The forward screen activated, startling him. The circle emblem of the Anethine Amphictyony filled it.
"Gentlebeing," a voice said softly, "you are departing Second Rank. Should your vehicle appear to pause any lengthy time, do not take alarm. The questions asked by preceding visitors may vary in length of time required for the Oracle to answer. A complex question may thus delay all succeeding vehicles. You may be assured that you will be advanced through the sequence as rapidly as possible. Should you need at any time to contact a living being, please press the red button by the screen. Please use this emergency facility with some restraint. There is an automat to your left if you wish refreshment; other facilities are likewise marked in the access. You are free to move about the vehicle with some caution.
"As regards your safety, please note that all First Rank facilities are automated. You will not directly contact any First Rank resident, nor will you be observed by any save of course the Oracle herself. Rules of access to the audience chamber are strictly enforced. You will find them posted on the wall of this car and clearly displayed in your native tongue on the screens of the audience chamber. For violation of minor rules, a two-year ban from consultation; for major violations, a lifetime ban for the individual and the sponsor according to the average lifetime of the species; for threat against the Oracle, defense mechanisms will act instantly and fatally against the individual and full sanctions of the Amphictyony will be invoked against the sponsor. Please stay within the white lines at all times and obey oral and written instructions. The machines are programmed to assist you. Should you decide that you do not wish to continue, press the red button and ask to be returned to Second Rank. You will be transferred back as rapidly as systems traffic permits. We do however assure you that there is no hazard so long as you observe the white lines and follow instructions. We sincerely hope you will continue to the audience chamber and we assure you that all precautions are in the interest of providing you and those who follow you with a safe and thoroughly productive encounter."
Cosean shivered despite himself. He was offended by the implied threat. Aneth was arrogant. The arrogance was apparently offered all comers, and therefore the threat gave him no excuse to withdraw. The High Ministry expected results. It rested on him. He sat, arms folded, senses at forced alertness, and wished that there were something with which to occupy himself.
Three times the Confederacy had submitted a representative to this irritating procedure. There were great powers which consulted continually at enormous expense. Use of the Oracle approached on some worlds the aspect of a cult, a religion.
True, others had attempted to expose it. . . trap-questions, tricks, all unsatisfactory in result. The myth persisted undiminished. The Oracle declared past, present, and near future . . . save on rare and cataclysmic occasion, in which the range seemed extended. Half an Anethine year was the normal limit.
(Thus securing, Cosean thought cynically, a guaranteed return trade from the wealthy, on whom Aneth spent most research; and thus shielding itself from later complaints from the vast multitudes of individuals who could not afford that every-six-months consultation.)
Researchers, allegedly reputable, had played with it . . . so the Corielli government insisted. Corporations had recourse to it; and knowing that fourteen worlds had paid to establish the Enclave, other worlds and the great inter-zone corporations had become involved. From there it was only a step to what it now embraced, the great powers, in increasing numbers and with increasing frequency, human and now nonhuman.
Thus the Amphictyony, the Neighbors of Aneth. War might break out, but the Pact guaranteed Aneth's safety, for a violator would find practically the totality of man and several polities outside ranged against him, some of whom might be fanatic enough to act. It was not strategically wise . . . to harass Aneth.
So Aneth, serene, untouchable . . . allegedly incorruptible and immune to influence . . . advised and prophesied and moved the policy of super-nations and zones.
Amphictyony: he had researched the word, which was old, and terrestrial. There had been a place named Delphi, another Sibyl, a league ranged about that side which extended influence not alone through one nation but throughout the cradle of human civilization. Similar sanctions had attended it. Similar claims surrounded it. Wars had protected it. It was gone now, but ancient history returned to haunt them, a concept still powerful in superstition. Amphictyony: the Dwellers-round-about-Shrine; the word translated into other species' tongues. There were everywhere legends of Oracles.
Cosean found the blind walls suddenly oppressive.
Gods, he thought, forgetting that the Technarchy acknowledged none, what manner of thing is this? The Ministry sits secure. I am the one exposed to this thing. Suppose that there are subtle emanations.
I am mad to have come this far.
His finger hovered over the red button. Panic coursed over him, which had nothing to do with conspiracies and politics. It was something primal and ugly. He fought it down, remembering his duty.
And the vehicle stopped.
Dead. The machinery rested in utter stillness.
Waited.
The fourteen Intimates at in their circle, hands demurely folded, observing the old woman's sleep. They waited, with downcast eyes, mental zero, for the Vision was silent.
Mishell trembled.
And thrust herself to her feet.
The thirteen lifted their faces and stared, round-eyed.
Mishell crossed the polished floor to the Oracle's couch.
Maranthe still smiled in her sleep. The bliss, spread now even to these hours, maddened, mocked them. Mishell smoothed the thin gray hair, touched the age-spotted temple, the cheek, the frail throat . . . closed her hands, pressed. Something snapped. The smile ceased. The blind eyes opened, forever blind.
There came a soft fluttering about the room, Servants on their feet, whispering in dismay.
