by John Varley
“Come on back here and fight, you yellow bitch! What are you…afraid? Gaea’s afraid, Gaea’s a coward, Gaea’s a stinking whore!”
Gaea hung there, swaying back and forth, torn between going for Adam and taking care of this insect once and for all. She knew it was a trick. She knew Cirocco wanted her to come and silence her filthy mouth. She knew it…and more than anything in this stinking, dreary universe she wanted to go back and crush this horrible upstart.
Cirocco spat in Gaea’s direction. She picked up a rock and threw it as hard as she could. It bounced off Gaea’s head, leaving a bloody mark. She drew her sword and held it high in the sweet light of Hyperion. It flashed as Cirocco brandished it.
“God? You make me laugh, Gaea. You are a pig. Your mother was a pig, your grandmother was a pig, and her mother fucked dead pigs. I spit on you. I piss on you. I dare you to come out and fight. If you run away, everyone will know you for the coward you are!”
Tears of rage were streaming from Cirocco’s eyes.
Gaea might still have turned away and gone after Adam, but Cirocco gave a bloodcurdling shriek…and charged at her.
Which was simply too much. Gaea began to move.
Toward Cirocco.
***
“It’s time, Gene.”
“I know it’s time, Gaby. I’m sorry I ra…r-r-r-raped you. I’m sorry I killed you. I didn’t mean to do it.”
His hands fumbled with the detonator on his lap. It was a simple mechanism, he knew it was simple. It was just so horrible. He couldn’t remember.
Eugene Springfield had been a flyer. He had piloted jet fighter aircraft, rocket-powered moon landers. He had been picked over a thousand others to fly the exploration vehicles Ringmaster brought to Saturn, and there was only one reason for it. He was the best.
And now he couldn’t sort out this jumble of wires any slack-brained terrorist could have put together in his sleep.
He wiped away tears. Start from the beginning. What did Gaby say?
Take out the…
His eyes opened wide. The most important part, and he had almost forgotten it. By golly, his brains must be turning to mush.
There it was, at his feet. The black glass jar with the metal lid.
He picked it up, opened it, tossed the lid into the clattering darkness.
The fat, toad-like parasite which had sucked his brains for ninety years hopped out and perched on the edge of the jar. Its eyes took in the scene, then bulged out. It made incoherent sounds: croaks, sobs, strangling gasps. It didn’t mean jackshit to Gene, but Gaby had said it was important.
Gaea must see it, Gaby had said.
“Think you’re smarter’n me, do you?” Gene whispered, staring the thing in its ugly bloodshot eyes. “Well, ol’ Gene’ll show you a thing or two.”
He looked again at the detonator.
Battery. That’s this dingus right here.
Wires. Well, there’s a couple of them. This one goes to here, and this one goes to here. So it ought to logically follow that if a fella touched this wire to this one over here, he ought to get one hell of a
***
Gaea froze as her eyes in Oceanus were uncapped, as they looked up out of the bottle, hopped up on the edge of it, and stared down at the spectacle of a brain-damaged child playing with matches and gasoline.
“Gene!” she screamed. “Don’t do it!”
***
Cirocco charged, filled with a blood-red rage she hadn’t known was in her. She ran at the monster and sank her sword in its foot.
Then Gaea screamed, and Cirocco was filled with an incredible sense of triumph…which lasted about two seconds. Gaea wheeled around, tossing Cirocco off like a pesky ant. Gaea had forgotten Cirocco existed.
Cirocco got to her feet, saw Gaea stop dead in her tracks. Gaea put her hands to her head, then she looked slowly up at the sky.
“Gaby!” she shouted. “Gaby, wait! Listen, I’m…I’m not ready! Gaby, we’ve got to talk!”
Then the ground was shaking as Gaea ran at top speed toward the cable.
Cirocco sank to her knees and sobbed helplessly. She felt a hand on her shoulder, looked up, and saw all three of her Generals at her side. My god, she thought. They came to me. They didn’t run.
