The Years of Rice and Salt

by Robinson, Kim Stanley

  Bai nodded uneasily; he did not like to talk of such things. He tried to hear only the roaring. He tried to forget all he had seen the last three days.

  'How can we have possibly survived for so long?' Kuo asked recklessly. 'Everyone else we began with is dead. In fact the three of us have outlasted five or six generations of officers. How long has it been? Five years? How can it be?'

  'I am Peng‑zu,' lwa said. 'I am the Unfortunate Immortal, I can never be killed. 1 could dive right into the gas and it still wouldn't work.' He looked up from his rice mournfully.

  Even Kuo was spooked by this. 'Well, you'll get more chances, don't worry. Don't think it's going to end any time soon. The Japanese could take the north because no one cares about it. When they try to come off the taiga onto the steppes, that's when it'll get interesting. 1 don't think they'll be able to turn the hinge very far. It would mean a lot more if the breakout was in the south. We need to connect up with the Indians.'

  lwa shook his head. 'That won't happen.' This kind of analysis was more like him, and the other two asked him to explain. For the Chinese the southern front consisted of the great wall of the Himalaya and Pamirs, and the jungles of Annam and Burma and Bengal and Assam. There were only a few passes over the mountains that were even thinkable, and the defences of these were impregnable. As for the jungles, the rivers offered the only passage through them, and they were too exposed. The fortifications of their south front were therefore geographical and immovable, but the same could be said for the Muslims on the

  other side of them. Meanwhile the Indians were trapped below the Deccan. The steppes were the only way; but the armies of both sides were concentrated there. Thus the deadlock.

  'It has to end some day,' Bai pointed out. 'Otherwise it will never end.'

  Kuo spat out a mouthful of rakshi in a burst of laughter. 'Very deep logic, friend Bai! But this is not a logical war. This is the end that will never end. We will live our lives in this war, and so will the next gener‑ ation, and the next, until everyone is dead and we can start the world all over, or not, as the case may be.'

  'No,' lwa disagreed mildly. 'It can't go on that long. The end will come somewhere else, that's all. The war at sea, or in Africa or Yingzhou. The break will come somewhere else, and then this region will just be a, a what, a feature of the long war, an anomaly or whatnot. The front that could not be moved. The frozen aspect of the long war at its most frozen. They will tell our story for ever, because there will never be anything like it again.'

  'You're such a comfort,' Kuo said. 'To think we're in the worst fix any soldiers have ever been in!'

  'We might as well be something,' lwa said.

  'Exactly! It's a distinction! An honour, if you think about it.'

  Bai preferred not to. An explosion above shook dirt out of their ceiling onto them. They bustled about covering cups and plates.

  A few days later and they were back in the usual routine. If there was still a Japanese breakout to the north there was no way to tell it here, where the daily barrage and sniping from the Muslims was the same as always, as if the Sixth Great Error, with its loss of perhaps fifty thousand men and women, had never happened.

  Soon after that the Muslims too started using poison gas, spreading over the death zone on the wind just as the Chinese had done, but also sending it over contained in explosive shells that came down with a loud whistle, scattering the usual shrapnel (including anything that would cut, as they too were running low on metal, so that they found sticks, cat bones, hooves, a set of false teeth) and now with the shrapnel a thick yellow geyser of the gas, apparently not just mustard gas but a variety of poisons and caustics, which forced the Chinese to keep both gas mask and hood and gloves always by them. Dressed or not, when

  one of these shells came down it was hard not to get burned around the wrists and ankles and neck.

  The other new inconvenience was a shell so huge, cast so high by such big cannons, that when it came down out of the sky it was falling faster than its sound, so there was no warning. These shells were bigger around than a man, and taller, designed to penetrate the mud some distance and then go off, in stupendous explosions that often would bury many more men in trenches and tunnels and caves than were killed by the blasts themselves. Duds of these shells were dug out and removed, very cautiously, each one occupying an entire train car. The explosive used in them was a new one that looked like fish paste, and smelled like jasmine.

  One evening after dusk they were standing around drinking rakshi and discussing news that lwa had got from the comm cave. The southern army was being punished for some failure on that front, and each squad commander had to send back one per cent of his command, to be executed as encouragement to those that remained.

  'What a good idea!' Kuo said. 'I know just who 1'd send.'

  lwa shook his head. 'A lottery would create better solidarity.'

  Kuo scoffed: 'Solidarity. Might as well get rid of the malingerers while you can, before they shoot you in the back some night.'

  'It's a terrible idea,' Bai said. 'They're all Chinese, how can we kill Chinese when they haven't done anything wrong? It's crazy. The Fourth Assemblage of Military Talent has gone insane.'

  'They were never sane to begin with,' Kuo said. 'It's been forty years since anyone on Earth has been sane.'

  Suddenly they were all knocked off their feet by a violent blast of air. Bai struggled to his feet, banged into lwa doing the same. He couldn't hear a thing. There was no sight of Kuo, he was gone and there was a big hole in the ground where he had been standing, a hole perfectly round and some twelve feet wide, thirty feet deep, and floored by the back end of one of the big Muslim supershells. Another dud.

