The Years of Rice and Salt (73 page)

Budur stopped reading. A deep silence filled the room. Some of the men nodded their heads, as if to say, Yes, that's the way it happens; I've had that very thought for years; still others reached out as if to snatch the book from her hands, or gestured as if waving her away, telling her to leave. If they had had their sight they would have walked her to the door, or done something; but as it was no one knew what to do.

She said something and got up and left, and walked downriver through the city, out onto the docks, then out the big jetty, out to its end. The beautiful blue sea sloshed against the boulders, hissing its clean salt mist into the air. Budur sat on the last sun-warmed rock and watched the clouds fly in over Nsara. She was as full of grief as the ocean was of water, but still, something in the sight of the noisy city was heartening to her; she thought, Nsara, now you are my only living relative. Now you will be my aunt Nsara.

20
And now she had to get to know Piali.

He was a small, self-absorbed man, dreamy and uncommunicative, seemingly full of himself. Budur had thought that his abilities in physics were compensated for by an exceptional lack of gracefulness.

But now she was impressed by the depth of his grief at Idelba's death. In life he had treated her, Budur often thought, as an embarrassing appurtenance, a needed but unwanted collaborator in his work. Now that she was gone, he sat on a jetty fishermen's bench where they had occasionally sat with Idelba when the weather was good, and sighed, saying, “She was such a joy to talk things over with, wasn't she? Our Idelba was a truly brilliant physicist, let me tell you. If she had been born a man, there would have been no end to it—she would have changed the world. Of course there were things she wasn't so good at, but she had such insight into the way things might work. And when we got stuck, Idelba would keep hammering away forever at the problem, forehead pounding the brick wall, you know, and I would stop, but she was persistent, and so clever at finding new ways to come at the thing, turning the flank if the wall wouldn't give. Lovely. She was a most lovely person.” He was deadly serious now, and emphasizing “person” rather than “woman,” as if Idelba had taught him some things about what women might be that he was not so stupid as to have missed. Nor would he fall into the error of exceptionalism, no physicist tended to think of exceptions as a valid category; and so now he spoke to Budur almost as he would have to Idelba or his male colleagues, only more intently, concentrating to achieve some semblance of normal humanity, perhaps—and yet achieving it. Almost. He was still a very distracted and graceless man. But Budur began to like him better.

This was a good thing, as Piali took an interest in her too, and over the next several months, courted her in his peculiar way; he came by the zawiyya, and got to know her house family there, and listened to her describe her problems with her studies in history, while also going on at nearly intolerable length about his problems in physics and at the institute. He shared with her a propensity for the café life as well, and did not seem to care about the assorted indiscretions she had committed since her arrival in Nsara; he ignored all that, and concentrated on things of the mind, even when sitting in a café sipping a brandy, and writing all over his napkins, one of his peculiar habits. They talked about the nature of history for hours, and it was under the impact of his deep skepticism, or materialism, that she finally completed the shift in the emphasis of her study from history to archaeology, from texts to things—convinced, in part, by his argument that texts were always just people's impressions, while objects had a certain unchangeable reality to them. Of course, the objects led directly to more impressions, and meshed with them in the web of proofs that any student of the past had to present in order to make a case; but to start with the tools and buildings rather than the words of the past was indeed a comfort to Budur. She was tired of distilling brandy. She began consciously to take on some of the inquisitiveness about the real world that Idelba had always exhibited, as a way of honoring her memory. She missed Idelba so much that she could not think of it directly, but had to parry it by homages such as these, invoking Idelba's presence by her habits, as if becoming a kind of Madame Sururi. It occurred to her more than once that there were ways in which we know the dead better than the living, because the actual person is no longer there to distract our thinking about them.

Following these various trains of thought, Budur also began to come up with a great number of questions that connected her work with Idelba's as she understood it, as she considered physical changes in the materials used in the past: chemical or physical or qi or qileak changes, which might be used as clocks, buried in the texture of the materials used. She asked Piali about this, and he quickly mentioned the shift over time in the types of particulates in the heartknots and shells, so that, for instance, lifering fourteens within a body would, after the death of an organism, begin slowly to fall back to lifering twelves, beginning about fifty years after the death of an organism and continuing for about a hundred thousand years, until all the lifering in the material was back to twelves, and the clock would stop functioning.

This would be long enough to date most human activities, Budur thought. She and Piali began to work on the method together, enlisting the help of other scientists at the institute. The idea was taken up and extended by a team of Nsarene scientists that grew by the month, and the effort quickly became global as well, in the usual way of science. Budur had never studied harder.

Thus it was
that over time she became an archaeologist, working among other things on dating methods, with the help of Piali. In effect she had replaced Idelba as Piali's partner, and he had therefore moved part of his work to a different field, to accommodate what she was doing. His method of relating to someone was to work with them; so even though she was younger, and in a different field, he simply adjusted and continued in his habitual way. He also continued to pursue his studies in atomic physics, of course, collaborating with many colleagues at the laboratories of the institute, and some of the scientists at the wireless factory on the outskirts of the city, whose lab was now beginning to match the madressa and the institute as a center of research in pure physics.

The military of Nsara were getting involved as well. Piali's physics research continued along the lines set by Idelba, and though there was nothing more published about the possibility of creating a chain-reaction splitting of alactin, there was certainly a small crowd of Muslim physicists, in Skandistan and Tuscany and Iran, who had discussed the possibility among themselves; and they suspected that similar discussions were taking place in Chinese and Travancori and New World labs. Internationally published papers on this aspect of physics were now analyzed in Nsara to see what they might have left out, to see if new developments one might expect to see were appearing or if sudden silences might mark government classification of these matters. So far no unequivocal signs of censorship or self-silencing had appeared, but Piali seemed to feel it was only a matter of time, and was probably happening in other countries as it was among them, semiconsciously and without a plan. As soon as there was another global political crisis, he said, before hostilities came to a head, one could expect the field to disappear entirely into classified military labs, and along with it a significant number of that generation of physicists, all cut off from contact with colleagues anywhere else in the world.

