Ghosts In My Head




The Bodhisattvas by Gord Sellar

“The skyhooks are rotting," Yana said softly as she stared out the viewport.
The cable had grown hairy, and shed miniscule bundles of threads off into
Martian orbit as the car soared along its length. The filaments drifted off
into the emptiness of space. It wasnłt an organic sort of rot, not the way
that bodies and dead leaves go; it was how dying, intelligent machinery goes
bad, its maintenance systems collapsing by degrees, backups and stopgaps all
failing in slow, mindless sequence.
“Yes," said the ancient bodhisattva standing beside her. “But itÅ‚s slow
rot. Theyłll be usable for another hundred years or so. No need to rush and
build more." The monk gazed down at the pulsating, goo-wasted surface of the
planet. He must have been working on the Martian rehabilitation project.
Yana had never met him before, this squat black saint-monk beside her,
his eyes tucked away behind thick folds, so that only the pupils and a
little iron-grey iris were visible. He smiled down into her facehe was a
little taller than her, maybe ninety-five centimeters altogether, and
dressed in the saffron robes of brothers from the Old World. Yana, a Western
Shore monk, was in the traditional grey and white of her order.
“Where are you going?" she asked.
“Home, eventually," he said, gazing silently out the portscreen for a
moment. His evident homesickness was a feeling Yana knew very well herself.
When he turned to face her, he seemed to read the next question on her face,
or perhaps her heart, as it was said some old bodhisattvas could do. “The
Plateau," he told her with a small grin, and nodded as if to preempt any
doubt. “But for now, I have things to do on Luna."
Yana gasped softly, but unmistakably. “YouÅ‚re really from the Plateau?
The stories IÅ‚ve heard are they true?"
The monk inclined his head a little, and said, “ItÅ‚s the most beautiful
place. It breaks my heart to wait to return. Of course, that is an
attachment and I should rid myself of it. But," the old monk smiled, “with
the Plateau, attachment is understandable."
Yana felt as if somehow a blindfold had slipped from her face. He was
old, this bodhisattva, so immensely old, and as her eyes traced the thick
folds of inky skin that sagged upon his ancient face, she realized that he
was dying.
He had been away from the Earthłs gravity far too long, had not done his
zero-g exercises in many years. When he went home to the most beautiful
place left on Earththe last beautiful place remaining therehe would go
there to die.
Yana touched his hand. In many eras such touch had been forbidden between
monks, especially monks of different sexes, but this age was one of
compromises with the universe; most of the last stewards of the worlds had
turned to the path of compassion and braved the vale of attachments again,
to see them through the long dark and silence. They touched, made love, bore
children. They alone kept their population stable.
The old monk smiled at her, so calmly, as the space elevator ground to a
stop. One palm pressed against the other, the lotus of her hands bidding him
good journey and peace, she bowed. Smiling, the ancient monk returned the
ancient gesture, and then returned his gaze to the viewport for a moment
longer, to the way station looming above them in Martian orbit, and the
stars glittering beyond it.
#
Yana reached out from within herself towards Dharma, which she visualized
as an ancient king: a being shaped not like her or the other monksneither
small nor wrinkled, his eyes open to the beautiful blue skies of the world
as it had been before man had ruined it, and his skin fair enough to darken
in the gentle sunlight. The Dharma King was a virtual giant, his thick black
mane streaming behind his head. His white tunic and golden crown shone in
the starlight, and the skin that stretched over his muscles gleamed with a
divine light.
Slowly, he soared toward her, across the star-spattered darkness. He
would envelop her in his arms, reacquaint her with stillness. Untouched by
hurry or hesitation, he approached like a sunrise, inevitable. Yana thought
suddenly of mountain peaks she had stared up into as a monk-child, and
imagined the silent darknesses beneath the oceans she had stared out across
on long, blistering afternoons. Faint droplets of memory flicked at her
skin, a hazy recollection from childhood rainstorms. She felt the gentle
patter upon her bald head, and rivulets trickling down her shoulders and
chest.
Through those storms child-Yana had remained, always, in the stone lotus
position, the same posture in which she now drifted weightless in the
chamber where she would shed her flesh. She was soon to go out bodiless
across the teeming emptiness as a message of light, only to find herself
embodied again on the far side, leaving Earth far behind.
The present was a distraction. The chamber was a distraction, as was her
coming voyage. Like any human, her mind was littered with attachments, and
Yana felt the perceptible drift toward them begin again. It was an ancient,
unceasing pattern of mind, but she had learned that fighting this drift was
useless. Though her people no longer resembled humans in the time of
Shakyamuni, they remained human. Across the ages they had engineered
themselves into a new form, one adapted to survive in their ruined home
world, and sometimes they shed their bodies, in a prefiguration of the final
shedding of ego and samsara that would come at the doorstep to
nirvana.
Yet attachments plagued their souls still, and still they drifted towards
them daily, just as Yana did now, slipping past Dharma, who was not yet
close enough to encircle her in his arms, and toward memories of pain.
She saw Daigon on a small screen, shivering and crying out animal noises.
She felt the arms of a pair of Brothers restraining her, the weight in her
belly. The hot wetness in her eyes that was the closest thing to crying
possible in bodies redesigned for a deadly, ruined biosphere.
Yana breathed deeply, slowly, and immersed herself in the pain. The hands
on her arms, the cold stone beneath her feet. The hum of a ventilator fan
far above her.
And it was not sorrow that haunted her. It was rage, rage at the unnamed
sickness that had robbed her of him. Rage at the ancient ones and their
idiot war. Rage at the toxic soil and the poisoned sky.
Breath. Breath was life. The energy of the world, even here surrounded by
the void of space, could be drawn in through the nose, the tailings of
thought expelled through the mouth.
She whispered her bodhisattva vow again, words she had first spoken as a
child, promising to struggle as long as time and space would endure, through
the suffering of Earth and all worlds, as long as living beings would exist,
to the end of all things, that she would drown misery in compassion, and
kindness.
The words stilled her, and then the familiar sensation began. Coldness
and quickly rising dark. She was being stripped down to data, and would soon
be light among stars, bodiless and unthinking, yet moving, intact and real
as stone and water and sunlight and thought.
