The Years of Rice and Salt

1

On sunny mornings the parks on the lakefront were filled with families out walking. In the early spring, before the plants had done more than create the tight green buds soon to blossom in their profusion of colors, the hungry swans would congregate in the gleaming black water beside the promenade to fight over the loaves of stale bread thrown at them by children. This had been one of Budur’s favorite activities as a young girl, it had cast her into gales of laughter to see the swans flop and tussle for the scraps; now she watched the new kids convulsed by the same hilarity, with a stab of grief for her lost childhood, and for the awareness that the swans, though beautiful and comical, were also desperate and starving. She wished she had the boldness to join the children and throw more bread to the poor things. But if she did it now she would look odd, like one of the mentally deficient ones on their trip out from their school. And in any case there was not a great deal of bread left in their house anyway.

Sunlight bounced on the water, and the buildings lining the back of the lakeshore promenade glowed lemon, peach, and apricot, as if lit from within by some light trapped in their stone. Budur walked back through the old town toward home, through the gray granite and black wood of the ancient buildings. Turi had begun as a Roman town, a way station on their main route through the Alps; Father had once driven them up to an obscure alpine pass called the Keyhole, where a stretch of the Roman road was still there, switchbacking through the grass like a petrified dragon’s back, looking lonely for the feet of soldiers and traders. Now after centuries of obscurity Turi was a way station again, this time for trains, and the greatest city in all of central Firanja, the capital of the united Alpine emirates.

The city center was bustling and squeaky with trams, but Budur liked to walk. She ignored Ahab, her chaperone; though she liked him personally, a simple man with few pretensions, she did not like his job, which included accompanying her on her excursions. She shunned him on principle as an affront to her dignity. She knew also that he would report her behavior to Father, and when he reported her refusal to acknowledge his presence, yet another small protest of harem would reach Father, if only indirectly.

She led Ahab up through the apartments studding the hillside overlooking the city, to High Street. The wall around their house was beautiful, a tall patterned weave of green and gray dressed stones. The wooden gate was topped by a stone arch seemingly held in a network of wisteria vines; you could pull out the keystone and it would still stand. Ahmet, their gatekeeper, was in his seat in the cozy little wooden closet on the inside of the gateway, where he held forth to all who wanted to pass, his tea tray ready to serve those who had time to tarry.

Inside the house Aunt Idelba was talking on the telephone, which was set on a table in the inner courtyard under the eaves, where anyone could hear you. This was Father’s way of trying to keep anything untoward from ever being said, but the truth was that Aunt Idelba was usually talking about microscopic nature and the mathematics of the interiors of atoms, and so no one could have any idea what she was talking about. Budur liked to listen to her anyway, because it reminded her of the fairy tales Aunt Idelba had told in the past when Budur was younger, or her cooking talk with Mother in the kitchen—cooking was one of her passions, and she would rattle off recipes, procedures, and tools, all mysterious and suggestive just like this talk on the telephone, as if she were cooking up a new world. And sometimes she would get off the phone looking worried, and absentmindedly accept Budur’s hugs and admit that this was precisely the case: the ilmi, the scientists, were indeed cooking up a new world. Or they could be. Once she rang off flushed pink, and danced a little minuet around the courtyard, singing nonsense syllables, and their laundry ditty, “God is great, great is God, clean our clothes, clean our souls.”

This time she rang off and did not even see Budur, but stared up at the bit of sky visible from the courtyard.

“What is it, Idelba? Are you feeling hem?” Hem was the women’s term for a kind of mild depression that had no obvious cause.

Idelba shook her head. “No, this is a mushkil,” which was a specific problem.

“What is it?”

“Well… Simply put, the investigators at the laboratory are getting some very strange results. That’s what it comes down to. No one can say what they mean.”

This laboratory Idelba talked to over the phone was currently her main contact with the world outside their home. She had been a mathematics teacher and researcher in Nsara, and, with her husband, an investigator of microscopic nature. But her husband’s untimely death had revealed some irregularities in his affairs, and Idelba had been left destitute; and the job they had shared had turned out to be his in the end, so that she had nowhere to work, and nowhere to live. Or so Yasmina had said; Idelba herself never spoke about it. She had shown up one day with a single suitcase, weeping, to confer with Budur’s father, her half brother. He had agreed to put her up for a time. This, Father explained later, was one of the things harems were for; they protected women who had nowhere else to go. “Your mother and you girls complain about the system, but really, what is the alternative? The suffering of women left alone would be enormous.”

Mother and Budur’s older cousin, Yasmina, would snort or snarl at this, cheeks turning red. Rema and Aisha and Fatima would look at them curiously, trying to understand what they should feel about what to them was after all the natural order of things. Aunt Idelba never said anything about it one way or the other, neither thanks nor complaint. Old acquaintances still called her on the phone, especially a nephew of hers, who apparently had a problem he thought she could help him with; he called regularly. Once Idelba tried to explain why to Budur and her sisters, with the aid of a blackboard and chalk.

“Atoms have shells around them, like the spheres in the heavens in the old drawings, all surrounding the heartknot of the atom, which is small but heavy. Three kinds of particles clump together in the heartknot, some with yang, some with yin, some neuter, in different amounts for each substance, and they’re held bound together there by a strong force, which is very strong, but also very local, in that you don’t have to get far away from the heartknot for the force to reduce a great deal.”

“Like a harem,” Yasmina said.

“Yes, well. That may be more like gravity, I’m afraid. But anyway, there is a qi repulsion between all particles, that the strong force counteracts, and the two compete, more or less, along with other forces. Now, certain very heavy metals have so many particles that a certain number leak away from them one by one, and the single particles that leak leave distinctive traces at distinct rates of speed. And down in Nsara they’ve been getting strange results from a particular heavy metal, an elemental that is heavier than gold, the heaviest elemental found so far, called alactin. They’re bombarding it with neuter particles, and getting very strange results, all over the plates, in a way hard to explain. The heavy heart of this elemental appears to be unstable.”

“Like Yasmina!”

“Yes, well, interesting that you say so, in that it is not true but it suggests the way we keep trying to think of ways to visualize these things that are always too small for us to see.” She paused, looking at the blackboard, then at her uncomprehending students. A spasm of some emotion marred her features, disappeared. “Well. It is yet another phenomenon that needs explaining, let’s leave it at that. It will take more investigation in a lab.”

After that she scribbled in silence for a while. Numbers, letters, Chinese ideograms, equations, dots, diagrams—like something out of the illustrations for the books about the Alchemist of Samarqand.

After a time she slowed down, shrugged. “I’ll have to talk to Piali about it.”

“But isn’t he in Nsara?” Budur asked.

“Yes.” This too was part of her mishkul, Budur saw. “We will talk by the telephone, of course.”

“Tell us about Nsara,” Budur asked for the thousandth time.

Idelba shrugged; she was not in the mood. She never was, to begin with; it took a while to break through the barrier of regrets to get her to that time. Her first husband, divorcing her near the end of her fertility, with no children; her second husband, dying young; she had a lot of regrets to get through. But if Budur was patient and merely followed her around the terrace, and in and out of rooms, she often would make the passage, helped perhaps by her shifts from room to room, matching the way each place on Earth we have lived in is like a room in our mind, with its sky for a roof, hills for walls, and buildings for furniture, so that our lives have moved from one room to the next in some larger structure; and the old rooms still exist and yet at the same time are gone, or emptied, so that in reality one could only move on to some new room, or stay locked in the one you were in, as in a jail; and yet, in the mind…

First Idelba would speak of the weather there, the storm-tossed Atlantic rolling in with water, wind, cloud, rain, fog, sleet, mist, sometimes snow, all broken by sunny days with their low shards of light emblazoning the seafront and the rivermouth, the docks of the giant city filling the valley on both banks all the way upstream to Anjou, all the states of Asia and Firanja come west to this westernmost town, to meet the other great influx by sea, people from all over the world, including the handsome Hodenosaunee, and the shivering exiles from Inka, with their serapes and gold jewelry splashing the dark gray afternoons of the storm-thrashed winters with little bits of metallic color. These exotics all together made Nsara fascinating, Idelba said, as did the unwelcome embassies of the Chinese and Travancoris, enforcing the terms of the postwar settlement, standing there like monuments to the Islamic defeat in the war, long windowless blocks at the back of the harbor district. As she described all this, Idelba’s eyes would begin to gleam and her voice grow animated, and she almost always, if she did not cut herself short, ended by exclaiming Nsara! Nsara! Ohhh, Nssssarrrrra! And then sometimes sit down wherever she was and hold her head in her hands, overwhelmed. It was, Budur was sure, the most exciting and wonderful city on Earth.

The Travancoris had of course founded a Buddhist monastery school there, as they had in every city and town on Earth, it seemed, with all the most modern departments and laboratories, right next to the old madressa and the mosque, still operating much as they had been since the 900s. The Buddhist monks and teachers made the clerics of the madressa look very ignorant and provincial, Idelba said, but they were always courteous to Muslim practices, very unobtrusive and respectful, and over time a number of Sufi teachers and reformist clerics had eventually built laboratories of their own, and had taken classes at the monastery schools to prepare to work on questions of natural law in their own establishments. “They gave us time to swallow and digest the bitter pill of our defeat,” Idelba said of these Buddhists. “The Chinese were smart to stay away and let these people be their emissaries. That way we never really see how ruthless the Chinese are. We think the Travancoris are the whole story.”

But it seemed to Budur that the Chinese were not so hard as they could have been. The reparation payments were within the realm of the possible, Father admitted, or if they were not, the debts were always being forgiven, or put off. And in Firanja, at least, the Buddhist monastery schools and hospitals were the only signs of the victors of the war imposing their will—almost; that dark part, the shadow of the conquerors, opium, was becoming more and more common in Firanji cities, and Father declared angrily after reading the newspapers that as it all came from Afghanistan and Burma, its shipment to Firanja was almost certainly sanctioned by the Chinese. Even in Turi one saw the poor souls in the working district cafés downriver, stupefied by the odd-smelling smoke, and in Nsara Idelba said the drug was widespread, like any other world city in that regard, even though it was Islam’s world city, the only Islamic capital not destroyed by the war: Konstantiniyye, Cairo, Moscow, Tehran, Zanzibar, Damascus, and Baghdad had been firebombed, and not yet completely rebuilt.

But Nsara had survived, and now it was the Sufis’ city, the scientists’ city, Idelba’s city; she had gone to it after a childhood in Turi and at the family farm in the Alps; she had gone to school there, and mathematical formulations had spoken to her as if speaking aloud from the page; she understood them, she spoke that strange alchemical language. Old men explained its rules of grammar to her, and she followed them and did the work, learned more, made her mark in theoretical speculations about the nature of microscopic matter when she was only twenty years old. “Young minds are often the strongest in math,” she said later, already outside the experience itself. Into the labs of Nsara, then, helping the famous Lisbi and his team to bolt a cyclic accelerator together, getting married, then getting divorced, then, apparently very quickly, rather mysteriously, Budur thought, getting remarried, which was almost unheard of in Turi; working again with her second husband, very happily, then his unexpected death; and her again mysterious return to Turi, her retreat.

Budur asked once, “Did you wear the veil there?”

“Sometimes,” Idelba said. “It depended on the situation. The veil has a kind of power, in certain situations. All such signs stand for other things; they are sentences spoken in matter. The hijab can say to strangers, ‘I am Islamic and in solidarity with my men, against you and all the world.’ To Islamic men it can say, ‘I will play this foolish game, this fantasy of yours, but only if in return you do everything I tell you to.’ For some men this trade, this capitulation to love, is a kind of release from the craziness of being a man. So the veil can be like putting on a magician queen’s cape.” But seeing Budur’s hopeful expression she added, “Or it can be like putting on a slave’s collar, certainly.”

“So sometimes you didn’t wear one?”

“Usually I did not. In the lab it would have been silly. I wore a lab djellaba, like the men. We were there to study atoms, to study nature. That is the greatest godliness! And without gender. That simply isn’t what it’s about. So, the people you are working with, you see them face to face, soul to soul.” Eyes shining, she quoted from some old poem: “ ‘Every moment an epiphany arrives, and cleaves the mountain asunder.’ ”

This had been the way of it for Idelba in her youth; and now she sat in her brother’s little middle-class harem, “protected” by him in a way that gave her frequent attacks of hem, that in truth made her a fairly volatile person, like a Yasmina with a bent toward secrecy rather than garrulousness. Alone with Budur, pinning up laundry on the terrace, she would look at the treetops sticking over the walls and sigh. “If only I could walk again at dawn through the empty streets of the city! Blue, then pink—to deny one that is absurd. To deny one the world, on one’s own terms—it’s archaic! It’s unacceptable.”

But she did not run away. Budur did not fully understand why. Surely Aunt Idelba was capable of tramming down the hill to the train station, and taking a train to Nsara, and finding lodgings there—somewhere—and getting a job that would support her—somehow? And if not her, then whom? What woman could do it? None of good repute; not if Idelba couldn’t. The only time Budur dared to ask her about it, she only shook her head brusquely and said, “There are other reasons too. I can’t talk about it.”

So there was something quite frightening to Budur about Idelba’s presence in their home, a daily reminder that a woman’s life could crash like an airplane out of the sky. The longer it went on the more disturbing Budur found it, and she noticed that Idelba too grew more agitated, wandering from room to room reading and muttering, or working over her papers with a big mathematical calculator, a net of strings holding beads of different colors. She wrote for hours on her blackboard, and the chalk squeaked and clicked and sometimes snapped off in her fingers. She talked on the phone down in the courtyard, sounding upset sometimes, pleased at others; doubting, or excited—and all about numbers, letters, the value of this and that, strengths and weaknesses, forces of microscopic things that no one would ever see. She said to Budur once, staring at her equations, “You know, Budur, there is a very great deal of energy locked into things. The Travancori Chandaala was the deepest thinker we ever have had on this Earth; you could say the Long War was a catastrophe just because of his death alone. But he left us a lot, and the energy-mass equivalence—look—a mass, that’s just a measure for a certain weight, say—you multiply it by the square of the speed of light—half a million li per second, think of that!—it results in enormous numbers, for even a little pinch of matter. That’s the qi energy locked up in it. A strand of your hair has more energy in it than a locomotive.”

“No wonder it’s so hard to get a brush through it,” Budur said uneasily, and Idelba laughed.

“But there’s something wrong?” Budur asked.

At first Idelba did not answer. She was thinking, and lost to all around her. Then she stared at Budur.

“Something is wrong if we make it wrong. As always. Nothing in nature is wrong in itself.”

Budur wasn’t so sure of that. Nature made men and women, nature made flesh and blood, hearts, periods, bitter feelings… sometimes it all seemed wrong to Budur, as if happiness were a stale scrap of bread, and all the swans of her heart were fighting for it, starving for it.

The roof of the house was forbidden to the women; it was a place where they might be observed from the roof terraces higher up Turi’s Eastern Hill. And yet the men never used it, and it was the perfect place to get above the street’s treetops, and have a view of the Alps to the south of Lake Turi. So, when the men were all gone, and Ahmet asleep in his chair by the gate, Aunt Idelba and cousin Yasmina would use the laundry drying posts as the legs of a ladder, placing them in olive jars and lashing them together, so that they could climb the lashings very gingerly, with the girls below and Idelba above holding the posts. Up they would go until they were all on the roof, in the dark, under the stars, in the wind, whispering so that Ahmet would not hear them, whispering so that they would not shout at the top of their lungs. The Alps in full moonlight stood there like white cardboard cutouts at the back of a puppet stage, perfectly vertical, the very image of what mountains should look like. Yasmina brought up her candles and powders to say the magic spells that would drive her men admirers to distraction—as if they weren’t already. But Yasmina had an insatiable desire for men’s regard, sharpened no doubt by the lack of access to it in the harem. Her Travancori incense would swirl up into the night, sandalwood, musk, saffron, nagi, and with their exotic scents filling her head it would seem to Budur a different world, vaster, more mysteriously meaningful—things suffused with their meanings as if with a liquid, right to the limits of surface tension, everything became a symbol of itself, the moon the symbol of moon, the sky the symbol of sky, the mountains the symbol of mountains, all bathed in a dark blue sea of longing. Longing, the very essence of longing, painful and beautiful, bigger than the world itself.

But one time the full moon came, and Idelba did not organize an expedition to the roof terrace. She had spent many hours that month on the telephone, and after each conversation had been uncharacteristically subdued. She hadn’t described to the girls the contents of these calls or said who she had been talking to, though from her manner of talk Budur assumed it was her nephew, as usual. But no discussion of them at all.

Perhaps it was this that made Budur sensitive and wary of some change. On the night of the full moon she scarcely slept, waking every watch to see the moving shadows on the floor, waking from dreams of anxious flight through the alleys of the old town, escaping something behind her she never quite saw. Near dawn she woke to a noise from the terrace, and looked out her little window to see Idelba carrying the laundry poles down from the terrace into the stairwell. Then the olive jars as well.

Budur slipped out into the hall and down to the window at the carrel overlooking the yard in front. Idelba was constructing their ladder against the side of the household wall, just around the corner of the house from Ahmet’s locked gate. She would top the wall next to a big elm tree that stood in the alley running between the walls of their house and the al-Dins’ next door, who were from Neshapur.

Without a moment’s hesitation, without any thought at all, Budur ran back to her room and dressed quickly, then ran downstairs and back out into the yard, around the corner of the house, glancing around the corner to be sure Idelba had gone.

She was. The way was clear; Budur could follow without impediment.

This time she did hesitate; and it would be difficult to describe her thoughts in that crucial moment of her life. No particular train of thought occupied her mind, but rather a kind of balancing of her whole existence: the harem, her mother’s moods, her father’s indifference to her, Ahab’s simple face always behind her like an idiot animus, Yasmina’s weeping; all of Turi at once, balanced on its two hills on each side of the river Limat, and in her head; beyond all that, huge cloudy masses of feeling, like the clouds one saw boiling up over the Alps. All inside her chest; and outside her a sensation as if clusters of eyes were trained on her, the ghost audience to her life, perhaps, out there always whether she saw them or not, like the stars. Something like that. It is always thus at the moment of change, when we rise up out of the everyday and get clear of the blinders of habit, and stand naked to existence, to the moment of choice, vast, dark, windy. The world is huge in these moments, huge. Too big to bear. Visible to all the ghosts of the world. The center of the universe.

She lurched forward. She ran to the ladder, climbed swiftly; it was no different than when it was set upstairs between terrace and roof. The branches of the elm were big and solid, it was easy to climb down far enough in them to make a final jump to the ground, jarring her fully awake, after which she rolled to her feet as smoothly as if she had been in on the plan from the start.

She tiptoed to the street and looked toward the tram stop. Her heart was thumping hard now, and she was hot in the chill air. She could take the tram or walk straight down the narrow streets, so steep that in several places they were staired. She was sure Idelba was off to the train station, and if she was wrong, she could give up the chase.

