But they grew wise in some mysterious way, and eventually made a conscious decision to become male or female, blimp or sub. Each entailed a hazard. The water contained many predators which ate young subs. There was no such risk in the air, but a young blimp could not manufacture his own hydrogen. His fate after metamorphosis would be to sit on the water, an empty bladder, and hope a mature blimp would, so to speak, blow him up. No adult could support more than six or seven in his squadron. If there were no openings, it was just too bad. The decision to differentiate was irrevocable.
The blimps and subs had little to do with each other. They might never come together at all at the watery interface between their worlds but for two facts. There was a species of seaweed that grew only in deep water; without it, the blimps could not survive, and the Titan trees-massive spurs of the body of Gaea herself, growing more than six kilometers tall and only in the highlands-sprouted leaves near their tops which were vital to the diets of subs.
Amicable mating was in the interest of both sexes.
Something fell from the tendrils which dangled below the midships bulge on the great curve of the blimp's belly. It splashed into the water. The sub's tentacles gathered it in and made it vanish. There was a deep sigh as the blimp vented hydrogen and sank toward the outstretched arms of his lover.
Beyond that there was not much to see. The tendrils entwined and the massive bodies touched at the surface of the sea, and they just stayed that way. It was only when waves began to roll the raft that Chris realized how much activity might be concealed by distance.
"There is a lot happening," Cirocco confirmed. "There is a way to get closer to the action, by the way. I was once a passenger in a blimp when he got smitten by love. Let me tell you ... never mind. It's a rough ride."
Cirocco went away as quietly as she had come. Chris continued to watch. Before long he heard hooves on the deck, and Valiha came around the cabin to join him. He was sitting on the edge of the raft, his feet dangling over the side to just reach the water. Valiha sat the same way, and for a moment a trick of the shadows made the equine part of her body vanish. She became a very big woman with shrunken, spindly legs, dangling her devil's feet in the water. The image upset him, and he looked away from her.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" she asked, in English so singsong that for a moment he thought she had sung it in Titanide.
"It's interesting." In truth, he was beginning to tire of it. He was just about to get up when she took his hand, raised it to her mouth, and kissed it
"Oh."
"Hmmm?" She looked at him, but he could not think of anything to say. It apparently didn't matter. She kissed him on the cheek, the neck, and the lips. He took a deep breath when he was able.
"Wait. Valiha, wait." She did, looking at him with her great, guileless eyes. "I don't think I'm ready for this. I mean... I don't know what to tell you. I just don't think I can handle it. Not now." She continued to search his eyes. He wondered if she was looking for madness, decided that was his own fear speaking. At last she briefly pressed his hand between both of hers, nodded, and let him go. She stood up.
"Let me know when you are. Okay?" She hurried away.
He felt bad about it. Though he tried to analyze his reasons for rejecting her, nothing satisfied. Partly Valiha was a reminder of something he had done while possessed. He was a lot braver at those times, unless he was a lot more timid. It looked as if that had been a brave time because try as he might, he could not come up with a comfortable answer to one question: what did a Titanide and a human do? And another: how much life insurance would he need before attempting it?
Valiha was big. She scared him to death.
It might have been fifteen minutes later that Gaby came around the side of the cabin and joined him in the bow. He only wanted to be alone with his thoughts, but his hideaway was turning into a parade ground.
She leaned on the rail, whistling, then nudged him.
"Feeling the blues, buddy?"
He shrugged. "It's been a weird eight hours or so. You think something's in the air?"
"Like what?"
"I don't know. Everybody's in love. Out there the sky's in love with the sea. Back onshore I found myself acting foolish over Robin."
Gaby whistled. "Poor boy."
"Yeah. Just a few minutes ago Valiha wanted to pick up where my mad alter ego left off, shooting marbles, as they say." He sighed. "It must be something in the air."
"Well, you know what they say. It makes the world go around. Love, that is. And Gaea spins a hell of a lot faster than the Earth."
He looked at her suspiciously. "You didn't have anything... ."
She held her hands up and shook her head. "Not me, friend, I won't bother you. With me, it's once in a blue moon, and usually with girls. I don't go in for the short-term stuff either. I want all my relationships to last. All seventeen of them." She made a face.
"I guess you have a different perspective on it," Chris ventured. "Being as old as you are."
"You'd think so, wouldn't you? Not true. It always hurts. I want it to last forever, and it never does. And it's my fault. I always end up measuring them by Cirocco, and they never measure up." She coughed nervously. "Well, listen to me. I didn't mean to get into that. I came to stick my nose into your business. You don't have to be afraid of Valiha. Not emotionally, if that's what's bothering you. She would not be jealous, or possessive, or expect it to last long. Titanides have no concept of exclusiveness."
"Did she ask you to tell me that?"
"She'd be furious if she knew. Titanides handle their own affairs and don't want interference. This is Gaby the know-it-all butting in. I'll say one more thing, then butt out. If your reservations are moral-bestiality, maybe?-wise up, friend. Didn't you hear? Even the Catholic Church says it's okay. All the Popes agree, Titanides have souls even if they are heathens."
"What if my objection is physical?"
Gaby laughed merrily and patted his cheek. "Oh, boy, do you have some pleasant surprises in store."
22 The Idol's Eye
The sub was unwilling to interrupt her postcoital bliss to tow the raft to Minerva. Cirocco stood in the bow and tried to woo it in a language combining the less pleasant sounds of asthma and whooping cough, but the big bathyzoote's light grew even fainter as she reached for the abyss. The blimp, who might have helped for a short time, turned out to have business in the west. Blimps were always ready to give a free ride, but only if one wanted to go where the blimp was bound.
It didn't matter. In a few hours a breeze came up from the west. Soon they were at the base of the central Rhea vertical cable.
Robin studied it as they drew nearer. Cirocco had not been exaggerating. Minerva was not really an island; it was more of a shelf. It had been formed over the aeons by barnacleoids, pseudolimpets, near corals, and other Gaean equivalents of sessile mollusks and crustaceans. The problem was that the water level was low-it had, in fact, been dropping gradually for a million years as the cables stretched and Gaea expanded slowly as she aged. This was in addition to the seasonal lows, which included a seventeen-day short cycle and a thirty-year long one. They had arrived near the trough of the long fluctuation, with the result that the main body of the "island" shelved away from the cable 50 meters above the water. The thickness of the shelf varied. At some places it jutted out more than a hundred meters; elsewhere the mass of shells and sand had broken away from wave action or its own weight, and the cable rose vertically. But it was encrusted as far as Robin could see. Two kilometers above her were the corpses of organisms that had lived during Earth's Pliocene Epoch.
She wondered how they intended to land Constance when the nearest place to stand was fifty meters up. The answer became apparent as the raft was steered to the south side of the cable. There one of the hundreds of strands had broken near the waterline. The upper end curled away from the cable far above. Reef builders had transformed the lower end into a cove that enclosed a flat circle of land only five meters high. Constance was soon moored, and Robin followed Gaby and Psaltery through a jagged cleft, stepping on meter-wide shells that still housed living creatures. They emerged onto the flat, severed end of the cable strand, 200 meters in diameter.