The Years of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  When he could spare a moment he went to her side, in the highest cabin on the rear deck, and looked beseechingly at I-Chen, who would not reassure him. She was coughing up a foamy blood, very red, and I-Chen was sucking her throat clear of it from time to time with a tube he stuck down her mouth. “A rib has punctured a lung,” he said shortly, keeping his eyes on her. She meanwhile was conscious, wide-eyed, in pain but quiet. She said only, “What’s happening to me?” After I-Chen cleared her throat of another mass of blood, he told her what he had told Kheim. She panted like a dog, shallow and fast.

  Kheim went back into the watery chaos above decks. The wind and waves were no worse than before, perhaps a bit better. There were scores of problems large and small to attend to, and he threw himself at them in a fury, muttering to himself, or shouting at the gods; it didn’t matter, no one could hear anything above decks, unless it was shouted directly in their ears. “Please, Tianfei, stay with us! Don’t leave us! Let us go home. Let us return to tell the Emperor what we have found for him. Let the girl live.”

  They survived the storm: but Butterfly died the next day.

  • • •

  Only three ships that found each other and regathered on the quiet blank of the sea. They sewed Butterfly’s body in a man’s robe and tied two of the gold discs from the mountain empire into it, and let it slide over the side into the waves. All the men were weeping, even I-Chen, and Kheim could barely speak the words of the funeral prayer. Who was there to pray to? It seemed impossible that after all they had gone through, a mere storm could kill the sea goddess; but there she was, slipping under the waves, sacrificed to the sea just as that island boy had been sacrificed to the mountain. Sun or seafloor, it was all the same.

  “She died to save us,” he told the men shortly. “She gave that avatar of herself to the storm god, so he would let us be. Now we have to carry on to honour her. We have to get back home.”

  So they repaired the ship as best they could, and endured another month of desiccated life. This was the longest month of the trip, of their lives. Everything was breaking down, on the ships, in their bodies. There wasn’t enough food and water. Sores broke out in their mouths and on their skin. They had very little qi, and could hardly eat what food was left.

  Kheim’s thoughts left him. He found that when thoughts leave, things just did themselves. Doing did not need thinking.

  One day he thought: sail too big cannot be lifted. Another day he thought: more than enough is too much. Too much is less. Therefore least is most. Finally he saw what the Daoists meant by that.

  Go with the way. Breathe in and out. Move with the swells. Sea doesn’t know ship, ship doesn’t know sea. Floating does itself. A balance in balance. Sit without thinking.

  The sea and sky melded. All blue. There was no one doing, nothing being done. Sailing just happened.

  Thus, when a great sea was crossed, there was no one doing it.

  • • •

  Someone looked up and noticed an island. It turned out to be Mindanao, and after the rest of its archipelago, Taiwan, and all the familiar landfalls of the Inland Sea.

  The three remaining Great Ships sailed into Nanking almost exactly twenty months after their departure, surprising all the inhabitants of the city, who thought they had joined Hsu Fu at the bottom of the sea. And they were happy to be home, no doubt about it, and bursting with stories to tell of the amazing giant island to the cast.

  But any time Kheim met the eye of any of his men, he saw the pain there. He saw also that they blamed him for her death. So he was happy to leave Nanking and travel with a gang of officials up the Grand Canal to Beijing. He knew that his sailors would scatter up and down the coast, go their ways so they wouldn’t have to see each other and remember; only after years had passed would they want to meet, so that they could remember the pain when it had become so distant and faint that they actually wanted it back, just to feel again they had done all those things, that life had held all those things.

  But for now it was impossible not to feel they had failed. And so when Kheim was led into the Forbidden City, and brought before the Wanli Emperor to accept the acclaim of all the officials there, and the interested and gracious thanks of the Emperor himself, he said only, “When a great sea has been crossed, there is no one to take credit.”

