During the last myriarev, when construction was at its peak, Gaea had diverted more and more human refugees from Bellinzona for use as laborers at Pandemonium. At times the work force numbered seventy thousand. The work was hard, but the food was adequate. Workers who complained or died were turned into zombies, so labor unrest was never a problem.
It was to be Gaea's masterpiece.
At the time of the capture of Adam, work on the permanent site was almost complete. When Gaea saw the extent of the damage to her traveling show, she ordered the final move, though there was still a kilorev's work to be done.
The south-central cable was five kilometers in diameter and one hundred kilometers high at the point where it pierced the Hyperion roof and vanished into daylight. Five hundred kilometers beyond that point it joined the Gaean hub, where it became one strand of many in a monstrous basket-weave that composed the anchor at which Gaea's rim perpetually strained. The network of cables were fastened to Gaea's bones, deep beneath the rim, and it was their function to defeat centripetal force, to keep Gaea from flying apart. They had been doing this for three million years, and were showing certain signs of strain.
Each cable was composed of one hundred forty-four wound strands, each strand about two hundred meters in diameter. Over the aeons the strands had stretched. The process was called-though not by Gaea, who thought it crude-millennial sag. As a result, the base of the vertical cables was not a five-kilometer column but a narrow cone of unwinding strands about seven kilometers wide. There were gaps between the strands; it was possible to walk right through the cable, threading the titanic strand-forest. Inside, it was like a dark city made of round, brooding skyscrapers with no windows and no tops.
In addition to the sag, there were broken strands. There were one hundred and eight cables in Gaea, for a total of fifteen thousand five hundred fifty-two strands. Of those, two hundred could be seen to be broken because they were part of the outer layer. Each cable in Gaea had its visible wound, with the top part of the strand curling away like a stray split end, and the lower part lying on the ground, stretching for one kilometer or seventy, depending on how high the break had been.
All but one in south-central Hyperion. While other cables had two, three, or even five visible breaks, the one that rose from the center of New Pandemonium was pristine, climbing in smooth and breathtaking perspective.
Gaea absently patted the cable strand she had been standing near, took a last look up, and moved down into the heart of her domain. Only she knew of the internal broken strands, the ones that never saw daylight. There were four hundred of those. Six hundred failures out of fifteen thousand was a rate of around four percent. Not bad for three million years, she thought. She could tolerate twenty percent, but not easily. At that point she would have to start slowing her rotation. Of course, there were other dangers. The weakest cable was in Central Oceanus. Should several more strands give way there the whole cable could fail under the added strain. Oceanus would bulge, a deep sea would be created as Ophion flowed into it from both directions and never flowed out, the imbalance would create a wobble which would weaken other strands in turn... .
But that didn't bear thinking about. For many thousands of years Gaea's motto had been Let Tomorrow Take Care of Itself.
She came to the areas of New Pandemonium still under construction, watched for a while as the carpenters and Iron Masters labored on a soundstage bigger than any ever built on Earth. Then she looked out over the Studio.
New Pandemonium was a two-kilometer ring encircling the seven-kilometer cable. That gave about twenty-five square kilometers of area-almost ten square miles.
Completely surrounding the studio grounds was a wall thirty kilometers in circumference, and thirty meters high. Or at least, that was the plan. Most of the wall was finished, but some sections had reached only two or three meters. The wall was made of basaltic stone quarried from the southern highlands, forty kilometers away, and brought to Pandemonium over a second Iron Master railway. It was built along the general lines of the Great Wall of China, but higher and wider. And it was adorned by a monorail track that ran along the inner rim.
Outside the wall was a moat filled with sharks.
The wall was pierced by twelve gates, like a clock face. The gates were arched, reached by sturdy causeways that ended in drawbridges, and were twenty meters tall-high enough for Gaea to walk through without lowering her head. Flanking each gate just inside the wall were temples, two at every gate, each presided over by a Priest and his or her troops. Gaea had put a lot of thought into the location of each temple. It was her belief that a certain amount of tension among her disciples made for both better discipline and interesting and unplanned events. Most of the events were bloody.
Thus, the Universal Gate, located at twelve o'clock, the northernmost of the New Pandemonium gates, was guarded by Brigham and his Boys to the east of the gate, and Joe Smith and the Gadianton Robbers to the west. Brigham and Joe thoroughly detested each other, as befitted the leaders of rival sects within the same overall belief system.
Over a mile away, in the one o'clock position, was the Goldwyn Gate. Luther's huge unadorned chapel, filled with his twelve disciples and uncounted pastors, faced the Vatican of Pope Joan, teeming with Cardinals, Archbishops, bishops, statues, bleeding hearts, virgins, rosaries, and other popery. Luther seethed when the once-a-hectorev bingo games were held, and spat every time he passed the booth which did a brisk business in indulgences.
Two o'clock was the Paramount Gate, where Kali and her Thugs and Krishna and his Orangemen conducted endless stealthy intrigues against each other.
Three was the RKO Radio Gate. Blessed Foster and Father Brown gave virulent life to their respective fictional characters.
At four was Columbia Gate, where Marybaker had her reading room and Elron his E-meters and engrams.
Near the First National Gate, the Ayatollah and Erasmus X conducted a perpetual jihad from their dissimilar mosques.
The Fox Gate was relatively tranquil, the Gautama and Siddhartha only seldom resorting to violence, and that often directed at themselves. The main diversion at Fox was an interloper Priest named Gandhi, who kept trying to shoulder his way into the temples.
And so it went, around the huge clock of New Pandemonium. The Warner Gate was the arena for Shinto and Sony in their ceaseless battle of new and old. The MGM Gate was raucous with the perpetual revivals of Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson. Keystone was guarded by Confucius and Tze-Dong, Disney by The Guru Mary and St. Claus, and United Artists by St. Torquemada and St. Valentine.
There were other, disenfranchised Priests, whose holy places were far from the gates. Mumbo Jumbo of the Congo stalked the Studio in a black rage, muttering of discrimination, which was just as Gaea had intended. Wicca, Mensa, Trotsky, and I. C. grumbled about the emphasis on tradition, and the Mahdi and many others complained about the pro-Christian leanings of the entire New Pandemonium myth-system.
None of them voiced their complaints to Gaea, however. And all felt deep and sincere allegiance to the Child.
Leading from each gate was a street paved with gold.
At least that had been in the original specifications. In practice, Gaea did not contain and could not manufacture enough gold for that many streets. So eleven of the streets had been paved for fifty meters with bricks of pure gold, followed by a kilometer of gold-plated bricks, with the remainder of bricks covered with gold paint which was already flaking off.
Only the Universal street was pure gold from end to end. And at the far end was Tara, the Taj Mahal/Plantation-house/palace that housed Adam, the Child. Yellow-brick road, indeed, Gaea thought, as she strode down the Twenty-four Carat Highway.