Demon (GAIA) (44 page)

So when the manna had stopped falling, Bellinzona was ready.

Without quite knowing how it had happened, Valiha and Virginal had become fisherfolk. Neither had ever netted a fish before.

Those humans who knew something about ships had, with the authority of the Mayor’s decrees, taken command of all the Bellinzonan boats capable of doing more than rocking at anchor. For the last decarev the fleet had been putting out to sea, with Valiha and Virginal at the prow.

Their main function was to ward off the submarines.

There might have been a fishing industry in Bellinzona long before this, but for the fact that human-piloted boats that ventured more than ten kilometers from the environs of the city were promptly eaten. Submarines had huge appetites, and were not picky.

The Captain had made some sort of treaty with them. It worked so well that not only were the ships not eaten, but the fishing fleet could now rendezvous with the submarine flotillas and find the seas strewn with the disgorged and still living schools recently scooped up by the subs’ vast mouths.

There was a submarine song. Valiha and Virginal sang it, though it was not one they were born to know. And the leviathans eased up from the depths to give much of their catch to the hungry city.

It was a miracle.

That’s what they were doing now. Valiha stood at the prow of one of the largest boats in the Bellinzona fleet and sang the submarine song, while not far away the vast bulk of a submarine wallowed near the surface. Great gouts of water spurted up in the direction of the smaller ships and the nets rigged between them, stunned and bewildered fish vainly thrashing in the torrent, escaping from the jaws of the submarine only to be swallowed by the nets.

It was rather beautiful to watch. Lately, the fisherfolk had begun singing their own version of the submarine song as they hauled on their nets. Valiha listened critically. She knew it lacked the nuances of Titanide song, but like so much human music, it had a simple vitality that was attractive. Perhaps, one day, the submarines would respond to human song alone. That would be good, for Valiha had no wish to command the fleet for the rest of her life.

It had been turbulent seas, at first. With a hard core of dedicated sea-folk and a larger number of human police and a handful of Titanides, it had just been possible to put to sea with a cargo of recalcitrant prisoners. The first outings had produced little but blisters and aching backs. But the human police were zealous—maybe a little too much so, Valiha thought—and soon everyone was at least working as hard as possible. Then a spirit began to grow. It took root slowly at first. But now, when Valiha overheard conversations in the bustling fish markets, there was a clear sense that these people thought of themselves as a group—and what’s more, as slightly better than the idlers ashore. It now took fewer police to keep them in line. When the fleet set sail, people hoisted the lines with a will, and when the fish were sighted there was cheering. There were songs for departure and songs for return, as well as the Titanide-inspired submarine chantey.

It was a good thing, Valiha knew. The last shower of manna had been many days late, and when it was opened, was too rancid to eat.

Bellinzona was now on its own.

“It’s Gaea,” Adam said.

“It sure is,” Chris confirmed, as brightly as he could. Adam put down his toys and sat in front of the television screen.

Chris had been worried enough when Gaea only showed up in old Marilyn Monroe movies. He and Adam had seen them all a dozen times. Adam was quite bored with them.

But about a kilorev after the air show which had so badly upset Gaea, something new had happened. Gaea had showed up in an animated cartoon.

He should have expected it. It was an easy enough thing to do, and it wouldn’t stop there. But Chris had been away from television for over twenty years, and had forgotten about that capability.

The first had been a Betty Boop cartoon, and had been simple image-substitution. Wherever Betty Boop had appeared in the original, Gaea had replaced her with a stylized but easily-recognizable cartoon of Marilyn Monroe. The sound track was un-altered.

If Earth computers could do it, it stood to reason that Gaea could.

Later, she began to appear in the movies Chris knew to be Adam’s favorites. This was much more sophisticated stuff, with full-body replacement, facial enhancement, and the Monroe/Gaea voice. It was impossible to detect the fakery. It was seamless movie magic, special effects to the
n
th degree.

And it was distinctly odd to see Marilyn Monroe starring in
Fists of Fury
. She was a formidable figure, replacing Bruce Lee in every whirl, glower, and leap. All the Chinese actors spoke dubbed English, but Gaea/Lee was lip-synched. Of course, Lee had spent most of his time in those movies with his shirt off, so Gaea did, too. Then there were the love scenes….

