“Open it yourself,” Bakrish said.
Orne willed it: Show me, Bakrish.
A sandy scraping filled the cell. Light fanned inward from the side as the entire wall opened. Orne looked out at Bakrish, a shadow framed against light like a robed statue.
The Hynd stepped forward, jerked to a halt as he saw Orne standing in darkness. “Did you not prefer the light, Orne?”
“No.”
“But you’re standing, unafraid of my warning. You must have understood the test.”
“I understood,” Orne agreed. “The psi machine obeys my uncensored will. That’s faith, the uncensored will.”
“You understand and still choose the dark?”
“Does that bother you, Bakrish?”
“Yes.”
“For the moment, I find that useful,” Orne said.
“I see.” Bakrish bowed his shaven head. “I thank you for sparing me.”
“You know about that?” Orne was surprised.
“I felt the flames and the heat. I smelled the burning. I sensed my own screams of agony.” Bakrish shook his head. “The life of a guru on Amel is not an easy one. There exist too many possibilities.”
“You were safe," Orne said. “I censored my will.”
“Therein lies the most enlightened degree of faith,” Bakrish murmured. He brought up his hands, palms together and once more bowed to Orne.
Orne stepped out of the dark cell. “Is that all there is to my ordeal?”
“Oh, that was merely the initial step,” Bakrish said. “There are seven steps: the test of faith, the test of the miracle and its two faces, the test of dogma and ceremony, the test of ethics, the test of religious ideal, the test of service to life, and the test of the personal mystique. They do not necessarily fall in that order and sometimes are not distinctly separated.”
Orne tasted a sense of exhilaration, sensed that his prescient awareness of peril had receded. He said: “Let’s get on with it.”
Bakrish sighed, said: “Holy Rama defend me.” Then: “Very well, the two faces of the miracle; that is indicated next.”
The sense of peril came alive once more in Orne. He fought to ignore it, thinking: I have faith in myself. I can conquer my fear.
Angrily, Orne said: “The sooner we get through this, the sooner I see the Abbod. That’s why I’m here.”
“Is that the only reason?" Bakrish asked.
Orne hesitated, then: “Of course not. But he’s the one who’s putting the heat on the I-A. When I’ve solved all of your riddles, I’ll still have him to solve.”
“He is the one who summoned you, that is true,” Bakrish said.
“I thought of casting him into hell,” Orne said.
Bakrish paled. “The Abbod?”
“Yes.”
“Rama, guard us!”
“Lewis Orne guard you,” Orne said. “Let’s get on with it.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
The pattern of massive lethal violence, that phenomenon we call war, is maintained by a guilt-fear-hate syndrome which is transmitted much in the manner of a disease by social conditioning. Although lack of immunity to this disease is a very human thing, the disease itself is not a necessary and natural condition of human existence. Among those conditioned patterns which transmit the war virus you will find the following—the justification of past mistakes, feelings of self-righteousness and the need to maintain such feelings…
Bakrish stopped before a heavy bronze door at the end of a long hall down which he had guided Orne. The priest turned an ornate handle cast in the form of a sunburst with long projecting rays. He threw his shoulder against the door and it creaked open.
He said: “We generally don’t come this way. These two tests seldom follow each other in the same ordeal.”
Orne stepped through the door after Bakrish, found himself in a gigantic room. Stone and plastrete walls curved away to a domed ceiling far above them. Slit windows in the high curve of the ceiling admitted thin shafts of light that glittered downward through gilt dust. Orne’s gaze followed the light down to its focus on a straight wall barrier about twenty meters high and forty or fifty meters long. The wall was chopped off and appeared incomplete in the middle of the immense room, dwarfed by the space around it.
Bakrish circled around behind Orne, closed the heavy door. He nodded toward the barrier wall. “We go there.”
He led the way; Orne followed. Their slapping sandals created an oddly delayed echo. The smell of damp stone was a bitter taste in Orne’s nostrils. He glanced left, saw evenly spaced doors around the room’s perimeter—bronze doors appearing identical to the one they had entered. Looking over his shoulder, he tried to pick out their door. It was lost in the ring of sameness.
Bakrish came to a halt about ten meters from the center of the odd barrier wall. Orne stopped beside him. The wall’s surface appeared to be smooth gray plastrete, featureless, but menacing. Orne felt his prescient fear increase as he stared at the wall. The fear came like the surging and receding of waves on a beach. Emolirdo had interpreted this as infinite possibilities in a situation basically perilous.
What was there in a blank wall to produce such a warning?
Bakrish glanced at Orne. “Is it not true, my student, that one should obey the orders of his superiors?”
The priest’s voice carried a hollow echo in the room’s immensity. Orne coughed to clear the rasping dryness of his throat. “If the orders make sense and the ones who give them are truly superior, I suppose so. Why do you ask?”
“Orne, you were sent here as a spy, as an agent of the I-A. By rights, anything that happens to you here is the concern of your superiors and no concern of ours.”
Orne tensed. “What’re you driving at?”
Sweat gleamed on Bakrish’s forehead. He looked down at Orne, the dark eyes glistening. “These machines terrify us sometimes, Orne. They are unpredictable in any absolute sense. Anyone who comes within their field can be subjected to their power.”
“Like back there when you were hanging on the edge of the inferno?”
“Yes.” Bakrish shuddered.
“But you still want me to go through with this?”
“You must. It is the only way you can accomplish what you were sent here to do. You could not stop, you do not want to stop. The wheel of the Great Mandala is turning.”
“I was not sent here,” Orne said. “The Abbod summoned me. I am your concern, Bakrish. Otherwise you would not be here with me. Where is your own faith?”
Bakrish pressed his palms together, placed them in front of his nose and bowed. “The student teaches the guru.”
“Why do you voice these fears?” Orne asked.
Bakrish lowered his hands. “It is because you still suspect us and fear us. I reflect your own fears. This emotion leads to hate. You saw that in your first test. But in the test you are about to undergo, hate represents the supreme danger.”
“To whom, Bakrish?”
“To yourself, to all of those you may influence. Out of this test comes a rare kind of understanding, for it is…”
He broke off at a scraping sound behind them. Orne turned, saw two acolytes depositing a heavy, square-armed chair on the floor facing the barrier wall. They cast frightened glances at Orne, scurried away toward one of the bronze doors.
“They fear me,” Orne said, nodding toward the door where the acolytes had fled. “Does that mean they hate me?”
“They stand in awe of you,” Bakrish said. “They are prepared to offer you reverence. It would be difficult for me to say how much of awe and reverence represents suppressed hate.”
“I see.”