Demon

by John Varley

  It was hard to tell what effect these movies had on Adam. They were usually flagrant morality plays, with Cirocco always cast as the evil one, usually being killed in the end to the cheers of onlookers. Still, Chris remembered that both Dracula and Frankenstein, ancient cinematic bad-guys, were viewed with a certain fascination by children. Adam seemed to react in the same way. He grew excited when Cirocco appeared on the television screen.

  Maybe that was part of Gaea's plan. Maybe she wanted Adam to identify with the bad guy, even if it was Cirocco.

  On the other hand, there was the computer-altered version of King Kong.

  Chris had never seen any of these old films, but long ago Cirocco had told him the plot of that one, as he had been thinking of going into northern Phoebe to attempt the heroic slaughter of Gaea's re-creation.

  The version on Pandemonium television was different. Gaea had been cast as Kong, and Cirocco as Carl Denham. Fay Wray was hardly in the movie. Kong/Gaea never threatened her in any way; everything he/she did was to protect innocent bystanders from Denham's blundering attempts to kill Kong. At last, hounded to the top of a tall building, horribly wounded by little biplanes, Gaea had fallen. Chris remembered the classic last line: "It was beauty killed the beast." In this version, Cirocco/Denham said "Now the world is mine!"

  It was impossible to think of Kong without a queasy glance down the Twenty-four Carat Highway. Not too far from where it ended at the gates of Tara was a big black ball with protruding ears. It was the head of Kong. Every time Chris passed it, the mournful eyes followed him.

  "What's gonna happen, Daddy?"

  Chris was brought back to the present. It was Adam's favorite question. When watching a movie on television, as the tension built Adam would look back at Chris with anticipation and fright, and ask what's gonna happen.

  What happens next?

  It's what we all ask ourselves, Chris thought.

  "I think there's going to be a war, Adam."

  "Wow!" Adam said, and looked back to his telescope.

  NINETEEN

  The attack on Pandemonium commenced two decarevs after the last encampment had been made. It started with a rendition, by the three hundred members of the Titanide Brass Band of the Army of Bellinzona, of The Liberty Bell, by John Philip Sousa.

  Gaea, atop her wall of stone, had watched the band assembling, seen the polished instruments appear and gleam in the beautiful Hyperion light, listened to the two-bar opening phrase. Then she jumped up in delight.

  "It's ... Monty Python!" she shouted.

  She stared in astonishment. Somehow, Cirocco had taught or persuaded or convinced the Titanides to march. They had always adored march music, but had little talent for marching in step. Their usual habit was to caper about randomly-while still keeping that steady and invariable march tempo, as if metered by a metronome. But now they were in step, in formation, and belting it out as only Titanides could. And it was glorious. One of Sousa's earliest marches, The Liberty Bell had been adopted by a comedy group as their theme song, and was familiar to Gaea from many movies and television tapes.

  Soon she was quite caught up in it. She marched back and forth along her stone wall, and shouted imprecations at her own troops inside until they wearily formed up and marched back and forth with her.

  The Titanides stayed a reasonable distance from the moat that encircled the walls, and began marching counterclockwise around Pandemonium, heading for the United Artists gate. They finished The Liberty Bell and, without a pause, swung in to Colonel Bogey. Gaea frowned for a moment, remembering the bad scene with the movie not so very long ago, but quickly brightened, especially when half the Titanides put down their instruments and whistled the refrain.

  After that came Seventy-six Trombones. Many of the subsequent numbers seemed to be identified with movies in one way or another.

  As the sound faded with distance, Gaea looked back to the north, where a single black-clad figure was approaching, a good fifty meters in front of another group of three hundred Titanides. Behind them, in perfect formations, were the Legions. Only the commanding officers, at the head of each group of soldiers, wore brass brightwork, which Gaea thought was rather cheap of Cirocco. But what brass there was was polished to a high gloss, and she had to admit the common footsoldiers looked rested, alert, competent, and dedicated.

