Demon

MUSICAL INTERLUDE

Not long after Conal's arrival at Gaea, a ship named Xenophobe broke out of its circum-Saturn orbit and headed for Earth at maximum acceleration.

The Xenophobe's departure had nothing to do with Conal. The ship and others like it had maintained orbit around Saturn for almost a century. The first one had been owned and operated by the United Nations. When that body died, ownership had passed to the Council of Europe, and later to other peace-keeping organizations.

None of the ships had ever been mentioned in any of the treaties and protocols signed between Gaea and various Earth nations and corporations. When Gaea had entered the U.N. as a full voting member, she had thought it the diplomatic thing to ignore their existence. The ships' purpose was an open secret. Each had carried enough nuclear weapons to vaporize Gaea. Treaty or no treaty, Gaea-a single sentient being-massed more than all terrestrial life forms put together; it seemed wise to successive generations to have the capability of destroying her should she exhibit unforeseen powers.

"The truth is," Gaea had once said to Cirocco, "I can't do shit, but why tell them that?"

"And who would believe you?" Cirocco had responded. Cirocco thought Gaea was secretly pleased to rate so much attention, such an unprecedented show of unanimity from the historically fractious peoples of Planet Earth.

But with the war about to enter its second year, Xenophobe's cargo could be put to better use at home instead of being squandered in space.

Gaea noted its departure.

A being in the shape of a 1,300-kilometer wagon wheel cannot be said to smile, in any human sense of the word. But somewhere in the pulsing scarlet line of light that served Gaea as a center of consciousness, she was smiling.

Half a dekarev later, the Pandemonium Traveling Film Festival began showing a double feature to packed houses: The Triumph of the Will by Leni Riefenstahl, and Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, by Stanley Kubrick.

In Gaea, time was doled out by the rev.

One rev was the time it took Gaea to rotate once on her axis: sixty-one minutes, three and a fraction seconds. The rev was often called the "Gaean hour." Metric prefixes were then used to describe any other length of time. The kilorev, called the Gaean Month, was forty-two days long.

Two kilorevs after Xenophobe left Saturn (to be shot down near the Moon's orbit by the Commie Rats), the mercy flights began. It was the first time Gaea had revealed any unforeseen powers.

It had been known that Gaea was an individual, aged specimen of a genetically engineered species called Titan. She had five younger sisters in orbit around Uranus, and an immature daughter waiting to be born from the surface of Iapetus, a moon of Saturn. Rare interviews granted by Gaea's Uranian sisters had established the Titan method of reproduction, the nature of Titan eggs, their method of promulgation and distribution.

It was also understood that Gaea, the senile Titan, had been known to employ manufactured beings that were not individuals with anything like free will, but rather extensions of herself in the same way that a finger or hand was an extension of a human's existence. These were called "tools of Gaea." For many years one of these tools had been presented to visitors as being Gaea herself. When Cirsocco killed that particular tool, Gaea promptly manufactured another.

That tools and seeds could be combined came as no surprise to Cirocco. After ninety years of living with the insane God, little could surprise Cirocco.

The resulting organism was very much like a spaceship. Gaea released these sentient, steerable, immensely powerful seeds by the score as soon as she knew the Xenophobe was destroyed and nothing was likely to replace it. All of them shaped orbit for Earth. Of the first waves, ninety-five percent were destroyed before reaching the atmosphere. Year Two of the War was a nervous time; everyone was shooting first and not bothering to ask questions later.

But gradually the nature of the seeds was established. Each headed for a site of nuclear carnage, landed and began shouting that salvation was at hand. The seeds spoke, played music calculated to lift the spirits of the broken creatures fleeing the holocaust, and promised medical care, fresh air, food, water, and unlimited vistas in the welcoming arms of Gaea.

The global nets picked up the story, dubbed the seeds "mercy flights." At first, it was hazardous to board one, as many were shot down attempting to leave Earth. But few hesitated. These were people who had seen horrors that would make hell itself seem like a summer resort. Before long, the combatants ignored the flights of Gaea's seeds. They had more important matters to consider, such as which million people to murder this week.

Each seed could carry about one hundred people. Frightful riots developed when the seeds landed. Children were often left behind as adults pushed beyond all civilized limits threw their children from them for the chance to board the seed.