  The Wanli Emperor nodded, fingering one of the gold disc ingots they had brought back, and then the big hummingbird moth of beaten gold, its feathers and antennae perfectly delineated with the utmost delicacy and skill. Kheim stared at the Heavenly Envoy, trying to see in to the hidden Emperor, the Jade Emperor inside him. Kheim said to him, “That far country is lost in time, its streets paved with gold, its palaces roofed with gold. You could conquer it in a month, and rule over all its immensity, and bring back all the treasure that it has, endless forest and furs, turquoise and gold, more gold than there is yet now in the world; and yet still the greatest treasure in that land is already lost.”

  FOUR

  Snowy peaks, towering over a dark land. The first blinding crack of sunlight flooding all. He could have made it then — everything was so bright, he could have launched himself into pure whiteness at that moment and never come back, flowed out for ever into the All. Release, release. You have to have seen a lot to want release that much.

  But the moment passed and he was on the black stage floor of the bardo’s hall of judgment, on its Chinese side, a nightmare warren of numbered levels and legal chambers and bureaucrats wielding lists of souls to be remanded to the care of meticulous torturers. Above this hellish bureaucracy loomed the usual Tibet of a dais, occupied by its menagerie of demonic gods, chopping up condemned souls and chasing the pieces off to hell or a new life in the realm of preta or beast. The lurid glow, the giant dais like the side of a mesa towering above, the hallucinatorily colourful gods roaring and dancing, their swords flashing in the black air; it was judgment — an inhuman activity — not the pot calling the kettle black, but true judgment, by higher authorities, the makers of this universe. Who were the ones, after all, that had made humans as weak and craven and cruel as they so often were — so that there was a sense of doom enforced, of loaded dice, karma lashing out at whatever little pleasures and beauties the miserable subdivine sentiences might have concocted out of the mud of their existence. A brave life, fought against the odds? Go back as a dog! A dogged life, persisting despite all? Go back as a mule, go back as a worm. That’s the way things work.

  Thus Kheim reflected as he strode up through the mists in a growing rage, as he banged through the bureaucrats, smashing them with their own slates, their lists and tallies, until he caught sight of Kali and her court, standing in a semi-circle taunting Butterfly, judging her — as if that poor simple soul had anything to answer for, compared to these butcher gods and their cons of evil — evil insinuated right into the heart of the cosmos they themselves had made!

  Kheim roared in wordless fury, and charged up and seized a sword from one of the death goddess’s six arms, and cut off a brace of them with a single stroke; the blade was very sharp. The arms lay scattered and bleeding on the floor, flopping about — then, to Kheim’s unutterable consternation, they were grasping the floorboards and moving themselves crabwise by the clenching of the fingers. Worse yet, new shoulders were growing back behind the wounds, which still bled copiously. Kheim screamed and kicked them off the dais, then turned and chopped Kali in half at the waist, ignoring the other members of his jati who stood up there with Butterfly, all of them jumping up and down and shouting ‘Oh no, don’t do that Kheim, don’t do that, you don’t understand, you have to follow protocol,” even I-Chen, who was shouting loudly over the rest of them, “At least we might direct our efforts at the dais struts, or the vials of forgetting, something a little more technical, a little less direct!” Meanwhile Kali’s upper body fisted itself around the stage, while her legs and waist staggered, but continued to stand; and the missing halves grew out of the cut parts like snail horns. And then there
were two Kalis advancing on him, a dozen arms flailing swords.

  He jumped off the dais, thumped down on the bare boards of the cosmos. The rest of his jati crashed down beside him, crying out in pain at the impact. “You got us in trouble,” Shen whined.

