The Years of Rice and Salt

by Robinson, Kim Stanley

  She walked along the harbour and the river, no longer expecting anyone from Turi to show up and take her back to her father's house. Much of the vast city remained unknown to her, but she had her routes through certain districts, and sometimes rode a tram out to its end just to see what kind of neighbourhoods it went through. The ocean and river districts were her particular study, which of course gave her a lot to work on. Wan sunlight splintered through clouds galloping on the ocean onshore wind; she sat at cafes behind the docks, or across the sea road from the strands, reading and writing, and looked up to see whitecaps dashing themselves at the foot of the great lighthouse at the end of the jetty, or up the rocky coast to the north. Pale washed blues in the sky behind the tumbling clouds, the bruised blues of the ocean, the whites of cloud and broken wave; she loved the looks of these things, loved them with all her heart. Here she was free to be her whole self. It was worth all the rain to have the air washed so clean.

  In one rather shabby and stormbeaten beach district at the end of tram line number six, there was a little Buddhist temple, and one day outside it Budur saw the Hodenosaunee mother and daughter from Kirana's class. They saw her and came over. 'Hello,' the mother said. 'You have come to visit us!'

  'Actually 1 was just wandering around town,' Budur said, surprised. 'I like this neighbourhood.'

  'I see.' Said politely, as if she didn't believe ber. 'I am sorry to have

  presumed, but we are acquainted with your aunt Idelba, and so 1 thought you may have been coming here on her behalf. But you don't ‑ well ‑ but would you like to come in?'

  'Thank you.' Mystified, Budur followed them into the compound, which contained a courtyard garden of shrubs and gravel, arranged around a bell next to a pond. Nuns in dark red dresses walked through on their way somewhere inside. One sat to talk with the Hodenosaunee women, whose names were Hanea and Ganagweh, mother and daughter. They all spoke in Firanjic, with a strong Nsarene accent mixed with something else. Budur listened to them talk about repairs to the roof. Then they invited her to come with them into a room containing a big wireless; Hanea sat before a microphone, and had a conversation in her language that crossed the ocean.

  After that they joined a number of nuns in a meditation room, and sat chanting for a time. 'So, you are Buddhists?' Budur asked the Hodenosaunee women when the session was over, and they had gone back out into the garden.

  'Yes,' Hanea said. 'It's common among our people. We find it very similar to our old religion. And I think it must also have been true that we liked the way it put us in league with the Japanese from the west side of our country, who are like us in so many other ways. We needed their help against the people from your side.'

  'I see.'

  They stopped before a group of women and men who were sitting in a circle chipping away at sandstone blocks, making large flat bricks, it seemed, perfectly shaped and polished. Hanea pointed at them and explained: 'These are devotional stones, for the top of Chomolungma. Have you heard of this project?'

  'No.'

  'Well, you know, Chomolungma was the highest mountain in the world, but the top was destroyed by Muslim artillery during the Long War. So, now there is a project started, very slow of course, to replace the top of the mountain. Bricks like these are taken there, and then climbers who ascend Chomolungma carry one brick along with their lifegas canisters, and leave it on the summit for stonemasons to work into the new summit pyramid.'

  Budur stared at the dressed blocks of stone, smaller than several of

  the boulders decorating the courtyard garden. She was invited to pick one up, and did so; it was about as heavy as three or four books in her arms.

  'It will take a lot of these?'

  'Many thousands. It is a very long‑term project.' Hanea smiled. 'A hundred years, a thousand years? It depends on how many climbers there are who want to carry one up the mountain. A considerable mass of stone was blasted away. But a good idea, yes? A symbol of a more general restoration of the world.'

  They were preparing a meal in the kitchen, and invited Budur to join them, but she excused herself, saying she needed to catch the next tram back.

  'Of course,' said Hanea. 'Do give our greetings to your aunt. We look forward to meeting with her soon.'

