Neon Lotus (3 page)

Someone
rapped on the door. As he went to answer it, he continued to speak his
thoughts.

“I’ve just
summed up a decade’s work in one equation. It makes me dizzy, Reting. I feel as
though I’m dreaming. It’s a mathematical expression for the fusion of emptiness
and appearance—the operation of bliss! The Bardo device’s operation may be
more thorough than I ever expected. One day we may be able to send a soul
directly to nirvana, bypassing the terrors of the Bardo, overriding the need
for rebirth!”

At that, he
opened the door.

Outside
stood a man, dark and thinly mustached, dressed in white and wearing a white
turban. At first Tashi thought it was the Sikh who lived down the hall, a
surveyor
who
sometimes posed obscure problems in triangulation for Tashi’s amusement. But on
closer inspection the face was not familiar, nor the voice. And the turban was
not orthodox—it covered too much of the man’s forehead.

“Dr. Tashi
Drogon?” said the man, extending an open hand.

“Yes?” he
said.

“Please
accept my apologies.”

The hand
exploded. Smoke filled Tashi’s eyes, bitter and stinking of charred blood. He
felt crushing pain and then an all-enveloping numbness. As he toppled into
shadows, crying for Reting, he tried to find his heartbeat, tried to recapture
his breath.

Both were
lost to him, along with the rest of the world.

He was
dying.

2. Beyond the Clear Light

Peter Strauss
and Kate Riordan met on the Interfaith Fellowship bus. For the first part of
their journey, from Bodh Gaya to Benares, they had been seatmates. Now, in the
last week of the tour, they were roommates.

Kate sat on
her bedroll in the middle of the floor and looked out the window. Mountains
capped in violet snow rose above the hotel like a pale, jagged wall against the
blackening sky. She had never seen such bright stars nor felt such a cold room.

“It’s colder
than my old dormitory room,” she told  Peter.

“Bad news,”
he said, unrolling his down sleeping bag.
“I think it’s going to get
colder.”

“You’re used
to snow in Switzerland,” she said. “It never gets this cold where I come from.”

“California
doesn’t have mountains?”

“I only went
there in the summer. Then it was mosquitos I worried about.”

“I’m
surprised they’d bite a skinny girl like you.”

“I have
sweet blood.”

“I know.” He
grinned and crawled toward her, flattening his sleeping bag as he came. “The
sweetest I’ve tasted.”

As their
lips met, she wondered if she were insane to be sharing a room with him. In a
few days they would board the bus again, endure the jarring ride back to Pathankot,
perhaps share a seat on the plane to Delhi, and from there the Fellowship would
fragment once more into two dozen individuals with common goals but separate
destinations. She would probably never see him again, despite their talk of
meeting in California or Switzerland in the next year or so.

She wondered
if she should have shared a room with Marguerite, in order to begin the painful
process of separation. But it wasn’t as easy as that. The time for a clean
break would come soon. Too soon.

“I can’t
kiss you when you’re thinking so hard,” he said.

“I rarely
stop, but you’ve managed to kiss me often enough.”

“Often enough,
eh?” He sat back on his bag, feigning distraction. “I guess I’ll play with my
altimeter. How high would you say we are?”

“I didn’t
mean it like that, Peter.” She leaned toward him, planted a kiss on his neck.

“I need a
shower,” he said.

“You’re not
the only one. I’ll tell you what: If I find anything, I’ll share it with you.”

She stood
up, bundling into her parka.

“You’re
going out?” he said.

“I think
we’d better check on the facilities. You don’t have to come. I’ll bring back a
full report.”

“That’s all
right, I’m not ready to bed down yet. There’s got to be some nightlife here,
after all.”

She laughed
as he slipped into his own jacket and pulled on a knit wool cap. “Peter, this
is the center of Tibetan Buddhism—what sort of nightlife do you expect?”

“Oh, you
know. Neon stupas, microwave ghats—all the traditional Asian fare.”

