Demon (GAIA)

by John Varley

  When he was done he moved a few kilometers away, turning again toward the east, and dropped a torrent of ballast water that froze to sleet before it reached the surface.

  The payload turned out to be firewood. It was scattered all over the site Cirocco had picked for the first encampment, cut to lengths convenient to the burners which could be set up inside the troops’ tents. It was dry and almost smokeless.

  Cirocco told the officers to pass the word through the ranks that the wood was a present from the Hyperion Titanides. The general opinion of Titanides, already high among the jungle veterans, went up another notch as they wolfed down hot meals and crawled into their bedrolls in the warm tents.

  ***

  It was during their second encampment in Oceanus that Gaby came to Cirocco again.

  She was in her tent. Her feet were stretched out toward the fire, which had been laid in a thing like a big oil drum. There was a cot in the tent. She had thought she might sleep. She hadn’t done so since…when was it? Somewhere in Cronus. But she wasn’t having much luck.

  Still, she knew she needed it, so she stretched out again, yawned, closed her eyes…and Gaby came through the tent flap. Cirocco heard her, and sat up. She didn’t have time to think. Gaby took her by the hand and hurried her toward the outside.

  “Come on,” Gaby said. “I’ve got something important to show you.”

  They went outside into the swirling snow.

  It wasn’t a blizzard. It wasn’t even really a storm, but any sort of wind was unpleasant when it was ten below. The two guards outside her tent were alert, standing with their backs to their fire so they wouldn’t be blinded…and they didn’t see Gaby and Cirocco. They looked right through them.

  Which was natural enough in a dream, Cirocco thought.

  They plodded through the snow toward another tent, and Gaby led Cirocco inside. There were two bedrolls, both occupied. Robin was asleep in one of them. In the other, Conal sat up, rubbing his eyes.

  “Captain? Is that…”

  Conal apparently had no trouble seeing Gaby. He must be dreaming, too.

  “Who’s that?” he said.

  “I’m Gaby Plauget,” Gaby said.

  Cirocco really had to admire Conal then. He looked at Gaby for a time, saying nothing, apparently fitting the reality to the endless stories he had heard during his time in Gaea. The idea of a ghost didn’t seem to give him a lot of trouble. Finally, he nodded.

  “Your spy, Captain…right?”

  “That’s right, Conal. That’s very good.”

  “It couldn’t have been anybody else, I figured.” He started to stand up, winced, then swung his legs around so he could lever himself up with his crutch.

  Conal should have been sent back to the city with his broken ankle. He had been prepared to put up a fuss if anybody suggested it, but it didn’t come up. Cirocco needed him in Hyperion, disabled or not. And since he could ride on Rocky, it wasn’t much of a problem.

  But it had been a bad break. The Titanide healers thought he would limp for a long time—possibly the rest of his life.

  Gaby knelt in front of him. With effortless strength she opened the bulky cast, then put her hands on the bare ankle. She squeezed for half a second. Conal gasped, then looked surprised. He stood up and put his weight on it.

  “Miracles, two for a quarter,” Gaby said.

  “I’ll have to owe you the quarter,” Conal said. “But thank you…” And he burst out laughing.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Thank you just seems a little…” He shrugged, and his mouth worked in a foolish grin. He seemed unsteady. “What’s the second miracle?”

  “I’ll show you. Take my hands, children.”

  ***

  Flying seemed to upset Conal a lot more than ghosts or magic healing. Cirocco could hear his teeth chattering.

  “Buck up, Conal,” Gaby said. “After that trick you pulled on the Luftmorder, this ought to be a walk in the park.”

  He said nothing. Cirocco simply endured. She didn’t like things that were out of her control. But during these dreams it never seemed to matter so much.

  She found out she was wrong. When she realized where they were headed, she wanted to turn around and go back.

  “You’ve trusted me this far,” Gaby said, gently. “Trust me a little longer. There’s nothing here for you to be afraid of.”

