The Loom of Thessaly

by David Brin

  Anyway, he had made his request; now he had to stand by it.

  "Besides," he said, "you ladies all look as if you could use some fresh air."

  Moira laughed.

  "He's right, sister. You act as though we were still at war and had to hide from Zeus's sky tower. How long has it been since you saw some sun?"

  Her manner was hearty. Yet Pavlos thought he detected a hidden note of uncertainty in her voice.

  "Clotho and I make the decisions here," Atropos threatened. "We outvote you, young Nemesis, remember?"

  With a whoop and a cackling laugh, Lachesis stood up. She seemed so frail and tottering that a small breeze might blow her over, yet she beamed and her eyes danced with deviltry.

  Pavlos was only slightly more shocked than the others when the frail old Fury stooped, grunted, and lifted the loom into the air.

  Moira shouted with delight and ran to keep the tapestry from tangling as it fed out behind the loom. Pavlos took a position by Lachesis's side. Not knowing whether she heard him or not, he kept up a running set of instructions to guide her down the steps.

  His old scoutmaster would have been proud.

  Stunned, Atropos was forced to drop Pavlos's bobbin and step back. The eldest Norn walked blithely past her and out on to the lawn.

  The sun was just rising as Lachesis set the loom to earth. She straightened and dusted her hands. For just an instant Pavlos saw somewhat beyond her apparent form, and was struck by the stark blue power and clarity of her aura, pulsing in momentary visibility around her.

  Then, just as suddenly, she was an old crone once more. With a cackling grin, she stood aside and bowed to him. Moira came up, carrying a stool, and set it before the loom.

  Pavlos stood still for a minute. His fate was set. In his case it was a path of his own choosing. Heroes were unique in that fashion, he now realized. He would sacrifice himself in a useless delaying action, but not by their whim. Heroes alone pick their own way of ending.

  Another thing. No other hero had so upset this household. He was sure of that. Atropos and Clotho would not soon forgive him for what he had done and would do this day.

  He felt a great wash of appropriateness as he shrugged off his pack. He upturned the rucksack, spilling the contents on the ground.

  With great dignity he stooped and brought up the helm of Theseus. Before sitting on the padded stool he carefully placed it over his head.

  "Now," he commanded. "Please be so kind as to point out Athens for me."

  Bustling, crowded, noisy streets... Everywhere the dawn colors, gray and brown, blending with the soot and smoggy haze... babies crying... street vendors calling... a worker wandering home drunk, praying that he won't be possessed by the evil again and beat his wife and children... And dreams... the dreams of millions of people soon to awaken. Dreams that twist and curl and wave like smoke... like drifting, myriad strands of thread, struggling to cut loose and fly...

  Elsewhere, patricians arguing... soldiers dying... fanatics of every stripe, free to choose whatever extreme ideology fit, so long as it matched the fanatical dye... and many good men and women here and there, whose minds would cloud briefly, long enough to make some colored-in mistake...

  Hatreds persistent in spite of reason... love and honor persisting as well... beauty trying, an echo, ineradicable, of hope...

  The images leapt at Pavlos, filling his brain with more information than he thought he could ever handle. He saw not through people's eyes, but their hearts; and the cumulation of power coursed through him like a hot flux.

  He reached out and caressed the pattern, and somehow he felt the individual threads, their textures, their will to fly.

  His hand, unguided, passed over and held one thread, floating above the others. It was not his own, he could tell, but one with whom he felt a kindred current. He ran his fingernail along its side, and was surprised to find that the paint flaked off like a molted skin.

  "Enough!" Atropos shook his shoulder. She had joined them at last, wearing a heavy shawl over her head.

  "You have been sitting there, talking to yourself, for two sixtieths of the daylight. That's all we can spare you. Get up, so we can move the loom back inside and begin our questioning!"

  Pavlos blinked. Was that all the time it had been? It had felt like forever. So many things he had witnessed... things taking place in the world right now.