Even wearing a veil it was too early for a girl from a good family to be on the tram alone; indeed, it was always too early for a respectable girl to be out alone. So she hustled over to the top of the first stair alley, and began hurrying down the weaving course, through courtyard, park, alley, the stair of the roses, the tunnel made by Japanese fire maples, down and down the familiar way to the old town and the bridge crossing the river to the train station. Onto the bridge, where she looked upstream to the patch of sky between old stone buildings, its blue arched over the pink hem of the little bit of mountains visible, an embroidery dropped into the far end of the lake.

She was losing her resolve when she saw Idelba in the station, reading the schedule for track listings. Budur ducked behind a streetlight post, ran around the building into the doors on the other side, and likewise read a schedule. The first train for Nsara was on Track 16, at the far side of the station, leaving at .5 sharp, which had to be close. She checked the clock hanging over the row of trains, under the roof of the big shed; five minutes to spare. She slipped onto the last car of the train.

The train jerked slightly and was off. Budur moved forward up the train, car to car, holding on to the seat backs, her heart knocking faster and faster. What was she going to say to Idelba? And what if Idelba was not on the train, and Budur off to Nsara on her own, with no money?

But there Idelba sat, hunched over, looking forward out the window. Budur steeled herself and burst through the compartment door and rushed to her weeping, threw herself on her, “I’m sorry, Aunt Idelba, I didn’t know you were going this far, I only followed to keep you company, I hope you have money to pay for my ticket too?”

“Oh name of Allah!” Idelba was shocked; then furious; mostly at herself, Budur judged through her tears, though she took it out for a little while on Budur, saying, “This is important business I’m on, this is no girl’s prank! Oh, what will happen? What will happen? I should send you right back on the next train!”

Budur only shook her head and wept some more.

The train clicked quickly over the tracks, through country that was rather bland; hill and farm, hill and farm, flat woods and pastures, all clicking by at an enormous speed—it almost made her sick to look out the window, though she had ridden in trains all her life, and had looked out before at the view without a problem.

At the end of a long day the train entered the bleak outskirts of a city, like Downbrook only bigger, li after li of apartment blocks and close-set houses behind their walls, bazaars full of people, neighborhood mosques and bigger buildings of various kinds; then really big buildings, a whole knot of them flanking the many-bridged river, right before it opened out into the estuary, now a giant harbor, protected by a jetty that was broad enough to hold a street on it, with businesses on both sides.

The train took them right to the heart of this district of tall buildings, where a station, glass roofed and grimy, let them out onto a broad tree-lined street, a two-parted street divided by huge oaks planted in a line down a center island. They were a few blocks from the docks and the jetty. It smelled fishy.

A broad esplanade ran along the riverbank, backed by a row of red-leaved trees. Idelba walked quickly down this corniche, like Turi’s lakeside corniche only much grander, until she turned onto a narrow street lined with three-story apartment blocks, their first floors occupied by restaurants and shops. Up a stair into one of these buildings, then into a doorway with three doors. Idelba rang the bell for the middle one, and the door opened and they were welcomed into an apartment like an old palace fallen apart.

2

Not an old palace, it turned out, but an old museum. No room in it was very big or impressive, but there were a lot of them. False ceilings, open ceilings, and abrupt cuts in wall paintings and wainscoting patterns made it clear that bigger rooms had been divided and subdivided. Most of the rooms held little more than one bed or cot, and the huge kitchen was crowded with women making a meal or waiting to eat it. They were thin women, for the most part. It was noisy with talk and stove fans. “What is this?” Budur asked Idelba under the hubbub.

“This is a zawiyya. A kind of boardinghouse for women.” Then with a bleak smile: “An antiharem.” She explained that these had been traditional in the Maghrib, and now they were widespread in Firanja. The war had left many more women alive than men, despite the indiscriminate devastation of its last two decades, when more civilians than soldiers had died, and women’s brigades had been common on both sides. Turi and the other Alpine emirates had kept more men at home than most countries, putting them to work in the armories, so Budur had heard of the depopulation problem, but had never seen it. As for the zawiyyas, Idelba said they were still technically illegal, as the laws against female ownership of property had never been changed; but male nominal owners and other legal dodges were used to legitimize scores of them, hundreds of them.

“Why did you not live in one of these after your husband died?” Budur asked.

Idelba frowned. “I needed to leave for a while.”

They were assigned a room that had three beds, but no other occupants. The third bed would serve as desk and table. The room was dusty, and its little window looked out on other grimy windows, all facing in on an airshaft, as Idelba called it. Buildings here were so compressed together that they had to remember to leave shafts for air.

But no complaints. A bed, a kitchen, women around them: Budur was content. But Idelba was still very worried, about something having to do with her nephew Piali and his work. In their new room she stared at Budur with a dismay she couldn’t conceal. “You know, I should send you back to your father. I’ve got enough trouble as it is.”

“No. I won’t go.”

Idelba stared at her. “How old are you again?”

“I’m twenty-three.” She would be in two months.

Idelba was surprised. “I thought you were younger.”

Budur blushed and looked down.

Idelba grimaced. “Sorry. That’s the effect of the harem. And no men left to marry. But look, you have to do something.”

“I want to stay here.”

“Well, even so, you have to inform your father where you are, and tell him that I did not kidnap you.”

“He’ll come here and get me.”

“No. I don’t think so. In any case you must tell him something. Phone him, or write him a letter.”

Budur was afraid to talk to her father, even over the phone. The idea of a letter was intriguing. She could explain herself without giving away her precise location.

She wrote:

She mailed this off, and after that stopped thinking of Turi. The letter was helpful in making her feel less guilty. And after a while she realized, as the weeks went on, and she did clerical work, and cleaning, and cooking, and other help of that kind in the zawiyya, and made the arrangements to start studies at the institute connected to the madressa, that she was not going to get a letter back from her father. And Mother was illiterate; and her cousins no doubt forbidden to write, and perhaps angry at her for abandoning them; and her brother would not be sent after her, nor would he want to be; nor would she be arrested by the police and sent off in a sealed train to Turi. That happened to no one. There were literally thousands of women both escaping from home, and relieving those left behind from the burden of caring for them. What in Turi had looked like an eternal system of law and custom that the whole world abided by, was in reality nothing more than the antiquated habits of one moribund segment of a single society, mountain-bound and conservative, furiously inventing pan-Islamic “traditions” even at the moment they were all disappearing, like morning mist or (more appropriately) battlefield smoke. She would never go back, it was that simple! And no one was going to make her. No one even wanted to make her; that too was a bit of a shock. Sometimes it did not feel so much that she had escaped as that she had been abandoned.

There was this fundamental fact, however, which struck her every day when she left the zawiyya: she was no longer living in a harem. She could go where she chose, when she chose. This alone was enough to make her feel giddy and strange—free, solitary—almost too happy, to the point of disorientation, or even a kind of panic: once right in the midst of this euphoria she saw from behind a man emerging from the train station and thought for a second it was her father, and was glad, relieved; but it wasn’t him; and all the rest of that day her hands shook with anger, shame, fear, longing.

Later it happened again. It happened several times, and she came to regard the experience as a kind of ghost glimpsed in the mirror, her past life haunting her: her father, her uncles, her brother, her male cousins, always in actuality the faces of various strangers, just alike enough to give her a start, make her heart jump with fear, though she loved them all. She would have been so happy to think they were proud of her, that they cared enough to come after her. But if it meant returning to the harem, she never wanted to see them again. She would never again submit to rules from anyone. Even ordinary sane rules now gave her a quick surge of anger, an instantaneous and complete NO that would fill her like a shriek in the nerves. Islam in its literal meaning meant submission: but NO! She had lost that ability. A traffic policewoman, warning her not to cross the busy harbor road outside the crosswalks: Budur cursed her. The house rules in her zawiyya: her teeth would clench. Don’t leave dirty plates in the sink, help wash the sheets every Thursday; NO.

But all that anger was trivial compared to the fact of her freedom. She woke in the morning, understood where she was, leaped out of bed full of amazed energy. An hour’s vigorous work in the zawiyya had her groomed and fed, and some of the communal work done, bathrooms cleaned, dishes, all the chores that had to be done over and over, all the chores that at home had been performed by the servants—but how much finer it was to do such work for an hour than to have other human beings sacrificing their whole lives to it! How clear it was that this was a model for all human labor and relations!

Those things done she was off into the fresh ocean air, like a cold salty wet drug, sometimes with a shopping list, sometimes only with her bag of books and writing materials. Wherever she was going she would go by the harbor, to see the ocean outside the jetty, and the wind whipping the flags; and one fine morning she stood at the end of the jetty with nowhere to go, and nothing to do; and no one in the world knew where she was at that moment, except for her. My God, the feel of that! The harbor crowded with ships, the brown water running out to sea on the ebb tide, the sky a pale wash of clean azure, and all of a sudden she bloomed, there were oceans of clouds in her chest, she wept for joy. Ah, Nsara! Nsssarrrrra!

But first on her list of things to do, on many mornings, was to visit the White Crescent Disabled Soldiers Home, a vast converted army barracks a good ways up the river park. This was one of those duties Idelba had pointed her toward, and Budur found it both harrowing and uplifting—like going to the mosque on Friday was supposed to be and never really had been. The larger part of this barracks and hospital was taken up by a few thousand blind soldiers, rendered sightless by gas on the eastern front. In the mornings they sat in silence, in beds or chairs or wheelchairs as the case might be, as someone read to them, usually a woman: daily newspapers on their thin inky sheets, or various texts, or in some cases the Quran and the hadith, though these were less popular. Many of the men had been wounded as well as blinded, and could not walk or move; they sat there with half a face, or without legs, aware, it seemed, of how they must appear, and staring in the direction of the readers with a hungry ashamed look, as if they would kill and eat her if they could, from unrealizable love or bitter resentment, or both all mixed together. Such naked expressions Budur had never seen in her life, and she often kept her own gaze fixed on whatever text she was reading, as though, if she were to glance up at them they would know it and recoil, or hiss with disapprobation. Her peripheral vision revealed to her an audience out of a nightmare, as if one of the rooms of hell had extruded from the underworld to reveal its inhabitants, waiting to be processed, as they had waited and been processed in life. Despite her attempts not to look, every time she read to them Budur saw more than one of them weeping, no matter what it was she read, even the weather reports from Firanja or Africa or the New World. The weather actually was one of their favorite readings.

Among the other readers there were very plain women who nevertheless had beautiful voices, low and clear, musical, women who sang their whole lives without knowing it (and knowing would have ruined the effect); when they read many in their audience sat forward in their beds and wheelchairs, rapt, in love with a woman to whom they never would have given a second glance could they have seen her. And Budur saw that some of the men leaned forward in the same way for her, though in her own ears her voice was unpleasantly high and scratchy. But it had its fans. Sometimes she read them the stories of Scheherazade, addressing them as if they were angry King Shahryar and she the wily storyteller, staying alive one more night; and one day, emerging from that antechamber of hell into the soaked sunlight of cloudy noon, she almost staggered at the realization of how completely the old story had been turned on its head, Scheherazade free to walk away, while the Shahryars were imprisoned forever in their own wrecked bodies.

3

That duty accomplished, she walked through the bazaar to the classes she was taking, in subjects suggested by Aunt Idelba. The madressa institute’s classes were folded in to the Buddhist monastery and hospital, and Budur paid a fee, with money borrowed from Idelba, to take three classes: beginning statistics (which began with simple arithmetic, in fact), accounting, and the history of Islam.

This last course was taught by a woman named Kirana Fawwaz, a short dark Algerine with an intense voice hoarsened by cigarettes. She looked about forty or forty-five. In the first meeting she informed them she had served in the war hospitals and then, near the end of the Nakba (or the Catastrophe, as the war was often referred to) in the Maghribi women’s brigades. She was nothing like the soldiers in the White Crescent home, however; she had come out of the Nakba with the air of one victorious, and declared in the first meeting that they would in fact have won the war, if they had not been betrayed both at home and abroad.

“Betrayed by what?” she asked in her harsh crow’s voice, seeing the question on all their faces. “I will tell you: by the clerics. By our men more generally. And by Islam itself.”

Her audience stared at her. Some lowered their heads uneasily, as if expecting Kirana to be arrested on the spot, if not struck down by lightning. Surely at the least she would be run down later that day by an unexpected tram. And there were several men in the class as well, one right next to Budur, in fact, wearing a patch over one eye. But none of them said anything, and the class went on as if one could say such things and get away with it.

“Islam is the last of the old desert monotheisms,” Kirana told them. “It is belated in that sense, an anomaly. It followed and built on the earlier pastoral monotheisms of the Middle West, which predated Muhammad by several centuries at least: Christianity, the Essenes, the Jews, the Zoroastrians, the Mithraists, and so on. They were all strongly patriarchal, replacing earlier matriarchal polytheisms, created by the first agricultural civilizations, in which gods resided in every domesticated plant, and women were acknowledged to be crucial to the production of food and new life.

“Islam was therefore a latecomer, and as such, a corrective to the earlier monotheisms. It had the chance to be the best monotheism, and in many ways it was. But because it began in an Arabia that had been shattered by the wars of the Roman empire and the Christian states, it had to deal first with a condition of almost pure anarchy, a tribal war of all against all, in which women were at the mercy of any warring party. From those depths no new religion could leap very high.

“Muhammad thus arrived as a prophet who was both trying to do good, and trying not to be overwhelmed by war, and by his experiencing of divine voices—babbling some of the time, as the Quran will attest.”

This remark drew gasps, and several women stood and walked out. All the men in the room, however, remained as if transfixed.

“Spoken to by God or babbling whatever came into his head, it did not matter; the end result was good, at first. A tremendous increase in law, in justice, in women’s rights, and in a general sense of order and human purpose in history. Indeed, it was precisely this sense of justice and divine purpose that gave Islam its unique power in the first few centuries A.H., when it swept the world despite the fact that it gave no new material advantage—one of the only clear-cut demonstrations of the power of the idea alone, in all of history.

“But then came the caliphs, the sultans, the divisions, the wars, the clerics and their hadith. The hadith overgrew the Quran itself; they seized on every scrap of misogyny scattered in Muhammad’s basically feminist work, and stitched them into the shroud in which they wrapped the Quran, as being too radical to enact. Generations of patriarchal clerics built up a mass of hadith that has no Quranic authority whatsoever, thus rebuilding an unjust tyranny, using frequently falsified authorities of personal transmission from male master to male student, as if a lie passed down through three or ten generations of men somehow metamorphoses into a truth. But it is not so.

“And so Islam, like Christianity and Judaism before it, stagnated and degenerated. Because its expansion was so great, it was harder to see this failure and collapse; indeed, it took up until the Nakba itself to make it clear. But this perversion of Islam lost us the war. It was women’s rights, and nothing else, that gave China and Travancore and Yingzhou the victory. It was the absence of women’s rights in Islam that turned half the population into nonproductive illiterate cattle, and lost us the war. The tremendous intellectual and mechanical progress that had been initiated by Islamic scientists was picked up and carried to much greater heights by the Buddhist monks of Travancore and the Japanese diaspora, and this revolution in mechanical capacity was quickly developed by China and the New World free states; by everyone, in fact, except for Dar al-Islam. Even our reliance on camels did not come to an end until midway through the Long War. Without any road wider than two camels, with every city built as a kasbah or a medina, as tightly packed as a bazaar, nothing could be done in the way of modernization. Only the war’s destruction of the city cores allowed us to rebuild in a modern way, and only our desperate attempt to defend ourselves brought any industrial progress to speak of. But by then it was a case of too little and too late.”

At this point the room was quite a bit emptier than it had been when Kirana Fawwaz began; and two girls had exclaimed as they stormed out that they were going to report these blasphemies to the clerics and the police. But Kirana Fawwaz only paused to light a cigarette and wave them out of the room, before continuing.

“Now,” she went on, calmly, inexorably, remorselessly, “in the aftermath of the Nakba, everything has to be reconsidered, everything. Islam has to be examined root and branch and leaf, in the effort to make it well, if that is possible; in the effort to make our civilization capable of survival. But despite this obvious necessity, the regressives prattle their broken old hadith like magic charms to conjure jinns, and in states like Afghanistan or Sudan, or even in corners of Firanja itself, in the Alpine emirates and Skandistan, for instance, the hezbollah rule, and women are forced into chador and hijab and harem, and the men in power in these states try to pretend that it is the year 300 in Baghdad or Damascus, and that Haroun al-Rashid will come walking in the door to make everything right. They might as well pretend to be Christian and hope the cathedrals will spring back to life and Jesus come flying down from heaven.”

4

As Kirana spoke, Budur saw in her mind the blind men in the hospital; the walled residential streets of Turi; her father’s face as he was reading to her mother; the sight of the ocean; a white tomb in the jungle; indeed everything in her life, and many things she had never thought of before. Her mouth hung open, she was stunned, frightened—but also elated, by every single shocking word of it: it confirmed everything she had suspected in her ignorant balked furious girlhood, trapped in her father’s house. She had spent her whole life thinking that something was seriously wrong with herself, or with the world, or both. Now reality seemed to have opened up under her like a trapdoor, as all her suspicions were confirmed in glorious style. She held on to her seat, even, and stared at the woman lecturing them, hypnotized as if by some great hawk circling overhead, hypnotized not just by her angry analysis of all that had gone wrong, but by the image she evoked thereby of History itself, the huge long string of events that had led to this moment, here and now in this rain-lashed western harbor city; hypnotized by the oracle of time itself, rasping on in her urgent smoky crow’s voice. So much had happened already, nahdas and nakbas, time after time; what could be said after all that? One had to have courage even to try to talk about it.

But very clearly this Kirana Fawwaz did not lack for courage. Now she stopped, and looked around at the half-emptied room. “Well,” she said cheerfully, acknowledging with a brief smile Budur’s round-eyed look, somewhat like that of the astonished fish in the boxes at the market. “It seems we have driven out everyone who can be driven out. Left are the brave of heart to venture into this dark country, our past.”

The brave of heart or the weak of limb, Budur thought, glancing around. An old one-armed soldier looked on imperturbably. The one-eyed man still sat next to her. Several women of various ages sat looking around uneasily, shifting in their seats. A few looked to Budur like women of the street, and one of these was grinning. Not what Budur had imagined when Idelba had talked about the Nsarene Madressa and Institutes of Higher Learning; the flotsam of Dar al-Islam, in fact, the sorry survivors of the Nakba, the swans in winter; women who had lost their husbands, fiancés, fathers, brothers, women who been orphaned and never since had the chance to meet a single man; and the war-wounded themselves, including a blinded veteran like the ones Budur read to, led to the class by his sister, and then the one-armed one, and the eyepatch next to her; also a Hodenosaunee mother and daughter, supremely confident and dignified, relaxed, interested, but with nothing at stake; also a longshoreman with a bad back, who seemed to be there mainly to get out of the rain for six hours a week. These were the ones that remained, lost souls of the city, looking for something indoors to occupy them, they were not sure what. But perhaps, for the moment at least, it would do to stay here and listen to Kirana Fawwaz’s harsh lecture.

