The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  The following week goes by even faster than a fifth of light-speed.

  On my birthday morning, a skinny young monk in a maroon jumpsuit comes for me and takes me down to Momo House.

  There I meet Mama Dolma. There, I also meet the children: the baby Alicia, the toddlers Pema and Lahmu, and the oldest two, Rinzen and Mickey. Except for the baby, they tap-dance about me like silly dwarves.

  The nursery features big furry balls that also serve as hassocks, blow-uppable yaks, monkeys, and pterodactyls, and cribs and learning booths, with lock belts for AG failures. A system made just for the Dumpling Gang always warns us of an outage at least fifteen minutes before it occurs.

  The nearly-six kid, Mickey, grabs my hand and shows me around. He introduces me to everybody, working down from the five-year-old to ten-month-old Alicia. All of them but Alicia give me drawings. These drawings show a monkey named Chenrezig (of course), a nun named Dolma (ditto), a yak named Yackety (double ditto), and a python with no name at all. I ooh and ahh over these masterpizzas, as I call them, and then help them assemble soft-form puzzles, feed one another snacks, go to the toilet, and scan a big voyage chart that ends (of course) at Gliese 581 g.

  But it’s Alicia, the baby, who wins me. She twinkles. She flirts. She touches. At nap time, I hold her in a vidped booth, its screen oranged out and its rockers rocking, and I nuzzle her sweet-smelling neck.

  Alicia tugs at my lips and pinches my mouth flat, so set on reshaping my face that she seems a pudgy sculptor elf. All the while, her agate irises, bigger than my thumb tips, play across my face with cross-eyed puppy love. I stay with Alicia—Alicia Paljor—all the rest of that day. Then the skinny young monk comes to escort me home, as if I need him to, and Mama Dolma hugs me goodbye.

  Alicia wails.

  It hurts to leave, but I do, because I must, and even as the hurt fades, the memory of my 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 the sauces to make them palatable. 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 orders.

  Daddy Simon wears the sour face proclaiming that everybody should call him Pieman Oldfart. I hurt to behold him. 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 wish to 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 Lake’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 chest. 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 for a long moment. “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. Even so, the under-lamas and their silly crew think less well of me than they would of a lame blue mountain.”

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

  “Oh, rot!” I actually say. “I wish I were anywhere but on this bean can flung at an iceberg light-years across the stupid Milky Way.”

  “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 Lake 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 sit with some 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.

  Soon I will turn thirteen. Much has happened in the six years since I woke to find that Sakya Gyatso had died and I had become Greta Gyatso, his tardy reincarnation.

  What has not happened haunts me as much as, if not more than, what has. I have a disturbing sense that the “investigation” into Sakya’s murder resides in a secretly agreed-upon limbo. Also, that my confirmation rests in this same misty territory, with Minister T as my “regent.” Recently, though, at First Officer Nima’s urging, Minister T assigned me a bodyguard from among the monks of U-Tsang Bay, a guy called Ian Kilkhor.

  Once surnamed Davis, Kilkhor was born sixteen years into our flight of Canadian parents, techs who’d converted to the Yellow Hat order of Tibetan Buddhists in Calgary, Alberta, a decade before the construction of our interstellar vessel. Although nearing the chronological of sixty, Kilkhor—as he asks me to call him—looks less than half that and has many admirers among the female ghosts in Kham.

  Officer Nima fancies him. (Hey, even I fancy him.)

  But she is celibacy-committed unless a need for childbearing arises on Guge. And assuming her reproductive apparatus still works. Under such circumstances, I suspect that Kilkhor would lie with her.

  Here I confess my ignorance. Despite lessons from Larry in the Tibetan language, I didn’t realize, until Kilkhor told me, that his new surname means “Mandala.” I excuse myself on the grounds that “Kilkhor” more narrowly means “center of the circle,” and that Larry often skimps on offering connections. (To improve the health of his “mortal coil,” Larry has spent nearly four of my last six years in an ursidormizine doze. I go to visit him once every two weeks in the pod-lodges of Amdo Bay, but these well-intended homages sometimes feel less like cheerful vi
sits than dutiful viewings.) Also, “Kilkhor” sounds to me more like an incitement to violence than it does a statement of physical and spiritual harmony.

  Even so, I benefit in many ways from Kilkhor’s presence as bodyguard and stand-in tutor. Like Larry, Mama and Daddy spend long periods in their pods; and Kilkhor, a monk who knows tai chi chuan, has kept the killer, or killers, of Sakya from slaying me, if such villains exist aboard our ship. (I have begun to doubt they do.) He has also taught me much of history, culture, religion, politics, computing, astrophysics, and astronomy that Larry, owing to long bouts of hibernizing, has neglected. Also, he weighs in for me with the monks, nuns, and yogis of U-Tsang, who feel disenfranchised in the process of confirming me as Sakya’s successor.

