The Year of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Putatoi was tucked into a nest of trees in this broad expanse of green and gold. It was a village in the Japanese style, with shops and apartments clustered by the stream, and small groupings of cottages ringing the town centre north of the stream. After Pyinkayaing it seemed tiny, dowdy, sleepy, green, dull. Bao liked it.

  The students at the college mainly came from farms in the valley, and they were mostly studying to be rice farmers or orchard managers.

  Their questions in the Chinese history class that Bao taught were amazingly ignorant, but they were fresh faced and cheerful youths; they didn't care in the slightest who Bao was, or what he had done in the postwar period so long ago. He liked that too.

  His little seminar of older students, who were studying history specif ically, were more intrigued by his presence among them. They asked him about Zhu Isao, of course, and even about Kung Jianguo, and about the Chinese revolution. Bao answered as if it were a period of history that he had studied extensively, and perhaps written a book or two about. He did not offer them personal reminiscences, and most of the time felt that he had none to offer. They watched him very closely as he spoke.

  'What you have to understand,' he told them, 'is that no one won the Long War. Everyone lost, and we have not recovered from it even yet.

  'Remember what you have been taught about it. It lasted sixty seven years, two-thirds of a century, and it's estimated now that almost a billion people died in it. Think of it this way; I've been talking to a biologist here who works on population issues, and he has tried to estimate how many humans have lived in all of history, from the start of the species until now.'

  Some in the class laughed at such an idea.

  'You haven't beard of this? He estimates that there have been about forty billion humans to have lived since the species came into being although of course that was no determinate moment, so this is just a game we play. But it means that if there have been forty billion humans in all history, then one in forty of all the people ever to have lived, were killed in the Long War. That's a big percentage!

  'So. The whole world fell into disarray, and now we've lived in the war's shadow for so long we don't know what full sunlight would look like. Science keeps making advances, but many of them rebound on us. The natural world is being poisoned by our great numbers and our crude industries. And if we quarrel again, all could be lost. You are probably aware, certainly most governments are, that science could provide us very quickly with extremely powerful bombs, they say one bomb per city, and so that threat hangs over us too. If any country tries for such a bomb, all may follow.

  'So, all these dangers inspired the creation of the League of All Peoples, in the hope of making a global system that could cope with our global problems. That came on the heels of the Year One effort, standardized measurements, and all the rest, to form what has been called the scientizing of the world, or the modernization, or the Hodenosaunee programme, among other names for it. Our time, in effect.'

  'In Islam they don't like all that,' one student pointed out.

  'Yes, this has been a problem for them, how to reconcile their beliefs with the scientizing movement. But we have seen changes in Nsara spread through most of Firanja, and what a united Firanja implies is that they have agreed there is more than one way to be a good Muslim. If your Islam is a form of sufism that is Buddhist in all but name, and you say it is all right, then it is hard to condemn the Buddhists in the next valley. And this is happening in many places. All the strands are beginning to weave together, you see. We have had to do it to survive.'

  At the end of that first set of classes, the history teachers invited Bao to stay on and do it on a regular basis; and after some thought, he accepted their invitation. He liked these people, and the work that came from them. The bulk of the college's efforts had to do with growing more food, with fitting people into the natural systems of the earth less clum sily. History was part of this, and the history teachers were friendly. Also a single woman his age, a lecturer in linguistics, had been particularly friendly through the time of his stay. They had eaten quite a few meals together, and got into the habit of meeting for lunch. Her name was Gao Qirignian.

  Bao moved into the small group of cottages where Gao lived, renting one next to hers that had come open at just the right time. The cottages were Japanese in style, with thin walls and big windows, all clustered around a common garden. It was a nice little neighbourhood.

