The Years of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  So it seems apparent that the Chinese are the rising dominant power in the world, in competition with the previous dominant power, Dar al-Islam, which still exerts a powerful attraction to people hoping for justice before God, if no longer much expecting it on Earth. India then exists as a third culture between the other two, a go-between and influence on both, while also of course influenced by both. Meanwhile the primitive New World cultures, newly connected to the bulk of humanity, immediately subjugated by them, struggle to survive.

  So. To a very great extent human history has been the story of the unequal accumulation of harvested wealth, shifting from one centre of power to another, while always expanding the four great inequalities. This is history. Nowhere, as far as I know, has there ever been a civilization or moment when the wealth of the harvests, created by all, has been equitably distributed. Power has been exerted wherever it can be, and each successful coercion has done its part to add to the general inequality, which has risen in direct proportion to the wealth gathered; for wealth and power are much the same. The possessors of the wealth in effect buy the armed power they need to enforce the growing inequality. And so the cycle continues.

  The result has been that while a small percentage of human beings have lived in a wealth of food, material comfort and learning, those not so lucky have been the functional equivalent of domestic beasts, in harness to the powerful and well-off, creating their wealth for them but not benefiting from it themselves. If you happen to be a young black farm girl, what can you say to the world, or the world to you? You exist under all four of the great inequalities, and will live a shortened life of ignorance, hunger and fear. Indeed it only takes one of the great inequalities to create such conditions.

  So it must be said that the majority of humans ever to have lived, have existed in conditions of immiseration and servitude to a small minority of wealthy and powerful people. For every emperor and bureaucrat, for every caliph and qadi, for every full rich life, there have been ten thousand of these stunted, wasted lives. Even if you grant a minimal definition of a full life, and say that the strength of spirit in people, and the solidarity among people, have given many and many of the world’s poor and powerless a measure of happiness and achievement amidst their struggle, still, there are so many who have lived lives destroyed by immiseration that it seems impossible to avoid concluding that there have been more lives wasted than fully lived.

  All the world’s various religions have attempted to explain or mitigate these inequalities, including Islam, which originated in the effort to create a realm in which all are equal; they have tried to justify the inequalities in this world. They all have failed; even Islam has failed; the Dar al-Islam is as damaged by inequality as anywhere else. Indeed I now think that the Indian and Chinese description of the afterlife, the system of the six lokas or realms of reality — the devas, asuras, humans, beasts, pretas, and inhabitants of hell — is in fact a metaphorical but precise description of this world and the inequalities that exist in it, with the devas sitting in luxury and judgment on the rest, the asuras fighting to keep the devas in their high position, the humans getting by as humans do, the beasts labouring as beasts do, the homeless preta suffering in fear at the edge of hell, and the inhabitants of hell enslaved to pure immiseration.

  My feeling is that until the number of whole lives is greater than the number of shattered lives, we remain stuck in some kind of prehistory, unworthy of humanity’s great spirit. History as a story worth telling will only begin when the whole lives outnumber the wasted ones. That means we have many generation’s to go before history begins. All the inequalities must end; all the surplus wealth must be equitably distributed. Until then we are still only some kind of gibbering monkey, and humanity, as we usually like to think of it, does not yet exist.

  To put it in religious terms, we are still indeed in the bardo, waiting to be born.

  • • •

  The old woman read the pages her husband had given her, walking up and down their long verandah, full of agitation. When she had finished, she put her hand on his shoulder. The day was coming to its end; the sky in the west was indigo, a new moon resting in it like a scythe. The black river flowed below them. She went to her own writing stand, at the far end of the verandah, and took up her brush, and in quick blind strokes filled a page.

  Two wild geese fly north in the twilight.

  One bent lotus droops in the shallows.

  Near the end of this existence

  Something like anger fills my breast;

  A tiger: next time I will hitch it

  To my chariot. Then watch me fly.

  No more hobbling on these bad feet.

