Neon Lotus (9 page)

Her fears
were confirmed a moment later. One of the rays swept over some members of the
party, not far distant. Screams tore the night, following the path of that
burning light.

Marianne
gasped, sickened. Walls of black rock rose around her, shutting out the stars
and those merciless rays. A soft green flare came to life, lighting the way
through a corridor of rock.

She glanced
back and saw Dr. Norbu and Jetsun Dorje hurrying along behind her, accompanied
by a number of the nomadic men and women who had greeted them. When she saw the
helpless expression on Reting’s face, she knew that he had also heard the
screams. She could think of nothing to say. Besides, she had to pay attention
to the path. The floor was uneven and it was all too easy to stumble.

Gradually
the corridor widened. The radiance of the green lantern grew diffuse in the
greater darkness and she heard their footsteps echoing from unseen walls. Just
ahead, she heard the rushing of water. A moment later she saw the green light
reflected on the surface of a tossing river. Stalactites hemmed in the
watercourse, like columns along a low-ceilinged canal. Floating along the
shore, tethered to the stone pillars, were three large rubber coracles fitted
with outboard motors.

She and Dr.
Norbu were helped into one boat along with two nomads. The remaining Tibetans
clambered into the other boats and the tethers were undone. Motors purred to
life. The boats turned against the current, spotlights probing the cold and
misty darkness ahead of them.

After
several minutes of watching the featureless walls slide past, Marianne grew
drowsy with the bobbing of the boat and the steady hum of the motors. No one
spoke. Dr. Norbu sat with his eyes half closed. She began to grow numb with
cold and exhaustion. At last the pills she’d taken in Jomsom were wearing off;
everything had an unreal quality, as if she were observing distant events
through a warped window.

Unable to
keep her head high any longer, she slumped against the side of the raft.

No,
she
thought.
This is not the time
.

She jerked
herself upright again, thinking that she saw light ahead.

She was
right. The boatman switched off the lantern but this new source of light
persisted, pale as moonglow on the subterranean river. It flooded down from a
gentle slope where a number of coracles rested. Several Tibetans came down to
the stone beach to meet them. She knew, upon seeing them, that this place was a
haven; unlike her nomadic companions, they carried no weapons.

The camp was
set back a hundred yards from the water; a number of lamps cast a steady glow
over the painted stone walls, but the upper reaches of the cavern remained
dark. Wherever she looked she saw brilliant decorations and religious images
inscribed on the rock. There were enormous Sanskrit syllables surrounded by
bright orange flames. She saw a Buddha the color of lapis lazuli, his dark blue
skin flecked with pyrite that glittered like underground stars. A cinnabar
Maitreya, Buddha of the Future, towered over the camp, sheltering it beneath
his delicately curved fingers.

Much nearer
were the Tibetans themselves, looking no less fantastic than their icons. The
nomads were wrapped in multicolored outfits, layer upon layer of clothing, long
coats with bright buttons, tasseled caps. They came toward her, bowing and
putting out their tongues to show that they had no sins to hide, no demonic
blackness within them.

“Gyayum Chenmo,”
said several, bowing and offering scarves to her.

If she had
accepted the scarves, they would have muffled her and eventually become a
burden. Instead, she smilingly returned the offerings, wrapping the silks back
around the shoulders of the nomads.

She noticed
a fissure in the rock wall not far beyond the camp, with two men standing
sentry on either side of it. They were tall, broad-shouldered, and wore their
hair in long braids; they seemed to hold themselves apart from the nomads in
many ways. They dressed in nothing but khaki military gear and stood with their
rifles ready, looking suspicious even of Marianne. She decided that they were
Khampas, the Eastern hill people, Tibet’s first guerrilla fighters. Of course
they would not trust a white girl in their sanctuary, no matter that the others
called her the Gyayum Chenmo.

When she had
drunk a cup of tea flavored with borax and
dze
butter, she asked Dr. Norbu
about them. “They’re guarding the temple, aren’t they? They look at me as if
they think I’m a spy.”

Dr. Norbu
took her arm and led her toward the sentries.

“They will
see that you are not.”

The Khampas
raised their weapons. She found herself reaching for one white scarf which had
remained around her neck; she took another from Dr. Norbu.

“Blessed are
the guardians of Chenrezi, the protectors of Tibet,” she said.

The first
guard looked embarrassed. He dropped his rifle and bowed his head, waiting like
a timid child as she draped the cloth across his shoulders. Turning, she saw
that the other sentry had also lowered his head to accept the scarf with equal
grace. She was gratified to see nothing but good humor in their eyes when next
they regarded her. Smiling, they stood aside from the dark fissure, clearing
the way.

She stared
into the opening and saw that there was light up ahead. They would not need a
lantern.

“Go on,”
said Dr. Norbu.

“Hold it!”
called a voice from the shore.

Looking
back, she saw Jetsun Dorje running toward them. “Don’t go without me,” he
cried, hurrying up the slope.

The soldiers
stepped away from the wall, raising their guns as Jetsun approached.

“There’s no
need for that,” said Marianne.

One nomad, a
stocky man with a long mustache, caught Jetsun as he passed. “They’re not going
anywhere,” he told the pilot; Marianne recognized the voice as that of Dr.
Norbu’s friend Dhondub, the leader of the party.

“Is there
some reason he can’t come with us?” Marianne asked.

“It’s all
right,” Jetsun said. “I just don’t want to be left behind.”

