John Varley - Gaea 3 - Demon

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Gaea 3 -- Demon -- John Varley -- (????)

(Version 2003.02.16)

PROPHECY

In the year 2024 the most important single thing which the cinema will

have helped to accomplish will be that of eliminating from the face of the

civilized world all armed conflict. With the use of the universal language of

motion pictures the true meaning of the brotherhood of man will have been

established throughout the Earth...All men are created equal.

-D. W. Griffith, 1924 (Director of "The Birth of a Nation," adapted from

the novel The Klansmen)

Music will always be the voice of the silent drama. There will never be

speaking pictures.

-D. W. Griffith, 1924

All right, D. W., take three...

DEMON

Being the Third Book in The Gaean TrilogyIn which certain events

described in TITAN and WIZARD come to their conclusions,And containing an

account of The End of the World.

SHORT SUBJECTS

Stupidity got us into this mess-why can't it get us out?

-Will Rogers

COMING ATTRACTIONS

The location scout was the first into the valley.

Like most of Gaea's genetically tailored beings, the scout did not have

a sex. It had no mouth and no organs of digestion. What it did have was a pair

of cinemascope eyes and a magnificent spatial sense.

The scout clattered over the valley on spindly rotors, hovered, and

turned slowly. It saw a rushing river beneath twenty-meter cliffs. Above the

cliffs was a plateau of sufficient size, and ringing the plateau were trees

more than sufficient for the needs of the approaching Crew. It felt warm

contentment, like a kitten who has found a bowl of milk. This was the place.

It flew over the trees, spraying them with an attractant pheromone. That

done, it made several passes over the plateau, dropping spores. It settled at

the edge of the plateau, already beginning to feel tired. Its rotor withered

and fell away. Walking on long, feathery legs, it circled the location,

stopping every hundred paces to poke a seed into the ground with a long sharp

organ growing from its belly.

With the last of its strength it made its way into the woods and died.

In twenty revs the plateau was covered with bushes a meter high. Spaced

around the location were klieg trees, already twenty meters high and getting

bigger at the rate of two meters per rev.

Forty-five revs after the death of the scout the advance party of

carpenters, teamsters, and vintners arrived. Carpenters were hairless animals

the size of grizzly bears, all alike except for their teeth, which were wildly

specialized. Some had beaver incisors, capable of gnawing down a tree with a

few dozen bites. Others had a single projecting tooth two meters long, notched

on one edge, which could saw beams and planks from raw timber. There were

carpenters with trapezoidal teeth. These could bite the end of a plank in

tenons, ready for dovetailing. Others had drill-bit teeth. Twisting their

heads vigorously, they could ream out a mortise.

In Gaea, a team of forty carpenters was called a union.

All the carpenters had quite human hands, except that each finger ended

in a nail shaped for a different utility. The palms of the hands were as

different as human fingerprints. Some were hard and horny, some were deeply

grooved or pebbled, while others were smooth as a jeweler's rubbing cloth.

With these hands the carpenters could plane and sand wood to a wondrous

luster. The distance from the end of the thumb to the end of the little finger

of each carpenter was exactly the same: fifty centimeters.

In a few revs, the platforms, soundstages, archives building, and scores

of chapels had begun to take shape.

The vintners were one-purpose creatures. All they did was move onto the

location and devour clusters of small white grapes. The plants that bore the

fruit were not grapevines, but the fruit were, for all practical purposes,

grapes. The vintners ate them all, then fell into a torpor from which they

would never emerge. But in thirty revs they could be tapped for an excellent

white chablis.

The teamsters were something else again. In a place where a union of

carpenters was well within the norm, the teamsters stood out as weird.

Teamsters looked something like hippos, but were five times the size of

elephants. They were land whales mincing along on six legs just thick enough

to support them in Gaea's low gravity. Three of them arrived at the valley and

started eating the plants that had grown from the scout's spores.

There were many kinds of plants. Each variety went to a different

stomach. The teamsters had eleven separate sets of digestive organs.

