Demon

by John Varley

  Gaea absently patted the cable strand she had been standing near, took a last look up, and moved down into the heart of her domain. Only she knew of the internal broken strands, the ones that never saw daylight. There were four hundred of those. Six hundred failures out of fifteen thousand was a rate of around four percent. Not bad for three million years, she thought. She could tolerate twenty percent, but not easily. At that point she would have to start slowing her rotation. Of course, there were other dangers. The weakest cable was in Central Oceanus. Should several more strands give way there the whole cable could fail under the added strain. Oceanus would bulge, a deep sea would be created as Ophion flowed into it from both directions and never flowed out, the imbalance would create a wobble which would weaken other strands in turn... .

  But that didn't bear thinking about. For many thousands of years Gaea's motto had been Let Tomorrow Take Care of Itself.

  She came to the areas of New Pandemonium still under construction, watched for a while as the carpenters and Iron Masters labored on a soundstage bigger than any ever built on Earth. Then she looked out over the Studio.

  New Pandemonium was a two-kilometer ring encircling the seven-kilometer cable. That gave about twenty-five square kilometers of area-almost ten square miles.

  Completely surrounding the studio grounds was a wall thirty kilometers in circumference, and thirty meters high. Or at least, that was the plan. Most of the wall was finished, but some sections had reached only two or three meters. The wall was made of basaltic stone quarried from the southern highlands, forty kilometers away, and brought to Pandemonium over a second Iron Master railway. It was built along the general lines of the Great Wall of China, but higher and wider. And it was adorned by a monorail track that ran along the inner rim.

  Outside the wall was a moat filled with sharks.

  The wall was pierced by twelve gates, like a clock face. The gates were arched, reached by sturdy causeways that ended in drawbridges, and were twenty meters tall-high enough for Gaea to walk through without lowering her head. Flanking each gate just inside the wall were temples, two at every gate, each presided over by a Priest and his or her troops. Gaea had put a lot of thought into the location of each temple. It was her belief that a certain amount of tension among her disciples made for both better discipline and interesting and unplanned events. Most of the events were bloody.

  Thus, the Universal Gate, located at twelve o'clock, the northernmost of the New Pandemonium gates, was guarded by Brigham and his Boys to the east of the gate, and Joe Smith and the Gadianton Robbers to the west. Brigham and Joe thoroughly detested each other, as befitted the leaders of rival sects within the same overall belief system.

  Over a mile away, in the one o'clock position, was the Goldwyn Gate. Luther's huge unadorned chapel, filled with his twelve disciples and uncounted pastors, faced the Vatican of Pope Joan, teeming with Cardinals, Archbishops, bishops, statues, bleeding hearts, virgins, rosaries, and other popery. Luther seethed when the once-a-hectorev bingo games were held, and spat every time he passed the booth which did a brisk business in indulgences.

  Two o'clock was the Paramount Gate, where Kali and her Thugs and Krishna and his Orangemen conducted endless stealthy intrigues against each other.

  Three was the RKO Radio Gate. Blessed Foster and Father Brown gave virulent life to their respective fictional characters.

  At four was Columbia Gate, where Marybaker had her reading room and Elron his E-meters and engrams.

  Near the First National Gate, the Ayatollah and Erasmus X conducted a perpetual jihad from their dissimilar mosques.

  The Fox Gate was relatively tranquil, the Gautama and Siddhartha only seldom resorting to violence, and that often directed at themselves. The main diversion at Fox was an interloper Priest named Gandhi, who kept trying to shoulder his way into the temples.

  And so it went, around the huge clock of New Pandemonium. The Warner Gate was the arena for Shinto and Sony in their ceaseless battle of new and old. The MGM Gate was raucous with the perpetual revivals of Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson. Keystone was guarded by Confucius and Tze-Dong, Disney by The Guru Mary and St. Claus, and United Artists by St. Torquemada and St. Valentine.

