Radiant

To my great surprise, I woke up. More or less.

I was no longer in the station. I was no longer anywhere. My surroundings were neither light nor dark, hot nor cold. Just there. Peaceful and placid, undemanding, unyielding.

So, I thought, the Afterlife Bardo. I’m dead.

Tibetan scholars liked to contemplate the gaps between things — particularly the gap between death and rebirth. They called these in-between states Bardos. The Bardo of Death was sometimes pictured as a spirit realm where the recently deceased made choices in preparation for their next life.

As a non-Tibetan, I had my doubts. In standard scriptures, the Buddha never mentioned Bardos; I’d always considered them holdovers from some pre-Buddhist mysticism. At best, I’d thought Bardos might be useful metaphors for stages in a more metaphysical journey.

Yet here I was. Or so it appeared.

Balrog, I said, with soundless words, you’re manipulating my perceptions again. Simulating an afterlife. Must you keep playing these games?

A point of red appeared in the nothingness. A solitary Balrog spore. It hovered in my consciousness — not speaking, just waiting.

This is all in my mind, I said. What’s left of my mind. Considering I’m missing most of my brain, it’s surprising I can think at all.

Silence.

You’re helping me, aren’t you? Working your magic from afar. For thousands of years, the Divine walled off the station from your influence… but the Divine are out of the picture. As soon as a few pretas got elevated — truly elevated — they’d deal with the Divine, one way or another. So you’re no longer shut out, and you can reach my dying brain. Right?

The glowing red spore showed no reaction… but I felt as if it was listening. Hearing my final thoughts.

I am dying, aren’t I? When you came to me back in Zoonau, I knew this all might lead to my death. And here it is. My death.

The spore dimmed slightly, then returned to its steady glow.

But, I continued, you could still save me, couldn’t you? If I invited you into my body again, you could patch me up. You could teleport spores into me from anywhere in the galaxy. You could heal me by infesting me again.

The spore bobbed slightly.

For several moments, I didn’t speak. Finally, I said, I’m not afraid of death. True death might not lead to a Bardo, but I’m not afraid. Fear is unskillful.

This time, the spore didn’t respond. It was still waiting.

There’s more I could do, isn’t there? I’m not afraid of death, but living would let me accomplish useful things. I laughed lightly. The Bodhisattva’s decision — choosing not to move on, because there are still creatures who need help.

The spore fluttered momentarily. I didn’t know what that meant. There were surely an infinite number of things I would never understand even if I became enlightened. Enlightenment isn’t omniscience; it’s just freedom.

At that moment, I had a degree of freedom. Free choice: I could bid farewell to the Balrog and let death come as it always comes eventually; or I could invite the Balrog to enter me, once again surrendering to alien infestation.

Put it another way: I could run from the sufferings of the universe, or I could join forces once again with a quirky creature who’d called me to be its champion.

I had no body, but I moved toward the glowing spore. I opened my being… my trust… my love…

Once again, I woke up.

Festina was lightly slapping my face. 'Youn Suu. Come on, Youn Suu, wake up. Come on…'

I opened my eyes. What I saw first was Festina’s hand; it had ooze on it. She’d been slapping my bad cheek and hadn’t cared. I took her hand… kissed it… wiped it off on my uniform. When she looked embarrassed, I just smiled. 'I’m fine,' I said. 'I died for a bit, but decided that was too easy.'

'What do you mean, you died?' By now, Festina had pulled back her hand and was wiping it vigorously on her own uniform. Wiping off my kiss? 'I scanned you with the Bumbler,' she said. 'You weren’t dead, you just fainted.' She gave me a look. 'If you’d been dead, you idiot, I’d be giving you CPR, not patting your face as if you were a swooning chambermaid.'

I shrugged. Whether I’d really died didn’t matter. If I’d rejected the Balrog, all the CPR in the universe wouldn’t have helped me. But the dead spores inside me had been replaced by fresh ones, full of mischievous energy. I could feel them — feel their power.

My sixth sense was back.

Which meant I could tell what was happening in the rest of the station. Light continued to gush from the station’s emitter plate… and Tut still lay on the golden disk, bending this way and that to make shadows on the ceiling with his body. His thin frame didn’t block much of the radiance — certainly not as much as the Divine had all these years.

