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DEMON

TWENTY-SIX

“So you think I should let Conal move back in?”
“Do you love him?”
“Sometimes I think I do.”
“I don’t know a lot of things for sure, but one thing I’m pretty sure about is that love is the only thing that’s worth much.”
“He makes me happy,” Robin admitted.
“All the better.”
“We’re . . . very good in bed.”
“Then you’re a fool to be anywhere else. It was good enough for your great-great-great grandmaw. You are descended from a long line of lesbians, but there’s a touch of perversion in your blood.”
Another hundred steps went by, then still another.
“Okay. I‘ll think about it,” Robin said. “You told me what sin is. What’s evil?”
“Robin . . . I know it when I see it.”
That was all there was time for, as, to Robin’s surprise, she found herself at the bottom of the Dione stairs.
It was nothing like the other regional brains. Robin had seen three of them: Crius, still loyal to Gaea, Tethys, an enemy; and Thea, one of Gaea’s strongest allies. The twelve regional brains had chosen sides long ago, during the Oceanic Rebellion, when the land itself had become disloyal to Gaea.
It had been Dione’s misfortune to be located between Metis and Iapetus, two of Oceanus‘ strongest and most effective supporters. When war came, she was squeezed between the two and mortally wounded. It had taken her a long time to die, but she had been dead now for at least five hundred years.
It was dark at the bottom of the staircase. Their footsteps echoed.
The moat surrounding the huge conical tower that had once been Dione was dry. Where Tethys had glowed with a red inner light and had seemed alert and aware even in his utter immobility, Dione was obviously a corpse. Parts of the tower had collapsed. Robin could glimpse a lattice-like internal structure through the gaping holes. When Cirocco’s flashlight fell on it, it threw back a million shattered reflections.
When the flashlight turned the other way, the reflections were only two. The twin gleams were about two meters apart, and came from inside a big, arched tunnel entrance. It looked like a train was sitting just inside.
“Come on out, Nasu,” Cirocco whispered.
Robin’s heart turned over. She fell back through the years, twenty and more . . .
. . . to the day when, as a young girl, she had been given the tiny snake, a South American anaconda, Eunectes murinus, and selected it as her demon. No cats or crows for Robin; she would have a serpent. She named it Nasu, which someone told her meant “little pig” in some Earth language, after watching it devour six terrified mice in one meal.
. . . to arriving in Gaea, Nasu in her handbag, terrified and confused by Customs, and by the low gravity. Nasu had bitten her three times that day.
. . . to losing the snake somewhere in the depths of Gaea between Tethys and Thea. She and Chris had looked for a long time, had set out bait, called endlessly, to no avail. Chris had tried to convince her the snake would find prey down there in the darkness, that she could survive. Robin had tried to believe it was so, and had failed.
She had meant to keep the snake all her life. She had intended to grow old with this reptile. She knew they could grow to ten meters in length and outweigh a mere python, inch for inch, by a factor of two. A truly remarkable snake, the anaconda . . . .
Nasu made a hissing sound that raised the hairs on the back of Robin’s neck. There must have been sounds like that, though not so deep or so loud, in the swamps of the Cretaceous Period. A remarkable snake, but they didn’t grow that big.
“Sh-sh-sh . . . Cirocco . . . let’s get—”
Nasu moved. Surely there could never had been a slither like that since the dawn of time. It was a slither to make tyrannosaurs run squealing into the brush, to loosen the bowels of a wolverine, to give lions and tigers cardiac arrest.
To stop Robin’s heart.
The anaconda’s head came out of the tunnel and it stopped. Her tongue was twice the girth of a full-grown anaconda, and it slid out and flicked this way and that. Her head was completely white. It was about the size of the locomotive Robin had first visualized in the darkness. The eyes were golden, with narrow black slits.
“Talk to her, Robin,” Cirocco whispered.
“Cirocco!” Robin hissed, urgently. “I don‘t think you understand! An anaconda isn’t a puppy dog or a kitty cat.”
“I know that.”
“You don’t! You can care for them, but you never own them. They tolerate you because you’re too big to eat. If she’s hungry . . . ”
“She’s not. I know a little about this, babe. There’s big game down here. You don’t think she grew that big eating chickens and rabbits, do you?”
“I don’t believe she grew that big at all! In twenty years? That’s impossible.”
There was that awful slithering sound again, and twenty more meters of Nasu entered the dark chamber. She paused, and tasted the air again.
“She won’t remember me. She’s not a pet, damn it. I had to handle her carefully, and even then I got bites.”
“I promise you, Robin, she’s not hungry. And even if she was, she wouldn’t bother with anything as small as us.”
