Caliphate

Cape Town, South Africa,

14 October, 2113

Curiously enough, paper books had never gone out of style. Perhaps this was because there was something comforting about the solidity of a book. Perhaps it was because, as many said, books made attractive wall coverings. Perhaps it was merely that books suited the human mind and body in a way that screen images and holographic projections simply could not. Whatever the case, books were still commonly printed in dead-tree format.

Caruthers had made a present of such a book to Hamilton, just as the latter had boarded the airship at Reagan National.

"I know you think we're dirty, John," Caruthers had said. "And you're right; we are. But the difference between us and the people we are fighting is that we have a chance to get better on our own . . . and they don't and never will. Here's proof that we might get better."

It was a huge book, Empire Rising, more than twelve hundred pages, exclusive of appendices, end notes, tables, bibliography and photographs. Hamilton had spent most of the three-day trip to Cape Town engrossed in it.

Hamilton closed the book just as the airship slid over the coastline on its way to the aerodrome northeast of Cape Town. From this altitude, the entire scene looked very neat, almost antiseptic. He knew, from both his readings and his instruction at OSI headquarters, that the core of the place was anything but antiseptic. Moslems might hate the American Empire, a feeling that was fully reciprocated, but the every day, present tense loathing of most African blacks and whites for each other put those American-Moslem antipathies in the shade for sheer intensity, if not necessarily for destructiveness.

Looking down at the book before sliding it into his carryall, Hamilton thought, Well . . . it's got to be a good step that things like this can be published again. After ninety years of censorship, perhaps we've gotten over the Three Cities.

In his heart though, however much he wanted to, he didn't believe it.

"Meneer De Wet?" the black driver from Koop Human Resources asked, as Hamilton stepped out of the underground corridor that connected the airship landing pit with the main terminal. The driver was medium height, balding, with a neatly trimmed beard and an expansive gut. Hamilton suspected the fat concealed an impressive amount of muscle.

"Yes," Hamilton answered. He'd been expecting to be picked up. Almost he offered his hand to the driver before the endless hours of drill in South African customs reasserted itself. "I'm De Wet."

"Caruthers told me to say, 'Hi,'" the driver said, in Bronx-accented English. Hamilton immediately felt a profound sense of relief. "You'll be working for me. My name here is Bonginkosi Mathebula . . . and if I see you almost offer me your hand again, I will break it. Control yourself, baas. My friends call me 'Bongo.' That's good enough.

"Officially," Bongo continued, "I am your indentured manservant. Unofficially, I'm in charge. Don't forget it. If we didn't need a reliable white front man, you wouldn't even be here."

* * *

The drive to the company guesthouse on the outskirts of Cape Town was long. Bongo drove while Hamilton sat in back. The black used the opportunity to lecture.

"A century and a half ago, the whites were on top. You should already have known that but one can never tell what the idiots at Langley may forget to pass on.

"They'd have stayed there, too," Bongo continued, "through a combination of pigheaded determination and bloody-minded ruthlessness. Ultimately, they were pretty sure that as long as the black opposition was supported by and in turn supported the communists, the west would never let white South Africa go under. That was true, too, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late twentieth century. This made the value of the white regime to the anti-Soviet coalition drop like a lead weight.

"The Boers and the Cape English saw the writing on the walls then and, facing a desperate race war with no possibility of help from their racial kin, they made the best deal they could.

"Unfortunately for South Africa, while not all the whites' fears came to pass, enough of them did. After majority rule was instituted, whites fled the country in droves. Some of them left because of the crime. Other got sick of nepotism and corruption masquerading as affirmative action. I'm sure still others left in sheer funk at not being the local master race anymore.

"Whatever the cause, the white portion of the South African population dropped substantially, about in half, even while the black and mixed populations grew. Even worse, it was the most technically skilled and capable whites who left, while those who stayed tended to be government flunkies and corporate bureaucrats."