  “I know, but—”

  “But you’ve always felt an irrational fear every time you went through Oceanus, and you’ve never been within a hundred kilometers of the central cable. Oceanus is the enemy, your mind keeps telling you. Oceanus is Evil. Well, for twenty years now you’ve known it’s Gaea that is evil. So what does that make Oceanus?”

  “…I don’t know. Many times I’ve started out to come and look the bastard in the eye…and I keep seeing the Ringmaster coming apart at the seams.”

  “And hearing that fancy story Gaea told us up in the hub”—Gaby paused, and made her voice sound like a petulant child—“about how poor, misunderstood Gaea tried everything, honest she did, and she only wanted to be friends with humanity, to welcome us with open arms…but that foul conniving rebellious bastard Oceanus reached out and…oh, you poor souls, how terrible it must have been for you, but it wasn’t my fault, you see, it was Oceanus, who used to be a part of my titanic brain, but is really his own semi-god now, and I just have no control over the rascal…”

  Gaby fell silent, and Cirocco went over it in her mind again.

  “I’m not such an idiot that I haven’t thought that out,” Cirocco said. “But like I told you, I just couldn’t come here.”

  “Snitch had a lot to do with that,” Gaby said. “Even when you got him out of your head, he left some of his garbage behind.”

  Cirocco shuddered.

  “Sorry, it was a pretty bad metaphor, I guess. No more metaphors. Now we get down to the reality.”

  ***

  They landed just outside the verge of the strand-forest of the central cable, and proceeded in on foot.

  It grew warmer as they neared the center. What little light there had been failed within the first hundred meters. Neither Conal nor Cirocco carried a lantern, but Gaby had some kind of light source that streamed ahead of her like beams of moonlight, or reflections from a mirrored ballroom globe. It was enough to see by…and there was nothing to see. Cirocco had been under many cables, and there had always been the flotsam of centuries beneath them. Skeletons of long-dead creatures, fallen nests of blind flying animals, the crumpled remains of dimpled tapestries that peeled away from the cable strands and hung for hours or millennia…even old cardboard boxes and plastic sandwich wrappers and crumpled cans from the days of Gaea’s tourist program, when thousands of humans had gone rafting on the Ophion or caving in the strand forests. Strand forests supported complex nocturnal ecologies, seldom seen, but indicated by animal droppings and seed-pods fallen from the unseen interstices high above.

  In Oceanus, there was nothing. A cleaning team might have swept through only hours before, dusting and polishing. The ground had the texture of linoleum.

  Cirocco’s fears were now vaguely remembered. When she thought about it, she was amazed that she had been afraid. Her times with Gaby had always been spent in a pleasant, half-drugged dream state. She knew nothing could go wrong. Even in retrospect, the dreams did not seem frightening. Now she walked in her usual state of placid expectancy. In a way, she felt like a small child walking with her mother on a winding, wooded path. It was interesting, without being exciting. There would be new things around each curve, but they would not be scary. She had a sweet what-comes-next expectancy, but no sense of urgency.

  She felt some of Conal’s emotion, in a way difficult to describe. He was not afraid, either, but he was very curious. Gaby had to keep calling him back or he would have bounded ahead of them. Continuing her analogy, he was like a boy from the city who had never seen the forest; every curve held a new marvel.

  At a point
Cirocco knew—without understanding how she knew—to be the exact center of the cable, they saw a light. As they got nearer they saw a man sitting beside the light. They approached him, and stopped. He looked up at them.

  He looked like Robinson Crusoe, or Rip Van Winkle. His hair and beard were long and gray. There were foreign objects, twigs and little bits of fishbone, matted in it, and a long brown stain in his beard below his mouth. He was crusted with dirt. He was wearing the same clothes Cirocco had last seen him in, twenty years ago, writhing in the sawdust on the floor of The Enchanted Cat taproom, in Titantown. To say the clothes were tatters did them an injustice; they were the most decrepit articles of apparel she had ever seen. Great gaps in them showed a lot of skin—gaunt, stretched tightly over the bones—and every inch of that skin had scars great and small. His face was old, but not the same way Calvin’s was old. He might have been a sixty-year-old beachcomber. One of his eye sockets was empty. “Hello, Gene,” Gaby said, quietly.

