Chapter 31: Alone at the Top

Time: Judgment 1, 8239 10:00 PM

At the sound of the gong, I released my form and slowly stood up. I had spent the last hour in the Prayer of Repose holding a Shaolin half-lotus sit while nervous Commander Priests questioned me on theology. My mind went back to my conversation with Makin two years ago at the boy's monastery at Karbala. Adult testing is indeed easier than passing the third childhood gate, even with the ringers I suspected the Health faction had lined up against me in the Prayer of Weakness testing.

It did cause me to pause last June, when I was on an afternoon video link to Aleppo. I had called Jibran to confirm a bullet-train test run to Aleppo the next day. In return he idly mentioned he was considering taking a refresher course in Kung Fu.

It's just not Jibran's style to bring up something like that. I felt a bit queasy for a moment as I realized that power politics sometime move in strange and mysterious ways. Regardless, I spent the next six months in intensive training with Dakar's reigning Wing Chun master, and learned exactly the skills I needed to blow my Judgment competition away, ringers and all.

Another advantage of adult testing is that at 10 PM the Initiate is free to go home and wait for the results. I still felt a bit hot from all the testing though, and decided to take the long way home through my gardens and open courtyards.

The moon had set hours ago, and Dakar has a tradition of no external lights on the night on Judgment 1, in sympathy with the monastery boys facing their gates. I found the tradition encouraging, a show of compassion by the township. But turning off lights is a far cry from turning off the practice of culling children. The gulf between their Holy and mine is still so wide.

So I walked around the courtyards with only starlight as my guide. It was enough for walking, but barely. The gardens were in dark shadows, well bedded down for the winter. After the stress of the day, the evening temperature was pleasantly chill, and with no wind off the lake I was not cold at all. I idly remembered this morning's forecast, a high of +3C this afternoon and a low of -6C tonight, a very typical Dakar winter day. We might get a winter storm in a few days, a big one. That'll be nice. We could use the moisture.

It took Chanah just five months to come through with her breakthroughs with the crystal data. I have to give a lot of credit to Sheffie too, for her foresight. A year ago she asked me to get a high-performance quantum computer from Ariel for my private lab. It's the specialty of the High Tech Guild there, at the ancient site of Mobile, Alabama.

It's not a pure quantum computer of course. It's an integrated three-way hybrid, with a classical electronic front-end backed by classical photonic processor arrays and specialized quantum-resolution electronic modules. I got the top-of-the-line model for a desk-sized unit, an Ariel 4700, and its ability to sift through combinations is awesome. The computer was Chanah's primary tool for cracking the data transforms.

After the breakthroughs, my four wives spent the next three months working furiously to translate the data. Almost all of the files are in English, the video and the text. It's an ancient language that Abigail is quite familiar with. The four have been off on their own doing the translation work, concentrating mostly with the text files.

I've done almost none of this work. There was just no time. The political maneuvering I needed to do as I approached my test for CL-28 was immense. My wives and I have had little more than brief sleep periods to be affectionate with each other. None of us wanted to talk much about our work, especially my wives until they have something major to report.

I have also been doing some specialized work with Sheffie, and with Chanah too for that matter. In some other research, Sheffie came up with a very novel way of using nano crystals in photonic switching. We both worked on the write-up which I then published under my name. The paper has been very well received. The Photonics Guild at Baalbek has been after me to visit and give a guest lecture. My paper is also dependent on some large scale quantum computations. It provides a good cover for the computer's real job.

Ah, home at last! I walked in through the front door. My four wives came running and knelt in supplication before me, beseeching me to accept their bondage. It's the traditional way wives of royalty are supposed to act, and I've heard many commanders and even managers and some laborers have begun to demand this evening ritual from their wives.

I gave the hand sign to show that their bondage was acceptable, and then reached over and typed in my personal code to completely seal my personal complex from monitors.

It's a burden for my wives, but there just isn't a good cover story for why I would want my living quarters unobserved while my wives are here but I'm not. Men are not observed without their consent during the hours of low impurity, but the privilege does not extend to women.

Fortunately for all of us, I have an excellent and acceptable reason why I don't want my private research spied upon, including the work of my wife-assistants. The four women spend most of their days in the lab, happily working on our plan to one day change the world.

Abigail studied the display closely after I finished typing, and called out, "Clear!" My four wives all rose off their knees smiling at me. I shook my head at the thought of the necessity of turning off the monitors. I had not given them permission to stop kneeling in reverence before me. A standard punishment for such gross negligence would be to have them all whipped, the leather strap for the first and perhaps the second offense, certainly the thin bamboo cane for the third.

Instead a few moments later we were all cuddling in loose sleep clothing playing on my huge bed. Whipping my wives?! The thought was unfathomable!

Abigail gave me an affectionate hug and then playfully pushed me down on the bed and sat on my groin. I had Michal and Sheffie by my sides, one in each arm, and Chanah was sitting above my head playing with my hair. Four delightful, beautiful women! Abigail wiggled her hips to get my attention.

"So, what do you think?"

"Hmmm, I think your hip bottom fits into me perfectly."

"Hah!" laughed Abby. "Ilias, be serious!" She kept up her gentle wiggling motion though, very playful. It felt delightful through the loose clothes.