Neon Lotus (13 page)

She twisted
around, spinning on one heel, and felt the muscles in her leg suddenly bunch
and then straighten. She became a flame, soaring up into the night, arcing over
the dark trench.

And then she
stood numb—but still burning—on the far side of the ravine.

She threw
back her head and let out a wild laugh. The rest of the herd came leaping after
her.

She ran
ahead of them, ran as if she had no other reason to live. Pupils wide, she
drank in the starlight. The plain seemed luminous with its own fires. The
grasses glowed with a wan green light; minerals flickered underfoot like
earthly constellations. She laughed again and the cry became a howl. She went
loping ahead of the herd, leading them into the night, feeling them swerve
after her in a single body.

For a moment
she felt Rainbow Tara rising up to look out through her eyes.

“Marianne,”
Tara whispered, “there are others here with us. Look!”

A pale shape
appeared just ahead of her, like a noctilucent cloud forming over the plain. It
was a lean, four-legged creature with striped flanks and slender horns. By
comparison, her flight was clumsy and slow. It looked back and fixed her with
its large brown eyes.

She felt as
if the dream-beast were herding her in the direction it willed her to go. She
resisted for a moment, darting one way and then another, but it always ran
ahead of her and cut off her escape. Finally she laughed and let it guide her.
She did not know where they were headed after all. But this venerable creature
had a true instinct for navigation.

Once she was
moving evenly again, it fell in alongside her. She glanced over and admired its
ease, its grace,

“Gyayum
Chenmo,” it said.

The voice
seemed natural coming from the creature. She inclined her head for a moment,
having no breath herself to spare on words.

“We are
honored that you run with us,” the creature said.

Again, she
could not reply, but she felt as if the animal understood her thoughts.

“Many are
the children of the great plateau—the snow lions and the grazing beasts alike,
the fish and birds. Few of us survive as we once were. Everything is altered on
the wheel. But we honor you, and are grateful to have this chance to aid you.”

She thought,
What is the difference between
animals and humans? We are all born; we all grow old
,
suffer and die
.
We should help each other.

The creature
moved closer, holding her in its great eyes. Closer still. And suddenly it gave
a leap from every hoof at once and plunged at the spot into which she was
running.

She could
neither slow herself nor swerve to avoid collision.

There was no
impact. She felt a warm thrill, as if she had passed through a cloud of heated
air. The creature had vanished but she could sense its presence. It was here, inside
her, running in that same warm green field where she had met Tara.

There were
more animals around her now, all of them two-legged. Looking to one side she
saw Dhondub Ling, who occasionally barked a few words to a lean, shaggy-haired
man running at his side. Dr. Norbu ran behind them, loping along like a marathon
runner. There must have been something in the lung-gom that cleansed the blood
of toxins even as it fueled this strenuous run.

She turned
her eyes again to the dark plain ahead, watching the shapes of distant hills
rising against the stars. They did not look so distant now.

The air was
crisp and vitalizing. She was infused with strength, and felt confident that
she could endure a full night of such running. It would be hard to leave the
herd, in fact; hard to give up running for the slower pace of normal human
life.

But she
could not think of that now.

She gave her
whole being to the herd, bent herself to running, abandoned fear and worry. The
night stretched on, the ground rose and fell beneath her feet. She splashed
through icy creeks, slid down crumbling slopes, and finally fell into a dream.

She dreamed
she had four legs with which to run across an endless plain of lush green
grasses and cold serpentine streams. She ran with her people, ran and ran
without any purpose other than to live, eating grass and wild onions, drinking
the cystalline water that ran in rills across the plain.

In her dream
she carried a rider, a young girl with skin of every color, who braided
wildflowers in her mane and patted her gently; who stroked her ears and called
her by a lovely but meaningless name:

“Marianne.”

6.
Prayers at a Two-Way Shrine

The sound of
wind woke Marianne; it seemed to have followed her from sleep. She felt a
warmth that could only have been sunlight seeping down into her muscles and
bones, working out kinks and cramps. She moaned and rolled over and the sun hit
her right in the eyes. Shading her face with a hand, she opened her lids a
fraction of an inch and stared straight into the huge glassy eye of a lamp. It
shone with a clear white light, warming her thoroughly. Above it, she saw a
sloping ceiling of cloth. She was inside a tent.

She had only
the faintest memories of having entered the tent. Their nightlong run had
brought them to a sprawl of nomad dwellings just as the first pale light of
dawn had begun to erase the stars at her back. She’d already felt weariness
creeping over her when they sighted the encampment. Dhondub said that they had
nearly exhausted the artificial lung-gom’s capacities—as well as their own.

Upon trying
to rise, she found herself cramping into a tight ball of muscle. Her knees
jerked up to her chest. She let out a cry of pain, then relaxed and let the
lamp continue with her healing.

