Wizard (51 page)

“Just a minute,” Chris said. “If you—”

“Don’t interrupt me,” Gaea said, wagging a finger. “Your turn will come … you should, as I was saying, bear in mind the old warning about accepting rides from strangers. Especially in here.”

“I remember a very long ride,” Robin said, suddenly angry. “It was a long way down. Now I find the ride back up was a trick, too.”

“I don’t apologize for it. I don’t need to, and I don’t want to. Everyone takes that long ride down. It usually impresses them with their own mortality; Chris, I believe you are the only person so far who has not remembered that Big Drop to his dying day.”

“I want to say something that—”

“Not yet. Robin, you were about to speak.”

She looked hard at Gaea.

“All right. How do I know I’m cured? You can’t expect me to trust you after what you did the last time I was here.”

Gaea laughed. “No, I suppose not. There is no consumer protection in here. And I admit a fondness for tricks. But my reputation in this is flawless. I swear to you now that—barring future injuries to your head, which has been known to prompt epileptic seizures—you have thrown your last fit. Chris, it is now your turn. What do you think of—”

“I want to say something. I don’t know if you’ve cured me or not, but if you did, you shouldn’t have. You had no right.”

This time both of Gaea’s eyebrows lifted.

“You don’t say. I was just going to ask if you thought you deserved a cure, but you’ve grown so cocky that the answer must surely be yes.”

“My answer is no answer. But I do have an opinion. You sent me out to be a hero, and I returned alive. That alone should count for something. But I don’t believe in heroes anymore. I just believe in people coping with their lives as best they can. You do what you have to do, and in some ways you have no more choice about it than a rock has about falling from a high place. I spent the first part of my trip
examining everything I did, from shooting the rapids to brushing my teeth, wondering if it was a heroic thing to do. Then I did a few things I was pretty sure passed the test, and I realized the test was a fake. You take your standards from comic books and then watch people dance. I despise you.”

“Do you? You presume too much. Since you won’t answer my question, I will tell you that you, too, are cured. Now, how do you know if I based my decision on your exploit in saving Gaby’s life in Phoebe or your decision to endure boredom to stay at Valiha’s side?”

“You—” Robin could see the anger boiling in Chris and see it contained. She was sure he had checked himself because of the same realization that had suddenly frightened her at the mention of Gaby’s name: how much did Gaea know?

“I don’t want to be cured,” Chris was saying. “I’m not going back to Earth, and my problems don’t matter so much here. And I don’t want to accept a cure from you.”

“Because you despise me,” Gaea said, looking away with a bored expression. “You said that. Granted, you can’t hurt the Titanides, but what about the humans who live here? Who will look out for them?”

“I’m not going to be around them. Besides, I’ve improved on my own. Since I got back to Titantown, my episodes have been more uniform and not nearly so violent. Listen, I … I’ll admit it. I’m not too proud to accept something from you. I shouldn’t have said I was. I had it in my mind that if you did offer to cure me, I would propose that you do something else instead. I mean, you said I had earned the cure, whether I think I did or not. I thought you might consider the idea that you owed me something.”

Gaea was smiling now, and Robin’s face burned with sympathy for what she knew must be humiliating for Chris.

“We had a verbal contract,” Gaea said. “Quite specific. I admit I had all the better of it, I dictated all the terms, and they were non-negotiable, but I do run this place, don’t forget. But I’m dying to hear what you thought I might agree to.” She adopted an exaggerated listening posture and blinked several
times at him.

“You did it for Cirocco and for Gaby,” he said quietly, not looking at her. “If you’re waiting for me to beg, I’m not going to.”

“Not at all,” Gaea said. “I knew you wouldn’t—I have some idea what this is costing you after all the high-flown prose—and I’d have been appalled if you did. I’ve never been
that
far wrong about even a human. I’m merely waiting for you to spell it out. Be specific. What do you want?”

“The ability to sing.”

Gaea’s laugh rang in the empty darkness of the hub. It went on and on. Soon all the regulars at her heavenly film festival were laughing, too, on the well-known principle that what’s funny to the boss is
funny
. Robin watched Chris, thinking he would surely attack the obscene little potato-faced pustule, but he somehow managed to hold it in. Gradually the laughter died away, Gaea’s first, then everyone else’s.

