Looking for the Mahdi

by N Lee Wood

  Halton didn’t seem so fresh-pressed; he looked a little haggard around the edges. I kept seeing him move unearthly fast across a dusty café room, the dull snap of bones breaking, the flash of the Eclipse spitting, how beautiful the dead woman looked crumpled on the floor after he shot her. I’ve seen people die before, some of them up close and personal, but the sheer speed and efficiency with which Halton had killed scared me.

  I was staring at him. It probably didn’t take a mind reader to see what was written on my face. His eyes wavered, pained; then he looked away. “I’ve never killed anyone before,” he finally said in a low voice.

  Could have fooled me. I shuddered. But that was definitely a subject I didn’t particularly care to bring up anyway. “Where’s the microflake?” I demanded, unemotional.

  For an answer, he stuck a forefinger in the side of his mouth, between his upper lip and his teeth as if digging at something caught between his molars. It stuck there a second, then pushed in further up. And up. And up. I could see the bulge it made against his cheekbone, and the lower lid of his eye pushed half shut. When he extracted his finger, the microflake rested on its tip.

  “I have certain extra cavities in various parts of my body where people are not likely to look,” he explained.

  “That,” I said, “is gross.”

  He gave it to me, and I handled it carefully, holding it up to the early morning light. It was surprisingly dry, winking dully. It seemed harmless enough. “She called you something,” I said pensively. “…Yah’malahjinn? Your Markundi is better than mine.”

  “It’s a kind of mythological mechanical demon,” he said. “Somewhat analogous to a Jewish golem.” He didn’t sound offended.

  “Hmm.” My mind was starting to work again, slowly. She had certainly seemed rather surprised. She had known about the microflake, known it was coming in on us, but didn’t know Halton was a fabricant until it was too late. Very odd.

  I continued to hold it up, eyeing it thoughtfully. “She seemed to want this rather badly,” I said finally. “And she wasn’t too polite about asking for it.”

  He took a deep breath, looking a little less frazzled. “Yes,” he said. “So it seems.”

  “I wonder if we can crack it.” I sat up and slowly put my legs over the side of the bed. And cried. I’m entitled, I’m a woman, it’s in my contract. Besides, it really hurt. Halton didn’t try to assist me or stop me, but mutely handed me my shirt. I had to have help getting into the pants, though.

  We got the PortaNet and the HoloPak hooked up to the single Chinese model TV holoset the hotel room boasted, which of course didn’t fit any standard jacks. I wished we’d brought an AI pocket PC with us as well, but the rather more orthodox Khuruchabjani muftis get the willies around machines that hold intelligent conversations with people. Something about trapped souls. Apparently Allah doesn’t like them, and what Allah doesn’t like isn’t legal in Khuruchabja. At least openly, anyway. We finally got the jacks linked into the holoset.

  Microflakes are made for containing extremely compressed layers of data, enough condensed information to hold half the Library of Congress squashed down into an opaque square two millimeters thick and no bigger than the nail on my little finger. They’re multiple layered micro-DRAM-chips grown on a molecular level, very expensive, and you’re not likely to find them on sale at your corner Mom and Pop Computer Shop. It takes a fairly sophisticated AI reader to unlock and unfold these layers, something that was a bit much to ask of a jury-rigged PortaNet and Chinese holoset. We could unfold about two simple layers before the thing balked; like seeing the cover art on a bookchip and only getting to read the title page.

  All it said was, “Confidential. Restricted Access. Authorized Personnel Only.” No shit.

  I was sweating and cursing as we took turns bending over the PortaNet. Halton wasn’t having any more success than I was, but concentrating on breaking into the flake made me forget some of my aches and pains. The phone rang, and I jumped about three feet in the air, landing hard on the chair. My pubis reminded me I shouldn’t be doing any calisthenics for a while.

  It also reminded me that I was royally pissed off.

  “What!” I yelled.

  “Kay Bee Sulaiman?” a man’s voice on the other end asked, his tone slightly puzzled. I hadn’t bothered to get up and turn the screen on. And didn’t intend to. Not with my face the way it looked at the moment.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Elias Somerton,” he said promptly.

