Demon

SECOND FEATURE

I was always an independent, even when I had partners.

-Sam Goldwyn

ONE

The zombies were in separate pens, in a row, each about twenty meters from its nearest neighbor.

Cirocco didn't want to ask, but she knew she had to.

"Were these ... already dead?"

"No, Captain," Valiha said.

"What were they doing?"

Valiha told her. It made her feel a little better. Slavery was an ancient evil from which the human race might never be free, in one form or another.

Still, Valiha's remark about reading them their rights and giving them fair trials hurt. It hurt because there were no such things in Gaea, and without some kind of rules the human animal seemed capable of anything-including killing eleven men at random. Cirocco was not so foolish as to mourn them. But she was very tired of killing, or of ordering men to be killed. She felt it could become too easy. She did not wish to play God.

She only wanted to be left alone. She wanted to be accountable to herself, and no one else. She longed for total privacy, for about twenty years all by herself to drag out her scarred soul and try to wash the sin from it. She no longer liked the smell of this being called Cirocco Jones.

The urge to jump out of the plane and follow Chris to what would be certain death had been overwhelming. Nova, Robin, and Conal had barely been able to restrain her.

She still didn't know if the urge had been toward suicide, or if she had been so consumed with rage she felt able to fight Gaea toe-to-toe. She had felt rage and despair in about equal portions. It would be so nice to be done.

But now she had another battle to fight.

Maybe it would be the last.

The zombies shuffled aimlessly. She fought the sickness that came over her, and conquered it, but not before Valiha noticed.

"You shouldn't feel responsible," the Titanide sang. "This was not your deed."

"I know it."

"It is not your world. It is not ours, either, but we feel no compunction in ridding it of animals like these."

"I know, Valiha. I know. Say no more of this to me," she sang.

It was true these men had deserved death. But with a primitive and illogical certainty, Cirocco felt that no one deserved this, She had thought the buzz bombs the worst things ever created, until Gaea conceived the zombies. Suddenly, buzz bombs were like high-spirited kittens.

"What are you saying?" Nova asked. Cirocco glanced at her. The child looked a little green, but was holding up well. Cirocco didn't fault her; zombies were hard to take.

"Just discussing ... capital punishment. Never mind. You don't have to be here, you know."

"I want to see them die."

Again, Cirocco was not surprised. Nova had demonstrated a talent for fighting, but little taste for blood. Cirocco approved of that. But zombies were something else entirely. She didn't know Nova's motives, though she suspected they had something to do with a creature that wouldn't die clumping inexorably toward her. As for Cirocco, she felt killing a zombie was a genuinely humane act.

"Let's get to it," she said. "Move the first one into the chamber."

Rocky and Hornpipe attached a rope to the cage and dragged it down a primitive road to a garage-like structure about a kilometer away. It had a few windows, a ladder leading to the roof and a trapdoor up there, and had been made reasonably air-tight. They loaded the cage into the structure and sealed the doors behind it. Hornpipe checked the wind and pronounced it to be within acceptable limits.

The problem was to find out what had killed the zombies with such startling efficiency. It seemed unlikely that all the ingredients of Nova's love potion were necessary.

There were a lot of questions. She hoped some of them never had to be answered, but knew from bitter experience that Gaea often had practical jokes built into things that, at first, looked wonderful.

There was blood in the recipe. Did it have to be of a particular type? There was pubic hair in it. Would Nova's scalp hair have worked as well? Would only blonde pubic hair work, or any pubic hair?

It might be worse than that. Gaea planned ahead in some things. Nova was planned. She was the daughter of Chris and Robin, but not in the conventional way. Gaea could have planned even more finely. It might turn out that only Nova's blood and Nova's pubic hair would do the trick.

She hadn't gotten around to telling Nova that yet.

The first part was easy. Cirocco climbed the ladder, opened the hatch on top, and dumped in a measured amount of benzoin-what Nova had called "benjamin." She went back down and everyone clustered around the windows.

The zombie took no notice.

"Okay," Cirocco said. "Air it out, and then let's try the cubeb."

TWO

Conal stood in water up to his chest and watched Robin churning by with a lot more enthusiasm than grace. He grinned. Lord, but she was a worker. If she'd only relax a little, ease into it, forget about trying to set speed records and just let her powerful little body take over... .

The lessons had started soon after their return. Robin had said she would never again find herself in a tight spot because she couldn't swim, and Conal had found himself elected to teach.

It was okay with him. He was only an adequate swimmer himself, and no kind of teacher at all, but he could stand in the water and show her, and catch her when she started to sink, and that seemed to be enough. He looked beyond Robin, out where the water was deep and swift, and saw Nova moving along with about as much effort as a seal. He wished he could take some pride in that, but the fact was that there are people born to the water, and she was one of them. It was funny it had taken her eighteen years to discover that. Now she was twice the swimmer he would ever be.

But she couldn't seem to impart any of it to her mother. Conal saw Robin floundering again, and pushed off. He was beside her in a few strokes. She was floating on her back, gasping.

"I'm okay," she said. "At least I've got this part down."

"You're getting better."

"No need to lie about it, Conal. I'm never going to be good at this."

He brought her in closer and they got their feet on the ground. Nova zipped by them and clambered across the narrow beach to stand, dripping, sleek and shiny, shaking the water from her short blonde hair. She bent to grab a towel and rubbed it vigorously over her head.

"I'll meet you back at the house," she said, and walked down the beach.

Conal looked away from her, to Robin, and saw she was looking at him.

"She's a hunk, isn't she," Robin said, quietly.

"I guess I was staring ... "

"Don't be bashful. I may be her mother, but I can appreciate a hunk when I see it."

"The funny thing is," Conal admitted, "I wasn't really looking at her as a girl. I mean, not sexually. I've been swimming with you two almost every day, you know, so I'm used to looking at her. She's just such an incredibly healthy animal. She sort of glows."

Robin was giving him a skeptical eye, so he played the role she expected, acting abashed and shaking his head as if caught in a lie. But it was a funny thing, and it was true. He could be around a naked Nova all day long and never have a sexual thought about her. There were attainable dreams and there were impossible dreams, and Nova was always and forever the latter. It was too bad, but there it was. So now they were working cautiously toward a mutual respect that was still just shy of true friendship, and he liked that just fine.

And it didn't interfere at all with his appreciation of her stupendous beauty. A world couldn't be all bad if it contained such a creature.

So then wasn't it just like him, he thought, to be felled in the midst of his pride by suddenly and unaccountably becoming uncomfortably aware of Robin as a woman.

Well, it was her own fault. She shouldn't have brought it up.

They waded ashore and dried themselves on the fluffy white towels from the Junction. Conal kept stealing glances at her. She sat on a big smooth rock and carefully dried between her toes, fastidious as a cat.

She sure didn't look forty. She looked ... thirtyish, he supposed, but at the low end. But age was a funny thing. You could be twenty-eight and a pasty, lumpy, draggle-tailed thing. Or you could be fifty-five with a firm, flat belly and the glow of health and laugh-wrinkles around your eyes.

Like the hair. Shaved off high and unnatural around one ear, the one that was centered in the odd pentagonal design. A real fright when you first saw it, but as time went by it was somehow right for her.

Like the snakes. Now there was something to put a guy off, those snakes coiling around one leg and one arm, one fat loop going under her breasts, and the heads facing each other. But when you'd seen it a few times, it was just Robin. More than that, it was a pretty thing in itself.

"Do you have a will?" he asked, rubbing his hair vigorously.

"A will? Oh, you mean for when I die. It wouldn't do much good in here, would it. No covens-or courts of law; whatever they have on Earth."

"I guess not. But when you die, those ought to be saved."

She grinned up at him.

"Like the snakes, do you? I wouldn't mind being skinned and tanned, when it's all over." She stood up, facing him. "Touch them, Conal."

"What do you-"

"Just touch them. Please." She held out her hand, and he took it.

Hesitantly, wondering if she was playing some kind of joke on him, he touched the end of the snake with his finger. It coiled three times around her pinky, so he traced that with a fingertip. It grew a little fatter as it crossed the back of her hand, then made three more loops around her forearm. He touched lightly along its length. Then three times around her upper arm. She turned and he drew his hand over her shoulder and down between her shoulder-blades, and she lifted her naked arm-the one without a tattoo-and kept turning beneath his hand until she faced him again, and he drew his fingertips up over her breast, down between the two of them, underneath, and then opened his palm and cupped the breast. She looked down at the hand. She was breathing deeply and evenly.

"Now the other," she said.

So he went down on one knee and touched her foot. The snake's tail started on the small toe. It made S-turns along the top of her foot, coiled around her ankle and looped twice around her calf. He traced it out, going slowly, feeling the firm, clever muscles beneath the skin, which was absolutely smooth. Her other leg, he noticed, had very fine hairs.

The snake swelled around her thigh. He traced it faithfully, reaching around her when it was out of sight. Then she turned again, and his hand went over her hip, across a buttock, and up her back once more. She lifted her arm and he reached under it and cupped her other breast from behind. He held it for a moment, then let go.

She turned and smiled sadly at him. Then she took his hand, lacing her fingers through his, and they walked side-by-side up the beach. For a long time he felt strangely content not to say anything. But the feeling couldn't last forever.

"Why?" he finally asked.

"I've been asking myself that question. I wonder if you've found a better answer than I did."

"Is it ... was it a sex thing?" Conal, he told himself, you are the soul of subtlety. Just take all your little problems to Conal, girls. He'll stomp through them with his hob-nail boots.

"Maybe. Maybe not as simple as that. I think I just wanted to be touched. Deliberately. You've touched me while you teach me to swim, and it wasn't the same ... but it disturbed me, how good it felt."

Conal thought it over.

"I'll rub your back for you. I know how."

She smiled at him. Her eyes were bright with tears, but she didn't look at all like she was about to cry. It was odd.

"Would you? I'd like that."

Again there was a time of silence. Conal could see the stairs leading up to the Junction, and was sorry they were there. He wished the beach were longer. He liked holding her hand.

"I've been ... very unhappy most of my life," she said, quietly. He glanced at her. She was watching her own bare feet pad through the sand.

"I haven't had a lover for about two years now. When I was a girl I had a new lover every week, like girls do. But none of them could stand me for long. After I came back from Gaea, I wanted one woman to live my life with. I found three of them, and the longest one lasted a year. So I decided I just wasn't cut out for pair-bonding. In the last five years I didn't make love because it felt good-it felt awful, once the sweaty part was over-but because it felt so bad not to make love. I finally gave that up and just went without sex entirely."

"It sounds ... awful," Conal said.

They were at the foot of the stairs. Conal started to go up, but Robin stopped, still holding his hand. He turned.

"Awful?" A tear went down her cheek, and she wiped it away with her free hand. "I don't miss the sex that much. What I miss is being touched. Being hugged. Holding somebody in my arms. Since Adam's been gone ... there hasn't been anyone to touch me."

She kept looking up at him, and he felt more nervous than he had felt since his first month on the weights. Conal was not awkward around women, but this one and her daughter were different, and it went beyond the fact that they were lesbians.

She squeezed his hand tightly, so he thought what the hell, and put his arms around her and turned his head slightly to kiss her. He saw her lips parting, then she turned her head away so he started to let go of her, but she had her arms around him by then, so he put his hands on her back in what he hoped was a fatherly way, and she started to move her hips against him, slowly, and press dry lips to his neck. All in all, it was about as gracefully done as two ten-year-olds paying forfeits on a game of spin-the-bottle, but when all the adjustments were made they were pressed close together from knees to shoulders, and Conal could feel her tears trickling over his chest. She was holding him tightly, and he nuzzled the top of her head while running his hands up and down the smooth curves of her back.

Several times he tried to gently break away, but she kept holding him. After a while he didn't try anymore, and was beginning to entertain some wild notions. That was just in his mind; the rest of him was far ahead, to his consternation and embarrassment.

At last she wiped her eyes and moved a few inches away, keeping her hands lightly on his hips.

"Uh ... Robin, I don't know how much you know-"

"Enough," she said, glancing down between them. "You don't need to apologize for him. I know your friend down there leads his own life, and that a touch is enough to excite him. And that he may respond in spite of your own feelings in the matter."

"Ah ... actually, he and I are usually in pretty good agreement."

She laughed, and hugged him again, then looked up solemnly.

"You know it couldn't work, of course."

"Yeah. I know that."

"We're too different. I'm too old."

"You're not too old."

"Believe me, I am. Perhaps you shouldn't give me that back rub. It might be too difficult for you."

"Maybe I shouldn't."

She looked at him wistfully, then started up the stairs. She stopped, stood very still for a moment, then came back to stand on the last step. It put her on his level. She put her hands on his cheeks and kissed him. Her tongue darted around his lips, then she moved back and slowly dropped her hands.

"I'll be in my room for about an hour," she said. "If you're smart, you'll probably stay down here." She turned, and he watched the snakes play over her bare back as she mounted the steps, until she was out of sight. He turned and sat on the steps.

He spent a maddening ten minutes, getting up and sitting down again. No matter what, he couldn't go into the house in this condition. Rational thought was what was called for.

It was a situation that demanded cooling off. She was completely right. It could never work out. And once would be silly, she said that herself. Once wasn't enough with her, and once was all it could ever be with him. An experiment, and bound to turn out badly.

He looked up the stairs again. He could still see her trim backside.

"Well," he sighed, "it's been a long time since anybody accused me of being smart." He looked down at his lap.

"You knew it all along, didn't you?"

THREE

Valiha sat atop the hill overlooking Tuxedo Junction, near the wide scorch on the ground. Already, plants were sprouting in the ashes, growing around the white bones. Soon the place would be hard to find.

There were several human skulls. One was much smaller than the others.

Her hands were busy. She had begun with a broad, weathered plank and an assortment of carving tools. The thing was almost finished now, but she was only peripherally aware of it. Her hands worked, unguided. Her mind was far away. Titanides did not sleep except as infants, but they did go into a state of lessened awareness for periods of two or three revs. It was a dreamtime, a time when the mind could rove far and wide, into the past, into places it did not really want to go.

She relived her time with Chris. She tasted again the bitterness of him, the alien craving so deep in his soul that would deny her sharing her own body with those others she loved, the awful, extended goodbye-time when he had turned from wonderful-crazy to worms-in-the-head-crazy, the slow regaining of trust and the knowledge that it would probably never be the way it was. She touched once more her deep love for him, unchanged and unchangeable.

She thought of Bellinzona. The humans were sterilizing their home planet. To do this, they used weapons beyond her comprehension, weapons that could turn Hyperion into glowing glass. She had a thought she would not have entertained while awake. If she had one of those weapons, she would use it to sterilize Bellinzona. Many worthy people would die and that would be a shameful thing. But surely the good of such a deed would outweigh the evil. The wheel was her home. These visitors were a cancer eating out the heart of the wheel. There were good humans, certainly. But it seemed that if you got enough together in one place, an evil thing grew.

She thought it over again, and knew the people on Earth must be thinking the same thought. "This is not a good thing I do, but the good outweighs the evil. It is regrettable that innocents are killed... "

Valiha reluctantly gave up all thought of sterilizing Bellinzona. She would have to continue as she and other Titanides had been doing for many kilorevs now, battling the cancer cell by cell.

With that thought, Valiha passed from dream-time into real time, and noticed she had finished her project. She held it up to the light and surveyed it critically.

It was not the first time she had made one of these things. She didn't have a name for them. Titanides had never buried their dead. They simply threw them into the river Ophion and let the waters take them. They raised no memorials.

Titanides had no god but Gaea. They did not love her, but believing in her was not an article of faith. Gaea was as real as syphilis.

Titanides did not expect an afterlife. Gaea had told them there was no such thing, and they had no reason to doubt her. So they had no rituals for it.

But Valiha knew it was different for humans. She had watched the burial rites in Bellinzona. Always pragmatic, she was not prepared to say the rites were worthless. And she had thirteen bodies, all unidentified, with no way of telling what any of them might have believed out of the Babel of Earthly cults. What was a conscientious being to do?

Her response was the carving. Each one had been different, a sort of free-association of Valiha's incomplete understanding of human totems. This one had a cross on it, and a crown of thorns. There was a hammer and sickle, a crescent moon, a star of David, and a mandala. There was also an image of Mick ey Mouse, a television screen displaying the CBS eye, a swastika, a human hand, a pyramid, a bell, and the word SONY. Across the top was the most mystic symbol of all, which had been written on Ringmaster: the NASA logo.

It seemed good to her. The television eye was centered over the pyramid. It reminded her of another symbol that might go well: the letter S with two vertical slashes through it.

She shrugged, stood, and placed the sharpened end of the plaque on the ground. With her left fore-hoof she hammered it until it was firmly planted. She kicked the skulls until they were grouped around the plaque, then glanced at the sky. That didn't work, Gaea was up there, and Gaea was not worth speaking to. So she looked around her at the world she loved.

"Whoever or whatever you may be," she sang, "you might want to take these departed human souls to your breast. I don't know anything about them except one was very young. The others were, for a time, zombies in the service of Luther, an evil thing, no longer human. No matter what they may have done in life, they must have started out innocent, as do we all, so don't be too hard on them. It was your fault for making them human, which was a dirty trick. If you are out there somewhere, you ought to be ashamed of yourself."

She had not expected an answer, and she didn't get one.

Valiha knelt again and picked up her woodworking tools, placing them in her pouch. She kicked at the wood shavings and took one last look around the peaceful scene. She wondered once more why she did it.

She was about to head back to the Junction, but saw Rocky coming up the path toward her, so she waited for him. Thinking back, she realized she had come to a decision about his proposal during her dream-time.

He joined her and looked at her handywork without saying anything. He stood in solemn silence for a time, as he had seen humans do at graveyards, then faced Valiha.

"It has been one thousand revs," he sang.

One kilorev, Valiha thought. Forty-two Earth days with Adam and Chris captive in Pandemonium.

"I have decided," she sang. "I have concluded there is no good time to bring new life into the world." His eyes fell, then he looked up again with a glimmer of hope. She smiled at him, and kissed his lips.

"There never will be a good time, so to do it anyway is a gesture that appeals to me. And to do it in this age, without Gaea's approval, appeals to me even more. May his life be long and interesting."

"The humans," Rocky sang, "sometimes use those very words as a curse."

"I know. They also say 'break a leg' to bring good luck. I don't believe in curses or in luck, and I can't imagine wanting life to be short and boring."

"Humans are crazy, it is well known."

"Speak not of humans. Speak to me with thy body."

She came into his arms and they pressed close together and began to kiss. It was interrupted by the clanking of Valiha's tools in her pouch. They laughed, and she put them aside, and resumed the kiss.

It was stage one of frontal intercourse. Though not as formalized as posterior intercourse, there was much of ritual about it. To warm up they would mount each other, and do it three or four more times during the course of their more serious lovemaking.

They had an interesting five revs ahead of them.

FOUR

Cirocco sat in the deep forest, twenty kilometers from the Junction. She had built a small fire five revs earlier. It was still burning brightly. The logs did not seem to be consumed.

Miracle.

One kilorev. One thousand hours since Adam had been taken.

"What have you learned?"

She looked up, saw Gaby's face beyond the dancing flames. She relaxed, letting her shoulders slump.

"We've learned to make a poisonous gas that kills zombies," she said. "But we learned that a long time ago."

It had turned out that any blood would do, even Titanide blood. But it had to be pubic hair, and it had to be from a human. The good news was that not much was needed. One hair could serve to make a pound of the stuff. Other than that, omitting even one ingredient from Nova's brew ruined the whole batch.

There were Titanides at work preparing bushels of it.

"What else have you learned?"

Cirocco thought about it.

"I have friends watching Pandemonium. From a safe distance. They told me about the latest move, to the base of the southern highlands. Nova and Robin have learned how to swim. They're teaching Conal some things he didn't know about fighting. I'm teaching them to fly."

She sighed, and rubbed her forehead with her hand.

"I know Chris and Adam are alive and are not being harmed. I know Robin is having strange thoughts about Conal. I know Nova still feels the same way about me, since she tried to follow me here. She's getting better at it. I know she's also coming around to the idea that Titanides are worth associating with. She's pretty much accepted Conal.

"And I know I need a drink worse than I have in twenty years."

Gaby reached out, through the flames. Her hand seemed to burn, and Cirocco gasped and shrank away from her. She stared at the indistinct face, and saw Gaby's bewilderment.

"Oh," Gaby said, and drew her hand back. "I guess that must have looked pretty awful to you. I didn't see the fire."

Didn't see the fire, Cirocco thought, and an image sprang into her mind. It was something she had never seen with her own eyes, but it had walked through her dreams for two decades. Gaby, one side of her face and most of her body blackened and cracking open ...

"You didn't see the fire," Cirocco muttered, shaking her head.

"Don't ask too many questions," Gaby warned.

"I can't help it, Gaby. I can't make it fit around anything I believe in. You're like... the mysterious spirit in a fairy tale. You speak in riddles. I never understood why the spirits in those stories couldn't just come out with it. Why all the dire warnings, and the fragments and hints about things that are so dreadfully important?"

"Cirocco, my only love ... nobody wants to help you more than I do. If I could, I'd tell you everything I know, from point A right through to point Z, just like a NASA debriefing. I can't do that. There is a very good reason why I can't ... and I can't tell you that reason."

"Can't you hint at it?"

Gaby's eyes got very distant.

"Ask your questions quickly."

"Uh ... Gaea watches you?"

"No. She watches for me."

Christ, Cirocco thought. It's all or nothing, but stop complaining.

"Does she know you ... come to me?"

"No. Hurry, I can't do this much longer."

"Is there a way to ... "

"To defeat her? Yes. Reject the obvious answers. You must ... "

She stopped, and began to fade away. But her eyes were squeezed shut and her fists were clenched at her temples, and her image began to strengthen again. Cirocco felt the short hairs standing up on the back of her neck.

"It's better if you don't ask questions. Or not too many. Since she got Adam, her attention is with him most of the time."

Gaby rubbed her eyes with her knuckles, blinked, then leaned back on her arms and stretched her feet out. It was only then Cirocco saw the fire was out. Not only out, but long dead, nothing but crumbling ashes. Gaby moved her heels through the ashes.

"If not for her madness, Gaea would be invulnerable. There would be nothing you could do. But, because she is mad, she takes chances. Because she is mad, she approaches reality as a game.

"She operates by rules. The rule book came from her old movies, and from television, and from fairy stories and myths.

"The most important thing you must realize is that she is not the good guy. She knows this, and prefers it that way. Does that suggest anything to you?"

Cirocco was sure it ought to, but had been so intent on listening that the question surprised her. She frowned, chewed on her lips, and hoped she didn't sound like a fool.

"... the good guys always win," she said.

"Exactly. Which doesn't mean you are going to win, because it hasn't yet been established, by her rules, that you are the good guys. If you lose, it would be at least two decades before another challenger could arise."

"Are you talking about Adam?" Cirocco asked.

"Yes. He is the next possible hero. Gaea has him waiting in the wings, ready for you to stumble. But his task would be horribly difficult. She plans to make him love her. He would first have to fight that, before he could get around to fighting Gaea. That's why Chris was permitted to live. He will function as Adam's conscience. But Gaea will kill him when Adam is six or seven years old. That, too, is part of the game."

They were silent for a time, as Cirocco digested it all. She felt a deep urge to protest, but she swallowed it. She remembered her words to Conal. You expected a fair fight?

"So far, you're going at it the wrong way. You have been given powers that you don't seem to wish to acknowledge. You accept the physical powers easily enough, but the others are stronger."

Gaby began to list things on her fingers.

"You have many more allies than Gaea. There are those above, and those below. Some will come to your aid when you least expect it. You have a spy in the enemy camp. Use Snitch, and trust what he has to say.

"You have a guardian angel, of sorts." Gaby grinned, and jerked a thumb toward her chest. "Me. I will do all I can to stack the outcome in your favor. I'll tell you all I can... but don't expect timely warnings. Rely on me for deep background. Think of me as a mole."

Gaby waited while Cirocco absorbed that.

"Remember, it's better to wait until you feel right about it than to rush into something. Now. If you would ... touch me-" Gaby coughed and looked away, and Cirocco realized she was close to tears. She started to get up.

"No, no, you stay there. Nothing sexy, nothing like that. But I can maintain contact with you a bit longer if we touch. Just move forward a little."

Cirocco did, until her bare feet were in the ashes with Gaby's. Gaby sat with her chin on her knees, and they held hands, and she told Cirocco a story.

FIVE

Robin watched Conal get up, open the door, and leave.

Rather abrupt, she thought, but she hadn't asked for anything else. They had used each other for their own purposes. Still, he could have said good-bye.

Then he was back, carrying the old jacket he had worn when they'd met him in Bellinzona, and which he had been wearing less and less in the days since the kidnapping of Adam. He rooted around in one of the pockets and came up with a long, fat cigar, the kind he had smoked constantly before and seldom did now. Come to think of it, he had gone through a lot of changes from the time she had first met him.

"Can I have one of those?" Robin asked.

Conal had clamped his in his teeth and now he gave her a sideways look. But he took another from his pocket and tossed it to her.

"You're not gonna like that," he said, as he sat on the bed and leaned back against the gigantic pillows heaped against the headboard.

"They smell good," Robin said. "I always liked the smell."

"Smelling 'em's one thing, smoking 'em's another." He bit the end off his, so she followed suit, then he struck a match and took a long time getting it going. The air filled with bluish, aromatic smoke. "Just whatever you do, don't inhale it," he said, and held a match for her.

She sucked on the bitten-off end, and in a few seconds she was coughing. He took the cigar from her and patted her on the back until her breath returned, then ground hers out in an ashtray.

"Pretty foul, huh?" he said.

"Maybe I can just take a few puffs on yours."

"Anything you want, Robin. You're calling the shots."

"Am I?"

He turned and looked at her, and she was surprised to see he was nervous and apologetic.

"Listen, I'm sorry I couldn't do better. I tried, honest, but after a while there's not much I can do but-"

"What are you talking about? You did fine."

His eyes narrowed.

"But you didn't come."

"Conal, Conal ... " She turned and put an arm over his chest and a leg over his loins, and snuggled fiercely into the hollow of his neck. She spoke into his ear.

"I never expected to. Think back. Did I seem to be enjoying myself?"

"Yes," he admitted.

"Then you did fine. I didn't expect an orgasm. Frankly, I still don't see how it's possible, that way. The design of the bodies is all wrong. The act doesn't seem designed to satisfy the female."

"It can," he said. "Take my word for it. You just have to get used to it, that's all. And I have to learn ... "

He trailed off, and they searched each other's eyes. He gave a fatalistic shrug and leaned back against the pillows. Robin did the same.

It was a hot day. Both of their bodies gleamed with sweat. Robin felt great. There was a boneless warmth in her that made her body hum. It had been so long since she had felt it. She put her hands behind her head and looked down at herself, and at him. Moving one of her bare feet to touch his leg, she compared her foot with his. So different, yet the same basic design. It was the same with the legs. Then the loins, so totally different. Her compact, tidy arrangement, his ... flamboyant, exuberant, external softnesses, lying there smug and exhausted and damp from her.

She never had found it ugly, even when erect. It looked so vulnerable-and was, as she had learned long ago during an unfortunate episode with Chris.

She tried to imagine her head sitting where his was. What would it be like, to look at oneself and see that? Try as she might, she could go no further than the fear she thought he must always feel. She felt she would have to walk crouched over, eternally alert for an attack, pitifully exposed. His was a nakedness she could never feel. She thanked the Great Mother she had been blessed to be born a woman.

"You know what I liked?" she said, suddenly.

"What?"

"Your penis is so little. When I did it with Chris, it was uncomfortable, because he's so much bigger than you, but the first time I ... "

She became aware that he was shaking, and glanced at him. His face was screwed up and he seemed to have trouble breathing, then he looked at her, tried to say something, and burst out laughing.

It was one of those laughs that are very hard to get under control. It was infectious, up to a point-Robin laughed with him for a while, but before long she felt that special insecurity that comes from not getting the joke, not knowing if you are being laughed at. Finally he settled down with a case of the hiccups.

"Did I say something wrong?" she asked, icily.

"Robin, all I'm going to say is thank you. I'll accept the compliment in the spirit it was offered."

"I'm afraid that's not going to be enough, Conal."

He sighed. "No, I guess it wouldn't be. I guess I'll have to explain it." He looked up at the ceiling. "Oh, Great Mother, give me strength."

It was so unexpected that Robin laughed.

"What in the world made you say that?"

"I don't know. I guess I've heard Nova say it enough times when she was up against this or that bit of cultural gap. And I had the feeling She was the only one who might understand."

Robin waited patiently as he wiped his eye and held his breath, trying to banish the hiccups.

"It's stupid, Robin, okay? It's one of those things where you gotta laugh or cry. Not many years ago, I'd have been insulted. Thank god I've grown up a little bit since then."

So he explained it to her, and he was right, it was stupid. She was certainly no expert on the matter, but knew it was something that could only be important to a man. She wondered if it was tied up in their vulnerability, if they thought that, somehow, having a big penis would help. But he said logic had nothing to do with it He wondered if there might be any parallels in Coven society. She couldn't think of any. He told her that, on Earth, breast size was often important in a woman's sense of herself.

"Not in the Coven," Robin said. "I'm sorry, but-"

"No, no, no. I told you, I knew it was an honest compliment. It just broke me up that ... you know."

She thought she did, and it made her sad.

"It's just another example of why it couldn't work between us, Conal."

He sobered, looked at her, and nodded, reluctantly.

"I guess you're right."

She hugged him again, and it felt good to be held close in return.

"I want to thank you for ... for the comfort," she said.

"It was entirely my pleasure, ma'am. Sorry to say."

She laughed, but knew he really was disturbed that he had failed to bring her to orgasm.

"I want you to know that I really like you, Conal."

"I like you, too, Robin."

He turned onto his back again. He puffed on his cigar, and Robin watched the blue clouds of smoke rising toward the ceiling. She lazily moved her bare foot up and down against his leg. He moved his leg so he could touch her foot with his, and they played a silly game with their toes, laughed quietly, and were still again.

Then Conal tossed his cigar out the window, raised himself on one elbow, and leaned over to kiss her nipple. He grinned at her.

