by John Varley
Robin opened her shirt, lifted him, and he found the nipple.
And now the world was perfect.
***
The group reached the far end of the suspension bridge and began to file across. Adam was asleep now. Robin was ready to sleep. Nova was more than ready, but still lagged far behind the rest.
They passed under an arched gateway with the name of Chris’s treehouse painted on it: Tuxedo Junction. Robin wondered what it meant.
***
Pandemonium was on the move again.
Gaea, as she moved through the forest of northern Hyperion, pondered recent events. She was not happy, and when Gaea was unhappy those around her always knew it. One elephant failed to get out of her way in time. She kicked it without breaking stride. The elephant flew into the air and landed a hundred meters away, torn in half.
She was deciding on the program for the next encampment. After much thought she decided on Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Then she remembered the other two, waiting at Tuxedo Junction. Chris and Cirocco. Well there was that film from 1994, it had nine in the title, didn’t it? Surely her librarian could ferret it out.
Then she had it, and laughed aloud. The second feature would be Fellini’s 8½.
Two
Chris deftly flipped fried eggs out of the copper pan and onto an earthenware plate. The pan was almost a meter across. All his cookware was outsized. Most of his guests were Titanides, who loved to eat as much as they loved to cook.
He was only a mediocre chef, but Cirocco didn’t seem to mind. She used her fork to make a gesture of thanks as he removed the first plate and set the second batch of eggs before her. She sat at the high table on a high stool, her feet hooked around the crossbraces, her elbows set wide and her head held low as she shoveled it in. Her wet hair was tied back out of harm’s way.
Chris pulled a stool over to the table across from her and hitched himself up onto it. As Cirocco tore into her fourteenth egg, Chris began eating the two he had fixed for himself, and watched her over the table.
She seemed pale. She was thin. He could count her ribs; her breasts were hardly there.
“How was the trip?” he asked.
She nodded, then reached for her coffee cup to wash down the last mouthful of eggs. The job required two hands. It was a Titanide cup.
“No problems,” she said, and wiped her mouth on the back of her arm. Then she looked surprised, gave him a guilty glance, and picked up her napkin. She wiped her arm first, then her mouth.
“Sorry,” she said, with a nervous giggle.
“Your table manners don’t concern me,” he said. “This is your house, too.”
“Yeah, but that’s no reason to be a pig. It just tastes so good. Real food, I mean.”
He knew what she meant. She had been foraging for a long time. But he smiled at the description of the food. The “bacon” was meat from a smiler with swine genes in its ancestry, in the baffling Gaean system of crossbreeding that would have driven Luther Burbank to the madhouse. The “eggs” came from a shrub common in Dione. Left unharvested, they would eventually hatch a many-legged reptile that scattered the plant’s seeds in its excrement. But the fruit tasted very much like real eggs.
The coffee, oddly enough, was real coffee, a hybrid adapted to the low light of Gaea. With the collapse of the Earth-Gaea trade it had become as profitable to grow coffee in the highlands as cocaine, the traditional Gaean export. Coke glutted the market, but coffee was hard to get.
“Kong’s dead,” she said, around another mouthful.
“Really? Who did the job?”
“Do you need to ask?”
Chris thought it over, and could come up with only one likely candidate.
“You going to tell me about it?”
“If you’ll slap some more bacon in that pan.” She grinned at him. He sighed, and got up.
As the bacon began to sizzle, she told him what she had seen in Phoebe. While she talked, she finished her second helping. She got up and rinsed her plate, then stood beside him and sliced hunks off a huge loaf of bread and arranged them on a tray for toasting.
“I figure he’s got to die when they cut his brain up. Doesn’t he?” She squatted and slid the tray into the bottom drawer of the stove, beneath the firebox where the radiant heat would warm it slowly.
“I guess so.” Chris made a face.
