Caliphate

'Hans, I need you to listen carefully to me,' Ling said. 'This is important and the answer means everything. Why did you attack that man last night?'

Hans drew in a deep breath and then exhaled forcefully. 'He's a slave trader, and I saw his cargo. They were just children, Ling, even younger than Petra was when they took her away. He's a stinking slave trader.'

Ling chewed on her lower lip, wracked with indecision. Finally, she asked, 'What if he wasn't?'

Hans just shook his head in confusion. 'What if he wasn't what?'

'What if he wasn't a slave trader, but was something else?'

'Something else? Like what?'

'I can't tell you. Not won't; can't. Someday you'll understand, maybe someday soon. But what if he really wasn't a slave trader?'

'I saw what I saw,' Hans insisted.

'Yes . . . but you didn't necessarily understand what you saw.' Ling started chewing her lip again. She continued at that for several confused minutes—confused for both her and Hans—before saying, 'I need you to prove to me you're not with the Caliphate.'

'I'm a dead man,' he said, 'dead before I can do any good, if I can't trust you. Everything I've told you so far would get me nailed up to a wooden cross. How much more can I do?'

She insisted, 'I need more, Hans.'

He thought about that for a minute. Then he went to his overnight bag, dropped off in her quarters by a servant the previous night. From the bag he pulled out a Koran. He opened in to a random page and spit on it. 'That's one,' he said. 'Now follow me.'

There were, after all, reasons why Abdul Rahman had thought Hans had a future. If he had flaws, lack of decisiveness wasn't among them.

Ling followed Hans to her bathroom. There he thumbed through the book, apparently looking for a choice passage. When he'd found it, he tore that page from the Koran, bent over, and wiped his rear end with it. 'That's two.' He dropped the page in the toilet, spit again, and flushed.

Hans walked back to the bedroom and picked up his bag again, feeling inside for a small box. This he withdrew from the bag and opened. From the box he pulled out a crucifix, kissed it and said, 'This was given to me by a man, a priest, I helped murder . . .'

* * *

'These mountains are murder, I know,' Hamilton said in sympathy, as he helped Petra over a rock lying across their path.

Feeling like an absolute rat, Hamilton had offered anything to make up to her his—'stupid, insensitive, moronic, unfeeling, idiotic'—question.

Shyly, she'd asked, 'I don't get to go out much. If I dress properly, could you, maybe . . . take me for a walk?'

He'd had to leave a six hundred dinar deposit, but that was within his means. (Why six hundred when her purchase price had been three? The cost of her training had been added to her value.) Other than that, the management had had no objections whatsoever. Since Hamilton had 'hospitality of the house,' they'd sent for a picnic lunch for the two from the kitchen. The two had left by the main gate to the castle, before the mosque and between the minarets.

From the castle they walked down to the town, and then to the lakeshore.

'I have a place,' she confessed, still full of shyness, 'up in a tower where I can see this. I dream sometimes of being free to walk the lake. Sometimes—yes, I know it sounds foolish—but sometimes I dream I'm a princess up there and a hero will cross the lake and take me away. Silly, no?'

'Maybe not so silly. Anything's possible.'

'Not in the Caliphate,' she said. 'Not in the Caliphate for a woman . . . or a Christian . . . or a slave . . . or a whore.'

'Stop it,' he said. 'What you have to do is not the same thing as what you are.'

'Thank you, Johann,' she said, quietly. 'But even if that's true there are many things that I can never do that also define what I am.' She stood facing the lake, wind blowing through the few loose strands of her hair, and continued, 'I don't know how to cook. I can't sew or weave. Unless they decide to breed me they'll keep me from ever getting pregnant until it's too late for me to be a mother. If they did breed me it would be to produce a slave. I'd strangle the baby with my own hands, before I let that happen. No respectable man would ever marry me, not now. Independence for a woman is simply not possible here, except as a freelance whore.

'At least I can read and write. Well,' she admitted, 'I can read. My writing is not . . . good.'

'That's okay,' he said. 'You could learn.'

