Demon (GAIA) (39 page)

Chris was not impressed. In fact, he hardly noticed the television except as a constant, noisy nuisance.

He eventually noticed that some sort of neilson was in operation. The things that Adam liked most—measured in gpm, or giggles per minute—began to show up more often. Most of it was hardly
objectionable. There were a lot of Walt Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons, a lot of Japanese computer animation from the 90’s and the turn of the century, some old television shows. Here and there a western crept in, and there were kung fu films which Adam seemed to like because they were so noisy.

Chris actually laughed when the first obscure 20th Century Fox film showed up on the screens. It was called
A Ticket to Tomahawk
, and Gaea had a small part in it. Chris had watched it while Adam napped—there being little to do in his ornate prison when not actually occupied with Adam. It was a silly little western. Then he spotted Gaea in a chorus line.

It wasn’t Gaea, of course, but an actress who looked very much like her. Chris looked in the end credits to find the long-dead woman’s name, but couldn’t pick it out.

Not long after that he spotted Gaea again in a film called
All About Eve
. She had a larger part in that one, and he was able to determine that the actress was named Marilyn Monroe. He wondered if she had been famous.

He soon decided she had been, as her films started appearing regularly on Tara Television. Adam took very little notice.
All About Eve
had rated zero on the gigglometer; Adam had hardly glanced at it.
The Asphalt Jungle
didn’t fare much better. Neither did
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
.

Then Chris started to see documentaries about the life and death of Marilyn Monroe. There were an astonishing number of them. Most of them talked about qualities Chris simply could not see. While she might have been one hell of a box-office draw during the twentieth century, when the documentaries were made, few of the films meant much to Chris.

But one thing eventually did. During one of the dull documentaries, Adam looked up from his toys, smiled, pointed at the television screen, and said, “Gay.” He looked over to Chris, pointed again, and said, “Gya.”

Chris began to be disturbed.

***

Gaea never came to Tara.

That is, she never entered it, though the place had been constructed with her monstrous frame in mind. All the doors were wide and high enough for her, and the stairs and second floor were reinforced enough to bear her weight.

But she did pay visits. When she came, she remained far away and Adam was brought to a second-floor balcony. Chris understood the logic of it. Someone so huge might alarm the child. Gaea would get Adam used to her gradually, coming a little closer every day.

When she visited she always had something interesting. One time it was fireworks, which Gaea held in her hand and then hurled up into the air. They were not too loud, but very pretty. Another time it was a herd of trained elephants. She made them jump through hoops and walk tightropes. She slung one uncomfortable-looking beast over her shoulders, then had one balance in the palm of each hand, and lifted them high in the air. Chris was impressed, and Adam giggled the whole time. Gaea kept up a running patter of baby talk, calling Adam by name, telling him she loved him, and mentioning her name as often as possible. And she always brought a marvelous gift.

“Gay, gay, gay,” Adam would shout.

“Gay-
ah
,” Gaea would call back.

Adam was about fifteen months old now. His vocabulary was expanding. It wasn’t long before he could say Gaea.

Marilyn Monroe had made about thirty films. Chris had seen each of them at least once by the time of the dedication of the Universal Gate. He brooded about it as he walked down the stairs from the third floor. More and more often now, Adam would pause in his play to point to the television, laugh, and say the name of his gargantuan granny.

He was about to start down to the ground floor when he was startled by a loud bang, followed quickly by another. It took him a moment to identify the sounds as sonic booms.

He turned and hurried to the second-floor balcony.

Up in the sky were two medium-sized Dragonflys. They were turning, slowing, coming back after their startling pass over New Pandemonium. Chris was vaguely aware of shouting and scurrying on the ground. The planes were far too high for him to tell who was in them, or even how many people.

Cirocco, he thought. My god, Cirocco, you couldn’t be that stupid. You can’t think it will do any good to bomb this place….

He watched, open-mouthed, as the two planes, moving quite slowly now, went through an intricate series of turns and twists. They seemed to be lining up for something.

His heart almost stopped when both planes began to smoke. What could have happened to them?

