Valiha was big. She scared him to death.
It might have been fifteen minutes later that Gaby came around the side of the cabin and joined him in the bow. He only wanted to be alone with his thoughts, but his hideaway was turning into a parade ground.
She leaned on the rail, whistling, then nudged him.
"Feeling the blues, buddy?"
He shrugged. "It's been a weird eight hours or so. You think something's in the air?"
"Like what?"
"I don't know. Everybody's in love. Out there the sky's in love with the sea. Back onshore I found myself acting foolish over Robin."
Gaby whistled. "Poor boy."
"Yeah. Just a few minutes ago Valiha wanted to pick up where my mad alter ego left off, shooting marbles, as they say." He sighed. "It must be something in the air."
"Well, you know what they say. It makes the world go around. Love, that is. And Gaea spins a hell of a lot faster than the Earth."
He looked at her suspiciously. "You didn't have anything... ."
She held her hands up and shook her head. "Not me, friend, I won't bother you. With me, it's once in a blue moon, and usually with girls. I don't go in for the short-term stuff either. I want all my relationships to last. All seventeen of them." She made a face.
"I guess you have a different perspective on it," Chris ventured. "Being as old as you are."
"You'd think so, wouldn't you? Not true. It always hurts. I want it to last forever, and it never does. And it's my fault. I always end up measuring them by Cirocco, and they never measure up." She coughed nervously. "Well, listen to me. I didn't mean to get into that. I came to stick my nose into your business. You don't have to be afraid of Valiha. Not emotionally, if that's what's bothering you. She would not be jealous, or possessive, or expect it to last long. Titanides have no concept of exclusiveness."
"Did she ask you to tell me that?"
"She'd be furious if she knew. Titanides handle their own affairs and don't want interference. This is Gaby the know-it-all butting in. I'll say one more thing, then butt out. If your reservations are moral-bestiality, maybe?-wise up, friend. Didn't you hear? Even the Catholic Church says it's okay. All the Popes agree, Titanides have souls even if they are heathens."
"What if my objection is physical?"
Gaby laughed merrily and patted his cheek. "Oh, boy, do you have some pleasant surprises in store."
22 The Idol's Eye
The sub was unwilling to interrupt her postcoital bliss to tow the raft to Minerva. Cirocco stood in the bow and tried to woo it in a language combining the less pleasant sounds of asthma and whooping cough, but the big bathyzoote's light grew even fainter as she reached for the abyss. The blimp, who might have helped for a short time, turned out to have business in the west. Blimps were always ready to give a free ride, but only if one wanted to go where the blimp was bound.
It didn't matter. In a few hours a breeze came up from the west. Soon they were at the base of the central Rhea vertical cable.
Robin studied it as they drew nearer. Cirocco had not been exaggerating. Minerva was not really an island; it was more of a shelf. It had been formed over the aeons by barnacleoids, pseudolimpets, near corals, and other Gaean equivalents of sessile mollusks and crustaceans. The problem was that the water level was low-it had, in fact, been dropping gradually for a million years as the cables stretched and Gaea expanded slowly as she aged. This was in addition to the seasonal lows, which included a seventeen-day short cycle and a thirty-year long one. They had arrived near the trough of the long fluctuation, with the result that the main body of the "island" shelved away from the cable 50 meters above the water. The thickness of the shelf varied. At some places it jutted out more than a hundred meters; elsewhere the mass of shells and sand had broken away from wave action or its own weight, and the cable rose vertically. But it was encrusted as far as Robin could see. Two kilometers above her were the corpses of organisms that had lived during Earth's Pliocene Epoch.
She wondered how they intended to land Constance when the nearest place to stand was fifty meters up. The answer became apparent as the raft was steered to the south side of the cable. There one of the hundreds of strands had broken near the waterline. The upper end curled away from the cable far above. Reef builders had transformed the lower end into a cove that enclosed a flat circle of land only five meters high. Constance was soon moored, and Robin followed Gaby and Psaltery through a jagged cleft, stepping on meter-wide shells that still housed living creatures. They emerged onto the flat, severed end of the cable strand, 200 meters in diameter.
It was a strange seashore, backed as it was by the limitless vertical wall of the cable. There were skeletal trees growing from sandy deposits and a clear, still pool near the center. The area was littered with bone-white driftwood.
"We'll be here a day or two," Hautbois said as she passed Robin, carrying a huge burden of tent canvas. "Feeling better?"
"I'm fine, thanks." She smiled at the Titanide, but in truth, she was still shaky from her last bout of palsy. Hautbois had taken good care of her. Without her restraint, Robin would surely have injured herself.
She snagged Gaby's arm as she passed by and fell in step beside her.
"What are we stopping here for?"
"It's the garden spot of Rhea," Gaby said, sweeping her arm wide. But the joke seemed forced. "Actually, Rocky has some business here. Better count on two days. Maybe three. Getting tired of us?"
"No. Just curious. Should I be?"
"It might be better if you weren't. She has something to do, and I can't tell you what it is. That's for your own good, believe it or not." Gaby hurried away, back to the raft.
Robin sat on a log and watched the Titanides and Chris pitching camp. A month ago she would have forced herself to get up and help. Honor would have mandated it because to sit here was an acknowledgment that she was weak. Well, damn it, she was weak.
She had Hautbois to thank for being able to say that to herself. The Titanide had sung to her all through her recent seizure, in both English and Titanide. She had not let Robin turn away from her helplessness, had forced her to begin looking at ways to cope with it beyond sheer gutsiness. When Robin began to regain control, she found she did not resent what the Titanide had said. She learned Hautbois was a healer. That included doctor and psychiatrist and counselor and comforter, and possibly other things. Robin had the impression Hautbois would willingly have made love to her in the private, frontal mode, if it could have helped anything. Whatever Hautbois had done had given Robin more peace of mind than she had felt since ... she could not recall. She thought she must have breached her mother's womb ready to fight the whole world.
Nasu was agitating to get out. Robin opened her sack and let her writhe onto the sand, confident she would not go far. She dug in her pocket and came up with a piece of hard candy wrapped in a leaf, peeled it, and sucked on it. The sand was too cold for Nasu's likeing, so she coiled around Robin's ankle.
Cirocco was standing alone near the wall, motionless, looking at a tall crack in it. Robin followed it with her eyes and realized it was a space between two cable strands. Three of them abutted the island, which had once been an outer strand itself, making the little bay semicircular. There was a similar crack between the center strand and the one on the left. Below the sea, the strands would splay out widely. She remembered a picture of the conical mountain and its strand forest in Hyperion. Here the gaps between strands were no more than ten meters wide and partially clogged with barnacles.