Demon (GAIA) (49 page)

Suddenly Cirocco remembered encountering that lone Supra in the air over Iapetus, while the deathangel was flying away with Adam.

“So, why have we come here to this nest?” Cirocco asked, addressing the group of angels, not Gaby, and inverting her question in a way calculated to cause the least confusion to the Supras.

“Yes, a most interesting thing,” one said.

“Why have they come, why have they come?”

“One is of air, one is of dream.”

“Dreams in the nest, how very strange.”

“The one who burns. Why did they come?”

Gaby cleared her throat, and all looked at her.

“We have come for the same reason we came in the past,” she said. “To prosecute the case against Gaea, and to further the preparations for war against her and all her estates and nests.”

“Exactly!” Cirocco, who couldn’t have been more confused, chimed in. “That is precisely our intention. To…engage in most brilliant stratagems and tacticalities.”

“Most precise!” one angel said, enthusiastically.

“Oh, rue the day!”

“The nest of Gaea will be laid low.”

“Mumble,” said one angel, which is what they said when they had nothing to say but didn’t want to be left out of the conversation.

“Mumble,” another agreed.

It was easy to see the Dione Supras as amiable nitwits, idiot savants with large and fractured vocabularies. They were nothing of the kind. The English language was a delight to them, so illogical and fertile and well-suited to their natural desire to confuse, obfuscate, and generally side-step clear meaning whenever possible.

“Quite violent,” Gaby suggested.

“Oh, so very violent. Much torment.”

“And cautious, extremely cautious.”

“The tactics,” one said. “Such a lexicon of tactics.” The way he said it, Cirocco knew it was a question that might translate as
How do we fight her?

Gaby made that same tricky pass with her hands. Nothing up her sleeve, Cirocco decided. For a moment she knew how others must feel when she worked her own meager magics.

She produced a red stick that was unmistakably dynamite—that was, in fact, labeled DYNAMITE: Product of Bellinzona. The angels fell silent when they looked at it. Cirocco took it and turned it around in her hands. The angels sighed in unison.

“Where did you get this?” Cirocco asked, momentarily forgetting the others. “There’s nothing like this in Bellinzona.”

“That’s because you won’t make it for another kilorev,” Gaby said.

“Ephemera!” a Supra crowed. “It’s ephemera!”

“An insubstantial nullity,” another opined.

“Not made yet? How farcical! We are keenly misinformed.”

“It doesn’t exist,” one summarized. “Like this Cirocco one.”

“Don’t quibble,” came an adjuration.

“Did you forget it’s a dream?” one reminded Cirocco.

“Dynamite! Dynamite! Dynamite!”

“There will be dynamite,” Gaby agreed. “When it comes time to fight Gaea, there will have been dynamite for some time.”

“Will have been! A truly stratospheric verb.”

“Most sincerely.”

“An…illusion?” a younger Supra said, with wrinkled brow, still staring at the dynamite in Gaby’s hand.

“A will-o-the-wisp,” one explained.

“A figurehead! A moonshine of farragoes, a pre-pentimentoized, infra-extinct, fleeting mockery! A vacuity!” shouted another, effectively shutting off debate.

They stared at it again, in a feather-rustling quiet. Gaby made it vanish back to where it had come from—the future, Cirocco presumed.

“Ah,” one of them sighed, at last.

“Indeed,” affirmed another. “My goodness, the things we will do with such a lump of power!” he asked.

“Yes, you will,” Gaby agreed. “And right now, you’re going to tell us all about it.”

Which Gaby did, at great length.

***

When she was through, there was the customary offer of sex. Both Cirocco and Gaby accepted, which was the polite thing to do.

They went through the courting ritual, which had always reminded Cirocco of a square dance, while the others sang and clapped in rhythm. Cirocco’s partner was a sterling specimen of the species. His bright red wings enfolded her warmly as the act was “consummated.”

