Wizard

Cirocco reached into her wrap and took out a small bottle of compressed air. Twisting to face the red line, she held one end of the cylinder to her stomach and turned the valve on the other end. It hissed, and a steady pressure threatened to turn her around, but she kept it in balance. Soon she could see she was building up speed.

When the bottle was empty, she threw it as hard as she could, then removed the two remaining clips for the automatic and threw them, following it with everything in her pockets. She was about to throw the gun itself but hesitated. Robin deserved to have it back, if that were possible. Instead, she slipped out of the red blanket, balled it up as tightly as she could, and threw that. Every ounce of reaction mass counted in her haste to get moving.

Damn! She should have fired the remaining bullets instead of throwing them away. She might have been able to save her serape. But she could not think of everything, and besides, when she turned around, she saw it did not matter as much as it might have. The entire cylindrical interior of the Rhea Spoke crackled with a million electrical snakes. She had hoped to get quickly out of range, but now she must run this gauntlet.

Below her she spied the slowly circling shapes of her angel escort, waiting where she had instructed them. As she watched, one of them was struck, and seemed to explode in a shower of feathers. She looked away for a moment, sickened. When she brought her eyes back, she saw the remaining five had not scattered as she had feared they would. At first glance it might have appeared they were fleeing, for all she could see of them was their feet and their frantically flapping wings, but she quickly realized they had spotted a problem before she had, with their incomparably better ballistic senses. A few seconds later she streaked past them and had occasion to feel relief that she had not fired the remaining bullets. Her velocity was already high enough to put her in jeopardy of outdistancing them.

She turned and fell with her back to the ground. There was no point in looking for lightning flashes as she could do nothing to avoid them. She spread her arms to kill some of her speed, and the angels chased her falling body through the flickering tu

45 Fame and Fortune

Valiha had traded in her crutches for the Titanide version of a wheelchair. It had two rubber-rimmed wheels a meter in radius, attached to a wooden framework slightly wider than her body. Stout bars were supported just ahead of and behind the lower part of her human torso, and from them was slung a canvas cup with holes for her forelegs and straps to hold the arrangement secure. Chris thought it peculiar at first but quickly forgot about it when he saw how practical it was. She would be in it for a short time yet; her legs were healed, but Titanide healers were conservative about leg injuries.

She could walk in it faster than Chris could run. Her only problem was cornering, which she had to do slowly. And like wheelchairs everywhere, it coped badly with stairs. She looked at the broad wooden staircase coming down from the green canopy at the edge of the Titantown tree, frowned with one side of her mouth, then said, "I think I can get up that."

"And I can vividly see you tumbling down," Chris said. "I'll just be up for a minute to get Robin. Serpent, where's the picnic basket?"

The child looked surprised, then abashed.

"I guess I forgot it."

"Then run right home and pick it up, and don't stop off anywhere."

"All right. See you." He was gone in a cloud of dust.

Chris started up the staircase. It had a rustic touch in keeping with the arboreal surroundings: a set of letters made of sticks tied together with ropes, like the entry to a Boy Scout camp. The letters spelled out "Titantown Hotel." He climbed to the fourth level and knocked on the door to room three. Robin called out that it was open, and he entered to find her stuffing clothing into a rucksack.

"I never used to accumulate stuff," she said, wiping sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. It was another hot day in Hyperion. "There's another thing that seems to have changed about me. Now I can't seem to throw anything away. Why don't you have a seat? I'll clear a place for you..." She began moving stacks of shirts and pants, mostly of Titanide manufacture.

"I'll confess I'm surprised to see this," he said, sitting. "I thought you were going to stick around at least until we found out if Cirocco made it out-"

Robin tossed an ugly hunk of metal onto the bed beside him. It was her family heirloom, the Colt .45.

"That was delivered a few hours ago," she said. "Haven't you heard? I thought the whole town was buzzing with the news. The signs a few days ago were right: there was a great battle in heaven, and the Wizard got away. But Gaea is not satisfied, and her spies are all over. Carnival is permanently canceled; the race is doomed. Or Carnival will still happen, but it will be late. Cirocco is badly injured. She's in a coma. Or she's just fine and she injured Gaea. Those are the rumors I've heard, and I haven't even left the hotel."

Chris was surprised, but not that he had missed the news. He had spent the day indoors with Valiha and Serpent, then come straight to the hotel when lunch was packed. They had talked of the commotion several dekarevs earlier, when the Place of Winds cable had been seen to sway slowly and the sound of continuous thunder had been heard from Rhea.

"What do you know for sure?"

Robin reached out and patted the gun. "That's it. This is here, so Cirocco made it to the rim. I hope she got some good use out of it. What happened to her from there I can't even guess."

"Maybe she doesn't dare show up here," Chris suggested.

"There's a rumor to that effect. I had been hoping ... oh, that she would come and give me the gun so I'd have a chance to ... well, when she left, I still hadn't thanked her properly. Now maybe I never will. For sending Trini to wait for me."

"I doubt you'd come up with the right words. I didn't."

"You're probably right."

"And the last time I saw her she kept apologizing to me for getting me into so much trouble."

"Me, too. I think she was expecting to die. But how could I blame her? There was no way for her to know what was ... going to..." She put her hand to her stomach and looked uncertain for a moment.

"Careful," Chris cautioned.

"I'm supposed to be able to talk about it with you, aren't I?"

"Were you feeling sick?"

"I don't really know. I think I was frightened that I would feel sick. This isn't going to be easy to live with."

Chris knew what she meant but was of the opinion that in a few months they would hardly notice Gaea's parting joke.

It had solved a mystery, but the nature of the solution precluded their divulging it to anyone else. They both had thought it odd, when they had time to think about it at all, that with all the analysis done on Gaea and the experiences of pilgrims going to her for a cure, no book had made mention of the Big Drop. The reason was simple. Gaea would not let anyone talk about it. Nor could they discuss anything about their individual quests or the quests of others; indeed, they could not mention that pilgrims to Gaea would be asked to do anything at all for their cures.

Chris was sure it was the best-kept secret of the century. Like the several thousand others who shared it, he was not surprised no one had spoken. He and Robin had each felt compelled to test the security system they had been told about soon after their return to Titantown.

Neither of them would ever do it again.

Chris was not proud of that fact, but he knew it to be true. Gaea had given him a psychological block. It was flexible in some ways-he could talk freely to Robin or anyone else who already knew. But should he try to speak to others of the Big Drop, his adventures in Gaea, or anyone else's exploits in pursuit of a miracle cure, he would experience pain so disabling he would be unable to utter even one word. It would start in his stomach and rapidly progress through all his muscles like red-hot snakes burrowing through his flesh.