Posts
Monday, August 31, 2009
119 - The sooner one accepts truth
Saturday, August 29, 2009
[Author's note: I'm emailing with Chevenga]
No, really. I know you think I’m making this up. But I’m not, I swear. Chevenga emailed me for the first time Aug. 17, and we’ve gone back and forth a few times since.
A fan who was using the name as an Internet handle, after reading my books? Someone who thought of it independently? I’ll probably never know. When I checked again after deciding to start writing online, he’d given chevenga.com up, so I grabbed it. If you’re out there, Jeyen Chevenga, thanks for giving the domain name back. And I promise: there is a giraffe association near you.I’m embarrassed to say that I can’t remember if I ever contacted you before to let you know that I was very inspired by Fourth Chevenga, so much so that I adopted the name. I hope that you don’t mind about there being a real-world Chevenga (and sometimes Shefenkas and Karas Raikas and Shininao...). A thousand thanks for sharing those characters. I try to live up to Chevenga in both name and spirit.
Mostly, I love his big heart, “lion-heart” in the best brave and loyal symbolic sense. His willingness to see through other people’s eyes. Being fiercely democratic, but also expecting everyone to speak their vote. Being aware of the costs of leadership. Now that I try to write it down, I suppose I try to be as much Yeoli as Chevenga.
Friday, August 28, 2009
118 - One child in one stream
† “You are thinking of yourself as the murderer of your own children.” Now we were in my little House of Integrity, full of the smell of newly-hewn timbers and heather. Oh shit, talk healing. Maybe he could go back to talking to my body? I took a deep breath, and spoke from my heart. “I am the murderer of my own children.” I sound like Niku, I thought. How she’d relish hearing this. “The stream-test is not murder,” he said. “One died, but you did the same with… how many others?” “Three.” “And they lived.” Surya’s family didn’t do it, as I found out later. And while he’d had clients whose families did, he’d had none whose families did it the ancient, severe way, killing about one in four, as mine does. “They lived, but they carry the mark I now know I carry. I murdered one in body, and all the others in spirit. Murdered myself, I became a murderer, and as I have murdered them, they will become murderers in their turn.” “Mm-hmm. So let’s say Tawaen lays his firstborn in the stream, and the child dies. Are you going to have him charged with murder?” He had me here. If I said “No! Of course not!” he’d say “Why is it different with yourself?” It’s like laesha; you learn to know the moves ahead. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath. “So I should not think that. Tell me what I should think.” “Chevenga, I can see in your aura, how much of the death in you comes from your stream-test. I’m interested to know whether you know, how much.” “You must be kidding,” I said. “Surely you can tell from my aura that I haven’t suddenly become able to see it?” “Quit quailing and feel inside yourself with your mind.” I did, and looked down into the churning black horror, the same way you touch your tongue to a tooth so sore it would send even a seasoned warrior screaming. “A lot of it, I think,” I said, the best I could do. “All right, good. The death in you is only emotion. Here is what you have to understand, what happens with these things. When a person undergoes terrible suffering, especially very young, the emotion is so massive and intense that it convinces the mind that it is both immutable and eternal.” The thought flitted through my mind, from old habit: It’s not terrible suffering; it’s just the stream test. I cured that by bringing back just a tendril of the memory. “The extremes that one feels etch deeply on the mind a sense that they are reality,” he went on. “That is the nature of suffering and of the human mind in emotion so strong it overwhelms. You have a clear memory now; you can make use of it. Think back.” Alchaen had said the same thing, in essence, on Haiu Menshir after I’d been tortured. I am alone in an existence of nothing but my own destruction. It is all I know, all I have ever known, all I ever will know. “That’s what you were left with. However… well, let me ask you this. If you were a visitor from another Earthsphere, somewhere in the stars, and you wanted to know whether life was good or bad on this one, do you think you’d get a true assessment from a two-day-old child—let’s say he has a magical ability to talk—who’s in the middle of being dunked to near-freezing in an ice-cold stream?” “He’d be likely to tell you, life is nothing but torture.” “Right. Because that