“What do you mean, you don’t believe in the oracle?” The woman’s eyes are wide over her plate of lemon crab; a thin purple scarf runs in and out of her hair, elegant and luxuriously braided.
Sitting across the table, Aratus is regretting many things. He regrets being on this journey through settled-space—though he is, admittedly, here through no fault of his own. He regrets coming to the dining room tonight, their last night on this ship, rather than ordering the meal to his quarters. And he most definitely regrets having that extra glass of honey wine. Without the mead loosening his tongue, he would never have begun to vent his…unusual views to half a dozen near-strangers.
“You do know that the oracle is not really an oracle, young man?” says Purple Scarf’s husband. “It’s ar-ti-fi-cial in-te-lli-gen-ce.” He pronounces the words like Aratus might have never heard them before.
“You do wear a transponder,” says the man sitting just to his right. He is neatly dressed with a quiet voice, and he rubs the thin metallic band on his own wrist. It shines under the flicker of the oil lamps set on the table.
The gesture leads everyone to reflexively glance down to their own arms, where they all bear a matching circle of silver. Aratus feels the coolness of his against his skin.
Everything he says—and his every interaction with a display—is recorded and sent back to the oracle. Wearing a transponder is a requirement to living in any community connected to the oracle’s network, which now counts over eighty percent of human settlements. Including his own. Realistically, he has no choice but to wear one, not if he wants to live close to his family—not if he wants to continue pursuing his work.
“That’s why the oracle’s predictions are always accurate,” Purple Scarf chips in, supported by her nodding spouse. “It knows everything about you. It knows what you want. What you need.”
“I’m not disputing that the oracle is accurate—” Aratus begins.
“A friend of mine escaped a costly divorce, thanks to a consultation with the oracle,” the husband cuts in. “She was about to marry, took her fiancé to Pythia, and would you believe it? The oracle told them to split up. They did immediately. She was distraught, but can you imagine the expenditure, years down the line?”
All around the table are nodding and muttering in assent: everyone has heard a similar story. Aratus is trying very hard not to roll his eyes.
The quiet man leans in. “Did you consult the oracle on your own marriage?”
The husband wags his finger. “Couldn’t afford it then. The oracle isn’t cheap, is she? But we’ll send all of our children, that’s for sure.” He turns to Aratus. “You see, young man, I know taking these contrarian stands are fashionable these days, but there’s really no reason–”
“My friend left an abusive spouse, thanks to the oracle,” says a tall person with a grave expression, two seats to Aratus’ left. Everyone waits for them to go on. They don’t.
There is a beat of awkwardness before Purple Scarf’s husband speaks again.
“The oracle told Esther and I to take a year off, to journey through settled-space. It was life-changing.” He shakes his head. “Life changing! We would have never thought of it had it not been for her.”
Aratus typically enjoys spirited debate; this is why he is open about his views, even if he knows that few people agree with them. But something about this conversation is making him feel small; wobbly inside. Perhaps it’s something about being called a young man when he’s thirty-seven; perhaps it’s because this is the first time that he’s left his sister’s homestead since his divorce, and he’s still more fragile than he thought.
The quiet man just to his right leans towards him. “Sorry, I must ask—if you believe what you say, then why are you here?” His tone is curious, not aggressive.
Aratus shifts his eyes across the dining hall, to the floor-to-ceiling panes of reinforced glass. In a relentless sea of black space, a circle of brightness looms: Pythia, their destination. The planet stands glittering-grey, the light of its sole moon reflected on its broad oceans. Satellites cluster around it like bees, sending packets of information down to the surface, where, Aratus knows, across miles and miles of servers, it is stored and analysed.
“I drew a ballot,” Aratus says tiredly. “Isterion, my community, sends an emissary to Pythia every eighteen months. There is a lottery to decide who goes each time.”
“That must have been…odd for you.”
Aratus shrugs. “I wasn’t going to shirk my responsibilities. And I am a historian, so I am curious to see the rituals on Pythia. But yes, it is fair to say that everyone at home was very amused that I was chosen.”
Amused was an understatement. He’d been mercilessly teased in the months leading up to the journey; good-natured, of course, but a few people had taken him aside and suggested that he see this as a sign; that he use the opportunity to consult the oracle for guidance on his own life.
It had been rather difficult to argue that his own life was doing fine, thank you very much. He was still living at his sister’s, still sleeping in his niece’s old gaming room, and still struggling to get his research going again. And in a small community like Isterion, everyone knew exactly what everyone else was up to.
