I can’t take this, Snook thought in pure panic. It’s too much.
The taste of the chicle grew strong in his mouth, a reminder that he was not alone in his ordeal, and—as the floor levels merged—he obediently stepped towards the Avernian.
The insubstantial face drew near his own, the mist-pools of the eyes growing larger. Snook inclined his head forward, yielding himself. There was a merging.
Snook grunted with surprise as his identity was…lost.
Deep peace of the running wave.
I am Felleth. My function in society is that of Responder—which means that I give advice to others, tell them what to do or what should be done next. No, your concept of the oracle is incorrect, my function reversed. An oracle would give forewarning of events, and leave its audience to devise their own -perhaps incorrect—responses. As the concept of prediction is invalid when one goes beyond the causality of the growing seed reaching maturation or the falling stone reaching the ground, it is necessary only to appreciate the significance of what has already occur ed and to give infallible advice on how to react…
Oracle. Logic arrow pointing to related concept. The stars foretell. True as the stars above. Astra. Dis-astra.
Disaster!
Wait, wait, wait! 1 am in pain.
The stars in their courses. Planets? Plural ? Cyclic? What is ayear?
No! Your concept of time is incorrect. Time is a straight thread, tightly drawn between the Past Infinity and the Future Infinity, light and dark strands—night and day—appearing to alternate, but each is continuous. Continuous, but twisted….
Wait! The pain increases.
Sun, the provider of day. Planets, ellipses, axial spin. No cloud-roof. Clear skies, many suns. Logic arrow pointing to related concept. Particles, anti-particles. Correct—our relationship almost precisely defined—but there is something else. Anti-particle planet, seen beyond the cloud-roof. In the year 1993…
Confusion concepts. It is not possible to measure time in any way other than minus-now orplus-now. And yet…
One thousand days ago the weight of our oceans decreased. The waters rose into the sky, until they touched the cloud-roof. Then they swept away the People. And the houses of the People…
You say I should have known. That I should have been able to predict.
You say.…
NO!
The minty warmth on Snook’s tongue became real again. He found himself kneeling on hard rock, in the midst of anxious faces, his body being steadied by several hands. His Amplites were gone and somebody had switched on a portable light, bringing the tool-marked contours of the tunnel walls into sharp relief and at the same time making them seem stagey and unreal.
“Are you all right, Gil?” Murphy’s voice was noncommittal, an indication that he was really concerned.
Snook nodded and got to his feet. “How long was I out?” “You weren’t out,” Ambrose said, sternly professorial. “You fell down on your knees. That was when George switched on the light—against my instructions, I might add—and brought the experiment to a premature end by almost blinding us.” He turned to Murphy. “You know, George, the instructions with magniluct glasses clearly warn you against switching on a bright light where people are wearing them.”
Murphy was unrepentant. “I thought Gil was hurt.” “How could he have been hurt?” Ambrose became businesslike once more. “Oh, well—there’s no point in holding a post mortem. We can only hope the few seconds of recordings we did get are worth…”
“Just a minute,” Snook put in, floundering, still trying to orient himself in what should have been the familiar universe.
“How about Felleth? Did you see how he reacted?”
“Who’s Felleth?”
“The Avernian. Felleth. Didn’t you…?”
“What are you talking about?” Ambrose’s fingers clawed into Snook’s shoulders. “What are you saying?”
“I’m trying to find out how long the Avernian’s head was…you know…inside mine.”
“Hardly any time at all,” Culver said, knuckling his eyes. “I thought I saw him jumping back from you, then George nearly burned my retinas out with his…”
“Quiet!” Ambrose’s voice was almost frantic. “Did it work, Gil? Did you get an impression of the Avernian’s name?”
“An impression?” Snook smiled tiredly. “More than that. I was part of his life for a while. That’s why I wanted to know how long the contact had been—it seemed like minutes. Perhaps hours.”
“What can you remember?”
“It isn’t a good place, Boyce. Something went wrong. It’s funny, but before we came down here this time I got a kind of idea…”
“Gil, I’m going to give you a debriefing right now and get it on tape while it’s still fresh in your memory. Do you feel up to it? Are there any ill effects?”
“I’m a bit shagged out, but it’s all right.”
“Good.” Ambrose held his wrist recorder close to Snook’s mouth. “You’ve already said his name was Felleth—did you get a name for their planet?”
“No. They don’t seem to have given it a name. It’s the only world they know about, so maybe it doesn’t need a name. Anyway, the contact wasn’t like that—we didn’t have a conversation.” Snook began to feel doubts about his ability to give a proper description of the experience, and at the same time something of its enormousness began to dawn on him. An inhabitant of another universe, a ghost, had touched his mind. Lives had mingled…
“All right—try going back to the beginning. What is the first thing you remember?”
Snook closed his eyes and said, “Deep peace of the running wave.”
“Was that a greeting?”
“I think so—but it seemed more important to him. Their world seems to be mostly water. The wind could take a wave right…Oh, I don’t know.”
“Okay. Skip the greeting—what came next?”
“Felleth calls himself a Responder. That’s something like a leader, but he doesn’t think of himself as leading. Then there was a kind of argument about oracles and predictions, with him doing all the arguing. He said prediction was impossible.”
“An argument? I thought you said you didn’t have a conversation.”
“We didn’t—but he must have had access to my ideas.”
“This is important, Gil,” Ambrose said briskly. “Do you think he got as much information from you as you got from him?”
“I can’t say. It must have been a two-way process, but how could I tell who got the most?”
“Did you get any sense of being pressurised into talking?”
“No. In fact, he seemed to be hurting. There was something about pain.”
“Okay. Keep going, Gil.”
“He was shocked to learn about stars. They don’t seem to have any astronomy. There’s a permanent cloud cover -Felleth has it mixed up in his mind with the idea of a roof. He didn’t know the relationship between planets and suns.”
“Are you certain? Surely they could have devised an astronomy.”
“How?” Snook felt oddly defensive.
“It wouldn’t be too easy, I know, but there are lots of clues. The cycles of day and night, seasons…”
“They don’t think that way. Felleth didn’t know that his world rotates. He thanks of night and day as being like black and white marks on a straight thread. They don’t have seasons. They don’t have years. For them, time…everything else…is linear. They don’t have dates or calendars, as we know them. They count time forwards and backwards from the present.”