Demon (GAIA) (6 page)

He moved down the narrow finger piers between the endless rows of boats, passing small groups of humans who gave him plenty of room. His wide nostrils flared. He smelled many things—roasting meat, human excrement, a distant Iron Master, fresh fish, human sweat—but never a Priest. Gradually he came
to more traveled lanes, to the broad floating thoroughfares of Bellinzona. He clattered over bridges arched so high as to be nearly semi-circles. They were easy to negotiate in Gaea’s one-quarter gravity.

He stopped at an intersection just short of the Free Female Quarter. He looked around, aware of the squad of seven human Free Females stationed at the interdiction line and as unconcerned about them as they were about him. He could enter the Quarter if he wished; it was human males the guards were watching for.

There were few other humans about. The only one he noticed was a female Rocky judged to be about nineteen or twenty years old, though it was hard to tell the age of a human between puberty and menopause. She sat on a piling with her chin in her hands, wearing low-cut black slippers with blunt toes. They had ribbons that laced around her calves.

She looked up at him, and instantly he knew other humans would judge her insane. He also knew she was not violent. The madness did not bother him; it was, after all, only a human word. In fact, the combination of insanity and non-violence produced the humans Rocky most admired. Cirocco Jones, now
there
was a madwoman….

He smiled at her, and she cocked her head to one side.

She rose up on her toes. As her arms came up and out she was transformed. She began to dance.

Rocky knew her story. There were thousands like her: trash people, without a home, without friends, without anything. Even the beggars of Calcutta had owned pieces of sidewalk to sleep on, or so Rocky had heard. Calcutta was only a memory. Bellinzonans frequently had even less than that. Many no longer slept at all.

How old could she have been when the war came? Fifteen? Sixteen? She had survived it, had been picked up by Gaea’s scavengers, and had come here, stripped not only of her physical possessions and her culture and everyone who had ever mattered to her, but of her mind as well.

Still, she was wealthy. Someone, certainly long ago on the Earth, had taught her to dance. She still had the dance, and the ballet slippers. And she had her madness. It was worth something in Gaea. It was
protection; bad things often happened to those who tormented the insane.

Rocky knew humans could not see the music of the world. The few humans around to witness, had they even noticed her dance, would not be hearing the sounds she created for him. To Rocky, the Titantown Philharmonic might be playing just behind her as she leaped and whirled. Gaea was wonderful for ballet. She hung in the air forever, and made walking on the tips of one’s toes seem the natural gait for humans—insofar as they could be said to
have
a natural gait. Human dancing was a source of giddy excitement to Rocky. That they could
walk
was a miracle, but to
dance
….

In complete silence she created
La Sylphide
there on that filthy pier, on the edge of humanity’s garbage bin.

She finished with a curtsy, then smiled at him. Rocky reached into his pouch and found another packet of cocaine, thinking it little enough payment for the smile alone. She took it and curtsied again. On impulse, he reached into his hair and pulled out a single white flower, one of many braided there. He held it out to her. This time the smile was sweeter than ever, and it made her cry.

“Grazie, padrone, mille grazie,”
she said, and hurried away.

“You got a flower for me, too, dogfood?”

Rocky turned and saw a short, powerfully built human buck, or “buck canuck” as he liked to style himself. The Titanide had known Conal for three years, and thought him beautifully insane.

“I didn’t think you went in for human—”

“Don’t say ‘tail,’ Conal, or I’ll remove some teeth.”

“What’d I say? What’s the big deal?”

“You couldn’t possibly understand, being tone-deaf to beauty. Suffice it to say that your arrival was like a turd falling into a Ming vase.”

“Well, I try.” He shrugged his fleece-lined coat up around his shoulders, looked around, and took a final puff on the stub of his cigar, then tossed it into the murky water. Conal always wore the coat. Rocky thought it made him smell interesting.

“You seen anything?” Conal finally asked. He was looking at the seven sisters guarding the Quarter. They were looking right back at him, weapons held loose but ready.

“No. I don’t know the town, but it seems quiet to me.”

