by John Varley
But she saw gray light about the time the glowbird was becoming useless. She tossed the cage away and headed for it.
It was a strange sensation to see so far again. The weather was clear in Thea. The air was crisp and biting with an intermittent wind gusting up to five or ten kilometers per hour. It sucked the heat from her skin where it touched. She could see Twilight to her left, so that was west, meaning she had to circle the cable before she could go south.
Unless she was remembering wrong. It would be wise to consider it again before starting around the cable on a trip she would have to retrace if Ophion were north of the cable. She had had enough backtracking, and this time she had to consider her toes, which were already getting cold. She remembered that Thea was dominated by a rugged mountain range that reached from the north to the south highlands. Ophion, which kept to a nearly central course through the region, divided into a north and south fork somewhere near the middle of Thea. The central cable attached near the point where the streams reunited. For most of its length the south branch flowed beneath one of the two glacial sheets that covered most of Thea and would be nearly impossible to find. But the north branch was free of permanent ice. At times, during some part of Gaea's thirty-year climatic cycle, it thawed, and a narrow valley in central Thea experienced a brief, bleak springtime. Now was not one of those times. Still, even frozen, it should not be too hard to find. It would be relatively level and would be at the bottom of a wide valley.
The more she thought about it, the more she felt her first recollection had been wrong. The ground before her sloped gently down. It was too dark to tell if the river was ahead, but she now thought it was. And what the hell? The chances were even, and this way she would not have to begin by circling the cable. She started off to the north.
The wind picked up before she had gone half a kilometer. Soon snow was whipping from the tops of high drifts, stinging her cheeks. Once more she stopped to rearrange her clothing, this time wrapping her blanket around herself and fashioning a hood which she could hold tight at her neck and thus protect everything but her eyes from the wind.
While she sat, something approached her. She never did get a clear look at it through the blowing snow, but it was white, about the size of a polar bear, and had massive arms and a mouthful of teeth. It sat watching her, and she watched it until it decided to move in for a closer look. Possibly it wanted to say hello, but she didn't wait to find out. It absorbed her first bullet with no change of expression but paused to look down at a spreading red stain on its fur. When it kept coming, she emptied the magazine, and it folded up like clean white linen and did not move again. She fought the shaking in her hands as she reloaded the gun with her last clip, cursing under her breath and blowing on her fingers to make them bend. The creature had still not moved when she was through, but she did not try to approach it. She made a wide detour and resumed her downhill slog.
In a way it was good that she had not thought of what to do once she reached the river. If she had, she might still be huddled under the cable. Better to set one's goal a few steps at a time, she thought, as she stood on the wide, flat, windy plain that must be the frozen Ophion. She looked east, then west. Each direction looked equally impossible. She was in the dead center of Thea, with more than 200 kilometers to go in either direction before she reached daylight. To the east was Metis, which looked warm and inviting but was not, according to Cirocco. Metis was an enemy of Gaea, though not so dangerous as Tethys. West, of course, was Tethys, and the desert. Somehow it did not look so bad from here. She thought of the baking heat of the sands, then of the wraiths beneath those sands, and turned east. There had really been no choice, but pretending there was had given her a few minutes to stand still and not think about her feet.
The terrible thing was that she was burning up as she froze to death. She could not feel her toes while sweat ran down her back and arms. The exertion was keeping her warm-in fact, overheated-but the wind was killing her. There was nothing to do for either condition; she kept walking.
When she stumbled several hours later and then jerked her head up with the realization she had almost fallen asleep, she forced herself to take stock. She had enough experience by now with the drugged, careless rapture so common among people who tried to live in Gaea without a clock that she knew she was far gone under its spell. She had no idea how long she had been awake, but it was probably something like two or three days. She had already been tired when she reached the corridor that led to Thea, and she had been exerting herself continually since that time. It was possible to fall asleep standing up, she knew, because she had done it several times in her traverse of the cavern. She had to find a place to sleep, and fast.
Nothing looked promising. Trying to get her brain to work, she suddenly recalled something about burrowing in the snow. It didn't make sense, but then sleeping out in the wind sounded even crazier.
At the edge of the frozen river was a place where snow had drifted eight meters high. She went to the downwind side and began to hack at the snowbank. It was hard and crusty on the surface, but the digging quickly became easier. She scooped out the snow with both arms, working feverishly to hollow out something big enough to take her body. When she had it, she crawled in, fitfully tried to pack snow around the entrance, then curled up as tightly as she could and was instantly asleep.
She had thought "chattering teeth" was a figure of speech, and not a very good one, like knees knocking when one is afraid. Then she realized her knees were knocking, too. Her whole body was quivering, and she could not stop it. She began to cough, and a lot of wet matter came up before she was through. She was soaking wet and burning with fever. She knew she was going to die.
That thought was enough to bring her scrambling out of her cubby to stand unsteadily on the riverbank. She coughed again, could not stop until she threw up the bitter contents of a nearly empty stomach. She was surprised to find herself on her knees.
She was even more surprised to find herself walking over the ice. Looking back, she could not find the spot where she had stopped. She must have been moving for some time, and she had no recollection of it.
