The Final Frontier

by Neil Clarke

  —Why do we voyage? one of them will ask.

  —To fulfill, I say, —the self-determination tenets of the Free Federation of Tibet and to usher every soul pent in hell up through the eight lower realms to Buddhahood.

  From the bottom up, these realms include: 1) hell-pent mortals, 2) hungry ghosts, 3) benighted beasts, 4) fighting spirits, 5) human beings, 6) seraphs and suchlike, 7) disciples of the Buddha, 8) Buddhas for themselves only, and 9) Bodhisattvas who live and labor for every soul in each lower realm.

  —Which realm did you begin in, Your Probationary Holiness?

  —That of the bewildered, but not benighted, human mortal.

  —As our Dalai Lama in Training, to which realm have you arisen?

  —That of the disciples of Chenrezig: “Hail the jewel in the lotus.” I am the funky simian saint of the Buddha.

  (Sometimes, depending on my mood, I ad-lib that last bit.)

  —From what besieged and battered homeland do you pledge to free us?

  —The terrestrial “Land of Snow”: Tibet beset, ensorcelled, and enslaved.

  —As a surrogate for that land gone cruelly forfeit, to which new country do you pledge to lead us?

  —“The Land of Snow,” on Guge the Unknowable, where we all must strive to free ourselves again.

  The foregoing part of the catechism embodies a pledge and a charge. Other parts synopsize the history of our oppression: the ruin of our economy; the destruction of our monasteries; the subjugation of our nation to the will of foreign predators; the co-opting of our spiritual formulae for greedy and warlike purposes; the submergence of our culture to the maws of jackals; and the quarantining of our state to anyone not of our oppressors’ liking. Finally, against the severing of sinews human and animal, the pulling asunder of ties interdependent and relational, only the tallest mountains could stand. And those who undertook the khora, the sacred pilgrimage around Mount Kailash, often did so with little or no grasp of the spiritual roots of their journeys. Even then, that mountain, the land all about it, and the scant air overarching them, stole the breath and spilled into its pilgrims’ lungs the bracing elixir of awe.

  At length, the Tibetans and their sympathizers realized that their overlords would never withdraw. Their invasion, theft, and reconfiguration of the state had left its peoples few options but death or exile.

  —So what did the Free Federation of Tibet do? Larry, Kilkhor, or Xao will ask.

  —Sought a United Nations charter for the building of a starship, an initiative that all feared China would preempt with its veto in the Security Council.

  —What happened instead?

  —The Chinese supported the measure.

  —How so?

  —They contributed to the general levy for funds to build and crew with colonists a second-generation antimatter ship capable of attaining speeds up to one-fifth the velocity of light.

  —Why did China surrender to an enterprise implying severe criticism of a policy that it saw as an internal matter? That initiative surely stood as a rebuke to its efforts to overwhelm Tibet with its own crypto-capitalistic materialism.

  Here I may snigger or roll my eyeballs, and Lawrence, Kilkhor, or Xao will repeat the question.

  —Three reasons suffice to explain China’s acquiescence, I at length reply.

  —State them.

  —First, China understood that launching this ship would remove the Twenty-first Dalai Lama, who had agreed not only to support this disarming plan but also to go with the Yellow Hat colonists to Gliese 581g.

  —‘Praise to the gods,’ my catechist will say in Tibetan.

  —Indeed, backing this plan would oust from a long debate the very man whom the Chinese reviled as a poser and a bar to the incorporation of Tibet into their program of post-post-Mao modernization.

  Here, another snigger from a bigger poser than Sakya; namely, me.

  —And the second reason, Your Holiness?

  —Backing this strut-ship strategy surprised the players arrayed against China in both the General Assembly and the Security Council.

  —To what end?

  —All they could do was brand China’s support a type of cynicism warped into a low-yield variety of ‘ethnic cleansing,’ for now Tibet and its partisans would have one fewer grievance to lay at China’s feet.

  With difficulty, I refrain from sniggering again.

  —And the third reason, Miss Greta Bryn, our delightfully responsive Ocean of Wisdom?

  —Supporting the antimatter ship initiative allowed China to put its design and manufacturing enterprises to work drawing up blueprints and machining parts for the provocatively named UNS Kalachakra.

  —And so we won our victory?

