Oracle

by David Wood

  Dorion had been statue-still the whole time, but after another minute or so, he seemed to relax, as if he had dozed off. Jade glanced at the others, silently telegraphing the message: ‘Should we wake him up?’

  Before she could act on the impulse to do so, Dorion’s eyelids fluttered open. His gaze drifted for a moment and then he started, looking about wildly. “I’m on the Explorer?” He took a deep breath then looked down at the Shew Stone in his hand. “I did not lose consciousness, did I? The effect is similar to what I felt at CERN, but not as…”

  “What did you see?” asked Ophelia, with the same eager breathlessness.

  “I remember things that I know haven’t happened yet.”

  “Did you see the location of the Moon stone?”

  Dorion frowned and appeared to be searching his anachronistic memories. “I think I did. I remember you.” He pointed to Jade. “You were very excited. You were about to change into a diving suit right on the open deck. That must mean we find it. Perhaps if we get closer to the location, I will recognize it.”

  “Then we are on the right course,” Ophelia said with sublime confidence. “Literally as well as…you know what I mean. We will find it.”

  Jade’s first impulse was to caution against raising hopes too high, but she could not forget how they had found the stone sphere on Isla del Caño.

  Dorion set the Shew Stone on the table. Professor turned to Jade. “I guess it’s your turn now.”

  “Maybe you should give it a try?”

  He shook his head. “No thanks, I don’t want to spoil the twist at the end. Besides, I think I’ve already caught a peek of the future, and there’s a great big Bootstrap Paradox coming down the pike. You go ahead.”

  Now that the opportunity to glimpse the future had come, Jade felt apprehensive. There was a reason that, despite having the Shew Stone in her possession, she had not made a serious effort to test whether it possessed even a very small dark matter field. It seemed quite reasonable that it did. The ferocity with which Roche had pursued Jade, to say nothing of his prescient certainty that she would steal the orb, seemed to suggest that his uncannily accurate predictions were not simply well reasoned guesses. She wasn’t ambivalent about the crystal ball because of a fear that it might not work; quite the opposite in fact.

  She reached out and took the orb in her hand. But I need to know.

  Jade checked her watch again. Like her, the diver’s chronograph had picked up a few scars over the last few years. The stainless steel casing was scratched and the blue paint on the fixed bezel was chipped in a few places, but the sapphire crystal covering the blue watch face with the bright red sweep hands was clear and unmarred. It reminded her of another crystal she had looked into once, long, long ago.

  He was late.

  Professor was late. Strange how she still thought of him as Professor after all these years. After everything they had been through, everything they had made together, everything they had lost, he was still Professor.

  And he was late. That wasn’t like him. She hoped he had merely been delayed by a detour to get around the riots, and not caught up in them.

  Even from ten blocks away, the acrid smell of the smoke burned in her nostrils. Maybe the wind was blowing the fumes through the concrete canyons, or maybe the wildfire of violence had escaped containment and was now racing south, toward this bastion of wealth and power. Not that there was any danger here. The rioters would never reach this place, not with all the troops deployed throughout the city, and she hoped they had the good sense not to try.

  “Jade!”

  She turned in the direction of the hissed whisper and saw him, standing at the corner of the building. He wasn’t exactly inconspicuous. Even without the hoodie covering his head, shadowing his features—she had actually gotten used to that silly fedora, and now she found herself acutely aware of its absence—he would have looked out of place here. Still, there was something about his presence, the way he moved, that made him seem almost invisible.

  She smiled. It was good to see him again, in spite of the circumstances. “You made it.”

  He nodded. “I think you’re right about this. About everything that’s happened.”

  “How do we stop it?”

  “You already know the answer to that,” he said. “The real question is, can we?”

  Jade felt a knot of fear settle in her gut. He was right. “Have you got a plan?”

  “You mean a better plan than go in with guns blazing?” He shook his head.

  She knew him well enough to know what he was thinking. This was bigger than just the two of them, but there wasn’t anyone else left now. All their friends were gone.

  How did things get this bad?

  She knew the answer to that, too.

  My fault.

  “She probably already knows we’re coming,” Professor said.

  Jade nodded soberly. “But there’s something she doesn’t know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How it ends.”

  “Jade?”

  Jade blinked and looked around. Where am I? She spotted Professor, but he looked different, younger, without the scar.

  I remember this. Yet, it was an old memory, like something from a dream. Her eyes slid sideways and she saw….

  The universe abruptly synchronized and she realized what had happened. This was the reality and all of those things that she now remembered so vividly were nothing but distant possible futures.

  “Jade?” Professor repeated. “You okay?”

  She nodded slowly, unable to tear her stare away from….

  Ophelia leaned forward, her eyes alight with hope and anticipation. “What did you see?”

  Jade shook her head. “Nothing.”

  After two fruitless hours, Jade gave up on the hoped-for oblivion of sleep. She pulled on a t-shirt and a pair of cargo shorts and headed up to the deck to get some fresh air. The tropical night was warm and humid, but not uncomfortably so. The stars were startlingly visible despite the bright lights that illuminated the deck and shone out over the water, and a nearly full moon hung almost directly overhead.

