“She comes up with some wild story, doesn’t even bother to explain most of it, and you’re all just going to go along with whatever she tells you? Good lord, we’re on a starship.”
A murmur rolled through the small crowd, and Lamont shifted uncomfortably on the bench. “Is this serious?” He whispered.
Constance Beckett jabbed his arm with an elbow, her eyes fixed on the white-garbed figure at the front of the meeting hall, hushing him.
There was a pregnant pause as the murmuring among the colonists settled, then Miss Anna, from her seat at the front of the room, spoke again. “The vision was this: There is a high tower, and standing atop the tower is a giant. He has—” Her bony hand lifted from her lap to touch her brown forehead, and she hesitated as if she were trying to describe something with difficulty. “He has a single eye, here, in the middle of his head. An eye like a star. He speaks in mysteries, wonderful to hear.”
A cyclops? Lamont thought to himself. He tapped a note out on the recorder that he held in his lap, as slowly as possible to quiet its mechanical clicking.
“The giant holds a sword, and with the sword he divides a body in two.” Miss Anna was speaking slowly and deliberately now. Her arms lifted above her head as if holding the handle of a sword and sweeping it downward in a vertical arc from above her head to the level of her chest. “One half of the body he consumes. The other half cannot live; it has been separated from the whole.”
There she stopped, resting her hands on her lap. After a long and uncomfortable silence, it became apparent that she was finished.
The colonists exchanged uneasy glances and whispered questions. Toward the front, a child asked: “What does it mean, Miss Anna?”
Miss Anna stood stiffly. “We are the body. If we are divided, all will die. I call for a time of fasting and prayer so that we may prepare for what is to come.”
Outside the meeting hall, the colonists broke into clusters, absorbed in conversation as they began to resume their normal tasks—tasks that, at least this evening, would not involve the preparation of food. Lamont shook his head in wonder as he strolled with Constance Beckett in the direction of the elevator. “No offence intended,” he was saying, “But you lot don’t really take that seriously, do you?”
The girl looked at him curiously. “Why wouldn’t we?”
“She comes up with some wild story about a cyclops with a sword, doesn’t even bother to explain most of it, and you’re all just going to go along with whatever she tells you? Good lord, we’re on a starship.”
“It isn’t that simple,” Constance insisted. “I’ll be the first to say that Miss Anna can be...overbearing. But the meaning of the vision will reveal itself in time. It’s happened before.”
“When?” Lamont asked. “Do you mean the last system we visited—when she predicted that it wouldn’t be a home for the colonists?”
Constance nodded.
“Easy guess. We were unlikely to find a good match on the first try.” They stopped in front of the elevator door while Lamont pulled out a cigarette.
“That’s not all she saw,” Constance said. “She had a vision of stars. On one star was a king—a young king, kneeling before the other stars. But smaller stars dragged him down into a mountain of bones.”
Lamont rolled his eyes as he lit his cigarette, and was about to say something dismissive, but then his brow furrowed. He looked at Constance. “A young king. Rex. Kneeling.”
The girl looked at him expectantly.
“Rex O’Neil?” The newspaperman gasped incredulously.
Constance nodded, watching his features.
“That’s preposterous,” Lamont muttered, but his tone lacked conviction. He took a long pull from his cigarette and exhaled slowly, looking toward the multicolored clouds outside the curved glass of the observation windows. “When did she have this vision?”
“She held a meeting the day after we arrived in the system. Long before we reached the planet.”
Lamont waved his hand. “Right, right—but when did she have the vision? Was it after the Escherspace jump? Was it during the jump?”
Constance shrugged. “Could be.”
Lamont frowned and stepped into the elevator. “I need to interview Miss Anna,” He said. “Can that be arranged?”
The girl winced. “I’m not exactly on her good side,” She admitted. “Say, why are you in such a hurry?”
“I have a date with some electrodes,” Lamont explained as the doors slid closed. “Let me know about that talk.”
Next: A Denizen of the Abyssal Depths