The Year of Rice and Salt

Bao was given an apartment on the hundred and sixtieth floor of one of the skyscrapers set on the main channel of the Irrawaddy, near the seafront. Walking out onto his balcony for the first time he was amazed at the view, and spent most of an afternoon looking around: south to sea, west to Pagoda Rock, cast along the other mouths of the Irrawaddy, and upstream, looking down onto the rooftops of the supercity, into the million windows of the other skyscrapers lining the riverbanks and crowding the rest of the delta. All the buildings had been sunk deep through the alluvial soil of the delta to bedrock, and a famous system of dams and locks and offshore breakwaters had secured the city against floods from upstream, high tides from the Indian Ocean, typhoons – even the rise in sea level that was now beginning did not fundamentally threaten the city, which was in truth a kind of collec tion of ships anchored permanently in the bedrock, so that if eventually they had to abandon the 'ground floors' and move up it would be, just one more engineering challenge, something to keep the local construction industry occupied in years to come. The Burmese were not afraid of anything.

Looking down at the little junks and water taxis brushing their deli cate white calligraphy over the blue brown water, Bao seemed to read a kind of message in them, just outside the edge of his conscious comprehension. He understood now why the Burmese wrote 'Burmese history', because maybe it was true – maybe all that had ever happened, had happened so that it could collide here, and make something greater than any of its elements. As when the wakes from several different water taxis struck all together, shooting a bolt of white water higher than any individual wave ever would have got.

This monumental city, Pyinkayaing, was then Bao's home for the next several years. He took a cable car high across the river to the League offices on the other bank, and worked on the balance with nature problems beginning to plague the world, wreaking such damage that even, Burma itself might some day suffer from it, unless they were to remove Pyinkayaing to the moon, which did not seem completely impossible given their enormous energy and confidence.

But they had not been a power long enough to have seen the way the wheel turns. Over the years Bao visited a hundred lands as part of his job, and many reminded him that in the long run of time, civilizations rise, then fall; and most, upon falling, never really rose again. The locus of power wandered the face of the earth like some poor restless immortal, following the sun. Presumably Burma would not be immune to that fate.

Bao now flew in the latest spaceplanes, popping out of the atmosphere like the artillery shells of the Long War, and landing on the other side of the globe three hours later; he also flew in the giant airships that still conveyed the bulk of traffic and cargo around the world, their slowness more than compensated for by their capacity, humming around like great ships in the sea of air, for the most part unsinkable. He conferred with officials in most of the countries of the Earth, and came to understand that their balance with nature problems were partly a matter of pure numbers, the human population of the planet rebounding so strongly from the Long War that it was now approaching ten billion people; and this could be more people than the planet could sustain, or so many scientists speculated, especially the more conservative ones, those of a kind of Daoist temperament, found in great numbers in China and Yingzhou especially.