by John Varley
She waited, and Cirocco said nothing.
"Very well," Gaea said, waving a hand impatiently. "I won't even change that. She will be herself in all respects. I can hardly do better than that."
Cirocco had been looking at a point slightly above Gaea's head. Now she brought her eyes down and shifted on her chair.
"This was the only thing I was afraid of," she repeated. "I thought about not even coming here so I wouldn't have to listen to the offer and be tempted. Because it is tempting. It would be such a nice way to feel better about so many things and to find an excuse to go on living. But then I wondered what Gaby would have thought of it and knew just what a stinking, corrupt, foul deviltry it would be. She would have been horrified to think she would be survived by a little Gaby doll made by you out of your own festering flesh. She would have wanted me to kill it immediately. And thinking a little more, I knew that every time I saw it I would eat out a little more of my guts until there was nothing left."
She sighed, looked up, then down to Gaea.
"Is that your last offer then?" Cirocco said.
"It is. Don't do-"
The explosions could not be separated. Five closely spaced holes appeared in the front of Cirocco's serape, and her heavy chair slid backward two meters before she was through firing. The back of Gaea's head erupted blood. At least three of the bullets entered her body near chest level. She was thrown backward and rolled loosely for thirty meters before coming to rest.
Cirocco stood, ignoring the pandemonium, and walked to her. She brought Robin's Colt .45 automatic from beneath her wrap, aimed it at Gaea's head, and squeezed off the last three shots. Moving rapidly now in a gathering quiet, she took out a metal can and opened it, poured a clear liquid over the corpse. She dropped a match and stood back as flames burst into the air and began to creep along the carpet.
"So much for gestures," she said, then turned to the crowd. She pointed with her gun toward the nearest cathedral.
"Your only chance is to run toward the spoke," she told them. "When you reach the edge, jump. You will be picked up by angels and landed safely in Hyperion." Having said that, she forgot them totally. It was a matter of no consequence if they lived or died.
She was breathing rapidly as she ejected the empty magazine and took a loaded one from her concealed pocket. She snapped it in, pulled the slide back and let it return forward, then walked away from the growing fire.
When she was far enough away to see clearly, she set her feet wide and raised the gun over her head. Aiming nearly straight up, she fired at the thin red line. She spaced the shots, taking her time, and did not stop firing until the clip was empty.
She pulled out another clip and snapped it home.
44 Thunder and Blazes
It was in the middle of her fourth magazine that the feeling began to trouble her. At first she could not put her finger on it. She shook her head, aimed, and fired another round. She swallowed dryly. It was quite possible the "gesture" was still going on; she could not know. Even if she hit the thing, her bullets were small and probably harmless. Nevertheless, she fired another shot and was about to shoot again when the feeling returned, stronger than before.
Something was telling her to run. That this should strike her as an unusual feeling to have in her present situation might have amused her at another time, but it did not now. She fired twice more, and the slide locked open on the empty chamber. She released the empty clip and let it fall beside her, where it clattered noisily. She swallowed again. The feeling came back, stronger than ever. Unaccountably tears came to her eyes and ran down her cheeks. Damn it, she was waiting to die, and it was taking longer than she had thought.
But she knew what she was feeling now, and the tiny hairs stood up on her arms and the back of her neck. For whatever reason, she was sure Gaby was telling her to move.
It was some trick of Gaea's. She moved a few uncertain steps, and it felt good. But she stopped moving, and the feeling started again.
Why was she determined to die? It had not been in her plan when she started, except in the sense that she had been prepared to die if it had to be. There were certain things she had to do. She had done them, and it had been her intention to flee afterward. Was this the trick? Was Gaea putting Gaby's voice in her mind to confuse her until vengeance could arrive?
But suddenly she trusted it. She began to walk toward the cathedrals.
The air seemed to split as a bolt of lightning crashed into the spot where she had been standing. She ran, and Gaea's wrath poured from the world all around her. The red line above glowed more brightly than ever.
Jump!
She obeyed, cutting sharply to her left, and another bolt crashed where she had been.
It was possible to build up a frightening speed in the negligible gravity of the hub, but it came slowly. Feet on the ground could not provide enough traction to accelerate quickly. She had to begin with short, choppy steps, gradually lengthening them until her feet touched the ground many meters apart. And the speed, once attained, stayed with her. She streaked along, touching the ground infrequently, as the lightning crashed.
The biggest difficulty was changing direction. When she decided she must veer to the right, it was hard to put the urge into action, but she managed and could not tell this time if it had done any good. No bolt hit where she had been.
The ground was shaking. Some of the cathedrals, hit by repeated bolts and now attacked from beneath, were coming apart. Stone gargoyles crashed around her as she overtook some of the people who had fled. Spires tottered in slow motion, fragmented, and monstrous blocks of stone started to float inexorably down. Though they might weigh only a few kilograms, their mass would crush anything they encountered.
Too late to turn, she found herself heading straight for the replica Notre Dame. She lifted both feet from the ground, continuing to skim along the surface until she had sunk half a meter; then she pushed off with both feet and soared into the air. She cleared the peaked roof, came slowly down, and bounced up again. Below her, the remnants of the Mad Tea Party milled like a disturbed anthill. She could see the sloping edge of the Rhea Spoke mouth just ahead. She would not touch the ground again; her momentum would carry her over nothingness. A few people had reached the edge and stood gazing down at a leap they could never make.
