Prophecy

Chant wrote, in the good ink, with flourishes he'd practiced a thousand times:

I am open to the Divine, to be spoken to and through; may the Divine make me its vessel.

The letters were almost too tiny to see. His pen was needle-sharp and his hand was very precise.

While the ink dried, he moved on to the next little square of paper and wrote it again.

At the same time, he was humming. He couldn't sing while he was writing, not the whole time. His voice would give out; his hands were only this tolerant of all the minuscule calligraphy after years of practice. When his throat began to threaten to be sore he switched to humming, or sometimes tapping his feet to the rhythm of the same chant he was writing.

He came to the end of a batch. The writing on the first square was thoroughly dry. Chant picked it up and folded it into a neatly creased origami component of the prayer ball he was building. The back of the paper, lustrous red, caught the light from the high shallow window in his chamber. He tucked it into place in the ball and folded the next one. He misfolded the fourteenth square in the batch, sang an apology while he burnt it, and wrote a replacement to dry and form its own segment of the ball.

When the prayer ball was finished, after another forty-five batches over the next few weeks adding scale after scale to the sphere of paper, it'd go up on a fishing line to hang from the ceiling of his cell. He had a lot of them already. The building's rooms were built with high ceilings covered in hooks, so you could hang some dangling low in between others tucked up high against the paint. Chant was working on a third altitude of ball now, and had to duck around them by the door.

Nobody else in seminary had this many and it was Chant's greatest anxiety.

Some people chose other ways to beseech the Divine. Chant had school chums who were pure meditators, ones who took psychedelics, who deprived themselves of sleep and food and touch and sunlight and comfort until their medical supervisors intervened and then started all over again. There had been, the previous year, a group of six foreign exchange students who spoke broken Prophesy (though, naturally, they called their own language their own word for Prophesy) and were all seeking the Divine by having bizarre sexual congress with one another in configurations Chant hadn't even tried to understand. Apparently it had worked in the past. Lots of things worked, if you kept at them long enough with a sincere heart. The Divine wasn't hiding, it was just far away.

Chant put his in-progress prayer ball in its protective box, since it wouldn't hold up well to any jostling before it was finished. He got to his feet, hunched over so he wouldn't disturb any of the bright hanging monuments to just how far away.

From him. It was especially far away from him.

The lunch bell was ringing and Chant joined the general flow of traffic to the dining hall, where he collected his pre-ladled bowl of mashed potatoes and topped them with a selection of vegetables and scrambled eggs. He cast his eyes around and landed on someone he knew, one of the self-abnegation types who was only in the cafeteria to steel herself against its contents. There was disagreement about whether this made sense, whether being tempted and (presumably) resisting would get you closer to the Divine than simply locking yourself in a cell and praying till you collapsed. Diozi was in the former camp. She had her eyes closed and was inhaling the scent of food regularly, probably re-committing herself to the Divine with every breath.

She noticed the scrape of the chair when Chant sat down across from her. "Oh, hello," she said, opening her eyes. She looked tired. Probably coming off an all-nighter. "How is it going?"

"Uh, halfway through prayer ball thirty-three," said Chant, sheepish.

Diozi's brow knit. "Are you sure prayer balls are the way to go for you?" she asked gently. She paused partway through the sentence to lick her lips. Her medical supervisor usually let her get away without water for no more than twelve hours at a time but that was plenty of opportunity to get chapped. That, or she was just smelling the mashed potatoes.

"I did try other things," said Chant. "That's how I got my nickname. The prayer balls feel right, but - no, there's really no way to be sure." He shrugged awkwardly. "Supposedly the average is twenty-two complete balls, but that's only counting people who do eventually prophesy, right? If I give up, the average they tell new enrollments will drop, but not because of how quickly I made it to the Divine..." He took a forkful of lunch. It needed salt. He tried to imagine how good it would taste to Diozi, swinging between deprivation and relief. This improved the experience but only a little.

"I think I'm getting close and I've only been here five years," said Diozi.

And Chant was coming up on nine. "I know a lot of people are quicker," he acknowledged. Sometimes he tossed and turned at night, wondering what he was doing wrong. He felt so sure that the problem wasn't the prayer balls, just - that he had a longer way to go to reach the Divine, or that it had something especially complicated to say to him and he needed to meet it more than halfway. He wanted so keenly to know what it would tell him.

