Wizard

8 The Aviator

Robin knew better than to stomp. She had not spent the last twelve years banished to the uplight regions of the Coven for nothing. But emotionally she was stomping.

Someone was supposed to be guiding her back to the elevator, but she quickly outdistanced her. Like an ant among elephants, she threaded her way through monuments.

Ridiculous things. Was she supposed to be impressed? If waste was impressive, she was overwhelmed.

Cathedrals. Tap dancers. A bloated, obscene thing passing herself off as the Great Mother, surrounded by listless sycophants. And to top it off?

Heroes.

She spit in the general direction of Notre Dame.

Why should she want to be the salvation of twenty-six strangers? One of them was undoubtedly her father. Gaea had pointed that out, to get a blank look in return. Fatherhood was as alien to Robin as stock options.

Nothing came for free, Gaea had said. What about those twenty-six who were counting on Robin to search out a nasty, dangerous death? Her whole being rebelled against the idea. Had even one of the sufferers been of the Coven she would have moved heaven and Earth to help her. But outsiders?

She had been on a fool's errand from the start. There was no need to compound the mistake. Staying among that pitiful pack of ass kissers was absolutely out of the question, and so was playing Gaea's game. She would go back to where she belonged, live her life as the Great Mother intended.

She found the elevator and pressed the summons beside it. A bell rang, and she got in. Bad design, she realized, looking around for grips to hold. There were two buttons to push-one marked "Heaven" the other "DOWN!" She hit the second one and raised her hands to catch the ceiling if it descended too fast. In that position, with that expectation, it was not alarming to feel her feet leave the floor. There was a blank moment before she realized the ceiling was not getting any closer. In fact, it was slowly receding. She looked down.

She saw her boots. Six hundred kilometers below them she saw Nox, the Midnight Sea.

Time slowed to a crawl. She felt adrenalin sweep to her extremities in a burning surge. Images swirled: brief, yet crisp with detail. The air tasted good. There was raw power in her limbs as she reached out with hands and feet grown curiously distant. Then there was dissociation as fear and despair threatened to obliterate her.

When she began to scream, her waist was just passing the level of the elevator floor. She continued to sink, cursing and screaming lustily. The walls stayed just out of reach until they were far above her. The elevator was a diminishing box of light.

Robin's calculations were not begun in the hope the answer would put her back among the living. She could see her death many kilometers below. What she wanted to know was how many seconds. Minutes? Could she possibly have hours to live?

Growing up in the Coven was a help. She knew about centripetal movement, could work that type of problem more readily than she could have dealt with gravitation. Robin had never been in a gravitational field of any consequence.

She began with a known factor, which was the one-fortieth gee that prevailed at the hub. When the elevator floor opened under her, she had begun to fall at a velocity of one-quarter meter per second. But she would not accelerate at that rate. A moving body in a spinning object does not fall along a radial line but appears to move against the direction of spin. In effect, she would be moving in a straight line if viewed from the outside, while the wheel turned under her. Her downward acceleration would at first be slight. Only when she had built up a considerable sidewise velocity would the rate of her fall really begin to increase, and she would experience this as wind coming from the direction opposite the spin.

She looked around quickly. The wind was already strong. She could make out the tops of trees growing from one vertical wall. This was the storied horizontal forest of Gaea. Had Gaea been turning the other way, Robin would have been smashed in seconds or minutes. Since the fall had started at the near wall, she still had time.

There were a few simplified calculations she could make. She was handicapped by not knowing the precise air density in Gaea. She had read it was high, something like two atmospheres at the rim. But at what rate did it fall off as one approached the hub? It never got too thin to breathe, so she could get an estimate by assuming one atmosphere at the hub.

It was oddly comforting to lose herself in the math. She didn't mind having to start over, though she was struck with the futility of the project. She kept at it from a desire to know when death would overtake her. It was important to die right. She gripped the strap of the bag containing Nasu and started again.

She came up with an answer she didn't like, tried again, and a third time when the answers didn't match. Averaging, she got a figure of fifty-nine minutes to impact. As an added bonus there was the impact speed. Three hundred kilometers per hour.

