.
I stood in the background once again, this time looking at the banner hanging in the blackness in front of me, stirring up ancient memories.
‘Tapestry’ was a loose term, in this case. This banner was actually a form of weaving from the Fundamental Plane, in which the various objects depicted could freely move around the material. And in contrast to my clumsy efforts at embroidery, Senhion had been a master of this style of cloth-work. She had also been a master painter and calligrapher. Now that I thought about it, it seemed to me that the print holding Kanon’s ‘Garden Pavilion’ might just have been a work that Senhion brought with her when she Descended. Or to be more accurate, that she replicated in Mortal Realm substances. Somewhere along the way, someone had repurposed it for Kanon.
Curator had techniques to restore and maintain the physical artworks to which the scenarios connected, so, as unbelievable as it seemed after ten thousand years, this Six Geometries, Seven Elements Tapestry was the very artwork that Senhion had crafted to teach the mathematical theory behind the magic rules of this universe. Although I had to admit, it might be open to question to what degree this tapestry was actually the same article. Surely Curator had replaced most of the constituent material at one point or another during periodic restorations.
Still, I could recognize the gentle and elegant style with which Senhion wrote her characters, which flowed like a reverse waterfall of golden ink up the righthand edge of the work, giving an explanation in literary juvenile Xa-Ne characters– Ancient Fairy characters– Chinese characters– of the relationships between the seven elements and how they followed the same structure as the ‘Six Geometries’, which is what we called the five Platonic solids plus the sphere.
Right now, looking at this from within the art gallery’s background, where time compression was diluting the spiritual energy down to Huade standard, I couldn’t really follow the explanations that she had written. I could only grasp how the basic elemental oppositions corresponded to the Tetrahedron.
That was the reason this tapestry was not used in the manner which Senhion had planned for it. The Servants weren’t able to get it either. It ended up repurposed for use as a combat training field instead.
I turned my attention to the scenario beyond, holding my open palm up about an inch from the surface. Using my spiritual senses, I checked the current situation. It seemed that Ryuu was taking a lunch break at the moment. Kanon was nearby, telling him her observations about his efforts, and he didn’t look very happy about it.
As the text of the first paragraph of Senhion’s explanation finished and the second paragraph began, I ordered the operating spirit, Place the simulation in time dilation at one hundred-thousandth of background time.
The system automatically suspends the simulations of admins and brings them outside the scenario during dilations. Kanon appeared beside me the moment the clock froze inside. She could return when the scenario resumed and reveal no evidence that she had been gone. If she were absent for a full day, background time, Ryuu would not notice that she had gone silent for less than a second from his perspective.
“Do you need something, Commander?” she asked, completely unperturbed by the sudden change in her environment. Come to think of it, Curator, Jia, Kanon and others probably did this to each other on a regular basis while they were working in this place.
“I need to discuss making some changes to the training,” I told her.
Her eyebrows went up slightly, and she tipped her head slightly. “I thought we were in agreement on the training method.”
“We were,” I nodded. “How do you think things are proceeding?”
“Somewhat slowly,” she admitted. “He’s quite stubborn.”
“I’ve decided that our methods are at fault,” I told her. “They don’t suit his nature, at all.”
Her eyebrow popped up briefly, then she nodded. “Very well. What adjustments should we make?”
I chewed on my lip for a bit. I actually had a pretty clear plan in my head. The problem was, explaining it Kanon. She didn’t have the wisdom of the quasi-man who had thought of it, and here in this environment, I couldn’t as easily tap his wisdom.
“Let’s head back to the garden pavilion,” I told her. “I’m having trouble thinking in this place.”
“What is the issue, Commander?” Kanon wondered.
I sighed. “I only have an infantile spiritual vessel, which is not enough to support my mind out here where the energy is thin. In this environment, I revert to the mind of a juvenile. I would need my adult mental strength to explain it.”
She nodded, then we were standing in the middle of the pavilion once again. Naturally, she had a shortcut set up to this place. I secretly breathed a sigh of relief as the thick flow of spiritual energy reawakened my mind.
Kanon immediately looked at the ceiling, where Dilorè was now sunning herself on my doppelgänger’s meditation dais. “You remodeled it?”
“If you dislike it, feel free to change it back,” I told her instead of explaining. I wanted to get on with the subject.
“It’s fine,” she said as she took a seat on a meditation cushion. “It no longer matches your artwork, though.”
I nodded. As I guessed, the print upon which this was based was indeed Senhion’s work.
Now, Kwelabi’s thoughts again floated to the surface of my mind, along with the advice that Fan Li had for us. I explained, “The issue is that Mr. Kowa is entirely unlike the sort of person who would have become a Servant back then. And Servants and candidates were the only mortals that we trained. Senhion’s… My way of training them is not fit for him.”
She tipped her head again. “Does it truly matter that much? Mortals are fairly straightforward and simple creatures in the end.”
Oh, wow, I thought to myself. I kept myself from showing my thoughts, though. If Kanon were indeed Senhion without all my many lives of experience, then she would be quite prideful.
“That was how we saw them, back then, wasn’t it?” I nodded. “That is why we lost control of things.”
