The Year of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  'What demonstration do you have in mind?'

  'We must manufacture shells containing the Chinese wai jen ti formula, shells that won't break on firing, but will when they hit the ground.'

  They tried out several different designs, and even the demonstrations proved quite dangerous; more than once people had to run for their lives. It would be a terrible weapon if it could be made to work. Bahram hurried around all day every day, imagining his family returned, Samarqand saved from infidels; surely if Allah meant these things to be, then the weapon was a gift from Him. It was not hard to overlook the terror of it.

  Eventually they manufactured hollow flat backed shells, pumped full of the liquid constituents of the ki I ler of myriads, in two chambers separated by a tin wall. A packet of flashpowder in the nose of the shell exploded on contact, blowing the interior wall apart and mixing the constituents of the gas.

  They got them to work about eight times out of ten. Another kind of shell, entirely filled with gunpowder and an igniter, exploded on impact most deafeningly, scattering the shell like fragmented bullets.

  They made fifty of each, and arranged a demonstration out on their test grounds by the river. Khalid bought a small herd of broken nags from the gluemaker, with the promise of selling them back ready for rendering. The ostlers staked these poor beasts out at the extreme range of the test cannon, and when the Khan and his courtiers arrived in their finery, looking somewhat bored by now with this routine, Khalid kept his face turned away in as close to a gesture of contempt as he could risk, pretending to attend busily to the gun. Bahram saw that this would not do, and went to Nadir and Sayyed Abdul Aziz and made obeisances and pleasantries, explaining the mechanism of the weapon, and introducing Khalid with a little flourish as the old man approached, sweating and puffing. '

  Khalid declared the demonstration ready. The Khan flicked a hand casually, his characteristic gesture, and Khalid gave the sign to the men at the gun, who applied the match. The cannon boomed and expelled white smoke, rolled back. Its barrel had been set at a fairly high angle, so that the shell would come down hard on its tip. The smoke swirled, all stared down the plain at the staked horses; nothing happened; Bahram held his breath A puff of yellow smoke exploded among the horses, and they leapt away from it, two pulling out their stakes and galloping off, a few falling over when the ropes pulled them back. All the while the smoke spread outwards as from an invisible brushfire, a thick mustard yellow smoke, obscuring the horses as it passed over them. It covered one that had burst its tether but charged by accident back into a tendril of the cloud; this was the one they could see rear up in the mist, fall and struggle wildly to get back on its feet, then collapse, twitching.

  The yellow cloud cleared slowly, drifting away downvalley on the prevailing wind, seeming heavy and clinging long in the hollows of the ground. There lay two dozen dead horses, scattered in a circle that encompassed two hundred paces at least.

  'If there was an army in that circle,' Khalid said, 'then, most excellent servant of the one true God, Supreme Khan, they would be just as dead as those horses. And you could have a score of cannon loaded with such shells, or a hundred. And no army ever born could conquer Samarqand.'

  Nadir, looking faintly shocked, said, 'What if the wind changed its course and blew our way?'

  Khalid shrugged. 'Then we too would die. It is important to make small shells, that can be fired a long distance, and always downwind, if possible. The gas does disperse, so if the wind was mildly towards you, it might not matter much.'

  The Khan himself looked startled at the demonstration, but more and more pleased, as at a new form of fireworks; it was hard to be sure with him. Bahram suspected that he sometimes pretended to be oblivious to things, in order to make a veil between himself and his advisers.

  Now he nodded to Nadir, and led his court off on the road to Bokhara.

  'You have to understand,' Khalid reminded Bahram on the way back to the compound, 'there are men in that very group around the Khan who want to bring Nadir down. For them it doesn't matter how good our weapon is. The better the worse, in fact. So it's not just a matter of them being utter simpletons.'

  These Things Happened

  The next day Nadir was out with his full guard, and they had with them Esmerine and the children. Nadir nodded brusquely at Bahram's fulsome thanks and then said to Khalid, 'The poison air shells may become necessary, and I want you to compile as many as you can, five hundred at least, and the Khan will reward you accordingly on his return, and he makes promise of that reward in advance, by the return of your family.'

