Wizard

37 West End

Nasu ran away sometime during the early part of their stay in the cavern. Chris was never able to say precisely when it happened; time had become an irrational quantity.

Robin went through hell trying to find the snake. She blamed herself. Chris was unable to ease her sorrow because he knew she was right. Gaea was no place for an anaconda. Nasu had probably suffered more than anyone, coiled in Robin's shoulder bag, allowed out only briefly. It had been with many misgivings that Robin finally let her out to explore the camp. The rocks were warm, and Robin had expressed the opinion that her demon would not wander far from the light of the small campfire. Chris had his doubts. He felt Robin was unconsciously attributing to the snake almost arcane powers of intelligence and loyalty merely because she was her demon, whatever that meant. He thought it was too much to expect of a snake, and Nasu proved him right. One morning they woke up and Nasu was gone.

For many days they searched the vicinity. Robin scoured every corner, calling Nasu's name. She left out fresh meat in an attempt to lure her back. Nothing worked. It gradually came to a stop as she realized she would never see the animal again. Then she compulsively questioned Chris and Valiha, asking them if they thought the snake would survive. They always said Nasu would have no problem, but Chris was not sure that was the truth.

Gradually both the searches and the questions tapered off, Robin accepted her loss, and the incident melted through the event horizon of their timeless existence.

The problem was that Hornpipe had carried both the clocks. He still had them, assuming he was still alive.

Chris had a hard time convincing himself that it was a problem, even as the evidence mounted. He had experienced a sense of dislocation even on the surface, where the degree of light varied only with distance travelled and, to a lesser extent, with the weather. But then they had had the clock to tell them how much time had gone by, and Gaby had kept them all punctual. Now he realized he had no clear idea how long it had been since they set out from Hyperion. Going back over it, he arrived at figures from thirty-five to forty-five days.

Down in the cavern the timelessness was intensified. Chris and Robin slept when they were tired and called each period a day, while aware that one might be ten hours and another fifty-five. But as the days began to accumulate, Chris found that he had increasing trouble recalling the sequence of things. Further confusion resulted from their late realization that keeping a tally calendar of sleep periods could be of some help. Thus, from fifteen to twenty sleeps went by before they began to make notches in a stick, and all their calculations were plus or minus an unknown number of days. Even the calendar was useful only if they assumed their days averaged twenty-four hours, and Chris was far from sure it was safe to assume that.

And it mattered. For though they had no timepiece, there was a process going on that was measuring time as surely as atomic decay: Valiha was making a baby Titanide.

She estimated she had been injured on the twelve hundredth rev of her pregnancy but admitted she could be off because she had no recollection of the climb down the Tethys stairway. She recalled little from Gaby's death to her own return to consciousness after her failed attempt to leap the crevasse which had cost her two broken legs. Chris translated 1,200 revs into about fifty days, turned that into one and two-thirds months, and felt a little better. He then asked her if she knew how long her legs should take to heal.

"I could probably walk on crutches in a kilorev," she said, adding helpfully, "That's forty-two days."

"You wouldn't get too far on crutches in here."

"Probably not, if there's climbing to be done."

"There's climbing to be done," said Robin, who had been exploring the area as far as two or three kilometers from the camp.

"Then the time for complete healing would be as much as five kilorevs. Possibly four. I doubt I'd be much good in as little as three."

"As much as seven months. Possibly five or six." Chris added it up and relaxed slightly. "It will be close, but I think we can get you out of here before your time."

Valiha looked puzzled; then her face cleared.

"I see your mistake," she said placidly. "You thought I would take nine of your months to get the job done. We do things more quickly than that."

Chris rubbed his palm over his eyes.

"How long?"

"I have often wondered why it takes human females so much longer to produce something not nearly so large and still so far from completion-no offense meant. Our own young are born able to-"

"How long?" Chris repeated.

"Five kilorevs," Valiha said. "Seven months. It's certain I'll birth him before I can hope to walk out of here."

