by John Varley
“When the great pillars of the sky snap, such that the ground trembles and one fears the world will come apart and fling herself into the void, I do not complain.
“But at the time of Gaea’s breath, when the hate is upon me, I reason no more. I lead my people into battle, knowing not that my own hinddaughter falls at my side. I knew it not. She was a stranger to me because the sky was filled with angels and it was time to fight. It is only later when the rage lifts from us that we count the cost. It is then the mother finds her child slain on the field. It was then I found the daughter of my flesh wounded by angels but trampled by the feet of her own people.
“This was five breaths ago. My heart grew sick, and I fear it will never heal.”
Cirocco dared not break the silence as Meistersinger turned from her. He stood and walked to the door, faced the darkness while Cirocco watched the candle flicker on the table. He made sounds that were certainly the sounds of weeping, though they did not sound like human weeping. After a time, he came back to her and sat, looking very tired.
“We fight when the rage takes us. We do not stop fighting until the angels are all dead or gone back to their home.”
“You speak of Gaea’s breath. I am a stranger to it.”
“You have heard it wailing. It is a raging gale from the heavenly towers; cold from the west and hot from the east.”
“Have you ever tried to talk to the angels? Will they not listen to your song?”
He shrugged again. “Who can sing to an angel, and what angel would listen?”
“I’m still bothered that no one has tried … to negotiate with them.” That word was difficult. The one she finally settled on meant “surrender,” or “turn tail” in a literal sense. “If you could sit down and hear each other’s songs, perhaps you could have peace.”
His brow wrinkled. “How can there be the feeling-of-harmony-among siblings when they are angels?” The word he used was the same one Cirocco had picked as the best of an inadequate lot. “Peace” among Titanides was a universal condition, hardly worth comment. Between Titanides and angels, peace was a concept the language could not embrace.
“My people have no enemies of other races, but fight among ourselves,” Cirocco said. “We have evolved ways of resolving these conflicts.”
“This is not a problem for us. We deal well with hostility among our own kind.”
“Maybe you could teach us about that. But for my part, I could wish that I might show you the ways we have learned. Sometimes both parties are too hostile to sit down and talk. In that case, we use a third party to sit between the enemies.”
He raised one eyebrow, then lowered them both suspiciously. “If this works, why do you have need of so many weapons?”
She had to smile. It was not easy to put something over on the Titanides.
“Because it doesn’t always work. Then our warriors try to destroy each other. But our weapons have grown so fearsome that no one has used them in a long time. We have become better at peace, and I offer as proof that while having been able to destroy our entire planet for at least … make it sixty myriarevs, we have not done so.”
“That is the blink of an eye as Gaea turns,” he sang.
“I’m not bragging. It is a terrible thing to live with the knowledge that not only your … your hindmother and friends and neighbors can be wiped out, but every one of your kind down to the smallest stripling.”
Meistersinger nodded gravely, looking impressed.
“It is up to you. Our kind can offer you more war, or the possibility of peace.”
“I see that,” he sang, preoccupied. “It is a grave decision to make.”
Cirocco decided to shut up. Meistersinger knew it was within his power to learn of the weaponry Gene offered to give.
The candle in the wall holder guttered to darkness; only the one between them survived to cast dancing light across his feminine features.
“Where could I find this one to stand in the middle? It seems to me that such a one would be hit by spears thrown from both sides.”
Cirocco spread her hands. “I am willing to offer my services as an authorized representative of the United Nations.”
Meistersinger studied her. “Meaning no disrespect to the you-nigh-ted-naish-uns, we have never heard of them. Why would they be interested in our wars?”
“The United Nations is always interested in wars. Frankly, they are no better than we are as a whole, which is to say far from perfect.”
He shrugged, as if he had assumed that from the start. “Why would you do this for us?”
“I’m going through the territory of the angels anyway, on my way to see Gaea. And I hate war.”
For the first time Meistersinger looked impressed. It was plain that his opinion of her had gone up significantly.
“You did not say you were a pilgrim. This puts a new light on matters. I fear you are a fool but it is a holy foolishness.” He reached across the table and took her head in his big hands, leaned over, and kissed her forehead. It was the most ritualistic thing she had seen a Titanide do, and it touched her.
“Go, then,” he said. “I will think no more of new weapons. Things are fearsome enough, without taking a road that must lead to destruction.”
He paused, seeming to draw in on himself.
“If by some happenstance you should actually see Gaea, I wish you would ask her for me why my hinddaughter had to die. If she will not answer you, slap her face and tell her it’s from Meistersinger.”
“I’ll do that.” She got up, strangely exhilarated, somehow less worried about the future than she had been in two months. She started to leave, but was curious about something.
“What was the kiss for?” she asked.
He looked up.
“It was the kiss for the dead. When you leave, I will never see you again.”
Chapter Seventeen
Hornpipe had assumed the role of guide and source of information for the human party. She said her hindmother approved, and felt it would be a good learning experience. The humans were the most exciting things to happen in Titantown for many a myriarev.
