The Years of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  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 her 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 naïve.” 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.

  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.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Darkness. Silence. Then a voice in the void: Kirana? Are you there? Kuo? K
yu? 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!

  As if one could refuse.

  Oh come on. You wouldn’t even if you could. You’re always the one leading the way down there, you’re always up for a fight.

  . . . I’m tired. I don’t know how you persist the way you do. You tire me too. All that hope in the face or calamity. Sometimes I think you should be more marked by it. Sometimes I think I have to take it all on myself.

  Come on. You’ll be your old self once things get going again. Idelba, Piali, Madam Sururi, are you ready?

  We’re ready.

  Kirana?

  . . . All right then. One more turn.

  BOOK TEN

  The First Years

  ONE

  Always China

  Bao Xinhua was fourteen years old when he first met Kung Jianguo, in his work unit near the southern edge of Beijing, just outside the Dahongmen, the Big Red Gate. Kung was only a few years older, but he was already head of the revolutionary cell in his work unit next door, quite an accomplishment given that he had been one of the sanwu, the “three withouts” — without family, without work unit, without identity card — when he turned up as a boy at the gate of the police station of the Zhejiang district, just outside the Dahongmen. The police had placed him in his current work unit, but he always remained an outsider there, often called “an individualist”, which is a very deep criticism in China even now, when so much has changed. “He persisted in his own ways, no matter what others said.” “He clung obstinately to his own course.” “He was so lonely he didn’t even have a shadow.” This is what they said about him in his work unit, and so naturally he looked outside the unit to the neighbourhood and the city at large, and was a street boy for no one knew how long, not even him. And he was good at it. Then at a young age he became a firebrand in Beijing underground politics, and it was in this capacity that he visited Bao Xinhua’s work unit.

  “The work unit is the modern equivalent of the Chinese clan compound,” he said to those of them who gathered to listen. “It is a spiritual and social unit as much as an economic one, trying its best to continue the old ways in the new world. No one really wants to change it, because everyone wants to have a place to come to when they die. Everyone needs a place. But these big walled factories are not like the old family compounds that they imitate. They are prisons, first built to organize our labour for the Long War. Now the Long War has been over for forty years and yet we slave all our lives for it still, as if we worked for China, when really it is only for corrupt military governors. Not even for the Emperor, who disappeared long ago, but for the generals and warlords, who hope we will work and work and never notice how the world has changed.

  “We say, “we are of one work unit” as if we were saying, “we are of the same family”, or “we are brother and sister”, and this is good. But we never see over the wall of our unit, to the world at large.”

  Many in his audience nodded. Their work unit was a poor one, made up mostly of immigrants from the south, and they often went hungry. The postwar years in Beijing had seen a lot of changes, and now in the Year 29, as the revolutionaries liked to call it, in conformity with the practice of scientific organizations, things were beginning to fall apart. The Qing dynasty had been overthrown in the middle years of the war, when things had gone so badly; the Emperor himself, aged six or seven at the time, had disappeared, and now most assumed he was dead. The Fifth Assemblage of Military Talent was still in control of the Confucian bureaucracy, its hand still on the wheel of their destiny; but it was a senile old hand, the dead hand of the past, and all over China revolts were breaking out. They were of all sorts: some in the service of foreign ideologies, but most internal insurgencies, organized by Han Chinese hoping to rid themselves once and for all of the Qing and the generals and warlords. Thus the White Lotus, the Monkey Insurgents, the Shanghai Revolutionary Movement and so on. joining these were regional revolts by the various nationalities and ethnic groups in the west and south — the Tibetans, Mongolians, Xinzing and so on, all intent on freeing themselves from the heavy hand of Beijing. There was no question that despite the big army that Beijing could in theory bring to bear, an army still much admired and honoured by the populace for its sacrifices in the Long War, the military command itself was in trouble, and soon to fall. The Great Enterprise had returned again to China: dynastic succession; and the question was, who was going to succeed? And could anyone succeed in bringing China back together again?

  Kung spoke to Bao’s work unit in favour of the League of All Peoples’ School of Revolutionary Change, which had been founded during the last years of the Long War by Zhu Tuanjie-kexue (“Unite for Science”), a half-Japanese whose birth-name had been Isao. Zhu Isao, as he was usually called, had been a Chinese governor of one of the Japanese provinces before their revolution, and when that revolution came he had negotiated a settlement with the Japanese independence forces. He had ordered the Chinese army occupying Kyushu back to China without loss of life on either side, landing with them in Manchuria and declaring the port city of Tangshan to be an international city of peace, right there in the homeland of the Qing rulers, and in the midst of the Long War. The official Beijing position was that Zhu was a Japanese and a traitor, and that when the appropriate time came his insurgency would be crushed by the Chinese armies he had betrayed. As it turned out, when the war ended and the postwar years marched by in their dreary hungry round, the city of Tangshan was never conquered; on the contrary, similar revolts occurred in many other Chinese cities, particularly the big ports on the coast, all the way down to Canton, and Zhu Isao published an unending stream of theoretical materials defending his movement’s actions, and explaining the novel organization of the city of Tangshan, which was run as a communal enterprise belonging equally to all the people who lived within its embattled borders.

  Kung talked about these matters with Bao’s work unit, describing Zhu’s theory of communal creation of value, and what it meant for ordinary Chinese, who had for so long had the fruits of their labour stolen from them. “Zhu looked at what really happens, and described our economy, politics, and methods of power and accumulation in scientific detail. After that he proposed a new organization of society, which took this knowledge of how things work and applied it to serve all the people in a community and in all China, or any other country.”

  During a break for a meal, Kung paused to speak to Bao, and asked his name. Bao’s given name was Xinhua, “New China”; Kung’s was Jianguo, “Construct the Nation” — they knew therefore that they were children of the Fifth Assemblage, who had encouraged patriotic naming to counteract their own moral bankruptcy and the superhum
an sacrifices of the people during the postwar famines. Everyone born around twenty years before had names like “Oppose Islam” (Huidi) or “Do Battle” (Zhandou) even though at that point the war had been over for twenty years. Girls’ names had suffered especially during this fad, as parents attempted to keep some traditional elements of female names incorporated into the whipped-up patriotric fervour, so that there were girls their age named “Fragrant Soldier” or “Graceful Army” or “Public Fragrance” or “Nation-loving Orchid” and the like.

  Kung and Bao laughed together over some of these examples, and spoke of Bao’s parents, and Kung’s lack of parents, and Kung fixed Bao with his gaze, and said, “Yet Bao itself is a very important word or concept, you know. Repayment, retribution, honouring parents and ancestors — holding, and holding on. It’s a good name.”

  Bao nodded, captured already by the attention of this dark-eyed person, so intense and cheerful, so interested in things. There was something about him that drew Bao, drew him so strongly that it seemed to Bao that this meeting was a matter of yuanfen, a “predestined relation”, a thing always meant to be, part of his yuan or fate. Saving him perhaps from a nieyuan, a “bad fate”, for his work unit struck him as small-minded, oppressive, stultifying, a kind of death to the soul, a prison from which he could not escape, in which he was already entombed. Whereas he already felt as if he had known Kung for ever.

  So he followed Kung around Beijing like a younger brother, and because of him became a sort of truant from his work unit, or in other words, a revolutionary. Kung took him to meetings of the revolutionary cells he was part of, and gave him books and pamphlets of Zhu Isao’s to read; took charge of his education, in effect, as he had for so many others; and there was nothing Bao’s parents or his work unit could do about it. He had a new work unit now, spread out across Beijing and China and all the world — the work unit of those who were going to make things right.