79 - [June 30] My odds

Lanai Kesila (presiding): We are joined in our gathering by Surya Chaelaecha of Kabiri, healer, and healer to Chevenga: welcome, Surya, we thank you for your willingness to be here.

Surya: Thank you, sib Committee members.

La: Now, Surya, first, we ask you to read and witness this: we asked Chevenga to commit to writing, so we would have a signed and written record, his permission to you to waive healer’s confidentiality concerning him and his state of mind…


Surya: On an average person, I can see their aura two paces out. The innermost aura is a beautiful jewel-blue colour on a healthy person; the second-most has different colours depending on the feelings; the third is golden, the fourth blue again, the fifth different colours depending on feelings, the sixth golden again. I also see the energy-lines within the physical body, and the vortices, which are each a different colour, as in a rainbow, and the lines that connect the person with other people…


Kurai: Surya, I would like to ask you a question to which I know the answer myself, but I ask on behalf of those, and I know they are many, who find it baffling. Why can’t Chevenga, now that he is aware that what he thought was foreknowledge was not, simply decide that he’s going to live a long life, barring unforeseen circumstances, like anyone else? Why is it that he is still in any danger, when he knows the truth? Why can’t he just see the obvious, that he deserves to live as much as anyone else, and just throw off the delusion?

Su: You do the work of the Committee well in asking that question, sib Kuraila, given that it stands for the people of Yeola-e, who I know must wonder the same thing. In fact he wonders himself… or more exactly, several times he’s thought he was cured of it, and expressed relief that his struggle is over, when in fact it wasn’t.

A belief that we have held since young childhood is simply hard to reverse, because we have lived with it so long. It has become what we know and, in our perception, all that we know. The difficulty is not that Chevenga doesn’t want to be in the state of mind of believing he can and ought to live long; it’s that he can’t even imagine that state, he’s been so long in the other, and lived it so intensely.

Let me use this analogy; say you find out in your late twenties that what you were taught about your family was all, for reason of someone wanting to hide something, untrue, and your mother is in fact your aunt. You now know she is your aunt, and you can’t deny it. But when you open your mouth to address her, what will come out is “Mama.” When you look at her, at heart you will not be able to see her as anything but mother. How easy will it be to change that? Most people in that situation would simply go on calling her “Mama,” just in respect of their own habit, even though it is a lie. To their heart it can never be anything but truth.

Now I know how it is for those who are baffled. You have your own habit of thinking, and it is that you deserve as long as life as anyone else; that is natural, and you’ve always had it, and so it seems self-evident and obvious to you that it should apply to everyone. And so you can’t understand why Chevenga does not see the same for himself.

What you need to understand is that for him, “I will and ought to die before thirty” is no less ingrained in and instinctive to him than your own view to you.

You also need to understand that part of why you’d like to shake him and say “Wake up and just decide!” comes from your own emotion. Yes, it is horrifying, and potentially tragic, that he carries this. Yes, you want to seize him, save him, shake sense into him, out of love for him, because otherwise we might lose him. And so you are predisposed to think of it as possible that he could just decide, because that would lift him out of the danger you fear. But your emotion makes no difference to whether it is possible or not. A harsh thing, but true.

Yes, in that sense, Chevenga lives in a strange world, that defies belief because belief in it is very unpleasant. But it is real…


Linasika Aramichiya: Surya, is Chevenga insane?

Su: Insane is a word that has many meanings for those you represent, and I want to make sure you aren’t asking with one meaning in mind only to have me answer with another, and therefore, in effect, inaccurately. If you give me your definition of it, I will tell you whether he matches it.

Li: … On reflection, you are right; it does have many meanings. I suppose I ask with this meaning in mind: is he unable, in some way, to perceive accurately, to see truth, of some sort.

Su: Yes, but that’s true of all of us. We all have our delusions, our blindnesses, our prejudices, our stubbornnesses that keep us from seeing entirely accurately what is before us (assent). If by ‘insane’ you mean something untypical of the run of humanity, you’ll have to refine your definition.

Li: All right, then, does he have delusions, or blindnesses, or stubbornnesses of mind, to a degree that is untypical?

Su: Yes, in one regard, but before you claim to others that I have said, therefore, that he is insane, you have to tell me how untypical a person’s delusions must be to qualify as insane in your mind, and I can tell you whether he matches that.

Li: How do I quantify untypicality?

Su: I don’t know, but you must in your mind somewhere, since you ask your question with an unspoken premise, which is your own notion of what degree of untypicality would constitute insanity, and what would not.

Darosera Kinisil: I’d like to submit that this line of questioning is useless and therefore an unnecessary expenditure of our time. To my mind, at no point in our report will we say “Chevenga is insane,” or “Chevenga is not insane,” since, as Surya noted, the word is far too subject to misunderstanding; instead we will distill the details of what we learn in our investigation into a clear exposition of his precise mental state, describing the specifics of whatever is untypical, from which the reader may draw their own conclusions as to his sanity. I propose we continue in that vein.

