NINE ORACLES
EMMA BULL
1. The Oracle of Brooklyn
She sponges milk off the table, the floor, the Hot Wheels car. She’d heard her mother come out her mouth when she’d said it, which is how she’d known it wouldn’t do any good. Then why hadn’t she moved the glass?
She tugs a paper towel off the roll and dabs milk out of the tiny wheel wells. Had her mother wondered the same thing, afterward?
Advice, predictions, warnings, aimed at her, her brother, her father. They used to joke about it: “What does Mommy say?” “‘You better not!’” They’d heard, they’d joked, but had they ever listened?
Being right doesn’t fix anything. Fixing is another set of skills, and some days she can’t remember if she ever learned them. Call your mother. That, at least, she can do something about.
2. The Oracle of Santa Monica
It’s called a bubble for a reason.
She stares at the blue-and-white insignia in the middle of the steering wheel. If cars were bought a piece at a time, she’d probably own all of this one except that damned little disc. She’ll sell before the repo, buy a used Toyota.
Being right ought to deflect the splatter when everything hits the fan. But as one of her professors once said, “So tell me the mathematical symbol for ‘ought to.’” When the corporate ought-to runs into real-world math, it’s not mathematics that gets towed away and declared a total loss.
It’s easier on her, because she’s had time to prepare. That’s the upside of being the one dissenting voice in the conference room: time to prepare. God knows she won’t get credit for calling it, back when they could have avoided disaster. Finance is a superstitious business, worse than theater. Because she saw it coming and said so, it will be as if she made it happen. Her pink slip will be in the first wave.
The light turns green. She goes forward, because she has to.
3. The Oracle of Baltimore
She wades, alone, into the seething flock of news vultures outside the courthouse. Their microphone beaks reach to peck at her, their screeching batters her: Did you! Your testimony! What do you! How will this! She can barely keep herself from flailing her arms to watch them scatter into the sky.
Where were you carrion birds when I first spoke up, when you might have done some good? You only appear when the beast is already dead and stinking. You don’t know what it’s like to face its teeth and claws.
“Doctor!” One earnest young vulture stands his ground and blocks her path. “Now that the court’s verdict has confirmed your allegations about Protelect and your former employer, how do you feel?”
Tiny black stars dance in the margins of her vision, and her mouth is dry and tastes like steel. Under her skin and inside her ribs she can feel the imminent vibration of panic. She imagines the brave benzodiazepine fighting and dying before the rebel hormones overwhelming her central nervous system.
Protelect supplied arms to that rebellion, of course. That’s why the rebels will triumph. It’s benzodiazepine’s last stand.
“How do I feel?”
“About the verdict. You were right.”
As if the verdict makes her right. As if she needs the verdict to prove it to herself, like a “100%!” scrawled at the top of her test paper. She’s been right for ten years. She was right before the first death. If the case had been dismissed, she’d still be right, and the company would still be wrong. Is it possible schools no longer teach the difference between science and law? Or is it not required for vultures’ credentials?
And the disabling effects, the ruined lives, the deaths—Being right doesn’t mend a single one. How does he think she feels?
She stares into his blue, blue parasitic eyes and clenches her teeth to still the shivering muscles in her jaw. “Anxious,” she says, with a precision terrible even to her.
The color drains from his face. He steps back and lets her pass.
4. The Oracle of Montgomery
“You’re sure?” Dr. Mujarrah says. He’s a good doctor. She likes him, likes working with him. But he’s young, so there’s things he hasn’t seen much of.
Some of the young ones think they have to prove they’re better than the nurses, which is a lot of damned foolishness and wastes time. It’s not better. It’s different. And being right isn’t about pride and awards. It’s for the patients.
Dr. Mujarrah’s smart enough to know he doesn’t know everything. So she shows him some respect by stopping to consider the question. “I’ve been surprised before.”
“But you think…”
“Sometimes you can tell. Something in the eyes, maybe, trying to look past things they’ve seen all their lives.”
Dr. Mujarrah gives her a stare like the one she gets sometimes from her daughter Janice whenever she starts to say something about Janice’s church.
Mr. Vilek is eighty-four, which is a wonder, with rheumatic fever at the age of twelve on his medical history. Heart damage. He knows it, and so do his family and his doctors. But it’s not given anyone to know the day or the hour, until it’s close.
“I’ve warned the family,” says Dr. Mujarrah. There’s still one little question in his voice. She nods. “They’ll want to come now.”
5. The Oracle of Wichita
The band plays “Kiss from a Rose” for the bride-and-groom dance. She’s pretty sure neither Steve nor Vonda requested that. Maybe Vonda’s mom.
They waltz, not quite as stiff as the mannequins in Bloomingdale’s. Vonda holds the ruffles on her fishtail train with more attention than she holds Steve. Steve sneaks looks at Vonda’s cleavage.
