Looking for the Mahdi

by N Lee Wood

  Somewhere during the fire-bombing of the Behjars’ last retreat and the coverage of occupying troops pouring into Nok Kuzlat, Hamid gravely shook my hand and disappeared. So did a lot of the old Behjar regime, bodies popping up here and there with their throats cut.

  Victory inevitably turned to revenge. After the new government set up by the occupying powers began settling old scores with their defeated enemies, they became edgy when several of their own associates mysteriously joined the mutilated bodies dumped in alleyways and garbage bins. The government started publicly hanging members of their former allies and their own loyal rebel execution squads. The UN moved in with refugee aid as the Coalition withdrew. By the time the new regime was overthrown in a military coup and replaced by a newer, even more vicious regime, I’d left Nok Kuzlat. For good, I’d thought. I’d prayed.

  I accepted my little awards at a civilized ceremony, and went to work on the feed-in desk. The waking nightmares started shortly after I got back, and I finally started seeing a shrink, covertly. No one other than Arlando ever knew. My glib medley of predigested Press Club anecdotes covered up a lot of torment and depression.

  Once in a while I’d see hints of Hamid’s work, keeping tabs on the rise and fall of Khuruchabja’s seasonal governments until Sheikh Larry’s predecessor ascended the Presidential throne. The violence gradually died, the people exhausted after a decade of blood.

  While it was one thing for the Behjars to have stolen infrafusion bombs, or so it was publicly claimed, the infighting that went on long after they had fallen was no heartbreak for the U.S. Government. The goal was to keep Khuruchabja unstable, but weak. If Khuruchabja was too busy arguing over internal politics, they weren’t likely to ally themselves with one neighbor or the other outside their borders, keeping the broader region fractured and factional, malleable to what the West considered proper influences on world security.

  Now I smelled a rat. And if there was any rat-shit to sniff out, Hamid would probably know about it.

  I took off my shoes as we entered the family’s ma’gâlees, a small living room above the shop, and Hamid seated us at a place of honor for his guests, on a genteelly worn sofa and chair around a carved and inlaid wood table set low on the floor. As Hamid settled into a chair, I politely admired the family photos decorating the walls between ornate Qur’an calligraphy in worn gilt frames. A collection of small nicotine-stained narghileh pipes was arranged in an English knotty pine teacup cabinet; the family’s good tea set shared space on a table in the corner with an eclectic set of French demitasse cups and saucers.

  Ahmat sat next to his father, while small children played outside the doorway, peeping in and giggling once in a while. Jamilah brought the long-handled brass ibik, and poured us cup after tiny cup of potent coffee while feeding us the little sweetmeats she was hurriedly making in her immaculate kitchen.

  Hamid had changed dramatically over the years. The thin, dour man who had stared at me over a severed finger had been transformed into a chatty, laughing man. But his eyes were still sharp, the hashshâshin warrior still watching me, eyeing Halton, evaluating.

  “You’ve done okay for yourself, Hamid—a grocery store, of all things,” I said.

  “Allah has been kind to an old man,” he said.

  “Old, my ass. You have one or two more years on me, my friend, and I’m not old.”

  “Is it always the years that make us old, Kay Bee?” Hamid smiled, and I saw the bitterness in the wrinkled lines radiating from his eyes. “I became too slow, too fat, to remain a young troublemaker sprinting over rooftops. I had Ahmat to think of, as well.”

  Ahmat grimaced, the universal disdain boys have at the crux between being a child and leaving home as a man. “And so… ?” Hamid shrugged. “I found myself a good woman with wide hips who could make healthy sons, and became a respectable man in the community. I have important responsibilities now. I bought a miserable little grocery so that at least my family will never starve, and created Old Hamid the Grocer.” He indicated his plump torso with an actor’s flourish.

  He had allowed Jamilah to remove her yashmak and loosen the h’jab around her face, a sign we were accepted as close friends of Hamid’s. Her face was round and plain, but she had beautiful, intelligent eyes. Hamid obviously adored her, although his masculine pride made him attempt to hide it. She entered with another tray of sweetmeats, setting it down on the low table. Hamid brushed her hands away as she attempted to serve us, and she tsked with affectionate impatience.

