Work Text:
All the illumination comes from the adjoining room, so she sits, as usual, on a promontory of light. A bright isthmus of carpet joins her chair to the open door, while darkness foams and breaks around the console. It is from the darkness that he clears his throat. As she speaks, he hears the momentary catch that all voices share, even hers, when his presence is thus announced. His conversations seldom open without that continuo of fear. A necessary evil. Seers have to be reminded that someone else is watching.
“Bruce?”
“Barbara.” He steps out on to the shores of light. “I’m busy. Make this good.”
“Sixty Hail Marys and a side order of mortification couldn’t make what I’ve got here good. But you need to see it, all the same.”
She knows he dislikes her whimsy. There is little the Oracle does not know. Knowledge is her weapon, and she whets the unlikeliest facts to a cutting edge. Even a man who can take out a room of hostiles with his little finger is circumspect around a woman who could do it with the name of a Red Sox pitcher.
“Show me.”
“That energy spike we picked up in the Pacific, a couple of days back. Once I cleaned up the signal, it started to look real familiar. Take a look. What else produces a signature like that?” She tries to read his face, hope somehow beating the weight advantage of experience. “I know you said that they were all accounted for, but…”
“I was wrong.” He points at the display. “Do you have a theory on those fluctuations?”
“Yeah, they puzzled me too. My best guess is that this one, for whatever reason, doesn’t behave like the others. Instead of doing its thing in one burst, it irradiates the surrounding area continuously. Less effect, but more range. Double the fun.”
“Double the frenzy.”
“Exactly. Take up thy bed, and walk straight out of thy mind.” She shudders. “God help anyone who gets close.”
“Is there a location fix?”
“Working on it. It’s harder than it should be. Looks like someone’s been trying to jam the signal, and the local geography’s kind of funky. It’s been performance cartography all the way here; half the place-names look like an upturned Scrabble set.” She smiles. “I guess eventually you just run out of phonemes. Did you know Emo was an island?”
“Barbara…”
“Straight up. Ballantyne invented it, for the novel-that-isn’t-Lord-of-the-Flies. It was the next island along. Full of cannibals.” She sighs and holds out a print-out. “Here’s what I have. I’m guessing this is a priority. It’s not every day that you find someone farming a Lazarus Pit.”
“Good work. If you find out any more…”
“I’ll be where I always am…” He is gone from her sight half-way through the sentence, so perhaps she does not know he hears her add: “…. a bracing swim away from Emo. It’s not a bad place to be.”
Or perhaps she knows that, too.
FINIS