Going Interstellar

by Les Johnson

  “Like what, child?” Captain Xao seems nice but clueless.

  “Doubts about who made me, why I was born in a big bean can, why I like the AG on rather than off. Doubts about the shipshapeness of our ship, the soundness of Larry Lake’s mind, the realness of the rock we’re going to. Doubts about the pains in my legs and the mixing of my soul with Sakya’s . . . because of how our lifelines overlapped. Doubts about—”

  “Whoa,” Xao Songda says. “Officer Photrang tells me you have doubts about the official version of the Twenty-first’s death.”

  “Yes.”

  “I too, but as captain, I want you to know that it cruises in shipshape shape, with an artist in charge.”

  After staring some, I say, “Is the official story true? Did Sakya Gyatso really die of Cadillac infraction?”

  “Cardiac infarction,” the captain says, not getting that I just joked him. “Yes, he did. Regrettably.”

  “Or do you say that because Minister T told everyone that and he outranks you?”

  Xao Songda looks confused. “Why do you think Minister Trungpa would lie?”

  “Inferior motives.”

  “Ulterior motives,” the stupid captain again corrects me.

  “OK: ulterior motives. Did he have something to do with Sakya’s death . . . for mean reasons locked in his heart, just as damned souls are locked in hell?”

  The captain draws a noisy breath. “Goodness, child.”

  “Larry says that somebody killed Sakya.” I climb out of my vidped booth and go to the captain. “Maybe it was you.”

  Captain Xao laughs. “Do you know how many hoops I had to leap through to become captain of this ship? Ethnically, Gee Bee, I am Han Chinese. Hardly anybody in the Free Federation of Tibetan Voyagers wished me to command our strut-ship. But I was wholeheartedly Yellow Hat and the best pilot-engineer not already en route to a habitable planet. And so I’m here. I’d no more assassinate the Dalai Lama than desecrate a chorten, or harm Sakya’s likely successor.”

  I believe him, even if an anxious soul could hear the last few words of his speech unkindly. I ask if he likes Nima’s theory—that Sakya Gyatso killed himself—better than Minister T’s Cadillac-infraction version. When he starts to answer, I say, “Flee falsehood again and speak the True Word.”

  After a blink, he says, “If you insist.”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Then I declare myself, on that question, an agnostic. Neither theory strikes me as outlandish. But neither seems likely, either: Minister T’s because His Holiness had good physical health and Nima’s because the stresses of this voyage were but tickling feathers to the Dalai Lama.”

  I surprise myself—I begin to cry.

  Captain Xao grips my shoulders so softly that his fingers feel like owl’s down, as I dream such down would feel on an Earth I’ve never seen, and never will. He whispers in my ear: “Shhh-shh.”

  “Why do you shush me?”

  Captain Xao removes his hands. “I no longer shush you. Feel free to cry.”

  I do. So does Captain Xao. We are wed in knowing that Larry my tutor was right all along, and that our late Dalai Lama fell at the hands of a really mean someone with an inferior motive.

  Years in transit: 87

  Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 12

  A week before my twelfth birthday, a Buddhist nun named Dolma Langdun, who works in the Amdo Bay nursery, hails me through the Kalachakra intranet. She wants to know if, on my birthday, I will let one of her helpers accompany me to the nursery to meet the children and accept gifts from them.

  She signs off, —Mama Dolma.

  I ask myself, “Why does this person do this? Who’s told her that I have a birthday coming?”

  Not my folks, who sleep in their somnacicle eggs, nor Larry, who does the same because I’ve “exhausted” him. And so I resolve to put these questions to Mama Dolma over my intranet connection.

  —How many children? I ask her, meanwhile listening to Górecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” through my ear-bud.

  —Five, she replies. —Very sweet children, the youngest ten months and the oldest almost six years. It would be a great privilege to attend you on your natal anniversary, Your Holiness.

  Before I can scold her for using this too-soon form of address, she adds, —As a toddler, you spent time here in Momo House, but in those bygone days I was assigned to the nunnery in U-Tsang with Abbess Yeshe Yargag.

  —Momo House! I key her. —Oh, I remember!

  Momo means dumpling, and this memory of my caregivers and my little friends back then dampens my eyelashes. Clearly, during the Z-pod rests of my parents and tutor, Minister Trungpa has acted as a most thoughtful guardian.

