Wizard

by John Varley

  She snagged Gaby's arm as she passed by and fell in step beside her.

  "What are we stopping here for?"

  "It's the garden spot of Rhea," Gaby said, sweeping her arm wide. But the joke seemed forced. "Actually, Rocky has some business here. Better count on two days. Maybe three. Getting tired of us?"

  "No. Just curious. Should I be?"

  "It might be better if you weren't. She has something to do, and I can't tell you what it is. That's for your own good, believe it or not." Gaby hurried away, back to the raft.

  Robin sat on a log and watched the Titanides and Chris pitching camp. A month ago she would have forced herself to get up and help. Honor would have mandated it because to sit here was an acknowledgment that she was weak. Well, damn it, she was weak.

  She had Hautbois to thank for being able to say that to herself. The Titanide had sung to her all through her recent seizure, in both English and Titanide. She had not let Robin turn away from her helplessness, had forced her to begin looking at ways to cope with it beyond sheer gutsiness. When Robin began to regain control, she found she did not resent what the Titanide had said. She learned Hautbois was a healer. That included doctor and psychiatrist and counselor and comforter, and possibly other things. Robin had the impression Hautbois would willingly have made love to her in the private, frontal mode, if it could have helped anything. Whatever Hautbois had done had given Robin more peace of mind than she had felt since ... she could not recall. She thought she must have breached her mother's womb ready to fight the whole world.

  Nasu was agitating to get out. Robin opened her sack and let her writhe onto the sand, confident she would not go far. She dug in her pocket and came up with a piece of hard candy wrapped in a leaf, peeled it, and sucked on it. The sand was too cold for Nasu's likeing, so she coiled around Robin's ankle.

  Cirocco was standing alone near the wall, motionless, looking at a tall crack in it. Robin followed it with her eyes and realized it was a space between two cable strands. Three of them abutted the island, which had once been an outer strand itself, making the little bay semicircular. There was a similar crack between the center strand and the one on the left. Below the sea, the strands would splay out widely. She remembered a picture of the conical mountain and its strand forest in Hyperion. Here the gaps between strands were no more than ten meters wide and partially clogged with barnacles.

  She saw Gaby return from the raft bearing an oil lamp. Gaby hurried over to Cirocco and handed it to her. They were talking, but the constant noise of the sea obliterated the words before they reached Robin. Cirocco was not saying much; it fell to Gaby to do most of the talking, and she was animated about it. She did not look happy. Cirocco kept shaking her head.

  At last Gaby gave up. She stood facing Cirocco for a moment. Then the two women embraced, Gaby standing on her toes to kiss her old friend. Cirocco hugged her once more, then entered the crack between the cables. The light of her lantern was visible for a short time, then gone.

  Gaby walked to the edge of the circular cove, as far from everyone else as she could get. She sat and put her head in her hands. She did not move for two hours.

  Cirocco's absence passed in relaxation and games. The Titanides did not mind it, nor did Chris. Gaby was nervous much of the time. Robin grew more bored by the hour.

  She took up whittling, taught by the Titanides, but did not have the patience for it. She wanted to ask Chris to teach her to swim but felt she should not be naked in front of him again. Gaby solved the problem by suggesting she wear a bathing suit. One was quickly improvised. The idea of a bathing suit was as unexpected to Robin as wearing shoes in the shower, but it did the job. She took three lessons in the central body of water she had misnamed a tidepool. (There were no tides in Gaea.) In return, she tutored Chris in fighting, something he knew little about. The lessons had to be called off temporarily when she herself learned something, which was that testicles are amazingly easy to injure and can cause their owner a great deal of pain. She exhausted her store of apologies and was genuinely sorry, but how could she have known?

  Only two incidents livened an otherwise comatose two days. The first was soon after Cirocco had left, when Gaby seemed to want to move around. She took them along a narrow trail leading from the campsite to the high ledge girdling the cable. All seven of them spent the next hour walking carefully on irregular ground that sloped toward a fifty-meter drop into the sea. They went almost halfway around the cable to a point where the ledge had broken away. Just short of that was a recess between two cable strands. Standing in it was a squat stone pilaster, and sitting on that was a golden statue of an alien creature.