is his own current experience. But of life in general? Of how kind or harsh the world is itself?” “He’d only be able to tell you the one thing.” “Right. For two reasons, yes? Do you see there are two?” “No; I see only one; that he’s too young to have learned about anyone else’s experience, or even to have much other experience himself.” “That’s one. The other is the intensity of the experience; the extremes being etched on his mind, as I said. You have remembered them now, so you know what I mean. But—is what he feels all of reality?” “If he dies, it is all of his reality.” “But is it all the world’s reality?” “No, obviously. He’s just one child, in one stream.” “And in one moment of his life.” “Yes.” “Now how do you know that? I mean, from what knowledge of yours do you say that?” “Everything I have learned… since.” “Right. All your subsequent experiences, that have shown you that reality has many more facets. And yet, to part of you, your stream-test defines your entire reality, true? While you were dreaming you were back there. When you were confronting your mother, and trying to kill yourself in the stream again, and having the attack afterwards, your mind considered your stream-test your whole reality, did it not? You felt as if the entire world was shattering again, all those times, did you not?” It boggles the mind. How could he so easily put into words what had happened without my having even the trace of a single word for it, so that I didn’t even know it had happened until it woke full-blown in my head, on his words? “Yes.” I could not say more. “So, while you were in the middle of that… where was all the knowledge derived from your subsequent experiences?” “I… it was…” I remembered how with my hands on my mother’s shoulders, I had been unable to speak. “I forgot it. It was gone.” “Chevenga, listen to me very closely.” He brought his face in close to mine, stern and unsmiling, and tapped the side of my head. “It’s still there.” In spite of everything, I laughed. Something else I’ve learned about great healers and teachers; they can give you as many of your moments of enlightenment with laughter as with tears or intense thought. The corner of his lip quirked only slightly. “Bring it back!” “A-e kras.” “Say it—summarize it.” “Everything I know?” “Yes. Starting with your age.” “I’m twenty-eight… I had the semanakraseyeni education and the full School of the Sword and Circle School trainings, I know everything I’ve learned from the wars I’ve fought, I speak four languages, I’ve read every book on general-craft ever written in three of them, I’m not bad with Haian remedies, I taught Diverse Foreign Philosophy at a doctoral level in the University of Arko for several months, I’ve learned more than I ever wanted to know about healing, I know Yeoli law inside out so I could even tell the judge she need not look up whether I’d be impeached if I were ruled incompetent… All right, it’s back. Or still there.” “So, in the light of all that knowledge, where does the sense that your stream-test is your whole reality come from?” “I… when these things happen, I go right there. It’s as if I’ve gone backward in time, I’m in the stream again, and everything else is undone.” “Because…?” “Because… I remember so… intensely, as you say.” “Intensely in the emotions and the sensations, yes? They are huge?” “Indescribably huge.” “Then do you see it? The sense that your stream-test is your whole reality is an artifact of emotion: the extreme shock, terror, anger, pain, despair and shame that you naturally felt. It was extreme, yes; but still, it was only emotion and sensation. Not the sum total of reality. The sum total of reality is also what you have come to know from your four languages and remedies and trainings and everything we learn just by living our lives, yes?” “As much as one mind with its limitations can know it, yes.” “So is your stream-test your whole reality?” Part of me made my tongue trip over it, but I said, “No.” The aura-seeing gaze came into his eyes. I knew why, almost as if I could feel his thinking; he wanted to see how deep my “no” went. “It doesn’t go deep enough,” I said. “I know it doesn’t. The emotion is still there, I can feel it simmering under a closed lid. The blade of ice, too. What do I do about this?” “Don’t worry,” he said. