John Varley - Wizard

"She didn't start drinking at once. She used to sniff cocaine when she was younger but hadn't for years. She went back to that for a while. Liquor worked better, and that's what she ended up doing. When Carnival time approaches, she tries her best to get away. But she can't."

Gaby stood up and signaled to Psaltery, whose boat was paralleling Chris's ten meters away. He angled toward them.

"All that's beside the point, of course," she said briskly. The important thing about a drunk on a trip like this is not why she drinks, but whether she'll be any use to anybody, herself included, if things get tough. I tell you she will, or I wouldn't have suggested you come with us."

"I'm glad you told me," Chris said. "And I'm sorry."

She smiled lopsidedly. "Don't be sorry. You've got problems; we've got problems. We got what we asked for, me and Rocky, It's our own fault if we didn't realize what we were asking."

The rain Gaby had been expecting finally arrived when they had been on the river for five hours. She broke out the oilskins and handed one to Psaltery. The others were doing the same, except for Cirocco, who still slept in the front of Hornpipe's canoe. Gaby started to tell Psaltery to bring the boat over so she could get the Wizard out of the rain, then changed her mind. Her impulse was always to pamper Rocky when she was like this. She had to remember what she had told Chris. Cirocco must take care of herself.

Presently the Wizard raised her head and peered at the rain, as though she had never seen anything as inexplicable as water falling from the sky. She started to sit up, then leaned over the side of the canoe and vomited into the brown water. It was a lot of effort for not much return.

When she was through, she crawled to the middle of the canoe, threw back the red tarpaulin, and began rooting around in the supplies. Her search grew more and more frantic. In the back, Hornpipe said nothing but kept paddling steadily. At last the Wizard sat back on her heels and rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand.

Suddenly, she looked up.

"GaaaaBEEEE!" she yelled. She spotted Gaby, twenty meters away, then stepped onto the edge of the boat and out onto the water.

For a moment it looked as if she could actually pull it off. It turned out to be just the low gravity, however, for with her second step she went in over her knees, and before she could take a third, the water closed over her slightly puzzled face.

"She may be a Wizard," Chris chuckled, "but she's not Jesus."

"Who's Jesus?"

Robin listened to the explanation for a moment, long enough to know it wasn't something that interested her. Jesus was a Christian myth figure, apparently the one who founded the whole sect. He had been dead more than two thousand years, which struck Robin as the best thing about him. She remained cautious until she was able to ask Chris if he believed any of that, and when he said no, she considered the subject closed.

The two of them were sitting on a log a good distance from the rest of the group, all of whom circled the figure of Cirocco, shivering in a blanket next to a roaring fire. A big pot of coffee hung from a metal trivet, slowly blackening in the flames.

Robin was feeling sour. She was wondering what in the name of the Great Mother she was doing on this fool's errand led by a Wizard she wouldn't trust to tie her own shoelaces competently. And Gaby. The less said about her, the better. Four Titanides ... actually, she rather liked them. Hautbois had shown herself to be quite a teller of tales. Robin had spent the first part of the trip listening to her, from time to time throwing in a yarn of her own, feeling her out to see how gullible she might be. Hautbois would get along well in the Coven; she was not easily taken in. Then there was Chris.

She had put off getting to know him, feeling uneasy about actually having to meet socially with a male. Yet she already knew a lot of what she had been taught about men was untrue. She could see the tales of men had grown in the telling. She could not imagine ever learning to be comfortable with him, but if they were to make this trip together, she should try to understand him better.

That was turning out to be hard to do, and she berated herself for it. It was not his fault. He seemed open enough. She just could not bring herself to talk to him. It was a lot easier talking to the Titanides. They did not seem as alien as he.

So instead of talking, she looked at the water dripping from the edge of the tent fly they had suspended between two trees. There was not a breath of wind. The rain fell straight down, hard and steady, but the rude shelter was enough to keep them dry. The fire was for the coffee and the Wizard; it was quite warm, though not unpleasantly so.

"Hyperion gets a lot darker on a cloudy day than California does," Chris said.

"Does it? I hadn't realized."

He smiled at her, but it was not patronizing. He seemed to want to talk, too.

"The light here's deceptive," he said. "It seems bright, but that's because your eyes open to accommodate it. Saturn only gets about a hundredth as much light as the Earth does. When something blocks most of that, you notice the difference."

"I wouldn't know about that. We handle things differently in the Coven. We keep the windows open for weeks at a time to make the crops grow better."

"No kidding? I'd like to know more about it."

So she told him about life in the Coven and found one more example of a quality that was the same for men and women: it was easy to talk to anyone if he or she was a good listener. Robin knew she was not and was not ashamed of the fact, but she respected someone who, like Chris, could make her feel as if his whole attention were on her, as if he really were absorbing what she had to say. At first this respect, grudging as it was, made her nervous in itself. This was a male, damn it. She no longer expected him to assault her twice a day, but it was disorienting to realize that without that stubble of beard and breadth of shoulder, he did not look or act like anything but a sister.

She could tell that he thought many things about the Coven were strange, though he avoided expressing it. That bothered her at first-how could someone from peckish society think her world was weird?-but trying to be fair, she had to admit that all customs must look strange to one who was unused to them.

"Then those ... tattoos? Everyone has them in the Coven?"

That's right. Some have more than I; some, less. Everyone has the Pentasm." She tossed her head to show him the design around her ear. "Usually it is centered on the mother's mark, but my womb is defiled and..." He was frowning his incomprehension. The-" what was it Gaby called it?- "the belly button." She laughed, remembering. "What a silly name! We call it the first window of the soul because it marks the holiest bond, that between mother and daughter. The windows of the head are the mind's windows. I have been accused of heterodoxy for putting my Pentasm in guard over my mind rather than my soul, but I successfully defended myself before the tribunal because of my defilement. The windows of the soul lead to the womb, here and here." She put her hands to her belly and her crotch, then hastily took them away when she recalled the difference between herself and the man.

"I'm afraid I don't understand the defilement."

"I can't have children. They would have what I have, or so the doctors say."

"I'm sorry."

Robin frowned. "I don't understand this custom of apologizing for things one didn't do. You never worked at the Semenico Sperm Bank in Atlanta, Gah, did you?"

"That's Georgia," he said, smiling. "Gee Ay stands for Georgia. No, I didn't work there."

"Someday I might meet the man who did. His death would be unusual."