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When the Oracle Speaks (Part 1)

by Albert Chu

One year after the war’s end, the royal court welcomed a hundred orphan boys into our ranks. They flew into the city’s spaceport by shuttle and proceeded up the hill on the backs of the court’s own palanquin-bearers; upon entering the palace grounds, they received the speeches and banquets we held in honor of their noble suffering. The boys, hailing from the kingdom’s most war-torn moon, had lost everything, but now their days of hardship were over. They had become esteemed wards of the House of Hassam.

After a few days, though, people in the court whispered of something else. The cooks and dressing girls repeated the same rumor: Did you hear? One of the new boys can see the future. The ministers and generals, who should have held themselves above idle gossip, indulged in speculation: If this is true, could the boy be of use? And everyone wondered how the king might act. We all knew his strength was the House’s strength. If the boy possessed some special power, my father would take him.

So I never had any intentions of turning the boy to my side. I was just curious.

I found him sitting on a bench in the middle of a courtyard, surrounded by onlookers. It was another rainy day, and all the aristocrats had a servant beside them, shielding their heads with an umbrella. Some pretended to write calligraphy or paint—the perfect image of artful nobility, honing their talents as the rain fell around them—while others just stared.

I took in this scene from the colonnade which circumscribed the courtyard. “Come,” I said, and my servant chaperone opened my umbrella. “I’m going to talk to him.”

We left the colonnade’s shelter and entered the courtyard. The boy didn’t appear special—he was skinny and looked around the same age as me, and the only thing unusual about him was his uncovered head. Rain plastered his thick, reddish curls to his forehead. They’d be a frizzy mess later; I wrinkled my nose at the thought of it.

Instead of looking up as we approached, he only stared at the rain hammering the surface of the courtyard pond. He’d been doing that, it seemed, all afternoon long. My servant and I stood there, waiting, until the silent lack of recognition grew irritating. Finally, my servant spoke: “Prince Meira Pashel em-Hassam wishes to speak to you.”

The boy turned around. His eyes swept over me—my jeweled coat jacket, inlaid with silver; the ceremonial lightgun at my belt; my coiled black locks, cascading to my chest and lustrously shiny. The regalia of a prince was designed for impact. But his face betrayed no emotion—not fear, nor awe, nor muffled resentment—none of the familiar reactions.

As if he expected it all. My irritation grew.

The boy didn’t bow, but I refrained from comment; I’d already conceded enough conversational power to this commoner. Instead, I said, “You look wet. Would you like an umbrella? My servant can fetch one.”

He shook his head. “I like the rain. It’s nice on my head.”

The word the boy used for ‘rain’ caught my attention—a formal construction, not the colloquialism that everyone in the city used. I remembered why he was here. We were both Artani, but I had been born on this moon, Artan itself, while he, like the rest of the orphans, was from Eshtan. Once the crown jewel and proudest province of the House of Hassam, now a dead moon, bombed to a ruin by the Samandirans.

The boy lacked etiquette, but not only was he my House’s ward, he’d also lost his parents to the Artani people’s mortal enemy. I could hardly reprimand him. So instead, I said, “Welcome, in the name of the House of Hassam, to your new home. Our hospitality is yours to command.”

The boy responded to my generosity with only a turn of his lips. I had expected gratitude, and having not received it, I was off-balance. His lips slid back into a level line, and his flat, even stare did nothing to help me regain confidence. I had never spoken to someone like this before.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Iuno.”

“Iuno,” I repeated. “Well, everyone is talking about you. I wanted to know more for myself. About your powers.”

He sat there, his hands folded in his waterlogged lap, and waited.

My smile grew pained; I’d lost patience for subtlety. “Please tell me about them. How far do you see? What is it like? Can you tell me if someone will be dead in a year, or which side will win a war? Are you ever wrong?”

“That’s a lot of questions.” Iuno pushed some of his dripping hair out of his eyes.

“And to say that you can see the future is an extreme claim.” And I’m your prince. “Indulge me.”

“If you insist,” he said, and I smiled harder to stop my nostrils from flaring. “In the morning, I see everything that I will live through that day. At night, I sleep, and when I wake, it happens again with the new day’s knowledge. It’s actually fairly simple.”

“You must see one of many possible futures, then, perhaps the most likely—”

“No.” Iuno spread out his hands, as if to apologize for his gift. “I see exactly what will happen. I am never wrong.”