She stood and unbound her hair, shook it out, and ran her fingers through it. Chris watched, noted that it was almost entirely white now. It reached far down her back. He wondered if she would ever cut it again. Before her brain surgery, five years earlier, she had seldom let it get below her shoulders. Then her head was shaved, and she seemed to have found a new affection for long hair.
“Anything else I should know?” he asked.
“I talked with Gaby again.”
Chris said nothing, but continued to turn the bacon strips. Cirocco started rummaging through a cabinet.
“What did she say?”
Cirocco came up with a Titanide curry-comb and began running it through her hair. She said nothing for a time, then sighed.
“I saw her twice. Once about three hectorevs before I went to Kong’s mountain. Again in Tethys, not long afterward. The first time she told me Robin was returning to Gaea. She didn’t say why. She has children with her.”
Chris said nothing. Not long ago, he would have, but he had begun to wonder about a few things since then. Things like the definitions of “rational,” the meaning of magic, the line between the quick and the dead. He had always thought himself a rational man. He was civilized. He didn’t believe in sorcery. Though he had lived twenty years in a place with a “God” he had talked to, had loved a “Demon” who had once been a “Wizard,” he took none of these words with their literal definitions. Gaea was a bush-league God. Cirocco was remarkable, but she had no magical powers, for good or evil.
In the face of the things he had witnessed or heard about, why should he worry about one measly resurrection?
But it had given him a lot of trouble. Gaby had died in his arms. He would never forget her horrible burns. The first time Cirocco told him she had seen Gaby, he had exploded. Later, he had been gentle, fearing his old friend was getting senile. But senility was too easy an explanation. Even if rationality was down the drain, pragmatism was still valuable, and Chris thought of himself as a pragmatist. If it works, it’s there. And Cirocco’s conversations with Gaby had been very good at predicting the future.
“When will she get here?’ he asked.
“Here in Gaea? She’s here already. In fact, she should be getting near the Junction by now.”
“She’s coming here?”
“Conal’s bringing them. There’ll be some Titanides with them, too. What’s the matter? Don’t you want them here?”
“It’s not that. It’ll be great to see her again. I never thought I would.” He looked around the kitchen. “I was just wondering if I have enough on hand for guests. Maybe I should run over to the Hua’s and see if they have—”
Cirocco laughed, and put her arms around him. He looked down at her face, and recognized the glint of mischief there.
“Don’t be such a housewife, Chris,” she said, and kissed him. “The Titanides are better at that, and they like it, too.”
“Okay. What do you want to do?” He embraced her, let his hands slide down her back to her buttocks, and lifted her easily.
“First, let’s get that bacon and toast off the stove before they burn. I’ve decided I’m not as hungry as I thought.”
“No?”
“Well, not that way. I’ve been running all over this stinkin’ wheel with nothing to look at but Iron Masters.” She slipped a hand between them, down his belly, and squeezed. “Suddenly your homely face seems oddly attractive.”
“That’s not my face, old woman.”
“It’ll do,” she said, and squeezed again.
***
At the completion of her thirteenth decade, boredom
was one of Cirocco’s chief fears. She had been spared the depredations of aging, the dulling of the senses and mental powers. It was conceivable that someday bedding down with a lover and performing the ancient rituals of coitus would pall. That was the day she would be ready to die.
But so far, so good.
They were in the crow’s nest, a garret rising over the main house at Tuxedo Junction. There were windows in each of the six walls. One ladder went down to the third floor, and another up to a belfrey that housed Chris’s carillon. Two dozen ropes ran along one wall, through holes in the floor and ceiling.
“Yowee!” Cirocco cried, and stretched an arm toward the ropes. She selected one and gave it a yank. The largest brass bell above them gave a joyous peal.
“That good, huh?” Chris said, and collapsed on top of her.
“I tell thee thrice,” she said, and rang the bell two more times. Then she wrapped her arms and legs around him and hugged as hard as she could.
