The Year of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  This moment, Zhu said, had become the organizing principle and perhaps the obsession of the Samarqandi anthologist Old Red Ink, who had collected the lives in his reincarnation compendium using something like the clinamen moment to choose his exemplars, as each entry in his collection contained a moment when the subjects, always reincarnated with names that began with the same letters, came to crossroads in their lives and made a swerve away from what they might have been expected to do.

  'I like the naming device,' Bao remarked, leafing through one volume of this collection.

  'Well, Old Red Ink explains in one marginalia that it is merely a mnemonic for the ease of the reader, and that of course in reality every soul comes back with every physical particular changed. No telltale rings, no birthmarks, no same names – he would not have you think his method was anything like the old folk tales, oh no.'

  The Minister for Natural Health asked about a stack of extremely slender volumes, and Zhu smiled happily. As a reaction against these endless compendiums, he explained, he had got into the habit of buying any books he came across that seemed required by their subject matter to be short, often so short that their titles would scarcely fit on their spines. Thus 'Secrets to Successful Marriage', or 'Good Reasons to Have Hope for the Future', or 'Stories About Not Being Afraid of Ghosts'.

  'But I have not read them, I must admit. They exist only for their titles, which say it all. They could be blank inside.'

  Later, outside on his balcony, Bao sat next to Zhu watching the city flow beneath them. They drank cup after cup of green tea, talking about many different things, and as the night grew late, and Zhu feeling pensive, it seemed, Bao said to him, 'Do you ever think of Kung Jianguo? Do you ever think of those times any more?'

  'No, not very often,' Zhu admitted, looking at him directly. 'Do you?'

  Bao shook his head. 'I don't know why. It's not as if it's so very painful to recall. But it seems so long ago.'

  'Yes. Very long.'

  'I see you still have a bit of a limp from that day.'

  'Yes, I do. I don't like it. I walk slower and it's not so bad. But it is still there. I set off metal detectors in the high security zones.' He laughed. 'But it is a long time ago. So many lives ago I get them all confused, don't you?' And he smiled.

  One of Zhu Isao's last sessions was a discussion of what purpose the study of history might have, and how it might help them now in their current predicament.

  Zhu was tentative in this matter. 'It may be no help at all,' he said. 'Even if we gained a complete understanding of what happened in the past, it might not help us. We are still constrained in our actions in the present. In a way we can say that the past has mortgaged the future, or bought it, or tied it up, in laws and institutions and habits. But perhaps it helps to know as much as we can, just to suggest ways forward. You know, this matter of residual and emergent that we discussed – that each period in history is composed of residual elements of past cultures, and emergent elements that later on will come more fully into being this is a powerful lens. And only the study of history allows one to make this distinction, if it is possible at all. Thus we can look at the world we live in, and say, these things are residual laws from the age of the Four Great Inequalities, still binding us. They must go. On the other hand we can look at more unfamiliar elements of our time, like China's communal ownership of land, and say, perhaps these are emergent qualities that will be more prominent in the future; they look helpful; I will support these. Then again, there may be residual elements that have always helped us, and need to be retained. So it is not as simple a matter as "new is good, old is bad". Distinctions need to be made. But the more we understand, the finer we can make the distinctions.

  'I begin to think that this matter of "late emergent properties" that the physicists talk about when they discuss complexity and cascading sensitivities, is an important concept for historians. justice may be a late emergent property. And maybe we can glimpse the beginnings of it emerging; or maybe it emerged long ago, among the primates and proto humans, and is only now gaining leverage in the world, aided by the material possibility of post scarcity. It is hard to say.'

  He smiled again his little smile. 'Good words to end this session.'

  His final meeting was called 'What Remains to be Explained', and consisted of questions that he was still mulling over after all his years of study and contemplation. He made comments on his list of questions, but not many, and Bao had to write as fast as he could to get the questions themselves recorded:

  What Remains to be Explained Why has there been inequality in accumulation of goods since the earliest recorded history? What causes the ice ages to come and go? Could Japan have won its war of independence without the fortuitous combination of the Long War and the earthquake and fire striking Edo? Where did all the Roman gold end up? Why does power corrupt? Was there any way that the native peoples of the New World could have been saved from the devastation of Old World diseases? When did people first arrive in the New World? Why were the civilizations on Yingzhou and Inka at such different stages of development? Why can't gravity be reconciled mathematically with pulse microprobability? Would Travancore have initiated the modern period and dominated the Old World, if the Kerala had never lived? Is there life after death, or transmigration of souls? Did the polar expedition of the fifty second year of the Long War reach the south pole? What causes well fed and secure people to work for the subjugation and immiseration of starving insecure people? If al Alemand had conquered Skandistan, would the Sami people have survived? If the Shanghai Conference had not arranged such punitive reparations, would the postwar world have been more peaceful? How many people can the Earth support? Why is there evil? How did the Hodenosaunee invent their form of government? Which disease or combination of diseases killed the Christians of Firanja? Does technology drive history? Would things have turned out differently if the birth of science in Samarqand had not been delayed in its dispersal by the plague? Did the Phoenicians cross the Atlantic to the New World? Will any mammals larger than a fox survive the next century? Is the Sphinx thousands of years older than the Pyramids? Do gods exist? How can we return the animals to the earth? How can we make a decent existence? How can we give to our children and the generations following a world restored to health?

