Up From The Skies

The boy looked up at the morning sky and saw a dozen military helicopters. A battle broke out and several men in the village were killed in the gunfight. The air was soon filled with the sound of wounded men screaming in agony, and women and children crying with fear. Then the boy saw a soldier aim his rifle at him. The boy stood, unable to move, as the soldier grinned and took aim. Before the soldier pulled the trigger, a sergeant hit the soldier on the arm with his hand and motioned with his head to follow him. The boy ducked into an alley, where he saw some people lined up against a wall before they were shot. He saw his mother and father up against the wall. The commander of the firing squad was a lieutenant with blond hair and steely blue eyes. The lieutenant’s face looked gaunt, like he hadn’t slept for days. Then the lieutenant gave the order to fire. The last thing the boy saw was a volley of gunfire...

Mark Tardif woke up with a gasp. It wasn’t the first time he had had this dream; it was a recurring dream from his childhood. For a moment, he didn’t know where he was. Then, when he sat up in bed and looked around him, he saw a woman lying in bed next to him, still asleep. She was a prostitute that he had picked up in the bar downstairs the night before. Like most prostitutes in this part of the galaxy, she was a copy. The brothels preferred copies that were sterile when they were cloned.

When Tardif stopped panting several minutes later, he put his hands to his face and muttered angrily, “Ohlendorf!”

“What’s an ohlendorf?” the girl in bed with him asked sleepily.

The captain in the dream was First Lieutenant Otto Ohlendorf, an officer in the Janissaries. The boy was Tardif himself. When Tardif was eight years old in Earth years, Ohlendorf’s platoon swooped down on his village in search of rebels. Both of Tardif’s parents were killed in the skirmish and he was placed in an orphanage. When Tardif became a man, he was accepted into the military academy of the Confederation, where he graduated near the bottom of his class. Tardif excelled on the range; he made sharpshooter his first time on the range. However, he had difficulty staying out of trouble. He faced court martial after a shoot out in an alley on Planet H2Q 2C7, but his regimental commander, First Colonel Vladimir Rasputin, suggested that he be sent on a mission to assassinate General Ohlendorf, who had turned rouge. Tardif’s orders were “to handle with extreme care.” As leader of a special hit team of twelve men and women, he wasn’t expected to survive. Besides Tardif, there was only one other member of the hit team left: Mehmet Ökür, who considered it a point of honour to always draw blood with his bayonet. If Ökür hadn’t used his bayonet in combat, he cut his arm to draw blood.

The Janissaries were an elite corps in the Confederation army whose mission was to seek out and destroy smugglers and insurgents in the galaxy. Tardif and Ökür were both members of the Janissaries. Their target, General Ohlendorf became notorious as commander of Special Detachment D of the Janissaries. SPD-D, as they were called, wiped out whole villages and even entire planets in their search for rebels and smugglers. That was the stick. The carrot was to build hospitals and schools, pave roads, and bring electricity and running water to places in the galaxy that had never had these things before. Ohlendorf’s superiors couldn’t deny that his tactics had been effective, because his sector, Delta Quadrant, soon reported almost no rebel activity. However, word of atrocities hit the press when a journalist, Veronica Guerin, got hold of top secret documents, including a memo from Ohlendorf criticizing “excesses” in the Janissaries’ war against the insurgents. Ohlendorf pointed to problems with discipline and morale; drunkeness and drug addiction were endemic, he wrote. It was understood that Ohlendorf’s tactics had the tacit approval of his superiors, but once news of this secret war hit the press, Ohlendorf became expendable. Then Ohlendorf was indicted by the Intragalactic Tribunal of Justice for war crimes and crimes against humanity. With two regiments under his command, Ohlendorf led a mutiny; he remained on the run, a rogue general whose superiors wanted him handled with extreme caution.

First Lieutenant Mark Tardif and Senior Staff Sergeant Mehmet Ökür were on Planet K6A-2S7, Delta Quadrant, in search of Ohlendorf. Intelligence operatives had placed Ohlendorf somewhere in this quadrant, though Tardif and Ökür couldn’t be sure how current the information was. Officially, Tardif and Ökür were on K6A-2S7 for R and R. Though almost everybody on this planet was a Muslim, this planet had several nude beaches where people sunbathed à la Cannes. These beaches weren’t just for the tourists. There was a kind of modesty that permeated these beaches, where everybody looked like everybody else, the women like the other women and the guys like the other guys. If somebody showed up at this beach wearing a veil or a scarf, all dressed in black down to the ankles, this would be a crying lack of modesty. Such a woman is saying to the world, “Hey, look at me! See how modest I am!” This behaviour, coming to a nude beach fully clothed, is not modest but provocative; it is to call attention to one’s self just as surely as if one stripped naked at an intersection of a busy street.

