Demon

FIRST FEATURE

What we want is a story that starts with an earthquake and works its way up to a climax.

-Sam Goldwyn

ONE

Soon after Cirocco's arrival at the treehouse, a party of seven-three Titanides and four humans-crested the last hill to look down at the bend of the river Briareus. They saw the great rock, the great tree, and Chris's treehouse sprawled in it.

In the time it had taken the party to travel the two hundred kilometers from Bellinzona to Briareus, Cirocco had run almost halfway around Gaea's rim.

They could have moved faster. One of their number refused to ride a Titanide, so the whole group had slowed rather than leave her behind. Several of the other six had noted how little the seventh seemed to appreciate this fact.

After a short pause during which the Titanides sang praises of the magnificent view and composed a few songs of arrival, the group moved down the faint trail to the river.

Conal was in love again.

Not that he was unfaithful to Cirocco. He still loved her, and always would. But this was a different kind of love.

And not that this one was going to be his lover, since she hated him totally. Still, love was love, and it didn't cost anything to hope. And she hated everybody. He couldn't believe anyone could hate everybody forever. Maybe when she got over it she'd notice what a fine fellow Conal Ray was.

Conal was not exactly thinking these things as they began the final leg of their journey to Briareus, though they were going through his mind. He was in a pleasant state between sleep and waking, stretched out on the broad back of Rocky the Titanide. He had spent most of the trip asleep. Working for the Captain, who might go a full hectorev without sleep and who never seemed to tire, he had learned the value of getting all the sleep he could get. His was an infantryman's philosophy: plenty of sacktime in a dry bed, a full belly, and he was content with life.

He only woke up when the women had one of their high-voltage, shrieking arguments. At first he had feared they would come to blows, in which case one of them would surely die. But they always stopped short. He finally decided they always would, and was able to enjoy the shouting matches for the great theater they were. The curses those women knew! It broadened his vocabulary, and deepened his love.

Conal turned on his side and went deeper into sleep. Though the path was steep and rocky, the ride was smooth as a gurney rolling on linoleum. It had been said that Titanides were the most comfortable mode of travel ever discovered.

Titanides did not exactly appreciate being considered a mode of travel, but neither did they resent it. They carried only those they wished to carry. Very few humans had taken a ride on a Titanide.

Phase-Shifter (Double Sharped Lydian Trio) Rock'n'Roll didn't mind carrying Conal. Since the day of his operation on Cirocco Jones, almost five myriarevs ago, he and Conal had been the closest of friends. Sometimes that happened between a Titanide and a human. Rocky knew of Chris and Valiha, who had loved each other for twenty years, and of Cirocco Jones and Hornpipe, who were sometime lovers and also grandmother and grandson-though it was not that simple a relationship, as no Titanide family tree is ever simple. He had heard of the great love Gaby Plauget had had for Psaltery (Sharped Lydian Trio) Fanfare.

Rocky had never made physical love to Conal, did not expect to, knew Conal would be shocked to know Rocky would like to. And it was not quite what humans think of as love. Chris Major had learned that about Valiha and it had hurt him. Nor was it the love one Titanide could feel for another. It was something else. It was something any Titanide could see. All at once, and with no good excuse, everyone knew this or that human was so-and-so's human, though they had the taste not to put it in those words. Rocky knew Conal was his human, for better or worse.

He wondered if Conal thought of him as "his" Titanide.

Behind Conal and Rocky rode Robin and Valiha.

Robin was emotionally exhausted. She was not looking forward to meeting Chris again after all these years.

He had stayed in Gaea, she had returned... but not gone home. She no longer had a home. She had risen as high as one could go in the Coven, had been for a time the Black Madonna, head of the Council.

She had won every honor her society could bestow, at an age younger than any before her.

She had been, and still was, miserably unhappy. It had been a tough twenty years. She wondered what it had been like for Chris.

"Valiha, do you know if ... "

The Titanide turned her head around. Robin wished she wouldn't do that. Titanides were frighteningly supple.

"Yes? What is it?"

Robin had forgotten what she wanted to ask. She shook her head, and Valiha returned her attention to the path. She looked exactly as Robin remembered her. What had she been? Five? That would make her twenty-five now. Titanides didn't change much from their third year, when they were mature, to somewhere around their fiftieth, when they began showing signs of age.

She had forgotten so many things. The timelessness of Gaea, for instance. They had been traveling a long time but she had no idea how long. They had camped twice and she had been so tired that she had slept better than she had in years. It had been long enough for her nose to heal, and for the wound in her shoulder to improve.

A long time, as only Gaean time could be.

How had it been for Chris?

Valiha (Aeolian Solo) Madrigal was worried about Robin.

It seemed such a very short time since the young witch had boarded the ship for her return to the Coven. Valiha, Robin, Chris, and Serpent had gone for a picnic. The Wizard was not there, but her presence was felt, just like the other unseen presences: Psaltery, Hautbois, and Gaby.

Then Robin had left them.

Now she was thirty-nine Earth years old, and looked forty-nine. She had this insufferably marvelous mad child who burned all the time. The child was more Robinish than Robin was. And there was this ... embryo.

Valiha knew about human infants, had seen thousands of them. But she never lost her sense that something was wrong.

She peeled back the blanket and looked at it. So small it hardly seemed to fill her palm, the infant looked back with pale blue eyes and grinned. It only had a couple of teeth. It waved a tiny hand at her.

"Mama!" it said, then gurgled happily.

That was about the limits of its powers of speech. It was learning to walk and talk. Within a few years it would master other skills. This was a stage Titanides did not go through. Titanides skipped infancy and the biggest part of what humans would think of as childhood. They walked a few hours after birth, talked shortly after that.

There was something else humans had to learn which this infant had not even started on yet. Titanides never learned it; on the other hand, Titanides never had to be carried around, so it wasn't a problem. Valiha twisted and handed the child back to its mother.

"Its diaper is full again."

"He, Valiha. Please. His diaper is full." Robin took him.

"I'm sorry. His sex just seems so irrelevant at this point."

Robin laughed bitterly.

"I wish you were right. But it's practically all that's important about him in this lousy world."

Valiha didn't want to get into that. She turned and thought of Chris again. It would be nice to see him. It had been almost a myriarev.

Serpent (Double-Flatted Mixolydian Trio) Madrigal had seen Chris many times over the last myriarev. He spent a lot of his time with Chris.

He viewed himself as uniquely lucky. Though Chris had not participated in the trio that gave birth to Serpent, he had acted like a father to the child for his first four years. Serpent had a Titanide father-forefather and hindfather in the same individual-and two mothers: Valiha, his hindmother, and a foremother who was now dead. But none of his parents had been quite like Chris. He knew parenting was different for humans. He had only to look at the cheerful idiot in Robin's arms to understand why that must be so. But though Titanide childhood was short, it was there, and quite different from adulthood. As Titanides grew they tended to get serious-solemn, in Serpent's view. Too solemn. They lost much of their sense of play.

Humans did that, too, but they didn't go overboard about it. No Titanide father would have taught him to play baseball. Titanides liked to race, but beyond that sports were foreign to them. It hadn't been easy to organize the leagues Chris and Serpent had set up in sports ranging from baseball and football (Chris had called it Polo at first, then threw away the mallets and just let the kids kick the ball) to tennis, hockey, and cricket, but they had done it. They had found that a Titanide raised with team sports will continue playing well into adulthood. Serpent was the best bowler in the Key of Thunderers, the champion cricketeers of the Hyperion League.

There were a lot of reasons Serpent wanted to talk to Chris. One was his recent realization regarding the World Cup. It had been held on Earth four years earlier, in spite of the war. The matches had been spread around the globe to avoid making a tempting target. Even so, three games had ended early when stadium, players, and spectators were incinerated. Eastern Siberia had eventually claimed the Cup.

But there was simply no possibility of any games this year, a World Cup year. There were no arenas left. By default, the World Cup should be decided in Gaea. Serpent planned to organize it.

The thought so excited him that he increased his pace, only to remember for the hundredth time the tail-end charlie. He slowed, and looked over his shoulder at her, trudging along when she could just as well be riding.

He had offered her a ride, hadn't he?

He snorted. It was her own fault if her feet were sore.

Nova had more than sore feet. Like her mother, she had never been known for having a long fuse. By now she was ready to explode.

Only a year ago she had known the shape of life, all the turnings of the world. The Coven floated at LaGrange Two, solid and steady and real. Then the Council had decided to move it. Too many O'Neils had been blown up. No one could tell what the maniacs on Earth would do next. So preparations had been made and the mighty engines started. The witches of the Coven proposed to fly to Alpha Centauri.

At the start of the year, Robin had been Black Madonna. Now, Robin was nothing. She had narrowly avoided execution. Her manner of leaving allowed no possibility of return. It was a staggering fall, and it had brought Nova down, too. She was a stateless person. Her entire culture was on its way to the stars.

And, of course, there was him.

What a way to sum it up, she thought. A being so terrible that a whole new set of pronouns were needed. He. Him. His. The words hurt her ears like grotesque laughter.

All that wasn't enough. Now there was this awful place.

Upon entering it she and Robin had fought for their lives. They had killed almost a hundred people. The magnitude of the carnage had overwhelmed her. She had never killed anyone before. She knew how, but found theory and practice were completely different things. She had been sick for days. Not an hour passed that she didn't see the heaped bodies leaking blood, or the wolf packs of children tearing the clothes off the corpses.

Robin expected Nova to treat these monstrous animals as if they were people. To be friends with them, Great Mother save us.

They all expected her to talk with this Conal abomination, this twisted, reeking, hairy, graceless, pinheaded lump of muscle whose finest hour would have been an early abortion. They were on their way to see yet another male. Apparently there hadn't been enough of them in Bellinzona; her mother felt they had to tramp through the jungle to find this one.

Everything about Gaea was awful. The temperature was wrong. She sweated buckets every day. Climbing was all wrong. She was always too light, and kept stumbling as learned reflexes played her false.

It was too damn dark.

The air smelled of decay, and smoke, and wild things.

It was too big. The Coven, on the rim of Gaea, would have rolled around like a BB in a truck tire.

And it never changed. Nobody ever closed the windows and let night come, or opened them for a decent day. The concept of time was not the same in here. She missed the nice little half-hours and the comfortable cycles of days and weeks. Without them, she was adrift.

She wanted to go to sleep and wake up to find it had all been a dream. She would go to the Council and she and Robin would have a good laugh over it. Remember that place you went when you were a kid, mother? Well, I dreamed we went there, and you had a baby. A boy, would you believe it?

It wasn't going to happen.

She sat down on the trail. The yellow Titanide named Serpent, which looked exactly like its mother but which she was supposed to believe was a male, stopped and called something to her. She ignored it. It waited for a moment, then went on. That was fine with Nova. She could see the treehouse now. She would go to it when she felt ready. Or maybe she'd just sit here and die.

The last member of the party was the happiest of the lot.

He had been near death three times in his short life, but he did not know that. His mother had been his first potential murderer. Robin had thought long and hard on it, when she saw what she had miraculously brought forth from her troubled womb into a troubled world. Most recently he had almost been killed by a babylegger. His memories of that were vague. It had all been over so quickly. He remembered the man who had smiled down at him. He liked the man.

There were a lot of new people. He liked that. He liked the new place, too. It was easier to walk here. He didn't fall down so much. Some of the new people were very big, and they had a lot of legs. They were many exciting colors, so bright and vivid that he laughed in delight every time he saw them. He had learned a new word: Tye-Nye.

A bright yellow Tye-Nye was carrying him now. He was satisfied with the ride. Only two things marred an otherwise perfect afternoon. His ass felt wet, and he was wondering if it was about time for dinner.

He was just about to mention these points when the Tye-Nye handed him to mother. Mother put him on the Tye-Nye's back, and he watched the Tye-Nye's long, fluffy pink hair bouncing above him as his mother changed his diaper. The Tye-Nye turned her head around, and he found that hilarious. And mother was laughing! She hadn't been doing that much lately. Adam was ecstatic.

Robin opened her shirt, lifted him, and he found the nipple.

And now the world was perfect.

The group reached the far end of the suspension bridge and began to file across. Adam was asleep now. Robin was ready to sleep. Nova was more than ready, but still lagged far behind the rest.

They passed under an arched gateway with the name of Chris's treehouse painted on it: Tuxedo Junction. Robin wondered what it meant.

Pandemonium was on the move again.

Gaea, as she moved through the forest of northern Hyperion, pondered recent events. She was not happy, and when Gaea was unhappy those around her always knew it. One elephant failed to get out of her way in time. She kicked it without breaking stride. The elephant flew into the air and landed a hundred meters away, torn in half.

She was deciding on the program for the next encampment. After much thought she decided on Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Then she remembered the other two, waiting at Tuxedo Junction. Chris and Cirocco. Well there was that film from 1994, it had nine in the title, didn't it? Surely her librarian could ferret it out.

Then she had it, and laughed aloud. The second feature would be Fellini's 8 1/2.

TWO

Chris deftly flipped fried eggs out of the copper pan and onto an earthenware plate. The pan was almost a meter across. All his cookware was outsized. Most of his guests were Titanides, who loved to eat as much as they loved to cook.

He was only a mediocre chef, but Cirocco didn't seem to mind. She used her fork to make a gesture of thanks as he removed the first plate and set the second batch of eggs before her. She sat at the high table on a high stool, her feet hooked around the crossbraces, her elbows set wide and her head held low as she shoveled it in. Her wet hair was tied back out of harm's way.

Chris pulled a stool over to the table across from her and hitched himself up onto it. As Cirocco tore into her fourteenth egg, Chris began eating the two he had fixed for himself, and watched her over the table.

She seemed pale. She was thin. He could count her ribs; her breasts were hardly there.

"How was the trip?" he asked.

She nodded, then reached for her coffee cup to wash down the last mouthful of eggs. The job required two hands. It was a Titanide cup.

"No problems," she said, and wiped her mouth on the back of her arm. Then she looked surprised, gave him a guilty glance, and picked up her napkin. She wiped her arm first, then her mouth.

"Sorry," she said, with a nervous giggle.

"Your table manners don't concern me," he said. "This is your house, too."

"Yeah, but that's no reason to be a pig. It just tastes so good. Real food, I mean."

He knew what she meant. She had been foraging for a long time. But he smiled at the description of the food. The "bacon" was meat from a smiler with swine genes in its ancestry, in the baffling Gaean system of crossbreeding that would have driven Luther Burbank to the madhouse. The "eggs" came from a shrub common in Dione. Left unharvested, they would eventually hatch a many-legged reptile that scattered the plant's seeds in its excrement. But the fruit tasted very much like real eggs. The coffee, oddly enough, was real coffee, a hybrid adapted to the low light of Gaea. With the collapse of the Earth-Gaea trade it had become as profitable to grow coffee in the highlands as cocaine, the traditional Gaean export. Coke glutted the market, but coffee was hard to get.

"Kong's dead," she said, around another mouthful.

"Really? Who did the job?"

"Do you need to ask?"

Chris thought it over, and could come up with only one likely candidate.

"You going to tell me about it?"

"If you'll slap some more bacon in that pan." She grinned at him. He sighed, and got up.

As the bacon began to sizzle, she told him what she had seen in Phoebe. While she talked, she finished her second helping. She got up and rinsed her plate, then stood beside him and sliced hunks off a huge loaf of bread and arranged them on a tray for toasting.

"I figure he's got to die when they cut his brain up. Doesn't he?" She squatted and slid the tray into the bottom drawer of the stove, beneath the firebox where the radiant heat would warm it slowly.

"I guess so." Chris made a face.

She stood and unbound her hair, shook it out, and ran her fingers through it. Chris watched, noted that it was almost entirely white now. It reached far down her back. He wondered if she would ever cut it again. Before her brain surgery, five years earlier, she had seldom let it get below her shoulders. Then her head was shaved, and she seemed to have found a new affection for long hair.

"Anything else I should know?" he asked.

"I talked with Gaby again."

Chris said nothing, but continued to turn the bacon strips. Cirocco started rummaging through a cabinet.

"What did she say?"

Cirocco came up with a Titanide curry-comb and began running it through her hair. She said nothing for a time, then sighed.

"I saw her twice. Once about three hectorevs before I went to Kong's mountain. Again in Tethys, not long afterward. The first time she told me Robin was returning to Gaea. She didn't say why. She has children with her."

Chris said nothing. Not long ago, he would have, but he had begun to wonder about a few things since then. Things like the definitions of "rational", the meaning of magic, the line between the quick and the dead. He had always thought himself a rational man. He was civilized. He didn't believe in sorcery. Though he had lived twenty years in a place with a "God" he had talked to, had loved a "Demon" who had once been a "Wizard," he took none of these words with their literal definitions. Gaea was a bush-league God. Cirocco was remarkable, but she had no magical powers, for good or evil.

In the face of the things he had witnessed or heard about, why should he worry about one measly resurrection?

But it had given him a lot of trouble. Gaby had died in his arms. He would never forget her horrible burns. The first time Cirocco told him she had seen Gaby, he had exploded. Later, he had been gentle, fearing his old friend was getting senile. But senility was too easy an explanation. Even if rationality was down the drain, pragmatism was still valuable, and Chris thought of himself as a pragmatist. If it works, it's there. And Cirocco's conversations with Gaby had been very good at predicting the future.

"When will she get here?" he asked.

"Here in Gaea? She's here already. In fact, she should be getting near the Junction by now."

"She's coming here?"

"Conal's bringing them. There'll be some Titanides with them, too. What's the matter? Don't you want them here?"

"It's not that. It'll be great to see her again. I never thought I would." He looked around the kitchen. "I was just wondering if I have enough on hand for guests. Maybe I should run over to the Hua's and see if they have-"

Cirocco laughed, and put her arms around him. He looked down at her face, and recognized the glint of mischief there.

"Don't be such a housewife, Chris," she said, and kissed him. "The Titanides are better at that, and they like it, too."

"Okay. What do you want to do?" He embraced her, let his hands slide down her back to her buttocks, and lifted her easily.

"First, let's get that bacon and toast off the stove before they burn. I've decided I'm not as hungry as I thought."

"No?"

"Well, not that way. I've been running all over this stinkin' wheel with nothing to look at but Iron Masters." She slipped a hand between them, down his belly, and squeezed. "Suddenly your homely face seems oddly attractive."

"That's not my face, old woman."

"It'll do," she said, and squeezed again.

At the completion of her thirteenth decade, boredom was one of Cirocco's chief fears. She had been spared the depredations of aging, the dulling of the senses and mental powers. It was conceivable that someday bedding down with a lover and performing the ancient rituals of coitus would pall. That was the day she would be ready to die.

But so far, so good.

They were in the crow's nest, a garret rising over the main house at Tuxedo Junction. There were windows in each of the six walls. One ladder went down to the third floor, and another up to a belfrey that housed Chris's carillon. Two dozen ropes ran along one wall, through holes in the floor and ceiling.

"Yowee!" Cirocco cried, and stretched an arm toward the ropes. She selected one and gave it a yank. The largest brass bell above them gave a joyous peal.

"That good, huh?" Chris said, and collapsed on top of her.

"I tell thee thrice," she said, and rang the bell two more times. Then she wrapped her arms and legs around him and hugged as hard as she could.

There were good and bad things about living in Gaea. Some things, such as the unchanging light, Cirocco hardly noticed anymore. The passing of day into night was just a vague memory. One of the good things she usually didn't notice was the low gravity. The one time she did notice it was during the act of love. Even a man as large as Chris did not weigh much. Instead of becoming an oppressive burden, his body was a warm and comforting presence. They could lie this way for hours if they wanted to, he utterly relaxed, she in no danger of being squeezed. And she loved that. Once a man was inside her, she always hated to give him up.

Chris raised himself slightly and looked down at her. He glistened with sweat, and she liked that, too.

"Did she say anything about ... " He didn't know how to finish the sentence, but it didn't matter. Cirocco knew what he meant.

"Nothing. Not a word. But I know it's coming, and soon."

"How do you know?"

She shrugged. "I don't. Call it sexagenarian intuition."

"It's been a long time since you were a sexagenarian."

"What are you talking about? I've made it there twice. I'm a double sexagenarian, plus ten."

"I guess that makes you twice as sexy as anyone, plus ten."

"Damn right. I-"

They both heard it at the same time. Not far away, Titanide voices were raised in song. Chris kissed her and went to stand in the window looking down toward the bridge. Cirocco rolled on her side and looked at him. She was pleased at what she saw, but wondered what Robin would think.

From the waist down, Chris was the hairiest human she had ever seen. He might have been wearing trousers made from bearskin. It was light brown, like the hair on his head, and nowhere less than ten inches long. It was soft and fine, the nicest possible pelt to wrap one's legs around.

Chris was turning into a Titanide. He'd been doing it for five myriarevs now. There was no hair at all on his chest or arms. His beard had stopped growing long ago and now his chin was smooth as a boy's. In the right light, his face could pass for that of a twelve-year-old. There were other things here and there that would surely startle Robin ... such as his tail. The fleshy part of it was only about six inches long, but he could twitch it and make the long hair fly like a frisky horse. He was smugly proud of that tail, and no more in control of it than a dog. It twitched back and forth in excitement as he looked down at the party crossing his bridge. He turned, smiling.

"It's them," he said, and his long ears stood up straight, higher than the crown of his head. Cirocco's mind flew backward a century and a quarter, to a movie which had been old even then: cartoon boys shooting pool and turning into donkeys. A little wooden boy, and her mother holding her hand there in the darkness ... but she could not remember the title.

"I'm going to meet them," he said, starting down the ladder. He paused. "You coming?"

"In a minute." She watched him go, then sat up in the huge straw-filled bag they had been using for a bed. She pushed the thick mass of white hair away from her face, stretched, and looked out the window opposite the one where Chris had stood.

Gaby was out there. She was sitting on a tree limb level with the belfrey, not more than fifty feet away.

"Was it good?" Gaby asked.

"Yes." Cirocco felt no embarrassment or resentment when she realized Gaby might have been out there for a long time.

"You'll have to be careful with him. He's in great danger."

"What can I do?"

"There are some things I don't know." She looked sad, then shook it off. "Two things," she said. "One, he's the father of both of them. He might as well know it, because Robin is pretty sure of it already."

"Chris?"

"Yes. You'll see it. With Nova, anyway. The boy, too."

"Boy? What boy?"

"Two," Gaby went on. She grinned. "Don't strangle the girl-child. She'll drive you crazy, but put up with it. She's worth the effort."

"Gaby, I-". Then Cirocco gasped, as Gaby rolled off the limb and dived toward the pool below. She had one glimpse of her, arms pointed down, toes straight behind her, then the apparition was swallowed up in the greenery.

She listened a long time, but there was no splash.

THREE

The Titanides prepared a feast. From their happy singing, Robin assumed they were oblivious to the human tensions around them. She was wrong. The Titanides knew more about what was going on than Robin did, but they also knew they were powerless to affect any of it. So they employed a tactic that had worked reasonably well for almost a century. They left human affairs to the humans.

Robin had forgotten how good Titanide food could be. Shortly after her return to the Coven, just before the birth of Nova, she had ballooned to twenty kilos over her fighting weight. Ruthless dieting had taken it off, and kept it off for twelve years.

At some point she had lost interest in eating. Keeping slim had not been a problem for five years. During that time she had to remind herself to eat at all. Nothing tasted good. Now, digging into the heaping plates of food the Titanides offered, she wondered if she was going to have to be careful again.

It was a curiously joyless, brittle occasion. Chris, Cirocco, and Conal smiled a lot but spoke little. Nova, of course, had taken her plate to the most distant corner of the room. She ate furtively as an animal, always watching Cirocco.

"Nova," Robin called to her. "Come join us at the table."

"I prefer it over here, Mother."

"Nova."

The girl dragged her feet and scowled, but she came. Robin wondered how much longer she would do that. The virtue of obedience was strong in a Coven child, where families were quite different from the traditional human model. Nova owed Robin total allegiance until her twentieth birthday, and a great deal of respect after that. But she was eighteen now. A year or two years... it had little meaning in Gaea.

There were small blessings, though. The two of them had not fought since arriving at Tuxedo Junction. Robin was grateful for that. The fights tore at her heart. When fighting, it helps to know without doubt that one is right, and Robin hardly ever knew that anymore.

In fact, Nova hadn't said a dozen words since they got here. She had sat silently, either looking at her hands or at Cirocco. Robin followed her daughter's gaze to the Wizard-sorry, she corrected herself, to the Captain- who was singing some incomprehensible bit of Titanide to Serpent, then looked back at Nova.

Great Mother save us.

"Have you had enough, Robin?"

Flustered, Robin shook off her surprise and tried to smile at Cirocco. She dipped a spoon in the bowl of baby food the Titanides had prepared, and put the spoon in Adam's mouth.

"Me? Yeah, I'm doing great. It takes him longer, though."

"Could I talk to you? In private?"

There was nothing Robin wanted to do more, but suddenly she was frightened. She scraped food from Adam's mouth and gestured vaguely.

"Sure, as soon as-"

But Cirocco had already come around the table and lifted the baby. She handed him to Chris, who seemed pleased.

"Come on. Chris will take good care of him, won't you, old man?"

"Sure thing, Captain."

Cirocco was pulling Robin's elbow, gently but insistently. The little witch gave in. She followed Cirocco through the kitchen, out onto one of the railed walkways lying atop a horizontal branch, and up a gentle rise to a separate building half-hidden in the branches. It was five-sided, made of wood. The door was so low Cirocco had to bend over to enter. Robin was able to walk through with an inch to spare.

"This is a weird place."

"Chris is a weird fellow." Cirocco lit an oil lamp and set it on the table at the center of the room.

"Tell me about it. Valiha warned me he'd changed, but I never ... " Robin trailed off, having finally looked at the interior of the pavilion.

All the walls were copper. Hammered into the metal were a hundred designs, some of them quite familiar to Robin, others foreign. Still more seemed to remind her of things deeply buried.

"What is this?" she whispered.

Cirocco gestured to the largest of the artworks. Robin moved closer and saw a stylized woman, angular and primitive as a hieroglyph. She was nude, pregnant, and had three eyes. A serpent coiled around her from one ankle to the opposite shoulder, where it reared its head and stared into her face. The figure gazed back at the snake, unblinking.

"Is this ... supposed to be me?" Her hand went involuntarily to her forehead. It was the location of her tattooed third Eye. She had earned it over twenty years before, and without it, would have been unable to return to Gaea.

She also bore the tattoo of a serpent that wound around her leg, across her body, and up to her breast.

"What is this?"

There were two straight-backed wooden chairs in the room. Cirocco pulled one toward the center and sat in it.

"You probably should ask Chris about that. I think of it as a memorial. He liked you. He didn't expect he'd ever see you again. He built this."

"But it ... it's weird."

"As I said, so is Chris."

"What's happening to him?" Robin said.

"You mean physically? He's getting what Gaea promised him so long ago."

"It's disgusting."

Cirocco laughed. Robin flushed again, then knew Cirocco was not laughing at her, but at some private thought.

"No, it's not," she said. "It's only startling. You're seeing it all at once. I saw it day by day, and it looked entirely natural and right. And as for startling ... you shocked him more than he shocked you."

Robin had to turn away. She knew what she looked like.

"It's called age," she said, bitterly. The terrible fact was that she looked a lot older than Cirocco.

"No. You've aged, but that's not the shocking part. In your own way you've changed as radically as Chris has. Some terrible fear has marked your soul."

"I don't believe that. Failure and disgrace, yes. Not fear."

"Fear," Cirocco went on, inexorably. "The Great Mother has deserted you. Your center is gone. You no longer burn; you float, your feet unable to reach the womb of the earth. You have no place to stand, no Umbilicus."

"How do you know these things?" Robin screamed.

"I know what I see."

"Yes, but the words, the ... the secret words ... " Some of them were from Coven ritual, from ceremonies and exorcisms Robin knew she had never mentioned to the Wizard. Others were from the darkest corners of her own soul.

"I've had some guidance. Right now, I want to know your purpose here. Why did you come? What do you hope to do?"

Robin wiped away tears and pulled a chair closer to Cirocco. She sat down, and eventually was able to look at the older woman.

She told her story.

Robin had come to Gaea, like so many others, to be cured.

Gaea was a god who never gave anything away. Robin had been told she must prove herself, do something heroic, before a cure was possible. She had not been inclined to do so. Her condition had not been impossible to live with. She had dealt with it before: when her hand began to tremble with the onset of a seizure, she had simply amputated her little finger.