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Butterfly informed him as they panted off together into the mists. “I’ve seen a lot of people try. They lash out in fury and cut the hideous gods down, and how they deserve it — and yet the gods spring back up, redoubled in other people. A karmic law of this universe, my friend. Like conservation of yin and yang, or gravity. We live in a universe ruled by very few laws, but the redoubling of violence by violence is one of the main ones.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Kheim said, and stopped to fend off the two Kalis now pursuing them. He took a hard swing and decapitated one of the new Kalis. Swiftly another head grew back, swelling on top of the gusher on the neck of the black body, and the new white teeth of her new head laughed at him, while her bloody red eyes blazed. He was in trouble, he saw; he was going to be hacked to pieces. For resisting these evil unjust absurd and horrible deities he was going to be hacked to pieces and returned to the world as a mule or a monkey or a maimed old geezer —

  BOOK FOUR

  The Alchemist

  Transmutation

  Now it so happened that as the time approached for the great alchemist’s red work to reach its culmination, in the final multiplication, the projection of the sophic hydrolith into the ferment, causing tincture — that is to say, the transmuting of base metals into gold — the son-in-law of the alchemist, one Bahram al-Bokhara, ran and jostled through the bazaar of Samarqand on last-minute errands, ignoring the calls of his various friends and creditors. “I can’t stop,” he called to them, “I’m late!”

  “Late paying your debts!” said Divendi, whose coffee stall was wedged into a slot next to Iwang’s workshop.

  “True,” Bahram said, but stopped for a coffee. “Always late but never bored.”

  “Khalid keeps you hopping.”

  “Literally so, yesterday. The big pelican cracked during a descension, and it all spilled right next to me — vitriol of Cyprus mixed with sal ammoniac.”

  “Dangerous?”

  “Oh my God. Where it splashed on my trousers the cloth was eaten away, and the smoke was worse. I had to run for my life!”

  “As always.”

  “So true. I coughed my guts out, my eyes ran all night. It was like drinking your coffee.”

  “I always make yours from the dregs.”

  “I know,” tossing down the last gritty shot. “So are you coming tomorrow?”

  “To see lead turned into gold? I’ll be there.”

  Iwang’s workshop was dominated by its brick furnace. Familiar sizzle and smell of bellowed fire, tink of hammer, glowing molten glass, Iwang twirling the rod attentively: Bahram greeted the glassblower and silversmith, “Khalid wants more of the wolf.”

  “Khalid always wants more of the wolf.” Iwang continued turning his blob of hot glass. Tall and broad and big-faced, a Tibetan by birth, but long a resident of Samarqand, he was one of Khalid’s closest associates. “Did he send payment this time?”

  “Of course not. He said to put it on his tab.”

  Iwang pursed his lips. “He’s got too many tabs these days.”

  “All paid after tomorrow. He finished the seven hundred and seventyseventh distillation.”

  Iwang put down his work and went to a wall stacked with boxes. He handed Bahram a small leather pouch, heavy with small beads of lead. “Gold grows in the earth,” he said. “Al-Razi himself couldn’t grow it in a crucible.”

  “Khalid would debate that. And Al-Razi lived a long time ago. He couldn’t get the heat we can now.”

  “Maybe.” Iwang was sceptical. “Tell him to be careful.”

  “Of burning himself?”

  “Of the Khan burning him.”

  “You’ll be there to see it?”

  Iwang nodded reluctantly.

  The day of the demonstration came, and for a wonder the great Khalid Ali Abu al-Samarqandi seemed nervous; and Bahram could understand why. If Sayyed Abdul Aziz Khan, ruler of the khanate of Bokhara, immensely rich and powerful, chose to support Khalid’s enterprises, all would be well; but he was not a man you wanted to disappoint. Even his closest adviser, his treasury secretary Nadir Devanbegi, avoided distressing him at all costs. Recently, for instance, Nadir had caused a new caravanserai to be built on the east side of Bokhara, and the Khan had been brought out for its opening ceremony, and being a bit inattentive by nature, he had congratulated them for building such a fine madressa; and rather than correct him on the point, Nadir had ordered the complex turned into a madressa. That was the kind of khan Sayyed Abdul Aziz was, and he was the khan to whom Khalid was going to demonstrate the tincture. It was enough to make Bahram’s stomach tight and his pulse fast, and while Khalid sounded like he always did, sharp and impatient and sure of himself, Bahram could see that his face was unusually pale.

