"Jeez, Auntie!" Tut made a disgusted sound, then turned to me. "What about you, Mom? You believe in gods and stuff. Wouldn’t you like to be one?"
"I’m with Festina on this. Godhood is a phase of existence for those who aren’t mature enough to be born human. Buddhists would never hurl defiance at the gods — that’s just rude — but we don’t envy the divine condition. The gods are stuck in celestial kindergarten: flashy powers, fancy toys, people prostrating themselves before your altar… it’s just childish wish fulfillment. Hardly a situation that encourages enlightenment. If your karma condemns you to birth as a god, the best you can do is resist the urge to throw thunderbolts and hope that in the next life you’ll get to be human."
"Oh come on!" He turned to Ohpa. "What about you? You’re enlightened. Don’t you want to be elevated beyond what you are now?"
Ohpa gave a small bow. "I yearn to be Tathagata… but will the process developed on this planet truly achieve that goal? My meager wisdom makes me mistrust easy solutions. Can genuine enlightenment be imposed by external forces? Can a normal being, full of conflicts and confusion, suddenly have every mental twist made straight? If so, is the resulting entity really the original person? Or is it some alien thing constructed from the original’s raw components, like a worm fed on a corpse’s flesh?"
Tut threw up his hands. "You’re all hopeless! You’ve got a chance to go cosmic, but all you do is nitpick. Can’t you think big?"
"Tut," I said, "suppose this process made you wise: honest-to-goodness wise. And suddenly, you weren’t interested in shining your face, or wearing masks, or pulling down Captain Cohen’s pants. All you wanted to do was help people transcend frivolous impulses, and recognize the emptiness of their fixations. Suppose that happened to you all at once, not gradually learning from experience, but flash, boom, like lightning. Doesn’t that sound like brainwashing? Or even getting lobotomized? Not deliberately refining yourself step by step, but having a new personality ruthlessly imposed on you."
"I see what you’re getting at, Mom… but suppose honest-to-goodness wisdom turns out to be shining your face, wearing masks, and pulling down Captain Cohen’s pants. How do you know it isn’t? Wisdom could be dancing and humping, not sitting in stodgy old lotus position."
Festina chuckled. "The Taoist rebuttal to Buddhism. But we don’t have time for religious debate. We’ve got to start Stage Two." She turned to Ohpa. "Any ideas how we do that?"
Ohpa thought for a moment. "Stage Two involved a network of projection stations all around the planet — to bathe Stage One clouds with energy to complete the transformation. The closest such station is on this river, some distance downstream: a day’s journey by foot, if your species’ walking pace is close to ours. It’s a large building beside a dam."
"A hydroelectric dam?" Festina asked. "I hope not. If the station depends on the dam for power, we’re screwed. After sixty-five hundred years with no one looking after the place, the generators will be rusted solid and clogged with silt."
Ohpa gave his tail a noncommittal flick. "I don’t know how the station obtains its power. I know almost nothing about it — as I said, the Stage Two workers kept aloof from those working on Stage One."
"Then come with us to the station. However little you know, it’s more than we do."
Ohpa shook his head. "I’ve told you what I can; have faith it’s what you need. If you yourselves don’t lay my people’s ghosts to rest, at least you’ll pass on my words, and the news will spread. Eventually, someone will bring this to an end. But I won’t live to see it — my part is over."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
He turned my way. His faceted eyes showed no emotion a human could recognize, yet I felt compassion flood from him — deep pity for my ignorance. "I told you, my body needs special food. I will die without it: very soon. I avoided putting myself into stasis as long as I could, in hopes that a landing party from my own people would find me. I only entered the stasis sphere when I was on the verge of collapse."
"We have rations," Festina said, reaching into her pocket. She pulled out a standard protein bar. "Maybe this can tide you over until…"
"No. My body needs more than nutrition; it needs stabilization."
Ohpa held out his hand. The tips of his claws were smoking. Evaporating, like dry ice steaming into the air. His hand didn’t shake as the claws slowly vanished, and his fingers began to disintegrate.
"Stop," said Festina. "Don’t you dare do this. There are still things we need to know."
"You’ve heard everything necessary," Ohpa told her. "And I couldn’t stop this, even if I wished to. I stayed out of stasis as long as I could — until the time remaining to this body was just sufficient to do what was needed. To speak with you."
"You couldn’t know that," Festina said. "You had no idea how much time you’d need. You didn’t know who’d free you from stasis, you didn’t know if you’d speak our language, you didn’t know if we’d sit still and listen, you didn’t know if we’d care what you had to say, you didn’t even know if we’d be smart enough to follow your explanations. If we’d been a party of Cashlings, you’d have spent your last minutes listening to them complain how Muta had no good restaurants."
"But you aren’t Cashlings, are you? You’re members of the human Explorer Corps. With a mysterious knack for turning up where you’re required." Ohpa’s mandibles twitched. I could almost believe he was laughing at us. "Really, Admiral Ramos… I might not be Tathagata, but give me a little credit. My timing has been impecca-"
With a rush, the rest of his arm turned to smoke, followed an instant later by his entire body. The particles hung in the air a moment, still retaining the shape of what Ohpa had been; then the cloud dispersed, thinning out, spreading in all directions until there was nothing to see.
"Huh," Tut said. "He called you ‘Admiral Ramos.’ I wonder how he knew. None of us ever called you that."
Festina gestured irritably. "I’ve met enough higher beings to know their tricks. They’re all incorrigible show-offs, they love getting a rise out of lesser mortals, and they all know my goddamned name." She sighed. "They’re also fond of dramatic exits. Speaking of which, we should get going ourselves."
"Downstream to the Stage Two station?"
"Where else?" She muttered something about "jumping through goddamned hoops for alien puppet-masters," then headed out the door.
CHAPTER 14
Maitri [Sanskrit]: Loving kindness for all living creatures.
Outside the building we stopped so Festina could speak with Pistachio. She summarized what we’d learned, then asked Captain Cohen to do some eye-in-the-sky scouting for us. He soon reported a Fuentes building beside a dam thirty kilometers to the south. The dam had become a waterfall — silt must have closed the sluices, leaving the river with nowhere to go but over the top. Years of rushing water had mildly eroded the dam’s upper ramparts, but there’d been no major collapse; the dam still held back a reservoir of cold autumnal water. The accompanying building lay on the east bank of the reservoir… which told us which side of the Grindstone we should be on for the trek downstream.
Pistachio’s cameras didn’t have enough resolution to see much detail — not from such high orbit. However, Captain Cohen had begun to build new reconnaissance probes as soon as we’d left the ship, and there’d be one ready within five hours: just enough time, he said, to gather advance data, since we’d need six hours to walk to the dam. (When Cohen said that, I thought, Six hours? We’d take six hours to walk thirty kilometers on clear flat roads. Traveling through brush, up hills and down ravines, following the shore of a meandering river and perhaps dodging the occasional Rexy, we’d take much longer… and that was ignoring nightfall, now only three hours off, plus the storm we’d seen heading our way. When Festina asked Cohen how the storm looked, he admitted, "Oy, it’s a doozy.")