But through the persuasion of Gaby Plauget, Robin had embarked on a trip around the interior of the wheel, accompanied by Gaby, Cirocco, the Titanides Psaltery, Hautbois, Hornpipe, and Valiha, and Chris Major, who was also seeking a cure.

Gaby and Cirocco had an ulterior motive. They were seeking an ally among the eleven regional brains of Gaea. Gaby was seeking a lot harder than Cirocco was; the Wizard had been a hopeless alcoholic who had to be dragged into the enterprise. Some of those regional brains were allies of Gaea. Some were enemies. The lines had been drawn during the Oceanic Rebellion while humans were still living in caves.

Gaby's plan had been nothing less than the overthrow and replacement of Gaea herself. She had been out to recruit a new God. The mission had cost her life, and possibly much more. It had cost Cirocco her status as Wizard. It remained to be seen whether it had cost the Titanides their survival as a race.

The only ones who seemed to have benefitted from the abortive quest were Robin, Chris, and the Iron Masters. Robin and Chris had been cured. The Iron Masters had, for reasons unknown, been allowed to expand from their tiny island in Phoebe until they now challenged the Titanides for dominance of the great wheel.

And at the end, Robin had headed for home, intending to live happily ever after.

"It was great for a while," she said, and smiled at the memory. "Chris was right. There was a great deal of labra in growing back a finger. I recommend it as a way to amaze your friends."

She knew Gaby and Cirocco had dismissed labra as the female version of macho. They had been wrong, but it didn't really matter. The fact that it was Gaea who had replaced Robin's severed pinky had continued to gnaw at her, and in the end hollowed out both Robin and her victory.

It was as meaningless as the third Eye, which was supposed to confer infallibility. In practice, the wearers of the Eye were bullies who could do no wrong, sanctimonious as any Pope.

"I left the Coven already a semi-mythical figure," Robin went on. "I came back... I don't know a word for it. The Coven had never seen anything like me."

"Superstar," Cirocco supplied.

"What's that?"

"Archaic word. It's somebody whose reputation exceeds all reasonable bounds. Pretty soon, they start to believe the reputation."

Robin considered it.

"There was some of that. Yes. I moved up as quickly as I wanted to. I could have gone faster, but ... I wasn't sure I should."

"You heard a voice," Cirocco suggested.

"Yes. It was my own voice. I think I could have been proclaimed the Great Mother herself. But I knew I wasn't. I knew I wasn't even very good."

"Don't be too hard on yourself. You were damn good, as I recall."

"Damn fast. Damn strong. Damn mean and a cast-iron bitch. But where it counted, to me"- and she thumped her chest -"right in here, I knew what I was. I decided to get out of public life. There are places we can retreat ... something like nuns. Isn't that what nuns do?"

"So I've heard."

"I was going to meditate for about a year. Then I was going to have a child and devote myself to raising her. But I didn't have time. The next thing I knew, I was pregnant."

She was silent for a moment, looking back on it. She chewed her lower lip, and at last looked back at Cirocco.

"This was a year-more than a year-after I got back from Gaea, you see. On Earth it could have just slid by. But in the Coven, we have to artificially-"

"I remember. I know what you're talking about."

"Yeah, but see, the women at the birth centers know who came in to have it done. When I started to swell up ... " She sighed, and shook her head. "The awful thing is, if it had happened to someone else, she might have been burned. We haven't burned anyone for Christianity for... oh, fifty years. But it looked like there were just two possibilities. Either I'd had carnal relations with a Christian demon, or ... it was the Gynorum Sanctum, the union of a mortal woman with the Holy Mother, perfect and blameless."

Cirocco studied her as she lowered her head into her hands.

"Did they really buy that?" she asked.

"Oh, they did and they didn't. There's a conservative faction that holds all the teachings to be literally true. Anyway, it sealed my fate. I'm not saying I didn't help it along. For a while there I think I did believe the Great Mother had come to me. But every time I looked at Nova's face, something told me it was someone else."

Cirocco shook her head wearily. So much could have been avoided if she had not been busy while Robin was getting ready to leave.

Stop it, she told herself. You were busy for a while, sure, but then you were drunk for almost a kilorev.

"Did you ever suspect where the baby came from?"

"Not for a long time. Like I said, it was a lot easier to take it as it came. It wasn't till later I consciously questioned it."

"I could have told you Gaea would leave you with a parting practical joke. She did the same thing to me, and Gaby and August, right after we first got here. We were all pregnant. We had abortions." She paused, and looked at Robin again. "Do you ... did you have any feeling about ... who the child's father might be?"

Robin laughed.

"Go look at her. Isn't it obvious?"

"Nova's got your mouth."

"Right. And she's got Chris's eyes."

Chris was in the basement, looking for a film projector.

It was perhaps a semantic fallacy to have a "basement" in a treehouse, where all levels were above the ground, but Chris had managed it. A trapdoor in the floor of the main building led to a hollowed-out area in the trunk of the great tree. This room eventually received everything Chris had never managed to find a use for. There was a lot of it.

Conal, standing on the ladder and holding the lamp high as Chris threw objects from one pile to another, surveyed the miscellany with dismay.

"Aside from being a compulsive architect," he observed, "you've also got a bad case of packratitis."

"I think it's terminal," Chris agreed. "Still, you could say the same thing about the Smithsonian."

"What's that?"

"It's nothing, now that you mention it. Blown up many years ago. But it was a museum. And there aren't any museums in Gaea." He straightened, wiped a mixture of dust and sweat from his face. "It's a dirty job, but somebody ought to do it."

"The Titanides have a museum."

"Point taken. But the oldest thing in it is not much older than Cirocco. They haven't been around that long. We don't have any human museums in Gaea. If there are any left on Earth, they won't be around much longer. So why not start here?"

Conal took another dubious look at the piles of junk.

"Confess, Chris. You just can't throw anything away."

"Guilty." He reached deep into a stack of oddments, and came up with an ancient Kodak Brownie. "But you never know when you'll need something."

"Yeah, but where do you get it all?"

Chris shooed Conal up the ladder, followed him out, and shut the trapdoor behind him. Conal followed him through the maze of doors and rooms until they reached the space Chris had set aside as his workshop. It was actually several rooms, and in them Chris was able to do everything from glassblowing to repairing computers.

He set the projector on a workbench and began taking it apart.

"I just pick things up here and there," he said. "That's how it started. Nowadays, all the Titanides who come calling bring a gift. They do a lot of trading. No telling what they'll pick up. Not much stuff gets here from Earth anymore, but in the old days just about anything might come in. Settlers brought most of their possessions. This was back before the War."

He got the side panel off and peered in, blowing away clumps of dust. He poked a finger into the mechanism, made a wheel turn. He pulled a long glass bulb out of the projector and flipped it toward Conal, who snagged it. "Test that out, would you? I doubt it's any good. I'll probably have to blow another one."

Conal turned toward the electrical bench. He clamped the bulb and took two insulated wires with bare ends, touched one to the brass casing and the other to the dull metal tip. He flipped a switch, and the filament glowed brightly.

Chris brought the projector over and set it near the bulb.

"So it does work, huh? That'll save some time." He took it and screwed it back in place, then connected several devices together on the workbench and finally touched two wires to contacts on the projector's motor. It hummed and there was the faint smell of ozone, but nothing else happened. Chris muttered and tried a new arrangement of transformers. Still nothing. He looked up, to see Cirocco and Robin enter the room. Trailing a little behind them was Nova.

"Cirocco," Chris said, "I can go find a new motor for this thing and rig up a way to make it run the film drive. Or ... " He gestured to her, then to the projector. "Do you think you can heal it?"

She gave him an odd look, then shrugged and walked to the workbench. She looked at the projector, put her hands on it, and frowned. Sparks crackled; Robin gasped, but Cirocco merely blinked. Something clattered briefly and then stopped. Cirocco leaned closer, oblivious to the blue Jacob's ladders that arced in the gaps between her fingers. Just for a second Conal saw a dreamy blurring of her eyes, then she straightened and put the tip of her thumb in her mouth.

"Bastard burned me," she muttered, sucking on it.

Chris raised an eyebrow, then punched the projector's power button. It stuttered, then ran as smoothly as such an old machine ever would. No one said anything. Conal fetched chairs as Chris threaded Cirocco's film through the projector. He had no take-up reel, but it hardly mattered, as he assumed no one would want to see this more than once.

Cirocco and Robin tacked a sheet over the far wall.

"Shouldn't we invite the Titanides?" Robin asked.

"Motion pictures upset them," Cirocco said.

"We're not sure what it is," Chris added, answering the question in Robin's eyes. "Their brains don't seem equipped to handle it. They get nauseous, like they were seasick."

He started the projector.

In a moment there was a retching sound from the doorway. Conal turned and saw Nova fleeing the images on the screen. He thought about going after her, but knew it was a silly notion. He turned back to the film.

Gaea bit the head off a second man. This one was dressed in an orange robe. The first had been in a traditional priest's collar and black vestments.

It was a warm-up for the match with Kong. The giant ape could be seen hovering in the background of some of the shots. The bolex who shot them had been more concerned with the eating of the holy men. Each shot was rock-steady and carefully framed.

The fight began. Gaea and Kong grappled. Kong went sailing over Gaea's head to land on his back. He seemed stunned as Gaea lumbered over and pinned him. Gaea was thrown off the great beast. He came after her. There was a gap, and Kong was down again. Gaea hovered over him, then pounced.

She seemed to be doing more than just pinning him this time. Conal couldn't figure it out. He stared at the screen, his mouth dry, fascinated and ashamed of it. Finally he had to look away. He studied Chris, Cirocco, Robin ... anything but the screen.

"I would have sworn he was asexual," Cirocco said at one point.

"It was well-hidden," Chris said. "She had to drag it out of him."

"Great Mother preserve us," Robin whispered.

Conal looked back. He hadn't thought it was possible for a female to force sex on a male. Perhaps it wouldn't have been, but Kong was badly injured. Blood gushed from a hole in his chest as Gaea straddled him. She washed herself in it.

"Turn it off," Conal pleaded. Cirocco glanced at him, her face stony, and shook her head. He could leave, or he could watch. He dragged his eyes back.

Gaea staggered, seeming drunk. She ran into the stone wall of the cave, and fell onto her side. The screen went black for an instant, then lit again. Gaea was on her side, still nude. The blood was drying on her face and hands. She rolled onto her back. She moaned. Her stomach was heaving up and down.

"She's giving birth," Chris said. "Yeah," Cirocco growled. "But giving birth to what?" The end of the film ran through the shutter mechanism and trailed down to the floor. The white screen flickered and lit three pale faces until Chris mercifully shut it off.

It was a camel, and it was dead.

The camel had been born alive and Gaea had caused it to be included in the entourage from Kong mountain to the current site of Pandemonium, trying to think of a use for it.

She had not planned on a camel. She didn't plan much of anything these days. She was enjoying chaos. It was a hell of a lot more fun than running the friggin' world.

Gaea gave birth to things simply because it seemed the proper function for a god. She was as surprised as anyone else at what came out. Her mind had fragmented into many parts, each independent, some crazier than the others, but all quite mad.

Mental note: Show The Three Faces of Eve one day soon.

The part of her that supervised her equivalent of a uterus didn't tell the rest of her what it was up to. She was satisfied with the arrangement. After three million years a surprise was worth something. Once a kilorev her body presented her with something new. In the past year she had borne a litter of dragons, a four-meter tiger, and a creature that was half Model-T and half octopus. Most of them did not live long, lacking such items as hearts or noses. The rest were mules. Her subconscious couldn't be bothered with the fine details.

But the camel was pretty good. It was a full-grown dromedary, mean as the welfare department, and now it was dead because she had decided what to do with it. She was going to put it through the eye of a needle.

It was a large needle, granted. There was a big funnel, and machinery to grind the camel fine.

With a hundred cameras rolling, Gaea mounted the scaffolding above the funnel and poured the first barrel of camel puree into it.

Three revs later, tired and peckish, she called a halt. About half the camel was through and the rest would just be a matter of tedious work.

Besides, the footage she had could be edited with shots she'd have taken of the funnel after it was cleaned out.

She settled in her chair to watch the day's double feature, which was Lawrence of Arabia and... she couldn't remember. She twisted and squirmed in her seat, impatient.

When was Cirocco going to get started?

Gaea was waiting for the Main Event.

FOUR

"Robin, wake up."

Robin was instantly alert. She saw Cirocco looming over her.

"Nothing's wrong. Don't be afraid."

"I'm not." She rubbed her eyes. "What time ... "

Cirocco smiled as she saw Robin remember where she was.

"You've been asleep for about seven hours. Is that enough?"

"Sure." Cirocco was still whispering, so Robin did, too. "But ... enough for what?"

"I want you to come with me," Cirocco said.

Nova kept her eyes closed and didn't move while her mother dressed. After Robin had left the room, shutting the door behind her, Nova sat up and crept to the door. She opened it a fraction of an inch, saw Cirocco and Robin talking quietly in the hallway. They moved out of her sight. She heard them going down the stairs to the first floor.

From the second-floor bannister she could see them in the main room, then heard the front door open and shut. She hurried back into the room she shared with her mother and Adam. She glanced to his crib, and was surprised to see he was gone. She knew Robin hadn't taken the little monster, so she assumed Cirocco had.

By leaning out the window she could see the far end of the suspension bridge. She leaned-then darted back in quickly. The two women were crossing it. Cirocco had the baby.

She was dressed, down the stairs, and had her hand on the door-stopped to think.

Nova had a fair idea of her own capacities. On her home ground it was just possible she might tail Cirocco without being discovered. But Cirocco was too good. She seemed to feel eyetracks on her skin, to sense a passing thought. That Nova could follow such a woman through a jungle she didn't know was beyond the realm of reason.

But Great Mother, she ached to be with her.

At first Robin had not realized they were following a path. It was not well-defined, but it was there. They had to duck some low branches and climb over fallen trees. Still, the trail was there. Robin searched her meager knowledge of the ways of wild animals, wondering if this was a game trail, then realized what little she knew applied to Earth, not Gaea. Who could tell why a Gaean animal behaved as it did?

"Do you trust me, Robin?"

"Trust you? Sure, I guess so. Why?"

"Guessing isn't enough. Think it over."

Robin did, following along behind the woman she still thought of as the Wizard. She felt clumsy, weak, and very old. Ahead, Cirocco was lean, lithe, and seemed to grow from the ground under her feet.

Trust her? Robin could think of a lot of pro's and con's. The Wizard had been an alcoholic when Robin had known her. Did they ever get cured, really cured? Wasn't it possible that, when things got bad, she would dive back into the bottle?

Robin took another look. No, she wouldn't. She didn't know how she could be so sure, but she was. There had been a fundamental change in the woman.

"I trust you to keep your word. I believe that if you say you'll do something, I can count on it being done."

"It will, if I'm alive."

"I trust you to do what you think is right."

"Right for who? You, me, or everyone? It's not always the same."

Robin knew it wasn't, and gave it some more thought.

"For everyone. I think you'd tell me if you had to do something that you thought best, but was going to hurt me."

"I would."

They walked on in silence for a time, then Cirocco half-turned and gestured for Robin to walk beside her. The path was wide enough for two at that point. She took Robin's hand and they walked together.

"Do you trust me to keep a secret?"

"Sure."

"I didn't phrase that right. There are some things I have to keep secret from you. I can't tell you why. Part of it is the old golden rule of the so-called intelligence community. What you don't know, you can't tell."

"You're serious, aren't you?"

"I ain't playing games, kid. There's war here just as sure as there's war on Earth. In some ways, this one is just as ugly."

"Yeah, I trust you to do that. At least, until I know more."

"That's good enough." She stopped, and turned Robin to face her. "Just relax and look into my eyes,Robin. I want you to relax completely. Every muscle is loose, and you're starting to get sleepy."

Robin had been hypnotized before, but never so easily. Cirocco didn't talk a lot, didn't use any tools. She simply looked into Robin's eyes and her pupils grew big as the Phoebe Sea. She murmured quietly and touched her palms to Robin's cheeks, and Robin relaxed.

"Let your eyes close," Cirocco said, and Robin did. "You will sleep, but you don't need to go deep. You can feel things, smell things, and hear perfectly well, but you'll see nothing. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

Robin felt herself being lifted. It was nice. She heard a wind rustling through trees. There was a smell like over-ripe strawberries. She felt herself bounce as Cirocco jogged along the path. Then she was turning around. This went on for an immeasurable time, until all sense of direction was destroyed.

She didn't care. Mostly she felt Cirocco's strong arms beneath her back and under her legs, felt her hard stomach muscles against her hip, smelled the distinctive, slightly sweet odor she associated with the Wizard. Her mind built pleasant fantasies. It had been a long time without a lover.

She felt good. Better than she had since ... since those long-ago days sailing down the Ophion with seven companions toward an unknown destiny. There was something to be said for being swept off one's feet by forces-or Wizards-beyond one's control.

"Nova wasn't asleep when I came in to get you," Cirocco said.

"She wasn't?"

"No. She followed us down the stairs. Then she watched us out the window. I thought she was going to tail us, but she didn't."

"She's not a fool."

"I can see that. She's ... difficult."

Robin laughed. "If you'd been demoted from the Virgin Daughter to an outcast and a refugee, you might be difficult, too."

"Why did she come? She seems to hate you."

"Part of her does, I think. I failed so hugely, my fall was so great... it was like I did it to her, too." Robin stopped, wondering why she was saying these things with no pain, then remembered she was hypnotized. That was fine with her. They needed to be said.

"She came out of obedience? It doesn't sound like her style."

"You don't know the Coven. It was obligation ... and fear. I don't think my beloved sisters will make it. I think they're going to freeze out there. But by the time the question was put, I didn't have a vote. Nova didn't think they'd make it either.

"And... she didn't feel like she had a lot of choice. It was tough for us. For ninety days, after Adam was discovered, we didn't exist. My third Eye saved my life, but only just."

"Why did she have to go? You were the one with the child."

"Ah, it didn't matter. She was a freak, you see. She found out about Adam when he was six months old. She tried to kill him. I stopped her. Then both of us concealed him, but we knew it couldn't last. And it all came out in the end. It took every ounce of my former prestige to swear that he was a girl. No one looked, but they all knew."

"What do you mean, Nova was a freak?"

"The only child in the Coven with a brother. Guilt by association with me, the great sinner." She sighed. "Aren't people wonderful?"

"They're about the same everywhere."

Cirocco said nothing for a while. Robin had an odd thought. Where was Adam? Cirocco had been carrying him when they started out. Now she was carrying her, and it took both hands.

She didn't worry about it. She did trust Cirocco.

"She was also suspiciously tall. That didn't matter when we were riding high. Later on, there were whispers of acts better not described. And there was love."

"Love?"

"She loves me. She doesn't show it much these days, but she does."

"I could see that."

"She loves you, too. In a quite different way."

"I see that, too."

Cirocco finally set her down. Robin's senses were deliriously sharp. She felt soft, damp soil under her bare feet. (What had happened to her shoes? It didn't matter.) There was an aromatic vapor in the air. She felt a trickle of sweat run down her back. She stood there in the dark and waited. Cirocco's voice came from in front of her.

"You can sit down now, Robin, and open your eyes."

Robin did. She saw Cirocco kneeling in front of her. Her eyes were deep, fascinating pools. She glanced to her left and saw Chris, also kneeling, holding Adam wrapped in his pink blanket. He smiled at her, then Cirocco touched her chin with a fingertip and turned Robin's head forward.

"Don't look at him. Look at me."

"All right."

"I want you to go a little deeper. You can keep your eyes open if you want to, but don't pay any attention to what you see. The sound of my voice is the only important thing."

"All right."

"How deep are you?"

Robin thought it over earnestly.

"About three feet."

"Give it another foot."

Robin did. Her eyes were open. All she really noticed were swirling clouds of steam. Cirocco was no longer in front of her, but she couldn't have said just what was out there. She felt a light pressure on the top of her head. It was Cirocco's hand.

"Why did you let Adam live, Robin?"

She heard her own voice come from far away. She had a brief glimpse of the three of them, seen from above: a big, half-hairy man, a strong woman; a tiny, helpless, pitiful ...

That thought was shut off quickly.

"I had a dream."

"What was the dream about?"

"Adam." Smiling. Pink. Delicate tiny toes. The smell of her own milk and his wet diaper. "Gaby." Black and peeling. Crispy skin. A ruined eye. A sweet smell.

"You dreamed of Gaby?"

"She sat with me. She helped deliver him. She held him up, all bloody and awful. Then she kissed me and I cried."

"In the dream?"

"Yes." Robin frowned. "No. She was better. Not burned."

"In the dream?"

"No. Yes... I don't remember waking up. I remember ... going to sleep after the dream. Adam was nursing."

"What did Gaby say?"

"She said I must find it in my heart to keep him. She said the world was going to be destroyed. The Earth, the Coven ... maybe Gaea. She said he was important. I had to bring him here. She said Chris was his father. I said two virgin births was one too many. She said Gaea had done it, Gaea had used magic to ... keep a part of Chris inside me. Tiny time capsules, she called them. Then she went away."

"She vanished?"

Robin was surprised. "No, she went out the door."

Cirocco didn't say anything for a while, and Robin didn't mind. She was waiting for more questions. Instead, the pressure of Cirocco's hand on her head went away, then came back. This time it wasn't her palm, but the heel of her fist. It touched lightly, but Robin felt she could almost read the ridges and whorls through her scalp. There was a tiny voice.

"Let go of me, you ancient cunt."

Robin had never heard anyone speak to Cirocco that way. The voice went on in that vein for a time. Robin felt the fist tense, and the little voice squealed.

"I'll report you to the fucking SPCA, you vomit bag. I'll fuck you in your big hairy ears, and I've got syphilis, I've got things they haven't even named yet, I'll-"

Again the squeeze, followed by a sharper scream.

"I command you to speak," Cirocco said. Robin said nothing. Somehow she knew the command wasn't for her.

"Gaea's gonna piss kerosene and shit napalm when she hears-"

"Speak!"

"I know my rights, I want a goddam LAAAAAWYER! I want-"

"Speak!"

"Aaaaaaah! Aaah! Okay, okay, okay, I'll speak!"

"Is the hand of Gaea on this child? I command you to answer."

"I can't, I can't, I can't see ... see ... I think maybe-"

"Speak!"

"No, no, no! Gaea touched her long ago. Gaea knows she is here. Gaea planned the child's family, but did not touch them. Gaea's hand is not on this child."

And suddenly, neither was Cirocco's. Robin sat, blinking, feeling somehow that a terrible weight had been lifted from her head.

"You can come up now, Robin. Slow and easy. Everything's all right."

Robin did come up. She felt refreshed, took a deep breath, blinked again, and turned around. Cirocco was stowing a bottle in a knapsack. In one hand she held a familiar object: an old Colt .45 automatic. Cirocco handed it to her. Robin turned it over in her hand. The safety was off. She put it back on, and looked up.

"This is my gun."

"I took it from you before Cirocco woke you up," Chris said.

"What was that?" Robin gestured to the pack.

"My demon." Her eyes bored into Robin's. "Can you keep a secret?"

Robin returned the gaze, and finally nodded.

"If that's the way you want it."

Cirocco nodded, and relaxed a little. "I can tell you only that it was something that had to be done. I used to have another method. It wasn't as reliable, and not nearly so easy." For a moment there was terrible pain in her eyes. She looked away, then back. "Ask Conal about it sometime. Wait till he's got a little wine in him."

"You thought I was a spy for Gaea?"

"I had to assume you could be. Could you be sure you weren't?"

Robin was about to deliver an indignant of course I could, but stopped herself. She thought about tiny time capsules, virgin births. Gaea touched her long ago. Gaea planned her family.

"She can do anything at all, can't she?"

"She'd like you to believe that. But, yes, just about. You have no idea yet just how bad that can be."

"Would you have killed me?"

"Yes."

Robin thought she should be angry about that, but she wasn't. She was oddly comforted. If Gaea had laid a slimy trap in her body, she would rather be dead.

"What about Nova?" she said, suddenly.

"Now you're starting to be properly paranoid," Cirocco said, nodding. "But you've got a long way to go to catch up with me. I examined Nova hours ago. I thought it wise... considering her temperament, that she not remember it. I told her to forget, and she will."

"And Adam?"

"Innocent as a baby," Chris said, and smiled at her. She smiled back, suddenly remembering how warmly she had liked him, many years ago. She was even willing to forgive him his hair, at least for now. Then she looked at her surroundings for the first time, and frowned.

"What is this place?" she asked.

"The fountain of youth," Cirocco said.

There had once been twelve fountains in Gaea. The one in Oceanus had been destroyed in the Rebellion. The one in Thea was deep beneath the ice and the ones in Mnemosyne and Tethys were buried in sand. Of the remaining eight, seven had been abruptly shut down one day twenty years ago, a day that had also seen the death of the first incarnation of Gaea and a rain of cathedrals from Heaven.

But Gaea did not control Dione, because the central brain of Dione was dead. She could not influence the land for good or evil. She could send her troops in and she could make Bellinzona a living hell, but the deeper functions beneath the surface were beyond her.

Dione did surprisingly well in spite of that. Cirocco thought the gremlins might have a hand in it. For whatever reason, plants continued to grow, water flowed, and air circulated.

And the fountain brewed.

The fountain was the primary reason Chris had built Tuxedo Junction where he had. He needed it as much as Cirocco did. It seemed a good idea to be close enough to keep an eye on it.

"How do I know it won't hurt me?" Robin asked.

"You don't have to do it," Cirocco said.

"I know that, you told me that, but ... how do you know? Maybe it's a trick. Maybe Gaea's hand is on you."

"If it is, you're sunk already," Cirocco pointed out. "You've already said you trust me. Either you do, or you don't."

"I do. Emotionally."

"That's the only way it works. Logic has nothing to do with it. There's no logical way to prove Gaea isn't controlling me."

"I know. I'm sorry. I'm just nervous."

"Don't be. Just get undressed."

Cirocco turned away, sensing that Robin was as nervous about getting undressed as about anything else. She thought about sending Chris away, letting him come back later for his own treatment. Then she turned and saw Robin stepping out of her pants and knew Chris had nothing to do with it. She hoped nothing showed in her face, but she felt heat in the back of her throat, the choking taste of sudden pity.

Robin looked very sad, standing there in the nude. She would have looked sad anyway, but to one who had seen her glory, it was heartbreaking. All the tattoos had faded badly. Cirocco had already seen the Eye and the Pentasm on her head, and part of the snake on her arm. They had been multi-colored and bright when Robin was nineteen. Now they were muddy, with a hint of dull red or murky green in a design made up mostly of slate-gray. Her fourth tattoo-the snake around her leg-was in the same shape as the rest. But the fifth had been vandalized.

It was no great loss to the art world, Cirocco thought, but it was still butchery. Robin had known early in life that any children she bore would have the same disease she came to Gaea to eradicate. In a surge of youthful bravado, she had made a hideous design on her belly. It showed a shadowy monster tearing through her skin, trying to break free from her womb to the outside world with teeth and claws.

"Nova was so damn big," Robin said, ruefully, rubbing the scar that had made the tattoo even more ugly. "I had to have a Calpurnian section." She stood with shoulders slumped, trying to make it look as if her hands just happened to be clasped over her abdomen. Her skin was pasty, and her hair lifeless. Her face was seamed and even her teeth didn't look good. Robin had been letting herself go for quite a time. Aging was one thing; this was something else.

"Never mind," Cirocco said. "This will put a stop to that."

She waded into the water, and held out her hand.

It was hotter than Robin had believed possible. She felt the heat in an odd way, aware of it, but not feeling burned.

They took it in easy steps. First out to the ankles, then the knees, then a pause before going in up to the hip. Chris was on one side of her, Cirocco on the other. They both held her hands.

The water-if water it was-had a sweet smell, and was the color and consistency of honey. No, she realized, that wasn't right. It wasn't syrupy. Maybe it was more like nectar.

She went in up to the waist, and she gasped. The fluid was oozing inside her. She could feel it, like a fine oil, as it filled her bowels and her vagina. It seemed that it ought to feel disgusting, but the plain fact was that it didn't. It felt wonderful. It felt better than anything she had ever known. She shuddered, and felt her knees grow weak. Cirocco supported her. Then the waters were covering her breasts.

She relaxed into Cirocco's arms, as the Wizard had told her to do.

She closed her eyes, felt a hand pinch her nostrils, and she was lowered into the water.

It was a dreamy sensation. There was no reason ever to come out. The need to take a breath was building, but when it got strong she felt Cirocco's lips press against hers, and she inhaled the Wizard's breath. She let it dribble out slowly.

