Robert Asprin & E. Friesner - E-Godz

E.Godz

Robert Asprin and and Esther Friesner

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this

book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is

purely coincidental.

thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-3605-9

Cover art by Gary Ruddell

First printing, May 2003

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Asprin, Robert.

E. Godz / by Robert Asprin & Esther Friesner.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-7434-3605-9 (hc)

1. Family-owned business enterprises—Fiction. 2. Inheritance and

succession—Fiction.

3. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 4. Wizards—Fiction. I. Friesner,

Esther M. II. Title.

PS3551.S6E155 2003

813'.54—dc21

2003041677

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

Also by Robert Asprin

The Time Scout series with Linda Evans

Time Scout

Wagers of Sin

Ripping Time

The House That Jack Built

For King and Country (with Linda Evans)

License Invoked (with Jody Lynn Nye)

Also by Esther Friesner

Editor, Chicks in Chainmail series

Chicks in Chainmail

Did You Say Chicks?!

Chicks and Chained Males

The Chick is in the Mail

Chapter One

On a lovely spring morning in the hyperborean wilderness of Poughkeepsie, New

York, Edwina Godz decided that she had better die. She did not make that decision

lightly, but in exactly the manner that such a (literally) life-altering choice should, ought,

and must be made. That is to say, after a nice cup of tea.

It wasn't as if she was about to kill herself. Just die.

She reached the aforementioned decision almost by accident, while pondering the

sorry state of her domestic situation and seeking a cure for the combination of headache,

tummy trouble, and spiritual upheaval she always experienced every time she thought

about her family. Under similar circumstances, most women would head right for the

medicine cabinet, but Edwina Godz was a firm believer in the healing power of herbs.

Better living through chemistry was all very well and good, yet when it came down to

cases that involved the aches, pains, and collywobbles of day-to-day living, you couldn't

beat natural remedies with a stick.

Especially if the stick in question was a willow branch. Surprising how few people

realized that good old reliable aspirin was derived from willow bark.

Edwina realized this, all right. In fact, she was a walking encyclopedia of herbal

therapy lore. It was partly a hobby, partly a survival mechanism. You didn't get to be the

head of a multicultural conglomerate like E. Godz, Inc. without making a few very . . .

creative enemies. When you grew your own medicines, you didn't have to worry about

the FDA falling down on the job when it came to safeguarding the purity of whatever

remedy the ailment of the moment demanded. Perhaps it was a holdover from her chosen

self-reliant life-style all the way back in the dinosaur days of the '60s, but Edwina Godz

was willing to live by the wisdom that if you wanted to live life to the fullest, without the

pesky interference of the Man, you should definitely grow your own.

No question about it, Edwina had grown her own, and it didn't stop at herbs for all

occasions. However, at the moment, herbs were the subject under consideration.

Specifically: which one to take to fix Edwina's present malaise? It wasn't going to be

an easy choice, not by a long shot. Peppermint tea was good for an upset tummy, though

ginger was better, but valerian was calming and chamomile was the ticket if you were

having trouble getting to sleep. Then again, green tea was rich in antioxidants, which

were simply unsurpassed when it came to maintaining one's overall health, and ginseng

was a marvelous source of all sorts of energy, while gingko biloba—

Edwina sighed and stared at the multicolored array of boxes in the little closet sacred

to her tea things. It was built into the wall beside the fireplace in her office, though

"office" wasn't quite the right word to describe the room Edwina used for transacting

most of her business. "Office" conjured up visions of sleek, sterile twenty-first century

furnishings, pricey pieces with surfaces made of wood, stainless steel, brushed aluminum,

and name-brand plastics, garnished with a liberal sprinkling of high-tech trappings.

While Edwina did command enough bells-and-whistles machinery to satisfy even the

nerdiest of technogeeks, she chose not to show them off. Discretion was her watchword,

in both her personal life and her business dealings. It was enough for her to rejoice

privately in the fact that she owned a very special kind of fax machine (to put it mildly);

she didn't need to put it out on a marble pedestal so that visitors might ooh and ah over it

in green-eyed envy.

