Demon

by John Varley

  From the waist down, Chris was the hairiest human she had ever seen. He might have been wearing trousers made from bearskin. It was light brown, like the hair on his head, and nowhere less than ten inches long. It was soft and fine, the nicest possible pelt to wrap one's legs around.

  Chris was turning into a Titanide. He'd been doing it for five myriarevs now. There was no hair at all on his chest or arms. His beard had stopped growing long ago and now his chin was smooth as a boy's. In the right light, his face could pass for that of a twelve-year-old. There were other things here and there that would surely startle Robin ... such as his tail. The fleshy part of it was only about six inches long, but he could twitch it and make the long hair fly like a frisky horse. He was smugly proud of that tail, and no more in control of it than a dog. It twitched back and forth in excitement as he looked down at the party crossing his bridge. He turned, smiling.

  "It's them," he said, and his long ears stood up straight, higher than the crown of his head. Cirocco's mind flew backward a century and a quarter, to a movie which had been old even then: cartoon boys shooting pool and turning into donkeys. A little wooden boy, and her mother holding her hand there in the darkness ... but she could not remember the title.

  "I'm going to meet them," he said, starting down the ladder. He paused. "You coming?"

  "In a minute." She watched him go, then sat up in the huge straw-filled bag they had been using for a bed. She pushed the thick mass of white hair away from her face, stretched, and looked out the window opposite the one where Chris had stood.

  Gaby was out there. She was sitting on a tree limb level with the belfrey, not more than fifty feet away.

  "Was it good?" Gaby asked.

  "Yes." Cirocco felt no embarrassment or resentment when she realized Gaby might have been out there for a long time.

  "You'll have to be careful with him. He's in great danger."

  "What can I do?"

  "There are some things I don't know." She looked sad, then shook it off. "Two things," she said. "One, he's the father of both of them. He might as well know it, because Robin is pretty sure of it already."

  "Chris?"

  "Yes. You'll see it. With Nova, anyway. The boy, too."

  "Boy? What boy?"

  "Two," Gaby went on. She grinned. "Don't strangle the girl-child. She'll drive you crazy, but put up with it. She's worth the effort."

  "Gaby, I-". Then Cirocco gasped, as Gaby rolled off the limb and dived toward the pool below. She had one glimpse of her, arms pointed down, toes straight behind her, then the apparition was swallowed up in the greenery.

  She listened a long time, but there was no splash.

  THREE

  The Titanides prepared a feast. From their happy singing, Robin assumed they were oblivious to the human tensions around them. She was wrong. The Titanides knew more about what was going on than Robin did, but they also knew they were powerless to affect any of it. So they employed a tactic that had worked reasonably well for almost a century. They left human affairs to the humans.

  Robin had forgotten how good Titanide food could be. Shortly after her return to the Coven, just before the birth of Nova, she had ballooned to twenty kilos over her fighting weight. Ruthless dieting had taken it off, and kept it off for twelve years.

  At some point she had lost interest in eating. Keeping slim had not been a problem for five years. During that time she had to remind herself to eat at all. Nothing tasted good. Now, digging into the heaping plates of food the Titanides offered, she wondered if she was going to have to be careful again.

  It was a curiously joyless, brittle occasion. Chris, Cirocco, and Conal smiled a lot but spoke little. Nova, of course, had taken her plate to the most distant corner of the room. She ate furtively as an animal, always watching Cirocco.

  "Nova," Robin called to her. "Come join us at the table."

  "I prefer it over here, Mother."

  "Nova."

  The girl dragged her feet and scowled, but she came. Robin wondered how much longer she would do that. The virtue of obedience was strong in a Coven child, where families were quite different from the traditional human model. Nova owed Robin total allegiance until her twentieth birthday, and a great deal of respect after that. But she was eighteen now. A year or two years... it had little meaning in Gaea.

  There were small blessings, though. The two of them had not fought since arriving at Tuxedo Junction. Robin was grateful for that. The fights tore at her heart. When fighting, it helps to know without doubt that one is right, and Robin hardly ever knew that anymore.

