Wizard (2 page)

All her planning came to naught when Oceanus, ever eager for a chance to sabotage Gaea in any way he could, destroyed
DSV Ringmaster
, the first ship to reach her. But the humans failed to fulfill her worst expectations. The second ship, though armed and ready to destroy her, stayed its hand long enough for explanations to be made. In this Gaea was aided by the surviving members of the first expedition. An embassy was established, and everyone politely ignored the ship which took station at a safe distance, never to leave her neighborhood again. She did not worry about it. She had no intention of ever provoking it to loose its deadly cargo, and Oceanus’s range of mischief was limited.

Scientists came to study. Later, tourists came to do what tourists do. She admitted anyone as long as he signed a statement absolving her from responsibility.

In due time she was recognized by the Swiss government and allowed to establish a consulate in Geneva. Other nations quickly followed, and by 2050 she had become a voting member of the United Nations.

She looked forward to spending her declining years studying the endless complications of the human species. But she knew that for real security the human race must need her. She must become indispensable, at the same time making it clear that it would be impossible for any one nation to claim her as its prize.

She soon found a way to accomplish that.

She would perform miracles.

The Titanide galloped from the fog like a fugitive from a demented carousel. Take a traditional centaur—half horse, half human—and paint it in Mondrian white lines and squares of red, blue, and yellow: that was the Titanide. She was a nightmare quilt from hooves to eyebrows, and she was running for her life.

She thundered down the seawall road, arms held out behind her like the silver lady on a Rolls-Royce, steam snorting from her wide nostrils. Close behind her was the mob, riding tiny citipeds and brandishing fists and clubs. Above them a police Maria slid into position, bellowing orders that could not be heard over the hoot of its klaxons.

Chris’fer Minor backed farther into the arched tunnel where he had hidden when he heard the sound of the riot horns. He pulled his jacket tight around his neck, wishing he had chosen another refuge. The Titanide was sure to head for the fort as the only cover in sight. There was nowhere else to go except the bridge, protected behind a high fence, and the Bay.

But the Bay was where she headed. She flew over the cracked asphalt of the parking lot and leaped the suspended chain barrier at the edge of the seawall. The jump was of Olympic caliber. She was beautiful in the air, sailing far enough to clear the rocks and most of the shallow, foamy water. The splash was awesome. Her head and shoulders emerged, then more of her until she looked like a human standing in waist-deep water.

The people were not satisfied. They began to tear out chunks of asphalt and shy them toward the alien. Chris’fer wondered what the Titanide had done. This mob had none of the feral festivity of pure alien-baiters. They were angry about something specific.

The rioteer in the hovering Maria turned on the sunburn gun, a device normally reserved for use against armed disturbances. Clothes began to smolder, hair to crackle and curl. In no time the parking lot was empty, and the former mob sizzled and cursed in the cold Bay waters.

Chris’fer heard the drone of approaching paddycopters. It was hardly the first riot he had witnessed. While he was curious about the cause, he knew that hanging around was a sure way to spend the week in jail. He turned and passed through the short corridor into the oddly shaped brick building.

Inside was a trapezoidal concrete courtyard. It was surrounded by a three-tiered gallery. The outer wall was pierced regularly by half-meter square holes. There was not much else to say about the building; it was an abandoned hulk, but a well-swept one. Here and there wooden easels supported signs with old-fashioned gold lettering on them, pointing the way to various parts of the building, giving history and details in small print.

Near the center of the courtyard was a brass flagpole. At the top a flag whipped in the stiff breeze coming through the Golden Gate: centered in a field of black, a six-spoked golden wheel. It was impossible to look up at that flag without having one’s eye drawn farther, to the imposing sight of the bridge span hanging unsupported in space.

This was Fort Point, constructed in the nineteenth century to protect the entrance to the Bay. All its cannons were gone now. It would have been a redoubtable defense against an enemy from the sea, but none had ever come. Fort Point had never fired a shot in anger.

He wondered if the builders had thought their creation would last two hundred and fifty years, structurally unchanged from the day the last brick was laid. He suspected they had, but would have been dumbfounded to stand where he now stood, to look up at the orange metal of the bridge arching so insolently over the brick behemoth.

Actually, the bridge had not fared nearly so well. After it had been brought down in the quake of ’45, it had been fifteen years before a new roadway was slung between the undamaged towers.

Chris’fer took a deep breath and shoved his hands into his pockets. He had been trying to put off what he had come here for, terrified of being turned down. But it had to be done. There was a sign indicating his direction. It said:

THIS WAY TO THE GAEAN EMBASSY

THE AMBASSADOR IS IN

The word “in” was on a dirty piece of cardboard hanging from a nail.

