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TWO

Chris deftly flipped fried eggs out of the copper pan and onto an earthenware plate. The pan was almost a meter across. All his cookware was outsized. Most of his guests were Titanides, who loved to eat as much as they loved to cook.
He was only a mediocre chef, but Cirocco didn‘t seem to mind. She used her fork to make a gesture of thanks as he removed the first plate and set the second batch of eggs before her. She sat at the high table on a high stool, her feet hooked around the crossbraces, her elbows set wide and her head held low as she shoveled it in. Her wet hair was tied back out of harm’s way.
Chris pulled a stool over to the table across from her and hitched himself up onto it. As Cirocco tore into her fourteenth egg, Chris began eating the two he had fixed for himself, and watched her over the table.
She seemed pale. She was thin. He could count her ribs; her breasts were hardly there.
“How was the trip?” he asked.
She nodded, then reached for her coffee cup to wash down the last mouthful of eggs. The job required two hands. It was a Titanide cup.
“No problems,” she said, and wiped her mouth on the back of her arm. Then she looked surprised, gave him a guilty glance, and picked up her napkin. She wiped her arm first, then her mouth.
“Sorry,” she said, with a nervous giggle.
“Your table manners don’t concern me,” he said. “This is your house, too.”
“Yeah, but that’s no reason to be a pig. It just tastes so good. Real food, I mean.”
He knew what she meant. She had been foraging for a long time. But he smiled at the description of the food. The “bacon” was meat from a smiler with swine genes in its ancestry, in the baffling Gaean system of crossbreeding that would have driven Luther Burbank to the madhouse. The “eggs” came from a shrub common in Dione. Left unharvested, they would eventually hatch a many-legged reptile that scattered the plant’s seeds in its excrement. But the fruit tasted very much like real eggs. The coffee, oddly enough, was real coffee, a hybrid adapted to the low light of Gaea. With the collapse of the Earth-Gaea trade it had become as profitable to grow coffee in the highlands as cocaine, the traditional Gaean export. Coke glutted the market, but coffee was hard to get.
“Kong’s dead,” she said, around another mouthful.
“Really? Who did the job?”
“Do you need to ask?”
Chris thought it over, and could come up with only one likely candidate.
“You going to tell me about it?”
“If you’ll slap some more bacon in that pan.” She grinned at him. He sighed, and got up.
As the bacon began to sizzle, she told him what she had seen in Phoebe. While she talked, she finished her second helping. She got up and rinsed her plate, then stood beside him and sliced hunks off a huge loaf of bread and arranged them on a tray for toasting.
“I figure he’s got to die when they cut his brain up. Doesn’t he?” She squatted and slid the tray into the bottom drawer of the stove, beneath the firebox where the radiant heat would warm it slowly.
“I guess so.” Chris made a face.
She stood and unbound her hair, shook it out, and ran her fingers through it. Chris watched, noted that it was almost entirely white now. It reached far down her back. He wondered if she would ever cut it again. Before her brain surgery, five years earlier, she had seldom let it get below her shoulders. Then her head was shaved, and she seemed to have found a new affection for long hair.
“Anything else I should know?” he asked.
“I talked with Gaby again.”
Chris said nothing, but continued to turn the bacon strips. Cirocco started rummaging through a cabinet.
“What did she say?”
Cirocco came up with a Titanide curry-comb and began running it through her hair. She said nothing for a time, then sighed.
“I saw her twice. Once about three hectorevs before I went to Kong’s mountain. Again in Tethys, not long afterward. The first time she told me Robin was returning to Gaea. She didn’t say why. She has children with her.”
Chris said nothing. Not long ago, he would have, but he had begun to wonder about a few things since then. Things like the definitions of “rational”, the meaning of magic, the line between the quick and the dead. He had always thought himself a rational man. He was civilized. He didn’t believe in sorcery. Though he had lived twenty years in a place with a “God” he had talked to, had loved a “Demon” who had once been a “Wizard,” he took none of these words with their literal definitions. Gaea was a bush-league God. Cirocco was remarkable, but she had no magical powers, for good or evil.
In the face of the things he had witnessed or heard about, why should he worry about one measly resurrection?
