FSF Magazine, August 2007 Read online

  His voice, if possible, deepened. “And then the forms of the universe emerged."

  With a soft murmur of well-oiled machinery, the ceiling began to open. A long narrow V appeared and spread rapidly to the shape of a quarter-moon. We were looking away from Terra into limitless spangled darkness.

  I sucked in my breath, and so did everybody else. The hall seemed to inhale. Going about your daily life, eating, sleeping, working, scratching your butt, you know it's always there, this fathomlessness. But to see it this way, to be projected into it, was simply stupefying.

  "Brothers and sisters, behold your Self. That art thou,” intoned the voice, now issuing from noplace and everyplace. “Release yourselves from the bonds of ego. Release yourselves from the illusions of time and space. Know, feel, and experience the fact that this body, your body, already fills the ten parts of the universe."

  He began to chant, and no human voice could have done it better than this invisible lion-faced monk.

  "Auummmmmmmm,” he intoned, and one hundred and twenty voices followed his lead. As the m-sound stretched out and out, it mimicked the harmonics of a great gong. Suddenly a real gong crashed through the amphitheater. I felt the belt tighten as if I were trying to levitate, as maybe I was. Another long tremolo of dying echoes.

  "Auummmmmmm,” came again as one voice. I was losing the sense of myself—or no, not that exactly: I was losing the sense that I'm only myself. At first it scared me and I fought against it. I was afraid of the darkness, the antiphonal chant of voices and gong, the stupefying sky bending over me.

  Then gradually I stopped fighting. I let go, took a vacation from the ordinary. I was seeing with new eyes other forms of nature besides the transient atom called Robert—Robert—

  Something. My name got lost. Like Alice in Wonderland, I was thinking, “L—I know it starts with L!” The bronze cymbal crashed. The chant resumed. The chains of time and place broke apart silently. How easy it would've been to slip off the belt, to let myself rise and mingle and converge. Float away on Heaven's River, as the Japanese call the Milky Way. I was thinking: the atoms, the particles, the quarks that make me also make this. The natural laws that bind me bind this as well. This is my true body, already filling the ten parts of the universe. This am I.

  All things together make a harmony, said Lao-Tzu. When not screwed up by human egotism and greed, added Kohn, unquenchably sardonic.

  Oh right, that was my name. Slowly the religious experience faded. I started to breathe normally again, though I still had a fizzy, light-headed feeling. Machinery was purring, the ceiling was closing, the red lights flickering on. The whole amphitheater exhaled, the people sadly returning to their mere local selves. I checked my watch. Astounding. I could've sworn I'd been here maybe twenty minutes. In fact, one hour, nine minutes and an eternity had elapsed.

  A long silence ensued. Then the Chief Monk stood up with a grunt, strode to a door, and eased it open. He returned to Master Po, helped him rise, and together they proceeded slowly out of the hall.

  Others began to follow. Guests were standing, stretching cramped limbs. Somebody broke wind. The Great Meditation was over for the day.

  * * * *

  Following a light supper in a hall called the Refectory, I found my way to Sister Jann's small cluttered office next to the infirmary. She was sitting in a comfortable-looking chair with her hood thrown back—another violation of Regulation 19—and frowning at the shadowbox of a computer. Floating in the darkness of the box was a three-dimensional schematic of a lengthy molecule. She gestured at the model. “Recognize this? We found it in a guest's quarters during the aprés-murder shakedown."

  The display looked somewhat familiar. “Maybe GLS?"

  "Very good, Colonel. You're almost right. It's a hypermodern designer drug derived from gamma-lysergin, just as GLS had its ancestor in plain old ordinary LSD. This stuff won't have hit the street yet. It's too exotic and too difficult to make. I suppose Councilor Mmahat uses it as an enhancer to his religious experiences."

  "There's a Councilor of State up here?"

  "The biggest of our VIGs—our Very Important Guests. Represents the Middle Eastern Council District. Background in Sufi mysticism, rich as sin and terribly important and powerful. His enemies call him the Whirling Dervish, among many other things. Here, sit down,” she added, moving a Chinese paperweight and a heap of hardcopy to reveal a chair hiding beneath.

