Demon

by John Varley

  "When you tell me a lie."

  His thoughts were moving around like glue, but something in the way she looked at him inspired him to work it out.

  "How will you know if I'm lying?" he said.

  "That's the tough part," she admitted.

  She held up a knife, turned it in front of his face. She put the edge lightly along the top of his foot and drew it slowly toward her. There was no pain, but a line of blood appeared. She held it up again, and waited.

  "Sharp," he ventured. "Very sharp."

  She nodded, and put the knife down.

  She took the cigar from her mouth, knocked off some ash, and blew on the tip until it glowed fiercely. She put the glowing tip about a quarter inch away from his foot.

  The skin began to blister, and he felt it this time; it wasn't like the knife at all.

  "Yes," he said, "yes, yes, I understand."

  "Not yet, you don't." She held it right there.

  He tried to move his foot within the bindings, but the Titanide's hand appeared from behind him and held it rock steady. He bit his lip, he looked away; his eyes were dragged back. He started to scream. He screamed for a long time, and the pain never got any better.

  Even when she took it away-in five minutes? Ten?-the pain remained. He sobbed helplessly for a long time.

  At last he could look at it again. The skin was burned black in a circle about an inch around. He looked at her, and she was watching him again, as emotional as a stone. He hated her. He had never hated anyone or anything as he hated her then.

  "That was twenty seconds," she said.

  He wept when he realized she was telling the truth. He tried to nod, tried to tell her he understood what it meant, that twenty seconds was not a very long time, but he could not control his voice. She waited.

  "There's one more thing you should understand," she said. "The foot is fairly sensitive, but it's a long way from being the most sensitive part of your body." He held his breath as she quickly flashed the tip near his nose, just long enough for him to feel the heat. Then she drew a fingernail slowly from his chin to his crotch. He felt fault heat all the way down, and when her hand stopped, he heard and smelled hair being singed.

  When she took her hand away without burning him down there, an astonishing thing happened to Conal. He stopped hating her. He was sorry to see the hate go. It had been all he had left. He was naked and he hurt everywhere and she was going to hurt him some more. Hatred would have been a nice thing to hang onto.

  She put the cigar back in her mouth and clenched it in her teeth.

  "Now," she said. "Just what sort of deal did you make with Gaea?"

  And he began to cry again.

  It went on forever. The sad thing was that the truth was not going to save him. She thought he was one thing, when he really was something else.

  She burned him twice more. She didn't put the cigar to the black spot, where the nerves were dead, but to the raw, swelling edges where the nerves were screaming. After the second time he concentrated his entire being on telling her whatever she wanted to hear.

  "If you didn't see Gaea," Jones said, "who did you see? Was it Luther?"

  "Yes. Yes, it was Luther."

  "No it wasn't. It wasn't Luther. Who was it? Who sent you to kill me?"

  "It was Luther. I swear, it was Luther."

  "Is Luther a Priest?"

  "... yes?"

  "Describe him. What does he look like?"

  He hadn't the faintest idea, but he had learned a lot about her eyes. They were far from expressionless. There were a million things to be read in them and he was the world's best student of Cirocco's eyes. He saw the changes in them that meant agony and the smell of burning flesh, and he started to talk. Halfway through his description he realized he was delineating the evil sorcerer from "The Golden Blades," but he kept talking until she slapped him.

  "You've never met Luther," Jones said. "Who was it, then? Was it Kali? Blessed Foster? Billy Sunday? Saint Torquemada?"

  "Yes!" he shouted. "All of them," he added, lamely.

  Jones shook her head, and Conal heard, as though from afar, the sound of whimpering. She was going to do it, he saw it in her eyes.

  "Son," she said, and sounded sorrowful, "you've been lying to me, and I told you not to lie." She took the cigar from her mouth, blew on it again, and moved it toward his crotch.

  His eyes bulged as he tried to see it. When the pain came, it was exactly as bad as he had imagined it would be.

  It was hard for them to bring him back to life, because he would have preferred to remain dead. There was no pain in death, no pain...

