The Year of Rice and Salt

'Same above, same below, just as Bahram is always saying. Everything is attracted to everything else by precisely this level of attraction. Multiply the two masses attracting each other, divide that by the square of the distance they are apart from each other multiply by whatever speed away from the central body there might be, and the force of the attraction results. Here – try it with the planets' orbits around the sun, they all work. And they travel in ellipses around the sun, because they all attract each other as well as being pulled down to the sun, so the sun sits at one focus of the ellipse, while the sum of all other attractions make the other focus.' He was sketching furiously as he spoke, as agitated as Bahram had ever seen him. 'It explains the discrepancies in the observations out at Ulug Beg. It works for the planets, the stars in their constellations no doubt, and the flight of a cannonball over the Earth, and the movement of those little animalcules in pondwater or in our blood!'

Khalid was nodding. 'This is the power of gravity itself, portrayed mathematically.'

'Yes.'

'The attraction is in inverse proportion to the square of the distance away.'

'Yes.'

'And it acts on everything.'

'I think so.'

'What about light?'

'I don't know. Light itself must have so little mass. If any. But what mass it has, is being attracted to all other masses. Mass attracts mass.'

'But this,' Khalid said, 'is again action at a distance.'

'Yes.' Iwang grinned. 'Your universal spirit, perhaps. Acting through some agency we don't know. Thus gravity, magnetism, lightning.'

'A kind of invisible fire.'

'Or perhaps to fire as the tiniest animals are to us. Some subtle force.

And yet nothing escapes it. Everything has it. We all live within it.'

'An active spirit in all things.'

'Like love,' Bahram put in.

'Yes, like love,' Iwang agreed for once. 'In that without it, all would be dead on Earth. Nothing would attract or repel, or circulate, or change form, or live in any way, but merely lie there, dead and cold.'

And then he smiled, he grinned outright, his smooth shiny Tibetan cheeks dimpled by deep creases, his big horsey teeth gleaming: 'And here we are! So it must be, do you see? It all moves – it all lives. And the force acts exactly in inverse proportion to the distance between things.'

Khalid began, 'I wonder if this could help us to transmute But the other two men cut him off: 'Lead into gold! Lead into gold!' Laughing at him.

'It's all gold already,' Bahram said, and Iwang's eyes suddenly gleamed, it was as if the goddess of the stove had filled him, he pulled Bahram to him and gave him a rough wet woolly hug, humming again.

'You're a good man, Bahram. A very good man you are. Listen, if I believe in your love, can I stay here? Will it be blasphemy to you, if I believe in gravity and love, and the oneness of all things?'

Theories without Application

Make Trouble

Bahram's days became busier than ever, as was true for everyone in the compound. Khalid and Iwang continued to debate the ramifications of Iwang's great figure, and to run demonstrations of all kinds, either testing it or investigating matters related to it. But their investigations did little to help Bahram in his work at the forge, it being difficult or impossible to apply the two explorers' esoteric and highly mathematical arguments to the daily effort to make stronger steel or more powerful cannons. To the Khan, bigger was better, and he had heard of new cannons of the Chinese Emperor, that dwarfed even the old giants left stranded in Byzantium by the great plagues of the seventh century. Bahram was trying to match these rumoured guns, and finding it hard to cast them, hard to move them, and hard to fire them without causing them to crack. Khalid and Iwang both had suggestions, but these did not work out, and Bahram was left with the same old trial and error that metallurgists had used for centuries, always coming back to the idea that if he could only get the molten iron hot enough, and of the right mix of feed stocks, then the resulting metal of the cannon would be stronger. So it was a matter of increasing the amount of the river's force applied to the blast furnaces, to create temperatures that turned the melts incandescent white, so brilliant it hurt to look at them. Khalid and Iwang observed the scene at dusk, and argued till dawn about the origins of such vivid light, released out of iron by heat.