“Me, too. I was hoping your nose’d smell something I ain’t been able to see. But I don’t think anybody’s been here for quite a while.”

“If they had, I’d know it.” Rocky confirmed.

“Then I guess they can go ahead.” He scowled, then looked up at Rocky. “Unless you want to talk her out of it.”

“I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t,” Rocky said. “There is something badly wrong. Something has to be done.”

“Yeah, but—”

“It’s not that dangerous, Conal. I won’t hurt her.”

“You sure as hell better not.”

***

They had bargained for a while, Cirocco and Conal, on that first day. It had been years ago, but Conal remembered it well. Conal had held out for lifetime servitude. Cirocco said that was too long: cruel and unusual punishment. She offered two myriarevs. Conal gradually came down to twenty. The Wizard offered three.

They settled on five. What Cirocco didn’t know was that Conal intended then, and intended now, to fulfill his original promise. He would serve her until he died.

He loved her with his entire soul.

Which is not to say there had never been wavering, never a bad moment. It was possible to sit alone in the dark, unguarded, and begin to feel some resentment, to taste the idea that she had treated him badly, that she had done things to him that he didn’t deserve. He had sweated many a “night” away,
unsleeping in the eternal Gaean afternoon, feeling rebellion growing inside and knowing absolute terror. Because sometimes he thought that, far down in a place he could never see, he hated her, and that would be an awful thing, because she was the most wonderful person he had ever seen. She had given him life itself. He knew now, as he had not known then, that it was not something he would have done. He would have shot the stupid meddling fool, the idiot with his comic books. He’d shoot him today, if he ever encountered such a fool. One round, right through the head,
wham!
as was only right and proper.

The first few kilorevs had been tough. He was still amazed he had survived them. Mostly, Cirocco did not have time to worry about him, so he had been left behind in the escape-proof cave. He had a lot of time to think. As he healed, he took a look at himself for the first time in his life. Not in a mirror; there were no mirrors in the cave, and that drove him crazy for a while because he was so used to admiring the flow of muscles in his mirror, and because he wanted to see how disfigured he was. Eventually, he began looking in different directions. He started to use the mirror of past experience, and he was not pleased at what he saw.

What did he have? Adding it up, he came up with a strong body (now broken) and…his word. That was it.

Brains? Forget it. Charm? Sorry, Conal. Eloquence, virtue, integrity, restraint, honesty, gratitude, sympathy? Well….

“You’re strong,” he told himself, “but not now, and, let’s face it, she can beat you any time she needs to. You had a certain beauty, or so the girls said, but can you take credit for that? No, you were born that way. You had health, but not right now, you can hardly stand up.”

What was left? It came down to honor.

He had to laugh. “An affair of honor,” Cirocco had said, just before the Titanide clobbered him from behind. So what the hell was honor, anyway?

Conal had never heard of the Marquis of Queensbury, but he had picked up the rules of gentlemanly behavior. You don’t shoot a man in the back. Torture is contrary to the Geneva
Conventions. Always fire a warning shot in the air. Tell your opponent what you’re going to do. Give the other fellow a fighting chance.

That was all very well, for games. Games were played by rules.

“Sometimes you have to pick your own rules,” Cirocco told him, much later. But by then he had already figured that out.

Did that mean there were no rules at all? No. It just meant you had to decide which ones you could live with, which ones you could
survive
with, because Cirocco was talking about survival and she was better at it than anyone in the history of humanity.

“First you decide how important survival is,” she said. “Then you know what you’ll do to survive.”

With enemies, there were no rules. Honor didn’t enter into it. The best way to kill an enemy was from a great distance, without warning, in the back. If the need arose to torture your enemy, you ripped his guts out. If you had to lie, you lied. It didn’t matter. This is the
enemy.

Honor only arose among friends.

It was a hard concept for Conal. He had never had a friend. Cirocco seemed an unlikely place to start—seemed, in fact, a damn good candidate for the worst enemy he ever had. No one had ever hurt him a thousandth as much as she had.

