With that she gathered herself and almost ran out the front door, taking the path inward toward the Renewal park, where she’d be sure not to encounter Krinata.
EIGHT
Swarm
Watching Dar go, Jindigar shut down his link to her, making sure she knew she had privacy now. And then he was totally alone except for the wisp of Eithlarin’s presence.
He’d often been told that to be Center meant to stand alone, but he’d never suspected what it would be like.
He sank down on the periphery of the worldcircle and stared up at the white blur that was Eithlarin. Had he been wrong to do this to her? There was no one to ask. It would be more than a thousand years until he might ask a Complete Priest from Dushaun. //Oh, Eithlarin—come back to us!//
As if Eithlarin’s return would make everything as it had been! That was a kind of fallacy typical of ephemeral thought.
Was Darllanyu right? Could his very thinking have been warped by too much time among ephemerals? Had he adopted the short-term outlook, forgetting how a small error propagates through time to become a major disaster? The harm to Eithlarin was already permanent and would propagate through all her zunre, all her community. As an Inactive Priest, he should serve that group, not harm them like this. Had he decided to cut Eithlarin off only because he was becoming Active and interested only in the personal, or had he lost his priesthood?
He could hear his father asserting with that overwhelming aura of true knowledge, You’re a Historian, Jindigar. You’ve never belonged to Aliom.
Trembling, he leaned over and placed his hands on the worldcircle, feeling for the vibration of this world, the stamp of its individuality. His hands were dark shapes against the whiteness. The pure flowing energy shimmered and blurred around all fourteen of his fingers, the distortion showing that he, unlike Krinata, was holding himself away from Phanphihy. At his level of the priesthood he should be superficially attuned to the world he was on at all times.
Why am I holding myself from Phanphihy rather than lead ing the community to attunement?
A chill clamped at his heart. In his fear of fighting the dysattunement battle he had overlooked how vital his personal attunement was, not just to his Oliat but to the community. Perhaps he, himself, was the disruptive source of all their errors. The act of Inverting the Oliat function, as he had done when he sent Takora to her death and as he had done so often to save Krinata from ephemeral death, produced a disruptive backlash in the Invert’s life—so that a period of errors, disasters, and bad judgments ensued. Was that the source of their problems? Simply Inversion splashback? If so, there was no cure but to ride it out, taking care not to Invert again. And
But Inversion wouldn’t cause a loss of the Priest’s attunement to Aliom the way omission of his priestly duties could. That omission could be the real reason he couldn’t make a Center’s decisions properly.
He knew what he had to do—unknowingly Darllanyu had said it. He must Emulate a Dushau. He must do the most basic of a Priest’s exercises,, the Emulation of himself at his own induction, in order to attune himself and all who resonated with him, to Phanphihy.
Despite all of Raichmat’s zunre’s careful plans, he was the only Aliom Priest who had yet made it to Phanphihy. Only he could do this for them—and he had not done it in all the time they’d been here. True, he could only do the Inactive Priest’s Induction—the rest would have to wait. But even that—even that, he had avoided. Why?
The others didn’t know of his omission—they didn’t know there was anything to be done. Very few of those who elected to learn Aliom and train in Oliat ever became Priests. An Aliom Priest forsook all other disciplines, for Aliom filled the whole of life–in Renewal and between. One had to be very sure one could attain Completion in Aliom; one had to sense shaleiliu between the self and Aliom before taking that drastic a step, because the dedication, once made, could not be forsaken.
Jindigar had made that dedication gladly and had never regretted it. Then why—why had he neglected this duty?
As he struggled to frame that question a pall of lethargy sapped his will, damped his thoughts to stillness, immobilized his body. This inability to move or think was his species’ method of hiding from predators. But this predator was a thought —a danger to life, perhaps, but still only a thought.
lie fought his own will, wrestled with instinct, and won glimpses of what he feared: Krinata time and again wrenching control of his life from him as they fled the Empire; Ontarrah invading his family, inadvertently wreaking havoc among those he loved, Takora making him choose between Inversion and Incompletion-death. And all of them were Krinata. Icy fear transfixed him, fear of Krinata. What if she really is Takora?
