“What are we supposed to be seeing?” Mai said.
Lexi asked Archie the same question.
“It will soon become apparent.”
They stood side by side, Lexi and Mai, wavering in the faint grip of gravity. The sunlit half of the crater directly in front of them, the dark half beyond, shadows shrinking back as the sun slowly crept into the sky. And then they saw the first shapes emerging.
Columns or tall vases. Cylindrical, woman-sized or larger. Different heights in no apparent order. Each one shaped from translucent ice tinted with pastel shades of pink and purple, and threaded with networks of darker veins.
Lexi stepped down the broken blocks of the inner slope and moved across the floor. Mai followed.
The nearest vases were twice their height. Lexi reached out to one of them, brushed the fingertips of her gloved hand across the surface.
“These have been hand-carved,” she said. “You can see the tool marks.”
“Carved from what?”
“Boulders, I guess. He must have carried the ice chips out of here.”
They were both speaking softly, reluctant to disturb the quiet of this place. Lexi said that the spectral signature of the ice corresponded with artificial photosynthetic pigments. She leaned close, her visor almost kissing the bulge of the vase, reported that it was doped with microscopic vacuum organisms.
“There are structures in here, too,” she said. “Long fine wires. Flecks of circuitry.”
“Listen,” Mai said.
“What?”
“Can’t you hear it?”
It was a kind of interference on the common band Mai and Lexi were using to talk. Faint and broken. Hesitant. Scraps of pure tones rising and fading, rising again.
“I hear it,” Lexi said.
The sound grew in strength as more and more vases emerged into sunlight. Long notes blending into a polyphonic harmony.
The microscopic vacuum organisms were soaking up sunlight, Lexi said, after a while. Turning light into electricity, powering something that responded to changes in the structure of the ice. Strain gauges perhaps, coupled to transmitters.
“The sunlight warms the ice, every so slightly,” she said. “It expands asymmetrically, the embedded circuitry responds to the microscopic stresses. . . .”
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Yes . . .”
It was beautiful. A wild, aleatory chorus rising and falling in endless circles above the ground of a steady bass pulse . . .
They stood there a long time, while the vases sang. There were a hundred of them, more than a hundred. A field or garden of vases. Clustered like organ pipes. Standing alone on shaped pedestals. Gleaming in the sunlight. Stained with cloudy blushes of pink and purple. Singing, singing.
At last, Lexi took Mai’s gloved hand and led her across the crater floor to where the robot mule, Archie, was waiting. Mai took out the pouch of human dust and they plugged it into the spray pistol’s spare port. Lexi switched on the pistol’s heaters, showed Mai how to use the simple trigger mechanism.
“Which one shall we spray?” Mai said.
Lexi smiled behind the fishbowl visor of her helmet.
“Why not all of them?”
They took turns. Standing well back from the vases, triggering brief bursts of gritty ice that shot out in broad fans and lightly spattered the vases in random patterns. Lexi laughed.
“The old bastard,” she said. “It must have taken him hundreds of days to make this. His last and best secret.”
“And we’re his collaborators,” Mai said.
It took a while to empty the pouch. Long before they had finished, the music of the vases had begun to change, responding to the subtle shadow patterns laid on their surfaces.
At last the two women had finished their work and stood still, silent, elated, listening to the music they’d made.
That night, back under the dome of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff habitat, Mai thought of her father working in that unnamed crater high on the rimwall of Amata crater. Chipping at adamantine ice with chisels and hammers. Listening to the song of his vases, adding a new voice, listening again. Alone under the empty black sky, happily absorbed in the creation of a sound garden from ice and sunlight.
And she thought of the story of Fiddler’s Green, the bubble of light and warmth and air created from materials mined from the chunk of tarry ice it orbited. Of the people living there. The days of exile becoming a way of life as their little world swung further and further away from the sun’s hearthfire. Green days of daily tasks and small pleasures. Farming, cooking, weaving new homes in the hanging forest on the inside of the bubble’s skin. A potter shaping dishes and bowls from primordial clay. Children chasing each other, flitting like schools of fish between floating islands of trees. The music of their laughter. The unrecorded happiness of ordinary life, out there in the outer dark.
