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NINETEEN

But one could sit with people like that, have conversations like that, and still walk outside into watery sunlight with nothing to cat and no money worth anything. Budur worked hard at the zawiyya, and set up classes in Persian and Firanjic for the hungry girls moving in who only spoke Berber or Arabic or Andalusi or Skandistani or Turkish. At night she continued as a habituaee of the cafes and coffee houses, and sometimes the opium dens. She got work with one of the government agencies as a translator of documents, and continued to study archaeology. She was worried when Idelba fell ill again, and spent a lot of time caring for her. The doctors said that Idelba was suffering from 'nervous exhaustion', something like the battle fatigue of the war; but to Budur she seemed very obviously physically weaker, harmed by something the doctors could not identify. Illness without cause; Budur found this too frightening to think about. Probably it was a hidden cause, but that too was frightening.

She got more involved with the running of the zawiyya, taking over some of what Idelba had done before. There was less time to read. Besides, she wanted to do more than read, or even write reports: she felt too anxious to read, and merely perusing a number of texts and then boiling them down into a new text struck her as an odd activity; it was like being a still, distilling ideas. History as a brandy; but she wanted something more substantial.

Meanwhile, many a night she still went out and enjoyed the midnight scene at the coffee and opium cafes listening to Tristan's oud (they were friends only now), sometimes in an opiated dream that allowed her to wander the fogged halls of her thoughts without actually entering any rooms. She was deep in. a reverie concerning the Ibrahamic collisional nature of progress in history, something like the continents themselves, if the geologists were right, creating new fusions, as in Samarqand, or Mughal India, or the Hodenosaunee dealing with China to the west and Islam to the east, or Burma, yes all this was coming clear, like random bits of coloured rock on the ground swirling into one of Hagia Sophia's elaborate self-replicating arabesques, a common opium effect to be sure, but then that was what history always was, a hallucinated pattern onto random events, so there was no cause to disbelieve the illumination just because of that. History as an opium dream Halah from the zawiyya burst into the cafe's back room looking around; spotting her Budur knew immediately that something was wrong with Idelba. Halali came over, her face holding a serious expression. 'She's taken a turn for the worse.'

Budur followed her out, stumbling under the weight of the opium, trying to banish all its effects immediately with her panic, but that only cast her farther out into visual distortions of all kinds, and never had Nsara looked uglier than on that night, rain bouncing hard on the streets, squiggles of light cobbling underfoot, shapes of people like rats swimming…

Idelba was gone from the zawiyya, she had been taken to the nearest hospital, a huge rambling wartime structure on the hill north of the harbour. Slogging up there, inside the rain cloud itself; then the sound of rain pounding on the cheap tin roof. The light was an intense throbbing yellow white in which everyone looked blank and dead, like walking meat as they had said during the war of men sent to the front.

Idelba was no worse looking than the rest, but Budur rushed to her side. 'She's having trouble breathing,' a nurse said, looking up from her chair. Budur thought: these people work in hell. She was very frightened.

'Listen,' Idelba said calmly. She said to the nurse, 'Please leave us alone for ten minutes.' When the nurse was gone, she said in a low voice to Budur, 'Listen, if I die, then you need to help Piali.'

'But Aunt Idelba! You aren't going to die.'

'Be quiet. I can't risk writing this down, and I can't risk telling only one person, in case something happens to them too. You need to get Piali to go to Isfahan, to describe our results to Abdol Zoroush. Also to Ananda, in Travancore. And Chen, in China. They all have tremendous influence within their respective governments. Hanea will handle her end of things. Remind Piali of what we decided was best. Soon, you see, all atomic physicists will understand the theoretical possibilities of the way alactin splits. The possible application. If they all know the possibility exists, then there will be reason for them to press to make peace permanent. The scientists can pressure their respective governments, by making clear the situation, and taking control of the direction of the relevant fields of science. They must keep the peace, or there will be a rush to destruction. Given the choice, they must choose peace.'

'Yes,' Budur said, wondering if it would be so. Her mind was reeling at the prospect of such a burden being placed on her to carry. She did not like Piali very much. 'Please, Aunt Idelba, please. Don't distress yourself. It will be all right.'

Idelba nodded. 'Very possibly.'

She rallied late that night, just before dawn, just as Budur was beginning to come down from her opium delirium, unable to remember much of the night that had taken so many eons to pass. But she still knew what Idelba wanted her to try to do. Dawn came as dark as if an eclipse had come and stayed.

It was the following year before Idelba died.

The funeral was attended by many people, hundreds of them, from zawiyya and madressa and institute, and the Buddhist monastery, and the Hodenosaunee embassy, and the district panchayat and the state council, and many other places all over Nsara. But not a single person from Turi. Budur stood numbly in a reception line with a few of the senior women from the zawiyya, and shook hand after hand. Afterwards, during the unhappy wake, Hanea came up to her again. 'We loved her too,' she said with a flinty smile. 'We will make sure to keep the promises we made to her.'

A couple of days later Budur kept her usual appointment to read to her blind soldiers. She went in their ward and sat there staring at them in their chairs and beds, and thought, This is probably a mistake. I may feel blank but I'm probably not. She told them of her aunt's death, then, and tried to read to them from Idelba's work, but it was not like Kirana's; even the abstracts were incomprehensible, and the texts themselves, scientific papers on the behaviour of invisible things, were composed largely of tables of numbers. She stopped trying with those, and picked up another book. 'This is one of my aunt's favourite books, a collection of the autobiographical writings found in the works of Abu Ali Ibn Sina, the early scientist and philosopher who was a great hero to her. From what I have read of him, Ibn Sina and my aunt were alike in many ways. They both had a great curiosity about the world. Ibn Sina first mastered Euclid's geometry, then set out to understand everything else. Idelba did that very same thing. When Ibn Sina was still young he fell into a sort of fever of inquiry, that gripped him for almost two years. Here, I will read to you what he himself says about that period:

During this time I did not sleep completely through a single night, or devote myself to anything else but study by day. I compiled a set of files for myself, and for each proof that I examined, I entered into the files its syllogistic premises, their classification, and what might follow from them. I pondered over the conditions that might apply to their premises, until I had verified this question for myself in each case. Whenever sleep overcame me or I became conscious of weakening, I would turn aside to drink a cup of wine, so that my strength would return to me. And whenever sleep seized me I would see those very problems in my dreams; and many questions became clear to me in my sleep. I continued in this until all of the sciences were deeply rooted within me and I understood them as far as is humanly possible. Everything which I knew at that time is just as I know it now; I have not added anything much to it to this day.