by John Varley
Chris climbed in and seated himself on the free-form couchshape inside. There were filaments growing from the inner walls, useful in strapping oneself securely. Chris used them. It was his third ride in what native Gaeans called the bumper cars. He knew the ride could be rough as the thing bumbled through eddied currents around switch points.
The interior was luminescent. With the opening sealed behind him, Chris wished he had brought a book. He faced a three-hour ride with no company but his churning stomach and the knowledge that at the end of the line he would be interviewed by a God.
There was a sucking sound as the capsule was drawn into the protective maze of valves within the cable. It blundered from auricle to ventricle until, with an unexpected surge of power, it headed for heaven.
The dancer was under a suspended spotlight, floating in and out of a yellow cone spilling through the still air. He was a tap-dancing fool in top hat and tails, spats and boiled shirt. Like all the best dancers, he made it look easy. The soles of his black shoes and the metal foot of his cane hammered a complex tattoo that echoed in the unseen cavern of the hub.
He was performing fifty meters from the door of the common, ordinary elevator which had brought Chris on the last leg of the trip. A bell rang, and Chris turned to see the door closing.
The dancer disturbed him. It was as if he had walked into a theater showing an obscure film that was half over. The man must refer to something; the artist must have had something in mind. But there he danced, divorced from all meaning, sufficient unto himself. His face was concealed in the shadow cast by the brim of his hat; only his pale pointed chin was visible. He should remove his hat, Chris thought, to reveal an empty skull: the face of death. Or else stop dancing and indicate with his elegantly gloved hand where Chris's path lay. He gave no such signal, refused to turn himself into a symbol of anything. He just kept dancing.
He finally made his move when Chris approached him. The spotlight winked out, and another came on twenty meters distant. The man's silhouette clattered through darkness until it was again fleshed out in light. A third light came on, a fourth, a diminishing series. He leaped from one to the other, pausing for an improvised rhythmic statement before hoofing it to the next one. Then the lights died. The sound of taps on marble was gone.
The darkness of the hub was not absolute. High above was a single, dimensionless red line of light, sharp as a laser. Chris stood between high shadows: Gaea's cathedral collection. Spires and towers, flying buttresses and stone gargoyles were cool gray against fathomless black. Did they have interiors? His books had not said. He knew only that Gaea collected architecture and specialized in places of worship.
The regular tapping of heels in the distance soon resolved itself into a human woman in a white jumpsuit, like the ones the quarantine personnel had worn. She came around the corner of a squat stone temple, paused to sweep the area with a flashlight. The glare blinded him, moved past, returned to pin him like an escaping felon, then lowered.
"This way, please," she said.
Chris joined her, feeling awkward in the low gravity. She led him on an irregular path through the monuments. Her boots were white leather, with stilted heels that clacked authoritatively. She made it look easy, while Chris tended to bounce like a rubber ball. The spin of the hub imparted only one-fortieth gee; he weighed just a few kilograms.
He wondered what she was. It had not occurred to him, in quarantine, to doubt the humanity of the employees. Up here, it was somehow different. He knew Gaea could, and often did, make living creatures to order. She could create new species, such as the Titanides, who were only two centuries old as a race, and give them free will and the benefit of her neglect. Or she could make one-shot individuals just as free and uncontrolled.
But she also made things called tools of Gaea. These creatures were nothing more than extensions of herself. She used them to build full-scale replicas of cathedrals, to communicate with small life forms-to do anything she could not accomplish through her normal ecology of existence. He would soon meet one of these tools, who would call herself Gaea. Gaea was actually all around him, yet it would do him little good to speak to the walls.
Chris looked again at the tall woman with the flowing black hair. Was she a tool or a real human?
"Where are you from?" he asked.
"Tennessee."
The buildings were built to no plan. Some shouldered close in what Chris thought of as celestial slum districts; others were widely separated. The haphazard arrangement was as likely to form a plaza as an alley. They squeezed between a replica of Chartres and a nameless pagoda, crossed a huge square paved in marble on the way to Karnak.
The writer of the book Chris had read confessed bafflement as to why Gaea built these things. And why, having done so, did she leave them in the dark, all but invisible? It made one feel like a flea lost in the musty bottom of a child's toy box. The structures might have been counters in a trillionaire's Monopoly set.
"That's my favorite," the woman said unexpectedly.
"Which?"
"That one," she said, pointing her flashlight. "National."
It seemed familiar, but after so many in such a short time one pile of stone was beginning to look like any other.
"What's the point of this? You can barely see them."
"Oh, Gaea doesn't need visible light," she assured him. "One of my great-grandparents worked on that one. I saw it, in Washington."
"It doesn't look like that."
"No, it's a mess. They're going to demolish it."
"Is that why you came here? To study great architecture as it was?"
She smiled. "No, to build it. Where can you do this kind of work on Earth? They worked on these things for hundreds of years. Even here, it takes twenty or thirty, and that's with no labor unions or building codes and no worries about cost. On Earth, I was building things a lot bigger, but if they weren't done in six months, they'd hire somebody else. And when you were finished, what you had looked like a turd had fallen out of the sky. Here, I'm working on the Zimbabwe Mormon Tabernacle."