“What I want to do,” she said then, “is to cut through all the stories, through the million stories we have constructed to defend ourselves from the reality of the Nakba, to reach explanation. To the meaning of what has happened, do you understand? This is an introduction to history, like Khaldun, only spoken among us, in conversation. I will be suggesting various projects for further research as we go along. Now let’s go get a drink.”

She led them out into the dusk of the long northern evening, to a café behind the docks, where they found acquaintances from other parts of her life, already there eating late meals or smoking cigarettes or puffing on communal narghiles, and drinking little cups of thick coffee. They sat and talked through the long twilight, then far into the night, the docks out the windows empty and calm, the lights from across the harbor squiggling on black water. The man with the eyepatch was a friend of Kirana’s, it turned out; his name was Hasan, and he introduced himself to Budur and invited her to sit on the wall bench next to him and his group of acquaintances, including singers and actors from the institute, and the city’s theaters. “My fellow student here, I venture to say,” he said to the others, “was quite taken by our professor’s opening remarks.”

Budur nodded shyly and they cackled at her. She inquired about ordering a cup of coffee.

The talk around the dirty marble tabletops ranged widely, as was true in all such places, even back in Turi. The news in the newspapers. Interpretations of the war. Gossip about the city officials. Talk about plays and the cinema. Kirana sometimes rested and listened, sometimes talked on as if she were still in her class.

“Iran is the wine of history, they are always getting crushed.”

“Some vintages are better than others—”

“—so for them all great civilizations must finally be crushed.”

“This is merely al-Katalan again. It is too simple.”

“A world history has to simplify,” the old one-armed soldier said. His name was Naser Shah, Budur learned; his accent when speaking Firanjic marked him as Iranian. “The trick of it is to get at causes of things, to generate some sense of the overall story.”

“But if there isn’t one?” Kirana asked.

“There is,” Naser said calmly. “All people who have ever lived on Earth have acted together to make a global history. It is one story. Certain patterns are evident in it. The collisionary theories of Ibrahim al-Lanzhou, for instance. No doubt they’re just yin and yang again, but they make it seem pretty clear that much of what we call progress comes from the clash of two cultures.”

“Progress by collision, what kind of progress is this, did you see those two trams the other day after the one jumped its tracks?”

Kirana said, “Al-Lanzhou’s core civilizations represent the three logically possible religions, with Islam believing in one god, India in many gods, and China in no gods.”

“That’s why China won,” said Hasan, his one eye gleaming with mischief. “They turned out to be right. Earth congealed out of cosmic dust, life appeared and evolved until a certain ape made more and more sounds, and off we went. Never any God involved, nothing supernatural, no eternal souls reincarnated time after time. Only the Chinese really faced that, leading the way with their science, honoring nothing but their ancestors, working only for their descendants. And so they dominate us all!”

“It’s just that there’s more of them,” one of the questionable women said.

“But they can support more people on less land. This proves they are right!”

Naser said, “Each culture’s strength can also be its weakness. We saw this in the war. China’s lack of religion made them horribly cruel.”

The Hodenosaunee women from the class appeared and joined them; they too were acquaintances of Kirana’s. Kirana welcomed them, saying, “Here are our conquerors, a culture where women have power! I wonder if we could judge civilizations by how well women have done in them.”

“They have built them all,” proclaimed the oldest woman there, who up till now had only sat there knitting. She was at least eighty, and therefore had lived through most of the war, start to finish, childhood to old age. “No civilizations exist without the homes women build from the inside.”

“Well, how much political power women have taken, then. How comfortable their men are with the idea of women having this kind of power.”

“That would be China.”

“No, the Hodenosaunee.”

“Not Travancore?”

No one ventured to say.

“This should be investigated!” Kirana said. “This will be one of your projects. A history of women in the other cultures of the world—their actions as political creatures, their fates. That this is missing from history as we have been given it so far, is a sign that we still live in the wreckage of patriarchy. And nowhere more so than in Islam.”

5

Budur of course told Idelba all about Kirana’s lecture and the after-class meeting, describing them excitedly while they washed dishes together, and then sheets. Idelba nodded and asked questions, interested; but in the end she said, “I hope you will keep working hard on your statistics class. Talk about these kinds of things can go on forever, but numbers are the only thing that will get you beyond talk.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the world operates by number, by physical laws, expressed mathematically. If you know these, you will have a better grasp of things. And some possible job skills. Speaking of which, I think I can get you a job washing glassware in the lab. That would be good, it will give you some more money, and teach you that you need some job skills. Don’t get sucked into the whirlpool of café talk.”

“But talk can be good! It’s teaching me so many things, not just about history, but what it all means. It sorts it out, like we used to do in the harem.”

“Exactly! You can talk all you want in the harem! But it’s only in institutes that you can do science. Since you’ve bothered to come here, you might as well take advantage of what’s offered.”

This gave Budur pause. Idelba saw her thinking about it, and went on:

“Even if you do want to study history, which is perfectly sensible, there is a way of doing it that goes beyond café talk, that inspects the actual artifacts and sites left from the past, and establishes what can be asserted with physical evidence to back it, as in the other sciences. Firanja is full of old places that are being investigated for the first time in a scientific manner like this, and it is very interesting. And it will take decades to investigate them all, even centuries.”

She straightened up, held her lower back and rubbed it as she regarded Budur. “Come with me for a picnic on Friday. I’ll take you up the coast to see the menhirs.”

“The menhirs? What are they?”

“You will see on Friday.”

So on Friday they took the tram as far north up the coast as it ran, then changed to a bus and rode for half a watch, looking out at the apple orchards and the occasional glimpses of the dark blue ocean. Finally Idelba led the way off at one stop, and they walked west out of a tiny village, immediately into a forest of immense standing stones, set in long lines over a slightly rolling grassy plain, interrupted here and there by huge mature oak trees. It was an uncanny sight.

“Who put these here? The Franks?”

“Before the Franks. Before the Kelts, perhaps. No one is quite sure. Their living settlements have not been found with certainty, and it’s very difficult to date the time when these stones were dressed and stood on end.”

“It must have taken, I don’t know, centuries to put this many up!”

“It depends on how many of them there were doing it, I suppose. Maybe there were as many then as now, who can say? Only I would expect not, as we find no ruined cities, as they do in Egypt or the Middle West. No, it must have been a smaller population, taking a lot of time and effort.”

“But how can a historian work with stuff like this?” Budur asked at one point, as they walked down one of the long lanes created by the rows of stones, studying the patterns of black and yellow lichen that grew on their nobbled surfaces. Most were about twice Budur’s height, really massive things.

“You study things instead of stories. It’s something different than history, more a scientific inquiry of material conditions that early people lived in, things they made. Archaeology. Again, it is a science begun during the first Islamic flowering, in Syria and Iraq, then not pursued again until the Nahda,” this last being the rebirth of Islamic high culture in certain cities like Tehran and Cairo, in the half-century before the Long War started and wrecked everything. “Now our understanding of physics and geology is such that new methods of inquiry are being suggested all the time. And construction and reconstruction projects are digging up all kinds of new finds as well, and people are going out deliberately looking for more, and it is all coming together in a very exciting way. It is a science taking off, if you know what I mean. Most interesting. And Firanja is turning out to be one of the best places to practice it. This is an ancient place.”

She gestured at the long rows of stones, like a crop seeded by great stone gods who had never come back to make a harvest. Clouds scudded by overhead, and the blue sky seemed flat and low over them. “Not just these, or the stone rings in Britain, but stone tombs, monuments, whole villages. I’ll have to take you up to the Orkneys with me some time. I may be wanting to go up there soon; in any case, I’ll take you along. Anyway you think about studying this kind of thing too, as a grounding for you while you listen to Madame Fawwaz and all her scheherazading.”

Budur rubbed her hand over a stone dressed by a thin lichen coat of many colors. Clouds rushed by. “I will.”

6

Classes, a new job cleaning Idelba’s lab, walking the docks and the jetty, dreaming of a new synthesis, an Islam that included what was important in the Buddhism so prevalent in the labs: Budur’s days passed in a blur of thought, everything she saw and did fed into it. Most of the women in Idelba’s lab were Buddhist nuns, and many of the men there were monks. Compassion, right action, a kind of agape, as the ancient Greeks had called it—the Greeks, those ghosts of this place, people who had had every idea already, in a lost paradise that had included even the story of paradise lost, in the form of Plato’s tales of Atlantis, which were turning out to be true, according to the latest studies of the scholars on Kreta, digging in the ruins.

Budur looked into classes in this new field, archaeology. History that was more than talk, that could be a science… The people working on it were an odd mix, geologists, architects, physicists, Quranic scholars, historians, all studying not just the stories, but the things left behind.

Meanwhile the talk went on, in Kirana’s class and in the cafés afterward. One night in a café Budur asked Kirana what she thought of archaeology, and she replied, “Yes, archaeology is very important, sure. Although the standing stones are rather mute when it comes to telling us things. But they’re discovering caves in the south, filled with wall paintings that appear to be very old, older even than the Greeks. I can give you the names of the people at Avignon involved with that.”

“Thanks.”

Kirana sipped her coffee and listened to the others for a while. Then she said to Budur under the hubbub, “What’s interesting, I think, beyond all the theories we discuss, is what never gets written down. This is crucial for women especially, because so much of what we did never got written down. Just the ordinary, you know, daily existence. The work of raising children and feeding families and keeping a home together, as an oral culture passed along generation to generation. Uterine culture, Kang Tongbi called it. You must read her work. Anyway, uterine culture has no obvious dynasties, or wars, or new continents to discover, and so historians have never tried to account for it—for what it is, how it is transmitted, how it changes over time, according to material and social conditions. Changing with them, I mean, in a weave with them.”

“In the harem it’s obvious,” Budur said, feeling nervous at being jammed knee to knee with this woman. Cousin Yasmina had conducted enough clandestine “practice sessions” of kissing and the like among the girls that Budur knew just what the pressure from Kirana’s leg meant. Resolutely she ignored it and went on: “It’s like Scheherazade, really. Telling stories to get along. Women’s history would be like that, stories told one after another. And every day the whole process has to be renewed.”

“Yes, Scheherazade is a good tale about dealing with men. But there must be better models for how women should pass history along, to younger women, for instance. The Greeks had a very interesting mythology, full of goddesses modeling various woman-to-woman behaviors. Demeter, Persephone… they have a wonderful poet for this stuff too, Sappho. You haven’t heard of her? I’ll give you the references.”

7

This was the start of many more personal conversations over coffee, late at night in the rain-lashed cafés. Kirana lent Budur books on all kinds of topics, but especially Firanji history: the Golden Horde’s survival of the plague that had killed the Christians; the continuing influence of the Horde’s nomad structures on the descendant cultures of the Skandistani states; the infill of al-Andalus, Nsara, and the Keltic Islands by Maghribis; the zone of contention between the two infilling cultures in the Rhine Valley. Other volumes described the movement of Turks and Arabs through the Balkans, adding to the discord of the Firanji emirates, the little taifa states that fought for centuries, according to loyalties Sunni or Shiite, Sufi or Wahhabi, Turkic or Maghribi or Tartar; fought for dominance or survival, often desperately, creating conditions usually repressive for women, so that only in the farthest west had there been any cultural advances before the Long War, a progressiveness that Kirana associated with the ocean, and contact with other cultures by sea, and with Nsara’s origins as a refuge for the heterodox and marginal, founded indeed by a woman, the fabled refugee Sultana Katima.

Budur took these books and tried reading from them aloud to her blind soldiers in the hospital. She read them the story of the Glorious Ramadan Revolution, when Turkic and Kirghizi women had led seizures of the power plants of the big reservoirs above Samarqand, and moved into the ruins of the fabled city, which had been abandoned for nearly a century because of a series of violent earthquakes; how they had formed a new republic in which the holy laws of Ramadan were extended through the year, and the life of the people made a communal act of divine worship, all humans completely equal, men and women, adult and child, so that the place had reclaimed its glorious heritage of the tenth century, and made amazing advances in culture and law, and all had been happy there, until the shah had sent his armies east from Iran and crushed them as heretics.

Her soldiers nodded as they listened. That’s the way it happens, their silent faces said. The good is always crushed. Those who see the farthest have their eyes put out. Budur, seeing the way they hung on every word, like starving dogs watching people eat in sidewalk cafés, brought in more of her borrowed books to read to them. Ferdowsi’s The Book of Kings, the huge epic poem describing Iran before Islam, was very popular. So was the Sufi lyric poet Hafiz, and of course Rumi and Khayyam. Budur herself liked to read from her heavily annotated copy of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah.

“There is so much in Khaldun,” she said to her listeners. “Everything I learn at the institute I find already here in Khaldun. One of my instructors is fond of a theory that has the world being a matter of three or four major civilizations, each a core state, surrounded by peripheral states. Listen here to Khaldun, in the section entitled ‘Each dynasty has a certain amount of provinces and lands, and no more.’ ”

She read, “ ‘When the dynastic groups have spread over the border regions, their numbers are necessarily exhausted. This, then, is the time when the territory of the dynasty has reached its farthest extension, where the border regions form a belt around the center of the realm. If the dynasty then undertakes to expand beyond its holdings, its widening territory remains without military protection, and is laid open to any chance attack by enemy or neighbor. This has a detrimental result for the dynasty.’ ”

Budur looked up. “A very succinct description of core-periphery theory. Khaldun also addresses the lack of an Islamic core state that the others can rally around.”

Her audience nodded; they knew about that; the absence of alliance coordination at the various fronts of the war had been a famous problem, with sometimes terrible results.

“Khaldun also addresses a systemic problem in Islamic economy, in its origins among Bedouin practice. He says of them, ‘Places that succumb to the Bedouins are quickly ruined. The reason for this is that the Bedouins are a savage nation, fully accustomed to savagery and the things that cause it. Savagery has become their character and nature. They enjoy it, because it means freedom from authority and no subservience to leadership. Such a natural disposition is the negation and antithesis of civilization.’ He goes on to say, ‘It is their nature to plunder whatever other people possess. Their sustenance lies wherever the shadow of their lances falls.’ And after that he gives us the labor theory of value, saying, ‘Now, labor is the real basis of profit. When labor is not appreciated and is done for nothing, the hope for profit vanishes, and no productive work is done. The sedentary population disperses, and civilization decays.’ Really quite amazing, how much Khaldun saw, and this back in a time when the people living here in Nsara were dying of their plague, and the rest of the world not even close to thinking historically.”

The time for reading ended. Her audience settled back into their chairs and beds, hunkering down for the long empty watches of the afternoon.

Budur left with her usual combination of guilt, relief, and joy, and on this day went directly to Kirana’s class.

“How can we ever progress out of our origins,” she asked their teacher plaintively, “when our faith orders us not to leave them?”

Kirana replied, “Our faith said no such thing. This is just something the fundamentalists say to keep their hold on power.”

Budur felt confused. “But what about the parts of the Quran that tell us Muhammad is the last prophet, and the rules in the Quran should stand forever?”

Kirana shook her head impatiently. “This is another case of taking an exception for the general rule, a very common fundamentalist tactic. In fact there are some truths in the Quran that Muhammad declared eternal—such existential realities as the fundamental equality of every person—how could that ever change? But the more worldly concerns of the Quran, involved with the building of an Arabic state, changed with circumstances, even within the Quran itself, as in its variable statements against alcohol. Thus the principle of naskh, in which later Quranic instructions supercede earlier ones. And in Muhammad’s last statements, he made it clear that he wanted us to respond to changing situations, and to make Islam better—to come up with moral solutions that conform to the basic framework, but respond to new facts.”

Naser asked, “I wonder if one of Muhammad’s seven scribes could have inserted into the Quran ideas of his own?”

Again Kirana shook her head. “Recall the way the Quran was assembled. The mushaf, the final physical document, was the result of Osman bringing together all the surviving witnesses to Muhammad’s dictation—his scribes, wives, and companions—who, together, agreed upon a single correct version of the holy book. No individual interpolations could have survived that process. No, the Quran is a single voice, Muhammad’s voice, Allah’s voice. And it is a message of great freedom and justice on this Earth! It is the hadith that contain the false messages, the reimposition of hierarchy and patriarchy, the exceptional cases twisted to general rules. It’s the hadith that abandon the major jihad, the fight against one’s own temptations, for the minor jihad, the defense of Islam against attack. No. In so many ways, the rulers and clerics have distorted the Quran to their own purposes. This has been true in all religions, of course. It is inevitable. Anything divine must come to us in worldly clothing, and so it comes to us altered. The divine is like rain striking the earth, and all our efforts at godliness are therefore muddy—all but those few seconds of complete inundation, the moments that the mystics describe, when we are nothing but rain. But those moments are always brief, as the sufis themselves admit. So we should let the occasional chalice break, if need be, to get at the truth of the water inside it.”

Encouraged, Budur said, “So how do we be modern Muslims?”

“We don’t,” the oldest woman rasped, never pausing in her knitting. “It’s an ancient desert cult that has brought ruin to countless generations, including mine and yours, I’m afraid. It’s time to admit that and move on.”

“On to what, though?”

“To whatever may come!” the old one cried. “To your sciences—to reality itself! Why worry about any of these ancient beliefs! They are all a matter of the strong over the weak, of men over women. But it’s women who bear the children and raise them and plant the crops and harvest them and cook the meals and make the homes and care for the elderly! It’s women who make the world! Men fight wars, and lord it over the rest with their laws and religions and guns. Thugs and gangsters, that’s history! I don’t see why we should try to accommodate any of it at all!”

There was silence in the class, and the old woman resumed her knitting as if she were stabbing every king and cleric who ever lived. They could suddenly hear the rain pouring down outside, students’ voices in a courtyard, the old woman’s knitting needles murderously clicking.

“But if we take that route,” Naser said, “then the Chinese have truly won.”

More drumming silence.

The old woman finally said, “They won for a reason. They have no God and they worship their ancestors and their descendants. Their humanism has allowed them science, progress—everything we have been denied.”

Even deeper silence, so that they could hear the foghorn out on the point, bellowing in the rain.

Naser said, “You speak only of their upper classes. And their women had their feet bound into little nubbins, to cripple them, like clipping the wings of birds. That too is Chinese. They are hard bastards, you take my word for it. I saw in the war. I do not want to tell you what I saw, but I know, believe me. They have no sense of godliness, and so no rules of conduct; nothing to tell them not to be cruel, and so they are cruel. Horribly cruel. They don’t think the people outside China are really human. Only the Han are human. The rest, we are hui hui, like dogs. Arrogant, cruel beyond telling—it does not seem a good thing to me that we should imitate their ways, that they should win the war so completely as that.”

