99 Gods: War

by Randall Farmer

  Reed closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I can’t see how this crap works. None of your tricks make any logical sense to me.”

  “Magic isn’t logical, it’s psychological,” John said. He had used that tag line with his workers for about a century, as he found the comment easy for others to understand. “In some way, magic is alive and thinks for you. This is one of the reasons why magic’s so dangerous. If you ask for help, if you’re not careful, you create your helper. If you do evil, you create evil.”

  “Then why did you spend all those years turning off other magicians?” Reed said. “Why didn’t you just convince them to only do good?”

  John smiled at Reed’s centuries old argument. “What appears good to one person may not be good in an absolute sense. The infernal powers do exist, and we’ll likely run into them before this is over, Reed, so be prepared…and they are extremely talented at leading people astray.”

  “Uh, John, now that you’re…” Reed started, interrupted himself, and reddened.

  “Of course I’m worried about myself and what I’m doing,” John said. “But my backing is pure and religious. I know from my long experience that magicians with religious backing take the longest to fall to the infernal forces, often long enough to become saints, and many of them remove their own ability to do magic when it becomes too hazardous for them to continue.”

  “Then what’s the big worry?”

  “I’m far too powerful, and always have been, to be able to remove my own ability to do magic,” John said. “For this reason I’m sticking to informative and defensive magic.” For the moment.

  “Your defensive magic you used when you were attacked sounded offensive to me. Pardon my question.”

  “Don’t you worry. Self-defense is acceptable,” John said. “Wish safety, create safety. On the other hand, other risks do exist, dangerous risks. Those risks are why I took the new oath I told you about. In the long term, I’m no longer trustworthy enough to continue my old task.”

  “I just hope you’re not fooling yourself,” Reed said. He did something to his computer and the screen changed. “Take a look at this.”

  John read. “That’s me.” He even recognized the clothes, the ones he had worn when he went to visit Dubuque. He read some more. The news service article listed him as the likely suspect in numerous crimes he had no knowledge of, several of which he didn’t even understand. The article went on to say John was an ‘evil magician’ and an ‘alleged demon’, in the service of ‘Atlanta.’ He was, in the modern terminology, ‘wanted for questioning’. “What’s all this mean?” John said, and pointed to the accusations he did not understand.

  “You’re familiar with how websites work?”

  John shook his head.

  “Okay, hacking. Someone owns the name and puts on the website associated with the website name information they want published on the web. You are accused of changing this information without authorization, on hundreds of websites.” Reed moved the computer’s ‘mouse’ around and clicked. “Here’s an example.”

  John even recognized the website, since the site had the same name as one of the television networks. He read. The article started ‘Philip Johnson, an aide to the mayor of Cincinnati, has embezzled over three million dollars of federal government aid by funneling the stolen money through non-existent religious charities’ and went on to give some impressive details. “This is a hacked story,” Reed said. “Originally, the story had been about how the mayor shut down all of Cincinnati’s animal shelters because of inhumane euthanasia procedures.”

  “I didn’t do any such thing,” John said, confused. “Why am I being accused of this?”

  “Because the hacking behind this bit of alteration is otherwise impossible, at least according to the technical articles I’ve read on the subject. It takes magic to do something like this.” Reed shrugged. “Either that or someone just upped and bent the mind of several investigator types into believing you’re the one involved.”

  “Bah,” John said. He traced a few helpful symbols in the air and called up a picture of the perpetrator of this ‘hacking’ crime on to the ‘laptop’ screen. The screen blanked for a moment before returning to its normal incomprehensible self. “Double bah. Blocked. One of the 99 is behind this so-called ‘hacking.’”

  “Oh, great,” Reed said. “Then the internet isn’t safe from them, either. We’re hosed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if they can hack the internet, they’ll make it so you can’t stick your head up in public. They’ll be able to ruin your name and have every police agency in the world out after you.”

