Caliphate

by Thomas Kratman

  Bongo's voice grew contemplative. "I have often wondered if the barbarian migrations that wrecked the Western Roman Empire didn't start just that way, one group in Mongolia raiding Chinese living north of the Great Wall, thereby causing the Chinese to push the first offending group right off its lands, starting a chain reaction. Whether it did or not, it sure worked that way here. First the Moslems nudged us, then we made their lands uninhabitable, they in turn went to Europe, which drove the Europeans here, which further fucked the blacks here, in the ass and without grease.

  "It might not have been so bad, except for two other factors. Those Europeans who fled were typically highly fertile and more than a little bitter about being driven—whatever the truth of the matter, that's how they felt about it—from their original homes. They were, moreover, the most highly conservative of Europeans. They were not remotely interested in nepotism masquerading as affirmative action. Nor did they see why affirmative action should disadvantage them, since their ancestors had had nothing to do with apartheid. This is all a fair point of view, you'll agree," Bongo said, smiling over his shoulder at Hamilton.

  "The civil war that broke out in 2038 lasted for nine years and cost millions of lives. At the end of it, disciplined fire, the old European military tradition, and a critical alliance with the Zulu people ended black majority rule in South Africa. By 2065, virtually all of sub- Saharan Africa was under white sway once again. They've learned a lot, though. That controlling hand is often felt only lightly. They prefer to rule through locals, much as the French did for more than half a century after notionally giving up their empire.

  "Still, give the Boers . . . oh, yes, they're all Boers now, even the Cape English . . . give them their due. They pay their bills. The only exception to effective white rule in sub-Saharan Africa is Zululand, a hefty chunk carved out of Natal and points north for the Zulu in full payment for their services. And this time they weren't idiot cheapskates about it; this time they gave the Zulu a real country."

  "What the fuck?" Hamilton's eyes could not believe what they were seeing, one man, two women in hijab, half a dozen kids with the oldest girl in hijab as well. "A Moslem family? Running around free?"

  Bongo raised his eyes heavenward and shook his head with disgust. "I knew those assholes at Langley would miss important details." His hand left the steering wheel to point a finger generally off to the right front. "We've got maybe three hundred thousand Moslems here in Cape Town, something like three-quarters of a million in the country as a whole, exclusive of possessions and protectorates. There's a mosque over there," he said. "Pretty large one, actually. They call it the 'Red Mosque.' No, it isn't painted red and never has been. About forty years ago, a wild-eyed imam used to preach the jihad from its pulpit. Then one Friday, the Boers sent in ten thousand assegai-wielding Zulu. They killed every man, woman, and child in the place, then went on to kill every imam in Cape Town and their families, except for a very few the government took under its protection. After that, about fifty-thousand more of them were sold, some locally and some to the Caliphate, as slaves.

  "Since then? Never a problem with the Moslems here. Never a peep, as a matter of fact. And some thousands of them drop Islam and become Christians every year. See, Baas De Wet, terror works."

  KHR House, Swartland, Western Cape Province, Boer Republic of South Africa,

  14 October, 2113

  "Well, it beats the fuck out of Olson Hall," Hamilton whispered very softly to himself when shown to his temporary quarters. The woman guiding him was extraordinarily tall, being just over six feet. If Hamilton had been more familiar with South Africa he might have identified her as being a mix of Dutch, Irish, English, French, Arab, Malay, Swede, Bantu, and Hindi. The percentages would have defied even a native to guess. He thought her very pretty as, indeed, any man would have. The woman, not much more than a girl, really, whatever her height, introduced herself as "Alice."

  She directed Bongo to place Hamilton's bags on the bed, then dismissed him, peremptorily. Hamilton thought it a fine commentary of the senior agent's fieldcraft that he bowed and scraped his way out on the suite with a more servile expression on his face than any Hamilton had seen on the liberated slaves of the Moros, during the Philippines campaign.

