Wizard (5 page)

He was glad he had spent the time on it. Gaea was nearly invisible from space. Though he crowded around the ports with the others as the ship was snared by Gaea’s docking tendrils, he could see little. With the exception of the reflecting mirrors, her outer surface was flat black, the better to absorb all the sunlight available to her.

* * *

He had done his homework and did not expect any surprises. It turned out there was only one, but it was a disaster.

As expected, his group was taken to join the other tourists arriving that day for the beginning of forty-eight hours of quarantine and decontamination. These procedures were one of the reasons Gaea did not attract the rich or the trendy. The routine was a cross between a hospital, Ellis Island, and Auschwitz. Uniformed human quarantine officers told everyone to disrobe and surrender all personal possessions. This included Chris’s medication. His arguments were met with firm refusals. There were no exceptions to be made under any circumstances, and if he did not wish to surrender the pills, he was free to return to Earth at once.

The decontamination was in earnest and carried out with dehumanizing efficiency. Naked bodies,
male and female together, were put on moving belts to be taken from one station to the next. They were washed and irradiated. There were emetics and diuretics to be taken, enemas to be endured. After a waiting period the whole process was repeated. The attendants made no concessions to privacy. Examinations were done in huge white rooms with dozens of tables, crowded by naked, shuffling people. Everyone slept in a common bunkroom and ate tasteless food dished out on steel trays.

Chris had never felt comfortable in the nude, even with other men. He had something to hide. While it was certainly not visible on his body, he suffered from the irrational fear that by removing his armor of clothing, he was exposing his differentness. He stayed away from situations where social nudity was the custom. As a result, he
was
conspicuous; in a sea of black and brown and tanned skin, he was pale as milk.

The attack came early on the first day. The chemicals in the pills had nothing to do with it, for they were certainly still in his bloodstream. It was the placebo effect which had been removed. Though his condition was not a psychological one, it was by now more complex than that. He was subject to anxiety from worrying about the psychochemical problem, and the punch line was that the anxiety attacks could trigger the serious ones. When his palms and the back of his neck began to perspire, he knew it was coming.

Soon he began to experience visual distortion and an acute sensitivity to sound. He had to assure himself each minute that everything was still real, that he was not on the verge of a heart attack, that people were not laughing at him, that he was not dying of a brain tumor. His feet were distant, pale, cold things. It was all a charade, and he had to act his part in it, pretend he was normal when everyone knew he was not. It was funny, really. He pretended to laugh. Then he pretended to cry, laughing secretly, knowing he could stop crying any time he wanted to, right up to the moment a man touched him on the shoulder and Chris punched him in the nose.

After that he felt better. He laughed at the man struggling to his feet. They were in the shower room—they spent most of their time there, he thought, feeling cross for a moment. But the annoyance passed.
The man on the floor was shouting, but Chris couldn’t have cared less. He was more interested in the erection he was getting. He thought it was a fine thing and knew all the naked women would agree with him. There was a wet splat behind him, and he turned and saw the man he had hit had fallen again. The dumb idiot had taken a swing at Chris from behind and slipped in a puddle.

He felt like fucking something. It didn’t really matter what. The urge hardly amounted to an obsession. He could have been diverted from the project quite easily, but it sounded like fun.

“Who wants to fuck?” he yelled. Many of the people in the shower turned to look at him. He spread his arms, sharing his delight in the fine thing. A few people laughed. Most looked away. He was unperturbed.

A big blond woman caught his eye. He loved her instantly, from the long, wet hair against her back to the fine swell of muscle in her calves. He went to her and pressed his love offering against her hip. She looked down, then quickly up to the grin on his face, and slapped him with a soapy hand.

He put his palm against her face and shoved her back and down. She hit with a thud of buttocks and a sharp clack of teeth and was too startled by it all to attempt to dodge the kick he aimed at her, but the kick didn’t connect anyway because a man grabbed Chris by the arm and spun him around, and they both slipped and went down in huge confusion. By this time men were coming from all directions to defend the blond woman. It got very involved.