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.” “My children—the lucky ones—are carrying this without knowing it, just as I did.” “They’ll come to the point of healing when they need to and are ready, as you have. You will be in a very good position to help them. You already have, in fact; just by beginning to heal the incident within yourself. It extends up and down generations.” “I… would do anything to help them, with this.” I clasped my crystal as I said it, instinctively. “The hardest thing is remembering, and you’ve already done that.” I wept for a while then, imagining them remembering, and the temptation of death once more tongued my heart. “All-Spirit,” I sobbed. “Best they remember… before… no, All-Spirit, All-Spirit, I can’t let them, I can’t let them do it to their own children.” “Virani-e, do you see where this is going?” He put a gentle hand on my shoulder. “It’s clear in your aura.” He and I stared at each other, as the flash went through my mind. I will see the stream-test abolished. How did I have any choice? I covered my face in my hands, and just rocked on the bed. † Why was it familiar, this I’m-going-to-catch-a-world-of-shit feeling? Why, when I’d never even thought of abolishing the stream-test before, did it feel somehow as if I’d already done it? It came to me in a moment. It was in Arko. The purification. I’d never say it publicly, of course, because every Yeoli would be offended beyond forgiveness by the comparison, but I saw the similarity clear. It was something done to children against their will, leaving them scarred through and through, done as a sacred ritual, and rarely talked about. The differences were superficial. Of course in Arko, I could prohibit it with the stroke of a pen. Here, I’d have to talk everyone out of it. Yet underneath the nervousness, something inside me that had been screaming was suddenly quiet and calm. I felt a lightness I hadn’t known was possible, as if I’d just put down a shoulder-crushing burden I hadn’t known I’d been carrying. “How many Yeoli families, do you think, still do the stream-test?” Surya asked me. “Say out of a hundred people—what would be your estimate?” I had no idea. How can you know, when it’s the one thing we never arm-wavingly talk about? The oddest thing here was that he sounded as if he were testing me, as if he knew. Had he had enough Yeoli clients? Or could he just see it in everyone’s auras, every day, while in Yeola-e? “They study it on Haiu Menshir,” he said. “I found out as part of my training. Every Yeoli who goes to the island for healing, they ask, and even those who are just visiting, if they can. As well, the healers practicing in Yeola-e ask their clients, and send the numbers home. At the University they keep track.” I couldn’t remember Alchaen asking me, but then there was much I couldn’t remember of that time. Perhaps he hadn’t even needed to, knowing that the semanakraseyeni line does it. Had he asked my mother, Esora-e, Krero, and all the members of my escort whether they’d had it done too? We’d have pushed the incidence upwards. “They have a count that goes back a thousand years,” he said. “You see ups and downs due to this or that event, but overall, a gradual decline. The oldest count shows seventy-three in a hundred, though obviously there was a time in which everyone did it. So now…what do you think?” “I don’t know. I’m guessing. Half—fifty?” “About seventeen,” he said. “Though that was when I was training… you can bet that someone’s writing a paper now about the effects of the Arkan war on the rate. Maybe they’ll predict it’s gone down, since with so many killed, people want to keep their babies; or up, from people thinking that the Arkan invasion succeeded because we were weak… anyway, you’re actually in a quite small minority.” I was hardly hearing him. I’d frozen all over. I wasn’t even sure what I felt. He was looking at my aura again. Maybe I should ask him what I feel, I thought acidly. “Seventeen in a hundred,” I finally managed to say. “That’s… that’s not very many. There must be many people who act as if they’ve had it done when they haven’t… especially among warriors.” “From my own time in the army, I think you’re right,” he said. “When I learned the number, I was surprised, too.” “You know how it is… you’re not a real warrior if you aren’t stream-tested. Only seventeen, though? It must be higher in warrior families.” “You could find out. The Haians have the records. But it’s also possible that it seems like more to you because we are drawn to those who have suffered the same as ourselves, and we pick our friends accordingly.” As a child, I’d been part of a tight clique of five, all of whom were dead except for Krero and me. We’d all been stream-tested, I realized, as had both the Yeoli girlfriends I’d talked marriage with. How is it that Haians know more truth about ourselves than we do? “Why do they study it?” I asked. “I would have thought they’d treat it with revulsion.” “Because they’re healers. It’s what they call a ‘national trauma’—something to look into, with every single member of a particular people who walks into your office. Like the Arkan custom of purification.” It’s not just me seeing the similarity, I thought. “So let me guess,” I said, feeling slightly sick. “They’ve also measured and tabulated and examined what execrable messes our minds all are because of it.” I don’t know why I even asked the question, knowing the answer so certainly. He just said, “In your campaign, you’ll have good evidence.” “Campaign,” I hissed between my teeth. “If anyone in all Yeola-e still respects me, I’m a straw-hair’s uncle. I’m not even kyashin legally competent.” “Mm-hmm,” he said. --
