Demon (GAIA) (30 page)

Then she’d spit the head into the Resurrect-O-Master and a dozen revs later some mewling abortion would come out the other end and she’d tell it
You’re Rasputin
, or
You’re Luther
, and solemnly intone the Gospel that one was supposed to believe in, and send it out into the world.

They lasted a while, the Priests did, not like the zombies, which had a half-life of about a kilorev. Still, even Priests reached a point where they were too mortified to do more than lie there and twitch, which was only funny for a short time, so Gaea had run through a lot of Luthers and a lot of Rasputins.

Everybody loved it.

But during the last part of the arrival of the King, Gaea was one goddamn scary fifty-foot special effect.

It was Oceanus that caused it, of course. Oceanus was the Enemy. Almost in the same league with Cirocco Jones herself. There’s just no way she was going to feel good while the King was being flown over Oceanus’s hyperborean precincts.

If the truth were told, not many of the Pandemonii felt good about being that close to Oceanus in the first place. Oceanus was a thing that ought to be comfortably far around the Great One’s Curve, not looming frigidly like a gigantic breaking wave of icebergs. A lot of the most faithful sycophants were walking around with their shoulders hunched. You could have made a fortune on the gooseflesh concession.

But then the King was winging out of the twilight zone and over the Key of G—the most southwestern of Hyperion’s eight regions, and only three hundred kilometers from the Key of D Minor, where Pandemonium had encamped. And maybe she did something with the sun panels out there in vacuum, constantly angling those rays down over fat and sassy Hyperion, or maybe it was just the enormous relief Gaea felt—and when a fifteen-meter goddess/starlet heaved a sigh of relief, brother, you felt it down to your
toe-nails
…but the day, the endless and unchanging day, was suddenly brighter.

Suddenly it was orders here and orders there, and everybody falling all over themselves to see who could kiss ass the quickest.

“Wine!” Gaea trumpeted. “Let the land flow with wine!” And twenty baffled vintners were trotted out and upended and stuffed like Strasberg geese until the chablis spouted into a thousand flasks.

“Food!” she boomed. “Open the mighty cornucopia and let my abundance flow forth!” So butter was melted by the ton, and hard kernel corn shoveled by the bucketful into the rotating maws of thirty poppers big as cement mixers—which had, in fact, originally
been
cement mixers—and fires stoked beneath them until hot yellow puffs were exploding in every direction, littering the ground, being devoured there by legions of producers who momentarily forgot their taste for fresh film in their popcorn feeding frenzy. Ten thousand franks were soon sizzling on a hundred grills, and milk chocolate flowed from the crusty teats of the teamsters.

“Film!” Gaea roared. “Let it be a festival to the King, the most stupendous celluloid celebration of all time! Run it on three screens at once, suspend the pass list, and raise the price at the box office!”

Then she began to shout titles.
King of Kings. The Greatest Story Ever Told. Jesus Christ, Superstar. Jeez. Jeez II. Jeez III and IV. The Nazarene. The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. Life of Brian. Ben-Hur. Ben-Hur II. Bethlehem! The Story of Calvary.
There was some muttering among the Priests with Moslem or Jewish or Mormon heritage, but it was quiet muttering, and quickly forgotten in the general rejoicing.

For who could complain? The King was coming. There was wine, food, and film, and Gaea was happy. What more could Pandemonium ask?

But then there was more.

About ten minutes before the King was due to arrive, just as the party was getting into full swing, Gaea winched herself to her feet, took four disbelieving steps, then pointed into the air and grinned in cinerama.

“She’s coming!”
Gaea shrieked in a voice that shattered the eyes of ten bolexes and an arri, and sent real creepshow horripilations down the spines of everybody within ten kilometers who had a spine worth creeping on.

“She’s coming, she’s coming, she’s coming!” Gaea was jumping up and down now, which was good for seven or eight on anybody’s Richter scale. The commissary collapsed and a klieg tree toppled. “It’s Cirocco Jones. After twenty years, I’ve lured her to do combat.”

So everyone strained their eyes, and soon a lumpy, ridiculous little transparent plane hissed into view and started to circle about a kilometer over their heads.

