by John Varley
“The bastard threw up on my tail,” the Titanide said.
“Yeah?” came another voice, which he recognized as Cirocco Jones’s.
So the Demon was somewhere near his feet.
He thought he would go mad. He screamed, he pleaded with them, but they said nothing. It was impossible that the thing could climb such a slope by itself, and yet it was doing it with both Conal and Cirocco on its back, and doing it about as fast as Conal could have walked on level ground.
Just what sort of animal was this Titanide?
***
They brought him to a cavern midway up the cliff. It was just a hole in the rock, ten feet high and about as wide, forty feet deep. There was no path of any kind leading to it.
He was dumped, still in his cocoon of rope. Cirocco wrestled him into a sitting position.
“In a little while, you’re going to answer some questions,” she said.
“I’ll tell you anything.”
“You’re damn right you will.” She grinned at him again, then hit him across the face with the barrel of his own gun. He was about to protest when she hit him again.
***
Cirocco had to hit him four times before she was sure he was out. She would have hit him with the gun butt, except that would have pointed the barrel at her, and she hadn’t lived to be one hundred and twenty-three by doing stupid things like that.
“He shouldn’t have called me a witch,” she said.
“Don’t look at me,” Hornpipe said. “I would have killed him back at La Gata.”
“Yeah.” She sat back on her heels and let her shoulders sag. “You know, sometimes I wonder what’s so great about reaching one hundred twenty-four.”
The Titanide said nothing. He was loosening Conal’s bonds and stripping him. He had been with the Wizard for many years, and knew her moods.
The back of the cavern was ice. On a hot day like this one, a trickle of water flowed over the rock floor. Cirocco knelt beside a pool. She splashed water on her face, then took a drink. It was icy cold.
Cirocco had spent many nights here when things got uncomfortable down at the rim. There was a stack of blankets as well as several bales of straw. There were two wooden pails: one for use as a latrine, and the other to catch drinking water. A hammock was suspended between two pitons driven into the rock. An old tin washboard provided the only other amenity. When she had to stay for a long time, Cirocco would string a clothesline across the mouth of the cavern to catch the dry updrafts.
“Hey, we missed one,” Hornpipe said.
“One what?”
The Titanide tossed her a comic book which had been stuffed into Conal’s back pocket. She caught it, and watched the Titanide work for a moment.
There was a heavy stake embedded in the floor of the cave. The naked bodybuilder had been tied to it, sitting down, and his ankles fastened to stakes about three feet apart. It was a totally defenseless posture. Hornpipe was tying Conal’s head to the post by wrapping a wide leather strap around his forehead.
The man’s face was a wreck. It was crusted with dried blood. His nose was broken, and his cheekbones, but Cirocco thought his jaw was okay. His mouth was swollen and his eyes were tiny slits.
She sighed, and looked at the crumpled comic book. The cover said “The Wizard of Gaea,” and showed her old ship, the Ringmaster, in its death throes. Even after this long she hated to look at it.
It was a dedicated book, in that all the characters were named and could not be changed by the purchaser. Most of Conal’s books had provision to punch in one’s own name for the hero.
The characters were familiar. There were Cirocco Jones, and Gene, and Bill, and Calvin, and the Polo Sisters, and Hornpipe the Younger, and Meistersinger.
And, of course, someone else.
Cirocco closed the book and swallowed to get rid of the heat at the back of her throat. Then she sprawled in the hammock and started to go through it.
“Are you really going to read that thing?” Hornpipe asked.
“You can’t read it. There are no words.” Cirocco had never actually seen a book like “The Wizard of Gaea,” but she understood the principle. The colors glowed, or strobed, or glistened and felt wet to the touch. Buried in the ink were microscopic balloonchips. When you touched a panel the characters in it delivered their lines. Sound effects had replaced the old printed tzings, ker-pows, braka-braka’s and screeches.
The dialogue was even worse than Conal’s in La Gata, so she simply looked at the pictures. The story was easy enough to follow.
It was even accurate, in its broad outlines.
She saw her ship approaching Saturn. There was the discovery of Gaea, a thirteen-hundred-kilometer black wheel in orbit. Her ship was destroyed, and all the crew emerged inside after a period of weird dreams. They took a ride on a blimp, built a boat and sailed down the river Ophion, met the Titanides. Cirocco was mysteriously able to sing the Titanide language. The group got embroiled in the war with the Angels.
The characters screwed a lot more than she remembered. There were very steamy scenes between Cirocco and Gaby Plauget, and more between Cirocco and Gene Springfield. The last was an utter fabrication, and the first was out of sequence.
Everyone was armed to the teeth. They carried more weapons than a battalion of mercenaries. All the men bulged with muscles, worse than Conal Ray, and all the women had tits the size of watermelons that kept bursting free of the skimpy leather hammocks supporting them. They encountered monsters Cirocco had never heard of, and left behind nothing but bloody gobbets of flesh.
Then it got interesting.
She saw Gaby, Gene, and herself climbing one of the huge cables that led to the hub of Gaea, six hundred kilometers above. The three of them made camp, and the shenanigans started. It appeared to be a love triangle, with Cirocco involved with both her companions. She and Gaby plotted by the campfire, exchanging words of undying love, things like “Oh, God, Gaby, I love your hands on my hot, wet pussy.”
