Engineering Infinity (19 page)

Laughing
,
echoed his mind in nineteen whispers.

He set to getting his strange
dharma charges, who called themselves Hanalb, into shape. Sitting before his
cave one evening, he went over his usual roster of puzzlement.

How did these creatures
reproduce? Eggs? Cloning? He had no idea. There were no youngsters. When he
asked, he encountered a wall of deep sadness. A sadness so deep they could not
formulate any thoughts about it.

He turned to another constant in
his roster.

Beer.

With the reverence of ritual, he
took his little packet of yeast from its cool resting place in the cave. He ran
his thumb over the smooth plastic bag, yearning to unleash the power within. He
could do it here. There was plenty of grain at this higher elevation. How he
wanted to have something to drink! He still clung to memories, and the memory
of entering neon-lit bars in Honolulu at two a.m. was tensho-like. He had to
let it go, yet it fell squarely into the category of holy.

The Hanalb thought him a Roshi.
He didn’t quite understand that responsibility; until he did, perhaps it was
best to wait to carry out this enterprise. He had failed at everything else;
when he drank, he was able to forget, for a little while, that nagging, gnawing
feeling that he could face nothing, that he was worthless. A pleasant little
forgetting. Immensely pleasant...

He sighed, returned the package
to its niche, and left the cave.

One morning, he noticed that two
of his monks were gone. From beneath lowered eyelids he counted. Yes, only
seventeen. His first reaction was that of old Kyo. He would wait, see, and
learn.

But then he was all fierce Roshi.
Not thinking. Just doing.

Where are
Tyseralise and Miniell
? he asked sternly.

Not one of them shifted in their
meditational attitude; not one blinked.

Where
?
he shouted, then “Where?” aloud.

One of them rose, and took him by
the hand. He was led to the lip of the cliff, where he stood, staring.

Finally he made them out, two
tiny dots moving across the lava field.

“They will die! We must go get
them!”

The creature beside him shook his
head, and when Kyo took a step down the faint path etched into the sheer cliff,
the creature grabbed him with powerful arms and dragged him back from the
cliff.

Kyo shrugged him off. “Where are
the ones who brought us to this planet?” he asked the air. “The ones with the
ships?” This tiny enclave existed in the same primitive manner as the monks
across the lava plains. They used no technology at all.

The Hanalb would answer none of
his questions.

Kyo turned away, and hiked up the
valley with furious speed. Following a faint path up a side valley, he came to
a cave he had discovered soon after he arrived. At the back was a tunnel. Next
to the tunnel, on the floor, was a ceremonial bowl of blue lava.

Kyo had flirted with the thought
of entering it before, but feared becoming lost, falling into a fissure, or
worse.

Now, brimming with frustration,
he crawled inside.

The intense darkness was
oppressive, but he continued crawling. He determined to go as far as he possibly
could, no matter what. The tunnel narrowed. His shoulders were wider than those
of the Hanalb, and he feared getting stuck, but the thought that the Hanalb
used this as a passageway forced him to continue.

Finally, after what seemed ages
of crawling through the dank, still darkness, he emerged onto a tiny ledge,
scraped and bleeding.

What he saw made his chest ache
with joy.

A small, intricate settlement
blazed white far out on the blue lava plain, reminding him of a lone rogue
white-topped wave on the blue Pacific.

Next to it was the ship he
remembered from Honolulu, or one like it: tiny, no longer luminous. He looked
at it for a long time, struck by the dreamlike quality of what he saw, the
bizarre and absolutely outrageous fact of his presence here.

Wherever “here” was.

Kyo slid from ledge to ledge
until he found a path leading down.

When he found the first body he
sat next to it for a long while. His heart contracted in simple, unrelenting
pain.

After the fifth body, he stopped
counting. There were too many, each in the same position, which he suspected
had ceremonial significance.

At the top of the final foothill
before the lava sloped gently to the plain where the buildings sat, he paused.

