Vorn

Before he died, a long and painful death as it happens, my husband was something of a joker. One of his favourites was a joke about a man surnamed Sunday. Maybe you've heard it before, but in any case, it goes like this:

"There was once a man surnamed Sunday, born into a long line of vicars. With a name like that, it seemed inevitable he'd follow the family trade. But this particular Mr Sunday had other ideas. I'm my own man, he thought to himself. Fate won't decide my path!

"So he left the seminary where he'd been training and drifted from job to job, searching for a vocation that felt right. And after years of trying, he finally found his calling . . .

"He opened an ice-cream parlour."

Sundae—as in ice-cream sundae. Geddit? my husband used to say, cracking himself up. Yeah, I got it. But I never really found it as funny as he did.

***

I think of that joke now on my way to Vorn.

Vorn, for the unaware, is a planet at the tip of the Orion Spur of the Milky Way, just over a week's journey from Terra by starliner. The humanoids on Vorn possess a unique organ in the centre of their foreheads—roughly oval in shape and set partly into the skull, so that it appears, to Terrans at least, like a bulbous, lidless eye. Unlike an eye, however, which strictly speaking receives and interprets the various waves of the electromagnetic spectrum, the Vornian organ is sensitive not to light but to nonlocal excitations in the tachyon field—the supradimensional information matrix in which all events across time are encoded—thus affording Vornians the ability to "see" into the future.

This singular propensity of the natives has, understandably, made Vorn the Delphi of the Post-Expansionist Age, with pilgrims from all across the many planets of the Commonwealth flocking there to receive a prediction. Unlike the Delphic Oracle, however, the fortune tellers of Vorn display none of the latter's ambiguity. A case in point: when Croesus, King of Lydia, consulted the Oracle on whether he should invade Persia, the Oracle replied that if he should invade, a great empire would fall. Croesus, of course, misinterpreting the "great empire" as the Persians', duly invaded and was duly defeated, causing his own "great empire" to fall. If only he had been a little more discerning, the Croesian Empire may be more than a footnote in Persian history.

Vornian prophecies, on the other hand, are far more immune to such vicissitudes. The future as predicted by a Vornian is always spoken with absolute clarity, and, unlike the garbled hexameters of the Delphic Oracle, is always inevitable, affording not a jot of multivalence. A pilgrim, for example, hearing he is destined to die on the 29th of December in a plane crash into the English Channel, will, despite all possible attempts to thwart the machinations of fate, find himself, by a thousand unavoidable inconveniences, boarding a flight to France on the exact date and time as the Vornian prophet predicted.

If the Vornians have taught us anything, it is that the future, whether we like it or not, is set in stone.

And yet, as jarring an experience as it might be for a pilgrim to receive such an edict, it is difficult to imagine what life is like for the Vornians themselves, who, for the moment the post-natal film falls from their tachyon-perceptive organ, have their entire futures laid out before them in, what one imagines must be, an irrevocably retracting tapestry.

Before embarking on my journey, I made a point of posing this question to a Vornian I knew, an acquaintance of an Ysian artist friend of mine for whom I had once modelled. The Vornian, a maker of fine porcelain by the name of Mok Gil'Lem, replied that for Vornians, the experience of living is much akin to that of an actor performing a play. Never able fully to live in the moment, they remain, in a substrate of their consciousness, always detached, and though they may, on appearance, display joy, shock, passion, anger—they are always, like an actor, simply reading out a memorized script.

It was through Mok Gil'Lem that I also learned of the existence of those peculiar Vornians who undergo the traumatic and dangerous removal of their peculiar organ. According to Mok Gil'Lem, these lobotomised individuals live lives of intense pleasure, the memory of their future having disappeared along with the removal of their third eye. (Though knowledge of one's future does not change it, it does change the experience of living.) To know that one will be successful at one's goal takes all the joy out of the pursuit; to know that one will end up wretched robs every preceding moment of its magic. Every unlobotomised Vornian is, in this way, no more than a puppet on a string, and those who do undergo the risky procedure are living testimonies to the phrase "ignorance is bliss."