She was falling with her back to the wind. Since she was moving toward both the rim and the approaching wall, it meant her body was at a slight angle. The hub was not quite under her feet. The receding wall was not quite vertical to her. She looked around.

It was breathtaking. Too bad she could not appreciate it.

The Coven, if dropped from her point of departure, would have been a tin can falling down a smokestack. The Rhea Spoke was a hollow tube, flared at the lower end, completely encrusted with trees to dwarf the biggest sequoia. The trees rooted in the walls and grew outward. She could no longer make out even the largest as individual plants; the inner walls were a featureless sea of dark green, all around her. The interior was lit by twin vertical rows of portholes, if one could use that name for openings at least a kilometer in diameter.

She craned her neck, looking into the blast of wind. Nox looked closer. There was something else, something that hovered at the top of her view.

It was the vertical Rhea spokes. They fastened to islands in the Midnight Sea and leaped straight up, converging until they met near the bottom of the spoke and entwined themselves in a monumental pigtail.

She had to see. Twisting in the air, she managed to stabilize herself with her teeth to the gale and opened her eyes. The spokes were in front of her, getting closer by the second.

"Oh Great Mother, hear me now." She mumbled her way through the first death incantation, unable to look away from what had become a rushing dark wall before her. The cable seemed to rotate like a barber pole, the result of her rapid progress past the wound strands.

It took a full minute to sweep past the cables. At the closest approach she held her right arm close to her side. The conviction was strong that if she reached out, she could touch it, though she knew she must be more distant than that. When she was past, she twisted in the air once more and watched the thing recede from her.

One hour didn't sound like that much time. Surely one could remain in absolute terror that long. She began to wonder if something was wrong with her because she no longer felt terror. Before the approach of the cables had rekindled her fright, she had attained a kind of peace. She felt it stealing over her once more and welcomed it. There is a sweet calm that can come with the realization that one's death has arrived, that it will be swift and painless, that there is no good to be gained by sweating and clawing air and cursing fate.

It couldn't last forever. Why couldn't it last just twenty more minutes?

She was skipping back and forth now between fatalism and fear. Knowing there was nothing she could do was not enough. She wanted to live, she was not going to, and there were no words to express the sorrow of that.

Her religion was not one that believed in answered prayers. The Coven did not pray at all, in that sense. They asked nothing. There were things they could demand, positions to be earned in the afterlife, but in a tough spot you were on your own. The Great Mother was not going to interfere in anyone's fate, and it never occurred to Robin to ask Her to. But she did wish there was something she could turn to for help, some power in all this vastness.

And then she wondered if that was what Gaea wanted. Could she listen, all the way down here, minutes from destruction? After the first tremendous shock of it, Robin had not been greatly surprised that Gaea had done this terrible thing. It seemed to mesh well with the insanity she had been talking. But now she wondered why, and the only reason she could think of was to terrorize Robin into acknowledging Gaea as her Lord.

If true, there might be something Gaea could do. Robin opened her mouth, and nothing came out. She tried again and screamed. Through some welcome spiritual alchemy, her fear was transmuted into anger so consuming it shook her more powerfully than the winds.

"Never!" she shouted. "Never, never, never! You stinking cancer! You abomination! You loathsome, repulsive perversion! I'll meet you in your grave, and I will disembowel you and choke you with your reeking guts! I'll stuff you with coals; I'll bite out your tongue; I'll spit you on cold iron and fry you for eternity! I curse you! Hear me now, oh Great Mother, hear me and mark me well! I pledge my shade to the eternal torment of the one called Gaea!"

"Good for you."

"I'm not even started yet! I'll-"

She looked toward her feet. One meter beyond them was a grinning face. There was not much more she could see, considering his angle; just his shoulders, an amazing bulge of chest, and the wings folded on his back.

"You're taking this very calmly."

"Why shouldn't I?" Robin asked. "I thought I had it figured out, and I'm still not sure I was wrong. You swear, by whatever powers you hold holy, that Gaea didn't send you?"

