The Far Side of The Stars

by David Drake

  The effect of Daniel's order would be to rotate the corvette on her axis instead of skewing her in plane. The Princess Cecile would squeeze between unacceptable gradients instead of smashing directly into one.

  Daniel eyed the heavens pressing against the very existence of the Princess Cecile. The Matrix wasn't hostile, but it was pitiless and vastly beyond the ability of Mankind to conceive, even to the degree that Man understood the universe which had created him.

  The Princess Cecile's transition would come shortly. The astrogation computer had used Uncle Stacey's logs to determine the course—but the Matrix changed, and a computer could predict but could not feel. Daniel, here on the leading mast-truck of a ship not very different from Commander Bergen's, was doing what his uncle would have done. If he misjudged, they'd go off course or very possibly disintegrate.

  He wasn't as skilled as Uncle Stacey, of that he was sure. But in his heart Daniel believed his judgment was good enough.

  Someone moved on the hull below him. Daniel looked down, gripping the mast with his left hand because the helmet of his heavy rigging suit distorted his peripheral vision. Yes, somebody had just emerged from the forward hatch and was handing his way along by the lubber lines which acted as guides and support for the non-riggers who were forced by circumstances to work on the hull.

  Daniel smiled. The only person so clumsy who'd have come out now was Adele. She knew better than to try to climb to him; even if she'd been able to do so without drifting away, there was no room for her here at the peak which he already occupied.

  She stopped at the base of the antenna and attached her safety line to an eyebolt, then bent backward to look up. She didn't signal and he couldn't see her features through his faceshield and hers; but she was there. She had nothing to offer but her presence nearby, so she was offering that.

  Daniel looked at the heavens again. The lights surrounding him, surrounding them all, shivered and changed like the cascading images of a kaleidoscope, each linked to the one before it but utterly different.

  The Princess Cecile slid between universes. Her sails blazed. Though the rippling heavens gave the impression of movement, the reality of her change in relation to the sidereal universe was beyond human understanding.

  Daniel felt transitions ripple swiftly, each within safe parameters. Once a violet glare shoved against the bubble in which the corvette sailed, but only for a heartbeat; then the Princess Cecile was through the throat, the danger point, and proceeding on a course that an intrasystem scow could've navigated safely.

  We'll make it, Daniel thought. Of course. Together we'll make it again.

  He even had mental leisure to wonder what the oracle of New Delphi would be like. . . .

  CHAPTER 21

  Adele's only warning that the Princess Cecile had reached the surface of New Delphi came when the plasma thrusters shut off. There was no jolt, no violent buffeting—just silence and an end to the juddering vibration of ions expelled at high velocity to counteract the pull of gravity.

  "Ship, this is the captain," Daniel announced over the common channel. "We've landed, but the surface here is sand, not water. We'll wait ten minutes for the site to cool before opening any hatches. I repeat, ten minutes—and I mean it, Sissies, I'm not having a bubble of molten glass pop and spit through a port. Captain out."

  "We're on the ground already?" the Klimovna said, her tone mixing surprise with at least a hint of irritation. With the thrusters shut down, probably everyone on the bridge could hear her; certainly Adele could. "I thought this landing was supposed to be very dangerous!"

  Adele unstrapped herself from her couch and sat up. Forcing a smile, she looked at her employers in the annex and said, "I'm sure many captains could have given you all the danger you could imagine on such a landing, mistress. Fortunately you were wise enough to hire a man with a talent for making the difficult look easy."

  Daniel rose to his feet with a satisfied smile. "Loose sand is a better surface than I'd feared it might be," he said. "Though of course walking to the monastery is going to be a chore."

  He cleared his throat. "Mistress Mundy?" he went on. "While we're forced to wait, would you please run through a description of New Delphi for me and the crew?" He bowed toward the annex. "And for our employers, of course, if they're interested."

