The Loom of Thessaly

by David Brin

  He watched them for a while. Lachesis's fingers were a blur, yet there was a fascination to the rhythmic pattern of her movements. He tried to see the beauty translating from the whirling motions of her hands to the pattern of the weave, but was distracted by the incessant clicking of Atropos's shears. He couldn't make himself believe that he was seeing his own human society in the making, from moment to moment before him, in the microscopic lengthening of the abstract tapestry.

  "Lately some of the patterns have developed a degree of spontaneity," Moira said from beside him. "Not only are there more threads than ever, but Lachesis seems to have been giving them their head in contacting one another. It makes little sense, geographically. People seem to be on the move more... and the rate of travel has surprised us.

  "I thought you controlled everything we do," Pavlos said bitterly.

  "That is true to an extent," Moira agreed, "though what is controlled consists primarily in who a person meets during his life. Lachesis handles this by having thread contact thread -- and in the way men and women feel about one another when they meet. That part is managed by Clothe's dyes. Finally Atropos chooses the moment of death, constrained by the pattern in the tapestry.

  "Thus it is Clotho, primarily, who drives the theme of mankind's weaving, for her colors constrain Lachesis to fit them together in an arrangement that has meaning. Of late, however, our eldest sister seems to have become more imaginative in her patterning, causing threads to hop about like fleas upon a rug. We do not know why she is moving you humans about the world so, these days... Lachesis has not spoken to us for centuries, now. We are very interested in finding out how you are managing it physically. That is one reason why Clotho was so glad to learn that a hero had finally come.

  Pavlos paused.

  "You mean you don't know -- ?" Then he stopped. By lamplight he saw something he had not noticed before. Four very large bobbins hung at the edge of the tapestry. Their size alone was hint enough, but when he saw the long, totally straight trace of those threads, visible among all of the others and leading interminably back into the weave, Pavlos felt a cold elation.

  With a cry he leapt forward, the machete gleaming bright in his hand. He seized the large bobbins in his left hand and brought the machete down with all his might.

  He felt a slicing... a sudden parting. His blood surged with battle fever. But when he looked down he saw the stump that his blade had become. Four gleaming pieces of steel lay on the ground.

  He opened his left hand. The large bobbins were intact, still connected by undamaged thread to the loom. But also in his palm was a curling mass of tiny tendrils, attached to tiny balls smaller than ants.

  There was a sound like thunder.

  Lachesis finally took notice of him, barely. Almost as an afterthought, she pushed him aside. The force sent him reeling, the bobbins torn from his grasp. He slipped on the smooth marble floor and skittered until he tumbled, jarringly, into a massive pillar.

  Atropos laughed.

  "Good try, hero! Only one in ten thinks of that! And only a few are strong enough to break steel on us!"

  Moira came up to him, smiling with a certain degree of pity. She offered her hand. It was such a natural gesture that Pavlos took it unconsciously. His ears were ringing and the rumble of thunder was growing.

  Atropos peered at the section of the weave he had attacked. "And a stronger hero, even still! Not mighty enough to break our threads, I fear... but the first in a long time powerful enough to snap a few humans he grabbed along by mistake!"

  "What?" Pavlos felt dizzy. Suddenly he remembered the curling wisps, the tiny, antlike bobbins in his hand.

  "As I see it --" Atropos looked closely "-- you snipped almost a hundred of them... not more than a few leagues from here!"

  She sounded impressed. Pavlos stared.

  The growling sound drifted in from the open portico, now punctuated with distant coughs and pops. Only slowly did Pavlos come to recognize it. With leaden footsteps, he followed it outside.

  Flame leapt from a mountainside no more than twenty miles away. Several explosions followed one another, pealing across the hills like funeral drums. The tiny speck flickered with a hot, blue glare for long minutes, before settling down to a lingering, crimson flame.

  "... a plane crash," Pavlos muttered to himself, the cottony numbness gathering around him once again in a protective embrace. "Something straying from the main routes... maybe a military jet."