She settled quietly, letting her ego dissolve into the silence and the
circular rhythm of her breathing.
#
Walking toward Temmus of Usak Plot, Yana found herself oddly unable to
hold his eye. She turned her gaze to the walls of the ancient chamber to
which the other monks had led her. All around were faded paintings of Indian
gods and goddesses. A female goddess, whom she remembered had been named
Gangathe goddess of a river long swallowed by desert nowrose up, wrestling
with some blue-skinned deity whose name she could no longer remember from
her childhood studies.
And then she was before him, surrounded by an entourage of
scholar-brothers, in a brightly-lit chamber crammed with machinery. It was
enormous by the monksł standards, like all rooms built by the ancients, and
they were near its center. No longer the boy she remembered from sangha,
Temmus had become a small, bright-eyed monk in a white robe, smiling
brightly in greeting.
Silently folding his hands together in anjali, the prayerful
greeting used by all monks, Temmus smiled to her. Yana mirrored the gesture,
and then added the slight bow customary among the monks at her sangha.
He bowed slowly, awkwardly and late, as if he had grown uncomfortable with
the custom during his many years away.
“Welcome to Ayodhya Station," Temmus said, his smile anxious.
“Thank you, butyou donÅ‚t seem ill," Yana said, careful to convey more
puzzlement than annoyance. She could still see in his face the troublesome
boy that Temmus had once been. With a surprising fondness she remembered
their blood-berry fights on the edge of Usak Plot, and the adolescent scraps
Temmus had gotten into with Daigon.
“That depends," Temmus said, “on how you define ill. If you saw things as
I see them" His voice trailed off, before he turned to face the computer
screens plastering every surface of the room. “This is my laboratory. This
is where we do our work."
“Work," Yana said dubiously. “Fiddling with black holes."
“Birthing new universes," Temmus corrected her with a smile. “Stages upon
which all the souls still trapped in samsara can learn how to live in
compassion." As he finished the second sentence, he shuddered slightly, his
eyes sliding out of focus. He shut his eyes, and then opened them again. “It
is important, sacred work."
Yana smiled with gentle, kind derision. She had seen great debates held
at great sangha conferences: bitter theological disputes between
rival orders on whether the birthing of universes from tuned singularities
was heretical, or indeed the highest dharmic calling of any sangha
that could summon the scientific wherewithal to conduct such experiments.
The unforgettable drama of monastic debateclapped hands and stomping feet
driving home each point of an argumentbrought a smile to Yanałs face as she
remembered how Daigon had smiled, watching those contests, clapping his
hands softly in unison with the debaters.
Then she noticed that Temmus was nervous. He shivered as ifit looked
like a seizure, though she knew from the reports shełd read that it was
nothing of the kind. Epilepsy would have been impossible: A millennium
before, Tenguz Gyuto Nen had ordered that all genetic disorders be
engineered out of the faithful who were to remain on Earth. It was no
naturally-occurring illness, this: no infection, no inborn defect, not a
sign of decrepitudeTemmus was clearly too young for thatand whatever was
causing this, scientific medicine could not say.
When he stilled, Yana looked him square in the eye and asked, “How do
you see things, Temmus? Since I cannot seem them as you do"
He looked at her, and then at the other monks, and said, “Tomorrow. A
demonstration is necessary, and one will not be possible until then. And,"
he added, catching her eye, “I am sure you have news for me, as well."
“Yes," she said, looking to the goddess of the extinct river once again,
and nodded. “And a space in which to meditate?"
“Of course," Temmus said. “You may join us in our silence hall."
#
The calm of the meditative trance still hung around Yanałs mind as they
sat upon the floor of Temmusł chamber, held softly down by gravity simulated
by the rotation of Ayodhya Station, and ate the last meal before sleep.
“This sickness," an older Ice Shore monk named Gehje said, and then
paused. He continued his sentence only after a glance toward Temmus. “You
will not understand it until"
“How is everyone at Usak Plot?" Temmus interrupted, turning his gaze upon
Yana. His twitching and dislocation seemed to have passed, and she could see
no sign of illness in his face or eyes.
“They were well when I left, ten years ago. I have been on Phobos since
then. Biosphorming project. Bacteria."
Temmus smiled at the idea of a decade of bacteria. “Do it a million
times, and the thing you thought was most boring becomes the most
interesting thing in the world," he said with a smile, quoting some ancient
monk whose name had long been lost. He was speaking physicist-to-physicist,
she could tell.
“Not at all," she wobbled her head in disagreement. “It was always
fascinating. Therełs still plenty of interesting work going on in
biophysics. Just in anthroselective programming and biospheric
energy-transfer modeling"
“Of course," Temmus said with a smile that took her back decades, to an
afternoon seated outside at the sangha, when he had cruised his way
through a pile of ancient Feimang diagrams and suddenly started spouting
claims about vacuum energy and something called the Higgs field. He was two
years her junior, yet Yana had never heard of such things, and realized the
boy had been up late at nights, after working in the sanghaęs
greenhouses, studying physics from the roots up.
That was when she had realized the word “genius" actually meant
something.
Other sunlit days flashed through her mind, as wellraces run in the
sangha yard, and a younger, prettier monkłs hand in Temmusł. A tiny
fluttering of what Yana had thought was long-dead jealousy tickled in her
belly, and she narrowed her tiny eyes.
“I think youÅ‚d be surprised what a rewarding pursuit it is to use oneÅ‚s
scientific training for directly practical purposes," she said, noticing a
tiny pang of defensiveness rising within her. “For the good of living
beings, in a career of compassion. After all, your work is all theoretical,
beyond the visible effects of the singulari"
“No," Temmus interrupted her with a pang of annoyance. “We have hard
evidence of inflationary expansions in baby universesthe first instants of
cold Big Bangs being carved from Bulkspace are clearly evident. Explosions
of pure bodhicitta-potentiality! IÅ‚ll show you the echoes"
“ItÅ‚s alright," Yana said, relief spreading within her that he had not
accepted her criticism. She steered the conversation back to why she had
come: “IÅ‚ll take your word for now. But tell me, what is this sickness that
has struck you, and why did you summon me? IÅ‚m no more a physician than you
are. You should have requested an appropriate specialist."
