by John Varley
The Eye was supposed to be a badge of infallibility. There were limits, and everyone tacitly understood this, but it was useful. Some of the wearers used the Eye to back up absurd assertions, to take anything they wanted merely by saying it belonged to them. They earned only resentment. Robin always told the absolute truth about the small things, reserving the Eye for the Big Lie. It earned her respect, which was something she needed more than most. She was only nineteen years old, and might at any moment froth at the mouth and fall helpless to the ground. One needed respect at those vulnerable moments.
Robin never lost consciousness during her attacks, never had difficulty recalling what had happened. She simply lost all control over her voluntary muscles for a period of from twenty minutes to three days. The attacks could not be predicted except in one respect: the higher the local gravity, the more frequently they came. As a result, she spent most of her time near the hub, no longer going to the full gravity on the Coven floor.
It limited her activities, made her an exile with home always in sight. The ends of the cylinder called the Coven were a series of terraced concentric circles. Homes were in the downheavy rings where people felt more comfortable. The Coven floor was reserved for farming, livestock, and parkland. Uplight was machinery. Robin never went below the gee 3 level.
What she had was not a curable epilepsy. The Coven's doctors were as good as any on Earth, but Robin's neurological profile was new to them. It was to be found only in recent medical journals. The Terrans were calling it High-gee Complex. It was genetic disorder, a recent mutation, that resulted in cyclic abnormalities of nerve sheaths, aggravated by the composition of blood when the body was in gravity. In weightlessness the altered blood chemistry acted to inhibit the attacks. The mechanism of the disease was unclear, and the drugs to treat it were unsatisfactory. Robin's children would have it or carry it.
The reason for her predicament was known. She was the practical joke of some faceless lab technician. For many years, unknown to them, their orders for human sperm had been handled by a man who knew of them and who did not like lesbians. Though the shipments were carefully checked for disease and many common genetic disorders, it was impossible to screen out a syndrome the existence of which was not known to the Coven doctors. Robin and a few others were the result. All but Robin were dead.
There was one side effect of the meddling no one knew about yet. The women had been getting sperm from short men born of short parents. With no standard but their own, they did not realize they tended to be small.
Robin pushed through the swinging door to the shower room, stripping off her suit as she went. One woman was sitting on the wooden bench between the two walls of lockers, drying her hair. At the far end of the room another stood motionless with water spraying into her hands, cupped beneath her chin. Robin put her suit in her locker and got Nasu out of the drawer in the bottom. Nasu was her demon, her familiar: a 110-centimeter anaconda. The snake coiled around Robin's arm and darted her tongue; she approved of the damp heat of the shower room.
"Me, too," Robin said. She went to the shower, ignoring the woman who looked sidelong at her tattoos. The two painted snakes were common enough in the Coven, where tattooing was universal. The design on her belly, however, was uniquely her own.
As soon as she got the taps turned on and had endured a chilling blast of water, there was a great clanging of pipes and the showers stopped. The woman next to her groaned. Robin bounced up to the nozzle and put a death grip on it, wringing it like a chicken neck. Then she dropped down and began to scream. Her companion joined in, and eventually the third woman did, too. Robin put her guts into it, trying, as she did in all things, to scream louder than anyone else. Soon they were coughing and chuckling, and Robin realized someone had been calling her name.
"Yeah, what is it?" A woman she knew slightly-perhaps her name was Zynda-was leaning around the edge of the door.
"The shuttle just brought a letter for you."
Robin's jaw dropped, and for a moment she looked blank. Mail was a rare thing in the Coven, whose members, put together, knew no more than a hundred outsiders. Most of it was packages ordered through catalog sales, and the bulk of that came from Luna. It could be only one thing.
She sprinted for the door.
It was nervousness, not her affliction, that caused her hands to shake as she handled the flimsy white envelope. The postmark over the kangaroo stamp read "Sydney," and it was addressed to "Robin Nine-fingers, The Coven, LaGrange Two." The return address was engraved and read "The Gaean Embassy, Old Opera House, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, AS 109-348, Indo-Pacific." It had been more than a year since she had written.
She managed to get it open and unfolded, and read:
Dear Robin,
Sorry to be so long in answering.
Your plight has touched me, though perhaps I shouldn't say it as you made it clear in your letter that you aren't looking for sympathy. This is well, as Gaea never grants cures for nothing.
She has informed me that she wishes to see representatives of Earthly religions. She mentioned a group of witches in orbit. It sounded unlikely, and then your letter arrived, almost as if some divine providence had intervened. Perhaps your deity had a hand in it; come to think of it, I know mine did.
You should take the first available transportation. Please write and tell me how it all came out.
Sincerely,
Didjeridu (Hypoaeolian duet) Fugue
Ambassador
"Billea tells me Nasu ate her demon."
"It wasn't her demon yet, Ma. It was just a kitten. And she didn't eat it. She squeezed it. It was too big to eat."
Robin was in a hurry. Her duffel bag stood half full on her bunk, and she was tearing through her dresser drawers, tossing unwanted items left and right, throwing the things she would take in a pile beside her mother.