  "Yes, of course," Adele said. She settled back on her couch, thumbing electronically through images to pick the best sequence for the purpose. She didn't know whether Daniel was really interested in a presentation or if he simply wanted her to fill time that might otherwise permit awkward questions.

  It didn't matter, of course. She'd been asked to provide information, so she'd do just that.

  "There's no certainty of when New Delphi was discovered," she said, transmitting over an alert channel. The signal went to everyone aboard the Princess Cecile, but nobody else could respond by it. "It was settled and named three hundred years before the Hiatus by what appears in the beginning to have been a scientific expedition. They're now a religious order calling themselves the Service of the Tree. There've never been more than a hundred acolytes under a prior on New Delphi. They're volunteers from all over the human galaxy. The Service has extensive charitable works on many scores of planets, staffed by Lay Servants and funded from the fees charged for incubation within the monastery."

  Sun looked at her with a worried expression. "Pardon, mistress?" he said. "But 'incubation'? There's disease here?"

  There aren't even any brothels here, so you needn't worry about disease, Adele thought in irritation at being interrupted. But because Sun probably spoke for scores of spacers throughout the ship, she continued aloud, "Incubation means sleeping; in this particular instance it means sleeping in the Chamber of the Tree to receive dreams which are said to be prophetic."

  She cleared her throat and added, "Some of those making the claims of prophecy are in fact scientific bodies of the highest repute. A delegation from the Academic Collections on Bryce made a detailed study thirty-three years ago. It concluded that the so-called Tree Oracle did in fact foretell the future in statistically-verifiable fashions."

  It embarrassed Adele to repeat superstitious nonsense, but she was unwilling to suppress evidence simply because she was sure those listening would misinterpret it. There was some explanation other than godlike wisdom housed in a tree; it was just that no one had discovered it yet.

  There was a general buzz of voices which Adele ignored as she selected visuals, of the planet generally and of the monastery a quarter mile away. In a commanding tone, Count Klimov said, "What is the amount of the fee the monastery charges, if you please?"

  Adele looked expressionlessly into the annex. Over the alert channel she answered, "The fees are variable, according either to whim or to rules which have never been stated to outsiders. The only certainty is that they're very high."

  Before somebody could interrupt with another question, Adele projected the images she'd picked from her files. She supplemented them with one which the Princess Cecile took from orbit and with a realtime display from the corvette's dorsal sensor pack.

  "New Delphi is arid," she said, "with no surface water at present. There are significant stocks of water in deep aquifers, however, and in some locations plants which rooted before the onset of the final drought have been able to survive by tapping that water. One of these . . . oases is the wrong word, no seedlings have rooted for millennia. One of these existing plants is the so-called Oracle Tree, which has been growing out from its center to a present diameter of nearly six miles. We've landed beside it."

  She highlighted the realtime display. A tangled mass of trunks and branches reached a hundred and twenty feet high. It didn't look like a single tree to her, but she accepted the opinion of the experts.

  The mass didn't even seem to be alive, but again Adele supposed the experts must know. The gray leaves were sparse and individually tiny, but presumably they proved sufficient to the tree's limited requirements.

  "Th
e monastery's built within the tree," she continued. "It's only the outer ring that's alive; the wood of the interior is dead and in the center has rotted away. There are extensive passages through the dead portion of the trunk and in the soil beneath, though five years ago—that's the latest report I could find—there were only forty-one acolytes on New Delphi."

  "What kind of defenses does the monastery have, Mundy?" Daniel asked. "The wealth of the Delphi Foundation would be a tempting prize even in a more settled part of the galaxy. Here in the North I'd judge it'd be a race between pirates and the Commonwealth government itself as to who'd be the first to loot the planet."

  "The Tree Oracle funds the operations of the Delphi Foundation all over the human galaxy," Adele said, remembering that she was speaking to members of the crew who couldn't hear Daniel's question. "Orphanages, hospitals, development schemes—nearly a thousand projects on several hundred worlds, and I doubt that's an exhaustive list. But none of the wealth is here."

