The Year of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

'Nevertheless.'

  This gruff concern for the health of her hands, from the great intellectual, the teacher – suddenly surrounded by an audience of her own, asking her what she thought of certain Chinese feminists… Budur watched her reply immediately and at length about their origins among Muslim Chinese, particularly Kang Tongbi, who, with the encouragement of her husband the Sino Muslim scholar Ibrahim al Lanzhou, set out the theoretical groundwork for a feminism later elaborated in the Chinese heartland by generations of late Qing women – much of their progress contested by the imperial bureaucracy, of course – until the Long War dissolved all previous codes of conduct in the pure rationality of total war, and women's brigades and factory crews established a position in the world that could never be retracted, no matter how hard the Chinese bureaucrats tried. Kirana could recite by memory the wartime list of demands made by the Chinese Women's Industrial Workers' Council, and now she did just that: 'Equal rights for men and women, spread of women's education and facilities for it, improvement in position of women in the home, monogamy, freedom of marriage, encouragement of careers, a ban on concubines and the buying and selling of women, and on physical mutilation, improved political position, reform of prostitution.' It was a most strange sounding song, or chant, or prayer.

  'But you see, the Chinese feminists claimed women had it better in Yingzhou and Travancore, and in Travancore the feminists claimed to have learned it from the Sikhs, who learned it from the Quran. And here we focus on the Chinese. So that you see it has been a matter of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, each imagining that it is better in a different country, and that we should fight to equal the others…' On she talked, weaving the last three centuries together most brilliantly, and all the while Budur clenched her cracked white hands, thinking, She wants you, she wants your hands healthy because if she has her way, they will be touching her.

  Budur wandered away on her own, disturbed, saw Hasan on another terrace and went up to join the group around him, which included Naser Shah and the ancient grandmother from Kirana's class, looking at a loose end without her knitting kit in hand. It turned out they were brother and sister, and she the hostess of this party: Zainab Shah, very curt when Budur was finally introduced; and Hasan a long time family friend of theirs. They had. all known Kirana for years, and had taken her classes before, Budur learned from Naser as the conversations swirled around them.

  'What bothers me is to see how repetitive and small minded he could be, what a lawyer '

  'That's why it works in application 'Works for who? He was the lawyer of the clerics.'

  'No writer, anyway.'

  'The Quran is meant to be spoken and heard, in Arabic it is like music, he is such a poet. You must hear it in the mosque.'

  'I will not go there. That's for people who want to be able to say, I am better than you, simply because I assert a belief in Allah." I reject that. The world is my mosque.'

  'Religion is like a house of cards. One fingertap of fact and it all falls over.'

  'Clever but not true, like most of your aphorisms.'

  Budur left Naser and Hasam, and went to a long table containing snacks and glasses of red and white wine, eavesdropping as she walked, eating pickled herrings on crackers.

  'I hear the council of ministers had to kotow to the army to keep them out of the treasury, so it comes to the same thing in the end '

  ' the six lokas are names for the parts of the brain that perform the different kinds of mentation. The level of beasts is the cerebellum, the level of hungry ghosts the limbic archipelago, the human realm the speech lobes, the realm of the asuras is the frontal cortex, and the realm of the gods is the bridge between the two halves of the brain, which when activated gives us glimpses of a higher reality. It's impressive, really, sorting things out that clearly by pure introspection 'But that's only five, what about hell?'

  'Hell is other people.'

  ' I'm sure it doesn't add up to quite as many partners as that.'

  'They've got control of the oceans, so they can come to us whenever they want, but we can't go to them without their permission. So '

  'So we should thank our lucky stars. We want the generals to feel as weak as possible.'

  'True, but nothing in excess. We may find it becomes a case of from the coffee pot to the fire.'

  ' it's well established that a belief in reincarnation floats around the world from one culture to the next, migrating to the cultures most stressed.'

  'Maybe it migrates with the few souls who are actually transmigrating, ever think of that?'

  With student after student, it's like a kind of compulsion. A replacement for friends or something like that. Sad really, but the students are really the ones who suffer, so it's hard to feel too sorry 'All history would have been different, if only.

