it's good to see you.' She reached out for him, and they came
together in long, loving embracelittle of sex in it, but lots of
pure animal gratification, as she could feel Toshi's skin and
muscle and bone and had knowledge at some level beneath thought
that both he and she still existed.
Toshi said, 'Diana, to see you again makes me very happy.'
'Oh, me, too.' She could feel the tears in her eyes, and she
wiped at her eyes and said, 'Don't mind me, Toshi. It's been a
long time.'
'Yes, it has.'
Toshi led her out the door and through a gate at the rear of
the minimalist garden of raked sand. The curve of Halo's bulk
reached upward; Toshi's small portion of it was enclosed by a high
pine fence that climbed the curve of the city's hull.
Immediately before them stood a pond. On its far side, a
waterfall splashed into a stream that coursed by a large rock and
into the pond, where carp with shining skins of gold smeared with
red and green and blue swam in the clear water. Another
rockstrewn stream led away to the right and passed under a
gracefully-arched wooden bridge. Cherry and plum trees blossomed
in the brief spring.
'All this wood,' he said and smiled. 'It is my reward for
many years of service. I told them I wanted to live here at Halo
and make my gardens.'
She said, 'It's beautiful. Have you become a Zen master,
Toshi?'
'No, I have not become a master, or even a sensei. I am not
Toshi Roshi, I am a gardener. A philosopher, perhaps: a Japanese
garden maps the greater world; so to make one is to declare your
philosophy, but without words, in the Zen manner.' He gestured at
the surrounding trees and shrubs. 'With others I sometimes sit,
meditating, and together we discuss the puzzles we have some
think a new kind of Zen will emerge here, a quarter of a million
miles from Earth; others hit them with sticks when they say so.'
She said, 'You have your riddles, I have mine. Tell me, do
you understand these things about to happen with Jerry and Aleph
and me?'
'Ah, Diana, there are many explanations. Which of them would
you hear?' He stopped and stared into the distance. He said,
'Besides, who wants to know?' And he began laughinga full laugh
from below the diaphragm, unlike any she had heard from him years
ago.
'I don't get it,' she said.
'Zen joke. 'Who wants to know?' There is no who, no self.'
Diana frowned. He said, 'Not funny? Well, you had to be there.'
He laughed again, shortly. 'Same joke,' he said. Then his
expression changed, grew solemn. He said, 'I think this is a very
difficult, perhaps impossible perhaps undesirable project.'
'Difficult or impossible, I understand. But undesirable?
Are you talking about the danger to me? Aleph seems to think that
is negligible.'
'No, though I worry about you, you have chosen to do this,
and I must honor that choice.'
'What, then? I don't understand.'
'Let me tell you a story.' Toshi sat on a wooden bench and
looked up at her. He said, 'Once, long ago, there was a Japanese
monk named Saigyo, and he had a friend whose wisdom and
conversation delighted him. But the friend left him to go to the
capital, and Saigyo was desolate at the loss. So he decided to
build himself a new friend, and he went to a place where the
bodies of the dead were scattered, and he assembled somethingit
was very like a manand brought it into motioninto something
very like lifewith magical incantations. However, the thing he
had made was a frightening, ugly thing, that terribly and
imperfectly imitated a man. So Saigyo sought the advice of
another monk, a greater magician than he, and the monk told him
that he had successfully made many such imitation men, some of
them so famous and powerful that Saigyo would be shocked to find
who they were. And the other monk listened to what Saigyo had
done and told him of various errors in technique he had committed,
that made his work go bad. Saigyo thus believed he could make a
simulacrum of a man; however, he changed his mind.' He stopped,
smiling.
'That's it?' she asked. He nodded. She said, 'Put a few
lightning bolts in the story and you've almost got Frankenstein.
Not much of an ending, though.'
'This story is ambiguous, I think, as is your project.'
'Could I say no, Toshi?'
'No, though I'm not sure you should say yes, either.'
'Yet you were the one who called me, who asked me to come
here.'
'True. Like you, I am imprisoned by yes and no.'
#
Hours after Diana left him, Toshi sat in mid-air, floating in
a zero-gravity chamber at Halo's Zero-Gate. He had adjusted the
spherical room's color to light pink, the color that calms the
organism.
On Earth, to do zazen, you made a still platform of your
body, pressed by gravity against the Earth itself; the
straightness of your spine could be measured perpendicular to that
sitting platform, in line with the force of gravity that pushed
straight down. Here you could do that, or, as a visiting sensei
said, 'You can find a place with no illusion of up or down, where
you must find your own direction.'
In full lotus Toshi hung in mid-air, perfectly still, his
eyes lowered, focusing not on what came in front of them here and
now as the small air currents shifted him, focusing on no-thing
The eyes, sensitive part of the brain, extended stalklike
millions of years ago in humankind's ancestral past, sensitive to
