"Chris, my old and dear friend, if I could do that, I would do it And leave you to the tender mercies of Gaea... and probably die of shame as soon as I had him in a safe place. But I would You know I'll save you if I can-"
"And if you can't, I accept that."
She hugged him again, and kissed his chin, which was as high as she could reach. Chris felt numb, but it felt good to be holding her.
"Gaea is ... Chris, I don't know how to explain this. But her will is focused on Adam. I let him see me the last time I was here. She knows I was here, and getting in this time was much harder. I can't visit you again. And if I took Adam and ran, she would get both of us. I know that. Can you accept that?"
"I will if I have to."
"That's all I ask. Your job is to stay on good terms with Gaea, however distasteful that might be. And be careful of her. You might find yourself liking her. No, no, don't tell me that's impossible. I liked her at one time. All you can do is be yourself, love Adam, and ... hell, Chris. Trust me."
"I do, Cirocco."
Her eyes were haunted. She kissed him again ... and then left him. It was odd, how she left. She moved back into the shadows, into a place where she couldn't have moved away without him seeing her ... and she was gone.
TEN
"Witch of the South, Witch of the South, this is Witch of the North. The bottom of that last E was pretty ragged, fellow."
Conal spoke into his mike as he sliced through a four-gee turn.
"Tend your own knitting, child," he said. "You got all the easy letters." He pulled back on the stick, looked rapidly to left and right at the vast, flat perspectives of the letters already drawn, and hit the smoke button again. He watched carefully until he was even with the base line, then killed the smoke and turned hard right. They had practiced it for a week, starting with attempts that Cirocco, from the ground, had sworn looked like Chinese, gradually moving on to writing that was almost legible. By now Conal thought he could fly it in his sleep.
It was crazy, of course, but no more crazy than other things they had been doing. They were living on a new and unfamiliar plane, it seemed. An act, in and of itself, was no longer always enough. The way it was done was also important. Certain things had to be done with deliberation, others with something called panache. The skywriting could have been done letter-perfect, with no drill, simply by programming the maneuvers into the planes' autopilots. But Cirocco had vetoed that.
Conal didn't complain. He liked writing challenges in Gaea's clean sky.
"Witch of the North," he called. "You call that an R?"
"I'll stack it up against any R in the sky," Nova shot back.
"Knock it off, children," Robin called, from her vantage point high above. "Move down to the second line."
Cirocco stepped off the golden road just short of the point where it actually became pure gold, and slipped between two towering buildings. She found an alcove out of sight and quickly stripped off her costume.
She had been dressed as an Indian princess when she came through the Columbia gate, and had managed to pass herself off as an extra showing up for work in the horse opera currently shooting on that lot. Getting to Tara had been less a matter of costuming than sheer brass. There was a thing she could do. She didn't know how she did it, and thinking about it too hard could destroy what faculty she had, but she thought of it as making herself small. People would glance at her and glance away. She wasn't worth looking at. It had worked long enough to get to Chris. She hadn't needed it much on her way out, as everyone's attention was on the skywriting.
But the exit had to be different, and called for a different brass.
She donned black pants, boots, shirt, and hat, clothing very much like what she had worn during her first meeting with Conal. She tied the short black cape around her neck, tucked a small automatic into the top of her boot and a large revolver into her waistband.
"Maybe I oughta wear a neon sign, too," she muttered to herself. "It couldn't be more incriminating than this get-up."
She stood for a moment, getting her breathing under control. On impulse-the sort of impulse she had learned to trust-she opened the top three buttons of her shirt and thrust her chest out. That would give them something to concentrate on other than her too-recognizable face. Then she stepped out onto the pavement and strode confidently up to the guard at the MGM Gate.
She had to nudge him with her elbow. He was staring up at the air show.
"What does S-U-R-R-E ... " he began.
"Why do they have an illiterate on this gate?" Cirocco snarled. The man stood straight and jerked his clipboard protectively over his chest. She held out an empty, black-gloved hand.
"I'm the first vice-president for procurement," she said. "This is my identification. Gaea has ordered me to de-fusticate the thingamabob at once." She thrust the non-existent identity card into a breast pocket, and the man's eyes followed the hand as far as the pocket, and then stuck. He gaped at her cleavage, and nodded.
"What did you say?"
"Uh ... go ahead, sir!"
"What about security? What about the record you're supposed to be keeping of who enters and exits through this gate? All the hounds of hell could come baying through here and you'd give them dog biscuits. Aren't you going to ask me my name?"
"Uh ... w-w-w-what is your n-n-name ... sir?"
"Guinness." She peered over the man's shoulder as he wrote on the clipboard. "Be sure to get that right, now. G-U-I-N-N-E-S-S. Alec Guinness. Gaea will want to know."
Cirocco turned on her heel and marched out the gate and over the drawbridge, glancing neither right nor left.
It was fifteen minutes before the man returned to full awareness. By then Cirocco was a hundred miles away.
Gaea had it figured out from the first SU.
She stood there at the Universal Gate, her huge feet planted firmly on more gold than Fort Knox ever had, her hands on her hips, and she smiled.
SURR.
SURREN.
She started to laugh. By that time some of the others, who had also seen a lot of films-more than they cared to remember, in many cases-were also getting it. It had been a nervous couple of minutes for most of them. Eyes moved constantly from Gaea's face to the writing in the sky. Then, when Gaea laughed, it was a signal for a massive eruption of laughter. The human population roared anew as each letter appeared, and each letter redoubled Gaea's own laughter.
By the time the message was complete the initial S was almost illegible. But it didn't spoil the fun.
SURRENDER GAEA.
"We must go see the Wizard!" Gaea howled. "He'll know what to do!"
The laughter got louder.
It's time for a festival, Gaea thought. Jones must be desperate to do a silly thing like that. Didn't she know it was the Wicked Witch of the West who did the skywriting? Didn't wicked mean anything to her? There were rules in this combat, and symbols were all-important.
Her mountainous laughter had dwindled to random chuckles. The letters were diffusing now, falling as a fine mist. The two planes were joined by a third which Gaea had been aware of all along. Most likely Cirocco herself had been up there, safely out of range, watching while her minions did the dirty and dangerous work. This contest wasn't even going to be worth it, she thought.
Oddly, that thought depressed her.
She shrugged it off. The three planes were flying lower now, in echelon, circumscribing the huge circle of New Pandemonium. They were still emitting smoke.
A fantasy film festival, she thought. What titles haven't been shown lately? Well, let's see, there was that ...
She stopped, and looked up suspiciously.
"No!" she shouted, and began to run. "No, you bitch! I didn't budget for that!"