Neon Lotus

by Marc Laidlaw

  Then Tara smiled and gave her a warm, secret squeeze. “It’s all right,” she said. “We’ll see him again.”

  “I hope so,” said Marianne.

  “What’s that?” asked Dr. Norbu.

  “Nothing. Talking to myself. You go ahead.”

  5. Map and Mandala

  Marianne slept a deep and dreamless sleep, wrapped up in blankets on the hard floor of the cave, until she felt a shadow standing over her. A girlish voice said, “Wake up.”

  She opened her eyes and sat up with a start.

  Rainbow Tara stood waiting, her skin a shade of blue slightly darker than the sky above. Seeing Marianne awake, she sat down cross-legged on the grass.

  Marianne leapt to her feet in a meadow dotted with wildflowers. She was more terrified than delighted to see green hills on the horizon. The sky above was deep blue, cloudless; the sun burned clear and warm, its light forming a shimmering aureole around the rainbow girl.

  “Sit down,” Tara said, putting a hand on the grass. “Don’t be frightened.”

  “Where are we? When did we leave the cave?”

  “We’re still in the cave. I caught you on your way out of sleep.”

  Marianne sank down slowly, hardly able to believe what her senses told her. It seemed impossible that this should be a dream. She had never felt more alert.

  But when she stared at Tara, sitting across from her, she knew that they were not in the world to which she was accustomed.

  Tara’s flesh changed color with every passing instant, as if rich-hued clouds swept below the surface of her skin, driving rainbows ahead of them. Sometimes, when the inner lights played at certain angles, Tara seemed to dissolve into a spray of many colors at once. She never lost her human form: the transformations merely illuminated it, made it seem like something new.

  She wore a skirt of multicolored doth that left her budding breasts bare. Silk scarves fluttered about her shoulders. A golden necklace gleamed against her throat. She wore garlands of flowers in her hair and carried an unearthly blue long-stemmed lotus in one hand. The earth beneath her was cushioned with wildflowers, yet she sat upon the delicate blossoms without bending a blade or crushing a petal.

  “You’re very beautiful,” Tara said.

  “Me?” Marianne put a hand to her cheek: it felt warm and real.

  “I had expected . . . well, an old man in a woman’s body.”

  Marianne laughed. “That’s what I feel like sometimes. I have these foul moods.”

  “Your hair is golden.”

  “And yours is—I don’t know what to call it. Prismatic.”

  “Do you remember what it was like to be Tashi Dragon?”

  Marianne tensed. Even dreaming, the question troubled her.

  “No,” she said. “They tell me that when I was born, I had his memories. I even spoke Tibetan, but I’ve had to relearn it. Reting Norbu taught me everything I know about Dr. Drogon and his work.” Her fingers dug into the grass. “I’m not Tashi anymore. Tashi Drogon died. I’m Marianne Strauss. I have a life of my own to lead. It doesn’t matter who I was. I hate even thinking about it. No one ever gives me credit for anything I accomplish on my own. If I had studied science more thoroughly, and had any success in the field, I think it would all be attributed to Tashi Drogon. As if I couldn’t possibly contribute anything of value to the world without the mind of a dead genius hidden somewhere inside me.”

  “Don’t you believe you are his reincarnation?”

  “It just doesn’t matter to me. Or rather—it does, but it shouldn’t. I don’t see why I can’t help Tibet without his name constantly coming up. Tashi Drogon never entered this land, did you know that? He never fought for his country. I’m going to succeed where he failed. I won’t do anything that he might have done. I can’t let his death rule my life, do you see?”

  Tara nodded. “Clearly.” She narrowed her almond-shaped eyes and flushed bright green from head to toe while her palms turned pink. “I hear two voices when you speak. One sounds like an older woman. Your mother?”

  Marianne looked abruptly toward the hills. This Tara, she thought, knew her too well.

  “My mother hated the idea of Tashi Drogon. She hated the interference of strangers like Reting. She always told me to be my own person, to find myself—but she also stood in my way when I tried to do it.”

