by John Varley
The boy had been the heir to a large fortune. He was about a year older than the War. When he and his family had emerged from their shelter in the mountains of Mexico one of Gaea’s mercy missions had picked him up. His mother had been deaf, which had given him a skill now useful to Kali. He had once been a bright, healthy, and alert six-year-old. Now his body was the sort a political cartoonist might draw, purposely exaggerated, and label World Hunger. His eyes never left Kali’s hands. He was about eighty years older than he had been two years ago.
“Gaea gave we the right to take the child,” Luther thundered.
Kali gobbled even louder, and her fingers flew.
“Shesez Gaea dint give you no right to get it lessen you got to it first,” the boy chattered. “Shesez you was too fuckin late. Shesez you is a prodisint—” Kali slammed a hand across the boy’s bruised face.
“—shesez you is a prod—”
Again he was slapped.
“—protisent—”
And again.
“—prot…is…tent…shesez you is a protestant muhfuckering ig…ig…ignor-a-mouse shitheaded buggerin christian. Shesez you is too ugly to live. Shesez whyn’t ya go suck on the Pope’s prick.”
“Whore of Vavylon! Harlot of Gomorrah!”
“Shesez damn straight. Shesez she gonna take on you and your whole asshole crew. Shesez lessen you tooken a vow of sebisiss—”
Kali hit him again.
“—sebila—sela—cellba—celili-li-li-li—celibin—celiba…cy.”
The boy sighed his pleasure and relief when he got it right and Kali stopped hitting him.
“Celibacy, celibacy, celibacy,” he muttered. He would get it right the next time, no question.
“Fofery!” Luther hissed, meaning popery. Arthur Lundquist, whose faint ghost informed the actions of the thing he had become, would not have known popery from plenary indulgences, being a thrice-Reformed Lutheran and a spiritual ally of most of the Catholic sects. But it amused Gaea for all her Priests to be fundamentalists, and she had a long memory, and so Luther was further enraged.
“Fofery!” he repeated, and his Apostles fuffed and fawed sympathetically in his wake. “Fofery! Vy what right do you take the child?”
“Shesez Gaea told her to. Shesez she did a hell of a lot better job than you and your fuckoffs did.”
“Vut the angels. I…” Luther stopped, enraged but unable to do anything about it without the possibility of blasphemy.
Why had Gaea given her angels? Luther had no angels. He had never had any angels, had never been told he might even get angels.
“It won’t work,” he tried. “Your angel can’t reach Fandewoniuh.”
The boy watched the hands again.
“Shesez it will too work. Shesez she’s got a shitload of angels. Shesez she’s got enough to relay the little muhfucker all the way to Pandemonium. Shesez howdja like to take a big juicy bite outta her big juicy—”
Luther shrieked, and hit the boy. The boy absorbed it, as he had absorbed everything for the last two years, never taking his eyes from Kali’s hands, never pausing in his vile curses. He had learned that nothing that could come from anywhere else could ever rival the things that came from Kali.
He was wrong. Luther swung his cross and the boy was instantly dead. He turned on Kali and his Apostles followed. They all tore at her. She did not resist. She lay on her back and gobbled contentedly, and her laughter enraged Luther further…
Until he noticed that all his Apostles were dead.
Twelve
They gathered in the room from which Adam had been taken.
Conal watched them come in, one after the other. His head still hurt something awful, but it was minor compared to the feeling of fear that was stealing over him.
The three Titanides were wet, and ignoring it. Cirocco was wet, and didn’t seem to notice. Chris had a towel and was drying himself off. He seemed exhausted, and distant. Conal didn’t know the special hell Chris was going through, but he could see some signs of it.
Robin was wet, and shivering. Chris handed her his towel when he was through.
Nova…
She still wore Conal’s coat. She was holding it over her shoulders with one hand, shivering almost as badly as her mother. And, though she wore the coat, and though she was holding it in place, she was making no attempt to cover herself. It only reached to her waist, anyway, so it wouldn’t have done her much good, but she held her injured arm out for Rocky to work on, and was unconcerned that one breast was revealed.
Nova seemed to have no body modesty. Conal was used to that in Cirocco, and saw it frequently in long-time residents of Bellinzona. But it was unusual in new arrivals.
He remembered her pressed against him up there in her bedroom. It was a moment he was not going to forget. And now he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her.
“This is going to hurt badly,” Rocky said.
“Doctors don’t say things like that,” Nova said. “They promise you it isn’t going to hurt much.”
“I am not a doctor. I am a healer, and this is going to hurt a lot.”
Rocky poured the antiseptic solution over Nova’s cuts and started to clean them out. Her face froze, then turned very ugly, but she didn’t scream.
Conal thought she was foolish. He had been treated for zombie wounds. Rocky had to probe deep to be sure he got out every particle of corruption. To have a zombie breathe on you was enough to put you in bed for a week. To be torn up like Nova…
He had to look away. He’d never had a strong stomach.
Cirocco had been waiting like stone for everyone to assemble. Now that they were all here, she wasted no time.
“Who was in the room with Adam when he was taken?” she asked.
Conal’s heart froze.
He saw Chris looking around, frowning, trying to put it together.