"Yes, but what is it good for? What does it mean?"
Her look was full of pity. "If you have to ask that question, you wouldn't understand the answer."
They were in an area of subdued lighting. It was impossible to find the source of light, but for the first time there was enough to see the hub roof, more sharply curved than that of the rim but still more than 20 kilometers away. It was an intricate basket weave, each reed being a thousand-meter cable strand. To the near wall was fastened a white cloth the size of a cyberschooner's mainsail. A movie was being projected on it. Not only was it two-dimensional, but it lacked color and sound as well. A pianola near the projection booth provided musical accompaniment.
Between the booth and the screen was an acre of Persian carpet. On divans and pillows lounged two- or threescore men and women in loose, colorful garments. Some of them watched the movie; others talked, laughed, and drank. One of them was Gaea.
She did not do justice to her photographs.
Few pictures had been taken of the particular tool Gaea was pleased to present as "herself" In them, scale was indeterminate. It was one thing to read that Gaea was a small woman, quite another to stand facing her. No one would have noticed her warming a park bench. Chris had seen thousands like her roaming the urban wastelands little, lumpy ragpickers.
Her jowly face had the texture of a potato. She had soft dark eyes squeezed between a heavy brow and folds of fat. Her frizzy hair, shot with gray, had been trimmed off evenly at shoulder level. Chris had found a picture of Charles Laughton to see if an oft-expressed comparison was true. It was.
She grinned sardonically.
"I know the reaction, son. Not as impressive as a goddamn burning bush, am I? On the other hand, what do you think Jehovah had in mind when He did that? Scare the pants off some superstitious Jew goatherder, that's what. At ease, boy. Pull up a pillow and tell me about it."
It was surpris
ingly easy to talk to her. There was this to be said about her unorthodox choice of Godly aspect: it suited, in a way impossible to pinpoint, the image of Gaea as Earth Mother. One could relax in her presence. Things long held inside could be brought out, bared, in a trust that grew as one spoke. She had a knack all good therapists or parents should have. She listened and, beyond that, made him feel that she understood. It was not necessarily a sympathetic ear, nor was it uncritical love. He did not feel that he was her special favorite, or even any great concern. But she was interested in him and the problem he presented.
He wondered if it was all subjective, if he was projecting all his hopes onto the dumpy woman. Nevertheless, he wept unselfconsciously as he spoke and felt no need to justify it.
He seldom looked at her. Instead, his eyes roamed, lighting on a face, a goblet, a rug, without really seeing anything.
He finished what he had come to say. There were no reliable reports about what might happen next. People who had returned with cures were curiously vague about their interviews with Gaea and about the average of six months they spent inside her after the audience. They would not speak of it, no matter what the inducement.
Gaea watched the screen for a time, took a sip from a long-stemmed glass.
"Fine," she said. "That's pretty much what I got from Dulcimer. I've examined you thoroughly, I understand your condition, and I can guarantee a cure is possible. Not only for you, of course, but for-"
"Excuse me, but how did you examine-"
"Don't interrupt. Back to the deal. It is a deal, and you probably won't like it. Dulcimer asked you a question, back at the embassy, and you didn't answer it. I'm wondering if you have thought about it since and if you have an answer now."
Chris thought back, suddenly recalled the problem of the two children tied down before an approaching train.
"It doesn't mean much," Gaea conceded. "But it's interesting. There are two answers I can see. One for Gods, and another for humans. Have you thought about it?
"I did, once."
"What did you come up with?"
Chris sighed, decided to be honest. "It seems that it's likely that if I attempted to rescue either of them, I would probably die while trying to set the second one free. I don't know which I would free first. But if I tried to free one, I would have to try to free the other."
"And die." Gaea nodded. "That's the human answer. You people do it all the time-go out on a limb to pull back one of your kind and have the limb break under you. Ten rescuers die while looking for one lost hiker. Terrible arithmetic. It's not universal, of course. Many humans would stand by and watch the train kill both children." She looked at him narrowly. "Which would you do?"
"I don't know. I couldn't honestly say I'd sacrifice myself"
"The answer for a God is easy. A God would let them both die. Individual lives are not important, in other words. While I'm aware of every sparrow that falls, I do nothing to prevent the fall. It's in the nature of life that things should die. I don't expect you to like that, to understand it, or to agree with it. I'm just explaining where I stand. Do you see?"
"I think so. I'm not sure."
Gaea waved it away. "It's not important that you approve, just that you understand that is how my universe works."
"That I understand."
"Fine. I'm not quite as impersonal as that. Few Gods are. If there were an afterlife-which, by the way, there isn't, not in my theogony or in yours-I'd probably be inclined to reward the fellow who jumped onto the tracks and died trying to save those children. I'd take the poor bastard into heaven, if there were one. Unfortunately"-she gestured expansively, with a sour look-"this is the closest anyone will ever come to heaven, right here. I make no great claims for it; it's a place, like any other. The food's okay.
