Demon

"Who's Calvin?" Conal wanted to know.

"Remember your comic book?" Cirocco asked. "He was the black one."

"He's still alive, too?"

"Yes." Cirocco turned to Gaby again. "What about Bill?"

"When he went back to Earth, he resigned from NASA and went to work as an agent for Gaea. All quite openly, but he had clandestine activities. I think he got one like Gene did, but I don't know. Don't ask me about April or August; I don't know what Gaea did with them."

"How much do you know? Can you tell me more now?"

"Knew he was up there," Gene said. They all looked at him.

"He liked fish," Gene clarified, and gestured to the bucket. "Got hisself real fat on fish, he did. Didn't do much for me, fish." He thumped his scrawny chest. "But I knew he was up there. Pissin' on my head, he was." He cackled.

"Do you know who put him there, Gene?" Gaby asked.

"Gaea."

"What do you think of that?"

"Mean thing to do." He cackled again, and shook his head. "Been doing some thinking, down here. Been doing me some thinking."

Gaby spoke to Cirocco as if Gene could not hear. And perhaps he couldn't.

"The cornpone dialect is a parting gift from Gaea. Remember the movie analogy I told you about? She wanted him to be a character actor. A buffoon, a sidekick... I don't know. Folksy humor."

"Real fu

"Tons of fun," Gaby agreed. "Gaea always had been about as fu

"Poked m'own eye out," Gene said, and cackled. "Thinking real hard, I was. Like to bust a gut, thinking. It just popped right out. Hurt like the dickens. Tried to put 'er back in." He cackled again. "She'll grow back in, though. Always happens that way. Like to sawed my hand off, once, trying to stop thinking. She grew back, too." He pondered this. "Thinking hurts," he concluded.

"Did you think of something, Gene?" Gaby asked.

He squinted his one eye.

"Sure did," he said, at last. "Thought something oughta be done. Somebody oughta ... whale the daylights out of her, that's what!" He looked at them defiantly.

"There may be a way, Gene," Gaby said.

He narrowed his eye suspiciously.

"Don't kid with Gene, Gaby." He looked puzzled, then cackled, then shrugged, and regarded her in the same way a dog would if the dog had just made a mess where he knew he shouldn't.

"Are you really Gaby? Been meaning to look you up. Wanted to tell you ... gosh, I'm really sorry for ... " He looked even more puzzled. "... for killing you."

"That's all in the past, Gene," Gaby said.

Gene's laugh sounded genuine for the first time.

"All in the past. That's a good one. I'll have to tell ... " He looked around vaguely in the darkness. Then, with difficulty, he brought himself back to his tenuous co

"There's maybe something you can do," Gaby said. "To Gaea."

"To Gaea?"

"But it will be dangerous. I'll be honest. You might get killed."

Gene studied her. Cirocco wondered if he had understood. Then she saw a tear fall from his eye.

"You mean... I may be able to stop thinking?"

FIFTEEN

Gaby brought them to Oceanus by the same sort of dizzy-making teleportation she had used in the previous dream. When Cirocco got her bearings, she looked around and felt she had been here before.

But she had not. It simply looked so much like Dione. The big difference was a big, greenish tube ru

The moat was deep and dry. Nothing had been alive in here for a long time. Cirocco turned to Gaby.

"What happened?"

"We'll probably never know all of it. Parts of it are still in Gaea's mind. Parts are lost. It was thousands of years ago, like she told us. But the brains were never separate. I think Oceanus just ... died. Gaea couldn't accept it.

"The human analogy can only be pushed so far before it breaks down, but I don't have a better way of explaining it to you.

"Gaea felt betrayed. She refused to believe in something so fantastic as Oceanus's death. So her mind did split up, and she grew this nerve down to here-that part goes to the Hyperion brain, and the other one to Mnemosyne-and ... became Oceanus. And that part of her was a bastard. Some sort of physical struggle did occur, but I don't think it was as dramatic as Gaea described it to you. It was always Gaea talking to herself. When you talk to any of the regional brains, you're really talking to a fragment of Gaea's personality.

"She's splitting up more and more. She... I still can't tell you all of it, but she evolved a ... system to keep things ru

Gaby turned to Gene.

"If I tell you some things to do, will you do them? Will you remember? If you know these things will hurt Gaea?" Gene's eye gleamed.

"Oh, yes. Gene will remember. Gene will hurt Gaea." Gaby sighed. "Then the last piece is in place," she said.

Gaby left them on the outskirts of the camp, but inside the outer perimeter of guards so there would be no misunderstanding. They started walking toward the light.

Conal stumbled. Cirocco reached out for him-and realized he was crying. She hesitated just a moment, wondering what would be best for him, then put her arms around him. He wept helplessly, got it under control quickly, and pulled away, embarrassed.

"Feel better?"

"I was just remembering ... what I came here to do to you."

"Don't be a horse's ass. I didn't know most of what we just heard."

"That poor man. That poor, sorry son of a bitch."

"You'll feel better when you wake up."

He looked at her strangely, then squeezed her hand and went off toward his own tent.

Cirocco went to hers. The guard challenged her, then recognized her, and saluted. He didn't seem to have any trouble with the idea that she could sneak out of her tent, despite his surveillance.

If only he could see inside the tent, Cirocco thought. She sighed, and pulled back the tent flap, preparing herself for an evolution she had performed twice before but which still made her uneasy.

But there was no other Cirocco in the bunk.

After standing there for a while, pondering it, she sat on the cot and pondered some more. She eventually decided there was no point in trying to wake up if she wasn't asleep.

She glanced at the time, saw it was approaching the rev when they should move on, and went back outside to get things started.

The army moved into Hyperion.

Their objective had been in sight, in clear weather, since the middle of Mnemosyne. One could hardly miss the south vertical cable, which pointed directly at the heart of Pandemonium. Now, as they marched across the gently rolling hills of southwest Hyperion, they could sometimes see the circular wall that surrounded the Studio.

The bridge over the Urania River was one of the few still intact on the Circum-Gaea. Cirocco had her engineers check it out, first for booby-traps, then for structural strength. She was told it was sound, but took the precaution of spacing the wagons widely and making the troops march out of step. The bridge held.

Gaea had provided the bridge over the Calliope. The dam she had caused to be built there was earth-fill. The turbines were small, by human hydro-electric standards.