by John Varley
From the second-floor bannister she could see them in the main room, then heard the front door open and shut. She hurried back into the room she shared with her mother and Adam. She glanced to his crib, and was surprised to see he was gone. She knew Robin hadn’t taken the little monster, so she assumed Cirocco had.
By leaning out the window she could see the far end of the suspension bridge. She leaned—then darted back in quickly. The two women were crossing it. Cirocco had the baby.
She was dressed, down the stairs, and had her hand on the doorknob before she stopped to think.
It wouldn’t work.
Nova had a fair idea of her own capacities. On her home ground it was just possible she might tail Cirocco without being discovered. But Cirocco was too good. She seemed to feel eyetracks on her skin, to sense a passing thought. That Nova could follow such a woman through a jungle she didn’t know was beyond the realm of reason. But Great Mother, she ached to be with her.
***
At first Robin had not realized they were following a path. It was not well-defined, but it was there. They had to duck some low branches and climb over fallen trees. Still, the trail was there. Robin searched her meager knowledge of the ways of wild animals, wondering if this was a game trail, then realized what little she knew applied to Earth, not Gaea. Who could tell why a Gaean animal behaved as it did?
“Do you trust me, Robin?”
“Trust you? Sure, I guess so. Why?”
“Guessing isn’t enough. Think it over.”
Robin did, following along behind the woman she still thought of as the Wizard. She felt clumsy, weak, and very old. Ahead, Cirocco was lean, lithe, and seemed to grow from the ground under her feet.
Trust her? Robin could think of a lot of pro’s and con’s. The Wizard had been an alcoholic when Robin had known her. Did they ever get cured, really cured? Wasn’t it possible that, when things got bad, she would dive back into the bottle?
Robin took another look. No, she wouldn’t. She didn’t know how she could be so sure, but she was. There had been a fundamental change in the woman.
“I trust you to keep your word. I believe that if you say you’ll do something, I can count on it being done.”
“It will, if I’m alive.”
“I trust you to do what you think is right.”
“Right for who? You, me, or everyone? It’s not always the same.”
Robin knew it wasn’t, and gave it some more thought.
“For everyone. I think you’d tell me if you had to do something that you thought best, but was going to hurt me.”
“I would.”
They walked on in silence for a time, then Cirocco half-turned and gestured for Robin to walk beside her. The path was wide enough for two at that point. She took Robin’s hand and they walked together.
“Do you trust me to keep a secret?”
“Sure.”
“I didn’t phrase that right. There are some things I have to keep secret from you. I can’t tell you why. Part of it is the old golden rule of the so-called ‘intelligence community.’ What you don’t know, you can’t tell.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“I ain’t playing games, kid. There’s war here just as sure as there’s war on Earth. In some ways, this one is just as ugly,”
“Yeah, I trust you to do that. At least, until I know more.”
“That’s good enough.” She stopped, and turned Robin to face her. “Just relax and look into my eyes, Robin. I want you to relax completely. Every muscle is loose, and you’re starting to get sleepy.”
Robin had been hypnotized before, but never so easily. Cirocco didn’t talk a lot, didn’t use any tools. She simply looked into Robin’s eyes and her pupils grew big as the Phoebe Sea. She murmured quietly and touched her palms to Robin’s cheeks, and Robin relaxed.
“Let your eyes close,” Cirocco said, and Robin did. “You will sleep, but you don’t need to go deep. You can feel things, smell things, and hear perfectly well, but you’ll see nothing. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
Robin felt herself being lifted. It was nice. She heard a wind rustling through trees. There was a smell like over-ripe strawberries. She felt herself bounce as Cirocco jogged along the path. Then she was turning around. This went on for an unmeasurable time, until all sense of direction was destroyed.
She didn’t care. Mostly she felt Cirocco’s strong arms beneath her back and under her legs, felt her hard stomach muscles against her hip, smelled the distinctive, slightly sweet odor she associated with the Wizard. Her mind built pleasant fantasies. It had been a long time without a lover.
