Demon

by John Varley

  "Won't work. Not if it's being used as money. It gets passed back and forth so many times how do we know where it came from?"

  "There's that problem," Conal conceded. "And even the good distilleries use labels that are easy to counterfeit ... and people water it."

  "It's not a very good currency," Cirocco said. "I think the best thing is to start a public education campaign. I don't know much about methanol. Isn't it pretty easy to tell? Can't you smell it?"

  "I'm never sure. First you have to get past the stink of the booze."

  They brooded about it in silence for a time. Conal was inclined to let it go. He didn't believe in protecting people from themselves. His own solution was to drink only from sealed bottles he had received from the hands of a distiller he trusted. It seemed to him everyone else should do the same. But maybe a law was needed, after all.

  He was ambivalent about the whole thing. It was not that he had loved Bellinzona before. He knew the place was vastly improved. You could walk the streets unarmed with reasonable safety.

  But every time you turned around, you ran into a law. After living seven years without laws, it was hard to get your head back in gear to think about them.

  Which brought him to the question he was sure Cirocco would ask next. She did not disappoint him.

  "What about me? How's the Conal-meter rating?"

  He held out a hand and rocked it back and forth.

  "You're better. Ten or fifteen percent like you well enough. Maybe thirty percent tolerate you and will admit, with a few beers in them, that you've made things better. But the rest really don't like you at all. Either you upset their wagons, or they don't think you're doing enough. There's lots of folks out there who'd feel better if somebody told them what to do from the time they woke up to the time you put 'em to bed."

  "Maybe they'll get their wish," Cirocco muttered.

  Conal waited for her to go on, but she didn't. So he took another puff on his cigar and tried to pick his words carefully. "There's something else. It's ... image, I guess. You're a face on the side of a blimp. Not really real."

  "My media team has made that abundantly clear," she said, sourly. "I come across as a stiff-necked bitch on television."

  "I don't know about normal TV," Conal said. "But on those big screens on Whistlestop they just don't like you. You're above them. You're not one of the people ... and you're not strong enough, if that's the word, to inspire the kind of fear... or, I don't know, maybe it's respect... "He trailed off, unable to express what he felt.

  "Once again, you're confirming my media studies. On the one hand, I'm Olympian and Draconian-and people hate that-and on the other, I'm insufficient as an authority-figure."

  "People don't believe in you," Conal said. "They believe in Gaea more than in you."

  "And they haven't even seen Gaea."

  "Most of 'em haven't seen you, either."

  Again she brooded. It was clear to Conal she was coming to a decision she found distasteful, but unavoidable. He waited, patiently, knowing that whatever she decided he would do his best to fulfill his part in it.

  "Okay," she said, putting her feet up on the table. "Here's what we're going to do."

  He listened. Pretty soon he was grinning.

  NINETEEN

  When the meeting was over, Conal went out into the unfailing light of Dione and turned left on the Oppenheimer Boulevard causeway.

  Bellinzona was a city that never slept. There were three rush hours each "day," signaled by a massive toot from Whistlestop. During those times people would go from their jobs to their homes, or vice versa. Somebody was in charge of scheduling everything, Conal knew, so that about a third of the city was always relatively quiet, its residents sleeping, while another third hummed with the sounds of commerce, and yet another with the sounds of Bellinzona's meager amusements. Many people worked two shifts, or one and a half, to make ends meet. But there were taverns and casinos and whorehouses and meeting rooms to provide the necessary social life. All work and no play would have been a dismal way to run a city, in Conal's opinion.

  The river docks and the wharves where the fishing fleet tied up were busy around the clock. The shipyards were always busy, as well. And others of the city's infant industries worked on three shifts. But the main reason for the staggered working hours was to keep the city from seeming too crowded. The plain fact was there was not enough housing if everyone tried to bed down at once. Cooperative living was the norm.