Chris didn’t mind. Practically from the outset of the brawl he found himself at the edges of it, so he joined the majority of people hurrying to be as far from the fight as possible. It turned into a crush against one wall with the showerheads spraying warm water down on acres of skin, a great deal of which was female skin. Chris embraced them at random, and it wasn’t long before he got a smile in response. The woman was small and dark-haired, which was great because he had had it with big blonds, and she giggled when he threw her over his shoulder and carried her off to the big, deserted barracks and tossed her into an upper bunk. Soon he was happily fornicating.

And it was really unfair, just a terrible injustice, because he felt he could have kept at it all day long
except this fascist attendant happened by and told them they had to be in the exam room for some damn colonic irrigation or other similar idiocy, and she just wouldn’t listen when Chris explained that he’d had it with tubes up his ass. It was really annoying him, so he stood up and planted his feet—the woman made a funny gurgle when Chris stepped on her chest—and took a swing at the uniform, who had already stepped back and who had her weapon out and took careful aim and
shot
him.

He woke in a pool of vomit streaked with blood. And what else is new? he wondered, but didn’t really want to know. There was a three-day growth of beard on his chin, caked with dried blood. He didn’t remember much, knew that was the one thing he had to be grateful for.

They wanted to know if he was going to be a good boy now, and he assured them he would.

The woman who had shot him helped him clean up. She seemed anxious to give him the full details of his stay in jail and the events that had led up to it, but he closed his mind. He was given his personal effects and taken to some sort of elevator. When the doors shut behind him, he saw that the capsule was free-floating in a yellow fluid that moved through a gargantuan pipe. Once those facts were noted, however, he ceased to think about it.

The trip took nearly an hour, and for that time he thought of nothing. He emerged beneath the mind-numbing curved sky of Gaea, stood on her terrifying curved ground, glanced around, failed to be terrified or numbed. He was at the limits of numb. Overhead, a thousand-meter blimp was passing by. He looked at it blankly and thought of pigeons. He waited.

Nasu was in a terrible mood. Robin bore two fresh stigmata on her forearm to attest to her demon’s temper. Anacondas do not react well to washing and prodding; the snake was terrified and bewildered by the events of the last two days, and her way of expressing it was to lash out at the nearest target, which was Robin. In all the time they had been together, Nasu had bitten Robin only three times before.

Robin was not doing much better herself. Some of the things she had been warned about had turned out to be chimeras. But the heat was terrible.

The temperature was thirty-five degrees. She had verified that astonishing fact—announced by the guide who met her group at the surface—by finding a thermometer and staring at it in disbelief. It was preposterous to run an environment that way, but the people shrugged it off. They complained but expressed no determination to
do
something about it.

Her urge was to tear off her clothes. She fought it as long as she could, but her mother had been wrong about so many other things she decided it was safe to disobey her in this. Many of the people in the dusty streets of Titantown were nude; why shouldn’t she be? She compromised, keeping her loins covered as a signal she would fight any rape attempt. Not that she really feared rape anymore.

The first penis she saw, in the mass showers of quarantine, had made her laugh and earned her a sour look from the proud owner. All the rest had been just as comical. She couldn’t imagine its swelling enough to harm her but reserved judgment until she could observe a man raping with one.

But there wasn’t any raping the first night, though she stayed awake a long time to watch for it and fight off attackers. The second night there were two men raping in one corner of the barracks. The bunks all around the couples were empty, so Robin sat on one and watched. The hilarious dangling things had swollen more than she thought they would, but not really very much. The women did not seem to be in pain. Neither had been knocked unconscious, nor were they face down. One, in fact, was on top of the man.

One woman told Robin to go away, but she had seen enough. If someone managed to knock her out, the experience would be distasteful but not very dangerous. She regularly dilated herself more than that for cervical exams.

She watched the women after the raping was over, looking for signs of shame. There did not seem to be any. So at least that much was true; peckish women had been taught to take degradation in stride. Slaves usually did, she remembered, at least outwardly. She wondered what rebellions smoldered inside.