No newsnet reported it, but the trip back to Saturn was miraculous. No injury was too severe to heal. The horrors of biological warfare were all cured. Everyone had plenty to eat and drink. Hope was reborn during the mercy flights.

Gaea's interior was divided into twelve regions. Six were in permanent daylight, six in endless night. Between these regions were narrow bands of failing or rising light-depending on one's direction of travel or state of mind-known as twilight zones.

The zone between Iapetus and Dione contained a large, irregular lake, surrounded by mountains, known as Moros. Moros means Doom or Destiny.

The coastline of Moros was irregular and precipitous. The southern part of it included scores of peninsulas, each defining a narrow, deep bay. The peninsulas were for the most part anonymous, but each bay had a name. There was the Bay of Fraud, the Bay of Incontinence, the Bay of Sorrow, the Bay of Equivocations, and Bays of Forgetfulness, Hunger, Disease, Combat, and Injustice. The list was long and depressing. The nomenclature, however, was logical, provided by early cartographers armed with lists from Greek mythology. All the bays were named after children of Nox (night), the mother of Moros. Moros was the eldest; Fraud, Incontinence, Sorrow, et al, the benighted younger sibs.

The easternmost of the line was known as Peppermint Bay. The reason for the name was simple: nobody wanted to live in a place called the Bay of Murder, so the Wizard changed it.

There was one settlement on the Bay: Bellinzona. It was a sprawling, noisy, dirty place. Half of it clung to the almost vertical stone of the eastern peninsula, and the rest extended onto the water on pontoon piers. The islands of Bellinzona were artificial, standing on piles, or harsh knuckles or rock standing straight out of the black waters.

The city Bellinzona most resembled was Hong Kong. It was a polyglot city of boats. The boats were tied to piers or other boats, sometimes twenty or thirty deep. The boats were made of wood and came in every style humans had ever imagined: gondolas and junks, barges and dhows, smacks, wherries, and sampans.

Bellinzona was three years old when Rocky came to it, and already ancient with sin and decay, a giant felonious assault on the face of Peppermint Bay.

It was a human city, and the humans were as various as their boats, from every race and nation. There were no police, no fire department, no schools, courts, or taxes. There were plenty of guns, but there was no ammunition. Even so, the murder rate was astronomical.

Few of Gaea's native races frequented the city. It was too wet for the sand wraiths and too smoky for the blimps. The Iron Masters of Phoebe maintained an enclave on one of the islands from which they bought human children to be used as incubators and first meals for their hatchling stages. From time to time a Submarine would come to feed on the city, biting off large chunks and swallowing them whole, but for the most part the Bellinzona sewage disposal system kept the sentient leviathans distant. Titanides came to trade but found the city depressing.

Most Bellinzonans agreed with the Titanides. There were those who found romance in the place-raw, husky, and vital, "Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage... ." But unlike old Chicago Bellinzona was not hog butcher, tool maker, stacker of wheat. Food came from the lake, from manna, or from deep wells tapping Gaea's milk. The main things the city produced were dark brown stains in the water and plumes of smoke in the air; some part of Bellinzona was always burning. In its damp byways one could buy stranglers' nooses, poisons, and slaves. Human meat was sold openly in butchers' stalls.

It was as if all the misery of the tortured Earth had been brought to this one place, distilled, concentrated, and left to rot. Which is exactly as Gaea had planned it

On the 97,761,615th rev of the twenty-seventh gigarev, Phase-Shifter (Double-Sharped Lydian Trio) Rock'n'Roll stepped from his longboat and onto the end of Pier Seventeen on the outskirts of Bellinzona.

Cirocco Jones had once said of the Titanide that "It just shows you how a system designed to simplify things can get out of hand." What she meant was that any Titanide's real name was a song that told a great deal about the Titanide but could not be transliterated into any human tongue. Since no human had ever learned to sing Titanide without Gaea's help, it made sense for them to adopt names in English-the preferred human language in Gaea.

The system was useful-to a Titanide. The last name was that of his or her chord. Chords were like human clans, or associations, or extended families, or races. Few humans understood what the chords meant, though many could recognize the distinctive pelt each possessed, like Scottish tartans or school ties. The second, parenthetical name indicated which of twenty-nine ways had been employed to give birth to the Titanide, who could have from one to four parents. The first name celebrated the third important factor in any Titanide's heritage: music. They all chose musical instruments as first names.

