by Dan Simmons
And now it was going to end.
“Albedo’s Elements calculate a ninety-four percent probability that de Soya will rise to our bait,” said the Cardinal.
“It’s been how long since Pax Fleet and the Holy Office planted the information?” said the Pope, finishing his tea and carefully setting the cup and saucer on the edge of the settee.
“Five weeks standard,” said Lourdusamy. “Wu arranged for it to be encrypted in the AI aboard one of the escort torch-ships that the Raphael jumped at the edge of Ophiuchi System. But not so heavily encrypted that the Ouster-enhanced systems aboard the Raphael could not decipher it.”
“Won’t de Soya and his people scent a trap?” mused the man who had once been Father Lenar Hoyt.
“Unlikely, Your Holiness,” said the Cardinal. “We’ve used that encryption pattern before to feed reliable information to de Soya and …”
The Pope’s head snapped up. “Cardinal Lourdusamy,” he said sharply, “do you mean to tell us that you sacrificed innocent Pax ships and lives … lives beyond resurrection … merely to insure that the renegades will consider this information reliable?”
“Yes, Holy Father,” said Lourdusamy.
The Pope let out a breath and nodded. “Regrettable, but understandable … given the stakes involved.”
“In addition,” continued the Cardinal, “certain officers aboard the crew of the ship positioned to be captured by the Raphael had been … ah … conditioned … by the Holy Office so that they also had the information on when we plan to move on the girl Aenea and the world of T’ien Shan.”
“All this prepared months in advance?” said the Pope.
“Yes, Your Holiness. It was an advantage given us by Councillor Albedo and the Core when they registered the activation of the T’ien Shan farcaster some months ago.”
The Pontiff laid his hands flat on his robed thighs. His fingers were bluish. “And that escape has been denied the Devil’s Child?”
“Absolutely,” said the Cardinal. “The Jibril slagged the entire mountain around the farcaster portal. The farcaster itself is all but impervious, Your Holiness, but at the moment it is buried under twenty meters of rock.”
“And the Core is certain that this is the only farcaster on T’ien Shan?”
“Absolutely certain, Holy Father.”
“And the preparations for the confrontation with de Soya and his renegade archangel?”
“Well, Admiral Wu should be here to discuss the tactical details, Your Holiness …”
“We trust you to convey the general outline, Simon Augustino.”
“Thank you, Holy Father. Pax Fleet has stationed fifty-eight planet-class archangel cruisers within the T’ien Shan System. These have been hidden for the past six standard weeks …”
“Excuse us, Simon Augustino,” murmured the Pope. “But how does one hide fifty-eight archangel-class battlecruisers?”
The Cardinal smiled thinly. “They have been powered down, floating in strategic positions within the inner-system asteroid belt and the system’s outer Kuiper Belt, Your Holiness. Completely undetectable. Ready to jump at a second’s notice.”
“The Raphael will not escape this time?”
“No, Your Holiness,” said Cardinal Lourdusamy. “The heads of eleven Pax Fleet commanders depend upon the success of this ambush.”
“Leaving a fifth of our archangel fleet to float for weeks in this Outback system has seriously compromised the effectiveness of our Crusade against the Ousters, Cardinal Lourdusamy.”
“Yes, Your Holiness.” The Cardinal set his own palms against his robe and was surprised to realize that his palms were damp. Besides the eleven Pax Fleet heads riding on the success of this mission, Lourdusamy knew that his own future hung in the balance.
“It will be worth it when we destroy this rebel,” murmured the Pope.
Lourdusamy took a breath.
“We presume that the ship and Captain de Soya will be destroyed, not taken captive,” said His Holiness.
“Yes, Holy Father. Standing orders are to slag the ship to atoms.”
“But we will not harm the child?”
“No, Holy Father. All precautions have been taken to assure that the contagion vector named Aenea will be taken alive.”
“That is very important, Simon Augustino,” muttered the Pope. He seemed to be whispering to himself. They had gone over these details a hundred times. “We must have the girl alive. The others with her … they are expendable … but the girl must be captured. Tell us again the procedure.”