  The cruelties were unchanged from those he had seen in the racks. They were larger, more subtle, perhaps... more indiscriminate. But the tapestry showed that the old evils were persistent.

  Yet something was different. The pattern of the weave, certainly, was opening up, reflecting man's new mobility.

  But hidden in the opening was something else. Something Pavlos could not readily define, but which he was determined to protect.

  He sighed. Well, at least he had kept the world free of their meddling for a few minutes. It was a good thought.

  And now it was time to go.

  Atropos stood nearby, holding what he supposed was his bobbin. Pavlos rose and bowed respectfully to Lachesis. "Thank you. I now know that it is the dye to blame. Your pattern is lovely.

  Clotho, veiled like Atropos, snorted. But Lachesis smiled.

  "With your permission," he went on, "I would like to touch the weave one last time.

  The eldest nodded even before Atropos could object.

  He stepped up to the loom and ran his hand along the surface, right to left.

  Five billion threads.

  Atropos held her shears up next to his own thread. His hand approached hers.

  The color of the threads guided him. One large spool held thread the color of spite, the other that of contempt. He grabbed those, ignoring the other two, and pulled.

  The threads stretched as he leapt backward and, for an instant, he felt triumphant as Clotho and Atropos staggered.

  But the tension held when he had pulled two meters taut. Try as he might, he could stretch no further.

  Atropos regained her balance. Her nimbus became visible, a fiery dirty yellow. She hissed at him.

  "You try to tweak our noses? Why, hero? You know you cannot harm the threads without a more powerful weapon than you have. One of your guns might, but you have none. So why do you ask for the mercy of my knife?"

  She pondered for a moment.

  "That's it, isn't it? You want to end your existence before we can question you! Clotho! Go and get your dyes! This one knows something. I shall enjoy tearing it out of him!"

  Pavlos felt despair. His plan had failed and, worse, he didn't doubt Clotho's power to make him do whatever she wished.

  Could he reach his own bobbin and cut it himself?

  As if sensing his desperate thoughts, Atropos snorted her contempt and threw his thread down into the jumbled mass along the weave. Never in a century could he find it by himself.

  Quickly, he looked about for an alternate plan. He saw the tholos, the small shrine by the great cedar, only a hundred meters away across the grassy meadow. Could he get inside and launch himself into the "other universe"...? It might be possible even to survive, to get help, as well as deny the Fates his mind.

  Pavlos's shoulders slumped. He remembered the size of the granite slab that blocked the doorway. By the time he moved it, if he could budge it at all, Clotho and Atropos could physically capture him.

  Clotho approached, two bottles in her hand. An instinct he never knew he had told him the colors were Torment and Submission.

  In an instant, he knew at last what a hero was. A hero died of no wound in the back. A hero was a gesture... a defiance. In moments he might be their willing slave, but now he had the Spark, and speech.

  "Cavernous shades! You dotard remnants of a wrong path taken! Know this! That you have kept the child restrained too long! That you have filled the world with woe too long! And you have taken undue liberties for ages too long without measure!"

  The helm of Theseus rang with his extemporaneous words. He felt a return
of the thrill he'd had on first seeing it. The power coursed through him, imagined as he knew it to be... imagined as the sense of rightness he could feel streaming to him from the tiny building behind him, under the giant cedar. He held the bobbins of Clotho and Atropos tightly, keeping the tension in their threads, like bowstrings.

  "This then, you devious crones! Know that your time is short! Your days are numbered! Yes, they are numbered in seconds!"

  Atropos had stopped. She and Moira stared at him. Lachesis watched with a sober expression, eyes darting from him to her sisters and back.

  But Clotho shifted her weight from foot to foot, apparently unamused and unimpressed. Her boredom was his end, he knew. There would be time for only a few more words.

  Ah, good-bye, life. How sweet to die a hero!