But the system had broken down with Phase-Shifter. The Wizard had decided his name was just too outrageous to use. She dubbed him Rocky, and the name had stuck. It was a triumphant ploy for Cirocco, who had been plagued by the nickname for over a century. Now, having given the name to the Titanide, she found no one ever called her Rocky, if only to avoid confusion.

Rocky the Titanide moored his boat to a piling, looked around him, then up at the sky. It might have been late evening. It had been like that in Moros for three million Earth years, and Rocky had not expected it to change. There were clouds falling from the Dione spoke, three hundred kilometers overhead, while to the west sunlight yellow as butter streamed through the arched roof over Hyperion.

He sniffed the air and immediately regretted it, but sniffed again, cautiously, searching for the spoiled-meat scent of a Priest or the worse odor of Zombie.

The city seemed somnolent. Existing in perpetual fading twilight, Bellinzona had no rush hours or dead times. People did things when the spirit moved them, or when they could no longer put them off. And yet there was a pulse to the activity. There were times when violence hovered in the air, ready to be born, and times when the lazy beast, sated, coiled itself and nestled into a nervous sleep.

He approached an old buck human roasting fish heads over a fire in a rusty bucket.

"Old man," he said, in English. He tossed a small packet of cocaine, which the human snatched from the air, sniffed, and pocketed.

"Guard my boat until I return," Rocky said, "and I will give you another like that one."

Rocky turned and clattered down the dock on four adamantine hooves.

The Titanide was cautious, but not too worried. Humans had needed a long time to learn their lesson, but they had by now learned it well. When the ammunition ran out, Titanides had stopped being gentle.

They never had been, really, but they were realistic. There is no sense arguing with an armed human. For the better part of a century, most humans in Gaea had been armed. Now the bullets were gone and Rocky could walk the docks of Bellinzona with little fear.

He outweighed any five humans taken together, and was stronger than any ten. He was also at least twice as fast. If attacked by humans he was capable of kicking heads from bodies and pulling off limbs with his bare hands, and he would not hesitate to do so. If fifty of them ganged up on him, he could outrun them. And if nothing else worked, he had a loaded .38 revolver, more precious than gold, tucked into his belly pouch. But he intended to return the weapon, unused, to Captain Jones.

He was a formidable sight, trotting through the twilight city. He stood three meters high and seemed almost a meter wide. Centauroid in shape, he was an altogether smoother construction than the classical Greek model, and the details were all wrong. There was no join in between the human and equine parts of him. His whole body was smooth and hairless but for thick black cascades growing from his head and tail, and pubic hair between his front legs. His skin was pale lime green. He wore no clothing, but was festooned with jewelry and splashed with paint. Most startling of all to a human who had never seen a Titanide, he appeared to be female. It was an illusion: all Titanides had big, conical breasts, long eyelashes and wide, sensual mouths, and none grew beards. The top meter-and-a-half of him would instantly be identified as a woman in any culture on Earth. But sex in a Titanide was determined by the organs between the front legs. Rocky was a male who could bear children. He moved down the narrow finger piers between the endless rows of boats, passing small groups of humans who gave him plenty of room. His wide nostrils flared. He smelled many things-roasting meat, human excrement, a distant Iron Master, fresh fish, human sweat-but never a Priest. Gradually he came to more traveled lanes, to the broad floating thoroughfares of Bellinzona. He clattered over bridges arched so high as to be nearly semi-circles. They were easy to negotiate in Gaea's one-quarter gravity.

He stopped at an intersection just short of the Free Female Quarter. He looked around, aware of the squad of seven human Free Females stationed at the interdiction line and as unconcerned about them as they were about him. He could enter the Quarter if he wished; it was human males the guards were watching for.

There were few other humans about. The only one he noticed was a female Rocky judged to be about nineteen or twenty years old, though it was hard to tell the age of a human between puberty and menopause. She sat on a piling with her chin in her hands, wearing low-cut black slippers with blunt toes. They had ribbons that laced around her calves.

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.

Honor only arose among friends.