Things began to fade in and out as she walked. Her vision would narrow as if she were looking through a long pipe; then the edges would redden, and she would have to pick herself up from where she had fallen. Her outline looked comical as she stood there swaying, regarding the human cookie-cutter shape she had made. Snow angels, they were called, and she had no idea how she knew that.
Sometimes people walked beside her. She had a long conversation with Gaby and did not remember she was dead until long after. She fired a shot at what could have been another snow monster or just a gust of snow-laden wind. The gun was deliciously warm for a few minutes after that, and she thought of firing it again until she realized it was pointed at her stomach. When she tried to put it back in her pocket, some of her skin came away, stuck to the metal handle. Part of the tail of one of her snake tattoos went with it. Even worse, the lashes of one eye froze together, and she wasn't seeing all that well out of the open one.
The flashing light, when she saw it, was a bother at first. It irritated her because she could not explain it. She wanted no part of paranormal phenomena like the ghost of Gaby or hallucinations of Chris and Valiha, and she was sure this light was something like that. If she went there, she'd probably find Hautbois all saddled up and ready to gallop away with her.
On second thought, why not? If she were going to die, she might as well do it with a friend. So what if the Titanide was dead? She was not prejudiced. They would have a good laugh, and Hautbois would have to admit that there really was a life after death, that she and her whole race had been wrong about that. She laughed at the thought and struck out over the low rise where the light had been.
She was considerably sobered when she reached it, aware of how dangerously close to complete delirium she was getting. She had to keep her wits about her. The light was real, and though she had no idea what it
might be, if it wasn't her salvation, then she had none.
Her vision was getting worse. If she had not run into the metal leg, she might well have blundered past it and into oblivion. But the thing rang when her head hit it, and she staggered up one more time, dazed, and peered up into the darkness. A red light was flashing up there, once every ten or fifteen seconds. She could dimly make out a building set on four stilts tied together with metal girders like a fire lookout tower. The tower was about ten meters high. There was a ladder with wooden rungs that went all the way to the top.
Something caught her eye beside the ladder. It was a small sign set just below eye level. She brushed snow away and read it:
PLAUGET CONSTRUCTION COMPANY REFUGE NUMBER ELEVEN
"WELCOME, TRAVELERS!"
-Gaby Plauget, Prop.
Robin blinked at it, read it through several times to see if it would fade away as Gaby's ghost had. It didn't. She licked her lips and fumbled around, trying to get a grip on the wooden rungs. Her hands would not work. Still, it was thoughtful of Gaby to have made the ladder from wood, she thought, recalling the terrible cold of the metal gun butt.
So she hooked her arms over the rungs and dragged herself up that way. She had to look down to see if her feet were on the steps; she could not feel them. Three steps and rest, then five and rest again, then three, then two. Then not even one. She could not raise herself any higher. She looked down and saw that she was almost halfway up, so she must have blacked out and lost count. She looked up and it might as well have been Mount Everest.
So close.
The door opened above her. A face peered down over a narrow ledge. She hoped it was Cirocco because she could believe that; the Wizard had business in Thea-good, sound, logical business. If it were anyone else, she would know it was a mirage, a phantom.
"Robin? Is that you?"
She smelled coffee and something cooking on the stove. That was too good to be true, and no, it was not Cirocco. It was so ridiculous there was no point in even bothering to look back because the face she finally recognized belonged to Trini, her lover a million years ago back in Titantown. At that instant she knew it was all a dream, probably the tower as well as Trini.
She let go and landed on her back in a deep snowdrift.
39 The Outpost
Cirocco's money had been piling up on Earth for more than seventy-five years. There were the royalties from her scholarly works and travelogs of Gaea and from her autobiography, I Chose Adventure (publisher's title, not her own), which had been a best seller and the subject of two movies and a television series. In addition, she owned a piece of the cocaine trade which was quite lucrative. There was even the NASA salary accrued during the voyage of Ringmaster, until her resignation.
She had hired a Swiss investment counselor and a Brazilian lawyer and given them two instructions: to keep her ahead of inflation and to avoid confiscation of assets by communist governments. She had hinted that she would like her money to go into firms dealing in space travel and that she would not like it to be used in ways contrary to the interests of the United States. Her lawyer had suggested the last requirement was old-fashioned and almost impossible to define anymore, and she wrote back saying that Earth was full of lawyers. He got the point, and his descendants were still working for her.
After that she forgot about it. Twice a year she got a report, which she would open to glance at the bottom line, then throw away. Her fortune weathered two depressions when countless short-lived investors were wiped out. Her agents knew she could look to the long term and knew she would not get excited by temporary losses. There had been bad years, but the overall trend had been relentless growth.
It all had been a meaningless abstraction. Why should she care to know that she owned X kilograms of gold, Y percent of corporation Y Prime, and Z deutsche marks in rare postage stamps and works of art? If the report arrived on a dull day, she might spend a few minutes chuckling over the lists of assets, from airliners to Airedales, from Renoirs to rental housing. Only once did she send a letter, when she discovered by accident that she owned the Empire State Building and that it was scheduled for demolition. She told them to restore it again, instead, and lost millions during the next two years. After that she made it all back, and her agents undoubtedly thought she was a financial genius, but she had spared the building because her mother had taken her to the top when she was seven years old, and it was one of her fondest memories of her mother.