All around her was the army. Swords were drawn, arrows were fitted into bowstrings…and nobody had anything to shoot at. They all watched, terrified and dumbfounded, as Gaea floundered through the moat, still shrieking at the top of her lungs.
The wall didn’t stop her. She lowered one shoulder and plowed right through it. She ran through the flames of the Universal studio complex, thundered along the rutted remains of the Twenty-four Carat Highway.
At last she came to the cable.
She leaped, her fingers dug into the incredibly hard material of one cable strand. Gaea began to climb it, agile as any monkey.
Later, people speculated that she had been seeking the fastest way to the hub. Gaby was there, Gaby was taking control, and it was imperative that Gaea/Monroe, which now held over ninety percent of the thing that was called Gaea, get up there at once and begin negotiations.
Gaea was five hundred meters up the strand when it broke off at ground level.
The strand snapped up, quick as a mousetrap. Incalculable tons of cable strand curled, twisted…and smashed the Gaea-thing against the unyielding bulk of the cable.
“Hang on!” Cirocco shouted. “Get down, and hang on!”
The ground below them dropped thirty meters.
Twenty-three
Far above them, as these events were played out, a far less dramatic but far more important drama unfolded in the region known as the red line.
The entity known as Gaea was dispersed. It was dealing with many things at once. The entity known as Gaby was pulled close in, in a defensive posture. One after another, horrible blows landed on the Gaea-mind. The important nerve being severed in Oceanus was the last blow. Gaby erupted from her place of concealment.
There was no way to explain what happened to a human, or a Titanide, or a blimp, or anything with time-bound senses.
The end result was simple. The mind of Gaea was destroyed. The mind of Gaby Plauget, of New Orleans, Louisiana, flew through the non-Einsteinian space of the red line, unchallenged.
Twenty-four
They waited for Valiha, Chris, and Adam to catch up with them. They waited, while hundreds of Pandemonium extras charged at them with swords of wood, cardboard…and, occasionally, steel.
“They’re props!” Nova shouted to Virginal.
“I see that,” Virginal shouted back. “But not all of them are.”
It was horrible. Try as you might, it was hard to tell which weapon was real and which was an imposter. And the people of Pandemonium didn’t seem to know the difference.
***
They charged out the Fox Gate. Chris was badly hurt. Valiha had a deep gash in her left hind leg. Robin was being held in place by Serpent, who had several injuries himself.
Conal felt an awful detachment. He shot at the people who came at him, but it didn’t seem as if he were shooting at real things.
They went through the gate, heading straight out toward the forest. The hordes of Pandemonium followed.
They stopped, turned, and watched as the Brass Band arrived on schedule and began to slay the enemy by the hundreds.
“Stop!” they shouted. “Wait, back off! They’re not armed!”
Gradually, with expressions of stunned horror, the three hundred Titanides slowed, saw what was happening…and moved away. The Pandemonium troops milled around aimlessly. It seemed that most of them had been fleeing what they thought was an invasion from the inside.
Conal remembered how so many of them had run. The gate to the outside must have seemed like a safe place.
He jumped down from Rocky’s back and went to his knees. He swayed there, not knowing if he would throw up. He felt an arm go around his shoulders, and turned to hug her tightly to him.
&nb
sp; But it was Nova, not Robin, and she was crying too. He hugged her, then they both hurried to Robin.
They had just enough time to learn that no one had an injury that was surely fatal—though everyone was bleeding—when the ground dropped out from under them.
***
The great wheel of Gaea vibrated for twenty revs.
The first three or four were the worst. Many people died in the first wave, when the strand broke. Most of them were in Pandemonium, where structures toppled. But a few of Cirocco’s army were badly hurt in the pounding.
Then, on the fourth resonation, a strand in Tethys broke, and the next three bounces were bad, but not as bad as the first series.