The Muslims on this planet are not lacking in sophistication. They understand that young people do what’s natural. At this beach, people meet au naturel, like it’s nothing to be completely naked before the other sex. Besides, there’s always some old grandmother as a chaperon for the adolescent girl. They don’t have sex here; that would be uncool. They can’t make out with each other here either. In fact, the women sit apart from the men on the other side of the beach, but in full view of the men, on many nudist beaches on this planet. Young people come to this beach to check each other out, that’s all. They only come here to meet other people and make new friends. The people on this planet still believe in marriage. Even with online dating across billions of planets in outer space, you still have to meet somewhere, don’t you? You have to make a first date. A nudist beach on a distant quadrant in the far reaches of the galaxy is as good a place as any. It all starts with a photo and a smile. However, that’s life a thousand years, maybe ten thousand years from now.

Now, Muslim women will never completely abandon the scarf or the veil; it won’t happen. Ten thousand years from now, some Muslim women will chose to cover her hair, no matter what. Given the choice between covering her hair and saving the world from certain annihilation, she will wear the scarf and let the world be damned. They call it “modesty.” But if a Muslim girl dresses like Eve on a nude beach, there must be a reason for it. Besides, girls from strict Muslim families will wear a two-piece. This modesty is considered appropriate on a nudist beach on this planet. Some people, you must understand, are naturally shy.

There are billions of people living on this planet in tall high rises a hundred or two hundred stories tall. If you look outside your window during work hours, you might see an airplane right outside your window zigzagging between buildings and around other airplanes. On the streets of this planet, Tardif and Ökür hear the cries from the muezzins in the minarets of the mosques: “Bismallah ihr-rahim ihr-rahman.” But almost nobody knows what the Bismillah means anymore because almost nobody speaks Arabic. Like roosters in the morning, one after the other, the muezzins call the faithful to prayer. Every block has at least one mosque, all of which can be rotated on their foundations so that the qibla, the niche that holds the Quran, always faces the holy city of Mecca faraway on Planet Earth, no matter where Earth may be in the heavens. Among the Muslims on this planet are some of the most noted astrophysicists in the galaxy, all because the Muslims want to know how they can find the Holy City of Mecca at any time.

There are other people besides Muslims on this planet, of course, mostly Christians and Jews. Because Christians and Jews are people of the dhimma, fellow monotheists, they are tolerated. Their prophets, Moussa (Moses) and Issa (Jesus), are even esteemed by Muslims, though not as highly as Muhammad. However, the peoples of the dhimma have to pay a special tax, since they don’t pay the Muslim zakat, the tax for taking care of the poor. Never mind that the tithes that they pay to their churches or synagogues may go towards taking care of the poor in their own communities; they still have to pay the special tax in lieu of the zakat. What’s more, they are not allowed to proselytize. A man walking around with a sign saying “John 3:16” was whipped and heavily fined. Non-Muslims are tolerated, but they have to be discrete. In the end, most non-Muslims born here choose to leave this planet.

Of course, the guys and the girls on the beach don’t always hear the call of the muezzins in the afternoon. That’s because the blood is rushing away from their ears, and the young don’t have it in them to be pious like their elders. Once they have found the right shepherd or the right shepherdess, however, maybe they will stop going to the beach and listen to the call of the muezzin. They will pray five times a day, give alms to the poor, observe the fast during the holy month of Ramadan, and try to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, though Mecca is many thousands of light years away on Planet Earth. Young people have always understood, at least intuitively, that heaven is for the dead and the dying. Therefore, the young people on this beach are not yet ready to make their peace with God; they aren’t ready to die. Fortunatlely, people can watch the Muslim faithful make their circumambulations around the Kaaba at Mecca on DVD.

Tardif and Ökür have nothing to do on a Sunday afternoon, so they go to a nude beach. On this beach, the guys sit on one side of the beach while the girls sit on the other. The vendors selling hot dogs and shish kebabs are careful not to let their eyes linger on the nubile bodies of the young maidens for too long as they serve their customers. There are divorcees at this beach too, as well as single mums and women past a certain age who have never married. Then Tardif sees a girl wearing nothing but her pale skin. He can see the tits and ass, the thighs and hips perfectly. She’s absolutely gorgeous, tall, like a fashion model. She’s the perfect woman, Tardif thinks. She could be a movie star. And her eyes! She has large dark brown eyes the colour of chocolate chips. Above all, he contemplates her locks long and flowing like a river, black like the morning sky before a muezzin on Earth sees the sliver of moon and the Morning Star on the first day of Ramadan. It’s the lightning bold. However, she probably wears the scarf and the long chador on the street so that nobody can contemplate her long and beautiful hair.