When the field was cleared, the teamsters moved to the side and fell

over, somnolent as the vintners. Their legs withered until the animals were

little more than bulging bladders lined with row upon row of nipples in a

bewildering variety of shapes and colors. But the teamsters retained their

mouths for a little longer. They would eat the union of carpenters when

construction was done.

Gaea's operations were always tidy.

Things started to really pop when the production crew began trickling

in.

There were hordes of skittering little bolexes, brainlessly pointing

themselves in all directions and whirring fruitlessly, too stupid to know they

needed re-loading. They spotted the teamsters and began fighting for a teat

like piglets after a weary sow. Their excited cries sounded like meet meet!

meet!

Close behind them were the arriflexes, accompanied by producers, and

behind them were the lordly panaflexes, each with its attendant

executiveproducer. The production species hung back with nothing to do while

their photofaunal symbiotes gorged on silver nitrate, pyroxylin, and other

chemicals, each going to its proper holding bladder. All the producers looked

much the same, except for their size. The execs were the largest and the only

ones with a voice. From time to time, for reasons having nothing to do with

communication, one of them would grunt unch, unch.

As the bolies, arries, and panas chowed down, others of the Crew

filtered into the site, dodging carpenters, who were putting the finishing

touches on their work with Swiss Army fingernails. There was a gaggle of

twenty-meter booms, stalking through the chaos like solemn storks. Groups of

grips and bestboys quickly broke up, guiding others to their work sites.

Painters sucked stains and dyes from the teamsters, then spread them over the

bare wood with their long perforated tails. Elephants arrived, pulling

rumbling carts full of costumes, props, carpets, make-up, and portable

dressing rooms. These were real Earth elephants, bred from imported stock. In

Gaea's gravity, elephants did not lumber; they pranced, supple and frisky as

cats.

Pandemonium was taking shape.

Humanoids, androids, homunculi, and a few genuine human beings made

their penultimate entrances, signaling it would not be long before the

appearance of the Director Herself.

Some of these human-based and human-derived hybrids were workers, others

mere extras. Some were the shambling undead, from which even the brainless

constructs seemed to recoil. A very few were stars. Luther swept in with fire

in his demented eyes and took his apostles straight to their spare chapel.

Brigham and his boys rode in on horses to find the Temple not yet ready for

them. There were recriminations, and conniption fits. Mary Baker was there,

and so was Elron. It was rumored that Billy Sunday was in the neighborhood,

and perhaps even Kali. It was going to be quite a festival.

As each bolex, arriflex, and panaflex finished eating, the appropriate

producer attached itself and the two moved off as one. Like the producers, the

photofauns were enough alike that one could serve as model for all, except in

size. The most important thing about a panaflex was the size of its single,

glassy eye, and the width of its horizontal anus, which was precisely seventy

millimeters.

A panaflex had only one urge: getting the shot. It would do anything to

get the shot-take a ride on a copter, dangle from a boom, go over a waterfall

in a barrel. Its unblinking eye ogled everything, and when it was ready, it

shot film. Somewhere in its innards guncotton and camphor and other unlikely

substances came together under considerable pressure to form a continuous

strip of celluloid. That strip was coated with photoreactive chemicals to

produce a full-color negative. The strip moved behind the panaflex's eye and

was exposed in discrete frames by a muscle-and-bone pull-down and shutter

mechanism Edison would have recognized.

The producer rode on the back of the panaflex, facing the rear, ready

for the emerging film, which it ate. Naturally, this required a close contact

to prevent fogging by ambient light. It didn't faze the producer, who was

always hungry for film. By eating it, the producer also developed and fixed

it.

When they in turn defecated, the product was projector-ready footage,

which was why Gaea called them producers.

It was sixty revs after the preliminary scout first discovered the site

and found it good. The flacks and hypes were returning from their forays into

the woods, laden with game. These were ape-like creatures: two of the few

predatory species Gaea had ever produced. Gaea was not good at predators. A

hype would have fared poorly in an African jungle. But in Gaea, most of the

fauna were not good at flight, either, simply because they had no predators.

