"After a while, though, it began to wear on her. There's a lot of despair at Carnival. You don't see it because Titanides grieve in private. And I'm not saying they go out and kill themselves if they don't get picked. I've never heard of a Titanide suicide. Still, she was the cause of a lot of sorrow. She kept at it for a long time after the fun had gone out of it, you understand, out of a sense of duty, but about twenty years ago she decided she had done all that could be expected of anybody. It was time to hand the job over to someone else. She went to Gaea and asked to be relieved of the job. And Gaea refused."
She looked at him intently, waiting for him to understand. He did not yet, not completely. Gaby leaned back in the bow of the boat, her hands laced behind her head. She stared at the clouds.
"Rocky took her job with some reservations," Gaby said. "I was with her, so I know. She went into it with what she thought were open eyes. She did not trust Gaea to be completely true to her word; she was ready for some jokers in the deck. The funny thing, though, was that Gaea did live up to her end of the bargain. There were some good years. Some close calls, some really bad troubles, but all in all they were the best years of her life. Mine, too. You'd never hear either of us complaining, even when things got dangerous, because we knew what we were getting into when we decided not to go back to Earth. Gaea did not promise an easy ride. She said that we could live to a very ripe old age, so long as we kept on our toes. That's all been precisely as promised.
"We didn't think much about getting older because we didn't." She laughed, with a hint of self-deprecation. "We were sort of like the heroes of a serial or a comic strip. 'Join us again next week ...' and there we'd be, unchanged, off on a new adventure. I built a road around Gaea. Cirocco got carried off by King Kong and had to get loose. We ... hell, shut me up, please. You walk into an old folks' home, you get stories."
"It's all right," Chris said, amused. He had already thought of the comic-strip analogy. The lives of these two women had been so divorced from the reality he knew as to make them seem less than real. Yet here she was, a century old and real as a kick in the pants.
"So Rocky finally came up against it. The joker, and it was a hell of a trick. We should have expected it, though. Gaea does not conceal the fact that she never gives something for nothing. We had thought we were satisfying our end of that deal, but she wanted more. Here's how the swindle worked.
"You saw her put the Titanide egg in her mouth at Carnival?" Chris nodded, and she went on. "It changed color. It turned clear as glass. The thing is, no Titanide egg can be completely fertilized until that change occurs."
"You mean until it's put in someone's mouth?"
"You've almost got it. A Titanide mouth won't do the job. It has to be a human mouth. In fact, it has to be a particular human."
Chris started to say something, stopped, and sat back.
"Just her?"
"The one and only wonderful Wizard of Gaea."
He didn't want her to go on talking. He saw it now, but she insisted on being sure he saw all the implications.
"Until and unless Gaea ever changes her mind," she went on relentlessly, "Rocky is solely and completely responsible for the survival of the race of Titanides. When she realized that, she skipped a Carnival. She could not face another one, she said. It was too much to put on any one person. What if she were to die? Gaea wouldn't give her an answer. Gaea is perfectly capable of letting the race vanish if Rocky leaves here, if she stops going to Carnival, or even if she dies.
"So she started going to Carnivals again. What else could she do?"
Chris thought of the Titanide ambassador back in San Francisco. Dulcimer, her name had been. He had felt sick when she explained her position to him. He felt worse now.
"I don't understand how... ."
"It was very slickly done. When Rocky took the job, she had just convinced Gaea to stop a war between the Titanides and the angels. The animosity between the two races was built into their brains, into their genes, I guess. She had to recall all of them physically and make changes. At the same time Rocky and I submitted to the direct transfer of a great deal of knowledge from Gaea's mind. When it was done, we could both sing the Titanide language and a lot of others, and we knew a hell of a lot about the inside of Gaea. And Rocky's salivary glands had been changed to secrete a chemical which the Titanides had been changed to need for reproduction.
"She didn't start drinking at once. She used to sniff cocaine when she was younger but hadn't for years. She went back to that for a while. Liquor worked better, and that's what she ended up doing. When Carnival time approaches, she tries her best to get away. But she can't."
Gaby stood up and signaled to Psaltery, whose boat was paralleling Chris's ten meters away. He angled toward them.
"All that's beside the point, of course," she said briskly. The important thing about a drunk on a trip like this is not why she drinks, but whether she'll be any use to anybody, herself included, if things get tough. I tell you she will, or I wouldn't have suggested you come with us."
"I'm glad you told me," Chris said. "And I'm sorry."
She smiled lopsidedly. "Don't be sorry. You've got problems; we've got problems. We got what we asked for, me and Rocky, It's our own fault if we didn't realize what we were asking."
17 Recognition
The rain Gaby had been expecting finally arrived when they had been on the river for five hours. She broke out the oilskins and handed one to Psaltery. The others were doing the same, except for Cirocco, who still slept in the front of Hornpipe's canoe. Gaby started to tell Psaltery to bring the boat over so she could get the Wizard out of the rain, then changed her mind. Her impulse was always to pamper Rocky when she was like this. She had to remember what she had told Chris. Cirocco must take care of herself.
Presently the Wizard raised her head and peered at the rain, as though she had never seen anything as inexplicable as water falling from the sky. She started to sit up, then leaned over the side of the canoe and vomited into the brown water. It was a lot of effort for not much return.
When she was through, she crawled to the middle of the canoe, threw back the red tarpaulin, and began rooting around in the supplies. Her search grew more and more frantic. In the back, Hornpipe said nothing but kept paddling steadily. At last the Wizard sat back on her heels and rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand.
Suddenly, she looked up.
"GaaaaBEEEE!" she yelled. She spotted Gaby, twenty meters away, then stepped onto the edge of the boat and out onto the water.
For a moment it looked as if she could actually pull it off. It turned out to be just the low gravity, however, for with her second step she went in over her knees, and before she could take a third, the water closed over her slightly puzzled face.
"She may be a Wizard," Chris chuckled, "but she's not Jesus."
"Who's Jesus?"
Robin listened to the explanation for a moment, long enough to know it wasn't something that interested her. Jesus was a Christian myth figure, apparently the one who founded the whole sect. He had been dead more than two thousand years, which struck Robin as the best thing about him. She remained cautious until she was able to ask Chris if he believed any of that, and when he said no, she considered the subject closed.