Like so much else in her life—from technotoys to tea—the fax machine was tucked

away, out of sight but never out of mind, in one of the many hidey-holes that riddled her

office: either behind the dark wood paneling that flanked the fireplace, the faux-Oriental

papered walls, or within one of the many unique items of furniture so tastefully taking up

floor space. Let others more insecure than she flaunt their desktops, laptops, and

palmtops: Edwina Godz's office looked like nothing more than the plush, snug, and

inviting parlor of a Victorian mansion.

Which it was.

None of which self-congratulatory knowledge did a thing to help her in the matter of

deciding which herbal tea to take right now.

If she brewed herself a cup of comfort incorporating every last one of the herbal

essences she needed to cure everything that ailed her, there wouldn't be any room left in

the teapot for the boiling water. She shrugged and closed the tea-closet door, and instead

ambled over to the other side of the fireplace where the liquor cabinet reposed. Gingko

biloba was all very well and good when you were confronting the ordinary headaches of

day-to-day life, but when it came to dealing with one's children there was no substitute

for single malt scotch.

Grain was an herb, when you got down to it, and so was malt, she told herself. As for

the peat that was involved somewhere in the manufacturing process of a decent single

malt, well, you couldn't get any more back-to-Mother-Earth than that unless you got

down on all fours and sucked topsoil. Edwina was still rationalizing in top form as she

downed the first shot and poured the second, all while standing in front of the liquor

cabinet with a grim expression on her face that would have stopped a charging

wildebeest.

Not that there were many wildebeest running loose in the greater Poughkeepsie area

(unless you went by appearances alone, in which case some of the individuals to be found

roaming the vast bureaucratic savannahs of nearby Vassar College might be considered

as—ah, but that was strictly a matter of personal opinion). Edwina Godz's palatial home

stood in splendid semi-isolation on the banks of the mighty Hudson River with a

breathtaking view of some of the loveliest countryside on the whole Eastern Seaboard.

Her back yard was refuge to vast nations of squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, opossums,

deer, and the occasional fox. A fabulous assortment of birds also called Edwina's estate

home, but the only winged wildlife that made it through the great oak and Tiffany-

stained-glass front doors was the dusty bottle of Wild Turkey shoved into the rear right

corner of the liquor cabinet.

Edwina polished off the second shot and considered taking a third. She was not a hard

drinker, as a rule, but there were some situations that drove her to it and kept the motor

running.

"Bah," said Edwina, gazing at the empty shot glass in her hand. "Who's to be master

here?" She knew the answer to that one well enough, and slammed down the glass to

prove it. Shoulders squared, she closed the liquor cabinet, returned to the tea things, and

brewed herself up a steaming pot full of the ginseng-ginger blend. The present situation

had given her a bellyache that screamed for ginger, but it would take the energizing

powers of ginseng to give her the mental and physical oomph she'd need to deal with the

cause of it all.

The causes. Plural.

Edwina settled herself on the sofa, sipped her tea, and stared stonily at the framed

family photograph on the small marble-topped table at her elbow. Of all her attempts to

evoke the American ideal of domestic harmony, this photo was the best and only thing

she had to show for her efforts.

"Smiling," she said, regarding the three faces in the picture. "We were all smiling. I

know that I meant it, but how on earth did I ever manage to persuade Peez and Dov to do

it? Was it bribery or just good old-fashioned threats?"

She set down her teacup and picked up the framed photo for closer study. It had been

taken some ten years ago, maybe a little farther back than that, certainly long before Dov

and Peez had left the nest to pursue their own fortunes.

"And mine," Edwina muttered.

Her children had gone through the usual period of adolescent rebellion, loudly

declaring that no one understood them and that they would show Edwina how things

ought to be done as soon as they were out of the house and running their lives their way.

They didn't need her to tell them what to do, or to do anything for them. By heaven, they

didn't need anybody, if it came to that! Just let them hit the legal age of adulthood and

then, look out! They'd make their own marks in the world, and they'd do it widescreen,

big time, and Broadway style.

So what had happened when that day of dear-won independence finally dawned?

They went to work in the family business. Dov manned the Miami office, Peez held

down the fort in New York City, and both of them still looked to Edwina to handle all the

really big management decisions for E. Godz, Inc. Not since they'd nursed at Edwina's

ample bosom had her two children been so dependent on her for their daily sustenance.

