Demon (GAIA)

by John Varley

  The water—if water it was—had a sweet smell, and was the color and consistency of honey. No, she realized, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t syrupy. Maybe it was more like nectar.

  She went in up to the waist, and she gasped. The fluid was oozing inside her. She could feel it, like a fine oil, as it filled her bowels and her vagina. It seemed that it ought to feel disgusting, but the plain fact was that it didn’t. It felt wonderful. It felt better than anything she had ever known. She shuddered, and felt her knees grow weak. Cirocco supported her. Then the waters were covering her breasts.

  She relaxed into Cirocco’s arms, as the Wizard had told her to do. She closed her eyes, felt a hand pinch her nostrils, and she was lowered into the water.

  It was a dreamy sensation. There was no reason ever to come out. The need to take a breath was building, but when it got strong she felt Cirocco’s lips press against hers, and she inhaled the Wizard’s breath. She let it dribble out slowly.

  She did that for a long time. Robin didn’t count, but she knew it was a long time. Then she stopped. Robin felt the urge to breathe building in her again. Cirocco had told her what to do, but she was still a little frightened. Did she really trust the Wizard that much?

  Well, why not? She felt the hands release her nostrils. The hot nectar began to flow inside. She opened her mouth. Air bubbled out and the waters flowed in.

  There were a few spasms as her lungs filled and she tried to cough away the last of the air. She struggled, but was held firm. Then she was at peace again.

  ***

  Cirocco held her in the water for half a rev, then carried her to shore and put her beside Adam, who still slept. Chris produced a towel and Cirocco started to dry her. Golden fluid dribbled from Robin’s mouth. Cirocco slapped her back, and she began to breathe again, after bringing up the last few pints in her throat. Her skin was brown and almost too hot to touch.

  “You go ahead,” Chris said, taking the towel. “I’ll take care of her.”

  Cirocco nodded, and entered the pool. In a moment she was floating just below the surface. In half a rev she came out, and her long hair, soaking and plastered to her shoulders, was glossy black.

  Chris stayed in the longest. When he came out he was almost an inch taller and his face had changed slightly.

  Cirocco put Robin back into a light trance and Chris lifted her with Adam in her arms. With a glance over his shoulder at Cirocco, Chris set out to take Robin back to Tuxedo Junction, and to make his proposition.

  Five

  Luther stalked the docks of a Bellinzona as empty of people as the dusty streets of the western town in High Noon, with Gary Cooper. It is possible his mind made the connection, as he had recently seen the film at Pandemonium.

  He didn’t look like Gary Cooper. He looked like Frankenstein’s monster after a three-day bender and a car wreck. Most of the left side of his face was gone, baring some jawbone and cracked teeth, part of a mastoid, and a hollow eye socket. Greenish brain tissue showed through a ragged crack in his skull, as if it had leaked out and been haphazardly stuffed back in. His remaining eye was a black pit in a red sea, blazing with righteous fury. Sutures encircled his neck; not scars, but actual thick threads piercing the skin. If they were removed, his head would have fallen off.

  All of his body but his hands was concealed behind a filthy black cassock. The hands bore stigmata which wept blood and pus. One of his legs was shorter than the other. It was not a deformity, but a simple mechanical problem: the leg had once belonged to a nun. It did not slow him down.

  There was no need to hide, and Luther made no attempt to. It wasn’t easy for him and his band at the best of times. Luther was no delight to the nose, but his Apostles’ aroma could stun a hog at fifty paces. Even humans, with their atrophied sense of smell, could usually detect Luther long before he hove into view. Sometimes a downwind stalk worked, but lately the Bellinzonans seemed to have developed a sixth sense where Priests were concerned.

  His twelve Apostles shuffled along behind him. Compared to them, Luther was a beauty.

