Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [39]
“To do what?”
“I want to try to get the gibbons to sing. I know they’ve recaptured one or two.”
“Oh, no thanks. I think I’ll stay here and keep watching the tigers.”
“Sure. You’ll be able to hear the gibbons from here, if they do it.”
Eventually the tigers flopped down in the morning shade and stared into space. The zoo people made speeches as the crowd dispersed through the rest of the zoo. Some pretty vigorous whooping from the direction of the gibbons’ enclosure nevertheless did not sound quite like the creatures themselves. After a while Frank rejoined them, shaking his head. “There’s only one gibbon couple that’s been recovered. The rest are out in the park. I’ve seen some of them. It’s neat,” he told Nick. “You’ll like it.”
Drepung came over. “Would you join our little party in the visitors’ center?” he asked Frank.
“Sure, thanks. My pleasure.”
They walked up the zoo paths together to a building near the entry on Connecticut. Drepung led the Quiblers and Frank to a room in back, and Rudra Cakrin guided them to seats around a round table under a window. He came over and shook Frank’s hand: “Hello, Frank. Welcome. Please to meet you. Please to sit. Eat some food, drink some tea.”
Frank looked startled. “So you do speak English!”
The old man smiled. “Oh yes, very good English. Drepung make me take lessons.”
Drepung rolled his eyes and shook his head. Padma and Sucandra joined them as they passed out sample cups of Tibetan tea. The cross-eyed expression on Nick’s face when he smelled his cup gave Drepung a good laugh. “You don’t have to try it,” he assured the boy.
“It’s like each ingredient has gone bad in a completely different way,” Frank commented after a taste.
“Bad to begin with,” Drepung said.
“Good!” Rudra exclaimed. “Good stuff.”
He hunched forward to slurp at his cup. He did not much resemble the commanding figure who had given the lecture at NSF, Anna thought, which perhaps explained why Frank was regarding him so curiously.
“So you’ve been taking English lessons?” Frank said. “Or maybe it’s like Charlie said? That you spoke English all along, but didn’t want to tell us?”
“Charlie say that?”
“I was just joking,” Charlie said.
“Charlie very funny.”
“Yes . . . so you are taking lessons?”
“I am scientist. Study English like a bug.”
“A scientist!”
“I am always scientist.”
“Me too. But I thought you said, at your lecture, that rationality wasn’t enough. That an excess of reason was a form of madness.”
Rudra consulted with Drepung, then said, “Science is more than reason. More stronger.” He elbowed Drepung, who elaborated:
“Rudra Cakrin uses a word for science that is something like devotion. A kind of devotion, he says. A way to honor, or worship.”
“Worship what, though?”
Drepung asked Rudra, got a reply. “Whatever you find,” he said. “Devotion is a better word than worship, maybe.”
Rudra shook his head, looking frustrated by the limited palette of the English language. “You watch,” he said in his gravelly voice, fixing Frank with a glare. “Look. If you can. Seems like healing.”
He appealed again to Drepung. A quick exchange in Tibetan, then he forged on. “Look and heal, yes. Make better. Make worse, make better. For example, take a walk. Look in. In, out, around, down, up. Up and down. Over and under. Ha ha ha.”
Drepung said, “Yes, his English lessons are coming right along.”
Sucandra and Padma laughed at this, and Rudra scowled a mock scowl, so unlike his real one.
“He seldom sticks with one instructor for long,” Padma said.
“Goes through them like tissues,” Sucandra amplified.
“Oh my,” Frank said.
The old man returned to his tea, then said to Frank, “You come to our home, please?”
“Thank you, my pleasure. I hear it’s very close to NSF.”
Rudra shook his head, said something in Tibetan.
Drepung said, “By home, he means Khembalung. We are planning a short trip there, and the rimpoche thinks you should join us. He thinks it would be a big instruction for you.”
“I’m sure it would,” Frank said, looking startled. “And I’d like to see it. I appreciate him thinking of