  Alice then proceeded to empty out Hamilton's two suitcases, leaving alone only the contents of the locked carryall. The suits were hung in a large armoire, one of a pair to one side of the queen-sized bed. Underwear and socks went into drawers inside the armoire, while Alice carried his toiletries to the suite's expansive bath. Shoes she placed on a tree, without comment.

  It was always a pleasure to watch an expert at work. Deciding that Alice knew what she was doing better than he did, Hamilton sat down in a comfortable stuffed chair and watched her work. She spoke very little.

  It doesn't matter; a girl with an ass like that doesn't need to talk to be entertaining. Not that she's beautiful, but she's at least very pretty and her body is . . . amazing. If I weren't on mission I'd be a fool not to at least think about asking her out.

  Some of Hamilton's clothing she found faulty upon examination. These she separated out for the maids to take care of.

  And then she was done, standing there in the middle of the room. "Why don't you take a shower, baas," Alice suggested.

  Hamilton's hair was full of shampoo and his eyes burning with soap when he heard a small click and felt a cool draft on his wet body. There was somebody inside the shower with him. He immediately backed into one corner, putting out one hand to guard while trying desperately to get the soap from his eyes.

  He stopped himself, feeling inexpressibly silly, when he heard Alice laugh. "Didn't you understand?" she asked. "I come with the room . . . like a piece of furniture. I'm here for your enjoyment."

  "How did you end up here?" Hamilton asked, later, as the two lay in bed, half-exhausted.

  "I was born," Alice answered, cryptically. "I'm sorry," she amended. "That wasn't fair. I wanted to go to school. I couldn't afford it. KHR made me an offer. I get room and board—and it's a very nice room, don't you think?"

  "Very nice," Hamilton agreed.

  "Yes. The company gave me a budget to decorate and I did it myself. I was even able to save a little.

  "Anyway . . . well, I get room and board, a small stipend, and can go to class when I don't have duties here. It may take me six years to get a degree, instead of four, but six years is better than never."

  "And for that?"

  "For that I signed a contract of indenture . . . I have to be nice to men assigned to this suite." She smiled warmly. "I was happy when you were assigned, baas. Usually the men are a lot older and I don't care for them much.

  "Someday, if I graduate well, I'd like to put in papers to emigrate to America . . . or maybe some of its possessions where the rules for immigration are a little easier."

  Hamilton said nothing but thought, You should try and I wish you luck, Alice. We may suck . . . but the rest of the world is just one giant vacuum that pulls away hopes and dreams and runs them through filth on the way to the garbage can.

  Hamilton's last thought, as he drifted off to sleep, was, Amend will. Give ten thousand? No, that wouldn't be enough. Give twenty-thousand Imperial New Dollars to Alice Mbatha, of KHR House, Cape Town, with hopes that it helps her make her way . . .

  Slave Pen Number Five, KHR House Holding Facility, Cape Town, South Africa,

  17 October, 2113

  "If you wince," Bongo said, on the elevator ride down to the pens, "if you give any indication that those kids are anything more than cattle, you are out of here." It was an idle threat, after spending so much time training Hamilton for this one mission, he was not going to be replaced. Still, Bongo thought, perhaps he didn't understand that.

  "I won't," Hamilton assured his ostensible servant and genuine boss. "But I've got to ask: How the hell do you stand it, day after day, year after year?"

  "You can get used to anything," Bongo replied. The subterranean eleva
tor doors opened to the sound of wailing and moaning and utter human misery. "Some things are just a lot harder than others.

  "This is one of the hardest," Bongo whispered, before taking the lead and saying aloud, "This way, baas, your lot is right over this way."

  There were six pits below the elevator walkway. Separated by some kind of tough, clear plastic, they allowed the staff of the complex to walk between them to distribute food and water. The oddest thing, to Hamilton's eye, was that to one or two sides of each of five of the six pits women, some black, some brown, a few obviously with some white in their ancestry, stood staring at the sixth, their hands seeming desperate to push through the clear barriers that held them.

  "Why—"

  Bongo answered before the question was fully formed. "Those are mothers, pining for their children. The children—our cargo—are in the sixth pen."

