Wizard (4 page)

Parthenogenesis was still a dream. To conceive, the women had to import sperm. Eugenics was easy in one sense: male fetuses could be detected early and stilled in the womb. But with sperm, as with everything else, the watchwords were still
caveat emptor
.

Robin toed herself lightly down the curved corridor. The gravity at the hub masked her weariness, but she felt it in her back and shoulders. Even downheavy she would not have shown it or the weight of depression she always carried from watch-standing.

She wore a white, water-cooled vacuum suit of ancient vintage, her gloves and boots stuffed into the helmet carried under her arm. The suit was cracked and patched, its metalwork tarnished. Hanging from the utility belt were a Colt .45 automatic in a handmade holster and a carved wooden fetish festooned with feathers and a bird’s claw. Barefoot, with long finger- and toenails painted dark red, hair blond and unkempt, lips stained purple, bells hanging from pierced earlobes and nostril, she might have been a barbarian sacking technology’s greatest achievement. But looks can be deceiving.

Her right arm began to tremble. She stopped and looked at her hand with no change of expression, but the emerald Eye tattooed in the center of her forehead began to weep sweat. Hatred boiled up like an old friend. The hand was not her, could
not
be her hand, because that would mean the weakness was hers, and not something visited on her from the outside. Her eyes narrowed.

“Stop that,” she whispered, “or I will cut you off.” She meant every word and dug her thumbnail into the patch of scar tissue where her little finger had been to prove to herself that she meant it. The hardest part, surprisingly, had been getting the knife to the right spot with a hand that jerked at random. It had hurt, but the attack had vanished in the amazing agony.

The shaking stopped. Sometimes the threat was enough.

There was a story that she had bitten off her finger. She had never uttered a word to deny it. There was a quality called labra that the witches valued. It had much to do with honor, with toughness and stoicism, with Eastern concepts of obligation. It might entail dying to a purpose, and with style, or paying any price to cancel debts, to individuals or society. Insisting on standing watches when one was subject to fits of palsy held much labra. Cutting off one’s finger to stop the attacks had even more. The witches said Robin had enough labra to fill the wombs of ten ordinary women.

But standing watches when she knew it could endanger the community held no labra at all. Robin knew it, and so did the more thoughtful members of the Coven, those who were not dazzled by her young legend. She stood watches because no one on the council could look into the intensity of her eyes and deny her. The third Eye, impassive and omniscient, only added weight to her assertion that she could prevent the attacks by sheer effort of will. A dozen witches had earned the right to wear the third Eye. All were twice Robin’s age. No one would stand in the way of Robin the Nine-fingered.

The Eye was supposed to be a badge of infallibility. There were limits, and everyone tacitly understood this, but it was useful. Some of the wearers used the Eye to back up absurd assertions, to take anything they wanted merely by saying it belonged to them. They earned only resentment. Robin always told the absolute truth about the small things, reserving the Eye for the Big Lie. It earned her respect, which was something she needed more than most. She was only nineteen years old, and might at any moment froth at the mouth and fall helpless to the ground. One needed respect at those vulnerable moments.

Robin never lost consciousness during her attacks, never had difficulty recalling what had happened. She simply lost all control over her voluntary muscles for a period of from twenty minutes to three days. The attacks could not be predicted except in one respect: the higher the local gravity, the more frequently they came. As a result, she spent most of her time near the hub, no longer going to the full gravity on the Coven floor.

It limited her activities, made her an exile with home always in sight. The ends of the cylinder called the Coven were a series of terraced concentric circles. Homes were in the downheavy rings where people felt more comfortable. The Coven floor was reserved for farming, livestock, and parkland. Uplight was machinery. Robin never went below the gee/3 level.

