by John Varley
Cirocco got out a knife and slit the assosh up the middle. Inside it was quite dry, and sixteen hundred feet of super-eight film was coiled on a reel delicate as a seashell.
She pulled out several feet of the film, held it up to the light, and squinted at it. Not much detail could be seen, of course, but it was quite clear there were two figures wrestling. One was brown and one was white. The white one was naked, and female. There could be little doubt who it was.
It must have been spectacular, but that was no surprise. Gaea had few budget restrictions. Cirocco could imagine the scene: Kong, master of all he surveyed, standing in dumb puzzlement as the obscene circus encamped, perhaps giving the fifteen-meter woman a wary eye. Kong was programmed to kill Titanides and human males, and to imprison human females. But Gaea would not have smelled right. None of the other mad creatures associated with Pandemonium would have looked like food or likely captives, either. And without that, Kong was essentially a pussycat. He was lazy, and he was stupid. Gaea’s big problem had most likely been getting him to put up a fight.
Cirocco almost felt sorry for Kong.
“Gaea deeded the corpse to us.”
She turned to face the Iron Master who had joined her on the ledge.
“Fine,” she said. “You can have him.”
“She said you were welcome to a percentage, should you happen by.”
She studied the Master. From the amount of gleaming brightwork on his body she knew him to be a Tycoon, high in the hive hierarchy. She could see herself reflected in his carapace. It was chrome plating. Chromium was rare in Gaea. The Iron Masters worked hard to scrape what they could find from deep shafts in the Black Forest of Phoebe. For a while there had been a thriving trade in antique automobile bumpers, but the war had interrupted that.
Cirocco was deeply ambivalent about the Masters. It was impossible to like creatures who incubated their young in human infants. On the other hand, she did not hate them as so many humans did. Perhaps they were “monsters,” but only if you concede that eating veal or baby lamb chops made humans into monsters. They were not nearly the threat to human children that the children’s own parents and neighbors were. Baby stealing was a cottage industry in Bellinzona. The Iron Masters never stole anything; they paid for what they got, and they paid top dollar, and they bought only a few. Compared to any general, from Caesar to the ones currently rearranging the Earth, the Iron Masters were saints.
Still, they were creepy, the most alien of Gaea’s sentient races. The best thing about them was their utter reliability.
“Why should I be entitled to a percentage?” Cirocco asked the Tycoon.
“One never asks Gaea why.”
“You ought to try it sometime.” But that was no use; Cirocco was never going to get a rebellion going among the Masters. This one still regarded her impassively—if something with no obvious eyes can be said to regard. It reminded her of a picture in an old book, something from her childhood. Owl, from Winnie-the-Pooh. It was tall and tubular, with little peaks on top that might be ears. Its metal body flared into a skirt near the ground, its odd feet barely visible behind it. The creature had a great many arms—Cirocco never knew just how many—that all fit into recesses as neatly as a blade into a jackknife.
“For my percentage, I’ll take a ride back to Ophion.”
“Done.” The thing turned and started to waddle off, penguin-like.
“What will you do with him?”
The Iron Master stopped, and turned again.
“We will find uses.” Which was the creature’s way of saying “none of your business,” Cirocco realized. In a century of dealing with the engineering, trading Masters, she had learned very little about them. She didn’t even know if there really was something like living matter anywhere inside their metal bodies. For a while she had entertained the notion that the ones she saw were all robots, that the real masters never left their carefully guarded island in the Phoebe Sea. She did know that when an Iron Master lost an arm, it did not grow it back; it built a new one, and bolted it on.
“Why do you have him tied down?”
There was a pause. The Tycoon turned slowly to look at Kong, then back to Cirocco. Was it amused? She didn’t see how, but that was what she felt.
“He is still lively.”