"I could be wrong about being close," she acknowledged. "And I suppose Medical might send me packing an inch from the finish line."

"- well, you could still fast at home, right?" said Chant. "I'd run out of money for papers, but fasting isn't expensive."

"Of course fasting is expensive," said Diozi. "It's not safe to go hard on it without supervision, and even doing it gentler so I won't die I'd have a heck of a time working an ordinary job. My sister works at a store, folding clothes and ringing people up at the counter, and my hands would shake too much to do that, or to wait tables, or drive a bus. Usually when I come off a long fast I have to start with things that go through a straw before I can pick up a fork." She was staring at his bowl as she said this, then closed her eyes again and inhaled, exhaled, inhaled, exhaled. "I'd have to stop, or only do it on weekends, or something. That's if I even wanted to keep trying."

"Wouldn't you?" Chant blinked at her. It would certainly take longer and be more difficult, working toward meeting the Divine weekends only, but only a few prophets got more than one revelation in their lifetimes anyway. She might wait until she was forty, but then she'd know what it wanted to tell her!

She shrugged awkwardly. "I want a prophecy of my own," she said. "But if I couldn't focus on it, I'd find other things to want. Regular people don't even start trying, even if a hobbyist amount of practice could get them there eventually. I'd blend in with the regular people. They say you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with."

"Oh," said Chant, who had never really considered not trying to commune with the Divine. He'd known since he was very small that if it was trying to speak to him he had to do his end of the work to bring its voice to his ear.

"I do think I'm close, though." She smiled encouragingly. "You probably are too. You work so hard."

After lunch Chant went back to his chamber and worked some more on the prayer ball. This one was in shades of red. He worked with whatever papers were on sale at the school store, buying them out of his scholarship stipend, winding up with whatever nobody else had snapped up at full price. Most of his balls were mostly white since that was available in the greatest bulk, that and marked-down leftover holiday palettes that he remixed with one another. Unbroken Eve's navy blue camouflaged with Holy Spring fawn and pink. He cared a little about the balls not being riots of orange and purple and glitter rainbow, but only a little. Any colors that were cheap would do. It was not unrelated to how he'd stretched his scholarship so far to begin with.

It was written that the first recorded prophet - the first one to have any surviving notes scribbled down about him, after uncounted generations of prophets from before the invention of the alphabet - spent twenty years of his adult life in prayer, for his first revelation, and that it was mostly about how to do it more efficiently next time. After that he took ten for the second, and ten for the third, and ten for the fourth, and that was the last one he achieved in his lifetime. A fifty percent reduction in average time was pretty good. All the following iterations on his example had accomplished the same, but only once in aggregate. Five years was the new normal, for a supported student of divinity committed to trying.

There were faster ones. The first recorded prophet hadn't been a particular talent, he'd just known some nerd who'd picked up scribal skills. Occasionally a shining star would appear on the scene, sunk halfway into the Divine with every breath and thought, repeating mantras when they snored, and they'd announce their prophecy with only three or four summers of study under their belts, and sometimes they could keep up that pace, too. And to balance them out...

Well, there was Chant.

There were occasionally flyers up on the school of divinity's campus. A nearby academic university had a thriving social sciences department and they wanted to predict who got the flashiest prophecies, the fastest ones, the clearest and most usable. They wanted to sift through everybody's data and find a way to predict of some pious elementary schooler that they'd be able to blitz through a prayer-wheel-oriented practice in thirty-nine months flat. They wanted to find the most miraculous talents so as to come out with a divinely inspired policy opinion on sect reconciliation that healed every tiff and quibble between the Ancients, and the Incorrupt, and every minor splinter cult following some fraud's "prophecy" that everyone should give him all their money and daughters.

(Chant's school was Incorrupt, but he didn't strongly subscribe to the one over the other. The Ancient spoke to the same Divine. Even the official Incorrupt catechism didn't call any major Ancient prophets liars. The strange sex-based prayers of the exchange students were offputting, but not erroneous - they were reaching in the same direction Chant himself was.)

