What Remains to be Explained Why has there been inequality in accumulation of goods since the earliest recorded history? What causes the ice ages to come and go? Could Japan have won its war of independence without the fortuitous combination of the Long War and the earthquake and fire striking Edo? Where did all the Roman gold end up? Why does power corrupt? Was there any way that the native peoples of the New World could have been saved from the devastation of Old World diseases? When did people first arrive in the New World? Why were the civilizations on Yingzhou and Inka at such different stages of development? Why can't gravity be reconciled mathematically with pulse microprobability? Would Travancore have initiated the modern period and dominated the Old World, if the Kerala had never lived? Is there life after death, or transmigration of souls? Did the polar expedition of the fifty second year of the Long War reach the south pole? What causes well fed and secure people to work for the subjugation and immiseration of starving insecure people? If al Alemand had conquered Skandistan, would the Sami people have survived? If the Shanghai Conference had not arranged such punitive reparations, would the postwar world have been more peaceful? How many people can the Earth support? Why is there evil? How did the Hodenosaunee invent their form of government? Which disease or combination of diseases killed the Christians of Firanja? Does technology drive history? Would things have turned out differently if the birth of science in Samarqand had not been delayed in its dispersal by the plague? Did the Phoenicians cross the Atlantic to the New World? Will any mammals larger than a fox survive the next century? Is the Sphinx thousands of years older than the Pyramids? Do gods exist? How can we return the animals to the earth? How can we make a decent existence? How can we give to our children and the generations following a world restored to health?
Soon after that final session, and a big party, Zhu Isao returned to Beijing, and Bao never saw him again.
They worked hard in the years after Zhu's visit to enact programmes that helped to frame some answers to his final questions. Just as the geologists had been greatly helped in their labours by the construction of a framework of understanding based on the movement of the broken eggshell plates of the crust, so the bureaucrats and technocrats and scientists and diplomats at the League of All Peoples were helped in their endeavours by Zhu's theoretical considerations. It helps to have a plan! as Zhu had often remarked.
And so Bao criss crossed the world, meeting and talking to people, helping to put certain strands into place, thickening the warp and weft of treaties and agreements by which all the peoples on the planet were tied together. He worked variously on land tenure reform, forest management, animal protection, water resources, panchayat support and divestiture of accumulated wealth, chipping away at the obdurate blocks of privilege left in the wake of the Long War and all that had happened in the centuries before it. Everything went very slowly, and progress was always in small increments, but what Bao noticed from time to time was that improvements in one part of the world situation often helped elsewhere, so that, for instance, the institution of panchayat governments at the local level in China and the Islamic states led to increased power for more and more people, especially where they adopted the Travancori law of requiring at least two of every five panchayat members to be women; and this in turn mitigated many land problems. Indeed, as many of the world's problems stemmed from too many people competing for too few resources, using too crude technologies, another happy result of the panchayat empowerment of localities and of women was that birthrates dropped rapidly and dramatically. The replacement rate for a population was 2.I births per woman, and before the Long War the world rate had been more like five; in the poorest countries, more like seven or eight. Now, in every country where women exerted the full range of rights advocated by the League of All Peoples, the replacement rate had fallen to less than three, and often less than two; this, combined with improvements in agriculture and other technologies, boded well for the future. it was the ultimately hopeful expression of the warp and the weft, of the principle of late emergent properties. It seemed, though everything went very slowly, that they might be able to concoct some kind of dharmic history after all. Perhaps; it was not yet clear; but some work got done.
So when Bao read of Zhu Isao's death, some years later, he groaned and threw the paper to the floor. He spent the day out on his balcony, feeling unaccountably bereft. Really there was nothing to mourn, everything to celebrate: the great one had lived over a hundred years, had helped to change China and then all the world; late in life he had appeared to be thoroughly enjoying himself, going around and listening by talking. He had given the impression of someone who knew his place in the world.
But Bao did not know his place. Contemplating the immense city below him, looking up the great watery canyons, he realized that he had been living in this place for over ten years, and he still didn't know a thing about it. He was always leaving or coming back, always looking down on things from a balcony, eating in the same little hole in the wall, talking to colleagues from the League offices, spending most of his mornings and evenings reading. He was almost sixty now, and he didn't know what he was doing or how he was supposed to live. The huge city was like a machine, or a ship half sunk in the shallows. It was no help to him. He had worked every day trying to extend Kung and Zhu's work, to understand history and work on it in the moment of change, also to explain it to others, reading and writing, reading and writing, thinking that if he could only explain it then it wouldn't oppress him quite so much. It did not seem to have worked. He had the persistent feeling that everyone who ever meant anything to him had already died.
When he went back inside his apartment, he found a message on the screen of his lectern from his daughter Anzi, the first he had received from her in a long time. She had given birth to a daughter of her own, and wondered if Bao wanted to visit and meet his new grandchild. He typed an affirmative reply and packed his bag.
Anzi and her husband Deng lived above Shark Point, in one of the crowded hilly neighbourhoods on the bay side of Fangzhang. Their baby girl was named Fengyun, and Bao enjoyed very much taking her out on the tram and walking her in a stroller around the park at the south end of town, overlooking the Gold Gate. There was something about her look that reminded him very strongly of Pan Xichun – a curve of the cheek, a stubborn look in her eye. These traits we pass on. He watched ber sleep, and the fog roll in through the Gate, under and over the sweep of the new bridge, listening to a feng shui guru lecture a small class sitting at his feet, 'you can see that this is the most physically beautiful setting of any city on Earth', which seemed true enough to Bao; even Pyinkayaing had no prospect compared to this, the glories of the Burmese capital were all artefactual, and without those it was just like any other delta mouth; unlike this sublime place he had loved so in a previous existence, 'oh no, I don't think so, only geomantic imbeciles would have located the city on the other side of the strait, apart from practical considerations of street plaiting, there is the intrinsic qi of place, its dragon arteries are too exposed to the wind and fog, it is best to leave it as a park'. Certainly the opposing peninsula made a beautiful park, green and hilly across the water, sunlight streaming down on it through cloud, the whole scene so vibrant and gorgeous that Bao lifted the babe up out of her stroller to show it all to her; he pointed her in the four directions; and the scene blurred before his eyes as if he too were a babe. Everything became a flow of shapes, cloudy masses of brilliant colour swimming about, vivid and glowing, stripped of their meanings as known things, blue and white above, yellow below… He shivered, feeling very strange. It was as if he had been looking through the babe's eyes; and the child seemed fretful. So he took her back home, and Anzi reproached him for letting her get cold. 'And her nappy needs changing!'