The Year of Rice and Salt

Thus the bitter scepticism of the old woman, the stubborn hope of the old soldier, the insistent inquiry of Kirana, an inquiry which never got to the answers she wanted, but forged on through idea after idea, testing them against her sense of things, and against thirty years of insatiable reading, and the seedy life behind the docks of Nsara. Budur, wrapping herself in her oilcloth raincoat and hunching through the drizzle home to the zawiyya, felt the invisibilities welling up all around her – the hot quick disapproval of maimed young men who passed on the street the clouds lowering overhead – the secret worlds enfolded inside everything that Aunt Idelba was working on at the lab. Her job sweeping up and restocking the empty place at night was… suggestive. Greater things lay in the final distillation of all this work, in the formulas scrawled on the blackboards. There were years of mathematical work behind the experiments of the physicists, centuries of work now being realized in material explorations that might bring new worlds. Budur did not feel she could ever learn the maths involved, but the labs had to run right for anything to progress, and she began to get involved in ordering supplies, keeping the kitchen and dining halls running, paying the bills (the qi bill was huge).

Meanwhile the talk between the scientists went on, endless as the chatter in the cafes Idelba and her nephew Piali spent long sessions at the blackboards running over their ideas and proposing solutions to their mysterious mysteries, absorbed, pleased, also often worried, an edge in Idelba's voice, as if the equations were somehow revealing news she did not like or could not quite believe. Again she spent lots of time on the telephone, this time the one in its little closet in the zawiyya, and she was often gone without saying where she had been. Budur couldn't tell if all these matters were connected or not. There was a lot about Idelba's life that she didn't know. Men that she talked to outside the zawiyya, packages, calls… it appeared from the vertical lines etched between her eyebrows that she had her hands full, that it was a complicated existence somehow.

'Whatever is the problem with this study you are doing with Piali and the others?' Budur asked her one night as Idelba very thoroughly cleaned out her desk. They were the last ones there, and Budur felt a solid satisfaction at that; that here in Nsara they were trusted with matters; it was this that made her bold enough to interrogate her aunt.

Idelba stopped her cleaning to look at her. 'We have some reason for worry, or so it seems. You must not talk to anyone about this. But well – as I you told before, the world is made of atoms, tiny things with heartknots, and around them lightning motes travelling in concentric shells. All this at so small a scale it's hard to imagine. Each speck of dust you sweep up is made of millions of them. There are billions of them in the tips of your fingers.' She wiggled her grimy hands in the air. 'And yet each atom stores a lot of energy. Truly it is like trapped lightning, this qi energy, you have to imagine that kind of blazing power. Many trillionqi in every little thing.' She gestured at the big circular chart painted on one wall, their table of the elementals, Arabic letters and numerals encrusted with many extra dots. 'Inside the heartknot there is a force holding all that energy together, as I told you, a force very strong at very close distances, binding the lightning power to the heart so tightly it can never be released. Which is good, because the amounts of energy contained are really very high. We pulse with it.'

'That's how it feels,' Budur said.