Wizard

by John Varley

  Valiha began to carve things for them. She did so much of it that Robin was kept busy hunting for the scarce, stunted trees which had the only wood worth carving. The Titanide seemed the least affected by boredom; to her, this was simply an extended rest period. Chris thought it must be what a six-month sleep would be to a human.

  They were in the west end of an irregular cavern that averaged one kilometer in width and stretched an unguessable distance to the east. The floor was a hopeless jumble of fallen rocks, crags, spires, pits, and slopes. They could deduce from the dimensionless points of light the glowbirds became when festooning the ceiling that it was at least a kilometer high, possibly more. To the north and south was a bewildering variety of openings. There were tunnel mouths that led to corridors much like the one they had fled through. Many of these looked as if they had been bored through the rock; some actually had timber shorings. Some went up, and others down. Some stayed level, but all of them branched within a hundred meters into two or three other tunnels, and if they were followed for any distance, the branch tunnels divided again. In addition, there were fissures in the rock walls of the sort found in natural caves. The environment beyond these cracks was so chaotic it seemed pointless to explore them. A promising path would dwindle to a passage so narrow even Robin could barely squeeze through, then open into a chamber the size of which she could only guess at.

  At first Chris went with Robin on her explorations, but when he returned, he always found Valiha in such a state of despair that he soon stopped. After that Robin went alone, as often as she could talk Chris into agreeing.

  Chris was impressed with the change in Robin. It was not a revolutionary one, but to anyone who knew her it was dramatic. She listened to him and would usually do as he said, even if it went contrary to what she wished to do. He was astonished at first; he had never expected that she would take orders from a man. On more careful reflection he decided that his being male was not the crux of the issue. Robin had functioned reasonably well as part of a group with first Gaby and then Cirocco as the leader, but Chris suspected that if either of them had told her to do something she strongly did not wish to do, she would have left them on the spot. She would never have done anything to harm the group-unless leaving it could be called harm-but she always had the option in her own mind of striking out on her own; she was not a team player.

  Nor had she magically transformed herself into a follower under Chris's leadership. Yet there was a difference. She was more willing to listen to his arguments, to admit it when he was right. There had been no struggle. In a sense, there was little need for a leader when their group had been reduced to three, but Robin seldom initiated anything, and Valiha never did, so the role, such as it was, devolved on Chris. Robin was too self-centered to be a leader. At times it had made her insufferable to those around her. Now she had added something, which Chris thought was a little humility and a little responsibility. It was humility which allowed her to admit she might be wrong, to listen to his arguments before making up her mind. And it was responsibility to something larger than herself that made her stick with Chris and Valiha day after weary day instead of striking off on her own to bring back help, which was all she really wanted to do.

  They compromised on many things. The most trouble was caused by Robin's exploration of the cavern. They had the same argument countless times, in almost the same words, and neither of them really minded it. Boredom had become intense, they had talked out every subject they held in common, and even disagreement became a welcome diversion.

  "I don't like it when you go out there alone," Chris said for what might have been the twentieth time. "I've read a little about caving, and it's just not something you do, like swimming in deep water by yourself."

  "But you can't come with me. Valiha needs you to stay here."

  "I'm sorry," Valiha said.

  Robin touched the Titanide's hand, assuring her she didn't blame her and apologizing for bringing up the touchy subject. When Valiha had been soothed, she went on.

  "Somebody has to go out. We'll all starve if I don't." What she said was true, and Chris knew it. There were animals other than glowbirds living in the cavern, and they, too, lacked both fear and aggression. They were easy to approach and easy to kill, but not so easy to find. Robin had discovered three species so far, each about the mass of a large cat, slow as turtles, all without hair or teeth. What they did with their lives was anyone's guess, but Robin always found them lying immobile near conical gray masses of a warm, rubbery substance that might have been a sessile animal or a plant but that was firmly rooted and almost certainly alive. She called the rubbery masses teats because they bore a resemblance to the udders of a cow, and the three sorts of animals cucumbers, lettuce, and shrimp. It was not for the tastes-they all tasted more or less like beef-but after the three Terran organisms they mimicked. She had walked by the cucumbers for weeks before she accidentally kicked one and it opened big, mooning eyes at her.

  "We're doing all right," Chris said. "I don't see why you think you have to go out more often than you already are." But he knew it was not true even as he said it. They had some meat, it was true, but hardly enough for Valiha's huge appetite.

  "We can always use more," Robin argued, indicating with her eyes that they would not talk about what they both were thinking while Valiha was present. They had discussed her pregnancy and mentioned some of their fears to her, to find out she shared them and was worried she was not getting enough food, or enough of the right diet, for proper development of her child. "Those things are hard to find," Robin went on. "I'd almost like it better if they ran from me. As it is, I can walk within a meter of one and never see it."