But it had given him a lot of trouble. Gaby had died in his arms. He would never forget her horrible burns. The first time Cirocco told him she had seen Gaby, he had exploded. Later, he had been gentle, fearing his old friend was getting senile. But senility was too easy an explanation. Even if rationality was down the drain, pragmatism was still valuable, and Chris thought of himself as a pragmatist. If it works, it’s there. And Cirocco’s conversations with Gaby had been very good at predicting the future.
“When will she get here?” he asked.
“Here in Gaea? She’s here already. In fact, she should be getting near the Junction by now.”
“She’s coming here?”
“Conal’s bringing them. There’ll be some Titanides with them, too. What’s the matter? Don’t you want them here?”
“It’s not that. It’ll be great to see her again. I never thought I would.” He looked around the kitchen. “I was just wondering if I have enough on hand for guests. Maybe I should run over to the Hua’s and see if they have—”
Cirocco laughed, and put her arms around him. He looked down at her face, and recognized the glint of mischief there.
“Don’t be such a housewife, Chris,” she said, and kissed him. “The Titanides are better at that, and they like it, too.”
“Okay. What do you want to do?” He embraced her, let his hands slide down her back to her buttocks, and lifted her easily.
“First, let’s get that bacon and toast off the stove before they burn. I’ve decided I’m not as hungry as I thought.”
“No?”
“Well, not that way. I’ve been running all over this stinkin’ wheel with nothing to look at but Iron Masters.” She slipped a hand between them, down his belly, and squeezed. “Suddenly your homely face seems oddly attractive.”
“That’s not my face, old woman.”
“It’ll do,” she said, and squeezed again.
 
At the completion of her thirteenth decade, boredom was one of Cirocco’s chief fears. She had been spared the depredations of aging, the dulling of the senses and mental powers. It was conceivable that someday bedding down with a lover and performing the ancient rituals of coitus would pall. That was the day she would be ready to die.
But so far, so good.
They were in the crow‘s nest, a garret rising over the main house at Tuxedo Junction. There were windows in each of the six walls. One ladder went down to the third floor, and another up to a belfrey that housed Chris’s carillon. Two dozen ropes ran along one wall, through holes in the floor and ceiling.
“Yowee!” Cirocco cried, and stretched an arm toward the ropes. She selected one and gave it a yank. The largest brass bell above them gave a joyous peal.
“That good, huh?” Chris said, and collapsed on top of her.
“I tell thee thrice,” she said, and rang the bell two more times. Then she wrapped her arms and legs around him and hugged as hard as she could.
There were good and bad things about living in Gaea. Some things, such as the unchanging light, Cirocco hardly noticed anymore. The passing of day into night was just a vague memory. One of the good things she usually didn’t notice was the low gravity. The one time she did notice it was during the act of love. Even a man as large as Chris did not weigh much. Instead of becoming an oppressive burden, his body was a warm and comforting presence. They could lie this way for hours if they wanted to, he utterly relaxed, she in no danger of being squeezed. And she loved that. Once a man was inside her, she always hated to give him up.
Chris raised himself slightly and looked down at her. He glistened with sweat, and she liked that, too.
“Did she say anything about  . . . ” He didn’t know how to finish the sentence, but it didn’t matter. Cirocco knew what he meant.
“Nothing. Not a word. But I know it’s coming, and soon.”
“How do you know?”
She shrugged. “I don’t. Call it sexagenarian intuition.”
“It’s been a long time since you were a sexagenarian.”
“What are you talking about? I’ve made it there twice. I’m a double sexagenarian, plus ten.”
“I guess that makes you twice as sexy as anyone, plus ten.”
“Damn right. I—”
They both heard it at the same time. Not far away, Titanide voices were raised in song. Chris kissed her and went to stand in the window looking down toward the bridge. Cirocco rolled on her side and looked at him. She was pleased at what she saw, but wondered what Robin would think.
From the waist down, Chris was the hairiest human she had ever seen. He might have been wearing trousers made from bearskin. It was light brown, like the hair on his head, and nowhere less than ten inches long. It was soft and fine, the nicest possible pelt to wrap one‘s legs around.
