99 Gods: War

by Randall Farmer

  “Oh, that’s no big secret,” Inventor said. “He just put it in an enchantment, like the charged Kevlar body armor you’ve had me making.”

  The audience flipped pages and ignored Inventor’s comment.

  “Before we get to the inevitable questions and technical discussions… Reed, the second paper, please?” John paused. “This paper deals with an analysis of what you Gods are made of. This one’s a bit beyond my comfort level, but my people are quite certain they’re correct. You’re made up of something called neutral strangelets, not ordinary matter. Each neutral strangelet is a million times the mass of a normal atomic nucleus, and made from a large number of subatomic particles normally having an insignificant lifetime. As a strangelet, or at least this variety of strangelet, they apparently last forever, or something equivalent. As to how this gives you Gods your power, all my people have are wild hypotheses. The current consensus is that each of the neutral strangelets is a simple computer or computer analog, and there’s enough of them in your body to hold your souls, your minds and your abilities.” Grover, Joe and Jurgen and their crew hadn’t been so polite. They had called that idea a wild-assed guess at best, each of them terrified of what Grover termed ‘godawful pants-wetting superscience’.

  “If this is a technology, it’s farther above our heads than our modern technology is above hand axes,” Singularity said. “Unless I’m right and a near infinite technological spike happens in the next fifty years.”

  John nodded. Jurgen’s comment was ‘This is to nanotech as nanotech is to the Model T’, which matched Singularity’s observation.

  “What about the specks?” Inventor said. “You’ve described the silvery parts of our makeup. The dark specks have macroscopic reality. They are not this.”

  “Meaning?” John said.

  “They’re large enough to see, as solid objects, through a microscope. They’re not strangelets.”

  John shrugged. “My people said they’re made up of the same neutral strangelet matter as the rest of you, but in a different configuration, and to an unknown purpose. They called it an unidentified strange matter object.” Which, in John’s opinion, meant nothing at all. He had no desire to pass along their terrifying speculation on the dark specks.

  Portland raised her hand, politely, and the technical discussion started.

  “There’s something I need to talk to you about,” Boise said, after the gathering broke up. John loaded his plate again, tempted to gluttony by the wonderful food. His ample waist showed his chronic lack of restraint. The buffet table was always his friend.

  Boise came alone. He still hadn’t taken a shower, the wild prophet of Idaho still whiff enough to gag all bystanders. The mountain God exuded bad mood, likely because the Mormon Elders had labeled him a two-bit evil spirit follower of Satan and teacher of untruth.

  “Okay,” John said, doing his best to control his gorge. “Is it about Portland’s suggestion we assign the problem of the Seven Suits to Freedom and that group of Ideological Gods?” The solution felt wrong to him, very wrong.

  “No, not at all. In fact, I agree with Portland’s suggestion,” Boise said. “My observation’s something else, based on some spies I have in Dubuque’s headquarters in Oklahoma City,” Boise said.

  John smiled. “Now that’s useful. Dubuque’s cleaned mine out.”

  Boise shrugged. “I’ve learned that he’s recruited a Telepath to serve him, and when I told Nessa and Ken about the recruit, they practically died on the spot and directed me to you.”

  “Well, that doesn’t sound good,” John said, uneasy. He kept track of all the powerful mature Telepaths and he didn’t know of any worth the reaction.

  “This recruit’s an old man, in his seventies. Blind, and the blindness appears impervious to miraculous healing,” Boise said. “I haven’t gotten a name on him yet.”

  John paled. “His name is Blind Tom, and he hasn’t been a Telepath in years.”

  “Your work? I thought you could only remove the ability to be a magician,” Boise said.

  “A common misunderstanding,” John said, a misunderstanding he had cultivated over the years. “I don’t remove their ability to do magic, I remove their knowledge and interest in it. I can do the same with anyone abnormal who gets out of line. As Blind Tom did.” Far out of line.

  “You don’t sound pleased.”