I remember a few words only from subsequent times he did tenar menhu. “Go to the very centre of it; I am going to touch you there.” They blur together. “My soul is a city being sacked.” They are mixed like clouds in a storm in my mind, even with Surya’s habit of precise meaning. “You did kill your child; breathe in acceptance.” The mind is such a maelstrom it cannot enumerate them; and yet the change happens. “No, I did worse! I made his mother kill him!” I want to say it is brutal; but it was my salvation.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
117 - *Maesa Virani-e* ("house of Integrity")
Excerpt from the Proceedings of the Chevengani Mental State Assessment Committee, etesora 67, 1556 Linasika Aramichiya, Servant of Michalere: I must say, though I know I might be resented for saying it, but I must say it nonetheless: I would never have come out and stated it, but it has been my feeling, a sneaking sense, if you will, as we’ve conducted our investigation, that Fourth… pardon me, that Chevenga Aicheresa is no longer capable of performing the duties of the office. I apologize to Darosera in particular, but I cannot help but be… relieved, to see this sense of mine entirely vindicated, first by the total concurrence of those people who are closest to him and know him best, as evidenced by their bringing it to the court, and then by the court itself. Daroseral Kinisil, Servant of Thara-e-Kalanera: No apology necessary, Linasika. I don’t think his spouses would have asked that he be impeached, if they could have avoided it and still had him ruled incompetent, and with the judge we cannot know. Li: Still, I feel vindicated. Legally incompetent is legally impeached. Lanai Kesila, Servant of Issolai, presiding: Of more importance to us, sib gentlefolk, is to proceed. There are many questions concerning our mandate, his state of mind, that are raised here. Let me start with a procedural point: to bring Chevenga himself back for questioning, which is something we must, in due diligence, do, since he is legally incompetent we will have to ask permission of those who are now his guardians. Chanae Salhanil, Servant of Kaholil: If he is legally incompetent, is his testimony admissible? I mean, if he is legally incompetent, does that not make him by rights incompetent to swear in? La: … That is a good question. I wonder if any member knows of a precedent. Kusiya Aranin, Servant of Terera South: The thing that strikes me, and saddens me, is that even if he were by rights incompetent to swear, we know he would be truthful. All through, whatever has been happening, he has been unwaveringly truthful. He was in court, as well. Li: I’d like to dispute that. His answer to the question of whether he’d have carried it through was very striking to me. Recall what he said: it was that he didn’t know, and then, “impending death has changed many minds, perhaps it would have changed mine.” Now consider what we know—which the judge does not, of course—of his history, full of suicide attempts and suicidal inclinations. Each time, except for two, he changed his mind. So what he should have said was, “Perhaps I’d have changed my mind again, as I have most of the previous times.” That would be stronger substantiation of his point, referring to his own history rather than a general tendency, would it not? But instead he spoke of minds generally, concealing that there have been previous times. Of course he did not lie by commission; impending death has changed many minds, of course. It’s by omission, just the same as he lied by omission to all Yeola-e by not telling us before his coming into office that he was certain he’d have only ten more years of life. I’d really like to note for the record, since I was there, that it was more striking to witness than it is on paper, because you could see how he said it. You’d think he’d hesitate, show a momentary reluctance, uttering something like that—especially under oath—but he didn’t, absolutely none. It was utterly seamless and smooth… instinctively so. And I think that’s what I was seeing. A man who has such long practice at hiding his defects