  —“Hail the jewel in the lotus,” I reply.

  —And what do we Kalachakrans hope to accomplish on the sun-locked world we now call Guge?

  —Establish a colony unsullied by colonialism; summon other emigrants to ‘The Land of Snow’; and lead to enlightenment all who bore that dream, and who will carry it into cycles yet to unfold.

  —And after that?

  —The cessation of everything samsaric, the opening of ourselves to nirvana.

  YEARS IN TRANSIT: 94

  COMPUTER LOGS OF THE DALAI LAMA-TO-BE, AGE 19

  For nearly four Earth months, I’ve added not one word to my Computer Log. But shortly after my last recitation of the foregoing catechism, Kilkhor pulled me aside and told me that I had a rival for the position of Dalai Lama.

  This news astounded me. “Who?”

  “A male Soul Child born of true Tibetan parents in Amdo Bay less than fifty days after Sakya Gyatso’s death,” Kilkhor said. “A search team located him almost a decade ago, but has only now disclosed him to us.” Kilkhor made this disclosure of bad news—it is bad, isn’t it?—sound very ordinary.

  “What’s his name?” I had no idea what else to say.

  “Jetsun Trimon,” Kilkhor said. “Old Gelek seems to think him a more promising candidate than he does Greta Bryn Brasswell.”

  “Jetsun! You’re joking, right?” And my heart did a series of arrhythmic lhundrubs in protest.

  Kilkhor regarded me then with either real, or expertly feigned, confusion. “You know him?”

  “Of course not! But the name—” I stuck, at once amused and appalled.

  “The name, Your Holiness?”

  “It’s a ridiculous, a totally ludicrous name.”

  “Not really. In Tibetan it means—”

  “—‘venerable’ and ‘highly esteemed,’” I put in. “But it’s still ridiculous.” And I noted that as a child, between bouts of study, I had often watched, well, ‘cartoons’ in my vidped unit. Those responsible for this lowbrow programming had mischievously stocked it with a selection of episodes called The Jetsons, about a space-going Western family in a gimmick-ridden future. I had loved it.

  “I’ve heard of it,” Kilkhor said. “The program, I mean.”

  But he didn’t twig the irony of my five-year-younger rival’s name.

  Or he pretended not to. To him, the similarity of these two monikers embodied a pointless coincidence.

  “I can’t do this anymore without a time-out,” I said. “I’m going down-phase for a year—at least a quarter of a year!”

  Kilkhor said nothing. His expression said everything.

  Still, he arranged for my down-phase respite, and I repaired to Amdo Bay and my eggshell to enjoy this pod-lodging self-indulgence, which, except for rare cartoon-tinged nightmares, I almost did.

  Now, owing to somatic suspension, I return at almost the same nineteen I went under.

  When I awake this time amidst a catacomb vista of eggshell pods—like racks in a troopship or in a concentration-camp barracks—Mama, Minister T, the Panchen Lama, Ian Kilkhor, and Jetsun Trimon attend my awakening.

  Grateful for functioning AG (as, down here, it always functions), I swing my legs out of the pod, stagger a step or two, and retch from a stomach knotted with a fresh anti
-insomniac heat.

  The Tibetan boy, my rival, comes to me unbidden, slides an arm across my chest from behind, and eases me back toward his own thin body so that I don’t topple into the vomit-vase Mama has given me. With his free hand, Jetsun strokes my brow, meanwhile tucking stray strands of hair behind my ear. I don’t need him to do this stuff. Actually, I resent his doing it.

  Although I usually sleep little, I do take occasional naps. Don’t I deserve a respite?

  I pull free of the young imposter. He looks fifteen at least, and if I’ve hit nineteen, his age squares better than does mine with the passing of the last DL and the transfer of Sakya’s bhava into the material form of Jetsun Trimon.

  Beholding him, I find his given name less of a joke than I did before my nap and more of a spell for the inspiriting that the PL alleges has occurred in him. Jetsun and I study each other with mutual curiosity. Our elders look on with darker curiosities. How must Jetsun and I regard this arranged marriage, they no doubt wonder, and what does it presage for everyone aboard the Kalachakra?

