Wizard (9 page)

“You’re so soft, so much lovely padding… .”

“By the Great Mother, if you are going to rape me, do it now, and a curse be on you for a lying peacock! We haven’t got all day.” Robin was shivering, fear of falling and the threat of nausea combining to batter at her self-control.

“What’s in the bag?” he said tersely.

“My demon.”

“All right,
don’t
answer! But hold onto it. Here we go.”

His arms were like clamps now as he carefully began to open his great wings. Weight tugged at her, changing her free fall to the feeling of hanging upside down. It became impossible to keep her legs straight out behind her. When she let them drop, the unstable pair rocked briefly around the balance
point of the angel’s wings, below his shoulder blades.

The ground tilted as the angel banked cautiously. His goal was to head her toward Ophion, where it flowed beneath the cable joining the Place of Winds to the hub. The river was deep, wide, and slow in that country, running in a southeasterly direction. To that end, he had to go first south for a time, then north, to align their glide with the river. Then he must extend Robin’s fall by flattening the angle of his descent. Otherwise, she would have hit far short of the water.

They passed over a group of craters. Robin didn’t ask what they were. It
couldn’t
have been people; ninety meters per second would not give them that much kinetic energy. But other, heavier objects released at her point of departure could have done it.

The angel extended his wings to the fullest now. The ground below was hilly and forested, but ahead, the straight stretch of river could be seen. It did not look as if they would reach it, and there could be no pulling up and going around. The angel could lift little more than his own body weight.

“I think I’ll have you down to seventy or eighty kilometers per hour when you hit,” he said, shouting in her ear. “I will try to brake us in short bursts when I’m sure you’ll reach the river. You’ll be coming in at an angle.”

“I can’t swim.”

“Neither can I. You’re on your own there.”

* * *

It was a confusing experience. The tug of his arms increased sharply, and she took a deep breath, her heart hammering. Then they were gliding again, seemingly still high above the brown waters. Another tug; she put her hands out reflexively, but they were still airborne. The third tug was the hardest of all. For long seconds Robin could not draw a breath.

And now the shoreline was getting closer, streaking by on her right. Ahead, the river curved westward.

She thought she hit on her back but was too stunned to be sure. The next thing she remembered clearly was clawing through muddy water toward the light.

Swimming turned out to be strenuous. It was amazing the things one could do when the water rose over one’s upper lip.

* * *

The angel stood on the shore as she clambered out. It was not something he did well; his feet were not built for it. They were clawlike, with long, skeletal toes, made for grasping tree limbs. Robin crawled a meter or two on dry land, then went over on her side.

“Here, give me that,” the angel said, yanking the bag from her hand. “I deserve something for my work; you can’t argue with that.” He opened it, gasped, closed it quickly, and let it fall, backing away.

“I told you,” Robin wheezed.

The angel was angry and impatient. “Well, what have you got?”

“There’s a little money. You can have it all.”

“I have no use for it. The only place to spend it is at the Titanides’ madhouse.”

Robin sat up and used her fingers to comb wet hair from her face.

“You speak English well,” she said.

“What do you know? It can say nice things if it wants to.”

“I’m sorry. If I hurt your feelings, I didn’t really mean to. I just had a lot to worry about.”

“Not anymore.”

“I appreciate that. You saved my life, and I’m grateful.”

“All right, all right. I learned to speak English from my grandmother, incidentally. She also taught me that nothing comes for free. What do you have besides money?”

There was a ring, a gift from her mother. She offered it to the angel. He held out his hand and examined it sourly.

“I’ll take it. What else?”

“That’s all I’ve got. Just the clothes I have on.”

“I’ll take them, too.”

“But all my other things—”

“Are in the hotel. It’s over that way. The day is warm. Enjoy the walk.”

Robin removed her boots and poured water from them. The shirt came off easily, but the pants clung to her clammy skin.

He took them, then stood looking at her.

“If you only knew how much I love fat human women.”

“You’re not having this one. And what do you mean, fat? I’m not fat.” She was made uneasy by his eyes, a distinctly new sensation. Robin had no more body modesty than a cat.

