forever but one day,
a clear thought
The seeds of enlightenment grow slowly
even stainless bodhisattvas
compassion hearts overflowing
rarely find suitable lands
for full awakening
My son please act quickly
our fragile mother world fortuitous
harmony of numberless sorrows
help this perfect echo
moment last longer.”
Kalsang dreamily floated into the rich rhythm and comforting cadence of the teaching. Lama Wangmo shook him again, sharply.
“Kalsang, you spend all day long meditating on compassion. Everyone is your mother, your best friend, lost in a universal ocean of suffering. And then you smile because suffering is a dependent arising, an illusion, that can be overcome. This is very good, but do you ever wonder what this means in practice?”
Kalsang, with an imperceptible motion, shook his head.
“If you don’t know, you AREN’T ready to die. Don't be lazy. Get up.”
Kalsang shook his head, this time to gather up the unfolding tendrils of his mind, as his teacher abruptly vanished. He was still on Triton laying on his back staring up at the great blue mass of Neptune. The numbness in his legs receded as a strange warmth emanated from his bones.
He sat up. How could that be possible? His suit, which had been locked so stiff, had now gone a bit soft. The answer came to him - the CO2 scrubbers. In routinely cleaning his exhalations they had been sequestering the expelled carbon. Now there was just enough room to move about.
No time for sitting. Kalsang pulled himself painfully to his feet using one of the landing struts from the pod. The door was still open, and he slithered up onto the open deck of the airlock. He reached up to activate the lock. Nothing happened. No matter how long he pushed, there was no response.
The returning pain in his legs was screaming for his attention, a thousand needles plunging into his muscles. Kalsang’s brain was swimming from the lack of oxygen and his exertions. He slumped back to the floor, head bouncing off some metal cylinders lying on the floor behind him.
Oxygen? He rolled over and used a burst of adrenaline to fumble with one of the precious canisters. He yanked the auxiliary oxygen supply hose on his suit loose from the Velcro straps and clamped the adapter over the valve at the top of one of the tanks. The indicators in his neuroview turned from red to green as the life-saving gas rushed into his suit, which began to inflate. Kalsang scrambled to switch on the suit’s pressure regulators to prevent a fatal replay the over-inflated suit scenario.
No time to relax. What was going on here? The airlock was dark. Why should that be? He tried to register the pod’s status on the neurovisor. Nothing. Even the manual override for the airlock was not functioning. He crawled up a gantry and stretched to reach the view portal.
He kept a close look on his footing while his uppermost head turned to look.
Kalsang was disoriented for a moment. Why couldn’t he see anything? Then he realised that he couldn’t see through the portal because he no longer had multiple heads. When had he ever?
He noticed a hinge latch that he could get his foot over and managed to peek above the ledge.
It was dark inside as he expected, no need to waste energy on lights when he was out, but the standby panel lights had gone out as well, and the leaves of the plant nearest the window, still green, looked like they had cracked like glass, or ice. The fine edge of frost on them confirmed it - they had frozen. If the plant had frozen, what had happened to the TerraPod core? Kalsang’s heart was hit by a wave of grief for his little friends that had lived there. At the same time, his body hit the ground softly.
He had fallen again.
What to do? Kalsang climbed back up into airlock.
He reflected on the situation. The only possibility that made sense was a total power supply failure.
A soft glow at the corner of his neuroview caught his attention. The orbiter icon. Maybe he could interrogate the computer on the module orbiting Triton to override the computer in the pod and open the doors. He held his mind on this request and the orbiter’s control console appeared floating before him. A flashing warning light indicated that the orbiter had lost control of the pod’s computers and that all internal diagnostics for the pod were not responding. It was strange that communication had only been cut one way. Why should he be able to contact the orbiter but not the other way around.
Kalsang studied his dilemma. His situation was dire. His pod had become a black box with no apparent avenue of communication left open. The airlock was locked and there were no other entrances. Time was running out, but where could he go? The only safe place he could go seemed to be the orbiter. He contacted the orbiter’s computer, brought up the address on emergency evacuation procedures, and quickly scanned the downloaded mneme.
The contents were not encouraging. Since gravity on Triton was weak, only a fraction of that on the moon, it was possible, in theory, to insert himself into the correct orbit by using an Emergency Orbital Insertion Unit which was a modular one man rocket pack stored alongside the launch engines at the base of the Terradome. Kalsang followed the instructions and located a button that, when pressed, unceremoniously ejected the device out into the surrounding drifts nearly taking Kalsang with it.
He righted the unit, examining it doubtfully. It looked flimsy. A body harness strapped on a slight structural brace linking an assortment of rockets. It needed to be snapped together. How would they even test such a thing?
The rapidly dropping power in his suit’s batteries reminded him that this absurd contraption was his only chance. With trepidation, Kalsang pulled it over his shoulders, tightened the straps, and aimed himself unsteadily into the empty sky, and initiated the launch program.
“Internal diagnostic check complete. Suit power supply on reserve. Continue?”
Kalsang’s eyes selected the affirmative icon in the neuroview.
