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43 The Thin Red Line

Cirocco called it the Mad Tea Party and knew it was not appropriate; it was just that for some time she had felt a little like Alice. The retinue of despair that surrounded Gaea might have fitted better on Beckett's existentialist stage than in Carroll's Wonderland. Yet she would not have been surprised had someone offered her half a cup of tea.
The crowd was exquisitely sensitive to Gaea's mood. Cirocco had never seen them more restive than as she approached the party, or as suddenly wary as when Gaea finally spotted her.
"Well, well," Gaea boomed. "If it isn't Captain Jones. To what do we owe the honor of this spontaneous and unannounced visit? You there, whatever your name is, bring a large glass of something cold for the Wizard. Never mind what it is so long as it contains no water. Take the chair over there, Cirocco. Is there anything else can get you? No? Well." Gaea seemed at a momentary loss for something to say. She sat in her wide chair and mumbled until Cirocco's drink arrived.
Cirocco looked at it as if she had never seen anything quite like it before.
"Perhaps you'd prefer the bottle," Gaea suggested. Cirocco's eyes came up to meet Gaea's. She looked back at the drink, turned it over, and moved the glass in a slow circle until a sphere of liquid was formed, sinking slowly toward the floor. She tossed the glass into the air, and it was still rising when it left the circle of light. The sphere flattened and began soaking into the rug.
"Is this your way of telling me you're on the wagon?" Gaea asked. "How about a Shirley Temple? I just received the cutest mixer from an admirer on Earth. It's ceramic, shaped just like America's Sweetheart, and I daresay worth a lot of money. You can make martinis in it by mixing gin to the chin and vermouth to the—"
"Shut up."
Gaea cocked her head slightly, considering it, and did as she was told. She folded her hands on her stomach and waited.
"I'm here to give you my resignation."
"I have not asked for it."
"Nevertheless, you have it. I no longer wish to be Wizard."
"You no longer wish." Gaea clucked sorrowfully. "You know it's not that simple. However, it is coincidental. For the last few years I have been contemplating whether I should terminate your employment. The fringe benefits would have to go, too, of course, which would make it tantamount to a death sentence, so I didn't move hastily. But the fact is, if you recall the qualities I mentioned when I first took you on, you have not been living up to the job for some time now."
"I won't even resent that. The fact is that I'm through with the job, effective immediately after the next Hyperion Carnival. Between now and then I will visit all the other Titanide lands to—"
"'Effective immediately after . . .  .'" Gaea burst in with feigned surprise. "Will you listen to her? Who would believe a day could be so full of impudence?" She laughed and was quickly accompanied by some of her disciples. Cirocco looked at one of the people and did not take her eyes off him until he had thought it well to slink back out of her sight. By then it was quiet again, and Gaea motioned for her to go on.
"There's little to add. I promised a Carnival to remember, and I will deliver it. But after that I am demanding that you establish another way for the Titanides to reproduce, subject to my approval, and with a ten-year waiting period, during which I will observe the new method and weed out any tricks."
"You are demanding," Gaea said. She pursed her lips. "I'll tell you, Cirocco, you have me going back and forth on this thing. I frankly never thought you'd have the gumption to show up here, knowing what I just learned. That you have speaks well for you. It demonstrates those qualities I first observed in you that caused me to make you Wizard in the first place. If you recall, among them were courage, determination, a sense of adventure, and the capacity for heroism: qualities you have sadly lacked. I was not going to speak of my recent wavering. But then you follow it with these foolish demands, and I wonder if you have lost your sanity."
"I have regained it."
Gaea frowned. "Let's get it out in the open, shall we? We both know what we're talking about here, and I'll concede I acted hastily. I admit I overreacted. But she was foolish, too. It was not wise for her to have used those children as the medium for her message; no doubt in her condition she couldn't think of everything. But the fact remains that Ga—"
"Don't speak her name." Cirocco had raised her voice only slightly, but Gaea was stopped short, and the first rows of her audience unconsciously edged back. "Never speak her name to me again."
Gaea, to all appearances, was genuinely surprised.
"Her name? What does her name have to do with it? Unless you have been taken in by the tales of your own magic, I don't see the sense. A name is just a sound; it has no power over anything."
"I will not hear her name coming from your lips."
For the first time Gaea looked angry.
"I put up with much," she said. "I allow insults from you and from others that no God would ever endure because I see no point in slaughtering day in and day out. But you try my patience. I will go only so far, and you should take that as a warning."