There were good and bad things about living in Gaea. Some things, such as the unchanging light, Cirocco hardly noticed anymore. The passing of day into night was just a vague memory. One of the good things she usually didn’t notice was the low gravity. The one time she did notice it was during the act of love. Even a man as large as Chris did not weigh much. Instead of becoming an oppressive burden, his body was a warm and comforting presence. They could lie this way for hours if they wanted to, he utterly relaxed, she in no danger of being squeezed. And she loved that. Once a man was inside her, she always hated to give him up.
Chris raised himself slightly and looked down at her. He glistened with sweat, and she liked that, too.
“Did she say anything about…” He didn’t know how to finish the sentence, but it didn’t matter. Cirocco knew what he meant.
“Nothing. Not a word. But I know it’s coming, and soon.”
“How do you know?”
She shrugged. “I don’t. Call it sexagenarian intuition.”
“It’s been a long time since you were a sexagenarian.”
“What are you talking about? I’ve made it there twice. I’m a double sexagenarian, plus ten.”
“I guess that makes you twice as sexy as anyone, plus ten.”
“Damn right. I—”
They both heard it at the same time. Not far away, Titanide voices were raised in song. Chris kissed her and went to stand in the window looking down toward the bridge. Cirocco rolled on her side and looked at him. She was pleased at what she saw, but wondered what Robin would think.
From the waist down, Chris was the hairiest human she had ever seen. He might have been wearing trousers made from bearskin. It was light brown, like the hair on his head, and nowhere less than ten inches long. It was soft and fine, the nicest possible pelt to wrap one’s legs around.
Chris was turning into a Titanide. He’d been doing it for five myriarevs now. There was no hair at all on his chest or arms. His beard had stopped growing long ago and now his chin was smooth as a boy’s. In the right light, his face could pass for that of a twelve-year-old. There were other things here and there that would surely startle Robin…such as his tail. The fleshy part of it was only about six inches long, but he could twitch it and make the long hair fly like a frisky horse. He was smugly proud of that tail, and no more in control of it than a dog. It twitched back and forth in excitement as he looked down at the party crossing his bridge. He turned, smiling.
“It’s them,” he said, and his long ears stood up straight, higher than the crown of his head. Cirocco’s mind flew backward a century and a quarter, to a movie which had been old even then: cartoon boys shooting pool and turning into donkeys. A little wooden boy, and her mother holding her hand there in the darkness…but she could not remember the title.
“I’m going to meet them,” he said, starting down the ladder. He paused. “You coming?”
“In a minute.” She watched him go, then sat up in the huge straw-filled bag they had been using for a bed. She pushed the thick mass of white hair away from her face, stretched, and looked out the window opposite the one where Chris had stood.
Gaby was out there. She was sitting on a tree limb level with the belfrey, not more than fifty feet away.
“Was it good?” Gaby asked.
“Yes.” Cirocco felt no embarrassment or resentment when she realized Gaby might have been out there for a long time.
“You’ll have to be careful with him. He’s in great danger.”
“What can I do?”
“There are some things I don’t know.” She looked sad, then shook it off. “Two things,” she said. “One, he’s the father of both of them. He might as well know it, because Robin is pretty sure of it already.”
“Chris?”
“Yes. You’ll see it. With Nova, anyway. The boy, too.”
“Boy? What boy?”
“Two,” Gaby went on. She grinned. “Don’t strangle the girl-child. She’ll drive you crazy, but put up with it. She’s worth the effort.”
“Gaby, I—” Then Cirocco gasped, as Gaby rolled off the limb and dived toward the pool below. She had one glimpse of her, arms pointed down, toes straight behind her, then the apparition was swallowed up in the greenery.
She listened a long time, but there was no splash.
Three
The Titanides prepared a feast. From their happy singing, Robin assumed they were oblivious to the human tensions around them. She was wrong. The Titanides knew more about what was going on than Robin did, but they also knew they were powerless to affect any of it. So they employed a tactic that had worked reasonably well for almost a century. They left human affairs to the humans.