  In the mornings Bao started to hoe and plant vegetables in one corner of that central garden. Through a gap between the cottages he could see the great valley oaks in their streamside gallery; beyond them the green rice paddies, and the isolated peak of Mount Miwok, over a hundred li away, south of the great delta. To the cast and north, more rice paddies, curving green on green. The coastal range lay to the west, the Cold Mountains to the east. He rode an old bicycle to the college for classes, and taught his smaller seminars at a set of picnic tables by the side of the stream, under a stand of enormous valley oaks. Every once in a while he would rent a little airboat from the airport just west of town, and pilot it down the delta to Fangzhang, to visit Anzi and her family. Though Bao and Anzi remained stiff and fractious with each other, the repetition of these visits eventually made them seem normal, a pleasant ritual in most respects. They did not seem connected to his memories of the past, but an event of their own. Well, Bao would say to Gao, I'm going to go down to Fangzhang and bicker with my daughter.

  Have fun, Gao would say.

  Mainly he stayed in Putatoi, and taught classes. He liked the young people and their fresh faces. He liked the people who lived in the cluster of cottages around the garden. They worked in agriculture, mostly, either in the college's agronomy labs and experimental fields, or out in the paddies and orchards themselves. That was what people did in this valley. The neighbours all gave him advice on how best to cultivate his little garden, and very often it was conflicting advice, which was no very reassuring thing given that they were among the world's experts on the topic, and that there might be more people than there was food in the world to feed them. But that too was a lesson, and though it worried him, it also made him laugh. And he liked the labour, the sitting in the earth, weeding and looking at vegetables grow. Staring across rice terraces at Mount Miwok. He babysat for some of the younger couples in the cottages, and talked with them about the events of the town, and spent the evenings out lawn bowling with a group who liked to do that.

  Before long the routines of this life became as if they were the only ones he had ever known. One morning, babysitting for a little girl who had caught the chicken pox, sitting by her as she lay thoughtlessly in a lukewarm oatmeal bath, stoically flicking the water with her finger and occasionally moaning like a small animal, he felt a sudden gust of happiness sweep through him, simply because he was the old widower of the neighbourhood, and people used him as a babysitter. Old Dragonfish. There had been just such a man back in Beijing, living in a hole in the wall by the Big Red Gate, repairing shoes and watching the children in the street.

  The deep sense of solitude that had afflicted Bao since Pan's death began to slip away. Although the people he lived among now were not Kung, nor Pan, nor Zhu Isao – not the companions of his fate just people he had fallen in with by accident – nevertheless, they were now his community. Maybe this was the way it had always happened, with no fate ever involved; you simply fell in with the people around you, and no matter what else happened in history or the great world, for the individual it was always a matter of local acquaintances – the village, the platoon, the work unit, the monastery or madressa, the zawiyya or farm or apartment block, or ship, or neighbourhood – these formed the true circumference of one's world, some twenty or so speaking parts, as if they were in a play together. And no doubt each cast included the same character types, as in Noh drama or a puppet play. And so now he was the old widower, the babysitter, the broken down old bureaucrat poet, drinking wine by the stream and singing nostalgically at the moon
, scratching with a hoe in his unproductive garden. It made him smile; it gave him pleasure. He liked having neighbours, and he liked his role among them.

  Time passed. He continued to teach a few classes, arranging for his seminars to meet out under the valley oaks.

  'History!' he would say to them. 'It's a hard thing to get at. There is no easy way to imagine it. The Earth rolls around the sun, three hundred and sixty five and a quarter days a year, for year after year. Thousands of these years have passed. Meanwhile a kind of monkey kept on doing more things, increasing in number, taking over the planet by means of meanings. Eventually much of the matter and life on the planet was entrained to their use, and then they had to work out what they wanted to do, beyond merely staying alive. Then they told each other stories of how they had got where they were, what had happened, and what it meant.'

  Bao sighed. His students watched him.

  'The way Zhu told the story, it is a matter of tragedy for the individual, comedy for the society. Over the long pulses of historical time, reconciliations can be achieved, that's the comedy; but every individual meets a tragic end. We have to admit here that no matter what else we say, for the individual death is always an end and a catastrophe.'

