The Final Frontier

by Neil Clarke

  “I don’t know. I’ve never known. But this afternoon Mama told me why I ought to want it. And because I ought to, I do. I think.”

  Daddy studies me with an unsettling mixture of exasperation and tenderness. “Let me ask you something, straight up: Do you think the bhava of Sakya Gyatso, the direct reincarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the ancestor of the Tibetan people, dwells in you as it supposedly dwelt in his twenty predecessors?”

  “Daddy, I’m not Tibetan.”

  “I didn’t ask you that.” He unspikes and chomps into his Cordyceps, or synthetic caterpillar-fungus, sandwich. Chewing, he manages a quasi-intelligible, “Well?”

  “Tomorrow’s gold-urn lottery will reveal the truth, one way or the other.”

  “Yak shit, Greta. And I didn’t ask you that, either.”

  I feel both my tears and my gorge rising, but the latter prevails. “I thought we’d share some time, eat together—not get into a spat.”

  Daddy chews more sedately, swallows, and re-spikes his ‘caterpillar’ to the cork. “And what else, sweetheart? Avoid saying anything true or substantive?” I show him my profile. “Greta, forgive me, but I didn’t sign on to this mission to sire a demigod. I didn’t even sign on to it to colonize another world for the sake of oppressed Tibetan Buddhists and their rabid hangers-on.”

  “I thought you were a Tibetan Buddhist.”

  “Oh, yeah, born and raised . . . in Boulder, Colorado. Unfortunately, it never quite took. I signed on because I loved your mother and the idea of spaceflight at least as much as I did passing for a Buddhist. And that’s how I got out here more or less seventeen light-years from home. Do you see?”

  I eat nothing. I drink nothing. I say nothing.

  “At least I’ve told you a truth,” Daddy says. “More than one, in fact. Can’t you do the same for me? Or does the mere self-aggrandizing idea of Dalai Lamahood clamp your windpipe shut on the truth?”

  I have expected neither these revelations nor their vehemence, but together they work to unclamp something inside me. I owe my father my life, at least in part, and the dawning awareness that he has never stopped caring for me suggests—in fact, requires— that I repay him truth for truth.

  “Yes, I can do the same for you.”

  Daddy’s eyes, above their bruised half-circles, never leave mine.

  “I didn’t choose this life at all,” I say. “It was thrust upon me. I want to be a good person, a Bodhisattva possibly, maybe even the Dalai Lama. But—”

  He lifts his eyebrows and goes on waiting. A tender twinge of a smile plays about his mouth.

  “But,” I finish, “I’m not happy that maybe I want these things.”

  “Buddhists don’t aspire to happiness, Greta, but to an oceanic detachment.”

  I give him my fiercest Peeved Daughter look, but do refrain from eyeball-rolling. “I just need an attitude adjustment, that’s all.”

  “The most wrenching attitude adjustment in the universe won’t turn a carp into a cougar, pumpkin.” His pet name for me.

  “I don’t need the most wrenching attitude adjustment in the universe. I need a self-willed tweaking.”

  “Ah.” Daddy takes a squeeze-swig of his beer and encourages me with an inviting gesture to eat.

  My gorge has fallen, my hunger reappeared. I eat and drink and, as I do, become unsettlingly aware that other patrons in the Bhurel—visitors, monks— have detected my presence. Blessedly, though, they respect our space.

  “Suppose the lottery goes young Trimon’s way,” Daddy says. “What would make you happy in your resulting alternate life?”

  I consider this as a peasant woman of a past era might have done if a friend had asked, just as a game, ‘What would you do if the King chose you to marry his son?’ But I play the game in reverse, sort of, and can only shake my head.

  Daddy waits. He doesn’t stop waiting, or searching my eyes, or studying me with his irksome unwavering paternal regard. He won’t speak, maybe because everything else about him—his gaze, his patience, his presence—speaks strongly of what for years went unspoken between us.

  Full of an inarticulate wistfulness, I lean back. “I’ve told you a truth already,” I inform my father. “Isn’t that enough for tonight?”

  A teenage girl and her mother, oaring subtly with their hands to maintain their places beside us, hover at our table. Even though I haven’t seen the girl for several years (while, of course, she hibernized), I recognize her: Distinctive agate eyes in an elfin face identify her at once.