Robin had forgotten how good Titanide food could be. Shortly after her return to the Coven, just before the birth of Nova, she had ballooned to twenty kilos over her fighting weight. Ruthless dieting had taken it off, and kept it off for twelve years.
At some point she had lost interest in eating. Keeping slim had not been a problem for five years. During that time she had to remind herself to eat at all. Nothing tasted good. Now, digging into the heaping plates of food the Titanides offered, she wondered if she was going to have to be careful again.
It was a curiously joyless, brittle occasion. Chris, Cirocco, and Conal smiled a lot but spoke little. Nova, of course, had taken her plate to the most distant corner of the room. She ate furtively as an animal, always watching Cirocco.
“Nova,” Robin called to her. “Come join us at the table.”
“I prefer it over here, Mother.”
“Nova.”
The girl dragged her feet and scowled, but she came. Robin wondered how much longer she would do that. The virtue of obedience was strong in a Coven child, where families were quite different from the traditional human model. Nova owed Robin total allegiance until her twentieth birthday, and a great deal of respect after that. But she was eighteen now. A year or two years…it had little meaning in Gaea.
There were small blessings, though. The two of them had not fought since arriving at Tuxedo Junction. Robin was grateful for that. The fights tore at her heart. When fighting, it helps to know without doubt that one is right, and Robin hardly ever knew that anymore.
In fact, Nova hadn’t said a dozen words since they got here. She had sat silently, either looking at her hands or at Cirocco. Robin followed her daughter’s gaze to the Wizard—sorry, she corrected herself, to the Captain—who was singing some incomprehensible bit of Titanide to Serpent, then looked back at Nova.
Great Mother save us.
“Have you had enough, Robin?”
Flustered, Robin shook off her surprise and tried to smile at Cirocco. She dipped a spoon in the bowl of baby food the Titanides had prepared, and put the spoon in Adam’s mourn.
“Me? Yeah, I’m doing great. It takes him longer, though.”
“Could I talk to you? In private?”
There was nothing Robin wanted to do more, but suddenly she was frightened. She scraped food from A
dam’s mouth and gestured vaguely.
“Sure, as soon as—”
But Cirocco had already come around the table and lifted the baby. She handed him to Chris, who seemed pleased.
“Come on. Chris will take good care of him, won’t you, old man?”
“Sure thing, Captain.”
Cirocco was pulling Robin’s elbow, gently but insistently. The little witch gave in. She followed Cirocco through the kitchen, out onto one of the railed walkways lying atop a horizontal branch, and up a gentle rise to a separate building half-hidden in the branches. It was five-sided, made of wood. The door was so low Cirocco had to bend over to enter. Robin was able to walk through with an inch to spare.
“This is a weird place.”
“Chris is a weird fellow.” Cirocco lit an oil lamp and set it on the table at the center of the room.
“Tell me about it. Valiha warned me he’d changed, but I never…” Robin trailed off, having finally looked at the interior of the pavilion.
All the walls were copper. Hammered into the metal were a hundred designs, some of them quite familiar to Robin, others foreign. Still more seemed to remind her of things deeply buried. “What is this?” she whispered.
Cirocco gestured to the largest of the artworks. Robin moved closer and saw a stylized woman, angular and primitive as a hieroglyph. She was nude, pregnant, and had three eyes. A serpent coiled around her from one ankle to the opposite shoulder, where it reared its head and stared into her face. The figure gazed back at the snake, unblinking.
“Is this…supposed to be me?” Her hand went involuntarily to her forehead. It was the location of her tattooed third Eye. She had earned it over twenty years before, and without it, would have been unable to return to Gaea.
She also bore the tattoo of a serpent that wound around her leg. across her body, and up to her breast.
“What is this?’
There were two straight-backed wooden chairs in the room. Cirocco pulled one toward the center and sat in it.
