The Years of Rice and Salt

by Robinson, Kim Stanley

  A creature like a monkey approached him and raised a hand: 'Judg‑ ment,' it said in a deep voice.

  Bold's prayer sounded in his mind, and Kyu realized that Bold and this monkey were related somehow. 'Remember, whatever you suffer now is the result of your own karma,' Bold was saying. 'It's yours and no one else's. Pray for mercy. A little white god and a little black demon will appear, and count out the white and black pebbles of your good and evil deeds.'

  Indeed it was so. The white imp was pale as an egg, the black imp like onyx; and they were hoeing great piles of white and black stones into heaps, which to Kyu's surprise appeared about equal in size. He could not remember doing any good deeds.

  'You will be frightened, awed, terrified.'

  1 will not! These prayers were for a different kind of dead, for people like Bold.

  'You will attempt to tell lies, saying 1 have not committed any evil deed.'

  1 will not say any such ridiculous thing.

  Then the Lord of Death, up on its throne, suddenly took notice of Kyu, and despite himself Kyu flinched.

  'Bring the mirror of karma,' the god said, grinning horribly. Its eyes were burning coals.

  'Don't be frightened,' Bold's voice said inside him. 'Don't tell any lies, don't be terrified, don't fear the Lord of Death. The body you're in now is only a mental body. You can't die in the bardo, even if they hack you to pieces.'

  Thanks, Kyu thought uneasily. That is such a comfort.

  'Now comes the moment of judgment. Hold fast, think good thoughts; remember, all these events are your own hallucinations, and what life comes next depends on your thoughts now. In a single moment of time a great difference is created. Don't be distracted when the six lights appear. Regard them all with compassion. Face the Lord of Death without fear.'

  The black god held a mirror up with such practised accuracy that Kyu saw in the glass his own face, dark as the god's. He saw that the face is the naked soul itself, always, and that his was as dark and dire as the Lord of Death's. This was the moment of truth! And he had to concentrate on it, as Bold kept reminding him. And yet all the while the whole antic festival shouted and shrieked and clanged around him, every possible punishment or reward given out at once, and he couldn't help it, he was annoyed.

  'Why is black evil and white good?' he demanded of the Lord of Death. 'I never saw it that way. If this is all my own thinking, then why is that so? Why is my Lord of Death not a big Arab slave trader, as it would be in my own village? Why are your agents not lions and leopards?'

  But the Lord of Death was an Arab slave trader, he saw now, an Arab intaglioed in miniature in the surface of the god's black forehead, looking out at Kyu and waving. The one who had captured him and taken him to the coast. And among the shrieks of the rendered there were lions and leopards, hungrily gnawing the intestines of living victims.

  All just my thoughts, Kyu reminded himself, feeling fear rise in his throat. This realm was like the dream world, but more solid; more solid even than the waking world of his just‑completed life; everything trebly

  stuffed with itself, so that the leaves on the round ornamental bushes (in ceramic pots!) hung like jade leaves, while the jade throne of the god pulsed with a solidity far beyond that of stone. Of all the worlds the bardo was the one of the utmost reality.

  The white Arab face in the black forehead laughed and squeaked, 'Condemned!' and the huge black face of the Lord of Death roared, 'Condemned to hell!' It threw a rope around Kyu's neck and dragged him off the dais. It cut off Kyu's head, tore out his heart, pulled out his entrails, drank his blood, gnawed his bones; yet Kyu did not die. Body hacked to pieces, yet it revived. And it all began again. Intense pain throughout. Tortured by reality. Life is a thing of extreme reality; death also.

  ideas are planted in the mind of the child like seeds, and may grow to dominate the life completely.

  The plea: 1 have done no evil.

  Agony disassembled into anguish, regret, remorse; nausea at his past lives and how little they had gained him. In this terrible hour he sensed them all without actually being able to remember them. But they had happened. Oh, to get off the endless wheel of fire and tears. The sorrow and grief he felt then was worse than the pain of dismemberment. The solidity of the bardo fell apart, and he was bombarded by light exploding in his thoughts, through which the palace of judgment could only be seen as a kind of veil, or a painting on the air.

  But there was Bold up there, being judged in his turn. Bold, a cowering monkey, the only person after Kyu's capture who had meant anything at all to him. Kyu wanted to cry out to him for help, but stifled the thought, as he did not want to distract his friend at the very moment, of all the infinity of moments, when he needed not to be distracted. Nevertheless something must have escaped from Kyu, some groan of the mind, some anguished thought or cry for help; for a gang of furious four‑armed demons dragged Kyu down and away, out of sight of Bold's judgment.

  Then he was indeed in hell, and pain the least of his burdens, as superficial as mosquito bites, compared to the deep, oceanic ache of his loss. The anguish of solitude! Coloured explosions, tangerine, lime, quicksilver, each shade more acid than the last, burned his consciousness with an anguish ever deeper. I'm wandering in the bardo, rescue me, rescue me!

  And then Bold was there with him.