“How do I win her love?” sighs Tardif.

“First, you must become a Muslim,” replies Ökür, who is a Muslim, a Turk. “You must swear that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammed is his Prophet. Then you must talk to her father. In the end, it’s her father who decides whether the marriage takes place.”

Tardif takes a picture of her with his cellular phone. (They still have cellular phones on this planet, you know.) You can communicate with people even on distant planets millions of light years away, though it takes about twenty-nine minutes for a radio signal to travel from Earth to Mars right now, in 2010 CE. However, they will have greatly reduced the time it takes for messages to travel from planet to planet thousands of years into the future. Once they have deduced the causes of interference of these messages, like cosmic debris from asteroids, they will be able to facilitate intraplanetary communication even over many solar systems in our galaxy.

After successfully matching the face in the photograph with a name in a directory on his cellular phone, Tardif goes to the village where the girl lives with her parents. All the people in this village live in high rises hundreds of stories tall. Some of these high rises even have birds that fly around unmolested inside and nest freely, and petting zoos for the children. There are whole floors set aside as parks. Since building materials are scarce in this galaxy, the buildings on this planet are all made from millions of hologram images shining simultaneously from a single light source. Because light particles have mass, it is now possible to build houses or motor vehicles from hologram images. It is though you live in a house or apartment created by a movie projector. Whenever you want to move, you simply remove the microchip from this projector that stores the information for your house or apartment and take it with you. The hologram images of your apartment that can be stored on a sillicon microchip in your cellular phone are not very expensive, but you can buy a lot only at a very high premium. Therefore, most people on this planet rent lot space.

In his search for the girl’s identity, Tardiff learns that the girl’s name is Turhan. She’s Turkish rather than Arabic or Persian. Maybe her family no longer speaks the Turkish language, but they all know where they came from; they know that they came from Turkey on Planet Earth, from the city of Istanbul, many centuries ago, though Istanbul, once one of the most beautiful cities on Earth, may no longer exist. With pride, people of Turkish descent on this planet still say: “Ne mutlu Türküm diyene!” Happy is he who can say that he’s a Turk. However, many people no longer know what this phrase means. Everybody speaks English now, or some language based on English.

The father of the girl is a whirling dervish and astrophysicist. Tardif knocks on the door, and an old man answers it. Tardif says the shahada:“In the name of Allah the Most Compassionate, there is no god but Allah and Muhammed is his Prophet.” He even says it in Arabic, though nobody speaks Arabic on this planet anymore, except when they read from the Quran. This is not to say that people don’t know the shahada when they hear it.

The old man says nothing but waits for Tardif to speak again.

“I would like to talk to your daughter,effendi,” says Tardif. “Her name is Turhan, isn’t it?”

“What is your name?” asks the old man.

“Muhsin Latif,” replies Tardif.

Muhsin Latif is not his real name, of course, but people in this galaxy often have several names. It is how they screen calls on their cellular phones.

“I’m sorry, Muhsin Bey,” says the old man, “but my daughter is getting married tomorrow night. The women are about to perform the henna ceremony. If you aren’t from here, they put henna tattoos on the bride’s body the night before the wedding. It’s a Turkish custom.”

Then he says good bye and shuts the door.

A few weeks later, Tardif and Ökür see Turhan walking down the street with a white scarf embroidered with gold thread in the seam and a black chadordown to her ankles. Though she’s only about seventeen or eighteen in Earth years, she’s with a man in his forties, bald on top with hair to the sides of his head like Albert Einstein, like he’s a nuclear physicist deep in thought. Must be, this man is her husband, but Turhan doesn’t seem to be very happy to be with him. Probably, she thinks that he’s too old.

“Maybe we should leave this planet,” suggests Ökür, seeing the pain on Tardif’s face.

Tardif doesn’t want to leave this planet just yet. He and Ökür will go to the beach again. A few weeks later, he sees another girl from across the divide that separates the sexes. She’s not as beautiful as Turhan, but she has a certain allure, with curly light brown hair past her shoulders and a round face. Her tits are small and she has a little bit of a belly. Maybe her ass is a little too big when she sits on her beach towel and shakes her hair, but Tardif likes her face when she laughs while talking to her friends; she has a cute face. She has a pretty smile and a ready laugh.

