Demon (GAIA)

by John Varley

  ***

  Conal was ten meters beneath the Luftmorder.

  He felt like he could almost reach out and touch its great bulk. Red-eyes and sidewinders hung in clusters, squirming eagerly in the high wind.

  He saw the trailing edges of the great wings bend down and bite air, and had to move quickly getting his own flaps down or he would have shot out ahead of the monster.

  Slowing down. Getting ready for the bomb run. It would want to make it accurate, drop as many bombs as possible during its one and only pass. It probably knew there were no ground guns that could hurt it.

  Guns.

  Conal had been thinking about ramming. If the Luftmorder hadn’t slowed down, that would have been his only option.

  He looked up at the belly. There were sphincter-like puckerings all along it. He had wondered where the bombs came from. Might have known, he thought. That would certainly appeal to Gaea’s sense of humor.

  He blew his canopy. The wind hit him like a fist. But he and the creature were still slowing, and it got a little better. He dug in his flak jacket and came up with his flare pistol. The wind snatched the first shot and pushed it off to the Luftmorder’s left, just missing the fuselage. He had two more. Was the creature starting to turn? Never mind. He took aim again, giving it a lot of windage. He saw the flare embed itself in what was, surprisingly, soft flesh a few inches away from one of the sphincters. It was magnesium, and too bright to look at.

  Conal dropped and turned—and so did the Luftmorder. He heard a screaming sound, looked up, got a glimpse of a loathsome, unblinking eye protected behind a hard plastic-like material. The eye glared its hate at him, and the Luftmorder fell helplessly away, its innards on fire.

  Conal thought of all those bombs and kerosene fumes and missiles, and turned his plane as hard as he dared.

  Then it was like the Chinese New Year. Things were flying by all around him, trailing fire. The Dragonfly was buffeted by shock waves, rattled by shrapnel, for a moment engulfed in flames as a bomb went off close by.

  He was in clear air again.

  The Dragonfly shifted gears.

  It shifted again, and again, trying out one shape after another, slowing, beginning a slow roll to the left. Somewhere among its vast array of possible airframes there must be a configuration that would make further flight possible.

  But there wasn’t.

  Sorry, the brave little plane seemed to say, as it nosed over and dropped like a stone.

  Conal pushed himself away from it, popped his chute, and saw the Luftmorder hit the ground a hundred meters short of the army.

  And to think, he was the guy who had to be convinced that life never came out as well as it did in comic books.

  He looked up, and saw his chute had a big hole in it. In his present state of mind, it didn’t worry him in the slightest. This, too, I will survive, he told himself, with a big grin.

  And he did survive it.

  When he tried to get up he howled in pain. He had broken his ankle.

  “Never did get that parachute practice,” he told his rescuers.

  Eleven

  It might have gone differently.

  Gaea did not have much of a military staff, but she had a few, and when the first reports of the defeat of the Cronus and Metis air forces came in, one of the staff found her and informed her. He recommended moving other units up from the far side of the wheel, getting them in positions more favorable for a massed attack. It was generally agreed that was the best way to defeat the tricky little Bellinzona planes.

  Gaea was in a screening of War and Peace, the long, Mosfilm version. She agreed that was probably a good idea, and to ask her again when she got out and had a chance to think it over.

  When she came, blinking, out into the light again, she was informed that all her air bases had been destroyed and her air force was in the final stages of being obliterated.

  The news had produced a petulant frown on her huge face.

  “See if you can scare up that copy of Strategic Air Command,” she told her advisors, and went back into the screening room.

  Twelve

  The dead were counted, and gathered together. Just over six hundred humans, twenty-two Titanides. Their bodies were stacked with wood and set afire as all the Division stood at attention.

  The wounded were treated. There were fifteen hundred human and thirty-five Titanide injuries, many of them serious. Wagons were loaded with the less serious casualties, and moved out toward the city, with three Cohorts to guard them.

