“You use it to extend your life and youth,” Aiah points out.
Order of Eternity nods. “When our bodies are damaged, we strive to repair them.”
“When a doctor uses such techniques, his plasm bills are very high.”
“When a doctor uses such techniques,” says Order of Eternity, “his techniques are intrusive and hasty. He must repair the damage of years, and do it in a matter of hours. We, on the other hand, have years, decades sometimes, to attune our bodies to the ways of health. A doctor cannot afford to spend years working on a single patient, but we can. My name is not chance-chosen—we attempt to live according to the order of eternity, not to the needs of the moment. Years of meditation makes us aware of our bodies and their needs in ways that are uncommon outside these walls. We can become aware of wrongness—illness—years before anyone outside would think to bring the matter to the attention of a doctor. At such times only a small effort is required to correct the problem. Our plasm use is therefore subtle, and our usage small.”
Order of Eternity’s path takes her through an arch on the right, opposite a relief titled The Archon, a man in a long robe holding a multibranched candlestick, or perhaps a stylized tree… Dragging her eyes away, Aiah follows the dreaming sister.
“There are also your aerial displays to consider,” she says. “I have seen them, and they are impressive.”
A wistful smile crosses the sister’s youthful face. “I have not seen the displays in centuries. Not since I came to the Society when I was a girl.”
“Someone here arranges them.”
“We all do, in a way…” Order of Eternity’s voice trails away as she searches for words. “These displays… they are a glimpse into our meditations, but they are only a side effect. We seek to live in accord with plasm, the greatest creative power in the universe, and sometimes actual creation takes place.”
“If I wished to make displays of this sort,” Aiah says, “a public relations agency would charge tens of thousands of dinars in plasm fees alone. You can’t claim, as with the life extension treatments, that you spend years creating these things, and that the plasm required is therefore small. I know how much plasm it costs to light up the sky.”
Order of Eternity pauses, again searching for words. Behind her, two women lie in their niche, their eyes closed, dreaming in the soft light. One of them is twisted, her small embryo body looking like a grotesque doll that has been placed by the other’s pillow.
“We do not entirely understand the phenomenon,” Aiah’s guide says. “The displays are not something we create consciously. And yet we live in harmony with plasm, and plasm is a constant of our world—it underlies all matter, all reality, and it reacts to the humans who use it, views the world through their perceptions as if through a lens. It knows things of which no human is consciously aware… and sometimes it creates things without a human consciously willing it.”
A grin spreads across Aiah’s face. She has to admit that Order of Eternity had her going for a moment. Don’t try to fool one of the Cunning People, she thinks. We’ll see who’s the passu here.
“You’re saying that nobody creates these things? Nobody sticks them up in the sky?”
“Plasm is our life, our breath,” the dreaming sister says, “and we live in harmony with its motions and bind to it our souls. Plasm is a higher order of reality—it both creates reality and alters it. It would seem that plasm sometimes reflects our meditations, but it does so without our direction.”
“And without running through your meter.”
The dreaming sister simply shrugs. “Apparently so. Here is our accumulator.”
Aiah follows the sister into a circular room and realizes she is beneath the copper dome. Slits in the dome’s base let in Shieldlight, and it glows on a carved screen that holds a small plasm accumulator. The screen is of some kind of dark wood and features intricate carvings similar to those on the building’s exterior, a profusion of faces and bodies and floral displays, humans and plants and creatures all laced together, caught in a complex moment of transformation.
There are arched gaps in the screen that allow access to the accumulator, and Aiah steps through one. The accumulator comes only to Aiah’s waist, but Aiah can see her reflection in its polished bands of black ceramic and copper.
“You’re not the first to wonder about us,” says the dreaming sister as Aiah walks a circuit around the accumulator. “Every so often someone from the ministry will come by. She will examine the meter, perhaps subject our building to inspection, and then go away. Nothing is ever found.”
“There’s a war going on. Plasm is precious.”
“Plasm is always precious,” correcting, “but we have become aware of the war, yes. The movement of plasm… the patterns of use… the resonance of violence within our hearts as we dream… yes,” she nods, “we are aware of the war. The last time we felt such disturbance was eighty-nine years ago, but that war did not last long. We would have to remember two hundred fourteen years for a conflict of similar duration and intensity, and then the fighting was terrible. This building was converted to a hospital, and we sisters were confined to a small part of it.”
“What was the war about?” Aiah asks. Her knowledge of Caraqui history doesn’t go back that far.
The dreaming sister pauses and gazes at Aiah through the lacework screen. A shaft of light dropping from the dome gleams on her cropped hair.
“Ignorance,” she says.
Aiah leaves the screen area and walks to the control panel. It is silver metal and very old, its edges scalloped in a fluid pattern that is dimly familiar to Aiah, perhaps from old college classes on architectural history.
She looks at the dials and switches. The accumulator is topped up with plasm. A heavy black plastic knob sets a rheostat to provide the building with a smallish hourly amount that, divided between two hundred and fifty-six Dreaming Sisters, makes a tiny, truly insignificant dose of plasm for each, an absurdly small amount.
There are other devices on the control panel, clocks and timers, the function of which does not seem immediately apparent. “What are these?” Aiah asks.
“We tend to lose track of time during our meditations. The timer cuts off our plasm so that we will know to take meals, clean the building, have meetings, and so on.” She tilts her head like a bird. “All is in order?”
Dials, Aiah thinks, can be rigged to show far less plasm than really exists. To prove it would involve taking apart the mechanism and metering the plasm lines, but Aiah thinks she can demonstrate the sisters are cheating without going to that much effort.
“I see nothing unusual,” she says.
Order of Eternity turns and walks through the arch on her silent bare feet.
“There is a political philosophy about plasm,” Aiah says, following, “called New City. Do you know of it?”
“No,” over her shoulder, “and I do not in any case believe that it is new. I have lived over four hundred years,” she says in her young girl’s voice, “and I have yet to see a new thing. And of course the world is far older than I, and has spun upon its axis many millions of times since last a new thing stood upon it.” The dreaming sister pauses before one of the carved allegories, The Architect, a noble-looking man with a protractor and a pair of dividers.
“The Ascended Ones isolated us here,” the sister says. “We do not know why, or where they are now, or whether the Shield shall ever fall. We are a limited people, on a limited world, and we are condemned to wait. True freedom is denied us—the most unlimited thing in the world is plasm, and even that cannot penetrate the Shield.”