“I did,” Weeping for Cordoba said. “War, if I may call you that, you are the first. Great danger surrounds you unless you properly approach what you have discovered.”
“You’re talking about when I sensed time?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t need to worry about the danger. I can’t repeat my vision.”
“Your failure is not permanent.” Weeping for Cordoba altered his appearance to that of a blue-skinned man dressed in Arabic dress. “Consider where we are now.”
She did. Useless.
“What’s the danger, Weeping?”
“There are several. First, do not lose yourself in the Place of Time. A mind unprepared by willpower can be seduced into such things. The Place is not evil; instead, the Place of Time is an aspect of the Mind of God and one of the many ways an Angel can end their independence and rejoin with the Ultimate.”
War frowned. The Angels hadn’t explained any aspect of their spiritual reality before, save as it related to the existence of the 99 Gods. Translated, Weeping for Cordoba meant that the time vision place was a proper place for a spirit being to choose to die.
“Second, do not for a moment think that because you are first, you are unique or the Place of Time is yours alone. Foolish jealousy is ever a danger with a place so seductive.”
“Should I teach others?”
“Perhaps, and my third warning speaks to this, the greatest danger of all. The information you gain in the Place of Time increases your free will, not the opposite. If you believe the opposite, you place yourself in danger. A mature spirit being would not need to be told this, but as you still have a fingerful of mortality coursing through your soul, you might fall in this trap.”
A line of spirit beings, other Angels, flickered through a distant swirl of azure and gold. “I’m in Heaven’s world of projection, aren’t I?”
Weeping for Cordoba laughed. “Little one, do not let your thoughts linger too much on what you sense here, for what you experience is influenced by my mighty presence.”
A typical Angelic Host non-answer.
“How can seeing the future increase my free will?” War said. “I would predict the opposite.”
“You are listening to the song of your mortality,” Weeping for Cordoba said. “The future is just what has not happened yet, and more is possible to happen than you will be able to understand. What you understand will depend on your knowledge, experience, and frame of reference, and will be incomplete. A future you do not see can still happen; indeed, about a quarter of the futures hide from all seekers. How your free will increases is through the process of discovery of futures you cannot predict with logic.”
“My actions can make the improbable happen. Got that. But if a quarter of the futures are hidden, and the future is so open to manipulation, then is there any use to this form of vision?”
“You will find streams of events, War, the group actions of the multitudes. The subtle difference between ‘difficult to change’ and ‘impossible to change’ reveals the danger of the Place of Time. As more of the 99 Gods learn to use the Place of Time, the nature of time itself will change; what you can accomplish now you will not be able to accomplish then; what you can accomplish then you will not be able to accomplish now.” Weeping for Cordoba spread his angelic hands. War’s mind hurt as she thought through his words. “Enough on this has been said for now. What follows is up to you and your willpower.”
“Little do I understand, for you are mighty and deep,” War said. Weeping for Cordoba chuckled at War’s mimicking of the angelic form of address. “Why did the Angelic Host aid Phoenix?”
“Because of you, War,” Weeping for Cordoba said. “That which you and Persona discovered needed to be spread, to maintain the ongoing free will of the 99 Gods. Neither of you spread your discovery.” The Angel referred to the ability to change divine identity.
“You have goals beyond our creation, then,” War said. “The test you gave us, what you said to us during Apotheosis, how can the test be fair if you interfere while the test is ongoing?”
“As beings of pure spirit, we can tell what is fair and what is not by observing the changes in the Place of Time. If you had not found the Place of Time by accident, others among the 99 Gods would have eventually found the Place of Time by logic, through contemplation of our actions.”
The Host had access to the Place of Time. Persona would just love that.
“I’m doing okay, then?”
“No reassurance will I give, save the obvious: one who has damned herself will no longer stay in the Sight of the Host.”
Which meant she still had to be undamned, if she merited a visit by Weeping for Cordoba.
“Are you willing, yet, to tell me why you got or chose your name?”
