Demon (GAIA) (60 page)

She felt some of Conal’s emotion, in a way difficult to describe. He was not afraid, either, but he was very curious. Gaby had to keep calling him back or he would have bounded ahead of them. Continuing her analogy, he was like a boy from the city who had never
seen
the forest; every curve held a new marvel.

At a point Cirocco knew—without understanding how she knew—to be the exact center of the cable, they saw a light. As they got nearer they saw a man sitting beside the light. They approached him, and stopped. He looked up at them.

He looked like Robinson Crusoe, or Rip Van Winkle. His hair and beard were long and gray. There were foreign objects, twigs and little bits of fishbone, matted in it, and a long brown stain in his beard below his mouth. He was crusted with dirt. He was wearing the same clothes Cirocco had last seen him in, twenty years ago, writhing in the sawdust on the floor of The Enchanted Cat taproom, in Titantown. To say the clothes were tatters did them an injustice; they were the most decrepit articles of apparel she had ever seen. Great gaps in them showed a lot of skin—gaunt, stretched tightly over the bones—and every inch of that skin had scars great and small. His face was old, but not the same way Calvin’s was old. He might have been a sixty-year-old beachcomber. One of his eye sockets was empty. “Hello, Gene,” Gaby said, quietly.

“How are you, Gaby?” Gene asked, in a surprisingly strong voice.

“I’m well.” She turned to Conal. “Conal, let me introduce to you Gene Springfield, formerly of the
D.S.V. Ringmaster.
Gene, this is your great-great grandson, Conal Ray. He came a long way to see you.”

“Sit down,” Gene said, apparently to all of them. “I’m not going anywhere.”

They did. Conal was staring at his ancient relative, the man he had thought dead when he came to Gaea.

The first thing Cirocco noticed upon taking a closer look at Gene was that he had a bulge on his balding forehead. The skin there was unmarked. The shape of the skull was distorted, like half a grapefruit had bulged up under his skin.

The location of the bulge was suggestive. She wondered at the pressure the thing was putting on his frontal lobes.

She saw a little more of his surroundings. There wasn’t much. The fire came from a crack in the ground. It was bright and steady in the windless dark.

There was a heap of straw, apparently Gene’s bed. In the distance the light reflected off a still pool of water, twenty meters across. Close to Gene was a big, galvanized pail with water in it.

That was all. A short distance away was the entrance to the stairs that would lead down to Oceanus.

“Have you been in here all this time, Gene?” Cirocco asked him.

“All this time,” he confirmed. “Ever since that time in Tethys when Gaby cut my balls off.” He looked at Gaby, and cackled. No, Cirocco decided, that wasn’t quite the right word. There was no laughter in it. It was just a sound made by an old man. He made it again as he looked at Cirocco, Conal, then back to Gaby. “Didn’t come by to apologize for that, did you?”

“No,” Gaby said.

“Didn’t expect you would. No matter. They grew back, just like they did the first time you cut ’em off.” He cackled again.

“What do you eat?” Conal asked.

Gene eyed him with suspicion, then plunged a gnarled hand into the pail. He came up with something gray and blind that wiggled.

“You cook them on that fire?” Gaby asked.

“Cook ’em?” Gene asked, startled. He looked from the ugly thing in his hand, to the fire, then back again, and a wild surmise grew beneath the beetled brow. He grinned, showing the brown stumps of
teeth. “Say, that’s an idea. They’s pretty tough. Like to wear your teeth down, they do. Catch ’em in that pool yonder. Slippery devils.” He looked at the eel again, frowned, as if unable to remember how it had come to be there. He tossed it back in the pail.

“What do you do down here?” Conal asked.

Gene glanced up, but didn’t seem to see Conal. He scratched his head—Cirocco winced when she saw how deeply his fingers went into the bulge of skin—and muttered into his beard. He didn’t seem to be aware of them.

“Gaby,” Cirocco whispered. “What’s with…the way he talks, it’s—”

“Backwoods? Quaint? Colloquial?” One side of her lip curled in a bitter smile. “Interesting, for a Harvard graduate, NASA-type New Yorker, wouldn’t you say? Rocky, Gene is the sorriest son of a bitch that ever lived. He’s had tricks played on him that make what she did to us seem like playful pranks. Look at his head. Just look at it.”

Cirocco had hardly been able to take her eyes away.

