by John Varley
“Harsh words from a guy whose last name is Rock’n’Roll.”
Rocky had finished the fifth hole now. He started another.
“Not at all. I merely do not wish to deify a corpse, as some scholars do. Baroque music is still alive so long as there are those who play and enjoy it. In that sense, rock and roll lives, too. But the possibilities of baroque were depleted hundreds of years ago. The same with rock.”
“When did it die?”
“There’s some debate. Many say 1970, when McCartney sued the Beatles. Others put it as late as 1976. Some prefer 1964, for various reasons.”
“What do you prefer?”
“Between ’64 and ’70. Closer to ’64.”
He now had a series of eight holes drilled. He began using a saw to cut between them. He worked in silence, and for a while Cirocco had nothing to say. There was just the sound of the bone saw and, outside, the quiet lapping of the water against the side of the boat.
“I’ve read critics who speak highly of Elton John,” Cirocco said.
Rocky just snorted.
“What about a rock revival in the 80s?”
“Rubbish. Are you going to mention disco next?”
“No, I won’t mention it.”
“Good. You wouldn’t want my fingers to slip.”
Cirocco screamed.
Rocky’s hand almost slipped on the rotary saw. He had never heard such agony in a human voice. The scream was still rising in pitch and volume, and Rocky wanted to die. What had he done? How could he be causing so much pain to his Captain?
She would have ripped the skin from her face but for Valiha’s strong arms. As it was, every muscle in Cirocco’s body stood out like cables. She fought, the scream dying for lack of air. Its very silence was more painful to Rocky’s ears. She began to bite her tongue; Serpent moved in and jammed a piece of wood between her teeth, but it was only in one side. The tension was uneven. Rocky heard her jawbone crack.
Then it was over. Cirocco’s eyes opened, and moved cautiously back and forth, as if looking for something about to spring on her. The stick of wood was bitten nearly in two.
“What was that?” she said, slurring the words. Rocky gently felt her jaw, found the fracture, and decided to fix it later.
“I was hoping you’d tell me.” He leaned over to let Serpent mop the sweat from his face.
“It was…like all the headaches in the world, all at once.” She looked puzzled. “But I can hardly remember it. Like it’s not there, or never was there.”
“I guess you can be thankful for that. Do you want me to go on?”
“What do you mean? We can’t stop now.”
Rocky looked down at his hand, which had stopped shaking. He wondered why he’d ever studied human anatomy. If he hadn’t been so damn curious someone else could have been handling this.
“It just seemed like a warning,” was all he would say. Though he had told no one, he actually had a pretty good idea what he would find under Cirocco’s skull.
“Open it up,” Cirocco said, and let her eyes close again.
Rocky did as he was told. He finished his last cut, and lifted the section of bone away. Beneath was the dura mater, just as Gray’s had said it would be. He could see the outlines of the cerebrum beneath the membrane. In the middle, in the great longitudinal fissure between the two frontal lobes, there was a swelling that should not have been there. Cruciform, inverted, like some unholy devil’s mark…
The mark of the Demon, Rocky thought.
As he watched, the swelling moved.
He cut around it, lifted the membranes from the gray matter beneath, and looked down at a nightmare. The nightmare looked back, blinking.
It was pale white, translucent, except for its head. It looked like a tiny snake but it had two arms which ended in miniscule clawed hands. Its body nestled into the longitudinal fissure, and it had a tail that descended between the hemispheres.
Rocky saw all that in the first few seconds; what he kept coming back to was the thing’s face. It had outsize, mobile, troglodyte eyes set in the face of a lizard. But the mouth moved; it had lips, and Rocky could see a tongue.
“Put that back!” the thing shrieked. It started to burrow between the lobes of Cirocco’s brain.
“Tweezers,” Rocky said, and they were slapped into his palm. He grabbed the demon by the neck and pulled it out. But its tail was longer than he had thought, and still was lodged firmly in the fissure.
“The light! The light!” the creature was piping; Rocky had it by the neck, so he squeezed harder and the thing began to gurgle.
