Wizard

by John Varley

  Wizard

  John Varley

  John Varley

  Wizard

  PROLOGUE: Fairest of the Fair

  For three million years Gaea turned in solitary splendor.

  Some of those who lived within her knew of a broader space outside the great wheel. Long before the creation of the angels avian beings flew the towering vaults of her spokes, looked out the clerestory windows, and knew the shape of God. Nowhere in the darkness did they see another like Gaea.

  This was the natural order of things

  God was the world, the world was a wheel, and the wheel was Gaea.

  Gaea was not a jealous God.

  No one had to worship her, and it never occurred to anyone to do so. She demanded no sacrifices, no temples, no choirs singing her praises.

  Gaea basked in the heady energies to be found near Saturn. She had sisters scattered through the galaxy. They too were Gods, but the distance between them enforced Gaea's theology. Her conversations with them spread over centuries at the speed of light. She had children orbiting Uranus. They were Gods to those living inside them, but they hardly mattered. Gaea was the Supreme Titan, the Fairest of the Fair.

  Gaea was not a distant concept to her inhabitants. She could be seen. One could talk to her. To reach her, all one had to do was climb 600 kilometers. It was a formidable trip, but an imaginable distance. It put heaven within reach of those daring enough to make the climb. She averaged one visitor in a thousand years.

  Praying to Gaea was useless. She did not have the time to listen to all those within her, and would not have done so if she could. She would speak only to heroes. She was a God of blood and sinew whose bones were the land, a God with massive hearts and cavernous arteries who nourished her people with her own milk. The milk was not sweet, but there was always enough of it.

  * * *

  When the pyramids were being built on Earth, Gaea became aware of changes going on within her. Her center of consciousness was located in her hub. And yet, in the manner of earthly dinosaurs, her brain was decentralized to provide local autonomy for the more prosaic of her functions. The arrangement kept Gaea from being swamped with detail. It worked very well for a very long time. Around her mighty rim were spaced twelve satellite brains, each responsible for its own region. All acknowledged Gaea's suzerainty; indeed, at first it was hardly proper to speak of her vassal brains as separate from herself

  Time was her enemy. She was intimately acquainted with death, knew its every process and stratagem. She did not fear it. There had been a time when she did not exist, and she knew another such time would arrive. It divided eternity, neatly, into three equal parts.

  She knew Titans were subject to senility-she had listened as three of her sisters degenerated into ravings and fantasy, then fell silent forever. But she could not know how her own aging body would play her false. No human suddenly throttled by her own hands could have been more surprised than Gaea when her provincial brains began to resist her will.

  Three million years of supremacy had ill-prepared Gaea for the arts of compromise. Perhaps she could have lived in peace with her satellite brains had she been willing to listen to their grievances. On the other hand, two of her regions were insane, and another so darkly malevolent that he might as well have been. For a hundred years the great wheel of Gaea vibrated with the stresses of war. Those epic battles came close to destroying her and resulted in huge loss of life among her peoples, who were as helpless as any Hindu before the Gods of Vedic myth.

  No titanic figures strode the curve of Gaea's wheel, throwing thunderbolts and mountains. The Gods in this struggle were the lands themselves. Reason vanished as the ground opened and fires fell from the spokes. Civilizations a hundred thousand years old were swept away without trace, and others fell into savagery.

  Gaea's twelve regions were too headstrong, too unreliable to unite against her. Her most faithful ally was the land of Hyperion; her implacable enemy, Oceanus. They were adjacent territories. Both were devastated before the war became an armed truce.

  But revolt and war were not to be enough disgrace for an elderly God; elsewhere worse disaster approached. In the wink of an eye the airwaves were flooded with the most astonishing noises. At first she thought it was a new symptom of encroaching dotage. Surely she had invented these impossible voices from space with names like Lowell Thomas, Fred Allen, and the Cisco Kid. But she eventually caught on to the trick. She became an avid listener. Had there been mail service to Earth she would have sent in Ovaltine labels for magic decoder rings. She loved Fibber McGee and was a faithful fan of Amos and Andy.

  Television hit her as hard as talkies had stunned audiences in the late 1920's. As in the early days of radio, for many years most television was of American origin, and it was these programs she liked best. She followed the exploits of Lucy and Ricky and had all the answers to The $64,000 Question, which she was scandalized to discover was rigged. She watched everything, something she suspected not even the producers of many of the shows did.

  There were movies and there was news. In the electronic explosion of the eighties and nineties there was much more as entire libraries were transmitted. But by that time her studies of human culture were more than academic. Watching Neil Armstrong's performance confirmed something she had long suspected. Humans would come calling by and by.

  She began preparing to meet them. The outlook was not good. They were a warlike breed, possessed of weapons that could vaporize her. They could not be expected to take lightly the presence of a 1,300 kilometer living wheel-God in "their" solar system. She recalled Orson Welles's Halloween broadcast of 1938. She remembered This Island Earth and I Married a Monster from Outer Space.

  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.

  1 The Ambassador

  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 h
e 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 came 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."

  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."