Going Interstellar (28 page)

Link didn’t steer Isabet back toward the
North America
. He drew her in the opposite direction, into the habitat she had so longed to visit.

Isabet said, “It’s a slow leak. But your crawler should have detected it.”

Link said, “Add the sensors to its other problems. We’ll move the redesign up the priority list.”

“I have some ideas about that.”

“I’ll bet you do.”

They stopped just inside the hold, watching the frantic preparations for disengagement. He glanced down at her. “You want to get back on the ship?”

“No,” she said. “Not really.”

“You want to stay here?”

Breathless with sudden hope, she nodded. “Yeah,” she whispered. “I mean, yes, please. I really do.”

“I suspected as much.” Side by side, they watched the swarm of people preparing to seal the locks and separate the two vessels. “This could have been a tragedy,” he said.

“Yes. A leak like that grows pretty fast once it gets started.” She saw Tie Dye turn to stalk back into the ship. She wondered who would be in more trouble, Tie Dye or herself.

It would all be sorted out at the command level, no doubt. In any case, there wasn’t a damn thing Tie Dye could do now.

Link guided her into the vacuum elevator, and Isabet grasped the knack of traversing the layered decks in an instant. As they floated downward, he pointed out the level where the cubbies were. “We’ll find a free one for you.” He promised a tour of the gallery and the laboratories before they reached the lowest level, where he deposited her in the hydroponics area. “You can watch the ship leave from here,” he said, pointing to an observation window.

Her nerves still on fire from her near-miss, she watched the
North America
pull back from the habitat and revolve in preparation for its return to Earth. She leaned against the chilly plexiglass and imagined Tie Dye standing impotently near the space window to watch
Starhold
disappear as the ship revolved and prepared to get under way. She started to grin.

Were Skunk or Ginger or Happy Feet watching in wonder as the ship’s positronic reactors fired and the ship began to vibrate? Did they look around, asking about Isabet, or did they know she was stranded on the habitat? Just in case, she waved her arm in farewell. She kissed her hand to the ship for good measure.

Yep, she was stuck here. For the duration. Twelve months, at least. Helluva way to score a vacation.

She laughed aloud as the
North America’s
rockets bloomed, driving it away toward Earth.

When she had seen enough, she turned from the window, and stepped out into the ship. With a deft twist of her feet and her hands, she shot upward toward the gallery level. She would ask Link for work to do, find some way to be of use. Maybe in the kitchens, or maybe she could work on redesigning the crawler. It didn’t matter. She’d meet some other people, get to know the place, this first step on the path to the stars.

She was going to feel right at home.

TWENTY LIGHTS TO
“THE LAND OF SNOW”

Excerpts from The Computer

Logs of Our Reluctant Dalai Lama

Michael Bishop

The first thing most American readers will have to do when reading Twenty Lights to “The Land of Snow” is put aside their preconceived notions of what the crew and culture of an interstellar spacecraft must emulate—western culture. And with the current pace of space exploration in the West, new notions of how it might actually happen are certainly worth considering.

Awards? Michael Bishop has them: two Nebulas, four Locus Awards, and multiple Hugo nominations. Did we mention that he also writes award-winning poetry? Mysteries? And that he has edited several science fiction anthologies? And, yes, he was an English teacher. . . .

***

Years in transit: 82 out of 106?

Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 7

Aboard
Kalachakra
,
I open my eyes again in Amdo Bay. Sleep still pops in me, yowling like a really hurt cat. I look sidelong out of my foggy eggshell. Many ghosts crowd near to see me leave the bear sleep that everybody in a strut-ship sometimes dreams in. Why have all these somnacicles up-phased to become ship-haunters? Why do so many crowd the grave-cave of my Greta-snooze?

“Greta Bryn”—that’s my mama’s voice—“can you hear me, kiddo?”

Yes I can. I have no deafness after I up-phase. Asleep even, I hear Mama talk in her dreams, and cosmic rays crackle off
Kalachakra
’s plasma shield out in front (to keep us all from going dead), and the crackle from Earth across the reaching oceans of farthest space.

“Greta Bryn?”

She sounds like Atlanta, Daddy says. To me she sounds like Mama, which I want her to play-act now. She keeps bunnies, minks, guineas, and many other tiny crits down along our sci-tech cylinder in Kham Bay. But hearing her doesn’t pulley me into sit-up pose. To get there, I stretch my soft parts and my bones.