“I don’t understand what you want me to do.”
“Just stand your ground and talk to her. Say the things you used to say to her twenty years ago. Get her used to you . . . and don’t run away.”
So Robin did. They were three or four hundred meters from the snake. Every few minutes there would be more slithering, and another fifty meters would emerge from the tunnel. There was no sign Nasu was about to run out of meters.
There came a time when the head was no more than two meters away. Robin knew what came next, and braced herself for it.
The great tongue came out. It touched her lightly on her forearms, flirted briefly with the textures of her clothing, flicked over her hair.
And it was all right.
The tongue was moist and cool, but not unpleasant. And in that moment of touching, Robin somehow knew the snake remembered her. The touch of the tongue seemed to pass some sign of recognition from Nasu to Robin. I know you.
Nasu moved again, the great head lifted slightly off the floor, and Robin found herself in a semi-circle of white snake higher than her head. One fearful yellow eye regarded her with reptilian speculation, yet she was not afraid. The head tilted a little . . .
Robin remembered something Nasu had liked. She had sometimes rubbed Nasu on the top of the head, with her forefinger. The snake would rise to it, coil around her arm, and present herself for more.
She reached up and, with both fists, rubbed the smooth skin on top of Nasu’s head. The snake made a relatively small hissing sound—no worse than an ocean liner coming into port—and retreated. The tongue touched her again, and Nasu moved around her from the other side and tilted her head the other way for more rubbing.
Cirocco moved slowly up to join them. Nasu watched placidly.
“Okay,” Robin said, quietly. “I’ve talked to her. Now what?”
“Obviously, this is more than an anaconda,” Cirocco began.
“Obviously.”
“I don’t know what changed her. Diet? Low gravity? Something, anyway. She’s adapted to living underground. I’ve spotted her two or three times, bigger each time, and she’s stayed out of my way. I have reason to believe she’s a lot more intelligent than she was.”
“Why?”
“A friend told me she might be. The next time I saw Nasu, I told her to meet me here in Dione if she wanted to be with her old friend again. And here she is.”
Robin was impressed, but beginning to be suspicious.
“So what’s the purpose?”
Cirocco sighed.
“You asked me what evil is. Maybe this is. I’ve thought about it a long time, but I’m afraid I can’t get much of a handle on what might seem an evil thing to a snake. I don’t think she loves Gaea. And anyway, all I can do is suggest. The rest is up to you, and her.”
“Suggest what?”
“That you ask her to follow us to Hyperion, to slay Gaea.”

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DEMON

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TWENTY-SIX

“I don’t like all that army stuff,” Robin said.
“Why not? It’s equal opportunity. Men’s regiments and women’s regiments. The pay’s good, the food’s terrific—”
“I never know when you’re kidding anymore.”
“Robin, when it comes to the army, I’m kidding just about all the time. It’s the only way I can cope with it.”
Robin looked at Cirocco Jones, who sat astride Hornpipe, as she was sitting on Valiha. Nearby, the infant Tambura cantered in the gawky and amiable way of all young Titanides, enjoying the educational outing with her foremother, Hornpipe, and the two humans.
The Wizard, the Captain, the Mayor . . . the Demon. Cirocco Jones was all of them, and she was also an old friend. But sometimes lately she scared Robin. Seeing her at the big rallies in the stadium, watching the throngs cheer her every word . . . it reminded her too much of the historical footage of demagogues of the past, the silver-tongued rascals who led their people into disaster. She was a stranger, standing up there, arms raised, drinking the vast approval of the crowds.
Yet, on those rare occasions when she could be alone with her, she was just Cirocco. Of course, that had always been slightly overwhelming in itself, but in a quite different way.
Cirocco seemed to sense Robin’s mood. She turned to her, and shook her head.
“Remember what I told you, way back at the Junction,” Cirocco said. “Way back when we planned all this. I told you you wouldn‘t like all of it. But I told you to remember it isn’t all what it seems.”
“Putting that editor in jail . . . that made me sick. He was a good man.”
“I know he is. I admire him. When this is over I’ll use whatever influence I have left—if I’m still alive—to see that he is properly honored. Make him the head of the school of journalism, maybe . . . and he’ll hate me the rest of his life. With good reason.”
Robin sighed.
“Hell. As soon as she’s sure you’re gone, Trini will just stick him back in jail. Or Stuart.”
