Radiant

All this I saw through my mental perception: how little of me was left from hips to toes. And the Balrog hadn’t finished. It was still mainly occupied with emergency repairs to keep my condition stable. Once it stanched my wounds, I had no doubt it would annex whatever flesh remained healthy — cleaning up unfinished business, but always invisible from the outside.

At least the pain was gone. The nerves at my injury sites had been cannibalized to make spores, so my brain could no longer receive neural messages of agony. No sensation at all below the pelvis. But my brain was not the only player in the game of 'Who Is Youn Suu.' There was also that sentient point in my abdomen (my womb, my dantien) which served as the seat of higher perceptions. The Point of Me. It watched with perfect clarity as my legs became alien territory. When I finally tried to move them — when I summoned the courage to try — nothing happened. The legs (no longer my legs) remained as limp as death.

I found myself speaking aloud: 'Consider this body! A painted puppet with carpentered limbs, sometimes injured or diseased, full of delusions, never permanent, always changing.'

'Is that a quote?' Festina asked, grunting under my weight.

'From the Dharmapada,' I told her. 'Look at these brittle white bones,' I went on, 'like empty husks of fruit left to rot at the end of summer. Who could take joy in seeing them?'

'Buddhism is such a cheery religion,' Festina muttered. 'Then again, my nana used to recite similar lines from Ecclesiastes.'

'This body is only a house of bones,' I quoted, 'and I have searched many cycles of lives to find the house-builder. Who would construct such an edifice of grief? But now I have seen it was always my own hands wielding the tools… and knowing that, I shall not build this house again. I shall let the rafters fall. I shall let the bones break. I shall let in the sunlight of wisdom, so that when death comes I shall not be condemned to another prison of bones.'

Festina suddenly broke into a true run — not just the jog she’d been using. Her aura showed some thought had upset her. I asked, 'What is it? What’s wrong?'

She ran for a few more seconds, then sighed and slowed to a walk. 'You said ‘when death comes’… how do you know it will?'

'Everyone dies, Festina.'

'Every human does. But you aren’t human anymore.' She paused. 'How much do you know about Kaisho Namida?'

'I’ve read Pistachio’s files.' I gave a weak laugh. 'Since the Balrog first bit me, I’ve read them at least ten times.'

'Navy files are incomplete,' Festina said. 'The Admiralty lost touch with Kaisho as soon as she left the rehab center. I was the only one she kept in contact with. For a while, I… never mind. But know one thing, Youn Suu. Kaisho was middle-aged when she got bitten by the Balrog; now she’s a hundred and sixteen, but physically, she’s younger than me. The Balrog has rejuvenated her tissues.'

'The few tissues she has left.'

'The Balrog will never consume her entirely. That would be a nonsentient act. As long as the Balrog’s alive, Kaisho will be too. I’m not sure Kaisho will ever die.'

'Even the Balrog has to die eventually,' I said. 'If nothing else, it can’t survive the end of our universe.'

'Can’t it?' Festina began jogging again. 'These creatures… the ones way up the evolutionary ladder… they come and go from our universe… at least we think they do…' She slowed, out of breath. Not even Festina Ramos could jog, talk, and carry a full-grown woman without getting winded. 'I was on Cashleen when the Balrog appeared,' she said. 'Spores literally came from nowhere. The Cashlings got it on camera: one moment there was nothing, then there were spores.'

'We know the Balrog can teleport,' I said.

'But there was no trace of incoming matter or energy. It didn’t look like the Balrog was traveling in some other form through our universe, then reconstituted itself into spores. There was no discernible transmission. The spores just showed up. From elsewhere. From outside.' Festina jogged a few more steps. 'Other species do the same — the purple-jelly Fuentes, for instance. Researchers think these creatures spend most of their time outside the normal universe… whatever the hell that means. Anyway, the end of our universe may not guarantee the end of the Balrog. It may have someplace else to run.'

'Nothing lasts forever,' I said. 'Nothing is permanent. Even if the Balrog doesn’t die a conventional death, it can’t just go on and on. It can’t. Over time it’ll change into something different, the way rocks break down into soil. Then the soil is used by plants, the plants are eaten by animals, and everything keeps changing forever. If the Balrog lives in some universe where entropy doesn’t apply, there’ll be something else that makes things change. Impermanence is an inescapable fact.'

I could sense Festina smiling, though I wasn’t looking at her face. 'That’s the voice of your upbringing,' Festina said. 'If my nana were here, she’d lecture you on her inescapable facts: everlasting heaven, everlasting hell, everlasting souls, everlasting everything else… except, of course, for the physical universe, which she discounts as fleetingly insignificant. Nana sees immortality everywhere.' Festina chuckled. 'If it’s any consolation, Kaisho Namida is on your side. She believes devoutly in change and impermanence.'

