"Who builds them pretty?" Hamilton asked. To him, all airships looked pretty much alike, differing only in size and, at unknown distances, not even in that.
"The Chinks," the flight engineer answered. "That's one of theirs, an Admiral Cheng Ho class, if I'm not mistaken . . . that, or a Long March. They differ only in size, not in shape. The Long March class carries about five- or six hundred tons more."
"Well," Hamilton said, "all airships are pretty. What makes that so special?"
"The lines of the thing." Retief shook his head, saying, "You don't see it, do you?"
"I confess not."
"Oh, well." The engineer sighed. "I suppose the Parthenon wouldn't have been pretty to the Maya, either. Just trust me, though, that is one beautiful ship."
"If you say so," Hamilton half-agreed.
"The other thing is," Retief added, "the Chinks don't use theirs much to carry slaves."
"You don't approve of the slave trade?" Hamilton asked, stone mask descending once again.
"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."