  “I think I understand.” All this internet stuff made John’s head spin. Sudden cold sweat covered his arms as a bad thought came to him. “Back away for a moment. I’ve got a bit of magic to do.”

  John called for the balance information of his dozens of worldwide bank accounts. The informative pictures came up on the screen, and each showed a summary of an empty bank account. He called for a picture of the thief who had pirated his money, and a picture of a well-dressed man in a suit appeared on the screen.

  “Someone as old as you should know that the nail that stands up gets hammered down,” the man in the suit said. Then he vanished. The screen now glowed a flat blue. Reed typed. The screen didn’t change.

  “The bastard gave me a blue screen of death!” Reed said. “How’d he do that? I made sure this piece of crap laptop was firewalled.”

  “Magic,” John said. “He’s the God Desire, one of the so-called Seven Suits.” John stood and paced. “I hope you haven’t gotten too comfortable with luxury, such as it is, because my easy money’s been wiped out. The Gods have stolen my money as well as ruined my reputation.” He had several tens of millions in gold and silver bullion stashed away in various places, most in thick vaults in Switzerland, just for disasters like this. The bullion wasn’t easy to get to, for obvious reasons. He would have to start work on getting access, on top of all the other things.

  “Crap,” Reed said. He turned off his computer and tried to start the computer up again. It didn’t start. He closed the lid with a frustrated slam. “I guess the Gods aren’t all technophobes. That one broke my computer.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “What do you think I am, some sort of computer nerd?” Reed said. “I’m a damned social worker!”

  John paced. This wasn’t good. The Gods were after him in a big way, bigger than any cause he knew of justified. Something else here danced the tango, something he knew he wouldn’t like.

  31. (Dave)

  “This is just so boring, Dad,” Ron said.

  “Sit still, please. I took Shannon and Stacy to your Pop Warner practice yesterday evening,” Dave said. He felt better today, but the wooden bleacher seats made his back ache. His eleven year old son squirmed and elbowed his younger sister Stacy, who stared in rapt attention at Shannon’s cheer practice. Dave wondered if he had said something wrong again. He knew at an intellectual level his kids weren’t little adults, but he had a hard time convincing himself to talk and think that way. Olinda had probably handled it differently, back before they had to let her go.

  He watched the cheer practice and the mouthy coach’s praise and rebukes. He hadn’t known kid pseudo-sports could be so organized and so serious. A part of him hoped he would be able to get some new clients for DPMJ and go back to work, freeing up the money for another nanny to take over chauffeur responsibilities, but another part found this crazy time-wasting activity heartwarming. These were his children; watching them progress filled a need inside him he didn’t know he had.

  However, he could only watch Shannon’s not-so-skillful jumping and tumbling for so long before his attention wandered. He took out his cellphone and surreptitiously leafed through the internet headlines. Nairobi had joined Khartoum and Accra in the African God war-stomp business, although Nairobi hadn’t laid waste to any armies. He had taken away their weapons, as the Gods had dea
lt with North Korea, and appeared to them as some sort of giant-sized projection, ordering them to stop their fighting. Dave wondered if this would work or whether the Gods would need to supply another stronger example.

  “Dad, this is mucho boring,” Ron said. “Olinda let us…”

  “I don’t want to hear about what Olinda did,” Dave said. “Think of this as building a new life skill, one of patience.” Ron rolled his eyes. Dave went back to his cell, viewing a transcript of today’s speech by Dubuque, an argument that even a belief in the literal truth of the Bible does not preclude either the vast expanses of geological time or evolution. ‘Poetic truth is still literal truth, especially for people who didn’t have words for concepts such as ‘billion’ and ‘solar system’. Evolution is a means of ordering life, and is a piece of God’s creation itself. Since God created everything, and since evolution exists, why would God need to intervene otherwise? He’s already created everything.’ Oooh, the fundies are going to hate this argument, Dave thought. Dubuque’s words appealed to Dave a lot, and to Dave’s environmental geologist training.

  He waited until Ron had calmed down and gone back to staring a different direction before he whispered a question to Stacy. “What did Olinda let you do during each other’s practices?” he said.