  Daddy and I both lever ourselves up from our places, and I swim out to embrace the girl. “Alicia!” Over her shoulder, I say to her mother in all earnestness, “Mrs. Paljor, how good to see you here!”

  “Forgive us for interrupting,” Mrs. Paljor says. “We’ve come for the Gold Urn Festival, and we just had to wish you success tomorrow. Alicia wouldn’t rest until Kanjur found a way for us to attend.”

  Kanjur Paljor, Alicia’s father, has served since the beginning of our voyage as our foremost antimatterice fuel specialist. If anyone could get his secular wife and daughter to U-Tsang for the DL lottery, Kanjur Paljor could. He enjoys the authority of universal respect. As for Alicia, she scrunches her face in embarrassment, as well as unconditional affection. She recalls the many times that I came to Momo House to hold her, and later to her family’s Kham Bay rooms to take her on walks or on outings to our art, mathematics, and science centers.

  “Thank you,” I say. “Thank you.”

  I hug the girl. I hug her mother.

  My father nods and smiles, albeit bemusedly. I suspect that Daddy has never met Alicia or Mrs. Paljor before. Kanjur, the father and husband, he undoubtedly knows. Who doesn’t know that man?

  The Paljor women depart almost as quickly as they came. Daddy watches them go, with a deep exhalation of relief that makes me hurt for them both.

  “I was almost a second mother to that girl,” I tell him.

  Daddy oars himself downward, back into his seat. “Surely, you exaggerate. Mrs. Paljor looks more than sufficient to the task.”

  Long before noon of the next day, the courtyard of the Jokhang Temple swarms with levitating lamas, monks, nuns, yogis, and some authorized visitors from the Kalachakra’s other two passenger bays. I cannot explain how I feel. If Mama’s story of Sakya Gyatso’s heart attack is true, then I cannot opt out of the gold-urn lottery.

  To do so would constitute a terrible insult to his punarbhava, or karmic change from one life vessel to the next, or from his body to mine. Mine, as everyone knows, established its bona fides as a living entity years before Sakya Gyatso died. Also, opting out would constitute a heartless slap in the face of all believers, of all who support me in this enterprise. Still . . . .

  Does Sakya have the right to self-direct his rebecoming, or I the right to thwart his will . . . or only the obligation to accede to it? So much self will and worry taints today’s ceremony that Larry and Kilkhor, if not Minister T, can hardly conceive of it as deriving from Buddhist tenets at all.

  Or can they? Perhaps a society rushing at twenty percent of light-speed toward some barely imaginable karmic epiphany has slipped the surly bonds not only of Earth but also of the harnessing principles of Buddhist Tantra. I don’t know. I know only that I can’t withdraw from this lottery without betraying a good man who esteemed me in the noblest and most innocent of senses.

  And so, in our filigreed vestments, Jetsun Trimon and I swim up to the circular dais to which the attendants of the Panchen Lama have already fastened the gold urn for our name slips.

  In set-back vertical ranks, choruses of floating monks and nuns chant as we await the drawing. Our separate retinues hold or adjust their altitudes behind us, both to hearten us and to keep their sight lanes clear. Tiny levitating cameras, costumed as birds, televise the event to community members in all three bays.

  Jetsun’s boyish face looks at once exalted and terrified.

  Lhundrub Gelek, the Panchen Lama, lifts his arms and annou
nces that the lottery has begun. Today he blazes with the bearing and the ferocity of a Hebrew seraph. Tug-monks keep him from rising in gravid slow motion to the ceiling. Abbess Yeshe Yargag levitates about a meter to his right, with tug-nuns to keep her from wandering up, down, or sideways. Gelek reports that name slips for Jetsun Trimon and Greta Bryn Brasswell already drift about in the oversized urn attached to the dais. Neither of us, he says, needs to maneuver forward to reach into the urn and pull out a name-slip envelope. Nor do we need surrogates to do so.

  We will simply wait.

  We will simply wait . . . until an envelope rises on its own from the urn.

  Then Gelek will grab it, open the envelope, and read the name-slip aloud for all those watching in the Temple hall or via telelinks. Never mind that our wait could take hours, and that, if it does, viewers in every bay will volunteer to rejoin the vast majority of our population in ursidormizine slumber.

