by neetha Napew
;.. hutS.
?.• Here was a place unlike any other in this Station, or
:.” any Station. Ahead, on the left, a waist-high stone like a
|F miniature mountain reared from a path artfully de-
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signed to lead the eye toward a pavilion. Lunzie stood where she was, looking at that stone, and the small, irregular pool behind it.
“Cleansing the stone” was an elementary exercise, but the foundation on which more striking ones were built. Empty the mind of all concerns, see the stone as it is ... cleansed of associations, wishes, dreams, fantasies, fears. The word stone resonated in her mind, became all the hard things that had hurt her, because the mysterious Thek who confounded everyone’s attempt to understand them. She stood quietly, relaxed, letting all these thoughts spill out, and then wiped them away. Again they came, and again, and once more she cleared them away from the stone before her. It had a certain beauty of its own, a history, a future, a now. She let her eyes wander over that irregular surface, not bothering to remember the glitter of mica, the glint of quartz . . . she did not need to remember, the stone was here and now, as solid as she, and as worthy of knowing.
When she had looked, she let her hand touch it, lightly, delicately, learning again (but not remembering) its irregular lumpy shape. She bent slowly to smell it, the curious and indescribable scent of stone, with behind it the smell of the water, and other stones. Something more sweet also scented the air, now that she was attending to smell, but she rested her attention on the stone.
When she was quite still, unhurried and unaware of waiting, he was there, in the pavilion. Venerable Master Adept, who had a name that no one spoke in this place, where names meant nothing and essence was all. When she became consciously aware of him, she realized he had been there for a time. What time she did not know, and it did not matter. What mattered was her mind’s control of itself, its ability to engage or withdraw at her will. He would be ready when she was ready; she would be ready when he was ready. She heard a drop of water fall, and realized that the fountain was on. She bowed to the rock, her mind completely easy for the first time in too many years (for even in
coldsleep she had been willing to worry, if not capable of it), and moved slowly along the path. Thoughts moved in her mind, like the carp in the pool. She let them move, let some rise almost to the surface, their scaled beauty clear, while others hung motionless, mere shapes below the surface.
This was the center of the world—of her world—of the world of every Adept, this place that was, in a physical sense, not the center of anything. Embarrassment had no place, with the Master Adept. She kneh across the little table from Him, no longer aware that her worn workclothes from Ireta (however cleaned and smartened up by Sassinak’s crew) were different from his immaculate white robe. His sash this day was aswirl with greens and blues and purples ... a single thread of suliur yellow. Her eye followed that thread, and then returned to his hands, as they gently touched petal-thin cups and saucers. He offered one, and she took it. Even in the subdued light within the pavilion, the cup seemed to glow. She could feel the warmth of the tea through it; that fragrance soothed.
After a time, he raised his cup, and sipped, and she did the same. They said nothing, for nothing needed to be said at this time. They shared the silence, the tea, the small pool where water fell tinkling from a fountain and carp dimpled the water from underneath.
Lunzie might have thought how very different this was, from the world she had just left, but such thoughts were unnecessary. What was necessary was recognition, appreciation, of the beauty before her. As she watched the carp, sipping her tea at intervals, a novice came silently to the pool and threw a handful of crumbs. Tlie carp rose in a flurry of fins; a tiny splash broke the random song of the fountain. The novice retired.
The Master Adept spoke, his voice hardly louder than that splash. “It is what we identify as lost which brings us into concern, Adept Lunzie. When one knows that one owns nothing, nothing can be lost, and nothing mourned.”
Her mind shied from that as from hot metal: instant
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rejection. He had never had a child, and they had had this discussion before.
“I am not speaking of your child,” he said. “A mother’s instinct is beyond training ... so it must be. But the years you have lost, that you call yours: no one owns time, no one can claim even an instant.”
Her heart steadied again. She could feel the heat in her face; it would have betrayed her. That shame made her blush again.
“Venerable Master . . . what I feel... is confusion.”
It was safest to say what one felt, not what one thought. More than one tradition had gone into the concept of Discipline, and the Venerable Master had a Socratic ability to pursue a lame thought to its lair and finish it off She dared to look at him; he was watching her with those bright black eyes in which no amusement twinkled. Not now.
“Confused? Do you perhaps believe that you can claim time as your own?”
“No, Venerable Master. But ...”
She tried to sort out her thoughts. She had not seen him for so long . . . what would he know, and not know, about what had happened to her? How could he help if she did not explain everything? Part of her early training as a novice had been in organizing and relating memories and events. She called this up, and found herself reciting the long years* adventures calmly, softly, as if they had been written by someone else about a stranger’s life.
He listened, not interrupting even by a shift of expression that might have affected her ability to recall and report what had happened. When she was through, he nodded once.
“So. I can understand your confusion, Adept Lunzie. You have been stretched and bent past the limits of your train-ing. Yet you remained the supple reed; you did not break.”