I narrowed my eyes. Was this what he had the entire palace believing? Did people think my father might desire this boy’s power?

“I’m going to choose a number.” I crossed my arms and allowed myself a small smile. “Zero or one. Which will I choose?”

“Zero.” He didn’t hesitate.

“Well, I choose one. Didn’t you say you were never wrong?”

And then he began to laugh.

For such a small boy, he had a very loud laugh, and it was remarkably ugly. He wheezed like a decrepit minister a week from death. His cackling was unnaturally pitched several tones higher than his normal voice. He occasionally snorted.

Nobody in the courtyard pretended to practice the arts anymore. Aristocrats held their pens frozen in mid-stroke, and servants dropped their umbrellas to cover their mouths with both hands. After those umbrellas bounced off the cobblestones and clattered to rest, nothing moved but the endlessly falling rain and Iuno, who still shook with laughter.

Eventually, he stopped. He reached into his pocket, withdrew a scrap of paper, and handed it to me.

It, like Iuno himself, was completely soaked; I held it delicately to prevent it from dissolving in my hands. After reading a few lines, I understood.

He had transcribed our entire conversation. The trap that I thought I’d laid so cleverly stared back at me from the page: didn’t you say you were never wrong?

I read the note twice, three times, while the stillness held around me. Everyone marveled at the audacity of this orphan boy, who, by laughing in the face of Prince Meira Pashel, had surpassed even the latitude afforded to a guest. They wondered what I might do to him.

I crumpled the paper in my fist and squeezed it to pulp. “Come with me.”

We walked out of the courtyard, followed closely by my confused chaperone. Under the stares of the gathered aristocrats, we passed through the colonnade and into the warm, sunlamp-lit atria of the palace itself. I led him up the silver escalator to the floor with my suite, and when I reached my door, I turned to my servant. “Bring some hot towels for my guest and enough tea for both of us. You may leave after doing so.”

The servant wiped the confusion off his face and bowed; he understood my request for privacy well enough. “Yes, Prince Meira.”

When he left, I glanced down at Iuno’s sandals. With each step he took, he pressed rainwater out of his drenched soles with a wet, squelching sound. A trail of damp footprints followed behind him. “Take those off before your step inside,” I said, “and wait here. I’ll get you something to dry your feet.”

A few minutes later, Iuno, no longer dripping, sat next to me on my divan. The towels the servant had provided lay in a crumpled corner outside my washing room’s entrance. He’d changed into one of my spare tunics; the lavender scent of the palace maids’ laundry detergent clung to him. We both held cups of tea in our hands.

“It never rained on Eshtan.” Iuno held his cup close but didn’t drink, content instead to let his eyes bask in the steam. “I knew, today, that I’d feel it for the first time. But I didn’t expect how it could mingle with sweat and sting your eyes. Or how it makes the air smell like dirt.”

He spoke of his dead home—his parents’ grave—so lightly that I wondered if he missed it at all. Everyone knew how to speak to a victim; everyone could console a poor orphan for his loss. But he was different, and scripted gestures of nobility rolled off of him.

When he turned to face me, his steady gaze bordered on a challenge. “You didn’t punish me, like they all expected you to.”

“No.” I ran my fingers around a groove in my teacup. “I didn’t.”

However aggravating his laughter, however angering the exact correctness of his transcription, he was right. I had told him to prove he saw the future without error, and he had done so. How could I fault him? Perhaps he had laughed so freely because he had seen, when he opened his eyes this morning, that I would not punish him.

Still, I needed to ask one final question. “You lied,” I said. “You gave the wrong answer. You say that you know the future, but how can anyone trust you?” How could I trust him?

Finally, Iuno took a long sip from his cup. Then, he said, “You wanted to use me to prove that if you knew the future, you could change it. You weren’t interested in the truth. I’m not a trustworthy tool, but if you want the truth, I’ll give it.”

Was he challenging me at all? He showed no attention to the protocols of etiquette and hierarchy; he said exactly what he meant, without hiding his true meaning. What if it wasn’t some inscrutable gambit? What if he just wasn’t playing the game?

As we finished our drinks in silence, humid air creeped into the room from my suite’s open bay windows. Rain blanketed the entire city, and from our vantage point, we could see the swollen, frothing banks of the Azure River, its winding course cutting the city in half.

Iuno placed his empty teacup down. “Thank you for the tea, Prince Meira.”