  'He's going away?'

  'The plague has appeared in Bokhara. The caravanserai and the bazaars, the mosques and madressas and the Khanaka are all closed. The crucial members of the court will accompany the Khan to his summer residence. I will be making all his arrangements for him from there.

  Look to yourselves. If you can leave the city and still do your work, the Khan does not forbid it, but he hopes you can close yourself up here in your compound, and carry on. When the plague passes we can reconvene.'

  'And the Manchu?' Khalid asked.

  'We have word that they too have been struck. As you might expect. It may be they have brought it with them. They may even have sent their sick among us to pass along the infection. It would be little different than casting poisoned air on an enemy.'

  Khalid coloured at that but said nothing. Nadir left, clearly on his way to other tasks necessary before his flight from Samarqand. Khalid slammed the gate shut after him, cursed him under his breath. Bahram, ecstatic at the unexpected return of Esmerine and the children, hugged them until Esmerine cried out that he would crush them. They wept with joy, and only later, in the midst of shutting the compound off from the city, something they had done successfully ten years before when a plague of distemper had passed through the city, losing only one servant who had slipped into town to see his girlfriend and never come back – only later did Bahram see that his daughter Laila was red cheeked, with a hectic flush, and lying listlessly on a chest of drawers.

  They put her in a room with a bed. Esmerine's face was pinched with fear. Khalid decreed that Laila be sequestered there, and fed and kept in drink from the door, by poles and net bags and plates and gourds that were not to be returned to the rest of them. But Esmerine hugged the little girl, of course, before all this regime was introduced, and the next day in their bedroom Bahram saw her red cheeks, and how she groaned awake and lifted her arms, and there were the tokens in her armpits, hard yellow protuberances emerging from the skin, even (he seemed to see as she put down her arm) faceted as if they were carbuncles, or as if she was turning to jewels from the inside.

  After that they were a sickhouse, and Bahram spent his days nursing the others, running about all hours of the day and night, in a fever of a different kind to that of the sick ones, urged by Khalid never to touch or come within the breath of his stricken family. Sometimes Bahram tried, sometimes he didn't, holding them as if he could clasp them to this world. Or drag them back into it, when the children died.

  Then the adults started dying too, and they were locked out of the town as a sickhouse rather than a safe house. Fedwa died but Esmerine held on; Khalid and Bahram took turns caring for her, and Iwang joined them in the compound.

  One night Iwang and Khalid had Esmerine breathe on a glass, and they looked at the moisture through their small lens, and said little. Bahram looked briefly and glimpsed the host of little dragons, gargoyles, bats and other creatures. He could not look again, but knew they were doomed.

  Esmerine died and Khalid showed the tokens that same hour. Iwang could not rise from his couch in Khalid's workshop, but studied his own breath and blood and bile through the smallscope, trying to make a clear record of the disease's progress through him. One night as he lay there gasping he said in his low voice, 'I'm glad I did not convert. I know you did not want it. And now I would be a blasphemer, for if there is a God I would want to rebuke Him for this.
'

  Bahram said nothing. It was a judgment, but of what? What had they done? Were the gas shells an affront to God?

  'Old men live to be seventy,' Iwang said. 'I'm just over thirty. What will I do with those years?'

  Bahram couldn't think. 'You said we return,' he said dully.

  'Yes. But I liked this life. I had plans for this life.'

  He lingered on his couch but could take no food, and his skin was very hot. Bahram did not tell him that Khalid had died already, very swiftly, felled by grief or anger at the loss of Fedwa and Esmerine and the children – as if by apoplexy rather than plague. Bahram only sat with the Tibetan in the silent compound.

  At one point Iwang croaked, 'I wonder if Nadir knew they were infected, and gave them back to kill us.'

  'But why?'

  'Perhaps he feared the killer of myriads. Or some faction of the court. He had other considerations than us. Or it might have been someone else. Or no one.'

  'We'll never know.'

  'No. The court itself might be gone by now. Nadir, the Khan, all of them.'

  'I hope so,' Bahram's mouth said.

