The Prophet's Ladder

by Jonathan Williams

Samam pointed at the security guards, issued instructions to the two uniformed men.

  “Anne is not at home, she’s still at the university.”

  “Oh good. Good. Thank God.” Samam looked at his head wound.

  “We should get you to a hospital and get your cut looked at.”

  “No I’m all right, really. Samam….” Todd unbuckled his seatbelt, opened the driver’s side door, which groaned in protest.

  “Yes, Mr. Wittry?”

  “Where did you learn to shoot like that? I mean…”

  “I’ve known how to fire a pistol since I served in the army at eighteen. Your employer, Mr. Al-Hatem ensures that all of his company’s domestic servants are capable of serving as security detail, should the need arise. You are an invaluable asset, Mr. Wittry, and you must be protected.”

  “Well Jesus. Thank you. You saved my life. How…how did you know to come get me, where I was?”

  Samam nodded and smiled warmly. “No thanks are necessary. It is my pleasure to serve. We monitored your call to the police, tracked your location via GPS, and determined your intended route. Now, let’s dress your cut upstairs while we wait for the police to arrive, shall we? I’ve made tea and cookies.”

  Chapter 7

  1332 CE, the Byzantine Empire

  Ibn Battuta had never been one to gasp in amazement, or hang his mouth open in slack-jawed awe, but such was his current state as he gazed in wonder at the city that lay before him. It was the greatest city of the Rum, Constantinople. His eyes ran with delight over the skyline, brilliant domed churches and imposing towers interposed amongst a sprawling city, its defenses unbreachable, its might and grandeur unequaled in the western world. Here was the successor to ancient Rome, the bastion of Europe. It had checked innumerable invaders over the centuries; even the Arabs in their sweeping conquests had failed to breach its walls.

  He stabled his horse and pack animals before entering the metropolis. Swerving left and right to avoid the constant press of people, Ibn Battuta made his way to a central plaza, its name unknown to him, and ducked into an alleyway briefly to observe the crowd. Light-skinned men spoke in strange tongues, monks and priests of Isa, the Christian Son of God, clasped rosaries and staves of crossed oak wood. Bells and clappers rang from towers high above replacing the familiar call to prayer. Women went unveiled, uncovered, eyes of blue, green, grey, and brown. This was the gateway to another world, a land outside the Dar-Al-Islam, though People of the Book these foreigners remained. And yet, here and there he saw Arabs and Turks, Persians and Kurds, Muslims of various denominations, traders and dignitaries, even the occasional Imam. This was too a cosmopolitan city, a city that brought a host of peoples together, the ancient heart of an empire that was old when the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, was young.

  Above it all was the Hagia Sophia. It was to this church that Ibn Battuta made his way almost immediately, threading through the various byways and cobblestone streets that led into the capital’s center. It took him almost two hours to arrive at its entrance, the seat of the Patriarchate, the Church of the Holy Wisdom. The building’s stone foundation was massive, its footprint the equal of an entire village; he had not thought humans were capable of constructing such an enormous thing. Cut marble blocks the size of oxen shouldered arching columns and sweeping buttresses that reached high into the heavens, though here and there Ibn Battuta saw signs of damage, cracks brought on from age or the occasional earthquake.

  Christian patrons and devotees passed within the church’s bronze doorways, the alert, reproving eyes of two priests admitting all with earnest watchfulness. He studied them for a moment. They seemed not so different from his own faith’s clerics: the long beards, the flowing robes of black, though the iconography was somewhat strange to him. One of the priests took note of his studious glances from afar and frowned disapprovingly. Ibn Battuta’s heart grew heavy in his chest with sudden realization. I am not welcome within. The explorer had at last found one place he could not venture, one voyage he could not undertake. The thought saddened him, and he felt strangely empty. At last he turned away, the sun dipping low in the sky, and began his search for an innkeeper who spoke Arabic.

  ****

  He stayed in that city of Christians for more than a month, learning bits of their language and customs, perusing their goodly wares. He spoke with scholars, at least the less xenophobic ones, of philosophy and theology, and partook of their teas, though abstaining from the wines that were consumed in abundance. He was even granted a cursory audience with the Rum Emperor, Andronicus III.

