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Part 2
Page 17
Kanzeon Bosatsu smiled.
"Hail and well met, your highness."
"Indeed?" Kougaiji said coolly. "I'm not entirely
sure."
"My; do I take this to mean you find my presence
a bad omen?"
"Is it ever not?"
The smile took on a tart quality.
Generally gods had no qualms with obtuse mystic
riddles in communicating with mortals, but all tricks grew old if played
enough. Kanzeon Bosatsu knew it. The king was becoming something of a chore
to talk to these centuries.
"You'll tell me to stop seeing her, I suppose,"
Kougaiji said bluntly.
"Actually, no."
"No?"
"Quite the opposite, in fact."
He hesitated at that.
For hir part, se seemed to notice it and opted to
elaborate a little. "From what we've seen so far, you don't seem to be
doing her any actual harm," se said. "So, do carry on."
"You didn't come here to give me your approval."
"It comes attached with a warning, as always."
Ah. That was a bit more like it.
Se continued, seeing his attention on hir more focused
now. "It wouldn't do well to get too involved in her development.
I'm sure I don't have to get into the reasons why, do I? Someone like you
should know better. Your life-mate even said it, didn't he? Mortal lives
are transient and end in a heartbeat. For you, it's a small pain, but what
do you do to the one subject to your attention?"
"I do not connect myself arbitrarily."
"Naturally. Were your intentions impure or insincere,
I'd have stepped in sooner."
Kougaiji studied hir reprovingly. "Then why step
in at all?"
"She is not your best friend, Kougaiji."
The King of Demons said nothing.
Kanzeon Bosatsu shifted the weight on hir legs,
arms crossed over a too-revealing top. "Don't think you fool anyone, your
highness. You want to help her because you want to help Sanzo, but Shujuan's
no more Sanzo than Sanzo was Konzen. You know it's true."
"...Why is she even here?"
"She's in the lifestream, of course."
"I know that. I mean why. For any of them.
They earned their ascension."
"No, Kougaiji, they didn't."
Something flared in the king's eyes.
"What do you mean?" he demanded, baring his teeth
before he even realized the anger starting to build. "They put more on
the line than anyone should ever have to in your name. We were all rescued
from certain destruction thanks to their actions! They saved the
world!"
"At the cost of the lives of thousands."
"That doesn't--"
But it did.
"Mortal life is transient and ends in a heartbeat,"
the goddess said again. "It's a game of chess with only so many turns to
make, and when it's over, it's over. And then karma makes a tally and you
get to go at it from scratch all over again."
"Don't explain life to me," he muttered coldly.
"In that flicker of a life, Sanzo did as much evil
as he did good. He did not ascend or descend in his samsara to any significant
degree at all."
"Whose definition of evil?"
"None but karma, ineffable and infallible, your
majesty." Se spread hir hands. "And he's been going through his dharmic
cycle for over four hundred years, just the same as the others. He's lived
lives you've never touched and can never no matter how much you prod that
girl's brain. It's remarkable you've gotten as much resonance of Sanzo
out of her as you have, but then, she's closer to him than some of the
others have been. You know, surely, that it's only rarely a life incarnates
in full the soul it was before. More often other circumstances prevent
the person from developing into the same creature they were in the past.
Which is a survival trait, usually."
Red lips twisted a smirk, and se actually looked
away from Kougaiji, staring off at the unblinking city lights. "But Shujuan,
she's close to Sanzo. Not so much to Konzen, but there's still similarities
there. She's the closest match in a while. Shuuya was way off the mark,
got caught up with basketball and a stupid crush. Alden blew his damn hand
off on a firecracker 'cause he was an idiot. Oro never went to school because
he was busy at home taking care of his younger siblings all the time, got
blamed for the death of two of them. Sani kept climbing trees and falling
out of them to see how far he could go and still survive when he hit. Finlay
had these alcoholics for parents. Sam. Sam giggled a lot..."
It seeped in slowly, a chill going down like someone
had slipped ice down the king's neck, listening to the goddess as she went
on about these unheard lives.
"Why are you only talking about children?" he whispered.
Se stopped, turned to smile with dark approval at
him.
"Well," se said, lowering a hand from hir chin,
"you're faster on the uptake than you used to be, highness."
And then the smile vanished, so sharply and so finally,
so fake to begin with that it was glad to be rid of the pretense.
"Something is wrong," said Kanzeon Bosatsu. "I can't
say what and I can't say how, but something is wrong with her. She keeps
dying. Shujuan is the longest any incarnate of Konzen has lasted in about
two hundred years."
"Have you traced the source?" Kougaiji asked.
The goddess shook hir head. "It's some force, but
I don't know the cause of it. This isn't an echo of anything he did as
Sanzo. Karma's at play, we can tell that much, but the exact movement is
unknown to us. Something is warping the way karma affects him, and it's
killing him. Shot, or gotten sick, or starved to death or raped and pushed
to suicide or any number of things. There's no pattern. There's
no someone with an agenda. Every time it looks like nothing but one incredibly
well-timed coincidence."
"Get enough coincidence together," Kougaiji said
quietly, "and you get 'fate.'"
"There is no fate."
"I realize this."
"What there is," Kanzeon persisted, "is magnetism.
And that's come to be a worrying thing too. There's no denying to you
the link between Konzen and those other three, but none of us were really
prepared to find how deep it runs."