“But we were just as bad,” Kirana said.

“Not when we behaved as true Muslims. What would be a good project for a history class, I think, would be to focus on what has been best in Islam, enduring through history, and see if that can guide us now. Every sura of the Quran reminds us by its opening words—Bismallah, in the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful. Compassion, mercy—how do we express that? These are ideas that the Chinese do not have. The Buddhists tried to introduce them there, and they were treated like beggars and thieves. But they are crucial ideas, and they are central to Islam. Ours is a vision of all people as one family, in the rule of compassion and mercy. This is what drove Muhammad, driven by Allah or by his own sense of justice, the Allah inside us. This is Islam to me! That’s what I fought for in the war. These are the qualities we have to offer the world that the Chinese do not have. Love, to put it simply. Love.”

“But if we don’t live by these things—”

“No!” Naser said. “Don’t beat us with that stick. I don’t see any people on Earth living by their best beliefs anymore. This must be what Muhammad saw when he looked around him. Savagery everywhere, men like beasts. So every sura started with a call to compassion.”

“You sound like a Buddhist,” someone said.

The old soldier was willing to admit this. “Compassion, isn’t that their guiding principle of action? I like what the Buddhists do in this world. They are having a good effect on us. They had a good effect on the Japanese, and the Hodenosaunee. I’ve read books that say all our progress in science comes from the Japanese diaspora, as the latest and strongest of the Buddhist diasporas. They took up the ideas from the ancient Greeks and the Samarqandis.”

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.

Idelba shook her head at the great ages claimed for the settlement, and the dating methods used, and wondered aloud about certain geochronologies she had in mind that might be pursued. But after a while she fell as silent as the rest, and stood staring down into the spare and beautiful interiors of the old ones’ homes. These things of ours that endure.

Back in the island’s one town, Kirkwall, they walked through stone-paved streets to another little Buddhist temple complex, set behind the locals’ ancient cathedral, a tiny thing compared to the big skeletons left behind on the mainland, but roofed and complete. The temple behind it was very modest, a matter of four narrow buildings surrounding a rock garden, in a style Budur thought of as Chinese.

Here Idelba was greeted by Hanea and Ganagweh. Budur was shocked to see them, and they laughed at the expression on her face. “We told you we would be seeing you again soon, didn’t we?”

“Yes,” Budur said. “But here?”

“This is the biggest Hodenosaunee community in Firanja,” Hanea said. “We came down to Nsara from here, actually. And we return here quite often.”

After they were shown the complex and sat down in a room off the courtyard for tea, Idelba and Hanea slipped away, leaving a nonplussed Budur behind with Ganagweh.

“Mother said they would need to talk for an hour or two,” Ganagweh told her. “Do you know what they’re talking about?”

“No,” said Budur. “Do you?”

“No. I mean, I assume it has something to do with your aunt’s efforts to create stronger diplomatic relations between our countries. But that’s just stating the obvious.”

“Yes,” Budur said, extemporizing. “I know she’s been interested in that. But meeting you in Kirana Fawwaz’s class as I did…”

“Yes. And then the way you showed up at the monastery there. It seems we are fated to cross paths.” She was smiling in a way Budur couldn’t interpret. “Let’s go for a walk, those two will talk for a long while. There’s a lot to discuss, after all.”

This was news to Budur, but she said nothing, and spent the day wandering Kirkwall with Ganagweh, a very high-spirited girl, tall, quick, confident; the narrow streets and burly men of the Orkneys held no fears for her. Indeed at the end of the town tram line they walked far down a deserted strand overlooking the big bay that had once been such a busy naval base, and Ganagweh stopped at some boulders and stripped off her clothes and ran screaming out into the water, bursting back out in a flurry of whitewater, shrieking, her lustrous dark skin gleaming in the sun as she dried off with her fingers, flinging the water at Budur and daring her to take the plunge. “It’s good for you! It’s not that cold, it will wake you up!”

It was just the kind of thing Yasmina had always insisted they do, but shyly Budur declined, finding it hard to look at the big wet beautiful animal standing next to her in the sun; and when she walked down to touch the water, she was glad she had; it was freezing. She did feel as if she had woken up, aware of the brisk salt wind and Ganagweh’s wet black hair swinging side to side like a dog’s, spraying her. Ganagweh laughed at her and dressed while still damp. As they walked back, they passed a group of pale-skinned children who regarded them curiously. “Let’s get back and see how the old women are doing,” Ganagweh said. “Funny to see such grandmothers taking the fate of the world into their own hands, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Budur said, wondering what in the world was going on.

11

On the flight back to Nsara, Budur asked Idelba about it, but Idelba shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about it, and was busy writing in her notebook. “Later,” she said.

Back in Nsara, Budur worked and studied. At Kirana’s suggestion she read about southeast Asia, and learned how the Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic cultures had mixed there to make a vibrant new offspring, which had survived the war and was now using the great botanical and mineral riches of Burma and the Malay peninsula, and Sumatra and Java and Borneo and Mindanao, to create a group of peoples united against China’s centripetal power, freeing itself from Chinese influence. They had spread into Aozhou, the big burnt island continent south of them, and even across the oceans to Inka, and in the other direction to Madagascar and south Africa: it was a kind of emerging southern world culture, with the huge cities of Pyinkayaing, Jakarta, and Kwinana on the west coast of Aozhou leading the way, trading with Travancore, and building like maniacs, erecting cities that included many steel skyscrapers more than a hundred floors tall. The war had damaged but not destroyed these cities, and now the governments of the world met in Pyinkayaing whenever they tried to work out some more durable and just postwar dispensation.

There were more meetings all the time, as the situation became more and more deranged; anything to keep war from returning, as so very little had been resolved by it. Or so the members of the defeated alliance felt. It was unclear at this point if the Chinese and their allies, or the countries of Yingzhou, who had entered the conflict so much later than the rest, had any interest in accommodating Islamic concerns. Kirana remarked casually in class one day that it was very possible Islam was in the trash bin of history without yet knowing it; and the more Budur read of her books, the less sure she could be that this was necessarily a bad thing for the world. Old religions died; and if an empire tried to conquer the world and failed, it generally then disappeared.

Kirana’s own writing made that very clear. Budur took out her books from the monastery library, some published nearly twenty years before, during the war itself when Kirana had to have been quite young, and she read them with close interest, hearing Kirana’s voice in her head for every sentence; it was just like a transcript of her talking, except even more long-winded. She had written on many subjects, both theoretical and practical. Whole books of her African writings were concerned with various public health and women’s issues. Budur opened randomly, and found herself reading a lecture that had been given to midwives in the Sudan:

Budur flipped the pages of the book, disturbed. After a while she collected herself, and read the new page that presented itself:

Budur took a breath, marking the passage as something she would read to her blind soldiers. And as the weeks passed she read on, working her way through several volumes of Kirana’s essays and lectures, an exhausting experience, for Kirana never hesitated to attack head-on and at length everything that she disliked. And yet how she had lived! Budur found herself ashamed of her cloistered childhood and youth, the fact that she was twenty-three, now almost twenty-four, and had not yet done anything; by the time Kirana Fawwaz was that age she had already spent years in Africa, fighting in the war and working in hospitals. There was so much lost time to be made up!

Budur also read in many books Kirana had not assigned, concentrating for a while on the Sino-Muslim cultures that had existed in central Asia, how they had attempted for a number of centuries to reconcile the two cultures: the books’ bad old photographs showed these people, Chinese in appearance, Muslim in belief, Chinese in language, Muslim in law; it was hard to imagine such a mongrel people had ever existed. The Chinese had killed the greater part of them in the war, and dispersed the rest across the Dahai to the deserts and jungles of Yingzhou and Inka, where they worked in mines and on plantations, in effect slaves, though the Chinese claimed no longer to practice slavery, calling it a Muslim atavism. Whatever they called it, the Muslims in their northwest provinces were gone. And it could happen everywhere.

It began to seem to Budur there was no part of history she could read that was not depressing, disgusting, frightening, horrible; unless it be the New World’s, where the Hodenosaunee and the Dinei had organized a civilization capable, just barely, of resisting the Chinese to their west and the Firanjis to their east. Except even there, diseases and plagues had wrought such havoc on them in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that they had been reduced to a rather small populace, hiding in the center of their island. Nevertheless, small in number though they were, they had persevered, and adapted. They had remained somewhat open to foreign influences, tying everything they could into their leagues, becoming Buddhists, allying themselves with the Travancori League on the other side of the world, which indeed they had helped to form by their example; advancing from strength to strength, in short, even when hidden deep in their wild fastness, far from both coasts and from the Old World generally. Maybe that had helped. Taking what they could use, fighting off the rest. A place where women had always had power. And now that the Long War had shattered the Old World, they had become a sudden new giant across the seas, represented here by tall handsome people like Hanea and Ganagweh, walking the streets of Nsara in long fur or oilskin coats, butchering Firanjic with friendly dignity. Kirana had not written much about them, as far as Budur could find; but Idelba was dealing with them, in some mysterious fashion that began to involve packages, now, that Budur helped take on the tram up to Hanea and Ganagweh’s temple on the north coast. Four times she did this for Idelba without asking what it was for, and Idelba did not offer much explanation. Again, as in Turi, it seemed to Budur that Idelba knew things the rest of them did not. It was a very complicated life Idelba was living. Men at the gate, some of them pining for her romantically, one pounding on the locked door shouting, “Idelbaaa, I love you, pleeease!” and drunkenly singing in a language Budur didn’t recognize while punishing a guitar, Idelba meanwhile disappearing into their room and an hour later pretending nothing had occurred; then again, gone days at a time, and back, brow deeply furrowed, sometimes happy, sometimes agitated… a very complicated life. And yet more than half in secrecy.

12

“Yes,” Kirana said once to Budur in response to a question about the Hodenosaunee, looking at a group of them passing the café they were sitting in that day, “they may be the hope of all humanity. But I don’t think we understand them well enough to say for sure. When they have completed their takeover of the world, then we will learn more.”

“Studying history has made you cynical,” Budur noted. Kirana’s knee was pressed against hers again. Budur let her do it without ever responding one way or the other. “Or, to put it more accurately, what you have seen in your travels and teaching have made you a pessimist.” To be fair.

“Not at all,” Kirana said, lighting a cigarette. She gestured at it and said parenthetically, “You see how they already have us enslaved to their weed. Anyway, I am not a pessimist. A realist only. Full of hope, ha ha. But you can see the odds if you dare to look.” She grimaced and took a long drag on the cigarette. “Sorry—cramps. Ha. History till now has been like women’s periods, a little egg of possibility, hidden in the ordinary material of life, with tiny barbarian hordes maybe charging in, trying to find it, failing, fighting each other—finally a bloody mess ends that chance, and everything has to start all over.”

Budur laughed, shocked and amused. It was not a thought that had ever occurred to her.

Kirana smiled slyly, seeing this. “The red egg,” she said. “Blood and life.” Her knee pressed hard on Budur’s. “The question is, will the hordes of sperm ever find the egg? Will one slip ahead, fructify the seed within, and the world become pregnant? Will a true civilization ever be born? Or is history doomed always to be a sterile spinster!”

They laughed together, Budur uncomfortable in several different ways. “It has to pick the right partner,” she ventured.

“Yes,” Kirana said with her sly emphasis, the corners of her mouth lifted just the tiniest bit. “The Martians, perhaps.”

Budur recalled cousin Yasmina’s “practice kissing.” Women loving women; making love to women; it was common in the zawiyya, and presumably elsewhere; there were, after all, many more women than men in Nsara, as in the whole world. One saw hardly any men in their thirties or forties on the streets or in the cafés of Nsara, and the few one did see often seemed haunted or furtive, lost in an opium haze, aware they had somehow escaped a fate. No—that whole generation had been wiped out. And so one saw everywhere women in couples, hand in hand, living together in walk-ups or zawiyyas. More than once Budur had heard them in her own zawiyya, in the baths or bedrooms, or walking down the halls late at night. It was simply part of life, no matter what anyone said. And she had once or twice taken part in Yasmina’s games in the harem, Yasmina would read aloud from her romance novels and listen to her wireless shows, the plaintive songs flying in from Venezia, and afterward she would walk around their courtyard singing at the moon, wishing to have a man spying on her in these moments, or leaping over the wall and taking her in his arms, but there were no men around to do it. Let’s practice how it would be, she would mutter huskily in Budur’s ear, so we will know what to do—she always said the same thing—and then she would kiss Budur passionately on the mouth, and press herself against her, and after Budur got over the surprise of it she felt the passion passed into her mouth by a kind of qi transference, and she kissed back thinking, Will the real thing ever make my pulse beat this hard? Could it?

And cousin Rima was even more skillful, though less passionate, than Yasmina, as like Idelba she had once been married, and later lived in a zawiyya in Roma, and she would observe them and say coolly, no, like this, straddle the leg of the man you are kissing, press your pubic bone hard against his thigh, it will drive him completely crazy, it makes a full circuit then, the qi circles around in the two of you like in a dynamo. And when they tried it they found it was true. After such a moment Yasmina would be pink cheeked, would cry unconvincingly, Oh we’re bad, we’re bad, and Rima would snort and say, It’s like this in every harem there has ever been in the world. That’s how stupid men are. That’s how the world has gotten on.

Now, in the dregs of the night in this Nsarene café, Budur pressed back slightly against Kirana’s knee, in a knowing manner, friendly but neutral. For now, she kept arranging always to leave with some of the other students, not meeting Kirana’s eye when it counted—stringing her along, perhaps, because she was not sure what it would mean to her studies or to her life more generally, if she were to respond more positively and fall into it, whatever it might be, beyond the kissing and fondling. Sex she knew about, that would be the straightforward part; but what about the rest of it? She was not sure she wanted to get involved with this intense older woman, her teacher, still in some senses a stranger. But until you took the plunge, did not everyone remain a stranger forever?

13

They stood together, Budur and Kirana, at a garden party on a crowded patio overlooking the Liwaya River before it opened into its estuary, their upper arms just barely touching, as if by accident, as if the crush around the wealthy patron of the arts and philosopher Tahar Labid was so great that they had to do it to catch the beautiful pearls dropping from his lips; although in truth he was a terrible and obvious blowhard, a man who said your name over and over in conversation, almost every time he addressed you, so that it became very off-putting, as if he were trying to take you over, or simply to remember in his solipsism who he was talking to, never noticing that it made people want to escape him at all costs.

After a bit of this Kirana shuddered, at his self-absorption perhaps, too like hers to make her at all comfortable, and she led Budur away. She lifted Budur’s hand, all bleached and cracked from her constant cleaning, and said, “You should wear rubber gloves. I should think they would make you at the lab.”

“They do. I do wear them. But sometimes they make it hard to hold on to things.”

“Nevertheless.”

This gruff concern for the health of her hands, from the great intellectual, the teacher—suddenly surrounded by an audience of her own, asking her what she thought of certain Chinese feminists… Budur watched her reply immediately and at length about their origins among Muslim Chinese, particularly Kang Tongbi, who, with the encouragement of her husband the Sino-Muslim scholar Ibrahim al-Lanzhou, set out the theoretical groundwork for a feminism later elaborated in the Chinese heartland by generations of late Qing women—much of their progress contested by the imperial bureaucracy, of course—until the Long War dissolved all previous codes of conduct in the pure rationality of total war, and women’s brigades and factory crews established a position in the world that could never be retracted, no matter how hard the Chinese bureacrats tried. Kirana could recite by memory the wartime list of demands made by the Chinese Women’s Industrial Workers Council, and now she did just that: “Equal rights for men and women, spread of women’s education and facilities for it, improvement in position of women in the home, monogamy, freedom of marriage, encouragement of careers, a ban on concubines and the buying and selling of women, and on physical mutilation, improved political position, reform of prostitution.” It was a most strange-sounding song, or chant, or prayer.

“But you see, the Chinese feminists claimed women had it better in Yingzhou and Travancore, and in Travancore the feminists claimed to have learned it from the Sikhs, who learned it from the Quran. And here we focus on the Chinese. So that you see it has been a matter of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, each imagining that it is better in a different country, and that we should fight to equal the others…” On she talked, weaving the last three centuries together most brilliantly, and all the while Budur clenched her cracked white hands, thinking, She wants you, she wants your hands healthy because if she has her way, they will be touching her.

Budur wandered away on her own, disturbed, saw Hasan on another terrace and went up to join the group around him, which included Naser Shah and the ancient grandmother from Kirana’s class, looking at loose ends without her knitting kit in hand. It turned out they were brother and sister, and she the hostess of this party: Zainab Shah, very curt when Budur was finally introduced; and Hasan a longtime family friend of theirs. They had all known Kirana for years, and had taken her classes before, Budur learned from Naser as the conversations swirled around them.

“What bothers me is to see how repetitive and small-minded he could be, what a lawyer—”

“That’s why it works in application—”

“Works for who? He was the lawyer of the clerics.”

“No writer, anyway.”

“The Quran is meant to be spoken and heard, in Arabic it is like music, he is such a poet. You must hear it in the mosque.”

“I will not go there. That’s for people who want to be able to say, ‘I am better than you, simply because I assert a belief in Allah.’ I reject that. The world is my mosque.”

“Religion is like a house of cards. One fingertap of fact and it all falls over.”

“Clever but not true, like most of your aphorisms.”

Budur left Naser and Hasan, and went to a long table containing snacks and glasses of red and white wine, eavesdropping as she walked, eating pickled herrings on crackers.

“I hear the council of ministers had to kowtow to the army to keep them out of the treasury, so it comes to the same thing in the end—”

“—the six lokas are names for the parts of the brain that perform the different kinds of mentation. The level of beasts is the cerebellum, the level of hungry ghosts the limbic archipelago, the human realm the speech lobes, the realm of the asuras is the frontal cortex, and the realm of the gods is the bridge between the two halves of the brain, which when activated gives us glimpses of a higher reality. It’s impressive, really, sorting things out that clearly by pure introspection—”

“But that’s only five, what about hell?”

“Hell is other people.”

“—I’m sure it doesn’t add up to quite as many partners as that.”

“They’ve got control of the oceans, so they can come to us whenever they want, but we can’t go to them without their permission. So—”

“So we should thank our lucky stars. We want the generals to feel as weak as possible.”

“True, but nothing in excess. We may find it becomes a case of from the coffeepot to the fire.”

“—it’s well established that a belief in reincarnation floats around the world from one culture to the next, migrating to the cultures most stressed.”

“Maybe it migrates with the few souls who are actually transmigrating, ever think of that?”

“—with student after student, it’s like a kind of compulsion. A replacement for friends or something like that. Sad really, but the students are really the ones who suffer, so it’s hard to feel too sorry—”

“All history would have been different, if only…”

“Yes, if only? Only what?”

“If only we had conquered Yingzhou when we had the chance.”