The principal source of meat, the smilers, did not have to be stalked-they

didn't run-or even killed. Meat could be harvested from them in long strips,

doing no harm to the smiler. Many a smiler steak was sizzling in the

commissary building as the first great feast was prepared and laid out on long

trestle tables with immaculate white cloths and big crystal jugs of chablis. A

breathless quiet fell over the site as all awaited the arrival of Gaea. It was

broken only by the excited meet, meet, meeeet of the bolexes as they jostled

each other for position.

The ground began to tremble. She came through the woods. There was a

reverent gasp from the assembled Priests as her head came into view over the

treetops.

Gaea was fifteen meters tall. Or, as she preferred to have it, "fifty

foot two, eyes of blue."

They were blue, too, though they couldn't be seen behind the largest

pair of sunglasses ever constructed. Her hair was platinum blonde. She wore

enough heavy canvas, dyed light blue, to rig a Spanish galleon. The cloth was

cut and sewn by tentmakers into a knee-length dress. She wore moccasins the

size of broad-beamed canoes. In face and figure, she bore an uncanny

resemblance to Marilyn Monroe.

She paused when she reached the clearing and looked over all her

subjects and all their works. At last she nodded: it was good. The lights on

the klieg trees turned to face her and the massive lips parted in a smile,

revealing even white teeth big as bathroom tiles. All around her, bolexes and

arriflexes whirred admiration.

A chair had been built for her. It groaned as she settled into it. All

her movements seemed slow. A blink took almost a second. The panaflexes had

learned the trick of undercranking so that she seemed to move at normal speed

while her minions scampered like mice.

Dressers scrambled up ladders behind her, armed with rakes for her hair,

buckets of nail polish, cans of mascara. She ignored them; it was their job to

anticipate her movements-something they were not always able to do. She looked

at the big screen that had been erected facing her chair.

The Pandemonium Traveling Film Festival was about to begin. The klieg

trees dimmed, turned off; the valley darkened. Gaea cleared her throat-a sound

like a diesel engine-but when she spoke, it was pitched in the feminine range.

Very loud, but feminine.

"Roll it," she said.

NEWSREEL

It was common knowledge that World War V started in a defective twenty-

cent Molecular Circuit Matrix in a newly-installed firecontrol computer four

miles below Cheyenne Mountain, Wyoming.

An investigation eventually led to the apartment of Jacob Smith, thirty-

eight, of 3400 Temple, Salt Lake City. Smith had tested the MCM and allowed it

to be installed in Western Bioelectric's Mark XX "Archangel" Brain Array. The

Archangel had then replaced the aging Mark Nineteen in defense of the New

Reformed Latter-Day Saints Territories, commonly known as the "Norman Lands."

The story was as apocryphal as that of Mrs. O'Leary's cow. But it was

leaked to an eager young reporter for one of the global newsnets, where it

eventually became the lead item in the nightly special: "World War V: Day

Three." On Day Five Jake Smith was again in the news as a lynch mob dragged

him from police headquarters and hung him from a lamp post in Temple Square,

not thirty yards from the statue of another famous Smith, no relation.

By Day Sixteen the news anchors were trotting out historians who spent

their time debating whether the current unpleasantness should be called World

War III, IV, V, the Fourth Nuclear War, or the First Interplanetary War.

There were reasons to support the interplanetary designation, since in

the early days some Lunar and Martian settlements had sided with one or

another of the Terran factions, and even a few La Grange colonies began

tiptoeing toward a foreign policy. But by the time Jake Smith was hung all the

Outlanders had declared neutrality.

In the end, the decision was made in an office on Sixth Avenue, New York

City, Eastern Capitalist Confederation, by a network logo design analyst. The

overnight Arbitrons on the numeral V were strongly positive. The V looked sexy

and might stand for Victory, so World War V it was.

The next day, Sixth Avenue was vaporized.

