The Orion Protocol (12 page)

PART

III

We often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.

—President Ronald Reagan
United Nations General Assembly
September 1987

19

1973/Sinus Medii/the Moon

Setting up the last of the seismic sensors, they were unprepared for that first moment when the Earth rose up into view above the cratered lunar surface, achingly blue and gibbous in the pitch-black sky. Commander Jake Deaver dropped the hammer he’d been using and stared.

“Good God Almighty . . .”

The installed sensors registered the tool’s impact like a mini-moonquake.

“Commander? Uh, we failed to copy. Over.”

But Jake had stopped hearing the mission director at Johnson Space herding them through the choreography of their science schedule, stopped doing anything at all beyond just standing there, bearing witness to Earthrise.

He could feel his heart beating in his throat and hear the sound of his lungs inhaling and expelling the monitored mix of breathable bottled air. His eyes welled up, but he couldn’t wipe them clear.

“Commander?”

Blinking rapidly, Deaver decided he needed to see the world just as it was and lifted the gold visor on his helmet.

“Houston, we have Earthrise . . .”

“Copy that. Commander? Check your visor. Over.”

“Augie?” Jake pointed a pressurized glove.

“I got it.” Augie focused a hand-wound eight-millimeter Kodak camera
on the rolling lunar horizon just as it completed the full revelation of their home world.

“Commander? We show your visor in the up position. Over?”

Jake purposely ignored the transmission and allowed himself a good look around: unfiltered, the colors on the lunar surface were intense. What had only been dark shadows inside several surrounding craters were now plainly seen as pools of deep violet, and as he looked around he noticed a faint dusting, like indigo snow, on the worn-down lunar hills.

“Uh, Houston? Repeat the question. Over.”

“Commander? Check your visor. Do you copy? Over.”

Looking down, Deaver noticed how his own shadow was not black, as it would have been on Earth, but a curious rainbow of color, eerie and magical. The shifting spectrum of shades reflecting and refracting all around him made the moonscape intoxicating and surreal.

“Jake?”

“Visor check, copy that.”

Whatever happens, it was worth it,
Deaver thought, pulling the gold faceplate back into position, thrill-drunk as the Dog Star, Sirius, winked up over the horizon, trailing Mother Earth on a short leash.

“This is amazing . . . awesome . . .”

Something caught Jake’s eye and he plunged his gloved hand down into a mound of what looked like lavender beach glass heaped at his feet and extracted a blade-shaped indigo shard. He called over to his partner.

“Augie . . . I think you want to get this.”

Standing under the hard black sky, Deaver lifted the shard up in both hands like an ancient Egyptian priest making an offering to Ra, the sun god of the Followers of Horus. He seemed transfixed with awe.

“Podnah . . .” Augie panned the windup Kodak. Gold threads in the Apollo mission patch on Deaver’s shoulder flashed in the sun, the embroidery depicting the three belt stars of Orion. He held the glass shard very still.

“Can you see?”

“God, yes. Look at that . . .”

Augie zoomed in and Jake presented various angles on the indigo silica to the lens, but not to the billions back home. Like so much about
America’s last mission to the Moon, this film footage was destined to remain an Official State Secret until “the appropriate time,” however that would be determined.

The lunar shard would be brought back and preserved, then taken out and digitally photographed when that technology was developed in the ‘90’s and then secreted away again, in the most highly classified domain of the U.S. National Archives.

But Deaver and Blake would remember that moment of Earthrise at Medii the rest of their lives. Well into the twenty-first century, Jake in particular would return to it in dreams, and even fully awake, he’d find himself going back, imagining himself there and thinking about it, whether he wanted to or not.

20

February 1/Boulder, Colorado

Thinking
.

Inside Naropa Institute’s colorful Dharmadhatu Temple, former Apollo Commander Jake Deaver was sitting cross-legged on a Zabuton pillow, surrounded by fellow Buddhist students and trying desperately not to nod off.

Thinking
.

He shifted his knees and brought his wandering mind back to his out-breath.

Jake Deaver was long retired from NASA and the military and well into a third career as a teacher at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His short-cropped hair was textured with gray. The face it framed was lined and well worn, like the visage of some forgotten Roman general cast in silver coin and rescued from the Aegean by treasure hunters.

In repose, he might have been considered flat-out handsome, even at this distance from a glory-drenched youth. But Deaver’s lopsided smile, when it surfaced, played against that, revealing a fundamental lack of vanity. At least in regard to his looks.

Espresso
, he thought, almost smelling it, like the faint odor of a skunk wandering down from the hills outside Boulder.
My kingdom for a double espresso.

Thinking
.

He labeled this mental digression and returned his attention to his breath.

At one end of the high-ceilinged meditation hall, the Kharmapa, a visiting lama and lineage holder of the Khargyu School of Tibetan Buddhism, sat in meditation among the brightly robed monks of his order, a Vajrayana sect long exiled into northern India by the Chinese Army.

Jake became momentarily aware of the colored silk banners, Tibetan prayer flags, and traditional thangka paintings hung from red-and-gold-enameled beams, and of the presence of His Holiness, the reincarnated Khargyu master’s proper appellation.

Thinking
.

Deaver refocused on his breath and struggled to ignore the tingling sensations as his limbs began falling excruciatingly asleep.