At any rate, Chant had duly signed up for some studies. They usually paid in cash, since they had a hard time attracting a representative sample of fasters if they tried to bribe the divinity students with chips and soda. He'd been told that he was statistically likely to drop out. He'd been told that he was repressing his prophecy and it had most likely come to him already, missed somehow among half-remembered dreams and anxiety about his supply of coins for the washing machines. He'd been told that he had none of the hallmarks of being a successful prophet and would probably get a minor update on a mathematical question to spoil some professor's career.

Chant had said, to the last surveyor, "Wouldn't that be something, though? The Divine does speak through numbers and figures, and to know a little more about what it has to say there, in plain provable notation so that everyone who wanted to could understand by reading the right math textbook -"

The surveyor had not had time to talk about Chant's feelings about how worthwhile it would be to invest seven or eight years of his life into receiving a proof of a mysterious conjecture. He'd waved the next divinity student in to go over the questions and see what the model predicted for her.

The dinner bell rang. Chant finished his calligraphic sentence, pinned his still-drying papers to the desk with his fingers and blew on them so he could fold them up safely, and scurried out once they were all accounted for.

Diozi wasn't there. That wasn't unusual; even fasters who showed up to be tempted usually didn't want to do it on the schedule of everyone else's meals. Sometimes at this hour she took sparkling water and vitamin pills with a checkup in the health office. There wasn't really anyone else Chant regularly sat with. Everyone who'd entered when he had was gone by now, many with their prophesies and their careers in counseling or ministry or social work or theology or policy or whatever their visions suited them to. Prophecies weren't fundamentally incommunicable, but they lost things in translation. If the Divine could have spoken in words perhaps it would have been easier to get in touch.

The others, who had not gotten prophecies, were gone because they'd dropped out. Whenever Chant sat with some younger students, they gave him sidelong looks, wondering why he hadn't done exactly that.

He sat near but not right next to a knot of meditators. Most of them were eating as quickly as possible so as to get back to their practices, but some were taking thoughtful bites of porridgey soup so it could drizzle down their throats without active chewing and they could concentrate on the experience.

None of them felt like talking, but that was fine. Chant wasn't lonely, just pensive. His classmates were well into their adult lives. Not that he was a child, at twenty-six, but - he didn't know what he was going to be when he grew up. If he got a prophecy about how to solve drug addiction in a particular city he'd be spending the next decade on that, at least. If he got one about how to teach or compose devotional music or - he had no idea what the Divine would tell him. Besides "nothing". On any given day that tended to be what he got.

He really wanted to know, though.

When he'd finished his dinner he nodded to the meditators and went back to his chamber to fold some more prayers.

Back in his first years at the seminary Chant had taken classes. Technically he still could. He'd done it when he'd been ordered to rest his hand following a bit of a repetitive stress complaint. But the requirements were designed to be knocked out in three years or less, before typical scholarships ran out, to allow more time for concentrating on prophesying. History, catechism, philosophy, a required seminar on practices to connect to the Divine in case they were pursuing options that were wrong for them. Seminary students could bus over to the academic university too, if they wanted. Chant learned to make paper, when the art department over there offered a half-semester workshop on it. He'd had the idea that it would connect him more deeply to the process of writing his prayers and shaping his origami if he also made the paper. Unfortunately it turned out that handmade paper was unsuitable - too thick and lumpy. He hadn't taken any classes in a while.

Chant swung by Diozi's dormitory, after he'd finished another batch of origami, to see if she was awake enough to take a walk with him. She slept a lot. It came of being so hungry. Technically she was supposed to be depriving herself of sleep, too, but she'd relaxed on that when she couldn't get through a whole chapel service conscious. Better to take a little longer to reach the Divine with less onerous devotions than to be unable to listen to a sermon.

She didn't seem to be home, though. Chant asked her roommate.

"Oh, you didn't hear!" said the roommate, who was rebandaging a devotional tattoo on her shoulder. It depicted the stylized Divine commanding the first recipients to seek peace and reconciliation, though it was stylized enough that Chant might not have recognized it out of context.

"No, I didn't," Chant said agreeably, "where is she?"

"She got her prophecy! She collapsed in the bathroom and somebody from across the hall found her and she came to and -" A vague gesture. "She's probably still at medical."

"Oh!" exclaimed Chant, and he about-faced to head for the infirmary building.

Diozi was conscious and well enough to accept visitors. He went in to the row of beds; she was propped up in one with an ice pack on her temple and half a milkshake on her lap. She slurped as he approached.