He took his
glasses out of his pocket and set them on his nose; they had fogged up when he
entered the hotel.

Kate opened
the door and stepped into the hall. Several doors were open; music and chatter
echoed down the corridor. A few of their companions ducked from door to door,
tossing a battered Frisbee the length of the passage.

Avoiding the
sailing disk, Kate and Peter headed toward the stairs at the end of the hall.
They had just set foot on the landing when thunder broke above their heads.

“What was
that?” Kate said.

Peter
pressed against the rail and twisted to look up at the next landing. “Sounded
like a shot.”

Shouting
came from above. A man’s voice cried out louder than the rest. She didn’t
understand the words but she sensed his despair.

A figure
rushed onto the higher landing, blotting out the light from above. She grabbed
Peter’s arm and pulled him down the stairs as a man in a white turban came
leaping around the bend, four steps at a time. His eyes bulged from his face,
his teeth were clenched in determination. He gripped the rail with his left
hand; the right was a shattered ruin. For an instant she thought he must be the
victim, but one detail was missing: blood. The ruined hand gleamed like hard
plastic.

“Stop!”
Peter yelled, tearing away from her.

“No, Peter!”
She grabbed at him—missed.

Peter leapt
to regain the landing and cut off the man’s escape. Seeing the stairs blocked,
the man in white turned and rushed into the hallway. His right hand dropped off
and clattered onto the stairs, skittering past Peter. The scorched fingers
cracked under her feet as she ran after the two of them.

Out in the
hall, things were strangely silent. Nothing moved except the Frisbee, which
rolled past Peter and wobbled to a halt at her feet.

Peter stood
with his arms spread across the corridor. Looking past him, she saw the man in
white bent over with his left hand cupping his forehead, gasping in agony. The
turban lay on the floor like a pile of discarded bandages.

Doors stood
open all along the hall, but no one moved. The owner of the Frisbee, a stocky
young man, blocked the far end of the corridor, mirroring Peter’s stance.

Another man
rushed out of the stairwell only to find himself blocked by Peter’s arms. Kate
stared at him. He was a thin Asian with pinched features, crooked teeth, dark
circles under his eyes. He pointed at the man in white, speaking words in a
language that Kate didn’t know. Words, she thought, of accusation.

The man in
white straightened slowly to face his accuser, still covering his brow.

“Don’t
move,” Peter said firmly. “Do you understand English? You’re trapped.”

Kate saw no
fear in the man’s eyes—only resignation. His jaw clenched, then he slumped to
the floor face down.

Peter was
the first to reach him. He put his hand under the man’s jaw, taking the pulse
from his throat.

“Dead,” he
said.

A woman in
one of the doorways came out jabbering. She kept pointing at the dead man then
at her forehead where a spot of red pigment glistened. What was she saying?

Kate knelt
and rolled the dead man over. She drew back with a start as his face came into
view.

After a
moment she whispered, “Peter, is it real?”

The
witnesses began to whisper, coming up to stare.

In the
center of the man’s forehead, where the Frisbee must have struck him, was a
bloodshot third eye. It stared at the ceiling, unblinking in death, until Peter
reached out and closed it.

“Yes,” he
said. “It’s real.”

***

Reting knew
that there was no time for mourning. Nor was there time to question the police,
nor to ask the Kashag who might have opposed Tashi’s work. There was no time to
speculate on the assassin’s employer, nor even to wonder where a three-eyed man
had come from in the first place.

There was
time for only one thing. He had to get Tashi to the Bardo device.

When the
police arrived, Reting called the Silon and notified him of the murder. The
Silon asked with great calmness if Tashi were definitely dead.

“There’s no
question of that,” Reting informed him. “And there’s no time to waste. Tashi
believed the work must begin immediately—according to the
Bardo Thodol
, within the
time it takes to consume a meal. Not long.”

