Wizard

5 Prince Charming

Chris had taken the Titanide ambassador's advice and done some reading on Gaea before boarding the ship that would take him there. He was not a stupid man, but planning was not his long suit. He had seen so many of his plans ruined by attacks of insanity that he had fallen out of the habit.

He discovered that Gaea was not high on the list of places to visit in the solar system. There were many reasons for this, ranging from dehumanizing customs procedures to the lack of first-class tourist accommodations. He found an interesting statistic: on the average, 150 people arrived at Gaea daily. Something fewer than that number left. Some of the missing were people who decided to stay. Emigrating was informal, and Gaea had a resident human population of several thousand. But some were fatalities.

Gaea tended to attract the young and adventurous. Men and women came who were bored with the sameness of Earth. Often they arrived after a tour of human habitats around the solar system, where they found more of the same but in pressurized domes. Gaea offered an Earthlike climate. That meant freedom from the regimentation found on more hostile planets and elbow room that Earth no longer could provide.

He learned a lot about Titans in general, about Gaea's children at Uranus-who admitted only accredited scientific observers and spoke condescendingly of Gaea, the Mad Titan. He studied Gaea's physical structure and maps of her interior. She was a spinning hollow wheel with six hollow spokes. Even to humans who had grown up with space colonies at the LaGrange points, her dimensions beggared the imagination. She had a radius of 650 kilometers, a circumference of 4,000. The living space on the rim was shaped like an inner tube 25 kilometers across and 200 kilometers high. Between each of the six spokes was a flat, angled mirror that deflected sunlight through transparent windows in the rim roof, so that parts of the rim were always in daylight while the areas beneath the spokes were perpetually dark. Gaea was habitable throughout; even the spokes supported life, clinging to the sides of cylinders 400 kilometers high. Maps of Gaea were unwieldy, being sixteen times longer from east to west than from north to south. To study the maps properly, it was necessary to fasten the ends together to make a loop, set the map on edge, and sit in the middle.

He was glad he had spent the time on it. Gaea was nearly invisible from space. Though he crowded around the ports with the others as the ship was snared by Gaea's docking tendrils, he could see little. With the exception of the reflecting mirrors, her outer surface was flat black, the better to absorb all the sunlight available to her.

He had done his homework and did not expect any surprises. It turned out there was only one, but it was a disaster.

As expected, his group was taken to join the other tourists arriving that day for the beginning of forty-eight hours of quarantine and decontamination. These procedures were one of the reasons Gaea did not attract the rich or the trendy. The routine was a cross between a hospital, Ellis Island, and Auschwitz. Uniformed human quarantine officers told everyone to disrobe and surrender all personal possessions. This included Chris's medication. His arguments were met with firm refusals. There were no exceptions to be made under any circumstances, and if he did not wish to surrender the pills, he was free to return to Earth at once.

The decontamination was in earnest and carried out with dehumanizing efficiency. Naked bodies, male and female together, were put on moving belts to be taken from one station to the next. They were washed and irradiated. There were emetics and diuretics to be taken, enemas to be endured. After a waiting period the whole process was repeated. The attendants made no concessions to privacy. Examinations were done in huge white rooms with dozens of tables, crowded by naked, shuffling people. Everyone slept in a common bunkroom and ate tasteless food dished out on steel trays.

Chris had never felt comfortable in the nude, even with other men. He had something to hide. While it was certainly not visible on his body, he suffered from the irrational fear that by removing his armour of clothing, he was exposing his differentness. He stayed away from situations where social nudity was the custom. As a result, he was conspicuous; in a sea of black and brown and tanned skin, he was pale as milk.

The attack came early on the first day. The chemicals in the pills had nothing to do with it, for they were certainly still in his bloodstream. It was the placebo effect which had been removed. Though his condition was not a psychological one, it was by now more complex than that. He was subject to anxiety from worrying about the psychochemical problem, and the punch line was that the anxiety attacks could trigger the serious ones. When his palms and the back of his neck began to perspire, he knew it was coming.