  But he had worked on the projection for years, and studied all the alchemical texts he could obtain, including many bought by Bahram in the Hindu caravanserai, including ‘The Book of the End of the Search’ by jildaki, and jabir Ibn Hayyam’s ‘Book of Balances’, as well as ‘The Secret of Secrets’, once thought to be lost, and the Chinese text ‘Reference Book for the Penetration of Reality’; and Khalid had in his extensive workshops the mechanical capacity to repeat the required distillations at high heat and very good clarities, all seven hundred and seventy-seven times. Two weeks earlier he had declared that his final efforts had borne fruit, and now all was ready for a public demonstration, which of course had to include regal witnesses to matter.

  So Bahram hurried around in Khalid’s compound on the northern edge of Samarqand, sprawling by the banks of the Zeravshan River, which provided power to the foundries and the various workshops. The walls of the establishment were ringed by great heaps of charcoal waiting to be burned, and inside there were a number of buildings, loosely grouped around the central work area, a yard dotted with vats and discoloured chemical baths. Several different stinks combined to form the single harsh smell that was particular to Khalid’s place. He was the khanate’s principal gunpowder producer and metallurgist, among other things, and these practical enterprises supported the alchemy that was his ruling passion.

  Bahram wove through the clutter, making sure the demonstration area was ready. The long tables in the open-walled shops were crowded with an orderly array of equipment; the walls of the shops were neatly hung with tools. The main athanor was roaring with heat.

  But Khalid was not to be found. The puffers had not seen him; Bahram’s wife Esmerine, Khalid’s daughter, had not seen him. The house at the back of the compound seemed empty, and no one answered Bahram’s calls. He began to wonder if Khalid had run away in fear.

  Then Khalid appeared out of the library next to his study, the only room in the compound with a door that locked.

  “There you are,” Bahram said. “Come on, Father, Al-Razi and Mary the Jewess will be no help to you now. It’s time to show the world the thing itself, the projection.”

  Khalid, startled to see him, nodded curtly. “I was making the last preparations,” he said. He led Bahram into the furnace shed, where the geared bellows, powered by the waterwheel on the river, pumped air into the roaring fires.

  The Khan and his party arrived quite late, when much of the afternoon was spent. Twenty horsemen thundered in, their finery gleaming, and then a camel train fifty beasts long, all foaming at the gallop. The Khan dismounted from his white bay and walked across the yard with Nadir Devanbegi at his side, and several court officials at their heels.

  Khalid’s attempt at a formal greeting, including the presentation of a gift of one of his most cherished alchemical books, was cut short by Sayyed Adbul Aziz. “Show us,” the Khan commanded, taking the book without looking at it.

  Khalid bowed. “The alembi
c I used is this one here, called a pelican. The base matter is mostly calcinated lead, with some mercurials. They have been projected by continuous distillation and re-distillation, until all the matter has passed through the pelican seven hundred and seventy-seven times. At that point the spirit in the lion — well, to put it in more worldly terms, the gold condenses out at the highest athanor heat. So, we pour the wolf into this vessel, and put that in the athanor, and wait for an hour, stirring meanwhile seven times.”

  “Show us.” The Khan was clearly bored by the details.

  Without further ado Khalid led them into the furnace shed, and his assistants opened the heavy thick door of the athanor, and after allowing the visitors to handle and inspect the ceramic bowl, Khalid grabbed up tongs and poured the grey distillate into the bowl, and placed the tray in the athanor and slid it into the intense heat. The air over the furnace shimmered as Sayyed Abdul Aziz’s mullah said prayers, and Khalid watched the second hand of his best clock. Every five minutes he gestured to the puffers, who opened the door and pulled out the tray, at which point Khalid stirred the liquid metal, now glowing orange, with his ladle, seven times seven circles, and then back into the heat of the fire. In the last minutes of the operation, the crackle of the charcoal was the only sound in the yard. The sweating observers, including many acquaintances from the town, watched the clock tick out the last minute of the hour in a silence like that of sufis in a trance of speechlessness, or like, Bahram thought uneasily, hawks inspecting the ground far below.