The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
“By the time of the First Great Empires, four thousand years later, all this was gone, replaced by an extreme vertical scale, with god-kings, a priest caste with ultimate power, permanent military control, and slavery of defeated nations. These early developments, or one should say pathologies, of civilization (for the gathering into cities greatly speeded this process) are only now being dealt with, some four thousand years later still, in the most progressive societies of the world.
“In the meantime, of course, both these archaic cultures have almost entirely disappeared from this world, mostly due to the impact of Old World diseases on populations that apparently had never been exposed to them. Interestingly, it was the southern empires that collapsed most quickly and completely, conquered almost incidentally by the Chinese gold armies, and then quickly devastated by disease and famine, as if the body without its head must die instantly. Whereas in the north it was completely different, first because the Hodenosaunee were able to defend themselves in the depths of the great eastern forest, never fully succumbing to either the Chinese or to the Islamic incursion from across the Atlantic, and second because they were much less susceptible to Old World diseases, possibly because of early exposure to them from wandering Japanese monks, traders, trappers and prospectors, who ended up infecting the local populace in small numbers, thus serving in effect as human inoculants, immunizing or at least preparing the population of Yingzhou for a fuller incursion of Asians, who did not have quite as devastating an effect, although of course many people and tribes did die.”
Bodur moved on, thinking about the notion of a post-scarcity society, which in hungry Nsara she had never heard of at all. But it was time for another session, a plenary affair that Budur did not want to miss, and which turned out to be one of the most heavily attended. It concerned the question of the lost Franks, and why the plague had hit them so hard.
Much work had been done in this area by the Zott scholar Istvan Romani, who had done his research around the periphery of the plague zone, in Magyaristan and Moldava; and the plague itself had been studied intensively during the Long War, when it seemed possible that one side or another would unleash it as a weapon. It was understood now that it had been conveyed in the first centuries by fleas living on grey rats, travelling on ships and in caravans. A town called Issyk Kul, south of Lake Balkhash in Turkestan, had been studied by Romani and a Chinese scholar named Jiang, and they had found evidence in the cemetery of the town’s Nestorians of a heavy die-off from the plague around the year 700. This had apparently been the start of the epidemic that had moved west on the silk roads to Sarai, capital at that time of the Golden Horde khanate. One of their khans, Yanibeg, had besieged the Genoese port of Kaffa in the Crimea by catapulting the bodies of plague victims over the town walls. The Genoese had thrown the bodies in the sea, but this had not stopped the plague from infecting the entire Genoese network of trading ports, including, eventually, the whole of the Mediterranean. Movement from port to port, respite during the winters, then a renewal in the hinterlands the following spring; this pattern continued for over twenty years. All the westernmost peninsulas of the Old World were devastated, moving north from the Mediterranean and back to the east as far as Moscow, Novgorod, Kopenhagen and the Baltic ports. At the end of this time the population in Firanja was perhaps thirty per cent what it had been before the onset of the epidemic. Then in the years around 777, a date considered significant at the time by some mullahs and sufi mystics, a second wave of the plague — if it was the plague — had killed off almost all the survivors of the first wave, so that sailors at the start of the eighth century reported witnessing, usually from offshore, a completely emptied land.
Now there were scholars giving presentations who believed that the second plague had actually been anthrax, following on the bubonic plague; there were others who held the reverse position, arguing that contemporary accounts of the first sickness matched the freckling of anthrax more often than the buboes of bubonic plague, while the final blow had been the plague. It was explained in this session that the plague itself had bubonic, septic and pneumonic forms, and that the pneumonia caused by the pneumonic form was contagious, and very fast and lethal; the septic form even more lethal. Indeed, much had been clarified about all these diseases by the unfortunate experiences of the Long War.
But why had the disease, whichever one it had been, or in whatever combinations, been so lethal in Firanja and not elsewhere? The meeting offered presentation after presentation by scholars advancing one theory after another. From her notes Budur described them all for Piali at the end of the day, over supper, and he quickly jotted them down on a napkin:
Plague animalcules mutated in the 770s to take on forms and virulence similar to tuberculosis or typhoid;
Cities of Tuscany had reached enormous numbers by the eighth century, say two million people, and hygienic systems broke down and plague vectors ran wild;
Depopulation of the first plague followed by a series of disastrous floods that wrecked agriculture leading to starvation;
Super-contagious form of the animalcule mutated in northern France at the end of the first epidemic;
Pale skin of the Franks and Kelts lacked pigments that helped resist the disease, accounting for the freckling;
Sunspot cycle disrupted weather and caused epidemics every eleven years, effect worse every time
“Sunspots?” Piali interjected.
“That’s what he said.” Budur shrugged.
