Wizard (13 page)

* * *

“Where
were
you?” Valiha hissed.

“I’m really not going to do you any good,” Chris said. He noticed that the lovely Titanide egg had been balanced on the neck of an empty tequila bottle at Valiha’s feet. He gestured to it. “I’ll have no more effect than that trash.”

“Please, Chris, humor me in this. You promised you would.” Her eyes were pleading, and he thought uncomfortably that, yes, he had promised something like that. He looked away from her eyes, looked back, and nodded.

“All you have to do is stand just on the edge of the line. You can’t come into the square during the review … shhh! Quiet, everybody, she’s coming!”

Chris turned, and there she was, moving up the line behind him. She was judging the row opposite Valiha’s, going fairly quickly, and passed just a few meters from Chris. After she had taken a few more steps, she paused, tilted her head slightly, then turned and looked at him with her brow lowered. He felt awkward but could not look away. Eventually one corner of her mouth turned up.

“So you’re back with us,” she said. “We met, briefly, about a dekarev ago. I’m Cirocco. You can call me Rocky.” She did not offer her hand but continued to look him over. He felt underdressed in the shorts he had awakened in. The Wizard glanced at Valiha, did a double take, and fixed her with the gaze that had so unsettled Chris. Then she moved into the potential Double-flatted Mixolydian Trio.

“You’re Valiha,” Cirocco said. The Titanide made an odd curtsy in reply. “I knew your hindmother well.” She was walking around Valiha, rubbing her hand along the smooth mottled flanks. She nodded to Hichriki and Cymbal, bent to squeeze Valiha’s right-hind fetlock, then resumed her smoothing motions. She came around front again, reached up and stroked Valiha’s cheek. She knelt and rubbed the Titanide’s foreleg with both hands, then turned her head and spoke to Chris.

“You’ve fallen into good company,” she said. “Valiha’s an Aeolian Solo. I believe it’s the only one I’ve ever granted for this particular Madrigal-Samba mix. In another two or three hundred kilorevs her descendants might form a chord of their own. What she’s proposing here is well thought out, though. It’s
a consolidation instead of the rather daring Locrilydian Duet she proposed last Carnival. But she’s only … oh, make it five Earth years old, and the young want to do it all themselves, don’t they, Valiha?”

A tinge of pink colored the Titanide’s yellow cheeks as the Wizard stood up. She looked away and blushed deeper when Cirocco laughed and patted her hip.

“I expected you to be singing an Aeolian Solo this time,” Cirocco teased. She glanced at Chris, who felt uncomfortable with the exchange. It all had too much of the aspect of a horse show for his taste. He expected her to peel back the Titanide’s lips and look at her teeth.

“‘Singing an Aeolian Solo’ is a Titanide euphemism for conceit,” Cirocco explained. “A Titanide female can effectively clone herself, being all four parents to her offspring by using frontal and hind self-insemination. But I don’t let ’em do it too damn often.” She put her hands on her hips, then reached up again and brushed the back of her hand down the Titanide’s chest. “Are these breasts ready for this great responsibility, my child?”

“They are, Captain.”

“You’ve chosen well in the foreparents, Valiha. Your hindmother would have been proud.” She turned and picked up the egg from its glass pedestal. It grew very quiet as the Wizard held the sphere up to the light, then brought it to her lips. She kissed it, opened her mouth, and carefully put it in. When she took it out, it was already changing color, to become as clear as glass in a few seconds. Now Valiha was the only one moving, and what she did was to set her hind legs apart, lift her tail, and lean her torso forward. Her pink hair fell over her face, and she waited. Chris had a momentary return of memory: being present while two Titanides engaged in anterior intercourse—something they did often and with great relish during Carnival. This was the female position, ready to be mounted by the Titanide taking the male role. The Wizard walked around behind Valiha, who quivered in anticipation.

Chris looked away, wincing. Her arm had gone in past the elbow. When it came out, the egg was no longer in her hand.

* * *

“Queasy?” The Wizard had a towel, which she used to dry her arm and then tossed to a waiting aide. “Ranchers do that sort of thing all the time.”

“Yes, but these are … well, they’re people. It just struck me as undignified. Maybe I shouldn’t say that.”