  In fact, Nova hadn't said a dozen words since they got here. She had sat silently, either looking at her hands or at Cirocco. Robin followed her daughter's gaze to the Wizard-sorry, she corrected herself, to the Captain- who was singing some incomprehensible bit of Titanide to Serpent, then looked back at Nova.

  Great Mother save us.

  "Have you had enough, Robin?"

  Flustered, Robin shook off her surprise and tried to smile at Cirocco. She dipped a spoon in the bowl of baby food the Titanides had prepared, and put the spoon in Adam's mouth.

  "Me? Yeah, I'm doing great. It takes him longer, though."

  "Could I talk to you? In private?"

  There was nothing Robin wanted to do more, but suddenly she was frightened. She scraped food from Adam's mouth and gestured vaguely.

  "Sure, as soon as-"

  But Cirocco had already come around the table and lifted the baby. She handed him to Chris, who seemed pleased.

  "Come on. Chris will take good care of him, won't you, old man?"

  "Sure thing, Captain."

  Cirocco was pulling Robin's elbow, gently but insistently. The little witch gave in. She followed Cirocco through the kitchen, out onto one of the railed walkways lying atop a horizontal branch, and up a gentle rise to a separate building half-hidden in the branches. It was five-sided, made of wood. The door was so low Cirocco had to bend over to enter. Robin was able to walk through with an inch to spare.

  "This is a weird place."

  "Chris is a weird fellow." Cirocco lit an oil lamp and set it on the table at the center of the room.

  "Tell me about it. Valiha warned me he'd changed, but I never ... " Robin trailed off, having finally looked at the interior of the pavilion.

  All the walls were copper. Hammered into the metal were a hundred designs, some of them quite familiar to Robin, others foreign. Still more seemed to remind her of things deeply buried.

  "What is this?" she whispered.

  Cirocco gestured to the largest of the artworks. Robin moved closer and saw a stylized woman, angular and primitive as a hieroglyph. She was nude, pregnant, and had three eyes. A serpent coiled around her from one ankle to the opposite shoulder, where it reared its head and stared into her face. The figure gazed back at the snake, unblinking.

  "Is this ... supposed to be me?" Her hand went involuntarily to her forehead. It was the location of her tattooed third Eye. She had earned it over twenty years before, and without it, would have been unable to return to Gaea.

  She also bore the tattoo of a serpent that wound around her leg, across her body, and up to her breast.

  "What is this?"

  There were two straight-backed wooden chairs in the room. Cirocco pulled one toward the center and sat in it.

  "You probably should ask Chris about that. I think of it as a memorial. He liked you. He didn't expect he'd ever see you again. He built this."

  "But it ... it's weird."

  "As I said, so is Chris."

  "What's happening to him?" Robin said.

  "You mean physically? He's getting what Gaea promised him so long ago."

  "It's disgusting."

  Cirocco laughed. Robin flushed again, then knew Cirocco was not laughing at her, but at some private thought.

  "No, it's not," she said. "It's only startling. You're seeing it all at once. I saw it day by day, and it looked entirely natural and right. And as for start
ling ... you shocked him more than he shocked you."

  Robin had to turn away. She knew what she looked like.

  "It's called age," she said, bitterly. The terrible fact was that she looked a lot older than Cirocco.

  "No. You've aged, but that's not the shocking part. In your own way you've changed as radically as Chris has. Some terrible fear has marked your soul."

  "I don't believe that. Failure and disgrace, yes. Not fear."

  "Fear," Cirocco went on, inexorably. "The Great Mother has deserted you. Your center is gone. You no longer burn; you float, your feet unable to reach the womb of the earth. You have no place to stand, no Umbilicus."

  "How do you know these things?" Robin screamed.

  "I know what I see."

  "Yes, but the words, the ... the secret words ... " Some of them were from Coven ritual, from ceremonies and exorcisms Robin knew she had never mentioned to the Wizard. Others were from the darkest corners of her own soul.

  "I've had some guidance. Right now, I want to know your purpose here. Why did you come? What do you hope to do?"