One twisted quickly back and forth, while the other made a long, slow curve. Then they stopped smoking. Once more they were barely visible gnats turning around and moving into position again.

And he realized they had written the letters SU.

They curved up and over, and began to smoke again. This time they made two parallel lines, turned sharply, and added crescents to the tops of the lines. PP. SUPP. What the hell?

With precise, tight turns, two more lines were added.

SURR.

“Chris,” someone whispered. He almost jumped out of his skin. Then he turned, and very nearly yelled aloud when he found Cirocco standing close enough to touch.

“Cirocco,” he whispered, and found himself in her arms, which was a silly way to put it, he thought, since he towered over her. But the strength was all flowing in one direction; he was having a hard time fighting back his tears.

She pulled him back into the shadows within the building.

“Never mind that,” she said, quietly, jerking her chin toward the sky. “An amusing diversion…with a punch line. Gaea’s going to love it, right up to the end.”

“What are you—”

“I don’t have much time,” Cirocco said. “Getting in here isn’t easy. Can you listen for a while?”

Chris bit back the thousand questions he wanted to ask, and nodded.

“I wanted to…” Cirocco stopped, and looked away for a moment. Chris had time to notice two things, she was close to tears herself, and she was wearing an outlandish costume. He didn’t have time to take it all in.

“How is Adam?” she asked.

“He’s well.”

“Tell me what’s happened.”

He did, as quickly and concisely as he could. She nodded from time to time, frowned twice, and once looked as if she might be sick. But at the end she nodded.

“It’s about the way Gaby told me to expect,” she said. “And don’t give me any trouble about Gaby.”

“I wasn’t going to. Spooks don’t bother me anymore.”

“Good. You understand what you have to do, then?”

“Pretty much. I…I don’t know if I’ll do any good. She is a lot more subtle than I figured her for.”

“You can do it,” she said, with absolute assurance. “We will do our best to get you out of here. Like I told you last time, his soul isn’t in danger yet, and won’t be for quite a long time. But, Chris…it’s going to
be
a long time Do you realize that?”

“I think so. Uh…have you any idea how long?”

“It can’t be less than a year. It might be two.”

He did his best to conceal his dismay, but knew she saw it. She said nothing. He took a deep breath, and tried for a smile.

“Whatever you think is best.”

“Chris, it’s not just best. It’s the
only
way. I can’t tell you much about it. If Gaea thought you knew, she could get it from you.”

“I understand that. But…” He wiped at his forehead, and then looked directly at her. “Cirocco,
why don’t you just take him right now? Take him, and run like hell?”

“Chris, my old and dear friend, if I could do that, I
would
do it. And leave you to the tender mercies of Gaea…and probably die of shame as soon as I had him in a safe place. But I
would
. You know I’ll save you if I can—”

“And if you can’t, I accept that.”

She hugged him again, and kissed his chin, which was as high as she could reach. Chris felt numb, but it felt good to be holding her.

“Gaea is…Chris, I don’t know how to explain this. But her
will
is focused on Adam. I let him see me the last time I was here. She
knows
I was here, and getting in this time was much harder. I can’t visit you again. And if I took Adam and ran, she would get both of us. I
know
that. Can you accept that?”

“I will if I have to.”

“That’s all I ask. Your job is to stay on good terms with Gaea, however distasteful that might be. And be careful of her. You might find yourself liking her. No, no, don’t tell me that’s impossible. I liked her at one time. All you can do is be yourself, love Adam, and…hell, Chris. Trust me.”

“I do, Cirocco.”

Her eyes were haunted. She kissed him again…and then left him. It was odd, how she left. She moved back into the shadows, into a place where she couldn’t have moved away without him seeing her…and she was gone.

“Witch of the South, Witch of the South, this is Witch of the North The bottom of that last E was pretty ragged, fellow.”

Conal spoke into his mike as he sliced through a four-gee turn.

“Tend your own knitting, child,” he said. “You got all the easy letters.” He pulled back on the stick, looked rapidly to left and right at the vast, flat perspectives of the letters already drawn, and hit the smoke button again. He watched carefully until he was even with the base line, then killed the smoke and turned hard right.

