The Year of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  She was still under the spell of this poster, when Piali came hurrying up. 'I'm afraid we should get back home as fast as possible. The army command has suspended the government, and is trying to take over Nsara.'

  TWENTY TWO

  They flew back the next day, Piali fretting at the slowness of the airship, wishing that the military aeroplanes had been adapted more generally for civilian passenger use, also wondering if they would be arrested on their arrival, as intellectuals visiting a foreign power during a time of national emergency, or some such thing.

  But when their airship landed at the airfield outside Nsara, not only were they not arrested, but in fact, looking out of the windows of the tram as it rolled into the city, it was impossible to tell that anything at all had changed.

  It was only when they got out of the tram and walked over to the madressa district that a difference became apparent. The docks were quieter. The longshoremen had closed down the docks to protest about the coup. Now soldiers stood guard over the cranes and gantries, and groups of men and women stood on the street corners watching them.

  Piali and Budur went into the offices of the physics building, and heard all the latest from Piah's colleagues. The army command had dissolved the Nsarene state council and the district panchayats, and declared martial law over all. They were calling it sharia, and they had a few mullahs going along with it to provide some religious legitimacy, though it was very slight; the mullahs involved were hardline reactionaries out of step with everything that had happened in Nsara since the war, part of the 'we won' crowd, or, as Hasan had always called them, the 'we would have won if it weren't for the Armenians, Sikhs, Jews, Zott, and whoever else we dislike' crowd, the 'we would have won if the rest of the world hadn't beaten the shit out of us' crowd. To be among like minded people they should have moved to the Alpine emirates or Afghanistan long before.

  So no one was fooled by the facade of the coup. And as things had recently been getting a bit better, the timing of the coup was not particularly good. It made no sense; apparently it had only happened because the officers had been living on fixed incomes during the period of hyperinflation, and thought everyone else was as desperate as they were. But many, many people were still sick of the army, and supportive of their district panchayats if not of the state council. So it seemed to Budur that the chances for successful resistance were good.

  Kirana was much more pessimistic. She was in the hospital now, as it turned out; Budur went running over to it the moment she found out, feeling raw and frightened. For tests only, Kirana informed her brusquely, though she did not identify them; something to do with her blood or her lungs, Budur gathered. Nevertheless, from her hospital bed she was calling every zawiyya in the city, organizing things. 'They've got the guns so they may win, but we're not going to make it easy.'

  Many of the madressa and institute's students were already out in crowds on the central plaza, and the corniche and docks, and the grand mosque's courtyards, shouting, chanting, singing, and sometimes throwing stones. Kirana was not satisfied with these efforts, but spent all her time on the phone trying to schedule a rally: 'They'll have you back behind the veil, they'll try to turn back the clock until you are all domestic animals again, you have to get out in the streets in great numbers, this is the only thing that scares coup leaders' – always 'you' and not 'we', Budur noticed, excluding herself as if speaking posthumously, although she was clearly pleased to be involved in all the activities. And pleased also that Budur was visiting her in the hospital.

  'They mistimed it,' she said to Budur with a kind of mordant glee. Not only were the food shortages getting better, but it was spring, and as sometimes happened in Nsara, the endlessly cloudy skies had abruptly cleared and the sun was shining day after day, illuminating new greens that welled up everywhere in the gardens and the cracks in the pavement. The sky was washed clear and gleaming like lapis overhead, and when twenty thousand people gathered on the commercial docks and marched down Sultana Katima Boulevard to the Mosque of the Fishermen, many thousands more came to watch, and joined the crowd marching, until when the army ringing the district shot pepper gas canisters into the crowd, people poured in every direction out of the big transverse streets, cutting through the medinas flanking the Liwayya River, causing it to appear that the whole city had rioted. After those hurt by the gas were cared for, the crowd returned bigger than it had been before the attack.

  This happened two or three times in a single day, until the huge square before the city's great mosque and the old palace was completely filled with people, facing the barbed wire fronting the old palace and singing songs, listening to speeches, and chanting slogans and various suras of the Quran that supported the rights of the people against the ruler. The square never emptied, nor even grew uncrowded; people went home for meals and other necessities, leaving the young to carouse through the nights, but they refilled the square during the beautiful lengthening days to bear witness. The whole city was in effect shut down for all of the first month of spring, like an extreme Ramadan.

  One day Kirana was pushed to the palace square in a wheelchair by her students, and she grinned at the sight. 'Now this is what works,' she said. 'Sheer numbers!'

  They brought her through the crowd to the rough podium they were constructing daily, made of dock pallets, and got her up there to make a speech, which she did with gusto, in her usual style, despite her physical weakness. She grabbed the microphone of the amplifier and said to them: 'What Mohammed began was the idea that all humans had rights that could not be taken away from them without insulting their creator. Allah made all humans equally His creatures, and none are to serve others. This message came into a time very far from these practices, and the course of progress in history has been the story of the clarifi cation of these principles of Islam, and the establishment of true justice. Now we are here to continue that work!

  'In particular women have had to struggle against misinterpretation of the Quran, jailed in their homes and their veils and their illiteracy, until Islam itself foundered under the general ignorance of all for how can men be wise and prosper when they spend their first years taught by people who don't know anything?

