He had time to hope that Robin would be willing to wait until he was ready for a second time before he was seized by the shoulder and pulled roughly away.
"You idiot, get away from her!" It was Cirocco. Chris did not have time to understand anything beyond that because too much was happening at once. He rolled on the ground, curling into a foetal position, and spasming into violent ejaculation. In a feverish confusion he did not know whether to be embarrassed, angry, or hurt. In a moment it was over and Chris came up off the floor, swinging at Cirocco. With a perfect roundhouse he hit her squarely on the chin. For a moment, reeling back, she looked almost as surprised as he felt. But his triumph lasted only a second. As Cirocco folded like a puppet with her strings cut, his hand began to throb, and Gaby appeared from nowhere, flying at him as though she'd dropped from the sky. The next thing he knew she was kneeling on his chest and about to drive her stiff fingers right through his face.
Instead, she hesitated, and the fire went out of her eyes. She hit the ground with her fist, rolled off him, and patted his cheek.
"Never hit the bones with your fist," she counseled. "That's what sticks and stones were made for."
She helped him to his feet, where he saw Robin still on her back and looking baffled. Hornpipe had squeezed into the tent and was seeing to Cirocco, who was working her jaw cautiously.
Chris's fury was obviously still mounting, but with Gaby and a couple of Titanides stationed between him and Cirocco he was forced to voice his anger.
"You had no right to do that," he raved. "Damn it, I can't even think why you would. But this is it! You're getting out or I am."
"Shut up," Cirocco said coldly, waving Hornpipe away and sitting up. "There's a small chance I did something terrible. If that's true, I'll stand still while you both beat the daylights out of me. But hear me out first. Robin, what kind of birth control are you using?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Right. What about you, Chris?"
Chris felt a distinct chill but shrugged it off. She couldn't possibly be right.
"I take pills, but it doesn't-"
"I remember you telling me that. When was the-"
"-but she can't have children! She told me so, and if you had-"
"Stop. Hear me out." Cirocco held her hand up until she was sure everyone would listen to her.
"I think you misunderstood her. She said 'can't', and you thought she meant she was unable to. What she really meant was, because her children would have her condition, she will not impregnate herself. What's the use of sterilization when the act of conception is so complicated?" She looked at Robin, who was shaking her head in exasperation.
"But we were only making love," she said.
Cirocco went to her, took her shoulders, and shook her. "How do you think babies get made, damn it? Everywhere but in the Coven it's just like it was for-"
"But I trust him, can't you see that?" Robin shouted back. "We were just making love, not making a baby. He wouldn't have..... She wound down and for the first time looked uncertainly at Chris. He had to look away.
As Cirocco explained the true situation, the color slowly drained from Robin's face. Chris had never seen her look frightened, but it was clear she was terrified in retrospect, as well she might have been. The whole bizarre misunderstanding had arisen from Robin's failure to realize that the male orgasm involved ejaculation, and that it was not under his control, and from the impression Chris had formed that Robin was sterilized. She was not, and he was fertile, as the production of the egg with Valiha had established. The fact was that his pills had been lost during his episode in quarantine, and he had been unable to replace them.
Robin was reduced almost to tears. She sat with her head in her hands, shaking, saying, "I didn't know, I didn't know, I really didn't know."
Chris did not know what long-term effects there would be between himself and Robin, but there was one thing that was clear. "I owe you an apology," he said to Cirocco.
She grinned at him. "No, you don't. I'd have done the same thing. It's not a situation where you hang around for explanations."
She rubbed her jaw. "Actually, it's my own fault for not getting out of the way quicker. I think I'm slowing down."
"Maybe I'm speeding up."
"That's a possibility."
As though by mutual accord the others turned back to their tents, leaving Robin and Chris alone. The moment hung awkwardly in the air and Chris felt frightened. If Rocky had realized the score why hadn't he? Maybe because he'd been too eager for sex. Robin seemed to have some of the same feeling. He could tell she was thinking of their earlier conversation and perhaps reassessing it. She turned away from him briefly to collect her thoughts and then very carefully said she was sorry. In a few words she professed not to blame him any more than she blamed herself. It had been a simple misunderstanding, fortunately averted in time. She said she was no more afraid of him now than she had ever been.
But she moved back into her own tent that night
Cirocco came reeling in after the last day of Carnival, singing loudly. Gaby put her to bed and in the morning loaded her into a canoe and once more covered her with a blanket. They shoved off and soon left the diminishing gaity of Inglesina Island behind them. Ophion was again quiet, undisturbed, as the party, much subdued, paddled steadily toward the Twilight Sea.
26 Path of Glory
The body of water half in Crius and half in Phoebe was usually designated on maps as Phoebe or the Phoebe Sea, but no one ever called it that. One traveled through Phoebe and sailed on the Twilight Sea.
It was an apt name. The western end of the sea was in Crius, and thus in daylight, but it extended through the twilight zone and into the night of Phoebe. Seen from a distance sufficient for Gaea's curvature to upend it, the waters of Twilight began in shades of deep blue and green, faded through orange and copper, and ended in black. Roughly in the center was a large island known as Unome, always in twilight, that held two lakes known as Tarn Gandria and Tarn Concordia. A race of insectile creatures lived on the island and nowhere else, and they were known to humans and Titanides as the Iron Masters. Robin gathered from what little was said that they were thoroughly unpleasant, starting with their smell and continuing to just about every aspect of their culture and morals. She was just as glad that the Wizard had no business with them on this trip.
In fact, they planned to take the conservative path. The northern shore of the Twilight Sea was close enough to the straight-line route across it that it made sense to stay near a safe haven, particularly since Twilight was known for its sudden, violent storms.
The navigation of Twilight passed without incident, but Robin spent her time withdrawn from the others. The incident with Chris had upset her greatly. She did not blame him but could not help a certain queasy feeling when she caught him, sometimes, looking at her. Her policy was to draw lessons from the bad things in life, and what she learned from her experiment in heterosexual love was that her worst enemy in Gaea was usually her own ignorance. It was not a new realization. All through her life she had tended to shut out things that seemed to have no immediate bearing on her survival. By doing that, she often missed the things noticed by more patient, less discriminating people who listened to and watched everything, no matter how trivial it appeared.
And it was time to discard an opinion, which was that the Wizard was an alcohol-soaked zombie, commanding respect only through a title and tales of her past deeds. It was a small thing, really, yet Robin had been impressed when she had time to think about it. Cirocco could not have heard them until Chris began to moan, meaning he had already been on the edge of disaster. Cirocco had thought quickly, putting together such details as the lost contraceptives and Robin's genetic disorder, deducing their shared ignorance and Robin's probable fertility, and had immediately acted on her answer without worrying about the consequences. No matter that what she had done was socially unthinkable; she had been right, had known it, and had acted.