Tardif learns through the directory in his cellular phone that the girl’s name is Aziza. When he finds out where she lives, he goes to her father’s house. He says to her father, “In the name of Allah the Most Compassionate, there is no god but Allah and Muhammed is his Prophet.”

When he asks permission to talk to his daughter, the father agrees. Tardif and Aziza talk on the balcony of the apartment for about a half hour; they seem to get along well enough. Tardif doubts that Aziza is very attracted to him, but he likes her. She knows that her father wants her to marry. Therefore, when Tardif comes back, she will talk to him on the balcony like a good daughter. When Ökür tells him that it’s time to make a marriage proposal to the father, Tardif asks the father if he can marry his daughter; the father agrees.

The father of the bride rents a huge atrium at an expensive hotel in the same building as the apartment of the family of the bride. Tardif and Aziza are married before hundreds of people, all of whom are Aziza’s friends or members of her family. As on the beach, the women sit apart from the men, ullalating as they celebrate the wedding. Somebody is playing a keyboard synthesizer. By pressing a few buttons, the keyboard player can make hologram images of musicians appear on stage with him. The three other musicians are playing Arabic instruments: the zither-like qanun, the viol-like rahab, and a lute-like oud, only these musicians are merely hologram images. There are belly dancers to entertain both sexes, female dancers for the men and male dancers in drag for the women. (The male dancers are probably homosexual, but they don’t want heterosexual men anywhere near the women.) Then a female singer sings a haunting ballad in Arabic for everybody at the reception, though nobody on this planet can speak Arabic anymore. However, all eyes are on the singer, as though everybody can follow her story told in song. Must be the ways she tells her story with her hands.

During the reception, the bride and the groom steal away upstairs to their hotel suite. When Tardif and Aziza consummate their marriage, it is somewhat of a disappointment for both of them, lacking in passion. Though he likes Aziza, Tardif realizes that he’s still in love with Turhan. Who is Aziza in love with? Tardif knows that it isn’t him. It’s also the first time that Tardif has ever had sex with a virgin, so it’s strange for him making love to a girl who can’t even kiss properly. However, Aziza conceives soon after their wedding night. Tardif hopes that she will love him, and that he will love her. However, it doesn’t happen, even though Aziza has a son, whom they name Ali.

About a year after the wedding, Tardif and Ökür see Turhan walking down the street with her husband. She is obviously pregnant, but she looks miserable. When Turhan has the baby, the delivery will be extremely difficult. In the end, the baby will die and Turhan will almost lose her life. What’s more, she can no longer have children, and her husband will divorce her. Though beauty is a prized quality in a woman everywhere in the galaxy, fertility is more important on this planet. For Muslims on this planet, the reason for sex and marriage is to have children.

Now, not all women bear children through natural childbirth in this galaxy. Women of the middle class and up usually conceive by placing an ovum in a petri dish and then fertilizing it with a man’s sperm. Then they put the petri dish in an incubator for forty to forty-five weeks, until the product of the sperm and ovum is able to survive outside the incubator as a full-term baby. Should a woman experience an unwanted pregnancy, they can remove the zygote surgically and place it in an incubator. Some women even have abortions, though people don’t talk about it. Abortion is illegal on some planets, but women have always found ways around the laws.

There are all kinds of societies in this galaxy, from the most advanced to the most primitive. Technology has not produced greater social equality. On the contrary, it has intensified class differences and created an even greater divide between the rich and the poor, and between the most technically advanced and most primitive societies. Historically, each wave of technology has created a new class of entrepeneurs who leave people in the other classes in the dust. Thus, there are people with laptop computers sitting on park benches and men hunting with spears in rain forests while their women dig up tubers. In between those two extremes are farmers who still farm with an ox and a plough, people who work in dirty factories and dangerous mines deep underground, and homeless beggars on the streets. There are those who live in houses built of hologram images and travel from planet to planet in space shuttles while billions live in crude shantytowns. The poor you will have with you always.