Chris was turning into a Titanide. He’d been doing it for five myriarevs now. There was no hair at all on his chest or arms. His beard had stopped growing long ago and now his chin was smooth as a boy’s. In the right light, his face could pass for that of a twelve-year-old. There were other things here and there that would surely startle Robin  . . .  such as his tail. The fleshy part of it was only about six inches long, but he could twitch it and make the long hair fly like a frisky horse. He was smugly proud of that tail, and no more in control of it than a dog. It twitched back and forth in excitement as he looked down at the party crossing his bridge. He turned, smiling.
“It’s them,” he said, and his long ears stood up straight, higher than the crown of his head. Cirocco’s mind flew backward a century and a quarter, to a movie which had been old even then: cartoon boys shooting pool and turning into donkeys. A little wooden boy, and her mother holding her hand there in the darkness  . . .  but she could not remember the title.
“I’m going to meet them,” he said, starting down the ladder. He paused. “You coming?”
“In a minute.” She watched him go, then sat up in the huge straw-filled bag they had been using for a bed. She pushed the thick mass of white hair away from her face, stretched, and looked out the window opposite the one where Chris had stood.
Gaby was out there. She was sitting on a tree limb level with the belfrey, not more than fifty feet away.
“Was it good?” Gaby asked.
“Yes.” Cirocco felt no embarrassment or resentment when she realized Gaby might have been out there for a long time.
“You’ll have to be careful with him. He’s in great danger.”
“What can I do?”
“There are some things I don’t know.” She looked sad, then shook it off. “Two things,” she said. “One, he’s the father of both of them. He might as well know it, because Robin is pretty sure of it already.”
“Chris?”
“Yes. You’ll see it. With Nova, anyway. The boy, too.”
“Boy? What boy?”
“Two,” Gaby went on. She grinned. “Don’t strangle the girl-child. She’ll drive you crazy, but put up with it. She’s worth the effort.”
“Gaby, I—”. Then Cirocco gasped, as Gaby rolled off the limb and dived toward the pool below. She had one glimpse of her, arms pointed down, toes straight behind her, then the apparition was swallowed up in the greenery.
She listened a long time, but there was no splash.

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TWO

Chris deftly flipped fried eggs out of the copper pan and onto an earthenware plate. The pan was almost a meter across. All his cookware was outsized. Most of his guests were Titanides, who loved to eat as much as they loved to cook.
He was only a mediocre chef, but Cirocco didn‘t seem to mind. She used her fork to make a gesture of thanks as he removed the first plate and set the second batch of eggs before her. She sat at the high table on a high stool, her feet hooked around the crossbraces, her elbows set wide and her head held low as she shoveled it in. Her wet hair was tied back out of harm’s way.
Chris pulled a stool over to the table across from her and hitched himself up onto it. As Cirocco tore into her fourteenth egg, Chris began eating the two he had fixed for himself, and watched her over the table.
She seemed pale. She was thin. He could count her ribs; her breasts were hardly there.
“How was the trip?” he asked.
She nodded, then reached for her coffee cup to wash down the last mouthful of eggs. The job required two hands. It was a Titanide cup.
“No problems,” she said, and wiped her mouth on the back of her arm. Then she looked surprised, gave him a guilty glance, and picked up her napkin. She wiped her arm first, then her mouth.
“Sorry,” she said, with a nervous giggle.
“Your table manners don’t concern me,” he said. “This is your house, too.”
“Yeah, but that’s no reason to be a pig. It just tastes so good. Real food, I mean.”
He knew what she meant. She had been foraging for a long time. But he smiled at the description of the food. The “bacon” was meat from a smiler with swine genes in its ancestry, in the baffling Gaean system of crossbreeding that would have driven Luther Burbank to the madhouse. The “eggs” came from a shrub common in Dione. Left unharvested, they would eventually hatch a many-legged reptile that scattered the plant’s seeds in its excrement. But the fruit tasted very much like real eggs. The coffee, oddly enough, was real coffee, a hybrid adapted to the low light of Gaea. With the collapse of the Earth-Gaea trade it had become as profitable to grow coffee in the highlands as cocaine, the traditional Gaean export. Coke glutted the market, but coffee was hard to get.
“Kong’s dead,” she said, around another mouthful.