  And so we wait.

  And so we wait . . . and finally a small blue envelope rises through the mouth of the crosshatched gold urn. A tug-monk snatches it from the air, before it can descend out of view again, and hands it to the PL.

  Startled, because he’s nodded off several times over the past fifty-some minutes, Gelek opens the envelope, pulls out the name slip, reads it to himself, and passes it on to Abbess Yargag, whose excited tug-nuns steady her so that she may announce the name of the true Soul Child.

  Of course, that the Abbess has copped this honor tells everybody all that we need to know. She can’t even speak the name on the slip before many in attendance begin to clap their palms against their shoulders. The upshot of this applause, beyond opening my tear ducts, is a sudden propulsion of persons at many different altitudes about the hall: a wheeling zero-g waltz of approbation.

  YEARS IN TRANSIT: 95

  COMPUTER LOGS OF OUR RELUCTANT DALAI LAMA, AGE 20

  The Panchen Lama, his peers and subordinates in U-Tsang, and secular hierarchs from Amdo and Kham have made my parents starship nobles.

  They have bestowed similar, if slightly lesser honors, on Jetsun Trimon’s parents and on Jetsun himself, who wishes to serve us colonizers as Bodhisattva, meteorologist, and lander pilot. In any event, his religious and scientific educations proceed in parallel, and he spends as much time in tech training in Kham Bay as he does in the monasteries in U-Tsang.

  As for me, I alternate months among our three drums, on a rotation that pleases more of our ghosts than it annoys. I ask no credit for the wisdom of this scheme, though; I simply wish to rule (although I prefer the verb ‘preside’) in a way promoting shipboard harmony and reducing our inevitable conflicts.

  YEARS IN TRANSIT: 99

  COMPUTER LOGS OF OUR RELUCTANT DALAI LAMA, AGE 24

  I’ve now spent nearly five years in this allegedly holy office. Earlier today, thinking hard about our arrival at Guge, in only a little over seven Earth years, I summoned Minister Trungpa to my quarters.

  “Yes, Your Holiness, what do you wish?” he asked.

  “To invite everyone aboard the Kalachakra to submit designs for a special sand mandala. This mandala will commemorate our voyage’s inevitable end and honor it as a fruit of the Hope and Community”—I capitalized the words as I spoke them—“that drove us, or our elders, to undertake this journey.”

  Minister T frowns. “Submit designs?”

  “Your new auditory aids work quite well.”

  “For a competition?”

  “Any voyager, any Kalachakran at all, may submit a design.”

  “But—”

  “The artist monks in U-Tsang, who will create this mandala, will judge the entries blindly to determine our finalists. I’ll decide the winner.”

  Minister T does not make eye contact. “The idea of a contest undercuts one of the themes that you wish your mandala to embody, that of Community.”

  “You hate the whole idea?”

  He hedges: “Appoint a respected Yellow Hat artist to design the mandala. In that way, you’ll avoid a bureaucratic judging process and lessen popular discontent.”

  “Look, Neddy, a competition will amuse everyone, and after a century aboard this vacuum-vaulting bean can, we could all use some amusement.”

  Neddy would like to dispute the point, but I am the Dalai Lama, and what can he say that will not seem a coddling or a defiant promotion of his own ego? Nothing. (May Chenrezig forgive me, but I relish his discomfiture.) Clearly, the West animates parts of my ego that I should better hide from those of my subjects—a term I loathe—immersed in Eastern doctrines that guarantee their fatalism and docility. Of course, how many men of Minister Trungpa’s station and age enjoy carrying out the bidding of a woman a mere twenty-four-years old?

  At length he softly says, “I’ll see to it, Your Holiness.”

  “I can see to it myself, but I wanted your opinion.”

  He nods, his look implying that his opinion doesn’t count for much, and takes a deferential step back.

  “Don’t leave. I need your advice.”

  “As much as you needed my opinion?”

  I take his arm and lead him to a nook where we can sit and talk as intimates. Fortunately, the AG has worked much more reliably all over the ship than it did before my investiture. Neddy looks grizzled, fatigued, and wary, and although he doesn’t yet understand why, he has cause for this wariness.

  “I want to have a baby,” I tell him.

  He responds instantly: “I advise you not to, Your Holiness.”