"I have witnessed," Mok Gil'Lem told me, "a lobotomised man almost collapse in joy in the central square of Klem"—a populous city on Vorn—"crying out 'I could die at any moment and not have a clue!'"

I asked Mok Gil'Lem why, having seen the results of the procedure, that he had never undergone a lobotomy himself. He poured us a thin scented tea from a beautifully crafted pot of his own making, remained silent for a moment, and then replied, simply, that it was not, and in his case, would never be, fated.

For an unlobotomised Vornian, there is no such thing as a choice, any more than Prince Hamlet chooses to spare his murderous uncle while at prayer.

***

When my husband died, I felt . . . unmoored from time. Every object in our once-shared house felt like props from a play I was no longer in: his favourite T-shirts with their eye-rollingly corny slogans, our damp-speckled duvet, the elkhorn fern that we so carefully nurtured. After the funeral, the future opened up before me, a vast and unknowable thing, full of terror and uncertainty, so that every morning I woke in a cold sweat, terrified at what might befall me during the remaining waking hours of the day.

I found myself drawn, inexorably, to Vorn.

If I just knew what the future held, I could at least have some measure of peace, some measure of calm; would it be a fair trade, to swap my quaking, terrified heart for the tragic detachment of the Vornians?

Not sure of the answer, I nonetheless booked passage on the next starliner, hoping that the journey would clarify my thoughts. What, when the time came, did I want to ask? The moment and means of my own death? When I would stop grieving? Whether or not I would fall in love again?

Speaking to the other passengers, I see that I am far from alone in my troubles.

One, a particularly nervous man whom I met at dinner, plans to have a Vornian record in minute detail the coming events of his life; he is, I observed, by the age he took to order his meal last night, one of those people who agonizes over every choice, however seemingly insignificant; it would, I imagine, be a balm to him to have all of his decisions made in advance. Several others simply wish to know the date and time of their deaths, so that they may better prepare themselves mentally. What is increasingly clear to me is that none of us are in search of the opportunity to make better decisions or create a better life, only to experience the future in a different way.

***

We dock at Klem, as dawn is breaking over the city.

With the other pilgrims, I make my way through the winding streets of the city, to the Great Temple of Foretelling on the north side. Three-eyed Vornians pack the streets, ordering breakfast at the stalls on the thoroughfare, laughing in cafes over exotically-scented pastries, throwing up their hands in anger at the price of a knobbly purple fruit. There is so much life here, so much vibrancy, and yet, if I am to believe the words of Mok Gil'Lem, it is all an act, all of these people are simply going through the motions, one known action after another, and beneath it all—such profound sadness, so that as I climb the temple stairs I cannot stop the tears falling.

***

Stepping into the cool shade of the Temple's portico, I know, finally, what prophecy I desire. Along the eastern and western walls of the inner sanctum are set a dozen or so alcoves, each of which houses a Vornian willing to grant prophecy to foreigners. I approach one, set a stack of credits into his bowl, and implore him to see into my future.

"What would you like to know?" he asks.

I tell him my wish.

His third eye seems to vibrate, and then, in a clear voice he proclaims. "In twelve years' time, on the fifteenth of June, you will drink a cup of jasmine tea in a cafe on the Rue Sainte-Anne in Paris, and you will enjoy it very much." The scribe beside him scribbles the prophecy onto a roll of paper and hands it to me. I take it with thanks, nod to the Vornian, and leave, safe in the knowledge that whatever else happens, there is a small moment of happiness in my future.

***

I used to think that joke about Mr Sunday was rather cruel. The poor man, trying so hard to escape his fate, and still ending up exactly where his name said he would. Fate, always the winner.

But now I don't think it's cruel at all.

He loved running that ice-cream shop.

I'd bet my future on it.