"I don't understand the difference."
"With you, it will be agony, because you'll miss Adam's love. You're young, and nothing so good as Adam has ever happened to you."
"I understand that part. I don't understand why it'd be a favor to Cirocco."
"I didn't say favor. Gift. She needs it. Death is her friend. Death is the only way left for her to grow. She will never find love. But she can learn to live without it. I did."
Chris thought about that, and decided to take a chance.
"You sure did. You substituted cruelty."
She raised one eyebrow. Chris did not like to look into her eyes, even from a distance. There was too much ancient pain inside them. Evil, too, much, much evil... but he had started to wonder where evil comes from. Did one just decide to become evil? He doubted it. It must be a slow thing.
"Of course I'm cruel," Gaea muttered, closing her eye again. "There is no possible way for you to get the perspective on my cruelty, though. I'm fifty thousand years old, Chris. Cirocco is just over a hundred, and already feels things eating away at her soul. Can you imagine what I must feel?"
"You mean three million, not-"
"Of course. What was I thinking of. You can do my back now, Chris."
So he got the stepladder and climbed up with his scrubber and a hose. Her back was soft and yielding under his bare feet. She purred like a cat when he scrubbed between her shoulderblades.
TWENTY-FOUR
Cirocco came out of the Fountain and stretched out on the sand. She closed her eyes for a moment.
When she opened them she was still on sand, but it was the fine black sand of the small lake where Gaby had made love to her on the day Adam was taken.
She turned her head, and saw Gaby standing beside her. She reached up and Gaby took her hand. Once more there was a feeling like being pulled away from a sticky surface, then she was on her feet She hugged Gaby.
"You've been away so long," Cirocco said, on the edge of tears.
"I know, I know. Too long. And we don't have much time now, and there is much to see. Will you come?"
Cirocco nodded and, holding Gaby's hand, followed her into the lake. She knew the water was shallow, yet felt the bottom drop away quickly until they were floating with just their heads out of the water. Gaby made a movement with her head, and they dived.
It wasn't like swimming. They went straight down. Cirocco did not need to propel herself in any way; they simply moved. She could feel the water rushing past her.
And it wasn't water. It was more like mud, like warm earth. This must be what a worm feels moving along underground, she thought. She remembered, long ago, struggling through the damp soil of Gaea toward the light: hairless, disoriented, frightened as a new-born babe. This wasn't like that. There was no fear.
Then she was standing in a huge cave, with no memory of how she had come to be there. The cave stretched farther than she could see. She walked with Gaby beside the dry-docked, dormant, spidery forms of spaceships.
"I started saving these when the war started," Gaby said. "Captains would show up and refuse to go back to the war. They scuttled their ships. I brought them here and saved them."
There were hundreds of them. They looked very strange sitting there.
"It looks so ... forlorn," Cirocco said.
"Most of the damage is easily fixable," Gaby assured her.
"I suppose. But ... they weren't meant to be here. You know what it looks like? Jellyfish tossed up on the beach."
Gaby looked out over the silent armada and nodded. Spaceships did have a lot in common with the soft-bodied anatomical fantasies achieved by the more exotic marine invertebrates.
"You brought them here, you said. Not Gaea."
"I did. I thought they might come in handy one day. I brought a lot of other stuff, too, when I realized Gaea wanted the war to go on. Take a look over here." Gaby gently turned Cirocco ...
... and the darkness closed in again. When it lifted, Cirocco realized they were in a different place entirely.
"How did you do that?"
"Honey, I could never possibly explain how. Just accept that I can."
Cirocco thought about it. She felt a little fuzzy-headed, something like being drunk, something like dreaming. It was an accepting state of mind.
"Okay," she said, placidly.
They were in an endless tunnel. It was perfectly round, seemed absolutely straight, and pulsed with multi-colored light.
"This isn't real time you're seeing," Gaby explained.
"I'm dreaming, right?"
"Something like that. This is The Alchemist's Ring. It's a four-thousand-kilometer circular colliding-beam atom smasher ... and it uses some other techniques that soup it up way beyond anything we ever built on Earth. This is where Gaea makes heavy metals-mostly gold, lately. Before that, she stockpiled a lot of plutonium. I just wanted to show it to you."
Cirocco stared at the lights. They moved along the tunnel, like red-hot, yellow-hot, and white-hot bumblebees. Not very fast at all.
Not real time, Gaby had said. The lights had to be atomic nuclei, and they had to be pushing the speed of light. It's all a visual aid, she thought. Not a dream, but something like it. More like a film.
"There's no air in here, is there?"
"No, of course not. Does that bother you?"
Cirocco shook her head.
"Okay, take a look over here ... "
... and she turned again...
This time Cirocco held her head and it was a little easier. She never closed her eyes, but it didn't do her any good. She was in another cave, much smaller than the spaceship hangar.
"It's very close to absolute zero in here. These are frozen samples from several hundred thousand Earth animal and plant species. Gaea collected some of them. I ordered others, just before the war started. I hope they might come in useful some day, like the ships. Now, take one step up ... "
Cirocco did, and almost lost her balance. Gaby's hand steadied her, and her feet came down on the familiar black sand. She took a deep breath, one she could believe in.
"I don't like to go that way," she complained.
"Okay. But I have some other things to show you. You still want to go?"
"Yes."
"Then hold my hand and don't be afraid."
Cirocco did, and they rose into the air.
Cirocco had flown before, many times, in dreams. There were two ways of going about it, possibly having to do with some psychological weather report. Low visibility in the cerebrum; clear air in the medulla. One way was to sit and float, like on a Persian magic carpet. That way one could drift slowly over the world. The other was to swoop and soar-but never with quite the amount of control one had in an airplane.
This flying was like the second way, but very precise. She flew with her arms extended-holding Gaby's hand at first, but later letting go and flying on her own-and her feet together, legs outstretched.
It gave her a giddy feeling; it was wonderful. By sweeping her arms backward, she could go faster. The palms of her hands functioned as ailerons for banking and turning. Various movements of her feet put her into a climb or a dive. She experimented with it, doing some tight turns and loops. Something was very different from "normal" dream flying, and she quickly realized it was the kinesthetic sense. Though her vision was still oddly hazy and her mind very slightly drugged, she could smell and taste the air, feel it rushing over her body, and-most important of all-she had mass and inertia. She pulled gees at the bottom of her loops, having to strain to hold her arms out rigid, feeling the flesh of her cheeks and thighs and breasts pulled down.
She glanced over at Gaby, who was flying in the same way.
"Very nice," she said.
"I thought you'd like it. But we're running out of time. Follow me."