Looking for the Mahdi

by N Lee Wood

  It was also interesting to see how Halton handled the optical machinery. He could simply pick up any piece of equipment and figure it out in about ten seconds flat. But journalism is more than pointing a camera in the right direction and a recitation of cold, dry facts.

  The camera never lies, but a good cameraman can certainly edit what it sees. Close in on a shot and you can turn a few dozen beered-out kids into a whole city besieged in a riot. Pull back on a shot of a politician’s fiery speech to show a legislature full of empty seats, and you can thoroughly puncture his hot-air balloon. I explained the concept briefly to Halton, he nodded, and that was it. You never had to tell him anything twice.

  It was as if he’d done field work for years. I watched without any sense of pride, since I hadn’t done much teaching. What I felt was a vague indignation and anxiousness, the kind you get when someone says, “You can be replaced, you know.” Sort of what I imagined the tall Cro-Magnon man might have sneered down his Aryan nose at some dark and hairy, beetle-browed Neanderthal: This planet ain’t big enough for the both of us…

  Because that’s what someone like Halton meant to me. Anything I could do, he could do better than me. The six-gadzillion-dollar man—stronger, faster, smarter, cleaner, better-looking, more talented—you name it, John Halton had it. And if he didn’t, there were nine more exactly like him where he came from. He made me nervous.

  The night we filmed the potty patrol, we went back to the hotel to take a nap before the next scheduled shot. My watch bleeped me awake and I banged on the connecting door.

  “Let’s go, it’s a long walk,” I called out, running a comb through the stubble of what was left of my hair and tucking in my rumpled shirt. He opened the door within two seconds. I couldn’t help staring.

  Everything was in place. The shirt was still unwrinkled, his hair unmussed.

  “Didn’t you take a nap?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Yes, of course,” he said, serious.

  See what I mean?

  We trammed it to the shanklift, heading out to the peripheral edge of the South Pole, a place normally off-limits to the general public, but we’d pressed enough palms and filmed enough “Hi, Moms” to get an invite. There, we set up a telephoto shot, and filmed, I’m not kidding, a space cowboy riding his electric manure spreader away from the camera, down a long, long row of experimental crops glassed in under the wide black heavens above, pinpoint cold stars gleaming. We had timed and angled the shot to pick up the Earth low in the distance, and waited until the sun peeked out over the edge, shooting a nimbus of glorious color through the Station’s periphery and silhouetting our tiny Lone Ranger riding off into the sunrise. Barely got it into the slipclip, too, before the Station rolled far enough to ruin our perspective.

  God, it was hokey. Gloriously wonderfully tearjerker hokey, it’d be a hit, I was sure of it. But we had nine slip-clips worth of footage to cut and edit into a two-minute and a five-minute short, plus a full-length twelve-minute version, before boarding time for Khuruchabja the next morning.

  We hustled ass back to the hotel, with the intention of shoving my TV holoset through the connecting door into Halton’s room to use in tandem with his set as editing monitors. It was bolted to the floor.

  “Phone!” I bellowed somewhere mid-curse.

  “Yes?” Why do all phones have that same insipid, androgynous voice? Give them a goddamned gender and be done with it.

  “Front Desk. Now.”

  Once they’d figured out what we needed, it took about an hour to find somebody from Maintenance who knew how to disconnect the TV from the floor while I pulled out what was left of my hair. After we got the TV moved, I called Room Service, and had them send up a half-case of Budweiser, the real Czech stuff, not that watered-down American crap, a tub of ice to keep it cool and a couple trays of anonymous finger food.

  We plugged in the PortaNet to one monitor, and the HoloPak to the other, sitting cross-legged on the bed or the floor while we blipped and snipped, going over the edited clips and cleaning up sounds, re-digitalizing the images to sharpen the depth, magnifying some cuts, reducing others, intersplicing this with that to see what the effect would be. I paced around projections, making sure all the angles fit, then ran them back, over and over, until my eyes started burning. For a while, the joy of work even made me forget Halton was a CDI fabricant, and I snarled at him for his opinion of this shot or that angle as if he were any other all-too-human cameraman. Six and a half hours later, I had my three pieces, each ending with our little farmer far from Mother Earth in complete silence for several seconds, no commentary necessary, other than the sound of the manure spreader humming along, to spoil the overall impact.

