Time to wake up, she thought.
When nothing happened, she looked down at the beach. Two sets of footprints led to where she stood, tired and discouraged.
She closed her eyes and slapped her cheeks. She opened them to find no change in her situation. So she started back along the edge of the water.
She watched her bare feet as she walked. They made new imprints beside the two trails going the other way. Where the Woozle Wasn't, she thought, and could not remember where that came from. Getting senile, Cirocco.
Her body was a short distance from the water, up where the sand was dry and fine enough for filling hourglasses. It reclined with its head on the pack, its hands folded on its belly, and its legs straight out and crossed at the ankles. She knelt close to it. It breathed slowly and evenly.
She looked away from the body and down at ... at herself. At the body she was living in. It was completely familiar to her. She touched herself, rubbed her hands together, held a hand up and tried to see things through it and failed to do so. She pinched her thigh and watched the skin turn red.
After a while she reached out and touched the body on the forearm. The body was other, not self. It was an everyday dichotomy, with a disturbing twist. What if the body sat up and wanted to talk?
It was definitely time to wake up, she decided.
Or to go to sleep.
She reached back into a century's experience of living from her gut as well as her mind, and found a non-verbal notion tickling the back of her head. There was no use in trying to think it out. Sometimes, in Gaea, this was the only way to deal with life. Things happened here. Not everything could be explained.
She allowed her instinct to take over. Without thought, she closed her eyes and toppled forward, turning as she fell. She felt the brief touch of the skin of the other, a singular but not unpleasant sensation of fullness-something like the sensations of pregnancy-and rolled along the sand. She opened her eyes and sat up, alone.
The tracks in the sand were still there. Two sets led away, one returned.
She moved on hands and knees to the harder, wetter sand nearer the water. Selecting one of the smaller prints-high-arched, five toes clearly visible and digging in-she ran her fingertips lightly through the depressions. She moved to the next print and lowered herself until her nose almost touched the print. She scented Gaby quite distinctly. The prints of the larger feet did not smell at all. Her own prints never did. Cirocco's sense of smell, though inhumanly keen, could not distinguish her own spoor from the ever-present odor of herself.
She might have thought about it longer, but suddenly she smelled something else, quite far away but unmistakable. She grabbed her pack and sprinted at top speed toward Tuxedo Junction.
EIGHT
Robin nattered on for almost a rev.
Chris had expected it, and didn't mind. The little witch was riding high on a wave of rejuvenation. Part of it was chemical, the result of mystic compounds still surging through her blood, entering every cell and working their changes there. Part of it was psychological, and entirely understandable. Robin looked five years younger, but she felt better than she had in ten years. The result was something like amphetamines, something like manic-depressive psychosis. The highs were Himalayan and almost unendurable, the lows sharp but mercifully brief. Chris remembered it well.
It was no longer so exhilarating for him. When he visited the fountain it felt just as good as it used to, but the feeling didn't last, and was replaced by pain within a few revs. He felt it beginning along his spine and on the sides of his head. He didn't mind that; it was simply growing pains.
Robin chirruped out most of her life story, unable to sit down, pacing the pentagonal room he had built and coppered with remembrances of her. Chris simply sat at the table in the center of the room, nodding at the right places, offering noncommittal responses when it seemed polite to do so, and contemplating the single candle before him.
Eventually she wound down. She took the high stool opposite him and rested her elbows on the table, looking at the candle with eyes brighter than the flame. Slowly her breathing quieted and she shifted her gaze from the candle to him.
It was as if she was noticing him for the first time. She made several attempts to speak, and was eventually successful.
"Sorry," she said.
"Don't be. It's refreshing to see somebody so exuberant. And since you tend to be close-mouthed, it saved me a lot of questioning."
"Great Mother, I sure babbled, didn't I? I just couldn't seem to stop, I had to tell you-"
"I know, I know."
"Chris, it's so ... miraculous!" She looked at her arm, at the tattoo blazing forth on it. For the hundredth time she rubbed her skin in disbelief, her face showing that small remaining fear that it would rub off.
Chris reached for the fat candle, rolled it moodily around on its base, watching wax drip down the sides.
"It is wonderful," he agreed. "It's one of the few places Gaea can't touch. When you go there, you realize this must have been a pretty damn wonderful place to be, a long time ago."
She cocked her head and looked at him. He could not return her stare.
"Okay," she said. "You asked me out here to discuss something. A proposal, you said. You want to tell me what it is?"
He scowled at the candle again. He knew Robin valued directness and would be impatient if she sensed him stalling for more time, but he was unable to come out with it.
"What are your plans, Robin?"
"What do you mean?"
"Where are you going to stay? What are you going to do?"
She looked startled, then took another quick look around the crazy room he had built.
"I'm afraid I didn't think. That man, Conal, said it would be all right with you if we stayed here for a while, so-"
"That's no problem, Robin. This place belongs to all my friends. I'd be delighted if you made this your home. Forever."
She looked at him gratefully, but with a trace of suspicion.
"I appreciate it, Chris. It'll be good to spend a little time here and sort out the possibilities."
He sighed, and looked directly across the table at her. "I'm going to ask you right out. I hope you'll think about it before you answer. And I hope you'll be honest."
"All right. Shoot."
"I want Adam."
Her face froze. For a long time she did not move a muscle.
"What are you feeling right now?" Chris asked.
"Anger," she said, tonelessly.
"Just before that. Just before you clamped down on it."
"Joy," she said, and got up.
She went to the copper representation of herself on the far wall, and slowly ran her hand over it. She looked back at him.
"Do you think I'm a bad mother?"
"I haven't seen you in twenty years. I don't know. But I see Nova, and I know you are a good mother to her."
"Do you think I'm a good mother to Adam?"
"I think you're trying to be, and it's tearing you up."
She came back to the table, pulled the chair out, and climbed back up onto it. She folded her hands on the table, and looked at him.
"You're good, but you're not perfect, Chris. I told you I almost killed him when he was born. Maybe this will be hard for you to understand. If I had killed him... I would not feel like a murderer. It would have been the proper thing to do. Letting him live ruined me, politically, socially ... just about every way there is. I'm asking you to believe those things didn't enter into my decision."
"I believe that. The opinions of other people were never very important to you."
She grinned at him, and for a moment looked nineteen years old.
"Thanks for that. For a while their opinions were very important. You wouldn't have known me. But when he came out of my body and into the air, I took a good look at myself. I'm still doing it."