What she had was not a curable epilepsy. The Coven’s doctors were as good as any on Earth, but Robin’s neurological profile was new to them. It was to be found only in recent medical journals. The Terrans were calling it High-gee Complex. It was genetic disorder, a recent mutation, that resulted in cyclic abnormalities of nerve sheaths, aggravated by the composition of blood when the body was in gravity. In weightlessness the altered blood chemistry acted to inhibit the attacks. The mechanism of the disease was unclear, and the drugs to treat it were unsatisfactory. Robin’s children would have it or carry it.

The reason for her predicament was known. She was the practical joke of some faceless lab technician. For many years, unknown to them, their orders for human sperm had been handled by a man who knew of them and who did not like lesbians. Though the shipments were carefully checked for disease and many common genetic disorders, it was impossible to screen out a syndrome the existence of which was not known to the Coven doctors. Robin and a few others were the result. All but Robin were dead.

There was one side effect of the meddling no one knew about yet. The women had been getting sperm from short men born of short parents. With no standard but their own, they did not realize they tended to be small.

Robin pushed through the swinging door to the shower room, stripping off her suit as she went. One woman was sitting on the wooden bench between the two walls of lockers, drying her hair. At the far end of the room another stood motionless with water spraying into her hands, cupped beneath her chin. Robin put her suit in her locker and got Nasu out of the drawer in the bottom. Nasu was her demon, her familiar: a 110-centimeter anaconda. The snake coiled around Robin’s arm and darted her
tongue; she approved of the damp heat of the shower room.

“Me, too,” Robin said. She went to the shower, ignoring the woman who looked sidelong at her tattoos. The two painted snakes were common enough in the Coven, where tattooing was universal. The design on her belly, however, was uniquely her own.

As soon as she got the taps turned on and had endured a chilling blast of water, there was a great clanging of pipes and the showers stopped. The woman next to her groaned. Robin bounced up to the nozzle and put a death grip on it, wringing it like a chicken neck. Then she dropped down and began to scream. Her companion joined in, and eventually the third woman did, too. Robin put her guts into it, trying, as she did in all things, to scream louder than anyone else. Soon they were coughing and chuckling, and Robin realized someone had been calling her name.

“Yeah, what is it?” A woman she knew slightly—perhaps her name was Zynda—was leaning around the edge of the door.

“The shuttle just brought a letter for you.”

Robin’s jaw dropped, and for a moment she looked blank. Mail was a rare thing in the Coven, whose members, put together, knew no more than a hundred outsiders. Most of it was packages ordered through catalog sales, and the bulk of that came from Luna. It could be only one thing.

She sprinted for the door.

* * *

It was nervousness, not her affliction, that caused her hands to shake as she handled the flimsy white envelope. The postmark over the kangaroo stamp read “Sydney,” and it was addressed to “Robin Nine-fingers, The Coven, LaGrange Two.” The return address was engraved and read “The Gaean Embassy, Old Opera House, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, AS109–348, Indo-Pacific.” It had been more than a year since she had written.

She managed to get it open and unfolded, and read:

* * *

“Billea tells me Nasu ate her demon.”

“It wasn’t her demon yet, Ma. It was just a kitten. And she didn’t eat it. She squeezed it. It was too big to eat.”

Robin was in a hurry. Her duffel bag stood half full on her bunk, and she was tearing through her dresser drawers, tossing unwanted items left and right, throwing the things she would take in a pile beside her mother.

“Whatever the story is, the kitten is dead. Billea wants compensation.”

“I’ll say it was my kitten.”

“Child.” Robin recognized that tone. Constance was the only one who could still use it with her.

“I didn’t mean it,” Robin conceded. “Take care of it, will you? Give her anything of mine.”

“Here, let me see that. What are you taking with you?”

“This?” Robin turned and held the blouse over herself.

“It’s only a half-blouse, child. Put it back.”

“Well, of
course
it’s a half. Practically everything I
own
is, Ma. Are you forgetting your bloodrite gift?” She held out her left arm with the snake tattoo coiling around it from little finger to shoulder. “You don’t think I’m going to Gaea and not show it off, do you?”

“It leaves your breast bare, child. Come here. There are some things I need to talk to you about.”