And of course trouble could come at any time. China, though victorious in the war, had been wrecked almost as thoroughly as the defeated coalition, and it appeared to be falling into anarchy and civil war. Apparently it was near the end for the wartime leadership that had replaced the Qing dynasty.

“That's good,” Piali told Budur, “because only a military bureaucracy would have tried to build a bomb so dangerous. But it's bad because military governments don't like to go down without a fight.”

“No government does,” said Budur. “Remember what Idelba said. The best defense against government seizure of these ideas would be to spread the knowledge among all the physicists of the world, as quickly as possible. If all know that all could construct such a weapon, then no one would try.”

“Maybe not at first,” Piali said, “but in years to come it might happen.”

“Nevertheless,” Budur said. And she continued to pester Piali to pursue Idelba's suggested course of action. He did not renounce it, nor did he make any move to enact it. Indeed, Budur had to agree with him that it was difficult to see exactly what to do about it. They sat on the secret like pigeons on a cuckoo egg.

Meanwhile the situation
in Nsara continued to deteriorate. A good summer had followed several bad ones, taking the sharpest edge off the possibility of famine, but nevertheless the newspapers were full of bread riots, and strikes in the factories on the Rhine and the Ruhr and the Rhône, and even a “revolt against reparations” in the Little Atlas Mountains, a revolt that could not easily be put down. The army appeared to have within it elements who were encouraging rather than suppressing these signs of unrest, perhaps out of sympathy, perhaps to destabilize things further and justify a complete military takeover. Rumors of a coup were widespread.

All this was depressingly similar to the endgame of the Long War, and hoarding increased. Budur found it hard to concentrate on her reading, and was often oppressed by grief for Idelba. She was surprised therefore, and pleased, when Piali brought news of a conference in Isfahan, an international gathering of atomic physicists to discuss all the latest results in their field, “including,” he said, “the alactin problem.” Not only that, but the conference was linked to the fourth convocation of a large biannual meeting of scientists, the first of which had occurred outside Ganono, the great harbor city of the Hodenosaunee, so that they were now called the Long Island Conferences. The second one had taken place in Pyinkayaing, and the third in Beijing. The Isfahan conference was therefore the first one to take place in the Dar, and it was going to include a track of meetings on archaeology; and Piali had already gotten Budur funding from the institute to attend with him, as coauthor of papers they had written with Idelba on lifering dating methods. “It looks to me like a good place to talk privately about your aunt's ideas. There'll be a session devoted to her work, organized by Zoroush, and Chen and quite a few others of her correspondents will be there. You'll come?”

“Of course.”

21
The direct trains to Iran all ran through Budur's hometown Turi, and whether it was for this reason or another, Piali arranged for them to fly from Nsara to Isfahan. The airship was similar to the one Budur had taken with Idelba to the Orkneys, and she sat in the window seats of the gondola looking down at Firanja: the Alps, Roma, Greece and the brown islands of the Aegean; then Anatolia and the Midwestern states. It was, Budur thought to herself as the long floating hours passed, a big world.

Then they were flying over the snowy Zagros Mountains to Isfahan, situated in the upper reaches of the Zayandeh Rud, a high valley with a swift river, overlooking salt flats to the east. As they approached the city's airport they saw a vast expanse of ruins around the new town. Isfahan had lain on the Silk Road, and successive cities had been demolished in their turn by Chinggis Khan, Temur the Lame, the Afghans in the eleventh century, and lastly by the Travancoris, in the late war.

Nevertheless the latest incarnation of the city was a bustling place, with new construction going on everywhere, so that as they trammed into the downtown it looked as if they were passing through a forest of construction cranes, each canted at a different angle over some new hive of steel and concrete. At a big madressa in the new center of the city, Abdol Zoroush and the other Iranian scientists greeted the contingent from Nsara, and took them to rooms in their Institute for Scientific Research's big guest quarters, and then into the city center surrounding it for a meal.

The Zagros Mountains overlooked the city, and the river ran through it just south of the downtown, which was being built over the ruins of the oldest city center. The institute's archaeological collection, the locals informed them, was filling with newly recovered antiquities and artifacts from previous eras of the city. The new town had been designed with broad tree-lined streets, raying north away from the river. Set at a high altitude, under even higher mountains, it would be a very beautiful city when the new trees grew to their full heights. Even now it was impressive.

The Isfaharis were obviously proud of both the city and their institute, and of Iran more generally. Crushed repeatedly in the war, the whole country was now being rebuilt, and in a new spirit, they said, a kind of Persian worldliness, with their own Shiite ultraconservatives awash in a more tolerant influx of polyglot refugees and immigrants, and local intellectuals who called themselves Cyruses, after the supposed first king of Iran. This new kind of Iranian patriotism was very interesting to the Nsarenes, as it seemed to be a way of asserting some independence from Islam without renouncing it. The Cyruses at the table informed them cheerfully that they now spoke of the year as being not
A
.
H
. 1381, but 2561 of “the era of the king of kings,” and one of them stood to offer a toast by reciting an anonymous poem that had been discovered painted on the walls of the new madressa.

Ancient Iran, Eternal Persia,

Caught in the press of time and the world,

Giving up to it beautiful Persian,

Language of Hafiz, Ferdowski and Khayyam,

Speech of my heart, home of my soul,

It's you I love if I love anything.

Once more, great Iran, sing us that love.

And the locals among them cheered and drank, although many of them were clearly students from Africa or the New World or Aozhou.