  Her wands sequenced through a dozen images of the monastery's interior: the bare walls were either rock or wood textured by its grain; individual rooms—cells—with a table, a stool, and a sleeping mat unrolled on the floor; and a dining hall in which acolytes wearing identical robes of coarse gray fabric filled their bowls from a common urn.

  The only exception to the general starkness was the library containing tens of thousands of volumes and data consoles of advanced design. Adele smiled wryly as she flicked that image up, then replaced it with one of the Chamber of the Tree; its only furnishing was a couch carved into the trunk of the Tree itself.

  Adele was probably the only person aboard the Princess Cecile to whom a library like that one suggested extreme wealth. Pirates would react much the way Sun did, with blank incomprehension.

  "The acolytes live an ascetic existence, even by the standards of the RCN on active service," Adele said, allowing herself a strait-faced joke. "The oracle is open to all who pay the fee; the Foundation is wholly apolitical, acting for the betterment of Mankind without regard to government, religion, or any other factor save the perceived need of the recipients of the proffered aid. The combination of neutrality and poverty has preserved the monastery as no conceivable armament could have done."

  She smiled coldly. "A cynic might believe that the poverty alone was sufficient protection."

  "Six?" said Betts on the command channel. "There's people coming toward us. A little door opened in the side of the tree. Do you want we should let 'em aboard, over?"

  Adele increased the magnification of the realtime display at the top of her screen. A young woman and an older man with white-trimmed hem and cuffs had walked from the tree and to within a stone's throw of the Princess Cecile. They were barefoot and bare-headed, squinting slightly against dust blown by the steady wind. Occasionally the man would wobble; each time the woman took his arm to steady him.

  "I think," said Daniel, rising from his console, "that instead we'll go meet them. Ship, this is Six; all personnel may open the hatches in their area. Woetjans, meet me in the main lock with a twenty-strong escort; we're going to view the monastery of New Delphi. Mr. Chewning, you're in charge in my absence."

  He looked at the Klimovs. "Your excellencies?" he said. "Would you care . . . ?"

  "Yes," Valentina said as she and her husband rose stiffly. "Of course we'll come!"

  Adele got up from her couch and twisted her upper body one way, then the other, to loosen her muscles. "Ah . . . ?" she said, catching the "Daniel" before it left her tongue. "Captain? I'd like to accompany you. To see the library."

  "Yes, of course, Mundy," Daniel said with his usual bright smile. He buckled his equipment belt with the holstered pistol on over his utility uniform. "You'll be able to tell us what to look for."

  The group from the bridge trooped down the echoing companionway. Adele frowned when she saw that the escort waiting in the entryway within the open main hatch was armed to the teeth. "Daniel?" she murmured in her friend's ear. "Do you think the guns are necessary?"

  "No, I don't," he said, pursing his lips in thought. "But your most recent information is five years old, and there's no foreign ship on the planet so far as we could tell from orbit. The personnel Woetjans chose for our escort are well-disciplined, so we needn't fear accidents on our side . . . and I'd just as soon view the situation on the ground myself before I assume it's perfectly safe."

  The air blowing in through the hatchway was cool and dry with the hint of a vegetable odor. Adele would've described the smell as cinnamon if she'd been forced to pick, but of course she wasn't.

  "I'll lead," Daniel said nonchalantly and strode down the boarding bridge. Hogg was directly behind him, and Woetjans with her armed band followed ahead of the Klimovs, Adele, and last of all Tovera. Because the Princess Cecile stood on solid ground, the entry port was some distance in the air. High enough to break a leg or your neck, Adele suspected; and there was enough wind to make a fall possible even for someone sober.

  The ship's exhaust had fused the ground into coarse glass. There were similar patches at many places along the south side of the tree's vast circle. Archeologists could probably identify thousands of earlier landing sites, covered or broken up by ages of blowing wind.