It was a hard concept for Conal. He had never had a friend. Cirocco seemed an unlikely place to start-seemed, in fact, a damn good candidate for the worst enemy he ever had. No one had ever hurt him a thousandth as much as she had.

But he kept coming back to his list. His word. He had given his word. Naked, defenseless, seconds from death, it had been all he had left to give, but he had given it honestly. Or so he thought. The trouble was, he kept thinking about killing her.

For a while he didn't think survival was worth it. He stood for long hours on the edge of the precipice, ready to jump, cursing himself for the groveling he had done.

The first time she came back, after an absence of over a hectorev, he told her what he had been thinking. She didn't laugh.

"I agree that one's word is worth something," she said. "Mine is worth something to me, so I don't give it lightly."

"But you'd lie to an enemy, wouldn't you?"

"Just as much as I had to."

He thought that over.

"I've already mentioned this," she said, "but it bears repeating. An oath made under duress is not binding. I wouldn't consider it so. An oath I haven't given freely is no oath at all."

"Then you don't expect me to live up to mine, do you?"

"Frankly, no. I see no reason why you should."

"Then why did you accept it?"

"Two reasons. I believe I can anticipate your move, if it comes, and kill you. And Hornpipe believes you'll keep your word."

"He will," Hornpipe said.

Conal didn't know why the Titanide was so confident. They left him again, quite soon, and he had more time to think, but he found himself going back over the same old paths. An oath given under duress ... and yet, his Word.

In the end, there was nothing else. He had to jump, or he had to keep his word. Starting with that scrap dignity, perhaps he could build a man the Wizard might honor.

Conal and Rocky entered the Free Female quarter.

Each of the seven guards had to scrutinize Conal's pass, and even then there was an obvious reluctance to let him through. Since the establishment of the quarter two years earlier, not one human male had gone more than fifty meters beyond the gate and lived to tell about it. But the Free Females, by their very nature, were the one human group that acknowledged the Wizard's authority. Cirocco Jones was a goddess to them, a supernatural being, a figure of legend come alive. Her effect on the Free Females was much the same as a certifiable, living, breathing Holmes would have had on a group of fanatic Sherlockians: whatever she asked for, she got. If she wanted this man to pass into the zone, so be it.

Beyond the guard post was a hundred-meter walkway known as the Zone of Death. There were drawbridges, metal-clad bunkers with arrow slits, and cauldrons of flammable oils, all designed to slow an assault long enough for a force of amazons to be assembled.

A woman was waiting for them. She carried her forty-five years with a serenity many hope for but few achieve. Her hair was long and white. In the manner of Free Females at home, she wore nothing above the waist. Where her right breast had been there was now a smooth, blue scar that curved from her sternum to her seventh rib.

"Was there any trouble?" the woman asked.

"Hello, Trini," said Conal.

"No trouble," the Titanide assured her. "Where is she?"

"This way." Trini stepped off the dock onto the deck of a barge. They followed her to another boat, not quite as imposing. A rickety plank bridge took them to yet a third boat.

It was a fascinating journey for Rocky, who had always wondered what human nests looked like. Dirty, for the most part, he decided. Very little privacy, either. Some of the boats were quite small. There were tiny cockles with canvas awnings, and others open to the elements. All were stuffed with human females of all ages. He saw women asleep in bunks placed as far from the makeshift highway as space would allow. More women tended cooking fires, and babies.

At last they came to a larger boat with a solid deck. It was near the outside of the quarter, quite close to the open waters of Peppermint Bay. There was a big tent on the deck. Trini held a flap open and Conal and Rocky entered.

There were six Titanides in a space that might have held five comfortably. Rocky's arrival made it seven. Besides Conal, the only other human was Cirocco Jones, who was at the far end of the tent, wrapped in blankets, reclining in something that might have been a very low barber's chair. It put her head no more than a foot off the deck, where it was cradled between the yellow folded forelegs of Valiha (Aeolian Solo) Madrigal. The Titanide was drawing a straight razor slowly across Cirocco's scalp, putting the finishing touches on a shave that left the Wizard's head bare from the crown forward.

She raised her head, causing Valiha to coo a warning. Rocky noted that her head wobbled, that her eyes were not focusing well, and that, when she spoke, her speech was slurred, but that was to be expected.

"Well," Cirocco said. "Now we can begin. Cut when ready, doc."

