Engineering Infinity (18 page)

The creatures settled them on
couches and prepared them for the journey with gentle gestures. Then, he knew
nothing save for his brief memory, until the group of monks woke alone, in
their new little colony. How much later was it? Earth was a cinder, Roshi said;
time was no longer a thing they could comprehend, and they had only themselves.

The monks, eyes downcast, hands
clasped, walked with slow measured steps in ritual kinhin. Now the light was
dim, but soon it would sear the bleak landscape. Kyo reached his cushion and
sat. One, he counted. One.

The disturbing creatures were
there in his thoughts once more, creatures with wings. Their elongated bodies
were delicate. Two sets of opposing digits were on each hand: one was a sharp,
yet supremely flexible set which could reach inside delicate machinery and set
it to rights. The other set, shorter and three-jointed, was suitable for most
other tasks.

Kyo concentrated on one isolated
image.

He had wakened, briefly, to those
fingers touching his face, to eyes which did not look directly at him but were
instead concentrated on a task which sounded metallic to his sleep-drenched
brain. Perhaps the mechanism which kept him alive during the journey, which
must have taken several lifetimes, had needed some adjustment. That impression
was surrounded by darkness. It was all he had.

His thoughts jumped to his fellow
monks. Geckos! Insects! Couldn’t they see how everything had changed? Didn’t
they care?

Whack! Roshi hit him on the back.
He straightened. One. One.

Later, in the garden, Kyo
struggled with a huge watering can. Itchy sweat trickled beneath his white
garment. He set the can down and wiped his face. He wanted a beer. He arched
his back to relieve the pain, and endured his useless memories of the bars of
Honolulu. “‘Pain is awakening,’“ he mimicked Roshi. Crap. If he’d never gone to
the zendo, he’d be blessedly dead now, and pain-free.

They’d been here for what he called
months. They’d awakened in this small compound, ready, it seemed, for
inhabitants, with growing plants that flourished in the hot wind, which seemed
to provide them with enough food; he hadn’t noticed any indication of
nutritional deficiencies. To the contrary, they all seemed hearty. Their garden
was large enough for their number: twenty monks. The vegetables were somewhat
familiar - a tuberous starchy knob they called hasa, and a chewy leaf they
called lettuce, more sustaining than earth lettuce. Two types of trees bore
fruit. The grains could be cooked or ground into a flour for noodles. They
required only water from the spring which spouted like a miracle in its tiny
blue rock pool.

Kyo pulled slim metal rods from
their sockets and carried the awning to its next post. The plants had to be
shaded or they would burn. Kyo complained to himself once again that, though he
could brew some beer with these ingredients, there wasn’t enough to spare after
the noodles were made. He considered once again how to enlarge the garden.

Kyo could tell that Roshi was
behind him. He stood and wiped his hands. “When will we see them?” he demanded.

“See who?”

“The winged ones who brought us
here. You know that I saw them! You allowed this! We had no choice. The other
monks may accept everything you say, but you are no holier than I am, no more
great, no more full of Buddha-mind.”

Roshi’s eyes glimmered with fun.
The hint of a smile touched his face. “You are doing well, Kyo. Quite well.
Remember when you came to the zendo? Too weak to want to live at all, much less
argue with a Roshi.”

He gasshoed and strode off,
leaving Kyo angry and still wanting a beer. The precious packet of yeast he had
shown Liliha had remained in his pocket during the voyage. It frustrated him to
see the smooth, promising powder, so he kept the bag under his mat, where he
wouldn’t have to look at it. The resources here were meagre, and he needed to
start exploring if he wanted to brew beer.

“Have you seen them?” Kyo asked
that night as he tossed on his mat, sleepless.

“Who?” asked Rica. His tone of
voice did not invite conversation.

“The creatures with wings. The
beautiful ones who brought us here.”

“Roshi brought us here.”

“Where do you think you are,
anyway? Earth?” Kyo was getting angry again; he always did when Rica acted this
way. “Earth is ruined, burned. Why didn’t we burn with it?”

Rica sighed. “We have to get up
in three hours. Does it matter where we are? We have food and water.”

