Work brought Lee the rest of the way out of herselfa morning of aligning job descriptions with their flow charts, then running them through various trial sequences in her computer. At lunch she was somewhat uncommunicative, but her mind was on the tests, not on the night before. The television crew was still at the Cote, doing interviews, but they weren't impinging upon her.
Shortly after returning to her office, there was a knock at her door. "Yes?" she called.
"It is I. Dove."
The voice itself, and the grammar, would have been enough. "Come in," she said. He had, she supposed, seen rough cuts of yesterday's TV coverage, and was stopping by to comment.
She was mistaken. "Lor Lu went over your progress with me," Ngunda said. "He is unreservedly pleased, and I agree with him. He'd expected excellent results, but hadn't realized how excellent. I thought you'd like to know."
She did. "Thank you," she said. "At the beginning, I was surprised at how positive he was that I was the person for the job. I knew my recommendations were good, but . . ."
"Your references were a relatively small factor in Lor Lu's expectations. He is a bodhisatva, and thus without many of the perceptual barriers typical of humankind. So meeting you and Ben sharpened the vectors for himhis sense of thelet us say the probabilistic spray of results which might transpire should we hire you."
For a moment, Lee felt light-headed. In a general way she'd understood what Ngunda was telling her, but all she found to say was, "Actually he rattled me. He could easily have left with a poor impression, or worse."
Ngunda laughed. "Different beholders, different conclusions."
Different beholders. "What," she asked, "is a bodhisatva? Is that what he meant by 'holy man extraordinary'?"
Ngunda's eyebrows jumped. "Ah! Probably, in a humorous vein. A bodhisatva, as we use the term, is a soul which has graduated from the Earth School, so to speak. It has completed a full curriculum of lessons, of lives and deaths, and of course the between-lives reviews. But it chooses to be reborn anyway, to carry out some task, some project. And having no further karma to deal with, and no necessary lessons still to learn, is more perceptive than other humans. Thus Lor Lu gained a sense of you, simply by putting his attention on you from a distance. Then, by meeting you, his perceptions of the vectors were both strengthened and expanded."
The words washed over her without sticking. She should, she thought, be perturbed by all this weird, New Age credulity, but somehow it didn't seem that terrible. Crazy, yes, but she could deal with itas long as it didn't seriously infect her daughters. That was the bottom line.
"When he returned from Bridgeport," Ngunda continued, "he told me you would be able to examine a complex of situations, see potential problems, and intuitively recognize approaches to their solution."
Lee nodded. She'd never looked at it that way, but it fitted. "Thank you for your courtesy," she said, almost as if dismissing him. "I'm happy things are working out that well."
"You are quite welcome," Ngunda answered, and turning, left.
Bodhisatva! she thought as the door closed behind him. The first time I hear that word from Becca or Raquel, I'll blow my top.