The Year of Rice and Salt

Khalid frowned. 'This is just a start. Surely stronger lenses will be made. And then who knows what will be seen? Maybe it will allow us to understand the composition of metals at last, and work the transmutations.'

'Maybe,' Iwang allowed. He stared into the eye of the lens, humming to himself. 'Certainly the little crystals in granite are made clear.'

Khalid nodded, wrote notes in one of his notebooks. He returned to the glass, then drew the shapes he saw on the page. 'The very small and the very large,' he said.

'These lenses are a great gift from God,' Bahram said, 'reminding us that it is all one world. One substance, all interpenetrated with structure, but still one, big to small.'

Khalid nodded. 'Thus the stars may have their sway over us after all. Maybe the stars are animals too, like these creatures, could we only see them better.'

Iwang shook his head. 'All one, yes. It seems more and more obvious. But not all animal, surely. Perhaps the stars are more like rocks than these fine creatures.'

'The stars are fire.'

'Rocks, fire – but not animals.'

'But all one,' Bahram insisted.

And both of the older men nodded, Khalid emphatically, Iwang reluctantly, and with a low humming in his throat.

After that day it seemed to Bahram that Iwang was always humming. He came to the compound and joined Khalid in his demonstrations, and went with Bahram to the ribat and listened to Ali's lectures, and whenever Bahram visited him in his shop he was playing with numbers, or clicking a Chinese abacus back and forth, and always distracted, always humming. On Fridays he came to the mosque and stood outside the door, listening to the prayers and the readings, facing Mecca and blinking at the sun, but never kneeling or prostrating or praying; and always humming.

Bahram did not think he should convert. Even if he had to move back to Tibet for a time and then return, it seemed clear to Bahram that he was no Muslim. And so it would not be right.

Indeed, as the weeks passed he began to seem more strange and foreign, rather than less; even more an unbeliever, performing little demonstrations for himself that were like sacrifices to light, or magnetism, or the void, or gravity. An alchemist, precisely, but in an eastern tradition stranger than any sufi's, as if he were not only reverting to Buddhism but going beyond it, back to Tibet's older religion, Bon as Iwang called it.

That winter he sat in his shop with Bahram, before the open fire of his furnace, hands extended to keep the fingers warm as they poked out of the glove ends like his little babies, smoking hashish from a longstemmed pipe and handling it to Bahram occasionally, until the two men sat there watching the coals' film dance over the hot orange underneath. One night, deep in a snowstorm, Iwang went out to get more wood for the fire, and Bahram looked over at a movement and saw an old Chinese woman sitting by the stove, dressed in a red dress, with her hair pulled up in a knot on top of her head. Bahram jerked; the old woman turned her head and looked at him, and he saw her black eyes were filled with stars. He promptly fell off his stool, and groped to his feet to find her no longer there. When Iwang came back in the room and Bahram described her, Iwang shrugged, smiled slyly: 'There are lots of old women in this quarter of the city. This is where the poor people live, among them the widows, who have to sleep in their dead husbands' shops on the floor, on the sufferance of the new owners, and do what they can to keep hunger from the door.'

'But the red dress – her face – her eyes!'

'That all sounds like the goddess of the stove, actually. She appears next to the hearth, if you're lucky.'

'I'm not smoking any more of your hashish.'

Iwang laughed. 'If only that was all it took!'

Another frosty night, a few weeks alter, Iwang knocked on the gate of the compound, and came in greatly excited – drunk, one would have said of another man – a man possessed.

'Look!' he said to Khalid, taking him by his shortened arm and pulling him into the old man's study. 'Look, I've worked it out at last.'

'The philosopher's stone?'

'No no! Nothing so trivial! It's the one law, the law above all the others. An equation. See here.'

He got out a slate and chalked on it rapidly, using the alchemical symbols Khalid and he had decided on to mark quantities that were different in different situations.