"It would mean something to that woman up there. I'll bet she doesn't see it as a game."

"She's not your affair. She's a stranger."

"I'm surprised to hear you say that about a sister."

Robin had been a little surprised to hear it herself and uneasily searched for a motivation. When she found it, she was not delighted but faced it anyway. Part of it was, truly, that she detested the thought of anyone doing anything to impress the slime-Goddess, Gaea. The other part... .

"I don't want to see you hurt. You're my friend."

"This could be the most dangerous part of the trip," Cirocco told them.

"I disagree," Gaby said. "Iapetus will be the worst."

"I thought Oceanus would be," Chris put in.

Gaby shook her head. "Oceanus is tough, but I've never had too much trouble getting across. He's still lying low, making his plans. I don't expect to live to see the results. These beings think in terms of millennia. Iapetus is the most actively hostile region. You can count on him to notice you when you pass through and to try to do something about it."

The group was gathered around the base of the central Phoebe cable, which, like the one in Hyperion, came to ground in a wide bend of the river. It was actually more accurate to say the cable had created the bend through a process Cirocco called millennial sag. Gaealithic evidence beneath the cable proved that in earlier times Ophion had flowed among the cable strands. As its rim stretched, the land beneath the juncture had been pulled up and the river had found a new path.

"You're right about Iapetus and Oceanus," Cirocco said. "Though I'm not sure Oceanus will stay quiet much longer. The thing is that this is the only place where two strong regionals opposed to Gaea's rule are border to border. Rhea's too insane to be called an enemy. Beyond Tethys is Thea, who is still loyal to Gaea, and past her is Metis, who's an enemy but cowardly. Dione is dead, and beyond her-"

"One of the regional brains is dead?" Robin asked. "What effect does that have on things?"

"Not as much as you'd suspect," Cirocco said. "Dione's bad luck was to be squeezed between Metis and Iapetus when the war came. She was too loyal to cooperate or even to stay in the background, so they attacked her and she was mortally wounded. She's been dead for three or four centuries, but the land itself is doing okay. lapetus has tried to take it over, but he hasn't had much luck. I believe Gaea is able to handle most things that need doing."

"I've had fair amount of work there," Gaby pointed out. "Things break down more rapidly in Dione. But it's pretty peaceful."

"The point is," Cirocco continued, "that only here with Phoebe and Tethys do we have a situation with two strong enemies of Gaea side by side. I blimp over it when I can, and I thought you two ought to know you have that option if you want to leave us now. We're going to cross Phoebe and Tethys just as quickly as we can, but it has to be on land because while I can get a blimp to come in here and pick us up, none of them would take us from central Phoebe to central Tethys, which is what I have to do." She looked at Chris, then at Robin.

"I'll stick it out," Robin said. "But I would like to get out of here. I worry that Kong has ... you know. I've got two more days to go."

"As long as the wind holds, we're okay," Gaby said. "If it shifts, we'll get moving very fast, I promise you. What about you, Chris?"

Chris was still thinking about Kong, too, but not in the way Robin seemed to assume. He was not anxious to become a hero, dead or alive, but was bothered to know that this was the first real opportunity he had seen.

"I'll stick around," he said.

The Titanides did not like Phoebe. They tended to jump at unexpected sounds. Valiha almost stepped on Robin's foot at one point. They stayed near the fire a short distance from the outlying cable strands and sang their songs, which sounded to Chris like whistling in the dark.

He didn't blame them. He felt it, too.

Cirocco had said she did not expect to be long. There had been no question of anyone, even Gaby, going with her when she called on Phoebe. The Wizard knew Phoebe would not go so far as to drain her acid pool, so she would have to stand on the stairs and communicate as best she could. There seemed little reason why the encounter should last more than a few minutes. Cirocco would ask Phoebe to return to Gaea's arms and reap the benefits of her love-which meant avoid the consequences of her wrath since there was little Gaea could do to improve anything but a lot she could do to hurt Phoebe. Phoebe would refuse and send Cirocco on her way, possibly with a demonstration of power meant to frighten but not to seriously injure her. Phoebe was no fool. She was aware of the spoke pointed at her like a cosmic siege gun, and she knew about the Big Squeeze.

Cirocco had told Chris about the Squeeze, which had been Gaea's final weapon in the Oceanic Rebellion. The interior of each of the six spokes was lined with a thick coat of green which, when examined closely, turned out to be the trees of the vertical forest. It was vertical because of the ground; the trees grew horizontally from the spoke walls and dwarfed any redwood.

To apply the Big Squeeze, Gaea first deprived the forest of moisture for several weeks. It became the tallest pile of firewood ever conceived. It was not necessary for Gaea to squeeze too hard to dislodge the trees in their millions to shower over the night below. She had done this to Oceanus, setting it afire as it fell, then closing the lower spoke valve. The fire storm had scorched Oceanus down to the bedrock. He had apparently been impressed because it was ten thousand years before he dared defy Gaea again.

The hours dragged by, and Cirocco did not arrive. She had been up and down the staircases to the regional brains enough times to know within a few minutes how long the journey should take her. It had seemed unlikely that she would spend more than an hour with Phoebe, but that time came and passed, marked by the slow movements of the gyroscopic clock, and still no Cirocco. When Gaea had completed another sixty-one-minute rev, Chris joined the conference to determine whether the tents should be pitched. There was not much sentiment for the idea, though Robin and Chris had been awake a long time. Gaby hardly bothered to talk about it; unstated but known to all was the certainty that before much longer she would go after her old friend, with or without help.

Chris moved away from the group and reclined on the dry ground. He oriented his body north and south and placed the Gaean clock on his belly, its axis in the east-west plane of rotation. He could no more see it move than he could watch water freeze, but when he looked away and then looked back, the motion was apparent. They had a mechanical clock which was much more useful because it worked all the time, regardless of orientation, but this one was more fun. It seemed to him that he could feel Gaea spinning beneath him. He recalled a similar feeling on a clear night back on Earth, and suddenly he wanted to be home, with or without his cure. It was not the same to be overwhelmed by the vastness of a starry night as it was to look up the dark, towering spoke to an unseen but tangible heaven.

"Strap on those bags, you quartet of quadrupedal quacks!"

"How about I ride you this time, Captain?" Hornpipe shouted.

"Hey, Rocky, how do you stay balanced so long?"

Her return brought Chris back from the edge of sleep. The group was transformed into a swirl of energy that Cirocco shaped toward the task of breaking the rough camp and getting back to the canoes. But finally, Gaby asked the question they all wanted answered.

"How did it go, Rocky?"