At last Gaea spoke again.
"It was a good tale," she said. "Better than I have heard in many an age. You are truly heroic. I will speak with you both in my chambers."
With that, she vanished. There was only a flame which flickered for a few minutes, then died away.
They looked around them. They were in a large domed room. Behind them the stairs, unlighted now, reached down to the dark hub interior. Corroded nozzles lined the staircase, smoking fitfully, giving off the sharp pings of cooling metal. The smell of burnt rubber hung in the air.
The marble floor was cracked and discolored, covered with a film of dust that clearly showed their footprints. The place looked like a seedy opera house when the house lights come up and banish illusion.
"I've seen some screwy things since we got here," Gaby said, "but this takes it. Where do we go now? "
Cirocco pointed silently to a small door set into the wan on their left. It was ajar, and light was shining through the crack.
Cirocco pushed it open, looked around with a growing sense of recognition, then stepped in.
They entered a large room with a four-meter ceiling. The floor was composed of milky glass rectangles. Light shone through from below. The walls were paneled in beige painted wood and hung with gilt-framed oil paintings. The furnishings were Louis XVI.
"Deja vu, eh?" said a voice from the far end of the room. It was a short, dumpy woman in a shapeless sack dress. She looked like Gaea in the same way a carved bar of soap might resemble Michelangelo's "Pieta."
"Sit down, sit down," she said, jovially. "We don't stand on ceremony in here. You've seen the razzle-dazzle here's the bitter reality.
"Can I get you something to drink?"
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Cirocco had given up on having opinions. "You know what?" she asked, feeling more than a little giddy. "If somebody said right now that Ringmaster had never left Earth orbit, that this whole thing had been staged in a Hollywood backlot, I don't think I'd bat an eye."
"A perfectly natural reaction," Gaea soothed. She was waddling around the room, getting a glass of wine for Gaby and a double shot of Scotch on the rocks for Cirocco, straightening paintings, brushing dust from tables with the ragged hem of her skirt.
Gaea was short and squat, built like a barrel. Her skin was weathered and brown. She had a nose like a potato. But there were laugh lines at the corners of her eyes and her sensuous mouth.
Cirocco tried to place the face, giving her mind something to do while she studiously avoided making theories. W.C. Fields? No, only the nose qualified for the role. Then she had it. Gaea looked a lot like Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII.
Gaby and Cirocco sat on opposite ends of a slightly frayed couch. Gaea put a glass on the end table beside, each of them, then huffed across the room to hoist heir bulk into a high-backed chair. She wheezed, and laced her fingers in her lap.
"Ask me anything," she said, and leaned forward expectantly. Cirocco and Gaby looked at each other, then back at Gaea. There was a short silence.
"You speak English," Cirocco said.
"That's not a question."
"How do you speak English? Where did you learn it?"
"I watch television."
Cirocco knew what she wanted to ask next, but didn't know if she should. Suppose this creature was the last remnant of the builders of Gaea? She had seen no proof that Gaea was actually one organism, as April had said it was, but it was possible this person thought she was a Goddess.
"What about all that ... that show outsider" Gaby asked.
Gaea dismissed it with a wave.
"All done with mirrors, dear. Mere sleight-of-hand." She glanced at her lap, then looked sheepish. "I wanted to scare you off if you weren't real hero material. I gave it my best shot. I thought at this stage it would be easier for us to relate in here. Comfortable surroundings, food and drink-would you like something to cat? Coffee? Cocaine?
"No, I'd ... did you say ... "
"Did you say coffee? "
"... cocaine?"
Cirocco's nose was tingling but she felt more alert and less afraid than she had since they entered the hub. She settled back on the couch and looked into the eyes of the creature who called herself Gaea.
"Mirrors, you said. What are you, then?" Gaea's smile broadened.
"To the heart of the matter, eh? Good. I like directness." She pursed her lips and seemed to consider the question.
"Do you mean what is this, or what am I." She put her hands just above her enormous breasts, then didn't wait for in answer. "I am three kinds of life. There is my body itself, which is the environment you have been moving through. There are my creatures, such as Titanides, who belong to me but are not controlled by me. And there are my tools, separated from me, but part of me. I have certain powers of the mind-which were helpful in the illusions you just saw, incidentally. Call it hypnotism and telepathy, though it is neither. "
"I am able to construct creatures that are extensions of my will. This one is eighty years old, the only one of her kind. I also have other sorts. They built this room and the stairway outside, mostly from plans I stole from movies. I'm a big fan of movies, and I understand you---"
"Yes, but getting-"
"I know, I know," Gaea soothed. "I wander. This is a damn nuisance, you see. I have to talk to you this way. When I said 'I hear you' earlier ... well, I was using the upper Oceanus valve as a larynx, forcing air from the spoke. It plays hell with the weather. those three words sent snow all over Hyperion.
"But letting you see this body makes you want to believe something else. Namely, that I'm a dizzy old woman, all alone up here."
She looked narrowly at Cirocco.
"You still suspect that, don't you?"
"I ... I don't know what to think. Even if I believe you, I still don't know what you are."
"I am a Titan. You want to know what a Titan is." She leaned back in her chair and her gaze became distant.
"What I really am is lost in the past. "We are old, that much is clear. We were constructed, not evolved. We live for 3,000,000 years, and have been around for over a thousand of our generations. In that time we have changed, though not through evolutionary processes as you understand them.
"Much of our history is lost now. We do not know what race built us, nor for what purpose. Suffice it to say that our creators built well. They are gone, but we are still here. Perhaps their descendants still live within me, but if so, they have forgotten their former greatness. I listen to messages from my sisters spread through this galaxy, and no one speaks of the builders."
She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again, waiting.
"All right," Cirocco said. "You left out a lot of details. How did you get here ? Why is there only one of you? You listen to the radio; do you talk over it, too? And if so, why haven't you contacted the Earth before this?
Gaea held up a hand and chuckled. "One at a time, please. You're making a lot of assumptions. "What makes you think I'm a visitor? I was born in this system, just like you. My home is Rhea. On Iapetus my daughter is at this moment approaching maturity. There is a family of Titans circling Uranus. They make up the invisible rings. They're all smaller than I; I'm the largest Titan is this neighborhood."
"Iapetus?" Gaby said. "One of the reasons we--"
"Rest easy; I shall explain, and save you a trip. We cannot travel between the stars. We can't move at all except for minor orbital adjustment. I release eggs from my rim, where they already have a respectable velocity because of my rotation. I aim them as best I can but over these distances hitting the target is problematic, since the eggs have no guidance once launched. "
"When they fall on a suitable world-Iapetus is perfect: no air, rocky, plenty of sunlight, not too large and not too small-they take root. In 50,000 years the infant Titan is ready to be born. At that stage, she has covered an entire hemisphere of the birthing body. That's how Iapetus locked seventy-five years ago; one side was significantly brighter than the other.
"The Titan infant then contracts until she is a thick band that circles the world from pole to pole. That is what Iapetus has become. My daughter has delved deep. She has reached to the core to find the elements she needs for viability. I'm afraid that Iapetus had been quite looted by now; my grandmother, and her mother before her, all used that one moon.