Going Interstellar (collection)

Nima—she tells me to call her by this name—takes my arm and swims me along the tunnel to a door that opens at a knuckle bump. She guides me into her rooms, a closet with a pull-down rack and straps, a toadstool unit for our shipboard intranet, and a corner for talking in. We float here. Nicely, or so it seems, she pulls a twist of brindle hair out of my eye.

“Child, it’s possible that Sakya Gyatso had a heart attack.”

“Possible?”

“That’s the official version, which Minister T told all us ghosts up-phase enough to notice that Sakya had gone missing.”

I think hard. “But the unofficial story is …somebody killed him?”

“It’s one unofficial story. In the face of uncertainty, child, people indulge their imaginations, and more versions of the truth pop up than you can slam a lid on. But lid-slamming, we think, is a bad response to ideas that will come clear in the oxygen of free inquiry.”

“Who do you mean, ‘we’?”

Nima shows a little smile. “My ‘we’ excludes anyone who forbids the expression of plausible alternatives to any ‘official version.’”

“What do you think happened?”

“I’d best not say.”

“Maybe you need some oxygen.”

This time her smile looks a bit realer. “Yes, maybe I do.”

“I’m the new Dalai Lama, probably, and I give you that oxygen, Nima. Tell me your idea, now.”

After two blinks, she does: “I fear that Sakya Gyatso killed himself.”

“The Dalai Lama?” I can’t help it: her idea insults the man, who, funnily, now breathes inside me.

“Why not the Dalai Lama?”

“A Bodhisattva lives for others. He’d never kill anybody, much less himself.”

“He stayed up-phase too much—almost half a century—and the anti-aging effects of ursidormizine slumber, which he often avoided as harmful to his leadership role, were compromised. His Holiness did have the soul of a Bodhisattva, but he also had an animal self. The wear to his body broke him down, working on his spirit as well as his head, and doubts about his ability to last the rest of our trip niggled at him, as did doubts about his fitness to oversee our colonization of Guge.”

I cross my arms. This idea insults the late DL. It also, I think, poisons me. “I believe he had a heart attack.”

“Then the official version has taken seed in you,” Nima says.

“OK then. I like to think someone killed Sakya Gyatso, not that tiredness or sadness made him do it.”

Gently: “Child, where’s your compassion?”

I float away. “Where’s yours?” At the door of the first officer’s quarters, I try to bump out. I can’t. Nima must drift over, knuckle-bump the door plate, and help me with my angry going.

* * *

The artificial-gravity generators run again. I feel them humming through the floor of my room in Amdo, and in Z Quarters where our somnacicles nap. Larry says that except for them, AG aboard Kalachakra works little better than did electricity in war-wasted nations on Earth. Anyway, I don’t need the lock belt in my vidped unit; and such junk as pocket pens, toothbrushes, mess chits, and d-cubes don’t go slow-spinning away like my fuzzy dreams.

Somebody knocks.

Who is it? Not Larry—he’s already tutored me today—or Mama, who sleeps in her pod, or Daddy, who’s gone up-phase to U-Tsang to help the monks plant vegetables around their gompas. He gets to visit U-Tsang, but I—the only nearly anointed DL on this ship—must mostly hang with non-monks.

The knock knocks again.

Xao Songda enters. He unhooks a folding stool from the wall and sits atop it next to my vidped booth: Captain Xao, the pilot of our generation ship. Even with the hotshot job he has to work, he wanders around almost as much as me.

“Officer Photrang tells me you have doubts.”

I have doubts like a strut-ship has fuel tanks. I wish I could drop them half as fast as Kalachakra dropped its anti-hydrogen-ice-filled drums in the first four years of our run toward our coasting speed.

“Well?” Captain Xao’s eyebrow goes up.

“Sir?”

“Does my first officer lie, or do you indeed have doubts?”

“I have doubts about everything.”

“Like what, child?” Captain Xao seems nice but clueless.

“Doubts about who made me, why I was born in a big bean can, why I like the AG on rather than off. Doubts about the shipshapeness of our ship, the soundness of Larry Lake’s mind, the realness of the rock we’re going to. Doubts about the pains in my legs and the mixing of my soul with Sakya’s …because of how our lifelines overlapped. Doubts about—”

“Whoa,” Xao Songda says. “Officer Photrang tells me you have doubts about the official version of the Twenty-first’s death.”

“Yes.”

“I too, but as captain, I want you to know that it cruises in shipshape shape, with an artist in charge.”

After staring some, I say, “Is the official story true? Did Sakya Gyatso really die of Cadillac infraction?”

“Cardiac infarction,” the captain says, not getting that I just joked him. “Yes, he did. Regrettably.”

“Or do you say that because Minister T told everyone that and he outranks you?”

Xao Songda looks confused. “Why do you think Minister Trungpa would lie?”

“Inferior motives.”