She felt good. Better than she had since…since those long-ago days sailing down the Ophion with seven companions toward an unknown destiny. There was something to be said for being swept off one’s feet by forces—or Wizards—beyond one’s control.
“Nova wasn’t asleep when I came in to get you,” Cirocco said.
“She wasn’t?”
“No. She followed us down the stairs. Then she watched us out the window. I thought she was going to tail us, but she didn’t.”
“She’s not a fool.”
“I can see that. She’s…difficult.”
Robin laughed. “If you’d been demoted from the Virgin Daughter to an outcast and a refugee, you might be difficult, too.”
“Why did she come? She seems to hate you.”
“Part of her does, I think. I failed so hugely, my fall was so great…it was like I did it to her, too.” Robin stopped, wondering why she was saying these things with no pain, then remembered she was hypnotized. That was fine with her. They needed to be said.
“She came out of obedience? It doesn’t sound like her style.”
“You don’t know the Coven. It was obligation…and fear. I don’t think my beloved sisters will make it. I think they’re going to freeze out there. But by the time the question was put, I didn’t have a vote. Nova didn’t think they’d make it either.
“And…she didn’t feel like she had a lot of choice. It was tough for us. For ninety days, after Adam was discovered, we didn’t exist. My third Eye saved my life, but only just.”
“Why did she have to go? You were the one with the child.”
“Ah, it didn’t matter. She was a freak, you see. She found out about Adam when he was six months old. She tried to kill him. I stopped her. Then both of us concealed him, but we knew it couldn’t last. And it all came out in the end. It took every ounce of my former prestige to swear that he was a girl. No one looked, but they all knew.”
“What do you mean, Nova was a freak?”
“The only child in the Coven with a brother. Guilt by association with me, the great sinner.” She sighed. “Aren’t people wonderful?”
“They’re about the same everywhere.”
Cirocco said nothing for a while. Robin had an odd thought. Where was Adam? Cirocco had been carrying him when they started out. Now she was carrying her, and it took both hands.
She didn’t worry about it. She did trust Cirocco.
“She was also suspiciously tall. That didn’t matter when we were riding high. Later on, there were whispers of acts better not described. And there was love.”
“Love?”
“She loves me. She doesn’t show it much these days, but she does.”
“I could see that.”
“She loves you, too. In a quite different way.”
“I see that, too.”
***
Cirocco finally set her down. Robin’s senses were deliciously sharp. She felt soft, damp soil under her bare feet. (What had happened to her shoes? It didn’t matter.) There was an aromatic vapor in the air. She felt a trickle of sweat run down her back. She stood there in the dark and waited. Cirocco’s voice came from in front of her.
“You can sit down now, Robin, and open your eyes.”
Robin did. She saw Cirocco kneeling in front of her. Her eyes were deep, fascinating pools. She glanced to he
r left and saw Chris, also kneeling, holding Adam wrapped in his pink blanket. He smiled at her, then Cirocco touched her chin with a fingertip and turned Robin’s head forward.
“Don’t look at him. Look at me.”
“All right.”
“I want you to go a little deeper. You can keep your eyes open if you want to, but don’t pay any attention to what you see. The sound of my voice is the only important thing.”
“All right.”
“How deep are you?”
Robin thought it over earnestly.
“About three feet.”
“Give it another foot.”
Robin did. Her eyes were open. All she really noticed were swirling clouds of steam. Cirocco was no longer in front of her, but she couldn’t have said just what was out there. She felt a light pressure on the top of her head. It was Cirocco’s hand.
“Why did you let Adam live, Robin?”
She heard her own voice come from far away. She had a brief glimpse of the three of them, seen from above: a big, half-hairy man; a strong woman; a tiny, helpless, pitiful…
That thought was shut off quickly.
“I had a dream.”
“What was the dream about?”
“Adam.” Smiling. Pink. Delicate tiny toes. The smell of her own milk and his wet diaper. “Gaby.” Black and peeling. Crispy skin. A ruined eye. A sweet smell.