  There were other, disenfranchised Priests, whose holy places were far from the gates. Mumbo Jumbo of the Congo stalked the Studio in a black rage, muttering of discrimination, which was just as Gaea had intended. Wicca, Mensa, Trotsky, and I. C. grumbled about the emphasis on tradition, and the Mahdi and many others complained about the pro-Christian leanings of the entire New Pandemonium myth-system.

  None of them voiced their complaints to Gaea, however. And all felt deep and sincere allegiance to the Child.

  Leading from each gate was a street paved with gold.

  At least that had been in the original specifications. In practice, Gaea did not contain and could not manufacture enough gold for that many streets. So eleven of the streets had been paved for fifty meters with bricks of pure gold, followed by a kilometer of gold-plated bricks, with the remainder of bricks covered with gold paint which was already flaking off.

  Only the Universal street was pure gold from end to end. And at the far end was Tara, the Taj Mahal/Plantation-house/palace that housed Adam, the Child. Yellow-brick road, indeed, Gaea thought, as she strode down the Twenty-four Carat Highway.

  To her right and her left were the soundstages, barracks, commissaries, prop rooms, dressing rooms, equipment buildings, garages, executive offices, processing departments, cutting rooms, projection rooms, guild enclaves, and photofaun breeding pens of the greatest studio ever seen. And this, Gaea thought in vast satisfaction, is only one of twelve. Beyond the studio proper were the street sets-Manhattan 1930, Manhattan 1980, Paris, Teheran, Tokyo, Clavius, Westwood, London, Dodge City 1870-and beyond them were the back lots with their herds of cattle, sheep, buffalo, elephants, menageries of tropical birds and monkeys, riverboats, warships, Indians, and fog generators, stretching on each side to the next studio complexes: Goldwyn and United Artists. She paused and moved to one side to let a truck laden with cocaine sputter by her. It was zombie-driven. The creature at the wheel probably had never realized the pillar he had driven around was his Goddess; the top of the truck was not much above Gaea's ankle. It turned into the cocaine warehouse, which was almost full now. Gaea frowned. The Iron Masters were good at many things, but had never gotten the hang of the internal combustion engine. They liked steam a lot better.

  She reached the Universal Gate. The portcullis was up, the drawbridge down. Brigham stood on one side of the road, and Joe Smith on the other, glowering at each other. But both Priests and all their Mormons and Normans ceased their internecine squabbles when Gaea loomed over them.

  Gaea scanned the scene, ignoring the whirring of the panaflexes. Though the Studio was not yet complete, today's ceremony would finish the parts most important to her. Eleven of the twelve gates had been consecrated. Today was the final rite to complete the circle. Soon serious filming could begin.

  The hapless fellow who had admitted to being a writer stood in golden chains. Gaea took her seat, which creaked alarmingly beneath her, and caused several grips to come close to cardiac arrest. A seat had collapsed once ...

  "Begin," she muttered.

  Brigham slit the writer's throat. He was hoisted on a boom, and his blood was smeared on the great turning globe above the Universal Gate.

  Chris watched the ceremony from a high window of Tara. At that distance it was impossible to tell what was going on. One thing he was sure of: whatever was happening was murderous, and obscene, and demented, and a waste of life... .

  He turned away and descended the stairs.

  Chris had expected many things when he leaped from the plane, almost two kilorevs ago. None of them had been pleasant.

  What had happened to him was not pleasant... but it was nothing like what he had expected.

  At first he had wandered freely in the chaos of Pandemonium, avoiding the big fir
es, hoping against hope that he might locate Adam and flee into the countryside. That had not happened. He had been captured by humans and zombies, and by some things that seemed to be neither. He had killed a few of them, then been roughed up, bound, and knocked unconscious.

  There had followed an uncertain time. He was kept in a large, windowless box, fed irregularly, given a pail for urination and defecation ... and plenty of time to get used to the idea that this would be his lot for the rest of his life.