She did that for a long time. Robin didn't count, but she knew it was a long time. Then she stopped. Robin felt the urge to breathe building in her again. Cirocco had told her what to do, but she was still a little frightened. Did she really trust the Wizard that much?

Well, why not? She felt the hands release her nostrils. The hot nectar began to flow inside. She opened her mouth. Air bubbled out and the waters flowed in. There were a few spasms as her lungs filled and she tried to cough away the last of the air. She struggled, but was held firm. Then she was at peace again.

Cirocco held her in the water for half a rev, then carried her to shore and put her beside Adam, who still slept. Chris produced a towel and Cirocco started to dry her. Golden fluid dribbled from Robin's mouth. Cirocco slapped her back, and she began to breathe again, after bringing up the last few pints in her throat. Her skin was brown and almost too hot to touch.

"You go ahead," Chris said, taking the towel. "I'll take care of her."

Cirocco nodded, and entered the pool. In a moment she was floating just below the surface. In half a rev she came out, and her long hair, soaking and plastered to her shoulders, was glossy black.

Chris stayed in the longest. When he came out he was almost an inch taller and his face had changed slightly. Cirocco put Robin back into a light trance and Chris lifted her with Adam in her arms. With a glance over his shoulder at Cirocco, Chris set out to take Robin back to Tuxedo Junction, and to make his proposition.

FIVE

Luther stalked the docks of a Bellinzona as empty of people as the dusty streets of the western town in High Noon, with Gary Cooper. It is possible his mind made the connection, as he had recently seen the film at Pandemonium.

He didn't look like Gary Cooper. He looked like Frankenstein's monster after a three-day bender and a car wreck. Most of the left side of his face was gone, baring some jawbone and cracked teeth, part of a mastoid, and a hollow eye socket. Greenish brain tissue showed through a ragged crack in his skull, as if it had leaked out and been haphazardly stuffed back in. His remaining eye was a black pit in a red sea, blazing with righteous fury. Sutures encircled his neck, not scars, but actual thick threads piercing the skin. If they were removed, his head would have fallen off.

All of his body but his hands was concealed behind a filthy black cassock. The hands bore stigmata which wept blood and pus. One of his legs was shorter than the other. It was not a deformity, but a simple mechanical problem: the leg had once belonged to a nun. It did not slow him down.

There was no need to hide, and Luther made no attempt to. It wasn't easy for him and his band at the best of times. Luther was no delight to the nose, but his Apostles' aroma could stun a hog at fifty paces. Even humans, with their atrophied sense of smell, could usually detect Luther long before he hove into view. Sometimes a downwind stalk worked, but lately the Bellinzonans seemed to have developed a sixth sense where Priests were concerned.

His twelve Apostles shuffled along behind him. Compared to them, Luther was a beauty.

They were nothing but zombies, but Luther had once been Pastor Arthur Lundquist, of the American Unified Lutheran Church in Urbana, Illinois. Urbana had been destroyed long ago, and so had Pastor Lundquist, for the most part. Bits and pieces of him had once belonged to other people-Gaea assembled her Priests from the material at hand. But from time to time a stray thought of home passed through his murky brain, a thought of the wife and two children. It tortured him, and made him all the more zealous in God's work. A lot of air passed through his brain as well, the result of the gunshot wound which had given him his distinctive smile and manner of speech. That tortured him, too.

He marched up to the edge of the zone of death that led to the Free Female quarter. His eye scanned the fortifications ahead. He saw no one, but he knew they were there, watching him. He stood defiantly, contemptuous of them, his hands on his hips.

"Enemies of God!" he shouted, or at least tried to. With his left cheek missing he had trouble with any sound that required lips. Enemies came out sounding like "enaweesh."

"I auw Luther! I auw here on a wission of God!"

An arrow sizzled on a flat trajectory and hit him in the chest. All but the feathers went through him. Luther did not even bother to break it off, nor did he move his hands from his hips.

A Free Female hurried out to the bridge, a torch in her hand. She threw it on the oil which had been spread at the first rumor of Luther's band in Bellinzona. A wall of fire sprang up between Luther and the Quarter. It began consuming the bridge. The woman hurried back to cover.

"A child was vrought to thish blace wany ... sheveral revs ago. God hash need of thish child. God will schwile on she who tells we the whereavouts of thish child. Cuf forward, cuf forward, and resheive God's grashe!"

No one sprang forth to receive any grace. Luther had expected it, but it still enraged him. He began to howl. He shouted obscenities at the burning bridge, he turned in quick circles and stamped his long leg up and down on the planks of the dock. Soon blood was running from his eye and a mixture of spittle and black phlegm from the open side of his face. The front of his cassock darkened near his hips. The power was on him, the power was building. He flung himself to his knees, extended his arms to heaven, and began to sing.

"A whitey for-or-tresh iih our God!

A sword and shield victorious;

He vrakes the cruel offressor's rod

And wins salvation glorious!"

Verse after verse, the tone-deaf Priest shouted the hymn in a fractured, sibilant bass, bellowing when he forgot the words. It was not the words that mattered, anyway, but the Power, and he felt it on him as he had few times since his resurrection. He reached out, remembered the days when he had preached sermons from his pulpit. He had been something of a thunderer in those days, but nothing like he was today. God would be proud of him. Behind him, even the worm-eaten zombies were moved. They whimpered as if trying to sing, their slack tongues hanging from their horrible mouths and wagging as their bodies swayed.

And here she came, a single Free Female, standing and throwing aside her weapon. Her smile was a chaotic rictus, her eyes bright and empty as moonies.

The Free Females were screaming. They had started when Luther began his feculent hymn, and now they redoubled their efforts. They did not scream from fear-though they were all terrified to the depths of their souls-but as a tactic, to drown out the Power. It was a many-throated, astonishing warble, after the manner of Arab women in victory or mourning. Many had jammed cotton or wax into their ears, like Odysseus's crew, to protect themselves. Luther laughed at that. He knew it was a mistake. With their ears plugged they were more vulnerable, as they could not hear the communal shout, the sound of solidarity that was the only real defense against Luther and his kind.

She came forward. An arrow followed her, but the hand that loosed it had trembled too much for it to fly true. It missed, and so did a second. The third sank into her back. She shuddered, but kept walking.

The Free Females were not shooting out of contempt, or because they thought her a traitor. They knew too well the Power of Luther to cloud women's minds. They shot at her because death was the merciful alternative.

"The old evil foe, sworn to work us woe

With dread and craft and wight he arms himself to fight.

On Earth he has no equal!"

She walked into the flames.

Two more arrows hit her. She fell to her hands and knees as her hair went up like dry tinder. She continued to crawl, blackening. She struggled to her feet, hearing nothing, blinded, and a burning board broke under her. She fell backwards and rolled off the bridge into the water.

Luther stopped singing and stood up. He watched, smiling as half a dozen Free Females broke from their hiding places and ran forward, shielding their faces from the heat of the flames and his own awful presence. Several of them made horns at him, which amused him even more. Did they really think sticking out pinkie and index finger would protect them?

They caught their sister's body with a rope and pulled it onto the deck. She still lived, but that was a minor point. Had she been dead, they would have gone for her with even more determination. Now she could die and have a chance to stay dead.

"God will funish you!" Luther shouted, then turned to his troops. "Andrew! John! Thaddeus! Phil ... Judas!" Five zombies stepped forward, including Philip, whose dim awareness had been unable to decide if he, too, had been called. Luther waved him back impatiently. It was always these four when Luther wanted something done, and the reason was not mysterious. The other eight had a b, m, or p in their names. The names of two-thirds of his disciples were unpronounceable tongue-twisters to Luther.

"Advance uffon the unvelievers," he commanded them. "Swite the sinners! 'In flabing fire taking vengeance on they that know not God, and that ovey not the goshpel!' Firsht Thesshalonians! One! Eight through nine! Go, wy discifles!" Luther watched them march into the flames. They were goners, but they would do some damage first. Already they bristled with arrows, which they utterly ignored, as they ignored the fact that they were burning. Since they were already dead, it hardly mattered.

The former Pastor Lundquist turned away from it. He could no longer feel pain, nor anything very much like doubt, but sometimes a feeling crept in that made him grope in the dark much as a man who had been blinded, deafened, and had all four limbs amputated might grope. For one thing, it was annoying to see Judas march away to destruction. This was possibly the twentieth "Judas" he had lost. Something always made him choose the biggest, strongest, least decomposed recruit to be Judas. He didn't know why.

And something else. Try as he might, he couldn't conjure the foggiest recollection of what a Thessalonian was. It was habit that led Luther out of town on the path leading by the old graveyard. He didn't expect to find anything.

He got lucky.

There were six funeral pyres waiting to be lit, and there was even freshly turned soil. Luther's approach had apparently scared off the undertakers before they could torch the corpses. And could it be that someone had actually been buried?

The two things that almost everyone agreed on in Bellinzona were death and insanity. The insane were left alone as long as they were not violent. And the dead were promptly burned. A truce prevailed in the face of death, and the only example of community spirit Bellinzona had ever known showed itself. Everyone cooperated to get the dead to the graveyard, where they were disposed of in ceremonies taken from the Hindus of the Ganges.

It had not always been that way. In a town where ninety percent of the population had no relatives, bodies had been ignored. They might rot for days before someone got so disgusted as to kick them into the water and let them sink.

But then the bodies began to rise again, and climb over the sides of boats and lurk in dark corners. After that, the Vigilantes and Free Females organized burial details.

Burial proved no better. The dead clawed their way out of the graves. Cremation was the only sure answer.

"Vut you have to light the fire," Luther cackled. "Vring the vodies to we," he told his remaining Apostles.

Bartholomew and Simon Peter scrabbled in the dirt and came up with a dismembered body. Someone had thought they could beat the system, but Luther knew better. Even this was not beyond the power of almighty God.

The corpses were fairly fresh, except one that had been gone about two days. One was in a white winding cloth: a rich man, considering the price of fabric in Bellinzona. The rest were naked. Luther slit the cloth over the rich man's face and knew at once this was Judas Iscariot.

He worked himself into a minor frenzy. This was nothing compared to the holy-rolling toot he had thrown for the Free Females; resurrection was a routine matter, like handing out wafers. When he was in the proper state he knelt and kissed each pair of cold lips. He had to wait while Peter fit the pieces of the last one together.

In a few minutes they began opening their eyes. The Apostles helped them to their feet, while Luther studied them with a top sergeant's eye. That black female could be Thaddeus, he decided. And the Chinese would make a good John. He assigned names without regard to what sex they had been. After a few weeks, it was damn hard to tell, anyway.

The seven new zombies were weak and unsteady. It would take ten or twenty revs for them to attain their full strength. The dismembered one would take even longer. Luther would have it carried into the woods and left with the two others he would not be needing, to eventually make their way back to Pandemonium. Luther always traveled with just Twelve.

By the side of the river, Luther knelt in prayer.

Good, bad-there wasn't a lot of difference anymore. Luther could feel hatred, fury, and a religious ecstasy that was a great deal like both hatred and fury. The closest he ever came to feeling good, in the sense that Arthur Lundquist might have understood, was when he communed with God. When he prayed.

He didn't do it often. God was a very busy Woman, and didn't like to be bothered with trivia. Just to have Her not answer was stinging enough. To have Her deliver a rebuke could dash him to the ground like an insect. But today She heard, and She answered. Luther knew where the child was. He got to his feet and gathered his troops, gave them their marching orders.

He just hoped that spawn-of-a-whore Kali didn't get to Tuxedo Junction before he did.

SIX

Cirocco felt tired after her swim in the fountain. It hadn't always been that way. When she was younger, it had left her so full of energy it was almost painful. She had not needed to eat for two or three days. Chris said it was still that way for him. He was only forty-nine. It would probably be like that for Robin, too. But for the last fifty years or so, Cirocco needed to lie down for a few hours after a rejuvenation.

She did not do it at the fountain. It was the principle of the water hole. There were enemies who could come into Dione. They might come to the fountain, knowing Cirocco had to visit it once every three kilorevs.

So she went to a secluded lake she knew, about five miles from Tuxedo Junction. There was a beach of black sand, fine as powder, and warm from sub-Gaean heat.

She stretched, rested her head on her pack, and dozed.

Nova saw them when they reached the bridge. For a moment she didn't know who it was walking with the big hairy man, but there really could be little doubt. Robin wore only shorts, and the tattoos that made her body unique were visible. The snakes seemed almost alive. Robin glowed with vivid colors Nova knew only from photographs of her mother as a young woman. If anything, the colors were even brighter now. Patches of gold seemed to glitter, and reds and violets and greens and yellows shimmered like precious jewels. She looked like a little brown Halloween egg.

Brown?

Nova looked again. Sure enough, Robin had managed to get a sun tan. It was a neat trick in this buttermilk sunlight. Even neater to do it in just two hours and not burn in the process.

She kept watching the other end of the bridge, but Cirocco did not appear. She sighed, and went down the stairs to meet them.

It was shocking to see the change up close. Robin had shed five years. Nova had begun to realize that Cirocco was a very powerful witch indeed, but this was almost beyond belief. It irked her in some way she wasn't proud of to see how fresh and happy her mother looked. She just didn't have the right to be that happy when Nova was so miserable.

A meal was served, and still Cirocco didn't show.

Robin and Chris went off together somewhere. Nova watched them go, then hurried up to her room. In a short time she came out again, and went to the kitchen. Serpent was alone in there, mixing something that smelled like cookie batter in a big bowl. He glanced at her, then looked back to his work.

She wandered over to the tremendous spice rack on the wall. Hundreds of blown-glass bottles contained leaves and powders and crystals and some items Nova thought best left unnamed. Many were of Gaean ancestry. The problem was she knew there were many Earth spices in there, but they were all labeled in Titanide script, engraved on the glass. By lifting the stoppers and sniffing a few likely candidates she managed to locate aristolochia root, then after more trial and error something that smelled like powdered extract of cubeb. It was the right color, and it tasted right. But after that she was symied.

"Perhaps I can be of assistance."

She jumped in surprise-which was no small matter in the low gravity. She had been trying so hard to ignore the Titanide's existence that she had forgotten he was there.

"I doubt it," she said. For some reason, she was embarrassed when these outlandish animalls talked. They pretended to be human, and did such a poor job of it.

"You could try," Serpent suggested.

"I was wondering if ... if you had any cardamom."

"Great or small?"

"What?"

"We use two varieties: the Greater-"

"Yes, yes, I know. The small."

"Do you want the dried rind or the crushed seed?"

"The seed, the seed!" Nova regretted being drawn into the conversation in the first place. But Serpent handed her a jar, and she tapped a portion onto a slip of paper and twisted it shut. Then he helped her find the cinnamon. She could see he wondered what she might be cooking, and that whatever it might be, he didn't approve.

"Anything else?"

"Uh ... would you have any benjamin?"

Serpent pursed his lips primly.

"You'd have to look in the medicine cabinet for that." It was clear his opinion of her recipe had dropped even lower. "It will be labeled in English, as 'benzoin' " He paused, seemed about to ask a question, but Cirocco had warned him to tread on eggs when dealing with this human. "If it matters," he went on, "there won't be any potassium cyanide left in the solution, but there might be some alcohol."

Nova was going to say she meant the gum resin, not the crystal, but decided against it. She hurried away and upstairs to the infirmary, which she had already located and raided for other ingredients.

Back in her room, she shut the door, pulled the drapes, lit a candle, and stripped off her clothes. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she tapped out portions of her new acquisitions into the small metal dish she was using as a crucible, added some water, and stirred it with her finger. She used a pin to draw blood from her thumb, and dripped it into the aromatic mess as it began to bubble from the heat of the candle. When it was going well, she plucked three pubic hairs, singed them in the candle flame, and added them to the crucible.

A dollop of vodka nicked from the cabinet in the living room soon had the mixture sizzling with a blue flame. She continued to cook it until she had a few ounces of grayish powder. She sniffed it, and made a face. Well, she wouldn't use much. She fretted for a moment about the benjamin, and the fact that the recipe called for mushroom liqueur instead of vodka. But this was supposed to be sympathetic magic, not literal sorcery, so it ought to do.

She began plucking more hairs. She plucked until she was sore, and then wound them together and tied them up into a tiny, golden brush. Pulling on her shirt and pants, she peered out the door. When she was sure she was unobserved she hurried down the hall to Cirocco's room.

Inside, she used the brush to dab tiny spots of powder onto the bedposts and under the pillow. Under the bed she drew a five-sided figure and left a pubic hair in the middle. Then she retreated to the door, leaving an infinitesimal dab every three feet.

Down the hall she went, dabbing her brush in the pan and leaving little dots of powder in a trail to her doorway.

When she closed her door she had to lean against it for a moment. Her heart was pounding and her cheeks were hot. She tore off her clothes and jumped into bed. She used the brush to make a mark between her breasts, then thrust it down between her legs, muttering an invocation. Then she set the pan on the floor near the wall, where Robin would not see it. She pulled the bedclothes up to her neck and took a deep, shuddering breath.

Be still, heart. Your beloved will come.

Then she leaped out of bed and flung herself at the huge, wondrous vanity table with the wavy mirror. She dug into her cosmetics, heedless of the fact that some of them might be irreplaceable. She made up her face with infinite care, applied her best perfume, and jumped back into bed.

What if the perfume covered up the scent of the potion? What if Cirocco didn't care for lipstick? She wore none herself. She didn't wear any cosmetics, and was the most beautiful woman Nova had ever seen.

Sobbing, she flew down the hall to the bathroom. She scrubbed it all off, then was sick in the toilet. She cleaned it up, brushed her teeth, and hurried back to bed.

This must be love; what else could hurt so much?

She wept, she moaned, she thrashed the sheets to ribbons, and still Cirocco did not come.

Eventually, she cried herself to sleep.

SEVEN

In the dream, Cirocco opened her eyes.

She was on her back in the fine black sand. Her head rested on her pack. The sand was quite dry, and so was her body. She spread her arms and dug her fingers into the sand, pointed her toes and felt it shift under her heels, moved her shoulders and hips in a slow, sensuous circle that dug the Cirocco-shaped hole in the sand a few centimeters deeper. She let out a deep breath, and relaxed totally.

She was aware of every muscle and every bone. Her skin was stretched taut, each nerve ending waiting to feel the strange thing again.

It came after a timeless dream-time. A small hand was rubbing her left leg, from the top of her foot to her knee and back down again. She could feel it quite distinctly. Four fingers, a thumb, the heel of the hand. It was not pressing hard, not massaging, but neither was it the touch of a feather. She watched without alarm, in the way of some dreams. She could see the minute changes in texture on her skin where the hand moved.

Her nipples hardened. She closed her eyes (it was not completely dark beneath her eyelids), pressed her head back against the pack, raising her shoulders from the sand and arching her back. The hand moved up to her thigh, and another cupped her breast, moved light fingertips around the curve of it, brushed a thumb over the wrinkled nipple. She sighed, and relaxed back onto the accepting sand.

She opened her eyes again. In the dream.

The land was darker. In a land of unchanging light, dusk seemed to be sweeping over the quiet lake. Cirocco moaned. Her legs were heavy, engorged; she opened them, offering herself to the darkening sky. Her hips seemed to grow from the ground; she thrust them out and up in the most primitive gesture of all, then relaxed again.

Two small footprints appeared in the sand between her legs, one at a time. Then there was the imprint of knees. The sand swarmed, taking on the shape of legs, hollowing out a space for a hip as the phantom knelt and shifted. Both hands were on her thighs now, moving gently up and down.

Cirocco closed her eyes again, and could immediately see better. Ghost images of the lake, the far shore, the sky pulsed against the inside of her eyelids. She lifted herself on her elbows and let her head fall back. Through the thin skin she saw trees converging on a point in the sky. The sky was the color of blood. She bent her legs, her knees up and open. She gasped as the hands explored her. Keeping her eyes closed, she lifted her head.

When she looked straight ahead she could see nothing but the throbbing of her own pulse, the fulgurant and amorphous ephemera of her own retinas. But when she looked to the side-careful to keep her eyes closed-a figure was revealed kneeling between her open legs. It was a Cubist conception, existing from all sides at once, a layered thing with depths her peripheral dream-vision could not reach. It was a thing of colored smoke bound together by moonbeams. Cirocco knew who it was, and she was not afraid.

In the dream, she opened her eyes to almost total darkness.

The shadow knelt there. She felt the hands descend her thighs and spread out over her belly, saw her hyaline lover's face moving down, felt the brush of long hair, felt the tickle of a warm breath, felt the tender kiss, the more insistent kiss, the eager opening of mouth and vulva, the entry of tongue, the hands sliding around to clutch her buttocks and raise her from the yielding sand.

For a moment she was transfixed. She threw her head back, mouth open but unable to make a sound. When finally she was able to sob, to release her breath, the breath became a moan that trailed off into a whispered word.

"... Gaby ... "

It was utterly dark. Cirocco reached down and ran her hands through thick hair, down to Gaby's neck, over her shoulders. She squeezed the smaller woman between her legs, and Gaby kissed Cirocco's belly, her breasts, her neck. Cirocco felt the familiar heavy breasts sliding over her, the wonderful weight pressing down on her. Her hands greedily explored the impossible solidity of Gaby's body. She heard Gaby's breathing next to her ear, smelled the special complex of scent she knew to be Gaby. She wept.

In her dream, Cirocco closed her eyes again. She saw tears in Gaby's eyes, and a smile on her lips. They kissed. Gaby's black hair covered their faces.

She opened her eyes. It was getting light. Gaby still rested on her. They made meaningless noises at each other as a dim twilight stole over the land. Cirocco saw the beloved face. She kissed it. Gaby laughed quietly. Then she put her hands on the sand and lifted herself onto her knees, straddling Cirocco. She held out her hand and got to her feet, pulling Cirocco behind her. The ground clung like flypaper. She had to pull hard to get up. When she was finally standing, Gaby turned her and pointed down. Cirocco saw her own body reclined on the sand, unmoving.

"Am I dead?" she asked. It did not seem an important question.

"No, my beloved. I am not the angel of death. Walk with me." Gaby put her arm around Cirocco and they started up the beach.

In the dream, they spoke to each other. They did not use sentences. A word here and there was enough. Old hurts, old joys were brought out, held up to the yellow sky of Iapetus, cried over and laughed about, and tucked carefully away again. They spoke of things that had happened a century ago, but nothing of the last twenty years. The two decades didn't exist for the old friends.

At last it was time for Gaby to go. Cirocco saw that Gaby's feet no longer touched the sand. She tried to hold her, but the smaller woman kept drifting up into the sky and, in the manner of dreams, all Cirocco's movements were too slow and ineffectual to prevent it. It was a sad time. Cirocco cried for a while when Gaby was gone, standing there in the restored light.

Time to wake up, she thought.

When nothing happened, she looked down at the beach. Two sets of footprints led to where she stood, tired and discouraged.

She closed her eyes and slapped her cheeks. She opened them to find no change in her situation. So she started back along the edge of the water.

She watched her bare feet as she walked. They made new imprints beside the two trails going the other way. Where the Woozle Wasn't, she thought, and could not remember where that came from. Getting senile, Cirocco.

Her body was a short distance from the water, up where the sand was dry and fine enough for filling hourglasses. It reclined with its head on the pack, its hands folded on its belly, and its legs straight out and crossed at the ankles. She knelt close to it. It breathed slowly and evenly.

She looked away from the body and down at ... at herself. At the body she was living in. It was completely familiar to her. She touched herself, rubbed her hands together, held a hand up and tried to see things through it and failed to do so. She pinched her thigh and watched the skin turn red.

After a while she reached out and touched the body on the forearm. The body was other, not self. It was an everyday dichotomy, with a disturbing twist. What if the body sat up and wanted to talk?

It was definitely time to wake up, she decided.

Or to go to sleep.

She reached back into a century's experience of living from her gut as well as her mind, and found a non-verbal notion tickling the back of her head. There was no use in trying to think it out. Sometimes, in Gaea, this was the only way to deal with life. Things happened here. Not everything could be explained.

She allowed her instinct to take over. Without thought, she closed her eyes and toppled forward, turning as she fell. She felt the brief touch of the skin of the other, a singular but not unpleasant sensation of fullness-something like the sensations of pregnancy-and rolled along the sand. She opened her eyes and sat up, alone.

The tracks in the sand were still there. Two sets led away, one returned.

She moved on hands and knees to the harder, wetter sand nearer the water. Selecting one of the smaller prints-high-arched, five toes clearly visible and digging in-she ran her fingertips lightly through the depressions. She moved to the next print and lowered herself until her nose almost touched the print. She scented Gaby quite distinctly. The prints of the larger feet did not smell at all. Her own prints never did. Cirocco's sense of smell, though inhumanly keen, could not distinguish her own spoor from the ever-present odor of herself.

She might have thought about it longer, but suddenly she smelled something else, quite far away but unmistakable. She grabbed her pack and sprinted at top speed toward Tuxedo Junction.

EIGHT

Robin nattered on for almost a rev.

Chris had expected it, and didn't mind. The little witch was riding high on a wave of rejuvenation. Part of it was chemical, the result of mystic compounds still surging through her blood, entering every cell and working their changes there. Part of it was psychological, and entirely understandable. Robin looked five years younger, but she felt better than she had in ten years. The result was something like amphetamines, something like manic-depressive psychosis. The highs were Himalayan and almost unendurable, the lows sharp but mercifully brief. Chris remembered it well.

It was no longer so exhilarating for him. When he visited the fountain it felt just as good as it used to, but the feeling didn't last, and was replaced by pain within a few revs. He felt it beginning along his spine and on the sides of his head. He didn't mind that; it was simply growing pains.

Robin chirruped out most of her life story, unable to sit down, pacing the pentagonal room he had built and coppered with remembrances of her. Chris simply sat at the table in the center of the room, nodding at the right places, offering noncommittal responses when it seemed polite to do so, and contemplating the single candle before him.

Eventually she wound down. She took the high stool opposite him and rested her elbows on the table, looking at the candle with eyes brighter than the flame. Slowly her breathing quieted and she shifted her gaze from the candle to him.

It was as if she was noticing him for the first time. She made several attempts to speak, and was eventually successful.

"Sorry," she said.

"Don't be. It's refreshing to see somebody so exuberant. And since you tend to be close-mouthed, it saved me a lot of questioning."

"Great Mother, I sure babbled, didn't I? I just couldn't seem to stop, I had to tell you-"

"I know, I know."

"Chris, it's so ... miraculous!" She looked at her arm, at the tattoo blazing forth on it. For the hundredth time she rubbed her skin in disbelief, her face showing that small remaining fear that it would rub off.

Chris reached for the fat candle, rolled it moodily around on its base, watching wax drip down the sides.

"It is wonderful," he agreed. "It's one of the few places Gaea can't touch. When you go there, you realize this must have been a pretty damn wonderful place to be, a long time ago."

She cocked her head and looked at him. He could not return her stare.

"Okay," she said. "You asked me out here to discuss something. A proposal, you said. You want to tell me what it is?"

He scowled at the candle again. He knew Robin valued directness and would be impatient if she sensed him stalling for more time, but he was unable to come out with it.

"What are your plans, Robin?"

"What do you mean?"

"Where are you going to stay? What are you going to do?"

She looked startled, then took another quick look around the crazy room he had built.

"I'm afraid I didn't think. That man, Conal, said it would be all right with you if we stayed here for a while, so-"

"That's no problem, Robin. This place belongs to all my friends. I'd be delighted if you made this your home. Forever."

She looked at him gratefully, but with a trace of suspicion.

"I appreciate it, Chris. It'll be good to spend a little time here and sort out the possibilities."

He sighed, and looked directly across the table at her. "I'm going to ask you right out. I hope you'll think about it before you answer. And I hope you'll be honest."

"All right. Shoot."

"I want Adam."

Her face froze. For a long time she did not move a muscle.

"What are you feeling right now?" Chris asked.

"Anger," she said, tonelessly.

"Just before that. Just before you clamped down on it."

"Joy," she said, and got up.

She went to the copper representation of herself on the far wall, and slowly ran her hand over it. She looked back at him.

"Do you think I'm a bad mother?"

"I haven't seen you in twenty years. I don't know. But I see Nova, and I know you are a good mother to her."

"Do you think I'm a good mother to Adam?"

"I think you're trying to be, and it's tearing you up."

She came back to the table, pulled the chair out, and climbed back up onto it. She folded her hands on the table, and looked at him.