The monks glanced at one another, and Temmus shook his head. “You are
the appropriate specialist, Yana. But, we cannot explain the effect to you.
All we can do is show you. We will, tomorrow. Until then, could we please
leave this issue, as much as we can? Now, tell me, how are Ryangba and Nug
and Ohol?"
Yana sighed. “Ryangba returned to the bardo, three years ago. He
missed you, and often mentioned you in stories. Nug is well, and working
with The Infrastructure. She likes it, maintaining connections between
sanghas and the planets of our system. She deals specifically with
childrensł networks. And OholOhol is now among the Hinya, on the Silent
Satellites."
TemmusÅ‚ eyes widened. “Really? I thought he"
“Yes, he changed his mind. About five years ago. After all those years.
We hear from him every few years, but itłs always the same: ęDisembodiment
is the path to nirvana,Å‚ he says." Yana smiled. Ohol had been the most
vociferous opponent to sustained disembodiment, claiming that the computer
emulation of a human mind was a sacrilege against the universal order. An
idea like that could only come from the diseased cultures of the ancients
who ruined our world, he had said so often. During their childhood at the
Usak Plot sangha, Yana and Temmus had constantly quoted the line with
a tone of mock-anger, barely understanding what it meant. And now he was
preaching the bodiless path.
“It seems even an old monk can learn new tricks," Temmus said with a
grin.
“Yes," Yana said with a nod, touching her hands together, and scooping
some of the vegetable paste onto the boiled grains, and then placing some of
it in her mouth. It tasted plain, like everything the monks ate, but
nutritious. Its calming effect was part of their daily practice. But she was
full, and set her bowl aside, to show that she was finished.
With that, the other monks rose, and Yana followed their lead, rising to
her feet.
“How many hours until your demonstration?" she asked.
The other monks looked to the youngest among them, a woman named Uhl.
“Eleven," she said. She was the groupÅ‚s technician, Yana supposed. “We will
be ready tomorrow after morning rising and meditations."
“Good," said Temmus, and he met GehjeÅ‚s eyes pointedly. The older monk
nodded, and began to leave as Temmus turned to Yana, delicately grasping at
the hem of her sleeve.
“Let us speak alone for a few moments, Sister Yana," he said, releasing
her sleeve only after a momentłs hesitation.
Yana bowed her head and clasped her hands in anjali to the leaving
monks, and then she turned to face Temmus once more, an awkward smile on her
face.
“I heard what happened to Daigon," he said, his eyes on the wall
suddenly, as if afraid of the grief he imagined would well up in her. As if
it might be infectious. He had known Daigon too, had scrambled with him in
the dust, and laughed over tea on quiet evenings. For many years they had
spoken their daily bodhisattva vows in unison, with the same breath, and in
the same voice.
Temmus knew Yana better than he should have, after all these years, after
so much change. The grief he anticipated did well up in her, but he had
turned his eyes back to hers, and watched her. He reached out across the
squat floor-table, and touched her on the arm with one gentle, black hand.
Yana saw Daigon there, superimposed upon him for a moment, tears in his eyes
and reaching across the table too, and she lowered her eyes.
Flood. It was an ancient word that had used to mean a deluge of
water, an overflowing of a kind that Yana had never seen in the broken
desert land of her childhood. But she knew the word well, for in ancient
scriptures it was used to describe the rawest state of human emotions.
Emotions of which even a bodhisattva could not fully seize control, could
not completely escape as long as she remained at the doorstep of nirvana,
holding open the door for all others to go in first. But she was not at
Daigonłs deathbed now. She was not watching the love of her life die. She
was lost again in the vale of her mindłs attachments, and a hand was on her
shoulder.
She turned her face back to Temmus, and saw the faint lines on his face.
The tears surprised her. She had not imagined Daigon having remained in
TemmusÅ‚ mind, but Temmus swallowed softly and said, “In truth, only a little
time shall pass before this body, too, is discarded, empty of mind, like a
piece of wood thrown away once useless."
It was ancient scripture, and Temmus sat silently, looking at her for a
few moments. She did not gaze at him, but felt his eyes on her face. After a
time, he quoted Shakyamuni: “ItÅ‚s as if the sun and moon have left the sky,"
he said. Words the Buddha had said when hełd learned of the deaths of two
beloved disciples.
Yana nodded. The Buddha too had felt this pain. She let the emotion sit
within her, like a rock balanced on a rope that might explode if it fell to
the ground. She did not stir it, did no touch it. She let it rest where it
was, and tried not to stare at it.
But it did not remain still. It did not stay where she put it, but
rumbled deeply, threatening to explode anyway, and burn the rope away with
it. A dark surge of memories welled up once more within Yana: Daigonłs eyes
staring up at her from a ruined, inhuman face, his voice soft and pathetic
in a way she had believed he could never become. The liquid sound of his
breathing. The gentle shiver that he had developed just before the end.
Temmus closed his eyes, and began to hum. It was a melody that Daigon had
loved, and which Yana had not heard in years, had never sung to little
Gobai, the son she had borne for Daigon, the son who had long ago gone to
Venus to work on another biosphorming project. She braced herself, as if a
much greater flood might now strike, but instead, she felt calm, as if some
part of Daigon were in the room with them. Without thinking, she touched the
band of his braided hair that hung around her wrist. She could smell his
sweat in the air, and hear his soft, strained breathing.
And instead of weeping, she began to hum the song as well. The melody
filled the enormous room, with the gods on the walls playing out their
ancient stories. The room was full, and still, and calm.
And then Temmus held Yana for a time, as she wept again, and looked at
her as if he wanted to tell her something, something perhaps that Daigon had
said. But he only led her to her chamber and left her there, with one more
gentle touch upon the shoulder.
In her chamber, Yana did not sleep. The flood had not ended. This was why
it was called a flood. When waters had filled a place, they did not drain
away quickly or easily. They remained, soaking through everything, swirling
about perilously.
Rage. And for people who were ancient, and perhaps still lived, somewhere
distant.
#
It was on a morning many years ago that Daigon had died.
Yana had noticed that his shivering had gotten worse, and he seemed to
feel as if something were about to happen, too. The Degan Kalataka, a
text about a millennium old, had described this, the phenomenon in which a
mind naturally realized that it was on the doorstep of the bardo once
again.