  'Yes, if only? Only what?'

  'If only we had conquered Yingzhou when we had the chance.'

  'He's a true artist, it's not so easy working in scents, everyone has their own associations, but somehow he touches all the deepest ones everyone has, and as it's the sense most tied to memory, he really has an effect. That shift from vanilla to cordite to jasmine, those are just the dominant scents of course, each waft is a mix of scores of them, I think, but what a progression, heart rending I assure you…'

  Near the drinks table a friend of Hasan's, named Tristan, played an oud with a strange tuning, strumming simple chords over and over, and singing in one of the old Frankish languages. Budur sipped a glass of white wine and watched him play, forcing the voices talking around her from her attention. The man's music was interesting, the level tones of his voice hanging steadily in the air. His black moustache curved over his mouth. He caught Budur's eye, smiled briefly. The song came to an end and there was a patter of applause, and some of them surrounded him to ask questions. Budur moved in to hear his answers. Hasan joined them, and so Budur stood beside him. Tristan explained in clipped short phrases, as if he were shy. He didn't want to talk about his music. Budur liked the look of him. The songs were from France and Navarre, he said, and Provence. Third and fourth centuries. People asked for more, but he shrugged and put his oud in its case. He didn't explain, but Budur thought the crowd was simply too loud. Tahar was approaching the drinks table, and his group came with him. 'But I tell you, Vika, what happens is this ' ' it all goes back to Samarqand, when there was still 'It would have to be beautiful and hard, make people ashamed.' 'That was the day, the very hour when it all started '

  'You, Vika, are perhaps afflicted with intermittent deafness.' 'But here's the thing '

  Budur slipped away from the group, and then, feeling tired of the party and its guests, she left the party as well. She read the schedule posted at the tram stop and saw that it would be almost half a watch before another came, so she took off walking on the river path. By the time she reached the city centre she was enjoying walking just for itself, and she continued on out the jetty, through the fish shops and out into the wind, where the jetty became an asphalt road cracking over huge boulders that stood greenly out of the oil slicked water slurping against their sides. She watched the clouds and the sky, and felt suddenly happy an emotion like a child inside her, a happiness in which worry was a vague and distant thing, no more than a cloud's shadow on the dark blue surface of the sea. To think her life might have passed without her ever seeing the ocean!

  FOURTEEN

  Idelba came to her one night in the zawiyya and said, 'Budur, you must remember never to tell anyone what I said to you about alactin. About what splitting it could mean.'

  'Of course not. But why do you mention it?'

  'Well… we are beginning to feel that there is some kind of surveil lance being placed on us. Apparently from a part of the government, some security department. It's a bit murky. But anyway, best to be very careful.'

  'Why don't you go to the police?'

  'Well.' She refrained from rolling her eyes, Budur could see it. Voice lowered to a gentleness: 'The police are part of
the army. That's from the war, and it never changed. So… we prefer not to draw any attention whatsoever to the issues involved.'

  Budur gestured around them. 'Surely we have nothing to worry about here, though. No woman in a zawiyya would ever betray a housemate, not to the army.'

  Idelba stared at her to see if she was being serious. 'Don't be naive,' she said finally, less gently, and with a pat on the knee got up to go to the bathroom.

  This was not the only cloud to come at this time and drop its shadow on Budur's happiness. Throughout Dar al Islam, unrest was filling the newspapers, and inflation was universal. Military takeovers of the governments in Skandistan and Moldava and al Alemand and the Tyrol, very close to Turi, alarmed the rest of the world all out of proportion to their puny size, as seeming to indicate a resurgence of Muslim aggressivity. The whole of Islam was accused of breaking the commitments forced on them at the Shanghai Conference after the war, as if Islam were a monolithic block, a laughable concept even in the depths of the war itself. Sanctions and even embargoes were being called for in China and India and Yingzhou. The effect of the threat alone was felt immediately in Firanja: the price of rice shot up, then the price of potatoes and maple syrup, and coffee beans. Hoarding quickly followed, old wartime habits kicking in, and even as prices rose staples were cleared off the shelves of the groceries the moment they appeared. This affected everything else as well, both food and other matters. Hoarding was a very contagious phenomenon, a bad mentality, a loss of faith in the system's ability to keep everything running; and as the system had indeed broken down so disastrously at the end of the war, a lot of people were prone to hoard at the first hint of a scare. Making meals in the zawiyya became an exer cise in ingenuity. They often dined on potato soup, spiced or garnished in one way or another so that it remained tasty, but it sometimes had to be watered pretty thin to get a cup of it into everyone at the table.