and his weaknesses that it has become instinctive to him. He has been lying so long it is effortless, as easy for him as telling the truth is to the rest of us. Da: I was there also and I saw nothing more in it than his not wanting to speak of something embarrassing in court, when he was in a position of such utter humiliation already. It’s not as if his history is any secret. If she’s been reading our proceedings, the judge knows. And he denied absolutely nothing, and put up no argument at all. Li: Only because if he had, he’d have been questioned thoroughly, and everything would have been aired in front of the writers! The judge was doing him a kindness, giving him a chance to concede so it wouldn’t all come out, and he leapt at it. Da: For the record, what I saw was not leaping. Before he said he concurred and offered no contention, there was a long hesitation, which the court record does not show, and he took a deep breath, and he was quite pale. I think it was one of the hardest things he’s ever had to say in his life; that’s how it looked to me. He knew full well, he was more certain than the judge on it, because of his natural familiarity with semanakraseyeni law, that he was giving up the semanakraseyesin, and without a fight. I’d like to remind my friend and colleague Linasika that we resolved at the outset that we would approach Chevenga in a spirit of sympathy— Li: Only when we are questioning him. Da: And if you think the approach you take outside of questioning doesn’t influence the approach you take while you are doing it— La: Sib gentlefolk, please let us not be infected by madness. I recognize Miniya, who has been gesturing for the crystal with some urgency. Miniya Shae-Sima, Servant of Tinga-e-Pekola: I wonder if our work is at an end, because our entire mandate has been rendered irrelevant. Assembly appointed us to investigate Chevenga’s state of mind because, and only because, he is—was—semanakraseye. The state of Yeola-e would never so intrude into the life of a private citizen, and he has just become exactly that. La: It’s a point well taken, Miniya. My feeling is that we should seek the guidance of Assembly on this question, but let’s discuss first. Li: I will reiterate what I said before; Chevenga is hugely influential even if he is not semanakraseye. I think because of that, the people of Yeola-e will still wish the thorough truth about his state of mind, and are still entitled to it. Da: I wonder, now that he is a private citizen, how much we, how much Assembly, can give him his choice in the matter. We speak of ending our investigation, but perhaps he wants to continue it because he hopes and expects for us to vindicate him, and wants that public. Cha: We must consider whether that would be proper use of the people’s funds. Ikrena Shae-Sansera, Servant of Tassumai: Here’s another thing: he’s come back before. He could come back again. If he should finish this healing process and become solid in himself, and Assembly vote to accept him back… Li: Then he might get poor Artira thrown out twice, as well. La: I think Ikrena’s is a point well-taken. Still, we are dividing on something which, in truth, it is outside our purview to decide; I was, in truth, opening discussion on the question of requesting guidance of Assembly. We can argue these points there. Li: Fair enough. La: That we request guidance of Assembly with regard to continuing our investigation, now that Fourth Chevenga—Chevenga Aicheresa, I should say, has become a private citizen, deferring all further work of the Committee until we receive such guidance, all chalk, all charcoal, carried unanimously, thank you. Let’s adjourn for now. † The first thing I must do, Surya said, was recount everything to my spouses who were in town: what I’d dreamed, what I’d felt, what I’d done, all in detail. As he stepped out to send for them all, I found myself staring at the ceiling and thinking, I was doing so well. I fingered my senaherani crystal circle. What happened? They were dismayed as one, when I’d poured it all out to all of them. “But, Chevenga,” Shaina said. “The custom is fifteen hundred years old. We knew it was what the semanakraseyeni line does, so we’d have to do it. It’s hardly your fault. Why are you taking it all on yourself?” Neither she nor Etana, incidentally, had been stream-tested themselves, and they didn’t do it to the children they had between them. Skorsas asked Surya, “What can we do?” He gave them three answers: what they were already doing—love me—remind me of what I was clearly forgetting, even if it were as simple as breathing deeply, and be confident that I would come out of it. When Etana asked when that would be, Surya promised he’d