Wizard

12 The Bride-Elect

Chris came out of it in the middle of a dance. Operating on some automatic level, his body continued to move as it had been moving for some seconds before he could make it stop, at which point he was bumped from behind by a large blue Titanide. Chris had a grin on his face. He got rid of it.

Someone grabbed his elbow and pulled him from the line of dancers, turned him, and he was face to breast with another Titanide.

"I said, we have to get going now, or I'll be late for my own review," she said, and held one large hand in an odd position. When he did nothing, she raked her other hand through her long pink hair and sighed. "Well, step up, Chris! Come on!"

Something made him lift his bare foot and put it in the Titanide's palm. Call it a ghost reflex, his body remembering a learned operation his mind had forgotten. It was the right thing. She lifted; he grabbed for her shoulder and found himself astride her back. Her skin was hairless, predominately yellow but mottled with small brown spots like a ripe banana. Against his bare legs she had just the right temperature and texture: human skin stretched over a different frame.

She twisted at the waist, leaning to one side far enough to get one arm around his shoulders. Her big, almond eyes were glittering with excitement. To his amazement, she kissed him hard on the lips. She was so big she made him feel six years old.

"For luck, precious. We've got the mates and the mode. All we need now is luck, and you're my charm." She let out a howl and dug the ground with her back legs, springing forward at a full gallop as Chris hugged her waist and hung on.

He was not entirely unused to this sort of occurrence. There had been other times when he recovered from amnesia in mid-stride, so he thought he was prepared for almost anything.

He was not prepared for this.

The whole world was filled with bright sunlight, dust, Titanides, tents, and music. Especially music. They passed through waves of it, encountering what certainly must have been all the forms invented by humans and the vastly greater number known to Titanides. It should have been accoustical insanity, but it was not. Each group was aware of the things being done by adjacent groups. With improvisational prestidigitation they played off each other, re-worked themes, and threw them back for elaboration: re-metered, sweetened. Chris and the Titanide passed through families of music-ragtime next door to cakewalks, shouldering close to swing and nineteen varieties of progressive jazz, with small pockets of inhuman strangeness hushed or clarioned.

Some of it was inaccessible to Chris. The best he could do was think, yes, it might be interesting if music were like that. To Titanides all sound was music. The kinds humans loved were just a corner of the theater, nothing but a subset of the family music. One thing Chris heard was just sustained notes in clusters of three or four, each a few cycles away from the tonic. The Titanides managed to turn the resultant beats, the difference and summation tones, into music in and of itself.

Moving in the crush of Purple Carnival was a voyage through the innards of a 50,000-channel sound mixer with living electronics. Somewhere a Master Titanide thumbed the huge switch panel, augmenting here, muting there, bringing up one melodic line only to fade it out in a few seconds.

Things were sung in the direction of his companion. (Was it proper to call her his mount? His steed?) She usually waved and returned a short song. Then a Titanide called out, in English.

"What have you got there, Valiha?"

"A four-leaf clover, I hope," Valiha called back. "My ticket to maternity."

It was nice to have a name for her. She seemed to know him, embarrassingly well, as a matter of fact, and she would expect him to know her. Not for the first time, he wondered what he had been up to.

Their destination was a crater with eroded walls, half a kilometer in diameter. He groped for a name, just out of reach, and came up with Grandioso. Meaningless, but it felt right, as things sometimes did after an episode. The rock that sat on the edge of the crater had a name, but it wouldn't come.

From the sides of Grandioso he could look back and see the Titanide encampment, a mad brawl like the tuning of a thousand orchestras, a turmoil of color that trailed a dust plume far downwind.

The interior of the bowl was another world. It held many Titanides, but they had none of the anarchic revelry of those outside. Grandioso was covered in a carpet of short green grass and had been marked off in a grid of white lines. The Titanides had arranged themselves in small groups, never more than four in a square, like counters in a game. Some of the squares held gaudy but temporary-looking structures like floral floats. Others were nearly bare. Valiha entered the maze, went in three squares and over seven. She joined two other Titanides in a square that held a few objects like holly wreaths and a selection of polished stones, all laid out in a pattern that meant nothing to Chris.

She introduced him to the others, and he heard himself named as Long-Odds Major. What had he been telling her? The two Titanides were a female named Cymbal (Lydian Trio) Prelude and a male with the unlikely name of Hichiriki (Phrygian Quartet) Madrigal. Valiha, he learned, was also a member of the Madrigal chord. They were distinguished by their yellow skin and cotton-candy hair. Her middle, parenthetical name was Aeolian Solo. He gathered that the middle names of Titanides designated breeding. Little was clear beyond that.

"And all this ... ?" Chris hoped that not completing the sentence would protect the secret of his ignorance of things she thought he knew. He gestured at the white lines, at the rocks and flowers. "What mode did you say this was going to be?"