The quiet man is looking at him thoughtfully. “I’m going on behalf of my community too. We didn’t want to join the network, at first. The expense of it… then we had several years of failed crops. The grapes caught black rot, and we lost a lot of money.” He gives Aratus a wan smile. “Going to the oracle… it’s completely transformed how we run things in our community. It’s well worth it—take it from me.”
He pats Aratus on the arm, and it’s this gesture, more than anything else that evening, that hits Aratus right in the gut.
They make planetfall the next morning. Stepping out of the shuttle, Aratus squints, scanning the crowd bustling in the arrivals hall. Like all visitors to Pythia, he’s been assigned a host for the week.
He moves slowly. Thanks to the slight gravity differential, his legs are unsteady. It’s then that he spots it: ARATUS HELIODOROS, written in glossy cursive on a sign. He’s surprised to see that it’s held by a woman about his age, who has laughing black eyes and a cascade of brown curls framing her face. She’s wearing a turquoise tunic, cinched at the waist with a belt—a style popular on megapolis planets.
“I’m Cam,” she says, shaking his hand and grabbing his bag with the other. “Don’t be silly,” she adds when he tries to take it back. “You’re going to be shaky for the next couple of hours.”
He proves her right immediately by stumbling when they start moving towards the exit, so he doesn’t argue.
Outside the building, his lungs fill with a gust of dry, hot, air. There’s the smell of thyme and blooming jasmine riding on the wind, and the sun is shining high above them. Aratus gets that burst of feeling—that sense of freedom he used to get landing in a place completely new to him. It’s something that he loved about his work before, when he was living on a ship and travelling from place to place for his research.
His ship is now collecting dust (metaphorically speaking), docked at Isterion’s space station. He’d need a significant research grant to get it running again. As well as the willingness to leave.
“We have to walk to the town,” Cam winces a little, as she considers the dusty road that stretches beyond them. It’s dotted with other travellers following their hosts, luggage in tow. “It’s part of the rituals, for those who can do it.”
“No problem,” Aratus says. He wants to wince too, because of his legs, but there’s no doubt that it’ll do him good to use his muscles.
“You took it better than I did, when I first came here. I was so tired from the journey, I just wanted to sit on the side of the road and strop.”
“You came to consult the oracle?”
She nods. “She told me to stay. That was about two years ago, now.”
There’s something that flickers in her eyes, and Aratus wonders if Cam expected to be here for so long. He decides there and then that he will be keeping his opinion of the oracle to himself for the rest of this journey. There’s no point in making the week awkward for both of them. Or hurting her feelings.
“I don’t know how much you know about the process,” Cam is saying now. “You’re here a week. Every day there are rituals which you—we—are required to perform, leading up to the day of the consultation with the oracle. As your host, my role is to guide you through them, and represent the town of Pythia.”
Aratus smiles, and continues for her: “The rituals we perform during the week are almost identical to those related to the original oracle, the original Pythia. She claimed her prophecies were inspired by a god. This was a very long time ago on the Original Planet. Performing them today underlines the long-standing tradition of oracular prophecy throughout human history. It makes visitors’ experiences more meaningful.”
Contrary to what the people at dinner last night believed, Aratus has spent a long time researching and thinking about Pythia, the oracle, its history. You have to understand something well to disagree with it.
“You’ve read up,” Cam says, smiling back.
He tells her about his job, and why he takes an interest, and her eyes light up.
“Pythia is not my area of expertise though,” he rushes to add. “I specialise in early community history.” He finds it fascinating, the story of humans scattering across habitable planets like seeds tossed across a field. Some settlements grew monstrously, morphing into megapolis planets. Others maintained minute, utopian-like communities. Today most hover somewhere in the middle, like Isterion, where Aratus is from.
Early community history interests Cam too, and she peppers him with questions the next hour of the walk. How did he choose his subject area? What are his most exciting findings to date? What is he working on now?
Aratus finds himself enjoying the conversation, surprised that it is as easy to talk about his work on the development of the political systems in Halys as the fact that his research has stalled over the last two years, since the end of his marriage.
“That must have been really difficult,” she says, “And I suppose that it’s now more about rebuilding a sense of momentum, rather than grieving the end of your relationship.”
Aratus looks at her, startled. Everyone always assumes that he’s not moving forward with his work because he is still pining after Helena. “Yes, that’s exactly it.” He’s about to ask how the heck she knew, but she raises her hand between them. “Oh look! I like to keep quiet for this bit.”
She’s taking in the landscape: grey hills rolling tightly one after the other like bread buns; a clear-blue sky; a dusting of pines on the horizon. Just ahead of them, the dry road bends, and as they make the turn—reveals.