She had thought from time to time of willing her fortune to someone or something, but she was so removed from Earthly concerns she had no idea where it would do any good. She and Gaby used to laugh at thoughts of picking a name from the phone bank and dumping it all on one person or of endowing homes for unwed goldfish.
But now it was coming in handy after all.
Trini saw the plane when it was still quite a distance away by the glare of its landing lights. She heard the high whine of its tiny jet engine much later. She was not sure she approved. Cirocco's equipment had not yet arrived when Trini took up her vigil at Refuge Eleven; she had blimped in as a decent person should. One of the reasons she had come to Gaea was to escape the pressures of mechanical civilization. Like most humans in Gaea, she viewed any but the simplest technology with deep suspicion. But she understood the Wizard's reasons. Cirocco was waging all-out war on the buzz bombs, and Trim did not doubt they would soon be wiped from the skies.
The plane crawled through the last meters before touchdown, its exhaust raising clouds of snow. Ophion did not look like a promising landing field, hummocked as it was with drifted snow, yet the little plane made it easily in less than thirty meters of runway. The low gravity and Gaea's thick atmosphere provided a lot of lift, making the plane spry as a butterfly. It had transparent wings of plastic film. When the snow settled, Trini could see dark shapes embedded in them and assumed they were lasers or machine guns. It was a six-seat puddle jumper modified for aerial combat.
Cirocco got out from the pilot's seat, and someone else, about her size, from the other side.
Trini went back to her tiny stove and turned up the gas burner under the coffeepot. She had volunteered for the duty-though she and all the other humans in Gaea owed no allegiance to the Wizard-when she heard Cirocco was looking for human help for a rescue mission involving Robin of the Coven. Trini had not been able to stop thinking of Robin since the day she left, and thought waiting in the refuge was more in keeping with her talents than going down the stairs to see Thea. She had been brought in with crates of food, blankets, medical supplies, and bottled gas to prepare the long-abandoned way station for occupancy should any of the missing people show up. Cirocco had helped her get the beacon working again, but aside from that, there had not been much to do. The structure was still sound, and it kept out the wind. She had spent her time at the window, reading, but had been away from it when she felt the tower vibrate slightly with the sound of someone climbing the ladder.
Now it was vibrating again, more noticeably, as Cirocco and the other person hurried up outside. She opened the door for them. Cirocco went immediately to Robin, who was sleeping beneath a big stack of blankets. She knelt beside her and touched her face, looked back with concern.
"She's awfully hot."
"She drank some broth," Trini said, wishing she could say more.
Cirocco's passenger was a familiar figure to Trini and anyone else who had spent time in Titantown. He was Larry Ollara, the only human doctor in Gaea. Nobody cared that he was there because he was barred from practicing on Earth, and nobody asked why. He probably wasn't much at open-heart surgery, but could set a bone or dress a burn, and he charged nothing. He carried a genuine black bag without a gram of electronic equipment in it. This he now set down while removing his fur coat. Beneath it he was a big man with a black beard and rosy cheeks, more of a lumberjack than a surgeon. Cirocco stood back while he made his examination. He took his time about it.
"She may lose those toes," he announced at one po
int.
"Nonsense," Cirocco said, which struck Trini as a funny thing to say.
She really looked at the Wizard for the first time and was surprised to see she was wearing what she had always worn for as long as Trini had known of her: the faded brick red Mexican blanket with a hole cut in the center. It draped carelessly around her body, reached to the knees, and was modest enough when she stood still but not when she moved. She was barefoot. Snow still clung to the sides of her feet but was melting rapidly.
What was she? Trini wondered. She had known for a long time that Cirocco was different but had assumed she was still human. Now she was not so sure. Perhaps she was something more, but the differences were subtle. The only visible one was something she shared with Gaby Plauget. All the dark-skinned humans in Gaea had been born that way. Yet Gaby and Cirocco always looked freshly tanned.
At last Larry turned away from her and took the mug of coffee Trini offered him. He smiled his thanks and sat with the white mug warming his hands.
"Well?" Cirocco asked.
"I'd like to get her out of here," he said. "But I don't believe we should move her. I don't suppose I could do much more for her back at Titantown, at that. She's got some frostbite, and she's got pneumonia. But she's young and strong, and that Titanide drug I gave her is hell on pneumonia, and she should make it all right, with the proper care."
"You'll stay here to see that she gets it," Cirocco announced. Larry shook his head.
"Impossible. I have a practice in Titantown to take care of. You can care for her, or Trini can."
"I said-" Cirocco stopped herself with an effort that was visible on her face. She turned away for a moment. Larry looked interested; no more. Trini knew he was impossible to talk into anything. Once he had decided what his duty was, he would do it and not even bother to argue with you. Whatever had happened to him on Earth, he took his medical oath very seriously in Gaea.
"I'm sorry I snapped at you," Cirocco said. "How long can you stay?"