  “I don’t solicit your advice in that area. I’d like you to help me settle on a father for the child.”

  Neddy reddens. I’ve stolen his breath. He’d like to make a devastatingly incisive remark, but can’t even manage a feeble Ugh. “In case it’s crossed your mind, I haven’t short-listed you—although Mama once gave you a terrific, if unasked for, recommendation.”

  Minister T pulls himself together, but he’s squeezing his hands in his lap as if to express oil from between them.

  “I’ve narrowed the candidates down to two, Jetsun Trimon and Ian Kilkhor, but lately I’ve started tilting toward Jetsun.”

  “Then tilt toward Ian.”

  “Why?”

  And Mama’s lover provides me with good, dispassionate reasons for selecting the older man: physical fitness, martial arts ability, maturity, intelligence, learning (secular, religious, and technical), administrative/organizational skills, and long-standing affection for me. Jetsun, not yet twenty, has two or three separate callings that he has not yet had time to explore as fully as he ought, and the difference in our ages will lead many in our community to suppose that I have exercised my power in an unseemly way to bring him to my bed. I should give the kid his space.

  I know from private conversations, though, that when Jetsun was ten, an unnamed senior monk in Amdo often employed him as a drombo, or passive sex partner, and that the experience nags at him now in ways that Jetsun cannot easily articulate. Apparently, the community didn’t see fit, back then, to exercise its outrage on behalf of a boy not yet officially identified as a Soul Child. Of course, the community didn’t know, or chose not to know, and uproars rarely result from awareness of such liaisons, anyway. Isn’t a monk a man? I say none of this to Neddy.

  “Choose Ian,” he says, “if you must choose one or the other.”

  Yesterday, in Kham Bay, after I extended an intranet invitation to him to come see me about his father, who lies ill in his eggshell pod, Jetsun Trimon called upon me in the upper-level stateroom that I inherited, so to speak, from my predecessor. Jetsun fell on his knees before me, seized my wrist, and put his lips to the beads, bracelet, and watch that I wear about it. He wanted prayers for his father’s recovery, and I acceded to this request with all my heart.

  Then something occurred that I set down with joy rather than guilt. I wanted more from Jetsun than gratitude for my prayers, and he wanted more than my prayers for his worry about his father or for his struggles to master all his studies. Like me, he wished
the solace of the flesh, and as one devoted to compassion, forgiveness, contentment, and the alleviation of pain, I took him to my bed and divested him of his garments and let him divest me of mine. Then we embraced, neither of us trembling, or sweating, or flinching in discomfort or distress, for my quarters hummed at a subsonic frequency with enough warmth and gravity to offset any potential malaise or annoyance. Altogether sweetly, his tenderness matched mine. However—

  Like most healthy young men, Jetsun quickly reached a coiled-spring readiness. He quivered on Go.

  I rolled over and bestrode him above the waist, holding his arms to the side and speaking with as much integrity as my gnosis of bliss and emptiness could generate. He calmed and listened. I said that I begrudged neither of us this tension-easing union, but that if we proceeded, then he must know that I wanted his seed to enter me, to take root, to turn embryo, and to attain fruition as our child.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you consent?”

  “I consent.”

  “Do you further consent to acknowledge this child and to assist in its rearing on the planet Guge, as well as on this ship?”

  He considered these queries. And, smiling, he agreed.

  “Then we may advance to the third exalted initiation,” I said, “that of the mutual experience of connate joy.”

  I slid backward over the pliable warmth of his standing phallus and kissed him in the middle of his chest. He reached for me, tenderly, and the AG generators abruptly cut off—suspiciously, it seemed to me. I floated toward the ceiling like a buoyant nixie, too startled to yelp or laugh. Jetsun shoved off in pursuit, but hit a bulkhead and glanced off it horizontally.

  It took us a while to reunite, to find enough purchase to consummate our resolve, and to do so honoring the fact that a resurgence of gravity could injure, even kill, both of us. Nonetheless, we managed, and managed passionately.

  The ‘night’ has now passed. Jetsun sleeps, mind eased and body sated.

  I sit at this console, lock-belted in, recording the most stirring encounter of my life. Every nerve and synapse of my body, and every scrap of assurance in my soul, tell me that Jetsun and I have conceived: Alleluia.