Ten Directions

by Samuel Winburn

  The barley was carefully measured - one hundred grams for this week’s real meals. It had arrived with the chirpee cheese the other day, the other week, the other month? Time was almost meaningless here. Five kilos to last the next six months. In any case it was a welcome treat, thoughtfully supplied by his mother’s cousin, Thubten Lodi. The alternative fare was a textureless paste, with an assortment of flavors all equally indistinguishable, reconstituted from a self-sufficient blend of skin cells from the cabin air, yesterday’s cough, last week’s bowel movement, and a brew of organic molecules harvested from sediments outside.

  Kalsang listened to the continual and comforting scuttles issuing from the walls around him. His tiny friends were busy, keeping life going in this self-contained world. He glanced through the clear panels that revealed the activity occurring within his Terrapod, which was one of the newest Luna bred extra-terrestrial ecosystems. Nanodroids, like molecule-sized farmers and veterinarians, roamed about selectively catalyzing reactions, recycling nutrients, harvesting products essential for the balanced functioning of all the inhabitants of the Terrapod of which Kalsang was the least essential member. Kalsang was happy to return whatever contribution he could as the nanodroids clambered about his veins and digestive tract harvesting compounds required by the others.

  Kalsang noticed another incoming message, this one coming from a friend.

  “Aurora. . . Rora bora dora. He He.”

  Kalsang welcomed the transmission into his mind and smiled as Aurora materialised before him like a goddess in a dream. For some reason she always seemed young, even though she was older than he. Why would it be? Then he concentrated to hear her talk.

  “Oh Kalsang. Mate, I need to unload.”

  Oh dear. She looked too stressed. Kalsang invoked visualisations of the Buddhas to accompany Aurora in her sadness.

  “I don’t know what to do. No one seems to care. There is an entire potential world of life here and it is just too inconvenient to know. They’re sending me home Kalsang, when I am so close.”

  And then she let her emotions flow, like rain. Letting herself release. Telling the truth. Kalsang enjoyed her messages, and even though they couldn’t have a real conversation because of the lag he felt like they were keeping him from falling off the edge of loneliness.

  Rocket capsules of hot barley cracked open all at once and jetted through the air in wild, twisting arcs. Oh, what to do?

  Releasing the ghost of Aurora from his attention, Kalsang yanked a magnetized plastic waste bin from the wall and held it patiently over the hot plate to contain the swarm. He grimaced as his hand brushed the hot pan and he pulled faces at his reflection in the portal.

  The barley dance ceased. A few erratic puffs and those grains not electrostatically attached to the walls of the bin slowly settled into the pan. Kalsang switched off the heat and searched for his grinding tool, a hand-held fire extinguisher. He then relaxed into the rhythmic motion of crushing the roasted cereal into flour.

  “May all beings find happiness and its causes.”

  Kalsang switched off Aurora with the intent to give her full attention later. His eyes narrowed contentedly as he concentrated on grinding the barley.

  “May they be free of suffering and its causes.”

  Kalsang stared out the portals at the frozen panorama where single flecks of pink snow, dropped one by one by scant winds, landed atop inch high drifts about the base of his retreat. In the pale light of the distant Sun, diminished to a thirtieth of its familiar glory, the snow reflected an eerie spectrum of strangely coordinated colors. Triton was a land that had been still since the beginning and a place perfectly suited for meditation, far from the endless dance of Samsara on a crowded Earth. He was growing accustomed to this place and he felt that it would be difficult to leave.

  “May they find the happiness that never ends.”

  Steam whistled from a hole in the wall.

  “May they dwell in equanimity free from extremes of craving and hatred.”

  Time for tea.

  Kalsang mentally summoned a hose from the ceiling. Hot steam and water gurgled forth and settled gingerly on the bottom of a rough, ornately carved, and colorfully painted wooden tube. In went a few cubes of what one might, for want of a better word, call butter. Close enough. The tea was real. Kalsang pulled a black, crumbling brick of Indian Darjeeling from a storage bin, and broke off a mindfully rationed bit into the mouth of the churn.