I held up a hand to stop him from leaving. “Before you go,” I said. “I have a proposal. Instead of living in the common rooms with the other orphans, how would you like to make this your home?” For a moment, I wondered how to package my motivations—but I had tried, fruitlessly, to maneuver around Iuno for the whole day, and I was tired. “I never understood the tradition of princes having companions. There are dozens of boys from noble families who can fight or paint or just look pretty. The thought of randomly choosing one of them always bored me. But you’re different.”

He waited before answering; I willed myself to release my held breath. Then, he nodded. “Thank you, Prince Meira,” he said. “I accept.”

I chuckled. “Well,” I said, waving a hand, “if we’re going to be friends, you can’t call me by my title. My name’s Ahpa.”

“All right.” He smiled—something shy and genuine, the first time I’d seen that expression on his face. “Ahpa, then.”

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We grew older. While the commoners kept their hair short, the palace stylists knew to trim a noble’s hair only enough to prevent split ends. Eventually, my black curls cascaded down to my hips.

Iuno remained my companion. Some ministers, trying to gauge his usefulness, managed to corner him and press him with questions, but they always left disappointed. He had no power; he had no more ability to change the future than an ordinary person had to change the past. And if my father himself ever made a move for him, I never saw it.

We came to know each other. Iuno learned of my taste for dates, and on some afternoons, he surprised me with a plate of them, fresh from the market. “The merchants sell these only rarely,” he would say, “but I saw that they’d have them this morning, so I walked down the hill to get us some.” And while we finished the plate together on my divan, we talked. Sometimes about idle court gossip or the latest minister to embarrass himself in some political blunder. Sometimes about our favorite pieces of classical poetry. Sometimes about the war.

“On Eshtan, did you ever see them?” I once asked, between bites of date. “The enemy.”

He nibbled at his own dates, taking as long to finish one as I did to eat three. “I did,” he said. “They occupied my village for some time.”

“What did they do?” A scene of Samandiran brutality from the propaganda holovids flashed through my mind.

“Nothing exciting. Mostly, they were ordinary people.” Even when speaking of the soldiers who’d killed his parents, his voice betrayed neither anger nor sadness. “They were only there at all because they’d been ordered.”

I scoffed. “Samandiran High Command invaded Eshtan in a surprise attack a full day before they bothered declaring war. They killed millions of colonists like you. Shouldn’t they pay?”

“How?” he asked. “Another war?”

I blinked. Officially, the war had ended when my father, having turned the tide against Samandir, forced them to sue for peace. But everyone in the court knew that the ceasefire’s true architects were key ministers in my father’s council; he, to the contrary, had wanted to press his advantage and continue the fight. In recent months, as the peace grew stale, I’d overheard conversations where generals cursed those ministers and whispered their longing for revenge.

I shook my head. “I didn’t say that. Still, how can you say they were just following orders?”

He shrugged, reached into his mouth, and fished out his date’s pit, still shiny with saliva. “To me, everyone’s following orders.”

While I digested his meaning, he tossed the pit into our shared waste platter.

One day, some months later, the king convened a Great Circle, where the House of Hassam’s princes, ministers, and generals gathered to vote on a question placed before them. A Great Circle could shake lives and turn the fate of the entire kingdom—but nobody knew why my father had called for one. That morning, I left for the Circle, walking blindly into the future, and in the evening, the Circle finished, I returned to my suite.

“Ahpa.” Iuno lay belly-down on my rug, a book spread under his head. He craned his neck up to look at me. “Welcome back.”

I stood a step inside the doorway and stared out the bay windows. My mouth was dry.

“It was an ambush,” I said. After half a day in the throne room, silently watching the Great Circle unfold, the words spilled out of me.

My father had named half the senior ministers in the court, all ones who had pushed the House of Hassam towards a ceasefire at the end of the war. And he named one member of the royal family: Prince Meira Siushem em-Hassam, my eldest brother, his heir. All these men, he said, had committed treason.

His spies produced the evidence. In secret, the traitors had communicated with the Samandiran High Command to negotiate a permanent peace settlement. Its terms—when Meira Siushem took the throne, the House of Hassam would reduce its army to pre-war sizes, with the promise that Samandir would do the same.

A roar went up from the generals in the room. That, I knew, was an act, a front of outrage; surely my father had coordinated with them before convening the Circle.