“You’re choking me!” it squealed.
Nothing would have pleased Rocky more than to twist its vile head off, but he was afraid what that might do to Cirocco. He called for another tool, and used it to gingerly separate the halves of the brain. He could see, down deep, that the monster’s tail was embedded in the corpus callosum.
“Mother,” Cirocco said, in an odd voice. She began to cry.
What to do, what to do? Rocky didn’t know, but he did know one thing: he could not close her head until the creature was removed.
“Scissors,” he said. When he had them, he inserted them between the halves of the brain, down as far as he could go, until he had the tip of the demon’s tail between the blades. He hesitated.
“No, no, no—” the. thing screamed when it saw what he was doing.
Rocky cut.
The thing screamed bloody hell, but Cirocco did not move. Rocky held his breath for a long time, let it out, then looked again. He could see the severed end of the tail down there. It writhed, then came free from its mooring, the nature of which Rocky did not know. But it was loose, anyway, and Rocky almost reached for it with the tweezers, then remembered his prisoner—who had turned quite blue. He handed it to Serpent, who popped the squalling obscenity into a jar and sealed the lid. Rocky removed the severed bit of tail.
“Captain, can you hear me?” he said.
“Gaby,” Cirocco murmured. Then she opened her eyes. “Yes. I can hear you. I saw you get it.”
“You did?”
“I did. I’m not sure how. And it’s gone. It’s all gone. I know.”
“Gaea will not be happy this day,” Valiha sang. “We have her spy.” She held up the jar. Inside it, the creature writhed, sucking on the end of its amputated tail.
“Sorry about that,” Conal said, as he sat beside Rocky. He looked at Cirocco a bit queasily, but he was in control. “That looks normal, doesn’t it, Rocky? Didn’t you find anything?”
Valiha held up the jar. Conal looked.
“Somebody help him,” Rocky said. “It’s time to close up.”
***
Eleven revs after Rocky had sewn Cirocco’s head back together, the Pandemonium Theater began another double feature: Rock Around the Clock, with Bill Haley and the Comets, and Donovan’s Brain.
As usual, no one knew why Gaea had selected these particular movies from her vast library, but many people attending noticed she did not seem happy. She hardly watched the screen. She fidgeted and brooded. She got so agitated that at one point she accidentally stepped on two panaflexes and a human, killing all three.
The corpses were quickly eaten by Priests.
Episode Ten
No one dreamed the war could last for seven years, but it did.
Like any war, it had its ups and downs. There was one five-month period when no bombs fell and some dared hope it was over. Then Dallas was hit, and the exchanges were renewed. Four times huge flights of missiles arced from one area of the globe to another—massive “Sunday Punches” designed to end the conflict once and for all. None of them did so. Combatants fell by the wayside when they reached the point where no one survived capable of directing the attack. But a hard core of about two dozen nations were dug in so securely they could well be fighting for two centuries.
Fully seventy percent of the weapons malfunctioned in one way or another. “Dud” bombs fell in hundreds
of cities, spewing plutonium, notifying the residents that another bomb would soon follow. Editorials were written deploring the greed of munitions makers who had cut corners on government contracts, thinking no one would ever know the bombs were defective. Company presidents were lynched; lynching became a world-wide mania, something to take one’s mind off the war. Generals were skinned alive, diplomats drawn and quartered, premiers boiled in oil, but nothing seemed to help. The ones who mattered were in bunkers five miles deep.
There were peace efforts. The usual ending to a conference was the vaporization of the host city. Geneva took a beating, and so did Helsinki, and Djakarta, and Sapporo, and Juneau. Eventually, negotiators were shot on sight if they tried to enter a city.
After seven years the war no longer appeared on the evening news. All public news-gathering operations had been destroyed. All satellite time was used for encoded military messages, and no one had a television to receive a broadcast, anyway. About a hundredth of the Earth’s nuclear arsenal had been expended, and another twentieth destroyed before it could be used. There was still a lot left.
There were not many people, though.