After that there was no telling where Gaea might pop up. Chris saw her as Snow White, Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, and Indiana Jones. She appeared in old RKO serials, which Gaea broadcast at the rate of one episode per day. Pandemonium television had grown increasingly violent. Even the comedy tended sharply toward the slapstick.

There was little Chris could do about it. Having foreseen some of it didn’t make it any easier. Gaea continued to make her regular visits. She came a bit closer each time, but was as yet still distant. There was no chance she would scare the boy.

Chris could only love the child.

Which, he reflected, was nothing to sneer at. He knew Adam returned his love. But he knew a child’s love can be quite fickle. One day it would come to a showdown. Nothing could be clearer than that. But the outcome was far from clear.

“Hi, Gaea,” Adam said, waving at the screen.

“Hello, Adam, my lovely boy,” said Gaea.

Chris looked up. The image of Gaea had stopped and turned away from the action still happening behind her. She was facing Adam, and smiling.

Adam still didn’t get it. He giggled, and said hi again.

“How are you doing, Adam?” Gaea said. The action behind her was a fight scene. Gaea ducked as a chair was thrown. It sailed over her head. “Oops!! He almost got me!”

Adam laughed louder.

“Gotcha!” he shouted. “Gotcha!”

“They can’t get me!” Gaea boasted, and turned skillfully to block a blow from a huge guy in a black hat. She hit him a quick one-two-three combination and he fell on the floor. Gaea dusted her palms together, and grinned at Adam again.

“How’d you like that, Adam?” she said.

“I
like
it, I
like
it!” Adam laughed.

Somebody save me,
Chris thought, in a daze.

Serpent thundered down the field, clods of turf flying from his hooves, his forelegs flirting nimbly with the black and white ball. He kicked it with the side of his hoof, and Mandolin reared on her hind legs to butt it with her head in the general direction of Zampogna, who couldn’t take control and watched helplessly as Kekese of the Sharp team kicked it to Clavecin, who headed off toward the Flat’s goal. Serpent kept a sharp eye from midfield, and when Tjelempang stole it away again and passed it off to Piano, he was in position to take it on the run. Then he was in control again, running like the wind, the Pele of the four-legged set, bearing down on the Sharp’s goalie, who desperately tried to read Serpent’s moves, dodged left, then right, left again—and was in the wrong place when Serpent kneed the ball up thrust his head forward…deliberately missed the head-butt. The goalie went flying through the air toward the left side of the goal….

—and watched helplessly as Serpent twisted around and kicked with a hind leg. The ball sizzled into the center of the opposing net.

Flats ahead, four to three.

That was still the score when, with only a centirev left to play, Mandolin scored her first goal of the game, to put it out of reach. Serpent gathered with the others to congratulate Mandolin, who was still a rookie at the glorious sport of football. It never occurred to him to point out that he, Serpent, had scored the winning goal. He had also scored two of the other points. He was, no doubt about it, the best football player in Gaea.

Breathing like steam engines, dripping sweat, the Titanides engaged in the sort of horseplay usual after a hard-fought game. Gradually, Serpent became aware of another sound. For one moment he was
alarmed. It sounded a lot like the awful day of the riot.

But then he discovered a loose group of prisoners gathered near the sidelines, shouting and clapping.

They had been congregating there lately, watching the Titanides. This group was larger than before. In fact, the group had been getting bigger each day, Serpent realized. A few times, after the Titanide game was over, some of the human prisoners had taken the field to kick the ball around.

Serpent scooped up the football and kicked it high and long. It fell into the group of prisoners—all of these were males—and watched them toss it back and forth, waiting for the Titanides to leave.

He wondered if they might like to form teams themselves. He moved off to the sidelines and watched as they scrambled over the turf. They seemed to be playing twenty or thirty to a side on the over-sized Titanide field, cheerfully accepting the inconvenience caused by the rutted ground.

Serpent walked away thoughtfully. He joined the other Titanides on the hillside west of the valley, folded his legs under him, took his leather-bound sketch pad and a charcoal pencil from his pouch, stared out over the valley, and promptly fell into that mental state that was nothing like what humans called sleep, but was not quite like being awake.