“He asked us to exile the ministers.” He’d been wise, not seeking execution—that was a step too far. “He called for us to disinherit Meira Siushem.”

“And you voted to do so.”

My mind stuttered. How was he so sure? But then—of course.

“I did,” I said. “You’ve known everything I’ve told you since this morning.”

“I have.”

“But then why—”

Why not tell me? It didn’t matter; my behavior in the Circle wouldn’t have changed if I’d known the king’s intentions beforehand. Everyone knew that Meira Siushem, naively chasing peace with the Samandirans, had lost, and there was nothing to do but vote for his disinheritance. Still, something sharp lodged in my chest—betrayal. Iuno hadn’t told me.

“You’re anxious,” he said.

I had every reason to be anxious. With the throne’s succession now in question, the king held the right to designate a new crown prince. By disinheriting Meira Siushem, he had invited us, his sons, to compete among ourselves for power, his favor, and a chance to become the next king. Some princes had fought in the war; they could exploit their military connections. Others had mothers from wealthy families; they could purchase influence. And some would eliminate their rivals with poison or lightgun fire—why not, if they could get away with it?

I had none of these advantages, and in a contest of violence, I was underequipped.

“I can see my future.” I felt cold, but I resisted the urge to tighten my coat around my shoulders. “Prince Meira Pashel, a pawn in my brothers’ succession game. Nobody will notice if I die.”

I glanced down at Iuno and felt a spark of hope. I did have one advantage. “But you can help me,” I said. “Your powers—I’ve always thought they can’t do anything, but that isn’t true, is it? When you go buy those dates, how do you ever know that the market is selling them that day? The knowledge just—happens.”

“I only see that I buy dates, Ahpa. Then I buy them.”

I shook my head. “Couldn’t you use your powers to help me against my brothers? To give me access to this hidden knowledge?”

“No.” He spoke this simple refusal without malice or spite, but frustration still gripped me. “You don’t understand.”

“What don’t I understand?”

“I could just as easily share with you your doom. What if, one morning, I told you that you’d fall into a trap that day? What if I told you how you’d try to escape the trap, knowing that it was there, and still fail? You already tried to best the future once, Ahpa.”

I stared at Iuno and remembered that day, years ago, when he had handed me that waterlogged note.

“Besides,” he said, looking up at me with half-lidded eyes. “I have nothing to do with a power struggle between the princes of Hassam.”

I bristled. “Even when my life’s at stake?”

“It doesn’t have to be. You could walk away, couldn’t you? If you gave up your title, nobody would have any reason to quarrel with you.”

I stepped backwards and curled my lip. Then, without saying more, I turned and walked into my study. The door clicked shut behind me, and silence, broken only by the heavy sound of my breathing, pressed in. My fist had clenched when I’d heard Iuno’s suggestion of surrender, and slowly, I relaxed it.

Once, the king had also been a small prince, but when the incompetence of his brother, the reigning monarch, led us to lose half of Eshtan to the enemy, he had seized the future. He took the throne by force. He faced down Samandir’s army, larger and better-equipped, and won. He did not surrender to fate.

Like my father, I had my wit. If I played the game carefully, gathering information, cutting deals, and devising plans, I could come out alive on the winning side—a respected prince, with armies and ships sworn to my banner. A small part of me dreamed of winning everything and wearing my father’s crown. With Iuno’s help or without it, I wouldn’t surrender.

For one moment, I heard again his ugly laughter. I quickly stifled its sound.

---

For months, I had chased a secret.

The thread began with a corrupt customs official, a prime target for me to blackmail and a useful mine of information. One of the secrets he revealed: several months ago, a series of shipments, addressed to a place that didn’t exist, had arrived at the docks by the Azure River. After he’d fabricated papers for them at the behest of an unknown party, they’d disappeared a week later.

Gradually, the thread unraveled. Irregularities in the hiring of several dockhands. Strange incidents when the city guard had cordoned off sections of the docks from public access, citing leaks of dangerous chemicals—obvious pretexts. Then the final clue, when I looked into all the companies which had recently filed dock work permits—one company existed only on paper, and they owned only a single warehouse.

When I staked out that warehouse, I found its entrance guarded by a pair of security automata. They were camouflaged to appear commonplace, but I knew better—these were of an elite line allowed only to members of the court. If any trespasser failed to give them the correct passphrase, they would attack, and only a battalion of armed men could hope to dislodge them.