  His students regarded him steadily, perfectly willing to admit this, for they were all about twenty five years old, while he was near seventy, and so they felt immortal. This was perhaps the evolutionary usefulness of the elderly, Bao had concluded: to give the young some kind of psychic shield from reality, putting them under a description which allowed them to ignore the fact that age and death would come to them too, and could come early and out of sequence. A very useful function! And it gave the old some amusement as well, as well as an extra pinch from their own mortality to remind them to appreciate life.

  So he smiled at their unfounded equanimity, and said, 'But all right, we admit that catastrophe, and the people who live go on. Go on! They knit things together as best they can. So, what Zhu Isao used to say, what my old comrade Kung Jianguo used to say, was that each time a generation pulls itself together, and revolts against the established order of things in an attempt to make them more just, it is doomed to fail in some respects; but it succeeds in others; and in any case it gives something to posterity, even if it be only knowledge of how hard things are. Which makes it retroactively a kind of success. And so people go on.'

  A young Aozhani woman, come here like so many others did from all around the world, to study agriculture with the old adepts at the college, said, 'But since we are all reincarnated anyway, is death really such a catastrophe?'

  Bao felt himself take a long breath. Like most scientifically educated people, he did not believe in reincarnation. It was clearly just a story, something out of the old religions. But still how to account for his feeling of cosmic solitude, the feeling that he had lost his eternal companions? How to account for that experience at the Gold Gate, holding his granddaughter aloft?

  He thought about it for so long that the students began to look at each other. Then he said carefully to the young woman, 'Well, let us try something. Think that there might be no bardo. No heavens or hells, no afterlife at all. No continuation of your consciousness, or even your soul. Imagine all you are is an expression of your body, and when it finally succumbs to some disorder and dies, you are gone for good. Gone utterly.'

  The girl and the others stared at him.

  He nodded. 'Then indeed you have to think again what reincarnation might mean. For we need it. We all need it. And there might be some, way to reconceptualize it so it still has meaning, even if you admit that the death of the self is real.'

  'But how?' the young woman said.

  'Well, first, of course, there are the children. We are literally reincarnated in new beings, though they are the mix of two previous beings – two beings who will live on in the twistingladders that detach and recombine, passed on to subsequent generations.'

  'But that's not our consciousness.'

  'No. But consciousness gets reincarnated another way, when the people of the future remember us, and use our language, and unconsciously model their lives on ours, living out some recombination of our values and habits. We live on in the way future people think and talk. Even if things change so much that only the biological habits are the same, they are real for all that – perhaps more real than consciousness, more rooted in reality. Remember, reincarnation means return to a new body.'

  'Some of our atoms may do that literally,' one young man offered.

  'Indeed. In the endlessness of eternity, the atoms that were part of our bodies for a time will move on, and be incorporated in other life on this earth, and perhaps on other planets in subsequent galaxies. SO we are diffusely reincarnate through the universe.'

  'But that's not our consciousness,' the young woman said stubbornly.

  'Not consciousness, nor the self. The ego, the string of thoughts, the flow of consciousness, which no text or image has ever managed to convey – no.'

  'But I don't want that to end,' she said.

  'No. And yet it does. This is the reality we were born into. We can't change it by desire.'

  The young man said, 'The Buddha says we should give up our desires.'

  'But that too is a desire!' the young woman exclaimed.

  'So we never really give it up,' Bao agreed. 'What the Buddha was suggesting is impossible. Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire, bacteria feel desire. Life is wanting.'

  The young students thought it over. There is an age, Bao thought, remembering, there is that time in your life, when you are young and everything seems possible, and you want it all; you are simply bursting with desire. You make love all night because you want things so much.

