Wizard

by John Varley

  "Yes, but now you're stuck here because of me."

  "We're both stuck here," he admitted. "I won't pretend that this is where I want to be; that would be silly. Neither of us wants to be here. But so long as you're hurt, I'll stick by you wherever you are. And I don't blame you for anything that happened because the simple truth is none of it was your fault."

  She said nothing for a long time as her shoulders shook quietly. When she had stopped crying, she sniffed loudly and looked into his eyes.

  "This is where I want to be," she said.

  "What do you mean?" He drew back slightly, but she held him.

  "I mean I love you very much."

  "I don't think you really love me."

  She shook her head. "I know what you mean, and it's not true. I love you always, when you're quiet and when you rage. There are so many parts to you. I think perhaps I am the only one who has ever known them all. And I love them all."

  "A few doctors claimed to know them all," Chris said unhappily. When Valiha did not respond, he went to the question he had been afraid to ask for a long time. "Do I make love to you when I'm crazy?"

  "We make love in glorious tumult. You are my virile stallion, and I your erotomanic androgyne. We have anterior romps and frontal communion, and then we diddle around in the middle. Your penis-"

  "Stop, stop! I didn't ask for the dirty details."

  "I said nothing rhyparographic," Valiha said virtuously.

  "I don't ... what did you do, eat a dictionary?" he asked.

  "I must know all English words for the experiment," she said.

  "What ... never mind, tell me about that later. I knew I made love to you once. I just wanted to know if I still do."

  "Only twenty or thirty revs ago."

  "And it doesn't bother you that I do it only when I'm crazy?"

  She considered it. "I really have had a hard time understanding what you mean by crazy. Sometimes you lose some inhibitions-another word I have trouble with. This gets you into trouble with human women who don't wish to copulate with you and with any human who thwarts your desires. I have no trouble because if you ever become obstreperous, I simply pick you up by your hair and hold you at arm's length. When you calm down, I reason with you. You respond to this very well."

  Chris laughed, and it sounded hollow even to him.

  "You amaze me," he said. "I've been studied by the best doctors on Earth. They couldn't do a thing with me but give me some pills that are damn near useless. They'll be fascinated to hear your cure. Pick him up by the hair, hold him at arm's length, and reason with him. Ah, sweet reason."

  "It works," she said defensively. "I suppose it would be efficacious only in a society where everyone was larger than you."

  "My behavior at those times doesn't put you off?" he asked. "Titanides never assault one another, do they? I would expect you to see me... well, repulsive when I'm acting like that. It's so un-Titanide."

  "I find most human behavior un-Titanide," Valiha said. "Yours when you are 'crazy' becomes perhaps a trifle more aggressive than is normal, but all your passions are magnified, love as well as aggression."

  "I'm not in love with you, Valiha,"

  "Yes, you are. Even this part of you, the sane part, loves me with a Titanide's love: unchanging, but too large to give all of it to one person. You have told me so when you were crazy. You told me your sane self would not admit his love."

  "He lied to you."

  "You would not lie to me."

  "But I'm here to be cured of all that!" he said, in mounting frustration.

  "I know," she moaned, once more on the verge of tears. "I'm so afraid Gaea will cure you and you'll never know your love for me!"

  Chris thought this conversation was as crazy as any he had ever heard. Maybe he was crazy: permanently. It was within the realm of possibility. But he did not want to see her cry, he did like her, and suddenly it did not make sense to resist her any longer. He kissed her. She responded instantly, alarming him with her strength and passion, then paused and put her mouth close to his ear. "Don't worry," she said. "I'll be gentle." He smiled.

  It was not easy, but eventually he made the sling she needed to rest comfortably while her legs healed. Finding three poles long and strong enough among the stunted shrubs that passed for trees in the cavern took quite a while, but when he had them, he soon fashioned a tall tripod. There was just enough rope to make the sling and pad it with material from clothes they didn't need in the warm cave. When it was finished, Valiha carefully pulled herself up with her hands, and Chris positioned her legs through the loops. She settled down in it and heaved a sigh of contentment. Thereafter she spent most of her time with her front hooves dangling a few centimeters from the ground.