The town of Pythia comes into sight, its white marble shimmering in the sunlight. There are columns and porticoes and temples and monumental statues, whose outlines he can faintly distinguish. Around the constructions in marble, there is a thick circle of more utilitarian buildings, with white-washed walls and earthy-brown roofs. The town proper, Aratus assumes, where those who serve and visit the oracle eat and sleep.
Cam touches his arm, and smiles. The gesture fills him with warmth, and he can’t help but smile back.
Over the course of the week, Aratus realises that he is feeling happier than he has in a long time. It is, perhaps, that Cam is so easy to be around. They never seem to run out of things to talk about. Perhaps he’s been missing good conversation more than he’d realised. His life on his sister’s homestead, full as it is of excitable nieces and nephews, is not very conducive to long, heartfelt discussions.
For the first ritual, he must purify himself in the Castalian spring, and to this end, Cam takes him to the colossal bathing complex attached to the temple. She splits away to the women’s section: as his host, she must perform every step at the same time as him.
In the men’s, Aratus runs through a befuddlingly long course at different temperatures, going through hot pools to cold pools to steam rooms to dry heat—again and again until he feels dizzy and barely notices when he reaches the final basin, into which a dolphin-headed fountain pours waters straight from the Castalian spring itself.
When Cam sees his face as he steps out, she can’t help but laugh. “That awful, huh.”
“I can’t believe that you have to do this every week. If I were you, I’d quit on the spot.” And he grins.
The next day, they buy honeyed cakes from a large stall at the entrance of one of the temple gates, and spend the afternoon waiting in line, zigzagging between monuments for their turn at the sacred hearth.
The monuments, usually statues on pedestals, but sometimes small structures in the style of shrunken temples with columns at their front and delicately carved pediments, are dedications to the oracle, thanking her for the success of her counsel. A community is grateful for a recommendation for the right type of soy bean genetic modification; another for finding an outstanding location for a new prefab settlement; the other, for the ingenious layout of its tram line. There are also personal dedications from the richer visitors: a thriving child, a happy marriage—a successful investment in a space consortium.
Aratus feels a wrongness, looking at all this, but he says nothing, and continues chatting to Cam, discovering that before moving here she, like him, spent her time travelling; that she worked as a ship’s mechanic, a farmer, a builder. “I like learning how to make things,” she says, beaming at the thought, which makes Aratus wonder again about how she feels having spent two years on Pythia, guiding visitors.
They finally reach the temple hearth: an oval room, with a wide hole in the ceiling through which the smoke rises to the sky. On a large, scooped-out pedestal at the centre, the sacred flame is burning high. Aratus and Cam throw in the honeyed cakes, their arms stretching out at the same time. The fire licks the food, as if tasting, and then the cakes burst alight in its devouring mouth.
In the next room, there is a bleating goat tied to a column, and they dip their fingers into a bowl of cold water, moving close to the animal. Aratus and Cam hover their hands over the goat’s back, their fingers spread like crooked stars, and flick, dribbling droplets into the fur.
Cam’s eyes shine as she turns to him. “Would you judge me if I said this was my favourite thing every week?”
“How could it not be?” Aratus gestures at the goat, who is staring at them with an undeniably grumpy expression.
They flick water over and over until the goat shivers, shrugging off the drops—an ancient sign of good omen.
The climb is long, steep and unrepentant. Aratus understands why Cam said they should set off at dawn: the sun is still low over the horizon, and yet the heat is already clinging to his limbs. The trail snakes alongside the mountain slope like a ribbon dropped from the heavens. It looks endless.
Cam is a little ahead, clearly in shape from doing the hike at least once a week. Aratus, on the other hand, is struggling, and trying very hard to look like he isn’t. By the time they reach the mouth of the cave, he’s sweating and heaving, and ardently wishing that Cam, who only has a couple of drops of perspiration on her forehead, would stop looking at him. For the first time, Aratus finds himself really missing the athletic build he once took for granted.
The cave is a black and jagged maw on the side of the mountain. It looks greedy, ready to gobble up unsuspecting visitors. To its side are a set of shelves carved into the rock, stacked with dozens and dozens of clay oil lamps.
Cam gestures him closer. “You pick one that you like the look of. Don’t over-think it.” She lifts one off, seemingly at random from the shelf. Aratus grabs the one nearest to him.
Cam moves to fill her lamp with olive oil from the large dispenser on the ground, and then takes his to do the same. He sees her eyes shift over the intricate carving on top of his lamp. It’s of a small group of people, with a person standing a little to the side.
“Do I want to know what it stands for?” he says, his voice suddenly tight.
