by John Varley
The man saw nothing the second time he looked back, nor the third. There was nothing to be seen the fourth time, either, and for a very good reason. Conal was in front of him by then.
It wasn’t too hard to figure out where the man was going; the location of the Iron Masters’ trading post was well-known. There was no sense in keeping a kidnapped human baby any longer than you had to; most humans took a dim view of babylegging. So Conal positioned himself on a narrow pier and waited.
The man came hurrying along, still intent on pursuit from behind. Conal had the feeling the man had heard those screams and they had rattled him. He did what Conal had expected, which was hold the baby up in front of him while he went for Conal with a knife in his right hand. Conal grabbed his wrist and broke it; the man cried out and the knife fell. With his other hand, Conal reached around and stabbed the man in the back. He dropped the baby and Conal caught it, then pulled his knife out and eased the man down onto the wooden dock.
He made sure the baby was all right, then knelt beside the kidnapper.
Man. Okay, in Bellinzona, thirteen or fourteen years was enough to make you a man. It still didn’t feel right to Conal. He still looked like a boy. He was Japanese, Conal thought. That wasn’t rare, either. The human population of Gaea was roughly proportional to the population of Earth, which meant there were a lot more brown and black and yellow skins than white.
The boy was in a lot of pain, babbling something in his native tongue, and it looked like it was going to take him a while to die. Conal held up the knife and raised his eyebrows in what he hoped was a universal questioning gesture. The boy nodded excitedly. Conal slipped the blade between the ribs and into the heart, and the boy was dead in a moment.
He wiped the blade and put it away.
“The big hero,” he muttered. It was a shitty world when you couldn’t kill a baby-murdering human carcinoma and feel good about it. As usual, Cirocco had the last word. There were just not a hell of a lot of things you could do in this life that didn’t taste bad in one way or another.
***
There was the problem of what to do with the baby.
He could think of several things. There were religious orders and some other organizations that took in orphans. Of these, the strongest was the Free Females—also, in his opinion, the likeliest to provide proper care for an infant.
The baby was bundled in some sort of spacer’s carrying pack; it was not immediately obvious how to unfasten it. But he finally managed. He looked in the pertinent place, and shook his head. Okay, so the Free Females wouldn’t want the little guy. Who was the next best?
He had a funny thought. It was impossible, of course, but what if…?
So he headed back toward the Portal.
***
They were still there, still alive. Unless something happened soon, though, they would not be alive much longer.
There was a crowd of about a hundred of the toughest, meanest types Bellinzona had to offer, standing in a semi-circle fifty meters away from the rock wall where the two women were cornered. The area in between was littered with bodies. Conal stopped counting after two dozen. There were many more than that. He stood at the back of the crowd, trying to figure out what had happened.
The clue was in the bodies. Most of the ones close to the two women had died of knife wounds. The more distant ones had wounds seldom seen anymore in Gaea: round wounds about the size of a dime. His guess was confirmed when one of the people in the crowd threw a spear, and one of the women shot him in the stomach. Conal ducked. The crowd moved back, but inexorably began to close in again. The temptation was just too great.
It was a stand-off. No one in the crowd knew how much ammunition the two had left. Had they charged as a group the mob could have overwhelmed them, but there was no organization among these jackals.
He thought about it, and saw the irony. Obviously, the two had a limited number of bullets, or they would simply have shot everyone within range. Nobody in the crowd wanted to soak up a bullet just to enable someone else to grab the treasure. So the outcome, in minutes or hours, would be for the women to run out of bullets, in which case they could be attacked again—but then it wouldn’t be worth it.
Conal took another look at the tall one. Seventeen, he thought. Maybe eighteen. Long blonde hair, fierce blue eyes. She was beautiful, as he had already observed. But there was something else about her, something she shared with the older woman—her mother? It was a look that said she would die on her feet, fighting, that she would never be taken alive. He respected that. He had learned what it meant to be taken alive, and it was never going to happen to him again, either.