Daigonłs floor mat had been a wet tangle, soaked with sweat and soiled by
seeping blood and vomit. His extremities had swollen overnight, and trembled
involuntarily. His eyes stared blindly from an unrecognizable face, one
discolored and twisted.
In her safesuit, Yanałs hands shook, and the wetness gathered upon her
eyes, but she knew that he could not see these details. His eyes were
bloody, and glazed. He could only hear her, and feel the touch of her gloved
hand.
He was going to die, and she would never touch him, could not touch him
now. If she did, she would soon follow him, and he had forbidden her, sworn
her to surviving his illness. Daigon had blamed himself for his condition.
It was the same thing that Yana had loved so much about himhis easy nature,
his simple acceptance of things, his trust that everything would work
outthat had made him forget what sort of a culture he had been excavating.
Made him forget to check his safesuit occasionally. The thing that Yana had
loved most about him had killed him.
No sane culture could develop weapons like these, illnesses that would
kill a man only after a week, so that his sickness would strike all other
men he came in contact with. No sane culture would load such a weapon into
the air vents of a building, so that it would infect any trespasser, and
slay him for the transgression of stumbling upon a building six thousand
years after the nation that had built it had collapsed, its richest citizens
having fled to outer planets and the stars while the rest died.
Yana wrapped her gloved hand around his bare, swollen one, and sat beside
him on the mat. She said a prayer, and he moaned along with it, for he could
not speak and had refused pain-killers. The pain was sensation, the purpose
of life. Through sensation and detachment from it, one reached nirvana.
Daigon had vowed not to go into the bardo dulled, not even a little.

In her heart, at that moment, tablets of scripture began to crumble and
split. Why this doctrine, why the permanence of a road taken? Daigon was not
this suffering being in the bed, she realized. It was only a fragment of
him. A small trickle of light shone through the prism held at this angle,
instead of that one.
Daigon did not have to disappear. Would not have had to, if the sanghaęs
elders had not followed the Western Shore path. Had Daigon fallen ill on the
Ice Coast, or on the Plateau, he would have been reborn, to begin again from
the moment at which he had last stepped out of a transmutation to light.
But doctrine aside, it was not the elders, not the strictures of the
faith that were killing Daigon. He held to those principles, held to the
faith as he had learned it.
What had killed him was an ancient weapon, left behind by the long-gone
maniacs who had fled the Earth as soon as they had finished trashing it and
burning down its last trees, unthinkingly poisoning the last untouched
water-spring and the deepest corner of the oceans. They, those selfish ones
who drifted out there somewhere, frozen and searing across the void still,
that same generation, searching for another world to ruin.
The feeling was heavy in Yanałs heart, and she realized, with a twinge of
terror, that this was the feeling of hatred. The most terrible attachment,
the most paralyzing fetter, it had bloomed in a single moment, fully formed
and delicate as a tiny black flower embedded in her heart chakra. She could
feel it there, heavier than any other sensation she had ever experienced.

She held Daigonłs hand still, more firmly then, and whispered the
bodhisattva vow, the prayer that always had given Daigon strength. He
groaned, his mouth unable to form the words of the vow but his throat
grinding out the rhythms and phrases. And as she prayed with him, she sat
down to wait quietly and calmly for the end.
It had not taken so very long at all for life to slip from Daigon, for
him to slip through Yanałs fingers and be lost forever. But as much as she
studied, prayed, and unchained the attachments in her spirit, a part of her
would remain seated there, praying incoherently and with wet eyes, for the
rest of her life.
Such is the nature of human beings, and of the struggle all such
creatures face. And so it goes, evermore and always.
#
The bank of computer screens glittered with shimmering loops of imagery:
spinning energies, deeply symbolic representations that reflected the flow
of interactions and harnessed forces. It was power that thousands of
generations of humans could never have dreamed of controlling, but Temmus
mastered it with only his voice and his computers.
Yet Yana was not dazzled, for at her own workstation a far more
prodigious set of screens had flickered with mathematical maps of the
bacteriosphere that was the object of her last decadełs study. To study life
through the lens of physics was to gaze into the heart of samsara, to
look upon the illusory dance of karma and dharma and begin to
tap out the music in time with the movements of their feet against the
fundaments of the dream that was all existence. To Yana, working with mere
fundamental forces and masses could never compare.
Temmus had gone off in a shuttle to the experimentation platform a few
thousand kilometers away. In his absence Gehje had proven a rather nervous
and uninspired host. After the morning meal he had quietly led Yana to this
observation chamber. It was a rectangular room in which the side that was
not covered with screens opened into a wide viewport facing the distantbut
faintly visibleexperimentation platform.
“I will stay with you here while Temmus replicates the conditions for the
onset of the seizure," he told Yana.
“Seizure?" Yana asked. “Is it a neurological reaction?"
“Not exactly," Gehje said, and lowered his eyes for a moment before
gazing over at the screens. “That is a readout of TemmusÅ‚ brain activity,"
he said, and gestured with a nod towards one area of the wall of
displayscreens.
She scanned the displays until she found what she was looking for: the
image of a glowing brain upon a screen, rippling with the flow of energies
of thought. It looked normal enough to her, an impression confirmed by the
text onscreen that proclaimed Temmusł neurological state NORMAL.
“Yana?" came a voice, and she realized it was Temmus speaking through the
comms.
“Yes," she said loudly, before softening her voice. “WeÅ‚re here. Ready
when you are." She crossed over to the screen displaying Temmusł brain
readings, then sat on the floor and stared up at it.
But her eyes were drawn to other screens, where visual renderings of
pulsing numbers seared brightly into a cascade of forms. It was energy,
enormous amounts of it, turning round as a gyre turns, faster with each
moment, and as the forces compounded and increased, the bank of screens
quickly grew incandescent, until the room was flooded in white light.
A quick glance at the running scan of Temmusł brain showed nothing
strange going on other than a mild stress reaction.
And then, suddenly, the singularity formed at the center of the searing
ring of energy, its only emanation a trace amount of radiation, the ancient
technical term for which Yana could no longer remember. The black hole
expanded slowly, minutely, and infinitely small fluctuations in the particle
accelerator that had generated it now tuned it, resonating it this way and
that, in a fine cascade of adjustments.
