by John Varley
He needed adults around. What he had was a sharp, intelligent, delightful two-year-old…and Amparo, and Sushi. Other household help came and went, and never talked to Chris. He assumed they were under orders from Gaea to treat him as the man-who-isn’t-there. Only Amparo and Sushi were constant.
Both had been wet-nurses when Chris arrived. Amparo seemed to be an intelligent woman, but she had no English, and no urge to learn any. Chris had picked up enough rag-tag Spanish to communicate with her, but it would never be very satisfactory.
As for Sushi…
He didn’t know if that was really her name. She was an idiot. She might have been a super-genius before coming to Gaea, but Gaea had done something to her. The mark was on her forehead. It was a swelling below the skin in the shape of an inverted cross. When Chris had finally realized that Sushi’s mind was really as blank as her eyes, he had touched the swelling one day, and been astonished to see her fall on the floor and writhe as if in the throes of a seizure. Upon more careful examination—and queasy experimentation—he had learned it was not a seizure. It was the old pleasure principle. Gaea had put something like Snitch in Sushi’s head, and wired it into her pleasure center. Now she would do anything for a jolt. Touching it herself did no good. Someone else had to. She seemed to need it about three times a day. If she didn’t get it from Chris, she would nuzzle up to Adam, who thought it was very funny when Sushi writhed on the floor and moaned and masturbated.
So Chris had to keep Sushi content several times a day.
Luckily, he could drink five or six beers to settle down afterward.
They called her Sushi for a very simple reason. She subsisted on a diet of raw fish. The fish didn’t have to be fresh. They didn’t even have to be scaled, and the heads didn’t bother her.
Her breath was horrible.
It took Chris some time to put it together. Eating the fish was a conditioned reflex. Eat a fish, get a jolt. Before long, she wouldn’t eat anything else.
The television was fifty percent interactive these days. And now he was appearing in it, though he had never gone before Gaea’s cameras. At first, like many things in Tara, it had seemed harmless. He had first appeared in an Abbott and Costello feature. He had been substituted for Costello. Subtle changes had been made in him. He was short and dumpy, but it was definitely him. His voice was a blend of his real voice and the voice of Costello. Adam had loved it. Even Chris found himself grinning from time to time. Costello was a dunce, no question, but he was an amiable one. It could have been worse.
It got worse.
Next it was Laurel and Hardy. Gaea was Ollie, and Chris was Stan. Chris studied the movies carefully, weighing the pro’s and con’s. The two comedians had an affection for each other. That worried him. At first glance Stan seemed an idiot, but it was actually more complex than that. And Ollie was a blowhard, took a great many of the pratfalls…but in the end was the dominant personality. Again, Gaea was working up to something.
Lately he had begun to appear in some questionable roles. Not the villain per se, but someone rather unsavory. In one role, from a movie whose title he couldn’t remember, he saw himself beating Gaea. And he saw that it disturbed Adam, though he wouldn’t talk about it. Adam drew a line between fantasy and reality…but it was a fuzzy line. Gaea was that amazing, funny, huge, and harmless lady who came to the third floor window of Tara and handed him pretty toys. Why would Chris be beating her up? The plot wasn’t important, nor was the fact that Chris, at just over seven feet tall, was hardly a worthy opponent for the fifty-foot Monroe.
He was now sure he would lose, in the long run. It was all very well to be set up as Adam’s conscience, but television had always had a louder voice than a child’s conscience—which didn’t even exist until someone nurtured it. Chris wasn’t being given a chance.
A year had gone by. Cirocco had said it might be as long as two years before she came again.
He was pretty sure it would be too late by then.
It would have cheered him considerably to know Cirocco and her army were already on the march to Hyperion. But Gaea had not seen fit to tell him, and he had no other way of knowing. He might have gotten a clue from Gaean television. Adam was asleep, and Chris was sitting slumped in front of a set. The movie was the 1995 version of Napoleon, un-altered, and on the screen vast armies marched toward Waterloo.
