Neon Lotus (11 page)

As they
turned and walked toward the fissure that led out of the cavern, she felt an
intense sadness. She did not want to leave Chenrezi’s presence; she wanted
their conversation to go on endlessly, for his voices were as hypnotic as the
motion of his hands. She felt a tear on her cheek. Wiping it away, she had a
momentary vision of Tara, who was also weeping.

Then Tara
smiled and gave her
a
warm, secret squeeze. “It’s all
right,” she said. “We’ll see him again.”

“I hope so,”
said Marianne.

“What’s
that?” asked Dr. Norbu.

“Nothing. Talking
to myself. You go ahead.”

5.
Map and Mandala

Marianne
slept a deep and dreamless sleep, wrapped up in blankets on the hard floor of
the cave, until she felt a shadow standing over her. A girlish voice said,
“Wake up.”

She opened
her eyes and sat up with a start.

Rainbow Tara
stood waiting, her skin a shade of blue slightly darker than the sky above.
Seeing Marianne awake, she sat down cross-legged on the grass.

Marianne
leapt to her feet in a meadow dotted with wildflowers. She was more terrified
than delighted to see green hills on the horizon. The sky above was deep blue,
cloudless; the sun burned clear and warm, its light forming a shimmering
aureole around the rainbow girl.

“Sit down,”
Tara said, putting a hand on the grass. “Don’t be frightened.”

“Where are
we? When did we leave the cave?”

“We’re still
in the cave. I caught you on your way out of sleep.”

Marianne
sank down slowly, hardly able to believe what her senses told her. It seemed
impossible that this should be a dream. She had never felt more alert.

But when she
stared at Tara, sitting across from her, she knew that they were not in the
world to which she was accustomed.

Tara’s flesh
changed color with every passing instant, as if rich-hued clouds swept below
the surface of her skin, driving rainbows ahead of them. Sometimes, when the
inner lights played at certain angles, Tara seemed to dissolve into a spray of
many colors at once. She never lost her human form: the transformations merely
illuminated it, made it seem like something new.

She wore a
skirt of multicolored doth that left her budding breasts bare. Silk scarves
fluttered about her shoulders. A golden necklace gleamed against her throat.
She wore garlands of flowers in her hair and carried an unearthly blue long-stemmed
lotus in one hand. The earth beneath her was cushioned with wildflowers, yet
she sat upon the delicate blossoms without bending a blade or crushing a petal.

“You’re very
beautiful,” Tara said.

“Me?”
Marianne put a hand to her cheek: it felt warm and real.

“I had
expected . . . well, an old man in a woman’s body.”

Marianne
laughed. “That’s what I feel like sometimes. I have these foul moods.”

“Your hair
is golden.”

“And yours
is—I don’t know what to call it. Prismatic.”

“Do you
remember what it was like to be Tashi Dragon?”

Marianne
tensed. Even dreaming, the question troubled her.

“No,” she
said. “They tell me that when I was born, I had his memories. I even spoke
Tibetan, but I’ve had to relearn it. Reting Norbu taught me everything I know
about Dr. Drogon and his work.” Her fingers dug into the grass. “I’m not Tashi
anymore. Tashi Drogon died. I’m Marianne Strauss. I have a life of my own to
lead. It doesn’t matter who I was. I hate even thinking about it. No one ever
gives me credit for anything I accomplish on my own. If I had studied science
more thoroughly, and had any success in the field, I think it would all be
attributed to Tashi Drogon. As if I couldn’t possibly contribute anything of
value to the world without the mind of a dead genius hidden somewhere inside
me.”

“Don’t you
believe you are his reincarnation?”

“It just
doesn’t matter to me. Or rather—it does, but it shouldn’t. I don’t see why I
can’t help Tibet without his name constantly coming up. Tashi Drogon never
entered this land, did you know that? He never fought for his country. I’m
going to succeed where he failed. I won’t do anything that he might have done.
I can’t let his death rule my life, do you see?”

Tara nodded.
“Clearly.” She narrowed her almond-shaped eyes and flushed bright green from
head to toe while her palms turned pink. “I hear two voices when you speak. One
sounds like an older woman. Your mother?”

Marianne
looked abruptly toward the hills. This Tara, she thought, knew her too well.

“My mother
hated the idea of Tashi Drogon. She hated the interference of strangers like
Reting. She always told me to be my own person, to find myself—but she also
stood in my way when I tried to do it.”

Tara looked
sympathetic.

Marianne
sighed. “She was happy enough when I fought the notion that my identity
belonged to someone else. But she couldn’t understand why I grew up thinking of
Tibet as my true home. She was furious when I preferred my Tibetan friends and
teachers—I had quite a lot of them in Switzerland—to the friends she chose for
me. We fought constantly until I reached an age where I could do what I wished.
Then I moved to Dharamsala. I joined the Youth Congress and the government
enlisted me for other work.” She laughed ironically. “That’s the only time I’ve
been thankful for Tashi Drogon. They must have thought I’d give them secrets
from the old man’s memory. If I’d been just another European girl, they would
never have let me do the things I wanted to do.”

“Which
were?”

“I wanted to
be a warrior in the resistance. A warrior who fought without violence.”

“A soldier?
Because Tashi Drogon was a scientist?”

“You know me
well. Yes, because it was as different a thing from a scientist as I could
imagine.”

Tara smiled.
Marianne found herself staring into Tara’s eyes and seeing herself reflected in
them; in her reflected pupils she could see tiny images of Tara, in whose
tinier pupils she saw still tinier visions of herself, doubling and doubling
again like quicksilver tunnels branching into infinity. She felt as if she were
falling into Tara’s eyes and thus into her own. The blue sky blurred into a
dark streak, the grass fused into a bright green smudge, and she came

awake shivering in the cold cavern,
having rolled some distance from the radiator where she had laid down to sleep.