“He’s a true artist, it’s not so easy working in scents, everyone has their own associations, but somehow he touches all the deepest ones everyone has, and as it’s the sense most tied to memory, he really has an effect. That shift from vanilla to cordite to jasmine, those are just the dominant scents, of course, each waft is a mix of scores of them, I think, but what a progression, heartrending I assure you…”

Near the drinks table a friend of Hasan’s, named Tristan, played an oud with a strange tuning, strumming simple chords over and over, and singing in one of the old Frankish languages. Budur sipped a glass of white wine and watched him play, forcing the voices talking around her from her attention. The man’s music was interesting, the level tones of his voice hanging steadily in the air. His black moustache curved over his mouth. He caught Budur’s eye, smiled briefly. The song came to an end and there was a patter of applause, and some of them surrounded him to ask questions. Budur moved in to hear his answers. Hasan joined them, and so Budur stood beside him. Tristan explained in clipped short phrases, as if he were shy. He didn’t want to talk about his music. Budur liked the look of him. The songs were from France and Navarre, he said, and Provence. Third and fourth centuries. People asked for more, but he shrugged and put his oud in its case. He didn’t explain, but Budur thought the crowd was simply too loud. Tahar was approaching the drinks table, and his group came with him.

“But I tell you, Vika, what happens is this—”

“—it all goes back to Samarqand, when there was still—”

“It would have to be beautiful and hard, make people ashamed.”

“That was the day, the very hour when it all started—”

“You, Vika, are perhaps afflicted with intermittent deafness.”

“But here’s the thing—”

Budur slipped away from the group, and then, feeling tired of the party and its guests, she left the party as well. She read the schedule posted at the tram stop and saw that it would be almost half a watch before another came, so she took off walking on the river path. By the time she reached the city center she was enjoying walking just for itself, and she continued on out the jetty, through the fish shops and out into the wind, where the jetty became an asphalt road cracking over huge boulders that stood greenly out of the oil-slicked water slurping against their sides. She watched the clouds and the sky, and felt suddenly happy—an emotion like a child inside her, a happiness in which worry was a vague and distant thing, no more than a cloud’s shadow on the dark blue surface of the sea. To think her life might have passed without her ever seeing the ocean!

14

Idelba came to her one night in the zawiyya and said, “Budur, you must remember never to tell anyone what I said to you about alactin. About what splitting it could mean.”

“Of course not. But why do you mention it?”

“Well… we are beginning to feel that there is some kind of surveillance being placed on us. Apparently from a part of the government, some security department. It’s a bit murky. But anyway, best to be very careful.”

“Why don’t you go to the police?”

“Well.” She refrained from rolling her eyes, Budur could see it. Voice lowered to a gentleness: “The police are part of the army. That’s from the war, and it never changed. So… we prefer not to draw any attention whatsoever to the issues involved.”

Budur gestured around them. “Surely we have nothing to worry about here, though. No woman in a zawiyya would ever betray a housemate, not to the army.”

Idelba stared at her to see if she was being serious. “Don’t be naïve,” she said finally, less gently, and with a pat on the knee got up to go to the bathroom.

This was not the only cloud to come at this time and drop its shadow on Budur’s happiness. Throughout Dar al-Islam, unrest was filling the newspapers, and inflation was universal. Military takeovers of the governments in Skandistan and Moldava and al-Alemand and the Tyrol, very close to Turi, alarmed the rest of the world all out of proportion to their puny size, as seeming to indicate a resurgence of Muslim aggressivity. The whole of Islam was accused of breaking the commitments forced on them at the Shanghai Conference after the war, as if Islam were a monolithic block, a laughable concept even in the depths of the war itself. Sanctions and even embargoes were being called for in China and India and Yingzhou. The effect of the threat alone was felt immediately in Firanja: the price of rice shot up, then the price of potatoes and maple syrup, and coffee beans. Hoarding quickly followed, old wartime habits kicking in, and even as prices rose staples were cleared off the shelves of the groceries the moment they appeared. This affected everything else as well, both food and other matters. Hoarding was a very contagious phenomenon, a bad mentality, a loss of faith in the system’s ability to keep everything running; and as the system had indeed broken down so disastrously at the end of the war, a lot of people were prone to hoard at the first hint of a scare. Making meals in the zawiyya became an exercise in ingenuity. They often dined on potato soup, spiced or garnished in one way or another so that it remained tasty, but it sometimes had to be watered pretty thin to get a cup of it into everyone at the table.

Café life went on as gaily as ever, at least on the surface. There was perhaps more of an edge in people’s voices; eyes were brighter, the laughs harder, the binges more drunken. Opium, too, became subject to hoarding. People came in with wheelbarrows of paper money, or exhibited five trillion drachma bills from Roma, laughing as they offered them in exchange for cups of coffee and were refused. It wasn’t very funny in all truth; every week things were markedly more expensive, and there didn’t seem to be anything to be done about it. They laughed at their own helplessness. Budur went to the cafés less often, which saved money, and the risk of an awkward moment with Kirana. Sometimes she went with Idelba’s nephew Piali to a different set of cafés, with a seedier clientele; Piali and his associates, who sometimes included Hasan and his friend Tristan, seemed to like the rougher establishments frequented by sailors and longshoremen. So through a winter of thick mists that hung in the streets like rain freed of gravity, Budur sat and listened to tales of Yingzhou and the stormy Atlantic, deadliest of all the seas.

“We exist on sufferance,” Zainab Shah said bitterly as she knitted in their regular café. “We’re like the Japanese after the Chinese conquered them.”

“Let the occasional chalice break,” Kirana murmured. Her expression in the dim light was serene, indomitable.

“They have all broken,” Naser said. He sat in the corner, looking out the window at the rain. He tapped his cigarette on the ashtray. “I can’t say I’m sorry.”

“In Iran too they don’t seem to care.” Kirana appeared to be trying to cheer him up. “They are making very great strides there, leading the way in all kinds of fields. Linguistics, archaeology, the physical sciences, they have all the leading people.”

Naser nodded, looking inward. Budur had gathered that his fortune had gone to fund many of these efforts, from an exile of some unexplained sort. Another complicated life.

Another downpour struck. The weather seemed to enunciate their situation, wind and rain slapping the Café Sultana’s big windows and running across the plate glass wildly, pushed this way and that by gusts of wind. The old soldier watched his smoke rise, twined threads of brown and gray, oxbowing more and more as they rose. Piali had once described the dynamics of this lazy ascent, as he had the rain’s deltas down the windowpanes. Storm sunlight cast a silver sheen on the wet street. Budur felt happy. The world was beautiful. She was so hungry that the milk in her coffee was like a meal inside her. The storm’s light was a meal. She thought: now is beautiful. These old Persians are beautiful; their Persian accents are beautiful. Kirana’s rare serenity is beautiful. Throw away the past and the future. The old Persians’ Khayyam had understood this, one reason among many that the mullahs had never liked him.

The others left, and Budur sat with Kirana, watching her write something down in her brown-backed notebook. She looked up, happy to see Budur watching her. She stopped for a cigarette, and they talked for a while, about Yingzhou and the Hodenosaunee. As usual, Kirana’s thoughts took interesting turns. She thought the very early stage of civilization that the Hodenosaunee had been in when discovered by the Old World was what had allowed them to survive, counterintuitive though that was. They had been canny hunter-gatherers, more intelligent as individuals than the people of more developed cultures, and much more flexible than the Inka, who were shackled by a very rigid theocracy. If it weren’t for their susceptibility to Old World diseases, the Hodenosaunee no doubt would have conquered the Old World already. Now they were making up for lost time.

They talked about Nsara, the army and the clerics, the madressa and the monastery. Budur’s girlhood. Kirana’s time in Africa.

When the café closed Budur went with her to Kirana’s zawiyya, which had a little study garret with a door that was often closed, and on a couch in there they lay on each other kissing, rolling from one embrace to the next, Kirana clasping her so hard that Budur thought her ribs might break; and they were tested again when her stomach clamped down on a violent orgasm.

Afterward Kirana held her with her usual sly smile, calmer than ever.

“Your turn.”

“I already came, I was rubbing myself on your shin.”

“There are softer ways than that.”

“No, really, I’m fine. I’m already done for.” And Budur realized with a shock she could not keep out of her eyes that Kirana was not going to let her touch her.

15

After that Budur went to class feeling strange. In class and in the cafés afterward, Kirana acted toward her just as she always had, a matter of propriety no doubt; but Budur found it off-putting, also sad. In the cafés she sat on the other side of the table from Kirana, not often meeting her eye. Kirana accepted this, and joined the flow of conversation on her side of the table, discoursing in her usual manner, which now struck Budur as a bit forced, even overbearing, although it was no more verbose than ever.

Budur turned to Hasan, who was describing a trip to the Sugar Islands, between Yingzhou and Inka, where he planned to smoke opium every day and lie on white beaches or in the turquoise water off their shores, warm as a bath. “Wouldn’t that be grand?” Hasan asked.

“In my next life,” Budur suggested.

“Your next life.” Hasan snorted, bloodshot eye regarding her sardonically. “So pretty to think so.”

“You never know,” Budur said.

“Right. Maybe we should take a trip out to see Madame Sururi, and you can see who you were in your past lives. Talk to your loved ones in the bardo. Half the widows of Nsara are doing it, I’m sure it’s quite comforting. If you could believe it.” He gestured out the plate glass, where people in black coats passed in the street, hunched under their umbrellas. “It’s silly, though. Most people don’t even live the one life they’ve got.”

One life. It was an idea Budur had trouble accepting, even though the sciences and everything else had made it clear that one life was all you had. When Budur was a girl her mother had said, Be good or you’ll come back as a snail. At funerals they said a prayer for the next existence of the deceased, asking Allah to give him or her a chance to improve. Now all that was dismissed, with all the rest of the afterlives, heaven and hell, God himself—all that claptrap, all the supersitions of earlier generations in their immense ignorance, concocting myths to make sense of things. Now they lived in a material world, evolved to what it was by chance and the laws of physics; they struggled through one life and died; that was what the scientists had revealed by their studies, and there was nothing Budur had ever seen or experienced that seemed to indicate otherwise. No doubt it was true. That was reality; they had to adjust to it, or live in a delusion. Adjust each to his or her own cosmic solitude, to Nakba, to hunger and worry, coffee and opium, the knowledge of an end.

“Did I hear you say we should visit Madame Sururi?” Kirana asked from across the table. “A good idea! Let’s do it. It would be like a historical field trip for the class—like visiting a place where people still live as they did for hundreds of years.”

“From all I’ve heard she’s an entertaining old charlatan.”

“A friend of mine visited her and said it was great fun.”

They had spent too many hours sitting there, looking at the same ashtrays and coffee rings on the tabletops, the same rain deltas on the windows. So they gathered up their coats and umbrellas, and took the number four tram upriver to a meager neighborhood of apartments abutting the older shipyards, the buildings displaying small Maghribi shops at each corner. Between a seamstress’s workshop and a laundry hid a little walk-up to rooms over the shops below. The door opened to their knock, and they were invited in to an entryway, and then, farther in, to a dark room filled with couches and small tables, obviously the converted living room of a fairly large old apartment.

Eight or ten women and three old men were sitting on chairs, facing a black-haired woman who was younger than Budur had expected but not all that young, a woman who wore Zotti clothing, heavy kohl and lipstick, and a great deal of cheap glass jewelry. She had been speaking to her devotees in a low intent voice, and now she paused, and gestured to empty chairs at the back of the room without saying anything to the new arrivals.

“Each time the soul descends into a body,” she resumed when they were seated, “it is like a divine soldier, entering into the battlefield of life and fighting ignorance and evil-doing. It tries to reveal its own inner divinity and establish the divine truth on Earth, according to its capacity. Then at the end of its journey in that incarnation, it returns to its own region of the bardo. I can talk to that region when conditions are right.”

“How long will a soul spend there before coming back again?” one of the women in her audience asked.

“This varies depending on conditions,” Madame Sururi replied. “There is no single process for the evolution of higher souls. Some began from the mineral and some from the animal kingdom. Sometimes it starts from the other end, and cosmic gods take on human form directly.” She nodded as if personally familiar with this phenomenon. “There are many different ways.”

“So it’s true that we may have been animals in a previous reincarnation?”

“Yes, it is possible. In the evolution of our souls we have been all things, including rocks and plants. It is not possible to change too much between any two reincarnations, of course. But over many incarnations, great changes can be made. The Lord Buddha revealed that he had been a goat in a previous life, for instance. But because he had realized God, this was not important.”

Kirana stifled a little snort, shifted on her chair to cover it.

Madame Sururi ignored her: “It was easy for him to see what he had been in the past. Some of us are given that kind of vision. But he knew that the past was not important. Our goal is not behind us, it is ahead of us. To a spiritual person I always say, the past is dust. I say this because the past has not given us what we want. What we want is God-realization, and contact with our loved ones, and that depends entirely on our inner cry. We must say, ‘I have no past. I am beginning here and now, with God’s grace and my own aspiration.’ ”

There was not much to object to in that, Budur thought; it cut strangely to the heart, given the source; but she could feel skepticism emanating from Kirana like heat, indeed the room seemed to be warming with it, as if a qi-burning space heater had been placed on the floor and turned on high. Perhaps it was a function of Budur’s embarrassment. She reached over and squeezed Kirana’s hand. It seemed to her that the seer was more interesting than Kirana’s fidgets were allowing.

An elderly widow, still wearing one of the pins given to them in the middle decades of the war, said, “When a soul picks a new body to enter, does it already know what kind of life it will have?”

“It can only see possibilities. God knows everything, but He covers up the future. Even God does not use His ultimate vision all the time. Otherwise, there would be no game.”

Kirana’s mouth opened round as a zero, almost as if she were going to speak, and Budur elbowed her.

“Does the soul lose the details of its previous experiences, or does it remember?”

“The soul doesn’t need to remember those things. It would be like remembering what you ate today, or what a disciple’s cooking was like. If I know that the disciple was very kind to me, that she brought me food, then that is enough. I don’t need to know the details of the meals. Just the impression of the service. This is what the soul remembers.”

“Sometimes, my—my friend and I meditate by looking into each other’s eyes, and when we do, sometimes we see each other’s faces change. Even our hair changes color. I was wondering what this means.”

“It means you are seeing past incarnations. But this is not at all advisable. Suppose you see that three or four incarnations ago you were a fierce tiger? What good would this do you? The past is dust, I tell you.”

“Did any of your disciples—did any of us know each other in our past incarnations?”

“Yes. We travel in groups, we keep running into each other. There are two disciples here, for instance, who are close friends in this incarnation. When I was meditating on them, I saw that they were physical sisters in their previous incarnation, and very close to each other. And in the incarnation before that, they were mother and son. This is how it happens. Nothing can eclipse my third eye’s vision. When you have established a true spiritual bond, then that feeling can never truly disappear.”

“Can you tell us—can you tell us who we were before? Or who among us had this bond?”

“Outwardly I have not personally told these two, but those who are my real disciples I have told inwardly, and so they know it inside themselves already. My real disciples—those whom I have taken as my very own, and who have taken me—they are going to be fulfilled and realized in this incarnation, or in their next incarnation, or in very few incarnations. Some disciples may take twenty incarnations or more, because of their very poor start. Some who have come to me in their first or second human incarnation may take hundreds of incarnations more to reach their goal. The first or second incarnation is still a half-animal incarnation, most of the time. The animal is still there as a predominating factor, so how can they achieve God-realization? Even in the Nsara Center for Spiritual Development, right here among us, there are many disciples who have had only six or seven incarnations, and on the streets of the city I see Africans, or other people from across the sea, who are very clearly more animal than human. What can a guru do with such souls? With these people a guru can only do so much.”

“Can you… can you put us in communication with souls who have passed over? Now? Is it time yet?”

Madame Sururi returned her questioner’s gaze, level and calm. “They are speaking to you already, are they not? We cannot bring them forth in front of everyone tonight. The spirits do not like to be so exposed. And we have guests that they are not yet used to. And I am tired. You have seen how draining it is to speak aloud in this world the things they are saying in our minds. Let’s retire to the dining room now, and enjoy the offerings you have brought. We will eat knowing that our loved ones speak to us in our minds.”

The visitors from the café decided by glance to leave while the others were retiring to the next room, before they began to commit the crime of taking others’ food without believing in their religion. They made small coin offerings to the seer, who accepted them with dignity, ignoring the tenor of Kirana’s look, staring back at Kirana without guilt or complicity.

The next tram wasn’t due for another half watch, and so the group walked back through the industrial district and down the riverside, reenacting choice bits of the interview and staggering with laughter. Kirana for one could not stop laughing, howling it out over the river: “My third eye sees all! But I can’t tell you right now! What unbelievable crap!”

“I’ve already told you what you want to know with my inner voice, now let’s eat!”

“Some of my disciples were sisters in previous lives, sister goats in actual fact, but you can only ask so much of the past, ah, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

“Oh be quiet,” Budur said sharply. “She’s only making a living.” To Kirana: “She tells people things and they pay her, how is that so different from what you do? She makes them feel better.”

“Does she?”

“She gives them something in exchange for food. She tells them what they want to hear. You tell people what they don’t want to hear for your food, is that any better?”

“Why yes,” Kirana said, cackling again. “It’s a pretty damned good trick, now you put it that way. Here’s the deal!” she shouted over the river at the world. “I tell you what you don’t want to hear, you give me food!”

Even Budur had to laugh.

They walked across the last bridge arm in arm, laughing and talking, then into the city center, trams squealing over tracks, people hurrying by. Budur looked at the passing faces curiously, remembering the worn visage of the fake guru, businesslike and hard. No doubt Kirana was right to laugh. All the old myths were just stories. The only reincarnation you got was the next day’s waking. No one else was you, not the you that existed a year before, not the you that might exist ten years from now, or even the next day. It was a matter of the moment, some unimaginable minim of time, always already gone. Memory was partial, a dim tawdry room in a beat-up neighborhood, illuminated by flashes of distant lightning. Once she had been a girl in a good merchant’s harem, but what did that matter now? Now she was a free woman in Nsara, crossing the city at night with a group of laughing intellectuals—that was all there was. It made her laugh too, a painful wild shout of a laugh, full of a joy akin to ferocity. That was what Kirana really gave in exchange for her food.

16

Three new women showed up in Budur’s zawiyya, quiet women who had arrived with typical stories, and mostly kept to themselves. They started work in the kitchen, as usual. Budur felt uncomfortable with the way they glanced at her, and did not look at each other. She still could not quite believe that young women like these would betray a young woman like her, and two of the three were actually very nice. She was stiffer with them than she would have wanted to be, without actually being hostile, which Idelba had warned might give away her suspicions. It was a fine line in a game Budur was completely unused to playing—or not completely—it reminded her of the various fronts she had put on for her father and mother, a very unpleasant memory. She wanted everything to be new now, she wanted to be herself straight up to everybody, chest to chest as the Iranians said. But it seemed life entailed putting on masks for much of the time. She must be casual in Kirana’s classes, and indifferent to Kirana in the cafés, even when they were leg to leg; and she must be civil to these spies.

