Above Jupiter’s great cyclone, the Oracle sees a possible future: evacuation ships leaving a distant world too late.

Their star erupts. The ships are destroyed before they can escape.

The vision ends.

On that distant world, the sky is still quiet.

The Oracle studies the departure it has witnessed. In the vision, the inhabitants begin leaving only after the danger becomes visible.

The warning must reach them sooner.

Within Jupiter’s luminous storms, the Oracle reveals the threatened world beneath its familiar star. Then comes the eruption, and the ships caught in its fire.

Those who seek its visions carry the warning outward. It passes from vessel to vessel until it reaches that world.

The evacuation begins while the sky is still clear.

Above Jupiter’s eye, the Oracle watches the departures. One vessel leaves, then another. The inhabitants are acting on a danger they cannot yet see.

The storms turn beneath its drifting form as the last ships carry their passengers away.

Then the day of the vision arrives.

The star erupts.

The world burns.

The evacuation ships have already reached other star systems.

The Oracle follows them for a while. Their journeys continue beyond the ending it first witnessed, carrying the lives it had seen extinguished.

Within Jupiter’s storms, it lets the vision of the doomed departure fade.

Some visions are given so that no one has to live through them.