TWENTY LIGHTS TO “THE LAND OF SNOW”
Michael Bishop
Michael Bishop is one of the most acclaimed and respected members of that highly talented generation of writers who entered SF in the 1970s. His renowned short fiction has appeared in almost all the major magazines and anthologies, and has been gathered in four collections: Blooded On Arachne, One Winter in Eden, Close Encounters with the Deity, and Emphatically Not SF, Almost. In 1981 he won the Nebula Award for his novelette The Quickening, and in 1983 he won another Nebula Award for his novel No Enemy But Time, as well as winning the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for his novel Unicorn Mountain, and the Shirley Jackson Award for his short story “The Pile” (based on notes left behind on his late son Jamie’s computer). His other novels include Transfigurations, Stolen Faces, Ancient of Days, Catacomb Years, Eyes of Fire, The Secret Ascension, Count Geiger’s Blues, and the acclaimed baseball fantasy Brittle Innings. His most recent book is the big retrospective collection The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fancy: A Michael Bishop Retrospective. Recently retired as writer-in-residence at LaGrange College in West Central Georgia, Bishop lives in nearby Pine Mountain with his wife, Jeri, also a fledgling retiree.
In the complex and thoughtful novella that follows, the first core SF story Bishop has told in some years, and a welcome return to the days when he was turning out SF novellas such as the famous “Death and Designation Among the Asadi,” he sweeps us along with Tibetan dissidents and refugees who are fleeing to the stars in a generation ship in company with the Dalai Lama—or perhaps more than one.
Excerpts from The Computer Logs
of Our Reluctant Dalai Lama
Years in Transit: 82 out of 106?
Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 7
Aboard Kalachakra, I open my eyes in Amdo Bay. Sleep still pops in me, yowling like a really hurt cat trying to well itself. I look sidelong out my foggy eggshell. Many ghosts crowd near to see me leave the bear sleep that everybody in a strut-ship sometimes dreams in. Why have all these somnacicles up-phased to become ship-haunters? Why do so many crowd the grave-cave of my Greta-snooze?
“Greta Bryn”—that’s my mama’s voice—“can you hear me, kiddo?”
Yes I can. I have no deafness after I up-phase. Asleep even, I hear Mama talk in her dreams and cosmic rays crackle off Kalachakra’s plasma shield out in front (to keep us all from going dead), and the crackle from Earth across the rolling ocean of all-around-us space.
“Greta Bryn?”
She sounds like Atlanta, Daddy says. To me she sounds like Mama, which I want her to play-act now. She keeps bunnies, minks, guineas, and many other tiny crits down along our sci-tech cylinder in Kham Bay. But hearing her doesn’t pulley me into sit-up pose. To get there, I stretch my soft parts and my bones.
“Easy, baby,” Mama says.
A man in white unhooks me. A woman pinches me at the wrist so I won’t twist the fuel tube or pulse counter. They have already shot me in the heart, to rev its beating. Now I do sit up and look around, clearer. Daddy stands nearby, showing me his crumply fa
ce.
“Hey, Gee Bee,” he says, but doesn’t grab my hand.
His coverall tag is my roll-call name: Brasswell. A clunky name for a girl and not too fine for Daddy, who looks thirty-seven or maybe fifty-fifteen, a number Mama says he uses to joke his fitness. He does whore-to-culture—another puzzle-funny of his—so that later we can turn Guge green, and maybe survive.
I feel sick, like juice gone sour in my tummy has gushed into my mouth. I start to elbow out. My eyes grow pop-out big, my fists shake like rattles. Now Daddy grabs me, mouth by my ear: “Shhhh shhh shh.” Mama touches my other cheek. Everybody else falls back to watch. That’s scary too.
After a seem-like century I ask, “Are we there yet?”
Everybody yuks at my funniness. I drop my legs through the eggshell door. My hotness has colded off, a lot.
A bald brown man in orangey-yellow robes comes up so Mama and Daddy must stand off aside. I remember, sort of. This person has a really hard Tibetan name: Nyendak Trungpa. My last up-phase he made me say it a billion times so I would not forget. I was already four, but I almost forgetted anyway.
“What’s your name?” Minister Trungpa asks me.
He already knows, but I blink and say, “Greta Bryn Brasswell.”
“And where are you?”
“Kalachakra,” I say. “Our strut-ship.”
“Point to your parents, please.”
I do, it’s simple. They’re wide-awake ship-haunters now, real-live ghosts.
He asks, “Where are we going?”
“Guge,” I say, another simple ask.
“What exactly is Guge, Greta Bryn?”