"A Double-flatted Mixolydian Trio," she said, apparently nervous enough to chatter about anything, regardless of having discussed it before. "It's on the sign there in front. You realize that's not really what it is-a Double-flatted Mixolydian Trio is musically meaningless; it's just a string of English words we use for the real words that you can't sing. Oh, I guess I didn't say, but that mode means that Cymbal was the foremother and Hichiriki was the forefather. If we get tapped, Cymbal will be the hindfather."

"And you the hindmother," Chris said, feeling safe.

"Right. They produced the egg, and Cymbal will quicken it in me."

"The egg."

"Right here." She reached into her pouch-how handy to have a built-in pocket, Chris thought-and tossed him something the size of a golf ball. He almost dropped it, and Valihaa laughed.

"It doesn't have a shell," she said. "But haven't you seen one before?" A slight frown creased her forehead.

Chris had no idea. This one was quite hard, apparently solid. It was a perfect sphere, pale gold with brown whorls like fingerprint smudges. It had milky areas in its translucent depths. Someone had printed a series of Titanide characters on it.

He gave it back to her, then looked at the sign she had mentioned earlier. It rested on the ground, a ten-centimeter metal plate engraved with symbols and lines:

I FJVtF*|

UF^ f

F M M

"The F stands for female," someone said, behind him. He turned and saw two human women talking to each other. They both were short and rather pretty. The smaller one had a green, staring Eye painted on her forehead. There were more drawings partially visible on her legs and arms. She looked young. The other, darker one was the voice he had heard. He could not guess her age, though she did not look older than her middle thirties.

"The M, of course, is male. The star at the right is the semifertilized egg produced by the foremother, and the arrow pointing up from the bottom line shows the first fertilization. This is a Double-flatted Mixolydian Trio, which means the foremother is also the hindfather. Mixolydian ensembles are those with two females participating, except for Aeolian Duets, where the whole ensemble is female. All Aeolian modes are all-female. Lydian modes have one female and one, two, or three males, and the Phrygian mode, of which there is only the quartet, has three females and one male, the forefather."

Chris stepped out of the way as the smaller woman knelt to peer at the legend on the sign. He wanted to find out how he fitted into the picture and hoped he could learn by eavesdropping. It was a tactic he had used well in the past after memory lapses, a common one among people with mental problems, whose almost universal urge was not to reveal the extent of their condition.

The woman sighed as she straightened up.

"I guess I'm still missing something," she said with a faint accent Chris could not place. She pointed to Chris as if he were a statue. "How does he fit in?"

The older one laughed. "Not at all, into a Mixolydian Trio. There are two modes that include humans-the Dorian and Ionian - but there are none of those here today. You'll seldom see them. No, if anything, he's part of the decorations. He's a fertility fetish. A good-luck charm. Titanides are very superstitious at Carnival."

She had been looking at him while she spoke; now her eyes met his for the first time, searched for something, and did not seem to find it, and she broke into a smile. She extended her hand.

"I don't think you really are, though, anymore," she said. "I'm Gaby Plauget. I hope I didn't offend you."

Chris was surprised at the strength of her grasp.

"I'm-"

"Chris Major." She laughed again. It was innocent laughter, impossible to take the wrong way. "I shouldn't do that. You've probably gathered I know a little about you. We haven't met, though."

"I get the feeling that ... never mind." Chris thought he knew the name from somewhere, but she had said they had not met, so he dropped it. If he spent too much time trying to recall shadow experiences buried in his head, he would never get anything done.

She nodded. "I'll tell you more later. I'll see you around." She fluttered the fingers of one hand, still grinning, and returned to the other woman. "Look at the top row of symbols as one Titanide," she explained. "Hind legs to the left, head to the right. The top row represents a female: vagina in back, penis in the middle, another vagina between the forelegs. The second row is also a female, and the third row is a male. Now does it make sense? Top row is foremother and hindfather, middle row is hindmother, bottom row... ."

"What was that she was saying to you?"

Chris turned, saw Valiha looking nervous.

"Well, just what did I say to you?"

"That you were very lucky, and you ... you mean it's not true?" Her eyes grew wide, and she put her hand to her mouth.

"I seem to have times of being lucky," he said. "It's not reliable, though. And I don't recall how we met, or what we've talked about, or what we've done together. I'm blank from ... well, the last thing I remember is talking to Gaea in a big room at the hub. I'm sorry. Did I make some kind of promise?"

But Valiha had returned to her two partners. They put their heads together and sang a sweet moaning melody. He gathered they were talking it over. He sighed and looked around for Gaby and her companion, but they had moved far down the row, walking toward a large white tent that stood on the edge of the judging field.

