CALIPHATE(83)

Shyly, she'd asked, "I don't get to go out much. If I dress properly, could you, maybe . . . take me for a walk?"

He'd had to leave a six hundred dinar deposit, but that was within his means. (Why six hundred when her purchase price had been three? The cost of her training had been added to her value.) Other than that, the management had had no objections whatsoever. Since Hamilton had "hospitality of the house," they'd sent for a picnic lunch for the two from the kitchen. The two had left by the main gate to the castle, before the mosque and between the minarets.

From the castle they walked down to the town, and then to the lakeshore.

"I have a place," she confessed, still full of shyness, "up in a tower where I can see this. I dream sometimes of being free to walk the lake. Sometimes—yes, I know it sounds foolish—but sometimes I dream I'm a princess up there and a hero will cross the lake and take me away. Silly, no?"

"Maybe not so silly. Anything's possible."

"Not in the Caliphate," she said. "Not in the Caliphate for a woman . . . or a Christian . . . or a slave . . . or a whore."

"Stop it," he said. "What you have to do is not the same thing as what you are."

"Thank you, Johann," she said, quietly. "But even if that's true there are many things that I can never do that also define what I am." She stood facing the lake, wind blowing through the few loose strands of her hair, and continued, "I don't know how to cook. I can't sew or weave. Unless they decide to breed me they'll keep me from ever getting pregnant until it's too late for me to be a mother. If they did breed me it would be to produce a slave. I'd strangle the baby with my own hands, before I let that happen. No respectable man would ever marry me, not now. Independence for a woman is simply not possible here, except as a freelance whore.

"At least I can read and write. Well," she admitted, "I can read. My writing is not . . . good."

"That's okay," he said. "You could learn."

"Like you learned German?" she asked. "Yours is so much better than mine, so much more formal and correct. I was just a country girl, you see and . . .

"And this isn't even my country anymore."

Hamilton shook his head in agreement. No, it wasn't her country anymore.

"I've read of back when it was," Petra said. "My great-grandmother kept a journal. It's the only thing I really own for myself. I'd like to have lived back then. I wouldn't have done what she did. I'd either have fought, back when we could still fight, or I'd have left. She knew she should have done one or the other, too. By the time she knew that, though, it was too late."

"All right. Enough!" Ling said. "I believe you."

Yes, we do, said the voice in her head.

Hans stopped his gleeful dancing atop the Koran and said, "Okay. Now what was this all about?"

Tell him. Bring him to our side.

Ling exhaled heavily. "Where to begin?"

At the beginning is usually a good spot.

She nodded.

Stop nodding. You know how annoying that is to watch on a viewing screen back here. Now tell him.

"Your sister doesn't know any of this, but I'm not human," Ling said. She laughed at the expression on Hans' face, an even mix of disbelief and horror. "I mean I'm not human the way you are. Not born of woman. No father. I'm a genetically engineered being."

Hans' horrified look was like a dagger to her heart. She hastened to add, "I am one hundred percent human genes. But surely you noticed my skin and my breasts. Those are not normally found where I came from . . . where I was sold from. But Hans, I am all human inside. I can have children, provided that my pregnancy blocker is removed or allowed to run down. I feel. I think." She shrugged and let her head fall to one side. "What more do you want?"

"I'm sorry," he apologized, forcing his face to something less objectionable. "It was just a shock. You're wonderful. Please go on."

"Okay. I'm also a chippie. I have a thing planted in my brain."

My, this is a day for shocks, thought Hans.

"The reason I have a chip in my brain, and the reason I was genengineered, and the reason I was sold here, is that I am an enemy agent."

"Here to work against the Caliphate?" he asked. "Be still my heart."

"Yes," she admitted. "And that man you attacked . . . "

Hamilton spread out the thin blanket he'd found in the picnic basket, then walked to the lakeshore to look for some rocks to tack down the corners with. He was lucky to find two and an old brick; it just wasn't that kind of lake. He returned with these, adjusted the sheet slightly, then tacked down the three corners that were most into the wind. He invited Petra to sit.