But I don’t want to think—only to drink, my tongue’s so thick with sourness. “A planet,” I at last get out.
“Miss Brasswell”—now Minister T’s being a smart aleck—“tell me two things you know about Guge.”
I sort of ask, “It’s ‘The Land of Snow,’ this dead king’s place off to the west in olden Tibet?”
“Excellent!” Minister T says. “And its second meaning for us Kalachakrans?”
I think again, harder: “A faraway world to live on?”
“Where, intelligent miss?”
Another easy ask: “In the Goldilocks Zone,” a funny name for it.
“But where, Greta Bryn, is this so-called Goldilocks Zone?”
“Around a star called Gluh—” I almost get stuck. “Around a star called Gliese 581.” GLEE-zha is how I say it.
Bald Minister Trungpa grins. His face looks like a brown China plate with an up-curving crack. “She’s fine,” he tells the ghosts in the grave-cave. “And I believe she’s the ‘One.’ ”
Sometimes we must come up. We must wake and eat and drink, and move about so we can heal from ursidormizine sleep and not die before we reach Guge. When I come up this time, I get my own nook that snugs in the habitat drum called Amdo Bay. It has a vidped booth for learning from, with lock belts for when the AG goes out. It belongs to only me; it’s not just one in a common space like most ghosts use.
Finally I ask, “What did that Minister T mean?”
“About what?” Mama doesn’t eye me when she speaks.
“That I’m the ‘One.’ Which ‘One’? Why’d he say that?”
“He’s upset and everybody aboard has gone a little loco.”
“Why?” But maybe I know. We ride so long that anyone riding with us sooner or later crazies up: inboard fever. Captain Xao once warned of this.
Mama says, “His Holiness, Sakya Gyatso, has died, so we’re stupid with grief and thinking hard about how to replace him. Minister T, our late Dalai Lama’s closest friend, thinks you’re his rebirth, Greta Bryn, his heaven-sent successor.”
I don’t get this. “He thinks I’m not I?”
“I guess not. Grief has fuddled his reason, but maybe just temporarily.”
“I am I,” I say to Mama awful hot, and she agrees.
But I remember the Dalai Lama. When I was four, he played Go Fish with me in Amdo Bay during my second up-phase. Daddy sneak-named him “Yoda,” like from Star Wars, but he looked more like skinny Mr. Peanut on the peanut tins. He wore a one-lens thing and a funny soft yellow hat, and he taught me a song, “Loving the Ant, Loving the Elephant.” After that, I had to take my ursidormizine and hibernize. Now Minister T says the DL is I, or I am he, but surely Mama hates as much as I do how such stupidity could maybe steal me off from her.
“I don’t look like Sakya Gyatso. I’m a girl, and I’m not an Asian person.” Then I yell at Mama, “I am I!”
“Actually,” she says, “things have changed, and what you speak as truth may have also changed, kiddo.”
Everybody who gets a say in Amdo Bay now thinks that Minister Nyendak Trungpa calls me correctly. I am not I: I am the next Dalai Lama.
The Twenty-First, Sakya Gyatso, has died, and I must put on his sandals, which will not fit. Mama says he died of natural causes, but too young for it to look natural. He hit fifty-four, but he won’t hit Guge. If I am he, I must take his place in “The Land of Snow” as colony dukpa, Tibetan for shepherd. That job scares me.
A good thing has come from this scary thing: I don’t have to go back up into my egg pod and then down again. I stay up-phase. I must. I have too much to learn to drowse forever, even if I can sleep-learn by hypnoloading. Now I have a vidped booth that I sit in to learn and a tutor-guy, Lawrence (“Larry”) Rinpoche, who loads on me a lot.
How old has all my earlier sleep-loading made me? Hibernizing, I hit seven and learnt while dreaming.
People should not call me Her Holiness. I am a girl person—not a Chinese or a Tibetan. I tell Larry these things the first time he comes to my room in Amdo. I’ve seen him in spectals about samurai and spacers, where he looks dark-haired and chest-strong. Now, anymore, he isn’t. He has silver hair and hips like Mama’s. His eyes do a flash thing, though, even when he’s not angry, and it throws him back into the spectals he once star-played in as cool guy Lawrence Lake.
“Do I look Chinese, or Tibetan, or even Indian?” Larry asks.
“No, you don’t. But you don’t look like no girl either.”