She called the shots and they hastened to implement every word of her orders. They

trusted her business sense implicitly, and so far, that trust had paid off for all concerned.

Edwina couldn't have asked for more attentive corporate lieutenants, to say nothing of

more biddable children, even if solely in this aspect of their lives together. It was all so

very sweet, so drenched in the heady musk of family traditions, solidarity, and mutual

support that they might as well have belonged to the Mafia.

"Ha!" Edwina remarked to the air. "At least a Mafia family knows enough to fight its

real enemies."

As embittered as she felt at the moment, she couldn't help but smile when she

regarded the image of herself in the family photo. It was, of course, the likeness of a

much younger Edwina Godz, made back in the days before all of her hair had gone from

a rich auburn to a sparkling silver-gray. There were plenty of white streaks lacing the

younger Edwina's tawny mane, but the effect was both charming and attractive.

"You had it then, woman, and you've still got it now," Edwina told herself

complacently. She looked up from the photo in her hands to a trio of larger pictures

hanging on the wall just above the parlor fireplace. The one in the middle was the largest

of the three: an old-fashioned, sepia-toned example of turn-of-the-century photographic

art. A walrus-mustached man in what was clearly a very uncomfortable suit stood behind

a seated lady with her hair done up in the fashion popularized by the Gibson Girl. She

wore a high-necked lace dress with a small cameo brooch at her throat and she held a

large bouquet of orange blossoms on her lap. She wasn't a beauty, by common cultural

standards, but despite her wedding-day air of socially acceptable unease she still

managed to project confidence and self-possession that was somehow . . . sexy.

There was an unmistakable resemblance between Edwina and the woman in the sepia

picture. "I'll bet if you'd been the one who came through Ellis Island instead of him"—her

eyes flicked to the walrus-moustached gentleman in the photo—"you'd never have stood

for it when the Customs officer got your name wrong. What's so hard about spelling

'Goetz' anyway? You'd have made him change it back in short order, and no arguments

about it! On the other hand, I suppose I ought to be grateful that Grandpapa was such a

don't-make-waves wuss about how the Customs man changed his family name. Having a

name like 'Godz' is so much more effective in this business, from a marketing

standpoint."

Edwina gazed fondly at this relic of her ancestors' wedding day. Marriage was such a

quaint, dated concept. Still, some of the attendant trappings were alluring—on a purely

aesthetic level—even for a product of the '60s like Edwina, who had come of age in the

full flowering of the Sexual Revolution. She then let her eyes drift from the big photo

above the mantelpiece to the pair of smaller ones flanking it. They too were framed with

gold-leafed wood, but color photos and streamlined, minimalist frames alike spoke of

more modern provenance than the sepia centerpiece.

The resemblance between Edwina and the people in the two companion photos was

even more pronounced. The man in the photo on the left had supplied most of the genetic

input evident in Edwina's appearance, while the woman in the photo on the right had

provided a good deal of much-appreciated editorial tweaking. Thus the keen, gung-ho go-

getter looks of Edwina's father were nicely softened by her mother's influence, leaving

their daughter looking less like a hawk and more like a lamb. For this, Edwina was

thankful.

"Not that I'm not deeply grateful to you, Daddy," Edwina told the photo. "After all,

looks aren't everything. Especially at the bank."

You know it, kiddo, the photograph seemed to reply, and Edwina liked to believe she

could see the long-gone yet still beloved twinkle in her father's eye when he said that.

It was the same sort of twinkle that had lit up his face when he was about to make a

fresh "kill" in his ongoing role as a highly paid, extremely effective corporate lawyer.

Litigation was his lifeblood, but investment savvy was his vocation. He took his income

and sank it into a portfolio that fairly gushed profits. His dream had been to make enough

money to buy one of the smaller Hawaiian islands and set himself up as an independently

wealthy writer of science fiction, his first true love.

Alas, the dream was not to be. (And a good thing, too. Edwina had found some of her

father's old notebooks with ideas for his Great American Sci-Fi novel. Nothing good

could come of a book that began "Captain Studs Poleworthy arose from the bed of the

sated Bazinga slave-girl, dabbed lime-flavored eroto-gel from his magnificent chest, and

said, 'Sorry to come and go, my dear, but the starfields beckon.' ") While visiting Hawaii

to scope out potential real estate buys, both of Edwina's parents had died in a tragic

accident. They were touring a poi factory when one of the holding tanks broke and they

drowned in the glutinous flood.