  Then the voice-over: “Kay Bee Sulaiman”—long pause—“Clarke Orbital Station”—another long pause— “for GBN Network News.”

  The end.

  I leaned back, cracking stiff backbone joints and groaning. We’d been sitting on the floor for hours, and my butt had fallen asleep. Halton still looked like he’d just been unwrapped from the box. I looked around the room and chuckled.

  Empty beer bottles littered the room, some of the dead soldiers leaking fluid, foam-rimmed dark spots on the carpet. Slipclip cartridges were scattered on the floor and the rumpled bed, detritus of food crumbs and greasy chicken bones sprinkled liberally about for good measure.

  “Ah, jeez, Halton,” I teased. “We’ve mussed up your pretty room. What a shame.” He glanced around, and said without a trace of irony, “The cleaning crew will take care of it.” My jaw dropped and I burst out laughing, clutching my sides and rolling over onto the rug as he looked at me with an innocent, puzzled expression. That just kept me going. I laughed so hard, my eyes teared up and I thought I’d pee my pants. I was tired and punchy, and it just felt good to laugh.

  I wheezed back into some sense of self-control, and said, “Maybe we should have filmed this room and you as the last act. Jesus, Halton, you’re so fucking perfect.” I wiped my eyes, and handed him one of the last two beers left in the tub. “Here, why don’t we finish these off before we crash.”

  He took it and drank it. We leaned back together against the side of the bed, watching the fuzz of dead air hover as the monitor projected nothingness.

  “You did okay,” I said finally, a little reluctant. “I gotta admit. Good job, Halton.” I bounced the end of my half-finished beer lightly on the end of his knee, a gesture of semidrunkish camaraderie. Y’know, the fellow journalist buddies kind of shit.

  I was smiling, feeling mellow, feeling like we’d just done a good job, and my body was tired with the pleasant ache that comes after a well-done story. He looked at me, strange poker face hiding whatever was going on in that deluxe manufactured brain.

  The next second, I was standing, backed up against the wall, quivering with outrage and panic while he just sat on the floor gazing up with ingenuous surprise. The son of a bitch had just tried to kiss me.

  “You did a good job, but not that good,” I spat out. “Just what the fuck was that all about?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I misread your intention.”

  “No shit!”

  “May I explain?”

  I held my hands up, warding it off. “Hey-ey, I don’t think I want to hear it—”

  “Please, Kay Bee…”

  I was panting like I’d just run the three-minute mile, heart boinging around in my chest like mad. I didn’t say anything, too busy trying to catch my breath, get myself back under control, and he took that as a “yes.”

  “When I told you my sexual experience was limited, I didn’t define how limited it really is. I understand sex well enough; the kind of women I’ve had intercourse with simply made their propositions direct and unambiguous.”

  Christ, he didn’t even have the euphemisms down.

  “I haven’t had much exposure to people outside CDI; I’ve never been on an outside assignment before. It’s important for me… essential that I learn how to analy
ze different people’s emotional states—that’s what I was telling you about fabricant and human brains not seeing or feeling things in exactly the same way.”

  I haven’t had all that many men put the make on me in my lifetime, either, and I was well aware they usually had pragmatic ulterior motives for the sudden, undying passion. I didn’t like it any better than the next woman, and loathed myself whenever I gave in. But most of them had at least had the courtesy of maintaining the illusion of lusting after my body, and my self-esteem wasn’t exactly in a position to challenge anyone on it. Halton’s blunt admission that I was just a guinea pig for his impersonal curiosity about human emotions blew away any warm feelings I might have been developing toward him.

  “So learning the art of seduction is just another part of your assignment, is it?” I had the jitters under control, and scorching anger was taking its place. The words came out venom. “Your bosses teach you all the right tricks to get me to fall in lust, blow in my twat and I’ll follow you anywhere? Or is this just another part of your deal? Am I supposed to be so grateful that a hunk like you would jump these homely old bones, I’ll risk my ass for you?”

