Demon

She looked up at him, and instantly he knew other humans would judge her insane. He also knew she was not violent. The madness did not bother him; it was, after all, only a human word. In fact, the combination of insanity and non-violence produced the humans Rocky most admired. Cirocco Jones, now there was a madwoman...

He smiled at her, and she cocked her head to one side.

She rose up on her toes. As her arms came up and out she was transformed. She began to dance.

Rocky knew her story. There were thousands like her: trash people, without a home, without friends, without anything. Even the beggars of Calcutta had owned pieces of sidewalk to sleep on, or so Rocky had heard. Calcutta was only a memory. Bellinzonans frequently had even less than that. Many no longer slept at all.

How old could she have been when the war came? Fifteen? Sixteen? She had survived it, had been picked up by Gaea's scavengers, and had come here, stripped not only of her physical possessions and her culture and everyone who had ever mattered to her, but of her mind as well.

Still, she was wealthy. Someone, certainly long ago on the Earth, had taught her to dance. She still had the dance, and the ballet slippers. And she had her madness. It was worth something in Gaea. It was protection; bad things often happened to those who tormented the insane.

Rocky knew humans could not see the music of the world. The few humans around to witness, had they even noticed her dance, would not be hearing the sounds she created for him. To Rocky, the Titantown Philharmonic might be playing just behind her as she leaped and whirled. Gaea was wonderful for ballet. She hung in the air forever, and made walking on the tips of one's toes seem the natural gait for humans-insofar as they could be said to have a natural gait. Human dancing was a source of giddy excitement to Rocky. That they could walk was a miracle, but to dance...

In complete silence she created La Sylphide there on that filthy pier, on the edge of humanity's garbage bin.

She finished with a curtsy, then smiled at him. Rocky reached into his pouch and found another packet of cocaine, thinking it little enough payment for the smile alone. She took it and curtsied again. On impulse, he reached into his hair and pulled out a single white flower, one of many braided there. He held it out to her. This time the smile was sweeter than ever, and it made her cry.

"Grazie, padrone, mille grazie," she said, and hurried away.

"You got a flower for me, too, dogfood?"

Rocky turned and saw a short, powerfully built human buck, or "buck canuck" as he liked to style himself. The Titanide had known Conal for three years, and thought him beautifully insane.

"I didn't think you went in for human-"

"Don't say 'tail,' Conal, or I'll remove some teeth."

"What'd I say? What's the big deal?"

"You couldn't possibly understand, being tone-deaf to beauty. Suffice it to say that your arrival was like a turd falling into a Ming vase."

"Well, I try." He shrugged his fleece-lined coat up around his shoulders, looked around, and took a final puff on the stub of his cigar, then tossed it into the murky water. Conal always wore the coat. Rocky thought it made him smell interesting.

"You seen anything?" Conal finally asked. He was looking at the seven sisters guarding the Quarter. They were looking right back at him, weapons held loose but ready.

"No. I don't know the town, but it seems quiet to me."

"Me, too. I was hoping your nose'd smell something I ain't been able to see. But I don't think anybody's been here for quite a while."

"If they had, I'd know it," Rocky confirmed.

"Then I guess they can go ahead." He scowled, then looked up at Rocky. "Unless you want to talk her out of it."

"I couldn't, and I wouldn't," Rocky said. "There is something badly wrong. Something has to be done."

"Yeah, but-"

"It's not that dangerous, Conal. I won't hurt her."

"You sure as hell better not."

They had bargained for a while, Cirocco and Conal, on that first day. It had been years ago, but Conal remembered it well. Conal had held out for lifetime servitude. Cirocco said that was too long: cruel and unusual punishment. She offered two myriarevs. Conal gradually came down to twenty. The Wizard offered three.

They settled on five. What Cirocco didn't know was that Conal intended then, and intended now, to fulfill his original promise. He would serve her until he died.

He loved her with his entire soul.

Which is not to say there had never been wavering, never a bad moment. It was possible to sit alone in the dark, unguarded, and begin to feel some resentment, to taste the idea that she had treated him badly, that she had done things to him that he didn't deserve. He had sweated many a "night" away, unsleeping in the eternal Gaean afternoon, feeling rebellion growing inside and knowing absolute terror. Because sometimes he thought that, far down in a place he could never see, he hated her, and that would be an awful thing, because she was the most wonderful person he had ever seen. She had given him life itself. He knew now, as he had not known then, that it was not something he would have done. He would have shot the stupid meddling fool, the idiot with his comic books. He'd shoot him today, if he ever encountered such a fool. One round, right through the head, wham! as was only right and proper.

The first few kilorevs had been tough. He was still amazed he had survived them. Mostly, Cirocco did not have time to worry about him, so he had been left behind in the escape-proof cave. He had a lot of time to think. As he healed, he took a look at himself for the first time in his life. Not in a mirror; there were no mirrors in the cave, and that drove him crazy for a while because he was so used to admiring the flow of muscles in his mirror, and because he wanted to see how disfigured he was. Eventually, he began looking in different directions. He started to use the mirror of past experience, and he was not pleased at what he saw.

What did he have? Adding it up, he came up with a strong body (now broken), and... his word. That was it. Brains? Forget it. Charm? Sorry, Conal. Eloquence, virtue, integrity, restraint, honesty, gratitude, sympathy? Well...

"You're strong," he told himself, "but not now, and, let's face it, she can beat you any time she needs to. You had a certain beauty, or so the girls said, but can you take credit for that? No, you were born that way. You had health, but not right now; you can hardly stand up."

What was left? It came down to honor.

He had to laugh. "An affair of honor," Cirocco had said, just before the Titanide clobbered him from behind. So what the hell was honor, anyway?

Conal had never heard of the Marquis of Queensbury, but he had picked up the rules of gentlemanly behavior. You don't shoot a man in the back. Torture is contrary to the Geneva Conventions. Always fire a warning shot in the air. Tell your opponent what you're going to do. Give the other fellow a fighting chance.

That was all very well, for games. Games were played by rules.

"Sometimes you have to pick your own rules," Cirocco told him, much later. But by then he had already figured that out.

Did that mean there were no rules at all? No. It just meant you had to decide which ones you could live with, which ones you could survive with, because Cirocco was talking about survival and she was better at it than anyone in the history of humanity.

"First you decide how important survival is," she said. "Then you know what you'll do to survive."

With enemies, there were no rules. Honor didn't enter into it. The best way to kill an enemy was from a great distance, without warning, in the back. If the need arose to torture your enemy, you ripped his guts out. If you had to lie, you lied. It didn't matter. This is the enemy.