"I swear by the Squadron. Gaea knew she was not tossing you to certain death, but she had no hand in this. I do it freely, on my own."

"I figure I'll hit the wall in about five more minutes."

"Wrong. The bottom of the spoke flares, like a bell, remember? It's enough that you'll come out and fall at a sixty-degree angle over East Hyperion."

"If you're trying to cheer me up... ." But it did have some effect. Her first estimate of sixty-eight minutes was right, it turned out. But her figure for terminal velocity was low; she would be falling longer. She wondered what the angel could do to help her with that.

"It's true I can't carry you," he said. "Really, you amaze me. I get all sorts of reactions from people. Mostly they tell me what I have to do, when they're rational at all."

"I'm rational. Now can we get on with it? Time must be a factor here."

"But it's not, you know. I mean, not yet. I can help you only when we get closer to the ground, and what I'll do is slow you down. Until then you might as well relax. But I guess I don't have to tell you that."

Robin didn't know what to say to him. She was on the edge of hysteria, and her defenses against it were weakening. The only way to deal with that, she had found, was to pretend you are calm. If you can pretend well enough to fool someone else, you might even fool yourself

He was falling in front of her now. As she looked at him, two things occurred to her: he was one of perhaps five people she had ever met smaller than herself, and she had no reason to assume he was a male. She wondered why she had done so. He had no external genitalia; there was nothing but a patch of iridescent green feathers between his legs. It must have been his wiriness. In her short time in Gaea she had come to associate angularity with males. He seemed to be made of bones and cables, covered with equal amounts of bare brown skin and multicolored feathers.

"Are you a child?" she asked.

"No. Are you?" He grinned. "At least you've started to live up to my expectations. Your next question is: am I male or female? I am extremely male and proud of the affliction. I say affliction because male angels live about half as long as females, and are smaller and have less range. But there are compensations. Have you ever made love in the air?"

"I have never made love at all in the sense you probably mean."

"You want to try? We have about fifteen minutes, and I can guarantee you an experience you won't forget. How about it?"

"No. I can't imagine why you would want to."

"I'm a deviant," he said cheerfully. "I have this thing for fat. Can't seem to get enough of it. I hang around waiting for fat human women to drop by. I do them a favor, and they do me a favor. Everybody's happy."

"Is that your fee then?"

"No. Not a fee. I'll save you anyway. I don't like to see people squashed to death. But what do you say? It's not so much to ask. Just about everybody's been eager to return the favor."

"I'm not."

"You're odd, you know? I've never seen a human with markings like you. Were you born with those? Are you a different species of human? I can't understand why you won't make love with me. It's over so quickly. All it takes is a minute. Is that so much to ask?"

"You ask a lot of questions."

"I just want to ... oops! It's about time to start turning, or you're going to hit ... watch out!"

Robin had turned in panic, imagining the ground almost upon her. Her shoulder caught the rushing winds the wrong way, and she began to tumble.

"Just go limp again," the angel advised. "You'll straighten out. That's better. Now see if you can twist around. Keep your arms out to your sides, and angle them back."

Robin did as he said, ending in a swan dive. They were passing through the twilight zone now, close enough that the land below her was moving visibly. The angel moved in behind her and encircled her with his arms. They were hard and strong as ropes, one crossing her breasts, the other over her loins. She felt the cool pressure of his cheek feathers against her neck, then the warmth of his lips on her earlobe.

"You're so soft, so much lovely padding... ."

"By the Great Mother, if you are going to rape me, do it now, and a curse be on you for a lying peacock! We haven't got all day." Robin was shivering, fear of falling and the threat of nausea combining to batter at her self-control.

"What's in the bag?" he said tersely.

"My demon."

"All right, don't answer! But hold onto it. Here we go."

His arms were like clamps now as he carefully began to open his great wings. Weight tugged at her, changing her free fall to the feeling of hanging upside down. It became impossible to keep her legs straight out behind her. When she let them drop, the unstable pair rocked briefly around the balance point of the angel's wings, below his shoulder blades.

