Demon (GAIA) by John Varley Page A

heaped up around it. Others had seen a ruined belfrey. Cirocco admitted the aptness of that analogy: there were even bats circling it. Or at least they looked like bats. The peak was twenty kilometers away. To be seen at that distance, the bats had to be the size of jetliners.
    Cirocco knew the place well. She had spent some time there many years ago. It was not something she liked to remember.
    The angel swept above her, circled to lose altitude, then hovered by beating his brilliant wings. He was unwilling to set foot on Phoebe. Cirocco knew that hovering was taxing for an angel, so she did not waste words.
    “Kong?” she shouted.
    “Dead. Two, three hundred revs.”
    “Gaea?”
    “Gone.”
    She thought it over for a second, then waved her thanks.
    Cirocco watched him into the distance, then sat down on the edge of the cliff. She removed her boots—lovely brown knee-length things of Titanide manufacture, supple and waterproof—folded theminto a small, flat bundle, and stowed them in her pack. Then she shouldered the pack, checking its straps and the few items attached to her belt, turned around, and began climbing down the cliff.
    ***
    An Acapulco cliff-diver would have beaten her down the side of that cliff, but nothing else human could have. With bare feet and hands, ignoring the rope coiled in her pack, she moved down the difficult, near-vertical slope faster than most people could have gone down a ladder. She did it without giving it much thought. Her hands and feet knew what to do.
    She had thought about this from time to time, when other people reminded her that something she was doing was remarkable. She knew she was no longer quite human. She also knew she was a long way from being super-human. It was all a matter of perspective. Some of it was a matter of learning from every event in one’s life, and Cirocco did that well. Most of her mistakes were decades behind her. Some of it was knowing one’s limits, high as they might be. An observer watching her progress down the cliff would have thought she was in an awful hurry, taking insane chances. Actually, she could have done it a lot faster.
    Cirocco looked to be between thirty-five and forty years old, but it depended on where you looked. The skin on her hands and neck and face looked more like thirty; the wiry arms and marathon legs seemed older, while the eyes were older still. A hard woman to judge, was Cirocco Jones. She looked very strong, but appearances are deceiving. She was
much
stronger than she looked.
    When she reached the gentle hills at the bottom of the highland cliffs she put on her boots and began to run, not because she was in a big hurry but because there was nothing else to do and it was her natural gait.
    ***
    She covered the twenty kilometers in a little over a rev. She would have done it faster, but there hadbeen three rivers to swim. It didn’t take long to scale Kong Mountain. It was just a steady upward slope until the jagged multiple peaks were reached, and she had no need to climb them. There was a broad highway leading into Kong’s den.
    She took the last part slowly. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the angel. If he said Kong was dead, then he was dead. But the smell of the place brought back unpleasant memories.
    The rock arched over her and soon she was walking in gloom. Twice she had to detour around twenty-meter lozenges sitting in the middle of the path. These were the “bats” she had seen from a distance. They were actually more of a cross between a reptile and a garden slug, massing ten or twelve tonnes. With their pterodactyl wings folded against their bodies, they might have been mistaken for collapsed circus tents. They certainly did not seem to be alive, but they were. They would sometimes hibernate for as long as a myriarev. They flew by crawling on their slug-foot to the top of one of Kong’s spires, detaching themselves, and gliding for days at a time. As far as Cirocco knew, they were harmless. She never