chii-chi-chi-chi-chi-ki chii-chi-chi-chi-ki-ki
da daa dada da da dada da da dada da da da da da
chii-chi-chi-chi-chi-ki chii-chi-chi-chi-ki-ki
da daa dada da da dada da da dada da da da da da
chii-chi-chi-chi-chi-ki chii-chi-chi-chi-ki-ki
A sharp squeal in the key of G at 60,000 hertz knocked the rat off his perch and onto the rocks below. It lay twitching as Calvin30 put aside his horn and stood over it. One stomp later and it lay still.
The clone scowled at the mess left on his all Nigerian leather Andres Stiltle slips, regretting immediately his rash act. Near the top of his game and reduced to wrecking good shoes, this just wouldn’t do.
Then again now he’d killed his first thing and perhaps it only took getting used to. Next time he’d be more careful to keep clean.
He wiped his sole in the grass, avoiding the glazed gaze from the ghastly pile of guts the squirrel had become. The leather was still wet with it after many inspections. Calvin30 moved the shoe into the sun, and worried that when dry it would be ruined. He remembered buying them, hand crafted wonders, at a boutique in the part of the East Village still not under water. They couldn’t be replaced.
To distract himself from the disaster, Calvin30 activated his visor.
The scenery softened and blurred behind the mental projections of the Earth falling away and the stars shifting sideways. From the vantage of Valhalla, Calvin30 viewed the spinning disks of planetary paths and plotted the angles. The Mirtopik deep space micro-satellite relay was mostly under his command. Months could transpire before anyone would detect that the monk had expired. Any of myriad minor malfunctions could be implicated.
But why kill the monk? Because Calvin30’s control wasn’t complete. A chance conversation could sink the whole adventure. Delaying news was one thing, excising it was another, and if the monk spoke to someone on a personal channel, such as that Martian scientist, then the censor could be exposed.
Calvin30 traversed down to the Terrapod and stood beside it in a panorama mosaic stitched together from shots taken by the scientific rover attached to the mission. It was unthinkably small, a few metres sphered. He called forth a mneme of the monk, a bland looking boy, one Venerable Kalsang Jampa, implacably unimpressive.
Perusing the mneme logs for a sense of the man, Calvin30 found the monk pathetically silent during his tenure on Triton. Only standard acknowledgements to system checks and spartan well wishes to friends and relatives. It wasn’t completely clear whether he would be killing someone who might mind. Calvin30 shivered involuntarily. What bugged him about this guy?
What got him under Calvin30’s skin was a sense that, while he might write the guy off with a flick on a switch, there was no feel of the man he’d be offing. It was all too easy. No way to bring Jampa to the party, no self-pitying lament, no source of remorse that could occur in the last moments remaining.
He scanned some mnemes of the monk at his business.
Monk wakes up, monk says prayers, monk checks instruments, monk eats, monk shits, monk sleeps, monk smiles without mania, monk cries at times with no depression. No slow fuse self-immolation of the stoic was on view. Kalsang Jampa’s drama was as unselfconscious as a stone. This made him seem more unreachable than being past the edge of nowhere where he was.
What would happen when Calvin30 ended his days?
Monk dies.
And that would be all there was to it.
Was that all there ever was?
The globs of glistening goo encircling his heel print in the grass seemed to answer his question.
Squirrel dies.
If that was the sum total of a whole life, what was the point of it ending?
The glazed eyes on the limp head looked up accusingly, suggesting this wasn’t the entire story. Calvin30 scowled down into them and then was caught by a laugh. That was the whole point - that people believed their life was more than less. Knowing that, and flowing that, was his power. But then it bothered him that the monk looked to be in on the joke.
A family came towards him down the path and Calvin30 kicked the grime from his crime into a ditch out of view. He grinned sheepishly as they passed.
What was the matter with him?
After they had ambled away he looked back down, and the squirrel was gone.
What the hell?
Gone. It must be there. His eyes started to panic, flicking up and down the ditch.
He squinted, thinking it somehow camouflaged in the mud. Finally, he fell on all fours and felt through the ooze.
The thing had to be there only it wasn’t.
Had he imagined doing the deed? No, his slips were still slimed.
Calvin30 returned to erect, unreasonably upset. How could the damn thing just disappear? Why did he feel such primal possessiveness? What had denied him his kill?
Bushes twitched in a thicket. Calvin30 spied the culprit, a feral cat carrying his prize. The circle of life had claimed his victim - the squirrel was already half eaten. The cat licked itself over before starting in on the rest.
Calvin30 collected himself, inspired by the feline’s cool insolence. There was an animal he could appreciate. How could anyone eradicate that cat and not be second rate?
Calvin took up his horn and purred a homage - his preferred Ellington standard.
There will be
many other nights
like this
And I'll be
standing here
with someone new
There will be
other songs to sing
Another fall
Another spring
But there
will never be
another you
The cat toyed with his food, imagining its unlikely reanimation. Alive but dead. Calvin30 tipped his horn to the cat granting it credit due. If only death were not so definite then he could also kill the monk and play him too.
Some epiphanies appear only when the impossible presents.
