The Year of Rice and Salt

'What a good idea!' Kuo said. 'I know just who I'd send.'

Iwa shook his head. 'A lottery would create better solidarity.'

Kuo scoffed: 'Solidarity. Might as well get rid of the malingerers while you can, before they shoot you in the back some night.'

'It's a terrible idea,' Bai said. 'They're all Chinese, how can we kill Chinese when they haven't done anything wrong? It's crazy. The Fourth Assemblage of Military Talent has gone insane.'

'They were never sane to begin with,' Kuo said. 'It's been forty years since anyone on Earth has been sane.'

Suddenly they were all knocked off their feet by a violent blast of air. Bai struggled to his feet, banged into Iwa doing the same. He couldn't hear a thing. There was no sight of Kuo, he was gone and there was a big hole in the ground where he had been standing, a hole perfectly round and some twelve feet wide, thirty feet deep, and floored by the back end of one of the big Muslim supershells. Another dud.

A right hand lay on the ground beside the hole like a white cane spider. 'Oh damn,' Iwa said through the roar. 'We've lost Kuo.'

The Muslim shell had landed directly on him. Possibly, Iwa said later, his presence had kept it from exploding somehow. It had squished him into the earth like a worm. Only his poor hand left.

Bai stared at the hand, too stunned to move. Kuo's laugh seemed still to ring in his cars. Kuo certainly would have laughed if he had been able to see this turn of events. His hand was completely recognizable as his, Bai found that he knew it intimately without ever being aware of the fact until now, so many hours sitting together in their little cave, Kuo holding the rice pot or the tea kettle over the stove, or offering a cup of tea or rakshi, his hand, like all the rest of him, a part of Bai's life, callused and scarred, clean palmed and dirty backed, looking still just like itself, even without the rest of him around. Bai sat back down on the mud.

Iwa gently picked up the severed hand, and they gave it the same funeral ceremony given to more complete corpses, before taking it back to one of the death trains for disposal in the crematoria. Afterwards they drank Kuo's remaining rakshi. Bai could not speak, and Iwa didn't try to make him. Bai's own hands displayed the quivering o or inary trenc fatigue. What had happened to their magic umbrella? What would he do now, without Kuo's acid laughter to cut through the deathly miasmas?

Then the Muslims took their turn to attack, and the Chinese were busy for a week with the defence of their trenches, living in their gas masks, firing belt after belt at the ghostly fellahem and assassins emerging from the yellow fog. Bai's lungs gave out again briefly, he had to be evacuated; but at the end of the week he and Iwa were back in the same trenches they had started in, with a new squad composed almost entirely of conscripts from Aozhou, land of the turtle who held up the world, green southerners thrown into the conflict like so many rounds of machine-gun ammunition. They had been so busy that already it seemed a long time since the incident of the dud shell. 'Once I had a brother named Kuo,' Bai explained to Iwa.

Iwa nodded, patted Bai on the shoulder. 'Go and see if we have new orders.' His face was black with cordite, except around mouth and nose where his mask had been, and under his eyes, white with deltas of tear streaks. He looked like a puppet in a play, his face the mask of asura suffering. He had been at his machine gun for over forty straight hours, and in that time had killed perhaps three thousand men. His eyes looked sightlessly through Bai, through the world.

Bai staggered away, down the tunnel to the comm cave. He ducked in and fell into a chair, trying to catch his breath, feeling himself continuing to fall, through the floor, through the earth, on the airy drop to oblivion. A creak pulled him up; he looked to see who was already in the chair at the wireless table.

It was Kuo, sitting there grinning at him.

Bai straightened up. 'Kuo!' he said. 'We thought you were dead!'

Kuo nodded. 'I am dead,' he said. 'And so are you.'

His right hand was there at the end of his wrist.

'The shell went off,' he said, 'and killed us all. Since then you've been in the bardo. All of us have. You've gone at it by pretending you weren't there yet. Although why you would want to hang on to that hell world we were living in, I can't imagine. You are so damned obstinate, Bai. You need to see you're in the bardo to be able to understand what's happening to you. It's the war in the bardo that matters, after all. The battle for our souls.'

Bai tried to say yes; then no; then he found himself on the floor of the cave, having fallen off the chair, apparently, which had woken him up. Kuo was gone, his chair empty. Bai groaned. 'Kuo! Come back!' But the room stayed empty.