'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.

'Indeed. But look, it's many times beyond what we can feel. The formula proposed, as I told you, is energy equals the mass times the speed of light squared, and light is very fast indeed. So that with only a little matter, if any of its energy were released into the world…' She shook her head. 'Of course the strong force means that would never happen. But we continue to investigate this element alactin, that the Travancori physicists call Hand of Tara. I suspect its heartknot is unstable, and Piali is beginning to agree with me. Clearly it is very full of the jinni, both yin and yang, in such a fashion that to me it is acting like a droplet of water held together by surface tension, but so big that the surface tension is just barely holding it, and it stretches out like a water drop in the air, deforming this way and that, but held together, just, except for sometimes, when it stretches too far for surface tension, the strong force in this case, and then the natural repulsion between the jinni makes a heartknot split in two, becoming atoms of lead, but releasing some of its bound power as well, in the form of rays of invisible energy. That's what we are seeing on the photographic plates you help with. It's quite a bit of energy, and that's just one heartknot breaking. What we have been wondering what we have been forced to consider, given the nature of the phenomenon – is, if we gathered enough of these atoms together, and broke even one heartknot apart, would the released qi break a lot more of them at the same time, more and more again all at the speed of light, in a space this big,' holding her hands apart. 'If that might not set off a short chain reaction,' she said.

'Meaning…'

'Meaning a very big explosion!'

For a long time Idelba stared off into the space of pure mathematics, it seemed.

'Don't tell anyone about this,' she said again.

'I won't.'

'No one.'

'All right.'

Invisible worlds, full of energy and power: sub atomic harems, each pulsing on the edge of a great explosion. Budur sighed as this image came to her. There was no escaping the latent violence at the heart of things. Even the stones were mortal.

NINE

Budur got up in the mornings at the zawiyya, helped in the kitchen and office indeed, there was much that was the same about her work in the zawiyya and at the lab, and though the work felt quite different in each setting, it still had a basic tedium to it; leaving her classes and her walks through the great city as the place to work on her dreams and ideas.

She walked along the harbour and the river, no longer expecting anyone from Turi to show up and take her back to her father's house. Much of the vast city remained unknown to her, but she had her routes through certain districts, and sometimes rode a tram out to its end just to see what kind of neighbourhoods it went through. The ocean and river districts were her particular study, which of course gave her a lot to work on. Wan sunlight splintered through clouds galloping on the ocean onshore wind; she sat at cafes behind the docks, or across the sea road from the strands, reading and writing, and looked up to see whitecaps dashing themselves at the foot of the great lighthouse at the end of the jetty, or up the rocky coast to the north. Pale washed blues in the sky behind the tumbling clouds, the bruised blues of the ocean, the whites of cloud and broken wave; she loved the looks of these things, loved them with all her heart. Here she was free to be her whole self. It was worth all the rain to have the air washed so clean.

In one rather shabby and stormbeaten beach district at the end of tram line number six, there was a little Buddhist temple, and one day outside it Budur saw the Hodenosaunee mother and daughter from Kirana's class. They saw her and came over. 'Hello,' the mother said. 'You have come to visit us!'

'Actually I was just wandering around town,' Budur said, surprised. 'I like this neighbourhood.'

'I see.' Said politely, as if she didn't believe ber. 'I am sorry to have presumed, but we are acquainted with your aunt Idelba, and so I thought you may have been coming here on her behalf. But you don't well – but would you like to come in?'

'Thank you.' Mystified, Budur followed them into the compound, which contained a courtyard garden of shrubs and gravel, arranged around a bell next to a pond. Nuns in dark red dresses walked through on their way somewhere inside. One sat to talk with the Hodenosaunee women, whose names were Hanea and Ganagweh, mother and daughter. They all spoke in Firanjic, with a strong Nsarene accent mixed with something else. Budur listened to them talk about repairs to the roof. Then they invited her to come with them into a room containing a big wireless; Hanea sat before a microphone, and had a conversation in her language that crossed the ocean.

After that they joined a number of nuns in a meditation room, and sat chanting for a time. 'So, you are Buddhists?' Budur asked the Hodenosaunee women when the session was over, and they had gone back out into the garden.

'Yes,' Hanea said. 'It's common among our people. We find it very similar to our old religion. And I think it must also have been true that we liked the way it put us in league with the Japanese from the west side of our country, who are like us in so many other ways. We needed their help against the people from your side.'

'I see.'

They stopped before a group of women and men who were sitting in a circle chipping away at sandstone blocks, making large flat bricks, it seemed, perfectly shaped and polished. Hanea pointed at them and explained: 'These are devotional stones, for the top of Chomolungma. Have you heard of this project?'

'No.'

'Well, you know, Chomolungma was the highest mountain in the world, but the top was destroyed by Muslim artillery during the Long War. So, now there is a project started, very slow of course, to replace the top of the mountain. Bricks like these are taken there, and then climbers who ascend Chomolungma carry one brick along with their lifegas canisters, and leave it on the summit for stonemasons to work into the new summit pyramid.'

Budur stared at the dressed blocks of stone, smaller than several of the boulders decorating the courtyard garden. She was invited to pick one up, and did so; it was about as heavy as three or four books in her arms.