The Final Frontier

by Neil Clarke

  YEARS IN TRANSIT: 100

  COMPUTER LOGS OF OUR RELUCTANT DALAI LAMA, AGE 25

  Some history: Early in our voyage, when our AG generators worked reliably, our monks created one sand mandala a year. They did so then, as they do now, in a special studio in the Yellow Hat gompa in U-Tsang. They kept materials for these productions—colored grains of sand, bits of stone or bone, dyed rice grains, sequins—in hard plastic cylinders and worked on their designs over several days. Upon finishing the mandalas, our monks chanted to consecrate them and then, as a dramatic enactment of the impermanent nature of existence, destroyed them by sweeping a brush over and swirling their deity-inhabited geometries into inchoate slurries.

  These methods of creating and destroying the mandalas ended four decades into our flight when a gravity outage led to the premature disintegration of a design. A slow-motion sandstorm filled the studio. Grains of maroon, citron, turquoise, emerald, indigo, and blood-red drifted all about, and recovering these for fresh projects required the use of hand-vacs and lots of fussy hand-sorting. Nobody wished to endure such a disaster again. And so, soon thereafter, the monks implemented two new procedures for laying out and completing the mandalas.

  One involved gluing down the grains, but this method made the graceful ruination of a finished mandala dicey. A second method involved inserting and arranging the grains into pie-shaped plastic shields using magnets and tech-manipulated “delivery straws,” but these tedious procedures, while heightening the praise due the artists, so lengthened the process and stressed the monks that Sakya Gyatso ceased asking for annual mandalas and mandated their fashioning only once every five years.

  In any case, today marks our one-hundredth year in flight, and I am fat with a female child who bumps around inside me like those daredevils in old vidped clips who whooshed up and down the sloped walls of special competition arenas on rollers called skateboards.

  I think the kid wants out already, but Karma Hahn, my baby doc, tells me she’s still much too small to exit, even if the kid does carry on like ‘a squirrel on an exercise wheel.’ That metaphor endears both the kid and Karma to me. Because the kid moves, I move. I stroll about my private audience chamber, aka ‘The Sunshine Hall,’ in the Potala Palace in U-Tsang. I’ve voluntarily removed here to show my fellow Buddhists that I am not ashamed of my fecund condition.

  Ian announces a visitor, and in walks First Officer Nima Photrang, whom I’ve not seen for weeks. She has come, it happens, not solely to visit me, but also to look in on an uncle who resides in the nearby Yellow Hat gompa. She has brought a khata, a white silk greeting scarf, even though I already have enough of these damned rags to stitch together a ship cover for the Kalachakra. She drapes it around my neck. Laughing, I pull it off and drape it around hers.

  “Your design contest spurs on every amateur-artist ghost in Amdo and Kham,” Nima says. “If you wish your mandala to further community enlightenment by projecting an image of our future Palace of Hope on Guge, well, you’ve got a lot of folks worrying away at it—mission fully goosed, if not yet fully cooked.”

  I realize that Sakya Gyatso, my predecessor, his eye on Tibetan history, called the world toward which we relentlessly cruise ‘Guge,’ partly for the g in Gliese 581g. What an observant and subtle man.

  “Nima,” I ask, “have you submitted a design?”

  “No, but you’ll probably never guess who intends to.”

  No, I never will. I gape cluelessly at Nima.

  “Captain Xao Songda, our helmsman. He spends enormous chunks of time with a drafting compass and a pen, or at his console refining design programs that a monk in U-Tsang uploaded a while back to Pemako.”

  Pemako is the latest version of our intranet. I like to use it. Virtually nightly (stet the pun), it shows me deep-sea sonograms of my jetting squid-kid.

  “I hope Captain Xao doesn’t expect his status as our shipboard Buzz Lightyear to score him any brownies with the judges.”

  Nima chortles. “Hardly. He drew as a boy and as a teenager. Later, he designed maglev stations and epic mountain tunnels. He figures he has as good a chance as anyone in a blind judging, and if he wins, what a personal coup!”

  “Mmm,” I say.

  “No, really, you’ve created a monster, Your Holiness—but, as one of the oldest persons aboard, he deserves his fun, I guess.”

  We chat some more. Nima asks if she may lay her palm on the curve of my belly, and I say yes. When the brat-to-be surfs my insides like a berserk skateboarder, Nima and I laugh like schoolgirls. By some criteria, I still qualify.

