The invitation had been made by the lowest-status individual of the nest, a male who was old, scrawny, and probably near death.
"Couldn't possibly," Cirocco said, lightly, to another individual.
"Stuffed, we're absolutely stuffed," Gaby agreed.
"Flight would be impossible with another gram," Cirocco pointed out.
"Fat is perilous."
"Abstinence is a virtue."
They never looked at the one who had asked, thus spreading the load of embarrassment as equally as possible, which was the polite thing to do. The Supras clucked approvingly, and praised the prosperity of their guests.
Suddenly Cirocco remembered encountering that lone Supra in the air over Iapetus, while the deathangel was flying away with Adam.
"So, why have we come here to this nest?" Cirocco asked, addressing the group of angels, not Gaby, and inverting her question in a way calculated to cause the least confusion to the Supras.
"Yes, a most interesting thing," one said.
"Why have they come, why have they come?"
"One is of air, one is of dream."
"Dreams in the nest, how very strange."
"The one who burns. Why did they come?"
Gaby cleared her throat, and all looked at her.
"We have come for the same reason we came in the past," she said.
"To prosecute the case against Gaea, and to further the preparations for war against her and all her estates and nests."
"Exactly!" Cirocco, who couldn't have been more confused, chimed in. "That is precisely our intention. To ... engage in most brilliant strategems and tacticalities."
"Most precise!" one angel said, enthusiastically.
"Oh, rue the day!"
"The nest of Gaea will be laid low."
"Mumble," said one angel, which is what they said when they had nothing to say but didn't want to be left out of the conversation.
"Mumble," another agreed.
It was easy to see the Dione Supras as amiable nitwits, idiot savants with large and fractured vocabularies. They were nothing of the kind. The English language was a delight to them, so illogical and fertile and well-suited to their natural desire to confuse, obfuscate, and generally side-step clear meaning whenever possible.
"Quite violent," Gaby suggested.
"Oh, so very violent. Much torment."
"And cautious, extremely cautious."
"The tactics," one said. "Such a lexicon of tactics." The way he said it, Cirocco knew it was a question that might translate as How do we fight her?
Gaby made that same tricky pass with her hands. Nothing up her sleeve, Cirocco decided. For a moment she knew how others must feel when she worked her own meager magics.
She produced a red stick that was unmistakably dynamite-that was, in fact, labeled DYNAMITE: PRODUCT OF BELLINZONA. The angels fell silent when they looked at it. Cirocco took it and turned it around in her hands. The angels sighed in unison.
"Where did you get this?" Cirocco asked, momentarily forgetting the others. "There's nothing like this in Bellinzona."
"That's because you won't make it for another kilorev," Gaby said.
"Ephemera!" a Supra crowed. "It's ephemera!"
"An insubstantial nullity," another opined.
"Not made yet? How farcical! We are keenly misinformed."
"It doesn't exist," one summarized. "Like this Cirocco one."
"Don't quibble," came an adjuration.
"Did you forget it's a dream?" one reminded Cirocco.
"Dynamite! Dynamite! Dynamite!"
"There will be dynamite," Gaby agreed. "When it comes time to fight Gaea, there will have been dynamite for some time."
"Will have been! A truly stratospheric verb."
"Most sincerely."
"An ... illusion?" a younger Supra said, with wrinkled brow, still staring at the dynamite in Gaby's hand.
"A will-o-the-wisp," one explained.
"A figurehead! A moonshine of farragos, a pre-pentimentoized, infra-extinct, fleeting mockery! A vacuity!" shouted another, effectively shutting off debate.
They stared at it again, in a feather-rustling quiet. Gaby made it vanish back to where it had come from-the future, Cirocco presumed.
"Ah," one of them sighed, at last.
"Indeed," affirmed another. "My goodness, the things we will do with such a lump of power!" he asked.
"Yes, you will," Gaby agreed. "And right now, you're going to tell us all about it."
Which Gaby did, at great length.
When she was through, there was the customary offer of sex. Both Cirocco and Gaby accepted, which was the polite thing to do.
They went through the courting ritual, which had always reminded Cirocco of a square dance, while the others sang and clapped in rhythm. Cirocco's partner was a sterling speciman of the species. His bright red wings enfolded her warmly as the act was "consummated."
And that was another thing she found attractive about the Supras. They didn't have an ounce of xenophobia. A tribal people, their culture was laced with ritual, custom, and tradition-but they had flexibility. With visiting Supras the offer of sex would have been in complete earnest, and the act would not have been simulated. They had formalized this ritual solely for the purpose of dealing with human visitors. Real sex with the Supra would have been grotesque for both of them. As it was, the male simply gave her the lightest possible touch with his tiny penis, never seen, and everybody was happy. It made Cirocco feel good. In a way, it made her feel loved.
She had almost forgotten it was a dream until they landed lightly on the black sandy beach and she saw her sleeping body. Nearby was Hornpipe, resting on folded legs, making a carving during his own dream-time. He looked up and nodded at them both.
Cirocco kissed Gaby good-by and watched her fly away. Then she yawned, stretched, and looked down at herself. Time to wake up, she thought, wryly.
Once more she was impressed with how easily the fantastic could become commonplace. She knelt beside her sleeping body, remembering how it had been the last time, and rolled over onto it.
She gasped when she hit warm, muscular flesh instead of the sand she had expected. For a moment she lay sprawled across the sleeping body, then she leaped into the air as if she had landed on an ant-hill. She stood, horrified, as the other Cirocco stirred, raised a hand to her face ... then turned slightly on her side and went back to sleep.
She turned her head and saw Hornpipe looking at her. What is he seeing? She wondered if she would ever ask him that.
"I'm not ready for this," she said aloud. But she sighed, knelt on the sand, and hesitantly touched the body. Again, it was other. It was a big, strong-looking, brown-skinned, and not very pretty woman.
She took the other Cirocco's hand. The other stirred slightly, muttering something. Then she opened her eyes and sat up quickly.
There was a moment of vertigo, and then there was just Cirocco. She looked around quickly, saw no one else.
"Just you and me, kid," she said to herself, and went to join Hornpipe.
TWENTY-FIVE
Historians, when Bellinzona eventually produced some, were never quite sure when the change happened. The city had been born in chaos, had grown in confusion, been conquered in disarray. There was a brief time when there were almost as many inmates in the work camps as free citizens walking the streets.
Conal, with his informal polls of the citizens, detected no dramatic jump in morale, or in the approval rating of Cirocco Jones, not even after the aerial attack. He suspected it was the result of a combination of things.
But for whatever reason, at some point between the sixth and the ninth kilorev after Cirocco's invasion, Bellinzona stopped being a brawling collection of fractious individuals and became a community-within the human-defined limits of that term. It was nothing so dramatic as all men suddenly deciding they were brothers. Deep and persistent differences still existed, nowhere more strongly than in the Council. But at the end of the ninth kilorev Bellinzona was a city with an identity, and a purpose.