that could ensue from the Great Mother's anger, perhaps her off-the-cuff filibustering would take up so much time that those pests on the line from Chicago would get tired of waiting for her to answer and would hang up.

One by one she uncurled her fingers, reckoning up the sum of divine displeasure: "Floods, droughts, crop blights, cattle murrain, slowed download times, failure of the cacao crop, plagues of feral hamsters, skyrocketing movie ticket prices—"

She could have gone on for a much longer time, ticking off all the ways that the Great Mother had on tap to let mortals know that they'd pissed Her off, but Wilma cut in with the last item on the list.

"—zits," Wilma said in a no-nonsense tone of voice that let Peez know that further disaster-listing was unnecessary and would be punished to the full extent of a secretary's considerable powers. "I know about all the rest and I can handle them just fine, but I'm not going to risk zits. Not this weekend. I've got a date."

"You've ... got ... a ... what?"

A little while later, after she had sent Wilma off to do some filing and had dealt with the call from Chicago (more whining about the whole human sacrifice squabble, which somehow had managed to slip out of committee and turn into a full-blown flamewar on the Net), Peez leaned back in her butter-soft leather desk chair with built-in footrest, CD player, aromatherapy dispenser, heating and massage capabilities, and wished she were dead.

"Brilliant," she told the ceiling. "I am just so brilliant. If I were any more brilliant, I'd be a black hole. What was I thinking?"

"You were thinking that Wilma Pilut, the girl voted Most Likely to Date Mount Rushmore, has romantic plans for this weekend and you don't."

The voice that responded to Peez's self-deprecating declaration was a little too thin and a lot too sweet to be anything human. The sweetness, however, was all inherent in