by John Varley
At last they came to a broader passage, and Cirocco stepped into it. About twenty meters in diameter it seemed to stretch to infinity in either direction.
“Central Park,” Cirocco said. And indeed, there were tree-like organisms growing from the walls, pale and skeletal. They shrank from the light. Cirocco pointed forward. “Come on. It’s only about a mile.”
It was an odd mile. They were on top of a gasbag and the netting was much thicker, almost solid beneath their feet. And they bounced. It was like walking on a sea of pillows.
After a long time the corridor widened and there was light. They came into a vast, shapeless room. The floor sloped down to a transparent membrane cross-hatched with thin cables, bulging out from the internal pressure. It was cool in here, just as it had been everywhere inside the blimp.
“The B-24 Lounge,” Cirocco said, and started scanning the piles of colorful cloth. Nova moved forward, almost to the giant window. She realized she was in the nose of the creature, and slightly on the underside. It was the view a bombardier would have had in an old military plane, and it was magnificent. Far below, the ground crawled by in a slow and stately parade that had been going on for sixty thousand years.
Her foot hit something solid in a pile of cloth. She looked down, and gasped. It was a human foot: brown, withered, attached to a scrawny leg. The toes wiggled. She looked up and saw the face of an old, old man, completely bald, brown as mahogany, showing strong white teeth in a satisfied smile.
“My name is Calvin, dear,” the old man said. “And you’re the prettiest thing I’ve seen in a long time.”
***
She never did get to see much of Calvin. He moved around, but was always so swaddled in windings of cloth that only his head was visible.
“Only real problem with this life,” he said at one point, “…only real problem’s staying warm. Old Whistlestop, he likes to go where it’s cold. So how’s August doing, Rocky?”
Cirocco explained that August had been dead for a long, long time. Nova watched him, and wasn’t sure the old man understood it. He then went on to ask about others, all of them dead. Each time he shook his head sadly. Only once did Cirocco seem upset, and that was when he asked her about Gaby.
“She’s…she’s fine, Calvin. She’s doing just fine.”
“That’s real nice.”
Which was crazy, since Nova knew all about Gaby.
She finally realized Calvin was almost as old as Cirocco. He looked every year of it. And yet, he seemed spry enough, and quite happy and alert. It was only the business of inquiring about the dead that hinted of senility.
He bumbled around the chilly cave, rummaging in straw baskets, coming up with wooden bowls and bone knives and a cutting board. Cirocco sat next to Nova and spoke quietly to her.
“He’s not crazy, Nova. I don’t think he understands death. And I don’t think he has any conception of time. He’s lived up here for ninety-five years, and he’s the happiest man I ever knew.”
“Here it is!” Calvin crowed, coming up with a large wooden container. He came back to the flat surface where Cirocco and Nova were sitting cross-legged, and where he had already assembled bowls of salad and raw vegetables, and a huge jug of something he called mead.
“Just getting good,” he said, then glanced at Nova. “Better bundle up some, girl. Get cozy.”
Nova had been getting chilled, but was suspicious of the piles of rags. She had noticed some of the little blind, hairless mice crawling out of one pile. But the fabric didn’t smell dirty.
“The blimp exudes this stuff,” Cirocco said, pulling folds around her. “It makes good cold-weather gear. Go ahead, it’s clean. Everything in here is clean.”
“Always is, in a blimp,” Calvin chuckled. He was using a wooden spoon to ladle thick and chunky soup into bowls. “Try this…Nova you said your name was? Nice name, I like that name. New and bright, and you look shiny as can be. This is my special gazpacho. Made from only the finest grown-in-Gaea ingredients.” He chuckled again as he handed Nova a bowl. “Used to, I’d come down once a year for a hot meal. Then I realized it’d been a while since I’d done it, and I hadn’t missed it any.”
“I think you came down twice, you old fool,” Cirocco said. Calvin had a good laugh at that.
