Neon Lotus Page 4

“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 spraw
led 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.

  The dead man lay back in the litter, one arm having fallen limp across his breast with the forefinger pointing at the boulder. The lumps of dough had dropped from his eyes. He might have been staring at the two of them.

  Kate jumped to her feet in panic and revulsion, unable to restrain herself. Her movement caught the eye of the thin, grieving man—the only mourner in the procession. He hesitated, staring at her, apparently wondering where he had seen her before. His hand went to the white scarf slung around his neck.

  For a moment she was certain she saw thanks in his eyes. Thanks, no doubt, for the little they had done in capturing his friend’s murderer.

  The man with the drum and horn made a gesture to one of the monks, who ran up to rearrange the corpse and draw the sackcloth back over it.

  She caught her breath and sank back to the rock.

  The procession ambled on up the hill. The lean man occasionally glanced back at them until the party reached a bend in the road and disappeared through the trees.

  Peter and Kate climbed down from the rock. Neither spoke during the walk back to town; they kept their hands tightly clasped.

  Later, toward sunset, Kate looked back at the hill that rose above the buildings and the market square. From the peak, a coil of smoke drifted up into the flaming sky. Fumes from a funeral pyre.

  She put a hand on her belly, feeling nauseous again.

  That was their last night in Dharamsala.

  3. Recognition

  Peter and Kate Strauss hiked up Geary Street, hauling two carts full of groceries behind them. It was a cold August day, with wind and fog streaming over the buildings of downtown. The sidewalks were lined with open-air markets and squatters’ homes set back in the broken facades of ruined hovercar showrooms. Summer was the cruelest season in San Francisco, and hit the homeless the hardest. Kate often wondered why they didn’t simply move east or south, away from the fog-belt, toward Oakland or San Jose. There was no firewood in the city, nothing to burn for fuel; Golden Gate Park had been stripped to the ground and reclaimed by sand dunes. But the people stayed on, long after their pleas for assistance had gone unanswered, their loans for rebuilding unapproved. Developers had kept their money in the expanding Great Plains metropoli, having finally seen the absurdity of stacking fortunes on a major earthquake fault.

  To Kate, San Francisco resembled a graveyard of tumbled gray stone and broken black glass. Streets and alleys had buckled during the quakes; grass and dandelions sprang triumphant. Equally hardy groups of citizens clung to the seaport, promising to restore the city’s vitality without the help of investors. In the future, people would not build so high, nor out of such heavy materials. The Fellowship had sent the Strausses to help with the restoration.

  As they climbed the hill, they gradually came in sight of the church to which they had been assigned. Its low walls of gray and reddish-brown stone had survived with only minor damage, but the steeple tower had collapsed entirely, destroying everything inside the walls. Fog streamed around the new spire, a tall cone of emerald Plexiglass surmounted by a circle and cross. The summer wind whistled through the symbol.

  She smiled over at Peter and found him looking at the church with a builder's pride. She reached out and squeezed his hand.

  “The work is good,” she said.

  He nodded.

  They covered the last block in silence. A banner hung over the main entrance: DEDICATION TONIGHT. ALL WELCOME.

  Inside, the church was warm and crowded. There was the smell of food cooking, the shouts of children, and the eternal sound of hammering. Kate could still hear the wind in the cross; she was thankful to be inside.

  “I’ll take these to the kitchen,” she told Peter, catching the handle of his cart. He nodded, already looking preoccupied as he saw a man walking past with a plank under his arm. Repairs would continue until the dedication ceremony, then resume the moment it ended. As long as Peter was in the church, he thought of little else.

  At least he’d had an hour away with her, sharing in the shopping. They hadn’t spoken much, except when haggling with the grocers. Peter had no idea how expensive food had become. It was good for him to see for himself where the Fellowship’s money went, and why it went so quickly.

  As she passed through the swinging doors into the kitchen, she felt a hand tugging at her skirt. “Mommy!”

  “Hello, Marianne.”

  She picked up her daughter, leaving the carts by the door to be unloaded, and went through the kitchen talking to the cooks. The utility co-op—a skeleton of the former gas and electric company—had extended gas privileges to the church. Peter had had to be talked out of refusing the preferential treatment, which he considered unjust when practically everyone else in the city shivered and ate cold food.

