Neon Lotus (2 page)

But that was
an illusion.

This was
northern India and not Tibet.

And no
Tibetan would ever forget the land that lay on the far side of the Himalayas.

He watched a
group of young travelers disembarking from a bus that looked as if it had
rattled over every road in India before stopping in the dusty square outside
the Nowrojee Supermarket.
INTERFAITH FELLOWSHIP
was written in English on the side of the bus. Religious
students, no doubt, come to visit the spiritual and political—if not
geographic—center of the exiled nation. Since 1960, Dharamsala had attracted
more pilgrims than Lhasa had done in the two thousand years preceding. India
was far more accessible than any part of Tibet, especially now that the
Chinese—wracked by civil wars and too embarrassed to display the ravaged
Tibetan Autonomous Region to tourists—had once again closed the borders.

The
Interfaith Fellows perhaps looked on Dharamsala as a relic, a curiosity. They
would be attracted by the color and vitality of Tibetan Buddhism, by the
mementos of the Last Dalai Lama. There might be some genuine Buddhists among
them who would part from the tour and join a local monastery. There might even
be one who would look at the peaks rising above Dharamsala and feel a sharp
yearning, reminded faintly of a prior life when he or she had lived in Tibet.
Such events were not unknown. In the massacres of 1959 and the years
thereafter, Tibetan souls had been violently flung far and wide, to experience
rebirth in distant lands. Somehow, they always returned.

Tashi
smiled, wondering how many of the Interfaith Fellows would laugh at his
beliefs. He recalled from his days on American campuses that such “interfaith”
groups were mainly Christian fellowships. Reincarnation was a doctrine that had
never received wide Western approval, despite periods of popularity.

All that
might change soon. Very soon. He had done the theoretical work necessary to
revolutionize humanity’s objective understanding of death, although the
practical applications remained undemonstrated. Until the Bardo device was
complete he had elected to keep all of his findings secret. Once the device was
operable the Kashag might well impose an official silence.

Reting Norbu
sneezed, drained what must have been his tenth cup of tea, and stood up. “It’s
time, Tashi.”

They hurried
through the streets until they came to a group of buildings set back among
evergreens in a fold of the hills. Several jeeps raced past them and parked not
far away. Two ministers disembarked and vanished between the buildings. As the
doctors followed, a pair of soldiers appeared and requested their identification.
These soldiers became their escort to the Kashag’s meeting hall.

With the
last Dalai Lama long since passed away, the exiled state of Tibet was now in
the hands of its bureaucrats—and practiced hands they were. Bureaucracy had
been one of the chief arts of old Tibet; like Buddhism it had traveled well.
The government in exile was structured like a set of intricate interlocking
boxes. At the core was the Kashag or Council of Ministers, overseen by its
prime minister, the Silon.

Tashi and Reting
were the only nonministers allowed into the Kashag hall this afternoon.
Oracular disclosures were generally kept in strictest confidence, the Kashag
passing edited reports to the Assembly of Eight—the next larger box in which
the Kashag nestled.

The
ministers sat on cushions along the left side of the room at the right hand of
a life-sized golden image of Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, which
wore a crown of blinking lights. Two cushions were set out for the doctors
against the righthand wall.

When they
were seated, the Silon rose and approached the Dalai Lama. He put his palms
together and touched them to his forehead, lips, and breast, then prostrated
himself completely on the floor before the image. He repeated the grand
prostration twice more. Upon rising the third time, he drew the transcription
slate from a fold of his chuba and inserted it into a slot at the base of the
shrine.

The lights
dimmed but the wall behind the Dalai Lama stayed bright.

“Please
state your name and authorization code,” said the gentle voice of Tenzin
Gyatso, familiar to Tashi from countless recordings of religious teachings
which he had heard all his life.

Tashi saw
the Silon’s silhouette leaning to whisper into the ear of the statue. The wall
flickered and writing appeared upon it.

The Silon
turned to Tashi and Reting. “Yours was the first question submitted, therefore
the first answered. Once you’ve studied it, we must ask you to leave.”

Tashi looked
up at the lines of script. He had some difficulty focusing in the dark. Reting
spoke the words aloud:

“Not a thousand eyes has Chenrezi
,

But a thousand and twenty-three

For watching the six worlds
,

And shining out like beacons

To souls in distress”

Tashi saw
the eyes of the Silon upon him. The ministers read the prophecy and shook their
heads.

“The
prophecies often take the form of riddles,” the Silon said. “Does it mean
anything to you, Dr. Drogon?”

“Silon, with
all respect, I will need time to contemplate this. It may well contain the
answer we seek.”

“Take all
the time you need. If you will commit the prophecy to memory, please? We cannot
allow it to leave this room in any other form.”

Tashi read
the message several times, learning it by heart. He was only slightly
disappointed to find no reference to the scarf blessing he had received.

As he
recited the phrases inwardly a final time, the wall flickered and a second
message appeared. The ministers rose up in alarm at this disruption of protocol.
The Silon stepped close to the shrine and spoke with amusing urgency, as if
scolding an unruly child. The image persisted however, stubbornly defying his
commands.

