Wizard (43 page)

* * *

Gaea’s milk was indeed bitter, made all the more so by Robin’s departure. Its taste did change slightly from day to day, but not nearly enough to provide the variety Chris craved. In less than a hectorev he gagged at the thought of it, began to wonder if starvation might be better than subsisting on the filthy, revolting stuff.

He went foraging as often as he could, careful never to leave Valiha alone for too long. On these trips he gathered wood and from time to time brought back one of the indigenous animals. That was always a signal for rejoicing, as Valiha would bring out her hoarded spices and prepare each one in a different way. It soon became clear to him that she was eating only sparingly of the things she cooked. Chris was sure it was not because she preferred the milk. He thought many times of insisting she take her share but never had the determination actually to say it. He ate his portions like a miser, making the meal last for hours, and always took more when it was offered. He did not like himself for doing it but was unable to stop.

Time blurred. All the sharp edges of time’s passage had been worn away since the day he arrived in Gaea. Since before that, actually; the trip in the spaceship had begun his detachment from Earthly time. Then there had been the freezing of duration into one eternal afternoon in Hyperion, the slow crawl into night and once again into day. Now the process was complete.

He started going crazy again, after a long hiatus that had lasted from before the Carnival in Crius until his arrival in the cavern. He thought of it that way now—as going crazy rather than having an “episode,” as his doctors had so mincingly called it—because it was simply what happened. He no longer believed Gaea could cure him even if she wanted to, and he could think of no reason why she should want to. He was certainly doomed to go through life as a collection of maniacal strangers, and he would have to cope with them as best he could.

That was actually easier to do in the cavern than it had ever been. He often literally did not notice it. He would become aware of himself in a place he did not recall coming to and could not tell if he had gone crazy or had simply been wool-gathering. Each time it happened he would anxiously turn to Valiha to see if he had done her any harm. He never did. In fact, often she would look happier than she had been in days. That was another thing that made the craziness easier: Valiha did not care if he went crazy and actually seemed to like him better that way.

He wondered giddily if this was the cure Gaea had in mind. Down here craziness did not matter. All on his own he had found his way into a situation where he was normal and as well as anyone.

With no discussion between them, Valiha took over the chore of notching the calendar after each of his sleeps. As much as anything else he took that as a sign that he was indeed suffering lapses into manic states. He did not know what he did during those times. He did not ask Valiha, and she never spoke of it.

They spoke of everything else. The chores around camp took up no more than an “hour” each “day,” and that left anywhere from nine to forty-nine hours with little to do but talk. At first they spoke of themselves, with the result that Valiha soon ran out of things to say. He had forgotten how impossibly young she was. Though she was a mature adult, her experience was woefully small. But it did not take much longer for Chris to exhaust his life as well, and they turned to other things. They spoke of hopes and fears, of philosophy—Titanide and human. They invented games and made up stories. Valiha turned out to be only mediocre at games but great at stories. She had an imagination and a perspective just enough askew from the human to enable her to astonish him time and again with her reckless, disturbing
insights into things she should not understand. He began to see as he never had before what it was to be so nearly human, yet not human. He found himself pitying all those billions of humans who had lived before contact with Gaea, who could never have communed with this improbable engaging creature.

Valiha’s patience amazed him. He was going crazy, yet his freedom of movement was much greater than hers. He began to understand why it was the common practice to kill horses with injured legs: the frame was not designed for reclining. A Titanide’s legs were much more flexible than those of an Earthly horse, yet she had a terrible time. For half a kilorev she could do little but lie on her side. When the bones began to knit, she started sitting up but could not maintain the position long because her stiff, splintered forelegs had to be straight out in front of her.

His first hint that she was finding it difficult to bear was when she mentioned in passing that Titanides being treated in a hospital would be suspended in a sling with the injured legs hanging down. He was astonished.

“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” he asked.

“I didn’t see what good it would do, since—”

“Horseshit,” he said, and waited for her to smile. It had become his favorite expletive, something he used to tease her gently by pretending to bitch about his daily chore of cleaning up. But this time she did not smile.

“I think I could rig something like that,” he said. “You’d stand on your hind legs, right? So some kind of sling that went behind and between your front legs … I think I could do that.” He waited, and she said nothing. She would not even look at him. “What’s the matter, Valiha?”

“I don’t want to be any trouble,” she said almost inaudibly, and began to weep.

He had never seen her cry before. What an idiot he had been, to assume that because she had not cried, everything was fine. He went to her and found her eager for his touch. It was awkward at first, comforting someone so huge, and the position enforced on her by her injury did not simplify things. Yet he soon relaxed and could soothe her with no thought to anything but the moment. She had really been
asking so little all this time, he realized, and he had not given her even that.

“Don’t worry about it,” he whispered in the long, terete shell of her ear.

“I’ve been so stupid,” she moaned. “It was stupid to break my legs.”

“You can’t blame yourself for an accident.”

“But I remember it. I don’t remember much, but I remember that. I was so frightened. I don’t know what happened back there … back there on the stairs. I remember a terrible pain, and all I could think of was running. I ran and ran, and when I came to the ravine, I jumped, even though I knew I’d never make it to the other side.”

“We all do crazy things when we’re frightened,” he reasoned.

“Yes, but now you’re stuck here because of me.”

“We’re both stuck here,” he admitted. “I won’t pretend that this is where I want to be; that would be silly. Neither of us wants to be here. But so long as you’re hurt, I’ll stick by you wherever you are. And I don’t blame you for anything that happened because the simple truth is none of it was your fault.”

She said nothing for a long time as her shoulders shook quietly. When she had stopped crying, she sniffed loudly and looked into his eyes.

“This is where I want to be,” she said.

“What do you mean?” He drew back slightly, but she held him.

“I mean I love you very much.”

