Wizard

17 Recognition

The rain Gaby had been expecting finally arrived when they had been on the river for five hours. She broke out the oilskins and handed one to Psaltery. The others were doing the same, except for Cirocco, who still slept in the front of Hornpipe's canoe. Gaby started to tell Psaltery to bring the boat over so she could get the Wizard out of the rain, then changed her mind. Her impulse was always to pamper Rocky when she was like this. She had to remember what she had told Chris. Cirocco must take care of herself.

Presently the Wizard raised her head and peered at the rain, as though she had never seen anything as inexplicable as water falling from the sky. She started to sit up, then leaned over the side of the canoe and vomited into the brown water. It was a lot of effort for not much return.

When she was through, she crawled to the middle of the canoe, threw back the red tarpaulin, and began rooting around in the supplies. Her search grew more and more frantic. In the back, Hornpipe said nothing but kept paddling steadily. At last the Wizard sat back on her heels and rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand.

Suddenly, she looked up.

"GaaaaBEEEE!" she yelled. She spotted Gaby, twenty meters away, then stepped onto the edge of the boat and out onto the water.

For a moment it looked as if she could actually pull it off. It turned out to be just the low gravity, however, for with her second step she went in over her knees, and before she could take a third, the water closed over her slightly puzzled face.

"She may be a Wizard," Chris chuckled, "but she's not Jesus."

"Who's Jesus?"

Robin listened to the explanation for a moment, long enough to know it wasn't something that interested her. Jesus was a Christian myth figure, apparently the one who founded the whole sect. He had been dead more than two thousand years, which struck Robin as the best thing about him. She remained cautious until she was able to ask Chris if he believed any of that, and when he said no, she considered the subject closed.

The two of them were sitting on a log a good distance from the rest of the group, all of whom circled the figure of Cirocco, shivering in a blanket next to a roaring fire. A big pot of coffee hung from a metal trivet, slowly blackening in the flames.

Robin was feeling sour. She was wondering what in the name of the Great Mother she was doing on this fool's errand led by a Wizard she wouldn't trust to tie her own shoelaces competently. And Gaby. The less said about her, the better. Four Titanides ... actually, she rather liked them. Hautbois had shown herself to be quite a teller of tales. Robin had spent the first part of the trip listening to her, from time to time throwing in a yarn of her own, feeling her out to see how gullible she might be. Hautbois would get along well in the Coven; she was not easily taken in. Then there was Chris.

She had put off getting to know him, feeling uneasy about actually having to meet socially with a male. Yet she already knew a lot of what she had been taught about men was untrue. She could see the tales of men had grown in the telling. She could not imagine ever learning to be comfortable with him, but if they were to make this trip together, she should try to understand him better.

That was turning out to be hard to do, and she berated herself for it. It was not his fault. He seemed open enough. She just could not bring herself to talk to him. It was a lot easier talking to the Titanides. They did not seem as alien as he.

So instead of talking, she looked at the water dripping from the edge of the tent fly they had suspended between two trees. There was not a breath of wind. The rain fell straight down, hard and steady, but the rude shelter was enough to keep them dry. The fire was for the coffee and the Wizard; it was quite warm, though not unpleasantly so.

"Hyperion gets a lot darker on a cloudy day than California does," Chris said.

"Does it? I hadn't realized."

He smiled at her, but it was not patronizing. He seemed to want to talk, too.

"The light here's deceptive," he said. "It seems bright, but that's because your eyes open to accommodate it. Saturn only gets about a hundredth as much light as the Earth does. When something blocks most of that, you notice the difference."

"I wouldn't know about that. We handle things differently in the Coven. We keep the windows open for weeks at a time to make the crops grow better."

"No kidding? I'd like to know more about it."

So she told him about life in the Coven and found one more example of a quality that was the same for men and women: it was easy to talk to anyone if he or she was a good listener. Robin knew she was not and was not ashamed of the fact, but she respected someone who, like Chris, could make her feel as if his whole attention were on her, as if he really were absorbing what she had to say. At first this respect, grudging as it was, made her nervous in itself. This was a male, damn it. She no longer expected him to assault her twice a day, but it was disorienting to realize that without that stubble of beard and breadth of shoulder, he did not look or act like anything but a sister.

She could tell that he thought many things about the Coven were strange, though he avoided expressing it. That bothered her at first-how could someone from peckish society think her world was weird?-but trying to be fair, she had to admit that all customs must look strange to one who was unused to them.

"Then those ... tattoos? Everyone has them in the Coven?"

That's right. Some have more than I; some, less. Everyone has the Pentasm." She tossed her head to show him the design around her ear. "Usually it is centered on the mother's mark, but my womb is defiled and..." He was frowning his incomprehension. The-" what was it Gaby called it?- "the belly button." She laughed, remembering. "What a silly name! We call it the first window of the soul because it marks the holiest bond, that between mother and daughter. The windows of the head are the mind's windows. I have been accused of heterodoxy for putting my Pentasm in guard over my mind rather than my soul, but I successfully defended myself before the tribunal because of my defilement. The windows of the soul lead to the womb, here and here." She put her hands to her belly and her crotch, then hastily took them away when she recalled the difference between herself and the man.

"I'm afraid I don't understand the defilement."

"I can't have children. They would have what I have, or so the doctors say."

"I'm sorry."

Robin frowned. "I don't understand this custom of apologizing for things one didn't do. You never worked at the Semenico Sperm Bank in Atlanta, Gah, did you?"

"That's Georgia," he said, smiling. "Gee Ay stands for Georgia. No, I didn't work there."

"Someday I might meet the man who did. His death would be unusual."