“A girl, Your Holiness.” Larry must correct me. Mama says he will teach me logic, Tibetan art and culture, Sanskrit, Buddhist philosophy, and medicine (space and otherwise). And also poetry, music and drama, astronomy, astrophysics, synonyms, and Tibetan, Chinese, and English. Plus cinema, radio/TV history, politics and pragmatism in deep-space colony planting, and lots of other stuff.
“No girl ever got to be Dalai Lama,” I tell Larry.
“Yes, but our Fourteenth predicted his successor would hail from a place outside Tibet, and that he might re-ensoul not as a boy but as a girl.”
“But Sakya Gyatso, our last, can’t stick his soul in this girl.” I cross my arms and turn in a klutz-o turn.
“O Little Ocean of Wisdom, tell me why not.”
Stupid tutor-guy. “He died after I got borned. How can a soul jump in the skin of somebody already borned?”
“Born, Your Holiness. But it’s easy. It just jumps. The samvattanika viññana, the evolving consciousness of a Bodhisattva, jumps where it likes.”
“Then what about me, Greta Bryn?” I tap-tap my chest.
Larry tilts his ginormous head. “What do you think?”
Oh, that old trick. “Did it kick me out? If it kicked me out, where did I go?”
“Do you feel it kicked you out, Your Holiness?”
“I feel it never got in. Inside, I feel that I . . . own myself.”
“Maybe you do, but maybe his punarbhava”—his ‘re-becoming’—is in there mixing with your own personality.”
“But that’s so scary.”
“What did you think of Sakya Gyatso, the last Dalai Lama? Did he scare you?”
“No, I liked him.”
“You like everybody, Your Holiness.”
“Not anymore.”
Larry laughs. He sounds like he sounded in The Return of the Earl of Epsilon Eridani.
“Even if the process has something unorthodox about it, child, why avoid mixing your soul with that of a distinguished man you liked?”
I don’t answer this windy ask. Instead, I say, “Why did he have to die, Mister Larry?”
“Greta, he didn’t have much choice. Somebody killed him.”
Every “day” I stay up-phase. Every day I study and I try to understand what’s happening on Kalachakra, and how the last Dalai Lama, at swim in my soul, has slipped his bhava, “becoming again,” into my bhava, or “becoming now,” and so has become a thing old and new all at once.
Larry tells me just to imagine one candle lighting off another (even though you’d be crazy to light anything inside a starship), but my candle was already lit before the last Lama’s got snuffed, and I never even smelt it go out. Larry laughs and says His Dead Holiness’s flame “never quenched, but did go dim during its forty-nine-day voyage to bardo.” Bardo, I think, must look like a fish tank that the soul tries to swim in even with nothing in it.
Up-phase, I learn more about Kalachakra. I don’t need my tutor-guy. I wander all about, between studying and tutoring times. When the artificial gravity cuts off, as it does a lot, I swim my ghost self into nooks and bays almost anywhere.
Our ship has a loco largeness, like a tunnel turning through star-smeared space, like a line of railroad tank cars humming through the Empty Vast without any hum. I saw such trains in my hypnoloading sleeps. Now I peep them as spectals and mini-holos and even palm pix.
Larry likes for me to do that too. He says anything “fusty and fun” is OK by him, if it tutors me well. And I don’t need him to help me twig when I snoop Kalachakra. I learn by drifting, floating, swimming, counting, and just by asking ghosts what I want to know.
Here’s what I’ve learnt by reading and vidped-tasking, snooping and asking:
1. UNS Kalachakra hauls 990 human asses (“and also the rest of each bloke aboard”—Dad’s dumb joke) to a world in the Goldilocks Zone of the Gliese 581 solar system, 20.3 lights from Sol, the assumed-to-be-live-on-able planet Gliese 581 g.
2. Captain Xao says that most of us on Kalachakra spend our journey in ursidormizine slumber to dream about our colonizing work on Guge. The greatest number of somnacicles—sleepers—have their egg pods in Amdo Bay toward the nose of our ship. (These hibernizing lazybones look like frozen cocoons in their see-through eggs.) Those of us more often up-phase slumber at “night” in Kham Bay, where tech folk and crew do their work. At the rear of our habitat drum lies U-Tsang Bay, which I haven’t visited, but where, Mama says, our Bodhisattvas—monks, nuns, lamas, and such—reside, up-phase or down-.
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books) Page 51