Cirocco shrugged. “Say what you please. This is what they know. They think our marriage customs are pretty dull, and maybe they’ve got a point.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Say, are you and Valiha shooting marbles?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” As he said it, he had the uncomfortable feeling that maybe he did know what she meant.

“Never mind. She seems to be a friend anyway.”

“She seems to be. I don’t really remember.” He looked over her shoulder, where he could just see the three Titanides cresting the lip of the crater as they raced away to consummate the ensemble.

“Must be tough. I can see why you came here. Well, you ought to be there at the celebration anyway. If she’d been less excited, she’d have given you a ride.” She sang to one of the Titanides, who held out his hand in a familiar way.

“This is Harp of the Cantata Chord. He doesn’t speak any English, but he’ll take you to the party and bring you back in a few revs. Sober, I hope. Meet me in the tent over there. We have some things to talk about.”

It was cool and dim inside the Wizard’s Carnival tent. Its top was heavy and opaque while the sides were of white silk, slitted to admit the breeze. Overhead, a cloth panel moved slowly back and forth, fanning the hanging veils and scarves festooning the ridgepole. Gaby, Robin, Psaltery, and Chris sat on huge pillows, waiting for the Wizard.

The Titanides liked to make the Wizard’s quarters sumptuous at Carnival time. Layer upon layer of hand-loomed carpets had been spread on the ground, dominated by one featuring the great six-spoked wheel. Two walls were heaped with pillows. A third showcased the Snow Throne. It was made of twenty-kilo transparent viny-leaf bags of Highland Mind Powder, the finest cocaine in the universe and Gaea’s chief export. The Titanides built the throne fresh each Carnival, stacking the crystalline containers like sandbaggers on a levee.

There were two low tables heaped with the finest Titanide cuisine, steaming hot or sitting in sweating silver bowls of shaved ice. Titanides came and went steadily, removing things that had cooled, replacing them with fresh delicacies.

“You should try some of that stuff,” Gaby suggested. She saw Chris jerk his head up and smiled. Hyperion did that to newcomers. The light never changed, and people stayed awake forty or fifty hours without knowing it. She wondered how much sleep the poor child had managed since the beginning of Carnival. She remembered her own early days in Gaea, when she and Cirocco had marched until they
literally dropped. It had been a long time ago. She remembered feeling very old. Now she wondered if she had ever been that young.

She had been, once, on the banks of the Mississippi River near New Orleans. There had been an old house with a dusty attic where she would hide every night, trying to escape the sound of her mother’s screams. There was a dormer window she could raise to let in the air. With the window open the tugboat whistles almost drowned out the sounds from below, and she could see the stars.

Later, with her mother dead and her father in prison, her aunt and uncle took her to California. In the Rockies she first saw the Milky Way. Astronomy became her obsession. She read every book she could find, hitchhiked to Mount Wilson, learned mathematics in spite of the California school system.

She did not let herself care about people. When her aunt left, she took her four children but not Gaby. Her uncle didn’t want her, so she went with the social services women without a backward glance. By the time she was fourteen she found it easy to go to bed with a boy because he had a telescope. When he sold it, she never saw him again. Sex bored her.

She grew into a quiet, beautiful young woman. The beauty was a nuisance, like smog and poverty. There were ways to deal with all three things. She discovered a certain scowl that would keep boys from bothering her. There was no smog in the mountains, so she learned to hike with a telescope on her back. Cal Tech would accept a penniless student, even a female one, if she was the very best there was. So would the Sorbonne, Mount Palomar, Zelenchukskaya, and Copernicus.

Gaby did not like traveling. Nevertheless, she went to the Moon because the seeing was good. When she saw the plans for the telescopes to be taken to Saturn, she knew she had to be the one to use them. But at Saturn was Gaea, and disaster. For six months the crew of
Ringmaster
alternated between sleep and total sensory deprivation in the black belly of Oceanus, Gaea’s upstart Godling. To Gaby, it was twenty years. She lived every second of it. It was plenty of time to examine a life and find it wanting. There was time to realize she had not a single friend, that there was no one she loved and no one to love her. And that it mattered.

That was seventy-five years ago. Since then she had not seen one star and had never felt the lack. Who needs them when you have friends?

“What was that?” Robin asked.