  Iwang nodded. He died at dawn, wordless and struggling.

  Bahram got all the compound's survivors to put cloths over their faces and move the bodies into a closed workshop beyond the chemical pits. He was so far outside himself that the movements of his numb limbs surprised him, and he spoke as if he were someone else. Do this do that. Let's eat. Then, carrying a big pot to the kitchen, he felt the lump in his armpit, and sat down as if the tendons in the back of his knees had been cut, thinking: I guess it's my turn now.

  Back in the Bardo

  Well, it was, as might be imagined after an end like that, a very discour aged and dispirited little jati that huddled together on the black floor of the bardo this time around. Who could blame them? Why should they have had any will to continue? It was hard to discern any reward for virtue, any forward progress – any dharmic justice of any kind. Even Bahram could not find the good in it, and no one else even tried. Looking back down the vale of the ages at the endless recurrence of their reincarnations, before they were forced to drink their vials of forgetting and all became obscure to them again, they could see no pattern at all to their efforts; if the gods had a plan, or even a set of procedures, if the long train of transmigrations was supposed to add up to anything, if it was not just mindless repetition, time itself nothing but a succession of chaoses, no one could discern it; and the story of their transmigrations, rather than being a narrative without death, as the first experiences of reincarnation perhaps seemed to suggest, had become instead a veritable charnel house. Why read on? Why pick up their book from the far wall where it has been thrown away in disgust and pain, and read on? Why submit to such cruelty, such bad karma, such bad plotting?

  The reason is simple: these things happened. They happened countless times, just like this. The oceans are salt with our tears. No one can deny that these things happened.

  And so there is no choice in the matter. They cannot escape the wheel of birth and death, not in the experience of it, or in the contemplation of it afterwards; and their anthologist, Old Red Ink himself, must tell their stories honestly, must deal in reality, or else the stories m can nothing. And it is crucial that the stories mean something.

  So. No escape from reality: they sat there, a dozen sad souls, huddled together at a far corner of the great stage of the hall of judgment. It was dim, and cold. The perfect white light had lasted this time for only the briefest of moments, a flash like the eyeball exploding; after that, here they were again. Up on the dais the dogs and demons and black gods capered, in a hazy mist that shrouded all, that damped all sound.

  Bahram tried, but could think of nothing to say. He was still stunned by the events of their last days in the world; he was still ready to get up and go out and start another day, on another morning just like all the rest. Deal with the crisis of an invasion from the east, the taking of his family, if that was what it meant – whatever problems the day happened to bring, trouble, crisis, sure, that was life. But not this. Not this already. Salt tears of timely death, alum tears of untimely death: bitterness filled the air like smoke. I liked that life! I had plans for that life!

  Khalid sat there just as Khalid always had, as if ensconced in his study thinking over some problem. The sight gave Bahram a deep pang of regret and sorrow. All that life, gone. Gone, gone, gone altogether beyond… The past is gone. Even if you can remember it, it's gone. And even at the time it was happening Bahram had known how he had loved it, he had lived in a state of nostalgia for the present, every day of it.

  Now gone.

  The rest of the jati sat or sprawled on the cheap wooden floor around Khalid. Even Sayyid Abdul looked distraught, not just sorry for himself, but distraught for them all, sad to have left that turbulent but oh so interesting world.

  An interval passed; a moment, a year, an age, the kalpa itself, who could tell in such a terrible place?

  Bahram took a deep breath, exerted himself, sat up.

  'We're making progress,' he announced firmly.

  Khalid snorted. 'We are like mice to the cats.' He gestured up at the stage, where the grotesqueries continued to unfold. 'They are petty arseholes, I say. They kill us for sport. They don't die and they don't understand.'

  'Forget them,' Iwang advised. 'We're going to have to do this on our own.

  'God judges, and sends us out again,' Bahram said. 'Man proposes, God disposes.'

  Khalid shook his head. 'Look at them. They're a bunch of vicious children playing. No one leads them, there is no god of gods.'

  Bahram looked at him, surprised. 'Do you not see the one enfolding all the rest, the one we rest within? Allah, or Brahman, or what have you, the one only true God of Gods?'