  He said, 'Another way of rescuing the concept of reincarnation is simply to think of the species as the organism. The organism survives, and has a collective consciousness of itself – that's history, or language, or the twistingladder structuring our brains and it doesn't really matter what happens to any one cell of this body. In fact their deaths are neces sary for the body to stay healthy and go on, it's a matter of making room for new cells. And if we think of it that way, then it might increase feelings of solidarity and obligation to others. It makes it clearer that if there is part of the body that is suffering, and if at the same time another part commandeers the mouth and laughs and proclaims that everything is really fine, dancing a jig like the lost Christians as their flesh fell off – then we understand more clearly that this creature species or speciescreature is insane, and cannot face its own sickness unto death. Seen in that sense, more people might understand that the organism must try to keep itself healthy throughout its whole body.'

  The young woman was shaking her head. 'But that's not reincarnation either. That's not what it means.'

  Bao shrugged, gave up. 'I know. I know what you mean, I think; it seems there should be something that endures of us. And I myself have sometimes felt things. Once, down at Gold Gate…' He shook his head. 'But there is no way to know. Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it's the story itself that is the reincarnation.'

  Over time Bao came to understand that teaching too was a kind of reincarnation, in that years passed, and students came and went, new young people all the time, but always the same age, taking the same class; the class under the oak trees, reincarnated. He began to enjoy that aspect of it. He would start the first class by saying, 'Look, here we are again.' They never knew what to make of it; same response, every time.

  He learned, among other things, that teaching was the most rigorous form of learning. He learned to learn more from his students than they did from him; like so many other things, it was the reverse of what it seemed to be, and colleges existed to bring together groups of young people to teach some chosen few of their elders the things that they knew about life, that the old teachers had been in danger of forgetting. So Bao loved his students, and studied them assiduously. Most of them, he found, beli
eved in reincarnation; it was what they had been taught at home, even when they hadn't been given explicit religious instruction. It was part of the culture, an idea that kept coming back. So they brought it up, and he talked about it with them, in a conversation reincarnated many times. Over time the students added to his growing internal list of ways reincarnation was true: that you might really come back as another life; that the various periods of one's life were karmic reincarnations; that every morning you reawakened to consciousness newly, and thus are reincarnated every day to a new life.

  Bao liked all of these. The last one he tried to live in his daily existence, paying attention to his morning garden as if he had never seen it before, marvelling at the strangeness and beauty of it. In his classes he tried to talk about history newly, thinking things through yet again, not allowing himself to say anything that he had ever said before; this was hard, but interesting. One day in one of the ordinary classrooms (it was winter, and raining), he said, 'What's hardest to catch is daily life. This is what I think rarely gets written down, or even remembered by those who did it – what you did on the days when you did the ordinary things, how it felt doing it, the small variations time and again, until years have passed. A matter of repetitions, or almost repetitions. Nothing, in other words, that could be easily encoded into the usual forms of emplotment, not dharma or chaos, or even tragedy or comedy. just… habit.'

  One intense young man with thick black eyebrows replied, as if contradicting him, 'Everything happens only once!'

  And that too he had to remember. There was no doubt at all that it was true. Everything happens only once!

  And so, eventually, one particular day came: first day of spring, Day One of Year 87, a festival day, first morning of this life, first year of this world; and Bao got up early with Gao and went out with some others, to hide coloured eggs and wrapped sweets in the grass of the lawn and meadow, and on the streambank. This was the ritual in their ring of cottages; every New Year's Day the adults would go out and hide eggs that had been coloured the day before, and sweets wrapped in vibrantly coloured metallic wrapping, and at the appointed hour of the morning all the children of the neighbourhood would be unleashed on their hum baskets in hand, the older ones racing forwards pouncing on finds to pile in their baskets, the youngest ones staggering dreamily from one great discovery to the next. Bao had learned to love this morning, especially that last walk downstream to the meeting point, after all the eggs and sweets had been hidden: he strolled through the high wet grass with his spectacles taken off, sometimes, so that the real flowers and their pure colours were mixed in with the artificial colours of the eggs and the sweet wrappers, and the meadow and streambank became like a painting or a dream, a hallucinated meadow and streambank, with more colours, and stranger colours, than any nature had ever made on her own, all dotting the omnipresent and surging vivid green.