“Me and Robin were out in the Witch room,” he said. “When I got here—”
“I’m asking a simple question,” Cirocco interrupted. “I just want to know who was in here. We need a place to start.”
“Nobody was in here,” Conal said, and swallowed hard.
Cirocco turned to face him.
“And how do you know that?”
“Because when I heard the scream, I ran upstairs…”
Cirocco kept looking at him. She was not in the mood to waste time, so her look couldn’t have gone on much more than two seconds, and those seconds didn’t take much more than twenty years to go by.
“I told you to protect him, at all costs,” she said, tonelessly. For an instant the doors were open over the twin blast furnaces. Then she looked away, and Conal could breathe again.
Chris spoke up.
“That’s not fair, Cirocco. What was Conal supposed to do when he heard Nova scream? Ignore it? There’s no way he—”
Then Cirocco was looking at Chris, and he didn’t have anything more to say.
“Don’t waste my time, Chris. We can debate fairness some other day.”
That’s right, Conal thought. Nobody told you it was going to be fair. You walk up to the oldest, meanest, most paranoid human in the solar system…and you try to make a man out of what is left.
“Cirocco, what about Nova?” Robin asked. “Chris couldn’t have—”
“Shut up, Robin.”
“Captain,” Rocky began.
“Shut up, Rocky.”
Several people tried to speak at once, including Nova.
“Shut up.”
Cirocco didn’t precisely raise her voice, but she put something into it that nobody could argue with. And she didn’t wait for silence. It came, but she was already plunging ahead.
“I know how fast an angel can fly,” she said. “I couldn’t see this one well enough to know which clan it was. There are twenty-five species of angel and they all dislike each other, so it’s possible we can get help from other flights. Their range is limited. We can assume it’s headed for Pandemonium, so—”
“Why don’t we just let him go?” Nova muttered.
Cirocco took two quick steps and slapped Nova’s face so hard the young woman was thrown to the floor. She sat up, her mouth bleeding, and Cirocco pointed at her.
“Kid, I’ve taken all I’ll take from you. This is your first and last warning. You will grow up, damn fast, and you will join the human race, or I’m likely to kill you accidentally, and I’d hate to do that because Robin is my friend. We will now discuss how to save the life of a human being who happens to be your brother, and you will speak only when spoken to.”
Again, Cirocco had not raised her voice. There was scarcely a need to. Nova was lying on her side, stunned, in a place far beyond humiliation. Conal’s coat had fallen from her shoulders as she went down. A few minutes ago Conal would have been quite interested, but now he could only spare her a glance as Rocky helped her up. Cirocco needed him, and Nova had turned into just another broad, and a dumb one, at that.
“Gaea is behind this. Gaby warned me the child was important. I don’t know why Gaea wants him. Possibly just to lure me to do battle with her, which she’s been trying to do for years. But Gaea doesn’t have him yet. She is in Hyperion, which is as far from here as you can get. There’s something I need to know. Chris, when you entered Nova’s room, was the zombie already dead?’
“That’s right.”
“And the one in the hall…”
“It wasn’t there when I went in, and it was dead on the floor when I came out.”
“Any of you kill it?” Cirocco swept them with her eyes, and everyone indicated they hadn’t.
“The one in the music room. Tell me about that.”
“I was getting ready to fight it, and it just keeled over.”
“But the one with Adam got away.” She turned to Nova. “What did you do to that first one?”
“I shot it,” Nova whispered. “I shot it…three times.”
“That wouldn’t kill it. What did you do then?”
“I threw the gun at it.”
Cirocco waited.
“I threw the bed. Then other things.”
Nova shrugged, listlessly. She seemed to be in shock.
“The vase, the lamp, the cru—…” All the blood drained from her face.
“What?” Cirocco kept at her.
“Some-some-something I m-m-made.”
“I’m not going to hit you again, Nova, but you are going to tell me what it was you made.”
Nova’s whisper was almost inaudible.
“…a love potion…”
“She borrowed some ingredients from the kitchen,” Serpent volunteered.
Cirocco turned away from them all and was quiet for several seconds. No one moved. At last she turned back.
“Chris,” she said, pointing at him. “Radios. Three. Bring them back here, then meet me at the cave.”
Chris hurried off without a word.
“Valiha. You take one radio and go, as fast as you can, to Bellinzona. Put out a general call to all Titanides who still have faith in their Wizard. I want live zombies, as many as you can take. Don’t risk your life to get them, and stay in radio contact with me.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Rocky, you will stay here. We may have further instructions when we find out how they plan to get Adam to Pandemonium.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Serpent. As soon as you get your radio, you will head west, conserving your strength. You can’t outrun an angel, but we will try to guide you from the air. Take Weapons.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Conal, you come with me. Robin, Nova, you can come with me or stay here, as you please.”
She was already on her way out of the room when she kicked one of the loose Titanide eggs Adam had been playing with. She froze, then walked slowly to the wall where it lay, bent over, and picked it up.
Cirocco held the egg up to the light and stared at it, and for the first time in living memory, the Wizard looked stunned. The egg was transparent.
She dropped it and stood for a moment with her shoulders slumped.
