The Year of Rice and Salt

Budur shrugged; she hadn't thought about that part of it. What would Idelba say? 'What about just starting now? Call this meeting the zero date. It's spring, after all. Start the year on the spring equinox, perhaps, as most years already do, and then simply number the days of every year, avoiding the various ways of calculating months and the like, the seven day weeks, the ten day weeks, all that. Or something else simple, something beyond culture, unarguable because it is physical in origin. Day two fifty seven of Year One. Forwards and backwards from that zero date, three hundred and sixty five days, leap days added, whatever it takes to be accurate to nature. Then as these kinds of matters are all universalized, or made standard all over the world, when the time comes that governments come to put pressure on their scientists to work for just one part of humanity, they can say, I'm sorry, science doesn't work that way. We are a system for all peoples. We only work to make things so that they will be all right.'

The translator was saying all this in Chinese to Dr Chen, who watched Budur closely as she spoke. When she had finished, he nodded and said something.

The translator said, 'He says, those are good ideas. He says, let's try them and see.'

After that evening, Budur continued to attend the sessions, and take her notes, but she was distracted by thoughts of the private discussions she knew were taking place among the physicists on the other side of the madressa: the plans being made. Piali told ber all about them. Her notes tended to become lists of things to do. In sunny Isfahan, a city that was old but entirely new, like a garden just planted in a vast set of ruins, it was easy to forget how hungry they were in Firanja, in China and Africa and indeed over most of the world. On paper it seemed as if they could save everything.

One morning, however, she passed a poster presentation that caught her attention, called 'A Tibetan Village Found Intact'. It looked just the same as a hundred other hallway exhibits, but something about it caught her. Like most of them, it had its principal text in Persian, with smaller translated texts in Chinese, Tamil, Arabic and Algonquin, the 'big five' languages of the conference. The presenter and author of the poster was a big flat faced young woman, nervously answering questions from a small group, no more than half a dozen people, who had gathered to hear her formal presentation. She was Tibetan herself, apparently, and was using one of the Iranian translators to answer any questions she got. Budur wasn't sure if she was speaking in Tibetan or Chinese.

In any case, as she was explaining to someone else, an avalanche and landslide had covered a high mountain village in Tibet, and preserved everything within as if in a giant rocky refrigerator, so that bodies had stayed frozen, and everything been preserved – furniture, clothing, food, even the last messages that two or three literate villagers had written down, before the lack of air had killed them.

The tiny photos of the excavated village made Budur feel very odd. Ticklish just behind her nose, or above the roof of her mouth, until she thought she might sneeze, or retch, or cry. There was something awful about the corpses, almost unchanged through all the centuries; surprised by death, but forced to wait for it. Some of them had even written down goodbye messages. She looked at the photos of the messages, crammed into a margin of a religious book; handwriting clear, looking like Sanskrit. The Arabic translation underneath one had a homely sound: 'We have been buried by a big avalanche, and can not get out. Kenpo is still trying, but it is not going to work. The air is getting bad. We do not have much time. In this house we are Kenpo, Iwang, Sidpa, Zasep, Dagyab, Tenga and Baram. Puntsok left just before the avalanche hit, we don't know what happened to him. "All existence is like a reflection in the mirror, without substance, a phantom of the mind. We will take form again in another place." All praise to Buddha the Compassionate.'

The photos looked somewhat like those Budur had seen of certain wartime disasters, death impinging without much of a mark on daily life, except that everything was changed for ever. Looking at them Budur felt dizzy all of a sudden, and in the hall of the conference chamber she could almost feel the shock of snow and rock falling on her roof, trapping her. And all her family and friends. But this was how it had happened. This was how it happened.

She was still under the spell of this poster, when Piali came hurrying up. 'I'm afraid we should get back home as fast as possible. The army command has suspended the government, and is trying to take over Nsara.'

TWENTY TWO