Annex · The Training Temple

The Training Temple

The borrowed chamber where dialling is taught, and the contemplative order that staffs it.

Function: DIALLING INSTRUCTIONLocation: Sub-facility, beneath SUB-B13Staffed by: THE STILL POINT ORDEROwner: Training

FIG. T · The training temple. A small, very old stone chamber beneath the facility — borrowed, not built. Dialling instruction is given here.

1.0 The Temple

The training temple is a single small chamber of dressed stone, deep beneath the facility — older, by every survey, than anything the programme poured around it, and finer; we did not build it, we found it and cleared it. It holds a low meditation dais, niches for oil lamps, and the kind of silence that has weight. The crews train here because, the instructors say, the room helps — that a space kept still for a very long time holds a charge of its own, an anchor for the mind the way a soldier's token is an anchor for the lock.

2.0 The Order, and the Arrangement

Instruction is provided, under a standing arrangement, by the Still Point Order — a contemplative brotherhood whose discipline long predates the gate and who regard dialling as a single, minor use of it. They are not employees and take no payment the finance system recognises. They come when asked, teach what they judge a soldier ready to hold, and withhold the rest without apology.

The arrangement was not easy to make and is easy to lose. Its terms are few and absolute: no recording of the deeper instruction; no attempt to weaponise the teaching directly; and no inquiry, by any officer of the programme, into the home of the Order beyond what the Order chooses to show. We kept the terms. In return, after some years, the Order extended the one courtesy that matters here — it allowed a small number of the programme's people to be brought to the place the instructors come from.

NOTE: the Order's home is an island that appears on no chart this command can obtain, reached only in the Order's company. The standing file on the arrangement, and on the place itself, is kept with the monastery that maintains the Order. It is the one thread of this programme that leads somewhere gentle.