  “You don’t want to know,” John said. “Enjoy the day while you can. Blind Tom wasn’t blind after I removed his telepathic tricks. If he’s in Dubuque’s service and blind again, that means that Dubuque’s restored Blind Tom’s knowledge and interest in affairs telepathic. The reason this is very bad news is because Blind Tom is an evil man, one of the few I know who’s truly evil. He’s also got a bad history with Nessa and Ken, which could cause big whampum problems for all of us.” John paused in thought. He owed Boise for this information, and he had a proper payment, although he hadn’t wanted to spill the beans until the problem actually showed. “There’s a similar problem about to show its face, an old nemesis of mine, one who will be bothering all of us in North America.”

  “Yes?”

  “It also has nothing to do with the accusations against you,” John said, a millennium of sympathy in his voice.

  “Yes?”

  “Satan’s coming.”

  54. (Dave)

  Dr. Greuter sat them down in his office and smiled. Dave fidgeted; Tiff maintained her mask of professional distance. “There’s no bad news,” Dr. Greuter said. “Every test we ran confirms what you suspected. Your miraculous intervention by Dubuque fully cured you. You have less cadmium in your system than most other 40 year olds.”

  “That’s wonderful news, Doc,” Dave said. “Any cautions, caveats, anything?”

  “Not a one,” Dr. Greuter said. “I consulted with some other physicians with experience with the miraculously cured, and they say you’re clean. You don’t have a single non-functional body part being held together by ongoing divine tricks. As far as we can tell, you can go on with your life as if the cadmium exposure and its many side effects never happened.”

  Dave smiled and took a deep breath. Smiled wider. Hot damn!

  Dave toweled off after his four mile hike up and down the trails in Mount Falcon Park, tired and achy. Good aches, though. Muscle aches. A good tired. He loved Mount Falcon Park, despite its familiarity, because of several overlooks where he could peer through the firs and see his house, a distant dot in the valley below and to the west. He even ran in to a woman hiker with a large metal-framed kid-carrier backpack, the same as Tiff once owned. He even chatted her up for long enough for her to grow uncomfortable with him, something he hadn’t been able to do for months, if not years.

  He felt like he belonged again, back into the Denver swing of things, where absurdly fit was the norm.

  “Lunch, Dave?” Tiff said, waiting for him outside her home office.

  “Sure. To celebrate my cure?”

  “I found something strange for you,” she said. Her distant mood remained, even after Dr. Greuter’s good news. “I figure with the news about your health and your work, now would be the perfect time to bring this up.”

  He nodded. He had talked Pete and his other partners into a salary again after he brought in his third, albeit small, client contract. Only fifty percent pay, but his company had put the formal buyout on hold, at least for long enough to see if Dave could pull in enough clients to match those of his partners. He would never be able to replace the loss of Hernandez Industries, but if the deepening recession bottomed out, he might be able to come close. “We can do lunch,” he said to Tiff.

  They chose a favored soup and salad emporium, a short drive down into the outer suburbs. After they waited five minutes in line for a table, they sat. Dave practically bounced as he waited and chatted at Tiff, buoyed by the good news about his health and his successful hike. In his mind, he plotted out further things he could do to warm up his relationship with Tiff, his romantic gifts of flowers,
chocolates and jewelry not yet having the desired effect. He especially didn’t like the fact that the flowers never passed the door of Tiff’s office and tended to nearly rot before Tiff tossed them.

  Tiff made nothing more than social noises, often little more than a grunt. She ordered an ornate salad, giving the waiter her usual detailed instructions to the chef about what she wanted and didn’t want. Dave ordered French onion soup and a small house salad, content with whatever the place decided to throw at him today.

  “So, when would be good for you for my next client-hunting trip?” The hostess had given them a quiet table in the rear of the busy restaurant, a good place for private discussions.

  Tiff shrugged. “I’m not sure it matters,” she said. “Did you read the document I forwarded to you?”

  “The one by that crazy person who claims to be a real-life Telepath?” He couldn’t believe half the crap on the internet after Miami and Atlanta’s death duel. Every crazy in the world had come out of the closet, it seemed. If he believed the internet noise, some of the Telepaths even lived underwater, in the world’s oceans.

