The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(4)

By the time Lenson had finally heard about Witt’s untimely encounter with the cold, dark vacuum of space, however, he was no longer on the Agreed; he was a student at the University of Xi’an’s seminary school, the preeminent school for the Church of the Interdependency. Lenson’s unconventional upbringing on a spaceship made him an object of some curiosity to his fellow seminarians, but only at first; what marked him further as an object of curiosity was his vision of the Prophet.

“Sounds like hypoxia,” Ned Khlee, one of his first-year flatmates, told him in a late-night bull session, taking a swig of frado, a mildly psychotropic liqueur, and passing it on to Lenson.

“It wasn’t hypoxia,” Lenson said, taking the frado and passing it immediately to his right.

“I mean, you were hypoxic, right?” Sura Jimn, his other flatmate said, taking the bottle. “Your ship had a gash in it. Air was sucked out into space. Your cabin was leaking air for hours.”

“Yes,” Lenson admitted. “But I don’t think that was why I saw her.”

“Pretty sure it was,” Khlee said. He reached across Lenson to take back the frado from Jimn.

“So neither of you ever had a vision of Rachela? Ever?” Lenson asked, discomfited.

“Nope,” said Khlee. “I hallucinated a lizard once, but I was very high at the time.”

“It’s not the same thing,” Lenson said.

“It’s kind of the same thing,” Khlee said, and took another swig from the bottle. “A couple hits of this, and I might see it again.”

Lenson decided that it probably wouldn’t be a good thing to confide in his flatmates any more on this particular matter. Nor, as it would turn out, would he be confiding in most of his seminary mates. His fellow seminarians were generally kind, nice, moderate and compassionate individuals, all of whom had a practical, realistic streak in them, none of whom had ever experienced an ecstatic, religious fervor in their life, either for Rachela or for anyone else.

“The Church of the Independency is a largely practical religion,” the Reverend Huna Prin, Lenson’s curriculum advisor, told him in an early meeting, when Lenson decided he needed guidance on the matter and Prin seemed to him the one person obliged to address his issues without undue judgment. “It doesn’t really lend itself to mysticism, either in its tenets or its daily application. It’s closer to something like Confucianism than Christianity in its root.”

“But Rachela herself had visions,” Lenson protested, holding up the paperback of Kowal’s The Annotated Prophecies of Rachela I he’d happened to be carrying about and waving it at his advisor.

“Yes she did,” Prin agreed. “And of course one of the great discussions within the church is about the nature of those vi sions. Were they visions, actual communications with the divine, or ‘visions’”—Lenson sensed the quotation marks around the world—“meant as parables to help a divided humanity understand the need for a new ethical system that focused on cooperation and interdependency on a much greater scale than ever existed before?”

“Over the history of the church these debates raged,” Lenson said, nodding, echoing a primary text he’d read when he was much younger, imagining the brilliant early theologians going after each other in a high-stakes battle for the soul of the church.

“Well, raged is probably overstating it,” Prin said. “I think at the Fifth Ecclesiastical Diet Bishop Chen threw a cup of tea at Bishop Gianni, but that was less about the fundamental nature of the visions than the fact Gianni kept interrupting Chen, and she was sick of it. On the whole the early debates were orderly and concerned about the practical issues of how to present the visions. The early bishops were well aware that charismatic religions have a tendency to breed schisms and divisions, which is against the fundamental concept of interdependency.”

“Surely there are others who have had visions like mine,” Lenson said to Prin, and in later memories of the conversation he remembered the pleading nature of the question to his advisor.

“The history of the church records occasional priests and bishops who claimed religious visions, and used them as justification for attempted schisms,” Prin allowed. “The church has an inquiry process for it, which any priest or bishop who claims the visions must undergo.”

“What happens?”

“If I recall correctly usually the priests claiming visions are referred to medical attention for previously undiagnosed mental health issues, treated and returned to service, or retired if the issues persist.”

Lenson frowned. “So the church declares them crazy.”

“‘Crazy’ is a loaded term. I think it’s better said that the church realizes as a practical matter that visions usually aren’t actually divinely inspired but the result of other, less dramatic phenomena. Better to address that than to let the condition persist and possibly risk a schism.”

“But I had a vision and my mental health is fine.”

Prin shrugged. “Sounds like hypoxia to me.”

Lenson brushed this aside. “What happens if an emperox claims to have visions?” he asked. “They’re the actual head of the church. Do they go up against an inquiry?”

“I don’t know,” Prim admitted. “It hasn’t happened since Rachela.”