Well what if she was? He gazed into the white of the worldcircle and knew why he had neglected his disciplines. What if I reach for my priesthood and find nothing–because Aliom ix an illusion–because Krinata has forced me to see through that illusion? There was only one way to find out whether Aliom still held anything of value for him.
With it tremulous sigh he farfetched back and back into menu try, threading his way around the familiar scars of pain that littered his experiences, and found the day of his induction into the Aliom Priesthood. He Emulated himself at that moment, integrating his young self with his present self.
He became young again, just past his second Renewal. He kneeled down in the worldcircle of the Inactive Aliom Temple in Therdiv. None of his immediate family had come to witness this most solemn moment of his life, still insisting he’d return to Historian’s training. But his young self was brashly confident that he had found his own straight path to Completion. What if I was wrong? He had been wrong about one thing. It had not been so easy or so straight.
The thrumming of a hundred whules echoed in the vaulted hall. The white-clad Observing Priests surrounded him. The Senior Priests made a double line before him, a pathway to the eastern portal of the Temple around which were arrayed the symbols of Aliom: the lightning flash, the hand whose fingers were generated by lightning, and whose palm held life, the Oliat X balanced on the point of an arrow.
Through the portal behind the X came the Complete Priests in Oliat formation, dressed in black over pure white, each wearing one pure color of the spectrum. As they marched forward to surround the worldcircle he stretched out prone. They arrayed themselves in spectral order. The young Jindigar had not been instructed in what to expect—only to remember it always so that he might learn its meaning.
Four of the Senior Priests, those just short of being Complete, took hold of his limbs and pulled until he was spread-eagled into the form of the Oliat X. They suspended him above the white worldcircle, facedown above infinite white.
And then the whule music ended. The silence, despite the packed Temple, was profound. He’d imagined that the induction would be another formal questioning where he’d publicly declare his allegiance to Aliom, or perhaps another grilling where they asked seemingly superficial questions that required deep, abstract answers. But this—it was silly.
Perhaps that was the test—to see if the candidate had any common sense? He tried to raise his head to tell them that he’d gotten the point and they could stop now—but his eyes were glued to the whiteness beneath him. His initiation robes hung from his body, fluttering as if in a breeze—but not a breath of air stirred. His body was overheating. He couldn’t squirm– his limbs were numb. And there was nothing but whiteness that invaded his senses and possessed his mind.
A sudden, piercing panic thrilled through him. They were doing something to him, something that would change him forever. He’d said he’d wanted it—but he’d no idea it would be done to him, not something he promised to do to himself.
But he would have done it to himself if they’d given him the tool to do it with. He’d decided that, though at the time he’d thought in terms of the other initiations where the candidate did something symbolic to himself, s
uch as nicking the flesh to draw a drop of purple blood or blindfolding the eyes to sharpen other senses or binding the will with an oath.
His older self balked, no longer confident that his elders knew what they were about. But the memory played on relentlessly as he surrendered to his captors, letting the whiteness swallow him. Emulating, Jindigar could not prevent the youth’s confidence from becoming his own again.
And then the colors started. Braids of rainbow hues stirred through the whiteness–as if he were looking down on the tops of clouds touched just so by the sun, stirred by the winds, and wafted into rainbow swirls.
Suddenly he was looking down a long tunnel—falling up it—racing along it—falling out of the universe—into the heart of Dushaun. In one mind-searing flash he was part of the complex of forces generating life out of the elemental stuff of the planet and its sun, generating the star and its planets out of the plasma of the cosmos.
He stood outside reality and watched it forming in accord with the well-ordered Laws of Nature. He became one with the whirling lifestream that generated the Laws. There was nothing that was not Jindigar, yet Jindigar was only a component. He was only a Jindigar who would one day, if he could Complete, join The Jindigar.