  “Eat,” Hamid urged us, adding the old peasant’s idiom, “or I will be forced to divorce my wife.”

  I ate a flaky pastry filled with crushed dates and glazed with honey. “Where would you find another wife who could make anything as delicious as this?” I asked.

  “The same place I found this one, in a French cooking school. But perhaps I should look for another,” he said, “one who can’t cook as well, but with a sweeter disposition. My wife has been to University where she has learned too many foreign ideas. Women should not learn to read, it is very bad for their minds. They lose their proper virtue and honor when they think too much. I need another wife, a stupid wife who doesn’t read and who will respect me.”

  Jamilah didn’t seem too worried about his opinions, her rueful half-smile proof she’d put up with Hamid’s banter too long to be upset by it.

  “The love between a man and a woman is a fine thing, is it not?” Hamid said, one eye on his wife. “But the love between men, this is a strong, pure love. Only the love of Allah is greater, don’t you agree?”

  Seeing as neither Halton nor I were men, I demurred politely.

  “That is why a true man needs more than one wife. It is part of the natural way of life. Lucky are we Muslims to be able to have more than one wife”—Hamid was teasing— “unlike you wimpy Western men with your half-naked harpies marching through the streets like common prostitutes shouting for votes and driving-licenses instead of making their homes clean and giving their husbands sons.”

  “Muhammad had many wives,” Jamilah reminded him archly as she refilled our tiny coffee cups, “for all the good it did him. They fought among themselves and deceived the Prophet, and for all their trouble still gave him no living son for an heir.”

  “In that respect, the Prophet was unlucky,” Hamid declared. “But I have always had good luck with my women.” He was looking at Ahmat and added more quietly, “And my sons.”

  A little girl of about four had clambered into his lap to steal a square of pastry. “What about your daughters, Papa?” she said, her mouth decorated with sticky crumbs, brown eyes wide.

  He laughed, grabbed her and kissed the crumbs from her face as she squealed in delight. “May Allah see you grow up to be beautiful and lucky enough to have a husband as good as me!”

  I was smiling, but a tremor of cold shot through me as an image of Hamid, standing with his young son silently on the edge of a shallow crater, superimposed itself on this happy family. Clouds, they bring rain and joy, they blow away again on the breath of the wind—who can hold the clouds in his hands? Pride and fear shone in Hamid’s eyes.

  “You still keep in touch with old friends, Hamid?” I asked casually, watching him over the lip of my coffee cup as I sipped.

  He said nothing for a moment, then looked at Halton. Halton was back into his automaton mode, being inscrutable. I answered Hamid’s unspoken question. “No, I can’t trust him,” I said. “But he’s saved my life.” Hamid would understand that very well.

  He considered, then tickled the little girl before he brushed her from his lap. He turned to yell at the gaggle of children loitering around the doorway. “You kids go out and play! Out, out, out!” They giggled and jostled each other, ignoring Hamid’s order until Jamilah shooed them away with a wooden spoon waved threateningly in the air. She closed the door, and returned to the kitchen, quietly shutting that door as well. Ahmat remained seated, as sullen and brooding as his father had once been.

  �
��It is hard not to see old acquaintances in so small a city at least once in a while,” Hamid said carefully.

  “Would you know anyone who might have access to AI equipment?”

  Ahmat glanced at me, startled, then tried to mask his expression. Hamid smiled woefully, shaking his head. “My son scorns the ways of old men like his father, thinking we are all daft and ignorant. He is like Jamilah—he’s studied an entire year in University, you see, so he thinks he knows all the secrets in Allah’s universe. But he’s still as transparent as water.”

  Ahmat colored, a deep flush of red creeping up his neck and cheeks. His father laughed, putting an affectionate arm around the boy’s stiff shoulders. “Yes, my son knows a great deal about computers and other accursed Western toys,” he said proudly.

  “Ahmat,” I said, addressing him as a man, not as a child. “Maybe you could do us a great favor? I need to find an AI reader quickly.”

  Father and son exchanged looks, a silent understanding passing between them. Ahmat stood. “Come on, then. I’ll take you.”