The timelessness began to frighten Chris. One day he found himself trying to establish the sequence of events following their discovery of Valiha and found he could not. Some things he knew because they had followed each other during a particular waking period. He was sure he had set Valiha's legs soon after his talk with Robin because he recalled leaving her to prepare for the task. He knew when they had captured their first glowbird because that had happened after their first sleep.

The little luminescent animals were unafraid of them but avoided areas of activity. While they moved around in their camp, the glowbirds would not come near, but when they settled down to sleep, the creatures flew in and perched within meters of them.

Robin had been able to approach one that first "morning," even go so far as to reach out and touch it. They had been thankful for the light cast by the dozen or so glowbirds until a few minutes later they began to drift away. Robin caught the last one and tied it to a stake, where it fluttered all day, and the next morning another dozen had returned. She caught them all this time because they did not make any strong attempts to escape.

They were globular creatures puffed up with air. They had beady eyes with no heads to speak of, wings thin as soap bubbles, and a single two-toed foot. Try as he might, Chris could find nothing resembling a mouth, and all his efforts to feed them came to nothing. They died if kept captive more than two sleeps, so he and Robin used them only during one waking period, catching a fresh group every morning. A dead one had no more presence than a punctured balloon. If touched in the wrong place, they could give a nasty electrical shock. Chris had a theory that they contained neon-the orange light looked very much like it-but it was so wildly unlikely he kept it to himself.

He and Robin had moved Valiha one day fairly early in their stay. They all had grown tired of perching on a twenty-degree slope with a ten-meter drop below them. Chris had worried a long time about the best way to move her until Robin suggested they simply pick her up and carry her. To his surprise, it worked. They fashioned a stretcher and shifted her a few meters at a time until they had reached the plateau above. In the one-quarter gee the two of them could just lift the Titanide, though they could not carry her far.

It was on the plateau that they established their camp and settled in for the long wait. At the time of the move they were still far from optimistic about their chances for survival, for even with the most severe rationing they had food for no more than five or six hundred revs. But they went about making a home as though they expected to stay the six or seven months it would take Valiha to heal. They erected the tent and spent a lot of time in it, though there was no weather and the temperature was an even twenty-eight degrees. It simply felt good to get in from the echoing cavern.

Valiha began to carve things for them. She did so much of it that Robin was kept busy hunting for the scarce, stunted trees which had the only wood worth carving. The Titanide seemed the least affected by boredom; to her, this was simply an extended rest period. Chris thought it must be what a six-month sleep would be to a human.

They were in the west end of an irregular cavern that averaged one kilometer in width and stretched an unguessable distance to the east. The floor was a hopeless jumble of fallen rocks, crags, spires, pits, and slopes. They could deduce from the dimensionless points of light the glowbirds became when festooning the ceiling that it was at least a kilometer high, possibly more. To the north and south was a bewildering variety of openings. There were tunnel mouths that led to corridors much like the one they had fled through. Many of these looked as if they had been bored through the rock; some actually had timber shorings. Some went up, and others down. Some stayed level, but all of them branched within a hundred meters into two or three other tunnels, and if they were followed for any distance, the branch tunnels divided again. In addition, there were fissures in the rock walls of the sort found in natural caves. The environment beyond these cracks was so chaotic it seemed pointless to explore them. A promising path would dwindle to a passage so narrow even Robin could barely squeeze through, then open into a chamber the size of which she could only guess at.

At first Chris went with Robin on her explorations, but when he returned, he always found Valiha in such a state of despair that he soon stopped. After that Robin went alone, as often as she could talk Chris into agreeing.

Chris was impressed with the change in Robin. It was not a revolutionary one, but to anyone who knew her it was dramatic. She listened to him and would usually do as he said, even if it went contrary to what she wished to do. He was astonished at first; he had never expected that she would take orders from a man. On more careful reflection he decided that his being male was not the crux of the issue. Robin had functioned reasonably well as part of a group with first Gaby and then Cirocco as the leader, but Chris suspected that if either of them had told her to do something she strongly did not wish to do, she would have left them on the spot. She would never have done anything to harm the group-unless leaving it could be called harm-but she always had the option in her own mind of striking out on her own; she was not a team player.