  “Uh huh, Joan D’Ark’s piece,” Tiff said, slicing some of the warm bread and taking a bite of it, plain. She made a face and put it down on the bread plate, where Dave guessed it would remain the rest of the meal, once bitten. “What did you think of it?”

  “Unproveable hogwash,” Dave said. “I still don’t believe in those demonstrations of hers, nor the other demonstrations by the other alleged Telepaths who’ve gone public. I’m sure her thesis about the Living Saints going after the Telepaths is pure vapor, as all of the other so-called Telepaths who’ve gone public have done so under the protection of one of the Living Saints.”

  “There’s clearly some political nonsense going on behind the scenes among the 99 Gods, factions forming and dissolving, but I don’t want to talk about politics,” Tiff said. “I don’t doubt her veracity, based on some other information I can’t talk about. What I find interesting is D’Ark’s section on all the many varieties of almost-Telepaths, especially the group she calls ‘Psychics’. I think this can explain your strange encounter with Madame Xenia.”

  Dave furrowed his brows. “Yes, go on?”

  “If you read between the lines of what she wrote, Psychics apparently do, at times, some of the same tricks as the Telepaths, only these tricks normally stay buried in their subconscious. They can’t use them consciously, but these tricks do work, at least sporadically. The rest of the time they function as what D’Ark termed Mindbound, who appear to be nothing more than Telepaths who shut off their own Telepathy.” Tiff paused to examine the salad the waiter elegantly placed in front of her. She weighed her options, cataloging the accuracy of the chef in meeting her high expectations, and then sighed and accepted the salad. Dave started in on his soup. “True adult Telepaths tend to be paranoid and anti-social, apparently good enough or crazy enough to avoid or chase off anyone who might want to research them, which explains how they’ve been missed. Instead, the research community’s been stuck with the Psychics, with their sporadically successful tests and difficult to duplicate results. The most common of the tricks Psychics possess are what D’Ark calls ‘hunches’, not quite future foretelling but better than educated guesses about the future based on the thoughts and plans of others. Ring a bell?”

  He shrugged. “You’re suggesting that Madame Xenia was one of these Psychics?

  Tiff shook her head as she picked at her salad. “I don’t know anything about Madame Xenia, not having ever met her nor found any hint of her existence in any of the accessible databases. I’m talking about the puzzling comment she made to you, Dave, the one where she said you were meant for greater things.”

  “Huh?” Tiff hadn’t thought Diana’s comment worth its weight in air.

  “You’re a Psychic, Dave. You have quite a few of the signs: your bad dreams in your teen years of being someone else, your uncanny tendency to pick up on what’s going on around you, such as when you cancelled your trip over 9/11 or when you turned down the offer to become a Wise Shepherd and die in Miami’s attack, and your overly credulous and yet successful leap into the unknown, alone, to get your Dubuque cure. What initially threw me off the trail was that your tricks seemed so random, sporadic and untrustworthy, which appears, after a more careful reading of D’Ark’s document, to be exactly as expected for a Psychic.”

  Dave made a face and put down a spoon. Everything he had read about Telepaths made them sound like utter lunatics. “So I’m one of them? You’re saying I’m one of those crazies?” Disgusting! When people said he was staid and sane, this was never a compliment, but a character flaw. His woo woo moments had never compensated for his staid sanity. He actively liked chamber music, for gosh sakes.

  “I don’t believe you’re crazy, as it’s the sane and thoughtful ones who become Psychics or Mindbound. The crazies become either adult Telepaths or what D’Ark archly terms ‘failed Telepaths’. Psychotics.” Tiff sliced a cherry tomato into quarters and speared it, then speared some arugula lettuce to add to the tomato, swished the concoction in the lemon and extra virgin olive oil dressing, shook off the extra dressing, eyed the forked salad for a moment, and slowly took a bite. “Congratulations, you’re a one-in-a-million, if D’Ark’s numbers are right.” She frowned. “I’d sort of hoped that I might be a Psychic, the sort of cool thing that almost never happens to me, but no dice. I didn’t turn out to have a single one of the signs D’Ark mentioned. I’m likely not even one of the Mindbound.”

