by John Varley
Then she was standing in a huge cave, with no memory of how she had come to be there. The cave stretched farther than she could see. She walked with Gaby beside the dry-docked, dormant, spidery forms of spaceships.
“I started saving these when the war started,” Gaby said. “Captains would show up and refuse to go back to the war. They scuttled their ships. I brought them here and saved them.”
There were hundreds of them. They looked very strange sitting there.
“It looks so…forlorn,” Cirocco said.
“Most of the damage is easily fixable,” Gaby assured her.
“I suppose. But…they weren’t meant to be here. You know what it looks like? Jellyfish tossed up on the beach.”
Gaby looked out over the silent armada and nodded. Spaceships did have a lot in common with the soft-bodied anatomical fantasies achieved by the more exotic marine invertebrates.
“You brought them here, you said. Not Gaea.”
“I did. I thought they might come in handy one day. I brought a lot of other stuff, too, when I realized Gaea wanted the war to go on. Take a look over here.” Gaby gently turned Cirocco…
…and the darkness closed in again. When it lifted, Cirocco realized they were in a different place entirely.
“How did you do that?”
“Honey, I could never possibly explain how. Just accept that I can.”
Cirocco thought about it. She felt a little fuzzy-headed, something like being drunk, something like dreaming. It was an accepting state of mind.
“Okay,” she said, placidly.
They were in an endless tunnel. It was perfectly round, seemed absolutely straight, and pulsed with multi-colored light.
“This isn’t real time you’re seeing,” Gaby explained.
“I’m dreaming, right?”
“Something like that. This is The Alchemist’s Ring. It’s a four-thousand-kilometer circular colliding-beam atom smasher…and it uses some other techniques that soup it up way beyond anything we ever built on Earth. This is where Gaea makes heavy metals—mostly gold, lately. Before that, she stockpiled a lot of plutonium. I just wanted to show it to you.”
Cirocco stared at the lights. They moved along the tunnel, like red-hot, yellow-hot, and white-hot bumblebees. Not very fast at all.
Not real time, Gaby had said. The lights had to be atomic nuclei, and they had to be pushing the speed of light. It’s all a visual aid, she thought. Not a dream, but something like it. More like a film.
“There’s no air in here, is there?”
“No, of course not. Does that bother you?”
Cirocco shook her head.
“Okay, take a look over here…”
…and she turned again….
This time Cirocco held her head and it was a little easier. She never closed her eyes, but it didn’t do her any good. She was in another cave, much smaller than the spaceship hangar.
“It’s very close to absolute zero in here. These are frozen samples from several hundred thousand Earth animal and plant species. Gaea collected some of them. I ordered others, just before the war started. I hope they might come in useful some day, like the ships. Now, take one step up….”
Cirocco did, and almost lost her balance. Gaby’s hand steadied her, and her feet came down on the familiar black sand. She took a deep breath, one she could believe in.
“I don’t like to go that way,” she complained.
“Okay. But I have some other things to show you. You still want to go?”
“Yes.”
“Then hold my hand and don’t be afraid.”
Cirocco did, and they rose into the air.
***
Cirocco had flown before, many times, in dreams. There were two ways of going about it, possibly having to do with some psychological weather report. Low visibility in the cerebrum; clear air in the medulla. One way was to sit and float, like on a Persian magic carpet. That way one could drift slowly over the world. The other was to swoop and soar—but never with quite the amount of control one had in an airplane.
This flying was like the second way, but very precise. She flew with her arms extended—holding Gaby’s hand at first, but later letting go and flying on her own—and her feet together, legs outstretched.
It gave her a giddy feeling; it was wonderful. By sweeping her arms backward, she could go faster. The palms of her hands functioned as ailerons for banking and turning. Various movements of her feet put her into a climb or a dive. She experimented with it, doing some tight turns and loops. Something was very different from “normal” dream flying, and she quickly realized it was the kinesthetic sense. Though her vision was still oddly hazy and her mind very slightly drugged, she could smell and taste the air, feel it rushing over her body, and—most important of all—she had mass and inertia. She pulled gees at the bottom of her loops, having to strain to hold her arms out rigid, feeling the flesh of her cheeks and thighs and breasts pulled down.
