Chapter 1

I knew it was the wrong question before I asked it, knew Dr. Powers would never approve, and yet I had paid a small fortune for this opportunity. I wasn't going to leave with a simple yes or no.

I entered the chamber, stepping carefully through the tangled mess of power cables, data cables and security cables which kept the ring of sensors secured to the decking and connected to a n-core q-bit processor somewhere in the space station. In the center of the spider web lurked a carbon-black tank, three-quarters full of a faintly green glowing hydro-gel. Suspended over the tank on hydraulics, wreathed in tangled creepers of fiber-optic cables, a lid hung poised as if ready to slam down on whatever threat emerged from within.

The wall on my left, relatively free of obstructions, flickered to life where someone had slapped up a coat of smartpaint. A young, non-threatening, Eurasian female smiled reassuringly at me, her too symmetrical computer generated face marred by the occasional conduits and junction boxes over which it was displayed. "Greetings, Pilot Officer Phon. Welcome to the quantum-signature scanning room. We were able to access your records from the New Athens Academy and the Mars Defense Force so we will only need to ask you a few questions to update your information. If you would like the orientation briefing, say continue, if not, say skip."

"Skip."

"Please remove your clothes and your netpiece. You'll find personal facilities behind you."

I stripped off the Mars Defense Force flight suit and hung it on a hook. The rest of my gear went on a shelf. I tugged the netpiece hanging over my left ear from the magnetic contacts at the base of my skull, and laid it on top of my gear. The data feed glittering on the inside of my corneas disappeared, severing me from my connection to the news, culture, and my network of friends and family. It somehow left me feeling alone and naked in a way I hadn't felt when I was merely alone and naked.

"The hydrogel in the tank is necessary to filter out environmental noise. It also serves as a contact for the sensors. It has been heated to your current body temperature, so please step into the tank when you are ready." I stepped inside and sat in the warm ooze. The AI continued its instructions. "Please attach the respirator and ear plugs and lie back in the tank. If you need instructions, please say help."

I ripped the plastic mask from its velcro fastener on the underside of the lid and pulled the attached plastic tube until the valve clicked open. Removing the waxed plastic strip from the adhesive edge of the mask, I carefully sealed it around my face. Then I took the two earplugs from their container in the lid and inserted them.

This was my third visit to an oracle, my third attempt to pierce the veil of quantum probability. My first trip was as a student volunteer for a research project at the academy at New Athens. My second scan was part of a calibration test for the Martian Defense Force. This third scan would allow the oracle to more effectively triangulate my future, though I'm told the scans are even more effective if they're not quite so close together. At 2.3 million terra a scan--five times the average person's annual income--I wouldn't even have had this scan made if it were not for the advice of my mentor, Dr. Powers, and the decision I faced.

"Can you hear me?" the AI asked.

I lay back in the goo with a squelch. "Yes." The mask muffled my voice.

The lid began descending. "Our records indicate you .28 on the claustrophobic scale. You may prefer to close your eyes. A mild sedative has been added to your air mixture for your comfort." The light shining through my eyelids faded to black. Through the hydrogel, I heard the thunk and hiss of the lid sealing the tank. I took a slow deep breath, relaxed my body, and tried to will my heartbeat to slow.

"In a moment we will begin asking you a series of questions. These questions are necessary to interpret the results of your scan. It is important that your answers be as complete and accurate as possible. This is to ensure that your interpretation will be useful to you. Many of these questions will be highly personal in nature. Please do not be offended or concerned about your privacy. Be assured that all information you provide is protected by the strictest confidentiality laws and unbreakable encryption algorithms. Before we begin, however, we need to know the purpose of this visit. Take a moment to compose your question to the oracle, and please word it carefully. Speak when you are ready."