The black hole grew, and began to sing in a voice wholly made of gravity,
drawing everything into it.
The particle accelerator suddenly eased back, its goal achieved, and its
influence declined immediately. The black hole winked out of existence. The
peak, the cresting climax of the experiment, had passed. That had been the
point at which Temmus and his cohort claimed a universe was born someplace
else, in some inaccessible corner of the multiverses. A big bang locked
behind a door that could never be opened.
Immediately, things fell apart.
The image of Temmusł brain didnłt light up like any Yana had seen before:
no orderly pattern, no chaosit simply exploded into thorough radiance, as
if every synapse were firing constantly, simultaneously, the way a brain
plugged into a trillion batteries might look.
“HeÅ‚s dying!" she whispered, her eyes wide.
Gehje touched her shoulder, shaking his head. “We thought that too, the
first time. But he isnłt dying at all. This is the same as every other
time."
Yanałs eyes searched all the other displays, and found them all showing
the same strangeness. Cameras were flooded with a blinding haze, and the
shipłs readings were flickering between a multitude of conflicting signals,
all coming through on the same channel. A siren blared, and suddenly, the
shipłs readings flickered back into unity.
Then, just as suddenly as it had come, the chaos collapsed away.
When she turned to Gehje again, he was watching her. “Look at this," he
said, and pointed toward a screen that had been displaying visual imagery of
the experimentation platform. “Replay singularity formation," he said, his
eyes on that screen, and the screen skipped back a few minutes to the moment
when the singularity had coalesced, a delicate, ultramassive nothingness
formed of mass and energy and gravity.
The platform shuddered, suddenly faintly fuzzy and incoherent.
“Is it a camera problem?" she asked. “Some side effect of the energies?"

“No," Gehje told her, shaking his head. “ThatÅ‚s what it actually looks
like. Temmus sees it that way every time. So now you see why we needed you,"
he said. He was suddenly bold, his gaze locked on her eyes.
“Now you understand."
#
But for Yana, understanding was a much finer and more complex thing. It
was a thing built of numbers and long hours of silent contemplation, of
talking herself through equations and mechanisms, sketching Troschan
matrices and Feimang diagrams in the air as the computer traced her
movements and fine-tuned the illustrations that it shaped in her mind,
pulsing its miniscule signals into her brain.
Understanding took much more work than Gehje had implied. The black hole
glittered, conceptually visible only in terms the radiation it gave off as
it began to decay. For hours and hours, Yana beheld the disruptionor, a
model of it, carefully garnered from the records and readings of Ayodhya
Station, of the experimentation platform, and nearby scanner buoys that
tracked the region for any interesting developments.
And she had learned that the disruption was not, as shełd originally
thought, a discrete event. Rather, it appeared to come in a series of
pulsating waves, each more forceful and more destabilizing than the last. If
this was a natural phenomenon, it was something she had never heard about in
any of her studies: Something they had done, something about building the
black hole, had nudged mother universe into raising her robe and revealing a
hidden secret. The invisible, tangled quantum chaos that swirled in the
roots of physicality had become visible, for a moment, decohered and burned
itself into the seeing minds of living people.
She was certain, though she could not exactly say why, that some sort of
interaction between The Bulk and the brane that was the known universe was
going on. Something involving vacuum energy, and something involving
gravitons. Why the inception of a baby universe ought to disrupt the
transmission of gravitons from The Bulk to her worldłs brane, she could not
exactly say, but then, only a little was understood about the mechanism of
that transmission anyway. And she had learned, in her long life, to trust to
her instinctshowever tentativelywhen facing the unknown.
Yana pored over the literatureall of what was contained in the stationłs
computers, and in her own personal reference files. There was nothing so
stark, so apparent, that could explain what she had seen, what the
instruments had recorded. Nothing on this scale, or at this level of
complexity. This was, as far as she could discern, a new phenomenon.
She switched views, crossing into a Platonscape. After hours of staring
into the mathematical guts of the universe, she wondered whether perhaps
working backwards, from essential forms, would help her. The forms were, of
course, not emulations of physical objects, but rather highly symbolic
meta-objects and forces. She reached with one hand toward the glittering
black dot that was the seed of the black hole, pulsing slowly larger and
brighter (as a representation of its increasing gravitational pull) as the
emulation skipped forward a few picoseconds at a time.
The Worldbranethe lower-dimensional membrane-like layer of the universe
that was inhabited by Yana and her universefloated within a
higher-dimensional everythingness called The Bulk. The visible universe was
like a sheet of cloth hanging from the branch of a tree in an invisible,
immense, many-dimensioned jungle of forces and energies that made up The
Bulk.
Jungle, she thought to herself, thinking of the pulses. Why the
pulses? Why that pattern? They seemed familiar, but not from any phenomenon
within physics. She had sought out explanations from known models of The
Bulk, from the little that had been discovered in experiments, but so much
remained unknown. Yana and Temmus were unusual: Physics was the science that
had mattered the least to the bodhisattvas who had remained on Earth,
rebuilding the trashed ecosystem and gently re-designing its native life to
survive the aftermath of humanityłs ages-long rampage.
A jungle, she thought again, imagining what she had never seen herself,
for there were only a few small jungles on Earth now. Tentative, carefully
tended. Yana summoned up a picture from what she had seen in videos, and
read, and saw a green, wild place, but it was abstract. The only model she
had for teeming life was of the roiling, wild soup of bacteria she had spent
decades studying on Phobos. Wildly differentiated life, swimming in a
three-dimensional ocean, invisible from the surface.
Unimaginable, to one who knew nothing of the ocean and merely glanced at
its cresting waves, Yana thought, and she turned her eyes to the black hole
again, which was growing, warping the WorldBrane and pulling hard on The
Bulk beyond it; tendrils of Bulk twisted into the singularity, tearing off
and disappearing
“Yana!"
The voice seemed to come from the black hole, from the corona surrounding
it, but she realized that was because her mind was so focused on the
emulation. The voice was really coming from outside the emulation, from
somewhere inside her chamber. Yana hesitated, not eager to break from her
trance. Most of the insights she had achieved in the past had come at times
like this, deep in study of a phenomenon, closed in the tight circle of
observation, entranced.
