Demon (GAIA) (45 page)

At the center of the community was the gallows. It had been used frequently in the early days of the conquest, less often now. There had been the one awful riot, but since that day the Titanide guards had been reduced. Now there were hardly enough to form six football teams.

Though prison life was hard work, it was better than most of the prisoners had known in Bellinzona. Food had never been a problem in the old days. But now the manna no longer fell, and new prisoners told of hunger and uncertainty. There was an economic system being born, social lines being drawn. There were jobs in plenty, but the wages would buy only enough food to feed oneself, and not
well. Many of the jobs were harder and more dangerous than farm labor. And there were days when the fleet came back empty, or no barges arrived from the camps, and everyone went hungry.

Prison food was the best—the Warden was under orders to be sure that it was. It was plentiful. Prison was a secure place. Most of the people here didn’t want to make trouble.

So Titanides only patrolled the strip of no-man’s-land between the camps and the city. The seldom caught anybody, and few bunks turned up empty at roll-call.

Again Serpent looked at his sketch. Three men hung from ropes in the center of the camp. Two had been evil, Serpent remembered. One had only done something dumb. He had killed an Overseer in front of Titanide witnesses. The Overseer had certainly deserved it—Serpent recalled the man had been hanged in turn only a few hectorevs later—but the Law was the Law. Serpent would have let the man live. The human judge had felt differently.

Angrily, he tore that page out and threw it away. His mind kept returning to the thing he knew in his soul and hated to think about. This was a bad place, a place of suffering, a human place where no Titanide should be. Titanides
knew
how to behave. Humans spent their lives in an endless struggle to subdue their animal natures. It was quite possible that these laws, prisons, and gallows were the best solution they would ever find to that paradox. But it sickened the Titanide to be part of it.

He stared into the darkness of the Dione spoke and began to sing a song of sadness, and of longing for the Great Tree of home. Others joined him, their hands involved in simple tasks. The song went on for a long time.

There had to be something
good
to be done here. He didn’t expect to change the world. He didn’t expect to change human nature—and would not if he could. They had their own destiny. His aim was modest. He merely would like to make the world a slightly better place for his having lived in it. That seemed little enough to ask.

He looked down at his sketchpad. He had drawn a smiling human. The fellow was dressed in shorts and a striped shirt, and was wearing shoes. He was in violent motion, kicking a football.

Robin took her seat to the right of the larger chair at the end of the huge Council table, in the Great Hall of the Loop. She opened her cunningly crafted leather briefcase—a gift from Valiha and Virginal—took out a stack of papers, and tapped them on the polished wood. Then, with a nervous glance around, she took out her wire-rimmed glasses and put them on.

She still felt funny wearing them. Back home, she had suffered from a recurring optical problem that had been easily correctible as she advanced in years. Here, without visits to the Fountain, her eyes kept getting worse. And, Great Mother, it was no wonder, since she spent her days staring at endless reports.

It should not have surprised her, she knew, but it still did. In every way but the final, most important one, she was the Mayor of Bellinzona. She suspected that, had she been born Christian, she would have been Pope by now.

Cirocco had been quite reasonable about it, that day six kilorevs ago. She had been reasonable…up to a point. Then she had been adamant.

“You have the experience of leading a large group of people,” Cirocco had said. “I don’t. For reasons you’ll see, I will have to retain the final power in Bellinzona. But I will be relying on you and your judgment in a great many things. And I know you’ll rise to the challenge.”

Well, challenge it had been. But now it was more and more routine: the very thing she had hated about running the Coven.

She rubbed the table with her hand, and smiled. It was a wonderful table, made of the best wood, edged with more clever carvings than Robin could count. It had been made by Titanides, naturally. It
was the second table to grace the Council Chamber.

The first one had been round. Cirocco had taken one look at it and told them to take it away.

“This isn’t Camelot,” she had said. “There’ll be no meetings of equals here. Bring me a big,
long
table, with a
big
chair at this end.”

Robin knew it had been a natural mistake for the Titanides. There was a human way and a Titanide way. They were ignorant of the psychological edge Cirocco sought by sitting at the head.

