Cirocco had not mentioned the purpose of the trip. Robin had thought the central cable was just a landmark on the way to their final destination, but when they reached it, the Titanides stopped.
"We'll be happy to accompany you, Captain," Valiha said. "This place holds no horrors for us."
She was referring to the instinctive fear Titanides held for the central cables, and for the beings which lived at the bottom. Twenty years ago, trapped under a rockfall beneath the central Tethys cable, Robin and Chris had faced the nightmare task of herding Valiha down the five-kilometer spiral stairway that ended in the lair of Tethys himself-a cranky, obsessed, terrifying, and, luckily for them, myopic Lesser God. Valiha's I.Q. had decreased with every step down, until at the bottom she was no brighter than a horse and twice as skittish. The encounter had ended in two broken forelegs for Valiha, and an endless nightmare for Robin.
It was not a fear the Titanides could do anything about. It had been programmed into them by Gaea.
But Dione was dead, and that apparently made a difference.
"Thanks for the offer, my friends, but I would prefer it if you awaited us here. Our business will not take us long. You might use the opportunity to teach this useless one something of the good grace and dignity your race is known for, and which she so sorely lacks."
"Hey!" Tambura protested, and leaped at Cirocco, who dodged to the side, grabbed her, and wrestled in mock ferocity until the young Titanide was laughing too hard to continue the game. Cirocco mussed her hair, and took Robin's arm. They started into the forest of cable strands.
At twenty-five centimeters per step, there were twenty thousand steps leading down to Dione. Even in one-quarter gee, it was one hell of a lot of steps.
Cirocco had brought a powerful battery light. Robin was grateful for it. There was natural light from creatures called glowbes which clung to the high, arched ceiling, but it was dim and orange, and there were long stretches where the animals didn't nest. They marched in silence for a long time.
Robin realized she would probably never get a better chance to talk to Cirocco about something that bad been causing her a lot of agony. The new, improved, glorious Mayor had little time these days to spend talking with her friends.
"I don't suppose it's possible you don't know about me and Conal."
"You're right. It's not possible."
"He wants to move in with me again."
"Why did you throw him out?"
"I didn't-" But she had. She might as well admit it, she decided. It had been almost a kilorev now, and she wasn't getting much sleep. Not used to sleeping alone anymore, she told herself, and knew it was more than that.
"Nova was part of it, I guess," she said. "Every time I looked at her I saw the accusation, and I felt guilty. I wanted to get close to her again."
"Worked pretty good, didn't it?"
"That cold-ass, sanctimonious, snot-nosed little-" She bit it off before the rage could build.
"She's all I have," Robin said helplessly.
"That's not true. And it's not fair to her."
"But I-"
"Listen for a minute," Cirocco cut in. "I've given this some thought. I've been thinking about it since the feast, since we made the Pledge and started planning to take over Bellinzona. I-"
"You knew then?"
"I hate to see friends in such a mess. I've stayed out, because people don't really want advice about things like that. But I have some. If you want it."
Robin didn't want it. She had learned that the observations and plans made by the Mayor were usually the right thing to do-and quite often not what you would like to do at all.
"I want it," she said.
Robin counted three hundred steps before Cirocco spoke again. Great Mother, she thought. It must be really awful if she's taking this much time to choose her words. Who does she think I am?
"Nova hasn't learned the difference between evil and sin."
Robin counted fifty more steps.
"Maybe I haven't, either," she finally said.
"Naturally, I'm implying that I have," Cirocco said, with a chuckle. "Let me tell you what I think, and you can make of it what you will."
Ten more steps.
"Sin is a violation of the laws of the tribe," Cirocco said. "On Earth, in most societies, what you practice in the Coven was a sin. There's another word, too. Perversion. Historically, most humans have seen homosexuality as a perversion. Now, I've heard about a hundred theories as to why people are homosexual. Doctors say it happened in childhood. Biochemists say it's all chemicals in the brain. Militant gays say being gay is good for you, and so forth. In the Coven, you say men are evil beings, and only an evil woman could mate with one.
"I don't have a theory. I don't care. It just isn't important to me if somebody's heterosexual or homosexual.
"But it's important to you. In your mind, you have sinned by having carnal knowledge with a man. You're a pervert."
Another fifty steps went by as Robin thought this over. It wasn't a new thought to her.
"I don't know if this helps me," she said, at last.
"I didn't promise to help. I think your only hope is to look at it objectively. I've tried to. What I've concluded is that, for reasons I don't understand, some people are one way and some people are the other. On Earth, with overwhelming societal reasons to be heterosexual, there have always been those who are not. In the Coven, it's like a mirror image. I suspect there might have been a fair number of unhappy women in the Coven. They probably didn't even know what was making them unhappy. Maybe they dreamed about it. Sinful dreams. But their problem was that-for whatever reason, biological, behavioral, hormonal-they were ... well, for want of a better word, they were gay. They'd have been happier with male sex partners. I don't know if you're born gay or are made gay-on Earth, or in the Coven. But I think you're a pervert."
Robin felt the blood rushing to her face, but did not break stride on the long descent. It was best to have it out.
"You think I have to have a man."
"It's not that simple. But something in your personality meshes with something in Conal's. If he'd been a woman, you'd be the happiest person in Gaea right now. Since he's a man, you're one of the most miserable. It's because you've bought the Coven's big lie, even though you think you're too adult for all that. There were millions of Earth men and women who bought the Earth cultures' big lies, and they died just as unhappy as you are now. And I suggest to you that it's a foolish thing."
"Yeah, but ... damn it, Cirocco, I can see that. I've had those thoughts-"
"But you haven't fought them hard enough."
"But what about Nova?"
"What about her? If she can't accept you the way you are, then she isn't the person you hoped she would be."
Robin thought about it for many hundred steps.
"She's grown up," Cirocco said. "She can make her own decisions."
"I know that. But-"
"She represents the unforgiving weight of Coven morality."