A moment
later she heard the swish of a tent flap, and Dr. Norbu appeared. His eyes were
circled more darkly than usual, but he was smiling and appeared not much the
worse for his exertion.

“Good
afternoon,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“Afternoon?”
She tried to sit but her back seized up; she was forced to lie down again. “How
long have I been asleep?”

“Only since
dawn. Here, you’ll want to wear this purifier for a time. You should be feeling
better very shortly. The lamp helps. Why don’t you rest until there’s no more
pain?”

She strapped
another band onto her wrist, felt the familiar dermal pricking. Her cramps
began to ease gradually, as if crystals of pain were slowly dissolving from
her knees and buttocks, freeing her to move again. She sighed and spread her
arms out to either side, brushing the felt floor of the tent.

“I’ve got to
get up,” she said. “Need to stretch. What are you doing up and around so soon,
Reting? You’re in worse condition than me.”

“I’m also
more conservative. You didn’t see me leaping gorges or springing any higher
than was strictly necessary.”

She closed
her eyes and turned away from the lamp, remembering a few scattered images of
the run. “That was incredible,” she said. “Where do the lung-goms come from?”

“They’re a
nomad development,” Dr. Norbu said. “I’m very impressed with all that I’ve seen
of their pharmacology and technology. They’ve blended some very old lines of
knowledge with the newest devices they’ve managed to acquire. Naturally, it’s
all kept quite secret. They keep their most advanced work disguised in
primitive forms. So far the authorities haven’t caught on. Are you hungry?”

“Ravenous.”

He smiled.
“I’ll
be right
back, then. You just lie here a while longer.”

As he pushed
through the tent flap, the sound of wind grew louder for an instant. She saw a
shard of blue sky and green land before the flap fell shut.

She lay on
her side a moment longer, but the purifiers had taken effect and she began to
feel restless. She stretched her legs and arms, then rolled over and got to all
fours.

A light at
the far side of the tent caught her eye. For a moment she thought it was a
color holovision tank with the sound turned down, but there was no movement in
the image. It was a three-dimensional display of some kind, out of focus from
this distance. She could see a blur of pastel colors, shimmering gold and lush
green, with a radiant fan of white at the heart of the screen.

As she
crawled closer, the picture slowly came clear. The green fell back into the
depths of the tank, becoming hills that dwindled into distance. The golden
light lifted up and became a sky. Instead of clouds, the air was full of
lotuses, blossoms of all sizes with figures seated upon them. Between each
lotus seat was a smaller lotus, and between each of those was one still
smaller. As she stared at the deep screen, the grass and sky slowly vanished;
every interstice came to be occupied by a tiny lotus seat—a seemingly infinite
number of them.

At the
center of the display, seated on the primary lotus, was Chenrezi in his
four-armed aspect. He had one head, topped with a five-pointed crown. His two
upper arms were pressed together at his breast, holding a gleaming black
Wish-Fulfilling Gem between them. Of his lower hands, the right one held a
crystal rosary and the left a red flower.

It was not a
holovision set after all. It was a shrine.

Marianne put
her palms together and pressed them to her forehead, lips, and heart, invoking
the body, speech, and mind of the Buddha nature. She visualized a white OM on
her forehead, a red AH on her throat, and a blue HUM at her heart. Briefly she
closed her eyes and imagined a rosary whirling in her heart, made of the
syllables of Chenrezi’s mantra:
Om mani
padme hum.

She felt
Rainbow Tara stirring, but her yidam remained silent.

Marianne
imagined light flashing from the rosary, four brightly colored rays that
illumined the universe. She visualized a god at every point in infinite space,
and that these divine sparks were bathing in the radiance from her heart.

Silently,
she offered her activities to these gods, dedicating her work to the benefit
of all living beings.

Then she sat
following her breathing, resting her mind in emptiness.

Slowly,
concrete thoughts and images crept back in. The emptiness filled up again with
her passions, her concerns.

How
different she was from Tashi Drogon. She had tried to make herself distinct
from that old dead man in every possible way. The only thing they shared was a
love of Tibet, and in particular of the bright, vital religion that had been
preserved for centuries at the roof of the world. For in Tibet, Buddhism had
been kept alive in a pure form, even while it lay moribund in India. When
Tibet’s barriers had finally been shattered by the Chinese occupation, that
essential Tibetan Buddhism—called Vajrayana, the Diamond Path—had burst from
its isolation and spread across the world as fast as the refugees could carry
it. Some lamas insisted that this was the secret blessing of the Chinese
occupation. They taught that Tibet’s liberation would come about not through
violence but through the practice of Vajrayana, which aimed to liberate all
living creatures from ignorance and suffering. In Dharamsala, she had often
attended religious talks which turned into discussions of Tibet’s history; the
lamas continually compared the plight of Tibet to the spiritual plight of any
living being. It had added to her conviction that by helping Tibet, she aided
all life.

