Neon Lotus (8 page)

Dr. Norbu
recaptured her attention with a handful of white silk scarves.

He laid them
out across the table, five of them, all exactly alike.

She set the
slate aside, growing very solemn now. She looked at Dr. Norbu but then her eyes
wandered up toward the ceiling. Kate wondered what she could be thinking, or
remembering. She seemed to see something falling from above.

Marianne
reached out and touched the scarf at her far left. For a moment she brought it
to her face, feeling its softness, smelling it. Then she stood up in her seat,
leaned over the table, and held it out to Dr. Norbu.

Eyes closed,
he bent his head and allowed the child to drape the scarf around his neck. When
he raised his head, his eyes were full of tears.

“Cheer up,
Norbu,” Marianne said.

He kissed
the scarf, then the child’s hand.

Kate felt a
fierce envy of the bond between them. Marianne had never looked at her with
such longing, such determination, such intensity. What was this emotion that
reached out of the past, stronger than the love of a child for her mother?

“Three out
of three,” Chokyi said.

Kate could
not take her eyes off Dr. Norbu. She saw his gaze drop to the slate that
Marianne had chosen. He let out a gasp and reached out to bring it toward him.

For a
moment, he looked to be in shock.

“What is
it?” Peter asked.

Dr. Norbu
didn’t seem to know how to answer. He stared at Marianne.

“The equation
of emptiness,” he said. “A problem we’ve wrestled with since Tashi’s death. The
last step in programming our device. He was on the verge of it when
. . .”

“Wait a
minute,” Peter said. “She was a scientist? I thought the assassins struck only
religious targets.”

“His work
had spiritual significance. This was his personal slate. It still contains the
last problem he was working on, in the form he left it—unfinished. But she’s
solved it!”

Marianne sat
smiling at them, as if hardly aware of what she had done.

Dr. Norbu
said something to her in Tibetan but she continued to rock back and forth in
her seat. She grasped Kate’s hand and pulled closer to her mother.

Dr. Norbu
repeated his words.

Marianne
stood up and hugged Kate. “Mommy, why is he talking like that?”

Chokyi and
the doctor exchanged glances.

“Let me
try,” Chokyi said. He asked Marianne a question in Tibetan. She simply stared
at him, then looked to Kate for answers.

“Tashi?” Dr.
Norbu asked urgently.

But
something had changed in Marianne. She regarded him as if he were legitimately
a stranger.

“Thank God,”
Kate breathed. Her daughter had returned.

Marianne
began to whimper, then to cry.

“She’s
tired,” Kate apologized. “Come on, honey, you can take a nap.”

Before Kate
could carry her away, Marianne reached for the slate in Dr. Norbu’s hand. The
doctor smiled. “One moment. Let me copy your work.” He briefly connected the
slate to another, then broke the connection and returned it to the child.

Marianne
played with the slate as her mother carried her to bed. This time there were no
numbers, no complex geometries. She had accessed a photograph of snowy
mountains rising into an azure sky.

“Mommy,” she
said, “I want to go home.”

Kate laid
her down on the bed. “Honey, you’re home now. Why don’t you just close your
eyes and get some sleep?”

“No, I want
to go home.”

“But
Marianne, this is your home.”

“No!” her
daughter screamed. “Home!”

She pointed
at the slate. Kate saw high mountains, capped with snow.

“Oh my God,”
she murmured.

“Home. . . .”

PART TWO:
RAINBOW TARA

(a.d.
2158
)

4.
Memories of a Thousand Hands

At midnight
they crossed from Mustang into the Tibetan Autonomous Region, flying down from
a tongue of the Nepalese Himalayas that protruded into Chinese territory like
an insult. The CIA jet was supposed to be transparent to Chinese surveillance
equipment, but Marianne Strauss couldn’t quite believe that. She felt anything
but invisible, floating there in the darkness above snowcapped peaks. Spy
satellites were said to outnumber the visible stars. Even Jetsun Dorje, the
guerrilla pilot, had hinted that detection was only a matter of time. If they
stayed in the T.A.R. long enough, it became a certainty.

“Like Br’er
Rabbit, we could be stuck in
TAR
,”
he had said
with a chuckle. “You like puns?”

“Not much.”

Now he
watched his flight board with complete concentration. The topology of the land
below appeared in three dimensions on his screen: rugged mountains were
sketched in thin green lines, settlements crossed the panel in the form of hot
red clusters. Peering over his shoulder, she watched the fragile green
mountains closing in like lace curtains as he guided the plane through a narrow
pass. He did it with the calmness of a computer operator, as if the lovely
green lines had no reality beyond what appeared on the screen. She had to
remind herself that the images represented tangible objects, walls of solid
rock, any one of which would have erased them had Jetsun flown into it. But he
was an excellent pilot and he was at ease in the terrain. Tibet, although he
had never lived here, was his home.

