(Gea 03) Demon by John Varley

Author:John Varley
Language: es
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-12-17T20:52:29.838652+00:00

SEVEN

The Titanides had labored eight revs to produce the feast. There was a whole roasted smiler, and eels and fish cooked, jellied, stuffed back into their skins, and suspended artfully in clear savory aspic. The fruit course was a towering edifice shaped like a Christmas tree, bulging with a hundred varieties of Gaean berries, melons, pomes, and citrines, garnished by leaves of spun green sugar and glowing internally from a myriad glowbes. There were ten pates, seven kinds of bread, three soup tureens, rickety pagodas of smiler ribs, clever pastries with crusts thin as soap bubbles ... the mind reeled. Cirocco had not seen such a spread since the last Purple Carnival, twenty years ago.

There was enough food for a hundred humans or twenty Titanides. With just nine people to eat it all.

Cirocco took a little of this and a little of that, and sat back, chewing slowly, watching her companions. It was a shame, really, that she was not hungrier. Everything tasted very good.

She knew she was the luckiest of women. Long, long ago, when she might have worried about her weight, it had never been necessary. She could eat as much as she wanted and never put on a gram. Since becoming Wizard her mass had been as low as forty kilograms — after a sixty-day fast — and as high as seventy-five. It was largely a matter of conscious choice. Her body had no fixed metabolic set point.

Just now she was at the high end of that range. Three visits to the fountain of youth in less than a kilorev was an unprecedented frequency. She had an even layer of fat all over her body, and her breasts, buttocks, and thighs had become voluptuous. She smiled inwardly, remembering how the tall and gangly, slat-thin fifteen-year-old Cirocco Jones would have killed for breasts like this. The tredenscenial Cirocco found them a minor but necessary nuisance. They would come in handy in the grueling days ahead. Eventually they would be consumed. In the meantime, Conal was acting even more awe-struck than usual. He was sitting to her left, having a good time. Robin sat next to him. They kept offering things to each other. Since no one could eat much of any one thing, it made sense to point out a special delicacy, but Cirocco suspected it was more than that with these two. She thought if the meal had been stale C-rations, they would still be giggling like kids.

I ought to be shocked, Cirocco thought.

She had a feeling it would end badly, that it probably should not have even started. Then she chided herself. That was the safe view. If you looked at life that way, your regrets for things undone and untried would forge an endless chain to rattle in your later years. She silently saluted their courage and wished them well.

The idiots thought no one knew of their clandestine affair. Possibly there were Titanides in Hyperion who didn't know about it, but certainly none here in Dione.

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