The younger monk spoke briefly into his wrist microphone, and waited for a reply.
“Yes-it peaked at a hundred and twenty. That's five db above the previous record.”
“Send the usual protest to Kennedy or Gagarin Control, whichever it is. On second thoughts, complain to them both. Not that it will make any difference, of course.”
As his eye traced the slowly dissolving vapour trail across the sky, Bodhidharma Mahanayake Thero – eighty-fifth of his name – had a sudden and most un-monkish fantasy. Kalidasa would have had a suitable treatment for space-line operators who thought only of dollars per kilo to orbit… something that probably involved impalement, or metal-shod elephants, or boiling oil.
But life, of course, had been so much simpler, two thousand years ago.
2. The Engineer
His friends, whose numbers dwindled sadly every year, called him Johan. The world, when it remembered him, called him Raja. His full name epitomised five hundred years of history; Johan Oliver de Alwis Sri Rajasinghe.
There had been a time when the tourists visiting the Rock bad sought him out with cameras and recorders, but now a whole generation knew nothing of the days when he was the most familiar face in the solar system. He did not regret his past glory, for it had brought him the gratitude of all mankind. But it had also brought vain regrets for the mistakes he had made – and sorrow for the lives he had squandered, when a little more foresight or patience might have saved them. Of course, it was easy now, in the perspective of history, to see what should have been done to avert the Auckland Crisis, or to assemble the unwilling signatories of the Treaty of Samarkand. To blame himself for the unavoidable errors of the past was folly, yet there were times when his conscience hurt him more than the fading twinges of that old Patagonian bullet.
No-one had believed that his retirement would last so long. “You'll be back within six months,” World President Chu had told him. “Power is addictive.”