  Slowly, it came to Ibn Battuta that this city, like Baghdad, was past its prime. It was a capital of great provenance but failed ambition, resting on its laurels and faded glory. It had not recovered entirely from its sacking by those barbarous Franks more than a century ago. It seemed to him that what wealth and lands Constantinople once possessed were slowly being stripped away by the Turks and others more ambitious, less decadent. Is such the fate of all mankind’s creations? Can such a place find renewal, rebirth?

  His thoughts turned away from the throng of peoples in the city and drifted to the country. He needed room to breathe; this place was suffocating. As comfortable as Ibn Battuta was amongst the learned and the cultured, he felt too confined here, too cloistered. I must get away, into the country...the wide expanse of the Steppe.

  And so after a month’s time the Maghrebi explorer set out once more, traveling east across Anatolia to the open plains in the depth of winter. It was so cold that he insisted on covering himself in three fur coats, two pairs of trousers, and boots lined with bearskin. Each night and morning when he washed or performed ablutions with steaming water heated on the campfire, the water would freeze as it ran down his face, turning his beard into a solid mass of ice. At each meal he and the occasional companion would eat Turkish dugi, a plain, unflavored millet porridge mixed sometimes with horse or sheep’s meat. Further and further his line of travel extended, deep into the countryside of the Khanate. Eventually, he came upon the settlement of Astrakhan, the great city of the Golden Horde, as it lay beside the frozen belly of the Volga River, covered in snow. Even here, at what seemed to Ibn Battuta to be the ends of the Earth there were those educated aristocrats and scholars, fluent in the melodious language of his people, who welcomed him with open arms and a warm hearth. It was as far from home and as far north as he’d ever been. And yet, it was not the end of his journey, nor its outer limit. He resolved to go further still.

  ****

  Amina had been at her computer from six in the evening when her mother knocked on her door at ten o’clock, carrying a cup of herbal tea. The drink was warm, consisting of mint and lemon leaves steeped with cardamom and lavender honey. It had been many months since Ali’s passing, and she’d thrown herself wholeheartedly into this project, to the objection of many of her immediate family who thought it too deranged, too obsessive, even if she was a grieving widow. Only her mother had supported her, stood by her side as she compiled all of Ali’s writings, his posts, into a single book. A comprehensive digest, dedicated to his memory, that his message, his fire, might live on.

  “My beautiful daughter, I’ve brought you some tea. Drink it. You need your strength.” She placed the cup of steaming liquid in front of Amina on her drafting desk, the herbal smell wafting towards her pale face. She had not often left her room and had nearly forsaken sunlight, to her father’s consternation.

  “Thanks, mom. I will.”

  “How’s your work coming?” Her mom sat beside her on the edge of the bed.

  “It is coming along, slowly. There is a lot of formatting to do, as well as linking the narrative together; it takes time. I’m also illustrating the margins with some of my own artwork. See?” Amina pointed at her screen. There on the edges of the document contained in the word processor were beautiful scrolling illustrations: flowers stretching upwards, stems and leaves intertwining with one another, the occasional hummingbird hovering in mid-flight, delic
ately sampling each blossom’s wares. There too on other pages were repeating geometric motifs in the Islamic style, framing new chapters as a doorway or a window’s shutter. It was a work of classical antiquity, of a priceless medieval manuscript come to life in the confines of her laptop; each page was stunning. Amina’s mother was pleased, though not surprised, with the amount of effort and care her daughter had devoted to the document.

  “It is lovely. When will you be finished?”

  “Soon. Soon, I think. But there is the matter of finding a publisher…”

  “Finish it, and then worry about such things. God will show you the way, if it is just. And I know it is.”

  “Thanks, mom. And thank you for the tea.” Amina finally sipped at the drink, and warmth flowed into her face, her cheeks reddening. “I’ll go to bed soon, get some rest.”