Meanwhile, across the plaza in the lab, Idelba and Piali were hard at work, staying late into the night almost every night; and Idelba became more and more serious about it, trying, Budur thought, to hide her worries behind an unconvincing dismissiveness. “Just physics,” she would say when asked. “Trying to figure something out. You know how interesting theories can be, but they’re just theories. Not like real problems.” It seemed everyone put on a mask to the world, even Idelba, who was not good at it, even though she seemed to have a frequent need for masks. Budur could see very plainly now that she thought the stakes were somehow high.

“Is it a bomb?” Budur asked once in a low voice, one night as they were closing up the emptied building.

Idelba hesitated only a moment. “Possibly,” she whispered, looking around them. “The possibility is there. So, please—never speak of it again.”

During these months Idelba worked such long hours, and, like everyone else in the zawiyya, ate so little, that she fell sick, and had to rest in her bed. This was very frustrating to her, and along with the misery of illness, she struggled to get up before she was ready, and even tried to work on papers in her bed, pencil and logarithmic abacus scritching and clacking all the time she was awake.

Then one day she got a phone call while Budur was there, and she dragged herself down the hall to take it, clutching her night robe to her. When she got off the phone she hurried to the kitchen and asked Budur to join her in her room.

Budur followed her, surprised to see her moving so quickly. In her room Idelba shut the door and began to pile a mass of her papers and notebooks into a cloth book bag. “Hide this for me,” she said urgently. “I don’t think you can leave, though, they’ll stop you and search you. It has to be in the zawiyya someplace, not in your room or mine, they’ll search them both. They may search everywhere, I’m not sure where to suggest.” Her voice was low but the tone frantic; Budur had never heard her like that.

“Who is it?”

“It doesn’t matter, hurry! It’s the police. They’re on their way, go.”

The doorbell rang, and rang again.

“Don’t worry,” Budur said, and ran down the hall to her room. She looked around: a room search, perhaps a house search; and the bag of papers was big. She looked around, thinking over the zawiyya in her mind, wondering if Idelba would mind if she somehow managed to destroy the bag entirely—not that she had any method in mind, but she wasn’t sure how crucial the papers were—but possibly they could be shredded and flushed down a toilet.

There were people in the hall, women’s voices. Apparently the police who had entered were women officers, so they were not breaking the house rule against men. A sign perhaps; but men’s voices came from out in the street, arguing with the zawiyya elders; women were in the hall; a big knock on her door, they had come to hers first, no doubt along with Idelba’s. She put the bag around her neck, climbed onto her bed, then the iron headboard, and pulled herself up the wall and shoved up a panel of the false ceiling, and with a push off like a dance step, knee in the meeting of the two walls, got under the panel and onto the wall’s dusty top, which was about two feet wide. She sat on it and put the panel back down into place, very quietly.

The old museum had had very high ceilings, with some glass skylights that were now almost perfectly opaque with dust. In the dimness she could see over the ceilings of several rows of rooms, and the open tops of the hallways, and the true walls, far away in every direction. It was not a good hiding place at all, if they only thought to look up here, from anywhere.

The top of the walls consisted of warped wood beams, nailed to the top of the framing and over the drywall like coping. To each wall there were two sheets of drywall, notoriously transparent to sound, nailed onto each side of the framing; so there would be gaps between the two sheets of drywall, if she could get a beam off the top somewhere.

She moved onto her hands and knees and swung the bag onto her back, and began crawling over the dusty beams, looking for a hole while staying well away from the hallways, where a glance up could reveal her. From here the whole arrangement looked ramshackle, cobbled together in a hurry, and soon enough she found a cap where three walls met and a beam had been cut short. It wasn’t big enough to fit the whole bag, but she could stuff papers in there, and she did so quickly, until the bag was empty, and the bag dropped in last. It wasn’t a perfect hiding place if they wanted to be comprehensive, but it was the best she could think of, and she was pretty pleased with it, actually; but if they found her up on the beams, all would be lost. She crawled on as quietly as she could, hearing voices back in the direction of her room. They would only have to stand on her bed’s headboard and push up a panel for a look to see her. The far bathroom did not sound as though it had anyone in it, so she crawled in that direction, ripping the skin over one knee on a nailhead, and pulled up a panel an inch and peered in—empty—she pulled it aside, hung from the beam, dropped, hit the tiled floor hard. The wall was smeared with dust and blood; her knees and the tops of her feet were filthy with dust, and the palms of her hands marked everything like the hand of Cain. She washed in a sink, tore off her djebella and put it in the laundry, pulled clean towels from the cabinet and wetted one to clean the wall off. The panel above was still pulled aside, and there were no chairs in the bathroom; she couldn’t get up there to move it back in place. Glancing out in the hall—loud voices arguing, Idelba’s among them, protesting, no one in sight—she dashed across the hall to a bedroom and took a chair and ran back into the bathroom and put the chair against the wall, stepped up onto it, stepped gently on the chair back, reached up and yanked the panel back into place, smashing her fingers between two panels. Yank them free, push the panel into position, down again, the chair slipping across the tile with her movement. Clatter, bang, catch herself, another glance out, more arguing, coming closer; she put the chair back, went back in the bathroom, went to the showers and got in, soaping her knees and feeling the sting in the cut. She soaped and soaped, heard voices outside the bathroom. She washed off the soap as quickly as possible, and was dried and wrapped in a big towel when women came into the room, including two in army uniforms, looking like soldiers from the war whom Budur had seen long ago, in the Turi train station. She looked as startled as she could, held the towel to herself.

“Are you Budur Radwan?” one of the policewomen demanded.

“Yes! What do you want?”

“We want to talk to you! Where have you been?”

“What do you mean, where have I been? You can see very well where I’ve been! What is this all about, why do you want me? What could have brought you in here?”

“We want to talk to you.”

“Well, let me go get dressed and I will talk to you. I have done nothing wrong, I assume? I can get dressed before talking to my own countrywomen, I assume?”

“This is Nsara,” one of them said. “You’re from Turi, right?”

“True, but we are all Firanjis here, all good Muslim women in a zawiyya, unless I am mistaken?”

“Come on, get dressed,” the other one said. “We have some questions to ask about affairs here, security threats that may be centered here. So come. Where are your clothes?”

“In my room, of course!” And Budur swept past them to her room, considering which djebella would best hide her knees and any blood that might be seeping down her leg. Her blood was hot, but her breathing calm; she felt solid; and there was an anger growing in her, like a boulder from the jetty, anchoring her from the inside.

17

Though they made a fairly thorough search, they did not find Idelba’s papers, nor did they get anything but bewilderment and indignation from their questionings. The zawiyya filed suit with the courts against the police, for invasion of privacy without proper authorization, and only the invocation of wartime secrecy laws kept it from being a scandal in the newspapers. The courts backed the search but also the zawiyya’s future right to privacy, and after that it was back to normal, or sort of; Idelba never talked about her work anymore, no longer worked in certain labs she had before, and she no longer spent any time with Piali.

Budur continued in her routine, making her rounds from home, to work, to the Café Sultana. There she sat behind the big plate-glass windows and looked out at the docks, and the forests of masts and steel superstructures, and the top of the lighthouse at the end of the jetty, while the talk swirled around her. At their tables too, very often, were Hasan and Tristan, sitting like limpets in their pool with the tide gone out, exposing them wetly to the moon. Hasan’s polemics and poetry made him a force to be reckoned with, a truth that all the city’s avant-garde acknowledged, either enthusiastically or reluctantly. Hasan himself spoke of his reputation with a smirk meant to be self-deprecating, wickedly smiling as he briefly exposed his power to view. Budur liked him although she knew perfectly well he was in some senses a disagreeable person. She was more interested in Tristan and his music, which included not only songs like those he had sung at the garden party, but also vast long works for bands of up to two hundred musicians, sometimes featuring him on the kundun, an Anatolian stringed box with metal tabs to the side that slightly changed the tones of the strings, a fiendishly difficult instrument to play. He wrote out the parts for each instrument in these pieces, down to every chord and change, and even every note. As in his songs, these longer compositions showed his interest in adapting the primitive tonalities of the lost Christians, for the most part simple harmonic chords, but containing within them the possibility of various more sophisticated tonalities, which could at strategic moments return to the Pythagorean basics favored in the chorales and chants of the lost ones. Writing down every note and demanding that the musicians in the ensemble play only and exactly the written notes was an act that everyone regarded as megalomaniacal to the point of impossibility; ensemble music, though very highly structured in a way that went back ultimately to Indian classical ragas, nevertheless allowed for individual improvisation of the details of the variations, spontaneous creations that indeed provided much of the interest of the music, as the musician played within and against the raga forms. No one would have stood for Tristan’s insane strictures if it were not that the results were, one could not deny it, superb and beautiful. And Tristan insisted that the procedure was not his idea, but merely the way that the lost civilization had gone about it; that he was following the lost ways, even doing his best to channel the hungry ghosts of the old ones in his dreams and in his musical reveries. The old Frankish pieces he hoped to invoke were all religious music, devotionals, and had to be understood and utilized as such, as sacred music. Although it was true that in this hyperaesthetic circle of the avant-garde it was music itself that was sacred, like all the arts, so that the description was redundant.

It was also true that treating art as sacred often meant smoking opium or drinking laudanum to prepare for the experience; some even used the stronger distillates of opium developed during the war, smoking or even injecting them. The resulting dream states made Tristan’s music mesmerizing, the practitioners said, even those who were not fond of the lost civilization’s simplistic tootles; opium induced a deep absorption in the sensuous surface of musical sound, in the plainsong harmonies, vibrating between a drugged band and a drugged audience. If the performance was combined with the fanned aromas of a scent artist, the results could be truly mystical. Some were skeptical of all this: Kirana said once, “As high as they all get, they could simply sing a single note for the whole hour, and smell their armpits, and all would be as happy as birds.”

Tristan himself often led the opium ceremonies before leading the music, so these evenings had a somewhat cultic air to them, as if Tristan were some kind of mystic Sufi master, or one of the Hosain actors in the plays about Hosain’s martyrdom, which the opium crowd also attended after crossing into dreamland, to watch Hosain putting on his own shroud before his murder by Shemr, the audience groaning, not at the murder onstage, but at this choice of martyrdom. In some of the Shiite countries the person playing Shemr had to run for his life after the performance, and more than one unlucky actor had been killed by the crowd. Tristan thoroughly approved; this was the kind of immersion in the art that he wanted his musical audiences to achieve.

But only in the secular world; it was all for music, not for God; Tristan was more Persian than Iranian, as he put it sometimes, much more an Omarian than any kind of mullah, or a mystic of Zoroastrian bent, concocting rituals in honor of Ahura-Mazda, a kind of sun worship that in foggy Nsara could come straight from the heart. Channeling Christians, smoking opium, worshiping the sun; he did all kinds of crazy things for his music, including working for many hours every day to get every note right on the page; and though none of it would have mattered if the music had not been good, it was good, it was more than that; it was the music of their lives, of Nsara in its time.

He spoke of all the theory behind it, however, in cryptic little phrases and aphorisms that then made the rounds, as “Tristan’s latest”; and often it was just a shrug and a smile and an offered opium pipe, and, most of all, his music. He composed what he composed, and the intellectuals of the city could listen and then talk about what it all meant, and they often did all through the night. Tahar Labid would go on endlessly about it, and then say to Tristan, with almost mock aggressiveness, That’s right, isn’t it Tristan Ahura, then go on without pausing for an answer, as if Tristan were to be laughed at as an idiot savant for never deigning to reply one way or the other; as if he didn’t really know what his music meant. But Tristan only smiled at Tahar, sphinxlike and enigmatic under his moustache, relaxed as if poured into his window seat, looking out at the wet black cobbles or spearing Tahar with an amused glance.

“Why don’t you ever answer me!” Tahar exclaimed once.

Tristan pursed his lips and whistled a response at him.

“Oh come on,” Tahar said, reddening. “Say something to make us think you have a single idea in your head.”

Tristan drew himself up. “Don’t be rude! Of course there are no ideas in my head, what do you think I am!”

So Budur sat next to him. She joined him when, with a tilt of the chin and pursing of the lips, he invited her into one of the back rooms of the café where the opium smokers gathered. She had decided ahead of time to join them if the opportunity was offered, to see what hearing Tristan’s music under the influence would be like; to see what the drug felt like, using the music as the ceremony that allowed her to overcome her Turic fear of the smoke.

The room was small and dark. The huqqah, bigger than a narghile, sat on a low table in the middle of floor pillows, and Tristan cut a chunk from a black plug of opium and put it in the bowl, lit it with a silver cigarette lighter as one of the others inhaled. As the single mouthpiece was passed around the smokers sucked on it, and each in turn began immediately to cough. The black plug in the bowl bubbled to tar as it burned; the smoke was thick and white, and smelled like sugar. Budur decided to take in so little that she wouldn’t cough, but when the mouthpiece came to her and she inhaled gently through it, the first taste of the smoke caused her to hack like a demon. It seemed impossible she could be so affected by anything that had been in her so briefly.

Then it struck deeper. She felt her blood filling her skin, then all of her. Blood filled her like a balloon, it would spurt out if her hot skin didn’t hold it in. She pulsed with her pulse, and the world pulsed with her. Everything jumped forward into itself somehow, in time with her heart. The dim walls pulsed. More color revealed itself with every beat of her heart. The surfaces of things swirled with coiled pressure and tension, they looked like what Idelba said they really were, bundles of bundled energy. Budur pulled herself to her feet with the others, walked, balancing carefully, through the streets to the concert hall in the old palace, into a space long and tall like a deck of cards set on its side. The musicians filed in and sat, their instruments like strange weapons. Following Tristan’s lead, conveyed by hand and eye, they began to play. The singers chanted in the ancient Pythagorean tonality, pure and sugary, a single voice wandering above in descant. Then Tristan on his oud, and the other string players, bass to treble, sneaked in underneath, wrecking the simple harmonies, bringing in a whole other world, an Asia of sound, so much more complex and dark—reality—seeping in, and, over the course of a long struggle, overwhelming the old west’s plainchant. This was the story of Firanja that Tristan was singing, Budur thought suddenly, a musical expression of the history of this place they lived in, late arrivals that they were. Firanjis, Franks, Kelts, the oldest ones back in the murk of time… Each people overrun in its turn. It was not a scent performance, but there was incense burning before the musicians, and as their songs wove together the thick smells of sandalwood and jasmine choked the room, they came in on Budur’s breath and sang inside her, playing a complex rondelay with her pulse, just as in the music itself, which was so clearly another speech of the body, a language she felt she could understand in the moment it happened, without ever being able to articulate or remember it.

Sex too was a language like that; as she found later that night, when she went home with Tristan to his grubby apartment, and to bed with him. His apartment was across the river in the south wharf district, a cold and damp garret, an artistic cliché, and uncleaned, it appeared, since his wife had died near the end of the war—some factory accident, Budur had gathered from others, a chance of bad timing and broken machinery—but the bed was there, and the sheets clean, which made Budur suspicious; but after all she had been showing interest in Tristan, so perhaps it was only a matter of politeness, or self-respect of some heartening kind. He was a dreamy lover and played her like an oud, languorous and faintly teasing, so that there was an edge to her passion, of resistance and struggle, all adding somehow to the sexiness of the experience, so that it nagged at her afterward, as if set into her with hooks—nothing like the blazing directness of Kirana—and Budur wondered what Tristan intended by it, but realized also in that very first night that she was not going to learn from Tristan’s words, as he was as reticent with her as he was with Tahar, almost; so that she would have to know him by what could be intuited from his music and his looks. Which were indeed very revealing of his moods and their swings, and so of his character (perhaps); which she liked. So for a while she went home with him fairly often, arranging for prophylactics with the zawiyya clinic, going out at night to the cafés and taking the opportunity when it came.

After a time, however, it became annoying to try to have conversation with a man who only sang melodies—like trying to live with a bird. It echoed painfully that distance in her father, and the mute quality of her attempts to study the remote past, which were equally speechless. And as things in town got tighter, and each week added another zero to the numbers on the paper money, it got harder and harder to gather the large ensembles that Tristan’s current compositions required. When the district panchayat that ran the old palace chose not to lend a concert room, or the musicians were occupied with their real jobs, in class or on the docks or in the shops selling hats and raincoats, then Tristan could only strum his oud, and finger his pencils and take endless notes, in an Indian musical notation that was said to be older than Sanskrit, although Tristan confessed to Budur that he had forgotten the system during the war, and now used one of his own devising that he had had to teach to his players. His melodies became more morose, she thought, tunes from a heavy heart, mourning the losses of the war, and the ones that had happened since, and were still occuring now, in the moment of listening itself. Budur understood them, and kept joining Tristan from time to time, watching the twitches under his moustache for clues as to what amused him when she or others spoke, watching his yellowed fingers as they felt their tunes forward, or noted down one quicksilver lament after another. She heard a singer she thought he would like, and took him to hear her, and he did like her, he hummed on the way home, looking out the tram window at the dark city streets, where people hurried from streetlight to streetlight over gleaming cobblestones, hunched under umbrellas or serapes.

“It’s like in the forest,” Tristan said with a lift of the moustache. “Up in your mountains, you know, you see places where avalanches have bent all the trees down sideways, and then after the snow melts, the trees there all stay bent sideways together.” He gestured at the crowd waiting at a tram stop. “That’s what we’re like now.”

18

As the days and the weeks passed Budur continued to read voraciously, in the zawiyya, the institute, the parks, at the jetty’s end, in the hospital for the blind soldiers. Meanwhile there were ten-trillion piastre bills arriving with immigrants from the Middle West, and they were at ten-billion drachma bills themselves; recently a man had stuffed his house from floor to ceiling with money, and traded the whole establishment for a pig. At the zawiyya it was harder and harder to put together meals big enough to feed them all. They grew vegetables in crops on the roof, cursing the clouds, and lived on their goats’ milk, their chickens’ eggs, cucumbers in great vats of vinegar, pumpkins cooked in every conceivable fashion, and potato soup, watered to a thinness thinner than milk.

One day Idelba found the three spies going through the little cabinet above her bed, and she had them kicked out of the house as common thieves, calling in the neighborhood police and bypassing the issue of spying, without, however, getting into the tricky issue of what else besides her ideas she had that would be worth stealing.

“They’ll be in trouble,” Budur observed after the three girls were taken away. “Even if they’re plucked out of jail by their employers.”