Weeping for Cordoba chuckled again. “The time has not come for you to understand this; I predict you will not learn this lesson from me. I leave; one last warning for you to pass on to others when and if you choose to teach this to them: too much time spent contemplating the Place of Time steals time from your ability to act on the mortal plane of existence.”
“Not a mistake I’m likely to make.”
“One, however, others such as Boise might easily make. The fact I chose to warn you of this may sway them from such a path.” Weeping for Cordoba vanished, as did the distant flickering of other Angels. All that remained was the world of projection that War knew so well.
‘Consider where you are now’, the Angel had said. Was the Place of Time accessible from the world of projection, then? War exerted willpower. Nothing.
“He spoke in metaphor, then.” She reviewed how she first gained access to the world of projection. First, she knew projections were mobile. Second, she experimented, until she moved a projection fast enough to leave the real world…and lost the projection. Third, she kept working on moving projections until she no longer lost them when she entered the world of projection. Then, and only then, was she able to explore the world of projection.
Exactly. She dropped herself out of the world of projection and back to the lakeside cabin. She went over the memory of how she had stumbled into the Place of Time and laid out the variables.
There were a great many variables. A myriad experiments lay before her.
“Okay, anyone know where War is?” Alt said. He had called them all together in the largest cabin.
“She’s not anywhere,” Nicole said. She huddled under two blankets, shivering, sipping hot tea. She had spent several hours screaming after the end of the Siege of Dubuque.
“Normally, we ask you that,” War, as Leo, said.
Alt shrugged. He sat alone at the cabin’s dinner table, frown lines on his face. He had pulled one of the dinner table’s chairs away from the table and sat it upside down along a wall. War as War might have asked why, but Leo never would, so she kept quiet.
“War’s found a way to block me,” Alt said. “I need her for this discussion, though.”
“If she’s not to be found, does that mean we can put the discussion off?” Javier said, after a long wheeze and hawking up a landclam on to the cabin floor. The older Telepath had big bags under his eyes, and he had been doing an extraordinary amount of sleeping since the end of the siege, his way of coping with the battle trauma. War suspected that Javier might vanish one day himself and go back to being the street bum he preferred to be.
“No,” Alt said. “Phil, now that Lodz and Verona found a way to block Javier and I out of their lairs, it’s back to logic and experience. Do you have any ideas about what we should be doing?”
Phil nodded, overprepared as always. “Let me give you a list of all the options I’ve been able to come up with,” he said.
War closed her Leo eyes and let her mind wander again. She had succeeded at finding a controllable way to enter the Place of Time but she hadn’t found any miracles there. As Weeping for Cordoba had predicted she had found the ‘streams of events’ – the future, unfixed but bounded, twisting an
d turning, braids rejoining in overall structure but always so different in the details. In far too many of the event streams the 99 Gods lost the support of the Angelic Host. The 99, worshipped by smaller and smaller cults of fanatics, ended up as marginalized non-entities. In these scenarios, the world continued on its merry way toward one of many human-designed self-destruction events, few War had ever dreamed of, or ended up suffering one of several disasters emanating from Hell, which War had heard far too much about from the Indigo. One terrified her, a horrific plague from Hell, about a decade in the future. In another, involving an invasion of Hell-aliens, the remaining 99 Gods ended up compelled into the fight and all perished.
Singularity’s highbrow babble on the pace of technical change and the likely divine reaction, strangling tech growth, had been correct. The only no-Angelic-Host streams that didn’t end up with the marginalization of the 99 Gods ended up with Dubuque or Verona as the world’s God-Emperor and the surviving humans reduced to Roman Empire era technology. All those streams were foul.
War had found only three streams of events where the 99 Gods kept the support of the Angelic Host. All of them also repulsed her. Her Mission appeared in none of them. On the other hand, all three negated the Hell-plague scenario, which was at least something.
Until she found something to work for that meant something, War would be keeping on the down low, only doing what she had to do. If she couldn’t find anything…well, she would cross that Rubicon when she came to it.
