redRobe

Chapter Eighteen Body, Speech, Mind, Diamond

Om Ah Hum Vajra ...

Out beyond Luna, out even beyond the Arc, the Wheel of God spun in space, telling off endless prayers. Around the 1500 or so miles of its outer rim were attached three million scraps of calligraphy, each gummed in place at the top right corner. They were the prayers of the faithful, written in Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, and woodblocked onto rice fabric by Buddhist monks. Each tiny script had been fixed in place by a hired gang of Deacon Blues, space dwelling salvage rats subcontracted by the Dalai Lama.

There were longer streamers—some of merely human height, others at least a mile long—weighted at the end with small lead seals. These were prayers too, convoluted mantras endlessly repeated on each ribbon and then repeated again as the wheel’s edge spun them in a vast circle. Further off, huge steel drums hurtled through space, seemingly unattached to the wheel, their long lengths of monofilament so fine as to be invisible. In each drum were more prayers. As well as simple steel drums there were elaborate canisters of beaten silver, chased around the sides with complex, swirling representations of demons and the Rinpoche, Tibetan Buddhism’s great masters.

Inside the silver canisters were all the names of God, printed out onto silken ribbon. It had taken a bank of Cray3s at CalTek at least forty-seven years to track down all the names and ten minutes to spit them out.

This was Samsara, the Wheel of Life, the Wheel of God.

Here was Tibet reborn from the carnage of the Second Sino War. It was a place of duty and of prayer, but most of all it was a safe haven, recognised as such by the UN, WorldBank and the IMF. All ‘fugees had right of entry. They had to get there first, of course, but that didn’t lessen the principle no matter how much it limited the number.

Unlike the original Tibetan wheel, Samsara had no visible spokes and no hub; it rotated about itself, creating both surface pseudo-gravity and enough momentum to trap most of the new world’s atmosphere within the long central valley and the high, vertiginous mountains of its edges. What atmosphere bled away into space had to be replaced, but that was Tsongkhapa’s problem. And Samsara’s central AI didn’t trouble others with its problems.

Axl Borja knew none of this. He was asleep in his seat, knocked flat by melatonin and kept that way by a seriously cross stewardess. He knew the back-history, of course. How, as the giant bioCrays at CalTek were sourcing thirteen regional variants on the god Zoroaster, fifty-three years before the end of the leasing agreement, a Buddhist astronomer at MIT’s observatory on Darkside picked up the first sighting of the wheel.

Samsara wasn’t a world then, merely a hollow circle a thousand miles around its inner rim, like a huge bird’s egg with both ends cut off, if any bird could be so big that it might fly between the stars. And there were breakaway Navajo in Colorado who believed that Samsara was the remains of an egg, that there had been a bird which hatched. But then a Zen sect in Okinawa swore it was the birth sac of a vast cosmic carp and the sky was water.

The fractured stone bubble was not spinning around itself back then, merely tumbling end over end through space like a discarded tyre. And before the Navajo, the Carp cult—or the Enquirer’s insistence it was really all being staged in an SFX studio in Burbank, California—the Dalai Lama had known Samsara for more than that. Sitting cross-legged on his bed, logged into a vidgroup when he should have been sleeping, he’d opened a flash between Darkside and CalTek and known instantly that here was Samsara, Vajrayana, the indestructible vehicle. His destiny had arrived, if such a big word could be given to a shaven-headed, slightly podgy thirteen-year-old boy.

God-child creates world.

In private, Cardinal Santo Ducque maintained the story was so much shit, and he was right. MIT’s observatory on Darkside had been monitoring the ring for months, watching it come ever closer. And the Dalai Lama had known to the minute when the final name of God would be collated, cross-referenced and the entire list printed out.

But it was a good story and sometimes a fitting lie can do more good than a mundane truth. Particularly when used to raise funds.