  “Old Hamid the Grocer must open the shop,” Hamid said, getting laboriously to his feet. I didn’t believe for a second he was as feeble as he pretended to be, had no doubt those old legs were as sturdy and fast as they’d been a decade ago. “There are surely people waiting while we selfishly keep you from your business. There is gossip to catch up on which only old men are good at swapping. And since I know nothing of these matters young people learn in their great universities, being only an old and ignorant peasant, I trust you in the hands of my son. Allah yhishal’limakh, go with God.”

  We kissed cheeks; I felt Hamid’s strong fingers on my shoulders, the rasp of his beard against my skin. I held him at arm’s length, looking into his eyes. They crinkled as he smiled, dark and warm. Only eyes.

  “Mali salaama, my old friend,” I said quietly. “God give you peace.”

  TWELVE

  * * *

  Ahmat took us out the back. If the front of Hamid’s store seemed grim, the dirt alleyways twisting mazelike behind it were appalling. Blank, mud-colored walls abutted each other in mad confusion, leaving spaces between them barely wide enough for a man. Our shoes made sucking noises as we picked our way through the slime and rubbish, the smell of sewage and rot strong. Cockroaches scuttled in panic. Broken wood lattices in small windows above our heads hid eyes that I knew followed us.

  The maze widened into a dirt-paved street, and children seemed to coalesce around us, a growing feral pack with hate and hope in their eyes as grubby hands picked at our clothes, begging for money. They chattered in a clipped Markundi slang. I had a hard time looking into their ravaged faces, eyes and noses runny with dirt-crusted mucus. Ahmat walked in front with his back stiffened, brusquely pushing the children aside and slapping away the more aggressive.

  I glanced at Halton, wondering how he interpreted this small sample of human poverty and misery. The feeling of desperation intensified, and I was keeping my hands firmly on anything I didn’t want to see vanish. A bony, grime-stained hand nimbly attempted to separate Halton from an unprotected part of his HoloPak. The child’s eyes went wide as Halton effortlessly plucked the Pak back. Then the mob scattered as Ahmat grabbed the kid’s hand and broke a finger. The beggar child stumbled away, howling in pain and fury. As cruel as Ahmat seemed, under Islamic law the child might as easily have lost his whole hand. A rock spattered into the wall as another retreating ragged child cursed us, his aim wild.

  Ahmat glared at me, dark eyes bitter. The children were only another reminder for him of the endless, grinding deprivation in Nok Kuzlat, a glaring statement of Khuruchabja’s demeaning inequities, and the West’s indifference.

  When Ahmat had led us through the labyrinth of back streets until he was satisfied we were completely disoriented, we ducked into a squalid cluster of rooms behind a walled-in empty courtyard. Inside, our eyes adjusted to the gloom. Ahmat rapped his knuckles in a coded rhythm against a locked door. After a moment, solid locks thunked open and the door creaked ajar, a pair of bespectacled eyes blinking at us.

  Inside, the room was clean, brightly lit. Three young men straightened from old-fashioned flat-screen monitors to stare at us distrustfully, their faces reflecting the oscillating light. Cables connected an odd assortment of computers, AI frames, old holosets, faxerox machines, dozens of obsolete South Korean-made underboard interfaces siamesed together. A venerable laser printer hissed to itself in a corner, churning out a growing pile of pages.

  “ ’Ahchlan, Ahmat,” the oldest of the bunch greeted our guide, straightening to examine us suspiciously. He was in his late thirties, the rest barely out of their teens. “What’s going on?” He was self-assured, dark eyes intense. A charismatic personality, obviously the leader and patron of this small group.

  “Friends of my father’s,” Ahmat said, and sat down, pointedly away from us as if to separate us from any question of his loyalties.

  The man regarded us for a moment, then nodded with formal politeness, his hands spreading to greet us. “Be welcome,” he said, and swept a long rug-covered bench made of crates clear of manuals, program chips, and various pieces of electronic paraphernalia, to make room for us to sit.

  “Ih’salaam” I said, and we sat.

  Ahmat did a quick round of introductions; the older man’s name was Ibrahim al-Ruwala, the voice of authority. The others were all either his younger brothers or cousins. Then we sat staring at one another, the boys glancing uneasily at each other as the silence drew out uncomfortably. Shit, might as well cut right to it, I thought.

  “I understand you may be able to help us with some AI equipment,” I said in awkward Markundi.