  “You’d better. I’ll tell your father you’re looking well.” She rose to depart, kissing the top of her daughter’s head as she did so. “Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight, mom.”

  Amina watched the door close behind her and then returned to her computer screen. Opening her email inbox in her web browser, she reexamined the email she had received just an hour ago.

  Ms. Hannachi,

  Good Evening, and peace be upon you. I simply wished to offer my belated condolences on the recent passing of your fiancé. I always appreciated his thoughts on reform and Arab society.

  Take Care,

  -Nur Bin Zayed Al-Hatem

  She had received many such emails in the past months, kind words from fans of Ali’s blog or his newspaper columns. A smaller amount of emails were barbed threats and incendiary attacks; those Amina simply deleted or, if they were particularly malicious, forwarded on to the police. She recognized the name attached to this one, however. Where had she heard it before? Such a thing would bother her, she knew, though she would not be able to dredge up the association if she tried. A friend of a friend, perhaps. Some coworker from the bank? The answer might eventually spring forth from her unconscious unasked for, when she had forgotten to think on it.

  She finished her tea and, leaning from her chair, collapsed back onto her bed in one swift motion. There would be more work to do tomorrow, more illustrations, more editing, but what then? It will come as God wills.

  ****

  The artificial arachnid lifted its right rearmost leg and moved it forward, slowly, carefully, the limb’s movement betraying its apparent weightlessness in microgravity. Stretching forward, its servomotors spinning silently (for of course there is no sound in a vacuum), splayed pincers at the limb’s tip clasped firmly onto a tiny, jagged outcropping at the crater’s rim. In a display of added caution, as the artificial creature was tetherless and might drift off into the void of space were it not firmly attached to the asteroid, the robotic spider’s abdomen lowered itself onto the planetoid’s surface, embedded adhesive rollers clinging to the ground with almost supernatural strength. Slowly, another leg and then another stretched forward and repeated the process. Half meter by half meter the solifuge pulled itself forward, looking ever so much like a spider on a wall. Observers working the mid-afternoon shift noted its progress from cameras mounted in the automaton’s head and from various satellites stationed in close orbit.

  “Boy you just can’t improve much on Mother Nature’s designs, huh.”

  “Sure can’t.” The two women, members of Todd Wittry’s project team, ate shawarma at their computer terminals as they monitored the AI command codes and telemetry from the spider. Another two-person team sat on the other side of the enclosed, windowless room monitoring their own solifuge robot. One was a robotics engineer and the other a computer programmer just as the two women were. There were other teams in other rooms; the asteroid now supported a veritable swarm of spiders, ten in total, all functioning in close proximity to one another on the same rim of the crater.

  Several of the solifuges worked in pairs, ceramic chassis glowing like lanterns in the crater’s penumbra. Each team drilling and boring, sinking meter long titanium bolts into the asteroid’s crust, anchoring the foundation of a vast platform and silo that would serve as the base for the elevator’s space-bound components, its counterweight in orbit.

  For the hundredth time that day one spider’s medial claws clamped down tightly on a rocky bit near the rim of the depression, but this time the pitted stone broke apart beneath its grip, sending pieces of debris flying in every direction. The robot’s other legs reacted quickly, each extremity automatically bracing itself and tightening its grip, but the collapse of the rock beneath its body expanded exponentially outwards from its epicenter. The solifuge suddenly found itself floating rapidly away from the asteroid on a spaceward trajectory. Silent alarms immediately appeared onscreen at the control center planetside, Al-Hatem employees shook off the monotony of an uneventful afternoon, drew themselves up to their command consoles, ready to initiate control guidance and stabilization programs or even manually pilot the solifuge itself. Thankfully R&D had built a resilient machine that was as fond of its own self-preservation as its creators were. The robot’s AI quickly fired up its dorsal RCS thrusters, small bursts of highly compressed gas slowing and then stopping its unplanned flight. Incrementally, the spider propelled itself back towards the grey planetoid, its velocity slowed such that its landing was as nimble and gentle as a true spider’s descent onto a terrestrial cobweb. The event’s human spectators breathed a collective sigh of relief as the solifuge returned to its work, as if nothing untoward had happened. The creature had done as it had been programmed to do; there would be no setback or delay.