  She didn't explain what she meant, and Budur was left to think it over as she walked down to the beach stop and waited for the tram into town, huddling in its little glass shelter against the stiff blast of the wind. Half‑asleep, she saw an image of a line of people, carrying a whole library of stone books to the top of the world.

  TEN

  'Come with me to the Orkneys,' Idelba said to her. 'I could use your help, and want to show you the ruins there.'

  'The Orkneys? Where are they again?'

  It turned out they were the northernmost of the Keltic Isles, above Scotland. Most of Britain was occupied by a population that had originated in al‑Andalus, the Maghrib and west Africa; then during the Long War the Hodenosaunee had built a big naval base in a bay surrounded by the main Orkney island, and they were still there, overseeing Firanja in effect, but also protecting by their presence some remnants of the original population, Kelts who had survived the influx of both Frank and Firanji, and of course the plague. Budur had read tales of these tall, pale­skinned, red‑haired, blue‑eyed survivors of the great plague.,

  and as she and Idelba sat at a window table in the gondola of their airship, watching England's green hills pass slowly underneath them, dappled by cloud shadow and cut into large squares by crops, hedgerows and grey stone walls, she wondered what it would be like to stand before a true Kelt ‑ whether she would be able to bear their mute accusatory gaze, stand without flinching before the sight of their albinoesque skin and eyes.

  But of course it was not like that at all. They landed to find the Orkney islands were more rolling grassy hills, with scarcely a tree to be seen, except clustered around whitewashed farmhouses with chimneys at both ends, a design ubiquitous and apparently ancient, as it was replicated in grey ruins in fields near the current versions. And the Orcadians were not the spavined freckled inbred halfwits Budur had been expecting from the tales of the white slaves of the Ottoman sultan, but burly shouting fishermen in oils, red‑faced and straw‑haired in some cases, black­or brown‑haired in others, shouting at each other like fisherfolk in any of the villages of the Nsarene coast. They were unselfconscious in their dealings with Firanjis, as if they were the normal ones and the Firanjis the exotics; which of course was true here. Clearly for them the Orkneys were all the world.

  And when Budur and Idelba drove out into the country in an motorcart to see the island's ruins, they began to see why; the world had been coming to the Orkneys for three thousand years or more. They had reason to feel they were at the centre of things, the crossroads. Every culture that had ever lived there, and there must have been ten of them through the centuries, had built using the island's stratified sandstone, which had been split by the waves into handy plates and beams and broad flat bricks, perfect for drywall, and even stronger if set in cement. The oldest inhabitants had also used the stones to build their bedframes and kitchen shelves, so that here, in a small patch of grass overlooking the western sea, it was possible to look down into stone houses that had had the sand filling them removed, and see the domestic arrangements of people who had lived over five thousand years before, it was said, their very tools and furniture just as they had been left. The sunken rooms looked to Budur just like her own rooms in the zawiyya. Nothing essential had changed in all that time.

  Idelba shook her head at the great ages claimed for the settlement,

  and the dating methods used, and wondered aloud about certain geochronologies she had in mind that might be pursued. But after a while she fell as silent as the rest, and stood staring down into the spare and beautiful interiors of the old ones' homes. These things of ours that endure.

  Back in the island's one town, Kirkwall, they walked through stonepaved streets to another litt
le Buddhist temple complex, set behind the locals' ancient cathedral, a tiny thing compared to the big skeletons left behind on the mainland, but roofed and complete. The temple behind it was very modest, a matter of four narrow buildings surrounding a rock garden, in a style Budur thought of as Chinese.

  Here Idelba was greeted by Hanea and Ganagweh. Budur was shocked to see them, and they laughed at the expression on her face. 'We told you we would be seeing you again soon, didn't we?'

  'Yes,' Budur said. 'But here?'

  'This is the biggest Hodenosaunee community in Firanja,' Hanea said. 'We came down to Nsara from here, actually. And we return here quite often.'