It had been three years since a crop of any consequence had been brought in. Those few who survived on the surface scrounged for canned food, hunted, and ate each other. But there was little game left, animal or human.
Since the beginning of the war messiahs had been proclaimed at the rate of three or four per hour. Most of them claimed to know how to stop the war, but none of them did. Most of them were dead, now, and soon the Earth would be, too.
***
For seven years the Outlanders had been walking on eggs. Quick to declare neutrality at the outset of the war, the Lunar and Martian cities and the orbital colonies hoped only to stay out of the way while civilization collapsed down on Earth. Opinion varied as to whether the three Lunar nations could survive without support from Earth. There were almost a million people living on the moon at the outbreak of the war. The Martians figured to hold out twenty years, but no more than that.
Outnumbering these planet-bound settlements were the O’Neil colonies. There were hundreds of them, with populations ranging from five to a hundred thousand. Most were located at L4 and L5, points of gravitational stability sixty degrees in front of and behind Luna. There were also sizable clusters at L1 and L2, despite the perturbations that tended to make the structures drift out of the libration points; with a small thruster, even the largest colony could remain stable with minimum energy expenditure.
Those thrusters came in handy for something else as the war dragged on. Quietly, not making a big fuss about it, some of the O’Neils began converting into space vehicles. The newer ones had drives that were more than adequate already. Others needed some time, and took the slowest of orbits, but a migration began of all those who felt they could survive without the Earth.
There were a lot of places to go, none of them very good. One tried to make it in orbit around Mercury, where the free energy was intense. It proved to be too intense. A few took up orbit around Venus, and in Trojan orbit with Venus. Many more went out to the neighborhood of Mars, or to the Earth’s Trojan points. The problem was to get far enough away from the Earth to seem not worth shooting at and unlikely to hit, while staying close enough to the sun to survive.
A very few decided to take the big leap. They converted their homes into starships and headed out.
***
Conal heard about these events from refugees arriving during the seventh year of the war. An inescapable image came to mind: he saw the Earth as a blackened globe, cracking apart, girdled in flame. Tiny mites were scurrying away in droves.
“Rats leaving a sinking ship,” he told Cirocco.
“And what would you expect rats to do?” she countered. “Go down bravely? The rat’s about the smartest animal there is, and the toughest. The rats don’t owe the ship a damn thing, and neither do those ellfivers.”
“No need to bite my head off.”
“I’ll keep doing it as long as you think it’s a good idea to trust psychopaths. Anybody who can get away from the Earth right now and doesn’t is saying she believes it’s okay to lie down with a mad dog. Those ellfivers are the sane escaping the asylum. And maybe the grave.”
***
When he had the time, Conal liked to hang around the Portal just outside Bellinzona, improving the breed.
The Portal was just what the name implied: the port of entry for all the wretched refuse who flocked to Gaea’s shores. On Gaea’s outer surface was the catcher that retrieved Gaea’s returning eggs or the now-infrequent human ships seeking refuge. From there the people were taken to Gaea’s equivalent of Ellis Island, far down in her bowels, where they were processed. The immigration procedure had once been complex and time-consuming. Now it was simplicity itself: holy people to the left, mortals to the right. Messiahs, priests, preachers, pastors, shamen, gurus, juju men, dervishes, monks, rabbis, mullahs, ayatullahs, vicars, necromancers, prelates, and popes all were taken directly to an audience with Gaea. The rest were loaded into capsules with what they could carry on their backs. There was a short ride through Gaea’s circulatory system to a sphincter valve that squeezed them out, twenty at a time, into a small cave that Cirocco called “the asshole of the world.”
Since all the refugees came out at the same place, the Portal attracted a certain element that hoped to prey on weakness or ignorance. Like pimps standing sentry in a big-city bus station, these people were on the lookout for immigrants who had something that could be sold at a profit. Sometimes it was their meager material goods. Sometimes it was a lot worse than that.
It was a strange game Conal played. He had played it many times, though Cirocco said he was a fool to do so. He would have kept doing it even if he thought she really meant that, but he knew she didn’t, and Hornpipe had confirmed it.