The global networks recovered. By Day Twenty-nine all were embroiled in

the question: Is This IT? By "it," they meant the Holocaust, the Four

Horsemen, the Final War, the Extinction of Mankind. It was a tough question.

Nobody wanted to commit too strongly either way, remembering the egg on the

faces of so many who cried doom at the outbreak of the Fizzle War. But all the

nets promised to be the first with the news.

That it had resulted from a malfunction surprised no one. The strike by

the Norman Territories against the Burmese Empire was obviously an error.

Neither combatant had any grievances against the other. But shortly after the

failure of the MCM in Wyoming, the Burmese had plenty of reason for anger.

The Moroni VI satellite, in near-Earth orbit, made its move somewhere

over Tibet, mirved fifty miles above Singapore, and began evasive action. All

six warheads strewed decoys in their wakes, and were preceded by twenty

similar but harmless mirvs intended to soak up the ABM's and lasers. The

Burmese computer barely got a glimpse of the onrushing horde. It decided the

Moroni VI was going for ground-bursts at a minimum of twelve targets. About

the time it reached that decision, the ten-megaton warheads exploded thirty

miles over the province of New South Wales. The resulting burst of gamma

radiation produced an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, that blew out every

telephone, vid-screen, transformer, and electric sheep-shearer from Woomera to

Sydney, and caused the sewage system in Melbourne to run backward.

The Burmese Potentate was a headstrong man. His advisors pointed out

that the EMP tactic should have been followed by invasion if Salt Lake City

really intended to go to war. But he had been in Melbourne at the time of the

attack. He was not amused.

In two hours, Provo, Utah was radioactive rubble, and the Bonneville

Fun-city vanished.

It was not enough. The Potentate had never been able to distinguish one

Occidental religion from another, so he fired a missile at Milano, The Vatican

States, for good measure.

The Council of Popes convened in St. Peter's. Not the old one, which had

been torn down to make way for an apartment block, but the new one, in Sicily,

which was glass and plastic. For five days they conferred until the Spokespope

emerged to announce the Papal Bull as a Gabriel warhead fell toward Bangkok.

What Pope Elaine did not announce was another sense-of-the-meeting

resolution that had been summed up by vice-Pope Watanabe.

"If we're going to hit the B.E.," Watanabe had said, "why not

'accidentally' send one to those fuckers in the B.C.R.?"

So shortly after Bangkok was flattened by a one-megaton airburst, a

second Gabriel fell on the outskirts of Potchefstroom, Boer Communist

Republic. That it had been targetted for Johannesburg hardly seemed to matter.

So WWV, as it soon came to be abbreviated, lurched along in a back-and-

forth exchange with everyone waiting for one nation or another to launch that

all-out strike which, at county fairs, carnivals, and fireworks displays, is

known as the blow-off. It would come as a solid wave of missiles aimed at

hardened military sites, population centers, and natural resources, and would

be accompanied by plagues and deadly chemicals. At the time the war started,

there were fifty-eight nations, religions, political parties, or other

affinity groups capable of unleashing such an attack.

Instead, the bombs kept dropping at the rate of about one every week. At

first it looked like a free-for-all. But in three months alliances stabilized

along surprisingly classical lines. The newsnets began calling one side the

Capitalist Pigs and the other the Commie Rats. The Normans and the Burmese,

oddly enough, ended up on the same side, while the Vatican was on the other.

There were more vermin-the newscasters had names for them al-who would

occasionally step up and kick a giant in the shin. But by and large the war

soon came to resemble one of those contests Russians used to be so fond of

during the First Atomic War. Aslosh with vodka, they would take turns slapping

each other's face until one of them fell down.

The record for such a contest was established in 1931 and never beaten,

when two comrades went at each other for thirty hours.

At the rate of one five-megaton bomb per week-just about one kiloton per

minute-the Earth's nuclear stockpiles were estimated to be good for eight

hundred years.