"You put up with it because you love it," Cirocco said evenly. "Life is a game to you, and you control the pieces. The better show they give you, the more you like it. You have all these people to kiss your ass any time you tell them to. And I will insult you as I please."
"They would, too," Gaea said, smiling again. "And of course, you're right. Once again you prove that when you try, you can give me a better show than anyone." She waited, apparently thinking Cirocco would go on. Cirocco said nothing. She leaned her head against the back of her chair and looked up at the distant, geometrically straight, razor-sharp line of red light overhead. It was the first thing she had seen on her first trip to the hub, so very long ago. She had stood side by side with Gaby, and they had wondered what it was, but it was so high above them there seemed little point in speculating. They could never have reached it.
But Cirocco had felt even then that it was important. It was just a feeling, but she trusted her feelings. Some vital part of Gaea lived up there in the most inaccessible spot of a world filled with daunting vistas. It was at least twenty kilometers from where she sat.
"I would think you would be curious as to the answers to your requests," Gaea finally said. Cirocco brought her head forward and looked at Gaea again. There was no emotion on her face, as there had not been from the time she arrived.
"I couldn't be less interested. I told you what I was going to do, and then I told you what you were going to do. There is nothing further to say."
"I doubt that." Gaea looked at her narrowly. "Because this is absolutely impossible. You must know that, and you must have some threat to make, though I can't imagine what it might be."
Cirocco merely looked at her.
"You could not imagine that I would meekly grant your  . . .  very well, accede to your demands, if you prefer it that way. Demand or request, it matters little if the answer is no. Then you must tell me what you will do."
"The answer is no?"
"It is."
"Then I must kill you."
There was now no sound to be heard in the vastness of the hub. Several hundred humans stood grouped loosely behind Gaea's chair, hanging on to every word. They all were fearful people or they would not have been there, and certainly most of them were wondering only how Gaea would dispose of this woman. But a few, looking at Cirocco, began to wonder if they had put their allegiance in the right place.
"You really have taken leave of your senses. You have no plutonium or uranium and no way to get any. I doubt if you could fashion a weapon if you did. If you could conjure a nuclear device with the magic you seem to believe you possess, you would not use it because to do so would destroy the Titanides you have such affection for." She sighed again and turned one hand over carelessly. "I never pretended immortality. I know how much time I have left. I am not indestructible. Atomic bombs—in large quantities and placed with calculation—could fragment my body or at least render me uninhabitable. Short of that, I know of nothing that can do me serious harm. So how do you propose to kill me?"
"With my bare hands, if necessary."
"Or die in the attempt."
"If it comes to that."
"Exactly." Gaea closed her eyes, and her lips moved soundlessly. At last she looked at Cirocco again.
"I should have expected it. You would find it less painful to throw away your life than to live with what has happened. It is my fault, I admit it, but I don't want to see you wasted. You are worth this entire group, and more."
"I am worth nothing unless I do what I must do."
"Cirocco, I apologize for what I did. Wait, wait, hear me out. Give me this chance. I thought I could conceal what I was doing, and I was wrong. You won't deny that she was plotting my overthrow and that you were helping her—"
"I regret nothing but the fact I hesitated too long."
"Surely. That's understandable. I know the depth of your bitterness and of your hatred. It's all so unnecessary because what I did was done more from pride than fear; you can't think I was seriously worried that her puny efforts would—"
"Watch what you say about her. I won't warn you again."
"I'm sorry. The fact remains that nothing she or you could do would cause me any discomfort. I destroyed her for the insolence of thinking it would be done and, by doing so, have cost myself your loyalty. I find that a heavy price to pay. I want you back, fear I cannot, and yet want you to stay if for no other reason than to give the place some class."
"It needs some, but I can't do it, even if I had any."
"You underrate yourself. What you have demanded is impossible. You are not the first Wizard I have nominated in my three million years. There is only one way to leave the job, and that is feet first. No one has survived it, and no one will. But there is something I can do. I can bring her back."
Cirocco put her head in her hands and said nothing for a very long time. At last she moved, putting both arms under her shapeless blanket, hugging herself, and rocking slowly back and forth. "This is the only thing I was afraid of," she said, to no one.
"I can re-create her exactly as she was," Gaea went on. "You are aware that I carry tissue samples of you both. When you were examined initially, and when you report for the immortality treatments, I tap your memories. Hers are quite up to date. I can grow her body and fill it with her essence. She will be herself, I swear it; it will be impossible to tell any difference. It is what I will do with you if despite everything, it becomes necessary to kill you. I can give her back to you, with only one change, and that is to remove her compulsion to destroy me. Only that and nothing more."
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.