I’d been thrilled. Some member of the court—perhaps even one of my rival brothers—had hidden something inside that warehouse, and now I only needed to crack it open. But at this final step, my progress stalled. I found no leads as to who exactly owned the warehouse, and I had no way past the security automata. I didn’t have the passphrase, and without it, I was stuck.

“Something’s wrong with you,” Iuno said.

We sat across from each other on my rug, a chessboard between us. I’d carved the board and pieces myself and given them to him as a gift, many years ago. He had smiled when I presented them. “But Ahpa,” he said, “you always win.”

Now, he noticed my distracted play. I leaned backwards on my palms, sinking my fingers into my rug’s deep pile, and released a long exhale. “It’s a political matter. Nothing serious.”

Though we still lived in the same suite and drank tea together, I’d regarded him differently ever since he’d refused to help me on the day of the Great Circle. I needed to secure my future, buffeted as I was by the instability of a House without an heir. What was the point in sharing with him my life of blackmail and backroom deals? If he wasn’t helping me, what did he mean to me?

He grabbed one of his pawns at an angle and rubbed circles with the edge of its base against the board; wood scraped hoarsely against wood. “It looks serious,” he said. “When you worry, you don’t hide it well. At least around me.”

“You must forgive me.” I strained to keep my voice light; a prince did not allow a barb to offend. “I’m simply trying to open a locked door, but I lack the key. I didn’t want to burden you with something that doesn’t interest you.”

“The key?”

“A passphrase.”

“Yes,” he said, and I looked up. The confidence in his speech, the flat set to his eyes, the relaxed slump of his shoulders—all familiar. Iuno never cared to feign surprise. “Would you like to know it?”

I stared at him.

“If you go to this door tonight, speak a passphrase, and gain entry, you’ll know it’s the correct one,” he said. “What if you then return and give the passphrase to me? If, tonight, you do that, then I already know it. I can speak it now.”

I saw, again, the circles that Iuno drew on the chessboard with his pawn, and I shivered. Still, I didn’t understand. “But why help me?” I asked. “You said…”

“I said that I wasn’t a tool. That if you wanted the truth, I would give it.”

I tensed in apprehension. Was he warning me? Would the warehouse’s contents not benefit me? But I couldn’t let my doubts and questions dissuade me. I couldn’t command the future with a fearful hand.

I exhaled and willed myself to relax. “Give me the passphrase.”

He leaned forwards and whispered it in my ear.

After that, we continued our game without speaking; only the clack of pieces against the board broke the silence.

“Ah,” he said. I had trapped him in a mate-in-five two turns ago, but he’d kept playing as if he hadn’t seen. “You’ve won, haven’t you?”

“I have.”

He shrugged and tipped his king over. “I resign. Good game.”

“You as well.”

I stood to prepare for an excursion to the warehouse, and Iuno began to lay the chess pieces back inside the velvet-lined wooden case that I’d made with the set. Each piece slid into place with an insistent shush.

“After you come back,” he said, “we should talk.”

The light coming through my bay windows began to dim. Artan’s ever-present rain clouds gathered to obscure the sun, and in a few minutes, rain would flow down the city’s streets.

“All right,” I said. “We will.”

I left. Behind me, Iuno continued to place the chess pieces back into their case.

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Host Commentary

Once again, that was part one of When the Oracle Speaks by Albert Chu. The story will be concluded next week.

Stories about prophecy often revolve around how the characters struggle to change their fates, to avoid some impending doom that was foretold in the distant past, or was recently foreseen and just as quickly set into motion. Whether doing so ends up bringing about the very thing they were trying to prevent? Well, sometimes fate is tricky like that. This story presents us with a short-term prophet, one who can only see what happens to him that day—a very limited scope—but everything he sees will definitely come to pass, without fail and without alteration. Now, what would you do if such a prophet came to live with you? One from a war-torn place now in a fragile peace that might erupt into conflict again? What if you were a person who ostensibly had more agency than others, in a position of power where even a small amount of foreknowledge could make a big difference? Except that it can’t, because your new friend’s visions show immutable futures, so all you can do is help them happen… This is the muddle in which our characters find themselves, the tangled weaving into which they’re knotted. We’ll find out whether they tie themselves up more tightly or loosen their bonds when we delve into the rest of this story next week. Stay tuned. The future will be here before you know it.

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