Darllanyu shuddered and turned away, as if wishing she could control the linkages and close off her awareness of Eithlarin. //All right. You've made your point. I did beg you to stop Eithlarin. I shouldn't have done that, any more than you should have allowed what—you just allowed with Krinata.
But I'm not qualified to Center. I didn't know what would happen to Eithlarin if you shut her away enough to protect the rest of us. I didn't mean her any harm.//
//Neither did I. But I knew what might happen.//
//I'm ashamed to admit,// she confessed, transfixed by the input of Eithlarin, //that I'm glad it's her, not me.// She hugged herself, her inflamed fingertips absently scratching at the gold armlet Jindigar had given her. //If it had been a choice of me or Krinata—who would it have been?//
lie clamped off all the linkages, isolating his groan within himself. That was the question he had not dared ask.
//A Center has to make choices, Jindigar,// she reminded him gravely. //You're going to have to decide which of us lives and which of us dies. If—because of what you once did to Takora, you can't or won't sacrifice any of us, then just like Takora you're going to take your whole Oliat to Incompletion-death with you.//
//No!// he answered without thinking. //Krinata, at least,
must live through this.//
Darllanyu concluded, //So, you would have cut me off to save Krinata. That's honest, anyway. Jindigar, has it occurred to you that you're behaving this way because you've spent too much time among ephemerals—too much time Emulating ephemerals? You don't know what it is to be Dushau anymore. Maybe you'd better use that phenomenal ability of yours to Emulate a Dushau and find out what it's really like!//
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 leading 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 <so far he had kept his pledge to this Oliat not to Invert them.
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.