  That wasn’t Somerton’s voice. “Well, hi there, Eli old buddy! How’s your therapy coming along? Your kid out of detox yet?” Halton looked at me quizzically. I was feeling my old self coming back on-line.

  “We don’t have time for childish games, Sulaiman,” the voice said, with a slight, but annoyed, English accent. “You and your holo optics photographer are expected tonight at His Excellency’s Presidential Palace. There will be a formal dinner, nine o’clock. His Excellency is receiving the British Assistant to His Majesty’s Foreign Secretary.”

  “Wow, and we’re invited? Is it like black tie, or what?”

  “You’re just another reporter, Sulaiman—cover the dinner like any other GBN assignment. Do your job, got it?”

  “Got it, bwana.” I saluted even though the man on the other end couldn’t see me.

  “His Excellency has agreed to speak to you after the dinner. Wait for him to approach you.”

  I opened my mouth to say something about the microflake, then clamped it shut, temporarily distracted from thinking up wisecracks. I suddenly remembered, maybe a little too late, that the phones in Khuruchabja were routinely monitored. Especially those of foreigners. “Sure, no problem,” I said.

  “There had better not be,” the voice said and hung up.

  “CDI doesn’t hire too many finishing school grads, do they?” I said to Halton.

  “No, I don’t believe so,” he answered seriously.

  I shook my head ruefully. “Jeez, Halton…” Then I had him stick the microflake back up his extra nasal fistula. It was probably safer there than anywhere else.

  Khuruchabja’s capital is neither as rundown nor ultramodern as you might assume. It’s true that when God was busy parceling out national resources, Khuruchabja got the short end of the stick, one of the major reasons for their last war. They have few assets available to turn into ready cash in the same way as their rich Saudi Arabian and other Persian Gulf cousins do. The semi-friendly competition for the cutting edge on high-tech military toys had been exclusively reserved by the Israelis and the Americans between themselves for decades, with only occasional input from the French and British. Like every other Middle Eastern nation, Khuruchabja’s offensive military power has been kept frustratingly third-rate. With the brief exception of the infrafusion threat.

  Also, once the IMF got through “refinancing” Khuruchabja’s national postwar debt, a good many Khuruchabjani citizens would be calculating their profit margins on investment stock only by the amount of wool it had growing on its back for generations to come.

  Despite the customary Islamic duty of consecrating their worldly possessions by handing out a generous sadaqa-t to the needy, citizens of rich countries preferred to give alms to their native peasants, and let other countries worry about their own poor. There had been any number of complicated proposals for divvying up Middle Eastern oil wealth more evenly throughout the Arab world, none of which was ever found acceptable to those in control of the oil. For one thing, the “Arab” world isn’t all Arab. Why should rich Arabs just give away the money Allah so obviously had intended for them by putting all that oil under their sand in the first place to a bunch of Persians? Or Kurds? Or Turks?

  That question aside, there’s the problem of “good” Arabs, meaning all those rich and comfortable Haves that do a lucrative business with the rest of the modem world, versus “bad” Arabs, the Have Nots that keep on creating trouble. Why throw good Arab money away on rabble-rousers like th
e Yemenese or the Palestinians? Or the Khuruchabjans? Even if national differences could ever be ironed out, there’s always the next hurdle of which Muslim sects are the True and Pious Followers of the Prophet Muhammad, and which are nothing but a bunch of blasphemous reprobates spreading dissension and heresy. Royal families and presidents-for-life in various Middle East countries have been balancing on the delicate tightrope between secular progress and Islamic shar’ia law for decades, with only limited success.

  Of course, if these arguments get shaky, the self-respecting Arab could always wrap himself in his emotional heritage, deeply offended, to play on the inexplicable guilt of the West and the radical fears of Muslims everywhere, Shi’ite or Sunni, rich or poor. How dare these imperialist Zionist-loving Western lapdogs usurp the rights of our faithful brothers of Islam and dictate how Muslim money should be spent, these traitorous bloodsucking infidels who have brought nothing but war and butchery to our holy sands? It is an Arab problem, which should be solved only by Arabs.

  Right. Any century now.

