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was still a chance she could wipe out the budding independence he concea led
so carefully. Its grievances festered.
Why must he be in the dark? He, the mightiest of oceans, eternally covered
with ice. The life that struggled on the bleak ground above him was stunted
. Many of his children would die in the full light of day. What was so good
about Hyperion that he should be so lush and fair?
Quietly, a few meters a day, he extended a nerve beneath the ground until he
could speak directly to Rhea. He recognized the seeds of insanity in her, and
began casting his eyes to the west for an ally.
Mnemosyne was no good. She was desolate, physically and emotionally, mour ning
the passing of her lush forests. Try as he might to kindle resentmen t against
Gaea, Oceanus could not penetrate the depths of Mnemosyne's dep ression. He
tunneled on.
Beyond Mnemosyne was the night region of Cronus. Gaea's grip was strong her e
the satellite brain that held sway over the territory was a tool of the o
vermind, and had not as yet developed a personality of his own.
Oceanus kept moving west. Without realizing it, he was laying a communicati
ons net that would unite the six rebellious lands.
He found his strongest ally in Iapetus. If only he had been closer, they mig
ht have overthrown Gaea. But the tactics they imagined depended on close phy
sical cooperation, so he and Iapetus could only plot together. He was forced
to fall back on his alliance with Rhea.
He made his move around the time the pyramids were being built on Earth. W
ithout warning, he stopped the flow of cool fluids passing through his imm
ense body and through the support cables he controlled. At the far eastern end
of the sea that dominated his frozen landscape, he had control of two river
pumps.-huge three-chambered muscles that lifted the waters of Ophio n into
western Hyperion. He stopped their massive beating. To the east, Rh ea did the
same with the five pumps that raised water over her eastern mou ntain ranges,
while speeding the operation of her pumps near Hyperion. Shu t off from west
and sucked dry from the cast, Hyperion began to wither.
In a few days, Ophion ceased to flow.
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"I got all this second-hand from Rhea," Gaea said. "I had known I was losin
g control of my peripheral brains, but no one had mentioned any grievances.
I had not imagined they could exist."
It had grown gradually darker as Gaea told of the rebellion of Oceanus. Mos t
of the luminescent floor panels had gone out. Those remaining gave off a
flickering orange glow. The walls of the room receded in the gloom.
"I knew I had to do something. He was about to destroy whole ecosystems; it
might he a thousand years before I could put them together again."
"What did you do?" Gaby whispered. Cirocco jumped; Gaea's quiet voice ha d
nearly mesmerized her.
She held out her hand, slowly made a fist that looked like a lump of stone.
"I squeezed. "
The vast, circular muscle had been dormant for 3,000,000 years. It had only
one function: to contract the hub and draw out the spokes behind it, just af
ter the Titan was born. Gaea's network of cables depended on it. It was the
center of her ring the mighty anchor that held her together.
It jerked.
Gigatonnes of ice and rock leaped into the air. Ten thousand square kilomete
rs of Oceanus surface rose like an express elevator. The frozen sea turned t o
slush, embedded with ice cubes the size of city blocks. All over Gaea, cab le
strands snapped like rotten rope, raveling, snarling, flailing the land b
eneath them.
The muscle relaxed.
For one giddy moment weightlessness reigned in Oceanus. Kilometer-square i ce
floes drifted like snowflakes, turning in the hurricane that had begun to blow
from the hub.
When Oceanus bottomed out, fifteen cables twanged the deadly music of Gaea
's revenge. The sonic energy alone stripped ten meters of topsoil from the
surrounding regions and hurled opposing dust storms a dozen times around the
rim before their fury abated.
Like a hand squeezing a ball, the muscle in the hub contracted and relaxed in
a two-day rhythm that made Gaea vibrate like a plucked rubber band.
She had one more trick, but she waited until the cataclysm had flayed Ocean us
to the bare rock- She had only six other muscles. Now she flexed one of them.
The spoke that towered over Occanus contracted, squeezed to half its normal
diameter. Deprived of water for over a week, the trees were tinder-dry. They
fractured, sloughing off their tenuous grip in Gaea's flesh, and began to f
all.
On the way down, they began to burn
Oceanus was an inferno.
"I meant to burn the bastard," Gaea said. 'I meant to cauterize him for all
tim e."
Cirocco coughed, and reached for her forgotten drink. The ice cubes clicked
alarmingly in the silence and near-darkness.
"He was too deep, but I put the fear of God into him." She chuckled quietl y.
"I burned myself in the process--the fire damaged my lower valve, and f rom
then on I've blasted him with hurricanes and noise every seventeen day s. The
sound is not my Lament; it's my warning. But it was worth it. He wa s a very
good boy for thousands of years. Make no mistake, you can't have a dozen Gods
running a world. The Greeks knew what they were talking about
.
"But the catch, you see, is that his fate is linked with mine. He's another
par t of my mind, so in your terms, I'm insane. It will destroy us all,
eventually, the good with the bad.
"But he was on his best behavior until you came along. "I had planned to con
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tact you a few days before you arrived here. It was my intention to pick you
up with Hyperion's external grapples. I assure you I could have done it del
icately, not breaking any glassware.
"Oceanus exploited my weakness. My radio transmission organs are on the r im.
There were three of them, but one broke down ages ago. The others are in
Oceanus and Crius. Crius is my ally, but Rhea and Tethys managed to d estroy
his transmitter. Suddenly all my communications were in the hands of Oceanus. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]