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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 just 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.
“Spies,” Gaea said. “This was yours. Sitting in your head for seventy-five years. How’d’ya like that? This is Stoolie. Rocky’s got one called Snitch. She doesn’t know about it, any more than you did. Everything the two of you did, it came right back to me.”
Gaby felt a bottomless despair. This must be hell.
“No, it isn’t. That’s all bunk, too.” Gaea paused long enough to squeeze the life from the squalling obscenity in her hand, then wiped the bloody mess on the arm of her chair.
“Life and death aren’t as important as you think. Consciousness is the real conundrum. Your awareness of yourself as a living being. You remember dying, you think you remember floating up through space till you got here, not so very long ago. But time is tricky on this level. So is memory. You aren’t a spook, if that’s any consolation to you.
“I have you,” Gaea whispered, making a gesture much like the one she had used to crush the Stoolie. “I cloned you, I recorded you, I took everything there was of Gaby-ness about you when you first showed up here. Cirocco, too. Since then, I’ve been constantly updated by that little bastard in your head. I am not supernatural, I am not God, not in the way you think of God  . . .  but I am one hell of a magician. The question of whether you, Gaby Plauget, the little girl from New Orleans who loved the stars, really died down there in Tethys, is, in the end, philosophical hair-splitting. Not worth the effort. You know that the awareness I am now addressing is you. Deny it if you can.”
Gaby could not.
“It‘s all done with mirrors,” Gaea said, shrugging it off. “If you had a ‘soul’, then I missed it, and it’s floated off to your anthropomorphic-Catholic-Judeo-Christian ‘heaven’, which I personally doubt, as I’ve never heard any radio stations broadcasting from there. Everything else of you, I own.”
What are you going to do with me? Gaby asked.
“Shit. I wish there was a hell.” She brooded in silence for a time. Gaby could do nothing but look on. Slowly, Gaea produced an expression that wan an awful hybrid of a grin and a sneer.
“Actually, though hell isn’t available, I have a reasonable facsimile. I don’t expect you’ll survive it.
“But I didn’t finish telling you why. Do you want to know?”
Gaby thought anything would probably be better than Gaea’s substitute for hell.
“You can say that again,” Gaea said. “Because you’ve ruined Rocky for me. Rocky was a genuine flawed heroine. I’ve been looking for one for millennia. Now, she’s still flawed, but she’s going to get some spine. Snitch can feel it building. She’s just finding out you’re dead. She isn’t sure I killed you, but near enough. Robin and Valiha and Chris are in deep trouble. They may not survive it. Right now, Rocky’s going to devote all her energy to saving their lives. Then  . . .  she’s going to come up here and declare war. This”—Gaea thumped her chest—“this incarnation of Gaea won’t survive it.” She shrugged. “That’s okay. I was getting tired of Mrs. Potatohead, anyway. I have some ideas for the next Gaea that might amuse you. But you won’t care. I’m through with you. You’re wasting my time.”
With that, Gaea had reached out and  . . .  grabbed the dream locus that was Gaby. Things went black, then she found herself rising within the curved emptiness of the hub, rising toward a red line of light at the very top of the hub, a line she and Cirocco had seen when they first stepped out . . . 
It’s all a dream, she reminded herself. That conversation never happened, not on a physical level. Gaea had all Gaby’s memories, and was capable of making new ones on the computer-program/memory-matrix that was all that was left of Gaby, who used to be flesh and blood. So this is all illusion. She is doing something to me, but I am nor flying up into the air, I am not plunging into that swirling maelstrom which I have always known, in my heart, is the mind of this thing called Gaea . . .
One thought protected her. One notion clutched tightly in the midst of chaos prevented her from slipping from mania into insanity. This is the twenty years, Gaby thought. I lived through it already.
 
In the red line, the speed of light was a local ordinance, a quaint regional phenomenon which could be a nuisance—like a cop hiding behind a billboard in a rural Georgia town—but which, with the proper bribes or enough horses under the hood, need not cause concern.