Nor had she magically transformed herself into a follower under Chris's leadership. Yet there was a difference. She was more willing to listen to his arguments, to admit it when he was right. There had been no struggle. In a sense, there was little need for a leader when their group had been reduced to three, but Robin seldom initiated anything, and Valiha never did, so the role, such as it was, devolved on Chris. Robin was too self-centered to be a leader. At times it had made her insufferable to those around her. Now she had added something, which Chris thought was a little humility and a little responsibility. It was humility which allowed her to admit she might be wrong, to listen to his arguments before making up her mind. And it was responsibility to something larger than herself that made her stick with Chris and Valiha day after weary day instead of striking off on her own to bring back help, which was all she really wanted to do.

They compromised on many things. The most trouble was caused by Robin's exploration of the cavern. They had the same argument countless times, in almost the same words, and neither of them really minded it. Boredom had become intense, they had talked out every subject they held in common, and even disagreement became a welcome diversion.

"I don't like it when you go out there alone," Chris said for what might have been the twentieth time. "I've read a little about caving, and it's just not something you do, like swimming in deep water by yourself."

"But you can't come with me. Valiha needs you to stay here."

"I'm sorry," Valiha said.

Robin touched the Titanide's hand, assuring her she didn't blame her and apologizing for bringing up the touchy subject. When Valiha had been soothed, she went on.

"Somebody has to go out. We'll all starve if I don't." What she said was true, and Chris knew it. There were animals other than glowbirds living in the cavern, and they, too, lacked both fear and aggression. They were easy to approach and easy to kill, but not so easy to find. Robin had discovered three species so far, each about the mass of a large cat, slow as turtles, all without hair or teeth. What they did with their lives was anyone's guess, but Robin always found them lying immobile near conical gray masses of a warm, rubbery substance that might have been a sessile animal or a plant but that was firmly rooted and almost certainly alive. She called the rubbery masses teats because they bore a resemblance to the udders of a cow, and the three sorts of animals cucumbers, lettuce, and shrimp. It was not for the tastes-they all tasted more or less like beef-but after the three Terran organisms they mimicked. She had walked by the cucumbers for weeks before she accidentally kicked one and it opened big, mooning eyes at her.

"We're doing all right," Chris said. "I don't see why you think you have to go out more often than you already are." But he knew it was not true even as he said it. They had some meat, it was true, but hardly enough for Valiha's huge appetite.

"We can always use more," Robin argued, indicating with her eyes that they would not talk about what they both were thinking while Valiha was present. They had discussed her pregnancy and mentioned some of their fears to her, to find out she shared them and was worried she was not getting enough food, or enough of the right diet, for proper development of her child. "Those things are hard to find," Robin went on. "I'd almost like it better if they ran from me. As it is, I can walk within a meter of one and never see it."

The discussion went on and on, and nothing was changed when it was over. Robin went out every other day, half as much as she wanted to and a thousand times more often than Chris liked. Every moment she was gone he saw her lying broken at the bottom of a pit, unconscious, unable to shout for help, or too far away to be heard. Every moment she was in camp she squirmed, paced, shouted at them, apologized, shouted some more. She accused him of acting like her mother, treating her like a child, and he retorted that she was acting like a child, and a wild, willful one at that, and each knew both allegations were true, and neither could do anything about it. Robin ached to strike out for help but could not so long as they needed her to hunt, and Chris wanted to go nearly as badly but could not say so for Valiha's sake, so they both seethed and fought, and there seemed to be no solution to the problem until the day Robin angrily plunged her knife into one of the gray teats and was rewarded with a faceful of sticky white liquid.

"It is the milk of Gaea," Valiha said happily and immediately drained the waterskin Robin had filled. "I had not expected to find it so deep. In my homeland it flows two to ten meters below the ground."

"What do you mean, the milk of Gaea?" Chris asked.

"I don't know how to explain further. It is simply that: Gaea's milk. And it means my worries are over. My son will grow strong on this. Gaea's milk contains everything needed for survival."

"What about us?" Robin asked. "Can pe ... can humans drink it, too?"

"Humans thrive on it. It is the universal nutrient."