“You’re twenty percent fat, maybe more. You’re coated with it. You bulge all over with it.” He sighed. “And those are the
damnedest
markings I ever saw.” He paused, then grinned slowly. “At least I got to see you. Happy landings.” He tossed the clothes to her and leaped into the air.

The force of his wings rocked Robin back on her heels, stirred a choking cloud of dust and leaves. For a moment his majestic wingspread blotted out the sky; then he was rising, vanishing, a silhouette stick-man in a riot of feathers.

Robin sat again and surrendered to a bad case of the shakes. She glanced at her carrier bag, writhing angrily as a thoroughly upset anaconda tried to gain her freedom. Nasu would have to wait. She would not starve, even if the attack lasted for days.

Robin managed to turn over, fearing she would blind herself by staring at the sun, and soon had lost all control of her body. The timeless Hyperion day marched on while she twitched in the amber sunlight, helpless, waiting for the angel to come back and rape her.

Gaby Plauget stood on the rocky shelf and waited for the noise of the massive diastole to abate. A normal Aglaian intake cycle produced a sound like Niagara Falls. Today the sound was more like air bubbles rising from the neck of a bottle held underwater. The intake valve with the Titan tree jammed in it was almost completely submerged.

The place was called the Three Graces. It had been named by Gaby herself, many years before. In those days the few Terrans living in Gaea were still naming things in human speech, usually adhering to the early convention of using Greek mythology as a source. Knowing full well the other meaning of the word, Gaby had read that the Graces assisted Aphrodite at her toilet. She thought of Ophion, the circular river, as the toilet of Gaea and of herself as the plumber. Everything eventually ran into the river. When it clogged, she was the one who flushed it.

“Give me a plumber’s friend the size of the Pittsburgh Dome and a place to stand,” she had once told an interested observer, “and I will drain the world.” Not having such a tool, she found it necessary to come up with methods less direct but equally huge.

Her vantage point was halfway up the northern cliff of the West Rhea Canyon. Formerly, the canyon had possessed a distinctly odd feature: the river Ophion did not flow out of it into the flatlands to the west, but in the other direction. It was Aglaia which had made that possible. Now, with the mighty river pump’s intake valve impaired, common sense had caught up with Gaeagraphical whim. The water,
with no place to go, had turned Ophion into a clear blue lake that filled the canyon and backed up onto the plains of Hyperion. For many kilometers, far up the curving horizon of Gaea, a placid sheet of water covered everything but the tallest trees.

Aglaia sat like a purple grape three kilometers long, lodged in the narrowing canyon neck, her lower end in the lake, her far end extending to the plateau 700 meters above. She and her sisters, Thalia and Euphrosyne, were one-celled organisms with brains the size of a child’s fist. For three million years they had mindlessly straddled Ophion, lifting its waters over the West Rhea Summit. They took nourishment from the flot-sam that continually floated into their vast maws, and were large enough to ingest anything in Gaea except the Titan trees, which, being part of the living flesh of Gaea, were not supposed to become detached.

But these were the twilight ages. Anything could happen, and usually did. And that, Gaby reflected, was why a being the size of Gaea had need of a troubleshooter the size of Gaby.

The intake phase was completed now. Aglaia was swollen to maximum size. There would be a few minutes before the valve began to shut, as if Aglaia held her breath in anticipation of her hourly eruption. Silence settled through the golden twilight, and many eyes turned to Gaby, waiting.

She went down on one knee and looked over the edge. There did not seem to be anything left undone. Deciding when to make the move had been a hard choice. On the one hand, the contracting valve would hold the tree wedged more firmly than ever during the systolic phase. On the other, the water which Aglaia had swallowed would now come rushing out, exerting great force to dislodge the obstruction. The operation did not depend on a delicate touch; Gaby planned to give the tree the biggest jolt she could manage and hope for the best.

Her crew was awaiting the signal. She stood, held a red flag over her head, and brought it down sharply.

