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ONE-ARM.
     
    The message grew in huge bright
holo-tricons, animated and complex, changing as the Seer’s lips moved, voice
unheard.
     
    WELL MET TO THEE, LORD ORACLE
KILLER.
     
    ‘Well met yourself,’ Tom called
across the gap between them, voice raised above the lightning’s crackle.
     
    ‘We’ve met too many like you,’
murmured Elva, very low.
     
    OH, NO ... A trace of smile on the young/old wizened face. YOU’VE
NOT COME ACROSS ANYTHING LIKE ME.
     
    Elva swallowed.
     
    Then she leaped lightly to the
next step, deliberately away from Tom, untagging her graser pistol.
     
    ‘No,’ said Tom. ‘Not yet.’
     
    He feared there might be
defensive femtotech, perhaps a smartmiasma. It would be in defiance of the
Comitia Freni Fem’teloram, designed and codified to prevent humanity’s
destruction with its own weaponry, but there had been violations other than
those of Elva’s former comrades—beyond the destroyed infection inside his body—and
there was so much about this place which did not seem right.
     
    And so, addressing the Seer: ‘You’re
not an Oracle, then?’
     
    SEE FOR YOURSELF, MY LORD.
     
    The entire chamber flickered.
     
    And what happened next went far
beyond the abilities of any Oracle that Tom had ever met or heard of.
     

     
    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