THE HUNDRED YEAR MAN

Chapter 5

Frakas kept a wary eye out when wandering the halls of the Andredi. The ex-humans in his employ were still acclimating to their latest incarnation as lizard men. He felt certain once the shock had subsided, they'd thank him. Until then, he carried a laser pulse rifle adjusted to do just enough damage to get them to back off without burning a hole clear through them and the mother ship's inner walls, as well.  

The hall was suspiciously empty.  

The creaking bones of the mother ship could be explained away as nothing more than her own muscles straining to pull her joints back into alignment after Frakas's little makeover. He had taken to resetting her bones in hex patterns, pentagrams, and mandalas throughout the ship.  

The passageways between rooms now were all hex signs of his making, inspired by the classics, of course, with a few improvements. The twelve-petaled rosettes, which the Pennsylvania Dutch used for good luck, for the twelve months of the year, along with the triple star, also used for good luck, were Frakas's favorites, each enhanced with countless minor modifications to dress them up, according to the dictates of his own unconscious.  

But the Asian use of the mandala as a schematized representation of the cosmos, and the Jungian use of the mandala as a symbol representing the effort to reunify the self, were the applications that interested him most.  

And that much was clear by his choice of bone-adjustments on the pod ship Andredi. He hoped they would impart a calm and order to the lothra's minds as they did to his; help them to center more completely within their new bodies; help them, moreover, align mind, body, and spirit in a superior fashion, all owing to the greater alignment of mystical and earthly forces one was capable of in the presence of the now numberless mandala.  

How he wished he'd entertained Draxor's mystical temperament better when he had his mind to pick, not just a bunch of stale old e-books.  

But one of those e-books was worth considering. The one that stated, "The branch of Tibetan Buddhism known as Vajrayana Buddhism used the sand painting of mandalas to focus attention of aspirants and adepts, as a spiritual teaching tool, for establishing a sacred space, and as an aid to meditation and trance induction. Their symbolic nature can help one to access progressively deeper levels of the unconscious, ultimately assisting the meditator to experience a mystical sense of oneness with the ultimate unity from which the cosmos in all its manifold forms arises."  

And indeed, over the prior months, his mandalas had served to do just that, ever enhancing his ability to concentrate his mind, and that in turn was the gateway to ever more powerful forms of magic.  

Soon, with sheer, unclouded belief, and the rational mind pushed out of the way, he would be able to snatch anything out of the divine ground he desired, out of the void as it was understood by the Buddhists. The spiritual matter that gave birth to the cosmos as a perpetual arising from some holographic field that could project and sustain any amount of parallel universes within its inexhaustible substrate would soon yield all its secrets to him.  

Even as they calmed his over-excited subjects, the mandalas adorning the cavernous chambers of the pod ship Andredi granted him access to deeper quadrants of his psyche and soul, and that of the cosmos's psyche and soul, as well.  

But at this current moment, they also concealed the whereabouts of a chameleon lizard-man who was stalking him, marking him for death. He had trained himself to dart out of the corners of Frakas's eyes from one hex design to another, taking up position as one more line in the overall pattern that looked like it belonged there. Some former mathematician maybe, or a field officer with a keen sense of spatial relations, a surveyor by trade perhaps, who was now applying his "gift" to testing the play in Frakas's steely nerves. The Cambrian-like explosion of life aboard ship had broadened the genetic diversity beyond anything Frakas had consciously intended. In this one case, at least, that was a good thing.