The place seemed deserted. The
sharp, intense beauty of its gracefully intersecting planes, opalescent as they
caught the light, reminded him of wings.

Linda’s wings, as she floated on
the wind, outlined against the achingly blue Pacific.

Hanalb wings. On what were they
meant to glide?

The ship was still several miles
away. These people can
fly
, Kyo thought fiercely.
They came to Earth. What has happened to them? Battling tears, Kyo descended
the last few miles until he came to the wall surrounding the buildings.

A frieze along the top, about a
half-meter high, depicted an astounding assortment of beings. As the sky lost
light, Kyo circumnavigated the city, scrutinizing the graphics.

He saw what he realized were the
developmental stages of one species after another, as from one of his old
biology texts, depicted with salmon-pink stone inlaid on polished blue lava.

Each series of pictures ended
with a schema of a solar system, and tiny, intricate signs which he assumed was
the Hanalb written language.

Directions?

A final, winged Hanalb divided
each segment from the next like a period.

Once Kyo understood, he moved
frantically around the wall, searching for the pictorial statement which would
show him the developmental stages of the Hanalb.

He found none. There was only the
winged Hanalb at the end of each and every series. He was overwhelmed by the
number of beings with which the Hanalb were apparently familiar, beings which
crawled, swam, or ambulated on oddly shaped limbs covered with fur, scales,
skin, beholding life through eyes which dazzled by force of their sheer
variety.

Then he found the human segment.

All the phases of reproduction
were painstakingly shown. Each stage of growth was portrayed. He recognized a
Tibetan monk, a Catholic nun, a tall black woman dressed in ritual garb he did
not recognize. He pressed his hand against the large graven Earth; the polished
blue surface was cold. Asia was just a rough edge; Hawaii, a tiny string of
dots.

Next to that, unmistakably, a nun
sat in zazen, followed by a winged Hanalb, sitting in lotus.

“Enough!” he shouted. He hoisted
himself over the wall and dropped onto a narrow street of polished lava.

Yes, the city was empty, eerily
quiet. He swiftly passed two streets and crossed courtyards where fountains
splashed and huge flowering plants overflowed their receptacles; walked beneath
tiered balconies and searched the open abodes for signs of life.

He could see the ship beyond the
city, glowing blue in the last reflected rays of light. He imagined, briefly,
climbing inside, seeing controls which he couldn’t master, yet somehow doing
it, and setting a course for... where?

Where?

The question reverberated through
his being, filling him with melancholy which hit with inescapable force.

Then someone called his name from
the shadows in a faint, raspy voice.

“Kyo!”

Long used to the mindspeech of
the Hanalb, he turned; waited for a long, silent moment.

“Come.”

Kyo wanted to turn and run, back
to his tunnel, back to his cave, back to his safe sangha. But the voice held
him.

It was human.

“Who is it?” he asked, but the
words came out like rusty water from an unprimed pump. He cleared his throat. “Who
is it?” he demanded, sternly. Odd authority flooded him.

Receiving no reply, he stepped,
stepped, and then more boldly still, strode toward the source of the voice.

He entered an intricately tiled
courtyard, smooth and heat-holding in evening’s sudden coolness.

Though the light was dim, he saw
a Hanalb propped against the wall, obviously weak and barely able to speak.

He knelt and examined the face.

Memories surfaced: the Pantheon,
a place in Honolulu that had refreshed him A talk more mindspeech than words, a
testing of his depths.

“Kalihi?” He was chilled to
realize that, though some metamorphosis had taken place, he did indeed
recognize his Auntie’s friend. Kyo gazed for a long moment on this Hanalb,
trying to see which elements gave him such certainty.

A set of head; the way her
features meshed; the bladelike face which was mostly nose. The strong, pure
glance, which, though suffused with suffering, conveyed a deep, universal
amusement with existence and herself as a part of it.

Kyo embraced her. Her body felt
as fragile as that of an insect; her skin was rough and dry.

“But you are human,” he
whispered.

She shook her head.
Never. But - yes.

