Wizard (6 page)

She bought a ticket to an all-Titanide production of
Romeo and Juliet
, then found herself giggling so much she had to leave. A more apt title might have been
The Montagues and the Capulets Join the Cavalry
. It was also apparent that the script had been tampered with. Robin doubted the bard would have minded having Titanides play the roles but thought she would have resented having Romeo turned into a man by peckish revisionists.

Drawn by the sound of music, she wandered into a medium-sized tent and gratefully sat down on
one of many long benches. In the front, a line of Titanides sang under the direction of a man in a black coat. It seemed to be yet another show, but for the lack of a ticket-taker. Whatever it was, it felt good to get off her feet.

Someone tapped her shoulder. She turned and saw another man in black. Behind him stood a Titanide wearing steel-rimmed glasses.

“Excuse me, would you please put this on?” He was offering her a white shirt. He had a friendly smile, and so did the Titanide.

“What for?” Robin asked.

“It’s customary in here,” the man said apologetically. “We believe it improper to uncover ourselves.” Robin saw the Titanide was wearing a shirt: the first time she had seen one cover his or her breasts.

She shrugged into it, willing to humor screwy beliefs if she could sit and listen to the lovely music. “What kind of place is this anyway?”

The man sat beside her and grinned wryly.

“Well you may ask,” he sighed. “Sometimes it tests the faith of the most devout. We’re here to bring the Word to the outer planets. Titanides have souls just as humans do. We’ve been here twelve years now. Services are well-attended; we’ve performed a few marriages, a few baptisms.” He grimaced and looked toward the group in front. “But I think when all is said and done, our flock comes here for the choir practices.”

“Not true, Brother Daniel,” the Titanide said, in English. “‘I-believe-in-godthefather-maker-of-heav’n’earth-and-in-jesuscrise-hisonly-sonourlord—’”

“Christians!” Robin yelped. She leaped to her feet, making the two-fingered protective sign with one hand, holding Nasu out with the other, and began to back away, her heart pounding. She did not stop running until the church was lost in the dust.

She had been in a church! It was her one big fear, the one bogey from her childhood about which
she had no doubts. Christians were the very root and branch of the peckish power structure. Once in their hands, a merry pagan would be injected with drugs and subjected to hideous physical and mental tortures. There could be no escape, no hope. Their terrible rites would soon warp one’s mind beyond all hope of redemption; then the convert would be infected with a nameless disease that rotted the womb. She would be forced to bear children in pain to the end of her days.

* * *

Gaean cuisine was interesting. Robin found a place that smelled good and ordered something called a Bigmac. It seemed to be mostly carbohydrates wrapped around grease. It was delicious. She ate every bite, feeling reckless.

While she was mopping up mustard with her fingers, she became aware that a woman at the next table was watching her. She watched back for a while, then smiled.

“I was admiring your paint job,” the woman said, getting up to slide in next to Robin. She had scented her body and wore a carefully artless collection of thin scarves that just happened to cover most of her breasts and all of her groin. Her face looked fortyish until Robin realized the lines and shadows were cosmetics intended to make her look older.

“It’s not paint,” Robin said.

“It’s …” Real wrinkles appeared on her brow. “What is it then? Some new process? I’m
fas
cinated.”

“An old process, actually. Tattooing. You use a needle to drive ink into the skin.”

“That sounds painful.”

Robin shrugged. It
was
painful, but there was no labra in talking about it. You cried and screamed when it was happening, and never mentioned it again.

“My name’s Trini, by the way. How do you take it off?”

“I’m Robin, may the holy flow unite us. You don’t take it off. Tattooing is forever. Oh, you can edit
a little, but the pattern is there to stay.”

“How … what I mean is, isn’t that rather inflexible? I like to get a three- or four-day skin job as much as the next person, but I get tired of it.”

Robin shrugged again, getting bored. She had thought this woman wanted to make love, but it appeared she didn’t.

“You don’t rush into it, of course.” She craned her neck to see the wall menu, wondering if she had room for something called sauerkraut.