“Easy, baby,” Mama says.

A man in white unhooks me. A woman pinches me at the wrist so I won’t twist the fuel tube or pulse counter. They’ve already shot me in the heart, to stir its beating. Now I sit and look around, clearer. Daddy stands near, showing his crumply face.

“Hey, Gee Bee,” he says, but doesn’t grab my hand.

His coverall tag is my roll-call name: Brasswell. A hard name for a girl and not too fine for Daddy, who looks thirty-seven or maybe fifty-fifteen, a number Mama says he uses to joke his fitness. He does whore-to-culture—another puzzle-funny of his—so that later we can turn Guge green, and maybe survive.

I feel sick, like juice gone sour in my tummy has gushed into my mouth. I start to elbow out. My eyes grow pop-out big, my fists shake like rattles. Now Daddy grabs me, mouth by my ear: “Shhhh shhh shhh.” Mama touches my other cheek. Everyone else falls back to watch. That’s scary too.

After a seem-like century I ask, “Are we there yet?”

Everybody yuks at my funniness. I drop my legs through the eggshell door. My hotness has colded off, a lot.

A bald brown man in orangey-yellow robes steps up so Mama and Daddy must stand off aside. I remember, sort of. This person has a really hard Tibetan name: Nyendak Trungpa. My last up-phase he made me say it multi times so I would not forget. I was four, but I almost forgetted anyway.

“What’s your name?” Minister Trungpa asks me.

He already knows, but I blink and say, “Greta Bryn Brasswell.”

“And where are you?”

“
Kalachakra
,” I say. “Our strut-ship.”

“Point out your parents, please.”

I do, it’s simple. They’re wide-awake ship-haunters now, real-live ghosts.

He asks, “Where are we going?”

“Guge,” I say, another simple ask.

“What exactly is Guge, Greta Bryn?”

But I don’t want to think—just to drink, my tongue’s so thick with sourness. “A planet.”

“Miss Brasswell,”—now Minister T’s being smart-alecky—“tell me two things you know about Guge.”

I sort of ask, “It’s ‘The Land of Snow,’ this dead king’s place in olden Tibet?”

“Good!” Minister T says. “And its second meaning for us Kalachakrans?”

I squint to get it: “A faraway world to live on?”

“Where, intelligent miss?”

Another easy one: “In the Goldilocks Zone.” A funny name for it.

“But where, Greta Bryn, is this Goldilocks Zone?”

“Around a star called Gluh—” I almost get stuck. “Around a star called Gliese 581.” Glee-zha is how I say it.

Bald Minister T grins. His face looks like a shiny brown China plate with an up-curving crack. “She’s fine,” he tells the ghosts in the grave-cave. “And I believe she’s the ‘One.’”

Sometimes we must come up. We must wake up and eat, and move about so we can heal from ursidormizine sleep and not die before we reach Guge. When I come up this time, I get my own nook that snugs in the habitat drum called Amdo Bay. It has a vidped booth for learning from, with lock belts for when the AG goes out. It belongs to only me, it’s not just one in a commons-space like most ghosts use.

Finally I ask, “What did that Minister T mean?”

“About what?” Mama doesn’t eye me when she speaks.

“That I’m the ‘One.’ Why’d he say that?”

“He’s upset and everybody aboard has gone a little loco.”

“Why?” But maybe I know. We ride so long that anyone riding with us sooner or later crazies up: inboard fever. Captain Xao once warned of this.

Mama says, “His Holiness, Sakya Gyatso, has died, so we’re stupid with grief and thinking hard about how to replace him. Minister Trungpa, our late Dalai Lama’s closest friend, thinks you’re his rebirth, Greta Bryn.”

I don’t get this. “He thinks I’m not I?”

“I guess not. Grief has fuddled his reason, but maybe just temporarily.”

“I am I,” I say to Mama awful hot, and she agrees.

But I remember the Dalai Lama. When I was four, he played Go Fish with me in Amdo Bay during my second up-phase. Daddy sneak-named him Yoda, like from
Star Wars
, but he looked more like skinny Mr. Peanut on the peanut tins. He wore a one-lens thing and a funny soft yellow hat, and he taught me a song, “Loving the Ant, Loving the Elephant.” After that, I had to take my ursidormizine and hibernize. Now Minister T says the DL is I, or I am he, but surely Mama hates as much as I do how such stupidity could maybe steal me off from her.

