Wizard (53 page)

Too late to turn, she found herself heading straight for the replica Notre Dame. She lifted both feet from the ground, continuing to skim along the surface until she had sunk half a meter; then she pushed off with both feet and soared into the air. She cleared the peaked roof, came slowly down, and bounced up again. Below her, the remnants of the Mad Tea Party milled like a disturbed anthill. She could see the
sloping edge of the Rhea Spoke mouth just ahead. She would not touch the ground again; her momentum would carry her over nothingness. A few people had reached the edge and stood gazing down at a leap they could never make.

Cirocco reached into her wrap and took out a small bottle of compressed air. Twisting to face the red line, she held one end of the cylinder to her stomach and turned the valve on the other end. It hissed, and a steady pressure threatened to turn her around, but she kept it in balance. Soon she could see she was building up speed.

When the bottle was empty, she threw it as hard as she could, then removed the two remaining clips for the automatic and threw them, following it with everything in her pockets. She was about to throw the gun itself but hesitated. Robin deserved to have it back, if that were possible. Instead, she slipped out of the red blanket, balled it up as tightly as she could, and threw that. Every ounce of reaction mass counted in her haste to get moving.

Damn! She should have
fired
the remaining bullets instead of throwing them away. She might have been able to save her serape. But she could not think of everything, and besides, when she turned around, she saw it did not matter as much as it might have. The entire cylindrical interior of the Rhea Spoke crackled with a million electrical snakes. She had hoped to get quickly out of range, but now she must run this gauntlet.

Below her she spied the slowly circling shapes of her angel escort, waiting where she had instructed them. As she watched, one of them was struck, and seemed to explode in a shower of feathers. She looked away for a moment, sickened. When she brought her eyes back, she saw the remaining five had not scattered as she had feared they would. At first glance it might have appeared they were fleeing, for all she could see of them was their feet and their frantically flapping wings, but she quickly realized they had spotted a problem before she had, with their incomparably better ballistic senses. A few seconds later she streaked past them and had occasion to feel relief that she had not fired the remaining bullets. Her velocity was already high enough to put her in jeopardy of outdistancing them.

She turned and fell with her back to the ground. There was no point in looking for lightning flashes as she could do nothing to avoid them. She spread her arms to kill some of her speed, and the angels chased her falling body through the flickering tunnel.

Valiha had traded in her crutches for the Titanide version of a wheelchair. It had two rubber-rimmed wheels a meter in radius, attached to a wooden framework slightly wider than her body. Stout bars were supported just ahead of and behind the lower part of her human torso, and from them was slung a canvas cup with holes for her forelegs and straps to hold the arrangement secure. Chris thought it peculiar at first but quickly forgot about it when he saw how practical it was. She would be in it for a short time yet; her legs were healed, but Titanide healers were conservative about leg injuries.

She could walk in it faster than Chris could run. Her only problem was cornering, which she had to do slowly. And like wheelchairs everywhere, it coped badly with stairs. She looked at the broad wooden staircase coming down from the green canopy at the edge of the Titantown tree, frowned with one side of her mouth, then said, “I think I can get up that.”

“And I can vividly see you tumbling down,” Chris said. “I’ll just be up for a minute to get Robin. Serpent, where’s the picnic basket?”

The child looked surprised, then abashed.

“I guess I forgot it.”

“Then run right home and pick it up, and don’t stop off anywhere.”

“All right. See you.” He was gone in a cloud of dust.

Chris started up the staircase. It had a rustic touch in keeping with the arboreal surroundings: a set
of letters made of sticks tied together with ropes, like the entry to a Boy Scout camp. The letters spelled out “Titantown Hotel.” He climbed to the fourth level and knocked on the door to room three. Robin called out that it was open, and he entered to find her stuffing clothing into a rucksack.

“I never used to accumulate stuff,” she said, wiping sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. It was another hot day in Hyperion. “There’s another thing that seems to have changed about me. Now I can’t seem to throw anything away. Why don’t you have a seat? I’ll clear a place for you… .” She began moving stacks of shirts and pants, mostly of Titanide manufacture.