"You're good, but you're not perfect, Chris. I told you I almost killed him when he was born. Maybe this will be hard for you to understand. If I had killed him... I would not feel like a murderer. It would have been the proper thing to do. Letting him live ruined me, politically, socially ... just about every way there is. I'm asking you to believe those things didn't enter into my decision."

"I believe that. The opinions of other people were never very important to you."

She grinned at him, and for a moment looked nineteen years old.

"Thanks for that. For a while their opinions were very important. You wouldn't have known me. But when he came out of my body and into the air, I took a good look at myself. I'm still doing it."

"Do you love him?"

"No. I feel a lot of affection for him. And I'd die defending him. My feelings for him ... Chris, ambivalent just doesn't say it. Maybe I do love him." She sighed again. "But Adam is not tearing me apart. I made my peace with him, and with our joint destiny, and I will be a good mother."

"I never doubted it."

She frowned at him, and rubbed her hand through her hair.

"I don't get it, then."

"Robin, I never intended to rescue him, because I never imagined he needed it." His face darkened for a moment. "I'll admit I worry about Nova."

"She almost killed him herself."

"That doesn't surprise me. She's a lot like you were at her age."

"I was meaner. The difference between me and her is I would have succeeded in killing him, and she didn't. And the reason she didn't is that she really didn't want to. She picked a time when I would have to catch her. She was acting out her pain, and seeing if I really would stop her."

"Do you think he is safe from her now?"

"Utterly. She gave her word. And you remember how important an oath was to me? Well, I was positively wishy-washy compared to her." She reached for the candle in the center of the table and moved it to one side. "Maybe you could tell me why you still want him."

"Because I'm his father." He took a deep breath. "I'm working from ignorance. I don't know what a family is like in the Coven. I don't know how it works with only women around. Do you marry? Does the child have two parents?"

Robin thought about it for a while, then grimaced.

"I talked to Gaby about some of this, a long time ago, and she told me about heterosexual customs. I finally decided the two lifestyles aren't that different. About thirty or forty percent of us pair-bond and make it work. Most of the rest of us try to make a life commitment, but it falls apart in a few years. About ten percent separate sex life and family life completely, have casual or serial lovers and leave it at that."

"Single parents," Chris said. "The divorce rate where I grew up was about seventy-five percent. But I'm talking about my upbringing, my feelings of ... what is right and wrong. And that tells me a father has a responsibility to his children."

"What about Nova? She's yours, too."

"I was afraid you'd ask me that. She's no longer a child. But she's still a part of me, and I will do right by her."

Robin laughed.

"You shouldn't grit your teeth so hard," she said. "It makes me wonder if you really mean it."

"It won't be easy, I'll admit that."

"Don't worry. She's a lot of things, but easy to like isn't one of them. But leaving that aside for a minute, and tabling the notion of you 'doing what's right' for Nova, whatever that may be ... you still haven't told me why you want Adam. Just because you're his father?"

Chris spread his hands, looked at them there on the table-big, work-roughened, and ineffectual.

"I don't know if I can." He realized he was very close to tears. "I've been bothered... I have ... doubts." He gestured toward his ears, half-hidden in his long hair. They were long and pointed. "I'm changing. I asked for it, and I want it ... I think. It's a little late to go back. Me and Valiha... oh, God, I can't get into that now. I can't begin to tell you about that yet."

He put his face in his hands and wept. There seemed no way to make her understand.

He didn't know how long he cried. When he looked up, she was still looking at him curiously. She gave him a small smile that was probably meant to be reassuring. He wiped his eyes.

"I feel cheated. I had Serpent and I love him dearly. I love Titanides. I'm going to be one some day."

"When?"

"That's part of my doubts. The process is mysterious. It's taking a long time, and it's starting to be painful. I suppose I could stop now, and be forever stuck between human and Titanide.

"See, Robin... Titanides are not human. They're better and they're worse, and they're similar and they're different, but they aren't human. Ninety-nine percent of me wants to be one so ... so I can't hurt again the way I hurt for such a long time. So I can understand Valiha, so maybe I can explain to her why I did the things I did. But that nagging one percent is scared to death to stop being human."

"So you're the one who's being torn apart."

"I guess that sums it up."

"He's your link to being human."

"Yes. And I'm his father, no matter how roundabout it was."

Robin got up and walked once more to the wall. Chris took the candle and followed her. He held it high as she gently touched the hammered copper.

"I like this," she said.

"Thank you."

"I didn't think I would at first, but it grows on you." She gently traced the outline of the copper Robin, moving her finger along the line of the pregnant belly. She turned to him.

"Why did you make me pregnant in this?"

"I don't know. It wasn't a conscious decision."

"And you left off ... " She put her hands on her own abdomen, over the place where there had been a hideous tattoo, a monstrous, defiant, and despairing graffito scrawled on her own body by a proud child. The fountain had taken it away. It was as though it had never existed.

"Take him, then," she said.

For a moment Chris could not believe he had heard her right.

"Thank you," he said.

"You look like you didn't expect to convince me."

"I didn't. What changed your mind?"

One corner of her mouth curled in amusement.

"You have forgotten a lot about me. I made up my mind about a half second after you asked me. Then I had to hear your reason before I knew if I was just trying to take the easy way out."

Chris was so elated that he picked her up as easily as if she were a child and kissed her, as she laughed and pretended to fight him off.

They were still laughing when the sound of the scream reached them. It went right past the conscious part of Chris's mind, directly to something so basic as to be a reflex action, and he was sprinting for the door long before he knew who had screamed.

NINE

Rocky and Valiha were two kilometers from Tuxedo Junction, in one of the few flat, open pieces of land in that neighborhood, pulling a plow like the draft animals they most definitely were not. The comparison would not have bothered them. A Titanide farmer simply walked in front of the plow, not behind it.

Titanides were unfailingly honest and square-in the sense of a square deal. They paid debts. They would not think of accepting shelter or food without doing something in return. They also knew how to combine the payment of a debt with legitimate self-interest. Rocky and Valiha liked to visit the Junction, liked to stay with Chris in his fanciful aerie, and liked to eat well. There were certain items that did not flourish in a Gaean jungle, that would do well only in light, on flat land, and in the absence of competition. Hence the plowing. Chris could not have done it himself, and when it was done he would be able to grow more crops and set a better table. Everything balanced out nicely.

They had done about two acres. The fresh-turned soil smelled good to Rocky. It was good to exert oneself, to feel ones hooves dig the ground, to hear the creaking of the harness, to see the rich brown dirt steaming from sub-Gaean heat. It was good to rub haunches with Valiha. Yellow had always been a favorite color to him, and the Madrigals were ever yellow.

He had not known her long. That is, he had known about her almost since his birth, as she had gone on that terrible journey with the Captain, famous in legend and song. He had known her son, Serpent, for many myriarevs. But he had begun to know Valiha as a friend only about seven kilorevs ago.

Over the last kilorev he had begun to love her. This was a surprise to him. Titanides could be as quirky as the next intelligent species, and Rocky had a thing about Aeolian Solos. He tended not to like them. He knew it was illogical, since it was the single parent of the Solo who had the egotism to wish to birth a genetically identical copy of herself without help from any other Titanide. The child was as blameless as any child ... yet, if she was a copy, it stood to reason she would have her mother's egotism.

Valiha was an Aeolian Solo.

They came to the end of a row. Both were pleasantly sweaty, a little bit tired. Valiha reached for the buckles of her harness, so Rocky did the same. They shed the plow, and Valiha trotted forward a few paces, then turned, her tail high, and came back beside Rocky, facing the other way. She leaned over and reached beneath him to squeeze the bulge of flesh that sheathed his anterior penis.

"I'm horny," she sang. "Do you want to screw?"

"Sounds good to me," he sang, and trotted around behind her.

What they actually said in their song was much more than that, but Titanide song has never been readily translatable into English. Her four-note phrase was in an earthy mode, so "screw" and "horny" were close. But the way she walked was also a part of it, and the phrase included the idea that Rocky would mount her, not the other way around. Rocky's reply was more than simple assent. In a way, the entire exchange and their subsequent movements were as formalized as dressage.

She set her hind legs apart and lowered her hindquarters slightly. He walked his forelegs lightly up her back, straddled her, and entered her. He embraced her torso from behind and she reached back to hold his forelegs firmly. She reversed her head and they kissed, and humped merrily and lustily for a good two minutes before they reached their anterior orgasms-which, for sound Titanide neurological reasons, were always simultaneous. He rested in that position for a moment, his breasts squeezed firmly against her strong back, then backed down.

She asked if she might do him a similar service, and he declined, not because he didn't wish to be mounted-he wanted it very much-but because he had serious and intimate matters on his mind.

So he pranced out in front of her, lifting his forelegs high, and came to stand face-to-face, inches away from her. She smiled at him and put an arm over his shoulder and turned her head slightly to kiss him, then became aware of his frontal erection. She looked startled, but did not back away.

"Sir, I hardly know thee," she sang, in formal mode.

"It has been a short time," he agreed. "But a love as strong as mine sometimes grows quickly, in the manner of those-who-walk-on-two-legs. If she would permit, I would propose a union to my lady."

"Sing it, then."

"A trio. Myself the hindmother. I know not if I have spoken of it, but I have never been a hindmother."

"You are young."

"That is true."

"Mixolydian?"

"Lydian. And Serpent for the hindfather."

She lowered her eyes in thought.

"Sharped?" she sang.

"Yes."

What he had outlined was a Sharped Lydian Trio, one of the most common of the Twenty-nine Ways. He and Valiha would have frontal intercourse to produce a semi-fertilized egg: Rocky the forefather, Valiha the foremother. The egg would be activated by Cirocco Jones, implanted in Rocky's womb, and quickened by Serpent: Rocky the hindmother, Serpent the hindfather.

He could see her adding it up. Genetics was as instinctive in Titanides as it was imponderable to humans. He knew she would find no flaw in his proposal, though the fact that Valiha was Serpent's hindmother might make it seem incestuous to a human. But incest was a genetic problem to Titanides only in special and limited cases, and morally it was no problem at all.

"It is a good mating," she sang, finally. "It will require some thought."

"As she wills it."

"It is not thee, sir," she began, then dropped back into a less formal mode. "Dammit, Rocky, I'm beginning to love you, too, and you're an admirable fellow, but the times bother me."

"I know, Valiha. The world spins badly."

"I don't know if we should bring babies into a world like this."

"In your own hindmother's time, did we not war with the angels?"

She nodded, and wiped away a tear. She forced a smile.

"I know it. And Serpent will love it. Have you spoken of this to him?"

"No other soul knows of it."

"Then I pray you, hold it within thy heart while the world spins another thousand times. Then thou shalt have thy answer."

They kissed, and heard Serpent come out of the jungle at a full gallop. His hooves sprayed dirt as he thundered across the plowed field.

"I thought you two were plowing!" he sang. "I felt so guilty, staying home and baking, my only burden that fierce human child, while you labored like common farm hands. So I hurried, only to find you-"

He stopped, digging in with all four hooves, and stood perfectly still for two long seconds. Then he reared on his hind legs, wheeled, and dashed off the way he came.

"Zombies!" he shouted, in English, but by then Rocky and Valiha had smelled them, too, and were in hot pursuit.

"Rescue a kid and what does it get you?" Conal asked himself. He glanced at Adam. There was spit dripping down his chin. "You get to be a babysitter, that's what."

He yawned, and settled deeper into the couch. He was in a corner room on the first floor of the main house at the Junction, one with a lot of windows and a good view of the waterfall. Nova was somewhere upstairs, doing something that had produced a strange smell for a while. Whatever it was, it had made her throw up. Before that, she had been running all over the house, acting like a spy. But there had been no sound out of her for over an hour.

"Too good to sit with her baby brother," he told Adam. The infant regarded him solemnly, and then threw a Titanide egg at him.

Actually, Conal didn't mind. He just got a lot of satisfaction out of feeling put-upon.

The kid was okay. Not a howler. Real smart, and real strong. He could probably start with the weights in another year or so, just as soon as he had his feet solidly under him. He had the bones for it. And in a way, Conal was proud that Robin had trusted him enough to leave the baby with him.

He had set the kid up in the middle of the floor with some toys he'd scrounged, and Adam seemed happy to sit there and throw them around, then crawl after them. His favorite was the rack of old Titanide eggs. They were round, about the size of a golf ball, and came in all colors. They were too big for him to put in his mouth, though that didn't prevent him from trying, and they wouldn't break. About their only drawback was a tendency to roll under furniture, so Conal had rigged a palisade of pillows all around Adam, four meters wide. He didn't manage to chunk too many that far. He stumped around in there, naked, not falling down much, and bouncing right back up when he did.

Conal watched Adam grow still, and start peeing on the floor. Conal laughed, and Adam turned awkwardly and started laughing, too.

"Ma!" Adam squeaked. "Tye-Nye! Ma!"

"Pee-pee," Conal told him, getting up. "Gotta learn that, kid. Say, 'Gotta go pee-pee.'" Adam laughed louder, nodding.

Conal got a towel out of the bathroom and mopped it up. It was a nuisance, but what could you expect? And it was better than diapers.

He sat down again and his thoughts turned, not for the first time, to Nova. Most likely she was sleeping up there. Hell of a problem, Nova. Hell of a problem. What to do about it? Where to start?

He couldn't think of a good place. At first he thought she hated all living beings equally. Lately he had come to believe he held a special place in her heart, just below rattlesnakes, pederasts, and spirochetes. Definitely a tough place to start from, but determination had always been Conal's strong point.

Unhappily, imagination was not. Nor was subtlety. Cirocco had told him he had an admirable directness, but that it took some getting used to.

So when his thoughts turned to Nova, they kept going around in the same unprofitable pattern. He knew it was ridiculous, he knew something radical had to happen before she could ever begin to see him as anything but a repulsive monster, but he kept having the same recurrent fantasy. It started with him getting out of the chair and going up the stairs. He would knock on her door.

"Come in," she would say. He would enter, smile winningly.

"Just wanted to see if you needed anything, Nova," he would say.

Then-he wasn't sure about the details of this part-he would be sitting on the bed beside her, and he would lean over to kiss her, and her lips would part ...

She screamed.

It was a dreadful, terrifying scream, torn from her throat. So deep had been his fantasy that for a confusing moment he tried to form an apology, and then his blood seemed to freeze as he understood this was real.

His feet touched the bottom stair, the ninth stair, and the top stair, and he was barreling down the hallway toward her room.

TEN

Nova came awake slowly, not knowing what had been bothering her. She lay there, waiting for the sound again, wondering why she had thought Cirocco was outside her door waiting to come in.

There it was again. A scratching sound. But they didn't scratch at doors here, they hit them with their fists. And this wasn't the door, it was the window.

She got up, yawning, padded to the window, and stuck her head out. She looked down.

What she saw was frozen in her memory for all time.

There was a thing climbing up the outside of the house. She saw its arms, which were made of bones and snakes, and the top of its head, which was covered with cracked parchment and scraps of long hair. But the true terror was in its hands. She could see the bare finger bones, pieces of rotting flesh, and mouths. Each finger ended in a little bund snake with a wide mouth and needle-teeth, and when the hand grasped the vertical wall the snakes bit into the wood with an audible crunch. The thing was coming up fast, hand over hand. She was fumbling for her gun, realizing belatedly that she had no clothes on, when the thing looked up. It had the face of a skull. Worms swarmed in the eye sockets.

Nova was not easily frightened. Even that horrific face was not enough to make her scream. But then she turned to get her gun and was face to face with the second thing, hanging from the wall beside the window, its face two feet away from her own. Above its eyebrows there was just jagged bone and a boiling mass of worms. It reached for her and she screamed.

It had her by the wrist. She pulled, still screaming, as the tiny snakes bit into her flesh. Then she tore free.

She did not remember how she got across the room. Time went very slowly, or racketed by leaving momentary gaps. She found her gun in her hand. The hand trembled, fumbling with the safety. She brought it around and up. The second thing was in the room coming right at her and she pulled the trigger and heard nothing because the blood had made the gun slip out of her hand, and the thing was still coming at her. She rolled over her bed and down into the gap between it and the wall as she heard the door splintering. The gun had to be down there somewhere. She fought an overpowering urge to take another look, heard something hit something else with a meaty sound, heard something else rattle the house as it hit the floor. She found the gun, steadied it with her good hand, and jerked her arms over the bed with the gun out in front of her.

Conal came within a tenth of a second of dying. The nerve impulse was already on the way to Nova's trigger finger when she realized he was grappling with one of the creatures and managed to jerk her hands up in time to put her first rocket-propelled bullet into the wall a foot below the ceiling.

There was no way she was going to get a safe shot at the one Conal was fighting, but the second monster was framed in the window, on its way in, so she gave it two explosive slugs, one in the head and the second in the chest, and paused one second to see what it thought about that.

The head exploded, pulverized, vanished. The chest wanted to fly apart, but the silvery snakes that threaded the thing's body somehow managed to hold it together.

And it kept coming.

You do that much longer, she thought, and I'm going to get scared.

The one on the floor had thrown Conal off. Nova put three bullets into it, with results not much better than before. The creature was thrown against the wall by the force of the explosions and its left arm was blown off at the shoulder. But it got up, one handed, and started toward Conal.

So did the arm. It pulled itself rapidly along with its fingers.

Nova swallowed the sour taste of vomit, and put her last three slugs into the one just inside the window. The headless one. It staggered back, hitting the sill, and tumbled out, backwards. She heard things scrabbling at the wall, receding, then a splash as it hit the water.

That's when the second zombie turned toward her.

Conal seemed stunned. He was getting to his feet, but he kept shaking his head. And the monster slumped toward her on a shattered leg, shedding bone splinters and pieces of jelly-like flesh and scuttling beetles and little fanged rodents as it came.

She threw the gun at it, wishing it was her mother's substantial Colt instead of the new, modern, lightweight type. It opened a gash on the zombie's cheek and worms poured out

She picked up the bed and heaved that. The zombie batted it aside.

She was going down now, unable to stop herself from flinching away.

She threw a lamp, a vase, the bedside table, and still it was getting closer. Conal was coming up slowly behind it but it loomed over her now, she was crouched in the corner and it was going to get her. Her hand groped for a weapon. Anything. She found something and threw it.

And the thing collapsed just as Chris came through the door.

She saw Chris kick it as it fell, saw him attack the thing ... and then stop. He frowned, and Nova wondered what was wrong, then realized he couldn't figure out why the thing wasn't fighting back. He kicked it hard again. The zombie was starting to fall apart. The silver snakes that had held it together, that had seemed to animate it, were limp and lifeless.

Chris knelt in front of her. She couldn't see him very well. He glanced at her arm and seemed satisfied that her wounds were not life-threatening, then put big hands on her shoulders and looked at her.

"Are you going to be all right?"

She managed to nod, and he was gone. She heard him say something to Conal, something about Adam, and she heard him leave.

It seemed there was nothing in the room but the dead creature. She couldn't take her eyes off it. It was only about three feet away from her. Without conscious thought her feet began to push her away. Her back slid along the wall and her feet kept pushing until she hit something soft. That was no good, soft hadn't been what she'd had in mind at all, hard walls and hard floors were much better. She squeaked. It was a timid, frightened little squeak, and she regretted it, but there it was. She already knew she had bumped into Conal. The rough texture of his coat scratched against her shoulder, and that was okay. Anything warm was okay. The thing, when it grabbed her, had been terribly cold, and she was terribly cold now.

She sat there, shivering, as Conal put the coat over her shoulders. She heard shouting from the other rooms, sounds of fighting, and knew she should be helping them. But she sat quietly as Conal ripped his shirt and bound it around her bloody forearm and hand. While he did that she heard the pounding of Titanide hooves and what might have been war-cries.

Then he was getting up and she found herself clinging to his arm with her good hand. He stopped, waited for her to get up, and led her from the room. She never took her eyes off the thing on the floor.

It didn't make sense that the zombie was dead.

Dead? Well, hell, Chris thought. Of course, it's dead, it was dead to begin with, but that had never slowed them up in the past.

He wanted to kick the vile thing until what was left would have to be scraped off the walls, but he didn't have time for that. He didn't have time to figure out what had killed it, either. He really didn't have time to check on Nova, but he did.

Conal looked woozy. Blood ran from a scalp wound and he had a swelling the size of an egg on the side of his head.

"Where's Adam? Conal. Can you hear me?"

"... stairs," he muttered. "Downstairs. Hurry, Chris ... zombies."

Out in the hall there was another dead-or unmoving-zombie. It had come from the direction of Cirocco's room. Chris ran down the stairs, around a corner, through the music room-and into the arms of another zombie.

This one fought him. It was not as far gone as the one in Nova's room; dead no more than a week or two, by the look of her. Chris lifted the zombie and threw it, hoping to gain some time. The only way to really deal with the things was with edged weapons. It also helped to have the steady rhythm of a lumberjack chopping wood, and the strong stomach of Conan the Barbarian. Hitting them or wrestling with them was a good way to get killed. They could soak it up almost forever, and even if you dismembered them they kept fighting. But severing enough of the deathsnakes that gave the zombies an obscene semblance of life would eventually do the trick.

They were incredibly strong. If they got in close, the deathsnakes would tear at your flesh.

As the zombie hit the wall he was already searching for an axe or a blade. There didn't seem to be anything. He picked up a chair, planning to use it to fend the zombie off while he made his way to the kitchen, when he noticed something. It wasn't getting up.

The zombie-it seemed ridiculous to use the female pronoun, though it had bloated and festering breasts-had collapsed on the floor, crushing a fine old silver trombone.

Once again Chris didn't pause to wonder or to question his luck. He had never intended to fight it; the zombie had simply been in his way. He hurried through the music room, made it to the kitchen, where he grabbed his biggest cleaver, and raced through the house in time to see Robin poised in a windowsill, her legs bent and her arms out in front of her.

He shouted at her, but she dived out.

Robin almost beat Chris to the doorway of the Copper Room-then almost got jammed with him, which would have hurt, as he had enough momentum by then to not really need a door; he could have just punched through the wall. She broke step enough to let him through, went through herself, and, running as fast as she could, gawked at the spectacle of Chris Major moving at full speed. She didn't get to watch long. He might have been flying.

Great Mother, but this was one huge tree.

It seemed to take forever, but finally she slammed in the back door and hurried through room after room, calling for Chris, Nova, Conal ... anybody. She never stopped moving. Once, out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of some horror shambling through an empty room, but she didn't pause. Nothing was going to stop her until she found Nova, and the source of that scream. She knew her daughter well, knew it wasn't a mouse that had made her shout like that.

But something did make her stop. She looked into a room with a lot of pillows and toys on the floor. She heard Adam crying, and saw a man-shaped creature-there was something badly wrong with it, but she couldn't see what in the brief glimpse-diving through the window with Adam in its hands.

Stopping in one-quarter gravity is something that needs practice. Robin wasn't good at it yet, and had to bang into a wall, push off with her hands, and swing around into the room with her hand on the door-jamb. She ran to the window, looked out, and saw the creature swimming away, one-armed. The other arm was holding Adam out of the water.

She kicked off her boots, stepped up into the window, and jumped.

Later, she would deny that she had forgotten she didn't know how to swim. Once before she had been dumped into water over her head. Something had happened to her, and she managed to reach the shore. She was counting on that to work again. But it didn't.

She hit with a stunning splash, and then struggled toward the light.

Her head breached the surface and she took a deep breath, then tried to swim. The harder she worked at it the worse it got. Her head kept going under and she didn't know any better than to try to keep her nose high-an ambition she kept defeating with her windmilling stroke. The current was carrying her in the same direction as her goal, but that didn't help, as the kidnapper was swimming with the current, too, and in the brief glimpses she got he was always farther away. They were swirling through swift water now, with rocks here and there, but it was always deep, always cold, and before long she knew she was going to die in this river. She was getting her head above water less often, and for shorter periods, and more often than not taking in a lot of water when she gasped for air.

Then an arm went around her neck and she was pulled up, on her back. She struggled for a moment but the arm tightened until she was nearly choking. She coughed up water, and relaxed. Chris pulled her strongly through the water toward the shore.

He got her to a rock in the middle of the stream where she could cling with her torso high and dry and not too much current tugging at her.

"Hang on!" he told her.

"Get him, Chris!" she shouted, hoarsely.

He was already away.

She pulled herself higher and looked over the top of the rock. The kidnapper was maybe a hundred feet ahead of Chris, and the gap was narrowing. But the water ahead was extremely rough.

A kind of frozen lethargy settled over her. She was exhausted, had been near death, and it was all she could do to hang onto the rock and watch events unfold before her eyes. They didn't seem to have much relation to her. She was able to wonder if the thief could make it through the rapids and keep Adam alive, but unable to connect his survival or death to herself. A scream kept bubbling up in her throat, but it didn't have anywhere to go.

She heard the Titanides crossing the bridge, making a sound like an avalanche. She turned, and saw Serpent pointing toward Chris, saw Rocky leap over the railing and float down, forelegs first, then hit with a splash that sent water fifty feet high. His head came up and he was swimming strongly as Serpent and Valiha went through the front door of Tuxedo Junction, not bothering to open it.

There were sounds of something crashing through the brush, and Robin turned in time to see Cirocco pounding along the edge of the river. She passed Robin's rock, passed Chris, reached a suitable place for take-off and leaped. Her body followed an almost flat trajectory and she was forty feet from shore before she hit the water.

And she didn't sink. She had arched her back and held her arms in a swept-back position, like a jetliner, and held her chin high as she hit, and she skipped twice, like a flat stone, then body-surfed another precious five feet before the water had her. She was thirty feet behind her objective and swimming strongly.

Robin found herself balanced on her knees, her fists tight and her teeth clenched, willing Cirocco onward. Dimly she was aware of the sounds of Valiha and Serpent diving into the water somewhere behind her, but her eyes never left the woman she would always think of as the Wizard. It looked like Cirocco would tear the bastard into tiny pieces when she got to him, and there was nothing in the world Robin wanted to see more than that.

She heard shouts behind her. A wide shadow swooped over her with breathtaking speed, then all she could see was the skimpy rear profile of an angel, twenty-foot wings at full extension, the tips skimming the water.

It folded its wings the tiniest bit, seemed to hesitate in its headlong rush. Then it snatched Adam with the effortless grace of an eagle hitting a steelhead. It soared up, converting forward momentum into altitude. At two hundred feet it began to flap its great wings, and in a little while it had vanished into the east.

ELEVEN

Luther had a Sight on the way to Tuxedo Junction. He knew it wasn't going to work out well for him. He thought Gaea might be goading him with this information. And sure enough, when he reached the high hill overlooking the lake, the tree, and the treehouse, he was just in time to see the ending.

The Sight was still with him. It didn't rely on his single eyeball; trees, walls, and distance were no hindrance to it. He could see Kali's troops in the house, the child playing alone in the room. He watched as the half-Titanide heathen raced up and down the stairs, saw Cirocco Jones come running into the scene, knew when the two humans and three Titanides hit the water.

For a moment he dared to hope, when the Demon dived into the water. Much as he hated Jones, he knew none of Kali's band was her match-nor, for that matter, were any of his own disciples. Nothing would please Luther more than to see the Demon rend Kali's slime-spawn into component parts. Then the child might be his...

He watched in disbelief as the angel swooped down.

"Angels!" he shrieked. "Angels! Wy God, wy God, why hast thou forsaken we?"

His disciples shuffled nervously beside him, anxious to go. Having no minds of their own, they were somehow attuned to his emotions. They received his towering frustration, his hatred of the Demon and of Kali ... and his quick and virulent fear at the mortal sin he had just uttered.

Luther carried a special Cross in his belt, made of bronze, razor-sharp along all its edges. He pulled it out and began slashing at his own legs, feeling the arms biting deep, glorying in the mortification of the flesh.

He heard a gobbling sound above him.

When he looked up, there was Kali, climbing down from her perch in a tree. A pair of binoculars clattered against her improbable bosom. Her body-slave, a naked boy in his eighth year, scuttled after her, nimble as a monkey, with a golden collar attached to four feet of golden chain that bound him to Kali.

Kali was all gold and putrefaction. The slave chain was fourteen-carat, but the scores of rings she wore on fingers and toes were pure, soft, and fine. She wore a genuine brass bra, buttressed like a gothic cathedral to support the mammoth ochreus breasts. Her legs and her four arms were encircled by a hundred ornate bands and rings, each too small for the limb it squeezed, so that her flesh oozed around them. Her waist was constricted by a gold girdle ten inches in circumference, then her body swelled to a steatopygous abundance. The phrase "hourglass figure" might have been invented for her alone.