  I sat down and belted up. Sister Jann was a stocky woman with a short haircut and competent air. Her skin was almost translucent and her large gray eyes had the clear, unshockable calmness I've noticed in nursing sisters of the Mother Teresa Guild. Looking at her, the first word that crossed my mind was “virginal."

  Trying a friendly approach, I told her my wife was also an M.D. whom I met in space. To my surprise, she frowned and seemed to get angry. “That's so typical. After centuries of effort, women still don't get equal treatment in medicine on Earth. That's why so many of us wind up in space."

  Hastily I shifted my ground. “You know, Sister, the Chief Monk's quite a surprise to me. Isn't he an unusual type for a lamasery?"

  "Not really. In a religious community you need somebody with genuine insight to provide spiritual guidance, but you also need somebody to make things run. So there's the Master, and there's the CM, who very definitely knows how to make things run."

  "I found him pretty impressive just now."

  She shrugged. “He's got charisma, I'll admit that. But he's about as deep as spit. This stuff he peddles—a little Taoism, a little Buddhism, a little this, a little that—it's sort of Zen Lite."

  "Thanks for your frank opinion."

  "I can afford to be frank,” she said, “because his machinery of spying—pardon me, his monitoring system—is broken and he's still trying to get a technician up from Terra to fix it. It's such an antique, he can't find parts for it. How's the investigation going?"

  "It'll get started as soon as you give me the autopsy data on Brother Kendo and tell me exactly what happened to him. Incidentally,” I added, “whether you like the CM or not, he was absolutely right when he made me attend the Great Meditation. While that's going on, anything could happen and never be noticed."

  She nodded soberly. “It's sad, really sad in a way. This isn't the first time somebody's used a religious service as a cover for murder, you know. One of the Renaissance Popes tried to have Lorenzo de’ Medici assassinated at high mass. The signal for the murderer to strike was the bell ringing at the consecration of the host. Well, let's get to work."

  She rummaged in her desk, pulled out a memory cube and gave it to me.

  "Here's everything you never wanted to know about Brother Kendo. I also pulled his personnel records because the record keeper was Kendo himself, and as you know he's in the refrigerator. So you've got how he died, the state of his health prior to that, his retinagraph, DNA profile, personal history, his police record—or rather, his lack of one. In short, the works."

  "I'm sure it'll make good reading. Now suppose you tell me something about the guy that's not in the records."

  "He was a rather boring, sullen man. A loner. Hid himself away in the archives most of the time. Very good with numbers, I can't imagine why the CM didn't put him in the treasurer's office. Kendo had a temper, usually under control but not always. One day for no visible reason he punched a nuclear-steel rib of the hull so hard that he broke three bones in his hand. While I was splinting the hand I said, ‘Now, brother, what made you blow up like that?’ He said, ‘It's private,’ and that was all I could get out of him."

  "So he was a guy with internal tension."

  "Yes. But internal tension didn't kill him."

  "Tell me about the crime."

  She leaned back and put her fingertips together. A lot of technical experts make that gesture when they're about to give testimony. Makes them look judicious.

  "Considering that everybody in the station was present, the crime was astonishingly easy to miss.
A single outcry, so they say. I doubt if many people even heard it. I know I didn't. When the lights came on, Brother Kendo was sitting just below the lights with one hand clutching his chest. People were turning and looking at him. The brother seated nearest asked him what was wrong and he said, ‘A stabbing pain. In the heart.’”

  "Very accurate, that,” I murmured.

  "Well, Kendo had an esophageal hernia, so chest pains were an old story for him. It didn't seem serious at first, not even to him. Nevertheless, he looked quite pale and two brothers asked him if he could walk. He said yes. They helped him up and he walked to the door. There he fainted. By the time they got him to the infirmary, he was dead. It was only when they undressed him that they noticed a bloodstain on his undershirt. Almost all the bleeding was internal. You should've seen the mess when I opened him up."

  "Can you tell me why the CM thinks one of the guests did it?"

