"The other thing is," Retief added, "the Chinks don't use theirs much to carry slaves."
"You don't approve of the slave trade?" Hamilton asked, stone mask descending once again.
"No insult intended," the engineer answered, "but no, I don't. But I've got a family back in Pretoria and they have to eat, so I do my job and mind my own business. It's still disgusting."
You give me a little hope for humanity, friend, Hamilton thought, even as he made himself turn on his heels and walk away as if angry. He had to walk away; the temptation to ask the flight engineer for help in freeing the children was too great to trust himself had he stayed.
* * *
The Austrian Alps, rugged, forbidding and ice-capped, showed out the side windows. Switzerland was somewhere off to the west. The airships never crossed Swiss airspace unless they were planning on landing in Switzerland or had authorized passage through. Unauthorized crossings would invite the immediate attention of the Swiss Air Force, at which point the choices were landing or being shot down. Since slavery was illegal in Switzerland, the only western European state not subsumed in the Caliphate, ships like this one were well advised to avoid the country's airspace entirely.
"How do you live with yourself, Bongo?" Hamilton asked, in the privacy of their shared quarters. "How do you deal with the things you do?"
"You might as well know," Bongo said, "my real name is Bernard Matheson. And, yes, I'm from the Bronx. As for how I live with it, with myself . . . well . . . about a century ago four million of our countrymen were murdered because there was a mindset that wouldn't do bad things even to prevent worse ones. That allowed another mindset to arise, the kind that would do horrible things to prevent bad ones. For me, I'm content to take the middle road, and do bad things to prevent horrible ones. Yeah, it bothers me. Yeah, sometimes I sleep badly. But the fact remains, because of the bad things I do, a lot of much worse things are prevented."
Hamilton sighed, thinking of the PI campaign. And there, the evil—he thought there was no other word for the ethnic cleansing campaign he'd been a part of—was justified only by the prospect that, once the Moros were moved out, there would be a modicum of peace and an end to the endemic mutual massacre that had plagued the islands for centuries.
"Yeah . . . I understand. Been there; done that."
"You've done well, by the way, hiding how you feel about this," Bongo said. "I overheard the flight engineer worrying about his job because he might have offended you. You know they never pay any attention to us kaffirs, so they speak freely in front of us. Even the good ones do that."
Bongo frowned. "I almost forgot." He reached into a pocket and drew out a small computer memory card. "This message came in last night. I took the liberty of looking it over. At least you're not going to have to watch the kids auctioned off. Someone bought the whole lot, sight unseen. We have to deliver them to the town of Honsvang after we land. I've already arranged ground transportation from am- Munch."
Interlude
Kitzingen, Federal Republic of Germany,
11 November, 2005
It was late night and the town was quiet. Gabrielle and Mahmoud's apartment, however, was anything but. Nor had it been peaceful for months, ever since Mahmoud had revealed his intention of emigrating to America.
"There," said Mahmoud, pointing at the television screen as he stormed from one side of the small living room to the other, "there is the face of Europe's future! That is what you insist on staying to see."
The screen showed the face of a young Belgian woman, one Muriel Degauque, who had blown herself up in a fairly unsuccessful suicide attack on American forces in Iraq. She was a convert to Islam or, as Moslems preferred to think of it, a "revert."
"Nonsense," Gabi countered. While Mahmoud was enraged, she remained very calm. It was one of the things he loved about her . . . and that infuriated him at the same time. "She is, she was, just one poor disillusioned girl, hardly the wave of a flood of conversion."
"Indeed?" said Mahmoud, sneering. "Well then, how do you categorize Cat Stevens? Idris Tawfik? Yvonne Ridley?"
"If any of them were suicide bombers, surely I'd have heard of their names. Well . . . except for Cat Stevens, of course. Him I know about. And they're all harmless." Gabi shrugged eloquently.
"Susanne Osthof? Have you heard of her? Do you think for a minute she didn't participate in her own kidnapping in Iraq? They even found money on her that was paid for her ransom!"