"Your roommate told me you got your prophecy!" he exclaimed, taking the hand that wasn't holding her beverage. "Congratulations! But how's your head?"

"Throbbing like a drumline," Diozi admitted. "They're not sure I'm not concussed, I'm a little worried it'll make it hard to - remember, translate -"

"Oh no. I won't ask you to tell me all about it right now, then, I can wait." He patted her hand. "Do you want me to bring you anything?"

"Well, I'm not supposed to read, or do anything interesting," said Diozi, wry, "just try to fall asleep. So maybe if you wanted to run and get my music player it'd help me get un-wired enough to crash for the night, but I might be snoring by the time you get back either way."

"I'll get it," said Chant. "In case you want it before they release you. It's no trouble."

"Thank you," she said, smiling a watery smile, and she polished off her shake and set the cup aside.

She was, true to her guess, fast asleep by the time Chant returned with her player. He put it on her bedside table, draped another blanket over her because she had goosebumps, and -

What had he been going to Diozi's room for in the first place? He couldn't remember now. Simple company, probably. He didn't exactly have a firm sense of time passing when he was deep in prayer-writing and prayer-folding, assembling the balls, trimming imperfectly cut edges off papers, blending new ink - but he did accumulate all the usual privations that a person collects over the course of the day, loneliness included, and Diozi was his closest friend. He could just turn in early himself, but...

He really, really wanted to know, not only what the Divine had said to Diozi, but what it would say to him.

He went back to his cell and he resumed his work.

The end-of-term assessments were usually pretty rubber-stamped. He took a picture of his dangling forest of prayer balls, to show to his assessor, and expected to be nodded at and sent along to make some more. That was what had happened every time before.

"Enesh." Chant's advisor didn't like using his nickname. "Usually we like to see... progress."

"I haven't slowed down at making the balls," said Chant. "I'm more than halfway through the in-progress one."

"Progress toward prophecy."

That wasn't, as Chant understood it, the sort of thing you had "progress" toward. You'd collapse like Diozi, or you'd wake up at three in the morning twitching with visions, or you'd get up on a table in the dining hall and start ranting disjointed dream fragments that you weren't able to render as orderly language in real time. It was sudden.

Before he could formulate these objections aloud, the assessor went on: "You've been here, I'm sure you've noticed, quite a bit longer than average. Your scholarship is from the Foundation for a Closer Divine. Their mission is to increase the number of prophecies so that more aspects of mortal life can be informed by sacred guidance. You're coming up on costing twice as much for your first prophecy as some students cost for two."

"Who's getting two in this amount of time?" said Chant.

"It's not common, but neither is your situation."

"The first recorded receivers took more than a decade."

"The first recorded receivers lived long ago. They had only very limited support from their communities and would have spent much of their time on preindustrial labor, or recovering without useful medical attention from various diseases. Penicillin wasn't revealed until - you should know all this, Enesh. The point of the scholarship is to support you in a lifestyle of prayer that, in typical persistent students, results in prophecy in less than seven years. And the Foundation has determined that, since you're not a typical student, it must cut its losses somewhere. Somewhere is here. You have two weeks to say your goodbyes, pack your belongings, make travel and lodging arrangements for where you'll stay -"

"Try a blitz?" Chant asked.

"- yes, you may use your grace period to try a blitz."

It was called a "blitz" when a frustrated divinity student took a few days and threw everything they had at the chasm between themselves and the Divine. It was usually a fast and a drug cocktail and a long stint in a sensory deprivation tank with no human contact. It was not safe. Medical supervisors, even if they didn't refuse to participate out of principle, constituted human contact. Some people wore heart rate monitors and asked to be bailed out if something went too far wrong, but that tended to interfere with the very psychological state they were trying to achieve. One wanted to exist in a microcosm of the world in which only oneself and the Divine were present. The promise of rescue punctured the illusion. The improved survival rates weren't usually judged worth it, not among the kinds of people who tried a blitz at all.

Blitzes had been a legal grey area until a particular prophet had succeeded at one. She'd gotten advance warning of what would have been a devastating earthquake, and evacuated the affected area in time. She'd spent the rest of her career working on enshrining the right to blitz. She had, she explained, saved many more people with one success than would have been lost (among consenting adult volunteers, not innocent earthquake victims) over a hundred failures.