This was the moment I had worried over, my 2.3 million terra question. I had thought of nothing else on the shuttle from Luna to the space station at Lagrange Point Five and I was still unsure of exactly what to ask. The obvious question was whether I should join my friend Phil Porter on the Cack military expedition against The Unbounded Ones. However, if the answer was yes, I needed to know more and yet I could only afford the time and money for one question.

The one question that kept running through my mind was "what would my father think?" If I asked him, I know what he would say. He would say I was a big boy and I could make my own decisions. If he felt like talking, he might give me a lecture along the lines that if I hoped to take over the family business, I would have to make many important decisions myself.

He was always like that. Even when I nearly got kicked out of New Athens for a prank the administration did not find humorous, all I got was a lecture about duty, responsibility and "natural consequences," which meant he wasn't going to pull any strings to bail me out. He left me to fix things entirely on my own. Worse yet by far was the disappointment in his eyes. He was a hard man to anger, but an even harder man to please.

"I am considering a trip soon," I began uncertainly, "and I would like to know how I may take it and return most safely and profitably."

"Your question is, how you may most safely and profitably take the trip you are considering. Is this correct?"

"Yes." I felt stupid. I knew the repeated question was more for their lawyers than my own clarification, but I couldn't help but imagine a slight note of incredulity in the AI's tone.

"Good!" the AI burbled in simulated enthusiasm. "Now let us begin updating the file on your life events since your last visit to the oracle."

The AI began asking a vast array of questions from the obvious list of hopes, dreams, and fears to the obscurely trivial such as what I ate for each meal. Quite a few questions I simply couldn't answer. But with each question, I grew more relaxed as the hypnogenic gas took effect.

* * *

"Scan Complete."

I opened my eyes to see the lid had already been raised.

"Please dress and return to the waiting room. Cleaning facilities have been provided for your convenience."

A full shower on L5 was something of a luxury. Even so, I noted as I pulled myself from the goo, stepped inside the shower and turned it on, that the water reclamation facilities could only manage a faint stream. I stood under the tepid trickle, washed, and had just begun to towel off when a flustered young Anglo woman in a white lab coat barged into the room following a perfunctory knock. I hastily wrapped the towel around myself, a little disappointed that she didn't seem to notice I had no clothes.

"I apologize for the intrusion, but Dr. Swiftly has seen your profile and wishes to speak with you."

I judged from her breathless manner that this was somewhat unusual. In fact, it hardly seemed likely Dr. Swiftly would have had time to fully examine the results.

"He will be joining you shortly." She disappeared, jerking the door closed behind her.

Puzzled, I pulled on my flight suit wondering what future event in my life could be so unusual that it would cause such a commotion. As I slipped on my netpiece, a sudden thought chilled me. What if something very bad was going to happen to me? Was I about to die in some horrible accident? How did they deliver such news?

Moments later a long wall panel slid opened and a large Crawdad entered the room. Their own names for themselves translated as The Gifted Ones, though no human linguist had yet tweezed out its precise implications. Dr. Swiftly looked anything but swift. He stretched nearly three and a half meters from end to end and stood just under two meters at the shoulder. A large segmented carapace in mottled maroon and greens, a broad stubby tail and oversized clawed forelimbs gave his race their human nickname. Weighing nearly a quarter-ton, the crawdads stood on two thick hind legs, had a pair of eyestalks which could be retracted beneath the forward edge of their carapace and used the tentacles around their mouths as their primary manipulators. To Solarian eyes, they did not present an appearance of sentience. What they thought of the hominids of Earth, they did not volunteer.

The oracle's brochure translated Dr. Swiftly's name as "SwiftlyThrough-the-Tall-Grass-Like-the-Winds-Before-A-Winter-Storm." It also mentioned that the translation was but a fragment of his name and that it was inadequate to communicate the true idiomatic meaning.

The crawdad seemed to drop into a crouch before me, eyes out, large claws folded across each other. It rumbled, gurgled and hissed while a device attached to the smaller of his two claws translated, "Pilot Officer Kenneth Phon, seeing you delights my curious mind."