  They were nothing but zombies, but Luther had once been Pastor Arthur Lundquist, of the American Unified Lutheran Church in Urbana, Illinois. Urbana had been destroyed long ago, and so had Pastor Lundquist, for the most part. Bits and pieces of him had once belonged to other people—Gaea assembled her Priests from the material at hand. But from time to time a stray thought of home passed through his murky brain, a thought of the wife and two children. It tortured him, and made him all the more zealous in God’s work. A lot of air passed through his brain as well, the result of the gunshot wound which had given him his distinctive smile and manner of speech. That tortured him, too.

  He marched up to the edge of the zone of death that led to the Free Female quarter. His eye scanned the fortifications ahead. He saw no one, but he knew they were there, watching him. He stood defiantly, contemptuous of them, his hands on his hips.

  “Enemies of God!” he shouted, or at least tried to. With his left cheek missing he had trouble with any sound that required lips. Enemies came out sounding like “enaweesh.”

  “I auw Luther! I auw here on a wission of God!”

  An arrow sizzled on a flat trajectory and hit him in the chest. All but the feathers went through him. Luther did not even bother to break it off, nor did he move his hands from his hips.

  A Free Female hurried out to the bridge, a torch in her hand. She threw it on the oil which had been spread at the first rumor of Luther’s band in Bellinzona. A wall of fire sprang up between Luther and the Quarter. It began consuming the bridge. The woman hurried back to cover.

  “A child was vrought to thish blace wany…sheveral revs ago. God hash heed of thish child. God will schwile on she who tells we the whereavouts of thish child. Cuf forward, cuf forward, and resheive God’s grashe!”

  No one sprang forth to receive any grace. Luther had expected it, but it still enraged him. He began to howl. He shouted obscenities at the burning bridge, he turned in quick circles and stamped his long leg up and down on the planks of the dock. Soon blood was running from his eye and a mixture of spittle and black phlegm from the open side of his face. The front of his cassock darkened near his hips. The power was on him, the power was building. He flung himself to his knees, extended his arms to heaven, and began to sing.

  “A whitey for-or-tresh ish our God!

  A sword and shield victorious;

  He vrakes the cruel offressor’s rod

  And wins salvation glorious!”

  Verse after verse, the tone-deaf Priest shouted the hymn in a fractured, sibilant bass, bellowing when he forgot the words. It was not the words that mattered, anyway, but the Power, and he felt it on him as he had few times since his resurrection. He reached out, remembered the days when he had preached sermons from his pulpit. He had been something of a thunderer in those days, but nothing like he was today. God would be proud of him. Behind him, even the worm-eaten zombies were moved. They whimpered as if trying to sing, their slack tongues hanging from their horrible mouths and wagging as their bodies swayed.

  And here she came, a single Free Female, standing and throwing aside her weapon. Her smile was a chaotic rictus, her eyes bright and empty as moonies.

  The Free Females were screaming. They had started when Luther began his feculent hymn, and now they redoubled their efforts. They did not scream from fear—though they were all terrified to the depths of their souls—but as a tactic, to drown out the Power. It was a many-throated, astonishing warble, after the manner of Arab women in victory or mourning. Many had jammed cotton or wax into their ears, like Odysseus’s crew, to protect themselves. Luther laughed at that. He knew it was a mistake. With their ears plugged they were more vulnerable, as they could not hear the communal shout, the sound of solidarity that was the only real defense against Luther and his kind.

  She came forward. An arrow followed her, but the hand that loosed it had trembled too much for it to fly true. It missed, and so did a sec
ond. The third sank into her back. She shuddered, but kept walking.

  The Free Females were not shooting out of contempt, or because they thought her a traitor. They knew too well the Power of Luther to cloud women’s minds. They shot at her because death was the merciful alternative.

  “The old evil foe, sworn to work us woe

  With dread and craft and wight he arms himself to fight.

  On Earth he has no equal!”

  She walked into the flames.

  Two more arrows hit her. She fell to her hands and knees as her hair went up like dry tinder. She continued to crawl, blackening. She struggled to her feet, hearing nothing, blinded, and a burning board broke under her. She fell backwards and rolled off the bridge into the water.