The success rate wasn't actually as low as one percent, but it was pretty bad.

But almost everyone who lived had a prophecy at the end of it. Presumably some of those who died, died in the throes of contact with the Divine.

Chant had never wanted to do a blitz. He wanted to be alive to deliver his prophecy. He wanted to know what the Divine had to say to him, but he also wanted to spend longer than half a delirious hour knowing it, have a chance to put it into practice. He knew it might not be as amazing as evacuating for an earthquake. A lot of people, especially in modern times, got instructions from the Divine to go work in public policy or childhood education and do some subtle nondefault thing there, and they never got a particularly clear picture of what would have happened otherwise. And people could and did fail in living up to what the Divine had asked of them, and spend their prophesied career like anyone else as the shine wore off and people stopped listening to them so attentively.

But better a blitz than to be cast out into the world, trying, as Diozi had described, to hold down a job with only prayer balls and really good handwriting. Actually, he wasn't sure his handwriting was good in the general case. It only got practice with the specific prayer. It wasn't even a pangram.

He'd still try, if he had to get an apartment and an entry-level job somewhere. People had gotten prophecies before without fancy school-store paper, without the good ink, without indeed being literate at all. But if he could convince the Divine that he was meeting it halfway this weekend, that would be - well. Risky. But he would try it.

He prepped for his blitz. You were supposed to go on a liquid diet before you quit eating altogether, to eliminate... elimination... interruptions. Usually you'd have a catheter, though some people just went ahead and peed in the water they floated in while they were being sensorily deprived. They said it wasn't much different than a public pool and definitely wasn't one of the more hazardous parts of the experience. Chant didn't have a strong opinion and accepted the blitz counselor's advice on this, as everything else.

He swallowed pills. He received injections. He put in earplugs and donned a mask. He stripped down and got in the tank.

He floated. He prayed.

He promptly lost track of time. That was normal. That could happen with the tank or the drugs alone, let alone the two of them together. It was okay. He could float here for what felt like a hundred years and he would be fished out when he was expected to be over the school's risk threshold. The pool he floated in had a disposable plastic liner, to make it easier to clean up when they discovered, not a prophecy, but a body.

He got hungrier. Thirstier, too, the water around him was saltier than the sea even if he'd wanted to chance the urine. He tried not to lick his lips or think about food. Prayer. He was here for prayer, to speedrun his prayers. He missed his ink and paper, his cell and the scratch of his pen, the balls hanging above him as monuments to his own dedication whenever he worried he'd slacken.

I am open to the Divine, to be spoken to and through; may the Divine make me its vessel.

There were more complicated prayers. There were sects that believed that repetition was actually an inferior form and every prayer should be constructed on the spot, to the point that the less creative among them just noted the date and time before they began. But Chant was drawn to this one, this simplest and first call into the void that separated mortality from divinity, volunteering everything he was to learn and speak, to become a conduit and a prophet.

He floated. He prayed. His stomach roiled. He got disturbing closed-eye visuals and lost proprioception below the waist. Hopefully that would come back later. He had a button to call for help, if he wanted it while he could still use it, but he didn't. He wanted the prophecy. He didn't have one yet. He was going to float here until he got one.

Chant scanned somebody's carton of strawberries.

"You look sort of familiar," said the somebody, sticking them into her reusable canvas bag. It had a picture of a salad on it, and the name of a salad restaurant.

"One of those faces," said Chant distantly.

It had been a minor news item when he'd managed, somehow, to be pulled from a blitz alive and unsuccessful. Most people hit the button and reported their prophecies within a couple of days. Or they were pulled out, too weak to reach for it or too delirious to find it, but revealed what they'd seen once they convalesced.

He'd floated, and floated. He'd been told it had been forty-nine hours. He'd needed four days in the hospital catching up on hydration.

He hadn't seen anything except funky colors. He hadn't felt anything except a drug-addled emotional storm that added up to nothing when examined sober. He hadn't heard anything except his own pulse, his own relentless breath.

They'd pulled his yearbook photo for the article. He was now known among people who read relevant newspapers, or followed religious news specifically, for being so far from the Divine that he could live through a blitz without it deigning to touch him.

Fortunately he wasn't that distinctive-looking. He'd gotten a haircut. It had been his dad's advice for job hunting.

He rang up a man's apple juice.