Tashi had
taken his scientific inspiration from the mysteries of Vajrayana. Similarly,
her actions were motivated by an attempt to understand the Diamond teachings
and put the practice to work in the world. Tashi had worked with his mind; she
worked with her body. There was no reason to repeat his life, or to meet the
expectations of those who had known him. She had every reason on earth to
pursue her own goals.

She opened
her eyes and gazed at the shrine. It was undoubtedly of nomad design. She
wondered if they truly lit their midnight mandalas to attract the attention of
passing gods. They seemed more sophisticated than that.

At the base
of the hologram, arranged on the altar, were several sacred objects. She was
reminded of her own quest.

One was a
drilbu, a silver bell topped with the five-pronged tip of a vajra. She did not
wish to ring it, for fear of attracting undue attention. It was not generally
considered polite to use another’s consecrated tools without permission. Next
to the bell was a palm-sized vajra, the

wand that symbolized the
indestructible nature of the enlightened mind. Because it was silent, she
picked it up and held it tightly in both hands, thinking of all that it
represented. The Tibetan word for vajra was “dorje,” which reminded her of Jetsun
Dorje. A diamond.

The shrine
flickered, went gray, and began to strobe.

She realized
that she had twisted the two knobbed ends of the vajra inadvertently; she had
never known a dorje to do that before.

Suddenly she
heard Rainbow Tara’s laughter. She realized that the girl was with her, looking
out through her eyes.

“How long
have you been here?” she whispered.

“That vajra
interested me. Remember what Reting said about the nomads disguising their
devices? Go on, twist it again.”

“I shouldn’t
be doing this,” Marianne said.

She started
to lay down the ornament, but her own hands resisted her. She was too surprised
to struggle.

As Tara
twisted the vajra, the shrine lit up again. This time it showed no array of
gods. Instead she saw a dark-skinned man wearing little round glasses and a
conical leather cap with a fur brim. He was speaking to someone at his side,
though there was no sound.

“Now try the
drilbu,” Tara said.

“You
shouldn’t have done that,” Marianne said, but she reached out to turn the vajra
knob on the tip of the bell handle.

The sound
came up slowly. She could hear the man now.

“—leave me
now,” he was saying. “My brother is on the screen, can’t you see? I’ll be with
you in a minute.”

He looked a
bit like Dhondub Ling, she thought, although he was skinnier and wore glasses.
He turned toward her. “Yes, Dhondub?”

Then he
gasped, his eyes widening in surprise.

“Who are
you?”

Tara laughed
mischievously, taking control of Marianne’s lips. She clapped a hand over her
mouth then took it away and blurted, “I’m so sorry!”

He looked
frozen, terrified. She didn’t know what to say now, and Tara offered no wisdom.
He must think that this private channel had been tapped. She realized that she must
reassure him quickly, but what could she say to make him believe her?

Suddenly she
heard the tent flap thrown open. The voice of Dhondub Ling himself said,
“What’s this?”

She turned
toward the entrance, expecting the chieftain’s fury. Instead he threw back his
head and laughed.

“I’m glad
you’re on our side!” he said. “How long did it take you to figure that out?”

At a loss
for words, she moved away from the shrine. The image of Dhondub’s brother grew
blurred. Dhondub strode over, put a firm hand on her shoulder, and gave her a
reassuring squeeze. He dropped to his knees before the shrine, still laughing.

“Close your
mouth, Changchup,” he said to the screen. “You look like a fish out of water.
That was the Gyayum Chenmo herself.”

Marianne
could not hear the other man’s response; like the image, it was focused solely
for the benefit of the person at the shrine. Dhondub nodded and said, “Not
until tonight”

She backed
away and was standing in the middle of the tent when Dr. Norbu entered with a
covered basket and a bowl of steaming soup. He regarded Dhondub with interest.
She took the food from him and dropped down beneath the heat-lamp to gorge
herself on cheese, bread, and broth.

As she was
eating, Tara sprang into her thoughts. “No harm done, Marianne.”

Marianne
sighed and answered silently: “No, but I still don’t like it—you taking over
like that. This is my body. I don’t like to lose control.”

She felt the
girl’s remorse. “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. It’s just that I want to share
everything with you. I got carried away.”

“What kind
of a yidam are you, anyway? I thought you would be quiet and solemn and
instructive.”

“Is that the
only kind of wisdom you’ll accept? I don’t think so, Marianne. I’m more like
you—an active emanation of compassion. I mean no harm, but if you think I
intend to sit on a moonseat pretending that enlightenment comes only when one’s
eyes are closed, you’re wrong. That kind of behavior is for nuns and hermits.
We’re at a different place on the wheel, you and I. We have worldly work to
do.”

“Well,” said
Marianne. “I suppose you do what you must.”