This day he sat in deep trance for nearly three hours, and came back aware of things he’d never before noticed.
The Sigma Field had been somewhat known eight hundred years earlier, though imperfectly and incompletely. It had been defined and described mathematically with equations that enabled a technology to grow out of it. Equations that gave rise first to the sublight-speed warp drive, which actually was a drive, and later to the hyperdrive, which was no drive at all, but could transfer a ship to a remote point with a lapsed time differing from zero (very substantially from zero) only because of the limitations of matter, especially life forms.
Tenzin’s knowledge of the Sigma Field was far less precise, but it was broader, more comprehensive. He couldn’t have begun to design a warp drive with what he knew, let alone a hyperdrive, but he saw possibilities that Hampton and Mazour and their graduate students, some eight hundred years earlier, had not. To him the Sigma Field was not a complex of esoteric equations. It was like a mesh, a kind of net that clothed reality, and a template that gave it form. In a way it was alive, like a river is alive, flowing over and through and around. And like a stream, it was aware only at a very primitive level.
He thought of it as “the fabric of Tao,” which it is not.
It also seemed to him that like a net, the strands might be separated somewhat, not by hands but by his focused intent, powered by the Circle. And into the mesh something inserted which was highly aware. An elemental.
Besides Tenzin there were twelve members of the Cir-
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cle now, Songtsan Gampo having dipped deeper into the list of adepts compiled for him some years earlier. This permitted seating no fewer than four at any time, while still allowing adequate rest.
But seven, plus Tenzin as the director and manipulator, was the optimum number, called upon for special needs. And it was seven that the geshe seated now.
Ravens would not do for his newly recognized need. They were not assertive enough, not aggressive enough, probably not intelligent enough. What he needed was an elemental with a sufficient innate sense of the mesh that individuals of the species communed with one another psychically. Like ravens, but something more intelligent. He decided to gather a wolf elemental. Once in the mesh, it seemed to him it might “permeate” an area of it and become aware of all life over a considerable region. And after learning to function in the mesh, hopefully it could identify whatever it found.
Thus a wolf elemental was gathered: aware, intelligent, vibrant with fear, and for awhile he calmed it. When it seemed to Tenzin sufficiently calm, he held it as with a hand, and with the other opened the mesh. Then he urged the elemental to enter. It touched the field and resisted. He pushed, and the resistance increased; clearly an obedience command had its limits. Carefully he opened the mesh wider, but the resistance remained. And wider . . .
TWENTY-SEVEN
The cult, led by its master and his three sevens of acolytes, had encircled the village and attacked at dawn, when most of the villagers still slept. The cult members knew exactly what they were to do, while the villagers, though more numerous, were confused and terrified.
The attack was intended to kill the young men and anyone who resisted. It succeeded, except that a small handful escaped into the surrounding jungle. During the attack, women, children, and old men were struck down, some of them unconscious, a few dead, most simply cowed. When the young men were dead, the women, children, and old men were herded into a few lodges and held under guard until the cult had tallied its own injured, which were few.
Then the master examined the prisoners, questioning the old men, alternately scowling and nodding at the women and girls. Those he selected were taken under guard to a large hut. He gave his men leave to use the others as they would, but took only one for himself. When he had finished with her, he went out into the little plaza, where the chickens and pigs had calmed