“Oh, now, Rocky. That can’t be right. Can it?” He looked thoughtful for a moment, started to count on his fingers, but got lost quickly. Nova was trying not to laugh because she thought he’d be offended. He was quite nice, if befuddled.
“Now don’t you be afraid of that, honey,” he told her. “You treat it with respect, though. I don’t much care for heating my food, but I don’t mind it hot, if you catch my meaning.”
Nova did not, unfortunately. She sniffed, and liked the smell, so she took a big spoonful. It was based on tomato and celery and was good and spicy and cold. She took another mouthful…and then the first one hit her. She swallowed, gasped, and felt the stuff searing her nasal passages and burning behind her eyeballs. She lunged for the glass of mead and swallowed a whole beaker. It went down well. It had a honey taste.
Even the gazpacho was good, if taken in cautious sips. They all sat together and ate, and it was a fine meal, if a little noisy. All the raw vegetables crunched. They sounded like rabbits. Nova suspected she’d miss having meat after a while, but Calvin did well with his vegetarian, heatless cuisine.
And the mead was terrific. Not only did it cool down the spicier foods, it made her feel warm, loose, and nicely fuzzy around the edges.
***
“Time to wake up, Nova.”
“Wha…” She sat up quickly. Her head was hurting and she had a hard time focusing on Cirocco. “What time is it?”
“It’s a few hours later.” Cirocco smiled at her. “My dear, I think you got a wee bit drunk.”
“I did?” She was about to tell Cirocco it was the first time, then realized it would make her sound like a child, so she laughed. Then she thought she was going to be sick, but the feeling passed. “Well, what do we do now?”
“That’s it,” Cirocco said. “We’ll get you sobered up a little, then we go back to the Junction. I’m ready to move.”
Seven
The Titanides had labored eight revs to produce the feast. There was a whole roasted smiler, and eels and fish cooked, jellied, stuffed back into their skins, and suspended artfully in clear savory aspic. The fruit course was a towering edifice shaped like a Christmas tree, bulging with a hundred varieties of Gaean berries, melons, pomes, and citrines, garnished by leaves of spun green sugar and glowing internally from a myriad glowbes. There were ten pâtés, seven kinds of bread, three soup tureens, rickety pagodas of smiler ribs, clever pastries with crusts thin as soap bubbles…the mind reeled. Cirocco had not seen such a spread since the last Purple Carnival, twenty years ago.
There was enough food for a hundred humans or twenty Titanides. With just nine people to eat it all.
Cirocco took a little of this and a little of that, and sat back, chewing slowly, watching her companions. It was a shame, really, that she was not hungrier. Everything tasted very good.
She knew she was the luckiest of women. Long, long ago, when she might have worried about her weight, it had never been necessary. She could eat as much as she wanted and never put on a gram. Since becoming Wizard her mass had been as low as forty kilograms—after a sixty-day fast—and as high as seventy-five. It was largely a matter of conscious choice. Her body had no fixed metabolic set point.
Just now she was at the high end of that range. Three visits to the fountain of youth in less than a kilorev was an unprecedented frequency. She had an even layer of fat all over her body, and her breasts, buttocks, and thighs had become voluptuous. She smiled inwardly, remembering how the tall and gangly, slat-thin fifteen-year-old Cirocco Jones would have killed for breasts like this. The tredecenial Cirocco found them a minor but necessary nuisance. They would come in handy in the grueling days ahead. Eventually they would be consumed.
<
br /> In the meantime, Conal was acting even more awe-struck than usual.
He was sitting to her left, having a good time. Robin sat next to him. They kept offering things to each other. Since no one could eat much of any one thing, it made sense to point out a special delicacy, but Cirocco suspected it was more than that with these two. She thought if the meal had been stale C-rations, they would still be giggling like kids.
I ought to be shocked, Cirocco thought.
She had a feeling it would end badly, that it probably should not have even started. Then she chided herself. That was the safe view. If you looked at life that way, your regrets for things undone and untried would forge an endless chain to rattle in your later years. She silently saluted their courage and wished them well.