“I’ll confess I’m surprised to see this,” he said, sitting. “I thought you were going to stick around at least until we found out if Cirocco made out—”

Robin tossed an ugly hunk of metal onto the bed beside him. It was her family heirloom, the Colt .45.

“That was delivered a few hours ago,” she said. “Haven’t you heard? I thought the whole town was buzzing with the news. The signs a few days ago were right: there was a great battle in heaven, and the Wizard got away. But Gaea is not satisfied, and her spies are all over. Carnival is permanently canceled; the race is doomed. Or Carnival will still happen, but it will be late. Cirocco is badly injured. She’s in a coma. Or she’s just fine and she injured Gaea. Those are the rumors I’ve heard, and I haven’t even left the hotel.”

Chris was surprised, but not that he had missed the news. He had spent the day indoors with Valiha and Serpent, then come straight to the hotel when lunch was packed. They had talked of the commotion several dekarevs earlier, when the Place of Winds cable had been seen to sway slowly and the sound of continuous thunder had been heard from Rhea.

“What do you know for sure?”

Robin reached out and patted the gun. “That’s it. This is here, so Cirocco made it to the rim. I hope she got some good use out of it. What happened to her from there I can’t even guess.”

“Maybe she doesn’t dare show up here,” Chris suggested.

“There’s a rumor to that effect. I had been hoping … oh, that she would come and give me the gun so I’d have a chance to … well, when she left, I still hadn’t thanked her properly. Now maybe I never will. For sending Trini to wait for me.”

“I doubt you’d come up with the right words. I didn’t.”

“You’re probably right.”

“And the last time I saw her she kept apologizing to me for getting me into so much trouble.”

“Me, too. I think she was expecting to die. But how could I blame her? There was no way for her to know what was … going to …” She put her hand to her stomach and looked uncertain for a moment.

“Careful,” Chris cautioned.

“I’m supposed to be able to talk about it with you, aren’t I?”

“Were you feeling sick?”

“I don’t really know. I think I was frightened that I
would
feel sick. This isn’t going to be easy to live with.”

Chris knew what she meant but was of the opinion that in a few months they would hardly notice Gaea’s parting joke.

It had solved a mystery, but the nature of the solution precluded their divulging it to anyone else. They both had thought it odd, when they had time to think about it at all, that with all the analysis done on Gaea and the experiences of pilgrims going to her for a cure, no book had made mention of the Big Drop. The reason was simple. Gaea would not let anyone talk about it. Nor could they discuss anything about their individual quests or the quests of others; indeed, they could not mention that pilgrims to Gaea would be asked to do anything at all for their cures.

Chris was sure it was the best-kept secret of the century. Like the several thousand others who shared it, he was not surprised no one had spoken. He and Robin had each felt compelled to test the security system they had been told about soon after their return to Titantown.

Neither of them would ever do it again.

Chris was not proud of that fact, but he knew it to be true. Gaea had given him a psychological block. It was flexible in some ways—he could talk freely to Robin or anyone else who already knew. But should he try to speak to others of the Big Drop, his adventures in Gaea, or anyone else’s exploits in pursuit of a miracle cure, he would experience pain so disabling he would be unable to utter even one word. It would start in his stomach and rapidly progress through all his muscles like red-hot snakes burrowing through his flesh.

There were no escape clauses, or so he had been informed. Again, he knew he would never test that either. If he tried to write of his experiences, the result would be the same. Asked questions that strayed onto forbidden ground, he could not even say yes or no; “no comment” was a permissible reply, and “mind your own business” was even better. Safest of all was to tell an interrogator nothing.

The system had a certain beauty if one was not its victim. So far as Chris could see, it was infallible. All visitors to Gaea had to ride in her capsular elevator system even to reach the inner rim from the docks on the outside, and while doing so, they were put to sleep, examined, and cleared for release. No one with any forbidden knowledge could leave Gaea without receiving the block.

