The ground began to tremble. She came through the woods. There was a reverent gasp from the assembled Priests as her head came into view over the treetops.

Gaea was fifteen meters tall. Or, as she preferred to have it, "fifty foot two, eyes of blue."

They were blue, too, though they couldn't be seen behind the largest pair of sunglasses ever constructed. Her hair was platinum blonde. She wore enough heavy canvas, dyed light blue, to rig a Spanish galleon. The cloth was cut and sewn by tentmakers into a knee-length dress. She wore moccasins the size of broad-beamed canoes. In face and figure, she bore an uncanny resemblance to Marilyn Monroe.

She paused when she reached the clearing and looked over all her subjects and all their works. At last she nodded: it was good. The lights on the klieg trees turned to face her and the massive lips parted in a smile, revealing even white teeth big as bathroom tiles. All around her, bolexes and arriflexes whirred admiration.

A chair had been built for her. It groaned as she settled into it. All her movements seemed slow. A blink took almost a second. The panaflexes had learned the trick of undercranking so that she seemed to move at normal speed while her minions scampered like mice.

Dressers scrambled up ladders behind her, armed with rakes for her hair, buckets of nail polish, cans of mascara. She ignored them; it was their job to anticipate her movements-something they were not always able to do. She looked at the big screen that had been erected facing her chair.

The Pandemonium Traveling Film Festival was about to begin. The klieg trees dimmed, turned off; the valley darkened. Gaea cleared her throat-a sound like a diesel engine-but when she spoke, it was pitched in the feminine range. Very loud, but feminine.