Now she was seized by a compulsion to touch it. She fought it as long as she could, then she got up, knelt in front of him, and placed her palm against his forehead. It was soft. Something moved sluggishly under the skin.

She thought she should be revolted, but she was not. She stared at her hand as if it belonged to someone else, and felt a power building in her. Gene’s hands came up slowly, and he put them around her forearm, making no attempt to push her away. She felt him frown. She had an absurd impulse—very close to hysteria—to shout
Heal!

Then she was holding something wet and squirmy and vile-smelling. She looked at it dispassionately. It was covered with blood, and so was her hand. It was built along the same lines as Snitch, but bloated, grotesquely fat, with rolling eyes like peeled grapes. It made a croaking noise.

“Son of a bitch,” Gene muttered. “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.”

Cirocco heard Conal stumbling away, heard him vomiting. Somehow she knew it was important to
keep staring at the creature, which continued to croak. Gaby was moving, holding something out….

It was a jar made of thick, black glass. Cirocco popped the monstrosity into it, and screwed the lid on tight.

Only then did Cirocco look at Gene. He was fingering his forehead, which had bloody fingermarks on it, but was not broken. The skin hung loosely on his head, but there was no sign of damage.

“Son of a bitch,” he said.

“Like Snitch?” Cirocco asked. Now that it was over, she felt faint.

“No,” Gaby said. “They’re related. But Snitch only listened, and reported.” She tapped her own forehead. “The one in my head only listened.” She held up the black jar. “
This
one was like what spies call a mole. He burrowed deep, and he shuffled things around. When he could, without revealing himself, he made things happen. Things like rape, and war, and sabotage…. He ran Gene’s life after a while. Gene was like a puppet on Gaea’s strings.”

“Up there…on the cable?”

They had had their doubts about him, so many years ago, shortly after the wreck of the
Ringmaster.
He had tried to show the Titanides how to use new weapons in their war with the angels, in direct violation of First Contact procedures and United Nations regulations. But they had written that off as a simple desire to help the Titanides.

So they had taken him on their climb up the cable to the hub. And he had clubbed Gaby unconscious, left her for dead after raping her. Then he had raped Cirocco, and would have killed them both but for some luck and some fast footwork.

Gaby had wanted to castrate him then and there. Cirocco had not permitted it. She still didn’t regret the decision, even though he had been endless trouble in the next seventy-five years, and had set events in motion that led to Gaby’s death. She had regretted not
killing
him many times.

They had found he was very hard to kill. Gaby had once slit his throat and left him for dead. He had survived it.

So he had become like Snitch. When Cirocco wanted something from Snitch, she had to torture it out of him. And, over the years, whenever Gaby had encountered Gene she had left him a little less than he was—an ear, a few fingers, a testicle. He healed, but unlike Cirocco and Gaby, he scarred.

“No, not on the cable,” Gaby said. “Not directly, I mean. That thing didn’t jerk him around. But it whispered things to him. Gene was like a schizophrenic. I…think he had to have some tendency to rape, for the thing to egg him on to doing it. Later, it didn’t matter what Gene thought about anything. In a sense, Gene was gone. In a sense, he died years ago.”

Gaby sighed, and shook her head.

“It makes me feel ashamed. Because, see, if there’s a miracle here, it’s in how much he
resisted
, and for how long. Even to coming here…the one place in the wheel where Gaea doesn’t
ever
look. She still gets reports from the mole, but she pretends they’re coming from somewhere else.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because she’s crazy. And…something else you’ll see in a minute.”

Conal had rejoined them now. He still looked green.

“What did she
do
to him?” he said, with a quiet intensity.

For a moment Cirocco thought he was asking about what she had done. But he was looking at Gaby, and Gaby explained what Gaea had done, and how long ago, and what it had meant. Conal took it all in silence.

“What about Calvin?” Cirocco asked.

“He got one, too. But Whistlestop knew about it, and killed it almost immediately. I don’t know how. Whistlestop didn’t bother to tell us…which I blame him for, a little, even though I know he isn’t wrapped up in human concerns.” She shrugged. “Killing the thing in Calvin’s head is the reason he’s dying now.”

“Who’s Calvin?” Conal wanted to know.

“Remember your comic book?” Cirocco asked. “He was the black one.”

“He’s still alive, too?”

