The Final Frontier

by Neil Clarke

  Here’s what I’ve learnt by reading and vidped-tasking, snooping and asking:

  1. UNS Kalachakra hauls 990 human asses (“and therest of each burro aboard”—Daddy’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 581g.

  2. Captain Xao says that most of us on Kalachakra spend our journey in ursidormizine slumber to dream about our work on Guge. The greatest number of somnacicles—sleepers—have their eggpods 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, down- or up-phase.

  3. All must wriggle up-phase once each year or two. You cannot hibernize longer than two at a snooze because we human somnacicles go dodgy quite soon during our third year drowse, so Captain Xaotells us, “We’ll need every hand on the ground once we’re all down on Guge.” (“Every foot on the ground,” I would say.)

  4. Red dwarf star Gliese 581, also known as Zarmina,spectral class M3V, awaits us in constellation Libra. Captain Xao calls it the eighty-seventh closest known solar system to our sun. It has seven planets and spurts out X-rays. It will flame away much sooner than Sol, but so far from now that none of us on Kalachakra will care a toot.

  5. Gliese 581g, aka Guge, goes around its dwarf in a circle, nearly. It has one face stuck toward its sun, but enough gravity to hold its gasses to it; enough—more than Earth’s—so you can walk without floating away. But it will really hot you on the sun-stuck side and chill you nasty on its drearydark rear. It’s got rocks topside and magma in its zonal mountains. We must live in the in-between stripes of the terminator, safe spots for bipeds with blood to boil or kidneys to broil. Or maybe we’ll freeze, if we land in the black. So two hurrahs for Guge, and three for ‘The Land of Snow’ in the belts where we hope to plug in.

  6. We know Guge has mass. It isn’t, says Captain Xao, a “pipedream or a mirage.” Our onboard telescope found it twelve Earth years ago, seventyout from Moon-orbit kickoff, with maybe twenty or so to go now before we really get there. Hey, I’m more than a smidgen scared to arrive, hey, maybe a million smidgens.

  7. I’m also scared to stay an up-phase ghost on Kalachakra. Like a snow leopard or a yeti, I am an endangered species. I don’t want to step up to Dalai Lamahood. It’s got its perks, but until Captain Xao, Minister T, Larry Rinpoche, Mama, Daddy, and our security persons find out WHO kilt the twenty-first DL, Greta Bryn, a maybe DL,thinks her life worth one dried pea in a vacu-meal pack. Maybe.

  8. In the tunnels all among Amdo, Kham, and U-Tsang Bays, the ghost of a snow leopard drifts. It has cindery spots swirled into the frosting of its fur. Its eyes leap yellow-green in the dimness when it peeks back at two-leggers like me. It jets from a holo-beam, but I don’t know how or wherefrom. In my dreams, I turn when I see it. My heart flutter-pounds toward shutdown . . . .

  9. Sakya Gyatso spent many years as a ghost on Kalachakra. He never hibernized more than three months at once, but tried to blaze at full awakeness like a Bodhisattva. He slept the bear slumber, when he did, but only because on Guge he’ll have to lead 990 shipboard faithfuls and millions of Tibetan Buddhists, native and not, in their unjust exiles. Can an up-phase ghost, once it really dies, survive on a strut-ship as a ghost for real? Truly, I do not know.

  10. Once I didn’t know Mama’s or Daddy’s first names. Tech is a title not a name, and Tech Brasswell married my mama, Tech Bonfils, aboard Kalachakra (Captain Xao saying the words), in the seventy-fourth year of our flight. Tech Bonfils birthed me the following ‘fall,’ one of just forty-seven children born in our trip to Guge. Luckily, Larry Rinpoche told me my folks’ names: Simon and Karen Bryn. Now I don’t even know if they like each other. But I know, from lots of reading, that S. Hawking, this century-gone physicist, believed people are not quantifiable. He was definitely right about that.

  I know lots more, although not who killed the Twenty-first DL, if anybody did, and so I pick at that worry a lot.

  YEARS IN TRANSIT: 83 COMPUTER LOGS OF THE DALAI LAMA-TO-BE, AGE 8

  In old spectals and palm pix, starship captains sit at helms where they can see the Empty Vast out windows or screens. Captain Xao, First Officer Nima Photrang, and their crew keep us all cruising toward Gliese 581 in a closed cockpit in the upper central third of the big tin can that’s strut-shipping us to Guge.

