163 - Oh, to be semanakraseye

Travelling by moyawa is conducive to contemplation. The sky is peaceful, the great vista below is a constant reminder of the larger perspective, there is time, and if you are being double-winged because you aren’t allowed to pilot, you can even read letters on the subject you are contemplating.

“J’vengka, you are who you are as a soul and that does not change tremendously from life to life. If you had died young in this life, I believe your xramha—I use the Lakan word because there is no Enchian one—in the next would have been very different. As it is, you are actually burning unfortunate life patterns by assuming this-life responsibility. I suggest that you search your own memory and consult our records of lives to find, if it can be found, how this particular fate may have been established.”

Astalaz and I had written back and forth a few times since he’d learned my secret. It had inspired him to write such things from the Lakan belief, and instead of laughing it off when I replied, as I might have before, I asked questions. It was in the back of my mind that Surya believed in reincarnation, too, which made me think Haians must. I’d never heard one say it, but then I’d never asked one what they believe about death, and their ethics forbid them to speak to patients about such things unasked.

“Az: Does the Lakan record of lives record those of people who are not Lakans? Unless I was at least one Lakan in a previous life, it wouldn’t be there, right? And how would I find a Lakan life that was mine, if I have one? I am curious, do you remember previous existences?”

I had never asked Surya this; as I flew towards Vae Arahi, I resolved to. If anyone was likely to, it was him.

I was also thinking that I had always blown off the idea of reincarnation before because it was too odd. Now, I couldn’t argue that it was any odder than the soul travelling outside the body, which I did all the time now, or foreknowledge, or being made love to by a spirit-creature in a forest, or even, when it came down to it, weapon-sense.

“J’vengka: It is not the case that once a Lakan, always a Lakan. Souls leap from one nationality to another all the time. We have always recorded the past lives of Lakans, whatever nation they lived in in those lives. The priests began recording the past lives of people who weren’t Lakan in my great-grandfather’s day, realizing that they might well have lived lives as Lakans. If you want to remember, the Line-record priests can help you; they are trained in the method. I myself have the vaguest memories of but one past life, that of a girl-child who died young.”

What was it like, to remember being someone else? How different could you be, really, since you were the same soul? Speaking a different language perhaps, in a body with different strengths and weaknesses… but wouldn’t you be the same in character? And yet how a child is raised does much to determine his character—the Committee had certainly had much to say about that—and you’d be raised differently in different lives.

Even as I kept thinking, ‘This is all silly, the soul just dissipates into All-Spirit, as I was taught,’ I had a thousand questions by the time I got home.

Of course I had time only to land, bathe, sleep and eat breakfast before I was back in with the Committee, who asked and were granted a fourth extension to their time. Once again, I’d given them something new to investigate. They had asked Surya why I’d rushed off to Laka, and he’d told them the truth, of course.

Like everyone else who wasn’t close to me, they’d had no idea of my part in the massacre, and, naturally enough, they thought it might be relevant to my mental state, and of course I could not argue it was not. So I had to recount everything: how it had happened, how I’d felt afterward, my visit with Mirasae, how I’d put it out of mind for years, my visit with Surya and then my trip to tell Astalaz and add to the inscription. Next, they’d call in poor Mirasae, who was now practicing in Thara-e, about the times I’d gone to see her during the Lakan war. She could never have imagined how her work with a delicate-hearted anaraseye would come back to haunt her.

Next day, I pulled aside Surya after breakfast. (He and his family ate with mine in the hall every day now, another way in which he had ceased distancing himself from me as healer from client.) I couldn’t bring myself even to tell him what I wanted to talk about until we were alone in his sponge-lined room.

“I have a feeling that you’re going to tell me that I’ve brought this up because it’s time for me to look into it as part of my healing,” I said, “for all the timing feels like chance. But I’ll maintain my pretense of free will and bring it up anyway—”

“There is no pretense of free will,” he cut me off to say, as I should have known he would. “We freely choose to take on what we do when we are ready to.”

“Right, then I’ll freely choose… no wait. Can you tell from my aura what I want—what I am freely choosing—to bring up?”

“I can tell it frightens you,” he said, as I should have known he would. “And it has a tinge of… hmm. Laka; you were just there. And I see things from much further back, before you were born.” A tingle went down my spine.

“I know you believe in reincarnation, like the Lakans do,” I said. “Did you learn that in Haiu Menshir?” He signed chalk. “Do the Haians keep records like the Lakans do?”