  The following week goes by even faster than a fifth of light-speed.

  On my birthday morning, a skinny young monk in a maroon jumpsuit comes for me and escorts me down to Momo House.

  There I meet Mama Dolma. There, I also meet the children: the baby Alicia, the toddlers Pema and Lahmu, and the oldest two, Rinzen and Mickey. Except for the baby, they tap-dance about me like silly dwarves. The nursery features big furry balls that also serve as hassocks; inflatable yaks, monkeys, and pterodactyls; and cribs and vidped units, with lock belts for AG failures. A system made just for the Dumpling Gang always warns of an outage at least fifteen minutes before it occurs.

  The nearly-six kid, Mickey, grabs my hand and shows me around. He introduces me to everybody, working down from the five-year-old to ten-month-old Alicia. All of them but Alicia give me drawings. These drawings show a monkey named Chenrezig (of course), a nun named Dolma (ditto), a yak named Yackety (double ditto), and a python with no name at all. I ooh and ah over these masterpizzas, as I call them, and then help them assemble soft-form puzzles, feed one another snacks, go to the toilet, and scan a big voyage chart that ends (of course) at Gliese 581g.

  But it’s Alicia, the baby, who wins me. She twinkles. She flirts. She touches. At nap time, I hold her in a vidped unit, its screen oranged out and its rockers rocking, and nuzzle her sweet-smelling neck. She tugs at my lip corners and pinches my mouth flat, so involved in reshaping my face that I think her a pudgy sculptor elf. All the while, her agate eyes, bigger than my thumb tips, play across my face with near-sighted adoration.

  I stay with Alicia—Alicia Paljor—all the rest of my day. Then the skinny young monk comes to escort me home, as if I need him to, and Mama Dolma hugs me. Alicia wails.

  It hurts to leave, but I do, because I must, and even as the hurt fades, the memory of this outstanding birthday begins, that very night, to sing in me like the lovely last notes of Górecki’s Third.

  I have never had a better birthday.

  Months later, Daddy Simon and Mama Karen Bryn have come up-phase at the same time. Together, they fetch me from my nook in Amdo and walk with me on a good AG day to the cafeteria above the grave-caves of our strut-ship’s central drum, Kham. I ease along the serving line between them, taking tsampa, mushroom cuts, tofu slices, and sauces to make it all edible. The three of us end up at a table in a nook far from the serving line. Music by J. S. Bach spills from speakers in the movable walls, with often a sitar and bells to call up for some voyagers a Himalayan nostalgia to which my folks are immune. We eat fast and talk small.

  Then Mama says, “Gee Bee, your father has something to tell you.”

  O God. O Buddha. O Larry. O Curly. O Moe.

  “Tell her,” Mama says.

  Daddy Simon wears the sour face proclaiming that everybody should call him Pieman Oldfart. I hurt to behold him, he to behold me. But at last he gets out that before I stood up-phase, almost three years ago, as the DL’s disputed Soul Child, he and Mama signed apartness documents that have now concluded in an agreement of full marital severance. They continue my folks, but not as the couple that conceived, bore, and raised me. They remain friends but will no longer cohabit because of incompatibilities that have arisen over their up-phase years. It really shouldn’t matter to me, they
say, because I’ve become Larry’s protégée with a grand destiny that I will no doubt fulfill as a youth and an adult. Besides, they will continue to parent me as much as my odd unconfirmed status as DL-in-training allows.

  I do not cry, as I did upon learning that Captain Xao believes that somebody slew my only-maybe predecessor. I don’t cry because their news feels truly distant, like word of a planet somewhere whose people have brains in their chests. However, it does hurt to think about why I absolutely must cry later.

  Daddy gets up, kisses my forehead, and leaves with his tray.

  Mama studies me closely. “I’ll always love you. You’ve made me very proud.”

  “You’ve made me very proud,” I echo her.

  “What?”

  We push our plastic fork tines around in our leftovers, which I imagine rising in damp squadrons from our plates and floating up to the air-filtration fans. I wish that I, too, could either rise or sink.

  “When will they confirm you?” Mama asks.

  “Everything on this ship takes forever: getting from here to there, finding a killer, confirming the new DL.”

  “You must have some idea.”