  So it was one Legion of dead and wounded, and half a Legion who would not go on to Hyperion. Similar numbers applied to the Titanides. It was, in effect, another decimation.

  It could have been much worse. Everyone kept telling themselves that. Nobody mentioned it while the pyre was burning, or as blinded, burned, and dismembered survivors were loaded into the wagons.

  In the remorseless logic of warfare, Cirocco knew it could not have been better if she had planned every second of it.

  The Air Force was much more badly hurt than the army, both in planes and pilots—but the Gaean Air Force no longer existed. The survivors were heroes. The tale of their fight would be told in many a Bellinzona taproom.

  The Army was damaged—but was probably stronger now than it had been before. It had been, in that horribly exact word, “blooded.” Soldiers had seen comrades die. They blamed Gaea for it, and they hated her. They had learned something about fear. They were veterans now.

  Her Generals knew better than to bring up any of these points. They remembered the ex-General who had talked of “acceptable losses.” But they all knew it was the truth, and they knew Cirocco realized it.

  It could hardly have been any better.

  Cirocco was so happy she wanted to throw up.

  The only thing that made it even marginally tolerable was that, so far, they had been fighting monsters. She could accept and approve of this hatred, this spirit of bloodthirsty vengeance that would have repulsed her so had it been directed at another group of humans. So far, they had been fighting true evil.

  But in Hyperion, at the gates of Pandemonium, it might all change. If Cirocco’s plans for Gaea did not work out, these people would soon be fighting other human beings.

  A very few of those people had chosen to be there, and were as evil as Gaea herself. But the great majority in Pandemonium had been tossed on its shores as randomly as the Bellinzonans had been washed up in Dione. It was the luck of the draw, and Gaea was using a stacked deck.

  Cirocco found herself raising silent prayers to Saint Gaby. Please don’t let me fail. Please don’t let this army—this army I raised only when you promised me Adam could be saved without human beings ever warring against each other—please don’t let them learn to love killing other humans.

  One other thing kept her going. If she died, and the army had to fight, it was better to die a bloody death than live in slavery.

  ***

  The army pressed on.

  As the road vanished into the jungle, the Titanide groups moved to the front.

  There had been grumbling about the Titanides. It wasn’t logical, but those things never are. No matter that the pinned-down humans had nothing to fight back with—had not really fought a battle at all. No matter that, had it been possible, the humans would have run from the field of battle, too. The plain fact was, the Titanides had left and the humans had stayed behind to soak up the bullets.

  The jungle changed all that.

  Progress was slow through the jungle. As the troops moved through a long, dark tunnel of foliage, they would pass groups of exhausted, bleeding Titanides sitting at the side of the trail. Sitting with them would be the Legion that had been marching in the point position. When the end of the line passed them, the Legion and the Titanides would fall in at the back. This happened about every two revs.

  When a Legion got to the front, they saw what was happening. The groups of fifty Titanides were hacking through the jungle with
the speed and energy of a large, continuous buzz saw. It was awesome to watch. Little creatures that bit and clawed attacked them. Poisonous plants scored their colorful hides. It didn’t take long to see that humans could have moved the army at about a tenth its present speed, and only with heavy casualties.

  It was bad enough in the middle of the column, with things jumping out of the underbrush all the time. The troops got very jittery. Some just died, for no reason anyone could see, victims of contact poisons.

  When they camped, the jungle closed in. Creatures better suited to drugged nightmare than reality came blundering through the darkness and briefly into the light, fighting off four or five Titanides.

  They had to camp twice in the jungle. Nobody slept much.

  There was another constant tension. Word had come down that an attack in force might be made against them while they were in Cronus, who was an ally of Gaea. Nobody knew the nature of the possible enemies, but from what they had seen, it would be awful.

  But for some reason, Cronus did not attack. The army came out the other end and breathed a sigh of relief—all but fifty-two Titanides and sixteen humans who would never breathe again.