"What's it taste like, Robin?" Chris asked.

"I don't know. You didn't think I'd just drink it, did you?"

"The humans I know who have tried it say it has a bitter flavor," Valiha said. "I myself find some of that but believe its quality varies from one rev to the next. When Gaea is pleased, it becomes sweeter. In times of Gaea's anger, the milk thickens and cloys but is still nourishing."

"How would you say she's feeling now?" Robin asked.

Valiha upended the skin again, letting the last drops fall into her mouth. She tilted her head thoughtfully.

"Worried, I would say."

Robin laughed. "What would Gaea have to worry about?"

"Cirocco."

"What do you mean?"

"What I said. If the Wizard still lives, and if we live to tell her of Gaby's last moments and her last words, Gaea will tremble."

Robin looked dubious, and Chris privately agreed with her. He did not see how Cirocco could ever present a threat to Gaea.

But the significance of her discovery had not been lost on Robin.

"Now I can go get help," she said, beginning an argument that would last for three days and that Chris knew from the start he was certain to lose.

"The rope. Are you sure you have enough rope?"

"How can I know how much is enough?"

"What about matches? Did you get the matches?"

"I have them right here." Robin patted the pocket of her coat, tied to the top of the pack they had improvised from one of Valiha's saddlebags. "Chris, stop it. We've been over the supplies a dozen times."

Chris knew she was right, knew that his last-minute fussing was simply to delay her departure. It had been four days since his final capitulation.

They had located the nearest of Gaea's teats and laboriously moved Valiha. Though it was only 300 meters from the old camp in a straight line, that line had crossed two steep ravines. They had taken her half a kilometer north to find passable land, then a kilometer south, then back again.

"You have the waterskin?"

"Right here." She slung it over her shoulder and reached for her pack. "I have everything, Chris."

He helped her get it settled on her back. She looked so small when it was in place. She was weighted down with gear and reminded him with an irresistible protective tug of a toddler dressed to go out and play in the snow. He loved her at that moment and wanted to take care of her. That was exactly what he could not do, what she did not want him to do, so he turned away before she could see the look on his face. He did not want to get the argument started again.

But he could not keep his mouth shut.

"You'll remember to mark the trail."

Wordlessly she held up the small pick, then slipped it back into a belt loop. It was a wonderful belt, fashioned from cured cucumber hide by Valiha's skilled hands. The plan was that when Valiha got well enough to move with crutches, she and Chris would follow the trail Robin had blazed. Chris did not like to think about it, for if Robin had not made it out and returned with help long before that, it would be because calamity had befallen her.

"If you stop finding the teats, you can go three sleeps beyond the point when your waterskin is empty, then turn back if you don't find another."

"Four. Four sleeps."

"Three."

"We agreed on four." She looked at him and sighed. "All right. Three, if it'll make you happy." They stood looking at each other for a moment; then Robin went to him and put one arm around his waist.

"Take care of yourself," she said.

"I was about to say the same thing." They laughed nervously; then Chris embraced her. There was an awkward moment when he did not know if she wished to be kissed; then he decided he didn't care and kissed her anyway. She hugged him, then backed away with her eyes averted. Then she did look at him, smiled, and started moving away.

"Bye, Valiha," she said.

"Good-bye, little one," Valiha called back. "I'd say, 'May Gaea be with you', but I think you prefer to go alone."

"That's exactly right." Robin laughed. "Let her stay in the hub and worry about the Wizard. I'll see you people in about a kilorev."

Chris watched her out of sight. He thought he saw her stop and wave but could not be sure of it. Soon there was nothing but the bobbing light of the three glowbirds she carried in a cage woven of reeds, and then even that was gone.

Gaea's milk was indeed bitter, made all the more so by Robin's departure. Its taste did change slightly from day to day, but not nearly enough to provide the variety Chris craved. In less than a hectorev he gagged at the thought of it, began to wonder if starvation might be better than subsisting on the filthy, revolting stuff.