But by then Chris was too drunk to notice.
Five
The second day’s march saw even more soldiers pass out than on the previous trek, though this one was shorter.
Cirocco had expected that, too. It probably looked like an easy discharge. She told her medics to examine everyone carefully and send back only the most serious cases. Those turned out to be sixteen in number. Everyone else shouldered packs when camp was broken and marched on into Iapetus.
They crossed the two small, nameless rivers that flowed south from the Tyche Mountains into the great sea of Pontus that dominated Iapetus. The bridges were in good repair. The terrain was easy. Iapetus, an enemy of Gaea, would not hinder their progress through his domain, Cirocco knew. Their problems would begin in Cronus.
For several “days” the army camped by the lovely sea. The weather held clear and warm. Cirocco gradually picked up the pace as the soldiers grew more accustomed to the rhythm of the march. But she did not push it too hard. She wanted them tough, not exhausted, when they reached the hard parts.
***
At the confluence of Pluto and Ophion, very near the border of Cronus, Cirocco had her Generals pick the garrison of her extreme eastern line of defense. This time she did not go for the weak ones. She wanted veterans, the toughest men and women she could find. They would set up a fort just west of the Pluto ford, and north of Ophion. She left them Titanide canoes for crossing the big river. They were to patrol north and south, traveling light and fast. Their position was not defensible against a determined attack, but that was not the point. It was her hope that, if attacked, the troops could send messengers back to Bellinzona and fight a delaying, guerilla action, giving the city as much time as possible to prepare for the assault.
All this depressed her. Almost everything she had done in Iapetus was preparation for defeat. If the Bellinzona Air Force still existed, this outpost of its swift messengers would be superfluous. Even the slowest Dragonfly could get to Bellinzona from here in twenty minutes and sound the alarm.
But the Air Force might not make it through Cronus.
And of course, if her army was victorious in the coming fight, no one would be returning from Hyperion but her own soldiers and the refugees and prisoners of war from Pandemonium.
But she owed the city every precaution she could think of. She had conned it into producing not just a bunch of foot soldiers, but a dedicated and motivated fighting force.
She knew that, if it came to it, these troops would fight.
***
The Circum-Gaea had crossed the Ophion at a point just within the invisible boundary between Iapetus and Cronus.
Back when Gaby was building the Highway, Ophion crossings were her biggest challenges. The river was very broad and fairly deep in the flatlands, and in those places where it ran swift, it did so through unforgiving mountains. So she had kept the crossings to a minimum.
But some had been necessary. Cronus was a good example. There was no really easy way through Cronus, but the northern route was five times as hard as the southern. So a big bridge had been necessary.
Cirocco’s engineers, who had scouted the route as far as Mnemosyne and done what repairs were feasible to the roadway and bridges in Iapetus and, to a lesser extent, in Cronus, had reported that the Ophion Bridge was hopeless. The entire south end had collapsed. It had taken Gaby’s crews five years to build it, almost seventy years ago. There was no way it could be repaired in time for the march to Pandemonium.
So they encamped on the northern shore and hundreds of rafts were built. This was hard and slow work, as that part of Cronus had few trees l
arge enough to provide the lumber.
Cirocco and the Generals scanned the skies nervously throughout this operation. She expected an attack to come in Cronus or Hyperion—possibly in both places, if the first battle was not decisive. And the army, divided by the river and strung out on vulnerable barges, were sitting ducks during the Ophion crossing.
She had explained her reasoning to Conal, his pilots, and the Generals shortly before the beginning of the campaign. Using a clock-face analogy she had mapped the twelve regions of Gaea in a great circle, starting with Crius at twelve o’clock.
“That puts Hyperion, our destination, here, at two o’clock,” she had said, writing in the name. “The central Hyperion cable is the base for the Second Fighter/Bomber Wing of the Gaean Air Force. Next door, at three, is Oceanus. There is no Third wing; Gaea has no control in Oceanus.” She put a large X by the name of Oceanus.