He had been named Jindigar—Eternal Reverberation—but only now did he discover what it meant. The Completion of Jindigar would sound a chord, like shaleiliu, that would ring from one end of time to the other. The Complete Jindigar was part of the Completion of the lifestream itself. It was part– and yet it was the whole.
As with all things in Aliom, the part contained the whole, and the whole was only a part. The part and the whole, the individual and the group, the Observer and the Observed, Dushau and ephemeral, Dushaun and Phanphihy, Incomplete and Complete—the relationships were so clear to him at that peak moment that The Complete Jindigar could look upon the Incomplete and see the walls of fear dividing his mind, keeping him Incomplete.
His inner fragmentation was reflected in everything around him, just as Shoshunri’s Second Observation predicted. That’s why nothing his Oliat did worked. His Oliat’s failures hadn’t been caused just by splashback from his past Inversions but also by the fears dividing him.
The fear had started when he had first suspected that Krinata was in fact Takora reincarnated as an ephemeral.
Because, if Dushau reincarnate as ephemerals, then all of Aliom is invalid. Which means my experience at my induction was only illusion, which can’t lead to Completion. In fact, if Dushau reincarnate, it isn’t even necessary to pursue Com pletion with such dedication.
He had admitted his fear aloud, but the saying had blocked his appreciation of meaning. It was a lesson. True work is done in silence. How could I have forgotten that?
He had indeed Emulated humans too deeply, too often, too persistently. Perhaps he had been reaching out toward Krinata, who could not come to him. To the degree that he could not reach her, he feared her. He had to touch her, to close an open circuit that was draining away his vitality. He had to dispel the fear of her, the fear of how helpless her every act made him or, perhaps, the more basic fear of being helpless before overwhelming force.
That was the one salient lesson toward which Oliat training led—that being passive did not mean being ineffectual. This was the step he had to take toward Completion before he could
Dissolve his Oliat and become an Observing Priest. When he had done it, he’d be able to give up Oliat work without the poignant regret he’d always felt at the thought of leaving Oliat behind forever.
The colors of the Complete Priests blended into the whiteness of Dushaun’s worldcircle, and Dushaun’s whiteness blended vibrantly into the whiteness of Phanphihy, the part into the whole, Observer into Observed, and all of it faded rapidly as the induction Emulation ended.
As an Active Observing Priest, it would be incumbent upon him to comb the tenets of Aliom for fallacies and truths and to teach by Observing what he found. He had always known that, but now he knew with thunderous revelation that it was up to the Observers to challenge every tenet, and even to rewrite them. Every Observer has discovered at least one fallacy–in order to become a Senior Priest. He couldn’t think of a single exception, yet never had anyone made a special point of it.
Is anything I believe correct? He had once told Krinata that she had to develop an epistemology. But, true to Shoshunri’s Second Observation, it was he, himself, who needed to reconstruct his entire epistemology, for clearly his fears had kept him from Observing many important things.
Shoshunri was famous because he had codified the epistemology of Aliom, but every Senior Priest had made some contribution. Aliom was not infallible, nor was it Complete. It offered no safe refuge from overwhelming force. Nor had anyone ever made a secret of that.
Aliom viewed the universe holistically, and Aliom itself was holistic. An error in one premise, such as “Dushau do not reincarnate” did not necessarily invalidate the whole any more than one malfunctioning brain cell incapacitated the whole brain. The validity of Aliom was not threatened by Krinata being Takora.
And when Krinata had the chance to cut him off, as he had cut off Takora, she hadn’t done it. Krinata, herself, was no threat to him.
The trouble her actions caused him was probably the result of his Inversion of her Oliat. And what he really feared was the incredible force he had unleashed with that Inversion. The splashback from that force was naturally overwhelming. He would simply have to grow strong enough to absorb it and damp it down, or wait it out. It wasn’t something to fear, it was something to cope with and learn from. It was a real threat only if he was too afraid of it to Observe it properly.