Cardinal Lourdusamy closed his eyes. “As soon as the Raphael is interdicted and destroyed, the Core ships will move into orbit around T’ien Shan and incapacitate the planet’s population.”
“Deathbeam them,” murmured His Holiness.
“Not … technically,” said the Cardinal. “As you know, the Core assures us that the results of this technique are reversible. It is more the induction of a permanent coma.”
“Will the millions of bodies be transported this time, Simon Augustino?”
“Not at first, Your Holiness. Our special teams will go planetside, find the girl, and remove her to an archangel convoy that shall bring her here to Pacem, where she will be revived, isolated, interrogated, and …”
“Executed,” sighed the Pope. “To show those millions of rebels on sixty worlds that their putative messiah is no more.”
“Yes, Your Holiness.”
“We look forward to speaking to this person, Simon Augustino. The Devil’s Child or not.”
“Yes, Your Holiness.”
“And when will Captain de Soya take the bait and appear for his destruction, do you think?”
Cardinal Lourdusamy looked at his comlog. “Within hours, Your Holiness. Within hours.”
“Let us pray for a successful conclusion,” whispered the Pope. “Let us pray for the salvation of our Church and our race.”
Both men bowed their heads in the Room of Tears.
In the days immediately following our return from the Dalai Lama’s Potala palace, I get the first hints of the full scope of Aenea’s plans and power.
I am amazed at the reception upon our return. Rachel and Theo weep as they hug Aenea. A. Bettik pounds me on the back with his remaining hand and hugs me with both arms. The usually laconic Jigme Norbu first hugs George Tsarong and then comes down the line of us pilgrims, hugging all of us, tears streaming down his thin face. The entire Temple has turned out to cheer and clap and weep. I realize then that many had not expected us—or at least Aenea—to return from the reception with the Pax. I realize then what a close thing it had been that we had returned.
We set to work finishing the reconstruction of Hsuan-k’ung Ssu. I work with Lhomo, A. Bettik, and the high riggers on the last touches to the highest promenade, while Aenea, Rachel, and Theo surpervise detail work throughout the compound.
That evening, all I can think of is turning in early with my beloved, and from our hurried but passionate kisses during our few minutes alone on the high walk after the communal dinner, I guess that Aenea reciprocates the wish for immediate and intense intimacy. But it is one of her scheduled “discussion group” evenings—her last as it turns out—and more than a hundred people are there in the central gompa platform as darkness falls. Luckily, the monsoons have held off after the first foretaste of their gray rain, and the evening is lovely as the sun sets to the west of K’un Lun Ridge. Torches crackle along the main axis stairways and prayer pennants snap.
I am amazed by some of those in attendance this night: the Tromo Trochi of Dhomu has returned from Potala in spite of his declared need to move west with his wares; the Dorje Phamo is there with all nine of her favorite priests; there are numerous famous guests from the palace reception—mostly younger people—and the youngest and most famous of all, trying to appear incognito in a plain red robe and hood, is the Dalai Lama himself, minus his Regent and Lord Chamberlain, accompanied only by his personal bodyguard and Chief Crier, Car
l Linga William Eiheji.
I stand at the back of the crowded room. For an hour or so, the discussion group is a discussion group, sometimes led but never dominated by Aenea. But slowly her questioning turns the conversation her way. I realize that she is a master of Tantric and Zen Buddhism, answering monks who have spent decades mastering those disciplines in koan and Dharma. To a monk who demands to know why they should not accept the Pax offer of immortality as a form of rebirth, she quotes Buddha as teaching that no individual is reborn, that all things are subject to annicca—the law of mutability—and she then elaborates on the doctrine of anatta, literally “no-self,” the Buddha’s denial that there is any such thing as a personal entity known as a soul.
Responding to another query about death, Aenea quotes a Zen koan:
“A monk said to Tozan, ‘A monk has died; where has he gone?’ Tozan answered, ‘After the fire, a sprout of grass.’ ”
“M. Aenea,” says Kuku Se, her bright face flushed, “does that mean mu?”
