The Years of Rice and Salt

by Robinson, Kim Stanley

  Shi said bitterly, 'More than once I've been offered ten thousand taels to kill you, and I always turned them down.'

  Kung waved this away. 'That was only your duty, but you think it makes you special. As if you had to resist your character to do the right thing. But your character is no excuse! I'm sick of your character! 1 too have an angry soul, but this is China we're fighting for! For humanity! You have to ignore your character, and do what is right!'

  And he turned away as Shi Fandi was led off.

  Afterwards Kung was in a dark mood, not remorseful about the condemnation of Shi, but depressed. 'It had to be done but it did nothing. Such men as he often come out on top. Presumably they will never die out. And so perhaps China will never escape her fate.' He quoted from Zhu:‑‑‑Vastterritories, abundant resources, a great population ‑ from such an excellent base, will we only ever go in circles, trapped on the wheel of birth and death?"'

  Bao did not know how to reply; he had never heard his friend speak so pessimistically. Although now it seemed familiar enough. Kung had many moods. But in the end, one mood dominated; he sighed, leapt to

  his feet: 'On with it, anyway! Go on, go on! We can only try. We have to occupy the time of this life somehow, we might as well fight for the good.'

  It was the farmers' associations that made the difference in the end. Kung and Bao attended nightly meetings in hundreds of villages and towns, and thousands of revolutionary soldiers like them were conveying Zhu's analysis and plan to the people, who in the country were still for the most part illiterate, so that the information had to be conveyed by word of mouth. But there is no form of communication faster and more certain, once it reaches a certain critical point of accumulation.

  Bao learned every detail of farming existence during that time. He learned that the Long War had stripped away most of the men who had been alive, and many of the younger women. There were only a few old men around no matter where you went, and the total population was still less than it had been before the war. Some villages were abandoned, others were occupied by skeleton crews. This made planting and harvesting crops difficult, and the young people alive were always at work ensuring that the season's food and tax crops would be grown. The old women worked as hard as anyone, doing what they could at their age to help, maintaining at all times the imperial demeanour of the ordinary Chinese farmwife. Usually the ones in the village who could read and do accounts were the grandmothers, who as girls had lived in more prosperous families; now they taught the younger folk how to run the looms, and to deal with the government in Beijing, and to read. Because of this they were often the first ones cut down when a warlord army invaded their region, along with the young men who might join the fight.

  In the Confucian system the farmers were the second most highly regarded class, just below the scholar bureaucrats who invented the system, but above the artisans and merchants. Now Zhu's intellectuals were organizing the farmers in the back country, and the artisans and merchants in the cities largely waited to see what would happen. So it seemed Confucius himself had identified the revolutionary classes. Certainly there were many more farmers than city‑dwellers. So when the farmer armies began to organize and march, there was little the old Long War remnants could do about it; they had been decimated

  themselves, and had neither the means nor the will to kill millions of their countrymen. For the most part they retreated to the biggest cities, and prepared to defend them as if against Muslims.

  In this uneasy stand‑off, Kung argued against any all‑out assaults, advocating more subtle methods for defeating the city‑based warlords that remained. Certain cities had their supply lines cut off, their airports destroyed, their ports blockaded; siege tactics of the oldest kind, updated to the new weapons of the Long War. Indeed another long war, this time a civil war, seemed to be brewing, though there was no one in China who wanted such a thing. Even the youngest child lived in the wreckage and shadow of the Long War, and knew another one would be catastrophe.

  Kung met with White Lotus and other revolutionary groups in the cities controlled by the warlords. Almost every work unit had within it workers sympathetic to the revolution, and many of them were joining Zhu's movement. In reality there was almost no one who actively and enthusiastically supported the old regime; how could there be? Too much bad had happened. So it was a matter of getting all the disaffected to back the same resistance, and the same strategy for change. Kung proved to be the most influential leader in this effort. 'In times like these,' he would say, 'everyone becomes a sort of intellectual, as matters so dire demand to be thought through. That's the glory of these times. They have woken us up.'

  Some of these talks and organizational meetings were dangerous visits

  to enemy ground. Kung had risen too far in the New China movement

  to be safe making such missions; he was too famous now, and had a

  price on his head. 1

  But once, in the thirty‑second week of Year 35, he and Bao made a clandestine visit to their old neighbourhood in Beijing, hiding in a delivery truck full of cabbage heads, and emerging near the Big Red Gate.

  At first it seemed everything had changed. Certainly the immediate vicinity outside the Gate had been razed, and new streets laid out, so that there was no way they could find their old haunts by the Gate, as they were gone. In their place stood a police station and a number of work unit compounds, lined up parallel to the old stretch of city wall that still existed for a short distance on each side of the Gate. Fairly

  big trees had been transplanted to the new street corners, protected by thick wrought‑iron fences with spikes on top: the greenery looked very fine. The work unit compounds had dorm windows looking outwards, another welcome new feature; in the old days they were always built with blank walls facing the outside world, and only in their inner courtyards were there any signs of life. Now the streets themselves were crowded with vendor carts and rolling bookstalls.