"But if I admire someone for something he or she has done, I reward them in this life. Do you follow me?"
"Well, I'm still listening."
She laughed, reached over, and slapped his knee.
"I like that. Now, I don't give anything for free. At the same time I don't sell anything. Cures are awarded on the basis of merit. Dulcimer said you couldn't think of anything you'd done to deserve a cure. Think again."
"I'm not sure I know what you want."
"Well, for things done on Earth it would have to be independently documented. The invention of a life-saving device, the origination of a worthwhile new philosophy. Sacrificing yourself for others. Have you seen It's a Wonderful Life by Frank Capra? No? It's a shame how you people neglect the classics for the whims of fad and popular taste. The protagonist in that story did things that would have qualified him, but they weren't documented in the papers, and he could hardly bring up a busload of character witnesses to testify to me, so he'd be out of luck. It's too bad, but it's the only way I can operate. Have you thought of anything?"
Chris shook his head.
"Anything you did since you talked to Dulcimer?"
"No. Nothing. I suppose my energies have been directed mostly toward my own problem. Perhaps I should apologize for that."
"No need, no need. Now to the deal. The thing is, I deal only with heroes. You may assume that I'm a snob with ephemerals and that I must draw the line somewhere. I could have used wealth as a criterion, and you' be facing a more difficult task than you are now. It's harder to get rich than it is to become a hero.
"In times past, I wouldn't even be talking to you. You would have first needed to prove that you are heroic. In those days the test was simple. The elevator was closed to free beings. If they wanted to see me, they had to climb up through a spoke, 600 kilometers. Anyone who made it was by definition a hero. A lot didn't, and were dead heroes.
"But since I became a healer to the human race, I revised the plan. Some of the people who need cures are physically too weak to get out of bed. They can't slay dragons, obviously, but there are other ways of proving worth, and now they have a chance. Think of it as a crumb thrown in the direction of human concepts of fair play. Understand, I don't guarantee the fairness of any of this. You take your chances."
"That I also understand."
"Then there you are. Unless you have a question, you may be on your way. Come back when you're worthy of my notice." But she did not yet turn away.
"But what do you want me to do?"
She sat up straighter, began ticking off points on her fingers. They were stubby little sausages crusted with jewelry, the ring bands buried in fat.
"One. Nothing. Go home and forget about it. Two. The simplest. Go to the rim, and climb back up here. You have about one chance in thirty of making it. Three." She forgot about counting, swept her arm to include the people on the couches around her. "Join the party. Stay amusing, and I'll keep you healthy forever. All these people arrived as you did. They decided to play it safe. There's plenty of films, and as I said, the food is good. But the suicide rate is high."
Chris looked around, looked closely for the first time. He could imagine that it would be. Several of the people did not really look alive at all. They sat staring at the huge screen, dull presences that seeped depression like a gray Kirlian miasma.
"Four. Go down there, and do something. Return to me a hero, and I will not only cure you but give Terran doctors the answers that will enable them to cure the seventy-three people who have the same thing you have.
"That's the bottom line. Now it's up to you. Do you jump onto the tracks, or do you stand and wait for someone else to do it? These people are hoping someone braver will come along, someone suffering from what they have. There is one man, in fact, who has what you have. There he is, the one with the hungry eyes. If you go down, live or die, you can be his salvation. Or you can join him and wait for a real chump to arrive."
Chris looked at the man and was shocked. Hungry-eyed was precisely the way to describe him. For one frightening moment, Chris saw himself standing beside the man.
"But what do you want me to do?" Chris moaned. "Can't you just give me a hint?"
> He felt that Gaea was rapidly losing interest in him. Her eyes kept straying to the flickering images on the screen. But she turned to him one last time.
"There are one million square kilometers of terrain down there. It is a geography such as you have never imagined. There is a diamond the size of the Ritz sitting on top of a glass mountain. Bring me that diamond. There are tribes living in ruthless oppression, the slaves of fell creatures with eyes red and hot as coals. Free them. There are one hundred and fifty dragons, no two alike, scattered through my circumference. Slay one of them. There are a thousand wrongs to be righted, obstacles to be overcome, helpless ones to be saved. I recommend that you set out to walk around my interior. By the time you return to your starting point I guarantee your mettle will have been tested many times.
"You have to decide now. This man here and seventy-two others on Earth await you. They are damn well tied to the railroad tracks. It's up to you to save them, and you'll begin knowing that you may not be able to save yourself. But if you die, your death will count for something.
"So what will it be? Order a drink, or get out of my sight."
8 The Aviator
Robin knew better than to stomp. She had not spent the last twelve years banished to the uplight regions of the Coven for nothing. But emotionally she was stomping.
Someone was supposed to be guiding her back to the elevator, but she quickly outdistanced her. Like an ant among elephants, she threaded her way through monuments.
Ridiculous things. Was she supposed to be impressed? If waste was impressive, she was overwhelmed.
Cathedrals. Tap dancers. A bloated, obscene thing passing herself off as the Great Mother, surrounded by listless sycophants. And to top it off?
Heroes.
She spit in the general direction of Notre Dame.
