Demon (GAIA) (34 page)

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 outrun 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 on 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 free-fall 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.”