  He hadn’t moved from the floor, his hands palms down by his side on the rug, legs still stretched out casually, crossed at the ankles. His eyes watched me with detached calm. “It’s not like that,” he said quietly.

  “I’ll just bet,” I sneered.

  “You were sexually attracted to me when we met, before you knew I was a fabricant,” he said. I felt my face flush. “The other night at dinner, when you asked about my love life, you had strong sexual desires then, which I presumed I had been the stimulus for.”

  “God,” I said, mortified. “I didn’t realize I was being so obvious.”

  Halton looked suddenly embarrassed. “You weren’t,” he said, and held up one hand, palm facing me. “Nanos. Chemical sensors. I could read it when I touched you.”

  My skin crawled, and I think I wanted to kill him at that moment. Nothing could have better driven home just how inhuman he was. “You don’t touch me again, ever. You got that?” I hissed.

  He nodded. “Yes.” The steady expression was the same, but his face had paled.

  “I’ve been told I have to spend two more weeks with you, turn you over to Sheikh Larry, nothing more, and hopefully I’ll never lay eyes on you again. Unless you’ve got something more than a bunch of unverifiable numbers or your fabulous mechanical prick on offer, you got nothing that I or GBN are willing to stick our necks out for. Meantime, you just play your role, and don’t you forget mine, not for a second, not even in private. I’m a man, and I don’t fuck other men.”

  I could feel the rage beginning to unglue my seams again. At any moment I’d start smashing things, which I really didn’t want to do and chance destroying six and a half hours worth of edited work. I had to get out of there. My legs felt like frozen rubber bands as I crossed to the connecting door and jerked it open.

  “And I especially don’t fuck robot spies,” I said in a low voice, to keep it from quavering.

  “I understand,” he said softly, still sitting on the floor.

  “I hope to God you do.” I slammed the door shut behind me and spent the next few hours lying on my back, chainsmoking and staring at memories crowding the ceiling, hating myself.

  SIX

  * * *

  Iblipped the story down to GBN and wiped the slipclips before we packed up and checked out. I was nervously packing the microflake in my PortaNet, trying to stuff it casually into a side pocket (“Microflake? In my PortaNet? Jeez, Officer, how the hell’d that get in there?”), when Halton asked me for it. I’d hesitated for just a moment, then given it to him. What the hell, he was paid to do the spy-schtick, not me. He went to the head for a few minutes, returned, and we left the room without a word. Maybe he’d flushed it—I didn’t really care, just so long as I didn’t get caught trying to enter Khuruchabja with illegal substances. I wasn’t going to rot in a Khuruchabjani prison for fifty years so CDI agents could send love letters to each other.

  Going through Orbital Passport Control, I was more nervous than Halton, but I already knew that wasn’t unusual. He handed the Orbital officer his bogus passport card without blinking an eye, laid his steady hand down on the pad. The reader beeped a contented Okay, and spit it out, no problems.

  The Orbital down to Cairo was pretty much a rerun of the one up, this time with filet mignon and port-sautéed pears. Halton and I didn’t talk much on the flight, and I didn’t drink much this time. Khuruchabja is, technically, alcohol-free. They frown heavily on people smuggling liquor into the country, even if you’re bringing it inside your own bloodstream. We set down at Helwan InterOrbital, and had to race to catch the only connecting commuter flight from Cairo to Rawalpindi in the Republic of Independent Punjab, with a dozen stops along the way, including fabulous downtown Nok Kuzlat.

  The decrepit puddle-jumper was only fourteen hours behind schedule, remarkably on time for that part of the Middle East. At least five hundred passengers were waiting for a place in the seventy-seater plane, all of whom carried four times their weight in ratty luggage, boxes tied with string, extra-large duty-free bags filled to ripping capacity with plastic-covered clothes, bottles of French mineral water, stuffed toys, disposable diapers and Belgian chocolates. A few even held crates of various animal species, all adding their barks, mews, cackles and bahs to the overwhelming noise. We fought our way through the screaming, furious mob to the gate and were waved through by the grace of a fresh 100-écu note.