Conal "The Sting" Ray was a Capitalist Pig. Like his mates, he spent

little time thinking about it, but when he did, he thought of himself as

Canadian Bacon.

As a citizen of the Dominion of Canada, the oldest nation on Earth,

Conal was in no danger of being drafted, and in less danger than most of being

vaporized. For one thing, no nation was seriously engaged in raising armies.

War was no longer labor-intensive. And only one bomb had been dropped on the

Dominion. It had hit Edmonton, and the main reason Conal noticed it was

because the Oilers no longer showed up for their Canadian Hockey League dates.

That Canada had once been a much larger nation was a fact no one had

ever imparted to Conal-or if someone had, he had not been interested enough to

remember it. Canada had survived by surrendering. Quebec had been the first to

go, followed by British Columbia. B.C. was part of the Norman Lands, Ontario

was an independent nation, the Maritimes had been swallowed up by the E.C.C.

to the south, and most of southern Manitoba and Saskatchewan were owned by

General Protein, the Corporation State. Canada huddled between the western

shores of Hudson Bay and the foothills of the Rockies. Yellowknife was its

capital city. Conal lived in a suburb of Fort Reliance, a town called

Artillery Lake. Fort Reliance had a population of five million.

Conal had grown up with two passions: hockey, and listening to comic

books. He was terrible at hockey, being simply too fat and too slow. He was

usually the last to be chosen in pick-up games. When he played, he was always

installed at the goal, on the theory that though he wasn't quick, it would be

hard to shoot around him.

On his fourteenth birthday a bully kicked snow in his face and Conal

found a new passion: bodybuilding. To his surprise and everyone else's, he was

damn good at it. By the time he was sixteen he could have been Mr. Canada. In

true Charles Atlas fashion, he sought out the bully and forced him through a

hole in the ice covering Artillery Lake, after which the bully was never seen

again.

The name Conal meant "high and mighty" in Celtic. Conal began to feel

his mother had named him well, though he was only five foot eight. And there

was something in Mrs. Ray's heritage that, when he learned of it, provided

Conal with his fourth great passion in life.

So it was that on his eighteenth birthday, Day 294 of the War, Conal

took the morning sleigh to the spaceport at Cape Churchill, where he boarded a

ship bound for Gaea.

Aside from a trip to Winnipeg, Conal had never in his life been outside

Canada. This trip was considerably longer: Gaea was almost a billion miles

from Artillery Lake. The fare was expensive, but George Ray, Conal's father,

no longer dared thwart his son's desires. The boy had done nothing but eat,

play hockey, and lift weights for three years; it would be nice to have him

out from underfoot. A billion miles sounded about right.

Saturn impressed the hell out of Conal. The rings looked solid enough to

skate on. He watched the ship dock with the huge black mass of Gaea, then dug

out his oldest comic book, "The Golden Blades." It was the story of a young

boy who received a pair of magic skates from an evil sorcerer and how he

learned to use them. In the end the boy-who was also named Conal-mastered the

skates and cleaved the wizard's head with a mighty kick. Conal fingered the

soundlines bordering the final panel, heard the familiar meaty thunk as the

skate opened the wizard's skull, watched the blood gush and the foul brains

glisten on the page.

Conal doubted he could kill the Wizard with his skates, though he had

brought them. In his mind, he saw himself wringing the life from her with his

bare hands. In a more practical vein, he had also brought a pistol.

His quarry was Cirocco Jones, formerly Captain of the Deep Space Vessel

Ringmaster, erstwhile Wing Commander of the Angels, sub rasa Hindmother of the

Titanides, the one-time Great and Powerful but long-deposed Wizard of Gaea,

now called Demon. He planned to stuff her through a hole in the ice.

It took Conal a month to find Cirocco Jones. In part it was because the

Demon was not eager to be found, though she was not running from anything in

particular at the moment. The other reason it took so long was that Conal,

like so many before him, had underestimated Gaea. He had known the World/God

was large, but he had not translated the numbers into a picture of just how

much territory he had to deal with.

