Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [172]
“It seems I will get to find out soon enough anyway.”
He was slow, but he kept trying. His moves were pretty sure when they happened. His small mouth pursed in a perfect little O of concentration. In a few minutes more he made it up and hauled himself around to sit beside Charlie, uttering a happy “Ha.”
Frank had them do it again, trying other routes on the face; then they belayed each other, nervously, with Frank standing beside the belayer making sure all was well. Lastly he had them rappel down, in a simple but scary operation like the old Batman, but for real. They practiced until their hands got too tired and sore to hold on to anything.
After that (it had taken a couple of hours) Frank changed his belay to another tree on the cliff top. “It looks like both Juliet’s Balcony and Romeo’s Ladder survived. I’m going to do one of those, or Gorky Park.” He dropped away, leaving Charlie and Drepung sitting happily on the cliff’s edge, kicking their heels against the rock and taking in the view. To their left the rearranged falls roared down its drops, every step along the way boiling whitely. Below them Frank was climbing slowly.
Suddenly Charlie leaped to his feet shouting: “Where’s Joe!” and looking around them desperately.
“Not here,” Drepung reminded him. “With Anna today, remember?”
“Oh yeah.” Charlie sank back down. “Sorry. For a second there I forgot.”
“That’s okay. You must be used to watching him all the time.”
“Yes.”
He sat back on the cliff’s edge, shaking his head. Slowly Frank ascended toward them. As he looked up for his next hold his face reminded Charlie of Buster Keaton; he had that same wary and slightly baffled look, ready for anything—unflappable, although not imperturbable, as his eyes revealed just as clearly as Keaton’s that in fact he was perturbed most of the time.
Charlie had always had a lot of sympathy for Buster Keaton. Life as a string of astonishing crises to be dealt with; it seemed right to him. He said, “Drepung?”
“Yes?”
Charlie inspected his torn hand. Drepung held his own hand next to it; both were chewed up by the day’s action.
“Speaking of Joe.”
“Yes?”
Charlie heaved a sigh. He could feel the worry that had built up in him. “I don’t want him to be any kind of special person for you guys.”
“What?”
“I don’t want him to be a reincarnated soul.”
“. . . Buddhism says we are all such.”
“I don’t want him to be any kind of reincarnated lama. Not a tulku, or a boddhisattva, or whatever else you call it. Not someone your people would have any religious interest in at all.”
Drepung inspected his palm. The skin was about the same color as Charlie’s, maybe more opaque. Let that stand for us, Charlie thought. At least as far as Charlie’s sight was concerned. He couldn’t tell what Drepung was thinking. Except it did seem that the young man didn’t know what to say.
This tended to confirm Charlie’s suspicions. He said, “You know what happened to the new Panchen Lama.”
“Yes. I mean no, not really.”
“Because nobody does! Because they picked a little boy and the Chinese took him and he has never been seen again. Two little boys, in fact.”
Drepung nodded, looking upset. “That was a mess.”
“Tell me. Tell me what happened.”
Drepung grimaced. “The Panchen Lama is the reincarnation of the Buddha Amitabha. He is the second most important spiritual leader in Tibetan Buddhism, and his relationship with the Dalai Lama has always been complicated. The two were often at odds, but they also helped to choose each other’s successors. Then in the last couple of centuries the Panchen Lama has often been associated with Chinese interests, so it got even more complicated.”
“Sure,” Charlie said.
“So, when the tenth Panchen Lama died, in 1989, the identification of his next reincarnation was obviously a problem. Who would make the determination? The Chinese government told the Panchen Lama’s monastery, Tashilhunpo, to find the new