Bad Karma (Wine of the Gods Book 22) Read online

  Bad Karma

  Pam Uphoff

  Copyright © 2015 Pamela Uphoff

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN

  978-1-939746-11-5

  Cover Art derived from:

  © Zrelenenkyyyuriy | Dreamstime.com - Angry Dog With Bared Teeth Photo

  This is a work of fiction.

  All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional.

  Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  Chapter One

  Xen looked up in surprise when General Rufi Negue wandered casually into his office.

  "That's a bit worrying. I don't think I've ever seen you wander casually about, so why don't you tell me what the problem is."

  Rufi snorted. "No wonder you're getting a reputation. My problem is simple. Lord Hell is living up to his name. Will you please find out what the problem is and fix it?"

  "Good God. I'm almost afraid to ask what's happening."

  "Oh, the usual, but nastier. The Hell Hounds are eating people's poodles instead of screwing them. When they attack people, they are less likely to chase them up trees and more likely to actually bite them. No deaths there, yet, but other things that may not be related. Murders and riots, people falling down stairs. Nothing new, but there's so much of it, and it coincides with his one known visit to town, and now it's concentrated in the docks area, nearest the island. Go . . . do something. Produce a miracle if necessary."

  When Xen walked out of the corridor onto the Island he slammed his mental shields tight to block out the screeching tension and black miasma that seemed to be fighting for possession of the local aura. Oh. Not good.

  He looked around carefully, warily. The front door slammed open and Scarlet bolted out. "Xen, thank gods it's you and not some poor innocent . . . watch out for the dogs!"

  Xen grabbed a bubble and turned it inside out as he turned toward the sound of galloping paws and swept it over the trio of Hell Hounds as they leapt at him. They slowed in mid leap and halted like a frozen wave of aggression. It made a rather disturbing statue. He stuck the bubble to the ground so it wouldn't drift off.

  "Okay, where's Hell and what is he so upset about?"

  "He's walking down by the bay. Nobody can figure out what the problem is, and when he's around Mother he just starts to go all marbly, like a statue. Even Mom is scared."

  "Umm, I'll go talk to him." Xen headed to the right, where the black miasma seemed thickest. He grabbed a couple of bubbles and kept his eyes open for more dogs. Twice more he was nearly ambushed, and he cursed under his breath. It seemed that in extremis the puppies were picking up the original Hell Hound reactions and connections to the God. He could hear mournful howling and hoped to . . . whatever that he wasn't dealing with a suicidal god.

  The howling was the original four dogs, who were sticking close to their master, whining and pacing with him as he stomped and kicked his way up and down a strip of shoreline.

  He glared at Xen. "I suppose someone sent you to fix the problem? Well it can't be fixed." He stomped off and Xen perched on a convenient rock and waited until he came back.

  "She's getting old. I thought she'd live forever, she looked so young . . . but she's using magic and faking it. She's going to die and then what will I do? I can't live without her. You think it's bad now? Just wait. Before I met Trump, no one wanted me near. Not even the other gods could stand to have me around them. Trump's given me everything. When she's around, this damned karmic field is barely a mile across, the dogs piss on people. Haven't killed a bully since she woke us. People trip and sprain their ankles, not a single broken neck that I've heard of. People say unfortunate things, but they don't result in bloodbaths. Not yet. I can't even think about going back to the way I used to be. What am I going to do?" He had tears in his eyes and stomped off again.

  A thousand years alone and hated. Twenty-five years of bliss. Is this why the gods don't remember?

  He thought about it. Would he live forever, or at least until he did something even worse than his efforts so far? He watched Hell stomp back. "It has to be an engineered gene."

  Hell snorted. "Of course it is.”

  "So . . . would an essential transformation make a person already alive, immortal?" Xen frowned. "I think we need to talk to Lady Gisele." He glanced at the god. "Er, why don't I go talk to Lady Gisele. You need to realize that you've got thirty or forty years to save her, and stop this gloom and despair routine. Trump probably thinks you've gone insane and is preparing to kill you if you look wrong at one of the kids."