  A right hand lay on the ground beside the hole like a white cane spider. 'Oh damn,' lwa said through the roar. 'We've lost Kuo.'

  The Muslim shell had landed directly on him. Possibly, lwa said later, his presence had kept it from exploding somehow. It had squished him into the earth like a worm. Only his poor hand left.

  Bai stared at the hand, too stunned to move. Kuo's laugh seemed still to ring in his cars. Kuo certainly would have laughed if he had been able to see this turn of events. His hand was completely recognizable as his, Bai found that he knew it intimately without ever being aware of the fact until now, so many hours sitting together in their little cave, Kuo holding the rice pot or the tea kettle over the stove, or offering a cup of tea or rakshi, his hand, like all the rest of him, a part of Bai's life, callused and scarred, clean‑palmed and dirty‑backed, looking still just like itself, even without the rest of him around. Bai sat back down on the mud.

  lwa gently picked up the severed hand, and they gave it the same funeral ceremony given to more complete corpses, before taking it back to one of the death trains for disposal in the crematoria. Afterwards they drank Kuo's remaining rakshi. Bai could not speak, and lwa didn't try to make him. Bai's own hands displayed the quivering o or inary trenc

  fatigue. What had happened to their magic umbrella? What would he do now, without Kuo's acid laughter to cut through the deathly miasmas?

  Then the Muslims took their turn to attack, and the Chinese were busy for a week with the defence of their trenches, living in their gas masks, firing belt after belt at the ghostly fellahem and assassins emerging from the yellow fog. Bai's lungs gave out again briefly, he had to be evacuated; but at the end of the week he and lwa were back in the same trenches they had started in, with a new squad composed almost entirely of conscripts from Aozhou, land of the turtle who held up the world, green southerners thrown into the conflict like so many rounds of machine­gun ammunition. They had been so busy that already it seemed a long time since the incident of the dud shell. 'Once 1 had a brother named Kuo,' Bai explained to lwa.

  lwa nodded, patted Bai on the shoulder. 'Go and see if we have new orders.' His face was black with cordite, except around mouth and nose where his mask had been, and under his eyes, white with deltas of tear streaks. He looked like a
puppet in a play, his face the mask of asura suffering. He had been at his machine gun for over forty straight hours, and in that time had killed perhaps three thousand men. His eyes looked sightlessly through Bai, through the world.

  Bai staggered away, down the tunnel to the comm cave. He ducked in and fell into a chair, trying to catch his breath, feeling himself

  continuing to fall, through the floor, through the earth, on the airy drop to oblivion. A creak pulled him up; he looked to see who was already in the chair at the wireless table.

  It was Kuo, sitting there grinning at him.

  Bai straightened up. 'Kuo!' he said. 'We thought you were dead!'

  Kuo nodded. 'I am dead,' he said. 'And so are you.'

  His right hand was there at the end of his wrist.

  'The shell went off,' he said, 'and killed us all. Since then you've been in the bardo. All of us have. You've gone at it by pretending you weren't there yet. Although why you would want to hang on to that hell world we were living in, 1 can't imagine. You are so damned obstinate, Bai. You need to see you're in the bardo to be able to understand what's happening to you. It's the war in the bardo that matters, after all. The battle for our souls.'

  Bai tried to say yes; then no; then he found himself on the floor of the cave, having fallen off the chair, apparently, which had woken him up. Kuo was gone, his chair empty. Bai groaned. 'Kuo! Come back!' But the room stayed empty.

  Later Bai told Iwa what had happened, his voice shaking, and the Tibetan had given him a sharp glance, then shrugged. 'Maybe he was right,' he said, gesturing around. 'What is there to prove him wrong?'

  Another assault struck and suddenly they were ordered to retreat, to get to the back lines and then on the trains. At the depot yard it was chaotic, of course; but men with guns trained on them boarded them on the cars like cattle, and off the trains squealed and clanked.

  lwa and Bai sat at one end of a car as they trained south. From time to time they used their officers' privilege and went out onto the car's coupling base to smoke cigarettes and regard the steel sky lowering overhead. Higher and higher they rose, colder and colder. Thin air hurt Bai's lungs. 'So,' he said, gesturing at the rock and ice rolling past. 'Maybe it is the bardo.'

  'It's just Tibet,' lwa said.

  But Bai could see very well that it was more desolate than that. Cirrus clouds hung like sickles just overhead, as on a stage set, the sky black and flat. It didn't look the slightest bit real.

  In any case, whatever the realm, Tibet or the bardo, in life or out of it, the war continued. At night winged roaring flyers, their blimp

  components dispensed with, buzzed overhead dropping bombs on them. Arc lamp searchlights lanced the darkness, pinning flyers to the stars and sometimes blowing them up in gouts of falling flame. Images from Bai's dreams fell right out of the thin air. Black snow glittered in the white light of a low sun.

  They stopped before an impossibly huge mountain range, another stage set from the dream theatre. A pass so deep that from their distance it dipped under the sere tabletop of the steppe. That pass was their goal. Their task now was to blast the defences away and go south through that pass, down to some level below this floor of the universe. The pass to India, supposedly. Gate to a lower realm. Very well defended, of course.