He knew that Jones was usually found in the company of Titanides, and

that Titanides usually stayed in the region known as Hyperion, so he

concentrated his search there. His month of searching gave him time to become

accustomed to the one-quarter gravity inside Gaea, and the dizzying vistas

Gaea's mammoth ulterior presented. He learned that no Titanide would tell a

human anything about the "Captain," as they now called Jones.

Titanides were a lot bigger than he had expected. The centaur-like

creatures had played prominent roles in many of his comics, but the artists

had used considerable license in portraying them. He had expected to see eye

to eye with them, whereas the truth was they averaged three meters. In comics,

Titanides were male and female, though one never saw any sexual organs. In

reality, Titanides all looked female and their sexuality was impossible to

comprehend. They had either male or female organs-completely human in

appearance-between their front legs, and male and female organs behind. The

anterior male organ was usually sheathed; the first time Conal saw one he had

a feeling of inadequacy he had not experienced since his first week with the

barbells.

He found her in a place called La Gata Encantada. It was a Titanide pub

near the trunk of the largest tree Conal had ever seen. The tree was, in fact,

the largest in the solar system, and beneath it and in its branches was the

largest Titanide city in Gaea, called Titantown.

She was sitting at a table in a corner, her back to the wall. There were

five Titanides seated with her. They were playing an elaborate game with dice

and wondrously carved chessmen. Each player had a gallon-sized mug of dark

beer. The one beside Cirocco Jones was untouched.

She looked small, slouched in her chair among the Titanides, but she was

actually just over six feet. Her clothing was black, including a hat that

resembled the one Zorro wore in one of Conal's favorite comics. It left most

of her face in shadow, but the nose was too grand to hide. There was a thin

cigar clenched in her teeth and a blue-steel .38 tucked into the waistband of

her pants. Her skin was light brown, and her hair long and streaked with

silver.

He stepped up to the table and faced her. He was unafraid; he had been

looking forward to this.

"You're not a wizard, Jones," he said. "You're a witch."

For a moment he thought he had not been heard over the clatter and roar

in the pub. Jones did not move. Yet somehow the tension of his blazing aura

moved out and electrified the air. The noise gradually died away. All the

Titanides turned to look at him.

Cirocco Jones slowly lifted her head. Conal realized she had been

looking at him for some time-in fact, since before he approached the table.

She had the hardest eyes he had ever seen, and the saddest. They were deep-

set, clear, and dark as coal. She looked at him, unblinking, from his face to

his bare arms to the long-barreled Colt in the holster on his hip, his hand

opening and closing a few inches from it.

She took the cigar from her mouth and showed him her teeth in a

carnivorous grin.

"And who the hell are you?" she asked.

"I'm the Sting," Conal said. "And I've come to kill you."

"Do you want us to take him, Captain?" one of the Titanides at the table

asked. Cirocco waved her hand at him.

"No, no. This appears to be an affair of honor," she said.

"That's exactly right," Conal said. He knew his voice tended to get high

and squeaky when he raised it, so he paused a moment to slow his breathing.

She wasn't going to let these animals do her dirty work for her. It seemed she

might make a worthy opponent after all.

"When you came here, hundreds of years ago, you-"

"Eighty-eight," she said.

"What?"

"I came here eighty-eight years ago. Not hundreds."

Conal refused to be distracted.

"You remember someone who came here with you? A man called Eugene

Springfield?"

"I remember him very well."

"Did you know he was married? Did you know he left a wife and two

children back on Earth?"

"Yes. I knew that."

Conal took a deep breath, and stood straight.

"Well, he was my great-great grandfather."

"Bullshit."

"It is not bullshit. I'm his grandson, and I've come here to avenge his

murder."

"Mister...I don't doubt you've done a lot of crazy things in your life,

but if you did that, it would be the craziest thing you ever did."

"I came billions of miles to find you, and now it's just between you and

me."

He reached for his belt buckle. Cirocco jerked almost imperceptibly.