  "Watch then, you degenerate and pathetic creatures of the past, as I, and all humanity, do curse your threads and, in so doing, seal your eventual doom!"

  He meant it merely for show. A handwave that might or might not be a potent curse. Superstitious he knew them to be, at some deep level. Otherwise they would not be caught up in all of this allegorical rigmarole. Perhaps he could leave them with an uncertainty... a faint, nagging doubt that might keep them company in their cold evenings.

  He plucked a horsehair from his helmet, and held it out. He brought its tip against one of the taut threads and said, "There is an end to all things, ladies. And your time is certainly long overdue."

  No one was more surprised than he when the tip of the horsehair erupted in flame. A slender column of actinic light appeared before Pavlos. It speared down from the sky to land with searing brilliance upon one of the threads.

  The smell of ozone filled the air as the bolt of light hunted, wavered, then burned into the slender strand.

  Atropos screamed, dropping her shears.

  Her nimbus ballooned outward in a violent display of pain. Within it, she whirled and capered and finally spun about to run headlong toward the supposed safety of the temple.

  Pavlos suddenly felt a twang, as the fury's life thread parted! Her aura erupted as she was halfway to her destination, sending an explosion of sparks into the air. When they had fallen to earth, Atropos was gone.

  "Zeus!" Clotho bellowed. She dropped her pigments and clawed at the sky.

  "You're dead!" she screamed. "I pulled you down myself! The Sky Tower is no more!"

  The column of light hunted, then shifted toward the other thread, Clotho's.

  "A little farther south!" Pavlos cried out in English. "Steady, you fumble-thumbs Yankee! Steady!"

  Clotho howled as the pencil of brilliance struck its mark.

  "You!" She pointed at Pavlos. "You knew of this! This is what you meant by 'planes' and your new science! You men have learned to fly like gods, and throw their lightning!"

  The thread began to smoke. Pavlos felt a numbness take over him... a tremendous need to stand perfectly still. "Steady, steady..."

  "I'll fix this!" Clotho cried. She plucked her sister's shears from the ground. "I'll kill billions until I get those in your sky tower!"

  She ran toward the loom, fire and death in her eyes.

  And tripped over Moira's outstretched foot.

  The pillar of light wavered, almost missing its target. The burning went on, but Clotho was apparently made of tougher substance than her sister. She scrabbled on the ground toward him.

  "How!" she hissed at him, as her aura began to show ugly discolorations. "How are you doing what the gods could not?"

  Pavlos knew how he must look to her. The helm of Theseus might be appropriate for doing heroic deeds, but not for saying what he had to say to her. He removed it, being careful to keep his left hand, holding the bobbin, still.

  "That's a very good question, and you deserve an answer," he told her.

  "Deus ex machina," he said, as blithely as he could. Then he strained against the tension and felt a snapping parting with the past.

  8.

  "... I thought you were delirious! Those random mutterings about mythological women, controlling humankind with magical needles and thread -- "

  "Of course, Frank. What else were you to think?" Pavlos held the microphone of the small transceiver close to his mouth. He rested with one elbow on the top step of the broad temple stylobate. He was relieved to find his American friend relatively calm. Only a small tremor in the voice from the tiny speaker gave clue to the shock he had experienced.

  "Well, Pav, what was I to do? I was just about to call the police to get some search-and-rescue started when I realized it was sunrise, down there. So I took a chance and warmed up the spyscope to take a look."

  "And saw --"

  "And saw a tapestry fifty feet or longer... with colors I'd never seen before! Shit. You were sitting there, those women standing around, then you touched that damned loom thing and something happened to me!"

  Pavlos nodded. "So you decided to take a chance."

  "Yeah. I mean, what the hell, right? Everyone else up here was asleep. I figured, what would it hurt to burn a thread?"

  "I had no idea your experimental weapons were that good, Frank."