Valiha asked him to be near for the review when it came. She wanted to know if he brought bad luck when he was not crazy, and he said he didn't think so. It was clear the three Titanides were upset and did not know what to do. He thought it might be best to melt into the crowd, not burden them with what seemed to him the black cloud of doom he carried with him. With that intention he started off down the field, not hurrying, studying the groupings of Titanides.

It made more sense now. Each square contained an ensemble the purpose of which was to be certified for reproduction. To that end they had created proposals according to arcane rules of their own. They grouped themselves in twos, threes, and fours, each specifying one of the twenty-nine possible modes of procreation, each having already produced a semifertilized egg: the first stage of the Titanide sexual minuet.

Chris wondered, as he ambled slowly between the groups, just how many of these proposals would ever be put into effect and who made the decisions. It didn't take a lot of insight to realize that Gaea was a finite world. He supposed that with industrialization Gaea could be made to support many more sentient beings than she now did, but a limit would soon be reached. It followed that only a small number of the groups around him would be chosen to procreate. He made a guess at how few that would be, thought he was being conservative, and later learned he had overshot the mark by a factor of five.

Such competition produces stress, and stress leads to irrationality. Had Titanides been humans, there would have been much fighting at Carnival, but Titanides did not fight among themselves. Losers retired to weep in private. They emerged after a period of sorrow to wild drinking and dancing and much talk about next time. But before that they grasped at anything, decorating their assigned squares with talismans, amulets, and charms, becoming for a time intensely superstitious, like bettors at racetracks or primitives aware of their status as small beings doing their best to attract God's attention.

The displays they created to enhance their proposals ranged from the baroque to the minimalist. Chris saw one group of two who had built a shaky pagoda festooned with broken glass, flowers, empty cans, and beautiful ceramic pots. Another square was carpeted in white feathers, sprinkled with blood. Some practiced tableaux or short skits; others juggled knives while standing on their hind legs. There was a starkly simple display that Chris found irresistible, consisting of a worn gray stone with an egg sitting on it, set off by a twig and two tiny flowers.

There was one square with a single occupant. Chris at first thought the rest of the ensemble had not yet arrived, but when he studied the sign in front of the proposal, he was even more puzzled:

According to Gaby's explanation, each row on the sign represented a Titanide. Further, the sign seemed to indicate that this female intended to be forefather, foremother, hindfather, and hind-mother to her child. He looked at her. She was a lovely creature, covered in snowy fur, sitting down with a single clear green egg resting on the grass between her knobby front knees. He couldn't resist.

"Pardon me. I don't think I understand just how... ."

She was smiling at him, but her look showed incomprehension.

She sang a few notes to him, lifted her shoulders eloquently, and shook her head.

He left her, still curious as to just what it was she intended to do.

He had meant to steal away, but somehow he was still around when the Wizard emerged from her tent and began making her review. Chris happened to be close by. He decided to watch for a while.

She was a big woman and made no attempt to hide the fact, carrying herself erectly, shoulders back, chin out. Her skin was light brown, her hair a fine mahogany, blowing carelessly to each side of a part down the center. Her brow was a bit too prominent, her nose too long and her jaw too wide to play glamour roles in the movies, but she had a power in her movements, something about her that transcended more conventional beauty. She walked on the balls of her bare feet, a quarter-gee gait Chris had seen before that involved the knees' bending very little with each stride, with her hips doing most of the work. It was feline and very sexy, though not meant to be; it was simply the most efficient way to walk in Gaea.

He followed her for a while as she moved up and down the rows of applicants. She was accompanied by a brace of Titanide bucks of the Cantata clan: light-skinned and hairless but for their heads, tails, forearms, and lower legs, and large even among Titanides. One carried a clipboard; the other, a gold box. They were apparently identical twins. They wore only gold bracelets and bands around arms and legs. The Wizard looked less regal. Her sole garment was a faded brick-red blanket with a hole she could put her head through, covering her to the knees. Her arms were often lost in its folds, but when they came out, Chris could see she wore nothing under it.

The Wizard ignored the white lines on the ground, moving from one square to another as it suited her. Her Titanide retinue and the small number of other observers stuck to the lanes between squares, however, and Chris did, too. One of the Cantatas was making sure she looked at every group, checking off squares on his board, once calling the Wizard back when she turned at the wrong place.

She knew many of the Titanides. Often she would stop to sing with them, kissing some, embracing others. She walked slowly through the groups after first reading the sign in front and looking the Titanides up and down with no expression on her face. Sometimes she stopped and appeared lost in thought, then would confer with an aide, mutter something to him, and move on. At some squares she asked questions of one or more candidates.

She went through the entire group that way, then started through again. Chris began to be bored with it. He decided to say good-bye and good luck to Valiha and her ensemble.

"Where were you?" Valiha hissed.