  Stacy gave Dave a blank look and didn’t answer. She, at least, remained interested in Shannon’s practice.

  “I want my Gamester, Dad,” Ron said, from his other side.

  Oh.

  What a splendid idea.

  All three kids wanted a snack after they returned home, and Dave made them microwave popcorn. Ron had his Gamester set on the Lias life-is-a-soundtrack social media site, listening to the boom-boom-boom feed of some football player as he went through a supposedly average day. He wasn’t sure what to make of Lias or the whole ‘my life as if I’m starring in a movie’ fad, but he had at least checked Ron’s Lias feed to make sure it was set to G-rated.

  Tiff rolled in just before nine, perfect timing to give Stacy a bedtime hug. Dave spent a few minutes watching Shannon suck in a streamed anime cartoon that made no sense to him at all and followed Ron through several levels of a flashy and equally pointless video game that made even less sense to him, until Tiff interrupted him with a tap on his shoulder.

  “Dave?” she said, motioning with her fingers. He followed her out of the game room. “If you’re going to be here and help, you need to check to make sure the kids did their homework before you take them to their practices,” Tiff said.

  “Homework? I didn’t think the public schools did homework.” Why else had he and Tiff sneered at the public school system for all these years?

  Tiff gave him a blank sideways glance. “Unlike the Mile High Academy, they don’t get homework every night, so it’s not a routine, but they do have homework on occasion,” Tiff said, tapping her fingers together as she led him into her office. “They bring the homework home in a special folder.”

  “Okay,” Dave said, vaguely annoyed. He hadn’t thought much of homework when he had been a kid, and he didn’t see any reason to change his mind now. Busywork.

  “In addition, I got a phone call from Ron’s coach. Ron’s been acting up in the Pop Warner practices again, refusing…”

  “Why do I need to know this?” Dave said. “I’m not their…”

  “Dave, come on,” Tiff said, turning to him. “You set an example for Ron; and if you talked to him on the way…”

  “I’m not the one acting up in practices…”

  “No, you set an example by not paying attention to details, which gives Ron an excuse not to cooperate with Coach Joe,” Tiff said.

  “I’m not what who?” Dave said. Tiff frowned and Dave frowned back. “How’s Ron even supposed to know I don’t pay attention to details, if I’m even doing such a thing? This isn’t anything we’ve talked about.”

  “He’s got eyes and a mind,” Tiff said.

  “He’s only eleven.”

  “You need to stop flipping back and forth between thinking they’re adults and thinking they’re infants,” Tiff said, hands on her hips. “Did you take your full complement of pills today, Dave?”

  Dave gritted his teeth, annoyed. “I think I’d rather not talk about this now,” he said. He turned and stalked out of Tiff’s office, angry enough to throw expensive office knick-knacks. He didn’t like to be criticized like some school-age truant by anybody, let alone by his wife. Chewed out in her office! He needed to dredge up another client trip and get himself out of this place, he told himself, even a client trip without any hope. He refused to let anyone think of him as an invalid who should be in a hospice.

  He stalked to the back of the house, exited the piano room to the deck overlooking the long backyard meadow and, at the bottom, the rocky intermittent stream marking the boundary between their property and the Mitchell’s. The stress and the medication made him lightheaded. The air outside made him shiver, cold enough to make him wonder if some early season snow might be on the way.

  Damn Tiff! Why did she make it so hard? He did everything she asked regarding the kid-care issues, but he just didn’t obsess about them the way Tiff obsessed about everything. He hadn’t done all these activities when he had been a kid. Hell, at Ron’s age, he had actually run with a gang! Okay, that’s my New York Puerto Rican background showing, he told himself. But still…

  A light flicked on over at the Mitchell’s, then another. They worked Tiff hours, too. Crazy. Didn’t anyone his age and current social class come home at a reasonable hour anymore? What had Steve said on the subject? Oh, right. The bigger and fancier the kitchen, the less often the place got used for cooking anything except in the microwave oven.

