Titan (GAIA) (41 page)

“Not now, thank you,” Cirocco said, hastily. “Gaea, or your holiness, or whatever I’m supposed to call you—”

“Gaea is fine.”

“—we don’t like war.
I
don’t, and I don’t think any sane person does. Surely you’ve seen anti-war movies, too.”

She frowned, and chewed on a knuckle.

“Of course I have. But they were in the minority, and even then, they were
popular
. They contained more bloodshed than most of the
pro
-war movies. You
say
you don’t like war, but why are you so fascinated by it?”

“I don’t know the answer to that. All I know is I hate war, and the Titanides hate it, too. They would like to see it stopped. That’s what I came here to ask you.”

“No war?” She peered at Cirocco suspiciously.

“No.”

“Not even a skirmish now and then?”

“Not even that.”

Gaea’s shoulders slumped, then heaved in a great sigh.

“Very well,” she said. “Consider it done.”

“I hope it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” Cirocco went on. “I don’t know how you go about—”

“It’s
done
!” The room was lit by a flash of lightning that made a crown around Gaea’s head. The thunderclap brought Gaby and Cirocco to their feet. Gaby had her sword half out of its scabbard, standing between Cirocco and Gaea.

Several uncomfortable seconds passed.

“I didn’t mean to do that,” Gaea said, her hands fluttering nervously. “It was just … well, something of a disappointment.” She sighed, and motioned them to their seats.

“I should have said it’s
being
done,” she elaborated, when things had calmed down. “I’m recalling all the angels and Titanides. The re-programming will take a while.”

“‘Re-programing’?” Cirocco asked, suspiciously.

“No one will be hurt, my dear. The ground will swallow them up. They’ll emerge after a time, free of the compulsion. Satisfied?”

Cirocco wondered what the alternative was, but nodded her head.

“Very good. Now to the other matter. Your ship.”

“I didn’t do it.”

She held up her hand, waited until she was sure Cirocco would not interrupt her, then went on.

“I know I told you I was the whole world, that I
am
Gaea. That was completely true at one time. Now it is less so. Bear in mind that I’m 3,001,266 years old.” She paused, and raised one eyebrow.

“Three million …” Cirocco’s eyes narrowed. “That’s what you said your life span was.”

“Correct. I am old by my own standards, not just yours. You’ve seen it on the rim and in the hub. My deserts are drier and my wastelands deeper in ice than they have ever been, and I can do nothing about it. I doubt that I’ll live another 100,000 years.”

Suddenly Cirocco laughed. Gaby looked startled and Gaea merely sat politely, her head cocked to one side, until Cirocco got it under control.

“Pardon me,” Cirocco said, still gasping, “but somehow, I find it hard to be properly sympathetic. Only 100,000 years!” She laughed again, and this time Gaea joined in.

“You’re right,” she said. “There’s still plenty of time to send flowers. I could outlive your whole race.” She cleared her throat. “But back to what I was saying. I’m dying. I am malfunctioning in thousands of ways—still holding together, mind you, but not what I once was.

“Think of a dinosaur. A brain in its head, another in its rump. Decentralized control over a bulky body.

“I work the same way. When I was young my auxiliary brains worked with me, as your fingers obey you. In the last half million years that has changed. I’ve lost much control over my outlying areas. There are twelve separate intelligences on the rim, and I am fragmenting into two personalities even at my central nerve nexus, in the hub.

“In a way, it’s like the Greek theogony I’ve grown so fond of. My children tend to be unruly, willful, antagonistic. I fight them constantly. There are good lands and bad lands down there. Hyperion is one of the good ones. She and I get along well.

“Rhea is temperamental and quite mad, but at least I can often wheedle her into doing the right thing.

“But Oceanus is the worst. He and I do not speak any more. What I do in Oceanus I do by misdirection, by deceit, by cunning.

“It was Oceanus that snared your ship.”

Oceanus brooded for 10,000 years while he felt Gaea’s grip grow weaker. There was still a chance she could wipe out the budding independence he concealed so carefully. His grievances festered.

Why must
he
be in the dark? He, the mightiest of oceans, eternally covered with ice. The life that struggled on the bleak ground above him was stunted. Many of his children would die in the full light of day. What was so good about Hyperion that she should be so lush and fair?

Quietly, a few meters a day, he extended a nerve beneath the ground until he could speak directly to Rhea. He recognized the seeds of insanity in her, and began casting his eyes to the west for an ally.

Mnemosyne was no good. She was desolate, physically and emotionally, mourning the passing of her lush forests. Try as he might to kindle resentment against Gaea, Oceanus could not penetrate the depths of Mnemosyne’s depression. He tunneled on.