  Tara looked sympathetic.

  Marianne sighed. “She was happy enough when I fought the notion that my identity belonged to someone else. But she couldn’t understand why I grew up thinking of Tibet as my true home. She was furious when I preferred my Tibetan friends and teachers—I had quite a lot of them in Switzerland—to the friends she chose for me. We fought constantly until I reached an age where I could do what I wished. Then I moved to Dharamsala. I joined the Youth Congress and the government enlisted me for other work.” She laughed ironically. “That’s the only time I’ve been thankful for Tashi Drogon. They must have thought I’d give them secrets from the old man’s memory. If I’d been just another European girl, they would never have let me do the things I wanted to do.”

  “Which were?”

  “I wanted to be a warrior in the resistance. A warrior who fought without violence.”

  “A soldier? Because Tashi Drogon was a scientist?”

  “You know me well. Yes, because it was as different a thing from a scientist as I could imagine.”

  Tara smiled. Marianne found herself staring into Tara’s eyes and seeing herself reflected in them; in her reflected pupils she could see tiny images of Tara, in whose tinier pupils she saw still tinier visions of herself, doubling and doubling again like quicksilver tunnels branching into infinity. She felt as if she were falling into Tara’s eyes and thus into her own. The blue sky blurred into a dark streak, the grass fused into a bright green smudge, and she came

  awake shivering in the cold cavern, having rolled some distance from the radiator where she had laid down to sleep.

  Somewhere, in a sunny meadow, Tara was laughing.

  Marianne had slept in her clothes. She pulled on a sweater and walked away from the sleepers, toward the water’s edge. The lights were turned down low in the cave but she could see the Khampas sitting near the mouth of the temple, watchful as ever. She realized that this was probably the safest she would be for as long as she stayed in Tibet.

  How much time would pass before she saw Dharamsala again, or her mother, or anything of her old world? Chenrezi’s ornaments, if they still survived, must be scattered to the corners of Tibet by now. It was a huge country, barren and mountainous in most of its parts. It might take years to accomplish anything. Tashi Drogon had labored for decades over his work, and never lived to see its completion. Was that all she had to look forward to?

  But she had committed herself.

  As she approached the shore, she saw a tiny spark of orange light hanging above the water near a column of stone. A man stood in the shadows, smoking.

  “Jetsun?” she said.

  He looked around the column, stubbed his cigarette against the rock, and slipped the butt into his pocket.

  “Gyayum Chenmo,” he said, as if testing the name on his tongue.

  “Please don’t call me that. It’s not my name, it’s a title—and one I don’t even deserve. I was stuck with it by the exiled State Oracle. Do I look like anyone’s mother?”

  “The mother of the revolution,” he said. “I imagined an older lady. Plump, dark hair . . . Tibetan. You aren’t any of those things.”

  “Well, the government has never wanted to be explicit about exactly what body the Gyayum Chenmo wears. But I thought you knew.”

  He shrugged. “I thought you were Dr. Norbu’s assistant.”

  “The nomads, though—Dhondub’s people—they knew.”

  “They have all the communications equipment they’ve been able to steal. In Mustang, we only have what we’ve been given. And now the jet . . . gone.” He shook his head. “It’s a long walk back, you know, and I’m n
o Sherpa.”

  “We’re not going back,” she said. “No one told you?”

  “I heard, but I’m not coming along. My post is on the border.”

  “That’s too bad,” she said. “I’m sure we could use your help.”

  “Oh?”

  “Don’t you think you’d be doing more good inside Tibet than sitting out in that little base in Mustang? What did you do out there anyway?”

  He shrugged. “Flew in supplies. Played cards. Wrote poetry.”

  “Poetry? About what?”

  He laughed, watching the dark river. “Mountains. Snow. Beautiful women.”

  “I didn’t see any of those at the base,” she said.

  He turned toward her. “There weren’t any there until you came.”

  Marianne’s face grew warm.

  “You wonder why my friends were suddenly eager to fly into Chinese territory?”

  “For the cause,” she said.

