by John Varley
Robin sat again and surrendered to a bad case of the shakes. She glanced at her carrier bag, writhing angrily as a thoroughly upset anaconda tried to gain her freedom. Nasu would have to wait. She would not starve, even if the attack lasted for days.
Robin managed to turn over, fearing she would blind herself by staring at the sun, and soon had lost all control of her body. The timeless Hyperion day marched on while she twitched in the amber sunlight, helpless, waiting for the angel to come back and rape her.
9 The Free-Lance
Gaby Plauget stood on the rocky shelf and waited for the noise of the massive diastole to abate. A normal Aglaian intake cycle produced a sound like Niagara Falls. Today the sound was more like air bubbles rising from the neck of a bottle held underwater. The intake valve with the Titan tree jammed in it was almost completely submerged.
The place was called the Three Graces. It had been named by Gaby herself, many years before. In those days the few Terrans living in Gaea were still naming things in human speech, usually adhering to the early convention of using Greek mythology as a source. Knowing full well the other meaning of the word, Gaby had read that the Graces assisted Aphrodite at her toilet. She thought of Ophion, the circular river, as the toilet of Gaea and of herself as the plumber. Everything eventually ran into the river. When it clogged, she was the one who flushed it.
"Give me a plumber's friend the size of the Pittsburgh Dome and a place to stand," she had once told an interested observer, "and I will drain the world." Not having such a tool, she found it necessary to come up with methods less direct but equally huge.
Her vantage point was halfway up the northern cliff of the West Rhea Canyon. Formerly, the canyon had possessed a distinctly odd feature: the river Ophion did not flow out of it into the flatlands to the west, but in the other direction. It was Aglaia which had made that possible. Now, with the mighty river pump's intake valve impaired, common sense had caught up with Gaeagraphical whim. The water, with no place to go, had turned Ophion into a clear blue lake that filled the canyon and backed up onto the plains of Hyperion. For many kilometers, far up the curving horizon of Gaea, a placid sheet of water covered everything but the tallest trees.
Aglaia sat like a purple grape three kilometers long, lodged in the narrowing canyon neck, her lower end in the lake, her far end extending to the plateau 700 meters above. She and her sisters, Thalia and Euphrosyne, were one-celled organisms with brains the size of a child's fist. For three million years they had mindlessly straddled Ophion, lifting its waters over the West Rhea Summit. They took nourishment from the flotsam that continually floated into their vast maws, and were large enough to ingest anything in Gaea except the Titan trees, which, being part of the living flesh of Gaea, were not supposed to become detached.
But these were the twilight ages. Anything could happen, and usually did. And that, Gaby reflected, was why a being the size of Gaea had need of a troubleshooter the size of Gaby.
The intake phase was completed now. Aglaia was swollen to maximum size. There would be a few minutes before the valve began to shut, as if Aglaia held her breath in anticipation of her hourly eruption. Silence settled through the golden twilight, and many eyes turned to Gaby, waiting.
She went down on one knee and looked over the edge. There did not seem to be anything left undone. Deciding when to make the move had been a hard choice. On the one hand, the contracting valve would hold the tree wedged more firmly than ever during the systolic phase. On the other, the water which Aglaia had swallowed would now come rushing out, exerting great force to dislodge the obstruction. The operation did not depend on a delicate touch; Gaby planned to give the tree the biggest jolt she could manage and hope for the best.
Her crew was awaiting the signal. She stood, held a red flag over her head, and brought it down sharply.
Titanide horns sounded from the north and south canyon walls. Gaby turned and scrambled nimbly up the ten-meter rock face behind her. She bounded onto the back of Psaltery, her Titanide crew chief. Psaltery thrust his brass horn into his pouch and began galloping down the winding trail toward the radio station. Gaby rode him standing up, her bare feet on his withers, her hands holding his shoulders. She was protected by the Titanide trait of running with the human torso leaning forward and the arms swept back like a child imitating a fighter plane. She could grab the arms if she slipped, but it had been many years since she had needed to.