"So. You ready to do it again?"

"I thought you'd never ask."

SIX

Nova had hated being in Gaea for a long time. The turning point had been quite recent; now she was having more fun than at a Black Sabbath.

Swimming had started it. Swimming was a sensual delight she had never dreamed possible. It was better than all other sports put together; not even in the same league, really.

It would have been dreadful to have lived and never learned how to swim.

Then there was flying. She had soared in the Coven, but it was not the same thing. The raw power and infinite flexibility of the Dragonflys was a delight. She had taken to it quickly, though she doubted she would ever be as good as Conal.

And last but not least, there was Titanide riding.

At first they seemed dull as elevators. When you sat on one, you were hardly aware you were moving, so smooth was their gait. And while they walked along at a pretty good clip, it was not what you'd call speedy.

The important thing, she had found, was to find the right Titanide.

Now she clung to the broad back of the one called Virginal (Mixolydian Quartet) Mazurka, a two-year-old female, and out-raced the wind. It had been as simple as that, really. She had been under the mistaken impression that all Titanides were adults, since they were all about the same size. It had been a shock to learn Virginal was only two, and a pleasure to learn she still had a streak of recklessness. With Cirocco Jones gone so much of the time since Adam's kidnapping, Nova had spent every spare moment-when not swimming or learning to fly-on Virginal's back. Together, they had seen most of Dione south of the Ophion.

They were moving along the edge of the forest in the area where the trees thinned and the land rose slowly toward the towering ramparts of the southern highlands. Nova wore her riding clothes. Conal had called them Robin Hood clothes. They were made of supple green leather and covered her completely, leaving only her face bare. There were brown boots and gloves of the same material, and a green cocked hat with a white plume.

Virginal vaulted a fallen tree and for a moment Nova was weightless, holding on with her heels pressed to the Titanide's side and her hands clutching the swept-back arms. They came down, and Nova bounced up to stand lightly on the jouncing back, looking over Virginal's shoulder as they swept down a steep riverbank leading to one of four tributaries of the river Briareus. It was delicious; a controlled fall with the Titanide's hooves touching only here and there, with a noisy parade of small rocks, loose dirt, and boulders bouncing all around them but unable to keep up with Virginal's headlong plunge. The wind was raw and chilly and whipped at Nova's hair.

At the bottom, Virginal slowed when her hooves crashed into the water. There was a shower of spray, then only the slow clop-clop of her hooves on the rocky bank.

"Enough, golden one," Virginal gasped. Nova clapped the Titanide on her shoulder, and leaped to dry ground. She wouldn't have admitted it, but she needed a rest, too. Staying on the Titanide's back was almost as strenuous as running.

There would have been no hope of staying there at all without a lot of help from Virginal. A dozen times in a mile she would feel herself slipping from her bareback perch, only to be hauled back into place by a strong hand, or to feel the back shift beneath her just enough to nudge her back into precarious balance. A Titanide's sense of its load was almost supernatural. Nova suspected Virginal could run at a gallop with a dozen full wine glasses on her back, and never spill a drop.

She threw herself down on a broad, flat rock, rolled over, and looked up at the yellow sky.

Not such a bad place, after all. Of course, just to the left of the patch of sky was the incomprehensible depth of the Dione spoke, but there was too much haze to see it clearly. That was fine with Nova.

She looked at the Titanide, who had unbound her hair and was kneeling in the icy stream. Virginal ducked her head under the water, then whipped her torso erect, making a fine thick arc of crystalline water. Her hair was glossy brown, streaked with emerald green, and over a meter long. It hit her back with a slap, and Virginal shook her head vigorously, producing a shower that left water streaming down her flanks. Her breath was making puffs of steam. Nova thought she was beautiful.

Virginal was one of the hairy Titanides. All of her body but the palms of her hands and her face was covered with the kind of hair found on horses. Only on her scalp did it grow long, just as on a human. The hair was zebra-striped in green and brown. Her face was brown. Standing still on the edge of a forest, Virginal was almost invisible.

Nova knew wildlife mostly from nature films, and from the Coven's small zoo. She had seen films of humans riding horses, including some stories of young girls who were crazy about them. The Coven zoo had five horses. Nova had never been much impressed by them, but now wondered if that was because no one was allowed to ride them.

The thought disturbed her. She was making progress in seeing Titanides as humans... or people, as Conal would put it. It was hard to reconcile with the image of a dumb animal. But she suspected that, had she been born on Earth, she would have been an avid horsewoman. And watching Virginal cooling off in the water inevitably brought to mind the nature films. When winded, Virginal snorted like a horse, her wide nostrils flaring. As Nova watched, Virginal did a startling Titanide trick. She inhaled water through her nose-as much as two or three gallons of it-and then turned to spray it explosively over her flanks.

There were three faint musical notes, and Nova saw Virginal reach into her pouch-another totally alien thing-and pull out something called a radio seed. The Titanide sang to it briefly, then listened. Nova heard it singing back. Virginal trotted out of the water and shook herself like a dog.

"Was that Cirocco?" Nova asked.

"Yes. She wanted to know where we are."

"Is there anything wrong?"

"She did not say so. She wishes to know if you would accompany her on a short journey."

"Accompany ... where's she going?"

"She did not say."

Nova jumped to her feet.

"I don't care. Great Mother! Tell her yes! Tell her I'll be there-"

"She will pick you up," Virginal said, and sang once more to the seed.

Cirocco arrived in a few minutes, flying an almost invisible Dragonfly One. The little craft was quick and spritely as a hummingbird. Cirocco landed it on a flat patch of ground ten meters long, stopping with the nose almost touching a house-sized boulder. She got out, picked the airplane up, and had it turned around by the time Nova and Virginal joined her.

"Hail, hinddaughter of Munyekera," Cirocco greeted Virginal formally, then looked at Nova, smiled with one side of her mouth, and touched two fingers to her eyebrow. "How you doing, Nova?"

"Hail, Captain," Virginal sang. It was the only fragment of Titanide song Nova could recognize. She said nothing. As usual, when first seeing Cirocco, her mouth was too dry for speech.

The Wizard, Nova thought. None of this Captain business for her. Wizard summed it up nicely.

Cirocco looked good in clothes. Nova had had few chances to see her that way. She wore black pants and blouse, and a broad-brimmed black hat. She was heavier than when Nova had first met her. Somehow, the clothes emphasized it. Even in this, Cirocco could not do things like a normal woman would. She had added flesh all over her body, but particularly in her breasts. It had to do with the mysterious expeditions into the forest. Three times now she and Robin had gone, returning each time more youthful, healthier, and, in Cirocco's case, heavier. It made her even more beautiful.

"I have this little expedition I have to make," Cirocco said, seeming a bit uncomfortable. "It's really not necessary that you go along, I could do it myself. But it's not very dangerous and I thought you might be interested."

Nova felt faint. Ask me to walk on broken glass, my darling. Ask me to tear my heart out and give it to you. Ask me to swim around the world, to out-run a Titanide, to wrestle a zombie. Ask me any of these things and I will do them gladly, or die in the attempt, for you. So now you ask me if I might be interested in going somewhere with you ...

Trying to sound casual, she made a why-not shrug and said, "Sure, Cirocco."

"Good." Cirocco opened the door of the plane, and Nova saw the single seat had been taken out. The interior had been stripped. "It'll be cramped, but I wanted to take the smallest plane we have. I don't think it'll be too bad, but you'll practically be in my lap."

I'll find a way to endure it, Nova thought.

The plane was empty except for two tightly furled para-wings in the back. Cirocco handed one to Nova, and they both strapped them on.

"This will involve some jumping," Cirocco explained, and lowered herself into the cockpit. She squirmed over as far as she could go, and Nova wedged herself in. There was an awkward business with elbows for a moment, then they found the positions to sit.

"You think you can get us out of here?" Cirocco said.

"I believe so."

"Remember we're pretty heavy."

Nova was already roughing it out on the computer. Wouldn't it be just great to flub it, and have Cirocco take over to save both their necks? She put it out of her mind.

She sealed the door, looked around to see Virginal standing a safe distance away. She waved, and the Titanide waved back.

"Clear!" she shouted, feeling foolish. But in aviation, rules were for everybody, every time, as Conal had made clear in humiliating terms the day of her first lesson-backed up by Cirocco's cold glare.

She went over it mentally, then took a deep breath and pushed the throttle in. The plane leaped forward, came to the edge of the flat area ... and started to sink slightly. Nova worked the controls, goosed the tiny engine, and generally came close to a nervous breakdown as, over a very long ten seconds, the plane seemed determined to crash into some treetops.

They skimmed over, and Nova risked a glance at Cirocco. The Wizard had not even been watching the trees. She was looking through the transparent roof, searching for something. Nova felt oddly proud. Cirocco had assumed Nova could do it. She also felt a little deflated. An approving "well done" would have gone down very well. Then she realized the compliment was implied in the confidence.

"Take it up to thirty kilometers and bear to the northeast," Cirocco said.

"Any particular heading?"

"I can't be more precise, since I don't know just where he is."

"He?"

"Whistlestop. He's somewhere over western Iapetus."

A blimp! Nova felt a surge of excitement, then bewilderment. From what she knew of blimps, they would not appreciate an approach by a jet airplane.

"Does it matter how fast I climb?"

"Fuel-wise, we've got a big margin. You might as well scoot right along."

Nova calculated a rate of climb that was swift, without being profligate, doing it manually instead of just turning the whole thing over to the computer because she wanted the practice in emergency procedure. Cirocco watched, and said nothing.

"Do they usually cruise this high?" Nova asked, when they leveled out at the desired altitude. Cirocco was looking out and down.

"Very seldom. I want to be sure we get above him. Why don't you look out that side and see if you can spot him? It shouldn't be too hard. He's not much bigger than the State of Pennsylvania."

That was an exaggeration, but Nova was disappointed when they did locate him. She had seen several blimps from a distance-they never came too close to the ground in Dione-but Whistlestop didn't look all that big.

Then she noticed the numbers on the radar screen and realized that instead of being two or three kilometers away, he was twenty-five kilometers below them.

"Shut off the radar," Cirocco commanded. "It hurts his ears." Nova did as instructed, watched Cirocco checking her pack and her equipment belt and the attachments of her para-wing, so she did the same.

"Here's the plan. You program this crate to fly back to the cave by the Junction. Be sure it never gets closer than twenty kilometers to Whistlestop. After that, it's best for it to fly right down on the deck, two or three hundred meters." She looked at Nova. "Aren't you going to ask me why?"

"I didn't think I should."

"Relax, honey. We're not under military discipline here. The reason I want to fly low is I keep waiting for more buzz bombs to show up. They haven't yet, but one of these days they will. I don't want to lose this plane when it can't defend itself."

"That makes sense." She glanced nervously at the sky. Until that moment she had not thought of buzz bombs. She still remembered Conal's magnificent flying during the attack, and knew he had saved her life. She doubted her ability to handle a plane nearly so well.

So she started on the auto-pilot program while Cirocco waited calmly. Soon she was bogged down. She shook her head, and erased an impossible result.

"I don't know if I can handle all that," she admitted. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. Here's what you're doing wrong." Her fingers flew over the keys, pausing only long enough to be sure Nova had seen and understood. "One of the most important things you can learn is when to admit you need to learn more."

Nova glanced at her, saw that Cirocco was smiling.

"Where would we both be right now," Cirocco said, "if you hadn't known you were up to a very hairy take-off situation?" For a fraction of a second her smile became a grin, then she was looking at the computer again. And Nova knew that, once again, the Wizard had been far ahead of her. She would have sworn that Cirocco had not been paying attention to the take-off, and had not noticed her nervousness.

"Okay," Cirocco went on, locking the program in. "You get out first. Go ahead and deploy as soon as you're clear of the plane, then follow me. If you see any buzz bombs, cut your lines and freefall as far as you dare. There's a spare wing in that pack. Any questions?"

Nova had a dozen, but only asked one.

"Do you think we'll see buzz bombs?"

"No. But I can't rule it out."

They opened the door and Nova stepped out into the air. She got herself oriented, and pulled the rip cord. There was the familiar fluttering snap of the fabric, the singing of the lines, and she was tugged sharply. She glanced up...

For a horrible second she thought the para-wing had ripped loose. She had expected a colorful, traditional canopy. Instead, there was a thing of spiderwebs and air, almost invisible.

Well, it made sense. They would be hard to see.

She located Cirocco, who had both hands in the shrouds, swinging around to her right and losing altitude. With a few tugs on her own lines Nova fell in behind her. Follow me, the Wizard had said. Anywhere, Nova thought.

For several minutes Nova spent her time scanning the clear skies for the tell-tale contrails of buzz bombs. Twice she sighted their own abandoned jet. The first time it scared her; by the second she was already bored. She followed Cirocco sedately, on as fine a day for soaring as she had ever seen.

Then Cirocco began to gyrate wildly, swinging back and forth at the end of her lines. Nova was not worried at first, but the longer it went on the more she began to wonder what was wrong. She did not get alarmed until Cirocco went into a steep downward plunge. She had to work hard to follow her, and no sooner was she in her dive than Cirocco pulled up, and up, and up ... and almost over. A loop was difficult to do with a para-wing. The Wizard had not quite managed it.

But she still couldn't figure out what the trouble was, until she heard the sound of laughter.

"I thought you were going to follow me," Cirocco shouted, and laughed again. "I thought you were All-Coven Girl Champeen, or something."

"Oh, yeah?"

Nova hauled on her lines with both hands and swept so close in front of Cirocco she could hear her startled gasp. Downward she plunged, faster and faster, swinging from side to side and building momentum until, with a hard jerk, she swooped up and around and poised for a moment, upside-down, the wing collapsing beneath her. She tumbled, expertly avoiding entanglement with the loose lines, was jerked to a stop amid the sharp cracking sound of the wing catching air, and came out in a glide, neat and sweet as ever it had been done in competition. She could see, in memory, the string of 10's flashing on the judges' scoreboards.

Cirocco eased in beside her, just far enough away to keep their wings out of trouble, and regarded her with a sour look which she couldn't maintain. She burst out laughing again.

"I yield to the better woman," Cirocco said. "You gave me a fright there, young lady."

"You scared me," Nova protested.

"Yeah, I guess I would have. So I probably shouldn't have done it."

"I didn't mind."

"Nova, I know I seem like a very cold, very sour old bitch. Lately I can't afford much time to have fun. And I know I'm six times your age, and I know you've heard the tragic story of my life ... but you know what? Adding it all up, the good and the bad, I've had a great time. The last thirty years have been hard, and they're about to get harder. But I wouldn't have liked any other life. The awful thing is ... well, like now. When I want to cut up, it just seems out of character. That saddens me."

The last thirty years, Nova thought.

It was a long glide. They amused themselves with some more tricks, though nothing as extreme as the loops. And all the time, Whistlestop continued to grow larger beneath them.

Almost a century ago, when Cirocco and her crew had first seen him, Whistlestop had been just over one kilometer from nose to tail. The Hindenburg, the largest airship ever built on Earth, had been slightly less than a quarter the size of Whistlestop.

Since then, he had grown considerably.

Now he was two kilometers long. With the proportionate increase in his other dimensions, he was eight times as large as he had been. He contained half a billion cubic feet of hydrogen.

"Nobody knows why he grew so much," Cirocco told Nova as they made ready for landing on the broad back. "Blimps don't usually grow so quickly. I know he's about sixty thousand years old. His contemporaries only seem to grow a few inches every year. I know that Old Scout, who is at least twenty thousand years older than Whistlestop, is only about a kilometer and a half long."

There was more, and Nova listened to it all, but mere words could never do justice to Whistlestop. He had to be seen to be believed. She had thought making a landing on the back of a blimp would be a hazardous thing. It was going to be about as difficult as a mosquito landing on an elephant.

She touched down lightly, ran a few steps as she expertly reefed her chute, and was about to pull it in for folding when Cirocco touched her shoulder.

"Cut it loose," she said. "We'll get down another way."

"I don't have a knife," Nova said.

Cirocco looked surprised, then shook her head.

"I'm getting senile, I guess," she said, looking Nova up and down. Nova couldn't figure out what the problem was. Cirocco severed Nova's lines with a white-bladed knife. When she got a close look at it, Nova realized it was made of sharpened bone, intricately carved in the Titanide manner.

"You wearing anything under those clothes?" Cirocco asked.

"Just cotton shorts," Nova said.

"It's metal I'm looking for. It's not only impolite but extremely dangerous to take anything metal onto a blimp. Anything that can spark."

There were metal grommets on Nova's bootlaces, but after a close look Cirocco pronounced them acceptable. Nova was relieved, they had been a gift from Virginal.

Then Cirocco knelt and started feeling the tough hide of the blimp. Nova followed her. She knew she should be asking questions, but, despite the glimpse of a fun-loving Wizard she had had on the way down, her predominant reaction to Cirocco was awe, and her response was obedience.

She looked around. It might as well have been a flat, silvery saucer. She knew it curved downward, but she could have walked a long distance in any direction before it became a problem.

At last Cirocco seemed to have found her spot. She pressed the point of the bone knife to the blimp's skin and made a small hole. Nova watched her hold her hand over the puncture. She heard a hissing sound that soon subsided. Cirocco seemed satisfied, and, to Nova's amazement, she used the knife to make a large X in the blimp's hide. She pushed the flaps down into the hole, and the two of them looked into the incision.

It led down into blackness. On all sides of the narrow chimney the walls bulged inward, restrained by what looked like fishnet. Nova realized they were gasbags, and Cirocco had located a space between them.

"What if you'd punctured the bag?" Nova asked.

"Whistlestop has over a thousand gasbags. Three hundred of them could be holed at once and he'd still be okay. And if my first puncture had hit a bag, it would have healed in about ten seconds." She lowered her legs into the hole, found a footing, and grinned up at Nova.

"You folow me, okay?"

"He doesn't mind?"

"This hole will heal in five minutes. He won't even notice it, I promise."

Nova was dubious, but it had no effect on her willingness to follow. As soon as the Wizard's head was gone she stepped down, slipped, then grabbed onto some of the netting around her.

"Push the flaps back up," Cirocco called out, from below. "That'll make it heal faster."

Nova did as she was told, and it got darker inside the blimp.

"Now, just climb down. You'll see some things, but don't worry about them. There's nothing in here that can hurt you."

They descended a long time. At first it seemed utterly dark, then Nova's eyes adjusted and she could see a little.

It was easier to hold with her fingers, but it was tiring. From time to time her feet would find a larger cable she could perch on, but usually there was just the fine netting. Only the low gravity saved her.

After ten minutes there was a light below her. She stopped, and saw Cirocco taking a small, glowing orange globe from her pack. She handed it to Nova, and tied another around one of her wrists. It was a kind of bioluminescence, and it was sufficient to see by.

It was better at first. She could see where to put her hands and feet. Then, oddly, it began to make her feel more claustrophobic. It was like a nightmare where the walls were closing in on you, but it was real. The walls did bulge.

Then she thought about what she was doing. The things she grabbed and held were not ropes, not nets; they were the living muscles of a gargantuan being. She could feel them moving when she pulled on them. They were dry, thank the Great Mother and all her little demons, but it was still creepy.

They went by side passages. Some were no wider than her arm, but a few were big enough to walk in. Far away in the larger ones she could see eyes glittering.

"Cherubim," Cirocco said, after the first sighting. "They're the same relation to Angels as monkeys are to us. They nest in the greater blimps."

There were other denizens of the sky leviathan. Little things like mice kept skittering over her feet, and once Cirocco paused while something bigger scuttled out of her way. Nova never saw it, and didn't mind that at all.

"You're sure he doesn't mind us in here?" she asked, at one point.

"The more the merrier," Cirocco said. "If he didn't want us here we'd know it by now. All he has to do is seal this passage and flood it with hydrogen. Don't sweat it, Nova. Blimps have their own internal ecology. There's a hundred animals that can't live anywhere else. And they take on transient passengers all the time."

At last they came to a broader passage, and Cirocco stepped into it. About twenty meters in diameter, it seemed to stretch to infinity in either direction.

"Central Park," Cirocco said. And indeed, there were tree-like organisms growing from the walls, pale and skeletal. They shrank from the light. Cirocco pointed forward. "Come on. It's only about a mile."

It was an odd mile. They were on top of a gasbag and the netting was much thicker, almost solid beneath their feet. And they bounced. It was like walking on a sea of pillows.

After a long time the corridor widened and there was light. They came into a vast, shapeless room. The floor sloped down to a transparent membrane cross-hatched with thin cables, bulging out from the internal pressure. It was cool in here, just as it had been everywhere inside the blimp.

"The B-24 Lounge," Cirocco said, and started scanning the piles of colorful cloth. Nova moved forward, almost to the giant window. She realized she was in the nose of the creature, and slightly on the underside. It was the view a bombardier would have had in an old military plane, and it was magnificent. Far below, the ground crawled by in a slow and stately parade that had been going on for sixty thousand years.

Her foot hit something solid in a pile of cloth. She looked down, and gasped. It was a human foot: brown, withered, attached to a scrawny leg. The toes wiggled. She looked up and saw the face of an old, old man, completely bald, brown as mahogany, showing strong white teeth in a satisfied smile.

"My name is Calvin, dear," the old man said. "And you're the prettiest thing I've seen in a long time."

She never did get to see much of Calvin. He moved around, but was always so swaddled in windings of cloth that only his head was visible.

"Only real problem with this life," he said at one point, "... only real problem's staying warm. Old Whistlestop, he likes to go where it's cold. So how's August doing, Rocky?"

Cirocco explained that August had been dead for a long, long time. Nova watched him, and wasn't sure the old man understood it. He then went on to ask about others, all of them dead. Each time he shook his head sadly. Only once did Cirocco seem upset, and that was when he asked her about Gaby.

"She's ... she's fine, Calvin. She's doing just fine."

"That's real nice."

Which was crazy, since Nova knew all about Gaby.

She finally realized Calvin was almost as old as Cirocco. He looked every year of it. And yet, he seemed spry enough, and quite happy and alert. It was only the business of inquiring about the dead that hinted of senility.

He bumbled around the chilly cave, rummaging in straw baskets, coming up with wooden bowls and bone knives and a cutting board. Cirocco sat next to Nova and spoke quietly to her.

"He's not crazy, Nova. I don't think he understands death. And I don't think he has any conception of time. He's lived up here for ninety-five years, and he's the happiest man I ever knew."

"Here it is!" Calvin crowed, coming up with a large wooden container. He came back to the flat surface where Cirocco and Nova were sitting cross-legged, and where he had already assembled bowls of salad and raw vegetables, and a huge jug of something he called mead.

"Just getting good," he said, then glanced at Nova. "Better bundle up some, girl. Get cozy."

Nova had been getting chilled, but was suspicious of the piles of rags. She had noticed some of the little blind, hairless mice crawling out of one pile. But the fabric didn't smell dirty.

"The blimp exudes this stuff," Cirocco said, pulling folds around her. "It makes good cold-weather gear. Go ahead, it's clean. Everything in here is clean."

"Always is, in a blimp," Calvin chuckled. He was using a wooden spoon to ladle thick and chunky soup into bowls. "Try this ... Nova you said your name was? Nice name, I like that name. New and bright, and you look shiny as can be. This is my special gazpacho. Made from only the finest grown-in-Gaea ingredients." He chuckled again as he handed Nova a bowl. "Used to be, I'd come down once a year for a hot meal. Then I realized it'd been a while since I'd done it, and I hadn't missed it any."

"I think you came down twice, you old fool," Cirocco said. Calvin had a good laugh at that.

"Oh, now, Rocky. That can't be right. Can it?" He looked thoughtful for a moment, started to count on his fingers, but got lost quickly. Nova was trying not to laugh because she thought he'd be offended. He was quite nice, if befuddled.

"Now don't you be afraid of that, honey," he told her. "You treat it with respect, though. I don't much care for heating my food, but I don't mind it hot, if you catch my meaning."

Nova did not, unfortunately. She sniffed, and liked the smell, so she took a big spoonful. It was based on tomato and celery and was good and spicy and cold. She took another mouthful ... and then the first one hit her. She swallowed, gasped, and felt the stuff searing her nasal passages and burning behind her eyeballs. She lunged for the glass of mead and swallowed a whole beaker. It went down well. It had a honey taste.

Even the gazpacho was good, if taken in cautious sips. They all sat together and ate, and it was a fine meal, if a little noisy. All the raw vegetables crunched. They sounded like rabbits. Nova suspected she'd miss having meat after a while, but Calvin did well with his vegetarian, heatless cuisine.

And the mead was terrific. Not only did it cool down the spicier foods, it made her feel warm, loose, and nicely fuzzy around the edges.

"Time to wake up, Nova."

"Wha ... " She sat up quickly. Her head was hurting and she had a hard time focusing on Cirocco. "What time is it?"

"It's a few hours later." Cirocco smiled at her. "My dear, I think you got a wee bit drunk."

"I did?" She was about to tell Cirocco it was the first time, then realized it would make her sound like a child, so she laughed. Then she thought she was going to be sick, but the feeling passed. "Well, what do we do now?"

"That's it," Cirocco said. "We'll get you sobered up a little, then we go back to the Junction. I'm ready to move."

SEVEN

The Titanides had labored eight revs to produce the feast. There was a whole roasted smiler, and eels and fish cooked, jellied, stuffed back into their skins, and suspended artfully in clear savory aspic. The fruit course was a towering edifice shaped like a Christmas tree, bulging with a hundred varieties of Gaean berries, melons, pommes, and citrines, garnished by leaves of spun green sugar and glowing internally from a myriad of glowbees. There were ten pates, seven kinds of bread, three soup tureens, rickety pagodas of smiler ribs, clever pastries with crusts thin as soap bubbles ... the mind reeled. Cirocco had not seen such a spread since the last Purple Carnival, twenty years ago.

There was enough food for a hundred humans or twenty Titanides. With just nine people to eat it all.

Cirocco took a little of this and a little of that, and sat back, chewing slowly, watching her companions. It was a shame, really, that she was not hungrier. Everything tasted very good.

She knew she was the luckiest of women. Long, long ago, when she might have worried about her weight, it had never been necessary. She could eat as much as she wanted and never put on a gram. Since becoming Wizard her mass had been as low as forty kilograms-after a sixty-day fast-and as high as seventy-five. It was largely a matter of conscious choice. Her body had no fixed metabolic set point.

Just now she was at the high end of that range. Three visits to the fountain of youth in less than a kilorev was an unprecedented frequency. She had an even layer of fat all over her body, and her breasts, buttocks, and thighs had become voluptuous. She smiled inwardly, remembering how the tall and gangly, slat-thin fifteen-year-old Cirocco Jones would have killed for breasts like this. The tredenscenial Cirocco found them a minor but necessary nuisance. They would come in handy in the grueling days ahead. Eventually they would be consumed.In the meantime, Conal was acting even more awe-struck than usual. He was sitting to her left, having a good time. Robin sat next to him. They kept offering things to each other. Since no one could eat much of any one thing, it made sense to point out a special delicacy, but Cirocco suspected it was more than that with these two. She thought if the meal had been stale C-rations, they would still be giggling like kids.

I ought to be shocked, Cirocco thought.

She had a feeling it would end badly, that it probably should not have even started. Then she chided herself. That was the safe view. If you looked at life that way, your regrets for things undone and untried would forge an endless chain to rattle in your later years. She silently saluted their courage and wished them well.

The idiots thought no one knew of their clandestine affair. Possibly there were Titanides in Hyperion who didn't know about it, but certainly none here in Dione. Cirocco saw Valiha, Rocky, and Serpent-a threesome none of the other humans knew anything about-looking on with fond recognition. Hornpipe knew, but, as always, kept his own counsel. Virginal knew, but despite her growing closeness to Nova, would never mention it, mainly because the young Titanide realized her lack of knowledge of the ways of humans and would never risk hurting Nova inadvertently.

That left the ninth member of the party, Nova. She was coming along nicely, Cirocco judged, but was still far too much the self-centered youth to be aware of something her mother was taking pains to keep from her. She was blissfully ignorant of Robin's sin.

For sin it was. Cirocco wondered if Robin had recognized that yet, and how she would handle it when the guilty weight fell on her. She hoped she would be able to offer some help. She loved the little witch dearly.

She looked around the table at her band. She loved them all. For a moment she felt tears threaten, and fought them back. This was not the time. She made herself smile, and made a polite comment on a pastry she was offered. Serpent glowed with pleasure. But she saw Hornpipe watching her.

But it was a surprise, as the glorious meal was ending in the small sounds of belches and satisfied pats on the tummy, when Hornpipe cleared his throat and waited until he had silence.

"Captain," he said, in English. "We were pleased when you made no objection to the preparation of this feast. You are aware this sort of thing is done only in a moment of great importance to all of us."

" 'We are pleased,' Hornpipe?" Cirocco asked. She was disturbed to realize she did not know what he was talking about. And she looked at the other Titanides, saw them looking solemnly at their empty plates. Virginal glanced to the far end of the table, to the empty place setting which had been put out at every meal since Chris had jumped into Pandemonium.

"Who do you speak for, my friend?"

"I speak for all the Titanides here, and for many hundreds who could not come. I was elected to voice this ... " Once more Cirocco was amazed, as Hornpipe seemed to be groping for a word. Then she realized it was something else.

"Is 'grievance' the word you're trying to say?"

"It's in the right neighborhood," Hornpipe said, with a wry shake of his head. He looked at her, appealingly. For an instant he was a stranger. For an instant he was the first Titanide she had ever seen-and he was, in fact, a direct descendant of the first. He could be mistaken for a truly stunning woman. His heaped-up masses of shining black hair, broad cheekbones, long lashes, wide mouth and baby-smooth cheeks... .

She returned to the moment, to a reality that seemed to be getting away from her.

"Go on, then," she said.

"It is simple," he said. "We want to know what you are doing toward the return of the child."

"What are you doing?"

"Probes have been made. The defenses of Pandemonium have been tested. Aerial reconnaisance by blimp has given us a map of the fortress. Plans have been advanced, in Titantown."

"What sort of plans?"

"An all-out assault. A siege. There are several options."

"Are any being put into effect?"

