by John Varley
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, vidscreen, 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 targeted 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 all—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 terrib
le 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 rosa 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 interior 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 de
ath.”
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.