  “I don’t. The monks don’t want me. I can’t even visit their make-believe gompas over in U-Tsang.”

  “Well, those are sacred places. Not many of us get invitations.”

  “But Minister T has declared me the ‘One,’ and Larry has tutored me in thousands of subjects, holy and not so holy. Still, the subsidiary lamas and their silly crew think less well of me than they would of a lame blue mountain sheep.”

  “Don’t call their monasteries ‘make-believe,’ Gee Bee. Don’t call these other holy people and their followers ‘silly.’”

  “Fie!” I actually tell her. “I wish I were anywhere but on this bean can flung at an iceberg light-years across the stupid universe.”

  “Don’t, Greta Bryn. You’ve got a champion in Minister Trungpa.”

  “Who just wants to bask in the reflected glory of his next supposed Bodhisattva—which, I swear, I am not.”

  Mama lifts her tray and slams it down.

  Nobody else seems to notice, but I jump.

  “You have no idea,” she says, “who you are or what a champion can do for you, and you’re much too young to dismiss yourself or your powerful advocate.”

  One of the Brandenburg Concertos swells, its sitars and yak bells flourishing. Far across the mess hall, Larry shuffles toward us with a tray. Mama sees him, and, just as Daddy did, she kisses my forehead and abruptly leaves. My angry stare tells Larry not to mess with me (no, I won’t apologize for the accidental pun), and Larry veers off to chow with two or three bio-techs at a faraway table.

  Years in transit: 88

  Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 13

  Today marks another anniversary of the Kalachakra’s departure from Moon orbit on its crossing to Guge in the Gliese 581 system.

  Soon I will turn thirteen. Much has happened in the six years since I woke to find that Sakya Gyatso had died and that I had become Greta Bryn Gyatso, his really tardy reincarnation.

  What has not happened haunts me as much as, if not more than, what has. I have a disturbing sense that the ‘investigation’ into Sakya’s murder resides in a secretly agreed-upon limbo. Also, that my confirmation rests in this same foggy territory, with Minister T as my ‘regent.’ Recently, though, at First Officer Nima’s urging, Minister T assigned me a bodyguard from among the monks of U-Tsang Bay, a guy called Ian Kilkhor.

  Once surnamed Davis, Kilkhor was born sixteen years into our flight of Canadian parents, techs who’d converted to the Yellow Hat order of Tibetan Buddhists in Calgary, Alberta, a decade before the construction of our interstellar vessel. Although nearing the chronological age of sixty, Kilkhor—as he asks me to call him—looks less than half that and has many admirers among the female ghosts in Kham.

  Officer Nima fancies him. (Hey, even I fancy him.)

  But she’s celibacy-committed unless a need for childbearing arises on Guge. And assuming her reproductive apparatus still works. Under such circumstances, I suspect that Kilkhor would lie with her.

  Here I confess my ignorance. Despite lessons from Larry in the Tibetan language, I didn’t realize, until Kilkhor told me, that his new surname means ‘Mandala.’ I excuse myself on the grounds that ‘Kilkhor’ more narrowly means ‘center of the circle,’ and that Larry often skimps on offering connections. (To improve the health of his ‘mortal coil,’ Larry has spent nearly four of my last six years in an ursidormizine doze. I go to visit him once every two weeks in the pod-lodges of Amdo Bay, but these well-intended homages sometimes feel less like cheerful visits than dutiful viewings.) Also, ‘Kilkhor’ sounds to me more like an incitement to violence than it does a statement of physical and spiritual harmony.

  Even so, I benefit in many ways from Kilkhor’s presence as bodyguard and stand-in tutor. Like Larry, Mama and Daddy spend long periods in their pods; and Kilkhor, a monk who knows tai chi chuan, has kept the killer, or killers, of Sakya from slaying me, if such villains exist aboard our ship. (I have begun to doubt they do.) He has also taught me much history, culture, religion, politics, computing, astrophysics and astronomy that Larry, owing to long bouts of hibernizing, has sadly neglected. Also, he weighs in for me with the monks, nuns, and yogis of U-Tsang, who feel disenfranchised in the process of confirming me as Sakya’s successor.

