No!
“I know you do not share my religious views,” Chen Hsi-Feng said. “But I will summon a priest of any denomination you wish.”
Robert grimaced. “No, thank you.”
“You are sure? There is no hurry, and this much I can do for you. Of course, whoever shrives you must die also—I never understood why a good priest should fear death.”
Robert shook his head without speaking.
“Is there anything else you want to do first?”
Robert thought about it. “Cut your throat,” he suggested.
“So sorry,” his father said, and lifted the gun.
I had spent the last seconds, scurrying about inside my skull, recruiting every neuron I could. Now I threw everything I had into a massive last-ditch internal effort, trying desperately to throw off my chemical chains and regain control of my body. The counterrevolution was a qualified disaster. I could not invest the motor centers—or even, equally important to me, regain access to my emotional glandular system—but I managed to briefly retake the speech center. “He…is…your…son,” I said in a slurring drawl.
I succeeded in surprising him. He stiffened slightly, and rolled his chair to one side so that he could watch me without taking his gaze off Robert. Then he answered. “He is my illegitimate son. True, he is worth two of my heirs. But that is exactly why I have not been able to afford him since the moment he stopped being ruled by self-interest. I can no longer predict his actions. Last words, Po Chang?”
“Fuck you,” Robert said.
His father shot him in the face. The dart worked exactly as the demonstrator slug had worked on the rat. Robert stiffened momentarily, then began to tremble, then fell down and shivered himself to death. Blood ran from his eyes, ears, nose and mouth, then stopped. From the huff of the shot to the end of his death rattle took no more than five or ten seconds. I wished I could scream.
Chen Hsi-Feng spun his chair to me. “Last words?” he said again.
Even without emotions, and with nothing objective left to live for, I was not ready to die. “I would like to…I guess the word is, pray.”
“Do you require a cleric of some kind? I’m afraid I will not go to as much trouble for you as I was prepared to for my son.”
I shook my head. “I just want to sit zazen for a few minutes.”
He nodded at once. “Ah—Zen! An excellent faith. You may have five minutes. Who knows? Perhaps you will attain enlightenment this time.” He composed himself to wait.
I tried to get down from my chair and sit on the floor. But the persistent delusional feeling of being in low gravity threw me off; I fell to the floor with a crash. Distantly I heard the unmistakable sound of a bone cracking—every dancer’s nightmare horror sound—but it didn’t seem important at all. I didn’t even bother identifying which bone it was. I established that I could still force my legs into lotus, with the ease of two months of training. I tried to straighten my spine, but could not get a strong fix on local vertical. “Antidote,” I said. “Partial at least.”
He shook his head. “No. It is not a drug that hinders you, but a team of nanoreplicators. They will completely disassemble themselves when your temperature falls below 20 Celsius, but until then nothing can counteract them. Do the best you can. You have five minutes.”
All that is important is to sit, I had heard Reb say once. And to breathe. Last chance for both.
I closed my eyes and became my breath.
Time stopped, and so, for once, did I.
The state Buddhists call “enlightenment,” or satori, is so elusive, so full of contradiction and paradox, that many outsiders throw up their hands and declare it a chimera, a verbal construct with no referent. You seek to attain thought that is no-thought, feeling that is no-feeling, being that is non-being, and the cosmic catch-22 is that if you try, you cannot succeed. You must free yourself of all attachments, including even your attachment to freeing yourself. This state seems, verbally at least, to be so synonymous with, so identical to, death, that some scholars go so far as to say that everyone becomes enlightened sooner or later in his or her own turn, and there is no problem in the universe. The literature is filled with cases of Buddhists who claimed to have found enlightenment in the moment that they looked certain death in the face. Uyesugi Kenshin once said, “Those who cling to life, die, and those who defy death live.” Taisen Deshimaru said, “Human beings are afraid of dying. They are always running after something: money, honour, pleasure. But if you had to die now, what would you want?” And Reb Hawkins had once told Glenn and the rest of us in class, “Looked at from a certain angle, enlightenment is a kind of annihilation—a radical self-emptying.”
Perhaps it was nearness to death, then. Perhaps the microscopic nanoreplicators in my brain actually helped, by switching off emotions, making it impossible for me to feel thalamic disturbance, insulating me from physical aches and restlessness and even boredom. Perhaps it was the brutal fact of my despair—which is not an emotion, but a point of view. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
Whatever the reason, all at once I attained satori.
I was one with all sentient beings, and there was nothing that was not sentient in all the universe, not even space, not even chance. Everything that was, was simply quantum probability wavefronts collapsing into phenomena, dancing a teleological dance that was choreographed and improvised at the same time. “I” still existed, but I coexisted with and was identical to everyone/everything else.
I had been here before, for brief instants in my life, up until I gave my life to cynicism in my twenties—and then again, for a scattered few seconds, in Top Step, during a long period of kûkanzen. One of the things that had subconsciously held me back from entering Symbiosis, I now saw, had been a desire to experience it again for more than seconds, one last time the “natural” way, before I gave up and ate it prepackaged. A kind of spiritual pride.
It happened now, since I no longer yearned for it. Once again I was little Rain M’Cloud dancing on a floating dock, and was bobbing sea lions, and was the dance that connected us, all at the same time. And then I was not even that.
Sentient beings are numberless, says the Great Vow. I became one with that numberless number. And being one, we perceived ourself, with great clarity.
First, the things called no-thing. Vacuum, space, time, gravity, entropy, the void.
Next, the things called nonliving matter. Rock. Water. Gases. Plasma. Endless reshuffled combinations of hydrogen and the various ashes of its fusion.
Next, the things called living. The film of life that crawled and swam and flew and ran through and ultimately sank back into the surface of the Earth. I was all the viruses that swam in the soup of the world, all the grasses that grew, insects and reptiles and birds and fish and mammals, all striving to make ever-better copies of themselves. I seemed to be a part of all that lived, without being distinct from that which did not.
Then the things called sentient. I could see sentience as if it were a fire burning in the darkness. A tapestry of cool fires that was the dolphins and the orcas. Every dull selfish glow that was the consciousness of a cat. Every hot coal of fear and self-loathing that was a human being. I could pick out every Buddhist among them, tell the adepts from the students. There were all the Christians, and there the Muslims, those were the superstitious atheists and those all the lonely agnostics. I knew everyone on Earth who was happy, and everyone who was in agony. High overhead, and scattered about the Solar System from the orbit of Mercury to the fringes of the Oort Cloud, I saw/felt/was every Stardancer and all Stardancers, the Starmind—for the first time I began to understand it, what it was and what it was trying to become, I knew that it was a Starseed, and that if/when it finally bore fruit, there would be joy among the stars, and on Earth.