  After they were shown the complex and sat down in a room off the courtyard for tea, Idelba and Hanea slipped away, leaving a nonplussed Budur behind with Ganagweh.

  'Mother said they would need to talk for an hour or two,' Ganagweh told her. 'Do you know what they're talking about?'

  'No,' said Budur. 'Do you?'

  'No. 1 mean, 1 assume it has something to do with your aunt's efforts to create stronger diplomatic relations between our countries. But that's just stating the obvious.'

  'Yes,' Budur said, extemporizing. 'I know she's been interested in that. But meeting you in Kirana Fawwaz's class as 1 did . . .'

  'Yes. And then, the way you showed up at the monastery there. It seems we are fated to cross paths.' She was smiling in a way Budur couldn't interpret. 'Lets go for a walk; those two will talk for a long while. There's a lot to discuss, after all.'

  This was news to Budur, but she said nothing, and spent the day wandering Kirkwall with Ganagweh, a very high‑spirited girl, tall, quick, confident; the narrow streets and burly men of the Orkneys held no fears for her. Indeed at the end of the town tram line they walked far down a deserted strand overlooking the big bay that had once been

  such a busy naval base, and Ganagweh stopped at some boulders and stripped off her clothes and ran screaming out into the water, bursting back out in a flurry of whitewater, shrieking, her lustrous dark skin gleaming in the sun as she dried off with her fingers, flinging the water at Budur and daring her to take the plunge. 'It's good for you! It's not that cold, it will wake you up!'

  It was just the kind of thing Yasmina had always insisted they do, but shyly Budur declined, finding it hard to look at the big wet beauti‑ ful animal standing next to her in the sun; and when she walked down to touch the water, she was glad she had; it was freezing. She did feel as if she had woken up, aware of the brisk salt wind and Ganagweh's wet black hair swinging side to side like a dogs, spraying her. Ganagweh laughed at her and dressed while still damp. As they walked back, they passed a group of pale‑skinned children who regarded them curiously. 'Let's get back and see how the old women are doing,' Ganagweh said. 'Funny to see such grandmothers taking the fate of the world into their own hands, isn't it?'

  'Yes,' Budur said, wondering what in the world was going on.

  ELEVEN

  On the flight back to Nsara, Budur asked Idelba about it, but Idelba shook her head. She didn't want to talk about it, and was busy writing in her notebook. 'Later,' she said.

  Back in Nsara, Budur worked and studied. At Kirana's suggestion she

  read about southeast Asia, and learned how the Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic cultures had mixed there to make a vibrant new offspring, which

  had survived the war and was now using the great botanical and mineral riches of Burma and the Malay peninsula, and Sumatra and Java and Borneo and Mindanao, to create a group of peoples united against China's centripetal power, freeing itself from Chinese influence. They

  had spread into Aozhou, the big burnt island continent south of them, and even across the oceans to Inka, and in the other direction to Madagascar and south Africa: it was a kind of emerging southern world

  culture, with the huge cities of Pyinkayaing, Jakarta and Kwinana on the west coast of Aozhou leading the way, trading with Travancore, and building like maniacs, erecting cities that included many steel skyscrapers more than a hundred floors tall. The war had damaged but not destroyed these cities, and now the governments of the world met in Pyinkayaing whenever they tried to work out some more durable and just postwar dispensation.

  There were more meetings all the time, as the situation became more and more deranged; anything to keep war from returning, as so very little had been resolved by it. Or so the members of the defeated alliance felt. It was unclear at this point if the Chinese and their allies, or the countries of Yingzhou, who had entered the conflict so much later than the rest, had any interest in accommodating Islamic concerns. Kirana remarked casually in class one day that it was very possible Islam was in the rubbish heap of history without yet knowing it; and the more Budur read of her books, the less sure she could be that this was necessarily a bad thing for the world. Old religions died; and if an empire tried to conquer the world and failed, it generally then disappeared.