  It reminded Robin of the Frog Queen from a childhood tale. It was obviously aquatic; though it had six legs, they ended in broad flippers. It squatted, looking out to sea, hunchbacked and broad. Nothing grew on it, though it was draped with dried seaweed. Its single eye was a hollow socket.

  "That's been here at least ten thousand years," Gaby said. "There used to be an eye in the socket. It was a diamond about as big as my head. I saw it once, and it seemed to glow." She kicked at the sand, and Robin was startled to see a creature the size of a large dog emerge and slink away on six flippered feet. It was yellow and rather ugly. There was very little flesh on its bones. The thing did not look much like the statue, yet there was a family resemblance. It turned once, opened a mouth with several thousand long yellow teeth, hissed, and continued to shuffle away.

  "Those things used to be so mean a wolverine would have a heart attack just to look at them. They were so quick your guts would be on the ground before you saw them. They'd hide in the sand like that one was doing. As soon as the first one jumped out, they'd be coming from all over. I saw one take seven mortal hits from a rifle and still live to kill the man who shot it."

  "What happened to them?" Chris asked.

  Gaby picked up a big shell and threw it to shatter against the image. A dozen heads immediately appeared above the sand, open-mouthed. Robin reached for her weapon, but it wasn't necessary.

  The creatures looked around in confusion, then wriggled back into concealment.

  "They were put here to guard the idol's eye," Gaby said. "The race that made it is long gone. Only Gaea knows anything about them. You can be sure it wasn't really an idol because nobody in here ever worshiped anything but Gaea. Some kind of monument, I guess. Anyway, it's been at least a thousand years since anyone cared about it or visited it.

  "Until about fifty years ago. That's when the pilgrims started coming, and Gaea created these creatures as perversions of the original ones. She gave them one drive in life, and that was to protect the eye at all costs. They did a damn good job. The eye wasn't taken until about fifteen years ago. I personally know of five people who died right here where we're standing, and there were surely many more than that.

  "But after it was gone, there was nothing left for the guardians to do. Gaea didn't program them to die, so they eat a little and get a little older. But waiting to die is what they're doing."

  "So it was all just for a challenge?" Robin asked. "It wasn't even here before she started daring people to ... to go out and prove themselves..." She was unable to finish the thought. It brought back her anger in full force.

  "That's it. Something she didn't tell you, though, is that Gaea is rotten with places like this. I'm sure she fed you the whole spiel about a hundred and one dragons and jewels as big as blimp turds. The thing is, this place has been scoured by pilgrims for fifty years, all of them looking for some stupid thing to do. A lot of them have died trying it, but the thing about humans is if enough of them keep coming, they'll eventually do just about anything. The dragons have had the worst of it. There's not many left, and there's plenty of humans. Gaea can whomp up another dragon anytime she feels like it, but she's way behind. She's getting old and can't keep up anymore. Things break down and don't get repaired for a long time, if ever. I doubt there's a dozen dragons left, or two dozen unplundered monuments." />
  "There's a quest shortage," Valiha said, and couldn't understand why Robin laughed so hard.

  Chris was subdued on the way back. Robin knew he had visions of doing something worthy of tales, even if he was not aware of it. He was, after all, a man and trapped in peckish toy-soldier games. Robin could not have cared less if there were no more dragons.

  The second incident was more interesting, however. It happened after their second sleep period. Gaby, who had not slept the first time, awoke and came out of her tent to find huge tracks in the sand. She howled for the Titanides, who came from the raft at a gallop. By the time they arrived Chris and Robin were awake, too. "Where the hell were you?" Gaby wanted to know, pointing at a meter-long footprint.