  Soon after that final session, and a big party, Zhu Isao returned to Beijing, and Bao never saw him again.

  They worked hard in the years after Zhu's visit to enact programmes that helped to frame some answers to his final questions. Just as the geologists had been greatly helped in their labours by the construction of a framework of understanding based on the movement of the broken eggshell plates of the crust, so the bureaucrats and technocrats and scientists and diplomats at the League of All Peoples were helped in their endeavours by Zhu's theoretical considerations. It helps to have a plan! as Zhu had often remarked.

  And so Bao criss crossed the world, meeting and talking to people, helping to put certain strands into place, thickening the warp and weft of treaties and agreements by which all the peoples on the planet were tied together. He worked variously on land tenure reform, forest management, animal protection, water resources, panchayat support and divestiture of accumulated wealth, chipping away at the obdurate blocks of privilege left in the wake of the Long War and all that had happened in the centuries before it. Everything went very slowly, and progress was always in small increments, but what Bao noticed from time to time was that improvements in one part of the world situation often helped elsewhere, so that, for instance, the institution of panchayat governments at the local level in China and the Islamic states led to increased power for more and more people, especially where they adopted the Travancori law of requiring at least two of every five panchayat members to be women; and this in turn mitigated many land problems. Indeed, as many of the world's problems stemmed from too many people competing for too few resources, using too crude technologies, another happy result of the panchayat empowerment of
localities and of women was that birthrates dropped rapidly and dramatically. The replacement rate for a population was 2.I births per woman, and before the Long War the world rate had been more like five; in the poorest countries, more like seven or eight. Now, in every country where women exerted the full range of rights advocated by the League of All Peoples, the replacement rate had fallen to less than three, and often less than two; this, combined with improvements in agriculture and other technologies, boded well for the future. it was the ultimately hopeful expression of the warp and the weft, of the principle of late emergent properties. It seemed, though everything went very slowly, that they might be able to concoct some kind of dharmic history after all. Perhaps; it was not yet clear; but some work got done.

  So when Bao read of Zhu Isao's death, some years later, he groaned and threw the paper to the floor. He spent the day out on his balcony, feeling unaccountably bereft. Really there was nothing to mourn, everything to celebrate: the great one had lived over a hundred years, had helped to change China and then all the world; late in life he had appeared to be thoroughly enjoying himself, going around and listening by talking. He had given the impression of someone who knew his place in the world.

  But Bao did not know his place. Contemplating the immense city below him, looking up the great watery canyons, he realized that he had been living in this place for over ten years, and he still didn't know a thing about it. He was always leaving or coming back, always looking down on things from a balcony, eating in the same little hole in the wall, talking to colleagues from the League offices, spending most of his mornings and evenings reading. He was almost sixty now, and he didn't know what he was doing or how he was supposed to live. The huge city was like a machine, or a ship half sunk in the shallows. It was no help to him. He had worked every day trying to extend Kung and Zhu's work, to understand history and work on it in the moment of change, also to explain it to others, reading and writing, reading and writing, thinking that if he could only explain it then it wouldn't oppress him quite so much. It did not seem to have worked. He had the persistent feeling that everyone who ever meant anything to him had already died.

  When he went back inside his apartment, he found a message on the screen of his lectern from his daughter Anzi, the first he had received from her in a long time. She had given birth to a daughter of her own, and wondered if Bao wanted to visit and meet his new grandchild. He typed an affirmative reply and packed his bag.

  Anzi and her husband Deng lived above Shark Point, in one of the crowded hilly neighbourhoods on the bay side of Fangzhang. Their baby girl was named Fengyun, and Bao enjoyed very much taking her out on the tram and walking her in a stroller around the park at the south end of town, overlooking the Gold Gate. There was something about her look that reminded him very strongly of Pan Xichun – a curve of the cheek, a stubborn look in her eye. These traits we pass on. He watched ber sleep, and the fog roll in through the Gate, under and over the sweep of the new bridge, listening to a feng shui guru lecture a small class sitting at his feet, 'you can see that this is the most physically beautiful setting of any city on Earth', which seemed true enough to Bao; even Pyinkayaing had no prospect compared to this, the glories of the Burmese capital were all artefactual, and without those it was just like any other delta mouth; unlike this sublime place he had loved so in a previous existence, 'oh no, I don't think so, only geomantic imbeciles would have located the city on the other side of the strait, apart from practical considerations of street plaiting, there is the intrinsic qi of place, its dragon arteries are too exposed to the wind and fog, it is best to leave it as a park'. Certainly the opposing peninsula made a beautiful park, green and hilly across the water, sunlight streaming down on it through cloud, the whole scene so vibrant and gorgeous that Bao lifted the babe up out of her stroller to show it all to her; he pointed her in the four directions; and the scene blurred before his eyes as if he too were a babe. Everything became a flow of shapes, cloudy masses of brilliant colour swimming about, vivid and glowing, stripped of their meanings as known things, blue and white above, yellow below… He shivered, feeling very strange. It was as if he had been looking through the babe's eyes; and the child seemed fretful. So he took her back home, and Anzi reproached him for letting her get cold. 'And her nappy needs changing!'