  Then he had been freed in this new place, this vast, incredible, bustling insane asylum called New Pandemonium, shown to his quarters in Tara, and been brought in for an audience with Adam. Everyone called him the Child, with the capital letter implicit in their speech. He was unharmed, and seemed to be thriving. Chris was not sure Adam recognized him, but the infant was quite willing to play games with him. Adam had a king's ransom in toys. Wonderful, clever toys, made from the finest materials and all utterly safe, with no sharp edges and nothing that could be swallowed. He also had two nurses, a hundred servants, and, Chris soon realized ... Chris. He was to become part of the household furnishings in Tara.

  Not long afterward Gaea had paid a visit. Chris did not like to remember it. He thought himself as courageous as the next fellow, but to sit at the feet of this monstrous being and listen to her had almost taken the heart right out of him. She dominated him as a human might dominate a poodle.

  "Sit down," she had said, and he had done so. It was like sitting at the feet of the Sphinx.

  "Your friend Cirocco was very naughty," Gaea said. "I haven't completed the inventory yet, but it seems likely she destroyed three or four hundred films completely. By that, I mean they were films I only had one copy of. It's not likely any others exist on Earth. What do you think of that?"

  It had taken more courage than he would have thought to make his reply.

  "I think films don't mean anything compared to human life, or-"

  "Human, is it?" Gaea had said, with a faint smile.

  "I didn't mean that. I meant human and Titanide-"

  "What about the Iron Masters? They're intelligent, surely you don't doubt that. What about whales and dolphins? What about dogs and cats, and cows, and pigs, and chickens? Is life really that sacred?"

  Chris had found nothing to say.

  "I'm toying with you, of course. Still, I have found no special virtue in life, intelligent or not. It exists, but it's foolish to think it has a right to exist. The manner of its death is of little importance, in the end. I don't expect you to agree with me."

  "That's good, because I don't."

  "Fine. Diversity of opinion is what makes life, such as it is, interesting. Myself, I find art to be the only thing that is really impressive. Art can live forever. It's a good question as to whether it remains art with no eye to see it, or ear to hear it, but it's one of those unanswerable ones, isn't it? A book or a painting or a piece of music ought to live forever. Whereas life can only wobble through its appointed moments, eating and shitting until it runs out of steam. It's all rather ugly, really.

  "I happen to like film. And I think Cirocco did a great sin when she destroyed those four hundred films. What do you think?"

  "Me? I would personally destroy every painting, film, record, and book that ever existed if it would save one human or Titanide life."

  Gaea had frowned at him.

  "Perhaps both our positions are extreme."

  "Yours is."

  "You have a sort of museum back home, at Tuxedo Junction."

  "It's a luxury I would never miss. I won't deny the past is worth preserving, and it's a sad thing to see art-even bad art-pass out of the world forever. Destroying art is a bad thing and I don't applaud it, but Cirocco would not have done it unless she thought that by doing so she could save lives. So I don't think she sinned."

  Gaea had thought that over for a while, then smiled at him. She stood up, startling Chris badly.

  "Good," she said. "We're positioned perfectly, then. You on one side, I on the other. It's going to be interesting to see what Adam thinks."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Have you ever heard of Jiminy Cricket?"

  He hadn't, then. He had since seen the film, and now understood his role. In fact, he had seen the film four times. It was one of Adam's favorites.

  The shape of their days quickly became apparent.

  Chris stayed at Tara. He could spend all the time he wanted with Adam, except for one rev during each of Adam's waking periods. During that time Adam was alone with the television set.

  Every room in Tara had a television. Some had three or four. They could not be turned off. All of them showed the same program at the same time, so if Adam wandered from one room to another continuity was not lost.

  It didn't matter much to Adam at this point. His attention span was not much more than a minute, usually, though if the program really caught his attention he might sit for five or ten minutes, giggling at things only he seemed to understand. During the times when Chris couldn't get to him and attempt to divert him from the set, he sometimes played with his toys, and sometimes spent most of the rev watching the screen. Often he went to sleep.

  Chris was not impressed. In fact, he hardly noticed the television except as a constant, noisy nuisance.