He went foraging as often as he could, careful never to leave Valiha alone for too long. On these trips he gathered wood and from time to time brought back one of the indigenous animals. That was always a signal for rejoicing, as Valiha would bring out her hoarded spices and prepare each one in a different way. It soon became clear to him that she was eating only sparingly of the things she cooked. Chris was sure it was not because she preferred the milk. He thought many times of insisting she take her share but never had the determination actually to say it. He ate his portions like a miser, making the meal last for hours, and always took more when it was offered. He did not like himself for doing it but was unable to stop.

Time blurred. All the sharp edges of time's passage had been worn away since the day he arrived in Gaea. Since before that, actually; the trip in the spaceship had begun his detachment from Earthly time. Then there had been the freezing of duration into one eternal afternoon in Hyperion, the slow crawl into night and once again into day. Now the process was complete.

He started going crazy again, after a long hiatus that had lasted from before the Carnival in Crius until his arrival in the cavern. He thought of it that way now-as going crazy rather than having an "episode," as his doctors had so mincingly called it-because it was simply what happened. He no longer believed Gaea could cure him even if she wanted to, and he could think of no reason why she should want to. He was certainly doomed to go through life as a collection of maniacal strangers, and he would have to cope with them as best he could.

That was actually easier to do in the cavern than it had ever been. He often literally did not notice it. He would become aware of himself in a place he did not recall coming to and could not tell if he had gone crazy or had simply been wool-gathering. Each time it happened he would anxiously turn to Valiha to see if he had done her any harm. He never did. In fact, often she would look happier than she had been in days. That was another thing that made the craziness easier: Valiha did not care if he went crazy and actually seemed to like him better that way.

He wondered giddily if this was the cure Gaea had in mind. Down here craziness did not matter. All on his own he had found his way into a situation where he was as normal and as well as anyone.

With no discussion between them, Valiha took over the chore of notching the calendar after each of his sleeps. As much as anything else he took that as a sign that he was indeed suffering lapses into manic states. He did not know what he did during those times. He did not ask Valiha, and she never spoke of it.

They spoke of everything else. The chores around camp took up no more than an "hour" each "day," and that left anywhere from nine to forty-nine hours with little to do but talk. At first they spoke of themselves, with the result that Valiha soon ran out of things to say. He had forgotten how impossibly young she was. Though she was a mature adult, her experience was woefully small. But it did not take much longer for Chris to exhaust his life as well, and they turned to other things. They spoke of hopes and fears, of philosophy-Titanide and human. They invented games and made up stories. Valiha turned out to be only mediocre at games but great at stories. She had an imagination and a perspective just enough askew from the human to enable her to astonish him time and again with her reckless, disturbing insights into things she should not understand. He began to see as he never had before what it was to be so nearly human, yet not human. He found himself pitying all those billions of humans who had lived before contact with Gaea, who could never have communed with this improbable engaging creature.

Valiha's patience amazed him. He was going crazy, yet his freedom of movement was much greater than hers. He began to understand why it was the common practice to kill horses with injured legs: the frame was not designed for reclining. A Titanide's legs were much more flexible than those of an Earthly horse, yet she had a terrible time. For half a kilorev she could do little but lie on her side. When the bones began to knit, she started sitting up but could not maintain the position long because her stiff, splinted forelegs had to be straight out in front of her.

His first hint that she was finding it difficult to bear was when she mentioned in passing that Titanides being treated in a hospital would be suspended in a sling with the injured legs hanging down. He was astonished.

"Why didn't you tell me that before?" he asked.

"I didn't see what good it would do, since-"

"Horseshit," he said, and waited for her to smile. It had become his favorite expletive, something he used to tease her gently by pretending to bitch about his daily chore of cleaning up. But this time she did not smile.

"I think I could rig something like that," he said. "You'd stand on your hind legs, right? So some kind of sling that went behind and between your front legs...I think I could do that." He waited, and she said nothing. She would not even look at him. "What's the matter, Valiha?"

"I don't want to be any trouble," she said almost inaudibly, and began to weep.