And that was another thing she found attractive about the Supras. They didn’t have an ounce of xenophobia. A tribal people, their culture was laced with ritual, custom, and tradition—but they had flexibility. With visiting Supras the offer of sex would have been in complete earnest, and the act would not have been simulated. They had formalized this ritual solely for the purpose of dealing with human visitors. Real sex with the Supra would have been grotesque for both of them. As it was, the male simply gave her the lightest possible touch with his tiny penis, never seen, and everybody was happy. It made Cirocco feel good. In a way, it made her feel loved.

***

She had almost forgotten it was a dream until they landed lightly on the black sandy beach and she saw her sleeping body. Nearby was Hornpipe, resting on folded legs, making a carving during his own dream-time. He looked up and nodded at them both.

Cirocco kissed Gaby good-by and watched her fly away. Then she yawned, stretched, and looked down at herself. Time to wake up, she thought, wryly.

Once more she was impressed with how easily the fantastic could become commonplace. She knelt beside her sleeping body, remembering how it had been the last time, and rolled over onto it.

She gasped when she hit warm, muscular flesh instead of the sand she had expected. For a moment she lay sprawled across the sleeping body, then she leaped into the air as if she had landed on an ant-hill. She stood, horrified, as the other Cirocco stirred, raised a hand to her face…then turned slightly on her side and went back to sleep.

She turned her head and saw Hornpipe looking at her.
What is he seeing?
She wondered if she would ever ask him that.

“I’m not ready for this,” she said aloud. But she sighed, knelt on the sand, and hesitantly touched the body. Again, it was
other
. It was a big, strong-looking, brown-skinned, and not very pretty woman.

She took the other Cirocco’s hand. The other stirred slightly, muttering something. Then she opened her eyes and sat up quickly.

There was a moment of vertigo, and then there was just Cirocco. She looked around quickly, saw no one else.

“Just you and me, kid,” she said to herself, and went to join Hornpipe.

Historians, when Bellinzona eventually produced some, were never quite sure when the change happened. The city had been born in chaos, had grown in confusion, been conquered in disarray. There was a brief time when there were almost as many inmates in the work camps as free citizens walking the streets.

Conal, with his informal polls of the citizens, detected no dramatic jump in morale, or in the approval rating of Cirocco Jones, not even after the aerial attack. He suspected it was the result of a combination of things.

But for whatever reason, at some point between the sixth and the ninth kilorev after Cirocco’s invasion, Bellinzona stopped being a brawling collection of fractious individuals and became a community—within the human-defined limits of that term. It was nothing so dramatic as all men suddenly deciding they were brothers. Deep and persistent differences still existed, nowhere more strongly than in the Council. But at the end of the ninth kilorev Bellinzona was a city with an identity, and a purpose.

Football had a surprising amount to do with it.

Serpent’s obsession, combined with strong help from Robin’s organizational abilities and the willing work of the parks commissioner, soon had two leagues formed, ten teams to a league, and that was just for the adults. There were intermediate and junior teams, too. A second stadium had to be built to accommodate the number of games, which were strongly contested and heavily attended. It was something to cheer for. Local heroes were born, intra-city rivalries established. It was something to talk about in the taprooms after a long hard shift. For some, it was something to fight about. Titanide police
were instructed not to interfere as long as only fists were used. When word spread about this unprecedented instance of the law looking the other way, some mad brawls developed, some people were hurt…and the Mayor did nothing. Even this seemed to improve the community spirit. Cooler heads began to move in and stop the fights as the emerging citizens learned how better to tolerate each other.

Which is not to say no more noses got broken.

Whistlestop’s departure played a part. One day he simply drifted away and did not come back. People seemed to breathe easier. He was too visible a symbol of oppression. He was just an old bag of wind, completely harmless, but the people didn’t like him up there and were glad to see him go.

Titanides became less numerous, and less visible. The occupying force was in fact halved on the day of Cirocco’s return from the fountain, and halved again a kilorev later. Human police took up the slack, and Titanides intervened in only the worst violence. They were monumentally uninterested in civil crime.

Both the quality and quantity of food deliveries improved as more acreage was put under cultivation, and as the ones who grew it learned better methods. Smiler meat began to appear in markets, at gradually reducing prices. Independent farmers were created under land-grant schemes, and proved, to no one’s surprise, more efficient than forced laborers.

