Demon (GAIA) (41 page)

But it was built to human scale. There were large buildings and small. The doorways were rather high, but Titanides usually had to duck to get through them.

After the start of the War and the beginnings of the stream of refugees, Cirocco had briefly cherished the notion that Gaea had simply caused a safe haven to be built, knowing that war would engulf the Earth sooner or later. But Gaea’s influence in Dione was minimal, and her humanitarian impulses nonexistent.
Somebody
had built the core of Bellinzona, and built it rather well. Gaea’s contribution had been simply to provide the populace.

Cirocco suspected it had been the gremlins. She had no evidence of this. There was no “gremlin style” of architecture. The creatures had put up structures as varied as the Glass Castle and Pharoah Mountain. She often wished she could contact them and ask them a few questions. But not even
Titanides had ever seen a gremlin.

Humans had added to the central city in a haphazard and jerry-built fashion. The new piers usually rested on pontoons, and of course there were the jostling flotillas of boats. But despite neglect and misuse, some of the larger buildings of Bellinzona were quite impressive.

Cirocco had to raise an army to fight Gaea. Bellinzona was the only place able to provide that many people, but a rabble would not do for her purposes. She needed discipline, and to get it, she knew she had to civilize the place, to clean it up—and to utterly dominate it.

She chose a big, ornate, warehouse-sized structure on the Slough of Despond. The building was called the Loop by its tenant, a man by the name of Maleski, who came from Chicago. Cirocco had learned quite a bit about Maleski, who was one of the top four or five gang leaders in Bellinzona. It had the flavor of the unreal, but she decided it was just one of those odd things. She was going to go up against a real live gangster from Chicago.

When Cirocco and the five black-clad Titanides entered the building, almost everyone was clustered at the other end, looking out the windows there, staring up at the sky. That was not a coincidence. Cirocco stood there in the middle of the big room in the light of flickering torches, and waited to be noticed.

It did not take long. Surprise changed to consternation. No one was supposed to be able to just walk in to the Loop. It was heavily guarded on the outside. Maleski didn’t know it yet, but all those guards were dead.

The ones in the room drew their swords and began to disperse around the walls. Some of them grabbed torches. A tight group of nine made a human shield around Maleski. For a moment, no one moved.

“I’ve heard of you,” Maleski said, finally. “Aren’t you Cirocco Jones?”

“Mayor Jones,” Cirocco said.

“Mayor Jones,” Maleski repeated. He moved forward, out of the group. His eyes went to the gun
thrust in the waistband of her black pants, but it didn’t seem to worry him. “That’s news to me. Some of your people had a run-in with some of my boys a while back. Is this about that?”

“No. I’m taking over this building. I’m declaring a ten-hour amnesty. You’re going to need every minute of it, so you’d better go now. All the rest of you, you’re free to go as well. You have five minutes to take what you can carry.”

For a moment they all seemed too bewildered to say anything. Maleski frowned, then laughed.

“The hell you say. This building is private property.”

This time Cirocco laughed.

“Just what planet do you think you’re living on, you idiot? Hornpipe, shoot this guy in the knee.”

The gun had materialized in Hornpipe’s hand when Cirocco said “shoot,” and by the time she said “knee” the bullet was already coming out the other side of Maleski’s leg.

As Maleski fell, and for a few seconds after he hit the floor, there was a flurry of noise and activity. None of the men who survived it were ever able to recount a sequence of events, except to note that a lot of men stepped forward and neat holes appeared perfectly centered in their foreheads and they fell down and did not move. The rest, some twenty men, stood very, very still, except for Maleski, who was howling and thrashing and ordering his men to kill the goddamn sons of bitches. But each Titanide held a gun in each hand, and most of the men were getting excellent views down the wide barrels. Finally Maleski stopped cursing and just lay there, breathing hard.

“Okay,” he finally managed to croak. “Okay, you win. We’ll get out.” He rolled over heavily.

