The metallic silver uniform Anya had been wearing had turned to copper red on Hera. Her flaming hair tumbled past her shoulders.
“Most of it was an illusion, Orion,” Hera said to me. “But there was one point of truth in it. You must help me. If you don’t, you will never see your beloved Anya again.”
“What did you mean about the continuum being in danger of disruption?”
“That doesn’t concern you, creature. You are here in this time and place to do my bidding. And don’t think that just because Philip has sent you far from Pella that I can’t reach out and pluck you whenever I choose to.”
“Is Anya in danger?”
“We all are,” she snapped. “But you are in the most danger of all, if you don’t obey me.”
I lowered my eyes. “What must I do?”
“When the time comes I will let you know,” she said haughtily.
“But how—”
She was gone. I was standing alone in the cold night. Far in the distance a wolf bayed at the newly-risen moon.
The more I learned from Ketu about the Way the more I was attracted to it. And repelled, at the same time.
“The key to Nirvana is desirelessness,” he told me over and again. “Give up all desire. Ask for nothing, accept everything.”
The world is an endless round of suffering—that I knew. The Buddha taught that we endure life after life, constantly reborn to go through the whole pain-wracked cycle again, endlessly, unless we learn how to find oblivion.
“Meditate upon these truths,” Ketu instructed me. “See everything around you as Nirvana. See all beings as Buddha. Hear all sounds as sacred mantras.”
I was no good at all at meditation. And much of what seemed perfectly clear and obvious to Ketu was darkly obscure to my mind. The thought of final nothingness, the chance to escape the agony of life, was tempting, I admit. Yet, at the same time, oblivion frightened me. I did not want to cease to exist; I only wanted an end to my suffering.
Ketu would shake his head when I told him this. “The two are inextricably bound together, my friend, intertwined like the strands of a rope. To live is to suffer, to feel pain is to be alive. You cannot end one without ending the other.”
“But I don’t want an end to all sensation,” I confessed to him. “In my heart of hearts I don’t want complete oblivion.”
“Nirvana is not oblivion,” Ketu told me eagerly. “No, no! Nirvana is not a total extinguishing. All that is extinguished is the self-centered life to which the unenlightened cling. The truly real is not extinguished; indeed, only in Nirvana can the truly real be attained.”
I could not understand his abstractions.
“Think of Nirvana as a boundless expansion of your spirit. Through Nirvana you will enter into communion with the entire universe! It is not as if a drop of water is added to the ocean; it is as if all the oceans of the world enter a single drop of water.”
He was completely convinced of it and happy in his conviction. I could not overcome the doubts that assailed me. If I achieved nothingness, I would never see Anya again. Never know her love, her touch. If I found the final oblivion I would never be able to help her, and from all that I had gleaned from Hera, she needed my help desperately. Yet Hera was keeping me from her. How could I break through Hera’s control and—
I realized that I was far, very far, from being without desire.
On his part, Ketu remained fascinated by my claim to remember my earlier lives; at least, parts of some of them. For all I could remember were isolated fragments, a brief moment here, a snatch of a soldier’s song, the great dust clouds of the Mongol Horde on the march, the burning fury of a nuclear reactor running wild.
One sunrise, after another troubled, tossing night of obscure fears and blurred memories, I sniffed the crisp breeze blowing from the northwest as the men prepared their morning meal. We had camped in the open, along the shoulder of the long, wagon-rutted Royal Road in the middle of flat brown scrublands.