The Year of Rice and Salt

'Yes,' Budur said, wondering if it would be so. Her mind was reeling at the prospect of such a burden being placed on her to carry. She did not like Piali very much. 'Please, Aunt Idelba, please. Don't distress yourself. It will be all right.'

Idelba nodded. 'Very possibly.'

She rallied late that night, just before dawn, just as Budur was beginning to come down from her opium delirium, unable to remember much of the night that had taken so many eons to pass. But she still knew what Idelba wanted her to try to do. Dawn came as dark as if an eclipse had come and stayed.

It was the following year before Idelba died.

The funeral was attended by many people, hundreds of them, from zawiyya and madressa and institute, and the Buddhist monastery, and the Hodenosaunee embassy, and the district panchayat and the state council, and many other places all over Nsara. But not a single person from Turi. Budur stood numbly in a reception line with a few of the senior women from the zawiyya, and shook hand after hand. Afterwards, during the unhappy wake, Hanea came up to her again. 'We loved her too,' she said with a flinty smile. 'We will make sure to keep the promises we made to her.'

A couple of days later Budur kept her usual appointment to read to her blind soldiers. She went in their ward and sat there staring at them in their chairs and beds, and thought, This is probably a mistake. I may feel blank but I'm probably not. She told them of her aunt's death, then, and tried to read to them from Idelba's work, but it was not like Kirana's; even the abstracts were incomprehensible, and the texts themselves, scientific papers on the behaviour of invisible things, were composed largely of tables of numbers. She stopped trying with those, and picked up another book. 'This is one of my aunt's favourite books, a collection of the autobiographical writings found in the works of Abu Ali Ibn Sina, the early scientist and philosopher who was a great hero to her. From what I have read of him, Ibn Sina and my aunt were alike in many ways. They both had a great curiosity about the world. Ibn Sina first mastered Euclid's geometry, then set out to understand everything else. Idelba did that very same thing. When Ibn Sina was still young he fell into a sort of fever of inquiry, that gripped him for almost two years. Here, I will read to you what he himself says about that period:

During this time I did not sleep completely through a single night, or devote myself to anything else but study by day. I compiled a set of files for myself, and for each proof that I examined, I entered into the files its syllogistic premises, their classification, and what might follow from them. I pondered over the conditions that might apply to their premises, until I had verified this question for myself in each case. Whenever sleep overcame me or I became conscious of weakening, I would turn aside to drink a cup of wine, so that my strength would return to me. And whenever sleep seized me I would see those very problems in my dreams; and many questions became clear to me in my sleep. I continued in this until all of the sciences were deeply rooted within me and I understood them as far as is humanly possible. Everything which I knew at that time is just as I know it now; I have not added anything much to it to this day.

'That's the kind of person my aunt was,' Budur said. She put down that book and picked up another one, thinking that it would be better to stop reading things inspired by Idelba. It wasn't making her feel any better. The book she chose out of her bag was called 'Nsarene Sailors, Tales', true stories about the local seamen and fisherfolk, rousing adventures full of fish and danger and death but also of the sea air, the waves and the wind. The soldiers had enjoyed chapters of the book she had read to them before.