He was really quite good. The knife was concealed in his sleeve. He got it out as he rolled over, and his arm flicked it with the precision of long practice. It flashed in the air…and Cirocco reached out and caught it. She just grabbed it, holding it with the point about six inches from her throat, where it was supposed to have been buried. Maleski stared as she flipped it up and got a new grip, and then it flashed again and he screamed as it buried itself up to the hilt in the torn flesh that had been his knee. A man standing to Maleski’s left crumpled to the floor in a dead faint.

“Rocky,” Cirocco said, “tie a tourniquet around his thigh. Then throw him out. You men, drop your weapons where you stand and walk slowly away from them.
All
your weapons. Then strip. Carry one pair of trousers to the door and hand them to Valiha—the yellow Titanide. If she finds a weapon in them she will break your neck. Otherwise, you can put them on and leave. You have four minutes left.”

It didn’t even take one minute. They were all feverishly anxious to leave, and no one tried to cheat.

“Tell your friends what happened here,” she called to them, as her own people started arriving.

There were humans and Titanides in her crew. The Titanides were all calm, well-versed in their jobs. Most of the humans were nervous, having been drafted only hours before. There were Free Females among them, and Vigilantes, and others from other communities.

A desk was set up, and Cirocco took her place behind it as the lights were being arranged. She was suffering some reaction, both from the fight and from what she had done to Maleski—and from the close call. She felt she could do that knife trick six times out of ten, but that wasn’t nearly enough. She couldn’t let it get that close again.

But most of her nervousness was stage fright. Apparently, it wasn’t something one could outgrow. She had suffered from it since childhood.

Two men from the Vigilantes who had worked in mass communications before the War were setting up cables and a tripod and a small camera. The lights came blazing on, and Cirocco blinked. A microphone was set before her.

“All this stuff must be a century old,” one of the technicians grumbled.

“Just make it work for an hour,” Cirocco told him. He didn’t seem to be listening, but was studying her face from several angles. He reached out tentatively toward her forehead, and she backed away, alarmed.

“You really should have something there,” he said. “There’s a bad glare.”

“Have
what
there?”

“Make-up.”

“Is that really necessary?”

“Ms. Jones, you said you wanted a media consultant. I’m just telling you how I’d do this if I were running the show.”

Cirocco sighed, and nodded. One of the Titanides had some cream that the man seemed satisfied with. He smeared her face with the greasy stuff.

“Picture’s pretty good,” the other man announced. “I don’t know how long this tube will last, though.”

“Then we’d best get to it,” said the director. He picked up the mike and spoke into it. “Citizens of Bellinzona,” he said, and was drowned out by a high feedback whine. The other man adjusted some knobs, and the man spoke again. This time it was clear. Cirocco could hear the words echoing off the hills outside.

“Citizens of Bellinzona,” the director said again. “We have an important announcement from Cirocco Jones, the new Mayor of Bellinzona.”

A Free Female was at the window, looking up.

“The picture’s there!” she shouted.

Cirocco cleared her throat nervously, fought an impulse to smile brightly that
had
to have come from her NASA press conference days, a million years ago, and spoke.

“Citizens of Bellinzona. My name is Cirocco Jones. Many of you have heard of me; I was one of the first humans in Gaea, and for a time I was designated by Gaea to be her Wizard. Twenty years ago, I was fired from that job.

“It is important that you understand that, while Gaea fired me, the Titanides never accepted it. Every one of them will follow my orders. I have never taken full advantage of this fact. I am doing so now, and the results will change all your lives.

“As of this moment, you are all, as I said, ‘Citizens of Bellinzona.’ You’ll be wondering what that entails. Essentially, it means you’ll all take my orders. I have plans for democracy later, but as of now,
you’d better do what I tell you.

“There are now some thousands of Titanides in your city. Each of them has been briefed on the new rules. Think of them as police. To underestimate their strength or their quickness would be a bad mistake.

“Since you are going to be living by rules, I’ll give you some now. More will follow, after we have this thing going.

“Murder is not going to be tolerated.