Phil finished. Alt shook his head.
“Great list. I don’t know how we would go about deciding which of them to do,” Alt said.
Vickie tapped her long fingernails on the side of the deck chair she had dragged inside the cabin. “Well, if you want my opinion, then what we need to do is talk to Portland. She’s our boss.”
“Is she? Even after what happened in the Siege of Dubuque?” Alt said.
“I see no reason why we should go independent,” Vickie said. Alt had recruited her because she was a well-mind-shielded Mindbound and because of her self-defense expertise, learned during her years as a private investigator and Navy officer. War also suspected Alt had recruited Vickie as a lure for Ken Bolnick, also black, also a private investigator. His underhanded scheme hadn’t worked.
“How about the rest of you?” Alt asked.
War shrugged. The rest, save Walter, who played with illusory soldiers and refused any comments, signaled their interest in staying with Portland.
“Go to,” Alt said, to Vickie. Vickie, who had it in her to be a Grade One Supported, summoned in one of Portland’s projections. After they exchanged pleasantries, Alt had Phil repeat the list.
War’s mind tuned Phil out again. Each of the three streams of events where the Gods kept the support of the Angelic Host was a dystopia. One was secular, another religious and the last she didn’t have a good name for, save perhaps ‘Confucian’. To her surprise, Portland ended up top God in all three. None of the three Host-supported time streams ended up with any Dubuque-style worshipped Gods. In all three the worshipped Gods were ‘put down’ in one way or another. Dubuque’s vision of his City of God outlived him and formed the basis of the second stream; in addition, she sensed the Indigo all over this one, acting as Portland’s chief mortal allies. The first stream was too chaotic to describe with anything more meaningful than ‘secular’. Its substreams held far too many possibilities; in this scenario the thrashing chaos and corruption of the modern world continued unabated, and war returned to the Earth in the guise of never ending covert conflicts between cold war-like alliances of nations and Gods. The third stream War admitted she didn’t understand, save the scenario included an uncountable number of variations on ‘the world becomes China’, often literally, to where Mandarin-speaking bureaucrats dominated the United States government. In those, Portland joined and took over the Tradition faction.
All three of these streams possessed a shared flaw, though. The formation of each of the dystopias involved a near brush with a divine World War, a divine World War she found seeping out of a great many time streams. The outcome of these divine World Wars was uniformly horrific; each killed off all of humanity save a small number of the winning faction’s mortal followers.
The time streams did have ample wiggle room, though. She saw, now, how knowing this information expanded the scope of her free will, at least in theory. All she needed to do was find a non-disgusting future or group of possible futures.
“I understand,” Portland said, after Phil finished. “Options 8, 13, 14 and 15 appeal to me the most. We know what Dubuque said were his goals, but we don’t know how he’s going to implement them. We need information, and each of those four will help us gain this information.”
“Which one of those four, then?” Alt asked. “I see…”
Pointless, War knew. Directly, at least. Those options would hone the talents of Alt’s crew of Telepaths, though. She thought through what she knew of the future, and realized she couldn’t decide. Already, her future predictions were outdated, a silly thing to say about visions of the future, but outdated they were. Not only did the Place of Time show possible futures, but the possible futures changed as time went on, especially at the detail level. If Weeping for Cordoba hadn’t told her by about the importance of the Place of Time, she would have already discarded the Place as a distraction. Instead, she plotted out ways to learn the proper use of the Place of Time. The Angelic interest guaranteed this was possible.
“…the choice is up to you; I will support you in any of the four you choose,” Portland said.
“I say we go with number eight, then,” Alt said. “Let’s interfere with his smaller flunky groups, thwart them and pick their brains in the process. I’ve got another three potential recruits who can help us with this, including one Telepath who’s just been fired by Akron.”
Portland frowned. “Alt, why would Akron fire a Telepath?”