  But not all her time. In the sling, it was impossible for them to make frontal love, and that activity quickly became an important part of their lives. Chris was soon wondering how he had survived so long without it, then realized that, of course, he hadn't, he had been making love with Valiha all along. Now he felt he would most probably have succumbed to despair and simply wasted away, starving in the midst of plenty. Even Gaea's milk tasted a little better, and he wondered if it was his mood and not Her Majesty's that made the difference.

  Valiha was not like a human woman. It would have been pointless even to try to say if she was better or not as good; she was different. Her frontal vagina fitted him within lubricious tolerances too close to be the result of cosmic happenstance. He could almost hear Gaea chuckling. What a joke she had played on humanity, to arrange it so the first intelligent nonhumans the race encountered could play the same games humans played, and with the same equipment. Valiha was a vast, fleshy playground, from the tip of her broad nose across acres of mottled yellow skin to the softness just above the hooves of her hind legs. She was completely human-on a large scale-in the caress of her hands, the mass of her breasts, the taste of her skin and her mouth and her clitoris. And she was at the same time wildly alien in her bulging knees, in the smooth, hard muscles of her back, hips, and thighs, and in the imposing slither of her penis as it emerged moist from its sheath. When he kissed her in the hollow behind her expressive donkey ears, she smelled human.

  He was at first reluctant to admit the presence of most of her body. He tried to pretend she existed from the head to the fore-crotch and ignored the sexual superabundance she contained. Valiha led him gently to experience the surprising possibilities of her other two thirds. Part of his hesitation was a lingering misconception he had fought when he found it in others and had not realized he shared: part of her body was equine, meaning she was part horse, and one does not become intimate with animals. He had to discard all that. He found it surprisingly easy. In many ways there was less equine about her than there was simian in him. Another hurdle had been stated early by Valiha herself: she was an androgyne-though gynandroid was the closer of two words never meant to cover Titanides. Chris had never been homosexual. Valiha made him see that it meant nothing when making love with her. She was all things, and it made no difference that her anterior organs were so huge. He had always known that coitus was only a small part of making love.

  Titanide crutches were long, stout poles with padded crescents to fit the armpits, little different from the sort used by humans for thousands of years. Chris had no trouble making a pair.

  At first Valiha walked only fifty meters before resting, then a similar distance back to the tent. Soon she felt she was able to handle more. Chris struck the tent and packed everything on his back. It was a large burden, especially the poles of her tripod sling. He would never have attempted it but for the low gravity. Even with that advantage it was hard.

  Valiha walked by rolling her shoulders, lifting first one crutch, then the other, following with her hind legs. It put an unaccustomed strain on her shoulders, her human back, and the right-angle bend of her spine. Chris had no idea what her skeleton looked like in there; he was sure only that her vertebral structure must be very different fr
om his to enable her to turn her head around and do some of the other improbable contortions he had seen. But she was enough like him to get backaches. The end of each day's journey found her grimacing in pain. The muscles in the bend of her back were like stiff cables. Massage was not enough, though Chris tried. In the end he had to pound her with his fists to give her any relief, as though he were tenderizing meat.

  They toughened up, though both knew it would never get easy. For a while each trek was a little longer than the previous day until they reached a maximum Chris judged at about a kilometer and a half. Each day they passed many of the marks made by Robin in her earlier traverse. There was no way to tell how old they were and no use discussing what they both were thinking. By any accounting she should have been back with help long ago.

  They struggled on, and each day the question grew larger in their minds.

  Where was Robin?

  38 Bravura

  It was no longer a matter of admitting Chris had been right. Robin knew that, had known it for quite a long time. She had had no business going off on her own in a place like this.

