Les Johnson - Going Interstellar

But it’s Alicia, the baby, who wins me. She twinkles. She flirts. She touches. At nap time, I hold her in a vidped unit, its screen oranged out and its rockers rocking, and nuzzle her sweet-smelling neck. She tugs at my lip corners and pinches my mouth flat, so involved in reshaping my face that I think her a pudgy sculptor elf. All the while, her agate eyes, bigger than my thumb tips, play across my face with near-sighted adoration.

I stay with Alicia—Alicia Paljor—all the rest of my day. Then the skinny young monk comes to escort me home, as if I need him to, and Mama Dolma hugs me. Alicia wails.

It hurts to leave, but I do, because I must, and even as the hurt fades, the memory of this outstanding birthday begins, that very night, to sing in me like the lovely last notes of Górecki’s Third.

I have never had a better birthday.

Months later, Daddy Simon and Mama Karen Bryn have come up-phase at the same time. Together, they fetch me from my nook in Amdo and walk with me on a good AG day to the cafeteria above the grave-caves of our strut-ship’s central drum, Kham. I ease along the serving line between them, taking tsampa, mushroom cuts, tofu slices, and sauces to make it all edible. The three of us end up at a table in a nook far from the serving line. Music by J. S. Bach spills from speakers in the movable walls, with often a sitar and bells to call up for some voyagers a Himalayan nostalgia to which my folks are immune. We eat fast and talk small.

Then Mama says, “Gee Bee, your father has something to tell you.”

O God. O Buddha. O Larry. O Curly. O Moe.

“Tell her,” Mama says.

Daddy Simon wears the sour face proclaiming that everybody should call him Pieman Oldfart. I hurt to behold him, he to behold me. But at last he gets out that before I stood up-phase, almost three years ago, as the DL’s disputed Soul Child, he and Mama signed apartness documents that have now concluded in an agreement of full marital severance. They continue my folks, but not as the couple that conceived, bore, and raised me. They remain friends but will no longer cohabit because of incompatibilities that have arisen over their up-phase years. It really shouldn’t matter to me, they say, because I’ve become Larry’s protégée with a grand destiny that I will no doubt fulfill as a youth and an adult. Besides, they will continue to parent me as much as my odd unconfirmed status as DL-in-training allows.

I do not cry, as I did upon learning that Captain Xao believes that somebody slew my only-maybe predecessor. I don’t cry because their news feels truly distant, like word of a planet somewhere whose people have brains in their chests. However, it does hurt to think about why I absolutely must cry later.

Daddy gets up, kisses my forehead, and leaves with his tray.

Mama studies me closely. “I’ll always love you. You’ve made me very proud.”

“You’ve made me very proud,” I echo her.

“What?”

We push our plastic fork tines around in our leftovers, which I imagine rising in damp squadrons from our plates and floating up to the air-filtration fans. I wish that I, too, could either rise or sink.

“When will they confirm you?” Mama asks.

“Everything on this ship takes forever: getting from here to there, finding a killer, confirming the new DL.”

“You must have some idea.”

“I don’t. The monks don’t want me. I can’t even visit their make-believe gompas over in U-Tsang.”

“Well, those are sacred places. Not many of us get invitations.”

“But Minister T has declared me the ‘One,’ and Larry has tutored me in thousands of subjects, holy and not so holy. Still, the subsidiary lamas and their silly crew think less well of me than they would of a lame blue mountain sheep.”

“Don’t call their monasteries ‘make-believe,’ Gee Bee. Don’t call these other holy people and their followers ‘silly.’”

“Fie!” I actually tell her. “I wish I were anywhere but on this bean can flung at an iceberg light-years across the stupid universe.”

“Don’t, Greta Bryn. You’ve got a champion in Minister Trungpa.”

“Who just wants to bask in the reflected glory of his next supposed Bodhisattva—which, I swear, I am not.”

Mama lifts her tray and slams it down.

Nobody else seems to notice, but I jump.

“You have no idea,” she says, “who you are or what a champion can do for you, and you’re much too young to dismiss yourself or your powerful advocate.”

One of the Brandenburg Concertos swells, its sitars and yak bells flourishing. Far across the mess hall, Larry shuffles toward us with a tray. Mama sees him, and, just as Daddy did, she kisses my forehead and abruptly leaves. My angry stare tells Larry not to mess with me (no, I won’t apologize for the accidental pun), and Larry veers off to chow with two or three bio-techs at a faraway table.

Today marks another anniversary of the Kalachakra ’s departure from Moon orbit on its crossing to Guge in the Gliese 581 system.

Soon I will turn thirteen. Much has happened in the six years since I woke to find that Sakya Gyatso had died and that I had become Greta Bryn Gyatso, his really tardy reincarnation.

What has not happened haunts me as much as, if not more than, what has. I have a disturbing sense that the ‘investigation’ into Sakya’s murder resides in a secretly agreed-upon limbo. Also, that my confirmation rests in this same foggy territory, with Minister T as my ‘regent.’ Recently, though, at First Officer Nima’s urging, Minister T assigned me a bodyguard from among the monks of U-Tsang Bay, a guy called Ian Kilkhor.

Once surnamed Davis, Kilkhor was born sixteen years into our flight of Canadian parents, techs who’d converted to the Yellow Hat order of Tibetan Buddhists in Calgary, Alberta, a decade before the construction of our interstellar vessel. Although nearing the chronological age of sixty, Kilkhor—as he asks me to call him—looks less than half that and has many admirers among the female ghosts in Kham.

Officer Nima fancies him. (Hey, even I fancy him.)

But she’s celibacy-committed unless a need for childbearing arises on Guge. And assuming her reproductive apparatus still works. Under such circumstances, I suspect that Kilkhor would lie with her.

Here I confess my ignorance. Despite lessons from Larry in the Tibetan language, I didn’t realize, until Kilkhor told me, that his new surname means ‘Mandala.’ I excuse myself on the grounds that ‘Kilkhor’ more narrowly means ‘center of the circle,’ and that Larry often skimps on offering connections. (To improve the health of his ‘mortal coil,’ Larry has spent nearly four of my last six years in an ursidormizine doze. I go to visit him once every two weeks in the pod-lodges of Amdo Bay, but these well-intended homages sometimes feel less like cheerful visits than dutiful viewings.) Also, ‘Kilkhor’ sounds to me more like an incitement to violence than it does a statement of physical and spiritual harmony.

Even so, I benefit in many ways from Kilkhor’s presence as bodyguard and stand-in tutor. Like Larry, Mama and Daddy spend long periods in their pods; and Kilkhor, a monk who knows tai chi chuan, has kept the killer, or killers, of Sakya from slaying me, if such villains exist aboard our ship. (I have begun to doubt they do.) He has also taught me much history, culture, religion, politics, computing, astrophysics and astronomy that Larry, owing to long bouts of hibernizing, has sadly neglected. Also, he weighs in for me with the monks, nuns, and yogis of U-Tsang, who feel disenfranchised in the process of confirming me as Sakya’s successor.