  Moira stood beside him, watching the disaster slowly burn down. Finally she asked, "What is a 'plane'? And what is a -- a 'military jet'?"

  6.

  Pavlos rubbed his eyes, peered about in the gloom of the storeroom, and wondered how long he had been asleep. He sat by the eastern wall, in a circle of helmets, scrolls, ancient artifacts, and articles from his pack, letting his gaze rest on each item in turn.

  Weapons, texts, personal items from a hundred brave men. Each hero must have striven in his own way to overcome the ancient creatures who dwelt here. And each instead served them, by reporting the state of the world he knew.

  His gaze fell on the transceiver, still turned on and apparently operational, yet also apparently useless. Frank had never answered. Now Pavlos hoped he never would. If he heard Pavlos's story, he would undoubtedly think his friend delirious, and have a helicopter sent out.

  The helicopter would, of course, burn like the jet did, as would anything humanity sent against these hags.

  The door at the far end scraped open. Footsteps whispered softly in the dust, and Moira appeared at the end of a nearby aisle.

  "Atropos and Clotho want to see you," she said.

  "What do they want?"

  Moira shrugged "They will want to ask you questions, to have all of your knowledge. They are curious about some of the changes that have taken place in the physical lives of men.

  Pavlos held the bronze helmet on his lap, fingering the design along its crest. "How can you manipulate us without knowing anything about our science, our machines... our weapons?"

  "They hardly matter, do they?" She sighed. "Have they changed your emotions? The way you treat each other? The savagery and misery -- "

  "Which Clotho colors in!"

  "Which she only exaggerates! They are there anyway, to a lesser extent!" Moira snapped. There was power in her voice, and irritation. Pavlos also thought he detected a note of defensiveness. "It would be impossible for her to corrupt you if you had not the seed already, in copious supply."

  Pavlos looked down, avoiding her gaze.

  Moira glared for a moment, then shrugged again.

  "We were surprised, three heroes ago, to learn of gunpowder. The last hero told us of steamships. Clotho added some new pigments to see what wars would match the scale of your new toys. The pattern of the weave became more uniform."

  She looked pensive for a moment.

  "I will admit that I've become curious, these last few years. The number of new threads Clotho collects shows a massive birthrate, as if you humans were testing our power, somehow.

  "And there have been times when I have seen things in the air, like the rocs of elder days; things that fly growling through the sky. I have recently come to think that they might not be natural, but something caused by man. Are they these 'planes' you spoke of? They fly so swift and free" -- her expression grew distant -- "much as I once flew, before the war that brought down Zeus's sky tower and ended the glory of my race.

  Pavlos hardly paid attention to her words; he remembered something she had said earlier:

  "Clotho added some new pigments to see what wars would match the scale of your toys."

  No wonder we've gone so long without nuclear war, he thought. In our natural hues we're too sensible to go that far. Now, though...

  Pavlos shook himself away from that thought. He looked up at Moira. "Where do you fit into all this?" he asked. "Your name, I know -- "

  "Means 'Fate,' yes. Another of your nations called me Nemesis." Her eyes seemed to
shine, as she remembered. "When we agreed, at first, to the experiment proposed by the emissaries from the Other Place, I was the one who was the most enthusiastic. I worked with the emissary whom you now call Prometheus. I weeded and pruned. I ran to and fro across the globe, tending mankind like my own personal garden.

  "You needed so much work, in the beginning." Moira smiled distantly. "It is true that the Spark of Imagination and Ambition needs practice. Your ancestors were always hiding from it, or misusing it terribly. They wasted it on 'magic tricks' and mental powers for which they were simply unready. It took us long to suppress those powers deep within you, until such a time as you were ready for them.

  "Yet still I remember the most precocious of my children. Aesculapius, who had so much Spark of his own that he had to be destroyed. Alcestis, who spontaneously invented self-sacrifice, something we had never known. And sweet Odin, who visited me when I was Mimir, sitting by the gateway beneath the Great Tree, long before the terrible war, and offered me his eye in exchange for wisdom."

  Moira frowned.

