Demon

"How are you, Gaby?" Gene asked, in a surprisingly strong voice.

"I'm well." She turned to Conal. "Conal, let me introduce to you Gene Springfield, formerly of the D.S.V. Ringmaster. Gene, this is your great-great grandson, Conal Ray. He came a long way to see you."

"Sit down," Gene said, apparently to all of them. "I'm not going anywhere."

They did. Conal was staring at his ancient relative, the man he had thought dead when he came to Gaea.

The first thing Cirocco noticed upon taking a closer look at Gene was that he had a bulge on his balding forehead. The skin there was unmarked. The shape of the skull was distorted like half a grapefruit had bulged up under his skin.

The location of the bulge was suggestive. She wondered at the pressure the thing was putting on his frontal lobes.

She saw a little more of his surroundings. There wasn't much. The fire came from a crack in the ground. It was bright and steady in the windless dark.

There was a heap of straw, apparently Gene's bed. In the distance the light reflected off a still pool of water, twenty meters across. Close to Gene was a big, galvanized pail with water in it.

That was all. A short distance away was the entrance to the stairs that would lead down to Oceanus.

"Have you been in here all this time, Gene?" Cirocco asked him.

"All this time," he confirmed. "Ever since that time in Tethys when Gaby cut my balls off." He looked at Gaby, and cackled. No, Cirocco decided, that wasn't quite the right word. There was no laughter in it. It was just a sound made by an old man. He made it again as he looked at Cirocco, Conal, then back to Gaby. "Didn't come by to apologize for that, did you?"

"No," Gaby said.

"Didn't expect you would. No matter. They grew back, just like they did the first time you cut 'em off." He cackled again.

"What do you eat?" Conal asked.

Gene eyed him with suspicion, then plunged a gnarled hand into the pail. He came up with something gray and blind that wiggled.

"You cook them on that fire?" Gaby asked.

"Cook 'em?" Gene asked, startled. He looked from the ugly thing in his hand, to the fire, then back again, and a wild surmise grew beneath the beetled brow. He gri

"What do you do down here?" Conal asked.

Gene glanced up, but didn't seem to see Conal. He scratched his head-Cirocco winced when she saw how deeply his fingers went into the bulge of skin-and muttered into his beard. He didn't seem to be aware of them.

"Gaby," Cirocco whispered. "What's with ... the way he talks, it's-"

"Backwoods? Quaint? Colloquial?" One side of her lip curled in a bitter smile. "Interesting, for a Harvard graduate, NASA-type New Yorker, wouldn't you say? Rocky, Gene is the sorriest son of a bitch that ever lived. He's had tricks played on him that make what she did to us seem like playful pranks. Look at his head. Just look at it."

Cirocco had hardly been able to take her eyes away.

Now she was seized by a compulsion to touch it. She fought it as long as she could, then she got up, knelt in front of him, and placed her palm against his forehead. It was soft. Something moved sluggishly under the skin.

She thought she should be revolted, but she was not. She stared at her hand as if it belonged to someone else, and felt a power building in her. Gene's hands came up slowly, and he put them around her forearm, making no attempt to push her away. She felt him frown. She had an absurd impulse-very close to hysteria-to shout Heal!

Then she was holding something wet and squirmy and vile-smelling. She looked at it dispassionately. It was covered with blood, and so was her hand. It was built along the same lines as Snitch, but bloated, grotesquely fat, with rolling eyes like peeled grapes. It made a croaking noise.

"Son of a bitch," Gene muttered. "Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch."

Cirocco heard Conal stumbling away, heard him vomiting. Somehow she knew it was important to keep staring at the creature, which continued to croak. Gaby was moving, holding something out... .

It was a jar made of thick, black glass. Cirocco popped the monstrosity into it, and screwed the lid on tight.

Only then did Cirocco look at Gene. He was fingering his forehead, which had bloody fingermarks on it, but was not broken. The skin hung loosely on his head, but there was no sign of damage.

"Son of a bitch," he said.

"Like Snitch?" Cirocco asked. Now that it was over, she felt faint.

"No," Gaby said. "They're related. But Snitch only listened, and reported." She tapped her own forehead. "The one in my head only listened." She held up the black jar. "This one was like what spies call a mole. He burrowed deep, and he shuffled things around. When he could, without revealing himself, he made things happen. Things like rape, and war, and sabotage... He ran Gene's life after a while. Gene was like a puppet on Gaea's strings."

"Up there... on the cable?"

They had had their doubts about him, so many years ago, shortly after the wreck of the Ringmaster. He had tried to show the Titanides how to use new weapons in their war with the angels, in direct violation of First Contact procedures and United Nations regulations. But they had written that off as a simple desire to help the Titanides.

So they had taken him on their climb up the cable to the hub. And he had clubbed Gaby unconscious, left her for dead after raping her. Then he had raped Cirocco, and would have killed them both but for some luck and some fast footwork.

Gaby had wanted to castrate him then and there. Cirocco had not permitted it. She still didn't regret the decision, even though he had been endless trouble in the next seventy-five years, and had set events in motion that led to Gaby's death. She had regretted not killing him many times.

They had found he was very hard to kill. Gaby had once slit his throat and left him for dead. He had survived it.

So he had become like Snitch. When Cirocco wanted something from Snitch, she had to torture it out of him. And, over the years, whenever Gaby had encountered Gene she had left him a little less than he was-an ear, a few fingers, a testicle. He healed, but unlike Cirocco and Gaby, he scarred.

"No, not on the cable," Gaby said. "Not directly, I mean. That thing didn't jerk him around. But it whispered things to him. Gene was like a schizophrenic. I ... think he had to have some tendency to rape, for the thing to egg him on to doing it. Later, it didn't matter what Gene thought about anything. In a sense, Gene was gone. In a sense, he died years ago."

Gaby sighed, and shook her head.

"It makes me feel ashamed. Because, see, if there's a miracle here, it's in how much he resisted, and for how long. Even to coming here ... the one place in the wheel where Gaea doesn't ever look. She still gets reports from the mole, but she pretends they're coming from somewhere else."

"Why?"

"Why? Because she's crazy. And ... something else you'll see in a minute."

Conal had rejoined them now. He still looked green.

"What did she do to him?" he said, with a quiet intensity.

For a moment Cirocco thought he was asking about what she had done. But he was looking at Gaby, and Gaby explained what Gaea had done, and how long ago, and what it had meant. Conal took it all in silence.

"What about Calvin?" Cirocco asked.

"He got one, too. But Whistlestop knew about it, and killed it almost immediately. I don't know how. Whistlestop didn't bother to tell us ... which I blame him for, a little, even though I know he isn't wrapped up in human concerns." She shrugged. "Killing the thing in Calvin's head is the reason he's dying now."