Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

I eat nothing. I drink nothing. I say nothing.

“At least I’ve told you a truth,” Daddy says. “More than one, in fact. Can’t you do the same for me? Or does the mere self-aggrandizing idea of Dalai Lamahood clamp your windpipe shut on the truth?”

I have expected neither these revelations nor their vehemence, but together they work to unclamp something inside me. I owe my father my life, at least in part, and the dawning awareness that he has never stopped caring for me suggests—in fact, requires—that I repay him truth for truth.

“Yes, I can do the same for you.”

Daddy’s eyes, above their bruised half-circles, never leave mine.

“I didn’t choose this life at all,” I say. “It was thrust upon me. I want to be a good person, a Bodhisattva possibly, maybe even the Dalai Lama. But—”

He lifts his eyebrows and goes on waiting. A tender twinge of a smile plays about his mouth.

“But,” I finish, “I’m not happy that maybe I want these things.”

“Buddhists don’t aspire to happiness, Greta, but to an oceanic detachment.”

I give him my fiercest Peeved Daughter look, but do refrain from eyeball-rolling. “I just need an attitude adjustment, that’s all.”

“The most wrenching attitude adjustment in the universe won’t turn a carp into a cougar, pumpkin.” His pet name for me.

“I don’t need the most wrenching attitude adjustment in the universe. I need a self-willed tweaking.”

“Ah.” Daddy takes a squeeze-swig of his beer and encourages me with an inviting gesture to eat.

My gorge has fallen, my hunger reappeared. I eat and drink and, as I do, become unsettlingly aware that other patrons in the Bhurel—visitors, monks—have detected my presence. Blessedly, though, they respect our space.

“Suppose the lottery goes young Trimon’s way,” Daddy says. “What would make you happy in your resulting alternate life?”

I consider this as a peasant woman of a past era might have done if a friend had asked, just as a game, ‘What would you do if the King chose you to marry his son?’ But I play the game in reverse, sort of, and can only shake my head.

Daddy waits. He doesn’t stop waiting, or searching my eyes, or studying me with his irksome unwavering paternal regard. He won’t speak, maybe because everything else about him—his gaze, his patience, his presence—speaks strongly of what for years went unspoken between us.

Full of an inarticulate wistfulness, I lean back. “I’ve told you a truth already,” I inform my father. “Isn’t that enough for tonight?”

A teenage girl and her mother, oaring subtly with their hands to maintain their places beside us, hover at our table. Even though I haven’t seen the girl for several years (while, of course, she hibernized), I recognize her: Distinctive agate eyes in an elfin face identify her at once.

Daddy and I both lever ourselves up from our places, and I swim out to embrace the girl. “Alicia!” Over her shoulder, I say to her mother in all earnestness, “Mrs. Paljor, how good to see you here!”

“Forgive us for interrupting,” Mrs. Paljor says. “We’ve come for the Gold Urn Festival, and we just had to wish you success tomorrow. Alicia wouldn’t rest until Kanjur found a way for us to attend.”

Kanjur Paljor, Alicia’s father, has served since the beginning of our voyage as our foremost antimatterice fuel specialist. If anyone could get his secular wife and daughter to U-Tsang for the DL lottery, Kanjur Paljor could. He enjoys the authority of universal respect. As for Alicia, she scrunches her face in embarrassment, as well as unconditional affection. She recalls the many times that I came to Momo House to hold her, and later to her family’s Kham Bay rooms to take her on walks or on outings to our art, mathematics, and science centers.

“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you.”

I hug the girl. I hug her mother.

My father nods and smiles, albeit bemusedly. I suspect that Daddy has never met Alicia or Mrs. Paljor before. Kanjur, the father and husband, he undoubtedly knows. Who doesn’t know that man?

The Paljor women depart almost as quickly as they came. Daddy watches them go, with a deep exhalation of relief that makes me hurt for them both.

“I was almost a second mother to that girl,” I tell him.

Daddy oars himself downward, back into his seat. “Surely, you exaggerate. Mrs. Paljor looks more than sufficient to the task.”

Long before noon of the next day, the courtyard of the Jokhang Temple swarms with levitating lamas, monks, nuns, yogis, and some authorized visitors from the Kalachakra’s other two passenger bays. I cannot explain how I feel. If Mama’s story of Sakya Gyatso’s heart attack is true, then I cannot opt out of the gold-urn lottery.

To do so would constitute a terrible insult to his punarbhava, or karmic change from one life vessel to the next, or from his body to mine. Mine, as everyone knows, established its bona fides as a living entity years before Sakya Gyatso died. Also, opting out would constitute a heartless slap in the face of all believers, of all who support me in this enterprise. Still… .

Does Sakya have the right to self-direct his rebecoming, or I the right to thwart his will… or only the obligation to accede to it? So much self will and worry taints today’s ceremony that Larry and Kilkhor, if not Minister T, can hardly conceive of it as deriving from Buddhist tenets at all.

Or can they? Perhaps a society rushing at twenty percent of light-speed toward some barely imaginable karmic epiphany has slipped the surly bonds not only of Earth but also of the harnessing principles of Buddhist Tantra. I don’t know. I know only that I can’t withdraw from this lottery without betraying a good man who esteemed me in the noblest and most innocent of senses.

And so, in our filigreed vestments, Jetsun Trimon and I swim up to the circular dais to which the attendants of the Panchen Lama have already fastened the gold urn for our name slips.

In set-back vertical ranks, choruses of floating monks and nuns chant as we await the drawing. Our separate retinues hold or adjust their altitudes behind us, both to hearten us and to keep their sight lanes clear. Tiny levitating cameras, costumed as birds, televise the event to community members in all three bays.

Jetsun’s boyish face looks at once exalted and terrified.

Lhundrub Gelek, the Panchen Lama, lifts his arms and announces that the lottery has begun. Today he blazes with the bearing and the ferocity of a Hebrew seraph. Tug-monks keep him from rising in gravid slow motion to the ceiling. Abbess Yeshe Yargag levitates about a meter to his right, with tug-nuns to keep her from wandering up, down, or sideways. Gelek reports that name slips for Jetsun Trimon and Greta Bryn Brasswell already drift about in the oversized urn attached to the dais. Neither of us, he says, needs to maneuver forward to reach into the urn and pull out a name-slip envelope. Nor do we need surrogates to do so.

We will simply wait.

We will simply wait… until an envelope rises on its own from the urn.

Then Gelek will grab it, open the envelope, and read the name-slip aloud for all those watching in the Temple hall or via telelinks. Never mind that our wait could take hours, and that, if it does, viewers in every bay will volunteer to rejoin the vast majority of our population in ursidormizine slumber.

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.