“Rush to the
laboratory then, Dr. Norbu, and do what you can in preparation. I promise we’ll
have Tashi’s body delivered to you immediately. My staff is already on the
way.”

Reting
hurried upstairs only long enough to retrieve Tashi’s electronic slate. The
police had covered the body with a blanket. He fought down the numbing tide of
pain and disbelief that threatened to sweep him away, and suppressed the urge
to give explicit directions about where to deliver Tashi. He must trust that
the Silon would take care of the details. Furthermore, there was no time for
such things.

Down in the
street he found an officer sitting behind the wheel of a covered jeep. He
approached the man, stammering hopelessly, trying to explain why he had the
authority to commandeer the vehicle. As soon as he said his name, the officer
started the car. “Dr. Norbu, please get in. I’m to drive you to the Institute
of Science.”

Reting sat
huddled over the slate, clinging to the window frame so that he would not be
tossed from the jeep as it sped over uneven roads into a fold of hills below
the town. How many minutes had passed? How accurate was the
Bardo Thodol
, the Book
of the Dead? Tashi had made more precise predictions about the grace period,
but they escaped Reting. Tashi would have known exactly what to do, exactly how
much time they had.

Poor Tashi!

The doors of
the Institute open ahead of him. He rushed down the bright halls, past startled
guards. In the distance he could hear a siren, softer than the chanting of
monks at a monastery deeper in the valley.

At last,
Tashi’s laboratory.

It had never
seemed so cold, so clinical. The Bardo device loomed at the far end of the room
like a gray metal altar. The control console was dominated by a large
holovision screen. The housing of the device rose all the way to the high
ceiling, but most of it was featureless metal scored by access panels and
ventilation grills. To the right of the station, in a detached booth, was a
translucent moonwhite disk, two meters in diameter. A constellation of scanning
lenses glimmered in the hood of darkness above this, the containment stage. He shuddered
to think of the times he’d wondered if they would ever have a chance to prove
the device.

He threw
himself down at the console, switching on the system and letting it warm while
he scanned Tashi’s slate for the most recent data.

Here was the
equation of emptiness Tashi had mentioned. Reting didn’t have time to examine
the work, but it seemed incomplete—no more than a sketch of Tashi’s whole
thought. His teacher had often assumed that his unspoken intuitions were the
most obvious part of any

solution. The equation was useless
in such a state. He couldn’t begin to enter it into the computer.

The parent
document, however, showed a complete—even polished—proof. This was the Chenrezi
formula that Tashi had shown him. As he loaded the information into the main
computer, he heard shouting in the hallway and the sound of squeaking wheels.
The Bardo device accepted the information without complaint, but there was no
time to see if the recalibration made any difference.

Medics
hurried into the lab, pushing a cart ahead of them. Reting shivered.

“Over
there,” he said. “On the disk. Take him off the cart.”

The medics
worked hastily, leaving the body shrouded as they laid it out on the platform.
The covering blanket was soaked with blood; he was grateful that they did not
unveil the wound.

“Ready, Dr.
Norbu,” said the Bardo device. Its voice was a gentle creation of Tashi’s, the
voice of a bodhisattva.

When he
switched on the ray the shape was bathed in red light; for a moment it was
possible to believe that there was no blood. Then the light turned blue and the
stain took on a ghastly purple hue, like a fatal bruise. Again the light
changed—to white this time—and the bloodstains sprang out in total clarity,
seeming to detach from the body and float toward him in a spreading mist.

He turned
away, fighting dizziness. He must not faint.

“Leave me,”
he said.

The medics
hurried out, closing the door behind them.

He was alone
with Tashi. Alone with the Bardo device.

“I think
we’re in time,” he whispered, turning his eyes to the screen.

The scanner
had already begun to plumb the body’s secrets, penetrating flesh, blood, and
bone and sketching them out in translucent layers in the tanklike holovision
screen. The image resembled a dying fire. Spots of blackness sparked and
throbbed, spreading through the clouds of colored light that represented
Tashi’s body.