  ****

  Placing his tablet displaying the day’s briefing down beside him on the couch, Todd Wittry silently expressed his own relief that they had not lost the temporarily wayward $55 million machine. Below him his dog Thor placed his furry head on his master’s lap, wishing for nothing more than to be petted and have his ears scratched, as was his constant wont. Anne Wittry sat across from him on a plush Devon looking concernedly at Todd and their visitor, Karim Thawadi, Sheikh Nur’s executive officer and Todd’s immediate supervisor. Samam, their housekeeper and newly discovered guardian stood behind them in the kitchen, observing the entire scene with a nonchalant, though alert, eye.

  “Todd,” began Karim, “I can assure you we are doing everything we can to apprehend your assailant. Our own private security firm as well as our counterparts in the UAE military will find him, and the perpetrator will be brought to justice. I expected we will have results within twenty-four hour’s time.”

  “Mr. Thawadi, I appreciate your coming here directly to meet with us, and for bringing additional protection,” Anne nodded at the men in black suits and sunglasses standing outside their door and on the balcony, “but I still don’t understand why anyone would want to murder my husband.” Her voice was firm and steady, and did not contain any notes of the frantic paranoia or fear that she felt inwardly. “Is it Islamic fundamentalists...because Todd is an American?”

  “That’s a fair question Mrs. Wittry. May I call you Anne?” She nodded. “I will be forthright with you, Anne, though I understand this information may be upsetting. The assailant is not a Wahabist, not a fundamentalist or pan-Arab nationalist at all. Based on information currently in our possession we believe the operative is CIA, possibly NSA.

  “What?!” Anne was stunned. “You’re saying he was an American?”

  Todd seemed to sink back into the couch, as if he were wounded or suddenly, immensely tired. He muttered only two words, barely audible. “That’s impossible.”

  “Not impossible, and no, Anne, the agent or operative is not necessarily American. They may very well be a UAE national or the citizen of some neighboring nation, but we do believe they are in the employ of the U.S. government at the very least.

  “How do you know this?”

  Karim adjusted his silk tie with the slightest of hand movements. “I am not at liberty to divulge that information, Mr. and Mr
s. Wittry, but I can assure you our sources are reliable and are, frankly, indispensable at the moment, thus my seeming reticence.”

  Anne sat stone-faced, glancing at her husband who halfheartedly scratched Thor’s nose. “I see.”

  “We will protect you both; I can assure you of your complete and utter safety. You know now that Samam is trained for this sort of...situation.”

  Anne looked angry. “But why would a U.S. intelligence agency approve of an attack on an American citizen? It’s illegal! We’ll reach out to the American media on this!”

  “As of right now I must ask that you do no such thing. The CIA has plausible deniability until we have one of their agents in custody, alive, and willing to talk. Even then it will be tricky getting the U.S. government to admit their culpability in such an attack. As to why, well, there are any number of reasons. Todd could’ve angered someone, though I think this rather unlikely, or the American government feels threatened by what the space elevator project could do to the Middle East or at least its economic security. Perhaps Todd’s death would also serve as a warning to other expatriates in the region not to work contrary to their homeland’s interests.”

  “That’s extremely Machiavellian of them. Jesus.”

  Karim frowned. “Whoever said that the U.S. wasn’t Machiavellian? They have been intervening, coercing, killing, and manipulating the peoples and governments of the Middle East since the 1940’s, and the British and French before them, and the Ottomans before them, on and on back to the dawn of time. Regrettably, the American government currently considers this region, and how it is governed, vital to its welfare.

  Todd raised his head. “What about the other Americans on my team? Have there been other attacks?”

  “No. None as of yet, but we are looking into also providing the utmost for their wellbeing.” Karim looked Todd in the eye with a fierce intensity. “Forgive me, but I am required to ask this of you: have you noticed any unusual behavior from your subordinates? Has anyone said or done anything suspicious?”