  'I know that! I'll do it.'

  'No I'll do it, you don't know how.'

  'I most certainly do too, I changed your nappies often enough in my time.'

  She sniffed disapprovingly, as if he had been rude to do so, invading her privacy perhaps. He grabbed up the book he was reading and went out for a walk, upset. Somehow things were still awkward between them.

  The great city hummed, the islands in the bay with their skyscrapers looking like the vertical mountains of south China, the slopes of Mount Tamalpi equally crowded with huge buildings; but the bulk of the city hugged its hills tightly, most of it still human scale, buildings two and three storeys tall, with upturned corners on all the roofs in the oldfashioned way, like a city of pagodas. This was the city he had loved, the city he had lived in during the years of his marriage.

  And so he was a preta here. Like any other hungry ghost, he walked over the hill to the ocean side, and soon he found himself in the neighbourhood where they had lived when Pan was alive. He walked through the streets without even thinking about navigating his way, and there he was: the old home.

  He stood before the building, an ordinary apartment block, now painted a pale yellow. They had lived in an apartment upstairs, always in the wind, just as it was now. He stared at the building. He felt nothing. He tested it, he tried to feel something: no. The main thing he felt was wonder that he could feel so little; a rather pale and unsatisfactory feeling to have at such a momentous confrontation with his past, but there it was. The children each had had a bedroom to themselves up there, and Bao and Pan had slept on an unrolled futon in the living room, the stove of the kitchenette right at their feet; it had been a cricket box of a place, really, but there they had lived, and for a time it had seemed it would always be just like that, husband, wife, son, daughter, clothed in a tiny apartment in Fangzhang, and every day the same, every week the same, in a round that would last for ever. Thus the power of thoughtlessness, the power people had to forget what time was always doing.

  He took off walking again, south towards the Gate, on the busy promenade high over the ocean, the trams squealing by. When he reached the park overlooking the strait he returned to the spot where he had been just hours before with his granddaughter, and looked around again. Everything remained the same this time, retaining its shape and its meaning; no flow into colours, no yellow ocean. That had been an odd experience, and he shuddered again remembering it.

  He sat on the low wall overlooking the water, and took his book from his jacket pocket, a book of poems translated from the ancient Sanskrit. He opened it at random, and read, 'This verse from Kalidasa's "Sakuntala" is considered by many scholars of Sanskrit to be the most beautiful in the language.'

  Ramyani viksya madhurans ca nisamya sabdan paryutsuki bhavati yat sukhito pi jantuh tac cetasa smarati nunarn abodhapurvarn bhavasthirani jananantarasauhrdani. Even the man who is happy glimpses something Or a thread of sound touches him And his heart overflows with a longing he does not recognize Then it must be that he is remembering a place out of reach people he loved In a life before this their pattern Still there in him waiting He looked up, looked around. An awesome place, this great gate to the sea. He thought, maybe I should stay here. Maybe this day is telling me something. Maybe this is my home, hungry ghost or not. Maybe we cannot avoid becoming hungry ghosts, no matter where we live; so might as well be home.

  He walked back to his daughter's. A letter had arrived on his lectern from an acquaintance of his, living at the farm station of Fangzhang's college, inland from the city a hundred li, in the big central valley. This acquaintance from his Beijing years had heard he was visiting the area, and wondered if he would like to com
e out and teach a class or two a history of the Chinese revolution, perhaps foreign relations, League work, whatever he liked. Because of his association with Kung, among other things, he would be viewed by the students as a living piece of world history. 'A living fossil, you mean,' he snorted. Like that fish whose species was four hundred million years old, dragged up recently in a net off Madagascar. Old Dragonfish. He wrote back to his acquaintance and accepted the invitation, then wrote to Pyinkayaing and put in for a more extended leave of absence.

  4. The Red Egg

  The farm extension of the college, now a little college itself, was clustered at the west end of a town called Putatoi, west of the North Lung River, on the banks of Puta Creek, a lively brook pouring out of the coastal range and creating a riverine gallery of oaks and brush on an alluvial berm just a few hands higher than the rest of the valley. The valley otherwise was given over entirely to rice cultivation; the big rivers flowing into it out of the mountains on both sides had been diverted into an elaborate irrigation system, and the already flat valley floor had been shaved even flatter, into a stepwise system of broad flooded terraces, each terrace just a few fingers higher than the one below it. All the dikes in this system curved, as part of some kind of erosion resistance strategy, and so the landscape looked somewhat like Annam or Kampuchea, or anywhere in tropical Asia really, except that wherever the land was not flooded, it was shockingly dry. Straw coloured hills rose to the west, in the first of the coastal ranges between the valley and the bay; then to the east the grand snow topped peaks of the Gold Mountains stood like a distant Himalaya.