Neon Lotus (5 page)

He murmured
into her sweater, “Will you come with me?”

“Why can’t
you come to California?”

“If that’s
what it takes, I will.”

She felt
tears starting from her eyes. She wasn’t sure what to think.

“Is this too
sudden?” he asked. “Because I don’t feel that it is. We’ve gotten to know each
other gradually, you must admit—considering we’ve been together continuously for
. . . ”

“A month.”

“Will you
think about it?”

She kissed
him. “I’ve already thought about it. I do want to stay with you, Peter, but I
don’t know that I want to live in Geneva—no more than I want to go home and
pick up where I left off. But you know, there’s another place we could go.”

“Where’s
that?”

“The
Fellowship needs volunteers. We could travel together, couldn’t we? There are
projects in Europe and America, even in Asia if we—”

“Not Asia.
This place has opened my eyes a bit too wide. I need to see something familiar
again.”

She
remembered the man in white rolling over when she pushed him. Three eyes.

“I know what
you mean,” she said.

He drew her
down to him.

***

Reting awoke
from a nightmare of violence. A storm had broken over his head, trapping him in
a land of jagged crystals and broken glass. Every step and stumble was torment,
slicing him to ribbons. The rain was red; it had the stink of old blood. He
knew it was his own.

He had been
wandering forever, perpetually in flight, a fugitive.

The dream
had begun in darkness, but then a great light had arisen like a sun vaster than
infinity. As the merest edge of its circumference had dawned on the horizon of
his dreams, he had fled in terror, fearing that he would burst into flames,

Then
lightning crashed at his feet. The sky pulled itself up into peaks crested by
foaming clouds, arching above like a wave that would drown him utterly.

As the wave
began to break, he heard a soothing voice say, “Nobly born, you have passed
beyond the Clear Light. It is out of reach. But do not lose hope. Do not lose
hope.”

He jerked
himself awake and found that he had fallen asleep upon the console of the Bardo
device.

The silver
vapor had passed from the screen. Green light filled the tank, a watery
turmoil—

Yes, it was
a breaking wave.

As the foam
came crashing down, he flinched as if it were falling on his own head. He saw a
shadow, black as a hole into nothingness, cowering beneath the wave. He watched
as it was swept away. The Bardo device tracked it through rushing tides. Surely
it would be destroyed. . . .

But no. It
was Tashi s soul. It was indestructible.

Or was it
still Tashi? Could he give it such a name? What relation did it bear to his old
friend?

He
remembered the feeling of being a fugitive, nameless, without identity, no
more than a shadow in a dream of shadows. He remembered the howl of wind and
the sound of thunder, the agony slashing at every raw nerve.

He had seen
it all in his dream, as if somehow sharing the experience with Tashi.

More likely,
he had been gazing into the screen with his dreaming eyes half open.

The flood
left the black soul-shadow stranded on a rocky shore. Fierce winds peeled it
from the momentary purchase and swept it like a scrap of inky paper into the
midst of an inferno that could not consume it. The images were silent but
Reting Norbu could easily imagine the roar of an infinite forest in flames.

“You cast no
shadow,” said the Bardo device, still coaching the soul through the labyrinth.
“You journey through an infinite number of worlds in an infinitesimal amount of
time, but you leave no footsteps.

“No one can
see or hear you, though their thoughts echo in your ears.”

The flames
were gone. The black doll whirled at the center of a kaleidoscope. A million
patterns flickered across the screen, too fast for him to register. There was
no telling what the passage of time might have been like for that surviving
speck of mind.

Then came
darkness, incredible darkness, in which the black soul appeared luminous by
comparison.

“Sun, moon,
and stars have fallen from the sky.”

Reting saw a
fleck of light extending into a strand of pearls. From this appeared a lavish
feast, laid out upon a broad table. The black soul threw itself onto the table,
obviously starving; it fell upon the platters of steaming meat, the goblets of
nectar, the heaped fruits.

But the food
passed through the shadow’s hands.

Reting’s
fists clenched.

Feed, him
,
he thought.
Let him eat!

The table
turned over. Its underside was stark silver metal. The shadow floated through
and lay upon it like the silhouette of a sick man. It began to emanate a fine
mist of visions. Blood-red, pus-yellow, bile-black: evil faces formed above the
silver bed, slavering over the helpless mind. The soul writhed away from them
but could not escape, for they were the product of its own dissolution.

“Help him!”
he screamed, rising to his feet. He slammed his hands against the console of
the Bardo device.

“I am
sorry,” said the gentle bodhi voice. “He has no form, no substance. He is
insensible. There is nothing to help.”

Reting saw
the black shadow throw itself from the silver bed, and then there was nothing
but darkness on the screen again.

He looked at
the body on the moondisk. So cold.

And back at
the screen.

“It
changes,” said the voice.

“What
changes? What do you mean?”

“The soul
returns. Matter claims it. The mind has looked into the world.”

For a moment
he saw the black shape, surrounded by a nimbus of fire. Hands outstretched,
each finger lit separately, it seemed to be striving to crawl from the screen.
It clawed toward him, faceless and implacable. He saw nothing in it that he
recognized.

“The
quickening begins,” said the device. “We are losing our tracer.”