Her fingernails were six inches long, and made of bronze.

Her face... it was not completely accurate to speak of Kali's face, since she had three heads. But the right and left ones were simply tacked on. Each had a strangler' noose drawn tight. When one rotted off she would replace it from the supplies available to Gaea. At the time she dropped from the tree and walked toward Luther-in a grotesque, hip-sprung gait, a whore in a mortuary-one of the heads was pretty ripe, and another was a recent addition. The old one had been female and white. It was now extremely mortified, and purple, with red protruding eyeballs and black protruding tongue. It hung backwards by a scrap of flesh. The other head had belonged to a black man whose color had been changed very little by the act of strangulation. This one lolled drunkenly forward, swaying as Kali walked.

The central head had been-in the same sense that Luther had once been the Reverend Arthur Lundquist-a priestess named Maya Chandraphrabha in her previous life. Of Maya, only the head remained. In life, hers had been a boyish, awkward and sterile body. She who now called herself Kali never suffered a moment's regret, never experienced even the brief torments that sometimes beset he who was now Luther. She gloried in her virulent fecundity. Her womb was prolific as a jellyfish; each kilorev she whelped a new squalling monstrosity for the greater glory of Gaea.

She wore a belt fashioned of human skulls.

Kali's face was dead. Her eyes could move, but she could not blink, smile, frown, or close her mouth. Her jaw hung, and her tongue sagged out of her mouth. The gobbling sound Luther had heard was Kali's laughter.

Kali was the avatar of atrocity.

She gobbled at Luther, and the fingers of two hands traced intricate patterns in the air.

"Shesez where the hell has you been, Luther," the boy droned.

The boy had been the heir to a large fortune. He was about a year older than the War. When he and his family had emerged from their shelter in the mountains of Mexico one of Gaea's mercy missions had picked him up. His mother had been deaf, which had given him a skill now useful to Kali. He had once been a bright, healthy, and alert six-year-old. Now his body was the sort a political cartoonist might draw, purposely exaggerated, and label World Hunger. His eyes never left Kali's hands. He was about eighty years older than he had been two years ago.

"Gaea gave we the right to take the child," Luther thundered.

Kali gobbled even louder, and her fingers flew.

"Shesez Gaea dint give you no right to get it lessen you got to it first," the boy chattered. "Shesez you was too fuckin' late. Shesez you is a prodisint-" Kali slammed a hand across the boy's bruised face.

"-shesez you is a prod-"

Again he was slapped.

"-protisent-"

And again.

"-prot... is ... tent ... shesez you is a protestant muh-fuckering ig ... ig ... ignor-a-mouse shitheaded buggerin Christian. Shesez you is too ugly to live. Shesez whyn't ya go suck on the Pope's prick."

"Whore of Vavylon! Harlot of Gommorah!"

"Shesez damn straight. Shesez she gonna take on you and your whole asshole crew. Shesez lessen you tooken a vow of sebisiss-"

Kali hit him again.

"-sebila-sela-cellba-celili-li-li-li-celibin-celiba ... cy."

The boy sighed his pleasure and relief when he got it right and Kali stopped hitting him.

"Celibacy, celibacy, celibacy," he muttered. He would get it right for the next time, no question,

"Fofery!" Luther hissed, meaning popery. Arthur Lundquist, whose faint ghost informed the actions of the thing he had become, would not have known popery from plenary indulgences, being a thrice-Reformed Lutheran and a spiritual ally of most of the Catholic sects. But it amused Gaea for all her Priests to be fundamentalists, and she had a long memory, and so Luther was further enraged.

"Fofery!" he repeated, and his Apostles fuffed and fawed sympathetically in his wake. "Fofery! Vy what right do you take the child?"

"Shesez Gaea told her to. Shesez she did a hell of a lot better job than you and your fuckoffs did."

"Vut the angels, I ... " Luther stopped, enraged but unable to do anything about it without the possibility of blasphemy.

Why had Gaea given her angels? Luther had no angels. He had never had any angels, had never been told he might even get angels.

"It won't work," he tried. "Your angel can't reach Fandewoniuh."

The boy watched the hands again.

"Shesez it will too work. Shesez she's got a shitload of angels. Shesez she's got enough to relay the little muhfucker all the way to Pandemonium. Shesez howdja like to take a big juicy bite outta her big juicy-"

Luther shrieked, and hit the boy. The boy absorbed it, as he had absorbed everything for the last two years, never taking his eyes from Kali's hands, never pausing in his vile curses. He had learned that nothing that could come from anywhere else could ever rival the things that came from Kali.

He was wrong. Luther swung his cross and the boy was instantly dead. He turned on Kali and his Apostles followed. They all tore at her. She did not resist. She lay on her back and gobbled contentedly, and her laughter enraged Luther further ...

Until he noticed that all his Apostles were dead.

TWELVE

They gathered in the room from which Adam had been taken.

Conal watched them come in, one after the other. His head still hurt something awful, but it was minor compared to the feeling of fear that was stealing over him.

The three Titanides were wet, and ignoring it. Cirocco was wet, and didn't seem to notice. Chris had a towel and was drying himself off. He seemed exhausted, and distant. Conal didn't know the special hell Chris was going through, but he could see some signs of it.

Robin was wet, and shivering. Chris handed her his towel when he was through.

Nova ...

She still wore Conal's coat. She was holding it over her shoulders with one hand, shivering almost as badly as her mother. And, though she wore the coat, and though she was holding it in place, she was making no attempt to cover herself. It only reached to her waist, anyway, so it wouldn't have done her much good, but she held her injured arm out for Rocky to work on, and was unconcerned that one breast was revealed.

Nova seemed to have no body modesty. Conal was used to that in Cirocco, and saw it frequently in long-time residents of Bellinzona. But it was unusual in new arrivals.

He remembered her pressed against him up there in her bedroom.

It was a moment he was not going to forget. And now he couldn't seem to take his eyes off her.

"This is going to hurt badly," Rocky said.

"Doctors don't say things like that," Nova said. "They promise you it isn't going to hurt much."

"I am not a doctor. I am a healer, and this is going to hurt a lot."

Rocky poured the antiseptic solution over Nova's cuts and started to clean them out. Her face froze, then turned very ugly, but she didn't scream.

Conal thought she was foolish. He had been treated for zombie wounds. Rocky had to probe deep to be sure he got out every particle of corruption. To have a zombie breathe on you was enough to put you in bed for a week. To be torn up like Nova ...

He had to look away. He'd never had a strong stomach.

Cirocco had been waiting like stone for everyone to assemble. Now that they were all here, she wasted no time.

"Who was in the room with Adam when he was taken?" she asked.

Conal's heart froze.

He saw Chris looking around, frowning, trying to put it together.

"Me and Robin were out in the Witch room," he said. "When I got here-"

"I'm asking a simple question," Cirocco interrupted. "I just want to know who was in here. We need a place to start."

"Nobody was in here," Conal said, and swallowed hard.

Cirocco turned to face him.

"And how do you know that?"

"Because when I heard the scream, I ran upstairs..."

Cirocco kept looking at him. She was not in the mood to waste time, so her look couldn't have gone on much more than two seconds, and those seconds didn't take much more than twenty years to go by.

"I told you to protect him, at all costs," she said, tonelessly. For an instant the doors were open over the twin blast furnaces. Then she looked away and Conal could breathe again.

Chris spoke up.

"That's not fair, Cirocco. What was Conal supposed to do when he heard Nova scream? Ignore it? There's no way he-"

Then Cirocco was looking at Chris, and he didn't have anything more to say.

"Don't waste my time, Chris. We can debate fairness some other day."

That's right, Conal thought. Nobody told you it was going to be fair. You walk up to the oldest, meanest, most paranoid human in the solar system ... and you try to make a man out of what is left.

"Cirocco, what about Nova?" Robin asked. "Chris couldn't have-"

"Shut up, Robin."

"Captain," Rocky began.

"Shut up, Rocky."

Several people tried to speak at once, including Nova.

"Shut up."

Cirocco didn't precisely raise her voice, but she put something into it that nobody could argue with. And she didn't wait for silence. It came, but she was already plunging ahead.

"I know how fast an angel can fly," she said. "I couldn't see this one well enough to know which clan it was. There are twenty-five species of angel and they all dislike each other, so it's possible we can get help from other flights. Their range is limited. We can assume it's headed for Pandemonium, so-"

"Why don't we just let him go?" Nova muttered.

Cirocco took two quick steps and slapped Nova's face so hard the young woman was thrown to the floor. She sat up, her mouth bleeding, and Cirocco pointed at her.

"Kid, I've taken all I'll take from you. This is your first and last warning. You will grow up, damn fast, and you will join the human race, or I'm likely to kill you accidentally, and I'd hate to do that because Robin is my friend. We will now discuss how to save the life of a human being who happens to be your brother, and you will speak only when spoken to."

Again, Cirocco had not raised her voice. There was scarcely a need to. Nova was lying on her side, stunned, in a place far beyond humiliation. Conal's coat had fallen from her shoulders as she went down. A few minutes ago Conal would have been quite interested, but now he could only spare her a glance as Rocky helped her up. Cirocco needed him, and Nova had turned into just another broad, and a dumb one, at that.

"Gaea is behind this. Gaby warned me the child was important. I don't know why Gaea wants him. Possibly just to lure me to do battle with her, which she's been trying to do for years. But Gaea doesn't have him yet. She is in Hyperion, which is as far from here as you can get. There's something I need to know. Chris, when you entered Nova's room, was the zombie already dead?"

"That's right."

"And the one in the hall ... "

"It wasn't there when I went in, and it was dead on the floor when I came out."

"Any of you kill it?" Cirocco swept them with her eyes, and everyone indicated they hadn't.

"The one in the music room. Tell me about that."

"I was getting ready to fight it, and it just keeled over."

"But the one with Adam got away." She turned to Nova. "What did you do to that first one?"

"I shot it," Nova whispered. "I shot it ... three times."

"That wouldn't kill it. What did you do then?"

"I threw the gun at it."

Cirocco waited.

"I threw the bed. Then other things."

Nova shrugged, listlessly. She seemed to be in shock.

"The vase, the lamp, the cr-... " All the blood drained from her face.

"What?" Cirocco kept at her.

"Some-some-something I m-m-made."

"I'm not going to hit you again, Nova, but you are going to tell me what it was you made."

Nova's whisper was almost inaudible.

"... a love potion ... "

"She borrowed some ingredients from the kitchen," Serpent volunteered.

Cirocco turned away from them all and was quiet for several seconds. No one moved. At last she turned back.

"Chris," she said, pointing at him. "Radios. Three. Bring them back here, then meet me at the cave."

Chris hurried off without a word.

"Valiha. You take one radio and go, as fast as you can, to Belinzona. Put out a general call to all Titanides who still have faith in their Wizard. I want live zombies, as many as you can take. Don't risk your life to get them, and stay in radio contact with me."

"Yes, Captain."

"Rocky, you will stay here. We may have further instructions when we find out how they plan to get Adam to Pandemonium."

"Yes, Captain."

"Serpent. As soon as you get your radio, you will head west, conserving your strength. You can't outrun an angel, but we will try to guide you from the air. Take weapons."

"Yes, Captain."

"Conal, you come with me. Robin, Nova, you can come with me or stay here, as you please."

She was already on her way out of the room when she kicked one of the loose Titanide eggs Adam had been playing with. She froze, then walked slowly to the wall where it lay, bent over, and picked it up.

Cirocco held the egg up to the light and stared at it, and for the first time in living memory, the Wizard looked stunned. The egg was transparent.

She dropped it and stood for a moment with her shoulders slumped.

"Rocky," she said. "Gather all these eggs. Be sure you get them all. Destroy all the furniture, rip up all the pillows, but don't miss any. I'll have Chris radio back a count after we get away.

"When you're sure you have them all, destroy them."

It took a huge effort, but Cirocco managed to get her mind off the Titanide eggs and back to the problem at hand.

Both Robin and Nova had elected to join her. She did not try to dissuade them, nor did she question their reasons. They followed her into the jungle and up the hill toward the cave.

It was funny how quickly it all came back. The habit of command. Starting with what she felt was no natural talent for it and in an era when there were still few female role models she could study, she had worked doggedly at learning how it was done. She had talked to a thousand old men, naval captains, some of whom had commanded ships as far back as the First Nuclear War. Then there had been the space captains, and whole new traditions, new ways of doing things ... and yet with much in common. People were still people. Maybe they were a little more willing to let a woman command them than they had been in 1944, but the problems of insuring automatic obedience and earning the respect that would nurture a strong, united, and loyal crew were much the same as they had always been.

There were a thousand things you could learn, myriad ways of attaining that improbable position whereby men and women were willing to obey your orders. NASA had sponsored leadership courses and Cirocco had taken them all. She had read autobiographies of great leaders.

She knew, secretly, that she had no talent for command. It was all a false front, but if one kept it in place twenty-four hours a day no one was the wiser.

She lost her first command. Afterward, she had never been able to put the survivors back into a functioning team. They all went their own ways-all but Gaby and Bill-and she had lived for many years afterward with a deep feeling of failure.

NASA had been alarmed when only two of the seven people from Ringmaster could be convinced to return to Earth, and infuriated when they learned the Captain was among the five deserters. But NASA was a civilian organization, and after discharging what she saw as her responsibilities, telling everything she knew about what had happened and why, she felt justified in resigning her commission in a place of her own choosing.

NASA couldn't court-martial her, much as they would have liked to, even in absentia. But they did the civilian equivalent, which was to set up a dozen commissions and boards of enquiry.

She had had almost a century to think things over. In that time she had given a lot of thought to leadership. There were different kinds of leaders, she had concluded. Some were good, and some were bad. It was probably true that there were leaders who never suffered the doubts she had experienced, who were absolutely sure of themselves and everything they did. They were the egomaniacs, monomaniacs, megalomaniacs-Atilla, Alexander, Charlemagne, Mussolini, Patton, Suslov-men with obsessions, driven men, often psychotic or paranoid. It was even possible for them to be good leaders, but Cirocco felt that, by and large, the world was a worse place when they were through stamping their designs upon it.

For decades now Cirocco had been relieved of that kind of responsibility. She was most content when she had no one depending on her, and when she had to depend on no one. Her sole responsibility for the last two decades had been to keep herself alive, at almost any cost. Now maybe that was changing.

But when the need arose, it was satisfying to discover how quickly she could change gears.

Chris caught up with the rest of them just as they reached the cave.

It was high, wide, and deep: the perfect place for part of Cirocco's arsenal. The cave seemed to stand open, undefended. Actually, there were guardians so well-concealed that an intruder could walk over one without seeing it. Cirocco had gathered the creatures in Rhea, where they had once guarded an ancient idol, and had learned how to re-program their simple brains to suit her needs. They ignored Titanides. But any human not accompanied by Chris or Cirocco would have been dead before entering the cave.

Inside were the aircraft. There were six of them, but three had been cannibalized for parts to keep the others running. Twenty years ago, when Cirocco bought them and had them shipped to Gaea, they had been state-of-the-art. That state hadn't improved much in thirteen years, and not at all since the War. They were magnificent, incredible planes, bearing the same relation to the clumsy dinosaurs Cirocco had grown up piloting as the Wright Brothers Flyer did to a supersonic jet, though the differences would not have been obvious to the untrained observer.

She started her walk-around.

"How long since you took them out, Chris?" she asked.

"About half a kilorev, Captain. According to your schedule. I observed no problems with the Two and the Four, but the Eight is going to need some work."

"No matter. We won't need it. Robin. Nova. Can either of you fly?"

"Fly an airplane?" Robin asked. "I'm sorry, Captain."

"No need to overdo the Captain bit."

"I've ... back home, I fl-fl-flew a ... "

"Speak up, child. I won't hurt you anymore, I promise."

"I've soared," Nova said, in a half-whisper. "We have these gliders, and we go out along the axis and-"

"I've heard of it," Cirocco said. She considered it, still going over the Dragonfly Two, which was the smaller of the available planes and the one already perched on the catapult. "It's better than nothing. Conal, you'll fly this one, and Nova will go with you. Familiarize her with the basics if you get any free time. Get in now and heat it up and start your check-out. Chris, assemble five sets of survival gear. The basic kit, extra rations, hand weapons, rifles, clothing. Anything else you can think of that might come in handy and doesn't weigh too damn much."

"Flak suits?" Chris asked.

Cirocco paused, started to say something, then listened to her gut.

"Yes. Nova can wear one of mine. Get the smallest size you can for Robin, and-"

"I got you," Chris said. He was watching her, his eyes narrowed. "What about the cannons? You want them loaded?"

Cirocco looked at the Two, which had heavy-caliber guns mounted in its transparent wings.

"Yes. I'll get that. Robin, you help him."

She got two cases of shells for the wing cannons and loaded them, hearing Conal conducting his radio check with the Titanides. She snapped the covers closed as Chris and Robin loaded the gear into the space behind the seats.

"Stand clear!" Conal called out. He fired a test round from each cannon. It was quite loud in the cave.

Cirocco dragged the fuel line over the cave floor and snapped it to the fuselage, then watched as the big, collapsible tank filled to capacity.

"Get in," she told Nova.

"Where can I step?"

"Anyplace. The thing's a hell of a lot stronger than it looks." She understood Nova's concern. When Cirocco first saw the Dragonflys she thought some horrible mistake had been made. They seemed to be made out of cellophane and coat hangers. Nova climbed in and Cirocco slammed the door behind her. She watched as Conal showed her how to work the straps.

"Clear!" Conal shouted again, barely audible in the enclosed cockpit.

The engine started up. It was clearly visible through the transparent fuselage: about a meter long with an eight-inch bore. To the casual eye it looked about as basic and uncomplicated as a Bunsen burner. That was partly true, but deceptive. There was almost no metal in it. It was built of ceramics and carbon-filament windings and plastic. Its turbine revolved at speeds that would have been impossible without zero-gee bearings, and at temperatures that would have vaporized anything in use when Cirocco was young.

The plane coughed one small cloud of smoke, and the engine went rapidly through red, to orange, to yellow-hot. Conal hit the catapult release, and it was launched into the air. After two hundred meters it turned and headed straight up into the sky.

"Give me a hand with this," Cirocco said, and Robin and Chris grabbed the other wingtip and the tail of the Dragonfly Four. They lifted it easily and carried it to the catapult. Chris fueled it while Robin loaded the supplies and Cirocco got in the pilot's seat for her checkout. The Four was unarmed. Cirocco fretted about that for a second, then put it out of her mind. She had been unable to imagine a use for the Two's armament, but worked on the principle that if you've got it, it's stupid not to have it ready.

"Conal, do you read me?"

"Loud and clear, Captain."

"Where are you?"

"Headed due east from the Junction, Captain."

"Call me Cirocco, and orbit your present location at five thousand until further notice."

"Roger, Cirocco."

"Valiha, Rocky, Serpent, do you read?"

They all replied in the afirmative, and Cirocco told Nova to radio the recipe and ingredients of her love potion back to Rocky. When the plane was fueled and loaded, Chris climbed into the two rear seats and Robin sat next to Cirocco, and she started the engines.

When the thrust was right, she turned to Robin.

"Put your head back against the rest," she said. "This thing has a bit of a kick."

And they were off.

THIRTEEN

Cirocco had taught Conal to fly not long after his arrival in Gaea. He was very good at it, and it gave him pleasure.

Not that a Dragonfly was tough to learn. On a point-to-point they were capable of taking off, navigating, and landing all by themselves. They didn't need runways, and could get by with no more ground support than the occasional refueling stop. Anyone who had ever flown a Piper Cub would have been right at home in a Dragonfly in a few minutes, though the lack of instrumentation might have bothered him. The Dragonfly had, in a sense, just one instrument: a computer screen. A single keypad to the pilot's right called up any information the pilot might want, or the ship's brain, reviewing data fifty thousand times each second, would make the pilot aware of any critical situation and recommend a course of action. It had ground radar and air radar and all the radio capability anyone could need. Cirocco had replaced the compasses with inertial trackers.

But the rudder pedals and the stick were the same type that had been in use on Earth for over a century and a half. Conal used the time waiting for Cirocco showing Nova the uses of these devices. She watched alertly, and did the right things when he handed control to her.

When the Four rose up to join him, Conal fell in with the larger plane and flew to the right and slightly behind it.

"Here's the plan," Cirocco said. "The radar is good for about thirty kilometers in all directions. An angel can do about seventy kilometers per hour, and can maintain that for maybe two hours. He's been gone slightly under one hour. We will assume he's headed for Pandemonium, which is currently in southern Hyperion. We're going up to twenty, that's two zero, kilometers, and we'll fly fifty kilometers apart, with the same heading. We will fly at one two zero kilometers per hour for another thirty minutes, and hope that puts us in his general area. We will then throttle back to sixty and attempt to locate him by radar. If that doesn't work, we will move ahead at high speed until we're sure we're in front of him, and conduct a search pattern, diagonally across his project path, until we find him or one of us thinks of something better to do. Comments?"

Conal worked it out in his laborious but methodical way. Cirocco did not interrupt him. He realized that, aside from Chris, with whom she had already discussed this, he knew more about Gaea than anyone else.

"What if he goes higher?" Conal finally said. "Should the search pattern be vertical as well as horizontal?"

"I'm making the assumption that he's going to be fairly low."

Conal worked that out, too, and wasn't sure it was a valid assumption to make. Angels might not like clinging to the curved rim roof, but they could do it if they had to. Cirocco was obviously counting on some sort of relay maneuver, since no single angel could move Adam from Dione to Hyperion, and she must think the most likely place for the later carriers to hide was the outer rim of Gaea.

But Gaea was an unusual place for flying. You could climb a full hundred and fifty kilometers before running into the roof. And if you flew through a spoke, you could go even higher than that. If the angel went up to sixty kilometers, they could fly right under him, and never see him.

"Hyperion is about halfway around," Conal pointed out. "He might just go up a spoke, through the hub, and down again."

"You're absolutely right, Conal," Cirocco came back. "But for now, I'm going to assume the rim route. If we don't find anything in two or three revs, we can reassess."

"You're the boss," Conal said.

"Yeah, but don't let that stop you from giving me ideas. And besides, I'm going to do my best to cheat, in just a few minutes."

Conal could tell from Nova's frown that she had no idea what the Captain was talking about. Conal could make a pretty good guess, but kept his mouth shut.

"Weather advisory," the computer said. "You are entering a region where severe turbulence has-" Conal hit the override and the computer shut up.

"What was that about?" Nova asked. Conal glanced at her. She seemed to be feeling better. She must be, he thought, if she was willing to talk to him. He had not been looking forward to a long trip in the small space with somebody who hated him.

"The brain carries a model of Gaea in its head," he told her, calling up a cut-away side view of the wheel-world. "This plane and all the others share the model, and they make a note of places where the storm probability is high, based on past experience. Mostly it's a nuisance."

"I'd think it would be helpful."

"Not too much. Look." He zoomed in on the segment of wheel rim that contained Dione, showing part of the spoke that loomed above it. Two blue dots winked on and off near the bottom of the picture, labeled 2 and 4. "That's us," he said, pointing to the 2. "We're moving toward Iapetus, and we're getting close to the twilight zone, which means warmer air coming up from the ground. When air rises in Gaea, it moves into masses of air that are traveling slower, because they're nearer the hub. So it sort of curls over, like a breaking wave. You get a lot of quick downdrafts in the transitional zone."

He glanced at her to see if she understood. It had taken him a while to get it straight, with his Earth-based thinking. The equivalent effect on Earth was the rotation of air masses caused by north-south currents, and depended on the fact that air at the equator was moving faster with the turning of the planet than air to the north or the south. When the effect was very intense, it was called a hurricane.

"Sure," she said. "The Coriolis effect. We have to take that into account when we go soaring at home."

"It's not as bad here. Gaea's much bigger than the Coven. I don't have to think about it when I'm flying the plane, but the computer takes it into account for navigation." He pointed to the screen again. "The thing is, the weather's pretty regular in Gaea. Bad weather comes out of the spokes. Gaea sucks up a lot of air in one spoke, moves it through the hub into another one, and then lets it all fall out over a night region. It's all done by a schedule. So that's what the computer was telling me: I'm moving into a boundary line between day and night, which means I'm coming out from under a spoke, which means we can expect some bumps. The thing is," and he pointed up at the gargantuan mouth of the Dione Spoke looming above them, "I can see that easy enough."

She didn't say anything, but looked around her, studying the spoke, the curved roof ahead of them that arched over Iapetus, comparing them to the model on the screen. He knew the convoluted geometry of Gaea took some getting used to. It was one thing to look at a map of it, and something else to stand on the hurtling rim and get an ant's-eye view.

"I see what you mean about finding the angel," she finally said. "What's to prevent him from just going so high we'd never find him? It's shorter that way, too."

"All air distances in Gaea are shorter than ground distances," he said. "And if you wanted to go from Dione to Rhea, all the way around the wheel, the shortest way is straight up the spoke, through the hub, and down the Rhea spoke. It gets easier as you go, because you get lighter. And once you're in the hub, it's downhill all the way."

"Why does Cirocco think he won't do that?"

"A couple of reasons. Different flights of angels live in different spokes. They don't like each other and they're jealous of their territory. No matter which flight this one comes from, he'll have to go through unfriendly territory if he goes through two spokes. They might kill him, and he'd have a lot of trouble getting food. He'd do better foraging on the rim. It'd be easier for the others to hide on the rim, where no other flight has nesting rights."

"Why are you assuming he's going to Hyperion?"

Conal shrugged. "You'd have to ask the Captain about that. She has special knowledge which she doesn't always tell me about. Then again, that angel grabbing Adam was one hell of a surprise to her, I can tell you that."

They were in the west end of Iapetus when Cirocco gave the order to throttle back. Conal's plane was far to the north, invisible to the eye but making a strong steady blip when the computer displayed the ground map.

When the three-dimensional display was used, Robin found it hard not to be discouraged.

In that mode, Gaea's rim was a gently curved tube. The angel's possible locations made a hemisphere with Tuxedo Junction at the center. The search profile of the planes was a lengthening tube a hundred kilometers wide and fifty high. When compared with the region where the angel might be, it didn't seem enough. There was so much space above them where it could be, and a vast amount behind them.

"It's not as bad as it looks," Cirocco said. "I'm going to hang around here for a while and hope it shows up. But if we don't have it in an hour, I'll increase our speed and we'll start criss-crossing. We'll cover just about all the airspace."

"What if he's headed back toward Metis?"

"It's unlikely. But if we don't get results in four or five hours, I'll send Conal back in that direction."

"And the spoke?" Chris asked.

"That would be such a logistical nightmare I'm ruling it out."

Robin looked out at vast expanses of forest far below them.

"What if it just ... settles down there in the bush?"

"Robin, if it does that, there's not much we can do."

She wished she hadn't asked.

"But," Cirocco went on, "it isn't going to do that."

Robin thought about asking Cirocco how she could be so sure, and found she didn't have the nerve to. She wanted the Wizard to be sure. Having somebody around who seemed to know what she was doing helped a little.

"Hand me my pack, Chris. It's time for the nasty part."

The pack had the unmistakable stamp of Titanide manufacture, and looked like an old friend. Robin watched as Cirocco set it on the transparent floor between her feet, opened it, and pulled out a small glass jar with a metal lid. Something white and slimy was curled up in the bottom. It lifted its head and blinked.

"What in the nine billion perversions of Christendom is that?" Robin asked.

Cirocco looked at her apologetically.

"It's what I didn't want to tell you about at the fountain. Things have gone a little far for us to keep secrets, though. It's a piece of the mind of Gaea. It's something Rocky took out of my head about five years ago. In a word, it's my own personal Demon."

Robin looked at it. The thing was uncoiling itself.

It was like a snake with two legs. When it stood up it balanced on those legs with its tail providing the third point of support. The legs were actually more like arms, with clawed hands. Its neck was an inch long, and its tail about three inches, with a stubby tip. There were two round, lizard-like eyes, and a surprisingly expressive mouth.

Robin leaned over and stared at it. The thing seemed to be shouting. She could almost distinguish words. Could it possibly speak English?

"Does it have a name?"

Cirocco cleared her throat, and Robin looked at her.

"Actually," she said, with a twitch of her lips, "if you look closely, you'll see it's a male."

Robin looked again. Great Mother save us, it was male.

"He claims not to have a name," Cirocco said. "When I want to call him anything but 'you lousy slimebag' I call him Snitch." Cirocco vigorously rubbed her upper lip with one finger, cleared her throat, and in general exhibited all the signs of nervousness Robin would have thought foreign to her nature. You learn something new every day, Robin thought.