She glanced over at Gaby, who was flying in the same way.
“Very nice,” she said.
“I thought you’d like it. But we’re running out of time. Follow me.”
Gaby turned and started climbing over the dark terrain of Dione. Cirocco did as she had been told, falling in behind, finding herself accelerating without having intended to do so. She folded her arms back against her side, and the two of them streaked upward. This wasn’t like flying in an airplane. There was no sense of strain, no laboring engines. They just went straight up, like rockets. Soon they were entering the mouth of the Dione Spoke. Cirocco no longer felt any air resistance, though they must have been moving hundreds of miles per hour. Experimentally, she extended her arms, and felt no wind. Turning her hands or feet did nothing. She just followed Gaby.
***
The Dione Spoke, like all of the six spokes of the great wheel, was oval in cross-section, about a hundred kilometers along one axis and fifty along the other. It joined the rim in a vast, bell-shaped flare of tissue that gradually became the arched rim-roof. At the top of the bell was a sphincter that could be completely closed. At the other end, near the hub, was another sphincter. By opening or closing these valves and by flexing the three-hundred-kilometer-high spoke walls, Gaea pumped air from one region to another, heating or cooling it as needed.
Except for the Oceanus Spoke, which was barren, the interiors of these towering cylinders supported life in abundance. Huge trees grew horizontally from the vertical walls. Complex eco-systems flourished in the labyrinth branches, in hollows of the trees, and in the walls of the spoke itself.
There were dozens of species of angel in Gaea, most of them too dissimilar to inter-breed. The Dione Spoke supported three species—or Flights, as they called themselves. At the top, where gravity was almost nonexistent, were the spidery Air Flight: dwarves among angels, with translucent wings and skin, ephemeral, not too bright, more like bats than birds. They seldom landed anywhere except to lay eggs, which they abandoned to fate. They lived on a diet of leaves.
The middle part of the spoke belonged to the Dione Eagles, related to Eagle Flights in Rhea, Phoebe, and Cronus. Eagles did not form communities. In fact, when two Eagles met there was likely to be a bloody fight. Their young were born live, in mid-air, and had to learn to fly on the long fall to the rim. Many of them did.
But the Airs and the Eagles were in the minority. Most Gaean angels nested and nurtured their young. There were a lot of different ways to go about it. One species in Thea had three sexes: cocks, hens, and neuters. The hens were flightless and huge, the cocks small and savage. The neuters were the only intelligent ones, and they cared for the young, which were born alive.
The Dione Supra Flight—badly named, in Cirocco’s opinion, as their territory was at the bottom of the spoke—were peaceful, community-oriented beings. They built big beehive-shaped nests in the trees out of branches, mud, and their own dried feces, which contained a bonding agent. As many as a thousand Supras might live in one nest. Their
females gave birth to things called placentoids, a sort of mammalian egg containing an embryo which had to be attached to the living flesh of Gaea. In this way the females never grew too pregnant to fly and the young could grow quite large before being detached from the womb. Like humans, Supra infants were helpless for a long time. They learned to fly in six or seven years.
Cirocco liked the Supras. They were more approachable than most angels, had even been known to come trading in Bellinzona. They used tools more than most angels did. Cirocco knew it was illogical and prejudiced—it was not the fault of the Eagles that they were so heartless, it was simply their biology—but she couldn’t help it. Over the years she had had many Supra friends.
Like most angels, Supras looked like very thin humans with giant chests. Their bodies were black and shiny. Their knees bent in either direction, and their feet were bird-claws. Their wings were mounted low on the back, below the shoulderblades. When folded, the wing “elbow” joints towered over their heads, and the tips of the long primary feathers trailed far below their feet.
