Free The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

any.”
    She was not entirely reassured. She often saw hungry ghosts in her sleep, and they had to come from somewhere. And they sometimes complained to her of having had their bodies eaten. It made sense to her that they might cluster around restaurants in search of some kind of retribution. Bold nodded; it made sense to him too, though it was hard to believe the teeming city harbored practicing cannibals when there was so much other food to be had.
    As the restaurant prospered, I-Li made Shen improve the place, cutting holes in the side walls and putting in windows, filling them with square trelliswork supporting oiled paper, which blazed or glowed with sunlight, depending on the hour and weather. She opened the front of the building entirely to the lakefront promenade, and paved the downstairs with glazed bricks. She burned pots of mosquito smoke during the summer, when they were at their worst. She built in a number of small wall shrines devoted to various gods—deities of place, animal spirits, demons and hungry ghosts, even, at Bold's humble request, one to Tianfei the Celestial Consort, despite her suspicion that this was only another name for Tara, already much honored in the nooks and crannies of the house. If it annoyed Tara, she said, it would be on Bold's head.
    Once she came home retailing a story of a number of people who had died and come back to life shortly thereafter, apparently because of the mistakes of careless celestial scribes, who had written down the wrong names. Bold smiled; the Chinese imagined a complicated bureaucracy for the dead, just like the ones they had established for everything else. “They came back with information for their living relatives, things that turned out to be correct even through the briefly deceased person couldn't have known about it!”
    “Marvels,” Bold said.
    “Marvels happen every day,” I-Li replied. It was, as far as she was concerned, a universe peopled by spirits, genies, demons, ghosts—as many kinds of beings as tastes. She had never had the bardo explained to her, and so she didn't understand the six levels of reality that organized cosmic existence; and Bold did not feel that he was in a position to teach her. So it remained at the level of ghosts and demons for her. Malignant ones could be held off by various practices that annoyed them; firecrackers, drums and gongs, these things chased them away. It was also possible to strike them with a stick, or burn artemisia, a Sechuan custom that I-Li practiced. She also bought magic writing on miniature papers or cylinders of silver, and put up white jade square tiles in every doorway; dark demons disliked the light of these. And the restaurant and its household prospered, so she felt she had done the right things.
    Following her out several times a week, Bold learned a lot about Hangzhou. He learned that the best rhinoceros skins were found at Chien's, as you went down from the service canal to little Chinghu Lake; the finest turbans were at Kang Number Eight's, in the Street of the Worn Cash Coin, or at Yang Number Three's, going down the canal after the Three Bridges. The largest display of books was at the bookstalls under the big trees near the summer house of the Orange Tree Garden. Wicker cages for birds and crickets could be found in Ironwire Lane, ivory combs at Fei's, painted fans at the Coal Bridge. I-Li liked to know of these places, even though she only bought what they sold as gifts for her friends or her mother-in-law. A very curious person indeed. Bold could hardly keep up with her. One day in the street, rattling off some story or other, she stopped and looked up at him, surprised, and said “I want to know everything!”
             
    But all the while, Kyu had been watching without watching. And one night, during the tidal bore of the eighth moon, when the Chientang River roared with high waves and there were many visitors in the city, in the hour before the woodblocks and the