  'Thus we fought the Long War and lost it, for us it was the Nakba. Not the Armenians or the Burmese or the Jews or the Hodenosaunee or the Africans were responsible for our defeat, nor any problem with Islam itself fundamentally, as it is the voice of the love of God and the wholeness of humanity, but only the historical miscarriage of Islam, distorted as it has been.

  'Now, we have been facing that reality in Nsara ever since the war ended, and we have made great strides. We have all witnessed and taken part in the burst of good work done here, despite physical privations of every sort and underneath the constant rain.

  'Now the generals think they can stop all this and turn the clock back, as if they did not lose the war and cast us into this necessity of creation that we have used so well. As if time could ever run backwards! Nothing like that can ever happen! We have made a new world here on old ground, and Allah protects it, through the actions of all the people who truly love Islam and its chances to survive in the world to come.

  'So we have gathered here to join the long struggle against oppression, to join all the revolts, rebellions and revolutions, all the efforts to take power away from the armies, the police, the mullahs, and give it back to the people. Every victory has been incremental, a matter of two steps forwards one step back, a struggle for ever. But each time we progress a little further, and no one is going to push us backwards! If they expect to succeed in such a project, the government will have to dismiss the people and appoint another one! But I don't think that's how it happens.'

  This was well received, and the crowd kept growing, and Budur was pleased to see how many were women, working women from the kitchens and the canning factories, women for whom the veil or the harem had never been an issue, but who had suffered as they all had with the war and the crash; indeed they formed the
raggedest, hungriest looking mob possible, with a tendency merely to stand there as if asleep on their feet, and yet there they were, filling the squares, refusing to work; and on Friday they faced Mecca only when one of the revolutionary clerics stood among them, not a policeman in a pulpit, but a man among neighbours, as Mohammed had been in his life. As it was Friday, this particular cleric said the first chapter of the Quran, the Fatiha, known to everyone, even the large group of Buddhists and Hodenosaunee always standing there among them, so that the whole crowd could recite it together, over and over many times: 'Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds! The compassionate, the merciful! King on the day of reckoning! Thee only do we worship, and to Thee do we cry for help. Guide us on the straight path, The path of those to whom Thou hast been gracious; With whom thou art not angry, and who go not astray!'

  The next morning this same cleric got up on the dais and started the day by reciting into the microphone a poem by Ghaleb, waking people up and calling them out to the square again: 'Soon I will be only a story But the same is true of you. I hope the bardo will not be empty But people do not yet know where they live. Past and future all mixed together, Let those trapped birds out the window! What then remains? The stories you no longer Believe. You had better believe them. While you live they carry the meaning When you die they carry the meaning To those who come after they carry the meaning You had better believe in them. In Rumi's story he saw all the worlds As one, and that one, Love, he called to and knew, Not Muslim or Jew or Hindu or Buddhist, Only a Friend, a breath breathing human, Telling his boddhisatva story. The bardo Waits for us to make it real.'

  Budur on that morning was awakened in the zawiyya by someone bringing news to her of a phone message: it was from one of her blind soldiers. They wanted to talk to her.

  She took the tram and then walked into the hospital, feeling apprehensive. Were they angry at her for not coming recently? Were they worried about the way she had left after her last visit?

  No. The oldest ones spoke for them, or for some part of them, anyway; they wanted to march in the demonstration against the army takeover, and they wanted her to lead them. About two thirds of the ward said they wanted to do it.

  It wasn't the kind of request one could refuse. Budur agreed, and feeling shaky and uncertain, led them out of the gate of the hospital. There were too many of them for the trams, so they walked down the riverfront road, and then the corniche, hands on the shoulders before them, like a parade of elephants. Back in the ward Budur had got used to the look of them, but out here in the brilliant sunshine and the open air they were a shocking sight once again, maimed and awful. Three hundred and twenty seven of them, walking down the corniche; they had taken a head count when leaving the ward.

  Naturally they drew a crowd, and some people began following them down the corniche, and in the big plaza there was already a crowd, a crowd that quickly made room for the veterans at the front of the protest, facing the old palace. They arranged themselves into ranks and files by feel, and counting off in undertones, with a little aid from Budur. Then they stood silently, right hands on the shoulders to their left, listening to the speakers at the microphone. The crowd behind them grew bigger and bigger.

  Army airships floated low over the city, and amplified voices from them ordered everyone to leave the streets and plazas. A full curfew had been declared, the mechanical voices informed them.

  This decision had no doubt been made in ignorance of the blind soldiers' presence in the palace square. They stood there without moving, and the crowd stood with them. One of the blind soldiers shouted, 'What are they going to do, gas us?'

  In fact this was all too possible, as pepper gas had been deployed already, at the State Council Chambers and the police barracks, and down on the docks. And later it was said by many that the blind soldiers were in fact tear gassed during that tense week, and that they just stood there and took it, for they had no tears left to shed; that they stood in their square with their hands on each other's shoulders and chanted the Fatiha, and the bismallah which starts every sura: 'In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful! In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful!'

