The Years of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  And finally, very late in the night, when no more than a dozen of them remained, and the waiters of the restaurant looked as if they wanted to close down, Piali looked around the room, and got a nod from Abdol Zoroush, and said to Budur, “Dr. Chen here,” indicating a white-haired Chinese man at the far end of the table, who nodded, “has brought work from his team on the matter of alactin. This was one of the things Idelba was working on, as you know. He wanted to share this work with all of us here. They have made the same determinations we have, concerning the splitting of the alactin atoms, and how this might be exploited to make an explosive. But they have done further calculations, which the rest of us have checked during the conference, including Master Ananda here,” and another old man seated next to Chen nodded, “that make it clear that the particular form of alactin that would be necessary for any explosive chain reaction, is so rare in nature that it could not be gathered in sufficient quantities. A natural form would have to be gathered first, and then processed in factories, in a process that right now is hypothetical only; and even if made practicable, it would be so difficult that it would take the entire industrial capacity of a state to produce enough material to make even a single bomb.”

  “Really?” Budur said.

  They all nodded, looking quietly relieved, even happy. Dr Chen’s translator spoke to him in Chinese and he nodded and said something back.

  The translator said in Persian, “Dr Chen would like to add, that from his observations it seems very unlikely any country will be able to create these materials for many years, even if they should want to. So we are safe. Safe from that, anyway.”

  “I see,” Budur said, and nodded at the elderly Chinese. “As you know, Idelba would be very pleased to have heard these results! She was quite worried, as no doubt you know. But she would also press again for some kind of international scientific organization, of atomic physicists perhaps. Or a more general scientific group, that would take steps to make sure humanity is never threatened by these possibilities. After what the world has just been through in the war, I don’t think it could take the introduction of some super-bomb. It would lead to madness.”

  “Indeed,” Piali said, and when her words were translated, Dr Chen spoke again.

  His translator said, “The esteemed professor says that he thinks scientific committees to augment, or advise —”

  Dr Chen intervened with a comment.

  “To guide the world’s governments, he says, by telling them what is possible, what is advisable . . . He says he thinks this could be done unobtrusively, in the postwar . . . exhaustion. He says he thinks governments will agree to the existence of such committees, because at first they will not be aware of what it means . . . and by the time they learn what it means, they will be unable to . . . to dismantle them. And so scientists could take a . . . a larger role in political affairs. This is what he said.”

  The others around the table were nodding thoughtfully, some cautious, others worried; no doubt most of the men there were funded by their governments.

  Piali said, “We can at least try. It would be a very good way to remember Idelba. And it may work. It seems it would help, at the very least.”

  Everyone nodded again, and after translation, Dr Chen nodded too.

  Budur ventured to say, “It might be introduced simply as a matter of scientists doing science, coordinating their efforts, you know, as part of doing better science. At first simple things that look completely innocuous, like uniform weights and measures, rationalized mathematically. Or a solar calendar that is accurate to the Earth’s actual movement around the sun. Right now we don’t even agree on the date. We all come here in different years, as you know, and now our hosts have resuscitated yet another system. Right now there must be constant multiple listings of dates. We don’t even agree on the length of the year. In effect we are still living in different histories, even though it is just one world, as the war taught us. You scientists should perhaps gather your mathematicians and astronomers, and establish a scientifically accurate calendar, and start using it for all scientific work. That might lead to some larger sense of world community.”

  “How would we start it?” someone asked.

  Budur shrugged; she hadn’t thought about that part of it. What would Idelba say? “What about just starting now? Call this meeting the zero date. It’s spring, after all. Start the year on the spring equinox, perhaps, as most years already do, and then simply number the days of every year, avoiding the various ways of calculating months and the like, the seven-day weeks, the ten-day weeks, all that. Or something else simple, something beyond culture, unarguable because it is physical in origin. Day two fifty-seven of Year One. Forwards and backwards from that zero date, three hundred and sixty-five days, leap days added, whatever it takes to be accurate to nature. Then as these kinds of matters are all universalized, or made standard all over the world, when the time comes that governments come to put pressure on their scientists to work for just one part of humanity, they can say, I’m sorry, science doesn’t work that way. We are a system for all peoples. We only work to make things so that they will be all right.”

  The translator was saying all this in Chinese to Dr Chen, who watched Budur closely as she spoke. When she had finished, he nodded and said something.

  The translator said, “He says, those are good ideas. He says, let’s try them and see.”

  • • •

  After that evening, Budur continued to attend the sessions, and take her notes, but she was distracted by thoughts of the private discussions she knew were taking place among the physicists on the other side of the madressa: the plans being made. Piali told her all about them. Her notes tended to become lists of things to do. In sunny Isfahan, a city that was old but entirely new, like a garden just planted in a vast set of ruins, it was easy to forget how hungry they were in Firanja, in China and Africa and indeed over most of the world. On paper it seemed as if they could save everything.

