Les Johnson - Going Interstellar

And so we wait.

And so we wait …and finally a small blue envelope rises through the mouth of the crosshatched gold urn. A tug-monk snatches it from the air, before it can descend out of view again, and hands it to the PL.

Startled, because he’s nodded off several times over the past fifty-some minutes, Gelek opens the envelope, pulls out the name slip, reads it to himself, and passes it on to Abbess Yargag, whose excited tug-nuns steady her so that she may announce the name of the true Soul Child.

Of course, that the Abbess has copped this honor tells everybody all that we need to know. She can’t even speak the name on the slip before many in attendance begin to clap their palms against their shoulders. The upshot of this applause, beyond opening my tear ducts, is a sudden propulsion of persons at many different altitudes about the hall: a wheeling zero-g waltz of approbation.

The Panchen Lama, his peers and subordinates in U-Tsang, and secular hierarchs from Amdo and Kham have made my parents starship nobles.

They have bestowed similar, if slightly lesser honors, on Jetsun Trimon’s parents and on Jetsun himself, who wishes to serve us colonizers as Bodhisattva, meteorologist, and lander pilot. In any event, his religious and scientific educations proceed in parallel, and he spends as much time in tech training in Kham Bay as he does in the monasteries in U-Tsang.

As for me, I alternate months among our three drums, on a rotation that pleases more of our ghosts than it annoys. I ask no credit for the wisdom of this scheme, though; I simply wish to rule (although I prefer the verb ‘preside’) in a way promoting shipboard harmony and reducing our inevitable conflicts.

I’ve now spent nearly five years in this allegedly holy office. Earlier today, thinking hard about our arrival at Guge, in only a little over seven Earth years, I summoned Minister Trungpa to my quarters.

“Yes, Your Holiness, what do you wish?” he asked.

“To invite everyone aboard the Kalachakra to submit designs for a special sand mandala. This mandala will commemorate our voyage’s inevitable end and honor it as a fruit of the Hope and Community”—I capitalized the words as I spoke them—“that drove us, or our elders, to undertake this journey.”

Minister T frowns. “Submit designs?”

“Your new auditory aids work quite well.”

“For a competition?”

“Any voyager, any Kalachakran at all, may submit a design.”

“But—”

“The artist monks in U-Tsang, who will create this mandala, will judge the entries blindly to determine our finalists. I’ll decide the winner.”

Minister T does not make eye contact. “The idea of a contest undercuts one of the themes that you wish your mandala to embody, that of Community.”

“You hate the whole idea?”

He hedges: “Appoint a respected Yellow Hat artist to design the mandala. In that way, you’ll avoid a bureaucratic judging process and lessen popular discontent.”

“Look, Neddy, a competition will amuse everyone, and after a century aboard this vacuum-vaulting bean can, we could all use some amusement.”

Neddy would like to dispute the point, but I am the Dalai Lama, and what can he say that will not seem a coddling or a defiant promotion of his own ego? Nothing. (May Chenrezig forgive me, but I relish his discomfiture.) Clearly, the West animates parts of my ego that I should better hide from those of my subjects—a term I loathe—immersed in Eastern doctrines that guarantee their fatalism and docility. Of course, how many men of Minister Trungpa’s station and age enjoy carrying out the bidding of a woman a mere twenty-four-years old?

At length he softly says, “I’ll see to it, Your Holiness.”

“I can see to it myself, but I wanted your opinion.”

He nods, his look implying that his opinion doesn’t count for much, and takes a deferential step back.

“Don’t leave. I need your advice.”

“As much as you needed my opinion?”

I take his arm and lead him to a nook where we can sit and talk as intimates. Fortunately, the AG has worked much more reliably all over the ship than it did before my investiture. Neddy looks grizzled, fatigued, and wary, and although he doesn’t yet understand why, he has cause for this wariness.

“I want to have a baby,” I tell him.

He responds instantly: “I advise you not to, Your Holiness.”

“I don’t solicit your advice in that area. I’d like you to help me settle on a father for the child.”

Neddy reddens. I’ve stolen his breath. He’d like to make a devastatingly incisive remark, but can’t even manage a feeble Ugh. “In case it’s crossed your mind, I haven’t short-listed you—although Mama once gave you a terrific, if unasked for, recommendation.”

Minister T pulls himself together, but he’s squeezing his hands in his lap as if to express oil from between them.

“I’ve narrowed the candidates down to two, Jetsun Trimon and Ian Kilkhor, but lately I’ve started tilting toward Jetsun.”

“Then tilt toward Ian.”

“Why?”

And Mama’s lover provides me with good, dispassionate reasons for selecting the older man: physical fitness, martial arts ability, maturity, intelligence, learning (secular, religious, and technical), administrative/organizational skills, and long-standing affection for me. Jetsun, not yet twenty, has two or three separate callings that he has not yet had time to explore as fully as he ought, and the difference in our ages will lead many in our community to suppose that I have exercised my power in an unseemly way to bring him to my bed. I should give the kid his space.

I know from private conversations, though, that when Jetsun was ten, an unnamed senior monk in Amdo often employed him as a drombo, or passive sex partner, and that the experience nags at him now in ways that Jetsun cannot easily articulate. Apparently, the community didn’t see fit, back then, to exercise its outrage on behalf of a boy not yet officially identified as a Soul Child. Of course, the community didn’t know, or chose not to know, and uproars rarely result from awareness of such liaisons, anyway. Isn’t a monk a man? I say none of this to Neddy.

“Choose Ian,” he says, “if you must choose one or the other.”

Yesterday, in Kham Bay, after I extended an intranet invitation to him to come see me about his father, who lies ill in his eggshell pod, Jetsun Trimon called upon me in the upper-level stateroom that I inherited, so to speak, from my predecessor. Jetsun fell on his knees before me, seized my wrist, and put his lips to the beads, bracelet, and watch that I wear about it. He wanted prayers for his father’s recovery, and I acceded to this request with all my heart.

Then something occurred that I set down with joy rather than guilt. I wanted more from Jetsun than gratitude for my prayers, and he wanted more than my prayers for his worry about his father or for his struggles to master all his studies. Like me, he wished the solace of the flesh, and as one devoted to compassion, forgiveness, contentment, and the alleviation of pain, I took him to my bed and divested him of his garments and let him divest me of mine. Then we embraced, neither of us trembling, or sweating, or flinching in discomfort or distress, for my quarters hummed at a subsonic frequency with enough warmth and gravity to offset any potential malaise or annoyance. Altogether sweetly, his tenderness matched mine. However—