  ***

  They made a more elaborate camp by the river Ophion, on the verge of the great desert of Mnemosyne, not too far from where the river plunged underground and ran for two hundred kilometers before emerging.

  Cirocco let them rest, recover from the jungle, and gather strength for the desert crossing. Football games were organized. Men and women soldiers retired to the conjugal tents and forgot about fear for a while.

  Every available water container was topped off. There would be no oasis, no spring, no water of any kind until they reached the snows of Oceanus.

  Thirteen

  There was a universal mystic dread of the sandworm.

  Many a tale had been told of it, though of the humans there only Cirocco had ever seen it.

  It was ten kilometers long and had a mouth two hundred meters wide, some said. It thirsted for human blood, according to others. It liked to stay under the sand, where it could move faster than a Titanide could run, then come bursting to the surface to devour whole armies.

  Well…sort of.

  A lot of the tale-tellers were remembering the beast who had first appeared in a movie long ago—one of Gaea’s favorites. She had liked it so much she had built the beast, and let it loose in Mnemosyne, which, according to Titanide legend, had once been the Jewel of the Wheel.

  The truth was a lot more, and a lot less.

  They passed one great loop of the worm midway through their crossing. The worm was three hundred kilometers long and four kilometers in diameter. It preferred to stay below the surface, but where the bedrock was less than four kilometers down it had no choice, so loops of it were visible far into the distance. It was gradually crunching the rock into finer and finer sand, and somehow living on the minerals it ingested.

  As to its speed…

  Three hundred kilometers of sand creates a great deal of friction. The sandworm was made of huge ring-segments, each about a hundred meters long. What happened was, one of the visible segments would hitch itself forward six or seven meters, then the next one in line would pull itself back up against the first, then the next, and so on down. Two or three minutes later the segments would hitch along another six or seven meters.

  The relief of seeing it, awesome as it was and so utterly harmless, was so great that a fad developed which Cirocco did nothing to stop. The army began covering it with graffiti.

  As each Legion passed the two or three kilometers of visible worm, their commanders gave them a short break, and they crowded around to write on the biggest damn living wall any of them had ever seen, and to laugh at the messages left by those who had gone before. Names and hometowns were sentimental favorites. “Marian Pappadapolis, Djakarta,” “Carl Kingsley, Buenos Aires.” “Fahd Fong, the GREAT Texas Free State!”

  You could carve the surprisingly soft hide of the thing with sword or sheath-knife; it didn’t give a damn.

  There was poetry: “Those who write on a sandworm’s balls…”

  Urgent messages: “Sammy, call home!”

  Advertising: “For a good time, see George, Fifth Legion, Tent Twelve.”

  Criticism: “Sonja Kolskaya gives great head!”

  Philosophy: “Screw the Army.”

  Helpful suggestions: “Blow it out your ass!”

  And patriotism: “DEATH TO GAEA!!!!!”

  That message was repeated up and down the length of the worm. There were touching eulogies to dead friends, homesick laments common to soldiers everywhere. Even a bit of history: “Kilroy Was Here.”

  It was a good thing the sandworm was there, Cirocco knew. The army was in need of some comic relief. The crossing of Mnemosyne was hellish.

  The temperature soared as high as one hundred and forty Fahrenheit, and seldom went below one-ten. The humidity was very low, which helped. Nothing else did. There was no relief of night, no cooling breeze.

  The strategies of dealing with Gaean desert were quite different from those useful on the Sahara. The sunshine was weak as diluted tea. You couldn’t even tan in it, much less burn. So hats were not worn, nor any sort of protective garment. Many preferred to strip right down to the buff so the sweat could evaporate at the maximum rate. Others wore the lightest possible garments to trap some of the water.

  Neither strategy was very good. They had enough water to make it across without rationing, so Cirocco made no decrees. The problem was saving one’s feet, and getting some sleep.

