Demon

by John Varley

  That Canada had once been a much larger nation was a fact no one had ever imparted to Conal-or if someone had, he had not been interested enough to remember it. Canada had survived by surrendering. Quebec had been the first to go, followed by British Columbia. B.C. was part of the Norman Lands, Ontario was an independent nation, the Maritimes had been swallowed up by the E.C.C. to the south, and most of southern Manitoba and Saskatchewan were owned by General Protein, the Corporation State. Canada huddled between the western shores of Hudson Bay and the foothills of the Rockies. Yellowknife was its capital city. Conal lived in a suburb of Fort Reliance, a town called Artillery Lake. Fort Reliance had a population of five million.

  Conal had grown up with two passions: hockey, and listening to comic books. He was terrible at hockey, being simply too fat and too slow. He was usually the last to be chosen in pick-up games. When he played, he was always installed at the goal, on the theory that though he wasn't quick, it would be hard to shoot around him.

  On his fourteenth birthday a bully kicked snow in his face and Conal found a new passion: bodybuilding. To his surprise and everyone else's, he was damn good at it. By the time he was sixteen he could have been Mr. Canada. In true Charles Atlas fashion, he sought out the bully and forced him through a hole in the ice covering Artillery Lake, after which the bully was never seen again.

  The name Conal meant "high and mighty" in Celtic. Conal began to feel his mother had named him well, though he was only five foot eight. And there was something in Mrs. Ray's heritage that, when he learned of it, provided Conal with his fourth great passion in life.

  So it was that on his eighteenth birthday, Day 294 of the War, Conal took the morning sleigh to the spaceport at Cape Churchill, where he boarded a ship bound for Gaea.

  Aside from a trip to Winnipeg, Conal had never in his life been outside Canada. This trip was considerably longer: Gaea was almost a billion miles from Artillery Lake. The fare was expensive, but George Ray, Conal's father, no longer dared thwart his son's desires. The boy had done nothing but eat, play hockey, and lift weights for three years; it would be nice to have him out from underfoot. A billion miles sounded about right.

  Saturn impressed the hell out of Conal. The rings looked solid enough to skate on. He watched the ship dock with the huge black mass of Gaea, then dug out his oldest comic book, "The Golden Blades." It was the story of a young boy who received a pair of magic skates from an evil sorcerer and how he learned to use them. In the end the boy-who was also named Conal-mastered the skates and cleaved the wizard's head with a mighty kick. Conal fingered the soundlines bordering the final panel, heard the familiar meaty thunk as the skate opened the wizard's skull, watched the blood gush and the foul brains glisten on the page.

  Conal doubted he could kill the Wizard with his skates, though he had brought them. In his mind, he saw himself wringing the life from her with his bare hands. In a more practical vein, he had also brought a pistol.

  His quarry was Cirocco Jones, formerly Captain of the Deep Space Vessel Ringmaster, erstwhile Wing Commander of the Angels, sub rasa Hindmother of the Titanides, the one-time Great and Powerful but long-deposed Wizard of Gaea, now called Demon. He planned to stuff her through a hole in the ice.

  It took Conal a month to find Cirocco Jones. In part it was because the Demon was not eager to be found, though she was not running from anything in particular at the moment. The other reason it took so long was that Conal, like so many before him, had underestimated Gaea. He had known the World/God was large, but he had not translated the numbers into a picture of just how much territory he had to deal with.

  He knew that Jones was usually found in the company of Titanides, and that Titanides usually stayed in the region known as Hyperion, so he concentrated his search there. His month of searching gave him time to become accustomed to the one-quarter gravity inside Gaea, and the dizzying vistas Gaea's mammoth ulterior presented. He learned that no Titanide would tell a human anything about the "Captain," as they now called Jones.

  Titanides were a lot bigger than he had expected. The centaur-like creatures had played prominent roles in many of his comics, but the artists had used considerable license in portraying them. He had expected to see eye to eye with them, whereas the truth was they averaged three meters. In comics, Titanides were male and female, though one never saw any sexual organs. In reality, Titanides all looked female and their sexuality was impossible to comprehend. They had either male or female organs-completely human in appearance-between their front legs, and male and female organs behind. The anterior male organ was usually sheathed; the first time Conal saw one he had a feeling of inadequacy he had not experienced since his first week with the barbells.