  Hell straightened and glared. "She wouldn't. I wouldn't."

  "Oh yes she would. Ash raises witches that fight. Be careful how you approach her. I'll be back in a couple of days to talk to you both."

  He Traveled then, to the safest place in the World, so unsure of the god that he didn't want to turn his back on him.

  Chapter Two

  He stretched tight shoulders and opened his shields enough to let in the peaceful hush of the vineyard. "Phew." He stuck his head in the winery and hallooed. His parents could be very hard to find, both of them quiet by nature.

  Today the quiet seemed to be actual absence, and he walked downhill, stopping to greet all the horses in the fenced pastures around the mouth of the ravine. Most of the horses could easily leap the fences, but they did serve to remind them of where they were supposed to be.

  Lady Gisele was weeding her garden.

  "Have you run out of children to help?" Xen stepped over the fence and started uprooting grass and morning glory.

  She snorted. "They're all at school, silly boy. And I'm not the least bit fooled by your helpfulness. What do you want?"

  "I was wondering about the gods' longevity genes. And the witches. I was talking to Hell, you see, and he's really upset. It just hit him that Trump won't always be with him. So I was wondering about, well, which genes make some of us live so long."

  "There are eight of them, that I know of. Sizable complexes, not single genes, of course." The old crone sniffed. "Living forever—or at any rate for thousands of years isn't always that good of a thing. I've lost people to old age and death. My own daughter, for one. Well, I thought Romeau had died when the comet fell. I had finally worked out a way around my fertility problems—we first goddesses were rather poorly designed in some ways. I wanted a child, but I didn't want a husband to plague me forever. And I wanted my daughter to be normal. To not be cursed to live forever, watching everyone she knew die. It seemed a good idea, at the time. Nil . . . she begged me to make sure he lived long, so that I had a grandson to take care of me. Ha! Well, the concentrations of genes we had in Scoone, and now here in Ash have made rather a lot of long lived people. But not many with the potential to live for millennia."

  "Dad said the horses had those genes too." He pictured Pyrite's and Dun's chromosomes. Held the chart out. Highlighted the human inclusions, and then considered the engineered genes in the experimental insertions.

  "This one here, these two long strings here. Then down on the 17th chromosome, this complex here. Eighteenth, here and here. Two on the nineteenth, this first string and this bit down almost at the end."

  "Hmph. So the Dun really is fourteen hundred years old. Well, they all are, but he's been out the whole time."

  "Indeed. You need to be careful with this knowledge boy."

  "I know. What would the effect be, if no one died of old age any more?"

  The old woman cackled. "Damn few inheritances. And a crowded World. But your Gates can deal with that problem, can't they?"

  Xen nodded, and walked through the lush garden to another problem spot. "Now, which are the herbs and which are t
he weeds?"

  "Hmph. Shame on you. I just seeded this bed, can't you see the dill coming up?"

  "I see about four different sprouting things. Which are the dill?" He kept working for a couple of hours, until Gisele tsked quietly and sent him off to shift the oddly colored sheep away from the fields.

  "I hate to admit how spoiled we all were by having those goats to keep the sheep where they belonged. Horrible creatures, even your grandfather."

  "Don't you have dogs?" Xen brushed the dirt off his hands and headed up the lane. "Maybe I'd better get some for Mom." Because of course the oddly colored sheep were hers. The only normal colored one had started life as a wolf.

  He chased the sheep up the slope and a ways north where the grass was lush and green, and settled down to mind them and think.

  Sheep herding and thinking were compatible activities, so long as one didn't completely lose track of the sheep.

  So. Eight genes. He knew how to do essential transformations, and pulled out his best one for use as a template. He needed spells to find other chromosomes, to find those eight gene complexes on a human, not a horse, to compare them to the engineered complex, and change it where a mismatch occurred. He made tentative beginnings for eight separate spells. Fill in the blanks. Carefully. He could check what Trump was lacking, and change just those few.