He had never seen her cry before. What an idiot he had been, to assume that because she had not cried, everything was fine. He went to her and found her eager for his touch. It was awkward at first, comforting someone so huge, and the position enforced on her by her injury did not simplify things. Yet he soon relaxed and could soothe her with no thought to anything but the moment. She had really been asking so little all this time, he realized, and he had not given her even that.

"Don't worry about it," he whispered in the long, terete shell of her ear.

"I've been so stupid," she moaned. "It was stupid to break my legs."

"You can't blame yourself for an accident."

"But I remember it. I don't remember much, but I remember that. I was so frightened. I don't know what happened back there ... back there on the stairs. I remember a terrible pain, and all I could think of was running. I ran and ran, and when I came to the ravine, I jumped, even though I knew I'd never make it to the other side."

"We all do crazy things when we're frightened," he reasoned.

"Yes, but now you're stuck here because of me."

"We're both stuck here," he admitted. "I won't pretend that this is where I want to be; that would be silly. Neither of us wants to be here. But so long as you're hurt, I'll stick by you wherever you are. And I don't blame you for anything that happened because the simple truth is none of it was your fault."

She said nothing for a long time as her shoulders shook quietly. When she had stopped crying, she sniffed loudly and looked into his eyes.

"This is where I want to be," she said.

"What do you mean?" He drew back slightly, but she held him.

"I mean I love you very much."

"I don't think you really love me."

She shook her head. "I know what you mean, and it's not true. I love you always, when you're quiet and when you rage. There are so many parts to you. I think perhaps I am the only one who has ever known them all. And I love them all."

"A few doctors claimed to know them all," Chris said unhappily. When Valiha did not respond, he went to the question he had been afraid to ask for a long time. "Do I make love to you when I'm crazy?"

"We make love in glorious tumult. You are my virile stallion, and I your erotomanic androgyne. We have anterior romps and frontal communion, and then we diddle around in the middle. Your penis-"

"Stop, stop! I didn't ask for the dirty details."

"I said nothing rhyparographic," Valiha said virtuously.

"I don't ... what did you do, eat a dictionary?" he asked.

"I must know all English words for the experiment," she said.

"What ... never mind, tell me about that later. I knew I made love to you once. I just wanted to know if I still do."

"Only twenty or thirty revs ago."

"And it doesn't bother you that I do it only when I'm crazy?"

She considered it. "I really have had a hard time understanding what you mean by crazy. Sometimes you lose some inhibitions-another word I have trouble with. This gets you into trouble with human women who don't wish to copulate with you and with any human who thwarts your desires. I have no trouble because if you ever become obstreperous, I simply pick you up by your hair and hold you at arm's length. When you calm down, I reason with you. You respond to this very well."

Chris laughed, and it sounded hollow even to him.

"You amaze me," he said. "I've been studied by the best doctors on Earth. They couldn't do a thing with me but give me some pills that are damn near useless. They'll be fascinated to hear your cure. Pick him up by the hair, hold him at arm's length, and reason with him. Ah, sweet reason."

"It works," she said defensively. "I suppose it would be efficacious only in a society where everyone was larger than you."

"My behavior at those times doesn't put you off?" he asked. "Titanides never assault one another, do they? I would expect you to see me... well, repulsive when I'm acting like that. It's so un-Titanide."

"I find most human behavior un-Titanide," Valiha said. "Yours when you are 'crazy' becomes perhaps a trifle more aggressive than is normal, but all your passions are magnified, love as well as aggression."

"I'm not in love with you, Valiha,"

"Yes, you are. Even this part of you, the sane part, loves me with a Titanide's love: unchanging, but too large to give all of it to one person. You have told me so when you were crazy. You told me your sane self would not admit his love."

"He lied to you."

"You would not lie to me."

"But I'm here to be cured of all that!" he said, in mounting frustration.

"I know," she moaned, once more on the verge of tears. "I'm so afraid Gaea will cure you and you'll never know your love for me!"

Chris thought this conversation was as crazy as any he had ever heard. Maybe he was crazy: permanently. It was within the realm of possibility. But he did not want to see her cry, he did like her, and suddenly it did not make sense to resist her any longer. He kissed her. She responded instantly, alarming him with her strength and passion, then paused and put her mouth close to his ear. "Don't worry," she said. "I'll be gentle." He smiled.