Beyond Mnemosyne was the night region of Cronus. Gaea’s grip was strong here; the satellite brain that held sway over the territory was a tool of the overmind, and had not as yet developed a personality of his own.

Oceanus kept moving west. Without realizing it, he was laying a communications net that would unite the six rebellious lands.

He found his strongest ally in Iapetus. If only he had been closer, they might have overthrown Gaea. But the tactics they imagined depended on close physical cooperation, so he and Iapetus could only plot together. He was forced to fall back on his alliance with Rhea.

He made his move around the time the pyramids were being built on Earth. Without warning, he stopped the flow of coolant fluids passing through his immense body and through the support cables he controlled. At the far eastern end of the sea that dominated his frozen landscape, he had control of two river pumps—huge three-chambered muscles that lifted the waters of Ophion into western Hyperion. He stopped their massive beating. To the east, Rhea did the same with the five pumps that raised water over her eastern mountain ranges, while speeding the operation of her pumps near Hyperion. Shut off from the west and sucked dry from the east, Hyperion began to wither.

In a few days, Ophion ceased to flow.

“I got all this second-hand from Rhea,” Gaea said. “I had known I was losing control of my peripheral brains, but no one had mentioned any grievances. I had not imagined they could exist.”

It had grown gradually darker as Gaea told of the rebellion of Oceanus. Most of the luminescent floor panels had gone out. Those remaining gave off a flickering orange glow. The walls of the room receded in the gloom.

“I knew I had to do something. He was about to destroy whole ecosystems; it might be a thousand years before I could put them together again.”

“What did you do?” Gaby whispered. Cirocco jumped; Gaea’s quiet voice had nearly mesmerized her.

She held out her hand, slowly made a fist that looked like a lump of stone.

“I
squeezed
.”

The vast, circular muscle had been dormant for 3,000,000 years. It had only one function: to contract the hub and draw out the spokes behind it, just after the Titan was born. Gaea’s network of cables depended on it. It was the center of her rigging, the mighty anchor that held her together.

It jerked.

Gigatonnes of ice and rock leaped into the air.

Ten thousand square kilometers of Oceanus’ surface rose like an express elevator. The frozen sea turned to slush, embedded with ice cubes the size of city blocks. All over Gaea, cable strands snapped like rotten rope, raveling, snarling, flailing the land beneath them.

The muscle relaxed.

For one giddy moment weightlessness reigned in Oceanus. Kilometer-square ice floes drifted like snowflakes, turning in the hurricane that had begun to blow from the hub.

When Oceanus bottomed out, fifteen cables twanged the deadly music of Gaea’s revenge. The sonic energy alone stripped ten meters of topsoil from the surrounding regions and hurled opposing dust storms a dozen times around the rim before their fury abated.

Like a hand squeezing a ball, the muscle in the hub contracted and relaxed in a two-day rhythm that made Gaea vibrate like a plucked rubber band.

She had one more trick, but she waited until the cataclysm had flayed Oceanus to the bare rock. She had only six other muscles. Now she flexed one of them.

The spoke that towered over Oceanus contracted, squeezed to half its normal diameter. Deprived of water for over a week, the trees were tinder-dry. They fractured, sloughing off their tenuous grip in Gaea’s flesh, and began to fall.

On the way down, they began to burn.

Oceanus was an inferno.

“I meant to burn the bastard,” Gaea said. “I meant to cauterize him for all time.”

Cirocco coughed, and reached for her forgotten drink. The ice cubes clicked alarmingly in the silence and near-darkness.

“He was too deep, but I put the fear of God into him.” She chuckled quietly. “I burned myself in the process—the fire damaged my lower valve, and from then on I’ve blasted him with hurricanes and noise every seventeen days. The sound is not my Lament; it’s my warning. But it was worth it. He was a very good boy for thousands of years. Make no mistake, you can’t have a dozen Gods running a world. The Greeks knew what they were talking about.

“But the catch, you see, is that his fate is linked with mine. He’s another part of my mind, so in your terms, I’m insane. It will destroy us all, eventually, the good with the bad.

“But he was on his best behavior until you came along.

“I had planned to contact you a few days before you arrived here. It was my intention to pick you
up with Hyperion’s external grapples. I assure you I could have done it delicately, not breaking any glassware.

“Oceanus exploited my weakness. My radio transmission organs are on the rim. There were three of them, but one broke down ages ago. The others are in Oceanus and Crius. Crius is my ally, but Rhea and Tethys managed to destroy his transmitter. Suddenly all my communications were in the hands of Oceanus.

“I decided not to make the pick-up. Not having been in contact with me, you would surely have misinterpreted it.

“But Oceanus wanted you for himself.”