“Marianne,”
said a voice from the cabin behind her. “Why don’t you come sit down?”

“Listen to
Dr. Norbu,” Jetsun said without looking up from his board. “Between Zhongba and
Paryang there is plenty of traffic. Don’t make me any more nervous than I am
already.”

“Sorry.” She
pulled out of the cockpit and resumed her seat next to Dr. Norbu. “It’s those
pills I took in Jomsom. I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep for days.”

“There is no
time for sleep.”

“We have a
few hours now, don’t we?”

“Look out
the window, Marianne. That is Tibet below. You’ve done what Tashi never
managed.”

“So I can
die happy now and let my next incarnation take over from here.”

“It wouldn’t
be that simple with the nearest Bardo device in Dharamsala. By the time you
were old enough to continue the work, everything would have changed yet again.
There might be nothing left worth the effort—nothing but the struggle itself,
and the suffering. Now is the time, Marianne. Now is the best time to do all we
can.”

She reached
over and squeezed his hand; it felt frail to her, and his skin was always cold.
There was gray in his hair these days. He was her oldest friend, the friend of
two lifetimes.

“I’ve lived
for this chance, Reting, you know that.”

He nodded
with a melancholy smile. “Lived more than once.”

“I’ve fought
death and ignorance and governments. Not to mention my mother.”

“She was the
hardest.”

She smiled.
“I’ve gone through a lot to get here. I’m not going to give up an inch of what
I’ve gained.”

“Tibet is
fortunate to have you.”

She looked
out her window, down at the dark land, and shook her head. “It has been so
unfortunate, Reting. I love this land with all my heart. I would give anything
to see it liberated.”

“You sound
like a Tibetan,” called Jetsun Dorje from the cockpit.

She was
silent a moment, watching the lights of a town far away to the west. Finally
she said, “That I am.”

***

Two hours later,
the first mandala appeared. They passed to the east of it, giving Marianne a
perfect view.

It was a
wheel of five-colored light burning on the plain, composed of thousands of
steadily glowing points. At the center was a blue disk, around which the four
other colors shone in quadrants—white to the east, yellow to the south, red to
the west, and green to the north. She knew that the lanterns were held by
Tibetan nomads, the plains people, but she could see no individuals from this
altitude.

“Aren’t we landing
here?” she asked.

“Not this
one,” Jetsun said.

“There are
dozens burning tonight,” said Dr. Norbu. “They will appear all over the
countryside, and should distract the Chinese.”

“And what do
the Chinese think is happening out here all of a sudden?”

“This isn’t
sudden, Marianne. The nomads have been doing this for decades. The mandalas are
beacons to the night, signals shining out to the gods.”

She shook
her head. “The gods don’t travel in flying saucers.”

“Do you know
this for a fact? Why shouldn’t the gods avail themselves of technology, if it
provides a means of reaching those in need?”

“Right,” she
said. “The legends say that the first king of Tibet descended to earth on a
sky-cord. I suppose he was a passing alien in a human-suit.”

“And when he
died,” said Jetsun, “his body vanished completely—poof! No trace of it.”

“Obviously
there was a matter transmitter in orbit.” She sank back into her seat,
laughing.

Dr. Norbu
sighed. “Many people used to say that death was a frontier we would never
explore.”

“Science has
stripped the human soul of any lingering vestige of privacy,” she said. She
shook her head. “And to think I’m the one responsible.”

She glanced
over at Reting and saw that her words had upset him. The Bardo device had been
the center of his life for many years.

“I’m sorry,”
she said. “I shouldn't tease you. Of course the gods are aliens. Nothing like
Chenrezi could have evolved on this planet. Perhaps one day, after eons of
peace, it will be possible to have eyes in our palms; but they make one rather
vulnerable in hand-to-hand combat.”

“I didn’t
say I shared the nomads’ beliefs,” he said. “Some Communist instructor must
have given a halfhearted explanation of religious psychology, attempting to
describe the etiology of the gods, and the people turned it around to suit
their needs. It is fortunate that they have salvaged any sort of spirituality
from the depredations of the last two hundred years.”

Marianne
nodded. “I know.”

“And
besides,” he continued after a moment, “you are about to see something for
which even the most farfetched explanations seem unsatisfactory.”

“Mm. I
suppose.”

“So keep an
open mind.”

“We never
close,” she murmured, thinking of the Nowrojee Supermarket in Dharamsala. That
motto was inscribed on a placard in the grimy display window, and nothing could
have been less true of the shop with the most erratic hours in northern India.