The ground tilted as the angel banked cautiously. His goal was to head her toward Ophion, where it flowed beneath the cable joining the Place of Winds to the hub. The river was deep, wide, and slow in that country, running in a southeasterly direction. To that end, he had to go first south for a time, then north, to align their glide with the river. Then he must extend Robin's fall by flattening the angle of his descent. Otherwise, she would have hit far short of the water.

They passed over a group of craters. Robin didn't ask what they were. It couldn't have been people; ninety meters per second would not give them that much kinetic energy. But other, heavier objects released at her point of departure could have done it.

The angel extended his wings to the fullest now. The ground below was hilly and forested, but ahead, the straight stretch of river could be seen. It did not look as if they would reach it, and there could be no pulling up and going around. The angel could lift little more than his own body weight.

"I think I'll have you down to seventy or eighty kilometers per hour when you hit," he said, shouting in her ear. "I will try to brake us in short bursts when I'm sure you'll reach the river. You'll be coming in at an angle."

"I can't swim."

"Neither can I. You're on your own there."

It was a confusing experience. The tug of his arms increased sharply, and she took a deep breath, her heart hammering. Then they were gliding again, seemingly still high above the brown waters. Another tug; she put her hands out reflexively, but they were still airborne. The third tug was the hardest of all. For long seconds Robin could not draw a breath.

And now the shoreline was getting closer, streaking by on her right. Ahead, the river curved westward.

She thought she hit on her back but was too stunned to be sure. The next thing she remembered clearly was clawing through muddy water toward the light.

Swimming turned out to be strenuous. It was amazing the things one could do when the water rose over one's upper lip.

The angel stood on the shore as she clambered out. It was not something he did well; his feet were not built for it. They were clawlike, with long, skeletal toes, made for grasping tree limbs. Robin crawled a meter or two on dry land, then went over on her side.

"Here, give me that," the angel said, yanking the bag from her hand. "I deserve something for my work; you can't argue with that." He opened it, gasped, closed it quickly, and let it fall, backing away.

"I told you," Robin wheezed.

The angel was angry and impatient. "Well, what have you got?"

"There's a little money. You can have it all."

"I have no use for it. The only place to spend it is at the Titanides' madhouse."

Robin sat up and used her fingers to comb wet hair from her face.

"You speak English well," she said.

"What do you know? It can say nice things if it wants to."

"I'm sorry. If I hurt your feelings, I didn't really mean to. I just had a lot to worry about."

"Not anymore."

"I appreciate that. You saved my life, and I'm grateful."

"All right, all right. I learned to speak English from my grandmother, incidentally. She also taught me that nothing comes for free. What do you have besides money?"

There was a ring, a gift from her mother. She offered it to the angel. He held out his hand and examined it sourly.

"I'll take it. What else?"

"That's all I've got. Just the clothes I have on."

"I'll take them, too."

"But all my other things-"

"Are in the hotel. It's over that way. The day is warm. Enjoy the walk."

Robin removed her boots and poured water from them. The shirt came off easily, but the pants clung to her clammy skin.

He took them, then stood looking at her.

"If you only knew how much I love fat human women."

"You're not having this one. And what do you mean, fat? I'm not fat." She was made uneasy by his eyes, a distinctly new sensation. Robin had no more body modesty than a cat.

"You're twenty percent fat, maybe more. You're coated with it. You bulge all over with it." He sighed. "And those are the damnedest markings I ever saw." He paused, then grinned slowly. "At least I got to see you. Happy landings." He tossed the clothes to her and leaped into the air.

The force of his wings rocked Robin back on her heels, stirred a choking cloud of dust and leaves. For a moment his majestic wing-spread blotted out the sky; then he was rising, vanishing, a silhouette stick-man in a riot of feathers.

Robin sat again and surrendered to a bad case of the shakes. She glanced at her carrier bag, writhing angrily as a thoroughly upset anaconda tried to gain her freedom. Nasu would have to wait. She would not starve, even if the attack lasted for days.

Robin managed to turn over, fearing she would blind herself by staring at the sun, and soon had lost all control of her body. The timeless Hyperion day marched on while she twitched in the amber sunlight, helpless, waiting for the angel to come back and rape her.