  The Service of the Tree had pointedly chosen not to encourage visitors by improving the facilities. Even the small vessel the Service kept for its own purposes stood in the open. Its only protection was a fence upwind which formed a berm of sand dumped on the other side of the slats.

  Daniel had waited with his hands crossed behind his back until the Klimovs arrived. "Count and Lady Klimov," he said, "allow me to present the Prior of the Service of the Tree and Sister Margarida, a novice of the order."

  Adele noted with amusement she was careful to hide that the Count didn't know whether to react to Margarida as an attractive young woman—which she certainly was, at least in the slightly plush fashion that Daniel favored—or as the religious figure which her title and gray habit suggested. In the end he bowed to both man and girl, without offering to kiss the latter's hand.

  "Please come in with us," the Prior said, turning with the careful determination of age. "You'll find it more comfortable out of the wind, I'm sure."

  He chuckled, adding, "And so will we, to tell the truth, though I don't remember it bothering me so much when I was as young as Margarida, here. That was a very long time ago, of course."

  The door set into the rock was wooden, but it had weathered to such a degree that valve and jamb blurred visually from any distance. At ground level the Tree was a mass of trunks, surface roots, and low-hanging branches. The different portions were indistinguishable to Adele and probably confusing even to Daniel, whose knowledge of natural history was more than a dilettante's. Everything—bark, wood, and the underlying stone—was the same color: gray with tawny undertones.

  Margarida opened the door. Before she could help the Prior through, Woetjans pushed inside with her stocked impeller pointed forward at waist level.

  "Most of the Acolytes are at their duties in other parts of the monastery now," the Prior said with a faint smile. "I don't believe you'll find anyone in this section of corridor, but if you do I assure you that they'll be friendly."

  Daniel bowed to the old man. "May I help you, sir?" he said. "I appreciate you inconveniencing yourself in order to greet us."

  The tunnel within was eight feet wide and not quite that high. The ceiling was a mass of wood with a ropy pattern. Daniel, the Prior leaning on his right arm, looked up and said, "Is that a root, sir? It certainly appears to be."

  Margarida closed the door behind Tovera. Glow strips on the walls cast a yellow-green illumination to which Adele's eyes quickly adapted, though she noticed that as soon as the spacers stepped inside they slid down their light-enhancing goggles.

  "Yes, the tree's still alive in this section," the girl called in answer to Daniel's question. "You'll notice that the roots have grown over some of the lights a little way up the corrid
or."

  She smiled pleasantly to Adele as she passed, moving up to the front with the Prior, Daniel, and the Klimovs. Adele thought there was something appraising in the glance Margarida gave each of the Sissies in turn, but she supposed that was natural enough for a member of a small community suddenly visited by strangers three times its number.

  "This is the refectory," the Prior was saying as Adele entered a long room that grew from the tunnel rather than being served by it. "We eat twice a day here, though I should mention that our days are only nineteen standard hours. You're welcome to dine with us while you're on New Delphi, though please give us at least a few hours warning."

  He smiled; he still had his hair, but it was so fine and white that his scalp shone through. Since the only light was that of the glowstrips, what would normally be pink had a disconcerting purplish tone.

  "Normally two acolytes prepare each meal, a senior and a novice," the Prior explained. "I would wish to considerably increase the numbers in the kitchen if we're to feed all of you."

  According to all Adele's sources, the acolytes ate cheese, gruel and dried fruit, all of them imported but nonetheless of the simplest sort. They washed their identical meals down with water drawn up from the same aquifers which fed the Tree; reportedly it had enough iron to stain cups after a week or two of use.

  "I believe we'll eat aboard the Sissie rather than strain your resources, sir," Daniel said. Count Klimov looked vaguely irritated, probably by the fact his employee had spoken rather than the decision itself, but he didn't intervene. "His excellency the Count remarked that he'd like to see the incubation chamber. Is that permissible?"

  "Why yes, of course," the Prior said. "Those of us in the Service of the Tree have no secrets. There are no secrets from the Tree, you see."