Demon (GAIA)

by John Varley

  Hah! Walked right into that one, you abomination.

  “We call them Gaea’s tapeworms. I hope you have a large toilet.”

  Robin heard Nova laughing. That seemed to finally set Gaea off. It started as an incoherent scream. Robin had to turn the volume down. It went on for an amazing time, then turned into a stream of vile language, horrible threats, and nearly incoherent ranting. During a brief pause, Nova spoke.

  “That’s really something,” she said. “Maybe, when this is over, we can put her in a carnival sideshow.”

  “No,” Conal said. “Nobody’d pay. Everybody’s seen shit.”

  There was a short silence.

  “Young man,” Gaea said icily, “one day I will make you wish you had never been born. Nova, that was unkind, to say the least. But I suppose I can understand it. It must be hard for you. Tell me, how do you feel about that horrible fellow screwing your mother?”

  There was an entirely different quality to the silence this time. Robin felt her stomach lurch.

  “Mother, what—”

  “Nova, maintain radio silence. And remember what I told you about propaganda. Gaea, this conversation is over.”

  But it didn’t feel like having the last word. Propaganda was a fine term, but that didn’t mean she was going to be able to lie any longer to Nova.

  ***

  Gaea put down her radio and watched the planes vanish in the west, feeling thoroughly sour.

  Though the logical and emotional parts of her mind no longer functioned as they used to—a fact she recognized and no longer worried about—the purely computational power was undiminished. She knew how many zombies had been lost. Some forty percent of the Pandemonium work force were undead—now doubly dead. That was bad enough, but a zombie was worth five human workers, maybe six. They were stronger, and they needed no sleep or even rest breaks. They could be fed garbage a hog would choke to look at. While they couldn’t run something as complex as a tape recorder, they made excellent plumbers, electricians, painters, grips, carpenters…all the skilled trades so essential to the making of movies. With reasonable care they could be made to last six or seven kilorevs. They were economical even in death; when a zombie felt the final death approaching, its last act was to dig a grave and lie down in it.

  Problems, problems….

  The unions of carpenters, used for her mobile festival, had proven not versatile enough for the demands of New Pandemonium. Some of the buildings thrown up by them were already falling down. She could try to develop a master variety of carpenter…but knew uneasily that her skills as a genetic manipulator were deteriorating. She could hope that, instead of more camels or dragons, her next birthing would be something more useful, and self-perpetuating, but she knew she couldn’t count on it.

  Such were the perils of being mortal. For mortal she was. Not just in the sense that, in a hundred thousand years, the giant wheel known as Gaea would wither and die, but in the giant Monroe-clone in which she had elected to put so much of her vital force.

  She sighed, then brightened a bit. Good cinema sprang from adversity, not an uninterrupted series of successes. She would speak with the story department, incorporate this new setback in the vast epic of her life, twenty years in the making. The final reels were by no means in sight.

  In the meantime, there must be a solution.

  Once more she thought of Titanides. Hyperion was lousy with Titanides.

  “Titanides!” Gaea shouted, startling all those within half a kilometer.

  Titanides had to be her most recalcitrant invention. They had seemed a good idea at the time. They were still nice to look at. She had made them in the early 1900’s as a sort of first-draft human. It turned out she had built better than she knew. They kept exceeding specifications.

  When labor had started to be a problem during the early days of site preparation for the Studio, she had naturally thought of using Titanides. She sent Iron Masters out hiring—and they came back empty-handed. It was disconcerting. Didn’t they know she was God?

  They were hard to capture alive, but she had caught a few.

  Who wouldn’t do a lick of work. Torture didn’t help. As many as were able committed suicide. As far as Gaea knew, there had never been a Titanide suicide before the construction of the Studio. They loved life too much.

  She had asked one captive about it.

  “We’d rather die than be enslaved,” he had said.

  A fine sentiment, Gaea supposed, but not one she had built into them. Damn it, humans took to slavery like ducks to water. Why couldn’t Titanides?