“So,” Piali said, looking over the napkin, “it was either the plague animalcules, or some other animalcules, or some quality of the people, or their habits, or their land, or the weather, or sunspots.” He grinned. “That pretty much covers it, I should think. Perhaps cosmic rays ought to be included. Wasn’t there a big supernova spotted about that time?”
Budur could only laugh. “I think it was earlier. Anyway, you must admit, it does want explaining.”
“Many things do, but it looks as if we have a way to go on this one.”
• • •
The presentations continued, ranging from the recording of the world that had existed just before the Long War, all the way back through time to the earliest human remains. This work on the first humans forced everyone to the contemplation of one of the larger arguments shaping up in the field, concerning human beginnings.
Archaeology as a discipline had its origins for the most part in the Chinese bureaucracy, but it had been picked up quickly by the Dinei people, who studied with the Chinese and went back to Yingzhou intending to learn what they could about the people they called the Anasazi, who had preceded them in the dry west of Yingzhou. The Dinei scholar Anan and his colleagues had offered the first explanations of human migration and history, asserting that tribes on Yingzhou had mined the tin on Yellow Island in the biggest of the Great Lakes, Manitoba, and shipped this tin across the oceans to all the bronze era cultures in Africa and Asia. Anan’s group contended that civilization had begun in the New World with the Inka and Aztecs and the Yingzhou tribes, in particular the old ones who preceded their Anasazi in the western deserts. Their great and ancient empires had sent out reed and balsam rafts, trading tin for spices and various plant stocks with Asian ancestry, and these Yingzhou traders had established the Mediterranean civilizations predating Greece, especially the ancient Egyptians and Middle Western empires, the Assyrians and Sumerians.
So the Dinei archaeologists had claimed, anyway, in a very fully articulated case, with all sorts of objects from all over the world to support it. But now a great deal of evidence was appearing in Asia and Firanja and Africa that indicated this story was all wrong. The oldest lifering dates for human settlement in the New World were about twenty thousand years before the present, and everyone had agreed at first that this was extremely old, and predated by a good deal the earliest civilizations known to Old World history, the Chinese and the Middle Western and Egyptian; so at that point it had all seemed plausible. But now that the war was over, scie
Nowhere else on Earth were people making a claim like this one from the Africans, and there was a great deal of scepticism about it; some queried the dating methods, others simply dismissed the claim out of hand, as a manifestation of some kind of continental or racial patriotism. Naturally the African scholars were upset by this response, and the meeting that afternoon took on a volatile aspect that could not help but remind people of the late war. It was important to keep the discourse on a scientific basis, as an investigation into facts uncontaminated by religion or politics or race.
“I suppose there can be patriotism in anything,” Budur said to Piali that night. “Archaeological patriotism is absurd, but it’s beginning to look as if that’s how it started in Yingzhou. An unconscious bias, no doubt, towards one’s own region. And until we sort out the dating of things, it’s an open question as to which model will replace theirs.”
“Certainly the dating methods will improve,” Piali said.
“True. But meanwhile all is confusion.”
“That’s true of everything.”
The days shot by in a blur of meetings. Every day Budur got up at dawn, went to the madressa’s dining commons to have a small breakfast, and then attended talks and sessions and poster explanations from then until supper, and after that far into the evenings. One morning she was startled to hear a young woman describing her discovery of what appeared to be a lost feminist branch of early Islam, a branch which had fuelled the renaissance of Samarqand, and was then destroyed and the memory of it erased. Apparently a group of women in Qum had taken against a ruling by the mullahs, and led their families east and north to the walled town of Derbent, in Bactria, a place that had been conquered by Alexander the Great and was still living a Greek life in Transoxianic bliss a thousand years later, when the Muslim women rebels and their families arrived. Together they created a way of life in which all living beings were equal before Allah and among themselves, something like what Alexander would have made, for he was a disciple of the queens of Kreta. Then all the people of Derbent lived happily for many years, and though they kept to themselves and did not try to impose themselves on all the world, they did tell some of what they had learned to the people they traded with in nearby Samarqand; and in Samarqand they took that knowledge, and made of it the start of the rebirth of the world. You can read all this in the ruins, the young researcher insisted.
Budur wrote down the references, realizing as she did that archaeology too could be a kind of wish, or even a statement about the future. She went back into the halls, shaking her head. She would have to ask Kirana about it. She would have to look into it herself. Who knew, really, what people had done in the past? Many things had happened and never been written about and after a time had been utterly forgotten. Almost anything might have happened, anything. And there was that phenomenon Kirana had mentioned once in passing, of people imagining that things were better in another land, which then gave them the courage to try to enact some progress in their own country. Thus women had everywhere imagined that women elsewhere had it better than they did, and thus they had had the courage to press for changes. And no doubt there were other examples of the tendency, people imagining the good in advance of its reality, as in the stories of the good place discovered and then lost, what the Chinese called “Source of the Peach Blossom Stream” stories. History, fable, prophecy; no way to distinguish, until perhaps centuries had passed, and they had made the stories one thing or the other.
