The Hypothesis of Dwindling
The Hypothesis of Dwindling: An Oration by Voice Kailas Nemni in the Grand Atrium of Carver's Hall, Nemnosti, 16 Khurar, 768
Brother Voices, Sister Hands, acolytes young and old, I speak today not out of any pleasure, for the matter I raise is one that I know will cause you to think my gall bladder has burst. But rather, I come to this conclusion from the liver, from many years now of silent introspection and weary research, and an awareness that what I am about to say is a shock. And it is simply this:
- Where once, many saints awakened, now, gradually, as the river flows to the sea, there are fewer every year;
- And so too, we may expect that pace to dwindle further with the passing of the years;
- And in that dwindling we may foresee the day when the last saint will awaken, perhaps not in this century or the next, but soon after that;
- And that in perhaps two hundred years every saint ever to awaken shall be known, and the Unfolding shall give us no more.
I have come to this conclusion, as I say, not with joy, and indeed with trepidation. It has taken me many years, pursuing histories of births and deaths, of the ranks of the Khutuan saints who, for the past three hundred years, we know well. I know that some of you will regard this claim as, at best, the genealogical meanderings of a fool; that you may treat it with righteous skepticism, and even anger. I ask not that you accept the dwindling hypothesis at all, today, but that you keep your spleen clear for the possibility that it is so.
Above all, I stress that none of this bears even a whit on our love for The Lady, and Her teachings of the Courses, nor indeed on the teachings of Zunuga, Our Breath whose Epiphany brought us to understand awakening and the Six Kinds. But just as the fierce mountain stream in spring dries up by autumn, Kinds bring themselves under the natural law of decay. We may be given our Saints forever, but the institution of sainthood is a transient gift.
