John Varley - Wizard

She let Robin look her over for a reasonable time; then, with a slight movement of her head, her attention was completely shifted. Her eyes smiled before her mouth did, but when the lips caught up, they revealed even white teeth. She put out a hand, and Robin took it.

"I'm Gaby Plauget," she said.

"May the holy flow unite... ." Robin's eyes widened,

"Don't tell me they still remember me in the Coven. Really?" Her grin grew even bigger, and she squeezed Robin's hand. "You must be Robin the Nine-fingered. I've been looking for you all day."

Chris came out of it in the middle of a dance. Operating on some automatic level, his body continued to move as it had been moving for some seconds before he could make it stop, at which point he was bumped from behind by a large blue Titanide. Chris had a grin on his face. He got rid of it.

Someone grabbed his elbow and pulled him from the line of dancers, turned him, and he was face to breast with another Titanide.

"I said, we have to get going now, or I'll be late for my own review," she said, and held one large hand in an odd position. When he did nothing, she raked her other hand through her long pink hair and sighed. "Well, step up, Chris! Come on!"

Something made him lift his bare foot and put it in the Titanide's palm. Call it a ghost reflex, his body remembering a learned operation his mind had forgotten. It was the right thing. She lifted; he grabbed for her shoulder and found himself astride her back. Her skin was hairless, predominately yellow but mottled with small brown spots like a ripe banana. Against his bare legs she had just the right temperature and texture: human skin stretched over a different frame.

She twisted at the waist, leaning to one side far enough to get one arm around his shoulders. Her big, almond eyes were glittering with excitement. To his amazement, she kissed him hard on the lips. She was so big she made him feel six years old.

"For luck, precious. We've got the mates and the mode. All we need now is luck, and you're my charm." She let out a howl and dug the ground with her back legs, springing forward at a full gallop as Chris hugged her waist and hung on.

He was not entirely unused to this sort of occurrence. There had been other times when he recovered from amnesia in mid-stride, so he thought he was prepared for almost anything.

He was not prepared for this.

The whole world was filled with bright sunlight, dust, Titanides, tents, and music. Especially music. They passed through waves of it, encountering what certainly must have been all the forms invented by humans and the vastly greater number known to Titanides. It should have been accoustical insanity, but it was not. Each group was aware of the things being done by adjacent groups. With improvisational prestidigitation they played off each other, re-worked themes, and threw them back for elaboration: re-metered, sweetened. Chris and the Titanide passed through families of music-ragtime next door to cakewalks, shouldering close to swing and nineteen varieties of progressive jazz, with small pockets of inhuman strangeness hushed or clarioned.

Some of it was inaccessible to Chris. The best he could do was think, yes, it might be interesting if music were like that. To Titanides all sound was music. The kinds humans loved were just a corner of the theater, nothing but a subset of the family music. One thing Chris heard was just sustained notes in clusters of three or four, each a few cycles away from the tonic. The Titanides managed to turn the resultant beats, the difference and summation tones, into music in and of itself.

Moving in the crush of Purple Carnival was a voyage through the innards of a 50,000-channel sound mixer with living electronics. Somewhere a Master Titanide thumbed the huge switch panel, augmenting here, muting there, bringing up one melodic line only to fade it out in a few seconds.

Things were sung in the direction of his companion. (Was it proper to call her his mount? His steed?) She usually waved and returned a short song. Then a Titanide called out, in English.

"What have you got there, Valiha?"

"A four-leaf clover, I hope," Valiha called back. "My ticket to maternity."

It was nice to have a name for her. She seemed to know him, embarrassingly well, as a matter of fact, and she would expect him to know her. Not for the first time, he wondered what he had been up to.

Their destination was a crater with eroded walls, half a kilometer in diameter. He groped for a name, just out of reach, and came up with Grandioso. Meaningless, but it felt right, as things sometimes did after an episode. The rock that sat on the edge of the crater had a name, but it wouldn't come.

From the sides of Grandioso he could look back and see the Titanide encampment, a mad brawl like the tuning of a thousand orchestras, a turmoil of color that trailed a dust plume far downwind.

The interior of the bowl was another world. It held many Titanides, but they had none of the anarchic revelry of those outside. Grandioso was covered in a carpet of short green grass and had been marked off in a grid of white lines. The Titanides had arranged themselves in small groups, never more than four in a square, like counters in a game. Some of the squares held gaudy but temporary-looking structures like floral floats. Others were nearly bare. Valiha entered the maze, went in three squares and over seven. She joined two other Titanides in a square that held a few objects like holly wreaths and a selection of polished stones, all laid out in a pattern that meant nothing to Chris.

She introduced him to the others, and he heard himself named as Long-Odds Major. What had he been telling her? The two Titanides were a female named Cymbal (Lydian Trio) Prelude and a male with the unlikely name of Hichiriki (Phrygian Quartet) Madrigal. Valiha, he learned, was also a member of the Madrigal chord. They were distinguished by their yellow skin and cotton-candy hair. Her middle, parenthetical name was Aeolian Solo. He gathered that the middle names of Titanides designated breeding. Little was clear beyond that.

"And all this ... ?" Chris hoped that not completing the sentence would protect the secret of his ignorance of things she thought he knew. He gestured at the white lines, at the rocks and flowers. "What mode did you say this was going to be?"

"A Double-flatted Mixolydian Trio," she said, apparently nervous enough to chatter about anything, regardless of having discussed it before. "It's on the sign there in front. You realize that's not really what it is-a Double-flatted Mixolydian Trio is musically meaningless; it's just a string of English words we use for the real words that you can't sing. Oh, I guess I didn't say, but that mode means that Cymbal was the foremother and Hichiriki was the forefather. If we get tapped, Cymbal will be the hindfather."

"And you the hindmother," Chris said, feeling safe.

"Right. They produced the egg, and Cymbal will quicken it in me."

"The egg."

"Right here." She reached into her pouch-how handy to have a built-in pocket, Chris thought-and tossed him something the size of a golf ball. He almost dropped it, and Valihaa laughed.

"It doesn't have a shell," she said. "But haven't you seen one before?" A slight frown creased her forehead.

Chris had no idea. This one was quite hard, apparently solid. It was a perfect sphere, pale gold with brown whorls like fingerprint smudges. It had milky areas in its translucent depths. Someone had printed a series of Titanide characters on it.

He gave it back to her, then looked at the sign she had mentioned earlier. It rested on the ground, a ten-centimeter metal plate engraved with symbols and lines:

I FJVtF*|

UF^ f

F M M

"The F stands for female," someone said, behind him. He turned and saw two human women talking to each other. They both were short and rather pretty. The smaller one had a green, staring Eye painted on her forehead. There were more drawings partially visible on her legs and arms. She looked young. The other, darker one was the voice he had heard. He could not guess her age, though she did not look older than her middle thirties.