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.
TWO
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 conference 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.
THREE
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 supercity 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 the 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 collection 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 delicate 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.
• • •
This monumental city, Pyinkayaing, was then Bao’s home for the next several years. He took a cable car high across the river to the League offices on the other bank, and worked on the balance-with-nature problems beginning to plague the world, wreaking such damage that even, Burma itself might some day suffer from it, unless they were to remove Pyinkayaing to the moon, which did not seem completely impossible given their enormous energy and confidence.
But they had not been a power long enough to have seen the way the wheel turns. Over the years Bao visited a hundred lands as part of his job, and many reminded him that in the long run of time, civilizations rise, then fall; and most, upon falling, never really rose again. The locus of power wandered the face of the earth like some poor restless immortal, following the sun. Presumably Burma would not be immune to that fate.
Bao now flew in the latest spaceplanes, popping out of the atmosphere like the artillery shells of the Long War, and landing on the other side of the globe three hours later; he also flew in the giant airships that still conveyed the bulk of traffic and cargo around the world, their slowness more than compensated for by their capacity, humming around like great ships in the sea of air, for the most part unsinkable. He conferred with officials in most of the countries of the Earth, and came to understand that their balance-with-nature problems were partly a matter of pure numbers, the human population of the planet rebounding so strongly from the Long War that it was now approaching ten billion people; and this could be more people than the planet could sustain, or so many scientists speculated, especially the more conservative ones, those of a kind of Daoist temperament, found in great numbers in China and Yingzhou especially.
But also, beyond the sheer number of people, there was the accumulation of things, and the uneven distribution of wealth, so that people in Pyinkayaing thought nothing of throwing a party in Ingoli or Fangzhang, spending ten years of a Maghribi’s life earnings on a weekend of pleasure; while people in Firanja and Inka still frequently suffered from malnutrition. This discrepancy existed despite the efforts of the League of All Peoples and the egalitarian movements in China, Firanja, Travancore and Yingzhou. In China the egalitarian movement came not just from Zhu’s vision, but also from the Daoist ideas of balance, as Zhu would always point out. In Travancore it rose out of the Buddhist idea of compassion, in Yingzhou from the Hodenosaunee idea of the equality of all, in Firanja from the idea of justice before God. Everywhere the idea existed, but the world still belonged to a tiny minority of rich; wealth had been accumulating for centuries in a few hands, and the people lucky enough to be born into this old aristocracy lived in the old manner, with the rights of kings now spread among the wealthy of the Earth. Money had replaced land as the basis of power, and money flowed according to its own gravity, its laws of accumulation, which though divorced from nature, were nevertheless the laws ruling most countries on Earth, no matter their religious or philosophical ideas of love, compassion, charity, equality, goodness and the like. Old Zhu had been right: humanity’s behaviour was still based on old laws, which determined how food and land and water and surplus wealth were owned, how the labour of the ten billions was owned. If these laws did not change, the living shell of the Earth might well be wrecked, and inherited by seagulls and ants and cockroaches.
So Bao travelled, and talked, and wrote, and travelled again. For most of his career he worked for the League’s Agency for Harmony with Nature, trying for several years to coordinate efforts in the Old World and the New to keep some of the greater mammals alive; many of them were going extinct, and without action they would lose most of them, in an anthropogenic extinction event to rival even the global crashes now being found in the fossil record.
He came back from these diplomatic missions to Pyinkayaing, after travelling in the big new airships that were a combination of blimp and flyer, hovercraft and catamaran, skating over the water or in the air depending on weather conditions and freight loads. He looked down on the world from his apartment, and saw the human relationship to nature drawn in the calligraphy of the water taxis’ wakes, the airships’ contrails, the great canyons formed by the city’s skyscrapers. This was his world, changing every year; and when he visited Beijing and tried to remember his youth, or went to Kwinana in Aozhou, to see his son Zhao and family there, or when he tried to remember Pan Xichun — even when he visited Fangzhang once, the actual site of those years — he could scarcely call them to mind. Or, to be more precise — for he could remember a great many things that had happened — it was the feeling for these things that was gone away, leached out by the years. They if they had happened to someone else. As if they had been were as if previous incarnations.