So they had brought a
big
chair. Sometimes Cirocco sat in it.

But more and more lately, it stood empty, and Robin conducted her business from her customary seat at the right of the throne.

Others were taking their seats now. Directly across the table, Nova thumped a huge stack of paper onto the table and slipped into her own chair. She glanced up at her mother, nodded, and then began penciling notes in the margins.

The older witch sighed. She wondered how much longer Nova could keep this up. She would speak to her mother. It was possible to conduct business with her. But it was all so careful. There was no laughter, no joking, not even any complaints except those couched in the reasoned, maddening language of the bureaucrat. Robin longed for a good old shouting match.

She looked at the still-empty chair. Cirocco Jones, flanked by her two chief advisors. The Bitch and Two Witches, she had overheard someone say. Most of the Council did not realize the rift between mother and daughter.

Stuart took his seat to Robin’s right. She nodded at him and smiled politely, which was an effort. She didn’t like the guy, but he was able, efficient, canny, and brilliant, when it suited him. He was also awfully ambitious. In another situation he would be doing his best to stab Robin in the back. Just now he was biding his time, waiting to see if Cirocco really would relinquish power at the end of one Earth year, as she had promised. If she did, the feathers would fly.

Trini sat down next to Nova, who leaned over and kissed the Elder Amazon on the lips. Robin
squirmed in her chair. She didn’t like Trini much more than she did Stuart. Maybe less. It was hard to believe they had once been lovers, briefly, twenty years ago. Now she and Nova were an item. Robin didn’t know how genuine it was. Nova obviously retained her crush on Cirocco. Robin felt sure part of the reason for their public displays of affection was Nova’s shrewd knowledge that it would irritate her mother.

She scowled, and looked away. O brave new world.

The other chairs were filling up. Conal took his eccentric seat, a few yards behind Cirocco’s chair and slightly to one side, where he could watch the proceedings and smoke his cigars one after the other. He would say nothing, and hear everything. Most of the Council hadn’t the slightest idea what to make of him. His position was a device, Robin knew. He had the look of an assassin about him when he cared to project it. He looked sinister, wreathed in smoke.

Cirocco slid into her throne, scooted down on the seat of her pants, and put her boots up on the table. She had an unlit cigar clenched in her teeth.

“Let’s get going, folks,” she said.

***

“So what’s your gut reaction, Conal?” Cirocco asked.

“Gut?” He considered it. “Better, Captain. Not a lot, but better.”

“Last time you didn’t think it was going to work.”

“So a guy can be wrong.”

She studied him. Conal bore it, unperturbed.

At first he had felt left out. There was a job for everyone, it seemed, but Conal. Oh, sure, there was talk of him leading the air force, if and when, and he had organized the Bellinzona Air Reserve. They wore uniforms if they wanted to. But they didn’t fly airplanes, and wouldn’t for some time.

He had thought he was being left out, and had been hurt about it. But gradually he had realized that,
if Robin was Cirocco’s surrogate Mayor during those times when the Captain was out of the city on her mysterious errands, Conal was her eyes and ears.

His duties were amorphous, which suited him fine. What he did was drift around, in a variety of clothing. Nobody but Council members and a few of the top police knew he had anything to do with the governing of the city. He could come and go as he pleased, and people talked to him. Everything he heard went to Cirocco. He didn’t have Nova’s computer charts or Robin’s experience and elaborate theories, but he knew the secrets.

“What about that black market crap?”

“I agree with Robin.”

“Are you trying to needle me, or what? I agree with her, too, but I don’t come to you for theories, Conal. I come to you for reality.”

Conal was a little surprised at her reaction. Looking closely, he saw she was under a great deal of strain.

“The black market is not the problem Nova’s building it up to be. There’s not much stuff, and the prices are very high.”

“Which means,” Cirocco said, “that very little food is being diverted at the docks, and we’ve
still
got shortages. So the shortages are real.”

“Nobody’s going hungry. But a lot of folks wish the manna was still falling.”

Cirocco brooded about that for a while.

“How about the Buck?”

