Wizard
Authors: John Varley
Explore the Incredible Worlds
of John Varley …
“John Varley has had extraordinary success in giving readers the experience of living in the future.”
—Robert Silverberg,
The Washington Post
The Gaean Trilogy
“A seething, monumental trilogy … Grand-scale entertainment—violent, witty, irreverent, tirelessly inventive … This’ll have readers guessing and gasping right up to the end.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
Titan
“Big, brassy, and beautiful. I read the last page and muttered, ‘Wow.’”
—Michael Bishop
“Fast-paced and involving!”
—
The Washington Post
Wizard
“An extraordinary feat of storytelling.”
—
Fantasy Review
“Superb.”
—UPI
Demon
“
Demon
destroyed my preconceived ideas about science fiction … An epic climax.”
—
San Francisco Chronicle
“Magnificent … I can’t tell you all the adventure and glory and horror and laughter and sheer joy there is in reading this book.”
—
Fantasy Review
Discover the Other Works of John Varley …
Steel Beach
“I’ve been saying for years that John Varley is the best writer in America. This book proves it.”
—Tom Clancy
Books by John Varley
The Ophiuchi Hotline
The Persistence of Vision
Picnic on Nearside
(
formerly titled
THE BARBIE MURDERS
)
Millennium
Blue Champagne
Steel Beach
The Golden Globe
Red Thunder
Mammoth
Red Lightning
Rolling Thunder
Slow Apocalypse
The Gaean Trilogy
Titan
Wizard
Demon
The John Varley Reader: Thirty Years of Short Fiction
JOHN
VARLEY
WIZARD
ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) * Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England * Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) * Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) * Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India * Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) * Penguin Books (South Africa), Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa * Penguin China, B7 Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
WIZARD
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley/Putnam edition / August 1980
Berkley edition / January 1981
Eleventh printing / June 1986
Ace mass-market edition / April 1987
Copyright © 1979 by John Varley.
Cover art by Todd Cameron Hamilton.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ISBN: 978-1-101-62328-2
ACE
Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
For
K.L. King,
Kenneth J. Alford,
and
John Philip Sousa
ONTENTS
16. The Circumnavigators’ Club
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 1920s. 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
.