Wizard

2 The Mad Major

"So it's miracles you're wantin', then," the Titanide said in a flawless Irish accent. "You want to stand in the high place and ask Gaea to grant you a great wish. You want her to spend her precious time on a problem that seems important to you."

"Something like that." He paused, stuck out his lower lip. "Exactly like that, I guess."

"Let me guess. A medical problem. Further, a fatal medical problem."

"Medical. Not fatal. See, it's-"

"Hold on, wait a minute." She raised her hands, palms facing him. This was going to be a brush-off, Chris realized.

"Let me fill in some more of this form before we go on. Is there an apostrophe in Chris'fer?" She licked the tip of her pencil and filled in the date at the top of the page.

The next ten minutes were taken up with the information asked for in every government office in the world: unident number, spouse's name, age, sex ... ("WA3874-456-nog3, none, twenty-nine, hetero male ..." ). By the age of six any human could recite it asleep.

"Reason for wishing to see Gaea," the Titanide read.

Chris'fer fitted his fingertips together, partially hiding his face behind them.

"I have this condition. It's ... rather hard to describe. It's a glandular or neurological thing; they're not really sure. There's only a hundred cases of it so far, and the only name for it is Syndrome 2096 dash 15. What happens is I lose contact with reality. Sometimes it's extreme fear. Other times I go off into delusional worlds and am likely to do just about anything. Sometimes I don't remember it. I hallucinate, I speak in tongues, and my Rhine potential alters sharply. I get very lucky, believe it or not. One doctor suggested it was this extra psi that's kept me out of trouble so far. I haven't killed anyone or tried to fly by stepping off a building."

The Titanide snorted. "You sure you want to be cured? Most of us could do with a little extra luck."

"This isn't funny, not to me. No drug stops it; all I can do is be tranquilized when it happens. For years I've been put through every psychological diagnosis there is, and all it did was prove that the problem is medical. There is no trauma in my past causing it, and no current problem, either. I only wish there was. They can adjust anything psychological. Gaea is my last hope. If she turns me down, I'll have to go into a hospital for life." Without realizing it, he had made his hands into a hard knot at his chin. He relaxed them.

The ambassador regarded him with huge, fathomless eyes, then looked back to her form. Chris'fer watched her write. In the space marked "Reason for visa:" she wrote "ill." She frowned at it, scratched it out, and wrote "crazy."

He felt his ears burning. He was going to protest, but she asked another question.

"What's your favorite color?"

"Blue. No, green... is that really on there?"

She turned the form slightly, let him see that, yes, that really was on there.

"Are you sticking to green?"

Baffled, he nodded slowly.

"How old were you when you lost your virginity?"

"Fourteen."

"What was his or her name, and what color were his or her eyes?"

"Lyshia. Blue-green."

"Did you ever have sex with him or her again?"

"No."

"Who, in your opinion, is the greatest musician of the past or present?"

Chris'fer was getting angry. Privately he thought Rea Pashkorian must be the best; he had all her tapes.

"John Philip Sousa."

She grinned without looking up, and he could not understand it.

He had expected an admonition to be serious or to stop trying to curry favor, but she seemed to be sharing the joke. With a sigh, he settled in for the rest of the questions.

They got less and less relevant to his proposed trip. Just when he thought he had a pattern, the emphasis would change. Some questions involved moral situations; others seemed random madness. He tried to be serious, not knowing how much this questioning would affect his chances of getting in. He began to perspire, though the room was cold. There was just no telling what the right answers were, so all he could do was be honest. He had been told that Titanides were good at detecting falsehoods from humans.

But at last he had had enough.

"Two children are tied down in the path of an approaching gravity train. You have time to release only one of them. They are both strangers to you, both the same age. One is a boy, and one is a girl. Which do you rescue?

"The girl. No, the boy. No, I'd rescue one and go back and ... damn it! I'm not going to answer any more of these questions until you-"He stopped abruptly. The ambassador had thrown her pencil across the room and now sat with her head in her hands. He was seized with a fear so sudden and so intense that he thought it was the beginning of an attack.

She stood and walked toward the wood stove, opened the door in front, and selected several logs. Her back was to him. Her skin was the same color and texture as a Caucasian human's, from head to hooves. Her only hair was on her head and her magnificent tail. While she was sitting behind the desk, it was easy to forget she was not human. When she stood, her alienness was pronounced, precisely because half of her was so unremarkable.

"You don't have to answer any more questions," she said. "Thank Gaea, this time they don't matter." When she spoke Gaea's name, it sounded bitter.

As she fed wood into the stove, her tail flicked over her back and remained arched out of the way. She did what every horse does in every parade-usually in front of the reviewing stand-and with the same lack of shame. It was apparently done without conscious thought. Chris'fer looked away, disturbed by it. Titanides were such an odd mixture of the commonplace and the bizarre.

When she turned, she took a shovel which had been leaning against the wall, scooped up the pile and the straw it had landed on, and tossed it into a bin against the wall. She glanced at him as she sat down and looked wryly amused.

"Now you know why I don't get invited to parties. If I don't think about it all the time, every damn second... ." She let him imagine the consequences.