They were heading almost due west, into the heart of the Dione darkness. The Titanides had already brought them through the “impenetrable” jungle and up over the “unscalable” mountains about as easily as a pair of tanks moving over paved road. They had swum the Ophion, and were now nearing the Dione central vertical cable. It was like an Earth night with a full moon in the sky. Behind them, Iapetus curved up the inside of the wheel, and in front was Metis. Both regions reflected enough light into Dione for the Titanides to see by. Tambura scampered to the left and right of the main trail, but always returned at a gentle admonition from Valiha, and never got into trouble. Titanide children never did.
Cirocco had not mentioned the purpose of the trip. Robin had thought the central cable was just a landmark on the way to their final destination, but when they reached it, the Titanides stopped.
“We’ll be happy to accompany you, Captain,” Valiha said. “This place holds no horrors for us.”
She was referring to the instinctive fear Titanides held for the central cables, and for the beings which lived at the bottom. Twenty years ago, trapped under a rockfall beneath the central Tethys cable, Robin and Chris had faced the nightmare task of herding Valiha down the five-kilometer spiral stairway that ended in the lair of Tethys himself—a cranky, obsessed, terrifying, and, luckily for them, myopic Lesser God. Valiha’s I.Q. had decreased with every step down, until at the bottom she was no brighter than a horse and twice as skittish. The encounter had ended in two broken forelegs for Valiha, and an endless nightmare for Robin.
It was not a fear the Titanides could do anything about. It had been programmed into them by Gaea.
But Dione was dead, and that apparently made a difference.
“Thanks for the offer, my friends, but I would prefer it if you awaited us here. Our business will not take us long. You might use the opportunity to teach this useless one something of the good grace and dignity your race is known for, and which she so sorely lacks.”
“Hey!” Tambura protested, and leaped at Cirocco, who dodged to the side, grabbed her, and wrestled in mock ferocity until the young Titanide was laughing too hard to continue the game. Cirocco mussed her hair, and took Robin‘s arm. They started into the forest of cable strands.
At twenty-five centimeters per step, there were twenty thousand steps leading down to Dione. Even in one-quarter gee, it was one hell of a lot of steps.
Cirocco had brought a powerful battery light. Robin was grateful for it. There was natural light from creatures called glowbes which clung to the high, arched ceiling, but it was dim and orange, and there were long stretches where the animals didn’t nest. They marched in silence for a long time.
Robin realized she would probably never get a better chance to talk to Cirocco about something that bad been causing her a lot of agony. The new, improved, glorious Mayor had little time these days to spend talking with her friends.
“I don’t suppose it’s possible you don’t know about me and Conal.”
“You’re right. It’s not possible.”
“He wants to move in with me again.”
“Why did you throw him out?”
“I didn’t—” But she had. She might as well admit it, she decided. It had been almost a kilorev now, and she wasn’t getting much sleep. Not used to sleeping alone anymore, she told herself, and knew it was more than that.
“Nova was part of it, I guess,” she said. “Every time I looked at her I saw the accusation, and I felt guilty. I wanted to get close to her again.”
“Worked pretty good, didn’t it?”
“That cold-ass, sanctimonious, snot-nosed little—” She bit it off before the rage could build.
“She‘s all I have,” Robin said helplessly.
“That’s not true. And it’s not fair to her.”
“But I—”
“Listen for a minute,” Cirocco cut in. “I’ve given this some thought. I’ve been thinking about it since the feast, since we made the Pledge and started planning to take over Bellinzona. I—”
“You knew then?”
“I hate to see friends in such a mess. I’ve stayed out, because people don’t really want advice about things like that. But I have some. If you want it.”
Robin didn’t want it. She had learned that the observations and plans made by the Mayor were usually the right thing to do—and quite often not what you would like to do at all.
“I want it,” she said.
Robin counted three hundred steps before Cirocco spoke again. Great Mother, she thought. It must be really awful if she’s taking this much time to choose her words. Who does she think I am?
“Nova hasn’t learned the difference between evil and sin.”
Robin counted fifty more steps.
“Maybe I haven’t, either,” she finally said.
“Naturally, I’m implying that I have,” Cirocco said, with a chuckle. “Let me tell you what I think, and you can make of it what you will.”
Ten more steps.
“Sin is a violation of the laws of the tribe,” Cirocco said. “On Earth, in most societies, what you practice in the Coven was a sin. There’s another word, too. Perversion. Historically, most humans have seen homosexuality as a perversion. Now, I’ve heard about a hundred theories as to why people are homosexual. Doctors say it happened in childhood. Biochemists say it’s all chemicals in the brain. Militant gays say being gay is good for you, and so forth. In the Coven, you say men are evil beings, and only an evil woman could mate with one.
“I don’t have a theory. I don’t care. It just isn’t important to me if somebody’s heterosexual or homosexual.