“Really? Who did the job?”
“Do you need to ask?”
Chris thought it over, and could come up with only one likely candidate.
“You going to tell me about it?”
“If you’ll slap some more bacon in that pan.” She grinned at him. He sighed, and got up.
As the bacon began to sizzle, she told him what she had seen in Phoebe. While she talked, she finished her second helping. She got up and rinsed her plate, then stood beside him and sliced hunks off a huge loaf of bread and arranged them on a tray for toasting.
“I figure he’s got to die when they cut his brain up. Doesn’t he?” She squatted and slid the tray into the bottom drawer of the stove, beneath the firebox where the radiant heat would warm it slowly.
“I guess so.” Chris made a face.
She stood and unbound her hair, shook it out, and ran her fingers through it. Chris watched, noted that it was almost entirely white now. It reached far down her back. He wondered if she would ever cut it again. Before her brain surgery, five years earlier, she had seldom let it get below her shoulders. Then her head was shaved, and she seemed to have found a new affection for long hair.
“Anything else I should know?” he asked.
“I talked with Gaby again.”
Chris said nothing, but continued to turn the bacon strips. Cirocco started rummaging through a cabinet.
“What did she say?”
Cirocco came up with a Titanide curry-comb and began running it through her hair. She said nothing for a time, then sighed.
“I saw her twice. Once about three hectorevs before I went to Kong’s mountain. Again in Tethys, not long afterward. The first time she told me Robin was returning to Gaea. She didn’t say why. She has children with her.”
Chris said nothing. Not long ago, he would have, but he had begun to wonder about a few things since then. Things like the definitions of “rational”, the meaning of magic, the line between the quick and the dead. He had always thought himself a rational man. He was civilized. He didn’t believe in sorcery. Though he had lived twenty years in a place with a “God” he had talked to, had loved a “Demon” who had once been a “Wizard,” he took none of these words with their literal definitions. Gaea was a bush-league God. Cirocco was remarkable, but she had no magical powers, for good or evil.
In the face of the things he had witnessed or heard about, why should he worry about one measly resurrection?
But it had given him a lot of trouble. Gaby had died in his arms. He would never forget her horrible burns. The first time Cirocco told him she had seen Gaby, he had exploded. Later, he had been gentle, fearing his old friend was getting senile. But senility was too easy an explanation. Even if rationality was down the drain, pragmatism was still valuable, and Chris thought of himself as a pragmatist. If it works, it’s there. And Cirocco’s conversations with Gaby had been very good at predicting the future.
“When will she get here?” he asked.
“Here in Gaea? She’s here already. In fact, she should be getting near the Junction by now.”
“She’s coming here?”
“Conal’s bringing them. There’ll be some Titanides with them, too. What’s the matter? Don’t you want them here?”
“It’s not that. It’ll be great to see her again. I never thought I would.” He looked around the kitchen. “I was just wondering if I have enough on hand for guests. Maybe I should run over to the Hua’s and see if they have—”
Cirocco laughed, and put her arms around him. He looked down at her face, and recognized the glint of mischief there.
“Don’t be such a housewife, Chris,” she said, and kissed him. “The Titanides are better at that, and they like it, too.”
“Okay. What do you want to do?” He embraced her, let his hands slide down her back to her buttocks, and lifted her easily.
“First, let’s get that bacon and toast off the stove before they burn. I’ve decided I’m not as hungry as I thought.”
“No?”
“Well, not that way. I’ve been running all over this stinkin’ wheel with nothing to look at but Iron Masters.” She slipped a hand between them, down his belly, and squeezed. “Suddenly your homely face seems oddly attractive.”
“That’s not my face, old woman.”
“It’ll do,” she said, and squeezed again.
 
At the completion of her thirteenth decade, boredom was one of Cirocco’s chief fears. She had been spared the depredations of aging, the dulling of the senses and mental powers. It was conceivable that someday bedding down with a lover and performing the ancient rituals of coitus would pall. That was the day she would be ready to die.
But so far, so good.
They were in the crow‘s nest, a garret rising over the main house at Tuxedo Junction. There were windows in each of the six walls. One ladder went down to the third floor, and another up to a belfrey that housed Chris’s carillon. Two dozen ropes ran along one wall, through holes in the floor and ceiling.
