by John Varley
Explore the Incredible Worlds
of John Varley …
“John Varley has had extraordinary success in giving readers the experience of living in the future.”
—Robert Silverberg, The Washington Post
The Gaean Trilogy
“A seething, monumental trilogy … Grand-scale entertainment—violent, witty, irreverent, tirelessly inventive … This’ll have readers guessing and gasping right up to the end.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Titan
“Big, brassy, and beautiful. I read the last page and muttered, ‘Wow.’”
—Michael Bishop
“Fast-paced and involving!”
—The Washington Post
Wizard
“An extraordinary feat of storytelling.”
—Fantasy Review
“Superb.”
—UPI
Demon
“Demon destroyed my preconceived ideas about science fiction … An epic climax.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Magnificent … I can’t tell you all the adventure and glory and horror and laughter and sheer joy there is in reading this book.”
—Fantasy Review
Discover the Other Works
of John Varley …
Steel Beach
“I’ve been saying for years that John Varley is the best writer in America. This book proves it.”
—Tom Clancy
Books by John Varley
The Ophiuchi Hotline
The Persistence of Vision
Picnic on Nearside
(formerly titled THE BARBIE MURDERS)
Millennium
Blue Champagne
Steel Beach
The Golden Globe
Red Thunder
Mammoth
Red Lightning
Rolling Thunder
Slow Apocalypse
The Gaean Trilogy
Titan
Wizard
Demon
The John Varley Reader: Thirty Years of Short Fiction
JOHN
VARLEY
DEMON
ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) * Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England * Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) * Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) * Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India * Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) * Penguin Books (South Africa), Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa * Penguin China, B7 Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
DEMON
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / June 1984
Berkley mass-market edition / November 1985
Ace mass-market edition / May 1987
Copyright © 1984 by John Varley.
Cover art by Colin Anderson / Getty Images.
Cover design by Annette Fiore.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ISBN: 978-1-101-62329-9
ACE
Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
This book is dedicated to:
Irving Thalberg,
for the conceit;
Vlad the Impaler,
for the concept;
and
Edward Teller,
for the context.
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 Trilogy
In which certain events described
in TITAN and WIZARD
come to their conclusions,
And containing an account of
The End of the World.
Table of Contents
Short Subjects
Coming Attractions
Newsreel
Musical Interlude
Episode Ten
Travelogue
First Feature
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Second Feature
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Third Feature
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Fade Out
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. Marybaker 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 def
ecated, 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.