Conal knew all but two of the Titanides. There was Rocky and Valiha, and of course Hornpipe, and Valiha's son Serpent. Valiha and Serpent looked like identical twins except for their frontal sex organs, even though Valiha was twenty and Serpent only fifteen. For a long time Conal had been unable to tell them apart. He nodded to Viola (Hypolydian Duet) Toccata, whom he knew only slightly, and was introduced to Celesta and Clarino, both of the Psalm chord, who nodded gravely to him.

He watched Rocky move in and kneel at the Captain's side. Serpent handed him a black bag, which he opened, producing a stethoscope. As he was fitting it to his ears, Cirocco grabbed the other end and put it to her bare head. She tapped her head with her fist.

"Dong ... dong ... dong ... " Cirocco intoned, hollowly, then started laughing.

"Very funny, Captain," Rocky said. He was handing gleaming steel scalpels and drills to Serpent, who was in charge of sterilization. Conal moved closer and sat beside Rocky. Cirocco reached out and took his hand, grasped it strongly.

"So glad you could come, Conal," she said, and seemed to find it funny because she started laughing again. Conal realized she was drugged. One of the Psalm sisters had pulled the blankets away from Cirocco's feet and was sticking pins in them, twirling them between thumb and forefinger.

"Ouch," Cirocco said, with no real feeling. "Ouch. Ow."

"Does that hurt?"

"Nope. Can't feel a thing." And she started to giggle.

Conal was sweating. He watched Rocky bend over, pull the blanket from Cirocco's chest, and put his ear to her heart. He listened in various places, then listened to her head. He repeated the process with the stethoscope, not seeming to have much faith in the device.

"Isn't it awfully hot in here?" Conal asked.

"Take off your coat," Rocky said, without looking at him.

Conal did, and realized that, if anything, it was cold in the tent. At least the sweat on his body felt clammy.

"Tell me, doc," Cirocco said. "When you get through, will I be able to play the piano?"

"Of course," Rocky said.

"That's great, 'cause I-"

"-never could play it before," Rocky finished. "That one's terribly old, Captain."

Conal couldn't help it; he had never heard that one. He laughed.

"What the hell are you doing?" Cirocco roared, trying to rise. "Here I am about to die, and you think it's funny, do you? I'll-" Conal never heard what she'd do, as Rocky was calming her. The rage was gone as quickly as it appeared and Cirocco laughed again. "Hey, doc, will I be able to play the piano?"

Rocky was smearing a purple solution over Cirocco's forehead. Three of the Titanides began to sing quietly. Conal knew it was a song of calming, but it didn't do anything for him. Cirocco, on the other hand, relaxed considerably. It probably helped if you understood the words.

"You can wait outside, Conal," Rocky said, without looking up.

"What are you talking about? I'm staying right here. Somebody's got to be sure you do it right."

"I really think you ought to leave," Rocky said, looking at him.

"Nuts. I can take it."

"Very well."

Rocky took a scalpel, and quickly, neatly, cut a large backward "C" from the crown of Cirocco's head to just over her eyebrows. With his purple-tinted fingers, he drew the flap of skin to the right, exposing the bloody skull below.

"Take him outside," Rocky said. "He'll be all right in a few minutes."

He heard Celesta trotting outside with Conal's limp body, just as he had earlier heard Conal hitting the floor, but Rocky never took his eyes from his work. He had known Conal would faint. The man had been practically screaming the fact for ten minutes. Any Titanide healer would have heard the symptoms, though they were inaudible to the human ear.

If there was one area of unqualified Titanide superiority, it was the ear. It had been a Titanide ear that had first heard the odd sounds coming from Cirocco's head. They were not sounds that would register on a tape recorder-may not have been sounds at all, in the human sense of the word. But successive Titanide healers had heard it: a whisper of evil, the muttering of betrayal. Something was in there that shouldn't be. No one had any idea what it was.

Rocky had studied human anatomy. There had been talk of finding a human doctor to do the operation, but in the end Cirocco had rejected it, preferring to be in the hands of a friend.

So now here he was, preparing to open the skull of the being who stood in his world much as Jesus Christ stood to the human sect known as Christians.

He hoped no one realized how terrified he was.