Cirocco reached into her wrap and took out a small bottle of compressed air. Twisting to face the red line, she held one end of the cylinder to her stomach and turned the valve on the other end. It hissed, and a steady pressure threatened to turn her around, but she kept it in balance. Soon she could see she was building up speed.
When the bottle was empty, she threw it as hard as she could, then removed the two remaining clips for the automatic and threw them, following it with everything in her pockets. She was about to throw the gun itself but hesitated. Robin deserved to have it back, if that were possible. Instead, she slipped out of the red blanket, balled it up as tightly as she could, and threw that. Every ounce of reaction mass counted in her haste to get moving.
Damn! She should have fired the remaining bullets instead of throwing them away. She might have been able to save her serape. But she could not think of everything, and besides, when she turned around, she saw it did not matter as much as it might have. The entire cylindrical interior of the Rhea Spoke crackled with a million electrical snakes. She had hoped to get quickly out of range, but now she must run this gauntlet.
Below her she spied the slowly circling shapes of her angel escort, waiting where she had instructed them. As she watched, one of them was struck, and seemed to explode in a shower of feathers. She looked away for a moment, sickened. When she brought her eyes back, she saw the remaining five had not scattered as she had feared they would. At first glance it might have appeared they were fleeing, for all she could see of them was their feet and their frantically flapping wings, but she quickly realized they had spotted a problem before she had, with their incomparably better ballistic senses. A few second
s later she streaked past them and had occasion to feel relief that she had not fired the remaining bullets. Her velocity was already high enough to put her in jeopardy of outdistancing them.
She turned and fell with her back to the ground. There was no point in looking for lightning flashes as she could do nothing to avoid them. She spread her arms to kill some of her speed, and the angels chased her falling body through the flickering tunnel.
45 Fame and Fortune
Valiha had traded in her crutches for the Titanide version of a wheelchair. It had two rubber-rimmed wheels a meter in radius, attached to a wooden framework slightly wider than her body. Stout bars were supported just ahead of and behind the lower part of her human torso, and from them was slung a canvas cup with holes for her forelegs and straps to hold the arrangement secure. Chris thought it peculiar at first but quickly forgot about it when he saw how practical it was. She would be in it for a short time yet; her legs were healed, but Titanide healers were conservative about leg injuries.
She could walk in it faster than Chris could run. Her only problem was cornering, which she had to do slowly. And like wheelchairs everywhere, it coped badly with stairs. She looked at the broad wooden staircase coming down from the green canopy at the edge of the Titantown tree, frowned with one side of her mouth, then said, "I think I can get up that."
"And I can vividly see you tumbling down," Chris said. "I'll just be up for a minute to get Robin. Serpent, where's the picnic basket?"
The child looked surprised, then abashed.
"I guess I forgot it."
"Then run right home and pick it up, and don't stop off anywhere."
"All right. See you." He was gone in a cloud of dust.
Chris started up the staircase. It had a rustic touch in keeping with the arboreal surroundings: a set of letters made of sticks tied together with ropes, like the entry to a Boy Scout camp. The letters spelled out "Titantown Hotel." He climbed to the fourth level and knocked on the door to room three. Robin called out that it was open, and he entered to find her stuffing clothing into a rucksack.
"I never used to accumulate stuff," she said, wiping sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. It was another hot day in Hyperion. "There's another thing that seems to have changed about me. Now I can't seem to throw anything away. Why don't you have a seat? I'll clear a place for you..." She began moving stacks of shirts and pants, mostly of Titanide manufacture.
"I'll confess I'm surprised to see this," he said, sitting. "I thought you were going to stick around at least until we found out if Cirocco made it out-"
Robin tossed an ugly hunk of metal onto the bed beside him. It was her family heirloom, the Colt .45.
"That was delivered a few hours ago," she said. "Haven't you heard? I thought the whole town was buzzing with the news. The signs a few days ago were right: there was a great battle in heaven, and the Wizard got away. But Gaea is not satisfied, and her spies are all over. Carnival is permanently canceled; the race is doomed. Or Carnival will still happen, but it will be late. Cirocco is badly injured. She's in a coma. Or she's just fine and she injured Gaea. Those are the rumors I've heard, and I haven't even left the hotel."
Chris was surprised, but not that he had missed the news. He had spent the day indoors with Valiha and Serpent, then come straight to the hotel when lunch was packed. They had talked of the commotion several dekarevs earlier, when the Place of Winds cable had been seen to sway slowly and the sound of continuous thunder had been heard from Rhea.
"What do you know for sure?"
Robin reached out and patted the gun. "That's it. This is here, so Cirocco made it to the rim. I hope she got some good use out of it. What happened to her from there I can't even guess."
"Maybe she doesn't dare show up here," Chris suggested.
"There's a rumor to that effect. I had been hoping ... oh, that she would come and give me the gun so I'd have a chance to ... well, when she left, I still hadn't thanked her properly. Now maybe I never will. For sending Trini to wait for me."
