Wizard

22 The Idol's Eye

The sub was unwilling to interrupt her postcoital bliss to tow the raft to Minerva. Cirocco stood in the bow and tried to woo it in a language combining the less pleasant sounds of asthma and whooping cough, but the big bathyzoote's light grew even fainter as she reached for the abyss. The blimp, who might have helped for a short time, turned out to have business in the west. Blimps were always ready to give a free ride, but only if one wanted to go where the blimp was bound.

It didn't matter. In a few hours a breeze came up from the west. Soon they were at the base of the central Rhea vertical cable.

Robin studied it as they drew nearer. Cirocco had not been exaggerating. Minerva was not really an island; it was more of a shelf. It had been formed over the aeons by barnacleoids, pseudolimpets, near corals, and other Gaean equivalents of sessile mollusks and crustaceans. The problem was that the water level was low-it had, in fact, been dropping gradually for a million years as the cables stretched and Gaea expanded slowly as she aged. This was in addition to the seasonal lows, which included a seventeen-day short cycle and a thirty-year long one. They had arrived near the trough of the long fluctuation, with the result that the main body of the "island" shelved away from the cable 50 meters above the water. The thickness of the shelf varied. At some places it jutted out more than a hundred meters; elsewhere the mass of shells and sand had broken away from wave action or its own weight, and the cable rose vertically. But it was encrusted as far as Robin could see. Two kilometers above her were the corpses of organisms that had lived during Earth's Pliocene Epoch.

She wondered how they intended to land Constance when the nearest place to stand was fifty meters up. The answer became apparent as the raft was steered to the south side of the cable. There one of the hundreds of strands had broken near the waterline. The upper end curled away from the cable far above. Reef builders had transformed the lower end into a cove that enclosed a flat circle of land only five meters high. Constance was soon moored, and Robin followed Gaby and Psaltery through a jagged cleft, stepping on meter-wide shells that still housed living creatures. They emerged onto the flat, severed end of the cable strand, 200 meters in diameter.

It was a strange seashore, backed as it was by the limitless vertical wall of the cable. There were skeletal trees growing from sandy deposits and a clear, still pool near the center. The area was littered with bone-white driftwood.

"We'll be here a day or two," Hautbois said as she passed Robin, carrying a huge burden of tent canvas. "Feeling better?"

"I'm fine, thanks." She smiled at the Titanide, but in truth, she was still shaky from her last bout of palsy. Hautbois had taken good care of her. Without her restraint, Robin would surely have injured herself.

She snagged Gaby's arm as she passed by and fell in step beside her.

"What are we stopping here for?"

"It's the garden spot of Rhea," Gaby said, sweeping her arm wide. But the joke seemed forced. "Actually, Rocky has some business here. Better count on two days. Maybe three. Getting tired of us?"

"No. Just curious. Should I be?"

"It might be better if you weren't. She has something to do, and I can't tell you what it is. That's for your own good, believe it or not." Gaby hurried away, back to the raft.

Robin sat on a log and watched the Titanides and Chris pitching camp. A month ago she would have forced herself to get up and help. Honor would have mandated it because to sit here was an acknowledgment that she was weak. Well, damn it, she was weak.

She had Hautbois to thank for being able to say that to herself. The Titanide had sung to her all through her recent seizure, in both English and Titanide. She had not let Robin turn away from her helplessness, had forced her to begin looking at ways to cope with it beyond sheer gutsiness. When Robin began to regain control, she found she did not resent what the Titanide had said. She learned Hautbois was a healer. That included doctor and psychiatrist and counselor and comforter, and possibly other things. Robin had the impression Hautbois would willingly have made love to her in the private, frontal mode, if it could have helped anything. Whatever Hautbois had done had given Robin more peace of mind than she had felt since ... she could not recall. She thought she must have breached her mother's womb ready to fight the whole world.

Nasu was agitating to get out. Robin opened her sack and let her writhe onto the sand, confident she would not go far. She dug in her pocket and came up with a piece of hard candy wrapped in a leaf, peeled it, and sucked on it. The sand was too cold for Nasu's likeing, so she coiled around Robin's ankle.

Cirocco was standing alone near the wall, motionless, looking at a tall crack in it. Robin followed it with her eyes and realized it was a space between two cable strands. Three of them abutted the island, which had once been an outer strand itself, making the little bay semicircular. There was a similar crack between the center strand and the one on the left. Below the sea, the strands would splay out widely. She remembered a picture of the conical mountain and its strand forest in Hyperion. Here the gaps between strands were no more than ten meters wide and partially clogged with barnacles.

