He looked at me and smiled. I found obvious sexual arousal disconcerting. I looked away. I always end up regretting the look away part. The George the HAB took several paces back to the far side of the hall. George the Tourist tried to catch my eyes again. His eyes were brown, alive. They wanted me to look back at him and say something funny, something to get him into bed. The sexual pressure . This is why I loved Shaolin. For all the intrigues, for all the violence, for all the endlessly fluctuating circles of power, I knew my place, I knew my job. Every other memory was gone, but in the morning, I knew what I was supposed to do. No matter what heresies I committed, no matter what vows I broke, no matter what attrocities I performed, The Beaucracy contained a strange half-assed grace. I belonged. George the Tourist didn't seem to care. He wanted me now, and didn't seem inclined to talk about strategic planning for the long term. Keep looking at him, I thought. That's the way to fuck everything up. I wanted to kiss him, but I looked away again. Excused myself from the corridor. George the HAB followed. George the Tourist did not. I didn't see him again. We returned to my room. George offered to send a younger HAB in. I took him up on it. It didn't take long. The Younger HAB -- who also had brown eyes, though they were rather dull looking -- had completed his duties and was done. The Younger HAB conferred soto vocco with George the HAB and left. No complications. George the HAB was still sitting in the corner, making notes when I drifted off to sleep. Grace is a bitchy mistress, but she's reliable.
posted by RR at 8:10 AM

And then I looked at her. She was small... like a baby only months old, and twisted. Her skull fed into a glass bulb, and her fully grown brain spilled out into it. She could not walk. She could not even crawl. She was trapped into a body by the constant surgeries and hormone treatments. Her nurses blotted drool from her mouth and dried muccus from her nose and eyes and stood back to let him approach. I've told them, she said, not to stop anything you do. The doors are locked. This is the way these things happen. These probabilities cannot be fixed. "I'm afraid you have me mistaken for someone else," I said, trying not to gag when I spoke. She sighed. Then you are not the assassin from the Pope. I had hoped my guards had been mistaken. The probability seemed likely they had killed the courier rather than the assassin. It's nothing personal. "Just business?" I asked her. My business, she said. Yes. Please know I don't begrudge your being alive... Are you... armed? Her voice betrayed a small sense of hope. "Not here," I confessed. It seemed improbable. I did the calculations this morning. May I get you a seat. One apppeared, a servant scuttled back into hiding. The nurses turned and left the room. No, really, sit. I did.
posted by RR at 5:38 AM

But that's the tree. It's what you make of it. If I couldn't sleep, I'd dodge the HAB and come down here. Saw a childhood friend once ascend into it, hoping to reach a personal Nirvana; then saw a whole cult of Platonists a few days later. Almost no one goes that far. The Heretical Binah Sisters contemplate the higher planes of reality that may exist beyond the trees apex. The HAB wander the base and contemplate rest. I still don't know what the devotees think, if they think anything at all. Most of us come here to stare into the face of something unknown, the simultaneous possibility to dissolving and ascending, the pure light of heaven, the emptiness of nirvana, the fool's tumble off the edge of creation. When the Abbot was new a few years back, before he became a paranoid old fuck, he used to come round up the practicals and take us out for rampaging nights across the ship. Once, when it was he and Frank and I and someone named George, we sat at the tree's base, half passed out. He told us he thought that the whole world was encased in the trunk of this tree, and the vastness of the world beyond was what we thought of as god. But that that whole world was also encased in its own tree, and so on. "It's trees all the way up." He cracked himself up and retired to his quarter. I don't know what made me think of it, but it was the last time I'd seen the abbot at the tree until that moment.
posted by RR at 5:09 AM

My head is splitting when we decide to pull back up, out of Dead House and return to Shaolin. The trip back drives me to puking into a toilet on the poor pilgrims side of guest services. Mother Happenstance gives me three drops of something green and flavorless mixed into cheap vodka and that settles me down long enough to sleep off the rendezvous. There's not much to be said for zombies, but they're a reliable good time, especially when it's business. Today it was business. The room the devotees move me to this week is colder... almost too much. I almost leave a blanket out for the HAB, but I figure that might screw up our relationship.
posted by RR at 7:03 PM