The neighborhood began to look like Levittown, and the neighbors were odd. Just about any sizable lunatic fringe, band of separatists, or shouting society could now afford to homestead in the LaGrangians. L2 became known as Sargasso Point to the pilots who carefully avoided it; those who had to travel through it called it the Pinball Machine, and they didn't smile.
Some of the groups couldn't be bothered with the care and feeding of complex machinery. They expected to exist in pure pastoral squalor inside what was really just a big hollow coffee can. The developers were often happy to accommodate them, reasoning that all that expensive hardware, if installed, would only be abused. Every few years one of these colonies would come apart and fling itself and its inhabitants across the sky. More often, something would go wrong with the ecology and people would starve or suffocate. There was always someone willing to take one of the resulting hulks, sterilize it with free vacuum, and move in at a bargain price. The Earth never ran short of the alienated and the dissatisfied. The United Nations was happy to get rid of them and did not ask too many questions. It was a time of speculation-of instant fortunes and shoddy practices. Deals were made that would have shocked a Florida real estate developer.
The Sargasso Point incubated cultures more like carcinomas than communities. The most repressive regimes humanity had ever known took shape and died in the LaGrangians.
The Coven was not one of them. Though they had been around only fifty years at L2, it qualified them as founders. Like the first settlers everywhere, they were appalled at the quality of people moving in around them. Their own early days were forgotten now. Age, wealth, and the unforgiving environment had mellowed then hardened them into a viable group with a surprising amount of personal freedom. Liberalism had reared its head. Reform groups had replaced the original hard-liners. Ritual was once more put in the background, and the women turned to what most of them had no way of knowing was actually the group's original ethic: lesbian separatism. The term "lesbian" was no longer strictly accurate. On Earth, for many of the women, lesbianism had been a response to injustices suffered from the male sex. In space, in isolation, it became the natural order, the unquestioned basis of all reality. Males were dimly recalled abstractions, ogres to frighten children, and not very interesting ogres at that.
Parthenogenesis was still a dream. To conceive, the women had to import sperm. Eugenics was easy in one sense: male fetuses could be detected early and stilled in the womb. But with sperm, as with everything else, the watchwords were still caveat emptor.
4 Little Giant
Robin toed herself lightly down the curved corridor. The gravity at the hub masked her weariness, but she felt it in her back and shoulders. Even downheavy she would not have shown it or the weight of depression she always carried from watchstanding.
She wore a white, water-cooled vacuum suit of ancient vintage, her gloves and boots stuffed into the helmet carried under her arm. The suit was cracked and patched, its metalwork tarnished.
Hanging from the utility belt were a Colt .45 automatic in a handmade holster and a carved wooden fetish festooned with feathers and a bird's claw. Barefoot, with long finger- and toenails painted dark red, hair blond and unkempt, lips stained purple, bells hanging from pierced earlobes and nostril, she might have been a barbarian sacking technology's greatest achievement. But looks can be deceiving.
Her right arm began to tremble. She stopped and looked at her hand with no change of expression, but the emerald Eye tattooed in the center of her forehead began to weep sweat. Hatred boiled up like an old friend. The hand was not her, could not be her hand, because that would mean the weakness was hers, and not something visited on her from the outside. Her eyes narrowed.
"Stop that," she whispered, "or I will cut you off." She meant every word and dug her thumbnail into the patch of scar tissue where her little finger had been to prove to herself that she meant it. The hardest part, surprisingly, had been getting the knife to the right spot with a hand that jerked at random. It had hurt, but the attack had vanished in the amazing agony.
The shaking stopped. Sometimes the threat was enough.
There was a story that she had bitten off her finger. She had never uttered a word to deny it. There was a quality called labra that the witches valued. It had much to do with honor, with toughness and stoicism, with Eastern concepts of obligation. It might entail dying to a purpose, and with style, or paying any price to cancel debts, to individuals or society. Insisting on standing watches when one was subject to fits of palsy held much labra. Cutting off one's finger to stop the attacks had even more. The witches said Robin had enough labra to fill the wombs of ten ordinary women.
But standing watches when she knew it could endanger the community held no labra at all. Robin knew it, and so did the more thoughtful members of the Coven, those who were not dazzled by her young legend. She stood watches because no one on the council could look into the intensity of her eyes and deny her. The third Eye, impassive and ominiscient, only added weight to her assertion that she could prevent the attacks by sheer effort of will. A dozen witches had earned the right to wear the third Eye, All were twice Robin's age. No one would stand in the way of Robin the Nine-fingered.
The Eye was supposed to be a badge of infallibility. There were limits, and everyone tacitly understood this, but it was useful. Some of the wearers used the Eye to back up absurd assertions, to take anything they wanted merely by saying it belonged to them. They earned only resentment. Robin always told the absolute truth about the small things, reserving the Eye for the Big Lie. It earned her respect, which was something she needed more than most. She was only nineteen years old, and might at any moment froth at the mouth and fall helpless to the ground. One needed respect at those vulnerable moments.
Robin never lost consciousness during her attacks, never had difficulty recalling what had happened. She simply lost all control over her voluntary muscles for a period of from twenty minutes to three days. The attacks could not be predicted except in one respect: the higher the local gravity, the more frequently they came. As a result, she spent most of her time near the hub, no longer going to the full gravity on the Coven floor.
It limited her activities, made her an exile with home always in sight. The ends of the cylinder called the Coven were a series of terraced concentric circles. Homes were in the downheavy rings where people felt more comfortable. The Coven floor was reserved for farming, livestock, and parkland. Uplight was machinery. Robin never went below the gee 3 level.
What she had was not a curable epilepsy. The Coven's doctors were as good as any on Earth, but Robin's neurological profile was new to them. It was to be found only in recent medical journals. The Terrans were calling it High-gee Complex. It was genetic disorder, a recent mutation, that resulted in cyclic abnormalities of nerve sheaths, aggravated by the composition of blood when the body was in gravity. In weightlessness the altered blood chemistry acted to inhibit the attacks. The mechanism of the disease was unclear, and the drugs to treat it were unsatisfactory. Robin's children would have it or carry it.
The reason for her predicament was known. She was the practical joke of some faceless lab technician. For many years, unknown to them, their orders for human sperm had been handled by a man who knew of them and who did not like lesbians. Though the shipments were carefully checked for disease and many common genetic disorders, it was impossible to screen out a syndrome the existence of which was not known to the Coven doctors. Robin and a few others were the result. All but Robin were dead.