John Varley - Wizard

There were two low tables heaped with the finest Titanide cuisine, steaming hot or sitting in sweating silver bowls of shaved ice. Titanides came and went steadily, removing things that had cooled, replacing them with fresh delicacies.

"You should try some of that stuff," Gaby suggested. She saw Chris jerk his head up and smiled. Hyperion did that to newcomers. The light never changed, and people stayed awake forty or fifty hours without knowing it. She wondered how much sleep the poor child had managed since the beginning of Carnival. She remembered her own early days in Gaea, when she and Cirocco had marched until they literally dropped. It had been a long time ago. She remembered feeling very old. Now she wondered if she had ever been that young.

She had been, once, on the banks of the Mississippi River near New Orleans. There had been an old house with a dusty attic where she would hide every night, trying to escape the sound of her mother's screams. There was a dormer window she could raise to let in the air. With the window open the tugboat whistles almost drowned out the sounds from below, and she could see the stars.

Later, with her mother dead and her father in prison, her aunt and uncle took her to California. In the Rockies she first saw the Milky Way. Astronomy became her obsession. She read every book she could find, hitchhiked to Mount Wilson, learned mathematics in spite of the California school system.

She did not let herself care about people. When her aunt left, she took her four children but not Gaby. Her uncle didn't want her, so she went with the social services women without a backward glance. By the time she was fourteen she found it easy to go to bed with a boy because he had a telescope. When he sold it, she never saw him again. Sex bored her.

She grew into a quiet, beautiful young woman. The beauty was a nuisance, like smog and poverty. There were ways to deal with all three things. She discovered a certain scowl that would keep boys from bothering her. There was no smog in the mountains, so she learned to hike with a telescope on her back. Cal Tech would accept a penniless student, even a female one, if she was the very best there was. So would the Sorbonne, Mount Palomar, Zelenchukskaya, and Copernicus.

Gaby did not like traveling. Nevertheless, she went to the Moon because the seeing was good. When she saw the plans for the telescopes to be taken to Saturn, she knew she had to be the one to use them. But at Saturn was Gaea, and disaster. For six months the crew of Ringmaster alternated between sleep and total sensory deprivation in the black belly of Oceanus, Gaea's upstart Godling. To Gaby, it was twenty years. She lived every second of it. It was plenty of time to examine a life and find it wanting. There was time to realize she had not a single friend, that there was no one she loved and no one to love her. And that it mattered.

That was seventy-five years ago. Since then she had not seen one star and had never felt the lack. Who needs them when you have friends?

"What was that?" Robin asked.

"Sorry. Just bouncing over the chuckholes of my mind. Us old folks do that."

Robin gave her an exasperated look, and Gaby grinned. She liked Robin. Seldom had she met anyone with so much stubborn pride and so many sharp edges. She was more alien than a Titanide, knowing little of what everyone called "human" culture, aware of her ignorance, and mixing blind chauvinism with an eagerness to learn more about it. It was a touchy business, talking to Robin. She would make a dubious companion until one had earned her trust.

Gaby liked Chris, too, but where her urge was to protect Robin from herself, she wanted to protect Chris from the crazy outside world. It couldn't make much sense to him, and yet he struggled gamely on, his world view quite warped from a lifetime of domination by a series of malevolent spirits who spoke with his voice, saw with his eyes, and sometimes lashed out with his hands. He could no longer afford emotional involvement, for one of his alter egos would betray it soon enough. Who would trust him after he had once revealed the large or small confidences of love?

Chris caught Gaby looking at him and smiled uncertainly. His straight brown hair tended to fall over his left eye, causing him to toss his head. He was a tall man, a meter eighty-five or ninety, of medium build, with an angular face that might have looked cruel but for the evidence of pain around his eyes. The first impression of hardness was given by his slightly flattened nose and heavy brow.

His body, too, might have looked powerful, yet he seemed so lugubrious, sitting there in his scanty shorts and pale, pale skin, that it was impossible to see him as menacing. His arms and legs were strong, and he had good shoulders, but there was too much fat around the waist. He was not too hairy, which was to Gaby's liking.

All in all, Gaby could see why Valiha found him attractive. She wondered if Chris knew yet that she did.

Cirocco swept in, followed by her matched pair of Titanides. She glanced around, mopping her face with a wet towel, and headed for a corner of the tent.

"Where's Valiha?" she asked. "And wasn't there supposed to be a Titanide for Robin?" She slipped out of her scrape and stepped behind a shoulder-high cloth partition. Water began to spray from a nozzle suspended above her. She turned her face into it and shook her head. "If you'll just pardon me for a moment, folks. It's so damn hot out there."

"Valiha is still with her group," Chris volunteered." You didn't tell me I should bring her with me."

"You're getting started too fast here, Rocky," Gaby protested. "Why don't you begin at the beginning?"

"Sorry," she said. "You're right. Robin, I haven't met you yet. Chris, I met you, but you don't recall it. The thing is, Gaea told Gaby that you two were on your way down here-"

"On our way down?" Robin squeaked. "She dropped me."

"I know, I know," Cirocco said soothingly. "Believe me, I detest that. I've protested it every way I can, but it hasn't done any good. Don't forget, I work for her, not the other way around." She looked at Gaby, expressionless, held her gaze for a moment, then resumed her soaping.

"Anyway, we knew you were on your way, and we knew you'd probably both make it. Oddly enough, most of the pilgrims do. About the only way to die in the Big Drop is to panic. Some people-"

"You could drown," Robin put in, darkly.

"What can I say?" Cirocco asked. "Obviously it's dangerous, and it's a disgusting thing to do. Do I need to apologize any more for something I have no part of?" She looked at Robin, who said nothing but finally shook her head.

"As I was saying, some people fight the angels who are trying to help them, and the angels can do only so much. So her purpose-as she has expressed it to me, understand, don't think I'm defending this-is to teach you to respond safely in a crisis. If you panic, you'll never be a hero. Or so her thinking goes."

Chris had been looking increasingly puzzled.

"If all this is supposed to mean something to me, I'm afraid I missed the important part."

"The Big Drop," Gaby explained. "It's probably just as well you don't recall. Gaea drops pilgrims out of a false elevator after her interview. They fall all the way to the rim."

"You still don't remember any of it?" Cirocco asked. The flow of water stopped, and one of the Titanides handed her a towel.

"Nothing. From the time I left her until not long ago, it's blank."

"That would be understandable, even without your condition," Cirocco said. "But I've talked to one of the angels." She glanced at Robin. "It was old Fat Fred."

Gaby laughed. "Is he still around?" She saw Robin's glare and tried to get rid of the smile on her face, with no success.

"He's still around, still chasing human tail. He told me about meeting two wildcats. One eventually cooperated, and he eased her down in Ophion. Another was just plain crazy. He couldn't approach him at all, but he followed him in, thinking that when the ground got close, the man would come to his senses. Imagine his surprise when the guy hit dead center on the back of a blimp."