  They stood in their old bodies, looking at each other. The lights grew clearer, less painful to the eyes; a single ray of hope pierced the depth of Kyu's despair, like a lone paper lantern seen across West Lake. You found me, Kyu said.

  Yes.

  It's a miracle you could find me here.

  No. We always meet in the bardo. We will cross paths for as long as the six worlds turn in this cycle of the cosmos. We are part of a karmic jati.

  What's that?

  jati, subcaste, family, village. It manifests differently. We all came into the cosmos together. New souls are born out of the void, but infrequently, especially at this point in the cycle, for we are in the Kali‑yuga, the Age of Destruction. When new souls do appear it happens like a dandelion pod, souls like seeds, floating away on the dharma wind. We are all seeds of what we could be. But the new seeds float together and never separate by much, that's my point. We have gone through many lives together already. Our jati has been particularly tight since the avalanche. That fate bound us together. We rise or fall together.

  But 1 don't remember any other lives. And 1 don't remember anyone from this past life but you. 1 only recognize you! Where are the rest of them?

  You didn't recognize me either. We found you. You have been falling away from the jati for many reincarnations now, down and down into yourself alone, in lower and lower lokas. There are six lokas; they are t e orlds, the realms of rebirth and illusion. Heaven, the world of the devas; then the world of the asuras, those giants full of dissension; then the human world; then the animal world; then the world of pretas, or hungry ghosts; then hell. We move between them as our karma changes, life by life.

  How many of us are there in this jati?

  1 don't know. A dozen perhaps, or half a dozen. The group blurs at the boundaries. Some go away and don't come back until much later. We were a village, that time in Tibet. But there were visitors, traders. Fewer every time. People get lost, or fall away. As you have been doing. When the despair strikes.

  At the mere sound of the word it washed through Kyu: Despair. Bold's figure grew transparent.

  Bold, help me! What do 1 do?

  Think good thoughts. Listen, Kyu, listen ‑ as we think, so we are. Both here and hereafter, in all the worlds. For thoughts are things, the parents of all actions, good and bad alike. And as the sowing has been, so the harvest will be.

  I'll think good thoughts, or try, but what should 1 do? What should 1 look for?

  The lights will lead you. Each world has its own colour. White light from the devas, green from the asuras, yellow from the human, blue from the beasts, red from ghosts, smoke‑coloured from hell. Your body will
appear the colour of the world you are to return to.

  But we're yellow! Kyu said, looking at his hand. And Bold was as yellow as a flower.

  That means we must try again. We try and try again, life after life, until we achieve Buddha‑wisdom, and are released at last. Or some then choose to return to the human world, to help others along their way to release. Those are called bodhisattvas. You could be one of those, Kyu. 1 can see it inside you. Listen to me now. Soon you'll run for it. Things will chase you, and you'll hide. In a house, a cave, a jungle, a lotus blossom. These are all wombs. You'll want to stay in your hiding place, to escape the terrors of the bardo. That way lies preta, and you will become a ghost. You must emerge again to have any hope. Choose your womb door without any feelings of attraction or repulsion. Looks can be deceiving. Go as you see fit. Follow the heart. Try helping other spirits first, as if you were a bodhisattva already.

  1 don't know how!

  Learn. Pay attention and learn. You must follow, or lose the jati for good.

  Then they were attacked by huge male lions, manes already matted with blood, roaring angrily. Bold took off in one direction and Kyu in another. Kyu ran and ran, the lion on his heels. He dodged through two trees and onto a path. The lion ran on and lost him.

  To the east he saw a lake, adorned with black and white swans. To the west, a lake with horses standing in it; to the south, a scattering of pagodas; to the north a lake with a castle in it. He moved south towards

  the pagodas, feeling vaguely that this would have been Bold's choice; feeling also that Bold and the rest of his jati were already there, in one of the temples waiting for him.

  He reached the pagodas. He wandered from one building to the next, looking in doorways, shocked by visions of crowds in disarray, fighting or fleeing from hyena‑headed guards and wardens; a hell of a village, each possible future catastrophic, terrifying. Death's home town.

  A long time passed in this horrible search, and then he was looking through the gates of a temple at his jati, his cohort, Bold and all the rest of them, Shen, I‑Ii Dem his mother, Zheng He, Psin, all of them immediately known to him ‑ oh, he thought, of course. They were naked and bloodied, but putting on the gear of war nevertheless. Then hyenas howled, and Kyu fled through the raw yellow light of morning, through trees into the protection of elephant grass. The hyenas prowled between the huge tufts of grass, and he pressed through the knife edges of one broken‑down clump to take refuge inside it.

  For a long time he cowered in the grass, until the hyenas went away, also the cries of his jati as they looked for him, telling him to stick with them. He hid there through a long night of awful sounds, creatures being killed and eaten; but he was safe; and morning came again. He decided to venture forth, and found the way out was closed. The knife‑edged grass blades had grown, and were like long swords caging him, even pressing in on him, cutting him as they grew. Ah, he realized; this is a womb. I've chosen one without trying to, without listening to Bold's advice, separated from my family, unaware and in fear. The worst kind of choosing.