  “Maybe,” Ibrahim responded in English. “What have you got?”

  I had Halton turn his face to the wall before he produced the flake. Let them think he got it out of a false tooth, but people who stuck fingers up into their sinuses might look a bit too weird. He handed the flake to Ibrahim.

  After inspecting it, Ibrahim looked at us, his eyes shifting between Halton and me as he deliberated. “You’d need some top-line AI stuff for this,” he said. He waved a depreciative hand toward the jury-rigged system. “I’m afraid we might not be of much help.”

  “Halton?” I asked quietly.

  He’d already scanned the hodgepodge. “It’ll work,” he answered simply. “The equipment is better than it looks.”

  Ibrahim stared at him, eyes calculating. I smiled amiably. “Halton’s a decent enough computer hacker,” I lied, not knowing at that moment how right I was, “but of course, it’s your equipment.”

  Ibrahim grunted. “Okay, so if we do crack the flake, what’s in it for us?”

  It always comes down to the suuqs, even when dealing in bits and bytes. “What are you asking?”

  He grinned. “How about the flake?” he said shrewdly.

  I shook my head. “That’s no deal for you, believe me. This damn thing’s already been more trouble than it could possibly be worth.” I indicated the bruises on my face. Ibrahim looked thoughtful, considering. He nodded, giving up the idea of the flake. His lips pursed as he pretended to think.

  “Ibrahim, a PC miniCray,” the cousin with the wire-rim glasses blurted out impatiently. “What about a miniCray? Allah, what I could do with one of those babies…”

  “Baj’lâash khalâam, Abdullah,” Ibrahim snapped. “Shut your mouth.” Then he frowned, his tense eyes glancing at me. “Well,” he said reluctantly, “what about a miniCray?”

  “You’d have to trust me on an IOU, but I could get you one.”

  Abdullah beamed like a kid at Christmas. While it was obvious who their leader was, the scrawny nerd wearing glasses and peach fuzz on his upper lip was undeniably their principal whiz kid. We argued briskly over exactly which model, more for form’s sake. Ibrahim didn’t really believe I’d honor any bargain two minutes after we left, but his curiosity about the microflake was too aroused. When the deal was made, Halton and Abdullah st
arted in on the flake.

  Abdullah stumbled along for a few moments in English before Halton slipped into flawless Markundi. The kid looked surprised, then began rattling away with Halton in a rapid-fire exchange too fast for me to follow more than a few sentences heavily spiced with Anglicized computer terminology. The rest of us hovered around in the background, kibitzing. New cables were strung from the AI frame to the various computers. I plugged the HoloPak into one of the two wheezy-looking holosets, its murky gray haze shimmering in the air, waiting.

  It looked like it was going to take some time. Ibrahim pulled Ahmat to one side for a brief conference while I got nosy and picked up one of the sheets still being spit out by the laser printer. It was the usual polemic denunciation of some obscure local outrage, but even though my Arabic was rusty, I could read a little between the lines. Following the traditional vehement and sensationalist prose vilifying the sordid practices of the culprit in question was the suggestion for a reasoned, objective investigation along with a proposal to remedy the situation rather than the emotional cry to string the bastard up by his nuts in revenge. I smiled.

  “So you’re from GBN,” Ibrahim finally said to me, his chat with Ahmat over. He pointed his chin at the paper in my hand, his arms crossed belligerently across his chest. “A big-shot Western journalist like you must think that’s pretty naive stuff, huh?”

  “No, not at all. Of course not…” I assured him quickly.

  “No?” He raised an eyebrow, his lips twisted in an amused scowl. “But it’s supposed to be naive.” He laughed at my puzzled expression. “A nation fed for twenty years on nothing but bland rice can’t be expected to be able to digest hot spiced meat in a day. But neither can you expect them to stay satisfied forever on a tasteless diet. Change is necessary, but by incremental steps.”

  I held up the sheet. “And you’re in the process of gradually spicing up your politics?” He shrugged. “I hope so. Surround the unfamiliar with the familiar until it too becomes accepted. Not too much, not too little. Like the rain, too much and you end up with a devastating flood. Too little, you die from drought. Just enough, and ideas grow like plants. Anchor your roots first in the soil before trying to grow flowers.”