  But he did wake up, to all the familiar pain. He was surprised to find it didn't hurt ... down there. He could not bring himself to even think the word for the place she had burned him.

  She was looking at him again.

  "Conal," she said. "I'm going to ask you one more time. Who are you, what have you done, and why did you try to kill me?"

  So he told her, having come full circle back to the truth. He hurt badly, and he knew she was going to torture him. But he no longer wanted to live. There was more pain ahead, but there was peace at the end.

  Jones picked up the knife. He whimpered when he saw it, and tried to make himself small, but it didn't work any better than it had before.

  She cut the rope binding his left foot to the stake. At the same time, the Titanide loosened the knots binding his head to the post. His head fell forward, his chin hit his chest, and he kept his eyes firmly closed. But he eventually had to look.

  What he saw was a miracle. Some of his pubic hair had been singed, but his penis, shriveled in fear, was unmarked. Beside it was a small piece of ice slowly turning into a puddle on the rock floor.

  "You didn't hurt me," he said.

  Jones looked surprised. "What do you mean? I burned you three times."

  "No, I mean you didn't hurt me." He gestured with his chin.

  "Oh. Right." Oddly, she looked embarrassed. Conal began to taste the thought that he might live. To his surprise, it tasted good.

  "I don't have the stomach for this," Jones admitted. Conal thought that, if she didn't, she put on a damn good act. "I can kill cleanly," she went on. "But I hate inflicting pain. I knew, in the state you were in, that you couldn't tell heat from cold."

  It was the first time she had done anything like explain her actions. He was afraid to question her, but he had to do something.

  "Then why did you torture me?" he asked, and immediately saw it was the wrong question. Anger showed in her eyes for the first time and Conal almost died of fright, because of all the things he had seen in those eyes nothing was so terrifying as her anger.

  "Because you're a fool." She stopped, and it was as if twin doors had been closed over a roaring furnace; her eyes were cool and black again, but red heat glowed just beneath.

  "You walked into a hornet's nest and you're surprised you got stung. You walked up to the oldest, meanest, and most paranoid human being in the solar system and told her you were going to kill her, and then you expected her to play by your comic book rules. The only reason you didn't die is my standing orders that if it looks like a human, let it live until I can question it."

  "You didn't think I was human?"

  "I had no reason to assume it. You might have been some new kind of Priest, or maybe some completely different practical joke. Sonny, in here we don't take anything at face value, we ... "

  She stopped, stood up, and turned away from him. When she turned back, she seemed almost apologetic.

  "Well," she said. "There's no point in lectures. It's none of my business how you've lived your life; it's just that when I see stupidity I always want to correct it. Can you handle him, Hornpipe?"

  "No problem," said the voice from behind him. He felt the ropes loosen; everywhere they came away caused pain, but it was wonderful. Jones squatted in front of him again, and looked at the ground.

  "You've got a few choices," she said. "W
e've got some poison that's fairly painless and works quick. I could put a bullet through your head. Or you could jump, if you'd rather meet it that way." She spoke as though she were asking if he preferred cherry pie, cake, or ice cream.

  "Meet what?" he said. Her eyes came up again, and he saw mild disappointment; he was being stupid again.

  "Death."

  "But... I don't want to die."

  "Most people don't."

  "We're out of poison, Captain," the Titanide said. He lifted Conal as though he were a rag doll, and started toward the mouth of the cave. Conal was not at his best. He felt far from the strength he normally possessed. He fought, and the nearer he came to the edge the stronger he grew, yet it meant nothing. The Titanide handled him easily.

  "Wait!" he shouted. "Wait! You don't have to kill me!"

  The Titanide set him on his feet at the edge of the drop, and held him as Jones put the muzzle of his gun to his temple and pulled back the hammer.

  "Do you want the bullet or not?"

  "Just let me go!" he screamed. "I'll never bother you again."

  The Titanide did let him go, and it surprised him so badly he did a wild dance on the edge, almost fell over, went to his knees and then his belly and hugged the cool stone with his feet hanging over the edge.

