Free Demon (GAIA) by John Varley Page B

Bellinzona, thirteen or fourteen years was enough to make you a man. It still didn’t feel right to Conal. He still looked like a boy. He was Japanese, Conal thought. That wasn’t rare, either. The human population of Gaea was roughly proportional to the population of Earth, which meant there were a lot more brown and black and yellow skins than white.
    The boy was in a lot of pain, babbling something in his native tongue, and it looked like it was going to take him a while to die. Conal held up the knife and raised his eyebrows in what he hoped was a universal questioning gesture. The boy nodded excitedly. Conal slipped the blade between the ribs and into the heart, and the boy was dead in a moment.
    He wiped the blade and put it away.
    “The big hero,” he muttered. It was a shitty world when you couldn’t kill a baby-murdering human carcinoma and feel good about it. As usual, Cirocco had the last word. There were just not a hell of a lot of things you could do in this life that didn’t taste bad in one way or another.
    ***
    There was the problem of what to do with the baby.
    He could think of several things. There were religious orders and some other organizations that took in orphans. Of these, the strongest was the Free Females—also, in his opinion, the likeliest toprovide proper care for an infant.
    The baby was bundled in some sort of spacer’s carrying pack; it was not immediately obvious how to unfasten it. But he finally managed. He looked in the pertinent place, and shook his head. Okay, so the Free Females wouldn’t want the little guy. Who was the next best?
    He had a funny thought. It was impossible, of course, but what if…?
    So he headed back toward the Portal.
    ***
    They were still there, still alive. Unless something happened soon, though, they would not be alive much longer.
    There was a crowd of about a hundred of the toughest, meanest types Bellinzona had to offer, standing in a semi-circle fifty meters away from the rock wall where the two women were cornered. The area in between was littered with bodies. Conal stopped counting after two dozen. There were many more than that. He stood at the back of the crowd, trying to figure out what had happened.
    The clue was in the bodies. Most of the ones close to the two women had died of knife wounds. The more distant ones had wounds seldom seen anymore in Gaea: round wounds about the size of a dime. His guess was confirmed when one of the people in the crowd threw a spear, and one of the women shot him in the stomach. Conal ducked. The crowd moved back, but inexorably began to close in again. The temptation was just too great.
    It was a stand-off. No one in the crowd knew how much ammunition the two had left. Had they charged as a group the mob could have overwhelmed them, but there was no organization among these jackals.
    He thought about it, and saw the irony. Obviously, the two had a limited number of bullets, or they would simply have shot everyone within range. Nobody in the crowd wanted to soak up a bullet just to enable someone else to grab the treasure. So the outcome, in minutes or hours, would be for the womento run out of bullets, in which case they could be attacked again—but then it wouldn’t be worth it.
    Conal took another look at the tall one. Seventeen, he thought. Maybe eighteen. Long blonde hair, fierce blue eyes. She was beautiful, as he had already observed. But there was something else about her, something she shared with the older woman—her mother? It was a look that said she would die on her feet, fighting, that she would never be taken alive. He respected that. He had learned what it meant to be taken alive, and it was never going to happen to him again, either.
    Another spear was thrown, and the tall one snapped off another shot. This one went through the spear-thrower and into the heart of a man standing behind him. Nice gun, Conal thought.
    Where were the Free Females? he wondered, then saw them. They were also backed