“Slavery is prohibited. All human beings now in a state of slavery are freed. All humans who believe they own other humans had better free them at once. This includes any practice which may, through custom, deprive any other human of liberty. If you’re in doubt—if, for instance, you are muslim and believe you own your wife—you had better ask a Titanide. There is a ten-hour amnesty for this purpose.

“Human meat will no longer be sold. Any human consorting with an Iron Master will be shot on sight.

“There is no private property. You may continue to sleep where you have been sleeping, but do not think you own anything but the clothes you wear.

“There shall be no edged weapons allowed in human hands for at least four decarevs. Surrender those weapons to any Titanide during the amnesty. As quickly as possible, I shall be returning the police function to humans. In the meantime, possession of a sword or a knife is a capital offense. I recognize the hardship this will pose to you who use knives for other purposes, but, I emphasize, you will be shot dead if you keep your knives.

“I…have little good to offer you in the short term. I believe that in the long term, most of you will appreciate what I am doing today. Only the exploiters, the slavers, the killers, will never regain their present positions. The rest of you will reap security and the benefits of an organized human society.

“I demand to see the following persons at the building known as the Loop within ten hours. Any
who do not come will be shot in the eleventh hour.”

Cirocco read a list of twenty-five names, compiled with Conal’s help, of the most influential mafia, tong, and gang leaders.

When she had finished, she read the statement in French, and once more in her halting Russian. Then she relinquished her chair to a woman from the Free Females who read it in Chinese. There were a dozen other translators waiting, human and Titanide. Cirocco hoped to reach every new citizen of Bellinzona.

She felt drained when she was finally able to sit by herself. She had worked on the speech endlessly, it seemed, and was never able to make it sound good. It seemed to her there ought to be ringing declarations in there someplace. Life, liberty, and the Purfoot of Happinefs, maybe. But after a lot of thought, she realized there wasn’t anything she believed in as a capital R “Right.” Could any mortal claim a Right to Life?

So she had fallen back on pragmatism. It had served her fairly well through a long and pragmatic life. “This is the way it is, you poor silly suckers. Get in my way and you will be obliterated.”

Even starting from the best of motives, that didn’t taste so good in her mouth—and she was far from sure of her motives.

***

Life in Bellinzona was not what you could call dull. Violent death was all around and could happen at a moment’s notice. For the well-connected, it was at best comfortable, and at worst nervous. One never knew when a particular Boss would be defeated and all one’s careful preparations for the soft life come to nothing. Still, it was better than being down in the faceless masses. For them, Bellinzona was a special kind of hell. Not only were they constantly in peril of enslavement…most of them had nothing to do.

There were always the needs of survival, of course. That kept people busy. But it was not like
having a job. It was not like farming one’s own fields—or even the fields of a landlord. In most neighborhoods people owed allegiance to a Boss, a Shogun, a Landlord, a Capo…some local Mr. Big. For a woman it was even worse, unless she happened to have been taken in by the Free Females. Female slavery was rampant. It was more than the labor-slavery experienced by the men. It was old-fashioned sexual slavery. Women were bought and sold ten times as frequently as men.

And at the end of one’s usefulness, there was the butcher’s block.

Actually, there was relatively little killing for food. It happened, but with the manna and the bosses that sort of thing was fairly well under control. Still, with the meat shortage many of the corpses destined for the communal pyre were diverted to the hook, the knife, and the skillet.

Boredom was a big problem. It bred crime—senseless, random crime—as if Bellinzona needed any more reasons for violence.

It would be fair to say Bellinzona was ripe for a change. Any change.

So when the blimp drifted over the city, things ground to a halt.

Bellinzonans had seen blimps, from afar. They knew they were large. Many had no idea they were intelligent. Most knew the blimps never came near the city because of all the fires.

Whistlestop apparently didn’t care. He mooched up to the city as if he did it every day, and spread his gargantuan shadow from the Slough of Despond clear out to the Terminal Wharves. He was almost as big as Peppermint Bay itself. Then he just hung there, by far the largest object anyone in town had ever seen. His titanic hind fins moved languidly, just enough to keep him positioned over the center of town.