The Year of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  It was also true that treating art as sacred often meant smoking opium or drinking laudanum to prepare for the experience; some even used the stronger distillates of opium developed during the war, smoking or even injecting them. The resulting dream states made Tristan's music mesmerizing, the practitioners said, even those who were not fond of the lost civilization's simplistic tootles; opium induced a deep absorption in the sensuous surface of musical sound, in the plainsong harmonies, vibrating between a drugged band and a drugged audience. If the performance was combined with the fanned aromas of a scent artist, the results could be truly mystical. Some were sceptical of all this: Kirana said once, 'As high as they all get, they could simply sing a single note for the whole hour, and smell their armpits, and all would be as happy as birds.'

  Tristan himself often led the opium ceremonies before leading the music, so these evenings had a somewhat cultic air to them, as if Tristan were some kind of mystic sufi master, or one of the Hosain actors in the plays about Hosain's martyrdom, which the opium crowd also attended after crossing into dreamland, to watch Hosain putting on his own shroud before his murder by Shemr, the audience groaning, not at the murder onstage, but at this choice of martyrdom. In some of the Shiite countries the person playing Shemr had to run for his life after the performance, and more than one unlucky actor had been killed by the crowd. Tristan thoroughly approved; this was the kind of immersion in the art that he wanted his musical audiences to achieve.

  But only in the secular world; it was all for music, not for God; Tristan was more Persian than Iranian as he put it sometimes, much more an Omarian than any kind of mullah, or a mystic of Zoroastrian bent, concocting rituals in honour of Ahura Mazda, a kind of sun worship that in foggy Nsara could come straight from the heart. Channelling Christians, smoking opium, worshipping the sun; he did all kinds of crazy things for his music, including working for many hours every day to get every note right on the page; and though none of it would have mattered if the music had not been good, it was good, it was more than that; it was the music of their lives, of Nsara in its time.

  He spoke of all the theory behind it, however, in cryptic little phrases and aphorisms that then made the rounds, as 'Tristan's latest'; and often it was just a shrug and a smile and an offered opium pipe, and, most of all, his music. He composed what he composed, and the intellectuals of the city could listen and then talk about what it all meant, and they often did all through the night. Tahar Labid would go on endlessly about it, and then say to Tristan, with almost mock aggressiveness, That's right, isn't it Tristan Ahura, then go on without pausing for an answer, as if Tristan were to be laughed at as an idiot savant for never deigning to reply one way or the other; as if he didn't really know what his music meant. But Tristan only smiled at Tahar, sphinxlike and enigmatic under his moustache, relaxed as if poured into his window seat, looking out at the wet black cobbles or spearing Tahar with an amused glance.

  'Why don't you ever answer me!' Tahar exclaimed once.

  Tristan pursed his lips and whistled a response at him.

  'Oh come on,' Tahar said, reddening. 'Say something to make us think you have a single idea in your head.'

  Tristan drew himself up. 'Don't be rude! Of course there are no ideas in my head, what do you think I am!'

  So Budur sat next to him. She joined him when, with a tilt of the chin and pursing of the lips, he invited her into one of the back rooms of the cafe where the opium smokers gathered. She had decided ahead of time to join them if the opportunity was offered, to see what hearing Tristan's music under the influence would be like; to see what the drug felt like, using the music as the ceremony that allowed ber to overcome her Turic fear of the smoke.

  The room was small and dark. The huqqab, bigger than a narghile, sat on a low table in the middle of floor pillows, and Tristan cut a chunk from a black plug of opium and put it in the bowl, lit it with a silver cigarette lighter as one of the others inhaled. As the single mouthpiece was passed around the smokers sucked on it, and each in turn began immediately to cough. The black plug in the bowl bubbled to tar as it burned; the smoke was thick and white, and smelled like sugar. Budur decided to take in so little that she wouldn't cough, but when the mouthpiece came to her and she inhaled gently through it, the first taste of the smoke caused her to hack like a demon. It seemed impossible she could be so affected by anything that had been in her so briefly.