  What would a society of people without any non-work life look like? His marriage, perhaps?

  The French doors creaked open behind him. Tiff. Dave stiffened and leaned out over the waist-high deck railing, pretending he hadn’t heard a thing. Tiff walked over to near him and put her hands on the railing, five feet away.

  “I’ve got something to show you, Dave. Then I need to get back to work,” Tiff said.

  Ah. That’s why she had led him to her office, not to chew him out. He grunted an answer.

  “I’m sorry about earlier,” Tiff said. “I know I’m making things miserable for you, but, hell, I just don’t see it until after I say it. I’m not going out of my way to do this. I’m not trying to fight with you.”

  He grunted again, believing the opposite.

  “Say something, Dave.”

  “I don’t like having my life run for me,” he said. “I’m an adult, despite what you think.”

  “Dammit, I’m just trying to help,” she said. “You could make this easier for me, you know.”

  He glanced over at her; she had taken a step back from the railing and crossed her arms. He grunted again and turned back to watch the Mitchell’s lights.

  She didn’t speak for nearly two minutes. “I’m cold,” she said. She paused; he didn’t respond. “I do want to show you something.”

  He sighed. “Fine.”

  “I’m Marcie,” the woman said. “You’re Dave?”

  He nodded, forcing himself to be open minded. Tiff sat beside him, running the fancy teleconferencing set-up in her office. “You work in Portland’s organization?”

  “Yes, Dave. I reviewed your case, passed the info on to the Boss, and she says I can make the offer.”

  Dave licked his lips. “Your boss?”

  “Portland,” Marcie said. “You didn’t know? I’m one of Portland’s Wise Shepherds. I get direct access.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dave said. “The name means nothing to me.” He hadn’t spent much time in his research on Portland and her organization, only long enough to realize Portland preferred women with Arts and Letters degrees and didn’t appreciate businesses or people who had ever made more than a dime of profit.

  “We’re new. Boss is experimenting with some new methods of Divine support, a new way to
help her meet the demands of her responsibilities as a Territorial God.” Marcie smiled. She looked all of thirty, unattractive, overweight and serious. She reminded him of a caricature of a woman as an anthropomorphized tuna. “You’d be getting in on the ground floor of what’s likely to be a large operation.”

  “If I may ask,” Dave said, falling into his standard negotiation mode, honed for years by his client work at DPMJ, “what does this have to do with my request for medical help?”

  “This gets around the paperwork issues, the waiting time issues, and the fact you’re not a resident of the Boss’s territory,” Marcie said. “You sign on with us and the first thing we do is get you cured up.”

  Interesting. He wondered if the offer also came with a sex change operation and an unstoppable urge to gain weight. He banished his unkind and uncharitable thoughts. “What would my responsibilities be in this new job?” he said. “As you said, I live outside of Portland’s, um, territory.”

  “This isn’t a job, but a calling,” Marcie said, her voice taking on a strange tenor. “To start with, you would be helping us set up the Wise Shepherd organization. Once things are set up, you would be working in your professional specialty, finding, categorizing and leading other Wise Shepherds in environmental clean-up efforts.”

  He should have expected something this screwy. About to say something about how this sounded interesting, and thinking about how much good he could do in the world, environmentally, with a God backing him, he stopped cold. Cold, as in shivery goosepimpled arms watery eyes cold. One of his woo-woo moments, so familiar from before his illness, and so uncommon, now. He raised his hand for a moment to collect himself, and his scattered thoughts. Working for Portland was a bad idea, he realized. He wasn’t sure why, but it was. “You want me to do this from Denver?”

  “On your application, you did indicate you were open to travel,” Marcie said. Dave nodded. “During the initial startup period, and certainly while you’re being cured, you’ll come here. Later, when you’re doing the environmental work, you’d live at home and travel as normal up and down Portland’s territory and Boise’s territory, where you live, as Boise’s signaled an interest in this work.”