But he kept coming back to his list. His word. He had given his word. Naked, defenseless, seconds from death, it had been all he had left to give, but he had given it honestly. Or so he thought. The trouble was, he kept thinking about killing her.

For a while he didn’t think survival was worth it. He stood for long hours on the edge of the precipice, ready to jump, cursing himself for the groveling he had done.

***

The first time she came back, after an absence of over a hectorev, he told her what he had been thinking. She didn’t laugh.

“I agree that one’s word is worth something,” she said. “Mine is worth something to me, so I don’t give it lightly.”

“But you’d lie to an enemy, wouldn’t you?”

“Just as much as I had to.”

He thought that over.

“I’ve already mentioned this,” she said, “but it bears repeating. An oath made under duress is not binding. I wouldn’t consider it so. An oath I haven’t given freely is no oath at all.”

“Then you don’t expect me to live up to mine, do you?”

“Frankly, no.
I
see no reason why you should.”

“Then why did you accept it?”

“Two reasons. I believe I can anticipate your move, if it comes, and kill you. And Hornpipe believes you’ll keep your word.”

“He will,” Hornpipe said.

***

Conal didn’t know why the Titanide was so confident. They left him again, quite soon, and he had more time to think, but he found himself going back over the same old paths. An oath given under duress…and yet, his Word.

In the end, there was nothing else. He had to jump, or he had to keep his word. Starting with that scrap dignity, perhaps he could build a man the Wizard might honor.

***

Conal and Rocky entered the Free Female quarter.

Each of the seven guards had to scrutinize Conal’s pass, and even then there was an obvious reluctance to let him through. Since the establishment of the quarter two years earlier, not one human
male had gone more than fifty meters beyond the gate and lived to tell about it. But the Free Females, by their very nature, were the one human group that acknowledged the Wizard’s authority. Cirocco Jones was a goddess to them, a supernatural being, a figure of legend come alive. Her effect on the Free Females was much the same as a certifiable, living, breathing Holmes would have had on a group of fanatic Sherlockians: whatever she asked for, she got. If she wanted this man to pass into the zone, so be it.

Beyond the guard post was a hundred-meter walkway known as the Zone of Death. There were drawbridges, metal-clad bunkers with arrow slits, and cauldrons of flammable oils, all designed to slow an assault long enough for a force of amazons to be assembled.

A woman was waiting for them. She carried her forty-five years with a serenity many hope for but few achieve. Her hair was long and white. In the manner of Free Females at home, she wore nothing above the waist. Where her right breast had been there was now a smooth, blue scar that curved from her sternum to her seventh rib.

“Was there any trouble?” the woman asked.

“Hello, Trini,” said Conal.

“No trouble,” the Titanide assured her. “Where is she?”

“This way.” Trini stepped off the dock onto the deck of a barge. They followed her to another boat, not quite as imposing. A rickety plank bridge took them to yet a third boat.

It was a fascinating journey for Rocky, who had always wondered what human nests looked like. Dirty, for the most part, he decided. Very little privacy, either. Some of the boats were quite small. There were tiny cockles with canvas awnings, and others open to the elements. All were stuffed with human females of all ages. He saw women asleep in bunks placed as far from the makeshift highway as space would allow. More women tended cooking fires, and babies.

At last they came to a larger boat with a solid deck. It was near the outside of the quarter, quite close to the open waters of Peppermint Bay. There was a big tent on the deck. Trini held a flap open and
Conal and Rocky entered.

There were six Titanides in a space that might have held five comfortably. Rocky’s arrival made it seven. Besides Conal, the only other human was Cirocco Jones, who was at the far end of the tent, wrapped in blankets, reclining in something that might have been a very low barber’s chair. It put her head no more than a foot off the deck, where it was cradled between the yellow folded forelegs of Valiha (Aeolian Solo) Madrigal. The Titanide was drawing a straight razor slowly across Cirocco’s scalp, putting the finishing touches on a shave that left the Wizard’s head bare from the crown forward.

She raised her head, causing Valiha to coo a warning. Rocky noted that her head wobbled, that her eyes were not focusing well, and that, when she spoke, her speech was slurred, but that was to be expected.