Neon Lotus (26 page)

The shape
continued to diminish until it was no more than a black drop in the palm of one
hand; and then a speck that drained away through a pore in her flesh.

I am in you
. . . .

Marianne
rose from the grass. She had never felt so alone.

She had
never felt such rage.

She turned
her eyes to the trees and glared at them until they disintegrated, becoming a
black ceiling, a black wall, the room of her yidam’s torture.

After a time
she heard footsteps.

She let her
eyes fall shut and lay limp in the chair. Her bonds were loosened; strong hands
grasped her arms and pulled her forward. She let herself slide from the chair.

“It looks as
though more than the ego has been destroyed,” said a young man’s voice. Her
eyes opened slightly and she saw the same man who had strapped her in the chair
and removed her blindfold. He slung one of her arms over his shoulders and
half-carried, half-dragged her toward the door. She saw that the room behind
the chair was full of machines with lenses and dark screens. In the middle of
the far wall was an open door, and in that doorway stood another man.

She shut her
eyes.

“There
should be no physical damage,” said the man in the doorway. His was the voice
that had conducted the interrogation. “Her delusions of divinity reinforced the
ego beyond all normal bounds; its dissolution must have come as a great
shock—much greater than we typically see.”

“Then she’ll
need longer to recover.”

“Much longer.
But once she’s well, she will be all the more valuable to us. She’s not the
only one who thinks she is the Gyayum Chenmo, after all. The Tibetan people
believe her. It will be simple enough for her to do our work for us once we
have planted in her the seed of a new ego.”

The man in
the doorway stepped aside and she found herself being dragged down a hallway.
She pretended to awaken slightly and find her footing with exaggerated
clumsiness, so that the young man did not carry so much as lead her. She kept
her eyes half open.

The corridor
came to an end. Her guide removed a sonic key from his pocket and the wall slid
open on an elevator compartment. Inside, she slumped down against the wall,
glancing up as the older man followed them. She dared not study him, for his
eyes were fixed on her—all three of them. They were bright blue in color. His
hair was thin and red, like his mustache. Dark skin; features only faintly
Asiatic. She saw in him a melange of racial traits including Negro and
Caucasian.

If one race
combined all the breeds of humankind it might look like this, she thought. Yet
his triple eyes gave him an appearance that was distinctly inhuman.

“Our great
little mother,” he murmured, reaching out
to stroke her hair. “You may
indeed give birth to a new age, but I daresay it will not be the one you
expected.”

* * *

They left
her in a cell with dark walls where a yellow lightbulb burned. All of the
objects in the room—a desk, a bed, several books, and sheets of paper—appeared
black or white. The yellow light voided her perception of color. Her skin
looked as gray as Tara’s had been when she died.

For a time
she sat in the chair at the desk, her head in her hands, thinking of nothing.
She knew that they wished her to open the books, but she refused for now. She
was reluctant to see what bits of information they intended to feed her. She
was wary of showing curiosity, for they supposed her to be numb with shock.
Certainly she was in shock, but the experience had not numbed her. Her senses
were heightened despite the black and white surroundings.

Her mind
wandered, briefly touching on many subjects. She wondered after Jetsun and
prayed that they had not subjected him to the rays, for then there would be
nothing left of him that she could recognize, nothing beyond his outward frame.
If Tara had not shielded her from the rays, had not sacrificed herself, then
Marianne’s mind would certainly have been destroyed. She prayed that they had
not thought Jetsun important enough to torture.

After a
time, she remembered the lotus. Her hand drifted to her pocket. As she had
feared, it was flat, empty.

Yet there
was something inside, something that rustled with a dry sound. She dipped her
fingers in and encountered what felt like a wad of dead leaves. She withdrew a
handful of desiccated petals, a shriveled gray bud that had once been the lotus.

“Oh no,” she
whispered. “Not you, too.”

Desolate,
she closed both hands around the dead flower and put it to her forehead.

Through the
bones of her fingers, through her skull, she felt a faint vibration. Light
touched her eyelids.

She opened
her eyes and held out her hands.

The petals
were flush with life, growing plump and fresh again. A soft humming presence
filled the room. Out of the flower came a brightening pink radiance—yes, pink.
She could make out colors again: the brown hue of her tinted skin, the maroon
hem of her sleeve.

She stood
up, brought the lotus close to her face, and stared into its heart.

“Tsering?”
she whispered. “Are you there?”

At first she
could not believe the sound of lighthearted laughter that came out of the
lotus. The boy’s face appeared, cupped in her hands, smiling out at her.

“We fooled
them, Gyayum Chenmo! When they searched you, they didn’t even look twice at
me.”

“That’s
excellent, Tsering. Except . . . they were not completely
fooled. We’ve lost Tara, my guide. They crushed her, drove her mad. They would
have done it to me if she hadn’t . . . hadn’t sacrificed
herself.”

“Don’t be
sad,” said Tsering. “You can’t destroy energy. The leaf falls to fertilize the
earth but the tree remains.”

Marianne shook her
head, wondering.
What is the tree
,
in this case? Is it me? Or Chenrezi? Or the greater task at hand?
If I die in this undertaking
,
if I am merely another leaf that falls
,
where is the tree that shall
remain standing?