  It worked fairly well. But the birth rate was rising and the infant-mortality rate falling and the carpenters were always busy at the Terminal Wharves and high in the hills building new housing.

  Conal had decided he liked the city. It breathed new life. It was vital and alive, as he remembered Fort Reliance before the war. You heard a lot of gripes in the taprooms, but the very fact they felt free to gripe counted for something, he felt. It meant they had hope of improving those things they didn't like.

  In quick succession he passed one of the new parks-a big square floating dock with horseshoe pitches, volleyball nets, basketball hoops, and trees and shrubs in pots-a hospital, and a school. All would have been unthinkable in Bellinzona just seven kilorevs ago. He got out of the way as a Titanide galloped by with a pregnant woman in his arms, heading for the emergency entrance of the hospital. Inside the school, children sat on the floor and waited for the class to end, as they had always done. The game equipment in the parks was always in use. All these things warmed Conal. He hadn't realized how much he had missed them.

  Not that he wanted to live in the city. He thought, when this was all finished and turned over to locals, he would resume the life he had been leading, being a nomad known throughout the great Wheel, a friend of the Captain. But it was nice to know it was here.

  He turned into a familiar building and walked up three flights of stairs. The door opened to his key and he went in.

  The shades were drawn. Robin was in bed. He thought she was asleep. He went into the small bathroom and rinsed himself in the basin of water, using some of the hard, harsh soap that had recently become available on the black market. He brushed his teeth, and he shaved very carefully with an old razor. All these things were relatively new habits for Conal, but he had mostly forgotten those old days when a bath was something he took when his clothes got too stiff to bend easily.

  He slipped into bed, careful not to wake her.

  She turned to him, wide awake and hungry.

  "This will never work," she said, as she often did. He nodded, and took her into his arms, and it worked wonderfully.

  TWENTY

  Cirocco Jones went from the meeting to the place where she knew she would find Hornpipe. She moved in the way she had learned, in the way that so befuddled Robin when she used it to show up at the meetings of the Council. No one took any notice of her.

  She wondered if it might be the last time she could move that way. Not knowing where the power came from made it that much harder to believe it could last after what she planned to do.

  She mounted Hornpipe and he galloped out of the city. Soon they were moving through the jungles of southern Dione, not far from Tuxedo Junction.

  She reached the shores of the Fountain of Youth and dismounted.

  "Stay close," she advised Hornpipe. "This will take some time."

  The Titanide nodded, and faded back into the jungle. Cirocco stripped off her clothes and knelt on the sand. She opened her pack and took out the bottle containing Snitch. He blinked woozily. She dumped him on the ground and watched him stagger and curse. It would take him a little time to come around to any degree of intelligibility.

  Cirocco felt her body, as she might explore an unfamiliar and possibly dangerous object. Her ribs stood out. She still had more breast tissue than she was accustomed to, and her thighs were firm and full, but the knees were getting bony. Her hair was once more streaked with gray. She could feel the fine wrinkles around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth.

  Sh
e flicked Snitch in the face and he spat at her, but without any real heart in the gesture. Without having to be asked, Cirocco got the bottle from her pack and used the eyedropper to squeeze seven fat drops into his upturned and eager mouth.

  Snitch smacked his lips, and used the expression that passed, in Snitch's limited facial repertoire, for a smile.

  "The old hag is feeling generous today," he said.

  "The old hag isn't in the mood for any games. You want to hear how I'll flay you alive if you don't talk? Or are you as tired of that as I am?"

  Snitch balanced on one limb and used the other to scratch behind his ear.

  "Why don't we skip all that?"

  "Fine. How is Adam?"

  "Adam is peachy keen. He likes his great big grandmaw. One day soon Gaea will have him-you should pardon the expression-in the palm of her hand."

  "How is Chris?"

  "Chris is blue. On his good days he still thinks he can win the heart and mind of the aforementioned Adam, his son. On his bad days, he thinks he's already lost. These days, most of his days are bad days. This isn't helped by the fact that Gaea is starring him in some of her television shows, and making him do some distasteful tasks to earn his ... bread and butter."