  'It looks good,' Bao had to admit.

  Kung grinned. 'I liked the old place better. Let's get going and see what we can find.'

  Their appointment was in an old work unit, occupying several smaller buildings just to the south of the new quarter. Down there the alleys were as tight as ever, all brick and dust and muddy lanes, not a tree to be seen. They wandered freely here, wearing sunglasses and aviator's caps like half the other young men. No one paid them the slightest attention, and they were able to buy paper bowls of noodles and eat standing on a street corner among the crowds and traffic, observing the familiar scene, which did not seem to have changed a bit since their departure a few packed years before.

  Bao said, 'I miss this place.'

  Kung agreed. 'It won't be long before we can move back here if we want. Enjoy Beijing again, centre of the world.'

  But first, a revolution to finish. They slipped into one of the shops of the work unit and met with a group of unit supervisors, most of them old women. They were not inclined to be impressed by any boy advocating enormous change, but by this time Kung was famous, and they listened carefully to him, and asked a lot of detailed questions, and when he had finished they nodded and patted him on the shoulder and sent him back out onto the street, telling him he was a good boy and that he should get out of the city before he got himself arrested, and that they would back him when the time came. That was the way it was with Kung: everyone felt the fire in him, and responded in the human way. If he could win over the old women of the Long War in a single meeting, then nothing was impossible. Many a village and work unit was staffed entirely by these women, as were the Buddhist hospitals and colleges. Kung knew all about them by now, 'the gangs of widows and grandmothers', he called them; 'very frightening minds, they are beyond the

  world but know every tael of it, so they can be very hard, very unsenti‑ mental. Good scientists frequent among them. Politicians of great cunning. It's best not to cross them.' And he never did, but learned from them, and honoured them; Kung knew where th
e power lay in any given situation. 'If the old women and the young men ever get together, it will be all over!'

  Kung also travelled to Yingkou to meet with Zhu Isao himself, and discuss with the old philosopher the campaign for China. Under Zhu's aegis he flew to Yingzhou, and spoke with the Japanese and Chinese representatives of the Yingzhou League, meeting also Travancoris and others in Fangzhang, and when he returned, he came with promises of support from all the progressive governments of the New World.

  Soon after that, one of the great Hodenosaunee fleets arrived in Yingkou, and unloaded huge quantities of food and weapons, and similar fleets appeared off all the port cities not under revolutionary control already, blockading them in effect if not in word, and the New China forces were able over the next couple of years to win victories in Shanghai, Canton, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and inland all over China. The final assault on Beijing became more of a triumphal entry than anything else; the soldiers of the old army disappeared into the vast city, or out to their last stronghold in Gansu, and Kung was with Zhu in the first trucks of a giant motorcade that entered the capital uncontested, indeed hugely celebrated, on the spring equinox marking the Year 36, through the Big Red Gate.

  It was later in that week that they opened up the Forbidden City to the people, who had been in there only a few times before, after the disappearance of the last emperor, when for a few years of the war it had been a public park and army barracks. For the past forty years it had been closed again to the people, and now they streamed in to hear Zhu and his inner circle speak to China and the world. Bao was in the crowd accompanying them, and as they passed under the Gate of Great Harmony he saw Kung look around, as if surprised. Kung shook his head, an odd expression on his face; and it was still there when he went up to the podium to stand by Zhu and speak to the ecstatic masses filling the square.

  Zhu was still speaking when the shots rang out. Zhu fell, Kung fell;

  all was chaos. Bao fought his way through the screaming crowd and got to the ring of people around the wounded on the temporary wooden stage, and most of those people were men and women he knew, trying to establish order and get medical assistance and a route out of the palace grounds to a hospital. One who recognized him let Bao through, and he rushed and stumbled to Kung's side. The assassin had used the big soft‑tipped bullets that had been developed during the war, and there was blood all over the wood of the stage, shocking in its copious gleaming redness. Zhu had been struck in the arm and leg; Kung in the chest. There was a big hole in his back and his face was grey. He was dying. Bao knelt beside him and took up his splayed right hand, calling out his name. Kung looked through him; Bao couldn't be sure he was seeing anything; 'Kung Jianguo!' Bao cried, the words torn out of him like no others had ever been.

  'Bao Xinhua,' Kung mouthed. 'Go on.'

  Those were his last words. He died before they even got him off the stage.

  2. This Square Fathom

  All that happened when Bao was young.

  After Kung's assassination he wasn't much good for a time. He attended the funeral and never shed a tear; he thought he was beyond such things, that he was a realist, that the cause was what mattered and that the cause would go on. He was numb to his grief, he felt he didn't really care. That seemed odd to him, but there it was. It wasn't all that real, it couldn't be. He had got over it.