She dropped in on many more sessions, and this impression of people’s endless struggle and effort, endless experimentation, of humans thrashing about trying to find a way to live together, only deepened in her. An imitation Potala built outside Beijing at two-thirds full size; an ancient temple complex, perhaps Greek in origin, lost in the jungles of Amazonia; another in the jungles of Siam; an Inka capital set high in the mountains; skeletons of people in Firanja who were not quite like modern humans in their skull shape; roundhouses made of mammoth bones; the calendrical purposes of the stone rings of Britain; the intact tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh; the nearly untouched remains of a French medieval village; a shipwreck on the peninsula of Ta Shu, the ice continent surrounding the south pole; early Inkan pottery painted with patterns from the south of Japan; Mayan legends of a “great arrival” from the west by a god Itzamna, which was the name of the Shinto mother goddess of the same era; megalithic monuments in Inka’s great river basin that resembled megaliths in the Maghrib; old Greek ruins in Anatolia that seemed to be the Troy of Homer’s epic poem “The Iliad”, huge lined figures on the Inkan plains that could be seen properly only from the sky; the beach village in the Orkneys that Budur had visited with Idelba; a very complete Greek and Roman city at Ephesus, on the Anatolian coast; these and many, many more such finds were described. Each day was a rush of talk, Budur all the while scribbling notes in her notebook, and asking for reprints of articles, if they were in Arabic or Persian. She took a particular interest in the sessions on dating methods, and the scientists working on this matter often told her how much they owed to her aunt’s pioneering work. They were now investigating other methods of dating, such as the matching up of successive tree-rings to create a “dendrochronology”, proceeding fairly well, and also the measurement of a particular kind of qi-leak luminescence that was fixed into pottery that had been fired at high enough temperatures. But there was much work to be done on these methods, and no one was happy with the current state of their abilities to date what they found of the past in the earth.
• • •
One day a group of the archaeologists who had used Idelba’s work on dating joined Budur, and they crossed the campus of the madressa to attend a memorial session for Idelba put on by the physicists who had known her. This session was to consist of a number of eulogies, a presentation on the various aspects of her work, some presentations of recent work that referred back to hers, and then a short party or wake in celebration of her life.
Budur wandered the rooms of this memorial session accepting praise for her aunt, and condolences on her passing. The men in the room (for they were mostly men) were very solicitous of her and, for the most part, quite cheerful. Even the memory of Idelba brought smiles to their faces. Budur was filled with amazement and pride by this outpouring of affection, though often it made her ache as well; they had lost a valued colleague, but she had lost the only family that mattered to her, and could not always keep her focus on her aunt’s work alone.
At one point she was asked to speak to the assemblage and so she struggled to pull herself together as she went up to the lectern, thinking as she walked of her blind soldiers, who existed in her mind as a kind of bulwark or anchor, a benchmark of what was truly sad. In contrast to that this was indeed a celebration, and she smiled to see all these people congregated to honour her aunt. It only remained to work out what to say, and as she went up the stairs it occurred to her that she needed only to try to imagine what Idelba herself would say, and then paraphrase that. That was reincarnation in a sense she could believe in.
So she looked down at the crowd of physicists, feeling calm and anchored inside, and thanked them for coming, and added, “You all know how concerned Idelba was for the work that you are doing in atomic physics at this time. That it should be used for the good of humanity and not for anything el
She felt a stilling in the audience. The looks on their faces were all of a sudden very much like those on the faces of her blind soldiers: pain, longing, desperate hope; regret and resolve. Many of the people in this room had no doubt been involved in the war effort of their respective countries — at the end, too, when the race in military technologies had speeded up, and things had become particularly ferocious and dire. The inventors of the gas shells that had blinded her soldiers could very well be in this room.
“Now,” Budur continued cautiously, “obviously this has not always been the case, so far. Scientists have not always done the right thing. But Idelba’s vision of science had it as being progressively improvable, just as a matter of making it more scientific. That aspect is one of the ways you define science, as against many other human activities or institutions. So to me this makes it a kind of prayer, or worship of the world. It is a devotional labour. This aspect should be kept in mind, whenever we remember Idelba, and whenever we consider the uses of our work. Thank you.”
• • •
After that more people than ever came up to her to speak their thanks and appreciation, displaced though it was from its absent object. And then, as the memorial hour wound down, some of them moved on to a meal in a nearby restaurant, and when it was over, an even smaller group of them lingered afterwards over coffee and baklava. It was as if they were in one of the rain-lashed cafes of Nsara.