"Are you... do you and Gaby have something going?" She flushed, hoping it wasn't visible in the firelight. "That's none of your business."
"I always thought she was gay underneath," he said, nodding. "I didn't think you were."
She took a deep breath and looked at him narrowly. The darting shadows revealed nothing on his blond-bearded face.
"Are you deliberately needling me? I said it was none of your business."
"If you weren't queer for her, you'd have just said no." What was the matter with her? she wondered. Why was he making her skin crawl? Gene had always operated by his own bonehead logic when it came to people. His bigotry was carefully suppressed and socially acceptable, or he would never have been chosen for the trip to Saturn. He blundered cheerfully through his relationships, genuinely surprised when people took offence at his tactlessness. It was a common-enough personality, so well controlled, according to his psychological profile, as to barely qualify as an eccentricity.
So why did she feel so uncomfortable when he looked at her? "I'd better set you straight so you don't hurt Gaby. She's fallen in love with me. It has something to do with the isolation; I was the first person she saw afterward, and she developed this fixation. I think she'll grow out of it because she's never been significantly homosexual before. Nor heterosexual, for that matter."
"She covered it up," he suggested. "what year is this? Nineteen-fifty? You astonish me, Gene. You don't hide anything from those NASA tests. She had a homosexual affair, sure. I had one, and so did you. I read your dossier. You want me to tell you how old you were when it happened?"
"I was just a kid. The point is, I could tell about her when we made love. No reaction, you know? I'll bet it's not like that when you two make it."
"We don't-" She stopped herself, wondering how she had been drawn in as far as she was.
"This conversation is over. I don't want to talk about it, and besides, Gaby's coming back."
Gaby approached the fire and dropped a net full of fruit at Cirocco's side. She squatted, looked thoughtfully back and forth between the two of them, then stood up and put on her clothes.
"Are my ears burning, or is it my imagination?" Neither Gene nor Cirocco spoke, and Gaby sighed.
"Here we go again. I think I'm starting to agree with the folks who say manned space missions cost more than they're worth."
The fifth day took them irrevocably into night. There was now only the ghostly light reflected by the day areas curving up on each side. It was not much, but it was enough.
The ground was noticeably steeper, with a thinner layer of dirt. often they walked on the warm, bare strands, which provided surer traction. They began tying themselves together, and were careful to see that two were always hanging on while the other climbed.
Even here the plant life of Gaea had not given up. Massive trees splayed roots flat to the cable, sending out runners that scrambled into the surface and hung on tenaciously. The effort of wresting a living from such uninviting terrain had robbed them of beauty. They were gaunt and lonely, their trunks trans- lucent with a pale inner light, their leaves the, merest wisps of nothing. In places, the roots could be used as ladders.
At the end of the day they had come seventy kilometers in a straight line, and were fifty kilometers nearer the hub. The trees had thinned enough for them to see they had climbed above the level of the roof, well on their way into the narrowing wedge of space between the cable and the bell-shaped mouth of the Rhea spoke. They could look back and see Hyperion spread out below, as though they rode on a kite tied to a monster string tethered in the rocky knot called the place of winds.
They saw the glitter of the glass castle early on the sixth day. Cirocco and Gaby crouched in a tangle of tree roots and scanned it as Gene carried the rope to the foot of the structure.
"Maybe that's the place," Cirocco said.
"You mean your elevator lobby?" Gaby snorted. "If that's it, I'd as soon ride a roller coaster with paper rails."
It looked something like an Italian hill town, but made of spun sugar, a million years old, and half melted. Domes and bal- conies, arches, flying buttresses, battlements, and terraced roofs perched on a jutting shelf and dripped over the edge like syrup
poured over a waffle and quick-frozen. Tall towers jutted at all angles: pencils in a cup. They were tall and spindly. In the corners, drifts of snow or pastel confectioner's sugar sparkled.
"It's a hulk, Rocky."
"I can see that. Let me have my fantasy, will you?"
The castle fought a silent battle with wispy white vines. It looked like a stand-off; the castle had taken mortal damage, but when they joined Gene, Cirocco and Gaby heard the vines giving off the dry rustic of death.
"Like Spanish moss," Gaby observed, tugging a handful free the entangling mass.
"But bigger."
Gaby shrugged. "If Gaea can't build it in the large economy size, she doesn't bother."
"There's a door up here," Gene called back. "You want to go in? "
"You bet."
There was five meters of level space between the edge of the shelf and the castle wall. Not far from them was a rounded arch, not much taller than the top of Cirocco's head.
"Whew!" Gaby breathed, leaning against the wall. "Walking on level ground is almost enough to make you dizzy. I'd forgotten how."
Cirocco lit a lamp and followed Gene through the arch and into a hall of glass.
"We'd better stick together," she said.
There seemed good reason for the caution. While none of the surfaces were completely reflective, the place had a lot in common with, the mirror houses at carnivals. They could see through the walls to rooms on all sides of them, which also had glass walls leading to more rooms.
"How do we get out, once we're in?" Gaby asked. Cirocco pointed down. "Follow our footprints."
"Ah. How silly of me." Gaby bent and looked at the fine powder coating the floor. There were larger, flat sheets scattered through it.
"Ground glass," she said. "Don't fall down."
Gene shook his head. "I thought so at first, too, but it's not glass. It's thin as a soap bubble, and it won't hold an edge." He picked a wall and pressed it gently with the palm of this hand. It shattered with a soft tinkling sound. He caught one of the pieces that drifted down around him and crushed it in his hand.
"How many of those walls could you break before the second floor falls on us?" Gaby asked, pointing at the room above them.
"A lot, I think. Look, this place is a maze, but it wasn't originally. We walk through some of the walls because something broke them already. But this was a stack of cubes, with no way in or out of any of them."
Gaby and Cirocco looked at each other. "Like the building we looked at under the cable," Cirocco said, for both of them. She described it to Gene.
"Who makes buildings with rooms you can't get in or out of?" Gaby asked.
"The chambered nautilus does," Gene said.
"Say again?"
"The nautilus. It makes its shell in a spiral. When the shell gets too small, it moves up and seals off part of the shell in back. You cut them in half, they're very pretty. It sounds a lot like the building you saw; little rooms on the bottom, big ones on top."
Cirocco frowned. "But all these rooms look about the same size."
Gene shook his head. "The difference isn't great. This room is a little taller than the one over there. There'll be smaller rooms somewhere else. These things built sideways."
The picture that emerged of the creatures that built the glass castle was of something that worked like sea corals. The colony abandoned houses as they outgrew them, building m the re- mains. Parts of the castle towered ten levels or more. Structural strength came not from the tissue-thin walls but from the interstices that made up the edges. They were like clear lucite bars, thick as Cirocco's wrist, very hard and strong. If all the walls in the castle had been broken 'out, the outline would have remained, like the steel underpinnings of a skyscraper.