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."

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 .