It was hard
to imagine that twenty-four hours ago she had been asleep in her own bed,
spending her last night at home in the comfortable old house above Dharamsala.
Her mother had been shocked to find out where the Tibetan government had housed
her. It was a condominium-style building that looked as if it had been imported
direct from the United States. Her parents had noted it with disapproval on
their brief visit to India decades before.

She didn’t
imagine that her mother would look with any greater pleasure on her present
situation. Fortunately, she was well past the age of consent. Kate could
protest, but that was the extent of her power over her daughter. Marianne
required no more permission slips from Geneva—where Mother had remained after
Father’s death—in order to work for the exiled government of Tibet.

Father
himself had never voiced an objection to her activities, and didn’t seem likely
to do so. He was “Peter Strauss” no longer, but a three-year-old Swiss boy
named Nicholas Tiedemann. Marianne had followed his death in the Bardo device,
keeping him in Switzerland and pinpointing the exact moment and whereabouts of
his incarnation. Even with the equation of emptiness, it had proven impossible
to hold back a soul for any length of time. The equation helped ensure that the
next incarnation was made as favorable as possible, given that rebirth was as
inevitable as death.

Nicholas
Tiedemann, once Marianne's father, had parents of his own; and they were none
too receptive to Mother’s concerned interference.

Kate Strauss
had finally come to understand Reting's position in the last three years. It
hadn’t helped her temper in the least.

***

An hour
later, Marianne glimpsed far-flung glimmers of light that might have been
several more mandalas ahead of them. They were gradually losing altitude,
though, and the mountains cut off her sight of all but one brilliant wheel.

“Right on
target,” Jetsun Dorje said. He stretched a hand over his head, yawning, and
patted his topknot of thick curly hair. “Down we go.”

When they
were directly over the mandala, the jet engines whined with a new sound,
tilting. The plane began dropping straight down. The blue lights at the center
of the wheel dispersed rapidly as they descended, shading out into the rest of
the figure. The yellow southern quadrant took on a green cast, the west turned
purple. A circular void formed in the middle of the luminous field, opening like
a black iris beneath the jet. Marianne’s stomach lurched into her throat. She
pulled away from the window, but not before she saw a myriad of five-colored
upturned faces, each belonging to a nomad clutching a lantern.

They settled
lightly to the ground, engines whining into silence. The sound of voices
reached her through the hull:

“Gyayum
Chenmo! Gyayum Chenmo!”

The chanting
of the crowd surprised her. She turned to Dr. Norbu.

“Reting, how
do they know about that?”

“Word
spreads quickly,” he said. “More quickly than I would have thought.”

“Great
Mother?” said Jetsun, looking at Marianne with widened eyes. “Do they mean
you?”

She avoided
meeting his eyes. “Shouldn’t we be moving?”

Jetsun rose
from his seat, massaged his thighs briefly, then walked to the hatch and pushed
it open. A ladder unfolded from the door. Standing at the threshold, Marianne
looked down on the lantern-lit crowd.

The mandala
had lost its definition. A crush of people came toward.her in the dark, holding
out pale white scarves and other offerings. The sweet smell of wildflowers
fought with that of acrid cheese.

“They do
mean you,” Jetsun said. “I didn’t realize—”

“Sh!” said
Dr. Norbu suddenly, pressing past Marianne to the door. He leaned out into the
night, looking up at the sky.

Marianne
followed the direction of his gaze. Up above, she saw what looked like a
cluster of falling stars.

Aircraft.

The nomads
had already spotted the intruder. In an instant, every light on the plain went
out. Marianne was blind now; she waited for her eyes to adjust to starlight,
but there wasn’t time. Footsteps clamored up the steps and caught hold of her
wrists. She was urged to descend quickly.

“You were
followed,” said a gruff voice.

“Dhondub,”
said Dr. Norbu. “Good to see you. We half expected it.”

“Hurry,” Jetsun
Dorje said. “I’ve got to close up and get out of here.”

Marianne
reached the bottom of the ramp. She could hear them arguing above her.

“You can’t
fly back now,” Dr. Norbu said. “They’d shoot you down.”

“But my
jet—”

“Leave it,”
said the voice of Dhondub. “We’ll take it from here. We’ll also have a party
fleeing overland on horseback to further confuse them.”

“But you
can’t fly that plane,” Jetsun protested.

“I can fly
anything,” said a woman. “You go with your friends.”

“Quickly, Jetsun!”
said Dr. Norbu.

Suddenly two
beams of light stabbed down from the sky and touched the earth perhaps a
quarter mile away. They swept back and forth across the plain like luminous
calipers, closing in on the nomads. She hoped the beams were only meant for illumination,
but it seemed unlikely.