  'No. I see no sign of him at all.'

  'You aren't looking! You've never looked yet! When you look, you will see it. When you see it, everything will change for you. Then it will be all right.'

  Khalid scowled. 'Don't insult us with that fatuous nonsense. Good Lord, Allah, if you are there, why have you inflicted me with this fool of a boy!' He kicked at Bahram. 'It's easier without you around! You and your damned all right! It's not all right! It's a fucking mess! You only make it worse with that nonsense of yours! Did you not see what just happened to us, to your wife and children, to my daughter and grandchildren? It's not all right! Start from that, if you will! We may be in a hallucination here, but that's no excuse for being delusional!'

  Bahram was hurt by this. 'It's you who give up on things,' he protested. 'Every time. That's what your cynicism is – you don't even try. You don't have the courage to carry on.'

  ' The hell I don't. I've never given up yet. I'm just not willing to go at it babbling lies. No, it's you who are the one who never tries. Always waiting for me and Iwang to do the hard things. You do it for once! Quit babbling about love and try it yourself one time, damn it! Try it yourself, and see how hard it is to keep a sunny face when you're looking at the truth of the situation eye to eye.'

  'Ho!' said Bahram, stung. 'I do my part. I have always done my part. Without me none of you would be able to carry on. It takes courage to keep love at the centre when you know just as well as anyone else the real state of things! It's easy to get angry, anyone can do that. It's making good that's the hard part, it's staying hopeful that's the hard part! it's staying in love that's the hard part.'

  Khalid waggled his left hand. 'All very well, but it only matters if the truth is faced and fought. I'm sick of love and happiness I want justice.'

  'So do W 'All right, then show me. Show me what you can do this next time out in the miserable world, something more than happy happy.'

  'I will then!'

  'Good.'

  Heavily Khalid pulled himself up, and limped over to Sayyid Abdul Aziz, and without any warning kicked him sprawling across the stage. 'And you!' he roared. 'What is your EXCUSE! Why are you always so bad? Consistency is no exc
use, your CHARACTER is NO EXCUSE!'

  Sayyid glared up at him from the floor, sucking on a torn knuckle. Daggers in his stare: 'Leave me alone.'

  Khalid made as if to kick him again, then gave up on it. 'You'll get yours,' he promised. 'One of these days, you'll get yours.'

  'Forget about him,' Iwang advised. 'He's not the real problem, and he'll always be part of us. Forget about him, forget about the gods. Let's concentrate on doing it ourselves. We can make our own world.'

  One night can change the world.

  The Doorkeepers sent runners out with strings of wampum, announcing a council meeting at Floating Bridge. They wanted to raise to chiefdom the foreigner they called Fromwest. The fifty sachems had agreed to the meeting, as there was nothing unusual about it. There were many more chiefs than sachems, and the title died with the man, and each nation was free to choose its own, depending on what happened on the warpath and in the villages. The only unusual feature of this raising up was the foreign birth of the candidate, but he had been living with the Doorkeepers for some time, and word had spread through the nine nations and the eight tribes that he was interesting.

  He had been rescued by a war party of Doorkeepers who had run far to the west to inflict another shock on the Sioux, the western people bordering the Hodenosaunee. The warriors had come on a Sioux torture, the victim hung by his chest from hooks, and a fire building under him. While waiting for their ambush to set, the warriors had been impressed by the victim's speech, which was in a comprehensible version of the Doorkeeper dialect, as if he had seen them out there.

  The usual behaviour while being tortured was a passionate laughter in the faces of one's enemies, to show that no pain inflicted by man can triumph over the spirit. This foreigner hadn't been like that. Calmly he remarked to his captors, in Doorkeeper rather than Sioux: 'You are very incompetent torturers. What wounds the spirit is not passion, for all passion is encouragement. As you hate me you help me. What really hurts is to be ground like acorns in a grinding hole. Where I come from they have a thousand devices to tear the flesh, but what hurts is their indifference. Here you remind me I am human and full of passion, a target of passion. I am happy to be here. And I am about to be rescued by warriors much greater than you.'