  The 'Muslims' defending it remained invisible, always over the great snowy mass of granite peaks, greater than any mountains on Earth could be, asura mountains, and the big guns brought to bear on them, asura guns. Never had it been so clear to Bai that they had got caught up in some bigger war, dying by the millions for some cause not their own. Ice and black rock fangs touched the ceiling of stars, snow banners streamed on the monsoon wind away from the peaks, merging with the Milky Way, at sunset becoming asura flames blowing horizontally, as if the realm of the asuras stood perpendicular to their own, another reason perhaps that their puny imitation battles were always so hopelessly askew.

  The Muslims' big guns were on the south side of the range; they never even heard them. Their shells whistled over the stars, leaving white rainbow frost trails on the black sky. The majority of these shells landed on the massive white mountain to the cast of the huge pass, blasting it with one stupendous explosion after another, as if the Muslims had gone crazy and declared war on the rocks of the Earth. 'Why do they hate that mountain so much?' Bai asked.

  'That's Chomolungma,' Iwa said. 'That was the tallest mountain in the world, but the Muslims have knocked the summit pyramid down until it's lower than the second tallest, which is a peak in Afghanistan. So now the tallest peak in the world is Muslim.'

  His face was its usual blank, but he sounded sad, as though the mountain mattered to him. This worried Bai: if lwa had gone mad, everyone on Earth had gone mad. lwa would be the last to go. But maybe it had happened. A soldier in their squad had begun to weep

  helplessly at the sight of dead horses and mules. He was fine at the sight of dead men scattered about, but the bloated bodies of their poor beasts broke his heart. It made sense in a strange way, but for mountains Bai could conjure up no sympathy. At the most it was one god fewer. Part of the struggle in the bardo.

  At night the cold approached pure stasis. Watching starlight gleaming on the empty plateau, smoking a cigarette by the latrines, Bai considered what it might mean that there was war in the bardo. That was the place souls were sorted out, reconciled to reality, sent back down into the world. judgment rendered, karma assessed; souls sent back to try again, or released to nirvana. Bai had been reading lwa's copy of the Book of the Dead, looking around him seeing each sentence shape the plateau. Alive or dead, they walked in a room of the bardo, working on their fate. It was always so! This room as bleak as any empty stage. They camped on gravel and sand at the butt end of a grey glacier. Their big guns squatted, barrels tilted to the sky. Smaller guns on the valley walls guarded against air attack; these emplacements looked like the old dzong‑style monasteries that still lined some buttresses in these mountains.

  Word came they were going to try to break through Nangpa La, the deep pass interrupting the range. One of the old salt trading passes, the best pass for many 11 in both directions. Sherpas would guide, Tibetans who had moved south of the pass. On its other side extended a canyon to their capital, tiny Namche Bazaar, now in ruins like everything else. From Namche trails ran directly south to the plains of Bengal. A very good passage across the Himalaya, in fact. Rail could replace trail in a matter of days, and then they could ship the massed armies of China, what was left of them, onto the Gangetic Plain. Rumours swirled, replaced daily by new rumours. lwa spent all night at the wireless.

  It looked to Bai like a change in the bardo itself. Shift to the next room, a tropical hellworld clogged with ancient history. The battle for the pass would therefore be particularly violent, as is any passage between worlds. The artilleries of the two civilizations massed on both sides. Triggered avalanches in the granite escarpments were frequent. Meanwhile explosions on the peak of Chomolungma continued to lower it. The Tibetans fought like pretas as they saw this. Iwa seemed to have reconciled himself to it: 'They have a saying about the mountain coming

  to Mohammed. But 1 don't think it matters to the mother goddess.'

  Still, it brought home to them yet again how insane their opponents were. Ignorant fanatical disciples of a cruel desert cult, promised eternity in a paradise where sexual orgasm with beautiful houris lasted ten thousand years, no surprise they were so often suicidally brave, happy to die, reckless in frenzied opiated ways that were hard to counter. Indeed they were known to be prodigious benzedrine eaters and opium smokers, pursuing the entire war in a jerky drugged dream state that could include bestial rage. Most of the Chinese would have been happy to join them there, and opium had made its way into the Chinese army, of course, but supplies were short. lwa had local contacts, however, and as they prepared for the assault on Nangpa La he obtained some from some military policemen. He and Bai smoked it in cigarettes and drank it as a tincture of alcohol
, along with cloves and a pill of Travancori medicines said to sharpen sight while dulling the emotions. It worked pretty well.

  Eventually there were so many banners and divisions and big guns collected on this high plane of the bardo that Bai became convinced that the rumours were right, and a general assault on Kali or Shiva or Brahma was about to begin. As confirming evidence he noted that many divisions were composed of experienced soldiers, rather than raw boys or peasants or women ‑ divisions with extensive battle experience in the islands or the New World, where the fighting had been particularly intense, and where they claimed to have won. In other words, they were precisely those soldiers most likely to have been killed already. And they looked dead. They smoked cigarettes like dead men. A whole army of the dead, gathered and poised to invade the rich south of the living.