She saw Gaby return from the raft bearing an oil lamp. Gaby hurried over to Cirocco and handed it to her. They were talking, but the constant noise of the sea obliterated the words before they reached Robin. Cirocco was not saying much; it fell to Gaby to do most of the talking, and she was animated about it. She did not look happy. Cirocco kept shaking her head.

At last Gaby gave up. She stood facing Cirocco for a moment. Then the two women embraced, Gaby standing on her toes to kiss her old friend. Cirocco hugged her once more, then entered the crack between the cables. The light of her lantern was visible for a short time, then gone.

Gaby walked to the edge of the circular cove, as far from everyone else as she could get. She sat and put her head in her hands. She did not move for two hours.

Cirocco's absence passed in relaxation and games. The Titanides did not mind it, nor did Chris. Gaby was nervous much of the time. Robin grew more bored by the hour.

She took up whittling, taught by the Titanides, but did not have the patience for it. She wanted to ask Chris to teach her to swim but felt she should not be naked in front of him again. Gaby solved the problem by suggesting she wear a bathing suit. One was quickly improvised. The idea of a bathing suit was as unexpected to Robin as wearing shoes in the shower, but it did the job. She took three lessons in the central body of water she had misnamed a tidepool. (There were no tides in Gaea.) In return, she tutored Chris in fighting, something he knew little about. The lessons had to be called off temporarily when she herself learned something, which was that testicles are amazingly easy to injure and can cause their owner a great deal of pain. She exhausted her store of apologies and was genuinely sorry, but how could she have known?

Only two incidents livened an otherwise comatose two days. The first was soon after Cirocco had left, when Gaby seemed to want to move around. She took them along a narrow trail leading from the campsite to the high ledge girdling the cable. All seven of them spent the next hour walking carefully on irregular ground that sloped toward a fifty-meter drop into the sea. They went almost halfway around the cable to a point where the ledge had broken away. Just short of that was a recess between two cable strands. Standing in it was a squat stone pilaster, and sitting on that was a golden statue of an alien creature.

It reminded Robin of the Frog Queen from a childhood tale. It was obviously aquatic; though it had six legs, they ended in broad flippers. It squatted, looking out to sea, hunchbacked and broad. Nothing grew on it, though it was draped with dried seaweed. Its single eye was a hollow socket.

"That's been here at least ten thousand years," Gaby said. "There used to be an eye in the socket. It was a diamond about as big as my head. I saw it once, and it seemed to glow." She kicked at the sand, and Robin was startled to see a creature the size of a large dog emerge and slink away on six flippered feet. It was yellow and rather ugly. There was very little flesh on its bones. The thing did not look much like the statue, yet there was a family resemblance. It turned once, opened a mouth with several thousand long yellow teeth, hissed, and continued to shuffle away.

"Those things used to be so mean a wolverine would have a heart attack just to look at them. They were so quick your guts would be on the ground before you saw them. They'd hide in the sand like that one was doing. As soon as the first one jumped out, they'd be coming from all over. I saw one take seven mortal hits from a rifle and still live to kill the man who shot it."

"What happened to them?" Chris asked.

Gaby picked up a big shell and threw it to shatter against the image. A dozen heads immediately appeared above the sand, open-mouthed. Robin reached for her weapon, but it wasn't necessary.

The creatures looked around in confusion, then wriggled back into concealment.

"They were put here to guard the idol's eye," Gaby said. "The race that made it is long gone. Only Gaea knows anything about them. You can be sure it wasn't really an idol because nobody in here ever worshiped anything but Gaea. Some kind of monument, I guess. Anyway, it's been at least a thousand years since anyone cared about it or visited it.

"Until about fifty years ago. That's when the pilgrims started coming, and Gaea created these creatures as perversions of the original ones. She gave them one drive in life, and that was to protect the eye at all costs. They did a damn good job. The eye wasn't taken until about fifteen years ago. I personally know of five people who died right here where we're standing, and there were surely many more than that.

"But after it was gone, there was nothing left for the guardians to do. Gaea didn't program them to die, so they eat a little and get a little older. But waiting to die is what they're doing."

"So it was all just for a challenge?" Robin asked. "It wasn't even here before she started daring people to ... to go out and prove themselves..." She was unable to finish the thought. It brought back her anger in full force.