The idiots thought no one knew of their clandestine affair. Possibly there were Titanides in Hyperion who didn’t know about it, but certainly none here in Dione. Cirocco saw Valiha, Rocky, and Serpent—a threesome none of the other humans knew anything about—looking on with fond recognition. Hornpipe knew, but, as always, kept his own counsel. Virginal knew, but despite her growing closeness to Nova, would never mention it, mainly because the young Titanide realized her lack of knowledge of the ways of humans and would never risk hurting Nova inadvertently.
That left the ninth member of the party, Nova. She was coming along nicely, Cirocco judged, but was still far too much the self-centered youth to be aware of something her mother was taking pains to keep from her. She was blissfully ignorant of Robin’s sin.
For sin it was. Cirocco wondered if Robin had recognized that yet, and how she would handle it when the guilty weight fell on her. She hoped she would be able to offer some help. She loved the little witch dearly.
She looked around the table at her band. She loved them all. For a moment she felt tears threaten, and fought them back. This was not the time. She made herself smile, and made a polite comment on a pastry she was offered. Serpent glowed with pleasure. But she saw Hornpipe watching her.
But it was a surprise, as the glorious meal was ending in the small sounds of belches and satisfied pats on the tummy, when Hornpipe cleared his throat and waited until he had silence.
“Captain,” he said, in English. “We were pleased when you made no objection to the preparation of this feast. You are aware this sort of thing is done only on a moment of great importance to all of us.”
“‘We are pleased,’ Hornpipe?” Cirocco asked. She was disturbed to realize she did not know what he was talking about. And she looked at the other Titanides, saw them looking solemnly at their empty plates. Virginal glanced to the far end of the table, to the empty place setting which had been put out at every meal since Chris had jumped into Pandemonium.
“Who do you speak for, my friend?”
“I speak for all the Titanides here, and for many hundreds who could not come. I was elected to voice this…” Once more Cirocco was amazed, as Hornpipe seemed to be groping for a word. Then she realized it was something else.
“Is ‘grievance’ the word you’re trying to say?”
“It’s in the right neighborhood,” Hornpipe said, with a wry shake of his head. He looked at her, appealingly. For an instant he was a stranger. For an instant he was the first Titanide she had ever seen—and he was, in fact, a direct descendant of the first. He could be mistaken for a truly stunning woman. His heaped-up masses of shining black hair, broad cheekbones, long lashes, wide mouth and baby-smooth cheeks….
She returned to the moment, to a reality that seemed to be getting away from her.
“Go on, then,” she said.
“It is simple,” he said. “We want to know what you are doing toward the return of the child.”
“What are you doing?”
“Probes have been made. The defenses of Pandemonium have been tested. Aerial reconnaissance by blimp has given us a map of the fortress. Plans have been advanced, in Titantown.”
“What sort of plans?”
“An all-out assault. A siege. There are several options.”
“Are any being put into effect?”
“No, Captain.” He sighed, and looked at her again. “The child must be rescued. Forgive me if you can, but I must say this. You are our past. He is our future. We cannot allow Gaea to have him.”
Cirocco let the silence grow, looking from one face to another. None of the Titanides would look at her. Robin, Conal, and Nova glanced away quickly when their eyes met hers.
“Conal,” she said, finally. “Do you have a plan?”
“I wanted to talk it over with you,” he said, apologetically. “I was thinking of a raid. Just the two of us, in and out real quick. I don’t think the frontal assault would work.”
Cirocco looked around again.
“Are there any other plans? Let’s get ’em all lined up.”
“Lure her out,” Nova said.
“What’s that?”
“Use yourself as bait. Get her to come out and fight. Set a trap for her. Dig a big hole or something…I don’t know. I haven’t worked out the details. Maybe some kind of ambush.”
She looked at Nova with increased respect. It was a rotten idea, of course, but in some ways it was better than the others.
“That’s four ideas,” Cirocco said. “Any more?”
