Demon

But Cirocco had not mentioned it.

"You're a silly old biddy, Gaea," she said.

"Sticks and stones-"

"-Wouldn't even put a dent in that ugly hide of yours. But words wound you to the core. Cirocco told me that. As to gas warfare, have you checked your human population? Have you looked in on the elephants and camels and horses?"

"They seem to be all right," Gaea admitted, dubiously.

"So there you are. Don't take it personally, Gaea, you old bitch. We found a way to exterminate a pest we used to call deathsnakes. We're doing it as a public service. Pandemonium just happened to be on the spraying program. Hope it didn't inconvenience you too much."

"Not too ... used to call them? What do you call them now?"

Hah! Walked right into that one, you abomination.

"We call them Gaea's tapeworms. I hope you have a large toilet."

Robin heard Nova laughing. That seemed to finally set Gaea off. It started as an incoherent scream. Robin had to turn the volume down. It went on for an amazing time, then turned into a stream of vile language, horrible threats, and nearly incoherent ranting. During a brief pause, Nova spoke.

"That's really something," she said. "Maybe, when this is over, we can put her in a carnival sideshow."

"No," Conal said. "Nobody'd pay. Everybody's seen shit."

There was a short silence.

"Young man," Gaea said icily, "one day I will make you wish you had never been born. Nova, that was unkind, to say the least. But I suppose I can understand it. It must be hard for you. Tell me, how do you feel about that horrible fellow screwing your mother?"

There was an entirely different quality to the silence this time. Robin felt her stomach lurch.

"Mother, what-"

"Nova, maintain radio silence. And remember what I told you about propaganda. Gaea, this conversation is over."

But it didn't feel like having the last word. Propaganda was a fine term, but that didn't mean she was going to be able to lie any longer to Nova.

Gaea put down her radio and watched the planes vanish in the west, feeling thoroughly sour.

Though the logical and emotional parts of her mind no longer functioned as they used to-a fact she recognized and no longer worried about-the purely computational power was undiminished. She knew how many zombies had been lost. Some forty percent of the Pandemonium work force were undead-now doubly dead. That was bad enough, but a zombie was worth five human workers, maybe six. They were stronger, and they needed no sleep or even rest breaks. They could be fed garbage a hog would choke to look at. While they couldn't run something as complex as a tape recorder, they made excellent plumbers, electricians, painters, grips, carpenters ... all the skilled trades so essential to the making of movies. With reasonable care they could be made to last six or seven kilorevs. They were economical even in death; when a zombie felt the final death approaching, its last act was to dig a grave and lie down in it.

Problems, problems... .

The unions of carpenters, used for her mobile festival, had proven not versatile enough for the demands of New Pandemonium. Some of the buildings thrown up by them were already falling down. She could try to develop a master variety of carpenter ... but knew uneasily that her skills as a genetic manipulator were deteriorating. She could hope that, instead of more camels or dragons, her next birthing would be something more useful, and self-perpetuating, but she knew she couldn't count on it. Such were the perils of being mortal. For mortal she was. Not just in the sense that, in a hundred thousand years, the giant wheel known as Gaea would wither and die, but in the giant Monroe-clone in which she had elected to put so much of her vital force.

She sighed, then brightened a bit. Good cinema sprang from adversity, not an uninterrupted series of successes. She would speak with the story department, incorporate this new setback in the vast epic of her life, twenty years in the making. The final reels were by no means in sight.

In the meantime, there must be a solution.

Once more she thought of Titanides. Hyperion was lousy with Titanides.

"Titanides!" Gaea shouted, startling all those within half a kilometer.

Titanides had to be her most recalcitrant invention. They had seemed a good idea at the time. They were still nice to look at. She had made them in the early 1900's as a sort of first-draft human. It turned out she had built better than she knew. They kept exceeding specifications.

When labor had started to be a problem during the early days of site preparation for the Studio, she had naturally thought of using Titanides. She sent Iron Masters out hiring-and they came back empty-handed. It was disconcerting. Didn't they know she was God?

They were hard to capture alive, but she had caught a few.

Who wouldn't do a lick of work. Torture didn't help. As many as were able committed suicide. As far as Gaea knew, there had never been a Titanide suicide before the construction of the Studio. They loved life too much.

She had asked one captive about it.

"We'd rather die than be enslaved," he had said.

A fine sentiment, Gaea supposed, but not one she had built into them. Damn it, humans took to slavery like ducks to water. Why couldn't Titanides?

All right, all right, Gaea was nothing if not flexible. If they wouldn't work alive, she'd make them work dead. A zombie Titanide ought to handle the work of a hundred humans.

But it didn't work out that way. The Titanide corpses that went zombie were weaker than the originals, badly coordinated, and tended to sag in the middle like a swaybacked horse. She did an engineering study and found it was the skeletal structure that was at fault. Taxonomically speaking, Titanides were not vertebrates. They had a cartilaginous spine that was much more flexible and much stronger than the rather precarious stacks that formed the backbones of humans and angels. The problem was that, in death, the cartilage rotted, and the deathsnakes ate it. So the Titanides cheated her even from beyond the grave.

Gaea would have thought it was a stinking world, had she not remembered that she had created it.

What better time for the messenger to arrive from the MGM Gate, hand her the clipboard, and kneel, quivering, knowing Gaea's usual reaction to bad news.

For once, the reaction was moderate. Gaea looked at the name on the clipboard, sighed, and scaled it negligently over the roofs of three soundstages.

She had been out-movied. Twice in one day, Cirocco Jones had used her favorite mythologies against her.

"I've been Ozzed, and Star-Warred," she muttered.

She needed a break. How about a new festival? she wondered. Movies about movies. That sounded nice. She looked around for her archivist, and saw him cowering behind the corner of a building. She beckoned.

"I'm going to Projection Room One," she told him. "Get me Trufaut's Day For Night to start off with."

He scribbled on a note pad.

"Auteurs," she muttered. "Pick out a couple films by Hitchcock. Any of them will do. The Stunt Man. And ... what's that one about the collapse of the studio system?"

"Lights, Camera, Auction!" the archivist said.

"That's it. Be ready in ten minutes."

Gaea trudged down the golden road, more depressed than she had been in centuries. Jones had done a good job this day.

Part of her mind remained on the labor problem. She would just have to divert more refugees from Bellinzona. The terrible thing was, she was going to have to practically coddle her human labor from now on, because when they died, they were just go

And she wondered if she could pick up the slack from Bellinzona. The mercy flights to Earth were still going on, but the ships were coming back with a lot of empty seats.