Second Sunday

I didn’t quite know what to do with myself yesterday, with this sudden excess of Saturday. I made some failed attempts at both reading and writing, then settled into watching The Godfather Part II after dinner. That’s about as exciting as my weekend got.

Today, I did do a little writing, at my weekly free-writing group:

“There is no such thing as the future,” the doctor said. “Time is flux. Time is change. Time is — “

“Time can go to hell,” said Elliot. She stoked the campfire, then stood, brushing the dirt from her knees. “We’re not talking probabilities here, doc. There are events that play out the same way every time we run the scenario. That’s close to written in stone, if you ask me.”

“Even stone crumbles,” the doctor said.

“Tell that to Kennedy, or Lincoln. Dead every time. No matter how many new variables we throw at the board, time still plays out like we expect it to. The future, for all its flux, still happens on schedule.”

“Tell that your oracle.”

Elliott sighed. Now that had been an unexpected wrinkle. She usually didn’t like to hire on locals for this kind of operation; the paperwork at the other end was a pain, for one thing, and who had the time to run every primitive, pre-codex yahoo through a crash course in temporal mechanics? Better to rely on the techs who’d already been embedded in whatever century she was visiting, along with fully briefed participants like the doctor, who’d traveled her with her. But the codex had wanted her to investigate; they said the Oracle at Delphi exhibited anomalous behaviors, rippled the waters of causation or some bullshit like that, and they wanted a team of field techs to observe in situ.

What they hadn’t said was that the seer would be expecting them.

“She sure as hell isn’t my oracle,” Elliot said. “Up till now, I figured the whole vision thing was hokum.”

“In later centuries, it might have been,” the doctor said. “We still haven’t established if the accuracy of this particular vision is unique to the young lady herself or — “

“Or divinely inspired?” said Elliot. “Please tell me you’re not putting money on Apollo, doc. We’ve got troubles enough without ancient gods getting into the mix.”

Not quite sure what to make of that, but there you have it.

Back to work tomorrow, although luckily back to work from home on Mondays after a couple of weeks.