No one made love for as long as she observed. Robin supposed they had to hide it from the men.

* * *

Titantown had begun under a huge tree but, with the end of the Titanide-Angel War many years before, it had spread to the east. Most Titanides still lived under the tree or in its branches. Some had moved out into tents of multicolored silk bordering the crazy thoroughfare that was the nearest thing in Gaea to a tourist attraction. It was chockablock with salons and saloons, hippodromes and nickel pitches, emporia, divertissements, hijinks, kickshaws, bagatelles, burlesque, and buffoonery. Sawdust and Titanide droppings were trampled underfoot, and the dusty air was thick with the smells of cotton candy, perfume, greasepaint, marijuana, and sweat. The place was laid out with the customary Titanide disdain for formal streets and zoning regulations. A casino faced the Intergalactic Primitive Baptist Church, which stood next to an interspecies bordello—all three structures as flimsy as a promise. The sweet voices of Titanides at choir practice mixed with the clatter of roulette wheels and the sounds of passion
coming through thin tent walls. In a high wind, the whole bewildering hurly-burly could be swept away in moments, to reappear a few hours later in a new configuration.

The elevator to the hub ran once in a hectorev—which she learned was five Coven days or four point two Earth days—so Robin found herself with thirty-six hours to kill. Titantown looked educational, though she was not sure what it was for. Coven concepts of amusement had not prepared her to regard this kind of carnival as a place to have fun. The witches’ idea of a good time tended toward athletic contests, feasts, and festivals, though they loved practical jokes and tellers of lies.

Her mother had given her several hundred UN marks. Robin stood on the plank balcony of her tree house-hotel room, looked out over the noise and dust and bright colors below, and felt rising excitement in her breast. If she couldn’t find a way to raise hell down there, she’d turn in her third Eye.

* * *

Gambling was a bust. She won a little, lost a little, lost a little more, and could not bring herself to care. Money was a crazy peckish game, and she did not pretend to understand it. Her mother had said it was a means of keeping score in the great dominance display of the penile culture. That was all Robin needed to know.

She decided to keep an open mind, though many things seemed quite unpromising as amusements. At first, she followed the people who seemed to be having the best times, then did what they did. For half a mark she purchased the use of three knives to throw at a man who capered and taunted in front of a wooden target. He was very good. She couldn’t hit him, and neither could anyone else while she watched.

She followed a drunken couple into
Professor Potter’s Wonder Zoo!
, where Gaean animal oddities were displayed in cages. Robin thought it fascinating and couldn’t understand why the couple left after only a perfunctory glance, looking for some “action,” as the man put it. Well, then, she would find action.

In one tent she witnessed a man raping a woman on a stage and found it very boring. She had already seen this, and even the contortions could not make it of further interest. Then two Titanides repeated the performance, and it was well worth seeing, though semantically troubling. She thought one Titanide was raping the other, but then the rapist pulled out and was penetrated by the rapee. How could that be, logically? If both sexes could rape, was it still rape? Of course, the problem applied only to Titanides. Each had a male and a female organ in the rear, and a male or a female in front. The announcer presented the show as “educational” and explained that Titanides thought nothing of engaging in public anterior sex, but reserved frontal lovemaking for private moments. He also taught Robin a new verb: to fuck.

The Titanide anterior penis alarmed Robin. Normally sheathed and partially concealed by the hind legs, it was a formidable instrument when revealed. It looked exactly like the human model, but was as long as Robin’s arm and twice as thick. She wondered if her mother had been confused, attributing this fearsome thing to human men.

There were other educational and scientific sideshows. Many of them featured violence. This did not surprise Robin, who had expected nothing more of peckish society and who was no stranger to violence herself. In one small tent a woman demonstrated the powers of some form of yoga by sticking pins in her eyes, driving a long saber through her midriff until it emerged from her back, then deftly amputating her own left arm with scalpel and saw. Robin was sure the woman was a robot or a hologram, but the illusion was too good to penetrate. At the next show she was as good as new.