“It doesn’t seem to hurt the complexion,” Trini said as she lightly ran her fingertips over the coil of snake that looped Robin’s breast. Her hand dropped and came to rest on Robin’s thigh.

Robin looked at the hand, annoyed that she could not read this peckish woman’s signals. The face was no help, either, when she looked there. Trini seemed to have made a study of being casual. Well, she thought, it never hurts to try. She had to reach up to put her arm over the bigger woman’s shoulder. She kissed her on the lips. When she pulled away, Trini was smiling.

* * *

“So what is it you do?” Robin leaned forward to take the reefer from Trini, then settled back on her elbows again. They were reclining side by side, facing each other. Trini’s disheveled mop of hair was backlighted by the open window of her room.

“I’m a prostitute.”

“What’s that?”

Trini rolled onto her side, doubled up with laughter. Robin giggled with her for a while but subsided long before Trini did.

“Where the hell have you
been
? Don’t answer that, I know, cooped up in that big tin can in the sky. You really don’t know?”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I did.” Robin was annoyed again, not liking to feel ignorant. Her gaze,
looking for a place to light, settled on Trini’s calf. She stroked it absently. Trini shaved her legs, for no reason that Robin could see, and left the hair on her arms alone. Robin shaved anywhere she had a tattoo, which was her left arm and right leg, part of her pubic area, and a wide circle around her left ear.

“I’m sorry. It’s called the oldest profession. I provide sexual pleasure for money.”

“You sell your body?”

Trini laughed. “Why do you say that? I sell a service. I’m a skilled worker with a college degree.”

Robin sat up straight. “
Now
I remember. You’re a whore.”

“Not anymore. I free-lance.”

Robin confessed she did not get it. She had heard of the concept of sex for money but was having difficulty integrating it with her still-hazy concepts of economics. There was supposed to be a slavemaster in the picture somewhere, selling the bodies of the women he owned to men less rich than he.

“I think we have a semantic problem. You say ‘whore’ and ‘prostitute’ like they’re the same thing. They used to be, I guess. You can work through an agency or out of a house, and that’s being a whore. Or you can be on your own, and that’s a courtesan. On Earth, of course. Here, there’s no laws, so it’s every woman for herself.”

Robin tried to make sense of it but had no luck. It did not fit with what she knew of peckish society that Trini should keep the money she made. That would imply her body was her own property, and of course, it wasn’t, in men’s eyes. She was sure there was a logical contradiction in what Trini had said but was too tired to worry about it just then. One thing seemed clear, though.

“How much do I owe you, then?”

Trini’s eyes widened. “You think … oh, no, Robin. This I do for myself. Making love to men is my job, what I do for a living. I make love to women because I like them. I’m a lesbian.” Trini looked slightly defensive for the first time. “I think I know what you’re thinking. Why would a woman who doesn’t like men make a living having sex with them? It gets a little—”

“No, I wasn’t thinking that at all. That first thing you said is about the
only
thing you’ve said that makes sense. I understand that perfectly and see that you’re ashamed of your peckish enslavement. But what’s a lesbian?”

Chris hired a Titanide to take him to something called the Place of Winds, where he was told he could get an elevator ride to the hub. The Titanide was a blue-and-white long-haired pinto female named Castanet (Sharped Lydian Duet) Blues, but it was Chris who had the blues. The Titanide spoke some English and attempted to engage him in conversation, to which Chris replied in grunts, so she passed the trip playing her brass horn while at a full gallop.

He began to take more interest in the trip as they left Titantown behind. The ride was as smooth as a Hovercraft. They passed through brown hills and rode for a time beside a swift-flowing tributary of the river Ophion. Then the land began to rise toward the imposing presence of the Place of Winds.

Gaea was a circular suspension bridge. Her hub served as the anchor against centripetal force. Radiating down her spokes were ninety-six cables that tied the hub to the subterranean bone plates of the rim. Each cable was five kilometers in diameter, composed of hundreds of wound strands. They contained conduits for heating and cooling fluxes, and arteries for the transport of nutrients. Some of the cables met the ground at right angles, but the majority emerged from the vast spoke mouths overhead to slant through a twilight zone for a time before fastening in a daylight area.

