The next morning, they convened and went over to the Historians' Temple. No Aliom practitioner would be allowed within the Historians' sanctum, any more than a Historian could be admitted to the Aliom building now that the worldcircle had been ignited. But the debriefing apparatus had been set up in a fieldstone addition to the Historians' Temple, a large room that had its own entry, so they need not pass through the sensitized space.

They entered an alcove divided from the main room by a shimmering beaded curtain. Beyond that veil the debriefer was working, and Dushauni light filled the room beautifully. As Krinata paused to don dark glasses Jindigar examined the newly laid power lines, scavenged from some spaceship. They snaked across the floor and out a window, toward the power plant by the waterfall. Power regulators had been spliced in, for the waterfall's jury-rigged system produced unsteady current.

One of the Historians met them and, seeing Jindigar eyeing the heavy line, commented to Krinata, "It was difficult to get permission to black out the community this morning, but we're drawing the entire power output."

"//Then let's make it count, //" they replied through Krinata. From her voice Jindigar judged that the balance they had struck in the Aliom Temple ought to hold.

They followed the Historian through the curtain. The field-stone walls were undressed, the windows high and opaque, the floor of kiln-fired brick. The gleaming equipment brought from Dushaun seemed grafted onto the primitive setting. Control room couches had been brought in for the officers and set up in the configuration of the Oliat array.

Threntisn was already in his place, on the opposite side of the debriefer's large, circular optical membrane framed by a carefully tuned forcefield torus. Attendants were fussing over the connections to his bodyfield, and as they watched, the optical membrane cleared, then sparkled in readiness.

Jindigar, even with full Oliat awareness, could barely sense the presence of the Archive now. In theory he knew what had been done. The Archive itself did not exist inside the Historian's brain but was attached to Threntisn's mind through the locus at its center called the Eye. The Eye of the Archive opened into an elsewhere where space and time were not defined—a place before birth and after death. Around the Eye a multidimensional quasi-spacial structure was erected by the Historian to organize data, but that structure, too, didn't exist within the brain. It existed on the kind of nonmaterial mental plane where the Oliat linkages existed.

In the right mental state it was possible to travel such planes and function there as if they were real. But that was a handy fiction created by the mind to rationalize a nonrational experience.

Threntisn had placed himself in that mental state and had closed all the Archive's portals, working now through only one, and that one was tightly focused on the optical membrane and the other sensory inputs feeding into his bodyfield from the pickups the Oliat would wear.

Krinata took her place as any veteran Outreach might. Her outward poise never deserted her, but Jindigar could feel the flutter of tension within her. //Steady,// he urged as they settled into their couches and secured themselves with the spaceman's restraints. //Threntisn has complete control of the Archive now. We won't fall into it. Nothing like that can happen this time, Krinata.//

The Dushauni lights were dimmed, so most of the illumination now came from the optical membrane. Historian technicians began their age-old tasks, and for Jindigar it became– despite the bizarre setting–a soothingly familiar rhythm. As each of them settled helmets, foot contacts, and hand grips, a technician balanced the input circuits to clear the membrane again, using that clarity to measure Threntisn's readiness to tune another input channel. The Archive could take the Oliat's full data throughput, but Threntisn couldn't. Most of the data had to bypass his conscious mind.

The debriefing chamber was like a spaceport traffic control room or a singing meditation, picking up the essential rhythm of body and world, 'blending them to shaleiliu—to perfect harmony.

As the last of the contact checks died away Jindigar told Krinata, //Now wait for Threntisn's question—he's doing the job you used to do when debriefing an Oliat to make a prospectus for a newly discovered world.//

Ill know,// she replied impatiently. //We went all through that.//

Krinata had been a master of the debriefer used by Survey to make living brochures of colonizable worlds. She'd confessed that it had never occurred to her that Dushau hadn't created the debriefer merely to make Oliat memory visible to non-Dushau.

Suddenly Jindigar remembered how she had evoked his reliving the tornado that had killed Kamminth's Outreach, Taaryesh. He had been Kamminth's Receptor at that time, but by the time Krinata had debriefed Kamminth's, only three officers had been left alive, and Jindigar had taken Outreach. The reliving of Taaryesh's ungrieved death had nearly destroyed Jindigar. He hadn't thought until this moment how hard it must have been on Krinata—for at that time she had already begun to exhibit Oliat function sensitivity. Only, he hadn't known it until months later.

Spontaneous awakening of ability from contact with the debriefer would make sense if she was, indeed, Takora reincarnated. And that ill-fated debriefing had been her very last use of the equipment until now. She'd never mentioned it, but it must be on her mind. //Krinata, it won't be like Taaryesh. It will be vivid for us, yes—but real, not nightmarish. Relax and let Threntisn frame it for us. Just hold the linkages and let the data flow.//

Darllanyu felt his concern for Krinata. She shifted uncomfortably. //What's taking that Historian so long?//

Absently Jindigar kneaded his chair arm to relieve the nag– ging itch of his nail beds. He stared at his inflamed fingertips and refused to check Darllanyu's restless hands as he answered, //Threntisn is being cautious—wisely so, considering what happens when I tangle with that Archive.//

//Let's not dwell on that,// suggested Venlagar.

Then Threntisn's question came directly through their Outreach: How did you know the clickerbeasts were attacking the Holot?

The whole-Oliat response was engaged. With the Inreach focused on past experience, and the Outreach holding the current links, data flooded up out of their global memory into the current links, then flowed out through Krinata and onto Threntisn's screen as visual patterns while his Archive assimilated the Oliat's subtextual data.

To the Oliat it was real again: their first experience of the shaleiliu hum, their bright anticipation of Dissolution shattered, and the sky blackened with screeching, yammering, clicking bodies swarming toward the cliff face and the lip of the cave where the Holot fought them and lost.

The entire scene unreeled, skillfully directed by Threntisn's prompts. Why did you respond? And when they had controlled -the swarm, How did you induce them to leave?

Jindigar, at Center, separated the remembered data into levels, allowing facts to go into open file for any Historian to access, and then grading the Oliat's experiences so Aliom trained researchers could retrieve it.

He had never done this before, and in his concern for his officers, he had forgotten that he, himself, was entering new depths. One mistake and someone using the Archive might have data dumped into his nervous system with such speed that it would destroy his mind. It suddenly occurred to him that generations of Aliom Priests had debriefed to this Archive. It probably contained everything he'd need to train himself to his next level and lead this community properly.