"How's it look so far?" Cirocco asked. She sounded better to Rocky: much more relaxed. He took it as a good sign.

"I can't figure it out. There's this big black numeral eight in a white circle ... "

Cirocco chuckled. "I thought it'd be inscribed 'Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.'" She closed her eyes for a moment, breathed deeply. "I thought I could feel that for a minute," she said, her voice shaking.

"Impossible," Rocky said.

"If you say so. Can I have a drink?"

Valiha held a straw to her lips, and she took a swallow of water.

"It's as I thought," Rocky said, after listening carefully. "The trouble lies deeper."

"Not much deeper, I hope."

Rocky shrugged as he reached for the drill. "If it is, it is beyond my powers." He connected the drill to a batteryplant, tested it, hearing the high-pitched whine. Cirocco grimaced.

"Tell me about rock and roll," she said.

Rocky put the point of the drill to Cirocco's skull and turned it on.

"Rock and roll was the fusion of several musical elements present in human culture in the early 1950s," Rocky began. "Rhythm and blues, jazz, gospel music, some country influence ... it all began to come together under various names and in various styles around 1954. Most of our chord agree it achieved its first synthesis in Chuck Berry, with a song called 'Maybellene.'"

" 'Why cancha' be true?'" Cirocco sang.

Rocky moved the drill point to a new site, and looked at Cirocco suspiciously.

"You've been doing some research," he accused.

"I was just curious about your chord name."

"It was a grace note in musical history," Rocky admitted. "For a while it possessed an attractive energy, but its potential was soon mined out. This was not rare in those days, of course; a new musical form seldom lasted two years, much less a decade."

"Rock and roll lasted five decades, didn't it?"

"Depends on who you talk to." He finished the second hole and began on the third. "A species of music known as 'rock' persisted for a long time, but it had abandoned the Zeitgeist."

"Don't use them big words on me. I'm just a dumb human."

"Sorry. The creative energy was expended in increasingly byzantine production, overwhelmed by technological possibilities it did not have the balls to exploit or the wit to understand. It became a hollow thing with a glitter exterior, more concerned with process than thesis. Craftsmanship was never its strong point, and soon was forgotten entirely. An artist's worth came to be measured in decibels and megabucks. For lack of a replacement it stumbled along, dead but not buried, until somewhere in the mid-90s, then was ignored as serious music."

"Harsh words from a guy whose last name is Rock'n'Roll."

Rocky had finished the fifth hole now. He started another.

"Not at all. I merely do not wish to deify a corpse, as some scholars do. Baroque music is still alive so long as there are those who play and enjoy it. In that sense, rock and roll lives, too. But the possibilities of baroque were depleted hundreds of years ago. The same with rock."

"When did it die?"

"There's some debate. Many say 1970, when McCartney sued the Beatles. Others put it as late as 1976. Some prefer 1964, for various reasons."

"What do you prefer?"

"Between '64 and '70. Closer to '64."

He now had a series of eight holes drilled. He began using a saw to cut between them. He worked in silence, and for a while Cirocco had nothing to say. There was just the sound of the bone saw and, outside, the quiet lapping of the water against the side of the boat.

"I've read critics who speak highly of Elton John," Cirocco said.

Rocky just snorted.

"What about a rock revival in the 80s?"

"Rubbish. Are you going to mention disco next?"

"No, I won't mention it."

"Good. You wouldn't want my fingers to slip."

Cirocco screamed.

Rocky's hand almost slipped on the rotary saw. He had never heard such agony in a human voice. The scream was still rising in pitch and volume, and Rocky wanted to die. What had he done? How could he be causing so much pain to his Captain?

She would have ripped the skin from her face but for Valiha's strong arms. As it was, every muscle in Cirocco's body stood out like cables. She fought, the scream dying for lack of air. Its very silence was more painful to Rocky's ears. She began to bite her tongue; Serpent moved in and jammed a piece of wood between her teeth, but it was only in one side. The tension was uneven. Rocky heard her jawbone crack.

Then it was over. Cirocco's eyes opened, and moved cautiously back and forth, as if looking for something about to spring on her. The stick of wood was bitten nearly in two.

"What was that?" she said, slurring the words. Rocky gently felt her jaw, found the fracture, and decided to fix it later.

"I was hoping you'd tell me." He leaned over to let Serpent mop the sweat from his face.