"No, Captain." He sighed, and looked at her again. "The child must be rescued. Forgive me if you can, but I must say this. You are our past. He is our future. We cannot allow Gaea to have him."

Cirocco let the silence grow, looking from one face to another. None of the Titanides would look at her. Robin, Conal, and Nova glanced away quickly when their eyes met hers.

"Conal," she said, finally. "Do you have a plan?"

"I wanted to talk it over with you," he said, apologetically. "I was thinking of a raid. Just the two of us, in and out real quick. I don't think the frontal assault would work."

Cirocco looked around again.

"Are there any other plans? Let's get 'em all lined up."

"Lure her out," Nova said.

"What's that?"

"Use yourself as bait. Get her to come out and fight. Set a trap for her. Dig a big hole or something... I don't know. I haven't worked out the details. Maybe some kind of ambush."

She looked at Nova with increased respect. It was a rotten idea, of course, but in some ways it was better than the others.

"That's four ideas," Cirocco said. "Any more?"

The Titanides didn't have any. Cirocco was frankly astonished they had, among hundreds of them, come up with two. Titanides were many things, but they were not tacticians. Their minds didn't seem to work that way.

She stood up.

"All right. Hornpipe, there is no need for your apology. I've been remiss in not telling anyone what I've been doing. Naturally, you and all the Titanides are concerned about getting him back, and you don't see me doing anything. I've been gone a lot. I haven't been talking much. And, yes, he is your future, and I for one am thankful for it and sorry for him. I have been thinking of almost nothing else during the last kilorev. I expected to tell you my plans tonight, but you beat me to it.

"The first thing is Gaea. None of you understand her.

"You've given me four scripts. Four movies." She held up her fingers as she counted them out. "Hornpipe, you mentioned a frontal assault. We'll call that the World War Two movie. Then there was the siege; that's the Roman epic. Conal, your idea is a caper movie. Nova's idea is like a western. There are other approaches I've thought of. There's the monster movie, which I think Gaea would like, where we try to burn her up or roast her with electricity. There's the prison picture, where we get captured and make our escape. There's the aerial assault, which is probably a Viet Nam movie.

"What you have to remember is, she's thought of those, and of several more possibilities. My approach will borrow from several of them, but to defeat her, we have to move out of genre pictures altogether."

She looked from face to face, and was not surprised to see the bewilderment there. They probably thought she was going crazy, with all this talk about movies.

"I'm not crazy," she said, quietly. "I'm trying to think the way Gaea thinks. Gaea is obsessed with films from about 1930 to 1990. She has made herself in the image of a star who died in 1961. She wants to live movies, and she has a star system, and most of the ones she has selected to be the stars of her major epic are sitting right here. She has gone to great lengths to get some of you here. She has built some of you, in a sense, like the old studio moguls used to build images for their stars.

"She has cast me in the leading role. But this is a big production, with many important characters and a cast of billions.

"She can make mistakes. Gaby was one. Gaby was supposed to be alive at this point, as my faithful sidekick. Chris was another. He was supposed to be my leading man. There was supposed to be a love story between me and Chris, but Valiha got in the way. Their love wasn't planned.

"But Gaea is a smart director. She always has a fall-back subplot prepared, there is always an understudy ready to step in. The story department can always come up with some variation, some way to move things around and keep the plot going.

"Conal, you're a good example of that."

Conal had been looking mesmerized, now he jerked in surprise.

"You're descended from Eugene Springfield, one of the original players, one that Gaea chose to become the villain. That is certainly going to be important in upcoming events. I feel strongly-and Snitch backs me up on this-that you were manipulated into coming here."

"That's impossible," Conal protested. "I came here to kill you, and-" He stopped, and reddened. Cirocco knew he seldom spoke of their meeting.

"It felt like free will, Conal," she said, gently. "And it was. She didn't enter your mind way back there in Canada. But she owned the publishing company that put out that ridiculous comic book you brought with you. She was able to slant the story, and to be sure you knew of your ancestry, and probably nudge you into bodybuilding. The rest just worked out.

"Robin, you already know something of how you've been manipulated."

"I sure do," she said, bitterly.

"I'm sorry to have to tell you this ... hell, there's worse coming up, and nobody's going to like any of it. She had a hand in your life before you were ever born. Do your people still speak of the Screamer?"

Robin looked wary, but nodded.

"It's what moved us into space. It was a big meteor. The Coven was in Australia. It hit, and killed about half of us. But it was on our land, and it was full of gold and uranium that could be easily mined. It made us rich enough to have the Coven built in orbit ... "

Her eyes grew round with horror.

"The Screamer hit Australia in 2036," Cirocco said. "I'd been here eleven years. There is no doubt that Gaea sent it."

"That's crazy," Nova said.

"Of course it is. But not the way you mean, if you mean it couldn't have happened that way."

"But Gaea was being watched-"

"-and she was releasing eggs at the rate of one every ten revs all that time. The guardian ship tracked them out of range, and calculated if they could hit the Earth. None of them were ever seen as a threat, and there were too many to keep track of."

"It was awfully good shooting," Hornpipe said, dubiously.

"Gaea is very good at what she does. She hit the Earth once before, in 1908, getting the range, so to speak. That one landed in Siberia. The one that hit Australia had been launched nine years before, and appeared to come in from far out, like a long-period asteroid. It was steered on final approach. But all organic matter burned on re-entry, so there was no evidence it came from Gaea."

Robin was shaking her head, not in negation, but in incredulity.

"Why would she do that?"

Cirocco grimaced.

" 'Why' is a tough question with Gaea. When I wrote my book about Gaea, one of the critics had a hard time with my analysis of her. He couldn't accept that such a mighty being would do such petty things. If there's any reason, it's for the fun of it. I suppose she heard of your group. She thought it would be a good joke to drop a fortune on your heads at 25,000 miles an hour.

"And she stayed interested in the Coven. She owned-through half a dozen dummy corporations-the facility on Earth where the Coven bought its sperm. She bred you all to be tough and small ... and she threw in bad genes here and there, so sooner or later one of you would show up here for a cure. She was well pleased with you, Robin. You gave her a lot of laughs. Nothing like the uproar she got out of watching me, but funny enough."

Robin put her face in her hands. Nova touched her shoulder, but Robin shook her head and sat up straight again. Her eyes glittered with fury.

"Nova," Cirocco went on, "you already know what sort of fun Gaea had with you, and with Adam. You and Robin have both suffered the big reversal, the riches-to-rags script."

She looked at the Titanides.

"You all know how you've been used. Each of you is alive because of a decision I made. Each of your mothers and fathers had to come to me and beg for something that ought to be their right. You and your people have been so ground down that it took you a kilorev to nerve yourselves up to offer a very mild criticism of me ... and I've become so used to that attitude that it shocked me. I believe your entire race is being stifled. I suspect you can be much better in almost all ways than humans can be, but unless we defeat Gaea you'll never get that chance."

She looked from face to face once more, taking her time with each one. They were all hurt, and angry ... and determined.

"She sounds ... infallible," Virginal said. "What I mean is, she set out to bring Chris and Conal and Robin here, and they are all here. She planned the births of Nova and Adam. Everything she set out to do, she did."

Cirocco shook her head.

"It only looks that way. I already mentioned some things that didn't work out. You can be sure there were other schemes that failed, and we don't know about them simply because no one ever showed up. For about a hundred years she was issuing ... think of it as a casting call, all over the Earth. She set up embassies, did things as direct as hitting the planet with an asteroid, and as sneaky as hiring a writer to make Gene look like the hero in Conal's comic book. Some of those projects didn't work, and the people never got here. But she has her cast now. It's possible we'll meet more, but I doubt it. This is going to sound awful, but there's no way to get around it. All the other people in Gaea are extras or bit players, in Gaea's mind. Most of the important roles are gathered in this room. Nine of us. Then there are Chris and Adam. Whistlestop and Calvin. Snitch. And ... two, possibly three others who I'll tell you about later."

"Snitch?" Robin asked, looking disgusted.

"Yes. He's important. Arrayed against us are Gaea and the might of Pandemonium. There are important players over there, too. I believe Luther may be one, Kali another. I don't know about the others. But it will eventually come to a showdown ... and the cameras will be rolling."

"What do you want us to do, Captain?" Conal asked.

"First ... " She reached out and took Conal's hand, and on her other side, Valiha's. "I want us to pledge our lives, our fortune, and our sacred honor. My goal is the return of Adam, and the death of Gaea."

"One for all, and all for one," Conal said, then looked embarrassed. Cirocco gave his hand a squeeze, as she saw him take Robin's hand.

"What about Chris? Aren't we going to get him, too?" Valiha

"Chris is part of the pledge. His life is at risk, with ours. We will save him if we can, but if he must die, then he will, just like the rest of us."

Everyone joined hands now, except Nova and Serpent, who had no one beyond them but the empty chair meant for Chris. Cirocco looked at each of them in turn, measuring strengths and weaknesses. No one looked away from her. It was a good group. Their task was almost impossible, but she couldn't think of any others she would rather have at her side.

"There are two more things I have to tell you, and then we can get down to planning.

"I have seen Chris, and spoken with him briefly. He is not being harmed, and neither is Adam."

She waited for the murmurs to die down.

"I can't tell you any more just now. Maybe later. The second thing I have to tell you I've been putting off. It really has little bearing on what we have to do, but you should know it.

"I am almost certain that Gaea started the War. Even if she didn't, she has been instrumental in keeping it going for seven years."

There was the silence she had expected. There was shock, of course, but as she looked at the faces her estimate of the situation was confirmed: a lot of people had suspected something like that for a long time. Hornpipe was nodding sadly. Robin looked solemn. For a moment Cirocco thought Virginal was going to be sick.

"Forty billion people," Virginal said.

"Something like that."

"Murdered," Serpent said.

"Yes. In one way or another." Cirocco scowled. "Much as I hate her, I can't lay all the blame at her feet. The human race never did learn to live with the Bomb. It would have happened sooner or later."

"Did she drop the first bomb?" Conal asked. "The one on Australia?"

"No. She wouldn't have dared that. My ... informant thinks it's likely Gaea engineered the accident.

"I saw a shark-feeding frenzy once, a long time ago. That's what Gaea did. She saw this immense tank full of hungry sharks, millions of them. So she let some blood into the water. So they murdered each other. They were ready to; Gaea simply goaded them. Later, when the sentinel ship out here had been withdrawn, when the War showed signs of letting up, she would drop one of her own bombs in the right place and it would start up again. So she directly murdered a few billion."

"You're not talking about eggs now," Robin said. "Real atomic bombs? I didn't know Gaea had any."

"Why shouldn't she? She's had a century to acquire them, and there are people willing to sell. But she didn't need to do that. She can make her own. For a long time Gaea has been vulnerable. One very large fusion bomb could destroy this world. It was never in the cards that she'd sit still for that. So the war was in her interest. The combatants by now are at the point where they have no hope of ever hitting her-and some attempts have been made. A couple dozen missiles have started out in this direction. None have made it any farther than the orbit of Mars. She takes care of them easily."

She settled back into her chair and waited for questions. There were none for a long time. At last Nova looked up.

"Where did you learn all this, Cirocco?"

Good question, kid. Cirocco rubbed slowly at her upper lip and studied Nova through slitted eyes until the girl looked away, uneasy.

"I can't tell you right now. You'll just have to take my word for it."

"Oh, I didn't mean I-"

"You have every right to wonder. All I can do is ask you to remember our oath, and take it on faith for now. I promise you'll know all I know before I ask you to lay your life on the line."

And I will too, Gaby, she thought. Her biggest fear was that, in the end, Gaby would appear only to her.

"Can you tell us your plans?" Hornpipe asked.

"That I can do. In great and tedious detail. I suggest that beakers be filled, chairs pushed back, and cheese and crackers brought for those who can still find the odd corner of tummy to put them. This is going to take quite a while, and it's as crazy as anything that's gone before."

It did take a long time. After five revs they were still debating this or that point of the broad outline, but the plan itself had been sold.

By that time Nova was snoring in her chair. Cirocco envied her. She herself did not expect to sleep for a kilorev.

EIGHT

Cirocco left the table and climbed the main staircase of the big house, up to the third floor, which seldom saw use. Up here was a room Chris had set aside for her long ago. She did not know the impulse that had made him designate it "Cirocco's Room." He had been doing strange things at that time, like building the copper-clad shrine to Robin.

The room had bare wood floors and white walls and one window with a black shade which could be drawn. The only furnishing was a simple iron bed, painted white. The mattress was fat, bulging, stuffed with feathers. It was always made up neatly with bleached white sheets and one pillow, and it was so high she could see the springs beneath the mattress, and the floor under that. The only spot of color in the room was the brass doorknob.

It was a room where nothing could hide, or be hidden. It was a wonderful place to sit and think. With the shade drawn there were no distractions.

The light coming through the window reminded her of early morning. She remembered all-night sessions at college, returning to her room in light like this. There was the same pleasant weariness, the same ferment of ideas tossed back and forth, ideas still running around in her head.

It was not morning, of course. It was timeless afternoon.

Ciocco was used to that.

She missed little things. Sometimes she longed to see the stars again. Falling stars, making a wish.

She sat on the edge of the bed. What do you wish for, Cirocco? There's no falling star, but make a wish anyway, who's keeping track?

Well, someone to share this with would be nice.

She felt ungrateful as soon as she thought it. She had friends, the best in the world. She had always been lucky with friends. So the burden was shared.

But there was a special sharing she had missed. Many times she thought it might be possible, this might be the man. What is this thing called love? Maybe she didn't know. She had lived long enough that she had run out of fingers to count the almost-loves. The first one, when she was fourteen. The guy in college ... what was his name?

Thinking back, she wondered if that was her last chance. As a Captain and a candidate for command, there hadn't been room for that. Plenty of lovers, in the physical sense, but falling in love would have endangered her plans. As a Wizard ... something was always in the way.

She'd even been willing to stretch a point. When Mr. Right didn't show up, why not Ms. Right? She had been so close with Gaby. It might have worked. And all the dear Titanides. Twice she had borne children, once in the Titanide way, with another as the hindmother. Once in the human way, nurturing him in her own body. She had not thought of him in a long time. He went back to Earth, and he never wrote. Now he was dead.

All right, Cirocco, so much for that wish. That three wishes business doesn't work on stars-which you didn't even see anyway-but we'll stretch a point and give you two for the price of one.

She realized that just having a lover would help.

It would be so easy to do.

She wiped a tear from her cheek. Five Titanides down there. Any one of them would gladly be her lover-in the frontal mode, too, which they did not do lightly. But it had been decades since she had made love to a Titanide. It wasn't fair. All she had to do was put herself in their place and ask a simple question. Could they say no?

Conal... .

She went to her knees on the floor and sat there. Her face was wet with tears now.

Conal was and always had been hers for the asking. And she could never, never take him to bed. She had only to think of what she had done to him and she felt sick. No man should have his dignity stripped from him like that. To become his lover after such a thing was a grotesquerie she could not imagine.

Robin ... was so sweet Cirocco could hardly believe it. What a cast-iron, short-fused, piss and vinegar bitch she had been twenty years ago! Any sane person would have said she should have been drowned at birth. That's probably why Cirocco had liked her so much. But with Robin there had never been that spark of attraction, not even as much as there had been with Gaby. Which was just as well. Robin was going to have enough trouble with Conal without an aging Wizard getting in her hair.

She put her hands on the cool, shiny, smooth boards of the floor and lowered herself until her cheek touched it. Her vision was blurred. She sniffed, and rubbed her nose, and wiped her eyes, and looked dully along the floor to the crack of light under the door. There was not a speck of dust to be seen. There was the smell of wood polish, sharp and lemony. She relaxed, and then her shoulders started to shake.

Nova ...

Oh, god, she didn't want to be Nova's lover. She wanted to be Nova. Be eighteen years old, fresh and nubile and innocent and in love. In love with a tired old hag. It was bound to end in misery. But what a ... sweet misery it seemed to be young and having one's heart broken for the first time.

She was sobbing aloud now, not making a lot of noise, but unable to stop.

She thought of Nova slicing through the blue water, seal-sleek, of the big, awkward girl swinging at the end of her chute cords and then soaring like an angel without wings. She saw Nova devouring the Titanide feast, bright-eyed and laughing, and thought of her alone in her room, mixing the potion that was to bring her love. Cirocco gave herself over to her tears. She lay prone on the cool floor and wept for what had been and what was and what would be.

One tiny part of her mind said that she had better get it done with now.

There would be scant opportunity later.

Conal had been talking to Robin for what seemed like hours.

The talk had drifted away from Cirocco's plan-which still seemed slightly unreal to him-and into other things. Talking to her seemed easy, lately.

He noticed she seemed to be getting sleepy, and realized he was, too. Nova still slept curled up in her big chair. But all the Titanides were gone. He hadn't seen them leave. Now, Titanides could certainly move quietly, but that was ridiculous. Five of them, and he hadn't seen them leave?

He saw Robin was smiling at him.

"Where have our minds been?" she said, and yawned. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. "I'm for bed."

"Me, too. See you later."

He sat for a time after Robin had left, amid the ruins of the meal. Then he got up and headed for the stairs.

Virginal was standing like a statue in the center of the next room. Her ears were pointing up and forward, and she looked at a spot on the ceiling with an awful intensity. Conal was about to say something, but Virginal noticed him, gave him a brief smile, and went outside. He shrugged, and went up the stairs to the second floor.

And there were Valiha and Hornpipe, just as still. Their ears were up, too. They looked like they were in pain.

Neither of them noticed him until he was walking by, then they just glanced at him with no word of greeting and began to move slowly toward the stairs he had just climbed.

He couldn't figure it out.

He shrugged, and went into his room. He thought about it, and opened the door, stuck his head out. The two of them were back in their listening posture. Rocky was on the stairs, also listening, also looking up.

Conal studied the ceiling that seemed so interesting to the Titanides. He could see nothing at all.

Were they listening to something, up there on the third floor? All those rooms were empty. He heard nothing. Then Rocky started to sing, softly. Pretty soon Hornpipe and Valiha joined in, then Serpent came up quietly to join Virginal. It was a whispered song, and made no more sense to Conal than any of their songs did.

He yawned, and closed the door.

NINE

For five myriarevs, while Pandemonium continued its vagabond wanderings, the permanent site had been building in Hyperion.

The Iron Masters had been prime contractors. They had prepared the site, which encircled the south-central vertical cable. They had constructed a road to the vast forests of southwest Rhea. Bridges had been built over the placid Euterpe River, and over the violent Terpsichore. Two hundred square kilometers of wooded hills had been denuded, the lumber trucked to Pandemonium, where it was milled, sawed, cured, cut, stacked, joined, nailed, sanded, and carved by five thousand unions of carpenters. A railroad had been hammered through the difficult terrain from the mines, smelters, forges, and foundaries of Phoebe, through the Asteria mountains, bridging the mighty Ophion itself in the West Rhea twilight zone, and endless freight trains brought the metal bones of Pandemonium over the alien steel ribbons. To the west, the Calliope River had been dammed. The lake behind the dam was now twenty miles long, and its waters thundered through the turbines and generators, where electricity was fed into the lines and towers that marched over what had been Titanide herding land.

During the last myriarev, when construction was at its peak, Gaea had diverted more and more human refugees from Bellinzona for use as laborers at Pandemonium. At times the work force numbered seventy thousand. The work was hard, but the food was adequate. Workers who complained or died were turned into zombies, so labor unrest was never a problem.

It was to be Gaea's masterpiece.

At the time of the capture of Adam, work on the permanent site was almost complete. When Gaea saw the extent of the damage to her traveling show, she ordered the final move, though there was still a kilorev's work to be done.

The south-central cable was five kilometers in diameter and one hundred kilometers high at the point where it pierced the Hyperion roof and vanished into daylight. Five hundred kilometers beyond that point it joined the Gaean hub, where it became one strand of many in a monstrous basket-weave that composed the anchor at which Gaea's rim perpetually strained. The network of cables were fastened to Gaea's bones, deep beneath the rim, and it was their function to defeat centripetal force, to keep Gaea from flying apart. They had been doing this for three million years, and were showing certain signs of strain.

Each cable was composed of one hundred forty-four wound strands, each strand about two hundred meters in diameter. Over the aeons the strands had stretched. The process was called-though not by Gaea, who thought it crude-millennial sag. As a result, the base of the vertical cables was not a five-kilometer column but a narrow cone of unwinding strands about seven kilometers wide. There were gaps between the strands; it was possible to walk right through the cable, threading the titanic strand-forest. Inside, it was like a dark city made of round, brooding skyscrapers with no windows and no tops.

In addition to the sag, there were broken strands. There were one hundred and eight cables in Gaea, for a total of fifteen thousand five hundred fifty-two strands. Of those, two hundred could be seen to be broken because they were part of the outer layer. Each cable in Gaea had its visible wound, with the top part of the strand curling away like a stray split end, and the lower part lying on the ground, stretching for one kilometer or seventy, depending on how high the break had been.

All but one in south-central Hyperion. While other cables had two, three, or even five visible breaks, the one that rose from the center of New Pandemonium was pristine, climbing in smooth and breathtaking perspective.

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

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

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

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

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

Outside the wall was a moat filled with sharks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leading from each gate was a street paved with gold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Begin," she muttered.

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

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

He turned away and descended the stairs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris had found nothing to say.

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

"That's good, because I don't."

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

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

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

Gaea had frowned at him.

"Perhaps both our positions are extreme."

"Yours is."

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

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

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

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

"What do you mean?"

"Have you ever heard of Jiminy Cricket?"

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

The shape of their days quickly became apparent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris began to be disturbed.

Gaea never came to Tara.

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

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

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

"Gay, gay, gay," Adam would shout.

"Gay-aA," Gaea would call back.

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

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

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

He turned and hurried to the second-floor balcony.

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

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

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

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

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

And he realized they had written the letters SU.

They curved up and over, and began to smoke again. This time they made two parallel lines, turned sharply, and added crescents to the tops of the lines. PP. SUPP. What the hell?

With precise, tight turns, two more lines were added.

SURR

"Chris," someone whispered. He almost jumped out of his skin. Then he turned, and very nearly yelled aloud when he found Cirocco standing close enough to touch.

"Cirocco," he whispered, and found himself in her arms, which was a silly way to put it, he thought, since he towered over her. But the strength was all flowing in one direction; he was having a hard time fighting back his tears.

She pulled him back into the shadows within the building.

"Never mind that," she said, quietly, jerking her chin toward the sky. "An amusing diversion ... with a punch line. Gaea's going to love it, right up to the end."

"What are you-"

"I don't have much time," Cirocco said. "Getting in here isn't easy. Can you listen for a while?"

Chris bit back the thousand questions he wanted to ask, and nodded.

"I wanted to ... " Cirocco stopped, and looked away for a moment. Chris had time to notice two things. She was close to tears herself, and she was wearing an outlandish costume. He didn't have time to take it all in.

"How is Adam?" she asked.

"He's well."

"Tell me what's happened."

He did, as quickly and concisely as he could. She nodded from time to time, frowned twice, and once looked as if she might be sick. But at the end she nodded.

"It's about the way Gaby told me to expect," she said. "And don't give me any trouble about Gaby."

"I wasn't going to. Spooks don't bother me anymore."

"Good. You understand what you have to do, then?"

"Pretty much. I ... I don't know if I'll do any good. She is a lot more subtle than I figured her for."

"You can do it," she said, with absolute assurance. "We will do our best to get you out of here. Like I told you last time, his soul isn't in danger yet, and won't be for quite a long time. But, Chris ... it's going to be a long time. Do you realize that?"

"I think so. Uh ... have you any idea how long?"

"It can't be less than a year. It might be two."

He did his best to conceal his dismay, but knew she saw it. She said nothing. He took a deep breath, and tried for a smile.

"Whatever you think is best."

"Chris, it's not just best. It's the only way. I can't tell you much about it. If Gaea thought you knew, she could get it from you."

"I understand that. But ... " He wiped at his forehead, and then looked directly at her. "Cirocco, why don't you just take him right now? Take him, and run like hell?"

"Chris, my old and dear friend, if I could do that, I would do it And leave you to the tender mercies of Gaea... and probably die of shame as soon as I had him in a safe place. But I would You know I'll save you if I can-"

"And if you can't, I accept that."

She hugged him again, and kissed his chin, which was as high as she could reach. Chris felt numb, but it felt good to be holding her.

"Gaea is ... Chris, I don't know how to explain this. But her will is focused on Adam. I let him see me the last time I was here. She knows I was here, and getting in this time was much harder. I can't visit you again. And if I took Adam and ran, she would get both of us. I know that. Can you accept that?"

"I will if I have to."

"That's all I ask. Your job is to stay on good terms with Gaea, however distasteful that might be. And be careful of her. You might find yourself liking her. No, no, don't tell me that's impossible. I liked her at one time. All you can do is be yourself, love Adam, and ... hell, Chris. Trust me."

"I do, Cirocco."

Her eyes were haunted. She kissed him again ... and then left him. It was odd, how she left. She moved back into the shadows, into a place where she couldn't have moved away without him seeing her ... and she was gone.

TEN

"Witch of the South, Witch of the South, this is Witch of the North. The bottom of that last E was pretty ragged, fellow."

Conal spoke into his mike as he sliced through a four-gee turn.

"Tend your own knitting, child," he said. "You got all the easy letters." He pulled back on the stick, looked rapidly to left and right at the vast, flat perspectives of the letters already drawn, and hit the smoke button again. He watched carefully until he was even with the base line, then killed the smoke and turned hard right. They had practiced it for a week, starting with attempts that Cirocco, from the ground, had sworn looked like Chinese, gradually moving on to writing that was almost legible. By now Conal thought he could fly it in his sleep.

It was crazy, of course, but no more crazy than other things they had been doing. They were living on a new and unfamiliar plane, it seemed. An act, in and of itself, was no longer always enough. The way it was done was also important. Certain things had to be done with deliberation, others with something called panache. The skywriting could have been done letter-perfect, with no drill, simply by programming the maneuvers into the planes' autopilots. But Cirocco had vetoed that.

Conal didn't complain. He liked writing challenges in Gaea's clean sky.

"Witch of the North," he called. "You call that an R?"

"I'll stack it up against any R in the sky," Nova shot back.

"Knock it off, children," Robin called, from her vantage point high above. "Move down to the second line."

Cirocco stepped off the golden road just short of the point where it actually became pure gold, and slipped between two towering buildings. She found an alcove out of sight and quickly stripped off her costume.

She had been dressed as an Indian princess when she came through the Columbia gate, and had managed to pass herself off as an extra showing up for work in the horse opera currently shooting on that lot. Getting to Tara had been less a matter of costuming than sheer brass. There was a thing she could do. She didn't know how she did it, and thinking about it too hard could destroy what faculty she had, but she thought of it as making herself small. People would glance at her and glance away. She wasn't worth looking at. It had worked long enough to get to Chris. She hadn't needed it much on her way out, as everyone's attention was on the skywriting.

But the exit had to be different, and called for a different brass.

She donned black pants, boots, shirt, and hat, clothing very much like what she had worn during her first meeting with Conal. She tied the short black cape around her neck, tucked a small automatic into the top of her boot and a large revolver into her waistband.

"Maybe I oughta wear a neon sign, too," she muttered to herself. "It couldn't be more incriminating than this get-up."

She stood for a moment, getting her breathing under control. On impulse-the sort of impulse she had learned to trust-she opened the top three buttons of her shirt and thrust her chest out. That would give them something to concentrate on other than her too-recognizable face. Then she stepped out onto the pavement and strode confidently up to the guard at the MGM Gate.

She had to nudge him with her elbow. He was staring up at the air show.

"What does S-U-R-R-E ... " he began.

"Why do they have an illiterate on this gate?" Cirocco snarled. The man stood straight and jerked his clipboard protectively over his chest. She held out an empty, black-gloved hand.

"I'm the first vice-president for procurement," she said. "This is my identification. Gaea has ordered me to de-fusticate the thingamabob at once." She thrust the non-existent identity card into a breast pocket, and the man's eyes followed the hand as far as the pocket, and then stuck. He gaped at her cleavage, and nodded.

"What did you say?"

"Uh ... go ahead, sir!"

"What about security? What about the record you're supposed to be keeping of who enters and exits through this gate? All the hounds of hell could come baying through here and you'd give them dog biscuits. Aren't you going to ask me my name?"

"Uh ... w-w-w-what is your n-n-name ... sir?"

"Guinness." She peered over the man's shoulder as he wrote on the clipboard. "Be sure to get that right, now. G-U-I-N-N-E-S-S. Alec Guinness. Gaea will want to know."

Cirocco turned on her heel and marched out the gate and over the drawbridge, glancing neither right nor left.

It was fifteen minutes before the man returned to full awareness. By then Cirocco was a hundred miles away.

Gaea had it figured out from the first SU.

She stood there at the Universal Gate, her huge feet planted firmly on more gold than Fort Knox ever had, her hands on her hips, and she smiled.

SURR.

SURREN.

She started to laugh. By that time some of the others, who had also seen a lot of films-more than they cared to remember, in many cases-were also getting it. It had been a nervous couple of minutes for most of them. Eyes moved constantly from Gaea's face to the writing in the sky. Then, when Gaea laughed, it was a signal for a massive eruption of laughter. The human population roared anew as each letter appeared, and each letter redoubled Gaea's own laughter.

By the time the message was complete the initial S was almost illegible. But it didn't spoil the fun.

SURRENDER GAEA.

"We must go see the Wizard!" Gaea howled. "He'll know what to do!"

The laughter got louder.

It's time for a festival, Gaea thought. Jones must be desperate to do a silly thing like that. Didn't she know it was the Wicked Witch of the West who did the skywriting? Didn't wicked mean anything to her? There were rules in this combat, and symbols were all-important.

Her mountainous laughter had dwindled to random chuckles. The letters were diffusing now, falling as a fine mist. The two planes were joined by a third which Gaea had been aware of all along. Most likely Cirocco herself had been up there, safely out of range, watching while her minions did the dirty and dangerous work. This contest wasn't even going to be worth it, she thought.

Oddly, that thought depressed her.

She shrugged it off. The three planes were flying lower now, in echelon, circumscribing the huge circle of New Pandemonium. They were still emitting smoke.