"I, also," I replied uncertainly.

The tentacles hanging from Dr. Swiftly's mouth, which had twitched busily, dropped and hung motionless. His eyes spread wide on their stalks as if trying to examine me from both sides. I had no idea if this was a good or bad reaction. After a moment, Dr. Swiftly spoke again, "I seek you startle not at my wonderment. Translation is frequently incomplete. Divergent herd expressions are alone in the field."

I puzzled over his words, but all I got out of them was that he was having a hard time understanding me. "Please forgive my own inadequate speech. I intend only goodwill."

Dr. Swiftly's mouth tentacles wriggled upward and one eye drifted away lazily. "The pasture is open. Let us gather in my office. I have a spectacle for you to graze upon."

I followed him into the next room and watched as he leaned against what I took to be a backward chair. He rested his front against what would have been the chair's long back which was tilted at a forty-five degree angle. Dr. Swiftly gurgled and hissed at a control panel and two graphs appeared on the monitor, one in red and one in blue. The serpentine shapes had fern-like fronds curling away on each side. They were clearly fractal patterns.

"The leftward kairogram," Dr. Swiftly began, gesturing toward the red pattern, "is the course of He Who Looks Up's yesterdays and tomorrows."

He Who Looks Up was the name the aliens had given us humans, though, with the discovery of life on other star systems and the colonization of other worlds beginning, we'd begun referring to ourselves as Solarians.

"And on the right?" I prompted.

Dr. Swiftly paused, swinging both eyes around to fix on me. "The oracles perambulate the herd with the Moiarchy's kairogram."

My skin prickled with an almost electrical shock of surprise. "The Moiarchy? The Cack Moiarchy? Those Who Dwell Within?" 

They were the single most powerful known race in the galaxy, controlling tens of thousands of light-years of space. We Solarians had only narrowly avoided their hostile takeover with our frantic counterattacks. We didn't have the technology to defeat them, but we were able to force their cost overruns to rise above any profitable return on conquering our system.

I looked at the red and blue ferns on the display and tried to guess what Dr. Swiftly was pointing out. "The two are mirror images."

"Not all the way. Calves of the same mother, surely. The two gather, travel together a ways, then diverge. Your kairogram was alone in the field. Lift up your eyes." He gurgled at the control panel and a thin yellow line appeared in the purple area where the two ferns overlapped. It appeared in segments like a thread sewing a seam between the two. But whereas the other two kairograms branched into numerous curling fronds, the yellow one's branches were few, small and far between. Instead of a fern, it looked more like a withered vine.

The short hairs on the back of my neck prickled again. "Are you saying the yellow line is my kairogram?"

Dr. Swiftly's eyes swayed and dipped as if reluctant to look at me. "Yes."

I am no expert at reading kairograms, but even I could tell this looked bad. "It looks...stunted."

Dr. Swiftly's mouth tentacles bunched together, drew up, dropped and repeated the motion. It looked as if he were scooping up some invisible food into his mouth, though I sensed it was more likely some sort of crawdad facial gesture. "Stunted. Yes. A well-formed expression. Your tomorrows have been stunted." He gurgled at the controls and the monitor panned along a close-up view of my kairogram. Tiny abortive futures stuck out like singed hairs. Only one path seemed to last for any length, though it split into two near the end of the scan.

"It sounds as if it might be better if I stayed home."

"Truly, predators stalk the darkness on all sides. But once begun, you dare not turn back on the path. Others follow behind."

"Others?"

Dr. Swiftly turned back to the monitor and watched the kairograms panning across the display into the future beyond my timeline. The Cack and Solarian kairograms began to diverge, but while the Solarian future branched out in a flurry of probabilities, the Cack kairogram shrank and curled in on itself. He turned one eye toward me. "Soon your kind must join The Gifted Ones and Those Who Dwell Within at the center of God's will. Sol is rising and you are the step on which your species must tread in their ascent.