He had been tying himself in knots over nothing.
How absurd to fear truth. He couldn’t imagine where he had picked up such a twist to his thinking. It was totally out of character. Darllanyu had known him long enough to be disturbed by the change, and—No wonder Grisnilter was so worried about me! He must have thought Aliom had taught me to fear truth. But then, why would he have trusted me with his Archive?
Again revelation shattered him. Every brush with the Archive made him want the Archive, undermining his priesthood—because carrying an Archive was initiatory, like the Aliom induction. It wrought permanent change. Grisnilter did that to me on purpose! And Jindigar had been vulnerable because of the blind spots his fear of Krinata created.
Well, no more. He was ashamed of what he’d put his people through, but it would end now. He would make the Center’s decisions as necessary, and he would face what he had to face to finish with Oliat, for, he realized, he had just received his induction into the Observing Priesthood.
Peace throbbing silently through him for the first time in far too long, Jindigar came to full awareness. As always after this discipline, he was cold. His dark indigo hands lay spread before him, the pure energy of the world rising through them now without distortion. / have joined Dushaun and Phanphihy.
On the worldcircle, a short way in front of his hands, were two bare feet, Dushau feet, female feet—dark, dark indigo feet; elderly feet, but the toes were slightly inflamed with budding nails. Still struggling to focus his eyes, Jindigar forced movement into his neck and followed his gaze up the two trousered legs, and up and up to find Trinarvil looking down at him, her face in repose, radiant.
As his eyes made contact she effaced herself and bent to place both her hands, palm down, on the ground before him– doing homage to the Active Priest, saying by that silent gesture, “You have, by the exercise of your craft, given the world into my hands and shown me how I’m a part of it.”
Jindigar had not intended to perform in that role. He had done his discipline to maintain himself and the community at large, as an Inactive Priest must, not for the service of any individual, as the Active do. / mustn’t become Active yet.
He pulled his hands back from the circle and rose stiffly. It was nearly midnight. Without disturbing him his Oliat had assembled in the Temple, and now they closed i
n around him poised to work, as if there had never been strife among them. His exercise had steadied the Dushau, but he couldn’t guess what had brought Krinata peace with herself.
He had not felt them around him so harmoniously since the moment before the planned weddings when they began to Dissolve. There had been risk then. Now it was almost certain that someone would die. Deep revelations aside, he was ruefully aware that he still would not accept any deaths. Some stubborn part of himself was convinced that there was a way for all of them to survive. But there isn’t.
He took the linkages and brought them into balance, tuning now for the shaleiliu hum, strongly perceptible under the static of Eithlarin’s nebulous link. And even amid the static, that ineffable tone appeared. His Oliat strained to expand awareness, but this operation required compressed awareness, so he let them encompass only the area right about the settlement, carefully keeping to the macro-scale.
On the plain above the cliff the Holot had made a good start at creating a pond, though darkness had now stopped the work. Near the cliff edge, at the head of the rope and winch lift, the Holot had left their digging tools as a sign to the Gifters that they would return. The lift platform rested at the bottom of the cliff, the ropes slack and beaded with moisture from the fog off the river. The Gifters were asleep now, too, but it was clear to the Oliat that the Gifter hive was accepting the Holot gift.
The cornfields were dotted with barrels of Lehiroh oil, and some of the rows had already been treated. A crew of exhausted Lehiroh, humans, and Cassrians worked by torchlight to treat the rest of the field as well as the Cassrians’ pond. Otherwise things were very quiet, the night’s stillness broken only by an occasional nocturnal hunter’s cry. If nothing else happened, the colony would survive very well indeed.
Jindigar felt that he should run a full check on the entire colony, searching for the seeds of the next disaster, but there was no time and no strength for that. As beautifully as his Oliat was functioning now, there was no way to guarantee that they could keep it up for long. And they might cause more harm than they could prevent by lingering. So he brought them back, focusing in closer and closer.
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