Mishell hurled the body to the cold floor, where it lay, graceless and half-naked. She sat down on the Oracle's bed, trembling, as the others surrounded her.
Soft hands touched her, smoothed her robes, her hair, wiped the perspiration from her brow. Anxious faces hovered near. Trays, long prepared, rattled in shaking hands.
"Drink, Mishell."
"Eat, Mishell."
"Time to go back, Mishell."
How easy it was, she thought, and smiled. Of course they must hold to the tradition. That is all they know. It was only I who dreamed the dream.
She mounted the steps.
Seated herself. Extended her hands over the cold plates. The lights flared.
The car moved.
Cosean caught himself with a gasp. The car ran smoothly only a little distance into a dock. Locks meshed. The windows unsealed, revealing a dim, circular steel hall garishly lit by screens. He disembarked cautiously, keeping well within the white lines marked on the floor.
At his left a huge screen lighted, showing a vast interplay of light and machinery. There seemed a. mote of a white-robed figure locked within it, on a manner of throne.
The Anethine Sibyl? he wondered. Is it screen or window? The white lines did not permit near approach. He felt an unaccustomed awe, and loathed it, fighting for his fashionable cynicism.
A light flashed, the question symbol.
Cosean cleared his throat, stood squarely between the white lines at the nearest approach. "Sibyl, the Shantran Technarchy asks: What are the surest means to guarantee our increased prosperity?
Wait, the screen flashed. A light came on to indicate a bench. Cosean sat down and waited. The temperature of the air was neutral, the lighting dim, sound lacking. Time distended.
The light flashed. He arose. A white paper began to issue from the console before him. He took it for his answer, vaguely angry at the mechanical character of the response. He tore it free of the machine.
"Shantran Technarchy." The machine's voice seemed to vibrate through his bones. Female, if a machine could be female. The Sibyl?
"You will most surely prosper through peace with your neighbors."
Swill, he thought, almost shaking with sudden relief. It's after all a sham.
". . . The resources for which you prepare to go to war, Shantran Technarchy, lie within your own domains, on the second planet of the star Dazech, as yet undiscovered. Seek there. The resources are more than adequate for your needs. Precise coordinates are noted on the printed response. The audience is ended."
He stood still a moment. The window went dark. He turned finally in the direction of available light and reentered the car, seated himself, still clutching the paper. The car slid away from the station, the windows darkened and sealed.
Cosean was shaking.
He unfolded the paper and stared at the answer and the coordinates.
The Oracle gave an answer the accuracy of which could be checked . . . dared give something of such value.
It was . . . real.
A great gift first. . . to ensure that the Technarchy returned to consult again.
But then they could not longer afford to stay out of the close circle of the Pact; no government could abstain from its constant advice, its close direction . . . if the Oracle gave true answers.
And in his keenest fears . . . it did.
Faces blurred, flesh indistinct, so many, men and non-men, far-scattered, ambitions and fears and desires, empires and all of time.
Maranthe, Mishell, the same pattern . . . diamonds and helices of life, bright tapestry.
Bodies of the Builders, globular, many-legged, and slender and fine the filaments they spun. The mythic Fates were weavers, and the pattern was one, and old.
Mishell saluted them who waited—and felt awe, seeing all the web before her, knowing now the immediate design.
Draw in a thread here, a new color, bind it fast. A design became complete, begun in remotest antiquity, at an old, old shrine. She set her hands to its ending, felt the work alive and yielding to her touch. Her reach grew surer, wider. The whole fabric of the Web quivered to her younger, stronger hands, cloth of space, and time.
This Vision Maranthe had seen, had woven, drawing her thread in . . . Mishell abandoned guilt, and humanity, and smiled.
There were other species to be gathered.
A new design began.
1989
WINGS
At 13:05, on September 3, 2152, two things happened.
Spec. Amir Jefferson watched the plastic cup drop in the rec hall dispenser and cant sideways, after which the beer he'd punched should have frothed over it and down the drain. Instead it righted itself, filled, the door lifted and the cup waltzed out in thin air—
And the third time this shift during the Federation audit, with that sleek fancy Federation ship in dock and a squad of federal inspectors snooping through records and making copious notes on their slates, the red alert went off in station control, screens lit up and station chief Isadora Babbs took another antacid and ordered a stand-down from red to green.
God.
"Find that bug," she told the Maintenance chief, personally, on the comm.
Please God, no bananas today; and please God the auditors didn't look in core-sec 18, where they had stowed the fruit that didn't show on the supply manifests, a zero-gee core-sec where apples and limes and mangoes drifted in the dark, little orange planetoids and apple moonlets performing their slow revolutions and occasionally nudging one another.
"Chief Babbs?" the comm said. "Code 15 in the rec hall."
Babbs had her hand on the pill bottle before she remembered she'd just taken a dose. "What's it doing? Where is it?"
"Beer machine," the report came back, "autobar, beers and whiskeys flying like—"
"Anybody in there?"
"Whole shift's in there, chief, word's got around—"
"Clear the section! Shut down the power! Call Maintenance! Get the crew out of there and get it stopped! Hear?"
