Demon (GAIA) (36 page)

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 on 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 reconnaissance
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 asked.

“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.