She had thought "chattering teeth" was a figure of speech, and not a very good one, like knees knocking when one is afraid. Then she realized her knees were knocking, too. Her whole body was quivering, and she could not stop it. She began to cough, and a lot of wet matter came up before she was through. She was soaking wet and burning with fever. She knew she was going to die.

That thought was enough to bring her scrambling out of her cubby to stand unsteadily on the riverbank. She coughed again, could not stop until she threw up the bitter contents of a nearly empty stomach. She was surprised to find herself on her knees.

She was even more surprised to find herself walking over the ice. Looking back, she could not find the spot where she had stopped. She must have been moving for some time, and she had no recollection of it.

Things began to fade in and out as she walked. Her vision would narrow as if she were looking through a long pipe; then the edges would redden, and she would have to pick herself up from where she had fallen. Her outline looked comical as she stood there swaying, regarding the human cookie-cutter shape she had made. Snow angels, they were called, and she had no idea how she knew that.

Sometimes people walked beside her. She had a long conversation with Gaby and did not remember she was dead until long after. She fired a shot at what could have been another snow monster or just a gust of snow-laden wind. The gun was deliciously warm for a few minutes after that, and she thought of firing it again until she realized it was pointed at her stomach. When she tried to put it back in her pocket, some of her skin came away, stuck to the metal handle. Part of the tail of one of her snake tattoos went with it. Even worse, the lashes of one eye froze together, and she wasn't seeing all that well out of the open one.

The flashing light, when she saw it, was a bother at first. It irritated her because she could not explain it. She wanted no part of paranormal phenomena like the ghost of Gaby or hallucinations of Chris and Valiha, and she was sure this light was something like that. If she went there, she'd probably find Hautbois all saddled up and ready to gallop away with her.

On second thought, why not? If she were going to die, she might as well do it with a friend. So what if the Titanide was dead? She was not prejudiced. They would have a good laugh, and Hautbois would have to admit that there really was a life after death, that she and her whole race had been wrong about that. She laughed at the thought and struck out over the low rise where the light had been.

She was considerably sobered when she reached it, aware of how dangerously close to complete delirium she was getting. She had to keep her wits about her. The light was real, and though she had no idea what it might be, if it wasn't her salvation, then she had none.

Her vision was getting worse. If she had not run into the metal leg, she might well have blundered past it and into oblivion. But the thing rang when her head hit it, and she staggered up one more time, dazed, and peered up into the darkness. A red light was flashing up there, once every ten or fifteen seconds. She could dimly make out a building set on four stilts tied together with metal girders like a fire lookout tower. The tower was about ten meters high. There was a ladder with wooden rungs that went all the way to the top.

Something caught her eye beside the ladder. It was a small sign set just below eye level. She brushed snow away and read it:

PLAUGET CONSTRUCTION COMPANY REFUGE NUMBER ELEVEN

"WELCOME, TRAVELERS!"

-Gaby Plauget, Prop.

Robin blinked at it, read it through several times to see if it would fade away as Gaby's ghost had. It didn't. She licked her lips and fumbled around, trying to get a grip on the wooden rungs. Her hands would not work. Still, it was thoughtful of Gaby to have made the ladder from wood, she thought, recalling the terrible cold of the metal gun butt.

So she hooked her arms over the rungs and dragged herself up that way. She had to look down to see if her feet were on the steps; she could not feel them. Three steps and rest, then five and rest again, then three, then two. Then not even one. She could not raise herself any higher. She looked down and saw that she was almost halfway up, so she must have blacked out and lost count. She looked up and it might as well have been Mount Everest.

So close.

The door opened above her. A face peered down over a narrow ledge. She hoped it was Cirocco because she could believe that; the Wizard had business in Thea-good, sound, logical business. If it were anyone else, she would know it was a mirage, a phantom.

"Robin? Is that you?"

She smelled coffee and something cooking on the stove. That was too good to be true, and no, it was not Cirocco. It was so ridiculous there was no point in even bothering to look back because the face she finally recognized belonged to Trini, her lover a million years ago back in Titantown. At that instant she knew it was all a dream, probably the tower as well as Trini.

She let go and landed on her back in a deep snowdrift.

Cirocco's money had been piling up on Earth for more than seventy-five years. There were the royalties from her scholarly works and travelogs of Gaea and from her autobiography, I Chose Adventure (publisher's title, not her own), which had been a best seller and the subject of two movies and a television series. In addition, she owned a piece of the cocaine trade which was quite lucrative. There was even the NASA salary accrued during the voyage of Ringmaster, until her resignation.

She had hired a Swiss investment counselor and a Brazilian lawyer and given them two instructions: to keep her ahead of inflation and to avoid confiscation of assets by communist governments. She had hinted that she would like her money to go into firms dealing in space travel and that she would not like it to be used in ways contrary to the interests of the United States. Her lawyer had suggested the last requirement was old-fashioned and almost impossible to define anymore, and she wrote back saying that Earth was full of lawyers. He got the point, and his descendants were still working for her.

After that she forgot about it. Twice a year she got a report, which she would open to glance at the bottom line, then throw away. Her fortune weathered two depressions when countless short-lived investors were wiped out. Her agents knew she could look to the long term and knew she would not get excited by temporary losses. There had been bad years, but the overall trend had been relentless growth.

It all had been a meaningless abstraction. Why should she care to know that she owned X kilograms of gold, Y percent of corporation Y Prime, and Z deutsche marks in rare postage stamps and works of art? If the report arrived on a dull day, she might spend a few minutes chuckling over the lists of assets, from airliners to Airedales, from Renoirs to rental housing. Only once did she send a letter, when she discovered by accident that she owned the Empire State Building and that it was scheduled for demolition. She told them to restore it again, instead, and lost millions during the next two years. After that she made it all back, and her agents undoubtedly thought she was a financial genius, but she had spared the building because her mother had taken her to the top when she was seven years old, and it was one of her fondest memories of her mother.

She had thought from time to time of willing her fortune to someone or something, but she was so removed from Earthly concerns she had no idea where it would do any good. She and Gaby used to laugh at thoughts of picking a name from the phone bank and dumping it all on one person or of endowing homes for unwed goldfish.