  YEARS IN TRANSIT: 101

  COMPUTER LOGS OF OUR RELUCTANT DALAI LAMA, AGE 25-26

  I return to Amdo to deliver my child. Early in the hundred and first year of our journey, my water breaks. Karma Hahn, my mother, and Alicia and Emily Paljor attend my lying-in, while my father, Ian Kilkhor, Minister Trungpa, and Jetsun perform a nervous do-si-do in an antechamber. I give the guys hardly a thought. Delivering a kid requires stamina, a lot of Tantric focus, and a cooperative fetus, but I’ve got ‘em all and the kid slams on out in under four hours.

  I lie in a freshly made bed with my squiddle dozing in a warming blanket against my left shoulder. Well-wishers and family surround us like sentries, although I have no idea what they’ve got to shield us from: I’ve never felt safer.

  Mama says, “When will you tell us the ruddy shrimp’s name? You’ve kept it a secret eight months past forever.”

  “Ask Jetsun. He chose it.”

  Everyone turns to Jetsun, who at twenty-one looks like a fabled Kham warrior, lean and smooth-faced, a flawless bronze sculpture of himself. How can I not love him? Jetsun looks to me. I nod.

  “It’s . . . it’s Kyipa.” Like the sweetheart he is, he blushes.

  “Ah,” Nyendak Trungpa sighs. “Happiness.”

  “If we all didn’t strive so damned hard for happiness,” Daddy says, “we’d almost always have a pretty good time.”

  “You stole that,” Mama rebukes him. “And your timing sucks.”

  From behind those crowded about my babe-cave, a short, sturdy, gray-haired man edges in. I know him as Alicia Paljor’s father, Emily Paljor’s husband—but Daddy, Ian, and Neddy know him as the chief fuel specialist on our strut-ship and thus a personage of renowned ability. So I assume he’s come—like a wise man—to kneel beside and to adore our newborn squiddle. Or has he come just to meet his wife and daughter and fetch them back to their stateroom?

  In his ministerial capacity, Neddy says, “Welcome, Specialist Paljor.”

  “I need to talk to Her Holiness.” Kanjur Paljor bows and approaches my bed. “If I may, Your Holiness.”

  “Of course.”

  The area clears of everyone except Paljor, Ian Kilkhor, Kyipa, and me. A weight descends—a weight comprising everything that’s ever floated free of its moorings during every AG quittage that our strut-ship has ever suffered—and that weight, condensed into one tiny spherical mass, lowers itself onto my baby’s back and so onto me, crushing this blissful moment into dust and slivered glass. Ian edges to the top of my bed, but I already know that his strength and his heavy glare will prove impotent against whatever message Kanjur Paljor has brought.

  Paljor says, “Your Holiness, I beg your infinite pardon.”

  “Tell me.”

  He looks at Ian and then, in petition, at me again. “I’d prefer to deliver this news to you alone, Your Holiness.”

  “I’m not here,” Ian declares. “Proceed on that assumption.”

  “Regard my agent’s simultaneous presence and absence as an enacted mystery or koan,” I tell Paljor. “He speaks a helpful truth.”

  Paljor nods and seizes my free hand. “About fifteen hours ago, I found a serious navigational anomaly while running a fuel-tank check. Before bringing the problem to you, I ran some figures to make sure that I hadn’t made a calculation error; that I wasn’t just overreacting to a situation of no real consequence.” He pauses to touch my Kyipa’s blank
et. “How much technical detail do you want, Your Holiness?”

  “Right now, none. Give me the gist.”

  “For a little over one hundred and twenty hours, the Kalachakra traveled at its top speed at a small angle off our requisite heading.”

  “How? Why?”

  “Before I answer, let me assure you that we’ve since corrected for this deviation and that we’ll soon run true again.”

  “What do you mean, ‘soon’? Why don’t we ‘run true’ now?”

  “We do, Your Holiness, in the sense that First Officer Photrang has set us on an efficient angle to intercept our former heading to Guge. But we don’t, in the sense that we still must compensate for the unintended divergence.”

  Ian Kilkhor says, “Tell Her Holiness why this ‘unintended divergence’ constitutes one huge fucking threat.”