  Little Marianne received treats from nearly every cook: a slice of fresh baked bread, a sliver of roast chicken. She observed the kitchen with the wide green eyes she had inherited from Kate. Her hair was blonde, like Peter’s, and she had his way of fixing on vacant air with a look of intense absorption.

  “Where’s Daddy?”

  “He’s getting things ready for tonight.”

  “What’s tonight?”

  “The dedication ceremony.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s where we bless the church and open it up again.”

  “Why did it close?”

  “Because of the earthquakes, silly. The steeple fell down. Why do you think we’ve worked so hard rebuilding it?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “I just told you why.”

  “Can I get down?”

  Marianne ran from the kitchen into the crowded reception area. Kate followed, looking out for any odd task that needed doing. It pleased her to keep busy. When all the work was done, it would be time to move on. She had grown fond of San Francisco, with its winters clear as crystal and its frigid summer weather.

  Two strangers came through the front door as she entered the lobby. For a moment, seeing them, she was transported to another time, another place.

  Memories of India rushed back to her. The smell of dust and human waste, asafetida and incense; the constant heat and the even more oppressive evidence of drought, famine, and starvation. She never hoped to see so much death again, or walk through such a living hell. It was no wonder the East had evolved the religions it had, with their emphases on suffering, impermanence, and the mercy of annihilation; with their vision of the human body as nothing more than a stinking bag of guts.

  But there had also been the cool highlands, the hill country—Dharamsala.

  Something in the demeanor of the two newcomers reminded her more of that place than of the baking plains.

  They wore simple burgundy robes over vermilion shirts, and carried rosaries of dark beads wrapped around their wrists. They were dark men with black hair, although the older man’s hair and mustache were speckled with gray and he walked somewhat slowly.

  As Kate moved to greet them, she heard Peter calling out. “Chokyi! I’m glad you made it.”

  Peter spotted Kate as he pressed through the crowd. “Kate, these are friends from the Kagyu temple. Tibetan Buddhists.”

  “I thought so,” she replied.

  “They were kind enough to come offer their blessings at the dedication ceremony. This is Lama Nyinje Rinpoche. He’s visiting from Sikkim.”

  Kate bowed to the elderly man, who gave her a beautiful if crooked smile.

  “And Chokyi.”

  She held out her hand to the younger Tibetan, who was full-faced, smiling, plump. “I am charmed,” he said.

  As Kate smiled at the elder Lama, searching for appropriate words, Marianne pushed her way betwee
n her parents. When she saw the Lama, a cloud passed over her expression and she grew very solemn. She pressed her hands together as if in prayer, then put them to her forehead, lips, and breast, finally bowing as low as she could before the old man.

  Peter winked at Kate. “Very nice, Marianne,” he said.

  She felt curiously relieved to know that he must have taught Marianne the formal gestures, which seemed to make their guests feel welcome.

  Lama Nyinje put out his hand so that Marianne could take hold of it. She led him toward the chapel.

  “I wonder if I should go with them,” Kate said.

  “Don’t worry,” said Peter. “She’ll give him the grand tour. Could you show Chokyi the order of the ceremony, so he can translate for Lama Nyinje? I have to supervise a work crew.”

  Kate nodded. As Peter walked away, she turned to Chokyi. “Do you want to come with me?”

  “Peter tells me that you two met in India,” Chokyi said as they worked their way down the crowded hall toward the rooms at the back of the building.

  “That’s right. Nearly four years ago. He came back to California with me and we got married.”

  “And your daughter?”

  “She’s three now.” Kate smiled, thinking of their nights in Dharamsala. Marianne had been conceived in the hill town, although they hadn’t known it at the time. Those memories were a melange of pleasure and strange fears. She had felt so lost then, cut loose from everything familiar to her as she set foot on a new path that she would share with Peter. In addition, there had been the murder in the hotel, the man with three eyes, the strangeness of the funeral procession.

  She had not thought of these things in ages. The appearance of the Tibetans had stirred up a flurry of memories.

  “Have you been to Dharamsala?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Most exiled Tibetans make a pilgrimage at least once in their lives, now that Tibet itself is closed. I grew up in India, but times were hard, especially for Tibetans. After more than a century and a half, we are still refugees. Things change so slowly there; the culture is huge, stubborn, and very discriminatory. I stayed in school as long as I could bear it, then ran away to the mountains.”