Demon

She was sobbing aloud now, not making a lot of noise, but unable to stop.

She thought of Nova slicing through the blue water, seal-sleek, of the big, awkward girl swinging at the end of her chute cords and then soaring like an angel without wings. She saw Nova devouring the Titanide feast, bright-eyed and laughing, and thought of her alone in her room, mixing the potion that was to bring her love. Cirocco gave herself over to her tears. She lay prone on the cool floor and wept for what had been and what was and what would be.

One tiny part of her mind said that she had better get it done with now.

There would be scant opportunity later.

Conal had been talking to Robin for what seemed like hours.

The talk had drifted away from Cirocco's plan-which still seemed slightly unreal to him-and into other things. Talking to her seemed easy, lately.

He noticed she seemed to be getting sleepy, and realized he was, too. Nova still slept curled up in her big chair. But all the Titanides were gone. He hadn't seen them leave. Now, Titanides could certainly move quietly, but that was ridiculous. Five of them, and he hadn't seen them leave?

He saw Robin was smiling at him.

"Where have our minds been?" she said, and yawned. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. "I'm for bed."

"Me, too. See you later."

He sat for a time after Robin had left, amid the ruins of the meal. Then he got up and headed for the stairs.

Virginal was standing like a statue in the center of the next room. Her ears were pointing up and forward, and she looked at a spot on the ceiling with an awful intensity. Conal was about to say something, but Virginal noticed him, gave him a brief smile, and went outside. He shrugged, and went up the stairs to the second floor.

And there were Valiha and Hornpipe, just as still. Their ears were up, too. They looked like they were in pain.

Neither of them noticed him until he was walking by, then they just glanced at him with no word of greeting and began to move slowly toward the stairs he had just climbed.

He couldn't figure it out.

He shrugged, and went into his room. He thought about it, and opened the door, stuck his head out. The two of them were back in their listening posture. Rocky was on the stairs, also listening, also looking up.

Conal studied the ceiling that seemed so interesting to the Titanides. He could see nothing at all.

Were they listening to something, up there on the third floor? All those rooms were empty. He heard nothing. Then Rocky started to sing, softly. Pretty soon Hornpipe and Valiha joined in, then Serpent came up quietly to join Virginal. It was a whispered song, and made no more sense to Conal than any of their songs did.

He yawned, and closed the door.

NINE

For five myriarevs, while Pandemonium continued its vagabond wanderings, the permanent site had been building in Hyperion.

The Iron Masters had been prime contractors. They had prepared the site, which encircled the south-central vertical cable. They had constructed a road to the vast forests of southwest Rhea. Bridges had been built over the placid Euterpe River, and over the violent Terpsichore. Two hundred square kilometers of wooded hills had been denuded, the lumber trucked to Pandemonium, where it was milled, sawed, cured, cut, stacked, joined, nailed, sanded, and carved by five thousand unions of carpenters. A railroad had been hammered through the difficult terrain from the mines, smelters, forges, and foundaries of Phoebe, through the Asteria mountains, bridging the mighty Ophion itself in the West Rhea twilight zone, and endless freight trains brought the metal bones of Pandemonium over the alien steel ribbons. To the west, the Calliope River had been dammed. The lake behind the dam was now twenty miles long, and its waters thundered through the turbines and generators, where electricity was fed into the lines and towers that marched over what had been Titanide herding land.

During the last myriarev, when construction was at its peak, Gaea had diverted more and more human refugees from Bellinzona for use as laborers at Pandemonium. At times the work force numbered seventy thousand. The work was hard, but the food was adequate. Workers who complained or died were turned into zombies, so labor unrest was never a problem.

It was to be Gaea's masterpiece.

At the time of the capture of Adam, work on the permanent site was almost complete. When Gaea saw the extent of the damage to her traveling show, she ordered the final move, though there was still a kilorev's work to be done.

The south-central cable was five kilometers in diameter and one hundred kilometers high at the point where it pierced the Hyperion roof and vanished into daylight. Five hundred kilometers beyond that point it joined the Gaean hub, where it became one strand of many in a monstrous basket-weave that composed the anchor at which Gaea's rim perpetually strained. The network of cables were fastened to Gaea's bones, deep beneath the rim, and it was their function to defeat centripetal force, to keep Gaea from flying apart. They had been doing this for three million years, and were showing certain signs of strain.

Each cable was composed of one hundred forty-four wound strands, each strand about two hundred meters in diameter. Over the aeons the strands had stretched. The process was called-though not by Gaea, who thought it crude-mille

In addition to the sag, there were broken strands. There were one hundred and eight cables in Gaea, for a total of fifteen thousand five hundred fifty-two strands. Of those, two hundred could be seen to be broken because they were part of the outer layer. Each cable in Gaea had its visible wound, with the top part of the strand curling away like a stray split end, and the lower part lying on the ground, stretching for one kilometer or seventy, depending on how high the break had been.

All but one in south-central Hyperion. While other cables had two, three, or even five visible breaks, the one that rose from the center of New Pandemonium was pristine, climbing in smooth and breathtaking perspective.

Gaea absently patted the cable strand she had been standing near, took a last look up, and moved down into the heart of her domain. Only she knew of the internal broken strands, the ones that never saw daylight. There were four hundred of those. Six hundred failures out of fifteen thousand was a rate of around four percent. Not bad for three million years, she thought. She could tolerate twenty percent, but not easily. At that point she would have to start slowing her rotation. Of course, there were other dangers. The weakest cable was in Central Oceanus. Should several more strands give way there the whole cable could fail under the added strain. Oceanus would bulge, a deep sea would be created as Ophion flowed into it from both directions and never flowed out, the imbalance would create a wobble which would weaken other strands in turn... .

But that didn't bear thinking about. For many thousands of years Gaea's motto had been Let Tomorrow Take Care of Itself.

She came to the areas of New Pandemonium still under construction, watched for a while as the carpenters and Iron Masters labored on a soundstage bigger than any ever built on Earth. Then she looked out over the Studio.

New Pandemonium was a two-kilometer ring encircling the seven-kilometer cable. That gave about twenty-five square kilometers of area-almost ten square miles.