“I don’t think you really love
me
.”

She shook her head. “I know what you mean, and it’s not true. I love you always, when you’re quiet and when you rage. There are so many parts to you. I think perhaps I am the only one who has ever known them all. And I love them all.”

“A few doctors claimed to know them all,” Chris said unhappily. When Valiha did not respond, he went to the question he had been afraid to ask for a long time. “Do I make love to you when I’m crazy?”

“We make love in glorious tumult. You are my virile stallion, and I your erotomanic androgyne. We
have anterior romps and frontal communion, and then we diddle around in the middle. Your penis—”

“Stop, stop! I didn’t ask for the dirty details.”

“I said nothing rhyparographic,” Valiha said virtuously.

“I don’t … what did you do, eat a dictionary?” he asked.

“I must know all English words for the experiment,” she said.

“What … never mind, tell me about that later. I knew I made love to you once. I just wanted to know if I still do.”

“Only twenty or thirty revs ago.”

“And it doesn’t bother you that I do it only when I’m crazy?”

She considered it. “I really have had a hard time understanding what you mean by crazy. Sometimes you lose some inhibitions—another word I have trouble with. This gets you into trouble with human women who don’t wish to copulate with you and with any human who thwarts your desires. I have no trouble because if you ever become obstreperous, I simply pick you up by your hair and hold you at arm’s length. When you calm down, I reason with you. You respond to this very well.”

Chris laughed, and it sounded hollow even to him.

“You amaze me,” he said. “I’ve been studied by the best doctors on Earth. They couldn’t do a thing with me but give me some pills that are damn near useless. They’ll be fascinated to hear your cure. Pick him up by the hair, hold him at arm’s length, and reason with him. Ah, sweet reason.”

“It works,” she said defensively. “I suppose it would be efficacious only in a society where everyone was larger than you.”

“My behavior at those times doesn’t put you off?” he asked. “Titanides never assault one another, do they? I would expect you to see me as … well, repulsive when I’m acting like that. It’s so un-Titanide.”

“I find most human behavior un-Titanide,” Valiha said. “Yours when you are ‘crazy’ becomes perhaps a trifle more aggressive than is normal, but all your passions are magnified, love as well as
aggression.”

“I’m not in love with you, Valiha.”

“Yes, you are. Even this part of you, the sane part, loves me with a Titanide’s love: unchanging, but too large to give all of it to one person. You have told me so when you were crazy. You told me your sane self would not admit his love.”

“He lied to you.”

“You would not lie to me.”

“But I’m here to be cured of all that!” he said, in mounting frustration.

“I know,” she moaned, once more on the verge of tears. “I’m so afraid Gaea will cure you and you’ll never know your love for me!”

Chris thought this conversation was as crazy as any he had ever heard. Maybe he
was
crazy: permanently. It was within the realm of possibility. But he did not want to see her cry, he
did
like her, and suddenly it did not make sense to resist her any longer. He kissed her. She responded instantly, alarming him with her strength and passion, then paused and put her mouth close to his ear.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be gentle.”

He smiled.

It was not easy, but eventually he made the sling she needed to rest comfortably while her legs healed. Finding three poles long and strong enough among the stunted shrubs that passed for trees in the cavern took quite a while, but when he had them, he soon fashioned a tall tripod. There was just enough rope to make the sling and pad it with material from clothes they didn’t need in the warm cave. When it was finished, Valiha carefully pulled herself up with her hands, and Chris positioned her legs through the loops. She settled down in it and heaved a sigh of contentment. Thereafter she spent most of her time with her front hooves dangling a few centimeters from the ground.

But not all her time. In the sling, it was impossible for them to make frontal love, and that activity quickly became an important part of their lives. Chris was soon wondering how he had survived so long
without it, then realized that, of course, he hadn’t, he had been making love with Valiha all along. Now he felt he would most probably have succumbed to despair and simply wasted away, starving in the midst of plenty. Even Gaea’s milk tasted a little better, and he wondered if it was his mood and not Her Majesty’s that made the difference.

Valiha was not like a human woman. It would have been pointless even to try to say if she was better or not as good; she was different. Her frontal vagina fitted him within lubricious tolerances too close to be the result of cosmic happenstance. He could almost hear Gaea chuckling. What a joke she had played on humanity, to arrange it so the first intelligent nonhumans the race encountered could play the same games humans played, and with the same equipment. Valiha was a vast, fleshy playground, from the tip of her broad nose across acres of mottled yellow skin to the softness just above the hooves of her hind legs. She was completely human—on a large scale—in the caress of her hands, the mass of her breasts, the taste of her skin and her mouth and her clitoris. And she was at the same time wildly alien in her bulging knees, in the smooth, hard muscles of her back, hips, and thighs, and in the imposing slither of her penis as it emerged moist from its sheath. When he kissed her in the hollow behind her expressive donkey ears, she smelled human.

He was at first reluctant to admit the presence of most of her body. He tried to pretend she existed from the head to the forecrotch and ignored the sexual superabundance she contained. Valiha led him gently to experience the surprising possibilities of her other two-thirds. Part of his hesitation was a lingering misconception he had fought when he found it in others and had not realized he shared: part of her body was equine, meaning she was part horse, and one does not become intimate with animals. He had to discard all that. He found it surprisingly easy. In many ways there was less equine about her than there was simian in him. Another hurdle had been stated early by Valiha herself: she was an androgyne—though gynandroid was the closer of two words never meant to cover Titanides. Chris had never been homosexual. Valiha made him see that it meant nothing when making love with her. She was all things, and it made no difference that her anterior organs were so huge. He had always known that coitus was
only a small part of making love.

* * *

Titanide crutches were long, stout poles with padded crescents to fit the armpits, little different from the sort used by humans for thousands of years. Chris had no trouble making a pair.