When Cirocco expressed a desire to see the place of winds outside town, Hornpipe packed a picnic lunch and two full wineskins. Calvin and Gaby volunteered to go, but August just sat looking out the window, something she did often. Gene could not be found. Cirocco reminded Calvin he had pledged to stay with Bill.
Bill told her to wait until he was healed. She was forced to remind him that she was still in charge. He had been forgetting that as confinement made him peevish and petty. Cirocco understood, but liked him least when he turned protective.
“Nice day for a picnic,” Hornpipe sang as Cirocco and Gaby joined her on the edge of town. “The ground is dry. We should make it there and back in four or five revs.”
Cirocco knelt and tied the shoelaces of the soft leather moccasins that Titanides had made for her, then stood and looked out over the brown land to where the west central Rhea cable—the place of winds—loomed in the clear air.
“I hate to disappoint you,” she sang, “but it will take me and my friend a decarev to get there, and the same coming back. We plan to camp at the base and take the false death.”
Hornpipe shivered. “I wish you would not do that. It frightens me. How do the worms know not to eat you?”
Cirocco laughed. The Titanides did not sleep, ever. They found it even more disturbing than the odd knack of balancing forever on two legs.
“There’s an alternative. I hesitate to suggest it for fear of offending you. On Earth we have animals—not people—that are built something like you. We ride upon their backs.”
“On their backs?” She looked puzzled, then her face lit up as she made the connection. “You mean with one of your legs on each … of course, I see! Do you think it would work?”
“I’m willing to try it if you are. Hold out your hand. No, turn it … that’s it. I’m going to put my foot on it …” She did so, grabbed Hor
npipe’s shoulder, and swung herself up and over. She sat on the broad back with a cinch strap under her and a saddlebag behind each leg. “Is that comfortable?”
“I hardly know you’re there. But how will you stay on?”
“That’s what we’ll have to see. I thought I’d—” She broke off with a high-pitched yelp. Hornpipe had turned her head all the way around.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. We’re not so limber as that. I can hardly believe you’re doing it. Never mind. Turn around and watch where you’re going, and start out slow.”
“What gait would you prefer?”
“Huh? Oh. I don’t know anything about it.”
“All right. I’ll trot first, and work up to a slow gallop.”
“Do you mind if I put my arms around you?”
“Not at all.”
Hornpipe made a wide circle, gradually increasing her speed. They raced by Gaby, who cheered and shouted. When Hornpipe trotted to a stop she was scarcely breathing hard.
“Will it work, do you think?” Cirocco asked.
“I should think so. Let’s try it with both of you.”
“I’d like something to cover this strap,” Cirocco said. “As for Gaby, why don’t we find someone else for her?”
Within ten minutes Hornpipe had two cushions and another volunteer. This one was male, and covered in lavender fur, with white head and tail hair.
“Hey, Rocky. I’ve got a fancier mount than you.”
“Depends on how you look at it. Gaby, I’d like you to meet—” she sang the name, reversed the introduction, then whispered an aside to Gaby. “Call him Panpipe.”
“What’s wrong with Leo or George?” she groused, but shook hands with him and easily leaped astride.
They set out, the Titanides singing a traveling song that the women joined as best they could. When that one ended they learned another. Then Cirocco eased into “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” following it up with “The Caissons Go Rolling Along,” and “Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder.” The Titanides were delighted, they had not known the humans had songs.
Cirocco had been on a raft trip down the Colorado River, and in a nutshell boat on the Ophion. She’d flown over the south pole and hopped across the United States in a biplane. She had traveled by snowmobile and bicycle, cable car and gravity train, and once took a short trip on a camel. None of them were anything like riding a Titanide under the vault of Gaea, in that long afternoon forever on the verge of sunset. Ahead of her a stairway to heaven sprang from the ground and retreated into night.
She threw her head back and sang.
“It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go …”
The place of winds was hard rock and tortured earth.
Ridges like gnarled knuckles began to wrinkle the brown land, and between them deep chasms opened. The ridges splayed out and became fingers that gripped the land and crumpled it like a sheet of paper. The fingers soon joined a weathered hand and then a long shaggy arm reaching out of the night.
The air was never still. Sudden gusts from every direction generated a thousand dust devils to dance erratically in their path.
Soon they heard the howling. It was a hollow sound, not pleasant, but with none of the terrible sadness of the great wind from Oceanus known as Gaea’s Lament.
Hornpipe had given them some idea of what to expect. The ridges they were climbing were cable strands emerging at a thirty-degree angle to the ground, and covered with soil. The wind had eroded the land into gullies that all ran toward the source of the sound.
They began to pass suction holes in the ground, some no bigger than half a meter across, others large enough to swallow a Titanide. Each had its own distinctive whistling note. It was a non-harmonic, non-quantized music, like some of the more opaque experiments from the turn of the century. Behind it all was a continuous organ note.