“Yes,” Idelba agreed. “I was going to leave them here, as you saw. But once they were caught, we had to act as if we didn’t know who they were. And the truth is we can’t afford to feed them. So they can go back to who sent them. Hopefully.” A grim expression; she didn’t want to think about it—about what she might have condemned them to. That was their problem. She had hardened in just the two years since she had brought Budur to Nsara, or so it seemed to Budur. “It’s not just my work,” she explained, seeing Budur’s expression. “That remains latent. It’s the problems we have right now. Things won’t need blowing up if we all starve first. The war ended badly, that’s all there is to it. I mean not just for us, as the defeated, but for everyone. Things are so out of balance, it could bring everything down. So everyone needs to pull together. And if some people don’t, then I don’t know…”

“All that time you spend working in the music of the Franks,” Budur said to Tristan, one evening in the café, “do you ever think about what they were like?”

“Why yes,” he said, pleased at the question. “All the time. I think they were just like us. They fought a lot. They had monasteries and madressas, and water-powered machinery. Their ships were small, but they could sail into the wind. They might have taken control of the seas before anyone else.”

“Not a chance,” said Tahar. “Compared to Chinese ships they were no more than dhows. Come now, Tristan, you know that.”

Tristan shrugged.

“They had ten or fifteen languages, thirty or forty principalities, isn’t that right?” said Naser. “They were too fractured to conquer anyone else.”

“They fought together to capture Jerusalem,” Tristan pointed out. “The infighting gave them practice. They thought they were God’s chosen people.”

“Primitives often think that.”

“Indeed.” Tristan smiled, leaning sideways to peer through the window toward the neighborhood mosque. “As I say, they were just like us. If they had lived, there would be more people like us.”

“There’s no one like us,” Naser said sadly. “I think the Franks must have been very different.”

Tristan shrugged again. “You can say anything you like about them, it doesn’t matter. You can say they would have been enslaved like the Africans, or made slaves of the rest of us, or brought a golden age, or waged wars worse than the Long War…”

People shook their heads at all these impossibilities.

“…but it doesn’t matter. We’ll never know, so you can say whatever you like. They are our jinn.”

“It’s funny how we look down on them,” Kirana observed, “just because they died. At an unconscious level it seems like it must have been their fault. A physical weakness, or a moral failing, or a bad habit.”

“They affronted God with their pride.”

“They were pale because they were weak, or vice versa. Muzaffar has showed it, how the darker the skin, the stronger the persons. The blackest Africans are strongest of all, the palest of the Golden Horde are weakest. He did tests. The Franks were hereditarily incompetent, that was his conclusion. Losers in the evolutionary game of survival of the fittest.”

Kirana shook her head. “It was probably just a mutation of the plague, so strong it killed off all its hosts, and therefore died itself. It could have happened to any of us. The Chinese, or us.”

“But there’s a kind of anemia common around the Mediterranean, that might have made them more susceptible…”

“No. It could have been us.”

“That might have been good,” Tristan said. “They believed in a god of mercy, their Christ was all love and mercy.”

“Hard to tell that by what they did in Syria.”

“Or al-Andalus—”

“It was latent in them, ready to spring forth. While for us what is latent is jihad.”

“They were the same as us, you said.”

Tristan smiled under his moustache. “Maybe. They’re the blank on the map, the ruins underfoot, the empty mirror. The clouds in the sky that look like tigers.”

“It’s such a useless exercise,” Kirana reflected. “What if this had happened, what if that had happened, what if the Golden Horde had forced the Gansu Corridor at the start of the Long War, what if the Japanese had attacked China after retaking Japan, what if the Ming had kept their treasure fleet, what if we had discovered and conquered Yingzhou, what if Alexander the Great had not died young, on and on, and they all would have made enormous differences and yet it’s always entirely useless. These historians who talk about employing counterfactuals to bolster their theories, they’re ridiculous. Because no one knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing at all. Because we don’t know if history is sensitive, and for want of a nail a civilization was lost, or if our mightiest acts are as petals on a flood, or something in between, or both at once. We just don’t know, and the what-ifs don’t help us figure it out.”

“Why do people like them so much, then?”

Kirana shrugged, took a drag on her cigarette. “More stories.”

And indeed more of them were immediately proposed, for despite their uselessness in Kirana’s eyes, people enjoyed contemplating the what-might-have-been: what if the Moroccan lost fleet of 924 had been blown to the Sugar Islands and then made it back; what if the Kerala of Travancore had not conquered much of Asia and set out his railways and legal system; what if there had been no New World islands there at all; what if Burma had lost its war with Siam…

Kirana only shook her head. “Perhaps it would be better just to focus on the future.”

“You, a historian, say this? But the future can’t be known at all!”

“Well, but it exists for us now as a project to be enacted. Ever since the Travancori enlightenment we have had a sense of the future as something we make. This new awareness of time to come is very important. It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We’re midway through the loom, that’s the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture in the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history.”

19

But one could sit with people like that, have conversations like that, and still walk outside into watery sunlight with nothing to eat and no money worth anything. Budur worked hard at the zawiyya, and set up classes in Persian and Firanjic for the hungry girls moving in who only spoke Berber or Arabic or Andalusi or Skandistani or Turkish. At night she continued as a habitué of the cafés and coffeehouses, and sometimes the opium dens. She got work with one of the government agencies as a translator of documents, and continued to study archaeology. She was worried when Idelba fell ill again, and spent a lot of time caring for her. The doctors said that Idelba was suffering from “nervous exhaustion,” something like the battle fatigue of the war; but to Budur she seemed very obviously physically weaker, harmed by something the doctors could not identify. Illness without cause; Budur found this too frightening to think about. Probably it was a hidden cause, but that too was frightening.

She got more involved with the running of the zawiyya, taking over some of what Idelba had done before. There was less time to read. Besides, she wanted to do more than read, or even write reports: she felt too anxious to read, and merely perusing a number of texts and then boiling them down into a new text struck her as an odd activity; it was like being a still, distilling ideas. History as a brandy; but she wanted something more substantial.

Meanwhile, many a night she still went out and enjoyed the midnight scene at the coffee and opium cafés, listening to Tristan’s oud (they were friends only now), sometimes in a opiated dream that allowed her to wander the fogged halls of her thoughts without actually entering any rooms. She was deep in a reverie concerning the Ibrahamic collisional nature of progress in history, something like the continents themselves, if the geologists were right, creating new fusions, as in Samarqand, or Mughal India, or the Hodenosaunee dealing with China to the west and Islam to the east, or Burma, yes—all this was coming clear, like random bits of colored rock on the ground swirling into one of Hagia Sophia’s elaborate self-replicating arabesques, a common opium effect to be sure, but then that was what history always was, a hallucinated pattern onto random events, so there was no cause to disbelieve the illumination just because of that. History as an opium dream—

Halali from the zawiyya burst into the café’s back room looking around; spotting her Budur knew immediately that something was wrong with Idelba. Halali came over, her face holding a serious expression. “She’s taken a turn for the worse.”

Budur followed her out, stumbling under the weight of the opium, trying to banish all its effects immediately with her panic, but that only cast her further out into visual distortions of all kinds, and never had Nsara looked uglier than on that night, rain bouncing hard on the streets, squiggles of light cobbling underfoot, shapes of people like rats swimming…

Idelba was gone from the zawiyya, she had been taken to the nearest hospital, a huge rambling wartime structure on the hill north of the harbor. Slogging up there, inside the rain cloud itself; then the sound of rain pounding on the cheap tin roof. The light was an intense throbbing yellow-white in which everyone looked blank and dead, like walking meat as they had said during the war of men sent to the front.

Idelba was no worse-looking than the rest, but Budur rushed to her side. “She’s having trouble breathing,” a nurse said, looking up from her chair. Budur thought: these people work in hell. She was very frightened.

“Listen,” Idelba said calmly. She said to the nurse, “Please leave us alone for ten minutes.” When the nurse was gone, she said in a low voice to Budur, “Listen, if I die, then you need to help Piali.”

“But Aunt Idelba! You aren’t going to die.”

“Be quiet. I can’t risk writing this down, and I can’t risk telling only one person, in case something happens to them too. You need to get Piali to go to Isfahan, to describe our results to Abdol Zoroush. Also to Ananda, in Travancore. And Chen, in China. They all have tremendous influence within their respective governments. Hanea will handle her end of things. Remind Piali of what we decided was best. Soon, you see, all atomic physicists will understand the theoretical possibilities of the way alactin splits. The possible application. If they all know the possibility exists, then there will be reason for them to press to make peace permanent. The scientists can pressure their respective governments, by making clear the situation, and taking control of the direction of the relevant fields of science. They must keep the peace, or there will be a rush to destruction. Given the choice, they must choose peace.”

“Yes,” Budur said, wondering if it would be so. Her mind was reeling at the prospect of such a burden being placed on her to carry. She did not like Piali very much. “Please, Aunt Idelba, please. Don’t distress yourself. It will be all right.”

Idelba nodded. “Very possibly.”

She rallied late that night, just before dawn, just as Budur was beginning to come down from her opium delirium, unable to remember much of the night that had taken so many eons to pass. But she still knew what Idelba wanted her to try to do. Dawn came as dark as if an eclipse had come and stayed.

It was the following year before Idelba died.

The funeral was attended by many people, hundreds of them, from zawiyya and madressa and institute, and the Buddhist monastery, and the Hodenosaunee embassy, and the district panchayat and the state council, and many other places all over Nsara. But not a single person from Turi. Budur stood numbly in a reception line with a few of the senior women from the zawiyya, and shook hand after hand. Afterward, during the unhappy wake, Hanea came up to her again. “We loved her too,” she said with a flinty smile. “We will make sure to keep the promises we made to her.”

A couple of days later Budur kept her usual appointment to read to her blind soldiers. She went in their ward and sat there staring at them in their chairs and beds, and thought, This is probably a mistake. I may feel blank but I’m probably not. She told them of her aunt’s death, then, and tried to read to them from Idelba’s work, but it was not like Kirana’s; even the abstracts were incomprehensible, and the texts themselves, scientific papers on the behavior of invisible things, were composed largely of tables of numbers. She quit trying with those, and picked up another book. “This is one of my aunt’s favorite books, a collection of the autobiographical writings found in the works of Abu Ali Ibn Sina, the early scientist and philosopher who was a great hero to her. From what I have read of him, Ibn Sina and my aunt were alike in many ways. They both had a great curiosity about the world. Ibn Sina first mastered Euclid’s geometry, then set out to understand everything else. Idelba did that very same thing. When Ibn Sina was still young he fell into a sort of fever of inquiry, which gripped him for almost two years. Here, I will read to you what he himself says about that period.”

“That’s the kind of person my aunt was,” Budur said. She put down that book and picked up another one, thinking that it would be better to stop reading things inspired by Idelba. It wasn’t making her feel any better. The book she chose out of her bag was called Nsarene Sailor’s Tales, true stories about the local seamen and fisherfolk, rousing adventures full of fish and danger and death but also of the sea air, the waves and the wind. The soldiers had enjoyed chapters of the book she had read to them before.

But this time she read one called “The Windy Ramadan,” and it turned out to be about a time long before, in the age of sail, when contrary winds had held the grain fleet out of the harbor, so that they had had to anchor offshore in the roads as darkness fell, and then in the night the wind shifted around and a great storm came roaring in from the Atlantic, and there was no way for those out on the ships to get safely to shore, and nothing those on shore could do but walk the shore through the night. The author of the account had a wife who was taking care of three motherless children whose father was one of the sea captains out in the fleet, and, unable to watch the children at their nervous play, the author had gone out to walk the strand with the rest, braving the howling winds of the tempest. At dawn they had all seen the fringe of soaked grain lining the high-water mark, and knew the worst had come. “Not a single ship survived the gale, and all up and down the beach the bodies washed ashore. And as it had dawned a Friday, at the appointed hour the muezzin went to the minaret to ascend and make the call for prayer, and the town idiot in a rage detained him, crying, ‘Who in such an hour can praise the Lord?’ ”

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.

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

“This is how all the world will look, as people become more mobile,” Abdol Zoroush said to Budur and Piali afterward, as he showed them around the institute’s grounds, very extensive, and then the riverside district just south of it. There was a promenade overlooking the river being built, with cafés backing it and a view of the mountains upstream, which Zoroush said had been designed with the estuary corniche of Nsara in mind. “We wanted to have something like your great city, landlocked though we are. We want a little of that sense of openness.”

The conference began the next day, and for the next week Budur did little else but attend sessions on various topics related to what many there were calling the new archaeology, a science rather than just a hobby of antiquarians, or the misty starting point of the historians. Piali meanwhile disappeared into the physical sciences buildings for meetings on physics. The two of them then met again for supper in big groups of scientists, seldom getting the chance to talk in private.

For Budur the archaeological presentations, coming from all over the world, were a very exciting education all by themselves, making clear to her and everyone else that in the postwar reconstruction, with the new discoveries and the development of new methodologies, and a provisional framework of early world history, a new science and a new understanding of their deep past was coming into being right before their eyes. The sessions were overbooked, and went long into the evenings. Many presentations were made in the hallways, with the presenters standing by posters or chalkboards, talking and gesturing and answering questions. There were more that Budur wanted to attend than was possible, and she quickly developed the habit of positioning herself at the back of the rooms or the crowds in the halls, taking in the crux of a presentation while perusing the schedule, and planning her next hour’s wandering.

In one room she stopped to listen to an old man from western Yingzhou, Japanese or Chinese in ancestry, it appeared, speaking in an awkward Persian about the cultures that existed in the New World when it had been discovered by the Old. It was her acquaintance with Hanea and Ganagweh that made her interested.

“Although in terms of machinery, architecture, and so forth, the inhabitants of the New World still existed in the oldest days, without domesticated animals in Yingzhou, and none but guinea pigs and llamas in Inka, the culture of the Inkas and Aztecs somewhat resembled what we are learning of ancient Egypt. Thus the Yingzhou tribes lived as people in the Old World did before the first cities, say around eight thousand years ago, while the southern empires of Inka resembled the Old World of about four thousand years ago: a distinct difference, which it would be interesting to explain, if you could. Perhaps Inka had some topographical or resource advantages, such as the llama, a beast of burden which, though slight by Old World standards, was more than Yingzhou had. This put more power at their disposal, and as our host Master Zoroush has made clear, in the energy equations used to judge a culture, the power they can bring to bear against the natural world is a crucial factor in their development.

“In any case, the great degree of primitivity in Yingzhou actually gives us a view into social structures that might be like the Old World’s preagricultural societies. They are curiously modern in certain respects. Because they had the basics of agriculture—squash, corn, beans, and so on—and had a small population to support in a forest that provided enormous numbers of game animals and nut-bearing trees, they lived in a prescarcity economy, just as we now glimpse a technologically created postscarcity state in its theoretical possibility. In both, the individual receives more recognition as a value bearer him- or herself, than does the individual in a scarcity economy. And there is less domination of one caste by another. In these conditions of material ease and plenty, we find the great egalitarianism of the Hodenosaunee, the power wielded by women in their culture, and the absence of slavery—rather, the rapid incorporation of defeated tribes into the full texture of the state.

“By the time of the First Great Empires, four thousand years later, all this was gone, replaced by an extreme vertical scale, with god-kings, a priest caste with ultimate power, permanent military control, and slavery of defeated nations. These early developments, or one should say pathologies, of civilization (for the gathering into cities greatly speeded this process) are only now being dealt with, some four thousand years later still, in the most progressive societies of the world.

“In the meantime, of course, both these archaic cultures have almost entirely disappeared from this world, mostly due to the impact of Old World diseases on populations that apparently had never been exposed to them. Interestingly, it was the southern empires that collapsed most quickly and completely, conquered almost incidentally by the Chinese gold armies, and then quickly devastated by disease and famine, as if the body without its head must die instantly. Whereas in the north it was completely different, first because the Hodenosaunee were able to defend themselves in the depths of the great eastern forest, never fully succumbing to either the Chinese or to the Islamic incursion from across the Atlantic, and second because they were much less susceptible to Old World diseases, possibly because of early exposure to them from wandering Japanese monks, traders, trappers, and prospectors, who ended up infecting the local populace in small numbers, thus serving in effect as human inoculants, immunizing or at least preparing the population of Yingzhou for a fuller incursion of Asians, who did not have quite as devastating an effect, although of course many people and tribes did die.”

Budur moved on, thinking about the notion of a postscarcity society, which in hungry Nsara she had never heard of at all. But it was time for another session, a plenary affair that Budur did not want to miss, and which turned out to be one of the most heavily attended. It concerned the question of the lost Franks, and why the plague had hit them so hard.

Much work had been done in this area by the Zott scholar Istvan Romani, who had done his research around the periphery of the plague zone, in Magyaristan and Moldava; and the plague itself had been studied intensively during the Long War, when it seemed possible that one side or another would unleash it as a weapon. It was understood now that it had been conveyed in the first centuries by fleas living on gray rats, traveling on ships and in caravans. A town called Issyk Kul, south of Lake Balkhash in Turkestan, had been studied by Romani and a Chinese scholar named Jiang, and they had found evidence in the cemetery of the town’s Nestorians of a heavy die-off from the plague around the year 700. This had apparently been the start of the epidemic that had moved west on the Silk Roads to Sarai, capital at that time of the Golden Horde khanate. One of their khans, Yanibeg, had besieged the Genoese port of Kaffa in the Crimea by catapulting the bodies of plague victims over the town walls. The Genoese had thrown the bodies in the sea, but this had not stopped the plague from infecting the entire Genoese network of trading ports, including, eventually, the whole of the Mediterranean. The plague moved from port to port, took a respite during the winters, then a renewal in the hinterlands the following spring; this pattern continued for over twenty years. All the westernmost peninsulas of the Old World were devastated, moving north from the Mediterranean and back to the east as far as Moscow, Novgorod, Kopenhagen and the Baltic ports. At the end of this time the population in Firanja was perhaps thirty percent of what it had been before the onset of the epidemic. Then in the years around 777, a date considered significant at the time by some mullahs and Sufi mystics, a second wave of the plague—if it was the plague—had killed off almost all the survivors of the first wave, so that sailors at the start of the eighth century reported witnessing, usually from offshore, a completely emptied land.

Now there were scholars giving presentations who believed that the second plague had actually been anthrax, following on the bubonic plague; there were others who held the reverse position, arguing that contemporary accounts of the first sickness matched the freckling of anthrax more often than the buboes of bubonic plague, while the final blow had been the plague. It was explained in this session that the plague itself had bubonic, septic, and pneumonic forms, and that the pneumonia caused by the pneumonic form was contagious, and very fast and lethal; the septic form even more lethal. Indeed, much had been clarified about all these diseases by the unfortunate experiences of the Long War.

But why had the disease, whichever one it had been, or in whatever combinations, been so lethal in Firanja and not elsewhere? The meeting offered presentation after presentation by scholars advancing one theory after another. From her notes Budur described them all for Piali at the end of the day, over supper, and he quickly jotted them down on a napkin.

“Sunspots?” Piali interjected.

“That’s what he said.” Budur shrugged.