  Now there is nothing left to do

  But scribble in the dusk and watch with the beloved

  Peach blossoms float downstream.

  Looking back at all the long years

  All that happened this way and that

  I think I liked most the rice and the salt.

  BOOK SEVEN

  The Age of Great Progress

  Chapter One

  The Fall of Konstantiniyye

  The Ottoman Sultan Caliph Selim the Third’s doctor, Ismail ibn Mani al-Dir, began as an Armenian qadi who studied law and medicine in Konstantiniyye. He rose quickly through the ranks of the Ottoman bureaucracy by the efficacy of his ministrations, until eventually the Sultan required him to tend one of the women of his seraglio. The harem girl recovered under Ismail’s care, and shortly thereafter Sultan Selim too was cured by Ismail, of a complaint of the skin. After that the Sultan made Ismail the chief doctor of the Sublime Porte and its seraglio.

  Ismail then spent his time slipping about unobtrusively from patient to patient, continuing his medical education as doctors do, by practising. He did not attend court functions. He filled thick books with case studies, recording symptoms, medicines, treatments and results. He attended the janissaries’ inquisitions as required, and kept notes there as well.

  The Sultan, impressed by his doctor’s dedication and skill, took an interest in his case studies. The bodies of all the janissaries he had executed in the counter-coup of the year 1202 were put at Ismail’s disposal, and the religious ban on autopsy and dissection declared invalid for this case of executed criminals. A lot of work had to be completed quickly, even with the bodies on ice, and indeed the Sultan participated in several of the dissections himself, asking questions at every cut. He was quick to see and suggest the advantages of vivisection.

  One night in the year 1207, the Sultan called his doctor to the palace in the Sublime Porte. One of his old stablehands was dying, and Selim had had him made comfortable on a bed placed on one balance of a large scale, with weights of gold piled on the other balance, so that the two big pans hung level in the middle of the room.

  As the old man lay on his bed wheezing, the Sultan ate a midnight meal and watched. He told the doctor that he was sure this method would allow them to determine the presence of the soul, if one existed, and its weight.

  Ismail stood at the side of the stablehand’s elevated bed, fingering the old man’s wrist gently. The old man’s breaths weakened, became gasps. The Sultan stood and pulled Ismail back, pointing to the scale’s extremely fine fulcrum. Nothing was to be disturbed.

  The old man stopped breathing. “Wait,” the Sultan whispered. “Watch.”

  They watched. There were perhaps ten people in the room. It was perfectly silent and still, as if all the world had stopped to witness the test.

  Slowly, very slowly, the balance tray holding the dead man and his bed began to rise. Somebody gasped. The bed rose and hung in the air overhead. The old man had lightened.

  “Take away the very smallest weight from the other tray,” the Sultan whispered. One of his bodyguards did so, removing a few flakes of gold leaf. Then some more. Finally the tray holding the dead man in the air began to descend, until it drifted below the height of the other one. The bodyguard put the smallest flake back on. Skilfully he rebalan
ced the scale. The man at dying had lost a quarter grain of weight.

  “Interesting!” the Sultan declared in his normal voice. He returned to his repast, gesturing to Ismail. “Come, eat. Then tell me what you think of these rabble from the cast, whom we hear are attacking us.”

  The doctor indicated that he did not have an opinion.

  “Surely you have heard things,” the Sultan encouraged him. “Tell me what you have heard.”

  “Like everyone else, I have heard they come from the south of India,” Ismail said obediently. “The Mughals have been defeated by them. They have an effective army, and a navy that moves them around and shells coastal cities. Their leader styles himself the Kerala of Travancore. They have conquered the Safavids, and attacked Syria and Yemen —”

  “This is all old news,” the Sultan interrupted. “What I require of you, Ismail, is explanation. How have they managed to accomplish these things?”

  Ismail said, “I do not know, Excellency. The few letters I have received from medical colleagues to the east do not discuss military matters. I gather their army moves quickly, I have heard a hundred leagues a day.”

  “A hundred leagues! How is that possible?”