tell them all his estimate, but out of my earshot. “If you tell Chevenga, say, three months, he makes it into a deadline,” he explained. (When you’ve been ruled incompetent, I’ve noticed, you get talked about in third person right in front of your face a fair amount.) “‘I must do such-and-such in three months,’ he’ll think, just by habit. The last thing he needs is to feel he must do anything by a certain time. He needs to be free of that long enough to recover from it. So I’ll tell you all, later; but don’t tell him. Chevenga: it’s not three months.” He saw good in that way in my incompetence too; now there was no half-year medical leave. When I thought about it, I had made that into a deadline. The plan, I gathered, was to keep me secluded from all except Surya, Kaninjer for check-ups and my spouses, who’d take shifts being with me at all times except when Surya was. They’d found a gentle spot of land on Haranin, a little way up the slope towards the cave of Sukala the sage, and tomorrow they would have a tiny house thrown up among the trees. Same thing Kaninjer had done when I’d collapsed from exhaustion, getting me away from everyone; I remembered how good it had been for me. Maesa Virani-e, “house of Integrity,” seemed the obvious name for the place. Surya would work with me every day, for as long as needed, starting in the morning. He also let me know that I wasn’t done with the bonds; during the day I’d wear padded ankle-shackles that I could not untie, and at night my arms would be bound as well. How long this would all go on, he wouldn’t say, at least to me. I bared my heart to him, once we were alone and I was part-trussed again. “I thought I was doing so well; what happened?” “You are doing well—extremely well.” “Ah. Same as when I lay just this side of death with Idiesas’s sword in me. Right.” I flicked my eyes down meaningfully at my shackled ankles. “I know it doesn’t feel or seem like it, Chevenga, but everything is—” “Aigh, aigh, aigh, going as it should, aaiiiggghh!” “You had to go through this, as part of the journey, same as you had to go through becoming senahera. It’s all part. I told you at the start it would be hard.” “You did,” I admitted. “My own fault for not believing just how hard it would be. Ehh… it’s all my own fault, pardon my pathetic crabbing. But something I have to ask you: sometimes it seems as if you say that these things have happened as they ought to based on nothing more than their having happened at all. As if you are thinking, ‘Oh, Chevenga’s gone this way, so it must be right.’ Am I imagining it?” “Of course not, and that’s exactly what I’m going on,” he said. “How else would I know for sure?” I turned my face to go Aaaaaiiiiiggghh into my pillow, so as to spare his ears. --
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
116 - The *tenar menhu*
There was one advantage to being legally incompetent that came my way right away. When the writers crowded in calling, “Chevenga! Chevenga! Question!” Shaina, Etana and Skorsas all felt free to say instantly, “No! He’s speaking to none of you, you may not ask him anything, Chevenga don’t say a word.” Oh well, I thought. They and Kaneka’s four wrapped themselves into a solid knot around me. Surya and Kaninjer stonewalled the writers as well; they could reveal nothing personal to me without my permission, and, being legally incompetent, I couldn’t give it. I heard Linasika saying in his quote-me voice, “There is much being hidden here, much that we on the Committee need to find out.” We lurched as a cluster out of the courtroom and Assembly Palace. Their words all ran together, “forgive us it’s best we love you please understand,” so that I could barely hear. I said only, “I could climb better if my ankles were free.” No one had re-bound my arms; after a quick look at my aura, Surya said “Yes.” I thought I’d do it myself, but too many people were gripping me; Kaneka untied his own knots. As we came into the Independent, the children crowded around, curious. At the sight of the ones who’d been stream-tested, my mind blurred with dizziness and my eyes with tears, and I suddenly felt arms keeping me from falling. “Whichever room is the most secluded in the place is where he should sleep,” Surya said. “First my healing room though, let’s get him there.” He sent everyone else out of the room, and had me drink several long draughts of water and lie on the table. “I’m going to speak to your mind in time,” he said. “I’m going to speak to your body first. Make the white line, and breathe…” He kept saying, “Not deep enough,” though I thought I was breathing the same as any other time. Finally he clamped his hand over my mouth and nose, held long enough that I