The Year of Rice and Salt

But one could sit with people like that, have conversations like that, and still walk outside into watery sunlight with nothing to cat 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 habituaee of the cafes and coffee houses, 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 cafes listening to Tristan's oud (they were friends only now), sometimes in an 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 coloured 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 Halah from the zawiyya burst into the cafe'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 farther 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 harbour. 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.'