  He eventually noticed that some sort of neilson was in operation. The things that Adam liked most-measured in gpm, or giggles per minute-began to show up more often. Most of it was hardly objectionable. There were a lot of Walt Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons, a lot of Japanese computer animation from the 90's and the turn of the century, some old television shows. Here and there a western crept in, and there were kung fu films which Adam seemed to like because they were so noisy.

  Chris actually laughed when the first obscure 20th Century Fox film showed up on the screens. It was called A Ticket to Tomahawk, and Gaea had a small part in it. Chris had watched it while Adam napped-there being little to do in his ornate prison when not actually occupied with Adam. It was a silly little western. Then he spotted Gaea in a chorus line.

  It wasn't Gaea, of course, but an actress who looked very much like her. Chris looked in the end credits to find the long-dead woman's name, but couldn't pick it out.

  Not long after that he spotted Gaea again in a film called All About Eve, She had a larger part in that one, and he was able to determine that the actress was named Marilyn Monroe. He wondered if she had been famous.

  He soon decided she had been, as her films started appearing regularly on Tara Television. Adam took very little notice. All About Eve had rated zero on the gigglometer; Adam had hardly glanced at it. The Asphalt Jungle didn't fare much better. Neither did Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

  Then Chris started to see documentaries about the life and death of Marilyn Monroe. There were an astonishing number of them. Most of them talked about qualities Chris simply could not see. While she might have been one hell of a box-office draw during the twentieth century, when the documentaries were made, few of the films meant much to Chris.

  But one thing eventually did. During one of the dull documentaries, Adam looked up from his toys, smiled, pointed at the television screen, and said, "Gay." He looked over to Chris, pointed again, and said, "Gya."

  Chris began to be disturbed.

  Gaea never came to Tara.

  That is, she never entered it, though the place had been constructed with her monstrous frame in mind. All the doors were wide and high enough for her, and the stairs and second floor were reinforced enough to bear her weight.

  But she did pay visits. When she came, she remained far away and Adam was brought to a second-floor balcony. Chris understood the logic of it. Someone so huge might alarm the child. Gaea would get Adam used to her gradually, coming a little closer every day.

  When she visited she always had something interesting. One time it was fireworks, which Gaea held in her hand and then hurled up into the air. They were not too loud, but very pretty. Another time it was a
herd of trained elephants. She made them jump through hoops and walk tightropes. She slung one uncomfortable-looking beast over her shoulders, then had one balance in the palm of each hand, and lifted them high in the air. Chris was impressed, and Adam giggled the whole time. Gaea kept up a running patter of baby talk, calling Adam by name, telling him she loved him, and mentioning her name as often as possible. And she always brought a marvelous gift.

  "Gay, gay, gay," Adam would shout.

  "Gay-aA," Gaea would call back.

  Adam was about fifteen months old now. His vocabulary was expanding. It wasn't long before he could say Gaea.

  Marilyn Monroe had made about thirty films. Chris had seen each of them at least once by the time of the dedication of the Universal Gate. He brooded about it as he walked down the stairs from the third floor. More and more often now, Adam would pause in his play to point to the television, laugh, and say the name of his gargantuan granny.

  He was about to start down to the ground floor when he was startled by a loud bang, followed quickly by another. It took him a moment to identify the sounds as sonic booms.

  He turned and hurried to the second-floor balcony.

  Up in the sky were two medium-sized Dragonflys. They were turning, slowing, coming back after their startling pass over New Pandemonium. Chris was vaguely aware of shouting and scurrying on the ground. The planes were far too high for him to tell who was in them, or even how many people.

  Cirocco, he thought. My god, Cirocco, you couldn't be that stupid. You can't think it will do any good to bomb this place...

  He watched, open-mouthed, as the two planes, moving quite slowly now, went through an intricate series of turns and twists. They seemed to be lining up for something.

  His heart almost stopped when both planes began to smoke. What could have happened to them?

  One twisted quickly back and forth, while the other made a long, slow curve. Then they stopped smoking. Once more they were barely visible gnats turning around and moving into position again.

  And he realized they had written the letters SU.