was beginning to panic, and told me to feel the panic thoroughly. When he let go and I gasped in air right down to the pit of my lungs, he said, “That’s how deep they should all be. Breath is life. A big part of the problem is that you’re depriving yourself of it. Do you know that when you went dizzy when you saw the children, much of it was because you were not breathing? You thought, ‘I did this to them, I should die,’ and you held your breath. I saw it. The death in you was smothering you.” He ordered me to breathe very deep and fast, both, then, as if I were running; he called the rhythm, in and out, and I mindlessly followed. Very gradually, he slowed it down, until I was taking breaths so deep and so long that they were just at the edge of what I could bear. How long he kept me there I’m not certain; in a calm so deep it was almost a trance, I could not measure time. Then he freed me to breathe at the pace I wished, but told me to make sure it stayed deep, and took hold of my penis in his impersonal way. I’d got calm enough to feel what it is natural to feel. What he did to me then, my confidence with words again shrinks at the thought of describing. “You relinquished your will to me; do you remember that?” I signed chalk. “Will you still do as I command, or are you forsworn?” I said, “Kras, I will do as you command.” His hand tightened on my manhood, sending a streak of pleasure up through me, in spite of everything else I felt. Then he said, “Think of the stream-test. You lay in ice-water, and no one would pick you up…” I stared at him, speechless. You want me to think of that, and feel pleasure, at the same time? “Yes,” he said. “Hold it in your mind while I talk to you and touch you. Think what I tell you to. What you have to do is accept it. It happened. It is reality. It can’t be undone. Accept that. With each breath inward, draw in acceptance.” I breathed, felt myself falling and rising both at once, suddenly reminded of what had happened in the woods near Terera. “Feel what my hand is doing… feel it totally… breathe in acceptance of that.” I closed my eyes, felt the rising stronger than the falling. “Just as you were laid in ice-water, you laid your own children in it. One of them died.” A cry tore out me, and I whipped my head away. This is too brutal to be real! He didn’t stop. “It is what happened, Chevenga. It can’t be undone. Accept it. Breathe in acceptance. Just as you looked up at your mother wondering why she was killing you, your children looked up at you. In one case you really were killing him. Feel what my hand is doing, accept that too.” I screamed. It is like having two parts of yourself smashed into each other, like having two parts tear each other apart. He kept going, over and over, from my own stream-test to my children’s to the pleasure he was making me feel, then back around the circle, and always, “These things are all real, the truths of your life. Accept all of them at once, breathe in acceptance of all.” My will relinquished, I had no choice to be driven around that circle with him, no matter what it did to me. “You are fighting acceptance by holding your breath,” he said once. “Don’t. Breathe it in deep.” After the third or fourth time I’d cried out, he said, “Next time you bring to mind the stream-test, make no sound. You are using expression to fight acceptance. Take it silently.” But that’s the opposite of what Haians teach… isn’t it!? He didn’t relent. “You’re using tension to fight acceptance, right here”—he touched the back of my neck, which I realized was like rock, and starting to hurt. “Let it go loose, breathe acceptance into it.” Do as he commands mindlessly, however impossible it seems, I told myself, and commanded myself to be unable to think anything he didn’t command me to. Held between, my feelings went went back and forth, agony, ecstasy, agony, ecstasy, until I didn’t know up from down. My mind ran back and forth like a rabbit between two fires, helpless, flailing, futile, and feeling more and more immutably drawn towards the edge of some kind of complete collapse. He saw it, of course, and said, “Good—let yourself go over the edge. That’s exactly where you need to be.” My eyes went still, staring at the ceiling as if I couldn’t move them, like when the Pharmacist had griumed me; my sight went blurry. His words seemed to become things of their own, like the utterances of Gods expressed in natural phenomena, rather than a person’s words; each fell bone deep into me, huge as the world, as if I was under truth-drug. “Relax,” he said, more gently. “You have to accept that this terrible thing was done to you, and you did this terrible thing in your turn, and yet there is still love in the