"It was ... like all the headaches in the world, all at once." She looked puzzled. "But I can hardly remember it. Like it's not there, or never was there."

"I guess you can be thankful for that. Do you want me to go on?"

"What do you mean? We can't stop now."

Rocky looked down at his hand, which had stopped shaking. He wondered why he'd ever studied human anatomy. If he hadn't been so damn curious someone else could have been handling this.

"It just seemed like a warning," was all he would say. Though he had told no one, he actually had a pretty good idea what he would find under Cirocco's skull.

"Open it up," Cirocco said, and let her eyes close again.

Rocky did as he was told. He finished his last cut, and lifted the section of bone away. Beneath was the dura mater, just as Gray's had said it would be. He could see the outlines of the cerebrum beneath the membrane. In the middle, in the great longitudinal fissure between the two frontal lobes, there was a swelling that should not have been there. Cruciform, inverted, like some unholy devil's mark ...

The mark of the Demon, Rocky thought.

As he watched, the swelling moved.

He cut around it, lifted the membranes from the gray matter beneath, and looked down at a nightmare. The nightmare looked back, blinking.

It was pale white, translucent, except for its head. It looked like a tiny snake but it had two arms which ended in miniscule clawed hands. Its body nestled into the longitudinal fissure, and it had a tail that descended between the hemispheres.

Rocky saw all that in the first few seconds; what he kept coming back to was the thing's face. It had outsize, mobile, troglodyte eyes set in the face of a lizard. But the mouth moved, it had lips, and Rocky could see a tongue.

"Put that back!" the thing shrieked. It started to burrow between the lobes of Cirocco's brain.

"Tweezers," Rocky said, and they were slapped into his palm. He grabbed the demon by the neck and pulled it out. But its tail was longer than he had thought, and still was lodged firmly in the fissure.

"The light! The light!" the creature was piping; Rocky had it by the neck, so he squeezed harder and the thing began to gurgle.

"You're choking me!" it squealed.

Nothing would have pleased Rocky more than to twist its vile head off, but he was afraid what that might do to Cirocco. He called for another tool, and used it to gingerly separate the halves of the brain. He could see, down deep, that the monster's tail was embedded in the corpus callosum.

"Mother," Cirocco said, in an odd voice. She began to cry.

What to do, what to do? Rocky didn't know, but he did know one thing: he could not close her head until the creature was removed.

"Scissors," he said. When he had them, he inserted them between the halves of the brain, down as far as he could go, until he had the tip of the demon's tail between the blades. He hesitated.

"No, no, no-" the thing screamed when it saw what he was doing.

Rocky cut.

The thing screamed bloody hell, but Cirocco did not move. Rocky held his breath for a long time, let it out, then looked again. He could see the severed end of the tail down there. It writhed, then came free from its mooring, the nature of which Rocky did not know. But it was loose, anyway, and Rocky almost reached for it with the tweezers, then remembered his prisoner-who had turned quite blue. He handed it to Serpent, who popped the squalling obscenity into a jar and sealed the lid. Rocky removed the severed bit of tail.

"Captain, can you hear me?" he said.

"Gaby," Cirocco murmured. Then she opened her eyes. "Yes. I can hear you. I saw you get it."

"You did?"

"I did. I'm not sure how. And it's gone. It's all gone. I know."

"Gaea will not be happy this day," Valiha sang. "We have her spy." She held up the jar. Inside it, the creature writhed, sucking on the end of its amputated tail.

"Sorry about that," Conal said, as he sat beside Rocky. He looked at Cirocco a bit queasily, but he was in control. "That looks normal, doesn't it, Rocky? Didn't you find anything?"

Valiha held up the jar. Conal looked.

"Somebody help him," Rocky said. "It's time to close up."

Eleven revs after Rocky had sewn Cirocco's head back together, the Pandemonium Theater began another double feature: Rock Around the Clock, with Bill Haley and the Comets, and Donovan's Brain.

As usual, no one knew why Gaea had selected these particular movies from her vast library, but many people attending noticed she did not seem happy. She hardly watched the screen. She fidgeted and brooded. She got so agitated that at one point she accidentally stepped on two panaflexes and a human, killing all three.

The corpses were quickly eaten by Priests.