  He found her in a place called La Gata Encantada. It was a Titanide pub near the trunk of the largest tree Conal had ever seen. The tree was, in fact, the largest in the solar system, and beneath it and in its branches was the largest Titanide city in Gaea, called Titantown.

  She was sitting at a table in a corner, her back to the wall. There were five Titanides seated with her. They were playing an elaborate game with dice and wondrously carved chessmen. Each player had a gallon-sized mug of dark beer. The one beside Cirocco Jones was untouched.

  She looked small, slouched in her chair among the Titanides, but she was actually just over six feet. Her clothing was black, including a hat that resembled the one Zorro wore in one of Conal's favorite comics. It left most of her face in shadow, but the nose was too grand to hide. There was a thin cigar clenched in her teeth and a blue-steel .38 tucked into the waistband of her pants. Her skin was light brown, and her hair long and streaked with silver.

  He stepped up to the table and faced her. He was unafraid; he had been looking forward to this.

  "You're not a wizard, Jones," he said. "You're a witch."

  For a moment he thought he had not been heard over the clatter and roar in the pub. Jones did not move. Yet somehow the tension of his blazing aura moved out and electrified the air. The noise gradually died away. All the Titanides turned to look at him.

  Cirocco Jones slowly lifted her head. Conal realized she had been looking at him for some time-in fact, since before he approached the table. She had the hardest eyes he had ever seen, and the saddest. They were deep-set, clear, and dark as coal. She looked at him, unblinking, from his face to his bare arms to the long-barreled Colt in the holster on his hip, his hand opening and closing a few inches from it.

  She took the cigar from her mouth and showed him her teeth in a carnivorous grin.

  "And who the hell are you?" she asked.

  "I'm the Sting," Conal said. "And I've come to kill you."

  "Do you want us to take him, Captain?" one of the Titanides at the table asked. Cirocco waved her hand at him.

  "No, no. This appears to be an affair of honor," she said.

  "That's exactly right," Conal said. He knew his voice tended to get high and squeaky when he raised it, so he paused a moment to slow his breathing. She wasn't going to let these animals do her dirty work for her. It seemed she might make a worthy opponent after all.

  "When you came here, hundreds of years ago, you-"

  "Eighty-eight," she said.

  "What?"

  "I came here eighty-eight years ago. Not hundreds."

  Conal refused to be distracted.

  "You remember someone who came here with you? A man called Eugene Springfield?"

  "I remember him very well."

  "Did you know he was married? Did you know he left a wife and two children back on Earth?"

  "Yes. I knew that."

  Conal took a deep breath, and stood straight.

  "Well, he was my great-great grandfather."

  "Bullshit."

  "It is not bullshit. I'm his grandson, and I've come here to avenge his murder."

  "Mister... I don't doubt you've done a lot of crazy things in your life, but if you did that, it would be the craziest thing you ever did."

  "I came billion
s of miles to find you, and now it's just between you and me."

  He reached for his belt buckle. Cirocco jerked almost imperceptibly. Conal never saw it; he was too busy unbuckling his belt and throwing it and his gun to the floor. He had liked wearing that gun. He had worn it since his arrival, as soon as he saw how many other humans went armed; he thought it a pleasant change from the Dominion's stuffy firearms laws.

  "There," he said. "I know you're hundreds of years old and I know you can fight dirty. Well, I'm ready to take you. Let's step outside and settle this honorably. A fight to the death."

  Cirocco shook her head slowly.

  "Son, you don't get to be a hundred and twenty-three years old by doing everything honorably." She looked over his shoulder and nodded.

  The Titanide behind him brought the empty beer mug down on the top of his head. The thick glass shattered, and Conal slumped to the floor into a pile of orange Titanide droppings.

  Cirocco got up, tucking her second gun back into the top of her boot.