“Would you
like to leave now, Gyayum Chenmo?” Tsering asked, in a naive tone.

“I wish it
were that easy. Of course I would like to leave. I wish I had never seen this
place.”

“But you can
leave, you know. The lotus is your key. Try it.”

Without
questioning him she walked toward the door, holding the lotus out ahead of her.
It made an almost inaudible sound, mimicking the sonic key which her guard had
carried.

The door
slid open.

She waited
to see if anyone had noticed the change. After a moment, hearing no one coming
to investigate, she poked her head into the hall.

It was a
short corridor with blank walls at either end and doors along both sides. She
crossed the hall and waved the lotus at the opposite door. It slid open
instantly, revealing a room yellow-lit like her own, but empty.

The room
next to hers was also empty. But across the hall from that one, in the third
room, she found a man. He stood with his back to her, shoulders tense.

“Jetsun!”

He spun
toward her, astonished. “Where did you come from—how—?”

His eyes lit
on the lotus bud and a grin came reluctantly to his mouth. “They didn't find
it?”

“It camouflaged
itself. How have you been?”

“Worried,”
he said.

“They
haven’t questioned you?”

He shook his
head. “I haven’t seen a soul since they dumped me here. How about you?”

“I’ll tell
you when we’re out of here. The only thing is, I’m not so sure we should leave
just yet. I would like to know more about our captors. If we stayed a bit
longer, we might gain some valuable information.”

He nodded.
“It’s up to you, of course. Have you looked at their books? Mad doctrines—”

“I’ve heard
enough of those already.”

There was a
sound in the corridor. She spun toward the door, hearing footsteps. There was
no time to rush back to her room, nor even to close Jetsun’s door. In a moment
two armed guards blocked the entrance, a man and a woman. The woman had three
eyes.

The lotus
sang a weird and piercing song, almost leaping from Marianne’s hands. Beams of
colored light flowed through the amber air, dancing out toward the guards.

They dropped
their weapons and covered their ears, staggering backward out of the room. They
landed heavily against the opposite wall and slid to the floor in a tangled
heap.

Without a
word between them, Jetsun and Marianne bent over the guards and dragged them
back into his room. The chance for a leisurely gathering of information had
obviously passed them by. They stripped the soldiers and clothed themselves in
the green outfits, taking particular care to pull the caps down low over their
foreheads.

They left
the male guard in Jetsun’s room, the woman in Marianne’s, and used the lotus to
shut and lock both doors. The flower gave each lock a strange burst of sound,
causing tiny implosions; Tsering reassured her that the locks had been sealed,
the mechanisms fused.

One end of
the corridor proved to be a blank wall and nothing more. The opposite wall slid
open when she passed the lotus before it.

Beyond was
an uninhabited office. Banks of switches and monitors covered one wall; a book
lay open in one of several chairs. The screens showed interference patterns
that wavered and sparked in time with the humming of the lotus. The humming
quieted gradually, allowing the screens to clear. Several showed empty rooms;
two peered into the cells where they had left the naked guards. One showed the
corridor they had just traveled. The final screen pictured yet another
corridor, this one patrolled by an armed guard; Marianne guessed that she was
watching the hall outside this office.

Her fingers
moved among the switches, shutting off lights in the televised cells and then
darkening the monitors themselves. At last she found the switch that blackened
the office.

Holding Jetsun’s
hand in the dark, she unlocked the outer door. As it slid open she called out,
“Help us! Quickly!”

The guard
outside ran into the room. “What happened to the lights?” he said.

The lotus
gave a short burst of song. The man fell. They rushed out and sealed the door
behind them.

“Which way?”
Jetsun asked.

Marianne
hesitated. Suddenly the lotus surged with light and the voice of Tsering said,
“The amrita is here, Gyayum Chenmo! It calls to us.”

“Amrita? You
mean the nectar?”

“Yes!”

“Which way,
then? Left or right?”

The lotus
trembled violently in her hands; the sensation was so unusual that she almost
dropped the flower.

“What’s
happening?” Jetsun asked.

As the
petals folded back and showed themselves to be engorged with light, she
realized that the lotus was a kind of antenna, shedding and receiving energy.

In the heart
of the bloom was a moonwhite disk, smooth as a polished opal. An image formed
in the air above the disk, a tiny but sharp three-dimensional picture. At first
it looked like a diagram of circuitry, a schematic of some sort. Then the song
of the lotus changed slightly, echoing in the hall. The image grew, floating up
to a point perhaps a foot above the blossom. It resembled a transparent cube
made of lines and shadows, divided into numerous compartments. Tiny figures
moved through the cube,
attending to machinery, riding elevators through the illustration.

“It’s a
living map,” said Jetsun. “Of this place. There, you can see us!”

He pointed
into the bowels of the transparent cube. Two shadows stood close together in a
stretch of corridor. One held a many-pointed flower and the other was pointing
at it. Above the flower was a miniaturized version of the very same cube in
which the shadows stood, and in that tiny cube she could almost see a
reproduction of the same figures—even tinier—bent over a microscopic lotus.