 

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43 The Thin Red Line

Cirocco called it the Mad Tea Party and knew it was not appropriate; it was just that for some time she had felt a little like Alice. The retinue of despair that surrounded Gaea might have fitted better on Beckett's existentialist stage than in Carroll's Wonderland. Yet she would not have been surprised had someone offered her half a cup of tea.
The crowd was exquisitely sensitive to Gaea's mood. Cirocco had never seen them more restive than as she approached the party, or as suddenly wary as when Gaea finally spotted her.
"Well, well," Gaea boomed. "If it isn't Captain Jones. To what do we owe the honor of this spontaneous and unannounced visit? You there, whatever your name is, bring a large glass of something cold for the Wizard. Never mind what it is so long as it contains no water. Take the chair over there, Cirocco. Is there anything else can get you? No? Well." Gaea seemed at a momentary loss for something to say. She sat in her wide chair and mumbled until Cirocco's drink arrived.
Cirocco looked at it as if she had never seen anything quite like it before.
"Perhaps you'd prefer the bottle," Gaea suggested. Cirocco's eyes came up to meet Gaea's. She looked back at the drink, turned it over, and moved the glass in a slow circle until a sphere of liquid was formed, sinking slowly toward the floor. She tossed the glass into the air, and it was still rising when it left the circle of light. The sphere flattened and began soaking into the rug.
"Is this your way of telling me you're on the wagon?" Gaea asked. "How about a Shirley Temple? I just received the cutest mixer from an admirer on Earth. It's ceramic, shaped just like America's Sweetheart, and I daresay worth a lot of money. You can make martinis in it by mixing gin to the chin and vermouth to the—"
"Shut up."
Gaea cocked her head slightly, considering it, and did as she was told. She folded her hands on her stomach and waited.
"I'm here to give you my resignation."
"I have not asked for it."
"Nevertheless, you have it. I no longer wish to be Wizard."
"You no longer wish." Gaea clucked sorrowfully. "You know it's not that simple. However, it is coincidental. For the last few years I have been contemplating whether I should terminate your employment. The fringe benefits would have to go, too, of course, which would make it tantamount to a death sentence, so I didn't move hastily. But the fact is, if you recall the qualities I mentioned when I first took you on, you have not been living up to the job for some time now."
"I won't even resent that. The fact is that I'm through with the job, effective immediately after the next Hyperion Carnival. Between now and then I will visit all the other Titanide lands to—"
"'Effective immediately after . . .  .'" Gaea burst in with feigned surprise. "Will you listen to her? Who would believe a day could be so full of impudence?" She laughed and was quickly accompanied by some of her disciples. Cirocco looked at one of the people and did not take her eyes off him until he had thought it well to slink back out of her sight. By then it was quiet again, and Gaea motioned for her to go on.
"There's little to add. I promised a Carnival to remember, and I will deliver it. But after that I am demanding that you establish another way for the Titanides to reproduce, subject to my approval, and with a ten-year waiting period, during which I will observe the new method and weed out any tricks."
"You are demanding," Gaea said. She pursed her lips. "I'll tell you, Cirocco, you have me going back and forth on this thing. I frankly never thought you'd have the gumption to show up here, knowing what I just learned. That you have speaks well for you. It demonstrates those qualities I first observed in you that caused me to make you Wizard in the first place. If you recall, among them were courage, determination, a sense of adventure, and the capacity for heroism: qualities you have sadly lacked. I was not going to speak of my recent wavering. But then you follow it with these foolish demands, and I wonder if you have lost your sanity."
"I have regained it."
Gaea frowned. "Let's get it out in the open, shall we? We both know what we're talking about here, and I'll concede I acted hastily. I admit I overreacted. But she was foolish, too. It was not wise for her to have used those children as the medium for her message; no doubt in her condition she couldn't think of everything. But the fact remains that Ga—"
"Don't speak her name." Cirocco had raised her voice only slightly, but Gaea was stopped short, and the first rows of her audience unconsciously edged back. "Never speak her name to me again."
Gaea, to all appearances, was genuinely surprised.
"Her name? What does her name have to do with it? Unless you have been taken in by the tales of your own magic, I don't see the sense. A name is just a sound; it has no power over anything."
"I will not hear her name coming from your lips."
For the first time Gaea looked angry.
"I put up with much," she said. "I allow insults from you and from others that no God would ever endure because I see no point in slaughtering day in and day out. But you try my patience. I will go only so far, and you should take that as a warning."
