Going Interstellar (collection)

The Tibetan boy, my rival, comes to me unbidden, slides an arm across my chest from behind, and eases me back toward his own thin body so that I don’t topple into the vomit-vase Mama has given me. With his free hand, Jetsun strokes my brow, meanwhile tucking stray strands of hair behind my ear. I don’t need him to do this stuff. Actually, I resent his doing it.

Although I usually sleep little, I do take occasional naps. Don’t I deserve a respite?

I pull free of the young imposter. He looks fifteen at least, and if I’ve hit nineteen, his age squares better than does mine with the passing of the last DL and the transfer of Sakya’s bhava into the material form of Jetsun Trimon.

Beholding him, I find his given name less of a joke than I did before my nap and more of a spell for the inspiriting that the PL alleges has occurred in him. Jetsun and I study each other with mutual curiosity. Our elders look on with darker curiosities. How must Jetsun and I regard this arranged marriage, they no doubt wonder, and what does it presage for everyone aboard the Kalachakra?

During my year-plus sleep, maybe I’ve matured some. Although I want to cry out against the outrage—no, the unkindness—of my guardians’ conspiracy to bring this fey usurper to my podside, I don’t berate them. They warrant such a scolding, but I refrain. How do they wish me to view their collusion, and how can I see it as anything other than their sending a prince to the bier of a spell-afflicted maiden? Except for the acne scarring his forehead and chin, Jetsun is, well, cute, but I don’t want his help. I loathe his intrusion into my pod-lodge and almost regret my return.

Kilkhor notes that the lamas of U-Tsang, including the Panchen Lama and Abbess Yargag, have finally decided to summon Jetsun Trimon and me to our onboard stand-in for the Jokhang Temple. There, they will conduct a gold-urn lottery to learn which of us will follow Sakya Gyatso as the Twenty-second Dalai Lama.

Jetsun bows.

He says that his tutor has given him the honor of inviting me, my family, and my guardians to this ‘shindig.’ It will occur belatedly, he admits, after he and I have already learned many sutras and secrets reserved in Tibet—holy be its saints, its people, and its memory—for a Soul Child validated by lottery.

But circumstances have changed since our Earth-bound days: The ecology of the Kalachakra, the great epic of our voyage, and our need on Guge for a leader of heart and vision require fine tunings beyond our forebears’ imaginations.

Wiser than I was last year, I swallow a cynical yawn.

“And so,” Jetsun ends, “I wish you joy in the lottery’s Buddha-directed outcome, whichever name appears on the selected slip.”

He bows and takes three steps back.

Lhundrub Gelek beams at Jetsun, and I know in my gut that the PL has become my competitor’s regent, his champion. Mama Karen Bryn holds her face expressionless until fret lines drop from her lip corners like weighted ebony threads.

I thank Jetsun, for his courtesy and his well-rehearsed speech. He seems to want something more—an invitation of my own, a touch—but I have nothing to offer but the stifling of my envy, which I fight to convert to positive energies boding a happy karmic impact on the name slips in the urn.

“You must come early to our Temple,” the PL says. “Doing so will give you time to pay your respects at Sakya Gyatso’s bier.”

This codicil to our invitation heartens me. Lacking any earlier approval to visit U-Tsang, I have never seen the body of the DL on display there.

Do I really wish to see it, to see him?

Yes, of course I do.

We’ve lost many Kalachakrans in transit to Guge, but none of the others have our morticians bled with trochars, painted with creams and rouges, or treated with latter-day preservatives. Those others we ejected via tubes into the airless cold of interstellar space, meager human scraps for the ever-hungry night.

In Tibet, the bereaved once spread their dead loved ones out on rocks in ‘celestial burial grounds.’ This they did as an act of charity, for the vultures. On our ship, though, we have no vultures, or none with feathers, and perhaps by firing our dead into unending quasi-vacuum, we will offer to the void a sacrifice of once-living flesh generous enough to upgrade our karma.

But Sakya Gyatso we have enshrined; and soon, as one of only two candidates for his sacred post, I will gaze upon the remains of one whose enlightenment and mercy have plunged me into painful egocentric anguish.

* * *

At the appointed time (six months from Jetsun’s invitation), we journey from Amdo and across Kham by way of tunnels designed for either gravity-assisted marches or weightless swims. Our style of travel depends on the AG generators and the rationing of gravity by formulae meant to benefit our long-term approach to Guge. However, odd outages often overcome these formulae. Blessedly, Kalachakrans now adjust so well to gravity loss that we no longer find it alarming or inconvenient.