Demon (GAIA) (40 page)

By the time the message was complete the initial S was almost illegible. But it didn’t spoil the fun.

SURRENDER GAEA.

“We must go see the Wizard!” Gaea howled. “He’ll know what to do!”

The laughter got louder.

It’s time for a festival, Gaea thought. Jones must be desperate to do a silly thing like that. Didn’t she know it was the Wicked Witch of the
West
who did the skywriting? Didn’t
wicked
mean anything to her? There were rules in this combat, and symbols were all-important.

Her mountainous laughter had dwindled to random chuckles. The letters were diffusing now, falling as a fine mist. The two planes were joined by a third which Gaea had been aware of all along. Most likely Cirocco herself had been up there, safely out of range, watching while her minions did the dirty and dangerous work. This contest wasn’t even going to be worth it, she thought.

Oddly, that thought depressed her.

She shrugged it off. The three planes were flying lower now, in echelon, circumscribing the huge circle of New Pandemonium. They were still emitting smoke.

A fantasy film festival, she thought. What titles haven’t been shown lately? Well, let’s see, there was that…

She stopped, and looked up suspiciously.

“No!” she shouted, and began to run. “No, you bitch! I didn’t
budget
for that!”

She stepped on a dead zombie, slipped, and very nearly fell. She saw another zombie keel over.

Within two minutes, every zombie in Pandemonium was dead.

***

“All you need is love,” Robin said, then whistled it, then sang it.

“What’s that?” she heard Conal say over the radio.

“Just a song we witches sing.” She whistled it again as she banked her plane one last time over the strange scene below.

“
Mo
ther,” Nova said, exasperated.

“My dear, it’s time you stopped being embarrassed about the origin of our zombie-killer. Don’t you think?”

“Yes, Mother.” She heard Nova’s radio click off.

“Turn left on my signal,” Conal said. “That’s the MGM Gate below. The one with the big stone lion on it.”

“Roger,” Robin said, still humming. She looked down once more at New Pandemonium.

Cirocco had described the place, so they had known the layout before they arrived. But seeing it was something else entirely. Robin had jittered during the whole crazy performance, circling high, her more powerful radar and heavy armaments ready for buzz bombs, a dozen contingency plans tumbling over each other in her mind—plans drilled into all of them mercilessly by General Jones.

She grinned, then laughed. It appealed to the practical jokester in her.

“What do you think Gaea will say?” she asked the others. “I wonder if she’s figured out that we just dumped three tons of love potion on her?”

“Is that Robin of the Coven?” said a voice.

There was a moment of silence but for the high whine of the jet.

“Robin, what are you doing cluttering up my airwaves?”

“Jesus,” Conal breathed. “Is that—”

“South Witch, remember your radio rules. I think we should—”

“I know it’s Conal, my love,” Gaea said. “And I know it’s your dear daughter, Nova, in the other plane. What I don’t understand is all this talk about a love potion.”

Robin flew on in silence. The palms of her hands were moist.

“Ah, well,” Gaea sighed. “You’re going to be tiresome, I see. But there’s no need to execute Plan X-98, or whatever you were about to say. I’m not sending anyone after you. No buzz bombs will hinder your flight back to Dione.” There was a pause again. “I’m curious, though. Why didn’t Cirocco Jones come along on this little escapade? Perhaps she didn’t have the spine for it. She
does
have a knack for letting others fight her battles. Have you noticed that? How did you like her dramatic flying entrance back at the Junction, as my friends were rescuing your darling son from that awful place you’d taken him? Plenty of time for you all to see her heroic effort…which, sad to say, fell just short of actually having to
grapple
with the poor zombie. I wonder where she was? Did you ask her where she came from?”

Robin looked right and left, made hand signals to Nova and Conal to say nothing, and saw them both nod.

“Rather a dull conversation so far, I’d say,” Gaea went on. “I just wanted to ask you how things have been. It’s been a long time since last we met. I’d sort of hoped you would drop by when I saw you arrive.”

“Just couldn’t seem to find the time, I guess,” Robin said.

“Ah, that’s
much
better. You really should make the time. Chris has been asking about you.”