“Come down!” Gaea taunted. “Come down and fight, you ball-less wonder! Come down and eat your liver, you stinking traitor, you killer…you of little faith!
Come to me
.”

The plane just circled.

Gaea drew a deep breath and bellowed.

“He’ll learn to love me, Cirocco.”

Still nothing. People began to wonder if maybe Gaea hadn’t made a mistake. Gaea had been telling them about Cirocco Jones for years. Surely she couldn’t be as unimpressive as that.

Gaea began running around Pandemonium, picking up and hurling whatever came to hand: a boulder, an elephant, a popcorn popper, Brigham and five of his Robbers. The plane easily dodged them all.

Then it waggled its wings, dipped one, and dived. It leveled out at a hundred meters or so, and now the crazy thing had a full-throated roar. Hard to believe it could do anything, but still, to a flock of people who had seen at least four war movies a week for years the scene had a certain nervous familiarity. It had some of the flavor of those passes the F-86’s took in
The Bridges at Toko-Ri
, or maybe more like a Jap Zero skittering down toward that big scow the
Arizona
in
Tora! Tora! Tora!
Or a hundred other air combat pictures where the plane moves in fast and hot and starts shooting, only in those pictures you mostly saw the action from the
air
, where everything bloomed up toward you in terrific technicolor, not from the ground, where in a few short seconds things were beyond
belief.

The entire row of temples went up almost simultaneously. There would be a hypersonic streak of fire and the smart missiles would go right through the front door and
boom
, nothing but splinters and a mushroom of flame. The plane was strafing, too, but instead of going
ka-chow ka-chow ka-chow
and making little fountains of dirt in neat rows, these damn things twisted and turned and
chased
you, and went off like hand grenades when they hit.

Then Cirocco was turning, a racing turn, all she needed was a pylon, she must have been pulling twelve gees and was so low that if there’d been a field out there, she could not only have
dusted
the damn thing, she could have
plowed
it with her wingtip. So here she came again, faster than ever, strafing, firing more missiles, but starting farther back so everybody had time to see the
sturm und drang
coming at them. And she pulled up, almost vertical, rising higher and higher, and released three fat bombs, one, two, three, that kept rising as she pulled away, that went up until they were almost
invisible, hung there, and started falling. There was no
way
she could have aimed them. It was supernatural, they said, it just couldn’t be done, but they plopped right through the roofs of sound stages one, two, and three, just like that. One, two, three, and all of them were history.

The humans and humanoids were understandably terrified by all this action, but the photofauns were ecstatic. What footage! Riots developed at the camera mounts of copters, which would rise with five or six panaflexes clinging to their legs, twisting to find the shot. Most of them got glorious footage of missiles from the target’s point of view, shots that had never been done before. It was a shame none of the raw stock survived to reach the projector.

By then Pandemonium was so choked in smoke it was hard to tell where she was going to come from next. They listened to the sound of her engines protesting, heard it grow louder. Then she was on them again. Liquid fire was spilling from the belly of the plane. It twisted in the air…and, miraculously, fell a hundred meters from the carnage, in a semi-circle with Pandemonium at the center. Later, the survivors would agree it was impossible that had been a mistake. Jones had been too devilishly accurate for that. She had just been showing them she had it, and giving them something to think about for the next time. Most of them would spend a
lot
of time from then on, thinking about napalm.

Through it all Gaea stood. Solid as an oak. Great brows beetled as she watched the deadly gnat destroy everything around her. On the fourth pass she began to laugh. Somehow, it was more horrible than the sound of the bombs or the crackle of the flames.

Jones made a fifth pass—and for a moment Gaea stopped laughing as the Archives exploded. Twenty thousand film canisters became smoking debris. Ten thousand rare prints, many of them no longer replaceable. With one bomb Jones had wiped out two centuries of film history.

“Don’t worry,” Gaea shouted. “I have duplicates of most of them.” The survivors, crouched under rubble and hearing Jones coming around for another pass, dimly realized that Gaea was reassuring them. She thought they felt the loss as acutely as she did, when in fact
all
of them would have traded every
inch of film ever shot for the chance to get out of this nightmare. And again, Gaea laughed.