  Budur herself never saw any pepper gas dropped in the palace square, although she heard her soldiers chanting the bismallah for hours at a time. But she was not there in the square every hour of that week, and hers was not the only group of blind soldiers to have left their hospitals and joined the protests, either. So possibly something of the sort occurred. Certainly in the time afterwards everyone believed it had.

  In any case, during that long week people passed the time by reciting long passages from Rumi Balkhi, and Ferdowski, and the joker mullah Nusreddin, and the epic poet of Firanja, Ali, and from their own sufi poet of Nsara, young Ghaleb, who had been killed on the very last day of the war. Budur made frequent visits to the women's hospital where Kirana was staying, to tell her what was happening on the plaza and elsewhere in the great city, now pulsing everywhere with its people. They had taken to the streets and were not leaving them. Even when the rain returned they stayed out there. Kirana ate up every word of news, hungry to be out herself, supremely irritated that she was confined at this time. Obviously she was seriously ill or she wouldn't have suffered it, but she was emaciated, with sallow, dark rings under her eyes like a raccoon from Yingzhou, 'stuck', as she put it, 'just when things are getting interesting', just when her long winded acid-tongued facility for speech could have been put to use, could have made history as well as commented on it. But it was not to be; she could only lie there fighting ber illness. The one time Budur ventured to ask how she was feeling, she grimaced and said only, 'The termites have got me.'

  But even so she stayed close to the centre of the action. A delegation of opposition leaders, including a contingent of women from the zawlyyas of the city, were meeting with adjutants of the generals to make their protests and negotiate if they could, and these people visited Kirana often to talk over strategy. On the streets the rumour was that a deal was being hammered out, but Kirana lay there, eyes burning, and shook her head at Budur's hopefulness. 'Don't be naive.' Her sardonic grin wrinkled her wasted features. 'They're just playing for time. They think that if they hold on long enough the protests will die down, and they can get on with their business. They're probably right. They've got the guns after all.'

  But then a Hodenosaunee fleet steamed into the harbour roads and anchored. Hanea! Budur thought when she saw them: forty giant steel battleships, bristling with guns that could fire a hundred li inland. They called in on a wireless frequency used by a popular music station, and though the government had seized the station, they could do nothing to stop this message from reaching all the wireless receptors in the city, and many heard the message and passed it along: the Hodenosaunee wanted to speak to the legitimate government, the one they had been dealing with before. They refused to speak to the generals, who were breaking the Shanghai Convention by usurping the constitutionally required government, a very serious breach; they declared they would not move from Nsara's harbour until the council established by the postwar settlement was reconvened; and they would not trade with any government led by the generals. As the grain that had saved Nsara from starvation in the previous winter had mostly come from Hodenosaunee ships, this was a serious challenge indeed.

  The matter hung for three days, during which rumours flew like bats at dusk: that negotiations were going on between the fleet and the junta, that mines were being laid, that amphibious troops were being readied, that negotiations were breaking down…

  On the fourth day the leaders of the coup were suddenly nowhere to be found. The Yingzhou fleet was a few ships smaller in size. The generals had been spirited off, everyone said, to asylums in the Sugar Islands or the Maldives, in exchange for stopping without a fight. The ranking officers left behind led the deployed units of the army back to their barracks and stood down, waiting for further instructions from the legitimate State Council. The coup was cancelled.<
br />
  The people in the streets cheered, shouted, sang, embraced total strangers, went crazy for joy. Budur did all these things, and led her soldiers back to their ward, and then rushed to Kirana's hospital to tell Kirana everything she had seen, feeling a pang to see her so sick in the midst of this triumph. Kirana nodded at the news, saying, 'We got lucky to get help like that. The whole world saw that, it will have a good effect, you'll see. Although now we're in for it! We'll see what it's like to be part of a league, we'll see what kind of people they really are.'

  Other friends wanted to wheel her out to give another speech, but she wouldn't do it, she said, 'Just go and tell people to get back to work, tell them we need to get the bakeries baking again.'

  Darkness. Silence. Then a voice in the void: Kirana? Are you there? Kuo? Kyu? Kenpo? What. Are you there? I'm here. We're back in the bardo. There is no such thing. Yes there is. Here we are. You can't deny it. We keep coming back. (Blackness, silence. A refusal of speech.) Come on, you can't deny it. We keep coming back. We keep going out again. Everybody does. That's dharma. We keep trying. We keep making progress. A noise like a tiger's growl. But we do! Here's Idelba, and Piali, and even Madam Sururi. So she was right. Yes. Ridiculous. Nevertheless. Here we are. Here to be sent back again, sent back together, our little jati. I don't know what I would do without all of you. I think the solitude would kill me. You're killed anyway. Yes, but it's less lonely this way. And we're making a difference. No, we are! Look at what has happened! You can't deny it! Things were done. It's not very much.

  Of course. You said it yourself, we have thousands of lifetimes of work to do. But it's working.

  Don't generalize. It could all slip away.

  Of course. But back we go, to try again. Each generation makes its fight. A few more turns of the wheel. Come on – back with a will. Back into the fray!