Even half full impressed Duke Cochran. If I were one of Ngunda’s public, he told himself, I’d have gone home—or stayed home—and watched it on TV. But obviously ten or twelve thousand hadn’t felt that way.
The great majority of bomb threats were fakes. Most were examples of the so-called “two-bit sabotage” that had become common, producing gross confusion and delay for no more than the cost of a pay-phone call. And if enough people went home, an arena wouldn’t earn out the cost of putting on the event and cleaning up afterward. Enough of that, and arenas thought twice about handling events offensive to activists or even political parties.
Like most people, Cochran was in favor of the new law making terrorism and armed insurrection capital offenses, but they didn’t apply to two-bit terrorism. So now most public phones required identity cards. Anonymous telephone and Web threats were harder and harder to get away with.
Shortly the flow of people thinned to a trickle. He wondered if any had managed to smuggle in a weapon of some sort. Security scanners were manned at every entrance, capable of picking up anything including fiber glass pens. Their computers analyzed all of it, instantly and unobtrusively. A plastic grenade might look like a pocket flask; a ceramic, one-shot pistol could resemble a key case; a bag of explosive could be swallowed, and detonated by what appeared to be a hearing aid. Anything that suggested the size, shape, or composition of a large catalog of unacceptable objects brought a quick followup by guards with drawn guns.
But human beings were resourceful. One never knew.
Now the program participants entered, and took their seats on the speakers’ platform. There were four of them—four plus a pianist and her instrument. Cochran assumed the piano, too, had been thoroughly scanned.
Among the four speakers, Ngunda Aran stood out. And not, it seemed to Cochran, because he was black. He radiated charisma—a charisma boosted, Cochran suspected, by the energy of the thousands of admirers in the arena.
Cochran himself sat in the second row, in the press section. In a section of the first row were about a dozen young people: college students with a role in the program. A microphone stood on the floor in front of them.
On the platform, a woman got to her feet and approached the podium—Sacramento’s mayor. Adjusting the microphone to her height, she cleared her throat softly to alert the crowd, then spoke. As introductions went, it was brief and intelligent. She introduced herself, then Ngunda, then the guest singer, and finally the chairman of the Philosophy Department at Cal State Sacramento. Probably, Cochran thought, the professor considered himself an Ngunda scholar.
He kept his comments short, too. Then Ngunda himself stepped to the podium.
“Good evening,” he said. “I am Ngunda Aran. Thank you for your patience during the bomb search.” He turned, acknowledged the mayor and professor, then continued: “This evening I will focus on karma.”
The voice is part of it, Cochran thought. Deep and rich.
“Karma is neither punishment nor retribution, though it can be perceived as such. It is a force that helps us learn. And one of the lessons—just one of them—that humans learn from karma is that acts balance out over time.”
Cochran wasn’t impressed with Ngunda’s opening. He glanced around at the crowd. Most seemed to be paying close attention. But then, if they weren’t interested, they wouldn’t be there.
“The term karma is often applied to two different, though similar, sorts of phenomena. The most important is the karmic nexus, formed by killing someone, crippling or wrongly imprisoning them, brainwashing them, or in some way effectively blocking their chosen course of life.
“But even rudeness is sometimes spoken of as karmic, and this can be confusing. The sorts of unpleasant acts we perform many times in every life do not create a karmic nexus. If they did, each life would be a complex maze of between-life agreements with hundreds of people, for prearranged opportunities to balance and extinguish karma. The scheduling problems and compliances would be impossible. So I do not use the term karma for anything that does not create a nexus, a specific karmic note payable to the bearer sooner or later.”