Conal never saw it; he was too busy unbuckling his belt and throwing it and

his gun to the floor. He had liked wearing that gun. He had worn it since his

arrival, as soon as he saw how many other humans went armed; he thought it a

pleasant change from the Dominion's stuffy firearms laws.

"There," he said. "I know you're hundreds of years old and I know you

can fight dirty. Well, I'm ready to take you. Let's step outside and settle

this honorably. A fight to the death."

Cirocco shook her head slowly.

"Son, you don't get to be a hundred and twenty-three years old by doing

everything honorably." She looked over his shoulder and nodded.

The Titanide behind him brought the empty beer mug down on the top of

his head. The thick glass shattered, and Conal slumped to the floor into a

pile of orange Titanide droppings.

Cirocco got up, tucking her second gun back into the top of her boot.

"Let's see just what sort of dirty trick he really is."

There was a Titanide healer present; she examined the bloody scalp wound

and announced the man would probably live. Another Titanide pulled the pack

from Conal's back and started going through it. Cirocco stood over him

smoking.

"What's in it?" she asked.

"Let's see...beef jerky, a box of shells for that cannon, a pair of

skates...and about thirty comic books."

Cirocco's laugh was music to the Titanides because they heard it so

seldom. They all laughed with her as she passed the comics around.

Soon the place was buzzing with tinny balloonchip voices and sound

effects.

"Deal me out, folks," she told the people at her table.

Conal woke with the worst headache he had ever imagined. He was being

bounced around, so he opened his eyes to see what was causing it.

He found himself suspended head down over a two-mile drop.

Screaming hurt his head badly, but he was unable to stop. It was a high-

pitched, child's scream, almost inaudible. Then he was vomiting, and nearly

choked on it.

He was bound in so much rope he might have been wrapped by a spider. The

only part of his body with any freedom was his neck, and it hurt to move that,

but he did, looking wildly around.

He was strapped to the back of a Titanide with his head on the monster's

huge hindquarters. The Titanide was somehow climbing a vertical rock face.

When he leaned his head all the way back he could see the thing's rear hooves

scrabbling on ledges two inches wide. He watched in horrified fascination as

one ledge broke away and a shower of stones fell up and up and up until he

lost sight of them.

"The bastard threw up on my tail," the Titanide said.

"Yeah?" came another voice, which he recognized as Cirocco Jones's.

So the Demon was somewhere near his feet.

He thought he would go mad. He screamed, he pleaded with them, but they

said nothing. It was impossible that the thing could climb such a slope by

itself, and yet it was doing it with both Conal and Cirocco on its back, and

doing it about as fast as Conal could have walked on level ground.

Just what sort of animal was this Titanide?

They brought him to a cavern midway up the cliff. It was just a hole in

the rock, ten feet high and about as wide, forty feet deep. There was no path

of any kind leading to it.

He was dumped, still in his cocoon of rope. Cirocco wrestled him into a

sitting position.

"In a little while, you're going to answer some questions," she said.

"I'll tell you anything."

"You're damn right you will." She grinned at him again, then hit him

across the face with the barrel of his own gun. He was about to protest when

she hit him again.

Cirocco had to hit him four times before she was sure he was out. She

would have hit him with the gun butt, except that would have pointed the

barrel at her, and she hadn't lived to be one hundred and twenty-three by

doing stupid things like that.

"He shouldn't have called me a witch," she said.

"Don't look at me," Hornpipe said. "I would have killed him back at La

Gata."

"Yeah." She sat back on her heels and let her shoulders sag. "You know,

sometimes I wonder what's so great about reaching one hundred twenty-four."

The Titanide said nothing. He was loosening Conal's bonds and stripping

him. He had been with the Wizard for many years, and knew her moods.

The back of the cavern was ice. On a hot day like this one, a trickle of

water flowed over the rock floor. Cirocco knelt beside a pool. She splashed

water on her face, then took a drink. It was icy cold.