  Pumping the handle of the churn with one hand, his other hand fingering his mala beads, Kalsang began another round of mantras.

  He meditated, relaxing into the repetitive actions of his churning with one hand and the incremental rotation of his mala through the other.

  An alarm beeped on the monitor indicating that the frequency search had returned some more results. Kalsang let go of the churn handle and adjusted his neurovisor. His imagination began to flicker in anticipation, ready to receive whatever image was to be painted onto it.

  This time the customary ghosts of images attempting to be borne did not appear and instead a subtle darkness enveloped his mind. Kalsang leaned over and fiddled with cables on the console to restart the transmission to his neurovisor, which had apparently gone dead.

  Without warning the wall to his left dissolved into a yawning chasm, a deeply unsettling absence of light.

  Kalsang recoiled, tripping over his robe and losing his balance. In the reduced gravity he propelled into the air until the tubes connecting his body stocking to the Terrapod ecosystem yanked him back. He rebounded slowly back onto his tea-drenched cushion.

  As Kalsang regained his balance, he turned and inspected the void now sharing the room with him. He checked his mind carefully. Was he hallucinating, lost in some mistaken nihilistic twist in his meditation? He narrowed the focus of the neuroview, shrinking the hole to harmless dimensions and embedding it in the palm of his hand. He studied it warily before releasing it back into the room.

  Moving his attention from side to side, he probed its depths, looking for something substantial upon which to attach any frame of reference beyond the occasional static. He found nothing other than a blurry edge, which framed the blackness from a more palpable darkness around it that was peppered with stars.

  The focus of the image began to back away, carrying his viewpoint through a portal and into the interior of an aquarium of sorts. A small fish swam about without obvious vertical orientation. One of the alien beings, with a deep sadness recognizable in his many eyes, floated before Kalsang and addressed him in a sonorous whale-song language. The being pointed out several technical schematics and mathematical formulae as they drifted by. When this demonstration had finished the being jabbed a tentacle finger back out of the portal and towards the dreadful void.

  Kalsang registered a movement to his right. A large, round shimmer of blue drifted into the view. It was a world. Not Earth, but as alive, dangling in a halo of translucent rings. Serene and majestic, almost wholly covered by ocean, a vast field of blue flecked with white. Red and green aurorae danced about the top pole. Bands of cloud wrapped around the globe.

  Beneath them Kalsang could make out some disturbance, a web of lines ricocheting about, each traversing the whole visible hemisphere of the planet. The pattern of what were evidently gigantic waves on the surface seemed to converge in the direction of the void as the planet rotated making it apparent that a tremendous gravitational pull was being exerted upon it.

  Black hole. Kalsang knew the theory, the puncturing of the walls of the universe when a massive star, the atomic fires in its heart no longer able to support its weight, collapsed into a point of mass so dense that even light could not escape it. This one was in the process of eating a planet.

  “How horrible.”

  Kalsang shuddered at the monster’s uncompromising pull.

  The focus moved back to the being who closed his eyes in grief. Abruptly Kalsang’s perspective was flung into space, perhaps riding on a robotic probe that had l
aunched out of the being’s spacecraft, although it seemed to have been dropped from some other satellite in a closer orbit. As he fell towards the planet’s surface, the dark scar in the sky fell away behind the horizon; even out of view Kalsang could still feel its pull. As his altitude dropped he began to make out features. Thousands of islands stood as citadels facing the furies of a world-arcing tempest.

  Kalsang, encased in his shell of illusion, plunged into the boiling sea. For a while he was buried in a blanket of green turbulence and the roar of water rushing against water. Then, through the churning murk, lights appeared. Gradually these grew sharper and the outline of a city became apparent as a collection of phosphorescent lights. As he drew nearer the devastation generated by the incredible tidal currents began to become noticeable, chunks of buildings, giant dislodged forests of seaweed, struggling fish some many times larger than whales, all manner of debris.