"I wasn't really apologizing," he said. "Not that way. We often say, I'm sorry, just to offer sympathy."

"We don't wish sympathy."

"Then I withdraw the offer." His grin was infectious. Soon she had to smile with him. "God knows I get too much of it myself. I usually just let it pass, unless I'm feeling nasty." Robin wondered how he could say it so carelessly. Peckish people varied a lot. Some hardly understood what honor meant. Others could be very touchy. She had submitted to indignities upon arrival that she would never have accepted from one of her own people, and the reason was she presumed these folk didn't know any better. At first she assumed they all had no self-respect, but she thought Chris had some-though not a lot-and if he were willing to accept sympathy without protest, he must not see it as always encroaching on his own sense of self-reliance.

"I have been accused of being too nasty," she admitted. "By my sisters, that is. There are times when we can accept sympathy with no loss of honor, so long as it implies no patronization."

"Then you have my sympathy," he said. "As one sufferer to another."

"Accepted."

"What does 'peckish' mean?"

"It comes from our word for your ... we'd better not talk about that."

"Okay. Then why do you want to kill that man in Georgia?" She found herself launched on an explanation of what had been done to her, why it had been done, and that led into an explanation of the peckish power structure and how it operated. It dawned on her that she was speaking to a supposed member of that very power structure. Oddly, she was embarrassed. She had been saying some pretty terrible things, and after all, he had done nothing to her personally. Did that matter? She was no longer sure. "At least I think I know what 'peckish' means now," he said.

"I didn't mean to accuse you of anything," she said. "I'm sure you see it differently because of the way you were brought up, so-"

"Don't be so sure," he said. "I don't admit to any big conspiracy, you understand. If there is one, nobody's invited me to the meetings. And I do think you ... your Coven is operating from an obsolete world picture. If I read you right, you'd agree to that at least partially yourself."

She shrugged, noncommittally. He was right, partially. "When your group cut itself off from the rest of the human race, things might have been as bad as you say. I wasn't around, and I guess if I had been, I would have been part of the oppressor class and think it was the way things should be. But I have been told that things are a lot better now. I won't say they're perfect. Things don't get perfect. But most of the women I know are happy. They don't think there's many battles left to fight."

"You'd better stop there," Robin cautioned. "Most women have always been happy with the way things were, or at least they said so. That goes back to before peckish society allowed women to vote. Just because we of the Coven believe some things that I now know are overstated or incorrect, don't draw the conclusion that we are foolish about everything. We know that the majority is always willing to let things remain as they are until they are led to something better. A slave may not be happy with her lot, but most do nothing to improve it. Most do not believe it can be improved."

He spread his hands and shrugged. "You've got me there. And I wouldn't see oppression because I'd be the benefactor of it. What do you think? How bad does it look to you, as a sort of visitor from another planet?"

"Frankly, it is much better than I had hoped. On the surface anyway. I've had to discard a lot of preconceptions."

"Good for you!" he said. "Most people would rather die than discard a preconception. When Gaby told me about where you came from, the last thing I expected you to have was an open mind. But what do ... uh, peckish women think?"

Robin was feeling an odd mixture of emotions. Most unnerving of all was the fact that she felt pleased that he felt she had an open mind. This in spite of the way he had phrased it, which could be interpreted as an insult to the Coven. The closed, isolated group Gaby had probably described to him would be expected to cling to its own notions fanatically. The Coven was not like that, but it would be hard to explain to him. Robin had been trained to accept the universe as it existed, as she observed it, not to introduce a Finagle factor to make it conform to the equation or even to the doctrine.

It had been easy to discard the notions that males had meter-long penises and that they spent all their time raping women or buying and selling them. (That last was not yet disproved, but if it was happening, it was a subtle bit of social business she had not yet been able to observe.) She faced a disquieting notion: male-as-person. A human being not totally at the mercy of his testosterone, more than just an aggressor penis, but a person one could talk to, who could even understand one's point of view. Following that thought to its logical end took her to an almost unthinkable possibility: male-as-sister.

She realized she had been quiet too long.

"Peckish women? Uh, I really don't know yet. I met a woman who sells her body, though she says that's not the right way to look at it. I don't understand money, so I really can't say if she's right. Gaby and Cirocco are worse than useless in that respect. They have less to do with human society-as you know it-than I do. I have to say I don't know enough of your culture to understand women's role in it."

He was nodding again.

"What's in your bag?" he asked.

"My demon."

"Can I see it?"

"That probably isn't-" But he had already opened the bag. Well, let it be on his own head, she thought. Nasu's bite was painful but not serious.

"A snake!" he cried. He seemed delighted and reached into the bag. "A py-no, an anaconda. One of the nicest ones I've seen, too. What's his ... what's her name?"

"Nasu." She was regretting not saying anything now and wished Nasu would go ahead and bite and get it over with. Robin would then apologize because it was a dirty trick. How was he to know Nasu allowed no one but Robin to handle her?

But he was doing it correctly, showing the proper respect, and damn it if Nasu wasn't coiling around his arm.

"You know something about snakes."

"I've had a few. I worked in a zoo for a year, back when I could still hold a job. Me and snakes get along."

When five minutes went by and Chris still wasn't bitten, Robin had to admit the truth of what he said. And it made her more nervous than ever to see him sitting there with her demon wound around his shoulders. What was she to do? The main function of a demon was to warn one of enemies. Part of her knew that made no more sense than the infallibility granted by her third Eye. It was tradition, no more. She wasn't living in the Stone Age.

But a part of her much deeper than that looked at Chris and the snake and did not know what to do.