Les Johnson - Going Interstellar

Finally I ask, “What did that Minister T mean?”

“About what?” Mama doesn’t eye me when she speaks.

“That I’m the ‘One.’ Why’d he say that?”

“He’s upset and everybody aboard has gone a little loco.”

“Why?” But maybe I know. We ride so long that anyone riding with us sooner or later crazies up: inboard fever. Captain Xao once warned of this.

Mama says, “His Holiness, Sakya Gyatso, has died, so we’re stupid with grief and thinking hard about how to replace him. Minister Trungpa, our late Dalai Lama’s closest friend, thinks you’re his rebirth, Greta Bryn.”

I don’t get this. “He thinks I’m not I?”

“I guess not. Grief has fuddled his reason, but maybe just temporarily.”

“I am I,” I say to Mama awful hot, and she agrees.

But I remember the Dalai Lama. When I was four, he played Go Fish with me in Amdo Bay during my second up-phase. Daddy sneak-named him Yoda, like from Star Wars , but he looked more like skinny Mr. Peanut on the peanut tins. He wore a one-lens thing and a funny soft yellow hat, and he taught me a song, “Loving the Ant, Loving the Elephant.” After that, I had to take my ursidormizine and hibernize. Now Minister T says the DL is I, or I am he, but surely Mama hates as much as I do how such stupidity could maybe steal me off from her.

“I don’t look like Sakya Gyatso. I’m a girl, and I’m not an Asian person.” Then I yell at Mama, “I am I!”

“Actually,” Mama says, “things have changed, and what you speak as truth may have also changed, kiddo.”

Everybody who gets a say in Amdo Bay now thinks that Minister Nyendak Trungpa calls me correctly. I am not I: I am the next Dalai Lama. The Twenty-first, Sakya Gyatso, has died, and I must wear his sandals. Mama says he died of natural causes, but too young for it to look natural. He hit fifty-four, but he won’t hit Guge. If I am he, I must take his place as our colony dukpa, which in Tibetan means ‘shepherd.’ That job scares me.

A good thing has come from this scary thing: I don’t have to go back up into my egg pod and then down again. I stay up-phase. I must. I have too much to learn to drowse forever, even if I can sleep-learn by hypnoloading. Now I have this vidped booth that I sit in to learn and a tutor-guy, Lawrence (‘Larry’) Rinpoche, who loads on me a lot.

How old has all my earlier sleep-loading made me? Hibernizing, I hit seven and learnt while dreaming.

People should not call me Her Holiness. I’m a girl person—not a Chinese or a Tibetan. I tell Larry this when he swims into my room in Amdo. I’ve seen him in spectals about samurai and spacers, where he looks dark-haired and chest-strong. Now, anymore, he isn’t. He has silver hair and hips like Mama’s. His eyes do a flash thing, though, even when he’s not angry, and it throws him back into the spectals he once star-played in as cool guy Lawrence Lake.

“Do I look Chinese, or Tibetan, or even Indian?” Larry asks.

“No you don’t,” I say. “But you don’t look like no girl either.”

“A girl, Your Holiness.” Larry must correct me, Mama says, because he will teach me logic, Tibetan art and culture, Sanskrit, Buddhist philosophy, and medicine (space and otherwise). And also poetry, music and drama, astronomy, astrophysics, synonyms, and Tibetan, Chinese, and English. Plus cinema, radio/TV history, politics and pragmatism in deep-space colony planting, and lots of other stuff.

“No girl ever got to be Dalai Lama,” I tell Larry.

“Yes, but our Fourteenth predicted his successor would hail from a place outside Tibet; and that he might re-ensoul not as a boy but as a girl.”

“But Sakya Gyatso, our last, can’t stick his soul in this girl.” I cross my arms and turn a klutz-o turn.

“O Little Ocean of Wisdom, tell me why not.”

Stupid tutor-guy. “He died after I got borned. How can a soul jump in the skin of somebody already borned?”

“Born, Your Holiness. But it’s easy. It just jumps. The samvattanika viññana, the evolving consciousness of a Bodhisattva, jumps where it likes.”

“Then what about me, Greta Bryn?” I tap my chest.

Larry tilts his ginormous head. “What do you think?”

Oh, that old trick. “Did it kick me out? If it kicked me out, where did I go?”

“Do you feel it kicked you out, Your Holiness?”

“I feel it never got in. Inside, I feel that I …own myself.”

“Maybe you do, but maybe his punarbhava”—his re-becoming—“is in there mixing with your own personality.”

“But that’s so scary.”

“What did you think of Sakya Gyatso, the last Dalai Lama? Did he scare you?”

“No, I liked him.”

“You like everybody, Your Holiness.”

“Not anymore.”

Larry laughs. He sounds like he sounded in The Return of the Earl of Epsilon Eridani. “Even if the process has something unorthodox about it, why avoid mixing your soul self with that of a distinguished man you liked?”

I don’t answer this windy ask. Instead, I say, “Why did he have to die, Mister Larry?”

“Greta, he didn’t have much choice. Somebody killed him.”

Every ‘day’ I stay up-phase. Every day I study and try to understand what’s happening on Kalachakra , and how the late Dalai Lama, at swim in my soul, has slipped his bhava, “becoming again,” into my bhava, or “becoming now,” and so has become a thing old and new at the same time.

