The Years of Rice and Salt (67 page)

Kirana said, “We must find the most Buddhist parts of Islam, perhaps. Cultivate those.”

“I say abandon all the past!” Click click click!

Naser shook his head. “Then there could arise a new, scientific savagery. As during the war. We have to retain the values that seem good, that foster compassion. We have to use the best of the old to make a new way, better than before.”

“That seems good policy to me,” Kirana said. “And it's what Muhammad told us to do, after all.”

8
Thus the bitter skepticism of the old woman, the stubborn hope of the old soldier, the insistent inquiry of Kirana, an inquiry that never got to the answers she wanted, but forged on through idea after idea, testing them against her sense of things, and against thirty years of insatiable reading, and the seedy life behind the docks of Nsara. Budur, wrapping herself in her oilcloth raincoat and hunching through the drizzle home to the zawiyya, felt the invisibilities welling up all around her—the hot quick disapproval of maimed young men who passed on the street, the clouds lowering overhead, the secret worlds infolded inside everything that Aunt Idelba was working on at the lab. Her job sweeping up and restocking the empty place at night was . . . suggestive. Greater things lay in the final distillation of all this work, in the formulas scrawled on the blackboards. There were years of mathematical work behind the experiments of the physicists, centuries of work now being realized in material explorations that might bring new worlds. Budur did not feel she could ever learn the maths involved, but the labs had to run right for anything to progress, and she began to get involved in ordering supplies, keeping the kitchen and dining halls running, paying the bills (the qi bill was huge).

Meanwhile the talk between the scientists went on, endless as the chatter in the cafés. Idelba and her nephew Piali spent long sessions at the blackboards running over their ideas and proposing solutions to their mysterious mysteries, absorbed, pleased, also often worried, an edge in Idelba's voice, as if the equations were somehow revealing news she did not like or could not quite believe. Again she spent lots of time on the telephone, this time the one in its little closet in the zawiyya, and she was often gone without saying where she had been. Budur couldn't tell if all these matters were connected or not. There was a lot about Idelba's life that she didn't know. Men that she talked to outside the zawiyya, packages, calls . . . It appeared from the vertical lines etched between her eyebrows that she had her hands full, that it was a complicated existence somehow.

“Whatever is the problem with this study you are doing with Piali and the others?” Budur asked her one night as Idelba very thoroughly cleaned out her desk. They were the last ones there, and Budur felt a solid satisfaction at that; that here in Nsara they were trusted with matters; it was this that made her bold enough to interrogate her aunt.

Idelba stopped her cleaning to look at her. “We have some reason for worry, or so it seems. You must not talk to anyone about this. But—well—as I you told before, the world is made of atoms, tiny things with heartknots, and around them lightning motes traveling in concentric shells. All this at so small a scale it's hard to imagine. Each speck of dust you sweep up is made of millions of them. There are billions of them in the tips of your fingers.”

She wiggled her grimy hands in the air. “And yet each atom stores a lot of energy. Truly it is like trapped lightning, this qi energy, you have to imagine that kind of blazing power. Many trillionqi in every little thing.” She gestured at the big circular mandala painted on one wall, their table of the elementals, Arabic letters and numerals encrusted with many extra dots. “Inside the heartknot there is a force holding all that energy together, as I told you, a force very strong at very close distances, binding the lightning power to the heart so tightly it can never be released. Which is good, because the amounts of energy contained are really very high. We pulse with it.”

“That's how it feels,” Budur said.