A fantasy film festival, she thought. What titles haven't been shown lately? Well, let's see, there was that ...

She stopped, and looked up suspiciously.

"No!" she shouted, and began to run. "No, you bitch! I didn't budget for that!"

She stepped on a dead zombie, slipped, and very nearly fell. She saw another zombie keel over.

Within two minutes, every zombie in Pandemonium was dead.

"All you need is love," Robin said, then whistled it, then sang it.

"What's that?" she heard Conal say over the radio.

"Just a song we witches sing." She whistled it again as she banked her plane one last time over the strange scene below.

"Mother," Nova said, exasperated.

"My dear, it's time you stopped being embarrassed about the origin of our zombie-killer. Don't you think?"

"Yes, Mother." She heard Nova's radio click off.

"Turn left on my signal," Conal said. "That's the MGM Gate below. The one with the big stone lion on it."

"Roger," Robin said, still humming. She looked down once more at New Pandemonium.

Cirocco had described the place, so they had known the layout before they arrived. But seeing it was something else entirely. Robin had jittered during the whole crazy performance, circling high, her more powerful radar and heavy armaments ready for buzz bombs, a dozen contingency plans tumbling over each other in her mind-plans drilled into all of them mercilessly by General Jones.

She grinned, then laughed. It appealed to the practical jokester in her.

"What do you think Gaea will say?" she asked the others. "I wonder if she's figured out that we just dumped three tons of love potion on her?"

"Is that Robin of the Coven?" said a voice.

There was a moment of silence but for the high whine of the jet.

"Robin, what are you doing cluttering up my airwaves?"

"Jesus," Conal breathed. "Is that-"

"South Witch, remember your radio rules. I think we should-"

"I know it's Conal, my love," Gaea said. "And I know it's your dear daughter, Nova, in the other plane. What I don't understand is all this talk about a love potion."

Robin flew on in silence. The palms of her hands were moist.

"Ah, well," Gaea sighed. "You're going to be tiresome, I see. But there's no need to execute Plan X-98, or whatever you were about to say. I'm not sending anyone after you. No buzz bombs will hinder your flight back to Dione." There was a pause again. "I'm curious, though. Why didn't Cirocco Jones come along on this little escapade? Perhaps she didn't have the spine for it. She does have a knack for letting others fight her battles. Have you noticed that? How did you like her dramatic flying entrance back at the Junction, as my friends were rescuing your darling son from that awful place you'd taken him? Plenty of time for you all to see her heroic effort ... which, sad to say, fell just short of actually having to grapple with the poor zombie. I wonder where she was? Did you ask her where she came from?"

Robin looked right and left, made hand signals to Nova and Conal to say nothing, and saw them both nod.

"Rather a dull conversation so far, I'd say," Gaea went on. "I just wanted to ask you how things have been. It's been a long time since last we met. I'd sort of hoped you would drop by when I saw you arrive."

"Just couldn't seem to find the time, I guess," Robin said.

"Ah, that's much better. You really should make the time. Chris has been asking about you."

Robin had to bite her lower lip. There was nothing worth saying. She couldn't treat it as a game for very long.

"Tell me," Gaea said, after a thoughtful pause. "Have you heard of the Geneva Conventions concerning warfare?"

"Vaguely," Robin said.

"Did you know it is considered immoral to use poisonous gases? I ask, because I'm sure Cirocco has filled your head with a lot of nonsense about good guys and bad guys. As if there were such a thing. But even if it were true, ask yourself this. Do good guys break the international rules of war?"

Robin frowned for a moment, then shook her head, and wondered if it might actually be dangerous to listen to Gaea. Could she cast some enchantment over the radio, cause the three of them to do crazy things?

But Cirocco had not mentioned it.

"You're a silly old biddy, Gaea," she said.

"Sticks and stones-"

"-Wouldn't even put a dent in that ugly hide of yours. But words wound you to the core. Cirocco told me that. As to gas warfare, have you checked your human population? Have you looked in on the elephants and camels and horses?"

"They seem to be all right," Gaea admitted, dubiously.

"So there you are. Don't take it personally, Gaea, you old bitch. We found a way to exterminate a pest we used to call deathsnakes. We're doing it as a public service. Pandemonium just happened to be on the spraying program. Hope it didn't inconvenience you too much."

"Not too ... used to call them? What do you call them now?"

Hah! Walked right into that one, you abomination.

"We call them Gaea's tapeworms. I hope you have a large toilet."

Robin heard Nova laughing. That seemed to finally set Gaea off. It started as an incoherent scream. Robin had to turn the volume down. It went on for an amazing time, then turned into a stream of vile language, horrible threats, and nearly incoherent ranting. During a brief pause, Nova spoke.

"That's really something," she said. "Maybe, when this is over, we can put her in a carnival sideshow."

"No," Conal said. "Nobody'd pay. Everybody's seen shit."

There was a short silence.

"Young man," Gaea said icily, "one day I will make you wish you had never been born. Nova, that was unkind, to say the least. But I suppose I can understand it. It must be hard for you. Tell me, how do you feel about that horrible fellow screwing your mother?"

There was an entirely different quality to the silence this time. Robin felt her stomach lurch.

"Mother, what-"

"Nova, maintain radio silence. And remember what I told you about propaganda. Gaea, this conversation is over."

But it didn't feel like having the last word. Propaganda was a fine term, but that didn't mean she was going to be able to lie any longer to Nova.

Gaea put down her radio and watched the planes vanish in the west, feeling thoroughly sour.

Though the logical and emotional parts of her mind no longer functioned as they used to-a fact she recognized and no longer worried about-the purely computational power was undiminished. She knew how many zombies had been lost. Some forty percent of the Pandemonium work force were undead-now doubly dead. That was bad enough, but a zombie was worth five human workers, maybe six. They were stronger, and they needed no sleep or even rest breaks. They could be fed garbage a hog would choke to look at. While they couldn't run something as complex as a tape recorder, they made excellent plumbers, electricians, painters, grips, carpenters ... all the skilled trades so essential to the making of movies. With reasonable care they could be made to last six or seven kilorevs. They were economical even in death; when a zombie felt the final death approaching, its last act was to dig a grave and lie down in it.

Problems, problems... .

The unions of carpenters, used for her mobile festival, had proven not versatile enough for the demands of New Pandemonium. Some of the buildings thrown up by them were already falling down. She could try to develop a master variety of carpenter ... but knew uneasily that her skills as a genetic manipulator were deteriorating. She could hope that, instead of more camels or dragons, her next birthing would be something more useful, and self-perpetuating, but she knew she couldn't count on it. Such were the perils of being mortal. For mortal she was. Not just in the sense that, in a hundred thousand years, the giant wheel known as Gaea would wither and die, but in the giant Monroe-clone in which she had elected to put so much of her vital force.

She sighed, then brightened a bit. Good cinema sprang from adversity, not an uninterrupted series of successes. She would speak with the story department, incorporate this new setback in the vast epic of her life, twenty years in the making. The final reels were by no means in sight.

In the meantime, there must be a solution.

Once more she thought of Titanides. Hyperion was lousy with Titanides.

"Titanides!" Gaea shouted, startling all those within half a kilometer.

Titanides had to be her most recalcitrant invention. They had seemed a good idea at the time. They were still nice to look at. She had made them in the early 1900's as a sort of first-draft human. It turned out she had built better than she knew. They kept exceeding specifications.

When labor had started to be a problem during the early days of site preparation for the Studio, she had naturally thought of using Titanides. She sent Iron Masters out hiring-and they came back empty-handed. It was disconcerting. Didn't they know she was God?

They were hard to capture alive, but she had caught a few.

Who wouldn't do a lick of work. Torture didn't help. As many as were able committed suicide. As far as Gaea knew, there had never been a Titanide suicide before the construction of the Studio. They loved life too much.

She had asked one captive about it.

"We'd rather die than be enslaved," he had said.

A fine sentiment, Gaea supposed, but not one she had built into them. Damn it, humans took to slavery like ducks to water. Why couldn't Titanides?

All right, all right, Gaea was nothing if not flexible. If they wouldn't work alive, she'd make them work dead. A zombie Titanide ought to handle the work of a hundred humans.

But it didn't work out that way. The Titanide corpses that went zombie were weaker than the originals, badly coordinated, and tended to sag in the middle like a swaybacked horse. She did an engineering study and found it was the skeletal structure that was at fault. Taxonomically speaking, Titanides were not vertebrates. They had a cartilaginous spine that was much more flexible and much stronger than the rather precarious stacks that formed the backbones of humans and angels. The problem was that, in death, the cartilage rotted, and the deathsnakes ate it. So the Titanides cheated her even from beyond the grave.

Gaea would have thought it was a stinking world, had she not remembered that she had created it.

What better time for the messenger to arrive from the MGM Gate, hand her the clipboard, and kneel, quivering, knowing Gaea's usual reaction to bad news.

For once, the reaction was moderate. Gaea looked at the name on the clipboard, sighed, and scaled it negligently over the roofs of three soundstages.

She had been out-movied. Twice in one day, Cirocco Jones had used her favorite mythologies against her.

"I've been Ozzed, and Star-Warred," she muttered.

She needed a break. How about a new festival? she wondered. Movies about movies. That sounded nice. She looked around for her archivist, and saw him cowering behind the corner of a building. She beckoned.

"I'm going to Projection Room One," she told him. "Get me Trufaut's Day For Night to start off with."

He scribbled on a note pad.

"Auteurs," she muttered. "Pick out a couple films by Hitchcock. Any of them will do. The Stunt Man. And ... what's that one about the collapse of the studio system?"

"Lights, Camera, Auction!" the archivist said.

"That's it. Be ready in ten minutes."

Gaea trudged down the golden road, more depressed than she had been in centuries. Jones had done a good job this day.

Part of her mind remained on the labor problem. She would just have to divert more refugees from Bellinzona. The terrible thing was, she was going to have to practically coddle her human labor from now on, because when they died, they were just gonna stay dead. Hell of a note.

And she wondered if she could pick up the slack from Bellinzona. The mercy flights to Earth were still going on, but the ships were coming back with a lot of empty seats.

She almost wished she hadn't started the War.

ELEVEN

The origins of the City of Bellinzona were, as so many other things in the wide wheel, mysterious.

The first human explorers to enter Dione had reported a large, empty city made of wood. It stood on sturdy pilings sunk deep in the rock below the waterline, and had freshly carved streets that wound up into the rocky hills on each side of Peppermint Bay. To the south were relatively flat lands, rising to a pass that led to an encircling forest. Dangerous creatures lived in that forest, but they were not as bad as the quicksands, fevers, and poisonous and carnivorous plants. It did not seem like a place where anyone would want to live.

Cirocco Jones had been there long before the "explorers." She simply never bothered to tell anyone about the ghost city which had appeared sometime during the fiftieth year of her Wizardship. She had been as puzzled by it as anyone else. It didn't seem to have any use.

But it was built to human scale. There were large buildings and small. The doorways were rather high, but Titanides usually had to duck to get through them.

After the start of the War and the beginnings of the stream of refugees, Cirocco had briefly cherished the notion that Gaea had simply caused a safe haven to be built, knowing that war would engulf the Earth sooner or later. But Gaea's influence in Dione was minimal, and her humanitarian impulses nonexistent. Somebody had built the core of Bellinzona, and built it rather well. Gaea's contribution had been simply to provide the populace.

Cirocco suspected it had been the gremlins. She had no evidence of this. There was no "gremlin style" of architecture. The creatures had put up structures as varied as the Glass Castle and Pharoah Mountain. She often wished she could contact them and ask them a few questions. But not even Titanides had ever seen a gremlin.

Humans had added to the central city in a haphazard and jerry-built fashion. The new piers usually rested on pontoons, and of course there were the jostling flotillas of boats. But despite neglect and misuse, some of the larger buildings of Bellinzona were quite impressive.

Cirocco had to raise an army to fight Gaea. Bellinzona was the only place able to provide that many people, but a rabble would not do for her purposes. She needed discipline, and to get it, she knew she had to civilize the place, to clean it up-and to utterly dominate it.

She chose a big, ornate, warehouse-sized structure on the Slough of Despond. The building was called the Loop by its tenant, a man by the name of Maleski, who came from Chicago. Cirocco had learned quite a bit about Maleski, who was one of the top four or five gang leaders in Bellinzona. It had the flavor of the unreal, but she decided it was just one of those odd things. She was going to go up against a real live gangster from Chicago.

When Cirocco and the five black-clad Titanides entered the building, almost everyone was clustered at the other end, looking out the windows there, staring up at the sky. That was not a coincidence. Cirocco stood there in the middle of the big room in the light of flickering torches, and waited to be noticed.

It did not take long. Surprise changed to consternation. No one was supposed to be able to just walk in to the Loop. It was heavily guarded on the outside. Maleski didn't know it yet, but all those guards were dead.

The ones in the room drew their swords and began to disperse around the walls. Some of them grabbed torches. A tight group of nine made a human shield around Maleski. For a moment, no one moved.

"I've heard of you," Maleski said, finally. "Aren't you Cirocco Jones?"

"Mayor Jones," Cirocco said.

"Mayor Jones," Maleski repeated. He moved forward, out of the group. His eyes went to the gun thrust in the waistband of her black pants, but it didn't seem to worry him. "That's news to me. Some of your people had a run-in with some of my boys a while back. Is this about that?"

"No. I'm taking over this building. I'm declaring a ten-hour amnesty. You're going to need every minute of it, so you'd better go now. All the rest of you, you're free to go as well. You have five minutes to take what you can carry."

For a moment they all seemed too bewildered to say anything. Maleski frowned, then laughed.

"The hell you say. This building is private property."

This time Cirocco laughed.

"Just what planet do you think you're living on, you idiot? Hornpipe, shoot this guy in the knee."

The gun had materialized in Hornpipe's hand when Cirocco said "shoot," and by the time she said "knee" the bullet was already coming out the other side of Maleski's leg.

As Maleski fell, and for a few seconds after he hit the floor, there was a flurry of noise and activity. None of the men who survived it were ever able to recount a sequence of events, except to note that a lot of men stepped forward and neat holes appeared perfectly centered in their foreheads and they fell down and did not move. The rest, some twenty men, stood very, very still, except for Maleski, who was howling and thrashing and ordering his men to kill the goddamn sons of bitches. But each Titanide held a gun in each hand, and most of the men were getting excellent views down the wide barrels. Finally Maleski stopped cursing and just lay there, breathing hard.

"Okay," he finally managed to croak. "Okay, you win. We'll get out." He rolled over heavily.

He was really quite good. The knife was concealed in his sleeve. He got it out as he rolled over, and his arm flicked it with the precision of long practice. It flashed in the air ... and Cirocco reached out and caught it. She just grabbed it, holding it with the point about six inches from her throat, where it was supposed to have been buried. Maleski stared as she flipped it up and got a new grip, and then it flashed again and he screamed as it buried itself up to the hilt in the torn flesh that had been his knee. A man standing to Maleski's left crumpled to the floor in a dead faint.

"Rocky," Cirocco said, "tie a tourniquet around his thigh. Then throw him out. You men, drop your weapons where you stand and walk slowly away from them. All your weapons. Then strip. Carry one pair of trousers to the door and hand them to Valiha-the yellow Titanide. If she finds a weapon in them she will break your neck. Otherwise, you can put them on and leave. You have four minutes left."

It didn't even take one minute. They were all feverishly anxious to leave, and no one tried to cheat.

"Tell your friends what happened here," she called to them, as her own people started arriving.

There were humans and Titanides in her crew. The Titanides were all calm, well-versed in their jobs. Most of the humans were nervous, having been drafted only hours before. There were Free Females among them, and Vigilantes, and others from other communities.

A desk was set up, and Cirocco took her place behind it as the lights were being arranged. She was suffering some reaction, both from the fight and from what she had done to Maleski-and from the close call. She felt she could do that knife trick six times out of ten, but that wasn't nearly enough. She couldn't let it get that close again.

But most of her nervousness was stage fright. Apparently, it wasn't something one could outgrow. She had suffered from it since childhood.

Two men from the Vigilantes who had worked in mass communications before the War were setting up cables and a tripod and a small camera. The lights came blazing on, and Cirocco blinked. A microphone was set before her.

"All this stuff must be a century old," one of the technicians grumbled.

"Just make it work for an hour," Cirocco told him. He didn't seem to be listening, but was studying her face from several angles. He reached out tentatively toward her forehead, and she backed away, alarmed.

"You really should have something there," he said. "There's a bad glare."

"Have what there?"

"Make-up."

"Is that really necessary?"

"Ms. Jones, you said you wanted a media consultant. I'm just telling you how I'd do this if I were running the show."

Cirocco sighed, and nodded. One of the Titanides had some cream that the man seemed satisfied with. He smeared her face with the greasy stuff.

"Picture's pretty good," the other man announced. "I don't know how long this tube will last, though."

"Then we'd best get to it," said the director. He picked up the mike and spoke into it. "Citizens of Bellinzona," he said, and was drowned out by a high feedback whine. The other man adjusted some knobs, and the man spoke again. This time it was clear. Cirocco could hear the words echoing off the hills outside.

"Citizens of Bellinzona," the director said again. "We have an important announcement from Cirocco Jones, the new Mayor of Bellinzona."

A Free Female was at the window, looking up.

"The picture's there!" she shouted.

Cirocco cleared her throat nervously, fought an impulse to smile brightly that had to have come from her NASA press conference days, a million years ago, and spoke.

"Citizens of Bellinzona. My name is Cirocco Jones. Many of you have heard of me; I was one of the first humans in Gaea, and for a time I was designated by Gaea to be her Wizard. Twenty years ago, I was fired from that job.

"It is important that you understand that, while Gaea fired me, the Titanides never accepted it. Every one of them will follow my orders. I have never taken full advantage of this fact. I am doing so now, and the results will change all your lives.

"As of this moment, you are all, as I said, 'Citizens of Bellinzona'.You'll be wondering what that entails. Essentially, it means you'll all take my orders. I have plans for democracy later, but as of now, you'd better do what I tell you.

"There are now some thousands of Titanides in your city. Each of them has been briefed on the new rules. Think of them as police. To underestimate their strength or their quickness would be a bad mistake.

"Since you are going to be living by rules, I'll give you some now. More will follow, after we have this thing going.

"Murder is not going to be tolerated.

"Slavery is prohibited. All human beings now in a state of slavery are freed. All humans who believe they own other humans had better free them at once. This includes any practice which may, through custom, deprive any other human of liberty. If you're in doubt-if, for instance, you are muslim and believe you own your wife-you had better ask a Titanide. There is a ten-hour amnesty for this purpose.

"Human meat will no longer be sold. Any human consorting with an Iron Master will be shot on sight.

"There is no private property. You may continue to sleep where you have been sleeping, but do not think you own anything but the clothes you wear.

"There shall be no edged weapons allowed in human hands for at least four decarevs. Surrender those weapons to any Titanide during the amnesty. As quickly as possible, I shall be returning the police function to humans. In the meantime, possession of a sword or a knife is a capital offense. I recognize the hardship this will pose to you who use knives for other purposes, but, I emphasize, you will be shot dead if you keep your knives.

"I ... have little good to offer you in the short term. I believe that in the long term, most of you will appreciate what I am doing today. Only the exploiters, the slavers, the killers, will never regain their present positions. The rest of you will reap security and the benefits of an organized human society.

"I demand to see the following persons at the building known as the Loop within ten hours. Any who do not come will be shot in the eleventh hour."

Cirocco read a list of twenty-five names, compiled with Conal's help, of the most influential mafia, tong, and gang leaders.

When she had finished, she read the statement in French, and once more in her halting Russian. Then she relinquished her chair to a woman from the Free Females who read it in Chinese. There were a dozen other translators waiting, human and Titanide. Cirocco hoped to reach every new citizen of Bellinzona.

She felt drained when she was finally able to sit by herself. She had worked on the speech endlessly, it seemed, and was never able to make it sound good. It seemed to her there ought to be ringing declarations in there someplace. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, maybe. But after a lot of thought, she realized there wasn't anything she believed in as a capital R "Right." Could any mortal claim a Right to Life?

So she had fallen back on pragmatism. It had served her fairly well through a long and pragmatic life. "This is the way it is, you poor silly suckers. Get in my way and you will be obliterated."

Even starting from the best of motives, that didn't taste so good in her mouth-and she was far from sure of her motives.

Life in Bellinzona was not what you could call dull. Violent death was all around and could happen at a moment's notice. For the well-connected, it was at best comfortable, and at worst nervous. One never knew when a particular Boss would be defeated and all one's careful preparations for the soft life come to nothing. Still, it was better than being down in the faceless masses. For them, Bellinzona was a special kind of hell. Not only were they constantly in peril of enslavement ... most of them had nothing to do.

There were always the needs of survival, of course. That kept people busy. But it was not like having a job. It was not like farming one's own fields-or even the fields of a landlord. In most neighborhoods people owed allegiance to a Boss, a Shogun, a Landlord, a Capo ... some local Mr. Big. For a woman it was even worse, unless she happened to have been taken in by the Free Females. Female slavery was rampant. It was more than the labor-slavery experienced by the men. It was old-fashioned sexual slavery. Women were bought and sold ten times as frequently as men.

And at the end of one's usefulness, there was the butcher's block.

Actually, there was relatively little killing for food. It happened, but with the manna and the bosses that sort of thing was fairly well under control. Still, with the meat shortage many of the corpses destined for the communal pyre were diverted to the hook, the knife, and the skillet.

Boredom was a big problem. It bred crime-senseless random crime-as if Bellinzona needed any more reasons for violence.

It would be fair to say Bellinzona was ripe for a change. Any change.

So when the blimp drifted over the city, things ground to a halt.

Bellinzonans had seen blimps, from afar. They knew they were large. Many had no idea they were intelligent. Most knew the blimps never came near the city because of all the fires.

Whistlestop apparently didn't care. He mooched up to the city as if he did it every day, and spread his gargantuan shadow from the Slough of Despond clear out to the Terminal Wharves. He was almost as big as Peppermint Bay itself. Then he just hung there, by far the largest object anyone in town had ever seen. His titanic hind fins moved languidly, just enough to keep him positioned over the center of town.

That in itself would have been enough to stop traffic. Then a face appeared on his side, and began to say the most amazing things.

TWELVE

Twenty revs after usurping power, Cirocco was wishing she had left Bellinzona alone. She had anticipated the squabbles, but it didn't alter the fact that squabbles bored her. She sighed, and kept listening. It was best, at this point, if those she hoped would be her allies accepted the fact without the sort of demonstration that had been so useful with Maleski.

More demonstrations had been needed, but she had expected that. Of the twenty-five she had named, eighteen were now dead. Seven had come in, weaponless, to pledge their fealty to the new Boss. She knew damn well she couldn't trust any of them with a brass paper clip, but it was best to let them sink themselves through their own greed, let them hatch their conspiracies and hang them with due process of law. One could be perceived as fair, even when the fix was in.

So, in that sense, the bad guys were no problem. As usual, it was the good guys who gave endless headaches.

"We cannot and will not give up our separate enclave," Trini said. "You haven't been around here much, Cirocco. You don't know how it was. You can't understand how bad it was-and is-for a woman to try to live in Bellinzona. Some of our women were subjected to ... oh, Cirocco, it would make you weep! Rape was the least of it. We have to remain separate."

"And we won't give up our weapons," Stuart said. Stuart was the man who had come in response to Cirocco's demand for a representative of the Vigilantes, just as Trini had come as an elder of the Free Females. "You talked about law and order. For seven years, we've been just about the only group that has tried to maintain a degree of decency for all humans in Gaea"-and here he glared at Trini, who glared back. "We have been and remain willing to protect even those who don't belong to our organization, subject only to the availability of manpower and weapons. I won't claim we've made the streets safe. But our aim has been decency."

Cirocco looked from one to the other. Oddly, both of them had summed up their respective positions in two minutes. It was likely that neither of them remembered they had been arguing and embellishing for ten hours without saying a hell of a lot more than they had just said.

At any rate, they shut up for a moment, and looked anxiously at Cirocco.

"I like you both," Cirocco said, quietly. "It would bother me a lot to have either of you killed."

Neither of them flinched, but their eyes looked a little hollow.

"Stuart, you and I both know my weapons policy couldn't last long. I have been given one very large break, and I intend to use it for all it's worth. To control all the ammunition in Bellinzona. There are plenty of guns around. I intend to round them up, with house-to-house searches, if necessary. Making useful guns is beyond Bellinzona's industrial capacity, and will be for quite a while. But you can and will make knives, more swords, and bows and arrows and blackjacks ... and so forth.

"I'm going to use this short time when everybody is disarmed to... to give the people a chance to breathe freely. There's going to be a lot of killing in the next few days, but it's going to be Titanides killing humans. If a human kills another human, execution will be swift and public. I want people to see that. My goal here is to get a social compact going, and I'm starting practically from zero. My advantages are superior force, and the knowledge that most of these people came from lawful societies before the war. They'll soon remember the ways of getting along."

"You're trying to make a paradise, is that it?" Stuart sneered.

"By no means. I have few illusions about what's going to happen here. It will be brutal and unfair. But it's already better than it was twenty revs ago."

"I felt safe twenty revs ago," Trini said.

"That's because you lived in a walled camp. I don't blame you; I'd have done the same thing, in your positions. But I have to tear down the walls. And I can't have a lot of sword-toting Vigilantes swaggering around until I know more about them." She turned to Trini.

"I have a couple things to offer you. After the disarmament, I'm going to have a period of time-possibly as long as a myriarev-during which only the police will be allowed to carry swords and clubs. And only women will be allowed to carry knives."

"That's not fair!" Stuart shouted.

"You're damn right it's not fair," Cirocco went on. "It also isn't fair that most of the women who arrived here after the war were knocked out and dragged away by some large hairy item and sold at public auction."

Trini was looking interested, but still dubious.

"Some women will die," Trini pointed out. "Most of them don't know how to handle a knife."

"Some women died yesterday because they didn't have one," Cirocco replied.

She was still looking dubious. Cirocco turned to Stuart.

"As for your Vigilantes... we are going to be needing human police after this initial period. I intend to give preference to the Vigilantes."

"Armed with sticks?" he asked.

"Don't underestimate the billy club."

"So my people will be going up to guys and searching them, right? What happens when the guy pulls a knife?"

"It depends on how good your man is. He may very well die."

She let them think it over again. It was a great temptation to come right out and say it: you don't have any choice. But they knew that. It would be better if they found a way to like it, or at least part of it.

"So there will be laws, and courts?" Stuart asked.

"Not just yet. I've already sketched out laws about slavery and killing. For now, they'll be enforced at the scene of the crime with Titanides acting as judges. Pretty soon we'll elaborate the laws and go through the formality of arrest and some sort of trial."

"I'd feel better with some laws and courts right now," Trini said.

Cirocco just looked at her. She did not mention that there was an even more brutal alternative which she had considered for some time-and had not totally ruled out even yet. She called it the Conal Solution. The Titanides could make judgment calls that Cirocco trusted utterly. If they said this or that human ought to be killed, she knew they were right. There was no denying it would make things quicker and easier.

She didn't even know if it was wrong. Cirocco believed in good and evil, but right and wrong were something else entirely. Trini craved the sanction of law because that's what she had grown up with. Cirocco had, too, and believed it was ultimately necessary if humans were to live together. But she didn't worship it. She had no doubt that a Titanide's innate knack of smelling out evil in humans was better than the judgment of, for instance, a jury of twelve humans.

But it didn't feel right. So she had elected the more arduous course.

"We'll have laws and courts eventually," Cirocco said. "We'll probably have lawyers, too, in time. But that's all up to you."

Trini and Stuart looked at each other.

"You mean the two of us?" Stuart asked. "Or all the citizens?"

"That'll be up to you, too. If you can get along with me for a while, you'll be in an excellent position to take over government when I leave."

"Leave?" Trini said. "When would that be?"

"As soon as I can. I'm not doing this because I want to. I'm doing it because I'm the only one who can do it, and... for reasons that don't concern you now. I've never had any urge to govern. I expect it's going to be a huge headache."

Stuart was looking more and more thoughtful. Cirocco thought her original assessment of the man was correct. He had the hunger for power. She wondered how high he had gotten in government before the war. She had no doubt he had been in government, though she had not asked him.

Trini had the same impulse, though in a different form. Cirocco had known Trini for twenty years. It was only in the last seven that Trini's hidden perversion had surfaced. All things considered, she had done rather well with it. She had been a founding mother and guiding force behind the Free Females. She was basically a good person. Cirocco didn't need a Titanide to tell her that.

So was Stuart. Cirocco didn't really like either of them. She felt that the urge to lead large groups of people was basically not very nice, but knew such people had to exist. She could deal with them when she had to.

"What sort of government did you envision?" Stuart asked, cautiously. "You abolished private property. Are you a communist?"

"I am, temporarily, an absolute dictator. I'm doing the things I believe need to be done, in an order I have worked out very carefully. I abolished private property because Bellinzona is a found object. The most powerful people live in the biggest buildings. The poorest don't even have clothes. That came about because there was no law here when they arrived. The solution I came up with was, first, to abolish slavery, and, second, to wipe out all the outsized gains the more ruthless citizens made simply because they were sons of bitches. Here's one of the headaches I mentioned. As of now, I own the city of Bellinzona. But I don't want or need it. I intend to return the buildings, rooms, and boats to the people ... and I want to do it fairly. A lot of these people have worked hard. They built boats, for instance. I just stole them all. One of the things I hope you two will help me do is set up some sort of mechanism for sorting out claims to personal property and real estate and dwellings. So, yes, I'm sort of communist right now. But I expect that will change."

"Why not let the State keep everything?" Trini asked.

"Again, that will be up to you. I'd advise against it. I think you'll be more popular and sleep easier if you try to be fairer than that. But that may just be my own prejudice. I'll admit to a bias toward private property and democracy. It's the way I grew up. But I know there are other theories."

She again watched Stuart and Trini study each other. These two were going to be interesting, she decided.

"For now," she went on, "I need answers. Can you work with me, knowing my decisions are absolute?"

"If they're absolute, why do you need us?"

"For advice in making them. For criticism when you think I made a bad one. But don't think you'll have a vote."