Inflation remained a problem, but—in the immortal words of one of Nova’s economic reports—“The rate of increase of the rate of increase is slowing.”

Most people thought the biggest reason for the lift in morale was the most obvious one: the cowardly and unprovoked attack by what was later learned to be the Sixth Fighter/Bomber Wing of the Gaean Air Force, based in Iapetus. The Sixth was composed of one Luftmorder and nine buzz bombs, which came screaming in from the east on the first bright day following many decarevs of rain, catching people out of doors enjoying the unaccustomed warmth.

The “cowardly and unprovoked” line was used by Trini in a speech twenty revs later, as the pieces
were still being picked up. She had been even more intemperate than that; in an illogical but heart-felt rage, she had called the attack a day that would live in infamy.

Aside from the word “day,” the phrase was amazingly accurate.

“It’s Gaea, giving me help, damn her miserable hide,” Cirocco told the Council at the next meeting. “She’s handing me a Pearl Harbor on a silver platter—and a victory to boot. She must be desperate to have it out with me. She knows I’ll have to come soon now, with patriotism building like it is.”

The Sixth Fighter/Bomber Wing inflicted heavy damage on the city with bombs and missiles. Had the attack continued, or had they been joined by the Eighth, which Cirocco knew to be in Metis, the city might have turned into an inferno.

But the Bellinzona Air Force arrived in the nick of time.

The fact that there
was
a Bellinzona Air Force was news to the Bellinzonans, and those who dared emerge from cover had watched in awe as the Dragonflys, Mantises, Skeeters, and Gnats engaged the marauding aeromorphs in deadly combat. What they didn’t know was that the Sixth was overmatched at the start. It certainly didn’t
look
that way. The buzz bombs were huge and fast and loud, they trailed great clouds of black smoke, and spouted fire when they attacked. The Bellinzona planes seemed to be made of wire and cellophane. But they would turn and twist with a ghastly ease, and though their armament didn’t make a lot of noise getting out, it certainly had the desired result when it hit the target. Three Mantises harried the big, galumphing Luftmorder from the air, followed it as it shrieked in agony before bursting in flame on a hillside. From the frightened Bellinzonans there arose a ragged cheer.

It would have been a rout but for the lack of experience of some of the Bellinzonan pilots. One managed to run afoul of an especially cunning buzz bomb, lost a wing, and crashed into the sea. His body was recovered, and a spontaneous cortege carried it down Oppenheimer Boulevard. A monument was later erected to this first hero of the Gaean War.

So the victory in the Battle of Bellinzona was certainly an important part of the change that came over the city. But the crucial element of the change began upon Cirocco’s return from the Fountain.

She became a public figure.

Within a hectorev, the byways of Bellinzona were festooned with posters showing her face. They were heroic posters, modeled after those big banners of Lenin and Suslov carried through Moscow on Mayday. Looking at them, you just
knew
Cirocco Jones stood for brotherhood, solidarity, three square meals a day, and the welfare of the proletariat.

The community bulletin boards had developed into news centers, into big walls covered with messages and stories and football scores. A fledgling newspaper industry had developed; just four or five intermittent and scarce parchment sheets. The industry was quietly taken over. Editors were reasoned with, and one was jailed. Stories began to appear about Gaea, about New Pandemonium, about rumors of preparation for war in the east. That the stories were true did not change the fact that the Bellinzona media were State-run. A lot of people in government didn’t like it. About the same number thought it was a fine idea. Libertarians and fascists existed in about equal numbers everywhere, Cirocco had found.

Stuart and Trini
hated
it, though not from any moral foundation of civil liberties. They watched helplessly as Cirocco consolidated a stranglehold on Bellinzonan public opinion. And they knew that, as long as she could keep delivering security and stifling opposing opinion, she could remain Mayor until she died. Which, in her case, might very well be a thousand years hence.

On the other hand, there was the chance she would not live another kilorev.

She had started making public appearances. There were meetings, rallies, parades. She waded into groups of people, shaking hands, kissing babies, being seen with community leaders. She cut ceremonial ribbons on new development projects.