"That's it. Something she didn't tell you, though, is that Gaea is rotten with places like this. I'm sure she fed you the whole spiel about a hundred and one dragons and jewels as big as blimp turds. The thing is, this place has been scoured by pilgrims for fifty years, all of them looking for some stupid thing to do. A lot of them have died trying it, but the thing about humans is if enough of them keep coming, they'll eventually do just about anything. The dragons have had the worst of it. There's not many left, and there's plenty of humans. Gaea can whomp up another dragon anytime she feels like it, but she's way behind. She's getting old and can't keep up anymore. Things break down and don't get repaired for a long time, if ever. I doubt there's a dozen dragons left, or two dozen unplundered monuments."

"There's a quest shortage," Valiha said, and couldn't understand why Robin laughed so hard.

Chris was subdued on the way back. Robin knew he had visions of doing something worthy of tales, even if he was not aware of it. He was, after all, a man and trapped in peckish toy-soldier games. Robin could not have cared less if there were no more dragons.

The second incident was more interesting, however. It happened after their second sleep period. Gaby, who had not slept the first time, awoke and came out of her tent to find huge tracks in the sand. She howled for the Titanides, who came from the raft at a gallop. By the time they arrived Chris and Robin were awake, too. "Where the hell were you?" Gaby wanted to know, pointing at a meter-long footprint.

"We've been down working on Constance," Hornpipe said. "Hautbois discovered the waves had damaged one end and-"

"But what about this? You were supposed to be-"

"Now wait a minute," Hornpipe said hotly. "You told me yourself there was nothing to worry about here. Nothing from the land and nothing-"

"Okay, okay, I'm sorry. Let's don't argue." Robin was not surprised Gaby had backed down so quickly. Titanides got angry so seldom that there was something sobering about it when one did. "Let's take a closer look at this."

They proceeded to do that, examining one track in detail and following the whole series to see where the creature had come from and where it had gone. The results were frightening. The tracks appeared at one edge of the cove, went straight to the camp, made a circle around Gaby's tent, then vanished again at the edge of the water.

"What do you think it was?" Valiha asked Gaby, who was down on one knee, studying a track by the light of her lantern.

"I sure as hell wish I knew. It looks like the claw of a bird. There are birds that big in Phoebe, but they can't fly or swim, so what would they be doing here? Maybe Gaea's whipped up something new again. Damn if it doesn't look like a giant chicken."

"I don't think I'd like to meet it," Robin said.

"Me either." Gaby straightened, still frowning. "Don't anybody disturb this one. Rocky should see it when she gets back. Maybe she'll know what it is."

Cirocco returned eight revs later. She looked tired and hungry, yet more confident than when she had gone in. Robin noticed that she smiled more easily. Whatever had happened in there, it had gone better than expected.

Robin wanted to say something, but all she could think of were questions like "How did it go?" or "What did you do?" Gaby had warned her away from that. For the time being she would let it go.

"Maybe you were right, Gaby," Cirocco said as they headed toward camp. "I sure as hell didn't want to-"

"Later, Rocky. We've got something you ought to look at."

She was taken to the site of the mysterious track. It was not as distinct as it had been, but still legible. She knelt in the lantern light, and one by one, deep lines etched themselves in her forehead. She seemed offended by the whole idea of this creature.

"You've got me," she said at last. "It's nothing I've ever seen, and I've been around and around this goddamn wheel." She sang something in Titanide. Robin looked at Hautbois, who frowned.

"Freely translated, she said, 'Gaea likes her jokes as well as the next deity.' This is well known, of course."

"Giant chicken?" Cirocco said incredulously.

Robin could not stand it anymore.

"Excuse me, I'm not feeling good," she said, and hurried into the darkness. When she reached the water's edge, she climbed down into a ravine like the one near the raft mooring. Once safely out of view she began to laugh. She made as little noise as possible, but she laughed until her sides hurt, until the tears rolled down her cheeks. She did not think she could laugh any harder; then she heard Gaby yell.

"Hey, Rocky, come here! We found a feather!"

Robin laughed harder.

When she finally had herself under control, she reached into a crack between round growths of coral and pulled out two contraptions made of sticks, bits of driftwood, and shells. They had ropes to tie around her legs and places to rest her feet.

"Gaby and Cirocco," she said. "The great Gaean wildlife experts." She kissed one of the devices, then tossed it far out over the water.

"You'd better hurry. Gaby will be coming to see how you are." She looked up and saw Hautbois. She waved the remaining stilt at her and sent it after the first.

"Thanks for the diversion."

"You're welcome," Hautbois said. "I think Valiha is suspicious, but she won't say anything." He grinned broadly. "I think I'm going to enjoy this trip. But no more fooling with the salt, okay?"