Angels had one thing in common with Titanides. Both were relatively new creations, made by Gaea as variations on the human theme. Even with hollow bones, huge wings, giant muscles, and no fat at all, a flying human had taxed Gaea’s design capability to the limit. The larger angels could lift little more than their own weight at the rim. They preferred to live in the lower-gravity regions of the spokes.
In addition to their nesting habits, two other things set the Supras apart. One was their coloration. Females had green wing feathers and males had red. The caudal empennage of both sexes was black, except in mating season, when the females grew peacock fans and put on glorious displays. They had no other external sexual differentiation.
And they didn’t have names. Their language did not contain first-person singular pronouns. “We” was as near as they could come to it, and yet they were not communal minds. They existed as individuals.
This made communication with them somewhat difficult. But it was worth the effort.
***
The Supras did not seem at all startled to see Gaby and Cirocco fly up to the nest and land, light as a feather, near the big opening in the top. It was raining in the spoke, and the smiler-hide cover had been pulled across to keep the water out. Gaby ducked under it and Cirocco followed her into darkness.
Oddest damn dream, she thought. One minute she could fly, but as soon as she set down on the nest she was back to her normally awkward method of blundering through the Supra nest.
A Supra staircase was a series of rods embedded on the adobe-like nest wall. The angels grasped the rods with their feet; all Cirocco could do was hang on with both hands and try to pretend it was a ladder as she backed down it. In the same way, the Supra equivalent of a comfortable chair was a long horizontal pole. They perched on them effortlessly.
She and Gaby worked their way toward the back of the nest, which was built against the spoke wall. Dotted along the wall were Supra babies in little pockets of Gaea’s flesh. Some were no bigger than ostrich eggs, while others were as big as human infants and needed a lot of tending so they wouldn’t break their umbilical cords. Child care was done by all members of the flight, in rotation. Supras didn’t imprint on a particular mother or father.
The base of the placentoid rookery was the only spot in the nest with a spot level and wide enough to be used as a floor. Gaby and Cirocco went there and sat, cross-legged. Cirocco remembered she should have brought a gift. Anything would do—Supras loved bright things. It was a polite way to begin a visit. But she didn’t even have clothes.
Gaby didn’t, either, but with a magician’s flourish she opened her hand and produced an old plastic bicycle reflector that shifted colors when it was turned. The Supras loved it, passing it back and forth.
“It is a fabulous gift,” one of them said.
“Most luminiferous,” agreed another.
“Elegant and tricksy,” one suggested.
“We are most brilliantly aghast,” a fourth chimed in.
“It will be enshrined.”
They chattered their appreciation for some time, and when Cirocco and Gaby could get a word in, they praised the beauty, wit, poise, wisdom, and elegant flight characteristics of their hosts in the most extravagant terms. They applauded the rookery, nest, branch, wing, squadron, and Flight of the inestimable Supras. One rutting female was so moved she spread her tail feathers in sexual display. Though Cirocco could barely see it in the dimness, she joined the others in praising the female’s fertility and prowess in terms so explicit they might have made a whore blush.
“Would you take some…food?” one of them asked. The others looked away and kept a modest silence. It was a new thing for the Supras, something they were cautiously trying out in their dealings with humans. By custom, food was never asked for or offered outside of one’s own nest. Food would not be refused a starving Supra from another nest, but most Supras would rather die than ask.
The invitation had been made by the lowest-status individual of the nest, a male who was old, scrawny, and probably near death.
“Couldn’t possibly,” Cirocco said, lightly, to another individual.
“Stuffed, we’re absolutely stuffed,” Gaby agreed.
“Flight would be impossible with another gram,” Cirocco pointed out.
“Fat is perilous.”
“Abstinence is a virtue.”
They never looked at the one who had asked, thus spreading the load of embarrassment as equally as possible, which was the polite thing to do. The Supras clucked approvingly, and praised the prosperity of their guests.