They arrived at the station as the systolic backwash was beginning to be felt. The water was ten meters below them and the blocked intake valve half a kilometer up the canyon; nevertheless, as the torrent began to make a boiling bulge in the new lake and the water level began to rise, the Titanides stirred nervously.
The noise was building again, this time overdubbed with something new. At the top of the Aglaian plateau, at the Lower Mists, where the outflow valve would normally be spraying a stream of water hundreds of meters into the air, nothing was coming out but gas. The dry valve produced a sound Gaby thought of as contrabass flatulence.
"Gaea," she muttered. "The God that farts."
What did you say?" Psaltery sang.
"Nothing. Are you in contact with the bomb, Mondoro?" The Titanide in charge of etheric persuasion looked up and nodded.
"Shall I tell her to snuff it, my leader?" Mondoro sang.
"Not yet. And stop calling me that. Boss is sufficient." Gaby looked out over the water, where three cables emerged. She followed them with her eyes, searching for the raveling that would precede a break, and then regarded her impromptu fleet hovering overhead. After so many years the sight could still awe her.
They were the three largest blimps she could round up on a few days' notice. Their names were Dreadnaught, Bombasto, and Pathfinder. All were over a thousand meters long, each of them an old friend of Gaby's. It was friendship that had brought them here to help her. The larger blimps seldom flew together, preferring to be accompanied on their dirigible journeys by a squadron of seven or eight comparatively tiny zeps.
But now they were in harness, a troika the likes of which had seldom been seen in Gaea. Their translucent, gossamer tail surfaces-each large enough for the playing of a soccer match-beat the air with elephantine grandeur. Their ellipsoid bodies of blue nacre jostled and slithered and squeaked against each other like a cluster of carnival balloons.
Mondoro held up a thumb.
"Blow it," Gaby said.
Mondoro leaned over a seedpod the size of a cantaloupe which nestled in a tangle of vines and branches arranged between her front knees. She spoke to it in a low voice, and Gaby turned toward Aglaia, expectantly.
After a few moments Mondoro coughed apologetically, and Gaby frowned at her.
"She is angry at us for leaving her so long in the dark," Mondoro sang.
Gaby whistled tunelessly and tapped her foot, while wishing for a standard transmitter.
"Sing to her then of light," Gaby sang. "You're the persuader; you're supposed to know how to handle these creatures."
"Perhaps a hymn to fire ..." the Titanide mused.
"I don't care what you sing," Gaby shouted, in English. "Just get the damn stupid thing to blow." She turned away, fuming.
The bomb was lashed to the trunk of the Titan tree. It had been placed there, at considerable risk, by angels who flew into the pump during the diastolic cycle, when there was air above the inrushing waters. Gaby wished she had an army surplus satchel charge to give the angels. What she had sent instead was a contraption made of Gaean fruits and vegetables. The explosive was a bundle of touchy nitroroots. The detonator was a plant that produced sparks, and another with a magnesium core, wedded to a brain obtained by laboriously scraping plant matter from an IC leaf to expose the silicon chip with its microscopic circuitry. The chip was programmed to listen to a radio seed, the most fickle plant in Gaea. They were radio transceivers that sent messages only if they were phrased beautifully, that functioned only if the things they heard were worth repeating.
&nbs
p; Titanides were masters of song. Their whole language was song; music was as important to them as food. They saw nothing odd about the system. Gaby, who sang poorly and had never interested a seed in anything she sang, hated the things. She wished for a match and a couple kilometers of waterproof, high-velocity prima-cord. Above her, the blimps kept the lines taut, but they would not last much longer. They did not have stamina. Kilo for kilo, they were among the weakest creatures in Gaea.
Four Titanides had gathered around the transmitter, singing complicated counterpoint. Every few bars they slipped in the five note sequence the detonator brain was listening for. At some point the seed was mollified and began to sing. There was a muffled explosion that made Aglaia shiver, then a gout of black smoke from the top of her intake valve. The straining lines slackened.
Gaby stood on her toes, afraid to discover that the blast had merely broken the cables. Splinters that were themselves as large as pine trees began to spew from the opening. Then there was a cheer from the Titanides behind her as the bole of the Titan tree appeared, wallowing like a harpooned whale.
