MUHAMMED DROVE THE car back to the scene of the stoning. Blood stains decorated the street where the woman had died.
He felt a tingling sensation in his legs as he thought about what the girl child meant to do. No one had ever done such a thing. To arrest an imam would be to turn against Allah himself. Letting the imams have their way had always been standard practice in the city, even when the imams killed people with their own hands, as Imam Felor had done.
If confronted about the matter, he would say, as he had said countless times before, that the hand of Allah had struck the woman down. He himself had merely put a knife into the woman's body so that her soul might have a method of escaping her putrefying flesh.
The police, as Muhammed knew only too well, agreed with Imam Felor's statements. He usually led them in prayer before and after their shifts began. So often had Felor influenced the police officers in his mosque that every citizen of Alexandria had come to understand that religious authorities like Felor operated outside the law.
Muhammed had often thought the region would be better off had people not turned their beliefs into a cult as it had been in days long past. Religion, he thought, belonged in the privacy of one's own home, not in public.
As a child growing up in the city, he had been wandering around barefoot when he discovered an incident similar to the one his passengers had witnessed.
Instead of a stoning, it had been a burning.
Two women had been tied back to back with a large wooden stake between them. Bales of hay had been placed around the feet of their women. An imam whose name Muhammed did not know was telling the public in excited tones that the two women had committed crimes of a carnal nature together. They had been lovers.
As a child, Muhammed had not understood what the imam had meant by this.
Yet he understood when the fire had been set and the screaming began as the women was being burned alive. He could not pull his eyes away even while their flesh blackened from the bottom up.
All the while, the imam shouted them down, saying what a great crime it was for two women to lay together as would the beasts of the field. Allah forbade it, so the imam said. Any person who committed crimes of a carnal nature would be treated in such a manner.
Muhammed had stayed to watch until the fire had reduced the two women to black, screaming skeletons.
On that same day, Muhammed had gone straight to the police station. He had described to the officers what had happened. The officers had gone to the imam's house to arrest him. However, once they heard the circumstances of the burning, they left his house without bringing him into custody.
Muhammed knew on that day that he had to do his best not to cross the imams, for they had unlimited power to execute whomever they chose.
He found it ironic then that almost one hundred years later, he found himself ready to challenge an imam once again. If it were just him, Alaham and Abdelziz, he knew his challenge would be unsuccessful. As one, the imams would condemn him for interfering with their god's work. The best-case scenario would result in him branded an outcast.
In the worst case, the pious masses would turn against him, as they always turned against any person whom any of the city's imams condemned.
But this child who stood less than half as tall as Muhammed had been so determined that Muhammed could not find the strength to contradict her. Nor had he reconsidered he decision when, in the front of the car, Alaham and Abdelziz reminded him that turning against the imams would be suicide.
They had not seen the righteous fire in Proehl's eyes that Muhammed had. He didn't know how to explain it to them in a way they would understand. He knew, simply by speaking with her, that she would do what she set out to do whether he helped her or not. Muhammed had come to see the girl who had refused to wear a veil as a whirlwind.
He also intuitively recognized in her the potential for great change.
He had no reason to doubt what he now believed. He knew also that Alaham and Abdelziz both regarded him as one converted to a new faith. Muhammed behaved as if he had been struck by lightning and it had transformed his inner being.
Had anyone asked him, he would have called it faith, because he believed in an improbable event coming to pass.
Because he believed, he wanted to use all the strength given to him to make the event possible. But as he stopped in front of the scene of the execution, Imam Felor was nowhere in sight. He, like the crowd, had moved off.
Muhammed parked the car by the side of the road, telling his two countrymen to ask around for where Imam Felor might be found. He told Unquill, Savannah and Kenneth to wait in the car. Savannah had already opened one can of processed nutrients. She pulled out gray clumps of material with her fingers.
After asking several different people, an old woman with a bent back had the information Muhammed sought. She wore a brown shawl about her shoulders and a faded red kerchief about her head. She leaned heavily upon a cane that shook together with the hand that held it. Her eyes were two milky white orbs stuck in her head.
She looked out upon the world with sightless eyes. When she opened her mouth to speak, Muhammed saw the old woman had no teeth. But her words were crystal-clear.