“Om mani“
“Best orbital insertion calculated.”
“Padme”
“Countdown commencing.”
“Hung.”
“5,4,3,2,1. Launch is go. Are you sure that you wish to launch?”
What? Kalsang blinked in disbelief. What a time to ask a question like that. Of course, he bloody well wanted to launch.
The unit roared to life at Kalsang’s affirmative thought, suddenly blasting a stunned Kalsang out on a course nearly parallel to Triton’s surface at a breathtaking acceleration. The wall of the crater rushed towards him on a collision course. Kalsang squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for impact. He opened them in time to watch the crater rim rush beneath him with only meters to spare.
The great pink plain of Triton shot out before him as he was whipped out across it ever higher. Up he floated into the black emptiness of space as if pulled aloft by a balloon. This sense of a serene ascension was randomly interrupted by the rockets firing to tug him into alignment with the planned trajectory. Beyond these gut-churning episodes, Kalsang felt surprisingly relaxed. Nothing to do, so why worry.
Rendezvous with the orbiter was scheduled for several hours hence and, in the interim Kalsang, completed several rounds of mantras, and studied the surface of Triton as it passed below him. Triton was an ancient world of secrets, wholly unexplored except for cursory photographic mapping and some preliminary spectroscopic analysis to determine resources available to support a manned mission. No one had seen, or was likely to ever see, this elegant and remote world from the stunning perspective Kalsang experienced in these moments of free ascent into heaven.
Ahead of him grew the large, world wrapping violet crescent of Triton’s twilight. As Kalsang gradually entered it, and the ground below him dimmed, he became engulfed in the utter blackness of night in the outer solar system.
“No eyes, no eye consciousness, no ears, no ear consciousness.”
Kalsang flew on without any point of reference on which t
o attach any notion of self beyond the pale green light of the space suit’s status gleaming in his neurovisor. In fact, there seemed to be little difference between his current situation and his earlier brush with death. It occurred to him that for some reason in both instances, that these moments of total dissolution were paradoxically the moments where he felt himself to be most connected with the universe, that great vacuity which contained all potentials. He settled into a mediation focusing on this realisation.
His meditation was interrupted hours later when the positioning rockets jerked him around and the main jets fired in the opposite direction to slow his motion. Minutes later his attention was drawn to a blinking red light positioned next to his feet, illuminating a smooth surface beneath him. It was then that he had the disconcerting feeling that he was standing, or rather his feet were floating, against something. As he crouched down to examine the surface beneath his feet, the light softly pulled away as Newton’s Third Law of motion reared its ugly head. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Then it dawned on Kalsang. The orbiter. He was standing on the orbiter. He activated the torch on this helmet and rotated. His outreached hand managed to grab hold of a railing. He walked himself, slowly and deliberately, hand over hand down to the main airlock door and to safety.
Chapter 15 - Francesca
One Monday morning all her Sundays came at once.
Francesca watched once again the real time mneme she had shot with her neurovisor cam of the meeting she had just exited. If she was going to be canned for sticking her nose in where it didn’t belong, which was what she had thought the meeting was going to be about, that would be fine by her, but the suckers were going to have to pay out big time. Francesca wanted to record the guy squirming as she asked veiled tricky questions hinting about the clone’s secret downloads that her manager would know nothing about, but that the persons directing her manager and listening in would be threatened by. She had been on the look-out for that little tick people had when they were communicating by thought through their neurovisors with someone else. It was so obvious and annoying - anyone could tell. It would have enjoyable to watch her boss, the little cross-eyed twirp with the bureaucratic eyes and the crooked lazy grin, being forced to change his approach mid-stream, as directed by invisible puppeteers, and watch the price of her silence climb through the roof. So what if they let her go from her dream job? It was too good to be true anyway. She was expecting a golden parachute of voluminous dimensions, enough to cover her for a good long while. Then she would have headed out for a protracted period of playtime.
Only the thing was the guy didn’t try to let her go. In fact, he was cheesed off about the possibility of losing her.
“You are the best operator I’ve had in this spot for years. You have had some good reports from the team,” he said with a sigh.
That must have been Wolf. When was the guy going to cut to the chase? All this gushiness was breaking her heart into pieces, really.
“But I can’t get in your way on something like this. I should have known someone with your skills would be in the running.” More sighing and a particularly gross-out throat clearing.
Francesca didn’t know what to say. She didn’t even have a clue what the guy was talking about.
“The Academy let you in Salvador. It’s a sweet job. Everyone in ComSec wants to get that one so I can’t fault you, but you could have told me you put in for it.” More sighing. Francesca cut in before the throat clearing.
“What? Like the Academy for, you mean the Space stuff, that one?”
“Space stuff? Are you kidding me?” The guy was getting about as agitated as she could imagine a boring guy like him could get. “Mirtopik Merchant Marine Academy. You-you lucky lousy shit. I’ve applied for years.”
Por Dios, Francesca couldn’t stand for this idiot to start tearing up. Like she cared.
“Yeah. So what? I put in for it. Doesn’t everybody?”
Everybody but her that is.