For billions of people, sex and natural childbirth is the only way that they can afford to bring babies into the world. Then there are those for whom natural childbirth is a question of aesthetics: for pious people like the Muslims on this planet, the rigours of natural childbirth are woman’s punishment for Eve having deceived Adam into eating of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Most people in the galaxy have found the idea of heaven and hell as places of reward or punishment after death aesthetically disagreeable; these people would never sit on hard wooden pews in a church. But there are still those who believe that people deserve to suffer, fundamentalist Christians and Orthodox Jews, for instance, as well as radical Muslims. When it was learned that Turhan could no longer have children, the members of her family merely sighed, ”Inshallah.” If God wills it, it must be.

Tardif had become similarly fatalistic while living on this planet. As a sharpshooter in the Janissaries, the elite corps of the army of the Confederation, it was still Tardif’s mission to track down Otto Ohlendorf and handle with extreme caution. However, Ökür feared that Ohlendorf was slipping away because of Tardif’s inaction.

“A woman is fitna,” said Ökür with disapproval. “A woman is a distraction. If we are to find Ohlendorf, we must leave this planet. You must forget about her.”

Tardif’s reply was, ”Inshallah.” If God wills it.

Even though Tardif was still married to Aziza, he approached Turhan’s father to ask for Turhan’s hand in marriage. Polygamy was practised on this planet, so it was permissible for Tardif to take another wife. First, Tardif said the shahada: “In the name of God the Most Compassionate, there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet.” Then he stated the purpose of his visit.

“I remember you, Muhsin Bey,” said the old man with a bow. “Do you know who I am?”

When Tardif didn’t respond, the old man continued: “I am Sheik Necmettin Recip Tayyıp Erdoǧan, a Mehlevi dervish. We adhere to the teachings of Mevlana Jalal ad-Din al-Rumi. Maybe you have heard of him?”

“The mystic and the poet?” asked Tardif. “Yes, I have heard of him…”

The Sheik laughed. “A mystic and poet indeed!” he scoffed. “Jalal ad-Din wasn’t just a mystic and poet, Muhsin Bey, but a saint. It was the Prophet who revealed the Quran, but it was Mevlana who showed others that the Quran had a heart and soul, that the Quran was alive.”

Then the old man extended an invitation: “We are having a meeting tonight. You are most cordially invited, my friends!”

When Tardif was alone with Ökür, he said, “Tell me what you know about the dervishes.”

Ökür shrugged and replied, “They mostly keep to themselves, Tardif. Many people don’t even consider them to be real Muslims. They have often been persecuted, because they say and do strange things. For instance, they have been known to say that they are God when they really only mean to say that all things are one with God and they have attained unity with God. As well, a woman named Rabia performed a wedding ceremony with the Quran. That’s to say, she made the Quran her husband. However, they have a certain mystique. They spin around to make themselved dizzy and attain a state of ecstasy in an attempt to achieve unity with God. That’s why they are called ‘whirling dervishes.’ We shoudn’t be in any danger if we attend their meeting. They are mostly harmless.”

“Mostly harmless?” asked Tardif, raising an eyebrow.

Ökür shrugged his shoulders again and replied, “The original assassins were an order of dervishes, but I doubt that these dervishes are assassins. Besides, the Sheik is an astrophysicist, not a hit man.”

Tardif and Ökür decided to accept the Sheik’s invitation.

At the Sheik’s lodge, there are about twenty or thirty men and women present to commemorate the day that the Prophet was conceived. As is their custom, the men sit on one side of the living room while the women sit on the other. Everybody must remove his or her shoes upon entering the house, but slippers are provided for everybody. The women of the Sheik’s household serve refreshments for the guests. Everybody has a meal of lentil soup, beans, rice, and quinces. It is Turhan who serves Tardif a cup of very strong mint tea. She smiles mysteriously, without speaking to him, except to offer him a cup of tea. Then she makes a little bow and covers her face with the hem of her scarf. Must be, she knows the purpose of his visit.

After the meal, the Sheik leads all the men to an octagonal prayer hall downstairs in the basement. “Come and join us in an exercise that will free the soul!” he urges.

The meeting starts with a series of deep breathing exercises, with the congregation inhaling and exhaling as one the word: “Allah!” Then, to the beat of a drum on a CD player, a man in a conical felt hat and a skirted white cassock begins to spin counterclockwise with arms outstretched, the right palm up and the left palm down, in the centre of the octagon. Soon the entire congregation is dancing in concentric circles around the dancer in the middle, chanting the Muslim creed, slowly at first, then faster: “La ilaha illa llah!” There is no god but Allah.

Then the Sheik pulls Tardif up from his seat by the hand as a signal to join the other dancers; Ökür also joins the dancers. Tardif and Ökür dance with the other dancers clockwise around the dancer in the middle, who is still spinning counterclockwise, like the planets orbiting around the sun, spinning around like tops. They lose all track of time and space. They aren’t even dizzy. Lost in the whirl and the rhythm of the drum, the dancers shout, over and over: “La illaha illa llah!”