“Sorry. Just bouncing over the chuckholes of my mind. Us old folks do that.”

Robin gave her an exasperated look, and Gaby grinned. She liked Robin. Seldom had she met anyone with so much stubborn pride and so many sharp edges. She was more alien than a Titanide, knowing little of what everyone called “human” culture, aware of her ignorance, and mixing blind chauvinism with an eagerness to learn more about it. It was a touchy business, talking to Robin. She would make a dubious companion until one had earned her trust.

Gaby liked Chris, too, but where her urge was to protect Robin from herself, she wanted to protect Chris from the crazy outside world. It couldn’t make much sense to him, and yet he struggled gamely on, his world view quite warped from a lifetime of domination by a series of malevolent spirits who spoke with his voice, saw with his eyes, and sometimes lashed out with his hands. He could no longer afford emotional involvement, for one of his alter egos would betray it soon enough. Who would trust him after he had once revealed the large or small confidences of love?

Chris caught Gaby looking at him and smiled uncertainly. His straight brown hair tended to fall over his left eye, causing him to toss his head. He was a tall man, a meter eighty-five or ninety, of medium build, with an angular face that might have looked cruel but for the evidence of pain around his eyes. The first impression of hardness was given by his slightly flattened nose and heavy brow.

His body, too, might have looked powerful, yet he seemed so lugubrious, sitting there in his scanty shorts and pale, pale skin, that it was impossible to see him as menacing. His arms and legs were strong, and he had good shoulders, but there was too much fat around the waist. He was not too hairy, which was to Gaby’s liking.

All in all, Gaby could see why Valiha found him attractive. She wondered if Chris knew yet that she did.

* * *

Cirocco swept in, followed by her matched pair of Titanides. She glanced around, mopping her face with a wet towel, and headed for a corner of the tent.

“Where’s Valiha?” she asked. “And wasn’t there supposed to be a Titanide for Robin?” She slipped out of her serape and stepped behind a shoulder-high cloth partition. Water began to spray from a nozzle suspended above her. She turned her face into it and shook her head. “If you’ll just pardon me for a moment, folks. It’s so damn hot out there.”

“Valiha is still with her group,” Chris volunteered. “You didn’t tell me I should bring her with me.”

“You’re getting started too fast here, Rocky,” Gaby protested. “Why don’t you begin at the beginning?”

“Sorry,” she said. “You’re right. Robin, I haven’t met you yet. Chris, I met you, but you don’t recall it. The thing is, Gaea told Gaby that you two were on your way down here—”

“On our way down?”
Robin squeaked. “She
dropped
me.”

“I know, I know,” Cirocco said soothingly. “Believe me, I detest that. I’ve protested it every way I can, but it hasn’t done any good. Don’t forget, I work for her, not the other way around.” She looked at Gaby, expressionless, held her gaze for a moment, then resumed her soaping.

“Anyway, we knew you were on your way, and we knew you’d probably both make it. Oddly enough, most of the pilgrims do. About the only way to die in the Big Drop is to panic. Some people—”

“You could drown,” Robin put in, darkly.

“What can I say?” Cirocco asked. “Obviously it’s dangerous, and it’s a disgusting thing to do. Do I need to apologize any more for something I have no part of?” She looked at Robin, who said nothing but finally shook her head.

“As I was saying, some people fight the angels who are trying to help them, and the angels can do only so much. So her purpose—as she has expressed it to me, understand, don’t think I’m defending this—is
to teach you to respond safely in a crisis. If you panic, you’ll never be a hero. Or so her thinking goes.”

Chris had been looking increasingly puzzled.

“If all this is supposed to mean something to me, I’m afraid I missed the important part.”

“The Big Drop,” Gaby explained. “It’s probably just as well you don’t recall. Gaea drops pilgrims out of a false elevator after her interview. They fall all the way to the rim.”

“You still don’t remember any of it?” Cirocco asked. The flow of water stopped, and one of the Titanides handed her a towel.

“Nothing. From the time I left her until not long ago, it’s blank.”

“That would be understandable, even without your condition,” Cirocco said. “But I’ve talked to one of the angels.” She glanced at Robin. “It was old Fat Fred.”

Gaby laughed. “Is
he
still around?” She saw Robin’s glare and tried to get rid of the smile on her face, with no success.