  Indeed, because the Panchen Lama now in charge in U-Tsang will not let me set foot there, Kilkhor intercedes to get high monks to visit me in Kham. The Panchen Lama, to avoid seeming either bigot or autocrat, permits these visits. Sadly (or not), my sex, my ethnicity, and (most important) the fact that my birth antedates the Twenty-First’s by five years all conspire to taint my candidacy. I doubt it too, and fear that fanatics among the “religious” will try to veto me by subtraction, not by argument, and that I will die at the hands of friends rather than enemies of the Dalai Lamahood.

  Such fears, alone, throw real doubt on Minister T’s choice of me as Sakya’s only indisputable Soul Child.

  Years in transit: 89

  Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 14

  “The Tibetan belief in monkey ancestors puts them in a unique category as the only people I know of who acknowledged this connection before Darwin.”

  —Karen Swenson, twentieth-century traveler, poet,

  and worker at Mother Teresa’s Calcutta mission

  Last week, a party of monks and one nun met me in the hangar of Kham Bay. From their gompas (monasteries) in U-Tsang Bay, they brought a woolen cloak, a woolen bag, three spruce walking sticks, three pairs of sandals, and a white-faced monkey that one monk, as the group entered, fed from a baby bottle full of ashen-gray slurry.

  An AG-generator never runs in the hangar because people don’t often visit it, and the lander nests in a vast hammock of polyester cables. So we levitated in a cordoned space near the nose of the lander, which the Free Federation of Tibetan Voyagers has named Chenrezig, after that Buddhist disciple who, in monkey form, sired the first human Tibetans. (Each new DL instantly qualifies as the latest incarnation of Chenrezig.) Our lander’s nose is painted with bright geometries and the cartoon head of a wise-looking monkey wearing glasses and a beaked yellow hat. Despite this simian iconography, however, everyone on our strut-ship calls the lander the Yak Butter Express.

  After stiff greetings, these high monks—including the venerable Panchen Lama, Lhundrub Gelek, and Yeshe Yargang, the abbess of U-Tsang’s only nunnery!—tied the items that they’d brought to a utility toadstool in the center of our circle (“kilkhor”). Then we floated in lotus positions, hands palms-upward, and I stared at these items, but not at the pale monkey now clutching the PL and wearing a look of alert concern. From molecular vibrations and subtle somatic clues—twitches, blinks, sniffles—I tried to determine which of the items they wished me to select . . . or not to select, as their biases dictated.

  “Some of these things were Sakya Gyatso’s,” the Panchen Lama said. “Choose only those that he viewed as truly his. Of course, he saw little in this life as a ‘belonging.’ You may examine any or all, Miss Brasswell.”

  I liked how my birth name (even preceded by the stodgy honorific Miss) sounded in our hangar, even if it did seem to label me an imposter, if not an outright foe of Tibetan Buddhism. To my right, Kilkhor lowered his eyelids, advising me to make a choice. OK, then: I had no need to breast-stroke my way over to the pile.

  “The cloak,” I said.

  Its stench of musty wool and ancient vegetable dyes told me all I needed to know. I recalled those smells and the cloak’s vivid colors from an encounter with the DL during his visit to the nursery in Amdo when I was four. It had seemed the visit of a seraph or an extraterrestrial—as, by virtue of our status as star travelers, he had qualified. Apparently, none of these faithful had accompanied him then, for, obviously, none recalled his having cinched on this cloak to meet a tot of common blood.

  The monkey—a large Japanese macaque (Mucaca fuscata)—swam to the center of our circle, undid the folded cloak, and kicked back to the Lama, who belted it around his lap. Still fretful, the macaque levitated in its breechclout—a kind of diaper—beside the PL. It wrinkled its brow at me in approval or accusation.

  “Go on,” Lhundrub Gelek said. “Choose another item.”

  I glanced at Kilkhor, who dropped his eyelids.

  “May I see what’s in the bag?” I asked.

  The PL spoke to the macaque: a critter I imagined Tech Bonfils taking a liking to at our trip’s outset. It then paddled over to the bag tied to the utility toadstool, seized the bag by its neck, and dragged it over to me.

  After foraging a little, I extracted five slender books, of a kind now rarely made, and studied each: one in English, one in Tibetan, one in French, one in Hindi, and one (I’m guessing now) in Esperanto. In each case, I recognized their alphabets and point of origin, if not their subject matter. A bootlace linked the books. When they started to float away, I caught its nearer end and yanked them all back.

