Free Neon Lotus by Marc Laidlaw Page B

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