  "Then came the day when Zeus declared you ready, and my sisters became afraid. Even I, your eldest mother, who was Gaea and Demeter and Amaterasu, thought you were unripe and dangerous.

  "I helped my elder siblings pull down the sky tower and drive Prometheus into the Gateway. The last I saw of him was his smile. He winked at me, then disappeared. Within a day, the threads began arriving; and Clotho found she no longer had the power to end your race, merely to warp it.

  "To do even that much we had to make our transumptive personas almost real. To gain control over the potency of the threads, we were forced to weave ourselves into the tapestry, giving, for this epoch, our very lives into yarn to be woven therein.

  "Is it any wonder, then, that my sisters and I grow bored or bitter at the passage of time? There was a sweetness that I once knew, in wearing this form, but now I cannot remember it. Now even a rare visitor excites in me no more than a vague unease... and a wish that somehow this labor could come to an end."

  Pavlos began to speak; but something powerful stopped him as he looked at her distant, unfocused gaze. It was as if his ancestors had reached out to stifle him with a warning. Something of the experience of his forebears told him it was better to stay small and quiet during the confession of a goddess.

  As if to verify this, Moira's eyes shifted to gaze upon his. They were now steely and alert. If lightning had flashed from them he would not have been surprised.

  "So get thee up, thou lean-thighed Athenian, and bring toys to demonstrate them," she said. "You will get to ask of us one great reward, as heroes are privileged to do, before giving us your mind and becoming immortal in our memories.

  Pavlos hurriedly swept the items on the floor together and stuffed them into his pack. At this stage disobedience was the farthest thing from his mind.

  7.

  "This is your life!" the Fate cried. Atropos held a tiny bobbin in her hand. She grinned at him and raised her shears high. They glinted in the half-light already streaming in from the predawn sky.

  "Look at it! Do you see the colors? Some of Clotho's pigments scraped off this one, as they sometimes do. Or more likely such a strong thread shook them off by itself! And you doubted yourself a hero."

  Pavlos squinted. The thread was almost invisible. By rights it should be, in order to fit into a tapestry with five billion others. But he was beginning to understand the odd way in which subjectivity operated here.

  He squinted, tilting his head from left to right, and did catch an occasional flash of color. He found it hard to pay attention, though. Irrelevant memories interfered with his concentration.

  He recalled the prideful ownership of his first knife... the time he was lost in the woods for two days and came home with a wounded fox kit that became his pet for a year...

  There was the shame of being caught cheating on a third grade exam... the glory of serving on the honor guard at an all-Europe Boy Scout Jamboree... his first love... his first expedition across the Deccan of India... his third love... his mission for NATO...

  Suddenly he recognized what was happening to him. He tore his gaze from the tiny thread, and the flood of memories cut off at once. He threw his head back and laughed richly.

  "A hero's reaction." Clotho nodded. Even Lachesis looked up at him from her innumerable bobbins and regarded Pavlos for a moment. She gave his laughter a dim, satisfied smile that lasted only an instant. Then the dour expression returned and she went back to work.

  "Just remember this, hero," Atropos said as he subsided to a broad grin. "I hold the shears. You will now pay the price heroes must, by giving us your mind and memory. Do not be tempted by rash thoughts. You already know that you cannot harm us, but if you try, and do any more damage to the tapestry than you did last night, I can snap your thread as quickly as I cut this one... or this one... or this one..."

  The shears flashed, and each severed thread gave off a tiny spark as it expired.

  "Stop!" Pavlos cried.

  Atropos arched her brows.

  "Yes, yes, I understand," Pavlos said, hurriedly. "You don't have to kill anyone else to demonstrate your power!"

  The crone smiled. "They were doomed, anyway. But you will have a form of immortality, living forever in the minds of my sisters."

  A dubious home for all eternity, Pavlos thought. I'd rather spend it in a cesspool.

  "What was this about a reward?" he asked. "Don't I get some sort of prize for cooperating?"

  Lachesis grumbled. She bent forward over the loom, muttering to herself. Atropos smiled. Clotho put her arm around her elder sister's shoulder, then grinned at Pavlos.