Only afterward, when the dancing is over, does Tardif look at the clock on his cellular phone and realize that they have been dancing for more than an hour. Strange to say, he doesn’t feel dizzy, even after all the spinning. With everybody seated in rapt attention at the foot of their master, the Sheik asks: “What is time? Is it real or just an illusion? Maybe it is something that man uses to measure linear progress in a timeless universe. Maybe minutes and seconds are really only units of measure, like centimetres and kilometres. If you retreat to your secret, inner self, time takes a different form and has a different meaning. It does not flow like a river during a flood but sits still like a clear mountain lake. Haven’t you noticed that time is different in dreams? In dreams, past, present, and future become one. Time is only a dimension that keeps man occupied with the things of this world, not on God. For God, there is no time.”

After all the dervishes get ready to leave, the Sheik asks Tardif and Ökūr to stay behind. Through the telescope upstairs in his study, he shows them the planet Venus. “Even here, far away from the Earth’s solar system, we can observe Venus, the Morning Star, and know when it will be the start of Ramadan here on this planet. Come, take a look!”

Politely, both Tardif and Ökūr look at Venus through the Sheik’s telescope. Though Tardif knows little about astronomy and astrophysics, he has always been awed by the beauty of the night sky.

Then the Sheik gets down to business. “You are here to meet my daughter,” he says to Tardif. “I will send her down.”

A few minutes later, Turhan comes downstairs. Tardif watches as she slowly descends the staircase like a queen in a fantasy. When she is at the foot of the stairs, she approaches him with eyes lowered. Except for a white scarf on her head, she is dressed like a dervish, with a long and billowy white caftan like her father’s. Then she removes her scarf from her head and rests it on her shoulders. “How did you like the meeting?” she asks, smiling.

“It was very exhilerating,” replies Tardif.

“I have started a circle of female dervishes,” says Turhan. “Only we don’t dance in front of the men; we don’t want to be a distraction to them. When we dance alone, however, we can attain the same heights of extasy as my father and his dervishes. Like planets around a star, we spin until we feel like we are flying. We can also approach the Infinite, Muhsin Bey. Many times, I have travelled to distant stars. Would you like to watch us?”

When Tardif nods his head, Turhan summons her friends downstairs. Ten young women between the ages of twenty and fourteen come from upstairs and dance for three hours to the beating of a drum, with Turhan dancing by herself in the centre of the octagon, whirling in one direction, while the others dance around her in the opposite direction. Over and over, Turhan cries, “La illah illa llah!” The other women respond by repeating after her “La illah illa llah!”

At first, the women are relatively sedate, but then they dance faster and faster until it seems humanly impossible that they can dance any faster. Tardif and Ökūr are amazed that they don’t collide into each other, but each woman manages to spin around in place wthout losing her balance and causing the others to fall and lose their balance too. Then, when their frenzy reaches its peak, they suddenly stop and fall to the floor at the same time, as in a well-rehearsed ballet. Then, when they stand up again, Turhan takes a moment to catch her breath and asks Tardif, “Well, what do you think?”

“I’m very impressed,” replies Tardif.

“You don’t sound like it,” says Turhan with a pout, pretending to be hurt.

Then the all women sit at Turhan’s feet for a lecture. “What is the nature of the soul?” asks Turhan. “Is it masculine or feminine? Is my soul different from yours? Do we all really have different souls, or we all part of the same soul? If we stop and listen with our hearts, then God can speak to us in the language of the soul. It isn’t very hard to hear the voice of God. It is everywhere. You can hear His voice from the birds in the trees. You can hear His voice in the bleating of goats and sheep in the fields. You can hear His voice when two women haggle in the market place, or when a group of children are playing football in the street. You can hear His voice even when a lover whispers caressing words in his beloved’s ear. The voice of God is everywhere. In the end, it is only God that is talking. God is talking to Himself through you. God is you talking to yourself. If you listen in complete silence, you will hear yourself very loudly. No, my friends, my soul is the same as yours. Your soul is my soul and my soul is yours. We are all from the same soul, which is from God. It is God.”

Then Turhan asks all the women to turn around and greet Tardif and Ökür. “I would like all of you to salute the god in our guests with the god inside yourselves,” she says.

The women all turn around and say to Tardif and Ökür, “The god in me salutes the god in you.”