“That
passage is the only entrance to the temple,” Dhondub told him. “There is no
chance of them leaving without you.”

Jetsun
pulled his arm from Dhondub’s grasp and went to pour himself a cup of tea from
a huge copper kettle. With a smile, he raised the cup to Marianne. “Good luck!”

“Go ahead,”
Dr. Norbu said.

She stepped
into the passage, putting her hands upon the rock walls at either side. She
walked toward the light, hearing Dr. Norbu’s footsteps behind her. The passage
crooked right and then widened until she could no longer touch both walls at
the same time. A soft white radiance flooded the air. She saw the walls angling
up into dimness then dropping sharply to form a natural portico. Through that
gateway the light streamed steadily, yet there was a flickering quality to it
that reminded her of lightning or flames in a wood fire.

She stopped
in the entryway. Reting touched her elbow. The floor of the cave was inlaid
with colored tile. She walked out into the temple with the feeling that she was
dreaming.

All that she
saw strengthened this impression.

The cave was
alive with light. Constant flickering lines of radiance played through the
walls, causing the air to shimmer and dance. The shadows of stalagmites and
stalactites leapt forward and back across the floor as the luminance shifted.
Much of the cavern seemed to be quartz; she felt as if she had stepped into the
center of an enormous geode.

For a minute
she was too dazzled by the piezoelectric display to take notice of anything
else. But gradually her eyes followed the crackling trails of light and she
realized that they had a focus.

At the far
end of the cavern stood a figure of gold and white, studded with gleaming gems.
It moved slowly as if swept by unseen currents. At first she thought it was a
person, despite the fact that it stood over three meters tall.

Then she saw
that it was Chenrezi.

She moved
forward on the tesselated floor, running.

Lightning
zigzagged through the rocks above, streaming toward the idol, bathing it in
radiant energy. She felt like a bolt of thunder herself, flung without abandon
at the figure.

Chenrezi
stood above her, strange expressions crossing his eleven faces, while his
thousand arms and five thousand fingers flowed like the graceful tendrils of a
sea anemone. The fingers brushed each other, touching tip to tip, parting
again. Countless intricate patterns formed as the hands and fingers wove in and
around one another; connections were made and broken by the instant. His
fingers shaped the most elaborate mudras she had ever seen.

In the palm
of each hand, a jeweled eye gleamed as if it had only now blinked and been
moistened by tears.

She stared
at him, trying to find the signature of the artisans and engineers who had
built him. The limbs were seamless, the fingers unflawed ivory; they looked
like moon-white flesh.

Chenrezi’s
eleven heads were primarily of three colors—emerald, ivory, and cinnabar. They
rose in tiers like buds on a living stalk. The lowest three were green, white,
and red, with white facing outward. Above them were three more, one of each
color, with the green head facing forward. Above these, and slightly smaller,
was another set of three, with this time the red overlooking the chamber. The
penultimate head bore a dark blue visage, wrathful and staring from three eyes.
And at the very peak of the spire—like a topknot on the blue head—was a tiny
red face in the likeness of the Buddha Amitabha.

The heads
blinked, smiled and gaped, the five forward faces staring down at Marianne. The
illusion of life was perfect. Chenrezi apparently could do everything but walk.
His ivory feet were rooted to a disk of polished white stone where the
brilliant electricity of the cavern shone at its brightest and most tumultuous.

“It is the
most perfect automaton ever created,” Dr. Norbu whispered. “No one has dared
tamper with it to explore the mechanism, but the technology appears as
beautiful as the artistry.”

“A prayer
machine?”

“That’s only
my guess based on the holograms I was shown by Dhondub Ling. You see, it is
forever forming mudras with its hands. It would appear that the joining of
fingertips creates unique electric pathways. It could be a computer, using a
thousand hands to store and manipulate binary information. You could think of
the hands as memory and the eleven heads as registers. If there were only some
way to speak to it, to access that memory, to discover what was stored here
when the statue was built.”

“Religious
information probably,” Marianne said. “If it is an elaborate prayer device,
those mudras might simply be auspicious gestures. Whoever built the statue
might have set it here to work its rituals throughout the ages. It would be a
bit like all the solar-powered prayer wheels. But of course this is something
on a scale we’ve never seen before.”

“The nomads
believe it was set here to protect Tibet,” said Dr. Norbu. “Knowledge of its
presence has been passed down for generations. It has its keepers and
guardians, but there’s been little need for maintenance.”

Marianne
gazed up at the eleven faces of the statue. “And why have they brought us here
now?”

“Because I asked them to,”
Chenrezi answered.

For a moment
Marianne and Dr. Norbu did not move. In the distance, she could hear the river.
Her eyes remained fixed on the god’s faces. The voice, small and almost
inaudible, had come from the topmost head of Amitabha, to whom in the legends
Chenrezi had made his vow to save all sentient beings from suffering.

“It speaks,”
said Dr. Norbu.

“I do,” said
the fierce blue head of Vajrapani, lord of energy, second from the top. “I also
hear, and my eyes never close. None of them—none of a thousand and
twenty-three.”

“And did
those who . . . who constructed you, give you this
ability?” asked Dr. Norbu. Marianne felt too stunned to speak.

The lowest
of the five forward-facing heads—the white one—answered his question: “I was
created with many abilities, Doctor Norbu. Few of these remain, after the
passage of ages.”