"Whatever the story is, the kitten is dead. Billea wants compensation."
"I'll say it was my kitten."
"Child." Robin recognized that tone. Constance was the only one who could still use it with her.
"I didn't mean it," Robin conceded. "Take care of it, will you? Give her anything of mine."
"Here, let me see that. What are you taking with you?"
"This?" Robin turned and held the blouse over herself.
"It's only a half-blouse, child. Put it back."
"Well, of course it's a half. Practically everything I own is, Ma. Are you forgetting your bloodrite gift?" She held out her left arm with the snake tattoo coiling around it from little finger to shoulder.
"You don't think I'm going to Gaea and not show it off, do you?"
"It leaves your breast bare, child. Come here. There are some things I need to talk to you about."
"But, Ma, I'm in a-"
"Sit." She patted the bed. Robin dragged her feet, but she sat. Constance waited until she was sure she had Robin's attention. She put her arm around her daughter. Constance was a big dark woman. Robin was small, even for the Coven. She stood 145 centimeters in her bare feet and massed 35 kilos. There was little of her mother in her. She had the face and hair of her anonymous father.
"Robin," Constance began, "there never seemed a need to speak to you of these things, but now I must. You're going into a world very different from ours. There are creatures out there known as men. They're ... not like us at all. Between their legs they have -"
"Ma, I already know that." Robin squirmed and tried to shake off her mother's arm. Absently, Constance squeezed her shoulder. She looked at her daughter curiously.
"Are you sure?"
"I saw a picture. I don't see how they could ever get it in if you didn't want them to."
Constance nodded. "I often wondered myself." She looked away for a moment, coughing nervously. "Never mind. The truth of it is, life on the outside is based on the desires of these men. They think of nothing else but inserting their penis into you. The thing swells up to be as long as your forearm, and twice as thick. Th
ey hit you over the head and drag you into an alley... or, I guess, into an empty room or something like that." She frowned and hurried on.
"You must never turn your back on one of them, or they will rape you. They can do you permanent damage. Just remember, you're not at home, but out in the peckish world. Everyone out there is peckish, men and women alike."
"I'll remember, Ma."
"Promise me you'll always cover your breasts and wear pants in public."
"Well, I probably would wear pants anyhow, among strangers." Robin frowned. The concept of strangers was not a familiar one. While she did not know all the Coven by name, they all were by definition her sisters. She had anticipated meeting men in Gaea, but not peckish women. What an odd thought.
"Promise me."
"I promise, Ma." Robin was startled by the strength of her mother's embrace. They kissed, and Constance hurried from the room.
Robin looked at the empty doorway for a moment. Then she turned and finished her packing.
5 Prince Charming
Chris had taken the Titanide ambassador's advice and done some reading on Gaea before boarding the ship that would take him there. He was not a stupid man, but planning was not his long suit. He had seen so many of his plans ruined by attacks of insanity that he had fallen out of the habit.
He discovered that Gaea was not high on the list of places to visit in the solar system. There were many reasons for this, ranging from dehumanizing customs procedures to the lack of first-class tourist accommodations. He found an interesting statistic: on the average, 150 people arrived at Gaea daily. Something fewer than that number left. Some of the missing were people who decided to stay. Emigrating was informal, and Gaea had a resident human population of several thousand. But some were fatalities.
Gaea tended to attract the young and adventurous. Men and women came who were bored with the sameness of Earth. Often they arrived after a tour of human habitats around the solar system, where they found more of the same but in pressurized domes. Gaea offered an Earthlike climate. That meant freedom from the regimentation found on more hostile planets and elbow room that Earth no longer could provide.
He learned a lot about Titans in general, about Gaea's children at Uranus-who admitted only accredited scientific observers and spoke condescendingly of Gaea, the Mad Titan. He studied Gaea's physical structure and maps of her interior. She was a spinning hollow wheel with six hollow spokes. Even to humans who had grown up with space colonies at the LaGrange points, her dimensions beggared the imagination. She had a radius of 650 kilometers, a circumference of 4,000. The living space on the rim was shaped like an inner tube 25 kilometers across and 200 kilometers high. Between each of the six spokes was a flat, angled mirror that deflected sunlight through transparent windows in the rim roof, so that parts of the rim were always in daylight while the areas beneath the spokes were perpetually dark. Gaea was habitable throughout; even the spokes supported life, clinging to the sides of cylinders 400 kilometers high. Maps of Gaea were unwieldy, being sixteen times longer from east to west than from north to south. To study the maps properly, it was necessary to fasten the ends together to make a loop, set the map on edge, and sit in the middle.
He was glad he had spent the time on it. Gaea was nearly invisible from space. Though he crowded around the ports with the others as the ship was snared by Gaea's docking tendrils, he could see little. With the exception of the reflecting mirrors, her outer surface was flat black, the better to absorb all the sunlight available to her.
He had done his homework and did not expect any surprises. It turned out there was only one, but it was a disaster.