“Right. Some bowls, some watering
cans, some cook pots. It’s like a penal colony.”

“It’s an endless
sesshin
. An opportunity. We have our minds. We can do
zazen. We can achieve enlightenment.” He rolled over.

Why is my
mind so much different than his mind?
wondered Kyo. He stared into the
darkness and once more apologized to Io.
Well, Io, it’s
like this. You worked hard and did everything Dad wanted you to do and you’re
dead. I was a worthless sonofabitch, so inhuman that I drove my wife crazy, a
deadbeat and a drunk, and I’m alive. Hey, does it make sense to you?

Tears welled up, and overflowed
onto his cheeks. I’ve got tears in my ears from lying on my back in bed and
crying over you. Was that how it went? He’d never cried when he could drink.
Emotions had to come out sometime, somehow, medical dogma claimed, but he’d
tried to postpone that time until someone knocked him over the head in a dark
alley and killed him.

He hummed the tune, then
chortled. Riku made a sour warning snort.

“Silence, O revered Bodhisattva
Riku.” Kyo laughed until the laughs turned into long, ragged sobs, which Riku,
as usual, ignored.

And after that, just before
sleep, there was a slight, clean time in his mind. The image of the winged one
he had seen with Roshi appeared.

The eyes were violet. They seemed
deep and sad, but Kyo doubted that emotion was for them as it was for him. The
head was an irregular ellipsoid, and he could tell no sex. The wings themselves
were pale, streaked with luminescent colour, and arched high over the shoulders
of the slim being, who stood monk-straight in the rock garden in the zendo on
Nuuanu Avenue. He was not looking at Kyo, but at Roshi, who nodded once.

The next morning, as Kyo sat, a
small light grew within him until it swallowed the darkness. It was gentle but
insistent, and he could find no centre to it.

He let it engulf that which was
looking for a centre.

When he opened his eyes, all the
other monks were gone. In front of him on the floor, wobbling in the hot
breeze, was a leaf-shaped, stiff piece of thin, almost-transparent colour. Just
a piece of colour. Almost breathless, he reached out and found it rough and
dry, the texture of an old seed pod. He put it in his pocket and rose.

He had missed breakfast.

“It isn’t my Buddha-mind that’s
taking me, Roshi. It’s my
human
mind!” shouted Kyo. “I’m
going crazy!”

“They are the same,” replied
Roshi. He handed Kyo a flask of water. “Please turn back at midday. Then the
next time, you can try a different direction. If you continue until night and
find no water, you are dead.”

Kyo shrugged.

“Please return.”

So Kyo did. He explored seven
vectors, as best he could tell, returning for seven nights with the empty flask
and the bag of yeast he always took, his talisman, his only piece of Earth. He
also took the piece of colour. It was a rich rose, shot through with narrow
streaks of olive green.

“There’s nothing out there,” he
said. “Nothing but lava - blue, shiny, glittery lava. I’ll just have to go for
a whole day.”

On the eighth day, he took the
awkward watering can as well. He lashed a thin, rolled-up sleeping mat to his
back and included a good supply of dried noodles, which could soak in his
drinking water.

As usual, he could not interpret
the look in Roshi’s eyes as they stood on the edge of their little encamp-ment.
“Remember your Bodhisattva vow,” he said.

“No matter how numberless the
beings, I vow to enlighten them all.”

“Make that the source of your
every thought and action,” Roshi said, then turned away.

On the second day, he found the body.

It was desiccated. It hadn’t
rotted; it had dried.

Kyo had lost a good deal of his
water supply to evaporation and had been thinking of turning back. Now, he
changed his mind. He squatted and examined the dead creature.

All the colour had gone out of
its wings. He flaked away long, thin scales of translucent, mica-like material.
Thin, bony limbs fitted close to its body, as if it had been very cold before
death.

That night Kyo slept in a smooth
volcanic hollow, its glass-hardness softened little by his mat.

When he woke, it was to deep
violet eyes, compassionate and sad. The wings were backlit by sunlight, and
colours sped across their surface, brilliant, elusive. Its skin was dull olive;
fantastic digits folded in a complex arrangement as it held its hands at the
centre of its chest.

