Demon

Gaea turned slightly. It was like one of those arty films where the camera eye is supposed to represent a character, and the other players respond to it. She looked at Gaby, or at the locus of space where Gaby imagined herself to be.

"Do you have any idea the trouble you've caused me?" Gaea muttered.

No, I don't, Gaby said. Though, when she thought about it, "said" was a pretty concrete verb for what she actually did. There was no sound involved. She did not feel lips or tongue move. No breath was taken into the lungs which, so far as she knew, still lay in the darkness beneath Tethys, clotted with phlegm.

But the impulse was like speaking, and Gaea seemed to hear.

"Why couldn't you just leave it alone?" Gaea groused. "There are wheels within wheels, babe, to cop a phrase. Rocky was coming along nicely. What's wrong with being a little drunk every so often?"

Gaby "said" nothing. "Rocky" was, of course, Cirocco Jones. And she had been more than a little drunk almost all the time. As for leaving it alone ...

Cirocco might have. There was no way to be sure. Possibly forty or fifty years down the line she would have bestirred herself and tried to do something about the impossible situation that had driven her to drink. On the other hand, maybe it was possible for even an immortal to drink herself to death.

At any rate, it had been Gaby who finally pushed Cirocco into the first, tentative step of surveying the regional brains of Gaea, looking for hints of useful subversion, hoping to locate somebody who could serve as focus for Gaby's pla

It had earned her a nasty death.

"I had plans for that gal," Gaea was saying. "Two or three more centuries ... who knows? It might have been possible to tell her a few things. It might have been possible to ... to make her understand... to admit what ... " Gaea trailed off in disconsolate mutterings. Again, Gaby did not respond. Gaea glanced irritably at her.

"You've pissed me off," she complained. "I never figured you for starting all this trouble. Tragic figure, that's you. Following Rocky around with your little pink tongue hanging out, like a bitch in heat. It was a good role, Gaby, one you could have built a life around. I ain't go

Gaea looked up again, with a wicked leer.

"I'll bet you want some answers. I'm going to enjoy giving them to you. Here's one, right here." Gaea reached out-her hand blurring as it approached the Gaby/camera viewpoint-and came back holding a small, white, struggling thing with two legs and goggling eyes.

"Spies," Gaea said. "This was yours. Sitting in your head for seventy-five years. How'd'ya like that? This is Stoolie. Rocky's got one called Snitch. She doesn't know about it, any more than you did. Everything the two of you did, it came right back to me."

Gaby felt a bottomless despair. This must be hell.

"No, it isn't. That's all bunk, too." Gaea paused long enough to squeeze the life from the squalling obscenity in her hand, then wiped the bloody mess on the arm of her chair.

"Life and death aren't as important as you think. Consciousness is the real conundrum. Your awareness of yourself as a living being. You remember dying, you think you remember floating up through space till you got here, not so very long ago. But time is tricky on this level. So is memory. You aren't a spook, if that's any consolation to you.

"I have you," Gaea whispered, making a gesture much like the one she had used to crush the Stoolie. "I cloned you, I recorded you, I took everything there was of Gaby-ness about you when you first showed up here. Cirocco, too. Since then, I've been constantly updated by that little bastard in your head. I am not supernatural, I am not God, not in the way you think of God ... but I am one hell of a magician. The question of whether you, Gaby Plauget, the little girl from New Orleans who loved the stars, really died down there in Tethys, is, in the end, philosophical hair-splitting. Not worth the effort. You know that the awareness I am now addressing is you. Deny it if you can."

Gaby could not.

"It's all done with mirrors," Gaea said, shrugging it off. "If you had a 'soul', then I missed it, and it's floated off to your anthropomorphic-Catholic-Judeo-Christian 'heaven', which I personally doubt, as I've never heard any radio stations broadcasting from there. Everything else of you, I own."

What are you going to do with me? Gaby asked.

"Shit. I wish there was a hell." She brooded in silence for a time. Gaby could do nothing but look on. Slowly, Gaea produced an expression that wan an awful hybrid of a grin and a sneer.

"Actually, though hell isn't available, I have a reasonable facsimile. I don't expect you'll survive it.

"But I didn't finish telling you why. Do you want to know?"

Gaby thought anything would probably be better than Gaea's substitute for hell.

"You can say that again," Gaea said. "Because you've ruined Rocky for me. Rocky was a genuine flawed heroine. I've been looking for one for mille

With that, Gaea had reached out and ... grabbed the dream locus that was Gaby. Things went black, then she found herself rising within the curved emptiness of the hub, rising toward a red line of light at the very top of the hub, a line she and Cirocco had seen when they first stepped out...

It's all a dream, she reminded herself. That conversation never happened, not on a physical level. Gaea had all Gaby's memories, and was capable of making new ones on the computer-program/memory-matrix that was all that was left of Gaby, who used to be flesh and blood. So this is all illusion. She is doing something to me, but I am nor flying up into the air, I am not plunging into that swirling maelstrom which I have always known, in my heart, is the mind of this thing called Gaea...

One thought protected her. One notion clutched tightly in the midst of chaos prevented her from slipping from mania into insanity. This is the twenty years, Gaby thought. I lived through it already.

In the red line, the speed of light was a local ordinance, a quaint regional phenomenon which could be a nuisance-like a cop hiding behind a billboard in a rural Georgia town-but which, with the proper bribes or enough horses under the hood, need not cause concern.

Take it a piece at a time. "Speed" depends on space and time. Neither were very important concepts in the Line. "Light" was complex and u

The line extended all around the i