She cocked her head and appeared to be thinking about it.

“No. No to both requests. I will not uncure you, and I will not teach you to sing. You should have read the fine print and known your own desires before you came here. I am enforcing the letter of the contract. This may seem harsh, but you will find that things are not so bad as you think. When I cured you, there was some blending of your various personalities. You’ll find yourself a little more in touch with the violent tendencies that so turned on your Titanide bitch. That, combined with a little more skilled use of your penis, ought to keep the animal quite tame and loyal for at least—”

Chris was on her by then. Robin moved in to help but had to deal with the swarms of Gaea’s guests, who—while not the strongest collection of backbones Robin had ever seen—were unanimously eager to shine in Gaea’s eyes if all it cost them was a broken nose. Robin handed out several. Not many of them would be getting up soon, but before long they overwhelmed her and pinned her to the ground. She saw that Chris was down, too, and Gaea was being shown back to her chair.

“Let them up,” she said, sitting. There was blood dripping from her mouth, and she grinned in spite of it. Perhaps because of it; Robin could not know. Robin got up and stood beside Chris. She had cut her
hand and raised it to her mouth to suck on it.

“See what I mean?” Gaea said, as if nothing had happened. “The man who came here so long ago would not have done that. And I like it, though you really went too far, you know. But I will make a deal with you. I don’t think you will stay with me very long. I know more of these matters than you do, I know something of Titanide love and how it differs from the human variety. Your friend will soon begin to open her fine legs for others—please, there’s no need to go through that again.” She waited until he seemed calmer. “Your reaction tends to prove my point. I won’t deny she loves you, but she will love others. You will not handle it well. You will leave in great bitterness.”

“Will you bet on that?”

“That’s the deal. Come back in … oh, say, five myriarevs. No, I’ll be generous. Make it four. That’s about four and a half years. If you still want to be uncured and if you still want to sing, I’ll do both things for you. Do we have a deal?”

“We do. I’ll be back.”

Robin was never sure if he said more. It had finally penetrated to her conscious mind what part of her hand she was sucking on. She looked at it, stared in growing horror, screamed, and leaped. Once again Gaea went tumbling from her chair, and Robin’s memory of what happened next blurred until she found herself sitting on the floor with pain in her little finger, the one that should not have been there. She was biting it, and Chris was trying to pull it from her mouth. He needn’t have bothered. She released it and looked dumbly at the tooth-marks.

“I can’t do it,” she said.

“You never could,” Gaea reminded her. “You cut it off with a knife, remember? The story about biting was public relations. You were good at that back then; to enhance your image, you could have disemboweled yourself. I’m afraid you were a pain in the ass that only a mother could love.” She was wheezing slightly. “As you are now. Really, children, this must stop. Twice in one day? Must I endure assault and battery? What God would put up with it, I ask you?”

Robin no longer cared what Gaea said. The sad fact, the one she must now face as she had faced so many others, was that Gaea was at least partly right. She was no longer Robin the Nine-fingered.

“Don’t bother to say good-bye. Just leave,” Gaea said.

Chris helped Robin up, and all the way back to the elevator which she knew might drop her through the Rhea Spoke Robin wondered if the tattoo on her belly was intact, and knew she would not look for as long as possible.

Cirocco sat on a flat rocky outcropping above the Place of Winds, the last western march of the mesalike formation that made the cable known as Cirocco’s Stairs look so much like a hand gripping the soil of East Hyperion. Below her the strand fingers splayed over the ground, knotted knuckles blasted smooth by millions of years of ceaseless wind. Between the strands, where the webs between fingers would be, elliptical chasms yawned to gulp air, feeding it to interstitial ducts in the cable, lifting it to spill in the distant hub and fall through the spokes in the grand cycle of replenishment that was the essence of Gaea’s life. The ground was barren, yet the larger life that lay beneath it and around it and in some ways penetrated it to the uttermost molecule vibrated Cirocco’s bones.

Gaea was so God-awful big, and it was so easy to despair.

