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, such 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 Completion 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.