Cirocco looked, and felt hair prickle all up and down her neck. Kong’s eyes had opened. He was looking at her, his great brow furrowed. His only remaining arm, which ended at the elbow, had lifted and drawn the cables taut. His eyes rolled and he seemed to be trying to turn his head, but he was too weak. He returned his gaze to her again, forgetting about the problem of the pinned arm.
His lip curled in a tentative, chimp smile that seemed almost wistful.
***
Later, sitting on the back of the train and watching Kong Mountain dwindle in the distance, Cirocco wondered about it.
When would he die? She had watched them take out what must have been his heart, and it was not beating. Reflexes? Like twitching, severed frog’s legs? She doubted it. There had been awareness in those eyes.
Gaea built to last. She had not designed him to get old, to reproduce…or to die. So maybe when the gangs finally chopped his brain up, he could rest.
And maybe not.
She found that she did feel sorry for him.
***
Cirocco reached the main east-west line just north of the Phoebe Sea. She hopped an eastbound freight, thinking it would take her as far as the Arges River, but found the industrious Iron Masters had extended it over fifty kilometers since her last visit to Phoebe, no more than six kilorevs ago. And they were at work at the railhead. They’d be in Tethys soon, she realized. She wondered how they would cope with the sand.
Of course, the sand would be a problem for her, too, but she knew how she would deal with it.
She left the Masters and all their works behind, began running toward the northeast comer of Phoebe. Ahead, Tethys loomed up the curve of Gaea, yellow, desolate, and unforgiving.
***
She ran all the time except when the forage was very good. Cirocco knew ten thousand edible plants in Gaea, over a thousand animals, and even some places where the soil itself could be eaten. There were an equal number of poisonous plants, some of them very similar to the safe ones.
Phoebe was not friendly territory—if such a thing existed any longer. As she began to tire she gave some thought to resting before crossing Tethys. She had been awake for about ninety revs, and running a good part of that time.
She found a deep pool in the Phoebe-Tethys twilight zone. The land there was mountainous and rocky, full of springs and blue lakes. The water in them was not cold. Casting about, she found a deposit of blue clay.
She sat down and removed her boots, then her shirt, which she stuffed into one boot, and her pants, which she put in the other. She removed a slender coil of rope from her pack, then put her boots in the pack and sealed it, along with ten kilos of rocks. She knelt in the clay and began twisting and crushing some broad leaves. When the leaves bled a sticky sap, she worked it into the clay.
Soon the clay was pliable. She rolled in it, rubbed it over every inch of her body and into her hair. When she got up, she was a blue demon with white eyes. The layer of mud was an eighth of an inch thick, but did not crack or flake as she moved.
She dipped the rope in the pool. It began to swell. She fastened one end to a bush at the edge of the water. Then she stepped into the water and submerged, paying the rope out behind her—the rope which had now become a strong breathing tube.
At two fathoms the weak light of the twilight zone was gone. She groped her way onto a silted ledge and settled onto her back with the weighted pack on her stomach. She put the other end of the tube in her mouth and slowed her breathing.
After one minute of self-hypnosis she was deeply asleep.
***
Three hours was as long as she could sleep anymore. She opened her eyes in the cool darkness.
&n
bsp; Something slithered by her; she grabbed it and twisted, then pushed off for the surface. Just short of it, she paused and looked for danger above the water, then cautiously put her face into the air. Nothing. Satisfied, she climbed out and looked at her catch. A highlands rock eel, far south of its normal range. She thought about a fire, rejected it, and tossed the creature back into the pool. Highland eels cooked up fine, but were stringy and bitter raw.
The blue mud peeled off like rubber. It was a wonderful insulator.
She had learned many things in her long life. One was to be as comfortable as you can be all the time. And that meant dry boots, even if one had to sleep underwater. With satisfaction, she opened her pack and retrieved them. It was a wonderful pack, and they were wonderful boots. In her ranking of important things, dry boots came far ahead of food, and slightly before water.
She dressed, pulled on the boots, and started to run again.