  This section we call Kham Bay. Cut flowers in thin vials prettify the room where Xao and Photrang and crew sit to work. This pit also has a hanging of the Kalachakra Mandala and a big painted figure of the Buddha wearing a body, a man’s and a woman’s, with huge lots of faces and arms. Larry calls this window-free pit a control room and a shrine.

  I guess he knows.

  I visit the cockpit. No one stops me. I visit because Simon and Karen Bryn have gone back to their Siestaville to pod-lodge for many months on Amdo Bay’s bottom level. Me, I stay my ghostly self. I owe it to everybody aboard—or so I often get told—to grow into my full Lamahood.

  “Ah,” says Captain Xao, “you wish to fly Kalachakra. Great, Your Holiness.”

  But he passes me to First Officer Photrang, a Tibetan who looks manlike in her jumpsuit but womanlike at her wrists and hands—so gentle about the eyes that, drifting near because our AG’s gone out, she seems to have just pulled off a hard black mask.

  “What may I do for you, Greta Bryn?”

  My lips won’t move, so grateful am I she didn’t say, “Your Holiness.”

  She shows me the console where she watches the fuel level in a drop-tank behind our tin cylinder as this tank feeds the antimatter engine pushing us outward. Everything, she says, depends on electronic systems that run ‘virtually automatically,’ but she and other crew must check closely, even though the systems have ‘fail-safes’ to signal them from afar if they leave the control shrine.

  “How long,” I ask, “before we get to Guge?”

  “In nineteen years we’ll start braking,” Nima Photrang says. “In another four, if all goes as plotted, we will enter the Gliese 581 system and soon take a stationary orbital position above the terminator. From there we’ll go down to the adjacent habitable zones that we intend to settle in and develop.”

  “Four years to brake!” No one’s ever said such a thing to me before. Four years are half the number I’ve lived, and no adult, I think, feels older at their ancient ages than I do at eight.

  “Greta Bryn, to slow us faster than that would put terrible stress on our strut-ship. Its builders assembled it with optimal lightness, to save on fuel, but also with sufficient mass to withstand a twentieth of a g during its initial four years of thrusting and its final four years of deceleration. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Listen: It took the Kalachakra four years to reach a fifth of the speed of light. During that time, we traveled less than half a light-year and burned a lot of the fuel in our drop tanks. Jettisoning the used-up tanks lightened us. For seventy-nine years since then, we’ve coasted, cruising over sixteen light-years toward our target sun but using our fuel primarily for trajectory correction maneuvers. That’s a highly economical expenditure of the antimatter ice with which we began our flight.”

  “Good,” I say—because Officer Photrang looks at me as if I should clap for such an ‘economical expenditure.’

  “Anyway, we scheduled four years of braking at one twentieth of a g to conserve our final fuel resources and to keep this spidery vessel from ripping apart at higher rates of deceleration.”

  “But it’s still going to take so long!”

  The officer takes me to a ginormous sketch of our strut-ship. “If anyone aboard has time for a stress-reducing deceleration, Greta Bryn, you do.”

  “Twenty-three ye
ars!” I say. “I’ll turn thirty-one!”

  “Yes, you’ll wither into a pitiable crone.” Before I can protest more, she shows me other stuff: a map of the inside of our passenger can, a holocircle of the Gliese 581 system, and a d-cube of her living mama and daddy in the village Drak, which means Boulder, fifty-some rocky miles southeast of Lhasa. But—I’m such a dodo bird!—maybe they no longer live at all.

  “My daddy’s from Boulder!” I say to overcoat this thought.

  Officer Photrang peers at me with small bright eyes.

  “Boulder, Colorado,” I tell her.

  “Is that so?” After a nod from Captain Xao, she guides me into a tunnel lit by little glowing pins.

  “What did you really come up here to learn, child? I’ll tell you if I can.”

  “Who killed Sakya Gyatso?” I hurry to add, “I don’t want to be him.”

  “Who told you somebody killed His Holiness?”

  “Larry.” I grab a guide rail. “My tutor, Lawrence Rinpoche.”

  Nima Photrang snorts. “Larry has a bad humor sense. And he may be wrong.”