Tashi
wondered if he should look away but that seemed pointless now. The message was
so brief he had learned it the instant it appeared:

“Gyayum Chenmo
,
the Great Mother
,
is among you
.”

“I must ask
you to leave,” the Silon said. “There appears to be a malfunction in the
slate-reader. Anything you have seen here must be considered strictly confidential.”

“Of course,”
Tashi said, rising and bowing to the Silon and then to the ministers of the
Kashag. “We saw only the first message.”

Lights came
on, the words faded from the wall. Tashi and Reting found guards waiting to
escort them from the complex. When the doctors were on their own again, they
could scarcely wait to discuss what they had seen—not their own message but the
second.

“Did you
read it?” Reting said.

“It seems
like greater nonsense than our own prophecy. There were no women in the Central
Cathedral this morning except the Venerable Tara, and she’s too old to mother a
Dalai Lama.”

“Perhaps
it’s a coded message to which only the Kashag holds the key.”

“Hm,” said
Tashi. “I wish we had the key to our message. I didn’t expect Dorje Drakden to
give a simple solution, but this . . . If anything, our
problem looks more complex than before. Let’s go back to my room; we should
work on this.”

For once
Reting looked genuinely pleased and hopeful. He patted his teacher on the
back. “Let’s pick up something to eat first.”

“What’s
this, Reting? An appetite? I think that scarf must have miraculous powers. And
there’s color in your cheeks!”

Reting
stopped to haggle with a streetside vendor who sold him a carton full of momo
and another of curried goat. When Reting paid for the purchase out of his own
pocket, Tashi crowed with laughter.

“It’s true!”
he cried, “A miracle!”

Their good
spirits lasted into the evening, adding to Tashi’s enthusiasm as he set about
unlocking the prophecy. Intricate it was, but not insoluble. Ecstatic
utterances followed precise patterns, mirroring the whorls of the human mind.
Analysis of these geometries had become a commonplace to Tashi, who had delved
into the region where mysticism and mathematics merged. Illogic ruled the rational
mind; reason could not exist without unreason, any more than clouds could exist
without a sky.

Tashi’s
battered electronic slate contained the programs that had been troubling
him—the ones with which he’d asked the gods’ assistance. Once he solved the
problems on his slate, he would take them to the lab and enter them into the
Bardo computer. He hated working in the lab with so many soldiers about and the
high frequency whine of security systems droning in his ears. Most of the real
work of the last five years had been done in this little room, where he kept up
his guise as a simple mathematician, tutor to some of the ministers’ children,
a figure of no importance to the state.

He called up
the image of a revolving sphere, a bubble which spun as it floated in space. In
the center of the bubble stood a white god with eleven colorful faces, a
thousand arms, and an eye in the palm of each hand. The penultimate head,
bright blue in color, had three eyes.

Tashi
clucked his tongue. “A thousand eyes in Chenrezi’s hands and twenty-three more
in his heads. I wasn’t counting those. We made the wrong assumption from the
start, Reting. We’ll have to recalibrate the scope. That should have quite an
effect.”

The image of
the god dissolved into a screen full of equations which he invited his pupil to
inspect. The ancient images held a wealth of sacred mathematical information,
preserved by generations of holy men—even worshipped. Before computers, men had
counted on their fingers. He saw the connection now, the intentions of the
early artists. One thousand and twenty-three was as high as he could count on
his fingers in base-two. The Bardo computer would recognize the figure as an
even “K,” and that would doubtless make the rest of its operations run more
smoothly.

He laughed
and clapped a hand on his thigh. The sun had set and it was growing cold in the
little room, but he hardly minded now. His jacket remained where he had thrown
it hours ago. He rose, paced to the window, and looked down into the shadowy courtyard.
The Interfaith Fellows had taken a number of rooms in the hotel and some of
them were in the yard now, laughing and talking.

But his soul
was filled with a silence that could hardly be touched by sounds from outside.

He made a
few more swift entries onto the slate. His insights came from the shallows of
his mind, but they had been rising to the surface for years. At last his work
had achieved coherence. The prophecy had acted as a catalyst, causing the
crystallization of understanding. His new perspective made the proper operation
of the Bardo device seem not merely possible, but inevitable.

Tonight the flame is lit
, Tashi thought.
The work can
go forward. I bring the torch that enlightens humanity
,
a shining ray that will plumb
the darkest confusion of the realms of death and illumine the way for lost
souls
. I
carry the light of liberation
.

Liberation
. . .

The strange
words of the second prophecy returned to him. Great Mother—Gyayum Chenmo—was a
title of respect for the mothers of Dalai Lamas. What did it mean?

As in a
dream, he remembered the slow falling of the white scarf that had draped itself
upon his shoulders.

“Gyayum Chenmo is among you.”

Tashi’s
flesh grew chill.

“Let’s turn
on that heater,” he said abruptly, putting down his slate. “How about some more
tea?”

Reting
looked up from his own slate, where he had been working over a diagram of
Chenrezi. “Hm?”

“Never mind,
I’ll get it.”

“Tashi, I
think you’re right about the recalibration. It changes everything.”

Tashi smiled
until he thought he would never stop. “We’ve got it, Reting. Take a look at my
slate. I’m close to—”