  During my year-plus sleep, maybe I’ve matured some. Although I want to cry out against the outrage—no, the unkindness—of my guardians’ conspiracy to bring this fey usurper to my podside, I don’t berate them. They warrant such a scolding, but I refrain. How do they wish me to view their collusion, and how can I see it as anything other than their sending a prince to the bier of a spell-afflicted maiden? Except for the acne scarring his forehead and chin, Jetsun is, well, cute, but I don’t want his help. I loathe his intrusion into my pod-lodge and almost regret my return.

  Kilkhor notes that the lamas of U-Tsang, including the Panchen Lama and Abbess Yargag, have finally decided to summon Jetsun Trimon and me to our onboard stand-in for the Jokhang Temple. There, they will conduct a gold-urn lottery to learn which of us will follow Sakya Gyatso as the Twenty-second Dalai Lama.

  Jetsun bows.

  He says that his tutor has given him the honor of inviting me, my family, and my guardians to this ‘shindig.’ It will occur belatedly, he admits, after he and I have already learned many sutras and secrets reserved in Tibet—holy be its saints, its people, and its memory—for a Soul Child validated by lottery.

  But circumstances have changed since our Earth-bound days: The ecology of the Kalachakra, the great epic of our voyage, and our need on Guge for a leader of heart and vision require fine tunings beyond our forebears’ imaginations.

  Wiser than I was last year, I swallow a cynical yawn.

  “And so,” Jetsun ends, “I wish you joy in the lottery’s Buddha-directed outcome, whichever name appears on the selected slip.”

  He bows and takes three steps back.

  Lhundrub Gelek beams at Jetsun, and I know in my gut that the PL has become my competitor’s regent, his champion. Mama Karen Bryn holds her face expressionless until fret lines drop from her lip corners like weighted ebony threads.

  I thank Jetsun, for his courtesy and his well-rehearsed speech. He seems to want something more—an invitation of my own, a touch—but I have nothing to offer but the stifling of my envy, which I fight to convert to positive energies boding a happy karmic impact on the name slips in the urn.

  “You must come early to our Temple,” the PL says. “Doing so will give you time to pay your respects at Sakya Gyatso’s bier.”

  This codicil to our invitation heartens me. Lacking any earlier approval to visit U-Tsang, I have never seen the body of the DL on display there.

  Do I really wish to see it, to see him?

  Yes, of course I do.

  We’ve lost many Kalachakrans in transit to Guge, but none of the others have our morticians bled with trochars, painted with creams and rouges, or treated with latter-day preservatives. Those others we ejected via tubes into the airless cold of interstellar space, meager human scraps for the ever-hungry night.

  In Tibet, the bereaved once spread their dead loved ones out on rocks in ‘celestial burial grounds.’ This they did as an act of charity, for the vultures. On our ship, though, we have no vultures, or none with feathers, and perhaps by firing our dead into unending quasi-vacuum, we will offer to the void a sacrifice of once-living flesh generous enough to upgrade our karma.

  But Sakya Gyatso we have enshrined; and soon, as one of only two candidates for his sacred post, I will gaze upon the remains of one whose enlightenment and mercy have plunged me into painful egocentric anguish.

  At the appointed time (six months from Jetsun’s invitation), we journey from Amdo and across Kham by way of tunnels designed for either gravity-assisted marches or weightless swims. Our style of travel depends on the AG generators and the rationing of gravity by formulae meant to benefit our long-term approach to Guge. However, odd outages often overcome these formulae. Blessedly, Kalachakrans now adjust so well to gravity loss that we no longer find it alarming or inconvenient.

  Journeying, we discover that U-Tsang’s residents—allegedly, all Bodhisattvas—have forsworn the use of generators during the 72-hour Festival of the Gold Urn, with that ceremony occurring at noon of the middle day. This renunciation they regard as a gift to everybody aboard our vessel—somnacicles and ghosts—and no hardship at all. Whatever stress we spare the generators, our karmic economies tell us, will redound to everybody’s benefit in our voyage’s later stages.

  My entourage consists of my divorced parents, Simon Brasswell and Karen Bryn Bonfils; Minister T, my self-proclaimed regent; Lawrence Lake Rinpoche, my tutor and confidant, now up-phase for the first time in two years; and Ian Kilkhor, security agent, standby tutor, and friend. We walk single-file through a sector of Kham wide enough for the next Dalai Lama’s subjects to line its walls and perform respectful namaste as he (or she) passes. Minister T tells us that Jetsun Trimon and his people made this same journey eighteen hours ago, and that their well-wishers in this trunk tunnel were fewer than those attending our passage. A Bodhisattva would take no pleasure from such a petty statistical triumph. Tellingly, I do. So what does my competition-bred joy say about my odds in the coming gold-urn lottery? Nothing auspicious, I fear.