He followed the pointing hand through a door and into a hallway. Interior doors opened right and left into bare brick rooms. The Gaean Embassy held nothing but a metal desk and some hay bales stacked against a wall. Chris’fer entered, then saw there was a Titanide sprawled behind the desk.

She wore a comic-opera uniform on her human torso, festooned with brass and braid. Her horse body was palomino, and so were the hands and forearms that protruded from her jacket sleeves. She was apparently asleep, snoring like a chain saw. She embraced a gold military shako with a long white plume, her head thrown back to expose a tawny palomino throat. There was an empty liquor bottle sitting tilted in the hat, and another beside her left hind leg.

“Is somebody out there?” The voice from behind an interior door marked
Her Excellency, Dulcimer (Hypomixolydian Trio) Cantata
. “Tirarsi, show them in, will you?” There was a tremendous sneeze, followed by a snort.

Chris’fer went to the door, opened it hesitantly, and stuck his head in. He saw another Titanide sitting behind a desk.

“Your … ah … she appears to be passed out.”

The Titanide snorted again. “She’s a he,” Ambassador Cantata said. “And it ain’t unusual. She’s spun so far off the wheel she doesn’t even remember how it turned.” “Spinning off the wheel” was rapidly
replacing “falling off the wagon” and other euphemisms for a drinking problem. Titanides brought to Earth were notorious drunks. It was not just the alcohol—which they had known before they left Gaea—but the maguey plant. Its fermented, distilled nectar was so adored by Titanides that Mexico was one of the few Earth nations with a Gaean export trade.

“Come in, then,” the ambassador said. “Take a seat over there. I’ll be with you in a minute, but first I have to see where Tzigane got to.” She started to rise.

“If you mean a sort of quilted Titanide, she jumped into the Bay.”

The ambassador froze with her hindquarters nearly up and her hands flat on the desk. Slowly her rump settled again.

“There’s only one ‘quilted Titanide’ in West America, and he’s a male, and his name is Tzigane.” She narrowed her eyes at Chris’fer. “Was this a recreational plunge, or did he have a more pressing reason?”

“I’d say he discovered a sudden need to be in Marin County. There were about fifty people chasing him.”

She grimaced. “Hanging around bars again. He got one taste of human ass, and now he can’t seem to get enough. Well, sit down, I’ll have to try to square this with the police.” She picked up an old-fashioned blind phone and told it to connect her with City Hall. Chris’fer pulled the only chair in the room closer to the desk and sat on it. While she talked, he looked around her office.

It was large, as it had to be to accommodate a Titanide. It contained many nineteenth- and twentieth-century antiques and art objects, but very little furniture. A long-handled water pump was bolted to the floor in one corner, and the bare bulb that hung from the center of the room was hooded by a leaded Tiffany shade. A freestanding wood stove was near the room’s only window. There were paintings and posters on the walls: a Picasso, a Warhol, a J&G Minton, and a little black sign with orange letters reading “Some Day I’m Going to Have to Get ORGANIZED!” Behind the desk were two photos and a portrait. They depicted Johann Sebastian Bach, John Philip Sousa, and Gaea as seen from
space. On the desk was a silver bucket of limes.

Half the floor was covered in a thin layer of hay. There were bales of it stacked in a corner. Ambassador Cantata hung up the phone and reached for an open bottle of tequila and the bucket, popped a lime into her mouth, crunched it, and drank half the bottle. She made a face at him.

“You wouldn’t have any salt, would you?”

He shook his head.

“Too bad. Want a drink? How about a lime? I think I have a knife… .” She started to rummage through drawers, stopped when he politely refused.

“He looked like a female to me,” Chris’fer said.

“Huh? Oh, you mean Tzigane. No, I’m familiar with the mistake—it was the breasts that fooled you; we all have them—but he’s a male. It’s the frontal organs that determine it. Between the front legs. Tzigane’s are kind of hard to see from a distance, with that pattern of squares. I, for your information, am female, you may call me Dulcimer, and what is your name and what can I do for you?” He sat up a little straighter. “My name is Chris’fer Minor, and I want a visa. I’d like to see Gaea.”

She had written his name on a form from a stack on her desk. Now she looked up and moved the form away.

“We sell visas in all the major airports,” she said. “No need to see me. Just come up with the cash and put it in the vending machine.”

“No,” he said, voice a little unsteady. “I want to see Gaea herself. I have to see her. She’s my last chance.”

“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 …(“WA3874–456–11093, 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.