The next morning—though Cirocco remembered the trip as having taken a lot longer than that—at their audience with the great Goddess Gaea, Gene was offered the position of Wizard. He lowered his head humbly to accept, and Cirocco grabbed him by the hair, pulled his head back, and slit his throat from ear to ear. Blood spilled down the page, and she kicked his head contemptuously out of the way. Gaea—who was a lot more chickenshit than Cirocco remembered her—made Cirocco Wizard, with Gaby as her wicked assistant.
There was a lot more. Cirocco sighed and closed the book.
“You know what?” she said. “He may be telling the truth.”
“I thought so.”
“He could be just a fool.”
“Well, you know the penalty for foolishness.”
“Yeah.” She tossed the comic away, picked up one of the wooden pails, and threw two gallons of ice water into Conal’s face.
***
He awoke gradually. He was being pushed and pinched, but it all seemed far away. He didn’t even know who he was.
Finally he knew he was naked, bound beyond any hope of escape. His legs were spread wide and he couldn’t move them. He couldn’t see anything until Jones pried one of his blood-crusted eyes open. That hurt. There was a strap immobilizing his head, and that hurt, too. In fact, everything hurt.
Jones was in front of him, sitting on an overturned pail. Her eyes were as deep and black as ever as she studied him dispassionately. Finally he could stand it no longer.
“Are you going to torture me?” The words came out slurred.
“Yep.”
“When?”
“When you tell me a lie.”
His thoughts were moving around like glue, but something in the way she looked at him inspired him to work it out.
“How will you know if I’m lying?” he said.
“That’s the tough part,” she admitted.
She held up a knife, turned it in front of his face. She put the edge lightly along the top of his foot a
nd drew it slowly toward her. There was no pain, but a line of blood appeared. She held it up again, and waited.
“Sharp,” he ventured. “Very sharp.”
She nodded, and put the knife down.
She took the cigar from her mouth, knocked off some ash, and blew on the tip until it glowed fiercely. She put the glowing tip about a quarter inch away from his foot.
The skin began to blister, and he felt it this time; it wasn’t like the knife at all.
“Yes,” he said, “yes, yes, I understand.”
“Not yet, you don’t.” She held it right there.
He tried to move his foot within the bindings, but the Titanide’s hand appeared from behind him and held it rock steady. He bit his lip, he looked away; his eyes were dragged back. He started to scream. He screamed for a long time, and the pain never got any better.
Even when she took it away—in five minutes? ten?—the pain remained. He sobbed helplessly for a long time.
At last he could look at it again. The skin was burned black in a circle about an inch around. He looked at her, and she was watching him again, as emotional as a stone. He hated her. He had never hated anyone or anything as he hated her then.
“That was twenty seconds,” she said.
He wept when he realized she was telling the truth. He tried to nod, tried to tell her he understood what it meant, that twenty seconds was not a very long time, but he could not control his voice. She waited.
“There’s one more thing you should understand,” she said. “The foot is fairly sensitive, but it’s a long way from being the most sensitive part of your body.” He held his breath as she quickly flashed the tip near his nose, just long enough for him to feel the heat. Then she drew a fingernail slowly from his chin to his crotch. He felt faint heat all the way down, and when her hand stopped, he heard and smelled hair being singed.
When she took her hand away without burning him down there, an astonishing thing happened to Conal. He stopped hating her. He was sorry to see the hate go. It had been all he had left. He was naked and he hurt everywhere and she was going to hurt him some more. Hatred would have been a nice thing to hang onto.
She put the cigar back in her mouth and clenched it in her teeth.
“Now,” she said. “Just what sort of deal did you make with Gaea?”
And he began to cry again.
***
It went on forever. The sad thing was that the truth was not going to save him. She thought he was one thing, when he really was something else.
She burned him twice more. She didn’t put the cigar to the black spot, where the nerves were dead, but to the raw, swelling edges where the nerves were screaming. After the second time he concentrated his entire being on telling her whatever she wanted to hear.
“If you didn’t see Gaea,” Jones said, “who did you see? Was it Luther?”
“Yes. Yes, it was Luther.”
“No it wasn’t. It wasn’t Luther. Who was it? Who sent you to kill me?”
“It was Luther. I swear, it was Luther.”
“Is Luther a Priest?”
“…yes?”
“Describe him. What does he look like?”
He hadn’t the faintest idea, but he had learned a lot about her eyes. They were far from expressionless. There were a million things to be read in them and he was the world’s best student of Cirocco’s eyes. He saw the changes in them that meant agony and the smell of burning flesh, and he started to talk. Halfway through his description he realized he was delineating the evil sorcerer from “The Golden Blades,” but he kept talking until she slapped him.
“You’ve never met Luther,” Jones said. “Who was it, then? Was it Kali? Blessed Foster? Billy Sunday? Saint Torquemada?”
“Yes!” he shouted. “All of them,” he added, lamely.