  Indeed, because the Panchen Lama now in charge in U-Tsang will not let me set foot there, Kilkhor intercedes to get other high monks to visit me in Kham. The Panchen Lama, to avoid seeming either bigot or autocrat, permits these visits. Unhappily, my sex, my ethnicity, and (most important) the fact that my birth antedates the Twenty-first’s death by five years all conspire to taint my candidacy. I doubt it too and fear that fanatics among the ‘religious’ will try to veto me by subtraction, not by argument, and that I will die at the hands of friends rather than enemies of the Dalai Lamahood.

  Such fears, by themselves, throw real doubt on Minister T’s choice of me as the Sakya’s only indisputable Soul Child.

  Years in transit: 89

  Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 14

  “The Tibetan belief in monkey ancestors puts them in a unique category as the only people I know of who acknowledged this connection before Darwin.”

  —Karen Swenson,

  twentieth-century traveler, poet, and

  worker at Mother Teresa’s Calcutta mission

  Last week, a party of monks and one nun met me in the hangar of Kham Bay. From their gompas (‘monasteries’) in U-Tsang, they brought a woolen cloak, a woolen bag, three spruce walking sticks, three pairs of sandals, and a white-faced monkey that one monk, as the group entered, fed from a baby bottle full of ashen-gray slurry.

  An AG-generator never runs in the hangar because people don’t often visit it, and our lander nests in a vast hammock of polyester cables. So we levitated in a cordoned space near the nose of the lander, which the Free Federation of Tibetan Voyagers has named Chenrezig, after that Buddhist disciple who, in monkey form, sired the first human Tibetans. (Each new DL automatically qualifies as the latest incarnation of Chenrezig.) Our lander’s nose is painted with bright geometric patterns and the cartoon head of a wise-looking monkey wearing glasses and a beaked yellow hat. Despite this amusing iconography, however, almost everyone on our strut-ship now calls the lander the Yak Butter Express.

  After stiff greetings, these high monks—including the Panchen Lama, Lhundrub Gelek, and Yeshe Yargang, the abbess of U-Tsang’s only nunnery!—tied the items that they’d brought to a utility toadstool in the center of our circle (‘kilkhor’). Then we floated in lotus positions, hands palm-upward, and I stared at these items, but not at the monkey now clutching the PL and wearing a look of alert concern. From molecular vibrations and subtle somatic clues—twitches, blinks, sniffles—I tried to determine which of the articles they wished me to select . . . or not to select, as their biases dictated
.

  “Some of these things were Sakya Gyatso’s,” the Panchen Lama said. “Choose only those that he viewed as truly his. Of course, he saw little in this life as a ‘belonging.’ You may examine any or all, Miss Brasswell.”

  I liked how my surname (even preceded by the stodgy honorific Miss) sounded in our hangar, even if it did seem to label me an imposter, if not an outright foe of Tibetan Buddhism. To my right, Kilkhor lowered his eyelids, advising me to make a choice. OK, then: I had no need to breast-stroke my way over to the pile.

  “The cloak,” I said.

  Its stench of musty wool and ancient vegetable dyes told me all I needed to know. I recalled those smells and the cloak’s vivid colors from an encounter with the DL during his visit to the nursery in Amdo when I was four. It had seemed the visit of a seraph or an extraterrestrial—as, by virtue of our status as star travelers, he had qualified. Apparently, none of these faithful had accompanied him then, for, obviously, none recalled his having cinched on this cloak to meet a tot of common blood.

  The monkey—a large Japanese macaque (Mucaca fuscata)—swam to the center of our circle, undid the folded cloak, and kicked back to the Lama, who belted it around his lap. Still fretful, the macaque levitated in its breechclout—a kind of diaper— beside the PL. It wrinkled its brow at me in approval or accusation.

  “Go on,” Lhundrub Gelek said. “Choose another item.”

  I glanced at Kilkhor, who dropped his eyelids.

  “May I see what’s in the bag?” I asked.

  The PL spoke to the macaque: a critter I imagined Tech Bonfils taking a liking to at our trip’s outset. It then paddled over to the bag tied to the utility toadstool, seized the bag by its neck, and dragged it over to me.

  After foraging a little, I extracted five slender books, of a kind now rarely made, and studied each: one in English, one in Tibetan, one in French, one in Hindi, and one, surprisingly, in Esperanto. In each case, I recognized their alphabets and point of origin, if not their subject matter. A bootlace linked the books; when they started to float away, I caught its nearer end and yanked them all back.