But she had never reached that point without breaks along the way, she
reminded herself as the voice called out her name again, and a hand touched
her shoulder. She switched out, opening her eyes and turning her gaze
upward.
It was Temmus, wearing an expression that she had not seen on his face in
decades. The sweat-glistening face of the boy in the yard beside the study
hall, wrestling his friend in the dust; the boy who had known what a Feimang
diagram was before anyone else in his cohort.
“Messages!" he said, panting. He had run to her room, wiping his brow
with one sleeve. “WeÅ‚ve intercepted a message! You must come!"
She blinked, looking down, and felt the faint response inside her:
submission to his presence. It puzzled her, and hurt, so soon after having
wept once more for Daigon. She looked up again, and he was smiling at her,
his eyes knowing but unperturbed.
“From whom?" she asked, stretching her limbs and rising to her feet.
“From the ancestors. TheyÅ‚ve arrived, out there somewhere, wherever they
were going. And now theyłre calling home."
#
“Stewards of the home world," the woman said, her words, ancient and
incomprehensible, translated into modern speech by the computer that was
relaying them. “My name is Erinn. I am one of the last people who left
Earth." She said this with a smile, wistful but also brimming with hope, and
she paused to raise her hands, clasped together in that ancient salute, the
anjali. For a moment Yana wondered whether the woman had said, in her
own language, “I am" rather than “I was." Then she realized that the woman
had slept through millennia, and felt as if she had left mere weeks before
at most.
The ancient woman looked bizarre, huge and pink and fleshy, and the
proportions of her face were all wrong. Thick brown hair hung from her
scalp, and as she spoke, emotions flickered in her eyes, those huge, bare
eyes. Yana had seen ancient videographs of humans, of course, had seen the
strange faces, the whites of their eyes unshielded by fleshy layers as her
own were, and the odd expressions that they wore as they spoke. Looking upon
the ancients, she had felt the sweep of those emotions, unbridled and
somehow animal.
But this was different. This was a being that was alive nowor, at least,
sometime not so very long agoand speaking to her. Not to her directly, but
to the collective of sanghas, to all those who had stayed behind.
“We arrived at our new world three hundred years ago, but have only woken
in the past few days. For those three centuries, we have slept while our
machinery began the work of terraforming this planet. It is our new home,
perhaps the first one encountered. We have not heard from any of the other
sleepships yet. We hope that you are still there, and that your work has
continued. Wewe often think of you here."
Watching the woman speak, she felt as if the ancient emotions on the
strangerłs face had somehow infected her. Her face grew hot, and the deluge
she had experienced the night before began to surge again within her. She
turned and looked at Temmus, who was staring at the screen, his eyes burning
with fascination.
He turned and saw Yana watching him, and said, “This is just one of
millions of messages. But this one she is my ancestor. Well, almostI am a
descendant of a cousin of hers. She is she is family to me. My closest
living ancestor for thousands of light-years."
Yana glanced over to a nearby screen full of text. It was a lineage
tracker. But it was not displaying the result of Temmusł search. Rather, it
was working through another tracking series, and on one end of the list was
the name of Gehje of Ice Home. Gehje was searching for an ancestor in the
haystack of messages, too.
“We can find your ancestor next," Temmus said, smiling.
“We know that ages have passed," the pale, strange woman continued, “And
we are sure that if you remember us at all, it is as the people who
destroyed the Earth. You would remember us as monstrous destroyers, as
criminals of history. But we were not even born when this destruction began.
We were born into a ruined world, just as you were, and we did the best we
could. We didnłt know. I swear to you, we didnłt understand, until it was
too late. All we did differently was to leave in sorrow," the ancient monk
said with a quavering voice. She was remembering the world, a world that
Yana had never seen for it had crumbled away, leaving only its poisons, its
manufactured diseases, its ruinations. Yana had grown up at the scene of the
murder, and now the guilty were calling en masse to apologize, to
explain.
“I am a biological engineer. I will be redesigning human bodies to live
on the world we have found. It will be hard work. I miss your world. We all
do: We miss the Earth so much," the monk said. “We want to be friends with
you who stayed behind, to tend her in her sickness."
Yana felt Daigonłs hand through the glove, suddenly, all those years
later and she saw his eyes glazed over, seeing nothing but turned toward her
somehow.
The ancient womanÅ‚s voice trembled: “I will not hear from youit is too
farbut I hope my children or grandchildren will."
When Yana spoke in response to Temmusł offer, just before the deluge
surged up within her and she fled the room, it was only a single, simple
syllable. Louder than the voice of the computerłs translation, firm and
heavy with rage.
“No."
#
When the shuttle left for the platform, Yana and Temmus sat silently,
beside one another. Yana knew that Temmus wanted to talk about her outburst,
but did not know where or how to begin. It had always been that way with
him, which was why she had chosen Daigon instead, all those years ago.
Daigon hadnłt always known any better than Temmus what to say or do, but
he had never minded not knowing. He had been strangely comfortable with
uncertainties, one who had gone always with a smile into the unknown.
Which was what had killed him, but it had also made Yana love him, and
bear a child with him.
Temmus looked at the shuttlełs screens as much to have something besides
her to look at, as to confirm that the ship was on course. As they passed a
survey-buoy and it shimmered against the dark, star-spattered nothingness,
Yana thought of a long-ago night back on Usak Plot.
It was only a flash, a moment on that moonless night, when the stars for
once had shone brightly, and the monks had gathered by a fire, and then
wandered off alone. Monks were the only people in the world, and thus they
lived a redesigned monasticism. They fell in love. They had children, and
raised them in the heart of the sangha. They slipped apart,
sometimes, and sometimes they stayed together for decades, or even for life.

Yana remembered sitting far from the fire, Temmusł hand in her own, and
asking him a question in her softest voice. “Why do you want me?" She
remembered being puzzled at her own question, uncertain why she would even
ask it, and even a little shocked at herself. But Temmus was, she was
certain, a genius. She had seen him working. She had watched him discover
things that most people simply learned from books, understood poorly, and
recited from memory.
Temmus, she realized that night long ago, spoke the language of the
universe. It was his mother tongue, and this other language, the language of
the monks, was slightly foreign to him.
