Kim Robinson - Mother Goddess of the World

I said, “Not yet, Freds. You get over here and tell me what the hell happened down there with your buddy Kunga. You promised you would.”

Freds stood looking at me. We were in shadow—it was cold, but windless—the sky above was clear, and a very deep dark blue. The airy roar of the stove starting was the only sound.

Freds sighed, and his expression got as serious as it ever got: one eye squinted shut entirely, forehead furrowed, and lips squeezed tightly together. He looked over at Kunga, and saw he was watching us. “Well,” he said after a while. “You remember a couple of weeks ago when we were down at Chimoa getting drunk?”

“Yeah?”

“And I told you Kunga Norbu was a tulku.”

I gulped. “Freds, don’t give me that again.”

“Well,” he said. “It’s either that or tell you some kind of a lie. And I ain’t so good at lying, my face gives me away or something.”

“Freds, get serious!” But looking over at Kunga Norbu, sitting in the snow with that blank expression, those weird black eyes, I couldn’t help but wonder.

Freds said, “I’m sorry, man, I really am. I don’t mean to blow your mind like this. But I did try to tell you before, you have to admit. And it’s the simple truth. He’s an honest-to-God tulku. First incarnation the famous Tsong Khapa, born in 1555. And he’s been around ever since.”

“So he met George Washington and like that?”

“Well, Washington didn’t go to Tibet, so far as I know.”

I stared at him. He shuffled about uncomfortably. “I know it’s hard to take, George. Believe me. I had trouble with it myself, at first. But when you study under Kunga Norbu for a while, you see him do so many miraculous things, you can’t help but believe.”

I stared at him some more, speechless.

“I know,” Freds said. “The first time he pulls one of his moves on you, it’s a real shock. I remember my first time real well. I was hiking with him from the hidden Rongbuk to Namche, we went right over Lho La like we did today, and right around Base Camp we came across this Indian trekker who was turning blue. He was clearly set to die of altitude sickness, so Kunga and I carried him down between us to Pheriche, which was already a long day’s work as you know. We took him to the Rescue Station and I figured they’d put him in the pressure tank they’ve got there, have you seen it? They’ve got a tank like a miniature submarine in their back room, and the idea is you stick a guy with altitude sickness in it and pressurize it down to sea level pressure, and he gets better. It’s a neat idea, but it turns out that this tank was donated to the station by a hospital in Tokyo, and all the instructions for it are in Japanese, and no one at the station reads Japanese. Besides as far as anyone there knows it’s an experimental technique only, no one is quite sure if it will work or not, and nobody there is inclined to do any experimenting on sick trekkers. So we’re back to square one and this guy was sicker than ever, so Kunga and I started down towards Namche, but I was getting tired and it was really slow going, and all of a sudden Kunga Norbu picked him up and slung him across his shoulders, which was already quite a feat of strength as this Indian was one of those pear-shaped Hindus, a heavy guy—and then Kunga just took off running down the trail with him! I hollered at him and ran after him trying to keep up, and I tell you I was zooming down that trail, and still Kunga ran right out of sight! Big long steps like he was about to fly! I couldn’t believe it!”

Freds shook his head. “That was the first time I had seen Kunga Norbu going into lung-gom mode. Means mystic long-distance running, and it was real popular in Tibet at one time. An adept like Kunga is called a lung-gom-pa , and when you get it down you can run really far really fast. Even levitate a little. You saw him today—that was a lung-gom move he laid on that ice block.”

“I see,” I said, in a kind of daze. I called out to Laure, still at the stove: “Hey Laure! Freds says Kunga Norbu is a tulku!”

Laure smiled, nodded. “Yes, Kunga Norbu Lama very fine tulku!”

I took a deep breath. Over in the snow Kunga Norbu sat cross-legged, looking out at his country. Or somewhere. “I think I’m ready for that hash pipe,” I told Freds.

It took us two days to catch up to Arnold and the Brits, two days of miserable slogging up the West Shoulder of Everest. Nothing complicated here: the slope was a regular expanse of hard snow, and we just put on the crampons and ground on up it. It was murderous work. Not that I could tell with Freds and Laure and Kunga Norbu. There may be advantages to climbing on Everest with a tulku, a Sherpa long-distance champion, and an American space cadet, but longer rest stops are not among them. Those three marched uphill as if paced by Sousa marches, and I trailed behind huffing and puffing, damning Arnold with every step.

Late on the second day I struggled onto the top of the West Shoulder, a long snowy divide under the West Ridge proper. By the time I got there Freds and Laure already had the tent up, and they were securing it to the snow with a network of climbing rope, while Kunga Norbu sat to one side doing his meditation.

Farther down the Shoulder were the two camps of other teams, placed fairly close together as there wasn’t a whole lot of extra flat ground up there to choose from. After I had rested and drunk several cups of hot lemon drink, I said, “Let’s go find out how things stand.” Freds walked over with me.

As it turned out, things were not standing so well. The Brits were in their tent, waist deep in their sleeping bags and drinking tea. And they were not amused. “The man is utterly daft,” Marion said. She had a mild case of high-altitude throat, and any syllable she tried to emphasize disappeared entirely. “We’ve oyd outrunning him, but the Sherpas are good, and he oyy be strong.”

“A fooking leech he is,” John said.

Trevor grinned ferociously. His lower face was pretty sunburned, and his lips were beginning to break up. “We’re counting on you to get him back down, George.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Marion shook her head. “God knows we’ve tried, but it does no good whatever, he won’t listen, he just rattles on about making me a stee , I don’t know how to dee with that.” She turned red. “And none of these brave chaps will agree that we should just go over there and seize his bloody camera and throw it into Ti beee !”

The guys shook their heads. “We’d have to deal with the Sherpas,” Mad Tom said to Marion patiently. “What are we going to do, fight with them? I can’t even imagine it.”

“And if Mad Tom can’t imagine it,” Trevor said.

Marion just growled.

“I’ll go talk to him,” I said.

But I didn’t have to go anywhere, because Arnold had come over to greet us. “Hello!” he called out cheerily. “George, what a surprise! What brings you up here?”

I got out of the tent. Arnold stood before me, looking sunburned but otherwise all right. “You know what brings me up here, Arnold. Here, let’s move away a bit, I’m sure these folks don’t want to talk to you.”

“Oh, no, I’ve been talking to them every day! We’ve been having lots of good talks. And today I’ve got some real news.” He spoke into the tent. “I was looking through my zoom over at the North Col, and I see they’ve set up a camp over there! Do you suppose it’s that expedition looking for Mallory’s body?”

Curses came from the tent.

“I know,” Arnold exclaimed. “Kind of puts the pressure on to get going, don’t you think? Not much time to spare.”