The Council of Popes convened in St. Peter's. Not the old one, which had been torn down to make way for an apartment block, but the new one, in Sicily, which was glass and plastic. For five days they conferred until the Spokespope emerged to announce the Papal Bull as a Gabriel warhead fell toward Bangkok.

What Pope Elaine did not announce was another sense-of-the-meeting resolution that had been summed up by vice-Pope Watanabe.

"If we're going to hit the B.E.," Watanabe had said, "why not 'accidentally' send one to those fuckers in the B.C.R.?"

So shortly after Bangkok was flattened by a one-megaton airburst, a second Gabriel fell on the outskirts of Potchefstroom, Boer Communist Republic. That it had been targetted for Johannesburg hardly seemed to matter.

So WWV, as it soon came to be abbreviated, lurched along in a back-and-forth exchange with everyone waiting for one nation or another to launch that all-out strike which, at county fairs, carnivals, and fireworks displays, is known as the blow-off. It would come as a solid wave of missiles aimed at hardened military sites, population centers, and natural resources, and would be accompanied by plagues and deadly chemicals. At the time the war started, there were fifty-eight nations, religions, political parties, or other affinity groups capable of unleashing such an attack.

Instead, the bombs kept dropping at the rate of about one every week. At first it looked like a free-for-all. But in three months alliances stabilized along surprisingly classical lines. The newsnets began calling one side the Capitalist Pigs and the other the Commie Rats. The Normans and the Burmese, oddly enough, ended up on the same side, while the Vatican was on the other. There were more vermin-the newscasters had names for them al-who would occasionally step up and kick a giant in the shin. But by and large the war soon came to resemble one of those contests Russians used to be so fond of during the First Atomic War. Aslosh with vodka, they would take turns slapping each other's face until one of them fell down.

The record for such a contest was established in 1931 and never beaten, when two comrades went at each other for thirty hours.

At the rate of one five-megaton bomb per week-just about one kiloton per minute-the Earth's nuclear stockpiles were estimated to be good for eight hundred years.

Conal "The Sting" Ray was a Capitalist Pig. Like his mates, he spent little time thinking about it, but when he did, he thought of himself as Canadian Bacon.

As a citizen of the Dominion of Canada, the oldest nation on Earth, Conal was in no danger of being drafted, and in less danger than most of being vaporized. For one thing, no nation was seriously engaged in raising armies. War was no longer labor-intensive. And only one bomb had been dropped on the Dominion. It had hit Edmonton, and the main reason Conal noticed it was because the Oilers no longer showed up for their Canadian Hockey League dates.

That Canada had once been a much larger nation was a fact no one had ever imparted to Conal-or if someone had, he had not been interested enough to remember it. Canada had survived by surrendering. Quebec had been the first to go, followed by British Columbia. B.C. was part of the Norman Lands, Ontario was an independent nation, the Maritimes had been swallowed up by the E.C.C. to the south, and most of southern Manitoba and Saskatchewan were owned by General Protein, the Corporation State. Canada huddled between the western shores of Hudson Bay and the foothills of the Rockies. Yellowknife was its capital city. Conal lived in a suburb of Fort Reliance, a town called Artillery Lake. Fort Reliance had a population of five million.

Conal had grown up with two passions: hockey, and listening to comic books. He was terrible at hockey, being simply too fat and too slow. He was usually the last to be chosen in pick-up games. When he played, he was always installed at the goal, on the theory that though he wasn't quick, it would be hard to shoot around him.

On his fourteenth birthday a bully kicked snow in his face and Conal found a new passion: bodybuilding. To his surprise and everyone else's, he was damn good at it. By the time he was sixteen he could have been Mr. Canada. In true Charles Atlas fashion, he sought out the bully and forced him through a hole in the ice covering Artillery Lake, after which the bully was never seen again.

The name Conal meant "high and mighty" in Celtic. Conal began to feel his mother had named him well, though he was only five foot eight. And there was something in Mrs. Ray's heritage that, when he learned of it, provided Conal with his fourth great passion in life.

So it was that on his eighteenth birthday, Day 294 of the War, Conal took the morning sleigh to the spaceport at Cape Churchill, where he boarded a ship bound for Gaea.

Aside from a trip to Winnipeg, Conal had never in his life been outside Canada. This trip was considerably longer: Gaea was almost a billion miles from Artillery Lake. The fare was expensive, but George Ray, Conal's father, no longer dared thwart his son's desires. The boy had done nothing but eat, play hockey, and lift weights for three years; it would be nice to have him out from underfoot. A billion miles sounded about right.

Saturn impressed the hell out of Conal. The rings looked solid enough to skate on. He watched the ship dock with the huge black mass of Gaea, then dug out his oldest comic book, "The Golden Blades." It was the story of a young boy who received a pair of magic skates from an evil sorcerer and how he learned to use them. In the end the boy-who was also named Conal-mastered the skates and cleaved the wizard's head with a mighty kick. Conal fingered the soundlines bordering the final panel, heard the familiar meaty thunk as the skate opened the wizard's skull, watched the blood gush and the foul brains glisten on the page.

Conal doubted he could kill the Wizard with his skates, though he had brought them. In his mind, he saw himself wringing the life from her with his bare hands. In a more practical vein, he had also brought a pistol.

His quarry was Cirocco Jones, formerly Captain of the Deep Space Vessel Ringmaster, erstwhile Wing Commander of the Angels, sub rasa Hindmother of the Titanides, the one-time Great and Powerful but long-deposed Wizard of Gaea, now called Demon. He planned to stuff her through a hole in the ice.

It took Conal a month to find Cirocco Jones. In part it was because the Demon was not eager to be found, though she was not running from anything in particular at the moment. The other reason it took so long was that Conal, like so many before him, had underestimated Gaea. He had known the World/God was large, but he had not translated the numbers into a picture of just how much territory he had to deal with.

He knew that Jones was usually found in the company of Titanides, and that Titanides usually stayed in the region known as Hyperion, so he concentrated his search there. His month of searching gave him time to become accustomed to the one-quarter gravity inside Gaea, and the dizzying vistas Gaea's mammoth ulterior presented. He learned that no Titanide would tell a human anything about the "Captain," as they now called Jones.

Titanides were a lot bigger than he had expected. The centaur-like creatures had played prominent roles in many of his comics, but the artists had used considerable license in portraying them. He had expected to see eye to eye with them, whereas the truth was they averaged three meters. In comics, Titanides were male and female, though one never saw any sexual organs. In reality, Titanides all looked female and their sexuality was impossible to comprehend. They had either male or female organs-completely human in appearance-between their front legs, and male and female organs behind. The anterior male organ was usually sheathed; the first time Conal saw one he had a feeling of inadequacy he had not experienced since his first week with the barbells.