“No, not at all like the Lakans. They don’t concern themselves with who was who the same way; you know, they are healers. They concern themselves with how that which comes from a past life might afflict us in this one.”

“Afflict us?” This I had never heard of. The possible added complexities for the Committee were chilling. How many deadline extensions are they allowed?

“Don’t worry,” he said, with another auric glance. “Most people don’t have that, and in this way, oddly enough, you’re among most people.”

“My madness is all in this life, then.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that; but there is none that has crossed through the gate—between lives, I mean—in a substantial way.”

“That’s… good to know.”

“You see it mostly in the form of fears, that have no explanation in this life. Say someone who is afraid of dogs, but was never bitten by one as a child; they might have been killed by one a hundred years before, or a thousand.”

“Really? People remember that far back? Does anyone remember before the Fire?” My thousand questions was rapidly growing to two thousand.

“There are some records of that. The thing is, it can so easily be mixed in with the work of the imagination, one must treat what is learned that way with great caution. The Lakans have found that out; it’s one reason they are so careful with those records of theirs.”

“How would you heal such a fear?”

“Just the same as I would if the dog had bitten the person in this life: through the aura. A Haian might use remedies; a psyche-healer, by having the person go back into the memory.” How could he make it sound so simple? “But generally speaking, we are most strongly affected by that which happened to us in this life. One cannot say death ends all cares, always; but it heals many.” I tried to make sense in my mind of death being a healer.

“Do you remember previous lives?” I asked him. “I asked Astalaz that; he said just one.”

“Oh yes, I remember many of them. It was part of my training, to understand the nature of my soul, to learn what I was seeking to learn. I was—”

“Wait; there is something that is baffling to me,” I said. “You and Astalaz both speak as if a soul learns things over more than one life, carries knowledge from one life to the next. And yet I, and most people, remember nothing from before. You speak of what a person has to learn from one life, but we all start life as babies, and what babies have to learn is everything. I remember nothing from before that, so isn’t everything I learned in previous lives gone?”

“Your oversoul, your greater self, remembers,” he says. “It is knowledge in the larger sense than the thoughts that we can follow. It becomes part of the whole of you, of which every life is a fraction.”

“Well, why do we forget, then?”

“Because it is huge beyond most people’s bearing. Just the idea of eternity is hard enough to bear; and what I said about death healing cannot be if everything is remembered.”

“You would remember every death… right.” That would be horrible, beyond most people’s bearing, I imagined. I wondered how many deaths he remembered. “The greater self… oversoul… same thing?”

“Your crystal of All-Spirit, yes.” That called to something much deeper in me, that I knew I should come back to, later.

“And yet it knows things that my mind... my knowing mind... does not? Is this like... that unknown part of me that made me walk onto Idiesas’ sword? But, with any luck, more benign? I’m sorry if I sound like an ignoramus, Surya, but I only studied war and politics.”

“You know,” he said, “you’d understand this all much better from trying it than by our talking about it. You know it all already, in your greater self, as do we all.”

“Trying it?”

“Remembering a past life, yes.”

“Um… you know how to do that?” Of course he did; how stupid a question was that?

“It’s all right,” he says. “The idea makes most people nervous. You know you want to, though. It’s easy, in truth. On the table, deep breath, make the white line. And close your eyes; this time you want to go into the past.”

Hold on, wait, slow down… those unfamiliar wishes again. It was just fear. I closed my eyes. “Just go into trance, like any other time, Virani-e. I will tell you what to do after that.”

It took longer than usual, for the fear. Am I afraid not to be me? Of what I will find out? Is there some horror there? “Quit thinking, Virani-e,” he said, reminding me of a thousand times that war-teachers, usually Azaila, had barked the same at me, albeit usually using that other name. I said A-e kras in my mind, and it went still.

You are walking down through a cave mouth into the earth… there are twenty steps, you step once, twice, three times… My mind followed his words, beyond thought into image, then into mist, then into time. I felt it shift backwards. Then I was standing on the slope of Hetharin.

Assembly Palace lay below, but it was different somehow; there was less to it. I was sitting on a rock in the midst of the pasture; around me my sheep grazed, sluggishly peaceful, as they are, letting out a happy “baaaa” now and then. I was bored to itching. I am nothing up here; the world does not know me. Oh, to be semanakraseye, the person whose life makes a difference.

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