world enough for you that someone is willing to give you pleasure. That’s why I ask you to accept all of it at once.” That sent me over, as ponderously slow as if I were a palace falling off a cliff. The emotion and the tension by which I clung to it fell out of me, leaving nothing but his hand, and what it made me feel, and nothingness. “What do you want?” he whispered. I couldn’t answer; I couldn’t imagine an answer. “When you accept enough,” he said, “it will come to you.” And then he took me back onto the circle, and ran me around it again and again, until I felt like I was dying. “What do you want?” Every now and then, between the ecstasy and the horror, the hot joy and the icy anguish, that question was there, as if I had any right, any call, to want. “What do you want? Accept sufficiently, and you will say it.” How long he kept me there, feeling every moment as if I were about to die, I don’t know. I lost all measure of time. “What do you want… what do you want…accept and say it…” Time was on his side. He could do this all day, if he wanted. It came without warning out of a deeper depth than I’d known was in me, like an explosion of lava out of still ground, the only words that could make sense of it all. “I want to live!” Today he was being mercilessly thorough, though. He tested it, took me a few more times around the circle, your stream test, stream-testing your children, one of them to death, my hand, accept it all at once, what do you want? I want to live, each time the “I want to live” getting stronger. Then, just as in the first session, he told me to fly on the wings of it again as he lifted me to ecstasy, to form my joy-cries into the words. I did, even wilder and stronger and deeper in my soul than the first session. It has always been true of me that sex can break locked-up emotion out of me, and I know it happens with other people too; now it came up about the stream-test, full-bore, and in a moment I was screaming in his arms. But the edge that makes it madness, of wanting to freeze or smash my head or tear myself open and see my blood splash out free, was not there. It was just the pure pain, of the stream-test, suffered and imposed at once, that one wants to kill oneself to avoid. He held me through it, and I fell asleep without knowing I would, with my head on his arm. † I had not slept enough the night before, so now I made up for it, not rousing until evening. All-Spirit blessed me; I had no dreams. I woke on a bed in a room I knew as one of those in the guest wing, and so knew he’d had me carried here. I was hungry, and ate all of the dinner he sent for, which I could tell he took as a good sign. “The way the court request was conducted made it sound as if your spouses initiated it,” he said when I was finished. “They didn’t. It was I who convinced them.” “I thought so.” None of them would have had the nerve except perhaps Niku, and she wasn’t here. “What I didn’t know was that you’d be… removed from the demarchy. For not knowing, I apologize.” “That’s one thing about court,” I said. “Something always happens that you don’t expect. If you’d asked, I could have told you. But would that have made any difference? Wouldn’t you have done it anyway?” “Yes, I would have had to,” he said. “You aren’t feeling it right now, because the”—here he said two words I didn’t understand—”eased it, but you are still suicidal.” “Because the what eased it?” “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m speaking Haian. Tenar menhu: it translates as ‘extreme juxtaposition.’” I knew exactly what he was talking about. Accept your own stream-test, accept that you stream-tested your children, killing one of them, accept what my hand is doing, all at once. It was a healing method, a Haian one, it had to be, with a name. “You’ll get over it,” he said. “You’ll be back in truth entirely once you fully understand and accept what you have learned. But you’re not there yet, so you need still someone to decide for you, in the meantime. Do you deny it?” “You heard my answer to that when I was under oath.” “Healing can have phases like this,” he said. “Just as it can have phases like almost-fatal training accidents. Everything is—” We said in unison, “Going as it should.” I found myself laughing, of all things. “It cannot possibly seem to you that your losing the semankraseyesin is something that is going as it should… and I confess I don’t understand that myself, as I thought medical leave would suffice—” “Maybe it’s as simple, Surya, as Yeola-e deserving better than a lunatic as semanakraseye, even ceremonially. Meanwhile, I’m in your hands; you rule my whole life now, not just part. From here we go forward, somehow. Talk to my mind.” --