Cirocco had spent many nights here when things got uncomfortable down at

the rim. There was a stack of blankets as well as several bales of straw.

There were two wooden pails: one for use as a latrine, and the other to catch

drinking water. A hammock was suspended between two pitons driven into the

rock. An old tin washboard provided the only other amenity. When she had to

stay for a long time, Cirocco would string a clothesline across the mouth of

the cavern to catch the dry updrafts.

"Hey, we missed one," Hornpipe said.

"One what?"

The Titanide tossed her a comic book which had been stuffed into Conal's

back pocket. She caught it, and watched the Titanide work for a moment.

There was a heavy stake embedded in the floor of the cave. The naked

bodybuilder had been tied to it, sitting down, and his ankles fastened to

stakes about three feet apart. It was a totally defenseless posture. Hornpipe

was tying Conal's head to the post by wrapping a wide leather strap around his

forehead.

The man's face was a wreck. It was crusted with dried blood. His nose

was broken, and his cheekbones, but Cirocco thought his jaw was okay. His

mouth was swollen and his eyes were tiny slits.

She sighed, and looked at the crumpled comic book. The cover said "The

Wizard of Gaea," and showed her old ship, the Ringmaster, in its death throes.

Even after this long she hated to look at it.

It was a dedicated book, in that all the characters were named and could

not be changed by the purchaser. Most of Conal's books had provision to punch

in one's own name for the hero.

The characters were familiar. There were Cirocco Jones, and Gene, and

Bill, and Calvin, and the Polo Sisters, and Hornpipe the Younger, and

Meistersinger.

And, of course, someone else.

Cirocco closed the book and swallowed to get rid of the heat at the back

of her throat. Then she sprawled in the hammock and started to go through it.

"Are you really going to read that thing?" Hornpipe asked.

"You can't read it. There are no words." Cirocco had never actually seen

a book like "The Wizard of Gaea," but she understood the principle. The colors

glowed, or strobed, or glistened and felt wet to the touch. Buried in the ink

were microscopic balloonchips. When you touched a panel the characters in it

delivered their lines. Sound effects had replaced the old printed tzings, ker-

pows, braka-braka's and screeches.

The dialogue was even worse than Conal's in La Gata, so she simply

looked at the pictures. The story was easy enough to follow.

It was even accurate, in its broad outlines.

She saw her ship approaching Saturn. There was the discovery of Gaea, a

thirteen-hundred-kilometer black wheel in orbit. Her ship was destroyed, and

all the crew emerged inside after a period of weird dreams. They took a ride

on a blimp, built a boat and sailed down the river Ophion, met the Titanides.

Cirocco was mysteriously able to sing the Titanide language. The group got

embroiled in the war with the Angels.

The characters screwed a lot more than she remembered. There were very

steamy scenes between Cirocco and Gaby Plauget, and more between Ckocco and

Gene Springfield. The last was an utter fabrication, and the first was out of

sequence.

Everyone was armed to the teeth. They carried more weapons than a

battalion of mercenaries. All the men bulged with muscles, worse than Conal

Ray, and all the women had tits the size of watermelons that kept bursting

free of the skimpy leather hammocks supporting them. They encountered monsters

Cirocco had never heard of, and left behind nothing but bloody gobbets of

flesh.

Then it got interesting.

She saw Gaby, Gene, and herself climbing one of the huge cables that led

to the hub of Gaea, six hundred kilometers above. The three of them made camp,

and the shenanigans started. It appeared to be a love triangle, with Cirocco

involved with both her companions. She and Gaby plotted by the campfire,

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Gaea3--Demon--JohnVarley--(????)(Version2003.02.16)PROPHECYIntheyear2024themostimportantsinglethingwhichthecinemawillhavehelpedtoaccomplishwillbethatofeliminatingfromthefaceofthecivilizedworldallarmedconflict.Withtheuseoftheuniversallanguageofmotionpicturesthetruemeaningofthebrotherhoodofmanwillhave...

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John Varley - Gaea 3 - Demon

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