"See," Cirocco went on, "... uh, from the position he was in when Rocky found him, uh ... you might say he was sort of, well, fucking with my mind for about ninety years."

There could have been no possible reason for Gaea to make this thing male, since it had been meant to live out its days in Cirocco's head. Thus, its sex was one of Gaea's twisted jokes, and a special and ugly humiliation for Cirocco should it ever be found.

Cirocco twisted the lid off the jar and set it down on the flat surface just above the computer screen-what she had called the dashboard. Snitch jumped up and perched on the rim of the jar, looked around blearily, and yawned. He used one claw to scratch like a dog, then settled down like a tiny vulture with his head almost concealed by his shoulders.

"I could sure use a drink," he said. Robin remembered the voice.

"I'm talking to you, cuntface," he said.

Cirocco reached out and flicked a finger. The demon thumped hard against the windscreen and fell to the dashboard, howling. Cirocco reached out and mashed his head under her thumb. Robin heard crunching noises. Great Mother, she thought. She's killed it.

"Sorry," Cirocco said. "It's the only way to reach him."

"You're apologizing to me?" Robin squeaked. "Skin it alive and feed it to the worms. I was just surprised you kept him five years and killed him now."

"He's all right. I don't even know if he's killable." She removed her thumb, and Snitch rolled back onto his feet. His head was malformed and blood dripped from one eye. As Robin watched, the head returned to its former shape, like some weird plastic.

"Who do I have to blow to get a drink in this stinking place?" He hopped up and perched on the edge of the jar again.

Cirocco again reached into her pack and brought out a metal flask in a leather container. She took the top off and detached an eyedropper from the kit, inserted it in the neck, and drew out some clear fluid. Snitch was hopping from foot to foot in his eagerness, his head thrown back and his mouth open. Cirocco held the eyedropper over his mouth and let one fat drop fall into his mouth. He swallowed hugely, then opened his mouth again.

"That's it for now," Cirocco said. "If you're good, you can have more."

"What is that?" Robin asked. Snitch rolled his eyes toward her.

"It's grain alcohol. Snitch likes his liquor straight." She sighed. "He's an alcoholic, Robin. It's about all he consumes, along with a little blood once a day."

Snitch jerked his head toward Robin.

"Who's the bimbo?"

Cirocco flicked his face again, and he howled, then quickly shut up. "Maybe ... " Robin began, then thought better of it.

"Go ahead," Cirocco said.

"Uh ... maybe he was what was causing your... problem."

"There's no need to walk around it, Robin. Maybe it was him making me into a lush, right?" She sighed, and shook her head. "I tried my best to think that for a long time. But I knew I was just wishing my own weakness off on something else. If anything, I'm the cause of his problem. He sat there on top of an alcoholic brain for so long he got addicted." She straightened her shoulders and then leaned forward a little, staring at the demon.

"Now, Snitch," she said. "We're going to play a game."

"I hate games."

"You'll like this one. Gaea has done a terrible thing."

He cackled. "I knew something good was about to happen."

"But you'd never think of warning me, right? Well, maybe next time you will. What happened, you venomous pestilential cancre, is that somebody has kidnapped a child. Gaea is behind it, as surely as flies breed in shit, and you're going to tell me where the child is."

"Why don't you bite my ass?"

Robin was startled when Chris reached between them and grabbed the ugly little thing in a big fist. Only its head was visible, and its eyes rolled wildly.

"I want him, Captain," Chris said. His voice was low. "I've been thinking about him for the last hour, and maybe I've come up with some things you haven't thought of yet."

"Wait a minute, wait a minute!" the Snitch shrieked. "You know I do better work if you don't hurt me, you know that, you know that!"

"Hold on, Chris," Cirocco said. The tiny eyes moved from Chris to Cirocco and back again. He gulped, and then spoke in a wheedling tone.

"What do I care what Gaea's cooked up?" he said. "For a couple of drinks, I might be able to help you."

"Four drops is what I'm offering."

"Now be fair," he whined. "And be reasonable. You can't deny that I do my best work when I've had a few under my belt."

Cirocco seemed to consider it.

"All right. But you didn't let me tell you about the game. Put him down, Chris." He did, and Cirocco struck a match. She moved it toward the demon, held it about a foot away.

"I'm going to give you two drops right now. Then you are going to tell me where the child is. We will fly there. When we get there, if you were right, I'll give you three more drops. If you're wrong, I will wire one of these matches along your back and light it. They take about twenty seconds to burn. Then you'll try again. If you're wrong again, you get another match. I've got about ... " she looked down into her pack, "... oh, about fifty matches. So we can play the game a long, long time. Or it can be over very quickly."

"Quick, quick, quickquickquickquick!" Snitch yammered, jumping up and down.

"Okay. Open your mouth."

Cirocco gave him his two drops, which seemed to calm him. And, oddly, to color him. He had been a rather sickly yellowish-white at first. He was turning ruddier.

He jumped down from the edge of the jar and began pacing up and down the dashboard. Robin watched, fascinated.

The demon paced for a few minutes. Eventually he began to stagger as the drinks hit him. But gradually he looked more and more toward one part of the sky. He lurched up to the windshield and pressed his repulsive face against it, as if to see better. At last he belched and pointed with one leg.

"He's up thataway," he said, and fell over.

FOURTEEN

"Conal, turn left twenty degrees and climb to forty kilometers. Increase speed to two zero zero kilometers per hour."

"Twenty degrees left, forty, two hundred; Roger, Captain."

He executed the turn immediately, increased the thrust, and watched to make sure the plane did the rest as it was supposed to.

Like clockwork, he thought, with satisfaction. Outside, the wings were shrinking from their three-quarters deployed position and sweeping back slightly.

"Why do you suppose she decided to do that?" Nova asked.

"I don't know," Conal said. Actually, he had a good idea, but it would be too complicated to explain, and he had been instructed never to speak to anyone about the Snitch unless specifically authorized by Cirocco.

"I can't figure her out," Nova confessed.

"You aren't the first one."

"Conal, are you wearing your flak suits?"

"No, Cirocco. Should we?"

"I think so. We're putting ours on. I don't have any specific reason except my standard one."

"What's the use of having it if you don't use it, right, Captain?"

"That's it."

"Will do." He turned to Nova. "Can you reach them? Those blue outfits."

Nova fumbled with one of the suits until she had it unfolded. It was a light, slightly stiff blue jumpsuit without arms or legs. The carbon-filaments woven through tough plastic would stop any handgun bullet, and give some protection against heavier weapons and bomb fragments.

"What if you get hit in the head?" Nova asked.

"If we get into something, we'll put on those helmets, and the leggings, and the sleeves. Do you need any help with that?"

"I can manage." She lifted herself off the seat, and shoved her pants down around her ankles. The plane lurched to the right, and she looked outside anxiously. "What happened? What's the matter?"

"Nothing," Conal said, and coughed nervously. "Ah, I thought you'd put that on over your pants."

"Does it matter?" She pulled her shirt over her head. The plane only jumped a little that time.

"No, it doesn't matter," he said, and pulled the privacy curtain down from its little niche overhead.

He heard her long-suffering sigh. Then she jerked the bottom of the curtain and let it roll back up. He glanced at her and saw she was holding her clothes over the front of her body. Her eyes were blazing.

"Can I talk to you a minute? Is this okay? Am I decent?"

He gulped. "It's ... Nova, it's not enough."

She ran her fingers through her hair, then tugged at it in frustration.

"Okay. My mother told me about this but I just couldn't understand it, so maybe you can explain it. It's not that you don't like to look at me, is it."

"No, it's not that at all."

"That's what I can't understand. You make me feel ugly."

"I'm sorry." Jesus, where to start, how to explain? He wasn't even sure he could explain it to himself, much less to her. "Dammit, I get upset because I want you, and I can't have you. Seeing you gets me turned on, okay?"

"Okay! Okay! Great Mother, I don't know why you're so worried about getting turned on, but I'll go along with you. I'll cover up the places Robin told me to cover up. But I thought I was doing that now. So tell me, mister male man, what do I have to cover up?"

"You can throw all your clothes out the fucking window for all I care," Conal said, through clenched teeth. "It's your business, not mine."

"Oh, no, I wouldn't want to upset you. I wouldn't want to make you lose your precarious control of yourself. Mother, preserve me." She slammed the curtain back in place, then, a few seconds later, pulled it back up enough to look under it.

"There's one more thing. I didn't have a chance to pee before we took off. Do I have to wait till we land?"

Conal opened a compartment in the dash and handed her the oddly-shaped cup, pulled the vacuum hose from its slot.

"You hook the hose to this thing, then ... hold it to-"

"I can figure it out! I guess you'll want privacy for this, too."

"If you please."

Her reply was more growl than word, and she pulled the curtain down. Conal flew on, simmering, trying to ignore the sounds coming from the other side.

Seven years ago he might simply have gone mad. No telling what he might have done-what a temper he'd had! He'd learned a lot since then. The temper was still there. But it was tightly and permanently under control.

He went through the hard-learned routines to calm himself. When he was done, he felt foolish, as he usually did, for letting himself get so angry. She operated from her own logic, and by her lights he was being very silly.

Hell, he thought. By my own, too. He wished he hadn't allowed himself to get in a shouting match with her. She was right. Her nudity was no kind of assault on him.

He wished he could say those things as clearly as he could think them. But he knew from bitter experience that the words never quite came out right.

When she let the curtain back up she had her pants on over the flak suit. She had folded her shirt and stuffed it in back. She sat with her back straight and looked rigidly forward.

He made very sure he didn't laugh, though he wanted to. He felt a lot better. Now she was the foolish one. She didn't know how to turn off her anger, and that made him feel superior to her, which was a nice feeling. She was still so young.

So he solemnly pulled the curtain back down and quickly got into his own flak suit, and pulled his clothes on over it.

"You watch the radar while I take care of this stuff," he told her, as he opened the curtain again. She nodded and he turned and secured the netting over the loose cargo in back. When he turned back there was still nothing in the empty sky. They flew on, in silence.

In the next hour Cirocco got two signals from the radar. They were all excited the first time, though she had warned them not to be. And they quickly saw it was a solitary blimp. Cirocco veered away. Blimps hated anything to do with fire, and had been quite cool toward her for years after she imported the jets. Which was unfair, as her reason for doing so was to destroy the buzz bombs that had made the skies unsafe for lighter-than-air beings. But you couldn't argue with a blimp.

The second blip proved to be a solitary angel. Spirits rose for a moment, until it was clearly established that this one's wings were the wrong color. She turned off her engine and glided beside him for a few minutes. He was of the Dione Supra Flight. He seemed genuinely shocked that an angel was working for Pandemonium, and swore that his flight, section, and wing remained loyal to the Wizard.

So she attached a match to Snitch and it inspired him wonderfully. After another drop of grain alcohol he was able to talk again, and said the angel was below them now, and slightly behind. She radioed the new heading to Conal.

"Can I ask you something?" Nova said.

"Go right ahead."

It had taken her a long time to get that much out. Now that she had, she found it hard to go on.

Somehow, she had to make sense of this insane world, because she was stuck here for the rest of her life with Titanides and males. She could still feel the impact of Cirocco's palm on her cheek. She loved Cirocco, and Cirocco had hit her, and those two things had to be reconciled somehow, had to be worked out so that Cirocco would never find reason to hit her again. For that to be possible, she had to understand some things.

"What do you think Cirocco Jones meant when she told me I had to join the human race?" Having asked it, she relaxed a little. His answer wasn't going to mean much, she realized. It had been a silly idea to ask him in the first place. Perhaps her mother could explain it, when they had some time alone.

But he surprised her.

"I've been wondering the same thing," he said. "I guess she just didn't have time to say what she meant, so she said something to get your attention."

"So you don't know what she meant, either?"

"Oh, no, I didn't say that. I know what she meant." He frowned, and gave her a wry smile. "I just don't think I can explain it to you."

"Would you try?"

He looked at her for a long time. The look disturbed her.

"Why should I?" he finally said.

She sighed, and turned away. "I don't know," she said.

He shrugged. "I was asking myself. Why should I try to explain something to you, when every time I give you a friendly smile you look at me like I was a cootie bug? Don't you think I have feelings?"

It was just the sort of question Nova didn't want to think about. But not thinking about it had gotten her a slap in the face.

"You weren't thinking about my feelings a while ago."

"I admit I had an unfortunate lapse," he said. "You want to know what I'm going to do about that?" He looked at her again, and grinned. "I'm going to say I'm sorry, I apologize, and I'm going to do better from now on. How's that for a kick in the pants?"

She tried to meet his stare, but finally had to look away.

"It makes me feel uneasy," she admitted. "I don't know why."

"I do. Want to know?"

"Yes."

"Say please?"

What an infuriating person. But she took a deep, long-suffering breath, crossed her arms, and glared at him.

"Please."

"Jesus, that must have hurt."

"Not at all. It's just a word."

"It did hurt, and it's not just a word. It hurt for the same reason you didn't like me apologizing. Twice now you've had to look at me as a human being."

She thought that over for several minutes, and he didn't say anything.

"You're saying that's what Cirocco meant? That I have to become a heterosexual, make love to men?"

"Nothing so drastic, and nothing so simple." He rubbed his hand over his face and shook his head slowly. "Listen, I'm not the guy for this. I wish to hell Cirocco was here. Why don't you wait till you can talk it over with her?"

"No," she said, becoming more interested. "I'd like to hear it from you."

"I sure don't know why," he muttered. Then he took a deep breath.

"Look. With you, there's lines drawn all over the place. There's us, and there's them. Us seems to be a pretty small group. Okay, I can understand, I feel the same way. I don't like all human beings. And I know Cirocco ain't the biggest groupie the human race ever had, either. And she didn't even mean human, because Titanides aren't human but they're part of what she wants you to join. Are you with me so far?"

"I don't know. But go on."

"Shit. Grow up!" he thundered. "That's what she said. Stop making your decisions about people based on what they look like." He stopped, and shook his head sadly. "Nova. I could rattle on for half an hour, like a CBC public service spot, about how you're supposed to love the Qubeheads and the Normans and the Beeeees and the Eeks and the niggers and the poor and little fuzzy animals and rattlesnakes. I hated some of those people when I was a kid, too. These days I keep my hate for slavers and babyleggers ... and like that. Every person I meet is on probation, because it's a no-kidding dangerous world out there, and you're right to be suspicious of new faces. But if they don't prove themselves to be villains, why, then you treat them as you'd like to be treated, like the old golden rule. If a friend of mine has a friend, then he's my friend, too, until he proves otherwise. I don't care if he's black, brown, yellow or white, male or female, young or old, two-legged or four-legged or sixteen-legged. And I'm a good friend to have, too. I'm loyal as hell, and I wash my own dishes."

"I'm loyal, too!" she protested.

"Sure. To anybody on your side of the line. Which is only two-legged females. Valiha can't be your friend because she looks like an animal, and I can't because I have a cock." He pointed out the windscreen at the empty sky. "That poor little brother of yours can't be your friend, either, because you don't see him as human. Nova, just looking at you-at the good part of you-I know you'd be a terrific person to have on my side. But I can't cross that line."

He sighed, and leaned back. Nova had watched in fascination, not getting a lot of it, such as the part about Qubeheads and niggers. She hadn't the vaguest notion of what either of those might be. And why did he bring skin color into it? What did that have to do with anything?

"How would you suggest I go about this? Should you and I make sex?"

He threw up his hands.

"I'm hurt I really am. You think I said all that just to get in your pants?"

"I'm ... sorry. I don't know what I said wrong, though."

He looked tired.

"I guess you don't, do you? All right. Can you take honesty and not get angry? I'd love to 'make sex' with you. I was offended because, where I grew up, guys will say just about anything to get girls to go to bed with them, and here I am being so stinking noble it makes me sick, so it hurt me you thought it was all a line. But you were serious, weren't you?"

"Yes. I'll do it, if it's what has to be done."

"Kinder words have never been spoken to me."

"Did I offend again? I'm sorry."

He grinned.

"You're getting better at that. I appreciate it. Shows you're trying. Listen, Nova, you ought to talk this over with your mother. She figured out how to do it. But if you want my opinion, you should do what I did when Cirocco started straightening me out. I was a right 'orrible stinking bigot when I got here. I'm not perfect, but I'm better. So when I thought 'Frog,' or 'Qubehead,' I changed it to 'Canadian'. When I thought 'black,' I changed it to 'white'. So when you hear 'man,' change it to 'woman'. When you look at a person and think 'Titanide,' change it to 'sister'. When you think about Adam, pretend he's your baby sister. Think how you'd feel."

She thought about it, and was amazed at her rage. It went away quickly-it was only a trick, after all-but it was interesting to think of how the world would be if those things were true.

"Can I check an impression I have?" he asked. She nodded. "You find me ... physically repulsive, don't you."

And another amazing thing happened. She felt herself blushing.

"I don't wish to offend ... "

"I'd prefer honesty."

She nodded, uncomfortably. "You have too much hair. Your chin is so rough, I think it would be painful to be kissed by you. Your arms and legs are ... wrong. Do these things ... attract Earth women?"

He grinned again.

"They have been known to."

"And you find me ... attractive," she said.

"More than that. You are stunning. You're one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen."

Nova shook her head in wonder.

"It's a funny world," she said.

"What's wrong? Do lesbians have different ideas of beauty?"

"I don't know. In the Coven, I was freakishly tall. No one thought me beautiful." She looked at him again. "Is it true that men don't find extreme height unattractive?"

"Not in Artillery Lake," Conal chuckled. "Swear to God, after Cirocco Jones, I rate you number two."

"Now you're being ridiculous," she sniffed. She might have said more, but the radar alarm went off, and Cirocco was directing them on a new heading.

FIFTEEN

It was a shock to them all to discover that the thing which had Adam was not an angel. At least, if it was an angel, then a zombie was a human.

Cirocco cursed quietly as she studied it with her binoculars. Chris couldn't take his eyes off the thing. But when Cirocco handed him the binoculars he had to force himself to look.

His worst fears were not realized. Studying Adam, he couldn't see the bites of deathsnakes. Cradled in those repulsive arms, head hanging down, dark hair blowing in the wind, Adam was taking a snooze.

Chris had to lower the glasses and stop his trembling hands. He looked through them again and confirmed to a certainty what his heart already knew: the child was alive. Twice Chris saw Adam's mouth open and close, as though chomping, and he could see the tiny chest rise and fall.

Finally he was able to turn his attention to the zombie-angel.

It was a very old one. He couldn't see any skin remaining. There was just the skeletal framework, the feathers, and the networks of deathsnakes holding it together.

Robin was getting insistent, so he handed her the binoculars.

Cirocco let out a deep breath.

"Okay. That's why we didn't find it at first. It's flying faster than a live angel could. We're almost to Cronus."

Chris wanted to scream. He wanted to shout a thousand stupid questions, run in circles, bay at the moon. He swallowed it all. Remain calm, remain calm. Locate the fire exits. Move in an orderly manner. Don't lose your balance, put your head between your knees if you feel faint ... and think. Think!

"Any ideas?" Cirocco said. Chris listened to the dead silence, both in the plane and over the radio.

"All right," Cirocco said. "Priorities. Number one, we do nothing to endanger him. Conal, we're going to drop back a little bit so there's no chance we'll disturb the air currents. How does two hundred meters sound?"

"It's okay with me, Cirocco," Conal's voice came back.

"Ideas?" she asked again.

"W-w-what if he, uh, drops him?" Chris managed to say.

"That's not an idea, that's a situation." She frowned, and thought about it for a while. "Okay. I'm going to drop down about a kilometer and stay slightly behind him. Conal, you stay where you are. If you see the baby fall, I want to hear about it a tenth of a second later. I'll jump out and get him."

Parachutes! Chris thought. Something was wrong with him, he should have thought of that. He turned around and scrambled along the gear in back, looking for them. Only it couldn't be Cirocco, that was crazy, it had to be-

"Sorry, Cirocco," Conal said.

Cirocco looked amazed for a moment.

"What the hell do you mean, 'Sorry, Cirocco'?"

"It won't work," Conal said. "For one thing, the Captain doesn't leave her ship. That must have slipped your mind. But even if you could, you have to fly it."

"Chris can fly it!"

"Sorry again, Cirocco. He told me he's getting too big."

Bless him, Chris thought.

"He's right, Cirocco," Chris said, quickly. He was clipping his parachute-a fabric tube about the size of a tightly rolled umbrella-to the rings on his flak suit.

"That's crazy," Cirocco said. "You just move the lousy seat back and-" He looked right at her.

"I've forgotten how to fly," he said. She kept staring at him, and he was able to return it calmly. Finally she sighed, and nodded.

"All right. Now-"

"I should be the one," Robin said.

"God damn it! Who's the-"

"I've done some free-falling," Robin said, raising her voice slightly. "Chris hasn't. I'd have a better chance of getting to him."

"He's my responsibility," Chris said, with a meaningful look at Robin.

"I'm better trained," Robin shot back.

Cirocco looked from one to the other with fire in her eye.

"Anybody else going to put in their two-cent's worth?" she asked.

"I'll do it," came Nova's voice. "I've done twenty times as much parachuting as Robin. I was the Coven champion two years ago."

"Well blow me down," Cirocco muttered, then raised her voice. "All right, enough of this. We're all grandstanding and we're not getting anything done. Conal, you stay right where you are."

"You got it, Captain."

"Robin, Chris, if we get the word, you both go."

They got chutes rigged, and outlined the procedure for opening the plane and jumping. Robin worked the door latch a few times and pushed the door open just to make sure she could do it quickly.

"Right," Cirocco said. "Any more ideas?"

"I was thinking about the hand-off, Cirocco," Conal said.

"What about it?"

"Well, we're going to see the second one coming quite a while before it gets here. What if we shoot it down?"

No one spoke as everyone tried to work out all the implications of that. Chris began to think it might be a good idea.

"No," Cirocco finally said. "Not yet, anyway. First, I don't think they can make it with just one relay. I'm guessing four or five. So we should watch the first one and see how it's done, and be ready to catch him. If this one gets beyond the half-way point and then the relay shows up, we re-think it."

"I don't get it," Robin said. "If we shoot down the relay, this one's going to get tired and it'll have to land. Then we can take it, easy."

Cirocco nodded.

"That seems logical, doesn't it. But you can bet Gaea thought of that, and she's got some angle. We'll find out what it is on the first hand-off."

Chris agreed, though it was torture to wait.

"I'm just throwing this out for discussion," Conal said. "But could we try to take him? Is there any way I could maneuver closer and ... well, I don't have the steps worked out."

"I don't think so, Conal," Cirocco said. "We have to stick to our first priority, which is not to endanger him."

"Okay, I'll say it," Conal said. "Why is he safer in the arms of that thing than falling through the air with Chris and Robin ready to catch him? And why do you think he'll be safe if those bastards get him to Gaea?"

Chris swallowed hard. He'd been keeping those thoughts in the back of his mind, but they hadn't been happy there. Now they scrabbled around in his brain, urging him to scream.

Cirocco looked very tired.

"I think he will be completely safe with Gaea," she said, heavily. "At least physically. I'm sure she wants him alive." She frowned. "Pretty sure. Hold on while I check it out."

She pounded her fist on the sprawled, sleeping form of the Snitch. He squalled, and leaped to his feet.

"No more matches, no more matches!" He stopped, stunned. "My head!" He collapsed, chin on the dashboard, and covered his head with his feet. Cirocco pulled them away, one at a time.

"Relax, Snitch," she said. "You answer some questions and I won't hurt you anymore. And I'll give you three more drops."

One eye popped up on a slender stalk.

"No hurt Snitchy-baby?" he whined.

"No hurt."

"Drinky-winky?"

Cirocco got out the flask and let a drop fall into the demon's mouth.

"Answer the questions now?"

"Fire when ready, puss."

"We've found the child we were looking for."

"Tha's nice. Didn't do you lotsa good, did it?"

"No. He's going to Gaea, isn't he?"

Snitch nodded.

"Gaea loves the little shit. Gaea'll be real good to him. Star pris'ner. Nothin' too good for li'l ol' Adam. Stinkin' Priests out beatin' the bushes for weeks when the word came down the li'l bashtard's on his way."

"I don't understand how-" Robin began, but Cirocco silenced her with a gesture. She leaned over, and Chris could barely hear the whisper.

"When he's off his guard like this we can learn a lot."

He seemed to have gone back to sleep. Cirocco waved the eyedropper near him and his head came up, following it back and forth.

"More, Snitch."

The tiny demon began to weep.

"More, more, more, alla time it's more ... what do they want from me? Why can't I get any peace? They keep after you, never any rest ... and I tell ya, I'm innocent! I was framed! I didn't ask for any of this, I-"

"Where should I send the Oscar, Snitch?"

"My agent handles all that," he said, recovering instantly.

"The stinking priests were beating the bushes ... " Cirocco prompted.

"-for weeks! Whoever found him's gonna be th' new Wiz, Gaea says. Da Wiz, da Wiz, da wunnerful, wunnerful Wiz!"

"And the child?"

"He be King! King o' da Wheel! She look after dat li'l basser real good, I guarantee! Nothin' but da best."

"She doesn't want him dead?"

"No way, Jose! Don' hurt one hair on his li'l beanie, she say, or you wish you could die, only you can't, cause she gonna keep you alive least a year an' kill you in pieces! She got a palace all built to keep him in, all made o' gold and precious jools and pure plat'num, an' wet nurses running all around, an' flunkies to comb his hair and wash his pecker and butter his toes."

"And why is she doing all this?" Robin asked.

Snitch hiccuped, and turned one bleary eye to her. He looked her up and down, and one corner of his mouth turned up.

"Nice tits, sweetlips. How'd'ja like ta see where I got tattooed?"

Cirocco flicked his face. He belched.

"How about that snake? I see his tail, but where's his head?"

Again Cirocco flicked him. He blinked, shook his head, and began to sing.

"Hey, little snake, are you crazy, or what? Your butt's in the air and your head's up her-"

This time Robin flicked him, quite hard.

"That's it!" Snitch stormed, pacing angrily around the dashboard. "I gotta take that crap from you, douche-bag, but not from her. Nothing more, not word one, that's all I'm gonna say. My lips are sealed!"

Cirocco picked him up and shoved a match down his throat, end-first. It left a little of the shaft and the matchead sticking out of the demon's mouth. His eyes bulged as she upended him and struck the match on the dashboard. Then she held him erect, arms pinned to his sides, and let him watch the match begin to burn down.

"I think these matches would burn practically down to your tail," she said, calmly. "What I'm wondering, do you think we'll be able to see it? You think you'd glow like a lantern? What was that? You'll have to speak a little louder, I can't hear you." She waited, as Snitch struggled vainly. "Sorry, Snitch, I can't understand a word you're saying. What's that? Oh, all right." She wet her fingertips and pinched the match-head, which sizzled and went out. She pulled the match out of him and he collapsed, wheezing.

"The trouble with you," he said, "is you can't take a joke. My lord, you're a mean one, Cirocco Jones."

"I'll take that as a professional compliment. Now, she asked you a question. And you will address her as 'Ms. Robin,' with suitable deference, and you will keep your filthy thoughts to yourself."

"Okay, okay." He lifted a weary eye toward Robin. "Would you please repeat the question, Ms. Robin?"

"I just asked why Gaea is doing all this? Why is she going to all this trouble to steal Adam?"

"No trouble at all, Ms. Robin. See, she wins whichever way it comes out. If she gets the kid, and Cirocco don't come, why that's fine. But she figures, if she does get the kid, well then, Cirocco is sure to come." He turned his head and leered at Cirocco. "And Cirocco knows why she has to come, too."

Cirocco picked him up and popped him back in his bottle. Chris could hear him screaming his protests-mostly having to do with the promised alcohol-as she twisted the lid tight. No one said anything for a while. The look on Cirocco's face precluded idle conversation. At last she relaxed a little, and looked at Robin, then Chris.

"You'll want to know what he was talking about. I don't know if I need to say it, but I will. I would be going after him with everything I've got, no matter what. If Gaea got him, I would not rest until we had him back."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Robin confessed, "but I never thought anything different."

"I do know," Chris said, "and I never thought it would have made any difference, either."

"Thanks. To both of you. Robin, I have a reason other than friendship for doing my best to see that he doesn't get into Gaea's hands, and if he does, to get him away from her." She punched numbers on her keypad. "Rocky, how many eggs did you find in that room?"

