Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [143]
“Meaning there are still Bön spirits inhabiting you people?”
“Well, not everyone.”
“But some?”
“Yes, of course. Rudra was often pestered. He could not get rid of one of them. And he had invited them into him so many times, when serving as the oracle, it made him susceptible, you might say. Anyway this one would not leave him. This was one of the reasons he was so irritable in his old age.”
“I never thought he was that bad.” Charlie sighed. “So where is that Bön spirit now, eh? Is Rudra’s soul still having to deal with it in the bardo?”
“Possibly so. We cannot tell from here.”
“He’ll get reborn at some point, presumably.”
“At some point.”
“But so…Are there ceremonies to call spirits into you?”
“Sure. That’s what the oracle does, every time there is a visitation ceremony.”
“Ah ha. So listen, could you then call back the spirit that you exorcised from Joe? Could you explain it was a mistake, and invite him back?”
Drepung paddled on for a while. The silence lingered. Ahead of them Frank was now drifting into the shallows behind a snag.
“Drepung?”
“Yes, Charlie. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Drepung! Don’t give me that one!”
“No, I mean it. In this case, I think I know what you mean. And I have the right figure in mind. The one that was in Joe. A very energetic spirit.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“And I know the right ceremony too.”
“Oh good. Good. Well—let me know what I can do, then?”
“I will. I’ll have to talk to Sucandra about it, but he will help us. I will tell you when we have made the arrangements, and divined the right time for it.”
“The right time for what?” Frank asked, as they had caught up to him, or at least were within earshot. On the water that was often hard to determine.
“The right time to put Joe Quibler in touch with his spirit.”
“Ah ha! It’s always the right time for that, right?”
“To everything its proper moment.”
“Sure. Look—there’s one of the tapirs from the zoo, see there in that bush?”
“No?”
“There, it’s the same color as the leaves. An animal from South America. But I guess dead leaves are the same color everywhere. Anyway, it’s good to see, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. So how are the feral animals doing generally?”
“Okay. It all depends their natural range. Some species have been spotted seven hundred miles from the zoo, and up to thirty latitude lines out of their natural range. You must have heard Anna talking to Nick about this. She’s helping him and his group to make a habitat corridor map, networking all the remaining wildernesses together. It’s a GIS land-use thing.”
“So if we want it, we can have the animals back.”
“Yeah. We can. It would be cool if the president would back the forest and wilderness initiatives coming out of the animal rights community. Brother to Wolves kind of thing, you know.”
Charlie laughed. “He’s got a lot on his plate. I don’t know if he’s got time for that one right now. It’s a hard thing to get his attention these days.”
For Frank this was a new issue, but Charlie had been dealing with it for years, since long before Phil had become president. It simply was not easy to get any time with someone so powerful and busy. Now Charlie could see that Frank also was running into that limitation. Even though Diane was the presidential science advisor, ensconced in the Old Executive Offices and therefore able to walk over whenever called on to discuss things with the president and his people, she still did not see him very often. He was booked by the minute. No matter how sympathetic Andrea and Roy were to the scientists’ cause, there was very little presidential time available to give to meetings with them. On