“What’s the chance they’d pick a testarudo like me? I don’t know nobody. I didn’t need to tell you shit anyway.”
“No,” her now ex-boss replied stiffly, “no you didn’t.”
So, that was cool. They were promoting her out of their way and now she was cleaning out her desk and heading off into Outer Space, like Rocket Girl to the rescue or something. Incredible.
On the way out, she passed Wolfie for the last time. He was nervous and worn out because a lot of shit had been going down in the Department lately. “Don’t tell me you’re leaving,” he moaned. “What am I going to do with all that work?”
She handed over a stick with all the reports on it. “That’s them. I finished.”
“All of them?” Wolfie looked up at her like a starving man who someone just handed steak dinner.
“No, I said I finished, but I only did a couple.” Wolfie grimaced.
“No stupid. I was up all last night flossing my teeth. Of course, if I say I did something then I did it. Why would you doubt me? Here.” She put the stick in his shaky little hands.
“I, thank you.” Then he went all teary. Jesus, what was it with men and blubbering today? Francesca started to move into the hall.
“It was cool meeting you Wolf.”
She hoped he’d enjoy all the comics she’d left with a note for him in her office.
And then she was in the elevator and unlikely ever to come back. On the way out to the SkyTran station she thought she saw the clone again, except without his usual get up. It could have been any one of them because as time had passed at Mirtopik she’d seen that face in a number of different roles, but she recognised the confident gate, the subtle swagger that set him apart.
Francesca grinned and gave him a thumbs-up. She knew this was just a convenient way to get her out of the way with the least fuss, but there were lots of less generous ways to go about that. There was nothing about the clone that she trusted but she did owe him one. Probably that was the idea.
The clone looked around like he was unsure who she was motioning to and then gave her a tentative smile, and a thumbs-up back, as if he didn’t know her but was just pretending to be polite and shit. She caught him out by the glint of recognition in his eyes when their gaze met.
Who gave a shit anyway? Francesca was headed off on the greatest adventure of her life and she didn’t want to piss off the dude who had done it for her.
Francesca headed out to catch her flyseat on a time machine that would propel her through a day and night non-stop period of the most exhausting training in her life. Months later, she stepped off that time machine and boarded a rocket for the space station and then onto her final destination, the near-Earth orbit comet of Tsuchinshan. According to their briefing, the comet was full of valuable outer space water and came close to the Earth every five years give or take so they had to go out and mine the shit out of it while they had the chance. Her team would be relieving some of the guys that had been camped out on it as it was coming in from deep space, and would help them load the cargo, and then get everything locked down and get themselves off before the comet got too close to the Sun where it could become unstable.
Blah blah blah. Straight out of the lectures she’d been studying until her brains exploded, while her body was surviving all the slam and bam the brainiacs could throw at them, which was nothing on her really, and all the psych games thrown in to twist around their minds that she was so damn good at playing when she could be bothered. It was so easy to numb down and just work through it all that Francesca had sort of forgotten where it was all really leading to. And this was what it was all leading to; having the unlikely honor of being in the teeny tiny fraction of humans, those assholes lucky enough to get blasted off the planet and into the great beyond. It wasn’t as simple and up-in-your-head as that. The reality was that she was actually doing it. Right here, right now, countdown on, leaving everything totally and truly behind her. It was so incredibly awesome, like Superwoman
finding her G spot.
So now Francesca was strapping herself into the nose cone with a dozen odd other hardcores and it almost felt like sharing a Tran gondola at rush hour, but when fizz-crack-roar her head mashed down and smashed into her ass, Francesca knew this was something completely new for her. The fire and boom and the ground shrinking away looked like any one of the non-stop of neurosims that they’d put her through down to the crunch on every bone in her body. The fact that was completely different from all that was that now, in this moment, nobody could take this away from her ever. She was riding it for real, and heading into something that was absolutely hers, no looking back. All those idiots in her past could eat her smoke.
And then after a good God awful long shake her body went so feather light that her soul practically floated out of her mouth. It was the most beautiful feeling nobody had ever told her it was possible to feel.
A few hours later they were docking with the Mirtopik International Space Station and then having a good play in the zero G gym. The Earth was laid out overheard in these big panoramic windows that were unusual in this day and age when everyone went for the cheap option with cams shooting virtual landscapes through your neuroview, which meant you never knew what was real and where the ghost images of the walls kept interfering with the view. Here she was floating like Freya along the rainbow bridge fresh down from the hall of the Valkyries, stripping free from all those earthly things that had tied her down since forever, swirling like a genie dancer among the stars of the Arabian nights spread out below as the station orbited over the vast deserts that had claimed most of the land.
Francesca was sure that she had finally made it, watching her sweat beads lift off like constellations of pearl necklaces as she pushed effortlessly through her work out and the world in all its glory turned out below. The ecstasy flowing through her veins was not even limited by the ordinary distractions of lusting over the bodies of a few hot other grunts perspiring through their routines. In this magical liberty, even the old emotional traps could no longer get their teeth into her anymore. Hours and hours just evaporated into pure joy.
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