Robin had to bite her lower lip. There was nothing worth saying. She couldn’t treat it as a game for very long.

“Tell me,” Gaea said, after a thoughtful pause. “Have you heard of the Geneva Conventions concerning warfare?”

“Vaguely,” Robin said.

“Did you know it is considered immoral to use poisonous gases? I ask, because I’m sure Cirocco
has filled your head with a lot of nonsense about good guys and bad guys. As if there were such a thing. But even if it were true, ask yourself this. Do good guys break the international rules of war?”

Robin frowned for a moment, then shook her head, and wondered if it might actually be dangerous to listen to Gaea. Could she cast some enchantment over the radio, cause the three of them to do crazy things?

But Cirocco had not mentioned it.

“You’re a silly old biddy, Gaea,” she said.

“Sticks and stones—”

“—wouldn’t even put a dent in that ugly hide of yours. But words wound you to the core. Cirocco told me that. As to gas warfare, have you checked your human population? Have you looked in on the elephants and camels and horses?”

“They seem to be all right,” Gaea admitted, dubiously.

“So there you are. Don’t take it personally, Gaea, you old bitch. We found a way to exterminate a pest we used to call death-snakes. We’re doing it as a public service. Pandemonium just happened to be on the spraying program. Hope it didn’t inconvenience you too much.”

“Not too…
used
to call them? What do you call them now?”

Hah!
Walked right into that one, you abomination.

“We call them Gaea’s tapeworms. I hope you have a large toilet.”

Robin heard Nova laughing. That seemed to finally set Gaea off. It started as an incoherent scream. Robin had to turn the volume down. It went on for an amazing time, then turned into a stream of vile language, horrible threats, and nearly incoherent ranting. During a brief pause, Nova spoke.

“That’s really something,” she said. “Maybe, when this is over, we can put her in a carnival sideshow.”

“No,” Conal said. “Nobody’d pay. Everybody’s seen shit.”

There was a short silence.

“Young man,” Gaea said icily, “one day I will make you wish you had never been born. Nova, that was unkind, to say the least. But I suppose I can understand it. It must be hard for you. Tell me, how do you feel about that horrible fellow screwing your mother?”

There was an entirely different quality to the silence this time. Robin felt her stomach lurch.

“Mother, what—”

“Nova, maintain radio silence. And remember what I told you about propaganda. Gaea, this conversation is over.”

But it didn’t feel like having the last word. Propaganda was a fine term, but that didn’t mean she was going to be able to lie any longer to Nova.

***

Gaea put down her radio and watched the planes vanish in the west, feeling thoroughly sour.

Though the logical and emotional parts of her mind no longer functioned as they used to—a fact she recognized and no longer worried about—the purely computational power was undiminished. She knew how many zombies had been lost. Some forty percent of the Pandemonium work force were undead—now doubly dead. That was bad enough, but a zombie was worth five human workers, maybe six. They were stronger, and they needed no sleep or even rest breaks. They could be fed garbage a hog would choke to look at. While they couldn’t run something as complex as a tape recorder, they made excellent plumbers, electricians, painters, grips, carpenters…all the skilled trades so essential to the making of movies. With reasonable care they could be made to last six or seven kilorevs. They were economical even in death; when a zombie felt the final death approaching, its last act was to dig a grave and lie down in it.

Problems, problems….

The unions of carpenters, used for her mobile festival, had proven not versatile enough for the demands of New Pandemonium. Some of the buildings thrown up by them were already falling down.
She could try to develop a master variety of carpenter…but knew uneasily that her skills as a genetic manipulator were deteriorating. She could hope that, instead of more camels or dragons, her next birthing would be something more useful, and self-perpetuating, but she knew she couldn’t count on it.

Such were the perils of being mortal. For mortal she was. Not just in the sense that, in a hundred thousand years, the giant wheel known as Gaea would wither and die, but in the giant Monroe-clone in which she had elected to put so much of her vital force.

She sighed, then brightened a bit. Good cinema sprang from adversity, not an uninterrupted series of successes. She would speak with the story department, incorporate this new setback in the vast epic of her life, twenty years in the making. The final reels were by no means in sight.