“Yowee!” Cirocco cried, and stretched an arm toward the ropes. She selected one and gave it a yank. The largest brass bell above them gave a joyous peal.
“That good, huh?” Chris said, and collapsed on top of her.
“I tell thee thrice,” she said, and rang the bell two more times. Then she wrapped her arms and legs around him and hugged as hard as she could.
There were good and bad things about living in Gaea. Some things, such as the unchanging light, Cirocco hardly noticed anymore. The passing of day into night was just a vague memory. One of the good things she usually didn’t notice was the low gravity. The one time she did notice it was during the act of love. Even a man as large as Chris did not weigh much. Instead of becoming an oppressive burden, his body was a warm and comforting presence. They could lie this way for hours if they wanted to, he utterly relaxed, she in no danger of being squeezed. And she loved that. Once a man was inside her, she always hated to give him up.
Chris raised himself slightly and looked down at her. He glistened with sweat, and she liked that, too.
“Did she say anything about  . . . ” He didn’t know how to finish the sentence, but it didn’t matter. Cirocco knew what he meant.
“Nothing. Not a word. But I know it’s coming, and soon.”
“How do you know?”
She shrugged. “I don’t. Call it sexagenarian intuition.”
“It’s been a long time since you were a sexagenarian.”
“What are you talking about? I’ve made it there twice. I’m a double sexagenarian, plus ten.”
“I guess that makes you twice as sexy as anyone, plus ten.”
“Damn right. I—”
They both heard it at the same time. Not far away, Titanide voices were raised in song. Chris kissed her and went to stand in the window looking down toward the bridge. Cirocco rolled on her side and looked at him. She was pleased at what she saw, but wondered what Robin would think.
From the waist down, Chris was the hairiest human she had ever seen. He might have been wearing trousers made from bearskin. It was light brown, like the hair on his head, and nowhere less than ten inches long. It was soft and fine, the nicest possible pelt to wrap one‘s legs around.
Chris was turning into a Titanide. He’d been doing it for five myriarevs now. There was no hair at all on his chest or arms. His beard had stopped growing long ago and now his chin was smooth as a boy’s. In the right light, his face could pass for that of a twelve-year-old. There were other things here and there that would surely startle Robin  . . .  such as his tail. The fleshy part of it was only about six inches long, but he could twitch it and make the long hair fly like a frisky horse. He was smugly proud of that tail, and no more in control of it than a dog. It twitched back and forth in excitement as he looked down at the party crossing his bridge. He turned, smiling.
“It’s them,” he said, and his long ears stood up straight, higher than the crown of his head. Cirocco’s mind flew backward a century and a quarter, to a movie which had been old even then: cartoon boys shooting pool and turning into donkeys. A little wooden boy, and her mother holding her hand there in the darkness  . . .  but she could not remember the title.
“I’m going to meet them,” he said, starting down the ladder. He paused. “You coming?”
“In a minute.” She watched him go, then sat up in the huge straw-filled bag they had been using for a bed. She pushed the thick mass of white hair away from her face, stretched, and looked out the window opposite the one where Chris had stood.
Gaby was out there. She was sitting on a tree limb level with the belfrey, not more than fifty feet away.
“Was it good?” Gaby asked.
“Yes.” Cirocco felt no embarrassment or resentment when she realized Gaby might have been out there for a long time.
“You’ll have to be careful with him. He’s in great danger.”
“What can I do?”
“There are some things I don’t know.” She looked sad, then shook it off. “Two things,” she said. “One, he’s the father of both of them. He might as well know it, because Robin is pretty sure of it already.”
“Chris?”
“Yes. You’ll see it. With Nova, anyway. The boy, too.”
“Boy? What boy?”
“Two,” Gaby went on. She grinned. “Don’t strangle the girl-child. She’ll drive you crazy, but put up with it. She’s worth the effort.”
“Gaby, I—”. Then Cirocco gasped, as Gaby rolled off the limb and dived toward the pool below. She had one glimpse of her, arms pointed down, toes straight behind her, then the apparition was swallowed up in the greenery.
She listened a long time, but there was no splash.

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