"My sannyasi are as real as you yourself."
"Some mornings," Belew said, digging in the many pockets of his vest, "I wonder."
"Guru is a teacher of reality," Moonchild said. "Perhaps he can teach you as well."
"Thank you, Madam President." Moonchild flushed and dropped her eyes from Belew's. She always found it difficult to look her Minister in the eye. "But Reality herself has taught me of her myriad ways, and a harsh schoolmistress she is."
He produced a cigar and a cutter, snipped the end, fished in a pocket again. "But what was that about 'machine?'"
"There are different kinds of maya, as Guru was just explaining," the door-keeper said languidly from behind Belew. "His maya is creative maya, natural maya. Yours is the maya of Western linear thought. The maya of the machine." The yellowrobe sniffed. "The true illusion. Special effects."
"Indeed." Belew produced an ancient Zippo lighter, gleaming and metal, held it up like a magician a card.
"Well, that's appropriate in my case - " Holding the cigar in his teeth he stuck his right thumb in the cigar cutter and nipped the tip off. Blood pulsed, flowed down his hairy wrist.
"- because I'm the ace of the machine." He stuck the lighter firmly on the bleeding thumbtip. It stuck. As if of its own accord, it opened its cover. Its wheel turned, striking flame. Belew bent forward and lit his cigar.
"Oh, please," the yellowrobe said. Belew turned and blew a cloud of smoke into its ethereal face. It doubled in a coughing fit.
A man-high sunflower swiveled on its stem, bringing its black face to bear on Belew. He turned back to Moonchild and the guru, bringing the cigar to his lips.
The sunflower shot a stream of water full into his face, extinguishing the cigar with a hiss and melting his moustache into sad wet-bird wings.
Ganesha and his sannyasi laughed and laughed.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Hot afternoon. Walking the corridor, face darkened by his thoughts, Belew caught a murmur of voices from the garden. He paused, and then without the least self-consciousness had edged to the beginning of the arcaded walkway that surrounded the garden, peered around the corner. As security chief, he was privileged to lurk as he pleased around the Palace.
Ganesha sat on the stone bench with Sprout arranged beside him, pointing into the water of the pool. "See the fish, with his veil fins, so colorful and lovely," he said in a singsong murmur. "So does atman swim in Nirvana, in perfect freedom and release."
Sprout clapped her hands together. "Pretty!"
"Now look, my child," Ganesha said. "Hold out your hands."
Sprout obeyed. A large plush stuffed fish like a rainbow-hued fancy goldfish materialized in air, dropped softly into them. She gaped, astonished, then hugged it to her cheek.
"Oh, thank you, Unca Neesha! Thank you, thank you!"
"Does it find favor, O jewel child?"
She set the toy down between them to gather him into a fervent hug. "Oh yes! I love it! I love you, Unca Neesha!"
A shudder ran visibly through the guru's plump body then. Watching around the corner, Belew marked the way Ganesha's eyes caressed the very grown-up breasts, swelling the girl's white T-shirt under pressure from his own chest. The line of Belew's jaw grew harder.
With obvious reluctance Ganesha pushed Sprout away. "Now, my child, observe once again the fish in his pond, serene. See how he changes color - "
Obedient, she leaned well out over the pond, then exclaimed delightedly again as the fish, apparently, performed as advertised. What she did not see was Ganesha twitch aside the hem of the white robe he wore today, pluck a stuffed fish identical to the one he had materialized from beneath the bench, and slam it into the place of the materialization, which duly vanished just as Sprout straightened.
A strange sensation came over Belew then - the sense of being observed, which he had learned long ago to honor. He ducked back.
From the far end of the garden, where the corridor moved indoors again, a figure in a yellow robe was watching Belew watch the guru. Belew straightened. He nodded to the sannyas, turned, and walked away, not too fast.
Inside, he seethed.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
In his Spartan bedchamber, Mark sat lotus on his big colonial brass bed, rocking forward and back, pounding his thighs with knotted fists, tears pouring down his baby-red face.
"Oh, Guru, Guru," he moaned. "I've looked inside myself and seen what's there. It's evil. Ultimate darkness." He pounded his skinny chest. "In me."
He raised his head and looked at Ganesha through a cataract of tears. "Do you know what it's like, Guru? Do you?"
Ganesha's huge head nodded. "Yes, my son. I do."
Mark blinked, eyes as innocent as Sprout's. "And you overcame the darkness? You cleansed yourself of evil."
"I did." the Guru said. But his head turned away from Mark, ever so slightly, so that the pupil could not see what passed behind the master's eyes.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
Belew had his own office near Mark's. It was modest in size, the walls hung with high-quality reproductions of paintings by Dutch masters: Rembrandt, macabre Brueghel, the vans Eyck and Dyck - but never Rubens, whom he considered too much of a good thing. His only presumption upon his status was a grand recliner chair, in which he could listen to music: Vivaldi, Verdi, or Van Halen, for his tastes were as diverse as his talents.
His fax machine was busy disgorging a stack of papers. He knocked the dottle from his pipe, filled, tamped, relit. Then he squared a sheaf on the table beside him, held it up before his face, and carefully settled a pair of reading-glasses on his occasionally broken nose. It was a pity, but the regenerative gift which was already budding out a new pink tip to the thumb he'd truncated as a parlor trick yesterday, could only buffer him against so many of the ravages of that old devil, Time.
He read for an interval. Then he set his pipe aside and read the pages carefully through once more. Then he set them aside, tilted his head back, massaged the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger.
"Was I fearing to see something like this," he asked the ceiling, "or hoping?"
Because he would not lie to himself, he silently answered yes to both questions. Then he rose and looked for his shoes.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
The Vietnamese activist and the American joker spokesman stood in the audience hall and yelled at each other through interpreters. Moonchild stared from one to another in growing horror. She understood both languages well enough, yet she could not grasp what either was saying. It was as if she were trapped in a dream, one of those dreams when people look at you earnestly and mouth words, but all you hear are inchoate sounds, unintelligible as surf.
She glanced aside at guru, who stood beside her chair of state. He nodded slightly, smiled, and she felt warmth suffuse her.
He strengthens me with his darshan, his presence, she thought. He reassures me that there are answers, even if I have to grope for them myself....
Yet she still felt that desperate dislocation. Still the disputants' words held no meaning. She felt otherness ripple across her like a shockwave packet from a distant earthquake, as the other personalities all threatened to burst the seams of her consciousness and come tumbling in at once.
Guru says there is a cure for that, too. The cure for all my - our - problems. I can make that sacrifice. Can the others?
You better believe not, an internal voice was responding, male and angry, when she looked up and saw J. Bob standing in the door.
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
"You seemed to be in something of a hurry to get out of there, Madam President," J. Bob said, standing in the corridor outside. "Not deriving the same serenity from the Presence as you used to?"