“But it’s important to you. In your mind, you have sinned by having carnal knowledge with a man. You’re a pervert.”
Another fifty steps went by as Robin thought this over. It wasn’t a new thought to her.
“I don’t know if this helps me,” she said, at last.
“I didn’t promise to help. I think your only hope is to look at it objectively. I’ve tried to. What I’ve concluded is that, for reasons I don‘t understand, some people are one way and some people are the other. On Earth, with overwhelming societal reasons to be heterosexual, there have always been those who are not. In the Coven, it’s like a mirror image. I suspect there might have been a fair number of unhappy women in the Coven. They probably didn’t even know what was making them unhappy. Maybe they dreamed about it. Sinful dreams. But their problem was that—for whatever reason, biological, behavioral, hormonal—they were . . . well, for want of a better word, they were gay. They’d have been happier with male sex partners. I don’t know if you’re born gay or are made gay—on Earth, or in the Coven. But I think you’re a pervert.”
Robin felt the blood rushing to her face, but did not break stride on the long descent. It was best to have it out.
“You think I have to have a man.”
“It’s not that simple. But something in your personality meshes with something in Conal’s. If he’d been a woman, you’d be the happiest person in Gaea right now. Since he’s a man, you’re one of the most miserable. It’s because you’ve bought the Coven’s big lie, even though you think you’re too adult for all that. There were millions of Earth men and women who bought the Earth cultures’ big lies, and they died just as unhappy as you are now. And I suggest to you that it’s a foolish thing.”
“Yeah, but . . . damn it, Cirocco, I can see that. I’ve had those thoughts—”
“But you haven’t fought them hard enough.”
“But what about Nova?”
“What about her? If she can’t accept you the way you are, then she isn’t the person you hoped she would be.”
Robin thought about it for many hundred steps.
“She’s grown up,” Cirocco said. “She can make her own decisions.”
“I know that. But—”
“She represents the unforgiving weight of Coven morality.”
“But . . . can’t I make her get over it?”
“No. I’m not even sure you can help her. But . . . maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I think time is going to cure your problem. Time, and a Titanide.”
Robin questioned her about that, but Cirocco would say no more.
“So you think I should let Conal move back in?”
“Do you love him?”
“Sometimes I think I do.”
“I don’t know a lot of things for sure, but one thing I’m pretty sure about is that love is the only thing that’s worth much.”
“He makes me happy,” Robin admitted.
“All the better.”
“We’re . . . very good in bed.”
“Then you’re a fool to be anywhere else. It was good enough for your great-great-great grandmaw. You are descended from a long line of lesbians, but there’s a touch of perversion in your blood.”
Another hundred steps went by, then still another.
“Okay. I‘ll think about it,” Robin said. “You told me what sin is. What’s evil?”
“Robin . . . I know it when I see it.”
That was all there was time for, as, to Robin’s surprise, she found herself at the bottom of the Dione stairs.
It was nothing like the other regional brains. Robin had seen three of them: Crius, still loyal to Gaea, Tethys, an enemy; and Thea, one of Gaea’s strongest allies. The twelve regional brains had chosen sides long ago, during the Oceanic Rebellion, when the land itself had become disloyal to Gaea.
It had been Dione’s misfortune to be located between Metis and Iapetus, two of Oceanus‘ strongest and most effective supporters. When war came, she was squeezed between the two and mortally wounded. It had taken her a long time to die, but she had been dead now for at least five hundred years.
It was dark at the bottom of the staircase. Their footsteps echoed.
The moat surrounding the huge conical tower that had once been Dione was dry. Where Tethys had glowed with a red inner light and had seemed alert and aware even in his utter immobility, Dione was obviously a corpse. Parts of the tower had collapsed. Robin could glimpse a lattice-like internal structure through the gaping holes. When Cirocco’s flashlight fell on it, it threw back a million shattered reflections.
When the flashlight turned the other way, the reflections were only two. The twin gleams were about two meters apart, and came from inside a big, arched tunnel entrance. It looked like a train was sitting just inside.
“Come on out, Nasu,” Cirocco whispered.
Robin’s heart turned over. She fell back through the years, twenty and more . . .
. . . to the day when, as a young girl, she had been given the tiny snake, a South American anaconda, Eunectes murinus, and selected it as her demon. No cats or crows for Robin; she would have a serpent. She named it Nasu, which someone told her meant “little pig” in some Earth language, after watching it devour six terrified mice in one meal.
. . . to arriving in Gaea, Nasu in her handbag, terrified and confused by Customs, and by the low gravity. Nasu had bitten her three times that day.