That was acceptance, and even praise. This time the warmth that rushed over her brought comfort to cramped limbs and to spaces of her mind still sore despite Cleans-
ing the Stone. She had been sure he would say she had failed, that she was unfit to be an Adept.
“Our training,” he was saying, “did not consider the peculiar strains of those with repeated temporal displacements, even though you brought the original problem to our attention. We should have foreseen the need, but ...” he shrugged. “We are not gods, to know all we have not yet seen. Again, you have much to teach us, as we help you regain your balance.”
“I live to learn, Venerable Master,” said Lunzie, bowing her head.
“We learn by living; we live by learning.”
She felt his hand on her head, the rare touch of approval, affirmation. When she looked up again, he was gone and she was alone in the pavilion with her thoughts.
Retraining, after that, was both more and less stress-fill than she had feared. Her pallet in the sleeping hut was comfortable enough after Ireta and she had never minded plain food. But it had been a long time since she’d actually done all the physical exercises; she spent the first days constantly sore and weary.
All the Instructors were perfectionists; there was only tme right way (they reminded her) to make each block, each feint, each strike. Only one right way to sit, to kneel, to keep the inner center balanced. She had never been as good with the martial skills of Discipline; she had always thought them less fitting for a physician. But she had never been this bad. Finally one of them put her at rest, and folded herself down nearby.
“I sense either unwillingness or great resistance of tfie body, Lunzie. Can you explain?”
“Both, I think,” Lunzie began slowly, letting her breathing slow. “As a healer, I’m committed to preserving health; this side of Discipline always seems a failure to me . . . something we haven’t done right, that let things come to conflict. And then some physician— * perhaps me, perhaps another—will have to work to heal what we break.”
“That is the unwillin
gness,” said the instructor. “What fs the body’s difficulty? Only that?”
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“I’m not sure.” Lunzie started to slump, and reminded herself to balance her spine properly. “I would like to think it is the many times in coldsleep—the long times, when I spent years in one position. Supposedly there’s no aging, but there’s such stiffness on waking. Perhaps it does something, some residual loss of flexibility.”
The instructor said nothing for a long moment, her eyes half-closed. Lunzie relaxed, letting her sore muscles take die most comfortable length.
“For the unwillingness, you must speak to the Venerable Master,” said the instructor finally. “For the body’s resistance, you may be right—it may be the repeated coldsleep. We will try another approach on that, for a few days, and see what comes of it.”
Another approach meant hours in hot and cold pools, swimming against artificial currents. Lunzie could feel her body stretching, loosening, then re-knitting itself into the confident, capable body she remembered, almost as if it had been a broken bone. Her conditioning included gymnastics, running, climbing, music, and finally—after several long conferences with the Venerable Master—renewed work with unarmed combat.
She would never be a figure of the Warrior, he had told her, but each aspect of Discipline had its place in every Adept, and she must accept the need to cause injury and even death, when failure meant the deaths of others.
But her dislike of conflict was not all they discussed. He had lived the years she had spent exiled in coldsleep; he remembered both her as she had been, and all she had missed of those years. He let her talk at length of her distress at the estrangements in her family, the guilt she felt for disliking some of her descendants and resenting their attitudes. About the pain of losing a lover, the fear that no relationship could ever be sustained. She told him about meeting Sassinak, and about the strains between them.
“She’s the older one, really—she even said so—“ her voice broke for an instant, and he insisted on hearing the whole conversation, every detail.
“That hurt you,” he said afterwards. “You are older, you feel, and you want the respect naturally due to elders . . .” He let that trail away in a neutral tone.
“But I don’t feel like an elder, either,” Lunzie said, consciously relaxing her hands, which wanted to clamp into fists. “I feel... I don’t know what 1 feel. I can’t be young, it seems, or old: I’m suspended in life now just as much as when I was in coldsleep. I don’t even know which child she is—did I see her and forget her? Is she one they never mentioned?”
“The leaf torn from the branch by wind,” he said softly, smiling a little.
“Exactly.”
“You must come to believe that the branch was no more yours than the wind is; you must come to see that we are each, in each moment, in the right place, the place from which all action and reflection come, and to which they go.” He cocked his head, much like a bird. “What will you do if you must enter coldsleep again?”
She had not let herself think of that, forcing away the panic it brought with all the Discipline she could bring to bear. How had he known that she woke sweating some nights, sure that the terrifying numbness was once more spreading through her?
“I—I can’t.” She held her breath, stiff in every muscle, looking down and away from him. She heard the faintest sigh of breath.
“You cannot know that it will never happen.” His voice was neutral.
, “Not again—“ It was as much plea as promise to herself; all the days of retraining might have been nothing for the rush of that emotion.
“I had hoped this would heal of itself,” his voice said, musing. “But since it has not, we must confront it.” A pause so long she almost looked up, and then he snapped, Adept Lunzie!” and her eyes met his. “This is not beyond your strength or ability: this you will conquer. We cannot send you out still subject to such fears.”