Eventually, it all settled down. The interior of the rim was full of suspended dust motes for kilorevs, but the wheel had found a new equilibrium. Ophion rushed a little faster in some places, a little slower in others. A few lakes grew and a few shrunk. Two swamps claimed several thousand acres, and the desert of Tethys—which had always been desert, unlike Mnemosyne—advanced a few meters in each direction.
***
Rocky was kept busy for a while, treating the major and minor wounds of the band of seven—which had grown to nine with Chris and Adam. None of the wounds were life-threatening.
The Brass Band rounded up two thousand prisoners. It was expected that, after a short period of blockade, the holdouts in Pandemonium would surrender when they got hungry.
Adam seemed to have enjoyed the whole thing. He was unmarked. It had been just like the movies, and a little bit like flying…and he was looking forward to the sequel.
***
Cirocco stood at the head of her cheering army and watched the remains of the thing that had been Gaea drip wetly down the side of the cable.
She was the only one who understood why the cable had killed her, after Nasu and Whistlestop had failed—and she knew there were some questions still unanswered.
She heard a plaintive howling from her backpack. She reached into it, and came up with the bottle that held Snitch.
He was dying. She shook him out into her hand.
“Can I have a drink?” he asked her, between wheezes. Cirocco found the bottle. She didn’t bother with the eyedropper. She poured a generous dollop over Snitch’s body, and he lapped up several swallows.
She knew he was the last dying fragment of Gaea.
***
Gaea had known she might lose when she started the game. She hadn’t expected to…but there it was. Gaby had outwitted her.
So she lay in Cirocco’s palm. Poetic justice, she thought. You spend twenty years of your life plotting how to wipe out a traitor, and what does it get you? You get to cough out your last seconds literally in the fist of your greatest enemy.
She had devoted some thought to the matter of last words.
If you were going to go out, you ought to do it with some style. So she had thought it over, on the off chance.
There were the classic Looney Tunes cartoon words. A little too light-hearted.
There was “Rosebud.” Too arty, too obscure.
In the end, she reverted to the “B” movies she loved so well.
“Mother of mercy,” Snitch coughed. “Is this the end of Gaea?”
And she died.
***
And…
Long before the vibrations of the final cataclysm had died, a ray of light angled down from the Hyperion roof.
It centered on Cirocco Jones.
Cirocco stood up, facing into the light. Her feet left the ground.
She was lifted, bodily, into Heaven.
FADE OUT
Include me out.
—Sam Goldwyn
Cirocco found herself on the Stairway to Paradise without remembering how she had come there.
She and Gaby had first seen it almost a century earlier, when they had reached the hub after their long climb up the cable and through the inside of the Rhea Spoke. Then, it had been riddled with special effects right out of The Wizard of Oz—the film, not the books, which Cirocco doubted Gaea had ever read. At the top had been a massive, pantheistic thing that had tried to convince them it was Gaea.
The stairs were not in very good shape. But looking closely, Cirocco saw that someone had been at work on them. Some dust had been swept to the side. There was the smell of disinfectant—the strong sort that is used in subway restrooms.
She climbed to the top and saw the door to Gaea’s old room was ajar.
Inside was Gaby. Just Gaby. No supernatural rigamarole, no hocus-pocus.
She was down on her hands and knees, dressed in faded jeans and a blue work shirt, with a tool belt around her waist. Several of the translucent floor panels in the 2001 lounge had been removed and stacked against one wall. They were filthy, but sitting beside them were stacks of rags and bottles of blue cleanser. The furniture had been stacked against another wall.
Gaby was reaching down through the floor, working on a plain, ordinary fluorescent light fixture which was nailed to a wooden beam. The two light tubes were flickering.
She looked up at Cirocco, then sat back on her heels and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. The hand held a wrench, and was dirty.
“Lot of work to do up here,” Gaby said.
“Sure looks like it.”
Gaby got up, fitted the wrench into a loop on her belt, and stood with her hands on her hips, smiling up at Cirocco.