  Or he could make something like his father's wine. A self perpetuating web of spells fueled by the alcohol and using the chemicals in the wine to create . . . the Earthers referred to them as nano machines. Meaning very bloody damn small, but still complex molecules that served a specific, fairly simple task. Lady Gisele called them ribozymes—half RNA with the instructions, and half enzyme to do the work. He looked back at his spell, and contemplated it carefully. That part took the chemicals of the body and formed the molecular machine. This got it taken into the cells of the body. That part would restrict it to attaching only to the right part of the right chromosome, when he finished it. That bit was RNA, and that was an enzyme that changed the DNA to match the RNA pattern.

  He could see how it worked. To do it in some medium—yeah, wine really would work best, the spell itself would have to be replicating in the wine. And he planned an even larger molecule that manufactured both the molecular machine and reproduced itself.

  He got up and chased sheep again. And peered across the valley and waved to his mother.

  He sat back down and started planning his manufacturing molecule.

  "Good heavens, how did you get roped into sheep herding, and where is that wretched dog?"

  "No dog in sight. I suspect that unless it was part Hell Hound it wasn't smart enough to herd sheep without supervision. Or maybe That Ram ate it. I was talking genetics with Lady Gisele and thus was able to save you from the farmers' wrath. Actually it was rather nice to have the time to lie around and think. I'll have to try to herd sheep more often." He held out his eight spells for his mother's examination.

  "Very nice and tidy, once you put in the specifications. What genes are they tracking down and changing, though? And what to, and why?"

  "They hunt down the right genes and change them to the genes that gods have, that make them so long lived." He turned his attention inward, to his own and saw that he had all the best engineered genes, then reached out and touched his mother. She did too.

  "Who do you need these for? Should I get all excited?"

  "Sorry, no, no girlfriend, or at any rate, no new ones. Lord Hell was just falling apart at the thought of losing Trump, so I promised him I'd look into it."

  "Hmph. It's not like he's the first man to bury a wife. Admittedly, finding another Trump could be difficult."

  Xen nodded. "Someone like Hell, miserable and unhappy has a rather large impact. He wasn't doing it on purpose."

  "Really?" She turned around and waved to a tall man on a black horse, down on the main road. The horse veered off the road and leapt into a gallop.

  "Yeah. The Great Grand asked me to please find the problem and deal with it. It sounds like the Just Deserts we know is just amazingly mild compared to the Pre-Fall God of Just Deserts."

  "Amazingly mild is not the sort of thing I would call Lord Hell. But how bad could that field of his get?"

  The God of War laughed, and dropped off the horse as it halted. "There speaks a woman wrapped in blissful ignorance. Please, please, do anything to keep that man happy."

  "I've got a question for you too, about that wine." Xen pulled out his mental diagram of the manufacturing molecule. "Is this how it's done? It just occurred to me to wonder about it, and I haven't actually tried to analyze the wine, it just seemed . . . "

  His father was nodding. "That's how it's done. A von Neumann machine, they called the concept, after the guy that first thought of a machine that made exact copies of itself. You need to be careful that they can't keep working in the general environment, though. If you embed some molecules rarely found together except in your desired medium they won't turn the whole world into themselves, which would be rather inconvenient for the people living there." He pulled out a spell of his own. "See how it requires sulfur? And gets the power for the construction mainly from alcohol? And this shape limits the amount of the medium in contact, so below an alcohol level of about five percent the production rate drops dramatically. This shape here prevents it from disassembling proteins, so it doesn't eat people. And then these weakly bound alcohol molecules insure that in the end it eats itself."

  "Yeah. Now that's really tidy. I have only one question."

  "Oh?"

  "Did I beat Q in figuring this out?"

  They both laughed. "Well, yes, but does that count for another six years?"

  "Picky, picky. I'll run tell her about it immediately, and then I'll be perpetually the first."

