by John Varley
"Yes, but-"
"Valiha, do as I say. This is Long-Odds Major talking to you. Do you think I'd make you do something that wasn't a sure bet?"
Valiha hesitated one second more, then trotted under the arched doorway and across a stone floor until she reached the beginning of the five-kilometer stairs.
She started down.
32 The Vanished Army
The chemical fires had long guttered to their death when Cirocco, on foot, rounded the curve of the great cable with Hornpipe following behind. The Titanide used a three-legged gait, his right hind leg held up by a sling tied around his middle. The lower joint of the leg was splinted.
Cirocco, too, bore signs of the battle. There was a bandage wrapped around her head, covering one eye. Her face was streaked with dried blood. Her right arm was in a sling, and two fingers of her right hand were swollen and askew.
They walked on the hard rock that surrounded the base of the cable, not venturing onto the sand. Though the last wraiths they had encountered had been free of whatever bewitchment had enabled some of them to ignore water and actually to grapple with the humans and Titanides, Cirocco was taking no chances. One she had killed had sloughed off a clear, supple skin at the moment of death. It had felt like vinyl.
She saw something out on the sand, stopped, and held out her hand. Hornpipe handed her a pair of binoculars, which she awkwardly put to her good eye. It was Hautbois. She could be sure only because there were a few patches of green-and-brown skin undamaged. Cirocco looked away.
"I fear she will never see Ophion," Hornpipe sang.
"She was good," Cirocco sang, not knowing what else to say. "I hardly knew her. We will sing of her later."
Aside from the one body, there were few signs that a terrible battle had been fought here. A few patches of sand were blackened, but even now the relentless dunes were marching over them, the rising wind heaping grain after grain over the body of the Titanide.
Cirocco had expected much worse. They might be dead but she would not accept it until she saw the bodies.
They had been forced toward the east as their flight degenerated into chaos. Hornpipe had tried again and again to bear toward the other two Titanides but every time came upon another concealed cadre of the waterproof wraiths. There was little he could do but flee. The attacks had been so intense that Cirocco had decided the wraiths were after her alone. Thinking she could draw them off and thus relieve the pressure on her friends, she had told Hornpipe to run as fast as he could around the cable to the east. They were pursued by a lone buzz bomb, which nearly killed them when it dropped a bomb so close they were lifted into the air and slammed against one of the cable strands.
By then it was clear she had been wrong. The wraiths had not been after her; they had not followed her, nor had the buzz bombs, except for the one that had wounded them. Miserably, they sought shelter beneath the cable strands and listened to the sounds of battle far away, helpless to do anything about it. They had to bind their own wounds first.
Cirocco had been about to go on, but Hornpipe called her back. He was looking at the hard surface of the rock.
"One of our people came this way," he sang, pointing to parallel scratches that could have been made only by the hard, clear keratin of a Titanide's hoof. A few steps further he found a patch of drifted sand that bore two hoof marks and the imprint of a human foot.
"So Valiha made it here," Cirocco said, in English. "And at least one other." She put her free hand beside her mouth and shouted into the darkness. When the echoes had died away, they could hear no sound. "Come on. Let's go in and find them."
As they journeyed deeper into darkness, they began to encounter looming, irregular shapes that blocked their path. Hornpipe lit a lantern. By its light they could see a great deal of debris had fallen from the narrowing spaces overhead. The strands rose at least ten kilometers before entwining to form a single entity: the Tethys cable. Cirocco knew the maze harbored its own complex ecology-plants that rooted in the cable strands and animals that scuttled up and down them.
Cirocco led the way through the debris, conscious that under any of the larger piles could be all four of her friends. Yet from time to time Hornpipe called out to tell her he had seen another hoof mark. The two of them moved deeper until they came upon a massive pile of stone. Cirocco knew that she was dead center under the cable. She had been here before, and in the spot had been the usual gremlin-constructed entrance building. Now there was just rubble and, in the center of a huge scorch, the twisted corpses of three buzz bombs. There was not much left of them but the metal that had formed the combustion chamber linings and blackened steel teeth.
