by John Varley
Jones lowered the pistol.
“There’s a couple of reasons,” she said. “As long as I’ve got a gun on you you’re a harmless fool. But you might get lucky, and there’s nothing I fear so much as a lucky fool. And if you’d done to me what I’ve just done to you, I’d come and I’d find you, no matter how long it took.”
“I won’t,” he said. “I swear it. I swear it.”
“Conal, there are maybe five humans whose word I trust. Why should you be number six?”
“Because I know I deserved what I got, and I’m eighteen years old and made a dumb mistake and I don’t ever, ever want you angry with me again. I’ll do anything. Anything. I’ll be your slave for the rest of my life. I’ll do anything you want me to do.” He stopped, and knew to the depths of his soul that what he had just said was the truth. He remembered how little good the truth had done him a few hours ago. There had to be some way of proving to her that he spoke the truth. At last, he had it. A solemn oath.
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” he said, and waited.
The bullet didn’t come. He opened his eyes, and saw Jones and the Titanide looking at each other. At last the Titanide shrugged, and nodded.
Musical Interlude
Not long after Conal’s arrival at Gaea, a ship named Xenophobe broke out of its circum-Saturn orbit and headed for Earth at maximum acceleration.
The Xenophobe’s departure had nothing to do with Conal. The ship and others like it had maintained orbit around Saturn for almost a century. The first one had been owned and operated by the United Nations. When that body died, ownership had passed to the Council of Europe, and later to other peace-keeping organizations.
None of the ships had ever been mentioned in any of the treaties and protocols signed between Gaea and various Earth nations and corporations. When Gaea had entered the U.N. as a full voting member, she had thought it the diplomatic thing to ignore their existence. The ships’ purpose was an open secret. Each had carried enough nuclear weapons to vaporize Gaea. Treaty or no treaty, Gaea—a single sentient being—massed more than all terrestrial life forms put together; it seemed wise to successive generations to have the capability of destroying her should she exhibit unforeseen powers.
“The truth is,” Gaea had once said to Cirocco, “I can’t do shit, but why tell them that?”
“And who would believe you?” Cirocco had responded. Cirocco thought Gaea was secretly pleased to rate so much attention, such an unprecedented show of unanimity from the historically fractious peoples of Planet Earth.
But with the war about to enter its second year, Xenophobe’s cargo could be put to better use at home instead of being squandered in space.
Gaea noted its departure.
A being in the shape of a 1,300-kilometer wagon wheel cannot be said to smile, in any human sense of the word. But somewhere in the pulsing scarlet line of light that served Gaea as a center of consciousness, she was smiling.
Half a dekarev later, the Pandemonium Traveling Film Festival began showing a double feature to packed houses: The Triumph of the Will, by Leni Riefenstahl, and Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, by Stanley Kubrick.
***
In Gaea, time was doled out by the rev.
One rev was the time it took Gaea to rotate once on her axis: sixty-one minutes, three and a fraction seconds. The rev was often called the “Gaean hour.” Metric prefixes were then used to describe any other length of time. The kilorev, called the Gaean Month, was forty-two days long.
Two kilorevs after Xenophobe left Saturn (to be shot down near the Moon’s orbit by the Commie Rats), the mercy flights began. It was the first time Gaea had revealed any unforeseen powers.
It had been known that Gaea was an individual, aged specimen of a genetically engineered species called Titan. She had five younger sisters in orbit around Uranus, and an immature daughter waiting to be born from the surface of Iapetus, a moon of Saturn. Rare interviews granted by Gaea’s Uranian sisters had established the Titan method of reproduction, the nature of Titan eggs, their method of promulgation and distribution.
It was also understood that Gaea, the senile Titan, had been known to employ manufactured beings that were not individuals with anything like free will, but rather extensions of herself in the same way that a finger or hand was an extension of a human’s existence. These were called “tools of Gaea.” For many years one of these tools had been presented to visitors as being Gaea herself. When Cirocco killed that particular tool, Gaea promptly manufactured another.