  Luther stopped singing and stood up. He watched, smiling as half a dozen Free Females broke from their hiding places and ran forward, shielding their faces from the heat of the flames and his own awful presence. Several of them made horns at him, which amused him even more. Did they really think sticking out pinkie and index finger would protect them?

  They caught their sister’s body with a rope and pulled it onto the deck. She still lived, but that was a minor point. Had she been dead, they would have gone for her with even more determination. Now she could die and have a chance to stay dead.

  “God will funish you!” Luther shouted, then turned to his troops. “Andrew! John! Thaddeus! Phil…Judas!” Five zombies stepped forward, including Philip, whose dim awareness had been unable to decide if he, too, had been called. Luther waved him back impatiently. It was always these four when Luther wanted something done, and the reason was not mysterious. The other eight had a b, m, or p in their names. The names of two-thirds of his disciples were unpronounceable tongue-twisters to Luther.

  “Advance uffon the unvelievers,” he commanded them. “Swite the sinners! ‘In flabing fire taking vengeance on they that know not God, and that ovey not the goshpel!’ Firsht Thesshalonians! One! Eight through nine! Go, wy discifles!”

  Luther watched them march into the flames. They were goners, but they would do some damage first. Already they bristled with arrows, which they utterly ignored, as they ignored the fact that they were burning. Since they were already dead, it hardly mattered.

  The former Pastor Lundquist turned away from it. He could no longer feel pain, nor anything very much like doubt, but sometimes a feeling crept in that made him grope in the dark much as a man who had been blinded, deafened, and had all four limbs amputated might grope. For one thing, it was annoying to see Judas march away to destruction. This was possibly the twentieth “Judas” he had lost. Something always made him choose the biggest, strongest, least decomposed recruit to be Judas. He didn’t know why.

  And something else. Try as he might, he couldn’t conjure the foggiest recollection of what a Thessalonian was.

  ***

  It was habit that led Luther out of town on the path leading by the old graveyard. He didn’t expect to find anything.

  He got lucky.

  There were six funeral pyres waiting to be lit, and there was even freshly turned soil. Luther’s approach had apparently scared off the undertakers before they could torch the corpses. And could it be that someone had actually been buried?

  The two things that almost everyone agreed on in Bellinzona were death and insanity. The insane were left alone as long as they were not violent. And the dead were promptly burned. A truce prevailed in the face of death, and the only example of community spirit Bellinzona had ever known showed itself. Everyone cooperated to get the dead to the graveyard, where they were disposed of in ceremonies taken from the Hindus of the Ganges.

  It had not always been that way. In a town where ninety percent of the population had no relatives, bodies had been ignored. They might rot for days before someone got so disgusted as to kick them into the water and let them sink.

  But then the bodies began to rise again, and climb over the sides of boats and lurk in dark corners. After that, the Vigilantes and Free Females organized burial details.

  Burial proved no better. The dead clawed their way out of the graves. Cremation was the only sure answer.

  “Vut you have to light the fire,” Luther cackled. “Vring the vodies to we,” he told his remaining Apostles.

  Bartholomew and Simon Peter scrabbled in the dirt and came up with a dismembered body. Someone had thought they could beat the system, but Luther knew better. Even this was not beyond the power of almighty God.

  The corpses were fairly fresh, except one that had been gone about two days. One was in a white winding cloth: a rich man, considering the price of fabric in Bellinzona. The rest were naked. Luther slit the cloth over the rich man’s face and knew at once this was Judas Iscariot.

  He worked himself into a minor frenzy. This was nothing compared to the holy-rolling toot he had thrown for the Free Females; resurrection was a routine matter, like handing out wafers. When he was in the proper state he knelt and kissed each pair of cold lips. He had to wait while Peter fit the pieces of the last one together.

  In a few minutes they began opening their eyes. The Apostles helped them to their feet, while Luther studied them with a top sergeant’s eye, That black female could be Thaddeus, he decided. And the Chinese would make a good John. He assigned names without regard to what sex they had been. After a few weeks, it was damn hard to tell, anyway.