  He laughed. “Fortunately, I was the only one skilled enough to do it. They envied me, you know.”

  “They won’t be so envious when they learn you’re stuck here.”

  “They’ll say I’m fortunate to be stuck with you.” He sighed. “And now you’re going on.”

  “You could come with us, you know.”

  “Do you want me along?”

  “I invited you.”

  “Oh, that.” He grinned. “I thought that was a general invitation. Something Dhondub Ling asked you to pass on.”

  “I think Chenrezi would want you to come,” she said. “Chenrezi, eh?” He pursed his lips, nodded. “In that case, maybe I will.”

  ***

  “This,” said Dhondub Ling, the nomad chieftain, “is our map.”

  They had tramped a few hundred yards upriver from the camp, along a narrow ledge above the water. He turned his flashlight on the wall of the cave. The wet stones were painted with a bright wheel, an almost luminous mandala done in the five colors she had seen on the plains.

  “You can see the missing ornaments here,” he said. “The top of the map is to the north.”

  As he raised his light to illuminate the upper edge of the mandala, Marianne saw that the entire disk was nipped in the beak of an enormous bird whose wings spread out of sight across the dark wall. Just below the beak was a golden glyph—a tall pitcher with an elegant spout and handle.

  “The vase of nectar,” she said. “You think it’s in northern Tibet?”

  “This is the main reason we have for thinking so. Now look to the east.”

  She saw a golden wand, a scepter with two tapering heads.

  “The vajra,” she said.

  To the west, alone at the far left of the wheel, Dhondub’s light showed a red lotus.

  Then the beam tracked to the bottom of the mandala, southward on the map, and Marianne saw what seemed to be a black ovoid stone speckled with gold.

  “The Wish-Fulfilling Gem,” she said.

  “And in the center, the wheel,” said Dhondub.

  This was a gold disk surrounded by flames, decorated with a spiral.

  “What a strange map,” she said.

  “It is more like a lens held up to a map,” Dhondub said. “Take a closer look, Gyayum—”

  “Marianne.”

  “Marianne. I’m sorry.”

  He conducted the light past the edge of the mandala. She saw that the remainder of the wall was painted in dark pigments that scarcely showed up at all in contrast to the mandala. It took her a full minute of examining the intricate lines before she realized that they were more than meaningless patterns. They represented topography, the contours of mountains, valleys, rivers, and lakes.

  “It’s Asia,” said Dr. Norbu. “The Himalayas here, the Uygur Desert here—”

  “But the mandala—like a lens—is focused on Tibet alone,” said Dhondub.

  Moving closer to the map, Marianne could see that the topography was continuous with the interior of the mandala; mountains and watercourses had been subtly woven into the decorative patterns, making the land itself look like the work of an artist.

  Jetsun Dorje used his own flashlight to pick out locations on the mandala map. “That places the lotus near Pakistan, the vase in the Tsaidam basin, the vajra in Kham, the gem near Lhasa, and the wheel . . . in the middle of the Changthang. Nowhere.”

  “And that’s all we know?” Marianne asked.

  When Dhondub smiled, his stern, heavyset face was transformed into that of a proud boy. “That’s what we knew. Remember, we have been searching for some time now. The wheel, which seemed most lost, most hopeless, we are now quite close to recovering. We discovered ruins of a temple buried by an earthquake many centuries ago. A secret excavation is underway, but there have been frequent interruptions. We cannot assemble enough people in one place to do the job quickly. So nomads come and go, staying long enough to contribute to the work, but never lingering so long that they arouse suspicion.”

  “And what of the other ornaments?”

  He regained his former gravity, replacing it like a mask that duty required him to wear. “The search goes on.”

  Marianne felt a moment of lightness. She heard Tara say, “The ornaments will not be found until the proper time comes.”

  “You know that?” Marianne asked.

  Dhondub gave her a puzzled look. “Of course I do.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was talking to—”

  Tara’s laughter interrupted her: “I hear your thoughts, you know. You don’t have to make yourself sound like a fool.”

  Thanks for telling me, Marianne thought. When will the ornaments be found?