"Did they go in there?" Cirocco asked.
Hornpipe bent to study the ground in the light of his lantern.
"It is hard to say. There is a chance they got into the building before it was brought down."
Cirocco was breathing deeply. She took the lantern from Hornpipe and walked a short distance around the pile of rubble. Then she gingerly climbed a few steps until she had to give it up, handicapped by her broken arm and a feeling of dizziness. She came down. She sat with her forehead in her hand for a moment, sighed, got up, and began picking up small rocks and throwing them into the darkness.
"What are you doing?" Hornpipe asked after she had kept it up for several minutes.
"Digging."
Hornpipe watched her. There were rocks from fist-sized up to several hundred kilograms that the two of them would probably be able to move. But the great bulk of the pile, the rocks that gave the small mountain its massive shape, would have made good building blocks for an Egyptian pyramid. At last he came up behind her and touched her arm. She flinched away from him.
"Rocky, it's no use. You can't do it."
"I have to. I will."
"It's too-"
"Damn it, don't you understand? Gaby's down there."
She trembled and fell to her knees. Hornpipe eased himself down beside her, and she came into his arms to sob on his shoulder.
When she once more had control of herself, she drew back from his embrace, stood, and put both hands on his shoulders. Her eyes were burning with a determination Hornpipe had not seen in the Wizard for a long time.
"Hornpipe, my old friend," she sang, "by the blood tie that binds us, I must ask you to do a great thing for me. By the love we both know for your grandhindmother, I would not ask this thing if there were any other way."
"Command me, Wizard," Hornpipe sang, in formal mode.
"You must return to your homeland. There you must implore all who will to come to the great desert, to come to Tethys for their Wizard's sake, in her hour of need. Summon the great leviathans of the sky. Call Dreadnaught, Pathfinder, The Aristocrat, Ironbound, Whistlestop, Bombasto, His Honor, and Old Scout, himself. Tell them that the Wizard will make war on the skyrockets, that she will wipe their kind forever from the great wheel of the world. Say to them that in return for this sworn pledge, the Wizard asks them to take all who will come and bring them to Tethys. Will you do this thing for me, Hornpipe?"
"I will, Wizard. Yet I fear not many of my people will come. Tethys is far from home, the way is full of danger, and my people fear these places. We believe Gaea did not intend for us to come here."
"Then tell them this. Say to them that to each who will come, a baby is granted next Carnival time. Tell them that if they help me in this, I will give them a Carnival the people will sing of for the next thousand megarevs." She switched to English. "Do you think that will get them here?"
Hornpipe shrugged and replied in the same language. "Only as many as the blimps can lift."
Cirocco clapped the Titanide on the shoulder, stood, and tried to help him to his feet. He was slow to rise. She stood looking at him, then stretched up to kiss him.
"I will be waiting here," she sang. "Do you know the whistle of great distress, to call down the sky leviathans?"
"I know it."
"One will pick you up soon. Until
then be extremely cautious. Get there safely, and return to me with many workers. Tell them to bring ropes, block and tackle, their best winches, picks, and hammers."
"I will." He looked down. "Rocky," he said, "do you think they are alive?"
"I think there's a chance. If they're trapped down there, Gaby will know what to do. She'll know nothing will stop me from getting her out, and she'll have the others stay at the top of the stairs. It's too dangerous to go down to Tethys without me to hold her in check."
"If you say so, Rocky."
"I say so. Now go with love, my son."
33 Firebrand
"It was Gene," Gaby said in a hoarse whisper. "I could hardly believe it, but it was Gene who jumped out of the buzz bomb before it hit."
"Gaby, you have to take it easy," Chris said.
"I will. I'll sleep in a minute. But I wanted to tell you this first."
There was no way for Robin to tell how long the four of them had been on the stairway. She thought it might have been a full day. She had slept once, only to wake to the sound of Gaby's screams.