"There was a perfectly reasonable explanation for that, Mahmoud. The kidnappers simply reimbursed her for property she lost when they took her." Gabi looked upon Mahmoud with suspicion. "It's that Catholic priest who's filling you with this nonsense, isn't it?"
"You really believe both those things, don't you?" Mahmoud seemed to wilt. Before her calm, he felt his rage melt away.
"What I believe is that since you took up this Christian nonsense you've gone from a very reasonable and very bad Moslem to a very unreasonable and altogether too 'good' Christian. Relax, Mahmoud; there are several hundred millions of us. It will be a very long time before the nuts take over here."
"There are several hundred million of you that are spiritually empty vessels that Islam is eager to fill," Mahmoud said. "It's your lack of faith that makes you, and Europe, vulnerable."
Gabi shook her head. She was quite comfortable without religion, indeed, to the extent she retained some trappings of it, those made her uncomfortable. She couldn't imagine converting, and especially not to such an austere and anti-female faith as Islam. (As she saw it, Islam was anti-female; there were many who would have disputed that.) Since she could not imagine it for herself, imagining it for any substantial numbers of other people was simply inconceivable.
Mahmoud sat heavily on the couch next to Gabi and reached out to take her hand. "Please come with me?" he asked, for the hundredth time.
"To America? Mahmoud, I can't, I just can't. Anyplace but there."
"It is the only safe place for us, Gabi. It's the only place in the world with the will, the faith, the heart, and the strength of culture to remain free."
Gabi snorted. "Culture? America has no culture."
"This culture they don't have? It seems to dominate the world pretty well for something nonexistent."
Undeterred, Gabi marched on. "It's a place where the poor are free to sleep under bridges in the winter, yes? It's a place where the rich are free to exploit the workers, no? It's a place with race riots and lynchings . . . a place where the garbage is piled a meter deep to either side of their ramshackle highways."
"You really believe that? Racism? What does racism mean when blacks in America have higher per capita incomes than whites in Europe."
"That's not true anymore," Gabi answered huffily, pulling away her hand. "I just saw the figures and—"
"Don't think just about some exchange rates," Mahmoud interrupted. "Think purchasing power parity. And there, Sweden is beneath Mississippi. Why do you have ten percent unemployment when America's is under five percent? It's not even supposed to be possible to get under five percent, but they've done it. And most of the Americans are out of work only for a very short time. Most of Europe's unemployed are going to stay unemployed. Ah . . . never mind that. Just answer: How are you going to make jobs for all the Moslems if you've got ten percent unemployment? Coolie jobs? Do you think they'll settle, in the long run, for coolie jobs? In the last sixty years Europe has created maybe five million jobs, almost all of them in government, which produces nothing. America has created more than ten times as many, almost all of them productive."
"I still can't go with you, Mahmoud. I just can't."
Chapter Eleven
The weakness of the Arab nations stems from the fact that they buy weapons instead of choosing to do their own research. If it chose the latter course, an Arab state could pull off two miracles at one stroke: invest in an army of researchers and engineers, thus contributing to full employment, and free itself from military dependence on
the West.
—Fatima Mernissi, modern, enlightened, liberal,
Moslem feminist, Islam and Democracy
Castle Noisvastei, Province of Baya, 8 Muharram,
1538 AH (19 October, 2113)
Petra watched as thick, greasy looking smoke poured up from a chimney—a new one, not one of the old—at Castle Honsvang, far down the slopes. She'd seen such smoke dozens of times before and never thought much of it unless the wind came from that direction. On those days, she generally closed the window of her perch and retired down to her quarters. Her mother had been a decent cook and had never made pork smell quite so burnt and quite so bad.
Fortunately, today the wind blew from some other quarter, leaving Petra free to enjoy the fresh fall air and to peruse her great- grandmother's journal. She'd read it all many times before; between Besma and Ling she'd become quite well lettered. Still she found herself drawn back to certain passages over and over. With a sigh she closed the journal after reading once more great-grandmother Gabi's cri-de-coeur for her lost Mahmoud.
