by John Varley
And it didn't interfere at all with his appreciation of her stupendous beauty. A world couldn't be all bad if it contained such a creature.
So then wasn't it just like him, he thought, to be felled in the midst of his pride by suddenly and unaccountably becoming uncomfortably aware of Robin as a woman.
Well, it was her own fault. She shouldn't have brought it up.
They waded ashore and dried themselves on the fluffy white towels from the Junction. Conal kept stealing glances at her. She sat on a big smooth rock and carefully dried between her toes, fastidious as a cat.
She sure didn't look forty. She looked ... thirtyish, he supposed, but at the low end. But age was a funny thing. You could be twenty-eight and a pasty, lumpy, draggle-tailed thing. Or you could be fifty-five with a firm, flat belly and the glow of health and laugh-wrinkles around your eyes.
Like the hair. Shaved off high and unnatural around one ear, the one that was centered in the odd pentagonal design. A real fright when you first saw it, but as time went by it was somehow right for her.
Like the snakes. Now there was something to put a guy off, those snakes coiling around one leg and one arm, one fat loop going under her breasts, and the heads facing each other. But when you'd seen it a few times, it was just Robin. More than that, it was a pretty thing in itself.
"Do you have a will?" he asked, rubbing his hair vigorously.
"A will? Oh, you mean for when I die. It wouldn't do much good in here, would it. No covens-or courts of law; whatever they have on Earth."
"I guess not. But when you die, those ought to be saved."
She grinned up at him.
"Like the snakes, do you? I wouldn't mind being skinned and tanned, when it's all over." She stood up, facing him. "Touch them, Conal."
"What do you-"
"Just touch them. Please." She held out her hand, and he took it.
Hesitantly, wondering if she was playing some kind of joke on him, he touched the end of the snake with his finger. It coiled three times around her pinky, so he traced that with a fingertip. It grew a little fatter as it crossed the back of her hand, then made three more loops around her forearm. He touched lightly along its length. Then three times around her upper arm. She turned and he drew his hand over her shoulder and down between her shoulder-blades, and she lifted her naked arm-the one without a tattoo-and kept turning beneath his hand until she faced him again, and he drew his fingertips up over her breast, down between the two of them, underneath, and then opened his palm and cupped the breast. She looked down at the hand. She was breathing deeply and evenly.
"Now the other," she said.
So he went down on one knee and touched her foot. The snake's tail started on the small toe. It made S-turns along the top of her foot, coiled around her ankle and looped twice around her calf. He traced it out, going slowly, feeling the firm, clever muscles beneath the skin, which was absolutely smooth. Her other leg, he noticed, had very fine hairs.
The snake swelled around her thigh. He traced it faithfully, reaching around her when it was out of sight. Then she turned again, and his hand went over her hip, across a buttock, and up her back once more. She lifted her arm and he reached under it and cupped her other breast from behind. He held it for a moment, then let go.
She turned and smiled sadly at him. Then she took his hand, lacing her fingers through his, and they walked side-by-side up the beach. For a long time he felt strangely content not to say anything. But the feeling couldn't last forever.
"Why?" he finally asked.
"I've been asking myself that question. I wonder if you've found a better answer than I did."
"Is it ... was it a sex thing?" Conal, he told himself, you are the soul of subtlety. Just take all your little problems to Conal, girls. He'll stomp through them with his hob-nail boots.
"Maybe. Maybe not as simple as that. I think I just wanted to be touched. Deliberately. You've touched me while you teach me to swim, and it wasn't the same ... but it disturbed me, how good it felt."
Conal thought it over.
"I'll rub your back for you. I know how."
She smiled at him. Her eyes were bright with tears, but she didn't look at all like she was about to cry. It was odd.
"Would you? I'd like that."
Again there was a time of silence. Conal could see the stairs leading up to the Junction, and was sorry they were there. He wished the beach were longer. He liked holding her hand.
"I've been ... very unhappy most of my life," she said, quietly. He glanced at her. She was watching her own bare feet pad through the sand.
"I haven't had a lover for about two years now. When I was a girl I had a new lover every week, like girls do. But none of them could stand me for long. After I came back from Gaea, I wanted one woman to live my life with. I found three of them, and the longest one lasted a year. So I decided I just wasn't cut out for pair-bonding. In the last five years I didn't make love because it felt good-it felt awful, once the sweaty part was over-but because it felt so bad not to make love. I finally gave that up and just went without sex entirely."
"It sounds ... awful," Conal said.
They were at the foot of the stairs. Conal started to go up, but Robin stopped, still holding his hand. He turned.
"Awful?" A tear went down her cheek, and she wiped it away with her free hand. "I don't miss the sex that much. What I miss is being touched. Being hugged. Holding somebody in my arms. Since Adam's been gone ... there hasn't been anyone to touch me."
She kept looking up at him, and he felt more nervous than he had felt since his first month on the weights. Conal was not awkward around women, but this one and her daughter were different, and it went beyond the fact that they were lesbians.
