The Crystal Empire (21 page)

Ayesha wanted to ask her father,
But what of my mind, can that be of no se
r
vice to Almighty God, His Faithful, and their civilization,
but she did not. She could not. She had known, as long as she could remember, that this might happen someday. She had not thought about it much. Ah, well, another court, another ruler, a loyal subordinate to her father. She would continue her studies, perhaps even travel back and forth, leaving Rome neither alt
o
gether nor forever.

“May I be permitted to ask, Your Holiness, to which ruler I am to be married? The Sultan of ’Inglitarrah has four wives and two male heirs, F
a
ransaa’s ruler has taken a vow of celibacy. Hoolandaa—”

The Caliph stopped her with a hand.

“We do not know whom you are to wed, girl....”

There was a roughness in his voice which spoke of tears suppressed.

“You are to travel with Mochamet al Rotshild, here, also with your tutor, to the western coastline of the Savage Continent, there to be ma
r
ried to whomsoever rules there.”

A small voice shrilled within Ayesha’s mind.
What am I supposed to feel at this moment? What am I supposed to feel?
Her rigid posture su
g
gested to the outer world what she did feel: nothing. Even one of her nightmares, she thought, was preferable to this numbness.

The Caliph turned his head, looking first at Mochamet al Rotshild, then at the Lady Jamela, his expression changing as he did so.

“Each of those who have labored so diligently to persuade Us of this course—shall it prove successful or otherwise—shall reap an appropr
i
ate reward. We shall begin with Marya. You, too, are to accompany Our daughter, never setting a treacherous foot in Our court again as long as you live!”

Marya gasped and closed her eyes.

“But there are others well deserving of reward, Ayesha. As the future consort of a ruler—not to mention Our favorite child—We wish you to hear it meted out.”

He turned in his chair to look upon the Lady Shaabbah, who paled under his prolonged gaze.

After a time, he spoke. “We have not forgotten, for example, Our young, pretty,
faithless
junior wife, who helped Lady Jamela persuade Us of your disposition. She will be retired in disgrace—unless, within a year, she can provide Us with a healthy male heir, one she can prove beyond question was sired by Us. We leave it up to her to provide a method, satisfact
o
ry to Us, of guaranteeing its pedigree.”

Shaabbah blinked, a small and timid smile flirting about the corners of her mouth. She took a breath and straightened, a certain determin
a
tion visible in her bearing, Ayesha thought, a certain pride. A glance at the amused twinkle—others might have called it a savage glitter—in Mochamet al Rotshild’s eye told the Princess that he shared her observ
a
tion and opinion. Cast loose from Jamela, Shaabbah would make som
e
thing of he
r
self. Shaabbah would triumph.

Ayesha wondered why she cared.

“As for her lover,” Abu Bakr Mohammed went on, “guard-lieutenant Kabeer. You, sirrah, are to be reduced in rank and sent along to the Sa
v
age Continent, to serve another mistress. But ‘mistress’ in name alone, We are afraid, as you are first to be relieved by the executioner of those portions of your nether anatomy which got you into trouble. Performed under ane
s
thesia in the Palace infirmary, the process should be relatively painless.”

Kabeer swayed, his face gone gray.

The Caliph grinned. “Now that you know where you stand, Kabeer, We shall rescind Our order for your castration upon grounds of Caliphi
t
ic mercy, to inspire you to more faithful service in future—also because you are too liable to worsen your situation by buying off Our executio
n
er. That is, if We still kept an executioner around.

“Jamela—” Her eyes empty of fear or hope, the Caliph’s senior wife looked up again when her name was mentioned. He refused to look u
p
on her, keeping his eyes instead upon Ayesha. “Jamela is to be retired, penn
i
less, to that shabby Persian village whence she came.”

“But what of my son?” she demanded. Her voice was level, stripped of emotion. “
Your
son, Bu, your only legal heir?”

“
Min bhatlah,
David, will you please explain to the Lady Jamela, as once We heard you explain to the Princess, that, contrary to popular b
e
lief, there is no automatic inheritance of the Caliphate?”

Stunned by this swift turning of events, and by a certain hideous bri
l
liance in the Caliph’s judgments which he found himself both loathing and admiring, the rabbi could but nod in confirmation.

“In any case, Our former dear,” the Caliph continued, turning to face his senior wife at last, “that point shall soon be moot. As We were at some pain explaining to Ayesha, there is a war. Everyone—even poor, mindless Ali—is expected to serve.”

He glanced up at the guard-lieutenant, his voice sharper. “Put that
thing
into a uniform. Have it sent out with tomorrow’s troop shipment to the Island Continent!”

“It is not for the believers to go forth totally; but why should not a party of every se
c
tion of them go forth, to become learned in religion, and to warn the people when they r
e
turn to them, that haply they may beware?
”
—
The
Koran,
Sura IX

In the dusty stillness of a service corridor behind the Caliph’s library, a young man, tanned and turbaned, carefully removed a slim metallic wand from a hole he had drilled into the wall.

Daubing the aperture with a bit of spackling which he carried in his toolbox, now resting upon the floor, he gave the stuccoed wall an absent swipe to smooth it down. He played the hair-fine cord, leading from the wand into the box, back and forth into his palm until the elliptical hank could be fastened with another bit of wire and put away.

