The city centre was bustling and squeaky with trams, but Budur liked to walk. She ignored Ahab, her chaperon; though she liked him personally, a simple man with few pretensions, she did not like his job, which included accompanying her on her excursions. She shunned him on principle as an affront to her dignity. She knew also that he would report her behaviour to Father, and when he reported her refusal to acknowledge his presence, yet another small protest of harem would reach Father, if only indirectly.

She led Ahab up through the apartments studding the hillside overlooking the city, to High Street. The wall around their house was beautiful, a tall patterned weave of green and grey dressed stones. The wooden gate was topped by a stone arch seemingly held in a network of wistaria vines; you could pull out the keystone and it would still stand. Ahmet, their gatekeeper, was in his seat in the cosy little wooden closet on the inside of the gateway, where he held forth to all who wanted to pass, his tea tray ready to serve those who had time to tarry.

Inside the house Aunt Idelba was talking on the telephone, which was set on a table in the inner courtyard under the eaves, where anyone could hear you. This was Father's way of trying to keep anything untoward from ever being said, but the truth was that Aunt Idelba was usually talking about microscopic nature and the mathematics of the interiors of atoms, and so no one could have any idea what she was talking about. Budur liked to listen to her anyway, because it reminded her of the fairy tales Aunt Idelba had told in the past when Budur was younger, or her cooking talk with Mother in the kitchen cooking was one of her passions, and she would rattle off spells, recipes, procedures and tools, all mysterious and suggestive just like this talk on the tele phone, as if she were cooking up a new world. And sometimes she would get off the phone looking worried, and absent-mindedly accept Budur's hugs and admit that this was precisely the case: the ilmi, the scientists, were indeed cooking up a new world. Or they could be. Once she rang off flushed pink, and danced a little minuet around the courtyard, singing nonsense syllables, and their laundry ditty, 'God is great, great is God, clean our clothes, clean our souls.'

This time she rang off and did not even see Budur, but stared up at the bit of sky visible from the courtyard.

'What is it, Idelba? Are you feeling hem?' Hem was the women's term for a kind of mild depression that had no obvious cause.

Idelba shook her head. 'No, this is a mushkil,' which was a specific problem.

'What is it?'

'Well… Simply put, the investigators at the laboratory are getting some very strange results. That's what it comes down to. No one can say what they mean.'

This laboratory Idelba talked to over the phone was currently her main contact with the world outside their home. She had been a mat ematics teacher and researcher in Nsara, and, with her husband, an investigator of microscopic nature. But her husband's untimely death had revealed some irregularities in his affairs, and Idelba had been left destitute; and the job they had shared had turned out to be his in the end, so that she had nowhere to work, and nowhere to live. Or so Yasmina had said; Idelba herself never spoke about it. She had shown up one day with a single suitcase, weeping, to confer with Budur's father, her half brother. He had agreed to put her up for a time. This, Father explained later, was one of the things harems were for; they protected women who had nowhere else to go. 'Your mother and you girls complain about the system, but really, what is the alternative? The suffering of women left alone would be enormous.'

Mother and Budur's older cousin, Yasmina, would snort or snarl at this, cheeks turning red. Rema and Aisha and Fatima would look at them curiously, trying to understand what they should feel about what to them was after all the natural order of things. Aunt Idelba never said anything about it one way or the other, neither thanks nor complaint. Old acquaintances still called her on the phone, especially a nephew of hers, who apparently had a problem he thought she could help him with; he called regularly. Once Idelba tried to explain why to Budur and her sisters, with the aid of a blackboard and chalk.

'Atoms have shells around them, like the spheres in the heavens in the old drawings, all surrounding the heartknot of the atom, which is small but heavy. Three kinds of particles clump together in the heartknot, some with yang, some with yin, some neuter, in different amounts for each substance, and they're held bound together there by a strong force, which is very strong, but also very local, in that you don't have to get far away from the heartknot for the force to reduce a great deal.'

'Like a harem,' Yasmina said.

'Yes, well. That may be more like gravity, I'm afraid. But anyway, there is a qi repulsion between all particles, that the strong force counteracts, and the two compete, more or less, along with other forces. Now, certain very heavy metals have so many particles that a certain number leak away from them one by one, and the single particles that leak leave distinctive traces at distinct rates of speed. And down in Nsara they've been getting strange results from a particular heavy metal, an elemental that is heavier than gold, the heaviest elemental found so far, called alactin. They're bombarding it with neuter particles, and getting very strange results, all over the plates, in a way hard to explain. The heavy heart of this elemental appears to be unstable.'

'Like Yasmina!'

'Yes, well, interesting that you say so, in that it is not true but it suggests the way we keep trying to think of ways to visualize these things that are always too small for us to see.' She paused, looking at the blackboard, then at her uncomprehending students. A spasm of some emotion marred her features, disappeared. 'Well. It is yet another phenomenon that needs explaining, let's leave it at that. It will take more investigation in a lab.'

After that she scribbled in silence for a while. Numbers, letters, Chinese ideograms, equations, dots, diagrams – like something out of illustrations for the books about the Alchemist of Samarqand.

After a time she slowed down, shrugged. 'I'll have to talk to Piali about it.'

'But isn't he in Nsara?' Budur asked.

'Yes.' This too was part of her mishkul, Budur saw. 'We will talk by the telephone, of course." 'Tell us about Nsara,' Budur asked for the thousandth time.

Idelba shrugged; she was not in the mood. She never was, to begin with; it took a while to break through the barrier of regrets to get her to that time. Her first husband, divorcing her near the end of her fertility, with no children; her second husband, dying young; she had a lot of regrets to get through. But if Budur was patient and merely followed her around the terrace, and in and out of rooms, she often would make the passage, helped perhaps by her shifts from room to room, matching the way each place on Earth we have lived in is like a room in our mind, with its sky for a roof, hills for walls, and buildings for furniture, so that our lives have moved from one room to the next in some larger structure; and the old rooms still exist and yet at the same time are gone, or emptied, so that in reality one could only move on to some new room, or stay locked in the one you were in, as in a jail; and yet, in the mind…

First Idelba would speak of the weather there, the storm tossed Atlantic rolling in with water, wind, cloud, rain, fog, sleet, mist, sometimes snow, all broken by sunny days with their low shards of light emblazoning the seafront and the rivermouth, the docks of the giant city filling the valley on both banks all the way upstream to Anjou, all the states of Asia and Firanja come west to this westernmost town, to meet the other great influx by sea, people from all over the world, including the handsome Hodenosaunee, and the shivering exiles from Inka, with their serapes and gold jewellery splashing the dark grey afternoons of the stormthrashed winters with little bits of metallic colour. These exotics all together made Nsara fascinating, Idelba said, as did the unwelcome embassies of the Chinese and Tranvancoris, enforcing the terms of the postwar settlement, standing there like monuments to the Islamic defeat in the war, long windowless blocks at the back of the harbour district. Describing all this, Idelba's eyes would begin to gleam and her voice grow animated, and she almost always, if she did not cut herself short, ended by exclaiming Nsara! Nsara! Ohhh, Nssssarrrrra! And then sometimes sit down wherever she was and hold her head in her hands, overwhelmed. It was, Budur was sure, the most exciting and wonderful city on Earth.