  “I do not know. One of my colleagues wrote of treating burn wounds. I hear their armies spare those they capture, and set them to farm in areas they have conquered.”

  “Curious. They are Hindu?”

  “Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh — I get the impression they practise some mix of these three faiths, or some kind of new religion, made up by this sultan of Travancore. Indian gurus often do this, and he is apparently that kind of leader.”

  Sultan Selim shook his head. “Eat,” he commanded, and Ismail took up a cup of sherbet. “Do they attack with Greek fire, or the black alchemy of Samarqand?”

  “I don’t know. Samarqand itself has been abandoned, I understand, after years of plague, and then earthquakes. But its alchemy may have been developed further in India.”

  “So we are being attacked by black magic,” reflected the Sultan, looking intrigued.

  “I cannot say.”

  “What about this navy of theirs?”

  “You know more than I, Excellency. I have heard they sail into the eye of the wind.”

  “More black magic!”

  “Machine power, Excellency. I have a Sikh correspondent who told me that they boil water in scaled pots, and force the steam through tubes, like bullets out of guns, and the steam pushes against paddles like a river pushing a waterwheel, and thus the ships are rowed forwards.”

  “Surely that would only move them backwards in the water.”

  “They could call that forwards, Excellency.”

  The Sultan stared suspiciously at his doctor. “Do any of these ships blow up?”

  “It seems as if they might, if something goes wrong.”

  Selim considered it. “Well, this should be most interesting! If a cannonball hits one of their boiler pots, it should blow up the whole ship!”

  “Very possibly.”

  The Sultan was pleased. “It will make for good target practice. Come with me.”

  He led his usual train of retainers out of the room: bodyguard of six, cook and waiters, astronomer, valet and the Chief Black Eunuch of the Seraglio, all trailing him and the doctor, whom the Sultan held by the shoulder. He brought Ismail through the Gate of Felicity into his harem without a word to its guards, leaving his retainers behind to figure out yet again who was intended to follow him into the seraglio. In the end only a waiter and the Chief Black Eunuch entered.

  In the seraglio all was gold and marble, silk and velvet, the walls of the outer rooms covered with religious paintings and icons from the age of Byzantium. The Sultan gestured to the Black Eunuch, who nodded to a guard at the far door.

  One of the harem concubines emerged, trailed by four maids: a white-skinned red-headed young woman, her naked body glowing in the gaslight jets. She was not an albino, but rather a naturally pale-skinned person, one of the famous white slaves of the seraglio, among the only known survivors of the vanished Firanjis. They had been bred for several generations by the Ottoman sultans, who kept the line pure. No one outside the seraglio ever saw the women, and no one outside the Sultan’s palace ever saw the men used for breeding.

  This young woman’s hair was a gold-burnished red, her nipples pink, her skin a translucent white that revealed blue veins under it, especially in her breasts, which were slightly engorged. The doctor reckoned her three months pregnant. The Sultan did not appear to notice; she was his favourite, and he still had her every day.

  The familiar routine unfolded. The odalisque walked to the draped area of her bed, and the Sultan followed, not bothering to pull the curtains. The ladies-in-waiting helped the woman to cushion herself properly, held her arms out, her legs spread and pulled up. Selim said “Ah yes,” and went to the bed. He pulled his erect member from his pantaloons and covered her. They rocked together in the usual fashion, until with a shudder and a grunt the Sultan finished and sat beside her, stroking her belly and legs.

  He looked over at Ismail as a thought occurred to him. “What is it like now where she came from?” he asked.

  The doctor cleared his throat. “I don’t know, Excellency.”

  “Tell me what you have heard.”

  “I have heard that Firanja west of Vienna is mainly divided between Andalusis and the Golden Horde. The Andalusis occupy the old Frankish lands and the islands north of it. They are Sunni, with the usual sufi and Wahhabi elements fighting for the patronage of the emirs. The east is a mix of Golden Horde and Safavid client princes, many of them Shiites Many sufi orders. They also have occupied the offshore islands, and the Roman peninsula, though it is mostly Berber and Maltese.”

