by John Varley
Rocky tried not to be chauvinistic, but it seemed a more compassionate system than the mad brawl of human genetics. Humans evolved through horror and maladaption, through the cold mercilessness of chance, through endless defectives who, through no fault of their own, came squalling into the world with no chance of survival. At the best of times a human was a series of compromises between dominant and recessive genes. And the only programming in their infant brains, it seemed, was left over from ravenous animals who had lived in trees before Gaea began to spin.
This all explained, to Rocky, the cancer that was Bellinzona.
Titanides got a hard, basic, and practical education from their foremothers while they were still eggs, long before there was any awareness. The machine-like structures in the developing egg filtered the frontal semen for information and traits that would be useful, ran test simulations, rejected those that could not work, and then hardened into a potential. The egg did not take DNA helter-skelter, the good with the bad, but tore it apart, evaluated it, and used the bits that would be sensible.
If the embryonic Titanide got all things practical and much historical from the foremother, it got everything else from the hindmother. Rocky wondered if he wasn’t prejudiced—being hind-pregnant himself—but it seemed to him this was the most important part.
Tambura was alive and aware and in communication with Rocky at all times. It was not verbal—though Tambura had words—nor was it musical—though Tambura spent much time singing the strange songs of the womb. As her outer brain grew into something quite similar to a human brain, but with a cybernetic egg at its core, Rocky filled the developing layers with his love, his song…his soul.
In many ways, for a Titanide, pregnancy was the best part of life.
Rocky broke off his communication with his daughter when he smelled violence. There was a change in the way the air felt. He had felt that change often lately.
Looking ahead along the causeway he saw the source. He felt tired, and wondered how human cops had handled their jobs. The situations were so predictable, and yet each one was dangerously different.
He took his hand-weapon out of his pouch and checked the magazine. It was a totally different type of weapon from the one he had carried, reluctantly, that day so many revs ago when he had come to Bellinzona to operate on his Captain. This was a twenty-second century weapon, and had been designed and ordered with Gaean conditions in mind. Most of the principles were the same, but the materials were different. Rocky’s gun contained no metal. It looked like a long, narrow cardboard roll attached to a grip. There were short fins around the middle of the carbon-ceramic barrel; these glowed bright red for a second when the gun was fired.
The grip—which was too small for Rocky’s hand—contained forty tiny rockets tipped with lead. The projectile was eased through the barrel at a relative snail’s pace, then accelerated fiercely, cracking the sound barrier within one meter of the muzzle.
It was a marvelous weapon. Rocky hated it. From the way it felt in his pouch to the ugly results of its terrible accuracy, it was an evil thing through and through. He hoped the day would come when all such things could be erased from the land of Gaea.
In the meantime, he approached the shouting people.
A man had taken a woman by the upper arm and was pulling her along behind him as she shouted obscenities at him. He returned them, insult for insult. A crying child was following the two. A small group had formed to watch, but not to interfere. Rocky had seen the same events a dozen times, it seemed.
As he approached, the man—who must not have seen Rocky—finally stopped and hit the woman with his fist. He hit her again, and a third time…and then both of them noticed there was a Titanide standing very close with a gun pointed at them.
“Release her at once,” Rocky said.
“Look, I didn’t mean—”
Rocky tapped him lightly on the head in the place he had been taught would produce the fewest side-effects later, and the man crumpled. The woman, as Rocky had half-expected, quickly knelt beside the fallen man and began to cry as she held his head.
“Don’t take him in!” she sobbed. “It was my fault.”
“Stand up,” Rocky ordered her. When she did not, he pulled her up. She wasn’t wearing enough to conceal a weapon. He reached behind him, into his saddlebag, and came up with a short steel knife of the type already labeled “nutcutters” by the Bellinzonans.
“You are advised to carry this at all times,” he told her.
“I won’t. I don’t need a knife.”
“As you please.” Rocky returned it to its place. “Today you’re okay. In another hectorev you will be in violation of the law if you do not go armed. The penalty will be one kilorev in a labor camp for the first offense. Check the community bulletin boards for specifics, as ignorance is not acceptable as an excuse. If you cannot read, an interpreter will—”
She came at him, fists flying awkwardly. He had expected it. He wanted witnesses, and he wanted her to hit him, mostly because he didn’t like the idea of leaving the crying child with her. He let her land a few blows, then made her unconscious.
“Assault on a police officer,” he informed the crowd, and no one had any objection. The child cried louder. He was about eight, Rocky thought, but he could have been wrong. Ages of human children were tough for Titanides.
“Is this woman your mother?” he asked the child, who was too upset to even hear the question. Rocky looked at the crowd again.
“Does anyone know if this is the child’s mother?”
One man stepped forward.
“Yeah, he’s hers, or that’s what she says.”