  All right, all right, Gaea was nothing if not flexible. If they wouldn’t work alive, she’d make them work dead. A zombie Titanide ought to handle the work of a hundred humans.

  But it didn’t work out that way. The Titanide corpses that went zombie were weaker than the originals, badly coordinated, and tended to sag in the middle like a swaybacked horse. She did an engineering study and found it was the skeletal structure that was at fault. Taxonomically speaking, Titanides were not vertebrates. They had a cartilaginous spine that was much more flexible and much stronger than the rather precarious stacks that formed the backbones of humans and angels. The problem was that, in death, the cartilage rotted, and the deathsnakes ate it. So the Titanides cheated her even from beyond the grave.

  Gaea would have thought it was a stinking world, had she not remembered that she had created it.

  What better time for the messenger to arrive from the MGM Gate, hand her the clipboard, and kneel, quivering, knowing Gaea’s usual reaction to bad news.

  For once, the reaction was moderate. Gaea looked at the name on the clipboard, sighed, and scaled it negligently over the roofs of three soundstages.

  She had been out-movied. Twice in one day, Cirocco Jones had used her favorite mythologies against her.

  “I’ve been Ozzed, and Star-Warred,” she muttered.

  She needed a break. How about a new festival? she wondered. Movies about movies. That sounded nice. She looked around for her archivist, and saw him cowering behind the corner of a building. She beckoned.

  “I’m going to Projection Room One,” she told him, “Get me Truffaut’s Day For Night to start off with.”

  He scribbled on a note pad.

  “Auteurs,” she muttered. “Pick out a couple films by Hitchcock. Any of them will do. The Stunt Man. And…what’s that one about the collapse of the studio system?”

  “Lights, Camera. Auction!” the archivist said.

  “That’s it. Be ready in ten minutes.”

  Gaea trudged down the golden road, more depressed than she had been in centuries. Jones had done a good job this day.

  Part of her mind remained on the labor problem. She would just have to divert more refugees from Bellinzona. The terrible thing was, she was going to have to practically coddle her human labor from now on, because when they died, they were just gonna stay dead. Hell of a note.

  And she wondered if she could pick up the slack from Bellinzona. The mercy flights to Earth were still going on, but the ships were coming back with a lot of empty seats.

  She almost wished she hadn’t started the War.

  Eleven

  The origins of the City of Bellinzona were, as so many other things in the wide wheel, mysterious.

  The first human explorers to enter Dione had reported a large, empty city made of wood. It stood on sturdy pilings sunk deep in the rock below the waterline, and had freshly carved streets that wound up into the rocky hills on each side of Peppermint Bay. To the south were relatively flat lands, rising to a pass that led to an encircling forest. Dangerous creatures lived in that forest, but they were not as bad as the quicksands, fevers, and poisonous and carnivorous plants. It did not seem like a place where anyone would want to live.

  Cirocco Jones had been there long before the “explorers.” She simply never bothered to tell anyone about the ghost city which had appeared sometime during the fiftieth year of her Wizardship. She had be
en as puzzled by it as anyone else. It didn’t seem to have any use.

  But it was built to human scale. There were large buildings and small. The doorways were rather high, but Titanides usually had to duck to get through them.

  After the start of the War and the beginnings of the stream of refugees, Cirocco had briefly cherished the notion that Gaea had simply caused a safe haven to be built, knowing that war would engulf the Earth sooner or later. But Gaea’s influence in Dione was minimal, and her humanitarian impulses nonexistent. Somebody had built the core of Bellinzona, and built it rather well. Gaea’s contribution had been simply to provide the populace.

  Cirocco suspected it had been the gremlins. She had no evidence of this. There was no “gremlin style” of architecture. The creatures had put up structures as varied as the Glass Castle and Pharoah Mountain. She often wished she could contact them and ask them a few questions. But not even Titanides had ever seen a gremlin.

  Humans had added to the central city in a haphazard and jerry-built fashion. The new piers usually rested on pontoons, and of course there were the jostling flotillas of boats. But despite neglect and misuse, some of the larger buildings of Bellinzona were quite impressive.