Another spear was thrown, and the tall one snapped off another shot. This one went through the spear-thrower and into the heart of a man standing behind him. Nice gun, Conal thought.
Where were the Free Females? he wondered, then saw them. They were also backed to the wall, but one was dead, another badly wounded. The third crouched by her sisters, an arrow ready, looking very frightened. The two groups were twenty meters apart, and the newcomers showed no signs of wishing to join up with the archer. Who the hell were these people, anyhow? Apparently they didn’t trust anyone. He hadn’t seen anybody so suspicious since…well, since Cirocco Jones. It wasn’t going to be easy to rescue them.
Until that moment, he hadn’t realized he was going to rescue them. He wasted a few minutes trying to talk himself out of it. Looked at reasonably, it seemed the most foolhardy thing he had tried since the day he swaggered into a bar and told the most dangerous woman alive he planned to kill her.
He looked down at the face of the baby boy.
“What the hell do you have to smile about, mister?” Conal asked him. Then he turned and hurried back over the bridge.
***
“A hundred, did you say?” The Titanide named Serpent raised a dubious brow.
“Hell, Serpent, you know I can’t count to twenty-one without opening my fly. There’s about a hundred, maybe a hundred twenty.”
“Describe the smaller one to me again?”
“Drawings on her face. A real fright mask. The other one—”
“They are tattoos,” Serpent said.
“You mean they don’t come off? How do you know?”
“She has a third eye drawn on her-forehead, doesn’t she.”
“Yeah…yeah, I think so. Her hair was bouncing around a lot. They were pretty busy trying to look six ways at once…. How did you know?”
“I know her.”
“Then you’ll come?”
“Yes, I think I will.” He looked around the big warehouse that served the Titanides as a trading post, picked up two other Titanides with his eyes. “In fact, I think we’ll make it a troika.”
***
They sounded like the Apocalypse minus one as they thundered over the wooden bridge. Conal, clinging to Serpent’s back, wished he had a bugle. It was the friggin’ cavalry to the rescue, by God. The people in the back of the mob spent only a moment gaping at the sight, then scurried like hyenas from a carcass. They ran anywhere they could go. Many of them jumped into the putrid waters of the lake.
But a lot didn’t have time to flee. The Titanides waded in, weaponless, and began breaking necks.
Conal had worried the women might fire at these apparitions, but apparently their suspicious natures didn’t extend to Titanides. They watched, alert for an opportunity to break through and get away from the wall. Then Serpent lifted Conal and tossed him over the heads of the circle of people.
He landed on his feet and just managed to stay on them, stumbling forward, holding the baby out in front so they wouldn’t be tempted to shoot him. He had been gone for almost a rev, and during that time the women had been stoned by the crowd. He tripped over a large, loose rock, fell, and crawled around the makeshift barricade of luggage they had been crouching behind.
He looked up into the face of the blonde amazon. Nineteen, he decided. There was a line of drying blood do
wn the left side of her face. He felt a surge of anger; he wanted to kill the bastard who did that. There was more pressing business, however, such as the gun she held to his temple. He held out the baby and put on his most winning smile.
“Hi. I’m Conal, and I think this belongs to you.”
Another of Cirocco’s favorite aphorisms: Never Expect Gratitude. Her upper lip curled contemptuously, and she jerked her head toward the older woman.
“Not me. It’s hers.”
Travelogue
At about the same time Conal was charging to the rescue in Bellinzona, an angel came to Cirocco Jones in Phoebe.
She stood at the edge of the three-kilometer cliff that marked the northern highlands and watched the angel approach from the south. Beyond the angel was a dark mountain. It had four distinct peaks, each a different height. To Cirocco, it resembled a broken bottle planted butt-first in the ground, with dirt heaped up around it. Others had seen a ruined belfrey. Cirocco admitted the aptness of that analogy: there were even bats circling it. Or at least they looked like bats. The peak was twenty kilometers away. To be seen at that distance, the bats had to be the size of jetliners.