"Do we really have a choice?" Trini asked.

"Yes. I'm not going to kill you. If you refuse, I'll send you home and get another Free Female, and keep doing that until I find one who'll work with me in getting the Free Females back into society. Somebody will, you know."

"Yes, I do know. It might as well be me."

Stuart looked up.

"Me? Sure. I'll start right now by telling you it's a bad mistake to have Titanides killing humans. It's going to foster race prejudice."

"That's a chance I'm willing to take. The Titanides can defend themselves. If anybody's in danger here, it's the human race, not the Titanides. If things can't be worked out peacefully in the end, they will simply kill every one of you, man, woman, and child."

Stuart looked startled, then thoughtful. Cirocco was not surprised. Even seven years of Bellinzona had not eroded the man's anthropocentric conviction that humans would eventually triumph over all other species, just as they had done on Earth. He had just now entertained the notion it might not be so. He didn't like it.

There were going to be plenty of things he didn't like.

THIRTEEN

Rocky didn't like police duty. He wasn't alone in this; none of the Titanides cared for it. But the Captain had promised them most solemnly that this was the way to get the Child back, so he patrolled diligently.

It had been an interesting time.

On the first day he had participated in a raid on a Boss's headquarters that had left three hundred dead, including one Titanide who had taken an arrow through the head. Rocky himself had received an arrow wound, not serious but painful, in the left hindquarter. He was still favoring that leg.

That had not been the worst raid. One Boss had held out for almost a hundred revs. The Titanides besieged the building and built fires all around it to make the interior as unpleasant as possible. At the end, the Boss's troops had thrown the man's head out the front door and surrendered. Three Titanides had died in that action.

Altogether, Rocky knew of a dozen Titanide deaths. The human deaths were in the thousands, but most of them had come in the first forty revs, with another brief spurt when the disarmament policy went into effect. Now all the gangs were dispersed. Humans eyed Rocky with suspicion and fear, but no one had taken any action against him in quite a while.

So he strolled his beat, his sheathed sword tapping against his left foreleg, and looked for trouble, hoping not to find any. From time to time he passed a human of the kind Cirocco called crazy, but who Rocky thought of as having worms in the head. All humans were crazy, it was well-known, but with most of them it was a glorious thing. A minority were something else. The English word for it was psychopath, but the word held no flavor for Rocky. They were the ones he knew should be killed on the spot, as the only question about them was not if they would have to be killed, but when.

But the Captain had said no one was to be killed unless caught "red-handed," to use her phrase, in a capital offense.

Actually, by now that was fine with Rocky. He had seen enough killing. Let the humans kill their own mistakes.

Rocky preferred to think of more pleasant things. He smiled, startling a human woman who, after a brief hesitation, smiled back. Rocky tipped his ridiculous hat in her direction, then scratched under his shirt. Clothes bothered the hell out of him. Sometimes even the Captain had to be humored in her craziness. Wear the uniforms, she said, so Rocky did, and scratched all the time.

He heard the vague, dark thoughts of Tambura in his mind, and smiled again.

Tambura was his daughter. She wasn't very old yet. Valiha had kept the semi-fertilized egg for a while, waiting for a good time to approach the Wizard. Cirocco had given her permission, and a decarev before the invasion of Bellinzona Serpent had quickened the egg in Rocky's womb. And there she nestled in her third decarev of life. She was just a microscopic smudge of dividing cells now, with a brain the size of a walnut-a brain that had once been Valiha's egg. Within the crystalline egg structure were molecular lattices organized quite differently from those of the human brain. The ability to sing was already programmed in. Many things Valiha had learned in her life were stored in there, too, including all of the English language. There were memories of Valiha's life, and of all her foremothers stretching back to the foremother of the Madrigal Chord, Violone. To a lesser extent, the forefathers and hindfathers were represented, in the only form of immortality that mattered to a Titanide.

Rocky tried not to be chauvinistic, but it seemed a more compassionate system than the mad brawl of human genetics. Humans evolved through horror and maladaption, through the cold mercilessness of chance, through endless defectives who, through no fault of their own, came squalling into the world with no chance of survival. At the best of times a human was a series of compromises between dominant and recessive genes. And the only programming in their infant brains, it seemed, was left over from ravenous animals who had lived in trees before Gaea began to spin.

This all explained, to Rocky, the cancer that was Bellinzona.

Titanides got a hard, basic, and practical education from their foremothers while they were still eggs, long before there was any awareness. The machine-like structures in the developing egg filtered the frontal semen for information and traits that would be useful, ran test simulations, rejected those that could not work, and then hardened into a potential. The egg did not take DNA helter-skelter, the good with the bad, but tore it apart, evaluated it, and used the bits that would be sensible.

If the embryonic Titanide got all things practical and much historical from the foremother, it got everything else from the hindmother. Rocky wondered if he wasn't prejudiced-being hind-pregnant himself-but it seemed to him this was the most important part.

Tambura was alive and aware and in communication with Rocky at all times. It was not verbal-though Tambura had words-nor was it musical-though Tambura spent much time singing the strange songs of the womb. As her outer brain grew into something quite similar to a human brain, but with a cybernetic egg at its core, Rocky filled the developing layers with his love, his song... his soul.

In many ways, for a Titanide, pregnancy was the best part of life.

Rocky broke off his communication with his daughter when he smelled violence. There was a change in the way the air felt. He had felt that change often lately.

Looking ahead along the causeway he saw the source. He felt tired, and wondered how human cops had handled their jobs. The situations were so predictable, and yet each one was dangerously different.

He took his hand-weapon out of his pouch and checked the magazine. It was a totally different type of weapon from the one he had carried, reluctantly, that day so many revs ago when he had come to Bellinzona to operate on his Captain. This was a twenty-second century weapon, and had been designed and ordered with Gaean conditions in mind. Most of the principles were the same, but the materials were different. Rocky's gun contained no metal. It looked like a long, narrow cardboard roll attached to a grip. There were short fins around the middle of the carbon-ceramic barrel; these glowed bright red for a second when the gun was fired.

The grip-which was too small for Rocky's hand-contained forty tiny rockets tipped with lead. The projectile was eased through the barrel at a relative snail's pace, then accelerated fiercely, cracking the sound barrier within one meter of the muzzle.

It was a marvelous weapon. Rocky hated it. From the way it felt in his pouch to the ugly results of its terrible accuracy, it was an evil thing through and through. He hoped the day would come when all such things could be erased from the land of Gaea.

In the meantime, he approached the shouting people.

A man had taken a woman by the upper arm and was pulling her along behind him as she shouted obscenities at him. He returned them, insult for insult. A crying child was following the two. A small group had formed to watch, but not to interfere. Rocky had seen the same events a dozen times, it seemed.

As he approached, the man-who must not have seen Rocky-finally stopped and hit the woman with his fist. He hit her again, and a third time ... and then both of them noticed there was a Titanide standing very close with a gun pointed at them.

"Release her at once," Rocky said.

"Look, I didn't mean-"

Rocky tapped him lightly on the head in the place he had been taught would produce the fewest side-effects later, and the man crumpled. The woman, as Rocky had half-expected, quickly knelt beside the fallen man and began to cry as she held his head.

"Don't take him in!" she sobbed. "It was my fault."

"Stand up," Rocky ordered her. When she did not, he pulled her up. She wasn't wearing enough to conceal a weapon. He reached behind him, into his saddlebag, and came up with a short steel knife of the type already labeled "nutcutters" by the Bellinzonans.

"You are advised to carry this at all times," he told her.

"I won't! I don't need a knife."

"As you please." Rocky returned it to its place. "Today you're okay. In another hectorev you will be in violation of the law if you do not go armed. The penalty will be one kilorev in a labor camp for the first offense. Check the community bulletin boards for specifics, as ignorance is not acceptable as an excuse. If you cannot read, an interpreter will-"

She came at him, fists flying awkwardly. He had expected it. He wanted witnesses, and he wanted her to hit him, mostly because he didn't like the idea of leaving the crying child with her. He let her land a few blows, then made her unconscious.

"Assault on a police officer," he informed the crowd, and no one had any objection. The child cried louder. He was about eight, Rocky thought, but he could have been wrong. Ages of human children were tough for Titanides.

"Is this woman your mother?" he asked the child, who was too upset to even hear the question. Rocky looked at the crowd again.

"Does anyone know if this is the child's mother?"

One man stepped forward.

"Yeah, he's hers, or that's what she says."

It was possible that she was his natural mother. Rocky suspected she was, because she didn't seem to him the sort of woman who would adopt one of Bellinzona's endless foundlings.

"Is there anyone who is willing to take responsibility for him in this community?" That was a laugh, Rocky thought. Community. Still, it was the prescribed procedure, and Cirocco maintained that communities would develop. "If not, I will take him to the community creche, where he will be cared for until his mother returns from the labor camp."

Surprisingly, a man stepped forward.

"I'll take him," he said.

"Sir," Rocky began. "Your responsibilities in this situation are-"

"I know what they are. I read the goddamn bulletin boards. Very carefully. You just run along with those two, and I'll see this fellow has a place to sleep."

There was some anger in the man's words, some defiance. Humans will take care of their own, was the implication. But there was a grudging respect. Either way was fine with Rocky. He had the authority to make field decisions of this nature, and judged the boy would be all right in the man's care.

So he bound the prisoners and slung them over his back and headed for the jail. On the way there Tambura intruded into his mind again.

*Mother, what hurts?* Tambura's question was both much simpler and much more complex than the English translation. "Mother," for instance, was a gross oversimplification for the Titanide noun Tambura used. The question itself was more in the form of a wave of emotion.

*Events. Interpersonal and interspecies relations. Life.*

*Mother, do I have to be born?*

*You will love life, my child. Most of the time.*

FOURTEEN

Since the take-over, Nova had been busy as a witch with three holes in her spacesuit and only two patches.

Cirocco didn't seem to sleep at all. Nova had almost reached that state herself. It was now almost half a kilorev since the invasion. Nova had had little to do at first except record numbers of dead and wounded. But as laws were put into effect and the census got under way, her work load had increased. They were counting not only people, but dwellings, and an inventory of all formerly private property was contemplated.

Nova was in charge of the computers.

Can't run a revolution without computers, she thought.

Her title was Chief Bureaucrat. She didn't even know what it meant, except that it precluded her being out on the streets with a sword. That was okay with her. Now she fought only if it was unavoidable, and she was getting very good at avoiding it.

In that, she and Conal had a lot in common.

The thought of Conal irritated her for a moment. She looked away from her computer screen and went through some calming exercises.

There had been a fight upon their return from Pandemonium.

Nova had demanded to know if Gaea's assertions were merely propaganda. Robin, reluctantly, had told the truth. Nova had informed her that from that day forward, she no longer considered herself Robin's daughter.

She sighed, and pushed her hair out of her eyes.

Cirocco, in the endless meetings at the Junction before the invasion, had found out that Nova had a knack for running computers. Chris's ancient machines were brought out, dusted off, powered up, and readied for the big day. Since then, Nova had spent very few hours away from her console.

It was, she admitted to herself, an interesting way to view a revolution.

She was the first to spot the drop-off in summary executions. She knew before anyone else that the rate of admissions to the labor camps was declining. It was Nova who brought the first estimates of Belllinzona's population to the Wizard.

It turned out that Bellinzona had almost half a million humans living in it, a fact that surprised everyone but Conal. Nova's machines could line them up in any way that might be useful, from national origin to age and sex and languages and height and weight and eye color. It was a hell of a census. It was supposed to provide the basis for a system of identification in some hazy future time. Nova had a staff of one hundred constantly feeding information to her mainframe. She took the results to Cirocco and the Governing Council.

The Council still governed more in name than in fact. Cirocco was still the dictator, no one had any doubts about that.

The economics of Bellinzona had fascinated Nova as she learned more about them. There was one crucial factor that had caused Cirocco endless worry. Nova had dubbed it the Manna Factor.

Though Gaea did not control Dione, she owned the Spoke above it. When she had decided to discharge the human war refugees in the new town of Bellinzona she had apparently wanted to retain what control she could over them. So she had invented manna. As its name implied, it was food that fell out of the sky. It grew on a trillion plants up there in the darkness of the Dione spoke, and every few hectorevs it fell over Dione like a spilled cornucopia. Manna came in the form of coconut-sized balls floating on the ends of little parachutes. Even with the chutes, it was wise to get under cover when it was raining manna.

Like coconuts, manna modules had hard shells. They survived impact, but were not too hard to crack. Inside was one of a hundred varieties of nutritious meat. It came in a lot of flavors. It provided all the vitamins and minerals a human being needed to stay healthy. The manna was so good, in fact, that those who subsisted entirely on it-a large part of the population-were healthier than those who supplemented their diets with expensive and exotic Dionian meats and vegetables. Fat people lost weight on it, until they reached an optimum mass. People suffering vitamin deficiencies recovered after a few kilorevs of eating manna. It also inhibited tooth decay, sweetened the breath, lessened menstrual cramps, and cured baldness. Naturally, it was a sign of status in Bellinzona never to have eaten the stuff.

Manna had a shelf-life of two kilorevs. All but the most inept were able to squirrel away enough of it to last until the next shower. Those few who either couldn't or didn't were ripe for slavery when they got hungry.

Of course, Gaea giveth and Gaea taketh away. The weather in Dione was awful. It never got too cold, but it was often cold enough so the homeless masses shivered through an endless afternoon sleep-time. And it rained a lot. So shelter was something worthwhile, something many people worked to obtain. It was not easy to come by, as the Bosses had grabbed every inch they could control and exacted harsh prices for the right to sleep under a roof.

But aside from seeking shelter and storing a supply of manna every kilorev or so ... there was little one had to do to survive in Bellinzona. Cirocco had called it the ultimate welfare state.

And she had known that, not long after she moved to take control, the manna would stop falling from the sky. The question had been how long?

So the first and most important goal of her administration had been to feed the populace. It was a goal that came before everything else-even law and order. It had to be accomplished at all costs, because nothing could be worse than a subjugated but starving city.

Cirocco had been dismayed at Nova's population projections. She had envisioned feeding a city of two or three hundred thousand.

Still ... Moros teemed with edible fish. The flatlands at the end of Peppermint Bay were fertile. Gaean crops grew quickly. It could be done, but not with a free population. Conscript labor was essential. Some of the laws had been designed with that in mind. Filling the prisons was essential to Cirocco's plans, as she had no illusions about legions of volunteers marching out to clear the jungle and tend the crops. Violent crimes were punishable by instant execution: one less mouth to feed. Other crimes earned the bewildered citizen a long term in the labor camp. Cirocco had been ready to go as far as necessary. She would have made sneezing in public a criminal offense if that's what it took to fill the camps. Luckily, the citizens of Bellinzona had obliged her by violating her entirely reasonable laws in sufficient numbers to guarantee a food supply.

So when the manna had stopped falling, Bellinzona was ready.

FIFTEEN

Without quite knowing how it had happened, Valiha and Virginal had become fisherfolk. Neither had ever netted a fish before.

Those humans who knew something about ships had, with the authority of the Mayor's decrees, taken command of all the Bellinzonan's boats capable of doing more than rocking at anchor. For the last decarev the fleet had been putting out to sea, with Valiha and Virginal at the prow.

Their main function was to ward off the submarines.

There might have been a fishing industry in Bellinzona long before this, but for the fact that human-piloted boats that ventured more than ten kilometers from the environs of the city were promptly eaten. Submarines had huge appetites, and were not picky.

The Captain had made some sort of treaty with them. It worked so well that not only were the ships not eaten, but the fishing fleet could now rendezvous with the submarine flotillas and find the seas strewn with the disgorged and still living schools recently scooped up by the subs' vast mouths.

There was a submarine song. Valiha and Virginal sang it, though it was not one they were born to know. And the leviathans eased up from the depths to give much of their catch to the hungry city.

It was a miracle.

That's what they were doing now. Valiha stood at the prow of one of the largest boats in the Bellinzona fleet and sang the submarine song, while not far away the vast bulk of a submarine wallowed near the surface. Great gouts of water spurted up in the direction of the smaller ships and the nets rigged between them, stunned and bewildered fish vainly thrashing in the torrent, escaping from the jaws of the submarine only to be swallowed by the nets.

It was rather beautiful to watch. Lately, the fisherfolk had begun singing their own version of the submarine song as they hauled on their nets. Valiha listened critically. She knew it lacked the nuances of Titanide song, but like so much human music, it had a simple vitality that was attractive. Perhaps, one day, the submarines would respond to human song alone. That would be good, for Valiha had no wish to command the fleet for the rest of her life.

It had been turbulent seas, at first. With a hard core of dedicated sea-folk and a larger number of human police and a handful of Titanides, it had just been possible to put to sea with a cargo of recalcitrant prisoners. The first outings had produced little but blisters and aching backs. But the human police were zealous-maybe a little too much so, Valiha thought-and soon everyone was at least working as hard as possible. Then a spirit began to grow. It took root slowly at first. But now, when Valiha overheard conversations in the bustling fish markets, there was a clear sense that these people thought of themselves as a group-and what's more, as slightly better than the idlers ashore. It now took fewer police to keep them in line. When the fleet set sail, people hoisted the lines with a will, and when the fish were sighted there was cheering. There were songs for departure and songs for return, as well as the Titanide-inspired submarine chantey.

It was a good thing, Valiha knew. The last shower of manna had been many days late, and when it was opened, was too rancid to eat.

Bellinzona was now on its own.

SIXTEEN

"It's Gaea," Adam said.

"It sure is," Chris confirmed, as brightly as he could. Adam put down his toys and sat in front of the television screen.

Chris had been worried enough when Gaea only showed up in old Marilyn Monroe movies. He and Adam had seen them all a dozen times. Adam was quite bored with them.

But about a kilorev after the air show which had so badly upset Gaea, something new had happened. Gaea had showed up in an animated cartoon.

He should have expected it. It was an easy enough thing to do, and it wouldn't stop there. But Chris had been away from television for over twenty years, and had forgotten about that capability.

The first had been a Betty Boop cartoon, and had been simple image-substitution. Wherever Betty Boop had appeared in the original, Gaea had replaced her with a stylized but easily-recognizable cartoon of Marilyn Monroe. The sound track was unaltered.

If Earth computers could do it, it stood to reason that Gaea could.

Later, she began to appear in the movies Chris knew to be Adam's favorites. This was much more sophisticated stuff, with full-body replacement, facial enhancement, and the Monroe/Gaea voice. It was impossible to detect the fakery. It was seamless movie magic, special effects to the nth degree.

And it was distinctly odd to see Marilyn Monroe starring in Fists of Fury. She was a formidable figure, replacing Bruce Lee in every whirl, glower, and leap. All the Chinese actors spoke dubbed English, but Gaea/Lee was lip-synched. Of course, Lee had spent most of his time in those movies with his shirt off, so Gaea did, too. Then there were the love scenes...

After that there was no telling where Gaea might pop up. Chris saw her as Snow White, Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, and Indiana Jones. She appeared in old RKO serials, which Gaea broadcast at the rate of one episode per day. Pandemonium television had grown increasingly violent. Even the comedy tended sharply toward the slapstick.

There was little Chris could do about it. Having foreseen some of it didn't make it any easier. Gaea continued to make her regular visits. She came a bit closer each time, but was as yet still distant. There was no chance she would scare the boy.

Chris could only love the child.

Which, he reflected, was nothing to sneer at. He knew Adam returned his love. But he knew a child's love can be quite fickle. One day it would come to a showdown. Nothing could be clearer than that. But the outcome was far from clear.

"Hi, Gaea," Adam said, waving at the screen.

"Hello, Adam, my lovely boy," said Gaea.

Chris looked up. The image of Gaea had stopped and turned away from the action still happening behind her. She was facing Adam, and smiling.

Adam still didn't get it. He giggled, and said hi again.

"How are you doing, Adam?" Gaea said. The action behind her was a fight scene. Gaea ducked as a chair was thrown. It sailed over her head. "Oops!! He almost got me!"

Adam laughed louder.

"Gotcha!" he shouted. "Gotcha!"

"They can't get me!" Gaea boasted, and turned skillfully to block a blow from a huge guy in a black hat. She hit him a quick one-two-three combination and he fell on the floor. Gaea dusted her palms together, and grinned at Adam again.

"How'd you like that, Adam?" she said.

"I like it, I like it!" Adam laughed.

Somebody save me, Chris thought, in a daze.

SEVENTEEN

Serpent thundered down the field, clods of turf flying from his hooves, his forelegs flirting nimbly with the black and white ball. He kicked it with the side of his hoof, and Mandolin reared on her hind legs to butt it with her head in the general direction of Zampogna, who couldn't take control and watched helplessly as Kekese of the Sharp team kicked it to Clavecin, who headed off toward the Flat's goal. Serpent kept a sharp eye from midfield, and when Tjelempang stole it away again and passed it off to Piano, he was in position to take it on the run. Then he was in control again, running like the wind, the Pele of the four-legged set, bearing down on the Sharp's goalie, who desperately tried to read Serpent's moves, dodged left, then right, left again-and was in the wrong place when Serpent kneed the ball up, thrust his head forward ... deliberately missed the head-butt. The goalie went flying through the air toward the left side of the goal... .

-and watched helplessly as Serpent twisted around and kicked with a hind leg. The ball sizzled into the center of the opposing net.

Flats ahead, four to three.

That was still the score when, with only a centirev left to play, Mandolin scored her first goal of the game, to put it out of reach. Serpent gathered with the others to congratulate Mandolin, who was still a rookie at the glorious sport of football. It never occurred to him to point out that he, Serpent, had scored the winning goal. He had also scored two of the other points. He was, no doubt about it, the best football player in Gaea.

Breathing like steam engines, dripping sweat, the Titanides engaged in the sort of horseplay usual after a hard-fought game. Gradually, Serpent became aware of another sound. For one moment he was alarmed. It sounded a lot like the awful day of the riot.

But then he discovered a loose group of prisoners gathered near the sidelines, shouting and clapping.

They had been congregating there lately, watching the Titanides. This group was larger than before. In fact, the group had been getting bigger each day, Serpent realized. A few times, after the Titanide game was over, some of the human prisoners had taken the field to kick the ball around.

Serpent scooped up the football and kicked it high and long. It fell into the group of prisoners-all of these were males-and watched them toss it back and forth, waiting for the Titanides to leave.

He wondered if they might like to form teams themselves. He moved off to the sidelines and watched as they scrambled over the turf. They seemed to be playing twenty or thirty to a side on the over-sized Titanide field, cheerfully accepting the inconvenience caused by the rutted ground.

Serpent walked away thoughtfully. He joined the other Titanides on the hillside west of the valley, folded his legs under him, took his leather-bound sketch pad and a charcoal pencil from his pouch, stared out over the valley, and promptly fell into that mental state that was nothing like what humans called sleep, but was not quite like being awake.

He scanned the vista in front of him. Far to his right, to the north, was Peppermint Bay, with Moros just beyond it. Huddled at the near end under its usual blanket of haze was Bellinzona. Whistlestop was visible, stationed a prudent three kilometers above the firetrap city.

Sweeping in front of Serpent were the many kilometers of land reclaimed from the jungle.

It was not like Earth jungles, where the land, surprisingly, is fragile and not too fertile if cleared. Gaean land operated by different rules. Crops sank deep roots and thrived on the nutritious milk of Gaea, and from her underground heat. There was not much photosynthesis involved in the plants which could be raised in the dim light of Dione, so the fields were all colors. It was a huge patchwork quilt of crops. All the fields were square-except those right around the river, which were terraced and flooded to grow rice-like crops. Running between the squares were dirt paths where humans pulled hand-carts of harvested crops to the river docks, where barges floated the bounty down to the city. And dotted here and there among the fields were the neat rows of tents which housed the workers.

Cirocco insisted on calling them prisoners. Serpent thought slaves might be more accurate, but Cirocco insisted there was a difference. He supposed there was. Slavery was an alien concept to the Titanide mind, so he was ready to admit it would take a human to distinguish the gradations.

Once again, it was a matter of hierarchies, another concept Titanides had a lot of trouble with. They had elders, and were capable of obedience to the Captain, but anything more complex than that confused them terribly. The work camps, for instance, were ruled by a Warden, a former Vigilante Serpent didn't like very much, but not a bad man. He was responsible to the Council back in town-specifically, to the Prisons Committee. The Council was ruled by Cirocco Jones and her advisors: Robin, Nova, and Conal.

In the other direction, the Warden commanded twenty Camp Bosses, who in turn gave orders to a dozen or so Overseers, each in charge of a number of work gangs supervised by a Trusty.

He glanced down at his sketch pad. He had been looking at it off and on as he sat there, but his eyes had sent no messages to his brain. Now he saw he had done a simple rendering of the scene before him. He looked at it critically. He had left out the humans on the road. There were some hesitant lines to suggest the tents of the nearest camp. Serpent frowned. This was not what his mind sought. He tore out the page, crumpled it, and tossed it away. Then he looked down at the camp.

The tents were green canvas. Each housed ten humans. The sexes were segregated for sleeping, but sexual abstinence was not enforced. The Overseers and Bosses were appointed by the Warden, but not reviewed by the Titanides. In practical terms this was a mistake, Serpent knew. Some of the Overseers and Bosses were worse than the prisoners. It had been possible to catch a few of these in acts of brutality, whereupon they found themselves toiling in a prisoner's loincloth. But these days such people were careful to commit their atrocities out of sight. The Titanides could not be everywhere.

It was impractical, it was inefficient ... and it was the way the Captain said it must be done.

Serpent had fretted about it at first. Later he had seen the trap. Crazy as it was, it was the human way to do things. They couldn't detect lies or evil the way a Titanide could, so they had evolved these compromises which they usually called "justice," or, more accurately, "law." Serpent well knew that truth was a relative term, sometimes impossible to establish, but humans were almost totally blind to it. The trap-and it was a subtle one-was that if humans came to rely on Titanide perceptions of Truth and Evil, they would gain all the benefits of a sane society and Titanides would be enslaved to the humans' need.

Cirocco's solution made a lot more sense. She would use the Titanides as much as she had to. At first, this had been a lot, with Titanides acting as policeman, judge, jury, and hangman. The purpose was to galvanize the society into an understanding that evildoing would be punished.

But the humans had to be weaned away from this, back into their own way of doing things. Increasingly, it was so. The courts were taking more of the burden. That they were often inaccurate was simply the price humans had to pay for their freedom.

Once more he glanced down at his pad. There was a drawing of three female prisoners. The one in the center was old and tired, her hands gnarled from the harvest. She stood there in her dirty loincloth. Her face had a wondrous beauty etched deeply. The youngest and-in human terms-prettiest of the bunch had been drawn with the face of a monster. Serpent remembered her. This was an evil one. Some day she would hang. Looking closer, Serpent realized he had drawn a gallows into her face. He tore it out and crumpled it and looked again toward the camp.

At the center of the community was the gallows. It had been used frequently in the early days of the conquest, less often now. There had been the one awful riot, but since that day the Titanide guards had been reduced. Now there were hardly enough to form six football teams.

Though prison life was hard work, it was better than most of the prisoners had known in Bellinzona. Food had never been a problem in the old days. But now the manna no longer fell, and new prisoners told of hunger and uncertainty. There was an economic system being born, social lines being drawn. There were jobs in plenty, but the wages would buy only enough food to feed oneself, and not well. Many of the jobs were harder and more dangerous than farm labor. And there were days when the fleet came back empty, or no barges arrived from the camps, and everyone went hungry.

Prison food was the best-the Warden was under orders to be sure that it was. It was plentiful. Prison was a secure place. Most of the people here didn't want to make trouble.

So Titanides only patrolled the strip of no-man's-land between the camps and the city. They seldom caught anybody, and few bunks turned up empty at roll-call.

Again Serpent looked at his sketch. Three men hung from ropes in the center of the camp. Two had been evil, Serpent remembered. One had only done something dumb. He had killed an Overseer in front of Titanide witnesses. The Overseer had certainly deserved it-Serpent recalled the man had been hanged in turn only a few hectorevs later-but the Law was the Law. Serpent would have let the man live. The human judge had felt differently.

Angrily, he tore that page out and threw it away. His mind kept returning to the thing he knew in his soul and hated to think about. This was a bad place, a place of suffering, a human place where no Titanide should be. Titanides knew how to behave. Humans spent their lives in an endless struggle to subdue their animal natures. It was quite possible that these laws, prisons, and gallows were the best solution they would ever find to that paradox. But it sickened the Titanide to be part of it.

He stared into the darkness of the Dione spoke and began to sing a song of sadness, and of longing for the Great Tree of home. Others joined him, their hands involved in simple tasks. The song went on for a long time.

There had to be something good to be done here. He didn't expect to change the world. He didn't expect to change human nature-and would not if he could. They had their own destiny. His aim was modest. He merely would like to make the world a slightly better place for his having lived in it. That seemed little enough to ask.

He looked down at his sketchpad. He had drawn a smiling human. The fellow was dressed in shorts and a striped shirt, and was wearing shoes. He was in violent motion, kicking a football.

EIGHTEEN

Robin took her seat to the right of the larger chair at the end of the huge Council table, in the Great Hall of The Loop. She opened her cunningly crafted leather briefcase-a gift from Valiha and Virginal-took out a stack of papers, and tapped them on the polished wood. Then, with a nervous glance around, she took out her wire-rimmed glasses and put them on.

She still felt funny wearing them. Back home, she had suffered from a recurring optical problem that had been easily correctible as she advanced in years. Here, without visits to the Fountain, her eyes kept getting worse. And, Great Mother, it was no wonder, since she spent her days staring at endless reports.

It should not have surprised her, she knew, but it still did. In every way but the final, most important one, she was the Mayor of Bellinzona. She suspected that, had she been born Christian, she would have been Pope by now.

Cirocco had been quite reasonable about it, that day six kilorevs ago. She had been reasonable... up to a point. Then she had been adamant.

"You have the experience of leading a large group of people," Cirocco had said. "I don't. For reasons you'll see, I will have to retain the final power in Bellinzona. But I will be relying on you and your judgment in a great many things. And I know you'll rise to the challenge."

Well, challenge it had been. But now it was more and more routine: the very thing she had hated about running the Coven.