  They were standing ten feet from him. He got to his knees slowly and carefully, then sat back on his heels.

  "Please don't kill me."

  "I'm going to, Conal," she said. "I suggest you stand up and go out on your feet. If you want to pray or something, I'll give you time for that."

  "No," he said. "I don't want to pray. And I don't want to get up. It doesn't really matter, does it?"

  "That's always the way I figured it." She raised the gun.

  "Wait! Wait, please, just tell me why."

  "Is that a last request?"

  "I guess so. I ... I'm stupid. You're so much smarter than I am, you can squash me like a ... but why do you have to kill me? I swear, you'll never see me again."

  Jones lowered the pistol.

  "There's a couple of reasons," she said. "As long as I've got a gun on you you're a harmless fool. But you might get lucky, and there's nothing I fear so much as a lucky fool. And if you'd done to me what I've just done to you, I'd come and I'd find you, no matter how long it took."

  "I won't," he said. "I swear it. I swear it."

  "Conal, there are maybe five humans whose word I trust. Why should you be number six?"

  "Because I know I deserved what I got, and I'm eighteen years old and made a dumb mistake and I don't ever, ever want you angry with me again. I'll do anything. Anything. I'll be your slave for the rest of my life. I'll do anything you want me to do." He stopped, and knew to the depths of his soul that what he had just said was the truth. He remembered how little good the truth had done him a few hours ago. There had to be some way of proving to her that he spoke the truth. At last, he had it. A solemn oath.

  "Cross my heart and hope to die," he said, and waited.

  The bullet didn't come. He opened his eyes, and saw Jones and the Titanide looking at each other. At last the Titanide shrugged, and nodded.

  MUSICAL INTERLUDE

  Not long after Conal's arrival at Gaea, a ship named Xenophobe broke out of its circum-Saturn orbit and headed for Earth at maximum acceleration.

  The Xenophobe's departure had nothing to do with Conal. The ship and others like it had maintained orbit around Saturn for almost a century. The first one had been owned and operated by the United Nations. When that body died, ownership had passed to the Council of Europe, and later to other peace-keeping organizations.

  None of the ships had ever been mentioned in any of the treaties and protocols signed between Gaea and various Earth nations and corporations. When Gaea had entered the U.N. as a full voting member, she had thought it the diplomatic thing to ignore their existence. The ships' purpose was an open secret. Each had carried enough nuclear weapons to vaporize Gaea. Treaty or no treaty, Gaea-a single sentient being-massed more than all terrestrial life forms put together; it seemed wise to successive generations to have the capability of destroying her should she exhibit unforeseen powers.

  "The truth is," Gaea had once said to Cirocco, "I can't do shit, but why tell them that?"

  "And who would believe you?" Cirocco had responded. Cirocco thought Gaea was secretly pleased to rate so much attention, such an unprecedented show of unanimity from the historically fractious peoples of Planet Earth.

  But with the war about to enter its second year, Xenophobe's cargo could be put to better use at home instead of being squandered in space.

  Gaea noted its departure.

  A being in the shape of a 1,300-kilometer wagon wheel cannot be said to smile, in any human sense of the word. But somewhere in the pulsing scarlet line of light that served Gaea as a center of consciousness, she was smiling.

  Half a dekarev later, the Pandemonium Traveling Film Festival began showing a double feature to packed houses: The Triumph of the Will by Leni Riefenstahl, and Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, by Stanley Kubrick.

  In Gaea, time was doled out by the rev.

  One rev was the time it took Gaea to rotate once on her axis: sixty-one minutes, three and a fraction seconds. The rev was often called the "Gaean hour." Metric prefixes were then used to describe any other length of time. The kilorev, called the Gaean Month, was forty-two days long.

  Two kilorevs after Xenophobe left Saturn (to be shot down near the Moon's orbit by the Commie Rats), the mercy flights began. It was the first time Gaea had revealed any unforeseen powers.