“Can I get you anything? I’ve got beer, and wine.”
“Just a glass of water would be fine.”
“Pull up a chair.”
Gaby went through a doorway. Cirocco heard water running. She found two chairs that seemed steady, and put them a few feet apart. She sat down on one. Gaby returned, pulled up a low table and set two frosted glasses of ice water on them. Cirocco took a sip of hers, then a long drink. It tasted good.
The silence was not so good. It threatened to get awkward.
“So,” Gaby said. “You pulled it off. I was proud of you.”
Cirocco shrugged.
“I didn’t have as much to do with it as all those people down there think I did. But you know that better than anyone.”
“You’re the one who had to stand there and face Gaea. Not many people could have done that.”
“I guess not.” She looked around the room once more. There wasn’t anything new to see. She gestured with her glass. “Fixing this place up, are you?”
Gaby looked embarrassed.
“Well, I have to live somewhere. This isn’t just what I had in mind, but it’ll do temporarily.”
“Gaby…what are you?”
Gaby nodded rapidly, and swallowed hard, not looking at Cirocco. She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. She looked at the ceiling.
“I was watching, you know. When you came up here and demanded some answers from Gaea. She didn’t lie to you. She didn’t feel like she needed to. She was pretty sure you were going to kill her, but that didn’t matter. She was tired of that lousy little body, anyway. But she still wanted your loyalty. I’ll tell you why in a minute. But you remember…she offered to bring me back to life, just as I was—but without that compulsion I had to make war against her. You said no. So she made another offer. She’d bring me back unchanged. She’d resurrect me. You remember what you said?”
“Pretty well.”
Gaby’s eyes got a faraway look.
“You said it was tempting.” She focused on Cirocco again. “Thanks for that, by the way. Then you said, ‘But then I wondered what Gaby would have thought of it, and knew just what a stinking, corrupt, foul deviltry it would be. She would have been horrified to think she would be survived by a little Gaby doll made by you out of your own festering flesh. She would have wanted me to kill it immediately.’”
“Maybe I overstated the case a little.”
Gaby laughed, and shook her head.
“No. You were completely right. You had no way of knowing that some part of me still was alive, and liste
ning in…but you were right. If Gaea had put me back together then, I don’t think I’d have been my own person. And you were certainly right not to trust her about anything.
“She thought she got rid of me.” She gestured at the ceiling. “That red line up there…this is going to be difficult. You want all the answers, and I’m more than ready to tell them, but I’ll warn you that some of it will be hard to understand…and you’ll just have to take my word for it. Because I can’t explain to you what that red line is like. There aren’t any human concepts for so much of it.
“She threw me in there, and thought she’d made an end.
“I fooled her. I stayed sane. I survived…and I had to be careful. She’d been in there a lot longer than I had and she knew her way around. I had to learn to crawl, then walk, then run, and I had to do it all without her noticing me. That’s why I was so mysterious so much of the time. When I was learning to materialize my body…when I did anything at all, the chances of her discovering me were much greater. When I told you things she didn’t want you to know…it was like a security leak. She started becoming aware there was a leak, but didn’t know where it was. She might have found me in spite of my best efforts, but she wasn’t really looking that hard. It’s all that saved me. Her other obsessions took up too much of her time. Too much of her life-force, for want of a better word.
“But you asked me what I am. I’m not a creation of Gaea. I created myself. I’m real, and I’m alive…. I’m me.”
Cirocco kept looking at her, and Gaby had to look away again. Then she reached out and took Cirocco’s hand. She squeezed it.
“See? Feel me, Rocky. I’m real. I have a body. This body is completely human. I live in it, just like you live in yours.”
Again Cirocco said nothing. Then she rubbed her forehead with her hand.
“But Gaby…you still haven’t told me what you are.”
Gaby released her hand and sat back in her chair.
“I’m what you were supposed to be. Gaea’s successor. But you knew that, didn’t you.”