  "We've been down working on Constance," Hornpipe said. "Hautbois discovered the waves had damaged one end and-"

  "But what about this? You were supposed to be-"

  "Now wait a minute," Hornpipe said hotly. "You told me yourself there was nothing to worry about here. Nothing from the land and nothing-"

  "Okay, okay, I'm sorry. Let's don't argue." Robin was not surprised Gaby had backed down so quickly. Titanides got angry so seldom that there was something sobering about it when one did. "Let's take a closer look at this."

  They proceeded to do that, examining one track in detail and following the whole series to see where the creature had come from and where it had gone. The results were frightening. The tracks appeared at one edge of the cove, went straight to the camp, made a circle around Gaby's tent, then vanished again at the edge of the water.

  "What do you think it was?" Valiha asked Gaby, who was down on one knee, studying a track by the light of her lantern.

  "I sure as hell wish I knew. It looks like the claw of a bird. There are birds that big in Phoebe, but they can't fly or swim, so what would they be doing here? Maybe Gaea's whipped up something new again. Damn if it doesn't look like a giant chicken."

  "I don't think I'd like to meet it," Robin said.

  "Me either." Gaby straightened, still frowning. "Don't anybody disturb this one. Rocky should see it when she gets back. Maybe she'll know what it is."

  Cirocco returned eight revs later. She looked tired and hungry, yet more confident than when she had gone in. Robin noticed that she smiled more easily. Whatever had happened in there, it had gone better than expected.

  Robin wanted to say something, but all she could think of were questions like "How did it go?" or "What did you do?" Gaby had warned her away from that. For the time being she would let it go.

  "Maybe you were right, Gaby," Cirocco said as they headed toward camp. "I sure as hell didn't want to-"

  "Later, Rocky. We've got something you ought to look at."

  She was taken to the site of the mysterious track. It was not as distinct as it had been, but still legible. She knelt in the lantern light, and one by one, deep lines etched themselves in her forehead. She seemed offended by the whole idea of this creature.

  "You've got me," she said at last. "It's nothing I've ever seen, and I've been around and around this goddamn wheel." She sang something in Titanide. Robin looked at Hautbois, who frowned.

  "Freely translated, she said, 'Gaea likes her jokes as well as the next deity.' This is well known, of course."

  "Giant chicken?" Cirocco said incredulously.

  Robin could not stand it anymore.

  "Excuse me, I'm not feeling good," she said, and hurried into the darkness. When she reached the water's edge, she climbed down into a ravine like the one near the raft mooring. Once safely out of view she began to laugh. She made as little noise as possible, but she laughed until her sides hurt, until the tears rolled down her cheeks. She did not think she could laugh any harder; then she heard Gaby yell.

  "Hey, Rocky, come here! We found a feather!"

  Robin laughed harder.

  When she finally had herself under control, she reached into a crack between round growths of coral and pulled out two contraptions made of sticks, bits of driftwood, and shells. They had ropes to tie around her legs and places to rest her feet.

  "Gaby and Cirocco," she said. "The great Gaean wildlife experts." She kissed one of the devices, then tossed it far out over the water.

  "You'd better hurry. Gaby will be coming to see how you are." She looked up and saw Hautbois. She waved the remaining stilt at her and sent it after the first.

  "Thanks for the diversion."

  "You're welcome," Hautbois said. "I think Valiha is suspicious, but she won't say anything." He grinned broadly. "I think I'm going to enjoy this trip. But no more fooling with the salt, okay?"

  23 Tempest and Tranquil

  A stiff breeze from the west propelled Constance on her wallowing way from the isle of Minerva. That was good news to Gaby. Looking up, she could see that the lower valve had closed. She knew from bitter experience that meant the spoke above was going through its regular winter. The trees and everything else would be coated in a layer of ice. After the thaw began, all that water and a respectable tonnage of broken branches would pool at the valve. When it opened, Rhea would not be a healthy environment. In fifty revs Nox would rise two meters or more.

  No one asked where Cirocco had been. Gaby suspected they would have been surprised to learn the answer, and that included the Titanides.

  Cirocco had been to an audience with Rhea, the satellite brain who dominated the land for a hundred kilometers in every direction. She was subject to no higher authority but Gaea herself. She was also quite mad.