Bongo slammed on the brakes and cursed at a black couple crossing the street in front of the company car. The couple just smiled at him and waved.

"Two factors changed that rough demographic stability. One was the roughly one third of the black female population of child bearing age that was infected with HIV, the virus that caused AIDS, the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. This not only killed them in disproportionate numbers, generally in their most fertile years, it caused a very serious social breakdown because of the number of orphans produced. Still worse, it put financial strain on a government that had difficulty enough eking out tax dollars from the many sticky fingers, white and black, those tax dollars passed through. The government, hoping for yet more money in foreign aid to pilfer, even denied that HIV caused AIDS, which of course let the problem rage out of control.

"Still, with low white birthrates and white flight from the country, one could have expected roughly similar proportions to be maintained.

"And so they would have been, had there not been a different wave of white flight in the world, commencing in the 2020s. That wave emanated from Europe. Some of it washed up in Australia and New Zealand. Some small part was allowed into the United States and its possessions. But only South Africa found itself in really desperate need for immigrants. Thirteen million Europeans found their way here."

Bongo's voice grew contemplative. "I have often wondered if the barbarian migrations that wrecked the Western Roman Empire didn't start just that way, one group in Mongolia raiding Chinese living north of the Great Wall, thereby causing the Chinese to push the first offending group right off its lands, starting a chain reaction. Whether it did or not, it sure worked that way here. First the Moslems nudged us, then we made their lands uninhabitable, they in turn went to Europe, which drove the Europeans here, which further fucked the blacks here, in the ass and without grease.

"It might not have been so bad, except for two other factors. Those Europeans who fled were typically highly fertile and more than a little bitter about being driven—whatever the truth of the matter, that's how they felt about it—from their original homes. They were, moreover, the most highly conservative of Europeans. They were not remotely interested in nepotism masquerading as affirmative action. Nor did they see why affirmative action should disadvantage them, since their ancestors had had nothing to do with apartheid. This is all a fair point of view, you'll agree," Bongo said, smiling over his shoulder at Hamilton.

"The civil war that broke out in 2038 lasted for nine years and cost millions of lives. At the end of it, disciplined fire, the old European military tradition, and a critical alliance with the Zulu people ended black majority rule in South Africa. By 2065, virtually all of sub- Saharan Africa was under white sway once again. They've learned a lot, though. That controlling hand is often felt only lightly. They prefer to rule through locals, much as the French did for more than half a century after notionally giving up their empire.

"Still, give the Boers . . . oh, yes, they're all Boers now, even the Cape English . . . give them their due. They pay their bills. The only exception to effective white rule in sub-Saharan Africa is Zululand, a hefty chunk carved out of Natal and points north for the Zulu in full payment for their services. And this time they weren't idiot cheapskates about it; this time they gave the Zulu a real country."

"What the fuck?" Hamilton's eyes could not believe what they were seeing, one man, two women in hijab, half a dozen kids with the oldest girl in hijab as well. "A Moslem family? Running around free?"

Bongo raised his eyes heavenward and shook his head with disgust. "I knew those assholes at Langley would miss important details." His hand left the steering wheel to point a finger generally off to the right front. "We've got maybe three hundred thousand Moslems here in Cape Town, something like three-quarters of a million in the country as a whole, exclusive of possessions and protectorates. There's a mosque over there," he said. "Pretty large one, actually. They call it the 'Red Mosque.' No, it isn't painted red and never has been. About forty years ago, a wild-eyed imam used to preach the jihad from its pulpit. Then one Friday, the Boers sent in ten thousand assegai-wielding Zulu. They killed every man, woman, and child in the place, then went on to kill every imam in Cape Town and their families, except for a very few the government took under its protection. After that, about fifty-thousand more of them were sold, some locally and some to the Caliphate, as slaves.

"Since then? Never a problem with the Moslems here. Never a peep, as a matter of fact. And some thousands of them drop Islam and become Christians every year. See, Baas De Wet, terror works."