She was deciding on the program for the next encampment. After much thought she decided on Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Then she remembered the other two, waiting at Tuxedo Junction. Chris and Cirocco. Well there was that film from 1994, it had nine in the title, didn't it? Surely her librarian could ferret it out.
Then she had it, and laughed aloud. The second feature would be Fellini's 8 1/2.
TWO
Chris deftly flipped fried eggs out of the copper pan and onto an earthenware plate. The pan was almost a meter across. All his cookware was outsized. Most of his guests were Titanides, who loved to eat as much as they loved to cook.
He was only a mediocre chef, but Cirocco didn't seem to mind. She used her fork to make a gesture of thanks as he removed the first plate and set the second batch of eggs before her. She sat at the high table on a high stool, her feet hooked around the crossbraces, her elbows set wide and her head held low as she shoveled it in. Her wet hair was tied back out of harm's way.
Chris pulled a stool over to the table across from her and hitched himself up onto it. As Cirocco tore into her fourteenth egg, Chris began eating the two he had fixed for himself, and watched her over the table.
She seemed pale. She was thin. He could count her ribs; her breasts were hardly there.
"How was the trip?" he asked.
She nodded, then reached for her coffee cup to wash down the last mouthful of eggs. The job required two hands. It was a Titanide cup.
"No problems," she said, and wiped her mouth on the back of her arm. Then she looked surprised, gave him a guilty glance, and picked up her napkin. She wiped her arm first, then her mouth.
"Sorry," she said, with a nervous giggle.
"Your table manners don't concern me," he said. "This is your house, too."
"Yeah, but that's no reason to be a pig. It just tastes so good. Real food, I mean."
He knew what she meant. She had been foraging for a long time. But he smiled at the description of the food. The "bacon" was meat from a smiler with swine genes in its ancestry, in the baffling Gaean system of crossbreeding that would have driven Luther Burbank to the madhouse. The "eggs" came from a shrub common in Dione. Left unharvested, they would eventually hatch a many-legged reptile that scattered the plant's seeds in its excrement. But the fruit tasted very much like real eggs. The coffee, oddly enough, was real coffee, a hybrid adapted to the low light of Gaea. With the collapse of the Earth-Gaea trade it had become as profitable to grow coffee in the highlands as cocaine, the traditional Gaean export. Coke glutted the market, but coffee was hard to get.
"Kong's dead," she said, around another mouthful.
"Really? Who did the job?"
"Do you need to ask?"
Chris thought it over, and could come up with only one likely candidate.
"You going to tell me about it?"
"If you'll slap some more bacon in that pan." She grinned at him. He sighed, and got up.
As the bacon began to sizzle, she told him what she had seen in Phoebe. While she talked, she finished her second helping. She got up and rinsed her plate, then stood beside him and sliced hunks off a huge loaf of bread and arranged them on a tray for toasting.
"I figure he's got to die when they cut his brain up. Doesn't he?" She squatted and slid the tray into the bottom drawer of the stove, beneath the firebox where the radiant heat would warm it slowly.
"I guess so." Chris made a face.
She stood and unbound her hair, shook it out, and ran her fingers through it. Chris watched, noted that it was almost entirely white now. It reached far down her back. He wondered if she would ever cut it again. Before her brain surgery, five years earlier, she had seldom let it get below her shoulders. Then her head was shaved, and she seemed to have found a new affection for long hair.
"Anything else I should know?" he asked.
"I talked with Gaby again."
Chris said nothing, but continued to turn the bacon strips. Cirocco started rummaging through a cabinet.
"What did she say?"
Cirocco came up with a Titanide curry-comb and began running it through her hair. She said nothing for a time, then sighed.
"I saw her twice. Once about three hectorevs before I went to Kong's mountain. Again in Tethys, not long afterward. The first time she told me Robin was returning to Gaea. She didn't say why. She has children with her."
Chris said nothing. Not long ago, he would have, but he had begun to wonder about a few things since then. Things like the definitions of "rational", the meaning of magic, the line between the quick and the dead. He had always thought himself a rational man. He was civilized. He didn't believe in sorcery. Though he had lived twenty years in a place with a "God" he had talked to, had loved a "Demon" who had once been a "Wizard," he took none of these words with their literal definitions. Gaea was a bush-league God. Cirocco was remarkable, but she had no magical powers, for good or evil.
In the face of the things he had witnessed or heard about, why should he worry about one measly resurrection?
But it had given him a lot of trouble. Gaby had died in his arms. He would never forget her horrible burns. The first time Cirocco told him she had seen Gaby, he had exploded. Later, he had been gentle, fearing his old friend was getting senile. But senility was too easy an explanation. Even if rationality was down the drain, pragmatism was still valuable, and Chris thought of himself as a pragmatist. If it works, it's there. And Cirocco's conversations with Gaby had been very good at predicting the future.
"When will she get here?" he asked.
"Here in Gaea? She's here already. In fact, she should be getting near the Junction by now."
"She's coming here?"
"Conal's bringing them. There'll be some Titanides with them, too. What's the matter? Don't you want them here?"
"It's not that. It'll be great to see her again. I never thought I would." He looked around the kitchen. "I was just wondering if I have enough on hand for guests. Maybe I should run over to the Hua's and see if they have-"
Cirocco laughed, and put her arms around him. He looked down at her face, and recognized the glint of mischief there.
"Don't be such a housewife, Chris," she said, and kissed him. "The Titanides are better at that, and they like it, too."
"Okay. What do you want to do?" He embraced her, let his hands slide down her back to her buttocks, and lifted her easily.
"First, let's get that bacon and toast off the stove before they burn. I've decided I'm not as hungry as I thought."
"No?"
"Well, not that way. I've been running all over this stinkin' wheel with nothing to look at but Iron Masters." She slipped a hand between them, down his belly, and squeezed. "Suddenly your homely face seems oddly attractive."
"That's not my face, old woman."
"It'll do," she said, and squeezed again.
At the completion of her thirteenth decade, boredom was one of Cirocco's chief fears. She had been spared the depredations of aging, the dulling of the senses and mental powers. It was conceivable that someday bedding down with a lover and performing the ancient rituals of coitus would pall. That was the day she would be ready to die.
But so far, so good.
They were in the crow's nest, a garret rising over the main house at Tuxedo Junction. There were windows in each of the six walls. One ladder went down to the third floor, and another up to a belfrey that housed Chris's carillon. Two dozen ropes ran along one wall, through holes in the floor and ceiling.