Titan (GAIA) (38 page)

April was edging toward the top of the tree.

“You said ‘creature.’ Are you talking about this thing in the spoke?”

April looked surprised. “Why, no. This is only a part of her. The whole world is Gaea. I thought you knew that.”

“No, I—wait, please don’t go.” It was too late. They heard the beating of her wings. “Will you come back later?” Cirocco shouted.

“Once more,” came the distant reply.

“One being, you say. All one creature. How do you know this?”

April had returned in only an hour this time. Cirocco hoped she was getting used to company again, but she still would approach no closer than twenty meters.

“Believe it. Some of my people have talked with her.”

“She’s intelligent, then?”

“Why not? Listen … Captain.” She held her temples for a moment. Cirocco could imagine the conflicts. April had been one of the finest physicists in the system. Now she lived as a fierce wild animal, according to a code barely comprehensible to Cirocco. She thought the old April might be struggling to get through the creature she had become.

“Cirocco, you say you speak to … to those on the rim.” It was as close as she could come to the concept of Titanides without fleeing. “They understand you. Calvin can speak to the floaters. The changes Gaea worked on me are more complete. I
am
one of my people. I awoke knowing how to behave among them. I have the same feelings and drives as any other angel. This is one thing I know. Gaea is one. Gaea is alive. We live inside her.”

Gaby was looking a bit green.

“Just look around you,” April went on. “What have you seen that looks like a machine? Anything at all? We were seized by a living beast; you postulate a creature under the rim. The spoke is filled with a huge living thing; you decide it is a coating over the framework beneath.”

“What you say is intriguing.”

“More than that. It’s true.”

“If I accept that, I won’t find a control room in the hub.”

“But you’ll be where she lives. She sits like a spider and pulls strings like a puppet master. She watches over all her creatures, and she owns the two of you as surely as she owns me. She has tampered with us for her own purposes.”

“And what are they?”

April shrugged, a human gesture that hurt Cirocco to watch.

“She would not tell me. I went to the hub, but she refused to see me. My people say that one must be on a great mission to gain Gaea’s ear. Apparently mine was not great enough.”

“And what would you have asked her?”

April was quiet for a very long time. Cirocco realized she was crying. She looked up at them again.

“You hurt me. I think I won’t talk to you any more.”

“Please, April. Please, for the friendship we had.”

“Did we? Did we really? I can’t remember it. I remember only me and August, and long ago, my other sisters. We have always been alone with each other. Now I am alone, alone.”

“Do you miss them?”

“I did,” she said, emptily. “That was long ago. I fly, fly to be alone. Solitude is the world of the Eagle clan. I know that is right, but before … before, when I still yearned for my sisters …”

Cirocco held very still, afraid of frightening her away.

“We band together only at one time,” she said, with a quiet sigh. “When Gaea takes her breath, after the winter, then blows us over the lands …

“I flew with the wind that day. It was a fine day. We killed many because my people listened to me and rode the great floater. The four-legs were surprised because the breath was over; we few had remained on the floater, tired and hungry, but with the lust still in our blood, still able to work together.

“It was a day for the singing of great songs. My people followed me—me—did what I told them, and I knew in my heart that the four-legs would soon be wiped out in Gaea. This was but the first skirmish in the new war.

“Then I saw August and my mind left me. I wanted to kill her, I wanted to fly from her, I wanted to embrace her and weep with her.

“I flew.

“Now I dread the breath of Gaea, for someday it will take me down to slaughter my sister, and then I will die. I am Ariel the Swift, but enough of April Polo remains in me that I could not live with such a thing.”

Cirocco was moved, but could not help being excited. April sounded as if she was important in the angel community. Surely they would listen to her.

“It happens that I am up here to make peace,” she said. “Don’t go! Please don’t go.”

April trembled, but stood her ground. “Peace is impossible.”

“I can’t believe that. Many of the Titanides are sick in their hearts, as you are.”

April shook her head. “Does a lamb negotiate with a lion? A bat with an insect, a bird with a worm?”

“You’re talking about predators and prey.”

“Natural enemies. It’s printed in our genes, killing the fourlegs. I can … as April, I can see what you’re thinking. Peace should be possible. We have to fly impossible distances just to do battle. Many of us do not make it back. The climb is too hard, and we fall into the sea.”

Cirocco shook her head. “I just think if I could get some representatives together …”

“I tell you, it’s impossible. We are Eagles. You cannot even get us to act as a group, much less meet with the four-legs. There are other clans, some of them sociable, but they don’t live in this spoke. Perhaps you would have luck there, but I doubt it.”

The three of them were silent for a time. Cirocco felt heavy with defeat, and Gaby put her hand on her shoulder.

“What do you think? Is she telling the truth?”

“I suspect she is. It sounds just like what Meistersinger told me. They have no control over it.” She looked up, and spoke to April.

“You were saying that you tried to see Gaea. Why?”

“For peace. I wanted to ask her why the war had to be. I’m quite happy, but for that. She did not hear my call.”

Or she doesn’t exist, Cirocco thought.

“Will you still go seek her?” April asked.

“I don’t know. What’s the point? Why would this superhuman being stop a war just because I ask her to?”

“There are worse things to do in life than to have a quest to fulfill. If you turned back now, what would you do?”