  “They must reveal themselves.”

  Marianne repeated this message aloud for the benefit of her companions. They looked at her with strange expressions until Dr. Norbu explained the yidam’s methods.

  “Then all we can do is what we’ve been doing,” said Dhondub, once he understood that Marianne was not simply speaking her own mind.

  “Having me along will help,” Tara told them. Marianne was startled to find herself speaking in a gentler, higher-pitched voice. No one else seemed to notice the change. They must have thought Marianne had spoken only for herself.

  “I’ve made exact copies of the map,” Dhondub said. “But I thought you should see the original at least this once.”

  As they walked back along the shore toward camp, Marianne caught ahold of Dr. Norbu’s elbow.

  “Reting, I have a funny feeling.”

  He nodded, raising an eyebrow inquisitively.

  “It’s Tara—I’ve never known anything like this. It’s as if my mind has split into two pieces. What if it makes me schizophrenic?”

  “Do you feel that disoriented?”

  She shrugged. “No. But if the change were subtle enough, I might not notice a thing. Will you tell me if I begin to act strange?”

  He squeezed her hand. “Of course.”

  “You’re the only one here who knows me well enough to notice such a change.”

  “I promise, Marianne. But I assure you, this is not madness you’re experiencing. The mind can take many natural forms. You’re like two petals of the same flower, you and Tara.”

  She nodded and felt herself relax. “Yes, that is what it’s like. Thank you, Reting. I won’t worry.”

  ***

  They emerged from the tunnel just after sunset. A red glow lay along the western mountains, quickly darkening to violet; the sky to the east was black, already full of stars. The wind met no obstructions as it crossed the valley floor. It was bitterly cold, laden with sand and grit that stung like pinpricks. She could almost taste snow in the air.

  The hatch on the tunnel was disguised as part of the rocky inner wall of a dry gully. They took advantage of the shelter while Dhondub conversed briefly on the radio. Marianne gazed over the top of the gulch but saw no signs of life. She stared to the northeast, toward the heart of Tibet, and watched the darkness deepen.

  Her skin had
been stained to a shade of brown, and her hair felt stiff and coarse from the black dyes. Only her eyes remained untinted, green. She was dressed like a nomad woman in brown robes, a round cap with a fur brim, and a striped apron. While the cloth of her garments mimicked natural materials, it was all artificial, tailored for changing conditions of weather and exertion. Her gownlike chuba was meant to breathe and keep her cool if she were working strenuously, and to insulate and warm her if she were standing still. Her tall felt boots, embroidered with golden eyes, had the spongy, flexible soles of running shoes.

  As she leaned against the rocks, looking away from the wind, she couldn’t help but feel a pang of disappointment.

  This was Tibet. Khawachen. Bod Chenpo. The land of her dreams.

  And there was nothing here, nothing to be seen. It was a land so vast that she might travel for months without finding anything but vistas like this one, unless it were harsher and more desolate landscapes. She felt like a hypocrite, after her words to Chenrezi. What did she truly know of Tibet? How did she expect to care for it?

  Her first good look at the country showed it to be cold and bleak as the stars that lit it, and as indifferent to humanity. For the first time she feared that this was the wrong place for her. Tibet was a large and empty land. She might never make sense of it—or of her own needs.

  Far out across the plain, she saw a cloud rising against the lowest stars. She could see nothing else, but she had the feeling that there was movement near the horizon—something subtle and shadowy, only barely visible.

  She called down to Dhondub Ling: “Can I borrow your field glasses? They’re night scopes, aren’t they?”

  He nodded, handing them up; then he climbed to her side.

  The scopes gave her a vibrant view of the plain, painting it in shades of violet and crimson. Against the horizon was a shifting line of hot blue motion, approaching.

  She focused the lenses on the blue shapes, picking out the nearest. What she saw resembled a herd of fleet-footed luminous animals, perhaps antelopes. They ran close together for protection, rather than grazing. She listened for the pounding of hooves but heard nothing. They were graceful, light-footed runners.