There was a ring, a gift from her mother. She offered it to the angel. He held out his hand and examined it sourly.

"I'll take it. What else?"

"That's all I've got. Just the clothes I have on."

"I'll take them, too."

"But all my other things-"

"Are in the hotel. It's over that way. The day is warm. Enjoy the walk."

Robin removed her boots and poured water from them. The shirt came off easily, but the pants clung to her clammy skin.

He took them, then stood looking at her.

"If you only knew how much I love fat human women."

"You're not having this one. And what do you mean, fat? I'm not fat." She was made uneasy by his eyes, a distinctly new sensation. Robin had no more body modesty than a cat.

"You're twenty percent fat, maybe more. You're coated with it. You bulge all over with it." He sighed. "And those are the damnedest markings I ever saw." He paused, then grinned slowly. "At least I got to see you. Happy landings." He tossed the clothes to her and leaped into the air.

The force of his wings rocked Robin back on her heels, stirred a choking cloud of dust and leaves. For a moment his majestic wing-spread blotted out the sky; then he was rising, vanishing, a silhouette stick-man in a riot of feathers.

Robin sat again and surrendered to a bad case of the shakes. She glanced at her carrier bag, writhing angrily as a thoroughly upset anaconda tried to gain her freedom. Nasu would have to wait. She would not starve, even if the attack lasted for days.

Robin managed to turn over, fearing she would blind herself by staring at the sun, and soon had lost all control of her body. The timeless Hyperion day marched on while she twitched in the amber sunlight, helpless, waiting for the angel to come back and rape her.

Gaby Plauget stood on the rocky shelf and waited for the noise of the massive diastole to abate. A normal Aglaian intake cycle produced a sound like Niagara Falls. Today the sound was more like air bubbles rising from the neck of a bottle held underwater. The intake valve with the Titan tree jammed in it was almost completely submerged.

The place was called the Three Graces. It had been named by Gaby herself, many years before. In those days the few Terrans living in Gaea were still naming things in human speech, usually adhering to the early convention of using Greek mythology as a source. Knowing full well the other meaning of the word, Gaby had read that the Graces assisted Aphrodite at her toilet. She thought of Ophion, the circular river, as the toilet of Gaea and of herself as the plumber. Everything eventually ran into the river. When it clogged, she was the one who flushed it.

"Give me a plumber's friend the size of the Pittsburgh Dome and a place to stand," she had once told an interested observer, "and I will drain the world." Not having such a tool, she found it necessary to come up with methods less direct but equally huge.

Her vantage point was halfway up the northern cliff of the West Rhea Canyon. Formerly, the canyon had possessed a distinctly odd feature: the river Ophion did not flow out of it into the flatlands to the west, but in the other direction. It was Aglaia which had made that possible. Now, with the mighty river pump's intake valve impaired, common sense had caught up with Gaeagraphical whim. The water, with no place to go, had turned Ophion into a clear blue lake that filled the canyon and backed up onto the plains of Hyperion. For many kilometers, far up the curving horizon of Gaea, a placid sheet of water covered everything but the tallest trees.

Aglaia sat like a purple grape three kilometers long, lodged in the narrowing canyon neck, her lower end in the lake, her far end extending to the plateau 700 meters above. She and her sisters, Thalia and Euphrosyne, were one-celled organisms with brains the size of a child's fist. For three million years they had mindlessly straddled Ophion, lifting its waters over the West Rhea Summit. They took nourishment from the flotsam that continually floated into their vast maws, and were large enough to ingest anything in Gaea except the Titan trees, which, being part of the living flesh of Gaea, were not supposed to become detached.

But these were the twilight ages. Anything could happen, and usually did. And that, Gaby reflected, was why a being the size of Gaea had need of a troubleshooter the size of Gaby.

The intake phase was completed now. Aglaia was swollen to maximum size. There would be a few minutes before the valve began to shut, as if Aglaia held her breath in anticipation of her hourly eruption. Silence settled through the golden twilight, and many eyes turned to Gaby, waiting.

She went down on one knee and looked over the edge. There did not seem to be anything left undone. Deciding when to make the move had been a hard choice. On the one hand, the contracting valve would hold the tree wedged more firmly than ever during the systolic phase. On the other, the water which Aglaia had swallowed would now come rushing out, exerting great force to dislodge the obstruction. The operation did not depend on a delicate touch; Gaby planned to give the tree the biggest jolt she could manage and hope for the best.

Her crew was awaiting the signal. She stood, held a red flag over her head, and brought it down sharply.

Titanide horns sounded from the north and south canyon walls. Gaby turned and scrambled nimbly up the ten-meter rock face behind her. She bounded onto the back of Psaltery, her Titanide crew chief. Psaltery thrust his brass horn into his pouch and began galloping down the winding trail toward the radio station. Gaby rode him standing up, her bare feet on his withers, her hands holding his shoulders. She was protected by the Titanide trait of running with the human torso leaning forward and the arms swept back like a child imitating a fighter plane. She could grab the arms if she slipped, but it had been many years since she had needed to.

They arrived at the station as the systolic backwash was beginning to be felt. The water was ten meters below them and the blocked intake valve half a kilometer up the canyon; nevertheless, as the torrent began to make a boiling bulge in the new lake and the water level began to rise, the Titanides stirred nervously.

The noise was building again, this time overdubbed with something new. At the top of the Aglaian plateau, at the Lower Mists, where the outflow valve would normally be spraying a stream of water hundreds of meters into the air, nothing was coming out but gas. The dry valve produced a sound Gaby thought of as contrabass flatulence.

"Gaea," she muttered. "The God that farts."

What did you say?" Psaltery sang.

"Nothing. Are you in contact with the bomb, Mondoro?" The Titanide in charge of etheric persuasion looked up and nodded.

"Shall I tell her to snuff it, my leader?" Mondoro sang.

"Not yet. And stop calling me that. Boss is sufficient." Gaby looked out over the water, where three cables emerged. She followed them with her eyes, searching for the raveling that would precede a break, and then regarded her impromptu fleet hovering overhead. After so many years the sight could still awe her.

They were the three largest blimps she could round up on a few days' notice. Their names were Dreadnaught, Bombasto, and Pathfinder. All were over a thousand meters long, each of them an old friend of Gaby's. It was friendship that had brought them here to help her. The larger blimps seldom flew together, preferring to be accompanied on their dirigible journeys by a squadron of seven or eight comparatively tiny zeps.

But now they were in harness, a troika the likes of which had seldom been seen in Gaea. Their translucent, gossamer tail surfaces-each large enough for the playing of a soccer match-beat the air with elephantine grandeur. Their ellipsoid bodies of blue nacre jostled and slithered and squeaked against each other like a cluster of carnival balloons.