“But where
is he? Can’t you contain him? Can’t you even track him?”

The corona
of fire shot through the screen, as if the tank were cracking into a thousand
pieces. Imprisoned in the shattered web were tiny human figures, writhing
together, copulating. Globules of protoplasm drifted through the matrix; he saw
plump cells shivering, the migration of organelles. The cells divided again and
again, forming into embryos that sank as they grew heavier, sank and became
enmeshed with the others, caught in the web.

The image
flickered and died.

“Transmission’s
end,” said the Bardo device.

“You lost
him?”

“The world
reclaimed him.”

He sank
down, turning away from the screen.

They had
failed. Failed miserably, utterly.

The equation
of emptiness still shone from Tashi’s slate, a half-formed proof. It seemed to
mock him. It was the nut of the problem, and without it . . .

The assassin
had been successful enough.

He shut down
the Bardo device without a word. Standing over Tashi’s corpse, he felt himself
seized by futility. Without his teacher to see it through, the project had come
to nothing.

Alone, he
couldn’t possibly do the necessary work.

It was
hopeless.

Death would
never be an ally of humanity.

***

The last
week of the tour passed all too quickly for Kate Riordan, although in a way she
was anxious for the journey to conclude. At least she knew that the end of the
trip would not mean the end of her relationship with Peter Strauss. That, it
seemed, was only beginning.

They took
long hikes into the hills, through forests of evergreens and rhododendron,
exploring trails that ran between the scattered Tibetan settlements. These were
mainly crude buildings of stone, lacking electricity and plumbing, although
brightly painted and inhabited by cheerful residents. In vivid contrast were
the stark modern condominiums that appeared from time to time on stone outcroppings
and high ridges, reminding her in the worst possible way of California. They
looked like isolated monasteries, but sterile, unadorned with prayer flags or

evidence of devotion. It was
impossible to tell if they were inhabited.

While most
of their traveling companions entered brief courses of study with local lamas,
Peter and Kate confined their religious investigations to a few tours of the
major temples, including the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s Memorial Shrine and a
viewing of his mummy in the Central Cathedral. The week provided a relaxing
conclusion to their journey, after the crowds and clamor of the plains; and it
was mercifully undisturbed by any further events like that which had marred
their first night in Dharamsala.

The
afternoon before their departure, as they were descending from a nearby peak,
Kate looked down the road and saw a procession coming slowly toward them. It
looked like a religious parade.

“Let’s sit
here,” Peter said, indicating a large granite boulder on which some patient artisan
had painted hundreds of tiny images of an ivory divinity who appeared to have
a thousand arms and a multitude of heads.

“Who is
that?” Kate asked.

“Avalokiteshvara.
The Tibetans know him as Chenrezi, the god of compassion. He’s their patron
saint. Each Dalai Lama was supposed to be his incarnation. And here’s his
mantra, the infamous
Om mani
padme hum
, which translates as something
like, ‘Hail to the jewel in the lotus.’”

“You know
everything, don’t you, Peter?”

“Well, I
don’t know what it means,” he said.

“The jewel
is Buddhism, isn’t it? And the lotus is the world?”

He shrugged.
“There you go. I know everything, but only superficially.”

They
clambered up the backside of the boulder and perched on the chill rock as the
procession came slowly up the hill. With it came the unearthly howling of
trumpets, the rapid thumping of a hide drum, and the continual chanting of
several monks. Pheasants cried out in the forest; a splay-winged shadow swooped
over the road and vanished into the trees.

The main
figure in the procession was a huddled shape seated in a litter between two
long poles. Two strong men carried the litter between them, trudging red-faced
up the hill. Ahead of them went a youth in a claret monk’s robe, carrying a
tall banner embroidered with mystical symbols. Behind the litter came several
more monks, chanting tirelessly. A gray-haired man in tattered clothes walked
at the side of the litter, blowing on a thin trumpet of bone and twirling the
drum in his hand so that two beads strung to the rim of the drum were made to
hit the taut hide like a constant patter of rain.

On the other
side of the litter marched a man with slumped shoulders and a defeated air.
When he glanced over at the litter, revealing thin features emaciated by grief,
Kate recognized the man who had chased the three-eyed murderer down the stairs
and paused beside her in the hallway.

Only then
did she realize what rode in the litter.

She put her
hand on Peter’s arm. “It’s a funeral for the man who was shot,” she said. “It
must be.”

He didn’t
move; his eyes narrowed. She followed his gaze back to the funeral procession
and saw that the jolting pace had shaken the huddled rider into disarray. He
was wrapped in a white sackcloth that had covered him completely a moment
before; but now the laces had come undone and the sack was falling open. Every
step caused the sack to droop wider. Kate caught sight of a gray head inside
the swaddling.

As the
procession passed below the boulder, the foremost bearer stumbled in a rut. The
trumpet shrilled in Kate’s ear. The body in the litter sprawled out, limbs
jerking like a marionette’s. She had a glimpse of an old man’s face. The eyes
and mouth were packed with what looked like brown dough. She felt a stirring in
her belly, nausea. The second bearer stumbled in the same rut and the corpse
flopped backward, arms flung out wildly in a semblance of life.