  "Nor I! I wish to heaven I could remember what I did to keep the beam tight and steady like that! Speaking of which, you did some pretty fine fire control, helping me get that second witch. I almost had heart failure when the first one exploded like that!"

  Pavlos laughed. It was good to know that Frank was going to be all right. An awful burden had fallen upon Pavlos, and he would need a friend with whom he could share it.

  "Okay, Frank. Then there won't be any trouble at your end?"

  "Trouble? What, me worry?" There was only a slight touch of hysteria in Frank's laughter. "Look, Pav, I gotta go. Talk to you later. The commander's up and he'll be wondering what I've been up to all night!" The carrier wave cut off with a subdued "click," but the astronaut's tinny laughter seemed to hang in the air.

  Pavlos put down the microphone. He stretched back to rest his elbows on the granite platform and allowed the sunshine to do its work on him.

  The loom was a few feet away. Lachesis sat in her accustomed chair, once again making a blur of her hands as she shuttled five billion bobbins in intricate patterns through the warp of the tapestry. The rhythmic pumping of the foot pedal sounded like a heartbeat. There was a hint of smile on her parched, ancient face, and once again she seemed oblivious to everything but her art.

  Out on the lawn two seared brown patches stood out against the green. Beyond them he saw Moira leaving the Gateway shrine, carrying a covered basket.

  She mounted the wide steps of the portico, a distant expression of bemusement on her face.

  "They are still coming through," she said. "I'm not as nimble as Clotho was, so a fair number of the newborn threads escaped. That was what we had agreed to allow soon, anyway.

  Pavlos nodded. "I've been thinking about it, and I've come to believe you're right. Starting off by letting a few percent run wild -- that would be a fair experiment. If we humans have learned to use the Spark properly -- maybe even well enough to dispense with the threads altogether -- then those children will show it soon enough.

  "And if not?"

  Pavlos shrugged. He could not help glancing at Lachesis.

  The crone had dropped her bobbins and now held Atropos' shears. The clicking sound of lifelines parting went on for a moment, then she sat back and examined. The ghost of a smile returned. She went back to work, weaving.

  "We could have taken this thing no further if we tried," Moira assured him. "Lachesis is less fragile than Atropos and Clotho. I doubt it is within the realm of man or god to thwart her. Indeed, this whole affair probably came about because she finally tired of Clotho's garish, unnatural colors, and Atropos's meddling. In the last fifty years she has been forcing Atropos to allow the average lifespan to increase. This may be what she was leading up to.

  "I doubt very much if she'll let me wash Clotho's dyes out of the bobbins already in place. There will
have to be a transition, or the tapestry will look disjointed -- something she will never allow.

  "But I will try to clean a few of the uglier threads, or snip them. She won't mind that. And from this day forth the new threads will wear their natural colors... for well or ill."

  Moira looked Pavlos in the eyes.

  "You know how hard this is, to forswear all but the smallest interference. I am an old goddess, and I will find it hard to change. Even you may find yourself tempted to go too far, when you start feeling more and more of your power as a god."

  Pavlos felt a moment's irritation. They had disagreed about this earlier. "I'm not a god, I tell you. Stop saying that!"

  She smiled, and touched his arm lightly.

  "Not a hero, then not a god? Pavlos Apropoulos, you did not hear yourself, perhaps, when you cursed my sisters and called down thunderbolts?"

  "I told you, those were --"

  "Laser' bolts instead, yes. And your friend, who is also only a man, managed to overcome all of the safeguards on that secret weapon in his sky tower, and his doubts on hearing your weird tale through that talking box --"

  "Radio."

  "And you do not think these are the acts of gods?"

  Pavlos shrugged. Moira made him uncomfortable. There were too many things to think about... things that would take time and open air to consider... a desert somewhere, or a mountaintop.

  "By the way," Moira interrupted his train of thought. Her tone was no longer imperious, but that of an experienced elder speaking to a younger peer. "You should know that your presence will be required here in a year's time, when the summer solstice comes."