Conal laughed.

“The word is, a Buck makes a good coffee filter. Use five or ten of them, and when you’re done the brown stains might be worth something. They’re also useful rolled up to snort coke with.”

“Wastepaper, in other words.”

“It’s that law Nova was talking about. Robin said it meant bad money drove out good money.”

“No,” Cirocco said. “That’s what’s forcing the gold coins into mattresses and old socks. People save the stuff that has value and spend the stuff that inflates.”

“Whatever. I don’t think the school problem is as bad as they made out tonight. It’s true there’s some resentment. But most of the folks here were learning English, anyway, or enough to get by on. The thing that really jerks ’em off is having to learn
good
English.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Lowering the literacy requirement. Let ’em out of class when they can read a campaign poster, and don’t worry about teaching them the past perfect tense. Of course, coming from a guy who was illiterate when he got here and ain’t much of a reader even yet, maybe—”

“Come off it, Conal.” Cirocco chewed a knuckle. “You’re right. We can let the non-English-speaking adults get by with pidgen. Their kids will learn more than they did. I shouldn’t have pushed it so hard.”

“Nobody’s perfect.”

“Don’t remind me. What else do you know?”

“Most people prefer barter. I’d say sixty percent of the business done in town is barter. But there is another currency coming up fast, and that’s alcohol. There’s been beer for a long time. The wine is actually getting tolerable, but most of the time I can’t tell what it’s made from—and I probably don’t want to know. But we’re seeing more of the hard stuff.”

“Distilled spirits. That scares me.”

“Me, too. There’s some methanol going the rounds. Some people have gone blind.”

Cirocco sighed.

“Do we need another law?”

“Forbidding home-made hootch?” Conal frowned, and shook his head. “I’m applying your golden rule here. The minimum law to correct the problem. Instead of banning
good
liquor—which, believe me, is a contradiction in terms in Bellinzona—just ban the poison.”

“Won’t work. Not if it’s being used as money. It gets passed back and forth so many times how do we know where it came from?”

“There’s that problem,” Conal conceded. “And even the good distilleries use labels that are easy to counterfeit…and people water it….”

“It’s not a very good currency,” Cirocco said. “I think the best thing is to start a public education campaign. I don’t know much about methanol. Isn’t it pretty easy to tell? Can’t you smell it?”

“I’m never sure. First you have to get past the stink of the booze.”

They brooded about it in silence for a time. Conal was inclined to let it go. He didn’t believe in protecting people from themselves. His own solution was to drink only from sealed bottles he had received from the hands of a distiller he trusted. It seemed to him everyone else should do the same. But maybe a law was needed, after all.

He was ambivalent about the whole thing. It was not that he had loved Bellinzona before. He knew the place was vastly improved. You could walk the streets unarmed with reasonable safety.

But every time you turned around, you ran into a law. After living seven years without laws, it was hard to get your head back in gear to think about them.

Which brought him to the question he was sure Cirocco would ask next. She did not disappoint him.

“What about me? How’s the Conal-meter rating?”

He held out a hand and rocked it back and forth.

“You’re better. Ten or fifteen percent like you well enough. Maybe thirty percent tolerate you and will admit, with a few beers in them, that you’ve made things better. But the rest really don’t like you at all. Either you upset their wagons, or they don’t think you’re doing
enough
. There’s lots of folks out there who’d feel better if somebody told them what to do from the time they woke up to the time you put ’em to bed.”

“Maybe they’ll get their wish,” Cirocco muttered.

Conal waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. So he took another puff on his cigar and tried to pick his words carefully. “There’s something else. It’s…image, I guess. You’re a face on the side of a blimp. Not really real.”

“My media team has made that abundantly clear,” she said, sourly. “I come across as a stiff-necked bitch on television.”

“I don’t know about normal TV,” Conal said. “But on those big screens on Whistlestop they just don’t
like
you. You’re above them. You’re not one of the people…and you’re not
strong
enough, if that’s the word, to inspire the kind of fear…or, I don’t know, maybe it’s respect…” He trailed off, unable to express what he felt.