There he and Pan Xichun married and lived for twenty years, raising two children, a son, Zhao, and a daughter, Anzi. Pan Xichun took on one of the ministries of the Yingzhou government, which meant she travelled fairly often to Long Island, to Qito, and around the Dahai Rim countries. Bao stayed at home and worked for the Chinese embassy, looked after the children, and wrote and taught history at the city college. It was a good life in Fangzhang, that most beautiful and dramatic of all cities, and sometimes it would seem to him that his youth in revolutionary China was a kind of vivid intense dream he had once had. Scholars came over to talk to him sometimes, and he would reminisce about those years, and once or twice he even wrote about parts of it himself, but it was all at a great distance.
Then one day he felt a bump on the side of Pan Xichun's right breast; cancer, and a year later, after much suffering, she died. In her usual way she had gone on before.
Bao, desolate, was left to raise their children. His son Zhao was already almost grown, and soon took a job in Aozhou, across the sea, so that Bao rarely saw him in person. His daughter Anzi was younger, and he did what he could, hiring women to live in and help him, but somehow he tried too hard, he cared too much; Anzi got angry with him often, moved out when she could, got married, and seldom came to see him after that. Somehow he had botched that and he didn't even know how.
He was offered a post in Beijing, and he returned, but it was too strange; he felt like a preta, wandering the scenes of some past life. He stayed in the western quarters of the city, new neighbourhoods that bore no particular resemblance to the ones he had known. The Forbidden City he forbade to himself. He tried reading and writing, thinking that if only he could write everything down, then it would never come back again.
After not too many years of that he took a post in Pyinkayaing, the capital of Burma, joining the League of All Peoples' Agency for Harmony with Nature, as a Chinese representative and diplomat at large.
3. Writing Burmese History
Pyinkayaing was located on the westernmost channel of the Mouths of the Irrawaddy, that great river road of Burmese life, which was by now urbanized all across the mouths in one enormous seafront city, or congeries of cities, all the way up each branch of the delta to Henzada, and indeed from there up the river all the way to Mandalay. But it was Pyinkayaing where the super city could be seen at its most huge, the river channels running out into the sea like grand avenues, between stupendous skyscrapers that made of the rivers deep gorges, bridged by innumerable streets and alleyways, alternating with the many more numerous canals, all criss crossing each other in hundreds of overlapping grids, and all dominated by the deep canyons formed by the myriad tall buildings.
Bao was given an apartment on the hundred and sixtieth floor of one of the skyscrapers set on the main channel of the Irrawaddy, near the seafront. Walking out onto his balcony for the first time he was amazed at the view, and spent most of an afternoon looking around: south to sea, west to Pagoda Rock, cast along the other mouths of the Irrawaddy, and upstream, looking down onto the rooftops of the supercity, into the million windows of the other skyscrapers lining the riverbanks and crowding the rest of the delta. All the buildings had been sunk deep through the alluvial soil of the delta to bedrock, and a famous system of dams and locks and offshore breakwaters had secured the city against floods from upstream, high tides from the Indian Ocean, typhoons – even the rise in sea level that was now beginning did not fundamentally threaten the city, which was in truth a kind of collec tion of ships anchored permanently in the bedrock, so that if eventually they had to abandon the 'ground floors' and move up it would be, just one more engineering challenge, something to keep the local construction industry occupied in years to come. The Burmese were not afraid of anything.
Looking down at the little junks and water taxis brushing their deli cate white calligraphy over the blue brown water, Bao seemed to read a kind of message in them, just outside the edge of his conscious comprehension. He understood now why the Burmese wrote 'Burmese history', because maybe it was true – maybe all that had ever happened, had happened so that it could collide here, and make something greater than any of its elements. As when the wakes from several different water taxis struck all together, shooting a bolt of white water higher than any individual wave ever would have got.
This monumental city, Pyinkayaing, was then Bao's home for the next several years. He took a cable car high across the river to the League offices on the other bank, and worked on the balance with nature problems beginning to plague the world, wreaking such damage that even, Burma itself might some day suffer from it, unless they were to remove Pyinkayaing to the moon, which did not seem completely impossible given their enormous energy and confidence.
But they had not been a power long enough to have seen the way the wheel turns. Over the years Bao visited a hundred lands as part of his job, and many reminded him that in the long run of time, civilizations rise, then fall; and most, upon falling, never really rose again. The locus of power wandered the face of the earth like some poor restless immortal, following the sun. Presumably Burma would not be immune to that fate.
Bao now flew in the latest spaceplanes, popping out of the atmosphere like the artillery shells of the Long War, and landing on the other side of the globe three hours later; he also flew in the giant airships that still conveyed the bulk of traffic and cargo around the world, their slowness more than compensated for by their capacity, humming around like great ships in the sea of air, for the most part unsinkable. He conferred with officials in most of the countries of the Earth, and came to understand that their balance with nature problems were partly a matter of pure numbers, the human population of the planet rebounding so strongly from the Long War that it was now approaching ten billion people; and this could be more people than the planet could sustain, or so many scientists speculated, especially the more conservative ones, those of a kind of Daoist temperament, found in great numbers in China and Yingzhou especially.
But also, beyond the sheer number of people, there was the accumulation of things, and the uneven distribution of wealth, so that people in Pyinkayaing thought nothing of throwing a party in Ingoli or Fangzhang, spending ten years of a Maghribi's life earnings on a weekend of pleasure; while people in Firanja and Inka. still frequently suffered from malnutrition. This discrepancy existed despite the efforts of the League of All Peoples and the egalitarian movements in China, Firanja, Travancore and Yingzhou. In China the egalitarian movement came not just from Zhu's vision, but also from the Daoist ideas of balance, as Zhu would always point out. In Travancore it rose out of the Buddhist idea of compassion, in Yingzhou from the Hodenosaunee idea of the equality of all, in Firanja from the idea of justice before God. Everywhere the idea existed, but the world still belonged to a tiny minority of rich; wealth had been accumulating for centuries in a few hands, and the people lucky enough to be born into this old aristocracy lived in the old manner, with the rights of kings now spread among the wealthy of the Earth. Money had replaced land as the basis of power, and money flowed according to its own gravity, its laws of accumulation, which though divorced from nature, were nevertheless the laws ruling most countries on Earth, no matter their religious or philosophical ideas of love, compassion, charity, equality, goodness and the like. Old Zhu had been right: humanity's behaviour was still based on old laws, which determined how food and land and water and surplus wealth were owned, how the labour of the ten billions was owned. If these laws did not change, the living shell of the Earth might well be wrecked, and inherited by seagulls and ants and cockroaches.