  Jet herded the sheep after them as they walked home, bringing Xen up to date on their activities.

  "The Discordians and the Organtes are driving me crazy." His father sighed. "I really hate wars. Every time I turn around someone is praying to me, as if one man is going to make a difference. And they really get pissed when I choose the other side, or tell them both to leave me alone and kill themselves by themselves if they just really think they ought to."

  His mother nodded. "The Dark Lady story is spreading. I've found myself in a siege situation twice in the last six months."

  Xen stopped in dismay. "You're getting pulled around by the Collective, too?"

  "Yes. Both times I wound up catching thousands of bubbles and making safe shelters for people and livestock. I really don't know how else to respond."

  "You know how Q makes Gates using those cylinder shaped things?"

  "So they fall apart in four or five days?" Rustle eyed him thoughtfully. "I suppose I could let each town escape to their very own World, but to be frank, I've only managed to open a single Gate since the Comet, just to see if I still could. I should talk with Q . . . "

  "And Janic's Auralian experts. They might be able to tell you which towns are sympathetic or something, so you don't have to give each town a separate World."

  "Larger gene pool to grow from." Wolf opened a ordinary gate and they ushered all the sheep in.

  "You could donate your extra sheep." Xen grinned at her indignant look.

  "I needed to find the basis for the various colors. Now people have favorites, but they won't let me give them the whole sheep, they only want the fleece."

  "I should add my lambs to the herd. Their hair is a workable version of those optical fibers of Dad's."

  "Can't be worse than purple."

  "Q's purple sweaters are cute. But one was quite enough for me, thank-you-very-much."

  "Don't complain. She made yours a very masculine dark purple. Most of the rest of us got lavender and strange shades that just . . . don't flatter the wearer."

  Xen laughed, and they chatted through dinner, both his parents refraining from prying about his work. "You are both so polite. I'm just putzing around the office finishing up repo
rts on everything I've done for ages and ducked accounting for. It would be boring if it weren't so restful. Then Rufi came by and asked me to see what the problem with Hell was. Got to say that man's a bit scary when he's depressed."

  Wolf nodded. "Oh yeah, he's so mild now it's hard to remember what it used to be like when he was around. Spats turning into knife fights, murders and suicides, fatal accidents, rapes." He shook his head. "Please tell me he's not reverting."

  "He was in a funk over realizing that Trump was aging."

  "Oh. Oh bloody hell. Pardon the expression."

  "So I told him we had thirty years to work out how to fix the situation." Xen grinned. "Now I need to find some old critters to test this stuff on.

  "Huh. That may be a bit difficult."

  "Yeah, the chromosomes are different for hunting down the genes in the first place, and then the various gene complexes may differ between species. I suspect it'll keep me out of trouble for awhile."

  "Umm, think about the smart horses. They have the genes. I don't know about Hell's dogs."

  Xen nodded. "Lady Gisele showed me them in the horses. I'll check the dogs, and proceed slowly. If I kill Trump, I'm dead meat.

  His father was frowning. "Too, you said too. Are you getting pulled around by prayers?"

  "Four times so far. Some idiot agents praying to the God of Spies. Scared the crap out of me. And you wouldn't believe the clothes I showed up in. Black velvet with just enough optical fibers in it to confuse the eye."

  His parents both ignored the levity and looked worried. "Hey, at least I don't get pulled into wars."

  His father winced. "Sorry. I shouldn't have . . . "

  Xen snorted. "The alternative is to have never existed. I'll take this, or if I can't, I'll move to Rip World."

  His father nodded reluctantly. "I'd recommend you make your own clothes and a large batch of supplies, and have them in a bubble, ready to go. The Collective seems to be enthusiastic about some parts of it—the black velvet they may not budge on, but you can design it for all the contingencies you can think of, and add the weapons you want." He failed to suppress a smile. "So long as you have enough weapons to satisfy the collective's idea of The Spy."