  The only way to visit the regional brains was through the central vertical cables. All of them lived down there, at the bottom of five-kilometer spiral stairways. Not even the Titanides were aware of this. Their knowledge of the twelve demi-Gods was limited; Gaea, when she made Titanides-complete with a culture and racial wisdom-had seen no reason why they should bother their heads about the regionals. They were Gaea's appendages and no more, the quasi-intelligent servomechanisms that kept things running smoothly in their own limited domains. For the Titanides to think of them as even so much as subordinate Gods would detract from their capacity to appreciate Gaea. Obediently the Titanides thought no more about the big clumps of neural matter than did the most ignorant tourist. Hyperion was a place, not a person, to them.

  The reality was quite different, and had been since long before the birth of the Titanides. Perhaps the brains had actually been totally subservient to Gaea in her youth. She claimed it was so. But today all twelve increasingly went their own way. To accomplish her will, Gaea had to cajole or threaten. All it took with a regional like Hyperion was a simple request. Hyperion was Gaea's closest ally on the rim. Yet the fact that she had to ask showed how far things had come. Gaea retained little in the way of direct control on the rim.

  Gaby had met several of the regionals; she had been down to see Hyperion dozens of times. She found him dull, an automaton. She suspected that, as usual, the villains were far more interesting than the nice guys. Hyperion managed to use the word "Gaea" twice in every sentence. Gaby and Cirocco had seen him just before Carnival. The Hyperion central cable always made Gaby feel strange. She had visited it with Cirocco and others from the Ringmaster crew during her first weeks in Gaea. Unknowing, they had come within a few hundred meters of the entrance. Finding it would have saved them a terrible trip.

  Rhea was another story. Gaby had never been able to visit any of Gaea's enemies. Cirocco had met them all except Oceanus. She was able to do that because she was the Wizard and under Gaea's safe-conduct. There was no way to guarantee that protection to Gaby. Killing Cirocco would bring the full wrath of Gaea down on the murderer's lands. Killing Gaby would probably annoy Gaea, but little more.

  It was misleading, however, to call Rhea an enemy of Gaea. Though she had allied with Oceanus in the Oceanic Rebellion, she was far too unpredictable for either side to rely on. Cirocco had been down to her once before and barely escaped with her life. Rhea was a hell of a place to start, Gaby knew, but there had been no advan
tage to be gained by skipping her and coming back. Because their purpose was to visit eleven of the twelve regional brains. It was their fond hope that Gaea did not yet know this.

  It was risky, to be sure, but Gaby felt it could be done without arousing suspicion. She did not expect complete security; that would have been foolish. Though Gaea's eyes and ears were not what some people imagined them, she had enough contacts on the rim so that she eventually heard of most things that happened.

  They hoped simply to brazen it out. Some of it would be easy. It would have been bad form for the Wizard to pass through Crius, for instance, without dropping in for a visit. If Gaea wanted to know why the Wizard had visited an enemy like Iapetus, Cirocco could say she was simply keeping up with the state of affairs on the rim: part of her job. Asked why she had not told Gaea of this junket, she could protest quite truthfully that Gaea had never demanded she report every little thing.

  But visiting Rhea would be hard to explain. Poor, confused, erratic Rhea could be the most dangerous regional in Gaea if confronted face to face. Traveling her lands was not hazardous. She spent so much time internalizing that she seldom noticed what was going on above her. For that reason, Rhea the land was slowly going to hell. But there was no predicting what she might do if one went down to speak to her. Gaby had tried to convince Cirocco to skip Rhea entirely, and the danger was not the only reason. It would be hard to explain why the Wizard had risked the trip.

  The mysterious creature that had visited them had given Gaby some bad moments. She thought at first it might have been one of Gaea's tools, like the obscene little creature that greeted new pilgrims in the hub. Now she doubted that. More likely it was one of Gaea's sports. She spent more and more of her time dreaming up biological jokes to unleash on the rim. Such as the buzz bombs. There was a nasty bit of business.