  "For one thing, only guests were sitting behind Kendo. Besides, the killing was skillful, you know. Professional. Well, we've got a professional among the guests, as you may have heard. Our gladiator, a Korean called Huksa Byung. Must do real combat. He had a cyst on his back, took his robe off to let me work on it, and I can tell you he's got more scar tissue than skin."

  "Do you think he's guilty?"

  "I do not. Why in the world would a champion gladiator travel thirty-six thousand clicks into space to kill a morose, silent, friendless, penniless monk? The Chief Monk's trying to screw up your mind,” she added, going back to her bête noire. “He doesn't want the killer to be a monk, because that would be embarrassing, and he doesn't want the killer to be one of his important guests because that would cost the lamasery a donor. That's why he's scapegoating Huksa Byung."

  "Was there any physical evidence?"

  "Not in the hall, with all those people tramping around. At least none that we could find. We're not set up here to do real forensic science, but I made the old standard tests for occult blood—neoluminol, black light and so forth. No luck. Brother Ion—he's the CM's enforcer, you know—led a search of every cubic centimeter of living and storage space in Heaven's Footstool, trying to find the weapon. No luck for him either."

  "I presume the guests were also searched?"

  "Patted down by a monk or nun."

  "Body cavity searches?"

  "Impossible, Inspector. You don't do a digital on a Councilor of State's rectum unless he agrees to it. Nor on Huksa Byung either, unless he agrees. Besides, the knife had to have a blade at least twenty centimeters long and must have been razor sharp. You might want to hide that in a body cavity, but I would not."

  "Anything like that in your medical kit that somebody could have borrowed?"

  "No. I do have a few scalpels for jobs like puncturing the gladiator's cyst, but they're all too small to make the wound. The CM's quite a fanatic about his no-weapons policy and everything that even looks dangerous gets catalogued and locked away. The chances are overwhelming that the weapon was brought here in somebody's luggage, and that's another reason the CM's convinced the villain's a guest. You know,” she added, “I don't like the man. He's a bully and a faker. But I do think he wants to find out who killed Kendo. The murder scares him, it baffles him, and he's not a man who likes being either baffled or scared."

  That seemed to cover it. I pocketed the cube, got up to go. Then stopped. Before leaving, I wanted to satisfy my curiosity on one point that had nothing to do with the murder. I asked when Heaven's Footstool turned coed.

  "It's an experiment. I'm all for it, integrating the monks and the nuns. Some are starting to marry one another, and I'm all for that too, though I'm celibate myself by choice."

  "All this is rather different from the lamaseries on Terra,” I commented.

  "Our brothers and sisters down below follow the ancient rules of sexual segregation and forced celibacy. But they'll come to see our viewpoint in the end."

  "I haven't heard of any murders in lamaseries down below."

  "Perhaps they have no guests,” smiled Sister Jann.

  * * * *

  Ironically—for a retired cop—my room was called a cell. It lived up to the name. Two meters by three, with a single bed, desk, chair, wash stand with a Lucite dome and a vacuum pump to recover water and cleanser. Wall clock, waste-material vent, the usual belts on the chair and bed, everything clamped to the deck. I'd already located the nearest latrine and shower room, down the corridor. I assumed that VIGs had more luxurious accommodations, but didn't really expect them for myself.

  I'd had a long day, but decided to view the cube anyway, because I wanted to be up to speed about the victim when I started interviewing people in the morning. The clock murmured that the time—Heaven's Footstool used Greenwich Mean Time—was 2040 and Lights Out would come at 2130. I lay down on the bunk, took out my omni, inserted the cube, and on the ten-by-ten cm screen Brother Kendo's life started unreeling. He was born Drago Stancic fifty-four years ago in the warrens of the Luna Underground. Librarian and information control tech by profession. Married young, fathered two children whose present whereabouts were unknown. No police record on either Luna or Terra. Served briefly in the military without either distinction or disgrace. Divorced by his wife on grounds of incompatibility.

  Then the big break in his life. Thirteen years ago he entered a lamasery, at that time making over his small worldly wealth to the Order. His satorist recorded that he made a “significant spiritual breakthrough into cosmic consciousness” nine years ago. After post-enlightenment training, he requested a transfer to Heaven's Footstool, where his professional skills proved useful. Assigned to keep the personnel records.