“Yes.” Cirocco turned to Gaby again. “What about Bill?”

“When he went back to Earth, he resigned from NASA and went to work as an agent for Gaea. All quite openly, but he had clandestine activities. I
think
he got one like Gene did, but I don’t know. Don’t ask me about April or August; I don’t know what Gaea did with them.”

“How much
do
you know? Can you tell me more now?”

“Knew he was up there,” Gene said. They all looked at him.

“He liked fish,” Gene clarified, and gestured to the bucket. “Got hisself real fat on fish, he did. Didn’t do much for me, fish.” He thumped his scrawny chest. “But I knew he was up there. Pissin’ on my head, he was.” He cackled.

“Do you know who put him there, Gene?” Gaby asked.

“Gaea.”

“What do you think of that?”

“Mean thing to do.” He cackled again, and shook his head. “Been doing some thinking, down here. Been doing me some thinking.”

Gaby spoke to Cirocco as if Gene could not hear. And perhaps he couldn’t.

“The cornpone dialect is a parting gift from Gaea. Remember the movie analogy I told you about? She wanted him to be a character actor. A buffoon, a sidekick…I don’t know. Folksy humor.”

“Real funny,” Conal seethed.

“Tons of fun,” Gaby agreed. “Gaea always had been about as funny as cancer of the rectum.”

“Poked m’own eye out,” Gene said, and cackled. “Thinking real hard, I was. Like to bust a gut, thinking. It just popped right out. Hurt like the dickens. Tried to put ’er back in.” He cackled again. “She’ll grow back in, though. Always happens that way. Like to sawed my hand off, once, trying to stop thinking. She grew back, too.” He pondered this. “Thinking hurts,” he concluded.

“Did you think of something, Gene?” Gaby asked.

He squinted his one eye.

“Sure did,” he said, at last. “Thought something oughta be done. Somebody oughta…whale the daylights out of her, that’s what!” He looked at them defiantly.

“There may be a way, Gene,” Gaby said.

He narrowed his eye suspiciously.

“Don’t kid with ol’ Gene, Gaby.” He looked puzzled, then cackled, then shrugged, and regarded her in the same way a dog would if the dog had just made a mess where he knew he shouldn’t.

“Are you really Gaby? Been meaning to look you up. Wanted to tell you…gosh, I’m really sorry for…” He looked even more puzzled. “…for killing you.”

“That’s all in the past, Gene,” Gaby said.

Gene’s laugh sounded genuine for the first time.

“All in the past. That’s a good one. I’ll have to tell…” He looked around vaguely in the darkness. Then, with difficulty, he brought himself back to his tenuous connection with the present.

“There’s maybe something you can do,” Gaby said. “To Gaea.”

“To Gaea?”

“But it will be dangerous. I’ll be honest. You might get killed.”

Gene studied her. Cirocco wondered if he had understood. Then she saw a tear fall from his eye.

“You mean…I may be able to stop thinking?”

Gaby brought them to Oceanus by the same sort of dizzy-making teleportation she had used in the previous dream. When Cirocco got her bearings, she looked around and felt she had been here before.

But she had not. It simply looked so much like Dione. The big difference was a big, greenish tube running from the ruins of the brain that had once been Oceanus straight up into the darkness overhead. Before the tube reached floor level it split in two parts, going east and west. Cirocco tried to find the image it reminded her of, and finally got it. Old tenement buildings with bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling—extension cords to power the toaster and the television.

The moat was deep and dry. Nothing had been alive in here for a long time. Cirocco turned to Gaby.

“What happened?”

“We’ll probably never know all of it. Parts of it are still in Gaea’s mind. Parts are lost. It was thousands of years ago, like she told us. But the brains were never separate. I think Oceanus just…died. Gaea couldn’t accept it.

“The human analogy can only be pushed so far before it breaks down, but I don’t have a better way of explaining it to you.

“Gaea felt betrayed. She refused to believe in something so fantastic as Oceanus’s death. So her mind
did
split up, and she grew this nerve down to here—that part goes to the Hyperion brain, and the other one to Mnemosyne—and…
became
Oceanus. And that part of her was a bastard. Some sort of physical struggle did occur, but I don’t think it was as dramatic as Gaea described it to you. It was always Gaea talking to herself. When you talk to
any
of the regional brains, you’re really talking to a
fragment of Gaea’s personality.