"You put up with it because you love it," Cirocco said evenly. "Life is a game to you, and you control the pieces. The better show they give you, the more you like it. You have all these people to kiss your ass any time you tell them to. And I will insult you as I please."
"They would, too," Gaea said, smiling again. "And of course, you're right. Once again you prove that when you try, you can give me a better show than anyone." She waited, apparently thinking Cirocco would go on. Cirocco said nothing. She leaned her head against the back of her chair and looked up at the distant, geometrically straight, razor-sharp line of red light overhead. It was the first thing she had seen on her first trip to the hub, so very long ago. She had stood side by side with Gaby, and they had wondered what it was, but it was so high above them there seemed little point in speculating. They could never have reached it.
But Cirocco had felt even then that it was important. It was just a feeling, but she trusted her feelings. Some vital part of Gaea lived up there in the most inaccessible spot of a world filled with daunting vistas. It was at least twenty kilometers from where she sat.
"I would think you would be curious as to the answers to your requests," Gaea finally said. Cirocco brought her head forward and looked at Gaea again. There was no emotion on her face, as there had not been from the time she arrived.
"I couldn't be less interested. I told you what I was going to do, and then I told you what you were going to do. There is nothing further to say."
"I doubt that." Gaea looked at her narrowly. "Because this is absolutely impossible. You must know that, and you must have some threat to make, though I can't imagine what it might be."
Cirocco merely looked at her.
"You could not imagine that I would meekly grant your  . . .  very well, accede to your demands, if you prefer it that way. Demand or request, it matters little if the answer is no. Then you must tell me what you will do."
"The answer is no?"
"It is."
"Then I must kill you."
There was now no sound to be heard in the vastness of the hub. Several hundred humans stood grouped loosely behind Gaea's chair, hanging on to every word. They all were fearful people or they would not have been there, and certainly most of them were wondering only how Gaea would dispose of this woman. But a few, looking at Cirocco, began to wonder if they had put their allegiance in the right place.
"You really have taken leave of your senses. You have no plutonium or uranium and no way to get any. I doubt if you could fashion a weapon if you did. If you could conjure a nuclear device with the magic you seem to believe you possess, you would not use it because to do so would destroy the Titanides you have such affection for." She sighed again and turned one hand over carelessly. "I never pretended immortality. I know how much time I have left. I am not indestructible. Atomic bombs—in large quantities and placed with calculation—could fragment my body or at least render me uninhabitable. Short of that, I know of nothing that can do me serious harm. So how do you propose to kill me?"
"With my bare hands, if necessary."
"Or die in the attempt."
"If it comes to that."
"Exactly." Gaea closed her eyes, and her lips moved soundlessly. At last she looked at Cirocco again.
"I should have expected it. You would find it less painful to throw away your life than to live with what has happened. It is my fault, I admit it, but I don't want to see you wasted. You are worth this entire group, and more."
"I am worth nothing unless I do what I must do."
"Cirocco, I apologize for what I did. Wait, wait, hear me out. Give me this chance. I thought I could conceal what I was doing, and I was wrong. You won't deny that she was plotting my overthrow and that you were helping her—"
"I regret nothing but the fact I hesitated too long."
"Surely. That's understandable. I know the depth of your bitterness and of your hatred. It's all so unnecessary because what I did was done more from pride than fear; you can't think I was seriously worried that her puny efforts would—"
"Watch what you say about her. I won't warn you again."
"I'm sorry. The fact remains that nothing she or you could do would cause me any discomfort. I destroyed her for the insolence of thinking it would be done and, by doing so, have cost myself your loyalty. I find that a heavy price to pay. I want you back, fear I cannot, and yet want you to stay if for no other reason than to give the place some class."
"It needs some, but I can't do it, even if I had any."
"You underrate yourself. What you have demanded is impossible. You are not the first Wizard I have nominated in my three million years. There is only one way to leave the job, and that is feet first. No one has survived it, and no one will. But there is something I can do. I can bring her back."
Cirocco put her head in her hands and said nothing for a very long time. At last she moved, putting both arms under her shapeless blanket, hugging herself, and rocking slowly back and forth. "This is the only thing I was afraid of," she said, to no one.
"I can re-create her exactly as she was," Gaea went on. "You are aware that I carry tissue samples of you both. When you were examined initially, and when you report for the immortality treatments, I tap your memories. Hers are quite up to date. I can grow her body and fill it with her essence. She will be herself, I swear it; it will be impossible to tell any difference. It is what I will do with you if despite everything, it becomes necessary to kill you. I can give her back to you, with only one change, and that is to remove her compulsion to destroy me. Only that and nothing more."
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.
 

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