Larry tells me just to imagine one candle lighting off another (even though you’d be crazy to light anything inside a starship), but my candle was already lit before the last Lama’s got snuffed, and I never even smelt it go out. Larry laughs and says His Dead Holiness’s flame was “never quenched, but did go dim during its forty-nine-day voyage to bardo.” Bardo, I think, must look like a fish tank that the soul tries to swim in even with nothing in it.

Up-phase, I learn more about Kalachakra . I don’t need my tutor-guy. I wander all about, between study and tutoring times. When the artificial-grav cuts off, as it does a lot, I float my ghost self into bays and nooks everywhere.

Our ship has a crazy bigness, like a tunnel turning through star-smeared space, like a train of railroad cars humming through the Empty Vast without any hum. I saw such trains in my hypnoloading sleeps. Now I peep them as spectals and mini-holos and even palm pix.

Larry likes for me to do that too. He says anything ‘fusty and fun’ is OK by him, if it tutors me well. And I don’t need him to help me twig when I snoop Kalachakra . I learn by drifting, floating, swimming, counting, and just by asking ghosts what I wish to know.

Here’s what I’ve learnt by reading and vidped-tasking, snooping and asking:

1. UNS Kalachakra hauls 990 human asses (“and therest of each burro aboard”—Daddy’s dumb joke) to a world in the Goldilocks Zone of the Gliese 581 solar system, 20.3 lights from Sol …the assumed-to-be-live-on-able planet Gliese 581g.2. Captain Xao says that most of us on Kalachakra spend our journey in ursidormizine slumber to dream about our work on Guge. The greatest number of somnacicles—sleepers—have their eggpods in Amdo Bay toward the nose of our ship. (These hibernizing lazybones look like frozen cocoons in their see-through eggs.) Those of us more often up-phase slumber at ‘night’ in Kham Bay, where tech folk and crew do their work. At the rear of our habitat drum lies U-Tsang Bay, which I haven’t visited, but where, Mama says, our Bodhisattvas—monks, nuns, lamas, and such—reside, down- or up-phase.3. All must wriggle up-phase once each year or two. You cannot hibernize longer than two at a snooze because we human somnacicles go dodgy quite soon during our third year drowse, so Captain Xaotells us, “We’ll need every hand on the ground once we’re all down on Guge.” (“Every foot on the ground,” I would say.)4. Red dwarf star Gliese 581, also known as Zarmina,spectral class M3V, awaits us in constellation Libra. Captain Xao calls it the eighty-seventh closest known solar system to our sun. It has seven planets and spurts out X-rays. It will flame away much sooner than Sol, but so far from now that none of us on Kalachakra will care a toot.5. Gliese 581g, aka Guge, goes around its dwarf in a circle, nearly. It has one face stuck toward its sun, but enough gravity to hold its gasses to it; enough—more than Earth’s—so you can walk without floating away. But it will really hot you on the sun-stuck side and chill you nasty on its drearydark rear. It’s got rocks topside and magma in its zonal mountains. We must live in the in-between stripes of the terminator, safe spots for bipeds with blood to boil or kidneys to broil. Or maybe we’ll freeze, if we land in the black. So two hurrahs for Guge, and three for ‘The Land of Snow’ in the belts where we hope to plug in.6. We know Guge has mass. It isn’t, says Captain Xao, a “pipedream or a mirage.” Our onboard telescope found it twelve Earth years ago, seventyout from Moon-orbit kickoff, with maybe twenty or so to go now before we really get there. Hey, I’m more than a smidgen scared to arrive, hey, maybe a million smidgens.7. I’m also scared to stay an up-phase ghost on Kalachakra . Like a snow leopard or a yeti, I am an endangered species. I don’t want to step up to Dalai Lamahood. It’s got its perks, but until Captain Xao, Minister T, Larry Rinpoche, Mama, Daddy, and our security persons find out WHO kilt the twenty-first DL, Greta Bryn, a maybe DL,thinks her life worth one dried pea in a vacu-meal pack. Maybe.8. In the tunnels all among Amdo, Kham, and U-Tsang Bays, the ghost of a snow leopard drifts. It has cindery spots swirled into the frosting of its fur. Its eyes leap yellow-green in the dimness when it peeks back at two-leggers like me. It jets from a holo-beam, but I don’t know how or wherefrom. In my dreams, I turn when I see it. My heart flutter-pounds toward shutdown….9. Sakya Gyatso spent many years as a ghost on Kalachakra . He never hibernized more than three months at once, but tried to blaze at full awakeness like a Bodhisattva. He slept the bear slumber, when he did, but only because on Guge he’ll have to lead 990 shipboard faithfuls and millions of Tibetan Buddhists, native and not, in their unjust exiles. Can an up-phase ghost, once it really dies, survive on a strut-ship as a ghost for real? Truly, I do not know.10. Once I didn’t know Mama’s or Daddy’s first names. Tech is a title not a name, and Tech Brasswell married my mama, Tech Bonfils, aboard Kalachakra (Captain Xao saying the words), in the seventy-fourth year of our flight. Tech Bonfils birthed me the following ‘fall,’ one of just forty-seven children born in our trip to Guge. Luckily, Larry Rinpoche told me my folks’ names: Simon and Karen Bryn. Now I don’t even know if they like each other. But I know, from lots of reading, that S. Hawking, this century-gone physicist, believed people are not quantifiable. He was definitely right about that.