  Eventually, our crowds dwindle, and we enter a deck area featuring a checkpoint and a sector gate. A monk clad in maroon passes us through. Another dials open the gate admitting us, at last, to U-Tsang.

  I smell roast barley, barley beer (chang), and an acrid tang of incense that makes my stomach seize. Beyond the gate, which shuts behind us like a stone wheel slotting into a tomb groove, we drift through a hall with thin metal rails and bracket-like handholds. The luminary pins here gleam a watery purple.

  Our feet slide out from under us, not like those of a fawn slipping on ice, but like those of an astronaut trainee rising from the floor of an aircraft plunging to create a few seconds of pedagogical zero-g.

  The AG generators here shut down a while ago, so we dog-paddle in water-wheel slow-motion, unsure which tunnel to enter.

  Actually, I’m the only uncertain trekker, but because neither Minister T nor Larry nor Kilkhor wants to help me, I stay mute, from perplexity and pride: another black mark, no doubt, against my lottery chances.

  Ahead of us, fifteen yards or so, a snow leopard manifests: a four-legged ghost with yellow eyes and frost-etched silver fur. Despite the lack of gravity, it faces us as though it were standing on a ledge and licks its sooty beard as if savoring again the last guinea-pig-like chiphi that it crushed into bone bits. I hesitate. The leopard swishes its tail, turns, and leaps into a tunnel that I would not have chosen.

  Kilkhor laughs and urges us upward into this same purplish chute. “It’s all right,” he says. “Follow it. Or do you suspect a subterfuge from our spiritually elevated hosts?” He laughs again . . . this time, maybe, at his inadvertent nod to the Christian sacrament of communion.

  Larry and I twig his mistake, but does anybody else?

  “Come on,” Kilkhor insists. “They’ve sent us this cool cat as a guide.”

  And so we follow. We swim rather than walk, levitating through a Buddhist ra
bbit hole in the wake of an illusory leopard . . . until, by a sudden shift in perspective, we feel ourselves to be ‘walking’ again.

  This ascent, or fall, takes just over an hour, and we emerge in the courtyard of Jokhang Temple, or its diminished Kalachakra facsimile. Here, the Panchen Lama, the Abbess of U-Tsang’s only nunnery, and a colorful contingent of Yellow Hats and other monks greet us joyfully. They regale us with khata, gift scarves inscribed with good-luck symbols, and with processional music played by flutes, drums, and bells. Their welcome feels at once high-spirited and heartfelt.

  The snow leopard has vanished. When we broke into the courtyard swimming like ravenous carp, somebody, somewhere, stopped projecting it.

  So let the gold-urn ceremony begin. Put me out of, or into, my misery.

  But before the lottery, we visit the shrine where the duded-up remains of Sakya Gyatso lie in state, like those of Lenin in the Kremlin or Mao in the Forbidden City. Although Sakya should not suffer mention in the same breath as mass murderers, nobody can deny that we have preserved him as an icon, just as the devotees of Lenin and Mao mummified them. And so I must trust that a single Figure of Peace weighs more in the karmic-justice scales than does a shipload of bloody despots.

  Daddy begs off. He has seen the dead Sakya Gyatso before, and traveling with his ex-wife, the mother of his Soul Child daughter, has depressed him beyond easy repair. So he retreats to a nearby guesthouse and locks himself inside for a nap. Ian Kilkhor leaves to visit several friends in the Yellow Hat gompa with whom he once studied; Minister T, who has often paid homage at the Twenty-first’s bier, has business with Lhundrub Gelek and others of the confirmation troupe who met with me in Kham in the shadow of the Yak Butter Express.

  So, only Mama, Larry, and I go to see the Lama whom, according to many, I will succeed as the spiritual and temporal head of the 990 Tibetan colonizers aboard this ship. The shrine we approach does not resemble a mausoleum. It sits on the courtyard’s edge, like an exhibit of amateur art in a construction trailer.