Soon he began to experience visual distortion and an acute sensitivity to sound. He had to assure himself each minute that everything was still real, that he was not on the verge of a heart attack, that people were not laughing at him, that he was not dying of a brain tumor. His feet were distant, pale, cold things. It was all a charade, and he had to act his part in it, pretend he was normal when everyone knew he was not. It was funny, really. He pretended to laugh. Then he pretended to cry, laughing secretly, knowing he could stop crying any time he wanted to, right up to the moment a man touched him on the shoulder and Chris punched him in the nose.

After that he felt better. He laughed at the man struggling to his feet. They were in the shower room-they spent most of their time there, he thought, feeling cross for a moment. But the annoyance passed. The man on the floor was shouting, but Chris couldn't have cared less. He was more interested in the erection he was getting. He thought it was a fine thing and knew all the naked women would agree with him. There was a wet splat behind him, and he turned and saw the man he had hit had fallen again. The dumb idiot had taken a swing at Chris from behind and slipped in a puddle.

He felt like fucking something. It didn't really matter what. The urge hardly amounted to an obsession. He could have been diverted from the project quite easily, but it sounded like fun.

"Who wants to fuck?" he yelled. Many of the people in the shower turned to look at him. He spread his arms, sharing his delight in the fine thing. A few people laughed. Most looked away. He was unperturbed.

A big blond woman caught his eye. He loved her instantly, from the long, wet hair against her back to the fine swell of muscle in her calves. He went to her and pressed his love offering against her hip. She looked down, then quickly up to the grin on his face, and slapped him with a soapy hand.

He put his palm against her face and shoved her back and down. She hit with a thud of buttocks and a sharp clack of teeth and was too startled by it all to attempt to dodge the kick he aimed at her, but the kick didn't connect anyway because a man grabbed Chris by the arm and spun him around, and they both slipped and went down in huge confusion. By this time men were coming from all directions to defend the blond woman. It got very involved.

Chris didn't mind. Practically from the outset of the brawl he found himself at the edges of it, so he joined the majority of people hurrying to be as far from the fight as possible. It turned into a crush against one wall with the showerheads spraying warm water down on acres of skin, a great deal of which was female skin. Chris embraced them at random, and it wasn't long before he got a smile in response. The woman was small and dark-haired, which was great because he had had it with big blondes, and she giggled when he threw her over his shoulder and carried her off to the big, deserted barracks and tossed her into an upper bunk. Soon he was happily fornicating.

And it was really unfair, just a terrible injustice, because he felt he could have kept at it all day long except this fascist attendant happened by and told them they had to be in the exam room for some damn colonic irrigation or other similar idiocy, and she just wouldn't listen when Chris explained that he'd had it with tubes up his ass. It was really annoying him, so he stood up and planted his feet-the woman made a funny gurgle when Chris stepped on her chest-and took a swing at the uniform, who had already stepped back and who had her weapon out and took careful aim and shot him.

He woke in a pool of vomit streaked with blood. And what else is new? he wondered, but didn't really want to know. There was a three-day growth of beard on his chin, caked with dried blood. He didn't remember much, knew that was the one thing he had to be grateful for.

They wanted to know if he was going to be a good boy now, and he assured them he would.

The woman who had shot him helped him clean up. She seemed anxious to give him the full details of his stay in jail and the events that had led up to it, but he closed his mind. He was given his personal effects and taken to some sort of elevator. When the doors shut behind him, he saw that the capsule was free-floating in a yellow fluid that moved through a gargantuan pipe. Once those facts were noted, however, he ceased to think about it.

The trip took nearly an hour, and for that time he thought of nothing. He emerged beneath the mind-numbing curved sky of Gaea, stood on her terrifying curved ground, glanced around, failed to be terrified or numbed. He was at the limits of numb. Overhead, a thousand-meter blimp was passing by. He looked at it blankly and thought of pigeons. He waited.