“Probably not.” She inserts the wicks through the lamps’ spouts, and turns to face him. “Take a look. Mine isn’t particularly subtle either.”
She extends her hand. On hers, a man and a woman are sitting across from each other, crying into their palms. There is a small form, lying on a table in between them.
Cam makes a face. “I get ‘loss’ pretty often.” She sighs. “You’d think they’d have some cheerful ones in there. You know, for when you’re having a good day.”
Aratus takes what he suspects is ‘loneliness’ back from her other hand. The lamp feels smooth to the touch.
“Come on, let’s go in.”
It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Once they do, Aratus realises that the cave is much smaller than he imagined; the size of an average room. A few steps of solid ground give way to water, where a handful of lamps float—all far out.
Cam motions him down, and they both sink to sit on their knees by the side of the water. She lights a match and they take turns holding it to the wick of their respective lamps. Soon, it smells of olive as the fire begins nibbling away at the oil.
“Now we set them to the surface.”
As they lean forward at the same time, they exchange a glance. Aratus hesitates. Then moves to squeeze her shoulder. Cam turns her face, looking towards the water, rubbing her eyes.
The two flickering lights float ahead, small pinpricks in what seems, all of a sudden, an overwhelming darkness.
Walking back down the side of the mountain, words come out of Cam fast.
“It was my sister. She was ill for a long time. I spent most of my teenage years looking after her. After she died, I wanted to travel, to learn everything. At first, it was wonderful, and then all of a sudden—it wasn’t. Every choice, every new thing, I came up from, feeling empty. That’s when I went to the oracle. And now, now that I’ve been here so long…”
Aratus tilts his head to encourage her to go on, his heart beating oddly.
“I’m wondering. I’m wondering if it’s time to go again.”
Aratus tries to say all of the right things—how sorry he is for her loss, how hard it must have been on her. Tries to convey that he feels grateful, that she has chosen to share some of herself with him.
“I don’t know what to do either now,” he finishes. “Though I imagine that the first step probably involves moving out of my niece’s gaming room.”
Cam laughs, which feels like a victory.
He shakes his head. “Yeah, I don’t need an oracle to tell me that.”
She looks at him, and a moment later, says: “You don’t like the idea of an oracle, do you?”
He jolts, surprised. “How did you know?”
“You get a feeling for these things, I suppose.” She shrugs, just as her cheeks flush. “The way you talk about your life.”
Aratus wonders—wonders at her words, at the rising colour of her face, wonders whether her smile will soon turn to anger or derision. “You’re right,” he says, his words slow. “I don’t agree with the idea of an oracle. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to offend.”
“I’m not offended. Curious, rather.”
Aratus touches the silver band on his wrist. “The benefits of the oracle are undeniable. It’s hard not to see them everywhere.” He waves vaguely at the temple below them, at the forest of monuments contained within its enclosure. “But no one talks about what we lose, giving our lives over to it.
“I don’t want to feel guided through my life. I want to feel like my choices are my own, to feel that my successes or failures belong to me. Whatever amount of control I have—I want to feel like I’ve seized it.”
Cam bites her lip, thinking. “There’s a sort of passivity, isn’t there? That’s what you’re saying. There’s a helplessness to leaving things in the oracle’s hands. I’ve not left here, for instance, though I’ve wanted to for a while, because, well… I suppose I’ve been waiting. For something. For a sign to give this period in my life significance. When, I guess… I guess I could have given it my own.”
Aratus nods. “Having the option of consulting the oracle, I think, teaches us that we can’t solve our own problems.”
“But,” she counters. “I was really lost when I came here. I craved direction so much. It almost didn’t matter what it was, as long as it made sense. Had it not been for Pythia, I could have wasted a lot of time. Or… gone somewhere dark, for a while.”
“There—that’s the heart of it.” Aratus gives her a small smile. “It saves us time and pain, but at the same time, it takes away our agency. Most people don’t even realise what they are giving up in order to have that something in return. To me, the trade-off isn’t worth it.”
Cam is frowning, but Aratus can tell that she is frowning because she is considering what he is saying. She is listening, which some part of him can’t quite believe. He’s not been able to lay out his thinking like this for a long time. It doesn’t even matter to him whether she agrees with him; that she’s taken the time to hear out his opinion is enough.
“What would you do, if you were to leave now?” he asks her.
“You might laugh, but… I’d get on a ship and travel again. With a stable crew this time, not just wandering around from group to group.”
I have a ship, his brain screams. Aratus blinks, taken aback. His fingers are warm, and he wonders how it would feel to take her hand in his.
“But… that wouldn’t be for a while,” Cam goes on. “I’ve committed to hosting quite a lot of visitors over the next few months. I’d have to give my leave.”