  A high-pitched sound became discernible, a wailing. The volume built as Kalsang descended; a moaning like the screams of a million whales struggling against a million harpoons. The death-song of an entire world.

  Impossible sadness flooded Kalsang’s heart. He shook and squeezed his eyes shut against the waves of misery assaulting them. He opened them in time to encounter the terrified face of one of the beings rushing towards him, so close that Kalsang automatically reached out to catch the flailing hands. The curtain, through which he could not reach, was light years and centuries thick, but the being’s guttural howl, as it flew by, was instantly translatable. “Help me! Save me!” Kalsang watched helplessly as the being floated away.

  More aliens hurtled by, clutching at the water, at pieces of debris and at each other. A mother reaching out hopelessly to her children. A ball of beings embracing each other tightly, their eyes clamped shut, bracing against the inevitable. Another being, crushed between massive slabs, its life painfully squeezing out into the rushing sea. Kalsang strained to meet their eyes, to make some meaningful contact, to connect. More beings, a cloud of thousands screaming, terrified people being dragged to certain death.

  Their cries were not the cries of strangers. Kalsang knew them. His lives and their lives were intimately interwoven. Together they had created a universe, had been each other’s constant companions, had fought, had loved, and had ignored each other for countless lifetimes. The frantic, helpless people flying past, he recognized as his family, his own long-lost mothers. Time and again, in numberless previous lives, hadn’t they nursed him, cleaned him, cared for him, painstakingly and patiently taught him, and cherished his life above their own? This is what he had been taught since he was a child monk, left by his tearful mother at the monastery, her compassionate hopes for his future only slightly overcoming her natural attachment to her son.

  As he reflected on this, the distinction between these beings and his own lovely mother diminished, and a great sadness ballooned within his broken heart and overflowed in tears. Now they were suffering, drowning in agony, frightened and lost and in shock. They did not recognize him, but he recognized them. Their pain was the same as his pain, but they were many and so were many times more important, as he was only one.

  In Kalsang’s trained imagination, black blisters of smoke began to peel away from the multitude - their fear, their anguish, their frustration and anger, their grasping - all gathered into a great black ball and he breathed it in. The molasses smoke poured into his nostrils and sank within his breast, falling to the bottom of the breath. Waiting to receive it in in his core was his shadow, the collected remnants of lifetimes of delusion. Through the power of compassion, the darkness distilled into light and he breathed it back out to them.

  The process repeated. Black smoke rushed in from the beings and white light returned to them. Kalsang tried to focus on individuals, to keep the process from becoming abstract. The child sobbing and hugging her knees, alone. Two lovers swimming desperately to catch the other’s outstretched hand but being pulled away forever.

  Kalsang longed to connect with their pain and take it away, but he was trying too hard and his efforts solidified into an impregnable wall between him and them. Even so, the echo of their terror lodged in his heart and grew until it overwhelmed him. This wasn’t an exercise dreamt up in the sleepy safety of monastery or retreat. Those beings were falling into an endless abyss and, protected as he was, even he could not keep his composure.

  The dark evil collapsing this world became his own monumental isolation. He was so far away from anyone he had ever loved and who had ever loved him, and it was a separation he was unlikely to escape. As the maelstrom overtook Kalsang he became lost in panic.

  Crack.

  His clenched teeth broke through a hard pebble lodged forgotten in a back molar.

  “Amala.”

  Kalsang clung to those last fragments of hard cheese, as if his sanity depended upon it – rolling them between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. Back and forth, over and again, predictable, safe.

  “So, you have finally found your Self, and in a piece of cheese?” teased a memory of the voice of his precious teacher, Lama Wangmo. The voice seemed so clear and yet no one was there.

  How absurd, isn’t it? The laugh began as a tight giggle and then his whole body began to shake uncontrollably.