"Silly woman, grandma," she whispered. "You should have gone . . . as you yourself realized eventually. God knows, I wish you had. I wish—"
The words were interrupted as Ling danced in, waving a sheet of paper and exalting, "He's coming here again, Petra! And he's going to be here for a long time he says!"
"He?"
"Your brother, silly. Hans arranged to be assigned to local security at Honsvang, down the hill. He's finished all his training and is being assigned as an officer in the security company."
"Oh . . . oh, shit!"
"What? What 'Oh, shit'?"
"How often are we called down to Honsvang to service the men there, Ling, rather than them coming here? Every other month? Three times in four months? How do you think Hans will take it having you fucked in a different room in the castle? How will he take it when I am?"
"Oh." The Han girl bit her lip. "Hadn't thought about that. But . . . I mean it isn't like it's anything more than a job for me, and not one I like, either. Surely Hans would . . . no, I guess not. But he knows we sleep together and it doesn't bother him."
"'We' are a different matter entirely. What we do never seems to bother men, and that's not even counting when we're hired to put on a show."
"Crap. We'll have to think of something then . . . that, or explain it to Hans in . . . right, forget I said that. Stupid idea to explain things rationally to stupid men."
Castle Honsvang, Province of Baya, 8 Muharram,
1538 AH (19 October, 2113)
Sands, Johnston, and Meara watched through a high temperature glass window as flames raised the internal heat of the furnace to over two thousand degrees. The two bodies inside quickly burst into flames as their own fat caught fire, then burned down to ash. Even then, the residue was not released until that temperature had been maintained for some time. They were playing gods with world- destroying organisms here, and there was no room for chance.
"Damn" said Sands sadly, in a French accent, as he watched the last bits of bone from two human bodies turn to ash, "I thought we really had something there."
Meara shook his jowly head. "Bitch mutates too rapidly. Just when we think we've got a counter-virus to render it sterile in some phase, it changes to something we can't sterilize."
"Sometimes I wonder if we might not have been better off going with the discarding strands theory we left behind to throw the Empire off the track," added Johnston.
"No . . . no, I don't think so," Sands said. "The form we have would be better if we can find a way to control it."
And this was something of which the American Empire had no clue. The trio had been working on a virus such as described by Mary to Hamilton . . . officially. This virus did indeed change from harmless to deadly to sterile in five generations, being transmissible in all but the last stage. Yet they had never managed to time the thing just right. The extra strands simply would not slough off as planned.
On their own, though, and without leaving any computer record for the Empire to dissect, they had tried a very different approach, one which caused the virus to change by attacking different types of organs in turn. It was the theory and the work on this they had brought through Montreal to the Caliphate, for a very substantial set of fees and regular free access to highly desirable female slaves (except for Meara whose preferences switched between teenaged girls and very young boys).
This virus, the true VA5H, began by going after endothelial cells, those lining the throat and mouth. There, in those cells, the virus inserted various introns (DNA sections added), removed various exons (DNA sections removed), and produced a substantially different set of progeny because of the specific DNA of the cells invaded. These then went on to infect the nasal mucosa, and only the nasal mucosa, mimicking a cold and allowing the virus at that stage to spread by sneeze.
Within the nasal mucosa, a codon, coming from the DNA of the mucosa itself, inserted into the strand, changing its target to the lymph cells. There, it was spread by bodily fluid. This is to say, it didn't spread much.
It didn't have to. At the lymph cells, new modifications occurred, caused, once again, by the DNA of the lymphocytes themselves. This modification turned into full blown disease highly analogous to hemorrhagic smallpox. Moreover, it did so so quickly and so— literally, without pun—virulently, that infection of close family, co- workers, and medical staff was highly likely . . . for whichever of those co-workers, family and medicos had not already contracted the virus during its sneezing stage.