  Cafe life went on as gaily as ever, at least on the surface. There was perhaps more of an edge in people's voices; eyes were brighter, the laughs harder, the binges more drunken. Opium too became subject to boarding. People came in with wheelbarrows of paper money, or exhibited fivetrillion drachma bills from Roma, laughing as they offered them in exchange for cups of coffee and were refused. It wasn't very funny in all truth; every week things were markedly more expensive, and there didn't seem to be anything to be done about it. They laughed at their own helplessness. Budur went to the cafes less often, which saved money, and the risk of an awkward moment with Kirana. Sometimes she went with Idelba's nephew Piali to a different set of cards, with a seedier clientele; Piali and his associates, who sometimes included Hasan and his friend Tristan, seemed to like the rougher establishments frequented by sailors and longshoremen. So through a winter of thick mists that hung in the streets like rain freed of gravity, Budur sat and listened to tales of Yingzhou and the stormy Atlantic, deadliest of all the seas.

  'We exist on sufferance,' Zainab Shah said bitterly as she knitted in their regular cafe. 'We're like the Japanese after the Chinese conquered them.'

  'Let the occasional chalice break,' Kirana murmured. Her expression in the dim light was serene, indomitable.

  'They have all broken,' Naser said. He sat in the corner, looking out of the window at the rain. He tapped his cigarette on the ashtray. 'I can't say I'm sorry.'

  'In Iran too they don't seem to care.' Kirana appeared to be trying to cheer him up. 'They are making very great strides there, leading the way in all kinds of fields. Linguistics, archaeology, the physical sciences, they have all the leading people.'

  Naser nodded, looking inwards. Budur had gathered that his fortune had gone to fund many of these efforts, from an exile of some unexplained sort. Another complicated life.

  Another downpour struck. The weather seemed to enunciate their situation, wind and rain slapping the Cafe Sultana's big windows and running across the plate glass wildly, pushed this way and that by gusts of wind. The old soldier watched his smoke rise, twined threads of brown and grey, ox bowing more and more as they rose. Piali had once described the dynamics of this lazy ascent, as he had the rain's deltas down the windowpanes. Storm sunlight cast a silver sheen on the wet street. Budur felt happy. The world was beautiful. She was so hungry that the milk in her coffee was like a meal inside her. The storm's light was a meal. She thought: now is beautiful. These old Persians are beautiful; their Persian accents are beautiful. Kirana's rare serenity is beautiful. Throw away the past and the future. The old Persians' Khayyarn had understood this, one reason among many that the mullahs had never liked him: Come fill the cup and in the blaze of spring The winter garment of repentance fling: The bird of time has but a little way To fly and hey! The bird is on the wing!

  The others left, and Budur sat with Kirana, watching her write something down in her brown backed notebook. She looked up, happy to see Budur watching her. She stopped for a cigarette, and they talked for a while, about Yingzhou and the Hodenosaunee. As usual, Kirana's thoughts took interesting turns. She thought the very early stage of civilization that the Hodenosaunee had been in when discovered by the Old World was what had allowed them to survive, counter-intuitive though that was. They had been canny hunter gatherers, more intelligent as individuals than the people of more developed cultures, and much more flexible than the Inka, who were shackled by a very rigid theocracy. If it weren't for their susceptibility to Old World diseases, the Hodenosaunee no doubt would have conquered the Old World already. Now they were making up for lost time.

  They talked about Nsara, the army and the clerics, the madressa and the monastery. Budur's girlhood. Kirana's time in Africa.

