"No insult intended," the engineer answered, "but no, I don't. But I've got a family back in Pretoria and they have to eat, so I do my job and mind my own business. It's still disgusting."
You give me a little hope for humanity, friend, Hamilton thought, even as he made himself turn on his heels and walk away as if angry. He had to walk away; the temptation to ask the flight engineer for help in freeing the children was too great to trust himself had he stayed.
* * *
The Austrian Alps, rugged, forbidding and ice-capped, showed out the side windows. Switzerland was somewhere off to the west. The airships never crossed Swiss airspace unless they were planning on landing in Switzerland or had authorized passage through. Unauthorized crossings would invite the immediate attention of the Swiss Air Force, at which point the choices were landing or being shot down. Since slavery was illegal in Switzerland, the only western European state not subsumed in the Caliphate, ships like this one were well advised to avoid the country's airspace entirely.
"How do you live with yourself, Bongo?" Hamilton asked, in the privacy of their shared quarters. "How do you deal with the things you do?"
"You might as well know," Bongo said, "my real name is Bernard Matheson. And, yes, I'm from the Bronx. As for how I live with it, with myself . . . well . . . about a century ago four million of our countrymen were murdered because there was a mindset that wouldn't do bad things even to prevent worse ones. That allowed another mindset to arise, the kind that would do horrible things to prevent bad ones. For me, I'm content to take the middle road, and do bad things to prevent horrible ones. Yeah, it bothers me. Yeah, sometimes I sleep badly. But the fact remains, because of the bad things I do, a lot of much worse things are prevented."
Hamilton sighed, thinking of the PI campaign. And there, the evil—he thought there was no other word for the ethnic cleansing campaign he'd been a part of—was justified only by the prospect that, once the Moros were moved out, there would be a modicum of peace and an end to the endemic mutual massacre that had plagued the islands for centuries.
"Yeah . . . I understand. Been there; done that."
"You've done well, by the way, hiding how you feel about this," Bongo said. "I overheard the flight engineer worrying about his job because he might have offended you. You know they never pay any attention to us kaffirs, so they speak freely in front of us. Even the good ones do that."
Bongo frowned. "I almost forgot." He reached into a pocket and drew out a small computer memory card. "This message came in last night. I took the liberty of looking it over. At least you're not going to have to watch the kids auctioned off. Someone bought the whole lot, sight unseen. We have to deliver them to the town of Honsvang after we land. I've already arranged ground transportation from am- Munch."
Interlude
Kitzingen, Federal Republic of Germany,
11 November, 2005
It was late night and the town was quiet. Gabrielle and Mahmoud's apartment, however, was anything but. Nor had it been peaceful for months, ever since Mahmoud had revealed his intention of emigrating to America.
"There," said Mahmoud, pointing at the television screen as he stormed from one side of the small living room to the other, "there is the face of Europe's future! That is what you insist on staying to see."
The screen showed the face of a young Belgian woman, one Muriel Degauque, who had blown herself up in a fairly unsuccessful suicide attack on American forces in Iraq. She was a convert to Islam or, as Moslems preferred to think of it, a "revert."
"Nonsense," Gabi countered. While Mahmoud was enraged, she remained very calm. It was one of the things he loved about her . . . and that infuriated him at the same time. "She is, she was, just one poor disillusioned girl, hardly the wave of a flood of conversion."
"Indeed?" said Mahmoud, sneering. "Well then, how do you categorize Cat Stevens? Idris Tawfik? Yvonne Ridley?"
"If any of them were suicide bombers, surely I'd have heard of their names. Well . . . except for Cat Stevens, of course. Him I know about. And they're all harmless." Gabi shrugged eloquently.
"Susanne Osthof? Have you heard of her? Do you think for a minute she didn't participate in her own kidnapping in Iraq? They even found money on her that was paid for her ransom!"
"There was a perfectly reasonable explanation for that, Mahmoud. The kidnappers simply reimbursed her for property she lost when they took her." Gabi looked upon Mahmoud with suspicion. "It's that Catholic priest who's filling you with this nonsense, isn't it?"
"You really believe both those things, don't you?" Mahmoud seemed to wilt. Before her calm, he felt his rage melt away.
"What I believe is that since you took up this Christian nonsense you've gone from a very reasonable and very bad Moslem to a very unreasonable and altogether too 'good' Christian. Relax, Mahmoud; there are several hundred millions of us. It will be a very long time before the nuts take over here."
"There are several hundred million of you that are spiritually empty vessels that Islam is eager to fill," Mahmoud said. "It's your lack of faith that makes you, and Europe, vulnerable."
Gabi shook her head. She was quite comfortable without religion, indeed, to the extent she retained some trappings of it, those made her uncomfortable. She couldn't imagine converting, and especially not to such an austere and anti-female faith as Islam. (As she saw it, Islam was anti-female; there were many who would have disputed that.) Since she could not imagine it for herself, imagining it for any substantial numbers of other people was simply inconceivable.
Mahmoud sat heavily on the couch next to Gabi and reached out to take her hand. "Please come with me?" he asked, for the hundredth time.
"To America? Mahmoud, I can't, I just can't. Anyplace but there."
"It is the only safe place for us, Gabi. It's the only place in the world with the will, the faith, the heart, and the strength of culture to remain free."
Gabi snorted. "Culture? America has no culture."
"This culture they don't have? It seems to dominate the world pretty well for something nonexistent."
Undeterred, Gabi marched on. "It's a place where the poor are free to sleep under bridges in the winter, yes? It's a place where the rich are free to exploit the workers, no? It's a place with race riots and lynchings . . . a place where the garbage is piled a meter deep to either side of their ramshackle highways."
"You really believe that? Racism? What does racism mean when blacks in America have higher per capita incomes than whites in Europe."
"That's not true anymore," Gabi answered huffily, pulling away her hand. "I just saw the figures and—"
"Don't think just about some exchange rates," Mahmoud interrupted. "Think purchasing power parity. And there, Sweden is beneath Mississippi. Why do you have ten percent unemployment when America's is under five percent? It's not even supposed to be possible to get under five percent, but they've done it. And most of the Americans are out of work only for a very short time. Most of Europe's unemployed are going to stay unemployed. Ah . . . never mind that. Just answer: How are you going to make jobs for all the Moslems if you've got ten percent unemployment? Coolie jobs? Do you think they'll settle, in the long run, for coolie jobs? In the last sixty years Europe has created maybe five million jobs, almost all of them in government, which produces nothing. America has created more than ten times as many, almost all of them productive."