  Unbidden, Hamilton walked to stand above the sixth pen, the one obviously holding nothing but wide-eyed, mostly silent in shock or weeping with terror and despair, black and colored children aged from about six to nine or ten.

  God is never going to forgive me for this, he thought. For that matter, I am never going to forgive me for this.

  "You seem upset, baas," Alice said, standing in front of a seated Hamilton and wearing little but a short silk robe. "Can I help?" Before Hamilton could answer she dropped to her knees and began to undo his trousers.

  "Later, Alice," he said. "Please. Later tonight I'd be very happy to have you again. For now, I just need to think."

  "As you wish, baas," she answered, rising to her feet gracefully. "If you change your mind, just call. I'll be at the desk working on my studies."

  South Africa had produced high quality wines and beers for centuries. Wine or beer, however, just wouldn't do. And the local whiskey was . . . charitably . . . not good.

  The brandy, however, was superb. Hamilton poured his own drink from a net-wrapped, amber bottle labeled "Klipdrift."

  Damned shame, he thought, that I can't allow myself to get drunk. Crimes like the ones I'm engaged in cry out for sweet oblivion.

  Is there a way out of this? Caruthers was right; better two hundred should be enslaved than that four or five billion, and civilization itself, should die. But it would be better still if nobody were enslaved and all those billions, plus civilization, lived.

  Is that possible, though? Is there any way I can save these kids? Save their mothers down in the slave pens? Do that while still stopping VA5H? I doubt it.

  And what if I do? I mean, just imagine I had the money to buy every one of them down there and free them. What does that do? It improves the market so that more people get sold off. I could save those kids . . . but I can't do a damned thing about the two hundred that will be enslaved to make up for them. The demand will still be there . . . and that demand will be filled. And there is precisely nothing I can do about it.

  Fuck.

  As it turned out, Hamilton couldn't make love to Alice. She tried her very fine best to make it happen, of course, but under the circumstances her very fine best was not up to the task. No woman's would have been.

  Even after he told her to give it up, and waited until she began softly to snore beside him, he still lay awake thinking of the problem of the slave children . . . and of slavery in general.

  It has always existed, John, he told himself. Wars have been fought to end it, and it survived those. Alliances were formed to crush it; still it endured. Almost the whole world united against it, and still it survived.

  It makes no legal sense, in that it puts an undue burden on everyone to protect the intelligent, self-willed, and dangerous property of a few. It makes no economic sense; you can get more profit paying a free man well than you will ever get from a slave that you pay nothing. Morally, it is not better than killing them; slavery is just death drawn out, the absence of liberty which is the absence of everything life is about, of everything that makes it worthwhile to live.

  And then, too, what values does a slave learn? Looking out for number one, if they have any sense. And still they get manumitted, regularly. Hell, some Moslems buy slaves expressly to manumit to earn a few brownie points with God. But those slaves enter civil society with the "looking out for myself" attitude they learned as slaves. And they never lose it . . . but pass it on to the next generation . . . and the next.

  And I'm going to deliver two hundred children to that? Fuck, fuck, fuck!

  Okay, so it's an unutterable evil; what the fuck can I do about it? Anything? Am I lying here sleepless from guilt or from impotence.

  He laughed at himself as that last thought. Surely Alice thought he must have a problem in that department.

  No matter, he thought, suddenly, and the thought made Hamilton feel much, much better about himself. Yes, it looks impossible to do both, stop the VA5H and save those kids. But perhaps the horse will learn to sing; perhaps I can teach it to. I'm sure Laurie would have wanted me to try, at least. And . . . if I am too impotent to succeed, I am still not too impotent to try. Speaking of which . . .

  "Alice . . . how asleep are you?"

  Slave Pen Number Five, KHR House Holding Facility, Cape Town, South Africa,

  19 October, 2113

  One wall of the children's pen opened up with an echoing clatter of wheels, chains and gears. Black and colored security personnel in KHR House livery immediately entered the pen and began prodding the children out, forcing them through the newly opened wall and into two waiting cattle cars. Though the children were quiet enough, the mothers set up an awful wail as their babies were herded away. Their hands scraped helplessly at the clear plastic barriers holding them. Some cursed; others fainted; not a few wept to God for deliverance. Most of the children kept turning around, until forced onward, for a last glimpse of mothers they never expected to see again.