Lars Arcsen, leader of the Deacon Blues, brought the ring to a halt, using tugs and endless miles of monofilament. He lost thirty ships. Six hundred men and five AIs lost their lives, and when the ring finally stopped it was 50,000 miles further out than Lars had predicted.

Which worried Lars not a fuck, since there had been thirty-six hours towards the end when Lars was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to halt the ring at all.

And once Samsara was in position, getting it spinning properly took Lars another three months. And then came creation, except that took twenty-eight years, not six days, and no one got Sunday off to rest. Water came from the dirty ice of a captured comet, not filtered but purified by nanites that ate heavy metals. Nanites also shredded Samsara’s molecular bonds, feeding on pale sunlight as they separated out original elements, only to build them back into mountains, rocks, cliffs…

The comet ice was split into hydrogen and oxygen, mixed with nitrogen and fed back as atmosphere. Unbreathably thin at first, but getting thicker with each passing year.

But then, twenty-one years into creation, with the framework to this new landscape already grown, the project hit its biggest wall. Soil. Leaf litter. Loam. That broken-down biomass that gave Earth its actual name. Creating enough soil proved beyond the ingenuity of even Lars Arcsen.

Aged seven—sat in exile in a vast apartment on West 64th that had been sandblasted down to a stripped urban shell—the brand-new Dalai Lama flipped off the browband of his birthday Sony tri-D long enough to ask one question. ‘How many people die each year?’

Initially, WheelOfGod Enterprises expected resistance to their request for donated bodies. They ended up charging for the privilege. To start with, the whole of the West Coast America wanted to be recycled. Elderly models from Bel Air covenanted condos provided their dumb-fuck red setters could come too.

A Hollywood actress, three face transplants on from the v’Actor still making her hit movies, had her agent hold a press call at the Dome to announce she’d be donating her body to the Wheel. But then, as her first husband bitched, what was the big deal? She’d already donated it to everyone else.

At one time your annual salary plus post & packing on a shrub or tree secured you a place on one of the coffin ships (basically, a refrigerated Niponshi food transport too old and battered to pass NASA standards for the Luna run). It also bought you a rice-paper prayer tacked to the rim of the wheel. A street sweeper in Delhi went Wheelside for a tattered Jimsen weed and $23.60, the head of Team Rodent donated $238,000,000 and a forest of oak saplings, and still there were grumbles that it didn’t properly reflect his true remuneration.

Turnover proved to be high on Samsara when the living finally started to arrive. The Tibetan exiles thrived, but the refugees died faster and so did the tortured. Some died of injuries, others of shock. A few killed themselves, unable to live with the silence, temple bells and slightly-distant kindness of the monks.

But to start with, before Samsara had inhabitants, the dead got shredded into bone-filled fragments, mixed with disassemblers and sprayed over every surface, whether it stuck or not. Later, insects broke mounds of delivered bodies into mulch that got spread thin across the central valley. And then, that done, Niponshi drones hosed mulch onto the bare rock face of the mountainside which trickled down to pool again in the valleys.

Much later, mosses were planted, trees and shrubs, starting their own cycle of growth and corruption, though the bodies kept coming.

The Dalai Lama furnished the faith but the reclusive, obscenely-rich sandrat Lars Arcsen provided the knowledge. Few people knew where he got the skills or the technology, but then few people had ever been out to where Lars lived, surrounded by animals on a private orbital. All Lars did was take what had first been done in the Arc, and do it again, but larger. He was the one who called it all. Everyone else regarded it as a miracle.

Entrance to the Wheel of God wasn’t down through the atmosphere. It was up through a single hole in the shell. Besides the numerous lengths of high-tensile molywire rumoured to span from one side of the wheel to its opposite, there were two reasons for this. The reason given was that entry this way kept the side effects of atmospheric re-entry out of the loop. The real reason was that it allowed the Wheel’s pacifist AI, Tsongkhapa, to screen all incoming refugees for weapons and disease.