The Place of Winds was the Hyperion terminus of a slanting cable. It looked like a long arm reaching out of darkness, its fingers gripping the land in a fist of rubble. Somewhere in the maze of ridges and tumbled boulders high winds sang as air was pumped upward to spill in the hub and fall
through the spokes. It was Gaea’s millennial air conditioner, the means by which she prevented the formation of a pressure gradient and maintained a breathable oxygen pressure in a column of air 600 kilometers high. It was also the angels’ stairway to heaven. But Castanet and Chris were not headed there; the elevator was on the other side.

It took Castanet nearly an hour—or one rev, Chris reminded himself—to go around the cable. The far side was daunting. Incalculable tonnes of cable rested on the air above them, as if a skyscraper had been erected parallel to the ground.

The land beneath the cable was uncharacteristically barren. It could not have been merely lack of sunlight; Gaea was known for her prolificacy, supporting life forms adapted to any environmental extreme, including perpetual darkness. But only in the vicinity of the elevator terminus itself was there any plant life.

It was a dark, soft capsule, four meters long and three high, with a dilated opening in one end. The other was pressed against a sphincter of a kind common in Gaea. These openings led to the circulatory system, which, if one dared, could be used as transport. The capsules were corpuscles that included—in the dual-function organization that was a Gaean trademark—a life-support system. An oxygen-breathing animal placed inside could survive until it died of starvation.

Chris climbed in and seated himself on the free-form couch-shape inside. There were filaments growing from the inner walls, useful in strapping oneself securely. Chris used them. It was his third ride in what native Gaeans called the bumper cars. He knew the ride could be rough as the thing bumbled through eddied currents around switch points.

The interior was luminescent. With the opening sealed behind him, Chris wished he had brought a book. He faced a three-hour ride with no company but his churning stomach and the knowledge that at the end of the line he would be interviewed by a God.

There was a sucking sound as the capsule was drawn into the protective maze of valves within the cable. It blundered from auricle to ventricle until, with an unexpected surge of power, it headed for
heaven.

* * *

The dancer was under a suspended spotlight, floating in and out of a yellow cone spilling through the still air. He was a tap-dancing fool in top hat and tails, spats and boiled shirt. Like all the best dancers, he made it look easy. The soles of his black shoes and the metal foot of his cane hammered a complex tattoo that echoed in the unseen cavern of the hub.

He was performing fifty meters from the door of the common, ordinary elevator which had brought Chris on the last leg of the trip. A bell rang, and Chris turned to see the door closing.

The dancer disturbed him. It was as if he had walked into a theater showing an obscure film that was half over. The man must refer to something; the artist must have had something in mind. But there he danced, divorced from all meaning, sufficient unto himself. His face was concealed in the shadow cast by the brim of his hat; only his pale pointed chin was visible. He should remove his hat, Chris thought, to reveal an empty skull: the face of death. Or else stop dancing and indicate with his elegantly gloved hand where Chris’s path lay. He gave no such signal, refused to turn himself into a symbol of anything. He just kept dancing.

He finally made his move when Chris approached him. The spotlight winked out, and another came on twenty meters distant. The man’s silhouette clattered through darkness until it was again fleshed out in light. A third light came on, a fourth, a diminishing series. He leaped from one to the other, pausing for an improvised rhythmic statement before hoofing it to the next one. Then the lights died. The sound of taps on marble was gone.

The darkness of the hub was not absolute. High above was a single, dimensionless red line of light, sharp as a laser. Chris stood between high shadows: Gaea’s cathedral collection. Spires and towers, flying buttresses and stone gargoyles were cool gray against fathomless black. Did they have interiors? His books had not said. He knew only that Gaea collected architecture and specialized in places of
worship.

The regular tapping of heels in the distance soon resolved itself into a human woman in a white jumpsuit, like the ones the quarantine personnel had worn. She came around the corner of a squat stone temple, paused to sweep the area with a flashlight. The glare blinded him, moved past, returned to pin him like an escaping felon, then lowered.