The Year of Rice and Salt

Idelba shook her head. 'No, this is a mushkil,' which was a specific problem.

'What is it?'

'Well… Simply put, the investigators at the laboratory are getting some very strange results. That's what it comes down to. No one can say what they mean.'

This laboratory Idelba talked to over the phone was currently her main contact with the world outside their home. She had been a mat ematics teacher and researcher in Nsara, and, with her husband, an investigator of microscopic nature. But her husband's untimely death had revealed some irregularities in his affairs, and Idelba had been left destitute; and the job they had shared had turned out to be his in the end, so that she had nowhere to work, and nowhere to live. Or so Yasmina had said; Idelba herself never spoke about it. She had shown up one day with a single suitcase, weeping, to confer with Budur's father, her half brother. He had agreed to put her up for a time. This, Father explained later, was one of the things harems were for; they protected women who had nowhere else to go. 'Your mother and you girls complain about the system, but really, what is the alternative? The suffering of women left alone would be enormous.'

Mother and Budur's older cousin, Yasmina, would snort or snarl at this, cheeks turning red. Rema and Aisha and Fatima would look at them curiously, trying to understand what they should feel about what to them was after all the natural order of things. Aunt Idelba never said anything about it one way or the other, neither thanks nor complaint. Old acquaintances still called her on the phone, especially a nephew of hers, who apparently had a problem he thought she could help him with; he called regularly. Once Idelba tried to explain why to Budur and her sisters, with the aid of a blackboard and chalk.

'Atoms have shells around them, like the spheres in the heavens in the old drawings, all surrounding the heartknot of the atom, which is small but heavy. Three kinds of particles clump together in the heartknot, some with yang, some with yin, some neuter, in different amounts for each substance, and they're held bound together there by a strong force, which is very strong, but also very local, in that you don't have to get far away from the heartknot for the force to reduce a great deal.'

'Like a harem,' Yasmina said.

'Yes, well. That may be more like gravity, I'm afraid. But anyway, there is a qi repulsion between all particles, that the strong force counteracts, and the two compete, more or less, along with other forces. Now, certain very heavy metals have so many particles that a certain number leak away from them one by one, and the single particles that leak leave distinctive traces at distinct rates of speed. And down in Nsara they've been getting strange results from a particular heavy metal, an elemental that is heavier than gold, the heaviest elemental found so far, called alactin. They're bombarding it with neuter particles, and getting very strange results, all over the plates, in a way hard to explain. The heavy heart of this elemental appears to be unstable.'

'Like Yasmina!'

'Yes, well, interesting that you say so, in that it is not true but it suggests the way we keep trying to think of ways to visualize these things that are always too small for us to see.' She paused, looking at the blackboard, then at her uncomprehending students. A spasm of some emotion marred her features, disappeared. 'Well. It is yet another phenomenon that needs explaining, let's leave it at that. It will take more investigation in a lab.'

After that she scribbled in silence for a while. Numbers, letters, Chinese ideograms, equations, dots, diagrams – like something out of illustrations for the books about the Alchemist of Samarqand.

After a time she slowed down, shrugged. 'I'll have to talk to Piali about it.'

'But isn't he in Nsara?' Budur asked.

'Yes.' This too was part of her mishkul, Budur saw. 'We will talk by the telephone, of course." 'Tell us about Nsara,' Budur asked for the thousandth time.

Idelba shrugged; she was not in the mood. She never was, to begin with; it took a while to break through the barrier of regrets to get her to that time. Her first husband, divorcing her near the end of her fertility, with no children; her second husband, dying young; she had a lot of regrets to get through. But if Budur was patient and merely followed her around the terrace, and in and out of rooms, she often would make the passage, helped perhaps by her shifts from room to room, matching the way each place on Earth we have lived in is like a room in our mind, with its sky for a roof, hills for walls, and buildings for furniture, so that our lives have moved from one room to the next in some larger structure; and the old rooms still exist and yet at the same time are gone, or emptied, so that in reality one could only move on to some new room, or stay locked in the one you were in, as in a jail; and yet, in the mind…