So he had stared awkwardly into her eyes. She could see that he felt as
if he needed to say something, quickly, and she held herself back from what
she wanted to say, which was, “Tell me later, if you cannot say it now."
Instead, her face became more expectant, and his grew more anxious.
“I donÅ‚t know," he said, pulling closer to her, this monk who knew all
the answers there were known in the world. This monk who could see the
secrets of gravity, the language of the quark, the songs of the trembling
branes within The Bulk.
And she saw that he realized his mistake immediately, that he saw the
confusion that welled up in her, caught an unmistakable glimpsed it in her
eyes. Felt the awkwardness in her as he put his arm around her, and touched
the crown of his bald head against her own, and he said, “But I love you."

They had both felt it, already, the weakening pull, the tumble out of
orbit and into the cold and lonely dark. They had felt the ending begin.
“Yana," Temmus said, turning to look at her.
She looked up at him, not speaking this time.
He looked as if he wanted to tell her something else, but all he said
was, “WeÅ‚re there."
The shuttle docked to the experimentation platform with a slight jolt
that reverberated through the interior, and then the shuttlełs computer
announced that docking was complete and boarding could commence immediately.

Temmus turned to Yana, bowing once again with his hands raised in
anjali, the formal gesture of host to guest. She smiled, and returned
the gesture, accepting his anxious hospitality.
The platform was enormous, but the passages that linked the labs within
were very small, only a tiny fragment of the structure. It had been built
long ago, however, to accommodate the ancients, so that just as with Ayodhya
Station, the passages gave Yana a feeling of diminution, as if it was
impossible to live up to the stature of the enormous old ones.
Except it felt slightly different now. Despite herself, she had seen
something of her own self in that faraway, ancient woman on the screen. She
had seen another human being, strange-faced perhaps, but a creature with
recognizable feelings, and regrets, and sorrows. A being that, like herself,
struggled with attachments and had, after all, set out upon the same path of
suffering as everyone Yana knew.
While Yana was lost in her thoughts, Temmus led her silently to the lab,
which turned out to be an immense room clustered with equipment. Much of it
was disused, but there was a small workstation in the middle of the room.
Temmus led her to it.
“This is where I create the singularities. It is where the disturbances
have struck me. Are you certain that you want to"
“Yes," she said. She didnÅ‚t know why, but she felt she had to, if she
wanted any hope of understanding this phenomenon. “Is the accelerator
ready?"
“It is," Temmus said, and spoke a little more loudly, enabling the
commlink with Ayodhya Station. “WeÅ‚re here," he told Gehje and the others,
and then said, “Begin when you are ready." Then the two of the sat side by
side, and waited.
Before long, there was a humming noise shivering through the platform. It
grew so loud that Yana began to feel it coming up through the floor,
vibrating her body slightly. The energies at work were tremendous, immense.
The kind of energies that nature had played with from the beginning, but
which humans had not begun to harness until sometime just before the Exodus
of the Ancients.
For a moment, Yana was gripped by a sudden feeling that Temmus had left,
gone away, but when she turned she saw him sitting there, beside her. Still
awkward, a little, after all the decades that had passed. She reached out
her hand, and squeezed his, and smiled. He smiled, too, and then his eyes
turned toward one of the screens. He signaled to it, and the graphic leapt
from the screen to the air before them.
It was a chart, drawing itself up into an exponential curve. Yana knew
well enough that it was a graph of the energies at work, and that when they
approached the acceleratorłs absolute limit, a black hole would be born. And
that black hole would be the brief, instantaneous womb of a new universe,
forever disconnected from their own.
The chart climbed, slowly, and Yana watched it with anticipation. But at
the last moment, she felt Temmusł eyes on her, and turned to face him.
He was smiling, his hand still in hers, when the world shattered. His
smile blurred, and then shifted. There was not only one Temmus here, now;
there were millions of them, and millions of Yanas too, their hands in a
myriad different variations of the position they had been in, miniscule
variances that branched off from one another, all superimposed.
Yana felt an immense pain explode within her, and had to hold herself
calm for a moment, drawing on her decades of training to set aside her
emotions and her instincts to focus only on what she was experiencing. The
noise in her ears was denser and thicker than what she had heard when the
accelerator had been building up its energies. It was not one din, but an
infinity of dins echoing through one another.
She wondered for a moment what the buoys would pick up, and the
acceleratorłs own sensors would deduce from interactions within the particle
beam: whether any surge in gravitons would result, or other particles.
Whether there would be any explanation to be found there.
But this was real, she realized. She was experiencing it. It was
something that was yet to be explained, in this universe.
Something that had to be explained.
And Temmus could not do it, she marveled, as the pain and the noise grew
too great, and everything exploded into white light, and an infinity of
oceanic silences.
#
Yana woke with a head full of dreamed bacteria dancing, tracing out a
music that could never be heard by human ears.
She rose immediately, her strength having returned in the days since
their trip to the platform, and she hurried to Temmusł chambers. Perhaps she
was not as strong as she thought: A wave of dizziness hit her, but still she
hurried as quickly as her tiny legs could carry her.
“Brother," she called out, tapping on the door. “Brother!"
Temmus answered the door, and stepped back to let her in. Without pausing
even to offer anjali or to bow, she immediately said, “We need your
computer. I" She paused, and looked at him anxiously.
“Yes? You you what?" Temmus looked groggy, but awake.
Yanałs hesitation had appeared from out of nowhere, and in a mere instant
had bloomed to an enormous sunflower of doubt.
Temmus met her gaze, and she could feel him read what was within her. Her
intimidation at his genius, and her embarrassment at the insight that she
did not dare speak to him. Had he always seen into her soul this way?
“I asked you here because I knew you could help me," he said. “I asked
you here because I could not find the answer my way. What is it, Yana?"
She inhaled once, deeply, through her nose, and let the air fill her,
leach away her apprehension before exhaling through her mouth.
“I think maybe itÅ‚s life," she said. “Life in The Bulk."
“What?" Temmus narrowed his tiny eyes, and creases folded the night-black
skin around them.
“IÅ‚ve spent years studying bacteria. The physics of their evolution, the
mathematics of their dance of life. I have seen patterns threaded through
their reproductive cycles, music and meaning in the waves of their
propagation and the waves of death that have passed through their
populations."