  Totally appalled, I look back at my bodyguard and friend. “I thought you weren’t here! Or did you leave behind just that part of you that views me as an unteachable idiot? Go away, Mr. Kilkhor. Get out.”

  Kilkhor has the decency and good sense to do as I command. Kyipa, unsettled by my outburst, squirms fretfully on my shoulder.

  “The danger,” I tell Kanjur Paljor, “centers on fuel expenditure. If we’ve gone too far off course, we won’t have enough antimatter ice left to reach Guge. Have I admissibly described our peril?”

  “Yes, Your Holiness.” He doesn’t fall to one knee, like a magus beside the infant deity Christ, but crouches so that our faces are nearly at a level. “I believe—I think—we have just enough fuel to complete our journey, but at this late stage it could prove a close thing. If there’s another emergency requiring any additional course correction, that could place us in danger of—”

  “—not arriving at all.”

  Paljor nods, and consolingly pats Kyipa’s playing-card back.

  “How did this happen?”

  “Human error, I’m afraid.”

  “Tell me what sort.”

  “Lack of attention to the telltales that should have prevented this divergence from our heading.”

  “Whose error? Captain Xao’s?”

  “Yes, Your Holiness. Nima says his mental state has deteriorated badly over these past few weeks. What she first thought eccentricities, she now views as evidence of age-related mental debilities. He stays awake so long and endures so much stress. And he puts too much faith in the alleged reliability of our electronic systems.”

  Also, he came to feel that creating a design for my Palace of Hope mandala took precedence over his every other duty on a strut-ship programmed to fly to its destination, with the result that he put himself on auto-pilot too.

  “Where is he now?” I ask Paljor.

  “Sleeping, under medical supervision—not ursidormizine slumber but bed rest, Your Holiness.”

  I thank Paljor and dismiss him.

  Clutching Kyipa to me, I nuzzle her sweet-smelling face.

  Tomorrow, I’ll tell Nima to advise her flight crew that they must remain up-phase ghosts until we know for sure the outcomes of Xao’s inattention and our efforts to correct for its potential consequences: a headlong rush to nowhere.

  Without benefit of lock belts, my daughter Kyipa kicks in her bassinet. I seldom worry about her floating off during AG outages because she loves such spells of weightlessness. She uses them to exercise her limbs—admittedly, with no strengthening resistance—and to explore our stateroom, which boasts Buddha figurines, wall hangings, filigreed star charts, miniature starship models, and other interesting items. At five months, she thinks herself a big finch or a pygmy porpoise. She undulates about, giggling at the currents she creates, or, the AG restored, inches along with her pink tongue tip between her lips and her bum rising and falling like a migrating molehill.

  As Dalai Lama (many argue), I should never have borne this squiddle, but Karen, Simon, Jetsun, and Jetsun’s mama disagree, and all contribute to her care. Even Minister T acknowledges that conceiving and bearing her has confirmed my sense of the karmic rightness of my Dalai Lamahood more powerfully than any other event to date. Because of this sunny girl, I do stronger, better, holier work.

  To those who tsk-tsk when they see Kyipa squirming in my arms, I say:

  “Here is my Wheel of Time, my mandala, who has as one purpose to further my evolving enlightenment. Her other purposes she will learn and fulfill in time. So set aside your resentments that you may more easily fulfill yours.”

  But although I don’t fret about Kyipa during gravity outages, I do worry about her future . . . and ours.

  Will we safely arrive at the Gliese 581 system? Of the fifty antimatter-ice tanks with which (long before my birth) we started our journey, we’ve used up and discarded thirty-eight, and Paljor says that we have exhausted nearly half of the thirty-ninth tank, with over five and a half years remaining until our ETA in orbit around Guge. From the outside, our ship begins to resemble a skeleton of its outbound self, the bones of a picked-clean fish. And if the Kalachakra makes it at all, as Paljor has speculated, it will slice the issue scarily close.

  I stupidly assumed that our eventual shift into deceleration mode would work in our favor, but Paljor cautioned that slowing our strut-ship—so that we do not overshoot Guge, like a golf putt running up to but not beyond its cup— will require more fuel than I supposed. Later he showed me math proving that reaching Guge will require “an incident-free approach”—because our antimatter-ice reserves, the fail-safe tanks with which we began our flight, have already dissolved into the ether slipstreaming by the magnetic field coils generating our plasma shield out front.