  I float up. “But what if he’s right?”

  “Is the truth that important to you?” She pulls me down.

  A question for a question, like a dry seed poked under my gum. “Larry says that a lama in training must quest for truth in everything, and I must do so always, and everyone else, by doing that too, will clean the universe of lies.”

  “‘Do as I say and not as I do.’”

  “What?”

  Nima—she tells me to call her by this name—takes my arm and swims me along the tunnel to a door that opens at a knuckle bump. She guides me into her rooms, a closet with a pull-down rack and straps, a toadstool unit for our shipboard intranet, and a corner for talking in. We float here. Nicely, or so it seems, she pulls a twist of brindle hair out of my eye.

  “Child, it’s possible that Sakya Gyatso had a heart attack.”

  “Possible?”

  “That’s the official version, which Minister T told all us ghosts up-phase enough to notice that Sakya had gone missing.”

  I think hard. “But the unofficial story is . . . somebody killed him?”

  “It’s one unofficial story. In the face of uncertainty, child, people indulge their imaginations, and more versions of the truth pop up than you can slam a lid on. But lid-slamming, we think, is a bad response to ideas that will come clear in the oxygen of free inquiry.”

  “Who do you mean, ‘we’?”

  Nima shows a little smile. “My ‘we’ excludes anyone who forbids the expression of plausible alternatives to any ‘official version.’”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “I’d best not say.”

  “Maybe you need some oxygen.”

  This time her smile looks a bit realer. “Yes, maybe I do.”

  “I’m the new Dalai Lama, probably, and I give you that oxygen, Nima. Tell me your idea, now.”

  After two blinks, she does: “I fear that Sakya Gyatso killed himself.”

  “The Dalai Lama?” I can’t help it: her idea insults the man, who, funnily, now breathes inside me.

  “Why not the Dalai Lama?”

  “A Bodhisattva lives for others. He’d never kill anybody, much less himself.”

  “He stayed up-phase too much—almost half a century—and the anti-aging effects of ursidormizine slumber, which he often avoided as harmful to his leadership role, were compromised. His Holiness did have the soul of a Bodhisattva, but he also had an animal self. The wear to his body broke him down, working on his spirit as well as his head, and doubts about his ability to last the rest of our trip niggled at him, as did doubts about his fitness to oversee our colonization of Guge.”

  I cross my arms. This idea insults the late DL. It also, I think, poisons me. “I believe he had a heart attack.”

  “Then the official version has taken seed in you,” Nima says.

  “OK then. I like to think someone killed Sakya Gyatso, not that tiredness or sadness made him do it.”

  Gently: “Child, where’s your compassion?”

  I float away. “Where’s yours?” At the door of the first officer’s quarters, I try to bump out. I can’t. Nima must drift over, knuckle-bump the door plate, and help me with my angry going.

  The artificial-gravity generators run again. I feel them humming through the floor of my room in Amdo, and in Z Quarters where our somnacicles nap. Larry says that except for them, AG aboard Kalachakra works little better than did electricity in war-wasted nations on Earth. Anyway, I don’t need the lock belt in my vidped unit; and such junk as pocket pens, toothbrushes, mess chits, and d-cubes don’t go slow-spinning away like my fuzzy dreams.

  Somebody knocks.

  Who is it? Not Larry—he’s already tutored me today—or Mama, who sleeps in her pod, or Daddy, who’s gone up-phase to U-Tsang to help the monks plant vegetables around their gompas. He gets to visit U-Tsang, but I—the only nearly anointed DL on this ship—must mostly hang with non-monks.

  The knock knocks again.

  Xao Songda enters. He unhooks a folding stool from the wall and sits atop it next to my vidped booth: Captain Xao, the pilot of our generation ship. Even with the hotshot job he has to work, he wanders around almost as much as me.

  “Officer Photrang tells me you have doubts.”

  I have doubts like a strut-ship has fuel tanks. I wish I could drop them half as fast as Kalachakra dropped its anti-hydrogen-ice-filled drums in the first four years of our run toward our coasting speed.

  “Well?” Captain Xao’s eyebrow goes up.

  “Sir?”

  “Does my first officer lie, or do you indeed have doubts?”

  “I have doubts about everything.”

  “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.

  1She 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.