“You’re the expert.”
He cast another quick, sidelong glance at me, but this time retained his footing. “Besides,” he said, “if he becomes a problem I can always throw you at him, can’t I?”
“You actually made a joke,” I said. “I don’t believe it. Unless it wasn’t a joke.” Great. But then if I had a fate in store, why not that one? At least I could go out doing some good for somebody over something. I liked Shaa; I wouldn’t mind turning him a last final favor. Maybe then Shaa would put in a positive word for me with Karlini; perhaps he could rehabilitate my posthumous memory if nothing else. I genuinely believe that the thought of what the Great Karlini would do when he discovered I had murdered his wife had not yet fully occurred to me until then. That may have been due, however, to the fact that I kept shying away from the whole topic. It was just too big for me to encompass. Too big and too nasty. I kept finding myself re-plumbing the depths of “what’s worse” - was it worse to have your memory and personality stolen or to find out they’d never been there at all, that your entire existence was a fake? - was it worse to know you’d already killed one friend without knowing it was coming, or to wait for it to happen again on a larger scale, knowing there might be even less you could do to stop it the next time around? - and so forth.
Oh, my.
But what choices did I have? I needed more options than the ones I’d been working with, that was clear. I couldn’t just keep running around this way indefinitely. My cracked ribs were letting loose a constant patter of pain, and I hadn’t been able to take a good deep breath since I’d woken up, and then of course my whole body felt like I’d been wrestling with a squid, but if I tried to rest and fell asleep who was to say Iskendarian wouldn’t take the opportunity to spring to life again and take charge?
Well, at least I’d survived my latest encounter with Jill. All things considered she’d accepted the fact that all her past experience with me was a matter of mistaken identity, but then she was being hit by so many other new developments at the same time I showed up I could understand if I wasn’t the exactly the highest priority question on her mind. Gash had run interference for me with her, which was only fair since my problem with her had been created by him in the first place, but that wasn’t to say that she still wouldn’t strike back at him by swatting his pawn, me, especially since I’d now been revealed to lack Gash’s deterrent power after all. Of course, I had Iskendarian’s deterrent now instead, which seemed at least an even trade. “So do you think your wife’s actually going to help?” I asked. “What do you need her for anyway? Or is it just that you don’t want her activities distracting you right at the moment?”
“I realize your experiences with her may not have left you with a particularly positive impression,” said Gash, “but she does have resources and infrastructure where I do not. Also, our differences are too well known for others to give credence to the idea we might collaborate again.”
“You don’t actually intend to trust her, do you?”
“Jill is actually quite dependable, for one of us, and she also has her principles. You always know where you stand with Jill.”
Was Gash actually getting a bit dewy-eyed? Or was that only the mist of remembrance of good times past? “Why did you break up?”
“Why do you think? She got tired of me being me.”
“She didn’t try to slide a knife in your back or something, did she?”
“You have spent time with her, haven’t you.” Gash fell silent for a moment. “Well, yes. But I wouldn’t have been interested in her without an edge. It’s not as though either of us were known for laying waste to regions.”
“Right,” I told him. “Good comparison. From the interpersonal to the cosmic. Great way to show your humanity.”
“It’s certainly more humanity than Iskendarian was known for. He did like to lay waste to regions.”
“Thanks a lot. I guess your lot isn’t exactly a paragon of humane expression, but then my alter ego obviously wasn’t, either. We make a great team, don’t we, buddy-buddy and all that. Why are you looking at me that way?”
Gash had edged away. His gaze was narrow and focussed beneath a furrowed brow. “... No,” he said. “From the manner of your speech I was concerned that Iskendarian was emerging again. But no.”
“Well, that’s a relief. Where’s Byron when you need him, right?”
“Byron? Why do you bring him up? He must be considered a phantasm, at best.”
“His name seems so thoroughly unmentionable among the gods that he must have done something right. How well did you actually know him?”
Gash threaded his way across the crowded boulevard in mid-block. God or not, his boots and trousers were still splattered with mud and road dirt, and traffic didn’t automatically part before him by mere force of his radiating divinity. Well, I’d already seen that the perks of godhood were overrated. “I never knew him personally,” Gash said, once we had gained the relative quiet of the opposite curb. “He was in a way my patron, but the relationship was no closer than arm’s length. You might think of it as a scholarship arrangement more than one of hands-on mentoring. By the time I entered the scene Byron had drawn inwards, become a thorough recluse.”
“I understand Phlinn Arol knew Byron.”
“... Yes, that’s most likely the case. Have you discussed it with him?”
“I couldn’t make him sit still long enough.”
“Perhaps I should apply my influence,” Gash mused. “What tales have you heard about Byron?”
“He figured out whatever it was that made you all gods. Then he had second thoughts about the whole thing and got purged for it.”
Gash took a few steps in silent reflection. “As I told you I was not there at the first,” he repeated eventually. “I came in not long afterward, after the Dislocation, true, but that was still a time when so much was in flux, when already the accounts of the formation were being revised, recast into myth. Nevertheless, in the true story behind all the propaganda, I believe Byron was duped.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Byron was a technologist, a very clever one, but not as suspicious as he should have been then, or as he seems to have become later. It was a much different world, in many ways, but some things have always been the same. Beings with intelligence will always scheme and plot against each other, and take advantage and lay traps and double-cross their friends. Perhaps Byron naively thought he was too important, or that his associates had only high thoughts and good will. Perhaps he believed that he was only conducting an experiment, an intellectual exercise, when in fact his associates had all along planned to take his work and let it loose upon the world.”
My first thought was to wonder how anybody could have been so stupid, but almost as quickly as that thought had appeared I realized I knew plenty of cases where such stupidity had been the order of the day, and more than a few where the idiot in question had been me. At least I’d never been involved in anything with such long-range consequences. “What kind of technology are we talking about here? Not the same sort of thing as steam engines or light bulbs or printing presses, obviously.”