Demon (GAIA) (16 page)

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

“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t see…see…I think maybe—”

“Speak!”

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

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

“You can come up now, Robin. Slow and easy. Everything’s all right.”

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

“This is my gun.”

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

“What was that?” Robin gestured to the pack.

“My demon.” Her eyes bored into Robin’s. “Can you keep a secret?”

Robin returned the gaze, and finally nodded.

“If that’s the way you want it.”

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

“You thought I was a spy for Gaea?”

“I had to assume you
could
be. Could you be sure you weren’t?”

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

“She can do anything at all, can’t she?”

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

“Would you have killed me?”

“Yes.”

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

“What about Nova?” she said, suddenly.

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

“And Adam?”

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

“What
is
this place?” she asked.

“The fountain of youth,” Cirocco said.

***

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

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

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

And the fountain brewed.

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

“How do I know it won’t hurt me?” Robin asked.

“You don’t have to do it,” Cirocco said.

“I know that, you told me that, but…how do you know? Maybe it’s a trick. Maybe Gaea’s hand is on
you.
”

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

“I do. Emotionally.”

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

“I know. I’m sorry. I’m just nervous.”

“Don’t be. Just get undressed.”

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

Robin looked very sad, standing there in the nude. She would have looked sad anyway, but to one who had seen her glory, it was heartbreaking.

All the tattoos had faded badly. Cirocco had already seen the Eye and the Pentasm on her head, and part of the snake on her arm. They had been multi-colored and bright when Robin was nineteen. Now they were muddy, with a hint of dull red or murky green in a design made up mostly of slate-gray. Her fourth tattoo—the snake around her leg—was in the same shape as the rest. But the fifth had been vandalized.

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

She relaxed into Cirocco’s arms, as the Wizard had told her to do. She closed her eyes, felt a hand pinch her nostrils, and she was lowered into the water.

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

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

Well, why not? She felt the hands release her nostrils. The hot nectar began to flow inside. She opened her mouth. Air bubbled out and the waters flowed in.

There were a few spasms as her lungs filled and she tried to cough away the last of the air. She struggled, but was held firm. Then she was at peace again.

***

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

“You go ahead,” Chris said, taking the towel. “I’ll take care of her.”

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

Chris stayed in the longest. When he came out he was almost an inch taller and his face had changed slightly.

Cirocco put Robin back into a light trance and Chris lifted her with Adam in her arms. With a glance over his shoulder at Cirocco, Chris set out to take Robin back to Tuxedo Junction, and to make his proposition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I auw Luther! I auw here on a wission of God!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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