That tools and seeds could be combined came as no surprise to Cirocco. After ninety years of living with the insane God, little could surprise Cirocco.
The resulting organism was very much like a spaceship. Gaea released these sentient, steerable, immensely powerful seeds by the score as soon as she knew the Xenophobe was destroyed and nothing was likely to replace it. All of them shaped orbit for Earth. Of the first waves, ninety-five percent were destroyed before reaching the atmosphere. Year Two of the War was a nervous time; everyone was shooting first and not bothering to ask questions later.
But gradually the nature of the seeds was established. Each headed for a site of nuclear carnage, landed, and began shouting that salvation was at hand. The seeds spoke, played music calculated to lift the spirits of the broken creatures fleeing the holocaust, and promised medical care, fresh air, food, water, and unlimited vistas in the welcoming arms of Gaea.
The global nets picked up the story, dubbed the seeds “mercy flights.” At first, it was hazardous to board one, as many were shot down attempting to leave Earth. But few hesitated. These were people who had seen horrors that would make hell itself seem like a summer resort. Before long, the combatants ignored the flights of Gaea’s seeds. They had more important matters to consider, such as which million people to murder this week.
Each seed could carry about one hundred people. Frightful riots developed when the seeds landed. Children were often left behind as adults pushed beyond all civilized limits threw their children from them for the chance to board the seed.
No newsnet reported it, but the trip back to Saturn was miraculous. No injury was too severe to heal. The horrors of biological warfare were all cured. Everyone had plenty to eat and drink. Hope was reborn during the mercy flights.
***
Gaea’s interior was divided into twelve regions. Six were in permanent daylight, six in endless night. Between these regions were narrow bands of failing or rising light—depending on one’s direction of travel or state of mind—known as twilight zones.
The zone between Iapetus and Dione contained a large, irregular lake, surrounded by mountains, known as Moros. Moros means Doom or Destiny.
The coastline of Moros was irregular and precipitous. The southern part of it included scores of peninsulas, each defining a narrow, deep bay. The peninsulas were for the most part anonymous, but each bay had a name. There was the Bay of Fraud, the Bay of Incontinence, the Bay of Sorrow, the Bay of Equivocations, and Bays of Forgetfulness, Hunger, Disease, Combat, and Injustice. The list was long and depressing. The nomenclature, however, was logical, provided by early cartographers armed with lists from Greek mythology. All the bays were named after children of Nox (night), the mother of Moros. Moros was the eldest; Fraud, Incontinence, Sorrow, et al., the benighted younger sibs.
The easternmost of the line was known as Peppermint Bay. The reason for the name was simple: nobody wanted to live in a place called the Bay of Murder, so the Wizard changed it.
There was one settlement on the Bay: Bellinzona. It was a sprawling, noisy, dirty place. Half of it clung to the almost vertical stone of the eastern peninsula, and the rest extended onto the water on pontoon piers. The islands of Bellinzona were artificial, standing on piles, or harsh knuckles or rock standing straight out of the black waters.
The city Bellinzona most resembled was Hong Kong. It was a polyglot city of boats. The boats were tied to piers or other boats, sometimes twenty
or thirty deep. The boats were made of wood and came in every style humans had ever imagined: gondolas and junks, barges and dhows, smacks, wherries, and sampans.
Bellinzona was three years old when Rocky came to it, and already ancient with sin and decay, a giant felonious assault on the face of Peppermint Bay.
It was a human city, and the humans were as various as their boats, from every race and nation. There were no police, no fire department, no schools, courts, or taxes. There were plenty of guns, but there was no ammunition. Even so, the murder rate was astronomical.
Few of Gaea’s native races frequented the city. It was too wet for the sand wraiths and too smoky for the blimps. The Iron Masters of Phoebe maintained an enclave on one of the islands from which they bought human children to be used as incubators and first meals for their hatchling stages. From time to time a Submarine would come to feed on the city, biting off large chunks and swallowing them whole, but for the most part the Bellinzona sewage disposal system kept the sentient leviathans distant. Titanides came to trade but found the city depressing.