"Fifteen, Captain," came the voice over the radio. Cirocco turned to Chris.

"Does that sound right?"

"No. I'm sure I had a rack of sixteen in that room. It was full."

"Conal," Cirocco said, "what can you tell me about the rack of Titanide eggs you let Adam play with?"

"It was the standard keepsake rack, Captain. Two rows, eight above and eight below. It was full." Cirocco hit the keypad again.

"Rocky, it seems-"

"I've found the rack, Captain," Rocky said. "It held sixteen. I've been searching diligently, according to your orders."

"Rocky, so help me, if you-"

"Captain, permit me to interrupt before you say something that might insult me. I have the fifteen eggs here before me. I have not waited to find them all before destroying them. To be exact, I have split them in half, so you may count the pieces upon your return-as I anticipated the embarrassing situation which seems to have arisen. Now, I may still find the missing egg, or it could be that Adam was holding it when he was taken. But if it is not found, it would be rather incriminating if I were shortly to be pregnant, wouldn't you think?"

"I'm sorry, Rocky," Cirocco said. "It's just that I've seen the lengths a desperate Titanide will go to if-"

"No offense taken, Captain."

"Jesus." Conal's voice was awed. "I didn't see that, Cirocco."

"What are you talking about?" Robin asked.

"It's Adam," Cirocco said. "Suddenly he's more than just personally important to all of us."

"He's capable of fertilizing Titanide eggs," Chris told Robin. "The ones he chewed on turned transparent-they're activated."

"Yes," Cirocco said. "He can do the thing that only I could do for almost a century. So we have to get him back. We can't let Gaea have him, because if she has him the Titanides become her slaves. And if we can keep him free..." She looked up, out the windshield into nothing, and seemed surprised. "... then I can die."

"Settle down, settle down," Conal said. "She didn't mean it like that."

"How the hell else could she mean it?" Nova demanded.

"She didn't say she was going to kill herself, did she?" He let her think about that for a while. The truth was, Cirocco's words had rocked him, too, but he had soon been able to understand the meaning behind them.

"Then what did she mean? Explain it to me."

"First you have to understand what Gaea did to her," Conal said. "It was a long time ago, back when Cirocco and the rest of the original crew had just got here. Gaea offered her the job of Wizard. She took it. Part of it-and Gaea didn't mention this-was that the race of Titanides was changed. Gaea took out the built-in hatred of angels and stopped the war that had been going on for so long. She also changed them so ... do you know how Titanides reproduce?"

"Only vaguely."

"Okay. They have frontal intercourse first. The female produces a semi-fertilized egg. You saw some of them in Adam's room. They have to be implanted in a rear vagina and fertilized again by a rear penis."

Nova's lips thinned, but she nodded.

"The step I left out is Cirocco. The egg will never be fully fertilized unless it's activated by Cirocco's saliva. Gaea planned it that way. They used to have big festivals, where Cirocco would pick who could have a baby. Population control. Cirocco got so tired of playing God to the Titanides that she became an alcoholic. But she couldn't get away from it, even these days, when Gaea's agents are after her all the time."

Conal saw compassion in Nova's eyes, and it touched him.

"It must be very hard," Nova said.

"Extremely. And in some ways you might not think of. Gaea has never given any sign that Cirocco would ever be let off the hook. What I mean is, if Cirocco died, then the Titanides would die, too. Her own survival had to take first place over everything. It meant that she had to do some things she wasn't proud of. Like with me, she had to... " He stopped himself just in time, and swallowed a bitter taste. There were some things Nova wasn't entitled to know.

"I know of two times in the last seven years when she has had to let a Titanide friend of hers go into a sticky situation where Cirocco knew he couldn't survive, because she couldn't risk her own life. One of those times... I know she feels she betrayed him. One day she might have to betray me so she can survive. I know that, and I accept it.

"That's not an easy way to live. You become the ultimate survivor, but you can't take any pride in it, because you know the lengths you'll go to. It doesn't leave much room for honor. And Cirocco laughs at honor, but I know it's important to her-not the way somebody else defines it, but the way she does."

Nova was giving him an entirely new look. It made him uncomfortable. None of the things he had said had come easy to him. It had taken him a long, painful time to work them out.

"What I'm trying to say," Conal went on, diffidently, "is that Cirocco would like the pressure to end. She'd like to go back to having only herself to worry about. And she'd still be a survivor, she'd still be awful tough to kill, but her death would just be ... her death. What happens to us all."

"Yes," Nova said, still with that odd look. "I see that."

SIXTEEN

Robin watched through the binoculars as the first hand-off was made. She kept her hand on the door latch, ready to leap.

The second angel had been on their screens for half an hour, making its way up from the darkness of Cronus. In the last few minutes they had found it visually, then it had been swallowed up in the deeper darkness above. She could barely make out the two shapes at top magnification as she listened to Conal describe what was happening.

"The second angel is about fifty meters behind. He's coming up now ... getting closer. The first one is turning over. He's handing the baby over ... okay, the second one's got him. He's holding him the same way the first one did. Adam's awake. He's ... uh, he's crying."

Robin swallowed hard. She heard a sound from Chris, but did not look back.

"The first one's dropping back now. He's ... Jesus!"

"What?" Cirocco rapped out. "Report, Conal!"

"He, uh ... the first angel just came apart. I mean, he goddamn well exploded. We just flew through his feathers. His bones and the deathsnakes are falling... . I can't see them anymore. If you're in the right spot to catch Adam, you ought to be flying through them in a minute."

They all waited. Robin watched the diffuse cloud that had been the angel growing. Soon she had to put the binoculars down, and could watch it with her unaided eyes. There was a patter, like hail. A limp deathsnake draped itself over the left wing for a moment, then was swept away.

"That's the trick, then," Cirocco said. "The angels aren't going to land at all. If we shoot the next relay, the one that's got Adam will just fly until it dies."

"But it wasn't alive to begin with ... " Chris began.

"Don't be silly, Chris. A zombie is as alive as you or me. It is a group organism, a hive mentality that invades a corpse and lives in it. The deathsnakes slowly eat the dead flesh, and whatever else they can find. There's nothing supernatural about it."

"You don't think this one ... just decided to die? I mean, all the deathsnakes went at once. Is that likely?"

Robin watched Cirocco think it over.

"You don't understand zombies. First, they have no instinct for survival as individuals, or as hives. They don't feel pain. I don't believe they are intelligent, but they can follow orders. Whoever is directing these probably gave them the general objective-which was to get the child, unharmed-and some specific tactics, and they pulled it off."

"This whole thing has the look of calculation to me," Robin said.

Cirocco nodded.

"I think she's right. Whoever set this up-Luther, Brigham, Marybaker, Moon; any of them-they figured out just how far a death-angel could fly, flat out. This one could probably have gone another couple kilometers, but it couldn't have made it to the ground. So when its mission was over, it died. Which means if we'd shot down its replacement, Adam would be falling toward Cronus, and you two would be doing your best to catch him."

Chris cleared his throat, and Cirocco glanced at him.

"I guess this is as good a time as any to bring this up."

"I agree," Conal said.

"Cirocco," Chris went on, "what do you think the chances are? If Adam is dropped, can me and Robin get him?"

Cirocco shook her head.

"What can I say, Chris? I've been thinking about it for hours. There are too many factors. To be truthful, I think the chances are pretty good. There are two of you, and you'll have a couple of shots at him. If you don't panic, if you learn how to control your fall ... you should catch him. Robin says she's worked at it, so maybe she's got a better chance. I'd say your chances are better than ninety-five percent."

"Mine would be better," Nova said. "I should do it."

"You can't be two places at once," Cirocco replied. "My decision on that stands." She turned to Chris. "I'll spell it out. Your chances of catching him are excellent. If you were betting on a poker hand, I'd say go for it. But you've got a five percent chance of losing."

"I know, I know." Chris put his face in his big hands and was silent for a long time. When he looked up, his eyes were red. "What would you do, Captain?"

Cirocco leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes.

"Chris... I can't make that decision. I can't tell if I want him back because he's a human being in danger, or because he's my salvation. I feel like the professional they bring in when a child is kidnapped. I can tell you a few things about what might happen, but the decisions about the options are up to the parents." She looked from Chris to Robin, and back again. "I'll play it whichever way you two decide."

"What do you want to do?" Robin asked.

"Me? I want to steal him back, right now, so badly it's making me sick. But you know my ulterior motives."

"For what it's worth," Conal said, "I agree with Cirocco. I don't want Gaea to get her hands on him."

"I disagree," Nova said. "Sorry, Mother. There's too much risk, even if it was me going after him. I'm ninety-nine percent sure I'd get him. But one percent risk is too much."

"Tell me about Gaea," Chris said.

"Gaea?" Cirocco frowned. "You may not believe this, but I feel on firmer ground there. What Snitch said is the gospel. She won't hurt him. Once she has him, he won't be in any physical danger. He'll be treated well."

"I worry about psychological damage," Chris said.

"I hate to say this, Chris, but all we can do is take our pick of the trauma he suffers. Falling, or having a fifty-foot woman as a loving grandma."

"That's going to hurt him. She'll take him over."

"That's her plan, of course. But don't under-rate her. She'll raise him to love her. But that will insure he'll be treated well."

There was silence from all for a time, and at last Chris sighed.

"I probably won't ever have a tougher decision. But I think we ought to try and take him now."

"I agree," Robin said, quietly. She reached back and took Chris's hand.

"Okay," Cirocco said. "We're about halfway across Cronus. In about a rev we'll have the light we're going to need to pull this off. I'd welcome any more ideas."

Both planes were very quiet for a long time as they moved through the silvery night of Cronus. There were a hundred things that could go wrong, and they all knew it.

At one point in the endless rev, Rocky called from Tuxedo Junction, and it was a relief to Cirocco to have something new to deal with.

"Captain," Rocky said. "I have located the sixteenth egg. It had rolled down the hallway outside the room. It is now destroyed."

"Good enough, Rocky."

"There is information I have held back, not wishing to distract you from the central problem."

"Now's probably a good time to give it to me."

"Very well. Valiha, on her way to Bellinzona, discovered twelve dead zombies on top of a hill about a kilometer and a half from here. There were no signs of struggle."

"Was this hill downwind of the Junction?"

"Yes, it was. I'm assuming it was Nova's love potion that killed them."

"Seems reasonable."

"Valiha believes two Priests were on that hilltop. She thinks they were Luther and Kali. The scent was too old to be sure. In addition, there was a dead human child, male, between five and fifteen years old. I have recovered his body, and cannot estimate more closely, though perhaps you could."

"He hadn't gone zombie?"

"No. Perhaps he won't."

"Maybe not, but we can't take that chance. Cremate him, please. Anything else?"

"Valiha spoke to me not long ago. She asked that, if you called, and if you had the time, would you call her back."

"Roger, will do." Cirocco switched channels. "Serpent, do you read?"

"I read you, Captain."

"Where are you, my friend?"

"I'm almost to the mid-point of Iapetus, Cirocco." They could all hear Serpent's exhaustion.

"You're making incredibly good time, Serpent, but I'm afraid it was for nothing. We're most of the way through Cronus, and we're sure he's on his way to Hyperion. I don't think it'll do any good for you to go on."

"I'd prefer to keep going, unless you have something better for me to do. But I'll soon have to stop for rest and food."

"Don't push yourself so hard. I don't think there's much you can do, either way."

"Then I'll go on until you turn back."

"All right." Cirocco once again pressed buttons. "Valiha, are you there?"

"I am at the outskirts of Bellinzona, Cirocco," Valiha said.

"What did you want to know?"

"You bade me catch live zombies," she said. "I have enlisted Hornpipe, Mbira, Cembalo, Sistrum, and Lyricon in this project. They tell me Luther was here a short time ago, but know of no other zombie band in the area. We can search for strays, but our noses tell us none are in the area. The citizens of this fair city have become cautious enough that few new zombies spring from their graveyards. What I wanted to know, Captain, is must these zombies be already dead?"

Cirocco thought it over for a while.

"Valiha, you are ruthless and practical."

"Captain, to me there are those who have been executed for their crimes, and those who, through an oversight, are still walking around. Do you wish me to read them their rights and arrange fair trials?"

"Follow the right path as you see it," Cirocco sang.

Valiha turned off the radio and stuffed it in her pouch. She sang a few notes to her five companions, and they trotted off down the broad pier that ran along the Grand Canal. When they came to the crossing waterway known as the Slough of Despond, they stopped, and looked around. It was here that much of Bellinzona's thriving business in slaves was done.

Soon a caravan came shambling down Edward Teller Boulevard.

There were twenty slaves in iron fetters: sixteen females and four males, many of them children. They were guarded by ten muscular men in rough armor, and at the head of the procession was the slavemaster in a sedan chair carried by a pair of identical twins. The chair was a conspicuous indulgence in Gaea's low gravity, but it had nothing to do with utility and everything to do with showboating. The contingent of guards, on the other hand, might have proved too few, even if the caravan had been set upon by human bandits. But the slavemaster was counting on the unseen presence of the mafia to which he owed his allegiance.

The Titanides spread out along the edge of the pier. The guards looked at them nervously, as did the slavemaster.

"Are these for sale?" Valiha asked him.

The man was obviously surprised at the question. It was well-known that Titanides never bought slaves. But good business practice demanded steering clear of them, never offering offense-or at least treating them as the dangerous animals they were. So the man got up and made a perfunctory bow. His English was not great, but good enough.

"All for sale, sure. You in the market?"

"It so happens we are," Valiha said. She put her hand around his throat and squeezed. Long, long ago, she thought, someone was this man's mother. He was her darling baby boy. She felt a moment's regret as she heard his spine snap. I wonder what happened to him? she thought.

It was the only eulogy he would get from her.

When she looked up, the ten guards were dead. It had been done so quickly that many of the people on the crowded boulevard were only now becoming aware that it had happened at all. One moment there had been a slave caravan, and the next there were just slaves and Titanides lining bodies in a neat row. Some people hurried away. Others, noting that the Titanides made no more aggressive moves, watched warily, then went about their business. No one screamed. No one wept.

They stripped the corpses and piled weapons and clothing on the street, then removed the chains from the slaves. It took some time to convince them they were actually free. Valiha and her band held the scavengers off long enough for the freed slaves to take their pick of the booty. Cembalo volunteered to escort those women who wanted to go to the Free Female Quarter.

"Most of these will be enslaved again within ten revs," Hornpipe sang.

"This I know," Valiha sang. "However, I did not come here to clean up the world. Just this part of it, and just for a moment" She reached into her pouch and took out the radio.

"Rocky, do you read me?" she said, in English. Titanide song was often garbled when put through these clumsy human devices.

"I'm here, Valiha."

"There are four Titanides on their way to you. They will build pens for these creatures. We have eleven in hand. Did the Captain give you instructions for their housing?"

"She did. Until we know if Nova's elixir remains potent in the house, they are to be kept some distance away. I have selected a site."

"We will be with you shortly."

There was no trouble on the way out of town.

Valiha paused at the graveyard and gathered a few bushels of dirt into a leather pouch. It was probably unnecessary-most corpses left unburied eventually went zombie-but it was a certainty that the Bellinzona soil was thick with deathsnake spores.

They made good time to the Junction. When they got there, they arranged the corpses on the ground, back to back, belly to belly, and scattered the soil over them. As the zombies began to stir feebly they were put into the newly-built cages.

Valiha felt satisfaction when the job was done. She watched the monsters shuffling to and fro, bumping into the walls, directionless.

It would be very interesting to see what killed them.

SEVENTEEN

"I don't like this," Conal said, for the third time.

"I can't fly the plane," Nova said. She snapped the safety line to her harness, and looked at him.

"I still don't like it," he grumbled. "I don't know if you appreciate the danger to Adam."

"I guess I deserve that," Nova said, keeping her temper firmly under control. "But I'm playing your game. I'm going out there to rescue my little sister."

He looked at her for a long time, then nodded.

"Watch those feet," he warned again. "For chrissake, don't let that thing slash you up."

"I will watch, but not for the sake of Christ." She opened the door, latched it in place, and stepped out on the wing. Carefully, keeping herself turned so he couldn't see it, she unfastened the line and hooked it to a cloth loop on her shirt. If the deathangel dropped her bro ... sister, Nova intended to jump after him. Her.

Great Mother, hear your daughter and grant her luck.

She looked down, and was pleased to note she felt only cautious, not afraid. Her concern was not of falling, but of falling at the wrong time.

She held on as Conal eased the plane closer. He edged around until Nova could almost touch him. She took a firm grip on the knife.

The deathangel turned its skull-face toward her, dipped one wing, and plunged straight for the ground.

Nova could hear Conal shouting into the radio. She stuck her head in closer and did some shouting of her own.

"Chase him, damn it! Follow him down! Get me in close enough so I can rip the christ-loving psalm-singing prick!"

Conal did as he was told, but not as quickly as Nova wanted. Even so, she had to hold on with both hands. Inertia, she told herself. You feel light, but your mass is the same.

He had the plane in a nose-dive, the throttle back all the way. Still the plane gained speed. They closed in again behind the deathangel who turned away with a contemptuous flicker of his ratty tail feathers. Conal zoomed by, pulled up, turned left and Nova found herself hanging by her fingernails, her feet having slid off the transparent wing surface.

Conal did a tricky little flip-flop that left her momentarily weightless, and she scrambled to get her boots down, felt weight returning, and looked up to see they were about to hit the angel.

This time, when Conal was through with his frantic maneuvers, she was holding on with only one hand. He leveled out and throttled back again, and she climbed up breathing hard.

"It's no good," Conal said. "I almost hit him."

"I know," she said, getting back in.

Conal was holding the loose end of the safety line and looking angry. He was about to say something, but Cirocco's voice came over the radio.

"He's still dropping, Conal. Why don't you level out and join us?" He turned, spotted Cirocco's plane following the angel, which now descended at a more leisurely rate. He followed them down.

The deathangel went down for a long time. When it finally leveled out, it was at an altitude of one kilometer.

"Well," Cirocco said, dubiously, "it had to be tried. If we hadn't tried it, we'd all have been kicking ourselves forever."

"Is it over, then?" Robin asked.

"It might as well be," Cirocco said. "My dears, that thing has reduced our chances of catching Adam by a factor of ten."

"Worse," Nova said.

"Okay, worse. And worse than that, if it does drop Adam, it's our fault he's down so low."

"We had to try it," Chris said.

Cirocco nodded thoughtfully.

"Folks, we just got sent a message. Gaea will not hurt Adam. But she's willing to let us kill him, if we get too cute. So let's back off, like about a kilometer, and hope that son of a bitch gets up a little higher."

They did, and after a short time the deathangel rose to two kilometers and leveled out there. Then another appeared from the bright yellow sands of Mnemosyne and took Adam. They watched as the second one disintegrated just as the first had, and the third flew tirelessly on.

"Cirocco, I'm going to have a fuel problem," Conal said.

She watched as the figures from his computer filled her screen. Then she sat back and thought it out, going over it all three times, until she felt sure she had the right course of action.

"I'm going to give you some fuel now," she told Conal. "Leave myself enough to reach the base in the north wall. I'll leave the Four there, and come back in something bigger and meaner."

"Got you."

So Conal dropped down to the level Cirocco was maintaining, went below her, then put his plane on autopilot as he crawled out to catch the fuel hose dangling from the larger plane. He plugged it in and watched the fuel fill his own tank.

"Stay behind and below, as we discussed," Cirocco told Conal. "I won't be away long."

"Don't worry about us, Captain," she heard him say. She dipped her wings and turned to the north.

What followed was no more amazing than a mosquito turning into a hawk.

Airplanes are a series of trade offs. The designer has to pick which characteristic is most important, and work around that, knowing the other parameters will suffer for it. A slow-flying high-altitude plane needs a lot of wing surface to provide lift in thin air. A very fast plane doesn't need much wing, but must withstand atmospheric heating. Either way, there are problems of structural strength. The very fastest planes usually have a short range because they burn fuel extravagantly.

The Dragonfly series was the best attempt human engineers had yet made at planes that could do all things well. They had been designed for Earth conditions. Gaea's environment was different, but most of the differences worked to the advantage of the Dragonflys.

The powerplants were small, light, and almost one hundred percent fuel-efficient.

The airframes were very strong, light, heat-resistant, and of variable flight-geometry.

On Earth, a Dragonfly stalled at ten kilometers per hour. At Gaea's rim, where the air pressure was two atmospheres, a Dragonfly could stay in the air at walking speed. They could reach seventy thousand feet on the Earth; in Gaea that ability was wasted, as even in the hub the pressure was one atmosphere. They were acrobatic, able to pull more turning gees than a human pilot could withstand without blackout. They were ultra-light, idiot-proof, high-capacity, low-maintenance, fuel-efficient, high-altitude, long-range ...

... and supersonic.

Cirocco had cracked the sound barrier a few times in Gaea, but there was not much point in it. At the rim the speed of sound was between thirteen and fourteen hundred kilometers per hour, depending on air temperature. The longest possible trip was about an hour and a quarter at that speed.

When Cirocco pushed the throttles forward in southern Mnemosyne she was about two hundred kilometers from her destination. The engines roared, the wings folded back and pulled in and the fuselage constricted at the waist, and in three minutes she was doing a thousand kilometers per hour. A few minutes after that she had to begin her deceleration.

Her destination was a cavern about a mile up the side of the sheer northern highlands cliff.

When she declared war on the buzz bombs, Cirocco had bought enough weaponry to arm a medium-sized banana republic. It had not been cheap, and the freight charges to Gaea had tripled the price, but it meant nothing to her. She had a great deal of money on Earth, earned mostly because she had lived so outlandishly long, and it was just paper-less than paper; you could use paper to start a fire. It had pleased her to at last find a use for the stuff. Killing all the buzz bombs had not taken long. She could have used just the Dragonflys to do it, but she had bought a lot more than that. Most of it was still there, waiting to be used.

She let the plane's brain bring her in until the last hundred meters, then took control herself and barriered into the cave, directing the jet exhaust to bring the plane in vertically. They got out quickly, and she directed Chris and Robin to take out all the personal gear. Then she selected another plane.

It was a big cave. There were thirty aircraft in it.

She chose a Mantis Fifty. It was of the same generation as the Dragonfly, but its mission was not primarily transportation. Its name came from the fact that it could carry fifty people and a little armament. Or, it could carry twenty-five, and a lot of armament. Then again, it could carry ten, and enough firepower to shoot down a squadron of older planes and level a small city.

Counting Chris as two people, Cirocco was going to be taking off with four. She planned her payload accordingly.

The three of them spent the next half-hour attaching missiles to the wings, loading cannon, and stowing bombs. The lasers would take care of themselves.

The thing clinging to the vertical surface of the central Mnemosyne cable was not a buzz bomb, just as an alligator is not an iguana.

He was built along the lines of a 707. His wings were swept back, and four ramjet engines depended from them.

Gaea, who had dreamed of him three myarevs ago and then seen her dream spring to life, as they so often did, had named him and his brothers and sisters Luftmorder. The name was visible, in English script, on his slim fuselage, which gurgled happily with a full load of kerosene. The name was in white, and the rest of him was the color of drying blood. There were not many like him. In all of Gaea, only ten. All of them hung from cables, like barnacles.

His had been a dull life, so far, but he was patient. He had never tried his wings. But the day would come. He looked forward to it.

The Luftmorder was not a particularly bright being, but it would have been wrong to call him stupid. He was single-minded, and quite canny in the pursuit of his goals. He had clung for three myriarevs, feeding on the kerosene drip from the cable. He could cling that long again, and more, but did not think he would have to. He sensed Gaea's excitement. Orders would come.

Clinging to him in turn, squabbling among the rows of cold nipples that lined the undersides of his wings, were scores of creatures called sidewinders and red-eyes. They were quite stupid; a necessary nuisance. Red-eyes were larger, sidewinders were faster-at least, that was the theory. Each would get only one chance to find out, as they were not reusable. Each was an organic creature built around a solid-fuel skeleton. Their brains rode on cores of explosive. They saw in the infra-red spectrum, and they loved bright things just like moths love flames.

The Luftmorder was not a buzz bomb, though he was related. The nine aeromorphs that clung to the cable quite near him, however, were much like buzz bombs, in the same way a greyhound or a Doberman is much like a Chihuahua.

The Luftmorder was undisputed flugelführer of the squadron. He watched with infra-red-eyed concentration as the two planes dallied by far beneath him. He saw them come together for a time, saw the larger begin to burn much faster and pull away to the north. The buzz bombs wanted to go, but he counseled patience. When the larger plane was far away, when it had landed in that kerosene-source which his Gaean instincts told him must be there, he detached five of his underlings, one by one, and watched them fall toward the bright sand.

EIGHTEEN

"You'll have to take a close look at those one day," Conal said, when he saw Nova staring out at the south-central Mnemosyne cable. "I doubt you've ever seen anything quite like it."

"It looks so small from here," Nova said. "Just a thread."

"That thread is about five kilometers thick. It's made of hundreds of strands. There's animals and plants that live on them and never come down to the ground."

"My mother said Cirocco Jones climbed to the top of one once." She craned her neck and discovered the point where the cable joined the arched roof of Mnemosyne. "I don't see how she did it."

"She did it with Gaby. And it wasn't one of these. These go straight up. The one Cirocco climbed angled like those ahead of us. See how they bend up and go into the Oceanus spoke? You can't quite see into the spoke from here. She tells me they're what hold Gaea together."

"Why is everything so dead here?"

"It's because of the sandworm. He could pick his teeth with Mount Everest."

"Do you think ..." She had to pause, and yawn hugely. "... you think we'll see him?"

"Say, why don't you get some sleep?"

"I'll be okay."

"No, really. You ought to. I'll wake you if anything important happens, and if nothing does, then you can spell me in a couple revs."

"How long is a rev?"

"Near enough to an hour."

"All right. I will. Thanks." She turned slightly in her seat.

"How's the hand? You want those bandages wrapped again?"

"It's okay. I banged it while I was hanging onto the wing." She gave him a sleepy, friendly smile, then seemed to catch herself at it. Conal suppressed his own grin; she was definitely improving. She had to remember to be surly. Maybe she'd forget entirely one of these days. Could happiness be too far behind?

She closed her eyes and fell asleep in no more than ten seconds. Conal envied her. It usually took him at least a minute.

Feeling a little guilty, he studied her as she slept. Her face was relaxed, and she looked even younger than her eighteen years.

She still had a little girl's face, with a lot of cheek and a protruding lower lip. Conal could see her mother's features in her upturned nose and large jaw. With her eyes closed that unsettling resemblance to Chris was hard to find.

He resolutely turned away when he found his eyes straying to the full curves of the breast, the round hips, the long legs. Suffice it to say she had a child's face on a woman's body.

"Advisory," the computer said. "Hostile aircraft have been known to-"

Conal hit the override, and glanced at Nova. Her eyes fluttered, then she made an un-ladylike sound and nestled deeper into the cushions.

Once again, a nuisance. The damn computer had a long memory. The results of Cirocco's air war with the buzz bombs had been fed into it, so now it tried to warn Conal of a base that had been empty for eighteen years. The buzzers had liked to congregate at central cables. They could hang for years, nose down, waiting their chance. They had to hang like that, as they couldn't start their engines without first having some forward motion. Primitive ramjets, that's all they had been, nothing like the ultra-refined torch that hummed quietly in the back of the Dragonfly.

He was glad they were all dead.

Still, wouldn't it be funny if ...

He glanced at the central cable, and saw a tiny speck falling toward the sand. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and it was gone. He kept looking at the cable, then shook his head. It was easy to forget how gigantic it was. What did he expect to see? Buzz bombs clinging to the side?

On the other hand, just what the hell could that speck have been?

He fiddled with the radar, but nothing came back. He glanced up at the angel carrying Adam. Nothing wrong there.

On impulse, he fed power to the engine and climbed rapidly to six kilometers.

And the radar pinged.

"Alert," the computer said. "Four-correction, five unidentified aircraft approaching. Correction, three unident-correction, four-"

Conal overrode the voice, which was just a distraction. The graphic display would tell him a lot more.

But it didn't. He saw two blips clearly, down on the deck, moving rapidly in his direction. Then there were three, then another popped into being, "RADAR COUNTERMEASURES IN EFFECT," the computer printed on his screen.

That would seem to indicate Dragonflys, or Cirocco returning in the Mantis. He supposed she could be flying three planes on autopilot, but what for, and why hadn't she mentioned it to him? But buzz bombs couldn't jam radar.

