Gatefather (34 page)

“We were kind of hoping
you'd
tell us,” said Sin. “It's not like we have any money, except Laurette and, sort of, Hal. We can't
go
anywhere.”

“Unless,” said Wheeler.

“No!” the others shouted him down.

“We agreed not!” Laurette said.

“Failure to argue is not agreement,” said Wheeler.

“It's all right,” said Danny. “Transportation's not a problem. Where do you want to go?”

“Disney World,” said Xena.

“The Harry Potter place at Universal Studios,” said Sin.

“Wizarding World of Harry Potter,” said Xena.

“What about the rides? They cost money,” said Wheeler.

“We can't lay hands on enough money to pay for the rides?” asked Danny.

“Well, there's lots of it lying around inside banks,” said Wheeler, “which
some
people could get to easily.”

“Haven't we learned
anything
?” asked Pat.

“We've never even
tried
robbing banks,” said Wheeler.

“I meant about Danny,” said Pat. “About what kind of person Danny is. You keep projecting onto him your own childish fantasies about what you'd do if you had a cloak of invisibility or something.”

“Cloak of invisibility is nothing,” said Wheeler. “You still have to travel all that distance, and on foot, too.”

“Wildest childish, wildest childish…,” began Xena again.

“Shut up, Xena,” Laurette said sweetly. “I'm saving you from yourself.”

“I'm willing to get us to any place in the world,” said Danny. “But we can't go on rides without tickets. And they probably have some kind of serious ID system and my abilities don't extend to holographic forgery.”

“So, really,” said Hal, “you're pretty much useless after all.”

“It'll be winter in the Andes, so I don't suggest Machu Picchu,” said Danny. “The Alps?”

“I've seen pictures,” said Hal. “If we went in person, I'd just think, Oh, it looks very much like the pictures.”

“You taught Pat,” said Wheeler. “Why can't you teach
us
?”

“Because you
would
go inside the bank vaults,” said Hal.

“You don't trust us,” said Wheeler.

In a word, No, thought Danny. And apparently it showed on his face. Wheeler looked away in disgust.

“I can see you not trusting Wheeler,” said Laurette, “because he's, like, the human ambassador to the roaches.”

“He's a roach prince who just needs our social security numbers to help him receive his inheritance,” said Sin.

“Slug prince,” said Xena. “Nematode prince.”

“We introverta,” said Hal, “are quietly proud to count the nematoda among us.”

“Science puns,” said Laurette with a shudder.

“May I interrupt this punfest plus envython to point out something to Danny that he may not have noticed and that nobody else can see?” asked Pat.

“That sounds rude,” said Laurette. “Like rich people comparing their bank balances in front of homeless people.”

“Which they do all the time,” said Pat. “Danny, the free prets are clustering around all of them, but Wheeler's are the ones I was noticing. One or two would kind of divebomb his ka, and then he'd pop up with some bit of grossness or envy or, you know, a Wheelerism.”

Danny hadn't noticed, but as she spoke, he could see—or sense—the hovering clouds of undifferentiated prets, and saw many of them zip inward toward Wheeler's ka.

Wheeler whirled around and flared at Pat. “Oh, do I have some mark of
Cain
on me? Something that makes me an animal that doesn't understand English, that can't feel the
contempt
you have for me, Pat? You with your windmagery and your gate travel, you with the love of your life who happens to be a god panting along beside you, do you find a lonely guy like me disgusting? Ugly? Horrible?”

“You're inverting cause and effect,” said Laurette.

Danny held up a hand, watching how more of the prets moved in close to Wheeler's ka, which seemed to welcome them. They weren't even orbiting, they were practically attached to him.

It occurred to Danny that gates—or any kind of outself, really—consisted of prets that were bonded to somebody's ka. He knew that they came with human kas when they left Duat and were born on Earth. But these unattached prets—they weren't part of anything. Not part of atoms or molecules, not part of any person or animal.

“Sutahites,” whispered Pat.

Exactly, thought Danny. The prets that followed Set to Mittlegard when he was thrown out of Duat, permanently bodiless. Set had the ability to take possession of a human, to control his actions one way or another. But the other Sutahites were far weaker. More limited. They could only … suggest. Remind.

But if they were like gates that had no gatemage, could he gather them in the way that he had taken all of the Gate Thief's own gates and captive gates back last fall?

No. That gathering motion didn't work, because they weren't used to being part of anything. They didn't respond to any kind of law.

But that didn't mean Danny had to give up.

He could see Pat raising her hand to keep the others from speaking, from interrupting his concentration. And even though Wheeler was seething, Danny could see how he controlled himself and did
not
keep on acting out his anger and hurt. He just waited, as the Sutahites kept trying to entice him to act in a destructive way.

So Wheeler
did
have the power to resist them, when he had a stronger desire for something else. The desire to see what Danny was going to do.

What Danny did was
invite
the Sutahites to come to him. He was afraid that he might be repeating his mistake of inviting Set to come into him, but no. He wasn't asking them to
enter
him, to enter his body. He was asking them to attach themselves to his ka, as if they were becoming his gates.

But not his gates. He couldn't “make” them as gates because they didn't know how. They were lawless. They didn't know how to do anything except move to him, attach to him.

He could feel them coming. It wasn't hard to lure them away from Wheeler. None of them had a very strong will of its own. Danny's own ka was so strong, so … charismatic?… that they could hardly resist the invitation, if in fact any of them tried.

When they attached to him, he could sense them like a distant clamor of voices, like a crowd moving through a street on the other side of a large building. It wasn't words, really. They had learned how to trigger emotions, and Danny could feel them jostling him that way. Tiny pinpricks of envy, lust, greed, disgust, pride, resentment, ambition, even affection and humor. And the desire to hurt people. That was underlying almost all of them. Not rage, really. Just a desire to cause damage.