Then Turhan sends the other women upstairs. Ökür takes this as a signal to depart so that Turhan and Tardif can be alone, and he follows the other women upstairs.

For hours, Tardif and Turhan sit in front of a sofa in the basement, just talking. It seems that Turhan already knows what’s in his heart. Tardif tells Turhan everything about himself; he even tells her about his mission to assassinate Ohlendorf. “So you are a hashashin then?” asks Turhan with a smile.

Tardif doesn’t understand the double-entendre. He understands that Turhan has called him an assassin, but he doesn’t understand that she has also called him a hashish smoker. Then Turhan says to him, “If he surrenders to you quietly, you must not kill him. You must let him follow you even across several galaxies if he is willing to follow you. No matter where you go, you must let him follow.”

When Tardif shows her a picture of Ohlendorf, Turhan says with astonishment, “But he’s an imam! We know him as Salah ad-Din al-Aminullah al-Mufti al-Talib. He has billions of followers throughout the galaxy. Please believe me: You will never take him alive, unless he’s willing to follow you.”

Then Turhan says, “You can do it, but you must win his respect. He will respect you if you respect him, because you and he are the same. I know that he was a mass murderer, but he committed his crimes out of innocence; he didn’t know what he was doing. Likewise, you are planning his assassination of out innocence as well; you don’t know what you’re doing either. If you ask him to walk with you one mile, he will walk with you two miles. He will follow you across the galaxy, many galaxies, if you ask him. Like a wolf you stalk the lamb, but he understands that the lamb separated from the flock is soon prey to wolves: he may not leave with you willingly. Somehow, you must persuade him. The wolf must pay hommage to the lamb.”

It is then that Tardif understands that his superiors don’t want him to take Ohlendorf alive. Probably, his superiors don’t want him to come back alive either. As his superiors see it, Tardif really only has one ability: to shoot with deadly accuracy, because he graduated near the bottom of his class when he went to officers’ school. Once he has served his purpose, his handlers won’t need him anymore. What then? Do they handle him with extreme caution as well?

“I love you,” says Tardif. “I want to marry you. I want you to be my wife.”

“I can’t marry you,” replies Turhan with regret, looking down. “I can’t give you children, Mark; I’m barren. Someday you may want children. What then? Would you divorce me? Won’t you cast me out like my husband did? In terms of reproduction, I am no better than a copy. At best, I could only be your concubine.”

“Then be my concubine then,” says Tardif. “I only love you. That’s why I became a Muslim.”

“There are no Christians, Jews, or Muslims,” replies Turhan. “There is only the soul, and that soul is God. All things are one with God. All things share the same soul with God.”

Tardif kisses her hard on the mouth and replies, “Your father doesn’t believe in distinctions either. But you and I are alone. There must be a reason for it.”

Turhan falls silent. Then she sands up, shakes her long black hair, and wets her lips. Then she slowly removes her clothes. When she is completely naked, she stands before him as he contemplates her ample breasts and her round stomach, her shapely hips and her well-rounded ass. With his eyes and his heart, he takes in her beauty; she has a mother’s body now. He contemplates her pale skin. He can see the stretch marks from when she delivered the stillborn child, the vertical lines on her breasts, which are now losing their firmness, the striations on her lower back and abdomen. Though she can never again be the nubile maiden that he first saw at the beach, when she was just seventeen or eighteen, she has her own beauty. Her body has been used, not just for pleasure, but for bringing life into the world. In this way, she resembles Veronica, the mother of his two children, but Veronica and their children are no longer living.

“Come,” Tardif says to Turhan. Then he smiles and says to her in French, his own language, the language of his heart: “Qu’est-ce que tu dirais à une partie de jambes en l’air, ma jolie?”

When she approaches him, he takes her hands and kisses them. He kisses takes her in an embrace and kisses her hard on the mouth. He strips before he takes her. Then they make love until the morning light. At first, she murmurs softly, as he makes love to her: La illaha illa llah. Then her cries become more frenzied, more broken, until she is screaming in ecstasy: La illaha illa llah! With his face in her sex, who can say that she has not found God?

Then, when Tardif buries himself deep inside her, he is aware of her breasts parting to receive him as he lays his chest on hers. Then she wraps her legs around him as he shivers with delight. After he explodes into her, he buries his head into her left shoulder as she throws her head back. She holds him there for a moment with her hand to his head, and then she kisses him several times on the face. “I love I love I love you,” she babbles ecstatically. Then, when she is more sober, Turhan says to Tardif, “For this brief moment, we are married.” Then she kisses him again.

