She glanced at Daniel, then colored and looked at the floor of living rock. “I hope some day I’ll be able to fully appreciate the marvelous spiritual world in which I’m permitted to live.”
“Of course, child,” the Prior said as he shuffled up the corridor. “You’re young, dear. Enlightenment requires time; and I fear, looking back on my own youth, that it may require age as well. When one is young, no matter how deeply he may believe in the truth of the spirit the body has a certain insistence which the spirit cannot deny.”
He looked at Daniel as they moved along together. “Perhaps you feel that also, Captain Leary?” he said.
“I’m afraid I’m unfitted to discuss religion, sir,” Daniel said with seeming nonchalance. “I wonder, is the door by which we entered the monastery the only entrance there is?”
The Prior laughed. “Oh, goodness, no,” he said. “How many entrances would you guess there were, Margarida?”
She trilled a laugh also. “I know of thirty-seven,” she said. “That’s inside as well as outside the circle of the Tree. But the corridors run for scores of kilometers and we only use a fraction of them. In former times the Service was larger and there was also an extensive lay community on the northern rim.”
“There’ve often been groups and individual hermits living within the Tree,” the Prior said, sounding somewhat apologetic. “Apart from our Service, that is. There are hand-dug wells from ages before we have record. A sufficiently dedicated person can raise his or her own crops by carrying buckets up to where there’s light. I suspect there are some such people now, drawn by a less structured form of the same impulse that brought me and Margarida.”
He and Daniel led the group into a cavern. The corridors and refectory had been cut into the rock; the Tree formed only their ceilings and portions of the walls. It took Adele a moment to realize that this great room was entirely wood. Ages of humans, most of them barefoot acolytes, had worn the floor into troughs weaving toward the couch in the center.
“This is it!” the Count said in an insistent tone. “This is where you dream!”
“Yes,” said the Prior. “After preparation that includes drinking an infusion brewed from the berries of the Tree, the querent sleeps here. The querent and the Tree become one during the night, and the querent rises with a full awareness—as full as a human mind can retain—of the questions he or she wanted answered.”
“Part of the preparation involves focusing your mind properly before going to sleep,” Margarida said. She smiled broadly at Daniel. “There are stories of querents rising with a certain understanding of how they should rearrange their reception room—but nothing about the political situation facing the planet they rule.”
“I’d like to say that story was apocryphal,” the Prior said with a faint smile. “It isn’t, but that was an extreme example. We of the Service have been more careful in preparing the querents since that day, however.”
Adele stopped listening to the discussion among the others present. Her eyes had finally penetrated the opposite side of the huge room. She walked toward it, guided by the floor the way wild beasts follow the paths their ancestors’ hooves have hammered into the soil.
“Adele?” Daniel called. Then, insistently, “Adele.”
“The library’s here, Daniel,” she said. “I hadn’t realized it was the same room as the incubation chamber.”
The imagery in Adele’s database suggested the two functions were physically separate. That was untrue and close enough to being a lie that Adele felt her anger blaze. There probably wasn’t a conscious intention to deceive, but the photographer hadn’t shown a sufficient concern to encompass the truth either.
The backs of a dozen consoles—all reasonably new and built either on Cinnabar or one of the advanced worlds of the Alliance—were set in a row so their blank backs formed crenellations between the stack area and the couch. Adele stepped between two of the machines and switched them on without thinking to ask permission. They came up promptly; she’d used virtually identical equipment in the past. A male acolyte working at the console on the far end glanced up, nodded, and returned to his display.