  While there were plenty of people in Cairo anxious to get on the plane, most of them were not getting off at Nok Kuzlat. You have to remember that Khuruchabja hasn’t really been of world-wide importance for much other than some of the most spectacularly bloody, vicious fighting the world had seen. It has a few tiny oil deposits, not even sufficient for its own population’s energy needs, and no other natural resources that any other part of the world covets. Its indigenous population is a loose collection of rabid ultra-fundamentalist zealots, whose only interesting occupation seems to be continuous internecine squabbling. It has some minor strategic value, a sort of buffer zone between two countries who really hate each other’s guts. But Khuruchabja itself is too far from anything else anybody would want, and too small to be much more than a nuisance to its neighbors.

  The last time I’d been here, Khuruchabja was being run by a group of extremists calling themselves the National Behjar Democratic Brotherhood, who knew as much about democracy as I know about quantum astrophysics. Their monomaniacal leader, al-Husam, had the charisma of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the lunatic mania of Qaddafi and the chutzpah of Saddam Hussein. But except for the occasional car bomb and hostage-taking, they’d been no more than the usual nuisance. Then the Brotherhood managed to catapult Khuruchabja to the front line of world attention after the forerunner of the CDI helped them get their grubby hands on a couple of small infrafusion devices. Unfortunately, al-Husam promptly welshed on whatever covert agreement he’d made with the CDI, and was threatening to use the bombs in the name of Allah on his most detested Enemies of the Week, which would have severely altered the landscape and real-estate values of the countries immediately bordering his chosen target.

  The despised American devils and their traitorous puppet allies, of course, couldn’t allow such an occurrence, and the people responsible for creating the mess in the first place were keeping rather quiet about it. Technically, since it was an internal affair, direct action against the Behjars, the then current semi-legitimate government of Khuruchabja, was not recommended. The UN went through its usual futile attempts at negotiations, one broken cease-fire after another, before giving the inevitable okay for intervention. The Western powers managed to persuade the various countries allied in the Damascus Coalition “Peacekeeping” Force to stop quarreling with each other long enough to play with the newest high-tech toys in the name of Muslim Unity. The U.S. And Common Europe jockeyed with each other over
who got to be Executive Producer and which general got the credits as Director.

  Every news organization sent in its own battalions of reporters, PortaNets strapped to their backs. This war, our military didn’t bother with the press pool farce. But also, this war, the military gave the media some stiff competition of their own, a PR battle for the viewing public’s limited attention span, with their exclusive fighter gun and missile cameras bringing back spectacular high-definition digitalized holo footage of explosions in full living color with wraparound Dolby sound. With their consciences salved that our bombs were “guaranteed-100%-this-time-not-to-harm-civilians,” video war addicts went into prolonged orgasms.

  Mankind’s weapons get “smarter” and more sophisticated, but our political acumen doesn’t appear to evolve at the same pace. In spite of a few minor adjustments, the story unfolding was pretty much the same as the last one, and the one before that, the end result being lots of people dead and homeless, property destroyed simply to get back to square one and start the process all over again. The Have-Nots will always resent the Haves, and stir up trouble. The Haves will always squash them in the end, to keep them from getting any of theirs, and the news will be there to preserve those precious moments as they occur. Nobody has ever been able or willing to solve the underlying problems—especially in this part of the world—that have caused all this misery in the first place.

  While all of Khuruchabja’s military bases were outfitted with modern airfields, Nok Kuzlat’s civilian airport didn’t have quite the same degree of amenities. It had a single runway, the dirt and potholes covered by a thin layer of cracked tarmac and oil. A charred litter of less fortunate planes decorated the sides of the strip. The airport had no tower, no radar, the only item of hightech being a tattered red wind sock which usually hung lifeless from a pole. Of course, when there was wind, it would have been impossible to see the sock through the blowing sand, anyway.