  “Did His Holiness write these?” I asked.

  “Yes,” the Panchen Lama said, making me think that I’d passed another test. He added, “Which of the five did Sakya most esteem?” Ah, a dirty trick. Did they want me to read not only several difficult scripts but also Sakya’s departed mind?

  “Do you mean as artifacts, for the loveliness of their craft, or as documents, for the spiritual meat in their contents?”

  “Which of those options do you suppose most like him?” Abbess Yeshe Yargag asked sympathetically.

  “Both. But if I must make a choice, the latter. When he wrote, he distilled clear elixirs from turbid mud.”

  Our visitors beheld me as if I had neutralized the stench of sulfur with sprinkles of rose water. Again, I felt shameless.

  With an unreadable frown, the PL said, “You’ve chosen correctly. We now wish you to choose the book that Sakya most esteemed for its message.”

  I reexamined each title. The one in French featured the words wisdom and child. When I touched it, Chenrezig responded with a nearly human intake of breath. Empty of thought, I lifted that book.

  “Here: The Wisdom of a Child, the Childishness of Wisdom.”

  As earlier, our five visitors kept their own counsel, and Chenrezig returned the books to their bag and the bag to the monk who had set it out.

  Next, I chose among the walking sticks and the pairs of sandals, taking my cues from the monkey and so choosing better than I had any right to expect. In fact, I chose just those items identifying me as the Dalai Lama’s Soul Child, girl or no girl.

  After Kilkhor praised my accuracy, the PL said, “Very true, but—”

  “But what?” Kilkhor said. “Must you settle on a Tibetan male only?”

  The Lama replied, “No, Ian. But what about this child makes her miraculous?”

  Ah, yes. One criterion for confirming a DL candidate is that those giving the tests identify “something miraculous” about him . . . or her.

  “What about her startling performance so far?” Kilkhor asked.

  “We don’t see her performance as a miracle, Ian.”

  “But you haven’t conferred about the matter.” He gestured at the other holies floating in the fluorescent lee of the Yak Butter Express.

  “My friends,” the Panchen Lama asked, “what say you all in reply?”

  “We find no miracle,” a spindly, middle-aged monk said, “in this child’s choosing correctly. Her brief life overlapped His Holiness’s.”

  “My-me,” Abbess Yargag said. “I find her a wholly supportable candidate.”

  The three le
ftover holies held their tongues, and I had to admit—to myself, if not aloud to this confirmation panel—that they had a hard-to-refute point, for I had pegged my answers to the tics of a monastery macaque with an instinctual sense of its keepers’ moody fretfulness.

  Fortunately, the monkey liked me. I had no idea why.

  O to be unmasked! I needed no title or any additional powers to lend savor to my life. I wanted to sleep in my pod and to awaken later as an animal husbandry specialist, with Tech Karen Bryn Bonfils-Brasswell as my mentor and a few near age-mates as my fellow apprentices.

  The PL unfolded from his lotus pose and floated before me with his feet hanging. “Thank you, Miss Younghusband, for this audience. We regret that we can’t—” Here he halted, for Chenrezig swam across our meeting space, pushed into my arms, and clasped me about the neck. Then all the astonished monks and the shaken PL rubbed shoulders as if to ignite their bodies in glee or consternation.

  Abbess Yargag said, “There’s your miracle.”

  “Nando” the Lama said, shaking his head: No, he meant.

  “On the contrary,” Abbess Yargag replied. “Chenrezig belonged to Sakya Gyatso, and never in Chenrezig’s sleep-lengthened life has he embraced a child, a non-Asian, or a female—not even me.”

  “Nando,” the PL, visibly angry, said again.

  “Rha (Yes),” another monk put in. “Om mani padme hum (Hail the jewel in the lotus). Ki ki so so lha lha gyalo (Praise to the gods).”

  I kissed Chenrezig’s white-flecked facial mane as he whimpered like an infant in my already weary arms.

  Years in transit: 93

  Computer Logs of the Dalai Lama-to-Be, age 18

  —A Catechism: Why do we voyage?

  At age seven, I learned this catechism from Larry. Kilkhor often has me say it, to ensure that I don’t turn apostate to either our legend or my longterm charge. Sometimes Captain Xao Songa, a Han who converted and fled to Vashon Island, Washington—via northern India, Cape Town, South Africa; Buenos Aires; and Hawaii—sits in to temper Larry’s flamboyance and Kilkhor’s lethargic matter-of-factness.