Demon (GAIA) (31 page)

“And don’t call me kid,” she whispered, and fled to the back of the plane.

There was a short, uncomfortable silence, which Chris broke.

“If you want my opinion,” he said, “I sort of wish you hadn’t done it.” He got up and followed Nova.

“Well,
I’m
glad you did it,” Robin said, hotly. “I only wish you’d spent more time shooting at Gaea. Great Mother, what a disgusting thing.”

Cirocco barely heard her. Something was nagging at her, something that didn’t feel right. Chris wasn’t usually critical of her actions. He had a perfect right to be, of course, but he just usually wasn’t.

Then, when she thought about it, he hadn’t actually been critical….

“Chris,” she began, turning in her seat. “What did you—”

“It’s probably going to make things rough,” he said. He waved a hand at them and shrugged
apologetically. “Somebody’s got to look after him,” he said, and pulled the door open.

“No!”
Cirocco shouted, and lunged at him. It was too late. He was out, and the door slammed shut. She could only watch in horrified fascination as his chute opened and he glided toward Pandemonium.

Chris and Adam touched the ground within a minute of each other.

I was always an independent,

even when I had partners.

—Sam Goldwyn

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 lie down.

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 ingredient’s 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.”

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 shoulderblades, 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.