The Turning Of The Great Wheel

The High Lama sat on his golden throne and pensively looked out of the window. The snow was beginning its yearly retreat with the onset of summer, and the sunlight glinted on the peaks, but the Lama’s brow was furrowed. The prayer wheels turned outside, and the villagers had sent their compulsory donations of milk and grain and butter up to the monastery, but the news was not good. The High Lama had just met his advisors for the eighth time in five days, and the consensus was the same. Something was going to happen that would change the shape of his world, and change had always been anathema to the High Lamas, from the moment the first monastery had been constructed above this valley three hundred years ago and the villagers had been made to understand that their welfare lay in serving the monks in every way possible.

No, the High Lama didn’t want change. It was coming, though; the omens were unrelenting, the Great Wheel was about to turn. Perhaps the villagers, after all this time, would rebel and refuse to feed and clothe their lords and masters in the monastery. Perhaps the government down in the distant capital would send some functionary with orders to hand over charge of the local administration to him. Perhaps the Bodhisattva in person would rise and tell the High Lama everything he was doing was wrong. Perhaps...

There was a sudden deathly stillness in the courtyard, the hum of voices stilled, and then a chorus of cries of surprise and fear.

The High Lama walked unhurriedly to the window. At this moment, when his fears were undoubtedly coming true, when the Great Wheel was turning and things were to change forever, he managed a preternatural calm. What was destined to happen, would happen.

The monks were gathered in the yard, pointing to the sky and crying out. Above their heads, already below the peaks that towered over the monastery and dropping steadily lower, was the Light. It was orange and purple and green, and spun as it came down, with a faint but high-pitched whine. The High Lama watched it come down and waited for it to stop.

It did not stop.

With a soft but relentless crumple of metal on rock, the thing came down on the ridge next to the monastery wall. A cloud of dust and pulverised rock rose, hiding the ridge from view. When the dust cleared, the orange and purple and green light had gone out and something of dull grey metal, shattered and twisted, lay on the crag.

The first monks on the scene found the Alien. It was crawling slowly out of the wreckage on its belly, its blue overall suit smouldering. The monks put out the fire with handfuls of snow and pulled the Alien to its feet. Then they stepped back and looked at it.

It was small – no more than waist high to a tall man – and clad from neck to the tops of its soft round boots in the thick blue overall suit, the surface of which was charred black in places but not, at any point, burned all the way through. The suit extended to gloves that covered its small hands. Its face and head were encased in a steel-blue helmet, intact but for scorch marks on its surface, and from the middle of the shiny and opaque faceplate of its helmet a short pipe dangled, looking like a tiny corrugated elephant’s trunk.

“Are you hurt?” one of the monks asked finally. The small Alien turned its helmeted head towards him but made no sound. It looked at the shattered remnants of its craft for a moment, and then turned back to the monks. It stepped forward and tilted its head to one side, studying them.

“Are you badly hurt?” asked the monk again. “Do you need help?”

“It doesn’t understand our language, Tsering,” the other monks said. “Let’s take it back to the High Lama. He’s a reincarnation; he will know what to do.”

The High Lama watched them bring the Alien up to the monastery. It looked even stranger, small and blue and bulbous-helmeted, among the crowd of maroon-robed lamas. He stood at his window, watching, and he tried to keep his mind a perfect blank. He could get no help, no guidance from the line of High Lamas before him, nor of the other lamas whose reincarnation he was. The situation was so unprecedented that he could think of nothing.

He met them down in the entrance of the monastery. The Alien stopped when it saw him, and stood perfectly still, its helmeted face tilted up to look at him. The helmet seemed to merge into the top of its blue suit, with no break to show what kind of skin lay underneath. It raised a hand, palm towards itself, its small fingers held together. Watching, the High Lama did the same.

“Welcome,” he said hesitantly. “Are you hurt? Do you need help?”

“The answer,” the Alien said in a clear female voice, “to the first question is no, not badly. The slight injuries that I suffered will heal in a short while. To the second, it is yes; my craft is damaged beyond repair and I require help to return to my world. But first I have a job to do.”

“You speak our language!” the High Lama exclaimed.

“I have learned,” the Alien said. “I could catch your thought patterns. It is not difficult for me to learn languages.”

The High Lama swallowed. “How can we help you return to your world?”

“They will come for me, once I have finished what I came here for. You have to help me fulfil my mission.”

“What is your mission?” asked the High Lama, apprehensively, as the Alien followed him into the monastery.

“To establish contact with your race,” said the Alien. “We have heard that most of your species is violent and aggressive, but you – you here – follow a higher, peaceful moral code. Is that not so?”

“Wait a moment,” said the High Lama. He turned to the nearest monk and whispered in his ear. The monk hurried off to obey orders and stop, by all means necessary, the village people from approaching the wreckage of the Alien’s spacecraft. “In a manner of speaking, you have already contacted us, haven’t you?”

“Yes, but contact implies a lot more,” the Alien said in its beautiful clear female voice, which was beginning to make some of the younger monks shift uncomfortably. “I need to know more about you, and I will need you to tell me what I need to know. Only when that is accomplished will I send the signal that will fetch me home.”

“So be it,” said the High Lama. He bent his head graciously to the Alien. “You will no doubt require...facilities...for freshening up? Food?”

“Thank you,” said the Alien, “but simple conversation will suffice for now. Later I shall communicate my other requirements.” It stopped and studied the gold-plated masks and statuary without comment. “I assume you have questions about me, too?”

The High Lama hesitated. “You will understand that we are an isolated community here,” he said. “We know little about wider things that happen in the world.”

“It does not matter. Once we establish regular contact with you, we will be bringing to you all the knowledge of the universe you wish.”

“You come from a far world, then?”

“Further,” said the Alien, “than you can imagine. The name of my home world will mean nothing to you. Our race is but one among a myriad in the Galaxy.”

“I see,” said the High Lama. He stood politely aside and ushered the Alien through the next door. The monk who had, at the High Lama’s orders, been hiding behind the door stepped forward and broke the Alien’s neck with one blow of his iron staff. The High Lama surveyed the body with satisfaction.

“Take it away and burn it,” he said. “Hide the remains of the thing’s craft, as well. And tell the villagers, on pain of doubling their contribution to the monastery, to forget that they have seen anything today.”

“But,” said a monk, “what happens when its people begin wondering about it and come to rescue it?”

“Its signal has not been sent,” said the High Lama. “Its people will not be coming to fetch it soon. And, later, if ever they do come...”

“Yes, Holiness?”

“We know nothing,” said the High Lama. “We have seen nothing. Nothing at all.”