Cirocco knew the place well. She had spent some time there many years ago. It was not something she liked to remember.
The angel swept above her, circled to lose altitude, then hovered by beating his brilliant wings. He was unwilling to set foot on Phoebe. Cirocco knew that hovering was taxing for an angel, so she did not waste words.
“Kong?” she shouted.
“Dead. Two, three hundred revs.”
“Gaea?”
“Gone.”
She thought it over for a second, then waved her thanks.
Cirocco watched him into the distance, then sat down on the edge of the cliff. She removed her boots—lovely brown knee-length things of Titanide manufacture, supple and waterproof—folded them into a small, flat bundle, and stowed them in her pack. Then she shouldered the pack, checking its straps and the few items attached to her belt, turned around, and began climbing down the cliff.
***
An Acapulco cliff-diver would have beaten her down the side of that cliff, but nothing else human could have. With bare feet and hands, ignoring the rope coiled in her pack, she moved down the difficult, near-vertical slope faster than most people could have gone down a ladder. She did it without giving it much thought. Her hands and feet knew what to do.
She had thought about this from time to time, when other people reminded her that something she was doing was remarkable. She knew she was no longer quite human. She also knew she was a long way from being super-human. It was all a matter of perspective. Some of it was a matter of learning from every event in one’s life, and Cirocco did that well. Most of her mistakes were decades behind her. Some of it was knowing one’s limits, high as they might be. An observer watching her progress down the cliff would have thought she was in an awful hurry, taking insane chances. Actually, she could have done it a lot faster.
Cirocco looked to be between thirty-five and forty years old, but it depended on where you looked. The skin on her hands and neck and face looked more like thirty; the wiry arms and marathon legs seemed older, while the eyes were older still. A hard woman to judge, was Cirocco Jones. She looked very strong, but appearances are deceiving. She was much stronger than she looked.
When she reached the gentle hills at the bottom of the highland cliffs she put on her boots and began to run, not because she was in a big hurry but because there was nothing else to do and it was her natural gait.
***
She covered the twenty kilometers in a little over a rev. She would have done it faster, but there had been three rivers to swim. It didn’t take long to scale Kong Mountain. It was just a steady upward slope until the jagged multiple peaks were reached, and she had no need to climb them. There was a broad highway leading into Kong’s den.
She took the last part slowly. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the angel. If he said Kong was dead, then he was dead. But the smell of the place brought back unpleasant memories.
The rock arched over her and soon she was walking in gloom. Twice she had to detour around twenty-meter lozenges sitting in the middle of the path. These were the “bats” she had seen from a distance. They were actually more of a cross between a reptile and a garden slug, massing ten or twelve tonnes. With their pterodactyl wings folded against their bodies, they might have been mistaken for collapsed circus tents. They certainly did not seem to be alive, but they were. They would sometimes hibernate for as long as a myriarev. They flew by crawling on their slug-foot to the top of one of Kong’s spires, detaching themselves, and gliding for days at a time. As far as Cirocco knew, they were harmless. She never had figured out what they ate, or why they flew. She suspected they had been made merely to give the place the proper atmosphere. In Gaea, that was not an unreasonable assumption to make.
She reached the end of the passage and cautiously looked over the edge.
The floor of the cavern was a hundred meters below her. It was a passable copy of the chamber through which a foot-high rubber model of a gorilla had stalked in a movie from the 1930s. There was a shallow lake and many rock formations resembling stalactites and stalagmites—all of them much bigger than could have been formed through geological processes in Gaea’s three million years. Like many places in Gaea, it was a carefully constructed setting.
But it was a ruined setting. Many of the rock formations had been snapped off. The lake was churned to sludge, the muddy shoreline pocked with footprints three meters deep. The water had a pink tinge. And centered in the weak, slanting rays of light that found their way through the vaulted ceiling was the star of the show; the mighty Kong, eighth wonder of the world.