  Then it struck deeper. She felt her blood filling her skin, then all of her. Blood filled her like a balloon, it would spurt out if her hot skin didn't hold it in. She pulsed with her pulse, and the world pulsed with her. Everything jumped forwards into itself somehow, in time with her heart. The dim walls pulsed. More colour revealed itself with every beat of her heart. The surfaces of things swirled with coiled pressure and tension, they looked like Idelba said they really were, bundles of bundled energy. Budur pulled herself to her feet with the others, walked, balancing carefully, through the streets to the concert hall in the old palace, into a space long and tall like a deck of cards set on its side. The musicians filed in and sat, their instruments like strange weapons. Following Tristan's lead, conveyed by hand and eye, they began to play. The singers chanted in the ancient Pythagorean tonality, pure and sugary, a single voice wandering above in descant. Then Tristan on his oud, and the other string players, bass to treble, sneaked in underneath, wrecking the simple harmonies, bringing in a whole other world, an Asia of sound, so much more complex and dark – reality seeping in. and, over the course of a long struggle, overwhelming the old west's plainchant. This was the story of Firanja that Tristan was singing, Budur thought suddenly, a musical expression of the history of this place they lived in, late arrivals that they were. Firanjis, Franks, Kelts, the oldest ones back in the murk of time… Each people overrun in its turn. It was not a scent performance, but there was incense burning before the musicians, and as their songs wove together the thick smells of sandalwood and jasmine choked the room, they came in on Budur's breath and sang inside her, playing a complex roundelay with her pulse, just as in the music itself, which was so clearly another speech of the body, a language she felt she could understand in the moment it happened. without ever being able to articulate or remember it.

  Sex too was a language like that; as she found later that night, when she went home with Tristan to his grubby apartment, and to bed with him. His apartment was across the river in the south wharf district, a cold and damp garret, an artistic clich6, and uncleaned, it appeared, since his wife had died near the end of the war some factory accident, Budur had gathered from others, a chance of bad timing and broken machinery – but the bed was there, and the sheets clean, which made Budur suspicious; but after all she had been showing interest in Tristan, so perhaps it was only a matter of politeness, or self respect of some heartening kind. He was a dreamy lover and played her like an oud, languorous and faintly teasing, so that there was an edge to her passion, of resistance and struggle, all adding somehow to the sexiness of the experience, so that it nagged at her afterwards, as if set into her with hooks nothing like the blazing directness of Kirana – and Budur afterwards wondered what Tristan intended by it, but realized also in that very first night that she was not going to learn from Tristan's words, as he was as reticent with her as he was with Tahar, almost; so that she would have to know him by what could be intuited from his music and his looks. Which were indeed very revealing of his moods and their swings, and so of his character (perhaps); which she liked. So for a while she went home with him fairly often, arranging for prophylactics with the zawiyya clinic, going out at night to the cafes and taking the opportunity when it came.

  After a time, however, it became annoying to try to have conversation with a man who only sang melodies – like trying to live with a bird. it echoed painfully that distance in her father, and the mute quality of her attempts to study the remote past, which were equally speechless. And as things in town got tighter, and each week added another zero to the numbers on the
paper money, it got harder and harder to gather the large ensembles that Tristan's current compositions required. When the district panchayat that ran the old palace chose not to lend a concert room, or the musicians were occupied with their real jobs, in class or on the docks or in the shops selling hats and raincoats, then Tristan could only strum his oud, and finger his pencils and take endless notes, in an Indian musical notation that was said to be older than Sanskrit, although Tristan confessed to Budur that he had forgotten the system during the war, and now used one of his own devising that he had had to teach to his players. His melodies became more morose, she thought, tunes from a heavy heart, mourning the losses of the war, and the ones that had happened since, and were still occurring now, in the moment of listening itself. Budur understood them, and kept joining Tristan from time to time, watching the twitches under his moustache for clues as to what amused him when she or others spoke, watching his yellowed fingers as they felt their tunes forwards, or noted down one quicksilver lament after another. She heard a singer she thought he would like, and took him to hear her, and he did like her, he hummed on the way home, looking out of the tram window at the dark city streets, where people hurried from streetlight to streetlight over gleaming cobblestones, hunched under umbrellas or serapes.

  It's like in the forest,' Tristan said with a lift of the moustache. 'Up in your mountains, you know, you see places where avalanches have bent all the trees down sideways, and then after the snow melts, the trees there all stay bent sideways together.' He gestured at the crowd waiting at a tram stop. 'That's what we're like now.'

  EIGHTEEN

  As the days and the weeks passed Budur continued to read voraciously, in the zawiyya, the institute, the parks, at the jetty's end, in the hospital for the blind soldiers. Meanwhile there were ten trillion piastre bills arriving with immigrants from the Middle West, and they were at ten billion drachmas themselves; recently a man had stuffed his house from floor to ceiling with money, and traded the whole establishment for a pig. At the zawiyya it was harder and harder to put together meals big enough to feed them all. They grew vegetables in crops on the roof, cursing the clouds, and lived on their goats' milk, their chickens' eggs, cucumbers in great vats of vinegar, pumpkins cooked in every conceivable fashion, and potato soup, watered to a thinness thinner than milk.