Robin could hardly look at her. They had stripped away what was left of her clothing and put her on top of one of their two sleeping bags. Valiha's first-aid kit contained tubes of a salve for the treatment of burns, but they had run out of it long before they had covered all the seared skin. They had not even been able to spare enough water to wash the sand from her adequately, for when the waterskins were empty, there would be no more.
It was merciful that the one lantern, turned low to conserve fuel, cast so little light. Gaby was a mass of second- and third-degree burns, painful to behold. Her entire right side and most of her back were charred black. The skin cracked when she moved and oozed clear liquid. She said she could feel nothing there; Robin knew that meant the nerves had been destroyed. But the reddened areas that surrounded the destruction hurt her terribly. She would doze fitfully for a few minutes, then come to tortured awareness with croaking screams tearing at her throat. She would beg for water, and they would give her a few sips.
But now she seemed calmer, in less pain, more aware of the people around her. She was on her side, legs drawn up, head cradled in Valiha's lap, and she spoke of the minutes before her immolation.
"This was his doing. He contacted the buzz bombs-they're damn intelligent, by the way. He contacted the wraiths, too; only they don't work with outsiders. I knew that, and he knew it, and he tried not to tell me how he got them to cooperate. I persuaded him." She smiled, a terrible sight with half her face ruined.
"I've got to give him credit for one thing. That stunt with the wraiths surprised me completely. He dipped the bastards in plastic. He had them all go through a sprayer that coated them with some gunk, and he marched them out to do battle.
"But then he assumed we were smarter than we actually were, and that's what fouled him up. Remember, halfway to the cable, Rocky pointed out if we'd gone north to the road, doubled back on it, and then struck out for the cable, we'd have had less distance to travel over deep sand? If we had, we'd have run right into his ambush. He had his waterproof army deployed between the road and the cable, and a flotilla of buzz bombs hiding in the north mountains to bomb us to hell after we were pinned down. Where we came through, he had only a small force, not waterproofed. He said the plastic didn't last long, it got worn away in the sand, and he had only the one machine to put it on. He had to station that with his main force."
She coughed, and Robin offered her more water. She shook her head.
"We'll have to make that stuff last," she said. She seemed weakened from talking so long, and Chris again suggested she rest.
"Got to tell this first," she said. "Where was I? Oh. You were right, Chris. We allowed ourselves to get stopped by the small force of wraiths; then we hid when that buzz bomb appeared. That was Gene, looking for us. When he saw us, he radioed his main force to join up with him. If we'd gone then, we'd have been under the cable before the infantry or the air force could have reached us. I don't think Gene would have risked his neck trying to get us from the air, but I could be wrong. He had a pretty powerful motive.
"He was after me," she said, and began to cough again. When she had it under control, she resumed her story. "The whole thing and just about all our troubles on this trip, was Gene trying to kill me. The wraiths and the buzz bombs had orders to go for me first, get the rest later if they could. Cirocco was not to be harmed, but I think Gene had other ideas."
"What do you mean?" Robin asked. "Was he under orders himself?"
"Yes," Gaby said. "Goddamn right. He really didn't want to tell me about that. I told him if he didn't, I'd see to it he lived at least a day and I'd take him apart piece by piece. I had to take off a few pieces to make sure he believed me."
Robin swallowed nervously. She had thought herself no stranger to violence, but the scale of recent events had shaken her. She knew about bloodied noses and broken bones and even death, but war had been just a tale of the forsaken Earth. She did not know if she could have done the things Gaby now described. She could have slit his throat or stabbed him in the heart. Torture was foreign to her, yet she felt the deep current of hatred that flowed in Gaby, with this man Gene as its source. Once again she knew the tremendous gap between her nineteen years in the Coven and Gaby's seventy-five in the great wheel.
"So who was it?" Chris was asking. "Oceanus? Tethys?"
