by Neil Clarke
“He’s right,” interjected Jurriaan. Chiara looked at him in surprise. It was probably the first thing he had said on this voyage that didn’t involve his music.
She was outvoted. Even Orpheus expressed a support for Manuel’s proposal, although the Consortium didn’t give AIs full voting rights.
She left the cabin silently.
It took Manuel several days of an unceasing effort just to prepare the bodies. He filled them with nanobots and went through the results. He kept them under constant temperature and atmosphere. He retrieved what he could from the long dead ship about their medical records.
And then he began performing the procedure. He carefully opened the skulls, exposed the brains, and started repairing them. There wasn’t much useful left after eleven thousand years. But with the help of cutting edge designed bacteria and the nans, there was still a chance of doing a decent scan.
After another week, he started with that.
Chiara finally felt at peace. Since their rendezvous with Sedna, she felt filled with various emotions every day and finally she thought she couldn’t bear it anymore. As she stepped inside Orpheus after the last scheduled visit of the surface of Sedna, she knew it was the time.
Inside her cabin, she lay down calmly and let Orpheus pump a precisely mixed cocktail of modulators into her brain. Then Chiara entered her Dreamland.
She designed this environment herself some decades ago in order to facilitate the process of creating new musical themes and ideas from her emotions and memories as effectively as she could. And Chiara felt that the story of the ancient alien ship, Theodora, Dimitri and Sedna would make wonderful musical variations. Then it will be primarily Jurriaan’s task to assemble hers and Manuel’s pieces, often dramatically different, into a symphony such as the world has never heard. Such that will make them famous even beyond the Jovian Consortium, possibly both among the Traditionalists and the Transitioned. They will all remember them.
Chiara smiled and drifted away from a normal consciousness.
During her stay in the Dreamland, Orpheus slowly abandoned the orbit of Sedna and set on a trajectory leading back to the territory of the Jovian Consortium. Another expedition, triggered by their reports back, was already on their way to Sedna, eager to find out more especially about the alien ship and to drill through the ice crust into the possible inner ocean.
Chiara, Manuel, and Jurriaan had little equipment to explore the ship safely—but they didn’t regret it. They had everything they needed. Now was the time to start assembling it all together carefully, piece by piece, like putting back a shattered antique vase.
Even Manuel didn’t regret going away from this discovery. He had the bodies—and trying to revive their personalities now kept most of his attention. A few days after their departure from Sedna, he finished the procedure.
Chiara was awake again at the time, the burden of new feelings longing to be transformed into music gone. She didn’t mind now what Manuel had done; it would be pointless to feel anything about it after she had already created her part of the masterpiece.
Manuel first activated the simulation of Dimitri’s personality.
“Where am I? Dora . . . Dora . . . Dora,” it repeated like a stuck gramophone record.
“His brain suffered more damage than hers after he died,” Manuel admitted. “She had time to go through a fairly common cryopreservation procedure. However . . .”
“I’m stuck here. Our reactor broke down and the ship tore apart. There is too much damage. My husband is dead . . . But we found something, I have to pass this message on . . . But I feel disoriented, what have I finished? Where am I? What’s happening?” After a while, the female voice started again: “Have I said this already? I don’t know. I’m stuck here. Our reactor broke down . . .”
“They are both mere fragments, a little memories from before death, a few emotions and almost no useful cognitive capacity. I couldn’t have retrieved more. Nevertheless, this is still a giant leap forward. Theoretically, we shouldn’t have been able to retrieve this much after more than eleven thousand years.”
Chiara listened to the feeble voices of the dead and was suddenly overwhelmed with sorrow. It chimed every piece of her body and her mind was full of it. It was almost unbearable. And it was also beautiful.
“It is great indeed,” she whispered.
She didn’t have to say more. Jurriaan learned her thoughts through the open channel. She knew he was thinking the same. He listened all the time. In his mind and with help of Orpheus, he kept listening to the recordings obtained by Manuel, shifting them, changing frequencies, changing them . . . making them into a melody.
“Keep a few of their words in it, will you?” Chiara spoke softly. “Please.”