  One day Idelba found the three spies going through the little cabinet above her bed, and she had them kicked out of the house as common thieves, calling in the neighbourhood police and bypassing the issue of spying, without however getting into the tricky issue of what else besides her ideas she had that would be worth stealing.

  'They'll be in trouble,' Budur observed after the three girls were taken away. 'Even if they're plucked out of jail by their employers.'

  'Yes,' Idelba agreed. 'I was going to leave them here, as you saw. But once caught, we had to act as if we didn't know who they were. And the truth is we can't afford to feed them. So they can go back to who sent them. Hopefully.' A grim expression; she didn't want to think about it – about what she might have condemned them to. That was their problem. She had hardened in just the two years since she had brought Budur to Nsara, or so it seemed to Budur. 'It's not just my work,' she explained, seeing Budur's expression. 'That remains latent. It's the problems we have right now. Things won't need blowing up if we all starve first. The war ended badly, that's all there is to it. I mean not just for us, as the defeated, but for everyone. Things are so out of balance, it could bring everything down. So everyone needs to pull together. And if some people don't, then I don't know…'

  'All that time you spend working in the music of the Franks,' Budur said to Tristan, one evening in the cafe, 'do you ever think about what they were like?'

  'Why yes,' he said, pleased at the question. 'All the time. I think they were just like us. They fought a lot. They had monasteries and madressas, and water powered machinery. Their ships were small, but they could sail into the wind. They might have taken control of the seas before anyone else.'

  'Not a chance,' said Tahar. 'Compared to Chinese ships they were no more than dhows. Come now, Tristan, you know that.'

  Tristan shrugged.

  'They had ten or fifteen languages, thirty or forty principalities, isn't that right?' said Naser. 'They were too fractured to conquer anyone else.'

  'They fought together to capture Jerusalem,' Tristan pointed out. 'The infighting gave them practice. They thought they were God's chosen people.'

  ' Primitives often think that.'

  'Indeed.' Tristan smiled, leaning sideways to peer through the window towards the neighbourhood mosque. 'As I say, they were just like us. If they had lived, there would be more people like us.'

  'There's no one like us,' Naser said sadly. 'I think they must have been very different.'

  Tristan shrugged again. 'You can say anything you like about them, it doesn't matter. You can say they would have been enslaved like the Africans, or made slaves of the rest of us, or brought a golden age, or waged wars worse than the Long War…'

  People shook their heads at all these impossibilities.

  '… but it doesn't matter. We'll never know, so you can say whatever you like. They are our jinns.'

  'It's funny how we look down on them,' Kirana observed, 'just because they died. At an unconscious level it seems like it must have been their fault. A physical weakness, or a moral failing, or a bad habit.'

  'They affronted God with their pride.'

  'They were pale because they were weak, or vice versa. Muzaffar has shown it, how the darker the skin, the stronger the persons. The blackest Africans are strongest of all, the palest of the Golden Horde are weakest. He did tests. The Franks were hereditarily incompetent, that was his conclusion. Losers in the evolutionary game of survival of the fittest.'

  Kirana shook her head. 'It was probably just a mutation of the plague, so strong it killed off all its hosts, and therefore died itself. It could have happened to any of us. The Chinese, or us.'

  'But there's a kind of anemia common around the Mediterranean, that might have made them more susceptible.

  'No. It could have been us.'

  'That might have been good,' Tristan said. 'They believed in a god of mercy, their Christ was all love and mercy.'

  'Hard to tell that by what they did in Syria.'

  'Or al Andalus '

  'It was latent in them, ready to spring forth. While for us what is latent is jihad.'

  'They were the same as us, you said.'

  Tristan smiled under his moustache. 'Maybe. They're the blank on the map, the ruins underfoot, the empty mirror. The clouds in the sky that look like tigers.'

  I, it's such a useless exercise,' Kirana reflected. 'What if this had happened, what if that had happened, what if the Golden Horde had forced the Gansu Corridor at the start of the Long War, what if the Japanese had attacked China after retaking Japan, what if the Ming had kept their treasure fleet, what if we had discovered and conquered Yingzhou, what if Alexander the Great had not died young, on and on, and they all would have made enormous differences and yet it's always entirely useless. These historians who talk about employing counterfactuals to bolster their theories, they're ridiculous. Because no one knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing at all. Because we don't know if history is sensitive, and for want of a nail a civilization was lost, or if our mightiest acts are as petals on a flood, or something in between, or both at once. We just don't know, and the what ifs don't help us work it out.'