It was possible that she was his natural mother. Rocky suspected she was, because she didn’t seem to him the sort of woman who would adopt one of Bellinzona’s endless foundlings.
“Is there anyone who is willing to take responsibility for him in this community?” That was a laugh, Rocky thought. Community. Still, it was the prescribed procedure, and Cirocco maintained that communities would develop. “If not, I will take him to the community creche, where he will be cared for until his mother returns from the labor camp.”
Surprisingly, a man stepped forward.
“I’ll take him,” he said.
“Sir,” Rocky began. “Your responsibilities in this situation are—”
“I know what they are. I read the goddamn bulletin boards. Very carefully. You just run along with those two, and I’ll see this fellow has a place to sleep.”
There was some anger in the man’s words, some defiance. Humans will take care of their own, was the implication. But there was a grudging respect. Either way was fine with Rocky. He had the authority to make field decisions of this nature, and judged the boy would be all right in the man’s care.
So he bound the prisoners and slung them over his back and headed for the jail. On the way there Tambura intruded into his mind again.
*Mother, what hurts?* Tambura’s question was both much simpler and much more complex than the English translation. “Mother,” for instance, was a gross oversimplification for the Titanide noun Tambura used. The question itself was more in the form of a wave of emotion.
*Events. Interpersonal and interspecies relations. Life.*
*Mother, do I have to be born?*
*You will love life, my child. Most of the time.*
Fourteen
Since the take-over, Nova had been busy as a witch with three holes in her spacesuit and only two patches.
Cirocco didn’t seem to sleep at all. Nova had almost reached that state herself. It was now almost half a kilorev since the invasion. Nova had had little to do at first except record numbers of dead and wounded. But as laws were put into effect and the census got under way, her work load had increased. They were counting not only people, but dwellings, and an inventory of all formerly private property was contemplated.
Nova was in charge of the computers.
Can’t run a revolution without computers,
she thought.
Her title was Chief Bureaucrat. She didn’t even know what it meant, except that it precluded her being out on the streets with a sword. That was okay with her. Now she fought only if it was unavoidable, and she was getting very good at avoiding it.
In that, she and Conal had a lot in common.
The thought of Conal irritated her for a moment. She looked away from her computer screen and went through some calming exercises.
There had been a fight upon their return from Pandemonium. Nova had demanded to know if Gaea’s assertions were merely propaganda. Robin, reluctantly, had told the truth. Nova had informed her that from that day forward, she no longer considered herself Robin’s daughter.
She sighed, and pushed her hair out of her eyes.
Cirocco, in the endless meetings at the Junction before the invasion, had found out that Nova had a knack for running computers. Chris’s ancient machines were brought out, dusted off, powered up, and readied for the big day. Since then, Nova had spent very few hours away from her console.
It was, she admitted to herself, an interesting way to view a revolution.
She was the first to spot the drop-off in summary executions. She knew before anyone else that the rate of admissions to the labor camps was declining. It was Nova who brought the first estimates of Bellinzona’s population to the Wizard.
It turned out that Bellinzona had almost half a million humans living in it, a fact that surprised everyone but Conal. Nova’s machines could line them up in any way that might be useful, from national origin to age and sex and languages and height and weight and eye color. It was a hell of a census. It was supposed to provide the basis for a system of identification in some hazy future time. Nova had a staff of one hundred constantly feeding information to her mainframe. She took the results to Cirocco and the Governing Council.
The Council still governed more in name than in fact. Cirocco was still the dictator, no one had any doubts about that.
The economics of Bellinzona had fascinated Nova as she learned more about them. There was one crucial factor that had caused Cirocco endless worry. Nova had dubbed it the Manna Factor.
Though Gaea did not control Dione, she owned the Spoke above it. When she had decided to discharge the human war refugees in the new town of Bellinzona she had apparently wanted to retain what control she could over them. So she had invented manna. As its name implied, it was food that fell out of the sky. It grew on a trillion plants up there in the darkness of the Dione spoke, and every few hectorevs it fell over Dione like a spilled cornucopia. Manna came in the form of coconut-sized balls floating on the ends of little parachutes. Even with the chutes, it was wise to get under cover when it was raining manna.
Like coconuts, manna modules had hard shells. They survived impact, but were not too hard to crack. Inside was one of a hundred varieties of nutritious meat. It came in a lot of flavors. It provided all the vitamins and minerals a human being needed to stay healthy. The manna was so good, in fact, that those who subsisted entirely on it—a large part of the population—were healthier than those who supplemented their diets with expensive and exotic Dionian meats and vegetables. Fat people lost weight on it, until they reached an optimum mass. People suffering vitamin deficiencies recovered after a few kilorevs of eating manna. It also inhibited tooth decay, sweetened the breath, lessened menstrual cramps, and cured baldness. Naturally, it was a sign of status in Bellinzona never to have eaten the stuff.