  “How are you, Gaby?” Gene asked, in a surprisingly strong voice.

  “I’m well.” She turned to Conal. “Conal, let me introduce to you Gene Springfield, formerly of the D.S.V. Ringmaster. Gene, this is your great-great grandson, Conal Ray. He came a long way to see you.”

  “Sit down,” Gene said, apparently to all of them. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  They did. Conal was staring at his ancient relative, the man he had thought dead when he came to Gaea.

  The first thing Cirocco noticed upon taking a closer look at Gene was that he had a bulge on his balding forehead. The skin there was unmarked. The shape of the skull was distorted, like half a grapefruit had bulged up under his skin.

  The location of the bulge was suggestive. She wondered at the pressure the thing was putting on his frontal lobes.

  She saw a little more of his surroundings. There wasn’t much. The fire came from a crack in the ground. It was bright and steady in the windless dark.

  There was a heap of straw, apparently Gene’s bed. In the distance the light reflected off a still pool of water, twenty meters across. Close to Gene was a big, galvanized pail with water in it.

  That was all. A short distance away was the entrance to the stairs that would lead down to Oceanus.

  “Have you been in here all this time, Gene?” Cirocco asked him.

  “All this time,” he confirmed. “Ever since that time in Tethys when Gaby cut my balls off.” He looked at Gaby, and cackled. No, Cirocco decided, that wasn’t quite the right word. There was no laughter in it. It was just a sound made by an old man. He made it again as he looked at Cirocco, Conal, then back to Gaby. “Didn’t come by to apologize for that, did you?”

  “No,” Gaby said.

  “Didn’t expect you would. No matter. They grew back, just like they did the first time you cut ’em off.” He cackled again.

  “What do you eat?” Conal asked.

  Gene eyed him with suspicion, then plunged a gnarled hand into the pail. He came up with something gray and blind that wiggled.

  “You cook them on that fire?” Gaby asked.

  “Cook ’em?” Gene asked, startled. He looked from the ugly thing in his hand, to the fire, then back again, and a wild surmise grew beneath the beetled brow. He grinned, showing the brown stumps of teeth. “Say, that’s an idea. They’s pretty tough. Like to wear your teeth down, they do. Catch ’em in that pool yonder. Slippery devils.” He looked at the eel again, frowned, as if unable to remember how it had come to be there. He tossed it back in the pail.

  “What do you do down here?” Conal asked.

  Gene glanced up, but didn’t seem to see Conal. He scratched his head—Cirocco winced when she saw how deeply his fingers went into the bulge of skin—and muttered into his beard. He didn’t seem to be aware of them.

  “Gaby,” Cirocco whispered. “What’s with…the way he talks, it’s—”

  “Backwoods? Quaint? Colloquial?” One side of her lip curled in a bitter smile. “Interesting, for a Harvard graduate, NASA-type New Yorker, wouldn’t you say? Rocky, Gene is the sorriest son of a bitch that ever lived. He’s had tricks played on him that make what she did to us seem like playful pranks. Look at his head. Just look at it.”

  Cirocco had hardly been able to take her eyes away.

  Now she was seized by a compulsion to touch it. She fought it as long as she could, then she got up, knelt in front of him, and placed her palm against his forehead. It was soft. Something moved sluggishly under the skin.

  She thought she should be revolted, but she was not. She stared at her hand as if it belonged to someone else, and felt a power building in her. Gene’s hands came up slowly, and he put them around her forearm, making no attempt to push her away. She felt him frown. She had an absurd impulse—very close to hysteria—to shout Heal!

  Then she was holding something wet and squirmy and vile-smelling. She looked at it dispassionately. It was covered with blood, and so was her hand. It was built along the same lines as Snitch, but bloated, grotesquely fat, with rolling eyes like peeled grapes. It made a croaking noise.

  “Son of a bitch,” Gene muttered. “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.”

  Cirocco heard Conal stumbling away, heard him vomiting. Somehow she knew it was important to keep staring at the creature, which continued to croak. Gaby was moving, holding something out….