Alive And Dead? The exegesis came to Calvin30 from entirely outside the box.
Shröedinger’s cat.
Alive and Dead. The only animal he’d heard of that ever managed that trick just happened to be a cat. From his pop culture acquisition of quantum mechanics, Calvin30 knew of a freaky experiment dreamed up by a scientist named Shröedinger to show how weird subatomic physics could be.
His recipe went like this.
First, put a cat in a black box, not in a hat or a house with a mouse, but with a vial of poison gas. Next, from some radioactive matter pick an atom, any atom, whose decay will switch the trigger - when it goes the cat gets gassed. Nothing interesting from the outside folks.
Here’s where it gets weird. With atoms, what you see is what you get, but what you don’t see don’t actually factually exist. Since both the cat and the atom are hooked together in the dark, they disappear into the shadow of their potential. So, Atom Cat gets to play it both ways - hot AND decayed, alive AND dearly departed.
Calvin30 remembered this, not because he understood the science, but because it struck him as suitably twisted. When he’d first heard of it he’d mentally put his brothers in that box and dreamt them dissolving into improbability.
If a full planet of people
and uncounted cats
die and don’t in a box perhaps from some gas,
and no one outside can hear them scream,
do they sound like no sound?
It was all so extreme.
Calvin30 flushed at his fortuity in finally being able to enact this fantasy.
As everyone knew, the innards of computers used to be digital but these days they packed more switches into the same space by using quantum gates that could be both off and on, or off or on depending on how and when you looked in on them. The wizards had long since mass produced the perfect kitty killing itchy trigger finger.
It was almost too simple to link the life support in the Triton Terrapod to the stateless
state of one of these illogic gates. Calvin30 stood in awe of his artistry, at how he had transmuted the crudity of murder into an endless canvas of creation.
Details, details.
He’d have to cut all communications to the pod because peeking in would make one outcome so. If the monk chose to send out a signal from his side, the experiment was still on. As far as the world was concerned, the pod would have to vanish from view. They’d have to fly up an entirely new receiver to replace the one he was about to fuse.
The risk had to remain that the monk could blow Calvin30’s cover - otherwise only the fate of the monk would be in the box. But if the monk could both tell and not tell, with such enormous consequence, then everyone went into the box with him. It was too risky, of course, to make the odds fifty-fifty, and Calvin30 planned load God's dice considerably. Still, he’d have to be in the box, along with everyone else. The difference was only he would know it. The whole enchilada would become his solo.
There were the standard logistics of awarding credit. Such a stupendous career-shattering mistake for someone else to make - perhaps good old Wolf. Perhaps reveal the boy as a Rev saboteur. This could integrate nicely with the rest of his plans - although he would have to make the detective trail long enough to get the timing right. That shouldn't be a problem considering that it was going to take a while for the powers that be to realise that something more serious than a neurolink breakdown was happening here. In the meantime, the world would think of poor Wolf the way he would think of himself, as an overworked and consequently incompetent goof.
Calvin30’s fingers fiddled around the pipe keys as he composed. This was a stroke of sheer genius. He warmed up into an improvisation of ‘Everything happens to me.’ The cross program on the bass line would ping the connection to the Saturn up-link station to keep it open. A few standard phases needed to be reprogrammed to activate pre-programmed communication functions and to access different areas of the Terrapod’s computer. He tested the programs, running up and down scales and releasing discordant squawks and fluttering tremolos. He mapped out the composition, key changes, and timing. And then he went to work.
His tongue buzzed as the notes fired and whirled cascades of floating neuroviews before his eyes. The song jerked swiftly out of the melody and into a new improvisation whenever spontaneous alteration of the program was required. As he neared completion, the song crescendoed in excitement before relaxing into a playful rendition of ‘Without a Song’.
When he had finished, he checked the time. He had spent hours immersed in the bliss of creation, but now the scene was set. What the Big Guy in the sky had said and done in seven days, a mere clone had surpassed in less than one. While the Creator had made only one reality, Calvin30 had created two for the price of one. The alpha omega and nil.
The future was both alive and dead, a shimmering wave of probability encompassing the whole human species. He had perfected the art of undermining people’s sense of certainty. Now in one stroke he had consummately conquered certainty itself, casting the entire human body, including his own, into the quantum flux.
Not bad for an afternoon in the park.
His quantum self flipped off its neurovisor and looked around the park. Shröedinger families picnicking. Shröedinger bicycles and cars. Shröedinger squirrels and Shröedinger crows. Above him, Shröedinger clouds and, below him, Shröedinger dirt.
No longer would resentment motivate his Art. No longer would he wish unhappiness on the people down the park enjoying their picnics and their idle larks. Now, with precise clarity, he could see the uncertainty and hilarity lurking in every moment of their illusory reality. No need to seek it through manipulating their pathetic, tired, simple selves. Now he would feel it in the all of every minute of each entire glorious day. Calvin30 felt, as if for the first time, sufficiently complete.
A blur of calico blended through the foliage to his left.
Calvin30 leaned over. “Here kitty, kitty, kitty.”
