Dr. Harris paused in the open hatchway. Spread out in front of him were at least two dozen people in red and yellow clothing, drawn up in readiness to extend greetings.
He put his palms together in front of his chest and bowed. In front of him, Mario’s shutter began to whirr. Behind him, faint digitized clicks spilled out of Tav’s phone as he live-tweeted it.
THE KING DROVE HIM UP THE MOUNTAIN IN HIS PERSONAL LAND Rover, Doob riding shotgun in the passenger seat on the left—for Bhutan, as it turned out, was a drive-on-the-left country. Mario sat in the back angling to get both of them in the photo, and Tav sat next to Mario muttering voice memos into his phone. The king apologized for today’s murky weather, which was blocking potentially spectacular views of high mountains all around.
“But I suppose that is a very small matter in the larger scheme of things,” he concluded.
They had stopped at an intersection in the town of Paro to let three boys kick a soccer ball across the road in front of them. Piled up on the road behind them was a small motorcade of lama-packed Toyotas.
“So much joy they take in this simple game,” the king mused. “They know, of course. All of them know about the disaster that is to come. When they are thinking of it, it makes them sad. But at other times, they are as you see them—oblivious.”
The boys got out of their way and the king eased forward into the intersection. The town had a surprisingly Alpine look to it, with deep brown weather-beaten structures of wood built on stone foundations.
“Until a few days ago,” the king went on, “they might have consoled themselves by imagining that they would be the ones chosen.”
“In the Casting of Lots,” Doob said.
“Yes.” The king shot him a keen look. “I was responsible for choosing, you know.” He glanced back at Tav. “That is off the record.”
“No, Your Highness, I did not know that,” Doob said.
“We received guidelines, I suppose you could call them. Saying that it was not a literal casting of lots. The choice is best not left to chance—we must send only the finest candidates. Bhutan has only two places in the Cloud Ark. It would be foolish to waste them on someone unable to represent our people. So, it was a selective process.”
“Most people have come to the same conclusion,” Doob said. “A pool of promising candidates is identified and then the choice is made from among them by some process which might be random—just so no one person carries the entire responsibility.”
“When you are a king you sometimes have such responsibilities whether you want them or not. In this case, though, I was able to involve some of the lamas. There are precedents for such a selection procedure in the way that certain reincarnate lamas are identified—the drawing of lots from an urn is sometimes used.”
Tav couldn’t resist asking from the backseat: “What does the doctrine of reincarnation have to say about the situation we are faced with now?”
The king smiled. “Mr. Prowse, this is only a journey of ten kilometers. I am taking it slow. If we had a road trip ahead of us of ten thousand kilometers—an enjoyable thought—I might be able to impart enough information to you about what reincarnation means to my people that we would be able to have an intelligent conversation about it.”
“Fair enough. Sorry,” Tav said, glancing up from the screen of his phone when his brain detected a pause in the king’s speech. “You have to understand, my job is to communicate with geeks. People who like math. So I was trying to imagine—”
“When seven billion die, and only some thousands remain, where do the seven billion souls go?”
“Yes.”
They turned off what Doob guessed was the main road and onto a fork that wound through a wooded hamlet above the river. This hooked onto a bridge that took them across a fast-running, cold-looking stream, green and milky with rock flour carried down from melting glaciers thousands of meters above their heads. Doob still couldn’t get over the fact that in a little more than a year those glaciers would be gone, the rock beneath them exposed for the first time in millions of years, and no scientist would be there to record it.
“We don’t believe in anything as simple as metempsychosis—the movement of an individual soul from one body to another. That’s not what we mean by reincarnation at all.”
“What do you believe in, then?” Doob asked. Tav had lost interest and was belaboring his phone with his thumbs.