Flight of the Vajra (115 page)

“But having them on Continuum,” he said, “it’ll
make it, well, tough for others to visit, won’t it?”

“Not for long,” I said.

With Kallhander and Ioné keeping watch—not that
they needed to; the place was deserted save for us—Angharad and I knelt at the
spot where the headstones had stood. Each of us lit a lantern, but when it came
to the recitations, both of us were silent. Finally we stood together and
walked down the hill to where a brook trickled and glittered past, and Angharad
knelt again and let her sleeve float in the water. The Ulanjara River feeds
this brook from a great distance, I thought. I felt for a moment like Angharad
was going to plunge her hand in and come up with the ikon of her I’d thrown
away all those years ago.

Or maybe I’d see Enid sitting on a rock, swishing
her toes through the water:
If it isn’t deep enough to swim in, it’s always
deep enough for this. Come on, you spoilsports, shoes off.

Either one seemed about right.

“Mr. Sulley may have committed no sin,” Angharad
said, “but I have.”

I looked down at her; she looked up at me.

“When I extended my first invitation to you,” she
went on, “it was because I believed, in my arrogance, that I could help you. No—not
just ‘help’ you, but
heal
you. Through the sheer weight of my presence,
or my authority—much as any number of other people claimed I had done for them.
So I allowed you to come closer to me, so that you might . . . bask
that much more in me.

“I had any number of stories prepared to avoid
speaking of this, of course. I could tell everyone around me, myself included,
you included, that you were present in my company because of your technical
skills, your experience, your guidance . . . anything but you
yourself. When faced with the choice of being further from you but being safe,
or being closer to you and being reckless, I chose recklessness. When given the
choice to let you believe I was bound to my duty and my mission first and
foremost, I let you believe that. For all of my talk of wanting peers and not
worshippers, I still did this. And then I saw that you were happy being close
to me no matter what the reason . . . ”

She stopped, because all the while she’d been
talking I’d hunkered down on the bank of the stream next to her. I was worried
that at any second she’d burst into tears and need my shoulder, but I kissed
her before that could happen, and we stood up with our arms around each other
and our faces warm and close.

“You think I haven’t made a few mistakes in my
life?” I said. “And if I loved you because you were perfect, what fun would
that be?”

She nodded in recognition of my wisdom. “Then let
us go home,” she said, “and love each other anyway.”

I watched her face as she and I made our way back
up the hill to where Kallhander and Ioné waited. It’s not that she’s always
happy, I thought; it’s that she can always come back to being happy no matter
where else she’s been.

Seeing that raised me up too, up beyond even those
few fine moments when Biann had hidden half her face with her fan and stamped
one well-revealed leg, and Yezmé had shared a last dance with me. It wasn’t
that those moments were going to vanish, I thought. It was that they were free,
at last, to live side by side with so many other things at least as beautiful.

And when I got home—and it wasn’t a mistake to call
Continuum and Jakayagara “home”, now, was it?—I figured I’d finally start building
Angharad that ship I’d promised her, half of both our lifetimes ago.

The End

Acknowledgments

I am indebted forever, first and foremost, to Turid
Aarstad, friend of jazz composer and theoretician George Russell. His words, as
quoted at the front of this book and within it as well, formed the core of so
much of what it became.

My second greatest debt, for close reading and
endless thoughtful suggestions, is to Steven Savage. A big tip of the fedora goes
to him and the rest of the “Narwhal Tribe” for their understanding of what the
book was meant to be about. Their aid proved invaluable.

For perspective and insight of various kinds, I am
indebted to the following works: Richard Gombrich,
Theravada Buddhism: A
Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo
;
Thomas
Merton,
Confessions of a Guilty Bystander
; Keiji Nishitani,
Religion
and Nothingness
;
and Rudolf Otto,
The Idea of the Holy.

Serdar Yegulalp
is the author of five other
novels:
Casual Users
,
Another Worldly Device
,
Summerworld,
The Four-Day Weekend,
and
Tokyo Inferno.
He lives and works near New York City.

www.genjipress.com