"I'm afraid so."
"Have they told you who'll be giving you your Testing?"
"They've told me nothing," said Tisana. "They've left me guessing about the whole thing."
"As it should be," Vandune said. "Uncertainty is good for the soul."
"Easy enough for you to say," Tisana muttered, as Vandune trudged away. She wondered if she herself would ever be so cheerily heartless to candidates for the Testing, assuming she passed and went on to be a tutor. Probably. Probably. One's perspective changes when one is on the other side of the wall, she thought, remembering that when she was a child she had vowed always to understand the special problems of children when she became an adult, and never to treat the young with the sort of blithe cruelty that all children receive at the hands of their unthinking elders; she had not forgotten the vow, but, fifteen or twenty years later, she had forgotten just what it was that was so special about the condition of childhood, and she doubted that she showed any great sensitivity to them despite everything. So, too, most likely, with this.
She entered the assembly-room. Teaching at the chapterhouse was done mainly by the tutors, who were fully qualified dream-speakers voluntarily taking a few years from their practices to give instruction; but the consummates, the final-year students who were speakers in all but the last degree, were required also to work with the novices by way of gaining experience in dealing with people. Tisana taught the brewing of dream-wine, theory of sendings, and social harmonics. The novices looked up at her with awe and respect as she took her place at the desk. What could they know of her fears and doubts? To them she was a high initiate of their rite, barely a notch or two below the Superior Inuelda. She had mastered all the skills they were struggling so hard to comprehend. And if they were aware of the Testing at all, it was merely as a vague dark cloud on the distant horizon, no more relevant to their immediate concerns than old age and death.
"Yesterday," Tisana began, taking a deep breath and trying to make herself seem cool and self-possessed, an oracle, a fount of wisdom, "we spoke of the role of the King of Dreams in regulating the behavior of society on Majipoor. You, Meliara, raised the issue of the frequent malevolence of the imagery in sendings of the King, and questioned the underlying morality of a social system based on chastisement through dreams. I'd like us to address that issue today in more detail. Let us consider a hypothetical person — say, a sea-dragon hunter from Piliplok — who in a moment of extreme inner stress commits an act of unpremeditated but severe violence against a fellow member of her crew, and—"
The words came rolling from her in skeins. The novices scribbled notes, frowned, shook their heads, scribbled notes even more frantically. Tisana remembered from her own novitiate that desperate feeling of being confronted with an infinity of things to learn, not merely techniques of the speaking itself but all kinds of subsidiary nuances and concepts. She hadn't anticipated any of that, and probably neither had the novices before her. But of course Tisana had given little thought to the difficulties that becoming a dream-speaker might pose for her. Anticipatory worrying, until this business of the Testing had arisen, had never been her style. One day seven years ago a sending had come upon her from the Lady, telling her to leave her farm and bend herself toward dream-speaking, and without questioning it she had obeyed, borrowing money and going off on the long pilgrimage to the Isle of Sleep for the preparatory instruction, and then, receiving permission there to enroll at the Velalisier chapter-house, journeying onward across the interminable sea to this remote and forlorn desert where she had lived the past four years. Never doubting, never hesitating.
But there was so much to learn! The myriad details of the speaker's relationship with her clients, the professional etiquette, the responsibilities, the pitfalls. The method of mixing the wine and merging minds. The ways of couching interpretations in usefully ambiguous words. And the dreams themselves! The types, the significances, the cloaked meanings! The seven self-deceptive dreams and the nine instructive dreams, the dreams of summoning, the dreams of dismissal, the three dreams of transcendence of self, the dreams of postponement of delight, the dreams of diminished awareness, the eleven dreams of torment, the five dreams of bliss, the dreams of interrupted voyage, the dreams of striving, the dreams of good illusions, the dreams of harmful illusions, the dreams of mistaken ambition, the thirteen dreams of grace — Tisana had learned them all, had made the whole list part of her nervous system the way the multiplication table and the alphabet were, had rigorously experienced each of the many types through month upon month of programmed sleep, and so in truth she was an adept, she was an initiate, she had attained all that these wide-eyed unformed youngsters here were striving to know, and yet all the same tomorrow the Testing might undo her completely, which none of them could possibly comprehend.
Or could they? The lesson came to its end and Tisana stood at her desk for a moment, numbly shuffling papers, as the novices filed out. One of them, a short plump fair-haired girl from one of the Guardian Cities of Castle Mount, paused before her a moment — dwarfed by her, as most people were — and looked up and touched her fingertips lightly to Tisana's forearm, a moth-wing caress, and whispered shyly, "It'll be easy for you tomorrow. I'm certain of it." And smiled and turned away, cheeks blazing, and was gone.
So they knew, then — some of them. That benediction remained with Tisana like a candle's glow through all the rest of the day. A long dreary day it was, too, full of chores that could not be shirked, though she would have preferred to go off by herself and walk in the desert instead of doing them. But there were rituals to perform and observances to make and some heavy digging at the site of the new chapel of the Lady, and in the afternoon another class of novices to face, and then a little solitude before dinner, and finally dinner itself, at sundown. By then it seemed to Tisana that this morning's little rainstorm had happened weeks ago, or perhaps in a dream.
Dinner was a tense business. She had almost no appetite, something unheard-of for her. All around her in the dining-hall surged the warmth and vitality of the chapter-house, laughter, gossip, raucous singing, and Tisana sat isolated in the midst of it as if surrounded by an invisible sphere of crystal. The older women were elaborately ignoring the fact that this was the eve of her Testing, while the younger ones, trying to do the same, could not help stealing little quick glances at her, the way one covertly looks at someone who suddenly has been called upon to bear some special burden. Tisana was not sure which was worse, the bland pretense of the consummates and tutors or the edgy curiosity of the pledgeds and novices. She toyed with her food. Freylis scolded her as one would scold a child, telling her she would need strength for tomorrow. At that Tisana managed a thin laugh, patting her firm fleshy middle and saying, "I've stored up enough already to last me through a dozen Testings."
"All the same," Freylis replied. "Eat."
"I can't. I'm too nervous."
From the dais came the sound of a spoon tinkling against a glass. Tisana looked up. The Superior was rising to make an announcement.
In dismay Tisana muttered, "The Lady keep me! Is she going to say something in front of everybody about my Testing?"
"It's about the new Coronal," said Freylis. "The news arrived this afternoon."
"What new Coronal?"
"To take the place of Lord Tyeveras, now that he's Pontifex. Where have you been? For the past five weeks—"
" — and indeed this morning's rain was a sign of sweet tidings and a new springtime," the Superior was saying.