She squeezed his hand tightly, so he thought what the hell, and put his arms around her and turned his head slightly to kiss her. He saw her lips parting, then she turned her head away so he started to let go of her, but she had her arms around him by then, so he put his hands on her back in what he hoped was a fatherly way, and she started to move her hips against him, slowly, and press dry lips to his neck. All in all, it was about as gracefully done as two ten-year-olds paying forfeits on a game of spin-the-bottle, but when all the adjustments were made they were pressed close together from knees to shoulders, and Conal could feel her tears trickling over his chest. She was holding him tightly, and he nuzzled the top of her head while running his hands up and down the smooth curves of her back.
Several times he tried to gently break away, but she kept holding him. After a while he didn't try anymore, and was beginning to entertain some wild notions. That was just in his mind; the rest of him was far ahead, to his consternation and embarrassment.
At last she wiped her eyes and moved a few inches away, keeping her hands lightly on his hips.
"Uh ... Robin, I don't know how much you know-"
"Enough," she said, glancing down between them. "You don't need to apologize for him. I know your friend down there leads his own life, and that a touch is enough to excite him. And that he may respond in spite of your own feelings in the matter."
"Ah ... actually, he and I are usually in pretty good agreement."
She laughed, and hugged him again, then looked up solemnly.
"You know it couldn't work, of course."
"Yeah. I know that."
"We're too different. I'm too old."
"You're not too old."
"Believe me, I am. Perhaps you shouldn't give me that back rub. It might be too difficult for you."
"Maybe I shouldn't."
She looked at him wistfully, then started up the stairs. She stopped, stood very still for a moment, then came back to stand on the last step. It put her on his level. She put her hands on his cheeks and kissed him. Her tongue darted around his lips, then she moved back and slowly dropped her hands.
"I'll be in my room for about an hour," she said. "If you're smart, you'll probably stay down here." She turned, and he watched the
snakes play over her bare back as she mounted the steps, until she was out of sight. He turned and sat on the steps.
He spent a maddening ten minutes, getting up and sitting down again. No matter what, he couldn't go into the house in this condition. Rational thought was what was called for.
It was a situation that demanded cooling off. She was completely right. It could never work out. And once would be silly, she said that herself. Once wasn't enough with her, and once was all it could ever be with him. An experiment, and bound to turn out badly.
He looked up the stairs again. He could still see her trim backside.
"Well," he sighed, "it's been a long time since anybody accused me of being smart." He looked down at his lap.
"You knew it all along, didn't you?"
THREE
Valiha sat atop the hill overlooking Tuxedo Junction, near the wide scorch on the ground. Already, plants were sprouting in the ashes, growing around the white bones. Soon the place would be hard to find.
There were several human skulls. One was much smaller than the others.
Her hands were busy. She had begun with a broad, weathered plank and an assortment of carving tools. The thing was almost finished now, but she was only peripherally aware of it. Her hands worked, unguided. Her mind was far away. Titanides did not sleep except as infants, but they did go into a state of lessened awareness for periods of two or three revs. It was a dreamtime, a time when the mind could rove far and wide, into the past, into places it did not really want to go.
She relived her time with Chris. She tasted again the bitterness of him, the alien craving so deep in his soul that would deny her sharing her own body with those others she loved, the awful, extended goodbye-time when he had turned from wonderful-crazy to worms-in-the-head-crazy, the slow regaining of trust and the knowledge that it would probably never be the way it was. She touched once more her deep love for him, unchanged and unchangeable.
She thought of Bellinzona. The humans were sterilizing their home planet. To do this, they used weapons beyond her comprehension, weapons that could turn Hyperion into glowing glass. She had a thought she would not have entertained while awake. If she had one of those weapons, she would use it to sterilize Bellinzona. Many worthy people would die and that would be a shameful thing. But surely the good of such a deed would outweigh the evil. The wheel was her home. These visitors were a cancer eating out the heart of the wheel. There were good humans, certainly. But it seemed that if you got enough together in one place, an evil thing grew.
She thought it over again, and knew the people on Earth must be thinking the same thought. "This is not a good thing I do, but the good outweighs the evil. It is regrettable that innocents are killed... "
Valiha reluctantly gave up all thought of sterilizing Bellinzona. She would have to continue as she and other Titanides had been doing for many kilorevs now, battling the cancer cell by cell.
With that thought, Valiha passed from dream-time into real time, and noticed she had finished her project. She held it up to the light and surveyed it critically.
It was not the first time she had made one of these things. She didn't have a name for them. Titanides had never buried their dead. They simply threw them into the river Ophion and let the waters take them. They raised no memorials.
Titanides had no god but Gaea. They did not love her, but believing in her was not an article of faith. Gaea was as real as syphilis.
Titanides did not expect an afterlife. Gaea had told them there was no such thing, and they had no reason to doubt her. So they had no rituals for it.
But Valiha knew it was different for humans. She had watched the burial rites in Bellinzona. Always pragmatic, she was not prepared to say the rites were worthless. And she had thirteen bodies, all unidentified, with no way of telling what any of them might have believed out of the Babel of Earthly cults. What was a conscientious being to do?
