"Why didn't you realize? You seem to think we're so different. I'm just like you. Can't you get aroused by looking at someone sexually desirable?"
"Well, sure, but it didn't occur to me that a man-"
"Don't make it into such a tremendous distinction. We have a lot of things in common, whether you like it or not. We both erect, both have orgasms-"
"I'll bear it in mind," she said, tossed him the soap, scooped up her clothes, and hurried off down the beach.Chris worried that he might have killed a budding friendship. He did like her, almost in spite of himself. Or in spite of her. He wanted to be her friend.
A little later he wondered if she had left because of anger. Going back over the conversation, he realized that the point she had chosen to leave could be given another interpretation.
He did not think Robin would be too comfortable with the idea that he was like her. Or, conversely, that she was like him.
The completed raft would not have won any prizes in a boat show, but it was a marvel from the standpoint of size alone, considering the time it had taken to build it. It slid down the ramp which had been its construction site and hit the water with a mighty splash. Chris joined the Titanides in cheering. Robin was yelling, too. They had both had a hand in the finishing stages. The Titanides had shown them how to handle the glue and let them set deck planks in place while the railings were being installed.
It had ample room for the eight of them. There was a small cabin near the bow, large enough to bunk all the humans at once, and a canopy that could be hung to keep the rain off the Titanides. A mast amidships supported a silver Mylar sail with a minimum of rigging. Steering was done with a long tiller. Just aft of the mast was a circle of stones to support the cooking fire.
Gaby, Chris, and Robin gathered by the gangplank while the Titanides carried aboard saddlebags, provisions they had gathered near the beach, and heaps of firewood. Cirocco had already gone aboard and installed herself at the bow, gazing at nothing.
"They want me to name it," Gaby said to Robin. "Somehow I've gotten the reputation around here as the namer of names. I pointed out that we'll be using this raft for only eight days at the most, but they think every ship has to have a name."
"It seems appropriate," Robin said.
"Oh, you think so? Then you name it."
Robin thought for a moment, then said, "Constance. Is that all right, to name a ship after-"
"That's fine. A lot better than the first boat I sailed in here."
For several kilometers it was possible to propel Constance with long poles. This was fortunate because the wind had departed along with the rain. Everyone but Cirocco lent a hand. Chris enjoyed the hard work. He knew he was not moving the boat nearly so much as the Titanides, but it felt good to be contributing. He put his back into it until the poles would no longer touch bottom. At that point four oars were rigged, and they took shifts as galley slaves. It was even harder than the poling. After two hours at the oars Robin suffered a violent seizure and had to be taken into the cabin.
During one of his rest periods Chris went around the cabin and found that Cirocco had abandoned her post, presumably to sleep.
He stretched out on his back and felt the muscles protest. The night sky of Rhea was like nothing he had ever dreamed. In Hyperion, on a clear day, the sky was a uniform yellow blur, unguessably high. Only by following the sweep of the central vertical cable to where-as a mere thread-it penetrated the Hyperion Window could one really define where the solid sky was. Even then one had to keep it firmly in mind that the cable was five kilometers in diameter and not the slim spindle into which perspective and the eye's timid bias transformed it.
Rhea was different. For one thing, Chris was closer to the central Rhea vertical cable than he had ever been to Hyperion's great column. A black shadow that leaped from the sea, it dwindled rapidly and kept rising and rising until it vanished completely. To each side of it were the north and south verticals, improperly named because they both angled toward the center, though not nearly so much as the ones behind him, to the west. The cables vanished because of the darkness, but more important, because Rhea did not have a window arching over it. Rhea lived in the shadow of the vast trumpet-shaped mouth known as the Rhea Spoke.
Had he not known its size and shape from pictures, Chris would never have discovered its true geometry. What he could see was a dark, wide oval high overhead. In reality, it was more than 300 kilometers above the sea. Around the edge of that mouth was a valve that could close like the iris of an eye, isolating the space above it from the rim. It was now wide open, and he could see up into a dark, oblate cylinder the upper end of which, he knew, was another 300 kilometers away, where another valve led to the hub. He could not see that far, through that much dark air. But what he could see resembled the barrel of a gun that might have used planetoids for projectiles. It was aimed right at him, but the threat was so overblown he could not take it seriously.
He knew that between the lower valve and the radius of the Hyperion Window-a vertical distance of about a hundred kilometers-the spoke flared like the bell of a horn until it became one with the relatively thin arch of roof that stretched over the daylight areas on each side of Rhea. Try as he might, he could not see that flaring, though it had been discernible from Hyperion. Another trick of perspective, he concluded.
There were lights somewhere up there in the spoke. He supposed they were the windows he had read about. From here they dwindled like runway lights seen from a landing plane.
He gradually became aware of a more immediate light, to his left and over his head as he reclined on the deck. He sat up and turned around and saw that the surface of Nox was being lit from below with a pearly blue luminescence. At first he thought it was a hive of the sea insects Cirocco had told him about.
"It's a sub," said a voice to his right. He was startled; Cirocco had joined him silently. "I sent messengers a few hours ago, hoping to attract one. But it looks like she'll be too busy to give us a tow." She pointed at the sky to the west, and Chris found a big patch of deeper darkness against the night. He didn't need anyone to tell him it was a blimp, and a big one.
"Not many people have seen this," Cirocco said quietly. "There aren't any subs in Hyperion because there're no seas. Blimps go anywhere, but subs stay where they're born. Ophion won't hold them."
There was a piercing series of whistles from the blimp, followed by a sizzling and hissing from the rear of Constance. Chris understood that the blimp had asked for the fire to be put out, and the Titanides had complied.
He felt Cirocco's hand on his shoulder. She pointed over the water. "Right there," she said. He looked, still conscious of her hand, and saw tentacles writhing upward, thrashing slowly against the water. A slender stalk rose from the mass of them.
"That's her periscope eye. This is about as much of a sub as you'll ever see. Notice the long swelling there on the water? That's her body. She never comes out any more than that."
"But what's she doing?"
"Mating. Be quiet, don't disturb them. I'll fill you in."
The story was straightforward, though not obvious. The blimps and subs were male and female of the same species. Both descended from the sexless children of their union, which were snakelike and nearly brainless until competition had reduced their swarms to a small number of twenty-meter survivors. At that point they grew a brain and tapped some racial source of knowledge that neither Gaea nor the blimp-subs had ever explained to Cirocco. It had nothing to do with nurturing, for from the time they were spawned neither the mothers nor the fathers had anything further to do with them.