Something tightens in his gut. They are almost down the hill, to the edge of town, and from here Aratus can see the line of people waiting to get into the temple. He thinks about the hosts, who, week after week, accompany people like him; people whose lives are laid bare in a vulnerable moment. He thinks about Cam, who is attentive and caring in her role even though she wishes she was somewhere else. He thinks about how she will be picking up her next visitor from the spaceport tomorrow.
He also thinks about how very hard it is to watch someone walk away from your life.
He closes his hands into fists. Clears his throat. Realises that he’s been silent a beat too long, and that Cam is staring.
“Are you all right?”
He nods. The words feel ashen in his mouth, but he forces himself to say them. “I think I might fly out directly after seeing the oracle tomorrow. I’d better get home as soon as possible.”
The room in which the oracle consults is cave-like, humid and hot. She is wrapped up in purple cloth, sitting on a tripod stool over a crack in the ground. A faint, yellowish light rises from it, along with clouds of fumes that Aratus knows is simple water vapour. The woman there isn’t really the oracle, of course. The oracle is the analytical-predictive force running through the miles of servers underground, buzzing and buzzing across the vast surfaces of information to produce answers printed on a linen scroll at a terminal next door.
No, the woman in the room with him is an actor, a piece of theatre there to impart his consultation further meaning. Nonetheless, even he will admit that he prefers this to standing by a machine, waiting for an answer to spit out.
Aratus hands one of the priestesses his own linen scroll—full of carefully inscribed questions from his community, tightly packed into the space. One scroll per consultation is the rule, though there is leeway on how small you can make the handwriting, if you find a sufficiently talented scribe.
The priestess gestures for him to tap the band on his wrist, and he does, ensuring that all of his and Isterion’s data is up to date on the servers.
The priestess disappears, and Aratus is left standing there, he and the actor-oracle inhabiting the odd space in silence. Her chest rises and falls like she’s out of breath, and he finds that the humidity and heat are getting to him too, confusing his thoughts, and making the edge of his vision a little fuzzy.
His goodbye with Cam earlier had been stilted—a complete contrast to their easy back-and-forth until then. It’d had to be. He’d let his feelings get out of control. For a moment, he thought that there’d had been a hint of disappointment in her expression when she’d shaken his hand goodbye; but Aratus knew that he was imagining what he wanted to see.
He could only guess how many visitors like him there’d been, how many must have mistaken a listening ear and professional care for interest. He can’t bear the idea of Cam’s face morphing into unease; of her stepping back, shaking her head—and waving him off with an uncomfortable smile. He doesn’t want her to remember him like that: grasping, lost.
The priestess returns, a different scroll under her arm, which she hands to the actor-oracle.
The oracle’s human incarnation runs her fingers over the letters, nodding and whispering words that Aratus cannot make out. The priestess looks on, patiently. Aratus wants to lift his eyes to the tall ceiling but stops himself. He won’t be rude, not when he’s here representing Isterion. When the actor-oracle is done, the priestess pries the scroll gently out of her hands.
“Pythia has spoken,” she announces, handing him the scroll with a flourish. Then she pauses, shuffling through a pocket in her tunic, before producing a smaller square of linen paper. It’s folded in half.
“This is for you, Aratus Heliodorus. To you, the oracle offers her guidance.”
“I’ve not asked—”
The priestess lifts her shoulders. “The oracle’s answered you anyway.”
He takes the paper, his heart beating. Once back out in the sunlight, Aratus shuffles, feeling his mind clear from the drier—yet still hot—air. He runs his thumb over the bumps in the texture of the paper, feels along its folded edge. He knows that he will never open it.
He also knows what he desperately wants it to say.
He considers a moment longer. Then with a long breath, he lets the paper fall out of his hand. It flutters to the floor. He takes a step forward. And another.
He’ll move out of his sister’s homestead, and start his research in earnest again.
He’ll forget about Cam, and her eyes, and her laugh.
He’ll think about his mistakes, his pain, his joy, and know that they are his own.
And yet when he reaches the main gate of the temple, he stops. One side is the way to the dry, dusty road to the spaceport.
The other goes to the heart of town, back to his guesthouse—where he knows Cam is readying his room for the next visitor.
Well behind him, the linen square has fallen open on the marble floor. The sun shines off its surface.
It is blank.
Camille Koob is originally from France but has lived abroad most of her life, lately in South West England. Her short fiction has also appeared in Andromeda Spaceways, Old Moon Quarterly, and DreamForge. When she’s not reading or writing, she loves hiking in forests, or by the sea.
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