"I wanted it to be Oceanus," Gaby said. "But I didn't expect it to be. Gene was getting his orders from who I suspected all along. It was Gaea who told him I must be killed and Cirocco spared. That's why when Psaltery died, I couldn't help crying out that she had done it to him. I think she heard me and told Gene to step up his efforts. She gave him a source of napalm and explosives."
"Gene was behind that attack, too?"
"You remember what happened? Chris saw the buzz bomb and pushed me off Psaltery. If he hadn't, we both would have been dead. After that Gene had to make it look like an attack on us all because it was necessary that Rocky not know they were after just me." She coughed again, then grabbed Chris by the collar, lifting herself with hysterical strength.
"And that's what you have to tell Rocky when she gets here. She has to know it was Gaea that did it. If I'm asleep when she gets here, tell her the very first thing. Promise me you'll do that. If I'm delirious or too weak to talk, you have to tell her."
"I'll tell her, I promise," Chris said. He glanced at Robin. He thought she was delirious already, and Robin agreed. Cirocco was probably dead, and even if she wasn't, there was little prospect she could move the mountain of stone clogging the stairway above them.
"You don't understand," Gaby said, sagging back. "All right, I'll tell you what we were really doing while we pretended to be taking you two on a little walk in the park.
"We were plotting the overthrow of Gaea."
What Gaby and Cirocco had been doing was more an exploration of ways and means than an actual plot. Neither of them was at all sure it was physically possible to overthrow Gaea or if Gaea the being could be disposed of without wrecking Gaea the body, upon which all of them depended for survival.
As with so many things in Gaea, the situation had its roots in events long past. Gaby had felt an itch to change things at least thirty years before. Robin sat beside her in the flickering darkness and heard her speak of things she had been able to confide to no one but Cirocco.
"Rocky didn't even want to hear about it for a long time," she told them. "I don't blame her. She had a lot of reasons to be satisfied with things the way they were. So did I, for that matter. I didn't find life in Gaea a terrible thing. Every once in a while I found something I didn't like, but hell, it was worse on Earth. The universe isn't fair, and it isn't pretty, whether or not it's governed by a living God. I honestly believe that if the Christian God existed, I'd hate him more than I do Gaea. She isn't even in his league.
"And yet, just because you could talk to this God, just because she was actually there and I
had spoken to her and knew that she was responsible, that every injustice and every pointless death was the result of a conscious decision... it made it much harder to take. Cancer is acceptable to me only if I feel it just grew, that no one thought it out and decided to inflict it on people. On Earth, that's the way it was. If an earthquake happened, you suffered and patched your wounds and picked up the pieces and moved on to whatever the universe threw at you next. You didn't rail against God, or at least not many of the people I knew did.
"But if the government passed a law you didn't like, you raised hell. You either tried to throw the bastards out at the next election or organized to take power away from them by other means. Because those injustices came from people, and not an indifferent universe, you felt you could do something about it.
"It took me a long time to realize that it's the same way here, but I finally did. The obstacle was in thinking of her as a God, and believe it or not, for a long time I guess I did. There are so many resemblances. But she doesn't operate by magic. Everything she does is theoretically within the reach of beings like ourselves. So I gradually moved away from the God proposition and began viewing Gaea as City Hall. And damn it, I guess I can't resist fighting City Hall." She had to stop talking because she was seized by a coughing fit. Robin held the waterskin to her lips, and she drank, then looked down at herself with tears in her eyes. "You can see where it got me."
Valiha gently stroked Gaby's forehead. "You should rest now, Gaby," she said. "You must save your strength."
"I will," Gaby said. "I just have to get this out first." She breathed heavily for a short time, and Robin saw her eyes widen. She tried to raise herself, but Valiha kept her down, carefully not touching her burned skin. Robin could see a realization growing in the other woman as she looked wildly from one to the other. When she spoke, her voice was childlike.
"I'm gonna die now, aren't I?"
"No, you should just-"
"Yes," said Valiha, with a Titanide's directness about death. "There can be very little hope now."