  Cirocco had to raise an army to fight Gaea. Bellinzona was the only place able to provide that many people, but a rabble would not do for her purposes. She needed discipline, and to get it, she knew she had to civilize the place, to clean it up—and to utterly dominate it.

  She chose a big, ornate, warehouse-sized structure on the Slough of Despond. The building was called the Loop by its tenant, a man by the name of Maleski, who came from Chicago. Cirocco had learned quite a bit about Maleski, who was one of the top four or five gang leaders in Bellinzona. It had the flavor of the unreal, but she decided it was just one of those odd things. She was going to go up against a real live gangster from Chicago.

  When Cirocco and the five black-clad Titanides entered the building, almost everyone was clustered at the other end, looking out the windows there, staring up at the sky. That was not a coincidence. Cirocco stood there in the middle of the big room in the light of flickering torches, and waited to be noticed.

  It did not take long. Surprise changed to consternation. No one was supposed to be able to just walk in to the Loop. It was heavily guarded on the outside. Maleski didn’t know it yet, but all those guards were dead.

  The ones in the room drew their swords and began to disperse around the walls. Some of them grabbed torches. A tight group of nine made a human shield around Maleski. For a moment, no one moved.

  “I’ve heard of you,” Maleski said, finally. “Aren’t you Cirocco Jones?”

  “Mayor Jones,” Cirocco said.

  “Mayor Jones,” Maleski repeated. He moved forward, out of the group. His eyes went to the gun thrust in the waistband of her black pants, but it didn’t seem to worry him. “That’s news to me. Some of your people had a run-in with some of my boys a while back. Is this about that?”

  “No. I’m taking over this building. I’m declaring a ten-hour amnesty. You’re going to need every minute of it, so you’d better go now. All the rest of you, you’re free to go as well. You have five minutes to take what you can carry.”

  For a moment they all seemed too bewildered to say anything. Maleski frowned, then laughed.

  “The hell you say. This building is private property.”

  This time Cirocco laughed.

  “Just what planet do you think you’re living on, you idiot? Hornpipe, shoot this guy in the knee.”

  The gun had materialized in Hornpipe’s hand when Cirocco said “shoot,” and by the time she said “knee” the bullet was already coming out the other side of Maleski’s leg.

  As Maleski fell, and for a few seconds after he hit the floor, there was a flurry of noise and activity. None of the men who survived it were ever able to recount a sequence of events, except to note that a lot of men stepped forward and neat holes appeared perfectly centered in their foreheads and they fell down and did not move. The rest, some twenty men, stood very, very still, except for Maleski, who was howling and thrashing and ordering his men to kill the goddamn sons of bitches. But each Titanide held a gun in each hand, and most of the men were getting excellent views down the wide barrels. Finally Maleski stopped cursing and just lay there, breathing hard.

  “Okay,” he finally managed to croak. “Okay, you win. We’ll get out.” He rolled over heavily.

  He was really quite good. The knife was concealed in his sleeve. He got it out as he rolled over, and his arm flicked it with the precision of long practice. It flashed in the air…and Cirocco reached out and caught it. She just grabbed it, holding it with the point about six inches from her throat, where it was supposed to have been buried. Maleski stared as she flipped it up and got a new grip, and then it flashed again and he screamed as it buried itself up to the hilt in the torn flesh that had been his knee. A man standing to Maleski’s left crumpled to the floor in a dead faint.

  “Rocky,” Cirocco said, “tie a tourniquet around his thigh. Then throw him out. You men, drop your weapons where you stand and walk slowly away from them. All your weapons. Then strip. Carry one pair of trousers to the door and hand them to Valiha—the yellow Titanide. If she finds a weapon in them she will break your neck. Otherwise, you can put them on and leave. You have four minutes left.”

  It didn’t even take one minute. They were all feverishly anxious to leave, and no one tried to cheat.

  “Tell your friends what happened here,” she called to them, as her own people started arriving.