Take it a piece at a time. “Speed” depends on space and time. Neither were very important concepts in the Line. “Light” was complex and unnecessary parcels of massless wavicles, a by-product of living in the line, like sweat and feces. “Speed of light” was a contradiction in terms. How heavy is that day in the mountains when you built a campfire and saw a shooting star? What is the mass of yesterday? How fast is love?
The line extended all around the inner rim of Gaea, which, considered from an Einsteinian perspective, was a circle. The line was not circular. Seen against the backdrop of the inner rim, the line was thin. The line was not thin.
The line seemed to exist within the Universe. None of it extended outside the physical boundaries of Gaea, and Gaea was contained by the Universe; therefore, the line existed within the Universe.
The line was much bigger than the Universe.
In the end, the word “Universe” was unsuitable for use in a definition of the line. The concept of a naked singularity most closely approached the true nature of the line  . . .  and had little to do with it.
Things lived in it. Most of them were insane, as Gaea had intended Gaby to go insane. But Gaby kept holding to that thought: This is the twenty years. And: Cirocco will need me.
Slowly, cautiously, Gaby learned the nature of reality. She became as a God. It was pitifully inadequate—she had a lot of the Answers now, and knew that the Questions had never been phrased properly—but it was something. She would have been a lot happier living out the sort of script she had thought of as Life, but it was too late for that now, and she would accept what she must.
Cautiously, staying away from that dominant presence she knew as Gaea, Gaby began to look out of the line.
She saw Cirocco arrive in the hub, saw the bullets tear into the thing that called itself “Gaea,” felt the much more interesting series of changes pass through the entity she knew as Gaea, and grew thoughtful. There was a possibility there . . . 
She thought about it for a moment that turned out to be five years long.
She realized she could not endure much longer in this place. Gaea had not made it here, though a part of her remained in the line. Gaby must do the same thing if she were to survive. Carefully, trying not to alert Gaea, she disengaged herself and moved her center of consciousness down to the rim. She saw Cirocco many times, and remained unseen.
She began to learn the ways of Magic.

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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 just 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.
“Spies,” Gaea said. “This was yours. Sitting in your head for seventy-five years. How’d’ya like that? This is Stoolie. Rocky’s got one called Snitch. She doesn’t know about it, any more than you did. Everything the two of you did, it came right back to me.”
Gaby felt a bottomless despair. This must be hell.
“No, it isn’t. That’s all bunk, too.” Gaea paused long enough to squeeze the life from the squalling obscenity in her hand, then wiped the bloody mess on the arm of her chair.
“Life and death aren’t as important as you think. Consciousness is the real conundrum. Your awareness of yourself as a living being. You remember dying, you think you remember floating up through space till you got here, not so very long ago. But time is tricky on this level. So is memory. You aren’t a spook, if that’s any consolation to you.
“I have you,” Gaea whispered, making a gesture much like the one she had used to crush the Stoolie. “I cloned you, I recorded you, I took everything there was of Gaby-ness about you when you first showed up here. Cirocco, too. Since then, I’ve been constantly updated by that little bastard in your head. I am not supernatural, I am not God, not in the way you think of God  . . .  but I am one hell of a magician. The question of whether you, Gaby Plauget, the little girl from New Orleans who loved the stars, really died down there in Tethys, is, in the end, philosophical hair-splitting. Not worth the effort. You know that the awareness I am now addressing is you. Deny it if you can.”
Gaby could not.
“It‘s all done with mirrors,” Gaea said, shrugging it off. “If you had a ‘soul’, then I missed it, and it’s floated off to your anthropomorphic-Catholic-Judeo-Christian ‘heaven’, which I personally doubt, as I’ve never heard any radio stations broadcasting from there. Everything else of you, I own.”
What are you going to do with me? Gaby asked.
“Shit. I wish there was a hell.” She brooded in silence for a time. Gaby could do nothing but look on. Slowly, Gaea produced an expression that wan an awful hybrid of a grin and a sneer.
“Actually, though hell isn’t available, I have a reasonable facsimile. I don’t expect you’ll survive it.