“Rocky,” she said. “Gather all these eggs. Be sure you get them all. Destroy all the furniture, rip up all the pillows, but don’t miss any. I’ll have Chris radio back a count after we get away.
“When you’re sure you have them all, destroy them.”
***
It took a huge effort, but Cirocco managed to get her mind off the Titanide eggs and back to the problem at hand.
Both Robin and Nova had elected to join her. She did not try to dissuade them, nor did she question their reasons. They followed her into the jungle and up the hill toward the cave.
It was funny how quickly it all came back. The habit of command. Starting with what she felt was no natural talent for it and in an era when there were still few female role models she could study, she had worked doggedly at learning how it was done. She had talked to a thousand old men, naval captains, some of whom had commanded ships as far back as the First Nuclear War. Then there had been the space captains, and whole new traditions, new ways of doing things…and yet with much in common. People were still people. Maybe they were a little more willing to let a woman command them than they had been in 1944, but the problems of insuring automatic obedience and earning the respect that would nurture a strong, united, and loyal crew were much the same as they had always been.
There were a thousand things you could learn, myriad ways of attaining that improbable position whereby men and women were willing to obey your orders. NASA had sponsored leadership courses and Cirocco had taken them all. She had read autobiographies of great leaders.
She knew, secretly, that she had no talent for command. It was all a false front, but if one kept it in place twenty-four hours a day no one was the wiser.
She lost her first command. Afterward, she had never been able to put the survivors back into a functioning team. They all went their own ways—all but Gaby and Bill—and she had lived for many years afterward with a deep feeling of failure.
NASA had been alarmed when only two of the seven people from Ringmaster could be convinced to return to Earth, and infuriated when they learned the Captain was among the five deserters. But NASA was a civilian organization, and after discharging what she saw as her responsibilities, telling everything she knew about what had happened and why, she felt justified in resigning her commission in a place of her own choosing.
NASA couldn’t court-martial her, much as they would have liked to, even in absentia. But they did the civilian equivalent, which was to set up a dozen commissions and boards of enquiry.
She had had almost a century to think things over. In that time she had given a lot of thought to leadership. There were different kinds of leaders, she had concluded. Some were good, and some were bad. It was probably true that there were leaders who never suffered the doubts she had experienced, who were absolutely sure of themselves and everything they did. They were the egomaniacs, monomaniacs, megalomaniacs—Attila, Alexander, Charlemagne, Mussolini, Patton, Suslov—men with obsessions, driven men, often psychotic or paranoid. It was even possible for them to be good leaders, but Cirocco felt that, by and large, the world was a worse place when they were through stamping their designs upon it.
For decades now Cirocco had been relieved of that kind of responsibility. She was most content when she had no one depending on her, and when she had to depend on no one. Her sole responsibility for the last two decades had been to keep herself alive, at almost any cost. Now maybe that was changing.
But when the need arose, it was satisfying to discover how quickly she could change gears.
Chris caught up with the rest of them just as they reached the cave.
It was high, wide, and deep: the perfect place for part of Cirocco’s arsenal. The cave seemed to stand open, undefended. Actually, there were guardians so well-concealed that an intruder could walk over one without seeing it. Cirocco had gathered the creatures in Rhea, where they had
once guarded an ancient idol, and had learned how to re-program their simple brains to suit her needs. They ignored Titanides. But any human not accompanied by Chris or Cirocco would have been dead before entering the cave.
Inside were the aircraft. There were six of them, but three had been cannibalized for parts to keep the others running. Twenty years ago, when Cirocco bought them and had them shipped to Gaea, they had been state-of-the-art. That state hadn’t improved much in thirteen years, and not at all since the War. They were magnificent, incredible planes, bearing the same relation to the clumsy dinosaurs Cirocco had grown up piloting as the Wright Brothers Flyer did to a supersonic jet, though the differences would not have been obvious to the untrained observer.
She started her walk-around.
“How long since you took them out, Chris?” she asked.
“About half a kilorev, Captain. According to your schedule. I observed no problems with the Two and the Four, but the Eight is going to need some work.”
“No matter. We won’t need it. Robin. Nova. Can either of you fly?”
“Fly an airplane?” Robin asked. “I’m sorry, Captain.”
“No need to overdo the Captain bit.”
“I’ve…back home, I fl-fl-flew a…”
“Speak up, child. I won’t hurt you anymore, I promise.”
“I’ve soared,” Nova said, in a half-whisper. “We have these gliders, and we go out along the axis and—”
“I’ve heard of it,” Cirocco said. She considered it, still going over the Dragonfly Two, which was the smaller of the available planes and the one already perched on the catapult. “It’s better than nothing. Conal, you’ll fly this one, and Nova will go with you. Familiarize her with the basics if you get any free time. Get in now and heat it up and start your check-out. Chris, assemble five sets of survival gear. The basic kit, extra rations, hand weapons, rifles, clothing. Anything else you can think of that might come in handy and doesn’t weigh too damn much.”
“Flak suits?” Chris asked.
Cirocco paused, started to say something, then listened to her gut.
“Yes. Nova can wear one of mine. Get the smallest size you can for Robin, and—”
