit flying. I’ve always wanted to learn how. It looks like a hell of a rush.”

  Dave had only seen wingsuit flying in movies and on the internet, and knew the mortality rate was absurd. “That’s, uh…”

  “Crazy?”

  He grunted, not wanting to actually say the obvious word bounding around his mind, the one starting with an ‘s’. “You can be my admiring audience,” she said.

  “I already am.”

  Now that got him the expected fingernail poke in his side.

  14. (Nessa)

  Ken unwrapped the number two amulets and distributed them. “The purpose of these is to hide us from Gods.”

  Portland and Inventor’s work, Nessa knew. She put one on
and made sure their bodyguards did the same.

  “Where are we going?” Party Boy said.

  “Out for a walk,” Ken said. The entire group of bodyguards gave Ken ‘liar liar pants on fire’ looks, but they stayed professional enough not to say a word.

  Nessa smiled. What they didn’t know they couldn’t leak.

  Neither Nessa nor Ken hurried. They might have taken Haile Selassie Avenue across the Nairobi River, a more direct route from their hotel to the target, but this evening they wanted to meander.

  “Why isn’t this place totally stifling?” Nessa asked. When she thought ‘Africa’, she thought ‘humid’ with killer heat. New Orleans on steroids. She knew her discomfort had ‘too long in Alaska’ written all over it, but she didn’t care. “I mean, we’re practically on the equator.”

  “True, but Nairobi’s a mile in elevation,” Ken said. The temperature hovered in the 80s, but not as sticky as earlier in the week.

  The mile high city this wasn’t, though. She hadn’t seen a pine tree yet.

  Nessa inserted her arm through Ken’s and strolled. She had taken Ken dancing often enough over the past week to be as well-centered as possible, given her support. The jet lag was nearly gone and she hadn’t had the urge to hash things out with her socks for over three days. The sun had just set, and although the pamphlets around the hotel warned tourists to be careful, especially at night…well, bodyguards, guns and telepathic illusions. Guns made her feel safe, especially when Ken thought her stable enough to carry a few of her own. Which he did tonight.