"The paper, Colonel."
She looked at them, slid the simple piece of paper back across the desk. The board member collected it and put it into the folder. Carefully.
"It's more than evidence," she said. "That's a treaty. The indigenes know it is." They left her office, less than comfortable in their official search for blame and where, officially, to put it.
She was already packed. Going back on the same ship with an elvish corpse, all the way to Pell and Downbelow. There would be a grave there onworld.
It had surprised no one when the broadcast tape got an elvish response. Hopes rose when it got the fighting stopped and brought an elvish delegation to the front; but there was a bit of confusion when the elves viewed both bodies and wanted deFranco's. Only deFranco's. And they made him a stone grave there on the shell-pocked plain, a stone monument; and they wrote everything they knew about him. I was John Rand deFranco, a graven plaque said. I was born on a space station twenty light-years away. I left my mother and my brothers. The friends I had were soldiers and many of them died before me. I came to fight and I died for the peace, even when mine was the winning side. I died at the hand of Angan Anassidi, and he died at mine, for the peace; and we were friends at the end of our lives. Elves— suiltiwas one name they called themselves—came to this place and laid gifts of silk ribbons and bunches of flowers—flowers, in all that desolation; and in their thousands they mourned and they wept in their own tearless, expressionless way.
For their enemy.
One of their own was on his way to humankind. For humankind to cry for. I was Angan Anassidi, his grave would say; and all the right things. Possibly no human would shed a tear. Except the veterans of Elfland, when they came home, if they got down to the world—they might, like Agnes Finn, in their own way and for their own dead, in front of an alien shrine. 1987
THE GIFT OF PROPHECY
A shuttle landed on Aneth, third of the three which daily landed on the world's surface. There was a stir about this arrival as there generally was not, whatever the rank of those who attended the shrine. These were Shantrans, off the powerful high-tech world of An Shant . . . the last major power which resisted the amphictyony of the shrine.
With appropriate ceremony, the Shantrans paused in the Hall of Arrivals long enough to sign the Pact and join the Amphictyony, the Neighbors of the Shrine. They did so with frowns and hesitations enough to indicate a displeasure in principle; An Shant made few agreements. But this signature was the sole and indispensable condition of consultation with the Oracle . . . a militarily harmless accord. The Shantrans read it in detail and failed to find fault in any pact so easily broken, so lacking in enforcements.
That they bar none from access to the Anethine Oracle, it read, on pain of being barred themselves in future; to come to the aid of the shrine with armed force should any attempt to gain entry by force.
They walked away openly smiling, for they were not believers in the Oracle. They had come, nevertheless, to consult it, for reasons which were their own.
And the Anethines hastened to make them welcome, making themselves as agreeable as they showed themselves to all comers, believers or not.
Aneth desired above all to please.
Visions . . . and patterns . . . endless questions.
A tapestry of patterns, interwoven. . . . The mythic fates were weavers too, lives their thread, empires their pattern, uncaring patterners, heedless who or why; the pattern was all, had ever been, and all was pattern.
To perceive . . . to know . . . the ultimate design which shifted between thread and colors, almost to grasp—the Whole. . .
Time to cease.
There was a danger, a point past which humanness slipped the mind, when the knowledge itself became all, and the Eye was more powerful than the mind which must hold what it saw, when mind diminished in the face of design . . .
There was a point past which . . . not, not at all.
Maranthe tired of waking, and dulled her senses deliberately; began the withdrawal from life to shadows.
"Maranthe," the Voices began, reminding her of humanity, which she chose to forget. They persisted. A cup came to her lips; she drank, obedient. When the Shadows took her in their hands she walked, moved, performed necessary functions. At their whispering reminder, she ate, and they bathed her and laid her in her bed.
Then was utter dark. She did not dream.
She did not wake until the morrow, when she sat again with hands outstretched over the cold plates of the machine . . . and the Vision resumed.
The old woman sat surrounded by her machine.
Maranthe was—wholly—the machine. She saw, and smiled, forever, maddeningly smiled, her aged face rapt and her dimmed eyes fixed, lost in the power of the Vision. And Mishell envied.
Mishell did not speak of it. Possibly all the Servants of Aneth envied. Surely they must, for there was nothing on Aneth which approached the glory, the importance of Maranthe. Servants came and went, living and dying and being carried away. Maranthe was all. And there was no exit from Aneth, least of all for those sealed within the inmost enclave of the Machine. Only the visitors, who were never withinAneth, came, asked their single questions, departed. They went, and where they went Mishell could not imagine, could never imagine, sealed within white walls, silent, in silence. She had nothing of the Vision. They asked, these visitors, and what they asked Mishell could not hear. Only the Sibyl, only Maranthe—heard. Visitors went away to act, to pursue their lives and the fates the Oracle gave them—as Servants could never leave and never act, whose fate was to serve, tending Maranthe.
Mishell served. She guided the frail, bent woman from Machine to couch, from couch to Machine. With other Servants she fed her, bathed her, performed all minute and lowly things for her, who was the sole reason for their existence. Tiny, frail, blind, yet Maranthe smiled, constantly smiled while she waked . . . for long, long hours wrapped in the Vision, where Maranthe saw . . . and they could not.
In those hours, their own duty over, the Servants themselves must eat and sleep and dream. And in her dreams Mishell sought life. Armed only with the gray and white sameness of the Enclave, she built colors, and beauty, and tried with all her senses to attain to the Vision which was Maranthe's, which hovered palpably in the Enclave, a presence which seized and shaped, and gave them what dreams they knew.
It ended with waking. The world was cold again, steel and white garments and white plastics, and Servants moved soft-footed and whispering within it, for they must not intrude their small reality into the greater. Gently Mishell bathed Maranthe's wasted limbs, and gently folded the skeletal body into soft garments, and gently tucked her to bed.
And daily sat (or was it night?) through Maranthe's sleep, waking while the Vision was numb, and the walls were void and stark, the dreams dead within the Enclave's waking. There were other worlds; Maranthe saw them; they dreamed of them; the visitors came from them; but the worlds were dreams.
"It's a charade." The major paused with his hand on the rail of the boarding area, looking back at the port facility where the shuttle rested, with deepening regret. "Rational beings flock to this place. I find it incredible."