Alif the Unseen (29 page)

“So.” The Hand produced another chair, sat, and folded his hands in his lap. “What have you been doing to occupy yourself? The guards say you sing. And spout
nonsense.”

“Keeping busy,” said Alif.

“Yes, a good idea. Hallucinating yet?”

“I’m being watched by the Devil.”

The Hand chuckled.

“Naturally. He’s a very common guest down here. A lot of inmates see him. Then again, the really crazy ones see Gabriel, and the ones even crazier than that see God.”

“Saw the Devil before you locked me in this shit hole. He came out of that book of yours.”

The Hand looked displeased.

“Don’t be such a pietist. There is no such thing as evil knowledge.”

“I used to think so, too,” said Alif.

“Then you’ve begun right and ended wrong. I was the opposite—when I began to discover the unseen, I had as many spiritual qualms as my childhood Quran teacher could have
wished. Then again, my introduction to the hidden folk was mostly an accident. I began researching magic as a purely intellectual exercise. I hoped it would broaden my understanding of code. Our
impulse to store and access data through coding languages predates computers by thousands of years, and that’s really all magic is. I was simply looking for a fresh perspective. The first
time I tried to summon a demon, I wasn’t expecting anything to come of it.”

“What happened?”

The Hand’s smile was mechanical. His teeth gleamed like polished metal in the strong light.

“What do you suppose? It worked.”

Alif jerked as a chill gripped his body. The Hand hooked one foot under the crossbeam of Alif’s chair and pulled it closer.

“Now, I need you to pay attention,” he said. “There are things I need to know.”

“I’ve already told you what you need to know,” said Alif, feeling belligerent. “The
Alf Yeom
is not what you think it is. Or maybe it’s exactly what you
think it is. Either way, it’s dangerous.”

“Of course it’s dangerous. That’s the entire reason I want it. The way you were able to trample over my lovely security system tells me the code-writing methodology embedded in
the
Alf Yeom
works even better than I dared hope. I was so impressed with what you managed to get out of it that I couldn’t find it in my heart to be angry. Well, that’s a lie.
But my anger was tempered by respect.”

“It doesn’t work as well as you think,” said Alif. “It’s too unstable. When you ask information to adapt to new parameters that rapidly, the fundamental commands
get lost. There’s a huge data decay issue. The whole system forgot what its original function was supposed to be and collapsed. It fused the machine I was working on. I’ve never seen a
computer run that hot.”

“Yes, I saw. It was a useless lump of elemental metals when we got to it. Totally unrecoverable. But in my opinion the breakdown had more to do with the truly idiotic amount of RAM you
were using. That little desktop was never meant to handle such a data load.”

Alif shook his head emphatically.

“Nothing to do with RAM. I made sure each of the programs were running at peak efficiency. And I stripped out all the original software before I even started.”

“Wouldn’t have made a difference. In the final analysis, you were working on a computer too unsophisticated for what you were trying to achieve. If you’d had access to a suite
of our machines, all wired into a blade server, your little science experiment would have changed the future of computing.”

“No.”

The Hand made a gesture of irritation.

“If you’re still trying to fight with me about this, you clearly haven’t been down here long enough. I’m not interested in false humility and dire warnings. I know
you’re trying to put me off so I don’t build on your work and outdo your own efforts. You’re still playing the game, Alif. You haven’t yet realized that the game is over and
I have won.”

Alif sawed his jaws back and forth.

“I’m not playing anything. I’m telling you the
Alf Yeom
is ideological cancer. The djinn were right—we can’t really understand their way of thinking, and
we make a mess of it when we try. If you tried to use that methodology on a system that was really important—the City’s electrical grid or something—you could end up with chaos.
No light, no phones, people going crazy.”

The Hand sighed. His eyes reflected the light strangely, as if they were all pupil. Alif felt queasy.