  Also approaching from the northwest was a blimp. Even at twenty kilometers it was easy to see that it was Whistlestop.

  The group on the ground continued to march forward, and the blimp came in closer, stopping at about five kilometers distance and three kilometers altitude. Slowly, the great mass turned until its side faced Gaea and Pandemonium.

  Some humans were hurrying up beside Cirocco. These didn't look like soldiers. They set something up in front of her. Then Whistlestop's side flickered, and built up a pattern of lights that became Cirocco's face. Gaea thought it was a good trick. She hadn't known blimps could do that.

  "Gaea," Cirocco's voice boomed out from the blimp.

  "I hear you, Demon," Gaea shouted back. There was no need for technical tricks to amplify her voice. She could be heard in Titantown.

  "Gaean I am here with a mighty army, dedicated to the overthrow of your evil regime. We do not want to fight you. We ask you to surrender peacefully. You will not be harmed. Spare yourself the humiliation of final and total defeat. Lower the bridges to Pandemonium. We will be victorious."

  For a fleeting moment Gaea wondered what the stupid bitch would do if she did surrender. She wondered if Cirocco had brought a pair of handcuffs that big. But the thought passed. This must be fought out to the end.

  "Of course you don't want to fight," she taunted. "You will be killed, to the last soldier. My troops will march to Bellinzona and overwhelm the few who remain loyal to you. Give up, Cirocco."

  The reply certainly did not seem to surprise Cirocco. There was a long pause, then a rapid-fire series of explosions that caused a lot of unrest inside the walls of Pandemonium. People looked up, and saw the Bellinzona Air Force, all twelve operable planes, pulling out of their powerdives. All they had dropped on Pandemonium were sonic booms, however.

  The planes had been traveling from east to west. Now they pulled up sharply, performed a very spiffy roll-over maneuver that left them traveling in a straight line, wingtips almost touching. They began emitting pulsed dots of smoke at high speed. As they passed over again, the sonic booms were heard. And the dots were forming words.

  "People of Pandemonium," Cirocco's massive image on the side of Whistlestop bellowed ... and the planes printed PEOPLE OF PANDEMONIUM across Gaea's pristine sky.

  Gaea's jaw dropped. It was impressive as hell, she had to admit that. The planes went up and over, and very quickly were in position for another run.

  "Throw off your chains," Cirocco boomed. THROW OFF YOUR CHAINS. Then up, and over, and straightening out... .

  It was done with computers, obviously. Human reflexes couldn't be fast enough, at supersonic speeds, to drop all those little dots of smoke in the precise pattern. All the pilots had to do was stay in a perfectly straight line. Almost as soon as the line was written, the words were whipped away by the high winds caused by the planes' passage, leaving the sky clear for the next line.

  "Reject Gaea's bondage ... lower the drawbridges... flee to the hills ... you will be protected... "

  That was about enough of that, Gaea decided. She gave the orders for her own display. In a few moments the sky was filled with bursting fireworks. It served to take the people's minds off the skywriting. She saw to it that a lot of the pyrotechnics were directed at the big blimp. There was no hope of reaching him, of course, but it wouldn't hurt to rattle him a bit.

  It was an odd thing about Whistlestop, Gaea thought. She'd had the reports of his activities over Bellinzona. Hearing it and seeing it were two different things. A normally cautious blimp wouldn't want to be in the same airspace as those dangerous little fire-breathing planes. And a bottle rocket fired in his direc
tion ought to be enough to send him fleeing into Rhea as fast as his massive back fins could take him, much less the huge airbursts Gaea was sending into the sky. But Whistlestop didn't seem to care.

  Before long both the fireworks and the skywriting were over. They had both been symbolic, Gaea presumed. Cirocco was doing well in that direction. She wondered if she would do as well when the fighting started.

  That was when the ground began to move under her feet.

  Only one of her Generals had known what Cirocco was talking about when she mentioned a bullfight. Even he hadn't seen one.