“I don’t look like Sakya Gyatso. I’m a girl, and I’m not an Asian person.” Then I yell at Mama, “I am I!”

“Actually,” Mama says, “things have changed, and what you speak as truth may have also changed, kiddo.”

Everybody who gets a say in Amdo Bay now thinks that Minister Nyendak Trungpa calls me correctly. I am not I: I am the next Dalai Lama. The Twenty-first, Sakya Gyatso, has died, and I must wear his sandals. Mama says he died of natural causes, but too young for it to look natural. He hit fifty-four, but he won’t hit Guge. If I am he, I must take his place as our colony dukpa, which in Tibetan means ‘shepherd.’ That job scares me.

A good thing has come from this scary thing: I don’t have to go back up into my egg pod and then down again. I stay up-phase. I must. I have too much to learn to drowse forever, even if I can sleep-learn by hypnoloading. Now I have this vidped booth that I sit in to learn and a tutor-guy, Lawrence (‘Larry’) Rinpoche, who loads on me a lot.

How old has all my earlier sleep-loading made me? Hibernizing, I hit seven and learnt while dreaming.

People should not call me Her Holiness. I’m a girl person—not a Chinese or a Tibetan. I tell Larry this when he swims into my room in Amdo. I’ve seen him in spectals about samurai and spacers, where he looks dark-haired and chest-strong. Now, anymore, he isn’t. He has silver hair and hips like Mama’s. His eyes do a flash thing, though, even when he’s not angry, and it throws him back into the spectals he once star-played in as cool guy Lawrence Lake.

“Do I look Chinese, or Tibetan, or even Indian?” Larry asks.

“No you don’t,” I say. “But you don’t look like no girl either.”

“A girl, Your Holiness.” Larry must correct me, Mama says, because he will teach me logic, Tibetan art and culture, Sanskrit, Buddhist philosophy, and medicine (space and otherwise). And also poetry, music and drama, astronomy, astrophysics, synonyms, and Tibetan, Chinese, and English. Plus cinema, radio/TV history, politics and pragmatism in deep-space colony planting, and lots of other stuff.

“No girl ever got to be Dalai Lama,” I tell Larry.

“Yes, but our Fourteenth predicted his successor would hail from a place outside Tibet; and that he might re-ensoul not as a boy but as a girl.”

“But Sakya Gyatso, our last, can’t stick his soul in this girl.” I cross my arms and turn a klutz-o turn.

“O Little Ocean of Wisdom, tell me why not.”

Stupid tutor-guy. “He died after I got borned. How can a soul jump in the skin of somebody already borned?”

“Born, Your Holiness. But it’s easy. It just jumps. The samvattanika viññana, the evolving consciousness of a Bodhisattva, jumps where it likes.”

“Then what about me, Greta Bryn?” I tap my chest.

Larry tilts his ginormous head. “What do you think?”

Oh, that old trick. “Did it kick me out? If it kicked me out, where did I go?”

“Do you feel it kicked you out, Your Holiness?”

“I feel it never got in. Inside, I feel that I . . . own myself.”

“Maybe you do, but maybe his punarbhava”—his re-becoming—“is in there mixing with your own personality.”

“But that’s so scary.”

“What did you think of Sakya Gyatso, the last Dalai Lama? Did he scare you?”

“No, I liked him.”

“You like everybody, Your Holiness.”

“Not anymore.”

Larry laughs. He sounds like he sounded in The Return of the Earl of Epsilon Eridani. “Even if the process has something unorthodox about it, why avoid mixing your soul self with that of a distinguished man you liked?”

I don’t answer this windy ask. Instead, I say, “Why did he have to die, Mister Larry?”

“Greta, he didn’t have much choice. Somebody killed him.”

Every ‘day’ I stay up-phase. Every day I study and try to understand what’s happening on
Kalachakra
, and how the late Dalai Lama, at swim in my soul, has slipped his bhava, “becoming again,” into my bhava, or “becoming now,” and so has become a thing old and new at the same time.

Larry tells me just to imagine one candle lighting off another (even though you’d be crazy to light anything inside a starship), but my candle was already lit before the last Lama’s got snuffed, and I never even smelt it go out. Larry laughs and says His Dead Holiness’s flame was “never quenched, but did go dim during its forty-nine-day voyage to bardo.” Bardo, I think, must look like a fish tank that the soul tries to swim in even with nothing in it.