  Hamilton's face was a cold stone mask, a fact that pleased Bongo. Perhaps the boy's learning.

  Hamilton was reasonably certain he could not have maintained the stone mask if he hadn't determined that he was not going to let these kids be sold. Of course, even if I can save the kids, the mothers left behind I will not be able to save. I will not be able to reunite the families. Still, I must and will do what I can, save what I can. Now if I could only figure out how.

  The cattle trucks backed up to the looming bulk of the airship scheduled for the northern flight to am-Munch, in the Caliphate's province of Baya. Liveried guards formed up to either side, with two more guards between the pair of cattle trucks. The drivers dismounted and unlocked the back gates, turning cranks to allow the gates to descend from lower pivots to form ramps. Some of the children, most of them, really, came out willingly enough when the drivers beckoned them. Not all did, however, until the drivers set off shrieking alarms inside the cargo sections. These drove the remaining boys and girls out, most of them wailing in terror.

  Cargo slaves assigned to the airship stood inside to guide the children to their pen on the cargo deck. Whatever the cargo crew's feelings on the subject, their faces remained stone masks.

  Hamilton's face mirrored those of the cargo slaves. He wondered, Okay, let's assume I can somehow free them. How do I then get them out of the Caliphate without returning them to South Africa? Little kids are not going to be doing any forced marching. And there are too many to put in one truck, even if I could drive them out through every checkpoint between am-Munch and the Channel or the Adriatic. How then? An airship? I can't fly an airship.

  Fuck.

  The Great Rift Valley spread below as Hamilton knocked on the cockpit of the airship. A small closed circuit camera emerged from the wall and proceeded to look him over, head to shoes. A door opened and one of the flight crew emerged asking, "Can I help you, Mineer De Wet?"

  "I've never been in the cockpit of an airship," Hamilton said. "I was wondering if you good volk might be willing to give me a little tour, show me the ropes. Never know when it might be useful in my business."

  The crewman shrug
ged and called out over one shoulder to his captain.

  "Sure," the captain said. "Always glad to show hospitality to a member of KHR. C'mon in, mineer. Klaas, get up and give Mineer De Wet your seat."

  No, way, Hamilton thought, after two hours of instruction and the captain of the ship even allowing him to take the controls. No way I can fly this thing except on autopilot and then only to one of the programmed airship ports. Which would mean predictability which would mean the kids and I would be shot down within minutes. No way to land the thing either, except under the same circumstances. Fuck.

  The captain says he or his copilot, or any experienced pilot, could do all that alone in a pinch . . . but I am not, nor will I be, an experienced pilot. Again, fuck.

  Take a crew hostage and force them to fly me? That's a thought. But then, how do I arrange to have the crew waiting? And even if I do, what keeps the caliph's Air Force from shooting us down anyway?

  "They do build them pretty, no?" said the flight engineer to Hamilton, pointing as he spoke out a porthole towards another airship heading in the opposite direction. Hamilton read the name, "Retief," on the engineer's uniform.

  "Who builds them pretty?" Hamilton asked. To him, all airships looked pretty much alike, differing only in size and, at unknown distances, not even in that.

  "The Chinks," the flight engineer answered. "That's one of theirs, an Admiral Cheng Ho class, if I'm not mistaken . . . that, or a Long March. They differ only in size, not in shape. The Long March class carries about five- or six hundred tons more."

  "Well," Hamilton said, "all airships are pretty. What makes that so special?"

  "The lines of the thing." Retief shook his head, saying, "You don't see it, do you?"

  "I confess not."

  "Oh, well." The engineer sighed. "I suppose the Parthenon wouldn't have been pretty to the Maya, either. Just trust me, though, that is one beautiful ship."

  "If you say so," Hamilton half-agreed.