Wizard

11 The Purple Carnival

Hyperion was thought by many to be the loveliest of Gaea's twelve regions. In point of fact, few had traveled enough to make an informed comparison.

But Hyperion was a fair country: gentle, fertile, and washed in an eternal pastoral afternoon. He contained no rugged mountains but a plenitude of rivers. (Hyperion was always referred to with the male pronoun, though none of Gaea's regions was either male or female. They were named for the Titans, first children of Uranus and Gaea.) There was Ophion, wide and slow and muddy for most of its length. Flowing into it were nine major tributaries. They were named for the Muses. To the north and south the land rose gradually, as it did in all of Gaea's regions, until it ended in cliffs three kilometers tall. At the top of the cliffs were relatively narrow shelves known as the highlands. Here could be found plants and animals unchanged from the days of Gaea's youth. From there the land continued to rise until it could no longer support a rocky carapace. The naked body of Gaea became visible, still rising, becoming vertical and then arching over the land below, completely enclosing it with a translucent window to admit sunlight. The air at that altitude was not cold, but the walls were. Water vapor collected there and froze into a thick band of ice. It continually broke off to smash into the slopes of highland mountains, melt, rush down in narrow cascades, leap from the towering cliffs, and continue more placidly in the Rivers of the Muses. Eventually, as all things did, it joined the uniting flow of Ophion.

The west and central lands of Hyperion were clothed in thick forest. For part of its length Ophion became more lake than river, extending a finger of swamp from the central vertical cable terminus into the northeast. But throughout most of his area, Hyperion was prairie: a region of gently rolling hills with spacious skies and what looked like amber waves of grain. It was known as the Titanide Plains.

The grain grew wild, and so did the Titanides. They dominated the land without overpowering it, building little, content to herd a variety of animals that burrowed to suck Gaea's milk. They had no serious competitors for the land, no natural predators. There had never been a census, but 100,000 would have been a good estimate of their number. Had there been 200,000 the land would have been seriously crowded. Half a million would have meant starvation.

Gaea had patterned Titanides on human beings. They loved their children, who did not have to be taught to walk and talk and thus, child for child, required much less rearing than human infants. A Titanide child was independent in two Earth years, sexually mature in three. When the child left the nest, the parent was usually eager to have another one.

All Titanides could have children.

All Titanides wanted to have children, usually as many as possible. Infant mortality was low: disease, unknown. Life spans were long.

It could have been an equation of disaster. In fact, Titanide population had been stable for seventy years, and the reason was the Purple Carnival.

The rivers of Hyperion-Ophion and the Muses-divided the land into eight regions known as Keys: loose administrative areas analogous to human counties. The Keys did not mean a great deal. Anyone was free to move from one to another. But Titanides were not great travelers, tending to live in the region of their birth. The most important divisions within the species of Titanides were the chords, which resembled the human races. Like humans, Titanide chords could be crossed with no ill effect. Unlike humans, there was no racial tension. There were ninety-four established chords. All lived side by side, spread through each of the eight Keys of Hyperion.

The largest Hyperion Key was bounded by the rivers Thalia, Melpomene, and a southward curve of Ophion. This was the Key of E, and it contained Titantown and the Place of Winds. To the south was the Key of D Minor; to the west, C Sharp and F Sharp Minor.

Twenty kilometers north of Titantown in the Key of E a lone rock stood between the swamp and a wide, flat plain ringed by low hills. The rock was called Amparito Roca. It was 700 meters high and about as wide, sheer-sided but scalable, and had been thrown there from an unknown distance during the Oceanic Rebellion, many megarevs before. The craterlike area it dominated had been created when Amparito Roca bounced before coming to rest and was known as Grandioso.

Once in every ten kilorevs-420 Earth days, a period often called the Gaean Year-Titanides from the Hyperion Keys trekked to Amparito Roca in noisy, colorful caravans, taking enough provisions for a festival lasting two hectorevs. In Titantown the midway shut down, and the Titanides folded their tents, leaving the human tourists to fend for themselves. Every Titanide made the journey, but of the humans, only natives and pilgrims could attend the great festival.

It was the biggest event in the Titanides' lives, combining Christmas and Mardi Gras and Cinco de Mayo and Tet into one monster celebration, as if all the people of Earth had gathered together for a week of drinking and singing.

It was a time of great happiness and bitter disappointment. Dreams begun and nurtured ten kilorevs ago could bear fruit at the Purple Carnival. More often they came to naught. The crowds filling Grandioso on the first day of Carnival would soon be winnowed to a few, and the crowds leaving on the last day were more subdued than those which had arrived in song and laughter. Yet there would be no despair. You won or you lost; it was all in how Gaea turned.

The prize to be won in the bowl of Grandioso was the right to bear children.

The Purple Carnival commenced with the rendition of a march by the Key of E Quality-Plus Marching Band, 300 strong. This time it was "On Parade," by John Philip Sousa. Robin, perched on a ledge fifty meters up the red-brown side of Amparito Roca, had no way of knowing what she was about to experience. She listened to the opening bars, a solo trumpet call of remarkable crispness, then gripped the rock when the ensemble joined in, fortissimo, with three descending notes that were gone almost before they were uttered, yet which had possessed a volume and clarity little short of miraculous. The air was still trembling, astonished to have contained such a sound, while the trumpet repeated its earlier brash statement, only to be swallowed once again by the arrival of the massed winds, this time in earnest.

