The Second Coming by John Dalmas

“There are, we know, numerous people who’d like to see Dove dead, but Lor Lu insists that at present, the threat is less severe than it has been. At any rate, my job does not include taking things for granted. I’ll continue to take such precautions as I can get Dove to agree to.”

That ended the briefing. Lee left not at all reassured, though most of the staff seemed cheerful about it.

* * *

It was over dessert that evening that Lee brought up the subject with Ben, while the girls listened. “It frightens me,” she finished. “With so many lunatics wanting him killed, I’m really afraid for him.”

It was Raquel who answered. “Everyone dies sometime, Mom, but no one will kill Dove till he’s ready. The Tao won’t let them.”

Ben cocked an eyebrow at her. “Whatever became of choice? The assassin’s choice, I mean.”

Raquel shook her head, while Lee stared at her husband. “People can choose to try,” Raquel said, “but something goes wrong. Because someone else chooses to stop them.”

“Sure, Dad,” Becca added nonchalantly. “It’s the usual between-lives agreement thing, but with more backups, and stronger commitments. It’s not all right for a messiah to be killed before his time.”

Ben shook his head. “You guys are making too much of between-lives agreements. They’re important all right, but a lot more things are done without between-lives agreements. And as often as not, between-lives agreements get abrogated by the people involved anyway. This-world choices get in the way.”

“Just a minute!” Lee said. “Is this something from school? Something you discussed in class?”

“No, Mom,” Becca answered. “It just follows from the Michael teaching, the books. Even our disagreeing, because Dad’s right, but so am I. And so is Raquel. There are lots of possibilities, and this just isn’t a very predictable world.”

The exchange shook Lee, enough that she totally overlooked Becca’s improbable maturity. She’d known her husband and daughters had strange ideas, but this? She waited for the girls to leave the table, then led Ben into the kitchen, closing the door behind them. They sat down at the dinette table.

“Ben, I— It spooks me that you—the girls and you—have such strange ideas. I mean, ‘between-lives agreements’? And some ‘Tao’ protects Ngunda from assassins?”

“Those ideas aren’t so strange, hon. You’ve been exposed to them all your life, just differently phrased. You’ve heard ‘it was meant to be’; or ‘a match made in heaven.’ ” He gestured the quotation marks. “That sort of thing. They’re just oblique ways of talking about between-lives agreements. And if we call the Tao ‘God,’ then Christians have believed for two thousand years that the Tao can protect people. The amount of time spent praying, the tons of candles burned . . .”

“All right. I admit that. But it makes no sense!”

“Lots of things don’t, sweetheart. Your parents said it made no sense for you to marry me. Your mother told me flat out that you should have stuck it out with Mark—whose dad, she pointed out, is a multimillionaire.” He paused. “To her that was the last word, the decisive factor. It made perfect sense.”

Lee took a quavering breath. Mark the Asshole. Comparing him with Ben was ludicrous. What would the girls be like if she hadn’t left him?

“And Lor Lu—what he said about the man who was shot and the man who shot him . . . How does he know those things? Or was he speculating from the evidence?”

“You’d have to ask him about that.”

She didn’t say anything more for half a minute, remembering what Dove had told her about bodhisatvas. “Ben,” she said quietly, “talk to me more about Millennium’s beliefs. Between-life agreements and bodhisatvas—things like that. Maybe I’d feel better about them if I knew more.”

“Sure, sweetheart,” he said quietly, and began.

* * *

At the end of her hour with the computer, Raquel came into the living room. “Your turn,” she said to her sister, then gesturing toward the kitchen, lowered her voice. “Are they still talking in there?”

Becca closed her book. “Yep.”

“What about?”

“Dad’s making Mom feel better. About what we talked about at dinner: between-life agreements and stuff like that.”

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