Her response was the carving. Each one had been different, a sort of free-association of Valiha's incomplete understanding of human totems. This one had a cross on it, and a crown of thorns. There was a hammer and sickle, a crescent moon, a star of David, and a mandala. There was also an image of Mick ey Mouse, a television screen displaying the CBS eye, a swastika, a human hand, a pyramid, a bell, and the word SONY. Across the top was the most mystic symbol of all, which had been written on Ringmaster: the NASA logo.
It seemed good to her. The television eye was centered over the pyramid. It reminded her of another symbol that might go well: the letter S with two vertical slashes through it.
She shrugged, stood, and placed the sharpened end of the plaque on the ground. With her left fore-hoof she hammered it until it was firmly planted. She kicked the skulls until they were grouped around the plaque, then glanced at the sky. That didn't work, Gaea was up there, and Gaea was not worth speaking to. So she looked around her at the world she loved.
"Whoever or whatever you may be," she sang, "you might want to take these departed human souls to your breast. I don't know anything about them except one was very young. The others were, for a time, zombies in the service of Luther, an evil thing, no longer human. No matter what they may have done in life, they must have started out innocent, as do we all, so don't be too hard on them. It was your fault for making them human, which was a dirty trick. If you are out there somewhere, you ought to be ashamed of yourself."
She had not expected an answer, and she didn't get one.
Valiha knelt again and picked up her woodworking tools, placing them in her pouch. She kicked at the wood shavings and took one last look around the peaceful scene. She wondered once more why she did it.
She was about to head back to the Junction, but saw Rocky coming up the path toward her, so she waited for him. Thinking back, she realized she had come to a decision about his proposal during her dream-time.
He joined her and looked at her handywork without saying anything. He stood in solemn silence for a time, as he had seen humans do at graveyards, then faced Valiha.
"It has been one thousand revs," he sang.
One kilorev, Valiha thought. Forty-two Earth days with Adam and Chris captive in Pandemonium.
"I have decided," she sang. "I have concluded there is no good time to bring new life into the world." His eyes fell, then he looked up again with a glimmer of hope. She smiled at him, and kissed his lips.
"There never will be a good time, so to do it anyway is a gesture that appeals to me. And to do it in this age, without Gaea's approval, appeals to me even more. May his life be long and interesting."
"The humans," Rocky sang, "sometimes use those very words as a curse."
"I know. They also say 'break a leg' to bring good luck. I don't believe in curses or in luck, and I can't imagine wanting life to be short and boring."
"Humans are crazy, it is well known."
"Speak not of humans. Speak to me with thy body."
She came into his arms and they pressed close together and began to kiss. It was interrupted by the clanking of Valiha's tools in her pouch. They laughed, and she put them aside, and resumed the kiss.
It was stage one of frontal intercourse. Though not as formalized as posterior intercourse, there was much of ritual about it. To warm up they would mount each other, and do it three or four more times during the course of their more serious lovemaking.
They had an interesting five revs ahead of them.
FOUR
Cirocco sat in the deep forest, twenty kilometers from the Junction. She had built a small fire five revs earlier. It was still burning brightly. The logs did not seem to be consumed.
Miracle.
One kilorev. One thousand hours since Adam had been taken.
"What have you learned?"
She looked up, saw Gaby's face beyond the dancing flames. She relaxed, letting her shoulders slump.
"We've learned to make a poisonous gas that kills zombies," she said. "But we learned that a long time ago."
It had turned out
that any blood would do, even Titanide blood. But it had to be pubic hair, and it had to be from a human. The good news was that not much was needed. One hair could serve to make a pound of the stuff. Other than that, omitting even one ingredient from Nova's brew ruined the whole batch.
There were Titanides at work preparing bushels of it.
"What else have you learned?"
Cirocco thought about it.
"I have friends watching Pandemonium. From a safe distance. They told me about the latest move, to the base of the southern highlands. Nova and Robin have learned how to swim. They're teaching Conal some things he didn't know about fighting. I'm teaching them to fly."
She sighed, and rubbed her forehead with her hand.
"I know Chris and Adam are alive and are not being harmed. I know Robin is having strange thoughts about Conal. I know Nova still feels the same way about me, since she tried to follow me here. She's getting better at it. I know she's also coming around to the idea that Titanides are worth associating with. She's pretty much accepted Conal.
"And I know I need a drink worse than I have in twenty years."
Gaby reached out, through the flames. Her hand seemed to burn, and Cirocco gasped and shrank away from her. She stared at the indistinct face, and saw Gaby's bewilderment.
"Oh," Gaby said, and drew her hand back. "I guess that must have looked pretty awful to you. I didn't see the fire."
Didn't see the fire, Cirocco thought, and an image sprang into her mind. It was something she had never seen with her own eyes, but it had walked through her dreams for two decades. Gaby, one side of her face and most of her body blackened and cracking open ...