  It had been known that Gaea was an individual, aged specimen of a genetically engineered species called Titan. She had five younger sisters in orbit around Uranus, and an immature daughter waiting to be born from the surface of Iapetus, a moon of Saturn. Rare interviews granted by Gaea's Uranian sisters had established the Titan method of reproduction, the nature of Titan eggs, their method of promulgation and distribution.

  It was also understood that Gaea, the senile Titan, had been known to employ manufactured beings that were not individuals with anything like free will, but rather extensions of herself in the same way that a finger or hand was an extension of a human's existence. These were called "tools of Gaea." For many years one of these tools had been presented to visitors as being Gaea herself. When Cirsocco killed that particular tool, Gaea promptly manufactured another.

  That tools and seeds could be combined came as no surprise to Cirocco. After ninety years of living with the insane God, little could surprise Cirocco.

  The resulting organism was very much like a spaceship. Gaea released these sentient, steerable, immensely powerful seeds by the score as soon as she knew the Xenophobe was destroyed and nothing was likely to replace it. All of them shaped orbit for Earth. Of the first waves, ninety-five percent were destroyed before reaching the atmosphere. Year Two of the War was a nervous time; everyone was shooting first and not bothering to ask questions later.

  But gradually the nature of the seeds was established. Each headed for a site of nuclear carnage, landed and began shouting that salvation was at hand. The seeds spoke, played music calculated to lift the spirits of the broken creatures fleeing the holocaust, and promised medical care, fresh air, food, water, and unlimited vistas in the welcoming arms of Gaea.

  The global nets picked up the story, dubbed the seeds "mercy flights." At first, it was hazardous to board one, as many were shot down attempting to leave Earth. But few hesitated. These were people who had seen horrors that would make hell itself seem like a summer resort. Before long, the combatants ignored the flights of Gaea's seeds. They had more important matters to consider, such as which million people to murder this week.

  Each seed could carry about one hundred people. Frightful riots developed when the seeds landed. Children were often left behind as adults pushed beyond all civilized limits threw their children from them for the chance to board the
seed.

  No newsnet reported it, but the trip back to Saturn was miraculous. No injury was too severe to heal. The horrors of biological warfare were all cured. Everyone had plenty to eat and drink. Hope was reborn during the mercy flights.

  Gaea's interior was divided into twelve regions. Six were in permanent daylight, six in endless night. Between these regions were narrow bands of failing or rising light-depending on one's direction of travel or state of mind-known as twilight zones.

  The zone between Iapetus and Dione contained a large, irregular lake, surrounded by mountains, known as Moros. Moros means Doom or Destiny.

  The coastline of Moros was irregular and precipitous. The southern part of it included scores of peninsulas, each defining a narrow, deep bay. The peninsulas were for the most part anonymous, but each bay had a name. There was the Bay of Fraud, the Bay of Incontinence, the Bay of Sorrow, the Bay of Equivocations, and Bays of Forgetfulness, Hunger, Disease, Combat, and Injustice. The list was long and depressing. The nomenclature, however, was logical, provided by early cartographers armed with lists from Greek mythology. All the bays were named after children of Nox (night), the mother of Moros. Moros was the eldest; Fraud, Incontinence, Sorrow, et al, the benighted younger sibs.

  The easternmost of the line was known as Peppermint Bay. The reason for the name was simple: nobody wanted to live in a place called the Bay of Murder, so the Wizard changed it.

  There was one settlement on the Bay: Bellinzona. It was a sprawling, noisy, dirty place. Half of it clung to the almost vertical stone of the eastern peninsula, and the rest extended onto the water on pontoon piers. The islands of Bellinzona were artificial, standing on piles, or harsh knuckles or rock standing straight out of the black waters.

  The city Bellinzona most resembled was Hong Kong. It was a polyglot city of boats. The boats were tied to piers or other boats, sometimes twenty or thirty deep. The boats were made of wood and came in every style humans had ever imagined: gondolas and junks, barges and dhows, smacks, wherries, and sampans.

  Bellinzona was three years old when Rocky came to it, and already ancient with sin and decay, a giant felonious assault on the face of Peppermint Bay.