Aenea has taught me that mu is an elegant Zen concept that might translate as—“Unask the question.”
My friend smiles. She is sitting farthest from the door, in an open space near the opened wall of the room, and the stars are bright and visible above the Sacred Mountain of the North. The Oracle has not risen.
“It means that to some extent,” she says softly. The room is silent to hear. “It also means that the monk is as dead as a doornail. He hasn’t gone anywhere—more importantly, he has gone nowhere. But life has also gone nowhere. It continues, in a different form. Hearts are sorrowed by the monk’s death, but life is not lessened. Nothing has been removed from the balance of life in the universe. Yet that whole universe—as reproduced in the monk’s mind and heart—has itself died. Seppo once said to Gensha, ‘Monk Shinso asked me where a certain dead monk had gone, and I told him it was like ice becoming water.’ Gensha said, ‘That was all right, but I myself would not have answered like that.’ ‘What would you have said?’ asked Seppo. Gensha replied, ‘It’s like water returning to water.’ ”
After a moment of silence, someone near the front of the room says, “Tell us about the Void Which Binds.”
“Once upon a time,” begins Aenea as she always begins such things, “there was the Void. And the Void was beyond time. In a real sense, the Void was an orphan of time … an orphan of space.
“But the Void was not of time, not of space, and certainly was not of God. Nor is the Void Which Binds God. In truth, the Void evolved long after time and space had staked out the limits to the universe, but unbound by time, untethered in space, the Void Which Binds has leaked backward and forward across the continuum to the Big Bang beginning and the Little Whimper end of things.”
Aenea pauses here and lifts her hands to her temples in a motion I have not seen her use since she was a child. She does not look to be a child this night. Her eyes are tired but vital. There are wrinkles of fatigue or worry around those eyes. I love her eyes.
“The Void Which Binds is a minded thing,” she says firmly. “It comes from minded things—many of whom were, in turn, created by minded things.
“The Void Which Binds is stitched of quantum stuff, woven with Planck space, Planck time, lying under and around space/time like a quilt cover around and under cotton batting. The Void Which Binds is neither mystical nor metaphysical, it flows from and responds to the physical laws of the universe, but it is a product of that evolving universe. The Void is structured from thought and feeling. It is an artifact of the universe’s consciousness of itself. And not merely of human thought and feeling—the Void Which Binds is a composite of a hundred thousand sentient races across billions of years of time. It is the only constant in the evolution of the universe—the only common ground for races that will evolve, grow, flower, fade, and die millions of years and hundreds of millions of light-years apart from one another. And there is only one entrance key to the Void Which Binds …”
Aenea pauses again. Her young friend Rachel is sitting close to her, cross-legged and attentive. I notice now for the first time that Rachel—the woman whom I have been foolishly jealous of these past few months—is indeed beautiful: copperish-brown hair short and curly, her cheeks flushed, her large green eyes flecked with tiny specks of brown. She is about Aenea’s age, early twenties, standard, and hued to a golden brown by months of work in high places under T’ien Shan’s yellow sun.
Aenea touches Rachel’s shoulder.
“My friend here was a baby when her father discovered an interesting fact about the universe,” says Aenea. “Her father, a scholar named Sol, had been obsessed for decades about the historical relationship between God and man. Then one day, under the most extreme of circumstances, when faced with losing his daughter for a second time, Sol was granted satori—he saw totally and intuitively what only a few others have been privileged to see clearly through the million years of our slow ponderings … Sol saw that love was a real and equal force in the universe … as real as electromagnetism or weak nuclear force. As real as gravity, and governed by many of the same laws. The inverse square law, for instance, often works as surely for love as it does for gravitational attraction.
“Sol realized that love was the binding force of the Void Which Binds, the thread and fabric of the garment. And in that instant of satori, Sol realized that humankind was not the only seamstress of that gorgeous tapestry. Sol glimpsed the Void Which Binds and the force of love behind it, but he could not gain access to that medium. Human beings, so recently evolved from our primate cousins, have not yet gained the sensory capacity to see clearly or enter the Void Which Binds.