Jones shook her head, and Conal heard, as though from afar, the sound of whimpering. She was going to do it, he saw it in her eyes.
“Son,” she said, and sounded sorrowful, “you’ve been lying to me, and I told you not to lie.” She took the cigar from her mouth, blew on it again, and moved it toward his crotch.
His eyes bulged as he tried to see it. When the pain came, it was exactly as bad as he had imagined it would be.
***
It was hard for them to bring him back to life, because he would have preferred to remain dead. There was no pain in death, no pain….
But he did wake up, to all the familiar pain. He was surprised to find it didn’t hurt…down there. He could not bring himself to even think the word for the place she had burned him.
She was looking at him again.
“Conal,” she said. “I’m going to ask you one more time. Who are you, what have you done, and why did you try to kill me?”
So he told her, having come full circle back to the truth. He hurt badly, and he knew she was going to torture him. But he no longer wanted to live. There was more pain ahead, but there was peace at the end.
Jones picked up the knife. He whimpered when he saw it, and tried to make himself small, but it didn’t work any better than it had before.
She cut the rope binding his left foot to the stake. At the same time, the Titanide loosened the knots binding his head to the post. His head fell forward, his chin hit his chest, and he kept his eyes firmly closed. But he eventually had to look.
What he saw was a miracle. Some of his pubic hair had been singed, but his penis, shriveled in fear, was unmarked. Beside it was a small piece of ice slowly turning into a puddle on the rock floor.
“You didn’t hurt me,” he said.
Jones looked surprised. “What do you mean? I burned you three times.”
“No, I mean you didn’t hurt me.” He gestured with his chin.
“Oh. Right.” Oddly, she looked embarrassed. Conal began to taste the thought that he might live. To his surprise, it tasted good.
“I don’t have the stomach for this,” Jones admitted. Conal thought that, if she didn’t, she put on a damn good act. “I can kill cleanly,” she went on. “But I hate inflicting pain. I knew, in the state you were in, that you couldn’t tell heat from cold.”
It was the first time she had done anything like explain her actions. He was afraid to question her, but he had to do something.
“Then why did you torture me?” he asked, and immediately saw it was the wrong question. Anger showed in her eyes for the first time and Conal almost died of fright, because of all the things he had seen in those eyes nothing was so terrifying as her anger.
“Because you’re a fool.” She stopped, and it was as if twin doors had been closed over a roaring furnace; her eyes were cool and black again, but red heat glowed just beneath.
“You walked into a hornet’s nest and you’re surprised you got stung. You walked up to the oldest, meanest, and most paranoid human being in the solar system and told her you were going to kill her, and then you expected her to play by your comic book rules. The only reason you didn’t die is my standing orders that if it looks like a human, let it live until I can question it.”
“You didn’t think I was human?”
“I had no reason to assume it. You might have been some new kind of Priest, or maybe some completely different practical joke. Sonny, in here we don’t take anything at face value, we…”
She stopped, stood up, and turned away from him. When she turned back, she seemed almost apologetic.
“Well,” she said. “There’s no point in lectures. It’s none of my business how you’ve lived your life; it’s just that when I see stupidity I always want to correct it. Can you handle him, Hornpipe?”
“No problem,” said the voice from behind him. He felt the ropes loosen; everywhere they came away caused pain, but it was wonderful. Jones squatted in front of him again, and looked at the ground.
“You’ve got a few choices,” she said. “We’ve got some poison that’s fairly painless and works quick. I could put a bullet through your head. Or you could jump, if you’d rat
her meet it that way.” She spoke as though she were asking if he preferred cherry pie, cake, or ice cream.
“Meet what?” he said. Her eyes came up again, and he saw mild disappointment; he was being stupid again.
“Death.”
“But…I don’t want to die.”
“Most people don’t.”
“We’re out of poison, Captain,” the Titanide said. He lifted Conal as though he were a rag doll, and started toward the mouth of the cave. Conal was not at his best. He felt far from the strength he normally possessed. He fought, and the nearer he came to the edge the stronger he grew, yet it meant nothing. The Titanide handled him easily.
“Wait!” he shouted. “Wait! You don’t have to kill me!”
The Titanide set him on his feet at the edge of the drop, and held him as Jones put the muzzle of his gun to his temple and pulled back the hammer.
“Do you want the bullet or not?”
“Just let me go!” he screamed. “I’ll never bother you again.”
The Titanide did let him go, and it surprised him so badly he did a wild dance on the edge, almost fell over, went to his knees and then his belly and hugged the cool stone with his feet hanging over the edge.
They were standing ten feet from him. He got to his knees slowly and carefully, then sat back on his heels.
“Please don’t kill me.”
“I’m going to, Conal,” she said. “I suggest you stand up and go out on your feet. If you want to pray or something, I’ll give you time for that.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to pray. And I don’t want to get up. It doesn’t really matter, does it?”
“That’s always the way I figured it.” She raised the gun.
“Wait! Wait, please, just tell me why.”
“Is that a last request?”
“I guess so. I…I’m stupid. You’re so much smarter than I am, you can squash me like a…but why do you have to kill me? I swear, you’ll never see me again.”