  Charity has always begun at home, and altruism always stops at the border, no matter whose border it is. No one cares what’s going on in some other country, so long as it’s not a plot to take their money away from them. The end result being, of course, that some Islamic countries are shamelessly rolling in dough while two miles away, across the border, homeless Muslim children starve in the most abject poverty imaginable. But before you go getting all self-righteously indignant, bear in mind we Americhurjas have had the same thing in the States ever since Polk ripped off large chunks of Mexican real estate and turned what was left into part of our own personal Third World right next door.

  Khuruchabja is still an old, old part of the world, and there have been many borders drawn with a sandaled foot in its shifting sands over the centuries. Before Muhammad, the Persians and Sumerians carved great monuments here to their winged-lion gods, and the last remnants of the migratory Bedouin tribes still find shelter for their flocks in the shade of ruins. The Romans forged roads across the hostile deserts on their way to more hospitable vacation spots, and left behind a good number of sunken baths and arched aqueducts in the wastelands, a wealth of other statues and temples to other forgotten gods. The caliphs spread out into an increasingly complex fusion of Umayyad rule, uniting a new Muslim empire that embraced all of Khuruchabja in its enlightened collective grasp. Nok Kuzlat blossomed like a desert flower in the rain, and muezzins warbled from hundreds of minarets calling the thriving faithful to rich, opulent mosques.

  Until the whole thing collapsed under the Abbasids and Shi’ites with the same petty secessionism that still tears apart empires and nations all over the globe. The wealth of the Muslim empire slipped away to places like Baghdad and Mecca and Damascus and Medina, while Nok Kuzlat’s mosques, having no dearth of faithful, suffered from the lack of funds in their pockets. A brief rally under the Ottomans revived hopes of a united empire, the Turks occasionally stopping by to pay a Big Brotherly visit and a handy contribution to the city fathers.

  The Ottomans were not exactly loved and adored by all their subjects, but they at least were Islamic. At the turn of the twentieth century, the British crushed the last great Muslim empire under the heel of colonial imperialism; then the Americans started sucking away the dreams of a united Islamic state along with the oil and their business monopolies. Nok Kuzlat went back to being a third-rate city eking out an existence at the edge of the desert—bitter, resentful and forgotten.

  A partially dismantled ancient city wall demarcated the actual Old City center from the slums that had grown up around the perimeters. The city center itself had been relatively unscathed during the past war. Einsteinian missiles had carefully dissected communications centers and government buildings from architectural treasures while the outskirts took the brunt of the devastation, stupid bombs being sufficient to eradicate the messy chaos infesting the ’burbs. A compact collection of archaeological wonders and modem high-rise office buildings, the old city was punctuated by the green and white minarets and gold domes of all those mosques built during Nok Kuzlat’s glittering heyday.

  Khuruchabja was one of the last Muslim countries still collecting the religious donations that all Muslims were required to pay, since there were too few rich and generous businessmen to keep the cream floating on the top. The zakat created a steady drain on the already meager finances of average Khuruchabjans, but Islam was the law, and the law was to be obeyed. Or else. The faithful anted up their taxes to the holy IRS, and Nok Kuzlat continued to kid itself into believing it was actually a world-class city.

  His Excellency, the Most Glorious and Sanctimonious Lawrence Abdul bin Hassan al Samir al Rashid, Beloved Servant of the Almighty and Merciful, Omnipresent and Invisible, Eternal and Everlasting Allah, Rightful Descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, Adored and Revered Titular Royal President-for-Life of All Khuruchabja, was the son of the second cousin of the uncle of the brother-in-law of the last potentate of Khuruchabja, inheriting his enviable position in the time-honored manner of his father and forefathers: by assassination. His illustrious predecessor had managed to keep the rabid wolves at bay for a few years longer than most, many of them members of his own family. He’d actually started working out some minor reforms within Khuruchabja in an attempt to win Western approval in the form of foreign aid for economic development, which might have helped to raise the standard of living for most of his subjects to a more modem level comparable to the vastly richer, secularized Islamic countries outside Khuruchabja’s borders.

