Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [196]
He tried to resist this theory, so Edgardo-esque, by asking specific questions. “How old are you?”
“Eighty-one.”
“Where were you born?”
“Near Drepung.”
“Do you remember any of your past lives?”
“I remember many lives.”
“Lives before this life?”
Rudra looked down at the river as they crossed on the Beltway. “Yes.”
“Not interrupted by any deaths?”
“Many deaths.”
“Yes, but I mean, your own deaths?”
Rudra shrugged. “This does not seem to be the body I used to inhabit.”
Out on the farm, Rudra insisted on trudging slowly up to the land’s high point, a low ridge at the eastern edge of the property, just past the ruined farmhouse.
They looked around. “So you’ll make this your new Khembalung.”
“Same Khembalung,” Rudra said. “Khembalung is not a place.” He waved his arm at the scene. “A name for a way.” He wiggled his hand forward like a fish, as if indicating passage through time.
“A moveable feast,” Frank suggested.
“Yes. Milarepa said this, that Khembalung moves from age to age. He said it will go north. Not until now have we seen what he meant. But here it is.”
“But Washington isn’t very north of Khembalung.”
“From Khembalung go north, keep going, over top of world and down the other side. Here you are!”
Frank laughed. “So now this is Khembalung?”
Rudra nodded. He said something in Tibetan that Frank didn’t understand.
“What’s that?”
“The first Khembalung was recently found, north of Kunlun Mountains. Ruins located, recently, under desert mountain in Takla Makan.”
“They found the original? How old was the site?”
“Very old.”
“Yes, but did they say a date by chance?”
Rudra frowned. “Eighth century in your calendar?”
“Wow. I bet you’d like to go see that.”
Rudra shook his head. “Stones.”
“I see. You like this better.” Indicating the broad sweep of grass and mud under their gaze.
“Sure. More lively. Live living.”
“That’s true. So, a great circle route, and Shambhala comes to us.”
“Good way to put it.”
Slowly they walked down to the riverbank, a broad swath of mud curving around the ridge and then away to the southeast. The curve, Frank thought, might be another reason the land had been for sale. The natural snake-slither of riverine erosion would perhaps eat away this mud bank, and then the devastated grass above it. Possibly a well-placed wall could stabilize the bank at certain critical points. “I’ll have to ask General Wracke out for your homecoming party,” Frank said as he observed it. “He’ll have suggestions for a wall.”
“More dikes, very good idea.”
On their way back to the van they passed under a stand of trees, and Frank parked Rudra under one to take a quick survey of the grove. Two sycamores, a truly giant oak; even a stand of pines.
“This looks good,” he said to Rudra as he came walking back over the grass. “Those are really good trees, you could build in several of them.”
“Like your tree house.”
“Yes, but you could do it here. Bigger, and lower.”
“Good idea.”
Many remote underwater vehicles were cruising the North Atlantic, sending back data that quickly became front page news about the status of the stalled Gulf Stream. At the end of September a hurricane lashed Central America, dumping a great deal of rain in the Pacific, which would increase the salinity of the Gulf Stream further. All systems were go for the salt fleet now converging in the ocean west of Ireland; but in the meantime, with nothing more happening in the Atlantic, the news shifted its attention south, where the West Antarctic Ice Sheet continued to detach, in small but frequent icebergs at its new margin. The big fragment was adrift in the Antarctic Ocean, a tabular berg as big as Germany and thicker than any ice shelf had ever been, so that it had in fact raised sea level by several inches. Tuvalu was being