Sarah Zettel - Fool's War

It hardly seemed possible for the market place to be any more chaotic, but it was. It was twice as big as the market on Port Oberon and four times as crowded. Every person, every animal seemed determined to let loose at the tops of their lungs. Not even the swarms of drones underfoot could not keep up with the smells and litter.

Al Shei had heard that the drones, like most of the trams were guided by the settlement’s central communications complex, a place that was reported to make even the New Medina hospital look primitive.

The market’s stalls sheltered goods from who-knew-how-many worlds. The traders were dressed in ten dozen different costumes. New Medina silks, coffees and cottons were popular luxury items and its population took pride in its ancient trading heritage. To one side, a group of students hollered at each other about some point of Islamic law that Al Shei couldn’t quite catch. A hot breeze blew down the streets stirring the up the dust. The press and crowd weighted down her movements and, despite her wonder at it all, she began to feel like she was treading water to stay afloat rather than just walking through a noisy crowd.

Finally, she spotted the sign for the Ksathra Coffee house, one of the few cafes in the city that did not segregate its unmarried male and female patrons. Al Shei got herself a table in the back corner, away from the worst of the street noise and ordered a pot of turkish coffee from the cart-like server. The cafe had a filtration system in its stucco walls that combed out the dust and kept the heat somewhat controlled. While she waited, Al Shei studied the beautiful blue patterned tiles, considering what the cost would be for something similar for The Mirror of Fate , and found she was beginning to breathe easier.

Dobbs tried not to see the destruction around her. The Live One had managed to keep from shredding the Pasadena ’s network, but it hadn’t made any such efforts here. She flew past fragments and loops of programs struggling to knit themselves back together. A whole pathway cave in as the passed. She touched the dead, still ending of a burned out line.

What happened? Did freedom scare it that badly? Or did it just decide that in a world this huge it didn’t need to be careful?

The thought was strange and a little unnerving. She sent it down the line to the Guild Masters.

“It could be, Master Dobbs,” answered Havelock. “It might not even be aware that there are other intelligences outside its world.”

Wouldn’t be the first time . Dobbs squashed the thought and the others that threatened to follow it. She had to concentrate on the here and now.

The line behind her was stretched out over twenty miles of Farther Kingdom network and over more light years than she wanted to think about. The data running up and down its length was getting difficult to ignore. Unwanted sounds and sensations dribbled into her private mind, like loud conversations at a party when you were trying to concentrate on the person in front of you. Dobbs shut her private mind up as tightly as she could, but as long as she held onto the line, the unwanted information filtered in. Drips of circular reasoning. Pleas for maintenance that got nowhere. Frozen signals and stalled diagnostics.

And vanishing signals.

Dobbs stopped dead still.

Back along the length of the line, some packet of code dragged itself out from the path the line covered, and vanished. Yards away, it happened again.

“Agreed, Master Dobbs,” Havelock told her, almost before she formed the thought. “Back there.”

Dobbs doubled back along her line and flew toward the network’s other mind.

“‘Dama Al Shei?”

A heavily bearded man in immaculate white tunic and trousers picked his way between two small tables to stand in front of her. He bowed politely. His head was covered with a beautifully beaded cap and his sandals somehow had managed to repel all the dust. There was a glint in his eye that spoke of a familiarity with money.

“Peace be unto you,” Al Shei said, dropping into Arabic.

“And also unto you. I am Fedlifah Uysal.” Al Shei had originally heard about Uysal from friends of hers who crewed a corporate freighter. He had a reputation as a very dependable illegal operator.

“Thank you for meeting me.” Al Shei motioned him to a chair.

“You are most welcome, ‘Dama,” Uysal sat in his own chair and lifted the coffee pot. Al Shei pushed the spare cup closer. “Thank you.”

“You are from Istanbul, then, ‘Dama?” Uysal continued as she filled his cup with thick, black liquid.

“Not myself, but I have family there.” Al Shei sipped her own coffee.

“Do you? I have a number of cousins in the city proper…”

It was an old ritual, going back to the Slow Burn when Islam was in hiding. Both parties would try to determine how they were related. It was a very precise game. If you tried to claim too close a relationship, you risked getting exposed as a liar and embarrassed. If you didn’t know enough of your own lineage, you wouldn’t be able to make any kind of connection, and you might just lose your deal or your contact. Also, by revealing your family connections you made yourself vulnerable and showed yourself as trustworthy. Like snatching off the veils after prayer, it had become part of the tradition of Islam. Al Shei spun the dialog out and sat on her impatience. Eventually, Uysal and she determined they were fourth cousins, by marriage, once removed. It might even have been true.

“Well then, Cousin.” Uysal poured the last of the coffee into their cups. “Is this your first time in New Medina?”

“No, but I’ve been away so long it’s a fresh sight.” Patience, patience, she told herself. This one is going to play the game to the hilt and hurrying him will not do any good.

“The whole world is an amazing place,” he said with proprietary pride. “Built from the bedrock up. We’ve got more controls on our ecology than Earth.” He smiled at Al Shei’s arched brows. “You see, in the First Six treaties it was arranged that each faith would get its homeland.” He swept his hand out toward the palms. “Between us, the Jews, and the First-Faith Christians, it was necessary to create a lot of desert.” He drank down the last of his coffee. “Fortunately, we had some very determined engineers. The heat of this climate is primarily due to the fact that someone re-routed the lava from a volcano out there.” He pointed to the distant mountains. “It’s rather like running a heater filament under pavement to melt snow.” He smiled, obviously waiting for Al Shei to be impressed.

She was, actually, but she didn’t have the leisure time to hear more about how someone had managed to channel the lava.

“Cousin,” she said seriously. “I’ve been told you are a man to see about exotics.”

He smiled deprecatingly. “Cousin, I am the man to see about exotics.”

She nodded. Arrogance will out. “I’ve come into possession of something I shouldn’t have and don’t want. I need to know what it is and how it got to me.”

He tilted his cup toward him and looked into the bottom. “May I inquire, cousin, as to what you plan to do with this knowledge?”

“Wipe the thing out as effectively as possible,” she answered. “It’s making my life very difficult.”

His eyebrows both went up. “That is not a response I am accustomed to.” The server plowed a path to their table. Al Shei found their tab written on its back. She pulled out her pen and transferred over the credit to pay for the coffee.

Uysal waited with an air of complete patience until she had finished. “Can you give me the specifications of this…exotic?” he asked

Al Shei extracted a pair of wafer slivers from her belt pocket and pushed them across the table. “There’s what I’ve been able to learn.”