The Year of Rice and Salt

Nadir sent his men by on a monthly basis to receive the latest news of Khalid's studies, and from time to time dropped by himself unannounced, throwing the compound into a flurry, like an anthill hit by water. Khalid was polite at all times, but complained to Bahram bitterly about the monthly request for news, particularly since they had very little. 'I thought I escaped the moon curse when Fedwa went through menopause,' he groused.

Ironically, these unwelcome visits were also losing him allies in the madressas, as he was thought to be favoured by the treasurer, and he could not risk telling them the real situation. So there were cold looks, and slights in the bazaar and the mosque; also, many examples of grasping obsequiousness. It made him irritable, indeed sometimes he rose to a veritable fury of irritability. 'A little power and you see how awful people are.'

To keep him from plunging back into black melancholy, Bahram scoured the caravanserai for things that might please him, visiting the Hindus and the Armenians in particular, also the Chinese, and coming back with books, compasses, clocks, and a curious nested astrolabe, which purported to show that the six planets occupied orbits that filled polygons that were progressively simpler by one side, so that Mercury circled inside a decagon, Venus a nonagon just large enough to hold the decagon, Earth an octagon outside the nonagon, and so on up to Saturn, circling in a big square. This object astonished Khalid, and caused night-long discussions with Iwang and Zahhar about the disposition of the planets around the sun.

This new interest in astronomy quickly superseded all others in Khalid, and grew to a passion after Iwang brought by a curious device he had made in his shop, a long silver tube, hollow except for glass lenses placed in both ends. Looking through the tube, things appeared closer than they really were, with their detail more fine.

'How can that work?' Khalid demanded when he looked through it. The look of surprise on his face was that of the puppets in the bazaar, pure and hilarious. It made Bahram happy to see it.

'Like the prism?' Iwang suggested uncertainly.

Khalid shook his head. 'Not that you can see things as bigger, or closer, but that you can see so much more detail! How can that be?'

'The detail must always be there in the light,' Iwang said, I and the eye only powerful enough to discern part of it. I admit I am surprised, but consider, most people's eyes weaken as they age, especially for things close by. I know mine have. I made my first set of lenses to use as spectacles, you know, one for each eye, in a frame. But while I was assembling one I looked through the two lenses lined up together.' He grinned, miming the action. 'I was really very anxious to confirm that you two saw the same things I saw, to tell the truth. I couldn't quite believe my own eyes.'

Khalid was looking through the thing again.

So now they looked at things. Distant ridges, birds in flight, approaching caravans. Nadir was shown the glass, and its military uses were immediately obvious to him. He took one they had made for him, encrusted with garnets, to the Khan, and word came back that the Khan was pleased. That did not ease the presence of the Khanate in Khalid's compound, of course; on the contrary, Nadir mentioned casually that they were looking forward to the next remarkable development out of Khalid's shop, as the Chinese were said to be in a turmoil. Who knew where that kind of thing might end?

'It will never end,' Khalid said bitterly when Nadir had gone. 'It's like a noose that tightens with our every move.'

'Feed him your discoveries in little pieces,' Iwang suggested. 'It will seem as if there are more of them.'

Khalid followed this advice, which gave him a little more time, and they worked on all manner of things that it seemed would help the Khan's troops in battle. Khalid indulged his interest in primary causes mostly at night, when they trained the new spyglass on the stars, and later that month on the moon, which proved to be a very rocky, mountainous, desolate world, ringed by innumerable craters, as if fired upon by the cannon of some super emperor. Then on one memorable night they looked through the spyglass at Jupiter, and Khalid said, 'By God it's a world too, clearly. Banded by latitude and look, those three stars near it, they're brighter than stars. Could they be moons of Jupiter's?'

They could. They moved fast, around Jupiter, and the ones closer to Jupiter moved faster, just like the planets around the sun. Soon Khalid and Iwang had seen a fourth one, and mapped all four orbits, so that they could prepare new viewers to comprehend the sight, by looking at the diagrams first. They made it all into a book, another gift to the Khan – a gift with no military use, but they named the moons after the Khan's four oldest wives, and he liked that, it was clear. He was reported to have said, 'Jewels in the sky! For me!'

Who is the Stranger?