Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [64]
Then suddenly he took off directly toward the sand mandala, fists clenched and swinging like a miniaturized John Wayne. Anna cried out “Joe!” but he did not hear her. The Khembalis actually made way for him, some of them with arms outstretched as if to create a better corridor. “Joe!” she cried again more sharply. “Joe! Stop!” He hesitated for a second, at the edge of the circle of brilliant color, then walked out onto it.
“JOE!”
No one moved. Joe stood peacefully at the center of the mandala, looking around.
Anna rushed down the steps to the edge of the circle. Joe’s footprints had blurred some lines, and grains of colored sand were now out of place, scattered brilliantly in the wrong fields. Joe was looking very pleased with himself, surveying the pattern under his feet, a pattern made of colors almost precisely the same as the colors of his building blocks at home, only more vibrant. He spotted Rudra, and thrust an arm out to wave at him. “Ba!” he declared.
“Baaaa,” Rudra replied, putting his hands together and bowing.
Joe held his pose, not unlike that of the Adamantine Buddhas, with a kind of Napoleonic grandeur. Charlie, standing now beside Anna, shook his head. “Ya big old hambone,” he muttered.
Joe dropped his arm, made a gesture at all the people watching him. A few drops of rain spattered down out of the low clouds bowling in from sea, and the Khembalis oohed and ahhed as they felt it and looked up.
Joe took off again, this time in the direction of the reflecting pool. Anna rushed around the circle of people to cut him off, but she was too late; he walked right into the shallows. “Joe!” she called out, to no effect. Joe turned and confronted the crowd that had followed him, standing knee-deep in the water. It was sprinkling lightly but steadily now, the rain warm on Anna’s face, and all the Khembalis were smiling. Enough colored sand had stuck to Joe’s feet that vermillion and yellow blooms spread in the water around him.
“Rgyal ba,” Rudra declared, and the crowded repeated it. Then: “Ce ba drin dran-pa!”
“What is he saying?” Anna asked Drepung, who now stood beside her, as if to support her if she fainted, or perhaps to stop her if she started in after Joe. Charlie stood on her other side.
“All hail,” Drepung said. He looked older to Anna, his round face and little mouth finally at home. She had seen that he was clearly a well-known and popular figure here.
Joe stood in the shallows regarding the crowd. He was happy. The Khembalis were indulging him, enjoying him. The warm rain fell on them like a balm. Suddenly Anna felt happy; her little tiger saw that he was among friends, somehow, and at last he stood in the world content, relaxed, even serene. She had never seen him look like this. She had wanted so much for him to feel something like this.
Charlie, on the other hand, felt his stomach go tense at the sight of Joe in the pool. All his worries were being confirmed. He took a deep breath, thinking Nothing has changed, you knew this already—they’re thinking he’s one of their tulkus. That doesn’t mean that it’s true.
He couldn’t imagine what Anna was making of all this.
Standing beside each other, the two of them both felt the discrepancy in their reactions. And they sensed as well that their characteristic moods or responses were here reversed, Anna pleased by a Joe anomaly, Charlie worried.
Uneasily they glanced at each other, both thinking This is backwards, what’s going on?
“Big rain!” Joe exclaimed, looking up, and the crowd sighed appreciatively.
That night the visitors collapsed on the beds in their rooms, even Joe, and slept from the early evening through the night and well into the next morning. It had rained the whole time, and when they went back out after breakfast they found the island transformed; everything was drenched, with standing water everywhere. The Khembalis were very happy to see it, however,