E. Godz Read Free Page A

when Moonbeam Suntoucher (nee 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.
    C. He/she knew how to run the family business far better than her/him.
    D. If there were any justice in the universe, the day would come when
he/she would have the power to push her/him the hell out of her/his cushy,
undeserved position and