  Still, I don’t believe in shielding our human freight from issues bearing on our survival. Therefore, I’ve had Minister T announce the fact of this crisis to everyone up-phase and working. Thankfully, general panic has not ensued. Instead, crew members brainstorm stopgap strategies for conserving fuel, and the monks and nuns in U-Tsang pray and chant. Soon enough, when we begin to brake, everyone will arise again, shake off the fog of hibernizing, and learn the truth about our final approach. Then every deck will teem with ghosts preparing to orbit Guge; to assay the habitable wedges between its sun-stuck face and its bleaker side; and to decide which of the two wedges is better suited to settlement.

  YEARS IN TRANSIT: 102

  COMPUTER LOGS OF OUR RELUCTANT DALAI LAMA, AGE 27

  Captain Xao Songda, our deposed captain, died just twelve hours ago. Although Kyipa celebrated her first birthday last week, the man never laid eyes on her.

  Xao’s ‘bed rest’ turned into pathological pacing and harangues unintelligible to anyone ignorant of Mandarin Chinese. These behaviors—symptomatic of an aggressive type of senility unknown to us—our medicos treated with tranks, placebos (foolishly, I guess), experimental diets, and long walks through the commons of Kham Bay. Nothing calmed him or eased the intensity of his gibbering tirades. I had so wanted Kyipa to meet this man (or the avatar of the self preceding this sorry incarnation), but I could not risk exposing her to one of his abusive rants.

  It bears stating, though, that everyone aboard Kalachakra, knowing the sacrifices that the captain made for us, forgives him his navigation error. All showed him the honor, courtesy, and patience that he deserved for these sacrifices. Nima Photrang, who assumed his captaincy, believes he and Sakya Gyatso suffered similar personality disintegrations, albeit in different ways. Sakya used Tantric practices to end his life and Xao Songda fell to an Alzheimer’s-like scourge, but the effects of sleep deprival, suppressed anxiety, and overwork ultimately caused their deaths.

  Xao created designs for my mandala competition, I think, as a way to decompress from these burdens. During the last hours of his illness, Ian Kilkhor searched his quarters for anything that could help us fathom his disease and preserve our memory of him as the intrepid Tibetan Buddhist who carried us within three lights of our destination. However, Ian returned to me with two hundred hand-drawn sketches and computer-assisted designs for my Palace of Hope mandala
.

  These “designs” appalled and saddened us. The ones Xao hand-drew resemble big multicolored Rorschach blots, and those stemming from his cyber-design programs look like geometrically askew fever dreams. All are pervaded with interlocking claws, jagged teeth, vermiform bodies, and occluded reptilian eyes. None could serve as a model for the mandala of my envisioning.

  “I’m sorry,” Ian said. “The old guy seems to have swallowed the pituitary gland of a Komodo dragon.”

  So, given our fuel situation and Captain Xao’s death, I’ve declared a moratorium on mandala-design creation.

  Now there is a strong movement afoot—a respectful one—to eject Captain Xao Songda’s corpse into the void, one more human collop for the highballing dark. As I’ve already noted here, we’ve used this procedure many times before, as a practice coincident with Buddha Dharma and, in this case, as one befitting a helmsman of Xao’s stature. But I resist this seeming consensus in favor of a better option: taking the captain to Guge and setting his sinewy body out on an escarpment there, to blacken in its gales and scale in its thaws, our first sacrificial alms to the planet.

  *

  One work cycle past, Captain Photrang began to brake the Kalachakra. We are four years out from Gliese 581g, and Kanjur Paljor tells me that, unless a meteorite penetrates our plasma shield or some anomalous disaster befalls us, we will reach our destination. Ian observes that we will coast into planetary orbit like a vehicle with an internal-combustion engine chugging into its pit on fumes.

  I don’t fully twig the analogy, but I get its gist. Alleluia! If only time passed more quickly . . . .

  Meanwhile, I keep Kyipa awake and ignore those misguided ghosts advising me to ease her into grave-cave sleep so that time will pass more quickly for her. Jetsun and I enjoy her far too much to send her down. More important, if she stays up-phase most of the rest of our journey, she will learn and grow; and when we descend to the surface of Guge with her, she will have a sharper mind and better motor skills at five or six than any long-term sleeper of roughly similar age.