The Years of Rice and Salt (75 page)

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.