Going Interstellar (collection)

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.