She rubbed the table with her hand, and smiled. It was a wonderful table, made of the best wood, edged with more clever carvings than Robin could count. It had been made by Titanides, naturally. It was the second table to grace the Council Chamber.

The first one had been round. Cirocco had taken one look at it and told them to take it away.

"This isn't Camelot," she had said. "There'll be no meetings of equals here. Bring me a big, long table, with a big chair at this end."

Robin knew it had been a natural mistake for the Titanides. There was a human way and a Titanide way. They were ignorant of the psychological edge Cirocco sought by sitting at the head.

So they had brought a big chair. Sometimes Cirocco sat in it.

But more and more lately, it stood empty, and Robin conducted her business from her customary seat at the right of the throne.

Others were taking their seats now. Directly across the table, Nova thumped a huge stack of paper onto the table and slipped into her own chair. She glanced up at her mother, nodded, and then began penciling notes in the margins.

The older witch sighed. She wondered how much longer Nova could keep this up. She would speak to her mother. It was possible to conduct business with her. But it was all so careful. There was no laughter, no joking, not even any complaints except those couched in the reasoned, maddening language of the bureaucrat. Robin longed for a good old shouting match.

She looked at the still-empty chair. Cirocco Jones, flanked by her two chief advisors. The Bitch and Two Witches, she had overheard someone say. Most of the Council did not realize the rift between mother and daughter.

Stuart took his seat to Robin's right. She nodded at him and smiled politely, which was an effort. She didn't like the guy, but he was able, efficient, canny, and brilliant, when it suited him. He was also awfully ambitious. In another situation he would be doing his best to stab Robin in the back. Just now he was biding his time, waiting to see if Cirocco really would relinquish power at the end of one Earth year, as she had promised. If she did, the feathers would fly.

Trini sat down next to Nova, who leaned over and kissed the Elder Amazon on the lips. Robin squirmed in her chair. She didn't like Trini much more than she did Stuart. Maybe less. It was hard to believe they had once been lovers, briefly, twenty years ago. Now she and Nova were an item. Robin didn't know how genuine it was. Nova obviously retained her crush on Cirocco. Robin felt sure part of the reason for their public displays of affection was Nova's shrewd knowledge that it would irritate her mother.

She scowled, and looked away. O brave new world.

The other chairs were filling up. Conal took his eccentric seat, a few yards behind Cirocco's chair and slightly to one side, where he could watch the proceedings and smoke his cigars one after the other. He would say nothing, and hear everything. Most of the Council hadn't the slightest idea what to make of him. His position was a device, Robin knew. He had the look of an assassin about him when he cared to project it. He looked sinister, wreathed in smoke.

Cirocco slid into her throne, scooted down on the seat of her pants, and put her boots up on the table. She had an unlit cigar clenched in her teeth.

"Let's get going, folks," she said.

"So what's your gut reaction, Conal?" Cirocco asked.

"Gut?" He considered it. "Better, Captain. Not a lot, but better."

"Last time you didn't think it was going to work."

"So a guy can be wrong."

She studied him. Conal bore it, unperturbed.

At first he had felt left out. There was a job for everyone, it seemed, but Conal. Oh, sure, there was talk of him leading the air force, if and when, and he had organized the Bellinzona Air Reserve. They wore uniforms if they wanted to. But they didn't fly airplanes, and wouldn't for some time.

He had thought he was being left out, and had been hurt about it. But gradually he had realized that, if Robin was Cirocco's surrogate Mayor during those times when the Captain was out of the city on her mysterious errands, Conal was her eyes and ears.

His duties were amorphous, which suited him fine. What he did was drift around, in a variety of clothing. Nobody but Council members and a few of the top police knew he had anything to do with the governing of the city. He could come and go as he pleased, and people talked to him. Everything he heard went to Cirocco. He didn't have Nova's computer charts or Robin's experience and elaborate theories, but he knew the secrets.

"What about that black market crap?"

"I agree with Robin."

"Are you trying to needle me, or what? I agree with her, too, but I don't come to you for theories, Conal. I come to you for reality."

Conal was a little surprised at her reaction. Looking closely, he saw she was under a great deal of strain.

"The black market is not the problem Nova's building it up to be. There's not much stuff, and the prices are very high."

"Which means," Cirocco said, "that very little food is being diverted at the docks, and we've still got shortages. So the shortages are real."

"Nobody's going hungry. But a lot of folks wish the manna was still falling."

Cirocco brooded about that for a while.

"How about the Buck?"

Conal laughed.

"The word is, a Buck makes a good coffee filter. Use five or ten of them, and when you're done the brown stains might be worth something. They're also useful rolled up to snort coke with."

"Wastepaper, in other words."

"It's that law Nova was talking about. Robin said it meant bad money drove out good money."

"No," Cirocco said. "That's what's forcing the gold coins into mattresses and old socks. People save the stuff that has value and spend the stuff that inflates."

"Whatever. I don't think the school problem is as bad as they made out tonight. It's true there's some resentment. But most of the folks here were learning English, anyway, or enough to get by on. The thing that really jerks 'em off is having to learn good English."

"What do you suggest?"

"Lowering the literacy requirement. Let 'em out of class when they can read a campaign poster, and don't worry about teaching them the past perfect tense. Of course, coming from a guy who was illiterate when he got here and ain't much of a reader even yet, maybe-"

"Come off it, Conal." Cirocco chewed a knuckle. "You're right. We can let the non-English-speaking adults get by with pidgen. Their kids will learn more than they did. I shouldn't have pushed it so hard."

"Nobody's perfect."

"Don't remind me. What else do you know?"

"Most people prefer barter. I'd say sixty percent of the business done in town is barter. But there is another currency coming up fast, and that's alcohol. There's been beer for a long time. The wine is actually getting tolerable, but most of the time I can't tell what it's made from-and I probably don't want to know. But we're seeing more of the hard stuff."

"Distilled spirits. That scares me."

"Me, too. There's some methanol going the rounds. Some people have gone blind."

Cirocco sighed.

"Do we need another law?"

"Forbidding home-made hootch?" Conal frowned, and shook his head. "I'm applying your golden rule here. The minimum law to correct the problem. Instead of banning good liquor-which, believe me, is a contradiction in terms in Bellinzona-just ban the poison."

"Won't work. Not if it's being used as money. It gets passed back and forth so many times how do we know where it came from?"

"There's that problem," Conal conceded. "And even the good distilleries use labels that are easy to counterfeit ... and people water it."

"It's not a very good currency," Cirocco said. "I think the best thing is to start a public education campaign. I don't know much about methanol. Isn't it pretty easy to tell? Can't you smell it?"

"I'm never sure. First you have to get past the stink of the booze."

They brooded about it in silence for a time. Conal was inclined to let it go. He didn't believe in protecting people from themselves. His own solution was to drink only from sealed bottles he had received from the hands of a distiller he trusted. It seemed to him everyone else should do the same. But maybe a law was needed, after all.

He was ambivalent about the whole thing. It was not that he had loved Bellinzona before. He knew the place was vastly improved. You could walk the streets unarmed with reasonable safety.

But every time you turned around, you ran into a law. After living seven years without laws, it was hard to get your head back in gear to think about them.

Which brought him to the question he was sure Cirocco would ask next. She did not disappoint him.

"What about me? How's the Conal-meter rating?"

He held out a hand and rocked it back and forth.

"You're better. Ten or fifteen percent like you well enough. Maybe thirty percent tolerate you and will admit, with a few beers in them, that you've made things better. But the rest really don't like you at all. Either you upset their wagons, or they don't think you're doing enough. There's lots of folks out there who'd feel better if somebody told them what to do from the time they woke up to the time you put 'em to bed."

"Maybe they'll get their wish," Cirocco muttered.

Conal waited for her to go on, but she didn't. So he took another puff on his cigar and tried to pick his words carefully. "There's something else. It's ... image, I guess. You're a face on the side of a blimp. Not really real."

"My media team has made that abundantly clear," she said, sourly. "I come across as a stiff-necked bitch on television."

"I don't know about normal TV," Conal said. "But on those big screens on Whistlestop they just don't like you. You're above them. You're not one of the people ... and you're not strong enough, if that's the word, to inspire the kind of fear... or, I don't know, maybe it's respect... "He trailed off, unable to express what he felt.

"Once again, you're confirming my media studies. On the one hand, I'm Olympian and Draconian-and people hate that-and on the other, I'm insufficient as an authority-figure."

"People don't believe in you," Conal said. "They believe in Gaea more than in you."

"And they haven't even seen Gaea."

"Most of 'em haven't seen you, either."

Again she brooded. It was clear to Conal she was coming to a decision she found distasteful, but unavoidable. He waited, patiently, knowing that whatever she decided he would do his best to fulfill his part in it.

"Okay," she said, putting her feet up on the table. "Here's what we're going to do."

He listened. Pretty soon he was grinning.

NINETEEN

When the meeting was over, Conal went out into the unfailing light of Dione and turned left on the Oppenheimer Boulevard causeway.

Bellinzona was a city that never slept. There were three rush hours each "day," signaled by a massive toot from Whistlestop. During those times people would go from their jobs to their homes, or vice versa. Somebody was in charge of scheduling everything, Conal knew, so that about a third of the city was always relatively quiet, its residents sleeping, while another third hummed with the sounds of commerce, and yet another with the sounds of Bellinzona's meager amusements. Many people worked two shifts, or one and a half, to make ends meet. But there were taverns and casinos and whorehouses and meeting rooms to provide the necessary social life. All work and no play would have been a dismal way to run a city, in Conal's opinion.

The river docks and the wharves where the fishing fleet tied up were busy around the clock. The shipyards were always busy, as well. And others of the city's infant industries worked on three shifts. But the main reason for the staggered working hours was to keep the city from seeming too crowded. The plain fact was there was not enough housing if everyone tried to bed down at once. Cooperative living was the norm.

It worked fairly well. But the birth rate was rising and the infant-mortality rate falling and the carpenters were always busy at the Terminal Wharves and high in the hills building new housing.

Conal had decided he liked the city. It breathed new life. It was vital and alive, as he remembered Fort Reliance before the war. You heard a lot of gripes in the taprooms, but the very fact they felt free to gripe counted for something, he felt. It meant they had hope of improving those things they didn't like.

In quick succession he passed one of the new parks-a big square floating dock with horseshoe pitches, volleyball nets, basketball hoops, and trees and shrubs in pots-a hospital, and a school. All would have been unthinkable in Bellinzona just seven kilorevs ago. He got out of the way as a Titanide galloped by with a pregnant woman in his arms, heading for the emergency entrance of the hospital. Inside the school, children sat on the floor and waited for the class to end, as they had always done. The game equipment in the parks was always in use. All these things warmed Conal. He hadn't realized how much he had missed them.

Not that he wanted to live in the city. He thought, when this was all finished and turned over to locals, he would resume the life he had been leading, being a nomad known throughout the great Wheel, a friend of the Captain. But it was nice to know it was here.

He turned into a familiar building and walked up three flights of stairs. The door opened to his key and he went in.

The shades were drawn. Robin was in bed. He thought she was asleep. He went into the small bathroom and rinsed himself in the basin of water, using some of the hard, harsh soap that had recently become available on the black market. He brushed his teeth, and he shaved very carefully with an old razor. All these things were relatively new habits for Conal, but he had mostly forgotten those old days when a bath was something he took when his clothes got too stiff to bend easily.

He slipped into bed, careful not to wake her.

She turned to him, wide awake and hungry.

"This will never work," she said, as she often did. He nodded, and took her into his arms, and it worked wonderfully.

TWENTY

Cirocco Jones went from the meeting to the place where she knew she would find Hornpipe. She moved in the way she had learned, in the way that so befuddled Robin when she used it to show up at the meetings of the Council. No one took any notice of her.

She wondered if it might be the last time she could move that way. Not knowing where the power came from made it that much harder to believe it could last after what she planned to do.

She mounted Hornpipe and he galloped out of the city. Soon they were moving through the jungles of southern Dione, not far from Tuxedo Junction.

She reached the shores of the Fountain of Youth and dismounted.

"Stay close," she advised Hornpipe. "This will take some time."

The Titanide nodded, and faded back into the jungle. Cirocco stripped off her clothes and knelt on the sand. She opened her pack and took out the bottle containing Snitch. He blinked woozily. She dumped him on the ground and watched him stagger and curse. It would take him a little time to come around to any degree of intelligibility.

Cirocco felt her body, as she might explore an unfamiliar and possibly dangerous object. Her ribs stood out. She still had more breast tissue than she was accustomed to, and her thighs were firm and full, but the knees were getting bony. Her hair was once more streaked with gray. She could feel the fine wrinkles around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth.

She flicked Snitch in the face and he spat at her, but without any real heart in the gesture. Without having to be asked, Cirocco got the bottle from her pack and used the eyedropper to squeeze seven fat drops into his upturned and eager mouth.

Snitch smacked his lips, and used the expression that passed, in Snitch's limited facial repertoire, for a smile.

"The old hag is feeling generous today," he said.

"The old hag isn't in the mood for any games. You want to hear how I'll flay you alive if you don't talk? Or are you as tired of that as I am?"

Snitch balanced on one limb and used the other to scratch behind his ear.

"Why don't we skip all that?"

"Fine. How is Adam?"

"Adam is peachy keen. He likes his great big grandmaw. One day soon Gaea will have him-you should pardon the expression-in the palm of her hand."

"How is Chris?"

"Chris is blue. On his good days he still thinks he can win the heart and mind of the aforementioned Adam, his son. On his bad days, he thinks he's already lost. These days, most of his days are bad days. This isn't helped by the fact that Gaea is starring him in some of her television shows, and making him do some distasteful tasks to earn his ... bread and butter."

Snitch blinked, and frowned. "Did I mix a metaphor?"

Cirocco ignored the question.

"What about ... Gaby?"

Snitch cocked an eye at her.

"You've never asked me about her before."

"I'm asking you now."

"I could tell you she's a figment of your imagination."

"I could shove your head up your asshole."

"God," Snitch said, with a grimace. "Would that such a maneuver were the impossibility for me that it is for you."

"You know it's not."

"How well I remember." He sighed. "Gaby ... is preparing her dirty trick. You know what I'm talking about. Gaby treads a thin line. You may never know just how thin. Leave her alone."

"But I haven't seen her in-"

"Leave her alone, Captain."

They stared at each other. Such a remark called for punishment. Cirocco wondered what it meant that she was prepared to let him get away with it this time. What was changing? Or was she just too tired to care?

She put it out of her mind, gave Snitch three more drops of pure grain alcohol, and put him back in his bottle. Then she moved carefully into the purifying heat of the Fountain, reclined in it, and took a deep breath of the waters.

She did not move for ten revs.

TWENTY-ONE

New Pandemonium was complete.

Gaea had personally inspected the outer wall, had scooped Great Whites from the moat with her own massive hands, checked all the preparations for siege.

The labor problem was still bad. It had taken some time to get her production supervisors to understand that humans could no longer be worked to death. Many people had died before that lesson was learned. There was now a small desertion problem, as well, with no zombie battalions to hunt down and torture runaways. The Priests were not happy with human acolytes, but knew better than to kick up too much fuss about it. Luckily, the zombie dust had no effect on the Priests.

All the preparations had been made. New Pandemonium could withstand any attack, any siege.

Content, she summoned her archivist and ordered up a triple feature. The Man Who Would Be King. All the King's Men. Indira.

Wonderful political films, all.

TWENTY-TWO

Gaby Plauget had been born in New Orleans in 1997, back when it had been a part of the United States of America.

Her childhood was tragic. Her father killed her mother and she was shuttled back and forth between relatives and agencies, learning never to care for anybody too much. Astronomy had been her salvation. She had become the best there was at planetary astronomy, so good that when the crew of Ringmaster was being chosen she managed a berth, though she hated to travel.

She had been more or less indifferent to sex.

Then the Ringmaster had been destroyed, and all the crew had spent a time in total sensory deprivation. It had driven Gene crazy. Bill had been left with gaps in his memory, so he didn't know Cirocco when he met her again. The Polo sisters, April and August, never the most stable of clone-geniuses, had been separated, April to become an Angel, August to gradually pine away for her lost sister. Calvin had emerged with the ability to speak to the blimps, and no desire to be around humans again. Cirocco had gained the ability to sing Titanide.

Gaby had lived an entire lifetime. Twenty years, she had said. When she woke up, it had been like one of those crazy dreams where, all at once, you know what it's all about. The Big Answers to Life are within your grasp, if only you can keep your head clear long enough to sort them out. All her experiences during that twenty years were right there, fresh in her mind, ready to change her life and the world ...

... until, dream-like, they faded. Within a few minutes she knew only a few things. One was that it had been twenty years, full of the kind of detail only that amount of time could have provided. Another was a memory of walking up vast stairs, accompanied by organ music. Later, when she and Cirocco visited Gaea in the hub, Gaby had re-lived that moment. The third thing she retained was a hopeless and incurable love for Cirocco Jones, which was as big a surprise to Gaby as it was to Cirocco. Gaby had never thought of herself as a lesbian.

Everything else was gone.

Seventy-five years went by.

At the age of one hundred and three, Gaby Plauget died beneath the central cable of Tethys. She died horribly, painfully, of fluid building up in burned lung tissue.

Then came the biggest surprise of all. There really was a life after death. Gaea really was God.

She fought that notion all the way to the hub. She had seen her dead body lying there. She had become just a point of awareness, feeling nothing on a physical level. Disembodiment did not prevent her feeling emotions, though. The strongest one was fear. She regressed to her childhood, found herself reciting Hail Mary's and Our Father's and the Lord's Prayer, imagined herself in the huge, cool. forbidding, and yet comforting space of the old cathedral, kneeling beside her mother, saying the rosary.

But the only cathedral was the living body of Gaea.

She had been taken, or moved, or spirited, or in some way transported to the hub, to the movie-set staircase she and Cirocco had climbed so long ago. It was deep in dust, and adorned with movie-set cobwebs draped artfully. She herself felt like a camera on a very steady dolly, moving without volition or control through the little Oz door off to one side and into the Louis XVI room which was an exact duplicate of a set from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was where she and Cirocco had first met the squat and dumpy old woman who called herself Gaea.

The gilt paint was peeling from the picture frames. Half the lights were out, or flickering. The furniture was frayed and sprung and musty. Sitting in a wobbly chair, her bare feet propped on a low table, staring at an ancient black-and-white television set and drinking beer from a bottle, was Gaea. She was shapeless as usual in a filthy gray shift.

Gaby, like everyone but the most fanatical, had envisioned a thousand possibilities for what life after death might be like, spanning the spectrum from heaven to hell. Somehow, this one had never come up.

Gaea turned slightly. It was like one of those arty films where the camera eye is supposed to represent a character, and the other players respond to it. She looked at Gaby, or at the locus of space where Gaby imagined herself to be.

"Do you have any idea the trouble you've caused me?" Gaea muttered.

No, I don't, Gaby said. Though, when she thought about it, "said" was a pretty concrete verb for what she actually did. There was no sound involved. She did not feel lips or tongue move. No breath was taken into the lungs which, so far as she knew, still lay in the darkness beneath Tethys, clotted with phlegm.

But the impulse was like speaking, and Gaea seemed to hear.

"Why couldn't you just leave it alone?" Gaea groused. "There are wheels within wheels, babe, to cop a phrase. Rocky was coming along nicely. What's wrong with being a little drunk every so often?"

Gaby "said" nothing. "Rocky" was, of course, Cirocco Jones. And she had been more than a little drunk almost all the time. As for leaving it alone ...

Cirocco might have. There was no way to be sure. Possibly forty or fifty years down the line she would have bestirred herself and tried to do something about the impossible situation that had driven her to drink. On the other hand, maybe it was possible for even an immortal to drink herself to death.

At any rate, it had been Gaby who finally pushed Cirocco into the first, tentative step of surveying the regional brains of Gaea, looking for hints of useful subversion, hoping to locate somebody who could serve as focus for Gaby's planned Rebellion of the Gods.

It had earned her a nasty death.

"I had plans for that gal," Gaea was saying. "Two or three more centuries ... who knows? It might have been possible to tell her a few things. It might have been possible to ... to make her understand... to admit what ... " Gaea trailed off in disconsolate mutterings. Again, Gaby did not respond. Gaea glanced irritably at her.

"You've pissed me off," she complained. "I never figured you for starting all this trouble. Tragic figure, that's you. Following Rocky around with your little pink tongue hanging out, like a bitch in heat. It was a good role, Gaby, one you could have built a life around. I ain't gonna forgive you for writing your own lines. Just where do you come off being the ... " At a loss for words, Gaea hurled her beer bottle at a huge stain on the wall. There was a lot of broken brown glass heaped beneath the stain.

Gaea looked up again, with a wicked leer.

"I'll bet you want some answers. I'm going to enjoy giving them to you. Here's one, right here." Gaea reached out-her hand blurring as it approached the Gaby/camera viewpoint-and came back holding a small, white, struggling thing with two legs and goggling eyes.

"Spies," Gaea said. "This was yours. Sitting in your head for seventy-five years. How'd'ya like that? This is Stoolie. Rocky's got one called Snitch. She doesn't know about it, any more than you did. Everything the two of you did, it came right back to me."

Gaby felt a bottomless despair. This must be hell.

"No, it isn't. That's all bunk, too." Gaea paused long enough to squeeze the life from the squalling obscenity in her hand, then wiped the bloody mess on the arm of her chair.

"Life and death aren't as important as you think. Consciousness is the real conundrum. Your awareness of yourself as a living being. You remember dying, you think you remember floating up through space till you got here, not so very long ago. But time is tricky on this level. So is memory. You aren't a spook, if that's any consolation to you.

"I have you," Gaea whispered, making a gesture much like the one she had used to crush the Stoolie. "I cloned you, I recorded you, I took everything there was of Gaby-ness about you when you first showed up here. Cirocco, too. Since then, I've been constantly updated by that little bastard in your head. I am not supernatural, I am not God, not in the way you think of God ... but I am one hell of a magician. The question of whether you, Gaby Plauget, the little girl from New Orleans who loved the stars, really died down there in Tethys, is, in the end, philosophical hair-splitting. Not worth the effort. You know that the awareness I am now addressing is you. Deny it if you can."

Gaby could not.

"It's all done with mirrors," Gaea said, shrugging it off. "If you had a 'soul', then I missed it, and it's floated off to your anthropomorphic-Catholic-Judeo-Christian 'heaven', which I personally doubt, as I've never heard any radio stations broadcasting from there. Everything else of you, I own."

What are you going to do with me? Gaby asked.

"Shit. I wish there was a hell." She brooded in silence for a time. Gaby could do nothing but look on. Slowly, Gaea produced an expression that wan an awful hybrid of a grin and a sneer.

"Actually, though hell isn't available, I have a reasonable facsimile. I don't expect you'll survive it.

"But I didn't finish telling you why. Do you want to know?"

Gaby thought anything would probably be better than Gaea's substitute for hell.

"You can say that again," Gaea said. "Because you've ruined Rocky for me. Rocky was a genuine flawed heroine. I've been looking for one for millennia. Now, she's still flawed, but she's going to get some spine. Snitch can feel it building. She's just finding out you're dead. She isn't sure I killed you, but near enough. Robin and Valiha and Chris are in deep trouble. They may not survive it. Right now, Rocky's going to devote all her energy to saving their lives. Then ... she's going to come up here and declare war. This"-Gaea thumped her chest-"this incarnation of Gaea won't survive it." She shrugged. "That's okay. I was getting tired of Mrs. Potatohead, anyway. I have some ideas for the next Gaea that might amuse you. But you won't care. I'm through with you. You're wasting my time."

With that, Gaea had reached out and ... grabbed the dream locus that was Gaby. Things went black, then she found herself rising within the curved emptiness of the hub, rising toward a red line of light at the very top of the hub, a line she and Cirocco had seen when they first stepped out...

It's all a dream, she reminded herself. That conversation never happened, not on a physical level. Gaea had all Gaby's memories, and was capable of making new ones on the computer-program/memory-matrix that was all that was left of Gaby, who used to be flesh and blood. So this is all illusion. She is doing something to me, but I am nor flying up into the air, I am not plunging into that swirling maelstrom which I have always known, in my heart, is the mind of this thing called Gaea...

One thought protected her. One notion clutched tightly in the midst of chaos prevented her from slipping from mania into insanity. This is the twenty years, Gaby thought. I lived through it already.

In the red line, the speed of light was a local ordinance, a quaint regional phenomenon which could be a nuisance-like a cop hiding behind a billboard in a rural Georgia town-but which, with the proper bribes or enough horses under the hood, need not cause concern.

Take it a piece at a time. "Speed" depends on space and time. Neither were very important concepts in the Line. "Light" was complex and unnecessary parcels of massless wavicles, a by-product of living in the line, like sweat and feces. "Speed of light" was a contradiction in terms. How heavy is that day in the mountains when you built a campfire and saw a shooting star? What is the mass of yesterday? How fast is love?

The line extended all around the inner rim of Gaea, which, considered from an Einsteinian perspective, was a circle. The line was not circular. Seen against the backdrop of the inner rim, the line was thin. The line was not thin.

The line seemed to exist within the Universe. None of it extended outside the physical boundaries of Gaea, and Gaea was contained by the Universe; therefore, the line existed within the Universe.

The line was much bigger than the Universe.

In the end, the word "Universe" was unsuitable for use in a definition of the line. The concept of a naked singularity most closely approached the true nature of the line ... and had little to do with it.

Things lived in it. Most of them were insane, as Gaea had intended Gaby to go insane. But Gaby kept holding to that thought: This is the twenty years. And: Cirocco will need me.

Slowly, cautiously, Gaby learned the nature of reality. She became as a God. It was pitifully inadequate-she had a lot of the Answers now, and knew that the Questions had never been phrased properly-but it was something. She would have been a lot happier living out the sort of script she had thought of as Life, but it was too late for that now, and she would accept what she must.

Cautiously, staying away from that dominant presence she knew as Gaea, Gaby began to look out of the line.

She saw Cirocco arrive in the hub, saw the bullets tear into the thing that called itself "Gaea," felt the much more interesting series of changes pass through the entity she knew as Gaea, and grew thoughtful. There was a possibility there...

She thought about it for a moment that turned out to be five years long.

She realized she could not endure much longer in this place. Gaea had not made it here, though a part of her remained in the line. Gaby must do the same thing if she were to survive. Carefully, trying not to alert Gaea, she disengaged herself and moved her center of consciousness down to the rim. She saw Cirocco many times, and remained unseen.

She began to learn the ways of Magic.

TWENTY-THREE

"Maybe she's never coming," Gaea said.

"You could be right," Chris replied.

He dipped his scrubber into the soapy water, swished it around, and raised it again to the big, pink wall of flesh.

They were in the Bathhouse, which was simply one of the sound-stages on the RKO lot which had been used for an Esther Williams spoof and then left idle for the task of Gaea's Bath. The light was dim. The walls and ceiling were wood, the huge sliding doors closed. Somewhere hot rocks had been heaved into hot water, producing clouds of steam. Sweat poured off Chris and Gaea alike.

The scrubber was simply a big pushbroom with stiff bristles. Gaea's hide, though soft to the touch, seemed unharmed by this implement, no matter how hard Chris used it. It was one of the minor mysteries.

A panaflex wandered by, scanned the scene, shot a few feet of film, and then drifted away.

"You don't really think that," Gaea said.

"You could be right," Chris said, again.

Gaea shifted. Chris stood back, as any movement of Gaea's bulk entailed hazards to normal folk who happened to be in the way.

She was reclining, face down, her head resting on her folded arms. She was in about two feet of water. When she settled down again her head was turned, and one massive eye tracked him. He was cleaning her right side, from the waist to the shoulder, working his way toward the upper arm. It would take him a while.

"It has been a long time," Gaea went on. "What ... eight months now?"

"Something like that."

"Do you have any idea what she's doing?"

"You know she was here twice. You know I wouldn't tell you if I saw her again."

"You are impertinent, but I love you. Anyway, I know she hasn't been here."

Which was true. She had warned him that that was the way it would be, but it was still hard. Chris was badly in need of moral support.

On the other hand, this job as bath attendant was not as bad as he had feared it would be. It was obviously intended to demoralize him. He did his best to let Gaea think it was working, dragging his way to and from work on those days when she called for a bath. But it was just a job. Once you got over the bizarre nature of it, it wasn't much different than painting a house.

He worked his way along her side and down the outside of the arm, cleaned his scrubber again, and began rasping away at her elbow and upper arm.

"When she gets here ... " he began, then trailed off.

"What?"

"What will you do to her?"

"Kill her. I've already told you that. Or try to, anyway."

"You really think she has a chance?"

"Not much of a chance. She's overmatched, wouldn't you think?"

"Anybody can see that. Why don't you just ... go out and hunt her down? She couldn't escape you for long, could she?"

"She's very crafty. And my ... sight doesn't include her anymore. She worked that part of it very well."

Gaea had made oblique references to blindness before. Chris didn't know for sure, but suspected that was Snitch.

"Why do you hate her so much?"

Gaea sighed. The clouds of steam swirled violently.

"I don't hate her, Chris. I love her dearly. That's why I'm going to give her the gift of death. It's all I have to give her, and it's what she needs. I love you, too."

"Are you going to kill me?"

"Yes. Unless Cirocco can save you. With you, death won't be a gift."

"I don't understand the difference."

"With you, it will be agony, because you'll miss Adam's love. You're young, and nothing so good as Adam has ever happened to you."

"I understand that part. I don't understand why it'd be a favor to Cirocco."

"I didn't say favor. Gift. She needs it. Death is her friend. Death is the only way left for her to grow. She will never find love. But she can learn to live without it. I did."

Chris thought about that, and decided to take a chance.

"You sure did. You substituted cruelty."

She raised one eyebrow. Chris did not like to look into her eyes, even from a distance. There was too much ancient pain inside them. Evil, too, much, much evil... but he had started to wonder where evil comes from. Did one just decide to become evil? He doubted it. It must be a slow thing.

"Of course I'm cruel," Gaea muttered, closing her eye again. "There is no possible way for you to get the perspective on my cruelty, though. I'm fifty thousand years old, Chris. Cirocco is just over a hundred, and already feels things eating away at her soul. Can you imagine what I must feel?"

