The Oracle by Ari Juels

Author:Ari Juels
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781945863868
Publisher: Talos
Published: 2024-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

I checked every hour or so during the night. Smart contracts swam into the Magic Crystal as predicted. My setup was sound. But the Delphians’ code didn’t appear.

Diane texted me the next morning.

“I don’t know if it will help,” she said on a video call. “But I’ve realized how you can begin to understand the Delphians.”

After our failed educational jaunt into the metaverse with the virtual-reality headset, she’d tried to get me to read specialist material on Delphi. I was supposed to ingest some poem called the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, topped with the meaty scholarly book Delphi, and with lashings of the Greek tragic playwright Aeschylus. The only thing I could get myself to read were the first few lines of the hymn:

The gods tremble before Apollo as he strides on Olympus.

He approaches their seats and they leap up,

All of them, as he stretches back his glittering bow.

Nice to know he terrified not just me, but also his coworkers.

I consider myself a bit of a history buff, but didn’t have the patience for the rest of Diane’s syllabus. Too long, too tragic, too scholarly. My already short attention span was shrinking with my days of grace. But Diane had seen me perk up in the Helios Gallery and Mercator’s vault when there were gleaming artifacts and not just ancient texts. I think that’s what gave her the idea of using show and tell.

She fussed with something and raised a finger. “Listen.”

I admit that my taste in music is a little narrow. I don’t get rock music. I don’t get jazz. I don’t even get contemporary classical. I don’t understand why, when there exist sublime creations like the second movement of Mozart’s A Minor Piano Sonata, people instead subject themselves to the dull, strident, esoteric exercises in self-indulgence with which orchestras feel compelled to lard their programs in a hopeless quest to attract listeners besides me under the age of sixty. I’ve suffered through a lot of that stuff between the Bach and Tchaikovsky at Carnegie Hall.

I certainly didn’t get the music Diane played for me.

There was no melody. It was all eerie, experimental-sounding scales and tempos. A little like certain types of world music, maybe in some classical Eastern tradition, but austere and primitive. I could sense a kind of sophistication in it, a complicated structure that was unintelligible to me. A small male chorus sang in a language I couldn’t identify—Greek, I assumed. A string instrument was plucked to mark syllables or words. A drum materialized, also beaten syllable by syllable. Then a singer declaimed rhythmically, reminding me of the half-sung, half-spoken parts of an opera. But something was missing. There had to be some emotional content to it, some mood. It was music, after all. But was it tragic? Melancholy? Joyous? Contemplative? Angry? I couldn’t tell you. It left me feeling musically autistic.

It lasted for five minutes. When it ended, Diane broke into a proud smile. “This is better than virtual reality. Now you have a real idea of the religion practiced at Delphi.

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