Most Bellinzonans agreed with the Titanides. There were those who found romance in the place—raw, husky, and vital, “Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage….” But unlike old Chicago Bellinzona was not hog butcher, tool maker, stacker of wheat. Food came from the lake, from manna, or from deep wells tapping Gaea’s milk. The main things the city produced were dark brown stains in the water and plumes of smoke in the air; some part of Bellinzona was always burning. In its damp byways one could buy stranglers’ nooses, poisons, and slaves. Human meat was sold openly in butchers’ stalls.
It was as if all the misery of the tortured Earth had been brought to this one place, distilled, concentrated, and left to rot.
Which is exactly as Gaea had planned it.
***
On the 97,761,615th rev of the twenty-seventh gigarev, Phase-Shifter (Double-Sharped Lydian Trio) Rock’n’Roll stepped from his longboat and onto the end of Pier Seventeen on the outskirts of Bellinzona.
Cirocco Jones had once said of the Titanide that “It just shows you how a system designed to simplify things can get out of hand.” What she meant was that any Titanide’s real name was a song that told a great deal about the Titanide but could not be transliterated into any human tongue. Since no human had ever learned to sing Titanide without Gaea’s help, it made sense for them to adopt names in English—the preferred human language in Gaea.
The system was useful—to a Titanide. The last name was that of his or her chord. Chords were like human clans, or associations, or extended families, or races. Few humans understood what the chords meant, though many could recognize the distinctive pelt each possessed, like Scottish tartans or school ties. The second, parenthetical name indicated which of twenty-nine ways had been employed to give birth to the Titanide, who could have from one to four parents. The first name celebrated the third important factor in any Titanide’s heritage: music. They all chose musical instruments as first names.
But the system had broken down with Phase-Shifter. The Wizard had decided his name was just too outrageous to use. She dubbed him Rocky, and the name had stuck. It was a triumphant ploy for Cirocco, who had been plagued by the nickname for over a century. Now, having given the name to the Titanide, she found no one ever called her Rocky, if only to avoid confusion.
Rocky the Titanide moored his boat to a piling, looked around him, then up at the sky. It might have been late evening. It had been like that in Moros for three million Earth years, and Rocky had not expected it to change. There were clouds falling from the Dione spoke, three hundred kilometers overhead, while to the west sunlight yellow as butter streamed through the arched roof over Hyperion.
He sniffed the air and immediately regretted it, but sniffed again, cautiously, searching for the spoiled-meat scent of a Priest or the worse odor of Zombie.
The city seemed somnolent. Existing in perpetual fading twilight, Bellinzona had no rush hours or dead times. People did things when the spirit moved them, or when they could no longer put them off. And yet there was a pulse to the activity. There were times when violence hovered in the air, ready to be born, and times when the lazy beast, sated, coiled itself and nestled into a nervous sleep.
He approached an old buck human roasting fish heads over a fire in a rusty bucket.
“Old man,” he said, in English. He tossed a small packet of cocaine, which the human snatched from the air, sniffed, and pocketed.
“Guard my boat until I return,” Rocky said, “and I will give you another like that one.”
Rocky turned and clattered down the dock on four adamantine hooves.
***
The Titanide was cautious, but not too worried. Humans had needed a long time to learn their lesson, but they had by now learned it well. When the ammunition ran out, Titanides had stopped being gentle.
They never had been, really, but they were realistic. There is no sense arguing with an armed human. For the better part of a century, most humans in Gaea had been armed. Now the bullets were gone and Rocky could walk the docks of Bellinzona with little fear.
He outweighed any five humans taken together, and was stronger than any ten. He was also at least twice as fast. If attacked by humans he was capable of kicking heads from bodies and pulling off limbs with his bare hands, and he would not hesitate to do so. If fifty of them ganged up on him, he could outrun them. And if nothing else worked, he had a loaded .38 revolver, more precious than gold, tucked into his belly pouch. But he intended to return the weapon, unused, to Captain Jones.