  The Sultan nodded. “So they prosper.”

  “I don’t know. It rains there more than on the steppes, but there are mountains everywhere, or hills. There is a plain on the north coast where they grow grapes and the like. Al-Andalus and the Roman peninsula do well, I gather. North of the mountains it is harder. It’s said the lowlands are still pestilential.”

  “Why is that? What happened there?”

  “It’s damp and cold all the time. So it is said.” The doctor shrugged. “No one knows. It could be that the pale skin of the people there made them more susceptible to plague. That’s what Al-Ferghana said.”

  “But now good Muslims live there, with no ill effects.”

  “Yes. Balkan Ottomans, Andalusis, Safavids, the Golden Horde. All Muslim, except perhaps for some Jews and Zotts.”

  “But Islam is fractured.” The Sultan thought it over, brushing the odalisque’s red pubic hair with his palm. “Tell me again, where did this girl’s ancestors come from?”

  “The islands off the north coast of Frankland,” the doctor ventured. “England. They were very pale there, and some of the outermost islands escaped the plague, and their people were discovered and enslaved a century or two later. It is said they didn’t even know anything had changed.”

  “Good land?”

  “Not at all. Forest or rock. They lived on sheep or fish. Very primitive, almost like the New World.”

  “Where they have found much gold.”

  “England was known more for tin than gold, as I understand it.”

  “How many of these survivors were taken?”

  “I have read a few thousand. Most died, or were bred into the general populace. You may have the only purebreds left.”

  “Yes. And this one is pregnant by one of their men, I’ll have you know. We care for the men as carefully as we do the women, to keep the line going.”

  “Very wise.”

  The Sultan looked at his Black Eunuch. “I’m ready for Jasmina now.”

  In came another girl, very black, her body almost twin to that of the white girl, though this one was not pregnant. Together they looked like chess pieces. The black girl replaced the white one on the bed. The Sultan stood and went to her.

 
“Well, the Balkans are a sorry place,” he mused, “but farther west may be better. We could move the capital of the empire to Rome, just as they moved theirs here.”

  “Yes. But the Roman peninsula is fully repopulated.”

  “Venice too?”

  “No. Still abandoned, Excellency. It is often flooded, and the plague was particularly bad there.”

  Sultan Selim pursed his lips. “I don’t — ah — I don’t like the damp.”

  “No, Excellency.”

  “Well, we will have to fight them here. I will tell the troops that their souls, the most precious quarter grain of them, will rise up to the Paradise of Ten Thousand Years if they die in defence of the Sublime Porte. There they will live like I do here. We will meet these invaders down at the straits.”

  “Yes, Excellency.”

  “Leave me now.”

  • • •

  But when the Indian navy appeared it was not in the Aegean, but in the Black Sea, the Ottoman Sea. Little black ships crowding the Black Sea, ships with waterwheels on their sides, and no sails, only white plumes of smoke pouring out of chimneys topping black deckhouses. They looked like the furnaces of an ironworks, and it seemed they should sink like stones. But they didn’t. They puffed down the relatively unguarded Bosporus, blasting shore batteries to pieces, and anchored offshore the Sublime Porte. From there they fired explosive shells into Topkapi Palace, also into the mostly ceremonial batteries defending that side of the city, long-neglected as there had been no one to attack Konstantiniyye for centuries. To have appeared in the Black Sea — no one could explain it.

  In any case there they were, shelling the defences until they were pounded into silence, then firing shot after shot into the walls of the palace, and the remaining batteries across the Golden Horn, in Pera. The populace of the city huddled indoors, or took refuge in the mosques, or left the city for the countryside outside the Theodosian walls; soon the city seemed deserted, except for some young men out to watch the assault. More of these appeared in the streets as it began to seem that the iron ships were not going to bombard the city, but only Topkapi, which was taking a terrific beating despite its enormous impregnable walls.