  And yet to stay here would be to become a hungry ghost. He would have to submit. He would have to be born again. He groaned at the thought, cursed himself for a fool. Try to have a little more presence of mind next time, he thought, a little more courage! It would not be easy, the bardo was a scary place. But now, when it was too late, he decided he had to try. Next time!

  And so he re‑entered the human realm. What happened to him and to his companions that time around, it is not our task to tell. Gone, gone, gone altogether beyond! All hail!

  One. The Cuckoo in the Village

  What happens is that sometimes there is a confusion, and the reincarnating soul enters into a womb already occupied. Then there are two souls in the same baby, and a fight breaks out. Mothers can feel that kind, the babies that thrash around inside, wrestling themselves. Then they're born and the shock of that ejection stills them for a while, they're fully occupied learning to breathe and otherwise coming to grips with this world. After that the fight between the two souls for the possession of the one body recommences. That's colic.

  A baby suffering colic will cry out as if struck, arch its back in pain, even writhe in agony, for many of its waking hours. This should be no surprise, two souls are struggling within it, and so for weeks the baby cries all the time, its guts twisted by the conflict. Nothing can ease its distress. It's not a situation that can last for long, it's too much for any little body to bear. In most cases the cuckoo soul drives out the original, and then the body finally calms down. Or sometimes the first soul successfully drives out the cuckoo and is restored to itself. Or else, in rare cases, neither one is strong enough to drive the other out, and the colic finally subsides but the baby grows up a divided person, confused, erratic, unreliable, prone to insanity.

  Kokila was born at midnight, and the dai pulled her out and said, 'It's a girl, poor thing.' Her mother Zaneeta hugged the little creature to her breast, saying, 'We will love you anyway.'

  She was a week old when the colic struck. She spat up her mother's milk and cried inconsolably all through the nights. Very quickly Zaneeta

  forgot what the cheerful new babe had been like, a kind of placid grub at her breast sucking, gurgling amazedly at the world. Under the assault of the colic she screamed, cried, moaned, writhed. It was painful to see it. Zaneeta could do nothing but hold her, hands under her stomach as it banded with cramping muscles, letting her hang face downwards from Zaneeta's hip. Something about this posture, perhaps just the effort of keeping her head upright, quieted Kokila. But it did not always work, and never for long. Then the writhing and screams began again, until Zaneeta was near distraction. She had to keep her husband Rajit fed and her two older daughters as well, and having borne three daughters in a row she was already out of Rajit's favour, and the babe was intolerable. Zaneeta tried sleeping with her out in the women's ground, but the menstruating women, while sympathetic, did not appreciate the noise. They enjoyed getting out of the home away with the girls, and it was not a place for babies. So Zaneeta was driven to sleeping with Kokila out against the side of their family's house, where they both dozed fitfully between bouts of crying.

  This went on for a couple of months, and then it ended. Afterwards the baby had a different look in her eye. The dai who had delivered her, Insef, checked her pulse and her irises and her urine, and declared that a different soul had indeed taken over the body, but that this was not really important ‑ it happened to many babies, and could be an improvement, as usually in colic battles the stronger soul won out.

  But after all that internal violence, Zaneeta regarded Kokila with trepi‑ dation, and all through her infancy and childhood Kokila looked back at her, and at the rest of the world, with a kind of black wild look, as if she were uncertain where she was or what she was doing there. A confused and often angry little girl, in fact, although clever in manipu‑ lating others, quick to caress or to yell, and very beautiful. She was strong, too, and quick, and by the time she was five she was more help than harm around the home. By then Zaneeta had had two more children, the younger of them a son, the sun of their lives, all thanks to Ganesh and Kartik, and with all the work there was to be done she appreciated Kokila's self‑reliance and quick abilities.

  Naturally the new son, jahan, was the centre of the household, and Kokila only the most capable of Zaneeta's daughters, absorbed in the business of her childhood and youth, not particularly well‑known to

  Zaneeta compared to Rajit and jahan, whom naturally she had to study in depth.

  So Kokila was free to follow her own thoughts for a few years. Insef often said that childhood was the best time in a woman's life, because as a girl she was somewhat free of men, and mostly just another worker around the house and in the fields. But the dai was old, and cynical about love and marriage, having seen their results so often turn bad, for herself and for others. Kokila was no more inclined to listen to her than to anyone else. To tell the truth s
he didn't seem to listen much to anybody. She watched everyone with that startled wary look you see on animals you come upon suddenly in the forest, and spoke little. She seemed to enjoy going off to do the daily work. She stayed silent and observant around her father, and the other children of the village didn't interest her, except for one girl, who had been found abandoned as an infant, one morning in the women's ground. This foundling Insef was raising to be the dai after her. Insef had named her Bihari, and often Kokila went to the dai's hut and took Bihari with her on her morning round of chores, not talking to her very much more than she did to anyone else, but pointing things out to her, and most of all, bothering to bring her along in the first place, which surprised Zaneeta. The foundling was nothing unusual, after all, just a little girl like all the rest. It was another of Kokila's mysteries.