He was a formidable sight, trotting through the twilight city. He stood three meters high and seemed almost a meter wide. Centauroid in shape, he was an altogether smoother construction than the classical Greek model, and the details were all wrong. There was no join line between the human and equine parts of him. His whole body was smooth and hairless but for thick black cascades growing from his head and tail, and pubic hair between his front legs. His skin was pale lime green. He wore no clothing, but was festooned with jewelry and splashed with paint. Most startling of all to a human who had never seen a Titanide, he appeared to be female. It was an illusion: all Titanides had big, conical breasts, long eyelashes and wide, sensual mouths, and none grew beards. The top meter-and-a-half of him would instantly be identified as a woman in any culture on Earth. But sex in a Titanide was determined by the organs between the front legs. Rocky was a male who could bear children.
He moved down the narrow finger piers between the endless rows of boats, passing small groups of humans who gave him plenty of room. His wide nostrils flared. He smelled many things—roasting meat, human excrement, a distant Iron Master, fresh fish, human sweat—but never a Priest. Gradually he came to more traveled lanes, to the broad floating thoroughfares of Bellinzona. He clattered over bridges arched so high as to be nearly semi-circles. They were easy to negotiate in Gaea’s one-quarter gravity.
He stopped at an intersection just short of the Free Female Quarter. He looked around, aware of the squad of seven human Free Females stationed at the interdiction line and as unconcerned about them as they were about him. He could enter the Quarter if he wished; it was human males the guards were watching for.
There were few other humans about. The only one he noticed was a female Rocky judged to be about nineteen or twenty years old, though it was hard to tell the age of a human between puberty and menopause. She sat on a piling with her chin in her hands, wearing low-cut black slippers with blunt toes. They had ribbons that laced around her calves.
She looked up at him, and instantly he knew other humans would judge her insane. He also knew she was not violent. The madness did not bother him; it was, after all, only a human word. In fact, the combination of insanity and non-violence produced the humans Rocky most admired. Cirocco Jones, now there was a madwoman….
He smiled at her, and she cocked her head to one side.
She rose up on her toes. As her a
rms came up and out she was transformed. She began to dance.
Rocky knew her story. There were thousands like her: trash people, without a home, without friends, without anything. Even the beggars of Calcutta had owned pieces of sidewalk to sleep on, or so Rocky had heard. Calcutta was only a memory. Bellinzonans frequently had even less than that. Many no longer slept at all.
How old could she have been when the war came? Fifteen? Sixteen? She had survived it, had been picked up by Gaea’s scavengers, and had come here, stripped not only of her physical possessions and her culture and everyone who had ever mattered to her, but of her mind as well.
Still, she was wealthy. Someone, certainly long ago on the Earth, had taught her to dance. She still had the dance, and the ballet slippers. And she had her madness. It was worth something in Gaea. It was protection; bad things often happened to those who tormented the insane.
Rocky knew humans could not see the music of the world. The few humans around to witness, had they even noticed her dance, would not be hearing the sounds she created for him. To Rocky, the Titantown Philharmonic might be playing just behind her as she leaped and whirled. Gaea was wonderful for ballet. She hung in the air forever, and made walking on the tips of one’s toes seem the natural gait for humans—insofar as they could be said to have a natural gait. Human dancing was a source of giddy excitement to Rocky. That they could walk was a miracle, but to dance….
In complete silence she created La Sylphide there on that filthy pier, on the edge of humanity’s garbage bin.
She finished with a curtsy, then smiled at him. Rocky reached into his pouch and found another packet of cocaine, thinking it little enough payment for the smile alone. She took it and curtsied again. On impulse, he reached into his hair and pulled out a single white flower, one of many braided there. He held it out to her. This time the smile was sweeter than ever, and it made her cry.
“Grazie, padrone, mille grazie,” she said, and hurried away.