It was someone else in the League offices who thought to invite Zhu Isao himself to Pyinkayaing, and teach a set of classes to the League workers and anyone else who cared to attend. Bao was surprised when he saw this notice; he had assumed that somewhere along the way Zhu must have died, it had been so long since they had all changed China together; and Zhu had been ancient then. But that turned out to have been a youthful mistake on Bao’s part; Zhu was about ninety now, he was informed, meaning he had been only about seventy years old at that time. Bao had to laugh at his youthful miscalculation, so characteristic of the young. He signed up for the course with great anticipation.
• • •
Zhu Isao turned out to be a sprightly white-haired old man, small but no smaller than he had been all those years before, with a lively curious look in his eye. He shook Bao’s hand when Bao went up before the introductory lecture, and smiled a slight but friendly smile: “I remember you,” he said. “One of Kung Jianguo’s officers, isn’t that right?” And Bao gripped his hand hard, ducking his head in assent. He sat down feeling warm. The old man still walked with the ghost of a limp from that terrible day. But he had been happy to see Bao.
In his first lecture he outlined his plan for the course, which he hoped would be a series of conversations on history, discussing how it was constructed, and what it meant, and how they might use it to help them plot their course forwards through the next difficult decades, “when we have to learn at last how to inhabit the Earth”.
Bao kept notes as he listened to the old man, tapping at his little hand lectern, as did many others in the class. Zhu explained that he hoped first to describe and discuss the various theories of history that had been proposed through the centuries, and then to analyse those theories, not only by testing them in the description of actual events, “difficult since events as such are remembered for how well they prop up the various theories”, but also for how the theories themselves were structured, and what sort of futures they implied, “this being their chief use to us. I take it that what matters in a history is what there is in it we can put to use.”
So, over the next few months a pattern was set, and every third day the group would meet in a room high in one of the League buildings overlooking the Irrawaddy: a few score diplomats, local students, and younger historians from everywhere, many of whom had come to Pyinkayaing specifically for this class. All sat and listened to Zhu talk, and though Zhu kept encouraging them to enter the discussion and make of it a large conversation, they were mostly content to listen to him think aloud, only egging him on with their questions. “Well, but I am here to listen too,” he would object, and then, when pressed to continue, would relent. “I must be like Pao Ssu, I suppose, who used to say ‘I am a good listener, I listen by talking’.”
So they made their way through discussions of the four civilizations theory, made famous by al-Katalan; and al-Lanzhou’s collision of cultures theory, of progress by conflict (“clearly accurate in some sense, as there has been much conflict and much progress”); the somewhat similar conjunction theories, by which unnoticed conjunctions of developments, often in unrelated fields of endeavour, had great consequences. Zhu’s many examples of this included one he presented with a small smile: the introduction of coffee and printing presses at around the same time in caliphate Ir
an, causing a great outpouring of literature. They discussed the theory of the eternal return, which combined Hindu cosmologies with the latest in physics to suggest that the universe was so vast and ancient that everything possible had not only happened, but had happened an infinite number of times (“limited usefulness to that one, except to explain the feeling you get that things have happened before”); and the other cyclical theories, often based on the cycle of the seasons, or the life of the body.
Then he mentioned “dharma history” or “Burmese history”, meaning any history that believed there was progress towards some goal making itself manifest in the world, or in plans for the future; also “Bodhisattva history”, which suggested that there were enlightened cultures that had sprung ahead somehow, and then gone back to the rest and worked to bring them forwards — early China, Travancore, the Hodenosaunee, the Japanese diaspora, Iran — all these cultures had been proposed as possible examples of this pattern, “though it seems to be a matter of individual or cultural judgment, which is less than useful to historians seeking a global pattern. Although it is a weak criticism to call them tautological, for the truth is every theory is tautological. Our reality itself is a tautology.”
Someone brought up the old question of whether the “great man” or “mass movements” were the principal force for change, but Zhu immediately dismissed this as a false problem. “We are all great men, yes?”
“Maybe you are,” muttered the person sitting next to Bao.
“What has mattered are the moments of exposure in every life, when habit is no longer enough, and choices have to be made. That’s when everyone becomes the great man, for a moment; and the choices made in these moments, which come all too frequently, then combine to make history. In that sense I suppose I come down on the side of the masses, in that it has been a collective process, whatever else it is.
The Years of Rice and Salt Page 70