The military of Nsara were getting involved as well. Piali's physics research continued along the lines set by Idelba, and though there was nothing more published about the possibility of creating a chain reaction splitting of alactin, there was certainly a small crowd of Muslim physicists, in Skandistan and Tuscany and Iran, who had discussed the possibility among themselves; and they suspected that similar discussions were taking place in Chinese and Travancori and New World labs. Internationally published papers on this aspect of physics were now analysed in Nsara to see what they might have left out, to see if new developments one might expect to see were appearing or if sudden silences might mark government classification of these matters. So far no unequivocal signs of censorship or self silencing had appeared, but Piali seemed to feel it was only a matter of time, and was probably happening in other countries as it was among them, semi consciously and without a plan. As soon as there was another global political crisis, he said, before hostilities came to a head, one could expect the field to disappear entirely into classified military labs, and along with it a significant number of that generation of physicists, all cut off from contact with colleagues anywhere else in the world.

And of course trouble could come at any time. China, though victo rious in the war, had been wrecked almost as thoroughly as the defeated coalition, and it appeared to be falling into anarchy and civil war. Apparently it was near the end for the wartime leadership that had replaced the Qing dynasty.

'That's good,' Piali told Budur, 'because only a military bureaucracy would have tried to build a bomb so dangerous. But it's bad because military governments don't like to go down without a fight.'

'No government does,' said Budur. 'Remember what Idelba said. The best defence against government seizure of these ideas would be to spread the knowledge among all the physicists of the world, as quickly as possible. If all know that all could construct such a weapon, then no one would try.'

'Maybe not at first,' Piali said, 'but in years to come it might happen.'

'Nevertheless,' Budur said. And she continued to pester Piali to pursue Idelba's suggested course of action. He did not renounce it, nor did he make any move to enact it. Indeed, Budur had to agree with him that it was difficult to see exactly what to do about it. They sat on the secret like pigeons on a cuckoo egg.

Meanwhile the situation in Nsara continued to deteriorate. A good summer had followed several bad ones, taking the sharpest edge off the possibility of famine, but nevertheless the newspapers were full of bread riots, and strikes in the factories on the Rhine and the Ruhr and the Rhone, and even a 'revolt against reparations' in the Little Atlas Mountains, a revolt that could not easily be put down. The army appeared to have within it elements who were encouraging rather than suppressing these signs of unrest, perhaps out of sympathy, perhaps to destabilize things further and justify a complete military takeover. Rumours of a coup were widespread.

All this was depressingly similar to the endgame of the Long War, and boarding increased. Budur found it hard to concentrate on her reading, and was often oppressed by grief for Idelba. She was surprised therefore, and pleased, when Piali brought news of a conference in Isfahan, an international gathering of atomic physicists to discuss all the latest results in their field, 'including', he said, 'the alactin problem'. Not only that, but the conference was linked to the fourth convocation of a large biannual meeting of scientists, the first of which had occurred outside Ganono, the great harbour city of the Hodenosaunee, so that they were now called the Long Island Conferences. The second one had taken place in Pyinkayaing, and the third in Beijing. The Isfahan conference was therefore the first one to take place in the Dar, and it was going to include a track of meetings on archaeology; and Piali had already arranged funding for Budur from the institute to attend with him, as co author of papers they had written with Idelba on lifering dating methods. 'It looks to me like a good place to talk privately about your aunt's ideas. There'll be a session devoted to her work, organized by Zoroush, and Chen and quite a few others of her correspondents will be there. You'll come?'

'Of course.'

TWENTY ONE

The direct trains to Iran all ran through Turi, and whether it was for this reason or another, Piali arranged for them to fly from Nsara to Isfahan. The airship was similar to the one Budur had taken with Idelba to the Orkneys, and she sat in the window seats of the gondola looking down at Firanja: the Alps, Roma, Greece and the brown islands of the Aegean; then Anatolia and the Middle Western states. It was, Budur thought to herself as the long floating hours passed, a big world.

Then they were flying over the snowy Zagros Mountains to Isfahan, situated in the upper reaches of the Zayandeh Rud, a high valley with a swift river, overlooking salt flats to the east. As they approached the city's airport they saw a vast expanse of ruins around the new town. Isfahan had lain on the Silk Road, and successive cities had been demolished in their turn by Chinggis Khan, Temur the Lame, the Afghans in the eleventh century, and lastly by the Travancoris, in the late war.

Nevertheless the latest incarnation of the city was a bustling place, with new construction going on everywhere, so that as they trammed into the downtown it looked as if they were passing through a forest of construction cranes, each canted at a different angle over some new hive of steel and concrete. At a big madressa in the new centre of the city, Abdol Zoroush and the other Iranian scientists greeted the contingent from Nsara, and took them to rooms in their Institute for Scientific Research's big guest quarters, and then into the city surrounding it for a meal.

The Zagros Mountains overlooked the city, and the river ran through it just south of the downtown, which was being built over the ruins of the oldest city centre. The institute's archaeological collection, the locals informed them, was filling with newly recovered antiquities and artefacts from previous eras of the city. The new town had been designed with broad tree lined streets, raying north away from the river. Set at a high altitude, under even higher mountains, it would be a very beautiful city when the new trees grew to their full heights. Even now it was very impressive.

The Isfaharis were obviously very proud of both the city and their institute, and of Iran more generally. Crushed repeatedly in the war, the whole country was now being rebuilt, and in a new spirit, they said, a kind of Persian worldliness, with their own Shiite ultra conservatives awash in a more tolerant influx of polyglot refugees and immigrants, and local intellectuals who called themselves Cyruses, after the supposed first king of Iran. This new kind of Iranian patriotism was very interesting to the Nsarenes, as it seemed to be a way of asserting some independence from Islam without renouncing it. The Cyruses at the table informed them cheerfully that they now spoke of the year as being not 1423 AH, but 2561 of 'the era of the king of kings', and one of them stood to offer a toast by reciting an anonymous poem that had been discovered painted on the walls of the new madressa: 'Ancient Iran, Eternal Persia, Caught in the press of time and the world, Giving up to it beautiful Persian, Language of Hafiz, Ferdowski and Khayyarn, Speech of my heart, home of my soul, It's you I love if I love anything. Once more great Iran sing us that love.'

And the locals among them cheered and drank, although many of them were clearly students from Africa or the New World or Aozhou.