"It's disgusting."
Cirocco laughed. Robin flushed again, then knew Cirocco was not laughing at her, but at some private thought.
"No, it's not," she said. "It's only startling. You're seeing it all at once. I saw it day by day, and it looked entirely natural and right. And as for startling ... you shocked him more than he shocked you."
Robin had to turn away. She knew what she looked like.
"It's called age," she said, bitterly. The terrible fact was that she looked a lot older than Cirocco.
"No. You've aged, but that's not the shocking part. In your own way you've changed as radically as Chris has. Some terrible fear has marked your soul."
"I don't believe that. Failure and disgrace, yes. Not fear."
"Fear," Cirocco went on, inexorably. "The Great Mother has deserted you. Your center is gone. You no longer burn; you float, your feet unable to reach the womb of the earth. You have no place to stand, no Umbilicus."
"How do you know these things?" Robin screamed.
"I know what I see."
"Yes, but the words, the ... the secret words ... " Some of them were from Coven ritual, from ceremonies and exorcisms Robin knew she had never mentioned to the Wizard. Others were from the darkest corners of her own soul.
"I've had some guidance. Right now, I want to know your purpose here. Why did you come? What do you hope to do?"
Robin wiped away tears and pulled a chair closer to Cirocco. She sat down, and eventually was able to look at the older woman.
She told her story.
Robin had come to Gaea, like so many others, to be cured.
Gaea was a god who never gave anything away. Robin had been told she must prove herself, do something heroic, before a cure was possible. She had not been inclined to do so. Her condition had not been impossible to live with. She had dealt with it before: when her hand began to tremble with the onset of a seizure, she had simply amputated her little finger.
But through the persuasion of Gaby Plauget, Robin had embarked on a trip around the interior of the wheel, accompanied by Gaby, Cirocco, the Titanides Psaltery, Hautbois, Hornpipe, and Valiha, and Chris Major, who was also seeking a cure.
Gaby and Cirocco had an ulterior motive. They were seeking an ally among the eleven regional brains of Gaea. Gaby was seeking a lot harder than Cirocco was; the Wizard had been a hopeless alcoholic who had to be dragged into the enterprise. Some of those regional brains were allies of Gaea. Some were enemies. The lines had been drawn during the Oceanic Rebellion while humans were still living in caves.
Gaby's plan had been nothing less than the overthrow and replacement of Gaea herself. She had been out to recruit a new God. The mission had cost her life, and possibly much more. It had cost Cirocco her status as Wizard. It remained to be seen whether it had cost the Titanides their survival as a race.
The only ones who seemed to have benefitted from the abortive quest were Robin, Chris, and the Iron Masters. Robin and Chris had been cured. The Iron Masters had, for reasons unknown, been allowed to expand from their tiny island in Phoebe until they now challenged the Titanides for dominance of the great wheel.
And at the end, Robin had headed for home, intending to live happily ever after.
"It was great for a while," she said, and smiled at the memory. "Chris was right. There was a great deal of labra in growing back a finger. I recommend it as a way to amaze your friends."
She knew Gaby and Cirocco had dismissed labra as the female version of macho. They had been wrong, but it didn't really matter. The fact that it was Gaea who had replaced Robin's severed pinky had continued to gnaw at her, and in the end hollowed out both Robin and her victory.
It was as meaningless as the third Eye, which was supposed to confer infallibility. In practice, the wearers of the Eye were bullies who could do no wrong, sanctimonious as any Pope.
"I left the Coven already a semi-mythical figure," Robin went on. "I came back... I don't know a word for it. The Coven had never seen anything like me."
"Superstar," Cirocco supplied.
"What's that?"
"Archaic word. It's somebody whose reputation exceeds all reasonable bounds. Pretty soon, they start to believe the reputation."
Robin considered it.
"There was some of that. Yes. I moved up as quickly as I wanted to. I could have gone faster, but ... I wasn't sure I should."
"You heard a voice," Cirocco suggested.
"Yes. It was my own voice. I think I could have been proclaimed the Great Mother herself. But I knew I wasn't. I knew I wasn't even very good."
"Don't be too hard on yourself. You were damn good, as I recall."
"Damn fast. Damn strong. Damn mean and a cast-iron bitch. But where it counted, to me"- and she thumped her chest -"right in here, I knew what I was. I decided to get out of public life. There are places we can retreat ... something like nuns. Isn't that what nuns do?"
"So I've heard."
"I was going to meditate for about a year. Then I was going to have a child and devote myself to raising her. But I didn't have time. The next thing I knew, I was pregnant."
She was silent for a moment, looking back on it. She chewed her lower lip, and at last looked back at Cirocco.
"This was a year-more than a year-after I got back from Gaea, you see. On Earth it could have just slid by. But in the Coven, we have to artificially-"
"I remember. I know what you're talking about."
"Yeah, but see, the women at the birth centers know who came in to have it done. When I started to swell up ... " She sighed, and shook her head. "The awful thing is, if it had happened to someone else, she might have been burned. We haven't burned anyone for Christianity for... oh, fifty years. But it looked like there were just two possibilities. Either I'd had carnal relations with a Christian demon, or ... it was the Gynorum Sanctum, the union of a mortal woman with the Holy Mother, perfect and blameless."
Cirocco studied her as she lowered her head into her hands.
"Did they really buy that?" she asked.
"Oh, they did and they didn't. There's a conservative faction that holds all the teachings to be literally true. Anyway, it sealed my fate. I'm not saying I didn't help it along. For a while there I think I did believe the Great Mother had come to me. But every time I looked at Nova's face, something told me it was someone else."
Cirocco shook her head wearily. So much could have been avoided if she had not been busy while Robin was getting ready to leave.
Stop it, she told herself. You were busy for a while, sure, but then you were drunk for almost a kilorev.
"Did you ever suspect where the baby came from?"
"Not for a long time. Like I said, it was a lot easier to take it as it came. It wasn't till later I consciously questioned it."
"I could have told you Gaea would leave you with a parting practical joke. She did the same thing to me, and Gaby and August, right after we first got here. We were all pregnant. We had abortions." She paused, and looked at Robin again. "Do you ... did you have any feeling about ... who the child's father might be?"
Robin laughed.
"Go look at her. Isn't it obvious?"
"Nova's got your mouth."
"Right. And she's got Chris's eyes."
Chris was in the basement, looking for a film projector.
It was perhaps a semantic fallacy to have a "basement" in a treehouse, where all levels were above the ground, but Chris had managed it. A trapdoor in the floor of the main building led to a hollowed-out area in the trunk of the great tree. This room eventually received everything Chris had never managed to find a use for. There was a lot of it.
Conal, standing on the ladder and holding the lamp high as Chris threw objects from one pile to another, surveyed the miscellany with dismay.
"Aside from being a compulsive architect," he observed, "you've also got a bad case of packratitis."