"A new Archive's Eye will open? You can't predict that!"
"Certain historical stresses surround the opening of all the
Eyes we know of. The signature is with us, Jindigar, but none of our trainees has any real talent—the kind that runs in your family. We need you."
"No, Threntisn." Is there any way to make him stop this? Jindigar had known and cherished too many ephemerals. His mind was riddled with grieving scars too painful to touch, and the loss of Krinata was going to be the worst. Lacking wholeness, he could never work the Historian's path. With the muted dazzle of the Archive dancing so near him, Jindigar thought, for the first time in a long time, that maybe he had made a mistake, choosing Aliom. But it was a choice made and could not be rescinded. Threntisn knew that but apparently could understand it no more than Jindigar's father did. "I have too many scars—too many memory blockages."
"You're young yet. We could train you around them."
Threntisn only wanted to give him hope, something to live for so he'd fight harder to extricate himself from the trap that held his Oliat. The Historian didn't understand the anxieties his offer raised, for a Priest gave his whole self to the Aliom, forsaking all other possibilities for Completion. Gently Jindigar replied, "Perhaps you could train me, but I told you once, I'll enter the Historians' Temple the day you become an Aliom Priest."
"And, as I said, perhaps that means we'll go down to dissolution/death together." He shook himself and turned away, saying, "I didn't mean to be so gloomy. I'll try to be more cheerful tomorrow." He went toward his own Temple where he would no doubt spend the night preparing for the debriefing.
Jindigar walked until nearly midnight, wanting to lose himself in simple physical activity. When he came into the Oliat "quarters, the room seemed hot and stuffy, but everyone else was asleep. He found a dinner plate left aside for him on the warmer hearth, a napkin made of the rough-woven native cloth folded into a tent over it—Krinata's work. There was dried fruit; tea; hard, thin bread; nuts. Each of his officers had left him a portion of their favorite food.
The next morning, they convened and went over to the Historians' Temple. No Aliom practitioner would be allowed within the Historians' sanctum, any more than a Historian could be admitted to the Aliom building now that the worldcircle had been ignited. But the debriefing apparatus had been set up in a fieldstone addition to the Historians' Temple, a large room that had its own entry, so they need not pass through the sensitized space.
They entered an alcove divided from the main room by a shimmering beaded curtain. Beyond that veil the debriefer was working, and Dushauni light filled the room beautifully. As Krinata paused to don dark glasses Jindigar examined the newly laid power lines, scavenged from some spaceship. They snaked across the floor and out a window, toward the power plant by the waterfall. Power regulators had been spliced in, for the waterfall's jury-rigged system produced unsteady current.
One of the Historians met them and, seeing Jindigar eyeing the heavy line, commented to Krinata, "It was difficult to get permission to black out the community this morning, but we're drawing the entire power output."
"//Then let's make it count, //" they replied through Krinata. From her voice Jindigar judged that the balance they had struck in the Aliom Temple ought to hold.
They followed the Historian through the curtain. The field-stone walls were undressed, the windows high and opaque, the floor of kiln-fired brick. The gleaming equipment brought from Dushaun seemed grafted onto the primitive setting. Control room couches had been brought in for the officers and set up in the configuration of the Oliat array.
Threntisn was already in his place, on the opposite side of the debriefer's large, circular optical membrane framed by a carefully tuned forcefield torus. Attendants were fussing over the connections to his bodyfield, and as they watched, the optical membrane cleared, then sparkled in readiness.
Jindigar, even with full Oliat awareness, could barely sense the presence of the Archive now. In theory he knew what had been done. The Archive itself did not exist inside the Historian's brain but was attached to Threntisn's mind through the locus at its center called the Eye. The Eye of the Archive opened into an elsewhere where space and time were not defined—a place before birth and after death. Around the Eye a multidimensional quasi-spacial structure was erected by the Historian to organize data, but that structure, too, didn't exist within the brain. It existed on the kind of nonmaterial mental plane where the Oliat linkages existed.
In the right mental state it was possible to travel such planes and function there as if they were real. But that was a handy fiction created by the mind to rationalize a nonrational experience.
Threntisn had placed himself in that mental state and had closed all the Archive's portals, working now through only one, and that one was tightly focused on the optical membrane and the other sensory inputs feeding into his bodyfield from the pickups the Oliat would wear.
Krinata took her place as any veteran Outreach might. Her outward poise never deserted her, but Jindigar could feel the flutter of tension within her. //Steady,// he urged as they settled into their couches and secured themselves with the spaceman's restraints. //Threntisn has complete control of the Archive now. We won't fall into it. Nothing like that can happen this time, Krinata.//
The Dushauni lights were dimmed, so most of the illumination now came from the optical membrane. Historian technicians began their age-old tasks, and for Jindigar it became– despite the bizarre setting–a soothingly familiar rhythm. As each of them settled helmets, foot contacts, and hand grips, a technician balanced the input circuits to clear the membrane again, using that clarity to measure Threntisn's readiness to tune another input channel. The Archive could take the Oliat's full data throughput, but Threntisn couldn't. Most of the data had to bypass his conscious mind.
The debriefing chamber was like a spaceport traffic control room or a singing meditation, picking up the essential rhythm of body and world, 'blending them to shaleiliu—to perfect harmony.
As the last of the contact checks died away Jindigar told Krinata, //Now wait for Threntisn's question—he's doing the job you used to do when debriefing an Oliat to make a prospectus for a newly discovered world.//
Ill know,// she replied impatiently. //We went all through that.//
Krinata had been a master of the debriefer used by Survey to make living brochures of colonizable worlds. She'd confessed that it had never occurred to her that Dushau hadn't created the debriefer merely to make Oliat memory visible to non-Dushau.
Suddenly Jindigar remembered how she had evoked his reliving the tornado that had killed Kamminth's Outreach, Taaryesh. He had been Kamminth's Receptor at that time, but by the time Krinata had debriefed Kamminth's, only three officers had been left alive, and Jindigar had taken Outreach. The reliving of Taaryesh's ungrieved death had nearly destroyed Jindigar. He hadn't thought until this moment how hard it must have been on Krinata—for at that time she had already begun to exhibit Oliat function sensitivity. Only, he hadn't known it until months later.
Spontaneous awakening of ability from contact with the debriefer would make sense if she was, indeed, Takora reincarnated. And that ill-fated debriefing had been her very last use of the equipment until now. She'd never mentioned it, but it must be on her mind. //Krinata, it won't be like Taaryesh. It will be vivid for us, yes—but real, not nightmarish. Relax and let Threntisn frame it for us. Just hold the linkages and let the data flow.//