She highlighted the realtime display. A tangled mass of trunks and branches reached a hundred and twenty feet high. It didn’t look like a single tree to her, but she accepted the opinion of the experts.
The mass didn’t even seem to be alive, but again Adele supposed the experts must know. The gray leaves were sparse and individually tiny, but presumably they proved sufficient to the tree’s limited requirements.
“The monastery’s built within the tree,” she continued. “It’s only the outer ring that’s alive; the wood of the interior is dead and in the center has rotted away. There are extensive passages through the dead portion of the trunk and in the soil beneath, though five years ago—that’s the latest report I could find—there were only forty-one acolytes on New Delphi.”
“What kind of defenses does the monastery have, Mundy?” Daniel asked. “The wealth of the Delphi Foundation would be a tempting prize even in a more settled part of the galaxy. Here in the North I’d judge it’d be a race between pirates and the Commonwealth government itself as to who’d be the first to loot the planet.”
“The Tree Oracle funds the operations of the Delphi Foundation all over the human galaxy,” Adele said, remembering that she was speaking to members of the crew who couldn’t hear Daniel’s question. “Orphanages, hospitals, development schemes—nearly a thousand projects on several hundred worlds, and I doubt that’s an exhaustive list. But none of the wealth is here.”
Her wands sequenced through a dozen images of the monastery’s interior: the bare walls were either rock or wood textured by its grain; individual rooms—cells—with a table, a stool, and a sleeping mat unrolled on the floor; and a dining hall in which acolytes wearing identical robes of coarse gray fabric filled their bowls from a common urn.
The only exception to the general starkness was the library containing tens of thousands of volumes and data consoles of advanced design. Adele smiled wryly as she flicked that image up, then replaced it with one of the Chamber of the Tree; its only furnishing was a couch carved into the trunk of the Tree itself.
Adele was probably the only person aboard the Princess Cecile to whom a library like that one suggested extreme wealth. Pirates would react much the way Sun did, with blank incomprehension.
“The acolytes live an ascetic existence, even by the standards of the RCN on active service,” Adele said, allowing herself a strait-faced joke. “The oracle is open to all who pay the fee; the Foundation is wholly apolitical, acting for the betterment of Mankind without regard to government, religion, or any other factor save the perceived need of the recipients of the proffered aid. The combination of neutrality and poverty has preserved the monastery as no conceivable armament could have done.”
She smiled coldly. “A cynic might believe that the poverty alone was sufficient protection.”
“Six?” said Betts on the command channel. “There’s people coming toward us. A little door opened in the side of the tree. Do you want we should let ’em aboard, over?”
Adele increased the magnification of the realtime display at the top of her screen. A young woman and an older man with white-trimmed hem and cuffs had walked from the tree and to within a stone’s throw of the Princess Cecile. They were barefoot and bare-headed, squinting slightly against dust blown by the steady wind. Occasionally the man would wobble; each time the woman took his arm to steady him.
“I think,” said Daniel, rising from his console, “that instead we’ll go meet them. Ship, this is Six; all personnel may open the hatches in their area. Woetjans, meet me in the main lock with a twenty-strong escort; we’re going to view the monastery of New Delphi. Mr. Chewning, you’re in charge in my absence.”
He looked at the Klimovs. “Your excellencies?” he said. “Would you care . . . ?”
“Yes,” Valentina said as she and her husband rose stiffly. “Of course we’ll come!”
Adele got up from her couch and twisted her upper body one way, then the other, to loosen her muscles. “Ah . . . ?” she said, catching the “Daniel” before it left her tongue. “Captain? I’d like to accompany you. To see the library.”