  She tried once again to move her arm. This time she got some results: one finger twitched slightly, and she felt a rough texture beneath it. She swallowed carefully. One of her seemingly endless fears now was drowning in her own saliva. It could happen. Even worse things could happen. She might find, when she got her body back, that it was broken. In that case she would lie here in the dark forever, and while the bulk of that time would pass in peaceful nirvana, the first few weeks promised to be ugly.

  How odd to realize that less than a year ago she had been nineteen, and fearless. It did not seem like such a great age, yet it was ancient for someone who could stumble tomorrow and fall a thousand meters to her death.

  There was no reason death had to wait until tomorrow. While she lay helpless, the Night Bird could creep up on her and... do whatever it did to helpless witches.

  Her breath caught in her throat, and she once more strained to turn her head just the few centimeters that would enable her to see if, as she suspected, the Night Bird was actually crouching on the ledge a few meters above her head. Once again she failed to see it, but a drop of sweat ran from her brow to sting her eye.

  You were supposed to whistle, she remembered. Then: that's ridiculous. You're nineteen years old, maybe twenty already. You haven't been afraid of the Night Bird since you were six. Nevertheless, if she could have puckered, she would have warbled like a canary.

  She was half convinced that the faraway sounds she had been hearing since shortly after she left Chris and Valiha were echoes of her own footsteps, the faint whispers of glowbirds shifting on their perches, the distant sounds of falling water. But being half convinced leaves a lot of room for the imagination, and the picture of the Night Bird had leaped from her childhood memories to shriek and gibber just out of her sight.

  She did not believe it was the Night Bird; even in her present state she knew no such animal had ever existed, either here or on Earth. It was a story little girls told each other and nothing more. But the thing about the Night Bird was that no one ever saw it. It swooped down on wings of shadow and always attacked from behind; it could change its size and shape to conform to whatever dark place was available, hiding with equal ease in a gloomy cubicle, under a bunk, or even in a dusty corner. Whatever was trailing her-if there was anything-seemed to belong to that dreamworld.

  She saw nothing. From time to time she thought she heard the sound of claws snapping together, the rattle of a ghastly beak.

  Robin knew there were more living things in the cavern than the glowbirds, the cucumbers, shrimp, and lettuce, and the various plant species. There were tiny glass lizards with from two to several hundred legs. They liked heat and had grown more abundant as she moved east, so that her first morning chore was to rid her sleeping bag of the ones that had crept in. There were things like starfish and snails with shells as varied as snowflakes. Once she had seen a glowbird in flight snatched away by some unseen flier, and another time she had found something that might have been part of the ubiquitous body of Gaea denuded of her rocky covering, or could as well have been a creature beside which a blue whale would have seemed no more than a minnow. All she knew for sure was that it was warm and fleshy and, luckily, somnolent.

  If all these things lived in a cavern that was, at first glance, endless kilometers of rocky sterility, why not the Night Bird?

  Once more she tried to look over her shoulder, this time succeeding in lifting her chin a little. Soon she was able to twitch her feet. But long after she could move her legs and arms, she remained perfectly still, her feet almost a meter lower than her head, to be sure she was completely in control before she dared try to move from the slope where she had fallen.

  When she did move, it was with infinite caution. She edged backward on her heels and elbows until she felt the ground leveling out, then turned to hug the warm rock. Gravity was a wonderful thing when it was pressing you down against a stable surface, not so nice when it tried to pluck you from an uncertain perch. She had seldom thought about gravity before, as either friend or foe.

  When her trembling stopped, she crept to the edge of the ravine where she had lain helpless for so many hours. One of her glowbirds had been crushed beneath her when she fell. The other was flickering, near death, but it cast enough light for her to look down and see the bottom, no more than a meter and a half from where her feet had been.

  When she came to Gaea, she would have laughed at such a distance. She did not laugh now. After all, it did not take a hundred meters to kill; it did not even take ten. One or two would do, if she hit right.