  There were humans and Titanides in her crew. The Titanides were all calm, well-versed in their jobs. Most of the humans were nervous, having been drafted only hours before. There were Free Females among them, and Vigilantes, and others from other communities.

  A desk was set up, and Cirocco took her place behind it as the lights were being arranged. She was suffering some reaction, both from the fight and from what she had done to Maleski—and from the close call. She felt she could do that knife trick six times out of ten, but that wasn’t nearly enough. She couldn’t let it get that close again.

  But most of her nervousness was stage fright. Apparently, it wasn’t something one could outgrow. She had suffered from it since childhood.

  Two men from the Vigilantes who had worked in mass communications before the War were setting up cables and a tripod and a small camera. The lights came blazing on, and Cirocco blinked. A microphone was set before her.

  “All this stuff must be a century old,” one of the technicians grumbled.

  “Just make it work for an hour,” Cirocco told him. He didn’t seem to be listening, but was studying her face from several angles. He reached out tentatively toward her forehead, and she backed away, alarmed.

  “You really should have something there,” he said. “There’s a bad glare.”

  “Have what there?”

  “Make-up.”

  “Is that really necessary?”

  “Ms. Jones, you said you wanted a media consultant. I’m just telling you how I’d do this if I were running the show.”

  Cirocco sighed, and nodded. One of the Titanides had some cream that the man seemed satisfied with. He smeared her face with the greasy stuff.

  “Picture’s pretty good,” the other man announced. “I don’t know how long this tube will last, though.”

  “Then we’d best get to it,” said the director. He picked up the mike and spoke into it. “Citizens of Bellinzona,” he said, and was drowned out by a high feedback whine. The other man adjusted some knobs, and the man spoke again. This time it was clear. Cirocco could hear the words echoing off the hills outside.

  “Citizens of Bellinzona,” the director said again. “We have an important announcement from Cirocco Jones, the new Mayor of Bellinzona.”

  A Free Female was at the window, looking up.

  “The picture’s there!” she shouted.

  Cirocco cleared her throat nervou
sly, fought an impulse to smile brightly that had to have come from her NASA press conference days, a million years ago, and spoke.

  “Citizens of Bellinzona. My name is Cirocco Jones. Many of you have heard of me; I was one of the first humans in Gaea, and for a time I was designated by Gaea to be her Wizard. Twenty years ago, I was fired from that job.

  “It is important that you understand that, while Gaea fired me, the Titanides never accepted it. Every one of them will follow my orders. I have never taken full advantage of this fact. I am doing so now, and the results will change all your lives.

  “As of this moment, you are all, as I said, ‘Citizens of Bellinzona.’ You’ll be wondering what that entails. Essentially, it means you’ll all take my orders. I have plans for democracy later, but as of now, you’d better do what I tell you.

  “There are now some thousands of Titanides in your city. Each of them has been briefed on the new rules. Think of them as police. To underestimate their strength or their quickness would be a bad mistake.

  “Since you are going to be living by rules, I’ll give you some now. More will follow, after we have this thing going.

  “Murder is not going to be tolerated.

  “Slavery is prohibited. All human beings now in a state of slavery are freed. All humans who believe they own other humans had better free them at once. This includes any practice which may, through custom, deprive any other human of liberty. If you’re in doubt—if, for instance, you are muslim and believe you own your wife—you had better ask a Titanide. There is a ten-hour amnesty for this purpose.

  “Human meat will no longer be sold. Any human consorting with an Iron Master will be shot on sight.

  “There is no private property. You may continue to sleep where you have been sleeping, but do not think you own anything but the clothes you wear.

  “There shall be no edged weapons allowed in human hands for at least four decarevs. Surrender those weapons to any Titanide during the amnesty. As quickly as possible, I shall be returning the police function to humans. In the meantime, possession of a sword or a knife is a capital offense. I recognize the hardship this will pose to you who use knives for other purposes, but, I emphasize, you will be shot dead if you keep your knives.