“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.”
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