Alt shrugged. “I wasn’t going to bring this up, boss ma’am, but I think Akron and Worcester are distancing themselves from the Helping Hands Gods.” That’s because we lost, War groused. She didn’t blame either Territorial one bit. “Given the City of God’s opinion on the subject, having Telepaths in their organization is too risky for them right now.”
“Margo the ghost says that your current organization isn’t strong enough, Portland, and I agree,” Nicole said. “It’s too voluntary, too diffuse.”
“You’re right,” Portland said, her projection’s hands making knitting motions. War guessed Portland was more distraught than she admitted. “Do you have any suggestions?”
They all shook their heads.
“Then you do what you must and I’ll do what I must,” Portland said, a frown on her face. “Soon, we’re going to need to talk in person, when Nessa and Ken return.” She dissolved her projection.
“Crap,” Alt said. “I was hoping Nessa and Ken would stay away longer. Much longer. About our real plans…Phil, we need some logistics and…”
War tuned out Alt’s drone and went back to her deep thoughts.
There had to be a way out of this disaster. If only she could find it.
Then said the Most High, the Holy and Great One spake, and sent Uriel to the son of Lamech, and said to him: 'Go to Noah and tell him in my name "Hide thyself!" and reveal to him the end that is approaching: that the whole earth will be destroyed, and a deluge is about to come upon the whole earth, and will destroy all that is on it. And now instruct him that he may escape and his seed may be preserved for all the generations of the world.' And again the Lord said to Raphael: 'Bind Azâzêl hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness: and make an opening in the desert, which is in Dûdâêl, and cast him therein. And place upon him rough and jagged rocks, and cover him with darkness, and let him abide there forever, and cover his face that he may not see light. And on the day of the great judgment he shall be cast into the fire. And heal the earth which the angels have corrupted, and proclaim the healing of
the earth, that they may heal the plague, and that all the children of men may not perish through all the secret things that the Watchers have disclosed and have taught their sons.
-- The Book of Enoch 10, 1:8
“Work, die, what’s the difference.”
27. (Dave)
“I’m sorry, but according to Pete, my old company’s so overwhelmed by their current work they can’t expedite the seismic equipment shipment until the day after tomorrow,” Dave said, looking back at Elorie from his position at the small desk. Pete Diaz, his former partner, had even broached the subject of Dave coming back to work at PMJ. They had picked up an avalanche of work, all new West Coast contracts, spurred by Portland (the God). She had sent some of her Supported out with divine toxic waste detectors and had found over a hundred and fifty new sites needing cleanup, twelve of which merited emergency work. This boded better than her great Splursh splash of two days ago, where she had ‘helped’ Splurshvision by upgrading the intelligence of the Splursh group AI in return for putting a whammy on it to keep it from becoming self-aware. He swore the autobiography creation aspect of Splursh was now snarky and catty.
If this kept up, his company issued IOUs would have real value again. If Dave gave up on the mission, he had enough work waiting for him at his old company that he might be able to buy his way back in to the partnership.
The thought barely crossed his mind. He couldn’t give up on Elorie.
Elorie sat on a velvet high-backed chair, evidence of the Ankara hotel’s attempt at opulence. The room, a suite, theoretically, which meant it was almost as large as an American hotel room, had wooden floors, high ceilings, old furniture, and a small sitting area occupied by two of the velvet chairs, an ancient round coffee table, a small desk, and an old television on top of a small refrigerator. Elorie grunted, tapped fitfully on her laptop, and turned to Dave. Her bleary black-bruised eyes carved holes in his soul. A third of his requested equipment needed to be begged, borrowed or stolen from other sources, as his idiot company had sold a bunch of their warehoused equipment to make expenses. His list kept Elorie busy, working all hours the past two days. When she took off her makeup she always looked half dead, but today she worked on out-zombie-ing a zombie. Of all the strange things, Dave had noticed her eyes occasionally blinking off-unison. “If they can get them shipped, then no problem. If they can’t keep their schedule, we need another source.”
99 Gods: Betrayer Page 34