“The Fourth, based in Mnemosyne, was wiped out by an explosion just over a year ago. My sources tell me it has not been replaced.” She made another X. “The Sixth, from Iapetus, attacked Bellinzona and was wiped out. There is no Seventh, in Dione, for the same reasons that apply to Oceanus. The next viable unit is the Eighth, here in Metis.” She made the two more X’s, and stepped back to admire her work.
“You can see that Cronus exists in the middle of a large gap in Gaea’s air power. From Metis, here at eight o’clock, all the way around to Hyperion, at two, there are seven fully armed bomber wings. Metis is being watched closely. If an attack originates from there, we’ll get some warning over the radio. The same with Hyperion. But if the Fifth drops down on us while we’re in Cronus, we’ll have very little warning.
“I’ve worked out a couple possible scenarios. Say the Metis Eighth starts its attack. It takes them some time to get here, and we get some warning. The more logical thing for Gaea to do, I would think, is to begin with the Cronus wing to surprise us and pin us down. At the same time, the Eighth or the Second, or both, take off and get here in time to relieve the Fifth.
“The second option is to let us go right through Cronus. Frankly, I’d rather be attacked here. Because if Gaea waits until we get to Hyperion, she can bring in all these groups—Phoebe, Crius, Rhea, Hyperion, Cronus…maybe even Tethys, pretty much simultaneously and with little or no warning.”
Everyone had studied Cirocco’s big Gaean clock solemnly. Ideas had been advanced, some of them useful. The consensus was that the smart thing for Gaea to do was wait until they were in Hyperion and bring her full strength to bear.
Cirocco agreed…and thought glumly that Gaea would probably do just the opposite. All logic aside, Cirocco dreaded an attack in the hostile night of Cronus.
Six
The Luftmorder in Tethys did not know he was the flugelfuhrer of the Tenth Fighter/Bomber Wing of the Gaean Air Force. It was not a designation given to him by Gaea. He only knew he was the leader of the squadron. He had a vague awareness there were other squadrons, but it was of no importance to him. His mission was well-defined—and he didn’t work well with other Luftmorders. It was not in his nature to do so. He was the flugelfuhrer.
Orders had been coming through. They would involve re-fueling at bases under the command of other Luftmorders. The thought was distasteful to him, but Orders were Orders.
He knew there was an army, now marching through Cronus.
He knew that, at some point, Orders would come telling him to attack that army.
He knew there were enemies in the sky. This did not frighten him.
It all made him feel warm and contented.
About the only nuisance in his life were all the angels that had been coming around lately.
They flew quite close, chittering curiously. Green ones and red ones. He was contemptuous of them. Their jelly-bodies would make amusing targets for his red-eyes and sidewinders…but there were no Orders. He was contemptuous of the angels. They had so little power. They were so inefficient as flying machines.
They had begun building nests that hung, as he did, from the cable. There were three of them below him, great bulging structures that seemed to be made of mud and wattle. He considered them eyesores.
There had been four. He had loosed a red-eye at one, to test its strength. It had come apart like rice paper. The red and green feathers that drifted out of it and the alarmed squawks of the survivors had amused him.
But he had tried no more shots.
He awaited his mission.
Seven
Conal had wanted to lead an attack on the base in Cronus. He had argued his point long and well, until all Cirocco could do was let him in on her top secret plan, the one that might or might not work. There was just no other way Conal was going to sit still while Robin—and the rest of his friends, of course—marched helplessly under those bloodthirsty monsters perched on that loathsome cable.
When he heard the plan he agreed, reluctantly. It still put Robin in danger, but there was no way to get completely around that.
“It has to be this way, Conal,” Cirocco said. “I suspect an attack on the Cronus base will bring in reinforcements from all around the wheel, before we’ve had a chance to pull our surprise. If enough of them show up, you and your people could be wiped out. Then we’ll be vulnerable to air attack all the way to Hyperion.”
So Conal sat at his base now, well-concealed in the northern highlands of Iapetus, and brooded. It seemed an eternity. He didn’t sleep well. He never went more than two hundred meters from his plane, which was always fueled and ready.