  The moon made her think about their goal, but also called to mind Professor’s theory about the added influence of tidal forces on the dark matter fields. Dorion had explained it to her on the flight from London. The Delphic oracle had only spoken on one day each month, when a half moon would have been visible in the sky during daylight hours. He had suggested that perhaps at other times, the alignment of earth, moon and sun might combine to negate the dark matter field, but there was another possibility, a simpler one to Jade’s way of thinking. The moon’s gravity complemented the dark matter field, and that effect was strongest when the moon was overhead. Perhaps that was why so many ancient cultures had worshipped the moon; perhaps they had known that, in addition to helping them mark the turning of the seasons, the moon might also reveal possible futures.

  Maybe the knowledge of those possible futures, even at a subconscious level, lay at the heart of all the anecdotal reports about strange behavior during the full moon. There was a reason, after all, that insane people were called lunatics.

  “Couldn’t sleep?”

  She started reflexively, but it was Professor’s voice and she knew there was no cause for alarm. She turned and found him sitting in a deck chair, likewise gazing into the sky. “Guess I’m not used to being rocked in my bed all night long,” she lied. “What about you?”

  “Stargazing. To be honest, I’m not exactly sold on the accuracy of this ship’s GPS navigation system.”

  “You think it will happen again?”

  He shrugged. “It’s like when you know something’s wrong with your car, but when you take it to the mechanic, everything runs fine. No one’s given a good explanation for why it started acting up, so the problem hasn’t been fixed.”

  She was about to ask him for his opinion on what that cause might be, but realized she already knew the answer. “You think there’
s another saboteur on board?”

  “The thought has crossed my mind. Despite what Ophelia’s brother told her, the Norfolk Group hasn’t given up, and I don’t think they’ll stop now. It’s just a matter of time before they try again. They’ll probably wait until we get where going to make their next move, but…” Another shrug. “Better safe than sorry.” He stared at her appraisingly. “You saw something, didn’t you? Something you don’t want to tell the others?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Just like when you saw Hodges’ robot blowing up and killing us all was nothing?”

  She put her hands on her hips in what she hoped looked like a sufficiently irritated pose. “As you’ll recall, that didn’t happen. These visions…premonitions…whatever you want to call them, are just possibilities, and when you get right down to it, we can imagine those for ourselves without magic or dark matter or whatever.”

  “Fair enough. So what did you see?”

  She pulled another chair up next to him and settled into it. “If you had the power to see possible futures, how would you use it?”

  “Winning lotto numbers. Sports betting.” He said it with a grin. “But that word ‘possible’ kind of throws a monkey wrench in the works. So, I guess I’d look for things that aren’t subject to random variations.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, natural disasters like earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. We can’t predict them, but the forces that govern those things are mechanistic. I told you about the Schroedinger’s Cat experiment right? That’s an example of alternate universes governed by randomness. But a lot of things are not random at all. The earth’s rotation, the phases of the moon, the tides; these things all happen the same way regardless of random variations. Or, if you believe in the multiverse hypothesis, those things happen the same way in all…well, most possible universes. That’s true of other things that we aren’t able to predict with certainty.

  “We know, for example, that someday the Yellowstone super-volcano is going to blow. We don’t know what the tipping point is and there’s not a whole lot we can do to change those geological forces, but I have a feeling that when it finally does erupt, it will happen across all the possible universes. Or at least the ones that we are likely to inhabit. So, if you were able to see one possible future and pick up a newspaper that talks about an eruption at a specific date and time, then you could pretty confidently take action based on the knowledge that the event is going to occur. Evacuate the area, ground all flights, prepare for the ash cloud. Provided of course that you could get the authorities to believe you.”

  Jade nodded slowly. “And if you weren’t a particularly scrupulous individual, what then?”

  “I’d buy stock in bottled water and dust masks, I guess.” He paused for just a moment, then continued. “You think there’s a chance that someone who isn’t particularly scrupulous might be planning to do something like that?”

  “And we’re working to help her get it.”

  “Ophelia doesn’t strike me as being quite that calculating.”

  “People change. And you know what they say about power and corruption.”

  He frowned. “Now you’re getting into territory that isn’t quite so deterministic. In any case, you can’t judge a person on the basis of what they might do.”

  “If you had known from the beginning that Hodges was already working for the Norfolk Group, what would you have done differently?”

  “Point taken. So you think that if we allow Ophelia to find the Moon stone and open a permanent window on the future, she’s going to go all power hungry and destroy the world?”

  “I don’t think it,” she said, almost at a whisper. “I saw it.”

  And that’s not all I saw.

  Professor was silent for a long time after that. Finally he said, “Forewarned is forearmed, right? Now that we know what might happen, we can take steps to make sure it never does.”

  “And what if the steps we take are exactly what lead us to ruin?”