I am open to the Divine, to be spoken to and through; may the Divine make me its vessel.

Some people took longer. Some people were fast, sure. Some people took totally normal amounts of time in a totally normal setting. But if Chant kept praying, murmuring under his breath as he scanned barcodes and bagged canned soup, he had years and years left in him. Long enough to cross the gulf. Long enough to reach across to listen to what the Divine had to say. Blitzing hadn't done it, so what? Maybe it also didn't do it for lots of dead people and the special thing about Chant was more about his ability to tolerate drug interactions while absorbing water exclusively through his skin. He wasn't an old man.

The grocery store job made enough money to pay his parents some nominal rent, contribute to the household groceries, and cover other expenses that he suddenly had to worry about with his scholarship gone. He was saving up for a big bulk stack of papers to fold into ball components, but for the time being he was just back to the practice that had given him his name. Murmuring, always, whenever he had a spare moment. Under his breath. Aloud if he was in a setting where it seemed not too out of place. Occasionally people around him would join in when he did it on the bus. He attended three church services a week, though his parents only aspirationally managed one.

"Amen," said a scruffy man buying a bag of cheese slices and nothing else with his food assistance card.

Chant smiled at him and folded the receipt, quick as a wink, into the shape that would make a ball if you had enough of them. It got a gaptoothed laugh.

Chant's mother wanted him to date, give her some grandchildren. Chant wasn't some caricatured sexless monk, abstinence had never been his practice, but he didn't want to. He didn't feel ready - how could he build a life with someone when he was still trying to leave his life open to radical course alteration? What if he met someone, got engaged, planned to settle down and bend around their intended course, only to get a prophesy that required him to pack up and travel to another continent to apply his new knowledge to curing a plague or teaching literacy to a population that had only just worked out a written form of their language or - there were so many possibilities.

It had been a long time since anyone had gotten an entire language as part of their prophecy. It had been more common in the scriptural era. Chant's father sometimes opined, over breakfast or while flipping through channels, that prophecy quality had gone down a lot. Maybe there were only so many worthwhile things to say, and they were getting spread around more with refined efficient techniques for extracting them from the Divine, but surely, thought Chant, languages would be one thing there should be lots of in that case? Maybe the scriptures were just exaggerating. It could be that they were combining multiple people's prophecies, or multiple revelations a single person had picked up over a long and devout lifetime, and recording them as one. It could be that translations over time made them sound more impressive. Maybe with worse technology and other privations of the past, more dramatic torrents of information were necessary to make anyone capable of effecting significant change.

Diozi didn't visit. She'd moved to an island to take an ombudswoman position, managing constituent complaints in a town Chant had never heard of like some kind of public access social worker. He wasn't clear, even after a few phone conversations with her, whether the Divine had directed her to the specific posting, or if it was just available to anyone with a prophecy under their belt and she didn't have instructions to go elsewhere. Vague prophecies that qualified people for things like that, or for ethics advisory panels, or for the priesthood, were more common than earthquake premonitions or the discovery of oral rehydration therapy or the inspiration behind the most spectacular works of art. Maybe in Diozi's case the concussion was interfering and she'd lost some important feature of the communique. Seemed inconsiderate of the Divine, if so, to give her the prophecy at that moment and not the week following.

She called less and less often and seemed impatient when he wanted to know more about her prophecy. He stopped asking after awhile. He couldn't imagine not wanting to dissect his own with anyone who'd listen, but that was him. Maybe she'd been asked to keep it private? Not unheard of, just - odd. Usually the most profound and moving prophecies were the ones that were urgent to disseminate. Some people did get private ones, but Diozi hadn't actually said hers was private.

Chant prayed. He didn't date. A grocery store co-worker, Faran from the floral department, made some insinuations in his direction and he played dumb. He wanted to be ready for anything, and besides, Faran didn't seem to be very religious. Chant didn't think there was anything wrong with not being very religious, exactly. The Divine's gifts were to be shared unconditionally, and judging people for not being religious about it looked kind of like a condition when he thought about it. Faran was entitled to the fruits of all prophecies including the one he hoped for without any required performance in return. But he was himself devout as could be given his limited spare time. It didn't seem like it would be a good match on a personal level.

When Chant was 36, he had something of a crisis of faith.