The plane was coming around one more time. Some of them sensed this would be the last run, and a few even managed to be curious enough to lift their heads and watch it.

Jones came in straight and level. She fired missiles in pairs, and each streaked for Gaea—and turned aside at the last moment, missing her by inches. More and more of them came screaming by, to explode a hundred meters behind her. It began to look like a circus knife-throwing act as the projectiles went by her ankles, her arms, her ears, her knees. And still the plane kept coming on, and Gaea kept laughing.

A line of bullet holes appeared along Gaea’s chest. She laughed louder. It sounded like Jones had ten heavy guns on that plane, and all of them opened up as she got closer. Gaea was rocked, bloodied, marked from her legs to her massive head.

And anybody could see she was unhurt.

The plane pulled up, climbed…and kept climbing. At about three kilometers, when it was just a speck, it started circling again.

“I still won’t hurt him, Cirocco!” Gaea shouted. Then she looked at herself, frowned, and turned to see a gaffer hanging on the back of her bullet-pocked chair.

“We’d better bring up the second unit,” she told him. “And assemble my make-up crew. There’s a lot of work to do.”

The gaffer didn’t move, and Gaea frowned, then tilted the chair and saw it was only half a gaffer.

So she strode off into the flames, shouting orders.

***

“Well,” Cirocco finally said, much subdued. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” There had been none of the wild jubilation Conal and Nova had felt during their dogfight with the buzz bombs. Cirocco had more or less asked them all if she could do it, and they had all more or less agreed that she should.
So she had gone about it with a cold intensity and thoroughness that left them all, including Cirocco, a bit shaken. Only during the last run, when she had fired on the monstrosity that called itself Gaea, had she felt the hatred boiling up inside her. The temptation to give it all she had, to pour firepower into the thing and hope against hope that she could blow it apart, had been tremendous. She wondered if the others understood why, in the end, she had settled for the show of force and the minor injuries.

Gaea would not be killed that way. She could sit on an atom bomb, be vaporized, and sprout again from the killing ground. Gaea was not immortal. She was over the hill, senile, growing madder every day. She couldn’t last much longer…only about another hundred millennia.

And it was Cirocco’s job to kill her.

They all looked down at the blazing ruin that had been Pandemonium. Only one structure was left standing. There could be no doubt it was the “palace” the Snitch had spoken of, made of gold and platinum. Adam would be installed there, probably in a solid-gold crib, with goose-egg diamonds for marbles.

“Why didn’t you just take her out?” Conal asked, quietly.

“You still don’t understand her,” Cirocco said. “If I’d destroyed the palace, or killed Gaea, the deathangel would just have flown on, too low for us to catch Adam. He’d have kept flying until he fell apart, and Adam would die.”

“I don’t get it,” Conal confessed. “She said come down and fight. Well, you gave her a fight. What does she expect? Does she want you to land and arm-wrestle with her?”

“Conal, my old friend…I don’t know. That may be
exactly
what she wants. I have the feeling that…”

“What?” Conal prompted.

“She wants me to walk up to her with a sword in my hand.”

“I don’t buy it,” Conal said. “I mean…jesus, this sounds completely crazy. I guess it’s because I can’t find the right words. ‘Fair play’ isn’t it, but she has…
something.
Not all the time, and not in any
sane way, but from what you’ve told me about her I’d think she’d even it out a little more than that. I just don’t think that she wouldn’t leave you
any
chance.”

Cirocco sighed.

“I don’t either. And Gaby says—” she cut herself off quickly when she saw Robin giving her an odd look. “Anyway, Gaea won’t tell me what she wants, except to come and fight. I’m supposed to figure it out.”

It got quiet again and they all looked out over the carnage. Human beings had died down there, and innocent animals. The humans were in the service of evil, if not evil themselves, and Cirocco did not regret killing them. But she took no pleasure in it and did not feel proud of herself.

“I think I’m gonna be sick,” Nova said.

“I’m sorry, kid,” Cirocco said. “The head’s all the way in back.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Nova shouted, close to tears. “I
wanted
you to kill them, every last one! I
loved
it when you were killing them. I just…I just have a weak stomach, that’s all.” She sobbed, and looked imploringly at Cirocco.