Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [39]
“You’ll see.” Charlie leaned into her conspiratorially: “Maybe he learned English in an earlier incarnation. Just be aware of that when you’re talking around him.”
“Quit it,” she said, laughing her low laugh. “You be aware. You learn to pay attention like that.”
“Oh and then you’ll believe I understand English?”
“That’s right yeah.”
They returned to the dining room, laughing, and found Joe holding forth in a language anyone could understand, a language of imperious gesture and commanding eye, and the assumption of authority in the world. Which worked like a charm over them all, even though he was babbling.
After salad, and seconds on the pasta, they returned to the living room and settled around the coffee table again. Anna brought out tea and cookies. “We’ll have to have Tibetan tea next time,” she said.
The Khembalis nodded uncertainly.
“An acquired taste,” Drepung suggested. “Not actually tea as you know it.”
“Bitter,” Padma said appreciatively.
“You can use as blood coagulant,” Sucandra said.
Drepung added, “Also we add yak butter to it, aged until a bit rancid.”
“The butter has to be rancid?” Charlie said.
“Traditional.”
“Think fermentation,” Sucandra explained.
“Well, let’s have that for sure. Nick will love it.”
A scrunch-faced pretend-scowl from Nick: Yeah right Dad.
Rudra Cakrin sat again with Joe on the floor. He stacked blocks into elaborate towers. Whenever they began to sway, Joe leaned in and chopped them to the floor. Tumbling clack of colored wood, instant catastrophe: the two of them cast their heads back and laughed in exactly the same way. Kindred souls.
The others watched. From the couch Drepung observed the old man, smiling fondly, although Charlie thought he also saw traces of the look that Anna had tried to describe to him when explaining why she had invited them to lunch in the first place: a kind of concern that came perhaps from an intensity of love. Charlie knew that feeling. It had been a good idea to invite them over. He had groaned when Anna told him about it, life was simply Too Busy for more to be added. Or so it had seemed; though at the same time he was somewhat starved for adult company. Now he was enjoying himself, watching Rudra Cakrin and Joe play on the floor as if there were no tomorrow.
Anna was deep in conversation with Sucandra. Charlie heard Sucandra say to her, “We give patients quantities, very small, keep records, of course, and judge results. There is a personal element to all medicine, as you know. People talking about how they feel. You can average numbers, I know you do that, but the subjective feeling remains.”
Anna nodded, but Charlie knew she thought this aspect of medicine was unscientific, and it annoyed her as such. She kept to the quantitative as much as she could in her work, as far as he could tell, precisely to avoid this kind of subjective residual in the facts.
Now she said, “But you do support attempts to make objective studies of such matters?”
“Of course,” Sucandra replied. “Buddhist science is much like Western science in that regard.”
Anna nodded, brow furrowed like a hawk. Her definition of science was extremely narrow. “Reproducible studies?”
“Yes, that is Buddhism precisely.”
Now Anna’s eyebrows met in a deep vertical furrow that split the horizontal ones higher on her brow. “I thought Buddhism was a kind of feeling, you know—meditation, compassion?”
“This is to speak of the goal. What the investigation is for. Same for you, yes? Why do you pursue the sciences?”
“Well—to understand things better, I guess.”
This was not the kind of thing Anna thought about. It was like asking her why she breathed.
“And why?” Sucandra persisted, watching her.
“Well—just because.”
“A matter of curiosity.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“But what if curiosity is a luxury?”
“How so?”
“In that first you must have a full belly. Good health, a certain amount of leisure time, a certain amount of serenity. Absence of pain. Only then can one be curious.”
Anna nodded, thinking it over.
Sucandra saw this and continued. “So, if curiosity is a value—a quality