  “You see why I’m happier not knowing. You’ll drive yourself crazy trying to second-guess every decision. What you really need is a good night’s sleep though.”

  “Probably. But I think I’ll just sit here with you a while longer.”

  Professor smiled. “I can live with that.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Great Isaac Cay, The Bahamas

  The Quest Explorer arrived at its destination, without any further unexpected detours, in the early hours before sunrise. Jade had eventually turned in and slept successfully, her weariness overcoming her anxiety, but when she awoke, the apprehension returned in full force. As they sat over breakfast in the salon, she found herself staring at Ophelia the way a person might look at a career criminal or a known sexual predator, just waiting for them to give in to the dark desires hiding under the surface. And yet, Ophelia had not done anything wrong and might not ever do anything. Perhaps it would require only a single word, spoken at the right time, to ensure Jade’s memories of that dire future would never come to pass.

  Jade knew that the answer to the riddle of what that tipping point might be was probably there in her memory as well, but when she tried to think back…or was it forward?...she could only remember terror and loss on a scale that almost made her start crying.

  It didn’t happen. It won’t happen. I won’t let it.

  After the meal, they all went out on the deck for their first look at the smudge of sand that was Great Isaac Cay. To call it an island was overly generous. The cay was little more than a brow of limestone which, by virtue of its location, had been trapping sand for uncounted millennia. Rising up from it like a rude gesture was the Great Isaac Lighthouse, a one hundred-fifty-two foot tall rusty white spire that flashed its automated navigational warning light every fifteen seconds to alert mariners to the treacherous shallows of the Bahama Banks.

  From their anchorage just north of the cay, Jade found it hard to believe the light was still operational. The dilapidated tower and crumbling remains of keeper’s house and other support structures looked more desolate than some of the ruins she had excavated.

  “It’s supposedly haunted,” Professor said, with a mischievous gleam in his eye and looking none the worse for wear after his all-night vigil. “According to the lore, in the nineteenth century, a ship foundered nearby with all hands lost except an infant child who washed ashore alive. The ghost of his mother still haunts the island, especially during the full moon, looking for her son. They call her ‘the Grey Lady.’”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Jade had heard so many ghost stories in her years of field research that they were hardly more than background noise, but in this instance, she found herself hoping that Professor was just making it up.

  He shook his head. “The Grey Lady bit is probably just a coincidence, but the part about the full moon got my attention. Especially since it’s a full moon tonight.”

  “It’s not on the island,” Dorion said, peering at the lighthouse. “This is familiar, but we’re in the wrong place.”

  Though she kept silent, Jade had felt it too. The sight of the lighthouse had awakened more memories of future events revealed to her by the Shew Stone, but she felt none of the excitement that had accompanied a similar awakening in Costa Rica. Rather, this felt like the first ominous step down a path that could only lead to tragedy

  Nichols, who had joined them on deck, raised an eyebrow, but did not voice the question that was clearly foremost in his mind. “We can take you out in a launch. Circle the cay until you, uh, find what it is your looking for. If it’s in the shallows, we won’t be able to bring the Explorer in, but there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

  He led them to the side of the boat where a rigid hulled inflatable boat hung in a davit. Further along the deck was an empty sling, which presumably had once held the boat stolen by the missing crewman who had tried to kill them with the submersible. The remaining launch was lowered into the water, and the four pa
ssengers joined Nichols and another crewman for the excursion. With Dorion providing navigational cues, they motored to a spot northwest of the cay.

  Jade looked back to the lighthouse, recalling that this was the view as seen from the place where they had found… or rather would find… the Moon stone. Dorion confirmed this a moment later. “Here. It’s directly below us.”

  Nichols looked over the edge. The blue water was stunningly clear and Jade could see the sandy bottom and the reef protruding through. There was nothing that hinted at an old submerged wreck. “You say the Misericordia is down there?”

  Professor looked as well. “What do you figure? About six fathoms?”

  Nichols nodded. “The Explorer draws just shy of twenty-eight feet. That’s a little shallow for my liking, but if we watch the tides and maybe shed a little ballast, we should be able to work in here. It’s a nice depth for diving. We won’t have to worry about decompression stops. But this is a tricky business. You start blasting holes in the reef, and two things are likely to happen pretty darn quick. First, the government’s gonna ask what the hell we’re doing, and where’s our permit? Second, every pirate from here to New Orleans is going to come running to see what we’ve found.”

  “Pirates?” asked Ophelia, a little nervously.

  “My rivals. Other treasure hunters. Claim jumpers.”

  Jade knew that what Nichols was talking about simply went with the territory.

  “It would be in our best interests to avoid drawing a lot of attention to our presence here,” Ophelia said.

  “I disagree,” said Professor. “Given what happened last night, the wrong people already know that we’re here and they’ve always known what we’re after. Keeping things on the level isn’t going to make our situation any worse, and it will probably make it better since we’ll have the authorities on our side.”

  Jade thought it was a good argument, but Ophelia disagreed. “Going through official channels takes time, Dr. Chapman, and that’s something that’s in short supply.”