  "Let's see just what sort of dirty trick he really is."

  There was a Titanide healer present; she examined the bloody scalp wound and announced the man would probably live. Another Titanide pulled the pack from Conal's back and started going through it. Cirocco stood over him smoking.

  "What's in it?" she asked.

  "Let's see ... beef jerky, a box of shells for that cannon, a pair of skates ... and about thirty comic books."

  Cirocco's laugh was music to the Titanides because they heard it so seldom. They all laughed with her as she passed the comics around.

  Soon the place was buzzing with tinny balloonchip voices and sound effects.

  "Deal me out, folks," she told the people at her table.

  Conal woke with the worst headache he had ever imagined. He was being bounced around, so he opened his eyes to see what was causing it.

  He found himself suspended head down over a two-mile drop.

  Screaming hurt his head badly, but he was unable to stop. It was a high-pitched, child's scream, almost inaudible. Then he was vomiting, and nearly choked on it.

  He was bound in so much rope he might have been wrapped by a spider. The only part of his body with any freedom was his neck, and it hurt to move that, but he did, looking wildly around.

  He was strapped to the back of a Titanide with his head on the monster's huge hindquarters. The Titanide was somehow climbing a vertical rock face. When he leaned his head all the way back he could see the thing's rear hooves scrabbling on ledges two inches wide. He watched in horrified fascination as one ledge broke away and a shower of stones fell up and up and up until he lost sight of them.

  "The bastard threw up on my tail," the Titanide said.

  "Yeah?" came another voice, which he recognized as Cirocco Jones's.

  So the Demon was somewhere near his feet.

  He thought he would go mad. He screamed, he pleaded with them, but they said nothing. It was impossible that the thing could climb such a slope by itself, and yet it was doing it with both Conal and Cirocco on its back, and doing it about as fast as Conal could have walked on level ground.

  Just what sort of animal was this Titanide?

  They brought him to a cavern midway up the cliff. It was just a hole in the rock, ten feet high and about as wide, forty feet deep. There was no path of any kind leading to it.

  He was dumped, still in his cocoon of rope. Cirocco wrestled him into a sitting position.

  "In a little while, you're going to answer some questions," she said.

  "I'll tell you anything."

  "You're damn right you will." She grinned at him again, then hit him across the face with the barrel of his own gun. He was about to protest when she hit him again.

  Cirocco had to hit him four times before she was sure he was out. She would have hit him with the gun butt, except that would have pointed the barrel at her, and she hadn't lived to be one hundred and twenty-three by doing stupid things like that.

  "He shouldn't have called me a witch," she said.

  "Don't look at me," Hornpipe said. "I would have killed him back at La Gata."

  "Yeah." She sat back on her heels and let her shoulders sag. "You know, sometimes I wonder what's so great about reaching one hundred twenty-four."

  The Titanide said nothing. He was loosening Conal's bonds and stripping him. He had been with the Wizard for many years, and knew her moods.

  The back of the cavern was ice. On a hot day like this one, a trickle of water flowed over the rock floor. Cirocco knelt beside a pool. She splashed water on her face, then took a drink. It was icy cold.

  Cirocco had spent many nights here when things got uncomfortable down at the rim. There was a stack of blankets as well as several bales of straw. There were two wooden pails: one for use as a latrine, and the other to catch drinking water. A hammock was suspended between two pitons driven into the rock. An old tin washboard provided the only other amenity. When she had to stay for a long time, Cirocco would string a clothesline across the mouth of the cavern to catch the dry updrafts.

  "Hey, we missed one," Hornpipe said.

  "One what?"

  The Titanide tossed her a comic book which had been stuffed into Conal's back pocket. She caught it, and watched the Titanide work for a moment.

  There was a heavy stake embedded in the floor of the cave. The naked bodybuilder had been tied to it, sitting down, and his ankles fastened to stakes about three feet apart. It was a totally defenseless posture. Hornpipe was tying Conal's head to the post by wrapping a wide leather strap around his forehead.