"You mean three million, not-"

"Of course. What was I thinking of. You can do my back now, Chris."

So he got the stepladder and climbed up with his scrubber and a hose. Her back was soft and yielding under his bare feet. She purred like a cat when he scrubbed between her shoulderblades.

TWENTY-FOUR

Cirocco came out of the Fountain and stretched out on the sand. She closed her eyes for a moment.

When she opened them she was still on sand, but it was the fine black sand of the small lake where Gaby had made love to her on the day Adam was taken.

She turned her head, and saw Gaby standing beside her. She reached up and Gaby took her hand. Once more there was a feeling like being pulled away from a sticky surface, then she was on her feet She hugged Gaby.

"You've been away so long," Cirocco said, on the edge of tears.

"I know, I know. Too long. And we don't have much time now, and there is much to see. Will you come?"

Cirocco nodded and, holding Gaby's hand, followed her into the lake. She knew the water was shallow, yet felt the bottom drop away quickly until they were floating with just their heads out of the water. Gaby made a movement with her head, and they dived.

It wasn't like swimming. They went straight down. Cirocco did not need to propel herself in any way; they simply moved. She could feel the water rushing past her.

And it wasn't water. It was more like mud, like warm earth. This must be what a worm feels moving along underground, she thought. She remembered, long ago, struggling through the damp soil of Gaea toward the light: hairless, disoriented, frightened as a new-born babe. This wasn't like that. There was no fear.

Then she was standing in a huge cave, with no memory of how she had come to be there. The cave stretched farther than she could see. She walked with Gaby beside the dry-docked, dormant, spidery forms of spaceships.

"I started saving these when the war started," Gaby said. "Captains would show up and refuse to go back to the war. They scuttled their ships. I brought them here and saved them."

There were hundreds of them. They looked very strange sitting there.

"It looks so ... forlorn," Cirocco said.

"Most of the damage is easily fixable," Gaby assured her.

"I suppose. But ... they weren't meant to be here. You know what it looks like? Jellyfish tossed up on the beach."

Gaby looked out over the silent armada and nodded. Spaceships did have a lot in common with the soft-bodied anatomical fantasies achieved by the more exotic marine invertebrates.

"You brought them here, you said. Not Gaea."

"I did. I thought they might come in handy one day. I brought a lot of other stuff, too, when I realized Gaea wanted the war to go on. Take a look over here." Gaby gently turned Cirocco ...

... and the darkness closed in again. When it lifted, Cirocco realized they were in a different place entirely.

"How did you do that?"

"Honey, I could never possibly explain how. Just accept that I can."

Cirocco thought about it. She felt a little fuzzy-headed, something like being drunk, something like dreaming. It was an accepting state of mind.

"Okay," she said, placidly.

They were in an endless tunnel. It was perfectly round, seemed absolutely straight, and pulsed with multi-colored light.

"This isn't real time you're seeing," Gaby explained.

"I'm dreaming, right?"

"Something like that. This is The Alchemist's Ring. It's a four-thousand-kilometer circular colliding-beam atom smasher ... and it uses some other techniques that soup it up way beyond anything we ever built on Earth. This is where Gaea makes heavy metals-mostly gold, lately. Before that, she stockpiled a lot of plutonium. I just wanted to show it to you."

Cirocco stared at the lights. They moved along the tunnel, like red-hot, yellow-hot, and white-hot bumblebees. Not very fast at all.

Not real time, Gaby had said. The lights had to be atomic nuclei, and they had to be pushing the speed of light. It's all a visual aid, she thought. Not a dream, but something like it. More like a film.

"There's no air in here, is there?"

"No, of course not. Does that bother you?"

Cirocco shook her head.

"Okay, take a look over here ... "

... and she turned again...

This time Cirocco held her head and it was a little easier. She never closed her eyes, but it didn't do her any good. She was in another cave, much smaller than the spaceship hangar.

"It's very close to absolute zero in here. These are frozen samples from several hundred thousand Earth animal and plant species. Gaea collected some of them. I ordered others, just before the war started. I hope they might come in useful some day, like the ships. Now, take one step up ... "

Cirocco did, and almost lost her balance. Gaby's hand steadied her, and her feet came down on the familiar black sand. She took a deep breath, one she could believe in.

"I don't like to go that way," she complained.

"Okay. But I have some other things to show you. You still want to go?"

"Yes."

"Then hold my hand and don't be afraid."

Cirocco did, and they rose into the air.

Cirocco had flown before, many times, in dreams. There were two ways of going about it, possibly having to do with some psychological weather report. Low visibility in the cerebrum; clear air in the medulla. One way was to sit and float, like on a Persian magic carpet. That way one could drift slowly over the world. The other was to swoop and soar-but never with quite the amount of control one had in an airplane.

This flying was like the second way, but very precise. She flew with her arms extended-holding Gaby's hand at first, but later letting go and flying on her own-and her feet together, legs outstretched.

It gave her a giddy feeling; it was wonderful. By sweeping her arms backward, she could go faster. The palms of her hands functioned as ailerons for banking and turning. Various movements of her feet put her into a climb or a dive. She experimented with it, doing some tight turns and loops. Something was very different from "normal" dream flying, and she quickly realized it was the kinesthetic sense. Though her vision was still oddly hazy and her mind very slightly drugged, she could smell and taste the air, feel it rushing over her body, and-most important of all-she had mass and inertia. She pulled gees at the bottom of her loops, having to strain to hold her arms out rigid, feeling the flesh of her cheeks and thighs and breasts pulled down.

She glanced over at Gaby, who was flying in the same way.

"Very nice," she said.

"I thought you'd like it. But we're running out of time. Follow me."

Gaby turned and started climbing over the dark terrain of Dione. Cirocco did as she had been told, falling in behind, finding herself accelerating without having intended to do so. She folded her arms back against her side, and the two of them streaked upward. This wasn't like flying in an airplane. There was no sense of strain, no laboring engines. They just went straight up, like rockets. Soon they were entering the mouth of the Dione Spoke. Cirocco no longer felt any air resistance, though they must have been moving hundreds of miles per hour. Experimentally, she extended her arms, and felt no wind. Turning her hands or feet did nothing. She just followed Gaby.

The Dione Spoke, like all of the six spokes of the great wheel, was oval in cross-section, about a hundred kilometers along one axis and fifty along the other. It joined the rim in a vast, bell-shaped flare of tissue that gradually became the arched rim-roof. At the top of the bell was a sphincter that could be completely closed. At the other end, near the hub, was another sphincter. By opening or closing these valves and by flexing the three-hundred-kilometer-high spoke walls, Gaea pumped air from one region to another, heating or cooling it as needed.

Except for the Oceanus Spoke, which was barren, the interiors of these towering cylinders supported life in abundance. Huge trees grew horizontally from the vertical walls. Complex eco-systems flourished in the labyrinth branches, in hollows of the trees, and in the walls of the spoke itself.

There were dozens of species of angel in Gaea, most of them too dissimilar to inter-breed. The Dione Spoke supported three species-or Flights, as they called themselves. At the top, where gravity was almost nonexistent, were the spidery Air Flight: dwarves among angels, with translucent wings and skin, ephemeral, not too bright, more like bats than birds. They seldom landed anywhere except to lay eggs, which they abandoned to fate. They lived on a diet of leaves.

The middle part of the spoke belonged to the Dione Eagles, related to Eagle Flights in Rhea, Phoebe, and Cronus. Eagles did not form communities. In fact, when two Eagles met there was likely to be a bloody fight. Their young were born live, in mid-air, and had to learn to fly on the long fall to the rim. Many of them did.

But the Airs and the Eagles were in the minority. Most Gaean angels nested and nurtured their young. There were a lot of different ways to go about it. One species in Thea had three sexes: cocks, hens, and neuters. The hens were flightless and huge, the cocks small and savage. The neuters were the only intelligent ones, and they cared for the young, which were born alive.

The Dione Supra Flight-badly named, in Cirocco's opinion, as their territory was at the bottom of the spoke-were peaceful, community-oriented beings. They built big beehive-shaped nests in the trees out of branches, mud, and their own dried feces, which contained a bonding agent. As many as a thousand Supras might live in one nest. Their females gave birth to things called placentoids, a sort of mammalian egg containing an embryo which had to be attached to the living flesh of Gaea. In this way the females never grew too pregnant to fly and the young could grow quite large before being detached from the womb. Like humans, Supra infants were helpless for a long time. They learned to fly in six or seven years.

Cirocco liked the Supras. They were more approachable than most angels, had even been known to come trading in Bellinzona. They used tools more than most angels did. Cirocco knew it was illogical and prejudiced-it was not the fault of the Eagles that they were so heartless, it was simply their biology-but she couldn't help it. Over the years she had had many Supra friends.

Like most angels, Supras looked like very thin humans with giant chests. Their bodies were black and shiny. Their knees bent in either direction, and their feet were bird-claws. Their wings were mounted low on the back, below the shoulderblades. When folded, the wing "elbow" joints towered over their heads, and the tips of the long primary feathers trailed far below their feet.

Angels had one thing in common with Titanides. Both were relatively new creations, made by Gaea as variations on the human theme. Even with hollow bones, huge wings, giant muscles, and no fat at all, a flying human had taxed Gaea's design capability to the limit. The larger angels could lift more than their own weight at the rim. They preferred to live in the lower-gravity regions of the spokes.

In addition to their nesting habits, two other things set the Supras apart. One was their coloration. Females had green wing feathers and males had red. The caudal empennage of both sexes was black, except in mating season, when the females grew peacock fans and put on glorious displays. They had no other external sexual differentiation.

And they didn't have names. Their language did not contain first-person singular pronouns. "We" was as near as they could come to it, and yet they were not communal minds. They existed as individuals.

This made communication with them somewhat difficult. But it was worth the effort.

The Supras did not seem at all startled to see Gaby and Cirocco fly up to the nest and land, light as a feather, near the big opening in the top. It was raining in the spoke, and the smiler-hide cover had been pulled across to keep the water out. Gaby ducked under it and Cirocco followed her into darkness.

Oddest damn dream, she thought. One minute she could fly, but as soon as she set down on the nest she was back to her normally awkward method of blundering through the Supra nest.

A Supra staircase was a series of rods embedded on the adobe-like nest wall. The angels grasped the rods with their feet; all Cirocco could do was hang on with both hands and try to pretend it was a ladder as she backed down it. In the same way, the Supra equivalent of a comfortable chair was a long horizontal pole. They perched on them effortlessly.

She and Gaby worked their way toward the back of the nest, which was built against the spoke wall. Dotted along the wall were Supra babies in little pockets of Gaea's flesh. Some were no bigger than ostrich eggs, while others were as big as human infants and needed a lot of tending so they wouldn't break their umbilical cords. Child care was done by all members of the flight, in rotation. Supras didn't imprint on a particular mother or father.

The base of the placentoid rookery was the only spot in the nest with a spot level and wide enough to be used as a floor. Gaby and Cirocco went there and sat, cross-legged. Cirocco remembered she should have brought a gift. Anything would do-Supras loved bright things. It was a polite way to begin a visit. But she didn't even have clothes.

Gaby didn't, either, but with a magician's flourish she opened her hand and produced an old plastic bicycle reflector that shifted colors when it was turned. The Supras loved it, passing it back and forth.

"It is a fabulous gift," one of them said.

"Most luminiferous," agreed another.

"Elegant and tricksy," one suggested.

"We are most brilliantly aghast," a fourth chimed in.

"It will be enshrined."

They chattered their appreciation for some time, and when Cirocco and Gaby could get a word in, they praised the beauty, wit, poise, wisdom, and elegant flight characteristics of their hosts in the most extravagant terms. They applauded the rookery, nest, branch, wing, squadron, and Flight of the inestimable Supras. One rutting female was so moved she spread her tail feathers in sexual display. Though Cirocco could barely see it in the dunness, she joined the others in praising the female's fertility and prowess in terms so explicit they might have made a whore blush.

"Would you take some ... food?" one of them asked. The others looked away and kept a modest silence. It was a new thing for the Supras, something they were cautiously trying out in their dealings with humans. By custom, food was never asked for or offered outside of one's own nest. Food would not be refused a starving Supra from another nest, but most Supras would rather die than ask.

The invitation had been made by the lowest-status individual of the nest, a male who was old, scrawny, and probably near death.

"Couldn't possibly," Cirocco said, lightly, to another individual.

"Stuffed, we're absolutely stuffed," Gaby agreed.

"Flight would be impossible with another gram," Cirocco pointed out.

"Fat is perilous."

"Abstinence is a virtue."

They never looked at the one who had asked, thus spreading the load of embarrassment as equally as possible, which was the polite thing to do. The Supras clucked approvingly, and praised the prosperity of their guests.

Suddenly Cirocco remembered encountering that lone Supra in the air over Iapetus, while the deathangel was flying away with Adam.

"So, why have we come here to this nest?" Cirocco asked, addressing the group of angels, not Gaby, and inverting her question in a way calculated to cause the least confusion to the Supras.

"Yes, a most interesting thing," one said.

"Why have they come, why have they come?"

"One is of air, one is of dream."

"Dreams in the nest, how very strange."

"The one who burns. Why did they come?"

Gaby cleared her throat, and all looked at her.

"We have come for the same reason we came in the past," she said.

"To prosecute the case against Gaea, and to further the preparations for war against her and all her estates and nests."

"Exactly!" Cirocco, who couldn't have been more confused, chimed in. "That is precisely our intention. To ... engage in most brilliant strategems and tacticalities."

"Most precise!" one angel said, enthusiastically.

"Oh, rue the day!"

"The nest of Gaea will be laid low."

"Mumble," said one angel, which is what they said when they had nothing to say but didn't want to be left out of the conversation.

"Mumble," another agreed.

It was easy to see the Dione Supras as amiable nitwits, idiot savants with large and fractured vocabularies. They were nothing of the kind. The English language was a delight to them, so illogical and fertile and well-suited to their natural desire to confuse, obfuscate, and generally side-step clear meaning whenever possible.

"Quite violent," Gaby suggested.

"Oh, so very violent. Much torment."

"And cautious, extremely cautious."

"The tactics," one said. "Such a lexicon of tactics." The way he said it, Cirocco knew it was a question that might translate as How do we fight her?

Gaby made that same tricky pass with her hands. Nothing up her sleeve, Cirocco decided. For a moment she knew how others must feel when she worked her own meager magics.

She produced a red stick that was unmistakably dynamite-that was, in fact, labeled DYNAMITE: PRODUCT OF BELLINZONA. The angels fell silent when they looked at it. Cirocco took it and turned it around in her hands. The angels sighed in unison.

"Where did you get this?" Cirocco asked, momentarily forgetting the others. "There's nothing like this in Bellinzona."

"That's because you won't make it for another kilorev," Gaby said.

"Ephemera!" a Supra crowed. "It's ephemera!"

"An insubstantial nullity," another opined.

"Not made yet? How farcical! We are keenly misinformed."

"It doesn't exist," one summarized. "Like this Cirocco one."

"Don't quibble," came an adjuration.

"Did you forget it's a dream?" one reminded Cirocco.

"Dynamite! Dynamite! Dynamite!"

"There will be dynamite," Gaby agreed. "When it comes time to fight Gaea, there will have been dynamite for some time."

"Will have been! A truly stratospheric verb."

"Most sincerely."

"An ... illusion?" a younger Supra said, with wrinkled brow, still staring at the dynamite in Gaby's hand.

"A will-o-the-wisp," one explained.

"A figurehead! A moonshine of farragos, a pre-pentimentoized, infra-extinct, fleeting mockery! A vacuity!" shouted another, effectively shutting off debate.

They stared at it again, in a feather-rustling quiet. Gaby made it vanish back to where it had come from-the future, Cirocco presumed.

"Ah," one of them sighed, at last.

"Indeed," affirmed another. "My goodness, the things we will do with such a lump of power!" he asked.

"Yes, you will," Gaby agreed. "And right now, you're going to tell us all about it."

Which Gaby did, at great length.

When she was through, there was the customary offer of sex. Both Cirocco and Gaby accepted, which was the polite thing to do.

They went through the courting ritual, which had always reminded Cirocco of a square dance, while the others sang and clapped in rhythm. Cirocco's partner was a sterling speciman of the species. His bright red wings enfolded her warmly as the act was "consummated."

And that was another thing she found attractive about the Supras. They didn't have an ounce of xenophobia. A tribal people, their culture was laced with ritual, custom, and tradition-but they had flexibility. With visiting Supras the offer of sex would have been in complete earnest, and the act would not have been simulated. They had formalized this ritual solely for the purpose of dealing with human visitors. Real sex with the Supra would have been grotesque for both of them. As it was, the male simply gave her the lightest possible touch with his tiny penis, never seen, and everybody was happy. It made Cirocco feel good. In a way, it made her feel loved.

She had almost forgotten it was a dream until they landed lightly on the black sandy beach and she saw her sleeping body. Nearby was Hornpipe, resting on folded legs, making a carving during his own dream-time. He looked up and nodded at them both.

Cirocco kissed Gaby good-by and watched her fly away. Then she yawned, stretched, and looked down at herself. Time to wake up, she thought, wryly.

Once more she was impressed with how easily the fantastic could become commonplace. She knelt beside her sleeping body, remembering how it had been the last time, and rolled over onto it.

She gasped when she hit warm, muscular flesh instead of the sand she had expected. For a moment she lay sprawled across the sleeping body, then she leaped into the air as if she had landed on an ant-hill. She stood, horrified, as the other Cirocco stirred, raised a hand to her face ... then turned slightly on her side and went back to sleep.

She turned her head and saw Hornpipe looking at her. What is he seeing? She wondered if she would ever ask him that.

"I'm not ready for this," she said aloud. But she sighed, knelt on the sand, and hesitantly touched the body. Again, it was other. It was a big, strong-looking, brown-skinned, and not very pretty woman.

She took the other Cirocco's hand. The other stirred slightly, muttering something. Then she opened her eyes and sat up quickly.

There was a moment of vertigo, and then there was just Cirocco. She looked around quickly, saw no one else.

"Just you and me, kid," she said to herself, and went to join Hornpipe.

TWENTY-FIVE

Historians, when Bellinzona eventually produced some, were never quite sure when the change happened. The city had been born in chaos, had grown in confusion, been conquered in disarray. There was a brief time when there were almost as many inmates in the work camps as free citizens walking the streets.

Conal, with his informal polls of the citizens, detected no dramatic jump in morale, or in the approval rating of Cirocco Jones, not even after the aerial attack. He suspected it was the result of a combination of things.

But for whatever reason, at some point between the sixth and the ninth kilorev after Cirocco's invasion, Bellinzona stopped being a brawling collection of fractious individuals and became a community-within the human-defined limits of that term. It was nothing so dramatic as all men suddenly deciding they were brothers. Deep and persistent differences still existed, nowhere more strongly than in the Council. But at the end of the ninth kilorev Bellinzona was a city with an identity, and a purpose.

Football had a surprising amount to do with it.

Serpent's obsession, combined with strong help from Robin's organizational abilities and the willing work of the parks commissioner, soon had two leagues formed, ten teams to a league, and that was just for the adults. There were intermediate and junior teams, too. A second stadium had to be built to accommodate the number of games, which were strongly contested and heavily attended. It was something to cheer for. Local heroes were born, intra-city rivalries established. It was something to talk about in the taprooms after a long hard shift. For some, it was something to fight about. Titanide police were instructed not to interfere as long as only fists were used. When word spread about this unprecedented instance of the law looking the other way, some mad brawls developed, some people were hurt ... and the Mayor did nothing. Even this seemed to improve the community spirit. Cooler heads began to move in and stop the fights as the emerging citizens learned how better to tolerate each other.

Which is not to say no more noses got broken.

Whistlestop's departure played a part. One day he simply drifted away and did not come back. People seemed to breathe easier. He was too visible a symbol of oppression. He was just an old bag of wind, completely harmless, but the people didn't like him up there and were glad to see him go.

Titanides became less numerous, and less visible. The occupying force was in fact halved on the day of Cirocco's return from the fountain, and halved again a kilorev later. Human police took up the slack, and Titanides intervened in only the worst violence. They were monumentally uninterested in civil crime.

Both the quality and quantity of food deliveries improved as more acreage was put under cultivation, and as the ones who grew it learned better methods. Smiler meat began to appear in markets, at gradually reducing prices. Independent farmers were created under land-grant schemes, and proved, to no one's surprise, more efficient than forced laborers.

Inflation remained a problem, but-in the immortal words of one of Nova's economic reports-"The rate of increase of the rate of increase is slowing."

Most people thought the biggest reason for the lift in morale was the most obvious one: the cowardly and unprovoked attack by what was later learned to be the Sixth Fighter/Bomber Wing of the Gaean Air Force, based in Iapetus. The Sixth was composed of one Luftmorder and nine buzz bombs, which came screaming in from the east on the first bright day following many decarevs of rain, catching people out of doors enjoying the unaccustomed warmth.

The "cowardly and unprovoked" line was used by Trini in a speech twenty revs later, as the pieces were still being picked up. She had been even more intemperate than that; in an illogical but heart-felt rage, she had called the attack a day that would live in infamy.

Aside from the word "day," the phrase was amazingly accurate.

"It's Gaea, giving me help, damn her miserable hide," Cirocco told the Council at the next meeting. "She's handing me a Pearl Harbor on a silver platter-and a victory to boot. She must be desperate to have it out with me. She knows I'll have to come soon now, with patriotism building like it is."

The Sixth Fighter/Bomber Wing inflicted heavy damage on the city with bombs and missiles. Had the attack continued, or had they been joined by the Eighth, which Cirocco knew to be in Metis, the city might have turned into an inferno.

But the Bellinzona Air Force arrived in the nick of time.

The fact that there was a Bellinzona Air Force was news to the Bellinzonans, and those who dared emerge from cover had watched in awe as the Dragonflys, Mantises, Skeeters, and Gnats engaged the marauding aeromorphs in deadly combat. What they didn't know was that the Sixth was overmatched at the start. It certainly didn't look that way. The buzz bombs were huge and fast and loud, they trailed great clouds of black smoke, and spouted fire when they attacked. The Bellinzona planes seemed to be made of wire and cellophane. But they would turn and twist with a ghastly ease, and though their armament didn't make a lot of noise getting out, it certainly had the desired result when it hit the target. Three Mantises harried the big, galumphing Luftmorder from the air, followed it as it shrieked in agony before bursting in flame on a hillside. From the frightened Bellinzonans there arose a ragged cheer.

It would have been a rout but for the lack of experience of some of the Bellinzonan pilots. One managed to run afoul of an especially cunning buzz bomb, lost a wing, and crashed into the sea, His body was recovered, and a spontaneous cortege carried it down Oppenheimer Boulevard. A monument was later erected to this first hero of the Gaean War.

So the victory in the Battle of Bellinzona was certainly an important part of the change that came over the city. But the crucial element of the change began upon Cirocco's return from the Fountain.

She became a public figure.

Within a hectorev, the by-ways of Bellinzona were festooned with posters showing her face. They were heroic posters, modeled after those big banners of Lenin and Suslov carried through Moscow on Mayday. Looking at them, you just knew Cirocco Jones stood for brotherhood, solidarity, three square meals a day, and the welfare of the proletariat.

The community bulletin boards had developed into news centers, into big walls covered with messages and stories and football scores. A fledgling newspaper industry had developed; just four or five intermittent and scarce parchment sheets. The industry was quietly taken over. Editors were reasoned with, and one was jailed. Stories began to appear about Gaea, about New Pandemonium, about rumors of preparation for war in the east. That the stories were true did not change the fact that the Bellinzona media were State-run. A lot of people in government didn't like it. About the same number thought it was a fine idea. Libertarians and fascists existed in about equal numbers everywhere, Cirocco had found.

Stuart and Trini hated it, though not from any moral foundation of civil liberties. They watched helplessly as Cirocco consolidated a stranglehold on Bellinzonan public opinion. And they knew that, as long as she could keep delivering security and stifling opposing opinion, she could remain Mayor until she died. Which, in her case, might very well be a thousand years hence.

On the other hand, there was the chance she would not live another kilorev.

She had started making public appearances. There were meetings, rallies, parades. She waded into groups of people, shaking hands, kissing babies, being seen with community leaders. She cut ceremonial ribbons on new development projects.

She gave speeches. They were good speeches. They were good for the same reason the posters were stirring: Cirocco found the people who knew how to paint posters and how to write speeches, and set them to work.

It was all very slick. Even Trini and Stuart had to admit it. When they were in her presence, they could feel it: a force that seemed to emanate from the woman, a power that made you feel good to be around her, and to think good thoughts about her when she was gone. She could be whatever the situation demanded. In a crowd she had the common touch. On a podium she was rousing, uplifting... or alarming, when speaking about the threat of Gaea.

Trini began calling her Charisma Jones, at least when the Mayor wasn't around. Luckily, it was now possible to know when she was around. There were no more of those mysterious appearances. Cirocco seemed ubiquitous.

And that was the big hazard to her, Trini knew. All the good feeling aside, there were still those who hated her. There were two assassination attempts in three kilorevs. There would certainly have been many more in the early days of her administration had she been more accessible. Now, out in the crowds, she made a nice target. Had guns been available, she would not have stood a chance. As it was, those who came at her with knives had died in seconds. Cirocco was too good to need much in the way of bodyguards.

So far. One day a very good archer would stand far away and make a try.

In the meantime, it was good to live in Belllizona.

When Cirocco began raising an army, it seemed the most natural thing in the world.

TWENTY-SIX

"I don't like all that army stuff," Robin said.

"Why not? It's equal opportunity. Men's regiments and women's regiments. The pay's good, the food's terrific-"

"I never know when you're kidding anymore."

"Robin, when it comes to the army, I'm kidding just about all the time. It's the only way I can cope with it."

Robin looked at Cirocco Jones, who sat astride Hornpipe, as she was sitting on Valiha. Nearby, the infant Tambura cantered in the gawky and amiable way of all young Titanides, enjoying the educational outing with her foremother, Hornpipe, and the two humans.

The Wizard, the Captain, the Mayor ... the Demon. Cirocco Jones was all of them, and she was also an old friend. But sometimes lately she scared Robin. Seeing her at the big rallies in the stadium, watching the throngs cheer her every word... it reminded her too much of the historical footage of demagogues of the past, the silver-tongued rascals who led their people into disaster. She was a stranger, standing up there, arms raised, drinking the vast approval of the crowds.

Yet, on those rare occasions when she could be alone with her, she was just Cirocco. Of course, that had always been slightly overwhelming in itself, but in a quite different way.

Cirocco seemed to sense Robin's mood. She turned to her, and shook her head.

"Remember what I told you, way back at the Junction," Cirocco said. "Way back when we planned all this. I told you you wouldn't like all of it. But I told you to remember it isn't all what it seems."

"Putting that editor in jail ... that made me sick. He was a good man."

"I know he is. I admire him. When this is over I'll use whatever influence I have left-if I'm still alive-to see that he is properly honored. Make him the head of the school of journalism, maybe ... and he'll hate me the rest of his life. With good reason."

Robin sighed.

"Hell. As soon as she's sure you're gone, Trini will just stick him back in jail. Or Stuart."

They were heading almost due west, into the heart of the Dione darkness. The Titanides had already brought them through the "impenetrable" jungle and up over the "unscalable" mountains about as easily as a pair of tanks moving over paved road. They had swum the Ophion, and were now nearing the Dione central vertical cable. It was like an Earth night with a full moon in the sky. Behind them, Iapetus curved up the inside of the wheel, and in front was Metis. Both regions reflected enough light into Dione for the Titanides to see by. Tambura scampered to the left and right of the main trail, but always returned at a gentle admonition from Valiha, and never got into trouble. Titanide children never did.

Cirocco had not mentioned the purpose of the trip. Robin had thought the central cable was just a landmark on the way to their final destination, but when they reached it, the Titanides stopped.

"We'll be happy to accompany you, Captain," Valiha said. "This place holds no horrors for us."

She was referring to the instinctive fear Titanides held for the central cables, and for the beings which lived at the bottom. Twenty years ago, trapped under a rockfall beneath the central Tethys cable, Robin and Chris had faced the nightmare task of herding Valiha down the five-kilometer spiral stairway that ended in the lair of Tethys himself-a cranky, obsessed, terrifying, and, luckily for them, myopic Lesser God. Valiha's I.Q. had decreased with every step down, until at the bottom she was no brighter than a horse and twice as skittish. The encounter had ended in two broken forelegs for Valiha, and an endless nightmare for Robin.

It was not a fear the Titanides could do anything about. It had been programmed into them by Gaea.

But Dione was dead, and that apparently made a difference.

"Thanks for the offer, my friends, but I would prefer it if you awaited us here. Our business will not take us long. You might use the opportunity to teach this useless one something of the good grace and dignity your race is known for, and which she so sorely lacks."

"Hey!" Tambura protested, and leaped at Cirocco, who dodged to the side, grabbed her, and wrestled in mock ferocity until the young Titanide was laughing too hard to continue the game. Cirocco mussed her hair, and took Robin's arm. They started into the forest of cable strands.

At twenty-five centimeters per step, there were twenty thousand steps leading down to Dione. Even in one-quarter gee, it was one hell of a lot of steps.

Cirocco had brought a powerful battery light. Robin was grateful for it. There was natural light from creatures called glowbes which clung to the high, arched ceiling, but it was dim and orange, and there were long stretches where the animals didn't nest. They marched in silence for a long time.

Robin realized she would probably never get a better chance to talk to Cirocco about something that bad been causing her a lot of agony. The new, improved, glorious Mayor had little time these days to spend talking with her friends.

"I don't suppose it's possible you don't know about me and Conal."

"You're right. It's not possible."

"He wants to move in with me again."

"Why did you throw him out?"

"I didn't-" But she had. She might as well admit it, she decided. It had been almost a kilorev now, and she wasn't getting much sleep. Not used to sleeping alone anymore, she told herself, and knew it was more than that.

"Nova was part of it, I guess," she said. "Every time I looked at her I saw the accusation, and I felt guilty. I wanted to get close to her again."

"Worked pretty good, didn't it?"

"That cold-ass, sanctimonious, snot-nosed little-" She bit it off before the rage could build.