“What do you mean by that,
Kalihi?” Kyo’s voice was hard and demanding. He could tell she was dying, yet
he wanted to shake answers from her.

Once we grow
wings, speech is difficult
, was all she said.

But Kyo had learned to read their
expressions, and she seemed to be smiling. Her enigmatic refusal to reply
angered him.

“Yes, what a joke,” he shouted. “I
was
brought
here!” he shouted. “Taken from my home.”

Earth is dead
.
It was destroyed by an asteroid soon after you left. You
are alive
. She nodded toward a half-drunk bottle of sake.
Be glad. Drink
.

Alive? What did he know about
being alive? Why did he deserve to live, when everyone else was dead? “
You
drink!” he said, rising, robes whirling around him. He
grabbed the bottle and tilted it against her mouth. She swallowed. “Why are you
dying? Why do the Hanalb die?” He felt his eyes fill with tears. “You just walk
out onto the plains and die. Where is everyone? I have no one to tell me these
things. Please, Kalihi. Please. Why did you take
me
from Earth? An entire race of beings is gone. Why didn’t you bring some women?
Or at least some genetic material -” he was working himself into a rage when
she stopped him with her clear, precise thoughts.

Genetic
material. What good do you suppose genetic material is? It’s everywhere, Kyo.
In spite of that, all has failed. The beautiful experiment has failed. I
thought to live here for a long time, after returning, to think, to work, but -

“
What
experiment has failed?”

She tilted her head as if gauging
him.
Why do you strive for enlightenment, Kyo? Why do you
believe that such a state exists at all? Do you ever wonder about that?

“I think of little else.”

Tell me, Kyo:
can you save others with your transmission? That’s what you’re here for.

Though so sophisticated, they
held this strange delusion. He would do anything to save the Hanalb. But he was
helpless, stupid. “I have nothing to transmit. Nothing. I have experienced no
realization. Such a transmission is passed from Zen Master to Zen Master after
years of preparation. It isn’t passed to - to idiots like me. I can save no
one. Least of all myself.”

Her silence, in the darkness
which had fallen, had a curious quality he didn’t understand. Finally, her
thoughts sounded again.

There is
another way.

“After someone has done a lot of
work, Kalihi. That sort of thing doesn’t happen to people like me.” He knew
what she meant. Buddhist texts often stated that enlightenment could occur
without transmission - or simply, when the moment was exactly right, be triggered
by an otherwise insignificant event.

It happens
precisely to people like you. And for a very good reason.

He said, as evenly as he could, “Tell
me what you mean.”

Isn’t it
paradise
, she replied, laboriously,
to believe that
true consciousness is possible? Even now, even at the end of everything?

Kyo didn’t reply. He felt no
paradise, only despair.

A moon was rising, so he could
still see her face, fissured more deeply than any other Hanalb’s he had seen.
It occurred to him that he’d never seen one without wings, and he wondered what
they looked like.

She gazed at the stars, which had
spread brilliantly into that dark void which stopped his heart with pain and
distance each time he looked at it.
So many beautiful
places. So many beings.

She was wandering. He followed
her mind on this new track.

“The Hanalb have travelled to
places other than Earth?”

Everywhere
,
she sighed, and that sigh generated for him a comprehension of the probable
dimensions of the Hanalb empire.
Everywhere searching for
the
thought
, the
place-of-mind,
that would keep us from growing wings. Or... take us to the next
stage. There must be one. There must.

Kyo smoothed her beautiful wings
reverently. How could he save the Hanalb from their own wings, from something
that seemed a natural unfolding of life -

And death.

“Will other Hanalb come?” he
asked, his heart beating fast. If only! “Perhaps - return with answers? With -
someone who knows how to use these technologies - whatever must be here,
whatever gave you the ability to -”

I do not know
,
she replied. But her thought was limned with darkness. Perhaps she knew, and
didn’t want to tell him the truth. Or think it, even to herself. Perhaps this
was just an outpost, an emergency stopping place...