"I doubt you'd come up with the right words. I didn't."
"You're probably right."
"And the last time I saw her she kept apologizing to me for getting me into so much trouble."
"Me, too. I think she was expecting to die. But how could I blame her? There was no way for her to know what was ... going to..." She put her hand to her stomach and looked uncertain for a moment.
"Careful," Chris cautioned.
"I'm supposed to be able to talk about it with you, aren't I?"
"Were you feeling sick?"
"I don't really know. I think I was frightened that I would feel sick. This isn't going to be easy to live with."
Chris knew what she meant but was of the opinion that in a few months they would hardly notice Gaea's parting joke.
It had solved a mystery, but the nature of the solution precluded their divulging it to anyone else. They both had thought it odd, when they had time to think about it at all, that with all the analysis done on Gaea and the experiences of pilgrims going to her for a cure, no book had made mention of the Big Drop. The reason was simple. Gaea would not let anyone talk about it. Nor could they discuss anything about their individual quests or the quests of others; indeed, they could not mention that pilgrims to Gaea would be asked to do anything at all for their cures.
Chris was sure it was the best-kept secret of the century. Like the several thousand others who shared it, he was not surprised no one had spoken. He and Robin had each felt compelled to test the security system they had been told about soon after their return to Titantown.
Neither of them would ever do it again.
Chris was not proud of that fact, but he knew it to be true. Gaea had given him a psychological block. It was flexible in some ways-he could talk freely to Robin or anyone else who already knew. But should he try to speak to others of the Big Drop, his adventures in Gaea, or anyone else's exploits in pursuit of a miracle cure, he would experience pain so disabling he would be unable to utter even one word. It would start in his stomach and rapidly progress through all his muscles like red-hot snakes burrowing through his flesh.
There were no escape clauses, or so he had been informed. Again, he knew he would never test that either. If he tried to write of his experiences, the result would be the same. Asked questions that strayed onto forbidden ground, he could not even say yes or no; "no comment" was a permissible reply, and "mind your own business" was even better. Safest of all was to tell an interrogator nothing.
The system had a certain beauty if one was not its victim. So far as Chris could see, it was infallible. All visitors to Gaea had to ride in her capsular elevator system even to reach the inner rim from the docks on the outside, and while doing so, they were put to sleep, examined, and cleared for release. No one with any forbidden knowledge could leave Gaea without receiving the block.
Chris had found it best to observe absolute circumspection with anyone but Robin, Valiha, or other Titanides. There were other humans in Gaea who knew what he knew, but it was hard to be sure who they were. Unless he was positive, he would get a warning twinge like a toothache by opening his mouth to talk about the trip. It was all he needed. One dose of Gaea's aversive conditioning had been enough.
Robin had filled one bag and was starting on another. Chris saw her pick up a small thermometer, consider it, and toss it in the sack. He could imagine her problem. A lot of the equipment she had taken on the trip had acquired a sentimental value. On top of that, since their return it seemed that every Titanide in town wanted to stop by and make them a gift of some lovely trinket. They had run out of shelf space in Valiha's home to display all his booty.
"I still don't understand all this," Robin said, carefully wrapping tissue paper around an exquisitely carved set of wooden knives, forks, and spoons. "I'm not complaining-except that I don't know how I'm going to pack it all-but why do we rate this stuff? We didn't do anything for them."
"Valiha explained it, in
a way," Chris said. "We're sort of famous. Not like Cirocco, but moderately. We were pilgrims, and we came back cured, so Gaea judged us heroes. That means we're worthy of gifts. Also, Titanides will protest all day long that they're not superstitious, but to have survived what we did, they figure we're pretty lucky. They hope some of it will rub off if they're nice to us, come next Carnival time." He looked down at his hands. "With me there's another reason. Call it the welcome wagon or a bridal shower. I'm going to be part of the community. They want to make me feel at home."
Robin looked at him, opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again. She resumed her packing.
"You think I'm making a mistake," Chris said.
"I didn't say that. I never would, I guess, even if I did think that, but I don't. I know what Valiha means to you. At least I think I do, though I've never felt that way about anyone, myself."
"I think you're making a mistake," Chris said.
Robin threw up her hands, turned, and shouted at him. "Listen to you. Suddenly I'm the diplomatic one and you just say any old thing that comes into your head. Damn you! I was trying to be nice, but I could have said that I know you're not sure of what you're doing. Not completely sure. You're going to fear Gaea for the rest of your life, for one thing, and for another, you don't know yet just how it will make you feel when Valiha brings home her other lovers. You think you can live with that, but you're not sure."
"Can I apologize?"
"Just a minute, I'm not through shouting yet." But then she shrugged, sat on the bed beside him, and went on in a quieter voice.
"I don't know if I'm making a mistake, either. Trini..." She shook her head furiously. "I've had my eyes opened to a lot of things in here, not all of them bad. I'm scared that the ways I've been changed will make it very hard for me back home. And speaking of home, some days I can hardly remember what it looks like. I feel I've been here a million years. I've learned that some things my sisters believe are just fairy tales, and I don't think I'll be able to tell them that."