  She took stock of first her body, then her equipment. There was a sharp pain in her side, but after careful probing she decided no ribs were broken. There was blood dried under her nose; she had smacked it when her legs gave way, just before starting her terrifying, feet-first slide into the unknown. Aside from that and some scrapes and a torn fingernail, she was all right. An inventory of the equipment she had kept after several episodes of weeding revealed nothing missing. Her glowbird cage was crushed, but she no longer had any animals to keep in it, and she could make a new one from reeds and vines at her next camp.

  She had lost track of how many times she had brushed disaster, was to some degree unsure of just what counted as a brush. Even if she eliminated all the times she had felt her hands slipping on the rope, the momentary losses of footing, the falling rocks that hit only a few meters away, the quicksand that turned out to be only waist-deep, the flash flood that came from nowhere and thundered through a gully she had been about to cross ... even if she counted only the times she had actually felt the grasp of death as a cold, malefic presence, as though its clammy hand had brushed her and left its spoor of fear on her soul, it was too many times. She was lucky to be alive, and she knew it. There had been a time when danger exhilarated her. That time was no more.

  Each day brought its new fear. There were so many by now that she was no longer even ashamed of them; she was too beaten down, too crushed by the collapse of the person she had thought herself to be. If anyone ever emerged from this cavern, she knew it would not be Robin the Nine-fingered but some subdued stranger.

  It had not been easy to be Robin, but she was a person to respect. No one had ever pushed her around. Once again she wondered why she kept on. It would be more honorable, she felt, to live her life here where no one could see her. To emerge into the light would be to expose her shame.

  But sometime later, urged on by a force she did not understand and would have resisted if she had known how, she got up and resumed her long walk east.

  It had seemed so simple when she explained it to Chris and Valiha. She would make her way through the cavern, heading always toward the east, until she reached Thea. Of course, that was assuming the direction they were calling east really was east, but if it wasn't, there was little she could do about it.

  But it soon became apparent she
would have to make more leaps of faith than that first, basic one. She had to assume that the cavern, which was one or two kilometers across at the west end and reached into the unguessable east, would keep going in that direction. And there was no reason to assume that. By the pinpoint lights of the glowbirds she was able to tell the general trend of the passage for two or three kilometers in each direction. It seemed to average out as a straight line, but there were so many twists and curves she could not be sure.

  There was another possibility. It was impossible to tell if the cavern was rising or descending. They had started at a level she knew to be five kilometers beneath the surface because Cirocco had said so. She also knew Gaea's outer skin was thirty kilometers thick. There was room to miss Thea's chamber by quite a margin.

  Two simple instruments could have banished her disorientation. To go up in Gaea was to become lighter, while descending would have made her weigh fractionally more. A sensitive spring scale could have measured those differences. Her own senses were inadequate. The gyroscopic Gaean clock could have been used as a compass because when its axis was oriented north and south, it no longer turned. By aligning the clock until it stopped and then turning it ninety degrees, she could learn east and west by whether the clock ran backward or forward. But neither Gaby nor Cirocco had ever needed a spring scale in her travels, so they had not packed one. And the clock had stayed with Hornpipe.

  She wasted a great deal of time trying to fix her position and direction using simple equipment, and ended up being completely baffled. In particular, it should have been possible to determine east and west by the behavior of falling objects. She tried setting up long plumb lines and dropping things, with inconclusive results. So in the end she blundered on, lost in the dark. She had been doing it for at least three kilorevs, possibly more. She followed the north wall. It had seemed a good idea until she came to the end of a passage, no more than twenty sleeps into her trip. She had followed the south wall back until it began to bend and kept bending through 180 degrees, and she realized she had entered a side passage without knowing it. There was nothing to do but go back across the passage until she reached the marks she had made to guide Chris and Valiha, cross out one and chisel in a new one, directing them to the other passage. Until it, too, ended abruptly three sleeps later.