  Snitch blinked, and frowned. "Did I mix a metaphor?"

  Cirocco ignored the question.

  "What about ... Gaby?"

  Snitch cocked an eye at her.

  "You've never asked me about her before."

  "I'm asking you now."

  "I could tell you she's a figment of your imagination."

  "I could shove your head up your asshole."

  "God," Snitch said, with a grimace. "Would that such a maneuver were the impossibility for me that it is for you."

  "You know it's not."

  "How well I remember." He sighed. "Gaby ... is preparing her dirty trick. You know what I'm talking about. Gaby treads a thin line. You may never know just how thin. Leave her alone."

  "But I haven't seen her in-"

  "Leave her alone, Captain."

  They stared at each other. Such a remark called for punishment. Cirocco wondered what it meant that she was prepared to let him get away with it this time. What was changing? Or was she just too tired to care?

  She put it out of her mind, gave Snitch three more drops of pure grain alcohol, and put him back in his bottle. Then she moved carefully into the purifying heat of the Fountain, reclined in it, and took a deep breath of the waters.

  She did not move for ten revs.

  TWENTY-ONE

  New Pandemonium was complete.

  Gaea had personally inspected the outer wall, had scooped Great Whites from the moat with her own massive hands, checked all the preparations for siege.

  The labor problem was still bad. It had taken some time to get her production supervisors to understand that humans could no longer be worked to death. Many people had died before that lesson was learned. There was now a small desertion problem, as well, with no zombie battalions to hunt down and torture runaways. The Priests were not happy with human acolytes, but knew better than to kick up too much fuss about it. Luckily, the zombie dust had no effect on the Priests.

  All the preparations had been made. New Pandemonium could withstand any attack, any siege.

  Content, she summoned her archivist and ordered up a triple feature. The Man Who Would Be King. All the King's Men. Indira.

  Wonderful political films, all.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Gaby Plauget had been born in New Orleans in 1997, back when it had been a part of the United States of America.

  Her childhood was tragic. Her father killed her mother and she was shuttled back and forth between relatives and agencies, learning never to care for anybody too much. Astronomy had been her salvation. She had become the best there was at planetary astronomy, so good that when the crew of Ringmaster was being chosen she managed a berth, though she hated to travel.

  She had been more or less indifferent to sex.

  Then the Ringmaster had been destroyed, and all the crew had spent a time in total sensory deprivation. It had driven Gene crazy. Bill had been left with gaps in his memory, so he didn't know Cirocco when he met her again. The Polo sisters, April and August, never the most stable of clone-geniuses, had been separated, April to become an Angel, August to gradually pine away for her lost sister. Calvin had emerged with the ability to speak to the blimps, and no desire to be around humans again. Cirocco had gained the ability to sing Titanide.

  Gaby had lived an entire lifetime. Twenty years, she had said. When she woke up, it had been like one of those crazy dreams where, all at once, you know what it's all about. The Big Answers to Life are within your grasp, if only you can keep your head clear long enough to sort them out. All her experiences during that twenty years were right there, fresh in her mind, ready to change her life and the world ...

  ... until, dream-like, they faded. Within a few minutes she knew only a few things. One was that it had been twenty years, full of the kind of detail only that amount of time could have provided. Another was a memory of walking up vast stairs, accompanied by organ music. Later, when she and Cirocco visited Gaea in the hub, Gaby had re-lived that moment. The third thing she retained was a hopeless and incurable love for Cirocco Jones, which was as big a surprise to Gaby as it was to Cirocco. Gaby had never thought of herself as a lesbian.

  Everything else was gone.

  Seventy-five years went by.

  At the age of one hundred and three, Gaby Plauget died beneath the central cable of Tethys. She died horribly, painfully, of fluid building up in burned lung tissue.

  Then came the biggest surprise of all. There really was a life after death. Gaea really was God.