The next morning, Tardif confronts Turhan’s father in the kitchen, when the family is seated at table for breakfast. “I want to marry your daughter,” he says to the Sheik.

“But you can’t marry my daughter,” replies the Sheik. “She’s barren; she can’t have children.”

“I don’t care,” replies Tardif. “I love her and I want to marry her.”

Then the Sheik shoots an angry look at his daughter, who lowers her eyes with shame. If the Sheik wanted, he could order a male relative to kill her for having brought dishonour to the family; they still have female honour killings on this planet. In the end, the Sheik reluctantly agrees to perform a marriage ceremony that will make Tardif and Turhan a married couple for six months before they can go their separate ways. He performs the marriage ceremony in the kitchen in front of her family. The purpose of this marriage is mutual pleasure rather than children, since Turhan can’t conceive. It is really a concubinage rather than a marriage.

When Tardif’s wife, Aziza, hears about the marriage with Turhan, she files for divorce in an Islamic court. The judge, or qadri, will grant her the divorce, but she can only have custody of their infant son, Ali, until he’s seven years old. Then he will live with his father.

For six months, Tardif and Turhan are a happy couple, making noise upstairs in her bedroom night after night. All they do every night is watch television, laugh, and make love. Tardif even speaks to her in French. “Je t’aime les babines,” he will say, before he kisses her on the lips. While gently squeezing one of her breasts, he says, “Je t’aime les miches.” And Turhan will reply by murmuring, “Ô là-là, monsieur!”

Then, after six months, Turhan says to Tardif with regret: “You must go, my love. You must find Ohlendorf. Your friend has waited long enough.”

“But what about you?” asks Tardif.

“You have to let me go,” pleas Turhan. “Your destiny is somewhere else, not here. I am fitna, I’m a distraction.”

Tardif and Ökür see one more séance of female whirling dervishes. Then, after the séance, Turhan recites the Ten Commandments to the women in the form of ten polite requests: “Please worship no other god before Allah. Please do not worship idols. Please do not curse or take the name of Allah in vain. Please remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. Please honour your mother and father. Please do not take what does not belong to you. Please do not commit murder. Please do not be unfaithful to your spouse or significant other. Please do not lie. Please do not covet any of your neighbour’s personal possessions.”

One of the women, “What are you, Turhan Hanın? Some kind of prophet?”

The other women laugh when Turhan replies, “Too bad you aren’t all prophets.”

That night, Tardif and Turhan make love. For one last time, they are a mountain of flesh under the covers. When they are finished, Tardif puts his arms around her as they lie together in a spoon position. Her abdomen feels hot to the touch. He wonders if she hasn’t conceived, though she is supposed to be barren. If she is carrying his child, he wants to see that child when it is born. He would like to see that child grow up. At that moment, he swears that he will be back, no matter what, but Turhan merely replies, ”Inshallah.” If God wills it.

On the space shuttle leaving the planet, Tardif said to Ökür, “I would like to take Ohlendorf alive.”

“You must be mad!” exclaimed Ökür. “That man is considered a prophet by billions of people in this galaxy. You can’t just walk up to him and place him under arrest. You can't expect him to give himself up.”

Tardif looked hard at Ökür and asked, “How can we get close to him if he perceives that we are a threat? Haven’t people tried to kill him before? If we come to assassinate him, surely he will suspect that we are assassins. If we come in peace, he may leave with us in peace. I don’t think we can shoot our way out of this one, Mehmet. He has too many followers and there’s only just the two of us left. We have already lost several of our friends. I lost Veronica.”

Ökür shrugged his shoulderds and replied, “Inshallah. If God wills it. All kinds of things could happen, Mark. We could be captured and killed by pirates, for example.”

Tardif smiled and said, “Now you’re talking!”

That night, Tardif had the dream about the helicopters that came down from the skies. He was certain that he would soon have the officer who gave the order to execute his mother and father in the sights of his gun, but would he shoot him? Could he stop himself from killing Ohlendorf when it was Ohlendorf who was responsible for the deaths of his parents, for the deaths of Veronica and his children? He still wanted to avenge his loved ones.

Then, as he sat in the cockpit of the shuttle with Ökür, he thought he heard Turhan’s voice. “Listen to me, Mark,” it said. “Listen to me and I will lead you to him. But you must listen with your heart and not your ego…”

Every moment of every day, he would listen with his heart. He thought that he would know what to do once when he found Ohlendorf.