“We’re taking ballroom dance lessons,” Vonda had announced at the bridal shower. “Steve was all, ‘No way,’ but I talked him into it.”
Yeah, she can just imagine that.
She’d done what she could, as a friend. She’s known Steve since
sixth grade, for chrissake. She’d covered for him when he crashed the Driver Ed car, and helped him train for the state swim finals, and sat up with him all night at the hospital when they were afraid his mom would die of appendicitis.
Unfortunately, friends don’t always listen to good advice. In fact, sometimes good advice makes friends so mad they might just stop being friends.
Maybe someday he’ll forgive her for being right.
Steve and Vonda waltz slowly along the edge of the dance floor. She can see Vonda’s lips moving: ONE-two-three. ONE-two-three. Steve must not have said anything. Vonda would never have invited her if he had.
Steve catches her eye over Vonda’s bare shoulder and raises his eyebrows as high as they go. See? the eyebrows say. You’re wrong. It’s totally perfect.
The dance turns them away, and she sighs. You moron. Of course it’s perfect today. That’s not what I said.
6. The Oracle of Sheridan
A red, white, and blue shield-shaped sign and an arrow, glimpsed between swipes of the windshield wiper: the most beautiful thing she’s seen for hours. She sinks deeper into the passenger seat with relief. Nina catches the change in body language and shoots her a glance.
Oops. And after she’d pretended she wasn’t worried. I’m not judging you, sweetie…
Nina stops at the turnoff for the entrance ramp and looks across the console at her. “This right here? It’s exit 97, isn’t it?”
Nina’s mouth is pinned closed between her teeth on one side and pulled upward on the other, which also wrinkles her nose. It’s the most ridiculous and adorable apology on Earth, and it gets her every time.
“I… kinda think it is.”
“So, hey, we’ve only lost, what? Seventy-five miles?” Nina grins hopefully.
She clears her throat. “Something like that?”
“But it could have been a cut-across.”
Caught up in release of tension and Nina’s mad revisionism, she can’t hold back the bubbles of laughter pushing up from her lungs. “God, the look on your face when the pavement quit.”
“Pavement, hell! There were sheep! Sheep!”
They sit in the rain-washed car and shriek with laughter. Everything is funny. The wipers are funny. A chunk of mud falls from the undercarriage—gok—and she laughs so hard she’s afraid she’ll pee.
Slowly it occurs to her that being right doesn’t mean being unloved.
Not anymore.
Nina wipes away tears and puts the car in gear. “That’s it. No more ignoring the navigator. Next time I’ll listen to you.”
She smiles and rubs Nina’s shoulder with her knuckles. “No, you won’t.”
7. The Oracle of Red Lake
In the end, the river wins the race.
She staggers, trips over sandbags they hadn’t had time to get to the wall, and falls to her hands and knees. Ice water rushes in over the tops of her insulated mittens as if it had been waiting for the chance.
Hochstetter grabs her at the armpits and hauls her upright. With one arm across his shoulders, she slogs, shivering, to the truck. Chunks of ice eddy and bump around her boots. She’s too tired to drag herself into the high cab. He plants both hands on her ass and shoves (Inappropriate touch, she thinks, and it’s so hilarious she knows she’s out of rope), and slams the door as soon as her feet are clear.
“Hurry” isn’t one of the things she has to tell him. If the water floats the truck, it’s over.
But they make it. The high school, up on the bluff, is the emergency shelter and command center. She stumbles past the glass case of hockey trophies and National Honor Society plaques to reach the over-warm gym, a piece of floor to sit on, and coffee steaming in a styrofoam cup.
From the bluff you can see most of town. She can name the families who’d be under each roof if it weren’t for the cold gray-brown water. Thank God the gym doesn’t have windows.
Hochstetter squats next to her, a cup in his own hand. He’s left his fire department jacket and hat somewhere; in his snowmobile coveralls he looks like just another neighbor. Well, he is.
“There’s soup, Mayor. Beef barley. Get you some?”
“Not yet.” She lifts her coffee in both hands and eyes him over the quivering horizon of rim. “My arms are too tired to hold the spoon.”
He nods, which from Hochstetter is an out-loud laugh. They listen to the murmur of half the town, including kids, in one big room. She’s used to roaring noise in here, basketball games and pep rallies. Now you’d think it was a library.
Hochstetter clears his throat. “I didn’t figure you’d be out sandbagging.”
“Why not?” She can’t really taste the coffee, and she doesn’t care. It’s hot.
“Couldn’t have blamed you if you sat back and said ‘I told you so.’”
She’d give anything—anything—to have said so and been wrong. For the first time since she started fighting the town council, the residents, and the river, she wants to bust out crying.
Instead she swallows coffee too fast, so she can pretend it makes her eyes water. “Being right isn’t the same as being an asshole.”
8. The Oracle of Ft. Lauderdale
“I want to thank my mother...”