The Titanides didn’t have any. Cirocco was frankly astonished they had, among hundreds of them, come up with two. Titanides were many things, but they were not tacticians. Their minds didn’t seem to work that way.
She stood up.
“All right. Hornpipe, there is no need for your apology. I’ve been remiss in not telling anyone what I’ve been doing. Naturally, you and all the Titanides are concerned about getting him back, and you don’t see me doing anything. I’ve been gone a lot. I haven’t been talking much. And, yes, he is your future, and I for one am thankful for it and sorry for him. I have been thinking of almost nothing else during the last kilorev. I expected to tell you my plans tonight, but you beat me to it.
“The first thing is Gaea. None of you understand her.
“You’ve given me four scripts. Four movies.” She held up her fingers as she counted them out. “Hornpipe, you mentioned a frontal assault. We’ll call that the World War Two movie. Then there was the siege; that’s the Roman epic. Conal, your idea is a caper movie. Nova’s idea is like a western. There are other approaches I’ve thought of. There’s the monster movie, which I think Gaea would like, where we try to burn her up or roast her with electricity. There’s the prison picture, where we get captured and make our escape. There’s the aerial assault, which is probably a Viet Nam movie.
“What you have to remember is, she’s thought of those, and of several more possibilities. My approach will borrow from several of them, but to defeat her, we have to move out of genre pictures altogether.”
She looked from face to face, and was not surprised to see the bewilderment there. They probably thought she was going crazy, with all this talk about movies.
“I’m not crazy,” she said, quietly. “I’m trying to think the way Gaea thinks. Gaea is obsessed with films from about 1930 to 1990. She has made herself in the image of a star who died in 1961. She wants to live movies, and she has a star system, and most of the ones she has selected to be the stars of her major epic are sitting right here. She has gone to great lengths to get some of you here. She has built some of you, in a sense, like the old studio moguls used to build images for their stars.
“She has cast me in the leading role. But this is a big production, with many important characters and a cast of billions.
“She can make mistakes. Gaby was one. Gaby was supposed to be alive at this point, as my faithful sidekick. Chris was another. He was supposed to be my leading man. There was supposed to be a love story between me and Chris, but Valiha got in the way. Their love wasn’t planned.
“But Gaea is a smart director. She always has a fall-back subplot prepared, there is always an understudy ready to step in. The sto
ry department can always come up with some variation, some way to move things around and keep the plot going.
“Conal, you’re a good example of that.”
Conal had been looking mesmerized; now he jerked in surprise.
“You’re descended from Eugene Springfield, one of the original players, one that Gaea chose to become the villain. That is certainly going to be important in upcoming events. I feel strongly—and Snitch backs me up on this—that you were manipulated into coming here.”
“That’s impossible,” Conal protested. “I came here to kill you, and—” He stopped, and reddened. Cirocco knew he seldom spoke of their meeting.
“It felt like free will, Conal,” she said, gently. “And it was. She didn’t enter your mind way back there in Canada. But she owned the publishing company that put out that ridiculous comic book you brought with you. She was able to slant the story, and to be sure you knew of your ancestry, and probably nudge you into bodybuilding. The rest just worked out.
“Robin, you already know something of how you’ve been manipulated.”
“I sure do,” she said, bitterly.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this…hell, there’s worse coming up, and nobody’s going to like any of it. She had a hand in your life before you were ever born. Do your people still speak of the Screamer?”
Robin looked wary, but nodded.
“It’s what moved us into space. It was a big meteor. The Coven was in Australia. It hit, and killed about half of us. But it was on our land, and it was full of gold and uranium that could be easily mined. It made us rich enough to have the Coven built in orbit…”
Her eyes grew round with horror.
“The Screamer hit Australia in 2036,” Cirocco said. “I’d been here eleven years. There is no doubt that Gaea sent it.”
“That’s crazy,” Nova said.
“Of course it is. But not the way you mean, if you mean it couldn’t have happened that way.”