"I'm too old. I have no use for Allah anymore. I've been alive 732 years-would you believe that? I should have died a century ago, they tell me. They always tell me that. But you know what? Allah has visited me with pain and suffering. I don't like it these days. So you can find that imam at his mosque of bliss on Catcher Street."
Muhammed grasped the old woman's free hand with both of his own. "Thank you for telling me this. Before I leave you, dear lady, may I know your name?"
The woman pulled her hand out of Muhammed's grasp.
She turned her to one side and spat.
"Delia Felor. You tell him that when you meet him. His grandmother knows where he goes after he murders women in the name of that wicked god."
KENNETH THOUGHT THE tall, pointed tower standing next to the squat, square white building Alaham called a mosque looked like a rocket ready to be fired. The tower stood on behind the mosque's left-hand side. Though it had been constructed with blocks of stone, Kenneth saw no signs of age on the tower or the mosque. No sign had been posted outside the building to indicate what its purpose might be. Kenneth guessed the medieval-looking tower was all the indication anyone needed.
Muhammed parked the car in a dusty, unmarked parking lot behind the building. Kenneth got out of the car. A patch of sand blew his face. He turned away, coughing.
He secured the blue oval weapon to his palm, trying to figure out how Unquill had known it needed recharging. Kenneth couldn't determine this, no matter how often he had turned the object over his hands.
The underside of the weapon contained an etching stating who had constructed it. The top glowed the same calming blue color he had seen in many 73rd-century energy devices.
Savannah wiped a gray smudge from the corner of her mouth but still bore the signs of hunger in the expression of her face. Kenneth found himself hungry but not as hungry as Savannah seemed to be. The gray goop the people of the future called food just didn't sit right with him. His stomach roiled at the thought of eating another spoonful of the canned slush.
Errant bits of trash had gathered against the back wall of the mosque. What looked to Kenneth like a book page had crumpled up into a ball before wedging itself between a rusted green metal canister that bore a red flammable symbol and a small metal box with a steel latch.
On top of the metal box lay a book jacket, turned upside-down. Kenneth turned it over, only to find more of the weird writing he could not hope to read.
On an interior flap of the book jacket was a picture of a serious-looking man with a long, uncombed white beard. Kenneth almost laughed at how absurd the man looked compared with his stern expression. He put the jacket down where he'd found it and followed Muhammed around the side of the building to the front door.
The door lay open, held in place by a thumb of rubber nudged under the bottom. Kenneth strode in first, not sure what he would see. He pulled back a translucent white curtain that separated a reception area from what lay further beyond. For a moment he thought he might see a group of people kneeling on the ground, chanting their devotions.
He hadn't expected to see blood smeared all over the walls.
Nor he had expected, not even in his wildest imaginings, to see the amputated limbs of people and animals alike piled at the far end of the room. The smell of putrefying flesh hit Kenneth in a wave and he put his hand over his mouth and nose.
Orange fur and tan flesh mingled together, and a man in a white robe knelt before it, placing his head on the ground again and again.
Blood dripped from the ceiling, pattering in small puddles on the floor that he looked up, then instantly regretted doing so.
Several heads dangled on chains up there. They hung from metal hooks which had been jammed into wide, gaping mouths. Some of the heads were unrecognizable as anything human, having long since decayed.
One head, however, he recognized.
He saw the head of the woman who had been stoned to death.
Savannah, seeing what Kenneth saw, turned to one side and retched up all the gray food she had eaten. She brought it up in a violent, sudden heave that splattered all over the blood-stained floor. She stayed bent over for a moment before she retched again. Kenneth went to her side and placed a hand upon her back. That seemed to help, from what he could tell.
The man who had been kneeling and bowing before his collection of amputated limbs stood up. He turned to face the group who had entered the mosque. His wild eyes darted from Kenneth to Savannah to Unquill to Muhammed, back to Kenneth.
He rubbed his hands together, then licked his lips.
Kenneth felt his anger rising. He didn't want to think about what the man did with the rest of the corpses he brought to his place of worship.
"Imam or whoever you are, you're through."
Imam Felor cocked his head to one side.
"Oh? Through? Not so long as I have Allah. Yes, Allah provides. He keeps me well-nourished. I eat. Oh yes. I feast upon the flesh of the unholy. In so doing, I hasten my journey to see the god of my forefathers. This body may die, but my spirit, what I have done here, shall last forevermore!"
Savannah blinked away tears from her eyes.
"Just shut up."
Then she shot him.