It was during this stage that the virus began sloughing off sections of that codon which controlled lethality, becoming more deadly with each new transmission. Within five such generations, the last bit of that codon had disappeared, leaving a virus that was no longer deadly and incapable of reproduction, in theory.
It was that "in theory" part that had Sands, Meara, and Johnston up late, infecting and then incinerating the bodies of superfluous slaves, because the virus did not always lose the last, deadly section of that particular codon and those that did not went on replicating at the deadliest level.
Thus, they were working on two other projects. The first of these was to mimic the exterior polyglyceride coat of the virus to rapidly spread immunity through the Caliphate without giving warning to the Empire. The other, and more promising, project was a virus that would attack the ability of the human cells that produced the deadly form to do so.
Promising, however, was neither promised nor certain.
"And we're running out of test subjects," said Johnston.
"No matter," wheezed Meara, "the Caliph is sending us another two hundred."
Province of Baya,
19 October, 2113
Customs had been surprisingly thorough. Hamilton had assumed that the Caliphate would be as sloppy and susceptible to bribes there as it was reputed to be everywhere else. It hadn't worked that way. Oh, yes, the customs agent had taken the bribe and pocketed it. He'd then proceeded to go through Hamilton's and Bongo's bags with a fine toothed comb.
"The bribe," Bongo had explained, "is only good to keep them from taking the things you have legally. It does absolutely nothing as far as getting them to let you bring in something illegal unless you're already well connected."
"Glad we came in clean," Hamilton had agreed.
The city of am-Munch was . . . well, to call it a "disappointment" was far too mild. It was, in Hamilton's words, "Run down, unsightly, with garbage piled a meter deep to either side of the roads, creepy, depressing, dirty-rotten-filthy, and I can't believe any of my people ever lived in such a dump." He'd been more than happy to leave, despite the quality—or lack, thereof—of the road that lay ahead.
That road was a crumbling highway running through sheer-sided mountain passes. Along that highway, a half dozen small cargo trucks bearing two hundred children trudged behind an auto bearing Hamilton and his black chief toward their destination. Bongo drove. Provided one wasn't a female, the Calipha
te was pretty easy as far as licensing went. In other words, no license was required for males and none were possible for females. Rental cars and trucks were somewhat pricey.
Besides driving, Bongo had surreptitiously swept the auto for listening devices. By and large the Caliphate was less than sophisticated about such things. Still, it was always wise to make sure.
"Okay," Hamilton said, "this is too much. We need an 'in' to the castle and we get a purchase order for the entire group going to the castle. That shit just doesn't happen. Anything too good—"
"—to be true, isn't," Bongo interrupted. "I really don't understand your confusion. How do you suppose we knew where the three renegades were? How do you suppose we manage to operate here at all?"
Hamilton thought about that for a while before saying, "We own somebody at the highest levels in the Caliphate, don't we?"
"That's always been my guess, baas." It was a measure of Bongo's sheer professionalism that he'd never yet said that "baas" with the verbal sneer he felt. "There'd be a lot more of them, too, I think, if most of them weren't terrified of extermination."
"It's not like we haven't given them reason for that," said Hamilton.
"Nor like they didn't give us reason to give them reason. 'Sins of the fathers . . . to the third and fourth generations.' Sucks, don't it?"
Bongo downshifted to get over a particularly vile section of the road. He echoed his own words, answered his own question. "Yeah, baas, it sucks. But there's not a lot you or I can do about it."
"But how do we get control of someone in the Caliphate?" Hamilton asked. "We don't have the infrastructure there, so far as I can tell, to do much under the table recruiting."
Bongo kept silent for a moment before answering, "This isn't classified, though it probably should be. Even so, keep it close hold." He looked at Hamilton to make sure he understood before continuing, "I've got a cousin who works with the Bureau of Engraving. They don't do all that much engraving anymore, of course; that's all done by machines now. But they do make the coins. One of the coins they make, so my cousin told me, is the gold dinar. Another is the silver dirhem. Actually, they make the dirhem in about five denominations and the dinar in four."
Caliphate Page 20