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.
So what? Why fixate? Be free.
Don’t ask why it happened then; how can such a thing be explained? And I realized this brief flash of freedom might be the Balrog’s work. Regions of the brain’s temporal lobe can be stimulated to create artificial feelings of spiritual awe. The spores in my head could have granted me a bloom of the numinous to distract me from other trains of thought, to keep me quiet, or simply to toy with me… the way you scratch a dog’s belly and laugh at how much the dog likes it.
But I accepted that. I could live with it, as I could live with all the universe’s other ambiguities. Would getting upset solve anything? Would it improve my life or anyone else’s? No. So let it go.
Let it go.
Let everything go.
I told Festina about my sixth sense. How it let me perceive at a distance: the pretas, the Rexies, Tut and the diplomats. How I could sense a person’s life force, including hidden emotions. How, back in Drill-Press, I’d overextended my brain and ended up with spores replacing much of my gray matter.
In other words, I told the truth. Up till then, I’d clutched my secrets as if they were rubies everyone else wanted to steal… but that furtive privacy had just been ego. The terror of being vulnerable. A desire to keep an ace up my sleeve. The dread of being chided for withholding important facts.
Disclosing the truth didn’t hurt me. Why should I have thought otherwise? And Festina didn’t react badly. She’d stopped trusting me long ago, and she knew the Balrog had senses beyond the human norm. I was telling her nothing she hadn’t already considered. Her aura showed no self-consciousness at my ability to see beneath her defenses. Instead of getting flustered, she shifted into a virtually emotionless state, thinking through possibilities. I couldn’t read her mind, but I believed she was debating how to use me: like a new kind of Bumbler, capable of scanning uncharted spectra.
If nothing else, she let me guide her on the shortest route back to Tut. The trip took slightly longer than expected, because Tut’s group had stopped moving forward — they’d reached a clear area on the Grindstone’s bank and had stopped while Li fussed about something. I could have eavesdropped to determine the exact nature of his complaint, but his aura revealed that the specifics didn’t matter. Ambassador Li was cold, wet, and angry. He felt useless as Tut found trails and Ubatu ripped through foliage, so he latched onto some flimsy pretext to raise a fuss. Just to get attention.