"Good grief. They always meet?"
"No. No, they don't, you see, because Konzen keeps
getting taken out of the picture. You know well enough how one crucial
variable can screw up an equation. Sometimes he comes in contact with one,
or two, or all three of them early on in life, but for how his cycle is
upset, the others get screwed too. Tenpou and Kenren most always tend to
find each other, but you know? They almost always tend to kill each other
by the end too. Konzen's a very necessary third wheel and they don't even
realize it. Of course they can't. Goku? Goku can't even live without
Konzen, not as an actual living, breathing creature. I'm surprised he lasted
a decade before Shujuan found him."
Se leaned against the railing and looked up, and
he followed hir gaze. There were very few stars to be seen up there, under
the smog haze. The moon itself was dimmed out. And no one in the city would
have noticed, because they'd never have seen the moon any different.
"Konzen dies prematurely," se said, projecting out
this scenario for her listener's benefit. "That then fails to trigger two-dozen
events that link one to two and A to B. He leaves a hole in the lives of
others, and suddenly nothing works the way it should. So they die
before they're supposed to, or long after, and by the time Konzen's resurfaced,
nothing matches. The last time Goku found him, he was three years old and
Goku was a grandfather. Kenren and Tenpou ended up on opposite ends of
the earth when they should have been next-door neighbors. They all
died completely - fucking - alone and there was nothing to be done for
it at all. Everything just simply broke."
Se wasn't speaking as the Merciful Goddess now.
This wasn't a ruler of Heaven telling Kougaiji all of this while hir voice
started to strain ever so slightly. This was the aunt who had watched hir
nephew die and had had to watch it again and again and been able to do
nothing. This was the once-relative to Kougaiji's once-friend.
And then se cleared hir throat and it was gone again.
"The link," se reiterated. "Because they are inexorably
drawn to each other, it creates a reaction. Whether they want it or not,
whether they realize it or not. Tell me," se prodded suddenly, shifting
hir tone, "you've become quite the learned man over the years. Are you
familiar with the equation 'E = mc²'?"
Kougaiji couldn't help the sigh, after all that
build-up. "Madam," he said, even knowing the term wasn't a precise fit,
"everyone knows E = mc². It's been popularized so enthusiastically
that not knowing it would cause some comment."
"I meant well enough to explain it, dear."
"Naturally, but why--?"
"Well?"
And then he really sighed, but did as requested.
"It's nothing. It's an illustration of the relationship between matter
and energy if one were converted to the other. Say hypothetically you had
one kilogram of water, then in that water would be one hundred and eleven
grams of hydrogen. That matter accelerated to the speed of light, rather
one hundred and eleven multiplied by three hundred thousand squared would
equal--"
"The point, honey."
"--A lot of energy," he finished lamely. "Einstein
expanded from the relationship to look at the amount of energy released
during nuclear reactions, where a small percent of the mass is lost. Single
atoms colliding and fusing release millions of joules of energy."
Kanzeon Bosatsu flourished hir hands. "It's that
gravity," se stressed. "They have it between them, though they don't see
it. It took us long enough to spot it, for how their lives tend
to be anyway. Something happens when they find each other. One or two,
the line is dead as a doorstop. Three, we see a flicker. All four of them
in one place, and there's a spark. Followed by an explosion."
"Figuratively, I imagine you mean," the king clarified.
"And literally, on a few occasions."
"Am I to understand this is your concern, then?
The potential for these four kids to follow your E pattern?"
Se tilted hir head at him. "It's not a potential.
The trend is well-set; it's only a matter of when. There's a lot of charge
powder set to this one. This is the first time in a long time that they've
all been so close in age, and bonded so closely. After all, the tighter
the fusion, the more pain that will follow when it finally breaks. Because
you forgot one thing."
"Did I?"
"E = mc² describes two processes. The fusion
of atomic particles, and their breaking apart. When she finally does die,
how are they going to deal with it? Or maybe the explosion comes first,
in which case, what could she do about it? What could be in her power to
do?"
"What are you asking of me?" said the Youkai King,
pale eyes darkened off. "To protect her?"
"To guard her. There's a difference." It was a painful
little smile that graced hir face then, the knowledge that se was put to
asking this because it wasn't something se could do hirself. "Watch and
see. Maybe sort out something we can't from our end. You were planning
to keep in contact with her for some time anyway, weren't you?"
"I can't be here forever."
"If it happens, it will be soon."
"How are you sure?"
"Because time is against us, highness."
The wind picked up. Or rather, the wind was starting
to return.
Out in the distance, the lights of Beijing began
to twinkle because the stars couldn't.
Somewhere out there, the one girl he'd ever found
in this city without those polluted city eyes was probably sleeping, and
dreaming things of no consequence, and trying to lead a life just the same
way. He'd felt a bit guilty throwing her past at her before. If only he
could have phrased it more a warning than a promise.
"I'll guard her," he said to the goddess. "And watch
her."
"You make a better knight than a king, Kougaiji,"
Kanzeon remarked appreciatively, and this time it was a genuine optimism
that pulled hir mouth into a smile. "We'll keep in touch.
"Incidentally," se added, as the bells started ringing
from a place not here, "were you considering dying any time soon?"
"Wasn't planning on it."
"Ah. Just curious."
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