He scanned the vista in front of him. Far to his right, to the north, was Peppermint Bay, with Moros just beyond it. Huddled at the near end under its usual blanket of haze was Bellinzona. Whistlestop was visible, stationed a prudent three kilometers above the firetrap city.

Sweeping in front of Serpent were the many kilometers of land reclaimed from the jungle.

It was not like Earth jungles, where the land, surprisingly, is fragile and not too fertile if cleared. Gaean land operated by different rules. Crops sank deep roots and thrived on the nutritious milk of Gaea, and from her underground heat. There was not much photosynthesis involved in the plants which could be raised in the dim light of Dione, so the fields were all colors. It was a huge patchwork quilt of crops. All the fields were square—except those right around the river, which were terraced and flooded to grow rice-like crops. Running between the squares were dirt paths where humans pulled hand-carts of
harvested crops to the river docks, where barges floated the bounty down to the city. And dotted here and there among the fields were the neat rows of tents which housed the workers.

Cirocco insisted on calling them prisoners. Serpent thought slaves might be more accurate, but Cirocco insisted there was a difference. He supposed there was. Slavery was an alien concept to the Titanide mind, so he was ready to admit it would take a human to distinguish the gradations.

Once again, it was a matter of hierarchies, another concept Titanides had a lot of trouble with. They had elders, and were capable of obedience to the Captain, but anything more complex than that confused them terribly. The work camps, for instance, were ruled by a Warden, a former Vigilante Serpent didn’t like very much but not a bad man. He was responsible to the Council back in town—specifically, to the Prisons Committee. The Council was ruled by Cirocco Jones and her advisors: Robin, Nova, and Conal.

In the other direction, the Warden commanded twenty Camp Bosses, who in turn gave orders to a dozen or so Overseers, each in charge of a number of work gangs supervised by a Trusty.

He glanced down at his sketch pad. He had been looking at it off and on as he sat there, but his eyes had sent no messages to his brain. Now he saw he had done a simple rendering of the scene before him. He looked at it critically. He had left out the humans on the road. There were some hesitant lines to suggest the tents of the nearest camp. Serpent frowned. This was not what his mind sought. He tore out the page, crumpled it, and tossed it away. Then he looked down at the camp.

The tents were green canvas. Each housed ten humans. The sexes were segregated for sleeping, but sexual abstinence was not enforced. The Overseers and Bosses were appointed by the Warden, but not reviewed by the Titanides. In practical terms this was a mistake, Serpent knew. Some of the Overseers and Bosses were worse than the prisoners. It had been possible to catch a few of these in acts of brutality, whereupon they found themselves toiling in a prisoner’s loincloth. But these days such people were careful to commit their atrocities out of sight. The Titanides could not be everywhere.

It was impractical, it was inefficient…and it was the way the Captain said it must be done.

Serpent had fretted about it at first. Later he had seen the trap. Crazy as it was, it was the human
way to do things. They couldn’t detect lies or evil the way a Titanide could, so they had evolved these compromises which they usually called “justice,” or, more accurately, “law.” Serpent well knew that truth was a relative term, sometimes impossible to establish, but humans were almost totally blind to it. The trap—and it was a subtle one—was that if humans came to rely on Titanide perceptions of Truth and Evil, they would gain all the benefits of a sane society and Titanides would be enslaved to the humans’ need.

Cirocco’s solution made a lot more sense. She would use the Titanides as much as she had to. At first, this had been a lot, with Titanides acting as policeman, judge, jury, and hangman. The purpose was to galvanize the society into an understanding that evildoing
would
be punished.

But the humans had to be weaned away from this, back into their own way of doing things. Increasingly, it was so. The courts were taking more of the burden. That they were often inaccurate was simply the price humans had to pay for their freedom.

Once more he glanced down at his pad. There was a drawing of three female prisoners. The one in the center was old and tired, her hands gnarled from the harvest. She stood there in her dirty loincloth. Her face had a wondrous beauty etched deeply. The youngest and—in human terms—prettiest of the bunch had been drawn with the face of a monster. Serpent remembered her. This was an evil one. Some day she would hang. Looking closer, Serpent realized he had drawn a gallows into her face. He tore it out and crumpled it and looked again toward the camp.