The Chronicles of Riddick - Alan Dean Foster [77]
“I am quite happy to tell you for the asking. I only hesitated because my thoughts were momentarily directed elsewhere. Though I am at present your ‘guest,’ that does not mean you occupy all my thoughts.” She paused a moment before continuing in a more declamatory tone, as if delivering a lecture whose importance she did not want to be misunderstood.
“It has to do with a fore-telling. A supposed prediction now more than thirty years old. As the tale tells it, a young soldier once consulted—call the person a ‘seer,’ of sorts. Or the individual in question might have been nothing more than a raving maniac imbued with a desire to instill uncertainty in a tormentor. There are many views on whether it is possible to predict the future. Or any future.” She gathered herself.
“Regardless of how one views the scientific validity of such things, this person told the soldier that a child would be born on the planet Furya. A male child, who would someday cause the soldier’s downfall.”
When Dame Vaako had heard it all, she had heard enough. Ordering the transport to return to the Basilica, she remanded the Elemental to the respectful custody from which she had been borrowed, with a warning not to speak of the encounter to anyone (most especially the Lord Marshal). That accomplished, she then busied herself with a sufficiency of minor tasks to put off anyone who might have been assigned to keep tabs on her whereabouts.
It was later that evening when she made her way to a communications chamber. It boasted no advanced equipment, no glimmering electronics. There were only the appropriate decorations, dim lighting, and on the single slab before her, a lesser Quasi-Dead. By speaking to it, a Necromonger could speak through it, to another of its kind residing— elsewhere.
The receiving Quasi, to whom her words were relayed, was lying on a similar slab in a very dissimilar place—on board Vaako’s frigate. For contact to be made it was only necessary for the Quasi whose abilities she was utilizing to “think” at its counterpart deep in space. Sharing similar minds, they shared a similar mental place—and time frame.
Wasting little time on pleasantries that did not extend beyond constructive flattery, it did not take her long to repeat the entire tale that had been told to her by the obliging Elemental. As she spoke, she could see the lips of the pale gray creature sprawled on the slab before her moving in responsive repetition.
“. . . a downfall,” she eventually finished, “that would result in the soldier’s untimely death.”
A response was forthcoming almost immediately. This time, when the mouth of the Quasi moved, she could hear the voice of her unimaginably distant companion.
“‘Furya’?” Even across the parsecs, and even though the words were being mouthed not by Vaako but by the communicator Quasi in front of her, she could make out the bemusement in her companion’s voice. “I recall little mention of it. No reason to. A ruin of a world, with no remaining sentient life to speak of.”
“For good reason,” she told him through her Quasi. “The young soldier who participated in the attack that devastated Furya killed all the young males he could find, even personally strangling some with their birth-cords. An ‘artful’ fatal stroke, wouldn’t you say?” In the absence of an immediate reply she could not resist adding, “Who do we know who favors the selected application of aesthetics to mass killing?”
The Quasi’s lips moved hypnotically. “So this ‘soldier,’” Vaako was saying to her from the depths of his distant ship, “the one who tried to pre-empt the prediction, would later become—”
“That’s why he worries,” she put in helpfully.
“Our lord marshal,” Vaako continued. “And that would make the man-child—”
“. . . whom he worries he overlooked killing, that child in the crib of whom this supposed seer spoke . . .”
“Our Riddick,” Vaako concluded. “Do you believe any of this? Do you believe in prophecy? It is not science.”
“I know,