In the meantime, there must be a solution.

Once more she thought of Titanides. Hyperion was lousy with Titanides.

“Titanides!” Gaea shouted, startling all those within half a kilometer.

Titanides had to be her most recalcitrant invention. They had seemed a good idea at the time. They were still nice to look at. She had made them in the early 1900’s as a sort of first-draft human. It turned out she had built better than she knew. They kept exceeding specifications.

When labor had started to be a problem during the early days of site preparation for the Studio, she had naturally thought of using Titanides. She sent Iron Masters out hiring—and they came back empty-handed. It was disconcerting. Didn’t they know she was
God
?

They were hard to capture alive, but she had caught a few.

Who wouldn’t do a lick of work. Torture didn’t help. As many as were able committed suicide. As far as Gaea knew, there had
never
been a Titanide suicide before the construction of the Studio. They loved life too much.

She had asked one captive about it.

“We’d rather die than be enslaved,” he had said.

A fine sentiment, Gaea supposed, but not one she had built into them. Damn it, humans took to
slavery like ducks to water. Why couldn’t Titanides?

All right, all right, Gaea was nothing if not flexible. If they wouldn’t work alive, she’d make them work dead. A zombie Titanide ought to handle the work of a hundred humans.

But it didn’t work out that way. The Titanide corpses that went zombie were weaker than the originals, badly coordinated, and tended to sag in the middle like a swaybacked horse. She did an engineering study and found it was the skeletal structure that was at fault. Taxonomically speaking, Titanides were not vertebrates. They had a cartilaginous spine that was much more flexible and much stronger than the rather precarious stacks that formed the backbones of humans and angels. The problem was that, in death, the cartilage rotted, and the deathsnakes ate it. So the Titanides cheated her even from beyond the grave.

Gaea would have thought it was a stinking world, had she not remembered that she had created it.

What better time for the messenger to arrive from the MGM Gate, hand her the clipboard, and kneel, quivering, knowing Gaea’s usual reaction to bad news.

For once, the reaction was moderate. Gaea looked at the name on the clipboard, sighed, and scaled it negligently over the roofs of three soundstages.

She had been out-movied. Twice in one day, Cirocco Jones had used her favorite mythologies against her.

“I’ve been Ozzed, and Star-Warred,” she muttered.

She needed a break. How about a new festival? she wondered. Movies about movies. That sounded nice. She looked around for her archivist, and saw him cowering behind the corner of a building. She beckoned.

“I’m going to Projection Room One,” she told him, “Get me Truffaut’s
Day For Night
to start off with.”

He scribbled on a note pad.

“Auteurs,”
she muttered. “Pick out a couple films by Hitchcock. Any of them will do.
The Stunt Man
.
And…what’s that one about the collapse of the studio system?”

“Lights, Camera. Auction!”
the archivist said.

“That’s it. Be ready in ten minutes.”

Gaea trudged down the golden road, more depressed than she had been in centuries. Jones had done a good job this day.

Part of her mind remained on the labor problem. She would just have to divert more refugees from Bellinzona. The terrible thing was, she was going to have to practically
coddle
her human labor from now on, because when they died, they were just gonna stay dead. Hell of a note.

And she wondered if she could pick up the slack from Bellinzona. The mercy flights to Earth were still going on, but the ships were coming back with a lot of empty seats.

She almost wished she hadn’t started the War.

The origins of the City of Bellinzona were, as so many other things in the wide wheel, mysterious.

The first human explorers to enter Dione had reported a large, empty city made of wood. It stood on sturdy pilings sunk deep in the rock below the waterline, and had freshly carved streets that wound up into the rocky hills on each side of Peppermint Bay. To the south were relatively flat lands, rising to a pass that led to an encircling forest. Dangerous creatures lived in that forest, but they were not as bad as the quicksands, fevers, and poisonous and carnivorous plants. It did not seem like a place where anyone would want to live.

Cirocco Jones had been there long before the “explorers.” She simply never bothered to tell anyone about the ghost city which had appeared sometime during the fiftieth year of her Wizardship. She had been as puzzled by it as anyone else. It didn’t seem to have any use.