Glancing up the dimly gaslit hall, he stooped to the box.

There was a small, shrill squeal, then:

“...
point shall soon be moot
...”

A colorful miniature image of the Caliph was visible in a tiny wi
n
dow deep within the box.

“...
As We were at some pain explaining to Ayesha, there is a war. Ever
y
one
—
even poor, mindless Ali
—
is expected to serve. Put that
thing
into a uniform. Have it sent
—”

There was a
click.
The young man arose once again, dusting his hands off upon one another.

Smiling, he slung the toolbox over his naked shoulder and proceeded at a brisk pace down the corridor, satisfied that, at long last, he had something of substance for the evening transmission homeward.

**

“The evildoers shall have their portion, like the portion of
their fellows; so let them not hasten Me!”
—
The
Holy Koran,
Sura LI,
The Scatterers

“...We shall roll up heaven as a scroll is rolled for the writings....”
—
The
Koran,
Sura XXI

She sat waiting in a sidewalk restaurant in the busy heart of Rome, sharing a stained composition-covered table with three shabby foreig
n
ers. Young black men they were, perhaps students. They were of a co
r
rect age, speaking with heavy accents. One had brought a book-sized silver-colored chest. From twin, mysteriously screened apertures upon its face there issued a barbaric chant:

“Dancin’ in the dark, to the radio of love...”

This dubious miracle she took for granted. For her, at least at this particular moment, it was a common, sometimes pleasant, often irrita
t
ing phenomenon. At this pa
r
ticular moment, she did not mind it. To her left, heavy traffic squeezed by through a self-consciously quaint and cobbled street inadequate to handle it properly. There was a ru
m
bling hiss of rubber-tired wheels, a not totally unpleasant odor of burning p
e
troleum fra
c
tions inefficiently consumed.

Facing south, toward the Eternal City’s largest and most famous mosque, she realized that mounted sets of crossed bars, exactly like those worshipped by the ancient Christians, defiled the building. Moreover, people walked through its high-arched portals without so much as leaving their shoes upon the steps outside.

Any indignation she felt at the sacrilege seemed unreal, far away from her immediate concerns.

One of these was that she was about to meet David. Bored with wai
t
ing, with the present randomly acquired company and location, she was looking forward to seeing him. All around her hung an atmosphere of stagnant poverty, of a depression in which she was somewhat better off than the average. Absently she wondered what it was she did for a li
v
ing. No Caliph’s daughter would brazen unescorted into the streets of this strange, transformed city. David, she felt, was off somewhere, not very far away, in a general southeasterly direction.

The silver box continued pouring primitive music into the air.

She saw a police officer approaching from her right, a fortyish, pale blonde, almost plump woman, with rather short, curly hair. Not even the impossible phenomenon of a female law-enforcer surprised the girl. The woman wore a black cap with a short, highly polished visor extending halfway around her head, a light blue, epauletted tunic of cotton, a dark blue skirt, wool and scandalously short. Wrapped about her waist was a black leat
h
er pistol belt, stamp-tooled to resemble basket-weaving. There was no buckle
—
nor did Ayesha notice any other insignia.

Ayesha recalled having shared a casual word with the policewoman fifteen or twenty minutes earlier, upon her arrival at the cafe. Now she worried, not so much about the weapon the woman carried as about her own
—
a gray-black boxy little implement of death, rapid-fire, illegal in the extreme, slung by a black webbed nylon strap from one shoulder and concealed beneath her baggy overcoat.

Her right hand slipped through a hole cut in her coat pocket, tighte
n
ing about its plastic-paneled grip,

Nearing Ayesha, the policewoman drew her own weapon, a short, heavy-barreled revolver, very dark and therefore new, As its barrel rose, Ayesha could see its stubby front sight, its convex muzzle crown, even the faint, annular tool-markings about its bore. Thinking that pe
r
haps the woman planned to arrest her, Ayesha felt frustration rather than fear. The Cause—whatever cause that might happen to be
—
was too urgent to be thus inconvenienced,

As the woman reached Ayesha’s side, she pressed the cold muzzle of her revolver to the girl’s right temple, Ayesha felt a gentle bounce b
e
fore it made firm contact. To her utter surprise, just as the mysterious silver chest shouted
“Lights out!”,
the woman spat, “Goodbye, terro
r
ist!”

She pulled the trigger.

Ayesha heard the explosion in the center of her brain, not particula
r
ly loud. There was no pain. Her vision blacked abruptly
—
with some lingering granularity. More than anything, it was this loss of vision which made her angry,

She had time for two other thoughts; “Now I shall find out for ce
r
tain” and
“
I
was having such a good time with David. I am not yet ready to leave him.”

Child of her culture, child of many cultures, she somehow expected to begin drifting heavenward.

2

Instead, she awakened feeling depressed and shaken—something to which she was accustomed—with the blood vessels throbbing in the right side of her head.

Usually, when she had dreams like this one, she awoke just before she died. It was a long, long time before she felt like sitting up, longer still b
e
fore she thought to brush her porthole curtain aside to see where this odd vehicle had brought her upon this new and sunny day.