“I say ‘to see clearly’ because all humans with an open heart and mind have caught rare but powerful glimpses of the Void landscape. Just as Zen is not a religion, but is religion, so the Void Which Binds is not a state of mind, but is the state of mind. The Void is all probability as standing waves, interacting with that standing wave front which is the human mind and personality. The Void Which Binds is touched by all of us who have wept with happiness, bidden a lover good-bye, been exalted with orgasm, stood over the grave of a loved one, or watched our baby open his or her eyes for the first time.”
Aenea is looking at me as she speaks, and I feel the goose-flesh rise along my arms.
“The Void Which Binds is always under and above the surface of our thoughts and senses,” she continues, “invisible but as present as the breathing of our beloved next to us in the night. Its actual but unaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of almost-but-not-quite satisfying bullshit.”
The hundred-some listening monks, workers, intellectuals, politicians, and holy men and women shift slightly at this statement. The wind is rising outside and the platform rocks gently, as it was designed to do. Thunder rumbles from somewhere to the south of Jo-kung.
“The so-called ‘Four Statements of the Zen Sect’ ascribed to Bodhidharma in the sixth century A.D. are an almost perfect signpost to find the Void Which Binds, at least to find its outline as an absence of otherworldly clutter,” continues Aenea. “First, no dependence on words and letters. Words are the light and sound of our existence, the heat lightning by which the night is illuminated. The Void Which Binds is to be found in the deepest secrets and silences of things … the place where childhood dwells.
“Second, a special transmission outside the Scriptures. Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move. A musician can tell another musician apart from the millions who play notes as soon as the music begins. Poets glean poets in a few syllables, especially where the ordinary meaning and forms of poetry are discarded. Chora wrote—
“Two came here,
Two flew off—
Butterflies.
“—
and in the still-warm crucible of burned-away words and images remains the gold of deeper things, what R. H. Blyth and Frederick Franck once called ‘the dark flame of life that burns in all things,’ … and ‘seeing with the belly, not with the eye; with “bowels of compassion.” ’
“The Bible lies. The Koran lies. The Talmud and Torah lie. The New Testament lies. The Sutta-pitaka, the nikayas, the Itivuttaka, and the Dhammapada lie. The Bodhisattva and the Amitabha lie. The Book of the Dead lies. The Tiptaka lies. All Scripture lies … just as I lie as I speak to you now.
“All these holy books lie not from intention or failure of expression, but by their very nature of being reduced to words; all the images, precepts, laws, canons, quotations, parables, commandments, koans, zazen, and sermons in these beautiful books ultimately fail by adding only more words between the human being who is seeking and the perception of the Void Which Binds.
“Third, direct pointing to the soul of man. Zen, which best understood the Void by finding its absence most clearly, wrestled with the problem of pointing without a finger, of creating this art without a medium, of hearing this powerful sound in a vacuum with no sounds. Shiki wrote—
“A fishing village;
Dancing under the moon,
To the smell of raw fish.
“This—and I do not mean the poem—is the essence of seeking the key to the portal of the Void Which Binds. A hundred thousand races on a million worlds in days long dead have each had their villages with no houses, their dancing under the moon in worlds with no moons, the smell of raw fish on oceans with no fish. This can be shared beyond time, beyond words, beyond a race’s span of existence.
“Fourth, seeing into one’s nature and the attainment of Bud-dhahood. It does not take decades of zazen or baptism into the Church or pondering the Koran to do this. The Buddha nature is, after all, the after-the-crucible essence of being human. Flowers all attain their flowerhood. A wild dog or blind zygoat each attain their doghood or zygoathood. A place—any place—is granted its placehood. Only humankind struggles and fails in becoming what it is. The reasons are many and complex, but all stem from the fact that we have evolved as one of the self-seeing organs of the evolving universe. Can the eye see itself?”