“It is a worthwhile foolishness,” the Titanide had said. “It is a Titanide thing to do.” Titanides didn’t care if a cause was lost, and it didn’t worry them that they could not stamp out all the evil in the world. If they saw a chance to do some good without getting themselves killed, they did it, and so did Conal.
Which was not to say he went about it rashly. Some of the Portal layabouts ran in gangs, and took a dim view of anyone interfering in their activities. Conal would hang back, out of their way, and look for the chance to stalk the hunter as he led his prey to a dark, private place. When that chance came, when he had come in behind a Portal Rat and taken him by surprise, Conal killed him. Murderer, thief, slaver, or babylegger—it was all the same to Conal. There were no jails in Bellinzona, no middle ground between the quick and the dead.
More often he would have to watch as people got the living shit beat out of them and were stripped naked and left bleeding. Then he would take the victim to one of the jack-leg medicine men who served the function of hospitals in Bellinzona.
Today seemed like a good day. Looking around, he spotted a group of four Vigilantes wielding clubs that bristled with rusty nails. There were also three Free Female archers standing well away on high ground. With any luck at all, he would not have to do anything. The mere presence of these protective societies had driven many of the vermin away.
Increasingly, the pickings had been small at the Portal. More and more people arrived without so much as a stitch of clothing, wearing a vacant look: the walking corpses of Graveyard Earth. Most had been at the edge of death when rescued, some after suffering horribly for years. Gaea healed their bodies, but either could not or would not do anything about their minds.
Today’s group was different. Fully half of them were not only clothed, but carried packs and suitcases brimming with booty. Conal could, hear the jackals start to murmur. A Free Female bow twanged and an arrow shaft appeared in a man’s throat; it qualified as a gentle warning in Bellinzona. The Vigilantes began laying about them with their clubs, but soon were forced onto the defensive. Conal began to edge back. He didn’t plan to die in
a riot.
He saw a particularly interesting duo just as he was about to leave. A short, thirtyish woman with some kind of painting on her face carried a small bundle in her arms, walking beside a stunningly beautiful young woman who must have been six feet tall. Both women wore brilliant, padded synsilks: spacer’s clothes. The tall one carried most of the baggage, but the short one had a large synsilk pack.
Conal groaned. It was like watching a treasure-laden Spanish galleon sail into a nest of pirates. They had no idea what was about to happen.
It came quickly. A small figure darted from the crowd, punched the small one in the face, and grabbed the bundle. Conal realized it was an infant. The mother started to chase the man, but was suddenly hemmed in by the rest of the gang, who would strip the two women clean while the point man made off with the real prize.
There was nothing he could do to help the women. There were at least six men attacking them. So he would follow the man with the baby, because of all the things that could happen in Gaea he felt being sold to the Iron Masters was the worst. He was already after the man when the screaming began. Against his will, he looked back.
It was like a tornado. The women had knives in each hand, and knives in their boots, and they were whirling madly, shrieking at the top of their lungs, slashing and stabbing. One man took seven wounds before he had time to fall down and start to die. Another tried to hold his throat together as a second blade entered his bowels. Four were down, then five, as others moved in with knives drawn.
It was too bad, really. It was the most amazing display of sheer, furious will to fight he had ever seen, but he didn’t see how the two could hold off an army. They were going to take a fine honor guard to hell with them, but they were going to die. The least he could do was save the child of the older warrior.
He had almost waited too long, mesmerized by the carnage. The fleeing kidnapper was approaching the main bridge to Bellinzona when Conal finally got through the crowd and into the open.
He was a hundred meters behind the man when he left the bridge. The fleeing man was small and quick. He darted in and out of the crowd, and then he outsmarted himself. Knowing a running man is conspicuous, he slowed down, glancing over his shoulder to see if anyone was back there. If he had kept running for another minute, Conal might well have lost him, and if Conal had kept running one second longer, he would have been spotted. But this was Conal’s game, and when the man looked back, he saw no sign of pursuit.
