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Hills, and when the bus after a series of smooth ascensions gained a height, Pierce supposed that those hills, green then blue, then so faint as to meld into the pale horizon and disappear, were they.
    He rolled a cigarette and lit it.
    The first two of his three wishes (and of course there would be three, Pierce had studied the triads that cluster everywhere in Northern mythology—whence it seemed most likely his fortune would come—and had his own ideas as to why it had to be three and not more or fewer) had for some time been in their present form. They seemed airtight, clinker-built, foolproof to him, he had even recommended them to others, like standard legal forms.
    He wished, first of all, for the lifelong and long-lived mental and physical health and safety of himself and those whom he loved, nothing asked for in a subsequent wish to abrogate this. Something of a portmanteau wish, but an absolutely necessary piece of caution, considering.
    Next he wished for an income, not burdensomely immense but sufficient, safe from the fluctuations of economic life, requiring next to no attention on his part and not distorting his natural career: a winning lottery ticket, along with some careful investment advice, being more the idea than, say, having some book he might write thrust magically onto the bestseller list with all the attendant talk-show and interview business, awful, whatever pleasure he might have in such fame and fortune spoiled by his knowledge that it was fake—that would be selling his soul to the devil, which by definition works out badly; no, he wanted something much more neutral.
    Which left one more, the third wish, the odd one, the rogue wish. Pierce shuddered to think what would have become of him if one or another of his adolescent versions of this wish had been granted; at later times in his life he would have wasted it getting himself out of jams and troubles which he had got out of anyway without a wish's help. And even if, now, he could decide what he wanted, which he had never finally done, wisdom would be needed, and courage, and wits; here was danger, and the chance for strange bliss. The third wish was the world-changing one of the triad, and it was hedged around in his mind with strictures, taboos, imperatives moral and categorical: because, for Pierce Moffett anyway, the game was no fun unless all the consequences of any tentative third wish could be taken into account; unless he could imagine, with great and true vividness, what it would really be like to have it come true.
    World peace and suchlike enormous altruisms he had long dismissed as unworkable or worse, at bottom solipsistic delusions of the Midas kind, only unselfish instead of selfish: obverse of the same counterfeit coin. No one could be wise enough to gauge the results of imposing such abstractions on the world, there was no way of knowing what alterations in human nature and life might be required to bring about such an end, and as the CVD Brothers had taught him at St. Guinefort's, if you will the end you must axiomatically will the means. Any power strong enough to remold the whole great world nearer to the heart's desire Pierce had in any case no desire to match wits with. No: whatever destiny a man's three wishes compelled him to, hilarious or tragic or sweet, it was his destiny, as they were his wishes: he should leave the world alone to wish its own.
    Power: there was a sense in which, of course, all wishing was wishing for power, power over the ordinary circumstances of life one is subject to; but that was a different matter from actually wishing for power in the narrower sense, strength, subjection of others to your will, your enemies your footstool. This whole huge field of human desire was in some way alien to Pierce, power had never figured in his daydreams, he could somehow never manage to imagine power very vividly in his own hands, but only as it might be used against him; freedom from power was his only true wish