Manna had a shelf-life of two kilorevs. All but the most inept were able to squirrel away enough of it to last until the next shower. Those few who either couldn’t or didn’t were ripe for slavery when they got hungry.
Of course, Gaea giveth and Gaea taketh away. The weather in Dione was awful. It never got too cold, but it was often cold enough so the homeless masses shivered through an endless afternoon sleep-time. And it rained a lot. So shelter was something worthwhile, something many people worked to obtain. It was not easy to come by, as the Bosses had grabbed every inch they could control and exacted harsh prices for the right to sleep under a roof.
But aside from seeking shelter and storing a supply of manna every kilorev or so…there was little one had to do to survive in Bellinzona. Cirocco had called it the ultimate welfare state.
And she had known that, not long after she moved to take control, the manna would stop falling from the sky. The question had been how long?
So the first and most important goal of her administration had been to feed the populace. It was a goal that came before everything else—even law and order. It had to be accomplished at all costs, because nothing could be worse than a subjugated but starving city.
Cirocco had been dismayed at Nova’s population projections. She had envisioned feeding a city of two or three hundred thousand.
Still…Moros teemed with edible fish. The flatlands at the end of Peppermint Bay were fertile. Gaean crops grew quickly. It could be done, but not with a free population. Conscript labor was essential. Some of the laws had been designed with that in mind. Filling the prisons was essential to Cirocco’s plans, as she had no illusions about legions of volunteers marching out to clear the jungle and tend the crops. Violent crimes were punishable by instant execution: one less mouth to feed. Other crimes earned the bewildered citizen a long term in the labor camp. Cirocco had been ready to go as far as necessary. She would have made sneezing in public a criminal offense if that’s what it took to fill the camps. Luckily, the citizens of Bellinzona had obliged her by violating her entirely reasonable laws in sufficient numbers to guarantee a food supply.
So when the manna had stopped falling, Bellinzona was ready.
Fifteen
Without quite knowing how it had happened, Valiha and Virginal had become fisherfolk. Neither had ever netted a fish before.
Those humans who knew something about ships had, with the authority of the Mayor’s decrees, taken command of all the Bellinzonan boats capable of doing more than rocking at anchor. For the last decarev the fleet had been putting out to sea, with Valiha and Virginal at the prow.
Their main function was to ward off the submarines.
There might have been a fishing industry in Bellinzona long before this, but for the fact that human-piloted boats that ventured more than ten kilometers from the environs of the city were promptly eaten. Submarines had huge appetites, and were not picky.
The Captain had made some sort of treaty with them. It worked so well that not only were the ships not eaten, but the fishing fleet could now rendezvous with the submarine flotillas and find the seas strewn with the disgorged and still living schools recently scooped up by the subs’ vast mouths.
There was a submarine song. Valiha and Virginal sang it, though it was not one they were born to know. And the leviathans eased up from the depths to give much of their catch to the hungry city.
It was a miracle.
That’s what they were doing now. Valiha stood at the prow of one of the largest boats in the Bellinzona fleet and sang the submarine song, while not far away the vast bulk of a submarine wallowed near the surface. Great gouts of water spurted up in the direction of the smaller ships and the nets rigged between them, stunned and bewildered fish vainly thrashing in the torrent, escaping from the jaws of the submarine only to be swallowed by the nets.
It was rather beautiful to watch. Lately, the fisherfolk had begun singing their own version of the submarine song as they hauled on their nets. Valiha listened critically. She knew it lacked the nuances of Titanide song, but like so much human music, it had a simple vitality that was attractive. Perhaps, one day, the submarines would respond to human song alone. That would be good, for Valiha had no wish to command the fleet for the rest of her life.
It had been turbulent seas, at first. With a hard core of dedicated sea-folk and a larger number of human police and a handful of Titanides, it had just been possible to put to sea with a cargo of recalcitrant prisoners. The first outings had produced little but blisters and
aching backs. But the human police were zealous—maybe a little too much so, Valiha thought—and soon everyone was at least working as hard as possible. Then a spirit began to grow. It took root slowly at first. But now, when Valiha overheard conversations in the bustling fish markets, there was a clear sense that these people thought of themselves as a group—and what’s more, as slightly better than the idlers ashore. It now took fewer police to keep them in line. When the fleet set sail, people hoisted the lines with a will, and when the fish were sighted there was cheering. There were songs for departure and songs for return, as well as the Titanide-inspired submarine chantey.
It was a good thing, Valiha knew. The last shower of manna had been many days late, and when it was opened, was too rancid to eat.
Bellinzona was now on its own.
Sixteen
“It’s Gaea,” Adam said.
“It sure is,” Chris confirmed, as brightly as he could. Adam put down his toys and sat in front of the television screen.
Chris had been worried enough when Gaea only showed up in old Marilyn Monroe movies. He and Adam had seen them all a dozen times. Adam was quite bored with them.