Its entire heart and mind entered
its plea, which was precise and unmistakable:
Help us
.

How
?
Kyo found himself asking silently, forming the question with a telepathic
facility he had not known he possessed.

Come
.

Kyo rose, rolled his mat,
adjusted his robes. Hoisting his burden, he followed the creature as their
shadows grew ever shorter.

Kyo’s attempts to communicate
with it frustrated him. He tried to find the space from which he had
spontaneously asked “How,” but could not. Or perhaps he did, and the creature
was not in a conversational mood. It strode before him, perfectly erect,
graceful. After the first hour, Kyo entered a state of kinhin, walking zen. He
absorbed the ropy contours of the lava without thinking about where to step;
his legs carried him forward; the sun became very, very hot.

Observe.

Kyo allowed his attention to
shift into sight. Startled, he saw mountains where there had been none earlier
in the day. The sun had passed its zenith and he wondered at his ability to
forgo water for so long. Immediately, he uncapped his water bottle and drank.
Then he offered it to the creature, who, to his surprise, accepted it with a
grave gassho and drank as well.

Almost there
,
he heard.

Buddha be
praised
! he found himself answering.

The creature looked into his
eyes, and he fancied he saw a smile there.

When they arrived at the cliffs,
it took three winged creatures to fly Kyo up, and he was afraid even then that
they would lose power and plummet back onto the sharp lava below. Their wings
beat against the air ever more slowly.
Relax
, he
heard.
Your stiffness adds to the difficulty
.

He allowed his fear to be an
object, like the cliff face which moved downward with laborious slowness. Their
speed increased.
Better
.

Once they reached the lip, others
reached down and dragged him up. Long digits curled around his upper arms like
snakes. As he gained his feet and looked about, he was not particularly
surprised to see a group.

When they gasshoed as a body, he
automatically gasshoed back. But when he heard,
Greetings,
Roshi
, he emphatically shook his head.
I am no roshi
,
he replied, counting nineteen of them.

You have come
to teach us your ways. Have you not taken a vow
?

A vow? Yes. I
vow to save all beings, no matter how numberless
. Or how strange and
inhuman, he added to himself before going on.
I am not
qualified to do what you wish
.

If you cannot
give us the transmission, we will die
.

He found that difficult to
believe.
If humans do not achieve enlightenment, they do not
die
. Even as he thought it, a part of his mind demurred. Old philosophy
questions from college, snippets from the Bible and the Sutras thrust
themselves forward, a small crowd of dissenters. He sighed.
I am very tired
.

They led him to one of many
caves. Within, he saw jugs of water, some seeds, a comfortable cushion. He
unrolled his own mat, and slept.

Day was more shadowed here than
on the plain, and they had a spring which caused this valley, hanging like a
suspended bowl far above the plain, to bloom with strange plants.

He woke before dawn to find them
gathered around him, waiting. He didn’t even reflect on what was happening. He
had sat zazen every morning for years, and he sat today too. They all did.
Their long, slim limbs easily twisted into lotus.

Kyo was finished long before
them. So as not to disturb them, he said his vows silently, stood with the
merest rustle of robe, and walked further into the recessed valley.

Soon, red foliage cloaked the
lower portions of the cliffs. Flowerlike yellow growths were stark and strong
against blue lava rock. He passed a patch where grains he and his fellow monks
lived on flourished. He hoped they were watering the garden. He missed them,
and Roshi.

Roshi. They meant him to be their
Roshi. The craziness of his situation electrified him.

His hearty laugh echoed
throughout the little valley.

They came floating up the valley
then, and hovered around him in doubtful attitudes. One touched his mouth, the
tears on his face, observed Kyo questioningly.

“I am laughing,” he said, filled
with wonder; delight. He could not, literally, remember when he had last
laughed. When he was a kid, with Io, stealing Chinese crack seed from under his
Auntie’s nose? Out surfing Makaha, rushing shoreward balanced on the lip of a
killer wave? On his wedding day?