Cirocco remembered when he’d looked better.
He was on his back, surrounded by Lilliputian swarms of Iron Masters who were busy dismantling him.
They went about it with their customary thoroughness, speed, and efficiency. A rail line had been run in through the southern entrance of the mountain. Cirocco knew it would connect with a funicular down the slope, probably joining a new spur from their Black Forest roadbed, in turn joining the main Phoebe-Arges line. A train idled at the railhead, a 2-10-4 chromium-plated steam engine presiding over twenty hopper cars normally used for iron ore from the Black Forest, now full of bits of Kong. The Iron Masters were good at railroads.
They were good at a lot of things. They had Kong down to a head, a torso, and part of an arm. There were massive bones being sliced up by noisy steam-powered saws.
It was gruesome, but fascinating. Cirocco had expected Kong would stink to high heaven after three hundred revs—almost two weeks. Not that the place didn’t stink—it had in the best of times, she recalled, because it had never occurred to Kong to shovel out the tonnes of manure he generated every kilorev or even to step outside to relieve himself. But he did not appear to be rotting.
This annoyed Cirocco. Okay, so there was no law saying he had to rot, but the bastard ought to rot.
Still, there he was, hacked away up to his surprisingly complex ribcage, looking as fresh as the day he was slaughtered. Iron Master crews were cutting at his body with big flensing knives on long sticks, detaching hunks of pink meat, lifting them with hooks powered by a donkey engine and a tall mast like the ones loggers erect deep in the forest.
Another hectorev and he’d be gone.
It was no loss to Cirocco. She doubted anything could ever make her feel sorry for the great, idiotic beast. If anybody wept for him, she would invite the bleeding heart to spend a year in Kong’s dungeons, watching him bite the heads off live Titanides. His huge head was turned toward Cirocco. Funny about Kong: he didn’t look like a gorilla. His was a chimp’s head, complete with silly-putty lips and flapping ears. His pelt was orangutan-brown and matted with filth.
There were only two things about the scene that really interested her, aside from the good news of his demise. Who had killed him? An
d why did the Iron Masters have his one remaining arm strapped down with heavy cables?
Meet, meet, meet, meeeeeet!
Cirocco turned slowly at the sound, spotted the little bolex perched ten meters above her in a rocky niche. It goggled down at her, quiet now.
Ah ha! she thought.
“C’mere critter,” she crooned, climbing up after it. “Here boy, c’mon, I won’t hurt you.” She made all the whistling and tongue-clicking sounds appropriate to summoning a puppy, but the bolex squealed and backed into its niche, which was deeper than Cirocco had supposed. She tried reaching in for it, but it just retreated farther. She pulled back, stymied for a moment.
She considered asking the Iron Masters for help. They’d quickly blow the little bugger out. Then she had a better idea. She went back down to her ledge and began to dance and sing.
Cirocco was an excellent singer but Isadora Duncan would have had nothing to fear from her. Nevertheless, she worked at it, making enough noise so some of the Iron Masters looked up from their work for a moment—only to look back, doubtless filing away one more example of indecipherable human behavior in their cool, tin-foil brains.
Soon the bolex peered out. Cirocco danced faster. Its glassy eye glistened. She saw it stick out for a zoom shot, and soon it was scampering down, its eye held rock-steady. No bolex had ever been able to resist action.
When it got close enough she grabbed it. The bolex squealed, but it was defenseless, It kept shooting. Cirocco knew it must have run out of film long ago if it had come here with the Pandemonium Festival. And sure enough, the associateproducer attached to its back was dead. She peeled it off—they held on like leeches, long after they had become nothing but film canisters—and let the bolex go. It continued to shoot as it backed away, backed away, obviously ecstatic at the shots it was getting until it fell off the ledge and crashed on the rocks below.