The Quality-Plus Band had never heard of uniforms. They had never heard of directors either. They would have hated the first, had no need of the second. With ensemble music, music that was written down to be performed rigidly, all any Titanide needed was someone to provide a downbeat. Everything else was implicit on the paper and would be performed exactly as written, perfect the first time and every time thereafter. Titanides never needed rehearsal. They designed and built their own instruments, could play any horn, fiddle, drum, or keyboard they encountered with a few minutes' familiarization, and built few instruments alike.

The music moved Robin. It was a formidable accomplishment for the band, though they were never aware of it; Robin had never liked march music, associating it with peckish militaristic displays, with soldiery and aggression. The Titanides forced her to hear it as exuberance, as sheer, brassy vitality. She rubbed the goose bumps on her arms and leaned forward, hanging on every note.

This was the kind of celebration she could understand. The air held a promise, a vibrant excitement that tasted delicious. She had felt it even before she caught up with the cloud of dust that had marked the Titanide column on its way to Carnival, felt it in spite of being still shaken by her fall, her encounter with the angel, and her long helplessness on the banks of Ophion. Upon reaching the parade of partygoers she had been welcomed without reservation. Somehow they all knew she was a pilgrim, though Robin was herself far from sure she qualified for the status. Nevertheless, the Titanides overwhelmed her with gifts of food, drink, song, and flowers. They had carried her on their backs, where she had to share space with saddlebags and sacks of food, and on their wagons, which creaked and swayed beneath staggering loads. She had wondered what in the name of the Great Mother they were carrying that so burdened wagons with as many as twelve wheels, pulled by hitches of from two to twenty Titanides.

Now she overlooked the bowl of Grandioso and thought she knew. A good part of the cargo must have been costume jewelry. Stark naked, Titanides were often flashy as a neon kaleidoscope, but to a Titanide it was never enough. Even in town, for no special occasion, they averaged a kilo of bangles, beads, bracelets, and bells. If they had bare skin, they painted it; if covered with hair, they stained it, braided it, bleached it. They pierced their long ears, their nostrils, their nipples, labia, and foreskins and wore in them anything that flashed or jangled. They drilled holes in their adamantine hooves-clear and red as rubies-and bolted on gems of contrasting colors. One seldom saw a Titanide without a fresh flower braided into the hair or tucked behind an ear.

That was all apparently just a warm-up. For the Purple Carnival the Titanides threw restraint to the winds and got decked out.

The music reached a pounding climax and then was gone, though it reverberated in the rock. It seemed to Robin that something so alive as that sound should not be allowed to die, and indeed, it wasn't. The band tore into the "National Emblem," by E. E. Bagley. From that moment there was never to be a pause in the music.

But during the brief hiatus Robin saw that someone was going to join her. She felt annoyed at the imminent interruption-she would have to speak to this woman in the worn leather boots and green pants and shirt just when she had settled down to some serious listening. She considered leaving. The woman chose that moment to look up and smile. Her gesture seemed to say, "May I join you?" Robin nodded.

She was certainly agile enough. She bounded up the rock face it had taken Robin ten minutes to climb, hardly using her hands.

"Hi," she said, sitting beside Robin with her legs dangling off the ledge. "I hope I'm not disturbing you."

"It's okay." Robin was still watching the band.

"They don't really march, of course," the woman said. "The music excites them too much to stay in step. If Sousa saw them, he'd scream."

"Who?"

The woman laughed. "Don't let a Titanide hear you say that. John Philip Sousa is right up there with sex and good wine in their top ten. And damn if they don't make me like him, the way they play it."

Robin would not have known proper marching if she had seen it and could not have cared less. The Titanides' leaping and dancing were fine with her. Sousa must have been the man who wrote the march, but that was unimportant, too. The woman had said the music moved her in spite of herself, and it had done the same thing to Robin. She turned her head to study the new arrival.

The woman was not much taller than Robin, and that was refreshing. There had been entirely too many giants since she came to Gaea. Her face in profile was relaxed, with an oddly innocent quality belied by the way she carried her body. She might have been only a few years older than Robin, but somehow she didn't think so. The light brown color of her unlined skin had the look of a tan. Sitting, she did not move anything but her eyes, which missed nothing. She seemed bonelessly relaxed; it was an illusion.

She let Robin look her over for a reasonable time; then, with a slight movement of her head, her attention was completely shifted. Her eyes smiled before her mouth did, but when the lips caught up, they revealed even white teeth. She put out a hand, and Robin took it.

"I'm Gaby Plauget," she said.

"May the holy flow unite... ." Robin's eyes widened,

"Don't tell me they still remember me in the Coven. Really?" Her grin grew even bigger, and she squeezed Robin's hand. "You must be Robin the Nine-fingered. I've been looking for you all day."