  Of course, this kind of moral contamination by the Satanic West didn’t sit well with His Excellency’s overabundance of xenophobic fundamentalist sects. Economic development would bring the taint of the West with it, leading to unspeakable horrors, like whiskey and rock music and—Allah forfend!—barefaced women tourists in shorts. It was, after all, these same godless infidels who had dropped most of the bombs on Khuruchabja, they reminded the monarch, disregarding the argument that the Behjars had been the enemy and the West had helped the Damascus Coalition to “liberate” Khuruchabja. Tiring of all this erudite debate, one of his most trusted bodyguards pulled a marketing sample of Israel’s very first, brand-new Eclipse specials from under his robes and blew the ex-President to Paradise.

  That’s how it’s traditionally done. I could understand why Sheikh Larry wanted to tap an outside employment agency for his bodyguard service.

  Usually, one strong man is knocked off by another in a bloody game of King of the Mountain, brother pitted against brother, religious factions vying against secular. But when the dust cleared, a lot of job candidates on the short list were dead, while nobody had much idea exactly who was in charge anymore. The muftis and ulemas had to scramble through the old family photo album to dredge up Larry, the last male scion of a semi-royal family severely anemic from repeated bloodletting within their own ranks.

  On paper, Larry looked okay. He was educated, graduated with honors from Yale, did a few years as well at Oxford. He dabbled in yachting and horse racing, hobnobbed on occasion with the various other international remnants of obsolete royalty still leeching off public monies, but otherwise didn’t appear to have much else to his credit, good or bad. He’d been prepared to embark on a lifelong career as one of dozens of Khuruchabja’s typical royal family brats, a spoiled playboy leading a scandalous lifestyle in the decadent West. He’d probably been just as dismayed and petrified to find himself unexpectedly elevated to the pinnacle of power as a good many of his subjects were to have him there. He’d only been Top Banana for a few years, and spent most of them holed up in his Royal Presidential Palace with the bed sheets pulled up over his head, allowing various court toadies to battle each other for power and authority as they pleased, all in his glorious name.

  But apparently he was beginning to peek out once in a while, like a groundhog checking to see he still had a shadow, and taking his first tentative steps at actually ruling the place before he too followed i
n the footsteps of his blessed and exalted ancestors, off the customary exit stage left.

  I spent the day resting, and managed to score a bit of hashish from the Room Service kid. Alcohol might be illegal but black Turkish hash and Yemenese qat were imported openly by the ton. It took the edge off, but the pain was too sharp to allow much of a buzz. The sun set, and the air conditioner perked up as I changed into my other “good” suit, which was pretty much the same as the first one, except cleaner, and kept an ice pack on both upper and lower bruises until curtain time. The cuts and scrapes didn’t look nearly so bad as I’d feared, once they’d scabbed over. One eye sported a half-moon shiner, in lovely holocolor.

  We had the hotel call a taxi (we checked before we got in; it wasn’t our friend Samat), and arrived at the palace gates a little before nine. I wasn’t expecting a mad crush of reporters jockeying for position, hysterically waving press passes as if the king of England were arriving from Buckingham Palace. Nevertheless, it took the better part of an hour simply to have our credentials checked at the gate before we were politely escorted inside to Security. Once inside, we were subjected to a security check similar to the one we’d experienced at the airport, after which a car whisked us the quarter-mile distance to the immense Presidential Palace, where our credentials and choice of evening wear were again inspected. Inside, I met my fellow journalists, the usual gang of idiots lounging about listlessly while waiting for the show to start.

  I hadn’t been a field correspondent in over a decade and nobody’d ever seen Halton before, so I didn’t expect to bump into anyone I knew. I wasn’t disappointed. Most of them were desperate freelancers and amateur second-stringers from a half-dozen Third World countries; the rest being younger machos out serving rotations through Correspondent Purgatory, breaking in on the worst possible assignments. I’d never met any of them before.

  In fact, it was a bit gratifying when one of the kids from TVN cable news squinted and said, “Sulaiman? Kay Bee Sulaiman? Weren’t you the guy here during the war? Got the first clips of the air strike against the Bayjars?” He pronounced it just like he would have spelled it, and I tried to keep from wincing.