That’s me.
Mothers probably get thanked on streaming video every day of the week. It’s in the job description, that they believe crazy, unjustifiable things about their kids. And after the yelling/sulking/door slamming years, if nothing goes too horribly wrong with the work, the resulting grown kids says “Thank you, Mom” often enough that nobody’s surprised.
But this time my mother is her.
Her right shoulder and elbow joints hiss faintly as she reaches for the call button. She understands the production versions don’t do that. But she’s proud of that hiss. That’s how it is with prototypes.
The nurse scurries into the room. It’s the new one on night shift: he’s still scared to death of her, afraid the call signal means she’s dying. It’s almost enough to make her waste energy on laughing. Oh, honey, when I’m dying there won’t be anything I need from you.
But he’s not afraid this time. “Is this it?” He crouches beside her bed, eyes fixed on the screen. “That’s your daughter?”
Jacey doesn’t look like the newspaper photos. Dressed up, for one thing, and someone must have put makeup on her, because it’s damned sure Jace didn’t do it herself. Accepting the biggest biochemistry prize in the world, and you’re supposed to worry if your eyes look defined?
Mostly Jacey looks tired. Time zone changes, jet lag, awake all night her time making sure the video feed would work so her mom could watch.
She feels a nip of guilt at that. But after a decade spent creating muscle fibers, one night tinkering with streaming video isn’t bad. She’s lived through twenty-three years of being right, and being told, “All parents think their kids are special.” She’s waited twenty-three years for the world to acknowledge that she wasn’t just talking like a mother. She’s going to watch them do it.
9. The Oracle of Yuma
It blooms.
Like some crazy nature documentary time-lapse video, like a cartoon with a magic paintbrush, the green spreads over the landscape beneath them, fast enough to see in real time. It’s netting nanovolumes of moisture out of the air and soil, fixing nitrogen, gluing unstable molecules to poisons to turn them into food.
She spares a glance at the satellite downlinks. The faint green blush shows at all the insertion points: North Africa, Baja California, Central Asia, Central Australia.
Not as much fun as the view out the bubble of the copter, though. The micoid spreads like a lazy pool of liquid, but miles wide, miles, sinking in, poking out a finger wherever it likes the conditions. She feels laughter welling in her chest.
“What the fucking hell!” Jan croaks.
Jan likes redundant systems. Blasphemy backed up with obscenity.
She can’t stuff the laughter anymore. It shoots out her mouth and sprays into her headset mic, into the racketing noise of the helicopter’s insides. The pilot turns his insect-goggles to stare at her, expressionless, then shifts back to the stick.
She imagines the green laughing as it creeps along, eating, binding, changing everything. Bringing everything back.
“We win,” she gasps between spasms of her diaphragm.
“What are you talking about?” He grabs the shoulders of her padded jacket and shakes her hard. His breath is vile in her face; like her, like the rest of the insertion cells, he’s been on the move for seventy-three hours, tooth-brushing optional. “What the hell kind of demonstration is that?”
“It’s not a demonstration. It’s the solution.”
When he looks out the bubble again, there’s terror in his face. He thought he had a devil on a leash, a cell-bursting monster to make an example of a thousand acres of brutalized land. He’s already drafted his ransom note to the world. What does he feel when, instead of his incubated devil, he witnesses an angel of a new annunciation? Nobody leashes an angel.
Jan’s head swings back toward her. Rage and fear twist his face like a wad of clay. “You knew it would do this. Didn’t you?”
After all these years, he still can’t believe in her. Still can’t accept her being right.
“I knew before we raided the lab.” She smiles and looks up at the sky. Filmed with gray, like a painter’s glaze. But not for always, not now.
“You fucking traitor!” The slap cuts the inside of her mouth against her teeth; she tastes blood over her tongue. But his voice is a little boy’s, brimming with betrayal and tears.
I broke the game.
Jan grabs the front of her jacket. “What if I throw you out? You think maybe that shit down there will catch you?”
She should stop smiling; it might make him angrier. But she can’t. “You put my face on the world’s monitors. You made me the prophet of the revolution. Won’t the world ask where I am?”
His fingers slip off the windproof polyester; his face goes slack as if his nerves are cut. He looks again out the clear shell at the ground, where the micoid is turning arid, barren hardpan to friable soil, feeding dormant seeds with its own body.
“What about me?” he whispers, and the headset mic picks it up. “What happens to me?”
Jan Stangard, eco-terrorist, revolutionary, martyr, savior, dupe, murderer. He can’t be all of them. Not in this new world.
But she can be what she’s always been. Sustainability applies to human nature, too. She lifts his limp hands, presses them between both of hers. “I can’t know that. You haven’t created the answer yet.”
She’s changed the world. It will go on changing around her. She knows that, as she knows that what she is will never change.
With thanks to Elise Matthesen.