  One morning, however, she passed a poster presentation that caught her attention, called “A Tibetan Village Found Intact”. It looked just the same as a hundred other hallway exhibits, but something about it caught her. Like most of them, it had its principal text in Persian, with smaller translated texts in Chinese, Tamil, Arabic and Algonquin, the “big five” languages of the conference. The presenter and author of the poster was a big flat-faced young woman, nervously answering questions from a small group, no more than half a dozen people, who had gathered to hear her formal presentation. She was Tibetan herself, apparently, and was using one of the Iranian translators to answer any questions she got. Budur wasn’t sure if she was speaking in Tibetan or Chinese.

  In any case, as she was explaining to someone else, an avalanche and landslide had covered a high mountain village in Tibet, and preserved everything within as if in a giant rocky refrigerator, so that bodies had stayed frozen, and everything been preserved — furniture, clothing, food, even the last messages that two or three literate villagers had written down, before the lack of air had killed them.

  The tiny photos of the excavated village made Budur feel very odd. Ticklish just behind her nose, or above the roof of her mouth, until she thought she might sneeze, or retch, or cry. There was something awful about the corpses, almost unchanged through all the centuries; surprised by death, but forced to wait for it. Some of them had even written down goodbye messages. She looked at the photos of the messages, crammed into a margin of a religious book; handwriting clear, looking like Sanskrit. The Arabic translation underneath one had a homely sound:

  “We have been buried by a big avalanche, and can not get out. Kenpo is still trying, but it is not going to work. The air is getting bad. We do not have much time. In this house we are Kenpo, Iwang, Sidpa, Zasep, Dagyab, Tenga and Baram. Puntsok left just before the avalanche hit, we don’t know what happened to him. ‘All existence is like a reflection in the mirror, without substance, a phantom of the mind. We will take form again in another plac
e.’ All praise to Buddha the Compassionate.”

  The photos looked somewhat like those Budur had seen of certain wartime disasters, death impinging without much of a mark on daily life, except that everything was changed for ever. Looking at them Budur felt dizzy all of a sudden, and in the hall of the conference chamber she could almost feel the shock of snow and rock falling on her roof, trapping her. And all her family and friends. But this was how it had happened. This was how it happened.

  She was still under the spell of this poster, when Piali came hurrying up. “I’m afraid we should get back home as fast as possible. The army command has suspended the government, and is trying to take over Nsara.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  They flew back the next day, Piali fretting at the slowness of the airship, wishing that the military aeroplanes had been adapted more generally for civilian passenger use, also wondering if they would be arrested on their arrival, as intellectuals visiting a foreign power during a time of national emergency, or some such thing.

  But when their airship landed at the airfield outside Nsara, not only were they not arrested, but in fact, looking out of the windows of the tram as it rolled into the city, it was impossible to tell that anything at all had changed.

  It was only when they got out of the tram and walked over to the madressa district that a difference became apparent. The docks were quieter. The longshoremen had closed down the docks to protest about the coup. Now soldiers stood guard over the cranes and gantries, and groups of men and women stood on the street corners watching them.

  Piali and Budur went into the offices of the physics building, and heard all the latest from Piah’s colleagues. The army command had dissolved the Nsarene state council and the district panchayats, and declared martial law over all. They were calling it sharia, and they had a few mullahs going along with it to provide some religious legitimacy, though it was very slight; the mullahs involved were hardline reactionaries out of step with everything that had happened in Nsara since the war, part of the “we won” crowd, or, as Hasan had always called them, the “we would have won if it weren’t for the Armenians, Sikhs, Jews, Zott, and whoever else we dislike” crowd, the “we would have won if the rest of the world hadn’t beaten the shit out of us” crowd. To be among like-minded people they should have moved to the Alpine emirates or Afghanistan long before.

  So no one was fooled by the facade of the coup. And as things had recently been getting a bit better, the timing of the coup was not particularly good. It made no sense; apparently it had only happened because the officers had been living on fixed incomes during the period of hyperinflation, and thought everyone else was as desperate as they were. But many, many people were still sick of the army, and supportive of their district panchayats if not of the state council. So it seemed to Budur that the chances for successful resistance were good.

  Kirana was much more pessimistic. She was in the hospital now, as it turned out; Budur went running over to it the moment she found out, feeling raw and frightened. For tests only, Kirana informed her brusquely, though she did not identify them; something to do with her blood or her lungs, Budur gathered. Nevertheless, from her hospital bed she was calling every zawiyya in the city, organizing things. “They’ve got the guns so they may win, but we’re not going to make it easy.”

  Many of the madressa and institute’s students were already out in crowds on the central plaza, and the corniche and docks, and the grand mosque’s courtyards, shouting, chanting, singing, and sometimes throwing stones. Kirana was not satisfied with these efforts, but spent all her time on the phone trying to schedule a rally: “They’ll have you back behind the veil, they’ll try to turn back the clock until you are all domestic animals again, you have to get out in the streets in great numbers, this is the only thing that scares coup leaders” — always “you” and not “we”, Budur noticed, excluding herself as if speaking posthumously, although she was clearly pleased to be involved in all the activities. And pleased also that Budur was visiting her in the hospital.