  The discussion went on and on, and nothing was changed when it was over. Robin went out every other day, half as much as she wanted to and a thousand times more often than Chris liked. Every moment she was gone he saw her lying broken at the bottom of a pit, unconscious, unable to shout for help, or too far away to be heard. Every moment she was in camp she squirmed, paced, shouted at them, apologized, shouted some more. She accused him of acting like her mother, treating her like a child, and he retorted that she was acting like a child, and a wild, willful one at that, and each knew both allegations were true, and neither could do anything about it. Robin ached to strike out for help but could not so long as they needed her to hunt, and Chris wanted to go nearly as badly but could not say so for Valiha's sake, so they both seethed and fought, and there seemed to be no solution to the problem until the day Robin angrily plunged her knife into one of the gray teats and was rewarded with a faceful of sticky white liquid.

  "It is the milk of Gaea," Valiha said happily and immediately drained the waterskin Robin had filled. "I had not expected to find it so deep. In my homeland it flows two to ten meters below the ground."

  "What do you mean, the milk of Gaea?" Chris asked.

  "I don't know how to explain further. It is simply that: Gaea's milk. And it means my worries are over. My son will grow strong on this. Gaea's milk contains everything needed for survival."

  "What about us?" Robin asked. "Can pe ... can humans drink it, too?"

  "Humans thrive on it. It is the universal nutrient."

  "What's it taste like, Robin?" Chris asked.

  "I don't know. You didn't think I'd just drink it, did you?"

  "The humans I know who have tried it say it has a bitter flavor," Valiha said. "I myself find some of that but believe its quality varies from one rev to the next. When Gaea is pleased, it becomes sweeter. In times of Gaea's anger, the milk thickens and cloys but is still nourishing."

  "How would you say she's feeling now?" Robin asked.

  Valiha upended the skin again, letting the last drops fall into her mouth. She tilted her head thoughtfully.

  "Worried, I would say."

  Robin laughed. "What would Gaea have to worry about?"

  "Cirocco."

  "What do you mean?"

  "What I said. If the Wizard still li
ves, and if we live to tell her of Gaby's last moments and her last words, Gaea will tremble."

  Robin looked dubious, and Chris privately agreed with her. He did not see how Cirocco could ever present a threat to Gaea.

  But the significance of her discovery had not been lost on Robin.

  "Now I can go get help," she said, beginning an argument that would last for three days and that Chris knew from the start he was certain to lose.

  "The rope. Are you sure you have enough rope?"

  "How can I know how much is enough?"

  "What about matches? Did you get the matches?"

  "I have them right here." Robin patted the pocket of her coat, tied to the top of the pack they had improvised from one of Valiha's saddlebags. "Chris, stop it. We've been over the supplies a dozen times."

  Chris knew she was right, knew that his last-minute fussing was simply to delay her departure. It had been four days since his final capitulation.

  They had located the nearest of Gaea's teats and laboriously moved Valiha. Though it was only 300 meters from the old camp in a straight line, that line had crossed two steep ravines. They had taken her half a kilometer north to find passable land, then a kilometer south, then back again.

  "You have the waterskin?"

  "Right here." She slung it over her shoulder and reached for her pack. "I have everything, Chris."

  He helped her get it settled on her back. She looked so small when it was in place. She was weighted down with gear and reminded him with an irresistible protective tug of a toddler dressed to go out and play in the snow. He loved her at that moment and wanted to take care of her. That was exactly what he could not do, what she did not want him to do, so he turned away before she could see the look on his face. He did not want to get the argument started again.

  But he could not keep his mouth shut.

  "You'll remember to mark the trail."

  Wordlessly she held up the small pick, then slipped it back into a belt loop. It was a wonderful belt, fashioned from cured cucumber hide by Valiha's skilled hands. The plan was that when Valiha got well enough to move with crutches, she and Chris would follow the trail Robin had blazed. Chris did not like to think about it, for if Robin had not made it out and returned with help long before that, it would be because calamity had befallen her.

  "If you stop finding the teats, you can go three sleeps beyond the point when your waterskin is empty, then turn back if you don't find another."

  "Four. Four sleeps."

  "Three."

  "We agreed on four." She looked at him and sighed. "All right. Three, if it'll make you happy." They stood looking at each other for a moment; then Robin went to him and put one arm around his waist.

  "Take care of yourself," she said.

  "I was about to say the same thing." They laughed nervously; then Chris embraced her. There was an awkward moment when he did not know if she wished to be kissed; then he decided he didn't care and kissed her anyway. She hugged him, then backed away with her eyes averted. Then she did look at him, smiled, and started moving away.

  "Bye, Valiha," she said.

  "Good-bye, little one," Valiha called back. "I'd say, 'May Gaea be with you', but I think you prefer to go alone."

  "That's exactly right." Robin laughed. "Let her stay in the hub and worry about the Wizard. I'll see you people in about a kilorev."

  Chris watched her out of sight. He thought he saw her stop and wave but could not be sure of it. Soon there was nothing but the bobbing light of the three glowbirds she carried in a cage woven of reeds, and then even that was gone.

  Gaea's milk was indeed bitter, made all the more so by Robin's departure. Its taste did change slightly from day to day, but not nearly enough to provide the variety Chris craved. In less than a hectorev he gagged at the thought of it, began to wonder if starvation might be better than subsisting on the filthy, revolting stuff.