As he stroked the purring fur, the beast repaid Calvin30 by coughing up the leftovers from its feast at his feet. Cracked remnants of skull with one accusing eye spied up at him.
That creature had escaped his net, Calvin30 reflected. There was only one outcome for that being and he alone had decided it. Such a waste.
As Calvin30 wandered away he felt the eye following him and wondered if it would ever depart.
Chapter 14 - Kalsang
Kalsang lay prone outside the pod in his over-inflated inner tube of a space suit, slowly collecting a thin drift of pink methane snow. An answer to his predicament had not come and time was running out.
Some of the aliens turned from their vigil around him, to look back towards the Terrapod, and the others besides d’Song soon followed their lead. Was this an ill omen, or a clue that might lead to his survival? Perhaps it was best not to take the actions of imaginary beings too seriously.
His attention returned to his legs, slowly burning with cold, the pain extending upwards from his feet like a flame travelling down a wick. His feet, already consumed, were numb.
The situation would have been intolerable if his legs still belonged to him. However, from Kalsang’s detached perspective, the sensation was like watching a pair of well-loved trousers unravel.
Things were not so comfortable a few hours ago. Then the magnitude of his suffering would have made Kalsang writhe in anguish if his rigid suit had allowed him. Time and his contemplations had saved him. His toes were on fire? Were his toes on fire or was his mind on fire? If his toes were on fire why was his mind suffering? If his mind was suffering, then what part of his mind was on fire? If his toes and mind were one, why couldn’t he stand up by his thoughts? And so on like this.
By now the suffering was just another purification that Kalsang was happy to accept. Better to face it now than after death when the consequences of unresolved karma could be more severe.
More hours slowly passed. The numbness reached his hips. His alien audience began to evaporate.
Myriad images began to swirl into Kalsang’s mind as the oxygen supply in his suit dwindled. The Ice Ridges of Triton merged with the Snow Mountains of Tibet. Rainbows danced around his field of view. In the middle, seated on a jewel lotus, sat his Lama. Her body constantly shifted and broke into shards of other memories like a multi-faceted diamond.
There were his other teachers, his mother and brothers, his old meditation cell in Khyipuk, the faces of his debating partners and protectors, fragile flowers blowing in the mountain breeze, yaks and birds, starships and stars.
His body began to feel light, almost insubstantial as he observed his senses flicker in and out. He sank ever deeper into a general warm feeling.
Kalsang’s body was beginning to die. He recognised the first signs, a subject he had studied exhaustively as a student in the monasteries and had incorporated into his meditations since. He was dying and, happily, he had few regrets. So lucky, even though he was just in his early thirties. He’d been trained to know that death was just part of the package of living.
Once again Kalsang patiently reviewed his situation and once again resigned himself to the improbability of escape. He checked the time left on the oxygen supply and, carefully and methodically, Kalsang began the practice of dying.
His eyes, which now refused to shut, noticed the blue globe of Neptune begin to expand until it encompassed the whole sky. A rich field of indigo permeated space. His mind began to shimmer and grow cloudy as the memories started to fade.
“Kalsang-la, Kalsang, wake up.”
Kalsang looked around dreamily. Kalsang, yes Kalsang is still my name, still a name.
He felt an insistent tugging at his shoulder. He still had a shoulder. The tugging imparted a warmth that began to travel down his body, steadily thawing the numbness.
Kalsang looked up into the clear light that suddenly interrupted the ubiquitous blue. Like a proud parent Lama Wangmo gazed down indulgently at her young disciple.
“Lamal
a?” Kalsang murmured weakly, his features softening to return the smile.
“Dying is interesting, isn’t it Kalsang?”
Kalsang’s pupils widened. The habit of attention to instruction reactivated his mind. The small fact of dying did not seem to be a good excuse for disrespect to his Teacher.
“You have done what I asked, and you are dying well, Kalsang.”
“Lamala?” Kalsang began to shiver as his awareness of his body began to return, “are you real?”
Lama Wangmo laughed and pinched at her robes. “What is real? What do you think?”
“Uh.”
“No time, Kalsang. No time. Listen to me. Yes, no doubt you are dying well. Alone in your hermitage like some great yogi. In your next life, you are really going to be something. You must be proud.”
Kalsang's brow registered a wrinkle of surprise. Was his teacher mocking him?
“Kalsang la,” Lama Wangmo continued, “You must be congratulated. A fine culmination of a life of devotion. All the Buddhas and bodhisattvas in the ten directions and three times are overjoyed and waiting to shake your hand in the pure realms.”
“How?” Kalsang's frozen mouth struggled to form the word.
“Do I need to spell it out for you?” Lama Wangmo raised her eyebrows disparagingly.
Kalsang's body twisted as the stabbing pains returned. Lama Wangmo winced, betraying her concern for her student.
“Kalsang, listen to me, your loving Guru mother.
The seeds of space grow slowly
infinite eons of swelling darkness
there is no end, but even this
wasteland of void
can bear fruit
The seeds of life grow slowly
uncounted cellular generations
evolving without direction
an accidental mind arises
this jewel from dust
The seeds of consciousness grow slowly
dull impulses of ignorance
taste of grasping and fear
Ten Directions Page 22