As expected, his group was taken to join the other tourists arriving that day for the beginning of forty-eight hours of quarantine and decontamination. These procedures were one of the reasons Gaea did not attract the rich or the trendy. The routine was a cross between a hospital, Ellis Island, and Auschwitz. Uniformed human quarantine officers told everyone to disrobe and surrender all personal possessions. This included Chris's medication. His arguments were met with firm refusals. There were no exceptions to be made under any circumstances, and if he did not wish to surrender the pills, he was free to return to Earth at once.
The decontamination was in earnest and carried out with dehumanizing efficiency. Naked bodies, male and female together, were put on moving belts to be taken from one station to the next. They were washed and irradiated. There were emetics and diuretics to be taken, enemas to be endured. After a waiting period the whole process was repeated. The attendants made no concessions to privacy. Examinations were done in huge white rooms with dozens of tables, crowded by naked, shuffling people. Everyone slept in a common bunkroom and ate tasteless food dished out on steel trays.
Chris had never felt comfortable in the nude, even with other men. He had something to hide. While it was certainly not visible on his body, he suffered from the irrational fear that by removing his armour of clothing, he was exposing his differentness. He stayed away from situations where social nudity was the custom. As a result, he was conspicuous; in a sea of black and brown and tanned skin, he was pale as milk.
The attack came early on the first day. The chemicals in the pills had nothing to do with it, for they were certainly still in his bloodstream. It was the placebo effect which had been removed. Though his condition was not a psychological one, it was by now more complex than that. He was subject to anxiety from worrying about the psychochemical problem, and the punch line was that the anxiety attacks could trigger the serious ones. When his palms and the back of his neck began to perspire, he knew it was coming.
Soon he began to experience visual distortion and an acute sensitivity to sound. He had to assure himself each minute that everything was still real, that he was not on the verge of a heart attack, that people were not laughing at him, that he was not dying of a brain tumor. His feet were distant, pale, cold things. It was all a charade, and he had to act his part in it, pretend he was normal when everyone knew he was not. It was funny, really. He pretended to laugh. Then he pretended to cry, laughing secretly, knowing he could stop crying any time he wanted to, right up to the moment a man touched him on the shoulder and Chris punched him in the nose.
After that he felt better. He laughed at the man struggling to his feet. They were in the shower room-they spent most of their time there, he thought, feeling cross for a moment. But the annoyance passed. The man on the floor was shouting, but Chris couldn't have cared less. He was more interested in the erection he was getting. He thought it was a fine thing and knew all the naked women would agree with him. There was a wet splat behind him, and he turned and saw the man he had hit had fallen again. The dumb idiot had taken a swing at Chris from behind and slipped in a puddle.
He felt like fucking something. It didn't really matter what. The urge hardly amounted to an obsession. He could have been diverted from the project quite easily, but it sounded like fun.
"Who wants to fuck?" he yelled. Many of the people in the shower turned to look at him. He spread his arms, sharing his delight in the fine thing. A few people laughed. Most looked away. He was unperturbed.
A big blond woman caught his eye. He loved her instantly, from the long, wet hair against her back to the fine swell of muscle in her calves. He went to her and pressed his love offering against her hip. She looked down, then quickly up to the grin on his face, and slapped him with a soapy hand.
He put his palm against her face and shoved her back and down. She hit with a thud of buttocks and a sharp clack of teeth and was too startled by it all to attempt to dodge the kick he aimed at her, but the kick didn't connect anyway because a man grabbed Chris by the arm and spun him around, and they both slipped and went down in huge confusion. By this time men were coming from all directions to defend the blond woman. It got very involved.
Chris didn't mind. Practically from the outset of the brawl he found himself at the edges of it, so he joined the majority of people hurrying to be as far from the f
ight as possible. It turned into a crush against one wall with the showerheads spraying warm water down on acres of skin, a great deal of which was female skin. Chris embraced them at random, and it wasn't long before he got a smile in response. The woman was small and dark-haired, which was great because he had had it with big blondes, and she giggled when he threw her over his shoulder and carried her off to the big, deserted barracks and tossed her into an upper bunk. Soon he was happily fornicating.
And it was really unfair, just a terrible injustice, because he felt he could have kept at it all day long except this fascist attendant happened by and told them they had to be in the exam room for some damn colonic irrigation or other similar idiocy, and she just wouldn't listen when Chris explained that he'd had it with tubes up his ass. It was really annoying him, so he stood up and planted his feet-the woman made a funny gurgle when Chris stepped on her chest-and took a swing at the uniform, who had already stepped back and who had her weapon out and took careful aim and shot him.
He woke in a pool of vomit streaked with blood. And what else is new? he wondered, but didn't really want to know. There was a three-day growth of beard on his chin, caked with dried blood. He didn't remember much, knew that was the one thing he had to be grateful for.
They wanted to know if he was going to be a good boy now, and he assured them he would.
The woman who had shot him helped him clean up. She seemed anxious to give him the full details of his stay in jail and the events that had led up to it, but he closed his mind. He was given his personal effects and taken to some sort of elevator. When the doors shut behind him, he saw that the capsule was free-floating in a yellow fluid that moved through a gargantuan pipe. Once those facts were noted, however, he ceased to think about it.