  The seven new zombies were weak and unsteady. It would take ten or twenty revs for them to attain their full strength. The dismembered one would take even longer. Luther would have it carried into the woods and left with the two others he would not be needing, to eventually make their way back to Pandemonium. Luther always traveled with just Twelve.

  ***

  By the side of the river, Luther knelt in prayer.

  Good, bad—there wasn’t a lot of difference anymore. Luther could feel hatred, fury, and a religious ecstasy that was a great deal like both hatred and fury. The closest he ever came to feeling good, in the sense that Arthur Lundquist might have understood, was when he communed with God. When he prayed.

  He didn’t do it often. God was a very busy Woman, and didn’t like to be bothered with trivia. Just to have Her not answer was stinging enough. To have Her deliver a rebuke could dash him to the ground like an insect. But today She heard, and She answered. Luther knew where the child was. He got to his feet and gathered his troops, gave them their marching orders.

  He just hoped that spawn-of-a-whore Kali didn’t get to Tuxedo Junction before he did.

  Six

  Cirocco felt tired after her swim in the fountain. It hadn’t always been that way. When she was younger, it had left her so full of energy it was almost painful. She had not needed to eat for two or three days. Chris said it was still that way for him. He was only forty-nine. It would probably be like that for Robin, too. But for the last fifty years or so, Cirocco needed to lie down for a few hours after a rejuvenation.

  She did not do it at the fountain. It was the principle of the water hole. There were enemies who could come into Dione. They might come to the fountain, knowing Cirocco had to visit it once every three kilorevs.

  So she went to a secluded lake she knew, about five miles from Tuxedo Junction. There was a beach of black sand, fine as powder, and warm from sub-Gaean heat.

  She stretched, rested her head on her pack, and dozed.

  ***

  Nova saw them when they reached the bridge. For a moment she didn’t know who it was walking with the big hairy man, but there really could be little doubt. Robin wore only shorts, and the tattoos that made her body unique were visible. The snakes seemed almost alive. Robin glowed with vivid colors Nova knew only from photographs of her mother as a young woman. If anything, the colors were even brighter now. Patches of gold seemed to glitter, and reds and violets and greens and yellows shimmered like precious jewels. She looked like a little brown Hallowe’en egg.

  Brown?

  Nova looked again. Sure enough, Robin
had managed to get a sun tan. It was a neat trick in this buttermilk sunlight. Even neater to do it in just two hours and not burn in the process.

  She kept watching the other end of the bridge, but Cirocco did not appear. She sighed, and went down the stairs to meet them.

  It was shocking to see the change up close. Robin had shed five years. Nova had begun to realize that Cirocco was a very powerful witch indeed, but this was almost beyond belief. It irked her in some way she wasn’t proud of to see how fresh and happy her mother looked. She just didn’t have the right to be that happy when Nova was so miserable.

  ***

  A meal was served, and still Cirocco didn’t show.

  Robin and Chris went off together somewhere. Nova watched them go, then hurried up to her room. In a short time she came out again, and went to the kitchen. Serpent was alone in there, mixing something that smelled like cookie batter in a big bowl. He glanced at her, then looked back to his work.

  She wandered over to the tremendous spice rack on the wall. Hundreds of blown-glass bottles contained leaves and powders and crystals and some items Nova thought best left un-named. Many were of Gaean ancestry. The problem was she knew there were many Earth spices in there, but they were all labeled in Titanide script, engraved on the glass.

  By lifting the stoppers and sniffing a few likely candidates she managed to locate aristolochia root, then after more trial and error something that smelled like powdered extract of cubeb. It was the right color, and it tasted right. But after that she was stymied.

  “Perhaps I can be of assistance.”

  She jumped in surprise—which was no small matter in the low gravity. She had been trying so hard to ignore the Titanide’s existence that she had forgotten he was there.

  “I doubt it,” she said. For some reason, she was embarrassed when these outlandish animals talked. They pretended to be human, and did such a poor job of it.