Demon

Still, she knew she needed it, so she stretched out again, yawned, closed her eyes ... and Gaby came through the tent flap. Cirocco heard her, and sat up. She didn't have time to think. Gaby took her by the hand and hurried her toward the outside.

"Come on," Gaby said. "I've got something important to show you."

They went outside into the swirling snow.

It wasn't a blizzard. It wasn't even really a storm, but any sort of wind was unpleasant when it was ten below. The two guards outside her tent were alert, standing with their backs to their fire so they wouldn't be blinded ... and they didn't see Gaby and Cirocco. They looked right through them.

Which was natural enough in a dream, Cirocco thought.

They plodded through the snow toward another tent, and Gaby led Cirocco inside. There were two bedrolls, both occupied. Robin was asleep in one of them. In the other, Conal sat up, rubbing his eyes.

"Captain? Is that ... "

Conal apparently had no trouble seeing Gaby. He must be dreaming, too.

"Who's that?" he said.

"I'm Gaby Plauget," Gaby said.

Cirocco really had to admire Conal then. He looked at Gaby for a time, saying nothing, apparently fitting the reality to the endless stories he had heard during his time in Gaea. The idea of a ghost didn't seem to give him a lot of trouble. Finally, he nodded.

"Your spy, Captain ... right?"

"That's right, Conal. That's very good."

"It couldn't have been anybody else, I figured." He started to stand up, winced, then swung his legs around so he could lever himself up with his crutch.

Conal should have been sent back to the city with his broken ankle. He had been prepared to put up a fuss if anybody suggested it, but it didn't come up. Cirocco needed him in Hyperion, disabled or not. And since he could ride on Rocky, it wasn't much of a problem.

But it had been a bad break. The Titanide healers thought he would limp for a long time-possibly the rest of his life.

Gaby knelt in front of him. With effortless strength she opened the bulky cast, then put her hands on the bare ankle. She squeezed for half a second. Conal gasped, then looked surprised. He stood up and put his weight on it.

"Miracles, two for a quarter," Gaby said.

"I'll have to owe you the quarter," Conal said. "But thank you ... " And he burst out laughing.

"What's the matter?"

"Thank you just seems a little ... " He shrugged, and his mouth worked in a foolish grin. He seemed unsteady. "What's the second miracle?"

"I'll show you. Take my hands, children."

Flying seemed to upset Conal a lot more than ghosts or magic healing. Cirocco could hear his teeth chattering.

"Buck up, Conal," Gaby said. "After that trick you pulled on the Luftmorder, this ought to be a walk in the park."

He said nothing. Cirocco simply endured. She didn't like things that were out of her control. But during these dreams it never seemed to matter so much.

She found out she was wrong. When she realized where they were headed, she wanted to turn around and go back.

"You've trusted me this far," Gaby said, gently. "Trust me a little longer. There's nothing here for you to be afraid of."

"I know, but-"

"But you've always felt an irrational fear every time you went through Oceanus, and you've never been within a hundred kilometers of the central cable. Oceanus is the enemy, your mind keeps telling you. Oceanus is Evil. Well, for twenty years now you've known it's Gaea that is evil. So what does that make Oceanus?"

"... I don't know. Many times I've started out to come and look the bastard in the eye ... and I keep seeing the Ringmaster coming apart at the seams."

"And hearing that fancy story Gaea told us up in the hub"-Gaby paused, and made her voice sound like a petulant child-"about how poor, misunderstood Gaea tried everything, honest she did. and she only wanted to be friends with humanity, to welcome us with open arms... but that foul co

Gaby fell silent, and Cirocco went over it in her mind again.

"I'm not such an idiot that I haven't thought that out," Cirocco said. "But like I told you, I just couldn't come here."

"Snitch had a lot to do with that," Gaby said. "Even when you got him out of your head, he left some of his garbage behind."

Cirocco shuddered.

"Sorry, it was a pretty bad metaphor, I guess. No more metaphors. Now we get down to the reality."

They landed just outside the verge of the strand-forest of the central cable, and proceeded in on foot.

It grew warmer as they neared the center. What little light there had been failed within the first hundred meters. Neither Conal nor Cirocco carried a lantern, but Gaby had some kind of light source that streamed ahead of her like beams of moonlight, or reflections from a mirrored ballroom globe. It was enough to see by ... and there was nothing to see. Cirocco had been under many cables, and there had always been the flotsam of centuries beneath them. Skeletons of long-dead creatures, fallen nests of blind flying a

In Oceanus, there was nothing. A cleaning team might have swept through only hours before, dusting and polishing. The ground had the texture of linoleum.

Cirocco's fears were now vaguely remembered. When she thought about it, she was amazed that she had been afraid. Her times with Gaby had always been spent in a pleasant, half-drugged dream state. She knew nothing could go wrong. Even in retrospect, the dreams did not seem frightening. Now she walked in her usual state of placid expectancy. In a way, she felt like a small child walking with her mother on a winding, wooded path. It was interesting, without being exciting. There would be new things around each curve, but they would not be scary. She had a sweet what-comes-next expectancy, but no sense of urgency.

She felt some of Conal's emotion, in a way difficult to describe. He was not afraid, either, but he was very curious. Gaby had to keep calling him back or he would have bounded ahead of them. Continuing her analogy, he was like a boy from the city who had never seen the forest; every curve held a new marvel.

At a point Cirocco knew-without understanding how she knew-to be the exact center of the cable, they saw a light. As they got nearer they saw a man sitting beside the light. They approached him, and stopped. He looked up at them.

He looked like Robinson Crusoe, or Rip Van Winkle. His hair and beard were long and gray. There were foreign objects, twigs and little bits of fishbone, matted in it, and a long brown stain in his beard below his mouth. He was crusted with dirt. He was wearing the same clothes Cirocco had last seen him in, twenty years ago, writhing in the sawdust on the floor of The Enchanted Cat taproom, in Titantown. To say the clothes were tatters did them an injustice; they were the most decrepit articles of apparel she had ever seen. Great gaps in them showed a lot of skin-taut, stretched tightly over the bones-and every inch of that skin had scars great and small. His face was old, but not the same way Calvin's was old. He might have been a sixty-year-old beachcomber. One of his eye sockets was empty. "Hello, Gene," Gaby said, quietly.