“I don’t know that, either.”

“You’ve come a long way. You must have overcome great difficulties. My people say Gaea likes a good story, and she likes great heroes. Are you a hero?”

She thought of Gene spinning down into the blackness, of Panpipe running to his doom, of the mudfish bearing down on her. Surely a hero would have done better than that.

“She is,” Gaby said, suddenly. “Of all of us, only Rocky has held to her purpose. We’d still be sitting in mud shacks if she hadn’t pushed us. She kept us moving toward a goal. We may not reach it, but when that rescue ship comes, I’ll bet they find us still trying.”

Cirocco was embarrassed, but strangely moved. She had been fighting a sense of failure since the capture; it didn’t hurt to know someone thought she was doing well. But a hero? No, not hardly. She had only done what had to be done.

“I think Gaea will be impressed,” April said. “Go to her. Stand in her hub and shout. Do not grovel or beg. Tell her you have a right to some answers, for all of us. She will listen.”

“Come with us, April.”

The angel-woman edged away.

“My name is Ariel the Swift. I go with no one, and no one goes with me. I will never see you again.” She dived once more, and Cirocco knew she would keep her word.

She looked at Gaby, who rolled her eyes upward with a slight twist of her mouth.

“Up?”

“Why the hell not? There
are
a few things I’d like to ask.”

“I’m not a hero, you know.”

“All right, heroine.”

Cirocco chuckled. They were bedded down on the last day of their fourteenth winter together, their eighth month in the spoke. There were now only ten kilometers separating them from the hub. They could do it in their sleep, as soon as the thaw started.

“Not even that. If there’s a heroine here, it has to be you.”

Gaby shook her head.

“I’ve helped out. This probably would have been a lot harder for you if I hadn’t been here.”

Cirocco squeezed her hand.

“But I’ve just tagged along. I’ve helped you out of some messes, but I don’t qualify as a hero. A hero wouldn’t have tried to throw Gene over the side with no parachute.
You
would have made it here by yourself, I wouldn’t have.”

They were silent, each with her own thoughts.

Cirocco was not sure what Gaby said was true. Part of it was accurate, though she would never agree with it out loud. Gaby could not have brought them this far. She was not a leader.

But am
I
? she wondered. She had certainly tried enough to be one. Could she have made it alone? She doubted it.

“It’s been fun, hasn’t it?” Gaby asked, quietly.

Cirocco was genuinely surprised. Was it possible to call eight months’ struggle fun?

“I don’t think that’s the word I would have used.”

“No, you’re right. But you know what I mean.”

Oddly enough, she did. She was at last able to understand the depression that had plagued her during the last weeks. The trip would soon be over. They would discover the means to return to Earth, or they would not.

“I don’t want to go back to Earth,” Cirocco said.

“Me either.”

“But we can’t just turn back.”

“You know best.”

“No, I’m just stubborn. But we do have to go on. I owe it to April and Gene—and the rest of us, too—to find out what’s been done to us, and why.”

“Get out those swords, will you?”

“You expecting trouble?”

“Nothing that a sword would cure. I’d just feel better with it in my hand. I’m supposed to be a hero,
right?”

Gaby didn’t argue. She went down on one knee and rummaged through the extra pack, came up with the short swords and tossed one to Cirocco.

They were standing near the top of what had to be the last staircase. Like the one they had climbed at the bottom of the spoke, it made a spiral around the cable, which they had re-discovered at the top of a long, bare incline that marked the margin between the forest and the upper spoke valve. Climbing the slope had been pick, rope, and piton work, occupying them for two arduous days.

With no lamp oil remaining, the climb up the stairs had been done in total darkness, one step at a time. It had passed without incident until Cirocco had discerned a faint, red glow in front of them. Suddenly she had felt the need of a sword in her hand.

It was a fine weapon, though the hilt was too large. It weighed nothing at all this high in Gaea. She struck a match and touched the figure of a Titanide chased into the flat of the blade.

“You look like a Frazetta oil,” Gaby said.

She looked down at herself. She was ragged, wrapped in the tatters of her fine clothing. Her skin was pale where it was clean enough to see. She had lost weight; what was left was hard and wiry. Her feet and hands were tough as leather.

“And I always wanted to be one of those Maxfield Parrish girls. So much more lady-like.”

She shook the match out and lit another. Gaby was still looking at her. Her eyes glowed in the yellow light. Cirocco suddenly felt very good. She smiled, then laughed quietly, reached out and put her hand on Gaby’s shoulder. Gaby returned the gesture, a half-smile on her face.

“Do you … have some kind of feeling about this?” Gaby gestured with her sword toward the top of the stairs.

“Maybe I do.” She laughed again, and then shrugged. “Nothing specific. We ought to be on our toes.”

Gaby said nothing, but wiped her palm on her thigh before settling her fingers firmly around her sword hilt. Then she laughed.

“I don’t know how to use this.”

“Just act as if you do. When we get to the top of the stairs, leave all the gear behind.”

“You sure?”

“I don’t want the extra mass.”

“The hub’s a big place, Rocky. It might take a while to search it.”

“I’ve got a feeling it won’t be long. Not long at all.”

She blew out the second match. They waited until their eyes had adjusted, until they could see the faint glow from above. Then they walked, side by side, up the last hundred steps.