He was managing the produce department at this point. His parents kept suggesting training programs that would qualify him for more interesting work, but he'd held out hope. The grocery store wasn't a bad job. He hummed hymns while he stacked oranges into pyramids and weeded the greens for any that looked off. The customers liked him. Faran from the floral department had married a friend of her brother's and they were expecting a baby. And he could drop the job, if he ever got word that he needed to.

It just didn't look very likely.

Even the first recorded prophets hadn't taken this long. Chant could have told himself a just-so story about how modern life was worldly and distracting, but the fact was that average time spent in dedicated prayer per prophecy had dropped steadily throughout written history. He was no longer just an outlier for the age, he was an outlier for the entire class of prophets. And that was if you completely ignored the failed blitz, which was baffling on any model. He couldn't pretend, anymore, that the Divine was going to talk to him in any remotely normal time frame.

Maybe it didn't like him, and most people just gave up before having it rubbed in their face so hard. Maybe it had said something while he was having dehydration seizures and he had complete amnesia about it. Maybe he was praying wrong, somehow, even though his sect boasted no fewer prophecies per capita than any other major strain of the faithful. He tried an Ancient version of the basic prayer for a week, trying to get used to it. It felt wrong in his mouth and made a foreign old lady mistake him for someone who'd understand her paragraph about the tangerines. He didn't even know how to say "sorry" in her language. She complained about him at customer service in broken local Prophecy.

He experimented, briefly, with not trying any more.

This turned out not to make much difference. He was a creature of habit. His habit was to pray. When he wasn't doing it purposefully he did it on accident. It'd spill from his lips when he stocked grapes and leeks. He'd be walking to the bus stop and catch himself already halfway through a song of beseeching. He gave up trying to suppress it after a couple of days, and was back to full-throated pleading for the Divine to touch him just once a few days after that.

He'd made friends with Faran after a fashion, once she was clear that he did not want to date her and had found comfort from this mild inconvenience in the arms of her now-husband. Sometimes where the lilies met the carrots they talked. Mostly about her, because her life was more interesting - she was buying baby clothes, she was arguing with her sister-in-law, she was thinking about middle names. Sometimes about him, though.

"Maybe it just needs to tell you something really big," she suggested. "And it's... gotta whisper. So you've gotta get right up next to it, not halfway."

"It's a nice thought," said Chant. He was partially shucking ears of corn to provide those windows into their kernels that the shoppers preferred. If prophecy were corn, he was not getting a window into the kernels. Just a mountain of husks and silk, looking for one gold nugget and crossing his fingers that it would be sweet. He was so, so hungry.

"You don't think so?"

"I wouldn't expect it."

"Maybe it's something with fussy timing, like the Yellow Fault earthquake, and it's saving you for the proper day."

"Maybe." It was likelier, or sounded likelier. "There are more divinity students all the time, though. I'm not so well placed that there's much that'd better come from me late rather than from one of them in the right place at the right time."

"Maybe..." Faran trailed off. She'd run out of ideas. "I dunno. You pray harder than my priest. You pray harder than anybody I ever met. You ought to get something for it."

"I'd like to. But I've got to acknowledge, haven't I, that it's not looking too probable."

"I don't think you've got to acknowledge anything till the Divine makes you," said Faran, and at that he managed a real laugh.

Chant was forty. His birthday a month gone, he was dealing with his mother's hospital logistics. As soon as she got released for one thing, another complaint or scheduled elective reared its head. The Incorrupt didn't do a lot of praying for specific people or outcomes. Why would they, when the Divine knew what they needed and was doing the best it could to guide them to all the solutions whenever someone came close enough to hear its voice? But the Ancient sect did, not because it helped but because it wouldn't hurt, and he'd picked up a little of the habit during one of his regular long dark nights of the soul. He prayed she would be well as he sealed the envelope with the payment for her latest adventure with cardiology, and then lapsed back into his usual muttering chant.

The envelope went in the mailbox. The checkmark went on the to-do list and he moved on. He'd learned to cook and was making dinner more nights than not, now, since his mother was often fatigued and his father lately struggled to read labels on packaging, resulting in one memorable salt/sugar confusion. He put some water on to boil for the noodles and peas, and didn't salt it since his mother was supposed to be on a low sodium diet. Probably his father would ask if she'd like some sugar on hers; he was trying to turn it into a running joke.