Suddenly Cirocco remembered encountering that lone Supra in the air over Iapetus, while the deathangel was flying away with Adam.
“So, why have we come here to this nest?” Cirocco asked, addressing the group of angels, not Gaby, and inverting her question in a way calculated to cause the least confusion to the Supras.
“Yes, a most interesting thing,” one said.
“Why have they come, why have they come?”
“One is of air, one is of dream.”
“Dreams in the nest, how very strange.”
“The one who burns. Why did they come?”
Gaby cleared her throat, and all looked at her.
“We have come for the same reason we came in the past,” she said. “To prosecute the case against Gaea, and to further the preparations for war against her and all her estates and nests.”
“Exactly!” Cirocco, who couldn’t have been more confused, chimed in. “That is precisely our intention. To…engage in most brilliant stratagems and tacticalities.”
“Most precise!” one angel said, enthusiastically.
“Oh, rue the day!”
“The nest of Gaea will be laid low.”
“Mumble,” said one angel, which is what they said when they had nothing to say but didn’t want to be left out of the conversation.
“Mumble,” another agreed.
It was easy to see the Dione Supras as amiable nitwits, idiot savants with large and fractured vocabularies. They were nothing of the kind. The English language was a delight to them, so illogical and fertile and well-suited to their natural desire to confuse, obfuscate, and generally side-step clear meaning whenever possible.
“Quite violent,” Gaby suggested.
“Oh, so very violent. Much torment.”
“And cautious, extremely cautious.”
“The tactics,” one said. “Such a lexicon of tactics.” The way he said it, Cirocco knew it was a question that might translate as How do we fight her?
Gaby made that same tricky pass with her hands. Nothing up her sleeve, Cirocco decided. For a moment she knew how others must feel when she worked her own meager magics.
She produced a red stick that was unmistakably dynamite—that was, in fact, labeled DYNAMITE: Product of Bellinzona. The angels fell silent when they looked at it. Cirocco took it and turned it around in her hands. The ange
ls sighed in unison.
“Where did you get this?” Cirocco asked, momentarily forgetting the others. “There’s nothing like this in Bellinzona.”
“That’s because you won’t make it for another kilorev,” Gaby said.
“Ephemera!” a Supra crowed. “It’s ephemera!”
“An insubstantial nullity,” another opined.
“Not made yet? How farcical! We are keenly misinformed.”
“It doesn’t exist,” one summarized. “Like this Cirocco one.”
“Don’t quibble,” came an adjuration.
“Did you forget it’s a dream?” one reminded Cirocco.
“Dynamite! Dynamite! Dynamite!”
“There will be dynamite,” Gaby agreed. “When it comes time to fight Gaea, there will have been dynamite for some time.”
“Will have been! A truly stratospheric verb.”
“Most sincerely.”
“An…illusion?” a younger Supra said, with wrinkled brow, still staring at the dynamite in Gaby’s hand.
“A will-o-the-wisp,” one explained.
“A figurehead! A moonshine of farragoes, a pre-pentimentoized, infra-extinct, fleeting mockery! A vacuity!” shouted another, effectively shutting off debate.
They stared at it again, in a feather-rustling quiet. Gaby made it vanish back to where it had come from—the future, Cirocco presumed.
“Ah,” one of them sighed, at last.
“Indeed,” affirmed another. “My goodness, the things we will do with such a lump of power!” he asked.
“Yes, you will,” Gaby agreed. “And right now, you’re going to tell us all about it.”
Which Gaby did, at great length.
***
When she was through, there was the customary offer of sex. Both Cirocco and Gaby accepted, which was the polite thing to do.
They went through the courting ritual, which had always reminded Cirocco of a square dance, while the others sang and clapped in rhythm. Cirocco’s partner was a sterling specimen of the species. His bright red wings enfolded her warmly as the act was “consummated.”