Somewhere,
in a sunny meadow, Tara was laughing.

Marianne had
slept in her clothes. She pulled on a sweater and walked away from the
sleepers, toward the water’s edge. The lights were turned down low in the cave
but she could see the Khampas sitting near the mouth of the temple, watchful as
ever. She realized that this was probably the safest she would be for as long
as she stayed in Tibet.

How much
time would pass before she saw Dharamsala again, or her mother, or anything of
her old world? Chenrezi’s ornaments, if they still survived, must be scattered
to the corners of Tibet by now. It was a huge country, barren and mountainous
in most of its parts. It might take years to accomplish anything. Tashi Drogon
had labored for decades over his work, and never lived to see its completion.
Was that all she had to look forward to?

But she had
committed herself.

As she
approached the shore, she saw a tiny spark of orange light hanging above the
water near a column of stone. A man stood in the shadows, smoking.

“Jetsun?”
she said.

He looked
around the column, stubbed his cigarette against the rock, and slipped the butt
into his pocket.

“Gyayum
Chenmo,” he said, as if testing the name on his tongue.

“Please
don’t call me that. It’s not my name, it’s a title—and one I don’t even
deserve. I was stuck with it by the exiled State Oracle. Do I look like
anyone’s mother?”

“The mother
of the revolution,” he said. “I imagined an older lady. Plump, dark hair . . .
Tibetan. You aren’t any of those things.”

“Well, the
government has never wanted to be explicit about exactly what body the Gyayum
Chenmo wears. But I thought you knew.”

He shrugged.
“I thought you were Dr. Norbu’s assistant.”

“The nomads,
though—Dhondub’s people—they knew.”

“They have
all the communications equipment they’ve been able to steal. In Mustang, we
only have what we’ve been given. And now the jet . . . gone.”
He shook his head. “It’s a long walk back, you know, and I’m no Sherpa.”

“We’re not
going back,” she said. “No one told you?”

“I heard,
but I’m not coming along. My post is on the border.”

“That’s too
bad,” she said. “I’m sure we could use your help.”

“Oh?”

“Don’t you
think you’d be doing more good inside Tibet than sitting out in that little
base in Mustang? What did you do out there anyway?”

He shrugged.
“Flew in supplies. Played cards. Wrote poetry.”

“Poetry?
About what?”

He laughed,
watching the dark river. “Mountains. Snow. Beautiful women.”

“I didn’t
see any of those at the base,” she said.

He turned
toward her. “There weren’t any there until you came.”

Marianne’s
face grew warm.

“You wonder
why my friends were suddenly eager to fly into Chinese territory?”

“For the
cause,” she said.

He laughed.
“Fortunately, I was the only one skilled enough to do it. They envied me, you
know.”

“They won’t
be so envious when they learn you’re stuck here.”

“They’ll say
I’m fortunate to be stuck with you.” He sighed. “And now you’re going on.”

“You could
come with us, you know.”

“Do you want
me along?”

“I invited
you.”

“Oh, that.”
He grinned. “I thought that was a general invitation. Something Dhondub Ling
asked you to pass on.”

“I think
Chenrezi would want you to come,” she said. “Chenrezi, eh?” He pursed his lips,
nodded. “In that case, maybe I will.”

***

“This,” said
Dhondub Ling, the nomad chieftain, “is our map.”

They had
tramped a few hundred yards upriver from the camp, along a narrow ledge above
the water. He turned his flashlight on the wall of the cave. The wet stones
were painted with a bright wheel, an almost luminous mandala done in the five
colors she had seen on the plains.

“You can see
the missing ornaments here,” he said. “The top of the map is to the north.”

As he raised
his light to illuminate the upper edge of the mandala, Marianne saw that the
entire disk was nipped in the beak of an enormous bird whose wings spread out
of sight across the dark wall. Just below the beak was a golden glyph—a tall
pitcher with an elegant spout and handle.

“The vase of
nectar,” she said. “You think it’s in northern Tibet?”

“This is the
main reason we have for thinking so. Now look to the east.”

She saw a
golden wand, a scepter with two tapering heads.

“The vajra,”
she said.

To the west,
alone at the far left of the wheel, Dhondub’s light showed a red lotus.

Then the
beam tracked to the bottom of the mandala, southward on the map, and Marianne
saw what seemed to be a black ovoid stone speckled with gold.

“The
Wish-Fulfilling Gem,” she said.

“And in the
center, the wheel,” said Dhondub.

This was a
gold disk surrounded by flames, decorated with a spiral.

“What a
strange map,” she said.

“It is more
like a lens held up to a map,” Dhondub said. “Take a closer look, Gyayum—”

“Marianne.”

“Marianne.
I’m sorry.”

He conducted
the light past the edge of the mandala. She saw that the remainder of the wall
was painted in dark pigments that scarcely showed up at all in contrast to the
mandala. It took her a full minute of examining the intricate lines before she
realized that they were more than meaningless patterns. They represented
topography, the contours of mountains, valleys, rivers, and lakes.

“It’s Asia,”
said Dr. Norbu. “The Himalayas here, the Uygur Desert here—”

“But the
mandala—like a lens—is focused on Tibet alone,” said Dhondub.

Moving
closer to the map, Marianne could see that the topography was continuous with
the interior of the mandala; mountains and watercourses had been subtly woven
into the decorative patterns, making the land itself look like the work of an
artist.