***
Whenever possible, Cirocco avoided Tethys altogether. This time she would have to cross it. She holed up in the last patch of scrub brush, took out her tiny spyglass, and scanned the landscape ahead for sign of sand wraiths. She didn’t expect to see them this far north; the condensation from the north wall, though hard to find, was beneath the surface, and deadly to the silicon-based wraiths. Still, she hadn’t come this far by relying on her expectations.
The habit of traveling light had been ingrained for twenty years. Camouflage was an art she had studied at least that long. When God really is looking down from the sky—looking for you, and ready to kill—it pays to be both quick on your feet and hard to see. Her pack held ten kilos of the barest essentials. With the things in it, and the knowledge in her head, she could blend in anywhere.
Cirocco estimated it would be thirty-nine degrees on the sands.
No matter; she knew what to do.
She stripped once more, stuffed her clothing in her pack, and began digging at the base of one of the bushes that seemed dead. But the parched branches were only the top of the plant, and the least interesting part. They radiated away waste moisture.
When she reached the swollen roots a spurt of water washed over her bare feet. She knelt, cupped her hands, arid drank. It was alkaline, but bracing.
With her knife she severed a nodule on one of the roots, then cut it open. A slippery yellow sap oozed out, which she squeezed into her hands and began rubbing over her body. Her skin was the color travel brochures referred to as “bronzed.” It was a nice color, but several shades too dark for the sands of Tethys. She kept rubbing until she was the proper yellow-brown. The sap smelled like juniper. It was also a cure for acne, a property wasted on Cirocco.
There were a dozen scarves in her pack. She selected two of the proper hue, closed up the pack, then wrapped one scarf around her dark hair and the other around the pack itself. When she was done she was almost invisible.
Barefoot, she scrambled down the last rocky outcrop of Phoebe and down to the rolling dunes. She began to run.
***
Two hundred kilometers later, more than halfway across Tethys, she saw someone.
She did what seemed prudent: dived into the sand, wriggled until she was almost totally covered, like a stingray on the ocean floor, and waited.
She was pretty sure who it must be. She felt goosebumps, as she always did, then the feeling faded. It was possible she was going insane. Gaby had died here, a hundred kilometers to the south, twenty years before.
Cirocco didn’t care. She stood up. She was coated in sand. The sweat which had been cooling her so efficiently as she ran now drenched her, began running down her body, leaving clean streaks as it went.
Gaby shimmered in the merciless heat haze, coming down the near side of a dune four hundred meters away. She was nude, as she always was when she came to Cirocco. And why not? Why should a ghost take clothing to the spirit world? She was milk-pale. At first that had made Cirocco uneasy, as if Gaby had been drained of blood. Then she remembered that Gaby had always been pale, before Gaea. She and Cirocco had been the only tanned people in a world of weak sunshine. And then Gaby had been dead. In death, she must have been quite black, though Cirocco had not seen it and never asked those who had.
“You’re safe!” Gaby shouted, still coming toward her.
“Thank you! For how long?”
“All through Tethys.”
Cirocco waited while Gaby vanished behind the last dune, then marched up the far side. Gaby paused for a moment at the top, then started down. Her feet left deep prints in the sand. She was terribly beautiful. Cirocco heard herself sob. She went to her knees, then sat back on her ankles. Her shoulders slumped wearily.
Gaby stopped fifty meters away. Cirocco could not speak; her throat was too thick, and she could not draw a proper bream.
“Are they all right?” she finally managed to say.
“Yes,” Gaby said. “Conal found them. Saved their lives.”
“I knew that boy would turn out useful. Where is he taking them?”
“Where you’re going. You’ll get there ahead of them.”
“Good.” She ransacked her brain. There were forbidden topics. “Uh…is it…are they…”
“Yes, they’re still part of the key. Not all of it.”
“The key to what?”
“I can’t tell you that now. Do you still trust me?”
“Yes,” Unhesitatingly. There had been bad moments, but…
“Yes. I trust you.”