  Robin wiped away tears and pulled a chair closer to Cirocco. She sat down, and eventually was able to look at the older woman.

  She told her story.

  Robin had come to Gaea, like so many others, to be cured.

  Gaea was a god who never gave anything away. Robin had been told she must prove herself, do something heroic, before a cure was possible. She had not been inclined to do so. Her condition had not been impossible to live with. She had dealt with it before: when her hand began to tremble with the onset of a seizure, she had simply amputated her little finger.

  But through the persuasion of Gaby Plauget, Robin had embarked on a trip around the interior of the wheel, accompanied by Gaby, Cirocco, the Titanides Psaltery, Hautbois, Hornpipe, and Valiha, and Chris Major, who was also seeking a cure.

  Gaby and Cirocco had an ulterior motive. They were seeking an ally among the eleven regional brains of Gaea. Gaby was seeking a lot harder than Cirocco was; the Wizard had been a hopeless alcoholic who had to be dragged into the enterprise. Some of those regional brains were allies of Gaea. Some were enemies. The lines had been drawn during the Oceanic Rebellion while humans were still living in caves.

  Gaby's plan had been nothing less than the overthrow and replacement of Gaea herself. She had been out to recruit a new God. The mission had cost her life, and possibly much more. It had cost Cirocco her status as Wizard. It remained to be seen whether it had cost the Titanides their survival as a race.

  The only ones who seemed to have benefitted from the abortive quest were Robin, Chris, and the Iron Masters. Robin and Chris had been cured. The Iron Masters had, for reasons unknown, been allowed to expand from their tiny island in Phoebe until they now challenged the Titanides for dominance of the great wheel.

  And at the end, Robin had headed for home, intending to live happily ever after.

  "It was great for a while," she said, and smiled at the memory. "Chris was right. There was a great deal of labra in growing back a finger. I recommend it as a way to amaze your friends."

  She knew Gaby and Cirocco had dismissed labra as the female version of macho. They had been wrong, but it didn't really matter. The fact that it was Gaea who had replaced Robin's severed pinky had continued to gnaw at her, and in the end hollowed out both Robin and her victory.

  It was as meaningless as the third Eye, which was supposed to confer infallibility. In practice, the wearers of the Eye were bullies who could do no wrong, sanctimonious as any Pope.

  "I left the Coven already a semi-mythical figure," Robin went on. "I came back... I don't know a word for it. The Coven had never seen anything like me."

  "Superstar," Cirocco supplied.

  "What's that?"

  "Archaic word. It's somebody whose reputation exceeds all reasonable bounds. Pretty soon, they start to believe the reputation."

  Robin considered it.

  "There was some of that. Yes. I moved up as quickly as I wanted to. I could have gone faster, but ... I wasn't sure I should."

  "You heard a voice," Cirocco suggested.

  "Yes. It was my own voice. I think I could have been proclaimed the Great Mother herself. But I knew I wasn't. I knew I wasn't even very good."

  "Don't be too hard on yourself. You were damn good, as I recall."

  "Damn fast. Damn strong. Damn mean and a cast-iron bitch. But where it counted, to me"- and she thumped her chest -"right in here, I knew what I was. I decided to get out of public life. There are places we can retreat ... something like nuns. Isn't that what nuns do?"

  "So I've heard."

  "I was going to meditate for about a year. Then I was going to have a child and devote myself to raising her. But I didn't have time. The next thing I knew, I was pregnant."

  She was silent for a moment, looking back on it. She chewed her lower lip, and at last looked back at Cirocco.

  "This was a year-more than a year-after I got back from Gaea, you see. On Earth it could have just slid by. But in the Coven, we have to artificially-"

  "I remember. I know what you're talking about."

  "Yeah, but see, the women at the birth centers know who came in to have it done. When I started to swell up ... " She sighed, and shook her head. "The awful thing is, if it had happened to someone else, she might have been burned. We haven't burned anyone for Christianity for... oh, fifty years. But it looked like there were just two possibilities. Either I'd had carnal relations with a Christian demon, or ... it was the Gynorum Sanctum, the union of a mortal woman with the Holy Mother, perfect and blameless."