  She thought she was the last living human to have witnessed a real live bullfight. Her mother had taken her to one when she was quite young, shortly before they had been outlawed in Spain, the last country to permit them.

  Cirocco's mother had felt it was wrong to shield a child from all the world's ugliness and brutality. She had not approved of bullfighting-which was a political issue on the order of the Save the Whales movement a few decades earlier-but thought it would be an educational experience. Cirocco was a child of war, a rape-child, and her mother, a tough, self-reliant woman, had always been a little strange after her time in the Arab prison camp.

  It was one of Cirocco's most vivid childhood memories.

  Few spectacles are as colorful. The matador's costume was not called a suit of lights for nothing.

  She had watched in fascination as the men on horseback rode up to the mighty bull and drove their lances into his back. She remembered the bright red blood dripping down the sides of the bull. By the time the matador made his appearance, the bull was a pitiful sight: dazed, confused, and angry enough to charge at anything that moved.

  So then the little pissant matador moved in. With stunning machismo he toyed with the animal, faking it out time after time with his magical cape, turning his back on it as it stood in stupefied pain, unable to understand why the world had turned against it in such a grotesque manner. Cirocco had wanted to divorce herself from the crowd. She hated the crowd. She wanted to see the bull rip the matador from his balls to his chin, and she would cheer as his guts steamed in the hot Spanish sun.

  But it didn't turn out that way. The bad guy won. The stinking little prick faced the half-dead bull and plunged his sword into its heart. Then he strutted away to deafening applause, and if Cirocco had possessed a rifle and the know-how to use it, he would have been a dead little prick. Instead, she threw up.

  And now, she proposed to be the matador.

  There were a couple of things to keep in mind, before she drowned in self-disgust. For one, Gaea was not some dumb toro. She was not helpless, not innocent, and not stupid. For another, Cirocco was not fighting for sport. In any sane appraisal, Gaea had most of the advantages.

  To the person who knew nothing about bullfighting, it would seem at first glance that the bull had all the advantages, too. Analyzing it, watching the preparations and comparing the minds of the bull and the matador, one soon realized that only the most idiotic matador was in any danger at all. He had his moment of sport with the tired beast, killed it ... and fooled everyone into thinking he had done something glorious instead of craven and cowardly.

  But the principle was the same. Cirocco intended to keep her distracted, in pain, always watching the bright red cape, never understanding why her horns failed to do any good ... and slipping the sword in when Gaea was mentally and emotionally exhausted.

  So. The first part of the show was done. The words in the sky, the loud music. Gaea had helped out with fireworks.

  "Remember," Gaby had said, when last they met. "In many ways, Gaea has regressed mentally to about the age of five. She loves spectacle. It's what attracted her to movies in the first place. It's the basic reason she started the war, god help us all. Give her a good one, Rocky, and I'll take care of the rest. But don't forget, even for a moment, that it's only part of her that's child-like. The rest of her will be alert for a trick. She doesn't know where it will come from. She doesn't suspect we know as much as we do. Both times, when you go for her, it should look like you really mean it."

  Bearing all that in mind, Cirocco gestured the camera crew out of her way, stepped forward a little ways, folded her arms across her chest, and summoned Nasu.

  The ground buckled under Gaea. She fell a few feet, her arms waving, then turned and watched in amazement as the Twenty-four Carat Highway exploded.

  It was a rippling explosion, working its way from a point halfway to Tara to a point just under her feet. Solid gold bricks and clods of dirt flew in every direction-and a mammoth loop of something coiled around her ankle.

  She was jerked off her feet and stared up as Nasu, pearly white and scaled, reared three hundred meters above her.

  Monty Anaconda, she thought, and rolled away.

  Chris and Adam watched from the balcony of Tara.

  "King Kong!" Adam screeched.

  Chris glanced nervously at him. He seemed to be enjoying it.