  Further useless facts: Brother Kendo weighed seventy-eight kilos at his last physical before leaving Terra, stood one point six meters tall, had a sexual-orientation rating of point nine het, and suffered from a hiatal hernia, marginal blood-sugar, and a tendency to hyperlipidemia. He died in possession of his tonsils, appendix, and foreskin, the lucky devil. He was “predominantly celibate,” whatever that might mean. His work record was good....

  I suppose at that point I conked out. When I woke, wondering where the hell I was, the overhead light was still on. The omni had switched itself off. It lay on my chest, a silvery oblong twenty-five cm long. A bell was shrilling someplace in the corridor outside. Wondering why my whole body felt stiff and cold, I fantasized briefly that I was Brother Kendo laid out in the freezer. In short, I was disoriented.

  Then the clock—displaying 0430—informed me in the cool impersonal accents favored by garrulous machinery that I had half an hour to prepare for compulsory tai-chi muscle-toning exercises in Earthside Hall, followed by zazen or sitting meditation, followed by breakfast at 0700 in the Refectory. A new day had come to Heaven's Footstool, and I rose up like Frankenstein, laid the omni on the desk, and staggered toward the door to meet it.

  I spent the next thirty minutes in the company of a large number of male and female monks unhooded, as we all performed our morning rituals in the latrine and shower room. Interesting. The brother-and-sister lingo seemed to fit the way the men and women actually treated one another. Shower stalls had doors and small dressing cubicles and formed private spaces for whoever was occupying them. The general atmosphere resembled a unisex barracks or college dorm, though noisier because of the gulping sounds of the vacuum plumbing.

  Then the community shuffled off, many sticky boots moving at once, in what I guessed was the direction of Earthside Hall. Didn't figure I needed muscle-toning myself, since I didn't plan to be here long enough to have mine turn to jelly. Instead, after robing I wandered the corridors until appetizing smells started to emanate from the Refectory. Here I dawdled until the monks appeared, then stepped in among them, noting with interest how easily one more robed figure could be absorbed into the throng unnoticed.

  Breakfast turned out to be a subdued affair, eaten in silence—porridge and strong green tea, loaves of fresh hot bread from the monks’ own bakery and jars of fruit pres
erves with labels from half the farming regions of Terra. Meanwhile a reader perched on a dais read from the Tao Teh Ching. Anna introduced me to Lao-tzu, her fellow Chinese, and I've grown to like him as an honest man.

  "The Great Tao is without pity, it burns the families of men like straw dogs," intoned the reader. That I know to be true. The cosmos is fascinating, but it lacks a heart.

  As I was finishing, a monk tapped me on the shoulder and Brother Ion's gruff voice invited me to visit the CM at my earliest convenience, “like yesterday,” as he put it. So I followed him out, trying to arrange in my head a plausible plan of action with which to appease his holiness.

  * * * *

  The Reverend Aung Chai sat at his desk in exactly the same posture as before—one forearm flat, the other raised.

  "Sit, sit,” he said. “I want to know what you've found out, if anything, and what theories of the crime you may have formed."

  He glanced at his wall clock. “Ten minutes,” he added.

  I gave him the usual bureaucratic run-around. If you haven't accomplished anything, you try to look busy. I explained I'd reviewed Kendo's records and discussed the autopsy findings with Sister Jann. I regretted the fact that a scientific examination hadn't been made of the crime scene. Whatever evidence might have been found by now had been hopelessly corrupted, so interrogation would have to do the trick. I proposed to start with the guests, since the supply shuttle was due in two days and some of them might want to go home.

  "As I told you,” he said abruptly, “I suspect one of them is guilty. You know which one."

  "You may be right. But I'm not yet convinced that any guest did it."

  I got that terrific frown again. “Exactly why not?"

  I paused to appreciate the “exactly,” then went into my spiel. “With everybody dressed alike at the Great Meditation and the dim lights and all the shuffling around, I don't see why a monk couldn't have slipped in among the guests in the corridor, entered with them and sat down behind Kendo. Then mingled with the monks again during the confusion afterward. I mean, nobody was counting, right?"