  “Okay, okay,” Dave said. Now he understood some of Tiff’s recent stony behavior. In some idiot fashion beyond his understanding, he had out-Tiffed Tiff. Never ever a good thing. “From what I read, all this nonsense sounds like that and five dollars will get you a latte down at the Starbucks, unless you’re one of the real adult Telepaths.”

  “There’s one important benefit to being a Telepath of any variety,” Tiff said. “Attempts by Gods and Telepaths to control the minds of people like you supposedly slide off over time if they, you, exert your free will. Psychics appear to be the best at bouncing control attempts, going with their tendency to be hard-headed and strong willed.”

  “You talking ‘bout me?” Dave said. Tiff snorted. “Alright, I can understand that, at least a little.” He did have a tendency to do whatever he wanted to, once he got some forward momentum going. “So, any ideas about what ‘greater things’ I’m supposed to be doing?”

  “Just an educated guess, with implications I don’t like,” she said. “I think you were right; Madame Xenia was trying to recruit you, and as a Boise follower she was trying to recruit you to work for Boise. Perhaps, and this is only a guess, Boise’s got a way to turn Psychics into mature adult Telepaths, or he has some important uses for hard-headed difficult-to-control followers.”

  “Work directly for a God?” Dave said. He shook his head. “I’ve already turned that sort of thing down twice.”

  Tiff frowned, taking his comment as a slur on her advice. “I’m not saying I’d recommend taking a job with any of the Gods,” Tiff said. “This was only a hypothetical analysis. In fact, I think working directly for any God is far too dangerous right now, and will remain so until they sort out their hazardous political issues. They’ve shown their true colors at last, God Almighty save us all. I’ll bet, though, that if you offered yourself to Dubuque’s ministry, as a Psychic, you’d get an immediate job offer, likely a large one.” She shrugged. “If you want to avoid the implied danger, though, perhaps the best thing for you to do is to pretend you aren’t a Psychic and try and go on with your life.”

  He nodded. “There’s a good case to be made that I already had my fifteen minutes of fame,” he said. More like fifteen minutes of flame, considering the ruckus his blog entries on his Dubuque experiences caused on the various God-experience boards. The anonatrolls had accused him of looking at things in the worst possible light, of exaggerating the magnitude of his healing, and of lying, depending on the p
rejudices of the responder. He didn’t want anything to do with that sort of notice ever again. He certainly understood now why so few Dubuque experiences ever made it on any of those boards. “I don’t need any more notice. I think you’re right.”

  “Good,” Tiff said. She finished her salad, one swish and shake at a time, and pushed the plate away. Contrary to Dave’s expectations, her face remained its stony professional self. Normally agreeing with Tiff brightened her mood appreciably.

  “Since everything’s going so well with me, perhaps this is a good time to bring up our personal difficulties, and what we can do to sort them out,” Dave said. Nothing he tried had improved a thing. “Now that I’m cured, I’d like to look into your suggestion about counseling.”

  “I don’t think bringing up our problems today is a good idea. Why ruin one of your good days?” Tiff put her hands in her lap, even more distant, if possible.

  Huh? “In addition to following up on your counseling idea, I also think we might be able to scrape up enough money for a vacation, just for the two of us,” Dave said. “I was thinking Calgary.” Skiing sounded fun. Outdoorsy vacations had always brought them closer together in the past, especially something semi-athletic and competitive guaranteeing a victory for her.

  “I don’t think so, sorry,” Tiff said, frowning now.

  Dave stapled sympathy on his face. He thought his suggestion was a no-brainer. “Work problems?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Money?”

  “With you on half pay, not a problem, since we didn’t put anything back in the budget we cut before.”

  He ungritted his teeth and practiced Zen tongue amputation. He failed. “Then,” he said, “I don’t mean to press,” which of course he did, “but I’d like to know why not.”