“Ah, but he isn’t,” Arina laughed. “The difference is quantitative. A Prophet reads the lines of probability for the whole world, not only his own or the lines of people close to him. A Prophet informs us which direction humankind will move in, only not in the form of a learned treatise but with just one single fact that at first glance seems insignificant. Take the year 1956, for instance. At the age of sixty-two, the French Prophet André Lafleur utters his first prophecy, his main one—it happened that way because he was initiated late in life . . . The prophecy is absolutely crazy: ‘Soon shall the girl Mary shorten skirts and the world shall be adorned with naked legs.’ ”

I snorted.

“There, exactly,” said Arina. “Those who heard the prophecy quite reasonably suspected that André had gone senile and lapsed into lascivious fantasies in his old age. And note—only a year later the first Sputnik was launched into space! But here was a Frenchman muttering something about Mary, who would clip skirts shorter . . . But then in 1963 Mary Quant—a Londoner, by the way—showed her collection of miniskirts. They shook the world. And the result? The sexual revolution, emancipation, a significant increase in the birth rate in the Old World. So what was more important, the Sputnik or the miniskirt?”

“The Sputnik,” I said resentfully, although I myself had defended the importance of miniskirts to Gesar.

Arina laughed.

“It was all important. The Sputnik was prophesied too, but space flight was a generally anticipated important development. No one foresaw those twenty centimeters of cloth being snipped off, and they could only appreciate how important they were many years later. That’s the way a Prophet works—he foresees great upheavals and forewarns us of them through small events.”

“Then perhaps you know what was so remarkable about an Australian who died as an infant . . .”

“Alistair Maxwell? Yes, I know. The boy’s death broke up his parents’ marriage. In the late 1970s his mother had another child, by another man. That boy lives a perfectly ordinary life . . . but at the age of fifteen he pulled a little girl who was drowning out of the water. The situation didn’t seem like an emergency, he didn’t even realize that he had actually saved someone’s life. But now that little girl is one of the most powerful enchantresses in the Australian Day Watch. They forecast a great career for her. But if that infant hadn’t died . . .”

“I get it,” I said. “It’s just like in the joke.”

“What joke?” asked Arina.

“Well, this guy has died and he asks God: ‘What was the meaning of my life?’ And God answers: ‘Remember, in 1972 you were traveling in a train and you passed the salt to someone in the restaurant car? Well then . . .’ ”

Arina laughed.

“Yes, right. Sometimes it can be just like that. But if you really go into them thoroughly, all those strange prophecies can be explained.”