Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [62]
“Oooh! Oooh! Big— big— big—”
Big what, he could not say. His mouth hung open, his eyes bugged out; they could have molded a new mask portraying astonishment directly from his face.
Frank laughed. “These are his kind of people.”
“He probably thinks it’s a stack of mirrors,” Charlie said.
“Quit it,” Anna said. “Don’t be mean.”
Charlie and Nick leaned their faces in to take photos of themselves on each side of Joe, eyes bugged, tongues thrust out and down. Hopefully they were not offending their hosts. But looking around Anna saw that the guides were smiling.
“They’re masks that hide your face but show your insides,” Charlie said. “This is what we’re all really like inside.”
“No,” Anna said.
“Oh come on. In your feelings? In your dreams?”
“I certainly hope not. Besides, where’s the good feelings?”
She had been thinking of perhaps the curiosity mask, or the striving-for-accuracy mask, but Charlie gave her a Groucho look and indicated with his eyebrows the paintings on the beams between wall and ceiling, which included any number of improbably entwined couples. Frank was frankly checking them out, nodding as if they confirmed some sociobiological insight only he could formulate, bonobo Buddhism or something like that. Anna snorted, pretty sure that the tantrically horny painters had to have been fantasizing elements of female flexibility, among other endowments. Maybe six arms made it easier to position oneself. Or perhaps there was no gravity in nirvana; which would also explain all the perfectly round tits. She wondered what Joe would make of those, being still a breast man of the first order. But for now he remained too fixated on the demon masks to notice them.
Then they were joined by more scientists from the Khembalung Institute for Higher Studies. There were introductions all around, and Anna shook hands, pleased to see all her correspondents at last, just as shockingly real and vivid as the demon masks. Frank joined them, and for a while they chatted about NSF and their various collaborations. Then Frank and Anna and Nick left Charlie and Joe in Government House, and followed their new hosts through rooms and across a courtyard to the Institute itself, where the new labs that NSF had helped to fund and build were still under construction. Outside one of the rooms was a statue of the Buddha, standing with one hand raised before him palm outward, in a gesture like a traffic cop saying STOP.
“I’ve never seen him look like that.”
“This is, what say, the Adamantine Buddha,” one of her pen pals said. “The Buddha is represented in a number of different ways. He is not always meditating or laughing. When there is bad going on, the Buddha is as obliged to stop it as anyone else who sees it. And, you know, since bad things happen fairly regularly, there has always been a figure to represent the Buddha’s response.”
Nick said, “He looks like a policeman.”
Their guide nodded. “Police Inspector Sakyamuni. Who insists that we all must resist the three poisons of the mind: fear, greed, and anger.”
“So true,” Anna said. Frank was nodding also, lost in his thoughts.
“This aspect of Buddha-nature is also the one represented in the statues on the dike, of course.”
“Can we go on it?” Frank and Nick asked together.
“Of course. We’re very near it here.”
They finished their tour and joined the rest of their group outside, on a lawn surrounded on three sides by buildings, on the fourth, to the east, by the inner wall of the dike. The wall was a tilted lawn in this area, bisected by a set of broad stone steps leading to its top. Frank and Anna and Nick followed some of their guides up these steps; Charlie and Joe appeared below, and Joe began to run around on the grass.
On top they emerged into a stiff onshore wind. Out to sea lay a white fleet of tall clouds. A big statue of the Adamantine Buddha faced seaward, hand outstretched. From beside him they had a