'That's the kind of person my aunt was,' Budur said. She put down that book and picked up another one, thinking that it would be better to stop reading things inspired by Idelba. It wasn't making her feel any better. The book she chose out of her bag was called 'Nsarene Sailors, Tales', true stories about the local seamen and fisherfolk, rousing adventures full of fish and danger and death but also of the sea air, the waves and the wind. The soldiers had enjoyed chapters of the book she had read to them before.

But this time she read one called 'The Windy Ramadan', and it turned out to be about a time long before, in the age of sail, when contrary winds had held the grain fleet out of the harbour, so that they had had to anchor offshore in the roads as darkness fell, and then in the night the wind shifted around and a great storm came roaring in from the Atlantic, and there was no way for those out on the ships to get safely to shore, and nothing those on shore could do but walk the shore through the night. The author of the account had a wife who was taking care of three motherless children whose father was one of the sea captains out in the fleet, and, unable to watch the children at their nervous play, the author had gone out to walk the strand with the rest, braving the howling winds of the tempest. At dawn they had all seen the fringe of soaked grain lining the high water mark, and knew the worst had come. 'Not a single ship survived the gale, and all up and down the beach the bodies washed ashore. And as it had dawned a Friday, at the appointed hour the muezzin went to the minaret to ascend and make the call for prayer, and the town idiot in a rage detained him, crying 'Who in such an hour can praise the Lord?"'

Budur stopped reading. A deep silence filled the room. Some of the men nodded their heads, as if to say, Yes, that's the way it happens; I've had that very thought for years; still others reached out as if to snatch the book from her hands, or gestured as if waving her away, telling her to leave. If they had had their sight they would have walked her to the door, or done something; but as it was no one knew what to do.

She said something and got up and left, and walked downriver through the city, out onto the docks, then out on the big jetty, out to its end. The beautiful blue sea sloshed against the boulders, hissing its clean salt mist into the air. Budur sat on the last sun warmed rock and watched the clouds fly in over Nsara. She was as full of grief as the ocean was of water, but still, something in the sight of the noisy city was heartening to her; she thought, Nsara, now you are my only living relative. Now you will be my Aunt Nsara.

TWENTY

And now she had to get to know Piali.

He was a small, self absorbed man, dreamy and uncommunicative, seemingly full of himself. Budur had thought that his abilities in physics were compensated for by an exceptional lack of gracefulness.

But now she was impressed by the depth of his grief at Idelba's death. In life he had treated her, Budur often thought, as an embarrassing appurtenance, a needed but unwanted collaborator in his work. Now that she was gone, he sat on a jetty fishermen's bench where they had occasionally sat with Idelba when the weather was good, and sighed, saying, 'She was such a joy to talk things over with, wasn't she? Our Idelba was a truly brilliant physicist, let me tell you. If she had been born a man, there would have been no end to it she would have changed the world. Of course there were things she wasn't so good at, but she had such insight into the way things might work. And when we got stuck, Idelba would keep hammering away for ever at the problem, forehead pounding the brick wall, you know, and I would stop, but she was persistent, and so clever at finding new ways to come at the thing, turning the flank if the wall wouldn't give. Lovely. She was a most lovely person,' deadly serious now, and emphasizing 'person' rather than I woman', as if Idelba had taught him some things about what women might be that he was not so stupid as to have missed. Nor would he fall into the error of exceptionalism, no physicist tended to think of exceptions as a valid category; and so now he spoke to Budur almost as he would have to Idelba or his male colleagues, only more intently, concentrating to achieve some semblance of normal humanity, perhaps – and yet achieving it. Almost. He was still a very distracted and graceless man. But Budur began to like him better.

This was a good thing, as Piali took an interest in her too, and over the next several months, courted her in his peculiar way; he came to the zawiyya, and got to know her house family there, and listened to her describe her problems with her studies in history, while also going on at nearly intolerable length about his problems in physics and at the institute. He shared with her a propensity for the cafe life as well, and did not seem to care about the assorted indiscretions she had committed since her arrival in Nsara; he ignored all that, and concentrated on things of the mind, even when sitting in a cafe sipping a brandy, and writing all over his napkins, one of his peculiar habits. They talked about the nature of history for hours, and it was under the impact of his deep scepticism, or materialism, that she finally completed the shift in the emphasis of her study from history to archaeology, from texts to things convinced, in part, by his argument that texts were always just people's impressions, while objects had a certain unchangeable reality to them. Of course the objects led directly to more impressions, and meshed with them in the web of proofs that any student of the past had to present in order to make a case; but to start with the tools and buildings rather than the words of the past were indeed a comfort to Budur. She was tired of distilling brandy. She began consciously to take on some of the inquisitiveness about the real world that Idelba had always exhibited, as a way of honouring her memory. She missed Idelba so much that she could not think of it directly, but had to parry it by homages such as these, invoking Idelba's presence by her habits, as if becoming a kind of Madam Sururi. It occurred to her more than once that there were ways in which we know the dead better than the living, because the actual person is no longer there to distract our thinking about them.

Following these various trains of thought, there also began to occur to Budur a great number of questions that connected her work with Idelba's as she understood it, as she considered physical changes in the materials used in the past: chemical or physical or qi or qileak changes, that might be used as clocks, buried in the texture of the materials used. She asked Piali about this, and he quickly mentioned the shift over time in the types of particulates in the heartknots and shells, so that, for instance, lifering fourteens within a body would, after the death of an organism, begin slowly to fall back to lifering twelves, beginning about fifty years after the death of an organism and continuing for about a hundred thousand years, until all the lifering in the material was back to twelves, and the clock would stop functioning.

This would be long enough to date most human activities, Budur thought. She and Piali began to work on the method together, enlisting the help of other scientists at the institute. The idea was taken up and extended by a team of Nsarene scientists that grew by the month, and the effort quickly became global as well, in the usual way of science. Budur had never studied harder.

Thus it was that over time she became an archaeologist, working among other things on dating methods, with the help of Piali. In effect she had replaced Idelba as Piali's partner, and he had therefore moved part of his work to a different field, to accommodate what she was doing. His method of relating to someone was to work with them; so even though she was younger, and in a different field, he simply adjusted and continued in his habitual way. He also continued to pursue his studies in atomic physics, of course, collaborating with many colleagues at the laboratories of the institute, and some of the scientists at the wireless factory on the outskirts of the city, whose lab was now beginning to match the madressa and the institute as a centre of research in pure physics.