  Cirocco studied her as she lowered her head into her hands.

  "Did they really buy that?" she asked.

  "Oh, they did and they didn't. There's a conservative faction that holds all the teachings to be literally true. Anyway, it sealed my fate. I'm not saying I didn't help it along. For a while there I think I did believe the Great Mother had come to me. But every time I looked at Nova's face, something told me it was someone else."

  Cirocco shook her head wearily. So much could have been avoided if she had not been busy while Robin was getting ready to leave.

  Stop it, she told herself. You were busy for a while, sure, but then you were drunk for almost a kilorev.

  "Did you ever suspect where the baby came from?"

  "Not for a long time. Like I said, it was a lot easier to take it as it came. It wasn't till later I consciously questioned it."

  "I could have told you Gaea would leave you with a parting practical joke. She did the same thing to me, and Gaby and August, right after we first got here. We were all pregnant. We had abortions." She paused, and looked at Robin again. "Do you ... did you have any feeling about ... who the child's father might be?"

  Robin laughed.

  "Go look at her. Isn't it obvious?"

  "Nova's got your mouth."

  "Right. And she's got Chris's eyes."

  Chris was in the basement, looking for a film projector.

  It was perhaps a semantic fallacy to have a "basement" in a treehouse, where all levels were above the ground, but Chris had managed it. A trapdoor in the floor of the main building led to a hollowed-out area in the trunk of the great tree. This room eventually received everything Chris had never managed to find a use for. There was a lot of it.

  Conal, standing on the ladder and holding the lamp high as Chris threw objects from one pile to another, surveyed the miscellany with dismay.

  "Aside from being a compulsive architect," he observed, "you've also got a bad case of packratitis."

  "I think it's terminal," Chris agreed. "Still, you could say the same thing about the Smithsonian."

  "What's that?"

  "It's nothing, now that you mention it. Blown up many years ago. But it was a museum. And there aren't any museums in Gaea." He straightened, wiped a mixture of dust and sweat from his face. "It's a dirty job, but somebody ought to do it."

  "The Titanides have
a museum."

  "Point taken. But the oldest thing in it is not much older than Cirocco. They haven't been around that long. We don't have any human museums in Gaea. If there are any left on Earth, they won't be around much longer. So why not start here?"

  Conal took another dubious look at the piles of junk.

  "Confess, Chris. You just can't throw anything away."

  "Guilty." He reached deep into a stack of oddments, and came up with an ancient Kodak Brownie. "But you never know when you'll need something."

  "Yeah, but where do you get it all?"

  Chris shooed Conal up the ladder, followed him out, and shut the trapdoor behind him. Conal followed him through the maze of doors and rooms until they reached the space Chris had set aside as his workshop. It was actually several rooms, and in them Chris was able to do everything from glassblowing to repairing computers.

  He set the projector on a workbench and began taking it apart.

  "I just pick things up here and there," he said. "That's how it started. Nowadays, all the Titanides who come calling bring a gift. They do a lot of trading. No telling what they'll pick up. Not much stuff gets here from Earth anymore, but in the old days just about anything might come in. Settlers brought most of their possessions. This was back before the War."

  He got the side panel off and peered in, blowing away clumps of dust. He poked a finger into the mechanism, made a wheel turn. He pulled a long glass bulb out of the projector and flipped it toward Conal, who snagged it. "Test that out, would you? I doubt it's any good. I'll probably have to blow another one."

  Conal turned toward the electrical bench. He clamped the bulb and took two insulated wires with bare ends, touched one to the brass casing and the other to the dull metal tip. He flipped a switch, and the filament glowed brightly.

  Chris brought the projector over and set it near the bulb.

  "So it does work, huh? That'll save some time." He took it and screwed it back in place, then connected several devices together on the workbench and finally touched two wires to contacts on the projector's motor. It hummed and there was the faint smell of ozone, but nothing else happened. Chris muttered and tried a new arrangement of transformers. Still nothing. He looked up, to see Cirocco and Robin enter the room. Trailing a little behind them was Nova.