“Indeed. But look, it's many times beyond what we can feel. The formula proposed, as I told you, is energy equals the mass times the speed of light squared, and light is very fast indeed. So that with only a little matter, if any of its energy were released into the world . . .” She shook her head. “Of course the strong force means that would never happen. But we continue to investigate this element alactin, which the Travancori physicists call Hand of Tara. I suspect its heartknot is unstable, and Piali is beginning to agree with me. Clearly it is very full of the jinn, both yin and yang, in such a fashion that to me it is acting like a droplet of water held together by surface tension, but so big that the surface tension is just barely holding it, and it stretches out like a water drop in the air, deforming this way and that, but held together, just, except for sometimes, when it stretches too far for surface tension, the strong force in this case, and then the natural repulsion between the jinn makes a heartknot split in two, becoming atoms of lead, but releasing some of its bound power as well, in the form of rays of invisible energy. That's what we are seeing on the photographic plates you help with. It's quite a bit of energy, and that's just one heartknot breaking. What we have been wondering—what we have been forced to consider, given the nature of the phenomenon—is, if we gathered enough of these atoms together, and broke even one heartknot apart, would the released qi break a lot more of them at the same time, more and more again—all at the speed of light, in a space this big,” holding her hands apart. “If that might not set off a short chain reaction,” she said.

“Meaning . . .”

“Meaning a very big explosion!”

For a long time Idelba stared off into the space of pure mathematics, it seemed.

“Don't tell anyone about this,” she said again.

“I won't.”

“No one.”

“All right.”

Invisible worlds, full of energy and power: subatomic harems, each pulsing on the edge of a great explosion. Budur sighed as this image came to her. There was no escaping the latent violence at the heart of things. Even the stones were mortal.

9
Budur got up in the mornings at the zawiyya, helped in the kitchen and office—indeed, there was much that was the same about her work in the zawiyya and at the lab, and though the work felt quite different in each setting, it still had a basic tedium to it; her classes and her walks through the great city became the places to work on her dreams and ideas.

She walked along the harbor and the river, no longer expecting anyone from Turi to show up and take her back to her father's house. Much of the vast city remained unknown to her, but she had her routes through certain districts, and sometimes rode a tram out to its end just to see what kind of neighborhoods it went through. The ocean and river districts were her particular study, which of course gave her a lot to work on. Wan sunlight splintered through clouds galloping on the ocean onshore wind; she sat at cafés behind the docks, or across the sea road from the strands, reading and writing, and looked up to see whitecaps dashing themselves at the foot of the great lighthouse at the end of the jetty, or up the rocky coast to the north. She walked the beaches. Pale washed blues in the sky behind the tumbling clouds, the bruised blues of the ocean, the whites of cloud and broken wave; she loved the looks of these things, loved them with all her heart. Here she was free to be her whole self. It was worth all the rain to have the air washed so clean.

In one rather shabby and storm-beaten beach district at the end of tram line number six, there was a little Buddhist temple, and one day outside it Budur saw the Hodenosaunee mother and daughter from Kirana's class. They saw her and came over. “Hello,” the mother said. “You have come to visit us!”

“Actually I was just wandering around town,” Budur said, surprised. “I like this neighborhood.”

“I see,” the mother said politely, as if she didn't believe her. “I am sorry to have presumed, but we are acquainted with your aunt Idelba, and so I thought you may have been coming here on her behalf. But you don't—well—but would you like to come in?”

“Thank you.” Mystified a bit, Budur followed them into the compound, which contained a courtyard garden of shrubs and gravel, arranged around a bell next to a pond. Nuns in dark red dresses walked through on their way somewhere inside. One sat to talk with the Hodenosaunee women, whose names were Hanea and Ganagweh, mother and daughter. They all spoke in Firanjic, with a strong Nsarene accent mixed with something else. Budur listened to them talk about repairs to the roof. Then they invited her to come with them into a room containing a big wireless; Hanea sat before a microphone, and had a conversation in her language that crossed the ocean.

After that they joined a number of nuns in a meditation room, and sat chanting for a time. “So, you are Buddhists?” Budur asked the Hodenosaunee women when the session was over, and they had gone back out into the garden.

“Yes,” Hanea said. “It's common among our people. We find it very similar to our old religion. And I think it must also have been true that we liked the way it put us in league with the Japanese from the west side of our country, who are like us in so many other ways. We needed their help against the people from your side.”

“I see.”

They stopped before a group of women and men who were sitting in a circle chipping away at sandstone blocks, making large flat bricks, it seemed, perfectly shaped and polished. Hanea pointed at them and explained: “These are devotional stones, for the top of Chomolungma. Have you heard of this project?”