Titanide horns sounded from the north and south canyon walls. Gaby turned and scrambled nimbly up the ten-meter rock face behind her. She bounded onto the back of Psaltery, her Titanide crew chief.
Psaltery thrust his brass horn into his pouch and began galloping down the winding trail toward the radio station. Gaby rode him standing up, her bare feet on his withers, her hands holding his shoulders. She was protected by the Titanide trait of running with the human torso leaning forward and the arms swept back like a child imitating a fighter plane. She could grab the arms if she slipped, but it had been many years since she had needed to.

They arrived at the station as the systolic backwash was beginning to be felt. The water was ten meters below them and the blocked intake valve half a kilometer up the canyon; nevertheless, as the torrent began to make a boiling bulge in the new lake and the water level began to rise, the Titanides stirred nervously.

The noise was building again, this time overdubbed with something new. At the top of the Aglaian plateau, at the Lower Mists, where the outflow valve would normally be spraying a stream of water hundreds of meters into the air, nothing was coming out but gas. The dry valve produced a sound Gaby thought of as contrabass flatulence.

“Gaea,” she muttered. “The God that farts.”

“What did you say?” Psaltery sang.

“Nothing. Are you in contact with the bomb, Mondoro?”

The Titanide in charge of etheric persuasion looked up and nodded.

“Shall I tell her to snuff it, my leader?” Mondoro sang.

“Not yet. And stop calling me that. Boss is sufficient.” Gaby looked out over the water, where three cables emerged. She followed them with her eyes, searching for the raveling that would precede a break, and then regarded her impromptu fleet hovering overhead. After so many years the sight could still awe her.

They were the three largest blimps she could round up on a few days’ notice. Their names were Dreadnaught, Bombasto, and Pathfinder. All were over a thousand meters long, each of them an old friend of Gaby’s. It was friendship that had brought them here to help her. The larger blimps seldom
flew together, preferring to be accompanied on their dirigible journeys by a squadron of seven or eight comparatively tiny zeps.

But now they were in harness, a troika the likes of which had seldom been seen in Gaea. Their translucent, gossamer tail surfaces—each large enough for the playing of a soccer match—beat the air with elephantine grandeur. Their ellipsoid bodies of blue nacre jostled and slithered and squeaked against each other like a cluster of carnival balloons.

Mondoro held up a thumb.

“Blow it,” Gaby said.

Mondoro leaned over a seedpod the size of a cantaloupe which nestled in a tangle of vines and branches arranged between her front knees. She spoke to it in a low voice, and Gaby turned toward Aglaia, expectantly.

After a few moments Mondoro coughed apologetically, and Gaby frowned at her.

“She is angry at us for leaving her so long in the dark,” Mondoro sang.

Gaby whistled tunelessly and tapped her foot, while wishing for a standard transmitter.

“Sing to her then of light,” Gaby sang. “You’re the persuader; you’re supposed to know how to handle these creatures.”

“Perhaps a hymn to fire …” the Titanide mused.

“I don’t care what you sing,” Gaby shouted, in English. “Just get the damn stupid thing to blow.” She turned away, fuming.

The bomb was lashed to the trunk of the Titan tree. It had been placed there, at considerable risk, by angels who flew into the pump during the diastolic cycle, when there was air above the inrushing waters. Gaby wished she had an army surplus satchel charge to give the angels. What she had sent instead was a contraption made of Gaean fruits and vegetables. The explosive was a bundle of touchy nitroroots. The detonator was a plant that produced sparks, and another with a magnesium core, wedded to a brain obtained by laboriously scraping plant matter from an IC leaf to expose the silicon chip with
its microscopic circuitry. The chip was programmed to listen to a radio seed, the most fickle plant in Gaea. They were radio transceivers that sent messages only if they were phrased beautifully, that functioned only if the things they heard were worth repeating.

Titanides were masters of song. Their whole language was song; music was as important to them as food. They saw nothing odd about the system. Gaby, who sang poorly and had never interested a seed in anything she sang, hated the things. She wished for a match and a couple of kilometers of waterproof, high-velocity primacord. Above her, the blimps kept the lines taut, but they would not last much longer. They did not have stamina. Kilo for kilo, they were among the weakest creatures in Gaea.