  “They mistimed it,” she said to Budur with a kind of mordant glee. Not only were the food shortages getting better, but it was spring, and as sometimes happened in Nsara, the endlessly cloudy skies had abruptly cleared and the sun was shining day after day, illuminating new greens that welled up everywhere in the gardens and the cracks in the pavement. The sky was washed clear and gleaming like lapis overhead, and when twenty thousand people gathered on the commercial docks and marched down Sultana Katima Boulevard to the Mosque of the Fishermen, many thousands more came to watch, and joined the crowd marching, until when the army ringing the district shot pepper gas canisters into the crowd, people poured in every direction out of the big transverse streets, cutting through the medinas flanking the Liwayya River, causing it to appear that the whole city had rioted. After those hurt by the gas were cared for, the crowd returned bigger than it had been before the attack.

  This happened two or three times in a single day, until the huge square before the city’s great mosque and the old palace was completely filled with people, facing the barbed wire fronting the old palace and singing songs, listening to speeches, and chanting slogans and various suras of the Quran that supported the rights of the people against the ruler. The square never emptied, nor even grew uncrowded; people went home for meals and other necessities, leaving the young to carouse through the nights, but they refilled the square during the beautiful lengthening days to bear witness. The whole city was in effect shut down for all of the first month of spring, like an extreme Ramadan.

  One day Kirana was pushed to the palace square in a wheelchair by her students, and she grinned at the sight. “Now this is what works,” she said. “Sheer numbers!”

  They brought her through the crowd to the rough podium they were constructing daily, made of dock pallets, and got her up there to make a speech, which she did with gusto, in her usual style, despite her physical weakness. She grabbed the microphone of the amplifier and said to them:

  “What Mohammed began was the idea that all humans had rights that could not be taken away from them without insulting their creator. Allah made all humans equally His creatures, and none are to serve others. This message came into a time very far from these practices, and the course of progress in history has been the story of the clarification of these principles of Islam, and the establishment of true justice. Now we are here to continue that work!

  “In particular women have had to struggle against misinterpretation of the Quran, jailed in their homes and their veils and their illiteracy, until Islam itself foundered under the general ignorance of all — for how can men be wise and prosper when they spend their first years taught by people who don’t know anything?

  “Thus we fought the Long War and lost it, for us it was the Nakba. Not the Armenians or the Burmese or the Jews or the Hodenosaunee or the Africans were responsible for our defeat, nor any problem with Islam itself fundamentally, as it is the voice of the love of God and the wholeness of humanity, but only the historical miscarriage of Islam, distorted as it has been.

  “Now, we have been facing that reality in Nsara ever since the war ended, and we have made great strides. We have all witnessed and taken part in the burst of good work done here, despite physical privations of every sort and underneath the constant rain.

  “Now the generals think they can stop all this and turn the clock back, as if they did not lose the war and cast us into this necessity of creation that we have used so well. As if time could ever run backwards! Nothing like that can ever happen! We have made a new world here on old ground, and Allah protects it, through the actions of all the people who truly love Islam and its chances to survive in the world to come.

  “So we have gathered here to join the long struggle against oppression, to join all the revolts, rebellions and revolutions, all the efforts to take power away from the armies, the police, the mullahs, and give it back to the people. Every victory has been incremental, a matter of two steps f
orwards one step back, a struggle for ever. But each time we progress a little further, and no one is going to push us backwards! If they expect to succeed in such a project, the government will have to dismiss the people and appoint another one! But I don’t think that’s how it happens.”

  This was well received, and the crowd kept growing, and Budur was pleased to see how many were women, working women from the kitchens and the canning factories, women for whom the veil or the harem had never been an issue, but who had suffered as they all had with the war and the crash; indeed they formed the raggedest, hungriest-looking mob possible, with a tendency merely to stand there as if asleep on their feet., and yet there they were, filling the squares, refusing to work; and on Friday they faced Mecca only when one of the revolutionary clerics stood among them, not a policeman in a pulpit, but a man among neighbours, as Mohammed had been in his life. As it was Friday, this particular cleric said the first chapter of the Quran, the Fatiha, known to everyone, even the large group of Buddhists and Hodenosaunee always standing there among them, so that the whole crowd could recite it together, over and over many times:

  “Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds!

  The compassionate, the merciful!

  King on the day of reckoning!

  Thee only do we worship, and to Thee do we cry for help.

  Guide us on the straight path,

  The path of those to whom Thou hast been gracious;

  With whom thou art not angry, and who go not astray!”

  The next morning this same cleric got up on the dais and started the day by reciting into the microphone a poem by Ghaleb, waking people up and calling them out to the square again:

  “Soon I will be only a story

  But the same is true of you.

  I hope the bardo will not be empty

  But people do not yet know where they live.

  Past and future all mixed together,