A chill went through me. 'Is Kaisho Buddhist?'

Festina nodded. 'Zen meditation every day… at least until the Balrog took her.'

'You mean the Balrog has only claimed two human beings in all history, and both have been Buddhist women? Female Buddhist Explorers?'

'Ooo.' Festina’s aura flickered. 'Ouch. When you put it that way, it’s an odd coincidence. I hate odd coincidences.' She walked a few steps. 'How many practicing Buddhists do you think we have in the Explorer Corps?'

'I’m the first Explorer ever from Anicca — I checked the records once, out of idle curiosity. And Anicca’s the primary center for all Buddhist traditions. There are small retreats and communities on a lot of Technocracy worlds, but the only other planet with a sizable Buddhist population is Shin’nihon.'

'Which was Kaisho’s homeworld,' Festina said. 'I remember her once telling me… fuck.'

'What?'

'Five years ago — after she’d been infected by the Balrog. Kaisho and I were talking about something else, when all of a sudden she told me she was the only Explorer ever to come from her world. She mentioned it completely out of the blue. When I asked why she’d brought it up, she said I’d figure it out someday.' Pause. 'By which she must have meant today. Damn, I hate precognitive aliens!'

'So Kaisho’s the only Explorer from Shin’nihon, and I’m the only Explorer from Anicca. The odds are good we’re the only Buddhists ever to join the corps.'

Festina nodded. 'There’ve only been a few thousand Explorers since the corps began… and most were drawn from the core worlds, where it’s hard to find any religion beyond the usual vague sentiments.'

She broke into another jog, while I returned to thoughts of Kaisho. If she and I were the only two Buddhists who’d ever become Explorers… and both of us had been taken by the Balrog… what did that mean? That Buddhists were better suited to the experience? That we could handle it better because of our mental discipline? That we were easier to invade because we were more open?

Or maybe just that our flesh tasted sweet from being lifelong vegetarians.

Of course, Kaisho followed Zen — a different tradition from my own Tarayana. But the two traditions had much in common. Zen had been a significant influence in the early days of Tarayana… and since that time, there’d been cordial relations between the two, allowing for a degree of intermingling and convergence. Different roots but not so different in modern practice.

Zen and Tarayana. Kaisho and me. Avatars of the Balrog. Why?

'It has to mean something,' Festina said. 'Five years ago, Kaisho made sure I knew. Unless the Balrog was just playing games: trying to make us think there’s significance when there isn’t. Taking another Buddhist woman to fool us into believing there’s a pattern.'

I opened my mouth to say I didn’t like being consumed, physically and mentally, just so the Balrog could create a false mystique about its actions. But even as that thought glowered in my mind, a different one arose: So what?

So what?

So what?

A thing had happened. I wouldn’t have chosen this fate if I’d been given the option, but so what? Life was full of unasked-for results. Sometimes you got sick; sometimes you got hurt; sometimes you got a windfall success from pure unadulterated luck. Or from karma. Karma was something we all had to live with: a web of cause and effect so vast that no one could fathom it.

So what?

So what?

So what?

So what if my life had irreparably changed… for an important reason, a trivial reason, or no reason at all? Change happened to everybody, all the time — sometimes devastating change through no fault of your own. Sixty-five hundred years ago, a Fuentes scientist had made a mistake (possibly major, possibly minor) and ever since, millions of beings had been unjustly condemned to endure a preta purgatory. Maybe our party would join them; maybe we’d somehow save them. Rescuing people was better than getting trapped ourselves… but there’d always be more trouble, new trouble, one thing after another, and no one could dodge every bullet.

So what? What to do? What could anyone do?

Simple. You did what you could, in the here and now. Nothing else was possible.

The past was past. Remember, but let it go.

The future was not yet with us. Wise people planned and prepared, but didn’t obsess.

All anyone has is the present. Live there.

It sounds so trite when put into words. Stock phrases everyone has heard a thousand times. But in those few moments, as I bounced along on Festina’s shoulder, the words fell away like shabby clothing to reveal pure nonverbal reality. As if words were like a boat that had helped me across some river. Now I was on the other side, and could proceed forward without assistance. No words, no platitudes, just inexpressible realization: unvarnished unspeakable truth.

A path you can identify as a path isn’t The Path. A truth you can put into words isn’t true enough.

Thus I experienced a wordless release while Festina carted me down a game trail in the middle of a rainstorm.