Caliphate

Kitznen, Province of Affrankon, 26 Jumahdi I, 1531 AH (19 May, 2107)

"But why won't the Americans share their medicine with you, Besma?"

The older girl sighed, "Because we're at war, and it's a war we don't know how to end and they won't until we're all extinct." She thought about it for a minute and then walked to her trunk. From this she removed a textbook which she brought to the other girl.

She opened the book to a map of the globe. "This is what the world looks like. Here's where we are," she said, pointing to a green patch at one end of the largest land mass. That piece, Petra read, was labeled "Caliphate of Europe and Western North Africa." One small section, surrounded by green, was in red and labeled "Switzerland."

Besma's finger traced east, to a large red swatch extending down into the Balkans. "This is the Socialist Empire of the Tsar, Vladimir the Fifth. He's an enemy, too, but he isn't trying to extinguish us." The finger moved down to another section, colored in paler green, that stretched all the way from the upper part of the area labeled "Africa" over to some islands far to the right. "This is the Caliphate of Islam, Triumphant. I understand it's a mess."

Petra noticed that right in the middle of the Caliphate of Islam, Triumphant, on the eastern shore of the middle sea, there was a bare patch unmarked and unnamed. "And this?"

"I don't know," Besma said. "My teachers wouldn't talk about it."

Still farther down, the finger pointed to, "The Boer Free State, which owns most of Africa below the Sahara. A lot of the black slaves come from there. The Boers sell us their surplus population. The only good things about them are that they distrust America, too, and they provide us with a lot of technology we can't make for ourselves."

Moving her finger to the right, Besma marked, "This is the Celestial Kingdom of the Han. They also sell us some things we can't make for ourselves. They are at war with Nihon," the finger touched a large group of islands in the ocean marked "Peaceful." "Nihon is an ally of the American devils."

From there the finger moved southwest to a multicolored patchwork of little states, all crowded into a triangular peninsula. "This used to be a big country, but split into two, then three, then dozens. I don't know why."

"What's all this black?" Petra asked, her own little hand sweeping the two continents of the west, various islands in the sea called "Peaceful," the area south of the Kingdom of the Han, and two large islands off the coast of the Caliphate.

"That's the American devils, places they rule and places so closely allied to them they may as well rule them."