"Robin? Is that you?"
She smelled coffee and something cooking on the stove. That was too good to be true, and no, it was not Cirocco. It was so ridiculous there was no point in even bothering to look back because the face she finally recognized belonged to Trini, her lover a million years ago back in Titantown. At that instant she knew it was all a dream, probably the tower as well as Trini.
She let go and landed on her back in a deep snowdrift.
39 The Outpost
Cirocco's money had been piling up on Earth for more than seventy-five years. There were the royalties from her scholarly works and travelogs of Gaea and from her autobiography, I Chose Adventure (publisher's title, not her own), which had been a best seller and the subject of two movies and a television series. In addition, she owned a piece of the cocaine trade which was quite lucrative. There was even the NASA salary accrued during the voyage of Ringmaster, until her resignation.
She had hired a Swiss investment counselor and a Brazilian lawyer and given them two instructions: to keep her ahead of inflation and to avoid confiscation of assets by communist governments. She had hinted that she would like her money to go into firms dealing in space travel and that she would not like it to be used in ways contrary to the interests of the United States. Her lawyer had suggested the last requirement was old-fashioned and almost impossible to define anymore, and she wrote back saying that Earth was full of lawyers. He got the point, and his descendants were still working for her.
After that she forgot about it. Twice a year she got a report, which she would open to glance at the bottom line, then throw away. Her fortune weathered two depressions when countless short-lived investors were wiped out. Her agents knew she could look to the long term and knew she would not get excited by temporary losses. There had been bad years, but the overall trend had been relentless growth.
It all had been a meaningless abstraction. Why should she care to know that she owned X kilograms of gold, Y percent of corporation Y Prime, and Z deutsche marks in rare postage stamps and works of art? If the report arrived on a dull day, she might spend a few minutes chuckling over the lists of assets, from airliners to Airedales, from Renoirs to rental housing. Only once did she send a letter, when she discovered by accident that she owned the Empire State Building and that it was scheduled for demolition. She told them to restore it again, instead, and lost millions during the next two years. After that she made it all back, and her agents undoubtedly thought she was a financial genius, but she had spared the building because her mother had taken her to the top when she was seven years old, and it was one of her fondest memories of her mother.
She had thought from time to time of willing her fortune to someone or something, but she was so removed from Earthly concerns she had no idea where it would do any good. She and Gaby used to laugh at thoughts of picking a name from the phone bank and dumping it all on one person or of endowing homes for unwed goldfish.
But now it was coming in handy after all.
Trini saw the plane when it was still quite a distance away by the glare of its landing lights. She heard the high whine of its tiny jet engine much later. She was not sure she approved. Cirocco's equipment had not yet arrived when Trini took up her vigil at Refuge Eleven; she had blimped in as a decent person should. One of the reasons she had come to Gaea was to escape the pressures of mechanical civilization. Like most humans in Gaea, she viewed any but the simplest technology with deep suspicion. But she understood the Wizard's reasons. Cirocco was waging all-out war on the buzz bombs, and Trim did not doubt they would soon be wiped from the skies.
The plane crawled through the last meters before touchdown, its exhaust raising clouds of snow. Ophion did not look like a promising landing field, hummocked as it was with drifted snow, yet the little plane made it easily in less than thirty meters of runway. The low gravity and Gaea's thick atmosphere provided a lot of lift, making the plane spry as a butterfly. It had transparent wings of plastic film. When the snow settled, Trini could see dark shapes embedded in them and assumed they were lasers or machine guns. It was a six-seat puddle jumper modified for aerial combat.
Cirocco got out from the pilot's seat, and someone else, about her size, from the other side.
Trini went back to her tiny stove and turned up the gas burner under the coffeepot. She had volunteered for the duty-though she and all the other humans in Gaea owed no allegiance to the Wizard-when she heard Cirocco was looking for human help for a rescue mission involving Robin of the Coven. Trini had not been able to stop thinking of Robin since the day she left, and thought waiting in the refuge was more in keeping with her talents than going down the stairs to see Thea. She had been brought in with crates of food, blankets, medical supplies, and bottled gas to prepare the long-abandoned way station for occupancy should any of the missing people show up. Cirocco had helped her get the beacon working again, but aside from that, there had not been much to do. The structure was still sound, and it kept out the wind. She had spent her time at the window, reading, but had been away from it when she felt the tower vibrate slightly with the sound of someone climbing the ladder.
Now it was vibrating again, more noticeably, as Cirocco and the other person hurried up outside. She opened the door for them. Cirocco went immediately to Robin, who was sleeping beneath a big stack of blankets. She knelt beside her and touched her face, looked back with concern.
"She's awfully hot."
"She drank some broth," Trini said, wishing she could say more.
Cirocco's passenger was a familiar figure to Trini and anyone else who had spent time in Titantown. He was Larry Ollara, the only human doctor in Gaea. Nobody cared that he was there because he was barred from practicing on Earth, and nobody asked why. He probably wasn't much at open-heart surgery, but could set a bone or dress a burn, and he charged nothing. He carried a genuine black bag without a gram of electronic equipment in it. This he now set down while removing his fur coat. Beneath it he was a big man with a black beard and rosy cheeks, more of a lumberjack than a surgeon. Cirocco stood back while he made his examination. He took his time about it.
"She may lose those toes," he announced at one point.
"Nonsense," Cirocco said, which struck Trini as a funny thing to say.
She really looked at the Wizard for the first time and was surprised to see she was wearing what she had always worn for as long as Trini had known of her: the faded brick red Mexican blanket with a hole cut in the center. It draped carelessly around her body, reached to the knees, and was modest enough when she stood still but not when she moved. She was barefoot. Snow still clung to the sides of her feet but was melting rapidly.
What was she? Trini wondered. She had known for a long time that Cirocco was different but had assumed she was still human. Now she was not so sure. Perhaps she was something more, but the differences were subtle. The only visible one was something she shared with Gaby Plauget. All the dark-skinned humans in Gaea had been born that way. Yet Gaby and Cirocco always looked freshly tanned.
At last Larry turned away from her and took the mug of coffee Trini offered him. He smiled his thanks and sat with the white mug warming his hands.
"Well?" Cirocco asked.
"I'd like to get her out of here," he said. "But I don't believe we should move her. I don't suppose I could do much more for her back at Titantown, at that. She's got some frostbite, and she's got pneumonia. But she's young and strong, and that Titanide drug I gave her is hell on pneumonia, and she should make it all right, with the proper care."