Lanai: I concur and ask Servant Linasika to continue with that in mind, unless he objects and asks a vote…


Kuraila Shae-Linao: Now you were asked in Assembly, but I want to ask again for our own records, so that they will be complete: he is fighting against something in him that draws him towards death, so that if he wins he will live and if he loses he will die. What do you think are his odds?

Surya: Before I answer this, may I ask: the record that is being kept here, is it for all to see? Including him?

Kurai: Yes. Why; is there something you would tell us that you feel is best he not know?

Su: Yes, and I think that might come up more than once.

Kurai: The procedure then is to seek the Committee’s approval to testify in confidence.

Su: I’d like to do so, then, however it’s done.

La: You’ve just done so. That our subsequent questioning of Surya, until further notice, be conducted in confidence, all chalk, all charcoal, carried unanimously, thank you. Scribe, put down your pen.

†

I had my next visit with him the day after he’d been before them. “I have to say, I’ve never had an experience quite like that before,” he said, as I stripped to get on the table.

“Are you sure you’ve never been in politics?” I asked him. “You bested Linasika with an effortlessness that was a delight to see.”

He snorted. “He was playing with falsehood, and I wouldn’t let him, that’s all. I guess I should expect you to read every word of the proceedings.”

“Of course. In my trade we call this due diligence. You have no secrets now, either. Well, almost… in Assembly you said my odds were good, but you were vague about it. You must have told them something different in the Committee, since you told them in confidence, and I’m going to guess, since you’re not a liar, that you were less vague. So why don’t you want me to know that?”

“If you remember what I said in Assembly,” he answered, “perhaps you remember what you said too: ‘I just do the work, take the steps and don’t worry about the odds’? Was that just bravado?”

I took a deep breath. “I guess… that was easy to say, when you had been vague. I thought it was because you couldn’t be more certain; finding out now that you are—as I notice you have not denied it—is giving me a hunger to know.”

He slipped his fingers under my neck to touch the nape, and suddenly I was having to breathe deeply and slowly by sheer will. “A hunger to know?” he said. “To do what with the knowledge? To either take reassurance or strengthen resolve, I assume. But…” He brushed his finger against the sword, sending me gasping like a feather-touch on a naked nerve. “Which way?”

I clenched my eyes shut, as the feel of the sword let me know that I didn’t know. Part of me would take reassurance, part of me would strengthen its resolve, either way. But I wasn’t sure which way the Assembly in me would lean. “My patient,” he said to me gently, laying one hand on my forehead, “just as you aren’t qualified to make your life-and-death choices, you aren’t qualified to know your odds.”

He ran a glance over my aura, and said, “You’ve forgotten that; not gone backwards, but, shall we say, got out of practice. It’s natural, when you had so much else to do, while you were in Arko; now you don’t, and you need to renew. Everything, even the slightest thing, that inclines you against proceeding is natural; it happens with everyone. Complacency; distractions in reminiscing; the sense that there is not enough time; the feeling you are being selfish by giving so much time to yourself; the sense that the latest step means it’s over; being lax with the rules… as subtle and devious as your own mind is in strategy, Chevenga, the death in you is, as well, since it borrows your thought.”

“Can you see in my aura I had my hands on the bar and Niku took hers off?” I said, remembering his words the very first time, you can hide nothing from me. “But she was right there, and suicide on a double-wing is murder as well, which was why she trusted me.”

“I know. But there is a second importance to the rules, beyond prevention; it’s to keep yourself mindful that you’ve relinquished your will.”

I closed my eyes in shame, and took a deep breath. The lung-wound panged. “The thing I am most inclined to be least mindful of, willful soul that I am.”

He took hold of my manhood, as I had realized a moment ago there would be no escaping. “It’s not about whether you are willful or not. It’s as I say; all these things are natural, and happen every time to everyone. When you are on the edge of what you can bear, it’s the same as being on the edge of what you can do in training; if you want to stay there, you have to be at it constantly. You’re rusty at this, that’s all. Interesting, how harshly your judgment always lands on yourself when I call you on something… isn’t it?”

“Consider me ashamed of my shame,” I said, which made him laugh.

“Something else; you’ve got into the habit of feeling that wound as the sigil of the death-in-you. Because it was a wound of the type that most people think as unquestionably mortal, you are in a sense letting yourself feel killed by it… pinned to death by it.” I signed chalk; once again he’d put words to a feeling I’d had so all-encompassingly I hadn’t known I’d had it. “Here’s what you need to understand: it didn’t kill you. And it won’t. It means nothing, except whatever kyash you load into it in your mind; in and of itself it means nothing, healed as it is, except a slight loss of your wind. Take that in.”

I did for a while, as he stood in silence, his hand resting on my shoulder. “So I renew,” I said, taking my crystal in my hand. I had taken off the semanakraseyeni signet, since I was on leave; the ring of skin that had been under it was still delicate. “What would you do to live?” he asked. It seemed we were re-enacting that first visit.

“Anything. Short of a crime. I will do anything you say, second Fire come if I lie.” That was not quite enough; he made me relinquish in the strong way as he had the first time, and had me cry “I want to live!” and fly on the wings of it in my ecstasy again. Afterwards I wept, though I wasn’t sure why, and lay spent and dedicated. My life was this now, and nothing else.

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