Kanon’s brow wrinkled. That which was so obvious to me now, just wasn’t part of her way of thinking. Confused, she defended her statement. “Well, they are slaves of biological instincts. Once one accounts for the species, sex and a few genetic and cultural variables, they are more or less…”
“Not anywhere near as uniform as we believed,” I stated tautly, cutting her off.
Really, were we Elders that pigheaded back then? Fan Li tut-tutted in the back of my mind.
No matter how superior we thought ourselves, we were slaves to our nature as well, after all, Kwelabi observed. His unique way of observing the interlaced connections between everything in the world, rather than the world itself, had given him a special advantage for navigating Imperial society and the eternal political conflicts of Imperial families, despite his origins as a barbarian mystic. Here, it gave him the ability to see the massive discord between Ryuu’s mind and our training, and similarly, to understand almost without effort the ancient discord that destroyed the relationship between the non-Servant mortals and the Elders.
“How can you say that?” Kanon asked. “We brought all of our wisdom to bear, to ensure that we fully understood them when we first began managing them. We learned everything about their needs and desires, and we continually strove to refine our methods. How could we be wrong?”
“We weren’t wrong, Kanon. We were blind. Our bodies had mortal substance, but we had no mortal wisdom.”
“This sounds like sophistry,” she objected. “Observation begets knowledge and identifies truth. It doesn’t matter what eye makes the observation.”
I sighed. “When did they begin slipping from our management, Kanon?”
“When they emerged from the underworld,” she stated simply. “Almost exactly the moment that they saw the blue sky.”
“When they came up from places like Ilim Below,” I nodded. “Once the surface biome had recovered enough for them to support themselves on their own efforts. What was their first objective?”
She thought about it with a slight frown of concentration, then stated, “They sought to put physical distance between themselves and the settlements we built for them.”
I conceded, “The very first ones, yes. But that only describes the first to leave. What did the rest do?”
“Abide by the rules of our society.”
With a sigh, I told her, “While that is true, that’s not a description of what they were doing. It merely describes what they were not doing. They were not breaking our rules. What were their objectives at that same time? What did they strive for?”
Puzzled, Kanon asked, “How should I know that?”
“By the outcome,” I stated patiently. “Eventually, one after the other, they all left the society we set up for them and created their own. By a thousand years after emergence, even the supposed Elder-led society had conformed to the changes the mortals had wrought for themselves. They had all, in effect, left. From the start, they were making their own world views, their own beliefs, their own dreams. But was each wave’s exit from our society identical to previous waves?”
Her brow wrinkled again and she pondered the question a while. “I suppose in the broadest form they were. After all, it is simply a matter of leaving normal lives within our society in order to build new lives out in the wild.”
“In the broadest form, yes, but not in the details?”
“Naturally, they varied in their exact approaches according to group.”
“How do you define these groups?”
She turned perplexed. “Well, of course, by the form they eventually took. They didn’t begin as distinct groups, but the mortals began tampering with their own genetics and changing their cultures. And they began generating their own belief systems, contrary to what we had been teaching them about Eternity and the Realms of Existence.”
“So they began from the same position, yet did not all tamper with their genetics the same way, nor form the same alternate belief system?”
“Well, no…”
“Did they generally follow a similar pattern, within an acceptable range of variance one could call effectively the same?”
“… no. They found many quite different ways.”
“Kanon, if they all ‘started from the same position’ and were all the same ‘simple and straightforward creatures’, how could the results become so different?”
Her brows bunched together and she didn’t answer.
“They were not starting from the same position,” I declared. “Mortals don’t have time to patiently investigate and absorb the profound principles of reality. Their lifespans are insufficient. Having insufficient time to learn everything, they must fumble their way through life with many false understandings. And in order to ignore the uncertainty this leaves, they confirm their personal views of the world by flocking together with others who have reached a similar world view. Each of those groups represented a different combination of true and false understandings of the world, and each of those groups went forward from those differing understandings to reach differing results.”
I paused for a bit, in case she wanted to challenge that, but she simply stood there with a thoughtful look.
So, I continued. “The only group of mortals we ever understood were the ones whom we successfully recruited as Servants. They suited us because they tended to be similar to our previous Servants. Our training fit them because they were preselected to fit our training. And their uniformity created confirmation bias for our belief in the uniformity of mortals in general, because they were the mortals we interacted with.”
“Even though we began recruiting from all the different races that came forward?” Kanon asked. “Even though we had elves, merrow, dwarves, halflings and all the rest as well as humans? Weren’t these all individuals from all these different groups?”
“The descendants of those who left our society did not necessarily retain the beliefs or ideals of their ancestors. Children are influenced by their parents, but they program themselves.”
I was fortunate to have a term in Xa-Ne that meant the same thing as the English word program.
I finished with, “Mr. Kowa is almost exactly unlike those whom we would have made Servants back then. He has cunning and aggressiveness, but he doesn’t reason his way through challenges the way our Servants would have. He takes what others tell him and synthesizes his answers from that, almost by instinct. We need to stop expecting him to reach the answers on his own, because that is not how he succeeds.”
Kanon pursed her lips, then nodded. “So what do you suggest?”
“You’re going to go somewhere else and train that child who is sunning herself on the roof for a while, while I teach Mr. Kowa the way I should have done from the start.”