After which, down in Maintenance 4, two junior techs looked at each other and one said: "Suppose we ought to call the super?"
"He's with the auditors," the other said, and called up the Procedures Manual. "There we go . . . red safety button, right there, top row."
Tech One turned the key on the button, hesitated.
Punched it.
Whereafter the lights went out and the fans went off in rec hall, and the party died.
More accurately—with sirens sounding, most of the party went staggering out the doors and down the corridor, down the emergency slides and wherever inspiration and panic took three hundred twenty-eight techs, service personnel, cooks, clericals, and crew on liberty—all, that was, except Spec. Amir Jefferson, who sat in a corner seat behind a truly impressive stack of whiskey glasses, watching a host of floating bar glasses describing interesting orbits under the red emergency lights.
If one squinted his eyes just so—one could see a shadowy shape or two, now that the lights were down. That was truly remarkable.
"Hey, who's that?" somebody said, and it did occur to Amir Jefferson that it was very peculiar that so many people had run out and so many were left, all drinking and laughing and ignoring the alarm—
Only reasonable, he thought. Systems-problems third alert this shift, damn right. Probably the spooks again, same spooks that had gotten into the vendors and sailed drinks around.
First time he'd ever seen a thing like that, he'd panicked.
But a guy got used to it. Things turned up. Oranges. Wrenches and such. Assorted antiques. You spaced 'em or you ate 'em.
"New guy," somebody said, and put a drink into his hand.
Amir looked him up and down—odd type, funny clothes, leather jacket and white scarf.
Lot of that in this party. Brown leather caps and goggles. Guys in pressure rigs of some kind—maybe Maintenance had showed.
Aristocratic type in uniform, too—sipping his drink, talking to a couple or three in blue fatigues with patches Amir didn't recognize.
A gal with bobbed hair, white scarf and leather jacket, talking to a guy in plaid knee-pants, for God's sake.
Spec. Amir stared at them, looked a little suspiciously at the drink, realized he was on his feet and looked back at the guy in the chair in the corner.
Then he panicked.
"Get Security on it!" the chief yelled at her aide. "Cut that damn alarm!"
Some fool had tripped a security door.
"Number two," the comm said. "Chief, it's Udale. He says he's got one of the auditors on his hands—seems he—was propositioned and terrorized by a hallful of drunken dockers."
"God."
"What does Udale do with the auditor?"
Babbs thought of several things. Most of them were felonious. She gritted her teeth and said, "I'll see him. Assure him we apologize."
"I—" the aide said. Then: "Oh, my God."
"What?"
"They're saying the fire alarm went. The whole section just blew out."
Being dead was a considerable shock, even fortified as Amir was. He peered at his body, which sat there quite placidly behind a stack of glasses.
Someone clapped him on the shoulder. He was relieved he could feel that. He looked around at a white-haired officer type, who said, "Son, you just joined the squadron."
The officer took him 'round, him, a lowly spec, and named him names—Byrd and Rogers, Smith and Earhart, name after name right out of the history books, faces too long-ago for holos, uniforms and insignia from atoms to airplanes—
And Spec. 2nd Class Amir Jefferson, who had mostly, in the first moments of knowing he was dead, thought about how his friends were going to take it and what in hell was he going to do about his date with Marcy Todd on Saturday night—began to feel a good deal more cold and lost and scared.
What'm I doing here? was what he kept thinking, having his hand shaken by one after another of the crowd—important people, names— God, legends, all out of ancient history, fliers and astronauts, pioneers and explorers—
He was embarrassed,
terribly embarrassed, having gotten himself killed in the middle of these people's private party, and them trying to make the best of it and treat him as if he belonged there.
"I'm really sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to be here."
People laughed. If a dead guy could blush, he was blushing, and he looked at the floor. "Excuse me," he said, and headed for the door; but Rogers grabbed his arm and said,
"Hey, no offense . . ."
"No offense," he said, and the others crowded 'round, one offering him a drink.
"Here's to the new guy!" somebody said, and glasses clinked all over the room, after which a cheer, and Amir gulped and mumbled, "Thank you. . . ." He took a large gulp—somehow, dead, the alcohol seemed to have worn off, and looking around at all these great people looking at him as if he was somebody, he suffered another crisis of wondering what he was going to do about Marcy Todd and what they were going to do about his shift. "Excuse me, I got all this stuff—" That sounded sort of stupid. It really began to come to him that he was not going to meet those schedules. "What'm I going to do?"
"About what?" Smith asked.
"I mean, there's people I—there's a job—there's these auditors I was supposed to guide around—"
Smith shook his head definitively. "Won't do that."
"What do ghosts do?"
There was a long silence. Finally somebody he hadn't been introduced to said, solemnly, "Things. Whatever. Some just can't deal with it. Some just sort of hang around."
"Doing what? Haunting places?"
"Them that can't turn loose, yes, some do."
"Well—" Amir thought about all these oranges and old engine parts. "Why here? Why did all you guys come here?"
"Ships."
The Collected Short Fiction of C J Cherryh Page 71