  The man's face was a wreck. It was crusted with dried blood. His nose was broken, and his cheekbones, but Cirocco thought his jaw was okay. His mouth was swollen and his eyes were tiny slits.

  She sighed, and looked at the crumpled comic book. The cover said "The Wizard of Gaea," and showed her old ship, the Ringmaster, in its death throes. Even after this long she hated to look at it.

  It was a dedicated book, in that all the characters were named and could not be changed by the purchaser. Most of Conal's books had provision to punch in one's own name for the hero.

  The characters were familiar. There were Cirocco Jones, and Gene, and Bill, and Calvin, and the Polo Sisters, and Hornpipe the Younger, and Meistersinger.

  And, of course, someone else.

  Cirocco closed the book and swallowed to get rid of the heat at the back of her throat. Then she sprawled in the hammock and started to go through it.

  "Are you really going to read that thing?" Hornpipe asked.

  "You can't read it. There are no words." Cirocco had never actually seen a book like "The Wizard of Gaea," but she understood the principle. The colors glowed, or strobed, or glistened and felt wet to the touch. Buried in the ink were microscopic balloonchips. When you touched a panel the characters in it delivered their lines. Sound effects had replaced the old printed tzings, ker-pows, braka-braka's and screeches.

  The dialogue was even worse than Conal's in La Gata, so she simply looked at the pictures. The story was easy enough to follow.

  It was even accurate, in its broad outlines.

  She saw her ship approaching Saturn. There was the discovery of Gaea, a thirteen-hundred-kilometer black wheel in orbit. Her ship was destroyed, and all the crew emerged inside after a period of weird dreams. They took a ride on a blimp, built a boat and sailed down the river Ophion, met the Titanides. Cirocco was mysteriously able to sing the Titanide language. The group got embroiled in the war with the Angels.

  The characters screwed a lot more than she remembered. There were very steamy scenes between Cirocco and Gaby Plauget, and more between Ckocco and Gene Springfield. The last was an utter fabrication, and the first was out of sequence.

  Everyone was armed to the teeth. They carried more weapons than a battalion of mercenaries. All the men bulged with muscles, worse than Conal Ray, and all the women had tits the size of watermelons that kept bursting free of the skimpy leather hammocks su
pporting them. They encountered monsters Cirocco had never heard of, and left behind nothing but bloody gobbets of flesh.

  Then it got interesting.

  She saw Gaby, Gene, and herself climbing one of the huge cables that led to the hub of Gaea, six hundred kilometers above. The three of them made camp, and the shenanigans started. It appeared to be a love triangle, with Cirocco involved with both her companions. She and Gaby plotted by the campfire, exchanging words of undying love, things like "Oh, God, Gaby, I love your hands on my hot, wet pussy."

  The next morning-though Cirocco remembered the trip as having taken a lot longer than that-at their audience with the great Goddess Gaea, Gene was offered the position of Wizard. He lowered his head humbly to accept, and Cirocco grabbed him by the hair, pulled his head back, and slit his throat from ear to ear. Blood spilled down the page, and she kicked his head contemptuously out of the way. Gaea-who was a lot more chickenshit than Cirocco remembered her-made Cirocco Wizard, with Gaby as her wicked assistant.

  There was a lot more. Cirocco sighed and closed the book.

  "You know what?" she said. "He may be telling the truth."

  "I thought so."

  "He could be just a fool."

  "Well, you know the penalty for foolishness."

  "Yeah." She tossed the comic away, picked up one of the wooden pails, and threw two gallons of ice water into Conal's face.

  He awoke gradually. He was being pushed and pinched, but it all seemed far away. He didn't even know who he was.

  Finally he knew he was naked, bound beyond any hope of escape. His legs were spread wide and he couldn't move them. He couldn't see anything until Jones pried one of his blood-crusted eyes open. That hurt. There was a strap immobilizing his head, and that hurt, too. In fact, everything hurt.

  Jones was in front of him, sitting on an overturned pail. Her eyes were as deep and black as ever as she studied him dispassionately. Finally he could stand it no longer.

  "Are you going to torture me?" The words came out slurred.

  "Yep."

  "When?"