But it was all so very faint and weak. And Danny's own will overpowered them. They gave into him. Accepted his rule. Made him their king, became part of his domain.

And when the last of them was gone from Wheeler, he turned back around. “I was such a
jerk
, guys,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't tell me,” said Xena. “You didn't mean what you said.”

“Oh, I meant it,” said Wheeler, “because I really am a jerk. But … I knew better than to
say
it. Danny's my friend, man. I wouldn't say stuff like that to a friend, I don't know what I was thinking.”

“I do,” said Pat. “And I know why you're not thinking it now. Because Danny just took away the tiny
things
that were prompting you to say those things. To
feel
them.”

“Oh, get real,” said Hal. “Next thing you'll tell me is we really do have a tiny angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, like in cartoons.”

“We do,” said Pat, “except … no angel.”

The others looked to Danny for confirmation. “It's hard to explain it when you can't see it. Sense it. But yes, Pat saw it and I didn't till she pointed it out. That creature I had inside me, when I wasn't acting like me—”

“Set,” said Laurette and Xena together. “The Belmage,” said Sin at the same time.

“When he was expelled from Duat and came to Earth without a human body, there were millions that came with him. Also without bodies. Smaller than microscopic. More like geometric points. But they joined in Set's cause, which was to make human beings as miserable as possible, to make us destroy each other.”

“So the devil made me do it,” said Wheeler, halfway between scorn and hope.

“Not
made
you,” said Danny. “They would if they could, but no, they can only sort of
trigger
you. Remind you of something you already felt or thought. Every angry word you said to me was something you truly thought of. But it wasn't
all
you thought about me. Just the parts that might destroy our friendship.”

“Why would they care if I had you as a friend?” asked Wheeler.

“Any bonds between people—they're real, even if they're insubstantial. We bind ourselves to each other in friendship, in families. And the Sutahites want us all to act in ways that tear that down.”

Xena blushed. “So when we tried to, like, seduce you—”

“When we threw ourselves at you like discount whores,” said Sin.

“Clearance-table harlots,” said Laurette.

“Sutahites were working on us?” asked Xena.

“I don't know,” said Danny. “I couldn't see the prets then. But I think, probably so.”

“Do we have them now?” asked Laurette.

“When you guys were competing to find the most disgustingly clever way to describe your own behavior,” said Pat, “each time you had a couple or three sort of divebomb your ka, your inself.”

“Great,” said Sin. “So whenever I'm clever, it's really the devil that's clever and I'm just his puppet.”

“No,” said Danny. “You're never a puppet. They can't
make
you say or do anything. You have no strings to pull. I mean, when you're hungry and you pass the bakery department at Walmart—”

“Nothing there makes me hungry,” said Sin.

“Liar,” said Xena.

“Is your sudden rush of hunger
forcing
you to stop and pick up something to eat?” asked Danny. “You
can
just walk by, and when you're broke, that's exactly what you do. Your brain doesn't switch off, you can still choose.”

“So Wheeler was responsible for every mean thing he said?” Xena asked.

“Just as you're responsible for
that
mean thing,” said Pat. “But Danny just gathered up the ones that were hovering around Wheeler.”

“So if I say something nasty now, it just came from me,” said Wheeler.

“Or from habit,” said Danny. “Look, I don't understand this yet, we just saw something and I
tried
something.”

“But I'm clean,” said Wheeler. “I got none of them anymore?”

“No,” said Pat. “Already you've picked up some new ones. Maybe they were strays, maybe they came from somebody else.”

“So … my pure-thoughts phase was, like, ninety seconds long,” said Wheeler.

“Your thoughts were never pure,” said Pat. “You still had your full dosage of testosterone.”

“He's only got half a dose,” said Hal. “I thought you all knew that.”

“Not true,” said Wheeler, “but funny.”

“You mean they didn't know?” asked Hal.

“When you say something mean to a friend,” said Pat, “you can pretend you're joking, but you thought of it, you had the mean idea, and then you chose to say it. Laughing doesn't erase that. Not your laughter and not Wheeler's.”

“Can you take them away from all of us?” asked Laurette. “Because you have no idea how many bitchy things I've thought of to say in the last three minutes.”

“And I'm just dying to say, ‘You mean besides the ones you
did
say?'” said Sin.

“Very busy Sutahites,” said Pat.

“I don't know that it does any good to take them,” said Danny. “More come anyway. I think there are probably millions. Billions maybe. I don't know if I can gather them all. I sort of hear them, they do to me whatever they were doing to you. Probably not as strongly, maybe because they don't know me as well as they got to know you. I'm just saying … it won't necessarily do you any long-term good.”

“Because they can't become a part of you,” said Pat, “people can't take these Sutahites with them when they pass through a gate. Or a Great Gate. They get stripped away and left behind. I think what the Gate Thief fears about Great Gates is that Set will get through, and if
he
gets through, he can bring all the Sutahites with him, and the people of Westil have never had to deal with them. They really might become slaves.”

“Not that they haven't been perfectly capable of coming up with horrors and evils on their own,” said Danny.

“Seriously,” said Hal. “We're supposed to believe that our heads are surrounded by a cloud of gnats that tell us to do bad things.”

“Let's see,” said Laurette. “We've seen people disappear in one place and appear in another. Injuries healed in an instant. Kids flying up a mile above Buena Vista and coming back down not dead. A girl we've known half our lives suddenly being able to whip up dust devils and tornados. But you're right—clouds of tiny creatures around our heads is
way
too much to swallow.”

“It just feels so childish,” said Hal.

“Shut up,” said Sin. “Not you, Hal, Xena. She was about to start that stupid ‘wildest childish' tongue twister again.”