It was possible that in all of Gaea’s history, there had been only one who had dared defy her. Cirocco, the great Wizard, had pretended to, had put on airs as though she really could speak to Gaea as an equal, but only she herself knew just how empty that had been. Only she could count the loathsome list of her own crimes. At first it had been necessary for Gaea to stamp the ground quite close to the Wizard to bring her properly to heel. As time went by, she did not even have to lift her foot; Cirocco would wriggle under like a worm and feel any pressure as only right and good.

That her course had been wise was now obvious. The one who had dared to stand defiant was now dead, her corpse consumed by the angry ground which was the body of Gaea. It was a powerful object
lesson. There could be no doubt that Gaby had been a fool. Her rebellion, pitifully small and tentative as it had been, was gone with her life. No sooner had she taken the first steps than all of Gaea’s might had come down on her. Gaea had killed Gaby with about as much concern as a sleeping elephant rolling over on a flea.

Cirocco had not moved for many hours, but at the shout from behind her she turned her head, then stood. The angel was a winged speck but quickly grew larger. His multicolored wings twisted skillfully in the tricky winds, brought him to ground two meters from Cirocco. Not far behind him were five more angels.

“They’re back in Titantown,” the angel said. Cirocco’s shoulders relaxed slightly. They had insisted on going. Apparently they were too small for Gaea’s wrath. The angel was regarding Cirocco with narrowed eyes.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he said.

“I’m never sure of anything. Let’s get going.”

She walked with them to the lip of the precipice. Below her was the intake called the Great Howler, also known as the Forecrotch of Gaea for the way the mammoth vertical slit set between two rocky thighs resembled a vagina. It sang constantly in a mournful bass.

The angels moved up behind her. One on each side took her arms in their wiry hands. The other four were to provide relief for the dangerous flight in total darkness.

Cirocco stepped off the edge, and the wind caught her like a leaf. She entered the cable and sped toward the hub.

Cirocco called it the Mad Tea Party and knew it was not appropriate; it was just that for some time she had felt a little like Alice. The retinue of despair that surrounded Gaea might have fitted better on Beckett’s existentialist stage than in Carroll’s Wonderland. Yet she would not have been surprised had someone offered her half a cup of tea.

The crowd was exquisitely sensitive to Gaea’s mood. Cirocco had never seen them more restive than as she approached the party, or as suddenly wary as when Gaea finally spotted her.

“Well, well,” Gaea boomed. “If it isn’t Captain Jones. To what do we owe the honor of this spontaneous and unannounced visit? You there, whatever your name is, bring a large glass of something cold for the Wizard. Never mind what it is so long as it contains no water. Take the chair over there, Cirocco. Is there anything else I can get you? No? Well.” Gaea seemed at a momentary loss for something to say. She sat in her wide chair and mumbled until Cirocco’s drink arrived.

Cirocco looked at it as if she had never seen anything quite like it before.

“Perhaps you’d prefer the bottle,” Gaea suggested. Cirocco’s eyes came up to meet Gaea’s. She looked back at the drink, turned it over, and moved the glass in a slow circle until a sphere of liquid was formed, sinking slowly toward the floor. She tossed the glass into the air, and it was still rising when it left the circle of light. The sphere flattened and began soaking into the rug.

“Is this your way of telling me you’re on the wagon?” Gaea asked. “How about a Shirley Temple? I
just received the cutest mixer from an admirer on Earth. It’s ceramic, shaped just like America’s Sweetheart, and I daresay worth a lot of money. You can make martinis in it by mixing gin to the chin and vermouth to the—”

“Shut up.”

Gaea cocked her head slightly, considering it, and did as she was told. She folded her hands on her stomach and waited.

“I’m here to give you my resignation.”

“I have not asked for it.”

“Nevertheless, you have it. I no longer wish to be Wizard.”

“You no longer wish.” Gaea clucked sorrowfully. “You know it’s not that simple. However, it is coincidental. For the last few years I have been contemplating whether I should terminate your employment. The fringe benefits would have to go, too, of course, which would make it tantamount to a death sentence, so I didn’t move hastily. But the fact is, if you recall the qualities I mentioned when I first took you on, you have not been living up to the job for some time now.”