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==================
=  Chapter Nine  =
==================

Stephanie, Rayan, Palm-Frond, and indeed Goh, has to help Lutrin go

into hiding.

Lutrin's hideout was an old beach shack on the northern coast of a

dry, wind-swept continent in Malasrion.

The troupe had to drive to get to the destination, they could not use

up too much of their apperceptive energy to arrive there immediately.

As it was, given the way things were going, even using at much energy

as they were on rescuing Lutrin from assassination was going to leave

them with too little in order for all the rest of them to go to the

final layer of the state.

The drive took all day. They began at the state border checkpoint,

which was an aluminium shed, and got into their four-wheel drive and

began driving out into the wilderness.

This, Stephanie thought, was not going to be as simple as it seemed. I

am wise, Stephanie said. I will wait and see. I have never experienced

this before, so I am going to be well-prepared.

This journey, Goh thought, and then later said, is going to be a real

trial. I have many superstitions about this land. This, rightly and

truthfully, is a trial. I am testing myself by coming. I am being

tested by coming. This transit across this demonic and angelic land is

undoubtedly, and truthfully, mystical for me.

Rayan said--"We will arrive soon." This journey, for me, I have done

many times. Perhaps this was once a challenge for me, but I have long

dealt with this particular activity. I am at rest. I see nothing but

landscape and road. I see beautiful vistas and fauna. I see birds

flying, I see kangaroos, I see wattles. This is almost joyous for me,

if only I did not have to drive. This, in the end, for me, is work.

This, Palm-Frond thought, was my most recent challenge that I

overcame. The secret to this particular test is not to look for

meaning *in* the void that is driven across. The meaning *is* the

void. The very monistic substance of Nature Itself. When it is

realised that both mind and, this void-like, mindless extension of

space that occurs in the middle of the transit are just attributes of

a bigger substance, and are not substances themselves, then the

landscape becomes intelligible, and the car drive is is just an

absolutely stellar car drive.

The enormous milky way, Palm-Frond continued thining, that towers

above you and absorbs you at the end of the car drive is an amazing

experience.

Lutrin slept. She slept the jostled sleep of a car drive full of

people. She wept a little as she woke deep into the car trip, at dusk,

because she felt to blame for risking the revolution.

Eventually Lutrin's tears ceased and she steeled her resolve. Both

Rayan and Lutrin knew something that the others did not. The real

trial of the journey was after the drive through the penetrating

spiritual daggers of the bush.

Someone was already squatting at the secret hideout of the

revolutionaries. It was, in a way, almost convenient that Lutrin had

survived the assassination while Stephanie and Rayan had gone. They

had known for several Earth years that someone had returned to the

shack. Perhaps someone's child? Perhaps someone survived after all

these years in hermitude, hiding for centuries?

Or was it worse? Was someone waiting for them? Was someone flushing us

out? Was someone just living there, having moved off the

land--or--shipwrecked, which could be absolutely likely.

No-one else was the wiser, so they drove, and drove.

Goh stated out of the window the whole time. You did not have to do

this. You could listen to the road, you could feel the heat of the

sun, you could grow cold from the wind and the rain.

But Goh stared and stared. His being became nothingness. He decided he

may as well release his disbelief in the idea that experience is

involuntary.

He was a pure conduit for his eyes. He took every image of the world

in uncritically and built, from it, criticism. The world was speaking

to him, endless songs and words. Of all languages, and of every

language. He realised that experience is not just involuntary, but

actively involuntary. Or perhaps, he mused, involuntarily active.

Ha. He thought. It seems I have had the experience of the unity of my

consciousness the whole time. I can tackle this challenge with a

subjective approach, Goh thought. Palm-Frond talks of a universal

monadic substance, and I can see that. But I am accessing this

universal natural substance through my ability to experience. I have

taken a more concrete approach.

The vista of the landmasses and celestial bodies was laid out before

Goh. He marvelled in the pure beauty of both the day and the night,

and saw stars born and extinguished, and welcomed the appearance of

beautiful close-by planets.

Lutrin awoke as the journey newared its end. She sat upright and

tight-lipped. Then she remembered Stephanie.

We she was asked about the harrowing journey of supposedly great

void-like mind-absorption, Stephanie replied, "oh, I have driven up

this coast many times. This was my own dream, wasn't it. THis is a

beautiful dream that I routinely have, of incredible WA bush."

They all nodded. It made sense now. This is the lesson of the tale:

Humans are somehow, or have somehow become cut off from the meaning

inside the cosmos.

This was a journey where Malasrionese are not protected from human

ways of thinking. This is third-dimensional thought.

The emptiness of human experience is their undoing. But this challenge

does not have just one answer. That is why Rayan has largely forgotten

the active task of reorienting his thinking to human common sense

thought becuase he has it has a habit now.

Stephanie recognised only a mere projection of her own mind, because

there was nothing to strip away.

Goh was inexperienced, but devised a novel solution.

This was Palm-Frond's first adult experience of the mastery of having

higher dimensional-powers removed.

Lutrin? The drive bothers her not. She was the one who selected and

erected the beach shack hideout.

- EOF -