Going Interstellar (collection)

But it’s Alicia, the baby, who wins me. She twinkles. She flirts. She touches. At nap time, I hold her in a vidped unit, its screen oranged out and its rockers rocking, and nuzzle her sweet-smelling neck. She tugs at my lip corners and pinches my mouth flat, so involved in reshaping my face that I think her a pudgy sculptor elf. All the while, her agate eyes, bigger than my thumb tips, play across my face with near-sighted adoration.

I stay with Alicia—Alicia Paljor—all the rest of my day. Then the skinny young monk comes to escort me home, as if I need him to, and Mama Dolma hugs me. Alicia wails.

It hurts to leave, but I do, because I must, and even as the hurt fades, the memory of this outstanding birthday begins, that very night, to sing in me like the lovely last notes of Górecki’s Third.

I have never had a better birthday.

Months later, Daddy Simon and Mama Karen Bryn have come up-phase at the same time. Together, they fetch me from my nook in Amdo and walk with me on a good AG day to the cafeteria above the grave-caves of our strut-ship’s central drum, Kham. I ease along the serving line between them, taking tsampa, mushroom cuts, tofu slices, and sauces to make it all edible. The three of us end up at a table in a nook far from the serving line. Music by J. S. Bach spills from speakers in the movable walls, with often a sitar and bells to call up for some voyagers a Himalayan nostalgia to which my folks are immune. We eat fast and talk small.

Then Mama says, “Gee Bee, your father has something to tell you.”

O God. O Buddha. O Larry. O Curly. O Moe.

“Tell her,” Mama says.

Daddy Simon wears the sour face proclaiming that everybody should call him Pieman Oldfart. I hurt to behold him, he to behold me. But at last he gets out that before I stood up-phase, almost three years ago, as the DL’s disputed Soul Child, he and Mama signed apartness documents that have now concluded in an agreement of full marital severance. They continue my folks, but not as the couple that conceived, bore, and raised me. They remain friends but will no longer cohabit because of incompatibilities that have arisen over their up-phase years. It really shouldn’t matter to me, they say, because I’ve become Larry’s protégée with a grand destiny that I will no doubt fulfill as a youth and an adult. Besides, they will continue to parent me as much as my odd unconfirmed status as DL-in-training allows.

I do not cry, as I did upon learning that Captain Xao believes that somebody slew my only-maybe predecessor. I don’t cry because their news feels truly distant, like word of a planet somewhere whose people have brains in their chests. However, it does hurt to think about why I absolutely must cry later.

Daddy gets up, kisses my forehead, and leaves with his tray.

Mama studies me closely. “I’ll always love you. You’ve made me very proud.”

“You’ve made me very proud,” I echo her.

“What?”

We push our plastic fork tines around in our leftovers, which I imagine rising in damp squadrons from our plates and floating up to the air-filtration fans. I wish that I, too, could either rise or sink.

“When will they confirm you?” Mama asks.

“Everything on this ship takes forever: getting from here to there, finding a killer, confirming the new DL.”

“You must have some idea.”

“I don’t. The monks don’t want me. I can’t even visit their make-believe gompas over in U-Tsang.”

“Well, those are sacred places. Not many of us get invitations.”

“But Minister T has declared me the ‘One,’ and Larry has tutored me in thousands of subjects, holy and not so holy. Still, the subsidiary lamas and their silly crew think less well of me than they would of a lame blue mountain sheep.”

“Don’t call their monasteries ‘make-believe,’ Gee Bee. Don’t call these other holy people and their followers ‘silly.’”

“Fie!” I actually tell her. “I wish I were anywhere but on this bean can flung at an iceberg light-years across the stupid universe.”

“Don’t, Greta Bryn. You’ve got a champion in Minister Trungpa.”

“Who just wants to bask in the reflected glory of his next supposed Bodhisattva—which, I swear, I am not.”

Mama lifts her tray and slams it down.

Nobody else seems to notice, but I jump.

“You have no idea,” she says, “who you are or what a champion can do for you, and you’re much too young to dismiss yourself or your powerful advocate.”

One of the Brandenburg Concertos swells, its sitars and yak bells flourishing. Far across the mess hall, Larry shuffles toward us with a tray. Mama sees him, and, just as Daddy did, she kisses my forehead and abruptly leaves. My angry stare tells Larry not to mess with me (no, I won’t apologize for the accidental pun), and Larry veers off to chow with two or three bio-techs at a faraway table.

Years in transit: 88

Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 13

Today marks another anniversary of the Kalachakra’s departure from Moon orbit on its crossing to Guge in the Gliese 581 system.