It was his knees. An awkward jet-training parachute jump in ’66 at Wright-Patterson AFB was the primary suspect, an event so far in the past it might as well have been from another life.

Physical discomfort aside, Tibetan Shamata sitting practice was especially difficult because of the tendency of people to get bored out of their skulls, which meant their minds would constantly be wandering off into memories, feelings, daydreams, and every imaginable fantasy.

The trick, as taught by Rinpoche, Jake’s meditation instructor, was to mentally label whatever came up during sitting practice as
thinking
. Then, without judgment, to gently redirect your attention back to that ineffable human activity that was always occurring in the present: your own autonomic breath.

This was intended to help one rediscover the subtle, ordinary, but powerful state of
being present
or in the
now
. To see how thoughts arise out of nothing, manifest in living color, then return to nothingness. It also created the opportunity for the Shamata practitioner to recognize the repeating patterns of ego expressed in the human mind’s machinations, and see a lot of embarrassing shit about one’s self without jumping up and running off screaming—hopefully. And for Jake Deaver, at this point in his life, that was truly the ongoing challenge: consciousness . . . the final frontier.

Thinking
.

He felt firm feminine hands on his back and neck that he recognized as belonging to Maeera, a dancer from New York and a Dharmadhatu meditation instructor. Her strong deft fingers pushed and pulled on
him, effecting small but precise adjustments in Jake’s posture before moving on to help others.

Maeera would later be teased that her alignment of Jake’s lean athletic body and all-too-military spine had just been an excuse to lay hands on the astronaut. The Buddhist community, or Sangha, was spiritual and disciplined but not at all prudish; the lamas themselves seeming to be unimpressed with the notion of celibacy. And Deaver was no stranger to gossip.

Thinking
.

A Tibetan brass-bowl gong sounded twice, the ring-off reverberating as designated monks and students got up to lead walking meditation. Jake stood up on pins and needles, utterly unable to feel his feet, and made himself move. Limping along in silly agony, he shuffled into a long line filing around the room and passed the raised platform of His Holiness, the Kharmapa.

At the end of the hall, tapping the shoulder of a hosting American student with his ornate ceremonial fan, the Khargyu lineage holder pointed in Jake’s direction down the approaching line. The
tulku
’s mischievous eyes wrinkled, his voice raspy from hours of song-chant, which, for the visiting monks, had begun long before dawn.

“Moon Man,” the Kharmapa said in Tibetan, and waited as the flustered suit-and-tie Buddhist searched his modest Tibetan vocabulary.

“Ah! Moon Man! Yes.” The student laughed, working it out, and then froze for a moment, unsure if laughing was appropriate.

But the high lama simply sat in his traditional hat and robe, twinkling happily, and none of the attendant monks offered a reproving look.

By the time Jake had shuffled around in front of the Kharmapa, some feeling had returned to his extremities; at least he would probably not fall down.

“Your Holiness.” Deaver bowed slightly, his hands together.

“Moon Man.” The Kharmapa bowed back, speaking hoarsely in English.

His smile beamed beatifically, as if he was recognizing a saint or a long-lost relative from another life. His Holiness then nodded his closely shaved head, and with sly piercing black eyes he blessed Jake and
then gestured for him to come nearer. It was both an invitation and a royal command.

Deaver approached, understandably wary of those extremely intelligent-looking eyes. But the Buddhist master simply radiated unaffected compassion. And then leaning forward and touching foreheads with Jake, he whispered into his ear.

“Moon Man. Time to take another walk.”

It was as if Time had somehow stopped. The words had both literal and metaphoric meaning, but Deaver was experiencing something more: a vivid super-string of unfolding chaotic images mixed with waves of emotion that resonated through him, uncensored and charged with an indescribable oracular power. It was quick, quasi-psychedelic, and it left Jake speechless.

Time to take another walk.

Managing to mumble an awkward thank-you to His Holiness, he rejoined the rest of the practitioners for walking meditation in a state of turmoil.

Time to take another walk.

What the hell had just happened? It was as if the Vajrayana master had given him a brief inchoate glimpse of multidimensional Reality, tearing open the seemingly seamless fabric of space/time and laying the illusion of the senses bare for only a fraction of a moment.

But that had been quite enough. Whatever hard-won peace Jake had acquired through years of sitting practice and other devotions now seemed absurdly delusional: just another ripe field of play for spiritual materialism. The ego’s pride in the acquisition of skills or accumulation of spiritual experiences was a classic pothole on the path of dharma.

Seeing with stark clarity, in that instant, how this phenomenon of ego had manifested in himself was both liberating and deeply embarrassing.

Chagrined awake
, he thought.

He felt ungrounded now and almost comically sorry for himself. He wanted to go, just get the hell out of there. Or rush back and pepper the Kharmapa with questions.

What the hell just happened
there? Was he supposed to do something or “get” something? Was there a Tibetan name for it, what he just experienced there? And what exactly was that supposed to mean: “Time to take another walk”?

But then the bowl gong sounded the end to walking meditation and the Sangha members drifted back again to their
zafu
pads. Unpersuaded by any impulse to do anything else, Deaver took his spot among the others inside the crowded Buddhist temple, adjusting his legs under the Zabuton pillow.

Then, with a practiced effort, he resumed the three-thousand-year-old Tibetan discipline of following his own breath.

Thinking . . . thinking . . . thinking . . .