by John Varley
"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."
3 The Screamer
The Coven was established late in the twentieth century, though not under that name. It was more political than religious. Most accounts of the group's early days state that the original members were not at first serious about many of the things they did. Few of them believed in the Great Mother or in magic. Witchcraft was, at first, merely a social glue that held the community together.
As time went on and the dilettantes grew bored, as the moderate and the fainthearted moved away, the remaining core began to take its rituals seriously indeed. Rumors of human sacrifice began to be heard. It was said the women on the hill were drowning newborn male babies. The resulting attention served to draw the group tighter against a hostile outside world. They moved several times, ending in a remote corner of Australia. There the Coven surely would have perished, since all had sworn not to reproduce until parthenogenesis was a reality. But the Screamer arrived and changed all that.
The Screamer was an asteroid-millions of tonnes of metallic iron, nickel, and ice, with impurities running through it like the veins in a cat's-eye marble-that became, one fine May morning, a sizzling line of light through the southern sky. The ice burned away, but the iron, nickel, and impurities smashed into the desert on the edge of property owned by the Coven. One of the impurities was gold. Another was uranium.
It was well that the Screamer hit near the edge since even at that distance the blast killed sixty percent of the faithful. News of the asteroid's composition quickly spread. Overnight the Coven changed from just another forgotten deathlehem into a religion rich enough to stand beside the Catholics, the Mormons, and the Scientologists.
It also brought the group unwanted attention. The Australian Outback would seem an unlikely place to begin a search for a refuge remote from society, but the desert had proved far too reachable. The Coven wanted to find a new meaning for the word "remote."
This was the 2030's , and it so happened there was an ideal place to go.
When two bodies orbit around a common center of gravity, as the Earth-Moon system does, five points of gravitational stability are created. Two are in the orbit of the smaller body, but sixty degrees removed. One is between the two bodies; another, on the far side of the smaller one. They are called LaGrangian points and designated L1 through L5 .
L4 and L5 already held colonies and more were building. L2 seemed the best choice. From there the Earth would be completely hidden by the Moon.
They built the Coven there. It was a cylinder seven kilometers long with a radius of two kilometers. Artificial gravity was provided by spin; night, by closing the windows.
But the days of isolation were over almost before they began. The Coven was one of the first nongovernmental groups to move into space in a big way, but they were not the last. Soon the techniques of space colonization were refined, cheapened, standardized. Construction companies began to turn them out the way Henry Ford had turned out Model T's. They ranged in size from the merely gigantic to the Brobdingnagian.
The neighborhood began to look like Levittown, and the neighbors were odd. Just about any sizable lunatic fringe, band of separatists, or shouting society could now afford to homestead in the LaGrangians. L2 became known as Sargasso Point to the pilots who carefully avoided it; those who had to travel through it called it the Pinball Machine, and they didn't smile.
Some of the groups couldn't be bothered with the care and feeding of complex machinery. They expected to exist in pure pastoral squalor inside what was really just a big hollow coffee can. The developers were often happy to accommodate them, reasoning that all that expensive hardware, if installed, would only be abused. Every few years one of these colonies would come apart and fling itself and its inhabitants across the sky. More often, something would go wrong with the ecology and people would starve or suffocate. There was always someone willing to take one of the resulting hulks, sterilize it with free vacuum, and move in at a bargain price. The Earth never ran short of the alienated and the dissatisfied. The United Nations was happy to get rid of them and did not ask too many questions. It was a time of speculation-of instant fortunes and shoddy practices. Deals were made that would have shocked a Florida real estate developer.
The Sargasso Point incubated cultures more like carcinomas than communities. The most repressive regimes humanity had ever known took shape and died in the LaGrangians.
The Coven was not one of them. Though they had been around only fifty years at L2, it qualified them as founders. Like the first settlers everywhere, they were appalled at the quality of people moving in around them. Their own early days were forgotten now. Age, wealth, and the unforgiving environment had mellowed then hardened them into a viable group with a surprising amount of personal freedom. Liberalism had reared its head. Reform groups had replaced the original hard-liners. Ritual was once more put in the background, and the women turned to what most of them had no way of knowing was actually the group's original ethic: lesbian separatism. The term "lesbian" was no longer strictly accurate. On Earth, for many of the women, lesbianism had been a response to injustices suffered from the male sex. In space, in isolation, it became the natural order, the unquestioned basis of all reality. Males were dimly recalled abstractions, ogres to frighten children, and not very interesting ogres at that.
Parthenogenesis was still a dream. To conceive, the women had to import sperm. Eugenics was easy in one sense: male fetuses could be detected early and stilled in the womb. But with sperm, as with everything else, the watchwords were still caveat emptor.
4 Little Giant
Robin toed herself lightly down the curved corridor. The gravity at the hub masked her weariness, but she felt it in her back and shoulders. Even downheavy she would not have shown it or the weight of depression she always carried from watchstanding.
She wore a white, water-coole
d vacuum suit of ancient vintage, her gloves and boots stuffed into the helmet carried under her arm. The suit was cracked and patched, its metalwork tarnished.
Hanging from the utility belt were a Colt .45 automatic in a handmade holster and a carved wooden fetish festooned with feathers and a bird's claw. Barefoot, with long finger- and toenails painted dark red, hair blond and unkempt, lips stained purple, bells hanging from pierced earlobes and nostril, she might have been a barbarian sacking technology's greatest achievement. But looks can be deceiving.
Her right arm began to tremble. She stopped and looked at her hand with no change of expression, but the emerald Eye tattooed in the center of her forehead began to weep sweat. Hatred boiled up like an old friend. The hand was not her, could not be her hand, because that would mean the weakness was hers, and not something visited on her from the outside. Her eyes narrowed.
"Stop that," she whispered, "or I will cut you off." She meant every word and dug her thumbnail into the patch of scar tissue where her little finger had been to prove to herself that she meant it. The hardest part, surprisingly, had been getting the knife to the right spot with a hand that jerked at random. It had hurt, but the attack had vanished in the amazing agony.
The shaking stopped. Sometimes the threat was enough.
There was a story that she had bitten off her finger. She had never uttered a word to deny it. There was a quality called labra that the witches valued. It had much to do with honor, with toughness and stoicism, with Eastern concepts of obligation. It might entail dying to a purpose, and with style, or paying any price to cancel debts, to individuals or society. Insisting on standing watches when one was subject to fits of palsy held much labra. Cutting off one's finger to stop the attacks had even more. The witches said Robin had enough labra to fill the wombs of ten ordinary women.
But standing watches when she knew it could endanger the community held no labra at all. Robin knew it, and so did the more thoughtful members of the Coven, those who were not dazzled by her young legend. She stood watches because no one on the council could look into the intensity of her eyes and deny her. The third Eye, impassive and ominiscient, only added weight to her assertion that she could prevent the attacks by sheer effort of will. A dozen witches had earned the right to wear the third Eye, All were twice Robin's age. No one would stand in the way of Robin the Nine-fingered.
