6

Entering the temple

Being a Tuesday morning, nobody disembarked the Jar to visit the temple. As Jon rode his bike along the rocky coast toward the ruins, the air felt light and fresh and made him think of a white sheet drying in the sunshine.

Here and there he passed the rubble of dilapidated walls covered with moss and grass. By the crumbling temple gate, a young woman in a ticket booth watched him parking his bike.

“Have visiting hours started?” asked Jon.

“Our schedule is projected here, sir.”

The girl pointed at something in the air that Jon could not see.

“Oh, your Eye is out…”

“Let me put it in.”

Jon kept his 3RD-Eye travel case in a breast pocket for quick access. As he fixed his Eye in place, a projection appeared displaying hours and prices.

The sign indicated that temple hours ran from nine to three, six days a week. Jon purchased a ticket from a message prompt that had typed itself out in the air.

10u

adult ticket x1

age bracket ( 30)

morning discount

weekday discount

unemployment discount

Transfer 10u?

Yes / No

As he completed the transaction, the girl handed him a ticket projection. To anybody not wearing their Eyes, they would have appeared to be handing air to each other.

“You’ll have the whole temple to yourself! Nobody ever comes on Tuesdays unless it’s a holiday.”

“Lucky me,” said Jon, grinning.

“At the temple gate, hold out your ticket, and you can have a guided tour via the Eye.”

The actual temple was obscured by floating arrows pointing toward it, flashing and saying, ‘THIS WAY TO THE TEMPLE OF SIRIADNE!’ Signs hanging in the air listed sundry facts, like ‘MORE THAN 4,000 YEARS OF HISTORY!’

Jon sighed.

“Kind of takes away from the atmosphere, don’t you think?”

“I could give you the tour as well.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, I’m actually a research student going for my ultralaureate, but this job is part of my student responsibilities while I write my thesis… When they say ‘free education,’ they usually mean having a job like this on the side.”

“Well, I’d love a tour.”

“You would?”

This seemed to genuinely surprise her.

“Let’s do it!” she said, leaping out of her chair. "I’ve never actually given the tour before, but I help writing the scripts. I tried to warn the designers about those tacky signs, though. They insisted the tourists would get lost without them, so I was like, ‘Lost how? It’s a peninsula. Where are they going to get lost?’ You know? I’ll tell you when to put your Eye in for the good parts… By the way, I’m Gabby.”

The student Jon met that day would become one of the most respected academics in the field of archaeology from the archaic period. To this day, Dr Gabrielle Devine’s mass-market history, Our Shared Origins, and a separate tract on early religion in Icomo are widely read by laymen.

“As you probably know, this is the Temple of Siriadne, a goddess who had a cult following larger than most other gods and goddesses, but who is far more mysterious than any of them,” said Gabby. Passing through the gate, Jon’s ticket dematerialized. “You can see Siriadne’s statue over there…”

A cracked pedestal bore a throne on which a headless Siriadne was seated. Beside her was a stone dog. It reminded Jon of the dog from yesterday. Siriadne’s hand was resting on its head.

“The dog’s eyes…” said Jon, approaching.

“Beautiful, aren’t they? Pure tourmaline.”

The cyan gemstone, blue as the clearest of crystal shallows, twinkled in the dog’s eyes.

“Now would be a good time to put your Eye in,” said Gabby.

Jon obeyed.

The room underwent a complete restoration as his Eye activated. The paintings on the walls revived with vibrant depictions of ancient men and women in flowing clothes, waiting in line. Projections of torches illuminated the room with artificial light, and the statue of Siriadne had a head again. Tourmaline eyes shined from her observant gaze. In her right hand, she held a mirror that reflected Jon’s own face as he stood before the goddess, allowing him to watch himself watching her.

“The restoration is based on an illustration made centuries ago by an explorer from Ii,” said Gabby. “Unfortunately, the statue’s degraded since then. The walls aren’t actually as old as the foundations of the temple, though, which means this area was probably a place of worship long before the present building existed. The cult of Siriadne is ancient, indeed. Most temples in Icomo are like that. Their foundations are some of the oldest structures ever discovered from the archaic period, suggesting that early Icomo religion was already developed when our ancestors originally migrated to this continent for reasons unknown to us, bringing their gods along with them.”

Finished this speech, she sighed.

“Isn’t it miraculous to think about? The people who migrated here were like our own family, but we know nothing about them at all. We don’t even know why they came here. It’s like all of us are suffering from a form of collective amnesia. Thinking about it makes me sad sometimes.”

Her eyes glazed over as she began to lose herself in contemplation, but after a moment she snapped out of it.

“Do you see the people in the wall paintings? The one’s lining up?”

“I do.”

“We believe they were initiates of the cult, about to undergo a ceremony or ritual of some kind. Based on the paintings, we know they needed to pass through that door behind Siriadne’s statue…”

She pointed.

“It leads down a long stone hallway. It would have been unlit, and very dark.”

Jon peered down the black corridor. He could not see the end.

“Where does it go?”

“At the end of the corridor is a crawl space. It’s likely that not everyone would have felt brave enough to try crawling through. On the other side, a priest of Siriadne entered from a back door and waited for the initiate…

“We can only guess,” Gabby went on, “but the mainstream theory is that it represents a process of rebirth. Afterward, they would receive a teaching from the priest, and gain access to the Siriadic mysteries. We know from other, more well-documented cults, that the ancient mysteries were bodies of knowledge to which initiates gained access. The Siriadic mysteries are the least well-known, but also the most ancient.”

Staring down the dark corridor and imagining the crawl space made Jon uncomfortable.

“What’s in the room after the crawl space?”

Gabby smirked at him.

“I’ll show you.”

They went down a hallway with paintings of Siriadne running with her guardian dog. Tourmaline gemstones were fixed into their eyes. At the end of the hall, they reached the back entrance of the initiation room...