“Let’s talk as colleagues for a moment,” said the Hand. “Surely you see the limits of binary computing. We are rapidly approaching the ceiling of its utility. After that,
what? Is this the peak of civilization? Is there nowhere to go but down? Quantum is a pipe dream. If human progress is to continue, we have to relearn how to use the tools we already have. Reteach
our machines. Look what the ancient Egyptians were able to achieve using rudimentary wheels and pulleys. That’s what the
Alf Yeom
allows us to do, Alif. Build a pyramid with wheels
and pulleys. The djinn be damned—they’ve got something powerful and they don’t want to share it. That’s all their shadowy warnings amount to.”

Alif said nothing. He recalled the feeling the Hand was describing, the sense that he had, for bare instants, seen through to the sinews of the code, the bones of language itself, and known them
in some profound way. But that feeling was not attached to the
Alf Yeom
.

“You’re wrong,” Alif said. “We haven’t exhausted the possibilities of binary computing. There’s more left to do.”

“What makes you say so?”

Alif thought of the letter his name represented, repeating in a pattern over and over in Intisar’s words, unseen even by her. “Sometimes when you ask God for more, He moves the
horizon back just a little. Enough to let you breathe.”

The Hand grimaced.

“Are we still talking about computers, or have you come down with ergot poisoning? That slop they feed you is none too fresh.”

“I’m talking about things that matter.”

The Hand stood in one abrupt motion, causing his chair to skitter backward away from him.

“All right, I’m done. I didn’t come here for a philosophy lesson. I thought you might be grateful for a little shop talk. I only want one thing before I leave: where is the
Alf Yeom
now? State couldn’t locate it in the mosque where we found you.”

Alif frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “I had it next to me while I was working. I didn’t move it.”

“Not even after your computer crashed? Not to get it out of the way?”

“My fingertips were all burned and I hadn’t slept in two days. I wasn’t thinking about much of anything else.”

“If you’re trying to prevent me from re-creating your code, this is not the way to do it. I’ve got my people reverse-engineering it from the mess you left on the State intranet
as we speak.”

“Be my guest. You’ll just end up screwing yourselves. I don’t know where the book is and I don’t care.”

“How sad. This means we’ll have to keep interrogating the sheikh. I’m not sure how much longer he’ll last at this rate. He’s not a young man.”

Alif felt the blood drain from his face.

“You’ve got Sheikh Bilal in here?” he asked. His voice had grown hoarse.

“Oh, yes. Right down the hall. I’m surprised you can’t hear him. He makes quite a bit of noise when we start in with the electric prods. I suppose the walls must be thicker
than I imagined.”

Alif began breathing rapidly. “He doesn’t know anything,” he said. “I’ll swear it on whatever you put in front of me. He doesn’t even know my name. He’s
just an old man with a conscience.”

“A conscience is something old men who harbor terrorists cannot afford, I’m afraid.”

“I’m not a terrorist. I’ve never been a terrorist. All I do is protect people who want the freedom to say what they really think.”

The Hand stepped back toward the door. His eyes still shone oddly in the light, black discs that reflected only fluorescence.

“What naive garbage. People don’t want freedom anymore—even those to whom freedom is a kind of religion are afraid of it, like trembling acolytes who make sacrifices to some
pagan god. People want their governments to keep secrets from them. They want the hand of law to be brutal. They are so terrified by their own power that they will vote to have it taken out of
their hands. Look at America. Look at the sharia states. Freedom is a dead philosophy, Alif. The world is returning to its natural state, to the rule of the weak by the strong. Young as you are,
it’s you who are out of touch, not me.”

Alif passed a hand over his eyes. His head ached.

“Please leave the sheikh alone,” he said in a small voice. “I’ll say whatever you want me to say. I’ll say you’ve won. I don’t care. Just don’t
hurt him anymore. It’s on me if he dies. It’s all on me. I can’t bear it.”

The Hand’s eyes widened. His expression made Alif nervous: a blank, menacing, almost sensual readiness—the look of a rapist.

“What were you thinking,” he murmured, “when I came in today? What went through your mind when you saw me?”

Alif began to shake.

“I was glad to see you,” he said. “I was relieved to see you. I wanted you to stay. I still want you to stay. I don’t want to go back to the dark.”

Exhaling, the Hand closed his eyes. His face slackened.

“Very good,” he said. “Yes. Very good. I have been waiting for this.”