“But I didn’t finish telling you why. Do you want to know?”
Gaby thought anything would probably be better than Gaea’s substitute for hell.
“You can say that again,” Gaea said. “Because you’ve ruined Rocky for me. Rocky was a genuine flawed heroine. I’ve been looking for one for millennia. Now, she’s still flawed, but she’s going to get some spine. Snitch can feel it building. She’s just finding out you’re dead. She isn’t sure I killed you, but near enough. Robin and Valiha and Chris are in deep trouble. They may not survive it. Right now, Rocky’s going to devote all her energy to saving their lives. Then  . . .  she’s going to come up here and declare war. This”—Gaea thumped her chest—“this incarnation of Gaea won’t survive it.” She shrugged. “That’s okay. I was getting tired of Mrs. Potatohead, anyway. I have some ideas for the next Gaea that might amuse you. But you won’t care. I’m through with you. You’re wasting my time.”
With that, Gaea had reached out and  . . .  grabbed the dream locus that was Gaby. Things went black, then she found herself rising within the curved emptiness of the hub, rising toward a red line of light at the very top of the hub, a line she and Cirocco had seen when they first stepped out . . . 
It’s all a dream, she reminded herself. That conversation never happened, not on a physical level. Gaea had all Gaby’s memories, and was capable of making new ones on the computer-program/memory-matrix that was all that was left of Gaby, who used to be flesh and blood. So this is all illusion. She is doing something to me, but I am nor flying up into the air, I am not plunging into that swirling maelstrom which I have always known, in my heart, is the mind of this thing called Gaea . . .
One thought protected her. One notion clutched tightly in the midst of chaos prevented her from slipping from mania into insanity. This is the twenty years, Gaby thought. I lived through it already.
 
In the red line, the speed of light was a local ordinance, a quaint regional phenomenon which could be a nuisance—like a cop hiding behind a billboard in a rural Georgia town—but which, with the proper bribes or enough horses under the hood, need not cause concern.
Take it a piece at a time. “Speed” depends on space and time. Neither were very important concepts in the Line. “Light” was complex and unnecessary parcels of massless wavicles, a by-product of living in the line, like sweat and feces. “Speed of light” was a contradiction in terms. How heavy is that day in the mountains when you built a campfire and saw a shooting star? What is the mass of yesterday? How fast is love?
The line extended all around the inner rim of Gaea, which, considered from an Einsteinian perspective, was a circle. The line was not circular. Seen against the backdrop of the inner rim, the line was thin. The line was not thin.
The line seemed to exist within the Universe. None of it extended outside the physical boundaries of Gaea, and Gaea was contained by the Universe; therefore, the line existed within the Universe.
The line was much bigger than the Universe.
In the end, the word “Universe” was unsuitable for use in a definition of the line. The concept of a naked singularity most closely approached the true nature of the line  . . .  and had little to do with it.
Things lived in it. Most of them were insane, as Gaea had intended Gaby to go insane. But Gaby kept holding to that thought: This is the twenty years. And: Cirocco will need me.
Slowly, cautiously, Gaby learned the nature of reality. She became as a God. It was pitifully inadequate—she had a lot of the Answers now, and knew that the Questions had never been phrased properly—but it was something. She would have been a lot happier living out the sort of script she had thought of as Life, but it was too late for that now, and she would accept what she must.
Cautiously, staying away from that dominant presence she knew as Gaea, Gaby began to look out of the line.
She saw Cirocco arrive in the hub, saw the bullets tear into the thing that called itself “Gaea,” felt the much more interesting series of changes pass through the entity she knew as Gaea, and grew thoughtful. There was a possibility there . . . 
She thought about it for a moment that turned out to be five years long.
She realized she could not endure much longer in this place. Gaea had not made it here, though a part of her remained in the line. Gaby must do the same thing if she were to survive. Carefully, trying not to alert Gaea, she disengaged herself and moved her center of consciousness down to the rim. She saw Cirocco many times, and remained unseen.
She began to learn the ways of Magic.

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