The Oracle Year(23)

“And you live in New York?”

“That’s right.”

“What brought you down here today?”

“Same thing as most of these people, I suppose. I wanted to see what will happen.”

“Do you think these rallies will bring the Oracle out of hiding?”

“I doubt it,” John said.

“Really?” Leigh said. “You seem very certain. Why not?”

“I just think that if he’s keeping himself out of the public eye, he probably has a good reason. I mean, you think he isn’t already aware that the world wants to know who he is? What, he’s going to come out of hiding just because all these people say please?”

Leigh nodded, smiling. She liked this guy. He had a point of view.

“A lot of people here today think that the Oracle has a responsibility to share his gifts with the world more directly than he already has,” she said. “To make himself available, to help humanity navigate away from any disasters that might be looming on the horizon. What’s your take on that?”

“I think it’s his business. I think we don’t have the whole picture about what’s going on with this guy, so when people assign him motives or responsibilities, it’s just sort of silly and frustrating.”

“Frustrating? That’s an interesting choice of words. Why are you frustrated by how people feel about the Oracle?”

“I just think people need to get over it, I guess. Let the guy be.”

“But yet, here you are.”

John Bianco gave a short, quick laugh.

“Yeah, I guess I am.”

Behind them, from somewhere deep in the middle of the crowd, shouts rose up, loud enough to drown out the speakers at the south end of the park. Leigh and John Bianco turned to see what was going on, but it was hard to make out anything from where they were standing.

Eddie grabbed her arm.

“Come on. We’re leaving,” he said.

“Why?” Leigh said. “What’s happening?”

He nodded at the mounted police at the edge of the crowd. They were all on their radios, and some were beginning to push inward, letting their horses clear a path.

“They can see better than we can, and I’m sure they have spotters on the rooftops. Something’s going on in there, and we don’t want to get stuck in the middle of it.”

The noise from whatever was happening in the center of the crowd was growing louder, and now a few screams could be heard. The mobile uplink antenna for the van closest to the disturbance was swaying in increasing arcs, presumably as the van hidden by the crowd was pushed back and forth. As Leigh watched, it toppled slowly into the crowd like a felled tree.

Leigh glanced at John Bianco and his friend. They were transfixed, staring at the burgeoning chaos. The Indian man turned and grabbed Bianco’s shoulder, trying to pull him away.

“Oh . . . oh no,” she heard John Bianco say, quietly.

He took a step toward the crowd, and the Indian man put his other hand on Bianco’s arm, forcibly rotating him away from the center of the park.

“There’s nothing you can do,” he said. “We have to get out of here, Will, right now!”

“But it’s happening again!”

Leigh had a moment to wonder what that could mean, until a fresh round of screams reached her ears. Her head whipped around, back toward the center of the square, where she could see clouds of white smoke billowing up in the midst of the demonstrators.

“Eddie,” she said. “We need to get in there. We need to see what’s going on. Document it.”

A bottle smashed onto the pavement two feet away, exploding into a hundred tiny blades.

“Fuck that. That white smoke is tear gas,” Eddie said in her ear, taking her by the arm. “The crowd will stampede, any second. Leigh, we have to—”

A second bottle crashed directly into the camera Eddie was holding in his free hand. He dropped it, cursing, and the camera fell to the ground with a crunch. Eddie held up his hand, staring at it in disbelief. Blood streamed freely from deep gashes in his palm and wrist.

Leigh bent to retrieve the camera, snatching it up from the ground, and then a sound from behind them, like the roar of a fire stoked with new fuel. They turned to look, and saw hundreds of red-faced, terrified people surging toward them out of the white gas clouds covering the south end of the park.

They ran.





The Oracle in the Desert




On the horizon, shapes appeared, round dark lumps shimmering in the heat haze. The village. Arnaud Teulere slowed his Jeep, thinking hard.

Teulere could admit that the chances of the Oracle living in a hut in the northeastern deserts of Niger were . . . remote, to be charitable. But he had been in Africa for a long time, and he had seen stranger things. Besides, there was more hope in his breast than he’d had in years, and perhaps that was worth a nine-hour drive into the wastes. Even a single prediction of the future could be sold for enough to get him back on his feet, to return to France and start over. What else did he have to spend his time on? Contemplating failure? That had grown tiresome a decade ago, when his uranium mines stopped producing.

The Jeep was now close enough to the village for details to be discerned. It was small, six or seven huts surrounding a well sunk deep into the earth. Teulere stopped his vehicle and stepped down into the desert. He made a display of pulling his pistol from his belt and checking the loads. Only two bullets, but the villagers wouldn’t know that. He didn’t want to start things on an aggressive note, but he was very far from safety here, and if these people turned out to be hostile, he wanted them to know that he wouldn’t be easily taken.