long, empty nights. The army had not seen fit to give him an electric stove or any other conveniences. Jan Muhammad supposed they didn’t want him to get too comfortable. He could have reassured them on that point.
Like a crack of thunder from a clear sky, a mortar shell ripped a hole in the thin soil two hundred yards downslope. Jan Muhammad stood in the center of his small room, cursing softly. He’d just been thinking about a Mohajeran raid, and now their deafening shell-bursts were walking slowly up toward his observation post, leaving craters like the devastating footprints of an invisible giant. The armed refugees had tried many times in the last year to pry the lonely soldier from his defensive position. Although they had stolen grenades, machine guns, and small arms, they had no leadership, no discipline, no strategies, and no definite goals. They were just a large mob in possession of some sophisticated weapons. They were poorly matched against Jan Muhammad and his data deck.
He sat down calmly at his work space. “Diagnostics,” he murmured. The autotest lights came on, all burning green; he grabbed the red plastic command module and chipped it onto the anterior implant plug at the crown of his skull. He gasped as the hot, stale-smelling observation post melted away. His brain began to receive information only through the data deck. He saw a panoramic view of his hilltop, the rugged pass to the west, and the cracked, dry plain to the east. The view was assembled from input from many holocameras hidden in the surrounding area, processed through the data deck, and presented to Jan Muhammad in a view he might have if he were hovering peacefully some fifty feet in the air. It took him a moment to let go of his body’s senses and surrender to the deck. As much as he liked chipping in, he resisted for an instant each time, with a tingling, absurd fear that on this occasion he wouldn’t be able to disengage.
Jan Muhammad chipped the black personality module onto his posterior implant plug. Now it wasn’t his physical environment that vanished, but Jan Muhammad himself. His own anxious, impetuous identity faded beneath an artificial construct wired into the black moddy. A fictional soldier usurped his brain, as perfect a warrior as the military programmers could make him: competent, cool, fiercely loyal, and absolutely fearless. With his distant sensors, Jan Muhammad watched the mortar shells blasting all around him, searching with terrible fingers for the stone bunker. The explosions didn’t concern him. He spoke a few words to the data deck and called up a magnified scan of the eastern perimeter. He caught the glitter of sunlight on metal at six hundred yards, near a tall shoulder of rock. Without needing to put his request into words, he got the precise coordinates of the target from the data deck. He fired a salvo of demolition rockets, waited fifteen seconds, and fired a second round. He watched twenty or thirty people, men and women, young and old, all dressed in rags and carrying rifles, sprint from the blasted rocks toward new shelter across fifty yards of open plain. Jan Muhammad put down a blaze of heavy machine gun fire; none of the rebels reached their cover alive.
He turned his attention to the Mohajeran mortars. The attackers didn’t know how to use the weapons. Instead of making patterned searches, the mortar shells seemed to wobble all over the landscape. It would be only luck if one happened to find its target. Jan Muhammad was now conscious of the fact that sooner or later, the Mohajeran might get lucky. He deduced that there couldn’t be more than two mortars in operation. He analyzed the parabolic paths of a dozen shells and calculated where each mortar was hidden. He fired three explosive rockets and two fragmentation shells at the targets. A moment later, stillness settled over the hillside, broken only by the occasional racket of Mohajeran rifle fire.
Jan Muhammad relaxed a little, knowing that he had eliminated the chief danger. Through his amplifiers he heard the shrill, trilling war cry, “Allahu akbar!” Two squads of refugees charged up the hillside, one on the north slope, the other a quarter of the way around on the western side. It was suicide. Jan Muhammad’s machine guns opened up on both detachments; it took only a few seconds to dispose of them all. He would have to go out later and throw all the corpses into the defile. That irritated him more than anything else.
The rest of the Mohajeran fled now, some shrieking and wailing for their dead comrades. Jan Muhammad watched them go, letting them escape. He didn’t feel like cutting them down with machine gun bullets or rockets. He didn’t feel like dealing with any more dead bodies around his post than he had to. They’d come back, they’d definitely come back; he’d kill them all another day. He popped the personality moddy out first, then the command moddy. He gasped again as his heightened senses and abilities fell away. He was once again limited to his own mortal body. The fatigue, fear, hunger, and thirst that had been obscured by the moddies flooded through him. He leaned forward and rested his head wearily on his arms. He still had his chores to finish.
