Context (7 page)

First
vision.

Tom saw:

A kaleidoscope of
busy bazaars
... crystal ballrooms with nobles dancing ...thermidors flaring in lava ...deserted
thousand-kilometre tunnels where only blind-moths move
...

It was a flickering montage of
everyday life throughout the world, from every stratum and sector of
Nulapeiron.

Second
vision.

A
dizzying switch to other worlds,
whose very existence had been mere legend, a fantasy, during Tom’s impoverished
youth:
mist-borne cities above silver seas ...antlered bipeds communing in
an amphitheatre beneath a violet sky ...bewigged tripods dancing on razorstone
while their voracious seedlings wait with fangs bared
...

‘What are you doing to him?’

Elva’s voice, sounding from a
distance.

Tom reeled at the sense of
limitless space.

I have seen the sky.

No more than a few dozen people—among
ten billion inhabitants—had seen the world’s surface, but Tom was one of them,
was conditioned against the agoraphobic response which could reduce an
unprepared person to catatonia.

But, lost amid the Seer’s
visions, Tom felt a sense of unremitting emptiness, the insignificance of life
amid the vastly greater, infinite universe, and it pressed inexorably down,
saddening and overwhelming him.

~ * ~

Third
vision.

He
saw
the creamy nebuloid drifting in space as
flame-tailed comets, the tiny males of her species, wheel inwards to her core
...

‘Last chance, Seer. Release him.’

He whimpered before the
immensity, the vast interstellar scale of his forced perception.

~ * ~

Fourth
vision.

Changes coming faster now ...

Angular lightning, dancing
gavottes on a salt-white desert ... fat green toroids rolling, with tiny
bipedal corpses trapped on their digestive rims ... a newborn spindlebug drops
screeching from its cocoon...

‘I
said...’

Gasping,
Tom held up his hand.

He shuddered, blinked moisture
from his eyes.

‘It’s all right, Elva.’

It
had begun as revenge, for the loss of his mother and his father’s death. He had
studied all the logosophical disciplines - 
‘For you, logosophy is a weapon,’
Sylvana once said -including all he could find on the forbidden topic of
the Oracles.

Time flowed both ways in an
Oracle’s brain, past and future intermixed, with no tangible difference between
past memory and prescient vision—of their own personal future - save that
Lords and Ladies could use truecasts as the basis for their formidable
political power.

Poor Oracles.

They spent most of their time
watching and reading news reports and analyses, to be reported (subjectively
later) as future-memories to their constant entourage of analysts. Sometimes,
now, Tom could see the Oracles as tools, as pitiful victims who were scarcely
human, and rarely benefited from the privileged strata their existence helped
to maintain.

But not one of them could see things
which did not occur before his or her own eyes at some point in their life, or
force their strange disturbing visions into another person’s mind.

‘Seer,
what exactly are you?’

It seemed no coincidence that Dr
Xyenquil had lately been talking about Calabi-Yau transformations, and the use
of spacetime’s hidden hyperdimensions. If the Seer could truly perceive distant
places and times ...

AND WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF
EXISTENCE?
A mocking smile crossed the Seer’s
features.
BY ALL MEANS, LET’S ADDRESS THE BIG, ETERNAL QUESTIONS WHILE WE’RE
HERE ...

Sapphire lightning continued to
dance.

An image grew between Tom and the
Oracle, and for a moment Tom thought it was another vision. But it was merely
holo. Elva, too, was frowning at the sight.

A membrane separates the chamber
from the glowing blue fluid. Inside, drifting shapes move slowly: humans,
connected by tendrils to some shadowy central mass.

Two youths watch, horrified, from
the observation chamber... And one of these youths is Tom, visiting his
imprisoned schoolfriend Kreevil
...

The holo dwindled, faded, was
gone.

Tom remembered the occasion, and
how it had been his fault that Kreevil was among the schoolboy thieves. Poor
unlucky Kreevil: imprisoned for a crime he had not wanted to be part of.

That was real.

Could the Seer really pluck
images from the past, and cause them to be reproduced?

And why that particular image?

He noted then that the lightnings
and the glowing blue fluid were of the same electric hue. He had seen other
hints of it in the past...

‘What is that fluid, Seer?’

A strange expression masked the
Seer’s face, was gone.

Keep your secret, then.

But Tom was far too familiar with
burning, long-held hatred not to recognize its obsessive presence in another
human being ... if this Seer could be termed human.

‘Just
what are you, Seer?’ he asked again. ‘An experiment gone wrong?’

Silence, while the lev-throne
rose higher, almost to the domed ceiling, then dropped down closer. The Seer’s
lips moved; Tom could not quite hear his whisper.

YOUR REPUTATION AS A FIGHTER IS
WELL EARNED.

A half-smile.

BUT ARE YOU THE LOGOSOPHER THAT
PEOPLE CLAIM?

‘Try me.’

Then five, twenty, a hundred
holo-manifolds blossomed into being, tesseracts with equations scrolling past
at breakneck speed. It was genuine, and it was new, and Tom tried to slip into
full logosophical trance, to merge with the gestalten-tao ... but it was too
late, and the tantalizing images minimized to dots, and vanished.

Timewave engineering ? Damn you .
..

It was some kind of cruel joke,
to allow a glimpse of the workings behind an Oracle’s mind, then to take that
insight away.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE COLLEGIUM PERPETUUM
DELPHINORUM WOULD DO, IF THEY KNEW YOU HAD SEEN EVEN THAT MUCH?

Tom shook his head.

‘Sweet Chaos.’
Elva. ‘Do you have any idea how
valuable—?’

On the next lev-step, Elva went
down on one knee, and turned towards Tom. Her eyes held an expression he had
never seen: a hunger, a despair, a great depth of sadness.

‘Tom, I’m sorry ...’ She paused,
then: ‘I’ve another loyalty, and this one goes right back to childhood.’

Tom stared at her. Beyond, at the
edge of his vision, the Seer’s spherical lev-throne dropped, came hurtling
downwards.

NO! STOP HER!

It shot towards Elva.

DON’T YOU KNOW WHAT SHE IS?

‘I
never thought I’d be the one to do this. Oh, Tom, I
never once woke up without wondering if this was the day everything would just
end. It was always Litha who was the important one. I thought, I really
thought—’

STOP! DON’T LET HER DO IT!

‘Tom, you must know how I feel
about—’

Confused, Tom leaped to Elva’s
side, almost sliding off the lev-step before he caught his balance. He grasped
her arm.

‘What’s going on?’