"Make sure it's five or ten kilometers from the intake when you stake it down," Gaby sang to Clavier, the Titanide delegated to handle the mop-up. "It will take awhile for all that water to be pumped out, but if you take the trunk to the waterline now, it will be high and dry in a few revs."
"Sure thing, Chief," Clavier sang.
Gaby stood watching her crew take care of the equipment borrowed from Titantown while Psaltery went to get Gaby's personal luggage. She had worked with most of these Titanides before, on other jobs. They knew what they were doing. It was possible they did not need her at all, but she doubted any of them would have tackled it except under divine orders. For one thing, they did not have Gaby's contacts with the blimps.
But Gaby had not been ordered to do anything. All her work was performed under contract and paid in advance. In a world where every being had a prescribed place she defined her own.
She turned at the sound of hoofbeats. Psaltery was returning with her belongings. There was not much; the things Gaby needed or valued enough to carry at all times could be stuffed into a small hiker's backpack. The things she most valued were her freedom and her friends. Psaltery (Sharped Lydian Trio) Fanfare was one of the best of the latter. He and Gaby had traveled together for ten years.
"Chief, your phone was ringing."
The ears of the other Titanides perked up, and even Psaltery, who was used to it, seemed subdued. He handed Gaby a radio seed identical to all the others. The difference was that this one connected to Gaea.
Gaby took the seed and withdrew from the group. Standing alone in a small grove of trees, she spoke softly for a time. The Titanides were not eager to hear what Gaea had to say-news of the doings of Gods is seldom good news-but they could not help noticing that Gaby stood quietly for a time when the conversation was obviously over.
"Are you up to a trip to the Melody Shop?" she asked Psaltery.
"Sure. We in a hurry?"
"Not really. Nobody's seen Rocky for almost a kilorev. Her Nibs wants us to check in and let her know it's almost Carnival time."
Psaltery frowned.
"Did Gaea say what the problem might be?"
Gaby sighed. "Yeah. We're supposed to try to sober her up."
10 The Melody Shop
Titanides were terribly overpowered. Of all the beings in Gaea, they alone seemed improperly designed for their habitat. Blimps were precisely as they must be to live where and how they did. Everything about them was as functional as their fear of flame. Angels were so close to impossible they had left Gaea no room for her customary playfulness. It had been necessary for her to design them to tolerances of grams and subordinate everything to their eight-meter wingspans and the muscles needed to power them.
The Titanide was obviously a plains animal. Why then was it necessary to make it able to climb trees? Their lower bodies were equine-though cloven-hoofed-and in the light gravity of Gaea they could have done quite well with legs slimmer than any thoroughbred's. Instead, Gaea had given them the quarters of a Percheron, the fetlocks of a Clydesdale. Their backs, withers, and hips were broad with muscle.
It turned out, however, that Titanides, alone of Gaea's creatures, could withstand the gravity of Earth. They became Gaea's ambassadors to humanity. Considering that the race of Titanides was less than two centuries old, it became obvious that their strength was no accident. Gaea had been planning ahead.
There was an unexpected dividend for the humans living in Gaea. A Titanide's walking gait had none of the jouncing associated with Terran horses. They could move like clouds in the low gravity, their bodies maintained at a constant height by light touches of their hooves. The ride was so smooth, in fact, that Gaby had no trouble sleeping. She reclined on Psaltery's back with one leg hanging over each side.
While she slept, Psaltery climbed the winding trail into the Asteria Mountains.
He was a handsome creature of the naked-skin type, colored like milk chocolate. He had a thick mane of orange hair that grew not only from his scalp but down his neck and over a lot of his human back, worn in a series of long braids, like the hair of his tail. As with all his species, his human face and torso appeared to be those of a female. He was beardless and had large, wide-set eyes with sweeping lashes. His breasts were large and conical. But between his front legs was a penis that looked all too human for many Terrans. He had another, much larger one between his hind legs, and under his lovely orange tail was a vagina, but to a Titanide it was the frontal organs that made the difference. Psaltery was male.