"Hold on there, Conal," he muttered to himself. The plain fact was he had never seen a buzz bomb. He had never fought one. And believing that things always stayed the same in Gaea was a quick way to be dead.

"Wake up," he said, shaking Nova's shoulder. She was alert very quickly.

"Cirocco, I have some unidentified blips on my screen. At least four, probably five. They don't reply to transponders. They are closing on me at about ... five hundred kilometers per hour, and they are employing radar countermeasures. I have climbed to six kilometers in case... in case they take hostile action. I-" he paused, and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. "Hell, Cirocco, what should I do?"

They both listened, and heard nothing but static. Nova was searching the sky above them, but he doubted she would see anything. Then, bless her, she turned quickly and began digging out the rest of their flak suits.

"Cirocco, do you read?" Again, silence. She was probably out of the plane, gathering weaponry, doing a check-out. Maybe she could hear him, and was on her way to the radio.

"Cirocco, I'm going to lead them away from Adam, and then I'm going to shoot them down. I'll leave this channel open." Nova was handing him a helmet and leggings. He put the helmet on, then waved the rest away. "Forget about that, we don't have time. Tighten your straps and hold on." The instant she had the strap pulled tight around her lap, Conal pulled back on the stick and pushed the throttle forward. The little plane leaped forward and curved up like a rocket.

Nova was looking forward, and side to side.

"The ones on the radar were under us," Conal said. "They were hugging the ground. So they'll be behind us now, and I don't think-"

"Right there," Nova said, pointing forward and to the left.

It was heading straight for them, plunging like a hawk, growing bigger.

Conal turned right and pulled back, and they flipped over. The buzz bomb screeched by them, howling. Conal had a glimpse of a shark's mouth, gulping air, and of wings that arched high and then swept down and back. They were buffeted in the heated air from the buzz bomb's tailpipe, then Conal got them turned around and dipped a wing for a better view.

"Why didn't you shoot?" Nova asked.

"I ... I forgot I had guns," he confessed. "You see them down there?"

"Yeah. The first one is pulling around, the other four-"

"I've got 'em." The four were climbing in tight formation. It took Conal back to a cold winter day. He had been ten, and the Snowbirds, Canada's precision flying team, had put on a show. They had flown wingtip to wingtip, turning as a unit. And they had climbed just like these were doing, and at the top of the climb the buzz bombs spread out, trailing black plumes of exhaust, quartering the sky.

Conal had picked them all up on radar now. The images were clear; the computer, fooled at first, was learning the new radar signatures. And it was a damn good thing he had radar, he realized. It was amazing how quickly the devils flew out of sight.

He felt rather helpless. The two of them watched the radar blips twist and turn without apparent pattern. Conal felt he should be preparing some maneuver, as the buzz bombs so obviously were. But he didn't know anything about aerial combat.

He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants, and started to work it out.

What did he know about buzz bombs?

"They're big, clumsy, relatively slow, and they weren't equipped for air-to-air encounters." He could hear Cirocco's voice in his memory. She had not talked a lot about the creatures. "Their big tactic was ramming. I had to watch out for that, since they didn't seem to care whether they lived or died. One got me that way, once, and I was damn lucky to walk away from it."

That was all very well, and the one that had almost rammed them had certainly been big-possibly three times the length of the little Dragonfly. But clumsy, and slow? He looked again at the twisting trails in the sky. He thought he was faster than they were, and certainly more maneuverable, but these didn't look all that clumsy.

"There's one coming in behind us," Nova said.

"I see him." He tried a few things, feeling it out. All he could remember was dogfights in movies. There, they came out of the sun-but that wouldn't work well in Gaea. And they got on your tail and shot you down. Since buzz bombs didn't have guns, that wouldn't work.

He began to feel better. He slowed a little, let the pursuer move in closer, then went through a rapid series of turns and dives, all the time keeping his eyes open for the other four. The one behind him repeated his moves, but more slowly, overshooting. His confidence grew. Okay, the thing to do ...

He put the thought into action, pulling back very hard on the stick, going up and up and over, feeling five gees press him into his seat. He kept going, through the loop, and the buzz bomb made a wide loop, falling back, and it was a little slow when Conal made an eight-gee right turn and a dive, and a sudden twist ... and there it was, almost under him now, so he throttled back and the wings spread and shuddered as they dug into the air and lifted him but he kept the nose down firmly ...

The thing was in his sights, and he found himself shouting as the wing cannons chattered. He kept shouting as he followed its frantic twists. Then it was spewing orange flame and he had to pull up and give it more throttle or he was going to fly up its tailpipe. He ripped through black smoke and saw the buzz bomb below him, one wing torn away, spiraling toward the ground ten kilometers below.

"Just like in the movies!" he roared. Nova was bouncing up and down in her seat, making a weird sound like nothing he'd ever heard, but you just knew it was jubilation even before you saw the eager light in her eyes. It was a fierce light, matched by the gleam of her teeth, and Conal loved her for it.

"Conal! Conal, do you read?"

"I'm here, Cirocco."

"We'll be taking off in about two minutes. What's your situation?"

"I just splashed one buzz bomb, Captain." He was unable to keep the pride out of his voice. "Four to go." He glanced at Nova and she had picked just that moment to glance at him. It couldn't have a second, but she wore a wicked grin that said you're okay, and, by God, he thought, we are, aren't we? It was the closest they had ever been. Then she was watching the sky again.

"We won't admire the scenery on the way there," Cirocco said.

"I think we're going to be okay, Captain."

"There's three pulling around behind us," Nova said.

"I see 'em." He had them on the radar screen, and visually. He wondered what they were up to, and where the fourth one was.

"I'm going to check with Snitch, see what he knows about this," Cirocco said. Conal didn't bother to answer. He pulled up again, did a wide loop, and almost had a shot at the trailing buzz bomb in the formation chasing him, but didn't take it as he knew he had better conserve his ammunition. So he led them a merry chase through the skies until they were strung out all over hell, and they broke off and re-grouped as he gained altitude, still worrying about that last one. It wasn't on his screen. He had a thought.

"One may be headed your way, Captain," he said. "Maybe he'll try an ambush when you're taking off."

"I'll watch for it, thanks."

Once again they were behind him. He planned his moves, and figured he'd be able to pick off one this time, maybe two, before Cirocco arrived. They were in a line back there, weaving as they chased him. He pulled up, starting slow, and saw the last in line pull up quickly. He didn't like that. Then the Dragonfly lurched to the left and he had to fight the stick. He looked out his window and saw a ragged hole in the wing, just outside the cannon. As he watched, two more holes appeared, and something whined off the tougher canopy material over his head. He looked up at the deep gouge, then yanked back on the stick.

"They're shooting at us!" Nova shouted.

He didn't know quite what he did for the next twenty seconds. The ground was all over the place, off to the side one moment, then overhead, then twisting around them. It must have worked. For a moment one of them was in his sights and he fired, but missed. He looked back, and all three were far behind, but lining up again.

Maybe he should just outrun them. He didn't think they could match his top speed. Discretion being the better part of valor, and all that ...

But he was worried about the damaged wing. Dragonflys were incredibly tough, but there were limits.

He shrugged, and pushed the throttle all the way forward.

"In front of you!"

She must have had incredible eyes. He never would have seen it until it was too late-did not see it, in fact, until it was almost filling his vision, just a gaping mouth shooting little gouts of flame at them. But he pushed down on the stick, and they shot under the fourth buzz bomb with about a meter to spare. He heard an explosion and risked a look back. The tactic had not paid off. It had just missed him, and collided head-on with the third one in the row behind him. What was falling toward Mnemosyne didn't even vaguely resemble airplanes.

"Conal," Cirocco's voice came, sounding concerned. "Snitch says they may be armed. I don't know how reliable that is."

"Thanks!" he shouted, and dived as he heard the bullets whipping by him. He aimed for the ground and twisted and turned all the way down. Then something smashed through the fuselage and seemed to ricochet around inside. The cabin filled with acrid smoke, and Nova was shouting and stamping her feet.

"It's alive, it's alive!" she was screaming, but he didn't have time for that. He kept turning, and once again they spread out behind him. When he thought he had a moment he looked to his right. Nova's face was contorted, and she was stamping at something black that wiggled and hopped and smoked. It had a mouth, and it kept biting at her legs. As he watched, she put one of the unused flak-suit leggings over it and tromped on it.

There was a bang like a firecracker, and Nova's leg was shoved up so hard her knee hit her chin. The whistling note he had heard since they were hit altered in pitch, and he saw the legging sucked through a four-inch hole in the floor.

He didn't have time to worry about it. He was almost on the deck. He pulled up, and streaked over the desert at seven hundred kilometers per hour, fifty meters above the dunes. The left wing was screaming its agony.

And still he didn't have time to think, because they were right behind him and still shooting.

"Well, hell," he said. "Now I'm mad." And it was true, he was furious, and he didn't give much of a damn. So, without thinking about it, he pulled up, still dodging for all he was worth, kept going up until he judged he had just about enough room, then he throttled back and pushed the stick forward as far as it would go.

For an instant they were weightless, then the gee forces pulled them, harder and harder, up against the straps. They were aimed at the ground, not very far below. Five gees, six, seven. Ten gees, and their faces were red as the ground, with agonizing sluggishness, rotated around them. Outside, the wing complained, and inside, Conal wondered if he had cut it too close. The outside loop was as tight as he could possibly make it. All he could do was hope the buzz bombs followed him, and hope he would soon see a slice of sky creeping over the nose.

He saw the sky appear through the floor, then grow. Dimly, he thought he heard two impacts behind them, and he managed a smile, but his thoughts were moving slowly. If he had worked it right, those buzz bombs had just flown into the ground. Then he was flying level, upside-down. The sand was so close that if he lifted his hand, he could have touched it.

Gingerly he nursed the Dragonfly higher, until he had room to flip over again. He glanced at Nova, who looked green. He would have felt the same way if he'd had the time for it, but the wing was chattering at him now. He took it up slowly to one kilometer, having to throttle back three times as the left wing began to flap. The little plane felt like a car jolting over a rutted road. He glanced at the wing again, saw it was being held on by one thin strut, and cut the engine. They were crawling through the air in silence.

"Out!" he shouted, and watched her throw her door open. She had forgotten the harness release, so he hit it, shoved her, saw her push up and out, then leaped in the other direction and was falling.

He counted to ten-at seven his teeth started to chatter, when he realized he had never parachuted before-and pulled the cord. The chute billowed out, jerked him hard, and he let out a deep breath. He looked around, saw the twin columns of flame where his pursuers had crashed, and then spotted the bright orange blossom of Nova's chute.

He was five for five.

Gaea turned purple when she heard about it.

"He endangered my baby!" she roared, and began to stamp up and down the already churned grounds of Pandemonium. Everyone had to hustle to get out of her way. Many of them were successful.

"Who does he think he serves, anyway?" she thundered. "No chances, no chances are to be taken with that child! Didn't I make that clear?"

There were affirmative shouts. Bolexes jostled closer for the shot, climbing over each other like beetles in a jar.

She raised a hand into the air and there was silence but for the whining of the cameras. She clenched it into a fist the size of a station wagon, and lightning crashed down from the sky to make a purple nimbus around her. Face contorted with rage, she drew her arm back like a javelin thrower and hurled something that might have been a bolt of hatred in the direction of Mnemosyne.

High on the central cable, the Luftmorder's fuel tanks exploded. Sidewinders and red-eyes caught fire and found themselves streaking in their death lunges, to explode when their fuel burned out. Four buzz bombs also caught fire. The event was noisy and bright, and looked very much like the traditional Japanese pyrotechnic shell known as Bouquet of Chrysanthemums. When it was over, there were only nine Luftmorder combat groups in Gaea.

Robin, Chris, and Cirocco saw the show, and Cirocco edged around it warily, but nothing came down from the cable to chase them. Cirocco laid the wings back almost flush to the fuselage, and headed for the place that was full of black smoke. She kept calling for Conal, and getting no answer.

She slowed down at the twin columns of smoke, and began to circle. They all dreaded to find that one of the pyres marked the graves of Conal and Nova.

A flare crawled up into the sky and burst, and three minutes later Cirocco was setting down lightly. She had no sooner cut the motors than Chris and Robin were out, hurrying toward the two figures.

Conal had somehow managed to twist his ankle. Cirocco would not have thought it possible in the soft sand-then she remembered she had never gotten around to the parachute training she kept meaning to give him.

He had an arm draped over Nova's shoulders and she had an arm around his waist, and they managed to move in the one-quarter gee about as quickly as one person could walk. Nova had four inches on him, and he was wearing a silly grin, and Cirocco wondered just how badly that ankle was really hurt.

"Do we have any time, Cirocco?" he asked.

"It depends. What's up?" She thought about Adam, and knew they'd have to hang well back if they might be attacked by buzz bombs again. Then she thought about buzz bombs, and her eyes went nervously to the skies. They made a hell of a target out here.

"There might be something in the fuselage we ought to take a look at. It's right over there."

"I'll get it," Nova said, and dropped him. He squawked, overbalanced, and sat down in the sand. They watched Nova running toward the wreckage of the Dragonfly.

"They were shooting at us," Conal said. "Snitch was right."

He told them about the attack, how he had shot down one and made two crash and lucked out on the other two. Cirocco told him about the explosion, which Conal and Nova had seen from a great distance.

"I haven't the faintest idea what caused it," Cirocco said. "But it was in the spot where the buzz bomb base used to be. And it wasn't just jet fuel, either. There was a lot of explosives, and maybe some solid rocket fuel."

Nova returned, breathing hard, and held out the remains of the thing that had tried to bite her.

It looked a little like an exploding cigar, after the explosion. It was about four inches of flexible, hollow tube. One end was scorched and the other was ragged, splayed out. Nova pointed to the ragged end.

"There was a head there," she said. "It must have been hard, because it clanged when it hit the floor. It was jerking around like-"

"Like a fish in the bottom of a boat," Conal said.

"It didn't have any eyes. But it had a mouth, and it kept snapping at me. I stomped on it and its head exploded."

Cirocco took it from Nova. She handled it gingerly, and sniffed the burnt end.

"It's sort of a rocket bullet," she said finally. "I guess it was supposed to explode when it hit. It must have had one hell of a hard head to get through the Dragonfly hull. But, see, if it twists it can aim itself a little after it's ignited." She grimaced, then looked at Nova, "You say it blew up under your foot."

"Part of a flak suit was over it."

"Still, it wasn't enough of a charge to blow your foot off." She sighed, and tossed it away. "But it blew a hole in the floor. Friends, a buzz bomb could carry one hell of a lot of those little abominations. I don't like it one damn bit."

She couldn't think of anything to do but load them all back into the Mantis. She listened to Conal's description of the radar-jamming that had happened, and of the shape of the buzz bombs he had shot down. Most of the changes sounded to Cirocco like they were meant to confuse radar-that complex of characteristics known as "stealth."

Then they took off and headed east again. Soon they located the angel, and followed at a discrete two kilometers. Cirocco kept one eye on the radar and the other on the sky.

NINETEEN

During the long flight through Oceanus, Gaea sat still as stone in her monster chair, looking to the icy west, brooding. All the denizens of Pandemonium walked on eggs. They had never seen Gaea this way. Tons of fun, Gaea was, even if she did have a tendency to step on things. She was loads of laughs, the way she received all those preachers with big ceremonies, built the poor goons up till their heads were ready to bust, thinking Gaea had laid all this on for them, told them she had invited them to Pandemonium-them, personally, and nobody else, because nobody else quite had the slant on things, nobody else really understood the true faith quite as well as the schmuck-of-the-moment-and asked them would they pretty please let her in on the no-kidding Absolute Truth, and otherwise dispense their brilliant insights on theology? Then, when they were getting really wound up, she'd look at them like a pro gambler watching aces spill out of some poor dumb hick's sleeve, thunder blasphemy! and bite their fool heads off.

Then she'd spit the head into the Resurrect-O-Master and a dozen revs later some mewling abortion would come out the other end and she'd tell it You're Rasputin, or You're Luther, and solemnly intone the Gospel that one was supposed to believe in, and send it out into the world.

They lasted a while, the Priests did, not like the zombies, which had a half-life of about a kilorev. Still, even Priests reached a point where they were too mortified to do more than lie there and twitch, which was only funny for a short time, so Gaea had run through a lot of Luthers and a lot of Rasputins.

Everybody loved it.

But during the last part of the arrival of the King, Gaea was one goddamn scary fifty-foot special effect.

It was Oceanus that caused it, of course. Oceanus was the Enemy. Almost in the same league with Cirocco Jones herself. There's just no way she was going to feel good while the King was being flown over Oceanus's hyperborian precincts.

If the truth were told, not many of the Pandemonium felt good about being that close to Oceanus in the first place. Oceanus was a thing that ought to be comfortably far around the Great One's Curve, not looming frigidly like a gigantic breaking wave of icebergs. A lot of the most faithful sycophants were walking around with their shoulders hunched. You could have made a fortune on the gooseflesh concession.

But then the King was winging out of the twilight zone and over the Key of G-the most southwestern of Hyperion's eight regions, and only three hundred kilometers from the Key of D Minor, where Pandemonium had encamped. And maybe she did something with the sun panels out there in vacuum, constantly angling those rays down over fat and sassy Hyperion, or maybe it was just the enormous relief Gaea felt-and when a fifteen-meter goddess/starlet heaved a sigh of relief, brother, you felt it down to your toenails... but the day, the endless and unchanging day, was suddenly brighter.

Suddenly it was orders here and orders there, and everybody falling all over themselves to see who could kiss ass the quickest.

"Wine!" Gaea trumpeted. "Let the land flow with wine!" And twenty baffled vintners were trotted out and upended and stuffed like Strasberg geese until the chablis spouted into a thousand flasks.

"Food!" she boomed. "Open the mighty cornucopia and let my abundance flow forth!" So butter was melted by the ton, and hard kernel corn shoveled by the bucketful into the rotating maws of thirty poppers big as cement mixers-which had, in fact, originally been cement mixers-and fires stoked beneath them until hot yellow puffs were exploding in every direction, littering the ground, being devoured there by legions of producers who momentarily forgot their taste for fresh film in their popcorn feeding frenzy. Ten thousand franks were soon sizzling on a hundred grills, and milk chocolate flowed from the crusty teats of the teamsters.

"Film!" Gaea roared. "Let it be a festival to the King, the most stupendous celluloid celebration of all time! Run it on three screens at once, suspend the pass list, and raise the price at the box office!"

Then she began to shout titles. King of Kings. The Greatest Story Ever Told. Jesus Christ, Superstar. Jeez. Jeez II. Jeez III and IV. The Nazarene. The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. Life of Brian. Ben-Hur. Ben-Hur II. Bethlehem. The Story of Calvary. There was some muttering among the Priests with Moslem or Jewish or Mormon heritage, but it was quiet muttering, and quickly forgotten in the general rejoicing.

For who could complain? The King was coming. There was wine, food, and film, and Gaea was happy. What more could Pandemonium ask?

But then there was more.

About ten minutes before the King was due to arrive, just as the party was getting into full swing, Gaea winched herself to her feet, took four disbelieving steps, then pointed into the air and grinned in cinerama.

"She's coming!" Gaea shrieked in a voice that shattered the eyes of ten bolexes and an arri, and sent real creepshow horripilations down the spines of everybody within ten kilometers who had a spine worth creeping on.

"She's coming, she's coming, she's coining!" Gaea was jumping up and down now, which was good for seven or eight on anybody's Richter scale. The commissary collapsed and a klieg tree toppled. "It's Cirocco Jones. After twenty years, I've lured her to do combat."

So everyone strained their eyes, and soon a lumpy, ridiculous little transparent plane hissed into view and started to circle about a kilometer over their heads.

"Come down!" Gaea taunted. "Come down and fight, you ball-less wonder! Come down and eat your liver, you stinking traitor, you killer ... you of little faith! Come to me."

The plane just circled.

Gaea drew a deep breath and bellowed.

"He'll learn to love me, Cirocco."

Still nothing. People began to wonder if maybe Gaea hadn't made a mistake. Gaea had been telling them about Cirocco Jones for years. Surely she couldn't be as unimpressive as that.

Gaea began running around Pandemonium, picking up and hurling whatever came to hand: a boulder, an elephant, a popcorn popper, Brigham and five of his Robbers. The plane easily dodged them all.

Then it waggled its wings, dipped one, and dived. It leveled out at a hundred meters or so, and now the crazy thing had a full-throated roar. Hard to believe it could do anything, but still, to a flock of people who had seen at least four war movies a week for years the scene had a certain nervous familiarity. It had some of the flavor of those passes the F-86's took in The Bridges at Toko-Ri, or maybe more like a Jap Zero skittering down toward that big scow the Arizona in Tora! Tora! Tora! Or a hundred other air combat pictures where the plane moves in fast and hot and starts shooting, only in those pictures you mostly saw the action from the air, where everything bloomed up toward you in terrific technicolor, not from the ground, where in a few short seconds things were beyond belief.

The entire row of temples went up almost simultaneously. There would be a hypersonic streak of fire and the smart missiles would go right through the front door and boom, nothing but splinters and a mushroom of flame. The plane was strafing, too, but instead of going ka-chow ka-chow ka-chow and making little fountains of dirt in neat rows, these damn things twisted and turned and chased you, and went off like hand grenades when they hit.

Then Cirocco was turning, a racing turn, all she needed was a pylon, she must have been pulling twelve gees and was so low that if there'd been a field out there, she could not only have dusted the damn thing, she could have plowed it with her wingtip. So here she came again, faster than ever, strafing, firing more missiles, but starting farther back so everybody had time to see the sturm und drang coming at them. And she pulled up, almost vertical, rising higher and higher, and released three fat bombs, one, two, three, that kept rising as she pulled away, that went up until they were almost invisible, hung there, and started falling. There was no way she could have aimed them. It was supernatural, they said, it just couldn't be done, but they plopped right through the roofs of sound stages one, two, and three, just like that. One, two, three, and all of them were history.

The humans and humanoids were understandably terrified by all this action, but the photofauns were ecstatic. What footage! Riots developed at the camera mounts of copters, which would rise with five or six panaflexes clinging to their legs, twisting to find the shot. Most of them got glorious footage of missiles from the target's point of view, shots that had never been done before. It was a shame none of the raw stock survived to reach the projector.

By then Pandemonium was so choked in smoke it was hard to tell where she was going to come from next. They listened to the sound of her engines protesting, heard it grow louder. Then she was on them again. Liquid fire was spilling from the belly of the plane. It twisted in the air ... and, miraculously, fell a hundred meters from the carnage, in a semi-circle with Pandemonium at the center. Later, the survivors would agree it was impossible that had been a mistake. Jones had been too devilishly accurate for that. She had just been showing them she had it, and giving them something to think about for the next time. Most of them would spend a lot of time from then on, thinking about napalm.

Through it all Gaea stood. Solid as an oak. Great brows beetled as she watched the deadly gnat destroy everything around her. On the fourth pass she began to laugh. Somehow, it was more horrible than the sound of the bombs or the crackle of the flames.

Jones made a fifth pass-and for a moment Gaea stopped laughing as the Archives exploded. Twenty thousand film canisters became smoking debris. Ten thousand rare prints, many of them no longer replaceable. With one bomb Jones had wiped out two centuries of film history.

"Don't worry," Gaea shouted. "I have duplicates of most of them." The survivors, crouched under rubble and hearing Jones coming around for another pass, dimly realized that Gaea was reassuring them. She thought they felt the loss as acutely as she did, when in fact all of them would have traded every inch of film ever shot for the chance to get out of this nightmare. And again, Gaea laughed.

The plane was coming around one more time. Some of them sensed this would be the last run, and a few even managed to be curious enough to lift their heads and watch it.

Jones came in straight and level. She fired missiles in pairs, and every one streaked for Gaea-and turned aside at the last moment, missing her by inches. More and more of them came screaming by, to explode a hundred meters behind her. It began to look like a circus knife-throwing act as the projectiles went by her ankles, her arms, her ears, her knees. And still the plane kept coming on, and Gaea kept laughing.

A line of bullet holes appeared along Gaea's chest. She laughed louder. It sounded like Jones had ten heavy guns on that plane, and all of them opened up as she got closer. Gaea was rocked, bloodied, marked from her legs to her massive head.

And anybody could see she was unhurt.

The plane pulled up, climbed ... and kept climbing. At about three kilometers, when it was just a speck, it started circling again.

"I still won't hurt him, Cirocco!" Gaea shouted. Then she looked at herself, frowned, and turned to see a gaffer hanging on the back of her bullet-pocked chair.

"We'd better bring up the second unit," she told him. "And assemble my make-up crew. There's a lot of work to do."

The gaffer didn't move, and Gaea frowned, then tilted the chair and saw it was only half a gaffer.

So she strode off into the flames, shouting orders.

"Well," Cirocco finally said, much subdued. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

There had been none of the wild jubilation Conal and Nova had felt during their dogfight with the buzz bombs. Cirocco had more or less asked them all if she could do it, and they had all more or less agreed that she should. So she had gone about it with a cold intensity and thoroughness that left them all, including Cirocco, a bit shaken. Only during the last run, when she had fired on the monstrosity that called itself Gaea, had she felt the hatred boiling up inside her. The temptation to give it all she had, to pour firepower into the thing and hope against hope that she could blow it apart, had been tremendous. She wondered if the others understood why, in the end, she had settled for the show of force and the minor injuries.

Gaea would not be killed that way. She could sit on an atom bomb, be vaporized, and sprout again from the killing ground. Gaea was not immortal. She was over the hill, senile, growing madder every day. She couldn't last much longer ... only about another hundred millennia.

And it was Cirocco's job to kill her.

They all looked down at the blazing ruin that had been Pandemonium. Only one structure was left standing. There could be no doubt it was the "palace" the Snitch had spoken of, made of gold and platinum. Adam would be installed there, probably in a solid-gold crib, with goose-egg diamonds for marbles.

"Why didn't you just take her out?" Conal asked, quietly.

"You still don't understand her," Cirocco said. "If I'd destroyed the palace, or killed Gaea, the deathangel would just have flown on, too low for us to catch Adam. He'd have kept flying until he fell apart, and Adam would die."

"I don't get it," Conal confessed. "She said come down and fight. Well, you gave her a fight. What does she expect? Does she want you to land and arm-wrestle with her?"

"Conal, my old friend... I don't know. That may be exactly what she wants. I have the feeling that ... "

"What?" Conal prompted.

"She wants me to walk up to her with a sword in my hand."

"I don't buy it," Conal said. "I mean... Jesus, this sounds completely crazy. I guess it's because I can't find the right words. 'Fair play' isn't it, but she has ... something. Not all the time, and not in any sane way, but from what you've told me about her I'd think she'd even it out a little more than that. I just don't think that she wouldn't leave you any chance."

Cirocco sighed.

"I don't either. And Gaby says-" she cut herself off quickly when she saw Robin giving her an odd look. "Anyway, Gaea won't tell me what she wants, except to come and fight. I'm supposed to figure it out."

It got quiet again and they all looked out over the carnage. Human beings had died down there, and innocent animals. The humans were in the service of evil, if not evil themselves, and Cirocco did not regret killing them. But she took no pleasure in it and did not feel proud of herself.

"I think I'm gonna be sick," Nova said.

"I'm sorry, kid," Cirocco said. "The head's all the way in back."

"Don't be sorry," Nova shouted, close to tears. "I wanted you to kill them, every last one! I loved it when you were killing them. I just... I just have a weak stomach, that's all." She sobbed, and looked imploringly at Cirocco.

"And don't call me kid," she whispered, and fled to the back of the plane.

There was a short, uncomfortable silence, which Chris broke.

"If you want my opinion," he said, "I sort of wish you hadn't done it." He got up and followed Nova.

"Well, I'm glad you did it," Robin said, hotly. "I only wish you'd spent more time shooting at Gaea. Great Mother, what a disgusting thing."

Cirocco barely heard her. Something was nagging at her, something that didn't feel right. Chris wasn't usually critical of her actions. He had a perfect right to be, of course, but he just usually wasn't.

Then, when she thought about it, he hadn't actually been critical... .

"Chris," she began, turning in her seat. "What did you-"

"It's probably going to make things rough," he said. He waved a hand at them and shrugged apologetically. "Somebody's got to look after him," he said, and pulled the door open.

"No!" Cirocco shouted, and lunged at him. It was too late. He was out, and the door slammed shut. She could only watch in horrified fascination as his chute opened and he glided toward Pandemonium.

Chris and Adam touched the ground within a minute of each other.