"What did you mean, this time it doesn't matter?"

Her smile vanished.

"It's out of my hands is what I mean. It's hard to believe, the number of things that kill you humans, and more new ways every year. Do you know how many people ask me to see Gaea? Over two thousand every year, that's how many. Ninety percent of them are dying. I get letters, I get phone calls, I get visits. I get pleas from their children, husbands, and wives. Do you know how many people I can send to Gaea in a year? Ten."

She reached for the tequila bottle and took a long pull. Absently she picked up two limes and ate them in one bite. She was facing the wooden stove, but her eyes were focused at infinity.

"Just ten?"

She turned her head and looked at him with scorn.

"Boy. You're something. You are really something. You had no idea.

"I-

"Spare me. I think you feel pretty sorry for yourself. You think you've got it rough. Fella, I could tell you stories ... never mind. People study for years to learn how to psych me out, me and the three other ambassadors. To be one of the forty." She hit the stack of forms with her fist. "There are books an inch thick analyzing this form, telling people how to answer. Computer studies of how past winners answered." She picked up the stack and hurled it, and it came apart into a short-lived snowstorm that settled all over the room.

"How would you pick? I've approached it every possible way, and there's no good answer. I've tried to think like a human would think, make a decision like a human would, and the first thing they always seem to start out with is nine or a dozen forms, so I wrote up a form and hoped the answers would be in there, but they weren't, any more than they were in the crystal ball or the damn dice. Yeah, I actually own a crystal ball. And I've shot craps for people's lives. And nineteen hundred and ninety of my decisions every year are still wrong. I've done my best, I swear I have, I've tried to do the job right. All I want to do is go back to the wheel."

She sighed so deeply that her nostrils quivered. "There's something about the wheel, I think. Every hour you go through a cycle. You can't feel it, not really, but if it's gone, you know it. You can no longer sense the center of things. The clock of your soul is no longer advancing. Everything has flown apart; everything gets more distant."

When she had been silent for a full minute, Chris'fer cleared his throat.

"I didn't know any of this." She snorted again.

"I'm surprised you came here and took this job, feeling the way you do. And ... I'm surprised that you sound like you resent Gaea. I thought she was, well, like a God to Titanides."

She regarded him levelly, spoke with no emphasis. "She is, Herr Minor. I came here because she is God and because she told me to come. If you meet her, it would be best to remember that. Do what she tells you. As for the resentment, of course I resent it. Gaea doesn't require that you love her. She just wants obedience, and she damn well gets it. Nasty things happen to those who don't listen to her. I'm not talking about going to hell; I'm talking about a demon eating you alive. I don't love her, but I have a tremendous respect for her.

"And you'd better watch it, I'd say. There's a streak of fatalism in you. You came here unprepared, ignorant of things you could have learned if you'd even read the Britannica article. That won't work in Gaea."

Chris'fer slowly realized what she was saying but still could not quite believe it.

"Yes, you're going. Maybe it's your luck working for you. I wouldn't know about luck. But I got a directive from Gaea. She wants some people who are crazy. You're the first one this week who qualifies. I can even feel good about sending you. I was bracing myself for turning down a great humanitarian in favor of some slobbering killer. Compared to that, you'll do fine. Come with me."

The outer office now held a swaying but revived Titanide and three humans. One, a young woman with reddened eyes, came toward the ambassador. She tried to say something involving a child. Dulcimer (Hypomixolydian Trio) Cantata danced nimbly by her and hurried out into the corridor. Chris'fer saw the woman seek comfort in the arms of a hard-faced man. He looked away hurriedly. He could not have seen accusation in her eyes; there was no way she could know he had been chosen.

He caught up with the Titanide in the tunnel and had to jog to equal her walking pace. They went around the fort on the north side, by the Bay.

"Get rid of that apostrophe," she said.

"Huh?"

"In your name. Change it to Chris. I hate the apostrophe.

"Don't make me mention that I wouldn't send someone with a silly name like Chris'fer to Gaea."

"All right, I won't. I mean, I will. Change my name."

She was unlocking a gate in the fence that kept the public away from the bridge. She opened it, and they went through.

"Change your last name to Major. Maybe it'll jar you out of that fatalism."

"I will."

"Have it done in court, and send me the papers."

They reached the bottom of a huge concrete bridge support. A metal ladder had recently been bolted to it. It dwindled in the distance but appeared to reach all the way to the roadway with no safety cage.

"Your passport is on top of the south tower. It's a little Gaean flag, like the one outside the embassy. Climb this ladder, go up the cable, get it, and come back. I'll wait here."

Chris'fer looked at the ladder, then at the ground. He wiped his sweating palms on his pants.

"Can I ask why? I mean, I'll do it if I have to, but what does it mean? It's like a game."

"It is a game, Chris. It is random; it makes no sense. If you can't climb this measly ladder, then you aren't worth sending to Gaea. Come on, get going, kid." She was smiling, and he thought that, despite her professed sympathy for humans, it might amuse her to see him fall. He put his foot on the first rung, reached up, and felt her hand on his shoulder.

"When you get to Gaea," she said, "don't expect too much. From now on you are in the grip of a vast and capricious power."