  He kept his nose in books, and read all the time. He attended the college in Beijing and read history and political science, and accepted diplomatic posts for the new government, first in japan, then Yingzhou, then Nsara, then Burma. The New China programme progressed, but slowly, so slowly. Things were better but not in any rapid marked way. Different but in some ways the same. People still fought, corruption infected the new institutions, it was always a struggle. Everything took much longer than anyone had anticipated, and yet every few years everything was also somehow entirely different. The pulse of history's long duration was much slower than an individual's time.

  One day, after some years had passed, he met a woman named Pan Xichun, a diplomat from Yingzhou, in Beijing on assignment to the embassy there. They were assigned together to work on the Dahai League, the association of states encircling the Great Ocean, and as part of that work they were both sent by their governments to a confer~ ence in Hawaii, in the middle of the Dahai. There on the beaches of

  the big island they spent a great deal of time together, and when they returned to Beijing they were a couple. Her ancestry was both Chinese and Japanese, and all her great‑grandparents had lived in Yingzhou, in Fangzhang and the valley behind it. When Pan Xichun's assignment in Beijing ended and she went back home, Bao made arrangements to join the Chinese embassy in Fangzhang, and flew across the Dahai to the dramatic green coastline and golden hills of Yingzhou.

  There he and Pan Xichun married and lived for twenty years, raising two children, a son, Zhao, and a daughter, Anzi. Pan Xichun took on one of the ministries of the Yingzhou government, which meant she travelled fairly often to Long Island, to Qito, and around the Dahai Rim countries. Bao stayed at home and worked for the Chinese embassy, looked after the children, and wrote and taught history at the city college. It was a good life in Fangzhang, that most beautiful and dramatic of all cities, and sometimes it would seem to him that his youth in revolutionary China was a kind of vivid intense dream he had once had. Scholars came over to talk to him sometimes, and he would reminisce about those years, and once or twice he even wrote about parts of it himself., but it was all at a great distance.

  Then one day he felt a bump on the side of Pan Xichun's right breast; cancer., and a year later, after much suffering, she died. In her usual way she had gone on before.

  Bao, desolate, was left to raise their children. His son Zhao was already almost grown, and soon took a job in Aozhou, across the sea, so that Bao rarely saw him in person. His daughter Anzi was younger, and he did what he could, hiring women to live in and help him, but somehow he tried too hard, he cared too much; Anzi got angry with him often, moved out when she could, got married, and seldom came to see him after that. Somehow he had botched that and he didn't even know how.

  He was offered a post in Beijing, and he returned, but it was too strange; he felt like a preta, wandering the scenes of some past life. He stayed in the western quarters of the city, new neighbourhoods that bore no particular resemblance to the ones he had known. The Forbidden City he forbade to himself. He tried reading and writing, thinking that if only he could write everything down, then it would never come back again.

  After not too many years of that he took a post in Pyinkayaing, the capital of Burma, joining the League of All Peoples' Agency for Harmony with Nature, as a Chinese representative and diplomat at large.

  3. Writing Burmese History

  Pyinkayaing was located on the westernmost channel of the Mouths of the Irrawaddy, that great river road of Burmese life, which was by now urbanized all across the mouths in one enormous seafront city, or congeries of cities, all the way up each branch of the delta to Henzada, and indeed from there up the river all the way to Mandalay. But it was Pyinkayaing where the super‑city could be seen at its most huge, the river channels running out into the sea like grand avenues, between stupendous skyscrapers that made of the rivers deep gorges, bridged by innumerable streets and alleyways, alternating with the many more numerous canals, all criss‑crossing each other in hundreds of overlapping grids, and all dominated by the deep canyons formed by the myriad tall buildings.

  Bao was given an apartment on the hundred and sixtieth floor of one of the skyscrapers set on the main channel of the Irrawaddy, near the seafront. Walking out onto his balcony for the first time he was amazed at the view, and spent most of an afternoon looking around: south to sea, west to Pagoda Rock, cast along the other mouths of the Irrawaddy, and upstream, looking down onto the rooftops of the supercity, into the million windows of the other skyscrapers lining the riverbanks and crowding the rest of the delta. All the buildings had been sunk deep through t
he alluvial soil of the delta to bedrock, and a famous system of dams and locks and offshore breakwaters had secured the city against floods from upstream, high tides from the Indian Ocean, typhoons ‑ even the rise in sea level that was now beginning did not

  fundamentally threaten the city, which was in truth a kind of collec‑ tion of ships anchored permanently in the bedrock, so that if eventually they had to abandon the 'ground floors' and move up it would be, just one more engineering challenge, something to keep the local construction industry occupied in years to come. The Burmese were not afraid of anything.

  Looking down at the little junks and water taxis brushing their deli‑ cate white calligraphy over the blue‑brown water, Bao seemed to read a kind of message in them, just outside the edge of his conscious comprehension. He understood now why the Burmese wrote 'Burmese history', because maybe it was true ‑ maybe all that had ever happened, had happened so that it could collide here, and make something greater than any of its elements. As when the wakes from several different water taxis struck all together, shooting a bolt of white water higher than any individual wave ever would have got.