Their untimely deaths came just at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, when their

daughter was first beginning to scent the cultural changes in the air, to hear the distant

beat of a different drum, and to inhale . . . her destiny. An only child with no living close

relatives, Edwina had mourned the loss of her small family—for family had always been

important to her—but then had dealt with her grief in what seemed to be the best

available manner, at the time. Having been rendered an orphan, she performed a series of

reverse adoptions, for want of a better way to describe matters. Independently wealthy,

thanks to her late father's savvy for high finance, and just plain independent on account of

the Great Poi Flood of '64, Edwina Godz set out to replace the family she had lost by

making herself a part of every ragtag tribe, clan, commune or gaggle of rock band

groupies that took her fancy.

Now, settled into comfortable middle age, a rich and respectable businesswoman,

Edwina looked back over her wild, freewheeling youth without so much as a blush. And

why should she be embarrassed to recall her counterculture odyssey and the many lovers

she'd enjoyed en route to Enlightenment? She'd hurt no one by her amorous escapades,

and even in the pre-AIDS era she'd had the foresight to take certain precautions that had

preserved the robust health of her girlhood from pesky STDs.

Besides, it was thanks to the Summer of Love—which had somehow slipped into the

Autumn of Eros and the Winter of Whoopee—that Edwina had obtained not only her

darling children, but a method of earning more money than her dear, departed Daddy had

ever imagined, even had he lived long enough to invest in Microsoft.

Her darling children . . .

Edwina turned her back on the family portraits above the fireplace and returned her

full attention to the framed photograph in her hands. She shook her head sadly. The

smiles frozen in the instant of a camera's shutter click meant nothing. A photograph was a

moment's illusion artificially preserved. The reality of the situation concerning her

precious offspring had nothing at all to do with smiles.

"Why can't the two of you just get along?" she inquired peevishly of the glossy faces.

"I'm not asking you to adore one another. I'm not even asking you to remember each

other's birthdays. All I want is just one itsy-bitsy little indication that you can work

together. And I don't mean simultaneously plotting each other's professional destruction.

Good gods, I hope it would be limited to professional destruction only, but the way you

two have been going for each other's throats lately, who knows? A little cooperation for

your mutual benefit, to say nothing of cooperation for the benefit of the company: Is that

so much to ask?"

Something behind one of the parlor walls went *ding!* This was followed by the

sound rather like a passel of cats scratching madly in their litterboxes, but when Edwina

went to the wall whence issued these noises and touched the spring catch that opened the

desired panel, she revealed their true source, a flock of fountain pens rapidly scribbling

away as if guided by unseen hands. There were twelve of them in all, though only two of

them were working at the moment, transcribing a telephone conversation between Dov

Godz and his older sister, Peez. Each one of the dozen pens was linked by suitably arcane

spells to a piece of office equipment—be it telephone, fax machine, or any item of

computer wizardry from desktop to day planner—in either the Miami or New York City

offices of E. Godz, Inc.

Which was to say that the items themselves—all gifts from Edwina to her offspring—

were enspelled eavesdropping devices, clandestine portals that permitted her to keep

constant, magically enabled tabs on the children's every move.

Wouldn't it be silly to own and run America's only family-operated clearinghouse for

magical power and not put some of that power to work spying on your kids?

For that, in a nutshell, was E. Godz, Inc.'s stock-in-trade: magic.

It was not a career path that Edwina had consciously sought out, at first. Rather, it

was a by-product of all those years back in the '60s that she'd spent crisscrossing the

country in flower-splashed vans, salvaged schoolbuses, or, in a pinch, VW Bugs painted

to look like Peter Max's worst nightmare. Like so many of her hippie brethren, Edwina

discovered that life on the nation's back roads and byways led a person to consider

whether there were also spiritual roads-less-traveled that might bear exploration. The

faith of her forebears wasn't a good fit for her new lifestyle: Peyote and Presbyterians

didn't mix worth a damn.