. . . to losing the snake somewhere in the depths of Gaea between Tethys and Thea. She and Chris had looked for a long time, had set out bait, called endlessly, to no avail. Chris had tried to convince her the snake would find prey down there in the darkness, that she could survive. Robin had tried to believe it was so, and had failed.
She had meant to keep the snake all her life. She had intended to grow old with this reptile. She knew they could grow to ten meters in length and outweigh a mere python, inch for inch, by a factor of two. A truly remarkable snake, the anaconda . . . .
Nasu made a hissing sound that raised the hairs on the back of Robin’s neck. There must have been sounds like that, though not so deep or so loud, in the swamps of the Cretaceous Period. A remarkable snake, but they didn’t grow that big.
“Sh-sh-sh . . . Cirocco . . . let’s get—”
Nasu moved. Surely there could never had been a slither like that since the dawn of time. It was a slither to make tyrannosaurs run squealing into the brush, to loosen the bowels of a wolverine, to give lions and tigers cardiac arrest.
To stop Robin’s heart.
The anaconda’s head came out of the tunnel and it stopped. Her tongue was twice the girth of a full-grown anaconda, and it slid out and flicked this way and that. Her head was completely white. It was about the size of the locomotive Robin had first visualized in the darkness. The eyes were golden, with narrow black slits.
“Talk to her, Robin,” Cirocco whispered.
“Cirocco!” Robin hissed, urgently. “I don‘t think you understand! An anaconda isn’t a puppy dog or a kitty cat.”
“I know that.”
“You don’t! You can care for them, but you never own them. They tolerate you because you’re too big to eat. If she’s hungry . . . ”
“She’s not. I know a little about this, babe. There’s big game down here. You don’t think she grew that big eating chickens and rabbits, do you?”
“I don’t believe she grew that big at all! In twenty years? That’s impossible.”
There was that awful slithering sound again, and twenty more meters of Nasu entered the dark chamber. She paused, and tasted the air again.
“She won’t remember me. She’s not a pet, damn it. I had to handle her carefully, and even then I got bites.”
“I promise you, Robin, she’s not hungry. And even if she was, she wouldn’t bother with anything as small as us.”
“I don’t understand what you want me to do.”
“Just stand your ground and talk to her. Say the things you used to say to her twenty years ago. Get her used to you . . . and don’t run away.”
So Robin did. They were three or four hundred meters from the snake. Every few minutes there would be more slithering, and another fifty meters would emerge from the tunnel. There was no sign Nasu was about to run out of meters.
There came a time when the head was no more than two meters away. Robin knew what came next, and braced herself for it.
The great tongue came out. It touched her lightly on her forearms, flirted briefly with the textures of her clothing, flicked over her hair.
And it was all right.
The tongue was moist and cool, but not unpleasant. And in that moment of touching, Robin somehow knew the snake remembered her. The touch of the tongue seemed to pass some sign of recognition from Nasu to Robin. I know you.
Nasu moved again, the great head lifted slightly off the floor, and Robin found herself in a semi-circle of white snake higher than her head. One fearful yellow eye regarded her with reptilian speculation, yet she was not afraid. The head tilted a little . . .
Robin remembered something Nasu had liked. She had sometimes rubbed Nasu on the top of the head, with her forefinger. The snake would rise to it, coil around her arm, and present herself for more.
She reached up and, with both fists, rubbed the smooth skin on top of Nasu’s head. The snake made a relatively small hissing sound—no worse than an ocean liner coming into port—and retreated. The tongue touched her again, and Nasu moved around her from the other side and tilted her head the other way for more rubbing.
Cirocco moved slowly up to join them. Nasu watched placidly.
“Okay,” Robin said, quietly. “I’ve talked to her. Now what?”
“Obviously, this is more than an anaconda,” Cirocco began.
“Obviously.”
“I don’t know what changed her. Diet? Low gravity? Something, anyway. She’s adapted to living underground. I’ve spotted her two or three times, bigger each time, and she’s stayed out of my way. I have reason to believe she’s a lot more intelligent than she was.”
“Why?”
“A friend told me she might be. The next time I saw Nasu, I told her to meet me here in Dione if she wanted to be with her old friend again. And here she is.”
Robin was impressed, but beginning to be suspicious.
“So what’s the purpose?”
Cirocco sighed.
“You asked me what evil is. Maybe this is. I’ve thought about it a long time, but I’m afraid I can’t get much of a handle on what might seem an evil thing to a snake. I don’t think she loves Gaea. And anyway, all I can do is suggest. The rest is up to you, and her.”
“Suggest what?”
“That you ask her to follow us to Hyperion, to slay Gaea.”

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