Demon

"Part of a flak suit was over it."

"Still, it wasn't enough of a charge to blow your foot off." She sighed, and tossed it away. "But it blew a hole in the floor. Friends, a buzz bomb could carry one hell of a lot of those little abominations. I don't like it one damn bit."

She couldn't think of anything to do but load them all back into the Mantis. She listened to Conal's description of the radar-jamming that had happened, and of the shape of the buzz bombs he had shot down. Most of the changes sounded to Cirocco like they were meant to confuse radar-that complex of characteristics known as "stealth."

Then they took off and headed east again. Soon they located the angel, and followed at a discrete two kilometers. Cirocco kept one eye on the radar and the other on the sky.

NINETEEN

During the long flight through Oceanus, Gaea sat still as stone in her monster chair, looking to the icy west, brooding. All the denizens of Pandemonium walked on eggs. They had never seen Gaea this way. Tons of fun, Gaea was, even if she did have a tendency to step on things. She was loads of laughs, the way she received all those preachers with big ceremonies, built the poor goons up till their heads were ready to bust, thinking Gaea had laid all this on for them, told them she had invited them to Pandemonium-them, personally, and nobody else, because nobody else quite had the slant on things, nobody else really understood the true faith quite as well as the schmuck-of-the-moment-and asked them would they pretty please let her in on the no-kidding Absolute Truth, and otherwise dispense their brilliant insights on theology? Then, when they were getting really wound up, she'd look at them like a pro gambler watching aces spill out of some poor dumb hick's sleeve, thunder blasphemy! and bite their fool heads off.

Then she'd spit the head into the Resurrect-O-Master and a dozen revs later some mewling abortion would come out the other end and she'd tell it You're Rasputin, or You're Luther, and solemnly intone the Gospel that one was supposed to believe in, and send it out into the world.

They lasted a while, the Priests did, not like the zombies, which had a half-life of about a kilorev. Still, even Priests reached a point where they were too mortified to do more than lie there and twitch, which was only fu

Everybody loved it.

But during the last part of the arrival of the King, Gaea was one goddamn scary fifty-foot special effect.

It was Oceanus that caused it, of course. Oceanus was the Enemy. Almost in the same league with Cirocco Jones herself. There's just no way she was going to feel good while the King was being flown over Oceanus's hyperborian precincts.

If the truth were told, not many of the Pandemonium felt good about being that close to Oceanus in the first place. Oceanus was a thing that ought to be comfortably far around the Great One's Curve, not looming frigidly like a gigantic breaking wave of icebergs. A lot of the most faithful sycophants were walking around with their shoulders hunched. You could have made a fortune on the gooseflesh concession.

But then the King was winging out of the twilight zone and over the Key of G-the most southwestern of Hyperion's eight regions, and only three hundred kilometers from the Key of D Minor, where Pandemonium had encamped. And maybe she did something with the sun panels out there in vacuum, constantly angling those rays down over fat and sassy Hyperion, or maybe it was just the enormous relief Gaea felt-and when a fifteen-meter goddess/starlet heaved a sigh of relief, brother, you felt it down to your toenails... but the day, the endless and unchanging day, was suddenly brighter.

Suddenly it was orders here and orders there, and everybody falling all over themselves to see who could kiss ass the quickest.

"Wine!" Gaea trumpeted. "Let the land flow with wine!" And twenty baffled vintners were trotted out and upended and stuffed like Strasberg geese until the chablis spouted into a thousand flasks.

"Food!" she boomed. "Open the mighty cornucopia and let my abundance flow forth!" So butter was melted by the ton, and hard kernel corn shoveled by the bucketful into the rotating maws of thirty poppers big as cement mixers-which had, in fact, originally been cement mixers-and fires stoked beneath them until hot yellow puffs were exploding in every direction, littering the ground, being devoured there by legions of producers who momentarily forgot their taste for fresh film in their popcorn feeding frenzy. Ten thousand franks were soon sizzling on a hundred grills, and milk chocolate flowed from the crusty teats of the teamsters.

"Film!" Gaea roared. "Let it be a festival to the King, the most stupendous celluloid celebration of all time! Run it on three screens at once, suspend the pass list, and raise the price at the box office!"

Then she began to shout titles. King of Kings. The Greatest Story Ever Told. Jesus Christ, Superstar. Jeez. Jeez II. Jeez III and IV. The Nazarene. The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. Life of Brian. Ben-Hur. Ben-Hur II. Bethlehem. The Story of Calvary. There was some muttering among the Priests with Moslem or Jewish or Mormon heritage, but it was quiet muttering, and quickly forgotten in the general rejoicing.

For who could complain? The King was coming. There was wine, food, and film, and Gaea was happy. What more could Pandemonium ask?

But then there was more.

About ten minutes before the King was due to arrive, just as the party was getting into full swing, Gaea winched herself to her feet, took four disbelieving steps, then pointed into the air and gri

"She's coming!" Gaea shrieked in a voice that shattered the eyes of ten bolexes and an arri, and sent real creepshow horripilations down the spines of everybody within ten kilometers who had a spine worth creeping on.

"She's coming, she's coming, she's coining!" Gaea was jumping up and down now, which was good for seven or eight on anybody's Richter scale. The commissary collapsed and a klieg tree toppled. "It's Cirocco Jones. After twenty years, I've lured her to do combat."

So everyone strained their eyes, and soon a lumpy, ridiculous little transparent plane hissed into view and started to circle about a kilometer over their heads.

"Come down!" Gaea taunted. "Come down and fight, you ball-less wonder! Come down and eat your liver, you stinking traitor, you killer ... you of little faith! Come to me."

The plane just circled.

Gaea drew a deep breath and bellowed.

"He'll learn to love me, Cirocco."

Still nothing. People began to wonder if maybe Gaea hadn't made a mistake. Gaea had been telling them about Cirocco Jones for years. Surely she couldn't be as unimpressive as that.

Gaea began ru

Then it waggled its wings, dipped one, and dived. It leveled out at a hundred meters or so, and now the crazy thing had a full-throated roar. Hard to believe it could do anything, but still, to a flock of people who had seen at least four war movies a week for years the scene had a certain nervous familiarity. It had some of the flavor of those passes the F-86's took in The Bridges at Toko-Ri, or maybe more like a Jap Zero skittering down toward that big scow the Arizona in Tora! Tora! Tora! Or a hundred other air combat pictures where the plane moves in fast and hot and starts shooting, only in those pictures you mostly saw the action from the air, where everything bloomed up toward you in terrific technicolor, not from the ground, where in a few short seconds things were beyond belief.