They had practiced it for a week, starting with attempts that Cirocco, from the ground, had sworn looked like Chinese, gradually moving on to writing that was almost legible. By now Conal thought he could fly it in his sleep.

It was crazy, of course, but no more crazy than other things they had been doing. They were living on a new and unfamiliar plane, it seemed. An act, in and of itself, was no longer always enough. The way it was done was also important. Certain things had to be done with deliberation, others with something called panache. The skywriting could have been done letter-perfect, with no drill, simply by programming the maneuvers into the planes’ autopilots. But Cirocco had vetoed that.

Conal didn’t complain. He
liked
writing challenges in Gaea’s clean sky.

“Witch of the North,” he called. “You call that an R?”

“I’ll stack it up against any R in the sky,” Nova shot back.

“Knock it off, children,” Robin called, from her vantage point high above. “Move down to the second line.”

***

Cirocco stepped off the golden road just short of the point where it actually became pure gold, and slipped between two towering buildings. She found an alcove out of sight and quickly stripped off her costume.

She had been dressed as an Indian princess when she came through the Columbia gate, and had managed to pass herself off as an extra showing up for work in the horse opera currently shooting on that lot. Getting to Tara had been less a matter of costuming than sheer brass. There was a thing she could do. She didn’t know how she did it, and thinking about it too hard could destroy what facility she had, but she thought of it as making herself small. People would glance at her and glance away. She wasn’t worth looking at. It had worked long enough to get to Chris. She hadn’t needed it much on her way out, as everyone’s attention was on the skywriting.

But the exit had to be different, and called for a different brass.

She donned black pants, boots, shirt, and hat, clothing very much like what she had worn during her first meeting with Conal. She tied the short black cape around her neck, tucked a small automatic into the top of her boot and a large revolver into her waistband.

“Maybe I oughta wear a neon sign, too,” she muttered to herself. “It couldn’t be more incriminating than this get-up.”

She stood for a moment, getting her breathing under control. On impulse—the sort of impulse she had learned to trust—she opened the top three buttons of her shirt and thrust her chest out. That would give them something to concentrate on other than her too-recognizable face. Then she stepped out onto the pavement and strode confidently up to the guard at the MGM Gate.

She had to nudge him with her elbow. He was staring up at the air show.

“What does S-U-R-R-E…” he began.

“Why do they have an illiterate on this gate?” Cirocco snarled. The man stood straight and jerked
his clipboard protectively over his chest. She held out an empty, black-gloved hand.

“I’m the first vice-president for procurement,” she said. “This is my identification. Gaea has ordered me to de-fusticate the thing-amabob
at once
.” She thrust the nonexistent identity card into a breast pocket, and the man’s eyes followed the hand as far as the pocket, and then stuck. He gaped at her cleavage, and nodded.

“What did you say?”

“Uh…go ahead,
sir
!”

“What about security? What about the record you’re supposed to be keeping of who enters and exits through this gate? All the hounds of hell could come baying through here and you’d give them dog biscuits.
Aren’t you going to ask me my name?
”

“Uh…w-w-w-what is your n-n-name…sir?”

“Guinness.” She peered over the man’s shoulder as he wrote on the clipboard. “Be sure to get that right, now. G-U-I-N-N-E-S-S. Alec Guinness. Gaea will want to know.”

Cirocco turned on her heel and marched out the gate and over the drawbridge, glancing neither right nor left.

It was fifteen minutes before the man returned to full awareness. By then Cirocco was a hundred miles away.

***

Gaea had it figured out from the first SU.

She stood there at the Universal Gate, her huge feet planted firmly on more gold than Fort Knox ever had, her hands on her hips, and she smiled.

SURR.

SURREN.

She started to laugh. By that time some of the others, who had also seen a lot of films—more than
they cared to remember, in many cases—were also getting it. It had been a nervous couple of minutes for most of them. Eyes moved constantly from Gaea’s face to the writing in the sky. Then, when Gaea laughed, it was a signal for a massive eruption of laughter. The human population roared anew as each letter appeared, and each letter redoubled Gaea’s own laughter.