The Year of Rice and Salt

'Yes,' Kirana said once to Budur in response to a question about the Hodenosaunee, looking at a group of them passing the cafe 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 again.'

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 against 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 cafes 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 Venizia, and afterwards 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 practise how it would be, she would mutter huskily in Budur's car, 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 skilful, 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 as 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 got on.