  When the cafe closed Budur went with her to Kirana's zawiyya, which had a little study garret with a door that was often closed, and on a couch in there they lay on each other kissing, rolling from one embrace to the next, Kirana clasping her so hard that Budur thought her ribs might break; and they were tested again when her stomach clamped down on a violent orgasm.

  Afterwards Kirana held her with her usual sly smile, calmer than ever.

  'Your turn.'

  11 already came, I was rubbing myself on your shin.'

  'There are softer ways than that.'

  'No really, I'm fine. I'm already done for.' And Budur realized with a shock she could not keep out of ber eyes that Kirana was not going to let her touch her.

  FIFTEEN

  After that Budur went to class feeling strange. In class and in the cafes afterwards, Kirana acted towards her just as she always had, a matter of propriety no doubt; but Budur found it off putting, also sad. In the cafes she sat on the other side of the table from Kirana, not often meeting her eye. Kirana accepted this, and joined the flow of conversation on her side of the table, discoursing in her usual manner, which now struck Budur as a bit forced, even overbearing, although it was no more verbose than ever.

  Budur turned to Hasan, who was describing a trip to the Sugar Islands, between Yingzhou and Inka, where he planned to smoke opium every day and lie on white beaches or in the turquoise water off their shores, warm as a bath. 'Wouldn't that be grand?' Hasan asked.

  'In my next life,' Budur suggested.

  'Your next life.' Hasan snorted, bloodshot eye regarding her sardonically. 'So pretty to think so.'

  'You never know,' Budur said.

  'Right. Maybe we should take a trip out to see Madam Sururi, and you can see who you were in your past lives. Talk to your loved ones in the bardo. Half the widows of Nsara are doing it, I'm sure it's quite comforting. If you could believe it.' He gestured out through the plate glass, where people in black coats passed in the street, hunched under their umbrellas. 'It's silly though. Most people don't even live the one life they've got.'

  One life. It was an idea Budur had trouble accepting, even though the sciences and everything else had made it clear that one life was all you had. As a girl her mother had said, Be good or you'll come back as a snail. At funerals they said a prayer for the next existence of the decea
sed, asking Allah to give him or her a chance to improve. Now all that was dismissed, with all the rest of the afterlives, heaven and hell, God himself – all that claptrap, all the superstitions of earlier generations in their immense ignorance, concocting myths to make sense of things. Now they lived in a material world, evolved to what it was by chance and the laws of physics; they struggled through one life and died; that was what the scientists had revealed by their studies, and there was nothing Budur had ever seen or experienced that seemed to indicate otherwise. No doubt it was true. That was reality; they had to adjust to it, or live in a delusion. Adjust each to his or her own cosmic solitude, to nakba, to hunger and worry, coffee and opium, the knowledge of an end.

  'Did I hear you say we should visit Madam Sururi?' Kirana asked from across the table. 'A good idea! Let's do it. It would be like a historical field trip for the class like visiting a place where people still live as they did for hundreds of years.'

  'From all I've heard she's an entertaining old charlatan.'

  'A friend of mine visited her and said it was great fun.'

  They had spent too many hours sitting there, looking at the same ashtrays and coffee rings on the tabletops, the same rain deltas on the windows. So they gathered up their coats and umbrellas, and took the number four tram upriver to a meagre neighbourhood of apartments abutting the older shipyards, the buildings displaying small Maghribi shops at each corner. Between a seamstress's workshop and a laundry hid a little walk up to rooms over the shops below. The door opened to their knock, and they were invited in to an entryway, and then, farther in, to a dark room filled with couches and small tables, obviously the converted living room of a fairly large old apartment.

  Eight or ten women and three old men were sitting on chairs, facing a black haired woman who was younger than Budur had expected but not all that young, a woman who wore Zotti clothing, heavy kohl and lipstick, and a great deal of cheap glass jewellery. She had been speaking to her devotees in a low intent voice, and now she paused, and gestured to empty chairs at the back of the room without saying anything to the new arrivals.