“So,” Piali said, looking over the napkin, “it was either the plague animalcules, or some other animalcules, or some quality of the people, or their habits, or their land, or the weather, or sunspots.” He grinned. “That pretty much covers it, I should think. Perhaps cosmic rays ought to be included. Wasn’t there a big supernova spotted about that time?”

Budur could only laugh. “I think it was earlier. Anyway, you must admit, it does merit explaining.”

“Many things do, but it looks as though we have a way to go on this one.”

The presentations continued, ranging from the recording of the world that had existed just before the Long War, all the way back through time to the earliest human remains. This work on the first humans forced everyone to the contemplation of one of the larger arguments shaping up in the field, concerning human beginnings.

Archaeology as a discipline had its origins for the most part in the Chinese bureaucracy, but it had been picked up quickly by the Dinei people, who studied with the Chinese and went back to Yingzhou intending to learn what they could about the people they called the Anasazi, who had preceded them in the dry west of Yingzhou. The Dinei scholar Anan and his colleagues had offered the first explanations of human migration and history, asserting that tribes on Yingzhou had mined the tin on Yellow Island in the biggest of the great lakes, Manitoba, and shipped this tin across the oceans to all the bronze-era cultures in Africa and Asia. Anan’s group contended that civilization had begun in the New World with the Inka and Aztecs and the Yingzhou tribes, in particular the old ones who preceded their Anasazi in the western deserts. Their great and ancient empires had sent out reed and balsam rafts, trading tin for spices and various plant stocks with Asian ancestry, and these Yingzhou traders had established the Mediterranean civilizations predating Greece, especially the ancient Egyptians and Midwestern empires, the Assyrians and Sumerians.

So the Dinei archaeologists had claimed, anyway, in a very fully articulated case, with all sorts of objects from all over the world to support it. But now a great deal of evidence was appearing in Asia and Firanja and Africa that indicated this story was all wrong. The oldest lifering dates for human settlement in the New World were about twenty thousand years before the present, and everyone had agreed at first that this was extremely old, and predated by a good deal the earliest civilizations known to Old World history, the Chinese and the Midwestern and Egyptian; so at that point it had all seemed plausible. But now that the war was over, scientists were beginning to investigate the Old World in a way that hadn’t been possible since a time predating modern archaeology itself. And what they were finding was a great quantity of signs of a human past far older than any yet known. Caves in the Nsaran south containing superb drawings of animals were now reliably dated at forty thousand years. Skeletons in the Midwest appeared to be a hundred thousand years old. And there were scholars from Ingali in South Africa saying they had found remains of humans, or evolutionarily ancestral prehumans, that appeared to be several hundred thousand years old. They could not use lifering dating for these finds, but had different dating methods they thought were just as good as the lifering method.

Nowhere else on Earth were people making a claim like this one from the Africans, and there was a great deal of skepticism about it; some queried the dating methods, other simply dismissed the claim out of hand, as a manifestation of some kind of continental or racial patriotism. Naturally the African scholars were upset by this response, and the meeting that afternoon took on a volatile aspect that could not help but remind people of the late war. It was important to keep the discourse on a scientific basis, as an investigation into facts uncontaminated by religion or politics or race.

“I suppose there can be patriotism in anything,” Budur said to Piali that night. “Archaeological patriotism is absurd, but it’s beginning to look that’s how it started in Yingzhou. An unconscious bias, no doubt, toward one’s own region. And until we sort out the dating of things, it’s an open question what model will replace theirs.”

“Certainly the dating methods will improve,” Piali said.

“True. But meanwhile all is confusion.”

“That’s true of everything.”

The days shot by in a blur of meetings. Every day Budur got up at dawn, went to the madressa’s dining commons to have a small breakfast, and then attended talks and sessions and poster explanations from then until supper, and after that far into the evenings. One morning she was startled to hear a young woman describing her discovery of what appeared to be a lost feminist branch of early Islam, a branch which had fueled the renaissance of Samarqand, and was then destroyed and the memory of it erased. Apparently a group of women in Qom had taken against a ruling by the mullahs, and led their families east and north to the walled town of Derbent, in Bactria, a place that had been conquered by Alexander the Great and was still living a Greek life in Transoxianic bliss a thousand years later, when the Muslim women rebels and their families arrived. Together they created a way of life in which all living beings were equal before Allah and among themselves, something like what Alexander would have made, for he was a disciple of the queens of Kreta. Then all the people of Derbent lived happily for many years, and though they kept to themselves and did not try to impose themselves on all the world, they did tell some of what they had learned to the people they traded with in nearby Samarqand; and in Samarqand they took that knowledge, and made of it the start of the rebirth of the world. You can read all this in the ruins, the young researcher insisted.

Budur wrote down the references, realizing as she did that archaeology too could be a kind of wish, or even a statement about the future. She went back into the halls, shaking her head. She would have to ask Kirana about it. She would have to look into it herself. Who knew, really, what people had done in the past? Many things had happened and never been written about and after a time had been utterly forgotten. Almost anything might have happened, anything. And there was that phenomenon Kirana had mentioned once in passing, of people imagining that things were better in another land, which then gave them the courage to try to enact some progress in their own country. Thus women had everywhere imagined that women elsewhere had it better than they did, and thus they had had the courage to press for changes. And no doubt there were other examples of the tendency, people imagining the good in advance of its reality, as in the stories of the good place discovered and then lost, what the Chinese called “Source of the Peach Blossom Stream” stories. History, fable, prophecy; no way to distinguish, until perhaps centuries had passed, and they had made the stories one thing or the other.

She dropped in on many more sessions, and this impression of people’s endless struggle and effort, endless experimentation, of humans thrashing about trying to find a way to live together, only deepened in her. An imitation Potala built outside Beijing at two-thirds full size; an ancient temple complex, perhaps Greek in origin, lost in the jungles of Amazonia; another in the jungles of Siam; an Inka capital set high in the mountains; skeletons of people in Firanja who were not quite like modern humans in their skull shape; roundhouses made of mammoth bones; the calendrical purposes of the stone rings of Britain; the intact tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh; the nearly untouched remains of a French medieval village; a shipwreck on the peninsula of Ta Shu, the ice continent surrounding the south pole; early Inkan pottery painted with patterns from the south of Japan; Mayan legends of a “great arrival” from the west by a god Itzamna, which was the name of the Shinto mother goddess of the same era; megalithic monuments in Inka’s great river basin that resembled megaliths in the Maghrib; old Greek ruins in Anatolia that seemed to be the Troy of Homer’s epic poem The Iliad; huge lined figures on the Inkan plains that could only be seen properly from the sky; the beach village in the Orkneys that Budur had visited with Idelba; a very complete Greek and Roman city at Ephesus, on the Anatolian coast; these and many, many more such finds were described. Each day was a rush of talk, Budur all the while scribbling notes in her notebook, and asking for reprints of articles, if they were in Arabic or Persian. She took a particular interest in the sessions on dating methods, and the scientists working on this matter often told her how much they owed to her aunt’s pioneering work. They were now investigating other methods of dating, such as the matching up of successive tree rings to create a “dendrochronology,” proceeding fairly well, and also the measurement of a particular kind of qileak luminescence that was fixed into pottery that had been fired at high enough temperatures. But there was much work to be done on these methods, and no one was happy with the current state of their abilities to date what they found of the past in the earth.

One day a group of the archaeologists who had used Idelba’s work on dating joined Budur, and they crossed the campus of the madressa to attend a memorial session for Idelba put on by the physicists who had known her. This session was to consist of a number of eulogies, a presentation on the various aspects of her work, some presentations of recent work that referred back to hers, and then a short party or wake in celebration of her life.

Budur wandered the rooms of this memorial session accepting praise for her aunt, and condolences of her passing. The men in the room (for they were mostly men) were very solicitous of her and, for the most part, quite cheerful. Even the memory of Idelba brought smiles to their faces. Budur was filled with amazement and pride by this outpouring of affection, though often it made her ache as well; they had lost a valued colleague, but she had lost the only family that mattered to her, and could not always keep her focus on her aunt’s work alone.

At one point she was asked to speak to the assemblage and so she struggled to pull herself together as she went up to the lectern, thinking as she walked of her blind soldiers, who existed in her mind as a kind of bulwark or anchor, a benchmark of what was truly sad. In contrast to that this was indeed a celebration, and she smiled to see all these people congregated to honor her aunt. It only remained to figure out what to say, and as she went up the stairs it occurred to her that she only needed to try to imagine what Idelba herself would say, and then paraphrase that. That was reincarnation in a sense she could believe in.

So she looked down at the crowd of physicists, feeling calm and anchored inside, and thanked them for coming, and added, “You all know how concerned Idelba was for the work that you are doing in atomic physics at this time. That it should be used for the good of humanity and not for anything else. I think the best memorial you could make to her would be some kind of organization of scientists devoted to the proper dissemination and use of your knowledge. Perhaps we can talk about that later. It would be very appropriate if such an organization came to be as a result of thinking about her wishes, because of a belief she held, as you know, that scientists, among all people, could be counted on to do what was right, because it would be the scientific thing to do.”

She felt a stilling in the audience. The looks on their faces were all of a sudden very much like those on the faces of her blind soldiers: pain, longing, desperate hope; regret and resolve. Many of the people in this room had no doubt been involved in the war effort of their respective countries—at the end, too, when the race in military technologies had speeded up, and things had gotten particularly ferocious and dire. The inventors of the gas shells that had blinded her soldiers could very well be in this room.

“Now,” Budur continued cautiously, “obviously this has not always been the case, so far. Scientists have not always done the right thing. But Idelba’s vision of science had it as being progressively improvable, just as a matter of making it more scientific. That aspect is one of the ways you define science, as against many other human activities or institutions. So to me this makes it a kind of prayer, or worship of the world. It is a devotional labor. This aspect should be kept in mind, whenever we remember Idelba, and whenever we consider the uses of our work. Thank you.”

After that more people than ever came up to her to speak their thanks and appreciation, displaced though it was from its absent object. And then, as the memorial hour wound down, some of them moved on to a meal in a nearby restaurant, and when it was over, an even smaller group of them lingered afterward over coffee and baklava. It was as if they were in one of the rain-lashed cafés of Nsara.

And finally, very late in the night, when no more than a dozen of them remained, and the waiters of the restaurant looked like they wanted to close down, Piali looked around the room, and got a nod from Abdol Zoroush, and said to Budur, “Doctor 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 procedure 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. Doctor Chen’s translator spoke to him in Chinese and he nodded and said something back.

The translator said in Persian, “Doctor 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 superbomb. It would lead to madness.”

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

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

Doctor 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, Doctor 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. Forward and backward 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 begin 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 Doctor Chen, who watched Budur closely as she spoke. When she was done, he nodded and said something.

The interpreter 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 a half-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 good-bye messages. She looked at the photos of the messages, crammed into a margin of a religious book; the handwriting was clear, and looked like Sanskrit. The Arabic translation underneath one had a homely sound:

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 forever. 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.”

22

They flew back the next day, Piali fretting at the slowness of the airship, wishing that the military airplanes 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 the windows of the tram as it rolled into the city, they could not 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 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 Piali’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 hard-line 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 façade 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 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 becoming less frequent and severe, 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 the big transverse streets, cutting through the medinas flanking the Lawiyya 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 wheeled 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 Muhammad 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 backward! 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 forward one step back, a struggle forever. But each time we progress a little further, and no one is going to push us backward! 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 of them 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 neighbors, as Muhammad 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:

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:

Budur on that morning was awakened in the zawiyya by someone bringing news to her of a phone message: it was from one of her blind soldiers. They wanted to talk to her.

She took the tram and then walked into the hospital, feeling apprehensive. Were they angry at her for not coming recently? Were they worried about the way she had left after her last visit?

No. The oldest ones spoke for them, or for some part of them, anyway; they wanted to march in the demonstration against the army takeover, and they wanted her to lead them. About two-thirds of the ward said they wanted to do it.

It wasn’t the kind of request one could refuse. Budur agreed, and feeling shaky and uncertain, led them out the gate of the hospital. There were too many of them for the trams, so they walked down the riverfront road, and then the corniche, hands on the shoulders before them, like a parade of elephants. Back in the ward Budur had gotten used to the look of them, but out here in the brilliant sunshine and the open air they were a shocking sight once again, maimed and awful. Three hundred and twenty-seven of them, walking down the corniche; they had taken a head count when leaving the ward.

Naturally they drew a crowd, and some people began following them down the corniche, and in the big plaza there was already a crowd, a crowd that quickly made room for the veterans at the front of the protest, facing the old palace. They arranged themselves into ranks by feel, and counted off in undertones, with a little aid from Budur. Then they stood silently, right hands on the shoulders to their left, listening to the speakers at the microphone. The crowd behind them grew bigger and bigger.

Army airships floated low over the city, and amplified voices from them ordered everyone to leave the streets and plazas. A full curfew had been declared, the mechanical voices informed them.

This decision had no doubt been made in ignorance of the blind soldiers’ presence in the palace square. They stood there without moving, and the crowd stood with them. One of the blind soldiers shouted, “What are they going to do, gas us?”

In fact this was all too possible, as pepper gas had been deployed already, at the State Council Chambers and the police barracks, and down on the docks. And later it was said by many that the blind soldiers were in fact tear-gassed during that tense week, and that they just stood there and took it, for they had no tears left to shed; that they stood in their square with their hands on each others’ shoulders and chanted the Fatiha, and the bismallah that starts every sura:

Budur herself never saw any pepper gas dropped in the palace square, although she heard her soldiers chanting the bismallah for hours at a time. But she was not there in the square every hour of that week, and hers was not the only group of blind soldiers to have left their hospitals and joined the protests either. So possibly something of the sort occurred. Certainly in the time afterward everyone believed it had.

In any case, during that long week people passed the time by reciting long passages from Rumi Balkhi, and Ferdowski, and the joker mullah Nusreddin, and the epic poet of Firanja, Ali, and from their own Sufi poet of Nsara, young Ghaleb, who had been killed on the very last day of the war. Budur made frequent visits to the women’s hospital where Kirana was staying, to tell her what was happening on the plaza and elsewhere in the great city, now pulsing everywhere with its people. They had taken to the streets and were not leaving them. Even when the rain returned they stayed out there. Kirana ate up every word of news, hungry to be out herself, supremely irritated that she was confined at this time. Obviously she was seriously ill or she wouldn’t have suffered it, but she was emaciated and sallow, dark rings under her eyes like a raccoon from Yingzhou, “stuck,” as she put it, “just when things are getting interesting,” just when her long-winded acid-tongued facility for speech could have been put to use, could have made history as well as commented on it. But it was not to be; she could only lie there fighting her illness. The one time Budur ventured to ask how she was feeling, she grimaced and said only, “The termites have got me.”

But even so she stayed close to the center of the action. A delegation of opposition leaders, including a contingent of women from the zawiyyas of the city, were meeting with adjutants of the generals to make their protests and negotiate if they could, and these people visited Kirana often to talk over strategy. On the streets the rumor was that a deal was being hammered out, but Kirana lay there, eyes burning, and shook her head at Budur’s hopefulness. “Don’t be naïve.” Her sardonic grin wrinkled her wasted features. “They’re just playing for time. They think that if they hold on long enough the protests will die down, and they can get on with their business. They’re probably right. They’ve got the guns after all.”

But then a Hodenosaunee fleet steamed into the harbor roads and anchored. Hanea! Budur thought when she saw them: forty giant steel battleships, bristling with guns that could fire a hundred li inland. They called in on a wireless frequency used by a popular music station, and though the government had seized the station, they could do nothing to stop this message from reaching all the wireless receptors in the city, and many heard the message and passed it along: the Hodenosaunee wanted to speak to the legitimate government, the one they had been dealing with before. They refused to speak to the generals, who were breaking the Shanghai Convention by usurping the constitutionally required government, a very serious breach; they declared they would not move from Nsara’s harbor until the council established by the postwar settlement was reconvened; and they would not trade with any government led by the generals. As the grain that had saved Nsara from starvation in the previous winter had mostly come from Hodenosaunee ships, this was a serious challenge indeed.

The matter hung for three days, during which rumors flew like bats at dusk: that negotiations were going on between the fleet and the junta, that mines were being laid, that amphibious troops were being readied, that negotiations were breaking down…

On the fourth day the leaders of the coup were suddenly nowhere to be found. The Yingzhou fleet was a few ships smaller in size. The generals had been spirited off, everyone said, to asylums in the Sugar Islands or the Maldives, in exchange for quitting without a fight. The ranking officers left behind led the deployed units of the army back to their barracks and stood down, waiting for further instructions from the legitimate state council. The coup was canceled.

The people in the streets cheered, shouted, sang, embraced total strangers, went crazy for joy. Budur did all these things, and led her soldiers back to their ward, and then rushed to Kirana’s hospital to tell Kirana everything she had seen, feeling a pang to see her so sick in the midst of this triumph. Kirana nodded at the news, saying, “We were lucky to get help like that. The whole world saw that; it will have a good effect, you’ll see. Although now we’re in for it! We’ll see what it’s like to be part of a league, we’ll see what kind of people they really are.”

Other friends wanted to wheel her out to give another speech, but she wouldn’t do it, she said, “Just go tell people to get back to work, tell them we need to get the bakeries baking again.”

23

Darkness. Silence. Then a voice in the void: Kirana? Are you there? Kuo? Kyu? Kenpo?

What.

Are you there?

I’m here.

We’re back in the bardo.

There is no such thing.

Yes there is. Here we are. You can’t deny it. We keep coming back.

(Blackness, silence. A refusal of speech.)

Come on, you can’t deny it. We keep coming back. We keep going out again. Everybody does. That’s dharma. We keep trying. We keep making progress.

A noise like a tiger’s growl.

But we do! Here’s Idelba, and Piali, and even Madame Sururi.

So she was right.

Yes.

Ridiculous.

Nevertheless. Here we are. Here to be sent back again, sent back together, our little jati. I don’t know what I would do without all of you. I think the solitude would kill me.

You’re killed anyway.

Yes, but it’s less lonely this way. And we’re making a difference. No, we are! Look at what has happened! You can’t deny it!

Things were done. It’s not very much.

Of course. You said it yourself, we have thousands of lifetimes of work to do. But it’s working.

Don’t generalize. It could all slip away.

Of course. But back we go, to try again. Each generation makes its fight. A few more turns of the wheel. Come on—back with a will. Back into the fray!

As if one could refuse.

Oh come on. You wouldn’t even if you could. You’re always the one leading the way down there, you’re always up for a fight.

…I’m tired. I don’t know how you persist the way you do. You tire me too. All that hope in the face of calamity. Sometimes I think you should be more marked by it. Sometimes I think I have to take it all on myself.

Come on. You’ll be your old self once things get going again. Idelba, Piali, Madame Sururi, are you ready?

We’re ready.

Kirana?

…All right then. One more turn.