By the time he’d finished breaking up the firewood and stowing it in the box, he heard a man’s voice calling to him from down on the hill. “Yaa sarbaaz!” came the high-pitched, wavering cry. It was Rostam, who traveled out from the village of Ashnistan twice a week with supplies.
Jan Muhammad grunted. He was looking forward to the goat cheese and fresh bread the old man was bringing. Quickly he threw a handful of sticks onto the crumbling coals in the stove and blew the fire into life. He poured water from a hanging goatskin into a small teapot and put it on to boil.
“Yaa sarbaaz! Soldier! Turn off your guns!”
Jan Muhammad made sure that the scrawny, bearded trader was alone, then slapped off the automatic ranging and firing mechanisms. Then he went outside. “It’s all right, O my uncle. Come on up.” He watched Rostam pick his way slowly among the rocks, leading his raw-boned, red-eyed mule.
When Rostam came close enough so that he didn’t need to shout, he gave Jan Muhammad a nod. “Salam alekom,” he said hoarsely.
“Alekom-os-salam,” said Jan Muhammad. “Come inside, I’m making tea.”
“Thank you, my son.” The old man lifted a coarse sack from the mule’s back and followed the soldier into the stone strongpoint.
Jan Muhammad checked the water, but it wasn’t hot yet. He turned back and offered Rostam the single chair in the bunker; he himself sat down on the edge of the cot. After a moment, he realized that the old man was staring at him. Jan Muhammad had forgotten to put his cap back on. Rostam was looking at the two chrome-steel plugs in the young man’s skull. The soldier leaned forward, grabbed his tan forage cap from where it lay on his data monitor, and jammed it low over his brow.
The old man pushed his lips out, then in, then out again. “Aga, I’ve brought you flour, lard, cheese, tea, and a little dried meat,” he said. “I’ve also brought you what we talked about a week ago.”
Jan Muhammad raised his eyebrows.
Rostam looked around nervously, as if there were listening devices hidden in the bare stone room. As a matter of fact, the comm unit in the military data deck could transmit everything that was said in the observation post, but Jan Muhammad had learned how to cut himself out of the net. He preferred to use the portable equipment. If he ever needed to use the deck’s link — if, for instance, the portable unit was disabled — he knew how to patch himself back in. “Don’t worry, O my uncle, we may talk.”
Rostam let out his breath in a rattling sigh. “I have brought you tobacco and some white liquor. I’ve brought magazines, too, aga. They’re printed in some language, I don’t know which, but they have good pictures. You know what I mean? Good pictures?”
Jan Muhammad nodded wearily. Rostam was his one connection to the village, to the world beyond his observation post. The soldier was not permitted to leave his small stony domain. From what his superiors said, this one hill guarding an unused pass through the Persian mountains was the key to the future of the Mahdi’s army, a vital position that guaranteed the inevitable Islamic conquest. Jan Muhammad didn’t believe all that, of course. He only knew that the post and the rocky defile below were his responsibility, and he was doomed — “honored,” in the words of his sergeant — to remain there like a mad hermit saint until he was killed by Mohajeran raiders or until the rest of the world acknowledged the supremacy of the young savior, whichever came first.
The young soldier jingled his few remaining coins in his pocket. The payroll officer wouldn’t be coming by for at least another two weeks. Jan Muhammad guessed that before then, as usual, he would have to go a week or ten days without meat and tobacco. “How much do you want?” he asked.
“Twenty tuman, aga,” said Rostam.
The soldier gave him a sharp look. The price was twice what the supplies were worth.
“Eighteen tuman,” said Rostam. “It is getting difficult for me to bring these to you, my son. The shopkeeper in the village has sympathies with the Mohajeran, he does not like selling me these things, knowing that they come to you. He charges me more than his other customers. And I am not as strong as I used to be, aga. The long journey from the village — “
“All right, I’ll give you sixteen.”
