Turnover proved to be high on Samsara when the living finally started to arrive. The Tibetan exiles thrived, but the refugees died faster and so did the tortured. Some died of injuries, others of shock. A few killed themselves, unable to live with the silence, temple bells and slightly-distant kindness of the monks.

But to start with, before Samsara had inhabitants, the dead got shredded into bone-filled fragments, mixed with disassemblers and sprayed over every surface, whether it stuck or not. Later, insects broke mounds of delivered bodies into mulch that got spread thin across the central valley. And then, that done, Niponshi drones hosed mulch onto the bare rock face of the mountainside which trickled down to pool again in the valleys.

Much later, mosses were planted, trees and shrubs, starting their own cycle of growth and corruption, though the bodies kept coming.

The Dalai Lama furnished the faith but the reclusive, obscenely-rich sandrat Lars Arcsen provided the knowledge. Few people knew where he got the skills or the technology, but then few people had ever been out to where Lars lived, surrounded by animals on a private orbital. All Lars did was take what had first been done in the Arc, and do it again, but larger. He was the one who called it all. Everyone else regarded it as a miracle.

Entrance to the Wheel of God wasn’t down through the atmosphere. It was up through a single hole in the shell. Besides the numerous lengths of high-tensile molywire rumoured to span from one side of the wheel to its opposite, there were two reasons for this. The reason given was that entry this way kept the side effects of atmospheric re-entry out of the loop. The real reason was that it allowed the Wheel’s pacifist AI, Tsongkhapa, to screen all incoming refugees for weapons and disease.

‘Wake now,’ said the stewardess and Axl did, into the darkness he was coming to dread. Almost half of his life hadn’t been enough to come to terms with losing his internal backing track and he knew the rest of his life wouldn’t be long enough for him to learn to face being blinded with anything other than gut-churning self pity. That knowledge was almost as sickening as being swallowed by the blackness.

‘Come on, wake up,’ repeated the voice.

Just by listening he knew she was out of reach. Cramps were spreading up his left arm and he guessed she’d just pumped norAdrenaline into his wrist implant to kick him awake. It worked, he was jumpier than a rattlesnake.

‘We’re here.’

‘Where?’ Axl asked.

‘Where you’re going.’ Her answer was bright, accurate and utterly unhelpful. ‘I’m going to get the cabin chief now…’

There was a sudden silence to go with the blackness. So Axl just waited, keeping his thoughts to a bare minimum. Which was pretty easy given the steady thud of blood in his head and a writhing ratking knot in his stomach that gnawed like hunger but was probably fear.

Two-thirds of the human mind is taken up processing sight. And okay, not even Axl knew what was being logic-chunked through his unconscious mind, but his conscious brain knew only too well that it was missing visual input. And since over sixty percent of information stored in the brain got there via sight, his brain was missing it bigtime.

The cabin he was in was almost completely noiseless, Axl realised. Just the low thud of airfilters lazily converting his breath back into oxygen.

‘You feeling better now?’ The voice of the cabin chief was polite, but not that polite. Axl flipped out a hand and grinned when he heard the overgrown toy take a quick step backwards.

‘Maybe not,’ the voice said petulantly. And then there was silence again.

Outside, the Nuncio’s cruiser kept pace with the edge of Samsara, rising slowly towards the wheel while the ship waited for the opening of a steel iris to let it pass into the first of many locks. Coming into its approach, the Boeing’s AI had passed control to Tsongkhapa. Though what took control of the Boeing, moving the cruiser up through the iris, its forward speed exactly matching that of the Wheel’s outer rim, was a subset of a subset, obviously enough. A mere fragment of intelligence.

But still it was running code it knew intimately and the Nuncio’s Boeing hung exactly in the centre of the closing lock: from outside the wheel it would have looked as if the silver, purple and gold vessel was framed by a circle of black.

Below the cruiser the metal iris closed, vents opened as pressure was equalised and then an iris overhead unfurled like the petals of a chrysanthemum folding back into nothing. The elegant cruiser climbed a level and then that iris closed below it. Vents hissing softly as the ceiling overhead began to unfurl. There were a dozen locks, maybe more. Axl didn’t count them, he just heard the hiss of vents, each one louder than the one before as the pressure began to reach atmospheric.

The entry point to the new world was the crater of what could have been a high and unlikely volcano, except for the final steel iris which unfurled to deliver the Nuncio’s cruiser high above lakes and dark oak forests set on the floor of a broad valley.

From the crater, entering shuttles descended the high mountain towards Vajrayana City. The effect—carefully chosen—was as if the craft had merely flown in from another part of the new world.

‘You’ll need this.’ The cabin chief was back again. Manifesting as a cold emptiness in a world of darkness sticky with sparks of neural feedback, like snow burning up the screen of an untuned newsfeed. Axl could hear the toy breathing.

‘Need what?’ Axl asked. He wasn’t enjoying himself.

‘This...'

It was soft and wet, round and sticky like a peeled plum. Axl realised the cabin chief was just waiting for the question and knew too that he wasn’t going to like the answer. But Axl asked it anyway.

‘What is it?’

‘Well,’ the voice was studiedly neutral. ‘How can I… ? But if you tell me whether you prefer to see with your left or right…’ Fingers began wiping crusted blood from below both eye sockets and Axl finally realised what he was holding. He didn’t know whether to laugh or weep.

‘Animal?’ Axl asked.

‘Synthetic. Red Cross standard issue.’

That was worse. Polymer lens and liquid-plastic optic fluid. Primitive self-adhering nerve splice. They worked all right, after a fashion: if you didn’t mind the world in black and white. Rod cells were cheaper to mimic, even when you needed one hundred million of them. The colour-defining cone cells were more expensive.

But that wasn’t the real problem with emergency-issue optics. No, getting them out again was the fuck up. And they were only really good if fitted within seventy-six hours of initial damage.

Axl tried to count off the time from leaving Villa Carlotta in his head and realised he had little idea exactly how long he’d been on the shuttle. That he was actually on the Nuncio’s cruiser he didn’t know at all.

Mind you, clinics on Samsara that could rush grow him two new eyes or enhance his body with integrated armour were likely to range from few to non-existent. And, he’d be lucky if he even found a decent gun. Tsongkhapa might be the most advanced post-Turing AI in existence but as a Buddhist it disliked weapons-relevant technology.

Axl couldn’t fault the logic. Aggression in humans was hardwired. That’s why satori was so difficult… Difficult like sawing off your own maggot-infested leg was difficult. One madman with a blade could gut his family. With a Browning pulse/R he could clear his ‘hood. With a tank he could take out the next ‘burb and with a LockMart X37 the next country. Give the idiot a fission device and he could unmake his planet.