Temmus leaned forward, straining to understand.
“Temmus, weÅ‚ve been spending aeons trying to understand why gravity works
as it does. Wełve modeled every possible variation of structure for The
Bulk, and still we have never accounted for it successfully. Every theory
has failed," she said.
Temmus nodded, sitting down on the floor as if in shock. He was beginning
to see.
“I cannot be sure, Temmus, but when I was unconscious, I dreamed." Yana
said this last word softly, reverently. There had been a time when
scientists might have smirked at it, but it had passed. Dreams were never
evidence of anything, of course, but they were leads. Not a few scientists
over the ages had stumbled upon insight in their dreams and imaginings.
“I have dreamed it every time I have slept, since then. We are seated
upon the brane, in the station," she said, and pulled up an image, an Angref
model of human beings on a brane. Temmusł computer caught the image, and
drew it into the air.
“Our brane exists within The Bulk," she said, knowing he knew this, but
fuzzing in The Bulk on her diagram anyway. “When you created the black hole,
the resultant warping acted not only on our brane, but upon The Bulk itself,
via the threads that bind all things."
“Now," Yana said, pulling up an image of bacteria and splattering it into
the model and transforming The Bulk into a teeming jungle of life. “Imagine
The Bulk as a place of life. An ecosystem, but not a biological one in the
sense we know in our own brane. Life there would thrive on energies, on
interactions. On the constant flow of vacuum energies, on the force
communications of gravitons and bosons. And perhaps these interactions that
they thrive on are also only possible because of this life?"
Temmus stared at the model, baffled, and then he nodded. “ItÅ‚s
speculative, Yana"
“But Temmus, what if? What if, when you create those baby universes"
She flicked a model of a black hole into the image, and then allowed it to
warp gravity and spacetime across the Worldbrane and The Bulk alike.
A miniature extinction exploded, in pulsing waves, around the black hole,
as a baby universe formed within The Bulk and exploded into a brane of its
own.
Temmus clasped his hands, though he could not stop them shuddering. They
both knew that this would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to test. And yet
it felt possible. It felt as if Yana had stumbled upon something.
“We can test it," he said. “We can work at lower energies, create
patterned interactions at high energies and see what echoes back to us from
The Bulk." But he was still shaking, and his eyes were wet and his mouth
working silently now. He looked the way bodhisattvas look when they weep.

Since childhood, they had both been raised to share a terror of ecocide.
The ancients, they had been taught, were to be forgiven, but such
forgiveness was difficult. They had lived in a world of green, of vivid
life, and they had slaughtered it. They had poisoned it and kicked it in the
face. Ecocide was, for the bodhisattvas, the most awful crime imaginable.

And Temmus was now imagining experiments to discover whether he had,
unwittingly, been committing it himself.
Yana saw him through the haze of her own wet eyes, and lay her hand upon
his own. Daigon was in her mind, groaning, his hand upon her suited hand,
and he was calling her name. The face of the ancient brown-haired woman on
the screen appeared before her, saying, “We didnÅ‚t know." She met his eyes
as his face distorted, filled with his shame and horror. He turned his face
away, and she realized that of all people, he was most ashamed in front of
her.
Some part of Temmus was still there, on that beach far from the
firelight, searching for what to say, and failing. Failing again and again,
over the decades.
“ItÅ‚s alright," she said, gripping his trembling fingers, and looking
into his face with kind eyes. “You didnÅ‚t know."
But Temmus kept his eyes down, broken. Yana moved closer to him, and put
an arm around him as he shuddered. If it were true, what suffering would he
undergo?
“You couldnÅ‚t know," she told him. “And it is only speculation."
But he said nothing.
After a few moments, Yana began to sing the song that Temmus had sung to
her only a few days before. She didnłt know that she remembered the
songuntil Temmus had sung it, she had not heard it since their
childhoodbut it was, somehow, complete within her memory.
It was a jataka song, a tale from the lives of the Buddha. A tale
of a hunter and a doe, with the Buddha as the doe. The creature had found a
starving hunter, begging the universe to give him a deer to hunt, and had
offered itself up not because of the hunterłs karma, but out of compassion.
The hunter had slain the deer cleanly, lovingly, and with compassion
himself. It was a song that had puzzled Yana when she had heard it as a
child: people killing animals? How could there be compassion in that? How
could anyone speak of such acts with the word compassion?
But now, with Temmus curled against her and sobbing, she understood what
the song meant. She held him, and sang, and sang, until she could feel that
some small measure of peace had come into his heart.
#
Yana spoke her full name, her lineal designation and her place of birth,
Usak Plot on the Great Outer Western Shore.
On the screen, the computer displayed her name, and then began to spit
out the line of her ancestry: her mother and her father and their siblings;
their parents, and grandparents, and cousins, and aunts and uncles.
A great tree spread out, and for the first time in ages, Yana felt truly
connected to the past. So many lives, each laboring under the weight of its
own attachments and struggles. Each life riddled with joys and hopes and
griefs. Each mind longing to transcend, and lost in a vale of difficulties
and confusion.
So many generations, each tied together with a single string of wordsthe
bodhisattva vow. She spoke it, softly, as she watched the branching family
of her ancestors expand across the screen:

As long as time and space endure,
As long as living beings exist,
And as long as creatures struggle and suffer,
Until the end of all things may I remain also,
To drown misery in compassion and kindnesses.

By the end of the vow and perhaps from habit, her eyes were shut. Yana
sat there for a few moments in the silence of the room, and felt the
emptinesses that loomed within her. And she felt her own unimagined
missteps, and the suffering she had, unwitting and unwantedly, left to
fester in the heart of poor Temmus.
After some time, the computer broke the silence.
“Message from your ancestor found," it said. “Brother Shamol Dairani,
Lesser Eastern Shore order." Yana opened her eyes, and saw a man with skin
the color of rich earth, of living, loamy soil. His head was lined with
grey-white stubble, he had a nose that was flat and broad, and his enormous
brown eyes looked utterly alien to her, yet also familiar.
Her ancestor. And, she was surprised to see, he was a monk.
After a few more moments of tactful silence, the computer asked, “Would
you like to listen?"
And then Yana said yes.