“You dreamed of Gaby?”
“She sat with me. She helped deliver him. She held him up, all bloody and awful. Then she kissed me and I cried.”
“In the dream?”
“Yes.” Robin frowned. “No. She was better. Not burned.”
“In the dream?”
“No. Yes…I don’t remember waking up. I remember…going to sleep after the dream. Adam was nursing.”
“What did Gaby say?”
“She said I must find it in my heart to keep him. She said the world was going to be destroyed. The Earth, the Coven…maybe Gaea. She said he was important. I had to bring him here. She said Chris was his father. I said two virgin births was one too many. She said Gaea had done it, Gaea had used magic to…keep a part of Chris inside me. Tiny time capsules, she called them. Then she went away.”
“She vanished?”
Robin was surprised. “No, she went out the door.”
Cirocco didn’t say anything for a while, and Robin didn’t mind. She was waiting for more questions. Instead, the pressure of Cirocco’s hand on her head went away, then came back. This time it wasn’t her palm, but the heel of her fist. It touched lightly, but Robin felt she could almost read the ridges and whorls through her scalp. There was a tiny voice.
“Let go of me, you ancient cunt.”
Robin had never heard anyone speak to Cirocco that way. The voice went on in that vein for a time. Robin felt the fist tense, and the little voice squealed.
“I’ll report you to the fucking SPCA, you vomit bag. I’ll fuck you in your big hairy ears, and I’ve got syphilis, I’ve got things they haven’t even named yet, I’ll—”
Again the squeeze, followed by a sharper scream.
“I command you to speak,” Cirocco said. Robin said nothing. Somehow she knew the command wasn’t for her.
“Gaea’s gonna piss kerosene and shit napalm when she hears—”
“Speak!”
“I know my rights, I want a goddam LAAAAAWYER! I want—”
“Speak!”
“Aaaaaaah! Aaah! Okay, okay, okay, I’ll speak!”
“Is the hand of Gaea on this child? I command you to answer.”
“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t see…see…I think maybe—”
“Speak!”
“No, no, no! Gaea touched her long ago. Gaea knows she is here. Gaea planned the child’s family, but did not touch them. Gaea’s hand is not on this child.”
And suddenly, neither was Cirocco’s. Robin sat, blinking, feeling somehow that a terrible weight had been lifted from her head.
“You can come up now, Robin. Slow and easy. Everything’s all right.”
Robin did come up. She felt refreshed, took a deep breath, blinked again, and turned around. Cirocco was stowing a bottle in a knapsack. In one hand she held a familiar object: an old Colt .45 automatic. Cirocco handed it to her. Robin turned it over in her hand. The safety was off. She put it back on, and looked up.
“This is my gun.”
“I took it from you before Cirocco woke you up,” Chris said.
“What was that?” Robin gestured to the pack.
“My demon.” Her eyes bored into Robin’s. “Can you keep a secret?”
Robin returned the gaze, and finally nodded.
“If that’s the way you want it.”
Cirocco nodded, and relaxed a little. “I can tell you only that it was something that had to be done. I used to have another method. It wasn’t as reliable, and not nearly so easy.” For a moment there was terrible pain in her eyes. She looked away, then back. “Ask Conal about it sometime. Wait till he’s got a little wine in him.”
“You thought I was a spy for Gaea?”
“I had to assume you could be. Could you be sure you weren’t?”
Robin was about to deliver an indignant of course I could, but stopped herself. She thought about tiny tune capsules, virgin births. Gaea touched her long ago. Gaea planned her family.
“She can do anything at all, can’t she?”
“She’d like you to believe that. But, yes, just about. You have no idea yet just how bad that can be.”
“Would you have killed me?”
“Yes.”
Robin thought she should be angry about that, but she wasn’t. She was oddly comforted. If Gaea had laid a slimy trap in her body, she would rather be dead.
“What about Nova?” she said, suddenly.