  He went foraging as often as he could, careful never to leave Valiha alone for too long. On these trips he gathered wood and from time to time brought back one of the indigenous animals. That was always a signal for rejoicing, as Valiha would bring out her hoarded spices and prepare each one in a different way. It soon became clear to him that she was eating only sparingly of the things she cooked. Chris was sure it was not because she preferred the milk. He thought many times of insisting she take her share but never had the determination actually to say it. He ate his portions like a miser, making the meal last for hours, and always took more when it was offered. He did not like himself for doing it but was unable to stop.

  Time blurred. All the sharp edges of time's passage had been worn away since the day he arrived in Gaea. Since before that, actually; the trip in the spaceship had begun his detachment from Earthly time. Then there had been the freezing of duration into one eternal afternoon in Hyperion, the slow crawl into night and once again into day. Now the process was complete.

  He started going crazy again, after a long hiatus that had lasted from before the Carnival in Crius until his arrival in the cavern. He thought of it that way now-as going crazy rather than having an "episode," as his doctors had so mincingly called it-because it was simply what happened. He no longer believed Gaea could cure him even if she wanted to, and he could think of no reason why she should want to. He was certainly doomed to go through life as a collection of maniacal strangers, and he would have to cope with them as best he could.

  That was actually easier to do in the cavern than it had ever been. He often literally did not notice it. He would become aware of himself in a place he did not recall coming to and could not tell if he had gone crazy or had simply been wool-gathering. Each time it happened he would anxiously turn to Valiha to see if he had done her any harm. He never did. In fact, often she would look happier than she had been in days. That was another thing that made the craziness easier: Valiha did not care if he went crazy and actually seemed to like him better that way.

  He wondered giddily if this was the cure Gaea had in mind. Down here craziness did not matter. All on his own he had found his way into a situation where he was as normal and as well as anyone.

  With no discussion between them, Valiha took over the chore of notching the calendar after each of his sleeps. As much as anything else he took that as a sign that he was indeed suffering lapses into manic states. He did not know what he did during those times. He did not ask Valiha, and she never spoke of it.

  They spoke of everything else. The chores around camp took up no more than an "hour" each "day," and that left anywhere from nine to forty-nine hours with little to do but talk. At first they spoke of themselves, with the result that Valiha soon ran out of things to say. He had forgotten how impossibly young she was. Though she was a mature adult, her experience was woefully small. But it did not take much longer for Chris to exhaust his life as well, and they turned to other things. They spoke of hopes and fears, of philosophy-Titanide and human. They invented games and made up stories. Valiha turned out to be only mediocre at games but great at stories. She had an imagination and a perspective just enough askew from the human to enable her to astonish him time and again with her reckless, disturbing insights into things she should not understand. He began to see as he never had before what it was to be so nearly human, yet not human. He found himself pitying all those billions of humans who had lived before contact with Gaea, who could never have communed with this improbable engaging creature.

  Valiha's patience amazed him. He was going crazy, yet his freedom of movement was much greater than hers. He began to understand why it was the common practice to kill horses with injured legs: the frame was not designed for reclining. A Titanide's legs were much more flexible than those of an Earthly horse, yet she had a terrible time. For half a kilorev she could do little but lie on her side. When the bones began to knit, she started sitting up but could not maintain the position long because her stiff, splinted forelegs had to be straight out in front of her.

  His first hint that she was fin
ding it difficult to bear was when she mentioned in passing that Titanides being treated in a hospital would be suspended in a sling with the injured legs hanging down. He was astonished.

  "Why didn't you tell me that before?" he asked.

  "I didn't see what good it would do, since-"

  "Horseshit," he said, and waited for her to smile. It had become his favorite expletive, something he used to tease her gently by pretending to bitch about his daily chore of cleaning up. But this time she did not smile.

  "I think I could rig something like that," he said. "You'd stand on your hind legs, right? So some kind of sling that went behind and between your front legs...I think I could do that." He waited, and she said nothing. She would not even look at him. "What's the matter, Valiha?"

  "I don't want to be any trouble," she said almost inaudibly, and began to weep.

  He had never seen her cry before. What an idiot he had been, to assume that because she had not cried, everything was fine. He went to her and found her eager for his touch. It was awkward at first, comforting someone so huge, and the position enforced on her by her injury did not simplify things. Yet he soon relaxed and could soothe her with no thought to anything but the moment. She had really been asking so little all this time, he realized, and he had not given her even that.

  "Don't worry about it," he whispered in the long, terete shell of her ear.

  "I've been so stupid," she moaned. "It was stupid to break my legs."

  "You can't blame yourself for an accident."

  "But I remember it. I don't remember much, but I remember that. I was so frightened. I don't know what happened back there ... back there on the stairs. I remember a terrible pain, and all I could think of was running. I ran and ran, and when I came to the ravine, I jumped, even though I knew I'd never make it to the other side."

  "We all do crazy things when we're frightened," he reasoned.