  It was a jar made of thick, black glass. Cirocco popped the monstrosity into it, and screwed the lid on tight.

  Only then did Cirocco look at Gene. He was fingering his forehead, which had bloody fingermarks on it, but was not broken. The skin hung loosely on his head, but there was no sign of damage.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  “Like Snitch?” Cirocco asked. Now that it was over, she felt faint.

  “No,” Gaby said. “They’re related. But Snitch only listened, and reported.” She tapped her own forehead. “The one in my head only listened.” She held up the black jar. “This one was like what spies call a mole. He burrowed deep, and he shuffled things around. When he could, without revealing himself, he made things happen. Things like rape, and war, and sabotage…. He ran Gene’s life after a while. Gene was like a puppet on Gaea’s strings.”

  “Up there…on the cable?”

  They had had their doubts about him, so many years ago, shortly after the wreck of the Ringmaster. He had tried to show the Titanides how to use new weapons in their war with the angels, in direct violation of First Contact procedures and United Nations regulations. But they had written that off as a simple desire to help the Titanides.

  So they had taken him on their climb up the cable to the hub. And he had clubbed Gaby unconscious, left her for dead after raping her. Then he had raped Cirocco, and would have killed them both but for some luck and some fast footwork.

  Gaby had wanted to castrate him then and there. Cirocco had not permitted it. She still didn’t regret the decision, even though he had been endless trouble in the next seventy-five years, and had set events in motion that led to Gaby’s death. She had regretted not killing him many times.

  They had found he was very hard to kill. Gaby had once slit his throat and left him for dead. He had survived it.

  So he had become like Snitch. When Cirocco wanted something from Snitch, she had to torture it out of him. And, over the years, whenever Gaby had encountered Gene she had left him a little less than he was—an ear, a few fingers, a testicle. He healed, but unlike Cirocco and Gaby, he scarred.

  “No, not on the cable,” Gaby said. “Not directly, I mean. That thing didn’t jerk him around. But it whispered things to him. Gene was like a schizophrenic. I…think he had to have some tendency to rape, for the thing to egg him on to doing it. Later, it didn’t matter what Gene thought about anything. In a sense, Gene was gone. In a sense, he died years ago.”

  Gaby sighed, and shook her head.

  “It makes me feel ashamed. Because, see, if there’s a miracle here, it’s in how much he resisted, and for how long. Even
to coming here…the one place in the wheel where Gaea doesn’t ever look. She still gets reports from the mole, but she pretends they’re coming from somewhere else.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because she’s crazy. And…something else you’ll see in a minute.”

  Conal had rejoined them now. He still looked green.

  “What did she do to him?” he said, with a quiet intensity.

  For a moment Cirocco thought he was asking about what she had done. But he was looking at Gaby, and Gaby explained what Gaea had done, and how long ago, and what it had meant. Conal took it all in silence.

  “What about Calvin?” Cirocco asked.

  “He got one, too. But Whistlestop knew about it, and killed it almost immediately. I don’t know how. Whistlestop didn’t bother to tell us…which I blame him for, a little, even though I know he isn’t wrapped up in human concerns.” She shrugged. “Killing the thing in Calvin’s head is the reason he’s dying now.”

  “Who’s Calvin?” Conal wanted to know.

  “Remember your comic book?” Cirocco asked. “He was the black one.”

  “He’s still alive, too?”

  “Yes.” Cirocco turned to Gaby again. “What about Bill?”

  “When he went back to Earth, he resigned from NASA and went to work as an agent for Gaea. All quite openly, but he had clandestine activities. I think he got one like Gene did, but I don’t know. Don’t ask me about April or August; I don’t know what Gaea did with them.”

  “How much do you know? Can you tell me more now?”

  “Knew he was up there,” Gene said. They all looked at him.

  “He liked fish,” Gene clarified, and gestured to the bucket. “Got hisself real fat on fish, he did. Didn’t do much for me, fish.” He thumped his scrawny chest. “But I knew he was up there. Pissin’ on my head, he was.” He cackled.

  “Do you know who put him there, Gene?” Gaby asked.

  “Gaea.”

  “What do you think of that?”