Alif wondered what he was meant to understand from ‘this.’ Bile rose in his throat at the thought of what the Hand might ask him to do, to which he himself might acquiesce without
complaint. Anything was better than another stretch in the void with the thing-that-was-not-Farukhuaz padding around him in the darkness in ever-shrinking circles.

But the Hand merely turned and rapped on the door.

“I’m glad you felt you could share your true feelings with me,” he said. The door opened. “I wanted our relationship to end on exactly this note. I hope you ate well at
your last meal—you’ll never have another.”

Alif swallowed. The Hand regarded him with something very like sympathy.

“Good-bye, Alif. In a way, I feel as though I’m losing a friend. I’ll think of you every time I have Intisar on her back. What a strange coincidence that we should want the
same woman, but for two very different reasons. Fitting, somehow, but strange.”

* * *

Alone in the dark again, Alif was almost immediately hungry. He paced the room with one hand on the wall to guide him, avoiding the slop corner, and attempted to take his mind
somewhere else. He thought of daylight. He thought of sitting in the window of his room in Baqara District on a spring afternoon, his limbs cooking pleasantly in the heat of the sun-warmed cement
ledge. He thought of Dina in a summer robe, gray or green in contrast to her usual black, sandals slapping against her feet as she came through the courtyard laden with bags of fruit from the
market. That would make it a Saturday. He was baffled to remember that there had been a time when such a scene would have filled him with existential dread, agony at the quiet female rhythms that
encompassed him, prompting him to flee back into his computers, the cloud, the digital world populated by men.

Now the idea of such an afternoon seemed exquisite. He had let too many pass with too much indifference. In his mind he made himself get down off the ledge and go outside to help Dina with her
bags, then see if there was anything his mother needed; he spoke to the maid in complete sentences, and remembered to clean the dust from his own shoes when he came back inside. Naked in the dark,
with the memory of the Hand’s reptilian eyes, he realized that the ritualized world he had dismissed as feminine was in fact civilization.

As time began to blur again, he occupied himself by rewriting more of his own history. He did not shrink from his father, and did not hate him; instead he politely demanded that his mother be
given equal time, reminding the man of all she had given up to marry him and raise his son. He was helpful and active around the house. He contributed more money toward their monthly expenses.
Finally, he presented himself to Dina’s parents as soon as he knew what she wanted—which he should have known years earlier, when they were still almost children and Alif remained the
only boy she would seek out and speak to alone. He ached then, ached for their conversations on the roof, cursing himself for treating her intimacy in such an offhand way. Her decision to veil had
irritated and alarmed him as it irritated and alarmed her family, and he had been too absorbed in himself to realize that her continued friendship was a kind of plea, a thread back to the life she
had left behind.

The necessity of returning to her kept his survival instincts alive. He drank all the water he was given, making no effort to speed his death by adding thirst to hunger. The knot in his stomach
turned into a sharp, continuous cramp, and sitting became painful; it felt as though his hip bones bruised the flesh beneath them. He gripped his waist with his hands to keep the pain at bay. He
had expected to feel afraid, but did not; his thoughts, though sluggish, were clear. His body remained relentlessly alive. He marveled at it, a machine more elaborate and efficient than any
computer he had ever used. This was where the echoes of God lived: not in his mind but in his cells and sinews, the parts of him that could not lie. He felt his flesh transcend itself.

Farukhuaz came to him for the last time when he was lying on his side to relieve the pressure beneath his hips.

“Bones, bones, bile, bones, locked away to die alone,” it rasped. “You are digesting your own insides.”

“I’m alive,” said Alif. “And I know what you really are. You’re not Farukhuaz at all. That’s just the illusion you projected to sway me into doing what you
wanted. You’re something much worse.”

“I am I. End it quickly, neatly.”

“I’m not planning to die.”

The hissing laughter started up, bouncing off the invisible walls of the room as though it had no precise origin.

“You’re a fool,” said the thing-that-was-not-Farukhuaz. “You are already dying. There is no one here to commend you for bravery or witness your sacrifice. Your death will
go unseen. Have a little pride and end things on your own terms.”