"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-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."