“No.”

“Well, you know, Chomolungma was the highest mountain in the world, but the top was destroyed by Muslim artillery during the Long War. So, now there is a project started, very slow of course, to replace the top of the mountain. Bricks like these are taken there, and then climbers who ascend Chomolungma carry one brick along with their lifegas canisters, and leave it on the summit for stonemasons to work into the new summit pyramid.”

Budur stared at the dressed blocks of stone, smaller than several of the boulders decorating the courtyard garden. She was invited to pick one up, and did so; it was about as heavy as three or four books in her arms.

“It will take a lot of these?”

“Many thousands. It is a very long-term project.” Hanea smiled. “A hundred years, a thousand years? It depends on how many climbers there are who want to carry one up the mountain. A considerable mass of stone was blasted away. But a good idea, yes? A symbol of a more general restoration of the world.”

They were preparing a meal in the kitchen, and invited Budur to join them, but she excused herself, saying she needed to catch the next tram back.

“Of course,” said Hanea. “Do give our greetings to your aunt. We look forward to meeting with her soon.”

She didn't explain what she meant, and Budur was left to think it over as she walked down to the beach stop and waited for the tram into town, huddling in its little glass shelter against the stiff blast of the wind. Half-asleep, she saw an image of a line of people, carrying a whole library of stone books to the top of the world.

10
“Come with me to the Orkneys,” Idelba said to her. “I could use your help, and want to show you the ruins there.”

“The Orkneys? Where are they again?”

It turned out they were the northernmost of the Keltic Isles, above Scotland. Most of Britain was occupied by a population that had originated in al-Andalus, the Maghrib and west Africa; then during the Long War the Hodenosaunee had built a big naval base in a bay surrounded by the main Orkney island, and they were still there, overseeing Firanja in effect, but also protecting by their presence some remnants of the original population, Kelts who had survived the influx of both Frank and Firanji, and of course the plague. Budur had read tales of these tall, pale-skinned, red-haired, blue-eyed survivors of the great plague; and as she and Idelba sat at a window table in the gondola of their airship, watching England's green hills pass slowly underneath them, dappled by cloud shadow and cut into large squares by crops, hedgerows, and gray stone walls, she wondered what it would be like to stand before a true Kelt—whether she would be able to bear their mute accusatory gaze, stand without flinching before the sight of their albinoesque skin and eyes.

But of course it was not like that at all. They landed to find the Orkney Islands were more rolling grassy hills, with scarcely a tree to be seen, except clustered around whitewashed farmhouses with chimneys at both ends, a design ubiquitous and apparently ancient, as it was replicated in gray ruins in fields near the current versions. And the Orcadians were not the spavined freckled inbred half-wits Budur had been expecting from the tales of the white slaves of the Ottoman sultan, but burly shouting fishermen in oils, red faced and straw haired in some cases, black or brown haired in others, shouting at each other like fisherfolk in any of the villages of the Nsarene coast. They were unselfconscious in their dealings with Firanjis, as if they were the normal ones and the Firanjis the exotics; which of course was true here. Clearly for them the Orkneys were all the world.

And when Budur and Idelba drove out into the country in a motorcart to see the island's ruins, they began to see why; the world had been coming to the Orkneys for three thousand years or more. They had reason to feel they were at the center of things, the crossroads. Every culture that had ever lived there, and there must have been ten of them through the centuries, had built using the island's stratified sandstone, which had been split by the waves into handy plates and beams and broad flat bricks, perfect for drywall, and even stronger if set in cement. The oldest inhabitants had also used the stones to build their bedframes and kitchen shelves, so that here, in a small patch of grass overlooking the western sea, it was possible to look down into stone houses that had had the sand filling them removed, and see the domestic arrangements of people who had lived over five thousand years before, it was said, their very tools and furniture just as they had been left. The sunken rooms looked to Budur just like her own rooms in the zawiyya. Nothing essential had changed in all that time.