  She fought that notion all the way to the hub. She had seen her dead body lying there. She had become just a point of awareness, feeling nothing on a physical level. Disembodiment did not prevent her feeling emotions, though. The strongest one was fear. She regressed to her childhood, found herself reciting Hail Mary's and Our Father's and the Lord's Prayer, imagined herself in the huge, cool. forbidding, and yet comforting space of the old cathedral, kneeling beside her mother, saying the rosary.

  But the only cathedral was the living body of Gaea.

  She had been taken, or moved, or spirited, or in some way transported to the hub, to the movie-set staircase she and Cirocco had climbed so long ago. It was deep in dust, and adorned with movie-set cobwebs draped artfully. She herself felt like a camera on a very steady dolly, moving without volition or control through the little Oz door off to one side and into the Louis XVI room which was an exact duplicate of a set from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was where she and Cirocco had first met the squat and dumpy old woman who called herself Gaea.

  The gilt paint was peeling from the picture frames. Half the lights were out, or flickering. The furniture was frayed and sprung and musty. Sitting in a wobbly chair, her bare feet propped on a low table, staring at an ancient black-and-white television set and drinking beer from a bottle, was Gaea. She was shapeless as usual in a filthy gray shift.

  Gaby, like everyone but the most fanatical, had envisioned a thousand possibilities for what life after death might be like, spanning the spectrum from heaven to hell. Somehow, this one had never come up.

  Gaea turned slightly. It was like one of those arty films where the camera eye is supposed to represent a character, and the other players respond to it. She looked at Gaby, or at the locus of space where Gaby imagined herself to be.

  "Do you have any idea the trouble you've caused me?" Gaea muttered.

  No, I don't, Gaby said. Though, when she thought about it, "said" was a pretty concrete verb for what she actually did. There was no sound involved. She did not feel lips or tongue move. No breath was taken into the lungs which, so far as she knew, still lay in the darkness beneath Tethys, clotted with phlegm.

  But the impulse was like speaking, and Gaea seemed to hear.

  "Why couldn't you j
ust leave it alone?" Gaea groused. "There are wheels within wheels, babe, to cop a phrase. Rocky was coming along nicely. What's wrong with being a little drunk every so often?"

  Gaby "said" nothing. "Rocky" was, of course, Cirocco Jones. And she had been more than a little drunk almost all the time. As for leaving it alone ...

  Cirocco might have. There was no way to be sure. Possibly forty or fifty years down the line she would have bestirred herself and tried to do something about the impossible situation that had driven her to drink. On the other hand, maybe it was possible for even an immortal to drink herself to death.

  At any rate, it had been Gaby who finally pushed Cirocco into the first, tentative step of surveying the regional brains of Gaea, looking for hints of useful subversion, hoping to locate somebody who could serve as focus for Gaby's planned Rebellion of the Gods.

  It had earned her a nasty death.

  "I had plans for that gal," Gaea was saying. "Two or three more centuries ... who knows? It might have been possible to tell her a few things. It might have been possible to ... to make her understand... to admit what ... " Gaea trailed off in disconsolate mutterings. Again, Gaby did not respond. Gaea glanced irritably at her.

  "You've pissed me off," she complained. "I never figured you for starting all this trouble. Tragic figure, that's you. Following Rocky around with your little pink tongue hanging out, like a bitch in heat. It was a good role, Gaby, one you could have built a life around. I ain't gonna forgive you for writing your own lines. Just where do you come off being the ... " At a loss for words, Gaea hurled her beer bottle at a huge stain on the wall. There was a lot of broken brown glass heaped beneath the stain.

  Gaea looked up again, with a wicked leer.

  "I'll bet you want some answers. I'm going to enjoy giving them to you. Here's one, right here." Gaea reached out-her hand blurring as it approached the Gaby/camera viewpoint-and came back holding a small, white, struggling thing with two legs and goggling eyes.