Wizard

10 The Melody Shop

Titanides were terribly overpowered. Of all the beings in Gaea, they alone seemed improperly designed for their habitat. Blimps were precisely as they must be to live where and how they did. Everything about them was as functional as their fear of flame. Angels were so close to impossible they had left Gaea no room for her customary playfulness. It had been necessary for her to design them to tolerances of grams and subordinate everything to their eight-meter wingspans and the muscles needed to power them.

The Titanide was obviously a plains animal. Why then was it necessary to make it able to climb trees? Their lower bodies were equine-though cloven-hoofed-and in the light gravity of Gaea they could have done quite well with legs slimmer than any thoroughbred's. Instead, Gaea had given them the quarters of a Percheron, the fetlocks of a Clydesdale. Their backs, withers, and hips were broad with muscle.

It turned out, however, that Titanides, alone of Gaea's creatures, could withstand the gravity of Earth. They became Gaea's ambassadors to humanity. Considering that the race of Titanides was less than two centuries old, it became obvious that their strength was no accident. Gaea had been planning ahead.

There was an unexpected dividend for the humans living in Gaea. A Titanide's walking gait had none of the jouncing associated with Terran horses. They could move like clouds in the low gravity, their bodies maintained at a constant height by light touches of their hooves. The ride was so smooth, in fact, that Gaby had no trouble sleeping. She reclined on Psaltery's back with one leg hanging over each side.

While she slept, Psaltery climbed the winding trail into the Asteria Mountains.

He was a handsome creature of the naked-skin type, colored like milk chocolate. He had a thick mane of orange hair that grew not only from his scalp but down his neck and over a lot of his human back, worn in a series of long braids, like the hair of his tail. As with all his species, his human face and torso appeared to be those of a female. He was beardless and had large, wide-set eyes with sweeping lashes. His breasts were large and conical. But between his front legs was a penis that looked all too human for many Terrans. He had another, much larger one between his hind legs, and under his lovely orange tail was a vagina, but to a Titanide it was the frontal organs that made the difference. Psaltery was male.

The trail he followed through the woods was tangled with vines and new growth, but occasionally it was possible to see that once it had been wide enough for a wagon to pass. In some of the clearings broken patches of asphalt could be seen. It was part of the Circum-Gaea Highway, built more than sixty years ago. Gaby had had a hand in its construction. To Psaltery, it had always been there: useless, seldom-traveled, slowly crumbling.

He reached the top of the Aglaian plateau, the Lower Mists. Soon he was out of them and trotting beside the Aglaian Lake with Thalia in the distance, thirstily sucking the waters. He climbed to the Middle Mists, to Euphrosyne and the Upper Mists. Ophion became a river once more, briefly, before entering the double-pump system that lifted it to the Midnight Sea.

Psaltery turned north before reaching the last pumps and followed a small mountain stream. He forded it in white water and began to climb. He was in Rhea now and had been for quite some time, but the boundaries in Gaea were not well-defined. The journey had started in the middle of the twilight zone between Hyperion and Rhea, that hazy area between the perpetual weak daylight of the one and the eternal moonlit night of the other. He had been proceeding into night. Somewhere on the middle slopes of the Asterias he reached it. The Rhean night presented no visibility problems; Titanide night vision was good, and this close to the boundary there was still much light reflected from the plains of Hyperion curving up behind them. He ascended the steep mountainside along a narrow but well-defined path. In a series of alpine switchbacks he made his way through two passes and into the deep valleys on the other side. The Rhean mountains were sheer and rocky, with slopes averaging seventy degrees. There were no more tall trees, but the land was upholstered in lichens thick and smooth as the felt on a pool table. Dotted over that were broad-leafed shrubs the roots of which scrabbled into the living rock, sending out taproots that could be as long as half a kilometer before they reached the nourishing body of Gaea-the mountains' real bones.

Soon he could see the Melody Shop's beacon rising between two peaks. Rounding a bend, he came upon a sight that was unique, even in Gaea, who had made a hobby of creating the unusual.

Between two peaks-each as sharply pointed as the Matterhorn-was slung a narrow saddle of land. It was flat on top with a perpendicular drop on each side. The plateau was called Machu Picchu, after a similar place in the Andes where the Incas had built a stone city in the clouds. A single ray of sunlight had inexplicably wandered from the flood that poured through the distant Hyperion roof. It angled sharply into the night, where it drenched the plateau in buttery gold. It was as if the sun had found a pinhole through the blackest clouds imaginable, late on a stormy afternoon.

There was only one structure on Machu Picchu. The Melody Shop was a two-story wooden house, whitewashed, topped by a roof of green shingles. At this distance it looked like a toy.

"We are here, Chief," the Titanide sang. Gaby sat up, rubbing her eyes, turned, and gazed out over Cirocco's valley.

"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" she muttered. "Salty, that gal ought to have her head examined. Somebody ought to tell her that."

"You did, the last time you were here," Psaltery pointed out.

"Yeah, I did, didn't I?" Gaby winced. The memory was still painful. "Just drive on, would you?"

The two descended the path to the narrow neck of land leading to Machu Picchu. There was a rope-and-wood suspension bridge spanning a deep chasm just before the plateau. The bridge could be brought down with a few chops of an ax, isolating Cirocco's stronghold to all but an aerial approach.

A young man was seated on the far side of the bridge, wearing climbing shoes and a khaki outfit. From his gloomy expression Gaby figured him for one of the endless procession of suitors who made their way, year after year, to conquer the mysterious and lonely Wizard of Gaea. When they arrived, they found she was far from lonely-with three or four lovers already in attendance-and deceptively easy to conquer. Getting into her bed was not hard if a man did not mind the crowd. Getting out intact was something else. Cirocco tended to drain men's souls, and if their souls were shallow enough to be drained, she no longer needed them. She had seventy years on all of them. This alone made her fascinating, but ninety-five years of sexual activity made her preternaturally skillful, far beyond their experience. They fell in love with her by the score, and she gently turned them out when they became obnoxious about it. Gaby called them the Lost Boys.

She eyed this one suspiciously as she crossed the bridge. They had been known to jump. She decided he would probably make it when he managed to grin at her emphatic gesture toward the trail leading back to Titantown and the pieces of his old life.

She jumped from Psaltery's back as he neared the wide front porch. Though the tall doorways of the house had been built with Titanides in mind, none of them would enter unless personally invited by the Wizard. Gaby took the four steps of the front stoop in one easy leap and had her hand on the brass doorknob before she noticed an arm hanging off the side of the porch glider. Between the side slats of the seat she could see a bare foot. All else was covered by a dirty Titanide horse blanket that looked very like a serape.

When she pulled the blanket back, she looked down at the open-mouthed face of Cirocco Jones, formerly Captain of the Deep Space Vessel Ringmaster, now the Wizard of Gaea, Hindmother of the Titanides, Wing Commander of the Angels, Admiral of the Dirigible Fleet: the fabled Siren of the Titan. She was out cold. Cirocco was sleeping off a three-day binge.

Gaby's face could not hide her disgust. She teetered on the edge of walking away from it; then her expression gradually softened. The ghost of affection sometimes came back to her when Cirocco was like this. She smoothed unkempt dark hair from the sleeping woman's brow and was rewarded by a loud snort. Hands fluttered vaguely, searching for the blanket, and the Wizard rolled over.

Gaby got behind the glider and grasped its bottom. She lifted, and the chains creaked overhead as her onetime superior officer rolled out and hit the porch with a thud.