“Now you’re starting to be properly paranoid,” Cirocco said, nodding. “But you’ve got a long way to go to catch up with me. I examined Nova hours ago. I thought it wise…considering her temperament, that she not remember it. I told her to forget, and she will.”
“And Adam?”
“Innocent as a baby,” Chris said, and smiled at her. She smiled back, suddenly remembering how warmly she had liked him, many years ago. She was even willing to forgive him his hair, at least for now. Then she looked at her surroundings for the first time, and frowned.
“What is this place?” she asked.
“The fountain of youth,” Cirocco said.
***
There had once been twelve fountains in Gaea. The one in Oceanus had been destroyed in the Rebellion. The one in Thea was deep beneath the ice and the ones in Mnemosyne and Tethys were buried in sand. Of the remaining eight, seven had been abruptly shut down one day twenty years ago, a day that had also seen the death of the first incarnation of Gaea and a rain of cathedrals from Heaven.
But Gaea did not control Dione, because the central brain of Dione was dead. She could not influence the land for good or evil. She could send her troops in and she could make Bellinzona a living hell, but the deeper functions beneath the surface were beyond her.
Dione did surprisingly well in spite of that. Cirocco thought the gremlins might have a hand in it. For whatever reason, plants continued to grow, water flowed, and air circulated.
And the fountain brewed.
The fountain was the primary reason Chris had built Tuxedo Junction where he had. He needed it as much as Cirocco did. It seemed a good idea to be close enough to keep an eye on it.
“How do I know it won’t hurt me?” Robin asked.
“You don’t have to do it,” Cirocco said.
“I know that, you told me that, but…how do you know? Maybe it’s a trick. Maybe Gaea’s hand is on you.”
“If it is, you’re sunk already,” Cirocco pointed out. “You’ve already said you trust me. Either you do, or you don’t.”
“I do. Emotionally.”
“That’s the only way it works. Logic has nothing to do with it. There’s no logic
al way to prove Gaea isn’t controlling me.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I’m just nervous.”
“Don’t be. Just get undressed.”
Cirocco turned away, sensing that Robin was as nervous about getting undressed as about anything else. She thought about sending Chris away, letting him come back later for his own treatment. Then she turned and saw Robin stepping out of her pants and knew Chris had nothing to do with it. She hoped nothing showed in her face, but she felt heat in the back of her throat, the choking taste of sudden pity.
Robin looked very sad, standing there in the nude. She would have looked sad anyway, but to one who had seen her glory, it was heartbreaking.
All the tattoos had faded badly. Cirocco had already seen the Eye and the Pentasm on her head, and part of the snake on her arm. They had been multi-colored and bright when Robin was nineteen. Now they were muddy, with a hint of dull red or murky green in a design made up mostly of slate-gray. Her fourth tattoo—the snake around her leg—was in the same shape as the rest. But the fifth had been vandalized.
It was no great loss to the art world, Cirocco thought, but it was still butchery. Robin had known early in life that any children she bore would have the same disease she came to Gaea to eradicate. In a surge of youthful bravado, she had made a hideous design on her belly. It showed a shadowy monster tearing through her skin, trying to break free from her womb to the outside world with teeth and claws.
“Nova was so damn big,” Robin said, ruefully, rubbing the scar that had made the tattoo even more ugly. “I had to have a Calpurnian section.” She stood with shoulders slumped, trying to make it look as if her hands just happened to be clasped over her abdomen. Her skin was pasty, and her hair lifeless. Her face was seamed and even her teeth didn’t look good. Robin had been letting herself go for quite a time. Aging was one thing; this was something else.
“Never mind,” Cirocco said. “This will put a stop to that.”
She waded into the water, and held out her hand.
***
It was hotter than Robin had believed possible. She felt the heat in an odd way, aware of it, but not feeling burned.
They took it in easy steps. First out to the ankles, then the knees, then a pause before going in up to the hip. Chris was on one side of her, Cirocco on the other. They both held her hands.