  Kirana's own writing made that very clear. Budur took out her books from the monastery library, some published nearly twenty years before, during the war itself when Kirana had to have been quite young, and she read them with close interest, hearing Kirana's voice in her head for every sentence; it was just like a transcript of her talking, except even more long‑winded. She had written on many subjects, both theoretical and practical. Whole books of her African writings were concerned with various public health and women's issues. Budur opened one of these randomly, and found herself reading a lecture that had been given to midwives in the Sudan:

  If the parents of the girl insist, if they cannot be talked out of it, it is extremely important that only one third of the clitoris should be cut off, and two thirds left intact. Someone who practically attacks a girl with a knife, cutting off everything, this goes against the words of the Prophet. Men and women are meant to be equal before God. But if a woman's entire clitoris is cut off it leaves ber a kind of eunuch, she becomes cold, lazy, without desire, without interest, humourless, like a mud wall, a piece of cardboard, without spark, without goals, without desire, like a

  puddle of standing water, lifeless, ber children are unhappy, her husband is unhappy, she makes nothing of her life. Those of you who must perform circumcisions, therefore remember: cut off one third, leave two thirds! Cut off one third, leave two thirds!

  Budur flipped the pages of the book, disturbed. After a while she collected herself, and read the new page that presented itself:

  1 was privileged to witness the return of Raiza Tarami from her trip to the New World, where she had attended the conference at Yingzhou's Long island on women's issues, just after the end of the war. Conference members who came from throughout the world were greatly surprised to see this Nsarene woman exhibiting a full awareness of all the issues that mattered. They had been expecting a backward woman living behind the walls of the harem, ignorant and veiled. But Raiza was not like that, she stood on the same footing as her sisters from China, Burma, Yingzhou and Travancore, indeed she had been forced by conditions at home to explore theoretically far in advance of most.

  So she represented us well, and when she returned to Firanja, she had come to believe that the veil was the biggest obstacle in the way of the progress of the Muslim woman, as standing for general complicity in the whole system. The veil had to fall if the reactionary system were to fall. And so, upon her arrival on the docks of Nsara, she met her companions from the women's institute, and she stood before them with her face unveiled. Her immediate companions had removed their veils as well. Around us the signs of disapproval became apparent in the crowd, shouting and jostling and the like. Then women in the crowd began to support the unveiled, by removing the veils from their own faces and throwing them to the ground. it was a beautiful moment. After that the veil started to disappear in Nsara with great speed. In just a few years unveiling had spread throughout the country, and that brick in the wall of the reactionaries had been removed. Nsara became known as the leader of Firanja because of this action. This 1 was lucky e
nough to witness with my own eyes.

  Budur took a breath, marking the passage as something she would read to her blind soldiers. And as the weeks passed she read on, working

  her way through several volumes of Kirana's essays and lectures, an exhausting experience, for Kirana never hesitated to attack head‑on and at length everything that she disliked. And yet how she had lived! Budur found herself ashamed of her cloistered childhood and youth, the fact that she was twenty‑three, now almost twenty‑four, and had not yet done anything; by the time Kirana Fawwaz was that age she had already spent years in Africa, fighting in the war and working in hospitals. There was so much lost time to be made up!

  Budur also read in many books Kirana had not assigned, concen‑ trating for a while on the Sino‑Muslim cultures that had existed in central Asia, how they had attempted for a number of centuries to reconcile the two cultures: the books' bad old photographs showed these people, Chinese in appearance, Muslim in belief, Chinese in language, Muslim in law; it was hard to imagine such a mongrel people had ever existed. The Chinese had killed the greater part of them in the war, and dispersed the rest across the Dahai to the deserts and jungles of Yingzhou and Inka, where they worked in mines and on plantations, in effect slaves, though the Chinese claimed no longer to practise slavery, calling it a Muslim atavism. Whatever they called it, the Muslims in their northwest provinces were gone. And it could happen everywhere.