"I am open to the Divine, to be spoken to and through; may the Divine make me its vessel," Chant whispered, opening the package of pasta. "I am open to"

The pasta disappeared from his awareness, with the pot of water, the kitchen, his own hands and heartbeat. Untethered, he thought the next words: "the Divine", and very nearly continued by rote, but - that was it, here and now and already, wasn't it. The Divine.

That or a near-death experience, drug flashback, seizure -

No.

It was not quite a word. The psychic equivalent of a red circle with a slash through it. That one concept would be easy enough to translate, but Chant assumed that the Divine did not only want to tell him "no". At least he was unshakably clear that it meant he wasn't having a drug flashback. It would have been a real body blow if it had called him into a prophecy just to tell him to stop bothering it.

It would never do that, it said. Its benevolence was a tangible thing, as obvious once Chant thought about it as the friction of breath in his throat. It was the Divine; it loved him and everyone; and it had something to say, to him, to Chant specifically and only out of all the would-be prophets over the world.

Floating in its benign omnipresence, Chant leaned in - or thought of leaning in, there was no difference in this un-place.

I have given twenty-nine prophecies in the past year including this one, said the Divine.

Was - was that Chant's holy revelation, just a count of the prophecies for the -

Wait. That couldn't be right. Chant's old school alone graduated a hundred-something prophets every year. There were other schools, bigger ones. There were independent practitioners who meditated on their own time and turned up with a vision from the Divine. A run of the mill prophecy wasn't even news. They happened every day. Twenty-nine had to be - that was less than once a week. Had he somehow managed to - mishear, the Divine, was that even possible -

No.

If there had been fewer than thirty real prophecies in the last year then there were thousands of frauds - if that year was representative -

It is. It has been declining as people have begun expecting faster and faster results.

Then there were thousands, annually, there were hundreds of thousands still walking around pretending, lying. Only a handful of the most dramatic prophecies could be real, like the earthquake one. Everyone else was - Diozi was, not that he'd spoken to her in years, just making it up. For instance. Almost everybody -

Some have fooled themselves. Some are lying but with good intentions, seeking the credibility that will let them attempt their project or scheme. Some are unwilling to admit that they are ready to give up, and they give up without admitting it. Some are genuinely conniving for respect and influence - though not as many as you are imagining, because most begin hoping for a true prophecy and only later contrive the need to fabricate one.

Chant could hardly wrap his mind around it. He thought he'd known so many prophets. His priest was a fake. His teachers. Everyone he'd entered divinity school with. That customer at the grocery store with the prayer beads and the social worker badge who'd sometimes come in at six in the morning with a teary client to treat them to ice cream. Most of the members of most governments.

He had to tell - who could he tell. Who would believe him? He'd have to determine who the real ones were, maybe, and rally them together somehow to present a united front, so he wouldn't just be one lone fraud. One fraud, a forty-year-old divinity school dropout who'd lived through a failed blitz, would be so much easier to swallow than the epidemic the Divine was telling him about now. But he'd be able to identify the ones who couldn't possibly be fabricating it, who'd had information there was no other way to get -

You will not need to figure it out.

Oh, those were the real ones. This was admittedly less information than an entire language. And they'd have had a real shared experience, and they wouldn't be strangely reluctant to talk about it.

It will take time.

Right. Of course it would. This wasn't going to come as a mild aside on the evening news. It was going to be a body blow to everyone, to everything. Careers would end, good work would fall with bad justifications, governments might topple - had that been why the Divine waited so long to puncture the deception?

It took time to arrange the conditions for success here. I am sorry.

Sorry? What was it -

The un-place was collapsing like cotton candy in the rain. The love and the peace and the certainty drained away. There was just Chant, on the floor, with a smarting elbow and an angrily boiling pot of water.

What was it sorry for? That it'd be hard? That he'd have to spend the rest of his life on this? Hadn't he always wanted to spend the rest of his life on a mission from the Divine -

Oh. It was sorry it had taken so long, he realized, sitting up and wincing as the elbow twinged. It was sorry he'd needed to wait all that time to hear its voice.

"It's okay," he whispered. "I understand. It's going to take years and years and nobody will recognize what I'm working towards at first. But you know I can do it. And I've been waiting long enough that I know too."

Chant got up and put the pasta in the pot. He set his timer, and started writing up a plan.