“But, Ma, I’m in a—”

“Sit.” She patted the bed. Robin dragged her feet, but she sat. Constance waited until she was sure she had Robin’s attention. She put her arm around her daughter. Constance was a big dark woman. Robin was small, even for the Coven. She stood 145 centimeters in her bare feet and massed 35 kilos. There was little of her mother in her. She had the face and hair of her anonymous father.

“Robin,” Constance began, “there never seemed a need to speak to you of these things, but now I must. You’re going into a world very different from ours. There are creatures out there known as men. They’re … not like us at all. Between their legs they have—”

“Ma, I already know that.” Robin squirmed and tried to shake off her mother’s arm. Absently, Constance squeezed her shoulder. She looked at her daughter curiously.

“Are you sure?”

“I saw a picture. I don’t see how they could ever get it
in
if you didn’t want them to.”

Constance nodded. “I often wondered myself.” She looked away for a moment, coughing nervously. “Never mind. The truth of it is, life on the outside is based on the desires of these men. They think of nothing else but inserting their penis into you. The thing swells up to be as long as your forearm, and twice as thick. They hit you over the head and drag you into an alley … or, I guess, into an empty room or something like that.” She frowned and hurried on.

“You must never turn your back on one of them, or they will rape you. They can do you
permanent damage
.
Just remember, you’re not at home, but out in the peckish world. Everyone out there is peckish, men and women alike.”

“I’ll remember, Ma.”

“Promise me you’ll always cover your breasts and wear pants in public.”

“Well, I probably would wear pants anyhow, among strangers.” Robin frowned. The concept of strangers was not a familiar one. While she did not know all the Coven by name, they all were by definition her sisters. She had anticipated meeting men in Gaea, but not peckish women. What an odd thought.

“Promise me.”

“I promise, Ma.” Robin was startled by the strength of her mother’s embrace. They kissed, and Constance hurried from the room.

Robin looked at the empty doorway for a moment. Then she turned and finished her packing.

Chris had taken the Titanide ambassador’s advice and done some reading on Gaea before boarding the ship that would take him there. He was not a stupid man, but planning was not his long suit. He had seen so many of his plans ruined by attacks of insanity that he had fallen out of the habit.

He discovered that Gaea was not high on the list of places to visit in the solar system. There were many reasons for this, ranging from dehumanizing customs procedures to the lack of first-class tourist accommodations. He found an interesting statistic: on the average, 150 people arrived at Gaea daily. Something fewer than that number left. Some of the missing were people who decided to stay. Emigrating was informal, and Gaea had a resident human population of several thousand. But some were fatalities.

Gaea tended to attract the young and adventurous. Men and women came who were bored with the sameness of Earth. Often they arrived after a tour of human habitats around the solar system, where they found more of the same but in pressurized domes. Gaea offered an Earthlike climate. That meant freedom from the regimentation found on more hostile planets and elbow room that Earth no longer could provide.

He learned a lot about Titans in general, about Gaea’s children at Uranus—who admitted only accredited scientific observers and spoke condescendingly of Gaea, the Mad Titan. He studied Gaea’s physical structure and maps of her interior. She was a spinning hollow wheel with six hollow spokes.
Even to humans who had grown up with space colonies at the LaGrange points, her dimensions beggared the imagination. She had a radius of 650 kilometers, a circumference of 4,000. The living space on the rim was shaped like an inner tube 25 kilometers across and 200 kilometers high. Between each of the six spokes was a flat, angled mirror that deflected sunlight through transparent windows in the rim roof, so that parts of the rim were always in daylight while the areas beneath the spokes were perpetually dark. Gaea was habitable throughout; even the spokes supported life, clinging to the sides of cylinders 400 kilometers high. Maps of Gaea were unwieldy, being sixteen times longer from east to west than from north to south. To study the maps properly, it was necessary to fasten the ends together to make a loop, set the map on edge, and sit in the middle.