  Odd devices, carried all the way from Dione, were broken out and passed around. They looked like snowshoes, and were woven of tough reeds. It took some practice to walk in them, but it was worth the effort. All the heat came from below, up through the sand, which in some places was hot enough to cook on. The sand shoes spread the weight so one didn’t sink in. And, most of the time, they kept the soles of the boots away from contact with the ground.

  Titanides had their own, heavy duty versions. But the jeeps had an awful time of it. They honked almost continuously.

  The encampments were nightmares.

  People slept standing up, leaning against wagons. It was possible to heap folded tents, clothes, and anything else that came to hand in a pallet that would insulate to some degree. People crowded onto them—and awoke gasping, drenched in sweat, from nightmares of burning.

  It was better to sleep during the march. Troops did it in rotation, climbing atop the wagons and grabbing a few hours of sleep until roused by the next shift. Still, many fell asleep while marching, fell down, and jumped up screaming.

  There were cases of exhaustion, and dehydration. The Air Force flew in and out constantly, taking the worst cases ahead to the edge of Oceanus. Even so, there were deaths, though not as many as Cirocco had feared.

  ***

  At the twilight zone between Mnemosyne and Oceanus, on the shores of the warm lake where Ophion emerged from his subgaean journey, Cirocco allowed a brief encampment. It was possible to sleep on the ground. Then she hurried them on to the shores of the biggest sea in Gaea, the one that took up sixty percent of the land surface of Oceanus and was called, simply, Oceanus.

  The water was cool. Plants grew along the shore. The Legions stripped off what little they had been wearing and plunged into the sea. Jeeps clambered into the water with joyous hoots. Titanides swam out where it was deep, looking like improbable Loch Ness monsters with their human torsos just out of the water.

  Cirocco gathered her Generals once more to discuss the arrangements for troops too weakened by Mnemosyne. She tried to conceal her fear from them, and didn’t think she succeeded. To Cirocco, Oceanus was the great unknown. She had crossed it many times, but always with a deep fear. It was hard to explain, since nothing really bad had ever happened to her there. But Gaby had refused to talk about it, and that worried her.

  It was decided that those soldiers certified by the Medical Corps a
s too debilitated to stand the Oceanus crossing would stay here at the west shore of the lake. No troops would guard them. They would have to take care of themselves, if it came to fighting.

  Cirocco showed them what they could eat and what to stay away from, and, having put it off as long as she could, led her army into Oceanus.

  Fourteen

  The wagons were as light as they would ever be. Gear brought along for the jungle had been left at the west edge of the desert. Desert gear was with the convalescents on the eastern edge. There was no need to carry water into Oceanus, and the cold-weather gear, carried so long and so far, was now on the backs of the troops. If the jeeps appreciated their lighter burdens, they didn’t let on.

  Their route through Oceanus took them along the southern shore of the sea, past the point where the great ice sheet began forming, and to the edge of one of the three major glaciers that inched their way from the southern highlands. At that point the ice sheet was more than a hundred meters thick, plenty of safety margin to bear the weight of the army.

  There was no Circum-Gaea Highway in Oceanus, just as there had not been in Mnemosyne. It would have been silly to try to carve a permanent route. The easiest way was across the frozen sea. While it was not flat—pressure from the glaciers fractured the ice and pushed huge sheets of it up and over other sheets—it was possible to find a reasonably level route. Now that the angels had used all the dynamite they would ever need, regular flights by Conal’s remaining planes brought in tons of the stuff, which was used by the scouts to blast passages.

  As they moved into the ice-bright night of Oceanus toward their first encampment, a familiar shape grew in the east. It was Whistlestop, once again doing the inexplicable. Blimps always went through Oceanus at high altitude. But here he came, as if he had a down payment on the place.

  He stopped short of the army, and what looked like fine dust began to fall from his belly. It kept falling for a long time. At intervals they would hear the eerie foghorn bellow as he valved away excess hydrogen. Even so, he gradually rose higher as the dust kept falling.