  When he recovered himself, Kalsang dove back with renewed purpose into the river of pain and confusion as it pulled both he and the alien beings towards their destruction. This time he sought no feeling of either separation or togetherness – everything was as it was, and that was enough.

  This time as the dark smoke reached his heart it spontaneously ignited into a glow that flared up and then exploded throughout Kalsang’s body, flinging his breath outwards, a supernova of bliss, its shock wave annihilating any suffering it encountered. As the flame overtook each being it sheltered them in a protective cocoon of peace. As warmth flowed into their hearts it filled them with solace, comfort, and courage.

  Kalsang flew along with them, feeling their misery while dispelling it, carried along by the same irresistible tide. As the blackness on the horizon grew darker, the light released from Kalsang’s heart exceeded it.

  Eventually the neuroview shattered into fragments of static, only to reappear back in the aquarium spacecraft. The sad sentinel turned to Kalsang and looked at him directly with many eyes. In its whale-song language the alien announced a eulogy for its world. The tone conveyed an unmistakable warning. “If our loss is to have any meaning don’t do as we have done.”

  Its task finished the alien slumped back.

  A spiral of atmosphere and water leaped off the planet into the darkness and began the orbit down into the black hole. The planet faded brown and began to break into rubble.

  The face of the being contorted in agony and his voice collapsed into a guttural sob. He was so utterly alone, except that he wasn’t. Kalsang was with him. As the being's voice collapsed into silence Kalsang sang to fill the void.

  Dear friend from a distant lost world

  you who were my mother for limitless lifetimes

  just as your kindness has now borne fruit

  in my many opportunities for joy

  just as your care has now borne fruit

  in my freedoms and leisure so difficult to find

  just as your striving has now borne fruit

  in my persistence on the paths of the Victors

  just as your friendship has now borne fruit

  in the poise, which tames my restless mind

  In just this way so too will I,

  Kalsang Jampa,

  solitary meditator with few realizations,

  for you become

  the sun warming your frozen heart

  the open sky free of every obstacle

  the wide river carrying you to the ocean of endless bliss

  the firm gentle ground to hold up your peace

  The signal carrying the message had run out, flowing through the maze of circuits and amplifiers like the last grains of san
d in an hourglass. They focused in a parabolic antenna on top of the Terrapod and launched Earthward on a beam of laser light, instantaneously puncturing the thin atmosphere of Triton.

  Looking back from the quickly changing vantage of the signal, in the first second a small pink world snapped suddenly into relief against the deep blue of Neptune. In another few seconds both worlds were swallowed by the ubiquitous emptiness of space as the signal began its long journey, via a relay of micro-satellites, to an uncertain reception by those at Mirtopik who controlled the receiver.

  Meanwhile Kalsang sat, over and over again breathing in the agony of a world long dead and breathing hope out into the universe. Fullness pervaded his tiny hermitage. Electric offering lamps flickered before a simple altar, backlighting neurographic images of the Buddhas and meditating gurus. Cooling butter tea surrendered its steam into the Terrapod air. A neuroview screensaver of a three-dimensional mandala replaced the static of the completed transmission. Kalsang sat in meditation and wept. The beings he had encountered on the dying world sat silently in meditation around him. The spheres of butter tea on the floor began to congeal. The mandala continued to rotate. Neptune rose, and Neptune set in the skylight above. Kalsang’s tears collected on his cheeks and evaporated in a steady cycle.

  He sat for a long time - breathing in darkness, breathing out light. This was his true family, a universe of Dear Ones suffering purposelessly. He would not abandon them.

  Chapter 5 - Francesca

  The Sun burns harshly on the broken walls of the Justice League of the United Sys of Gaia as our tale begins. Wind whistles through the wreckage. A slab of twisted metal panel creaks in response to movement pushing up from beneath. Fingers with ivory polished nails feel their way out along the jagged edge and melt into the steel as they clench down.

  “Urrghh.”

  The metal turns to liquid pouring down around the form of a woman before seeping away into the ground beneath.