“Good. I wanted to—”
“I love you, Gaby.”
The image started to waver. Cirocco cried out, then jammed the heel of her hand into her mouth. She could see the dune through Gaby’s body.
“I love you, too, Rocky. Or is it Captain, now?”
“It’s whatever you want.”
“I can’t stay, Gaea’s in Hyperion. She’s moving west.”
“But she won’t go into Oceanus.”
“No.”
Gaby was the little woman who wasn’t there. Just an outline, a wish, a hallucination…and she was gone.
Cirocco sat there for almost a rev, pulling herself together, staring at the footprints on the dune where Gaby had been. In the end, as before, she did not go over to touch them. She was terrified to discover they really weren’t there at all.
***
The northern Thea ice-shield began in twilight and curved south and east. Cirocco ran along its edge, in blessed coolness.
There was no question of crossing Thea to the north. The mountains were not impassable—nothing really was, in Cirocco’s experience; she had crossed them once in two kilorevs—but she did not have time for it. The fast way through Thea was over the frozen Ophion, which flowed right down the middle of the region of eternal night.
When she stopped, she was knee-deep in snow, and still naked. It was the work of a few moments to open her pack, reverse her clothes and boots so the white side was visible, and camouflage her pack and hair with white scarves.
She ran, but eventually got tired again. To be sleepy so soon was a sign she was overtaxing herself. She noted it, and looked for a safe haven.
Her requirements were spartan. She dug a hole in a snowbank, crawled in, and packed snow in behind her. As she fell asleep, she remembered that no more than fifty kilometers ahead was the spot where a certain Robin of the Coven had buried herself in snow—tired, frightened, and ignorant of the danger—to wake up with a case of pneumonia. Robin had almost died in Thea.
Cirocco simply slept. Three hours later she woke up, brushed off the snow, and started to run again.
***
It was six hundred kilometers and most of the way across Metis before she again felt the need to sleep.
There were those in Gaea who would not have believed it, but Cirocco Jones—rumored to be capable of regenerating a severed leg, of shape-changing into a serpent, a vulture, a cheetah, and a shark, of wrestling a dozen Titanides and of being able to pass unnoticed through a brightly lighted room—this
same Jones had her limitations. The stories were exaggerations. It was true, she did have a hex power, and she could charm people into believing she was not there, and when she had lost her left foot seventy years ago she had grown it back, but she doubted she could manage a leg. And she could not remain awake forever, like a Titanide.
It was an appalling need, when one thought about it. To become defenseless, to simply lie there while something crept up bent on murder….
She was in the south of Metis, in the region below the great Poseidon sea, beyond the swamp named Steropes that was Metis’ most prominent feature. Here the land was savannah: level, grassy, dotted with windswept trees. In Africa, big cats would be sitting in the trees—or at least Cirocco had always envisioned it that way, though she knew little about Africa. But in Gaea the trees were bright red and leafless. They looked like diagrams of the circulatory system, with the big trunk branching to finer and finer capillaries.
Cirocco planned to sleep like a cat in one of those trees.
She stripped again, wrapped her pack in a red scarf. With her knife, she made deep gouges in the tree trunk. Red sap began to flow. She rubbed it over her skin, gradually becoming a scarlet woman. When she was completely painted she climbed the tree and made her way out on a horizontal branch thirty meters above the ground. She hooked her feet over the branch, letting her knees fall on either side, made a pillow out of her folded hands, and put her head down. In a moment, she was asleep.
***
In Dione, she finally slowed down.
Dione was safety—from Gaea, if not from humans.
She passed to the south of the long lake known as Iris, through mountainous countryside and into the forest surrounding Eris lake, until she reached the river Briareus, one of the longest rivers in Gaea.
At a bend in the river, over a hundred kilometers south of Moros, Peppermint Bay, and Bellinzona, she came upon a treehouse that would have made the Swiss Family Robinson envious.