The other pilots played cards, told jokes, and generally tried to pass the time. These were mostly men and women who had flown military aircraft back on Earth. Conal didn’t have much in common with them. College kids, most of them. They looked down on him, resented the fact Cirocco had placed him in command…but admired his skills in aviation. He was a natural, they said. That was true, but the biggest factor that made them listen to him was that he had more air time in Gaea than all the rest of them put together. He knew the special conditions of Gaea, knew what the tough little planes could endure in the high pressure and low gravity, understood the coriolis storms that so confused many of the other pilots.
They tolerated him, and learned from him.
He sat by the radio every waking hour.
The base itself maintained radio silence. It was their hope that Gaea did not know its location, and their suspicion that the buzz bombs could hear radio communications. So they listened to the forward observers in Metis, and to the terse communications from the advancing army.
At last the alert came.
“Bandits at eight o’clock,” said the voice on the radio. “…six, seven…there’s the eighth, nine…and Big Daddy makes ten.”
The crews scrambled. Conal was already in the air when the rest of the message came.
“They’re dropping down to the deck. Can’t see them anymore. Station one signing off. Come in station two, station three.”
Station one was in the southern highlands of Metis. The people there had the biggest telescope in Gaea—requisitioned, as so many other high-tech things had been, from Chris’s improbable basements—and it was constantly trained on the Metis central cable.
Two and three were to the east and west of the cable. No matter which direction the Eighth went, Conal would know soon. He expected them to turn east, toward Bellinzona and the army; still, it was always possible this was a diversion or a trick.
But he was pretty sure of one thing. The Fifth Wing was dropping down toward Cronus, and they didn’t have far to go.
“Station three reporting. We have all ten bandits in sight. Heading…due east, within the limits of our radar.”
Three squadrons of five planes had scrambled at the initial alarm. Conal didn’t like to think of how few planes were in reserve.
“This is the Big Canuck,” Conal said. “Squad Leader Three, turn east and execute plan three.”
“Roger, Canuck.”
“And good luck to you.”
“Roger,” came the laconic reply. They would need it, Conal knew. The Eighth would head due east for as long as possible before disclosing their final destination by either turning sharp left for Bellinzona, or continuing toward Cronus and the army. Either way, the Third Squadron would take them on, outnumbered two to one.
Conal watched the five planes peel off, neat and sweet as an air show. He wished that was all it was.
They had been heading due south. Now he gave the order to turn to the east. Squads one and two would angle away from each other and then converge over the army from the north and south.
Just as they were completing the turn his radio gave him the message he had been dreading.
“This is Rocky Road. We are under attack from the air. No ground troops reported. Attackers are believed to be the Cronus Fifth, but unable to confirm at this time.” There was the sound of an explosion. “Hurry up, you guys! We’re getting chewed to pieces out here!”
***
At the first word from station one, the army executed their defense plan, meager as it was.
They had pushed on into Cronus from Ophion, over gently rolling land that left them hideously exposed from the air. They were moving into a narrowing neck of grassland that would eventually be squeezed out by the jungle to the south, and the sea of Hestia to the north.
There was no offensive action open to them. Nothing in the arsenal had any hope of hitting a buzz bomb. Attempts had been made to convert the Air Force’s weaponry to ground-launched control, and they had been dismal failures. Cirocco had given it up, knowing she had already wasted too much of the Air Force’s dwindling supplies in her self-indulgent display over Pandemonium. She would pay for it now, and so would everyone around her.
Bellinzona had recently begun the manufacture of gunpowder and nitroglycerine. The army had gunpowder, in the form of big rockets, but almost all the nitro—in the form of dynamite—had been diverted to a destination Cirocco would not disclose, which infuriated the Generals. But even if they had access to dynamite it would not have made much difference in fighting off an aerial attack. The rockets and their warheads were useful only as diversions. It was hoped the red-eyes and sidewinders would be attracted to their heat.