  "Poor Lachesis. She hates this part. It always makes more work for her.

  "Yes, hero. You may choose anything that is in our power to give... providing it does not thwart our purpose, or change your commitment to us, and takes no more than a twentieth part of the day to fulfill."

  "That leaves a lot of choice," Pavlos said sarcastically.

  "Heroes usually ask some favor for one they love, or for the city or country of their birth. We can do all of this for you, hero! Think of your loved ones! It would amuse us to do you, the finest hero we have had in many centuries, the favor of a long and prosperous life for your children. Should your city prosper? Know that the overall suffering around the world shall remain the same, but for some years your homeplace will be joyful!

  "Choose your favor, hero! You have won our hearts and will not be denied!" And if Clotho's ancient, puckered face were capable of affection and generosity, it showed them now.

  Pavlos hesitated.

  He was being offered a great prize indeed. It was a clever one, as well.

  If he chose, for instance, to ask for another Golden Age in Athens, he was certain the city would, indeed, see some return to greatness... to whatever extent it would not interfere with these Norns' overall plan for this era.

  Or he could ask to have his favorite nephew, Theagenis, cured of his emphysema and go on to be the Olympic runner he dreamed of becoming.

  But whatever he asked for, someone unknown to Pavlos would suffer to counterbalance the boon he handed out. And there was another disadvantage. Anything they gave him could be readily repealed if he succeeded in killing himself.

  In the feathery unreality of his encounter with the Fates, he now found a plan crystallizing with stark and terrible clarity.

  The one advantage humanity had, at the moment, was its new technology. It was no accident, he now saw, that so much had been learned by men in the short time since these creatures had last been visited by a hero. The Spark itself was making a countermove, at last.

  It was a weak move, at best. Clotho, Atropos, and Lachesis could stave off anything, even a nuclear strike, by merely sensing an intent in the weave and severing the instigators from the tapestry.

  Still, they knew less about humanity now than they had in millennia. They were confused geographically and technically. If the tren
d could continue while they stayed complacently ignorant of what was going on for another century... until another "hero" came...

  By then there might be colonies on Mars... or psychics, trained through biofeedback to hide their thoughts. Perhaps those hidden mental powers Moira had mentioned might have a flowering, if given only a few more decades free from knowledgeable interference.

  As a hero he knew his model had to be Leonidas at Thermopylae. His job was simply to buy time.

  "I know what I want as my boon," he said at last.

  "I want none of the things you mentioned, for even I will admit the aesthetic beauty of this tapestry. I do not love Clotho for her dyes of cruelty and hate, nor Atropos for her untimely knife, but I would regret seeing Lachesis's lovely patterns wrecked for the sake of a selfish wish. Those I love will care for themselves and each other... fate permitting."

  Atropos and Clotho stared at him. Moira looked puzzled. Lachesis cast him a sidelong glance. For a brief instant he thought he saw a smile flicker before she returned to the weave. Twice for one hero, Pavlos thought. The others will think you're flirting.

  "Then what is your boon?" Clotho asked sharply. "Do not ask for what we cannot give. You know the conditions!"

  Pavlos bowed his head.

  "I understand. My request will easily fall under them.

  "All I want is to sit before this great loom, out in the sunshine, and contemplate the very latest work that you have done."

  "No!" Atropos cried. She hissed at Pavlos and waved the shears dangerously close to his bobbin. "We will not take the loom outside."

  "But why not?" he asked. "You are all strong enough. And it won't interrupt your work for more than a few minutes."

  Pavlos tried to stay calm, but internally he was shivering. Now he had to stand by it, but that part about taking the loom outside had only been an afterthought, suggested against the vague chance that Frank might see something of sufficient strangeness, from his eyrie in space, to make him think twice about sending a search party after his missing friend. If, by some miracle, the American had heard Pavlos's earlier rantings, or was picking up this very conversation via the transceiver in Pavlos's backpack, he just might add two and two and have the wisdom to keep his mouth -- his very mind -- shut about this plateau for the rest of his life.