'Like you learned German?' she asked. 'Yours is so much better than mine, so much more formal and correct. I was just a country girl, you see and . . .

'And this isn't even my country anymore.'

Hamilton shook his head in agreement. No, it wasn't her country anymore.

'I've read of back when it was,' Petra said. 'My great-grandmother kept a journal. It's the only thing I really own for myself. I'd like to have lived back then. I wouldn't have done what she did. I'd either have fought, back when we could still fight, or I'd have left. She knew she should have done one or the other, too. By the time she knew that, though, it was too late.'

'All right. Enough!' Ling said. 'I believe you.'

Yes, we do, said the voice in her head.

Hans stopped his gleeful dancing atop the Koran and said, 'Okay. Now what was this all about?'

Tell him. Bring him to our side.

Ling exhaled heavily. 'Where to begin?'

At the beginning is usually a good spot.

She nodded.

Stop nodding. You know how annoying that is to watch on a viewing screen back here. Now tell him.

'Your sister doesn't know any of this, but I'm not human,' Ling said. She laughed at the expression on Hans' face, an even mix of disbelief and horror. 'I mean I'm not human the way you are. Not born of woman. No father. I'm a genetically engineered being.'

Hans' horrified look was like a dagger to her heart. She hastened to add, 'I am one hundred percent human genes. But surely you noticed my skin and my breasts. Those are not normally found where I came from . . . where I was sold from. But Hans, I am all human inside. I can have children, provided that my pregnancy blocker is removed or allowed to run down. I feel. I think.' She shrugged and let her head fall to one side. 'What more do you want?'

'I'm sorry,' he apologized, forcing his face to something less objectionable. 'It was just a shock. You're wonderful. Please go on.'

'Okay. I'm also a chippie. I have a thing planted in my brain.'

My, this is a day for shocks, thought Hans.

'The reason I have a chip in my brain, and the reason I was genengineered, and the reason I was sold here, is that I am an enemy agent.'

'Here to work against the Caliphate?' he asked. 'Be still my heart.'

'Yes,' she admitted. 'And that man you attacked . . . '

Hamilton spread out the thin blanket he'd found in the picnic basket, then walked to the lakeshore to look for some rocks to tack down the corners with. He was lucky to find two and an old brick; it just wasn't that kind of lake. He returned with these, adjusted the sheet slightly, then tacked down the three corners that were most into the wind. He invited Petra to sit.

She kicked off her shoes—more slippers than shoes, really; that was part of what had made the walk down 'murder'—and stepped lightly onto the blanket. Moreover, she sat with a sheer grace he found utterly delightful, like a film of a growing tulip shown in faster than real time but in reverse.

Hamilton looked at the girl, sighed and said, 'You really are incredibly lovely, you know.'

'They tell me that sometimes. For myself, I don't know. Ling says I am.'

'Ling?' He really didn't need to ask but it would have been odd not to have.

'The girl who was with me when my brother attacked you.'

'That was your brother?' Hamilton suddenly had an altogether too kinky hint of something. It must have showed on his face.

Petra laughed. 'No, no, no. It's nothing like that. He and Ling are . . . special to each other. It happens sometimes, even with houris. I, on the other hand, am going to have to go to some pains to make sure no one from my brother's new command ever sees my face. It would be a great shame to him.'

This girl's brother and my contact have the hots for each other? Is this a good or a bad thing?

'He's not a slave trader?'

'No,' Ling said. 'Yes, he's had to put on a show and yes, those children really were sold, but no—and my control tells me this De Wet person was up in arms over the whole thing—he's not really a slave trader.'

'Do you know what those children were sold for?' Hans asked. 'Does he?'

'We've got a pretty good idea, Hans, yes. But if they're the price to pay for saving a world?'

'No one asked them if they were willing to pay it, did they?'

'No one asked me either, Hans, when they sold me to this place.'

He nodded and said, 'What a perfect Hell of a world. What now?'

'I'm not sure,' she answered. 'How far are you willing to go to hurt the Caliphate?'

Hans started to laugh. The laugh grew and grew until it filled Ling's entire room.