Chris had found it best to observe absolute circumspection with anyone but Robin, Valiha, or other Titanides. There were other humans in Gaea who knew what he knew, but it was hard to be sure who they were. Unless he was positive, he would get a warning twinge like a toothache by opening his mouth to talk about the trip. It was all he needed. One dose of Gaea’s aversive conditioning had been enough.

Robin had filled one bag and was starting on another. Chris saw her pick up a small thermometer, consider it, and toss it in the sack. He could imagine her problem. A lot of the equipment she had taken on the trip had acquired a sentimental value. On top of that, since their return it seemed that every Titanide in town wanted to stop by and make them a gift of some lovely trinket. They had run out of shelf space in Valiha’s home to display all his booty.

“I still don’t understand all this,” Robin said, carefully wrapping tissue paper around an exquisitely carved set of wooden knives, forks, and spoons. “I’m not complaining—except that I don’t know how
I’m going to pack it all—but why do we rate this stuff? We didn’t do anything for them.”

“Valiha explained it, in a way,” Chris said. “We’re sort of famous. Not like Cirocco, but moderately. We were pilgrims, and we came back cured, so Gaea judged us heroes. That means we’re worthy of gifts. Also, Titanides will protest all day long that they’re not superstitious, but to have survived what we did, they figure we’re pretty lucky. They hope some of it will rub off if they’re nice to us, come next Carnival time.” He looked down at his hands. “With me there’s another reason. Call it the welcome wagon or a bridal shower. I’m going to be part of the community. They want to make me feel at home.”

Robin looked at him, opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again. She resumed her packing.

“You think I’m making a mistake,” Chris said.

“I didn’t say that. I never would, I guess, even if I did think that, but I don’t. I know what Valiha means to you. At least I think I do, though I’ve never felt that way about anyone, myself.”

“I think
you’re
making a mistake,” Chris said.

Robin threw up her hands, turned, and shouted at him. “Listen to you. Suddenly
I’m
the diplomatic one and
you
just say any old thing that comes into your head.
Damn you!
I was trying to be nice, but I could have said that I
know
you’re not sure of what you’re doing. Not completely sure. You’re going to fear Gaea for the rest of your life, for one thing, and for another, you don’t know yet just how it will make you feel when Valiha brings home her other lovers. You
think
you can live with that, but you’re not sure.”

“Can I apologize?”

“Just a minute, I’m not through shouting yet.” But then she shrugged, sat on the bed beside him, and went on in a quieter voice.

“I don’t know if I’m making a mistake, either. Trini …” She shook her head furiously. “I’ve had my eyes opened to a lot of things in here, not all of them bad. I’m scared that the ways I’ve been
changed will make it very hard for me back home. And speaking of home, some days I can hardly remember what it looks like. I feel I’ve been here a million years. I’ve learned that some things my sisters believe are just fairy tales, and I don’t think I’ll be able to tell them that.”

“Which things?”

She looked sideways at him, and one corner of her mouth curled.

“You want the final report of the woman from Mars, huh? Okay. What I know for sure is that the human penis is not as long as my arm, no matter what men might wish. My mother was dead wrong about that. She was off base to say that all men want to rape all women all the time. And to say that all men are evil.

“But I’ve been doing a lot of talking to Trini these days. It’s the first chance I’ve had to spend some time with a woman who knows Earth society. I find there were some exaggerations. The system of repression and exploitation is not as bad or as open as I was led to believe, but it’s there, still, even after the century my sisters have held themselves away from it. I asked myself if I would advise making any changes in the Coven, and my answer is no. If I had found a completely equal society, my answer might have been different, but I’m not sure even then. What purpose would it serve? We’re doing fine. There is nothing abnormal about us. Very, very few of my sisters could ever trust a man at all, much less love one, so what would we do back on Earth?”

“I can’t imagine,” Chris said. He thought it sounded too disapproving, so he added, “I don’t have any quarrel with the Coven. I didn’t mean for you to defend your way of life to me. It needs no defense.”