She wanted to protest, but knew it would do no good. The next several days tested her strength of will and body both: intense sessions of counseling, hours
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spent in a variety of cubicles resembling cold-sleep tanks of various types, even a couple of cold-sleep inductions, with the preliminary drugs taking her briefly into unconsciousness.
She thought at first she would simply go crazy, but the Venerable Master had been right: she could endure it, and come out sane. Valuable knowledge if she needed it, though she hoped she would not.
By the time her other instructors approved her skills, her mind had found a new balance. She could see her past uncertainties, her flurries of worry, her bouts with envy and guilt, as the struggles of a creature growing from one form to another. Most people had some emotional turmoil in their thirties; at least some of hers was probably just that: growing out of one stage of life. She had been that person; now she was someone else, someone who no longer envied Sassinak’s power or Aygar’s physical strength. Her life made sense to her, not as a tragic series of losses, but as challenges met, changes endured and even enjoyed.
The memory of her stuffier descendants no longer irritated her—poor darlings, she thought, they don’t even know what fun they’re missing—and Sassinak’s potential for violence now seemed the appropriate foil for her own more pacific abilities. She could cherish Sassinak as a descendant, and respect her as an elder, at one and the same time, with a ruffle of amusement for the odd circumstance that made her both.
Her last sight of the Mountain was of that same quiet pool, that same boulder, the door opening now in the hands of another novice. She knew her own fece expressed nothing but calm; inside she could feel her heart smiling, feel the excitement of another chance at life with all its difficulties.
Now the medical personnel in the corridors looked more like potential colleagues, and less like fortunate strangers who would never accept her. Lunzie checked into the Transient Physicians’ Hostel at the first open terminal, and then entered the callcode the Venerable
if Master Adept had given her. The screen flashed briefly,
5 then steadied as a line scrolled across it.
1- “Lunzie . . . good news. Level 7, Concourse B, 1300 tomorrow.” And that was that, and she was on her way. The Hostel, when she arrived at its door, gave her the clip to a single room with cube reader and datalink. $he put her duffel on the single bed and touched the keypad. A menu of services available filled the wallscreen. She could find a partner for chess or sleep, purchase goods or information (to be included, with a service charge, in her hostel total), or roam the medical databases, all without leaving the room.
She was tempted to send a message to Sassinak; Fleetcom, the public access mail system for all Fleet personnel, would forward it. But that might bring attention they didn’t want. Safer to wait. She had almost a lull standard day before meeting someone (the Venerable Master had not said who) the next day at 1300. She would use that time to make predictable inquiries, things anyone would expect her to want to know.
She treated herself to a good meal at a cafe that occupied the space where, years before, she’d known a bar. The music now had a different sound, lots of chiming bells and some low woodwind behind a female trio. Back in her room, she fell asleep easily and woke without concern.
Level seven of Concourse B still sported the apricot striped walls that made Lunzie feel she had fallen into a layered dessert. Various names had been tried for this section, from Exotic Epidemiology to Nonstandard Colonial Medical Assistance. None had stuck; everyone called it (and still called it, she’d found out) the Oddball Corps. Its official designation, at the moment, was Vari-; ant Medical Concerns Analysis Division . . . not that anyone used it.
Lunzie presented her credentials at the front desk. Instead of the directions she expected, she heard a
V. cheerful voice yelling down the corridor a moment
^ later.
V “Lunzie! The legen
dary Lunziel” A big bearded man
:ff grinned as he advanced, his hands outstretched. She
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searched her memory and came up with nothing. Who was this? He went on. “We heard you were coming. Forty-three years, in this last coldsleep? And that makes how much altogether? We’ve got a lot of research we can do on you.” His face fell slightly and he peered more closely at her. “You do remember me, don’t you?”
She was about to say no, when a flicker of memory gave her the face of an enthusiastic teenager touring a hospital with a class. Now where had that been? She couldn’t quite say - . . but he had been the most persistently curious in his group, asking questions long after his companions (and even his instructors) were bored. He had been pried loose only by the fifth reminder that their transport was leaving . . . now. She had no idea what his name was.
“You were younger,” she said slowly, giving herself time to think. “I don’t remember that beard.”
His hands touched it. “Oh . . . yes. It does make a difference, I suppose. And it’s been over forty years for you, even if most of that wasn’t real time. I mean waketime. I was just so glad to see your name come up on the boards. I suppose you never knew that it was that hospital tour that got me into medicine, and beyond that into the Oddballs—“
“I’m glad,” she said. What was his name? He had worn a big square nameplate that day; she could remember that it was green with black lettering, but not what the name was.
“Jerik,” he said now, relieving her of that anxiety. “Doctor Jerik now, but jerik to you, of course. I’m an epidemiologist, currently stranded in Admin because my boss is on leave.”