I will. They’ll make a great introduction. They will give the listeners a sense of the ages long gone and of personalities of former humans. And he immersed into his composition once again. She knew better than to interrupt him now. In a few days or weeks, he will be done; he’ll have gone through all her and Manuel’s musical suggestions and come up with a draft of the symphony. Then it will take feedback from her and Manuel to complete it. But Jurriaan will have the final say in it. He is, after all, the Composer.
And after that, they should come up with a proper name. A Symphony of Ice and Dust, perhaps? And maybe they should add a subtitle. Ghosts of Theodora and Dimitri Live On Forever? No, certainly not; far too pompous and unsuitable for a largely classical piece. Voices of the Dead? A Song of the Shipwrecked?
Or simply: A Tribute.
Michael Bishop’s first professionally published work was a Keats-flavored ode, “An Echo through the Timepiece,” in The Georgia Review in 1968, but his first published short story, “Piñon Fall,” appeared in the October/ November issue of Galaxy, a sale that nudged him into a genre that his fondness for the work of H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Ursula K. Le Guin had perhaps made inevitable, science fiction. Since then, he has been nominated on many occasions in several categories for the Hugo Award and has won two Nebula Awards, the first for his novelette “The Quickening” and the second for his anthropological novel about human origins, No Enemy but Time. Other well-received novels include Transfigurations, recently reissued by Fairwood Press in a revised text with a new introduction by sf scholar and academic Joe Sanders, as well as A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire; Ancient of Days; Count Geiger’s Blues; Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas; and Brittle Innings. His newest original book, Other Arms Reach Out to Me: Georgia Stories (July 2017), gathers fifteen of his best primarily mainstream works of short fiction and is available from Fairwood Press and Bishop’s own imprint there, Kudzu Planet Productions. In November of 2018, Bishop will be inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.
TWENTY LIGHTS TO “THE LAND OF SNOW”
EXCERPTS FROM THE COMPUTER LOGS OF OUR RELUCTANT DALAI LAMA
MICHAEL BISHOP
YEARS IN TRANSIT: 82 OUT OF 106? COMPUTER LOGS OF THE DALAI LAMA-TO-BE, AGE 7
A board Kalachakra, I open my eyes again in Amdo Bay. Sleep still pops in me, yowling like a really hurt cat. I look sidelong out of 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 reaching oceans of farthest 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 par
ts 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’ve already shot me in the heart, to stir its beating. Now I sit and look around, clearer. Daddy stands near, showing his crumply face.
“Hey, Gee Bee,” he says, but doesn’t grab my hand.
His coverall tag is my roll-call name: Brasswell. A hard 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 shhh.” Mama touches my other cheek. Everyone 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 steps 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 multi times so I would not forget. I was 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 out 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—just to drink, my tongue’s so thick with sourness. “A planet.”
“Miss Brasswell,”—now Minister T’s being smart-alecky—“tell me two things you know about Guge.”
I sort of ask, “It’s ‘The Land of Snow,’ this dead king’s place in olden Tibet?”
“Good!” Minister T says. “And its second meaning for us Kalachakrans?”
I squint to get it: “A faraway world to live on?”
“Where, intelligent miss?”
Another easy one: “In the Goldilocks Zone.” A funny name for it.
“But where, Greta Bryn, is this 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 T grins. His face looks like a shiny 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 up and eat, 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 commons-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.’ 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 Trungpa, our late Dalai Lama’s closest friend, thinks you’re his rebirth, Greta Bryn.”
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,” Mama 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 wear his sandals. 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 as our colony dukpa, which in Tibetan means ‘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 this 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’m a girl person—not a Chinese or a Tibetan. I tell Larry this when he swims into 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,” I say. “But you don’t look like no girl either.”
“A girl, Your Holiness.” Larry must correct me, Mama says, because 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 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 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 ev
erybody, 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, why avoid mixing your soul self 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 try to understand what’s happening on Kalachakra, and how the late 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 at the same time.
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 was “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 study and tutoring times. When the artificial-grav cuts off, as it does a lot, I float my ghost self into bays and nooks everywhere.
Our ship has a crazy bigness, like a tunnel turning through star-smeared space, like a train of railroad 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 wish to know.