"I'm really not going to do you any good," Chris said. He noticed that the lovely Titanide egg had been balanced on the neck of an empty tequila bottle at Valiha's feet. He gestured to it. "I'll have no more effect than that trash."

"Please, Chris, humor me in this. You promised you would." Her eyes were pleading, and he thought uncomfortably that, yes, he had promised something like that. He looked away from her eyes, looked back, and nodded.

"All you have to do is stand just on the edge of the line. You can't come into the square during the review ... shhh! Quiet, everybody, she's coming!"

Chris turned, and there she was, moving up the line behind him. She was judging the row opposite Valiha's, going fairly quickly, and passed just a few meters from Chris. After she had taken a few more steps, she paused, tilted her head slightly, then turned and looked at him with her brow lowered. He felt awkward but could not look away. Eventually one corner of her mouth turned up.

"So you're back with us," she said. "We met, briefly, about a dekarev ago. I'm Cirocco. You can call me Rocky." She did not offer her hand but continued to look him over. He felt underdressed in the shorts he had awakened in. The Wizard glanced at Valiha, did a double take, and fixed her with the gaze that had so unsettled Chris. Then she moved into the potential Double-flatted Mixolydian Trio.

"You're Valiha," Cirocco said. The Titanide made an odd curtsy in reply. "I knew your hindmother well." She was walking around Valiha, rubbing her hand along the smooth mottled flanks. She nodded to Hichiriki and Cymbal, bent to squeeze Valiha's right-hind fetlock, then resumed her smoothing motions. She came around front again, reached up and stroked Valiha's cheek. She knelt and rubbed the Titanide's foreleg with both hands, then turned her head and spoke to Chris.

"You've fallen into good company," she said. "Valiha's an Aeolian Solo. I believe it's the only one I've ever granted for this particular Madrigal-Samba mix. In another two or three hundred kilorevs her descendants might form a chord of their own. What she's proposing here is well thought out, though. It's a consolidation instead of the rather daring Locrilydian Duet she proposed last Carnival. But she's only ... oh, make it five Earth years old, and the young want to do it all themselves, don't they, Valiha?"

A tinge of pink colored the Titanide's yellow cheeks as the Wizard stood up. She looked away and blushed deeper when Cirocco laughed and patted her hip.

"I expected you to be singing an Aeolian Solo this time," Cirocco teased. She glanced at Chris, who felt uncomfortable with the exchange. It all had too much of the aspect of a horse show for his taste. He expected her to peel back the Titanide's lips and look at her teeth.

"Singing an Aeolian Solo is a Titanide euphemism for conceit," Cirocco explained. "A Titanide female can effectively clone herself, being all four parents to her offspring by using frontal and hind self-insemination. But I don't let 'em do it too damn often." She put her hands on her hips, then reached up again and brushed the back of her hand down the Titanide's chest. "Are these breasts ready for this great responsibility, my child?"

"They are, Captain."

"You've chosen well in the foreparents, Valiha. Your hindmother would have been proud." She turned and picked up the egg from its glass pedestal. It grew very quiet as the Wizard held the sphere up to the light, then brought it to her lips. She kissed it, opened her mouth, and carefully put it in. When she took it out, it was already changing color, to become as clear as glass in a few seconds. Now Valiha was the only one moving, and what she did was to set her hind legs apart, lift her tail, and lean her torso forward. Her pink hair fell over her face, and she waited. Chris had a momentary return of memory: being present while two Titanides engaged in anterior intercourse-something they did often and with great relish during Carnival. This was the female position, ready to be mounted by the Titanide taking the male role. The Wizard walked around behind Valiha, who quivered in anticipation.

Chris looked away, wincing. Her arm had gone in past the elbow. When it came out, the egg was no longer in her hand.

"Queasy?" The Wizard had a towel, which she used to dry her arm and then tossed to a waiting aide. "Ranchers do that sort of thing all the time."

"Yes, but these are ... well, they're people. It just struck me as undignified. Maybe I shouldn't say that."

Cirocco shrugged. "Say what you please. This is what they know. They think our marriage customs are pretty dull, and maybe they've got a point." She narrowed her eyes at him. "Say, are you and Valiha shooting marbles?"

"I don't know what you mean." As he said it, he had the uncomfortable feeling that maybe he did know what she meant.

"Never mind. She seems to be a friend anyway."

"She seems to be. I don't really remember." He looked over her shoulder, where he could just see the three Titanides cresting the lip of the crater as they raced away to consummate the ensemble.

"Must be tough. I can see why you came here. Well, you ought to be there at the celebration anyway. If she'd been less excited, she'd have given you a ride." She sang to one of the Titanides, who held out his hand in a familiar way.

"This is Harp of the Cantata Chord. He doesn't speak any English, but he'll take you to the party and bring you back in a few revs. Sober, I hope. Meet me in the tent over there. We have some things to talk about."