  The snake quickly looped its massive coils around Gaea. Gaea rolled. She rolled so hard and so fast that she had demolished three soundstages before she was able to struggle to her feet. She killed hundreds of extras during the roll. Those who saw her get up could barely believe their eyes. All that could be seen of Gaea was her feet, and part of one leg.

  Then an arm struggled free.

  There was the sound of breaking bones. Nobody figured it was the snake that was getting crushed. High above her, the snake looked down impassively on her victim. It had been a long time since she had attacked prey as satisfying as this. Heffalumps were boring. They didn't even run.

  Then the other arm was free. The hands groped, found a loop, and started to pull at it.

  Snakes don't have any facial expression. About all they can do is open their mouths, blink, and flick their tongues. Nasu's tail began to thrash.

  Gaea, still blinded, staggered toward the wall. She hit it, seemed to think that was a good idea, and backed off to hit it again. The top three meters of the wall crumpled. She hit it again.

  Some of Nasu's coils loosened. The top of Gaea's head was now visible. There were more crunching sounds. Gaea's bones had sounded like redwoods snapping off at ground level. Nasu's bones were more flexible, and sounded like two-by-fours breaking.

  Gaea started groping for the snake's head. Nasu bobbed and weaved, and squeezed even harder. A forest of redwoods cracked beneath the terrible pressure.

  Then Gaea was on top of the wall. And she was peeling the snake away from her, ten meters at a time. Those parts she pulled away didn't move.

  Nasu opened her mouth. It was all she could do.

  Gaea fell backwards, and the Universal globe was knocked from its turntable and went rolling down the far side of the wall. She struggled up again ... and finally she had the snake's head. She opened its mouth, kept opening it and opening it.

  Nasu's head cracked. Gaea pounded it against the wall over and over, until it was a limp mass. She stood, winded and confused, holding the head of the dead snake. Then she tossed it and a hundred meters of coils over the side of the wall, down into the moat. Sharks quickly converged on it and began a feeding frenzy.

  Gaea was ... bent. None of her joints looked right. Her head was a squashed melon, her back took a series of horrible turns, like a Swiss mountain road.

  Then she started to squirm. She threw one hand up high, and something snapped into place. She moved her hips, and there was another loud cracking sound. She pressed her palms to her face, setting bones back into place. Step by step, she put herself back together until she stood, whole, unmarked, and glaring out at Cirocco, who still stood impassively, arms folded.

  "That was a stinking trick, you bitch!" she shouted. Then she turned, leaped down on the inside of the wall, and shouted to the gatekeeper.

  "Open this door! Lower that bridge. I'm going out to get her."

  One of her military advisors tried to say something. It earned him a kick that dropped his broken body ten miles away, in Wa
rner territory. And the man in charge of the gate was already frantically cranking it open.

  Gaea put her foot on the drawbridge as it started to lower. Her weight caused the pulley to turn so fast the rope smoked and caught fire. Then she strode over the bridge and onto the Universal causeway.

  She was out of the magic circle.

  TWENTY

  Chris reached into the cooler beside his chair-Gaea had been quite kind in providing all the coolers and all the beer he needed; an ice-cold bottle was never more than a few steps away-pulled out a bottle, and uncapped it. The encounter with the monster snake had been frightening at first. But as it went on, it became more and more like the hundreds of monster movies he had seen in the last year. It was unreal. It was preordained. One knew the woman was going to kill the snake, and she had done so.

  He was beginning to feel a pleasant buzz from the beer. Adam still sat on the floor and stared, spellbound, through the posts of the balcony. He had never seen a movie quite like this one. From time to time he would jump up and run to the telescope for a better view.

  Chris had never felt so helpless. But Cirocco had been quite explicit in her orders. He was to stay put until she came to get them out. Well, she was out there, all right-just a black speck at the head of an improbable army. Was he supposed to march out the Universal gate, side-stepping Gaea as she battled the snake? It didn't make a lot of sense, and he had felt no impulse to do it.

  Someone will come for you, Cirocco had said.

  He wished that someone would get here.

  Gaby tapped him on the shoulder.