The trail he followed through the woods was tangled with vines and new growth, but occasionally it was possible to see that once it had been wide enough for a wagon to pass. In some of the clearings broken patches of asphalt could be seen. It was part of the Circum-Gaea Highway, built more than sixty years ago. Gaby had had a hand in its construction. To Psaltery, it had always been there: useless, seldom-traveled, slowly crumbling.
He reached the top of the Aglaian plateau, the Lower Mists. Soon he was out of them and trotting beside the Aglaian Lake with Thalia in the distance, thirstily sucking the waters. He climbed to the Middle Mists, to Euphrosyne and the Upper Mists. Ophion became a river once more, briefly, before entering the double-pump system that lifted it to the Midnight Sea.
Psaltery turned north before reaching the last pumps and followed a small mountain stream. He forded it in white water and began to climb. He was in Rhea now and had been for quite some time, but the boundaries in Gaea were not well-defined. The journey had started in the middle of the twilight zone between Hyperion and Rhea, that hazy area between the perpetual weak daylight of the one and the eternal moonlit night of the other. He had been proceeding into night. Somewhere on the middle slopes of the Asterias he reached it. The Rhean night presented no visibility problems; Titanide night vision was good, and this close to the boundary there was still much light reflected from the plains of Hyperion curving up behind them. He ascended the steep mountainside along a narrow but well-defined path. In a series of alpine switchbacks he made his way through two passes and into the deep valleys on the other side. The Rhean mountains were sheer and rocky, with slopes averaging seventy degrees. There were no more tall trees, but the land was upholstered in lichens thick and smooth as the felt on a pool table. Dotted over that were broad-leafed shrubs the roots of which scrabbled into the living rock, sending out taproots that could be as long as half a kilometer before they reached the nourishing body of Gaea-the mountains' real bones.
Soon he could see the Melody Shop's beacon rising between two peaks. Rounding a bend, he came upon a sight that was unique, even in Gaea, who had made a hobby of creating the unusual.
Between two peaks-each as sharply pointed as the Matterhorn-was slung a narrow saddle of land. It was flat on top with a perpendicular drop on each side. The plateau was called Machu Picchu, after a similar place in the Andes where the Incas had built a stone cit
y in the clouds. A single ray of sunlight had inexplicably wandered from the flood that poured through the distant Hyperion roof. It angled sharply into the night, where it drenched the plateau in buttery gold. It was as if the sun had found a pinhole through the blackest clouds imaginable, late on a stormy afternoon.
There was only one structure on Machu Picchu. The Melody Shop was a two-story wooden house, whitewashed, topped by a roof of green shingles. At this distance it looked like a toy.
"We are here, Chief," the Titanide sang. Gaby sat up, rubbing her eyes, turned, and gazed out over Cirocco's valley.
"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" she muttered. "Salty, that gal ought to have her head examined. Somebody ought to tell her that."
"You did, the last time you were here," Psaltery pointed out.
"Yeah, I did, didn't I?" Gaby winced. The memory was still painful. "Just drive on, would you?"
The two descended the path to the narrow neck of land leading to Machu Picchu. There was a rope-and-wood suspension bridge spanning a deep chasm just before the plateau. The bridge could be brought down with a few chops of an ax, isolating Cirocco's stronghold to all but an aerial approach.
A young man was seated on the far side of the bridge, wearing climbing shoes and a khaki outfit. From his gloomy expression Gaby figured him for one of the endless procession of suitors who made their way, year after year, to conquer the mysterious and lonely Wizard of Gaea. When they arrived, they found she was far from lonely-with three or four lovers already in attendance-and deceptively easy to conquer. Getting into her bed was not hard if a man did not mind the crowd. Getting out intact was something else. Cirocco tended to drain men's souls, and if their souls were shallow enough to be drained, she no longer needed them. She had seventy years on all of them. This alone made her fascinating, but ninety-five years of sexual activity made her preternaturally skillful, far beyond their experience. They fell in love with her by the score, and she gently turned them out when they became obnoxious about it. Gaby called them the Lost Boys.