"She's all I have," Robin said helplessly.

"That's not true. And it's not fair to her."

"But I-"

"Listen for a minute," Cirocco cut in. "I've given this some thought. I've been thinking about it since the feast, since we made the Pledge and started planning to take over Bellinzona. I-"

"You knew then?"

"I hate to see friends in such a mess. I've stayed out, because people don't really want advice about things like that. But I have some. If you want it."

Robin didn't want it. She had learned that the observations and plans made by the Mayor were usually the right thing to do-and quite often not what you would like to do at all.

"I want it," she said.

Robin counted three hundred steps before Cirocco spoke again. Great Mother, she thought. It must be really awful if she's taking this much time to choose her words. Who does she think I am?

"Nova hasn't learned the difference between evil and sin."

Robin counted fifty more steps.

"Maybe I haven't, either," she finally said.

"Naturally, I'm implying that I have," Cirocco said, with a chuckle. "Let me tell you what I think, and you can make of it what you will."

Ten more steps.

"Sin is a violation of the laws of the tribe," Cirocco said. "On Earth, in most societies, what you practice in the Coven was a sin. There's another word, too. Perversion. Historically, most humans have seen homosexuality as a perversion. Now, I've heard about a hundred theories as to why people are homosexual. Doctors say it happened in childhood. Biochemists say it's all chemicals in the brain. Militant gays say being gay is good for you, and so forth. In the Coven, you say men are evil beings, and only an evil woman could mate with one.

"I don't have a theory. I don't care. It just isn't important to me if somebody's heterosexual or homosexual.

"But it's important to you. In your mind, you have sinned by having carnal knowledge with a man. You're a pervert."

Another fifty steps went by as Robin thought this over. It wasn't a new thought to her.

"I don't know if this helps me," she said, at last.

"I didn't promise to help. I think your only hope is to look at it objectively. I've tried to. What I've concluded is that, for reasons I don't understand, some people are one way and some people are the other. On Earth, with overwhelming societal reasons to be heterosexual, there have always been those who are not. In the Coven, it's like a mirror image. I suspect there might have been a fair number of unhappy women in the Coven. They probably didn't even know what was making them unhappy. Maybe they dreamed about it. Sinful dreams. But their problem was that-for whatever reason, biological, behavioral, hormonal-they were ... well, for want of a better word, they were gay. They'd have been happier with male sex partners. I don't know if you're born gay or are made gay-on Earth, or in the Coven. But I think you're a pervert."

Robin felt the blood rushing to her face, but did not break stride on the long descent. It was best to have it out.

"You think I have to have a man."

"It's not that simple. But something in your personality meshes with something in Conal's. If he'd been a woman, you'd be the happiest person in Gaea right now. Since he's a man, you're one of the most miserable. It's because you've bought the Coven's big lie, even though you think you're too adult for all that. There were millions of Earth men and women who bought the Earth cultures' big lies, and they died just as unhappy as you are now. And I suggest to you that it's a foolish thing."

"Yeah, but ... damn it, Cirocco, I can see that. I've had those thoughts-"

"But you haven't fought them hard enough."

"But what about Nova?"

"What about her? If she can't accept you the way you are, then she isn't the person you hoped she would be."

Robin thought about it for many hundred steps.

"She's grown up," Cirocco said. "She can make her own decisions."

"I know that. But-"

"She represents the unforgiving weight of Coven morality."

"But ... can't I make her get over it?"

"No. I'm not even sure you can help her. But ... maybe I shouldn't say this, but I think time is going to cure your problem. Time, and a Titanide."

Robin questioned her about that, but Cirocco would say no more.

"So you think I should let Conal move back in?"

"Do you love him?"

"Sometimes I think I do."

"I don't know a lot of things for sure, but one thing I'm pretty sure about is that love is the only thing that's worth much."

"He makes me happy," Robin admitted.

"All the better."

"We're ... very good in bed."

"Then you're a fool to be anywhere else. It was good enough for your great-great-great grandmaw. You are descended from a long line of lesbians, but there's a touch of perversion in your blood."

Another hundred steps went by, then still another.

"Okay. I'll think about it," Robin said. "You told me what sin is. What's evil?"

"Robin... I know it when I see it."

That was all there was time for, as, to Robin's surprise, she found herself at the bottom of the Dione stairs.

It was nothing like the other regional brains. Robin had seen three of them: Crius, still loyal to Gaea, Tethys, an enemy; and Thea, one of Gaea's strongest allies. The twelve regional brains had chosen sides long ago, during the Oceanic Rebellion, when the land itself had become disloyal to Gaea.

It had been Dione's misfortune to be located between Metis and Iapetus, two of Oceanus' strongest and most effective supporters. When war came, she was squeezed between the two and mortally wounded. It had taken her a long time to die, but she had been dead now for at least five hundred years.

It was dark at the bottom of the staircase. Their footsteps echoed.

The moat surrounding the huge conical tower that had once been Dione was dry. Where Tethys had glowed with a red inner light and had seemed alert and aware even in his utter immobility, Dione was obviously a corpse. Parts of the tower had collapsed. Robin could glimpse a lattice-like internal structure through the gaping holes. When Cirocco's flashlight fell on it, it threw back a million shattered reflections.

When the flashlight turned the other way, the reflections were only two. The twin gleams were about two meters apart, and came from inside a big, arched tunnel entrance. It looked like a train was sitting just inside.

"Come on out, Nasu," Cirocco whispered.

Robin's heart turned over. She fell back through the years, twenty and more ...

... to the day when, as a young girl, she had been given the tiny snake, a South American anaconda, Eunectes murinus, and selected it as her demon. No cats or crows for Robin; she would have a serpent. She named it Nasu, which someone told her meant "little pig" in some Earth language, after watching it devour six terrified mice in one meal.

... to arriving in Gaea, Nasu in her handbag, terrified and confused by Customs, and by the low gravity. Nasu had bitten her three times that day.

... to losing the snake somewhere in the depths of Gaea between Tethys and Thea. She and Chris had looked for a long time, had set out bait, called endlessly, to no avail. Chris had tried to convince her the snake would find prey down there in the darkness, that she could survive. Robin had tried to believe it was so, and had failed.

She had meant to keep the snake all her life. She had intended to grow old with this reptile. She knew they could grow to ten meters in length and outweigh a mere python, inch for inch, by a factor of two. A truly remarkable snake, the anaconda... .

Nasu made a hissing sound that raised the hairs on the back of Robin's neck. There must have been sounds like that, though not so deep or so loud, in the swamps of the Cretaceous Period. A remarkable snake, but they didn't grow that big.

"Sh-sh-sh ... Cirocco ... let's get-"

Nasu moved. Surely there could never had been a slither like that since the dawn of time. It was a slither to make tyrannosaurs run squealing into the brush, to loosen the bowels of a wolverine, to give lions and tigers cardiac arrest.

To stop Robin's heart.

The anaconda's head came out of the tunnel and it stopped. Her tongue was twice the girth of a full-grown anaconda, and it slid out and flicked this way and that. Her head was completely white. It was about the size of the locomotive Robin had first visualized in the darkness. The eyes were golden, with narrow black slits.

"Talk to her, Robin," Cirocco whispered.

"Cirocco!" Robin hissed, urgently. "I don't think you understand! An anaconda isn't a puppy dog or a kitty cat."

"I know that."

"You don't! You can care for them, but you never own them. They tolerate you because you're too big to eat. If she's hungry ... "

"She's not. I know a little about this, babe. There's big game down here. You don't think she grew that big eating chickens and rabbits, do you?"

"I don't believe she grew that big at all! In twenty years? That's impossible."

There was that awful slithering sound again, and twenty more meters of Nasu entered the dark chamber. She paused, and tasted the air again.

"She won't remember me. She's not a pet, damn it. I had to handle her carefully, and even then I got bites."

"I promise you, Robin, she's not hungry. And even if she was, she wouldn't bother with anything as small as us."

"I don't understand what you want me to do."

"Just stand your ground and talk to her. Say the things you used to say to her twenty years ago. Get her used to you ... and don't run away."

So Robin did. They were three or four hundred meters from the snake. Every few minutes there would be more slithering, and another fifty meters would emerge from the tunnel. There was no sign Nasu was about to run out of meters.

There came a time when the head was no more than two meters away. Robin knew what came next, and braced herself for it.

The great tongue came out. It touched her lightly on her forearms, flirted briefly with the textures of her clothing, flicked over her hair.

And it was all right.

The tongue was moist and cool, but not unpleasant. And in that moment of touching, Robin somehow knew the snake remembered her. The touch of the tongue seemed to pass some sign of recognition from Nasu to Robin. I know you.

Nasu moved again, the great head lifted slightly off the floor, and Robin found herself in a semi-circle of white snake higher than her head. One fearful yellow eye regarded her with reptilian speculation, yet she was not afraid. The head tilted a little...

Robin remembered something Nasu had liked. She had sometimes rubbed Nasu on the top of the head, with her forefinger. The snake would rise to it, coil around her arm, and present herself for more.

She reached up and, with both fists, rubbed the smooth skin on top of Nasu's head. The snake made a relatively small hissing sound-no worse than an ocean liner coming into port-and retreated. The tongue touched her again, and Nasu moved around her from the other side and tilted her head the other way for more rubbing.

Cirocco moved slowly up to join them. Nasu watched placidly.

"Okay," Robin said, quietly. "I've talked to her. Now what?"

"Obviously, this is more than an anaconda," Cirocco began.

"Obviously."

"I don't know what changed her. Diet? Low gravity? Something, anyway. She's adapted to living underground. I've spotted her two or three times, bigger each time, and she's stayed out of my way. I have reason to believe she's a lot more intelligent than she was."

"Why?"

"A friend told me she might be. The next time I saw Nasu, I told her to meet me here in Dione if she wanted to be with her old friend again. And here she is."

Robin was impressed, but beginning to be suspicious.

"So what's the purpose?"

Cirocco sighed.

"You asked me what evil is. Maybe this is. I've thought about it a long time, but I'm afraid I can't get much of a handle on what might seem an evil thing to a snake. I don't think she loves Gaea. And anyway, all I can do is suggest. The rest is up to you, and her."

"Suggest what?"

"That you ask her to follow us to Hyperion, to slay Gaea."

TWENTY-SEVEN

Nova looked up at Virginal and tried to conceal her disappointment.

"Are you tired? Is that it?"

"No," Virginal said. "I ... just don't feel like running today."

"Not feeling good?" Nova couldn't remember any Titanide complaining of so much as a headache. They were disgustingly healthy. Short of broken bones or major internal injuries, not much could keep a Titanide down.

It was her right, of course. Nova had no illusions of owning Virginal, or even of having a claim on the Titanide's time. But it had been a thing they did regularly since coming to Bellinzona. Nova would pack a huge picnic lunch and they would gallop off to some remote, scary, mountainous place, Nova clinging for her life yet knowing she was in little danger. They would eat, talk of this and that, Nova would nap while Virginal had her dream-time.

At first, they had done it faithfully, once every hectorev. As Nova's responsibilities grew she had found less and less time for the outings. But it was her only real recreation, her only escape from the eternal, dreary numbers. Football bored her. She didn't drink.

"Well, maybe tomorrow then," she said, using the common Bellinzona term for "after my next sleep period."

To her surprise, Virginal hesitated, then looked away from her.

"I don't think so," she said, reluctantly.

Nova dropped the heavy pack on the wooden causeway and put her hands on her hips.

"Okay. There's something on your mind. I think I have a right to hear about it."

"I'm not sure you do," Virginal said. She looked pained. "Perhaps Tambura would like to go riding with you. I can ask her."

"Tambura? Why her? Because she's a baby?"

"She can bear you with no trouble."

"That's not the point, Virginal!" She pulled herself back from the edge of anger and tried again.

"Are you saying ... you don't want to ride with me today, tomorrow ... forever?"

"Yes," Virginal said, gratefully.

"But ... why?"

"It is not a 'why' thing," Virginal said, uncomfortably.

Nova tumbled the sentence around in her mind, trying to make sense of it. Not a 'why' thing. But there's always a why. Titanides were honest folk, but they did not always tell the whole truth.

"Don't you like me anymore?" Nova asked.

"I still like you."

"Then... if you can't tell me why, you can tell me what ... what's different. What's changed?"

Virginal nodded reluctantly.

"There is a thing," Virginal finally said. "Growing in your head."

Nova involuntarily put her hand to her forehead. She immediately thought of Snitch, and felt ice and spiders sliding on her skin.

But she couldn't have meant that.

"I thought it would quickly die," Virginal said. "But you are nourishing it now, and it will soon be too big to kill. I weep for this. I wish to say good-by to you now, before the thing consumes the Nova I have loved."

Once again, Nova tried very hard, and this time she came up with something.

"Does this have to do with my mother?"

Virginal smiled, pleased to have gotten through.

"Yes. Of course. That is the seed of it."

Nova felt the anger building again. She wondered if she would be able to restrain it this time.

"Listen, damn you, if Robin put you up to this-"

Virginal slapped her. It was quite a light slap for a Titanide. It didn't quite knock her over.

"It was Cirocco, wasn't it? She told you what I-"

Virginal slapped her again. She tasted blood. And she was crying.

"I'm very sorry," Virginal said. "I have my pride, too. No one is playing a trick on you. I would not allow myself to be the instrument of anyone's schemes for your reunion with your mother."

"It's none of your business!"

"That's exactly right. It's none of my business at all. You have your own life to lead, and you must do as you think best." She turned and started off.

Nova chased after her, grabbed her arm.

"Wait. Please wait, Virginal. Listen, I ... what can I do?"

Virginal stopped, and sighed.

"I know you don't intend to be impolite, but offering advice in a situation like this is considered rude by my people. I cannot chart a course for you."

"Make up with my mother, right?" Nova said, bitterly. "Tell her it's okay for her to ... to break every solemn vow... to consort with that..."

"I don't know if that would help you. I ... have said too much. Go to Tambura. She is young, and will not see the thing for a time. You can go for rides in the country with her."

"For a ... you mean other Titanides can-"

The enormity of the idea overwhelmed her. She felt naked. Were all her secret thoughts on display to every Titanide?

What do they see?

Virginal reached into her pouch and came up with a small flat piece of wood, the kind she often used for her carving.

It showed a girl, easily recognizable as Nova, sitting in a box with a stony expression on her face. Outside the box were others-Robin? Conal? Virginal?-not as distinct, but in attitudes of sorrow. Nova realized the box might be a coffin. But the girl inside was not dead. It made her feel sick, and she tried to hand it back.

"Look more closely at the face," Virginal commanded.

She did. It had seemed expressionless. On closer examination, she saw a smug, cat-like twist of the lips. Self-satisfied? The eyes were empty holes.

She thrust it away. Virginal took it, glanced sadly at it, then scaled it out over the water of Moros.

"Shouldn't you keep that?" Nova asked, bitterly. "It might be worth something someday. But maybe it's a bit over-done. A little too overtly symbolic. If you try again, I'm sure you could get it just right."

"That was the fifth in a series, Nova. I made them during my last five dream-times. I have tried to ignore them, I have thrown them away. But I can no longer ignore what my dreams are telling me. You are rejecting those who love you. This is sad. You are enjoying it. This is something which-as you say-is not my business, but something I cannot be around. Good-bye."

"Wait. Please don't go yet. I'll ... I'll go tell her it's okay. I'll tell her I'm sorry."

Virginal hesitated, then slowly shook her head.

"I don't know if it will be enough."

"What can I do?"

"Open yourself again," Virginal said, without hesitation. "You have sealed off the possibility of love. Not only from your mother. There is a girl in your office. You hardly see her. She admires you. She might be your friend. She might be your lover. I don't know. But there is no possibility for either thing as you are now."

Once again Nova was bewildered.

"Who are you talking about?"

"I don't know her name. You would see her, if you looked."

"I don't know how."

Virginal sighed.

"Nova, if you were a Titanide I would tell you to go away for a time. If this disease of the soul infected me, I would go into the wilderness and fast until I could see things clearly again. I don't know if it works for humans."

"But I can't. My job ... Cirocco needs me ... "

"Yes," Virginal said, sadly. "You're right, of course. So good-bye."

TWENTY-EIGHT

Cirocco found Conal sitting on a hillside, overlooking Boot Camp.

It was located on a big, long island in the middle of Moros. Tents had been set up. There was a big mess hall and a parade ground. The air was filled with the shouts of sergeants, and the tiny figures of new recruits marched in lines or scrambled over obstacle courses. He looked up as she sat beside him.

"Some place, huh?" she said.

"Not my favorite," Conal confessed. "But you're sure getting the recruits."

"Thirty thousand, last time I checked. I thought I'd have to offer bonuses in pay and food rations to get so many, but they keep coming. Isn't patriotism a wonderful thing?"

"I never thought about it much."

"You been thinking about it now?"

"Sure have." He gestured out over the fledgling Bellinzona Army. "You say they aren't going to have to fight. But I wonder. They look like they want to. Even..."

"After all they've seen on Earth," Cirocco finished. "I know. I thought it would be hard to raise a volunteer army here. But I don't think some ... deep, basic taste for warfare will ever be gone from the human race. One of these days Bellinzona will grow too big. We'll establish another city somewhere nearby, maybe in Iapetus. Not too long after that they'll start trading back and forth. And pretty soon they'll be fighting each other."

"Do they like running around and taking orders?"

Cirocco shrugged.

"A few. The rest ... lots would go back home if they could. We didn't tell 'em enlistment's for the duration, and a medical discharge is the only way out. Half the people down there are thinking they made a mistake." She pointed to a fenced area. "That's the stockade. It's a lot worse than the work camps. When they get out, they soldier very hard."

Conal knew that; he knew a lot of the things she had just said. He had spent some time here, trying to understand it. He had been born much too late for the days of large armies. Military discipline was foreign and frightening to him. The soldiers he talked to seemed ... different.

"They're sure getting ready to fight," Conal observed. It was true. The drilling below was in earnest. Sword production was way up. Each soldier was to be provided with a short sword, a hardened-leather chest-plate or-for the officers-one of bronze, an iron helmet, good boots and trousers ... the basic infantry equipment. They were organized into legions and cohorts, and had learned Roman tactics. There were legions of archers. There were combat engineers learning how to construct siege towers and catapults, which would be built on the site from native materials. Some units had already departed, and were busy in Iapetus and Cronus repairing the bridges of the old Circum-Gaea Highway.

"They have to be ready," Cirocco said. "If the big fight, the one between me and Gaea... if I lose that, the war won't be over for those soldiers. They'll be stuck a long way from home, and Gaea won't call it off. She's got maybe a hundred thousand people in Pandemonium, and they'll all fight. They won't be trained-Gaea's too slipshod. But our people will be outnumbered four to one. I owe it to them to see they're ready to fight."

Conal took a moment to add this up in his head.

"But we've already got thirty thousand, and more coming ... "

"Some will die along the way, Conal." He turned to look at her, and saw she was watching for his reaction.

"That many?"

"No. I intend to do some weeding out. But there will be casualties. How many is up to you, in part."

He understood that, too. These "Roman" legions would march under the constant threat of air attack. It would be his job to fight off the Gaean Air Force.

"How many planes? Do you know that yet?"

"Buzz bombs? I'm pretty sure there are eight combat groups left. That's eighty planes. How's the training going, by the way?"

"Very well. I've got more good pilots now than I have planes."

"Well, in planes, what you've got is all you'll ever have. Don't waste any."

Conal was momentarily annoyed. It wasn't like Cirocco to say something like that. He looked at her, and was frightened to see, just for a moment, that she almost looked her age. It must be a hell of a burden.

"Conal ... maybe this is a bad time to bring this up. I just got back from a trip with Robin, and I detected a ... nervousness about her."

"What do you mean? What kind of nervousness?"

"Oh... I got the feeling that ... maybe she was afraid I was enjoying all this too much." She gestured with her head out toward the camp, but the gesture implied a lot more.

Conal had had the same thought.

"It did occur to me," he said, "that nobody's going to take your job away from you. Not even if you stood for election."

"You're right."

"It's a great deal of power."

"It is, indeed. I told you something of what it would be like when we all first discussed this. But hearing about it and seeing it are two different things."

Conal felt a coldness creeping over him. It hadn't happened in a long time. The hub of his universe was this enigma called Cirocco Jones. Their relationship had begun in blood and agony. It had moved slowly through the politics of terror and submission, into acceptance, to something close to worship ... and finally to friendship.

But there was always a tiny chip of dry ice down there in his soul.

There had been a time, up in that cave, when he thought he was going to die. Cirocco and Hornpipe had not been back in over a kilorev. What little food had been stored for him was long gone. He existed in a half-waking state appropriate to the unchanging light. He watched the meat melt off his bones, and knew they had abandoned him.

That didn't seem right. He hadn't expected Cirocco to do that.

But it made him feel oddly superior. He had learned some lessons about himself, and the fellow who starved to death in a few more weeks would be a better man than the one who walked up to the black-clad stranger in the Titanide bar. If she let him die, it would be her loss.

Then Hornpipe had clambered into the cave one "day," and Conal's new-built world crashed around him. They were testing me, he thought. Let him get hungry, see what he thinks about that. So what if he goes a little crazy? It'll make him more manageable.

It lasted only a fraction of a second. Then he saw that Hornpipe was badly injured, bleeding from a dozen wounds, one arm in a sling. How he had made it up here in such a state ...

"I am deeply shamed," Hornpipe had said, in a weary voice. "Had it been within the realm of possibility, I would have been here long since. But we have been unable to move. Cirocco bade me bring you her word that, should she survive, she will apologize to you personally. But live or die, she now grants you your freedom from this place. You should never have been left here."

Conal had been filled with a thousand questions, none of which seemed important when he saw the food. Hornpipe prepared a meal of broth, and stayed with him a short time to be sure he was going to be all right. He would not answer any questions, when Conal got around to asking them, except to say Cirocco had been badly injured but was in a moderately safe place.

Then the Titanide had left again, leaving a cache of food in glass jars, a stove and some fuel, and a parachute. He explained its operation, assuring him his chances of survival were excellent if he were forced to use it-at least until he was on the ground. But Hornpipe emphasized that the cave was, at that moment, the safest place in Gaea, and that he was going to bring Cirocco there for that very reason. Terrible things were abroad in the land, Hornpipe told him, and he would do well to stay until the food ran out. Hornpipe swore that nothing but his own death would prevent him from returning to the cave. If Hornpipe didn't show up before the food was gone, Conal was to jump.

But Hornpipe was not gone long. He returned with Cirocco, whose injuries were too numerous to count. She had lost blood and weight-and two fingers, which later grew back. She was feverish and semiconscious.

A Titanide named Rocky had come with them. He was a healer, and gradually nursed her back to health.

But it took a while, and during that period an opportunity had come, as Conal had known it would. Both Titanides were at the mouth of the cave, doing that half-sleep, half-waking thing. Their backs were to him. Cirocco slept on a pallet a few feet away.

He had worked the gun free of her pack. He had pulled the hammer back with his thumb. He had pressed the barrel against her temple. And he had waited to see what he was going to do next.

A few ounces of pressure against the trigger and she would be dead.

He remembered glancing to see if the Titanides were watching him. They were not. Another suspicion came, and he looked quickly to see if the gun was loaded. It was.

So he moved it away from her head, carefully lowered the hammer, and put it away. When he looked up, both Titanides were standing a few feet away from him. They had odd expressions, but did not seem angry. He knew they had seen him put the gun away. Later, he understood they had known everything he did, and his belief in the judgment of a Titanide was complete from that moment.

It was shortly after this that Rocky had put his ear to Cirocc's head and proclaimed he heard something in there...

"Conal?"

He looked up, startled.

"You looked like you were a million miles away."

"I guess I was. You were asking me if I was worried you would become permanent dictator of Bellinzona."

Cirocco stared.

"I didn't actually come out and ask it ... but I guess that was the idea."

"The answer is, I don't care. If you did, I think you'd do it better than anyone else, except maybe Robin, who I'm planning to convince to get out of government and go live in a little cabin in Metis with me and maybe have a couple more babies, and you and Nova and Chris and all the Titanides can come visit us on their birthdays. And I think you know what you're doing. And I don't think you'll stay on in the job ... if only because you're too damn smart for that."

"Whew." Cirocco shook her head, then laughed. "You're right. It's seductive, even to a confirmed old solitary bitch like me. But you're right again when you say it isn't that seductive."

"So what did you come up here for?" Conal asked.

"To get an honest opinion, I think. These days, I get so paranoid I think even the Titanides are just telling me what I want to hear."

"And I didn't?"

Cirocco grinned.

"Sure you did, Conal. It's just that from you, I believe it."

TWENTY-NINE

It was to be the last meeting before the Great March began, only one hectorev away. Plans for the big parade were being finalized. It was a nuisance-the troops would have to be barged into Bellinzona, landed, paraded through the city to the cheers of multitudes, re-loaded, and barged to the south end of Moros, where the overland trek to the highway was flat and easy. But it couldn't be helped. The city needed to see its army. The army needed to know the people were behind them as they moved into harm's way. It was deadly to underestimate the importance of morale.

The meeting was a nuisance, too. Cirocco sat quietly and listened to the usual complaints, suggestions, and displays of ego, and waited her turn.

The big tent easily held the four Generals, twenty Colonels, and one hundred Majors who formed the top brass of the army. She knew all of them by name-part of being a politician was to remember everyone's name, and she had been meticulous about it-but privately she liked to think of them by the names of their commands.

There were four Divisions, each led by a General. Thus, there was a General Two, Three, Eight, and One Hundred and One, leading the Second, Third, Eighth, and One Hundred First Divisions. That there were no First, Fourth, etc. Divisions did not bother Cirocco. She had picked the numbers for historical reasons that would appeal to Gaea,

Each General presided over five Legions, commanded by Colonels. The Legions had two thousand soldiers each, and were numbered consecutively.

There were five Cohorts in a Legion, ten Companies in a Cohort, two sections in a Company. Companies were commanded by Sergeants, of which there were sixteen hundred in the Bellinzona Army.

These numbers had resulted from endless wrangling, and were still the cause of debate. Most of the senior staff agreed the officer/enlisted ratio was hopelessly small. Forty thousand soldiers needed more officers, in the view of these professional military people.

The second major complaint was lack of weaponry and equipment. Procurement had fallen short of expected goals. Cirocco listened to General One Hundred and One expounding the numbers: a shortfall of X in swords, Y in shields, Z in breastplates.

The third was lack of training. The brass complained bitterly of having no one to practice on. As a result, there were no blooded troops except a handful who had fought on Earth.

Cirocco listened to it all, and finally stood up.

"First," she said, and pointed to General Two, "you're fired. You have contempt for human life, and ought to be back on Earth pushing buttons and creating deserts. I'd send you back if I could. As it is, I'm sending you to the prison camp for two kilorevs. Your bags are packed. Go home and write your memoirs."

She waited in the thick silence as the red-faced man marched from the tent. She pointed to Colonel Six.

"You're promoted to take his place. There's a star sitting on your bunk. Pin it on when you get there. Pick your successor for the Sixth Legion-and it doesn't have to be one of your Majors." She pointed three more times. "You, you, and you. You're not Colonels anymore. You're not good enough to run a Legion." The three got up and left. If anything, the silence was even thicker.

"I don't know the Majors well enough to make reasoned judgments on their performance, so you can breathe easier. But I urge all of you here to do whatever is necessary in the way of discharges and demotions to make this a more efficient outfit.

"And now ... I'm going to solve all your problems. I am going to decimate your troops."

She waited for the buzz of conversation to die down, then addressed the Generals.

"I want the orders to go out to the Sergeants. Each of them is in charge of twenty soldiers. I want them to pick the two worst they have, and send them home. I want them to choose the rawest recruits, the guy who keeps tripping over his bootlaces or stabbing himself with his sword, the girl who can't keep her head down or remember which end of the arrow fits over the string... I want all the fuck-ups and misfits and weaklings and idiots weeded out. Muster them out within twenty revs, honorable discharges, no stigma attached." She waved a hand negligently. "It doesn't have to be two from each Section. Some sections are going to be solid all the way through, and others will have four or five rejects. Have it worked out on the Company and Cohort level ... but work it out. In twenty revs, I want this army to be ten percent smaller."

There was more conversation, as she had expected. She repressed a smile. It damn sure improved the officer/enlisted ratio, but it wasn't what they'd had in mind at all.

"Next step," she went on. She pointed at General Three. He cringed slightly. "Yours is the newest Division, with the highest percentage of recruits. I believe you to be a good General, with a genuine concern for the welfare of your troops. It isn't your fault that your Division is the weakest of the four. Nevertheless, it is the weakest. So you become the Home Division."

"Now just a-"

Cirocco did not have to glare very hard to silence him. The man realized he had overstepped his bounds, and shut up.

"As I was saying, your Division will stay behind. This will solve the equipment problem, and help with the training problem, since you will be leaving all your equipment behind and continuing to train your troops while the rest of us are marching on Pandemonium."

The General swallowed hard, but remained silent.

"You will be receiving new equipment as it is manufactured. The rest of us will have to make do with what we bring along ... which will now be adequate. Your mission is to set up two garrisons, one at the east road leading to Iapetus, and one at the western pass into the mountains. These garrisons should be defensible if Gaea sends armies into Dione. You will also establish outposts on the northern rim of Moros. In consultation with the civil authorities, you are to establish a Navy to patrol Moros. I am leaving tactical decisions up to you, but I recommend some degree of fortification of the city, and a certain number of troops-possibly one Legion-stationed nearby. If we fail, the defense of Bellinzona will be up to you."

The General was looking a lot more interested, though Cirocco knew there was no way to make him like the assignment.

"One more thing, General. When we leave here, we will be leaving the worst Division behind. When we return, I want it to be the best, or you should look for another job."

"It will be," he said.

"Good. Go get started on it now."

He looked surprised, then stood up quickly and marched out, followed by his Colonels and Majors. When they were gone, the number of empty chairs was impressive. Cirocco had just cut the size of her Army by more than one fourth, and was well pleased with her work. She looked from face to face, taking her time, and when she was done, she smiled.

"Ladies and Gentlemen," she said, "we are ready to march on Pandemonium."