John Varley - Wizard

"I wasn't really apologizing," he said. "Not that way. We often say, I'm sorry, just to offer sympathy."

"We don't wish sympathy."

"Then I withdraw the offer." His grin was infectious. Soon she had to smile with him. "God knows I get too much of it myself. I usually just let it pass, unless I'm feeling nasty." Robin wondered how he could say it so carelessly. Peckish people varied a lot. Some hardly understood what honor meant. Others could be very touchy. She had submitted to indignities upon arrival that she would never have accepted from one of her own people, and the reason was she presumed these folk didn't know any better. At first she assumed they all had no self-respect, but she thought Chris had some-though not a lot-and if he were willing to accept sympathy without protest, he must not see it as always encroaching on his own sense of self-reliance.

"I have been accused of being too nasty," she admitted. "By my sisters, that is. There are times when we can accept sympathy with no loss of honor, so long as it implies no patronization."

"Then you have my sympathy," he said. "As one sufferer to another."

"Accepted."

"What does 'peckish' mean?"

"It comes from our word for your ... we'd better not talk about that."

"Okay. Then why do you want to kill that man in Georgia?" She found herself launched on an explanation of what had been done to her, why it had been done, and that led into an explanation of the peckish power structure and how it operated. It dawned on her that she was speaking to a supposed member of that very power structure. Oddly, she was embarrassed. She had been saying some pretty terrible things, and after all, he had done nothing to her personally. Did that matter? She was no longer sure. "At least I think I know what 'peckish' means now," he said.

"I didn't mean to accuse you of anything," she said. "I'm sure you see it differently because of the way you were brought up, so-"

"Don't be so sure," he said. "I don't admit to any big conspiracy, you understand. If there is one, nobody's invited me to the meetings. And I do think you ... your Coven is operating from an obsolete world picture. If I read you right, you'd agree to that at least partially yourself."

She shrugged, noncommittally. He was right, partially. "When your group cut itself off from the rest of the human race, things might have been as bad as you say. I wasn't around, and I guess if I had been, I would have been part of the oppressor class and think it was the way things should be. But I have been told that things are a lot better now. I won't say they're perfect. Things don't get perfect. But most of the women I know are happy. They don't think there's many battles left to fight."

"You'd better stop there," Robin cautioned. "Most women have always been happy with the way things were, or at least they said so. That goes back to before peckish society allowed women to vote. Just because we of the Coven believe some things that I now know are overstated or incorrect, don't draw the conclusion that we are foolish about everything. We know that the majority is always willing to let things remain as they are until they are led to something better. A slave may not be happy with her lot, but most do nothing to improve it. Most do not believe it can be improved."

He spread his hands and shrugged. "You've got me there. And I wouldn't see oppression because I'd be the benefactor of it. What do you think? How bad does it look to you, as a sort of visitor from another planet?"

"Frankly, it is much better than I had hoped. On the surface anyway. I've had to discard a lot of preconceptions."

"Good for you!" he said. "Most people would rather die than discard a preconception. When Gaby told me about where you came from, the last thing I expected you to have was an open mind. But what do ... uh, peckish women think?"

Robin was feeling an odd mixture of emotions. Most unnerving of all was the fact that she felt pleased that he felt she had an open mind. This in spite of the way he had phrased it, which could be interpreted as an insult to the Coven. The closed, isolated group Gaby had probably described to him would be expected to cling to its own notions fanatically. The Coven was not like that, but it would be hard to explain to him. Robin had been trained to accept the universe as it existed, as she observed it, not to introduce a Finagle factor to make it conform to the equation or even to the doctrine.

It had been easy to discard the notions that males had meter-long penises and that they spent all their time raping women or buying and selling them. (That last was not yet disproved, but if it was happening, it was a subtle bit of social business she had not yet been able to observe.) She faced a disquieting notion: male-as-person. A human being not totally at the mercy of his testosterone, more than just an aggressor penis, but a person one could talk to, who could even understand one's point of view. Following that thought to its logical end took her to an almost unthinkable possibility: male-as-sister.

She realized she had been quiet too long.

"Peckish women? Uh, I really don't know yet. I met a woman who sells her body, though she says that's not the right way to look at it. I don't understand money, so I really can't say if she's right. Gaby and Cirocco are worse than useless in that respect. They have less to do with human society-as you know it-than I do. I have to say I don't know enough of your culture to understand women's role in it."

He was nodding again.

"What's in your bag?" he asked.

"My demon."

"Can I see it?"

"That probably isn't-" But he had already opened the bag. Well, let it be on his own head, she thought. Nasu's bite was painful but not serious.

"A snake!" he cried. He seemed delighted and reached into the bag. "A py-no, an anaconda. One of the nicest ones I've seen, too. What's his ... what's her name?"

"Nasu." She was regretting not saying anything now and wished Nasu would go ahead and bite and get it over with. Robin would then apologize because it was a dirty trick. How was he to know Nasu allowed no one but Robin to handle her?

But he was doing it correctly, showing the proper respect, and damn it if Nasu wasn't coiling around his arm.

"You know something about snakes."

"I've had a few. I worked in a zoo for a year, back when I could still hold a job. Me and snakes get along."

When five minutes went by and Chris still wasn't bitten, Robin had to admit the truth of what he said. And it made her more nervous than ever to see him sitting there with her demon wound around his shoulders. What was she to do? The main function of a demon was to warn one of enemies. Part of her knew that made no more sense than the infallibility granted by her third Eye. It was tradition, no more. She wasn't living in the Stone Age.

But a part of her much deeper than that looked at Chris and the snake and did not know what to do.

Gaby had hoped to get all the way to Aglaia before camping but now saw that was unrealistic. Cirocco was in no shape to continue.

Actually they had not done badly. The Titanides' steady rowing had brought them to the last northward bend before Ophion resumed its generally eastward trend. A driftwood-strewn shelf elbowed into the river's flow and provided a gentle beach for the landing of the canoes. Atop a low bluff was a stand of trees, and it was there the Titanides made camp, with Chris and Robin trying to help but mostly getting in the way.

Gaby judged the rain would continue for several dekarevs. She could have called Gaea and found out for sure-even requested an end to it for good reason. But weather was fairly standardized in Gaea. She had seen a thirty-hour rain follow a two-hectorev heat wave many times, and this looked like one of those. The clouds were low and continuous. To the northwest she could just make out the Place of Winds, the Hyperion terminus of the slanted support cable known as Cirocco's Stairs. The cable vanished into the cloud layer, a vague, deeper darkness, before rising above it somewhere to Gaby's north. She thought she could detect brightness behind the clouds where it hung over them and reflected light into its own massive shadow.