The Titanides picked their way up the last, long ridge. It was hard, rocky ground, long since scoured of loose dirt, but the spine of the ridge was narrow and the chasms were wide and deep. Cirocco hoped they would know when it was best to stop. Already the wind whipped tears from her eyes.
“This is the place of winds,” Hornpipe sang. “We dare not approach any closer, as the winds become strong enough to carry you away. But you can see the Great Howler if you go down the slope. Would you like me to carry you there?”
“Thanks, I’ll walk,” Cirocco said, and swung to the ground.
“I’ll show the way.” Hornpipe started down the slope, taking short, mincing steps and looking unstable, but apparently having no trouble.
The Titanides came to a vertical drop and followed it to the east. When Gaby and Cirocco reached it they felt an increase in both the wind and the noise.
“If it gets much worse than this,” Cirocco shouted, “I think we’d better give it up!”
“I’m with you.”
But when they reached the place the Titanides had stopped, they saw it was as far as they would need to go.
There were seven visible suction holes, all of them at the ends of long, steep ravines. Six were from fifty to 200 meters across. The Great Howler could have swallowed them all.
Cirocco guessed it was a kilometer from the base of the opening to its top, and half that across its widest point. The oval shape was enforced by its position between two cable strands that made a sharp vee as they emerged from the brown land. Where they met, the great mouth of bare stone gaped open.
The sides of the opening were so smooth they flashed in the sunlight, like contorted mirrors. They had been polished by a thousand years of wind and the abrasive sand it carried. Veins of lighter ore in the dark stone gave it a mother-of-pearl sheen.
Hornpipe leaned over and sang close to Cirocco’s ear.
“I can see why,” Cirocco bellowed back.
“What did she say?” Gaby wanted to know.
“She said they call this place the fore-crotch of Gaea.”
“I can see why. We’re on one of her legs.”
“That’s the idea.”
Cirocco touched Hornpipe’s rump and gestured back to the top of the ridge. She wondered what they thought of this place. Awe? Not likely. It was just outside of town. Were the Swiss awed by mountains?
It was good to get back to relative quiet. She stood beside Hornpipe and surveyed her surroundings.
If the cable base was a giant hand, as she had seen it earlier, they had made it to the second knuckle of one of the fingers. The Howler was down in the webbing between two fingers.
“Is there another way up?” Cirocco sang. “A way to reach the broad plain up there, without being sucked up to Gaea?”
Panpipe, who was a little older than Hornpipe, nodded.
“Yes, many. This great mother of holes is the largest. Any of the other ridges will allow you to reach the plateau.”
“Then why didn’t you take me up there?”
Hornpipe looked surprised. “You said you wished to see the place of winds, not climb up to meet Gaea.”
“My fault,” she acknowledged. “But what is the best way to the top?”
“The very top?” Hornpipe sang, wide-eyed. “I was merely joking. Surely you will not go there?”
“I’m going to try.”
Hornpipe pointed to the next ridge to the south. Cirocco studied the land across the chasm. It looked no more difficult than the ridge they had climbed. That had taken the Titanides an hour and a half, so she should be able to walk it in six to eight hours. There was another six hours of uphill terrain until the plateau was reached, and beyond that …
From this vantage point the slanted cable was a preposterous mountain. It sloped away from her for approximately fifty kilometers, to the darkness above the Rhea border. For three of these kilometers nothing grew; it was chocolate-brown dirt and gray rock. For a similar distance there were only twisted, leafless trees. Beyond that, the persistent life of Gaea had found a foothold. She could not tell if it was grass o
r woodlands, but the five-kilometer diameter barrel of the cable was crusted in green—the corroded anchor chain of a sea-going vessel.
The green extended to the Rhea twilight zone. The zone was not a sharp-edged thing; it began gradually as the color was washed away by darkness. Green faded to bronze, deepened to dark gold, to silver over blood red, and finally to the color of clouds with the moon behind them. By then the cable was all but invisible. The eye followed the impossible curve as it dwindled to a rope, a string, a thread, before joining the looming darkness of the roof and vanishing into the spoke opening. The spoke could be seen to constrict gradually, but it was too dark to see much beyond that.
“It can be done,” she said to Gaby. “To the roof, at least. I was hoping there would be some sort of mechanical lift here at the bottom. There might still be, I guess, but if we searched for it …” She waved her hand at the corrugated land. “It could take months.”
Gaby studied the slope of the cable, sighed, and shook her head slowly.
“I go where you go, but you’re crazy, you know? We’ll never get past the roof. Take a look, will you? From there on in, we’d be climbing on the bottom of a forty-five-degree slope.”
“Mountaineers do it all the time. You did it, in training.”
“Sure. For ten meters. We’ll have to do it for fifty or sixty kilometers. And then—here’s the good news—then we only have to go straight up. For 400 kilometers.”
“It won’t be easy. We’ve got to try.”
“Madre de Díos.” Gaby hit her forehead with the heel of her hand, and rolled her eyes.
Hornpipe had watched Cirocco’s gestures as she outlined the problem. Now she sang, largo.
“You will climb the great stairs?”
“I must.”