It was not easy, but eventually he made the sling she needed to rest comfortably while her legs healed. Finding three poles long and strong enough among the stunted shrubs that passed for trees in the cavern took quite a while, but when he had them, he soon fashioned a tall tripod. There was just enough rope to make the sling and pad it with material from clothes they didn't need in the warm cave. When it was finished, Valiha carefully pulled herself up with her hands, and Chris positioned her legs through the loops. She settled down in it and heaved a sigh of contentment. Thereafter she spent most of her time with her front hooves dangling a few centimeters from the ground.

But not all her time. In the sling, it was impossible for them to make frontal love, and that activity quickly became an important part of their lives. Chris was soon wondering how he had survived so long without it, then realized that, of course, he hadn't, he had been making love with Valiha all along. Now he felt he would most probably have succumbed to despair and simply wasted away, starving in the midst of plenty. Even Gaea's milk tasted a little better, and he wondered if it was his mood and not Her Majesty's that made the difference.

Valiha was not like a human woman. It would have been pointless even to try to say if she was better or not as good; she was different. Her frontal vagina fitted him within lubricious tolerances too close to be the result of cosmic happenstance. He could almost hear Gaea chuckling. What a joke she had played on humanity, to arrange it so the first intelligent nonhumans the race encountered could play the same games humans played, and with the same equipment. Valiha was a vast, fleshy playground, from the tip of her broad nose across acres of mottled yellow skin to the softness just above the hooves of her hind legs. She was completely human-on a large scale-in the caress of her hands, the mass of her breasts, the taste of her skin and her mouth and her clitoris. And she was at the same time wildly alien in her bulging knees, in the smooth, hard muscles of her back, hips, and thighs, and in the imposing slither of her penis as it emerged moist from its sheath. When he kissed her in the hollow behind her expressive donkey ears, she smelled human.

He was at first reluctant to admit the presence of most of her body. He tried to pretend she existed from the head to the fore-crotch and ignored the sexual superabundance she contained. Valiha led him gently to experience the surprising possibilities of her other two thirds. Part of his hesitation was a lingering misconception he had fought when he found it in others and had not realized he shared: part of her body was equine, meaning she was part horse, and one does not become intimate with animals. He had to discard all that. He found it surprisingly easy. In many ways there was less equine about her than there was simian in him. Another hurdle had been stated early by Valiha herself: she was an androgyne-though gynandroid was the closer of two words never meant to cover Titanides. Chris had never been homosexual. Valiha made him see that it meant nothing when making love with her. She was all things, and it made no difference that her anterior organs were so huge. He had always known that coitus was only a small part of making love.

Titanide crutches were long, stout poles with padded crescents to fit the armpits, little different from the sort used by humans for thousands of years. Chris had no trouble making a pair.

At first Valiha walked only fifty meters before resting, then a similar distance back to the tent. Soon she felt she was able to handle more. Chris struck the tent and packed everything on his back. It was a large burden, especially the poles of her tripod sling. He would never have attempted it but for the low gravity. Even with that advantage it was hard.

Valiha walked by rolling her shoulders, lifting first one crutch, then the other, following with her hind legs. It put an unaccustomed strain on her shoulders, her human back, and the right-angle bend of her spine. Chris had no idea what her skeleton looked like in there; he was sure only that her vertebral structure must be very different from his to enable her to turn her head around and do some of the other improbable contortions he had seen. But she was enough like him to get backaches. The end of each day's journey found her grimacing in pain. The muscles in the bend of her back were like stiff cables. Massage was not enough, though Chris tried. In the end he had to pound her with his fists to give her any relief, as though he were tenderizing meat.

They toughened up, though both knew it would never get easy. For a while each trek was a little longer than the previous day until they reached a maximum Chris judged at about a kilometer and a half. Each day they passed many of the marks made by Robin in her earlier traverse. There was no way to tell how old they were and no use discussing what they both were thinking. By any accounting she should have been back with help long ago.

They struggled on, and each day the question grew larger in their minds.

Where was Robin?