She was not alone in this quest for new ways of getting in touch with her mystic side.

The '60s were famous for having driven hordes of young people out of their families'

churches and into the arms of the "earthy" religions out there. Chanting mantras was in,

catechisms were out, and the incessant beating of drums was much more desirable than

any silly old Bach mass for organ. It was part of the whole tribal-is-cooler/ethnic-is-in

package. And in some cases it was a pretty good excuse to get high, in the name of

seeking the One True Path, though heaven help anyone uncool enough to mention that

the end-justifies-the-means trip had its roots in the writings of Saint Jerome.

It was here that Edwina's One True Path took a sharp right off the spiritual interstate

and left the rest of her contemporaries far behind. Whereas they only nosed around the

borderline belief systems, she jumped in feet first, with eyes and mind wide open. While

her tribemates picked up this or that back-to-the-Earth faith, only to put it down again

when the glitter of the new toy wore off (or when it failed to piss off their parents

sufficiently), Edwina actually spent serious study time on every non-suburbia-standard

religion she encountered.

And when Moonbeam Suntoucher (née Greta Bradford-Smythe) announced that she

was a shaman because she had bought a genuine dreamcatcher and a boatload of dried

sage, or when Frodo Freelove (Mr. and Mrs. Kaplan's firstborn son, Sammy) insisted he'd

achieved samsara because the check he'd written out to the Happy Times Ashram and

Salad Bar had finally cleared, Edwina calmly went about the business of improving her

grasp on the true powers that underlie the more Gaia-centric beliefs, if you sought them

out with enough application and sincerity.

Either that or she just got lucky. But whatever the case, the fact remained that Edwina

Godz came away from all of her spiritual quests with a command of magic and

something more: the realization that the people who were following the many separate

paths of some really Old Time Religions didn't have the business sense of bread mold.

It was sad. There they sat—be they tribe or coven or council or conglomeration of

congregants—able to raise the might of the great earth-powers but helpless to do more

than take it in the unmentionables every year when Income Tax Day rolled around.

Edwina had fixed all that. Edwina was good at fixing things. Perhaps it was her

personal muse at work, perhaps it was thanks to her father's legal-eagle spirit, raised

during one of the many assorted ceremonies in which Edwina had participated over the

years, perhaps it was simply out-of-the-blue inspiration, but whatever the source, the

result was the same: Edwina Godz saw a way to help both the old earth-religion

followers, by whatever name they chose to call themselves, and herself. Retracing the

steps of her spiritual journey, she approached them one by one with her modest proposal:

that she show them the ropes of fund-raising, the benefits of obtaining tax-exempt status

as registered, organized religions, and the basics of bookkeeping to safeguard their

continued economic health.

Could she help it if the best, most efficient way for them to do this was by her

founding her own corporation and taking all of them on board as her subsidiaries? Was

she to blame if they were so grateful to lay hold of the advantages she offered that they

never uttered so much as a whisper of objection when she collected a nice, fat piece of

the action in exchange for services rendered? Did anyone protest when she used the

magic powers she'd mastered during her years of Searching to help run E. Godz, Inc. so

smoothly?

Of course not. There was more than enough butter to go around so that everyone's

bread was fully covered. The boat wasn't rocking, nothing was broken, and all was roses.

Except for a couple of thorns named Dov and Peez. In a perfect world, Edwina's

children would have appreciated the goldmine that their mother had created for them.

Instead they seemed to spend their free time trying to give each other the shaft. Didn't

they understand that if their bickering over personal differences got out of control it could

adversely affect E. Godz, Inc.? And then where would they be? Were they even fit for

any other sort of employment?

That annoying *ding!* sounded again, signaling the end of a transmission. The pair

of pens softly laid themselves down, their jobs done. Still clutching the family photo in

her left hand, Edwina reached in with her right to remove the sheets bearing the

transcribed conversation. It was a miracle that the papers didn't spontaneously combust in

her hand, given the level of volcanic vituperation zipping back and forth between the

siblings. As with every intercepted communication Edwina had ever seen, Dov and Peez

each managed to let the other know that:

A. He/she did not like her/him.

B. He/she did not trust her/him.

Robert Asprin & E. Friesner - E-Godz

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