I couldn’t sense the Divine. Perhaps when the first pretas were uplifted, they’d used their new power to eradicate the spores; or perhaps the newly elevated Fuentes had dealt more kindly with their centuries-long enemies. The pretas might have helped the Divine to ascend too, as should have happened from the very beginning. Vengeance or mercy: often hard to predict.

I felt the Fuentes’ arrival a moment before I saw it — a powerful presence blossoming in the room, a life force of dazzling vitality. The creature’s aura blazed from a spot behind Festina’s back… and suddenly, there was a small slick of purple on the floor, a sheen of quivering jelly.

How anticlimactic.

When I pointed out our visitor to Festina, she sighed. 'Now the big boys arrive — to pat us on the back and send us on our way.'

'Actually,' the jelly said, 'we’re patting ourselves on the back.' The voice was female: low and gentle, slightly amused. 'We did an excellent job choosing our champion.'

Festina glared. 'So Youn Suu’s theory about champions is true?'

The jelly laughed. 'Admiral, you can’t expect me to give a straight answer. Perhaps what Youn Suu said is true; perhaps every member of the Explorer Corps is the protege of some high-echelon race in the League of Peoples. Perhaps each member of the corps was created or chosen in the belief that Homo sapiens have the potential to do something we can’t do ourselves. Or perhaps we overheard Youn Suu expound that hypothesis, and we find it amusing to encourage such a ridiculous conjecture.'

'I hate you guys,' Festina muttered. 'Every smug bastard in the League. I really hate you.'

'Hypothetically,' I said to the jelly, 'if you did sponsor a particular Explorer as your champion… who would it be?'

'Not me,' Festina said. 'Please tell me I’m not the one. I’d hate to be created by something that looks like grape jam.'

The jelly laughed again. 'Rest assured, Admiral, you aren’t ours. Neither is Youn Suu; she and her ilk belong to the Balrog.'

'So if it isn’t me and it isn’t Youn Suu…' Festina’s head turned, and so did mine: both of us looked toward Tut.

'Your legends recount many refreshing forms of madness,' the jelly said. 'Mostly, such stories are untrue to life. Genuine mental illnesses are seldom amusing; those who suffer from such conditions are miserably dysfunctional. But your folktales abound with wise fools and lunatics. If one carefully arranges precise metabolic imbalances throughout a child’s gestation and infancy…'

Festina finished the sentence. 'You get someone who’s loony but still competent. Assuming you aren’t just lying about this whole ‘champion’ thing.'

No, I thought, the 'champion thing' wasn’t a lie. I remembered the flashes of purple I’d seen in Tut’s aura, helping him fight off possession by the pretas. It was the same shade of purple as the Fuentes jelly: just a tiny flicker of aid from his 'sponsors' to keep him in the game. The jelly couldn’t actually force Tut to do anything — that would ruin the spontaneity of the experiment — but they could orchestrate events to bring Tut to when and where he was needed.

'If you’re Tut’s patron,' I said to the jelly, 'who’s Festina’s?'

'That will be revealed at a time of her patron’s choosing… assuming, again, we aren’t lying.'

'And in the meantime, the patron just lets me sweat in ignorance?' Festina asked.

'Ignorance is necessary,' the jelly replied. 'If we influence you too much, we prevent you from acting spontaneously. That defeats the whole exercise. We cannot guide you, or we may unwittingly steer you away from… whatever you might discover. For the same reason, we cannot rescue you from every trouble that arises. Dealing with life-or-death situations is when you are most likely to make a breakthrough.' The jelly paused. 'Or at least that’s one school of thought.'

Festina growled. 'So you just keep manipulating Explorers into one potentially lethal danger after another to see how we react?'

The jelly chuckled. 'Admiral… that’s what ‘expendable’ means.'

EPILOGUE

If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him: An adage that warns against one last fixation — you can become unskillfully attached to Buddhism itself. You have to discard this final dependency too.

Poised on the beach outside the station, Festina, Tut, and I watched pulses of gold light spread from the spikes in the crown. My sixth sense told me the radiation blanketed an area fifty kilometers in radius; any preta within that zone ascended after a few seconds of exposure. As I’d expected, the news